Some inborn conditioning saved Lole. Instead of twisting and fighting—and probably dying in the effort—he instead went limp. Dangling with his toes some centimeters off the ground, Mitsuno was held up by two bands of steel that circled his arms. Under his own weight, these bands were beginning to stretch the skin beneath the fabric of his jacket sleeves and gouge into his biceps. In this free moment for reflection, he glanced down at them and saw human-shaped fingers in what looked like tight-fitting black rubber gloves.
Demeter slid away from the wall and walked around Lole, staring up at him with sober intensity—now that she was no longer the trapped animal.
"Don't hurt him, Colonel."
Colonel? Torraway? Why was he inside the complex now? And how did Demeter suddenly know . . . oh, through the grid. Of course.
"You can put me down, sir," Lole said quietly. "I won't bother anyone."
Without a word, the hands lowered Mitsuno smoothly until his feet were flat on the floor and his legs were taking his full weight.
Lole turned to confirm his guess. The Cyborg was bigger than he remembered, more than two meters tall and broad in proportion, with those batlike wings of solar filament quivering above his clean-shaven skull. The faceted eyes regarded him dispassionately.
"Well, Demeter—" Lole shifted his attention to her. "What happens now? Do we both escort you to your hotel?"
"You both will come with me," Colonel Roger Torraway said in a flat, machined voice. It was unaltered by the helium content of the tunnel's atmosphere, but he was pitching it high in an obvious attempt to put them at ease. "I know of a ... a safe place."
Lole glanced at Demeter. Her face registered dismay bordering on shock. Evidently this wasn't in her script.
"Where?' Lole asked, curious.
"A safe place," the Cyborg repeated.
"I think we can find our own way, Colonel," Mitsuno said suavely.
"Thank you, Colonel," Demeter said, inching toward Lole's side. "But I think I want to go to my hotel room now. I appreciate your—"
"You both will come with me to a safe place."
Demeter was now standing practically under his arm, looking up at the Cyborg, as was Lole. Mitsuno felt her fingers spider-dance into his hand and grip it tightly. "He's not... functioning right," she whispered. "He sounds different from before."
Clearly, Demeter didn't know that the Cyborg's aural range exceeded the human by at least a hundred percent. Torraway's ears would pick up her heartbeat, let alone her whispers. Yet he failed to react to what she said. The redly glinting eyes showed no awareness of either of them. He stood like a statue. Maybe, in the past million or so nanoseconds, Torraway had forgotten all about them.
Lole decided to test him. Keeping a grip on Demeter's hand, he began to slide sideways, to the right around the Cyborg, and so down the ramp.
With a flickering motion of hips and knees and elbows that defied the eye, the Colonel repositioned himself to block their escape.
Still smiling, staying loose, Lole drifted off to the left, dragging Demeter after him.
Flicker-shift, and the Cyborg was there again, standing across their main line of retreat. He moved like a defensive guard blocking the ball handler in a game of basketball, or like a collie dog heeling a pair of errant sheep, never actually touching Lole and Demeter, but always remaining psychologically poised between them and their goal.
After two such faked movements, Lole was ready to quit and resume negotiations. But apparently Torraway had other ideas. Suddenly he was herding them—not just guarding against their escape. He kept them in play by pushing his angular body first at Lole, then at Demeter, towering over them, spreading his arms, shaking his wide black wings. Lole took a step backward up the ramp, and Demeter came with him.
Torraway pressed after them, hedging them more closely still, pushing their gait. Soon Lole was taking two steps at a time, then three and stumbling. In another few seconds, he and Demeter turned and started to run—in the direction Torraway wanted to take them. Mitsuno had no hope of outrunning the Cyborg, which no human could do, but at least he could avoid having that dark presence take... other action with them.
After a dozen meters they had reached the center of the airlock facility, the six-sided chamber faced with massive doors. All were closed except one, which stood invitingly open, the readout panel beside it flashing clear. Peering through the connecting sleeve, Lole could see the interior of a standard utility walker, much like the one he and Demeter had taken on the survey in Harmonia Mundi.
"I guess we're supposed to go on in," she said with a brave smile.
"Yes. Please go in," Torraway grated, coming up behind them.
Mitsuno led Demeter through the hatch, keeping a sweaty but firm grip on her palm. He drew her to the forward seats, facing the instrument console and the front windshield. Only when they needed both hands to strap themselves in did they break contact.
Torraway followed behind, ducking his head and wings inside the low interior. He did not sit like a human but crouched, balanced for action, on the deck-plates. Again, he positioned himself in a direct line between them and the airlock.
The signal he gave must have been electronic, like the commands Wyatt used to control the walker. The rear door sealed with a sigh of pneumatics, the instrument board came alight with pressure readings, gyro headings, battery levels, and motor torques. Outside the side windows, the knee joints of the six legs flexed and bobbed.
The walker lunged slightly as it started away from the complex, but the movement smoothed as it headed out across the Martian landscape. The floor of the vehicle remained perfectly level, but the ground outside was rising perceptibly Lole, who knew the terrain around Tharsis Montes as well as any surface worker, abruptly realized where this "safe place" might be.
"No, Colonel! You can't take us there! We'll die."
His hands darted for the board, hoping to achieve an override and maybe turn this machine around.
Appearing with the suddenness of a policeman's cuffs, those black fingers reached around Lole and seized his wrists. They held his hands four centimeters above the controls.
Demeter turned in her seat and beat against the Cyborg's arms and face, trying to dislodge him. She might as well have flailed at the rocks outside.
"All right, Demeter," Lole said. "Don't hurt yourself. ... I'll be good, Colonel."
The steel hands held him a moment longer, time enough for Torraway to issue a silent command. The board went black, and the walker marched on.
Chapter 19
Back Up the Beanstalk
Seemingly of its own accord—but actually under the grid's guidance—the walker approached the base of the space fountain. The vehicle strode confidently around to the north wall of the perimeter enclosure, and there it paused. After a moment's calculation, the machine moved forward slowly. But still it stopped occasionally and pushed its nose at this or that cast panel of sand-blasted concrete. It was seeking something invisible to human or Cyborg eyes in the outer wall, like a dog sniffing a row of identical fenceposts, trying to find the one with exactly the right scent.
Although he knew the grid was looking for an opening, Roger Torraway was unable to assist in this effort. The Mars nexus ran most of the fountain's routine functions out of its most distant and least dynamic cyber modules. Their image of the fountain was totally operational, shaped by numbers that represented energy flowing in megawatts and cargo allotments moving in tonnes per meter per second. Of the towers layout, its plot plan showing various access points into the base structure, these cybers were ignorant. Any view they might have of the physical plant was internal, diagramed from the traffic carried on inside the feeder systems. They had never seen the foundation from the outside, let alone through the video pickups of a walker that ambled and bobbed over the sand, dodging rocks.