Roger flexed and extended his fingers, twisted his wrists, tensed the arches of his feet, unbent his knees, and stood slowly against the microaccelerations of the walker's cabin. He moved slowly, because even steel muscles can cramp from unexpected exertion.
"Lole, look!" Demeter husked. "What's he going to do to us?"
Torraway experimented with his voice circuits, to make sure they were his own again.
"Nothing," he said at last. "Demeter, I'm terribly sorry about all this. I had to break our deal."
Ellen Sorbel hovered in the background, watching and waiting to assist, as Dr. Lee cut into Jeff Te Jing's throat.
The doctor was trying to open a passage by which the young man could breathe; otherwise he would drown in the blood seeping from his crushed larynx. With the selection of instruments and drugs at hand, chosen and measured out for the one operation on Jory's systems, Wa Lixin had explained that he was working without painkillers and with barely enough disinfectant to clean his incision point. For the probable concussion and bruising of Te Jing's pericardium, the doctor could only rely on the patient's youth and natural strength.
Together Dr. Lee and Ellen had cleared Jory off the operating table to make way for the suffering young Chinese. Den Ostreicher lay now in the outer chamber, with his silver boxes screwed together and the bone disks loosely fitted back into the holes in his skull. But Dr. Lee had reconnected nothing and restarted none of his systems. If Jory survived, he would be a boy again—a boy with a large memory deficit and a badly damaged immune system, about to slough off several prosthetics and fifteen kilograms of polymer skin that his natural body had been trying to reject for more than a decade. Jory might even live through the experience, with a lot of emergency medical assistance.
He probably wouldn't get it in time, Sorbel thought coldly. She felt like an army general brought up from the rear to fight an exposed salient that was crumbling around her. Everything she did this night only made things worse.
"Now hold that!" Dr. Lee ordered.
"What?" She roused from her torpor.
"That!" He took her unsterile finger and guided it inside the end of his cut into Te Jing's throat, pressing it down through layers of slippery red membrane. At one point, she felt a jagged piece of bone and almost got sick. He pushed her finger deeper, until she was wedging the opening wide.
Jeff Te Jings body shuddered and drew a full, ragged breath.
Ellen fought to divorce her mind from her finger and what it could feel.
At that moment, Willie Lao stuck his head through the connecting tunnel. He was another of Lole's security people, some distant relation to Te Jing, she thought.
"No sign of the woman."
Dr. Lee looked up, distracted, and then bent again over the injured throat.
"Um," Sorbel temporized. "Coordinate with Lole, wall you? We're busy here."
"No sign of Lole, either."
"Well, then page him through—no, I guess you can't." Using the grid's resources to search for Lole would tip their hand, wouldn't it? Ellen tried to collect her thoughts and ignore the warmth flowing over her knuckles. "Did you check Coghlan's hotel?"
"She hasn't been back—not since earlier."
"How about the outside airlocks? Lole thought she would go that way."
"All the way up to the pressure doors," he nodded. "No record of anyone going through them, though, not for the past four hours."
Ellen was stumped. "How many of our people can you rouse?"
"This hour? Maybe ten ... fifteen."
Not enough to check twenty thousand cubic meters by visual reconnaissance, she decided. Not in a day. Not even in a week.
Slow down and figure things out one at a time, Ellen told herself. If Lole had not found Demeter by now, he would certainly have reported in—either returning to their secret room himself, or sending someone with the bad news. And if Lole had found Demeter, he would have brought her back here—or stashed her in some safe place and then sent word. Either way, he was now long overdue and could be presumed missing.
"Missing" was her minds own euphemism, Sorbel realized with cold shock. Spell it out! The grid was running Demeter Coghlan, the same as it ran Jory and the Korean. If Lole had tangled with her and come up missing, then there really were only two choices. He was dead. Or he was the grids captive and soon would be wired up to tell the machines everything he knew.
Ellen accepted neither of those choices. Not for her Lole!
But what could she do to deflect them?
Well ... if he was still a prisoner, then maybe she had time to intercede before he became one more of the walking dead.
Dr. Lee was still probing for bone pieces in Te Jing's throat. Ellen withdrew her finger, and the slit closed around his forceps.
"Hey! What're you doing?"
"Forget that for now." She wiped her hand on a fold of the body's sleeve. "We've got to move Lethe."
"But this man will—"
"Yeah, die, I know." She studied the cabling among the rogue computer's central processor, its memory modules, and its inventory of peripherals. She wanted to make the fewest disconnections to separate out a working cyber that the three of them could carry. "And so will Lole—die—unless we can get this machine out of here."
'Where are you taking it?" the doctor asked.
"Somewhere we can make a solid linkup with the grid, preferably by radio."
"Why?"
"So we can begin passing some access codes."
Dr. Lee looked down at the man on the operating table. Te Jing's throat was barely oozing now, and his chest was still. Ellen knew what the doctor was thinking: so many deaths this night, so many wrong moves.
Wa Lixin sighed. "I can't help him anyway"
From the entryway, Lao ducked his face and turned away.
'Willie!" Ellen snapped. "We need you, too."
"I'm sorry, Demeter," Roger Torraway said. The Cyborg had relaxed noticeably and now he was sitting cross-legged on the walker's deck in a less alert—and subtly more human—posture. Coghlan even fancied she could hear regret in that detached and perfectly mechanical voice.
"Where are you taking us?" she asked.
All she could see out the vehicle s side windows was stars, shining pinpricks in the black sky. It seemed as if the trip up the fountain had reversed time and overcome the dawn. The angled sunlight shining on the walker's outer hull could not blunt the gemfield displayed above them.
"I'm not taking you—" the Cyborg began, then paused. "Well, not anymore. I was under external control, putatively from the cybernetic nexus you know as 'the grid.' What its ... their... the nexus's plans are, I never was made aware. We are clearly riding the space fountain into low Mars orbit. From there, I don't know...."
"Back in the tunnels, you spoke about 'a safe place,'" Lole said. "What does that mean?"
"I don't... I remember it felt like a place that the grid controls. Where no other person .. . persona? .. . intelligence? ... could possibly interfere with its intentions toward you."
"Toward us, now," Demeter observed.
The Colonel's dark lips pulled upward in a smile, and she realized he was grateful at being included in their plight. Demeter suddenly understood how terribly lonely it must have been, wandering the open countryside for decades with only other machines and half-disemboweled humans for company. This might be the first time he had made common cause with human beings in almost fifty years—not since he had left Earth and the support of the Cyborg laboratory at Tonka, in old Oklahoma State.
"We're going to the new solar station," Lole said. "It has to be there."