"Fifty-seven dead and more than one hundred and fifty wounded!" Dyer brought his fist down hard on the table and bared his teeth. "There was no need for it! If you'd had the troops where they were needed, it would never have gotten out of hand."
"It wouldn't have made any difference," Linsay replied through tight lips. "They would have been too dispersed across Detroit to be effective at any one place. The only difference it would have made is that the enemy would now be all over the Rim instead of being contained in the Spindle. As things are, the Rim is secure. All drones in the Hub and Rim have been knocked out and the backup stations are handling the environment okay. All Spartacus nodes outside the Spindle are being dismantled. The only parts of it still running are the parts south of the Hub and it's sealed in there. The enemy has been forced back to a restricted area and we are in full control of the only exits."
"It wasn't forced back; we were forced out!" Dyer raged. "Your 'restricted area' is all it needs. It's got Christ knows how many homemade SPs in there, a fusion plant, a manufacturing complex and an extraction plant! It's got a stock of unprocessed moonrock that'll keep it growing itself and making drones for days . . . maybe weeks. You could have stopped it grabbing Detroit. That alone would have been enough to cripple it."
"It wouldn't have made any difference," Linsay replied grimly. "What caught us was the surprise. Nobody knew it would come up with improvised flamethrowers. You're thinking didn't allow for it and my thinking didn't allow for it. I still don't know what gave it the idea, but it's happened. We can't change it."
"And meanwhile there's nothing to stop it turning out as many destroyers and flying bombs as it wants," Dyer retorted. "The kill-teams have had their hands full even without that. How are they going to shape up when their destroyers start getting attacked? It could happen anytime in the next couple of hours. Spartacus hasn't even used its own destroyers yet and it's kicked us out of half of Janus!"
"It won't have the element of surprise a second time," Linsay pointed out. "Also, we have the advantage of position. They can only come out of the Spindle through a few access points and we've got those covered from all angles and in depth. Nothing can get through to the Hub. That was the whole purpose of my strategy, which you still seem unable or unwilling to appreciate."
A silence ensued while the two men glowered at each other across the table. Finally Krantz, who was the only other person present, spoke from a point midway between them.
"We could go on like this forever. Perhaps we'll never know for sure which of you was right, but recriminations can wait for a more opportune time. For the moment we have more urgent matters to attend to." He turned his eyes toward Linsay. "What are the arrangements for getting those people out of Southport?"
Linsay paused for a second to calm down, and then spread a plan of Janus on the table in front of them.
"The incoming traffic of catchers from Luna has been stopped, naturally," he began. "There are approximately two hundred persons in the Southport redoubt. Two shuttles are being loaded with fully equipped combat troops at Northport. The shuttles will dock at Southport to strengthen the position there and prepare it for use as an assault bridgehead. The ships will evacuate casualties and noncoms to Northport, collect fresh troops there and return to Southport to reinforce the units previously landed. Then we will commence a simultaneous attack on two fronts by advancing along the Spindle from both ends. Spartacus will be forced back by the hammer moving south from the Hub, onto the anvil moving north from Southport. The prime objective for the spearhead units will be to penetrate to the fusion plant and deactivate it. Other units have been ordered to act in supporting roles with that as the main thrust." He shot a challenging look at Dyer. "Does that meet with the doctor-general's approval?"
Dyer ignored the sarcasm and looked at Krantz.
"What's the point of this? We've got our answers now. Fifty-seven people who won't be going home are enough to tell me what we do about titan. It was never supposed to come to this. Why risk any more? I say pull everybody out now and let ISA take out this whole damn place with a big nuke."
Krantz assumed a meditative posture with his fingers steepled in front of his face. He stared gravely at them for what seemed a long time and then shook his head slowly. His reply was quiet but determined.
"I think not, Ray. As you say, the experiment was never expected to go to the extremes that we have seen, but it has. We are now at a crucial juncture. I see a great psychological need for us to pursue this to its end now, and to be seen to win. If we pull out now, what will the world see? It will see that we—a symbol of the human race itself—were defeated and had no effective reply left to offer. How do you think that knowledge would color our thinking for years, maybe decades, to come?" He shook his head again. "No. Now that we have come this far, we must prove that, although Man may sometimes make mistakes, he can always rise above them in the end. If we can do that much, your fifty-seven will not have died for nothing at all."
Dyer sat back and hunched his shoulders as he drew a long breath, then released it at once in a sudden sigh. Krantz was right.
"Or whatever the numbers end up as when it's all over," he said heavily.
Back on the Command Floor, Fred Hayes, who had been keeping watch on the dais while Dyer, Krantz and Linsay retired for their private conference, updated Dyer on what had been happening. Things had been fairly quiet, compared with earlier events anyway. Spartacus had tried moving its latest troops northward along the Spindle to the Hub, but this time the defenders had been well prepared and waiting, and the attack had collapsed rapidly. A similar fray with similar results had occurred at the perimeter around Southport. That was about all.
Feeling slightly relieved and a little more optimistic, Dyer walked over to where Laura was standing with Chris, Ron and a couple of CIM scientists. She saw him approaching and detached herself from the group to join him.
"Home is the hero," she said. "You look as if you just came from picking an argument with the whole of the Marine Corps." Dyer looked down at himself. He had come straight to the Command Room after returning from the Hub. His clothes were tattered and spattered with blood in places, and if his face was the same streaky colors as his arms he must look like a Zulu in war paint. The flippancy went out of Laura's voice and face abruptly. "Was it rough?" she asked.
"It was . . . rough."
"I was worried sick. Every time we got a list of latest arrivals at the Hub and your names weren't there, I just . . . Well, you're okay. I guess it doesn't matter now." She began walking with him over to the coffee dispenser on one side of the room. "Did you hear about Kim?"
"No, I didn't." Dyer turned a serious face. "What about her?"
"She cracked up," Laura told him. "When all those people got hit, that did it. She headed up the team that wrote the System. It was too much."
"What happened?"
"Oh, nothing dramatic. Her guilt hang-up about the whole thing bubbled over and she just went quietly to pieces. The doc's given her a sedative and she's lying down."
"At home?"
"No, upstairs. She'll be out for a while. Doc thinks we ought to ship her out with the casualties."
"I'll go talk to him later," Dyer muttered. He frowned to himself as he poured coffee into a cup. Another damn thing that he'd seen coming and never got around to doing anything about. If this was what they called learning the hard way, he wondered how he'd managed to survive all those years at all. And already he felt unhappy about their not declaring Emergency Red, and he wasn't doing very much to bring that about. But he couldn't; that was Krantz's decision to make. Dammit, he could try. This wasn't an argument about university timetables; it was life and death for people. Hadn't this whole lunatic project been his bright idea in the first place? He checked his flow of thought there with an effort. Much more like that, he told himself, and he'd be the next one to be put under sedation.
He raised the cup to his lips and washed the bitter taste of smoke from his mouth with a long, grateful swig. Laura was watching him and saying nothing.
"You haven't given me the speech yet," he said.
"What speech?"
"The I-told-you-so speech. Wasn't it me who always told you that computers were nothing to worry about? There's a computer out there that's just murdered fifty-seven people. So why don't you tell me I was wrong?"
"Because you weren't," Laura told him grimly. "Factories kill people. Airplanes kill people. So do steel plants, coal mines, high windows, oil refineries and a million other things. That isn't murder. Sometimes it happens because somebody somewhere didn't know as much as he thought he did. It's a shame it has to be that way but you can't change the way it is. What you're doing here is trying to find out. It's something that has to be done."
Dyer swilled the dregs of his coffee around in his mouth and spat them into the sink below the dispenser. By rights, surely it should have been Kim standing there saying things like that. It should have been the romantic idealist from Zeegram, surely, who should have been put to bed protesting and sedated upstairs. And suddenly it came to him how many lifetimes of front-line soldier's wisdom Danny Cordelle had packed into one short, simple statement when he had warned him, "Y' never can tell . . ."