Nobody ever found out exactly what caused the disaster at Southport.
It could have been damage to some vital piece of equipment during the sporadic fighting that had taken place there before the drones were pushed back and the perimeter was being secured. It could have been a result of the modifying and remodifying of control circuits that had been going on, performed by both human engineers and Spartacus's activities, for days. It could have been Spartacus. Possibly it was a million-to-one combination of all three. Afterward the designers of the safety interlocks insisted that in theory it couldn't happen, even with million-to-one odds. But that was in theory . . .
The antechamber behind the docking-bay airlocks at Southport was crowded with personnel assigned for evacuation to Northport when the first shuttle mated at Bay One. Minutes later the numbers were swollen further as the first company of marines doubled through the lock on their way to reinforce the perimeter.
The second shuttle was just nosing in toward the outer door of Bay Two when the door opened. The inner door had already been opened to speed up the two-way transfer of people after the shuttle docked.
Within seconds everybody who had been in the antechamber had become a blob of decompressed jelly hurtling away into the blackness of space.
Through somebody's quick thinking the doors that connected the antechamber through to the inner sections of Southport were closed quickly enough to save those who were still manning the perimeter. But they were desperately few, comprising only the front-line destroyer teams and riflemen who had been detailed to guard the perimeter until the marines from Northport arrived to strengthen them.
They were too few to hold when, just a matter of minutes later, Spartacus attacked.
The attacking force included the first of Spartacus's destroyers and purpose-built bombs. The defenders fought well and to the last, but they never really had a chance. The last message to come over the emergency channel to the Command Room told of the latest development in Spartacus's evolving awareness of what was causing what in the universe around it. It was directing its flying artillery not at the defenders' drones, but directly at the soldiers controlling them. The news was relayed hastily to the units positioned at the Hub. Meanwhile, with no bridgehead left to develop, the second wave of marines was ordered to abort its mission and to return to Northport.
The first drones to break through the doors into the antechamber were blasted suddenly forward by the rush of air and floundered about helplessly without power or steering in the vacuum chamber that it had become. Spartacus sealed the doors again and pondered. Then it sent in floor-crawling drones that ran a connection into the computers of the Southport backup station, which had previously been isolated from Spartacus's net, and began to interrogate the data stored there. The data included encoded pictures of the events that had taken place, as captured by the monitoring cameras located at strategic points around the antechamber and outside the docking bays. Spartacus analyzed the pictures . . . and pondered.
Soon afterward the floor-crawling drones closed the open airlock and Spartacus filled the area with air again to remobilize its fliers. Then it turned its attention to the catcher ships, a few of which were docked alongside the Southport unloading bay.
Spartacus had already deduced from the pictures that outside Southport was a whole new realm of existence which, unlike the inside, possessed no air. Also it knew now that the catcher ships moved in that realm. Therefore the catcher ships could move without need of air. If that was so, then perhaps drones could be built that could move without need of air. Drones like that would be able to work without interference from the shapes, maybe.
For Spartacus had seen what airlessness had done to the shapes.
The whole of the Command Room had been seized by shocked, disbelieving silence. Dyer, now cleaned up and wearing fresh clothes, sat numbly at his console on the dais, his eyes still frozen on the now blank screen that had shown the carnage at Southport. Beside him, Krantz stood rigid and ashen-faced, his fingers gripping the edge of the console in front of him. Linsay was at the center of a group of silent officers, his eyes bulging and the muscles of his throat moving without making any sound.
At last Krantz came slowly back to life and dropped weakly into his seat. The faces in the room slowly turned and looked at him, waiting. The next move was his.
He leaned forward and extended a shaky hand to activate a microphone on his console. His voice was barely more than a hoarse whisper when he spoke.
"I hereby declare a condition of Emergency Red . . . I repeat again, Emergency Red. Evacuation procedure is to commence immediately. The military command will secure and hold all access routes from the Spindle to the Hub until evacuation has been completed. Those positions are to be held at all costs. That is all." He flipped off the microphone and slumped back in his chair to stare at the far wall. Fifty miles out in space, the three ISA ships began moving in.
Sometime later, while the first batches of evacuees were being moved up the spokes and through the Hub to assemble in Northport, holes were beginning to appear here and there over the outer skins of Detroit and Pittsburgh. Machines of assorted shapes and sizes cut their way through and proceeded to set up instruments and sensors designed to scan the whole of the electromagnetic spectrum from VLP radio through to high-energy cosmic rays. Spartacus was making itself eyes to study the vast and wondrous world that it had discovered beyond Janus.