The arrivals concourse at the Hub end of the Berlin spoke was a scene of bustling activity when Kim emerged from one of the elevators. Busy medical orderlies were fussing over rows of stretchers waiting their turn to be moved down to the Rim while behind them the walking wounded were sitting and standing in weary, battle-stained groups, smoking cigarettes and watching the companies of freshly arrived troops and ammunition parties passing through on their way to the fronts.
She had been informed at the departure point in Berlin that standing orders required everybody bound for the Hub to be kitted out in suits, but that face visors could be left open in the areas that were still pressurized. When she arrived, therefore, there was nothing in particular to single her out from anybody else; besides that, everybody was too busy to take much notice of her. Carrying the conspicuous aluminum sighter case concealed inside a standard-issue plasticized storage bag intended to hold a laser range-finder, she worked her way through the confusion toward the south exit.
The soldiers preparing fallback positions at the lower end of the corridor that rose away toward the Spindle followed her with a few curious looks as she passed, but made no attempt to stop her. Farther on, a hole blown through the floor was being improvised into a fortified destroyer-control position and a sandbagged machine gun was covering the stretch ahead from behind a bulkhead door. At the far end of the corridor, where it transformed into a staircase to complete its steepest part, a squad of marines was positioned to cover the closed door that led onward. One of them moved into the center of the corridor and beckoned Kim to a halt as she approached.
"It's depressurized beyond this point, ma'am," he told her. "You sure you're going the right way?"
"What's the situation in 17D?" she inquired.
"We've got some forward units stationed there, that's all. Forward observation."
"It's still ours then," Kim said with a quick surge of inward relief. "How do I get through? I need to get in there."
The marine looked at her curiously. "Do you know it's right on the outside? What do you need to go there for?"
Kim made a vague gesture with the range-finder bag that she was holding.
"Somebody wants a special reconnaissance done of a couple of parts of Detroit. 17D's the best place to get the details they need. I was with a team but we got split up back there somewhere. I have to use the chance now, while I've still got it."
The marine waved a couple of men forward to open the bulkhead while Kim closed and secured her visor. She adjusted the suit's life-support and moved on into the space between the double doors of the bulkhead. The door behind her closed and a few moments later the indicators by the door in front changed to show that the lock had emptied. A slight nudge came through her gauntlet as the handle's interlock disengaged. She turned the handle to the "Free" position, and pushed the door outward.
The scene beyond was eerie—a tortured jungle of torn pipes and jagged twisted-metal sculptures rearing up out of nightmare chasms of shadow being cast by a few emergency lamps glowing dull red to preserve night vision. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she made out several shadowy helmeted figures crouching over weapons in the darker recesses and behind makeshift parapets of smashed machines and crumpled wreckage. A couple of the helmets turned toward her as the shaft of light stabbed briefly from the doorway, but apart from that the figures remained motionless. Kim clutched the handle of the bag more tightly, drew the handlamp from her belt and began picking her way slowly and carefully toward the pitch blackness ahead.
She used the lamp to guide her as far as the maze of collapsed debris that had once been the offices of the Maintenance & Spares Unit and through to the door that led to the storeroom beyond. There she doused the lamp and carried on by feel and memory until she could make out the faint rectangle that marked where the door led through to the catwalk overlooking the bug parking bay.
By now her eyes had grown more used to the dark and vague outlines of the metal ribbing hanging from above and heaped and broken storage racking began resolving themselves around her. She had reached the door and was about to go through when she saw the two spacesuited figures lying behind a low barricade at the edge of the catwalk, keeping a watch out over the floor below. She had almost walked straight into them, but their backs were toward her and because of the airlessness they had heard nothing. She backed slowly into the storeroom and forced herself to stay calm and think.
She remembered seeing a door somewhere to the left when she had come here with Chris and Ron. There was a chance that whatever place it led through to might open out onto the catwalk farther along. If it did, it would open out somewhere between where the two soldiers were positioned and the curving platform that ran below the window and above the airlocks used by the bugs, which was the direction she wanted to go. It was worth a try.
She felt her way through the wreckage until she found the wall. Then she began tracing it back with her hands, not daring to risk attracting attention by using her lamp. At last she came to a vertical break. It was jagged and pitted in places but felt like the edge of a doorway. The panel beyond it had to be the door. She pushed against it and the panel fell away noiselessly into the blackness. Doorway or not, there was an opening in front of her through the wall. She bit her lip and moved into it.
Blotches of faint light revealed a series of large jagged holes in the far end of whatever she was in—the end where the catwalk was. So, even if it hadn't been built to open out onto the catwalk, it did now. Kim picked her way across to the far side, away from where the two soldiers were stationed, went down low on the floor, and brought her head cautiously up near the edge of the gaping hole in front of her to study whatever lay beyond.
Where the large viewing window had been, above the two airlocks on the opposite side of the bay, there was now nothing but a huge irregular gash blown in the side of Janus. The menacing bulge of Detroit visible outside was in shadow and there was nothing but the faint glow of starlight from the part of the sky that wasn't obscured by Detroit, to raise scattered highlights among the almost total darkness that enveloped the chamber she was looking out into, and the parking area for the bugs below.
Immediately in front of her the catwalk was blocked by a mass of tangled wreckage that appeared to have fallen from somewhere above. If she kept low on the floor, she could probably use it as cover and get out onto the catwalk without being noticed by the soldiers, who were now farther along to her right. She moved her head closer to the hole and followed the line of the catwalk with her eyes as far as she could trace it into the gloom. It seemed to be twisted and buckled, offering plenty of shadow to conceal somebody worming along toward the platform. But what if there were more soldiers in the shadows than the two she had seen? What if they were using infrared viewers or image intensifiers? She'd stand out like an iceberg on the ocean. She felt clammy but at the same time cold inside her suit. Lying here and wondering about it wouldn't change anything. She drew a long, unsteady breath and turned to prop her back against the wall while she unfastened the range-finder bag and peeled it away from the aluminum case. She turned back onto her stomach, drew the case up alongside her, and slowly inched her way over the lip of jagged metal at the bottom of the hole and out onto the catwalk.
Five minutes later she had reached a point that was in deep shadow between a section of crazily tilted catwalk plates and the remains of part of the lower edging of the window and the adjacent wall. From there she was looking out into space, directly up under the black roof of the Spindle and across at the hanging bulk of Detroit. She was acutely conscious of the absence of anything behind her to block the line of sight from where the soldiers were still presumably lying, but she had no choice but to trust to the depth of the shadows for concealment. She snapped open the case, located by touch the two Gremlins in their launch tubes, and attached them to the floor supports in a position that gave them a clear line of fire up toward the midpoint of the Spindle. Then she slid the sighter out of the case and crawled back to a darkened vantage point twenty feet or so farther to the left.
As she eased herself into a comfortable firing position, she noticed something moving on the very edge of Detroit, just where its outline blacked out the starry sky beyond. She stared, puzzled for a moment, and then realized that the object was not on Detroit, but farther away, rising into view from somewhere behind it to the south. As it detached itself from the solid curve of Detroit's bulk and moved on outward and down in the direction of the Rim, she saw that it was a thin rod-shaped device that thickened into irregular shapes at the ends and appeared cluttered by smaller disks and cylinders in between. She didn't recognize it as being like anything she had seen before but she knew that all kinds of unexpected things had been happening during the time she had been out of action. Obviously it was something to do with Spartacus. All the more reason not to waste any time.
Her breath came in short, tense gasps inside her helmet as she laid the sighter into a notch between two pieces of warped structural tubing and moved her head into line behind the eyepiece. She flipped on the sighter's intensifier and at once details of the hitherto featureless black mass of the Spindle became clearly visible. The twin rings of the Spin Decoupler moved into the viewing Geld. Kim nudged a button to brighten up the cross hairs a fraction and then centered them on her target.
She saw the flash from the corner of her eyes as the Gremlin streaked away. An instant later the whole center portion of the Decoupler ring disappeared in a blaze of whiteness. She kept her eyes glued to the sighter and her body tensed. Part of the near half of the ring, which was stationary relative to the Hub, had been blown away between two severed ends that terminated at the jagged hole that had appeared in the north Spindle surface. But the ring had not jammed! Even as she watched she could see the far portion of the hole and the gap in the south ring sliding inexorably onward and up on its endless journey around the Spindle of Janus. Perhaps her aim had been slightly off.
She was certain there had been a tremor. For one tiny moment at the instant the Gremlin had struck, she was sure she had seen the rings falter as something snatched. But now they were sliding smoothly again. Janus was still intact. Spartacus was still there, still five hundred feet away from her inside the monstrous ball of darkness that was staring in at her across a thin wisp of empty space. Almost . . . she breathed to herself. Almost . . . Surely one more would be enough.
The floodlights came on and drenched the scene in sudden dazzling brightness.
Kim whirled her head to look back over her shoulder. The two soldiers on the catwalk were on their feet, both with weapons aimed straight at her. A third, whom she hadn't seen before, rose up a few feet farther along from them and began making unmistakable gestures for her to get up. No doubt they were shouting at her too, angrily from the look of the third's actions, but Kim had switched off the radio in her suit. She made no move to turn it on but cast her eyes quickly around. Three more figures in suits were standing farther away along the catwalk in front of another door from which they appeared to have just emerged. They were looking not at Kim but at the three soldiers who had been manning the observation point. Kim couldn't make out what was happening. The three new figures were waving their arms and seemed to be protesting about something while the two soldiers Kim had seen previously continued to stand motionless with their rifles trained on her, apparently heedless of whatever the others were saying to them. The third soldier was between the two groups and kept turning his head from one side to the other as if unable to make up his mind about something.
A slow throbbing vibration was building up in the floor beneath her. She could feel the plates pulsing through her suit as if the whole structure of Janus were being shaken by an invisible mighty hand. The Decoupler had snatched, she realized. The first shock waves were arriving after being transmitted along the Spindle. And then the vibrations died away again as the tremor passed.
Kim lay on her side and stared up into the muzzles of the two rifles. She was surprised to realize that she felt calm and somehow strangely detached. Even from that distance she met the steely stares of the soldiers peering out through their visors and down along the barrels of the unwavering rifles and she felt her own eyes turn cold and hard. At the same time a serenity and composure came welling up from somewhere deep inside her. All the terror and the helplessness that she had lived with for so long were being swept away. She could win. One more was all it would take, and then she would be complete again. Nothing would take that away from her now.
Slowly and deliberately, with the strange sensation that her body was being manipulated by some external influence beyond her control, she turned away and brought the sighter up to her cheek. The Decoupler ring moved under the cross hairs and stopped rock-steady at dead center. Slivers of metal sprayed against the outside of her helmet as a bullet gouged into the structure inches away from her head. The fleeting thought went through her mind that it should have been impossible for a trained soldier to miss at that range. Then she squeezed the firing button.
The Gremlin hit the target square at center zero.
There was no detonation.
Dud!
Something inside her broke as she let the sighter slip from her hands and rose numbly to her feet. She turned and looked up at the catwalk but her brain was incapable of registering the sight of one of the soldiers crumpling in a heap against the guardrail and another swinging around to point his rifle downward at him while the third was trying to recover his balance and bring his weapon to bear on Kim. And then another new figure was hurtling down like a cannonball from somewhere above the catwalk.
But Kim was already collapsing slowly to the floor as consciousness gave up the struggle and ceased to function.