Up on the dais in the Command Room, Krantz's face had turned ashen while Eric Jassic was pouring out his story. Behind them Danny Cordelle stood, outwardly impassive as ever with his hands on his hips, watching the view of Spartacus's invasion force converging toward Northport. The first wave was coming around the northern curve of the Hub while the second was moving outward to begin rounding the inner reflector ring.
"How long ago was this," Krantz whispered.
"Ray left about ten, maybe fifteen minutes ago," Jassic said. "Nobody knows for sure how long it's been since Kim went. She left a false trail that threw everybody for a while."
Krantz swallowed hard and shook his head disbelievingly.
"A Gremlin? It's ridiculous . . . Where would she get one of those from?"
"You'd better believe it," Cordelle threw in from behind Krantz's shoulder. "Look."
On the screen a pinpoint of light blazed briefly but brilliantly in the shadow between the Hub and Detroit, at a point exactly where the line of the Spin Decoupler would be.
"My God!" Krantz breathed. Next to him, Jassic gasped audibly. They stared speechlessly at the screen waiting for the first sign of the slow pivoting motion that would tell them Janus was beginning to break up. Seconds dragged endlessly by but nothing happened.
"She's there!" Krantz hissed. "She's made it. Half the Army's supposed to be guarding the Hub. How in the name of God could she have gotten through?"
"How many of those things has she got?" Cordelle inquired.
"I don't know," Jassic told him.
"Somebody has to get there and stop her before she tries with any more," Krantz said, recovering from the semistupor that had gripped him. He turned in his seat and called to the dais communications operator sitting a few feet away.
"Get me Operations at the Hub . . . Linsay if he's there." He looked back at Jassic and Cordelle. "That Decoupler might come apart at any moment now. I'm ordering a Rim evacuation."
He was referring to the last-resort measure that had been built in as part of the modifications to insure that there would still be a way out of Janus even if a passage through the Hub were denied. Many parts of the lowermost levels of the Rim were constructed as detachable, self-contained survival capsules that could be launched into space after the lower shield had been dispersed, simply by allowing them to fall through the floor. There were not enough of them to accommodate the whole population, but cabs and elevators could all be used to supplement them if necessary, along with standard survival tents as provided for use in lunar and other extraterrestrial environments. Ideally, these would be released sequentially and synchronized with the Rim's rotation speed to facilitate their location and recovery by the Watchdog ships.
"Have the capsules loaded and prepared for release at any time," Krantz said to Cordelle. Inwardly he was hoping that the order would never have to be given; just two ships would be hard pressed to round up all the capsules before they became hopelessly spread out across thousands of miles of space. On the other hand, if the Decoupler broke or if Linsay's guess about Spartacus turning the whole Rim into a gigantic X-ray tube came true, there would be little hope anyway.
The communications officer interrupted from behind him.
"General Linsay hasn't arrived at Operations yet, sir. I have Major Seymour on channel four." Krantz looked down and activated screen four on his console. The major was looking out through the open visor of a spacesuit. His eyebrows lifted inquiringly as he recognized Krantz's face.
"No time to explain," Krantz snapped. "There's a woman in Section 17D with a Gremlin—M & S Unit there. Send a squad in and grab her, fast. Report back to me as soon as you've got her. Her name's Sinclair." Without asking questions, the major promptly relayed the order to somebody offscreen. A few seconds later he looked back at Krantz and reported: "We've contacted the command post at 17D. They're doing it now." Behind him on the screen there were signs of excited figures rushing in various directions. Distant sounds of shouting and barked commands came through on the audio.
"Those Spartacus ships are getting pretty close," Cordelle commented. "Where the hell are the missiles?" The wall display showed that the first two hippos and their flock of drones were almost at Northport.
At that instant a voice from the Command Floor called out: "Strike launched!"
Fifteen missiles came in from the Watchdog ships standing off in space. Three got through to destroy both the hippos of the first attacking wave and one of the electron tubes. A ragged cheer went up from parts of the room. It was short-lived. Seconds later, four missiles arced out of Detroit, avoided the spokes and obliterated Northport.
The third hippo moved from the inner ring toward the wreckage; the way in was wide open and there were no more missiles to stop it, More drones were closing in on the Hub from all directions.
Krantz gazed horrified at the hole that now gaped in the north pole of the Hub. When he moved his eyes back to the console in front of him, screen four was blank. Krantz frowned at it in momentary bemusement.
"They were at Northport," Cordelle reminded him.
In a communications room at one end of the White House, Nash, Belford and Schroder stood tight-mouthed around a screen showing the transmission being sent back from the ISA command ship, as hundreds of tons of wreckage spun away into space in all directions from where Northport had been.
"Those weren't firecrackers," Belford said when he had recovered sufficiently from the shock, "Look. It's moving itself out of Janus already and it's got missiles that'd take out a city block! It's burning our missiles out with X-rays—something we never thought of. It's got drones that work in space and we haven't. What next? We've got to stop it now, Vaughan! We've got two of our ships there. What if it hits them next with whatever it used just then? They're not equipped for antimissile operations."
Nash was still getting over the shock of watching Northport's destruction and seemed undecided.
"What do you say?" he asked Schroder. The CIM secretary gazed at the screen for a long time, and at length shook his head.
"It's still concentrating on Janus itself," he said. "If it takes the Hub there's still a chance for the people in the Rim. We've got five more ships on the way right now. Give them a chance too. If they could get in close and saturate Spartacus's defenses, there's a chance they could take Detroit apart piece by piece from the outside in, without risking the whole structure, until the system stops running. It's maybe fifty-fifty, but while there's a chance at all we have to take it. If you're worried about the two ships out there, tell them to move back. There's nothing they can do now until the rest get there anyhow."
Belford looked unhappy but said nothing. Nash thought over Schroder's arguments, nodded curtly and spoke to the officer seated in front of the bank of communications equipment that took up one wall of the room.
"Order Commander Stalley to take his ships back out to fifty miles and rendezvous with Miller's squadron there. Then get me an update on when Miller thinks he'll arrive."
The officer operated a key and spoke into a permanently open channel to ISA Headquarters.
"Relay orders to Watchdog to move Watchdog One and Watchdog Three out to Position Blue, effective immediately. Watchdog to rendezvous with Z Squadron at Position Blue. Inform Z Squadron Leader of revision to plan. Confirmations required."
The officer cut the screen and brought up a display of the latest predictions from the computers at Mission Control. He keyed in a sequence of commands to update the computers on the revised situation. A few seconds later some of the numbers changed.
"Z Squadron arrival time at Position Blue estimated at three hours, twenty-seven minutes from now, allowing for course change," he reported.
Nash looked up at the clock above the door and resumed pacing back and forth from one end of the silent room to the other.