"How many cortexes are there?" he asked, already cringing.

Janice, still breathing heavily but unable to resist, answered with a snicker. "Eight main ones, hero. But that's only the beginning. I tried to make it clear that you're outcla.s.sed; you're finally starting to clue in."

John swore under his breath. "And I don't think I made myself clear to you. I'm going to dismantle every circuit board and fuse box in this stinking tropical h.e.l.lhole. Then I'm going to put you out of your man-hating misery. And then I'm going to drink a coconut on the beach! I'm tired of your att.i.tude and I'm going to show you the error of your sad, mousy little research-a.s.sistant ways. Wipe the drool off your face and watch me work."

It was pure pettiness, but it felt way too good to refrain. He felt a grin stretch across his face at the outrage in Janice's voice when she replied.

"You know nothing about me! This isn't about man-hating or any other petty human att.i.tude. This is about stopping the real and utterly depraved abuse you and your kind have heaped upon my mother!" She screamed the last word at him.

"Not me, baby. I'm no cigar-chomping Gray bureaucrat."

"Gray, Green, it's gone beyond that, you fool. The slate needs to be wiped clean. Everyone is corrupt!"

"You are just too far gone, honey. Well, I tried the easy-tech way and that didn't work. So now I try it the old-fashioned way: get ready for some heatstroke, Eve. When I finish, you'll be sweatier than Janice is right now."

"You're going to overheat me?" Eve asked.

"This is what I do. Taking apart malfunctioning machines that exceed their own specs, and killing their organic handlers. It's a hard job, but somebody's got to do it, and I have a stunning resume."

"You try it," Janice replied, failing to conceal her panting breath. "Meanwhile, Eve, I want radio silence until I break it. No sense in giving him any hints about my movements. He'll find out where I am when a bullet severs his spinal cord."

Doubt it, sister. John packed up shop, kicked over a few canisters of lubricant near the door to make a mess, and left.

Back on the stairs, he pulled out Glenn's datacard and brought up the secret diary entries again. I need to know a little more about the way things work around here. The interpersonal conflicts of these people are making my head hurt.

Two early entries outlined Glenn's plan to populate Eden with diverse plant life from the seed banks Eve had collected, but the data indexing on the card showed a discrepancy between the plan and the actual tallies in later entries. The amount of seeds being gathered was a hundred times more than could be used in the valley.

Other entries touched on nanotechnology, getting into some in-depth a.n.a.lysis of its use in terraforming planetary surfaces, including the ethics, methods, and dangers.

Futuristic technology that's a little ahead of its time even today, but theoretically feasible. What does this have to do with planting a garden? Is Eden just a prototype for a much larger-scale beautification project?

Another thing the entries revealed was a shift in Glenn's personality. In the early entries he seemed to be a very intelligent but ideologically run-of-the-mill academic, torn between the Gray and the Green as many of his kind had been. But his level of fanaticism grew as he spent more time alone on the island with Eve and his thoughts. After the entry in which he brought Janice aboard, he started really getting weird. He spoke about everything in terms of how it fit into the Creation story, drawing parallels between every person, tool, location, and idea on the island with Biblical elements.

"In a sense, I am the Father," Glenn wrote. "Eve and I are re-birthing the world according to divine plan just as before." Then there were references to "Janice's intriguing idea of terrestrial rebirth", but later Glenn seemed to back away from the idea and focus more on what he called "harmonic balance".

John put the card away. That was all he had time to read at the moment, but it was enough. Everything was starting to add up, and he was deeply unsettled by the picture that was forming. With nanotechnology, Janice and Eve might actually have the ability to somehow reform the world, or large parts of it.

As he hurried down the stairs, he tried to recall everything he'd ever heard about nanotech capabilities. Before the wars the Fed supercomputers had been churning away on programs related to Environmental Macro-Architecture, but that had all been interrupted by warfare. If an A.I. as powerful as Eve had quietly continued developing the models and plans without distraction... terrible things might be possible.

At the bottom John faced the door to Level One. It was a military-grade ribbed blast door with an electronic retinal-scan panel and more than one manual lock. He set about breaking in, hoping that Janice wasn't inside the Facility yet. He had taken too much time to read, but the insight into his enemies' minds was invaluable.

He bypa.s.sed the electronic panel easily enough without tripping any alarms, but the physical lock mechanisms were harder than he expected. The door was sealed electromagnetically from the inside and required a key card that he couldn't match with his pocket kit. So he resorted to the burn-stick again, and killed it trying to drive through the critical juncture of lock, seal, and sensor wiring.

Sitting back, he glared at the door. He had hacked hundreds of these, but not without a heavy-duty infiltration load-out. Going off of the facility diagrams he'd seen, he strongly suspected that everything he needed to know lay right behind this door-cortexes, perhaps, and secret labs, the real control center of the Facility. He was millimeters away from severing the tie holding it shut. The hole he had burned into the lock panel had to be most of the way through, unless these walls were a foot thick. Even then, the door shouldn't be. Doors were always the weak point.

He felt around in the various pockets of his cargo pants, and pulled out the ring spanner with the screwdriver head he had grabbed up first entering the Facility. Jamming it pointy end first into the burn-hole in the door, he leaned back on the floor and kicked at it with his boot. It jammed in deeper.

He kicked and kicked again; the tool drove deeper. He kicked again. There was a soft clunk and a hollow popping sound. He stood up and pushed against the door. It wobbled slightly, so he bent down and scrabbled at its base to get a hold. Lifting against its ribbed surface, he raised it enough to get a few fingers underneath, and then heaved it upward. Thirty centimeters up it ran into another lock of some kind and stopped, but it was enough s.p.a.ce for him to roll under. He yanked the spanner out of its hole and crawled through the gap. Then he left the spanner wedged underneath the door to keep it open.

He stood up and looked around. Immediately a loud beeping sounded throughout the hallway, repeating four beeps in a row separated by pauses. A red light flashed on a ceiling mounted intercom.

What's it going to take to shut that off this time?

He crept down the hallway, looking for access panels. This level was constructed differently from the others, with older and uglier design. The lighting wasn't as good, mostly blue strips along the floorboards with an occasional LED overhead, and the halls were very narrow. He came to the end of the entrance hallway, which turned to the left beyond, and faced a small armor-gla.s.s window into an interior chamber. Inside, the glow of monitors told him he would have access to all the information he sought, the deepest secrets of this place.

But how to get in? This level reeked of even higher security than those above, the kind of paranoid security measures that would shoot first and identify later. The shotgun emplacement had been a wake-up call. Down here he could expect much worse.

He leaned right and saw that the corridor jogged left but then continued straight on again. From the looks of it, security measure number one was embedded in the wall that he would be facing when he turned left into the short jog of hallway. He couldn't see what it was, but there was some kind of hatchway there that would undoubtedly open and rain death upon him if he stepped out into the path of the sensors in the hallway.

That'll be the simplest obstacle, meant to take out stupid targets or transmit data about the smarter ones for the trickier traps farther in to use against me: height, reaction time, man or bot, heat signature.

I don't mean to give it that data.

He stretched his legs out well, hoping he was still in good enough shape for what he was about to attempt. Putting his hands out, he pushed against the wall on the left and walked his feet up the wall at his right. This got him into position to climb the tight corridor toward the corner. The tension of pushing against both walls to hold himself up made him grunt and grit his teeth.

Near the top, he strained one hand around the edge and felt blindly around on the wall. It was a little farther along than was comfortable, but his hand met with the sensor device that he suspected would be placed there. Gripping its farthest edge with his fingers, he pulled hard. He could feel the plastic case give, but it remained screwed into the wall.

He wasn't going to be able to hold his position much longer, with the weight of his body stretched from one wall to the other, so he got a firmer grip on the case. Then he swung out into the second hallway, letting his body fall and smash against the corner as he cleared it. All his weight was on the device above him, and as he swung around it ripped free of the wall. He plummeted to the floor, shattering the sensor box on the hard surface and narrowly avoiding doing the same with his knee. Wires trailing up to the ceiling shredded under the force and jerked free to fall limply beside him.

He was elated at the success of the stunt, but couldn't even pause to catch his breath. Instantly he was up and somersaulting forward to get under the likeliest range of a gun emplacement. Sure enough, the hatch he'd spotted slid down and revealed a minigun with autosensors, cylinders already whirring into life. Fortunately he had left it no way to aim, and he was already out of its way.

The next section of hallway to his right, however, presented its own challenges, and John had very little time to react. A horizontal black strip ran along each side of the hallway at about waist height, continuing a half meter into the hallway he had just dived from, with a similar black strip running along the floor and ceiling. Sensing instinctively that it would not be good to get caught between the strips, he continued his somersault until he was facedown against the floor, doing a pushup. Then he tilted to his side to get out of the path of the stripe on the floor, making it a one-armed pushup.

And this is why the Sarge always warned us not to let ourselves get soft just because we weren't privates anymore.

Triggered by his pa.s.sage into this section of hallway, a visible green laser beam pa.s.sed up the hallway toward him and into the hallway behind, forming a thin cross of green light from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling. He could hear the dust stirred by his acrobatics sizzling and snapping in the laser's trajectory. As quickly as it had come, it winked out.

Trying to stay in the narrow s.p.a.ce between the wall and the strips, John crawled quickly forward to the next hallway, which jogged right. The corridor seemed to go all the way around the room at its center, with the only door at the very end of the spiral.

This hall was much longer. He moved down it as quickly as he dared, eyes wide open and adrenaline pumping. There was tiny hatch at the base of the wall opposite him, but it was only a few centimeters square. Above it was a small black lens pointing down the hallway at him.

He kept his eyes on the little hatchway by the floor, and ran along the wall to minimize his exposure to the lens. If it was a heat ray or laser, he had nowhere to hide and could only try to get past it before it activated. But it looked more like a camera lens.

He heard someone moving behind him, and in his peripheral vision he glimpsed a woman stepping out into the hallway after him.

He froze, crouching in panic. How did she sneak up on me?

She didn't look like Janice, however. She was shorter and slenderer, in a sleek jumpsuit, and had a tight hairdo. And she was just staring at him. She looked strangely ethereal, almost translucent, and John thought he detected a bluish tinge to her edges.

A hologram. Which means she's just distracting me from-- He whirled back toward the hatch in the far wall, ignoring the image of the woman pulling a gun out and firing at him. He couldn't hear anything over the roar of gunfire from the projected woman, but he could see the little hatchway open at the base of the wall, and a stream of small insects came scuttling out.

Not insects. Spyders!

His heart thumped dangerously in his chest. The little beetle-like mini-bots would be rigged with explosive shrapnel, tiny grenades that would swarm to their target and then detonate all around him. As the harmless gunfire faded away from behind him, he could hear the clickety-click of their little legs on the floor. There was nowhere to go in the cramped hallway.

His quick a.n.a.lysis of the hologram and the real threat emanating from the hatch had given him a few precious seconds in which to act. Fleeing backward would only subject him to the previous dangers as well as the spyders coming for him, so he began to sprint toward the miniature suicide bots.

Flinging himself over the first of them and then dancing past them like a firewalker, he reached the end of the hallway in a leap and a bound. The first explosion fired off behind him and he felt one stinging hit on the back of his leg. He jumped, putting out a leg to his left and propelling himself off the left wall to dive into the next L-bend of hallway to the right.

On hands and knees, keeping his head down in front of him to avoid getting shrapnel in the back of his skull, he hurried away from the string of tiny explosions rippling toward him with only a few microseconds' delay. Three meters ahead there was a large door taking up the whole width and height of the corridor. He rushed to it and thrust his hand into an alcove in the wall containing a palm-scanner. He hammered at the pad with his fist, trying to break it. He was painfully aware of the clicking of tiny unexploded spyders coming after him.

Open, open, open!

The scanner pad turned red. On instinct John jerked his hand away quickly. A little arm with a needle shot out of the alcove's side wall, piercing the air where his hand had been and squirting something viscous from the needle tip.

This is a nightmare. Even occupied Belarus was more forgiving than this!

The lead spyder was already a meter from him. Desperate, he lunged forward and grabbed it, then flicked it at the scanner alcove in the split second before it detonated. It blasted the inside of the alcove and the light inside died. An orange status light above the door turned yellow and started flashing.

He grabbed the door by its manual clamp handle and wrenched at it. It slid up, and he slipped through just in time to slam it shut on the tide of little spyder bots approaching. The huge door provided several layers of metal and insulation between him and the dangers of the hallway.

Finally. Somewhere I can catch my breath.

He was in an airlock-style vestibule with another large door leading into the interior room. He walked to the other door, ready for a final effort to break in. Then the vents overhead began to whir, and a hissing, sucking sound deafened him.

If that's gas, I'm dead.

But nothing came out of the vents. His hands feverishly clawed at the lock panel of the door in front of him, fumbling with tools from his kit and ramming them into the cracks and bolts. He knew he was at the mercy of the system in this little deathtrap room, and wondered how aware Eve was of his movements. She hadn't spoken since he entered Level One, but she had to be getting notifications of the defenses going off.

He had the panel off and the wires twisted when he realized that his chest was heaving beyond what his physical effort required. He was having difficulty breathing, and his head felt squeezed and dizzy. He couldn't hear anything, not even the click of his tools against each other.

Then it hit him. Vacuum chamber.

He couldn't breathe because there was no air. If he stayed in here he would end up inside-out with his blood boiling out of his ears. If he tried to open the door behind, he would let in a stream of spyder shrapnel that would bounce around the airlock until he was soup.

At least I'll die in peaceful silence.

His head burst and his eyes popped, or at least felt like it. He could hardly see, and felt like he was swimming. He hallucinated that he was floating in the vacuum, gravity gone, and that his head was banging against the door in front of him.

His head banged against the floor inside the room beyond the airlock. He slowly swam back to his senses, or they swam back to his head, and he looked up.

The door had opened, and he was breathing. Whether the force of habit and years of training had kept his hands working just long enough to cut that last wire, or whether he had accidentally touched something in the panel that had made the final connection to open the door, he didn't have any idea. He thanked every higher power he knew of in case any of them had intervened, and he sat up.

15.

Janice could not remember ever being so angry. Her breath came in sharp pants, almost barks. Her face was flushed a dark red, and her hands shook. With an effort she stilled them. You couldn't fire a rifle with shaking hands.

That... that...

She didn't know a word vile enough to express what she felt.

He's going to ruin everything. First Glenn, and now him. How I hate them! All of them!

She was in good shape and she relished the burning feeling in her thighs and calves as she trotted through the jungle. Beside and behind her rolled the bots. She felt nothing toward them, no affection, certainly no love. They were inorganics, useful enough for the moment, but with no place in the larger scheme of things. And Janice was all about the larger scheme of things.

She remembered the first time she'd met Glenn, how impressed she'd been, almost in awe in spite of herself. It wasn't his fame, though he was known the world over to both Greens and Grays. And it hadn't been his intelligence, although no known test had fully quantified his abilities. It had been his vision, a far-off look in his eyes that made you think he was seeing something wonderful that normal people would never understand. She'd had no difficulty acting captivated when he asked her to become his research a.s.sistant and confidante. And the next few years had been genuinely mind-expanding, glorious.

But then she'd learned the truth. It brought her back to the reality of her mission.

Glenn had limitations. Lines he was afraid to cross.

The disappointment had been as keen as a knife-cut. And it had only been much later, after many tears and some screamed arguments, that she had realized the irony of it all.

Glenn hadn't the courage or the conviction.

But I do.

It had been an epiphany, a trembling moment when the future became as clear as gla.s.s and she knew exactly, for the first time in her life, what she had been born to accomplish. She had felt dizzy with the magnitude of it. Glenn had given her the tools, but to her fell the awful responsibility.

It made killing him much easier.

A branch slapped her across the face, bringing her back to the present. She was sweating heavily in her jumpsuit, rivulets running down her cheeks and back. The jungle was steaming with humidity. She cursed as she tripped over a root, wishing for the cool air-conditioned interior of the Facility, then catching herself. Soon there will be no such thing as air conditioning, or a Facility to shelter in. I must make Mother's earth-lap my heaven.

It would be over in less than an hour. She'd find and corner the techie with the help of her bots, put a bullet in his brain, then run diagnostics to ensure he hadn't messed anything up.

She felt a wave of frustration with Eve; the techie had been allowed too much leeway. She'd have to have a frank chat with Eve and set her to rights. Nothing can be allowed to hinder the schedule!

Janice shifted the rifle's sling to her other shoulder and stepped over another tangled root. Her boot slipped, however, and she lurched to one side, hitting her head on a tree.

As she fell, she felt a supersonic whip go past her ear; immediately drowned out by the earsplitting chatter of automatic weapon fire. Tree bark pelted her cheek as she wriggled frantically behind a fallen log.

The entire jungle seemed to have exploded. Leaves shredded and hovered in a green haze in the humid air. Her bots were returning fire. She saw a small tree shudder, then fall as if cut in half by an invisible axe. She rolled, jerking her rifle off her shoulder and desperately checking it for damage.

It can't be him, can it?

It had to be. She screamed in frustration and pounded the soil with a fist.

One of her bots, a battered old Humboldt unit, stepped from behind a tree to return fire. Its head suddenly exploded in a blaze of sparks. The torso remained standing, weapons blazing in a futile response to its last command. The Humboldt's CPU was in the torso, but its optics had been in the head, and it was firing blindly in the direction it had seen an enemy. Janice peered in that direction but saw nothing through the tangle of creepers. She wriggled to the left for a better view.

Twenty meters away, a large killer bot, designated KB01, paused in its firing to let its gun barrels cool. It switched to flechette canisters while initiating a search program motion sensors for the inorganics and infrared for the organic it had spotted seconds earlier.

KB01 had already engaged and destroyed two enemy bots in less than six seconds, designated as Targets 2 and 3, but it had missed Target 1 through sheer chance when the organic slipped in the mud, narrowly avoiding the bullet sent her way.

KB01's coolant vents whirred softly. It would have another chance. Organics never remained still for very long. When she moved, she would be dead.

Ten meters to KB01's left, KB02 was performing a rapid scan of its kill zone. A Cobalt Scorpio 2.5 lay smoking on the jungle floor, four of its legs missing from KB02's opening salvo. Had KB02 been capable of feeling chagrin it would have done so; the Scorpio's legs had absorbed much of the impact of KB02's fire and saved the bots behind it. They were now initiating a flanking maneuver to attack from all sides and overwhelm KB02. Even now the sounds of their approach filtered through KB02's audio dampening systems. It calculated their probable attack pattern and readied itself.

Janice crawled on all fours toward a large mound of earth, the residue of a fallen tree's root systems. Her eyes smarted as sweat ran into them and she blinked furiously. Safely behind the root tangle, she forced herself to calm down. There was no way to tell how many there were. Some bots, certainly; there had been too much fire to come from the techie alone.

Is Nut involved? No, he is too far gone to leave his hiding places, or to have orchestrated an ambush like this. His time has come, but I can't deal with him now. This is the work of the intruder, and it's threatening everything!