Prisoners of Tomorrow Read Free

matter-zappers.” He tossed up his hands and shrugged. His face was constantly mobile, changing expression with each thought progression behind black, heavy-rimmed spectacles. “Other parts of the place seemed to be for launching ejectable modules, probably fission-pumped eggbuster lasers. And according to other reports, certain key parts of the structure are double-shelled and hardened against incoming beams.”
    “Yet nobody else has seen a hint of all this,” Paula remarked. “Enough visitors have been through the place, haven’t they?”
    “Just on the standard tour,” Colonel Raymond said from his seat opposite Watts. “They only see what they’re allowed to see. The place is over three miles around, not counting the hub. There’d be enough room backstage to hide the kinds of things we’re talking about.”
    Paula nodded and looked again at the image on the screen. Except for its inner surface—the “roof” facing the hub—the main torus was not visible directly; it moved inside a tire-like outer shield of sintered lunar rock which, to avoid needless structural loading, didn’t rotate with the rest of the colony. The shield was to exclude cosmic rays. Supposedly. Or was that another part of the defensive hardening? The question had doubtless occurred to other people too, so she didn’t bother raising it.
    In the center of the group, informally chairing the proceedings, was a broad-framed, craggy-featured man with a dark chin, moody eyes, and gray, wiry, short-cropped hair. He was Bernard Foleda, deputy director of the Pentagon’s Unified Defense Intelligence Agency, and had arranged the meeting. The UDIA was essentially an expanded version of the former Defense Intelligence Agency, now serving the intelligence needs of the Space Force in addition to those of the traditional services. He had said little since Paula’s arrival, tending instead to sit back for most of the time, watching and listening impassively. At this point, however, he leaned forward to take charge of the proceedings again.
    “Obviously this was something we had to check out.” Foleda spoke in a low-pitched, throaty voice that carried without having to be raised. “We put a lot of people on it. To cut a long story short, we succeeded in recruiting one of the people who worked on Tereshkova —a Russian, who was code-named ‘Magician.’”
    Paula’s eyebrows lifted. “As a source? You mean you actually got yourselves an inside man up there?”
    Foleda nodded. “Luck played a part in it. He was someone we’d had connections with for a while. The details don’t matter. Magician was an electrical maintenance supervisor, which meant he moved about a lot—exactly what we wanted. He worked there for almost six months. But as you can imagine, it wasn’t the easiest place to extract information from. The snippets he did get out to us were tantalizing. He indicated that he’d collected a whole package together, but he couldn’t get it down to us. The security checks on everybody who came back for leave or whatever were too strict. He wouldn’t risk it. But what he said he had up there sounded like dynamite. We christened it the ‘Tangerine’ file.”
    “Dynamite,” Jonathan Watts repeated, tossing up his hands again. “Weapons specs, pictures, firepowers, ranges, configuration data, parts lists, blueprints, test data, installation dates . . . the works.”
    Foleda resumed, “Then somebody had an idea.” He stopped and then looked at Colonel Raymond. “It might be better if you explain the technicalities,” he suggested.
    Raymond turned his head toward Paula. “It involved the packet-header and checksum protocols used in the Soviet communications link down from Mermaid.” Paula nodded. The terms related to data-communications networks.
    In many ways, communications networks are like road systems: their purpose is to move traffic quickly from one place to another with minimum congestion. They therefore present similar