Lethal Velocity

  “Hey!”

  It was the third guard. He was halfway down the corridor from the front desk, motioning with one hand.

  “Are you Poole?”

  “That’s right.” Poole turned from the window, Barksdale temporarily forgotten.

  “There’s someone on the radio for you, here at the desk.”

  Poole walked back to the anteroom, then took the radio that was handed over the desk. “Poole here,” he said.

  He listened for a moment to the anguished, incoherent voice that came crying over the transmitter.

  “Who is this?” he said. “What? Calm down, calm down. Terri, where are you exactly? Are you hurt? No, stay put—I’ll be right there.”

  Poole spun around, letting the radio drop to the desk. He dashed to the door, yelled down the corridor. “Lindbergh! Lindbergh!”

  The mop of black hair appeared. “Yes?”

  “Listen, I’ve got to go. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Guard those two, you hear? Guard them.”

  Lindbergh scratched his face perplexedly. “I’ll do that,” he replied. “Mr. Allocco said—”

  But Poole was already gone.

  THE WORST THING, strangely enough, was the music: the sterile, ethereal New Age music that seeped from hundreds of hidden speakers, suffusing Callisto with its promise of a tranquil future. Normally, it was barely audible beneath the clamor of numberless guests. But there were no longer any guests in the Skyport. The queue lines had all been dispersed, the would-be riders asked to return to Callisto’s other attractions. A silver curtain—part of a system for isolating sections of the Park in civil emergencies—now hung at the end of the concourse, shielding the Skyport from outside view. Though it looked ethereal, light as gossamer, it was completely opaque, heavily reinforced with layers of soundproofing. Two security specialists, dressed in Callisto’s twenty-second-century uniforms, stood guard before it.

  Bob Allocco walked across the Skyport, hearing the rap of his shoes against the reflective blue pavers, the icy cadences of the ambient music. It was cruelly, diabolically out of place here, and he wished he could get it out of his head. He wished, too, that he could get the other thing out of his head—his first glimpse of what had once been Station Omega—but he knew already that was one sight that had been seared into his memory forever.

  At night, when the Park was closed and there were no lines of guests, the walk across the Skyport always seemed long. Today it seemed even longer. Allocco glanced over, saw a security foreman trotting toward him.

  “Status?” Allocco was already asking as the man came up.

  “We’ve completed another sweep, sir,” the foreman said, panting slightly. “No guests anywhere. The Skyport’s totally secure.”

  After what he’d seen in Griffin Tower, Allocco no longer believed any place in Utopia was totally secure. But he grunted his approval. Under the circumstances, the evac had gone remarkably smoothly. There had been no panic, no outraged refusals to leave the Skyport. All the guests—on line, entering or leaving the rides—had seemed to buy the story of a federally mandated emergency drill. The barrier curtain had come down unobtrusively, the posting guard set up. Such a procedure had only been simulated in the past, and the best evac time in the drills had been four minutes. Today, the real thing had taken perhaps four and a half. On another occasion, Allocco might have been pleased.

  But none of this efficiency would be of any help to the riders on Station Omega.

  “I want three roving patrols, six men each,” he told the foreman. “Is the forward command post established?”

  “By the entrance to Moon Shot.”

  “Good. Have the teams keep in radio contact with the post, ten-minute call-ins. Keep running them through the Skyport until mop-up’s complete.” He glanced around. “Did anybody see anything unusual before this happened? Anything out of the ordinary?”

  The security foreman shook his head. “One of the loading attendants saw a cast member she didn’t recognize. That’s about it.”

  Allocco pounced on this. “She didn’t recognize? What made her remember?”

  “She just said it was funny, seeing a cast member in a shuttle pilot’s suit leaving the off-loading area.”

  “What’s this attendant’s name?”

  “Piper, sir. She’s still back there, with…with the others.”

  Allocco thought a minute. “I want plainclothes teams dispatched through the rest of Callisto. All the other Worlds, as well. Small groups, low profile, two teams to a World. Atlantis, too.”

  “The other Worlds, sir?” The foreman looked surprised. “Looking for what?”

  “Anything. I’ll take their reports in thirty minutes, then we’ll re-evaluate.”

  As he veered off in the direction of Moon Shot, Allocco glanced at his watch: 4:09. My God, was it possible he had been here only seven minutes? He felt as if he’d aged at least a year.

  When he’d first arrived on the scene, racing up the maintenance stairway, the exit area of Station Omega—out of sight from the main Skyport, thank God—had been a pandemonium of frantic activity: desperate rescue workers, off-load specialists either crying or shocked into senselessness. But it had been different then, of course: people still thought there was a chance to save lives. Now, over the course of just seven minutes, the atmosphere had changed completely. A kind of grim, spectral pall lay over the Skyport.

  Except, of course, for that damned music.

  A small group had gathered at the hastily constructed forward command post. As he approached, Allocco saw representatives from Guest Relations, Operations, Human Resources. All hovering out here, away from the accident scene, like wallflowers at a frat party. They all wore the same expression of white-faced disbelief. When Sarah got here, she’d…

  He realized he’d forgotten all about Sarah and the Holo Mirrors, and felt a momentary stab of concern for her. Then it vanished as several phones on one of the portable desks began ringing at once and Malcolm Griff, head of Guest Relations, plucked at his sleeve.

  “Yes?” Allocco said, turning to him.

  “I’ve got that report on the containment activities,” the man said over the ringing of the phones.

  “Let’s have it.”

  “The emergency-drill story seems to be working. I haven’t gotten word of any sizable hot spots.”

  “Good.” While he listened, Allocco’s eyes were constantly on the move. He watched security specialists answering the phones, watched another specialist unroll a large spool of fiber-optic wire, watched the foreman dispatch the first roving patrol.

  “With the help of Operations, we’re encouraging outflow from Callisto to the other Worlds. We’ve slowed inbound traffic at the portals. Just to speed up witness dispersal, retard any rumor clustering.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Witness dispersal, rumor clustering. Guest Relations used more fancy in-speak than a sociology convention. And yet Allocco sensed the man was keeping something back. He brought his roving eyes back, homing in on Griff.

  “What else?”

  The man hesitated. “We planted some of our people in the exit lines as the guests left the Skyport. To listen, you know: gauge the mood, what people were saying.”

  “Go on.”

  “One of our specialists overheard two guests talking. Apparently, some tourist was wandering near the backstage areas, looking for a bathroom. She caught a glimpse inside the Station Omega exit corridor before the off-loading site was cloistered.”

  “A glimpse?”

  “Um, yes. From what our specialist overheard, it sounded pretty accurate.”

  Jesus Christ. Just what we need. “You get a description of this witness?”

  Griff shook his head.

  “Any other similar reports?”

  “No, just the one.”

  Allocco’s eyes were on the move again. He spotted Tom Rose, Infrastructure chief, emerging from the Skyport backstage. “We’ll have to hope it doesn’t spread. People are always hearing things like
that—with any luck this will be chalked up as another shaggy-dog story. But have your people keep mingling with the guests, keep their ears open. I want to know if this story pops up again somewhere else.”

  Griff nodded, then turned and walked quickly toward the bank of telephones.

  Tom Rose was coming toward him. He was walking slowly, his face pallid. The collar of his shirt was dark with sweat.

  “Tom,” Allocco said, nodding in solemn greeting.

  The Infrastructure chief simply looked back in reply.

  “Any idea yet how this could have happened?”

  Rose chewed his lip, seeming to think about this. “I’ve got ride inspectors and engineers looking at it right now,” he said. Then he stopped. Allocco stood, waiting for him to continue.

  “They’re not sure exactly what it was yet. But it has nothing to do with the heat effects, like we thought it might. It seems to be related to the safety design.”

  “The safety design?”

  Rose nodded. It looked as if the man was about to burst into tears.

  “You know the hydraulic retarding system on Station Omega, how it kicks in after a hundred feet of free fall? It’s massively overengineered; it has to be, because of the way the drop is propelled by the injector mechanism.” Rose was talking faster now, as if he wanted to get the painful explanation over with.

  “I’ve seen the specs. Go on.”

  “Well, normal operation seems to have been reversed. The retarding system didn’t kick in at the bottom of the ride, like it was designed to. It came on at the beginning, at the top, just as the injector was trying to launch the ride compartment.”

  “And?”

  “Well, there was all that pressure pushing the compartment down, and all that pressure trying to retard it at the same time…It generated tremendous heat.”

  “How much heat?” As soon as it was out, Allocco was sorry he’d asked the question.

  Rose looked sorry, too. “My engineers estimated about 500 Celsius. And it vented…it vented—” He stopped abruptly.

  “Into the ride compartment,” Allocco finished for him.

  There was a brief, terrible silence.

  “But how could that happen?” Allocco asked.

  Tom Rose’s lips trembled. “We engineered that ride to be fail-safe. Everything was done to triple the original specs.”

  “So?”

  “Can’t you understand? Our main concern was safety. We designed the ride to be as safe as possible. Not as tamperproof as possible.”

  Suddenly, Allocco understood what it was Rose didn’t want to say directly. The ride’s own safety design had been used against it. It was a diabolical irony.

  “How could such a thing be done?” he asked.

  “If someone knew exactly what to do, it would be relatively easy. Reverse half a dozen switches, change the wiring in one of the control panels. The work of a minute, maybe two. But the safety governor would have to be in override mode. That’s a systems job, and much more complicated. You need high privileges, all sorts of things. That would have to be done remotely.”

  Allocco took a step backward, his jaw working. In his mind he saw John Doe, thumbing through pilfered engineering diagrams, determining just which ride could be most conveniently sabotaged against itself. And he saw something else: the unauthorized person in a shuttle pilot’s outfit, the one the loading attendant had witnessed walking away from Station Omega just before the calamitous drop. And he remembered what Poole had told him about the hacker; about how he’d just sat there in the Hub, typing, as they approached. As if he’d had to finish something important before…Dimly, he realized Tom Rose was asking him a question.

  “Sorry?” he said, turning.

  Now, Rose was crying. “Who?” he asked in a whisper. The tears were coursing down his cheeks unchecked. “Who would do such a thing? And why?”

  Allocco could not bear the pleading look on that face. He turned away again.

  John Doe had said to keep things quiet. But it was John Doe who had done this. So fuck John Doe.

  “My friend,” Allocco said quietly, “we’ve got some very bad people in the Park today.”

  When he turned back, Rose had gone.

  Allocco sighed, blinked, wiped his arm across his forehead. Until Sarah showed up, he was in charge of line operations. For at least the fifth time, he went through the emergency preparedness drill in his head. He’d just touched base with Security, Infrastructure, Guest Relations. That still left Medical and Emergency Response.

  But that would mean going back to the scene. Allocco had already been there once. And he really, really did not want to go back.

  He sighed again, took a balm stick from his pocket, ran it over his lips. Then he looked around, slowly, as if trying to take comfort in the deceptively calm Skyport around him. And then he left the command post, worked his way along the perimeter to Station Omega’s exit corridor, and stepped back into hell.

  —

  THE EXIT CORRIDOR smelled like a pig roast. A large, long tent of clear plastic had been hastily erected around the base of the drop shaft, concealing the spot where—once the fail-safe mechanisms had finally been overridden and the power cut—the ride known as Station Omega had come drifting down to earth and at last opened its doors. Allocco was grateful for the tent. The music was fainter here, and he was grateful for that, too. Involuntarily, he thought back to the first moment he’d seen those open elevator doors, the contents of the transport exposed pitilessly to view: the river of tumbled limbs, grotesque against the singed lines of shirts and pants and shoes…

  As the image lanced its way across his mind, he stopped. Then he forced himself forward once again, in the direction of the tent. It would be better now. There would be some semblance of order.

  To one side of the tent’s entrance, he could see a wheeled rack, hastily appropriated from Costuming. Dozens of heavy plastic garment bags, black and oversize, hung from its upper bar. Already, the rack was half-empty.

  Large banks of life-support equipment stood to one side. Beside them were several wheelchairs, empty, unnecessary. A video specialist passed him, walking quickly away from the site, face set in a greenish cast, evidence camera and video recorder swinging from his shoulders. Small knots of people were scattered around the off-loading area: ride attendants, mechanical engineers, security guards. There was sobbing, of course, but less than before. Most of the Station Omega crew were sitting together, heads bowed. Allocco recognized Dickinson, the tower operator, and Stevens, the ride foreman. A knot of security guards surrounded them. He made a mental note to track down the attendant named Piper, listen to her story before he left. As he passed, Allocco could hear someone talking. It was the young woman who’d been working off-load. She was still recounting the same story he’d heard already, over and over, broken-voiced, as if unable to stop herself. He glanced over. A nurse was kneeling by the woman, wiping her hands and face with a cloth.

  “It was quiet, so quiet, as it came down,” she was saying. The metallic cloth of her sleeve had been rolled up, a blood pressure cuff placed around her arm. “There was nothing, nothing, after all that screaming, and I couldn’t understand it, I just knew that something terrible had happened. And then the doors opened, and…and they were stacked up so high against it they just tumbled out, past me, past me, and there was no sound but they just kept coming and…Oh, God…” and she lapsed into silent, racking sobs. The nurse stroked her bent head, whispered to her. One member of the group stood up and began walking, stiff-legged, toward a far corner of the off-load area. Retching sounds reached Allocco’s ears.

  Jaw set, he walked past the security detail, put out a hand to pull the tarp away, and stepped into the medical tent.

  Here, in this plastic longhouse, the smell of burned flesh was much stronger. Stretchers and gurneys had been set up in two rows, allowing for the processing of corpses to be handled as efficiently as possible. When Allocco had first arrived on the scene, this effort had
been slow to get started: Medical, under the assumption a massive influx of casualties was on its way down from the ride, was being prepped for triage. But now the doctors, medical attendants, orderlies, and nurses who’d been ready to save lives were up here, helping to arrange the dead with as much dignity as possible.

  Dr. Finch, head of Medical, was at the near end of the left-hand row, bending over one of the oversize plastic bags. Like the others, he wore latex gloves and a double set of surgical masks. Allocco walked toward him, careful to keep his eyes away from the vast, oddly mounded tarp that covered the floor at the far end of the tent, where the ride doors lay open.

  “How do we stand, Doctor?” he asked as he approached.

  Dr. Finch zipped the bag closed, made a notation on a chart, and turned toward him. “We’ve got medevacs flying in from Columbia Sunrise and Lake Mead.”

  “Due when?”

  Above the mask, the doctor’s eyes were already haggard, red-rimmed. “They’re about twenty-two minutes out.”

  Even if they were here now, it wouldn’t make any difference, Allocco thought. What we need is a fleet of coroners.

  “We’ve contacted the sheriff’s office and the Clark County ME,” the doctor said, as if following his thoughts. “They’re due in the next half hour, forty minutes, tops.”

  Allocco nodded. He wondered what John Doe would think when he saw half the uniformed officials in Nevada descending upon the place. He realized he didn’t much care.

  “What’s the procedure here?” he asked, waving his hand along the rows of stretchers. Although Utopia’s emergency procedures manuals were exhaustive, there were no guidelines for anything quite like this.

  “We’re just stabilizing the site, organizing the bodies for the MEs to identify.”