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control and have any outsiders deal only with underlings at a remote location.
"Think about it, darling," Blaise put in, also revealing a British accent in
her sweet and sexy tones. "If you do what we want you at least have a chance
at what you want. If you fail, what difference will your own personal problems
make, anyway? You seem to be so smart about other things but so stupid when
it's personal. If you had your way, you might just win one but then when that
gets out what happens to that sweet little boy of yours?"
She was right. I really had been so hung up on one thing it never occurred to
me to put my priorities in order. A lack of enthusiasm for derring-do was one
thing; being blind-sided on my own interests was inexcusable.
"Just what's involved here?" I asked them.
Moran, who seemed to be almost machine-like, allowed himself a bit of a smile.
"I think you have the basic idea of what they're planning. I can fill in the
details."
He reached into his coat and brought out a close-up system map of the central
Zero region of the Labyrinth. It was well-worn and marked up and looked a lot
like the one on Yugarin's wall that I'd seen.
I crouched down with him on the floor of the station and looked at the thing.
Moran pointed to a complex-looking set of symbols. "There is True Zero, the
power source for the Labyrinth. It puts out enormous, near limitless, energy
which is tapped in the side cubes here and here bracketing the Zero access
itself. The huge areas here on either side are massive power regulators and
transformers that take this erratic but immense power and turn it into
something that can be used and make certain it is stable-and that it does not
bleed over.
The key bypass is here to allow traffic to go from one side to the other
without the impossibility of passing through Zero or having any real access to
the source."
I nodded. "All right, I'm with you so far."
"Good. Now, when the Company fries a world, as they did to those people, they
seal off a section here and here, run power bypasses along the container car
route to continue power, then terminate the main tunnel, making it effectively
a deadend siding. They rig a bypass, in other words. Power is then bled into
this new siding until eventually it reaches the end and emerges in a steady,
building stream. With nowhere else to go it fries all facets of the end cube."
I nodded. "I got that much."
"The analogy is much like pouring massive voltages through a wire or tube and
then using it much like a deadly firehose. It's quite tricky, which is why
it's a last resort thing, and that's what gave the opposition the idea. When
the energy is turned down, there's a lot built up without regulators at the
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end and some of it surges back through the line where the transformers and
regulators must absorb it and keep things cool, as it were. Now, the theory
was to produce surges from the opposite ends, out here a ways, so that they
rush inward to the transformers and regulators at the same time. If they are
overloaded without the massive safeguards, and both at the same time, they
can't handle the load. The odds are excellent that this will produce a
meltdown of the transformers and regulators. They are designed to do this as a
last resort, sealing off the
Labyrinth from the Zero world. So long as one side works, the other can be
brought back on line via the bypass, but if both are melted, well, then,
there's no power to the Labyrinth at all. It dies, and who knows if that
melted mass
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he%20Mirror.txt (117 of 150) [1/19/03 4:21:16 PM]
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20-%20The%20Maze%20in%20the%20Mirror.txt could ever be borne through again and
a new grid built?"
"I think I get the idea," I told him. "And the danger is that the intense heat
formed by the melting down might break through to Zero rather than seal the
opening, so we have the unchecked power of an energy universe rushing freely
through the Labyrinth."
"Precisely."
I stared at it. "I'm no physicist and I flunked most science, but I've done a
lot of electrical work. Where in hell are they getting enough power to rush
back along the lines to the regulators? Where are they getting so much power
that the surge will overload them and shut them down?"
"That was Mancini's genius, old boy. He developed a storage system which would
absorb and keep quantities of the energy from the main line. Just giant
batteries, really. The power demands were increased, of course, but not to a
degree that a flag would be raised in Maintenance. A few weeks of just, say, a
hundred and ten percent power consumption, far within the normal fluctuations
of the line, would be sufficient. And if the substation being serviced was
down or at minimal levels, almost all of the energy, perhaps ninety percent,
could be diverted to the storage cells. For that reason, they needed sidings
with little traffic and no commerce."
"I see. But why my siding?"
"Physics. The release of that stored energy must be sequential and it must be
perfectly timed, within milliseconds certainly. The signals can not exceed the
constant speed of light within the Labyrinth, so a number of sidings on both
sides were required and they had to be relatively close together and perfectly
positioned. They had their own abandoned sidings to start with, which were
easy, but not sufficient. They were able to take control of a few Company
sidings, and occasionally corrupt or take over main stations so they had
security on their siding work while maintaining normal commerce and not
raising the Company's suspicions, but there were just a few crucial gaps that
might make the difference between not enough power and enough for the job.
They tried taking inconsequential ones, under little or no Company control,
when they failed to control the optimum one, but they always threw another
location off. Yours was perfect It came down to using yours or widening the
risks."
I had already figured out that our home sweet home had to be a key to it all.
When I saw it marked with a circle on Yugarin's map, along with a lot of
others
I didn't know, it cleared up a lot. And when he told me that they'd come up
with this like ten years earlier, the rest fell into place. And the crazy
thing is, with all this hatred among this group, the key was a kind of
lopsided, bent love story.
See, the first case, the one that brought Brandy and me into the Company, was
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their initial attempt to seize control of the State College siding and
substation. They were going to replace key people in the Philadelphia branch
of the Company with their own duplicates and insure a no-interference
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