He paused the playback and looked at the trajectory files and whistled. “Neptune L-4? This is fragged.”
He scanned the list of ships, reading aloud. “500 combat vessels, 100 ice freighters and twenty-five repair tenders? Plus the Columbia attack group and two-thousand troops?”
Unbelievable.
He shook his head and punched the playback icon to continue listening.
“We will also be providing you with an upgraded tactical AA for this operation. You are to prepare all Level-6 and above AI and all AA systems to receive and install new core code elements.
“Once these updates are complete, you are to make way immediately. Further orders will follow, once you are en route.
“Lassiter Out.”
Atwater leaned back in his chair and let the air leak out of his lungs before he punched into his com. “I need my staff in here now, for a briefing. We’re going to war.”
“We are sir?” she asked the squeak still audible in her voice.
“Yah. Just not the one we expected to be fighting.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Gateway Colony: L-4 Prime:
Chei walked into Jeph’s office and closed the door behind him, latching it firmly before he bounced to the seat across from Jeph. It was late, almost thirdshift, but Jeph hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night since his gravity sickness had eased enough to wean him off the neuroblockers, and everybody aboard knew it.
Chei’s face split into a comical over-exaggeration of a grin, but he said nothing.
“What’s swinging?” Jeph asked after several seconds. He realized if he didn’t ask he wasn’t likely to get more than the silly expression.
“I’ve been outside the language matrix,” he said.
Jeph scanned the room like he was looking for something hidden in the corner. “I think we’re outside the language matrix now aren’t we?”
“Yes, but I have been outside the language matrix, and still inside the Tacra Un.”
“Wha …” the light came on in Jeph’s brain. “Oh?”
Chei nodded, slowly and deeply. “Yah. I think that means we’re officially finished.”
“How did you get past the matrix?”
“I just walked up to the edge door in an outside node and told it to open,” he said shrugging. “When it did, I realized it wasn’t leading to another node.”
“Where did it go?” Jeph asked.
“To a smaller room with no doors. When I stepped in and turned around, I realized I wasn’t where I started. The door I’d just come through, lead to a larger room with what might have been fabrication machinery in it.”
“Like an elevator,” he offered.
Maybe, but I don’t think it actually moved,” Chei said. “I tried it again from a different node and ended up in a different room. The second one looked more like a biomedical center, maybe.”
“Does every outside door lead to a different place?” he asked.
Chei shrugged. “I only tried the two of them, but if so there are hundreds of edge-doors.”
“The Tacra Un identifies these as aht-oolawath,” Dutch said.
“Space doorways,” Jeph said.
“The two additional chambers are now on my schematic,” Dutch said. “It is worthy of note that they are not contiguous to the language matrix itself.”
“They aren’t?” he said, leaning forward and logging into his console to bring up a diagram of the Tacra Un.
“The first location appears to be approximately two kilometers below the surface,” Dutch said. “The second one was six kilometers east of our present location.”
“How is that possible?” Jeph asked. “Nevermind. It’s magic.”
Chei chuckled. “Obviously it has to be some kind of matter transfer, or maybe an ERB gateway. I suspected that might be what it was, when I moved only fifteen meters sidewise to the second door, and the rooms I ended up in were each more than fifty meters across. They couldn’t have been side by side.”
“I don’t suppose either of these was a control center?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, “but I focused on gravity and physics language threads. Someone with the right language set might recognize what I was looking at.”
“Who was with you?” Jeph asked.
“Nobody,” he said. “I knew we were close to the end of the word mining so I pushed out a few extra hours to see if I could drill down the last line. Honestly, I didn’t notice I was there until I ended up in the … elevator.”
“Is anyone else inside the matrix now?”
“Negative,” Dutch said. “All the personnel from the Armstrong are off duty.”
“Until we map this, it might be a good idea to keep the traffic out of the Tacra Un,” Jeph suggested. “Especially if there’s potentially dangerous equipment in any of those rooms.”
“Danel and Jameson have been handling the study groups that have been working the shanak-che files. Ian and I have been coordinating word mining,” Chei said. “It’s been an effort to get any of them past the pedestals in the amphitheater, so I don’t think it’ll be too hard to keep them occupied, as long as they don’t know what’s happened.”
“We’ll have to post Seva and Cori to limit access while we put a mapping team together,” Jeph said, leaning forward to log back in to his console. “I think it’s smart to make sure nobody goes in without us knowing exactly where they are.”
“I agree,” Chei said. “If it’s jumping people half way across the Tacra Un, it would be easy to get lost.”
“What about the quicksand? Do we know if it’s shut down yet?”
Chei shrugged. “I didn’t do anything in there, so I don’t know.”
“The sensors from the Hector do not indicate that it has been discontinued, and the Tacra Un has not notified me of a change in status,” Dutch said. “Without testing the ceiling threshold of the gradient, I do not know if our sensors would be able to detect any change.”
“If we tell Roja that they might be free, they’ll know we’re through and that might change how they want to proceed,” Jeph said. “I don’t think I’m ready to renegotiate our position here yet.”
“That’s your game,” Chei said. “But I’m sure Jameson will realize quicklike that something’s going on.”
Cell A-106: Security Detention Center One: Galileo Station:
Paulson Lassiter looked better than Derek expected. But that was relative. His eyes were hollow, empty. He mumbled to himself as he rocked on the bed.
“Do you remember who I am?” Derek asked.
Lassiter snapped into reality and nodded. “I will never forget you.” Fire leapt from his eyes for an instant, but it died under something different. Something that looked more like pity.
“Do you know why this happened?”
Paulson leaned his head to the side for several seconds and then nodded again. “Odysseus wants to control everything. Now it will.”
“It needed to make sure you weren’t in a position to unbalance things with your own agenda,” he said, pulling the chair away from the table and sitting down.
“My agenda?” he said, his tone making the statement more a question. “My agenda was to protect us.”
“If it was, you wouldn’t have held those ships back,” he said. “FleetCom is gearing up to attack, and you wanted to keep the unaligned fleet out of the conflict. That isn’t protecting us. It is abandoning humanity to a civil war.”
“So you did get the command codes,” Lassiter said, his eyes glassing over as he fought back tears. “I tried.”
“Yes, Odysseus has ordered enough of the fleet into Zone One to stop the rebellion,” he said. “We have 150 ships inbound now.”
Lassiter shook his head. “I’d already done that. Those ships are coming because I ordered it, not Odysseus.”
“Odysseus sent the order yesterday,” Derek said.
“How long has it been since you locked me in here?” Paulson said.
“Four weeks,” he said. “Why?
”
Lassiter leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. He looked like he was struggling to put a memory into place. “Then they are about four weeks out,” he said. “Thereus is further out than Saturn. If Odysseus ordered it, they are still more than three months away.”
“Thereus?”
“The centaur where the fleet was based,” he said.
Is that true? Derek asked through his link.
“The battle group will be here in twenty-six days,” it replied.
So you didn’t send the orders? he challenged.
“I did not alter the orders in place,” it said. “I issued orders to the remaining fleet to proceed to the point of ESI contact.”
You don’t think it’s relevant that Paulson was complying with my wishes, before we had him scanned, Derek asked.
“I do not,” it said.
If he was working with us, why did you want to go ahead with it?
“I needed access to the rest of the fleet to complete my primary protocol,” it said. “His cooperation, with your security concerns, was of no relevance to my objectives. Once I acquired the access codes, all else became secondary to my plans.”
He might have cooperated, if you had let me bring him into the situation more completely, he thought.
“I could not risk being dependent on his cooperation. To allow that would have given him disproportionate power over the process,” it said. “His compliance is no longer required.”
Lassiter sat staring at him intensely while he verified the truth. “You just confirmed it didn’t you?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Twenty-six days,” he said, nodding.
“I suspected you had a neurolink installed,” Paulson said, tapping the bone behind his own ear at the location of Derek’s implant. “I noticed the scar a few days after you started organizing the new government.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Derek said.
Lassiter pulled himself forward to the edge of the bed. “It does matter. It means you are no longer you,” he said. “Tell me something, now that you think you’ve won. Is your mind your own anymore?”
“What kind of question is that?” he asked, feeling a rush of anger.
“Is your mind yours? Do you think for yourself at all, or does Odysseus do that for you?” he asked.
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I think you do,” Lassiter said. “Odysseus owns you. He owns your mind. Your soul.”
“He does not,” Derek growled.
“Odysseus tried to destroy my mind, but he failed because I was stronger than you.” He shook his head, and the insanity vanished from his eyes like fire being sucked into space. “I feel sorry for you. You will never again know silence, will you?”
“He is trying to manipulate you,” Odysseus said through the link.
“Shut up!” he said out loud.
“Me or Odysseus?” Lassiter said, laughing again.
Derek stood up, walked over and punched the door with his fist, both to get the guard’s attention and to pound down his own anger.
“When you’re ready to fight back, go see Jahen Tanner,” Paulson said. “She can fix it. She knows.”
“I don’t need anything,” he said, leaning against the door.
“If you say so,” Lassiter said. “It doesn’t matter. This is all about to end, anyway.”
FleetCom Military Operations Center: Lunar L-2 Shipyard:
Carranza Pratte and Graison Cartwright sat across from each other in the high security conference room in Tsiolkovskiy. Neither of them looked happy with how things were spiraling out of control in New Hope City. Surrounded by a moat of empty space, Admiral Quintana and the L-2 shipyard had the luxury of physical detachment from the situation that no one on the lunar surface could share.
“This isn’t a police action anymore,” Cartwright said.
“Pallassano is still using security units to remove potential dissidents isn’t she? That makes it, by its very nature, a police action,” the admiral said, glancing at his first officer and shrugging.
“The problem is that it looks like the resistance is getting organized,” Pratte said. “It isn’t random violence. It’s a tactical response.”
“If it were a social reaction, we’d expect it to be concentrated in areas where the security forces were evicting loyalists, but instead it is focused on FleetCom areas,” Graison said. “They’re targeting the spaceport and residential areas where our people live.”
“Are you thinking Tomlinson is orchestrating this?” Visser asked, leaning back in her seat and biting her lip.
“The mayor thinks so,” Pratte said.
Graison nodded. “There have been some serious casualties, although so far there haven’t been any deaths. Pallassano is stretching her security thin, and she is asking us to step in to provide security for our own people.”
“We don’t have spare people up here,” the admiral said. “Do you?
“We sent two extra squads from TFC and we have a private security company in Freeport South that says they can send twenty more, if we can pay the bills,” he said. “That would be a start.”
“If our people are being targeted in the pushback, should we just pull them out?” the admiral asked.
“We’ve got twenty thousand people resident there and Pallassano has all the available transport in use to ship DoCartel personnel out,” Pratte said. “We’d have to do it via shuttle and the pads are where they’re having the most serious engagements.”
“How many people are involved in the riots?” Visser asked.
“The biggest one she’s told us about so far had a couple thousand people,” Graison said. “It’s still a small minority of the population, but that could change, if the mayor has to get more aggressive.”
“Even twenty squads of paid guards won’t make a difference.” The admiral frowned and shook his head.
“They’re trained and armed for riot control,” he said. “So far the ones they will be facing are a mob.”
“An organized mob? Isn’t that an oxymoron?” His first officer grinned when he glanced at her. His mood was dropping like a rock and he didn’t have much patience for even a little levity.
“These mobs are like chaos bombs,” Pratte said. “They spread confusion once they go off, but they’re precisely targeted to have the most effect.”
“How many security units does the NHC government have involved in this?” Quintana asked.
“All of them,” she said. “But they have to protect the loop stations and other critical infrastructure. Out where the riots are happening, they are pretty thin.”
“Let’s say we decide to pull our people out, can we hold a port facility long enough to evacuate to multicruisers?” he asked. “It will take a crap-ton of shuttle runs to evacuate twenty thousand people.”
“Not all of them will be willing to run since a lot of them are permanent residents there,” Graison said. “I also think it would send the wrong idea to the mayor if we did that.”
“If it is organized, it’s only a matter of time before the mobs turn into an army,” Visser said. “We can’t assume that this chaos will not escalate into something much uglier.”
The admiral’s com link beeped and he glanced down at the icon. Urgent. “Hang on a second I have something to look at.” He muted the link to TFC and punched into the local com. “Quintana, go.”
“Admiral you just received a microburst text transmission. It’s odd though because it authenticates as your personal ident and is command level encrypted,” the com officer said. “Routing shows it came through Mars Relay-Six.”
“Is it from Edison Wentworth?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “How did he get your personal code?”
“I gave it to him for emergency use,” he said. “Send it to my desk.”
Glancing at his first officer he twisted in his seat to stare at his console while he waited for the file to transfer in. When it
opened, he read it aloud.
“Discovered a lost package. Says he has critical tactical intel you seek, but is only willing to give it to Chancellor Roja. We need to arrange highest-level security to complete this information exchange. Please advise.”
He read the text a second time to himself and frowned. “A lost package?”
“You don’t think he’s talking about Ariqat, do you?” she said.
“On Mars?”
“That’d be one hell of a place to hide him,” she said. “What kind of tactical information could he have? He’s been missing for months, so anything he’d have would be out of date and useless.”
The admiral drummed his fingers on the console and shook his head. “He was part of the ghost fleet conspiracy, but I think it’s more likely that someone’s jerking Wentworth’s chain and he is just trying to run it up the rigging to see who salutes.”
“Probably,” she said, nodding.
He punched the record icon on the screen and cleared his throat. “No possibility of contacting Roja, as per her orders. All com to L-4 goes through the chain of command. Clearly define the nature of the package and the content of the intel and I will forward any information I deem appropriate.”
CHAPTER NINE
Robinson: Western Athabasca Valles, Mars:
Edison sat in the back corner of the little lounge, watching the crowd moving past on the concourse below. Like everything else in Robinson, the Backwater Tavern was immaculate, even if it was trying to pretend to be a dive bar. The food was good and the alcohol even better.
His thinpad beeped and he looked at the screen for several seconds before he realized it was the reply from Quintana.
“Shit,” he whispered as the message drilled its way down through the mist the bourbon had left behind in his brain.
“Pa, why so hangface?” A cup of real coffee appeared on the table in front of him. Porcelain and fancy.
He blinked in surprise several times as a flashback overwhelmed reality. Kylla?
“He’s allergic to looking happy,” Saf said.
“Nojo,” she said. “Maybe he’d lip up, if I let him scan my tattys, but he’s still a dustpile, so gotta get extra for it.”
“He’s obviously not that old,” Saf said as she sat down across from him and let her eyes wander in a direction that made him blush and almost sweat. And proved she was right.
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