"Senal's fine, he wants to run. He'll steal the first military transport he finds. I think you should be on it too. I know you should be on it. When this plan goes into motion, you'll have less than two hours left," Sonny replied.
"I'll be exactly where I need to be, besides, there's going to be transportation there too," Peter said. "With no rush of civilians fighting for a spot."
"You're going to have over thirty people on that raid and we won't know how many runabouts will be docked with the tower. There'll be a rush there too, and a shortage if your plan works out."
"They'd leave me behind?" Peter asked, feigning surprise at Sonny's statement. "You know they'd put me on whatever transport is there, and I'll be off world minutes later, running for the rendezvous. We're wasting time. I'll see you soon, and then we'll be with Haven Fleet, or running across the galaxy, either way, we'll be together."
Sonny was frustrated, but he saw that there was no convincing Peter, so he kissed him instead and told him; "If I could just shove you into a bag and drag you along, I would. God, you frustrate me sometimes."
"Just to get me down from that pedestal you put me on sometimes," Peter replied. "I'll see you soon."
It was half an hour later as he went over their discussion, their fight in his head, and they were about to land on the main platform of the Northern Environmental Processing Tower. It was the tallest building in the hemisphere, a square that tapered up, up, its dark metal skin opening with giant vents that looked like too many eyes and mouths. Air flowed in, the temperature, humidity and velocity were changed, then it was released. Sometimes microscopic nutrients and seeds were added to the mix as well, and they'd be delivered through rain that was anything but natural.
They were dormant for most of Peter's childhood, but the Order of Eden ordered that they were turned up to full power things began to change. The balance of the world he loved was shifting visibly, and while he was happy the Order presence was low since they could control the government that was already in place, the changing weather and forestation was a constant reminder that his people were not in control.
A vibration and a message on his ocular display verified that Sonny and Senal had performed their duty. PORT TAKEN. There were no news alerts about it, so they'd kept it quiet, using people that Senal had in place to do it. Peter was surprised it worked, and sure that the authorities would catch on soon. The next step was to take control of every ship on the ground, that would definitely alert them. It would become the salvation to thousands who wanted to escape, and the call the authorities would answer, keeping them away from the Environmental Processing Tower.
There were ten people in the shuttle with him, and most looked at him as soon as he turned from the window. They were dressed in service uniforms, the vacsuits they were given were underneath. "We've all been called to service with the Order of Eden," Peter said, but many of them took it as a question and nodded or confirmed with terse yesses or yups. "I am happy I don't have to do this alone. Our friends are about to attack on the ground, they'll draw the guards away from the upper levels. Our families are in the port now, boarding ships that will take off soon. Friends we've known for years along with hundreds of fighters who we have never met are working together to take more ships, draw the authorities' attention, and seek freedom amongst the stars. Hopefully, we won't face much fighting, but if we do, I'll try to make sure as many of you can join them as possible. We should all have a chance to run."
"What about you, Sir?" asked a fighter at his side, his voice muffled by the vacsuit hood and brown worker's suit.
"Don't call me Sir, please," Peter said. "I love this world, seeing it change because it'll play host to some alien invader breaks my heart. After making sure you get away from here when we're finished, I want to make certain there's nothing for the Edxi here. I want to embarrass the Order in front of their allies and deny them. They don't deserve this planet, or peace, or cooperation, so I will deny them at every turn." He could feel the energy rise in the shuttle as it touched down. "Remember, we are a repair crew until the attack starts below."
The doors at the back of the shuttle opened. A powerful wind howled as they disembarked onto the high-altitude platform. To his left he could see Ridge Port in the distance, a city of grey and white surrounding it, with a brown and green forest wrapped around it. His imagination conjured a vision of Edxi ships planting eggs in the woods and smaller, alien creatures taking control of humans who were unlucky enough to live there, turning them into mindless slaves. Dismissing the horror in his head, Peter turned his attention back to the walkway leading from the landing pad to the secure doors. They whole tower was weather-stained, metal that once looked clean had turned brown with some green in the corners.
The doors opened suddenly, two armed guards emerging urgently. "We're under attack, get back in your shuttle and take off," one of them said, waving them away.
"I don't see an attack," Peter said, looking around at the platform.
"Below, on the ground level!" the guard replied as though he was talking to an idiot.
"What? So we're not safe here?" Peter asked, playing panicked. "What do we do?" he wasn't much of a fighter, but he knew how to put on a show, and he did his best imitation of a civilian in panic, turning into an unreasonable mess. "Who would attack a Terraforming Tower? It doesn't make sense!"
"Resistance fighters," the guard said, trying to push Peter away.
Peter tried to take his hand, the one that was resting on his rifle. "Wouldn't it be safer if we stayed here? None of us are armed!" That was the signal, that word, 'armed.'
"It'll be better if you just get back into your shuttle and… hey! Don't open your toolboxes, you don't need…"
The guards were both shot through an instant later thanks to the good aim of some of the resistance soldiers. "Rush the door!" Peter shouted as he burst into a run. He pulled his heavy pistol from a tool pouch on his worker suit as he did so. A guard fired at his group of resistance fighters once before slapping the inner control panel. Peter raised his weapon and got one shot off before the doors slid closed. It went wide, not even making it through. His group arrived at the door. "We knew this could happen, we're prepared," he said, pulling the cylindrical Hull Buster from his backpack. He checked the side that was supposed to go against the doors, pressed the main activation button, then put it against the metal, where it affixed firmly. He ran through the manual in his head quickly, making sure that he had the next step right, then turned the safety ring around the same green button until it clicked before pressing it again.
A large metal frame expanded from the sides of the Hull Buster, creating a metal dome against the door before the device began to hiss loudly. It started burning through the door, and if it functioned as promised, they'd have a nice big hole to rush through in a few minutes, perhaps less.
A public alert appeared on his ocular display. ALL PORTS CLOSED. PIRATES ARE TAKING HOSTAGES. Peter looked to Ridge Port and smiled as he saw the first of the rapid response law enforcement shuttles rush towards it. As soon as it rose up above the building between it and the circular port building, defence weapons mounted across the landing fields and terminal fired on it. The attack on the ports was far more important than the Environment Conditioning Tower, most of the authorities, if not all would go there. Two civilian Star Liners were taking off, they would be filled with normal citizens and family members of resistance fighters. "Like clockwork, I knew you'd have it all running perfectly, Sonny," Peter said under his breath.
Twenty
The Solution
* * *
There was no resistance in the outer corridors of the tower. Even though Peter had seen it thousands of times from the outside, a great, dark rectangle that cast long shadows over the landscape, the size of it from the inside was still astonishing.
Old halls that split to subsystems, service rooms, vent accesses and storage spaces for material that was meant to be floated off into the air were everywhere. The
walls, the absurdly tall ceilings and especially the floors looked ancient, clean but worn by bins with tracks that carried anything that was too heavy or inconvenient for the workers to move by hand were enough to create grooves in the floor and deep scrapes along the walls.
The map from one of the insiders guided them to the control room. The tower security guards decided to make their stand there, putting heavy equipment carts in the way so they could be used for cover in the last hallway. The door was sealed, but the security system was old. Peter had no problem popping the panel off and crossing a few wires, forcing it open. He was lucky. If he didn't take that duty on himself, he might have been in the doorway.
The guards inside opened fire on two of his men, the pair standing at the front, and even with their relatively primitive rifles, they broke through the work suit, then the vacsuits. It took more rounds than anyone could count, but in seconds those two resistance fighters were beyond bloodied, they were torn to shreds. Peter didn't let their sacrifice come to nothing, but ducked low and rushed forward, using one of the track driven carts that were placed in the way to provide the guards with cover for his own ends.
His fighters fired back, forcing the guards to duck. Moments later he was joined by his people, and they were half way up the hallway. The firing stopped on both sides and a stillness settled in. The guards were at the far end of the corridor, while Peter and the eight warriors he had left were half way up, hiding behind the tractor bins, not ten metres from the soldiers. "Big push down here, we need more men!" a scratchy voice said over the tower intercom. "The resistance has pushed us back, if we don't get reinforced by you guys up top, we'll have to retreat into the building and try to close the main doors."
"We're pinned down," replied one of the guards. "Get the military down there, there are only five of us here." He was whispering, but Peter was so close that he may as well of shouted.
"Military are responding to the ports, just get down here!" there was an explosion, it crackled over the building intercom before the system was silent.
Peter looked at Franklin's status feed and it increased to readable size in his ocular display: MAIN DOOR MECHANISM DESTROYED, GREAT GRENADE TOSS BY JERIK. GUARDS ARE PINNED DOWN, SPREADING OUT AND GETTING BEHIND WHATEVER COVER THEY CAN FIND.
It was good news, they would be occupied down there. "Five guards, rush them," Peter said as quietly as he could manage to the man at his side.
The resistance fighter looked to the pair behind him, passed the message, and the order was passed that way. No one trusted their electronics when they could signal each other, experience showed them anything could be tapped. Anyone could be listening.
"Go!" one of Peter's fighters shouted, and the eight moved out from behind cover and ran down the hallway, the rifles provided by Haven Fleet at the ready.
One of the shortest fighters was riddled with the guards' energy rounds, light burning through her work suit then passing through her, the smell of burnt flesh filling the air. It was a worthy sacrifice, enough to give everyone else an advantage so they could riddle the Guards with rounds. The mad, rapid popping roar from the Haven Fleet weapons made Peter flinch, he never realized how loud the fighting was when it was all around. It was the first raid he'd been right in the middle of while it was going on, and he remained behind cover as the last of the guards were subdued. A quick check on the ports revealed that they had control of nearly all the ships, including the military craft. They were corvettes, old gunships, and fighters. Resistance pilots, many of them deserted or retired military, were already taking off for the most part, the ships full to capacity. "How many people have we gotten off world now, Sonny?" he asked.
"We're loading the last now, so in a few minutes it'll be over forty thousand. I'm in police rescue ship, we can come get you when you're finished."
"Forty thousand, pass my congratulations to Senal," Peter replied.
"I would, but he went missing as soon as we finished taking the main port. He'll probably pop up sometime later, just lost in the confusion."
"Well, get everything off the ground and get out of the area quickly," Peter said.
"That's the plan, but this ship will stick around just in case you need…"
"No, Sonny, go with the rest. Our ship is in good condition and there are others here. No one has escaped the tower."
"If you're sure," Sonny said slowly.
"I'll tell you as soon as I'm not," Peter said. One of the resistance fighters, a burn on his left shoulder, moved to his side. His eyes were alight with excitement, the old command and control unit Haven Fleet provided them with had a medical icon on its screen, indicating that some treatment was going on.
"It's over, we have the control room," the resistance fighter said.
"Do we have full control? Is the emergency hatch to the main seed bay opening? Can you control deployment and processing?"
"Yeah, all of that, full control. We just need the nano-cartridge. Oh, and there are two surviving guards. We have them tied up."
"We lost three taking this station?" Peter asked.
"Four," the fighter said, lowering his head. "Darla is gone, I can't believe it."
Peter stood, opened his work suit and climbed out of it. His vacsuit had the same markings he saw on Alice's, it took some time to duplicate since the system fought him, it knew he hadn't earned the same place in the Fleet, but he was eventually able to use a decoration system that was made for children so they could add designs and colours to their suits. The fighter, Peter didn't want to know his name, looked surprised. "I want Haven to be a part of this, even if they didn't think it was important for them to be here themselves."
The fighter only nodded, it wasn't clear if he actually understood or even agreed.
It didn't matter to Peter, who walked down the remaining stretch of hallway, making his way between bins that had burn marks and dents on them. The pair of guards were on their knees in front of the door to the control room. "I don't have time for you to cause any problems." He said, and without thinking about the act, he drew his heavy handgun and fired towards the first guards' face, the barrel only a few centimetres away from his nose. The sudden eruption of blood and matter that scattered behind the man was more jarring than any experience Peter had ever had. Compared to seeing his ruined face for the first time, even compared to the painful recovery, his first personal kill was an unparalleled horror. What was left of the man from the jaw down tilted forward, blood from his still pumping heart covered Peter's leg.
"No, please! I have a family! Twins! Baby twins and a wife!"
"Collaborator," Peter said through clenched teeth, trying to force his disgust, regret and horror into blame and anger.
"It's a non-Order job, one of the last left! Babysitting the tower! Just let me go! I won't do anything! Let me go!" the guard was weeping openly, struggling at his bindings.
Hating his own sympathy was a completely new experience for Peter but hating himself was not. Misery was coming, people like that guard would have the worst time of it. "This is a mercy," Peter said under his breath as he made sure his pistol was pointed at the guard's head before he looked away then pulled the trigger. A resistance fighter flinched at the brief roar of the heavy handgun. His shocked eyes watched him as he stepped away, through the door into the control room.
It felt like he was going to throw up, so he filled his throat with words instead. "The last Czars of Earth didn't see their deaths coming. They could feel it around them like silent predator, they knew they weren't in danger, but in the end, when they were led to a dark basement room, when the lot of them were murdered, children and all, they didn't know it was to happen that moment until the bullets were in the air. That was bloody revolution, the end of an era and the beginning of one of the most painful national rebirths in all of history." He found the control that would open the hatch to the main seed chamber. "Revolution has a bloody cost, and breaking ties with your own national past is like eviscerating yourself to extract a t
umour." As he pulled the small lever down, the aperture in the corner of the room's floor opened. He turned his recorder on and forwarded the signal to the tower's broadcasting system. The board lit up and indicated that three hyper transmitters were picking it up, sending his voice and the security holorecorder data on to other solar systems.
Turning to the aperture, he crouched down and started to slip inside, the short tunnel leading to the seed bay lit up beneath him. Before he pushed off he continued what he was saying. "The Order of Eden lurks around the planet of Nuaji, our home, and its citizens like a stalking predator. We're not the Czars in this story, we're the revolutionaries that must sacrifice their lives, watch what's left of their country burn in order to force change. There are holes in the analogy, so I'll make my statement simple." He pushed off, slid down the round passage for several seconds, enough time for him to remember the guard, then landed roughly on top of a mountain of ultra-fine seeds. His suit protected him, but his stomach and mind were too unsettled, and he was throwing up as he rose to his knees, something he was sorry the galaxy had to see. He was down to bile by the time he finished retching, by the time he forced himself to stop thinking of the murders he'd just committed. Sure it was finally over, he cleared his throat, closed the hood of his vacsuit for a moment and let the cleaning system attend to his face and neck. When he was clean, he turned it off, revealing his ruined visage.
"I've never heard you give this speech before," Sonny was saying in his ear. "What are you doing? Why are you in the main seed chamber?"
"I love you," he said to Sonny. "I have never loved anyone more, not even when I was handsome, and I attracted more beautiful flies than I can count."
"I love you too, but what are you doing?" Sonny replied. "It'll take an hour to get you out of there if the hatch above you closes, and it will. As soon as you deploy the nanobots and activate the disseminator, it'll shut tight. We'll be stuck getting you…"
Spinward Fringe Broadcast 13 Page 16