Vent’s arrival through the airlock interrupted the cheering. After Vent had removed his helmet, he said, "Sorry I missed the test, but I couldn't stop until I was sure. The messages with the different ID make the same changes as those in the first half of the messages. They sent them all again when they didn't get the response they wanted the first time."
Tommy sat back in his chair. "Surely, they wouldn't have done what I'm thinking. Nobody's security is that bad!" He put his hands on his keyboard. "First, we will run the same test with the different ID. If it works, for what I have in mind, we need something a bit more convoluted."
A few minutes after the Kadiil computer had been started, they shut it down by transmission of a command with the alternate ID code.
Back in their workroom, Tommy and Vent found what Tommy was certain was the last piece to the puzzle. An hour later he had written, and they both had checked and rechecked, the radio transmission they would be sending. Time to try this live! If I’m right about the second ID code, it might be changed at any moment.
# # #
He called Cauth, Ulsu, San and Suna to the bridge and notified Leegh and Whna of his intentions. He also sent Fen to escort Ull to the bridge. Finally, he called Sisle to join them.
Tommy asked Leegh to take the command chair. "I think Vent has discovered something important, but our time to use it could be limited. And to prove the idea, we must jump away from the nova and wait until the last possible moment to reenter transit. If we wait too long--" He shrugged his shoulders.
"Why not perform your experiment here?" Leegh asked.
"The Kadiil ships arriving here are dying from the nova's effects. How would we know we were successful?" answered Tommy.
"Why am I here?" Ull asked.
So much has happened since I first met Ull in her chambers, he thought, and then responded, "I know this is not what we bargained for. You fulfilled your side of the contract, and in return I took your ship from you. I will not apologize for that. You took my life from me when you stole me from my family. Perhaps you are here because I feel guilty about making us the target of the Kadiil. Maybe you are here because I do not want you swimming calmly in your pond if the ship is destroyed.” His ironic whistle followed by flashing teeth caused Ull to step back into the chests of her warrior guards. “Anyway, it seemed like the right thing to do."
When Ull didn't respond, Tommy turned to Leegh. "Are you all right with this?"
"If you believe we are ready, I am ready," Leegh said.
"Transit us to the closest star ahead of the nova wave front, Tommy commanded. “I will begin transmitting the message we have prepared as soon as we exit."
Nine minutes later the dome cleared, and Tommy extended gravity sensors to three light seconds.
Tommy watched the sweep second hand of the clock on the command chair.
The message transmitted repeatedly. The first copy was out to three light seconds, then four, then five.
The signatures of five incoming wormholes appeared on the gravity monitor, each closer than ten thousand kilometers.
They are arriving in force and for the kill!
The first Kadiil ship emerged, and then the signature of a black hole being created overlaid that of the ship on the gravity monitor.
Leegh stood in front of the command chair, looking frantically back and forth between the gravity monitor and Tommy.
“We have to wait!” Tommy said.
Just as the sweep hand passed three seconds from time of entry, the black hole signature died.
During those three seconds, the other four ships in the group emerged. Tommy again watched the sweep hand, and it passed twenty seconds before he was sure. All of the Kadiil ships were drifting.
He looked up to find everyone's eyes on him.
"What did you do?" asked Leegh.
"We took advantage of a security breach."
"A security breach?"
"In the second group of tests, we allowed incoming communication through the internal dimensional tunnels. Whoever or whatever is on the other side of those tunnels tried to take control of the Kadiil computer, and, when it did not respond, they apparently assumed a computer failure and tried to rebuild the program that operates the Kadiil ship. That is speculation, but that is what it looked like. They tried twice. For the first transmission, they used the Kadiil ship's specific identification. What we would call its user ID. When the ship still did not respond, they tried again, using a different user ID. I decided that ID had to be what we would call the superuser ID. The ID that grants access to everything. Vent already understood how to send the shutdown code, but that was useless without the ID of each specific Kadiil ship, which we had no way of getting. The superuser ID gave us a way around that. Every Kadiil ship receiving that ID in front of Vent's code was forced to turn itself off!
"Not surprising, really. The only way the breach could be discovered would be to capture a Kadiil ship, and no one had done that for thousands of years."
In the stunned silence that followed, Sisle asked about something everyone else had missed. "I think I follow most of what you said, but I am confused about one thing. The first ship emerged from the dimensional tunnel and had time to begin its attack before its computer processed your message. The other ships should have done the same. Instead, they were dead when they arrived. How is that possible?"
Tommy smiled. "Vent and I also discovered how they send messages through the internal dimensional tunnels. We forced the first Kadiil ship to package the shutdown code as a superuser message and send it through before shutting itself down. Apparently, the Kadiil ships were coordinating the attack with each other, and our code disabled the other four ships before they arrived.
He glanced at the clock on the command chair. Several minutes had passed. "It may be better than that. Much better. They are relentless and have had plenty of time to start a second attack. We may never know for sure, but maybe all Kadiil ships are connected through those internal tunnels. Maybe those internal dimensional tunnels are their network connections. Maybe we sent our superuser code over the entire Kadiil network. Maybe we shut them all down!"
Ull
On three sides stood lofty mountain peaks covered with snow and the glinting ice of glaciers. The glaciers fed a rushing mountain river that in turn became the icy lake that spread out from her feet across the floor of a wide alluvial valley. A part of her wanted to join the other adults and their kits frolicking in the water.
Most of her wanted to kill the feral human standing behind her who had destroyed her way of life.
She turned to Leegh and Tommy, who stood on the ramp of the lander. “You plan to maroon us here. I can believe that of Tommy,” she spat out the name, her tail flicking from side to side, “but how can you do this, Leegh? You are one of us.”
“Ull,” said Leegh. “Your ears are filled with water. We are not marooning you.” She waved her arms at the huge pile of supplies around the base of the lander. “We are leaving you the means to support yourself on a water planet like Stream was before our industries polluted its oceans. You can build a new civilization here, rather than dying on The Peoples Hand.”
“And how will we build a new civilization,” Ull responded, “without slaves to do the work? In a single generation, we will be savages.”
“You take innocents as slaves,” Tommy accused. “As far as I’m concerned, you already are savages. I’ve given you a chance to become a great people again.” Ull offered no answer. “Anyway,” Tommy added, “I have pledged to both you and Leegh that we will be back,” Tommy said, “but with help and as traders, not as slaves. You will have no more slaves.”
Ull voiced a grinding whistle. “We had the stars, and you give us a single world with no one to do the work. We are marooned, and we will die here.”
She turned and dived into the lake. When she surfaced and looked back, the lander had lifted. A few moments later, it disappeared into the crystal blue sky of the world The People had a
lready named New Stream.
Chapter Twenty-two: No Place Like Home
Before leaving the site of their victories behind the nova and at the nearby star, they stuffed the hangers of The Peoples Hand and My Flowing Streams with every drive they had been able to retrieve. They kept three of the Kadiil ships intact, except for disconnecting the power cables. The remaining ships they stripped down to the drive modules, discarding the computer boxes overboard. If all the Kadiil ships were dead, those drives were literally beyond price. The transit location of the drives they couldn't retrieve would remain their closely guarded secret.
An hour before, the renamed Fist had entered synchronous orbit above the longitude passing through Washington, D.C. Within minutes, ground-based radar detected them and frantic transmissions from Earth began.
Tommy sat in front of a television monitor trying to make sense of what he was hearing. He changed to a public television channel in an attempt to get a more reasoned discussion. "The Kadiil were here less than two months ago," he interpreted to Leegh. "A moon-sized ship with an escort of smaller ships."
"Your scientists must have begun testing a gravity generator," Leegh said.
Tommy listened to the bearded man on the screen, a professor from M.I.T., and continued. "That is what is strange about what I am hearing. Testing is not mentioned. The Kadiil demanded that Earth stop working on gravity and quantum physics and ordered the end of further research in computer hardware. Why would they do that?"
"I assume that is a rhetorical question," Leegh replied. "Perhaps we can learn the answer when we talk directly with the Earth humans. Did the Kadiil make the same offer to provide transit drives?"
Tommy listened while the moderator filled in some background. "No, and the demand to stop computer research caused an immediate uproar. A big percentage of Earth's economy depends, directly or indirectly, on computer advancement," he quoted.
"What happened?" Leegh asked.
"The Kadiil left after giving their ultimatum and saying they would be back. Everyone on Earth believes we are the Kadiil!"
Next, the television panel discussed the sudden onslaught of signals coming from civilizations outside the solar system. The communications barrier around the system vanished about a month before.
Tommy translated for Leegh, and then added, "That would be at about the same time as our last battle with the Kadiil ships." He listened while someone from the SETI group discussed what all of this might mean. "I think they are in shock. Except for a few people whom everyone else thought were crazy, the people of Earth believed they were alone in the universe. Now, the Kadiil and transmissions from hundreds of other civilizations have disproved that."
"What will they do?" Leegh asked.
The answer came later in the day with the appearance of the President of the United States on all American television channels. He urged everyone to remain calm while "our military protects us from alien invasion." Within minutes, the Fist used Tommy's ball-filled missiles three times to destroy incoming ballistic missiles from the United States and once against missiles from Russia. The spectacular meteor showers formed by falling ball bearings added to the hysterical radio and television traffic.
Tommy wondered if he would be able to keep his promise to the former slaves after all.
He had been able to keep his word to the Nesu, landing everyone, except Leegh, Cauth, Ulsu, San, Suna, and Leegh’s relatives, on New Stream. Leegh and her family wanted to discuss mathematical physics with human theorists before joining The People. Leegh also wanted to experiment with creating wormholes for space travel, something she couldn't do on a planet's surface. The four young Nesu wanted to stay with Tommy. They claimed they felt safer with him than with their own people and were too young to settle down on a single world.
# # #
Tommy sat in front of a camera in the largest chamber they had available. Leegh stood nearby but out of the camera's view. All of the humans on the ship watched a monitor, also away from the camera. Everyone had a right to know what was happening and that this wasn't going well. Tommy also brought Potter for moral support, but the cat disappeared as soon as Tommy put him down.
His first inclination when they arrived had been to take down a lander. The missile attacks ended that. The U.S. military didn't seem to understand the disadvantage of being at the bottom of a gravity well 35,000 kilometers deep. Overnight, the United States launched against them five more times, each salvo with an increasing number of missiles. The ship's forward track guns effortlessly repelled each attack.
Since then, he had tried three times to contact someone rational on the ground. The third time, he took off all his clothes except his underwear and turned slowly in front of the camera in an attempt to prove his humanity. Even that hadn't gotten a response.
The monitor Tommy was using for video reception cleared, showing a man wearing a business suit.
"Are you Tommy Yates?" the man asked.
"Yes, I am," Tommy said. He stared for a long moment at the man on the screen. "I know you. You're the newsman who interviewed my family the day I was kidnapped. I don't remember your name, though."
"Bob Wilson. You don't look much like the little boy I interviewed."
"I've grown up," Tommy said. "Why am I talking to you instead of someone from the government?"
"Your television broadcasts have been received by everyone on this hemisphere. I don't know why you haven't been contacted. That's their business. If you're who you say you are, my bosses decided we couldn't pass up a chance for an exclusive. Will you talk with us?" The camera view panned from Bob Wilson to a man and woman seated on a lumpy sofa. "And with your parents?"
"Mom. Dad," was all he could think to say.
They looked off camera, and then his dad spoke to someone Tommy couldn't see. "He could be Tommy, but he's so much bigger!"
"He does look like you, Tom," his mom said. "Is that really you, Tommy?"
"Yes, it's me," he replied. Tears ran, unnoticed, down his cheeks.
Potter, who had been exploring the cables behind the camera, leaped into Tommy's lap. The cat circled once to get into his favorite position, with his head down next to Tommy's knee and his rear held high to be scratched at the base of the spine. His tail vibrated against the side of Tommy's face.
"Tom, that's Potter!" said Tommy's mother. "That has to be Tommy!" She grabbed his father’s arm and leaned toward the camera. "Are you in that huge spaceship?"
"Yes, I am Mom. A lot has happened in the past four years. I hope I get a chance to tell you about it."
"Why wouldn't you?" She spoke to someone off camera. "Why wouldn't he get a chance to tell us? When are you coming home?"
"The United States and Russia keep attacking us with missiles, Mom. It isn't safe to land."
Tommy leaned forward to look more closely at the monitor. "Why do you still have that old sofa? That was one of the first things you planned to replace with my software money."
His dad’s voice was gruff. "We never got the money. The contract had a clause saying you had to be available for support. When you disappeared..."
The screen went blank, and then the image of a man wearing a U.S. military uniform appeared on the screen. "Who’s in control of that ship?"
"I am," Tommy said.
"You say you are an eighteen-year-old American citizen named Tommy Yates. A boy by that name disappeared four years ago. You claim to be that person?"
"Yes, I am."
"An eighteen year old in control of a spaceship the size of a small moon? Why should we believe you?"
"Actually, the ship is a small moon, except for certain parts. I’m in command. How it happened will take a while to tell."
"What is that animal beside you?" the officer asked.
Tommy turned to Leegh, who had moved into range of the camera. "That's not an animal. She's Leegh, a mathematician and physicist, and one of the species that originally inhabited this ship. She's here because she felt she could find collea
gues on Earth. Now, she's not so sure."
"If you’re in command of that ship, it's your duty to turn it over to the United States Government and surrender yourself," the officer said.
"Surrender? My duty? Why?"
"Because you are a citizen of the United States, and you have knowledge vital to our national security."
"I'm not sure I follow; my school didn't have civics classes. Besides, I'm not the only human on board this ship, and the others are not citizens of the United States. I may be in command, but their opinions matter."
"Who are you talking about?" the officer asked.
Tommy beckoned Sisle in front of the camera. "This is Sisle. I’m talking about her and several hundred like her, plus a few hundred more who're different." He turned to the crowd of human farmers and artisans off camera. "The first Jack, come over here where he can see you."
The officer took his time examining Jack. Finally, he said flatly, "That's not human."
"Yes, he is," Tommy said curtly. "I'll call you again tomorrow at this time."
He cut off the camera and receivers.
"They don't seem happy to see us," Valin said.
"They think we're freaks," said the first Jack.
A murmur of agreement went around the room.
"I promised I would return you to Earth," Tommy said. "If we keep negotiating with them, eventually we should be able to. We do have something they want."
"But what will happen to us when we land?" asked the second Jack. "Will they accept us, or will we always be freaks?"
"I don't have an answer to that," Tommy said.
"Do you think they would accept the warriors?" Fen asked.
"Warriors look more like Earth humans. Actually, you look like football players or professional wrestlers. You would be more likely to be accepted, I suppose."
"Is that what they would want us to do, wrestle or play football, whatever that is?" asked another warrior.
"You must do something," Tommy said. "Earth has no free meal rooms or lodgings. Everything has to be paid for."
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