The foot was entirely, cleanly, missing. It looked like some shrapnel had hit him in the shoulder as well. Roe found the pulse points on Lobeck’s neck. And pressed.
Muscles, in abundance, even on the front of his neck. The man was one big muscle. Roe realized he would need more force.
“I need help,” he called. “Direct pressure on that leg. Use anything you can find. Anderson, Varma, hold his arms so we can provide care.”
The bridge crew swung into action as Roe ordered. They had been together for years, and knew how to follow his lead.
Roe climbed on top of Lobeck and pressed down on his neck, harder.
Somehow Lobeck started to speak. “Acti, activ, . . . I order ….”
Roe pressed, giving it all he had, pushing aside the revulsion at what he was doing by thinking of the millions of lives he was trying to save.
Then, Arn Lobeck began to get up.
Two strong crewmen held each arm. No matter. Lobeck pulled his arms away and swatted Roe aside. Roe landed hard against the door. He looked up to see Lobeck rotating up on to his knees and then plant his one remaining foot as if to get up.
“Activation Code Nine, Four, Alpha,” Lobeck began.
“Noise!” Roe called out. “And shut him up!”
Three shouting crewmen landed on Lobeck, but somehow the giant man held his position and even began to crawl toward the control console.
As Roe pulled himself up, he saw two of the guards circling in, looking for a clear shot. Now it was clear that the blasters were the wrong choice for a weapon. Roe knew from experience that it was impossible to hit any target smaller than a meter across with the destructive sidearm.
Suddenly one of the crewmen went rigid and fell off Lobeck. Then another. Lobeck shrugged the third off and half-stood alone. One of the guards, coming in from the back left corner of the bridge, held a much smaller gun, which Roe recognized as a stunner.
“Seven, Gamma,” Lobeck continued.
The guard with the stunner had to go. He could only take down so many at once. Roe found Varma’s eye and nodded toward the guard. Within a second, the remaining six men in the bridge crew were hurtling toward the man with the stunner. One of the crew went down but the rest buried the guard.
The three remaining guards had gathered together, and advanced to cover Lobeck, holding their blasters to keep the crew at bay. Three blasters against one stunner. “Nine, Delta,” Lobeck said. How many entries were in the D6 code?
Suddenly Sonia West stood between Lobeck and the command console. “Freeze!” she shouted, and pulled out a gun.
As she drew it up to aim at Lobeck, all three blasters swiveled toward her.
Roe saw Sonia raise her gun hand and start to bring it down, in an exaggerated gesture of preparing to fire.
Ravi came out of nowhere, grabbing the gun and knocking Sonia flying. He yelled out and leapt at the guards.
The blaster fire hit him from three places, spilling several meters past and igniting everything behind him.
Roe had seen a blaster hit on a person before. As the flames spread, the screaming victim would madly thrash in their last few searing panicked moments of life. Except this time, that wasn’t what happened. Ravi slowly turned, took two deliberate steps and laid himself on the console, sharing his flame with the conflagration that was already under way. The console crackled, wires popped, panels split open. Ravi was still, and the fire consumed him.
Smoke and fire were everywhere.
Lobeck, from his knees, reached out in the direction of the flaming console. “Six, Eight, Omega, Launch −” he said, and then toppled, landing in a motionless heap.
The three armed security guards stood mute. Roe stepped around Lobeck and walked up to the closest of them. “We need to get out of here. I recommend you evacuate your Vice President, if he can be saved. But first I need to borrow this,” he said, and took the blaster out of the guard’s hands. Roe turned and fired three quick balls of fire at a secondary control console, adding to the fire. He motioned other bridge crew aside and launched further fireballs at several other key stations.
“Crew, let’s hop,” Roe ordered, handing the gun back to the bewildered guard. “Two people carry each crew member that’s down, they’ll be out for another couple of minutes. We’ll broadcast the order to abandon ship while we’re in transit. Everyone to cutter number one. You too, Dr. West.” The crew sprang to follow him.
Perfect Hedron
Twenty ships, arranged in their perfect icosahedron, continued to gather energy as they awaited the activating signal. The threshold moment, when activating the D6 became possible, arrived and left without pause. From this point, the stored energy accumulated into levels which, while still workable, began to strain the resources of the three dimensional cordon of ships. The total quantity of energy was already well past what the twenty ships could have managed individually, even if divided into twenty equal packets. Only the continuous pouring of energy into ephemeral transit between the ships made the total accumulation possible.
The signal was to arrive by coded transmission, simultaneously at every node. Only this way could a balanced flow of destructive force be sent on its way to the planet’s surface, not only creating the most perfect destruction, but also sparing any one or more ships from the consequence of an overloaded, unbalanced accumulation. That consequence would be instant, fiery, annihilation. A dissynchronization of a fraction of a second could easily result in disaster.
The perfect moment long past, the minutes moved, and the flows of stored and transmitted energy mounted, past safe levels and into the red. Baffled ship commanders received no replies to their urgent inquiries.
No single ship could take useful action. To withdraw from the hedron was suicide. To cease accumulating the destructive force would create an imbalance in the hedron, and was likely as bad. With the command ship silent, frantic captains tried to coordinate a course of action.
But how to synchronize their activities? The transmission times between the ships numbered as long as two seconds across the entire formation.
Sooner or later, something was going to give.
Acting on a calculation and instinct, twenty ship captains started incrementally dumping some of the power out of the lattice. A very slight imbalance was tolerable, as long as the neighboring ships caught up within a few milliseconds. Gaining confidence, they dumped more power, then more. The energy fled, most of it into space and some into Kelter’s ionosphere.
As seen from the planet’s surface, wild shapes appeared in the sky. An ultimately insane aurora leapt and dove, changing colors through the rainbow and beyond. Even on the daylight side of the world, the colors outshone the sun.
People said their last prayers and held their loved ones.
With seconds to go, an imbalance finally broke through the fragile accord between the twenty ships. It raced from ship to ship, destroying every piece of power equipment on board each of the ships in the icosahedron.
On the surface of Kelter, the sky quietly returned to normal.
The Heralds
The gypsy fleet was ready.
It had no single destination, nor designs on conquest, at least by direct force. Rather, the fleet intended to disperse, to every destination in known space.
A few ships carried weapons. Most did not.
Every ship carried at least one skilled infoterrorist. Many carried more than one. Members of Kelter’s security and infoterrorism centers had been pressed into service, those who were willing. They applied their experience together with a lightning type of on-the-job training from their former adversaries.
For the previous infoterrorist attack, some version of planning had been going on for years or even decades. Axiom and his friends had not known what content they would be spreading, but they had made sure they were ready when the moment arrived.
This effort was more ad-hoc. Of necessity, it was planned in just hours, rather than years. Still, their prior practice and pla
nning was helpful.
There were many unknowns. Across star systems, and even within each system, the defenses would vary widely. In some cases the effort could fail. However, it was only necessary to win in a few places. To make sure that the Versari knowledge, of all of the hyperspace glomes and their destinations, was known as widely as possible, and that it could not possibly be denied.
Three days were allowed for all of the ships to arrive at their planned destinations.
In exactly seventy-two hours, the message would be launched in as many places as humanly possible, all at the same moment. The synchronization was essential in order to surprise and overwhelm any forces, whether from governments or families, that might wish to block the effort.
The information would be broadcast, but also conveyed in person to key leaders in government, commerce, the arts, and entertainment. Each campaign would be an evolving form of the art of infoterrorism, responding, adapting, persisting.
Governor Rezar reviewed the summary report.
The former Affirmatix fleet had dissolved. The twenty capital ships of the D6 had been completely disabled during the misfire of that weapon, and operations were under way to rescue their crews. The other ships had left the Kelter system for their home systems, following a terse order issued by Captain Roe of Affirmatix.
No force remained to halt the exodus.
Now the ships were cruising toward their assigned glomes under Incento’s direction. In some cases, they were glomes that had not ever been explored. The routes would take an additional hop, or two, or three, via previously unexplored systems, to drop back into known space at arrival points that clearly represented a previously unknown glome. These ships would arrive in seventy-two hours and one minute from the defined start time. Another nail in the coffin of any efforts at denial.
The new routes had been planned with trepidation. Even though it was understood very clearly that the Versari data was real, and was accurate, it was still a leap for every crew member. Rezar had ordered that only volunteers, whose willingness was verified through at least two independent interviews, would be on those crews.
The backlog of applicants was overwhelming. Retired admirals pulled strings to get a berth on the prized ships. Finally Rezar had to get Kestrel to design a fair online application process that could not be hacked.
All this had been done in a few hours.
The first ships approached their glomes. Just a few minutes, either to commit to the course of action or turn back. Of course, there was no question.
“Governor, will you provide the order to proceed?” Incento, being by the book.
Rezar prepared to assent, then paused a moment. He looked around the command room. Top brass. Staff. Reporters, capturing every moment. Axiom. McElroy. DelMonaco. Adastra.
He turned to Mira. “You believed in this, enough to leap a kilometer to your likely death. Do you still?”
“I do,” she said.
“Attention, ship commanders. I am delegating my authority in this matter to Mira Adastra. She will provide the next order.”
“Authority? Me? You can’t mean it.”
“In this matter, yes. As I promised. Shall we proceed? If so, tell the fleet. Just speak, and everyone in the fleet will hear you.”
Mira composed her words for a moment, then she began. “Members of the fleet. I give you no order. I ask you, as friends, to do this. Stop at nothing. Do not be denied. Act as if our lives, and the lives of our children, depend on succeeding in this mission. Because they do. Each of you will help build a new future for humanity. Without fear, speak what is true, and you will free all of us.”
Slowly, Mira stood. Tall, proud, scarred.
Beautiful.
Rezar said, “Thank you, Ms. Adastra. To the fleet: if there was any question about it, please interpret that request as an order.”
They watched on the big screen as the first ships vanished from the in-system display.
Rezar turned to Axiom.
“What will this bring us?” he asked. “Even now, I do not know if I am serving my people. Angering every hornet we could possibly find. All at once. There will be consequences.”
“Then, let us face them. Without fear, we will live what is true.”
“We will face them together, my friend,” Governor Rezar said to the infoterrorist.
Celebration Planning
Axiom relaxed in his visiting room.
The ships had all departed. Each carried the information about the Versari discovery, ready to spread the knowledge through known space. The glome routes to a hundred thousand new star systems, and also the ways to get back home. Compared to the thirty systems that currently held human life, the possibilities were close to infinite.
And the ships carried so much more.
By itself, the information about the glomes would change history. By itself, that knowledge might break the control of the Seven Sisters and allow billions of humans to chart their own course.
But as people looked more closely into the entire package of data, they would discover clues. Those clues would point them at further files in the package, and soon they would be able to unpack that which also waited.
The Codex was sharing its treasures.
Ideas and information that had not seen the light of day for decades or centuries. Skills that had not been exercised by any person now alive. Histories, from the point of view of the vanquished as well as the conquerors. The forbidden economic field of giniography. Some of the content had been suppressed, other parts simply forgotten, perceived as irrelevant in the world as it had become.
Perhaps most dangerously of all, the secrets of growing and propagating live, fertile seeds.
For seventy years, Axiom and his friends had collected information from all over known space, preparing for the moment when they would have a chance to share it. The effort by their predecessors extended before that, through earlier decades and even centuries.
Now that people would be free to travel to so many new star systems through the new glome pathways, many of the skills so carefully recorded in the Codex over the decades would be getting a workout.
For any given person or situation, there was no knowing what might matter. So it was all in there. All available for any persistent person to find, without some outside agency tracing the inquiry. The entire Codex was going to be distributed as widely as possible, hitchhiking with the Versari information about the glome routes.
It was a good thing that data didn’t weigh very much.
And now, Axiom had a visitor. She had brought her weaving, on a portable hand loom. Axiom was glad she was here.
“It will be lonely,” Axiom said. “So many friends leaving for the stars. I hope they will be back soon, and that they will be safe.”
It was virtually certain that some of the infoterrorists would not return. Each one had accepted the risk, and had chosen to go.
“I will miss everyone,” Orwen agreed. “Still, we will try to be good company for each other.”
“And I thank you for being here, my good friend. So, do you think we will succeed? Will people be able to break free of the Sisters?”
“Soon everyone will know of the new routes to the stars. The question is what they will do with that knowledge.”
“Exactly so,” Axiom said. “So much was taken during the Fencing of the Commons.”
Four decades before, all open source technology had been declared to be a source of terrorism and thus banned. Knowledge such as how to repair and build electronics or machinery was deemed to be far too dangerous in the wrong hands. Open source offerings were also undercutting legitimate commerce, harming the economy.
“Now we have given it all back,” he continued. “Will it be enough?”
“We will see,” Orwen said, “if people are able to exercise their brains once again.”
“What matters most is that it will be in everyone’s hands once again. A worthy purpose and I wish all of our friends a safe and succe
ssful journey. Meanwhile, we will use the quiet for something very important. We have a celebration to plan. Mine.”
Orwen looked up sharply from her loom. “Oh Axiom, you mustn’t worry about that. We will take care of any arrangements. That is, when the moment comes. Sometime in the future.”
“We must start planning for my celebration now,” Axiom told her. “So we can have it soon. I don’t want to miss it. I am thinking of eight weeks from now. Day twelve. My birthday. My century. And two days later, the anniversary of the settlement, when we started to live by the tree, seventy years ago. We’ll just make it a three day event. What do you think?”
“That sounds wonderful. But is that a celebration?”
“This one will be,” Axiom declared. “Save you the trouble, later.”
“Well, it would be nice if you get to enjoy it.”
“Now you’re getting into the spirit! We’ll have music. And dancing. All around the tree.”
“Three days, is that a good idea?” Orwen asked. “You’ll need to get some rest.”
They fussed over him too much. Axiom knew that it was from love, but he would never be used to it. “I’ll rest when I’m dead! So I think the timing is good. Eight weeks. Enough time for many of our friends to come home. Perhaps my niece will be knitted together enough to enter the tree climbing race. Never bet against her, you know.”
“No, never,” she agreed.
“And now I have something to aspire to. After we send out the invitations, I will have to survive at least until the day. I shall make a point of it. Do you think I will?”
Orwen considered the pattern in front of her. “My sisters might know best, but I think so,” she told him. “You have an excellent chance.”
Axiom looked around his visiting room. It had been part refuge, part self-imposed prison for so many years, a place of safety from the Kelter government and from the Sisters. He and his friends had added touches to make the place feel like home. Pieces in various media, created by artists whose ages ranged from two years to ninety.
Now, he was free to leave, and walk under the light of Kelter’s sun once again. But at this moment, he was most content in this place.
The Great Symmetry Page 31