by Ron Collins
Casmir and Deidra had maybe five minutes.
He flipped encryption on.
“I said get in!” he said as adrenaline kicked in, and he ran the last four steps to the rover-sled, threw his staff into the back, hopped into the cab, and slid over to the seat.
“I thought I was going to drive,” Deidra yelled.
“Get in,” Casmir replied, his voice already steadying.
He put the antigrav toggle into gear as Deidra ran to the passenger slot, and he punched the door command to get the compartment sealed. The sled’s motors spun up, and the craft rose off the ground. He depressed the accelerator, and the rover-sled was moving even before the containment seal was made.
Casmir popped his facemask open. Deidra did the same.
“Kick the communications system on, Deidra,” he said. “Make sure the guidance coordinates are proper.”
“We’re on course.” she said as she pressed icons and scanned the resulting images. “What was that?”
High-velocity piloting had been fun when he was younger. Now it was just one big butt clench. The antigrav drive kept the rover-sled off the ground without much input in most cases, but its response was sluggish. To go fast, the pilot had to guide everything. Casmir avoided a rising cliff and skimmed past a patch of sharp rock. A hard wind blew him off to his right, and the sound of the engines moaned behind them. After a moment he relaxed his grip and settled into a more stable frame of mind.
“That was a UG patrol,” he said. “I was stupid enough to be paying attention only to the place I was looking.”
“What did they want?”
He shrugged. “Who knows?”
“Are they okay?”
“They’ll be fine.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. They’ll be fine.”
Only then did Deidra relax.
He reached over and rubbed the top of her head. She ducked and shied away.
“Stop it.”
He smiled and steered around a boulder. His knees began to hurt again, and breathing felt like sucking swamp water. He gave a phlegmy cough. He wondered what the UG patrol wanted, too. Their aggression in this case surprised him, and sticking around to find out what they wanted was a risk he wasn’t willing to take with Deidra.
He glanced to his dataskin.
The use of the network attack would tell the UG that he was there, which meant that more patrols would be coming soon. That was how it was for him. The fight never ended, and vigilance could never be relaxed.
Seeing Deidra absorb the story had been worth it, though.
Seeing the look on her face now as the impact of the UG’s attack settled over her just made it better.
She already wanted to be like Perigee.
This attack would do nothing but speed that along.
“How about you call your mother,” he said. “She’ll be worried.”
“I’m fine.”
He smiled.
“Then how about you call in to the controller with our status? Tell them we left four sleepers, and to heighten all security measures.”
“All right,” she said with a smile.
“And when you’re done with that, tell them to let your mother know you are all right.”
CHAPTER 6
The Hive: Mars
Local Solar Date: February 12, 2206
Local Solar Time: 1005 Hours
Deidra waited by the access door. “Come on, Papa,” she said.
The air lock was a smooth, bulbous outcropping that rose from the ground like a ramp and gave access to a convex hatch. The door engaged as he approached, its steel rim gleaming in the sun as the portal swung open. A ring of heated gas came as a cloud of vapor as it met the atmosphere.
Once the door was sealed and the atmosphere swapped out, they sat on the composite bench and doffed their surface suits.
Casmir sat upright to ease pressure from the small of his back.
The air was cool and fresh, but breathing deeply gave him another chest-rattling cough that pained his ribs.
“Brilliant,” Deidra said as she dropped her gloves to the floor. Her dark hair was pasted against the side of her face.
“Don’t pretend you’re not going to clean those,” he said, pointing to the gloves.
“The service will get them,” she replied.
“We clean our own suits,” Casmir said, raising his eyebrows.
Deidra wasn’t wrong. The system techs could, in fact, come along behind them and clean their suits. But his CF meant a simple cold could knock him sideways, and an infection could literally kill him. He could still hear his mother’s voice as she drilled into him the idea that cleaning his own pressure suit was something he would always do. Don’t blame anyone else if you don’t clean it yourself. He had been doing it for so long now that the process had become almost a ritual.
She bent to pick them up.
“Do a good job,” he said.
Casmir worked bactericide over every piece of his own equipment as he removed it, kneading the cleaner into creases at the elbows and knees, and pulling the fingers of each glove inside out to expose those surfaces.
When he was finished, Casmir folded the suit, placed it into its cubby, then wrung his hands to get his circulation going again.
Deidra was still working, so he stretched his muscles and grabbed a towel to dry his hair. Wet hair made the lungs produce more mucus, and more mucus was the last thing he needed now. The movement helped too, because raising his arms made him feel better, though it brought on another tickle in his chest and caused a spear of pain to tweak his spine.
Deidra raised up to stow her suit and helmet in the right place.
She was like her mother—tall for her age.
Her arms were as thin as a dancer’s, and her fingers long and graceful. Her coarse hair was damp with sweat, which made it curl up in those tight clumps she despised. She wore a sleeveless top under her suit, also darkened with sweat at the base of her perfectly formed back.
Through the observation window, Yvonne was now waiting for them.
He waved and stood up.
She smiled back, standing patiently in her kimono.
Yvonne was nearly as thin as when they first met, though her hair was going gray and her crow’s feet had deepened. It bothered him that she worried so much now. He was a grown-up. He could take care of himself. That said, she was the most capable person he knew, and she didn’t get that way by not worrying about things.
He cleared his throat again and realized that Matt Anderson and a detail of three guards were also standing beside Yvonne.
Anderson, at twenty years old, was bright and dedicated. He was the son of Gregor Anderson, Casmir’s closest aide, and already more ambitious than his father ever had been. Unlike Yvonne, Matt was dressed, as always, in more formal attire—a pair of dark pants and a light blue jump jacket creased at the shoulders. A crisp Universe Three patch of red and yellow blazed from the left shoulder.
The stern expression on Matt’s face returned Casmir’s attention to the urgency of the moment. He noticed the set of his wife’s jaw, and the sharp tone of her eyes. The guards behind them were also tense, standing as if truly on guard rather than just working on a detail.
Suddenly everything tasted metallic.
“Hurry,” he said to Deidra. “You don’t want to be late to your own party.”
Casmir pressed the toggle, and the redundant pressure-locks let them through the gate. He stepped into the control center, his booted feet feeling almost too firm against the rubber floorplates.
The guards stood without speaking. Two techs sat behind control stations, one monitoring the air lock, the other controlling the ventilation system. All of them seemed to stand so awkwardly that even Deidra seemed to feel the tightness of the room.
“What’s happened?” Casmir said.
“Have you taken a C-Pak?” Yvonne replied as she handed him a Byzantine cube. It was a cipher block, a mechanism to ensu
re eyes-only messages were properly received.
He dismissed her medical question with a wave of his hand, looking instead at the data block.
Black text glowed on a silver screen.
The first few lines contained encryption sequences, then came a fractal marker that had been set by the originator—a countermeasure that would destroy both the message and the host machine if something other than the proper Byzantine reader managed to get hold of it.
The message read: The orange fox has jumped.
He looked at Yvonne. The tingle of a cough rose in his throat. The UG patrol suddenly made sense.
“When?” he said, forcing the cough down.
“Less than an hour ago.”
He scanned the date and time. The message had arrived at the Hive just eight minutes ago, meaning their mole had turned the information around in nearly real time.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
“What’s happening, Papa?” Deidra said.
Matt Anderson replied. “The United Government has just created a wormhole energy source in Alpha Centauri A that they will use to power their Excelsior class spaceships.”
“The Star Drive?” Deidra’s face clouded. “That means they can travel anywhere in the galaxy they want to go?”
“Yes,” Casmir said. “That is exactly what it means.”
“Can we do that?”
He glanced at his daughter.
His staff had been aware of the Everguard mission since well before it launched. They had planned for this moment for years, but the first thing that struck Casmir’s mind right then was how quickly Deidra had processed this news and how quickly she had moved from understanding the nature of the threat to comparing the strengths and weaknesses of their groups.
Already she was thinking like a leader.
“Can we, Papa?” she asked again. “Can we travel faster than light?”
“Don’t worry about that for now,” he replied, putting his hand on her shoulder. Fierce or not, working on how Universe Three would respond to the UG’s act of aggression was not something a thirteen-year-old should be dealing with. “Today it is your birthday. You have parties to attend.”
“But I want to worry about it now.”
“Later,” he said, clearing his throat again and glancing at Yvonne for support.
“Take a C-Pak,” Yvonne said as she led Deidra away. “Now.”
What she really meant was that he needed to go see Dr. Iwal, but she wasn’t going to chastise him that far in front of the rest of the room.
Casmir waited until they were gone, then turned to Matt Anderson.
“Tell your father we will meet to discuss our response this afternoon—” He glanced at a clock. “—at 1430.”
“Yes, sir.”
As the young man left, Casmir coughed and reached into his pocket for a C-Pak.
It was a thin film filled with a concoction of designer antibiotics, antihistamines, and other anti-inflammatory meds that could keep him running for a bit. The microscopic ridges of the patch affixed itself to his skin as he slapped it onto his forearm. A minute later, his body had absorbed it and he was breathing better.
He held his walking stick at his side as he stepped out of the room.
He had a brief to listen to now, a birthday party to attend, and then a meeting to lead.
Dr. Iwal would have to wait.
CHAPTER 7
The Hive: Mars
Local Solar Date: February 12, 2206
Local Solar Time: 1505 Hours
“So it’s settled,” Gregor Anderson said. “Operation Starburst will launch immediately.”
Heads nodded, but Gregor was second in command, so his word wasn’t enough. The twelve-member leadership team focused on Casmir.
The room they were in was large for a room in the Hive, oblong, with nearly ten meters to the longest dimension. Despite the air-handling system working overtime, the air here was clammy and warm.
Universe Three’s leadership team had taken the last half hour to review three preplanned responses to news that the UG Star Drive mission had been successful.
The first, Operation Lift, was a tricky play, meant to destroy the Star Drive spacecraft.
The Houdini Maneuver was a mass kidnapping plan that Casmir thought had little chance of success even when it had been devised.
And finally, Operation Starburst was a more audacious maneuver, but one that would definitively change the game: a hijacking gambit that would provide U3 a true advantage as well as make the grandest of statements a group like theirs could make.
Operation Starburst directly targeted the UG’s PR-driven Starburst event planned as the first major mission in UG’s portfolio—a grandiose exercise that would send all four of their new Excelsior class Star Drive spacecraft on concurrent jaunts to four different star systems. To disrupt that mission would be akin to putting a knife through the ribs of the UG command structure. Operation Starburst’s success would go straight to the competency of the United Government as a whole. It would also expose Universe Three as a direct threat.
Casmir flexed his fingers and drew a clean breath, taking an instant to dwell on his sense of free movement. The C-Pak had done wonders.
As he cleared his throat, the door to the chamber swung open and Tamira Weston, a young member of the communications center, stepped into the chamber. She let the door shut behind her, then waited until the room quieted.
“What is it, Tamira?” Casmir said.
Weston hesitated, her gaze flickering to Casmir and then away.
“Perhaps the director would like to hear this alone,” she said.
“Please feel free to speak openly,” he replied. “Any news we have now has to be freely available to everyone here.”
“Europa is reporting they’ve been attacked, sir,” Weston said.
It was as if the entire room did a double take.
Deego Larsi, the group’s logistical planner, gasped.
“Attacked?” Casmir said.
“Their communication station reports three explosions, almost certainly bombs on a sequence wire. They say their containment seals are damaged.”
The younger Anderson stood so sharply that the chair behind him slid away. Anger reddened his cheeks, and his shoulders and biceps bulged under his skintight shirt as he leaned his clenched fists against the table. “I can’t believe the bastards would do something like this.”
Voices rose.
Gregor Anderson grabbed his son’s arm and pulled him downward as if to get him to take a seat despite the lack of his chair. The young man shook his father off, but went to retrieve the chair. Through the tangle of sound, Casmir heard Kazima Yamada, his chief engineering adviser, whispering to herself: sonofabitch…sonofabitch…sonofabitch.
As was Casmir’s preferred approach, Universe Three had set up camp on Europa nearly two decades ago, several standard years before the United Government had tried to annex the place—with their normal chest-beating pomposity, of course, as if annexation was the highest achievement a tiny block of ice in Jupiter’s realm could possibly aspire to. His goal was to always be a step ahead of the UG—to arrive at a strategic location early enough to establish a self-sustaining culture that would resist the raw power of the United Government’s capitalistic barbarism.
His teams had done good work.
They staked out the ice fields that Europan kelpiefish used as their breeding grounds, an act that served to restrict UG stooges from overharvesting the creatures in their first few years on the satellite. Admittedly, Casmir didn’t care as much about the kelpiefish as he did about keeping the UG from making political headway, but if nothing else the species was a scoreboard, a way to judge progress. If the kelpiefish were here, U3 was winning; if they were gone, UG imperialism would rule. And, of course, while a kelpiefish was no silver bow, it was a form of life. The idea that they hadn’t lost population of the species when masses of humans arrived on Europa made him feel like they had accompl
ished something.
In those early days Universe Three had also planted discontent among the population of Europa’s private hydrogen miners, many of whom had toiled on the floes for long years before Universe Three’s people arrived. Those earliest colonists were already wildcatters, so it hadn’t been hard to inject them with solidarity against the UG.
And it had worked.
Europa was a clean system now, one of the few segments of the Solar System that could be developed without the UG’s oversight. The U3 station on Europa was important for that reason alone, but it was just as important to Casmir because its mere existence had been Perigee’s idea to begin with. She had concocted the plan late one evening over cocktails at one of the earliest parties wherein the concept that would eventually become Universe Three was hatched.
The voices of his leadership team jumbled together until he raised one thin hand.
“How many dead?” he asked Weston when the sound had calmed.
“Three people, sir. No report on wounded.”
“That’s outrageous,” Gregor Anderson said. “We’ve got to do something.”
“Attack fire with fire, I say,” replied Yamada, who spoke often about those early teams on Europa. “We can’t leave this alone.” Yamada was an engineer by degree, but a political strategist by vehemence. She had deep skin in the game and was clearing reeling.
“What do you think, Gregor?” Casmir said, already knowing what his friend would say.
The elder Anderson gave the dramatic nasal-toned inhale that Casmir had expected. Lines creased the corners of his lips, and his coffee-brown eyes darkened as he put his hands in his lap and looked back at Casmir.
“It’s a diversion,” he said.
“Please say more.”
“We’re fools if we think the UG is stupid. They know we’ve got something up our sleeves to respond to the wormhole, and they want us to be too busy saving our asses to take any action that might sabotage the Starburst program.”
Yamada spoke. “It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve done something like that.”