Flight of the Vajra (110 page)

Angharad shook her head. “No. The proper escape
from boredom is not terror, but fearlessness. It is knowing fear without
surrendering to it.”

“Knowing,” Aram said after a moment, looking at
Ioné. “Knowing is such a frustrating business, isn’t it? You have a whole
universe of facts and history available to you—in your case,
in
you—and
the one thing you need most doesn’t exist anywhere in it.”

“No,” Ioné said. “Because it doesn’t exist at all.
They made me so that it—that one needed thing—might be brought into existence
for Continuum’s sake. Whether it was through me, or whether it
was
me,
even they weren’t sure.”

“But here you is,” Enid said.

“And lucky them,” Aram said. “It seems I’ll have
to stumble through finding it on my own—well, not
wholly
on my own—” He
nodded at Angharad. “—but without the luxury of having the kind of collective
intelligence you have on your side. It’s actually something I considered doing,
you know—having multiple sub-variations on the same template for myself, each
one with a differently-weighted set of support algorithms, along the lines of
what Continuum themselves seem to be doing. But I threw it out.”

“Why?” This was me.

“I didn’t see a future in it,” Aram said. “Why be
many when I could just be one, forever? I was everything I thought I would
always need to be.” He tucked his legs back under himself. “Who isn’t like
that, even if only a little?”

“I know I am like that,” Angharad said. “It would
be folly for me to think I am exempt from such things. And I have all the more
reason to know it and reject it.”

Time check, I told myself. Only little more than
half an hour until the first message window. “I think we’d better start
cross-checking,” I told everyone through the pirate link. “Let’s pretend we’re
just breaking for lunch.” I had no idea how I was going to eat anything with my
stomach cavorting the way it was, but I knew I’d regret not trying.

At least there was still no shortage of kitchen
supplies. Marius wanted us well-fed while we sat and watched the rest of the
universe capitulating—although it also seemed he didn’t mind letting us sit in
the dark while word came in. That was the other thing I needed to look through
the comm relay log for: a total summary of who had replied and to what end, if
anyone. I could dump it and have someone else (Ulli, Cioran) paw through it
while we were doing more important business. I made a promise not to hate
myself for only just now thinking of that.

I commandeered Angharad’s ear in private and told
her about what had happened with the MemoCel and the p-knife. “I still don’t
know how to interpret that,” I said, “and I’ve got bigger things on my mind
than finding out if they were tampered with. But the
fact
it happened .
. . ”

“The fact of it alone is significant enough, yes.”

“You’re hoping that’s a sign your speech made some
kind of dent in Maruis’s crew, isn’t it? Yeah, me, too.” I was trying to dial
down the euphoria that was bubbling out of me, but whenever I was around her
now it was harder to keep it bottled up inside. And she looked just as quietly thrilled
as I did.

T minus twenty minutes. Ioné briefed me as I sat
down with a salad roll and a glass of copini juice.

“IPS has finished mobilizing all available units
across the last twelve hours,” she told me. “They’re spread out through the
city, and there’s a double allotment of them nearest the dock for Marius’s ship
and near the engine repository. We’ve kept them just shy of the red zones.”
Those were all the places—like the dock entryway—that had complements of
Marius’s men posted, and which we had been informed would be protected with
lethal force. But we could mill around outside of those all we liked. I took
stock of the map she sent me. “If IPS wants to shout for help from outside
through the relay once we get that hijacked, they should get a message ready.”

“They have a message ready,” I said. “Although,
from everything I’ve pieced together, this problem will either be solved by us
down here, or not at all.”

“I think you got that right.”

“Something else came to light, though. If we’re
lucky, we may be able to mask the key revocation from Marius for quite some
time. Hours, possibly.”

“Hours!” Cosm alive, I thought.
Good
news
for a change.

“Two hours and twenty minutes or so, local time, is
the best outside guess. We’re working on a passthrough that will allow anything
key-revoked by us to seem to him as though it’s still under his
control—although we’re confining that to what’s in the most immediate area,
since it’s what’ll take effect fastest.”

“As long as we have
something
to work with.
The city itself, or just a part of it—do we have that at least?”

“Yes. The city itself and a sizeable substrate
reservoir to go with it—whatever’s inside or part of the city’s isolation
sphere. Everything outside of that is something of a gamble; it may obey our
commands, it may not. We
were
telling the truth when we told Marius
there were physical challenges to performing a key revocation system on this
much of a scale. The key revocation system we use requires direct physical contact,
since key revocations are ‘handed off’ from one element to another.”

“Why’d you do it that way?”

“We didn’t trust it to be any other way. Not at
the time, anyway.”

Good old Continuum, I thought. Insular to the
last. “So what are the downsides to all this?”

“No guarantee of what we can control—apart from
our immediate sphere of influence, and of course the comm relay. The entire
substrate reservoir for the planet, though, may be an indeterminate mix. Some
currents of it may belong to him, some strata of it may belong to us.”

Oil and water, I thought. No: more like a cage
match between oil and water. I tried not to think about what that would do to the
planet, let alone what it would do to the few of us cowering on one tiny patch
of it.

I put down my salad roll. I’d made it halfway
through the thing before my stomach had finally blockaded itself off. “Then we
just work with what we have,” I said. “We strike once, fast and hard, knock him
off his feet, and don’t ever let him get back up again.”

 “Hey,” Enid said, to one side of me. “It’s almost
time, isn’t it?”

I answered her by putting my arms around her.

“I’m ready for it,” she said into my ear. “I swear
I am. It’s
you
I’m worried about.”

“I’m ready, too,” I said. “As ready as I can get.
I’ve thought of everything, twice, and I keep coming up empty. There’s got to
be
something
I missed.”

“Don’t say that. You said that before, and what
good did it do you?”

Once, I thought, it would have hurt so much to
hear those words I might have shoved her away. Now I just wrapped my arms
around her all the tighter and held on for what dear life there was.

“Kallhander and I will be prepping in our room,”
Ioné said, as soon as I let go. Enid looked at the two of us, then stepped
back—somewhat awkwardly—to let the two of us close our distance. I thought Ioné
would have imitated Enid’s hug, but instead she placed her hand into mine and
made me hold it over my own heart. It wasn’t a gesture she had picked up from
any of us, or had acquired from some world where that had been the custom. As
far as I had could tell, it had been an entirely spontaneous creation on her
part. The meaning of it was as direct and beautiful as the gesture itself.

“And I won’t ever forget you, either,” I said.

Angharad stood behind Ioné, hands folded in front
of her.

“Listen,” I said to Angharad, “go to Kallhander,
or maybe MacHanichy, and have them get ready to take you wherever they think
the safest place they can find will be. The second we’re found out, you’re
going to have a bullseye painted on you, and everyone’s going to be shooting at
it.”

“I understand,” she said.

I shook my head in surprise. I’d been expecting
resistance. Instead, she bowed her head once, and let me embrace her briefly
before she went to seek the others. Now that we both feel like we have that
much more to lose in each other, I thought, there’s no grandstanding.

MacHanichy patched in. “To be honest,” he said,
“given the distance between here and the IPS HQ node on this rock, she might be
safest right here in this building. I’d recommend moving her into the troop
transport in the garage. She’ll be behind six guards and centimeters of armor
plating.”

“
And
the garage walls.”

“Yes, for whatever good those’ll do once your
uprising starts in earnest.” To my surprise, he dropped the sarcasm entirely.
“I hope that means it’ll work.”

“Why don’t we all go in there?” Enid suggested.
“It’d be safer, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, too safe,” I said. “CL won’t work in there,
and those of us making this happen need a live connection to finish the job.”

“Which includes me, right?”

I looked at her—for real this time, not at her
projection in our pirate CL space. Of course it includes her, I thought. She’s
been with you this far and risked at least as much as you have, maybe more.

Before I could say anything, Cioran, in female
form, seized me by the cheeks and tried to kiss the air right out of me. “It’s
been a pleasure working with you, a profound pleasure.”

I clapped his sides. “Easy, now. We’re not dead
yet
,
you know.”

“Oh, I know. I’m just being completist.” He turned
and almost clobbered me with his polylute—it was strapped across his back, and
I realized then I’d unthinkingly enabled emulated-object collision detection in
our pirate CL space for the sake of completeness. Then I realized something
else.

“Cioran,” I said, “get yourself and that noisemaker
patched into the ops deck. I have the feeling it—you—might come in handy.”

“This? Me?”

“Cio, why so baffled?” Ulli, next to him, ran a
finger down Cioran’s nose. “I thought you were aching to be of more use!”

“Well, I am, but I was hoping it would be for, you
know, my excellent mind and my sterling attention to detail.”

“Actually,” I said, “it
is
for those
things. Now get plugged in.”

Ulli seized my hand as I prepared to step away.
“Let me echo everything he said,” she declared, holding my hand up high as if
she were about to twirl me around as a dance partner. “And echo what you said
as well. We’re not dead yet, and we have no plans to expire that quickly. Not
if we have something to say about it.”

“And we sure will.” I lowered her hand and let her
kiss me on the cheek.

T minus ten minutes.

The “ops deck”, as I’d called it, was a subsection
of our pirate CL space, a command-and-control bridge where all the crucial
aspects of what we were about to do would be available through a series of
topical interfaces. One for the communications hub we were about the hijack (and
all the traffic parsed through it and logged by it); one for the city’s
geography and troop movements therein; one for the geography outside the city.
Kallhander, Ioné, Eotvo and myself were all plugged in as full-access users;
everyone else—Enid, Angharad, Ulli, Cioran, Aram, MacHanichy—were all attached
in read-only mode, but they could be granted full permissions if need be.

T minus five minutes.

“All quiet on all fronts,” Enid said, showing me a
heat map of civilian distribution in the city. Only a few people were daring to
go outside now. It was the first time I could remember ever being relieved that
so many other people were so morose and unmotivated.

Give me a couple of minutes, I thought, and I’ll
give you a cosm of a lot to be motivated for.

T minus four minutes.

The full bloom of early afternoon was high over
the rooftops, evenly filling the air everywhere above us. I understood once
again what people meant by the sun “bathing” something.

T minus three minutes. T minus two minutes.

From somewhere, I felt both of my hands enveloped
by other, warmer hands. Enid’s, I thought, and Angharad’s. They were sitting
next to me on one of the semicircular extrusion couches in the common area. For
all I knew others were next to them as well, holding on and hoping.

“This includes you,” I told Enid, and she knew
exactly what I meant.

T minus one minute.

At thirty seconds, Ioné said, “We’re starting the
key revocation injection now. It’s timed so that it won’t actually take effect
until T zero.”

“Remember to cross your fingers first,
then
wave the dead chicken,” I said.

At ten seconds, a bird in the treetop closest to
the house took flight and joined a flock of its comrades headed west.

At five seconds, I closed my eyes shut so fiercely I
saw nebulae, and then at zero I opened them again and let the planet’s interfaces
fill my mind.

The planet’s comm relay
came first. I
sicced my pre-configured commands on it—first among them being dumping the
activity log to a local resource, so I could make sense of it even if we were
locked back out. Another of my preprogrammed routines started combing through
the log, looking for activity to or from any of the worlds we’d been planning
to spoof traffic from.

I read the log output; it seemed Ulli and Cioran
had been a step ahead of me. We’d prepared spoof messages from four different
planets—
three of which had already replied,
along with about nineteen
others. And that was just at first glance; who knew how much worse it got from
there on out.

“Ulli, Cioran,” I called out, “we’re going to need
some more spoofs. And on really short notice. We got pre-empted, three out of
four.”

Cioran: “Oh, no.”

Ulli: “Oh, you must be
joking
.”

“I haven’t had enough drinks to be joking yet. Get
on it; I’m going to see what else we can figure out. Kallhander, Ioné, how’s
the lay of the land?”

“We’re checking the status of the key passthrough
filter now,” Ioné said. “So far everything’s green. Our outside estimates for
detection might have been pessimistic.”

“Let’s stay optimistic about that pessimism, then.
Enid, poke through the rest of that message traffic—pull out everything
outbound since our friend took over.”

“Ugh,” Enid said. “It’s all encrypted, it looks
like. Wait—no, it’s not encrypted, it’s in the clear, from what this thing is
telling me. It’s just . . . gibberish.”

I stopped what I was doing, which was culling as
much data as I could about how much of the nearby infrastructure and protomic
ocean around us was now ours to command, and looked for myself. I saw what she
meant: the messages themselves were plain, but they didn’t make a quantum of
sense.

# his steppe will exhort the outlaw

# we flash snow peaks in the spring

# a dismally complete reference to the lifeline

# why don’t you eat carrots

“Oh, great, a one-time pad,” I said. “Or something
along those lines.”

“That’s supposed to be unbreakable, right?” Enid
was in close competition with me for sounding unthrilled.

“Not unless we have a copy of the pad itself,
no—wait, why does all this seem familiar?” The phrase
why don’t you eat
carrots
had passed in front of my eyes not all that long ago—when?
The
MemoCel
. I bit down on my lip to keep from shouting, but poor Enid squealed
out loud when I started looting her (real life) leg pocket for it.

“Hey! You could have just asked, you know!”

“I’m in a hurry here—” The MemoCel was torn and
partly malfunctioning from all the manhandling it had gone through, but its
contents were still undamaged, and there in the midst of the welter of files
that had accumulated inside it, the same welter we’d shaken both our heads at
before, was a lone document with the words
why don’t you eat carrots
standing out in the little thumbnail preview. No, another document as well,
with
To the Kathaya
as its title.

I patched in Angharad. “I think you’d better see
this,” I said.

To the Kathaya:

We represent a small faction of the Dezaki
instances that are with you here on Continuum, under Marius Prime’s
instructions. Among our number was one who was tasked with the job of
reverse-infiltrating you through the Dezaki instance that was in IPS custody,
whom you call Aram.

We learned of his presence via an exploit
similar to what you engineered between yourselves, which we were able to
instigate within Aram but without his awareness. By the time you read this,
that exploit will have been deliberately closed off and all traces of our
activity removed—as much for our sake as yours. Through Aram we learned of your
plans to attack Marius Prime’s off-world command-and-control structure.

It was your words, Kathaya, which encouraged us
to assert what we had been suspecting for some time, and which Aram himself had
concluded: that Marius was more a liability than he was a fruitful
collaborator.

To that end we have provided you with a complete
matrix of the control commands Marius Prime prepared for future use. To the
best of our knowledge this list is complete and accurate. We decided it would
be best for any such interference to come from you, rather than us, since we
will be providing our own share of distractions in the interim.

We disagree with you on many points, Kathaya, not
least of all the purpose of a life that exists in multiple, simultaneous and
parallel incarnations, as ours do. But we are prepared to disagree civilly.
Marius Prime, it seems, is not.

We hope to sit across from you and talk about
these matters sometime soon.

We wish you the best of luck until then.

Nature likes those who give in to her but loves
those who do not.

Inside the other document were hundreds of other
phrases, each one with the name of a world and an action description:
actuate,
disarm, prolong standby.

“Where in cosm did all this come from?” Enid
snatched the sheet back from me, almost tearing it in half this time. “We never
let Aram touch the—
oh.
” She looked up and fingered the existing tear at
the top of the page. “
Him
.”

The Dezaki instance we’d run into on our walk
earlier, I thought. He’d planted this on it after snatching it from her, and
given back her p-knife in the bargain.

“And only
now
do they tell me that the
pirate link went both ways,” I groaned. “Well. At least they had the courtesy
to keep it to themselves, and to lock the door behind them.”

During that next half hour or so, I sweated enough
to turn my chair cushion into a dish sponge. While Ulli and Cioran argued all
over again about what to put into the faked transmissions (“The Klemekhet Prime
Minister would never use the word ‘facile’. He
hates
that word! Right to
my face, he told me that in his greenhouse.”), Kallhander and Ioné (with Eotvo
running additional interference) poked gingerly at one piece after another of
the city’s—and planet’s—infrastructure to ensure Marius couldn’t determine
anything out of the ordinary was happening, and set about preparing to send off
the disarm commands.

A mistake here would do a lot more than merely blow
up in our faces. It wasn’t like walking through a minefield; it was like
rubbing the faces of two minefields against each other.

Enid plugged into the comm relay—one of the few
places we’d declared safe to play—and started pulling everything that had been
censored over the last couple of days. Not just the message traffic to and from
Marius himself, but everything that had been sent to Continuum and had never
been acknowledged as received. Here, a declaration of support from Merridon;
there, a tight-lipped but still note of encouragement from Omn Leva (at the
very least they didn’t want it to
look
like their hearts were made of
Type C) . . . and most striking of all, a curt little note from the
Achitraka:

We are obeying in letter, without accepting in
spirit, the instructions to disband the Achitraka. However, given the
conditions under which the Kathaya has made her statements, we regard her
statement of resignation as coerced and therefore invalid.

There was more in that vein, but it added up to
the same things: Just because you
say
we don’t exist anymore doesn’t
mean it’s true. And we’ve still got a Kathaya, no matter what
she
says.

Angharad read the note and did the closest thing
to making a face I’d seen her do yet. “They refuse to believe it is me,” she
said. “It is difficult to blame them. But that will make any conversation we
have after this very . . . delicate.”

“If there’s anyone who knows what to say to them,
it’ll be you. When the time is right.”

“Sending a message to them now would be out of the
question, I take it.”

“Not out of the question—we’re spoofing traffic
both ways now, so Marius never has to know a conversation is taking place. But
do you
really
want to get into an argument with the Achitraka right now
about this?” She reminded me of me, all over again: there mere
fact
of
knowing something was wrong, somewhere, was to her intolerable. To her credit,
she folded her hands and sat back.

“New messages are ready,” Ulli told me a few
minutes later, and shot Cioran a sidelong glare. “Although I
still
think
the Prime Minister would have said ‘facile’.”

“Trust in my ear, just this once, would you?”
Cioran poked at her cheek. “I loaned you its discernment for a reason—namely,
you wanted it!”

I took charge: “Cioran, did you get that
noisemaker of yours plugged in like I asked you to? We’re going to need it
soon.”

He sobered right up. “Plugged in and ready for
business, captain.”

“Stand by. I’m going to be sending you some grids
courtesy of both our hosts and our fine friends in the IPS.”

I’d described to Cioran earlier what I had in
mind, and asked:
Is it feasible?
His reply:
Feasible? Not just
feasible, it’ll be a frolic.
It had been his turn to wish he’d thought of such
an idea.

Enid
, I said to her and her alone,
this
is it. If you have any doubts about how far you want to stick your neck out for
me, now’s the time to pull it back in.

The only answer I got back from her was her hand,
her real hand, covering mine.

Last but completely not least, I said: “Angharad,
I think it’s time you went somewhere safe.”

Angharad stood, touched my cheek once, then let
herself be led away.

There comes a point in any endeavor when there’s nothing
left to do but touch fire to the fuse and stand back. I did exactly that.

The most direct way
to work with
protomics is, once again, to plug into it via CL and think at it. Given how
much I was working with, I wondered if I’d need a bigger brain. I settled for
using as much of the one I had as I could spare.

I overrode my vision and let every cell of protomic
substrate within reach of our command structure speak to me. The dim outlines
of the city, its foundations, the roof overhead, the oceans of substrate
below—it was the ocean below that responded to me most uniformly and
confidently, with only wisps and tendrils of everything else above
acknowledging that I had control there. Those few traces from above grew all
the brighter and more prominent as the moments passed, but there was no sense
in waiting for the whole city above to wake up first.

In the depths of the protomic reservoir
surrounding our homestead, I willed walls of substrate to coalesce in parallel into
a hemisphere extruded from the underside of the homestead’s foundation.
Whatever happened outside those walls, whatever Marius could conjure up out of
the ocean currents of substrate that might flow beyond it or butt up against
it, we now had a stockpile of substrate that was ours alone. This I piped into
the city above wherever it would go, allowing our key revocation sequence to
become accepted all the more broadly. Every building surface, every pavement block,
every doorknob was slowly returning to our command . . . but again,
everything outside the city isolation sphere was up for grabs.

To everyone within reach of the pirate CL link, I
let loose the message I’d prepped, one that would hand itself off to everyone
within reach of their own link and so on down the line:

Everyone—this is Henré Sim speaking. Not that
you couldn’t tell, but just so there’s no doubt.

Listen carefully, because from here on out
we’re fighting back.

We have a window of time—could be minutes,
could be hours—during which we’ll have control of the city’s protomic assets
without Marius knowing about it.

Right now as you hear these words, IPS is
moving into position to cut off both him and his clone-cronies from control of
the city. This won’t be easy, as he’s distributed his power in more than one
way.

Every household in this city’s been outfitted
with a small-scale manufaxture. You had your access revoked to these units when
Marius showed up. Guess what: you’ve got it back now.

You have choices. You can fab yourself up some weapons
and join the fight as you please, or you can batten down and protect
yourselves. Nobody’ll yell at you if you just want to stay safe, but I’ll be
blunt: the more people we have risking something, the better the odds for all
of us.

Live maps and other details will follow this message.

Nature likes those who give in to her but loves
those who do not.

I threw that into the pot and crossed my fingers.

In the comm relay that fed data from Continuum to
the rest of the galaxy and back, we piped the capitulation messages we’d
drafted—a few minutes’ delay between each one—and held our breath.

Barely a minute went by before a reply to each
message winged its way back out: #
time is revolving around the watercourse,
# baskets have been sent to new strangers
—Enid tackled me sideways with a
shriek of joy, which would have startled me if I hadn’t done the same thing in
just about the same moment.

Despite being handed the one-time pad, none of our
other detective work had gone to waste. The message traffic showed us the codes
were the real deal.

“Send ‘em all,” I said. “Shoot the moon.”

Bad choice of words, I thought, but they knew what
I meant. Ioné sent the entire matrix of recall codes, and then a general SOS to
whatever IPS outpost was nearest.
Planetary defenses are offline; we suspect
the target is in this area . . .
If we weren’t able to drill
through to wherever it was Marius was sequestering himself, maybe they could do
so from above when they arrived. If there was anything left by the time they
arrived.