The Great Symmetry (3 page)

“Head for Kelter Four at maximum,” he instructed, sinking into his seat as the acceleration kicked in.

Kelter Four. Breathable air, if thin and dry. Mostly brown and tan, rather than the
classic green and blue of the most hospitable worlds. Low gravity. Sparsely inhabited, with a population of about fifty million people. Evan needed no shipboard display to know the details of the planet.

Kelter was Evan’s home.

In a piece of great luck, they were already heading mostly in the direction of the planet when they had come out of the point of
emergence. Their intrinsic velocity, a result not only of their vector as they headed into the glome, but also of the relative speeds of the two star systems, had smiled on them.

Nonetheless, time was likely running out.

Could missiles go through a glome? The answer came unbidden. Of course they could.

The runabout had no weapons, and couldn’t exactly turn on a dime. If missiles arrived on his tail, there would be nothing he could do.

“Ship,” Evan asked. “Based on our last information, how soon could a missile come through the glome from Aurora?”

“Twelve minutes and twenty seconds,” the ship told him.

“And then how long until impact, if it pursued us at maximum acceleration?”

“Seven minutes and four seconds after emergence.” Almost twenty minutes all together.

There were two big branches of possibility. If no missiles came through the glome, then there was no problem, at least in the short term. He would head to Kelter Four and figure it out somehow.
If the missiles arrived, he had a big problem. So, he needed to concentrate on that scenario.

Evan pondered the largest branches of possibility, then the smaller branches, the twigs, and finally the leaves. Not being killed, those were preferred leaves.

Then he worked backward, crossing out certain leaves, then certain twigs, and finally entire branches.

If the missiles came, there was no rational solution. All that remained was an irrational one.

Evan decided not to tell the runabout of his plan. It was on a need to know basis, and the runabout didn’t need to know. The ship also had a black box
, which recorded all of its actions and communications.

Should he feel bad about deceiving a computer?

“Ship, if any missiles arrive through the glome, I plan to climb to the sled. I believe the missiles will pursue and attempt to destroy us, so I’ll need an escape vessel.”

The sled was designed to assist in scanning the surface of asteroids for faint signatures of the Versari. Of necessity, its low powered engine was shielded as completely as possible so it could operate without interfering with the delicate scanning operation.

The sled was clamped to the runabout, at a point forward near the nose.

“So here’s what I want you to do,” he told the ship. “At every moment starting as soon as possible, the ship must be at a location and velocity to go into orbit of Kelter or its moon Foray assuming no further acceleration.
On my instruction, you will change course sunward and accelerate as fast as you can. Then do any maneuver you possibly can to avoid the missiles.”

“Instructions received and accepted,” the ship replied.

Evan reached for his EVA suit and pulled it on except for the helmet, then stood ready at the airlock. There was nothing to do except wait.

He had been condemned to death by one of the most powerful people in all of space. Was it just bluster? A threat blurted out
in the extremity of the moment?

Over the past two years, Arn Lobeck had come to the station on Aurora about a dozen times, usually staying for a day or two. Each time Lobeck had brought his full attention, asking detailed questions, and challenging assumptions the research team had made. As the principal investigator on
the project, Evan had been on the receiving end of the most focused part of the grilling.

Evan could never tell whether he looked forward to the next review or whether he dreaded it. The questions were excellent, and pushed him to think. But there was no avoiding the sense of being examined by someone of great power, who, for whatever reason, was troubling himself to stay informed on an obscure research project.

In all of that time, had Lobeck ever said anything that he did not mean?

Evan cast his mind back over the last two years, searching. An empty threat. An exaggeration. A metaphor. A joke, even.

Never. Arn Lobeck was the most serious, most humorless man that Evan had ever met. And he had always done what he said he would.

Here and now. Think. If a missile came through the glome, his plan was
pathetic. There had to be something better.

But there just wasn’t.

The time arrived. “Ship, please advise. Has a missile arrived through the glome?”

“Nothing has arrived through the glome,” the ship said.

Good news. Perhaps he would be free to make it to Kelter Four – safety, at least for the moment.

“Update,” the ship told him. “An object has arrived through the glome. Two objects. Now three. Objects are accelerating in our direction at eight gravities.”

Game on. At a button push, the inner door of the airlock began to dilate open.

“How long until impact?”

The ship’s voice was anywhere it needed to be. “Eight minutes and thirty seconds at current velocity and acceleration.”

Evan put on his helmet and rotated it closed, then pressed the outer button
in the airlock with a thick gloved finger.

The spacewalk was going to be a novel experience. He had only done it under conditions of weightlessness. With the craft accelerating at almost one full gravity, the trip was not going to be a free float, powered by a gentle push, or a tug on the cord if he went astray. There would be apparent gravity due to acceleration.

The airlock door opened into space.

Evan stepped to the edge of the airlock, and saw a different kind of space than he had ever before experienced. This space had a definite up and down, and the hull of the craft was a vertical wall. Up was toward the nose. Down was a small cliff of spacecraft hull, then vastness. Below, the deepest, blackest pit any person could ever fall into.

“Seven minutes to impact,” the ship told him.

Evan held on to a safety bar on the outside edge of the airlock and looked straight down. There they were. Three red haloes, their superheated reaction mass creating the appearance of a ring around the unlit nose of each missile. Coming his way, at eight gravities of acceleration.

“When it is two minutes before impact,” Evan told the ship, “turn sunward with as much acceleration as you can.”

“Instruction received,” the ship said.

It was time to put the rest of his plan in motion, for what it was worth. “Suit, go private,” Evan
instructed. His instruction stopped communication with the runabout. “I need you to create a message for me.”

Evan told the EVA suit exactly what needed to be in the message. The suit, which had its own capable processor, easily managed the request. Part of the message was encrypted, using the public key of the intended recipient. Only that one person would be able to decrypt it, using a carefully guarded private key.

“Message created,” the suit told him.

“Suit, send the message to the ship and then go public.
Ship, take the message and transmit it to Kelter Four on all available channels to every available recipient. Do it immediately.”

“Send as a priority to any specific person?” the ship asked.

“No. Send to every recipient known on Kelter, its moons, or nearby stations. Continuously repeat sending until I countermand.”

“Acknowledged and in process,” the ship told him.

Evan had told the runabout he intended to escape in the sled, but that was not his plan. The sled had no additional life support systems beyond what was provided by his suit. If the sled was missing from the wreckage of the ship, it would be found. Or it might be detected by the second or third missile and destroyed shortly after the runabout. He needed an even smaller vessel.

And, he needed the boom. “Ship, run out the boom,” he instructed.

In the direction that he normally would have called aft, but which now appeared to be just below him, a series of struts started extruding from the ship. Evan found himself wondering where it all came from. Fully extended, the boom was longer than the width of the ship. Somehow it was assembled on the fly inside the workings of the runabout, resolved to an apparently flawless lattice
as it ran out from the ship.

“Suit, go private,” Evan instructed. “No further communication with the ship.”

“Gone private,” his suit told him.

Just over ten meters long, the boom was used for any number of operations. In this case, it would get him those ten meters farther away from the center of the ship, and the thrust of its engine.

“Suit, tell me when we are fifteen seconds from the two minute mark.”

“Acknowledged,” the suit said.

And then Evan began his walk out the plank.

It was a framework of metal bars
, comprising many small triangles. Perfectly good to hang on, or clip a line to, if you were weightless. Evan had done that any number of times before. But he had never walked on it.

Just ten meters. Ten steps, or a few more. With each step, he had to find a stable spot on the intersection of the struts by coordinating his vision with
the very limited feel he could get through his thick boots, and ultimately adding a little bit of positional intuition.

The first step was the biggest, going down a full meter from the airlock door to the start of the boom. He held the safety bar and lowered himself, then turned to face away from the ship. Away from the balance and comfort of the bar.

One step out on the boom, then two. Three
. He was getting the hang of it. The next few steps came more quickly. Then he was standing at the edge.

“Fifteen seconds at – Mark,” the suit told him. It was time.

“Count down the seconds to zero.” The timing was going to be critical. Evan needed to take exactly the right step, at exactly the right time, within a second or even less.

Evan stood on the very edge. He looked down at the approaching missiles
. They had grown both in size and brightness, just over two minutes away.

He wanted to turn and look back at the ship, to gauge if he would fall far enough away from the discharge of the engine, but he was afraid of losing his balance. So he set his vision straight ahead into the blackness and stars.

He was counting on his own precision. And a carefully crafted message. And most of all, he was counting on Mira.

The suit counted down. Four, three, two, one.

“Klono have mercy,” Evan said, and stepped off the end of the boom.

Hey, Get Off My Lawn!

Mira Adastra almost fell off her bar stool at the next thing she heard. How could that be?

In a huge news day, the story was posed as an intriguing mystery. The incoming ship, arriving at a previously unknown glome emergence, had used
its few remaining minutes to send a message, repeated over and over, before being destroyed. Most of it was encrypted, but the part in the clear was being treated as a joke.

The big screen over the bar was running one of the news channels of the Spoon Feed. In most public places you only got the Spoon Feed – approved programming and shopping opportunities. The genial older caster bantered with the infobabe, “Wow, that sounds like something I would say to the local kids.”

“You’re not that old,” she assured him. “Besides, we don’t even have lawns around here. Maybe we should explain what a lawn is, anyway.”

“Great idea, Lisa. On certain planets, people keep a patch of live grass around their home, where kids can walk or play.
I don’t mean turf – a lawn is an actual mat of little plants growing on the ground. To keep that grass going, you need constant irrigation.”

“Or even reliable natural rain, like they have on some parts of Earth,” Lisa put in.

“Yes. And in those places, older people are famous for
keeping their lawns meticulously tidy. If some kids come by, they could tear up the lawn or litter on it. So the old guy says –”

They finished in chorus: “Hey, Get off My Lawn!”

In her accustomed role, the young woman set up the senior caster. “That just makes no sense, Al. That a ship would send that as a message. What do you make of it?”

“Well Lisa, the clear part is probably just a diversion. And the encrypted message has been sequestered. Top secret, you know. Seriously, folks, don’t do anything to help infoterrorists – if for any reason you received the transmittal and haven’t called for help cleaning it off your system, you need to do that right now.”

“You mean, you need to do that yesterday.”

“That’s right, Lisa. You can’t be too careful with sequestered data.”

Mira knew what the cover message meant. The encrypted message was for her. And it was from Evan McElroy.

Which meant that he had been on that ship. And that
now he was dead, killed by the missile strike that had destroyed the ship.

Evan. Dead.

She left her stool, on purpose this time, and headed for the door, reaching for her phone. “Kestrel, meet me at the Buttonwood. How soon can you be there?”

A grumpy voice answered her. “Do I get to finish sleeping first?”

“No,” she told him.

“Five minutes then.”

“Ok, see you there.”

Perfect. Just enough time to walk there in the nice cool evening. Mira set an even pace, floating for
a brief moment off the ground in each long step.

The friendly streets of the Untrusted Zone were welcoming. They were home. There was always something going on, at any time of the day or night. Vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists, sorting it all out in real time, getting where they needed to go. Although there was no specific requirement to do so, she kept to the edge of the street as she walked along.