The Great Symmetry (36 page)

Relief, fear, and adrenaline swept through
Roe. To action. He scanned the bridge. The four guards were in their accustomed positions, each covering a wide field of view from a shallow corner. They definitely were at heightened attention.

Roe noted Lobeck looking at each guard in turn, exchanging a quick expression of affirmation, making sure that they were fully with him.

Sonia West had risen from her workstation in the resource room and was walking into the bridge. What was she doing?

She had a purpose. And she was terrified. Her manner was not exactly subtle. Roe saw the two guards in the back corners of the bridge begin to track her. Now she had Lobeck’s attention, and the Vice President stepped forward off his line to observe.

Whatever she was planning, Roe didn’t think it was going to help. As she began to reach inside her jacket, Roe was already in motion. Three strides brought him to her. Roe put one hand on her shoulder and circled her waist with the other, posing an improbable waltz next to the command console.

“Dr. West, I need your help at Station Six. Will you please join me there?”

From ten centimeters in front of his face, she sent defiance back at him. Roe willed his expression to somehow say that he had a plan, and she needed to let it unfold. He dared not say anything more, except, “Please. Dr. West. This way.”

Still she stood unmoving. Roe could tell without looking that they were the center of attention. He brought her even closer and murmured directly into her ear, “Not yet.”

Finally Roe felt her surrender. Now there was no time to waste.

With Sonia in tow, Roe pretended that he needed to check something at Station Six
on the bridge. The guards relaxed their posture, and Lobeck turned his attention back to the main screen.

From Station Six Roe could clearly see the red stripe that marked the boundary between the bridge and the resource room
. It was the path on which the airlock door would close.

The lock would not shut on any person or object. Three independent sets of sensors saw to that. The first was a set of light beams which, when interrupted, signaled the presence of an object. The second set was a pair of video cameras which registered movement in the area of the portal. The last set consisted of ordinary touch sensors on the leading edge of the lock door.

Roe watched Lobeck leaning on the edge of the portal. The man’s feet and center of gravity were clearly forward of the red line. A foot stepped forward and Lobeck was half a meter from the line. A situation at Station 3 resolved itself, and Lobeck relaxed to a straight standing position.

The actual lock door was powered by a hydraulic system, three cylinders which provided a total force of approximately thirty tons. The leading edge of the door was designed to penetrate the opposite side of the portal for a distance of about twenty centimeters, to assure a snug fit.

There was only one circumstance under which the lock
door would shut with all thirty tons of force, regardless of what stood in the way. If the resource room beyond suffered a massive loss of air pressure, the door would shut. No matter what.

By design, the bridge had the ability to maintain pressure, with three redundant supply systems, even if most of the ship was holed. That included the ability to shut off the bridge from the entire rest of the ship, quickly and automatically.

Beyond the far side of the resource room was the armored hull of the ship
. The armor was substantial. It would take a direct missile strike to put a hole in the hull at that spot.

Or, a limpet mine.

Roe looked into the resource room. Ravi and Skylar were there. “Ravi, I need you. Come here,”
Roe called. Ravi came, looking like a man who had seen his own death.

Lobeck was in his accustomed spot, on the line between the rooms. Now one foot was in, one out. Lobeck was right over the line. It would be better if he was simply in the resource room, but that did not appear to be in the cards. If there was a time, this was it. Roe sent a message from his brain to his finger to press the hot key
. The message seemed to travel from neuron to neuron at the speed of molasses.

Suddenly it was very real to Roe, as his finger finally pushed the key, that he was attempting to kill his temporary superior officer.

Roe had misjudged. The target was not still, and as Roe’s hand reached to fulfill its mission Lobeck was in forward motion. “Activate pro-”

The back wall of the resource room disintegrated. Metal was flying everywhere. Air howled out toward the gaping hole.

The lock door closed on Lobeck’s left ankle with a snap and a clang.
Lobeck fell forward and landed hard.

Roe was shouting. “The Vice President is injured! Get a medic immediately!” he ordered. “I’ll give first aid.”

Lobeck’s guards hesitated but took no action to stop Roe as the captain bent toward Lobeck’s head, reaching for his neck. “I need to take his pulse,” he called out.

Lobeck wormed on the floor, losing blood; his eyes rolled up to show almost entirely the whites.

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 planning 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 glome
s 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.