The Great Symmetry (14 page)

Kate was beside herself. “But
we’ve talked about this, and CoreValue released the shuttle to leave Top Station for here.”

It had taken some work to convince CoreValue to let the shuttle continue its trip back to the surface of Kelter. She had strung them along, expressing just enough interest in the offered position to get her way.

Kate continued to badger the gate attendant. “The ship landed a few minutes ago – just outside these doors! I’ll turn it right over. I just need to get there.”

“A representative from CoreValue will be here shortly.”

Kate stormed to no avail. She fumed as the minutes ticked by. Finally CoreValue showed up. Not just a representative, but a crew. Crassus was at their head. “Ms. DelMonaco, it’s great to see you again. Shall we go visit this errant shuttle?”

She found herself shaking hands, although she loathed the touch with every fiber in her being. “Yes, let’s,” she told him.

Crassus gave a nod
to the clerk, telling the man, “We’re clear to proceed now. Thank you for your attention to duty.”

At that moment, Kate heard a familiar voice. “Hello stranger!” Denison, his customary greeting. She whirled to see him in the entry lane, coming in to Abilene.

She needed to talk with Denison, and find out what he knew. But she had to get to the ship even more urgently. She called to him. “Follow us!” Denison half waved and half saluted, meaning – Yes he would. She hurried to join the CoreValue crew in the lock.

The cycling took forever. “Speed this thing up!” she demanded. But there was nothing that could be done. The lock took its sweet time, a full hundred and twenty seconds to gently lower the pressure to match the outside. Anything faster might cause headaches or other issues.

Finally
the lock equalized, then the big outer door slid open. To dust. To light. To the outside.

She didn’t waste any time. Her glasses adjusted as she bounded out the door on to the pavement. Grid K-4. Not far at all, just a few hundred meters.

And there it was. Kate raced to the door and entered the PIN. Had Mira changed it?

No. The ship’s lock opened, both the inner and outer doors at once. Inside, all was still.

As Kate moved forward, an arm reached across and barred her way. “Wait here, ma’am,” the soldier instructed, as Crassus climbed aboard.

“Hey, that’
s my ship! I need to look in there!”

Crassus looked back at her. “This is CoreValue’s ship. For what it’s worth, which isn’t much. We’re taking possession of the ship and contents.”

Kate didn’t care about the ship. She knew it was gone, with everything else. “Is anyone aboard?” Mira should be on board, and Kate planned to wring anything she could get out of her.

“No,” Crassus replied. “She looks empty. Ms.
DelMonaco, this very minor asset is no longer your concern. We allowed the ship to complete its trip so we could get the small amount of revenue from that activity, but now she’s ours. Unless you would like to reopen our dialog. You could join our family. I’m sure we could find a suitable position for you.”

“Yesterday it was a merger offer, and a CEO position.”

“You’ve been slow to move on that, so now we’re
moving on.” He looked over at two of the CoreValue crew who had been standing by. “Come up and start the inventory,” he told them. “You know the drill.”

Just then, Denison arrived. “I cycled back through as quickly as they would let me,” he told Kate.

Kate stopped herself from immediately asking about the trip down from Top Station. “Walk with me,” she said, spinning away from Crassus and taking Denison’s arm.

Walking together in Kelter’s gravity was a ballet, but Rod made it easy. Kate turned to look up at him
. He was one of the few people she knew who was taller than she was.

In his line of work, you would think that cynicism would breed hard lines over the years, but somehow it hadn’t. He gave her a kind smile.

How could he look like that? His ship had been seized at Top Station, and his employer – her family – was in a state of collapse.

“Where is Mira?” she demanded.

Denison shrugged. “She must have left the ship just after I did. She lives in the Untrusted Zone, so I assume she’s somewhere in there.”

“Do you know your way around?”

“After a fashion,” Rod said. “Why not just call her?”

“I tried! Several times, when I was stuck inside the habitrail, waiting for CoreValue to let me out. I’ll try again.”

No luck.
“How far to her place?” she asked.

“Just a few minutes to walk,” he told her. And so they set out across the landing field.

“The Descartes is gone,” Denison said as they walked. “
They took her at Top Station.”

“I saw. I’m so sorry, Rod.”

“Technically, she was your ship, not mine. And they offered me a job on her. Wasn’t clear whether it was as captain. I said I’d have to talk to you.”

“You should take it,” Kate offered.

“I don’t think it would be the same,” he told her. “I’m not exactly employee material, you know.”

“But you’ve been an employee of my family
for the last four years, haven’t you?”

“Did you ever tell me what to do?”

Kate had to agree. “I guess you’ve got a point there. And you’re right. You’re probably not cut out to be an employee. And I’m an even worse owner. Rapid subject change − I need details. Tell me everything about the trip down. Mira went to Top Station to get something, or to talk with someone. Can you fill any of that in?”

“Kate, I’m afraid I can
’t. We just rode down.”

“Nothing?” Kate stopped and turned to face him, just a few centimeters between their noses. “Nothing at all?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve got nothing for you. Perhaps Mira can tell you what you need to know.”

“You must have seen something. Heard something. Tell me.”

Denison reached out and put his hands on both of Kate’s shoulders. “Think about what you’re asking for. I was a passenger. First and foremost, that means respecting the captain. Who is also my friend.”

“But it was my ship! And you work for me
!”

“I’m not employee material. Remember?”

Kate turned away, defeated.

They had reached the edge of the paved landing field. Kate looked back, across the open area, to the door that led to civilization. In front of them, a low fence with an open gap. Beyond the fence, a road. Traffic – people and vehicles of all types.

“We’ll just see what she has to say for herself,” Kate declared.

They set out into the Untrusted Zone.

Truth to Power

Lobeck had moved everyone to the resource room immediately adjacent to the bridge of M3120. From here, he could see what was going on in both the resource room and the bridge, especially when he stood directly in the line of the doorway between them. The sensors respected his presence and kept the doors open. And now, he could give orders directly to the command crew on the bridge, in person.

“Adastra’s ship landed thirty-seven minutes ago.”
Skylar had the image projected up on the big screen of the resource room. “This field, adjacent to a portion of the Untrusted Zone adjoining Abilene.”

“Let’s review our strike options,” ordered Lobeck.

Skylar provided the briefing. “A single tactical, centered on the landing zone, will take out a radius of approximately one kilometer. Alternatively, a pattern of five tacticals will cover a two-kilometer radius. That’s what’s available in the very short term.”

“Captain Roe, p
repare the five and let us consider further,” Lobeck ordered.

Roe turned from his station. “Seriously? A nuclear strike?”

“Tactical nuclear,” Lobeck corrected. “The stakes are high. We must not hesitate, if this is the course of action in front of us.”

Roe was incredulous. “But your target is two people!”

“My target is protecting our entire future from a virus.”

“Virus? Do we believe our own story now? We made that up.”

Lobeck raised a hand. “There are many kinds of viruses, Captain, and you have just infected the entire bridge crew with a different kind of virus – you told them something they didn’t need to know. We will discuss that lapse later. Right now, you must prepare to launch, captain, or we will.”

“
I can initiate from here,” Skylar confirmed. “Ready in ninety seconds.”

Roe persisted. “But the targets have likely moved more than two kilometers from where they landed. That’s what I would do, and they have stayed a step ahead of us so far.”

“In which case executing the strike will not harm us. We will have fewer places to look,” Lobeck declared.

Sonia
had been doing her best not to throw up. That would probably reduce her standing as part of the brain trust.

Instead of the display in front of her, she found herself seeing faces, of people who might be in Abilene and in the nearby Untrusted Zone. Parents with their children. A scientist focused on her research. Young lovers. A teacher and his class. The images were coming out of nowhere.

Then she recognized one. The writer whose heartbeat had vanished, just hours before. A cold certainty arrived, even without any evidence, that the actual heart inside the man was no longer beating. How many lives? She would never know.

At that moment Sonia realized that if anyone could stop the strike, it was her
. “Mr. Lobeck,” she said. “I have some model input that may be relevant.”

Lobeck turned toward her. “Go on.”

“Our best case scenarios are based, not only on containing the information, but being highly confident that the information is contained. The ninety-nine percent plan will only work if we are absolutely certain that nobody else has the knowledge. Otherwise, the risk of being scooped, across the board, is off the charts.”

“Yes, that is why we are considering extreme measures.”

Sonia dove in. “
But ongoing uncertainty is the problem. In the aftermath of the nuclear strike, consider the physical result. The destruction is not uniform. Especially at the edges, it is capricious. If you execute the strike, you may come to believe that you have buried McElroy and the secret, but we will be exposed to discovery every moment of every day. Every turn of a shovel, over the course of years, could reveal it. And in that circumstance, the plan is stopped in its tracks.”

Lobeck was unmoved. “We must not be afraid to do what is necessary.”

“You must be certain,” she insisted. “Tell me, why has McElroy not simply told everyone on Kelter about the discovery by now? He could, at any minute.”

“Why indeed. He is holding it closely. For his own reasons. Perhaps he believes it will bring him riches. Perhaps he plans to deliver it to a specific third party.”

“And should we
strike and miss him, it is precisely the thing that could cause him to panic, and release the information. On the other hand, if he believes he is safe, he will not act, until the moment you catch him. In person. Take it all from him. Then, you can be certain.”

Lobeck studied Sonia closely. “Dr. West, I have been concerned
that you might be going a little, let’s say, wobbly. Have no stomach for seeing the eggs break?”

She could do this. “I call it like I see it. You want to throw your toys at the problem, go ahead and do that. Then we’ll be back at the models for a couple of days, figuring out the degraded new best case that we can salvage from the wreckage. If it’s even worth
bothering with, at that point. Are you going to make certain, or are you not?”

Sonia knew she had gone too far. Nobody spoke to Lobeck that way. Was this how it would end?

Lobeck abruptly turned to Skylar. “Is this a credible concern?” he asked.

Sonia could tell when Skylar was deep in a dataspace exploration, because her uncovered eye seemed to focus on nothing, not seeing any part of the world around her. Suddenly that eye swiveled to focus directly on Sonia, who did her best to maintain her most impassive professional expression.

“Dr. West brings up valid points,” Skylar told Lobeck at last. “We should also consider that we are still only speculating that McElroy was on that ship. If we launch, we may never know.”

“But we can’t let them get away!”

“Certainty is valuable, as Dr. West stated.”

“Hold the launch,” Lobeck ordered. “Prepare a surface team. Twenty of our core security team. I
will lead on the ground. You will command up here. Call ahead to secure vehicles and a century of rentacops. Keep the tacticals ready, we may need them yet.”

He turned back to Sonia. “Thank you, Dr.
West, for your sound advice. People rarely tell me what I need to hear.”

Sonia suppressed the urge to express wonder as to why that might be.

Screaming To Be Free

Mira pointed at the set of cubbyholes. “This is where we leave our clothes. And anything else we have with us.”

Evan was incredulous. “Everything? Is this really necessary?”

“It is. Don’t worry. What you leave here will be safe.”

“Safe? If we were in the Untrusted Zone before, this is like the Untrusted Zone squared. And now
we should be trusting.”

“We should.” Mira gave him an amused smile.

“But, my tablet. I can’t leave it.” Evan’s tablet was not his only concern, but it was the only one he would speak of in front of their escorts.

“You can.”

“It’s got a lot of personal stuff on it−”

“Evan!
Nobody will mess with it! Put it all in the cubby and let’s go!”

“How do you even know this guy, anyway?”

Evan, unclothed and unburdened by possessions, walked with Mira to the next room, and then into a hall. He couldn’t help but observe that he
r gymnast’s body looked as fine as ever, although some of the piercings he would never understand. And even a little bit of hair would help. But she was so strong and lithe. Wow.