Traveler_Losing Legong

by Tim Dennis

  Is Feric finding you an office? Should we just go to Traveler?

  Do you think he'll want to go?

  A little late for that.

  Of course he'll want to go.

  Ask.

  ?

  Ask Feric if she's working on your office or if she wants us to-

  Councilor Six walked in. Myles hesitated, uncertain whether he should stand. Feric ignored him, continuing with whatever task currently occupied her mind. Six turned to Myles and sneered, failing at a forced smile. She glanced down at the couch, the only seat in the room aside from Feric's own.

  There's room enough for three.

  Three ordinary citizens, but not an Advocate and a Councilor...

  Before Myles though to give up his seat, Krykowfert opened his office door. Six entered, closing the door behind her. Myles could hear voices, but no words. They seemed tense, and Myles felt uncomfortable. Feric looked up at him with an odd, bewildered expression, then went back to her original focus.

  What's her problem?

  I dunno. She thinks Earth is important. Much more so than Eden.

  She does?

  No. What? Feric? I didn't say anything.

  You're talking nonsense again.

  No. I just felt that Earth is important.

  You said FERIC thought Earth was important.

  The voices outside his head blurred into a muffled white noise. Myles got up and tried to make tea. He couldn't decide if he should pour it into a cup or simply sip from the pot's spout. He turned around and looked nervously at Feric. She peeked at him through the corner of her eye and looked away.

  I'm very unhappy about your Rip. You're bad. You're not thinking. I am thinking! More so than I am! Sit down. Calm down. Pour a tea in your ear and leave my ships alone.

  Shit.

  Myles sat back on the couch trying to make sense of the garbled thoughts and feelings swimming in his brain. He was overwhelmingly for and against going back to Earth and Eden both. He also felt very strongly about opening a new Rip.

  Councilor Six.

  A momentary feeling of calm swept over him, quickly changing back to confusion. He did his breathing, the meditative exercises he'd used to make tough implant connections, but instead of focusing on his implant he focused on himself. The thoughts became clear.

  Councilor Six wants to open a Rip to Earth. Krykowfert fears she isn't taking the risks seriously, but more than that, he thinks Earth is a dead-end, that our resources should be focused on Eden.

  Myles waited. No other voice broke in. No answers-back, no obfuscations, no questioning.

  Hmm...

  One millisecond of relaxed contemplation and the unity of his thoughts and feelings shattered. The flood of emotions returned.

  Anger, sadness, disappointment, frustration, sorrow. Deep, deep sorrow. Desperation. Desperation.

  Myles tried and failed to regain control of his mind. He stood, staring at the wall behind Feric's head. She was looking back at him, a mixture of curiosity and wariness that only added to Myles's confusion.

  Home. Just go home.

  "If you don't send Tugot I'll send Norte." Said Councilor Six. "She can fly it now."

  "She can only effect ancillary functions." Said Krykowfert.

  "Then I will open my Rip and send your ships through." Six was standing, Krykowfert still in his chair under the window.

  "You saw the white paper?" Krykowfert said. "R&D have found a-"

  "I saw your paper."

  Both Six and Krykowfert became silent.

  Myles decided he could just as easily plan a tour from his own living room as up here on Central Command and slipped out into the hall. His head cleared slightly, the impressions of Krykowfert and Six faded away.

  Must have been an implant-cross.

  That wouldn't be effected by moving into the corridor.

  Myles tried checking in, but could get no response at all from his implant. Instead, he turned inward to meet a rush of impressions. For a moment he was Councilor Six, furious, bitter and sad. Next he was Krykowfert, then Peto, confused but happy.

  Rim Bar...

  He took a few steps, the view from the Rim would calm him. He found the elevator and managed to get it moving.

  She might be there...

  The memory of the Lonely Lady welled up within him, sweeping through his body and then funneling away. Wave after wave of confused emotions inundated him until they lost all meaning, leaving no connections between themselves and the incidents that inspired them. They were just waves, they were water, gurgling and swirling around his feet. He was on the orange emergency buoy dashing his knife into the pig. No squeals, no struggle, just the wondering stare of little piggy eyes.

  Myles ran from the elevator. His feet hammered the floor but he felt nothing, Guards and parliamentarians stepped out his way but he saw none of them. Ejecting himself from a second elevator ride into Shuttle Lobby he pushed past waiting travelers into a boarding tube.

  Out of my way. I'm going home. I'm an Advocate, I insist we leave now. Off this spinning wreck. Home. Away.

  "The Caldera Shuttle is launching early. Those not aboard can-" The closing hatch shut out the woman announcer's voice and a burble of surprised and indignant questions rose from the half-filled cabin. Myles looked around.

  Did I do that?

  Can we even leave early? Will we be in position?

  The seats snapped into place, green lights turned to yellow, then orange, then red, and the shuttle shot down the Launch Rail into space.

  Launch from Central Command was a much more gentle experience than from the surface. A brief burst of acceleration down a much shorter tube followed by a few puffs from the attitude jets. Then a five to twenty minute float before the less pleasant deceleration of re-entry.

  The thing about space flight that no one talks about is the effect it has on your fat. In micro-gravity everything smooths out a little, which is flattering, but then comes the acceleration and everything flattens out. Cheeks stretch back to ears, bellies widen across the full width of chairs. After repeated trips, the stretching tended to leave a greater impact than the relaxing.

  That will come soon enough.

  But it didn't. Instead, Myles heard the attitude jets give a long, sustained hiss and his feet felt a slight weight. Another murmur passed through the cabin. The hiss stopped and his belly again went soft.

  That's not right.

  With business-like efficiency, Mallick and his cadre of elder ne'er-do-wells dragged a laden Skimmer-Cart into Caldera's Shuttle Station, hand-stitched copies of the S.I. insignia on the lapels of their simple brown jackets. Fernstrom stayed behind in the empty lobby, just in case, while Mallick, Cokely and Midgfet crammed themselves and the Cart into the elevator. No one spoke until, alighting on the sub-Legongian platform, Mallick employed his one great skill: bullshitting.

  "Excuse the delay folks, just a routine Grease-Maker check." No one grumbles about a Greaser check. A failing Greaser equals fried passengers as surely as a failing Banger.

  Midgfet cleared the Shuttle of early-boarders and, with Mallick at the platform-side of the loading tube, she and Cokely maneuvered the Skimmer-Cart into the narrow passage and unloaded it into the Shuttle.

  "Won't be long." Mallick said with a smile.

  Inside the Shuttle Cokely and Midgfet stripped off their ill-fitting S.I. jackets and dragged an innocent looking box down the narrow tube, past eight rows of seats to the rear of the aft passenger cabin.

  "Don't forget to disable the seat-coupler." Midgfet said.

  Cokely shot her a glance of 'you think I'm an idiot?' which Midgfet returned with a raised eyebrow of 'yes.'

  It took only a few minutes to install the programmable Maker-Controller and, leaving the Cart behind, Cokely and Midgfet rejoined Mallick on the platform. The three consulted in quiet whispers. The more perceptive of the dozen waiting passengers began to suspect something wasn't quite right.

  "Nothing to worry about f
olks," Mallick said to the crowd. "But I'm afraid you'll all have to wait for the next Shuttle. We're going to run this one empty, as a test."

  He, Midgfet and Cokely walked briskly into the elevator and disappeared as the crowd started to grumble. The lie Mallick told was a neat inverse of the truth. If the Banger, mounted on the front of the Shuttle, ensures the safety of Launch, the Greaser ensures safe re-entry. A simple but powerful Maker, the Greaser creates and sustains a dome-shaped layer of bismuth at the rear, several meters greater in diameter than the Shuttle itself. As it re-enters Legong atmosphere ass-first, this bismuth shell acts as a heat shield, slowing the ship for a gentler and safer catch in the Launch Rail. Not a device you would want activated on Launch.

  But that is, of course, exactly what Mallick intended. As he and his crew rode their Cab down to Caldera's harbor, the hacked Launch Sequencer started the Shuttle down the Rail. A slight vibration, a clatter and a whine. Nothing that would alarm the passengers waiting on the platform. The Launch Rail's massive electro-magnets switched into high-acceleration and as the Shuttle shot along its tube through the hundred-kilometer long cavern Mallick's Maker-Controller took over, rapidly switching the Greaser on and off. The on-again off-again dome of bismuth dragged through the Rail, shattering the vacuum tube and sending hundred-ton electro magnets flying about the cavern like the toys of a frustrated child. Bracing trusses ripped from the cavern walls, pulling rock with them. A slow launch meant dead passengers so the Launch Sabot battled the drag, turning up the power, frying conduits and heating the Rail to the point of softness. At six kilometers a second a Shuttle would neither reach Central Command nor survive the turn into the reclamation tunnel, so as the Shuttle reached the release point the Sabot let it go. The Banger cut its hole, the Greaser dragged behind, and the Shuttle split in two, tumbled and disintegrated, vaporizing in a bright orange ball of superheated everything. A spectacular sight if anyone had been there to see it.

  Mallick, Cokely, Midgfet and Fernstrom, jackets forgotten on shore, glided away from Caldera on a Broad-Plain bound Skimmer, listening to the distant ruble of multiple sonic booms, different from the soft, diffuse pop of a typical launch. Mallick smiled, imagining the fiery debris hurtling into the sky a hundred kilometers to the west. For hundreds of years that sky had thrown burning rocks at the settlers, it was damn time Legong threw a few back.

  21

  Feric stood in the doorway, Krykowfert and Traveler sat in the comfortably worn chairs under Krykowfert's office windows.

  "I've shifted resources temporarily," Feric said, "from Ark construction to Maker-Bots. That will create an excess of Maker-Bots, allowing an exponential increase in shipbuilding."

  "Yes, yes, very good." Krykowfert said.

  "And I've moved the construction project itself," she continued, "into a new division that includes domestic appliances and sanitary equipment maintenance."

  "Ha!" Krykowfert turned to explain to Traveler. "Sanitary equipment maintenance has a huge budget, combining it with domestic appliances and shipbuilding at the same time, well, it is a stroke of brilliance. The Council will never notice the increasing construction budget."

  Traveler nodded politely, bewildered by the elaborate obfuscations Krykowfert was resorting to in the construction of the new Arks. "This will serve you ends better?" He asked.

  Krykowfert held his hand up to Traveler and questioned Feric. "What if they annex Sanitary Maintenance?"

  "The Arks are officially designated to replace the outer system Transport Ferries. Even if they remove you from Command our people would still control them."

  Krykowfert turned back to Traveler. "Already I am obsolete! The Council takes away while Nia Feric takes over!" He nodded at Feric, he was done with her for now. "But this is not what I invited you for. Our friend Mr. Tugot has an idea that I thought you would approve of."

  Feric remained in the doorway, her eyes focused on the middle distance and her mouth fell open. Krykowfert continued speaking, but Traveler noticed and was unable to divert his attention. Krykowfert turned, looking at her with concern. He closed his eyes and forced a connection. Feric's attention snapped back into the room and she started changing the walls to show images of the destruction at the Caldera Station. Krykowfert snapped back a moment later.

  "Who's down there now?" Krykowfert asked. "Urbo? She's doing the Gun Emplacement?"

  "She's already on the scene." Feric said. "She doesn't realize its sabotage, she's initiating a recovery effort for the Shuttle." Feric's attention switched back to the distant events and her streams of data. Krykowfert stared at the images covering his walls, more curiosity than fear.

  "No injuries?" He asked Feric. She didn't answer right away. Krykowfert gave her time to finish.

  "I've given Urbo the data-"

  "Council Drops-?"

  "I initiated an emergency shutdown of all Orbital Launch facilities, by the time the Council undoes it we should have complete tactical control."

  "Excuse me." Krykowfert left Traveler in his office while he and Feric moved into his little conference room. He positioned himself against the far wall, at the head of the little table while Feric sat by the door, away from the table and out of direct view of the Councilors, their images already appearing in the spaces between table and walls. Krykowfert faced them with a look of grave concern, mirroring their own fears and holding their attention while Feric kept contact with Bento, guiding her actions and feeding her data.

  "Six is right." Said Councilor Three. "This is a reaction to the Earth-man."

  "No." Said Eight, "it is the discovery of Eden. It's destabilized the believer community."

  Krykowfert tried to calm them while engaging in a more rational examination of the event. "Shuttle Stations link the surface with Central Command. Whomever has done this has simply broken a tie between the surface and the Council."

  Feric heard this and broke her connection to advise Krykowfert against pursuing that line of reasoning, but it was too late and the Council were now all talking at once, moving away from the topic of the Shuttle destruction toward Krykowfert himself. Councilor Five silenced them.

  "Our Launch capacity has been shut down." She said.

  "A precaution." Replied Krykowfert. "All Rails should be checked before a launch. I have troops on the surface and have already secured the Caldera location."

  This seemed to placate the Councilors and Krykowfert was able to slow down. He noticed Councilor Six's image was the only one absent from the room.

  Myles and the Shuttle had settled into an orbit opposite to, and slightly higher than, Central Command; and in the two hours since their aborted re-entry, each had passed the other. Twice. This made their closing speed something on the order of fifteen kilometers a second, much too fast for a safe Rail capture. So they floated, chairs rotated back against the hull in boarding position, while they waited for Central Command to decide what to do with them.

  At least we can get to the toilet.

  Myles leaned over and looked down the row of seats. The toilet was unoccupied, but he felt safer waiting for the gravity assist of Central Command. Or the surface of Legong. Or one of the Farm Arks. Anywhere where one's excretions weren't likely to came chasing after you.

  So Myles sat, suppressing the burble in his gut and eavesdropping on the conversations of his fellow passengers. It seemed that once the immediate crisis was over every other passenger had established his or her own link with loves ones down below and information about Caldera's Shuttle Rail streamed up from the surface. No one had contacted Myles.

  Bento's busy with the investigation. Your parents don't even know where you are.

  That's exactly why I'd have thought they'd call.

  Maybe they tried.

  Myles checked his implant. The sudden separation from Central Command and Legong had been cathartic, and he was currently finding it easy to operate the connection.

  Nothing.

  Whatever the others had learned it didn't include anythin
g about Myles being the one who'd advanced the launch schedule.

  You don't know that's true, the launch could have been advanced for any number of reasons.

  Well, it was a hell of a coincidence.

  Had they stayed on schedule they'd never had launched at all, and they'd all be back on Central Command, standing upright. Peeing. At least one of them.

  Go use the bathroom.

  I don't need to.

  Liar.

  If no one was worried about him, at least he had the decency to care what happened to his friends. Myles reviewed the Legong Digest report. It already contained Bento's bio, as well as snippets of an interview with her, conducted between order-barking and Feric-consulting. She certainly didn't need saving.

  Lights in the shuttle turned green. A couple passengers floating in the aisle climbed back to their seats and locked in. The lights turned yellow and each chair in the two rows of seats rotated away from opposite walls to meet in the middle. Orange, red, puff. Myles felt himself gently pushed against his shoulder restraints. The next hour was spent dipping into and out of the atmosphere, slowing to a speed which would allow a capture on Central Command.

  They couldn't just divert us to Broad-Plain?

  They've closed down all the surface rails until they've had a chance to check them.

  So Central Command it would have to be, and once on Central Command his previous urges returned. Home. Now. And never leave again. He slipped out of his restraints before the chairs were in position and grappled his way along seat backs, shoulders and faces to be the first one off.

  Go see Krykowfert. He's got ships that don't need Launch Rails.

  Myles propelled himself through the first elevator door that opened and ended up in a sports complex he didn't know existed. He left with great haste, trotting along corridors, climbing up and down levels until coming to a familiar intersection. He paused to catch his breath.

  Could have stayed in the gym.

  Shut up.

  His breathing returned to normal.

  Krykowfert's not going to take you to the surface.