Consciousness came upon John-Litton Gant abruptly, as
his slowly spinning body rotated his face into sunlight
again. A stab of pain from the left torso jerked sore
muscles into motion, and the spacesuited figure began
pitching to, a freefalling human pendulum in the
interplanetary void.
He tried to turn his head, but his cheek was stopped by
the padding in his helmet. The sound of his breathing
suddenly grew louder in his ears, and his nostrils
registered the sterile scent of canned oxygen. Day-old
memories drifted groggily to the surface of his mind.
Twenty-eight hours before, he had been working EVA at
Raumer's Gate, the jewel of the inner Torus. Mitsubishi had
captured the hundred-mile-long asteroid thirty years ago,
fitted it with mass drivers, and maneuvered it into an orbit
keeping pace with Jupiter. Every two years, the asteroid
came to lie on a direct path between Mars and Jupiter, and
what the freighter captains then saved in fuel costs and
time, they paid in transit and docking fees to Mitsubishi.
This summer had proved to be especially lucrative.
Half the Torus was in a state of rebellion by the end of
August, and refusing to transport goods to the Jovian
colonies. Five times the normal traffic of supply shuttles
from Mars was passing through the Gate. The captains
grumbled about the abnormally high duties, which had been
hiked beyond the seasonal crest, but they were also raising
their own resale prices for the valuable food, water, and
electronics in their cargo bays. Capitalism ruled the
Torus, and everyone knew it.
Nobody had closely examined the Martian shuttle,
Grandiloquence, that had landed then. There were too many
ships going too many places in too much of a rush for
security to slow them all down. Regulation was bad for
business. Nobody had scanned more than cursorily beyond the
shielded hold which allegedly held two hundred tons of water
for delivery to Europa. When the shuttle's captain
disappeared, a single sentry had been dispatched to check
the vessel.
Mitsubishi executives had not been concerned with the
rising tensions in the Torus. Raumer's Gate is neutral,
they said. No one has any reason to attack us. Jupiter
needs the supplies, Mars and Earth want the business, and
Tories respect us. That face-off two days ago? A fluke.
Nothing to do with us. We're safe.
The bomb hidden inside Grandiloquence had vaporized the
entire spacedock. Shock waves from the blast had cracked
the station's main reactor housing, and a miniature star had
blossomed inside the heart of the asteroid. Every living
being on Raumer's Gate was dead or unconscious within ten
seconds of the detonation.
Now, more than a day later, John Gant was heading away
from the Sun at several thousand kilometers per second,
slowly and experimentally moving each part of his body. He
found four cracked ribs, a broken leg, and countless
bruises, but he was still alive, and his spacesuit was
intact. His radio and computer had not been so fortunate.
After establishing his relative safety, he began
reviewing the situation. He had no idea in what direction
he was moving, and without instruments, no way to tell. For
all he knew, he could be heading away from the ecliptic
plane and already outside the sphere of human
communications. That particular scenario was, in fact,
quite likely; the Solar System proper occupied a preciously
thin disk of planetoids.
His oxygen tanks were half full, according to the
gauges which might or might not be correct. If he recycled
the air in his suit and breathed shallow, he could stretch
it out to twenty hours or so. But even if he was still in
the Torus, he was a single man with no radio signature. The
chances of his being spotted visually or thermally and
subsequently rescued were astronomically small to begin
with. Given the time limit, it was more likely that his
radio would spontaneously repair itself.
John Gant made his decision quickly. After eighteen
hours, when he began choking on his air, he took a final
look at the void around him and wept at its cruel glory.
Then he broke the seal on his helmet, and felt his face
boiling under naked sunlight just before his heart exploded.
"Len," said Jenny Galza, "you have to see this."
Leonard McBride stepped onto the hangar deck with a
thud, too tired to remember that New Montana was spun for
gravity. "Can't it wait?"
"You don't want it to wait." She shoved a hand computer
at him as the rest of the Project Theory flight debarked,
grumbling about various mental and physical discomforts.
"This is gibberish," said Leonard, scanning the
display. "What am I looking at?"
"We received that transmission from somewhere outside
the Solar System two hours ago. It was repeated ten times
and then stopped. Take a look at the last line."
He looked. The last line read: Encrypted by Jacob-
Martin Quinn.
"You're kidding."
Jenny shrugged. "Decipher it yourself."
Leonard retrieved Jacob Quinn's public key, started the
decryption, and waited. Under the General Privacy system,
every UN citizen had a code key pair, one private, one
public, each at least thirty-two symbols long. Information
encrypted with the public key could only be decrypted using
the private key, and vice versa. The public key was freely
distributed and could be used by anyone, but only the owner
of the pair knew the private key. Cracking a GP-encoded
message by brute-force methods had been proven to be
mathematically intractable seven years ago.
Jac Quinn's message emerged as plaintext in less than a
second. Leonard read it and forgot to breathe.
We will return.
"Jick," he whispered.
"They're safe. That's something, at least."
The hand computer hit the far wall with a ringing sound
that froze everyone in the hangar. Jenny stared at Leonard
with shock and fear.
"This is meaningless." He held up his palms. "They can
read minds."
"What?" Sixty people were now listening intently.
"The Frogs. They cloned Gramble and Millen. Did you
ever watch the tapes from the supply runs? Everything
perfectly normal, completely human. So either the Frogs can
telepathically control minds, or they can read minds and
program their clones accordingly. But then we saw Gramble
in a loneboat at Saturn, even though his body was on a slab
at Star Ithaca. One of those two bodies must have been a
clone." His stare bored into Jenny's hope. "They can jicking
read minds. They could easily have faked this message."
She took a breath. "Wouldn't they have tried to be more
convincing, then? Included personal references, things that
only Jac and you or I would know about?"
Leonard laughed hoarsely. "Too obvious. If we already
know they can read minds, what's the point trying to
convince us otherwise?"
"Or maybe it's just Jac, being his usual, concise
self."
"We will never know." Leonard turned and walked toward
the elevator. "Even if Jac comes back someday, we'll never
know if it's the real Jacob Quinn."
The elevator doors closed with a hiss. The crowd began
mumbling again. Rob Price walked over to Jenny Galza and
handed her the slightly dented hand computer.
"I wouldn't put too much stock in McBride," said Price.
"He's had a long couple of days."
Jenny shook her head. "That's the thing. Even after
this ordeal, he makes perfect sense."
Price shrugged, looking elsewhere. "I think he's spent
too much time around Jemison. The paranoia is starting to
show."
"I'm not sure that's a bad thing."
Kyle Jemison knew as much as anybody in the Solar
System about cryptography. He had studied linguistics and
computer science at the University of Chicago, and later
served as Project Theory's communication expert. His Ph.D.
thesis had been an extensive study of criminal uses of data
security in perpetrating the Samuel Gregory assassination.
The parties responsible, who had never been caught, had used
legal and civilian means to thoroughly embarrass the
intelligence agencies of fifteen nations. Espionage had
never been the same since then.
While researching his thesis, Kyle had combed every
library on Earth and the Net for relevant information. He
knew the General Privacy algorithm inside out; he could code
it from scratch in six different programming languages. He
had memorized the four transmissions which had made it
possible for Samuel Gregory to be killed by a single bullet
fired by an unknown assassin. The Bannon Commission Report
had concluded that it was impossible to track down the
parties responsible, but Kyle had always been suspicious of
that dismissal.
Not included in the Jemison thesis was a ten-page
bundle of questions which the Commission had seen no point
in investigating. The only answers Kyle had been able to
find were speculations from the Net, wild conspiracy
theories and reactionary dismissals. After a while he had
despaired of ever finding the answers he wanted, and
surprised himself by qualifying for the astro school at Cape
Canaveral. The questions had been filed away with the rest
of his thesis materials.
He now fingered the yellowed sheets, an anachronism in
this paperless age, and smiled from ear to ear as he spun
his wheelchair around. "Delia!"
A brown face framed by dark curls appeared around the
corner. "Yes, darling?"
"We're going to be famous again."
His wife's eyes darkened for a moment. "Not again?"
"Remember Samuel Gregory?"
"Who doesn't?" Delia Jemison stepped forward
cautiously, wary of her husband's maniacal grin and grave
insinuations. "Don't tell me you've finally solved the
case."
The smile faded slightly. "I didn't have to. UNIA did
it fifty years ago."
He waved at the terminal behind him. Delia nearly fell
forward onto the desk, reading intently.
"It's not April yet, is it?" she said after a moment.
Kyle shook his head.
She turned her frown to face him. "How did you find
this? I mean, how did you--"
"They gave it to me." He nearly laughed, but coughed
instead. "They wanted me to find this. I was looking for
evidence of an Earth conspiracy against the Torus, and I'll
never be able to prove that there's nothing to find. So
they gave me this."
"To throw you off the trail."
"No. This is the toughest encryption I've ever seen;
the only reason I got through is because I know the back
doors. But Gandalf has been dropping hints like crazy,
leading me straight to it. He wants everybody to see this."
Delia nodded. "Because there is nothing to find."
"And this proves it. Jick. If UNIA was going to
protect anything..."
"Is it going to work?" She carefully placed a hand on
his shoulder.
He stared at the terminal. "I don't know."
"It's too late."
Andrew-Li Onato, Captain of the UNS Oracle, watched
with cold eyes as the UNS Castellan burned in space,
bleeding oxygen through her main rockets. Hordes of
multicolored Torie loneboats buzzed around the two
battleships, firing lasers and throwing kinetic shells. The
remains of a converted passenger liner bulged from
Castellan's crumpled broadside. Onato could see silvery
escape pods, painted to reflect laser and radar, falling
away from the disintegrating battleship.
It had only been Onato's second live combat in twenty
years of service, and his first as Captain of the Oracle.
He had known that Torus was highly volatile, and a single
wrong move could bring disastrous consequences. Everyone
knew that. Oracle and Castellan had been patrolling Seat Of
Honor, following their now week-old routine, and the Tories
had suddenly attacked. Onato was sure that some UNIA
analyst would later try to explain the political
inevitability of the incident, but only the Tories knew the
real reasons behind their actions. Was it Benfu which had
pushed them over the edge? The newly unearthed information
on the Samuel Gregory assassination?
"There she goes."
Castellan's main fusion reactor burned itself out in an
angry flash of white, as if to say: You don't win that
easily. The blast scorched several Torie loneboats which
had ventured too close and blinded most of the rest. Onato
seized the opportunity to attack, ordering a wide volley of
laser fire and self-guided kinetics. He wondered how the
Tories had ever thought they could win this battle. Oracle
and Castellan were old, but they each carried more weaponry
than the entire Torie strike force combined. Only surprise
had allowed the spaceliner to ram Castellan at the start of
the battle. His ship moved forward through the chaos,
extending cables to catch escape pods even as it repelled
the attacking vessels.
"Zero-six-zero seconds to perimeter."
Safety, such as it is. Onato wondered if he would feel
safe again before he died.
The skirmish at Seat Of Honor was nothing compared to
the first battle of the war. Newly inspired by the Gregory
assassination, Torie dissenters began flooding the Net with
encrypted communications-- schedules for secret meetings,
cracked passwords to government computers, recipes for
illegal weapons systems. If three disgruntled United
Nations Security Council members could conspire to
assassinate the General Secretary using public
cryptosystems, surely a few million angry Tories could start
a revolution the same way. Gandalf had gambled and lost.
UNIA managed to intercept and crack some of the weaker
ciphertext, but the anarchy of the Internet made it
impossible to trace communications back to their origins.
Decoys outnumbered actual messages by fifty to one. Even if
they had been willing to endure the backlash, the United
Nations could not shut down the Net-- it was, by design,
impossible to destroy. On the thirteenth of September, a
Monday, over a hundred vessels converged on Europa. They
ranged in size from loneboats to cargo freighters, and they
filled the sky around Jupiter with deadly colors.
UNSF had placed a small monitoring station into orbit
around Europa thirty years earlier, replacing and adding
equipment as the decades swept by. Within five minutes, the
Torie armada had reduced the station to debris, removing
Europa's main communication link, and begun attacking the
spaceport. The five UNSF and twelve private ships in dock
tried to fight, then run, both to no avail. The attacking
forces formed a sphere of ships surrounding the port, and
slowly constricted the formation, like a balloon collapsing
inward, suffocating their target.
Two hours later, UNSF patrollers arrived from
neighboring sectors. They were an hour too late. The
Tories had destroyed every manmade object at Europa and
stolen a caravan of water tankers, adding insult to injury.
Water was precious in the Torus, but a few thousand tons of
it was not worth three hundred human lives.
Images beamed through the chaos of battle had shown
several corporate logos scattered through the enemy fleet:
Oricon, Quintex, Anasazi-Gerber, PepsiCo, Ariane, others.
Official denials flashed onto the Net, but not faster than
the rumors and accusations. Every opinion imaginable
surfaced in the vast, roiling, electronic sea.
The Tories are right. UNSF was lax. Earth is trying
to establish a police state in the Torus. Quintex is
helping them. Ariane is helping them. It's not that hard
to paint a loneboat. Quintex is fighting Ariane. Quintex
and Ariane are conspiring against the Torus. Elvis is
alive. Quintex and Ariane are fighting UNSF. The Frogs are
a sign of the Apocalypse. Trust no one. Join the
revolution.
Watching from New Montana, Jennifer-Ford Galza felt the
weight of a presumably dead Jacob Quinn on her shoulders.
She knew what she had to do, and just as she was sad to keep
waiting for a child, she was determined to have a better
world to show her offspring.
When Leonard McBride awoke on Tuesday, Carolyn Leefield
was already gone. He found a note waiting for him on the
computer, slipped into his pressure suit, and left their
quarters.
She waved as he floated down to meet her at
Skyscraper's new docking ring, a monstrosity of jerry-rigged
components. Jennifer Galza had publicly announced her
intention to form a neutral coalition in the Torus on the
fourteenth of September, and in the next seven days, twenty
other corporations had joined Quintex and Ariane to form the
Liberty In Tranquillity Alliance. Their Charter, drawn up
with surprising speed by a conference of lawyers, had been
flashed onto the Net three days ago. The Alliance would
dedicate itself to preserving order in the Torus,
maintaining neutrality and trying to end the war peacefully.
Reactions were mixed, but none was hostile. The warring
sides had better things to fight.
Skyscraper Point, fortuitously placed outside the Torus
proper, had been appointed the Alliance's meeting place, and
as such had to be made compatible with all Alliance
spacecraft. That included accommodating Lockheed-Marietta's
docking collars, Oricon's fixed-rate gas exchange filters,
and a dozen other proprietary equipment designs. Such
things were already on the construction plan, but had not
been scheduled to be added until several years later, after
Skyscraper had proven its usefulness and Quintex and Ariane
had more bargaining power. Construction, which had been
slowing toward completion, again proceeded at a frantic
pace.
"More overtime?" said Leonard, his voice buzzing on the
open radio channel.
Carolyn smiled pleasantly, gesturing at another astro.
"Oricon wants to bring their cruisers in tonight. We need
this dock to pretend like it's working."
"Whose bright idea was it to build hexagonal docking
collars anyway?"
"They were probably just trying to spite everyone else.
Jack! Watch your flank!"
He blinked and tensed before he realized that she was
talking to one of the astros, who quickly swiveled to avoid
a flying plastic crate. Various panels, cables, tanks of
sealant, and uniformed crew had been orbiting the docking
ring for the past week. Somebody above him moved an arm in
wide circles. "Hey, Len, pass this down?"
Leonard nodded. A squarish box, as wide as his torso,
sailed down at him. He caught it with both hands and turned
to see another astro flapping his palms. The box descended
slowly, then was caught by two techs and guided into a
receiving slot. Warning lights lit up on the box, and high-
pitched tones sounded briefly over the radio.
One of the techs glanced over the displays on the box,
then nodded to his partner. The other tech pulled off one
side of the enclosure, revealing a round lens mounted on a
thick, black rod. Another panel, with a large circle cut in
its center, was fitted over the box and welded into place.
"Go on Lima Nine-Two." Harlanni gave the thumbs-up
signal. "Ready for test, Chief. Over."
"Roger that." Carolyn winked at Leonard. "Dock traffic,
this is Crew Chief. Prepare for live, repeat, live test of
Lima Nine-Two at grid square zero-three-zero. Repeat, all
stop in grid square zero-three-zero. Acknowledge, over."
"Roger that, Chief." "Wilco." "Somebody catch that
dog!"
"Thank you, Mister McBride." She elbowed him gently.
"Rock and roll, Jack. Over."
"Roger. Lima Nine-Two is live, now-now-now." Harlanni
touched a control panel, then pulled a small, transparent
globe from the side of the box and threw it away from the
station. Sensors inside laser mount L92 tracked the object,
obtained a lock, and fired an invisible beam into the center
of the vessel. Within a second, the water became vapor,
cracking the safety glass and sending small droplets in all
directions.
"Over."
"That's good. Lock it up. Dock traffic, Lima Nine-Two
is down. Grid square zero-three-zero is clear, repeat, grid
square zero-three-zero is clear. Chief out."
Harlanni caught the target, now a shattered sheet of
glass and plastic, and stuffed it into a pocket. Leonard
looked up along the long axis of Skyscraper, trying to pick
out the weapons, then back down at Carolyn. Her eyes, the
color of acid-washed denim, watched him as he walked over
and placed a hand on her arm. The spacesuits were
insulated, but unseen warmth passed between them.
"Carolyn," he said, "will you marry me?"
She clinked her helmet against his. "I thought you'd
never ask."
They dimly heard cheering over the radio.
THE END
OF
THE BEGINNING...
Copyright © 1996-1997 Curtis C. Chen. All Rights Reserved.