Sam sticks his hand up. "You're going to blow the longjump gate anchor frame," he says calmly, "stranding us teraklicks from the nearest other human polity. And then you're going to hunt the cabal down and shoot them, find their backup networks and offline them, then jump up and down on the smoking wreckage."
Janis smiles. "Not bad! Anyone else?"
El sticks her hand up. "Hold elections?"
Janis looks taken aback. "Something like that, I guess." She shrugs. "But that's getting a little ahead of ourselves, isn't it? What haven't I mentioned?"
I clear my throat. "We know where the longjump gate is. Which is good news and bad news."
"Why?" asks Helen. They're beginning to get involved, which is good, but could turn bad if Janis and I don't present them with a reasonable picture. They're not idiots, they must know that we wouldn't have brought them in on the cellar if the situation wasn't desperate.
"Reeve?" prompts Janis.
"Okay, here's the frame: We're on a MASucker that somehow got de-crewed during the censorship wars. At a guess, CY broke out during a scheduled crew shift change or something. Anyway, the polity we're in is actually a quilted patchwork of sectors spliced together by shortjump gates in all those road tunnels, but they're all in a single physical manifold aboard one ship rather than scattered across separate habs. That's why it was possible to turn it into a prison. There's only one longjump gate in or out of the MASucker, and it's stashed at one end of an armored pod on the outside of the hull with a shortjump gate at the other end of the tunnelthis is standard MASucker security, you understand. Someone outside could throw a nuke through at the ship and it would be expended outside the hull. Anyway, we first need to take and hold the shortjump gate leading to the longjump pod, then we need to trash the longjump pod.
"We need to sever communications between us and their base of operations in the surgeon-confessors' hall, then make sure everybody knows . Yourdon and Fiore have gotten away with running this existential dictatorship unopposed because they've got a sufficient proportion of us convinced that we're in line for a payback if we play along. Hanta gives them an ace in their hole. They don't need to worry about the payback; eventually she'll have time to just adjust everyone who drifts out of line. Once we're cut off from the outside, the cabal lose their backup and their social leverage, and we've got a straight fight. But if we don't succeed, they can just block the gates between parish sectors and mop us up in detail, one sector at a time."
I pause to lick my lips. "I spent some time on a MASucker before the war. The door to the longjump pod was stashed near the bridge, uh, the administrative blockwhich would correspond to either the cathedral or City Hall in the new structure Yourdon is assembling. I did some snooping around last week, and I found where Yourdon lives. He's got a suite up on the top floor of City Hall, with security up to the eyeballsI didn't get in, but I poked around the lower levelsand it turns out that City Hall bears a remarkable resemblance to the Captain's Lodge on the MASucker I was aboard. In which case, the T-gate to the longjump pod will be on the top floor, in a secure suite adjacent to the captain's quarters."
I stop.
Janis stands up. "There you've got it, folks, so let's keep this simple. We all have invitations to the ceremony at City Hall the day after tomorrow. I propose that we go there. I've had the fab here"she waves at the assembler"turning out kits with shielded bags so you can carry them away without fear of surveillance. Reeve?"
I clear my throat. "Plan is, we take our kit along and cut loose as soon as Yourdon steps up to the front to address everyone. Team Green's job is to secure the hall, drop any armed support the bad guys have, and kill as many copies of Yourdon, Fiore, and Hanta as we can find. They'll have backups or multiples running live, but if we do everything fast , we can stop the instances in City Hall getting word out. Meanwhile, Team Yellow will go up to the captain'sthe Bishop'squarters and blow the longjump pod right off the side of the ship. Any questions?"
Hands go up.
"Okay, here's what we'll do. El, Bernice, Helen, Priss, Morgaine, Jill, you're all on Team Green with Janis, who's in overall charge. Sam, Greg, Martin, and Liz are Team Yellow with me. I'm in charge. Team Yellow, hang around, and I'll brief you. Team Green, eat your lunch, then go back to workcome back to the library individually this afternoon or tomorrow, and Janis will sort you out, back you up, and brief you."
There's more muttering from the back. Janis clears her throat. "One more thing. Operational security is paramount. If anyone says anything, we are all... not dead. Worse. Dr. Hanta has a full-capability brainfuck clinic running in the hospital. If you give any sign outside of this basement that you're involved in this plan, they'll shut down the shortjump gates, isolating you, and flood us with zombies until we run out of bullets and knives. Then they'll cart us away and turn us into happy, smiling slaves. Some of you may figure that's better than dyingall right, that's your personal choice. But if I think any of you is going to try to impose that choice on me by going to the priests, you will find that my personal choice is to shoot you dead first.
"If you don't want to be in on this, say so right now or hang around upstairs and tell me when everyone else has gone. We've got an A-gate; we can just back you up and keep you on ice for the duration. There's no reason to be part of this if you're frightened. But if you don't explicitly opt out, then you're accepting my command, and I will expect total obedience on pain of death, until we've secured the ship."
Janis looks round at everyone, and her expression is harsh. For a moment Sanni is back, shining through her skin like a bright lamp through camouflage netting, frightening and feral. "Do you all understand?"
There's a chorus of yesses from around the room. Then one of the pregnant women at the back pipes up. "What are we waiting for? Let's roll!"
TIME rushes by, counting down to a point of tension that lies ahead.
We've got logistic problems. Having the A-gate in the library basement is wonderfulit's almost indispensable to what we're attempting to dobut there are limits on what it can churn out. No rare isotopes, so we can't simply nuke the longjump pod. Nor do we have the design templates for a tankbody or combat drones or much of anything beyond personal sidearms. You can't manufacture T-gates in an A-gate, so we've got to work without wormhole techthat rules out Vorpal blades. Given time or immunity from surveillance we could probably work around those restrictions, but Janis says we've got a maximum feedstock mass flow of a hundred kilograms per hour. I suspect Fiore, or whoever decided to plant this thing in the library basement, throttled it deliberately to stop someone like me from turning it into an invasion platform. Their operational security is patchy after the manner of many overhasty and understaffed projects, but it's far from nonexistent.
In the end Janis tells me, "I'm going to leave it on overnight, building a brick of plasticized RDX along with detonators and some extra gun cartridges. We can put together about ten kilos over a six-hour run. That much high explosive is probably about as much energy as we can risk sucking without triggering an alarm somewhere. Do you think you can do the job on the longjump gate frame with that much?"
"Ten kilos?" I shake my head. "That's disappointing. That's really not good."
She shrugs. "You want to risk going technical on Yourdon, be my guest."
She's got a point. There's a very good chance that the bad guys will have planted trojans in some of the design templates for more complex weaponsanything much more sophisticated than handguns and raw chemical explosive will have interlocks and sensor systems that might slip past our vetting. The machine pistols she's run up are crude things, iron sights and mechanical triggers and no heads-up capability. They don't even have biometric interlocks to stop someone taking your own gun and shooting you with it. They're a step up from my crossbow project, but not a very high step. On the other hand, they've got no telltale electronics that Yourdon or Fiore might subvert.