Safe House

“First or nothing,” Chel said. “Death or glory.”

Laurent stood looking thoughtfully at the diagram — the globe, the involved way in to the heart of it, the “sensitive area” hidden at the heart. “This looks,” he said, “kind of familiar.”

There was a subdued chuckle from some of the others. “Yeah,” Shih Chin said. “It’s a reworking of an old archetype. There have been some additions to it, though. Take a look—”

They spent the next few minutes going over the worst of the boobytraps — as much to show them to Laurent as to remind themselves. “The worst things are the shipeaters,” Del said, pointing at the two separate places where the “eaters” were known to have been positioned in the main accesses. “They’re nothing small that you could shoot up. They’re jaws that come out of the walls — they are the walls, actually — and munch you up. Nasty.”

“If you just get shot up and die, you can at least reclaim the points inherent in your shipbuild in another round of the game,” Maj said to Laurent. “But if something completely destroys your ship and you can’t recover the material for salvage, you have to start over from scratch…buy your way back into the construction program and then sometimes wait a month or two before the resources are available to build your new ship….”

“Like real life,” Laurent said.

“All too much like it,” Kelly said.

From the direction of the buildings in their base complex, a klaxon began to sound. “That’s it, troops,” Shih Chin said, and with a look of great relief headed off toward her ship.

“Chinnn!!” Bob and Del and Mairead shouted after her.

“Oh…I forgot.” She came back to the rest of them.

“Ready?” Bob said, putting out a hand.

Shih Chin put her hand on top of Bob’s, and then one after another, the Group piled hands up on top of one another. “Oh, come on, Goulash,” Bob said to Laurent then, and shyly, Laurent put his hand on top of all of theirs.

“Seven for seven,” Bob said. “Or nine, or ten. However many we are. Yeah?”

“Yeah!” they all shouted.

“Now let’s go kick the Archon’s big green butt,” Shih Chin said, “and be back home in time for popcorn and a late movie.”

Everyone headed hurriedly for their fighters. Shortly Maj and Laurent were back in their seats, and all around them the scream of Morgenroths coming up to speed was becoming deafening. “This planet,” Laurent said, nearly shouting over the noise, “it is in this system?”

“Nope,” Maj said. “Fourteen light-years away.”

Laurent’s eyes widened as the nine ships lifted up and away from the surface of Jorkas together, in formation. “And we are going to get there in ten minutes?”

“In about a second and a half, actually,” Maj said, checking the readouts for the sizable part of the Arbalest’s computer which managed the squeezefield synchronization. “If we had a jump gate, it would be even faster. But that uses a lot of power, and the gate structure is vulnerable at either end to sabotage. However, we have enough ships to do it the other way.” She glanced around. The others were slowing down, preparing.

“What way?”

“Hang on,” she said, and meant it. The first time it was always a surprise….

“Ready, Seven?” Bob’s voice came down the ship’s comm.

“Ready!” Maj said. Seven other voices said, “Ready!”

“Synch starts—now!”

The squeezefield sequence cut in. Maj watched the guidance laser jump from craft to craft, knitting them together in a many-times reflected webwork of light. The hypermass augmentation sequence started—

And then the stars streaked in to collapse around them, molded themselves flaming to the shapes of the ships, pushed the ships and their pilots unbearably inward on themselves in a wave of spatially compressed light and a deafening scream of sound—

Everything vanished. And then the stars blazed out again, leaping back out to their proper positions, and leaving the formation of Arbalests falling toward the surface of the planet Didion….

Laurent was gasping. “You — you—!”

“You can either poke holes in the universe to get where you’re going,” Maj said, “which some people suspect is bad for its structure…or you can wrap it around you like a coat, go where you’re going, and then take the coat off again. It’s all the same coat. Everything in it touches everything else….”

That was as much theory as Maj intended to get into at the moment, for there was a lot to do, a lot of instruments to check and double-check in the next minute or so. The cockpit was filling up with nervous background chatter from the others as they did what Maj was doing — made sure the weapons were hot and loose, the Morgenroths answering properly. Below them, streaks of fire and puffs of smoke and long streamers of contrail in the upper and middle atmosphere told them that the Battle of Didion was already in progress, and heating up.

“Ready?” Bob said from his Arbalest, taking squad leadership and point this time out. He had devised the strategy they would be using on the way in, and therefore he got to die first if anything went wrong.

“All set, big B,” Maj said.

“Ready, Bob—”

“Let’s do it, already!”

“Seven for seven,” Bob said. “Go. Go. Go.”

Nine Arbalest fighters fell at ever-increasing speed toward the surface of Didion. From the backseat of one of them came a yell of pure and not entirely inappropriate joy, and in the front seat, the pilot smiled, settled one arm deep into the field that handled the firing controls, and got ready to show her houseguest a good time.

Six thousand miles away the major was sitting in business class on a domestic flight to Vienna, from which she would have to catch yet another flight to Zurich, the nearest spaceplane port. She much disliked having to pass through Switzerland, but at the moment it was unavoidable. Speed was of the essence, and she had other things than the wretched Swiss on her mind.

“He has not left the house, Major,” said the voice down the hushed and scrambled Net link she was using from the booth at the back of business class.

“Good. A small blessing, if nothing else. What are his hosts doing?”

“Having a quiet day at home, it would seem. The mother has been working in the garden. The father has been in the household Net mostly, not out in the public Nets at all. The daughter and the boy are in the Net as well.”

“In the boy’s accounts?”

“No. Though they could be at any time. His father had his son’s account information installed on a North American server.”

“Well, that should hardly be a problem for us. Break into the accounts. I want them completely searched.”

“Unfortunately,” said her contact, “the server is not the one to which they were originally moved. The new server is one which is used by several U.S. government agencies…and it is regrettably extremely well protected. We cannot get at it.”

She muttered something rude under her breath. “Well, at the very least I want the boy watched and listened to wherever he goes in the public Nets. He’s likely enough to drop some useful information where it can be heard.”

“But, Major, except for the Greens’ household Net, he has been nowhere except in a proprietary system — and that as a guest on the professor’s daughter’s account. And the proprietary systems routinely have top-flight filters which keep outside access limited to registered subscribers—”

“Well, subscribe!”

“We did. But it takes twenty-four hours to approve the credit. And besides, our country’s domains are blocked. We had to go in through a Transylvanian domain address, and for that we had to get the usual clearances—”

Bureaucracy, she thought in anguish and covered her face with one hand. It had its uses, but most of them rarely did her any good.