‘Yes’ he replied, adding a slight nod.
‘Good. OK, then. My first thoughts are that the Go Down team will comprise Goosen, Bing and me. Goosen can fly the shuttle if we need to take it off auto, Bing will operate the light-tug, and I’m along for the ride.’
95
The arrival of Buoy G4:01 at the local buoy station was marked by a deep blue flash and an invisible gravitational ripple that bled out into space. A second later, it settled less than 50 kilometres to the port side of Buoy G4:02. Almost immediately, the two buoys exchanged data.
As he had for the first buoy, Bing sent a seconds-long burst of Trojan code across the emptiness, disguised as a software update. A few seconds later, the second buoy confirmed its receipt.
An instant later, the first buoy was on its way again; next stop, Trevon space, where it would exchange a few hours worth of commercial pricing data, family correspondence, security updates, political gossip, local news, software upgrades, newly approved medical procedures and anything else that two worlds had to say to each other across the vast reaches of space.
Only on this occasion, the new software update would filter the data received, and delete any message or document mentioning the rebels, the Lynthax Centre and a thousand other related words. And, once the buoy left Trevon, it was to drop off-channel by a couple of light years, where no one, except the rebels, could find it.
Satisfied the process was working, Scat ordered the launch of an unmanned shuttle, complete with copies of the Trojan, to catch the buoys that followed.
They then jumped away.
It was time to prepare for the main event.
96
The Go Down mission shuttle launched into Trevon space, just as the V4 passed across the terminator, having returned from its short-term hiding place midway to Prebos.
The descent was steep, with Trevon initially upside down and high up in the shuttle’s cabin window. As it approached the atmosphere, the shuttle flipped over to present its heat shield, after which Trevon was lost to view amid a furious envelop of burning air and ceramic tiles.
Scat had never flown in the cockpit of any vessel returning to a planet—not to Earth, Mars, Trevon or Prebos. He had always flown as a passenger, somehow grabbing a seat close to the cabin, hoping to get a decent view.
What he saw from the cockpit was altogether different. The V4’s shuttle cockpit was made almost entirely of transparent rad-hardened glass, the view a full 180º up, down, left and right, impeded only by the cockpit’s instrumentation and the seats they sat in.
Heads-up displays filled the bubble-like window with data; angles, elevations, speed, rate of descent, fuel burn and other key pieces of flight information. Goosen was flicking his eyes across the window, absorbing it all, concentrating on keeping the craft at an angle of descent that was within safe limits.
The floor beneath his feet appeared to be alive with sparkling air.
‘So when did you get your license?’ Scat thought to ask, and then regretted it.
‘I said I know how to fly the damn thing, not that I’m licensed,’ Goosen replied, knowing it was too late for Scat to get pissed with him. ‘I’ve flown three descents, several subsonic flights across the Plain and one ascent. All of them with the approval of the flight captain, with the exception of one of the descents: that one was an accident.’
Scat remembered the photo on Goosen’s living room wall, of a scowling pilot and a shuttle grounded on the Gap Plain. When Goosen said he could fly a shuttle, he should have put the two together.
‘Oh, OK. So long as you were approved …’
‘Scat, these things almost fly themselves. I’m only here to tell it where to go and to grab the controls if the computer is fried. Don’t worry.’
Scat thought it would be silly to worry, now that it was too late. Bing, however, let out a groan in the seat behind him.
‘Don’t you guys talk to each other?’ he asked. ‘It’s what most people do when they plan major events like these!’
Goosen looked at Scat, hiding a grin. Scat had closed his eyes, imagining the next stage of the mission.
‘Come on Scat! It’s not that bad.’
The shuttle flew level across the Gap Plain, decelerating to Mach 1 as it made its final approach to Go Down City, its heat shield still faintly glowing red.
Goosen ignored the spaceport’s directions to land, instead passing overhead, leaving a sonic boom in their wake. That set off a few alarm bells, but no immediate action. There were no Outer Rim Force interceptors to worry about, just a few civilian starflyers, and possibly the Lynthax frigate, which they believed was still orbiting Prebos.
Goosen decelerated more rapidly as they approached a faint strip of light that broke through the Plain a few miles ahead. The deceleration was brutal, pushing everyone against their seat belts, squeezing chests tightly, making breathing difficult for a full 15 seconds. Then they were overhead, looking down over a dull yellow glow, just able to make out the avenues that snaked north and south along Go Down, through the snow-dusted environment shield.
‘There it is,’ Goosen pointed out.
Scat looked down, but couldn’t see much. He looked back up at the heads-up display map to get his bearings, and then back down again. Now it was visible, just below his legs, a few hundred metres away.
Behind him, Bing worked on his portable light-tug remote, punching in its activation code, and then touching a map with a stylus to indicate its target.
Almost immediately, the cockpit filled with a whirring sound from the rear compartment as the light-tug powered up, rapidly drawing ignition power from the shuttles engines.
Scat looked at his graf. It was 3.09 pm.
‘The place should be clear of people by now, Birdie. Move overhead. Let’s get this done.’
The light-tug maintained its lock on the Lynthax Centre, all the while increasing its draw of power from the engine. It was almost ready to deploy, both humming and crackling.
‘One minute, Scat. We’re almost at full power.’ Bing explained.
It was a long 60 seconds.
‘Deploying now!’
The light-tug threw out a silent, deep blue-black energy beam that opened like a flower as it hit the environmental shield and then proceeded downwards along the sides of the Lynthax Centre to street level, gripping the building like a vine. It was hard to see it.
‘OK. I’m ramping up the amps. Almost ready.’ Bing said, adding, ‘You can pull away any time, Birdie. It’s locked. It’ll stay locked.’
‘OK. We’ll leave,’ Goosen said as he pulled the shuttle nose up from its sloping hover, and increased the downward thrust.
Below them, the air sizzled, and bright blue lances crackled through windows. Goosen had a sense of the blue light expanding up to meet them.
‘Got it! It’s done,’ Bing said a little too loudly now that the light-tug had ceased to make a noise in the rear compartment. ‘The whole place will be an electronic dead zone. Let’s go home!’
‘Not so fast guys,’ Scat cautioned. ‘Birdie, take her up, but let’s do a flyover to check the lights have gone out.’
They had. The entire column was in darkness. Seen from high above, the absence of light from the Lynthax Centre made the environment shield look like a dusty monitor that had lost some pixilation.
Scat smiled. That would be a hugely expensive outage.
‘Let’s get back to the V4. We’ve around 12 hours, and a whole load of planets to fark over. Then we can truly say we’re in business’ Scat said.
‘Second that!’ Goosen said with a smile, turning to look at Bing who was wiping dust off the lid of the light-tug remote.
The rebels had just made their first strike against the Lynthax Empire.
The rebellion was finally underway.
97
Once back on board the V4, Scat told Welks to turn on the media monitors throughout the ship so everyone could watch whatever the Earth press corps on Trevon could report of
their early morning activities.
While the monitors flickered and they switched between channels, Matheson asked whether he could now bring the unmanned shuttle back from the buoy station. Scat told him that it would stay there until later that day. They would return to collect it only when they were done for the night, though he didn’t say what being “done” might mean.
The bomb threat and the loss of power at the Lynthax Centre was the lead news story of the evening as it was the first of its kind in Go Down for over 50 years.
The NBC reporter provided the best coverage. She was asking questions about how the power outage was possible, while everyone else continued to enjoy power. She interviewed a few Lynthax officials; some looking embarrassed, others shocked. A close-up shot through a broken window of an upper floor showed a sprinkler-soaked room filled with melted PCs and blown lighting, scorched walls and buckled ceiling tiles.
The story of the night continued to build, though a little chaotically. They recapped: there had been a bomb threat; fireflies and fire marshal vehicles then arrived followed by the police; people had evacuated the building; it had flashed blue and then lost all power. They were extremely lucky that the sprinklers had kicked in; otherwise, the place would have been an inferno.
NBC had acquired footage of the flash, which was being analysed. The police confirmed the bomb threat as a hoax.
Once the recap had finished, the story continued to develop. In the past half-hour, there were unconfirmed reports of a shuttle hovering over the environment shield at the time of the flash. That added more spice to the story.
A special contributor, standing by the roadside opposite the Lynthax Centre, speculated that someone had deployed a light-tug.
The newsroom then moved onto the disappearance of the award-winning GCE news crew. A minute later, they interrupted the story with some breaking news. They now had evidence of an unauthorised re-entry. They could also confirm that it was a shuttle that had hovered over the Lynthax Centre just before it blew. Further more, the LM-V4 had jumped away, only to reappear several hours later well outside of standard orbit.
This changed the dynamic of the story. A first-ever hijacking, a daring attack on the Lynthax Centre, the mysterious disappearance of the Asian news crew: was the Asian Bloc or GCE involved, or was this the local people taking things into their own hands? They decided it was time to let the viewers decide. A toll-free number appeared on the screen.
Then it flickered. The breaking news died. There appeared a T-Street feed of a traffic junction along Third Avenue. Seconds later, it gave way to an advertisement for off-world corporate services. Finally, the spaceport hailed them. Scat flipped the speaker to mute.
‘Let ‘em squirm a while,’ he told the operator. ‘Bing, check the other stations. Let’s see what Lynthax is saying.’
Goosen tapped Scat on the shoulder and pointed a thumb towards a thick-legged, stocky man standing in the command cabin doorway. Scat did not recognise him. The man appeared Asiatic, possibly Middle Eastern. A guard held him in place with a hand on his shoulder.
‘Who is he?’ Scat asked. Perhaps he was one of the V4’s passengers.
‘It’s Khoffi Khan. He was most insistent, Scat. You should listen to him.’
Scat turned to look at Khan a second time. He remembered the name. This time he noticed Khan’s eyes were bloodshot and that he was trembling.
‘We ain’t going to top him, Birdie. Go reassure him.’
‘He isn’t scared—far from it. He’s seriously pissed. You need to listen.’
Scat shrugged his shoulders and pushed his chair away from the console.
‘OK. Take him into the briefing room. I’ll be along.’
When Scat arrived, Khan was sitting in a front row seat, leaning forward, head down. When he realised Scat was walking down the aisle, he stood up.
‘Thank you for seeing me, Mr Scat.’ He offered a hand. Scat did not take it.
‘OK, Khan. I know you were Trevon’s Earth Rep. What do you want to discuss—our terms of surrender?’
Khan dropped his hand and looked at Goosen.
‘So you didn’t tell him?’ he asked.
‘Tell him what?’ Scat asked. He looked at Goosen as he took a seat across the aisle.
‘You wouldn’t have believed me, Scat. Best it comes from him, directly.’ Goosen offered in his defence.
Scat turned to Khan. He was not in the mood for being messed around. He had a rebellion to fire up.
‘Let’s hear it, then.’
‘Petroff killed my son. I want to kill Petroff.’
Brevity was not quite what Scat was expecting. The man was meant to be a diplomat, after all.
‘Yeah?’
Again, Khan was remarkably brief.
‘Yes. My young boy, Farrin is in a coffin on board this ship. We were returning home to Earth—until you hijacked us. Petroff’s men killed him during a riot a couple of days ago. I sued. Lynthax had me dismissed.’
‘So, you want Jack Petroff dead?’
‘Yes. If I cannot leave it to the courts, then we’ll have justice the old-fashioned way. My people’s way. An eye for an eye.’
‘Even if that means hitching your wagon to our cause?’
‘Yes. Even if …’
‘You’re aware we aren’t organised?’ Scat asked.
‘I’m aware.’
‘You’ll be one of us—traitors to some.’
‘Yes. I’m aware of these things, Mr Scat. But family comes first, yes?’
‘You mean revenge comes first.’
‘OK, then. It is as you say. Revenge comes first. I prefer to call it justice. Justice implies civility.’
Scat looked across the aisle.
‘What do you think, Birdie? Worth taking on our first diplomat?’
Goosen stood up, put his hand on Khan’s shoulder and curled his lower lip.
‘He won’t be of much use to us as a diplomat, Scat. I doubt they’ll let us throw a cocktail party after what we just did to the Lynthax Centre, but it’d be useful to know how the other half thinks. Right now we only know what Nettles is thinking.’
Scat thought about that. They thought they knew what Nettles was thinking—he was a local politician after all—but they already had a sense of how the independence faction worked things out. Having an Earth Rep to bounce things from could prove equally useful.
‘OK, Khan. Let’s take this slowly, eh? One step at a time. How would you like to help me write a speech and then appear on TV?’
Scat ordered Goosen to prepare for an off-channel jump to G-eo. When Goosen reported everything was ready he went on air, striking up a link with the spaceport’s Video Exchange, making sure Khoffi Khan, Arthur Chan and his bugcam operator Li were present to prove his statement was authentic.
The spaceport Video Exchange operator was a little uncertain.
‘Come again: you’re who?’ he asked.
‘My name is Sebastian Scatkiewicz. I represent the Trevon rebels. This evening we hijacked the LM-V4, released Terrance Nettles and three other democratically elected House Representatives from unlawful detention and attacked the Lynthax Centre, taking considerable care to cause the maximum damage to their operations with the minimum loss of life.
‘We can confirm the use of a light-tug. We also confirm the whereabouts of the GCE news crew, and your recently departed Earth Representative, Khoffi Khan. They are with us, as are the crew of the V4 and several wrongfully deported security and ex-police personnel. They will be released shortly unless they volunteer to serve with us.’
As he was saying this, he panned the video around the room to show Khan, Chan and Li, plus members of the crew and a few ex-cops at the back of the command cabin. Li’s bugcam was up and running again, recording events off camera, Chan having convinced Scat of the historical significance of his announcement.
‘We have a message for Lynthax, and it is this: We resent your abuse of privilege and your involvement in our democratic in
stitutions. Until Trevon has achieved its independence, your operations are not safe, your out-of-system contractors are not safe, and your assets are not safe. Lynthax paper will be worth less than five cents on the dollar real soon. You have been warned.
‘We also have a message for our people of Trevon: We are fighting for our freedom and our right to determine the nature and pace of planetary development without fear or favour and without reference to our employers. We also fight for our children’s futures. Our goal is freedom from corporate involvement in the democratic process and freedom from Earth.
‘We are Trevon rebels, but we will need to take this fight to the rest of the Outer-Rim, to gain allies, and to obtain support. If you support our goals, you can contribute by supporting your local representative in calling for autonomy.
‘If you are against us, simply stay out of our way.
‘Thank you.’
Of course, there was no need to thank the spaceport operator. Scat was playing to the wider audience who would hear the message replayed, repeatedly, and throughout the night—that is if Lynthax or the Earth Delegation didn’t axe the news shows.
Well, grandstanding aside, there were three other Lynthax planets they could get to over the next 12 hours if their buoy ruse held out, which would be more than enough mayhem for one evening by anyone’s standards: something that not even Lynthax could keep out of the press.
It was time to jump away again.
‘Matheson, to G-eo in one jump, if you please!’
98
The V4 dropped into G-eo space, reasserted its reality, ran through its systems checks and then pushed itself closer to G-eo orbit using its chemical thrusters.
They had already dropped off an unmanned shuttle, complete with the Trojan code, to interfere with the buoys in the local channel.
Scat sat in a chair that had replaced the Commander’s high-backed command couch, damaged as it was in the initial storming. Matheson sat on the opposite side of the console, resigned to playing his part in the rebel’s overnight activities and hopeful of a swift release.
Bing sat alongside him, crowded in by two Trevon ex-cops who were running through the software that kept the V4 flying. Matheson was pointing out various functions.