Glasshouse

"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 Sa

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 wonderful—it's almost indispensable to what we're attempting to do—but 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 tech—that 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 ma

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 weapons—anything 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.

"Did you test the gun cartridges? Just in case?"

Janis nods. "Thunder stick go bang. No fear on that account."

"Well, at least something's going to work, then." I'd be happier if we could lay in a brace of stunguns, but since I'm not wearing Fiore anymore, that would be kind of difficult to arrange.

Janis looks at me. "Make or break time."

I breathe deeply. "When has it been any other way?"

"Ah, but. We had backups, didn't we?" Her shoulders are set defensively. "This time it's our last show. It isn't how I expected things to turn out."

"Me neither." I finish packing my bag and straighten up. "Do you think anyone will crack?"

"I hope not." She stares at the wall, eyes focused on some i

"True." Janis—no, Sa

"Sure." Her tone is relaxed but I see the little signs of tension, the wrinkles around her eyes. She knows why I used that name.

"What do you want to do after this?" I grasp for the right words: "We're about to lock ourselves down in this little bubble-polity like something out of the stone age, a generation ship  . . . we're not going to be getting out of here for gigasecs, tens of gigs, at a minimum! I mean, not unless we go into suspension afterward. And I thought you, you'd be wanting to escape, to get out and warn everybody off. Break YFH from the outside. Instead, well, we've come up with a case for pulling down the escape tu

Sa

I think for a minute. "No, I don't think so." Then I force myself to add, "But I think I could grow to like it here if only we weren't under pressure from . . . them."

"That's what it was designed for. A rest home, a seductive retirement, balm for the tortured brow. Go on home to Sam." She walks toward the stairs without looking at me. "Think about what you've done, or what he did. I've got blood on my hands, and I know it." She's halfway up the stairs, and I have to move to keep up with her. "Don't you think that the world outside ought to be protected from people like us?"

At the top of the staircase I think of a reply. "Perhaps. And perhaps you're right, we did terrible things. But there was a war on, and it was necessary."

She takes a deep breath. "I wish I had your self-confidence."

I blink at her. My self-confidence? Until I found her frightened and alone here, I'd always thought Sa