Glasshouse - Charles Stross [157]
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’s—the Bishop’s—quarters 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 work—come 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 dying—all 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 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 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