Forever Free

We had only twelve days before the supposed departure for Earth. I had sent all the others copies of the document from the One Tree, and we’d commiserated and talked about how, among other things, we might still get approval for our long journey, after talking to Man and Tauran on Earth.

While talking on the cube to them, I made a casual gesture, touching middle finger to cheekbone, that used to be phone code: “Disregard this; someone may be listening.” Most of them returned the gesture.

Not one word of the plot was communicated by voice or electronics. I wrote down brief and precise descriptions of each person’s role, the notes to be memorized and destroyed. Even Marygay and I never spoke of it, not even when we were tending the trotlines, alone out on the ice.

The seventeen of us saw a lot of each other, talking about Earth and passing notes about escape. The consensus seemed to be that it probably wouldn’t work, but we didn’t have time to come up with anything more refined.

I wished I could have told Sara. She was disconsolate at being denied a chance for Earth; a chance to leave Middle Finger just once in her life.

I tried not to smile too much. “Do something, even if it’s wrong,” my mother used to say. We were finally doing something.

Middle Finger didn’t have an army; just a lightly armed police force to keep order. There were very few weapons on the planet–nothing to go hunting for with anything more lethal than a hook and line.

But there was one weapon potentially more dangerous than all the small arms at Man’s disposal. In the Museum of History in Centrus, there was a fighting suit left over from the Forever War.

Even stripped of its nuclear and conventional explosives, even with the laser finger deactivated, it was still a formidable weapon because of its strength-amplification circuitry and armor. (We knew the circuitry was intact because Man occasionally dusted it off for construction and demolition jobs.) A man or woman inside it became like a demigod of myth–or, for my generation, a superhero of comics. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Kill a person with a single punch.

You could power up a cold suit from almost any source. It could suck the energy out of a floater and have enough juice for a little mayhem–or a couple of hours’ searching for a better source.

We couldn’t assume the suit was powered up, sitting there waiting to be taken–though Charlie argued that it probably was, for the same reason there was no military force in Centrus to keep us in line. If we fought Man and won, what would we accomplish, from their point of view? They saw themselves as mentors and partners, our conduit to true civilization. There was no need for Man to take precautions against a useless and futile action.

We were to learn otherwise.

Max Weston was the only person I knew who was physically large and strong enough that I had no doubt he could overpower the sheriff. We needed his weapons in order to attack the museum. We had to take them at the last minute, of course, just before we left for Centrus. We could lock him up in his own cell or possibly take him hostage. (I argued against killing him, or anyone, if we could help it. Max agreed too easily, I thought.)

Our timetable was set by Man. An express floater would arrive at noon on 10 Copernicus, and an hour later we would be in Centrus. We were to spend the afternoon in a last-minute briefing, then be prepped for suspended animation and shuttled up to the Time Warp as part of the baggage.

Max raised the possibility, which had occurred to me and probably others, that they had no intention of prepping us for SA. They would give us a shot not to suspend our animation, but to end it. Send the Time Warp off and have it come back without us, with some sad story–we all died of a rare Earth disease, because of lack of immunity–and MF would somehow have to get along without seventeen troublemakers.

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