The search for Kalid/8

Elevators
It was the end of another long day for Set. For a moment he reflected on the fact that it was close to the end of his fifteenth year of working towards the goal of gaining financial support from the Sakkaran government for the construction of space elevators. Back in 94, he had certainly never imagined that there would be so much resistance to development of such a transportation option that was now made possible by what Set viewed as a long-awaited and welcome technical breakthrough.

Of course, most people had long ago given up on the possibility of ever building useful space elevators on worlds as large as Sakkara. In the "golden age of space elevators", two centuries before Set was born, conventional materials had been found that allowed space elevators to be practical on planets with gravitation fields up to about 0.4g, but most chemists had believed then that the ultimate strength of chemical bonds had been reached and that it would never be possible to use space elevators on worlds with higher gravity.

Then, unexpectedly, materials science was revolutionized by the discovery of high specific strength polymers of tessellanium quarpounds. At that time, Set was recruited into a tessellanium research and development project funded by the Futurist Party. The suitability of tessellanium for space elevator construction was quickly proven, but then the political and economic hurdles could not be overcome.

The economics of transportation weighed heavy on Set and the entire Futurist Party. Thousands of antimatter-powered spaceships carried cargo and passengers to and from the surface of worlds like Sakkara on a daily basis. The commercial spaceship fleets had been incrementally built up over many decades and most worlds like Sakkara viewed the large initial investment in space elevators as an unnecessary extra cost for interplanetary transportation. However, transportation specialists like Set were well aware of the indirect costs of flying spaceships through planetary atmospheres. Within 10 years, investment in a space elevator on a world like Sakkara would pay back its initial investment. Still, a political will had to be found in order to mobilize the planetary government and channel the funds initially needed to build space elevators.

At least, that was still the dream, even thought the Futurist Party was funding the first two space elevators of Sakkara...and now they were nearly completed and functional. However, the Futurist Party had taken on too much debt and Set only viewed these first two elevators as proofs of concept. To handle all the passenger and cargo traffic of Sakkara about 50 space elevators would be needed. Government funding for elevator construction would greatly speed progress....working on its own, it might take a century for the Futurist Party to fund 50 elevators. So Set worked on, searching for ways to build public and government support for government funding for future construction of more elevators. But enough work for today...

Set turned his thoughts to the coming weekend that he would spend with Kat. During the construction of the elevators they had been meeting one weekend a month, alternating between Sakkara and where Kat worked, one of the two orbital stations for the elevators. There was a chance that Kat might come down to Sakkara this weekend using the down elevator, which was starting test runs.

Set tried to call his girlfriend, Katherine, to find out if he should meet her for the weekend at the spaceport or at the new down-planet elevator terminal. He had tried to reach her earlier in the day, but he had only been able to leave her a message. Set knew that she was not allowed to send or receive personal calls while working on the elevator, but surely she would be back to her office by now. Set wondered again if he should mention the troubling dream he'd had about her. He did not want to upset her, but he felt that the dream was important, and, after all, they frequently discussed their dreams since they both often had lucid dreams. Occasionally Set had a dream that seemed to be about the future and, since when he was quite young and one of his dreams of the future came true, he always paid special attention to any dream that had the "feel" of being about a future event. Set's dreams had always come true, or at least he thought so. However, he knew that there was a danger of only counting one's successes in such things, of not remembering all the failures and obviously wrong and silly predictions...not even counting them as predictions... but his dream had been so real....

Set had trained both his mind and his body according to the practices of the Order that had taken him in as an orphan. He had been encouraged to make the most of his life and had excelled in the technical field of materials research. Set was devoted to the idea that new discoveries should be exploited for the betterment of all people. Towards those altruistic ends, he did not care by which means he was able to get more power... he would use his skills and position just to protect and help his people, he thought. Of course, he did not like power just for the sake of it, he wanted to be powerful for noble reasons... even his most selfish reasons, such as just to help his girlfriend towards their shared goal of building The Elevators, were reasons that he felt were clearly honorable. He had a different view on many things than most people of his age, for example, he considered some things were beyond good and evil. Protecting beloved people, in his case, Katherine, was just a natural aspect of reality, as natural as gravity. It was disturbing to have a dream that seemed to go beyond all of his careful training and efforts to gain leverage and control in life...

"His people"...Set reflected on the fact that he now thought in such terms. How had it come to this? In his youth, he had always thought in terms of making contributions to all of society, but know he could not deny that he identified with the Futurist Party and its goals. Other segments of society worked in opposition to the Futurist Party and Set could not look kindly on them. And, yes, he placed Kat in a special category. No doubt his loneliness as an orphan made him particularly sensitive to the wondrous experience of finding a soul mate. Increasingly his life had come to be defined by efforts to work as a partner with Kat. They discussed all aspects of their lives; each plan, goal, challenge and success. And Set dreamed about Kat.

Well, maybe this latest dream and his worries about Kat's safety were just in his mind, only. Really, it had to be nothing more than a night terror... yes, it was only that, and not some real danger near to her. It would be unfair to trouble Kat with such silliness when she needed her full concentration on her work. The problem with modern life and the Empire was distance. Under optimal conditions, hyperspace communications could instantly link two people even on planets in distant star systems, but in other situations people were just too far apart. People had evolved under conditions where their loved ones were within easy reach, but now Kat was in orbit and it was not a matter of walking across town to see her. There were unavoidable physical limits; for example, spaceships jumping through hyperspace could not get too near to a star. The Swanzig radius, it was called. So, to get to an inhabited planet at another star system, interstellar travel always took some time. There was no way to speed that up. Antimatter engines had to be used to move a spaceship beyond the Swanzig radius and that just conventional movement through space was never very fast. Similarly, the space stations at the ends of the space elevators in orbit were now almost as inaccessible as the Swanzig radius of Memphis. Once the elevators were in full use that would change, but now there were no regular spaceship flights to the stations and the cable cars were just starting to be tested. So, now, when he felt a need to be close Katherine, or at least speak with her, it was painful to be out of touch. Why now? Why a dream suggesting that Kat was in danger? Set tried to keep from imagining that his dream and apprehensions were actually related to the reason why he could not communicate with her. He cursed the world and himself... why could he not contact her?

Katherine
Katherine had been feeling uneasy during the entire day. She had woken up thinking about Set... feeling that she would not see him as planned. And that was absurd since they had been making definite plans to have their monthly tryst on the coming weekend. It only remained to be determined if she would be able to take her first ride down to the surface of Sakkara by elevator. Anyhow, she had no confidence in her intuition, and this premonition was certainly wrong...if the elevator was not ready to be used today then she would just take a supply transport down planet.

Before meeting Set and getting to know his quirks she had never even thought in terms of intuition as something to pay attention to. She had grown up in a family with a proud history of producing engineers who trusted facts, not feelings. At first she had been amused by Set's interest in dreams as a possible a window on the future. She had long enjoyed the experience of vivid and lucid dreams, but she thought of those experiences as recreation, just a way to let her imagination play and run wild. However, she recognized the fact that her mind was not "trained" in the way Set's had been, although she was still puzzled about the exact nature of the education he had received as an orphan. If he believed in dream visions of the future, who was she to contradict him? She was comfortable imagining that all her dream experiences were just in her own mind, but nobody knew for certain if special mental powers like precognition really existed. Anyway, even if it was unusual for a man of science such as Set (also an engineer) to believe in such things, maybe he was right. Who could really know what goes on in the mind of another person? Besides, sometimes she had the sensation that Set knew exactly what she was thinking about....how weird was that? The extent to which Set knew her thoughts was spooky and went beyond what she could honestly accept as being due them being in a close and loving relationship.

But on this day, when she needed full attention on her work and her team's plan to make an elevator descent to planet, she could not calm down and put her worries out of mind. She found herself stepping out of the shower with no memory of having washed...all she was doing was worrying about seeing Set. All that week, until today, she had been feeling a sense of impending triumph as everything had fallen into place in preparation for the planned elevator test, but now her thoughts of meeting Set brought only a sense of looming danger. How could that be? It was illogical.

Or maybe not. Set was more than just an ordinary engineer, he was also a politician, after all, having risen to a leadership role within the Futurist Party. And politicians could always be the target for attacks. Moreover, she had seen that he was changing. That change was not a matter of Set turning to wrong deeds, it was just a feeling she had that he was increasingly hungry for power or progress towards his goals....he was pushing harder and harder to get government funding for space elevators. Set was always talking about the Futurist Party and fretting about its seemingly endless struggle against the ruling party. She could accept that he felt a responsibility to achieve success and obtain financial support for the goals of the Futurists and she had always known he was a workaholic, but she did not imagine that his drive and ambition had anything to do with him having a love for power just for its own sake. When they discussed their goals for the future he always explained that everything he did was for others. Even given his long devotion to the Party, he increasingly admitted to being tempted to push for budget increases and full funding for the elevators project, as he said, in order to support and protect her while she worked on that ambitious construction project...sometimes dangerous work that had her hanging in space above the planet coaxing untested equipment to life. For Kat, the depth of his concern for her safety and his devotion to the success of her work was was a thrilling part of the experience of his love. His dealings with her were always tender... but Set's single-minded drive for developing and applying space elevator technology seemed....dangerous. Was that what was tickling her unconscious and causing her to worry? Might Set push too hard and get himself in trouble? The more Set pushed the more it became clear that there were powerful forces pushing back.

It was time to go to work. She made a decided effort to try to think about what she needed to accomplish that day while working on the elevator car that was being prepared for testing, and those thoughts, or anything other than her anxiety about Set, had the potential to occupy her mind with more pleasantly than all this worrying. But before going out, she could not avoid what was really on her mind, the idea of calling Set. She looked at her phone and wondered if it was damaged. It was very unusual. The phone indicated that her call to Set could not be made. Sometimes calls from space were disrupted, particularly if sun spot activity on Memphis was firing large amounts of radiation at Sakkara.

She quickly checked the space weather report and saw that solar radiation levels were low. There was no time to try to use chat or e-mail that were transmitted by a different communications system than phone calls. Anyhow, she was late for work so she better just go and stop worrying about Set and wondering why communications were disrupted. She set down her personal phone and attached the comunit she used for her work to her forearm. There were rumors that some workers on the space elevators evaded the ban on use of personal phones during work hours by having them implanted into their bodies, but she did not use those new machines that could be plugged directly into people's heads. She liked natural modes of communication and felt that kind of direct brain-to-machine linking was unnatural. She was devoted to advanced technology, but when it came to her body and her brain she tried to live in a natural way. She just had to live with the fact that she was always going to be out of contact with Set while she was up here in orbit and working at her job to build space elevators. She accepted that it made sense not to let workers be distracted by personal matters when so much expensive equipment and so many lives were at stake.

Katherine and all the workers who were building the down elevator space terminal lived in the rotating ring portion of the space station in order to have some simulated gravity. There was a fleet of automated jet cars that shuttled people between the habitation ring and the main part of the station that was attached to the elevator cable. Kat got into one of the shuttles and barely noticed the car's artificial intelligence system chatting and describing what it was doing while it flew her to work. For a moment she had a great view of the the Space Elevator that her team was working to bring online. It was a miracle of science... well, the principles behind it were quite simple and the basic technology had been in use for centuries....but on a human scale it was a wonder to see and work on a structure that contained thousands of kilometers of cable.

When the elevator cable moved out of her view behind the body of the space station she shifted her gaze to the planet. That was really the greater wonder, the life-sustaining world, Sakkara. A constant and expensive process of stratospheric reconditioning was needed to protect the planet from the chemical changes induced by all the spaceships that daily went to and from the surface carrying passengers and cargo. Everyone took for granted that the antimatter engines of spaceships would heavily damage the environment and that was assumed to be the unavoidable price of transporting people and cargo into space. The entire population of the planet had to learn that it was "greener" and safer for the atmosphere to use space elevators.

The jet car docked to the station and soon she was inside and being greeted by a robot assistant carrying her tools and pressure suit. The robot automatically logged her into the integrated tracking and logistics system that coordinated the work site. She entered the Elevator's equivalent of an office building. This part of the space station would eventually be used to track all traffic passing through the station. Now it was where the offices were for the work crews that were bringing the elevator to life. She went to her office and turned on the computer that she wore on her arm. The video communications channels that normally provided links to her team members were not working. Weird. She checked her e-mail and again, nothing. The e-mail server seemed to be offline. What was going on? She opened a search channel to Globalnet and got a "no access" error. Maybe her computer was damaged in some way or maybe the whole space station was having network problems. She went directly to the office of the computer and communications support specialist.

"Carl, what's happening? I have not been able to..." Katherine shouted.

"...access Globalnet? Yes, it is not working." Carl answered.

"Right! And may I know...why is that?"

"You won't believe it but I have no clue!"

"What? Is that what you get payed for?"

"Well, yes. And to play online kakisi. No, really, I have not been able to find out why. It seems every form of communication is not working. Not even phones, be it to Sakkara or out of system via hyperspace. Some paranoid people have even thinking about the possibility that this is an infosystem attack. Not even news services using holography or old TV are reaching us From Sakkara, and those broadcasts do not depend on satellite relay! People are panicked! I am surprised nobody told you when you told you when you got to work."

"Well, when I am on my way to work I try to avoid people. I hate gossiping. But I'm late today and it looks like everyone on my team is already down at the work site. So, we are under some kind of data disruption attack?" Even while asking the question Katherine could not really believe that it would be possible. She knew something of the history of such things, but infosystem attacks were something from the past, from before the establishment of the Empire. Well, out on the fringes of the Empire pirates still used such methods, but here, in the heart of the Empire?

Carl replied, "I don't think so. Look here." He pointed to a video window on his data display. "We have the emergency direct fiber line that is embedded in the elevator cable itself...it hooks us right into the down elevator terminal on planet. That is still working. I've been in contact with the ground crew and Pablo is trying to trace the source of our communications problems-"

Katherine turned and looked at Carl's data display, which was the entire wall behind her. She noticed that there were half a dozen views of what she recognized as the elevator terminus some 40,000 kilometers below. At that moment they heard a loud noise that made them panic. Katherine saw the image of Pablo on the display and the image seemed to shake and wiggle. For an instant there was a look of fear on his face, then all the video feeds from Sakkara went blank. Katherine was stunned and continued to look at the display. Would the images from below return? Although Carl had been methodically trouble shooting the space station's communications problem and had seemed calm just moments before, Katherine vaguely realized through her shock and dismay that he was now shouting. Some words ran through her mind: "Calm down, remember we are not under attack..." but for some reason her lips just started to tremble. Fear had taken hold of her mind and no words could be spoken.

Soft targets
--under construction... I propose to change the part on Sakkara to be from the perspective of Pablo and then shift back to Katherine in orbit--

"Calm down, remember we are not under attack..." she said. Carl had no time for jokes, he was already at an elevator, in order to flee the building. It all seemed like an earthquake. Katherine stopped joking and now she was really frightened. Would that have something to do with her depression that very morning?

Anyway, they needed to act. The elevators were damaged; Carl commented that maybe it was intentional attacks after all. First, the communication problems and now this. They used emergency exits. Katherine was now desperate; she felt something wrong was happening then. Maybe it was true she would not see Set again. Everyone was in panic; all people were running at random. The whole building was in fires in some floors. It was hard for Katherine to try to avoid fires by jumping and crouching, nothing had prepared her for that. When they had traveled ten stories, something fell and hit Carl on the floor. Katherine looked back and approached his body. He was dead! She shouted and could not move. but the people who were trying to get out of the building pushed her towards the stairs. So, she had to keep running while crying. Katherine noticed that people were acting strange... those people whom she considered friends now seemed not to recognize her. Everyone did not care about others, it seemed, she was pushed and was even hit by people who were trying to escape. They were in danger and it seems that they had completely forgotten altruism. She got to the second floor, she slipped on the floor and a mob passed over her, hurting her badly. She woke up and try to hit a man who had hit her and the man punched her... it was completely nonsense. And there was no time for anything... some people even jumped from a window, those ones on the floors above 200. They knew they had no chance and it seemed that they preferred to die against the floor than to die of burning. Katherine would fight against all odds, her life was the most valuable thing she had.

They finally got out of the building and kept on running. Katherine looked back, towards the Space Elevators. She could not believe her eyes, they were being demolished! Maybe using bombs as in the office building... So, it was really an attack. Now there was nothing else to do but to flee... maybe even flee the planet. But Katherine remembered that no electronic equipment was working, after the bombing. So, how to run out of that planet? Every ship used electronic equipment for the AIs. Katherine went running until another building collapsed. Unfortunately, it was very close to her.

At that exact moment, Set felt a strong pain, he even thought he was to faint. He could see everything her girlfriend had saw... the bombing, the collapse of the Elevators and her last thought, seconds before dying: she thought about Set and maybe it opened the telepathic communication. Set shouted as no human had shouted before, he thought. He had lost his beloved girl, forever. Now, whoever it was guilty would have to stand the consequences. Set decided and promised that he would wipe the entire family of the person who was the cause of the attack. He thought he would lose his mind... but what if it was not real, maybe he only felt it and it could not be telepathy. He turned on his computer and saw he was right; there were news from the attack. Some journalists had come near the planet when they had noticed communications had failed. They even filmed some of the Elevators falling. So, everything was true and Katherine was dead.

Survivors?
It had been weeks of living hidden, as his father had taught him. Kaleb, Kalid's son, was at Flammis, near the base of the Haldus Order, hidden from Set. Set had thought he had killed everyone but Kaleb could escape due to an underground refuge his father had built. Kaleb remembered that horrid day as if it were the day before...

Kaleb woke up early that morning, the day Set attacked Flammis. His father had had to leave the planet and he left Kaleb in charge of the Haldus Order while he was away. Although Kaleb was only in the Third Circle, his being near his father granted him a high rank in the Order. According to Kalid, his son's powers were sometimes even stronger than his. But Kaleb was not so sure... That day he felt emotionally depressed. Depression always means having no reason at all to be sad. What would that mean? Kaleb went directly towards the Temple. He greeted the guards and entered. Haldus Order was old fashioned in some aspects. They did not use any robots at all, only the spaceship AIs. Kalid started to suspect robots after some of them had been hacked and reprogrammed as spies. Moreover, Kalid knew that the Empire's robot spies were far more numerous than human spies. Anyway, people would trust a robot more than a human and besides, robots could hide their emotions more easily. If they could have emotions... Kalid did not think they had.

Kaleb was thinking about how robots could one day control the Galaxy, if artificial intelligence improved some day. A dramatic change and they would enslave humanity because they outranked in numbers to human populations in most planets. Anyway, Kaleb thought that treachery could be in humans too, there were many spies. He remembered how he had to personally execute some spies he found at the Order. It was brutal to do that, but those were the rules at Flammis planet. That planet was so important for being the hidden center of the Haldus Order, that they could not risk by letting spies live. Kaleb was Kalid's right hand, not only because his advanced precognition abilities but also due to the fact that he was an expert in Bushitsu, the art of hiding. It was a secret martial art that was only taught to some selected people inside the Order, people like Kalid or Kaleb. There were very few people trained in that strange art, but they were deadly.

Kaleb started inspecting the security cameras inside the Temple. Although there were guards for that purpose, he liked to supervise them directly, sometimes. A friend of him, another Bushitsu expert, entered the cameras room. They greeted and started inspecting every camera. They also watched the global radars. It was much time since Kaleb did not do that. He felt the need to do that that very day. And he was right! There were some strange spaceships approaching the planet. It was unbelievable! Nobody knew about that planet, nobody outside the Order... Very few people inside it, actually. That woman called Sybil and Kaleb knew that 2 counsellors would get there. But he had been instructed to wait for only one spaceship and that ship would have to possess the Invocator device. So, it meant trouble.

"Morgan. We have company. Prepare to activate all invocators."

"All of them? I do not know if we have the energy to do that."

"Find out and do it now. We have no time and it seems that those spaceships are hostile... they do not have the identification beacon."

"Right."

They tried to activate the whole network of hiding nests in the whole planet. But it was too late. The spaceships started the attack. The problem was that the spaceships blew the energy generator for the hiding spots.

"We are lost!" Morgan shouted. "See, they blew our generator... and we don't have any other, remember the backup generator is still damaged."

"Oh, no. It makes me think that it was the same people who damaged our past generator. Maybe using spies."

"Yes."

Kaleb knew they had no time. He instructed Morgan to control everything from there and activate the planet's alarm. Kaleb had to save his family first. His duties had made him forget what was more important for him and his father. His brother and sister were in danger. Kalid's wife had already died years ago. So, they were a family of four now. Kaleb tried to send a message through hyperspace to Kalid but he could not. It seemed communications equipment had also been damaged. He looked at the damaged places and he was right. Whoever it was who was attacking them, he knew all important places at Flammis. It had been an inside job. Someone from Flammis had betrayed them, it was sure.

Kaleb got out from the main building by using the underground tunnel. He could not communicate with his family either so he took his flying motorcycle and went directly home. There was no other way to talk to his family except... by using telepathy. He put the motorcycle in automatic mode and went directly into conscious REM state. He needed to talk to his brother and sister fast. He sent a message but, strangely, he did not feel his brother or sister's presence. It could only mean one thing. They could be unconscious, kidnapped and shielded against telepathy or worse; they could be dead!

Kaleb took manual control of the motorcycle and pushed the throttle to maximum. He finally got home and went directly to the elevator that would take him home. The elevator was destroyed. It seemed that they had already bombed his home! He tried to find a way out but it was pointless. Everything was covered by rubble. He went to his motorcycle again to try to contact the main room. But he remembered that communications were damaged, so he could not know if his own home had been destroyed completely. He tracked back to another tunnel and could finally get to the surface. He approached what used to be his home and found the horrible truth... it was completely destroyed. He tried to contact his sister with his mind... he finally could do it. She was hurt... but alive. He found her near a tree at the house surroundings. He could talk to her and noticed that her wound was not lethal.

"Kaleb. He is dead. Logan is dead!"

"No!"

He felt his mind was dizzy now. He had lost his brother... and he was guilty for having forgotten to save his family. His training inside the Order had made him think on behalf of the Order and the planet first. It was a mistake and it seemed he could not forget himself.

"It is all my fault..." Kaleb said, crying like a child.

"No way. Don't ever say that again. You saved me. The attack was so fast that you could have never come here in time. Communications were destroyed. Our home was the first target of the attack, I guess. As soon as I watched the spaceships coming, they bombed us."

"Well, it could be. Whoever it was who made this, he will pay with his blood and the blood of his entire family! I promise."

"Yes. Although the Order forbids it, I am with you. We must take revenge."

After that moment, neither Kaleb nor Megan could be the same persons. Kaleb promised he would take revenge again and they both went towards another refuge. They had to abandon everything... the most probable thing was that the spaceships would land soon, when they considered they had killed everyone in the planet. Kaleb felt it would be very soon so they went towards the motorcycle again and hid, waiting for an opportunity to hit back.