The Great Symmetry Read Online Free

blue of the most hospitable worlds. Low gravity. Sparsely inhabited, with a population of about fifty million people. Evan needed no shipboard display to know the details of the planet.
    Kelter was Evan’s home.
    In a piece of great luck, they were already heading mostly in the direction of the planet when they had come out of the point of emergence. Their intrinsic velocity, a result not only of their vector as they headed into the glome, but also of the relative speeds of the two star systems, had smiled on them.
    Nonetheless, time was likely running out.
    Could missiles go through a glome? The answer came unbidden. Of course they could.
    The runabout had no weapons, and couldn’t exactly turn on a dime. If missiles arrived on his tail, there would be nothing he could do.
    “Ship,” Evan asked. “Based on our last information, how soon could a missile come through the glome from Aurora?”
    “Twelve minutes and twenty seconds,” the ship told him.
    “And then how long until impact, if it pursued us at maximum acceleration?”
    “Seven minutes and four seconds after emergence.” Almost twenty minutes all together.
    There were two big branches of possibility. If no missiles came through the glome, then there was no problem, at least in the short term. He would head to Kelter Four and figure it out somehow. If the missiles arrived, he had a big problem. So, he needed to concentrate on that scenario.
    Evan pondered the largest branches of possibility, then the smaller branches, the twigs, and finally the leaves. Not being killed, those were preferred leaves.
    Then he worked backward, crossing out certain leaves, then certain twigs, and finally entire branches.
    If the missiles came, there was no rational solution. All that remained was an irrational one.
    Evan decided not to tell the runabout of his plan. It was on a need to know basis, and the runabout didn’t need to know. The ship also had a black box , which recorded all of its actions and communications.
    Should he feel bad about deceiving a computer?
    “Ship, if any missiles arrive through the glome, I plan to climb to the sled. I believe the missiles will pursue and attempt to destroy us, so I’ll need an escape vessel.”
    The sled was designed to assist in scanning the surface of asteroids for faint signatures of the Versari. Of necessity, its low powered engine was shielded as completely as possible so it could operate without interfering with the delicate scanning operation.
    The sled was clamped to the runabout, at a point forward near the nose.
    “So here’s what I want you to do,” he told the ship. “At every moment starting as soon as possible, the ship must be at a location and velocity to go into orbit of Kelter or its moon Foray assuming no further acceleration. On my instruction, you will change course sunward and accelerate as fast as you can. Then do any maneuver you possibly can to avoid the missiles.”
    “Instructions received and accepted,” the ship replied.
    Evan reached for his EVA suit and pulled it on except for the helmet, then stood ready at the airlock. There was nothing to do except wait.
    He had been condemned to death by one of the most powerful people in all of space. Was it just bluster? A threat blurted out in the extremity of the moment?
    Over the past two years, Arn Lobeck had come to the station on Aurora about a dozen times, usually staying for a day or two. Each time Lobeck had brought his full attention, asking detailed questions, and challenging assumptions the research team had made. As the principal investigator on the project, Evan had been on the receiving end of the most focused part of the grilling.
    Evan could never tell whether he looked forward to the next review or whether he dreaded it. The questions were excellent, and pushed him to think. But there was no avoiding the sense of being examined by someone of great power, who, for whatever reason, was troubling himself to stay informed on an obscure