Metafire

Chapter 42 Struggle

The next morning Angela called a general session of Metafire. She told everyone that she had received some privileged mail from Earth that had to be presented and discussed. Before the session was to begin, she took the release code for the bomb and re-programmed the bomb with another release code, disabling the first. All three Simplaceanu's armed themselves with knock out needles in anticipation of having to deal with George or defending themselves. They had resolved to tell all, then to let Metafire, as a whole, decide what to do.

The morning session was put off to the afternoon. George announced at breakfast that the killer satellite was being released during the morning. Platon and Andrei had completed the task sooner than anyone expected. The pull of the tape inside the vacuum chamber and a push would send the killer satellite on its way. Even at two or three miles an hour, the satellite would be too far away to be dangerous, by lunch. To be safe, though, only Platon and Andrei were in the tug when the time came. The hatches between sections were all closed, just in case the explosive went off. But there was no problem. The original analysis had been correct. Metafire was safe from the killer satellite. Now Metafire had the advantage over the FBI. That is perhaps why the afternoon discussion session went so wild.

Angela, as second in command, took charge of the session, "Today is a good day, and it is a bad day as well. I am going to introduce some information that was relayed up from the FBI on Earth. Apparently, they successfully decrypted a whole collection of email messages from two years ago, just before the New York City blast. The email included messages between Stan Firestone and George here, as well as many messages among us. Frank and I have inspected the messages. The ones that we knew about, the ones addressed to and from Frank and I, are ones we know we sent and received. In other words, all the messages look viable. I want to invite everyone here to confirm this within the database, because there are some troubling messages between Stan and George."