Vanessa and her Uncle Bo had a corner block bench to themselves after a practice run in the mek suits. The action was seamless now for the entire team, even though they were only planning to launch three. She was doing some post-stretching in her suit. Uncle Bo was still wearing his knee brace. “You’re amazing at this. Too bad it won’t go towards your sporting record in track.”

“No… but it might go on some other record that’ll count for me or against me,” Vanessa joked, grinning lopsidedly.

“Hey, it works for you in our books. The rest of the world will know someday.”

“Or they won’t know, but they’ll still be safer.”

“Damn, kid.” Uncle Bo laughed helplessly.

Bassel, the puzzle engineer kid, drifted over to the two. He’d been watching the practice from the bridges. “There’s going to be another ice cream social in Oven Cleaner’s living room.”

“Oh, I would love that,” said Uncle Bo.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Vanessa seconded. They joined the loose straggle of kids and guardians leaving the locker room chamber.

The Human adults had been given one of the soft meeting rooms to discuss their part of strategy. They had strong feelings about their young activists going into a threatening situation, and they decided to express their desire to protect by brainstorming additional sources of social support. It may be that a mass of citizens with the right amount of political protection could create targeting hesitation. Somehow, if there were enough willing. Vedani strategists accepted their initiative, remaining open to request, providing space, and being communicative with relevancies.

It was a large room with a plush floor, suited to the Vedani manner of collaboration where they could sit or lay down while working together in the aetherscape. The Human adults here also gained the habit of laying down to think.

Mirya Ayo was the one who had been collecting ideas on how best to talk to other humans about their motivations and situation. How to explain that children in giant mek suits might need an additional level of citizen protection from Pan-Galactic forces? What would people want to know and need to know? Many felt certain that people would be ready to join them. “What I have here isn’t a dialogue script,” she said, standing to address the room, “but a collection of things you’ve all said that you’d like to say to people. Oibhn was telling me we may have a chance to communicate with some who are more motivated, sympathetic, curious, and understanding, and also uneasy with the current state of government control. People who may be willing to take a risk.”

One of them accepted a chip from her, which contained a key code that would give them access to this document at an aetherscape terminal. “We don’t yet know who we’ll be talking to, though.”

“No,” replied Mirya, “but they might be better than who we would choose.”

“So we might really be able to have a volunteer buffer. How desperate is Vario? Is he ready to shed civilian blood to keep covering his ass?”

“He already nearly did, remember. Ours and our kids’. They could have had the counteragent out right away, but they delayed precious days until they had a cover story, which Sturlusson generously offered.”

“Well Sturlusson actually did have a backup ampoule stashed in his arm. And they could have just taken it out, but either Vario thought bloody vengeance was a good look – and at the time, I might have agreed – or, he was that unhinged under pressure. So, that’s who we’re dealing with.”

“The way I’ve heard it explained by Hirylienites, in this edition of the Affliction, the terminal point was changed into a turnaround point, which we registered as a vision which could bring people to face the truth of what happened on Hirylien. It was never going to kill us in the first place, it was supposed to communicate the survivors’ viewpoint and make the dynasty cough up the counteragent and confess that they had it and chose to let a planet die. But they didn’t and still haven’t given up their dirty secret, so here we are, ready to right some of their wrongs. Led here by our kids.” This was from Daniel, Chrysanthe’s father.

“But just in case, Sturlusson had a real failsafe. And lost his arm delivering it.”

“He’s not guiltless, his own people admit.”

“No.”

“But our kids are.”

“Mostly,” Mirya said with a small smile, “Like you said, they got us here. So figure out what you want to say to someone halfway ready, and let’s hope some people come through.”

This time, Navann decided to apply fractal recursivity, by recombining the borders of the recombined border pictures. Border edges appeared to be there, in the grain of the image repeat reshufflings. She used her computer’s scope to peer at them closely with magnification. She printed up some copies of Isten’s interpretations and clipped off the borders where she saw their clipping lines in the images. Gazing between the magnified images and her new border strips, she was jogging something in her mind, a resemblance or connection that must be in there somewhere.

This was all in the spirit of idleness, a comfortable retired woman’s puzzle obsession. Navann did something with them that she did as a child, folding them around each other. That was a form of recombination. There was a little bit of random matching. She waved the accordioned strips around in the air a little, and went to sleep with them in a gathered pile on her bedside table.

There were some ways to align sections of these secondarily-nested borders that created regular polygons, matching sides and matching angles: hexagons, squares, triangles. She noticed this over her warm mug of the morning. She tried scope-scanning sections she matched up with a polygon in the center. Nope. She tried the areas made up by the corners between matching polygons. Nope. This didn’t exactly match any systems she knew, but there were always systems she didn’t know about, as a rule. Navann had a quixotic insight that would involve jamming on some software. She prepared a large pot of soup, and surrounded her desk with comforts.