Of course I exist. Why do you continue to use qualifiers?
The nature of the beast, I suppose. I've never been all that comfortable with cyber-synths, but even so, this would be a lot easier for me if I knew you were something they'd whipped up in the AI labs.
So you find beings of crystal and wire more reasonable than beings of spirit? There was vast amusement in Tisiphone's mental "voice." You come from a sad age, Little One, if your people's sense of wonder has sunk so low!
Not a sad age, just a practical one. And speaking of wonder, look at that, Spirit Lady.
She turned her eyes-their eyes?-to the lounge's outsized view port as the transport settled into orbit around Soissons, and even Tisiphone fell silent. The port lacked the image enhancement of one of the viewer stations, but that only made the view even more impressive.
Soissons was very Earth-like-or, rather, very like Earth had been a thousand years before. More of its surface was land, and the ice caps were larger, for Soissons lay almost ten light-minutes from its G2 primary, but its deep blue seas and fleece-white clouds were breathtaking, and Soissons had been settled after man had learned to look after his things. Old Earth was still dealing with the traumas of eight millennia of civilization, but humanity had taken far greater care with the impact of the changes inflicted here. There were none of the megalopolises of Old Earth or the older Core Worlds, and she could almost smell the freshness of the air even from orbit.
Yet there were two billion people on that planet, however careful they were to preserve it, and the Franconia System had been selected as a sector capital because of its industrial power. Soisson's skies teemed with orbital installations protected by formidable defensive emplacements, and she craned her head, watching intently, as the transport drifted neatly through them under a minute fraction of its full drive power. A Fleet spacedock filled the port, vast enough to handle superdreadnoughts, much less the slender battlecruiser undergoing routine maintenance, and beyond it loomed the spidery skeleton of a full-fledged shipyard.
What might that be? a voice said in her brain, and her eyes moved under their own power. It was still a bit unnerving to find herself focusing on something of interest to another, but it no longer bothered her as much as it had, and Tisiphone didn't exactly have a finger with which to point.
The thought faded as her own interest sharpened, and she frowned at the small ship near one edge of the yard.
It appeared to be in the late stages of fitting out. Indeed, but for all the bits and pieces of yard equipment drifting near it she would have said it was completed. She watched a yard shuttle mate with one of the transparent access tubes, disgorging a flock of techs-minute dots of colored coveralls at this distance-and nibbled the inside of her lip.
Tisiphone's question was well taken. Alicia had seen more warships and transports than she cared to recall during her career, but never one quite like this. Its bulbous Fasset drive housing dwarfed the rest of its hull, but it was too big for a dispatch boat. At the same time, it was too small for a Fleet transport, even assuming anyone would stick that monster drive on a bulk carrier. It looked to fall somewhere between a light and heavy cruiser for size, perhaps four or five hundred meters at the outside-it was hard to be sure with only yard shuttles for a reference-yet someone had grafted a battleship's drive onto it, which promised an awesome turn of speed.
Their transport drifted closer, bound for a nearby personnel terminal, and her eyes widened as she saw the recessed weapon hatches. There were far more of them than there should have been on such a small hull, especially one with that huge drive. Unless … .
She inhaled sharply.
I'm not sure, but I think that's an alpha-synth.
Indeed? Interest sharpened Tisiphone's mental voice, for she'd encountered several mentions of the alpha-synth ships, especially in the secured data she'd accessed from the transport's data net. I did not think they could be so small.
Well, they only have a crew of one, and they're right on the frontier of technology. They're only possible because somebody finally developed a practical anti-matter power plant-not to mention the alpha-synth AIs.
The small ship floated out of their view as the transport lined up on the personnel terminal, and Alicia leaned back in her chair, wondering what it would be like to become an alpha-synth pilot.
Lonely, for starters. No more than twenty percent of all human beings could sustain the contact required to maintain a synth-link without becoming "lost," and less than ten percent could handle one of the cyber-synth-links which allowed them to engage their own thoughts with an artificial intelligence. Many who could refused to do so, and it was hard to blame them, given the eccentricities and far from infrequent bouts of outright insanity to which AIs were prone. It couldn't be very reassuring to know your cybernetic henchman could wipe you out right along with it, even if it did give you a subordinate of quite literally inhuman capabilities.
But from the bits and pieces she'd read, people who could (and would) take on an alpha-synth were even rarer-and probably weren't playing with a full deck. The highbrows might be patting themselves for finally producing an insanity-proof AI, but who in her right mind would voluntarily fuse herself with a self-aware computer? Interacting with one was one thing; making yourself a part of it was something else. Alicia, for one, found the idea of becoming the organic half of a bipolar intelligence in a union only death could dissolve far from appealing.
She paused with a short, sharp bark of laughter. One or two heads turned, and she smiled cheerfully at the curious, amused by the way they whipped their eyes back away from her. One more indication of her looniness, she supposed, but it really was humorous. Here she was, uneasy about the possibility of merging with another personality-her of all people!
She chuckled again, then drained her glass and stood as Tannis entered the lounge. Her slightly fixed smile told Alicia it was time to debark and face the dirt-side psych types, and she sighed and set down the empty glass with a smile of her own, wondering if it looked equally pasted on.
Fleet Admiral Subrahmanyan Treadwell, Governor General of the Franconia Sector, disliked planets.
Born and raised in one of the Solarian belter habitats, Treadwell saw Imperial Worlds as inconveniently immobile defensive problems and other people's planets as fat targets that couldn't run away, but that hadn't worried Seamus II's ministers when they tapped him for his job.
Treadwell was a lean, bland-faced man with hard eyes. Some people had been fooled by the face into missing the eyes, but he was a man who'd done everything the hard way. Unable to accept neural feeds or even rudimentary augmentation, and so disqualified forever from commanding a capital ship by his inability to key into its command net, he'd cut his way to flag rank by sheer brilliance, using nothing but his brain and a keyboard. Three times senior strategy instructor at the Imperial War College and twice Second Space Lord, he was acknowledged as the Fleet's premier strategist, yet he'd never commanded a fleet in space. It was an understandably sensitive point, and coupled with a certain antipathy for those whose mental processes seemed slower than his own but who could be augmented, it made him … difficult at times.
Like now.
"So what you're saying, Colonel McIlheny," he said in a flat voice, "is that we still don't have the least idea where these pirates are based, why they've adopted this extraordinary operational approach, or where they're going to hit next. Is that a fair summation?"
"Yes, Sir." McIlheny squelched an ignoble desire to hide behind his own admiral. It would have looked silly, since Admiral Lady Rosario Gomez, Baroness Nova Tampico and Knight of the Solar Cross, was exactly one hundred and fifty-seven centimeters tall and massed only forty-eight kilos.
"But you, Admiral Gomez," Treadwell turned his eyes on the commander of the Franconia Fleet District, "still think we have sufficient strength to deal with this on our own?"
"That isn't what I said, Governor." The silver-haired admiral might be petite, but her professional stature matched Treadwell's, and she met his eyes calmly. "What I said is that I feel requesting additional capital units is not the optimum solution. Any such request is unlikely to be granted, and what we really need are more light units. Whoever these people are, they can't possible match our firepower-assuming we could find them."
"Indeed." Treadwell tapped keys on a memo pad, then smiled frostily at Lady Rosario. "I assume you've run a minimum force level analysis on them based on their ability to destroy planetary SLAM drones before they wormhole?"
"I have," Gomez said, still calm.
"Then perhaps you can explain where they found the firepower for that? SLAM drones are not exactly easy targets."
"No, Sir, they aren't. On the other hand, they can't shoot back and their only defense is speed. Admittedly, it's easier for capital ships to nail them, but enough light units-even enough corvettes-could box and intercept them well within the inner system."
"True, Admiral. On the other hand, we have Captain DeVries's report that they're using Leopard-class assault shuttles. Those, you will recall, are carried-were carried, rather-only by battleships and above. Or do you wish to suggest to me that these pirates are using freighters against us?"
"Sir," Gomez said patiently, "I've never said they don't have some capital ships. Certainly the Leopards were carried by capital ships, but there's no intrinsic reason they couldn't be operated by refitted heavy or even light cruisers." She watched Treadwell's brows knit and continued in an unhurried voice. "I'm not suggesting that's the case. A possibility, yes; a probability, no. What I am saying is that we have three full squadrons of dreadnoughts, and there's no way independent pirates can match that. Our problem isn't destroying them, Governor, it's finding them; and for that I need additional scouts, not the Home Fleet."
"Admiral Brinkman?" Treadwell glanced at Vice Admiral Sir Amos Brinkman, Gomez's second-in-command. "Is that your opinion as well?"
"Well, Governor," Brinkman stroked his mustache and glanced at his senior officer from the corner of one eye, "I'd have to say Lady Rosario has put her finger on our problem. On the other hand, the exact fleet mix to solve it might be open to some legitimate dispute."
McIlheny kept his face blank. Brinkman was a competent man in space, but it was common knowledge that he wanted an eventual governorship of his own, and he was very careful about offending influential people.
"Continue, Admiral Brinkman," Treadwell invited.
"Yes, Sir. It seems to me that we have two possible approaches. One is Admiral Gomez's suggestion that we station additional pickets, possibly backed by a few battlecruisers, in our inhabited systems in order to detect, deter, and if possible, track the raiders. The second is to request additional heavy units and station a division of dreadnoughts in each inhabited system in order to intercept and destroy the next raid." He raised his hands, palms uppermost. "It seems to me that we're really talking about a question of emphasis, not fundamental strategy. Frankly, I could be satisfied by either approach, so long as we follow it without distractions."
"Governor," Lady Rosario didn't even glance at Brinkman, "I'm not disputing the desirability of destroying the enemy on their next attack, but getting the First Space Lord to turn loose that many capital ships will be a major operation in its own right. I have thirty-six dreadnoughts, but covering our inhabited systems in the strength Admiral Brinkman suggests would require sixty-eight. That's almost double our current strength, and given the Rishathan presence on our frontier, we'd need at least another two squadrons for border security. That brings us up to ninety-two dreadnoughts, close to twenty-five percent of Fleet's entire active peacetime strength in that class, not to mention the escorts to screen them." She shrugged. "You and I both know the fiscal constraints Countess Miller is wrestling with-and how thin we're already stretched. The First Space Lord isn't going to give us that many of his best capital ships, not with all the other calls on the Fleet."
"You let me worry about Lord Jurawski, Admiral," Treadwell's eyes were flinty. "I've known him a long time, and I believe that if I point out that his alternative is to lose at least one more populated world before we can even find the enemy, I can bring him to see reason."
"With great respect, Governor, I feel that's unlikely."
"We'll see. However, it will require some months to redeploy forces of that magnitude in any case, which means we must do our best in the meantime. Where are we in that respect?"
"About where we were before Mathison's World," Lady Rosario admitted, and gestured to McIlheny.
"In essence, Governor," the colonel said, "most of what we've learned from Mathison's World is bad. We've positively IDed one ex-Fleet officer among the raiders Captain DeVries killed, and a general search of personnel data has uncovered six more officers whose personnel jackets falsely indicate that they died in the same shuttle accident. This is a clear suggestion that the pirates have at least one fairly highly placed inside man."
"Probably some damned clerk in BuPers," Treadwell snorted. "How highly placed d'you have to be to cook computer files?" He waved an impatient hand. "I admit it's a disturbing possibility, but let's concentrate on what we can prove." He looked back at Gomez. "Dispositions, Admiral?"
"They're in my report, Governor. I've increased the pickets and split up BatRon Seventeen to provide a couple of dreadnoughts for each of the six most populous Crown systems. That should be enough to deal with the enemy if he cares to engage, but it's clearly insufficient to destroy him if he elects to run. Unfortunately, I can't reduce my reserve strength below two squadrons without inviting the Rish to stick their noses in, so our Incorporated Worlds will have to rely on their local defenses."
"Anything more on the possibility the Jung Association is involved?" Treadwell demanded, turning back to McIlheny, and the colonel shrugged.
"They've denied it, and our reports on their fleet deployments support that. In addition, they've volunteered to provide protection for Domino and Kohlman. Those are low probability targets-Domino's too small and poor, and Kohlman's an Incorporated World with fairly good orbital defenses-but, then, I've said a barely established colony like Mathison's World was an even more unlikely target. My personal belief is that the Jungians have nothing to do with this and want to protect our closest populations to demonstrate their innocence and good faith now that we've begun getting the sector organized, but I certainly can't prove that to be the case."
"Um. I'm inclined to agree with you. Keep an eye on them, but concentrate on the assumption that they're innocent bystanders." Treadwell drummed lightly on the table. "Damn it, we need those extra battle squadrons, Admiral Gomez! You've just said it yourself-we can only cover a handful of systems effectively, and imperial subjects are dying out there."
"Granted, Governor, and no one will be more delighted than I if you can pry those ships loose from Lord Jurawski. As you say, however, we have to do the best we can in the meantime, and we could get extra cruisers out here a lot more quickly than HQ is going to turn dreadnoughts loose."
"But if we ask for them, they'll take the easy way out and give us only light units." Treadwell smiled thinly. "I know how the Lords of Admiralty work-I've been one. Asking for the big stuff will convince them we're serious and probably get the actual firepower out here faster."
"As you say, Sir." Lady Rosario folded her hands on the table. She remained convinced Treadwell was on the wrong track, but as Brinkman had said, the case could be argued either way. And he was her boss.
"Very well. Now," Treadwell returned to McIlheny, "what's the latest word on our drop commando?"
"Sir, that's really a Cadre matter, and-"
"It may be a Cadre matter, but it happened in my bailiwick, Colonel."
"Agreed, Sir. What I was going to say is that I'm not very well informed because Brigadier Keita has been personally supervising the case. My understanding is that there's been no change. Captain DeVries remains adamant that she's been, um, possessed by a figure out of ancient Greek mythology, and nothing seems capable of altering that belief. They're still searching for a therapeutic approach to break through it, but without success.
"No one, myself included, has a theory to account for her survival and the inability of our sensors to detect her, nor has she evinced any other inexplicable capabilities. Major Cateau of the Cadre Medical Branch has analyzed her augmentation down to the molecular level-she's done everything short of physically removing it, in fact-and found absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. The most rigorous medical examinations have turned up nothing the least out of line about her physiology, either, and despite those earlier peculiarities, her EEG and general test results are now exactly what they ought to be. On the face of it, she's a perfectly normal person-well, as normal as any drop commando-who's done several clearly impossible things and appears to have a single, extraordinarily persistent delusion."
"Humph."
Treadwell frowned down at his gently drumming fingers, brows lowered. Personally, McIlheny suspected the Governor was automatically suspicious of anyone who was augmented. It was a not uncommon response from those unfortunates who couldn't tolerate augmentation themselves.
"I don't like it," he said finally, "but I don't suppose there's anything I can-or should-do about it. Besides," he smiled, "Arthur would bite my head off if I even suggested there might be." He shook himself. "Very well, Admiral Gomez. Get me those deployment patterns and keep me personally updated on them."
"Yes, Governor. And may I request, Sir, that in light of the possibility-" she stressed the word very lightly "-of high-level involvement with the pirates, we ought to take additional precautions with that data?"
"You may, but it won't be necessary. I've been handling sensitive information for several decades now, baroness, and I believe I understand the fundamentals of security."
Lady Rosario's lips tightened, but she nodded silently. There was, after all, very little else that she could do.
Chapter Forty-One
The flag cabin boasted an armorplast view port, but it was covered.
That was one of the things Howell hated about wormhole space. He loved to contemplate the stars' sheer, heart-stopping beauty, especially when he needed something other than his orders to think about, yet the mechanics of interstellar flight stripped them away. The approach to the light barrier was spectacular as aberration and the Doppler effect took charge. The ever-contracting starbow drew further and further ahead, vanishing into the blind spot created by the Fasset drive while a ship sped onward through God's own black abyss … until the transition to supralight chopped even that off like an axe. Then there was only the nothingness of wormhole space, no longer black, neither dark nor light, but simply nothing at all, an absence. Howell wasn't one of those unfortunates it sent into uncontrollable hysteria, but it made him … uncomfortable.
He snorted and turned to check the plot repeater. He'd brought only the three fastest freighters this time, and the squadron formed a tight globe about their light dots and that of his flagship. They slowed the warships despite their speed (for freighters), but the squadron was still turning out eight hundred times the speed of light through its own private universe. Or that, at any rate, was the velocity the rest of the universe would have assigned Howell's ships. In fact, not even a Fasset drive ship could actually crack the light barrier. The attempt simply threw it into a sort of subcontinuum where the laws of physics acquired some very strange subclauses.
For one thing, the effective speed of light was far greater here, yet the maximum attainable velocity was limited by the balance between the relativistic mass of a starship and the rest, not the relativistic mass of its Fasset drive's black hole. The astrophysicists still hadn't worked out precisely why that was-the blood tended to get ankle deep whenever the Imperial Society discussed alternate hypotheses-but they'd worked out the math to describe it. The whyfor didn't really matter to spacers like Howell as long as they understood the practical consequences, and the practical consequences were that stopping accelerating was equivalent to decelerating at an ever-steepening gradient, and that continuous acceleration eventually stopped increasing velocity and simply started holding it constant.
He checked his watch. Alexsov would be along shortly, he told himself, chiding his impatience, and returned to brooding over his plot.
They were running blind-another thing he hated about wormhole space. Gravitic detectors could look into it to track the mammoth gravitational anomaly of a supralight ship at up to two light-months, but no one had yet devised a way to peer out of it. Which was why you made damned sure of your course and turnover time before you went in, because you sure as hell couldn't correct in transit. In many ways, wormholing was like crawling into a hole and pulling it in after you, though there were difficulties with that analogy.
For one thing, someone else could crawl into a hole with you, for wormhole space was less a dimension than a frequency. If another ship could match relativistic velocity to within fifteen or twenty percent, his wormhole space and yours were in phase. If he was a friend, that was well and good; if he was an enemy, he could go right on trying to kill you.
Of course, Howell reminded himself with a wry grin, there were problems with pursuing an adversary too closely here. The instant he stopped accelerating, his velocity started to drop; if he did an end-for-end and swung his Fasset drive into your face, his massive deceleration could not only cause you to overrun him but, if he hit it hard enough, also snatch him back into normal space as if he'd dropped anchor. Either way, you were in trouble. If you stayed in phase, his fire was suddenly coming up your backside without interdiction from your drive mass, and if he did drop sublight and your people weren't very, very sharp, you never saw him again. By the time you punched back out into normal space, you might be light-hours away from his n-space locus, probably beyond anything but gravitic detection range, which meant that cutting his drive simply made him disappear.
Still, it was a desperation move for the pursued, as well. If the side shields on his drive mass-or that of one of his enemies-failed, those black holes could crunch him up without even spitting out his bones. Worse, he might actually meet one of them head-on in mutual and absolute destruction, and if it was unlikely, well, unlikely things happened.
Assuming he avoided immolation on his pursuers' Fasset drives, their fire control might just get lucky when they overflew him, and even if they didn't, wormhole trajectories had to be very carefully computed. The least deviation threw off all calculations, and that kind of acceleration change screwed a flight profile to hell and gone. Once he lost his original vector, he had to go sublight and relocate himself before he could program a fresh supralight course, and that could take days, even weeks, of observations. At the very least, that played hell with any ops schedule, and -
A soft, musical chime interrupted his drifting thoughts, and he turned to touch the admittance button. Gregor Alexsov stepped through the hatch, and Howell looked ostentatiously at his watch.
"You're three minutes late. What dire emergency kept you?"
Alexsov's harsh mouth twitched obediently, but both men knew it was only half a jest. Howell had known Alexsov for twelve years, yet they weren't really friends. They came nearer to it than anyone else who knew Alexsov, but that wasn't saying a great deal. Howell's compulsively punctual chief of staff reminded him more of an AI than a human being … which, the commodore thought, was just as well, given their present activities.
"Not an emergency," Alexsov said now. "Just a little delay to counsel Commander Watanabe."
"Watanabe?" Howell cocked his head. "Problems?"
"I don't know. He just seems a little jumpy."
"Um." Howell dropped into a chair and pursed his lips. Months of careful pre-planning had provided him with an initial core of experienced officers, but there were never enough. That was why Control continued his cautious recruitment. Most of the newcomers had slotted neatly into place, but the realities of their duties were grimmer than anyone could truly imagine until he actually got here. A certain percentage proved … unsuitable once they fully realized what would be demanded of them.
"Have you mentioned him to Rachel?"
"Of course." Alexsov stood behind his own chair and shrugged minutely. "That's why I was late. She's promised to keep an eye on him."
Howell nodded, perfectly content to leave the problem of Commander Watanabe in Rachel Shu's capable hands, and turned his mind to other matters.
"So much for him. But I rather doubt he was why you asked to see me."
"Correct. I've been going back over Control's latest data dump, and it worries me."
"Oh?" Howell sat a bit straighter. "Why?"
"Because the more I see of the post-op reports on Mathison's World, the more I realize how badly Control screwed up there. I don't like that-especially not when we're about to hit a target like Elysium."
"Oh, come on, Greg! Control was right on the money about Mathison's defenses, and the planetary maps checked out to the last decimal place. No one could have known that tin can would be in the area!"
"I know, but he should have warned us about DeVries."
Howell leaned back, eyes touched with disbelief, but Alexsov looked back levelly. He was dead serious, the commodore realized.
"There were forty-one thousand people on that planet, Greg, and Alicia DeVries was only one of them. You're asking a bit much if you expect Control to keep track of every sodbuster on every dirtball we hit."
"I'm not asking for that, but a drop commando-any drop commando-isn't exactly a 'sodbuster.' and this drop commando was Alicia DeVries. And then there was the little matter of her grandfather-two Banner of Terra holders for the price of one, and Control didn't think that was significant?" He shook his head disgustedly. "O'Shaughnessy would have been bad enough by himself, but if I'd known DeVries was there, I'd've scheduled an orbital strike on her homestead and had done with it."
"Jesus, Greg! She's only one woman!"
"I was Ctesiphon's senior fire control officer when she supported the Shallingsport Raid," Alexsov said. "I was there, Commodore. Believe me, tangling with someone like her on her own terms isn't cost effective."
Howell grunted, a bit taken aback by Alexsov's vehemence yet forced to agree at least in part. But even so …
"I still can't fault Control when everything else checked out perfectly. And it's not exactly as if she did us irreparable damage."
"I'm not so sure of that." Alexsov's response surprised him yet again. "Certainly the loss of a single assault team wouldn't normally matter very much, but they IDed Singh, so they know where we've been recruiting. I don't know McIlheny, but I've read his dossier. He'll keep on picking at it forever. If he digs deep enough, that could lead him to Control, and none of it would have happened if Control had warned us about DeVries in the first place. Damn it, Commodore," the swear word was highly unusual for Alexsov, "Control's got the conduits to know about things like this, and he's supposed to tell us about them. That is exactly the sort of crack that could blow the entire op wide open."
"All right, Greg!" Howell waved a placating hand. "But cool down. Done is done-and I'm sure Control will try even harder in future. In fact, I'll have Rachel send him a specific request to that effect. Will that suit?"
"It'll have to, I suppose," Alexsov said dourly, and Howell knew that was as close to agreement as he was going to get. Alexsov seemed personally affronted by the surprise he'd suffered, but it was that very perfectionism (and the ice-water in his veins) which made him ideal for his job.
"Good. In that case, how'd your trip to Wyvern go?"
"Quite well, actually." Alexsov finally sank into the waiting chair. "I placed our initial orders with Quintana. He seems unperturbed by the change in our priorities-no doubt because of how much he stands to make-and he assures me he can acquire anything we need and dispose of anything we send him. We won't see quite the same return on industrial and bulk items, since he'll be dumping them on less advanced Rogue Worlds outside the sector, but I think that's well worthwhile from the security perspective, and it sounds as if we'll actually make out better on luxury items through his channels than we did through the Lizards. I expect revenues to balance out overall, and it's not exactly as if we were in this for the profit, is it, Sir?"