“Of course,” Heikki answered. “And while I’m looking at your terms, perhaps you’d like to look at our rough-estimate bid? Based of course on the first information we have.”
“Yes, thank you.” Mikelis slid a viewboard across the table, the screen lighting at his touch. Heikki fished the correct datasquare from her belt and laid it on the desk, then turned her attention to the viewboard. The lens setting blinked in the upper corner; she slipped her data lens from her belt, adjusted the bezel until the numbers matched, then squinted through the lens. Letters sprang to life on the screen: it was a standard form, pledging her to silence regarding the subjects discussed at this meeting—time, date, and place were specified in excruciating detail—for a year and a day, and named a heavy fine for breaking the agreement. She nodded, and reached for the stylus clipped to the board.
“This seems reasonable,” she said aloud, and scrawled name and verification code at the bottom of the form.
“Excellent,” Mikelis said, and even FitzGilbert looked a little less thunderous. “So, to business, then. As you know from the various reports, we lost a latac—an LTA—over the back country, on what should have been a routine flight from Retego Bay to Lowlands. Under normal circumstances, we’d expect to have a record of the course from the automatic locators, or at least to be able to home in on the beacon after the craft went down. The locators failed in-flight, and the beacon did not function. The latac was carrying a new crystal matrix, which was potentially extremely valuable. But I should let Electra tell you about the latac, first.”
What, no mention of Foursquare even now? Heikki thought. She looked at FitzGilbert, who grimaced.
“The crew has not walked out, which, coupled with the mechanical failures, begins to look like sabotage to me. Mik tells me you lived on Iadara—then you know what the set-up is.”
Heikki nodded, suppressing her impatience. Mikelis —or one of his underlings—would have gone through her records as a matter of course; the point hardly seemed worth making. When something more seemed to be expected of her, she said, “There’s triple redundancy in the locators, or there was thirty years ago, and the crash beacons are the type used all over the Loop and the Precincts. I’d have to agree, it’s suspicious.”
“Iadara’s weather is peculiar,” Sandrig murmured. “Electrical storms alone—”
“Do not affect the beacon, damn it,” FitzGilbert retorted, and made no apology for her immodest language. “The beacon should’ve gone off.”
“What did you do when the latac failed to come in?” Heikki asked. She had used the Iadaran dialect word out of old habit, and Mikelis gave her a rather startled glance.
FitzGilbert scowled again. “Not one hell of a lot, at least not at first. There was a storm brewing—we assumed that brought the latac down, and that delayed us. Like Pol says, the weather’s something fierce. We do lose a lot of transmissions, and we did think that it was just normal interference cutting out the locator. When the latac didn’t dome in, and we didn’t get a beacon signal, we sent out a search flight, working from both the projected flight path and the wind data we’d gotten from station blue—that’s the nearest recording point, weather station blue northwest. And we didn’t find a damn thing. That’s when I started getting worried, and I pushed the panic button.” She nodded to Mikelis. “That’s why it’s on Mik’s plate now.”
“So you’d be hiring us not just to find the wreck,” Heikki said, “but to tell you why it went down.”
“Yes,” Mikelis said, and added, before Heikki could speak, “I accept that it’s going to cost us more for that.”
“I’m afraid it will,” Heikki murmured, but in spite of herself felt the stirrings of a salvage operator’s curiosity. Hijacking or sabotage, one or the other, and from FitzGilbert’s story the two possibilities were evenly balanced— She curbed her enthusiasm sharply. There was still the matter of Foursquare’s attempt at the contract to settle, and the question of the cargo; better to deal with the lesser of the two first. “I take it that the cargo—you said a crystal matrix—was something fairly small and portable?”
“Yes.” Sandrig leaned forward in his chair, his hands sketching a cube perhaps half a meter square. “About so big—I don’t know if you’re familiar with crysticulture, Dam’ Heikki?”
“Only with what everybody knows. And I’ve seen the fields.”
“Ah, this is something different. It was the matrix— the seed for first-stage growth—for what we hoped would be the universal center crystal.” Sandrig managed a sudden, deprecatory smile. “We hoped! But the indications were promising.”
Heikki nodded. Anyone who spent time on the Loop knew that the great stumbling block to intersystems trade and to the expansion of the Loop lay in the way in which the Papaefthmyiou-Devise Engines were constructed. The Engines “folded space”—which was not what really happened, of course, but was the closest undisputed analogy—around an FTLship or Exchange Point, warping hyperspace until the points of origin and destination lay side by side. At the heart of the Engines were the crystals, the common crystals focusing the energies from the generators onto the crucial center crystal, whose interior geometry was crudely analagous to the “geometry” of the hyperspace it manipulated. Each of these center crystals had to be grown specifically and exclusively for the Engine in which it would eventually be mounted; the PDEs that drove the startrains had two such crystals, mirrored twins, to hold open a permanent fold in space.
Mikelis nodded as if he’d read her thoughts. “The failure rate for growing center crystals runs between sixty and seventy-five percent—for the common crystals we lose maybe one in a hundred as too flawed for use. A universal matrix….” He let his voice trail off.
“A universal matrix—a matrix that would fully and truly reflect the geometry of hyperspace—could be used in any PDE,” Sandrig said. “It could be grown in mass lots—and you heard what Mik said, common crystals have a one percent failure rate, and they’re grown from a universal seed. More than that, it would make it possible to build FTLships quickly and cheaply. Shipbuilders wouldn’t be held up while they waited for an unflawed crystal, they wouldn’t have to make expensive last minute changes to accommodate the center’s peculiar resonances.” His voice took on an almost evangelistic fervor. “It might even eliminate the problems with the startrains’ PDE, allow us to put more than three terminals into an Exchange Point. After all, the problem seems primarily to be one of interference…. But can you imagine, an infinite number of Exchanges within each point?”
“It’s been tried before,” FitzGilbert said. Her voice was not unkind, but it broke the spell. “They’d only just started testing, Pol.”
Sandrig looked away, blushing fiercely.
“I do have one more question,” Heikki said, into the sudden silence.
“Of course,” Mikelis answered, and seemed grateful for the change of subject.
“What happened to FourSquare?”
The question was verging on the immodest, but Heikki was not prepared for the vehemence of FitzGilbert’s response. “You tell us, you’re one of them. We signed a contract, made a first payment, then they backed out, said they couldn’t handle the back country, that we hadn’t given them all the information.” Her smile was a baring of teeth. “This when they’d been in contact with local talent from the beginning, even if we hadn’t been honest enough to give them all the details—”
“Electra.” Mikelis’s voice held a warning. “It’s a reasonable question.” He looked back at Heikki. “What Electra’s said is perfectly true, though. We hired them in good faith, and they broke contract without offering us any rational excuse. When they refused to turn over their survey tapes—which will be made available to the winning bidder, of course—we sued, and eventually obtained the material. Does that answer your question?”