"And?"
"And it occurred to me that under certain circumstances being considered mad might be very useful to you, so I thought I'd just drop by to share a little secret of my own. You see, everyone out here thinks I'm with Intelligence Branch. That's what I wanted them to think, though I never actually said I was with Intelligence. I'm an inspector, all right-but with O Branch."
Alicia's lips pursed in a silent, involuntary whistle. O Branch-Operations Branch of the Ministry of Justice- was as specialized, and feared, as the Cadre itself. It consisted of handpicked troubleshooters selected for initiative, flexibility, and pragmatism, and its members were charged with solving problems any way they had to. It was also very, very small. While "inspector" was a fairly junior rank in the other branches of the Ministry of Justice, it was the highest field rank available in O Branch.
"You're the only person out here who knows that, Captain DeVries," the inspector said, levering himself out of his chair.
"But … why tell me?"
"It seemed like a good idea." He gave her a crooked smile and straightened his crimson tunic fastidiously. "I know how you feel about spooks, after all." He walked calmly to the closed hatch, then half turned to her once more. "If you decide you have anything you want to tell me, or if there's anything I can do for you, please feel free to let me know. I assure you it will remain completely confidential, even from your kindly physicians."
He gave her a graceful, elegant bow and punched the hatch burton. It opened, then whispered shut behind him.
Chapter Eight
This invisible bubble was getting tiresome, Alicia thought, eyeing the empty tables around her in the lounge. No one would ever be crude enough to mention her insanity-but no one wanted to get too close to her, either.
"I wonder how much of it's fear of contagion?" she complained.
"Oh, very little, I should think. They fear what you may do to them, not what they might contract from you."
"A comforting thought," Alicia snorted, and hooked a chair further under the opposite side of the table to rest her heels on it. Her dialogues with Tisiphone no longer felt odd, which worried her from time to time, but not nearly so much as they comforted her. She had to be so wary, especially of her friends, that the relief of open conversation was almost unspeakable. Of course, her lips twitched wryly, it was still possible Tannis was right, but their exchanges remained a vast relief, even if Tisiphone didn't exist.
"Of course I exist. Why do you continue to use qualifiers?"
"The nature of the beast, I suppose. If you were something they'd whipped up in the AI labs, this would be a lot easier for me."
"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 out-sized 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 or 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 battle-cruiser 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. Roughly sixty percent of humanity could use neural receptors to interface with their technological minions, but no more than twenty percent could sustain the contact required to maintain a synth link- the direct, point-to-point connection which made a computer a literal extension of themselves-without becoming "lost," and less than ten percent could handle one of the cyber synth links which allowed them to interact 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 link 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 had no anti-tech bias, yet the idea of becoming the organic half of a bipolar intelligence in a union only death could dissolve was far from appealing.