There was so much she did not know.
Carol looked over at her lover, lying bonelessly in his crash couch, eyes now closed, the thick interface cable at his neck. What must it be like, she mused, to have one's mind encompass so much, all at once?
Perhaps she would know for herself, if the Sun-Tzu ever reached Wunderland.
Bruno, while Linked, had once told Carol that there was little of free will in what actions he took while Transcended. It was as if knowing the best solution to a problem removed freedom of choice — unless he intentionally chose an improper solution. Connected to a computer's vast silicon mind, Bruno had told Carol that he was driven to choose the best solution to a given problem; therefore, free will as she understood it did not exist for him.
Carol mulled that over for a few moments. What if, she thought, the basic nature of free will was the freedom to make mistakes?
The holoscreen flashed brightly in alert, and the buzzing electronic tones of the Battle Stations alarm broke her from her reverie.
“Pardon me,” Bruno told her calmly, eyes still closed, “but when I am part of the alarm system, I must act like the relevant component.” The alarm tone halted without Carol having to deactivate it.
“No matter. Give me a status report.” Carol's fingers tensed on the edges of the console before her. The dataglove and keypads were clipped impotently to the side of the console. With Bruno in full Linkage, her commands were far too slow and crude.
The main holoscreen window cleared, and quickly drew three separate blips, moving rapidly outward from the center of the screen, in different directions. She looked over at Bruno, whose eyes were still closed, facing forward.
“It appears,” he said, “that we have hit the jackpot, so to speak.” Not waiting for orders, he displayed the observational information, data windows opening and keeping pace with the tiny red sparks, highlighting and scrolling numbers in agreement with his statements.
“The mystery blip,” he continued, “did not wait for our change in attitude, Carol.” Abruptly he cackled with very unmachinelike glee, a false mirth animating his slack muscles. “Mystery, mystery!”
She jerked back at this sudden change. His face went limp as the hypospray hissed at his neck again. The flat voice came, sibilant and precise, as though driven by air leaking out of a balloon. “It presumably became aware of our engine shutdown seven and a half minutes ago. The single blip then split into three distinct signals. Inference: three ships, previously moving in close convoy, stealthed.”
“Finagle damn! One we might handle. But three?”
The holoscreen windows showed relevant data as marching columns of glowing numbers and glittering diagrams. “The stealthing apparently does not stand up well to high-gee maneuvers, and I obtained an excellent remote data acquisition download. I was easily able to correct for what electronic counter-measures the targets were able to activate under high acceleration.”
“Well?” Alien vessels for sure, Carol nodded to herself. Her hands gripped the arms of her crash couch until her knuckles turned white with the pressure. Were they ratcat ships, though? They had to be.
“As I predicted,” Bruno replied, not even the pretense of emotion in his voice. “Three Raptor-class kzin warcraft.” As he spoke, a larger window opened on the holoscreen, displaying comparisons between the unidentified craft and the standard Raptor-class kzin warbird. “Engine emissions,” he continued, “are consonant with slightly damaged and refurbished Third Wave kzinti space vessels. At the time our engine shutdown registered on their instruments, the convoy immediately broke up, each spacecraft moving in different directions at two hundred gees, which is the limit for Raptor-class war-craft.”
Carol forced herself to relax, to breathe deeply. She drummed her fingers on the console. “Are they too far out to fry with the drive?”
“That is one problem,” Bruno said evenly. “If we activate the drive now, the radiation and plasma exhaust plume would need to spread across many millions of kilometers. Also, while the drive is in operation it will be almost impossible to detect any further maneuvers of the alien craft, due to drive-wash interference.”
He paused, air wheezing in his throat. “On the other hand, the kzinti may already have fired energy weapons toward us that travel just behind our visual observations.”
Carol leaned back into her crash couch. “Recommendations?”
Bruno's face sketched a pale ghost of a human smile. “I recommend that we fire the antimatter drive in a random walk across the sections of space which I predict might contain the kzinti craft.”
Unconvinced, she made a face and squinted. “But you can't really know where any of the ships are when you fire the drive at them.”
The small but immensely powerful figure in the crash couch beside her remained unperturbed. “Naturally,” he replied, “due to light-speed limitations, and the fact that all three vessels are varying their acceleration and attitude randomly. They are clearly attempting to avoid energy weapons or missiles. But I have some familiarity with deep-space kzin strategies.” He didn't speak for a moment, then continued. “A hunch, perhaps you would call it. Biological minds have limited access to originality, after all.”
Carol frowned at the last statement, unsure of who precisely was the target of that insult. “No choice, then. Carry out your recommendation, pilot,” she ordered.
Bruno settled back into his crash couch and eased open his eyes. He turned his head toward Carol, and looked at her with his alien, faraway gaze and wide pupils. “Because there may not be time to react to maneuvers made by the kzin ships, I am going to have to take control of all ship functions from the automatic subsystems. Please understand that this will take a great deal of my processing capacity. Additionally, I will be heavily accessing many preprogrammed subroutines and predicting stochastic results…” He paused. “Guessing, you would call it.”
“What are you saying?” Carol asked, anxious to do something, anything, as she watched the red sparks of the three kzinti craft moving slowly across the starfield depicted in the holoscreen window. Blurred columns of numbers next to each red light displayed their changing velocities and positions.
Bruno nodded slightly. “I will be running short of the dispensable processing capacity that I normally use for conversation and purely human thought, Carol. I may not be able to speak with you for a few minutes. I will post the situation on the holoscreen as data.” He turned his head forward and closed his eyes again. His crash couch hummed and cradled him tightly, straps tightening automatically.
Carol bit her lip, then said, “Tacky… I mean, Bruno… I just…”
His eyes still closed, an almost human smile turned Bruno's lips gently upward. “I love you, too,” he interrupted softly, “even Linked.” The smile then turned mechanical, and began to fade away altogether. “At least a part of me does.”
Carol felt a chill prickle down her neck.
Outrage. The hotworld craft maneuver dangerously as this local-node predicted. The disgusting vermin do grave damage to the flux lines and particle density of this sacred region!
Caution. This local-node suggests that this local-and-other nodes observe and contemplate further. A quality of strangeness exists here, necessitating caution.
Fury. This local-node demands the erasure of all such vermin! This region-geometry is sacred!