“But this is unbelievable,” Magroom protested. “If it’s doing you as much damage as that, why don’t you just give the robots the sentient status they want?”
Archier stared at him blankly. “The Empire will not be coerced,” he stated simply. “You are suggesting the Imperial Council should give official voice to what is probably an untruth, and we simply do not do things like that. If machine sentience could be established philosophically, then it would be another matter.”
A sense of unreality began once more to engulf Magroom. “Not even if it means the fall of the Empire?” he persisted. “Let me tell you something; for a practical issue as vital as this our politicians on Alaxis—who are all elected representatives of regional populations—would have got machine sentience proved from top to bottom. Truth wouldn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Then that shows why you need the Empire,” Archier told him. “You need the Empire to save you from your own barbarism.”
Archier had managed to make brief visits to about a quarter of the ships under his command when the call to battle rang through Ten-Fleet. For a moment he was taken by surprise; the rebel fleet had advanced more quickly than anticipated.
He had returned to Standard Bearer to refresh himself before continuing the inspection tour. When Arctus came bustling in with the news, he laid down the flask of liquid cannabis concoction he had been sipping, and removed the coronet that had been wafting calming cortical pulses through his brow.
“Is this a verified ranging?” he asked, glancing through the date sheet the elephant gave him.
Arctus waved his trunk uncertainly. “It’s usually reliable at that distance. About ten light-years.”
“Usually. But not always.”
“Nevertheless, Admiral, may I suggest we go to the Command Room without delay…?” Arctus’ trunk curled itself questioningly in the air.
“Yes, we must,” Archier agreed crisply. He hoped the elephant didn’t think he was scared. He was, for a fact, beginning to feel tense despite the cannabis and the coronet. Early indications were that the rebel fleet was sizable; and this was his first proper space battle.
He rose, placed his Admiral’s crested combat casque upon his head, and nodded to Arctus.
They proceeded through a door to his right. The Command Room was not a physical location but a holocast meeting locus present somewhere within the communications nerve-net that covered the entire fleet. As Archier entered, it was into the appearance of a council room whose chairs, couches and cushions were arranged around a circular pool. In this pool, vague images moved.
Gruwert, Archier’s Acting Fire Command Officer, was already sprawled upon a large mattress-like cushion. He was fairly snuffling with excitement. Sitting across the pool from him, frowning with tension, was a young woman with an artificially aged face and brittle blue-grey hair: the Fleet Manoeuvers Officer.
Other officers of command rank popped into existence around the pool, some disappearing a moment as their attention was diverted elsewhere. Archier mounted to the Admiral’s throne.
Arctus settled down beside him. “Pool data, Arctus,” Archier said.
The pool at his feet cleared momentarily and then, indistinctly, a group of blurred dots appeared. These were the contents of the sheets Arctus had shown Archier: the rebel battlefleet. Ranging numbers appeared beside them; then these, too, wavered and altered, as if uncertain of themselves.
Archier sighed. The doubts he had expressed to Arctus had referred to a technical problem the Empire had never resolved satisfactorily: how did one communicate with a feetol ship? Likewise, was there any way of maintaining communication with the far-flung worlds of the Empire except by despatching such ships?
It could be done and it was done, but only within limits. There was in nature a phenomenon that propagated itself with a velocity that was practically instantaneous as compared with the tardy progress of light, but it was, so to speak, only half a phenomenon. The basic force in nature was the linear recession that took place between all particles—though it exhibited itself as an actual motion only between distant objects, such as the farther galaxies. The rate of this recession was what determined c, the velocity of light. But discovery of the recession lines left an old problem in physics only partly resolved: the Newtonian problem of Action at a Distance. There had to be a component of the line, it was surmised, that simultaneously “informed” each of the two particles at its ends of the recession of the other.
Eventually this component had been identified. It was styled “the leader tone.” It responded to spatial attenuation as effected by a feetol generator; and because its reaction time was near-zero throughout the length of the line information could be passed down it from a vibrating feetol field. In the same way, it could be used for light-years-range radar.
Yet the leader tone had no independent existence. It was, almost, nature’s mirror trick, and seemed unable quite to overcome the normal constraints of information theory. Any data imparted down it had to be incomplete. Messages with more than a small information content became garbled or ambiguous. Likewise, the radar was generally unreliable.
It was as if the principle once embedded in physics, that no message could be transmitted faster than light, still fought back. The closer it got, the more certain the ranging figures on the Escorian fleet would become—but then its usefulness would be much reduced.
“Nothing on number, Arctus?” he said querulously.
Arctus was silent for a moment. He was speaking on his in-brain communicator to the radar room. At his request they were sacrificing range-data to try to gain some notion of the size of the fleet. The dots blurred, became a patch, disappeared.
“Could be up to two hundred vessels,” the elephant announced in a mild neutral voice.
“Two hundred?” echoed the captain of a front-line-o’-war incredulously. “How could they assemble such a force without us knowing?”
“All too easily, I’m afraid,” Gruwert grunted fatalistically. “The Empire’s failure is mainly one of supervision. Well, let’s see if we still have what it takes to smash a revolt!”
“Data will be harder in a few minutes, Admiral,” Arctus said. “They are closing fast.”
“Alright. Excuse me, then, while I take a stroll.”
In body Archier did not move. Here in the command room mental access was much enhanced, and he wanted to take a last look around the flagship.
He flitted invisibly from point to contact point, pausing but briefly at most stations. Finally, he toured the gun turrets, of which Standard Bearer carried twenty-eight, more than any other ship of the fleet. The crews were motley: animals, children, one or two human adults. Turret fourteen was manned entirely by children under the age of ten—youngsters of that age volunteered eagerly for gun duty—while the crews of two more consisted of animals officered by a child no older.
Archier felt no misgivings over the performance of these young persons. Their training was excellent, and they knew how to use their comps to maximum effect. What was more, they were full of enthusiasm.
He had nearly finished his cursory tour when a voice in his ear brought him back to the Command Room. “Ranging close, sir,” Arctus murmured, his voice uncharacteristically tense. “Look!”
In the pool Archier saw one of the rebel ships; radar had gained an image of visual quality. From the look of it the ship had once been a passenger liner. It carried more than passengers now. Welded crudely and seemingly haphazardly over its elegant hull, like ugly metal slabs, were casemates roughly similar in shape to the turrets that studded Standard Bearer.