Empery (19 page)

A repartee worthy even of me
, Berberon thought with satisfaction.
She’s going to do just fine. Yes, she’s going to do just fine
.

Farlad found Wells in the star dome, lying on a recliner near the center of the room and staring out at the stars of Ursa Major. The moon, at first quarter, was just moving into the field of view, its brilliance overpowering the star field around it and lending a death-white cast to the interior of the dome.

“Yes, Lieutenant?” Wells said as Farlad approached.

“I thought you would want to know. We just got confirmation in the office of Chancellor Sujata’s request for proposal. It’s official. You’ve won.”

“This is just the beginning,” Wells said in a faraway voice.“I’ve been playing chess simultaneously with two opponents. Now the weaker has been eliminated. Now there is only one to concern myself with.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve been lying here thinking about Thackery. A great man, Teo. A great man despite his flaws. But he left the job half finished. No fault of his, mind you—there was no opportunity to do more. We have that opportunity,” Wells said.“Teo, you, and I are going to live to see this stalemate broken.”

“Sir?”

Wells sat up and swung his legs over the side of the recliner. “Rashuri gave us the Reunion—Thackery the Revision. But only when there has been a Reckoning will what they started be complete.”

Farlad’s frown was barely detectable in the moonlight. “It’s difficult for me to see that happening in our lifetime, sir.”

“There are ways to cheat time, Teo. I began this expecting to finish it.”

“You’ve accomplished a great deal just seeing Triad through to this point.”

Wells shook his head slowly. “There’s a great deal left to be done between now and when the Triad groups are ready. A great deal left to be done before we’re ready to face the Mizari.”

“Perhaps that won’t be necessary, sir.”

Wells stood, and the moonlight made his features and tall, lean frame seem sculpted of gray stone rather than flesh. “If we find them, we will have to fight them,” he said firmly. “And we
will
find them.”

“
Il faut, dans le gouvernement, des bergers el des bouchers
.”

—Voltaire

“I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along—to what? The Creature hath a purpose, and its eyes are bright with it.”

—John Keats

“I want to thank you for taking the time to come over,” Harmack Wells said to the woman keeping pace at his side.

“No trouble, Director. It’s my job to deal with this sort of thing when the Chancellor is off-station,” Wyrena Ten Ga’ar replied.

She had come to Unity as little more than a girl, but had grown enough in spirit that “woman” fit her more comfortably now. Six years of responsibility, responsibility that had expanded almost faster than she had been prepared for, had worked a change on her. The pattern and habits of her Ba’ar heritage were too deeply engrained to be erased, but they had been softened by a new confidence and self-assurance.

Still, sometimes new faces or places brought back an echo of how she had felt when she first arrived: insecure, intimidated, painfully deferential. And there was one old face who could do that to her still—Harmack Wells.

They were walking down a corridor deep in the bowels of USS-Central, in a section rarely seen by outsiders. The decor consequently lacked the plush and polish accorded the public areas. The walls were covered in a calming, but bland, light blue impervacoat, and the uncarpeted composite floor bore the scars and black streaks that were the telltale signs of vehicular traffic.

Ahead, the corridor divided. “This way,” Wells said as they neared it, catching Ten Ga’ar’s elbow and steering her toward the left branch. “Just a little farther to the lab.”

“Thanks. You’d think I’d know this whole station by now,“Ten Ga’ar said. “The Chancellor never gets lost. I still do. If you left me down here, I’d be a week finding my way back.”

“This is tech country,” Wells said. “Nobody ever comes down here except the whitecoats.”

A few paces ahead on the right, a door opened and a low-slung cargo trolley trundled out and began to make a wide turn toward them. Sensing their presence, it paused until they were past, then continued on its way with a faint whirring sound.

“You could always hitch a ride with one of those,” Wells said, smiling and jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “Here’s the lab,” he added, angling toward the next door.

The sign beside the door read, SYNTHETIC MODELING APPLICATIONS LABORATORY.

“I wouldn’t have asked you to come down here, except that this is the only full-scale holo simulator in a secured area,” Wells said, waiting for her to catch up. When she did, he stood aside and allowed her to enter first.

Beyond the door was a modestly sized and relatively uncluttered room. A single two-seat console faced a large synglas window, and three low equipment racks stood along one wall. The sole tech seated at the console wore gray coveralls and a black-and-red shoulder emblem Ten Ga’ar did not recognize. He came to his feet as they entered.

“Everything is ready, Director,” the tech said, saluting.

“Thank you, Joel,” Wells said. “We’ll go right on down.”

Wells led the way through another door and down a narrow passage on a steeply sloping ramp lit only by small lamps at knee height. After a dozen or so steps Ten Ga’ar found herself in a large, dimly lit chamber, which was spherical except for the small, level area in the middle of the floor where she and Wells were standing. Looking up, she saw the synglas window of the control room halfway up the wall to her right.

“Voice cue, please, Joel,” Wells said.

“Yes, Director,” was the disembodied reply. A moment later the window dimmed to black, and the chamber grew even darker.

Wells turned to face Ten Ga’ar. “What I wanted to talk to the Chancellor about—and will still need to, probably—concerns the Kleine communications system. Maybe it’s just as well that I have you to practice on, because of the complexity of the problem.”

“If the problem is anything other than procurement or security, I’m afraid you’re doomed to lose me,” Ten Ga’ar said with a wry smile.

“I’m afraid the problem is technical. But I don’t intend to offer a technical explanation,” Wells said. “I’m as likely as anyone to defer that sort of thing to an expert. I just want to see if I can give you a useful handle on the situation.”

“We can try, anyway,” Ten Ga’ar said agreeably.

“For the sake of our sanity we’ll keep this two-dimensional,” Wells said. “You know that the Kleine is used throughout the Service as the primary long-range communications system. The only such system, really, if you’re talking about any distance farther than a few cee-seconds.”

“All the ships still carry wideband EM transmitters, don’t they?”

“And narrowband laser relays, too, but about the only time they’re even used is in-system or when a ship’s disabled. The Kleine is used everywhere, all the time. How much do you know about how it works?”

“Enough to sit down at a com node and send a message somewhere—nothing more than that.“Wells nodded. “Then we’ll start from the beginning. I’ll invite you to think of an infinitely large billiard table—”

As he spoke, a fine grid of intersecting green lines appeared, just overhead and parallel to the floor. Some trick of reflection made it seem as though the phantom bisected the chamber and continued infinitely outward.

“This represents the boundary between the matter-matrix of the Universe, down here where we are, and the energy-matrix of the spindle, up there above us. The boundary—that is, the table—isn’t completely planar,” Wells continued. “Here and there you find a conical depression—”

Several dozen such depressions, each with a smoothly sloping symmetrical shape reminiscent of the bell of a brass instrument, appeared in the construct.

“—almost like pockets out in the middle of the table. At the bottom of every pocket is an AVLO generator—either a ship drive or a station power unit like we have here.” A number of the depressions, apparently representing ships in flight, started to crawl slowly across the mesh field. Wells continued, “Sending a Kleine transmission is like shooting a billiard ball up out of one of the pockets with exactly the right force and velocity so it crosses the table and drops into the pocket where the intended receiver is located.”

All across the grid, bright orange spheres began arcing up out of the various depressions, “rolling” across the mesh surface, and then plunging back down into a neighboring depression.

There was something elegant and graceful in their motions, but Ten Ga’ar forced herself to attend to the point of the illustration. “A receiver-addressable system,” Ten Ga’ar said.

“Exactly.”

“And the problem is?”

“That it’s becoming harder and harder to get the messages where they’re aimed.“Ten Ga’ar’s face creased with concern. “Why is it happening?”

“In objective terms, we don’t know. The problem is on the spindle, where we have no way of making direct observations. By analogy, though, it’s as though the surface of our billiard table were gradually getting rougher—wrinkling, developing tiny tears, warping.”

It was clear by now that the simulator was closely attending to Wells’s words, for as he continued to explain, each new aspect of the problem was played out on the construct overhead. Ten Ga’ar watched, fascinated, as the grid began to distort, sending the orange spheres careening unpredictably.

“No one understands why it’s happening—whether the four hundred years we’ve been using the Kleine has, in effect, worn down the table; or if it’s a matter of too many pockets in the table, so that the farther the message is going, the more likely it’ll be deflected; or even a matter of too many balls on the table, so they keep colliding.

“Kleine messages aren’t billiard balls, of course—they’re packets of energy, and the analogy breaks down at that point. Getting a message to its destination isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition—what happens is that the energy becomes diffused and the information content is degraded.”

“Is there anything you can do?”

“On its own, Operations instituted error-checking protocols on all communications about ten years ago. Of course, the error-checking procedures themselves can be affected by the interference, so that at times the data may come through clean but end up needing to be retransmitted because the checksum itself got hit. And all the error-checking and retransmission represent overhead that slows down the rate of data exchange—the more so, the worse the interference gets and the more complex the data-integrity precautions become.”

“Did you say the interference is getting worse?”

“Yes. Right now we’re managing, but the rate of deterioration has us concerned,” Wells said. “Concerned enough that we’ve restricted Kleine traffic in the Lynx and Boötes Octants and done everything we can to hold down the number of ships operating there.”

“Has that helped?”

“Not appreciably. End simulation,” he said, and the grid vanished. “I don’t need to tell you how important reliable Kleine communications are to everything we’re doing,” he continued, leading her back up the passage to the control center. “If data from the Sentinels on the Perimeter can’t reach us, we’re as good as blind—with no way to know what’s going on out there and no warning if what’s going on isn’t to our liking. And, of course, it would be impossible to coordinate any sort of response if we can’t reach all the elements of our forces swiftly and reliably. Thanks, Joel,” he added with a nod to the tech as they left the lab.

Ten Ga’ar did not need to be persuaded that the situation was serious. There were implications that went far beyond military readiness. Except for the Kleine, the Worlds and the ships that served them were all isolates in time. The Kleine bound them together.

Only the Kleine gave the concept of “now” more than a local, parochial meaning. Without it, the Affirmation could not exist. No number of ships could replace it. By ship, Journa was ten years away, Ba’ar Tell a quarter-century. Neither commerce nor a sense of community could survive the loss of the Kleine.

“You said that Operations knew about this for ten years, and you’ve apparently known about it for at least a while,“Ten Ga’ar said, falling in beside him as they headed back the way they had come. “Why are we only hearing about it from you now? Why did you wait this long to alert us to the problem?”

“A fair question. I feel a bit uncomfortable defending our silence. I guess part of the answer to that is that it wasn’t a problem at the outset, just an operational nuisance, the kind of technological idiosyncrasy that every complex system displays,” Wells said. “Another part is that we had no reason not to think the interference wouldn’t plateau at some manageable level.”

They reached the lift nexus, and Wells used his priority key to call a car. “So what do we do now that there is a problem?” Ten Ga’ar asked as the lift doors opened to admit them. There were two others on the lift already, and Wells shook his head. “Later.”

“We can go to my office,” Ten Ga’ar said.

“Mine is closer,” Wells said, in a manner that ended discussion.

They rode in silence, Wells studying the lift status display and Ten Ga’ar studying him. Wells no longer terrified her, but she still respected his power.
I should have insisted on my office
, she thought in self-reproach. It was a constant struggle not to simply surrender on some level to his aura of command.
Still
, she thought,
I think I’m handling myself pretty well on this one.

Looking away from Wells, Ten Ga’ar became aware that the other riders were eyeing Wells and her curiously, with questioning glances and barely concealed sniggering smiles. When they left the lift four levels up, she laughed. “You don’t think they thought—hearing only what they did—”

“I certainly hope so,” Wells said with a straight face. “My reputation can use the boost.”

Ten Ga’ar said nothing, but Wells’s jest started her thinking. In all the time she had known him Wells had lived alone, but clearly by choice rather than by necessity. With his burning eyes, trim physique, and quiet authority, Wells projected a message to which many women responded strongly. Ten Ga’ar herself felt it, and she had heard more than a few others on the staff admit to the same reaction.

Wells had taken advantage of that attraction to enjoy a series—and, at times, a multiplicity—of casual matings. In the language of her homeworld, he was
ga’fla
—one who beds, but does not wed. Ten Ga’ar counted among her friends two women who had been on his string and one who hoped she still was, and knew that their commitment to and hopes for the relationship had always been greater than Wells’s.

Even knowing Wells’s reputation, each had been convinced that she could offer him something unique, something that would make her his chosen. Though Ten Ga’ar was polite enough not to force them to face it, the reality was that all Wells wanted from them was what any woman could give him. He consciously and consistently chose not to involve himself on any other level.

But for perhaps as long as half a year, Wells had apparently been pulling back from even that minimal involvement. Ten Ga’ar became aware of it when Kilaoqe came to her, distraught that Wells had stopped asking for her and wondering if Wyrena knew who had stolen his attentions. After harvesting what they could from the grapevine and finding others wondering the same, they concluded it was someone Wells was seeing during his periodic brief visits downwell.

Wells’s small, self-conscious jest opened the door to an entirely different view of the matter. Consciously and deliberately, Wells had allowed his intimate relationships to quietly expire, like so many neglected houseplants. Ten Ga’ar had an idea how long ago he had made that decision. What still wasn’t clear was why.

Before Ten Ga’ar’s silence became conspicuous, the lift disgorged them on Level 1. Corridor traffic prevented them from resuming their conversation until they reached Wells’s office five minutes later.

“You were asking about what we do now,” Wells said as they settled in facing chairs. “The only long-term fix that any of our people can envision is building a system of automated relay stations. The interference increases with distance, so the plan would be to lay out trunk lines, with active repeaters every ten cees or so grabbing every message, cleaning it up as necessary, and firing it along to the next. We’re also looking at instituting communications controls at the same time.”