How Firm a Foundation (2 page)

Unfortunately, that didn’t necessarily mean someone—or something—
off
the planet couldn’t match or even exceed them. Which was, after all, pretty much the point of this evening’s experiment.

Merlin had chosen the Castaway Islands with care. They were eleven
thousand miles from the Temple, eighty-seven hundred miles from the city of Tellesberg, seventy-five hundred miles from the city of Cherayth, and just over twenty-six hundred miles from the Barren Lands, the closest putatively inhabited real estate on the entire planet. No one was going to see anything that happened here. And no one (aside from those arctic wyverns and seals) was going to get killed
if things turned out … badly.

Not that it looked that way to the recon skimmer’s sensors at the moment. Indeed, according to
them
, there were thousands of moving, human-sized thermal signatures scattered around the islands in half a dozen “towns” and “villages.” One of those towns was centered on the device he’d just examined twenty-four thousand feet below the skimmer, which had just come to
life as Owl obeyed his instructions. No one looking at it would have noticed anything, but the skimmer’s sensors picked up the new heat source immediately.

Merlin sat back, watching the thermal signature as its temperature rose to approximately five hundred degrees on the Fahrenheit scale Eric Langhorne had imposed upon the brainwashed colonists almost nine hundred Safeholdian years ago. It held
steady at that point, and if there’d still been any human (or PICA) eyes to watch, they would have noticed it was beginning to vent steam. Not a lot of it, and the wind snatched the steam plume to bits almost more quickly than it could appear. But the sensors saw it clearly, noted its cyclic nature. Only an artificial source could have emitted it in such a steady pattern, and Merlin waited another
five minutes, simply watching his instruments.

“Have we detected any response from the kinetic platforms, Owl?” he asked then.

“Negative, Lieutenant Commander,” the AI replied calmly.

“Initiate phase two, then.”

“Initiating, Lieutenant Commander.”

A moment later, additional heat sources began to appear. One or two of them, at first, then half a dozen. Two dozen. Then still more, scattered
around the islands as individuals and in clusters, all in around the same temperature range, but registering in several different
sizes,
and all of them “leaking” those cyclical puffs of steam. The cycles weren’t all identical and the steam plumes came in several different sizes and durations, but all of them were clearly artificial in origin.

Merlin sat very still, watching his instruments,
waiting. Five more minutes crept past. Then ten. Fifteen.

“Any response from the kinetic platforms now, Owl?”

“Negative, Lieutenant Commander.”

“Good. That’s good, Owl.”

There was no response from the computer this time. Merlin hadn’t really expected one, although Owl did seem to be at least starting to develop the personality the operator’s manual promised he would … eventually. The AI had
actually offered spontaneous responses and interpolations on a handful of occasions, although seldom to Merlin. In fact, now that he thought about it, the majority of those spontaneous responses had been directed to Empress Sharleyan, and Merlin wondered why that was. Not that he expected he’d ever find out. Even back when there’d been a Terran Federation, AIs—even Class I AIs (which Owl most emphatically
was not)—had often had quirky personalities that responded better to some humans than to others.

“Activate phase three,” he said now.

“Activating, Lieutenant Commander.”

This time, if Merlin had still been a flesh-and-blood human being, he would have held his breath as two-thirds or so of the steam signatures on his sensors began to move. Most of them moved fairly slowly, their paths marked
by twists and turns, stopping and starting, turning sharply, then going straight for short distances. Several others, though, were not only larger and more powerful but moved much more rapidly and smoothly … almost as if they’d been on rails.

Merlin watched the slower moving heat signatures tracing out the skeletal outlines of what could have been street grids in the “towns” and “villages” while
the larger, faster-moving ones moved steadily between the clusters of their slower brethren. Nothing else seemed to be happening, and he made himself wait for another half hour before he spoke again.

“Still nothing from the platforms, Owl?”

“Negative, Lieutenant Commander.”

“Are we picking up any signal traffic between the platforms and the Temple?”

“Negative, Lieutenant Commander.”

“Good.”
Merlin’s one-word response was even more enthusiastic this time, and he felt himself smiling. He leaned back in the flight couch, clasping his hands behind his head, and gazed up at the moon that never looked quite right to his Earth-born memories and the starscape no Terrestrial astronomer had ever seen. “We’ll give it another hour or so,” he decided. “Tell me if you pick up anything—anything
at all—from the platforms, from the Temple, or between them.”

“Acknowledged, Lieutenant Commander.”

“And I suppose while we’re waiting, you might as well start giving me my share of the flagged take from the SNARCs.”

“Yes, Lieutenant Commander.”

*   *   *

“Well,” Merlin said, several hours later as his skimmer headed northwest across the eastern reaches of Carter’s Ocean towards the city
of Cherayth, “I have to say, it looks promising so far, at least.”

“You could’ve told us when you started your little test.”

Cayleb Ahrmahk, Emperor of Charis and King of Old Charis, sounded more than a little testy himself, Merlin thought with a smile. At the moment, he and Empress Sharleyan sat across a table from one another. The breakfast plates had been taken away, although Cayleb continued
to nurse a cup of chocolate. Another cup sat in front of Sharleyan, but she was too busy breast-feeding their daughter, Princess Alahnah, to do anything with it at the moment. Depressingly early morning sunlight came through the frost-rimed window behind Cayleb’s chair, and Sergeant Edwyrd Seahamper stood outside the small dining chamber’s door, ensuring their privacy.

Like them, Seahamper was
listening to Merlin over the invisible, transparent plug in his right ear. Unlike them, the sergeant was unable to participate in the conversation, since (also unlike them) he didn’t have any convenient sentries making sure no one was going to wander by and hear him talking to thin air.

“I did tell you I intended to initiate the test as soon as Owl and I had the last of the EW emitters in place,
Cayleb,” Merlin said now, mildly. “And if I recall, you and Sharleyan knew ‘
Seijin
Merlin’ was going to be ‘meditating’ for the next couple of days. In fact, that was part of the cover plan to free me up to conduct the test in the first place, unless memory fails me. And in regard to that last observation, I might point out that
my
memory is no longer dependent on fallible organic components.”

“Very funny, Merlin,” Cayleb said.

“Oh, don’t be such a fussbudget, Cayleb!” Sharleyan scolded with a smile. “Alahnah was actually letting us sleep last night, and if Merlin was prepared to let us go on sleeping,
I’m
not going to complain. And frankly, dear, I don’t think any of our councilors are going to complain if
you
got a bit more rest last night, either. You have been a little grumpy lately.”

Cayleb gave her a moderately betrayed look, but she only shook her head at him.

“Go on with your report, Merlin. Please,” she said. “Before Cayleb says something else
we’ll
all regret, whether
he
does or not.”

There was the sound of something suspiciously like a muffled laugh from the fifth and final party to their conversation.

“I
heard
that, Ehdwyrd!” Cayleb said.

“I’m sure I don’t know
what you’re referring to, Your Majesty. Or, I suppose, I should say ‘Your Grace’ since you and Her Majesty are currently in Chisholm,” Ehdwyrd Howsmyn replied innocently from his study in far-off Old Charis.

“Oh, of
course
you don’t.”

“Oh, hush, Cayleb!” Sharleyan kicked him under the breakfast table. “Go on, Merlin. Quick!”

“Your wish is my command, Your Majesty,” Merlin assured her while
Cayleb rubbed his kneecap with his right hand and waved a mock-threatening fist with his left.

“As I was saying,” Merlin continued, his tone considerably more serious than it had been, “things are looking good so far. Everything I could see on the skimmer’s sensors, and everything Owl can see using the SNARCs, looks exactly like a whole batch of steam engines either sitting in place and working
or chugging around the landscape. They’ve been doing it for better than seven hours now, and so far neither the kinetic bombardment platform nor whatever the hell those energy sources under the Temple are seem to have been taking any notice at all. So if the ‘Archangels’ did set up any kind of automatic technology-killing surveillance program, it doesn’t look like simple steam engines are high
enough tech to break through the filters.”

“I almost wish we’d gotten
some
reaction out of them, though,” Cayleb said in a far more thoughtful tone, forgetting to glower at his beloved wife. “In a lot of ways, I would’ve been happier if the platforms had sent some kind of ‘Look, I see some steam engines!’ message to the Temple and nothing had happened. At least then I’d feel more confident that
if there
is
some command loop to anything under the damned place, whatever the anything was, it wasn’t going to tell the platforms to kill the engines. As it is, we can’t be sure something’s not going to cause whatever the anything might be to change its mind and start issuing kill orders at a later date about something else.”

“My head hurts trying to follow that,” Sharleyan complained. He gave
her a look, and she shrugged. “Oh, I understood what you were saying, it’s just a bit … twisty for this early in the morning.”

“I understand what you’re saying, too, Cayleb,” Merlin said. “For myself, though, I’m just as glad it didn’t happen that way. Sure, it’d be a relief in some ways, but it wouldn’t actually prove anything one way or the other about the decision-making processes we’re up
against. And, to be honest, I’m just delighted we
didn’t
wake up anything under the Temple with our little test. The last thing we need is to throw anything else into the equation—especially anything that might decide to take the Group of Four’s side!”

“There’s something to that,” Cayleb agreed, and Sharleyan nodded feelingly.

None of them felt the least bit happy about the energy signatures
Merlin had detected under the Temple. The native-born Safeholdians’ familiarity with technology remained largely theoretical and vastly incomplete, but they were more than willing to take Merlin’s and Owl’s word that the signatures they were seeing seemed to indicate something more than just the heating and cooling plant and maintenance equipment necessary to keep the “mystic” Temple environment
up and running. As Cayleb had said, it would be nice to know that whatever those additional signatures represented wasn’t going to instruct the orbital kinetic platforms which had transformed the Alexandria Enclave into Armageddon Reef nine hundred years before to start killing the first steam engines they saw even after it had been told about them. On the other hand, if whatever was under the Temple
(assuming there really was something and they weren’t all just being constructively paranoid) was “asleep,” keeping it that way as long as possible seemed like a very good idea.

“I agree with you, Merlin,” Howsmyn said. “Still, as the person most likely to catch a kinetic bombardment if it turns out we’re wrong about this, I have to admit I’m a little worried about how persistence might play
into this from the platforms’ side.”

“That’s why I said it looks good
so far,
” Merlin replied with a nod none of the others could see. “It’s entirely possible there’s some kind of signal-over-time filter built into the platforms’ sensors. I know it’s tempting to think of all the ‘Archangels’ as megalomaniac lunatics, but they weren’t all
totally
insane, after all. So I’d like to think that whoever
took over after Commodore Pei killed Langhorne at least had sense enough to not order the ‘Rakurai’ to shoot on sight the instant it detected something which
might
be a violation of the Proscriptions. I can think of several natural phenomena that could be mistaken at first glance for the kind of industrial or technological processes the Proscriptions are supposed to prevent. So I think—or hope,
at least—that it’s likely Langhorne’s successors would have considered the same possibility.

“For now, at least, what we’re showing them is a complex of obviously artificial temperature sources moving around on several islands spread over a total area of roughly a hundred thousand square miles. If they look a little more closely, they’ll get confirmation that they’re ‘steam engines,’ and Owl
will be turning them on and off, just as he’ll be stopping the ‘trains’ at ‘stations’ at intervals.” He shrugged. “We’ve got enough power to keep the emitters going literally for months, and Owl’s remotes can handle anything that might come up in the way of glitches. My vote is that we do just that. Let them run for at least a month or two. If we don’t get any reaction out of the platforms or those
energy sources under the Temple in that long, I think we’ll be reasonably safe operating on the assumption that we can get away with at least introducing steam. We’re a long way from my even wanting to experiment with how they’ll react to
electricity,
but just steam will be a huge advantage, even if we’re limited to direct drive applications.”

“That’s for certain,” Howsmyn agreed feelingly. “The
hydro accumulators are an enormous help, and thank God Father Paityr signed off on them! But they’re big, clunky, and expensive. I can’t build the things up at the mine sites, either, and if I can get away with using steam engines instead of dragons for traction on the railways here at the foundry, it’ll only be a matter of time—and not a lot of that—before some clever soul sees the possibilities
where genuine railroads are concerned.” He snorted in amusement. “For that matter, if someone else doesn’t see the possibilities, after a couple of months of running them around the foundries it’ll be reasonable enough for
me
to experience another ‘moment of inspiration.’ I’m developing quite a reputation for intuitive genius, you know.”