Spheres of Influence-eARC (43 page)

Chapter 54.

Many of the Councilors shrank back or leapt to their feet in consternation.
Whatever they were expecting, it sure by all the hells of space wasn’t
this
,
DuQuesne thought sourly. Wu Kung immediately interposed himself between as many of the newcomers and Ariane as he could.
And if people don’t keep their heads, Wu’s going to start
breaking
them.

But not everyone was panicked or confused. Saul merely turned his head slowly to gaze at Jill Esterhauer. “General? What are you doing?”

“I said it would be better if we
could
vote on this,” the general said, her voice now even more iron-hard. “But judging on the interest vectors and reactions, I am afraid that Ariane Austin would win that vote, and I cannot allow it.
We
cannot allow it.”

“General!” Saul was now on his feet. “Have you entirely lost your mind? I knew you were reluctant—”

“And I have learned enough now to be more than just reluctant,” she said. “You made a similar decision fifty years ago, Commander Maginot; one that, if you failed, would ruin you forever—if it didn’t kill you. The same is true here; I believe that we are faced with one of the most subtle and dangerous attacks we have ever seen, and it very nearly succeeded. It still
may
succeed, if I do not contain this problem here and now.”

She looked down at Ariane, Simon, and the others. “Please do not resist. If this becomes a fight, innocent people will be hurt. That is not my intent.”

“You
will
explain—or there
will
be a fight, and I do not think you will like the ending!” Wu Kung said. His teeth were bared, his tail lashing. DuQuesne gestured furiously at Wu to stand down, but he didn’t have much hope of having an effect.
If this
does
go south, there’s nothing that’s going to hold Wu back…and these people have
no
idea what he’s capable of.

“You are one of the clues, Sun Wu Kung.” She looked to DuQuesne. “Marc C. DuQuesne, hidden in plain sight. Survivor of Hyperion. You and Captain Austin traveled to another location prior to your return to the Arena—and came back with Wu Kung. Another Hyperion. Upon your return to the solar system, you then went to yet another location—one of the Counter Earth stations—and report some sort of murder of mysterious patients under the care of a doctor who has yet to recover. Instead of the local authorities, Saul Maginot sends a very specialized team to oversee the investigation.”

Sweet spirits of niter, as Rich used to say. It does sound damn peculiar the way she’s putting it.

“And you return, Captain Austin, having imprisoned both Ambassador Naraj and Deputy Ambassador Ni Deng…but their own intended bodyguard appears to have become a member of your inner circle. Oasis Abrams…or
is
that actually her name?”

Great
Space
, I think I see where her paranoia’s going,
DuQuesne sent to the others.
And with the right guidance it’s gonna be convincing as hell.

Simon’s face was grim—and yet distracted.
That sense of his is operating some even here. But it’s not giving him a clear sense of
what
the threat is, I can tell by the way he’s looking around.

“Then, of course, we have the Hyperion criminal Maria-Susanna—who had contact with
you
, Doctor Sandrisson, for some considerable time prior to your initial departure, and who—despite her reputation as a psychopathic murderer—did not harm you, nor any of your group, either here or in the Arena.

“General,” Robert Fenelon said, with a somewhat testy note in his voice, “I suppose I can—if I squint rather hard—see a possible pattern in all that, but really, that’s hardly enough to—”

“I am not without evidence—considerably more solid evidence,” General Esterhauer said, not taking her eyes from Ariane. “I won’t divulge all at this time, but to give one example: I am in possession of essentially incontrovertible evidence that the woman calling herself ‘Oasis Abrams’ is neither the Oasis Abrams who enlisted in the nascent Combined Space Forces fifty years ago, nor any direct relative of hers.” She looked straight at Oasis, who gazed back stonily. “In fact, whoever she is, she appeared immediately after Hyperion, and the original Oasis Abrams…was never seen again.”

DuQuesne winced.
Oh, that’s going to be a hard one to explain away.

She looked at Saul. “Hyperion, where it all changed. Hyperion, the event so terrible that it changed the way the Solar System worked, created the Combined Space Forces and the Space Security Council in their current form, and changed stellar law to give actual power to a system-wide government for the first time. Which gave you, Commander Maginot, control over what government Humanity had for fifty years.

“Hyperion, where secret operations became more secret, where new beings of unknown capabilities were created for purposes so hidden in propaganda and confusion that no one seems to even know exactly
what
happened—or how many survived. Hyperion, whose ‘experiments’ were supposed to be superior beings, engineered with techniques untested and forbidden for use on normal human beings, superior beings derived from various works of fiction. Sherlock Holmes; Verne’s scientific romances, Godin’s
Meru
series, Heinlein’s classic works, simgame heroes and protagonists from ancient movies and books…” Her gaze shifted. “Such as Doctor Marc C. DuQuesne.”

“Blast it,” DuQuesne muttered, then straightened up.
This could be it.

“I had my AISages check all the references, Doctor. Your original—quite an ambitious man. A patient man, a clever man, and one quite willing to deceive, manipulate, and even betray when the stakes were high enough. Someone with charisma enough to convince others of his motives, to draw them into his plans—and certain of his proper place above everyone else.”

And that’s a pretty good description of “Blackie” DuQuesne. Problem is…
“I’m…not like him. They didn’t exactly design me that way—”

“So you would say, of course,” General Esterhauer said. “But I see a different pattern—one that also leads to me wondering if even Captain Ariane Austin is the woman who left the Unlimited Racing circuit to join Sandrisson’s crew. Has another substitution happened, when Dr. DuQuesne took her to a hidden location in search of more Hyperions? Or something worse, when she channeled a power we don’t even begin to understand?”

Her voice was increasing with conviction every moment, and DuQuesne finally understood.
Yeah, she sees the pattern,
he sent to the others,
because someone’s been
showing
it to her, with appropriate subtle nudges to her subconscious, for months. Interface suborned, I’d bet.

Your Visualization is sound, youth,
came Mentor’s sonorous transmitted voice.
The manipulation of communications is clearly of a piece with that work.

DuQuesne saw Simon suddenly freeze, his eyes narrow and then widen, a look of clear understanding spreading across his face. The transmission Simon sent to Mentor and him was heavily encrypted.
If you are right, Marc, then our unknown factor will be watching the situation and ready to trigger something if his, her, or its plan seems about to be disrupted.

DuQuesne felt a shock in his gut.
Sure as God made little green apples. You got something, Simon?

Mentor, if you and DuQuesne can locate all her legitimate group members…I am certain that this unknown is
not
present in this room, or even immediately adjacent ones. Can the two of you, together, screen out or intercept any exterior transmissions?

A WORTHY CONCEPT
, boomed the pseudo-voice of Mentor.
Our adversary may of course have other mental conditionals in operation—contingencies, logic bombs, and so on—but this will certainly reduce the ability to play the game by remote. Yes, Simon Sandrisson, together I believe we can do this
.

Then let’s get cracking, O Manipulator of Civilization,
DuQuesne said, tense but hopeful. He opened up a full connection.
Isaac? Gimme full net access, and back me up. We’re doing some serious cyberwarfare in a minute, or I miss my guess badly.

Hmph. Just remember that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent—

Yeah,
DuQuesne interrupted with a grin,
because the competent resort to violence MUCH sooner, before it’s too late!

“But the fact is that even all of that is just a side issue,” the general went on, startling the entire group. “The real point is that—whether this is some long-term plan by survivors of Hyperion, or simply Ariane Austin’s considered decision, it is the most dangerous plan I have ever seen.”

She looked first at White Camilla, but then to Saul, and there was a note of appeal—not pleading, but definitely reaching, trying to draw others to her cause. “Commander Maginot, members of the Space Security Council and the Combined Space Forces—we are the most free society the solar system has ever seen. We have so few laws, so few controls on our actions, that even after Hyperion we have had the smallest military force in the history of mankind, compared to our numbers. We didn’t have a large enough military establishment to support the research on our defenses against the Arena’s Factions—we depend on private sim focus groups, players of games whose entertainment happens to also hold the key to our defenses. Most of us—approaching sixty billion—answer to no one and nothing save our own consciences.

“And now one person—one woman—will be in charge, the effective ruler of humanity? This is not just a step backwards, it is a complete and utter reversal of our civilization, back to the days of empires.” She looked levelly at Ariane. “And though you
say
we could give a time limit, ten years is still a long time, and one in which someone with near unlimited power could easily find ways to make ten into twenty, twenty into a hundred, and a hundred into forever.”

DuQuesne looked to Ariane, knowing how this echoed Ariane’s own fears. Her gaze flickered from Esterhauer to her friends, and he could see the uncertainty there, as she looked into Simon’s eyes. She was focused enough, now, that they could at least make the connection to her.
Ariane…
Simon sent.

She’s right, you know. Even if she’s wrong.

An electronic sigh came from Simon.
Yes. Yes, she is. But at the same time…

It’s all right, Simon.
DuQuesne felt her decision—though he couldn’t quite see it—and saw her straighten, looking for an instant to him; he gave her a simple nod and then returned his focus to the network that was overlaid on every activity throughout Kanzaki-Three.

Marc C. DuQuesne, I have isolated fifty-nine percent of the active threads and processes in the room.

I’ve got most of the rest. I think Vincent and Mio have the few left.

Everyone had a different experience of the raw network; to DuQuesne, networks were brilliant spiderwebs of light, pulsing and flickering, with symbols that he could read that told him what the traffic was, allowed him to
see
how information was moving around him, then—in a situation like this—mapped the network traffic to the real world. Unlike most people, he could actually grasp the entirety of the local net and its relationships—
one more backhanded gift from Hyperion; they tried to make me able to comprehend hyperdimensional physics they’d made up, and now I find it’s not entirely useless
. Now, in the sealed Council chamber, there was one faint, almost undetectable line of light that passed the virtual boundaries; all the rest were sealed off, self-contained within the chamber.
That’s our meddler. Monitoring. But if he opens a channel…

Marc DuQuesne,
Mentor said through the Network,
you have the scope and power of vision necessary; be sure, therefore, that you attend to what is happening in the physical world as well as here. It may be that a sign or signal will be given there as trigger.

Good thought, Mentor. I’m on it.

With considerable effort, he focused on the overlay, brought up a perception of things as they were happening in the physical here-and-now. It was
hard
to do; time perception in the electronic world and that in the physical world were not the same thing, for all that the same clocks might mark the passage of seconds. The physical world, where Ariane was confronting the general, was molasses-slow, yet almost infinitely complex compared to most network overlays except in the world-simulations. Scarcely a second or two had passed; Ariane was only now answering General Esterhauer’s speech, and he heard her through a shimmering halo of data that dusted his perceptions with stars.

“You are very eloquent, General—and you’re right, in some ways,” Ariane said calmly. DuQuesne could guess just how
hard
it must be for her to stay calm.

“In some ways?” repeated the general.

A shimmering pulse streaked from the general, echoed through the forces she was obviously directing.
A directive to attack? No…she’s telling them to wait.
He felt a surge of cautious optimism.
She really doesn’t want a fight, and she’s starting to listen. Maybe this will work out.

Ariane laughed. “In almost all ways, really. Did you think I came to this decision easily? That I
want
to be this stupid ‘Leader of the Faction of Humanity’? All those things you’re afraid of—I’m afraid of them too. Afraid of
not
being afraid of myself one day. Afraid I’ll accept too many expediencies without thinking enough about them.

“But,” she held up her hand as General Esterhauer was about to speak, “at the same time I am
terrified
of what is going to happen to us if we’re playing idiotic power games within our own tiny faction while the Molothos close in on us. We can’t
afford
it. If things had gone just a little differently, you’d already have someone
else
as the Leader of Humanity—maybe one of my friends, maybe not—the entirety of the secrets of Humanity that I know would be in the hands of the Blessed To Serve, and worse. Our ally Orphan would almost certainly be dead, his faction gone with him, and you wouldn’t even know how it
happened
. All because people had
already
decided I wasn’t the person for the job.”