So Pirius stood up, walked to the front of the room, and thought for a moment. He waved his hand to banish Nilis’s expensive Virtual displays, leaving only the whiteboard, and he picked up a stylus. With an apologetic glance at Nilis, he drew a red asterisk at the right hand side of the board. “Sir, I believe there are three fundamental problems. First, even if we could get through the Xeelee defenses in the region of Chandra” — he tapped the asterisk — “we don’t have any weapons that can strike at a black hole, and whatever the Xeelee are doing with it.”
“Of course not,” said Luru Parz. “How could we, since we’ve put no effort into finding out what the Prime Radiant actually is?… Go on, Ensign.”
Pirius drew a red circle around the asterisk. “Second problem. We can’t get through to Chandra anyhow, because if we could get close enough to engage the Xeelee’s inner defensive cordon, they would surely outfly us, outthink us. Their equipment is better than ours. Most important, their computing capability is superior.
“And third” — Pirius drew a dotted line reaching back to the left of the asterisk, and cut it through with a vertical line — “we can’t even get that close, because of FTL foreknowledge. The Xeelee would see us coming, and shoot us down before we left our bases.” He hesitated, looked at his sketch, and sat down.
He won an ironic slow clap from Gramm. “Admirably summarized.” The Minister raised an eyebrow at the Commissary. “Nilis? I hope you won’t claim now that you have a solution to all these problems?”
“No, sir. Not all of them. But, thanks to Pirius and his companions, I can solve one.” He walked to the whiteboard, picked up a stylus and tapped at the red circle Pirius had drawn around the Prime Radiant. “We may have a way to beat Xeelee processing power. It’s uncertain — Pirius Blue and his colleagues improvised it in the middle of combat — but we can take the concept, and build on it. Minister, we can outthink the Xeelee. I know that’s true, because we’ve done it once already. And if one of these ancient obstacles can at least in principle be overcome, then perhaps we can defeat the rest. Suddenly we see a chink of light; suddenly we have hope.”
Luru Parz was nodding. “Yes, yes. It was this strange news from the Front which drew my attention, too. A new hope.” And that was why she had forced her way into this meeting, Pirius saw, apparently over the objections of a Minister. Whoever this strange woman was, she had power — and her ambition seemed to be a mirror of Nilis’s.
Gramm glared at Nilis. “And that’s all you have to say? This is the case you’re going to make? Can you not see, Commissary, how you will make an enemy of almost everybody in authority if you go around claiming that better minds than yours have, for millennia, been pursuing the wrong targets — with the wrong weapons, too?”
Pirius saw that Nilis was struggling to control his anger. “Those ’better minds’ have been locked into a rigidity of thinking for all those long millennia, Minister.”
“Don’t go too far, Commissary,” Gramm said.
Nilis dismissed that with a wave. “I’m well aware that it wouldn’t be your decision alone, Minister, so let’s not play games. All I want at the beginning is seed-corn funding, enough to get us to proof-of- concept of the pilots’ new closed-timelike-curve computing paradigm. When that’s successfully demonstrated, we can move to the next stage, and ask for further funding to be released, stepwise. The political and financial control of the Coalition and the relevant Ministry over every stage of the project would be absolute—”
“You can bet your life it would,” Gramm shouted.
“Ask for more,” Luru Parz said immediately.
Nilis looked confused.
“Ask for more,” she said again. “We work in ignorance. We’ve seen that today. We have to start a new program of inquiry; we have to understand our enemy, at last. We can begin with your captive Xeelee, Commissary. But we have to find out more about them — especially their Prime Radiant — if we are to defeat them.”
Nilis had no choice but to nod. “You’re right, of course.”
Luru pressed Gramm. “Minister, these requests are undeniably reasonable — and politically, will be hard to refuse. After all, Nilis and his heroes and his captive Xeelee have made a real stir here on Earth. If there was no follow-up, questions would surely be asked. Even under the Coalition, public opinion counts for something.”
Gramm grunted. “The power of the mob. Which the Commissary no doubt intended to stir up when he marched his two pet soldiers through the streets of the Conurbation.”
Pirius glanced at Nilis. Could it be true that Nilis had been so manipulative as to use them to further his own ends in such a way? There was much of the doings of Earth he had yet to understand.
But he had listened to this meeting unfold with increasing irritation. He felt bold enough to speak again. “Minister, Commissary — I’m sorry — I don’t understand all this talk of control and caution and stepwise funding. Isn’t winning the war what this is all about? Why don’t we just do this?”
Gramm raised his eyebrows. “Bravely spoken,” he said with quiet menace. “But no matter what gossip you’ve heard in your barracks at the Front, we don’t have infinite resources, Ensign. We can’t do everything.”
“But it’s not just that,” said Luru Parz. “Ensign, my dear child, how sweetly naive you are — but I suppose you have to be or you wouldn’t be prepared to fight in the first place. Is winning the war really what we want to achieve? What would Minister Gramm do all day if there were no more need for a Minister of Economic Warfare? I’m not sure our system of government could withstand the shock of victory.”
Gramm glared at Luru Parz, but didn’t challenge her.
Recklessly Pirius said to Gramm, “I don’t care about any of that. We have to try to win the war. It’s our duty, sir.”
Gramm looked at him, surprised, then threw his head back and laughed out loud, spraying bits of food into the air. “You dare lecture a Minister on duty? Lethe, this pet of yours has spirit, Commissary!”
“But he’s right,” Nilis said, shaking his shaven head gravely.
Luru pressed again, “So he is. You have to support this, Minister.”
Gramm growled, “And I will be flayed in Conclave for it. I would have thought you would be the most conservative of all of us, Luru Parz.”
She smiled. “I am conservative — very conservative. I just work on timescales you can’t imagine.”
Gramm actually shuddered, hugely. Again Pirius wondered who this woman was, what hold she had.
Pila, Gramm’s elegant advisor, watched this wordlessly, her lips upturned with disdainful humor. Throughout the whole of the meeting, as far as Pirius could remember, she hadn’t said a single word.
When the meeting broke up, Nilis came to the ensigns, his eyes shining. “Thank you, thank you. I knew my hunch was right, to bring you here — you have made all the difference! Project Prime Radiant — that’s what we’ll call it — Project Prime Radiant was born today. And the way you spoke back to the Minister — I will be dining out on that for years to come!”
Torec glared at Pirius, who said dolefully, “Yes, sir.”
“And now we have work to do, a great deal of work. The Minister has given us seven weeks to report — not long, not even reasonable, but it will have to do. Are you with me, Ensigns?”
Pirius studied this flawed old man, a man who had dragged him from his training, from his life, had hauled him across the Galaxy and then paraded him to further his own ends — and yet, flawed though he might be, Nilis was working for victory. Pirius could see no higher duty. “Yes, sir.”