Nilis laughed out loud. “You have spent a long time studying human idioms.”
“We have little else to do,” the Ghost said.
“So,” Darc growled, “what do you suggest instead?”
“It would be better to operate the projector when it is being carried at close to lightspeed.”
Nilis frowned. He walked up to the image and poked his finger into its shining innards. “But that would bring us up to this region.” It was the complex border between order and chaos. “The shield would be no more than meta-stable.”
“But solutions in this part of the phase space, on the edge of chaos, would be responsive to small adjustments.”
“Ah.” Nilis nodded. “Which would make the shield more manageable, because it would respond more sensitively; we could control out the instabilities before a catastrophic disruption.”
Darc was visibly unhappy. “How rapidly would we have to react?” He brought up a Virtual of his own, ran some quick calculations. “There,” he said in triumph. “Look at that! Your meta-stable shield will flap like a sheet in a breeze. There’s no way we could react quickly enough to respond to it.”
“Of course you could,” the Ambassador said. “You have arbitrarily high processing speeds available on your ship. Your CTC-processor technology—”
Darc shot to his feet and stalked up to the Ghost, fists clenched. “Is that the game? How do you even know about that? If you think I am going to let you anywhere near the CTC system—”
Nilis said, “Commander, please. We’re simply discussing possibilities.”
Darc remained standing, glaring at the Ghost. “Why are you doing this? Humans destroyed your kind. Why would you help your conquerors?”
“Curiosity,” the Ghost said.
“And nothing else?” Darc asked heavily.
“Nothing. You recreated us at a whim. You could destroy us as easily. We have no hope.”
Darc’s eyes narrowed with suspicion, but he stayed silent.
Nilis was still thinking over the idea. “This would actually simplify the overall design, of course… You don’t seem happy, Ensign.”
Torec said, “I’m a pilot, sir. No pilot likes giving up control.”
“Hmm. I can sympathize with that. And of course this sort of active-control system isn’t without risks. You would go into battle behind an intrinsically unstable system. If the CTC failed, you would die immediately.”
“But we all die one day, Commissary.”
He embarrassed her by allowing his eyes to fill up. “Lethe, this laconic courage — I’m sorry! I can’t get used to it.”
The Ghost said, “You have one more test ship.”
“One more chance,” Nilis said. “The modifications would be straightforward.” He stared at Darc.
Darc held his stubborn stance for a moment, then seemed to give in. “All right. Lethe take this whole plagued project! But what are we to do for a crew?”
Torec sat up straight. “I’m willing to give it another go, sir.”
Nilis said, “I’d expect nothing less. But we must make this crucial trial work. I would suggest that the ensign’s ideal crewmates are in this room.”
Darc stared at him, then at the Ghost, which rolled silently. “You have got to be joking.”
But he wasn’t.
Chapter 27
“The Central Star Mass,” Nilis said. “Isn’t that what you call it, Pirius Blue? The Mass — what a mundane name for a place where you can find ten million stars in a space a few light-years across — a volume in which, at the Galactic vicinity of Sol, you would on average find one. How marvelous, that we feeble humans should have come so far!”
He had called Pirius Blue to the small quarters he had been allocated in Quin’s Officer Country. His face shining with enthusiasm, his long robe as scuffed and threadbare as ever, he bumbled around the room, setting out his data desks on the low table. The Commissary was just as Pirius remembered from the trial, though he seemed older, rather more careworn. But Nilis hadn’t been prepared for Pirius’s new eyes; at first sight he had recoiled, his shock comical.
This wasn’t the real Commissary, of course. Nilis was too busy with his mysterious projects in Sol system to come all the way to the center again in person. This was only a Virtual.
Nilis was still struggling to get political support for his schemes. He said he had forced his way into Quin Base on a pretext. He had managed to persuade his bosses at the Commission for Historical Truth that it was time somebody took a fresh look at the deviant religions sprouting here in the Core. But quizzing This Burden Must Pass about the nature of the Ultimate Observer was not Nilis’s true goal.
“Let me get this straight,” Pirius said. “Sir,” he added.
Nilis waved that away. “Please, please. We know each other too well for formality!”
But he was talking about a different Pirius, Blue thought, indeed a different Nilis. “You want to send a scouting mission inside the Front — into the Cavity. You want to fly to Chandra itself.”
“Or as close as we can get to it, yes.”
Nilis talked rapidly about the great project he was devising out at Sol’s lonely orbit — aided, in part, by Pirius’s own younger self, his FTL twin Pirius Red. Pirius Blue had heard nothing of this before, and he was stunned by Project Prime Radiant’s scope and ambition.
“But if we are to strike successfully we have to know more about Chandra itself,” Nilis said. “Even after three thousand years of war here at the Galaxy’s heart, we still know woefully little.”
And that, he said, was where Pirius Blue came in.
“You want me to fly the mission.”
“To scope it out, define, it, choose a crew… Yes! You will be the commander, Pirius Blue. It will be a historic flight.”
“Historic? Suicidal.”
Nilis said gravely, “Suicidal? Not necessarily. There are many myths about this war, Pirius Blue. We are locked into ways of thinking, ways of fighting. After three thousand years of stasis we have talked ourselves into believing that taking the war to the Xeelee is reckless, even suicidal, as you say. But we’re only talking about a scouting mission! And how do you know it would be suicidal? Do you know how long it is since a mission of this type was actually studied? I’ve looked high and low and I can’t find one — a long time indeed! — even though the information is of such obvious value. But everybody knows it’s impossible. And of course, I am reluctantly coming to see, there are plenty in high places with a vested interest in the war not being concluded…”
“Sir?”
“Never mind. Anyhow, as commander it would be your duty to make the mission survivable, wouldn’t it?”
Pirius was full of doubt. Everything Nilis said sounded reasonable — and exciting. But it also conflicted with his training, everything he had been brought up to believe.
Nilis said, a little exasperated, “Look — I would not order you to do this. Yes, there are obvious dangers; yes, you might not survive — and, yes, I am asking you to have faith in me, in a fat old fool from Earth. But the mission is, quite simply, vitally necessary. We must know more.” He watched Pirius’s face with a kind of wistful longing. “Oh, Pirius, this is such a strange encounter. I feel I know you so well! Look at you now, the way you hold your head when you listen to me, your seriousness, your focus on your duty, even the play of the light in your eyes. You’re so familiar. And yet it’s Pirius Red I’ve come to know, and you don’t know me at all, save for your brief encounter with a bumbling old fool at your hearing! It’s so strange, so strange. Sometimes I think that by hurling ourselves around the Galaxy faster than the speed of light we are pushing our humanity too far.”