The Outsiders, with their level of tech, would crack military codes faster than anyone. That they chose now to bug out meant something. What did they know that he didn’t? His gut insisted that mayhem, at a deadlier intensity than ever, was about to break out near Endurance.
Tanj it!
Sigmund had spent his life imagining what “normal” people found inconceivable. That was how one uncovered conspiracies. That was what had made him valuable as an ARM agent. That was how, time and again, he had saved New Terra.
It was time again to confront the inconceivable.
The minister was all but as timid as a Puppeteer. Did a person like that innocently get appointed to run the Ministry of Defense? Or were people high in the government working for the Puppeteers?
“I WASN’T EXPECTING to hear from you,” Alice said. Certainly not one-on-one; after the fireworks of the last mass debrief, the bigger surprise was that Sigmund still had access to the Ministry’s long-range hyperwave gear.
It was only comm delay, but Sigmund seemed to stare at her from the console.
“You know how it is,” he finally answered.
She managed not to react. From long ago, the innocent phrase was code for We need to speak in private. She set her pocket comp on the comm-console shelf and activated what Sigmund called protocol gamma: sound suppression, bug suppression, and a holographic screen to stymie lip-readers.
“Countermeasures are active, Sigmund. Now what’s this about?”
“The minister is not seeing reason.”
Norquist-Ng could hardly eavesdrop on her end of the link, and Alice doubted Sigmund wanted her to undercut his own granddaughter. So they were keeping secrets from Nessus, still ensconced in front of the pilot’s console. With the activation of the countermeasures, his irritating humming had faded into white noise.
Without the holo screen, could Nessus have read her lips? She didn’t put it past him. But it had been Sigmund’s idea to bring Nessus. Wheels within wheels …
She said, “And you suppose Nessus won’t see reason, either.”
“He always has —
“His own agenda,” she completed. “I know.” The Puppeteer might have been a valuable resource, but the Ringworld was gone. Nessus’ priority would revert — had reverted — to keeping Earth ignorant of the Concordance’s erstwhile slave colony.
“We don’t dare not contact the ARM,” Sigmund said. “Not with Kzinti fleets so near.”
Until yesterday, everything she knew about the Kzinti she had heard from Sigmund. She hadn’t doubted that hostile feline aliens existed, but that was no reason to obsess. It just hadn’t seemed credible that the Kzinti could be as aggressive as he claimed — not after losing successive wars to humans — and she had taken his foreboding as the paranoia speaking.
No longer. Not after watching those lens-shaped ships in action …
“It’s not our decision to make,” she said, shivering.
“True, we lack the authority. On the basis of qualifications, don’t you think the answer is different? Millions of lives are at stake.”
The worst of it was, she agreed with Sigmund. That didn’t give them the right to decide for everyone on New Terra.
Wait. How had he gotten access to a Ministry comm channel to plot sedition? “You’re working with someone in the Ministry,” she said. The notion made joining him in rebellion more palatable. Maybe.
“You could say that.”
And maybe not. Knowing Sigmund, she guessed that that someone wasn’t cooperating by choice. Someone embezzling from the Ministry? Sloppy with classified information? Sigmund had always made it his business to know. He had never admitted, even to her, every trap and back door hidden in the Ministry’s computer systems.
“Let’s say I agree with you,” Alice said. “What then?”
“Then you and Julia decide if you can safely reach out to the ARM.” For a moment, the demented mastermind paranoid expression melted to simple human worry. “I stress, safely.
“If you succeed in making contact, the story for everyone here will be that an ARM ship reached out to you.”
18
Some elements of the current investigation were well established: Eleven-dimensional tensors for the quantum-gravitational-field model. The differential geometry that had proven itself useful, if only empirically, in past analyses of hyperspace. Multiverse matrix mechanics.
Ol’t’ro lost themselves in the beauty of the mathematics.
But multiverse theory embraced an infinite number of possibilities. The equations had no known closed-form solution, and offered scant guidance which approximations might converge, even given the massively parallel, reconfigurable computers of the —
“Your Wisdom,” a timid voice intruded into the sealed melding chamber.
Ol’t’ro ignored the intercom, but the voice returned.
“Your Wisdom, it is time. You asked that I remind you.”
Almost, they had a candidate partitioning onto the processor arrays of the latest set of equations. The granularity of the partitioning was coarser than they would have liked. If only they had another million processing nodes for the simulation —
“Your Wisdom,” the servant tried again, plaintively, a bit louder.
The gathering on Hearth is at your demand, the Cd’o unit chided. And fainter, from an imprint of one long dead, Doing science is not our main purpose on this world.
“Your Wisdom, please. Before the meld, you were most insistent.”
They had not insisted. Before the meld there could be no they. Cd’o had insisted.
Frustrated and distracted, the gestalt began to crumble. Like an underwater avalanche, slow and inexorable, the mathematical synthesis fell into ruin.
From deep within the communal mind came the image — from how long ago? — of rocks and mud cascading down the side of a seamount. When, Ol’t’ro wondered, had they last experienced the sea? Many generations, and yet within their newest units the memories remained fresh. The ice-locked, world-spanning ocean of Jm’ho. The storm-tossed seas of Kl’mo, the colony they had —
Shaking off the reverie, Ol’t’ro spoke through the microphone positioned deep within a unit’s tubacle. “Thank you,” they told the anxious servant. “That will be all.”
Binding a Proteus fragment to the meld, linking to the Hindmost’s council chamber a world away, they opened the eyes of Chiron.
“THESE ARE WORRISOME TIMES,” this most recent Hindmost sang, directing a furtive, entreating glance at his master. “Without the Ringworld to fight over, at any time three alien fleets may turn our way. We have preempted additional resources to strengthen our defenses. As that effort progresses, we may find we need to divert yet more resources.”
“And I agreed,” Ol’t’ro, through Chiron, sang. To extend Proteus would be an intriguing experiment. “Nonetheless, our own research is important. It — ”
“Worrisome times,” Selene repeated. He was new, his predecessor as Minister of Industrial Production lost to catatonic collapse at the previous cabinet meeting.
From the indifferently brushed nature of Selene’s mane, Ol’t’ro did not expect this one to last, either. They ignored the interruption. “My research could lead to a new defensive weapon.”