The robot said nothing. It seemed to have shut itself off.
HOURS PASSED. RUE'S sinuses hurt and her ears kept popping painfully. Her private inscape told her she was being subjected to mounting air pressure that her circulatory nano were having a tough time compensating for. They kept popping up windows in the corner of her vision, asking whether she could please eat some silicon and iron so that they could start building more units. They anticipated a need to protect her from the bends at a later time. There was nothing to eat in the cube, so she ignored them.
She and Herat continued to plead with the robot to let them talk to someone in authority, but it continued to ignore them. Mike sat on the sidelines, looking despondent; he was polite but not warm when she spoke to him. It was frustrating to face walls of silence on two sides.
Just when Rue was eyeing one of the cots in resigned exhaustion, the robot jerked and stepped forward. "Apologies," it said. "Our apologies."
Rue's ears popped and simultaneously an inscape window appeared. Her nano were telling her that the air pressure was dropping again.
"What the hell is going on here?" demanded Herat.
A new inscape window opened in the center of the room— a public one, obviously, from the way the others looked at it.
The abbot of the monastery of Permanence, Griffin, stood there. He held out his hands in a supplicatory gesture. "We are so sorry, gentlemen, captain. We just found out about your rescue. It seems the military police who fished you out of the ocean had some trouble ascertaining your identity, because the I.D. tags of your sub had been lasered off."
Barendts grinned sheepishly and shrugged.
"We've been talking ourselves hoarse for hours," said Herat. "Wasn't anybody listening?"
Griffin looked, if possible, even more embarrassed. "There's a local human rights policy that forbade the police from taking a deposition from you without a human physically present. It comes from an old case of long-distance interrogation, the ugly details of which I won't go into. And there were… further complications… due to where you chose to be rescued."
"What complications?" asked Rue. She was rapidly tiring of Oculus and all its political mazes.
"It appears you've stumbled on a military secret that no one, least of all citizens of the Rights Economy, is supposed to know about."
"What secret?" But even as she said this, Rue remembered the strange spikelike things they had seen in the cavern above.
"Please, this is a very sensitive matter. We're reversing your pressure equalization and will have you shipped topside immediately. These are matters that we cannot discuss through inscape, due to," the abbot coughed politely, "certain parties' uncomfortable skills with inscape hacking." His image looked directly at Barendts.
"Hey, don't look at me," said Barendts. "I'm just here for the food."
TWELVE HOURS LATER Rue stood in the lavish council chamber of the Permanence monastery. Once again she faced an array of faces around the oak table that dominated the room. The faces were different this time and Rue suspected that these men and women were the real powers of the Cycler Compact.
The politician Mallory was conspicuously missing.
Rue had been separated from the others early on their journey up here. She was assured that Mike, Herat, and Barendts were safe and were being taken care of. They were citizens of a foreign power, however, and it was time to discuss matters that they should not know about.
She resented the implication; as soon as Rue saw Mike and Herat again, she was going to fill them in on the situation, no matter what was said in this council chamher. She trusted them. Of course, there was no way she was going to tell that to the military police who had escorted her here.
Captain Li was present. He stood up as she entered; the others followed suit. "Captain Cassels," he began gravely, "let me express my deepest condolences on the loss of your cousin."
Rue had been all business, but this simple gesture stopped her. She felt her eyes filling with tears and wiped them angrily away.
"Yes, well," she said, as she dropped herself into an empty chair. "Thank you. But let's get on with things, shall we?"
Li nodded and sat, as did the others. Rue tried to still the quivering of her lip by biting it.
"You've been briefed on the overall situation," said a woman Rue did not recognize. "After the murder of your cousin and your disappearance, Admiral Crisler exercised diplomatic immunity and retreated to your magsail with his people. You had already secured beam time from the monastery and with the help of Mallory's people, Crisler got the schedule moved up. They left two days ago and are now nearing the outskirts of the Colossus system."
"Rebecca went with them?" asked Rue for the tenth time. She couldn't understand why her doctor and friend had deserted her.
"She did," said Travis Li. "We spoke before she left; she genuinely believed you were dead. She told me that she wanted to defend the Envy from Mallory's people— first of all by making sure crew members Laurel and Chandra learned, as she put it, 'what really happened on Oculus. »
"I see. Thank you, Captain." This time, she held her expression completely neutral.
Captain Li continued. "We know now that Crisler has committed high crimes, but it is absolutely forbidden to withdraw beam power from a cycler cargo once it's on its way," he said. "You understand the sanctity of the Compact's laws? We have to honor our commitments regardless of local consequences." She nodded.
"We'll be questioning your companions about Crisler and the rebellion against the Rights Economy," said Griffin. "Don't worry, it won't be an interrogation. But we want to get your impressions most of all, as a citizen of the halo. We know Mallory's people have cut a deal with the R.E.; they want to abolish the Compact and make us dependent on the R.E." The abbot scowled, shaking his head. "They paint it as an opportunity, but it's really a power grab; we think Mallory and his cabal have been promised rights to all commercial travel between the lit worlds and the halo. As Rights Owners, they'd become fabulously wealthy…"
"And we'd be paying them to communicate with our own people," finished Rue. The prospect was appalling, but had its own sick logic.
She told the assembly the scenario she had worked out with Mike and Barendts, wherein Mallory got the Envy and Crisler whatever treasure lay at Apophis and Osiris. "Crisler is looking for some ultimate weapon he can use against the rebels and he thinks it's to be found at the Twins. We have to head him off."
"Why?" asked an elderly woman. "What does it matter to us if the R.E. tears itself apart? In fact, why shouldn't we just sit back and let them do it?"
Rue told them about the probability that Crisler's von Neumann machines would have to target alien worlds as well as human in order to guarantee wiping out the rebels. "This would amount to humanity declaring war against all other sentient life," she said. "I don't believe we could be neutral and I don't believe we could let it happen without being party to genocide beyond anything we've ever witnessed before. Do you really want that on your hands?"
They shifted uncomfortably; she could see they did not relish the prospect.
"But if you need a reason that's more… self-interested…" she said slowly, "think about this: If we're right and Crisler certainly believes as we do… if we're right, then what is waiting for us at Apophis and Osiris is some kind of technology that would make it easier for us to produce cyclers. Maybe they would produce themselves, we don't know. If Crisler gets his hands on it, we lose…" She shrugged. "Well, we lose everything. I think it's fair to say we lose the Compact. After all, who's building new cyclers these days?" She looked around the table.