“What are you launching?” she asked shortly.
“Survey drone.”
“What are you surveying?”
He turned and stared at her. “I don’t remember being told you had authority to oversee anything except our military activities,” he commented.
The inspector shrugged, as if attempting to ignore the insult. “Perhaps if you told me what you were looking for, I could help you find it,” she said.
“Unlikely.” He turned away. “Status, lieutenant?”
‘Two minutes to go. Telemetry bay closeout. Ah, we have confirmation of onboard control. It’s alive in there. Waiting on ullage baffle check, launch rail windup, bay depressurization coming up in sixty seconds.“
“There’s the message capsule,” the inspector said quietly. “Hoping for a letter from home, Commander?”
“You are annoying me,” Ilya said, almost casually. “That’s a bad idea. I say, over there! Yes, you! Status please!”
“Bay pressure cell dump in progress. External launch door opening … launch rail power on the bus, probe going to internal power, switch over now. She’s on her own, sir. Launch in one minute. Final pre-flight self-test in progress.”
“It’s my job to ask uncomfortable questions, Commander. And the important question to ask now is—”
“Quiet, please!”
“—Was the artifact you’re about to prod placed there by order of your Admiralty, or by the Festival?”
“Launch in three-zero seconds,” Lieutenant Marek announced into the silence. He looked up. “Was it something I said?”
“What are you talking about?” asked Ilya.
Rachel shook her head. Arms crossed: “If you don’t want to listen, be my guest.”
“One-zero seconds to launch. Ullage pressure jets open. Reactor criticality coming up. Muon flux ramp nominal, accelerator gates clear. Um, reactor flux doubling has passed bootstrap level. Five seconds.
Launch rail is go! Main heat pump is down to operating temperature!” The deck began to shudder, vibrating deep beneath the soles of their feet. ‘Two seconds. Reactor on temperature. Umbilical separation. Zero. We have full separation now. Probe one is clear of the launch bay. Doors closing.
Gyrodyne turn in progress, ullage pressure maximal, three seconds to main engine ignition.“ The shudder died away. ”Deflection angle clear. Main engine ignition.“ In the ops room, nothing stirred; but bare meters away from the ship, the probe’s stingerlike tail spat a red-orange beam of heavy metal ions. It began to drop away from the battlecruiser: as it did so, two huge wings, the thermal radiators, began to extend from its sides.
Ilya came to a decision. “Lieutenant Marek, you have control,” he said. “Colonel. Come with me.” He opened the door; she followed him into the passage outside. “Where are we going?” she asked.
“We’re going to have a little talk,” he said. Hurrying along toward the conference suite, he didn’t wait for her to keep up. Up the elevator, along the next passage, and into a room with a table and chairs in it; thankfully unoccupied. He waited for her to enter, then shut the door. “Sit down,” he said.
The inspector sat on the edge of a chair, leaning forward, looking up at him with an earnest expression.
“You think I’m going to tear a strip off you,” he began. “And you’re right, but for the wrong reason.” She raised a hand. “Let me guess. Raising policy issues in an executive context?” She looked at him, almost mockingly. “Listen, Commander. Until I came on the deck and saw what you were doing, I didn’t know what was happening either, but now I do I think you really want to hear what I’ve got to tell you, then tell it to the Captain. Or the Commodore. Or both. Chains of command are all very well, but if you’re going to retrieve that orbiting anomaly, then I think we may have less than six hours before all hell breaks loose, and I’d like to get the message across. So if we can postpone the theatrics until we’ve got time to spare, and just get on with things …?”
“You’re trying to be disruptive,” Ilya accused.
“Yes.” She nodded. “I make a career of it. I poke into corners and ask uncomfortable questions and stick my nose into other people’s business and find answers that nobody realized were there. So far, I’ve saved eight cities and seventy million lives. Would you like me to be less annoying?”
‘Tell me what you know. Then I’ll decide.“ He said the words carefully, as if making a great concession to her undisciplined refusal to stick to her place.
Rachel leaned back. “It’s a matter of deduction,” she said. “It helps to have a bit of context. For starters, this ship — this fleet — didn’t just accidentally embark on a spacelike trip four thousand years into the future. You are attempting a maneuver that nearly, but not quite, violates a number of treaties and a couple of laws of nature that are enforced by semidivine fiat. You’re not going to go into your own past light cone, but you’re going to come very close indeed — dive deep into the future to circumvent any watchers or eaters or mines the Festival might lay in your path, jump over to the target, then reel yourselves back into the past and accidentally come out not-quite-before the Festival arrives. You know what that suggests to me? It suggests extreme foolhardiness. Rule Three is there for a reason. You’re banging on the Eschaton’s door if you test it.”
“I had that much already,” Ilya acknowledged. “So?”
“Well, you should ask, what should we have expected to find here? We get here, and we’re looking for a buoy. A time capsule with detailed tactical notes from our own past light cone — an oracle, in effect, telling us a lot about the enemy that we can’t possibly know yet because our own time line hasn’t intersected with them. Yet more cheating. But we’re alive.”
“I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t we be?”
“Because—” She stared at him for a moment. “Do you know what happens to people who use causality violation as a weapon?” she asked. “You’re incredibly close to doing it, which is crazy enough. And you got away with it! Which simply isn’t in the script, unless the rules have changed.”
“Rules? What are you talking about?”
“Rules.” She rolled her eyes. “The rules of physics are, in some cases, suspiciously anthropic. Starting with the Heisenberg Principle, that the presence of an observer influences the subject of observation at a quantum level, and working from there, we can see a lot of startling correlations in the universe. Consider the ratio of the strong nuclear force to the electromagnetic force, for example. Twiddle it one way a little, and neutrons and protons wouldn’t react; fusion couldn’t take place. Twiddle it in a different direction, and the stellar fusion cycle would stop at helium — no heavier nuclei could ever be formed. There are so many correlations like this that cosmologists theorize we live in a universe that exists specifically to give rise to our kind of life, or something descended from it. Like the Eschaton.”
“So?”
“So you people are breaking some of the more arcane cosmological laws. The ones that state that any universe in which true causality violation — time travel — occurs is de facto unstable. But causality violation is only possible when there’s a causal agent — in this case an observer — and the descendants of that observer will seriously object to causality violation. Put it another way: it’s accepted as a law of cosmology because the Eschaton won’t put up with idiots who violate it. That’s why my organization tries to educate people out of doing it. I don’t know if anyone told your Admiralty what happened out in the back of beyond, in what is now the Crab Nebula: but there’s a pulsar there that isn’t natural, let’s put it that way, and an extinct species of would-be galactic conquerors. Someone tried to bend the rules — and the Eschaton nailed them.”