And still more disconcerting to know that the Linked Bruno spoke to her with only an infinitesimal portion of his Transcended consciousness. The rest of him was… elsewhere. Everywhere.
"So why are you looking at me, ummm?" she murmured, a little curious despite herself.
"Because I enjoy watching you, Carol, Linked or un-linked. It accesses many pleasant memories and associations in the human portion of my larger Self. But I can encompass much more about you while I am Transcended." He paused, then moved his head to face the holoscreen. "I perceive that you are still disturbed by my actions. I will face forward.”
"Well, I… " She felt vaguely uncomfortable, as if she had insulted Bruno at a cocktail party.
"To answer your question more directly, the signals we have been discussing almost certainly emanate from three kzin warships of the Raptor class, stealthed. Probability equals zero point nine nine eight. Third Fleet, I would predict; there are no improvements over that design detectable.”
"How can you be so sure?" Carol asked him quickly. She and the un-Linked Bruno had examined the data carefully; there was certainly nothing as straightforward as the Linked Bruno's answer would suggest.
Carol remained a bit suspicious of the black-magic aspects of Linkage.
Bruno paused a moment, then spoke flatly. "Please define for me in objective, nonhuman-oriented terms the tastes 'sweet,' then 'sour,' please.”
"Uh, well… “
His cheek twitched as he stared intently at the blinking red blur on the upper portion of the holoscreen. Was it a smile? A stray emotion filtering past his machine consciousness?
"Sensoria are usually difficult to describe in precise terminology without experiential referents," he continued. "Even for simplistic intelligent system networks. Suffice it to say that the anomalous signals 'taste' like three kzin warcraft to me, again, little different from the Third Wave warcraft in our databases.”
Carol decided to take his word for it. Taste. After all, this was why Bruno had been selected as pilot of the Sun-Tzu in the first place. If Carol didn't trust Bruno's Linked observations, why was he aboard?
It still stank of black magic to her. Would she see reality as differently as the computer-Linked Bruno did, once she was converted by the virus in Dolittle?
Carol pursed her lips and thought a moment. "So you would have no objections," she asked carefully, "if we point the antimatter reaction chamber toward them and see what they do?”
"On the contrary, I very much wish to verify my… intuition… “
"Make it so," she ordered formally. A schematic of the Sun-Tzu appeared in the main holoscreen window, with x-y-z coordinates in glittering red. Attitude jets flared on the schematic, slowly turning the spacecraft, and Carol felt the straps of her crash couch tightening as the attitude of Sun-Tzu matched that of its schematic.
After a few moments, the straps loosened once more, and the line diagram of the Sun-Tzu vanished from the holoscreen. Bruno closed his eyes as another hypodermic from his crash couch hissed against his neck.
"Reorientation complete," he reported crisply. "Now we must wait until the presumptive warcraft detect our change in attitude.”
They waited together. Seven light-minutes translated to 120 million kilometers. Fifteen minutes, roughly, until the light-speed-limited responses of the mystery signal, if any, arrived back at Sun-Tzu. Carol ordered Bruno to train the long-range sensor array at maximum sensitivity, to electronically sniff at the Deep surrounding them.
He smiled that thin, inhuman smile and informed Carol that he was doing that at all times, in any event. Along with many other things, of course.
Carol wanted to ask many questions of the augmented Bruno. What did the superintelligence sitting next to her, limp in his crash couch, think of their chances of success at Wunderland? What did he think of unaugmented humanity?
Could he still love?
Carol had never asked such questions of Bruno during full Linkage. Afraid of the answers, perhaps. But she feared something else more.
Would she see and feel as Bruno did under full Linkage, after Project Cherubim was complete, and she had been changed? Or would her own situation be worse still? The records from the Black Vault had been heavily censored, even to the crew of the Sun-Tzu.
There was so much she did not know.
Carol looked over at her lover, lying bonelessly in his crash couch, eyes now closed, the thick interface cable at his neck. What must it be like, she mused, to have one's mind encompass so much, all at once?
Perhaps she would know for herself, if the Sun-Tzu ever reached Wunderland.
Bruno, while Linked, had once told Carol that there was little of free will in what actions he took while Transcended. It was as if knowing the best solution to a problem removed freedom of choice – unless he intentionally chose an improper solution. Connected to a computer's vast silicon mind, Bruno had told Carol that he was driven to choose the best solution to a given problem; therefore, free will as she understood it did not exist for him.
Carol mulled that over for a few moments. What if, she thought, the basic nature of free will was the freedom to make mistakes?
The holoscreen flashed brightly in alert, and the buzzing electronic tones of the Battle Stations alarm broke her from her reverie.
"Pardon me," Bruno told her calmly, eyes still closed, "but when I am part of the alarm system, I must act like the relevant component." The alarm tone halted without Carol having to deactivate it.
"No matter. Give me a status report." Carol's fingers tensed on the edges of the console before her. The dataglove and keypads were clipped impotently to the side of the console. With Bruno in full Linkage, her commands were far too slow and crude.
The main holoscreen window cleared, and quickly drew three separate blips, moving rapidly outward from the center of the screen, in different directions. She looked over at Bruno, whose eyes were still closed, facing forward.
"It appears," he said, "that we have hit the jackpot, so to speak." Not waiting for orders, he displayed the observational information, data windows opening and keeping pace with the tiny red sparks, highlighting and scrolling numbers in agreement with his statements.
"The mystery blip," he continued, "did not wait for our change in attitude, Carol." Abruptly he cackled with very unmachinelike glee, a false mirth animating his slack muscles. "Mystery, mystery!”
She jerked back at this sudden change. His face went limp as the hypospray hissed at his neck again. The flat voice came, sibilant and precise, as though driven by air leaking out of a balloon. "It presumably became aware of our engine shutdown seven and a half minutes ago. The single blip then split into three distinct signals. Inference: three ships, previously moving in close convoy, stealthed.”
"Finagle damn! One we might handle. But three?”
The holoscreen windows showed relevant data as marching columns of glowing numbers and glittering diagrams. "The stealthing apparently does not stand up well to high-gee maneuvers, and I obtained an excellent remote data acquisition download. I was easily able to correct for what electronic counter-measures the targets were able to activate under high acceleration.”
"Well?" Alien vessels for sure, Carol nodded to herself. Her hands gripped the arms of her crash couch until her knuckles turned white with the pressure. Were they ratcat ships, though? They had to be.
"As I predicted," Bruno replied, not even the pretense of emotion in his voice. "Three Raptor-class kzin warcraft." As he spoke, a larger window opened on the holoscreen, displaying comparisons between the unidentified craft and the standard Raptor-class kzin warbird. "Engine emissions," he continued, "are consonant with slightly damaged and refurbished Third Wave kzinti space vessels. At the time our engine shutdown registered on their instruments, the convoy immediately broke up, each spacecraft moving in different directions at two hundred gees, which is the limit for Raptor-class war-craft.”