Troblum had no trouble producing the modified exotic matter theory behind an Anomine planet-shifting FTL engine and even describing the basic generator technology he wanted. But turning those abstractions into physical reality was tough. For a start, he needed information on novabomb technology, and even after nearly twelve hundred years the navy kept details of that horrendously powerful weapon classified. That was where Emily Alm came in.
It was Marius who had put the two of them in touch. Emily once had worked for the navy weapons division on Augusta. After three hundred years she had simply grown bored.
“There’s no point to it anymore,” she had told Troblum at their first meeting. “We haven’t made any truly new weapons for centuries. All the lab does is refine the systems we have. Any remotely new concept we come up with is closed down almost immediately by the top brass.”
“You mean ANA: Governance?” he had asked.
“Who knows where the orders originate from? All I know is that they come down from Admiral Kazimir’s office, and we jump fast and high every time. It’s crazy. I don’t know why we bother having a weapons research division. As far as I know, the deterrence fleet hasn’t changed ships or armaments for five hundred years.”
The problem he had outlined to her was interesting enough for her to postpone downloading into ANA. After Emily, others had joined his motley team: Dan Massell, whose expertise in functional molecular configuration was unrivaled; Ami Cowee, who helped with exotic matter formatting. Several technicians had come and gone over the years, contributing to the Neumann cybernetics array and then leaving as their appliance constructed its required successor. But those three had stuck with him since the early years. Their age and Higher-derived patience meant they were probably the only ones who could tolerate him for so long, that and their shared interest in the nature of the project.
When Troblum’s aging capsule landed on the pad outside the hangar, he was puzzled to see just Emily’s and Massell’s capsules sitting on the concrete beside the glossy black wall. He had been expecting Ami as well.
Then, as soon as he was through the second little office, he knew something was wrong. There was no quiet vibration of machinery. As soon as the shield over the third door cut off, his low-level field could detect no electronic activity beyond it. The hangar had been divided in half, with Mellanie’s Redemption parked at one end, a dark bulky presence very much in the shade of the assembly section. Troblum stood under the prow of the ship and looked around uncomprehendingly. The Neumann cybernetic modules in front of him were bigger than a house, joined into a lattice cube of what looked like translucent glass slabs the size of commercial capsules, each one glowing with its individual primary light. It was as if a rainbow had shattered only to be scooped up and shoved into a transparent box. At the center, three meters above Troblum’s head, was a scarlet and black cone, the ejector mechanism of the terminal extruder. It should have been wrapped in a fiercely complex web of quantum fields, intersecting feeder pressors, electron positioners, and molecular lock injectors. He could not detect a glimmer of power. If all had gone well over the last few days, the planet-shift engine would have been two-thirds complete, assembled atom by atom in a stable matrix of superdense matter held together by its own integral coherent bonding field. By this time the cylinder would be visible within the extruder, glimmering from realigned exotic radiation as if it contained its own galaxy.
Instead, Emily and Massell were sitting on a boxlike atomic D-K phase junction casing at the base of the cybernetics, drinking tea. Both silent with mournful faces, they flashed him a guilty glance as he came in.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“Some kind of instability,” Emily said. “I’m sorry, Troblum. The bonding field format wasn’t right. Ami had to shut it down.”
“And she didn’t tell me!”
“Couldn’t face you,” Massell said. “She knew how disappointed you’d be. Said she didn’t want to be responsible for breaking your heart.”
“That’s not—arrrgh.” He groaned. Biononics released a flood of neural inhibitors as they detected his thoughts growing more and more agitated. He shivered as if he had been caught by a blast of arctic air, but his focus was perfectly clear. A list of social priorities flipped up into his exovision. “Thank you for waiting to tell me in person,” he said. “I’ll call Ami and tell her it wasn’t her fault.”
Emily and Massell exchanged a blank look. “That’s kind of you,” she said.
“How big an instability?”
Massell winced. “Not good. We need to reexamine the whole effect, I think.”
“Can we just strengthen it?”
“I hope so, but even that will be a domino on the internal structure.”
“Maybe not,” Emily said with weak confidence. “We included some big operating margins. There’s a lot of flexibility within the basic parameters.”
Troblum fell silent with a dismay that even the inhibitors could not overcome. If Emily was wrong, if they needed a complete redesign, then the Neumann cybernetics would need to be rebuilt. It would take years. Again. And this drive generator had been his true hope; he genuinely had thought he would have a functional device by the end of the week. It was the only way to get people to agree with his theory. Marius would see that the navy never backed a search; he was sure of that. This was all that was left to him, his remaining shred of proof.
“You can get the resource allocation, can’t you?” Massell said in an encouraging voice. “I mean, you’ve managed to push your theory to this level.” His gesture took in the silent hulk of Neumann cybernetics. “You’ve got to have some powerful political allies on the committees. And this wasn’t a setback as such; only one thing was out of alignment.”
Troblum deliberately avoided looking in Emily’s direction. Massell had not been one of Marius’s candidates. “Yes, I can probably get the EMA for a rebuild.”
“Okay, then! Do you want to get on it right away or leave it a few days.”
“Give it a few days,” Troblum said, reading from his social priority list. “We’ll all need a while to recharge after this. I’ll start going over the telemetry and give you a call when I think I know what the new bonding field format should be.”
“Okay.” Massell gave him an encouraging smile as he slid off the casing. “There’s a certain Air technician I’ve been promising a resort time-out with. I’ll let her know I’m free.” He gave Emily a blank gaze, then left.
“Will there be the resources to carry on?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe not from our mutual friend.” At the back of his mind was a nasty little thought that this had been the result that benefited Marius best. Just how far would the Accelerator Faction’s representative go to achieve that? “But I’ll carry on one way or another. I still have some personal EMAs left.”
Her expression grew skeptical as she looked around the huge assemblage of ultrasophisticated equipment. “All right. If you need any help reviewing the data, let me know.”
“Thanks,” he said.
Troblum’s office wasn’t much, just a corner in one of the annex rooms big enough for a large wingback chair in the middle of a high-capacity solido projection array. He slumped down into the worn cushioning and stared through the narrow window into the hangar’s assembly section. Now that he was alone and the neural chemicals were wearing off, he did not have the heart to begin a diagnostic review. The drive engine should have slid smoothly out of the extruder and into the modified forward cargo hold of Mellanie’s Redemption. He would have been ready to show the Commonwealth he was right by the end of the week, to open up a whole new chapter in galactic history. Highers were not supposed to become frustrated, but right now he wanted to kick the shit out of the Neumann cybernetics.
Sometime later that afternoon the hangar security net informed Troblum that a capsule had landed on the pad outside. Frowning, he flipped the sensor image out of his peripheral vision and watched as the capsule’s do
or flowed open. Marius stepped out.
Troblum actually feared for his life. The warning at the restaurant had been awful enough. But Troblum had been so sure the design for the drive engine was valid, he could not stop thinking that the whole manufacturing process somehow had been knocked deliberately out of kilter, sabotaged, in other words. There was only one person who could have had that done. He gave the Mellanie’s Redemption a calculating glance. Even with his faction-supplied biononics, Marius would not be able to shoot through the ship’s force field.
It wasn’t going to happen. Troblum did not have anywhere to run to; he certainly did not have a friend—not one, not anywhere. And if Marius was there to eliminate him, it was on orders from the Accelerators. Hiding inside the starship would only postpone the inevitable.
I must start thinking about this, about a way out.
Reluctantly, he ordered the hangar net to open the side door.
Marius came into the office, gliding along in his usual smoothly imperturbable fashion. He glanced around, not bothering to hide his distaste. “So this is where you spend your days.”
“Something wrong with that?”
“Not at all.” Marius gave him a thin smile. “Everyone should have a hobby.”
“Do you?”
“None you’d appreciate.”
“So what are you here for? I did as you asked; I haven’t pressed the navy.”
“I know. And that hasn’t gone unnoted.” He studied the huge stack of Neumann cybernetics through the office window. “My commiserations. You put a lot of effort into today.”
“How did you know?”
The representative’s eerie green eyes turned back to stare at Troblum. “Don’t be childish. Now, I’m here because you need more funds and we have another little project which might interest you.”
“A project?” Since he did not seem to be in danger of immediate slaughter, Troblum couldn’t help the tweak of interest.
“One you’ll find difficult to refuse once you know the details. It’s an FTL drive which we’re putting into production. Who knows, perhaps there will be some overspill into this which you can take advantage of.”
Troblum really could not think what type of drive the ANA faction might want, especially after the last ultraclassified project he had worked on for Marius. “And you’ll help me acquire extra EMAs for a rebuild here?”
“Budgets are tight in these uncertain times, but a swift and successful conclusion to our drive program would probably result in some unused allocation we can divert your way. However, we also have something else you might be interested in—a bonus if you like.”
“What’s that?”
“Bradley Johansson’s genome.”
“What? Impossible. There was nothing left of him.”
“Not quite. He rejuvenated several times at a clinic on an Isolated world. We had an access opportunity several centuries ago.”
“Are you serious?”
Marius simply raised an eyebrow.
“That sounds good,” Troblum said. “Really good. I almost don’t have to think about it.”
“I need an answer now.”
Once again Troblum was uncertain what would happen if he said no. He could not detect any active embedded weapons in the representative, but that did not mean death wouldn’t be sudden and irrevocable. Talk about carrot and stick. “All right. But first I have to spend a couple of days analyzing what happened here.”
“We would like you to fly to our assembly station immediately.”
“If I can’t settle this problem to my own satisfaction, I won’t be any good to you. I think you know that.”
Marius hardened his stare, his eyes darkening from emerald to near black. “Very well, you can have forty-eight hours, no more. I expect you to be on your way by then.” He transferred a flight plan file to Troblum’s u-shadow.
“I will be.” It took a lot of biononic intervention to prevent Troblum from shaking as the representative left the office. There was nothing he could do about the sweat staining his suit along his spine. When the sensors showed him the representative’s capsule lifting off the pad, he turned to gaze back into the assembly section. It was all far too neat: the problem on the verge of success, the generous offer to help pay for a solution, plus the unbelievable promise of being able to clone Bradley Johansson. Troblum let his biononic field sweep out to flow through the inert cybernetics. “What did that bastard do?” he murmured. Around him the solido projectors snapped on, filling the air with a multicolored blizzard of fine equations that sparkled as they interacted. Somewhere there had to be a flaw in the blueprint that had taken him fifteen painstaking years to devise, a deliberate glitch. The only person who could have put it there was Emily. He called up the sections with which she was directly involved. There was an emotion tugging at him as he started to review the data. It took awhile, but he eventually realized it was sadness.
From the office he was visiting in the hangar five down from Troblum’s, the Delivery Man could just see Marius’s capsule as it took to the air again. All he used was his eyes; there was no way the Accelerator representative could know he was under direct observation. “He’s gone,” he reported. “And that hangar has distorted the spaceport’s basic guidance protocols—you can’t get there unless you’re invited. It’s definitely a nest for some bad boy activity. Do you want me to infiltrate?”
“No, thank you,” the Conservative Faction replied. “We’ll use passive observation for the moment.”
“What about this Troblum character it’s registered to?”
“Records indicate he’s some kind of Starflyer War enthusiast. His starship flight plan logs are interesting; he visits some out-of-the-way places.”
“Do you think he’s another representative?”
“No. He’s a physicist with some high-level navy contacts.”
“He’s involved with the navy?”
“Yes.”
“In what regard?”
“Leftover artifacts and actions from the Starflyer War. His interest verges on the fanatical.”
“So why would Marius pay him a personal visit?”
“Good question. We will research him further.”
“I can go home now?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent.” If he got to Arevalo’s interstellar wormhole terminus in the next ten minutes, he could be back home in time for tea with the girls.
Inigo’s Third Dream
It was a glorious summer evening, the bright sun tinting to copper over the Eggshaper Guild compound while Edeard walked across the main nine-sided courtyard. He took a contented breath as he watched the team of five ge-chimps cleaning the last patch of kimoss off the kennel roof. Their strong little claw hands were tearing up long dusty strips of the thick purple vegetation, exposing the pale slate. The kennels were the last of the courtyard buildings to be spruced up. Roofs and gutterings all around the other sides were clean and repaired. There were no more leaks down onto the young genistars, no more drains overflowing every time it rained. The walls also had benefited from the new chimp team renovating the guild compound. The mass of gurkvine had been pruned back to neat fluttering yellow rectangles between doors and windows, allowing the apprentice stonemasons to restore the mortar joins in the walls. An additional benefit of the long-neglected pruning was a bumper crop of fruit this year, with dangling clusters of succulent claret-colored berries hanging almost to the ground.
Edeard stopped to allow Gonat and Evox to herd the ge-horse foals into the stables for the night. “All brushed down and ready?” he asked the two young apprentices. He cast his farsight over the animals, checking their short rough fur for smears of dirt.
“Of course they are,” Evox exclaimed indignantly. “I do know how to instruct a ge-monkey, Edeard.”
Edeard grinned good-naturedly, struck by the way he now sounded like Akeem as he presided over the guild’s three new apprentices. He could sense Sancia in a stall over in the default stab
les, sitting quietly in a chair as her third hand flowed around an egg, subtly sculpting the nature of the embryonic genistar. The youngsters were talented: impatient, naturally, but eager to learn. Two of the new ge-horses had been sculpted by Evox, who was inordinately proud of the foals.
Taking on the apprentices had been a real turning point for Akeem and Edeard. Evox had joined them barely a week after the fateful Witham caravan the previous year. Sancia and Gonat had moved into the apprentice dormitory before winter set in, and now two more farmers were discussing sending children to the guild, at least for the coming winter months. After a hectic six months of initiation and adjustment, things had settled down in the compound. Edeard even found that he had some of that most luxurious commodity: spare time. And that was on top of having the compound’s ge-chimp team start the desperately needed renovation. With the apprentices honing their instructional skills, the chimps had performed some internal restoration: whitewashing walls, cleaning floors, and even preserving food in jars and casks. This coming winter season would not be as bleak as those in the past.
“How are the cats?” Gonat asked.
“Just going to inspect them,” Edeard said. So successful had the ge-cats been at extracting water, the council had commissioned a second well to be dug at the other end of the cliff face behind the village. As well as producing replacements for the existing well, Edeard now had to supervise a whole new nest. In truth, they did not last as long as he had hoped—barely two years—and they were still inordinately difficult to sculpt. “Don’t forget we have a delivery from Doddit farm in the morning. Make sure there’s enough room in the stores.”
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