“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’d 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 re-examine 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 a weak confidence. “We included some big operating margins. There’s a lot of flexibility within the basic parameters.”
Troblum fell silent with a dismay which even the inhibitors couldn’t 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’d genuinely 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 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 hadn’t 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 which benefited Marius best. Just how far would the Accelerator Faction representative go to achieve that? “But I’ll carry it on one way or another. I still have some personal EMA left.”
Her expression grew sceptical as she looked round the huge assemblage of ultra-sophisticated equipment. “All right. If you need any help reviewing the data, let me know.”
“Thanks,” he said.
Troblum’s office wasn’t much. A corner in one of the annexe 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 he was alone and the neural chemicals were wearing off, he didn’t 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 weren’t supposed to become frustrated but right now he wanted to kick the shit out of the Neumann cybernetics.
Some time later that afternoon the hangar security net informed Troblum 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 door 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 couldn’t stop thinking that the whole manufacturing process had somehow been deliberately knocked out of kilter—sabotaged, in other words. There was only one person who could have that done. He gave the Mellanie’s Redemption a calculating glance. Even with his Faction-supplied biononics, Marius wouldn’t be able to shoot through the ship’s force field.
It wasn’t going to happen. Troblum didn’t have anywhere to run to; he certainly didn’t have a friend—not one, not anywhere. And if Marius was here 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 smooth imperturbable fashion. He glanced round, not bothering to hide his distaste. “So this is where you spend your days.”
“Something wrong with that?”
“Not at all.” Marius gave 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 un-noted.” He studied the huge stack of Newman 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 didn’t seem 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. Its 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 couldn’t think what type of drive the ANA Faction might want, especially after the last ultra-classified project he’d 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 programme 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 couldn’t detect any active embedded weapons in the representative, but that didn’t 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 analysing 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 flightplan file over 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 wasn’t anything he could do to stop the sweat staining his suit right 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 multicoloured blizzard of fine equations, sparkling 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 put it there was Emily. He called up the sections she was directly involved with. There was an emotion tugging at him as he started to review the data. It took a while, 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 flightplan 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?”
“Left-over artefacts 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 on to the young genistars, no more drains overflowing every time it rained. The walls had also 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-coloured berries hanging almost to the ground.
Edeard stopped to allow Gonat and Evox 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 in the way he presided over the guild’s three new apprentices. He could sense Sancia in a stall over in the default stables, 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 last year. Sancia and Gonat had moved in to the apprentice dormitory before winter set in; and now two more farmers were already 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 he had some of that most luxurious commodity: spare time. And that was on top of having the compound’s ge-chimp team to 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 wouldn’t be anything like as bleak as those past.
“How are the cats?” Gonat asked.
“Just going to inspect them,” Edeard said. So successful had the ge-cats been at extracting water, that 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 didn’t last as long as he’d 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.”
“Yes,” Gonat and Evox groaned. They mentally pushed and goaded the frisky foals into their stable before Edeard could heap any more tasks on them. The whole courtyard resonated to the hoots, snarls, bleating, and barks of various genera. With the apprentices now capable of basic sculpting, the Guild had suddenly doubled hatching rates. There were a full twenty defaults in the stables; Akeem had consulted with Wedard on building more. The majority of the animals still went out to the farms, but most houses in the village had cleaned out their disused nests and asked for a ge-chimp or a monkey. The demand for ge-wolves since the Witham caravan had increased dramatically. It was all kind of what Edeard had wanted, but he was still disheartened by the way the older villagers refused to let him give them a simple refresher course in instruction, gruffly informing him they’d been ordering genistars round since before his parents were born. True enough; but if you’d been doing it wrong since then nothing was going to change, and they’d wind up with a lot of badly behaved genistars cavorting round Ashwell annoying everyone. So Edeard surreptitiously tried to make sure that the village children had a decent grounding in the ability. The Lady’s Mother, Lorellan, helped in her own quiet way by allowing Edeard to sit in on her own instructions to the village youth. Nobody dared protest about that.
Edeard reached the main hall, and sped up the stairs, pleased to be away from the courtyard. One further side effect of their Guild’s rising fortune and greater genistar numbers was the stronger smell seeping out from the stables. He’d moved out of the apprentice dormitory the week Evox arrived, taking over a journeyman’s room. “I can’t confirm you as a Master yet,” Akeem had said gravely, “no matter what you did beyond these walls, or how proficient you are. Guild procedures must be followed. To be a Master you must have served at least five years as a journeyman.”
“I understand,” Edeard had replied, secretly laughing at the formality. Lady help us from the way old peo
ple try to keep the world in order…
“And I’ll thank you to take the Guild a little more seriously, please,” Akeem had snapped.
Edeard rapidly wound down his amusement. Akeem seemed able to sense any emotion, however well-hidden.
His new room actually had some furniture in it. A decent desk he’d commissioned himself from the Carpentry Guild; a cupboard and a chest of drawers—needed to store his growing new wardrobe. His cot had a soft mattress of goose down. After some gruesome disasters, he’d eventually got the finer points of laundry ritual over to his personal ge-monkey; so once a week he had fresh sheets, scented with lavender from the herb bed in the compound’s small kitchen garden—also now properly maintained.
He washed quickly, using the big china jug of water. The Guild compound wasn’t yet connected up to the village’s rudimentary water pipe network, but Melzar had promised it would be done by the end of the month. Both he and the smithy were trying to design a domestic stove which would heat water for individual cottages, producing various ungainly contraptions with pipes coiled round them. So far the pipes had all burst or leaked, but they were making progress.
Edeard scraped Akeem’s ancient spare razor over his straggly chin hairs, wincing at the little cuts the jagged blade made. A new razor was next on his list of commissions—and a decent mirror. The ge-chimps had left a pile of newly washed clothes from which he chose a loose white cotton shirt, wearing it with his smart drosilk trousers. He’d found several weaver women in the village who would willingly make clothes for him in return for ge-spiders. Akeem called the unregistered trade enterprising, cautioning that it must not interfere with their official commissions. He still had the boots he’d bought in Witham. A little worn now after a year, but they remained comfortable and intact; the only problem was how tight they were becoming. He’d put on nearly two inches of height in the last year, not that he’d bulked out at all. His horror was that he’d wind up looking like Fahin as he put on more height without the corresponding girth.
The Dreaming Page 24
