None of which elevated keeping an appointment to the importance of understanding the latest accident.
I'm tired of waiting.
The second message might have said that. Or not. Glithwah dismissed it, too, unread, concentrating on recent industrial accidents. More than she could explain—other than by attribution to United Planets saboteurs. And, perhaps related: the pattern of attempts to penetrate the colony's secure networks. (Or, the experts told her, at least two patterns. One grouping of failed intrusions, almost certainly, was by their jailers. The other would-be intruders would be her rivals within the clan.)
And if the surge in accidents had not occupied her thoughts, other important matters would. The productivity of mines, factories, and farms. Demographic data. Staffing trends and labor shortages. Graduation rates and skills deficits. Macroeconomic statistics. Current events on Ariel and across the solar system...
Though the details were endless, the flood of information somehow kept managing to grow. It was too much to wrap her brain around. Even offloading much of the load to her implant. Even netting to trusted allies. Even delegating simulations and analyses to trusted AIs.
But maybe with an AI in her brain? Not netted and bandwidth-limited. Physically embedded, thoroughly integrated.
Though they remained a tiny minority, more and more humans were doing that. The Augmented, the changelings called themselves. Two minds, one never sleeping, in one body.
A temptation, every now and again, just for a moment....
And if the notion weren't disgusting? It wouldn't have mattered. Glithwah's United Planets overlords would never allow the clan access to such advanced technology.
And so, summary graphs, tables, and animations lined her office walls. As for her aspirations for the clan and her progress toward achieving them, the walls gave no hints.
At a hesitant knock, Glithwah glanced at the door. "What?" she snapped.
An aide entered. He said, "Foremost, that woman in attendance for her interview."
Mind to mind, "that woman" would have been fine. Too kind, in fact: Corinne Elman merited no courtesy. Aloud, however, the phrase lacked discipline.
No matter that humans could not reproduce any Hunter language. (Absent the gene tweaks to grow an extra pair of vocal cords. A handful of diplomats had had the procedure done.) Plenty of humans understood clan-speak. Elman had never demonstrated that aptitude, but Glithwah had her suspicions. And if the woman didn't understand? She would have a translator AI netted in.
As Glithwah would link with Loshtof, to interpret and analyze the journalist's every word and gesture. The AI was but a netted command away.
(No matter that Glithwah had long ago trained herself to think in all major human languages, and even to grasp their often absurd units of measure. "Know your enemy" was clan protocol long before Sun Tzu scribbled The Art of War.)
"Respect for my guest," she growled at the aide.
Because she would not have that woman stirring up the human public over needless slights. Some waiting, though, to put the human in her place? To remind who was Foremost of the clan and who a mere gossipmonger? That was appropriate. Perhaps even expected.
In English this time, her voice pitched to carry to the anteroom, Glithwah ordered, "In five minutes, show in Ms. Elman."
His head bowed and shoulders hunched, Cluth Monar scurried away.
Glithwah netted to a security cam. Her visitor squirmed in her chair. Jammed her hands into pockets, then removed them. Studied her nails. Curled a long tress around a finger. Once, twice, the woman's eyes glazed over in a netted consultation.
Glithwah returned to the data on industrial accidents, satisfied she would not be matching wits with an Augmented.
Many of the recent incidents were true accidents, traceable to carelessness, bad luck, or honest equipment failures. A few incidents she hoped appeared to be more of the same. But some events, that her most trusted aides had failed to explain, had the feel of sabotage. Glithwah, without proof, knew whom to blame: Carl Rowland and his minions. Who else could it be? Starting with the latest gray-goo runaway in Nanofab Twelve, when—
A mind's ear chime revealed the five minutes were almost up. With a thought, Glithwah netted in Loshtof. She blanked the floor-to-ceiling displays.
Turned a featureless slate gray, the walls looked as though she hid something.
Setting the walls transparent, crescent Uranus imbued her office with a wan, blue-green cast. The planet's rings, edge-on, were barely visible. Miranda was just past full phase, other inner moons mere dots.
Much better, she decided.
A final inspection revealed her desk to be too neat. It and everything on it were props. With the brush of a hand, she ruffled a neat stack of printouts.
It had been a basic tenet of clan doctrine since the surrender: never appear organized to the humans.
At Glithwah's door, another knock—this one self-assured.
Not waiting for a response, Corinne Elman strode into the office. Or tried, anyway, her entrance ungainly. But however clumsy her manner, Corinne's mind had always been adroit. For a human, anyway.
Her hair was longer than Glithwah remembered, and shot through with more gray. Her face was rounder than when they had last met, five Earth years earlier. She was short for an Earthborn human—and still, standing in the recessed foyer, she and Glithwah stood eye to eye. If Corinne should exhibit the egregious bad manners to step up onto the Hunter tier of the split-level office, the low ceiling would force her to crouch; they would remain eye to eye.
Corinne took a seat on the lower level. "Foremost, I am pleased to see you again."
Are you now? Glithwah thought. You had the good fortune, for a journalist, anyway, to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And having survived to tell—and sell—the tale. The experience made you wealthy. You've milked the one incident, exploited the clan, ever since.
But Glithwah said only, "Welcome back to Ariel."
For in one sense, the visit was welcome. Something long dreaded was at long last at hand. She might finally put this interview behind her. What was it anyway with humans and anniversaries?
She found comfort in the knowledge she would be elsewhere before the next five-year "commemoration."
"Thank you, Foremost." Elman leaned forward. "And thanks for agreeing to meet with me. I'm sure you're busy. Shall we get started?"
"Are we waiting for a cameraman?"
"Not necessary. I have an A/V upgrade."
An implant to record everything the woman saw and heard. Yet one more technology withheld from the clan.
Glithwah bided her time, hid her ire.
Corinne squirmed, just a little, in her chair.
"Shall we begin, then?"
To Glithwah's mind's eye, Loshtof texted unnecessarily: SOME EMBARRASSMENT.
"That will be fine,"
Glithwah said.
"Do you know what story would interest my viewers?"
"I do not."
But Glithwah could guess: humans loved to gloat. Because while the United Planets leadership continued to suppress just how dicey matters had been, at some level, however intuitive, humans saw the big picture. That a few thousand Hunters had made fools of them.
Too bad the humans would not stay beaten. Worlds of them, billions of them, could absorb one rout after another and keep coming. The endgame left Victorious adrift and abandoned, the clan decimated, its leadership slaughtered. It left the evacuees stranded on this remote moon, to beg and plead for resources and technology that should be theirs.
But that would change... if their captors remained clueless for a little while longer. To which end, disinformation channeled through this irksome reporter might contribute.
"No," Glithwah repeated. "What story would interest your viewers?"
"Change. Progress." Corinne smiled. "The last time I visited, this was a frontier settlement. Ariel has become a civilized world. You did that."
If human authorities s
hould ever learn half of what had been accomplished—much less how, or why—her life was forfeit. Perhaps many lives. Did Corinne suspect?
"What do you mean?" Glithwah asked.
"Such false modesty. I could not fail to notice the recent construction, least of all the colony's own spaceport."
A civilian spaceport, the woman meant. A spaceport not controlled by the United Planets occupation forces. With splayed fingers, Corinne swept wisps of hair off her forehead. There was a momentary frown that Loshtof annotated, SHE IS NERVOUS. POSSIBLY CONFLICTED.
"We should have had ships earlier," Glithwah said. "That we weren't permitted any had consequences."
"How so?"
(FEIGNED INTEREST, Loshtof interpreted.)
Glithwah had picked up on that, too. What was going on here? Off a corner of the desk, from the hand-carved wooden chess set that had once been her uncle's, she took a castle. Rolled the piece between fingers and thumb. "Without practice, many skills are lost. Such as piloting, to be sure. And such as the knack for keeping ships f lying, when something goes amiss. Because something always does."
Corinne's face reddened. (EMBARRASSED, texted Loshtof.)
Taking the point—when, after so many years, the clan had been permitted to acquire a few lumbering, obsolete scoop ships—that two vessels and crews had been lost? For something as mundane as harvesting of Uranian atmosphere, the gathering of deuterium and helium-3 for the colony's energy needs?
Corinne's periodic rehashing of the old conflict having played no small part in denying the clan autonomy—and ships—for so many years.
"I see," the woman said. "If it's any consolation, I understand the authorities have been looking into a spate of unexplained mishaps across the outer system. It's not only your clan that has lost ships."
"How is that a consolation?"
Murmuring something apologetic, red-faced again, Corinne segued into a banal interview question. What do you remember about the "incident" twenty years earlier?
Time and again Glithwah offered a contrite response—even, tersely, and with rigid circumspection, admitting to having regrets. She did regret the casualties, thousands among the humans, hundreds among the clan—but not for the reason Corinne might expect. In war, casualties were unavoidable. Any Foremost learned to accept them. What Glithwah could not accept, despite the decades that had passed, was so many having died for naught.
Failure was what made the losses sting.
Failure was what she would not permit to stand.
The questions kept coming. Do you appreciate the help the UP has given to build a new home? (Of course.) Has Ariel come to seem like home? (Yes.) Can humans and Hunters learn to get along? (But we already have.) And on, and on. And on.
The human had come a long way to ask general questions that she could as well have sent by vidmail, to which Glithwah could have recorded answers. The only acceptable responses were obvious. She dared to believe that this pointless interview must soon end.
More and more, the questions seemed pro forma, the questioner disengaged.
And then Corinne surprised her. "Foremost, about this anniversary..."
"Yes?"
"Let's move beyond past conflict and beyond the steady progress of the Ariel settlement. Discovery is all but complete. What are your thoughts about that?"
Discovery. Humanity's second starship. The first was seven years on its way, repatriating survivors of Victorious's original crew—those not resettled on Earth, too old and feeble for the long voyage—to Alpha Centauri.
"A great accomplishment," Glithwah said. "From what we are told." That wasn't much.
"Nothing more, Foremost?"
Glithwah set down the chess piece. "I haven't thought much about it."
"Truly? Discovery could be used to send home your people."
"It could," Glithwah agreed. It wouldn't, of course. The investment to build Discovery, to manufacture enough antimatter to fuel an interstellar drive, had been, well, astronomical. And if the humans had been so inclined, regardless? Great Clan rivalries had exiled Arblen Ems to K'rath's comet belt in the first place. The exiles would not be welcome.
But Arblen Ems would be great again. Glithwah felt it. She believed it. More, she had sworn it.
Then would come the time for a return to K'rath.
Chapter 4
InterstellarNet: The network that made possible and continues to bind the interstellar trading community. Radio-based commerce in intellectual property accelerated—and continues to bring into convergence—the technological repertoires of all member species.
A key milestone in InterstellarNet history was the development of, and cross-species agreement upon, artificially intelligent surrogates as local trade representatives for distant societies. Quarantine procedures govern the delivery and operational environment of each alien agent, protecting agents and their host networks from subversion by the other. Only once, soon after the earliest deployments of AI agents, has this security mechanism been breached. A trapdoor hidden within imported biocomputers, technology that had been licensed by Earth from the Hunters of Barnard's Star, was exploited by their trade agent. The attempt at extortion was foiled, the vulnerability within the adopted technology expunged, and the AI returned to its containment (see related article, "Snake Subterfuge").
What impact the dawning age of travel among the stars will have on the Interstellar-Net community remains to be seen.
—Internetopedia
From the spartan living room of his modest apartment, Carl consulted with the stern-faced, severely tailored woman who was going by the name of Danica Chidambaram. As far as everyone else on this rock knew, Danica, who arrived the week before as a passenger aboard a routine supply run, worked for Worldswide Insurance.
Who better than a claims adjuster to poke around the sites of Snake industrial accidents?
In a glimpse across the Commons, the nearest they had come in person on this world, Danica seemed shy but pleasant, with a mild manner and an averted gaze. But that reticent nature was an act, as contrived as her avatar. Among her fellow spooks, she was a flaming extrovert.
They were linked by the most robust and tightly controlled encryption software known to mankind. Across the entire solar system, perhaps a few dozen operatives, their names and exact numbers also classified, had access to the tech. (A few United Planet high officials doubtless had also gotten the biochip upgrade, though Carl knew that to be so only of the deputy director of UP Intelligence, having twice delivered especially sensitive reports to his boss on a COSMIC ULTRA link.) All the fancy tech notwithstanding, Carl would have preferred to debrief Danica in his office: behind two locked doors (inner and outer rooms alike swept every morning for bugs), within the most thoroughly shielded facility on Ariel.
Talented actor that Danica was, she might not have revealed any more face-to-face than over the link. He still wished they could have met in person. Spying was a lonely business.
"So what do you think?" he asked her. "Let's start with the deuterium refinery."
"Heavy hydrogen is still hydrogen. All it took was a spark." Danica shrugged. "Boom."
The Snake investigative report had surmised much the same.
"Uh-huh. And the source of that spark?"
"We may never know. Between the blast itself and the dome blowout, evidence is, shall we say, scattered. As often as not, vaporized."
"Speculate," he said.
"Carelessness? Sabotage? I don't know. I'll keep looking, but don't expect definitive answers."
"Can you confirm the headcount?" Snake media had reported twelve fatalities, most missing and presumed dead, and three times as many injured.
"Not without running DNA screens, or the Snake equivalent, against several square klicks of Ariel's surface. Maybe not then. Stuff got blasted off-world."
He considered. "It could have been much worse, I suppose. An hour later, when a bunch of trainees were due..."
Danica turned her hands palms-up. For
someone so loath to speculate, spying was an odd career choice.
"The meltdown at the plasteel mill?"
"Software glitch," she said.
"And?"
Another shrug. "Of unclear provenance."
"And the gray-goo incident?"
"Puzzling. It was Centaur nanotech."
In other words, mature and reliable. "And did it have any software glitches?"
"By inference, yes, but no one has found it. Or is apt to."
Because the standard response to nanoassemblers run amok was flamethrowers.
Case by case, they reviewed the various recent Snake misfortunes. None related in any obvious way to Ariel's other run of bad luck, several months earlier, the scoop-ship losses. Bottom line: mayhem and destruction, all of unclear antecedents. A high toll, but seldom as bad as it might have been.
"Insurance fraud?" Carl eventually asked.
Shrug.
"Ever feel you were trapped in a game of b'tok?"
"What's that?"
"The traditional Snake game of strategy."
"Oh. Like chess."
"Kind of."
Except that b'tok was to chess as chess was to rock-paper-scissors. For starters, b'tok was four-dimensional and could only be played virtually. The offensive and defensive capabilities of a b'tok game icon depended on its 3-D coordinates, the time spent at that location, and interactions with nearby pieces both friendly and rival. Also unlike chess, with its unchanging board of sixty-four squares, the b'tok domain of play evolved. It developed turn by turn, and the view differed by side. A player saw only as far as his pieces had explored. The dynamics tended to undo any equilibrium that might arise between rivals; it was a rare match that ended in a draw.
He could play, just a little. As a reason for unofficial face time with Glithwah, he tried to fit in a game at least once a month. Almost every match Carl did better—and yet he never won. He had come to believe that she played just well enough to beat him, imparting as little as possible about how experts played the game.
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