NanoSymbionts

by Joseph Philbrook

  “Attempts you say?” 1st interrupted. “Surely no whiffer beast's handler would try such a thing in the presence of a questor or even his apprentice. So how is it that you describe these abductions as attempts? Whiffer beasts are not known to be easily foiled.”

  “No! they are not,” Questor replied without waiting to see if 2nd was willing to again yield his turn to speak. “But what the handler of these whiffer beasts failed to take into account is just how effective a well trained team of augmented defenders can be. Which is in fact how I can be sure of the quality of the nano-enhancement. For when the team I trained and augmented managed to capture one of the whiffer beasts. It's internal nanites were able to defend it against nano-interrogation long enough for it's handler to remotely trigger a destruct circuit.”

  “I find this information most disturbing Questor,” 2nd spoke up.

  “But tell us,” 3rd inquired. “Just where were you when these alleged incidents occurred?”

  Questor sighed, then since 3rd was evidently waiting to hear his response, he replied.

  “I had made the mistake of thinking I could safely pursue an element of my personal quest,” he said. “While my team watched over the early stages of my apprentices development. I fear I misjudged the threat my apprentice would be under and evidently the speed with which he would develop.”

  “That brings us to the question,” 4th pointed out. “How would you explain your apprentice to us?”

  Questor shook his head. Then since 5th wasn't choosing to speak, he replied.

  “There is only so much I can explain,” Questor said. “But first you should know that when a transdimensional experiment of mine went wrong. I literally fell to the ground in front of a manually controlled vehicle that he was operating under severe weather conditions. He had no way of knowing that I would survive being hit by his vehicle. Without hesitation he put himself at risk to avoid hitting me. He did miss me but in doing so he crashed into a tree. He was grievously injured and there was little time to return the favor and save his life.

  You should be aware that his planetary culture has little more than theoretical knowledge of even the crudest of nanites. So when he first found out about the fact that some nanites had irreversibly decided to inhabit his body, he was alarmed and indeed even frightened. I should perhaps have realized he would develop more quickly than most. When at a very early stage, he actively sought help in preventing his nanites from imposing his subconscious desires upon those around him. But as I already told you, I made the mistake of thinking I could safely investigate something off world.

  When I returned, I found that he had left a detailed report concerning a narrow window of opportunity to prevent a particularly unpleasant calamity from befalling the entire galaxy. I have reviewed his data and have to agree that if the aggressive race in question had had time to initialize their plan for expansion via conquest, even the combined resources of the guild fleet and every Questor currently in existence would have been unable to prevent a terrible fate from befalling billions of inhabited worlds. He understood that there wasn't any time to spare and thus he left in a constructor ship on a temporally inverted voyage of interdiction. For a more detailed explanation of my apprentice I'm afraid you will need to ask him. That is, if he survived the task he appointed himself to.”

  “Why then did you not alert the council when you first received that report?” 5th demanded.

  Questor's shoulders sagged slightly.

  “Because it was by then already far to late, he explained. “If his symbiont or his ship's semi-symbiont AI computer hadn't developed enough to shield him from the temporal fugue, then it was too late to save him. If it had, then he had already accomplished his terrible mission. So instead I spent a little time to repair some of the damage that his first encounter with these creatures had had upon some of the the people I cared about at Hillside.”

  “The council has heard enough of this Questor,” 1st interrupted.

  “We will judge the nature of your report later,” 2nd added.

  “You will be sequestered pending further investigation into your actions,” 3rd continued.

  “I hope, for your sake,” 4th commented. “That we decide you have acted within the bounds of your oath.”

  “That is all!” 5th closed the session. “Take the prisoner away Admiral, then escort the new arrival...”

  That was all Questor heard before the sonic suppression field reinitialized as the isolation chamber once again became fully opaque.

  “There is a good chance that Jake is the new arrival, don't you think?” he asked his symbiont.

  “That is not certain,” the symbiont replied inside his brain. “I compute only a 40% probability that your assumption is correct.”

  “That is enough to kindle hope,” replied it's host-mind. “In any case I'm glad I've done what I could. To ensure that they don't attempt to punish him for violating an oath he has yet to actually take.”

  His symbiont didn't actually reply. There was no need. It could see that it's host-mind was rationally considering the possibilities. Including the ill will within the council he had generated for his own circumstances. By insisting that the councilor's own nanites acknowledge responsibility to ensure that the terms of the original nanosymbiotic pact would be honored. Further conversation on the subject would only have been counterproductive.

  Chapter 39 Audience

  Times were changing thought captain Waymaker as he sat in the command chair of his new starship. As he went through the prelaunch checklist for the maiden voyage of the Avant-garde, his mind drifted back to the surprise visitor that had changed his life.

  He remembered thinking it must be some kind of sick joke. He had just received a request for a personal meeting from the occupant of a state of the art guild vessel. ‘What the hell would the guild want with me?’ he had thought. ‘If they thought my clandestine activities had strayed far enough from the terms of my Free Spacer License to warrant their attention. They would have simply pulled my entire ship out of normal space-time with a manipulator field from a passing guild warship. I'd never even have seen it coming’

  Nonetheless, since his sensors showed him that a guild design star shuttle had suddenly appeared within docking range of his main airlock, Waymaker decided that he didn't know anyone with enough resources to pull off such a joke. So he had reflexively swallowed a mouthful of nothing and replied to the hail with permission to dock. While he waited for the guild vessel to dock and for his airlock to slowly cycle, Waymaker tried to think what business the guild could possibly have with him.

  The Waymaker family business was one of the few that had managed to stay continuously viable. From the day the Free Space Accord had been signed until today. They had nearly gone under many times. Though on each occasion to date, one or more of his ancestors had been able to turn things around again. Frequently by way of relocating the business to a different star cluster. Usually because the political situation in their former field of operations had become intolerable. This was no small feat in the business environment that had resulted from the slow decline of the accord's effectiveness.

  A decline that many Freespacers blamed on a lack of support from the guild. Though a few Freespacers, like himself, had always pointed out that the guild had been responsible for creating the accord in the first place. Which was true enough, the guild had expressly designed the accord to, among other things, prevent any single entity from acquiring a total monopoly on interstellar shipping. They had agreed to fund a program ensuring the continued research, development and when applicable, the construction of starships that were not based on the inverse temporal dilation that the guild used.

  They had hoped to get the majority of the governments involved to rule in their favor. The guild had wanted the ratification of the Free Space Accord so badly at the time, that they had even released the technical details of the majority of their interstellar technology. Making it possible for Governments and Free Spacer enti
ties to use a form of the Guild's own stardrive for robotically operated long range ship carriers and their overall strategy had worked. The old council of interstellar civilizations did ratify the accord by a 97% majority vote. Of course, the guild had known what they were doing. The majority of the passengers who were willing to submit to the required long term stasis preferred to do so with a live pilot on board and no one could blame them.

  The robotically operated ships were based on the stardrive of the old guild. They used the guild's inverse temporal dilation technology to generate a temporal wormhole. It allowed the starship to travel great distances almost instantaneously. With the trade off that everything traveling inside the wormhole would experience, all of the time it would otherwise have taken for a beam of light to travel the distance involved. The difference came into it because these wormholes were inherently somewhat unstable. It took an organic brain to sense when slight corrections to their trajectory might be needed to avoid drifting into the dangerous outer edges of the wormhole. Without such corrections, nearly 2% of such ships simply never made it to their destination. The losses were more like 5% on truly long range voyages. Whereas the loss rate of properly piloted ships was less than one in a trillion and the majority of those had been found to be the result of sabotage.

  So the robot ships hadn't ever put much of a dent in the guild's dominance in long range space travel. Though for a while, the accord had stimulated serious competition in the so called short range market where the distances involved were generally less than 100 lightyears. Unfortunately, lacking a truly viable medium range alternative to temporal inversion, most of the Free Spacer entities had been relatively short lived niche markets that depended on the continued goodwill of the governments in their region of operations.

  The Waymaker family business couldn't have remained viable for so long without relocating it's theater of operations on a regular basis. Now however, the current state of affairs wasn't very promising. It wasn't just a regional problem that they could escape by simply pulling up stakes and relocating while accepting the same risks as any new start up business. They just couldn't find anyplace worth relocating to. There didn't seem to be any government that thought of Free Spacers as a viable alternative to the guild anymore. Most of them seemed to think that their region's finite resources should only be used for government run space operations.

  Captain Waymaker commanded the best of the remaining three operational fringe effect vessels that were still owned by the family business and the Victorious was in rough shape. Unless the business found a significant source of new revenue to pay for some needed maintenance it wasn't going to pass inspection. They would be ordered to junk her. True, they could then use some of her parts to bring the other two ships up to muster. In the long run however, they'd be better off if he could cannibalize the other two ships for the parts to refit the Victorious. Unfortunately until one of the ships was formally condemned, the banking system wouldn't let him scrap it and the Victorious was due for recertification nearly two galactic standard years before either of the others.

  Waymaker's musings were interrupted when the Victorious's airlock finally creaked open and he got his first glimpse of his visitor. Waymaker was so shocked when he recognized his visitor as the well known ‘Captain’ of one of the more famous guild major transport vessels. That he had almost neglected to formally welcome him aboard the Victorious.

  “Welcome aboard,” Waymaker belatedly spat out. “To what do I owe the honor of such an esteemed visitor?”

  “Thank you for taking the time to meet with me,” the visitor said as soon as the airlock door closed behind him. “I've come to you to mediate a business proposition that would be in your best interest. But I'm afraid I do not have much time for all the formal procedures usually involved. I can only say that by my honor as a questor of the guild, I certify that the entity wishing to do business with you, is not directly affiliated with the guild. At least not yet. I also certify that he does in fact command the resources necessary to complete the deal described in the data pack I'm about to offer you.

  However the offer is extremely time sensitive and I must have an answer almost immediately. So I need to ask if your willing to waive the normal formalities and allow me to use a guild data infuser to import the details directly into your cerebral cortex?”

  Waymaker was stunned.

  “You want me to... What could possibly make you think I'd agree to that?” he demanded.

  “Because that's the only way you can understand the deal in time,” the questor began. “Because contingent on acceptance of this deal, your prospective business partner has already fully funded the construction of a dozen brand new state of the art starships, each with nearly triple the payload capacity of your current ship. All twelve of the new ships will, at least temporarily, be equipped with certain fully licensed new non-guild technology that will upgrade them into actually viable medium range starships. If you accept the offer I'm authorized to seal the transfer of ownership of all 12 vessels to you immediately. Along with a short term, conditional license for the use of the new technology. A longer term license for the new technology would be contingent upon my client's acceptance as a member of the Free Spacer Alliance.

  The ships themselves would remain yours even if the venture based on successfully sponsoring my client's membership request, fails. Though the continued use of the non-guild propitiatory technology that will enable the medium range functionality of these new ships, depends on his acceptance. Once my client is ratified as a member the Free Space Alliance will have a nonrevocable license to use the said technology, which permits a rapid form of subspatial flight without the associated risk of subspatial rift syndrome.”

  Waymaker was finding this hard to believe. If he hadn't heard his guest personally certify the validity on his honor as a questor, with his own ears, he wouldn't believe any of it. Nonetheless that was one pledge that no questor would dare misuse, so no matter how fantastic the explanation was, the questor himself must actually believe it and questors were not known to be easily deceived.

  When Waymaker came to, the questor was leaning over him with what looked like a concerned expression on his face.

  “Are you alright?” he asked. “I'm sorry, I should have at least made sure you were sitting down.” Then with a pointed glance at a timekeeping device that no questor really needed, the captain of the Resonance continued. “But I'm afraid I've run out of time. Will you let me infuse the offer or not?”

  “That depends,” Waymaker said after he picked himself up off the deck plating. “Why me?”

  “Because my files on you say your one of the best Free Spacers in the Galaxy,” his visitor explained. “And that your integrity is such that your one of the very few free spacers that I'm willing, on behalf of my client, to accept your word bond as a binding contract.”

  “I find it hard to believe that your files on me could possibly be extensive enough for that,” Waymaker suspiciously responded.

  “Would it help,” the questor asked with a slight grin. “If I told you I've been following the exploits of your family since I once met a man by the name of Gerald Uhlan.”

  Waymaker was flabbergasted.

  “And there I was thinking nobody knew the former name of the old scoundrel who first assumed the Waymaker name,” Waymaker acknowledged. “OK, I'll allow that anybody with records that deep, just might have a clue how good the word of a Waymaker is. So yes, I hereby waive the formalities but please be gentle.”

  ***

  “Attention, the final preflight checklist is complete,” the surprisingly human like voice of the Avant-garde's AI announced. “Please acknowledge. Attention the final preflight checklist is complete.”

  “Notification Acknowledged,” Waymaker belatedly responded. “Request launch clearance from departure control. Then, once approved, initiate the launch sequence.”

  No sooner had Captain Waymaker finished speaking then he felt a slight tremor run through
the superstructure of the ship as the docking clamps that held it were released. He almost couldn't feel the slight thrust of the docking thrusters as they slowly moved the ship clear of the station but there was no mistaking the sound of the inertial compensators ramping up to full power as the main particle transduction thrusters came on line.

  Waymaker was nervous. In less than three subcycles, he would be engaging the new subspatial insertion system and plunge deeply into subspace. On his way to a rendezvous in orbit around a worldless sun just 20 galactic standard lightyears from the Guild's Central Freight Station. He knew the new technology was supposed to make it safe but the very idea of deliberately crossing the line all the way into subspace was still hard to get used to. Though judging by the brief inspection he'd had time to make of the first of a dozen such ships, that were being built for his family business, he got the distinct impression that it was one of the best built ships he'd ever seen. He owed it to his benefactor to be part of the delegation of free spacers bringing suit against the guild. For interfering with their acquisition of permanent rights to use the only viable technology that could reasonably restore the Alliance's ability to compete with the guild.

  The Avant-garde was one of seven nearly identical sister ships that had already been completed. One for each of the seven Free spacer entities that the Captain of the Resonance had made a deal with. The presiding member of each of which, had been transported to the Resonance for a personal meeting with their benefactor. The plan was to use the solar energy they could harvest in close solar orbit, to replenish the highly concentrated synthetic fuel that powered the new ships. Before going on to the Guild's nerve center to protest that they were illegally holding an alliance supplicant as a prisoner. While trying to coerce him into formally joining the guild. Which membership would preclude the Alliance from completing his ratification ceremony as a Free Spacer. Jake Peterson could become a member of either the Guild or the Free Spacer Alliance but the two possibilities were mutually exclusive. He could not join both and he had already petitioned the Alliance for membership.