Into the Light

by David Weber

  “It sounds like you figured it out, though.”

  “I did.” Lewis nodded with a smile. “At least a little.”

  Dvorak set down his French fry and gave her his full attention.

  “So what did you do?”

  “Well, the first thing I did was to sit down with Brian here.” She waved at Jacobi as she spoke. “He’s the guy who’s really on the front line with the existing industrial base, after all.”

  Dvorak nodded. The Secretary of Industry had responsibility for the actual management of the captured Shongair industrial platforms, and he and Jessica Tallman worked closely with General Landers, whose SAR teams were carrying the lion’s share of the rebuilding effort. Tallman was the Secretary of Federal Management, a brand-new cabinet level position Howell had created when he pulled FEMA out from the Department of Homeland Security’s umbrella and handed it over to the woman who’d been his state’s Secretary of Administration. Her years as what amounted to North Carolina’s business manager stood her in very good stead in her new duties.

  “Bryan gave me a comprehensive picture of where we are right now—how we’re allocating resources, what the President’s established as our core priorities for the rescue efforts, and how they’re prioritizing production. Neither of them have had much time to do any real long-range thinking, though.”

  “You might put it that way,” Jacobi put in dryly, looking up from his own hamburger. “Personally, I like Truman’s pithy little phrase, though.”

  “Which would be—?” Dvorak asked with a slight smile. He’d encountered Truman Landers’ pithiness, himself.

  “He says we’re too busy clubbing alligators to worry about what else may crawl out of the swamp to bite us on the ass,” Lewis said, and Dvorak chuckled.

  “He’s absolutely right, though,” Jacobi said more seriously. “Truman’s people decide what we need worst; my people figure out how to build it for him; and Jessica spends her time as the umpire, managing the balance between our current production and expansion for future production. None of us can afford to take our eyes off of our own ball to think about long-term implications or how to prioritize tech as tech.”

  “They’re coming at it from the perspective of engineers and emergency managers rationalizing production to meet our immediate needs, which are pretty damned dire,” Lewis said. “That doesn’t leave much room for long-range, what you might call ‘strategic,’ thinking.”

  She paused, looking at Dvorak, and he nodded in comprehension.

  “I’m afraid we sucked Fabienne into our own task areas, though,” Jacobi observed with a crooked smile.

  “Well, one of the things I realized when I really started looking at my new assignment was that there’s not much I can do about long-term analysis right this minute, either. So I figured I should look at other ways to make myself useful until I get my own people—and myself—up to speed on the basic Hegemony scientific platform. Until we manage that, it’s all engineering and figuring out the best immediate applications for our problems, really,” Lewis pointed out. “And even with neural educators, getting at the underlying principles in a knowledge base as deep as the Hegemony’s is going to take what I believe you Southerners call ‘a while.’”

  Dvorak nodded again. He’d already encountered the same problem himself where galactic history was concerned, and he suspected it had to be a lot worse for someone who probably needed to unlearn quite a few things she’d always known in the past. Like the fact that faster-than-light travel was impossible, for instance.

  “And in the meantime?”

  “In the meantime, while I start familiarizing myself with the basic theory, I’m helping Brian and Jessica look at current problems and needs. That’s not really something I was trained for, either, and I didn’t have a clue about where to start. So, faced with such an overwhelming number of things I didn’t know, I fell back on the things I did know. I turned the whole problem into a giant, worldwide IT solution.”

  Dvorak cocked his head, and she smiled at the obvious interest in his eyes.

  “Once I could relate it to something I knew, some of the questions started answering themselves. I may not know about worldwide food and fuel distribution, for example, but I do know about networking. When I turned it into a networking issue, I realized it was very similar to what I’d do in the IT world; I just needed to learn the new terminology required. In this case, it’s infrastructure, and with Brian here as a tutor, I was able to at least start getting a handle on it.”

  “Fabienne’s being a little too modest,” Jacobi said. “The truth is that she’s been useful as hell when it comes to clubbing alligators, too.”

  “I can leave you and Jessica—and General Landers—to do the heavy lifting while I sit back and think about things,” Lewis pointed out. Then her smile faded and she reached out to lay a hand on Jacobi’s forearm. “All three of you have way too much on your plates for that, and we’re luckier than we deserve that you’re handling the short term as well as you are, because if you weren’t, there might not be a long term.”

  Jacobi shook his head and looked at Dvorak.

  “We’ve been focused on what Truman calls the ‘airdrop’ approach. We’re delivering supplies and medical teams by shuttle—by helicopter where we can, but mostly by shuttle, now—and we can reach any place on the planet that way. The problem is that we can only reach one place with each shuttle at any given moment, and that means we’re building up isolated enclaves whose only physical communication with one another—or with us—is by shuttle. A Starlander has a lot of capacity, but not enough to meet any logistic need beyond that. But because we have that capacity, that’s what we’ve been totally focused on using.”

  He paused until Dvorak nodded in understanding, then shrugged slightly.

  “Fabienne is looking beyond that stage, and I think the approach she’s taking has implications for everything else we’re up to.”

  “And that approach is?”

  “Before the Puppies came calling, we had a functioning infrastructure for food and fuel distribution,” Lewis said. “It may not have been perfect, and some of it may have been vastly in need of update—even here in the U.S.—but there was an infrastructure in place.

  “But when they dropped their KEWs on us, they blew gaps in that infrastructure—gaps big enough to cause it to collapse completely. Now food no longer goes where it’s needed, and the fuel no longer flows. Where I erred though, was in thinking we needed to create an entire new infrastructure to get things where they were needed.”

  “That wasn’t your error, Fabienne; it was ours,” Jacobi interrupted.

  “Well, maybe,” Lewis allowed. “But what really matters is that we don’t—need to create an entirely new infrastructure, I mean. Like any networking solution where a gap exists, we just have to close the gap. The rest of the infrastructure’s already there.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Dvorak agreed.

  “Here’s an example of what she’s talking about,” Jacobi said. “Canada needs some items of food and fuel to get from the east to the west, and other items of food and fuel need to go the other way—from the west to the east. We’ve been focused on using our existing Starlanders—and building more of them—to do the transporting because of how devastated the pre-invasion transportation systems are, and that’s been a pretty serious problem, because shuttle production is one of our bottlenecks. A Starlander’s built almost completely out of synthetics, and that uses up a lot of critical resources and a lot of our printer capacity.

  “But Fabienne took a closer look at that transportation system, and she realized the major rail nets are still pretty much there. The problem is the number of bridges that were taken out, and the number of freight yards that went up when the Puppies hit major cities. Those are all fixable problems … it takes a lot less of our capacity to turn asteroidal iron into steel rails—or bridge girders, for that matter—than it does to make Starlanders.”

  Dvorak’s ey
es narrowed, and Lewis shrugged.

  “The Puppies left us complete plans for fully automated, self-directing engineering vehicles and construction units,” she said. “In fact, they also left us a complete assembly line that was just about ready to start churning them out for the occupation when they decided we were too much trouble to conquer. It wasn’t that difficult to turn the line on and let it churn out some of those units for us, and then program them to build bridges.” She frowned. “Actually, it was a little more difficult than I’d expected. It’s probably a good thing the Puppies didn’t have true AI in the sense of fully sentient systems, because something like that might have objected to finding itself under new management. But it looks like what they really have is what we’d call ‘brilliant software.’ In a lot of ways, it’s so capable it might as well be sentient, but it isn’t, and getting the engineering units to understand exactly what we wanted out of them took longer than I’d have expected.”

  “But she managed it in the end,” Jacobi said. “So instead of trying to haul tons of food and fuel back and forth, my Starlanders only have to land a few dozen loads of rails and steel girders and drop off some of those engineering units of hers. Then I can switch them back to the ‘airdrop’ approach and get the hell out of the way. In about another two weeks, we’ll have trains running between Vancouver and what’s left of Newfoundland again, and a single freight train can carry one hell of a lot more than a dozen Starlanders!”

  “That makes sense,” Dvorak said. “You’re not trying to build from scratch; you’re just … patching the holes.”

  “Exactly.” Lewis nodded. “It’s kind of like this mall. What do you suppose people said when the President decided to set up the government—what will ultimately be the world government, if he has his way—in a shopping mall?”

  “You probably don’t want to know what Sharon said,” Dvorak replied with a smile. “Let’s just say that if the comments were anything like hers, they weren’t very complimentary.”

  “Exactly,” Lewis said again. “And yet here we are, eating in the food court of the world government.” She smiled. “It’s actually got better facilities—the Koury Convention Center, for example—than a lot of the pre-Shongair governments had, and it’s at the junction of a number of major interstate highways and it’s got its own airport, so getting in and out of here is relatively easy … as much as it is anywhere else in the world these days.”

  “So,” Dvorak said, “if it’s silly, but it works, then it isn’t silly.”

  “Yep.” Lewis smiled and took another bite of dumpling. “And until we get through the immediate recovery stage, that’s the kind of thing I’m going to focus on. I’ll still be thinking about where we go in terms of pure science, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be more useful helping Brian and Jessica with those alligators for right now. Would it be better in some sort of perfect, ideal world if we could start from scratch and build the kind of planetwide transportation system that’s possible with Hegemony-level tech? Of course it would! But we don’t live in an ideal world, and everything doesn’t have to be perfect. All it has to do is to work for now. After we get through the crisis, we can start worrying about perfection.”

  “Works for me,” Dvorak agreed with a slow smile.

  “I figured it would.” She smiled back at him. “And it’s occurred to me that you should take some of the same approach yourself. I mean, if you’re concerned that you’re not the man for the Secretary of State’s job, you’re the only person I know who thinks so.”

  “I beg your pardon?” His surprise showed, and she shook her head.

  “You’re a smart man, Dave. And you’ll have all of Hegemony history at your fingertips, once you’ve had a chance to delve into it—just like I’ll have all of the Hegemony’s tech and science at my fingertips. You don’t have time to drill down into it yet, just like I don’t, but you do have a pretty solid grasp of human history, and I’m sure there are plenty of things you can use there as corollaries when it comes to your duties. Humanity never had a world government that was a real parallel for its transportation net. Or, rather, never one that worked as efficiently as its transportation net did. But it had a lot of governments, and they talked to each other. There were plenty of … interfaces, let’s say. You just need to find them, start putting some of them back online. Trust me, only the real idiots won’t understand that we need something a lot better than we ever had before. So all you really need is to open those interfaces back up and get them all talking to you—and to President Howell—again. After that, an awful lot of things will start taking care of themselves. So how you get them talking doesn’t have to be managed perfectly—”

  “It just has to work,” Dvorak finished for her, and she nodded.

  “Exactly,” Fabienne Lewis said yet again, and smiled.

  . XI .

  PETTY BUILDING, UNC-G,

  GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA,

  UNITED STATES

  “Well, that’s weird,” Trish Nesbitt said.

  “Did you ever see the movie The Princess Bride?” Warren Jackson asked without looking away from his own computer display.

  “What about it?” Nesbitt asked suspiciously.

  “My favorite character’s Inigo Montoya,” Jackson said, looking up at her for the first time. He was a very tall, very black, very thin man who looked a good twenty years younger than his calendar age, and he stroked his mustache with an index finger. A mustache, Nesbitt realized for the first time, which looked a great deal like Inigo Montoya’s. “I think he gets most of the best lines. Of course, ‘You killed my father. Prepare to die,’ is sort of the classic, but there was another one. About the meanings of words.”

  “I know exactly the scene you’re talking about, and it doesn’t apply. The word means exactly what I think it means—weird. Although, now that I think about it, ‘inconceivable’ would run a fairly close second.”

  “Well, maybe.” Jackson rolled his chair back and stood. He stretched mightily, then ambled across to Nesbitt’s desk. “It’s just that what we call ‘weird’ is probably only one more manifestation of the fact that the aliens are … well, they’re aliens, Trish. Of course the way they do things is going to strike us as a little odd.”

  “A little odd?” Nesbitt looked at him incredulously. She was blond and the next best thing to two feet shorter than he was, and her blue eyes widened as she shook her head. “Warren, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only thing that would really be ‘odd,’ is for anything these bastards do to make sense!”

  “Might be putting it a bit too strongly.” Jackson chuckled. “On the other hand, might not be, either. So, what’s ‘weird’ today?”

  Nesbitt smiled back at him. Jackson’s easy-going manner had fooled some people into missing the keen-edged brain behind it, but Nesbitt never had. She was used to leaving other people in her intellectual dust, but that never happened with Jackson. More than that, she considered him probably the best boss she’d ever had, especially in academia. He was one of the very few people she’d ever met who seemed genuinely able to check his preconceptions at the door, and that was a very valuable trait indeed as they began picking their way through the cornucopia of the Hegemony’s industrial and scientific base.

  “All right, look at this,” she said, pointing at her monitor.

  It was an eighty-two-inch LCD with PIPPBP functionality … and as obsolete as a wax tablet, as soon as they got around to replacing it. It was, however, quite good enough for her current purposes, and Jackson bent over her shoulder to look at the pair of schematics on it. One was about a quarter the size of the other, and he frowned.

  “I’m looking. What would it happen I’m looking at?”

  “This,” Nesbitt said, pointing at the larger of the two, “is the basic counter-grav generator built into the Puppies’ ground vehicles. It’s smaller and less capable than the one built into their shuttles, and that one’s smaller and less capable than the one built into their work boats, whi
ch is then scaled up even further for larger ships, etc. Right?”

  “Sure.” Jackson nodded. The Hegemony was a great believer in standardization, and apparently once it had a design that worked—especially one that scaled—it saw no reason to produce competing designs.

  “Well, this one over here,” Nesbitt pointed at the smaller schematic, “is what their workboat counter-grav should look like.”

  “What?” Jackson quirked an eyebrow. “Trish, I’m willing to concede that the Hegemony over-engineers like mad, but this—” it was his turn to indicate the smaller, simpler schematic “—is the workboat counter-grav and it’s—what? Seventy percent smaller than the ground version?”

  “Yep.” Nesbitt shook her head, her expression disgusted.

  “I know they go for multiply redundant features, but are you saying seventy percent of this thing doesn’t need to be here?”

  “No, it’s worse than that.” She tapped a key and a portion—a small portion—of the larger schematic flashed red. “I’m saying that this is what actually does all the work in the ground vehicle version. So, no, it’s not seventy percent of the ground version that doesn’t need to be there. It’s more like ninety percent, and all the rest of this is all what you might call multiply multiply redundant features. Not one bit of it needs to be there, Warren. I mean, I kept double backups for every feature, and I was still able to cut the workboat version to less than a third of its original bulk. I know we’re talking molecular circuitry. I know we’re talking about a degree of miniaturization that was never possible for us before the invasion. But this is one of their more volume intensive components. In fact, if they’d been willing to accept this level of redundancy, they could’ve put counter-grav into every single one of their vehicles, not just their tanks, and still have saved a good ten or fifteen percent of the volume their engines and transmissions used. Not to mention most of the suspension, the steering gear—all of it.”