by S MacDonald
‘Oh, I expect there’s more to it than that,’ Tan said, reassuringly. ‘Deanne wouldn’t just dump projects out to Telathor to get rid of them – that isn’t really the Second’s style, you know, and it would be quite an expensive way to get rid of them, too, since the Second has to fund their travelling costs and the transport of all their equipment.’
Commander Mikthorn was startled. ‘You know Admiral Covara?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Tan said easily. ‘I’m based on Chartsey when not on active posting and it is, as they say, a remarkably small world at that level of society. You meet the same people all the time at official events and Deanne is a frequent guest at the Embassy, besides working closely with our Trade and Industry division. I’ve always found her to be very incisive, totally on the ball and very much in the habit of getting what she wants. You’re right in what you say about the pressure she is under – I’m aware that she’s set up an office specifically to deal with applications for time in the lab here, because I called Deanne myself and was put through to the Fourth’s department by call screening. They thought I was calling to lobby in support for a project, you see, and it took me some time to get past that and speak to her in person. I only wanted to tell her that I was coming out here and to ask for access to Second Irregulars files, a usual inter-agency courtesy. But as we were chatting she apologised for the difficulty in getting through, and commented that she’d had four Senators trying to get at her just that day, so her staff were just being protective.’
‘Senators?’ Commander Mikthorn looked bewildered.
‘Lord, yes,’ Tan chuckled. ‘Senate Ricochet – we get it at the Embassy too, of course, but I know Deanne is really in the firing line just now. What happens is, you see, that people put in applications for projects from all over the League, hundreds of university and commercial applicants competing for, as you say, just ten places. When they are turned down, as most of them are, or given provisional approval but told they’ll be on a waiting list which may mean several years, they do whatever they can to either get that decision reversed or move themselves up the priority. One of the obvious ways to do that is to write to their Senators and ask for their help. Most Senators are keen to be seen to be doing something for the people who elected them, and this kind of thing, supporting their world’s R&D, is a popular one. That’s why we call it the Ricochet, all the bullets being fired at them by their electorate, which they in turn bounce out at us. In this case, at Deanne. There’s a well-established lobbying tradition, a routine most of them trot through – a pinging to and fro of standard letters and replies, and if the Senator is really keen or really under pressure, culminating in a personal call or meeting. So yes, Deanne gets quite a lot of calls from Senators trying to push projects from their homeworlds – there’ll be letters from system presidents doing the same thing, too, for sure, in fact, a barrage of letters from as many influential people on that world as the project team has managed to bag on side. Letters, though, are easier to deal with than Senators on call or asking you to pop in to their office for a word. Anyway yes, undeniably, Deanne and her people are under a great deal of pressure there over the places in this lab. But I can’t think, you know, I really can’t, that Deanne would deal with that by throwing projects willy-nilly out at Telathor to get rid of them by dumping them at you. Like I say, really not her style. What I can see her doing is sending out projects on a contingency basis. I know the Fleet does that. There are so many people on the waiting list for secondment places here; I know the Fleet has those at the top of that list moved out to around where the Fourth is going to be on operations, so if a place does become available they’re on hand to get in there straight away. Quite a lot of those who were at Telathor have now gone to Oreol and are staffing the base there, I believe. It’s possible – likely, even – that Deanne authorised the teams to come out to Telathor on the same basis.’
Commander Mikthorn was looking obstinate.
‘That isn’t what my orders were,’ he stated. ‘I was told to relocate the Parrot team to Oreol and get the highest priority projects in here. The thing was,’ he went on, relapsing into a bitterly aggrieved tone, ‘that every time the ship came in there’d be another team on it with priority superseding the ones that were already there. I got to dread that ship arriving – there was one every week, coming in from ISiS Gateway. Now they’re running three a week and talk of it going to one a day, but one a week was more than enough for me. Every week, seriously, six weeks running, up popped another project team wanting accommodation and resources and wanting to know when could they get out to the ship, and with priority higher than the other teams already there so they had to be told they were going to have to wait. By week five, the first team to have arrived was looking at at least seven months before they could even get a look in, and they were just going berserk.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Tan.
‘I don’t think you can,’ said Commander Mikthorn. ‘There were tears, you know, I could cope with the shouting and even the swearing but the crying was unbearable, I’ve never seen people break down like that before, not in real life, it was horrible and nothing I could do about it. I did try to fix them up with facilities on Telathor but it didn’t help, sometimes even made things worse. I was at my wits end, really was. And with the Fourth out here all I could do was write to Professor Parrot, explain the situation, ask for his understanding and promise that I’d provide everything they wanted at Oreol… to which, as I said, after six weeks waiting desperately for a reply, I got No.’ He drew a breath and let it out heavily. ‘Then another team arrived and threw everything up in the air again and I decided enough was enough and I’d just have to come out here and sort it out myself. And that,’ he added sadly, ‘has gone down like a duralloy brick.’
Tan’s smile was understanding. ‘So – did the orders say definitely that Professor Parrot and his team have to move to Oreol?’
There was a short silence. ‘Yes and no,’ Commander Mikthorn equivocated. ‘Yes, there were orders to me to organise and provide for the move with everything they asked for. And I had orders too to get those other teams onto the ship at the earliest opportunity. But the instructions to the Parrot team did have a get-out clause allowing them to stay, with the agreement of the Fourth on grounds of operational imperative. I’m still not entirely sure exactly what that means and I don’t believe they know, either, but they’re using it to refuse to leave and I’ve had to face the fact that there is nothing I can do about it. I dread to think how many teams there are on Telathor by now, and some of them, you know, are really important – medical research, defence projects, genuinely high priority.’
Tan gave a small but very honest crack of laughter, shaking his head at the commander.
‘You really don’t get it, do you?’ He said, and as the commander looked a tad resentful at that, changed his tone. ‘Sorry. It’s just amazing to me that someone so intelligent and well educated, actually working for the Second, doesn’t understand the nature of what’s going on in that lab – no, I don’t mean the science of it, that’s gobbledy-babble to me too, don’t stand a chance of understanding it and won’t waste my time trying. But the nature of the thing… please forgive me if I take this back to basics, but do you know what happens when someone gives us tech? Advanced tech, I mean, beyond our current understanding.’
‘Well, I know that it’s reverse-engineered,’ Commander Mikthorn said cautiously.
‘You make that sound so simple. But it’s actually a process – the first thing we can do is the easiest, just use the tech as its provided without understanding how it works and with no attempt to manufacture it for ourselves. In this case, we could do that by buying in nanotech defence sensors from the Samartians, and that’s perfectly possible, we’re in trade-agreement relationship and selling them siliplas production which is advanced tech for them. The next step up from that is if the tech comes with a manual, blueprints and a theoretical handbook – R&D guys call that ‘the mat
h’. Getting tech and the math means that you can study the theory and take the tech to bits, which I guess is what you mean by reverse engineering. But it is never, ever, as simple as reading the handbook and copying the parts. Because it is tech beyond our current understanding just working through the math means that you are inevitably going to hit points where you go huh? If you’re really lucky then you are in a position to ask the people who gave it to explain the incomprehensible bit in the math. In exodiplomacy, though, things are never that simple and if you do get an explanation it tends to generate more questions than give answers. In engineering the thing, too, you need to go back several steps and figure out the tech you need to make the tech that will manufacture the parts. There are complex processes to be unravelled, and that in itself can take years, even to get to the point where we understand enough to reproduce the tech, exactly as it was given to us and for the same purpose, even if we don’t yet fully understand the theory. Beyond that is the ultimate goal of technological assimilation, reaching a point where we do understand the theory as well as having solved the production issues, at which point we make that tech our own by developing it for our own needs and purposes. For reference, okay, the biotech the quarians gave us ninety years ago took eleven years to research sufficiently to get it in production and it was another six years before we produced our first development tech from it. And we’re still in the process, come to that, of figuring out the math – which is why, incidentally, there’s such a feeding frenzy of projects fighting to get space here. You know, I take it, about the biovat?’
Commander Mikthorn looked really taken aback, as if Tan had said something astounding.
‘Uh…’ he said. ‘I know they have a biovat. And someone did once say that the reason everyone wants in with the Fourth is that they got the biovat to work, but I thought… well, I thought they were having me on.’
‘No, really not,’ Tan grinned. ‘That biovat was a dead duck, has been for years. It’s notorious in the R&D community, an R&D graveyard with tumbleweed and rows of tombstones for every team that’s grappled with it only to bite the dust. It was given to the Fourth as a joke, you know, it really was, it was absolutely nothing more than a wind-up from the Second to the Fourth, given to them in just the same way that the Fleet gives impossible tasks to cadets on their shipboard placement. The biovat, see, is based on that tech the quarians gave us. The principle of genetic manipulation of base proteins is well understood now and the engineering of the biovat for food production was not that big a leap. And it works very well, too, very well indeed … groundside. Put it on a superlight ship, though, and the thing just goes kerblooey. Nobody could figure out why, it just does not work on superlight ships, the production is clearly affected by wave space conditions but that makes no sense at all. Scientifically, at our current level of theoretical understanding, that shouldn’t make any difference at all. I can’t tell you how many solutions were tried, all the stabilisers and software patches and isolation fields and lord knows what else. The quarians are no help because they’re not a spacefaring people and have never used that tech for food production anyway so had no more idea than we did. I can tell you that the Second gave it to the Fourth for a laugh, though. There was never any real funding for it, they just gave them a vat and tried to get any teams coming out here on other projects to do a bit of work on the vat on the side – and if you suspect that there was an element of wind-up in that too, I wouldn’t disagree. R&D people, as I expect you’ve discovered, tend towards the maverick, and they are generally up for a laugh – spoof articles on daft research and that kind of thing. Most teams don’t fall for it; just give it a big fat pvvv. Sam Maylard, though, he was up for it – actually here to develop the Maylard cannon, of course, but he had a go at the biovat as well. And he did it, he actually cracked it, figured it out and got the thing producing edible food.’ He laughed. ‘There’s a brilliant article on it in DQ5,’ he said, that being the Second’s own in-house journal. ‘You should look it up – the headline quotes Deanne on being told that the biovat was actually producing fruit;’ he paused for a moment and quoted, ‘Well, I’ll be moggered.’ He chuckled. ‘Sam Maylard is brilliant, of course, a polymath who’s practically a multidisciplinary team in his own right, but with all due respect and credit to him for the breakthrough, he says himself that he could not have done it without the Fourth. And when you read the article, you see why. The sheer range of the contributors – I’m sure you have, yourself, experience of handling multi-disciplinary teams, but can you imagine a project for which you need superlight physicists, engineers, medical doctors, missile specialists and a chef?’
‘You are joking,’ Commander Mikthorn said, half incredulous and half appalled.
‘I promise you, I’m not.’ Tan said. ‘If it was written up for publication in other journals, it would have to be cut into chunks for physics, engineering, medicine and food technology, because they were all part of the solution. And the biggest part of that was figuring out the math, why the superlight conditions affect the vat. They’re still working on the detail, but the advances they’ve made so far have significantly increased our understanding of wave space dynamics and opened up new fields of research, too. And all that, yes, to make the biovat work. And the thing is, see, they didn’t know that was what they’d need to solve it, there was an even wider range of people who’d worked on it, too, but weren’t part of the solution. That’s like handing a project to every department in a university and asking them to join up in collaborative research. If you could persuade them to do it at all… well, herding cats has that one just about right. But the Fourth, you see, is a multi-disciplinary think tank, whatever project they’re working on, they come at it from every conceivable direction, and they work together with a level of teamwork you could never get in universities or even commercial R&D. That’s why people want to come here – word goes round fast in the R&D world and once it was realised that the Fourth really had got the biovat working, everyone with a stalled project wanted in. There is also the exodiplomacy aspect – just about everyone in the R&D world knows or suspects that the Fourth has aliens on board and there’s a thrill and cachet to that besides the potential for getting that highly advanced input to your project. And don’t underestimate, either, the social status teams get for themselves, their universities or companies if they win a place in the Fourth.’
‘But…’ Commander Mikthorn had been on Chartsey when students had come out in protest at one of their own PhD students doing research aboard the Fourth’s ship. He had had to pass through many an anti-Fourth demonstration outside Admiralty HQ, too, frequently with riot police in attendance. ‘Their public reputation…’
‘Oh, I know – dreadful,’ Tan agreed. ‘And bizarre – where the Fourth is concerned, really, the population falls into two distinct camps – those who know what’s really going on with them, and those who believe what they see in the media. Most of the R&D community is in the know, as are most members of government, the Diplomatic Corps, the Fleet, of course, and other authorities. It’s just that there is this wide gulf between the authorities and people in the know who are not in a position to disclose the truth, and the general public who believe, well, whatever they want to believe. It’s quite remarkable, really, when you step back and look at it – I’ve never seen any organisation that is both so admired and so reviled. It is, for sure, very much a case of love them or hate them. I hope, I really do, that having so much of this mission disclosed to the public will help smooth out some of that as people do see for themselves at least some of what they’re doing. I’m not holding my breath, though. As the Admiralty discovered, a media blitz has a life of its own and once it is unleashed, there is no reasoning with it.’
‘Hmmn.’ Commander Mikthorn looked unhappy, finding this confusing and feeling, too that any organisation which attracted such public outrage, whether it was merited or not, should be quietly disbanded in the wider interests of the Fleet. ‘So,’ he said, with a not-so-
subtle change of subject, ‘this research they’re doing, then, is figuring out how the Samartian tech works?’
‘Lord, no, they’re way past that.’ Tan said comfortably. ‘It’s not, you see, that far ahead of where we are already, both the math and the engineering within our reach, just not a field we’ve ever really explored to full potential. We could make the same kind of sensors that the Samartians use, now – in fact I believe there are already production facilities being built to do just that. But the research here is about pushing it on, taking the tech and finding out what we can do with it. Which may, I grant you, look haphazard, sparking off in all directions, but is really very high powered indeed and does, really does, have the potential to revolutionise our technology. And the reason they’re here, quite apart from all the benefits to the research team of working in with the Fourth, is to develop tech which the Fourth themselves can use in operations. They’re focusing on comms, obviously – still at quite a rough stage of prototyping but blazing away at it and making astonishing progress. We’re a very long way from anything that could be used as an intersystem comms network, of course, but I’ll lay you odds that we will, within a few years, be seeing systems based on what they’re doing here in production. Defence sensors, of course, helping to protect our worlds, and that’s no small thing, but one of the projects they’re working towards is to lay a network of comms around systems, along shipping lanes. As a Fleet officer, I’m sure you’re aware of the proportion of emergencies declared within twenty five hours of leaving or approaching port. It doesn’t need much thinking about, really, to realise the advantages of having a comms system by which ships could talk to system controllers even hours after they’ve launched.’
