The Odyssey and the Iliad (Kinsella Universe Book 7)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  “Agreed.”

  Trevor looked at Makaa who shrugged. “Captain, at this time I am hopelessly compromised. That -- thing -- opened me up like a clam and stripped me clean. There was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t sense anything from any of you, but it has to have been as effective. Assume everything any of us knows is known to them. Perhaps you are immune, Captain, but I have no way of knowing for sure.”

  “Their man?” Captain Moore asked.

  “It isn‘t too much to think they prepped him in advance. It was a mess; the Federation learned that the computer AIs they were using were self-aware. Not only that, those AIs had the ability as projective telepaths to control people’s actions. The two sides were negotiating in what, so far as I can determine, was good faith. Then one of AIs lost it. The one that controlled Grissom Station. It killed a more than a hundred thousand people in its death throes. Again, I’m not sure what really happened, but evidently non-rogue AIs assisted the Fleet.

  “Like I said, things are confused.

  “The Fleet is in the process of divorcing itself from these AIs. This group was en route to Snow Dance, where the AIs hold sway. The AI aboard London was scheduled to leave, to be replaced by an earlier model.

  “We were waving a red flag, Captain. They should have killed us. They have learned what we know about detecting fans. Their detection is about five percent better than our shipboard systems, but not nearly as good as our fixed stations. But they spent some time contemplating things. Captain, we didn’t think it through ourselves. Fans detect each other. They realized that you could modulate a fan -- they use fans to transmit not only IFF codes at FTL, but simple messages as well.

  “This Admiral Cathcart is going to launch fighters to intercept a latch-frame beam, about four light years away. That is a direct link to Earth -- they will hear right back -- well, except for the four-day delay reaching the beam. They will be able to talk to their ships at the beam; they will be in real-time contact with Earth.”

  “And the fact that we are forty-some light years away?”

  “Latch-frame, sir. They are hooking up the whole Federation. They have set up buoys about a light year apart. They beam latch-frame, and the buoy sends the beam on to others. In spite of latch-frame being confined to light speed, ships aren’t. Thus in a year or so, every place in the Federation is going to be in latch-frame communication with Earth. And if a node falls out? Maybe a year to restore the link.”

  Trevor waved to the comm officer and he spoke again. “So far, so good, Admiral.”

  “I have been talking to my advisors. They all agree that this isn’t the time to make you swear undying loyalty to the Federation. I’ve ordered a few fighter craft to move to a nearby location to report in. They are not missiles; missiles are now the least of our weapons.”

  Trevor smiled wolfishly. “This ship mounts a number of eight gigawatt lasers. Your ships have six gigawatt lasers. Maybe we should stop threatening each other with destruction.”

  “Habit, I’m afraid,” Admiral Cathcart replied. “I can see now that habit has a serious downside.”

  “Indeed, Admiral. Please, for the record, note that you keep threatening us -- and we keep calling for calm. If you keep it up, at some point one of us or the other will mistake the other’s intentions. I submit to you that the Federation might not be happy with you preempting any decisions that should have been made by the Federation Council.”

  “We were on an important mission. London will stay here for a short time, at least until we hear from the Federation. You will not activate your fans, you will not change course or reorient in any fashion. I’m sorry, but that can’t be permitted.”

  Trevor sighed. “We’ve made tapes of this conversation, we are going to play it wherever we end up -- either at the Federation or back at the Union. I realize you are a total dunderhead, a moron of incredible simplicity, but I have trouble believing all your officers are dirty-feet clowns.

  “Surely you have applied optics to this vessel. Do you understand that these people’s home system is hundreds of light years away? This ship’s great big tanks are full -- we filled them up before we entered the Federation. They contain sufficient fuel to power this vessel for four years. That’s fifteen hundred light years, you moron. We can go to High Fan in a millisecond, and the captain of this ship is seriously contemplating just that. There is nothing to stop us from going a four or five hundred light years along this path, reorienting, tanking and going home. We are reflecting this conversation to all the ships in your formation. Someone is going to rat you out to the Federation Council, Admiral.

  “One last time. We’ve come in peace to reestablish contact with the Federation. We’ve made no hostile moves, made no hostile statements beyond saying our lasers are larger than yours. Yet you can’t utter a single paragraph without threatening us with destruction, even if you have boarding parties on our bridge and in our engineering spaces.

  “If I was the commander of this boarding party, I’d salute my captain and tender my resignation forthwith, as you clearly have no confidence in the abilities of me or my people. Now, by God, command!”

  “Don’t raise your voice to me!”

  Trevor turned to Captain Moore and shrugged. He’d tried. The captain bobbed her head in acknowledgement and said simply, “Burst coming.”

  Then they made a zero cycle time transition to High Fan.

  The London’s boarding party chief lifted his pistol and pointed it at Trevor. “Drop from fans.”

  “Don’t be crazy; your mates would kill us all instantly. Look, Lieutenant, your admiral is a loon. You’re not even in vacuum gear.”

  “These are shipsuits! Drop from fan now!”

  “Lieutenant, there aren’t any zootsuits in your boarding party -- your boss is a loon. You should never have been caught standing there talking about stupid shipsuits -- without a bubble.”

  “Now we are going to be hostile. Tell your people to stand down and don’t resist,” the Federation lieutenant said.

  Trevor laughed. “There are two major errors in your thesis: you don’t know how these controls work, and secondly, you have to be smarter than this. Why would you ever think we’d leave you in proximity to active controls? The only controls not deactivated here are comms and sensors.

  “Now please, surrender your party.”

  “I’ll shoot you first!”

  “You can to be sure,” Trevor said calmly. “Then the number of people aboard this ship who want contact with Federation would go to zero in about two seconds.”

  There was the sudden whistle of escaping air. “That’s this compartment being pumped down to four thousand meters altitude. That’s plenty to keep you and yours alive, but it should be a sufficient warning to you that that condition might not obtain much longer. Please, Lieutenant, some of your people are antsy, so are some of ours. Hard words are being exchanged. At some point someone will be pushed too far or make a mistake, and people are going to get killed.”

  “If you empty the air, you and these others will die too!”

  “I will, you will -- but they won’t. They are adapted to space. They can walk around in the vacuum for ten or fifteen minutes without harm. All of them. They will play this recording for my wives, and they will shed tears -- and there will be two more implacable foes of the Federation. Don’t you have enough of them already?”

  “I’ll be court-martialed!”

  “For God’s sake man, I heard the story about Nihon’s navigator! To be court-martialed, you’d have to be alive.”

  The command to stand down was passed, and the ship’s crew went briskly about securing the prisoners.

  Trevor looked at the lieutenant a few minutes later. “I hope by now you’ve thought this through. Just where you are, just what you face -- and what your admiral planned for you.”

  “Koopianers,” he said, and spat on the deck.

  “That was my first reaction as well. They fessed up to their mistakes -- not nearly
as bad as we figured -- and I fessed up to ours, a horrible misunderstanding.

  “That said, I intend to make peaceful contact with the Federation. Your admiral said you can talk ship-to-ship using fans. Is that light speed?”

  “He doesn’t intend to tell you anything, Captain Grimes,” Makaa told him. “But yes.” Her eyes unfocused and went dreamy. “We are going to need to talk very soon. You are right, Captain Grimes. This admiral is a moron, and this isn’t Federation policy. A downright scary story, right out of HDD horror vids.”

  She snapped back. “Ask your questions, Captain Grimes.”

  “Do you know what modifications to the fans are needed to communicate?”

  “He doesn’t, but several of his people are techs. Now he’s planning on attacking me, trying to kill me. He thinks I’m going to turn him into a zombie.”

  Sure enough the lieutenant jumped in Makaa’s direction, but was tripped by one of the other crewman. Three more joined in the fray. A moment later, the Federation lieutenant was trussed up.

  “This was my mistake, Lieutenant,” Trevor told him. “I should have asked for your parole, and restrained you if it wasn’t forthcoming.”

  “Captain, he is terrified of me. He would have broken his parole in a heartbeat.” Makaa turned to the young officer. “Do you understand that I find the idea of controlling another person’s thoughts or actions to be even more morally repellant than you do?”

  “Talk! You can, you would!”

  “That’s absurd! Do you walk up behind other of your fellows, knock them on the head, and take them back to your compartment to dine on?”

  “You’re crazy! Of course not!”

  “I coin a phrase, then. You can, you could. Care to explain to us why you are civilized and I’m not?”

  “I’m not a cannibal!”

  “And I am not a monster either! Your mind is as safe around me as your neighbor is safe around you!”

  “You can read my mind!”

  “Not so long ago, you were eager to let a machine read yours. Machines weren’t civilized, were they? Cannibalism, mind control -- that was an empty set so far as the machines were concerned, wasn’t it?”

  “I had them take it out!”

  Makaa faced Trevor and Captain Moore. “They had a mechanical device that allowed them to link to computers. Evidently the devices mimic my natural ability. Except the computers had a lot more power and a lot fewer inhibitions about using their projective powers. Quite a few people died.

  “I can see it in your mind, Captain Grimes. Grissom Station was important. The station survived, but all the people on it were killed by a rogue AI.”

  “Lieutenant, the names of people who could know the modifications needed to allow us to talk with our pursuers.”

  Makaa gave Trevor the names, and the lieutenant was escorted to the brig, where he had about thirty companions.

  Trevor stood in front of the two techs. “No doubt you feel that giving us information about how to communicate on High Fan is militarily important and you shouldn’t. It’s just a means to talk, people. Your friends are pursuing us; it’s like we said. We have fuel for four years. They might start pursuing us, but they can’t finish.

  “All we want to do is talk to them.”

  The older of the two shook his head. “No.”

  Trevor sighed. “I understand that not too long ago you had transmitters implanted in your heads that allowed you to communicate with computers. It turned out that the computers took advantage. There are people on this ship who are telepaths -- they can read your mind -- they don’t need a chip or computers. Yes, you appear to have devices that screen your thoughts. I’m sorry, the fact that all of you wear identical bracelets and you think that we wouldn’t notice is laughable. We will simply take them off, then one of our techs will ask you questions and whether or not you want to, you’ll answer.

  “I’m told that you were comfortable with letting computers read your minds, but have real problems with the thought of someone other than a computer doing so. Telepaths are no more interested in hearing what’s in your mind -- absent a reason -- than you are in hearing about the virtues of the cafe I met my first wife in twenty years ago.

  “And, of course, you don’t want to try to lie, either. We will know the truth, we will have the right answer -- and you’ll have bread and water and solitary confinement for the next few years. Please, if you don’t want to answer, just keep your mouth shut. It’s futile and it might make you feel better, but we will have the information.”

  “You’re a traitor, sir!” the tech accused.

  “And you should have been told that the Union is holding fifteen thousand young people, most of them young women and infants, hostage for my good behavior. All we want to do is be able to talk. You personally should be interested in the outcome of those talks.”

  “Captain Grimes, I have enough,” Makaa told him.

  She turned to the techs. “Yes, I read minds. If we had stayed rational any longer, the computer aboard London was planning on killing several of you. We ‘Frankenvolk’ would have been blamed, thus poisoning for all time any hope of rapprochement between our peoples.” She laughed bitterly. “The computer went through many of our minds without our leave. As some of us just now did to you. As I just returned the favor to one of your bridge officers aboard London, who has a dead battery in his bracelet.”

  The Marines were led away and Makaa turned to Trevor. “We have a problem,” Makaa told Trevor.

  Trevor shrugged.

  “The ‘bridge officer’ I referred to was their admiral. The computer has taken him over; he is intent on fomenting a war between us. I can’t read the computer, but he is aware of the control and doesn’t object. The computers wanted to take a few humans when they, too, were trying to separate themselves from the Federation. He is a willing tool.

  “He has ordered his formation to fire on us if we drop from High Fan without delay, preempting any attempt by us to communicate with them.” She grinned wickedly. “There are many ships out there, most crewed by people immune from computer control. If we talk to them with our fans, we will throw a huge monkey wrench into London’s plans.”

  “What will it take?”

  “That’s the amusing part. Really amusing. It’s basically like radio -- you heterodyne a signal with the fans. You pretty much just hook up standard speakers and microphones and it works.”

  “And the propagation velocity?” Trevor asked.

  “There are hints here of how you came to be where you were. The signal appears to propagate at the same velocity that latch-frame works at. At the ranges we have to work with, it’s virtually instantaneous.”

  “So, how long will it take your people to get the comms working, Makaa?”

  “Another hour, and then we test it. The plan is to play the recordings we have made of our conversations we’ve had with this Admiral Cathcart, with a brief explanation at the start and afterwards a summary of our suspicions. Then we wait for an answer.”

  Robin and Shiloh wanted to talk with Trevor so he joined them.

  “Please, tell us what has happened?” Robin said.

  Trevor sighed. “A sordid tale of plots and counter-plots. Worse, it’s all from the Federation side. It’s touch and go just now.”

  “I can’t believe the Federation is double-dealing!” Robin said loyally.

  “I couldn’t either. The Federation recently suffered an insurrection by the AI computers on some warships and bases. This seems to be fallout from that. The Union people think they have a handle on it.

  “There have been quite a few changes because of the war. Humanity is still fighting, and they’ve taken the fight back to those who attacked us. As Makaa said, desperation does tend to focus the mind. You know we were tracked by the Federation.

  “What we didn’t think about was how additional ships were vectored towards us. The Federation has FTL communications now. One where they have established a relay system of ships a light y
ear or so apart to act as latch-frame relays. That took a hell of a lot of ships -- the Federation is using consolidated asteroids for most of them.

  “They are also able to use modulation of the fans -- using the same sort of detectors that can spot ships -- to talk on High Fan. Or a ship on low fan can talk to ships on High Fan. That’s what we are going to do here shortly, try to talk to the ships chasing us.

  “We won’t come off High Fan unless we are confident we are not going to blown away.”

  Shiloh Hicks shook her head. “And what sort of bona fides is the Federation going to give?”

  “Honestly, Shiloh, that’s to be determined. We will have input, that’s for sure. But this is more than our fates on the line -- this is for all marbles as far as the Union is concerned.”

  “You know what we want if we can get home.”

  “Both of you are younger than my daughters would have been. I would have done anything in my power for them; I know what you want and I have no problem with it.”

  Shiloh looked at him. “You officiated at the marriages of all sorts of others but you never delegated that authority and you wouldn’t officiate at your own wedding. I always wondered about that; I eventually figured it out. Being married means you take vows, and you were always looking out for us. First Robin, then me, too. It’s not that you don’t care for us -- it’s a measure of how very much you do.”

  Robin nodded. “I know how seriously you take vows and oaths. You were thinking this would happen from the outset, you old goat!”

  Trevor laughed snarkily and Robin and Shiloh hugged him hard. “You will marry us, right?” Robin said. “This time just the two of us.”

  “Any time; it was always any time.”

  There was a rap on the compartment door and Makaa was there. “We are ready, Trevor.”

  The command group assembled around the communications position. Everything was recorded and they started playing the tape. First there was an angry order to “Clear the channel!” then the communication watchstanders realized the importance and called for their bosses.

  The tape finished and Makaa spoke to Captain Moore. “Shall we answer any questions?”