Off Armageddon Reef

by David Weber

  "No doubt. But that doesn't change the fact that Tahdayo is only the opening wedge."

  "Nor the fact that he's going to begin looting Hanth the instant he's confirmed as Earl," Haarahld agreed, his expression hard. "And I won't be able to protect 'his' people from him, either. Not when the whole world knows I was forced to accept him by Church decree. Any attempt I make to rein him in will be the same as openly defying the Church, once his agents in the Temple get done telling the tale to the Vicars, and many on the Council will be prepared to automatically believe them."

  "But he and his masters aren't going to stop trying to undermine you, or our house, just because you can't crush him like the bottom-feeder he is."

  "Of course not."

  Haarahld turned away from the window and began limping back towards his chair. He seated himself heavily in it, and looked up at his son.

  "I believe we still have some time," he said then, his expression somber. "How much, I can't say. At least a few months, though, I think. We're not entirely without advocates in the Temple even today, even if our own archbishop has ruled against us in this matter. And even our foes in Zion are eager to drape their actions in the mantle of fairness and justice. So for at least a little while, Tahdayo and his patrons are going to be leery of anything that could be construed as an open move against us. And while I'm seldom happy to see Dynnys, if he holds to his usual schedule, he'll be here by February or March, which should put a sea anchor on affairs in the Temple until he returns to Zion next fall. But once the situation's settled a bit, they're going to begin pushing again, even without him there to speak in their support."

  "That's my thought, as well," Cayleb said. "I wish I felt more confident that I knew how they'll begin pushing, though."

  "Not openly, I think," his father said slowly, lips pursed as his fingers drummed on the arms of his chair. "I almost wish they would. If it were only a matter of our fleet against that of the League, even with Nahrmahn's thrown in, I believe we could more than hold our own. But Hektor will know that as well as I do. Before he commits to any sort of open warfare, he'll find a way to strengthen their combined naval power."

  "How?" Cayleb asked.

  "I don't know—not yet. My guess, though, would be that he's already talking to Gorjah."

  Cayleb frowned. King Gorjah III, ruler of the Kingdom of Tarot, was officially one of his father's allies. On the other hand . . .

  "That would make sense, wouldn't it?" he murmured.

  "Gorjah's never been all that happy with our treaty," Haarahld pointed out. "His father was another matter, but Gorjah resents the obligations he's found himself saddled with. At the same time, he recognizes the advantages of having us for friends rather than enemies. But if Hektor can work on him, convince him that with Corisande and Emerald both prepared to support him . . ."

  The king shrugged, and Cayleb nodded. But then his eyes sharpened, and he cocked his head to one side.

  "I'm sure you're right about that, Father. You usually are; you're one of the canniest men I know. But there's something else going on inside that head of yours."

  Haarahld looked at him for several seconds, then shrugged again. It was a very different shrug this time, as if his shoulders had become heavier since the last one.

  "Your mother is dead, Cayleb," he said softly. "She was my left arm and the mirror of my soul, and I miss her counsel almost as much as I miss her. Nor will I get any more heirs, and Zhan is barely eight years old, while Zhanayt is only two years older, and a girl child. If my enemies truly wish to cripple me, they'll take away my strong right arm as I've already lost the left."

  He looked into his elder son's eyes, his own level, and Cayleb looked back.

  "Remember the sand maggot," Haarahld told him. "The slash lizard might fling himself against us, fangs and claws first, but not the maggot. Watch your back, my son, and watch the shadows. Our enemies know us as well as we know them, and so they'll know that to kill you would take not simply my arm, but my heart."

  III

  The Mountains of Light,

  The Temple Lands

  Nimue Alban leaned back in the comfortable chair and frowned. There was really no actual need for her to use the chair, just as there was no need—aside from purely "cosmetic" considerations—for her to breathe, but as she'd discovered the very first time she used a PICA, habits transcended such minor matters as simple physical fatigue. Although, she reflected with a wry smile, breathing the preservative nitrogen atmosphere with which Pei Kau-yung had filled the depot wouldn't have done a flesh-and-blood human much good.

  She'd spent most of the last three local days sitting in this very chair, studying the data files Pei Kau-yung had left for her the hard way, because Elias Proctor's modifications to her software had inadvertently disabled her high-speed data interface. She was pretty sure Proctor hadn't realized he'd created the problem, and while she would have been confident enough about attempting to remedy it herself under other circumstances, she had no intention of fiddling around with it under these. If she screwed up, there was no one available to retrieve the error, and it would be the bitterest of ironies if, after all the sacrifices which had been made to put her here, she accidentally took herself permanently off-line.

  In a way, having to wade through all the information the old-fashioned way had been something of a relief, really. Sitting there, reading the text, viewing the recorded messages and video instead of simply jacking into the interface, was almost like a concession to the biological humanity she'd lost forever. And it wasn't as if she were exactly in a tearing hurry to start making changes.

  "Owl?" she said aloud.

  "Yes, Lieutenant Commander?" a pleasant, almost naturally modulated tenor voice replied.

  "I see here that Commodore Pei left us a ground-based surveillance system. Is it online?"

  "Negative, Lieutenant Commander," Owl replied. That was all "he" said, and Nimue rolled her eyes.

  "Why not?" she asked.

  "Because I have not been instructed to bring it online, Lieutenant Commander."

  Nimue shook her head. Owl—the name she'd assigned to the Ordoñes-Westinghouse-Lytton RAPIER tactical computer Pei Kau-yung had managed to "lose" for her—wasn't exactly the brightest crayon in the cybernetic box. The AI was highly competent in its own areas of expertise, but tactical computers had deliberately suppressed volitional levels and required higher levels of direct human command input. Owl wasn't precisely brimming with imagination or the ability—or desire—to anticipate questions or instructions. In theory, Owl's programming was heuristic, and something more closely resembling a personality ought to emerge eventually. On the other hand, Nimue had worked with a lot of RAPIERs, and none of them had ever impressed her as geniuses.

  "What I meant to ask," she said now, "is whether or not there's any hardware problem which would prevent you from bringing the array up."

  Again there was no response, and she pressed her lips rather firmly together.

  "Is there any such hardware problem?" she amplified.

  "Yes, Lieutenant Commander."

  "What problem?" she demanded a bit more testily.

  "The array in question is currently covered by approximately thirteen meters of ice and snow, Lieutenant Commander."

  "Ah, now we're getting somewhere." Her sarcasm simply bounced off the AI's silence, and she sighed.

  "Is it otherwise in operable condition?" she asked in a tone of deliberate patience.

  "Affirmative, Lieutenant Commander."

  "And can the ice and snow be removed or melted?"

  "Affirmative, Lieutenant Commander."

  "And you're connected to it by secure landline?"

  "Affirmative, Lieutenant Commander."

  "All right." Nimue nodded. "In that case, I want you to bring it up, passive systems only, and initiate a complete standard sky sweep for orbital infrastructure. And give me an estimate for time required to complete the sweep."

  "Activating systems now, Lieut
enant Commander. Time required to clear the array's receptors of ice and snow will be approximately thirty-one standard hours. Time required for a passive sweep after clearing receptors will be approximately forty-three standard hours, assuming favorable weather conditions. However, optical systems' efficiency may be degraded by unfavorable weather."

  "Understood." Nimue's tight smile showed perfect white teeth. "What I'm looking for ought to be fairly easy to spot if it's really up there."

  Owl didn't say anything else, and for just a moment Nimue tried to imagine what it must be like to be a genuine artificial intelligence rather than a human intelligence which had simply been marooned in a cybernetic matrix. She couldn't conceive of just sitting around indefinitely, patiently waiting for the next human command before doing anything.

  She grimaced at the direction of her own thoughts. After all, she'd been sitting around doing absolutely nothing herself for the last eight standard centuries—almost nine Safeholdian centuries—counting all the years since Nimue Alban's biological death. Of course, it didn't seem that way to her. Not, at least, until she thought of all the people she'd never see again. Or the fact that while she'd slept the Gbaba had undoubtedly completed the destruction of the Terran Federation and all human life on every single one of its planets . . . including Old Earth.

  A shiver ran through her, one which had absolutely nothing to do with the temperature of the "air" about her, and she shook her head hard.

  That's enough of that, Nimue, she told herself firmly. You may be a PICA, but your personality's still the same. Which probably means you're entirely capable of driving yourself crackers if you dwell on that kind of crap.

  She climbed out of the chair and clasped her hands behind her as she began to pace up and down. Aside from the fact that a PICA never experienced fatigue, it felt exactly the way it would have felt in the body nature had issued her, which was precisely how it was supposed to feel.

  The polished-glass stone ceiling was a smoothly arched curve, almost four meters above the absolutely level, equally smooth floor at its highest point. She was in one of a dozen variously sized chambers which had been carved out underneath one of the planet Safehold's innumerable mountains during the terraforming process. This particular mountain—Mount Olympus, in what had become known as the Mountains of Light—was lousy with iron ore, and Commodore Pei and Shan-wei had thoughtfully tucked her hideaway under the densest concentration of ore they could find. She was barely forty meters above sea level, and Mount Olympus was almost a third again the height of Old Earth's Everest. There were twelve thousand meters of mountain piled on top of her, and that was more than enough to have made the tiny trickle of energy from the geothermal power tap keeping the depot's monitoring computers online completely undetectable after Langhorne and the main fleet had arrived.

  She'd wandered through the rest of the complex, physically checking the various items she'd found on the equipment list stored in Owl's memory. Some of it seemed bizarre enough that she suspected that the Commodore and Shan-wei had added it simply because they could, not because they'd envisioned any compelling use for it, and exactly how they'd managed to drop some of it off of Langhorne's master lists was more than Nimue could imagine. The three armored personnel carriers, for example. And the pair of forward recon skimmers—not to mention the all-up assault shuttle, which was the size of an old pre-space jumbo jet. The small but capable fabrication unit in the cave complex's lowest (and largest) chamber made sense, and so, she supposed, did the well-stocked arms locker. Although exactly how Kau-yung had expected a single PICA to use two hundred assault rifles and two million rounds of ammunition all by herself was a bit of a puzzlement.

  The fully equipped medical unit from the transport Remus was another puzzlement, given her cybernetic nature. It even had cryo-sleep and antigerone capability, and although she would have hesitated to use any of its drugs after eight centuries, even with cryonic storage, the nanotech portion of the therapies were still undoubtedly viable. Not that a PICA had any need for either of them, of course. She sometimes wondered if Kau-yung's and Shan-wei's emotions had insisted that they remember the flesh-and-blood Nimue Alban, rather than the being of alloys and composites which had replaced her. Whatever their reasoning had been, there was even a complete kitchen . . . despite the fact that a PICA had no particular need for food.

  Other parts of the depot—which she'd found herself thinking of as Nimue's Cave—made a lot more sense. The library, for example. Kau-yung and Shan-wei had somehow managed to strip the library core out of the Romulus, as well, before the ship was discarded. They hadn't managed to pull the entire library computer, which was a pity in a lot of ways, since its AI, unlike Owl, had been specifically designed as an information processing and reference tool. Nimue wondered if that had been a size issue. The entire data core consisted of only three spheres of molecular circuitry, none larger than an Old Earth basketball, which could undoubtedly have been smuggled past others' eyes more easily than the entire computer system. But they'd still gotten the core down and connected it to Owl, which meant Nimue had access to the equivalent of a major Federation core world university's library system. That was undoubtedly going to be of enormous value down the road.

  The hefty store of SNARCs—Self-Navigating Autonomous Reconnaissance and Communication platforms—were also going to be incredibly useful. The stealthy little fusion-powered robotic spies were only very slightly larger than Nimue herself, but they had decent AI capability, were capable of speeds of up to Mach 2 in atmosphere (they could manage considerably better than that outside it, of course), could stay airborne for months at a time, and could deploy recoverable, almost microscopic-sized remotes of their own. She had sixteen of them up at this very moment, hovering invisible to the eye, or to any more sophisticated sensors (had there been any), above major towns and cities.

  For the moment, they were concentrating on recording the local languages and dialects. Without the PICA data interface, Nimue was going to have to learn the hard way to speak the considerably altered version of Standard English spoken by present-day Safeholdians. It looked as if the written language and grammar had stayed effectively frozen, but without any form of audio recording capability, the spoken form's pronunciation had shifted considerably . . . and not always in the same directions in all locations. Some of the dialects were so different now as to be almost separate tongues, despite the fact that virtually every word in them was spelled the same way.

  Fortunately, she'd always been a fair hand with languages, and at least her present body didn't need sleep. Her human personality did need occasional down periods—she'd discovered that the first time she'd operated a PICA in autonomous mode—although the cybernetic "brain" in which that personality resided didn't. She didn't really know whether she was completely "shut down" during those periods, or if she was at some level of . . . standby readiness. Functionally, it was the equivalent of going to sleep and dreaming, although she needed no more than an hour of it every few days or so, and she suspected it was going to be rather more important to her in her present circumstances than it ever had been before. After all, no one had ever contemplated maintaining a PICA in autonomous mode indefinitely, which meant no one had any experience in doing that for more than ten days at a time.

  Knack for language or not, it was going to take her a while to master the local version sufficiently for her to even consider attempting direct contact with any native Safeholdians. There was also the minor matter that she was female on a planet which had reverted, by and large, to an almost totally male-dominated culture.

  There was something she could do about that, although she didn't really care for the thought particularly. But there was also the fact that almost all the skills she'd learned growing up in a society which took advanced technology for granted were going to be of limited utility in this one. She'd always been an enthusiastic sailor, when she had time, but only in relatively small craft, like her father's favorite ten-meter sloop. That mig
ht be useful, she supposed, but unlike some of her fellow military personnel, she'd never been particularly interested in survival courses, marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat training, blacksmithing, or the best way to manufacture lethal booby traps out of leftover ration tins and old rubber bands. True, Commodore Pei had gotten her interested in kendo several years before Operation Ark. She'd done fairly well at it, as a matter of fact, although she'd scarcely thought of herself as a mistress of the art. Still, that was about the only locally applicable skill she could think of, and she was none too sure just how useful even that one was going to prove.

  Those were problems she was going to have to address eventually. In the meantime, however, she had plenty of other things to think about. Kau-yung's notes—almost a journal, really—had given her an insider's perspective on what Langhorne and Bédard had done to the colonists. With that advantage, she hadn't required any particular level of genius to begin discerning the consequences of their original meddling, despite her current imperfect understanding of the locals' conversations.