“No.” I smiled. “Thank you.”
“We can’t have a Coordinator with thinking impaired by low blood sugar.”
I was probably impaired in all too many other ways, but I didn’t protest. I just thanked her again and went into the office and ate everything on the tray.
Then I began to study the hard copy material neatly stacked and waiting for me. After three sheets, I reached for the linkboost. As it slipped in, my eyes dropped from the eastern peaks to the desk and the three hard copy sheets that showed the projected peaking of the cyb fleet’s power reserves within twenty-four hours.
“Elanstan?” I asked.
“She’s on Delta,” Rhetoral explained.
“How long before Delta’s functional? We’re running out of time.”
“Do you think your ‘incident’ shortened that time?” His words weren’t quite a question.
“Arielle and I think it probably added a day, but their message traffic is way up.”
“Another two days, Ecktor, that’s all we need,” pleaded Rhetoral. Elanstan wouldn’t plead, which was exactly why Rhetoral was on the uppernet with me. She could have linked almost as easily from Delta station.
“All I can promise is one. We might get two days or a week, but one is all I can promise.”
“Try for two.” Rhetoral’s words were ragged, and I knew they’d both been pushing themselves to the limit, but the universe doesn’t much care how hard you’ve worked. Neither do your enemies.
“I’m trying to avoid using the system, but so far, as the saying goes, ‘There are none so blind as will not see.’”
“Can’t you bend the Construct?” asked Rhetoral. “You are the Coordinator.”
“I’ve already bent it in so many directions that, if I survive this mess, I’ll owe a century of comptime.” My guts twisted at the exaggeration, and I added, “Not that much, but it feels like that much.”
“They really don’t want to see?”
“They’re still hanging on to their yes-no, on-off, single-value, linear logic.”
“But they built that fleet.”
“Their ancestors also built much of what made us what we are, and then turned their back on the implications of what they’d created. Remember?” I took a deep breath. “Do what you can. I’ll keep trying, but after tomorrow, I may need the entire system on line at any instant. Any instant,” I emphasized.
“I know you’re trying, but …”
“Give my best to Elanstan.” I knew she was listening in, but I was being polite about it. “We couldn’t have two better people there.” I meant it. Not only were their self-concepts sword and shield, but their actions matched those concepts. I wasn’t about to try and define mine … not after all I’d done.
“Thanks. I’d rather be anywhere but here—except where you are, Ecktor.”
“Thanks to you, too.”
He laughed and was gone offnet.
As the linkboost declined, I could sense a pulse from Keiko.
“Yes, Keiko? I’m off the link with Ell Control.”
“Ser … Crucelle and Arielle are here.”
“They can come in.” I hoisted myself out of the green swivel and walked toward the door, which opened before I got within three meters.
Crucelle and Arielle stepped in, and they both looked the way Rhetoral had sounded, with circles darker than mine under their eyes, and deep lines across their foreheads, and eyes that held bloody spiderwebs. Crucelle closed the door behind them, and they slumped into the green chairs. I was left with the long green couch. So I sat there.
Arielle and Crucelle exchanged glances. Neither spoke.
“You see?” she finally said. “If you’d pleaded or stalled or ignored them, they would have tried something else. Now, they’re confused.”
“How confused?” I asked.
“Not confused enough. In twenty-four hours they’ll be angry, so angry that they’ll be able to override the implications of what you did.”
Another stretch of silence filled the big office. Outside the trees wavered in the wind.
“I take it that your team hasn’t made the best of progress on repeating ‘the planet of death’ approach to the cybs?” I finally asked.
Arielle’s dark eyes smoldered, and I was glad I’d never been attracted to her except as a friend.
“It’s not going to work, not exactly,” Crucelle said. His green eyes betrayed the pain his efforts had caused him. “We can’t touch the marcybs, and very few of the cyb officers are in range.” He shifted his weight in the chair.
The sky over the eastern peaks remained cold china blue, and the tops of the trees swayed even more in the wind. All the open water, except for fast-running streams, had frozen, and even the streams had ice on the banks where the spray had frozen.
“Go on.” Somehow, I’d intuited that something like this would turn up.
Arielle crossed her ankles, then uncrossed them.
Crucelle scratched the back of his head and frowned before continuing. “They’ve made some changes in the marcybs’ genetic codes. Without some sophisticated hardware I can theoretically design, we can’t set up electroneural resonance there. Not the way we did with the Jykserians or any of the others. And that hardware would take months or years to build.”
“So we’re back to the satellite system?” That didn’t surprise me, and in some ways I was just as glad that we couldn’t create large-scale mindblazes. The thought had bothered me. Supposedly, death is death, but burning out someone’s neural system through sympathetic harmonic resonance is incredibly painful—both to the net generator and to the victims, except it had been fatal to virtually all the victims in the case of the Jykserians and only about twenty percent of the operators.
“There’s another problem,” pointed out Arielle. “A longer-term one that could be worse than this little fleet. The changes they’ve made to the marcybs are an easy piece of genetic engineering so far as any human-related genetic engineering is easy. They could do that to any egg or sperm, and it’s only got to be on one side. Then, they’d be like us, except …”
“We’d have no crossovers and no leverage?”
She nodded.
“And they would probably be able to hold up under the mindblaze parameters with around a thirty-five percent mortality—on either end,” added Crucelle.
That would effectively neutralize our abilities, and unlike the cybs, we no longer had war fleets—and, under the Construct, no way to build them. If we did, we repeated the errors of the Rebuilt Hegemony, with all the deaths that had caused and the millennia of recovery necessary, assuming we could withstand such a societal trauma a second time. And if we didn’t, we could expect ever larger cyb fleets, to the point where Old Earth would be obliterated or forced to build war fleets.
“You seem to be telling me that the physical destruction of the cyb fleet is an absolute imperative.”
“I don’t know about absolute,” hedged the redhead.
“It’s the optimal outcome in ninety-four percent of possible logical consistent alternities,” declared his dark-haired and dark-eyed soulmate.
“How about the six percent?” I asked.
“For reasons unknown, the cybs withhold an attack: point two percent. The cybs discover and embrace the Construct and Power Paradigms: one percent. They discover the Construct and Power Paradigms, realize their danger, and retreat and regroup for a later and more massive assault: two point eight percent. Unquantified alternatives: two percent.”
If Arielle were correct—and, unfortunately, she usually was—we had about as much chance of avoiding all-out conflict as a six-legged jackrabbit had of escaping a meleysen grove. Little or none.
“Me … I liked the unquantified options,” I quipped. Arielle didn’t smile, although Crucelle offered a faint twist of his lips for a moment.
“That’s all we have,” Crucelle said, after the silence stretched out and out.
“I can’t ask you to give me what you don’t have,” I
responded. “You need to get some rest.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Arielle.
“Stall, hope, and try to make some unquantified alternity work out while preparing for the worst.”
Crucelle shook his head and stood. “Better you than us.”
Arielle still smoldered, like the storm-tossed darkangel she was, all the way out of the office. She hadn’t liked my flippancy about her comps and analyses, but with her accuracy record, flippancy was all I had.
I left the office door ajar and walked right up to the south window and looked into the distance that held the house, wondering if three days or a week hence would find everything black glass.
Despite the triple panes, the cold radiated off the glass, and I shivered.
“Coordinator?” Keiko used the net to knock at the edge of my concentration. “Your too-friendly cyb subcommander is on the broadcast line. She wants to know if you’d be interested in visiting the Gibson tomorrow. They have a demonstration planned, and she indicated you might be interested. She emphasized that the demonstration did not involve inhabited physical locales. They’ll drop a lander for you.”
That figured. There was no way they wanted one of our ships near theirs again, especially after my exploits. Going on their lander didn’t matter. If it came to that, I was expendable. Coordinators were far more expendable than dozens of locials, and a demonstration that was explained as not involving inhabited physical locales sounded like a threat. Oh, well, a threat involved delay.
“Do you intend to go?” Keiko pulsed.
“Certainly. Why not?” After what I’d just learned … why not? That might buy Rhetoral the day he and Elanstan, and all of us, needed. Anyway, logic said that, short of the all-out conflict between the defense system and the cyb fleet, things couldn’t get that much worse—except I felt they could … and would.
“Such an optimist. I’ll confirm the time, and let you know.” Keiko dropped offline, and I looked back at the eastern peaks and the cold, china blue sky that had replaced the morning clouds: a china blue that concealed twelve adiamante hulls and a satellite defense system that hadn’t been used or fully tested in centuries—and one station that hadn’t been functional in a millennium.
Lovely job, Coordinator.
XXV
Looking through the wide south window didn’t help my sense of foreboding. The china blue sky and the cold wind that tossed the tops of the cedars and piñons from side to side told my body to shiver, warm as I felt physically.
“The subcommander will pick you up at the locial strip at 1000 tomorrow,” Keiko informed me through the local net. “Are you ready for this … visit?”
“No. I don’t happen to know what I’ve forgotten, but let me think about it.”
“If the cybs decide to relieve you of your responsibilities—and I’m not sure how far you’d go to avoid that comptime, Coordinator—what happens next?”
“K’gaio gets the job.”
“Lucky woman.” A faint hiss announced Keiko’s drop from the net.
Late as it was getting, there was yet another task for the Coordinator, one I didn’t relish at all, but since I had agreed to visit the cyb fleet the next morning, I had to check the alternative control center for the defense net.
“Keiko, will you find Dorgan and Wiane? Have them meet me on the upper maintenance level in ten minutes.”
“This isn’t optional, I take it?”
“No. Coordinator’s priority.”
“It’s getting late.”
“I’m late in getting organized, but I’m not used to this. It’s only been centuries since someone had to deal with potentially hostile interstellar visitors. Most of my predecessors didn’t survive long enough to leave instructions.”
“I’ll get them.” She left the local net with the equivalent of a sigh.
Another thought occurred to me, and I linked to the uppernet.
“K’gaio? This is Ecktor.”
“What can I do?” She pulsed back even, oiled words, despite the fact that it had to be just before dawn where she was.
“Tomorrow, I’m paying a courtesy visit to the Gibson, the cyb flagship. In a little while, I’ll be checking out the alternative systems. You should be available tomorrow, and you might want to be near the local alternative systems center.”
“That would be advisable, Ecktor. I will do so, and I appreciate the warning. Good night.”
That was as close to an admission that she had been sleeping as I would ever get.
Keiko turned in her chair as I stepped out of the Coordinator’s office. “They’re waiting below.”
“I’ll be quite a while.”
“Checking out the alternative systems could take some time,” she agreed, proving she had been on uppernet. “And it was wise to inform K’gaio.”
“I’m glad you think so. What else should I do?”
“If I were Coordinator, while I happened to be in the alternative system control center, I might check out the defense system nodes.”
I’d thought of that, but I just nodded, then grinned and went down the steps to the maintenance level where Dorgan and Wiane waited.
“Good afternoon, Coordinator.” Dorgan was thin-faced, dark-skinned, and had thin brown hair shorter than my too-short thatch.
Wiane inclined her head. She was round-faced, solemn-eyed, and willowy.
“Let’s go.” I headed through the heavy maintenance door and down the ramp.
They followed, and two ramps down, I opened the door to the lower power board area, stepped inside, and closed the door behind them.
“The boards are fine, Coordinator,” Dorgan said.
“I know that. We’re going for a bullet shuttle ride.”
Dorgan swallowed and looked at Wiane. “Are things that serious?”
“The other day, one of the cyb troopers slugged a woman and told her she was useless draff baggage. Since then the situation has gotten worse. The cybs visited both the Cherkrik ruins and a prairie dog town, where they disregarded territoriality. That got one marcyb killed. I had to kill four of the rodents. The cybs claimed it was my fault, essentially, because I had only warned them twice.”
“Hmmmm,” was all Dorgan said.
“Under the circumstances, I’d like to take a good solid look at the equipment. I hope we won’t need it, but if we do, I’m not going to have much time.”
Dorgan rubbed his temples. Wiane pursed her lips as I led the way to the concealed staircase and used the Coordinator’s codes to unlock the door. I could have used maintenance codes—I’d done work there, but the Coordinator’s codes seemed more appropriate.
From the third sublevel, the three of us walked down the steps to the platform. The bullet shuttles glistened under the glowstrips, silver quarrels in their induction notches, ready to be fired toward the control center ten klicks east. Each of the bullets to the alternative control center was short, less than ten meters long, with seven pairs of seats. The bullets to the locial receiving areas were far larger, and far more numerous.
After palming the lockplate on the lead bullet and waiting for the door to whine open, I stepped inside and sat in the right-hand seat. Dorgan and Wiane sat behind me, leaving the left-hand front seat empty.
The ten klick trip took three minutes, almost exactly.
The platform at the other end was empty, silent, and gray. Despite the continual maintenance, the spotless composite walls oozed age—unsurprising, since this particular center had been built nearly twelve centuries earlier. The equipment all worked. I knew. I’d worked on some of it over the years—almost as high a comptime rate as satellite maintenance, and not nearly so dangerous, but requiring an even higher degree of accuracy.
The solid door at the top of the stairs was sealed. This time it took the Coordinator’s codes. It could be opened with three separate maintenance codes, which, with three of us, would have posed no problem, but again, using the Coordinator’s access seemed more fitting.
The blast door whispered open.
“Activate standby,” I pulsed, and the glowstrips turned blackness into warm sunlight, powered by the standby fusactor.
Inside the door was the alternate control center: nothing very impressive, just a handful of hard-wired consoles supported by an independent power system in the sublevels below the equipment. The whole center, except for the bullet tunnel and the access tunnel to the comm grids, which could double as another exit, was surrounded with adiamante.
There were four other centers, scattered around the globe. Any one could handle the defense net, if necessary, but since no one could use the net unless the Construct were violated, conflicts weren’t a problem. In those circumstances, no one really wanted my job, including me.
My feet hurt, and I dropped into the main control chair. “Power.”
I waited as the other fusactors below came on line, one after another. Dorgan and Wiane looked from me to the boards and back to me as the power built.
Finally, after ten minutes, I slipped into and through the maintenance net for a status report before I opened the system and began the checks.
The status line was green.
“Dorgan, would you cross-check the power system after me, and note any discrepancies?”
“Yes, ser.”
I turned to Wiane. “After we’re powered up, I’m going into the link relays and the grids. I need you to follow the draw-downs in diagnostics. I assume you know what to look for?”
“Yes, ser. Any disconnects or lags, mostly.”
First I went through all the power diagnostics, then pulsed Dorgan, and could feel him on the power systems as I crossed subsystems. Once I called on the net for a test, I had to be quick. So I ran through the maintenance routines again, concentrating on the power to the nodes. The node check showed a few more abnormalities than recorded in the annual test nine months earlier, but well within the statistically insignificant, and with that many potential links and the demi level of tension about the cybs, what else could I have expected?
Next came the pulse tests on node loading, and after that, I tried the node links myself—three times.
The first time was smooth: minor electric currents ran through me, but that invisible link to the big magfield was clear. The second time, in another node, the minor jolts ran down my spine. The third time I never really got to the field, and my eyes and spine burned.
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