The faintest of scanner energies passed over me, pulling my image onto the shipnet—the open net that I could easily access enough to see my own image and that of Kemra walking across the enormous lock. Just an average dark-haired man and a slender sandy-haired woman—cyb officer, I corrected myself.
A guard of twenty-four marcybs in formal green uniforms waited by the exit hatch—a dozen on each side.
“Such formality,” I murmured.
“Planetary executives do rate an honor guard.”
The marcybs remained rigid as we passed. I wanted to yell something like “at ease” or “fire on deck.” I didn’t, just nodded, still disconcerted at the hypocrisy of the honor guard and at seeing my own image appearing on the shipnet.
We stepped through the hatch into a central hexagonal passageway, the corners between each surface filled with a thin glowstrip, the raised edges on each side of the glowstrip containing handholds for null gee operations. The side that comprised the “ceiling” was not a walking surface, but a ladder with rungs nearly eight meters long, supported at the ends and at two meter intervals in the middle.
“I’d hate to have to climb this.” I forced my face to remain calm as I heard my own words cross the net.
“So far no one has, but the designers insisted.” She gestured. “We’ll head aft.”
“Why a hexagonal corridor?” I disconnected from the shipnet I wasn’t even supposed to notice, trying to remind myself that everything I said, everything I did, would be recorded and used. The slight delay in following both Kemra and the net was scrambling my senses, and I didn’t need scrambled senses.
“The whole ship’s set up that way. It works better with adiamante, the designers found. That’s the official reason, anyway.”
I hadn’t thought that adiamante had a hexagonal bias, but I certainly didn’t know. We had used it only sparingly and, alternate control centers excepted, hadn’t done much with it in the last millennium except to deconstruct it, and that had been well before my time.
The corridor, although apparently one of the main fore-and-aft passages, was empty except for us. I didn’t like that either. On a ship that carried thousands, that was another unhealthy sign.
Kemra walk-bounded aft, and I struggled to keep up with her in the light grav.
“How do you keep in shape?” I asked.
“Stay at home in low gee, you mean? The senior officers’ quarters are high gee. The troopers have to make up for it with exercise, but they have the time, and we don’t.”
That made a strange sort of sense. Before I said more, we were at the hydroponic bays, somewhere near midships. No matter what anyone says about synthesis, repeated chem-synthesis doesn’t work, and the systems lose vitamins and trace elements, or concentrate them inappropriately. Even the cybs had to grow some food. Or chose to. With the Gibson’s size, they could have carried a few decades of dehydrated food, even for the thousand or so the ship seemed to carry.
After looking at the long rows of greenery, hundreds of meters long, I turned to Kemra. “How many levels here?”
“Eight.”
“Eight levels …” I mused half-aloud. Eight levels, each hundreds of meters long and stretching possibly the entire width of the ship. “You don’t really need these, not for the crew the ship carries.”
“It depends on what you mean by need. We can recycle everything through here, and everyone feels better.” She offered a wry grin. “People trust plants more than machines.”
Maybe the cybs did have a less crystalline side.
Next we turned off the main corridor into a narrower hexagonal passage, with doors every few meters. The single narrow corridor stretched more than three hundred meters to a distant and sealed hatch.
“These quarters belong to the troopers staying on Old Earth,” Kemra explained. She pressed a lockplate on the side of the nearest door.
I glanced inside—four bunks, chairs, a vision screen on the blank forward wall and jacks for headsets of some sort. The walls were a pale green plastic-like finish, and an open door led to a fresher.
“All like this?” I asked.
Kemra crossed the passage and pushed another plate, and I looked again at a mirror duplicate of the first empty room. The rooms reminded me of the descriptions of ancient monastical cells.
“I just wanted you to see.” She retraced her steps to the main corridor, and we continued aft. “This whole section here is for troopers.”
I calculated as we walked. Even on one level, there had to be room for more than five hundred marcybs—6,000 at a minimum on the twelve ships, 18,000 if the quarters stretched up even three levels, and more than 50,000 if six levels.
“Did you really think you’d need fifty thousand troopers for broken-down Old Earth?” I asked.
“Gorum thought fifty thousand was too few, but feeding large forces you may not need takes power and storage space.”
Maybe they did need those huge hydroponic systems.
After that, another four hundred meters aft of the marcyb quarters—another four hundred meters unmarked with side hatches or doors—we stepped through two heavy open hatches. Even before I stepped through the hatches, I could sense the energy swirls.
“The power section. I’m sure you can sense the fluxes.”
“It must be difficult for your shipnet.”
“It’s not a problem anymore. The initial engineering was difficult.”
Once again, we were talking around issues, she because she wished to reveal nothing when every word was being monitored, and I because … I wasn’t sure. Personal cowardice? Fear that revealing capabilities would push me too far beyond the envelope of the Construct?
“It won’t hurt to show you a single module.” Kemra guided me to another interior hatch lock and we stepped up to a small oblong armaglass window. There wasn’t that much to see through the armaglass—just an insulated oblong fifty meters on a side with supercon cabling exiting into a conduit. Each side of the composite oblong contained another lock-type door, probably double or triple thickness, and everything was gray, gray, and gray. Even the light seemed gray.
“Each module is self-contained,” Kemra pointed out, “and the flow conduits are independently channeled. Any single module can handle the ship’s housekeeping.”
“But not ops or weapons or drive systems.”
“No.”
“How many modules?” I asked idly.
“Enough.”
From the power flows I sensed, I figured between twenty and thirty—twenty or thirty far larger than anything on Old Earth not connected to the defense net. “I’m sure.”
Further aft were the drive systems, but I didn’t see them. As we returned to the main corridor, Kemra just pointed, “There’s the drive section, but we need to get forward now.”
“Demonstration time?”
“It will be before long.”
We turned forward. As we left the power section, well before the marcyb dormitories, Kemra paused. “I forgot. There’s one other thing. This way.”
She led me down a side corridor—the whole ship seemed like a maze, comprised of adiamante walls and composite supports and corridors. She coded the lockplate of another hatch, and I picked up the codes, not that they’d be particularly useful.
“This is lock two.”
In the massive multi-level lock were twenty craft the size of a large magshuttle.
“Armed scouts.” Kemra pointed to the nearest. “Each one carries a full range of weapons.”
I waited to hear how extensive that range of weapons was, but she seemed unlikely to elaborate.
“Antimatter pellets, tach-heads—that sort of thing?” I asked.
“Standard weapons,” she answered.
In short, at least as nasty as I’d predicted—not that the scouts mattered that much, since launching them, in my view, would also negate restrictions on me under the Construct. In a way, seeing the scouts was beneficial, since it clarified that any hostile acti
on was backed with impressive force. That would negate any restrictions on response, assuming we could create an effective response. I hoped Elanstan and Rhetoral—ancient shield and longsword—were managing to rebuild poor defunct Delta station.
“What do you think?” asked Kemra.
“About the same as before,” I admitted. “Your fleet represents the greatest concentration of force since the Rebuilt Hegemony.”
“Greater than the forces of Old Earth?” A faintly amused smile crossed her lips and vanished.
“Greater than any fleets we have, since we don’t have any.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“There isn’t an answer. You have a fleet. We don’t. We have a few interstellar ships, and a planet, and you could inflict great damage. If you tried, we would attempt to stop that. If we were successful, then you would have no fleet. If not, we’d probably have no planet, or one that’s not inhabitable. At this time, I am hoping that it does not become an issue of force. Everyone loses in those circumstances.”
“Can’t you give me a straight answer?” The green eyes flashed at me.
“I can’t answer you the way you want me to,” I finally said. “I’m doing what I can.”
“All right. I shouldn’t have pushed.” Her voice sounded resigned, and I wished I could have said more.
She gestured, and I followed her forward, silently, for several hundred meters more down the still empty corridor. Why didn’t they want me to see anyone? Or didn’t they want the ship’s personnel to see me and learn we still looked and acted human? Except they had me on the net, and that didn’t make sense. What wasn’t I seeing? Were personal meetings hard on the average cyb because they were shielded by their nets and preferred to avoid most personal meetings? Were the corridors empty not by order, but by choice?
Abruptly, Kemra opened a side hatch, and bounded down it. I hurried to catch up and half stumbled, half tumbled through a wave of energy where the ship’s air vibrated around me—some type of magnetic imaging probe being focused. It took every bit of effort to keep walking, holding on to the faith that it wasn’t in the cybs’ interest to destroy or neutralize me—yet.
The feeling passed as we walked past an open hatch with a double lock, and I wanted to smile. I’d just walked through a medical scanner. That was all, and the results wouldn’t offer much. All the normal human organs were of the usual sizes and in the usual places. So were the muscles, although a detailed enough analysis might show some deviation from the historical norms in the composition of fast- and slow-twitch muscles and the muscle density.
As for nerve cells—that would take a high-powered autopsy, and I wasn’t ready to provide the specimens for such an analysis, not voluntarily.
“You need to see the control center.” Kemra guided me into another narrow passageway that headed forward again. We paused at another armored hatch, and at this one I caught both codes and the message she pulsed. “Kemra, with the demi. Screen guard.”
“Cleared to enter. Guards up,” came the response.
The entire center area was girded with adiamante, except for the two locks outlined in energy. Impressive as it was in one way, it was idiotic in another, since anything powerful enough to penetrate the ship’s outer adiamante hull would be powerful enough to destroy the thinner interior shell around the control center.
“This is the control center.”
“Navigation and control center?” I asked, since the arrayed consoles weren’t that much to look at: two dozen specialized navigation screens, most of them untended, displaying various representations of the solar system, beneath a sweeping visual screen that showed the earth spread out against the black and the moon to the right edge. Half the console outputs were blackened, screen-guarded against the dangerous demi. I held back a snort.
Five cybs in green singlesuits tended the front line of consoles. None looked up, but they didn’t have to, since they were on the shipnet that had displayed my every move since I’d entered the Gibson.
The room held the contradictory impressions of newness and age, and the faintest scents of ozone and oil. While the cybs might erase their own scent-images, they couldn’t erase those of their machines. I wanted to laugh at the idea that their machines were more human than they were, and that laugh wanting to break out showed the stress pounding down on me.
The thirty-meter-square center held no weapons or sensor inputs, and it was clear I wasn’t going to be allowed anywhere near the operations or weapons centers—or whatever combined center held them both.
My eyes went to the twenty-meter-wide visual screen, and I frowned. Although the scale was difficult to determine, the Gibson appeared to be moving away from Old Earth and toward Luna.
I moistened my lips.
“We need to go.”
After a last look at the wide screen—and the Gibson was indeed headed toward Luna—I followed Kemra out of the nav-control center.
“You’ve seen some of the ship. What do you think?”
“It’s an impressive vessel, as I said before.” I was impressed in spite of my secondhand recollection—pulled through the databases at Parwon—of the battlecruisers of the Rebuilt Hegemony. The old Hegemony battlecruisers had carried a few more destructive tools, but the Gibson had more than enough gadgetry and power to turn the country around far too large a number of locials into black glass or the equivalent.
“We hoped you would find it so.” She stopped at a silver-rimmed hatch, and pulsed a signal, coded, while sending a message on the shipnet. “There’s one last stop we need to make before the demonstration.” The hatch slid open, and she gestured for me to enter.
The room was large for a starship—say half the size of my expansive Coordinator’s office—and it held one console with an array of screens I couldn’t see centered on one seat. Three empty blue chairs faced the console. A hawk-nosed officer with eight-pointed stars on the collars of his green uniform tunic sat behind the console. His faded and piercing blue eyes followed me into the office/command center.
“This is Fleet Commander Gibreal.”
The hawk-nosed commander nodded, but said nothing. He didn’t smell either, except of unbridled power.
The incipient energy fluxes around the walls indicated that the ship’s systems were focused on and around me—quite a compliment, that they thought I could be that dangerous.
“I’m pleased to meet you, Commander.” I didn’t attempt to infiltrate the ship’s system through the netlinks I’d unraveled. First, it wouldn’t do any good, since someone, presumably the weapons officer, had a hard lock on the surveillance and power. Second, it would only make things worse.
“Sit down,” Gibreal said, brushing aside my pleasantries, and pointing to the chair on the right side of the console. “I’ve read this Paradigms document. How can you make something like this work?”
“You can’t,” I explained as I sat. “There’s no way to make any society work over the long run.”
Kemra sat in the left-hand chair and nodded, ever so slightly, but Gibreal just frowned.
“Every society is based on trust and self-restraint. We encourage both, and we remove those who cannot or will not exercise them.”
“Power-based, then …” muttered Gibreal, his eyes straying to the console, then snapping back to focus on me.
“Not exactly. We also penalize the use of power, even for good. Because I’ve been Coordinator, I’ll spend years at relatively hard labor, working off that debt.”
The sensors trained on me were trying to read and determine my degree of truthfulness. I’d already resolved to be truthful, but I had the feeling that truthfulness would only be read as deception if the results didn’t agree with the cybs’ preconceived perceptions.
“And you accepted the position? Why?”
“Someone had to, and the cost to me was somewhat less than others.”
“I’ve read those principles. They’re all so general. How can you possibly make them work?
You talk of forbearance, but everyone has a different idea of what forbearing is. And trust? How can you define it or codify it?” Gibreal watched me like the hawk he resembled.
“We don’t. When you have to codify values, you’ve lost them. Every written definition creates more exceptions, more chance of mistrust, and more opportunities for the untrustworthy to hide behind words and legalisms. Some historians theorize that the SoshWars were caused by the ancient clan of lawyers.”
“Too many legalities aren’t good,” Gibreal admitted in a mild tone, “but to blame unrest and warfare on lawyers or programmers—they also codify … that seems excessive.”
Kemra’s eyes flicked from one of us to the other, and back again.
“I wasn’t alive back then,” I conceded, “but I don’t think so. If a society agrees that theft is not acceptable, then theft is not acceptable. Now, let’s say that an apple falls from my neighbor’s tree and rolls into my yard. Is it theft if I eat it? Probably not, and no sensible individual would argue about a single apple or even a few. When a lawyer writes down and codifies theft as not including fallen apples that roll away, then that creates the opportunity for some untrustworthy individual to shake apples from a tree onto a slanting ramp that carries them off the property. Then that untrustworthy individual can claim he did not steal the apples—not according to the law.”
“No one would do that.”
I just smiled. “Before the SoshWars, people did exactly that sort of thing.”
Gibreal stared at me, almost unbelievingly. It was an expression I was getting to know too well. Then he asked, “What can you do to stop us?”
“We hope that you’ll see that there’s no point in attacking Old Earth. We don’t threaten you, and we haven’t been interested in territorial expansion for a long time.”
“That’s not the question.”
“No. It’s not. The question is whether you can get away with revenge for being thwarted millennia ago.”
Kemra’s mouth opened fractionally, then shut, but I’d had to follow intuition. Gibreal was too sharp for my second-rate logic.
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