Torch of Freedom

by David Weber

  Hugh had only a fuzzy sense of the meaning of the term "epistemology," but he understood the gist of the princess's comments, and agreed with her. Manpower could obviously breed such a counter-agent. That would be no more difficult, biologically speaking, than breeding any other slave. And although it would be a nuisance—but no more than that—they could easily enough duplicate a number.

  But, as Jeremy had just asked, how could they possibly be sure of retaining the agent's loyalty, once they sent him out?

  Hugh could think of ways Manpower might try to retain that loyalty, to be sure. Threatening hostages would probably be the one with the greatest likelihood of success; sometimes the crudest methods really did work best. But keeping people close to the agent hostage and threatening to harm them wouldn't work as well in this sort of situation as it might in others. In the very nature of their origins and upbringing, Manpower's slaves didn't have people close to them. Except for the sort of adopted relations that Hugh himself had gotten, of course. He, of all people, was unlikely to ever underestimate how precious that sort of "relationship" could become . . . yet every slave knew in his bones that those bonds were fragile. They existed only on the sufferance of others, and they were always subject to being torn apart by those same others—and always would be . . . so long as the institution of slavery itself survived. When an agent ended up confronting the sort of gut-wrenching stress inherent in betraying comrades dedicated to the overthrow of the monstrous evil threaning to do just that, "reliability" went straight out the airlock.

  In fact, that was true of just about every method Hugh could think of, in a case like this, and Ruth's basic point sat at the center of everything: a turned agent was the great disaster every intelligence agency did everything in its power to avoid. Unless the people Manpower had in charge of its counterespionage against the Ballroom were complete fools—and there was no evidence that they were, and plenty of evidence that they weren't—there was no chance they'd take this sort of risk.

  And if they had been inclined to, it would have bitten them on the ass a long time ago, he thought grimly.

  There was a a long, still moment of silence as the question lay ugly and naked among them. Then Ruth inhaled audibly.

  "Manpower isn't what it seems," she said. "It just can't be. We already suspected as much, and this is still more evidence—and powerful evidence at that. There is no way a mere corporation, no matter how evil and shrewd and influential and powerful, could have created the man we all just saw dying. Not the way he died. One or two, maybe. With the right psych programming, the right threats and bribes. Maybe. But there's no way—no way—they could create enough of him to justify sending him to Torch for what had to be no more than a routine penetration. We've put this man's life here on-planet under an electron microscope, and he did nothing—nothing at all—except the sort of things a simple, white-bread information probe would have required. No corporation, not even the biggest transtellar, could have enough of these sorts of people to waste one of them on something that routine. They just couldn't. Something else is going on."

  "But . . . what?" asked Berry.

  "That's what we have to find out," said Jeremy. "And, finally, we're going to put the needed resources into it."

  Ruth looked very cheery. "Me, for starters. Jeremy's asked me to . . . well, coordinate it, anyway. I'm not really heading it up, exactly. God, is this fun or what?"

  Berry stared at her. "You think this is fun? I think it's pretty horrible."

  "So do I," said Palane forcefully.

  "Well, sure. One of you was born and raised in the warrens of Chicago, in the proverbial desp'rate straits. And the other was born and raised in the serf hellhole of Ndebele, which isn't exactly desp'rate straits but is about as miserable as anything this side of . . . of . . ."

  "Dante's third level of Hell," Hugh offered.

  "Who's Dante?" asked Berry.

  "He must be referring to Khalid Dante, the OFS security chief for Carina Sector," said Ruth. "Nasty piece of work, by all accounts. But the point I was getting to is that I was born and raised in the comfort and security of the royal house of Winton, so I know the truth, which is that the ultimate horror is boredom."

  She sat back in her seat, looking very self-satisfied.

  Berry looked at Palane. "She's gone barking mad on us."

  Palane smiled. "So? She was always barking mad, and you know it. Which only makes her an even better choice, when you come down to it. Who better to set on Manpower?"

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  "I think that just about does it, Jordin," Richard Wix observed. He was obviously trying to keep his voice properly blasé—or, at least, professionally detached—but he wasn't doing a particularly good job of it, and Jordin Kare chuckled.

  "You do, do you?" he inquired.

  "We've got the locus' central focus nailed, we've got the tidal stresses, and we've got the entry vector," Wix replied.

  "Which is all well and good, Doctor," Captain Zachary put in, "except for that other little problem."

  "We've been over that and over that," Wix said, as patiently as he could (which, truth to tell, wasn't all that patiently). "I don't see any way a gravitic kick that weak is going to have any significant impact on efforts to transit. We compensate for kicks like that every day, Captain."

  "No, TJ, we don't, actually," Kare said. Wix glowered at him, but Kare only shrugged. "I'll grant you that we routinely compensate for kicks of its magnitude. For that matter, we've got a kick several times this strong on the Manticore-Basilisk transit, and it's never been a problem. But you know as well as I do we've never seen one like this—one whose strength and repetition rate vary this sharply and unpredictably." He shook his head. "If you can show me what's causing it—a model that explains it, one that lets you predict what it's going to do for, say, a twenty-four-hour duration—then I'll agree with you that it's a matter of routine compensation. But you can't do that, can you?"

  "No," Wix admitted after a moment. "I don't think it's powerful enough, even at the strongest reading we've recorded, to seriously threaten a ship transiting the terminus, though."

  "I agree with you." Kare nodded. "That's not really my point, though. My point is that we're looking at something we've never seen before: a kick—and let's not forget, TJ, that what we call a 'kick' could just as accurately be called a 'spike'—that doesn't seem to be associated in any way with the routine stress patterns of the locus."

  "Exactly how significant is that?" Zachary asked. Kare cocked an eyebrow at her, and she shrugged. "I'm nowhere near the theoretician the two of you are, of course, but it looks to me like Dr. Wix does have a point about the relative strength of the kick, or 'spike,' or whatever we want to call it. There's no way anything that weak is going to pose any kind of threat to Harvest Joy's hyper generator or alpha nodes, so I don't see its significantly impacting our transit, either. Obviously, something about it bothers you a lot more than that, though."

  "What bothers me is that there's not another single instance anywhere in the literature of a gravitic spike like this one that wasn't somehow connected to the observable patterns of the locus associated with it," Kare said, his expression thoughtful. "People tend to think of wormhole termini as big, fixed doorways in space, and in gross terms, I don't suppose there's anything wrong with that visualization. But what they actually are are fixed points in space where intense gravity waves impinge on one another. On the gravitic level, they're areas of immense stress. It's a very tightly focused stress, one in which enormous forces are concentrated and counterbalanced so finely that they appear, on the macro level, to be stable. But it's a stability which results only from keeping enormous amounts of instability perfectly balanced against one another.

  "That's always been the really tricky point about surveying and charting wormholes, of course. Nobody could possibly build a ship tough enough to survive even momentarily if it tried to power its way through that interface of balanced instabilities by brute force.
Instead, we have to chart them, much like I suppose oceanographers chart currents and winds, to determine the precise vectors which let ships . . . well, 'shoot the rapids,' as a friend of mine likes to put it."

  He paused until Zachary nodded, and to the captain's credit, he noticed, there was no apparent impatience in her nod. He flashed her a quick smile.

  "I know none of that came as any great surprise to you, Captain," he told her. "But restating it may help to put my current concerns into context. You see, every other 'kick' or 'spike' we've ever encountered has been linked directly to a stress, or an eddy, in those patterns of focused instability. In fact, more often than not, when we find a kick, it leads us to a stress pattern we might not have noticed otherwise. In this case, though, it appears to be totally unrelated to any of the stress patterns in this terminus. It comes and goes on its own periodicity and with its own frequency shifts, completely irrespective of anything we've been able to observe or measure from this locus. I'm not saying it doesn't have a regular periodicity; I'm simply saying we haven't been able to determine what that periodicity may be, and we haven't been able to find any aspect of the terminus which is associated with it. It's almost . . . almost as if what we're observing here doesn't really have anything to do with the terminus at all."

  Wix snorted. Kare looked at him, and the younger hyper-physicist shook his head at him.

  "Oh, I can't disagree with anything you just said, Jordin. But whatever else this may be, it's clearly a hyper wall interface spike, and the only two things we've ever seen produce wall interface spikes are hyperdrive alpha translations and wormhole termini. One way or another, it's associated with a terminus!"

  "Maybe." Kare said. Wix arched a skeptical eyebrow, and Kare grimaced. "All right, it's definitely associated with a terminus. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to establish how it's associated with this terminus, have we?"

  "Well, no." Wix frowned as he made the admission, then shrugged. "It's almost like it's coming from somewhere else," he said.

  "But what I seem to be hearing both of you saying, is that even in a worst-case scenario, based on what we know at this point, Harvest Joy could safely transit?" Zachary asked.

  "Pretty much," Kare admitted after a moment.

  "Then I think it's time we talked to Queen Berry and the Prime Minister," she said.

  * * *

  "So, let me see if I have this straight," Berry Zilwicki said. "We know enough, we think, to send Harvest Joy through the wormhole—sorry, through the terminus—but we've got this 'kick' thingy, and we don't know what's causing it. And because we don't, Dr. Kare," she nodded courteously to the Manticoran, "is worried that we may be dealing with something no one's ever seen before."

  "That's pretty much it, Your Majesty," Kare agreed. "It's not the strength of the kick that worries me; it's the fact that we can't explain what's causing it. The hyper-physicist in me is intrigued as hell by the discovery of a new phenomenon. This is the kind of thing we look for all the time, you understand. But the surveyor in me is more than a little unhappy because of the hyper-physicist in me's inability to explain what's going on before I go venturing off into the unknown."

  "But you don't see any physical danger to the ship in making the transit?" Web Du Havel asked.

  "Probably not," Kare said "Almost certainly not, in fact. But given that we're dealing with something I ought to be able to explain and can't, I can't make any sort of categorical guarantee. I'm perfectly willing to make the transit aboard her, you understand, and I'm not exactly in the habit of sticking my neck out unless I'm pretty sure I'm going to be able to pull it back in safely afterward. But the bottom line is that we're dealing with an uncertainty factor no one's ever dealt with before."

  "What about getting back again?" Thandi Palane asked. Everyone looked at her, and she shrugged, hazel eyes intent. "If there's anyone in the galaxy who knows less about surveying wormholes than I do, I've never met her," she said. "On the other hand, I've been doing my best to bone up on the subject, and I've been watching those of you who do know what you're doing for the last three T-months. It occurs to me that you've been paying a lot of attention to charting the patterns, and what I'm wondering about is whether or not you think this 'kick' is enough that we should be worrying about how well we'll be able to chart the patterns from the other side for the return trip."

  "I don't see any reason it should make the charting exercise significantly more difficult from the other end," Kare replied. "Despite my own concern over the kick's unpredictability, it didn't keep us from getting a quick fix on the terminus's basic patterns. I don't see anything about it to suggest that it's going to significantly scramble patterns at the other end of the bridge, and having made transit once, Harvest Joy's sensors will have given us a huge head start on analyzing them, anyway. I suppose it's theoretically possible we'd have a problem, but it seems extraordinarily unlikely."

  "Forgive me, Doctor," Palane said with one of her dazzling smiles, "but 'extraordinarily unlikely' doesn't exactly sound like 'no way in hell' to me. And I can't help thinking the Star Kingdom might just be a little ticked off with us if we absentmindedly misplaced their best hyper-physicists by feeding them to some kind of rogue terminus."

  "That's probably true," Du Havel agreed with a chuckle. "And that doesn't even consider the kind of PR effect it could have on the summit between Manticore and Haven."

  The others around the conference table nodded, although in Wix's case it was obviously a nod of acknowledgment, not agreement. Eloise Pritchart's acceptance of Torch as the site for her summit meeting with Elizabeth Winton had reached the Torch System two days ago, and no one in that room was unaware of the monumental possibilities direct, face-to-face negotiations between the two warring heads of state presented. Wix, though, clearly failed to see the connection Du Havel was making, and the prime minister shrugged.

  "I never said it would be a logical effect, Dr. Wix," he said. "Human beings, however, don't always proceed on the basis of logic. For that matter, I think they almost never proceed on the basis of logic, when you come down to it. If nothing else, the fact that we'd managed to 'misplace,' as Thandi puts it, an entire survey team just three months before the summit would probably put something of a damper on the festivities. I imagine some people might even take it as an omen for the summit's ultimate chances of success, and the last thing anyone needs at this point is any sort of self-fulfilling prophecy of doom and gloom."

  "I could live with that, Web," Palane said dryly. "I'd just as soon not piss Queen Elizabeth off at us, though."

  "Worst-case scenario, Your Majesty," Captain Zachary said, "is that we can't survey the other end at all. Or that we can't chart it well enough to come back through it, anyway. In that case, we're looking at having to come home the long way around, via a regular hyper-space route."

  "Would that be likely to pose any significant problems or risks?" Du Havel asked.

  "Mr. Prime Minister, there's no way anyone could make this process risk free, whatever you do," Wix pointed out. "We could have dropped a decimal point in our analysis of the terminus. Over the last couple of hundred years, we've actually turned up a terminus no one has ever successfully transited. Just one. That's an absurdly tiny percentage of the total, but it has happened. Frankly, though, the possibility of something that unlikely happening would be a lot greater than the possibility that Harvest Joy couldn't get home again—eventually—from the other end of the bridge, wherever it is."

  "That's true, Mr. Prime Minister," Zachary agreed. "The longest wormhole leg anyone's ever charted is right on nine hundred light-years long in normal-space terms. The average is a lot shorter than that, and transits of more than three or four hundred light-years are rare. Harvest Joy, on the other hand, has a four-month unrefueled endurance. That gives us a cruising radius of eight hundred light-years before we'd have to re-bunker, and that figure is based on our having to make the entire trip under impeller drive. As soon as we could get into a grav wave, our e
ndurance would go up hugely, so we'd have to go a hell of a lot farther directly away from any settled area of the galaxy before we wouldn't be able to get home eventually."

  "Well, that's a relief," Du Havel said.

  "So are we prepared to authorize the transit?" Kare asked.

  "I think . . . yes," the prime minister replied after a thoughtful moment, and glanced at the queen. "Finding out where that terminus connects to is going to have too many economic and strategic implications for us to even think about delaying over something as . . . esoteric as this 'kick,' I think."

  "I agree." Queen Berry nodded, but she also frowned. "Before we do, though, is there any reason you have to go along, Dr. Kare?"

  "I beg your pardon, Your Majesty?"

  "I asked if there was any reason you, personally, would have to go along," the queen repeated.

  "Well, no . . . not really, I suppose," Kare said slowly. "It's my project, though, Your Majesty. If we're going to send anyone through, then I ought to be going along, as well. Sort of like the captain going along with the rest of his ship."

  "With all due respect, Jordin," Zachary said with a chuckle, "that's not really the best example you could have come up with. It wouldn't be like a captain going along with the rest of her ship; it would be like an admiral going along with one of the ships under her command. You might want to consider which one of us would actually be in command."

  "Well, you would, of course, Josepha!" Kare said quickly.

  "And that's my point," Berry said. "From what you're saying, it sounds to me like the return charting ought to be pretty straightforward. They aren't going to need you or Dr. Wix to do it, at any rate, right?"

  "Right," Kare acknowledged with manifest unwillingness. "But—"

  "But I'm afraid that means you're staying home, Doctor." There was understanding, and more than a little compassion, in the teenaged monarch's voice, yet that voice was also firm. "I know we're almost certainly worrying about nothing. And I know how much I always hated it when Daddy told me I couldn't do something I really wanted to do. Especially when I knew that he knew I wasn't really going to get into trouble if I did it. And I know you're going to be really pissed off if I don't let you go along with Captain Zachary. Despite which, I'm not going to."