“That’s . . .” Huron began.
“Seven . . . seven and half million people.” Kris had done the arithmetic as soon as Min pulled up the tonnage numbers. “If you can check those ships’ drives”—she nodded at the list—“you’ll find them way over-engined. That’s why. So lose forty percent, still come out shining.”
Across the table, Huron saw Min dividing the total population of the Outworlds by the fleet’s capacity while Trin watched. Exhaling between her teeth, Min erased with result.
“With the sultanate flipped, we can bet this isn’t a one-shot deal.”
Huron was sure he wasn’t the only one who noticed how her accent had lost most of its burr. “That does put a different complexion on the situation.” He looked back at Kris. “You ready to talk to Dr. Leidecker? If we’re going to go forward, it all has to be confirmed.” Reported to be and proven to be were poles apart, and confirmation lay in the encrypted data collected by Kestrel.
Kris met his look, eyes darkened to a smoldering amber. “Yeah. I’m on it.”
* * *
As the bells announced first watch, Kris caught Huron exiting the wardroom carrying a sandwich in one hand and a can of Margate beer in the other. With a pang, the size of the sandwich reminded Kris of her introduction to cheeseburgers; that must’ve been almost fourteen Terran months ago now.
Huron followed her gaze. “You want one?”
Kris shook her head.
“Good news or bad news?” he prompted.
“Ah, good news,” Kris answered, exhaling to ease the pang.
“She agreed?”
“She’ll talk about it. Leidecker explained it to her, and Lieutenant Anson arranged a meeting between her and Captain Wesselby for the next PM—their next PM—at 1800.”
Huron did a quick mental calculation. Trin could make it if she left within the hour. “Who’s invited?”
“Anson will be there and Leidecker and some security, but only the captain and Dr. VelSilinjes are gonna talk. No surveillance. No record of what’s said. That’s the deal.”
“Excellent.” No doubt Trin and the doctor could find common ground easily enough. Trin was capable of considerable charm, when she chose to exercise it, and well-informed, professional praise had won over many a researcher before now. “Something else?” Kris’s entire attitude, from the set of her shoulders to the way her boots were planted on the deck, declared there was something else.
“Well, ah . . . yeah.” She shifted her weight unconsciously. “This slaver fleet—”
“This raid you wanna stage?”
“Who told you? The major?”
“She came by about an hour ago.” Seeing Kris looking a little piqued at Min stealing her thunder, he added, “She’s impulsive like that.”
“Yeah . . . Okay. Did she brief you?”
“Nope. She wanted you to have that privilege. I think she’s in CIC with the general, now.”
“Oh . . .”
Rafe motioned down the passageway with his beer. “Lead on.”
Without a further word, Kris led on.
* * *
In Polidor’s CIC, Huron put the sandwich, cut into neat sections, on the ledge of the deep-radar console and handed the beer to Major Lewis. General Corhaine was there and, to Kris’s surprise, Commander Yanazuka.
“We were about to page you,” he explained as Kris gave him a gimlet eye. Selecting a quarter of the sandwich, he nodded at the omnisynth. “Let’s see what you got.”
What they had, once Min brought it up in the omnisynth’s display, was the Apollyon Gates. Unique in charted space, the Apollyon Gates were what was known of astrocartographers as a “folded node”. The term referred to the gravitational topology in the N-dimensional overspace which subsumed the familiar four. The companion to the Apollyon Gates was the Acheron Junction, named for the river that bordered Hell in Dante’s Inferno, as the gates were named for the black hole which was responsible for the topology in the first place. This same black hole also created the Shaula Traps, together with the rich antimatter fields that made the region so valuable.
Andaman and Nicobar, the Sultanate’s prime worlds, were part of an asterism that lay between the Apollyon Gates and the Acheron Junction, and the only way in and out of them was by transiting one of the other. Sensible people avoided the Gates when possible and used the junction; according to historians, “Apollyon” appeared in ancient sources as the name of a king, a demon or an angel; a place of destruction or a bottomless pit (much the same thing, the view of most), and some scholars claimed it to be Greek for “the Destroyer”. Any of the latter three terms well applied to a black hole (opinions on kings, demons and angels varied to a much greater degree), and astrogators liked to say the eponymous black hole played hell with the Gates.
Subject to ferocious tides and currents, as mariners called these gravitational phenomena, they also said the Gates were “the very devil to navigate” (astrogators delighted in a pun). By their nature, tides and currents tended to be unpredictable and variable, exhibiting fluctuations known as pulse, jitter, and slap (slap being what made the Rip so deadly), along the more common navigational hazards of rip and skeer.
The upshot of all this potential calamity was not just that transits through the Gates were to be treated with extreme caution, but that the transits themselves showed an unusual degree of asymmetry. For example, while both Andaman and Nicobar could be reached from the Gates, the Gates could not be entered from either system, those transits being one-way to ships of any size. Traffic between Andaman and Nicobar went via the Acheron Junction. Likewise, traffic to Ivoria also normally utilized the Acheron, there being a convenient bilateral transit through it. An alternate route connected Ivoria with the Gates, but this transit only allowed traffic to come in from Ivoria, not return.
Indeed, the powers that hold sway over such matters (here the hydra-headed question of angels and demons came to the fore) had decreed that only two bilateral transits terminated in the Apollyon Gates: one was the Rip itself, connecting the node with Port Mahon, and the other linked to Iona. A second route, this one out-going only, connected the Acheron Junction with Iona.
Thus, traffic between Iona and the Sultanate went “in by the gates of Hell and out by Charon’s river”—a circumstance that summed most Ionians feelings about the Sultanate rather succinctly.
But it also meant that the Ionians could enter and leave the Gate (more or less) at will, something the Andamans and Nicobarese could not do. This played a major role in the relationship between the Ionians and the Sultanate, because the one group that routinely used the Gates—again, the simile was appropriate in the view of many—were slavers, coming in via Ivoria and Winnecke IV. Ionian privateers could lay up in the Gates, “poaching” on this illegal traffic in what the Sultanate considered to be its “backyard”, and return to Iona without the Sultan’s forces being able to intervene. Only the Emir of Ivoria could do so, but providing armed escorts for slavers when he chose, which not only increased his wealth and power, but gave him an excuse for amassing considerable forces.
Kris and Min, aided and abetted by Corhaine and Yanazuka, intended to take this practice of “poaching” a step further. The Emir’s slaver fleet being gathered at Nicobar was vulnerable to a lightning raid, Kris explained, while Min supported her with smiles and occasional comments, while the general and the commander limited themselves to nods.
Since the transits were asymmetric and nonlinear with respect to mass, getting a good read on small fleet coming out the Gates into Nicobar was nearly impossible due the way local conditions distorted phase wakes. Yanazuka’s stealth frigates should be able to enter undetected—here, the commander affirmed they had in fact done this any number of times—and perform a reconnaissance of the Nicobarese port where Quinn had located the fleet, sending back the data to a squadron comprised of Polidor, Ariel, and those ships of the general’s fleet deemed necessary.
Nicobarese port security presented little chal
lenge to anyone who had any inkling of their business, and especially not to Yanazuka’s stealth frigates. Being essentially undefended, they could make short work of the fleet and depart via the Acheron Junction before a response could be organized.
Yanazuka and Corhaine both had experience navigating within the Gates, and Kris (while not a navigator per se) had transited it many times in Harlot’s Ruse, a ship roughly the size of a destroyer but equipped with heavy mass cruiser drives to allow it to use regions of the Gates less powerfully legged ships could not. Escaping from a larger ship on one memorable occasion, Harlot’s Ruse had even run the Rip.
Munching quietly through the presentation, Huron smiled in that ambiguous way of his when Kris finally set down her pointer, leaving the skeleton of their plan rotating serenely in the omnisynth’s display.
“So what’dya think?”
Huron wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I think if we don’t get hung up in the Gates waiting for a transit window and if Caneris is kind enough to stay at home and not cross the Acheron while we’re trying to use it and if we can convince the adult supervision the Emir is an enemy alien and his fleet is therefore a legit target so we don’t get shot for making a mutinous attack on a friendly power, it might—I emphasize might—work.”
Min seconded his assessment with a muffled snort into her almost empty beer.
“Okay,” Kris allowed. “Is that a problem?”
“Not if we have proper intel,” Huron answered. “Let’s see what your doctor and her pet rock can make of this. If we can get a warm fuzzy outta that, I’ll go back and see what I can do to explain the strategic necessity of this op. If that doesn’t work, you’ll read about it in the court martial proceedings. And I’ll expect you all to give me a nice send off.”
~ ~ ~
Day 216
Isabelle Downs, Llanberis District
South Continent, Iona, Cygnus Mariner
“Tea?” asked Isabeau VelSilinjes as she poured herself a cup and set in on a hastily cleared spot on her desk. Some researchers were as neat as bees, Trin reflected, while others made pack rats seem paragons of order. Few occupied the middle ground, and Dr. VelSilinjes was not one of these few. Her spacious office—apparently spacious, for its full extent was not immediately apparent—had been rendered cramped by an astounding collection of boxes, odd bits of equipment, old hardcopy references and various, less identifiable artifacts.
“Please,” Trin answered pleasantly, eyeing the oxygenator and heating unit perched precariously on what looked to be the remains of a recording device of a some kind. Isabeau poured a second cup, blowing into it first, and set it gingerly in front of Trin. She picked it up and sipped. Green tea was not her favorite, but she smiled appreciatively.
“Oh . . .” The doctor glanced up from stirring a spoonful of pale bond crystals in her tea. “Do you take it sweetened?”
“No. Thank you”—with an engaging smile. The doctor had shown her the lithomorph in its bath in the space outside this office and described some of their procedures and a few of the results. They hadn’t yet reached the main purpose of the meeting. They were still feeling their way toward that, rather like two strangers navigating a blind date. Trin decided on an oblique approach.
“Doctor, how do you actually communicate with the lithomorph?”
“That’s been our challenge,” Dr. VelSilinjes began. “Initially we used a keypad system that mimicked the internodal signals we’d detected. That served for simple interactions. It wasn’t until we learned to use a neural scanner—the same equipment we use for memory recovery—that we were able to pose complex problems.” She regarded Trin with a hint of doubt. “You’re familiar with that? The equipment, I mean?”
As an interrogator, Trin was intimately familiar with that equipment, but she responded with no more than a dip of her chin. “Would you object to explaining the procedure?”
“Not at all.” VelSilinjes paused to produce a package of thin wafers from among a stack of cylinders of unknown purpose. “It’s quite simple in the essentials. One of our people sets out to solve the problem manually; we record the process, apply a filtering module and transmit the impulses to the lithomorph. With luck, we get a response. If not, we adjust the filtering until we do. Biscuit?”
“Thank you.” Trin accepted a wafer and, following the doctor’s example, dunked it in her tea. Rather too sweet, but not bad. “What is the filtering based on?”
The doctor gave her head a little jog. “Frankly, I wish we knew. We began by assuming the lithomorph would respond best to a heavily filtered input—removing as many spurious or extraneous signals as we could. That did not seem to answer. Now, we apply a variety of filtering until we hit upon a combination that succeeds. It’s guesswork, I’m afraid.”
“What’s the overall success rate?”
“Rarely better than ten percent,” VelSilinjes admitted, frowning. “Although we did discover that having our researcher write the problem out longhand greatly improved things, and playing music while they do so often seems to help.”
“Music,” Trin murmured. “May I see some of these sessions?”
“Of course. We shall have to leave our tea to go into the other room, though.”
“Certainly.”
Dr. VelSilinjes maneuvered out from behind her desk and obligingly held the door for Trin while she extricated herself. In the large dim impeccably neat outer space (no clutter allowed here), Isabeau guided her to a console. Slid into the seat and unlocking the system, she opened a batch of files. Trin, watching over her shoulder, followed them intently.
“Who’s this one?” Trin reached out to pause the fourth video with a tap on the screen.
“Oh, that’s Brian,” the doctor answered with a note of satisfaction. “He’s by far our most successful researcher, getting responses almost half the time.”
“Fascinating . . .” Trin played a few more seconds. With another tap, she paused the video again, and zoomed the display with a swipe of her finger. “Is he a musician, by any chance?”
Dr. VelSilinjes looked up at Trin with newfound respect. “In fact, he is. Quite talented—a composer, too—although his work is not quite in the modern taste. Personally, I find it delightful.”
“I dare say.” Trin smiled. She opened the attached companion file. “What’s this?” She’d come very close to saying who’s—the traces on the screen at first glance could have been taken for a recording of a human mind, but she almost immediately perceived that was merely an overlay.
“That’s the lithomorph’s response to Brian’s query.”
“Has it always looked like that?”—inspecting the traces more closely.
“Oh, no. This is a fairly recent development. The lithomorph appears to be adapting—or modulating—it’s responses. It sounds a bit silly, but it’s rather like it wants to be understood.”
That didn’t sound silly at all to Trin. “Merge this file with Brian’s, if you would.”
As the traces merged, Trin hid a nascent smile. “I think your lithomorph is a bit . . .”—she hunted briefly for a word—“fond of Brian?”
Squinting at entwined lines, Dr. VelSilinjes shook her head slowly. “Oh dear me. I see what you mean.” She rubbed a forefinger across her lips. “I wonder what his girlfriend would say?”
Two: The Broken Seal
“And to him was given the key of the bottomless pit . . .”
Revelation 9:1
Day 217 (PM)
LSS Polidor, in orbit
Iona, Cygnus Mariner
Deep in the heart of the Tanith Rangers lay Chthonic Branch. Never more than a hundred twenty individuals, a tiny fraction of the total organization, it made up the Ranger’s core intelligence unit, with its own SIGINT collections specialists, all-source analysts, and deep-cover field operatives, one of whom was Lieutenant Althea Quinn (usually just Quinn, sometimes Allie—never Althea). Kept entirely separate from the Ranger’s Intelligence Support Department, none of these people
ever appeared on active roster and even within the organization, Chthonic Branch’s existence was treated on a strict need-to-know basis.
Its members rarely deployed with the fleet, but owing to this operation’s exceptional nature, Corhaine had most of the unit embarked, including her cryptology section, led by Francis Raven, a rather disorderly person who disliked ranks, and whose younger brother had been Joss PrenTalien’s chief of staff when the admiral was CinC PLESEC.
It was from this team of experts that Trin picked the people to assist Dr. VelSilinjes in decrypting a batch of data supplied by Quinn they’d chosen for a trial. The rest of the team, seconded by Yanazuka’s people, offered advice, encouragement and criticism from afar. (The decision to not involve Yanazuka’s cryptanalysis department directly was made by Huron, who felt the fewer CEF boots on Ionian ground, the better.)
Working around the clock, and surviving a bumpy start in which Raven (despite being warned) seemed determined to get crossways of Trin and was nearly run down before coming to his senses, the test sample gave up its secrets, confirming the slaver fleet, Kris’s assessment of it (much to the doctor’s chagrin at her initial resistance), and providing a discovery that brought the effort to a screeching halt.
Among the info Quinn sent was a file she’d recovered from the IRIS asset’s archive. Encrypted with a very unusual system, she’d flagged it for special attention. She though he was probably unaware of it: it appeared to have been stored on his system so it could be retrieved, if needed, by someone else, presumably one of his handlers or a senior IRIS agent.
Now that they were on good terms with the lithomorph, it accepted the problem and produced an auditory key of a type Trin had seen only once before. Applying it to the file and reading the block of text that appeared on the screen, Trin promptly yanked the data chip, purged the system and put everyone in the room under virtual house arrest while she bolted for the door.
Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit Page 48