InterstellarNet- Enigma

by Edward M. Lerner

  With his head bowed and shoulders hunched, Cluth Monar turned to scamper away.

  Glithwah netted to a nearby security cam. Her visitor squirmed in her chair. Jammed her hands into vest pockets, then removed them. Studied her nails. Curled a long tress around a finger. Once, twice, the woman’s eyes glazed over in a netted consultation. Squirmed some more. Glithwah returned to her statistics on industrial accidents, satisfied she would not be matching wits this day with an Augmented.

  Many of the recent incidents were true accidents, traceable to carelessness, bad luck, or honest equipment failures. A few of the incidents she hoped appeared to be more of the same. But some events, that her most trusted aides had failed to explain, had the feel of sabotage. Glithwah, without proof, knew whom to blame: Carl Rowland and his minions. Who else could it be? Starting with the latest gray-goo runaway in Nanofab Two. The presence of nanites, even half a (small) world away, made her skin crawl. But to have foregone a technology in such common use among the humans would have conceded an advantage, and that—

  A mind’s-ear chime reminded Glithwah that the five minutes were almost up. With a thought she blanked the floor-to-ceiling displays, then netted in Loshtof.

  Turned a featureless slate gray, the office walls looked as though she hid something.

  Setting both exterior walls transparent, crescent Uranus imbued her office with a wan, blue-green cast. The planet’s rings, seen edge-on, were barely visible. Miranda was just past full phase; lesser inner moons were mere brilliant dots.

  Much better, she decided.

  A final inspection revealed her desk to be too orderly. It and everything on it were props. With the brush of a hand, she ruffled a neat stack of printouts. It had been a basic tenet of clan doctrine since the surrender: never appear organized to the humans.

  • • • •

  At Glithwah’s door, another knock—this one self-assured.

  Not waiting for permission, Corinne Elman strode into the office. Or tried, anyway, her entrance ungainly. But however awkward her gait, Corinne’s mind had always been adroit. For a human, anyway.

  Her hair was longer than Glithwah remembered, and shot through with more gray. Her face was rounder than when they had last met, five Earth years earlier. She was short for an Earthborn human—and nonetheless, even standing in the recessed entryway, she and Glithwah stood eye to eye. If Corinne should exhibit the egregious bad manners to step up onto the Hunter tier of the split-level office, the low ceiling would force her to crouch; they would remain eye to eye.

  Corinne took a seat on the lower level. “Foremost, I am pleased to see you again.”

  Are you now? Glithwah thought. You had the good fortune, for a journalist, anyway, to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And having survived to tell—and sell—the tale, the experience made you wealthy. You’ve milked the one incident, exploited the clan, ever since. And maddening as that was, the human had done it very well.

  But Glithwah said only, “Welcome back to Ariel.” And the visit was welcome, in the narrow sense of something long dreaded being at long last almost out of the way. What was it with humans and anniversaries?

  Glithwah intended to be elsewhere before the next five-year “commemoration.”

  “Thank you, Foremost.” Elman leaned forward in her chair. “And thanks for agreeing to meet. I’m sure you’re busy. Shall we begin?”

  “Are we waiting for a cameraman?”

  “Not necessary. I have an A/V upgrade.”

  An implant to record everything the woman saw and heard. Yet one more technology denied to the clan.

  Glithwah bided her time, contained her resentment.

  Corinne squirmed, just a little, in her chair. “Shall we begin, then?”

  To Glithwah’s mind’s eye, Loshtof texted unnecessarily: Some embarrassment.

  “That will be fine,” Glithwah said.

  “Do you know what angle would interest my viewers?”

  “I do not.”

  But Glithwah could guess: humans loved to gloat. Because while the United Planets leadership continued to suppress just how dicey matters had been, at some level, however intuitive, humans saw the big picture. That a few thousand Hunters had made fools of them.

  Alas, the humans refused to stay beaten. If for little else, Glithwah respected the humans for their dogged determination. And so, worlds of them, billions of them, had absorbed one rout after another and kept coming. The endgame had left Victorious adrift and abandoned, the clan decimated, its leadership slaughtered. It had left the survivors marooned on this remote moon, to beg for resources and technology that should be theirs.

  But that would change … if their captors remained clueless for just a little while longer. To which end, disinformation channeled through this persistent pest might contribute.

  “No,” Glithwah repeated. “What angle would interest your viewers?”

  “Change. Progress.” Corinne smiled. “When last I visited, this was still a frontier settlement. Ariel has become a civilized world. You did that.”

  If human authorities should ever learn half of what had been accomplished—much less how, or why—Glithwah’s life was forfeit. Perhaps many lives. Did this troublesome woman suspect?

  “What do you mean?” Glithwah asked.

  “Such false modesty. I could not fail to notice the recent construction, least of all the colony’s own spaceport.”

  A civilian spaceport, the human meant. A spaceport not controlled by United Planets personnel. With splayed fingers, Corinne swept wisps of hair from her forehead. There was a momentary frown that Loshtof annotated, She is nervous. Possibly conflicted.

  About what?

  Unknown, Loshtof admitted.

  “We should have had ships earlier,” Glithwah said. “The delay had consequences.”

  “How so?”

  (Feigned interest, Loshtof interpreted.)

  Glithwah had picked up on that, too. Off a corner of the desk, from the hand-carved wooden chess set that had been a human’s gift to her uncle, she picked up a castle. Rolled the piece between fingers and thumb. “Without practice, skills are lost. Such as piloting, to be sure. And such as the knack for keeping ships flying, when something goes amiss. Because something always does.”

  Corinne’s face reddened. (Embarrassed, texted Loshtof.)

  Taking the point—when, after so many years, the clan had been permitted to acquire a few lumbering, obsolete scoop ships—that two vessels and crews had been lost? For something as mundane as harvesting of Uranian atmosphere, the gathering of deuterium and helium-3 for the colony’s energy needs? Corinne’s periodic rehashing of the old conflict had played no small part in denying the clan autonomy—and its own ships—for so many years.

  “I … I see,” the woman said. “If it’s any consolation, I understand the authorities have been looking into a rash of unexplained mishaps across the outer system. It’s not only your clan that has lost ships.”

  “How is that a consolation?”

  Murmuring something apologetic, again red-faced, Corinne segued into a banal interview topic. What do you remember about the “incident” twenty years earlier?

  Time and again Glithwah offered a contrite response—even, tersely, and with rigid circumspection, admitting to having regrets. She did regret the casualties, thousands among the humans, hundreds among the clan—but not for the reason Corinne might expect. In war, casualties were unavoidable. Any Foremost learned to accept them. What Glithwah could not accept, despite the years that had passed, was so many having died for naught.

  Failure made the losses sting. Failure was what she would not permit to stand.

  Inane questions kept coming. Do you appreciate the help the UP has given to build a new home? (Of course.) Has Ariel come to seem like home? (Yes.) Can humans and Hunters learn to get along? (But we already have. Look at the two of us.) And on, and on. And on.

  The human had come a long way to ask general questions that she could as well ha
ve submitted by vidmail, to which Glithwah could have recorded answers. The only acceptable responses were obvious. She dared to believe that this pointless session must soon end. More and more, the questions seemed pro forma, the questioner disengaged.

  And then Corinne surprised her. “One more thing …”

  “Yes?”

  “Let’s move beyond past conflict and beyond the steady progress of the Ariel settlement. Discovery is all but complete. What are your thoughts about that?”

  Discovery. Humanity’s second starship. The first was seven years on its way, repatriating survivors of Victorious’s original crew—those not resettled on Earth, too old and feeble for the long voyage—to Alpha Centauri.

  “A great accomplishment,” Glithwah said. “From what we are told.” That wasn’t much.

  “Nothing more, Foremost?”

  Glithwah set down the chess piece. “I haven’t thought much about it.”

  “Truly? Discovery could be used to send home your people.”

  “It could,” Glithwah agreed.

  It wouldn’t, of course. The investment to build Discovery, to manufacture enough antimatter to fuel an interstellar voyage, had been, well, astronomical. And if the humans had been so inclined, regardless? Great Clan rivalries had exiled Arblen Ems to K’rath’s comet belt in the first place. The exiles would not be welcome.

  But Arblen Ems would be great again. Glithwah felt it. She believed it. More, she had sworn it.

  Then would be the time for a return to K’rath. In triumph.

  CHAPTER 18

  InterstellarNet: the network that made possible and continues to bind the interstellar trading community. Radio-based commerce in intellectual property accelerated—and continues to bring into convergence—the technological repertoires of all member species.

  A key milestone in InterstellarNet history was the development of, and cross-species agreement upon, artificially intelligent surrogates as local trade representatives for distant societies. Quarantine procedures govern the delivery and operational environment of each alien agent, protecting agents and their host networks from subversion by the other. Only once, soon after the earliest deployments of AI agents, has this security mechanism been breached. A trapdoor hidden within imported biocomputers, technology that had been licensed by Earth from the Hunters of Barnard’s Star, was exploited by their trade agent. The attempt at extortion was foiled, the vulnerability within the adopted technology expunged, and the AI returned to its containment (see related article, “Snake Subterfuge”).

  What impact the dawning age of travel among the stars will have on the InterstellarNet community remains to be seen.

  —Internetopedia

  • • • •

  From the spartan living room of his modest apartment, Carl consulted with the stern-faced, severely tailored woman who was going by the name Danica Chidambaram. As far as anyone else on this rock knew, Danica, arrived the week before as a passenger aboard a routine supply run, worked for Worldswide Insurance. Who better than a claims adjuster to poke around the sites of Snake industrial accidents?

  In a glimpse across the Commons, the nearest they had come in person on this world, Danica seemed reserved but pleasant, with a mild manner and an averted gaze. But that reticent nature was an act, as contrived as her avatar. Among her fellow spooks, she was a flaming extrovert.

  They were linked by the most robust and tightly controlled encryption software known to mankind. Across the entire solar system, perhaps a few dozen operatives, their names and exact numbers also classified, had access to the tech. (A few United Planets high officials doubtless had also gotten the biochip upgrade, though Carl knew that to be true only of the deputy director of UP Intelligence, having twice delivered especially sensitive reports to his boss on a cosmic ultra link.) All the fancy tech notwithstanding, Carl would have preferred to debrief Danica in his office: behind two locked doors (inner and outer rooms alike swept every morning for bugs), within the most thoroughly shielded facility on Ariel.

  Talented actor that Danica was, she might not have revealed any more face-to-face than over the link. He still wished they could have met in person. Espionage was a lonely business.

  “So what do you think?” he asked her. “Let’s start with the deuterium refinery.”

  “Heavy hydrogen is still hydrogen. All it took was a spark.” Danica shrugged. “Boom.”

  The Snake investigative report had surmised much the same.

  “Uh-huh. And the cause of that spark?”

  “We may never know. Between the blast itself and the dome blowout, evidence is, shall we say, scattered. As often as not, vaporized.”

  “Speculate,” he netted.

  “Carelessness? Sabotage? I don’t know. I’ll keep looking, but don’t expect definitive answers.”

  “Can you confirm the headcount?” Snake media had reported twelve fatalities, including the missing and presumed dead, and three times as many injured.

  “Not without running DNA screens, or the Snake equivalent, against many square klicks of Ariel’s surface. Maybe not then. Stuff got blasted off-world.”

  He considered. “It could have been much worse, I suppose. An hour later, when a bunch of technician trainees were due ….”

  Danica turned her hands palms-up. For someone so loath to speculate, spy was an odd career choice.

  “The meltdown at the plasteel mill?”

  “Software glitch,” she netted.

  “And?”

  Another shrug. “Of unclear provenance.”

  “And the gray-goo incident?”

  “Puzzling. It was Centaur nanotech.”

  In other words, mature and reliable. “And did it exhibit any software glitches?”

  “By inference, yes, though no one has found proof. Or is apt to.”

  Because the standard response to nanoassemblers run amok was flamethrowers.

  Case by case, they reviewed the various recent Snake misfortunes. None related in any obvious way to Ariel’s other run of bad luck, several months earlier, the scoop-ship losses. Bottom line: mayhem and destruction, all of unclear antecedents. A high toll, but seldom as bad as it might have been.

  “Insurance fraud?” Carl eventually asked.

  Shrug.

  “Ever feel you were trapped in a game of b’tok?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The traditional Snake game of strategy.”

  “Oh. Like chess.”

  “Kind of.”

  Except that b’tok was to chess as chess was to rock-paper-scissors. For starters, b’tok was four-dimensional and could only be played virtually. The offensive and defensive capabilities of a b’tok game icon depended on its 3-D coordinates, the time spent at that location, and interactions with nearby pieces both friendly and rival. Also unlike chess, with its unchanging board of sixty-four squares, the b’tok domain of play evolved. It varied turn by turn, and the view differed by side. A player saw only as far as his pieces had explored. Those dynamics tended to undo any equilibrium that might arise between rivals; it was a rare match that ended in a draw.

  He could play, just a little. As a reason for unofficial face time with Glithwah, he tried to fit in a game with her at least once a month. Almost every match Carl did better—and yet he never won. He had come to believe that she played just well enough to beat him, imparting as little as possible about how experts played the game.

  Carl’s gut also told him the wave of accidents was sabotage. If so, if the Foremost was up to something, who was he kidding that he would win their game of cat-and-mouse?

  Danica netted, “Tell me why you’re thinking insurance fraud.”

  “The usual reason. For the money.”

  “Money for …?”

  She didn’t need to know Carl’s source: Pashwah, the Snake’s trade AI on Earth. Its latest allegations were scary, and he had confirmed bits and pieces. Someone new was buying alien tech. Someone canny, their transactions relayed from world to world, a
t each step disguised by an anonymizer service. But anonymized or not, huge cash flows couldn’t entirely hide. Regulators had to know when banks made big bets with their own money, and when big bets were made on behalf of customers. Even the banks representing aliens’ trade agents.

  If Pashwah’s inferences were to be believed—not a given, because the Great Clans to which it was beholden knew how to carry a grudge—that shadowy buyer was clan Arblen Ems. And that meant Glithwah.

  “For?” Danica prompted again.

  This time Carl shrugged. It indicated he didn’t care to say, not that he couldn’t. Raising an eyebrow, Danica acknowledged the distinction.

  She was too smart not to involve.

  “To acquire interstellar trade goods,” he told her. “The transactions were too well obscured, too indirect, to reveal anything beyond that there’s been a major, secretive InterstellarNet buy. I don’t know by whom. I don’t know from whom. I don’t know of what.”

  “But you suspect the local Snakes.”

  “As does my sometimes reliable source.”

  Danica needed a moment to take it all in. “I gather that my supposed employer paid out on the earliest claims.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you have a theory what the Snakes would buy.”

  “Yeah. Advanced industrial tech. The last couple years I’ve been ordered to supervise with a light hand, but I still get to oversee imports. Glithwah keeps asking for advanced robotics. I keep denying her requests.”

  “How advanced?”

  “Boater tech.” Boaters because their sun, Epsilon Eridani, appeared in the constellation Eridanus, the River.

  “We haven’t deployed much Boater robotics. Humans. Have we?”

  None, in fact, and Carl approved. From what he had seen online, Boater bots were … creepy. Too lifelike. But if humans had been built like jellyfish—the nearest terrestrial analogue to a Boater—he conceded he might have seen the pluses. Whatever the reason, Boaters had embraced robotics early and wholeheartedly.

  With a shiver Carl kept from his avatar, he answered her, curtly, “No.”