Minutegirls

by George Phillies

  Admiral Rohan spent some time examining closely the true Intelligence budget. "There is a perhaps-amusing question," he noted. "According to your numbers, which you have only just obtained, we are in fact spending almost nothing on spying on the Americans. There are these Centers. They must be very effective to produce so much analysis of the American challenge, the analyses in which I am regularly buried." Beyerlein shifted uncomfortably. "What I want to know is: How do I make the rest of our fleet operations so effective?"

  "Indeed, that was my next topic," Beyerlein said.

  "Excellent!" Rohan exclaimed.

  "Alas, Admiral, life is not so simple as it appears," Beyerlein said. "These Centers are the Centers in charge of producing Conferences on the American challenge. They are not the Centers in charge of producing data. Instead, they receive data. Data is transformed to facts. Facts are transformed to knowledge. Knowledge is transformed to reports. Reports are presented at Conferences in appropriate locations. Paris. Venice during Carneval. Each stage is mediated by a different group of centers. At each stage, computer interpolation is used to complete minor lacunae in previous stages' outputs." Rohan took a deep breath. "Furthermore, there is a need within the Commission Intelligence Apparatus to fund positions of responsibility, significance, and grandeur for persons who clearly merit them, but whose particular personal talents do not lend themselves to positions in other sections of the Apparatus. I identified some of these people -- persons I thought you likely to know personally." Photographs and names appeared on the goggles.

  Rohan held up a hand for silence. Indeed, he did know most of them. Daughter of High Commissioner. Over a year, attempted to consume an entire year's production of Chateau Picard, singlemouthed. Nephew of Eperley Aerospace owner. Once accused of doing work other than brown-nosing. Daughter (and grand-daughter and great-granddaughter) of three Supreme Commissioners. Academy of Starfleet graduate. Named by classmates 'most likely to have an FEU HealthScience Institute named in her honor'. Of course, first there would need to be established an Institute for the Study of Nymphomania.

  "Oh, dear," Rohan said. "Oh dear! But wait. As a young man, a Third Lieutenant, I commanded the Saint-Pouenges, a Mata Hari class observation sloop. We diligently recorded such American signals as could be detected. We made our regular orbital sweeps over North America, taking pictures of all sorts. We collected every sort of data. Where did it go? It cannot just vanish."

  "It can, however, be stored, ever more efficiently. And some was analyzed. For reports. And Commission White Papers. And there are a small number of people who do organize, efficiently, sighting and tracking data to keep tabs on the American Starfleet. Your predecessor? He found fleet data entrancing. So entrancing that he rarely asked for anything else," Beyerlein said, "except for even more evidence that the American Starfleet was even larger than believed. Our tonnage. Twice our tonnage, three times, the more the better. He gloried in that nonsense."

  "Signals intelligence?" Rohan. asked

  "Under modern conditions, codes cannot be broken," Beyerlein answered. "And continuous transmission defeats traffic analysis. The breakthroughs reported? There is one site in North America that we have found whose coding is defective. Every so often, it transmits on some new topic and that is a new breakthrough."

  "I am almost afraid to ask," Rohan said. "What does it transmit?"

  "Primarily, it is a real estate dealer. It sells homes. We track prices, showing deflation as the American economy collapses -- one of our most solid pieces of data. Largely it sells superluxury homes to the richest of the rich, many of whom are apparently clustered in rural Montana," Beyerlein said.

  "Montana?" Rohan shivered. "Cold. Dry. Mountainous. I thought...unpopulated."

  "When I took command we did not realize that these were palaces, because the translator simply assumed that the numerical value for the size of a house was its volume, in American units of course. 27,000 'cubic feet' is a four-story home, 90 square-meter footprint, large but not absurdly so. However, one has an occasional floor plan. An American house size is its *floor area*. '27,000' is a home of area over two thousand square meters. It's enormous. A palace. From photographic work, we could identify some of these advertisements against the actual buildings, and confirm that our interpretation is correct," Beyerlein said.

  "But I have seen housing prices for Manhattan," Rohan said.

  "Ah, the computers. Filling minor lacunae. House prices outside Montana, for example," Beyerlein explained.

  "Ah. These are minor lacunae? Montana? This is a bit odd," Rohan said. "It's cold. Look into that. Why do their billionaires live there? We still have the question: these reports on the Spiders, the Allies, the Americans....which do we believe?"

  "My Admiral, I am investigating this question. Vigorously. At the present, I am prepared to stand behind the American ship sighting reports, though not the absurd claim that their fleet has a larger tonnage than ours. I might credit that they have a third of our tonnage, counting a variety of thoroughly obsolete hulks. I have no idea yet about results on our Allies. I believe reports on the Spiders are tolerably reliable. After all, they match exactly the findings of our allies, who have been performing espionage for a far longer time than we have. We regularly cross-check with their results. On the Americans, with the one exception we have no human intelligence, no signals intelligence, only photographic and radiographic observation. And we have no program to analyze what we observe," Beyerlein answered.

  Admiral Rohan frowned. This was not a desirable situation. "There is a contingency budget. Under my personal control. Take from it up to four billion Euros for this year. Report to me weekly how it is spent. You are to create a competent Center of American Studies. In secret. As swiftly as possible. The center needs an Executive Officer. You've worked well with Captain Christine Dumont, haven't you? And you'll need some Russians or Serbs or the like as analysts and other specialists; they’re the best. I leave that up to you. And look again at our findings on the Spiders: how much is our observation? How much are the cross-checks? But now I must spend a few minutes preparing for Admiral T'renrensen." Beyerlein stood, saluted, and left the room.

  Rohan mopped his brow. Fleet intelligence was in even worse condition than he had feared. There was only one solution. He reached for another croissant.

  This unexpected American colony on Centauri was a bit of a complication. Perhaps it should have been obvious that such a place existed. The Americans had built several huge fast-as-light ships having no obvious purpose. A reasonable estimate was that they could complete a round trip to Alpha Centauri in eight years, transporting each time a half-million or so people and their necessities. Allowing for construction time, repairs, and refits, there might be fifty million or so people on Alpha Centauri D and perhaps a few on Centauri C.

  Perhaps fewer. The Enghien expedition had found Centauri D to be that anomaly, a habitable planet that some cosmic accident had stripped of all life. Whatever it had once been, it was now a place of blowing sand, dry rock, and towering mountains. Planets on the hyperspace grid, out as far as the EU had gone, were almost invariably more welcoming. The universe apparently allowed a limited number of biochemical arrangements; on perhaps one planet in ten you could live by eating native flora and fauna. Settling a sterile world was an enormous technical challenge, even for an economy as successful as the Union's. The American economy, crippled by its Darwinian economic theories and plummeting population, might be an eighth the size of the EU's. How could they afford interstellar colonization? The goods the Americans transshipped were undoubtedly seeds, peat moss, tools, and a few horticulturalists to help the project along.

  It was a bit surprising, decided Rohan as he nibbled at his second croissant, that the Americans had garrisoned the Alpha Centauri warp point. Why had they worried that it might be visited? Given American resources, the defensive squadron had been huge -- three or four forts, a half-dozen battleships, cruisers, a dozen radar and lidar buoys. Perhaps the warp
point had been visited before, if not by the Alliance then by the Spiders.

  It was worrisome to have a possible Spider incursion so close to Earth. Unlike the rational arrangements of the Alliance, the Spiders occasionally spilled through normal space from one system to the next. He'd have to speak to T'renrensen about searching for traces of a Spider incursion on the Gisbures' side of the Centauri warp point. He hoped that T'renrensen proved agreeable. The Gisbures were remarkably unwilling to help with questions that they decided were uninteresting.

  Rohan asked himself what had been learned about the American presence at Centauri. Producing that answer was up to Staff Intelligence. His staff would also brief him, he trusted, about the Gisbures's concerns. Fortunately the Gisbures had an extremely practical attitude toward the universe, and so far had never been offended to learn they had asked a question you weren't ready to discuss. The President of the Republic had a very different attitude; that meeting -- after a civilized lunch in the Presidential banquet hall, complete with his five-star chef’s best cooking -- would be much more intensive.

  Chapter 6

  37th Amendment. Suppression of Nobility. No person who is the spouse, significant other, daughter, granddaughter, son, or grandson of any person who has been elected or appointed to any office named within or created under the authority of this Constitution shall be eligible to hold any office of honor or profit under the United States.

  ...The Constitution of the United States, 2052

  The Stellar League shall comprise the linear distance travelled by visible light in a region of space having a pure-diagonal metric tensor in a period of 1/60,000 of one American second.

  ...Americanization of Units Act, 48 U.S.C. 372, 2049

  THE MORBIUS SKYCAR

  Above Michigan, United States of America

  April 30, 2174 9:30 AM

  Once again Morbius’s skycar soared through the blackness of near space, Sandra Miller at the controls, flying Morbius’s good friends to New Washington. We left from Leominster, she thought, not from near their home, and everyone knows exactly where Morbius lives. That should be adequate operational security for another trip to New Washington, if I never do this again.

  “So what can you tell us?” Barbara asked.

  "There was an Azores Truce Meeting. Three days ago. One of the European delegates was covered with fur," Sandra answered. "The visuals have his name. But the data slip has no records of the session, not even which Articles were invoked. Once again, Secretary Cornelius wants to see everyone in person.”

  "Now, I am old enough to have actually met a European," Charles announced. "Several, in fact. Some were even alive afterward. It really is an old wive's tale that Europeans are furred."

  "Sir, the visual is on the dataslip," Sandra said hesitantly, not sure what would happen if Charles and Barbara didn't believe her. "I'll put it on the deskscreen.” The outcome seemed unlikely to be good for her career. "I always thought that Europeans are homo sapiens sapiens."

  "Dear me," Barbara said after watching the visual. "Furry is the word. But not cuddly, not with those claws. Sapiens, capable of rational thought, might be stretching things, but real Europeans are homo sap. What did the Europeans do to this poor fellow?--If it is a fellow and not a gal."

  "They made him a delegate," Sandra announced, "I'd call that picture a giant cat, legs broken and reset. Radical biosculpt. Radical enough to turn off a MinuteBoy." She bit her lip. MinuteBoys were notoriously interested in horizontal action, but perhaps that description was too free for her guests.

  "I see," Charles said. "Well reported, Sandra, very well reported. Actually, I don't see. Europeans detest biochemical engineering. At least, they did a half a century ago. Thank you for being so thoughtful to bring our immediate attention to the most severe anomaly in the situation." Charles stressed his compliments to Sandra's report. Morbius had warned Sandra. At some time in the past, Charles had learned he had a problem: Even if he shot no messengers, his friends might. "At least I hope that is the most severe anomaly in the situation. The FEU has never liked biosculpt. Why did they warp this woman so badly?"

  "And they keep mumbling we use cloned delegates," continued Barbara. "Of course, we could tell them the truth, rather than quoting the Azores Convention at them." She giggled. The Europeans, Sandra knew, would throw three kinds of fit if they learned Americans outlived them. However, the Azores Convention spelled out in extreme detail rules for the conduct of negotiations. Barbara knew every one. After all, she had been one of the Convention's lead authors.

  "It would not make their day," Sandra agreed, "And they'd have something new to complain about."

  "There's not a hint they've changed their minds on biology," said Charles. "Morphing a person into a cat sounds hard. Why bother? Did it say anything?"

  "I gather it spoke English fluently," Sandra answered. "Albeit with an accent. That's in one of the Aside files. I don't know what it said. I'm not sure of its gender. The given name—supplied in the supporting material--is synthetic. There's no such word in any accessible archive in any language."

  "A briefing by Secretary of State Cornelius with tape of the negotiating session. Cornelius wants to do one briefing for everyone. It'll be two hours for Solar Navy to have the last of their people here, so there'll be a buffet and chance to talk first. A roster of attendees is on your dataslip." Sandra remembered another task. "It is my legal duty to remind you. Morbius tasked me." Charles and Barbara joined her, chanting in unison. "You are coming into the presence of a member of the Presidential Line of Succession. Unless exempt, it is your legal duty to go armed. If you are not armed, a selection of modern weapons is available for loan at the door." They all smiled. Barbara and Charles tapped their coats.

  Barbara read down the list, speaking half to herself. "State Department. War Department. Navy. Solar Navy. Coast Defense Artillery. Senate. Congress. Half-a-dozen intelligence corporations. Various experts on Europe. Guests by distanced viewing."

  "Experts. None of whom ever went to Europe, in some cases even back when it was still legal," Charles said. "Most of whom weren't born when the Continental Defense Screens went up."

  "Popular Army. And us," finished his other half. "We're not official. Not any more."

  "Not official," Sandra said. "But the briefing must go public soon. I gather that Cornelius felt your opinion would calm people who trust you more than their elected officials." Charles nodded agreeably. Sandra knew the truth. It had gnawed at the guts of more than one President of the Republic that the President was by no means the most trusted man in the United States, that in a crisis many Americans would turn to the fellow private citizens whom she was escorting.

  * * * * *

  Despite the magnificent buffet, Secretary Cornelius finally brought the meeting to order. “Fellow Americans,” he said, “I have grave news. The latest Azores meeting was quite hostile. Let us first see a tape of the session."

  The Hall darkened. A holodisplay repeated the meeting from the perspective of the Senior American Delegate. The American delegation entered the Negotiation Facility. The feline European delegate delicately goose-stepped to its side of the room and spoke its peculiarly accented English. Europeans blandly suggested that the United States should hand over all territories beyond Mother Earth. The American delegates marched coldly back to their aircraft.

  Silence was replaced with angry mutters as the tape completed.

  Secretary Cornelius waited for the lights to come back up. "The large colony in question, 4 light years out, are the planets Lincoln and Markoff and their 18 states of our Republic. The information provided by the Europeans confirms what the third Union delegate claimed. The European tape shows the Lincoln system as it would have been visible from the Clarksburg warp gate. Needless to say, we did not use the European pointless space travel confusion to go there, so we will categorically reject their claims about making constructive use of their worthless hyperspace net, claims for which they have no evidence except
that which they manufactured. It may someday be the case that even a group as dimwitted as the European barbarians will conclude we have an efficient and safe method of traveling hither to thither, not to be confused with their inefficient and dangerous method. I infer they have not yet done so."

  Sandra glanced left and right. The FEU delegate had said something significant, namely that someone with starships had allied itself with the FEU. Who? A number of other powers had starships, but which of them was calling itself an FEU ally? To her recollection, no FEU ally of any size was fond of biosculpt. None of the people she had been watching in the audience showed great interest at the FEU delegate's claim that the FEU had allies. Of course, most Americans were totally disinterested in the affairs of foreign nations, but this was a select audience. Surely one or two of them cared what the outside world was doing? And why hadn't a delegation from the allied nation, whatever it was, appeared separately at the Azores meeting? Under the Azores Convention, any other nation in the world could ask to appear at a negotiating session. Why was orange tabby heard only as an FEU representative?

  Sandra shook her head. Whatever benefit the Azores negotiations might once have had, a century later the two sides had trouble agreeing on the compass direction in which the sun rose. So far as she could tell, the Secretary's remarks had generated appropriate levels of audience surprise at appropriate moments. No one had shown signs of covering up a deliberate cease-fire violation.

  Secretary Cornelius nodded at an officer in the black and gold uniform of the American Solar Navy. "Grand Commodore Jacobsen?" he asked.

  The American Solar Navy's highest-ranking officer looked over the crowd, then doffed his tricorne. "We now see the European version of the Alpha Centauri incident. I wouldn’t put too much emphasis on the exact delay. There are travel delays between warp points, political bottlenecks in determining a response, and the like, so the actual travel time along their hypernet can only be a guess. I’ll keep you apprised of developments, should there be any.”