Spheres of Influence-eARC

by Ryk E. Spoor

  “Sit down, Laila. After what Simon talked to me about, I have a fairly good idea of what you needed to talk about.”

  The brown-haired scientist smiled quickly. “I don’t doubt it. Mainly, I had one quite specific question, though.”

  A specific question? Puzzled, Ariane asked, “All right, what is it?”

  Laila leaned forward. “You’ve been suspicious of me since I awakened—and it’s always seemed to me that you felt you had a reason for it, not just reasonable caution. I can’t say exactly why I felt this, but…” she looked apologetic, “but I just kept getting the feeling you didn’t trust me for some actual reason.”

  God, I feel like such an idiot. “Not…not really a reason, Laila. Actually, after my conversation with Simon, I was just reminded of how stupid I sometimes can be. It was just a silly impression.”

  “Oh?”

  She deserves to at least hear how silly I was being. “Right after our first talk—after you woke up—I was leaving, and when I looked back…” she sighed, smiled with embarrassment. “This is really stupid. It will completely ruin my reputation as any sort of bright commander, I warn you.”

  Laila waited.

  “All right. I looked back, and for just an instant—just a split second—I thought I saw you looking back at me with a completely different expression.”

  Laila raised an eyebrow. “What sort of expression?”

  She thought back to that moment, and that same chill went down her spine again. “Sort of the expression I’ve seen used when you’re studying something under a microscope, but at the same time almost as though you found me…funny? Amusing?” She shivered. “It was probably just the stress of the moment, but that impression was pretty creepy and it stayed with me.”

  Laila looked at her for a long moment. “Interesting. That is what you saw?”

  “That’s what I thought I saw,” Ariane said, feeling even more embarrassed. “I probably invented it.”

  Laila smiled slowly. “Possibly not. You have shown an…impressive ability to observe and act on your observations in the past; a combat or racing pilot who doesn’t notice things fast is likely dead thereafter.

  “Your reaction isn’t scientific, no, and I deplore the idea that a simple emotional reaction would determine the level of trust…but I also have to recall that your ‘gut-level’ instinct has managed to get us all through this in prior conflicts, so I would be rather ill-advised to just dismiss it. I will say that I don’t even recall looking at you as you left—but I also have other scattered moments in which I am not entirely clear what I was doing. So…perhaps I am not, in fact, Laila Canning.” She looked steadily at Ariane. “But I would like to resolve how I’ll be treated from now on.”

  “You aren’t giving me much of a break, are you?”

  She snorted. “No. I’ll admit to an emotional reaction of my own, and that is that I resent the idea that you’ve been wondering if I’m not myself because you thought you saw something. But in any case, I cannot give you a ‘break,’ Captain. This is your decision, and it should be made with full knowledge of what you might be doing.”

  I wish DuQuesne was here!

  She squelched that thought. DuQuesne wasn’t there, and if he was, he’d almost certainly just repeat Laila’s advice. That’s why they’d chosen her captain.

  She probably only sat there for a few moments, but to Ariane it felt like hours. Judging from the well-hidden tension in Laila’s face, it wasn’t a short wait for her, either.

  “All right, Laila,” she said finally. “I’ll be just as honest, then. I owe you that.

  “We don’t know if you’re yourself or not. You could be an agent of the Faith, or something else. Or you could be exactly who you always were. I think you’re a little changed—you don’t want to go back to who you were, with three AISages in your head, practically running your body while you studied. But honestly? First, I can’t afford to lose any of the people who’ve been here with me. Second, I really think you are you, or mostly you. Third…I can’t afford paranoia. If there is something not-you there, it’s never shown any sign of being anything other than helpful. Mandallon brought you back from what was basically brain-dead and gave you back to us, and I should be simply grateful for that. If the Faith did anything to you, well, they’ve already got all the information you have, and they haven’t shown any sign of it. So no matter what, I think you’re one of us, and you mean to stay one of us.

  “So as of now, I’m going to assume you are the exact same Doctor Laila Canning who made that trip, and I will inform DuQuesne of this decision. I don’t have time for this kind of worry. If I’m giving Simon—with a lot more evidence of something funny going on—the benefit of the doubt, I have to give it to you. Especially,” she smiled, “since I’m asking you to give the same benefit to me.”

  As with Simon, she saw tension seep away from Laila. “Thank you, Ariane,” she said. “I…did not want to leave here, but if I had to be always suspected—”

  “I know. It’s over.” She reached out and gripped the other woman’s hand. “I’m sorry. Welcome back. Welcome really back.”

  And Laila gripped back with a smile.

  Chapter 24.

  “I know it’s only thirty people, but that’s a hell of a crowd compared to us,” DuQuesne murmured. He glanced in the direction of the group that was waiting, mostly patiently, outside the entrance to the Guardhouse area, then looked back down at the cable he was rigging. Going to need a lot more power here.

  Carl Edlund paused in the middle of fixing the last brace for the table. “I don’t think they even outnumber you,” he said.

  “Ha. Unfortunately it’s not that kind of outnumbering.”

  “Be grateful,” Tom Cussler said, waving the first people forward. “They could have sent a lot more through, but I’m guessing they’re screening the first set very carefully.”

  “I guess. And it’s plain as day that we’ll be needing a lot more people for everything we want to do. Just wish I didn’t have to worry how many of them might be more on Naraj’s side than ours.”

  “Well, hey there, DQ!” called a cheerful voice.

  DuQuesne stood upright, startled, and looked down at a woman who looked to be in her mid-thirties, hair done in streaks like a box of neapolitan ice cream—brown, red, and white—with a dark tan and sharp hazel eyes. She had a large red duffle-bag slung over her shoulder and was gazing up at him with a broad grin.

  “Tobin? You came to this madhouse?”

  “DQ, once I heard you were involved, I had to come see what you’d gotten yourself into. After the Singularity project I’d thought the excitement was over, but judging from what I saw just on the way in, that was only a warm-up!”

  “You know Doctor Tobin?” Cussler asked. “I’d heard of you by reputation, Doctor, but—”

  “We worked together on the Singularity Power Project some years back,” DuQuesne said, still smiling. Damn, this is something of a stroke of luck. “Tom, Carl, and Steve, this is Doctor Molly Tobin, one of the best practical power engineering designers you’ll ever meet.”

  “Another power engineer?” Steve said with some excitement. “Oh, that’s excellent! DuQuesne’s great, but he’s got so many other things on his plate that we have to practically beg him for help on this stuff.”

  Tobin nodded, looking around, as Tom started getting information from the other two people he’d called up. “That’s DQ, all right; take on more work than any three other people and call it a good night’s work.”

  “‘DQ’?” Carl repeated. “Never heard that one before.”

  “And only Molly and about two other people get to call me that, so don’t start,” DuQuesne said in a half-serious warning tone. “What kind of equipment have you guys brought?”

  “Couple more AIWish units and a whole bunch of key elements—the sort that’re harder to come by, not available in large quantities out on your upper Sphere, at least based on what you’ve sent us so far,” Molly ans
wered promptly. “Efficient turbine designs and other components for various types of powerplants, of course, that can be coded direct to your AIWish. More power means getting more done, so we figured power engineering would be one of the key factors. Also brought a couple civil engineers, habitat analysis people, concept synthesizers, and so on.”

  “That’s definitely going to help. A lot.” He glanced at the group more closely. “Most of ’em don’t look too shellshocked, either. Been picking fron the ones who don’t rely on their AISages, eh?”

  “That was one of Ambassador Naraj’s directives, yes,” she agreed. “And based on what we knew, that made a lot of sense.”

  He bent, finished locking down the cable. “You been briefed?”

  “Heavily. Enough that I just about believe this crazy place really exists, now that I’m here.”

  He grinned at her. “Oh, it’ll get harder to believe before it gets easier. Well, we’ve just finished the survey above our Sphere and we have no fewer than eight Sky Gates. Simon’s preparing to send probes through to see what’s on the other side—hopefully one of them goes to Nexus Arena.” He turned. “Follow me, Molly. The others have to go through all the rigmarole, but I know you, you know me, and I want you to see the problem you guys will have to tackle first.”

  He led Molly up through the Inner Sphere to the elevator. “Get ready to meet the Arena.”

  “I thought the real Arena we couldn’t go to yet. This Nexus Arena.”

  “In a way, yeah…” The elevator door slid open, and they walked into the foyer towards the door to the Upper Sphere. “But this is still part of the Arena, and the important thing about now is that you’ve arrived at night.”

  They stepped through the door…and Molly Tobin stopped dead.

  Above the dark jungle, silhouetted against a distant horizon and spanning vision in all directions, was…

  There still aren’t words, DuQuesne thought. Maybe my long-ago creator, that bombastic Doctor E.E. Smith, could have described it. But I can’t.

  The sky of the Arena glowed above the Sphere of Humanity; a shimmering of clouds in the indescribable distance, flickering and flashing with lightning strokes that branched and stretched not for instants but long, long seconds of seething electrical fire, blue-white and fire-orange and gleaming pearlescent white against blue-black; a deep ruddy glow was visible in another direction, and against it a dark, trailing line of clouds edged in rose and blood. Directly above, a roiling, majestic sea of deep violet and velvet and sparking, shimmering blue. It was the sky of storms the size of worlds and of lights that might come from another world, a moon’s distance away in that impossible airy gulf, and faint, barely-seen movement that might be creatures, living beings that dared to live and fight and die and perhaps even think, wonder, and love in the endless spaces between Spheres.

  “Oh…my.” Molly said finally.

  “Yeah, that’s about all you can say. Or something like that. Even more if you’re here in the daytime first; looks pretty much like some place on Earth then, with the Luminaire up. You have to squint pretty hard to make out anything funny in the sky in the daytime. So then the sun goes down…that’s when you suddenly know you ain’t in Kansas any more.”

  “Or down the rabbit hole. This place seems just about that crazy.” She shook herself in a way that DuQuesne found amusingly familiar; most of the original visitors had done the same thing when recovering from a typical Arena shock. “So…besides that, what did you have for me?”

  “Listen.”

  She cocked her head, and even in the dim lighting he could see her sudden smile. “Oh, now, that is hopeful. A waterfall?”

  “And a big one,” DuQuesne said with an answering smile. “We’ve diverted a tiny portion of it so far with what we could rig up, but I know you worked on studying hydro plants before. My best estimate on this fall is it’s close to two million liters a second.”

  “That is pretty big,” she said. “I admit…I’m having trouble grasping this. We are on top of a spherical construct, right? What’s all this…world doing on top of it, if you know what I mean?”

  “It’s made to be similar to our home environment—though similar does not mean identical, so get that through your head. Near as I can figure, there’s a couple thousand kilometers of rock under us which acts like the actual mantle of a planet. Plate tectonics, the whole nine yards. You’ve got some kind of oceans out there—Simon’s probes were able to return some images, and we’re finally getting some idea of what the top of the Sphere looks like. Within the gravity area there’s some convection and condensation—but we’re not even close to figuring out how all this interacts with the stuff outside the gravity field.”

  He shook his head. “It’s enough to drive you nuts, I’ll tell you. But the long and the short is, we get weather like Earth, pretty close, you get night and day like Earth, there’s volcanoes and earthquakes and all the rest like Earth, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t seasons to the…North and South of us, where the Luminaire’s light will be more oblique; I’ll bet its path slowly goes North and South over the period of a year, just like the apparent position of the sun varies due to Earth’s axial tilt. We’re pretty much on the equator right here.” He paused. “The effective equator of the Upper Sphere, not the actual Sphere’s equator. Damnation. We’ll need yet more new vocabulary.”

  They stopped at the edge of the ridge overlooking the swift-running river. “That is impressive,” Molly said finally. “So you want me to design a power plant to use…that?”

  “Figure we could get a few gigawatts out of it, which would go a long way towards giving us some comfortable independence here. And if there’s one waterfall like this, I’m betting there’s plenty of opportunities for water-power here.”

  She nodded. “I can imagine the largest possible water power generator, actually.”

  “What do…oh.” He suddenly began to chuckle, then laughed loudly. “Doctor Tobin, you haven’t stopped thinking bigger, have you?”

  “It just seemed obvious to me, Marc,” she said, grinning back. “Given the description, there’s a wall, an edge, somewhere around this Upper Sphere, the point where the gravity stops keeping things comfortably on the surface. Go knock a hole in it and let the entire ocean start draining out until you reach equilibrium. With a few billion liters of water a second, I’ll start giving you some real power!”

  Chapter 25.

  Ariane rose slowly to her feet, favoring her side. “Okay, I think I know when I’m beaten,” she said, bowing to her opponent, Orphan.

  Wu Kung had been expecting her to yield earlier. But she’s a real fighter, he thought with admiration. Won’t give up even in a play fight without showing what she’s got in guts.

  Orphan leaned back on his tail with a buzzing chuckle. “Oh, now that I doubt in the extreme, Captain Austin. If you had the capacity to even believe you were beaten, how then could you have faced a Shadeweaver—and won?” He bowed to her. “Still, it is a wise tactician who recognizes they no longer need stay in the battle. And you did quite well.”

  “You managed to hit him a few times,” DuQuesne said with a grin. “Take that as a compliment. Orphan’s good.”

  “So I see. If I ever have to fight you for real, Orphan, you’ll pardon me if I cheat.”

  The chuckle turned to a full, rich laugh—though still with that buzzing undertone. “Oh, Captain Austin, I would expect you to cheat. Of course,” he said, with a lean forward and tilt that somehow conveyed the impression of a roguish grin, “if ever I must fight any of you, rest assured I will cheat as well!”

  “I sure don’t doubt that,” DuQuesne said.

  Gabrielle checked the signals from Ariane’s medical nanos using a handheld scanner. “No serious damage, Arrie.”

  “Of course not,” Wu said defensively, wondering if they thought he’d let her get hurt. “If I thought Orphan was actually going to hurt her—past a few broken bones or something like that—I’d have stopped h
im!”

  “I’d much rather you stopped it before any bones got broken, thank you kindly,” Gabrielle said with a sigh. “But in this kind of sparring I suppose that’s a forlorn hope.”

  Wu was going to protest that if you were going to let things like that stop you, you weren’t ready to learn serious fighting…but he remembered that a lot of other people didn’t think that way.

  Ariane seated herself on one of the benches set around the large exercise and practice area that Steve had figured out how to create inside their Embassy. Wu looked around admiringly. It’s not anywhere as big as what they showed me for some of the Great Factions, but it’s still a great sparring and exercise place!

  Currently, the room was configured in something that more than hinted at some of the Arena’s combat challenge areas: different levels of the floor, upright and sideways obstacles like tree trunks and branches, irregular obstacles like rocks, and so on. In this first contest—which, Wu understood, was partly a way of strengthening ties with the Liberated—Ariane had tried to use her smaller size and maneuverability against Orphan, but he was lightning fast and very strong. Fast and strong, and he hasn’t shown what he can do for real, not yet.

  “That was indeed a fine warmup,” Orphan said. “But you have been stretching yourself on the sidelines long enough, Doctor DuQuesne. Or perhaps you, Sun Wu Kung, would care to give me the instruction Dr. DuQuesne promised me?”

  Wu grinned a fanged smile but didn’t take the bait. This part of the contest DuQuesne and he had talked out in detail. DuQuesne wasn’t going to push himself past the point Orphan had already seen, in the battle against Amas-Garao, so Wu could push past that point, up to roughly where he knew DuQuesne would be if he started to push himself, which would be somewhere around Tunuvun’s skill and strength. “I think DuQuesne wants to try you first.”

  The door opened, and K—no, he reminded himself, Oasis Abrams, have to remember who she’s pretending to be—came in. “Sparring with aliens and no one invited me?”