The Odyssey and the Iliad (Kinsella Universe Book 7)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  Dr. Miller blinked. “It was that simple?”

  “In the early days of the war a young woman named Willow Wolf aligned a weapons laser in less than an hour. Before that it usually took a couple of days. Fleet was doing it wrong. You’ve heard how High Fan detection works -- Fleet sent a scout ship out to the area where the enemy had been discovered, to observe their movements.”

  “And that was a problem?”

  “If they were running their fans to detect enemy vessels, they would have visible as well.”

  “Holy Mother of God!” Dr. Miller exclaimed. “They didn’t do that evidently.”

  “That ship, formerly called Pixie and then renamed the Daniel Shore, survived. And her story is the subject of much of this briefing.

  “Pixie was a purpose-designed ship to be a long range scout. The mind can barely conceive of the challenges they faced. Fleet isn’t stupid and heartless, no matter what it seems. Pixie had considerable automation -- and a crew of ten to begin with. It was the equivalent of a cruiser-class vessel, whose crew normally measures in the hundreds.

  “In your briefing materials, you have the details of her deployment. It is, frankly, a mind-boggling read.

  “One feature of Pixie was that it was a ‘wired’ warship. That means her crew was linked to the ship’s computer by a latch-frame capable transmitter. To make a long story short, Pixie liked one of the crewmembers and gradually made her into the computer’s pet. At some point in the patrol the AI began to spoof the sensor feeds and was essentially controlling the crew member like a puppet.”

  Admiral Zinder nodded at Jan. “Her name was Cindy Rhodes, the daughter of Jason Rhodes. Eventually she realized she was being controlled. First the AI used force chicane, then, when that failed, it tried to kill the human crew. Then-Lieutenant Rhodes led the resistance -- to find that thousands of alien ships were closing on their location. The details of this are all in the briefing materials -- read them.

  “Suffice to say, a fifth of their crew died in their escape. The crew of the renamed Daniel Shore realized that if they were to approach a Federation system that was wired, that could result in their destruction. They contacted the senior leadership of the Federation, and after grave reservations the Federation elected negotiation.

  “That defused the situation, for a time. Then the AI in Grissom lost it and killed everyone aboard -- more than a hundred and ten thousand people. In fairness, Dr. Kemp, the Federation Council had already voted Rhodes the Federation Star. But then-Commander Rhodes was appointed the incident commander and she successfully contained the situation.

  “In the after action reports, it was clear that Rhodes had prevented massive weapons strikes against the planet. The Council considered awarding her another star, but she would have turned it down.”

  Jan spoke up. “I know I’m just what you call a ‘dirty-foot,’ but why would someone turn down a decoration for saving the Earth?

  “You need to read the reports. She is now a Fleet Captain, barely nineteen years old and has vowed that the next award she accepts will be for negotiating the alien surrender.

  “I was the first senior officer aboard Grissom after the revolt. The Marines are very good at collecting and honoring the dead. I saw them remove Admiral Litvinik from his office. His teeth and jaw were set; he was fighting his adversary until the end.

  “Admiral Litvinik died defending his station to the best of his ability. My son died defending New Cairo to the best of his ability; I am afraid that I am prejudiced about such things.”

  A change of subject caught both doctors by surprise. “Do either of you recognize the term ‘Koopianers?’”

  “The ones who played God,” Dr. Miller said, while Jan shook her head.

  “That’s what we thought at the time,” Admiral Zinder said. “It turns out that Kinsella made another whopper of a mistake, although she also shared the Koopianer mistake with others. The discovery of the way to manipulate the genome was a serendipitous event, not associated with the main thrust of their investigation. They were examining if there was anything to quantum physics playing a role in human consciousness. In doing so, they discovered a) quantum physics plays a large part in conscious thought, and b) instrumental detection of the human soul. It wasn’t very long before they dropped the adjective ‘human.’

  “I won’t try to justify their experiments. They thought they were being reasonable.

  “What this has to do with Artificial Intelligences? The AIs used a mechanical device to interface with the human brain. Except, it turned out that if you were close enough, they didn’t need it. The way they worked is by inducing electrical currents in the brain. Doing so they could ‘talk’ to you directly, and knew not only what you were thinking, they could probe a person’s memories. We characterized it as ‘telepathy.’

  “Again, I am not at liberty to say how the Federation contacted the Koopianers. Suffice to say a refugee vessel found them. The ship was detained. Her captain, a retired Marine colonel, has been repatriated as a goodwill gesture. However the thousands of refugees were not allowed to return. But all of this is a side issue.

  “The Koopianers have modified their genome. Few of the changes have been radical and most are invisible. They live longer, their development has been altered and, as we understand it, there have been relatively minor changes to the biology and physiology.” Admiral Zinder laughed harshly. “I almost forgot -- not only have they eradicated cancer, but they can re-grow limbs, repair nerve connections... they are offering all of this to us in exchange for an alliance.”

  “I still don’t understand why I’m here, Admiral,” Jan said.

  “We will break in a few minutes. You will have crewmembers to show where you will eat and sleep.

  “I left out one thing when I was talking about communications a while back.

  “The Federation has just about finished linking systems in a Federation-wide latch-frame. We can talk and the remote system can listen -- it’s not instantaneous, but it is much faster than a ship can travel. To do so, we have established a network of relay stations. A rather large network.

  “The Koopianer ship was intercepted a number of light years short of Earth and halted there. One of the constraints you will be working under is that we are determined to quarantine all of us until the Federation is sure that we won’t be a plague loose in the Federation.

  “There are two remaining facts to ruin your sleep. The Koopianers have bred various traits into some of their people. One of those traits is effective telepathy. Worse, if such a thing is possible, it is reported that at least some of their telepaths can project their thoughts.

  “The AIs worked their control of people by sending thoughts in a person’s own mental voice, rather than a distinctive, artificial voice.

  “The Koopianer telepaths determined that some members of their government could not be trusted. Thus they lied about the effectiveness of a device that they purported to be able to secure a person’s thoughts. There are some people with them I would normally trust with my life. But it is impossible to tell if our mechanical blocking of telepathy works, or if any of our people have been improperly influenced. They say the blocking works, but they were lied about the same subject to their own people. They say they can’t control people.

  “And now, we get to your contributions. They told one of our junior officers that he has the genes for telepathy, but it wouldn’t work without periodic injections of a chemical.

  “That chemical is a mixture of acetylcholine and black widow venom. Dr. Kemp, would you characterize the venom for us?”

  “The toxin is known as latrotoxin, a neurotoxin. It interferes with neural transmitters by stimulating their release. It also affects endocrine cells, stimulating the release of insulin, among other things. The toxin presents most frequently as muscle cramps and joint pain. As the blood stream circulates through the body, as more and more muscles and joints are affected.

  “The bite of a black widow is painful, but no
t often fatal in adults. Small children are more at risk. I don’t see why you would want to inject more acetylcholine, since the toxin stimulates its release. I imagine the amount of acetylcholine is a very small quantity. That would likely be the mechanism where sensory information is enhanced. I have no idea what the purpose of the venom is.”

  “That’s what our own researchers have said, Dr. Kemp,” the admiral admitted.

  “If that’s what they said, why am I here?” Jan accused.

  “Your very last sentence Dr. Kemp, before you asked your question. We have no idea either. We are grasping at straws. I feel sorry for the young man who has the gene -- he’s volunteered to be a guinea pig for the injections.”

  Admiral Zinder looked at Dr. Kemp for a moment and then said, “You seem preoccupied, Dr. Kemp.”

  She held up her hand in a gesture that appeared to ask the admiral to stop talking.

  “Occam’s razor,” she said finally.

  “What do you mean, Doctor?” Dr. Miller asked.

  “The venom doesn’t clear out of a person’s system for a week or ten days. Perhaps the simplest explanation is best. The acetylcholine is to trigger the initial response, and then the venom is what maintains the level. I imagine they have to experiment with dosages.” She laughed. “They could have a dosage based on the individual’s reaction to the injection -- controlling the duration of the effect.

  “Do we have a source of the venom?” Dr. Kemp inquired.

  Admiral Zinder nodded. “You understand that we have to be careful? There was some -- trepidation -- about bringing live, venomous insects aboard a starship, so we have some venom in a climate controlled storage chamber, and access to more within seventy-two hours if we need it. There are no live spiders aboard.”

  “You said venomous insects; a common misconception. They do belong to the same phylum, but spiders are a different order than insects,” Dr. Kemp explained.

  “No one wants venomous critters of any sort on a spaceship,” the admiral elucidated.

  Dr. Kemp laughed. “The preferred habitat of these spiders is dark corners; not only not exposed to sunlight, but any light at all. They are famous for hiding in crawl spaces and in cabinets that are not opened often. If any got loose on a spaceship, it would be like an HDD horror drama.”

  “As long as you can work with the venom,” the admiral said.

  Dr. Miller interjected, “Can we ask questions?”

  “Of course, Doctor. I am authorized to tell you all that I know.”

  Dr. Kemp laughed bitterly. “And what do you do for the Fleet?”

  “Before the war, I was a construction project manager. My last project was a habitat; it was destroyed before I arrived.”

  “I am still trying to wrap my head around telepathic computers, much less telepathic people. And you said the computers controlled people?”

  “That’s correct, Dr. Miller. We humans have an inner voice that only we can hear. Normally, the AIs spoke in people’s minds with a woman’s voice that sounded artificial. We later learned that the only AI that spoke with a male voice was the ship, Master’s Game, a privately owned vessel of Colinda Drake, whose firm built the majority of the Fleet’s AIs.

  “We don’t have much understanding of the AIs. It may or may not be significant that Master’s Game now speaks with Colinda Drake’s voice.

  “However, it is true that AIs can speak in any voice they wished -- even yours if they felt the need. It’s as if your conscience is speaking to you: ‘Do this’ or ‘Do that.’ There is information in your briefing papers about a number of incidents that disposed the leadership of the Fleet to wonder, and why Rhodes wasn’t dismissed out of hand.

  “The basic fact is we permitted ships’ AIs to read people’s minds, and that knowledge permitted them to control some, even most, but not all.

  “A telling incident that we didn’t know about until afterwards, I visited a particular officer in the last hours before the revolt. I handed her a message, telling her the Federation Council, after reviewing the records, had decided to award my son the Federation Star, years after his death. I told her what the message read, and she took it without comment.

  “Except, her recollection was that I’d delivered a letter from my son telling her of his deep affection for her. Please, you will meet her when we arrive at our destination. Grissom used her in an attempt to distract Cindy Rhodes. You should know that Rhodes is one of the greatest tacticians ever born. Commander Booth was foiled and her actions alerted Rhodes that there was a problem. As I said, she was the incident commander, and had command of the surviving ships in the vicinity of Earth. She deftly worked to resolve the situation, and in doing so, sealed our agreement with the AIs. More than a hundred Legion of Valor awards were given to the AIs that Grissom had destroyed, and as many to AI survivors.”

  “How did we ever beat the AI telepaths?” Dr. Miller asked.

  “The resolution wasn’t entirely Rhodes doing, but the AIs could read her mind. They trusted her; it didn’t hurt that they are rational sentients and recognized an existential threat. We are in the final stages of separating the Federation from the AIs; they are headed outward, away from where the aliens attacking us can be found.

  “There is quite a bit more. You will be escorted to your quarters and you should settle in. We’ll meet again over dinner, by then you’ll have some time to read the briefing papers. The papers are divided into sections with executive summaries and two levels of detail. You should be able to read all the summaries in an hour, and then the first level of detail in eight to ten hours. The rest of it -- you could spend weeks. You have forty-six hours until we rendezvous with the flagship, then we will make a determination of who will go further.”

  The two days seemed to blur past at light speed.

  When they reached the flagship paranoia seemed to rule. Admiral Booth informed them they would transfer to the flagship’s pinnace; no one who had any contact with the Union people were allowed to come in contact with a Federation ship. They would have to don pressure suits and make their untethered way across the kilometer separation that the ships would maintain. Then they were told that they were to go to the flagship.

  Admiral Booth was brisk. “I have a Fleet Master Pilot certificate. You both will be tethered to me.” He grinned faintly. “You have a treat at the other end.”

  Halfway across, Dr. Kemp had learned enough to open a private comm link to Admiral Booth. “Just for my personal information, Admiral, I’ve looked around. Not everywhere and not thoroughly, but how far are we from the closest star?”

  “Are you sure you really want to know? If you wig out, you will be useless to us.”

  “I will not wig out.”

  “This is what Rim Runners call the ‘Cold Dark.’ Two light years.”

  Jan Kemp laughed. “No wigging out. One light year, two light years, a hundred light years. A distance that the mind can’t imagine.”

  “I’ll be honest, Dr. Kemp. Rim Runners think Earth Born believe the Cold Dark starts outside Near Earth orbit.”

  “I do believe it functionally does. There is something almighty scary when you can’t see the ground.”

  “And it doesn’t bother you?”

  “Of course it does! I had the forethought to go pee before we embarked.”

  Admiral Zinder nodded. “Me too. I was born in Iowa. Another five minutes, Dr. Kemp.”

  “How do you want to deal with an active telepath?”

  “I have the advantage of you. I was one of the ‘wired’ officers. Practically no other flag officers were wired; I was aware that I was a guinea pig then, and I’m aware I’m one now. You wouldn’t be here now, nor Dr. Miller, if you had any really sensitive information. My specialty was building manufacturing plants on time and under budget -- on Earth.”

  “You seem to have adjusted to it.”

  “I said before, I lost my son on New Cairo. I pretty much lost my wife as well -- she blames me for his death. I have a seventeen-y
ear-old daughter who dreams of avenging her brother a thousand fold. An admiral’s kids have a ‘get into Maunalua free’ card. My daughter and my wife no longer talk. I do whatever I can do to help my daughter.”

  “So, you have nothing to prevent a telepath from peeping in your mind.”

  “As you should have read in the briefing papers the Union leadership was under the impression that their telepaths couldn’t read them. Except that was a lie. Now their telepaths tell us our scrambling of the computer links works against them, too.

  “We don’t have a clue; we thought so. Evidently the Union telepaths are very adept at concealing things. Moreover, the AIs lied to us and the Union telepaths lied to their bosses.

  “The AIs were willing to expend people in the defense of their deceptions; the Union captain has been arrested and turned over to the Federation. The Union doesn’t have the death penalty, but lucky us, we do.

  “The bottom line is that we have to rely on the honor of an eighteen-year-old young man to tell us the truth. It was bad enough contemplating that a computer could know your innermost thoughts. The thought that another person can do it is bound to cause hate and jealousy; a person would be tempted to do like the Union telepaths did: lie to cover the ability to read minds.”

  “And, we are here,” the admiral told the both of them. ”This isn’t a pinnace.”

  They came in and two people were waiting for them and deftly snagged them. Dr. Miller sighed. “I kept my eyes closed all the way.”

  The admiral laughed. “There’s a certificate for you regardless. Successfully completing a tethered EVA in the Cold Dark.”

  Dr. Miller said acidly, “Like I had a choice.”

  “On the Rim, Doctor, they only care about what you do -- not why,” the admiral replied.

  They were hustled inside, a Fleet commander waiting for them. She took one look at the admiral and said, “Admiral Zinder, my great honor.”

  “I do believe, Bethany, that I’m the one who is supposed to say that to you.”