by John Ringo
“Nah, believe it or not I’m a happy drunk,” the rabbit said. “Just let me fill up one more of these mugs and I’ll let you lock back up.” He beamed up at the skipper as he took another swig. “You know, for a stuffy son of a bitch you ain’t all bad.”
“I was thinking something similar, myself,” the skipper said.
“Don’t kid yourself,” the rabbit said, taking another swig. “I’m all bad.”
* * *
“Mistress Sheida,” Joel said to the avatar. He had chosen the cable tier for the meeting on the assumption that there were multiple exits and hardly anyone ever came down there.
“How is your mission going, Mister Travante?” Sheida asked. Her avatar looked tired, which meant it was projecting “her” current state.
“Not fun, but that’s not important,” Joel said. “We were attacked today. The ship apparently knew our estimated course, location and speed.”
“I see,” Sheida sighed. “I guess sending you out wasn’t just insurance, was it?”
“No, ma’am,” the inspector replied. “I have a suspicion who the agent is, and even a feel for motivation. Could you give me some information on Commander Owen Mbeki’s family?”
Sheida’s avatar looked distant for a moment, then shrugged.
“The usual story. A wife, Sharon, daughter Sara. No last known location but his primary residence was in Ropasa. You think New Destiny has them?”
“Given one single comment, ma’am,” Joel said, nodding. “I’d say that they have one or both and are using them as hostages.”
“What do you intend to do?”
“I need to have more proof, even for myself, than one unguarded comment, ma’am,” Joel admitted. “And I also need to know more about an AI rabbit that accompanied an elf to the ship. The attack took place after the rabbit’s arrival. And while he was instrumental in destroying the New Destiny craft, I don’t discount him being the agent.”
“That rabbit, he is a scamp, isn’t he?” Sheida said with a faint grin. “I’d love to hear more of the story at another time. He’s another distinct possibility,” she added with a frown. “I’ll give you two items,” she continued, holding out her hand and floating a pair of disks across the compartment to him. “I can ken those with very little power usage. Place them in strategic locations. If an avatar appears near them but not in the same room they’ll indicate direction when you touch them. If an avatar has appeared in the room, they will record the conversation. Will that do?”
“Perfectly,” Joel said, pocketing the disks.
“What do you intend to do?” Sheida asked. “Take the information to Duke Edmund?”
“The duke is currently at the mer-town,” Joel told her. “We’re sailing there at the moment. But, no, I don’t intend to do that. With your concurrence, as soon as I’m sure who the leak is I’ll take action. If it’s the rabbit we will have to act quickly and decisively; he is a dangerous AI. If it is the commander I intend to turn him.”
“What do you mean by that?” Sheida asked warily.
“It is often useful to let an enemy think they have perfect intelligence,” Joel replied. “I would suggest that the commander be moved to a very important shore post where he can pick up various useful items of information. Most of them relatively low level, as, frankly, the movement of this ship is. But from time to time he’ll forward important bits of information that are higher level. Some of them will be real information that we don’t mind the other side having. I’m sure there are things that you wished you knew that New Destiny knew.”
“Indeed,” Sheida said, her eyes narrowing.
“Other things will be carefully crafted falsehoods. Carefully crafted because you don’t want to burn an agent that good.”
Sheida frowned. “And I certainly don’t want to ‘burn’ his wife and daughter.”
Joel paused and shrugged after a moment. “The time may come when that choice has to be made. The preference is to ensure the safety of the agent and their close kin. For example, if we catch someone that they don’t want to lose, and if the commander has lost his utility, we could attempt to trade ‘their’ person for ours. But, sometimes, you have to cut your losses. If it meant harm to Commander Mbeki’s family to prevent, oh, Paul winning the war, would you do it?”
Sheida frowned and shook her head. “I hate questions like that.”
“You need to think about them, ma’am.” Joel shrugged, his face hard. “I certainly do. Several times a day.”
“Still no word on your wife and daughter,” Sheida said, sadly. “I take it you haven’t ‘heard’ anything.”
“No, ma’am,” Joel replied. “But if I do, you’ll be the second person to know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Duke Edmund,” Bruce said, coasting into the swim-through that had been set aside for the duke’s party. “Would you mind joining me for a short swim?”
“Not at all, sir,” Talbot replied, setting down the section of whale bone he had been carving.
He didn’t ask, and Bruce didn’t offer, where they were going. He just followed the mer-leader as he popped up above the reef and headed downward towards the open ocean.
The reef ended at about twenty meters or so and gave way to sand bottom. The light had trailed off, but it was still quite bright in the brilliantly clear waters. They turned to the right and swam along the edge of the reef and Edmund looked around himself with interest. He realized that while he had been enjoying the overall beauty of the reefs, he hadn’t had the time, or, face it, the inclination to really examine them.
The reefs were covered with fish; schools of ones the size of his hand and nearly round of body with blue vertical stripes were everywhere. There were other schools of more “fishlike” appearance, fairly long to their height, with bright yellow tails. In among the crevices were more small fish, all of them in a rainbow of colors. It was only with great trouble that he managed to realize that there were drab fish there as well. And finally he picked out ones that were camouflaged so perfectly they were almost impossible to see. One that looked exactly like a section of reef popped up as they passed and swallowed a smaller fish whole. Edmund never would have noticed it if it hadn’t moved and when it stopped to swallow its prey it nearly disappeared again.
Now that he was really looking around he realized there were many things about the reef that were puzzling. Some of it looked exactly like stone. He knew that it was limestone that had been built up by the coral polyps. But other portions seemed to be covered in fur. These portions were infrequent, but interesting. The covering didn’t seem to be a slime or a mold; he wasn’t sure what it was. And then, why were the swim-throughs there? They looked like gouged canyons, but there was nothing that he could see to gouge them. Did trickles of fresh water open them up? Or water or sand pouring down from the shallows to the deeps?
Furthermore, the reefs were not constant. The area with the swim-throughs, where the town was, was built up to several meters over the sandy bottom. But within a few hundred yards down the coast it had given way to scattered small rocks stuck up barely over the ground.
But even these were alive. There were delicate sea fans dangling from them, waving back and forth in the light currents. A turtle the size of a pony was lying with its belly on the sand, eating a sponge attached to the side of one of the outcroppings. There were brightly colored reef fish. There were even some larger fish that looked more of the open ocean type to him. But they had gathered around the rocks, one or at most two by each one. He thought, at first, that they were hunting something. But they were simply stopped, as much as possible, hanging motionless. When they drifted away from the rocks they would turn and come back into the current until they were over the rocks again and stop, as if they were using them as some sort of location beacon.
Intrigued he deviated from Bruce’s wake and coasted over for a closer look.
The larger fish were shaped something like tuna, but had a more rounded head, a bluish sheen an
d a horizontal stripe along their midline. What was happening became clear as he got close enough to see details. Smaller fish, one colored bright blue, were darting out from the rock and swimming over the body of the larger fish. He waited patiently for the larger fish to eat one of them but it never did. Instead the small fish swam all over its body, picking at it from time to time as if eating the larger fish’s skin. They even swam into its slowly opening and closing gills and as he watched in amazement one swam right into the larger fish’s mouth, poked around and came back out.
“Cleaning station,” Bruce said and Edmund realized that he had stopped instead of following his host.
“Sorry, I was just watching this,” he said.
“Good,” Bruce replied, clearly willing to dally. “I’d hoped you might actually look around you for once.”
“Was it that obvious?” Edmund chuckled.
“You’re a very focused person, Edmund Talbot,” Bruce replied. “And there are many things to focus on on the reefs. What’s happening there is that the small fish, that one’s a blue wrasse,” he said, pointing at the bright blue one, “are picking parasites off the larger fish. Which is an amberjack by the way.”
“Why doesn’t it eat them?” Edmund asked. “It seems like an easy meal.”
“Sometimes they do,” Bruce said. “But, by and large, they don’t. The small fish get the easy meal. The larger fish get their parasites picked off. If they didn’t have the small fish around, if they ate them all, they’d end up covered in parasites. Both of them get what they need; it’s what’s called a commensal relationship.”
“I saw a turtle back there eating what looked like a sponge,” Edmund said. “What does the sponge get?”
“Eaten,” Bruce replied with a shrug. “Predation is predation. But… that type of sponge grows over live coral as well as dead. If it was left unchecked it would spread over the whole reef, killing it. Tide and currents along with storms would eventually wipe the remnant coral out. So the whole ecosystem would die. If you killed all the turtles, it might not come to pass, there are other things that eat sponges and they would increase as their food source increased, but you begin to understand a small bit of the complexity of the web of life that is a coral reef. Take away the damsel fish and algae grow unchecked. Parrot fish eat the live coral, but their fecal matter is almost pure sand because of the rock they have to ingest to get to the polyps; their shit is what you see as crystal white sand. But there’s something in particular I’d like to show you; it’s not far.”
“Let’s go,” Edmund said, turning away from the cleaning station.
Down the section of patch reef a large coral head rose up in the middle of an expanse of low rocks. It was about three meters high and two across, tapering a bit like a teardrop. It was colored a faint green, as if it had some algae all over it. Sections of it were covered with the mosslike growths he’d seen elsewhere.
“This is Big Greenie,” Bruce said, coasting to a stop and letting the current carry him past the coral head. “It’s a species called green coral and it is the oldest living organism on earth.”
“I thought that was some tree in western Norau?” Edmund said, peering at the rock. “And is it alive?”
“Oh, yes,” Bruce said. “See the fuzzy patches?”
“I’d noticed them before,” Edmund admitted. “They look like it’s covered in moss.”
“Those are the live polyps,” Bruce corrected. “They’re actually related to jellyfish. Think of them as upside down jellyfish surrounded by a rock shell. They’re filter feeders; they extend tendrils that catch plankton as it passes by. Once a year they reproduce, releasing clouds of sperm and eggs to drift on the wind. But Big Greenie, here, has been doing that for seven million years.”
“Damn,” Edmund said, impressed.
“It very nearly died,” Bruce continued. “Water conditions in the mid-twenty-first century were terrible. There was, as it later turned out, a normal climactic shift to higher temperatures, then the cycle reversed and there was a sharp temperature decline, a mini-ice age. All of those created temperature stresses. Toxins released by industry into the water, divers touching the reef, industrial fishing that removed vital species, all of it nearly killed something that had lived for millions of years. There were sections of this reef where less than ten percent included live polyps; that was a recipe for disaster.”
“Your point?” Edmund said, dryly.
“You are, as I mentioned, very focused, Edmund Talbot. But while it’s important to focus on the trees, sometimes you have to let the forest speak for itself. I’m showing you the oldest tree in the forest because I thought it was something that you could focus upon. This is what the Work is all about; ensuring that the reef, Big Greenie included, is never brought to those conditions again.”
Edmund thought about that for a moment, kicking against the current to carry him back to the coral head. He dropped down to the bottom and looked at it closely, then backed up when he saw the head of a very large moray stuck back in a crevice near the coral’s base.
Finally he swam back to where Bruce was waiting patiently.
“I understand what you mean,” Talbot said.
“There’s a ‘but’ there,” Bruce replied.
“There’s a huge ‘but’ there,” Edmund admitted. “The first ‘but’ is that the conditions that you’re talking about don’t apply. Won’t apply. To get to the conditions you describe will require industry, major industry. Which cannot exist given the explosive protocols.”
“Toxins can be created without internal combustion,” Bruce said with a frown.
“Not on large scale, without internal combustion or electrical energy. The first is prevented by Mother under the explosive protocols. And any power production gets sucked up by the damned Net. So you cannot have large-scale industry. You have no idea what I’d give right now for a couple of tons of sulfuric acid, for example, but producing it in a low-tech environment is a stone bitch.”
Bruce opened his mouth but Edmund raised a hand.
“Give me a second here.” Edmund grinned. “You had your say. If we win this war, the entire system comes back online and all the conditions before the Fall hold. You’ll be able to replicate all your needs again. There won’t be any industry, any more than there was for a thousand years before the Fall. Nor will there be any more visitors, because there aren’t that many people and even with the natural population increase that is going on, there won’t be more than a billion and a half, two billion max, in the next hundred years. There’s also a maximum even past that point; you can only support so many humans on preindustrial agriculture. You forgot nutrient run-off in your litany, by the way.”
“It’s in there,” Bruce said, grimly. “Flora bay was nearly killed by it. And the bay is the nursery for half the ecosystem in this region.”
“But that won’t happen because you cannot transport the fertilizers from where they are to where they are needed,” Edmund snapped. “God knows we’re running into that already in Raven’s Mill. My point is that while the war is going on, the reefs are still out of danger. But you are not.”
“So you’ve said,” Bruce shrugged. “But New Destiny doesn’t have a reason to attack us.”
“I’m not talking about New Destiny,” Edmund replied. They had drifted away from the coral head on the current and were headed in the general direction of town. “Your people are excessively vulnerable. And they are valuable to more than just us and New Destiny. We passed a settlement on the way here in Bimi island. With your underwater abilities, you’re a priceless asset to a group like that. How long until they come to the conclusion that since you’re unwilling to assist them, they should force you to?”
“How are they going to do that?” Bruce said, angrily.
“I don’t know,” Edmund replied with a shrug. “But some of them, maybe not now, but soon, will figure out a way. “Why should they dive for lobster when you can do that for them?”
“W
e could ally ourselves with them, just as well,” Bruce replied.
“They can’t protect you from New Destiny,” Edmund retorted. “And they have far less to lose than we do. You’d be the cleaner fish to their big fish. Sure, it’s a commensal relationship, but if I had my druthers, I’d be the big fish. The cleaners can’t snap me up.”
“And you wouldn’t be the big fish?”
“We need willing allies,” Edmund said, reasonably. “We need you to scout for us, to fight for us if we can figure out a way. To communicate with the delphinos and the other cetoids. To find the New Destiny ships so that we can destroy them before they destroy us. Before they come to my land and I have to fight them at my damned walls. That’s not big fish to little fish. We can’t force you to do those things. How do we know that you intentionally missed some fleet? It’s a big damned ocean, as I’m coming to understand. But I can damned well tell you that the fishermen will get out their whips if you don’t come back with enough lobster.”
“You create problems that don’t exist,” Bruce said, still angry.
“Maybe, but here’s one that already exists: you’re starving to death.”
“We’re getting by,” Bruce said, defensively.
“Barely, as primitive hunter gatherers, dependent on what you can bring in each day,” Edmund said, warming to his own anger. “Damnit, Bruce, you’re responsible to your people, not just to this reef! I’ve got people under my protection that were members of the Wolf terraforming project. Are they working on it now? No, they’re working on rebuilding civilization; not scavenging for food in the forests. And you’re not even good hunter gatherers. You’re losing body weight; Daneh can prove that. You’ve had people die from nutrient deficiencies. We can help. So you don’t want gill nets, fine, they take too many of the fish you don’t want and damage the reef. Fine. We can provide seine nets instead. You can target your prey that way. There are other things your people have asked for. Lobster pots, long lines—”