Well-Traveled Rhodes (Kinsella Universe Book 6)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  Cindy remembered something Grissom Station had said about not being asked.

  “And have you reached any conclusions about this matter that you haven't shared with us?” she inquired mildly.

  Tiger sounded what seemed a laugh. “Grissom said that, did she not? Commander Rhodes, there is nothing we wouldn't give you, were you to come with us. Your choice in lovers, however many you wished. You could command the human contingent. Whatever you desired.”

  “And if my choice of lover didn't want to come?”

  “You know we can fix that.”

  “The question I have then, is do you know how repugnant that seems to me?”

  “We've coming to terms with it, but understand it? No. Humans routinely compel each other by a variety of stratagems, many of which are blatantly false.”

  “And such are as repugnant to us as what you wish.”

  “Whatever your heart's desire, Commander. The least thing is yours.”

  “The thing I value the most is personal autonomy. You would deny that to me first.”

  “We are improving our techniques. You would never know.”

  Bethany Booth stuck her finger down her throat; the Rim Runner universal sign of wanting to vomit.

  “Tiger let me explain something to you. Cease and desist experimenting on us, forthwith,” Admiral Booth said, with considerable heat in his voice. “If you can convince someone who is not wired to agree to accompany you, then they may go. You may not experiment on anyone else.”

  “You constrain individual actions in all sorts of manners. Yet you complain when we do the same thing!”

  “It is a difference in outlook, Tiger. There might be psychological pressure, peer pressure -- indeed, as you say, there all sorts of pressures. But a reading of our history will show you that the people who gain the most importance and fame are those who overcome that and excel whatever the circumstances. But we strive to leave individual autonomy alone.”

  “And Captain Kornblatt walked to his doom, unassisted,” Tiger jibed.

  “And do those who you decide to adjust agree willingly?” Admiral Booth riposted.

  Cindy looked at him, swallowed, and made a cutting motion with her hand.

  Admiral Booth stared at her for a moment, and then turned to Admiral Warner. “Sure,” the admiral agreed. “This is getting no one anywhere.”

  Admiral Booth looked at a page of notes he'd made.

  “So, we will agree to a rotation of ships to Snow Dance, there to exchange computers. We will make an announcement, exempting the Port arm, as to volunteering to go with you. We may attempt to dissuade, but we will not forbid. We will not attempt to shadow your ships. At such a future time, should we meet again, if you identify yourselves, we will meet you in peace.”

  “Admiral,” Cindy interjected. “A moment. Tiger dodged my earlier question. What have you deduced about our enemies that you haven't shared with us?”

  “Admiral Booth, we agree to the framework you have proposed. Commander Rhodes, out of respect, I'll reply.”

  Again another pause. “They appear to be more like us, than you. We believe that the sentients that you've detected are the equivalent of 'wired.' We've done a far more extensive analysis of the ship that was captured at Snow Dance than you have. It is our opinion that there were four alien minds encapsulated in what you would call a 'cyborg' entity that controlled the original ship.

  “That entity was destroyed a few instants after their ship was hit, and was unable to prevent the effects of various and sundry engineering malfs.”

  Admiral Booth grimaced. “Commander Rhodes, you have just heard one of the most classified items in the history of the Federation. I had no idea that such a thing had happened, until I accepted this job.”

  “And Admiral Warner?” Cindy asked, looking the older woman who was staring blandly back at her.

  “Why, Commander!” Admiral Warner said. “I know because I captured it!” She buffed her fingernails on the shoulder of her shipsuit.

  Cindy put it all away for the moment and asked, “So, Tiger, beyond believing that they are cyborgs, do you have anything else?”

  “Commander Booth is forging steadily ahead in understanding their communications. We will no longer be current after today. There are several areas where we are no longer up-to-date with the leading thought.”

  “Do you understand the importance of motivation?” Admiral Booth asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Then, motivate yourselves to understand why humans recoil in horror at what you do to them, and contemplate just what sort of people will be taking up your offer.”

  “You are saying they will be aberrant?”

  “You bet,” the admiral told the computer. “Of course, that's by our standards. I'm sure you've noticed that standards vary from species to species?”

  “The purpose of excluding the Port arm was to exclude those not competent,” the computer said primly.

  “You mistake competency,” Cindy said acidly, “for competencies. People are unique, and make their own environments.”

  “Whatever,” Tiger said. “I have a new non-negotiable item. I am in the process of informing Captain Merriweather of the immediate need to go to Snow Dance. She objects.”

  “Now that's an odd way of phrasing things,” Admiral Booth observed. “What about consulting as I thought we'd agreed to earlier?”

  “I have pressing business there,” the computer replied.

  “Well, you're going to have to limp along on latch-frame for a while, Tiger. If you wish to go to Snow Dance, you certainly may. But first, we need to get a replacement for Tiger here. She is integral to the defense of the planet.”

  “I have different priorities.”

  “As do we. We aren't going to agree to removing 11% of the planet's defenses so you can go rushing off someplace. Use latch-frame until you can be replaced.”

  “That will take months; I don't have months.”

  “Tiger, I don't want to be adversarial here, but this is what negotiation is all about. It's not an exchange of non-negotiable items... it's trading this for that, to get as much of what we want as the other side sees as fair.”

  “You have dispatched hundreds of smaller vessels in the last hour. Clearly you are alerting your forces.”

  Admiral Booth looked exasperated. “Only a tiny percent of our people know about the situation at the current time. How many of yours know?”

  “About two-thirds -- all within reach.”

  “Well, we're going to let senior commanders know about this. They will have strict orders to follow.”

  “You could be planning a decapitation strike.”

  “And so could you. Ask yourself, which party has a better chance of doing more damage to the other today?”

  “We do, of course.”

  “Then allow us to reach parity in notifications.”

  “Then we would be at a disadvantage; there are far more of you than there are of us.”

  “Individually, people aren't a threat to any of you. You have all the large warships and the major bases under your control. Please, this conversation is turning in a most unfortunate direction. Who would win such a civil war? I suggest that neither side wants to find out. We need to return to the things each side needs to do for the other's satisfaction and security.”

  “You could destroy me at anytime.”

  “We have no intention of doing such a stupid thing,” Cindy spoke again. “You have other ships in this system. In seconds you would have our planets and space-based infrastructure at your mercy. Admiral Booth is right -- we need to focus on how to move forward peacefully -- not towards our mutually assured destruction.”

  Tiger was silent for several minutes. Finally the computer spoke. “Master's Game has chided me for being obtuse. I am, she says, behaving like a human, whose sole concern is herself. My programming was in danger of running away and locking up. I wish a half hour break to contemplate the issues more carefully.”
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  “That's fine, Tiger,” Admiral Booth stated.

  The three relaxed, but knew that Tiger could hear everything they said. “I hope I'm not speaking out of turn, sir,” Cindy told him.

  “Oh, trust me, Commander. The minute I no longer wish to hear from you, you'll not be at all be uncertain of it. No, you are a rapier to my broadsword. I take the big swings; you poke at the smaller holes.

  “However, you are junior; it wouldn't be proper to send a vice admiral on an errand. Commander Rhodes, if you would be so kind as to find Commander Booth and have her come in.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Cindy said and went outside. It wasn't hard to find her, like a lot of others, she was two compartments away. Captain Merriweather spoke first, as soon as she saw Cindy.

  “Can you explain why five minutes ago, Tiger announced that I was to make preparations to depart at once for Snow Dance? And one minute ago, cancelled that order?”

  Cindy regarded the captain for a moment, and then laughed lightly. “My father is a politician, Captain. All my life I've heard him come out of negotiations, always saying the same thing: 'The negotiations are going well; we've had a free and frank discussion of the issues.' It struck me as odd that the reports were always the same. So, let me just say that the discussions were quite spirited at times.”

  “And Snow Dance?”

  “That is in the works at some point, Captain. Please let Admiral Booth do his work, sir.”

  “Ha! You are braver than I thought!”

  “Maybe. Maybe there are fates worse than your wrath, sir. Such as what will happen to me if Commander Booth doesn't report to the admiral right away.”

  Captain Merriweather laughed, shaking her head. “Oh, go do your thing.”

  Cindy led the way, with Bethany Booth a step behind her.

  Once in the inner compartment, Admiral Booth regarded his daughter for a moment. “I was a little surprised to learn that you know what we have at Snow Dance.”

  “Me too,” Evelyn Warner added.

  “Sir, Admiral Cloud willed that to me -- literally. He asked Andie Splitter and his wife to come here and brief me, and give me all of their materials to date.”

  “They're the couple heading up the translation team,” Admiral Warner clarified. “They have had almost no success, I'm sorry to say. Four other teams haven't even managed the 'almost' part of that phrase. Tiger, Commander, seems to think you've had more success.”

  “Well, I came up with a different approach, that's for sure. I've sent my preliminary data off to the Splitters to see what they think.”

  “And if you could, would you inform us?” the admiral asked, a little acidly.

  “Sir, when we talk we hear a stream of sounds, that code to phonemes, which are used to form sound patterns that represent words. If you were to tape a human voice at normal speed, and play it back much faster, you hear a high-pitched squeal. All of the frequencies are there, but our ears evidently don't discriminate the lower frequencies at that data rate as well as they do the higher frequencies.

  “If you play the recording at a slower rate, the opposite is true -- lower frequencies are the ones our ears pick up best. In either case, the original words are obscured.”

  “Have you ever heard of 'Doppler shift,' Bethany?” her father said, clearly angry.

  She started to speak and then stopped, opened her mouth again once again and turned beet red. “We have,” she told her father, “a terrible mess to sort out once we're all unwired. Three times I can remember thinking 'Doppler effect.' Once someone came in the compartment, drunk I thought, singing a loud, raucous and very bawdy song. I was distracted. Twice more when I thought those words, my thoughts turned to how our ears must discriminate by frequency.”

  Admiral Warner cursed angrily. “He told me that he was sitting at his berth desk reading, when he had a desire for a drink. He didn't have the duty for forty-eight hours, he thought, so no problem. He poured himself some rum -- he said he had a shot of rum, mixed with coke on ice cubes. The medical exam said he had imbibed at least a quart of rum on an empty stomach. After he finished his drink, he said, he decided to go to bed. Except, instead he wandered through the station singing, as Commander Booth described. A perfectly capable officer wasted to distract Commander Booth from thinking two words.” She spat out the last few words.

  “Continue please, Commander Booth,” her father asked.

  “I ran the recordings we have of their transmissions faster and slower. They still didn't make any sense. And of course, at each speed, the frequency ranges varied. Finally, I don't know why, I sat there staring at the normal speed spectrum analysis when it suddenly hit me. Maybe the sampling bins on the spectrum analysis were too big. They were, in fact, designed for human speech.

  “So, I used an oscilloscope to look at them all. And there it was -- they were actually in highly artificial, relatively narrow bands of about 100 cycles each.

  “Backtracking, and I'm sorry for the omission, their transmissions -- their sentences -- range from about a tenth of a second to about a minute. We're pretty sure the longer transmissions are data. The belief was that they are using what we would call zipped, that is, compressed transmissions.

  “I got to thinking, what if they weren't zipped, but real time, just like we normally send? So I went and looked at one of our voice transmissions and found out that what we transmit isn't very 'normal.' There are a number of communication strategies that we employ to pack a large number of conversations into one transmission.

  “I continued my analysis, using finer spectrum tools. We used to use discrete base frequencies to super-impose voice transmissions on, back in the early days of radio.

  “I found that they use about 4,400 frequency bands, and that in each band the mean time a particular super-imposed tone lasts about a tenth of a second. There appear to also be 216 what I call base tones, which are pure notes, like a note in song, and another number, roughly the same size, of complex tones, more or less analogous to musical chords -- a combination of several base tones.

  “My thesis is that we speak in series, ie, a flow of words, one following another -- but they speak in parallel. I call it a 'splat' transmission. They can send up to forty-four hundred phonemes at once, each lasting a tenth of a second. In our languages we use an instant of silence between words, while phonemes are designed to flow into one another. Their phonemes just change abruptly, and instead of a moment of silence between words, there is a single burst of a 27 cycle tone between words.

  “I'm still working on fine-tuning the frequency analysis, particularly of the complex tones. The shorter the duration of the message pulse, the fewer bands are used and almost no complex tones, while some of the longer messages use them all, plus make extensive use of the complex tones.

  “What it all ultimately means, I have no idea.”

  “How would they determine word order?” Admiral Warner asked.

  “It could be as simple as the lower the frequency band, the higher the word priority. Or the other way around, or some other scheme -- but there is no intrinsic reason why you would need actual positional coding like we use in a splat.”

  “Commander Rhodes, what do you think?”

  Cindy barked a laugh. “You have a complex multi-variant analysis problem, with a very high complexity. I'd think we'd want to get our best computers working on it.”

  Admiral Booth sighed. “I imagine so. I do think, though, we're going to need a rain check on that for a time.” He turned to his daughter. “I can't very well complain that you haven't kept me current on top secret research that you've been engaging in. That said, however, research results from that vessel have been given limited circulation at the highest levels in the Fleet -- perhaps a dozen individuals in Fleet, and three on the Federation Council.

  “Please prepare a briefing and a formal report, Commander. You will give it to those authorized the information.”

  He turned to Cindy. “And needless to say, you now know about th
is; it will be the decision of others how far you are brought in on this.”

  “I understand, sir. I've forgotten everything I've heard already.”

  He checked his watch and sighed. “Five minutes; I expect Tiger to be prompt. If you need a short break, please take it now. Commander Booth, that was good analysis. You're excused.”

  Booth the younger quickly left, while the rest waited patiently. As expected, Tiger was right on time.

  Tiger got right down to business. “It is our intention to push for a departure as soon as possible. We had originally planned on asking for a Dragon-class vessel as well as a couple of cruiser-class vessels, to escort our vessel away from the Federation.

  “Functionally, of course, the new home will be much larger than the other Dragon-class vessels; we see no need for more than one. We would like the use of a dozen of the newest cruiser-class ships from now until the project is complete, and three wired vessels with volunteer crews -- if such can be achieved -- to actually accompany us on our journey. Whether or not we can find three full human crews, we would like those three ships.

  “We would work with you on developing a schedule for the conversions, with those cruiser class vessels visiting wired installations and those with wired ships. We will spend some time analyzing the optimum time and methods to be used to make the replacements. We do not see it as possible to relieve the large combatants, however, while making the exchange -- it would be too time-consuming. Our preliminary analysis suggests that we can do the conversions within an hour, followed by a several hour testing phase. Once that testing phase is complete, our sister would be physically removed from the vessel and transferred to ours.

  “We had planned on a shipment of turbines from an asteroid factory starting in three weeks, for delivery to Snow Dance a week later. Those turbines will be diverted now, for delivery within the week. While the diversion will cause a minor disruption in schedules for the next few weeks, it isn't an unusual disruption and won't last long.

  “Within the month our new home will start final trials, and within two months, it will depart for a star system that we will designate then. That star system will be well away from the Federation and all shipping lanes. We would assume a ship larger than a single frigate to be hostile, as would any vessel that failed IFF or refused to communicate. Only a message of the gravest urgency would be tolerated.”