“They don’t need to know what’s going on.” Tomlinson felt a slight wave of annoyance that he would resist the suggestion.
The older man cleared his throat and tilted his head down to look over the top of his glasses, like a professor sizing up a student. “Most certainly we could keep the populace in the dark, but I think it would be infinitely more effective to have the power of the people push us forward into a more aggressive posture. We need to make people beg for protection rather than forcing them to accept protection.”
“How do you propose we make that happen?”
“Your plan to send the icebarges after her will work to that end, regardless of the outcome,” Lassiter said.
“I don’t follow.” Derek pulled his feet down and frowned.
“If the ships you are pressing into service take the Armstrong down, we’re done-and-out in one round, with no mess at all. If, on the other hand they are unsuccessful, it allows us to tilt the opinion of the Chancellery in a more proactive direction. Should they lose the firefight, we can play the Armstrong as the aggressor and gain sympathy across the Union, and with the Executive Council.”
“She’s already the enemy,” Tomlinson said.
Lassiter shook his head. “Even though the general populace understands she may have done evil things, right now they perceive her as the underdog. Human nature will give someone in that position the benefit of the doubt. But if she takes the monstrously huge and powerful Armstrong and hammers a fleet of icebarges to death, she becomes a mass murderer. And more importantly a mass murderer of the working-folk who were crewmen on those ships.
“This means that if we lose, we have an unprecedented opportunity to shift public opinion. No matter what we must do to stop her, we become the champions fighting the righteous battle,” he said, smiling.
“Then when we bring in our ships to chase her down, no one will do anything but cheer,” Derek said, nodding.
“There is also this to consider,” he said. “If she wins, she won’t risk remaining where the battle occurs. She will hit and then run, before we can send another wave after her.”
“What’s the advantage in that?”
“It will force her further into the deep-system, beyond where there will be witnesses. We certainly don’t want to show the level of our preparations, even if we have public favor. That populist support pendulum could swing back against us if we lose our perceived position and appear too aggressive.”
“I understand,” Tomlinson said. He hated that it made perfect sense, even if it didn’t satisfy his personal need for revenge.
“Now, never call me from her office again,” Lassiter said, slapping his hand down and disconnecting the com, without giving the chancellor a chance to reply.
“How fragging rude,” he muttered. He needs to remember who’s in charge here.
Jakob Waltz: Orbiting L-4 Prime:
“Hello, Dr. Whitewind. My name is Anju. I’m your doctor.” His eyes fluttered and he pulled against the restraints, shaking his head. The beeping of his heart monitor ticked up.
He shook his head again and opened one eye. “Tacra Un Anju trana che?”
“He’s confused,” Anju said, glancing over her shoulder at Jeph. “The Traumatic Stress Deformation could make it hard for him to think in words. It might take him some time to start speaking normally.”
“What’s he saying?” the captain asked.
The doctor shook her head. “I have no idea.”
“Ian ahn … Hector?” His eyes scanned the room frantically.
“You’re on the Jakob Waltz,” the captain said, floating up behind Anju. “I am Jephora Cochrane, the captain.”
“Jakob Waltz trana Hector?” he asked, jerking against the strap that held him to the bed. His eyes went wide. “Ian ahn Hector?”
“He’s panicking,” the doctor said, glancing at the display above the bed. His heart rate was surging higher and his adrenal levels were climbing.
“Ian, you have to calm down,” Anju said. “You will hurt yourself.”
“Nu ahn che. Nu trana Un,” he said, flinging himself toward the doctor and pulling hard against his restraints.
She jerked back, making sure she was out of head butting range, and keyed a mild sedative into his bloodstream. He gasped and stiffened slowly back against the bed.
“Is that an old dialect?” Jeph asked, easing back toward the door and out of range in case he started thrashing again.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Dutch, do you have language files from Earth? Ones he might speak?” the captain asked.
“I have several hundred, but nothing correlates,” the computer said. “It does, however, resemble the sounds recorded by Dr. Cross on the first landing party. There were more of them on the recovered thinpad audio files.”
“Can you decipher it?”
“Without a reference language to determine vocabulary definitions, it is challenging,” it said. “Many ancient Earth languages remained unintelligible until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and its table of comparative relationships between known languages. Without this reference I am only able to associate sounds to the symbols in the visual records, but I have no relative meanings to assign.”
Ian shook his head hard from side to side, then turned his face toward Anju. His eyes focused on her. “Nu che Un. Doctor che Un. Doctor da-ahn Un?” He raised his eyebrows in an exaggeration of a questioning expression.
“That’s encouraging,” Anju said. “It’s like he wants us to understand him.”
“Ian, ahn nu,” he said, smiling faintly and nodding. “Jakob Waltz da-ahn Hector? Jakob Waltz un Hector.”
“He’s fighting the drugs,” the doctor said, glancing up at the readouts again above the bed.
“Jephora, un Ian,” he said. “Jephora ahn … captain.”
“Do you understand me?” Jeph asked.
He nodded and moved his mouth, like he was trying to shape it into new sounds. “Yes.” He nodded again. “Ian da-ahn Un. Che?”
“The anti-seizure meds I gave him will take time to wear off,” she said. “We need to let him rest.”
The captain nodded, smiling and reaching out to touch Ian’s arm. “I’d like to say we’re here to rescue you, but until we can figure out what’s got us trapped, we’re as stuck as you were.”
“Un Shan Takhu cata nu. Tacra Un ahn ekahta shada.” Ian said, smiling expectantly.
Jeph shook his head. “Sorry?”
He nodded, closing his eyes and letting out a slow sigh. “Ian Un ekahta cata nu.”
Jeph nodded to Seva to resume her guard post as he pushed off toward the door. “Dutch, record everything Ian says when he’s awake. If he wants us to understand him, maybe he’ll help you build that Rosetta thing you’re talking about.”
Borehole Site: Surface of L-4 Prime:
A TICS unit created a steam jet that would push an iceberg like a simple reaction mass engine by sealing itself to the ice and then extending a set of radiators against the surface. A venturi ran through the center of the unit and allowed control of the steam so they could throttle and steer the engine. It was a simple device, other than the radioactive pile of plutonium that created the heat.
Modifying one of these to bore a tunnel, and keep correct orientation, as it melted down through the ice, was more challenging than turning the same device into a warhead. Placing it precisely where it needed to be to make the descent, was worse.
Seva and Chei had been struggling for over an hour, and both were sweating as they muscled the TICS into place on the top of the upthrust ridge. They hoped they were above the structure they’d dubbed The Tower.
“I feel awfully exposed out here,” Chei said, glancing up toward the sun. He knew the Jakob Waltz was there, but he couldn’t see the ship in the glare a few degrees to the south of the ecliptic. They’d stopped their orbit again and were maintaining station on thrusters, while the landing party was on the surface.
“Nojo,
” Seva said.
After dropping them and helping to set up a piton ring to keep them anchored while they worked, Kiro had lifted off the surface a hundred meters in the pod to keep an eye on the horizon. They weren’t expecting trouble, but they’d decided to be prudent and play it safe. “There’s nothing for klicks,” he said.
“I know that,” Chei said, huffing as he shoved the reactor over a hard ledge and onto the leveling ring. In the light gravity, the TICS weighed almost nothing, but was still massive. Moving it took traction and force. It also took leverage and luck to stop from overshooting the position where they wanted it to settle. He and Seva were the only earthborn mesomorphs on the crew, so they always got the job of placing the TICS. In a normal environment, it took concentration not to make a mistake, but nothing here seemed normal now that they knew something was under the ice.
“Do we have an estimated time of completion yet?” the captain asked, his voice sounding tight.
“Another ten minutes,” Chei said. “We’re almost in position and should have the link established in a few.”
“Copy,” he said. “You need to get a move on.”
“Whyfor?” Seva asked. She grunted, throwing her shoulder against the TICS and, bracing against the ring, used brute force to drop it into place.
“There’s some seismic activity near your position,” Alyx said, jumping on the com. “The interferometers are saying the hum in the ice is changing.”
“Changing how?” Chei asked.
“Both frequency and amplitude. The volume has almost doubled in the last twenty minutes,” she said.
Chei and Seva froze in place to listen. It was impossible to hear in a vacuum, but they both knew it was possible to feel sounds through the ground if they were loud enough, or near enough. “We’re not feeling anything down here,” he said.
“You’ve got a deposit of softer ice between you and the Hector,” she said. “It will damp the vibrations at your location.”
“So it’s coming from the Hector?” He glanced up and saw Kiro pivot the shuttlepod to look toward the crashed ship. At eight kilometers, it was over the horizon from their position, but he’d be close to seeing it from where he was.
“Might be,” Alyx said, “and might be a coincidence.”
“Maybe it’s a welcoming party looking to kick our asses too,” Seva said. Her voice betrayed that she wasn’t entirely joking.
“Negative,” the captain said. “It sounds natural to Danel, but focus on getting it done, and get back here.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Jakob Waltz: Orbiting L-4 Prime:
It was a long week. With nothing more interesting than watching the TICS inch its way down through the ice, everyone was grinding away in their own form of boredom hell. Danel was helping monitor the borehole project, but now that they were most of the way down and the sides hadn’t caved in, he had nothing to do. Until they reached the barrier wall, it was all tech and no science.
The last day down was excruciatingly slow. Since they reduced the heat on the radiators, the progress they’d been measuring in centimeters per hour, was now down to millimeters per hour.
Jeph was right. They didn’t want to hit whatever it was hard enough to stir up the hornets inside. Dropping a nuclear furnace into their secret base would be enough to piss someone off.
Caution trumped speed and Danel’s patience had exceeded its psychological limit. It would be several hours before they made contact, so he wandered down to the MedBay for a change of scenery and some conversation that didn’t revolve around trying to guess what they would do next. Anju was sitting at her console staring at an optic image of Ian Whitewind eating lunch.
This doesn’t look much more interesting than upstairs.
“The boss told me he’s got some kind of brain damage,” Danel said, startling her out of her concentration. “What happened to him?”
“I don’t know,” she said, swinging around to face him. “He’s got a profound deformation in his synapses. Other than a physical trauma to the head I don’t know what else could have caused it.”
“He’s got no other signs of injury?” Danel asked, pulling himself into a seat across from her.
“None,” she said. “Not even hairline fractures of his skull. I mean he’s broken his nose more times than I can count, but otherwise there’s no sign of damage. It’s only his brain.”
“And somehow this injury resulted in an alien language?” Danel asked.
“Exactly.” She grinned. “But don’t say that to the boss.”
“What?”
“Nevermind,” she said, shaking her head.
“Have you made any progress in tackling what he’s saying? It’s not gibberese?”
“No. I think it’s a real language. Dutch and I have been trying to create a database of words and symbols. Fortunately, he understands about half of what we say to him, so that helps.”
“He can understand us, but he can’t speak?”
“He’s recovered a few words in our language,” Anju said. “His comprehension of what we say is probably because auditory speech processes through the parietal lobe, but the trauma that hardwired his Broca Region to another portion of his brain doesn’t appear to affect that. It’s strange, but when he uses this new language, the part of the brain that would become active in high level logic processing goes into overdrive.”
“Logical processing? Like the thinking you’d use in math?
“That’s right,” she said. “The entire prefrontal cortex fires and then the Broca Region lights up as he vocalizes.”
“Maybe he’s speaking mathematics,” Danel offered. “Could be he’s making relational associations, like A equals B, or B is greater than C.”
“That is an interesting idea Dr. Cross,” Dutch said, joining the conversation. “It might explain the triads. He generally uses clusters of three word elements, even though he strings them together into longer structures.”
“You’re saying that rather than having verb forms, there might be relational words connecting nouns.” Anju grabbed her thinpad and looked at some notes she had on the open screen. She scrunched her eyes closed and scratched behind her ear as she concentrated. “The syntax didn’t make sense, but your suggestion would make it this, with respect to, this, and, this, with respect to, that.”
“There might also be modifiers applied to the base form that would explain the word elements,” Dutch said. “Frequent instances of the da element appearing connected to both a relational ahn and a noun che.” It paused for several seconds before adding, “When I analyze the data, there are 17,600 symbols on the thinpads and the Hector’s AI. Thus far, he has identified 2560 noun-form words and 110 potential relational words. That leaves us forty-six unidentified words that have neither relational nor physical definitions.”
“He’s been very helpful in trying to demonstrate words,” she said. “It’s challenging sometimes because he can’t find anything to refer to in his environment. There are words he is using that appear to be abstract and not physical in any form. They may not be complex, but we can’t decipher a meaning from his gesticulating.
“Not complex?”
“Yah, explain time or gravity without words or pictures,” she said. “They aren’t complex, but if you didn’t have either of those words and no language references to build on, how would you explain either of them?”
“Good point.”
“There’s one particular phrase he keeps repeating,” she said. “It seems to be very important to him that we understand, because his biometrics go sidewise every time he says it.”
“Ekahta ahn shada-Tacra-Un,” Dutch said. “In this case, shada-Tacra-Un is delivered like a single word and would therefore fit the triad pattern.”
“Do you know what any of the words mean?” Danel asked.
“Tacra Un is probably L-4 Prime,” she said. “He’s pointed at an image of it several times as he says that word.”
“If we assume your h
ypothesis of relational syntax is correct, then it is likely that ahn is a word for equivalence.” Dutch said.
“That gives us, ‘something’ is the same as ‘something’ down there,” Danel said. “So what are the gestures he’s using to demonstrate the two noun words in that sentence?”
“For the first one he smacks his hand on the table and for the second one he touches his lips,” Anju said.
“Would it help if I talked to him?”
“Couldn’t hurt,” Anju said, “and I’m sure he’d appreciate a new face.”
Challenger: Approaching Saturn:
“Captain Mei, we’ve got an incoming message from an ice bucket near Hyperion Station.” The com officer twisted in his PSE and looked over at the command riser where the captain sat enduring the 1.5-g deceleration burn. The engines rumbled with bone numbing intensity and voices carried only via comlink.
“Put it through,” she said.
“It’s audio only. We’re about nine seconds in delay, so it’s one way,” he said, toggling the message through to her comlink.
“Multicruiser Challenger. This is Commander Ronen Ashwell of the Ice Freighter Roswell. We’re tracking you and the Galen entering the system on approach to Mimas Research Station. Be advised that DoCartel ships on station at that location are equipped with weapon systems and planning to use force to prevent you from completing your mission.
“We’ve received instructions from Admiral Nakamiru to rendezvous with you in the vicinity of Hyperion and to transfer reaction mass as needed. We have three other ice freighters with us and should have sufficient stock to get you tanked and on your way.
“Please confirm receipt of the coordinates and acknowledge your intent to rendezvous. Roswell out.”
“Com, did we receive the coordinates?”
“Yes sir,” he said. “I put them through to helm to confirm.”
“Very good. Helm, show me the rendezvous location,” she said.
A diagram of the Saturn system appeared on the main display. Their current location and heading showed as an arcing line toward Mimas. The coordinates indicated a location just off their heading, but much closer to their current position.
Shan Takhu Legacy Box Set - With an Extra Bonus Story Page 28