Neffy smiled. “Thank you, Commander. That should do nicely.”
Haafiz pulled up his personal holo by tapping two fingers from his right hand on his left sleeve. His holo popped up and he muttered a few things. A voice came back, acknowledging whatever he’d said.
Neffy went on, “We also need everything you have about whatever Dr. Sacre did to create that prototype. Whether we’re going to retrieve it or destroy it, we need to know what we’re dealing with. Just blasting it with a missile risks creating a black hole in our star system, annihilating all of us instantly. And you wouldn’t want to do that, would you Commander?”
Haafiz looked like he was about to try and defend himself, but at that moment the door to the conference room slid open and a tall but slight officer stepped in. He nodded to Neffy and Ally, and then turned to Haafiz.
“Sir, the download is complete.” His voice and facial expression were both overly mannered, suggesting he saw himself as a cut above the average Drewdonian. Judging by the elevated tension in Haafiz’s troopers, this man had authority, although he was deferential toward Commander Haafiz. Neffy guessed he was probably the second in command.
“Good,” Haafiz nodded in approval and introduced the agents to his officer, “this is Flight Sergeant Zagir Serpico.”
“At your service,” Serpico continued, performing a little mock bow. Something about him irritated Neffy already.
“Serpico will look after you during your stay on the Aegelweard,” said Haafiz, standing up to leave, still looking a little sheepish at the enormous error in judgment he’d displayed less than an hour earlier. “Technology will be the downfall of humanity,” he sighed, shaking his head as he headed toward the door.
“Let’s hope not,” said Neffy.
Haafiz turned back.
“Please feel free to use the replicator, and holoports, and make yourselves comfortable here. You can contact me through the holo when you’re ready.” He turned again and left the room, followed by his team of troopers, and the vaguely irritating Serpico.
Neffy stared at the table, processing everything that had just happened.
CHAPTER TEN
Ally had been quiet for most of the meeting with Haafiz. She had sensed his prejudice against AIs, and his parting comment about technology summed up his underlying anxieties. The reality was, AI had been a valid lifeform for centuries now, yet there were still plenty of people who refused to think of AIs as sentient beings.
Pig, she thought to herself, relieved that Haafiz had left so they could talk freely and create a coherent plan to clean up his mess.
Neffy was still deep in thought, staring at the table in front of him. His macca must have been lukewarm by now, and lack of sleep was obviously taking its toll. Ally logged onto the room’s holoport with a double tap of her activated finger on the conference table. They still needed to understand what this sudden influx of vipassanators from Goliath Industries was, and how the Drewdonians were funding it. She would have liked to have asked Haafiz the question, but there were more pressing matters afoot.
“Do you want the specs and lab notes Haafiz sent over?” Ally finally asked, waking Neffy from his open-eyed daydream.
“Sure.” He sounded almost absent-minded. These were the actual schematics of the prototype device, something Neffy should have been much more interested in having a look at. It looked like Haafiz was finally taking the danger seriously – but Neffy was no longer paying attention.
“I can take them instead if you’d prefer,” Ally prodded, trying to get her friend focused or at least interacting, “It’s just that this is really your area of interest. Cutting-edge technology and so on.”
If they could find a way to get the tech back to the Drewdonians, maybe that would be enough to save Neffy’s life. Ally wondered if the unknown blackmailer threatening to deactivate her had any idea of the risks involved in letting the Drewdonians fire on that device.
She suspected not.
No one in their right mind would want to create a black hole in a populated star system. Right?
Unless that was the actual endgame.
The thought was unnerving. On the other hand, it certainly clarified matters as far as she was concerned. They could not allow the Drewdonians to open fire on that device. Never mind about being deactivated, she’d be pulled down into the black hole and crushed along with everything else in the star system. There was no advantage to complying with the blackmailer’s orders if she’d only be killed either way.
And that wasn’t all. There were several million people in this immediate area of space, and there’s no way she was going to be responsible for the deaths of millions of people, no matter the cost to her personally. The idea of killing her best friend just to facilitate a ghastly mass murder was beyond laughable. She wasn’t going to do it.
The stakes had changed and as horrible as the situation was it was still a relief. You’d think that the prospect of a black hole wiping out an entire star system would make things more tense, but it was actually rather freeing. She no longer felt that her hand was forced. The blackmailer could deactivate her any time he wanted to, but he couldn’t make her do a single thing.
However tired he might be, Neffy had finally started sifting through the data that Haafiz had sent over. Ally wasn’t sure how much of it he was actually taking in.
An alert came through, letting Ally know that her search through the Drewdonian financial records had produced some results. She glanced at the figures, then turned back toward Neffy.
“I’ve been following up on those vipassanators Drewdonia has been ordering. The numbers are convincing. The percentage of their budget devoted to purchasing these devices is much higher than what their economy can sustain. It’s like they’re trying to stay ahead of a crisis – and getting desperate about it.”
“Hmm…” Neffy murmured, “There must be a reason. Run a full spectrum scan on environmental factors, and socio-political changes over the last 24 months. Flag up anything that looks like a disturbance. We want to see what they might be trying to fix with these machines. While you’re at it, let’s broaden our search on Goliath Industries. If they’re involved with this sudden increase in imports, there may be similar things happening in other systems. If we can find a pattern, we can probably find the cause.”
It felt odd to Neffy to mistrust Goliath. After all, in most corners of the galaxy they had a reputation of being saviors, at least in terms of the socio-political landscape.
Goliath Industries was established nearly 400 years ago in 2603. They started as an R&D facility, experimenting with the science of neurology and post-traumatic stress syndromes. Their work in the eradication of irrational fear was widely held to be responsible for the huge leap forward in development on T3 around this time. But their impact became even more dramatic later, when they branched into belief-hacking and the facilitation of whole-brain thinking states.
About 50 years ago, though, they hit gold when they developed a system that would remove any type of limiting belief from the psyche itself. It was a seismic shift, as it struck at the core of the mind/brain interaction that humans had been philosophizing about for millennia. Thanks to this breakthrough, the technology was now available to change a mind through subtle and low-risk neurological procedures. People could literally redesign their own mental functioning for better health, wealth, and happiness. And they’d need all the above in order to afford the devices. Renting or buying on credit were the primary options, but even then, it was far from cheap. Regardless of the cost, they became a sensation, shipping out to all the developed colonies. They even became approved for use in areas where the Academy’s protocols were slow to bring peace and harmony.
The galaxy was becoming a more peaceful place. But sometimes it was an unhappy peace. Often the only tactic available to restore proper governance and security for the discontented citizens was to put neutral parties in power. This was where the Academy became so important. And their trained officia
ls, educated precisely to be excellent mediators and honest leaders, were the first choice for such roles. But if the residents in these areas opted to change their minds – their beliefs about whatever was causing the original conflicts – then this unhappy peace could often be transformed into genuine harmony.
There was no doubt about it. The Federation was better off with Goliath Industries in play.
Neffy was under no illusion that if anything led back to Goliath, there would be far-reaching consequences to his investigation. Things could get very dangerous for an Independent rep and his synthbot friend.
Hours had passed, and though Haafiz had sent his sniveling sidekick, Serpico, to check on progress a couple of times, Neffy refused to give him any further information.
His third cup of macca sat beside him, probably stone-cold by now. He was oblivious though, engrossed in holo schematics and Dr. Sacre’s old research notes, trying to figure out how the device might have worked.
His top priority was to make it safe. But hundreds of lightyears from anyone who could have been of even limited help, and isolated with only an e-DNA connection to the advanced research facility back on T3, it was slow going. He had someone on standby, but he needed to know what to ask them in order for their input to be even remotely useful.
He swiped another set of notes aside, and pulled up the next entry, cross-referencing with the schematic on a separate screen.
“Any thoughts on the prototype?” asked Ally, looking up from her own painstaking search for answers.
“Yeah. I’m not sure how we can take control of it remotely. Everything looks manual. It’s not even rigged up with e-DNA or anything that responds to an EM signal. It’s all mechanical except the fusion core, which would have been controlled by the normal entanglement remotes that plug into the mainframe back on the main power grid on Drewdonia. Unless they have the controllers that sync with the main grid here on the ship, we’re going to have to get down to the surface to dismantle it.”
She pulled up a map of the surface, and flicked it over to Neffy to see the kind of terrain they would have to navigate.
“Best bet for that looks like taking out the fusion core by hand,” she continued, without looking up from her screens. “It’s a ridiculous operation in itself. I’m assuming all this is fusion shielding,” she said, signaling around the outer shell of the device on the sketch in front of her, “We’ll need tools highly resistant to heat and radiation to do this operation, and that’s only if removing the core isn't going to set off whatever the mechanism is that interacts with the vacuum.”
She paused. Wondering.
Neffy’s eyes never left the screen as he responded. “I’m assuming it needs a vacuum for the particles to interact with the ZP field. If there are any particles present, then surely they’re more likely to interact with those particles than the ZP field, making the field inaccessible. We’re probably looking at some way of firing fermions into a vacuum at high speed. It will probably need a hugely powerful electromagnet along with a cooling core, to get any matter out of the way. I think we’re looking at single photons as the projectile. But then, with the size of magnet they'd need, I can’t see how this device could be portable.”
Moments passed.
Ally watched. She could almost hear Neffy’s mind racing through all the elements of the problem. If the device wasn’t live, then hitting it with a missile would not be particularly dangerous. If that was the case, then the blackmailer’s horrible demands were back in play.
“Neffy?” Ally’s voice disturbed his train of thought, but Neffy didn’t react. “Neff…”
“Hmm…” he acknowledged, eyes still locked on the schematic in front of him, scanning and searching.
“What does that mean?” Ally asked, dreading the answer, yet needing to know if she was still just as trapped as she’d been an hour ago.
“Well, it means we’re probably safe for now. I don’t think it’s likely to create a black hole in the star system in its current condition. At least as long as they don’t get it somewhere with the right equipment and then figure out how to put it back together.” Neffy took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair, contemplating their next move.
Ally held her breath, not daring to say anything. Now that they no longer had to worry about the destruction of the system, she was just as trapped as she had been before. Any comment she made could influence the course of action Neffy chose, potentially preventing the Drewdonians from firing on the device.
Unfortunately, Neffy was perfectly capable of forming his own conclusions. “We have to decide whether to keep this information a secret from the Drewdonians. If we tell them, we need to figure out another way to persuade them not to fire on the prototype. The thing is, any missile strike will be perceived as an act of aggression by the New Atlantians, who will wipe this ship out without a moment’s thought. Once they’ve been fired upon, it will no longer matter whether we’re on board or not. I just don’t see things working out for us in that scenario. There’s only one thing to do here. We let them think that a strike on the device will set off Armageddon, and then we get some backup out here to either retrieve or destroy the prototype.”
“Although,” Ally added, seeing another angle that might still allow the Drewdonians to destroy the prototype, “what if they already know that the prototype isn’t live and wouldn’t cause a threat? Then we’ll lose all our credibility and trust with them. We’d lose all our social capital, and without that how can we negotiate a resolution? How could we stop this from blowing up into a full-scale war?”
Lying in general was very much frowned on by the Academy for precisely the reasons Ally was putting forward. It could even get a negotiator into a lot of trouble, unless the lie was obviously driven by absolute necessity.
Neffy didn’t like to be reminded of the rules. He frowned. “You can’t always play things exactly by the book. Real situations are just too fluid for that. If you ask me, any fire from the Drewdonians will result in an immediate counterattack from the New Atlantians, and that means war. War is the one thing we’re supposed to prevent here.”
Ally shook her head. “I just don’t think so. The New Atlantians have huge advantages in both resources and technology. They could dominate Drewdonia from the beginning of the conflict. We don’t even know if the Drewdonians have another ship to send. If the Drewdonians fire and the Atlantians respond, that skirmish will probably be the end of the whole thing.”
The tension of the situation was interfering with Ally’s ability to think. Neffy was probably right that the New Atlantians would destroy the Drewdonian ship as soon as it fired, so she was basically arguing for an outcome just as deadly to her as the blackmailer’s threats. She might have to talk Neffy into fleeing the ship before that happened. Unless the Drewdonians succeeded in destroying all the New Atlantian ground defense positions before they could fire. It was too much to stay on top of.
Neffy was still thinking out loud, “I agree that the New Atlantians would dominate in the event of a shooting war, but that would only lead to a huge Federation inquiry and intervention. It certainly wouldn’t look good for the Federation.”
Neffy was undecided. It all seemed to rest on how much the Drewdonians knew – about the device, and about what they’d discovered. If the Drewdonians had been monitoring their conversations, and their investigations on the holo, then it was pretty safe to say they would be up to speed, and the ruse wouldn’t work. But if they could sell it long enough to get backup out here, then maybe it was worth the risk.
Neffy made his decision. “We should keep it from Haafiz. The risks of fallout are high, but we’ve got them in a holding pattern for now.”
Ally knew she had to change direction – anything to keep the blackmailer from having a reason to terminate her. “What are the odds of getting the Atlantians to surrender the device?”
Neffy chuckled. “Slim.” He flicked back into another holo screen showing the map and the tracker. The last
data-point put the device about ten clicks out from a desert outpost. Progress was slow going, leading Neffy to think that the equipment was both heavy and delicate. They were traveling carefully, and had avoided some hilly terrain, even though it had prolonged their journey. “But it may just be our best bet.”
He began examining the data with renewed energy. “If we can get down to the surface, we can probably take the device back. But we need to know how many warriors they have on that convoy. Just to be on the safe side, we’d have to assume that Xena and her crew are complicit in some way. We can’t let them know what we’re doing.”
Of course Neffy would go for that option, Ally thought to herself. Ally needed to work on her own plan. She needed a way to distract Neffy and get the Drewdonians to fire without getting herself killed by the New Atlantian response.
Unless…
Unless she could find a way to take over the controls and somehow fire on the device herself. In the confusion, no one would know what had happened at first. The Drewdonians would insist there had been some kind of weapons system malfunction, and she and Neffy could step in and assure the New Atlantians that the Drewdonians were telling the truth.
That was it. That would give her and Neffy time to negotiate a ceasefire, and still have the Drewdonians destroy the device as she had been ordered.
Fiddling with the operations of the ship, she started trying to hack into some of their maintenance systems, being careful not to alert Neffy to what she was doing.
Neffy had gone back to examining the map, and no doubt planning how to storm the outpost.
+++
Ally had been poking around the ship’s maintenance systems for thirty minutes and she was still no closer to finding a way to get the Drewdonians to fire. She needed access to the weapons.
She couldn’t imagine the alternative. Killing Neffy?
How would she even do it? They didn’t carry weapons or poisons…or anything deadly at all. Stop. Just stop thinking of this, she scolded herself, and kept trying to figure out a way to access the weapons system.
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