Exultant (34 page)

Torec suppressed a sigh. “Sir, Brea died doing her duty.”

“But if not for me she wouldn’t have been put in harm’s way in the first place.”

Darc said thunderously, “Commissary, with respect, that’s maudlin nonsense. Brea was a soldier.
Soldiers die,
sir, by putting themselves in harm’s way, as you call it. It’s a question of statistics; that’s how you have to look at it.”

Nilis turned on him, eyes rimmed red, clearly furious. “And is that supposed to comfort me?”

Darc’s expression didn’t change. “If you want comfort, know that she died doing her duty.”

Nilis snorted and resumed his pacing. “Well, if we’re not allowed to complete the test program, she will have died for nothing.”

Darc laughed. “You aren’t going to trap me that way, Commissary. I’m not convinced that throwing away more time and money, and more lives, on this program is justified. I’ve seen no sign that you’re coming close to solving these instability problems with the grav shield.”

Torec knew the situation was delicate. Darc’s power was all negative. He couldn’t approve the continuation of the test program on his own, but he could get it shut down. And she was scared that after a failure that embarrassed him as much as anybody else, he was ready to use that power. She said brightly, “We still have another ship. It’s already being prepared.”

“That means nothing,” Darc said. “Ensign, engineers work on engines unless they’re stopped by force; you know that. It doesn’t mean I’ll be approving another run.”

Nilis glared. “For you to shut us down now, after just one run, would be criminally irresponsible, Commander!”

Darc was very still, sitting in his chair, not moving a muscle. But Torec could hear the menace in his voice. “I know you’re under stress. But I won’t have you say that about me. I’ve been under pressure to terminate this program since the first poor results came in. In fact, Commissary, I’ve been championing you, keeping you alive.”

Nilis wasn’t intimidated. “Oh, have you? Or are you looking out for yourself, Commander? Seeking whatever advantage you can gain from the project, while always keeping your backside covered, in the grand Navy tradition!”

Torec saw Darc’s hands close on the arms of his chair, his knuckles whiten.

To her relief, before they came to blows, there was a soft chime, and a small Virtual window opened up before her. It revealed a shining sphere. She gaped.

“I have a visitor,” she said.

When Darc saw the Ghost’s image, he snarled, “Send it away. I won’t have that monstrosity in a Naval facility.”

Enough, Torec thought. “It’s my visitor,” she said. “Not
yours,
sir, with respect.”

Darc shot her a glance, but he knew she was right; by ancient Navy tradition sick bay patients had a few temporary privileges. But he waved a hand at the Virtual of the test run, dispersing it—as if, Torec thought, the Silver Ghosts assigned to the project hadn’t seen the whole thing live and firsthand anyhow.

The Ghost’s bulk was barely able to pass through the door. It hovered beside Torec’s bed, massive, drifting slightly, the glaring lamps of the room casting highlights from its hide.

She shivered, as if the Ghost’s immense mass was sucking the warmth out of the air. She pulled her med-cloak a little higher, and the semisentient wrap snuggled more tightly into place. A Silver Ghost, a bedside visitor in a Navy hospital, come to see
her
. . . .

Nilis’s characteristic curiosity cut in. He stood before the Ghost, hands on hips, rheumy eyes alive with interest. “So,” said Nilis. He held out a liver-spotted hand, as if to stroke the Ghost’s surface; but he thought better of it and pulled back, curling his fingers. “Which one are you?”

“I am the one you call the Ambassador to the Heat Sink.” The Ghost’s chill contralto voice seemed heavily artificial in this small sick-bay room. “We met on Pluto.”

“Of course we did. I should have guessed it was you. But how would I know if you were lying, if you’re a different Ghost entirely? Hah!”

The Ghost didn’t respond. Darc, still as a statue, was almost as unreadable.

Nilis went on, “And what are you doing here?”

“It’s come to see
me,
Commissary,” Torec said gently.

Nilis made a mock bow.

Torec plucked up her courage and faced the Ghost. She could see herself in its hide, a distorted image of a head and shoulders, clutching her med-blanket. “Maybe that’s what’s so scary about you,” she said aloud.

The Ghost said, “I do not understand.”

“That every time I look at a Ghost, I see myself.”

The Ghost rolled slowly, slight imperfections on its surface marking its movements. “Identity is a complex concept which does not translate well across cultures.”

Torec said, “Why have you come to see me, Sink Ambassador?”

“Because your project is failing,” it said.

Nilis nodded. “Yes, yes. We are battling the instability of your gravastar shield, it can’t be denied.”

Darc snorted. “And it’s a fundamental flaw. The spherically symmetric solution of the equations—a complete gravastar, a shell surrounding a ball-shaped pocket universe—would be stable. Your half-and-half solution, a spherical cap preceding a pocket universe that matches to ours asymptotically, is analytically complete, but is
not
stable.” He gave a thin-lipped grin. “Oh, don’t look so shocked, Commissary. Even Navy grunts know a little math. The problem is simple: instability. You have your pilot balancing a ten-meter pole on the palm of her hand; she can run as fast as she likes, but sooner or later she will fall.”

The Ghost said, “But we have a solution.”

Nilis and Darc both turned to face the Ghost, startled.

Torec smiled. “So that’s why you’ve come. You weren’t concerned about my health at all.”

The Ghost seemed to think that over. “No offense.”

Nilis gaped. “Did a Silver Ghost just make a
joke
?”

Darc said sternly, “You say you have a solution. Describe it.”

The Ambassador rolled, and Virtual images scrolled in the air. Torec recognized a map of the phase space of a system. It was a schematic diagram of the possible states of the gravastar shield. It looked like a slice of a rolling landscape, with valleys, peaks, and plains, and it was marked with contours that showed regions of chaos and stability, attractors and poles.

“The trick,” said the Ghost, “is to use the instability, not to fight it. You are trying to emulate the stability of the strongest attractor, which is the spherically symmetric solution here.” A point on the map winked red. “So you allow the shield to form at low velocities, or even when the projector is stationary. You find an equilibrium, but it is not stable. Then when you try to fly, the smallest instability disrupts the solution. Your running child trips on a pebble, Commander, and the pole is dropped.”

Nilis laughed out loud. “You have spent a long time studying human idioms.”

“We have little else to do,” the Ghost said.

“So,” Darc growled, “what do you suggest instead?”

“It would be better to operate the projector when it is being carried at close to lightspeed.”

Nilis frowned. He walked up to the image and poked his finger into its shining innards. “But that would bring us up to this region.” It was the complex border between order and chaos. “The shield would be no more than meta-stable.”

“But solutions in this part of the phase space, on the edge of chaos, would be responsive to small adjustments.”

“Ah.” Nilis nodded. “Which would make the shield more manageable, because it would respond more sensitively; we could control out the instabilities before a catastrophic disruption.”

Darc was visibly unhappy. “
How
rapidly would we have to react?” He brought up a Virtual of his own, ran some quick calculations. “There,” he said in triumph. “Look at that! Your meta-stable shield will flap like a sheet in a breeze. There’s no way we could react quickly enough to respond to it.”

“Of course you could,” the Ambassador said. “You have arbitrarily high processing speeds available on your ship. Your CTC-processor technology—”

Darc shot to his feet and stalked up to the Ghost, fists clenched. “Is that the game? How do you even
know
about that? If you think I am going to let you anywhere
near
the CTC system—”

Nilis said, “Commander, please. We’re simply discussing possibilities.”

Darc remained standing, glaring at the Ghost. “Why are you doing this? Humans destroyed your kind. Why would you help your conquerors?”

“Curiosity,” the Ghost said.

“And nothing else?” Darc asked heavily.

“Nothing. You recreated us at a whim. You could destroy us as easily. We have no hope.”

Darc’s eyes narrowed with suspicion, but he stayed silent.

Nilis was still thinking over the idea. “This would actually simplify the overall design, of course . . . You don’t seem happy, Ensign.”

Torec said, “I’m a pilot, sir. No pilot likes giving up control.”

“Hmm. I can sympathize with that. And of course this sort of active-control system isn’t without risks. You would go into battle behind an intrinsically unstable system. If the CTC failed, you would die immediately.”

“But we all die one day, Commissary.”

He embarrassed her by allowing his eyes to fill up. “Lethe, this laconic courage—I’m sorry! I can’t get used to it.”

The Ghost said, “You have one more test ship.”

“One more chance,” Nilis said. “The modifications would be straightforward.” He stared at Darc.

Darc held his stubborn stance for a moment, then seemed to give in. “All right. Lethe take this whole plagued project! But what are we to do for a crew?”

Torec sat up straight. “I’m willing to give it another go, sir.”

Nilis said, “I’d expect nothing less. But we must make this crucial trial work. I would suggest that the ensign’s ideal crewmates are in this room.”

Darc stared at him, then at the Ghost, which rolled silently. “You have got to be joking.”

But he wasn’t.

Chapter
27

“The Central Star Mass,” Nilis said. “Isn’t that what you call it, Pirius Blue?
The Mass—
what a mundane name for a place where you can find ten million stars in a space a few light-years across—a volume in which, at the Galactic vicinity of Sol, you would on average find
one.
How marvelous, that we feeble humans should have come so far!”

He had called Pirius Blue to the small quarters he had been allocated in Quin’s Officer Country. His face shining with enthusiasm, his long robe as scuffed and threadbare as ever, he bumbled around the room, setting out his data desks on the low table. The Commissary was just as Pirius remembered from the trial, though he seemed older, rather more careworn. But Nilis hadn’t been prepared for Pirius’s new eyes; at first sight he had recoiled, his shock comical.

This wasn’t the real Commissary, of course. Nilis was too busy with his mysterious projects in Sol system to come all the way to the center again in person. This was only a Virtual.

Nilis was still struggling to get political support for his schemes. He said he had forced his way into Quin Base on a pretext. He had managed to persuade his bosses at the Commission for Historical Truth that it was time somebody took a fresh look at the deviant religions sprouting here in the Core. But quizzing This Burden Must Pass about the nature of the Ultimate Observer was not Nilis’s true goal.

“Let me get this straight,” Pirius said. “Sir,” he added.

Nilis waved that away. “Please, please. We know each other too well for formality!”

But he was talking about a different Pirius, Blue thought, indeed a different Nilis. “You want to send a scouting mission inside the Front—into the Cavity. You want to fly to Chandra itself.”

“Or as close as we can get to it, yes.”

Nilis talked rapidly about the great project he was devising out at Sol’s lonely orbit—aided, in part, by Pirius’s own younger self, his FTL twin Pirius Red. Pirius Blue had heard nothing of this before, and he was stunned by Project Prime Radiant’s scope and ambition.

“But if we are to strike successfully we have to know more about Chandra itself,” Nilis said. “Even after three thousand years of war here at the Galaxy’s heart, we still know woefully little.”

And that, he said, was where Pirius Blue came in.

“You want me to fly the mission.”

“To scope it out, define, it, choose a crew. . . . Yes! You will be the commander, Pirius Blue. It will be a historic flight.”

“Historic? Suicidal.”

Nilis said gravely, “Suicidal? Not necessarily. There are many myths about this war, Pirius Blue. We are locked into ways of thinking, ways of fighting. After three thousand years of stasis we have talked ourselves into believing that taking the war to the Xeelee is reckless, even suicidal, as you say. But we’re only talking about a scouting mission! And how do you know it would be suicidal? Do you know how long it is since a mission of this type was actually studied? I’ve looked high and low and I can’t find one—a long time indeed!—even though the information is of such obvious value. But everybody
knows
it’s impossible. And of course, I am reluctantly coming to see, there are plenty in high places with a vested interest in the war
not
being concluded. . . .”

“Sir?”

“Never mind. Anyhow, as commander it would be your duty to make the mission survivable, wouldn’t it?”

Pirius was full of doubt. Everything Nilis said sounded reasonable—and exciting. But it also conflicted with his training, everything he had been brought up to believe.

Nilis said, a little exasperated, “Look—I would not
order
you to do this. Yes, there are obvious dangers; yes, you might not survive—and, yes, I am asking you to have faith in me, in a fat old fool from Earth. But the mission is, quite simply, vitally necessary.
We must know more.
” He watched Pirius’s face with a kind of wistful longing. “Oh, Pirius, this is such a strange encounter. I feel I know you so well! Look at you now, the way you hold your head when you listen to me, your seriousness, your focus on your duty, even the play of the light in your eyes. You’re so familiar. And yet it’s Pirius Red I’ve come to know, and
you
don’t know me at all, save for your brief encounter with a bumbling old fool at your hearing! It’s so strange, so strange. Sometimes I think that by hurling ourselves around the Galaxy faster than the speed of light we are pushing our humanity too far.”