Fortunes of the Imperium (46 page)

CHAPTER 41

I returned from having breakfast with the Autocrat the next morning. I had been trying to teach her to meditate as I did, learning the skill of mindfulness. Alas, every time I got her settled and relaxed and thinking of an empty room or the sound of non-zebra hoofbeats, the High Wisdom would bully his way back into the State Bedroom with some excuse or other. He did not like what he saw as my growing influence over Visoltia. I couldn’t blame him. The more independent she became, the less he would be able to frighten her into acceding to his will.

At the Second Levee the day before, he hovered at her elbow while she signed requisitions. To the annoyance of the High Nourisher, he persuaded Visoltia to divert the export of crops to a distant system and divert them to a nearer one. I would have wagered that he had some kind of financial interest in the matter, but could not even imply aloud that was what I thought.

I was accustomed to seeing courtiers maneuvering for advantage. In fact, I would have thought it strange not to see it. But he was outrageous in his behavior. If he were human, I would have said he was a man on the edge of madness. Something was going to break soon, and if I were truly in touch with the infinite, I might have seen a glimpse of what it was. He was dangerous. I worried what more he might demand of her. Visoltia was so afraid of displeasing him that she sent me home immediately after breakfast. He sensed my suspicions, and could not hide how much he disliked me.

The feeling was mutual. I was on the sharp lookout for a means of discrediting him for once and all.

I stopped in their sumptuous suite to visit with Jil’s ladies, all of whom had remained behind in the hotel in solidarity with my cousin. I tapped upon the door to Jil’s bedroom in the sumptuous suite.

“Go away!” came a cry from within. I turned to Banitra, who stood beside me.

“Lady Jil,” she said. “It’s Lord Thomas. I am looking right at him. Turn on your pocket secretary.” She held up her own device and aimed the pinhole pickup in my direction. I struck a pose. “Do you see?”

“I am not coming out, Thomas,” Jil said.

I decided not to make the appeal on my own behalf.

“Visoltia kept asking for you. She misses you. I hope you will not allow one arrogant human to interfere with your friendship. No one else in our entire family can claim the intimacy you have struck up—if only you don’t let it fade away!”

“I can’t come out!” she wailed.

“But there is so much more shopping to do,” I reasoned. “You haven’t bought your outfit for the feast. You can’t be the only one of us who has nothing new to wear.”

“I don’t care. I am not going to the feast.”

“Don’t be silly. You love a good party. Visoltia told me that there will be a hundred courses, all exotic and delicious. And entertainment! Ten concerts, played by virtuosos from all over the Autocracy.”

“Go away, Thomas. Please.”

Banitra shook her head. “I will keep trying.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I went back to my chamber and found a message on the house system from Anstruther. I cast myself into a comfortable chair while Excelsis divested me of my boots, and summoned her up on my viewpad. There I found several messages from Plet, Anstruther and Redius. I had forgotten to turn it back on once we were finished with the meditation exercise. How unmindful of me.

“Good afternoon,” I said cheerily, as Anstruther’s image appeared. “How may I help?”

“Thomas,” she replied, beaming. “Is Commander Parsons with you?”

“No, he isn’t,” I said. “He went off on a matter of his own concern last evening. I haven’t seen him since. Have you tried his own unit?”

“I did, but there is no reply. He must be off-grid somewhere. I really need to speak with him.”

“You sound so excited,” I said. “What is it you need to tell him? It must be good.”

“It’s about the merchant ships,” she said, and her usually shy face took on a sly smile. “And it’s funny. But I shouldn’t talk about it on comm.”

I sat up at once. Excelsis had clad my feet in soft-soled shoes, suitable for wearing around the hotel, but not outside. I signaled him to return to me in case I needed a change in footgear.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“In our suite. Fifth floor. Room 57.”

I sprang to my feet. “I will be there in a moment.”

The set of rooms assigned to my crew was on a humbler floor than my own, but palatial nonetheless. A central sitting room led off to four bedrooms and a rather grand bath. This common chamber had become an offshoot of the
Rodrigo
, since the crew had moved a good deal of useful equipment into it and laid out stations that approximated their own specialties.

“I knew it had to be a fantastic discovery,” I said, the moment Anstruther let me into the room, “because you didn’t blush at using my name.”

“Oh, I’m sorry!” she said, clutching the tablet in her arms close to her chest. She looked up at me. “I don’t mean to offend you.”

Redius and Oskelev, standing beside a high table with some very advanced-looking computer equipment on it, laughed aloud. Oskelev pounded the Uctu on the back, making him stagger. Nesbitt, perched on a stool beside the table, let out a big guffaw. Anstruther did blush then.

“I am teasing you,” I said. “Tell me your discovery.”

Her embarrassment vanished in a twinkling.

“I know how the programming made it into the victimized ships, and it’s not what we thought.”

“Really? Show me!”

She led me to the table, pushing Redius aside as though he was a pesty younger brother which, in a way, he was. He made way for me to a binocular scanner half a meter high.

“I think I can prove that the crew had something to do with putting the nanites on board. They conveyed a number of the nanites into the tanks themselves.”

“They
did
smuggle them?” I asked, looking from one eager face to another with growing horror in my soul.

“Not in a conscious sense,” Oskelev said. “You remember the symptoms that the merchant crews said they were suffering from?”

“Intimately,” I said.

“Do you remember the therapy to prepare you for the Uctu worlds?” Plet asked.

“Do I not?” I exclaimed. “What a load of disorientation! I have written a monograph on it, and the insights I gained from my days of disproportion. You should read it. I think it’s one of the best things I have come up with.”

Plet shrugged.

“Maybe later, my lord. But that is at the heart of the matter.”

“What? Disorientation?”

“No, sir.
Nanites
. Just like us, the crew was injected with a load of them so they could deal with the difference in sunlight and the chlorine in the atmosphere.” I looked at each of them in turn, still puzzled.

“Yes, but those were medical devices. And they were all gone from their bodies by the time the ships reached the Autocracy.”

“Their programming was hijacked by other nanites,” Anstruther said.

I felt my eyes widen.

“But where did those nanites come from?” I asked. Oskelev showed her sharp white teeth between bright pink lips.

“Remember what Anstruther discovered in the residue that Redius scraped off the internal spray valves, the food samples that we took out of the vending machine?”

“How could I ever forget it?” I said. “We all smelled like porridge for hours, especially Redius.”

“Unappetizing,” the Uctu agreed, blinking his large eyes.

“Well,” Anstruther said, her own eyes dancing. “My analysis showed that it had a pretty high level of inedible material within it, such as iron, silicates and so on.”

“Yes.” I nodded. “I supposed that it was just meant to save money on actual nutrients. A large measure of what we eat has no value but bulk.”

“That’s true. That’s how they disguised them.”

“Nanites?” I asked, in disbelief.

“Loads of them,” Nesbitt burst out, unable to contain himself any longer. His big face was spread with merriment. “They ate a ton of them. Maybe literally.”

The penny dropped, and with it, my jaw. I regarded four gleeful faces and felt laughter bubbling up inside me, desperate to get out.

“And
how
did the nanites get into the waste tank?” I asked, although the grin that spread across my face made it a rhetorical question.

“I think you know already, sir,” Anstruther said, her eyes dancing. “Bit by bit.”

I couldn’t help it. I began laughing helplessly.

“Do you mean . . . ?”

I mimed the progression thereof vaguely with both hands.

“Yes, my lord. I mean, Thomas. Every bite they took of station food contained a large proportion of nanos along with the nutrients,” Anstruther said. “Each nano was coated with a more palatable-tasting substance, but since the coating is designed to come off in the digestive tract, some weren’t completely covered to begin with.”

“So you could have a chocolate-covered spaceship? My cousin Nalney would love that. He would eat anything as long as it had enough chocolate on it. But, all of it? There were only six people on the Coppers’ ship, most of them very small. Although children seem to emit a great deal of extraneous matter, they could not possibly have produced all of it.”

“Well, they were there for three months, sir. That’s a good deal of input.”

“That’s fantastic!” I shouted. “Oh, where is Parsons when we need him?”

We all cackled and hooted. But when I paused to wipe tears of merriment from my eyes, a thought struck me.

“But they didn’t find any nanites in the waste tank,” I said. “They found a warship. A solid craft. Nanites work in a group, not as a single unit, millions of tiny machines all doing their own assignment.”

Anstruther beckoned me to the microscope.

“Take a look, sir. I only did a spectrographic analysis on the sludge before, but after we examined the merchant ships, I took a really close look at it. There are nanites in the sample, but they’re not all individuals.”

I peered into the eyepieces. I had seen nanites before. At minor magnification, a group of them looked like a handful of silver sand. At a much greater amplification, they resembled neat little globes studded over with tools so small that they ended in pincers or cutters made from single molecules. Instead, what lay under the scope looked like a box of broken toys.

“But these create shapes,” I said, in amazement. “They are still as tiny as a miser’s heart, but these look like pieces of something.”

“They’re made to go together,” Anstruther said. “Form things.”

“As in a stray one-pilot fighter?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Plet cleared her throat. “That’s probably why all the nanites were missing from the ship’s systems. In order to form the patterns that were programmed into them, they would have sought out any other nanites nearby. They had the transit time to form into the fighter craft and those weapons.”

“But why did they form before the checkpoint?”

“I think it was a mistake,” Anstruther said. “Otherwise we would never have known. The program malfunctioned in some way.”

“Do you know how the program worked that tells the nanites to become a specific object?”

“Not yet, sir,” Anstruther said, her pointed chin set firmly. “The navy’s development arm is working on parallel practices. I’m trying to read the coding against the programs we use, but they’re a lot more primitive than what these people, whoever they are, have already accomplished. I’m running dozens of programs on different samples, trying to unlock their system. Once I can read the original code, I’ll be able to trace the programmer and find out who commissioned the program. In the meantime, I can wipe the nanites’ memories and reinitialize them with the system we have. Want to see?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

Nesbitt plunked a pulse rifle on an electrically charged plate on Anstruther’s table and stood back.

“This is from the stash the customs agents found,” he said.

Anstruther pulled a dish of gleaming powder and sprinkled some of it on the gun. Then she activated her tablet. The rifle promptly collapsed into a long, narrow pile of silver. I was enchanted.

“Could you do that to the war skimmer?” I asked eagerly.

“I already did,” she said. She brought me to the side of the room where a utilitarian plastic barrel stood and lifted the top. Light gleamed upon the contents.