The Dreaming Void (6 page)

Troblum, who was first and foremost a physicist, had been attracted to Air by just that rationalization. He had spent a constructive seventy years working to translate theoretical concepts into physical reality, helping to build the force field generators that studded the geodesic lattice. At that point his preoccupation with the Starflyer War had taken over, and he had gained the attention of people running an altogether more interesting construction project. They made him an offer he couldn't refuse. It often comforted him how that episode of his life mirrored one from the life of his illustrious ancestor, Mark.

His capsule descended into the compound of the Commonwealth Navy office. It consisted of a spaceport field lined by two rows of big hangars and maintenance bays. Arevalo was primarily a base for the navy's exploration division. The starships sitting on the field were either long-range research vessels or more standard passenger craft; the three matte-black towers looming along the northern perimeter housed the astrophysics laboratories and scientific crew training facilities. Troblum's capsule drifted through the splayed arches on which the main tower stood and landed directly underneath it. He walked over to the base of the nearest arch column, toga suit surrounding him in a garish ultraviolet aurora. There were not many people about: a few officers on their way to regrav capsules. His appearance drew glances; for a Higher to be so big was very unusual. Biononics usually kept a body trim and healthy; it was their primary function. There were a few cases in which a slightly unusual biochemical makeup presented operational difficulties for biononics, but that normally was remedied by a small chromosome modification. Troblum refused to consider it. He was what he was and did not see the need to apologize for it to anyone in any fashion.

Even the short distance from the capsule to the column made his heart race. He was sweating when he went into the empty vestibule at the base of the column. Deep sensors scanned him, and he put his hand on a tester globe, allowing the security system to confirm his DNA. One of the elevators opened. It descended for an unnerving amount of time.

The heavily shielded conference room reserved for his presentation was unremarkable: an oval chamber with an oval rockwood table in the middle, ten pearl-white shaper chairs with high backs arranged around it. Troblum took the one opposite the door and started running checks with the navy office net to make sure all the files he needed were loaded properly.

Four navy officers walked in, three of them in identical toga suits whose ebony surface effect rippled in subdued patterns. Their seniority was evidenced only by small red dots glowing on their shoulders. He recognized all of them without having to reference their u-shadows: Mykala, a third-level captain and the local faster-than-light (FTL) drive bureau director; Eoin, a captain who specialized in alien activities; and Yehudi, the Arevalo office commander. Accompanying them was First Admiral Kazimir Burnelli. Troblum had not been expecting him; the shock of seeing the commander of the Commonwealth Navy in person made him stand up quickly. It wasn't just his position that was fascinating. The Admiral was the child of two very important figures from the Starflyer War and famous for a man his age: 1,206 years old, seven or eight centuries past the time most Highers downloaded themselves into ANA.

The Admiral wore a black uniform of stylishly cut old-fashioned cloth. It suited him perfectly, emphasizing broad shoulders and a lean torso, the classic authority figure. He was tall with olive skin and a handsome face. Troblum recognized some of his father's characteristics—the blunt jaw and jet-black hair—but his mother's finer features were there also: a nose that was almost dainty and pale friendly eyes.

“Admiral!” Troblum exclaimed.

“Pleased to meet you.” Kazimir Burnelli extended a hand.

It took Troblum a moment before he realized what to do and put out his own hand to shake, suddenly very pleased that his toga suit had a cooling web and that he no longer was sweating. The social formality file his u-shadow had pushed into his exovision was withdrawn abruptly.

“I'll be representing ANA: Governance for this presentation,” Kazimir said. Troblum had guessed as much. Kazimir Burnelli was the essential human link in the chain between ANA: Governance and the ships of the navy deterrent fleet, a position of trust and responsibility he had held for over eight hundred years. Something in the way he carried himself was indicative of all those centuries he had lived, an aura of weariness that anyone in his presence couldn't help being aware of.

There were so many things Troblum was desperate to ask, starting with:
Have you stayed in your body so long because your father's life was so short?
And possibly:
Can you get me access to your grandfather?
But instead he meekly said: “Thank you for coming, Admiral.” Another privacy shield came on around the chamber, and the net confirmed that they were grade-one secure.

“So what have you got for us?” the Admiral asked.

“A theory on the Dyson Pair generators,” Troblum said. He activated the chamber's web node so that the others could share the data and projections in his files and began to explain.

The Dyson Pair were stars three light-years apart that were confined within giant force fields. The barriers had been established in AD1200 by the Anomine for good reason: to contain the Prime aliens, who already had spread from their homeworld around Alpha to Beta and were pathologically hostile to all biological life except their own. The Starflyer, a Prime that had escaped imprisonment, had manipulated the Commonwealth into opening the force field around Dyson Alpha, resulting in a war that killed in excess of fifty million humans. The navy had kept an unbroken watch on the stars ever since.

Centuries later, when the Raiel invited the Commonwealth to join the Void observation project at Centurion Station, human scientists had been startled by the similarity between the planet-sized defense systems deployed throughout the Wall stars and the generators that produced the Dyson Pair force fields.

Until now, Troblum said, everyone assumed the Anomine had a technology base equal to that of the Raiel. He disputed that. His analysis of the Dyson Pair generators showed they were almost identical in concept to the Centurion Station DF machines.

“Which proves the point, surely?” Yehudi said.

“Quite the opposite,” Troblum replied smoothly.

The Anomine homeworld had been visited several times by the navy's exploration division. As a species they had divided two millennia earlier. The most technologically advanced group had elevated to postphysical sentience, and the remainder had retroevolved to a simple pastoral culture. Although they had developed wormholes and sent exploration ships ranging across the galaxy, they had settled only a dozen or so nearby star systems, none of which had massive astroengineering facilities. The remaining pastoral societies had no knowledge of the Dyson Pair generators, and the postphysicals had long since withdrawn from contact with their distant cousins. An extensive search of the sector by successive navy ships had failed to locate the assembly structure for the Dyson Pair generators. Until now human astro-archaeologists had assumed that the abandoned machinery had decayed into the vacuum or was simply lost.

Given the colossal scale involved, Troblum said, neither was truly believable. First, however sophisticated they were, it would have taken the Anomine at least a century to build such a generator from scratch, let alone two of them. Look how long it was taking Highers to construct Air, and that was with nearly unlimited EMAs. Second, the generators had been needed quickly. The Prime aliens of Dyson Alpha already were building slower-than-light starships, which was why the Anomine sealed them in. If there had been a century gap while the Anomine beavered away at construction, the Primes would have expanded out to every star within a fifty-light-year radius before the generators were finished.

“The obvious conclusion,” Troblum said, “is that the Anomine simply appropriated existing Raiel systems from the Wall. All they would need for that would be a scaled-up wormhole generator to transport them to the Dyson Pair, and we know they already possessed the basic technology. What I would like is for the navy to start a detailed search of interstellar space around the Dyson Pair. The Anomine wormhole drive or drives could conceivably still be there, especially if it was a ‘one shot' device.” He gave the Admiral an expectant look.

Kazimir Burnelli paused as the last of Troblum's files closed. “The Primes built the largest wormhole ever known in order to invade the Commonwealth across five hundred light-years,” he said.

“It was called Hell's Gateway,” Troblum said automatically.

“You do know your history. Good. Then you should also know it was only a couple of kilometers in diameter. Hardly enough to transport the barrier generators.”

“Yes, but I'm talking about a completely new manifestation of wormhole drive technology. A wormhole that doesn't need a correspondingly large generator; you simply project the exotic matter effect to the size required.”

“I've never heard of anything like that.”

“It can be achieved easily within our understanding of wormhole theory, Admiral.”

“Easily?” Kazimir Burnelli turned to Mykala. “Captain?”

“I suppose it may be possible,” Mykala said. “I'd need to reexamine exotic matter theory before I could say one way or another.”

“I'm already working on a method,” Troblum blurted.

“Any success?” Mykala queried.

Troblum suspected she was being derisive but lacked the skill to interpret her tone. “I'm progressing, yes. There's certainly no theoretical block to diameter. It's all a matter of the amount of energy available.”

“To ship a Dyson barrier generator halfway across the galaxy you'd need a nova,” Mykala said.

Now Troblum was sure she was mocking him. “It needs nothing like that much energy,” he said. “In any case, if they built the generators on or near their home star, they would still have needed a transport system, wouldn't they? If they built them in situ, which is very doubtful, where is the construction site? We'd have found something that big by now. Those generators were moved from wherever the Raiel had originally installed them.”

“Unless it was produced by their postphysicals,” she said. “Who knows what abilities they have or had.”

“Sorry, I'm going to have to go with Troblum on that one,” Eoin said. “We know the Anomine didn't elevate to postphysical status until after the Dyson barriers were established approximately a hundred and fifty years later.”

“Exactly,” Troblum said triumphantly. “They had to be using a level of technology effectively equal to ours. Somewhere out there in interstellar space is an abandoned drive system capable of moving objects the size of planets. We need to find it, Admiral. I've already compiled a search methodology using current navy exploration craft which I'd like—”

“Let me just stop you there,” Kazimir Burnelli said. “Troblum, what you've given us so far is a very convincing hypothesis. So much so that I'm going to immediately forward your data to a senior department review committee. If they give me a positive verdict, you and I will discuss the navy's investigation options. And believe me, for this day and age, that's being fast-tracked, okay?”

“But you can sanction the exploration division to begin the search right away; you have that authority.”

“I do, yes, but I don't exercise it without a good reason. What you've shown us is more than sufficient to start a serious appraisal. We will follow due process. Then, if you're right—”

“Of course I'm fucking right,” Troblum snapped. He knew that he was acting inappropriately, but his goal was so close. He had assumed that the Admiral's unexpected appearance that day meant the search could begin right away. “I don't have the EMAs for that many starships myself; that's why the navy has to be involved.”

“There would never be an opportunity for an individual to perform a search,” Kazimir replied lightly. “Space around the Dyson Pair remains restricted. This is a navy project.”

“Yes, Admiral,” Troblum mumbled. “I understand.” Which he did. But that didn't quell his resentment at the bureaucracy involved.

“I notice you haven't included your results on this ‘one shot' wormhole drive idea,” Mykala said. “That's a big hole in the proposal.”

“It's at an early stage,” Troblum said, which was not quite true. He had held back on his project precisely because he was so close to success. It was going to be the clinching argument if the presentation did not go well, which in a way it hadn't. But … “I hope to be giving you some positive results soon.”

“That I will be very interested in,” Kazimir said, finally producing a smile that lifted centuries away from him. “Thank you for bringing this to us. And I do genuinely appreciate the effort involved.”

“It's what I do,” Troblum said gruffly. He kept silent as the shielding switched off and the others left the chamber. What he wanted to shout after the Admiral was:
Your mother made her decisions without any committee to hold her hand, and as for what your grandfather would say about getting a consensus …
 Instead he let out a disgruntled breath as he sealed the files back into his storage lacuna. Meeting an idol was always such a risk; so few of them ever lived up to their own legends.