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Chapter Eight
This invisible bubble was getting tiresome, Alicia thought, eyeing the empty tables around her in the lounge. No one would ever be crude enough to mention her insanity—but no one wanted to get too close to her, either.
"I wonder how much of it's fear of contagion?" she complained.
"Oh, very little, I should think. They fear what you may do to them, not what they might contract from you."
"A comforting thought," Alicia snorted, and hooked a chair further under the opposite side of the table to rest her heels on it. Her dialogues with Tisiphone no longer felt odd, which worried her from time to time, but not nearly so much as they comforted her. She had to be so wary, especially of her friends, that the relief of open conversation was almost unspeakable. Of course, her lips twitched wryly, it was still possible Ta
"Of course I exist. Why do you continue to use qualifiers?"
"The nature of the beast, I suppose. If you were something they'd whipped up in the AI labs, this would be a lot easier for me."
"So you find beings of crystal and wire more reasonable than beings of spirit?" There was vast amusement in Tisiphone's mental "voice." "You come from a sad age, Little One, if your people's sense of wonder has sunk so low!"
"Not a sad age, just a practical one. And speaking of wonder, look at that, Spirit Lady."
She turned her eyes—their eyes?—to the lounge's out-sized view port as the transport settled into orbit around Soissons, and even Tisiphone fell silent. The port lacked the image enhancement of one of the viewer stations, but that only made the view even more impressive.
Soissons was very Earth-like—or, rather, very like Earth had been a thousand years before. More of its surface was land, and the ice caps were larger, for Soissons lay almost ten light- minutes from its G2 primary, but its deep blue seas and fleece-white clouds were breathtaking, and Soissons had been settled after man had learned to look after his things. Old Earth was still dealing with the traumas of eight mille
Yet there were two billion people on that planet, however careful they were to preserve it, and the Franconia System had been selected as a sector capital because of its industrial power. Soisson's skies teemed with orbital installations protected by formidable defensive emplacements, and she craned her head, watching intently, as the transport drifted neatly through them under a minute fraction of its full drive power. A Fleet spacedock filled the port, vast enough to handle superdreadnoughts, much less the slender battle-cruiser undergoing routine maintenance, and beyond it loomed the spidery skeleton of a full-fledged shipyard.
"What might that be?" a voice said in her brain, and her eyes moved under their own power. It was still a bit u
The thought faded as her own interest sharpened, and she frowned at the small ship near one edge of the yard.
It appeared to be in the late stages of fitting out. Indeed, but for all the bits and pieces of yard equipment drifting near it she would have said it was completed. She watched a yard shuttle mate with one of the transparent access tubes, disgorging a flock of techs—minute dots of colored coveralls at this distance—and nibbled the inside of her lip. Tisiphone's question was well taken. Alicia had seen more warships and transports than she cared to recall during her career, but never one quite like this. Its bulbous Fasset drive housing dwarfed the rest of its hull, but it was too big for a dispatch boat. At the same time, it was too small for a Fleet transport, even assuming anyone would stick that monster drive on a bulk carrier. It looked to fall somewhere between a light and heavy cruiser for size, perhaps four or five hundred meters at the outside—it was hard to be sure with only yard shuttles for a reference—yet someone had grafted a battleship's drive onto it, which promised an awesome turn of speed.
Their transport drifted closer, bound for a nearby perso
She inhaled sharply.
"I'm not sure, but I think that's an alpha synth."
"Indeed?" Interest sharpened Tisiphone's mental voice, for she'd encountered several mentions of the alpha synth ships, especially in the secured data she'd accessed from the transport's data net. "I did not think they could be so small."
"Well, they only have a crew of one, and they're right on the frontier of technology. They're only possible because somebody finally developed a practical anti-matter power plant—not to mention the alpha synth AIs."
The small ship floated out of their view as the transport lined up on the perso
Lonely, for starters. Roughly sixty percent of humanity could use neural receptors to interface with their technological minions, but no more than twenty percent could sustain the contact required to maintain a synth link— the direct, point-to-point co
But from the bits and pieces she'd read, people who could (and would) take on an alpha synth link were even rarer—and probably weren't playing with a full deck. The highbrows might be patting themselves for finally producing an insanity-proof AI, but who in her right mind would voluntarily fuse herself with a self-aware computer? Interacting with one was one thing; making yourself a part of it was something else. Alicia had no anti-tech bias, yet the idea of becoming the organic half of a bipolar intelligence in a union only death could dissolve was far from appealing.
She paused with a short, sharp bark of laughter. One or two heads turned, and she smiled cheerfully at the curious, amused by the way they whipped their eyes back away from her. One more indication of her looniness, she supposed, but it really was humorous. Here she was, uneasy about the possibility of merging with another personality—her of all people!
She chuckled again, then drained her glass and stood as Ta
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Fleet Admiral Subrahmanyan Treadwell, Governor General of the Franconian Sector, disliked planets. Born and raised in one of the Solarian belter habitats, he saw Imperial Worlds as inconveniently immobile defensive problems and other people's planets as fat targets that couldn't run away, but that hadn't worried Seamus II's ministers when they tapped him for his job.
Treadwell was a lean, bland-faced man with hard eyes. Some people had been fooled by the face into missing the eyes, but he was a man who'd done everything the hard way. Unable to accept even rudimentary augmentation and so disqualified forever from commanding a capital ship by his inability to key into its command net, he'd cut his way to flag rank by sheer brilliance, using nothing but his brain and a keyboard. Three times senior strategy instructor at the Imperial War College and twice Second Space Lord, he was acknowledged as the Fleet's premier strategist, yet he'd never commanded a fleet in space. It was an understandably sensitive point, and coupled with a certain antipathy for those whose mental processes seemed slower than his own but who could be augmented, it made him ... difficult at times. Like now.
"So what you're saying, Colonel McIlheny," he said in a flat voice, "is that we still don't have the least idea where these pirates are based, why they've adopted this extraordinary operational approach, or where they're going to hit next. Is that a fair summation?"
"Yes, sir." McIlheny squelched an ignoble desire to hide behind his own admiral. It would have looked silly, since Admiral Lady Rosario Gomez, Baroness Nova Tampico and Knight of the Solar Cross, was exactly one hundred and fifty-seven centimeters tall and massed only forty- eight kilos.
"But you, Admiral Gomez," Treadwell turned his eyes on the commander of the Franconian Fleet District, "still think we have sufficient strength to deal with this on our own?"
"That isn't what I said, Governor." The silver-haired admiral might be petite, but her professional stature matched Treadwell's, and she met his eyes calmly. "What I said is that I feel requesting additional capital units is not the optimum solution. It's unlikely to be granted, and what we really need are more light units. Whoever these people are, they can't possibly match our firepower— assuming we could find them."
"Indeed." Treadwell tapped keys on a memo pad, then smiled frostily at Lady Rosario. 'I assume you've run a minimum force level analysis on them based on their ability to destroy planetary SLAM drones before they wormhole?"
"I have," Gomez said, still calm.
"Then perhaps you can explain where they found the firepower for that? SLAM drones are not exactly easy targets."
"No, sir, they aren't. On the other hand, they can't shoot back and their only defense is speed. Admittedly, it's easier for capital ships to nail them, but enough light units—even enough corvettes—could box and intercept them well within the i