Flight of the Vajra (105 page)

“Yes, but is anyone game to call
that
particular bluff?” Cioran said. “Not I, for one.”

“There’s something else that I must ask,” Ulli
said. “What in the name of whatever you would want to invoke is Prince Nancelares
doing with him? Marius destroyed his entire planet! That doesn’t strike me as
the behavior of a collaborator.”

“Depends on the nature of the collaboration,
doesn’t it?” I said.

“I suppose it does, but . . . ” She
shook her head. “In what scenario would Nancelares find it to his benefit to
destroy the world he lives on?”

“How about one where he gets his pick of worlds
after the fact?”

That turned even more heads than I thought it
would have.

“Look at it from his point of view,” I went on. “He’s
on this one estate which he’s never been particularly attached to anyway, part
of which his ancestors leased out to what to him are total strangers. He’s getting
restless, getting bored—getting bored and restless in only the way someone like
him can be. He could kick everyone out, but then what? What he’d really like to
do is trade up, but there’s nowhere for him to trade up
to
. Marius comes
along, shows him everything he’s scavenged and all the pieces he’s put
together, and says: You give me a leg up to help make this happen—which would
also explain how he got away with his masquerade for so long—and you get your
pick of planets, plural, when this is over. After all, what’s to stop him now
from saying to anyone, ‘You there, with the planet. Out. Prince, take over’?
What’s the loss of Bridgehead compared to him getting the world of his choice?”

“Or maybe Marius just plain blackmailed him,” Enid
said. “
 
‘Hey, I just
blew up your sun. Help me out and you get any world you want. Get in my way and
next time I won’t miss.’
 
”

“From all I’ve seen of the Prince,” Cioran said,
“it sounds like either scenario’s a likely one. There isn’t a single thing in
his life that isn’t disposable, is there?”

“You included,” I reminded him. “
He’s
not
even what’s really wrong, you know.”

“Meaning?”

“It’s not that the Prince is a bad person. He
is
,
but that’s beside the point. It’s that there isn’t anyone left to say no to
someone like him. And then someone like Marius comes along, and before you know
it, it isn’t even
possible
to say no to someone like him.”

Cioran shrugged all that off by looking in the
drink cabinet. “Hey, now,” he admonished over his shoulder, out loud, “don’t
drain our stock too fast. Last I checked, the folks who stocked our wet bar
don’t have a Continuum delivery route.”

“And at this rate they never will.” Ulli chased
her sentence with the rest of her drink.

The changes I’d made to the protocol had paid off.
We’d managed to have that whole conversation in private, and without my head
threatening to burst open after five minutes, too.

Someone was at the door. Kallhander and Ioné stood
up—force of habit kicking in, yet again—and I let them greet our guest. At the
front gate stood MacHanichy and a detachment of eight IPS guards, their troop
carrier in the street outside.

I uttered something unflattering about the sexual
behavior of MacHanichy’s parentage. He retaliated with an admonition that I
perform an anatomical impossibility on myself. Some insults never go out of
style.

“You can call this house arrest if you want,”
MacHanichy said. “Or you can call it whatever you like. Just open up a garage
so we can park inside.”

And then:
+Clever hack with the telemetry
protocol, Sim. I’ve heard of things like that before, but never thought I’d be
whispering to people through one. We intercepted it when you sent it to Aram, but
given everything that was going on, we figured you had a good reason to pull
that stunt. We’ve since equipped everyone on our side with it.

+Don’t make me start charging you folks a
licensing fee.

I feigned disgust and started remotely hollowing
out the garage under the house. The troop transport did a U and started backing
into the newly-instantiated driveway. People were filling the street on both
sides to stare. I half-expected booing and tomato-throwing to start any second.

+I’ll push you out an update,
I went on.
I
made some refinements since
.
So you’re circling wagons with us?

+
It was the best bad idea anyone could come up
with on short notice. We’ve been asked to give up our own keysets as well, so
we have a grace period of about the same length of time as Continuum itself.
After that, we’ll all be fair game, Aram included.

+Which is why,
Aram said, despite being
nowhere to be seen,
I’m on board for this trip as well.

Nowhere to be seen but close by, I thought. Of
course:
the troop transport
. Even Marius wouldn’t be surprised that the
inside of such a thing wouldn’t be casually visible.

+We’re fairly sure Marius and the Prince don’t
know he’s here,
MacHanichy went on.
This particular ruse shouldn’t make
them look too closely, at least not until everyone’s keysets are yanked. So
whatever you’re going to do, do it fast. And for cosm’s sake don’t take him out
of the truck. We outfitted it so it would relay his telemetry back into the
building you’re in, anyway.

+I thought you would have burned your HQ by
now, since the whole thing’s compromised.

+Not when we’re holding assets that could
possibly undo all this, no. “IPS Central can yell at us later”—sounds like
something you’d say, I guess?

Out loud I said, “So you’re caving in too? Just
like that?”

“Unless we get orders to do otherwise, that’s the
plan. Like I said, call it whatever you want.”

I almost regretted how easy it was for us to be
snide to each other in public.

The troop transport backed into the garage and the
door melded shut behind it. I let MacHanichy follow me inside, with Ioné and
Kallhander (who’d heard our entire back-channel discussion) eyeing him as if
waiting for his head to pop off and for snakes to spew out of his neck.

“How does he do it, Aram?”
I said. “How
does he destroy stars?”

Aram—or rather, his projection—sat with the rest of
us in the common area, looking out at what had become nighttime over our city.
For some reason I’d gotten it stuck in my head that it seemed unfair that
Marius would take it for himself without us even having given it an official
name.

“That’s the first of two questions, isn’t it?”
Aram replied. “The other being, did the engine module he and Arsèni were after
actually provide a solution to the entanglement precision problem?”

“I was prepared to ask that in lieu of anyone
else, yes,” Ulli said.

“It all becomes easier to understand when you
realize the two aren’t different questions.”

Somewhere outside I heard a troop transport
grinding by, returning to base. The IPS was doing its best to look like it was
toadying—something that came naturally to it most of the time anyway, I
thought.

“Ulli,” Aram said, “you and Cioran expended a good
deal of effort and money to track down that missing engine module, because you
believed it had been devised as a solution to a problem that had eluded all the
groups whose research you had funded.”

“Well, it wasn’t as if they had no solutions,”
Ulli said. “It was only that the solutions were wholly impractical.”

“Impractical in what sense?”

“Energy expenditure. The amount of energy used by
an entanglement engine is . . . well, it’s nothing trivial, and over
the years we’ve found how to efficiently encapsulate the energy required. A
solar harvester can do the job automatically in fairly short order, and the engine
itself is a self-contained power source. But to overcome the precision problem
requires more energy than can be dealt with in a practical fashion.”

“What about dealing with it in an
impractical
fashion?”

“Well, there is always that, yes. But that makes
it nothing more than a curiosity. What’s the point of having such precision if
the cost of using it is impossibly prohibitive?”

“So what are your options at that point?”

“There’s two. Find a new way to accomplish the
same thing on a lower energy budget, or find an energy source that provides the
equivalent of a sun’s output for over a few million years.”

“All right. Now consider this: why settle for an
equivalent
?”

“What do you mean,” I said.

“Just what I said: why settle for the
equivalent
of that much energy, when you can simply
use
that much energy, period?
Granted, you’d have to sacrifice a star to do it, but what’s a sun here or
there in the name of progress? There’s plenty of them to go around, aren’t
there?”

We let him keep talking for lack of any reply that
came to mind.

“Trungpa’s nova wasn’t a coincidence. It was the
first test run for that particular configuration. The drives by themselves are
not what’s special; any batch of conventional entanglement engines will do the
trick. One about what you had for that that refugee ship you have parked next
door, actually.

“The trick is to have a certain ship configuration
on top of that, something which requires the attention of an expert in such
matters. That was the whole point of those experiments, to determine what sort
of configuration was needed to create the right kind of entanglement field that
would allow the siphoning of energy from a star to break the precision barrier—
and
to keep the ship in question from being turned into a nova itself, or simply
leaping right into the heart of the star, or leaping right into the heart of
another
star, or have stars at both ends conjoin in a mutual chain reaction, or having
a hundred other things go wrong.”

Ulli let out a shaky breath. “That’s part of what
I and others have suspected for some time now: that previous experiments in
this vein were merely attempts to learn how to weaponize the process. This was
the first time it had succeeded . . . depending on your definition of
success, I suppose.”

“Successful enough for what we’re talking about,
yes. Those running the Trungpa experiment had the right idea, but refused to
believe the process
had
to be that destructive. They refused to believe
it required that many orders of magnitude more power.”

“Unfortunately, nature proved them wrong.” Ulli,
never very ruddy to begin with, was looking ashier with each passing sentence.

“So the reason your men—” Here Aram nodded towards
Kallhander, Ioné and MacHanichy in turn. “—couldn’t figure out what was so
special about that engine unit, was that there
wasn’t
anything special
about it. It
had
come from that particular wreck, but the reason
everyone wanted it wasn’t because of how it was built. It was because of the
telemetry recorded by it.”

“Except there was no telemetry in the engine’s
logs,” Kallhander said. “It was either new from the factory . . . or
had been factory-reset. Presumably someone had already extracted what they needed
from it and wiped it clean.”

“Arsèni,” I said. “The salvage man. Marius took
him along because he could look at that stuff and reconstruct some idea of how
to build the rest of the ship. Build the parts that actually
mattered.
”

Aram nodded, bearing a smile I could only describe
as wicked. “He was apparently holding out on Marius, too, which infuriated him
quite a bit. Ars
èni
wasn’t
even sure if it was the right unit, but since Cioran was looking for it as well
and had better intelligence than he did . . . ”

“ . . . all he had to do was wave it
under my nose and see what I thought,” Cioran finished for him. “The markings
on it were a dead giveaway. But only if you knew that.”

“And again, once you have the design, the rest is
easy. There are no laws against getting too close to a sun, no more so than
there are swimming in the ocean without a lifeguard. Who’s fool enough to do
it? Granted, it’s also far more difficult to establish an entanglement lock
when you’re that close to a sun—”

“I got reminded of that the hard way,” I said.

“—but those are technical issues, nothing that
can’t be overcome with a little diligence. The hardest part of all is figuring
out how to channel the resulting energy front, and the only laboratory you can
do that in is space itself. But once you’re free of petty things like treaties
and all the rest, it becomes much easier to use whatever star you need. That
was the original mission’s idea: go out somewhere where they weren’t likely to
cause trouble or be subjected to it, and just blow up one star after another.
Just set up a free-standing manufaxture, which can harvest as much energy as it
needs from a given star, and use it to keep throwing ships at other stars in
the same neighborhood until they figured it out. And if anyone does blunder
into that part of space for who knows what reason, you can say you’re
conducting observations of the cluster. Who cares?”

“The competition,” Ulli said, “that’s who.”

“In a manner of speaking. You know that two
companies chose to pool their resources for that mission, Berletan and
Vynangard Limited. Two very big names in space travel. Normally, they would
just as soon kick each other’s teeth in, but they decided to partner up for the
sake of locking out a third competitor.”

“Exoluft,” I said. “My own former employer, oh irony
alive.”

“You can imagine Exoluft didn’t take that lying
down. So after a little judicious industrial espionage, they arranged two
separate missions. The first was to sabotage the whole project, and then see
what its competitors did in the wake of that. B&V’s response was to arrange
a deeply clandestine salvage mission—”