Originator (15 page)

“I don't know that he is a bad father,” Sandy replied. “I've heard other people say he's great with his daughter. But being the only child of a man like Shin is hard. They've travelled around a lot, and he has a lot of personal security concerns. She hasn't been able to make many friends, I think, because they keep moving, and she's been told not to talk to people about so many things. Like you.”

“That's what Danya said,” Svetlana admitted reluctantly.

“The difference between her and you is that she's all alone, while you have each other. And while I'm sure she's had the usual security training for the child of such a high-level man as her father, she hasn't actually lived it, like you guys have. She's been told there's threats everywhere, and she's probably been told I'm one of them, and therefore you guys are too. And probably that makes her scared. Especially when two of you talk to her together.”

Danya made a wry face. “Yeah. It's just that when I talk to people, girls especially, they usually react better if Svetlana's there.”

“Sure,” Sandy agreed. A lot of people found their relationship very sweet, having rarely seen brothers and sisters so close at this age. “But there's two of you, and she was outnumbered.”

“So you think I should have gone alone?”

“I think you probably shouldn't have gone at all.” With a good-natured
look
. Danya smirked. Adult-sensible or not, he was still a teenage boy on some things. She may as well have told him not to surf on the really big waves. “But if you must, why not let Svetlana do it?”

“Alone?” Another smirk.

“Hey!” said Svetlana.

“Probably talk about shoes,” said Danya. Svetlana slapped his arm.

“She might have done better talking about shoes,” said Sandy. “Then, a few days later, she could talk about hairstyles. And a few days later, boy bands. Then, two weeks later, ‘how's your father?' You see?”

Svetlana grinned triumphantly at Danya. Danya looked thoughtful. “You're such an ignoramus, Danya,” said his sister. “You know so much about everything except people.”

It was unfair, but not without some truth. Danya viewed everything as a technical problem to solve. With people less serious than himself, as children usually were, he didn't always relate.

“Sandy,” said Kiril, “how many people live in China?” Sandy smiled. While Kiril, meanwhile, lived in Kiril-land, a bright and happy place filled with interesting facts that had nothing to do with the topic at hand.

After dinner, Sandy helped them with homework. Danya's grades were okay but predictably depended on whether his teacher engaged him or not. The technicalities of maths and languages did little to excite him, but applying them toward actual results, like in Applied Design, had gotten him good marks, and renewed enthusiasm for the skills that went into it. At history he was best of all, the more brutal and bloodthirsty, the better. People and politics made sense to him, and few of the horrors in history books surprised him.

Svetlana struggled, having missed most of those early years of education Danya had at least received. They'd used some basic education tape on Droze, but it was very limited, and often she got frustrated with how far she was behind. Sandy helped her now with some basic maths, sipping coffee while pointing her way through some algebra on Svetlana's slate, converting sums into simple diagrams with her uplinks that demonstrated the problem in some different way. Sometimes she substituted funny comic-art animals for numbers, eliminating them as subtraction demanded by an equally comic boot up the backside, making Svetlana giggle—she'd discovered the best way
to curb the frustration was to break up the learning with laughter. It sobered her to recall how once, when she was very young in the League, she'd been dismissive of straights and their relative lack of maths and other basic mental skills. Less intelligent, less important, she'd thought. How wrong she'd been.

After homework she apologised and went to her room, with a promise to join them a bit later for a game they'd discovered they liked. In the room, she inserted the memory stick into her personal autistic drive, which established her local construct with no external connectivity whatsoever. It had no memory either, so no intruder or warranted search would find any trace of its use.

The memory stick loaded constructs in Fleet format, heavily encrypted, and Reichardt hadn't bothered to give her a decoder, knowing she could break it in a few seconds. She established the first construct . . . it was a nav map, from a ship's cruise recorder. The date had been not merely hidden but scrubbed, so she had no idea what ship it was, or when it had been recorded, or where. A bit of detective work could solve that, she supposed, sipping tea as she watched the recording play on her double desk screen, to save herself from the mental ache of too much uplink vision in one day. She could hear crew talking, and a voice-print match could find the personnel in question, the dates they'd served, and put the pieces together from there. Also, system features were clearly marked, planets, moons, stations, identifying names also scrubbed, but she knew quite a lot of that stuff from her time League-side in the war. Reichardt knew his career was over if anyone knew he'd shared this, names or no names.

This feed looked like a third-watch ship, twenty-four-hour cycles divided into three eight-hour slots. They were inertial, 31 AU from a star, twenty-three degrees nadir on an insystem heading. There was the usual system chatter, quite a lot of sensor data. Sandy guessed from the feeds it might be a Destroyer; the trajectory didn't suggest the jump engines of a Runner or the stealth of a Ghostie.

Suddenly an entry, a flare of jump energy . . . just 2.3 AU. Loud calls of alarm, scan and nav shouting figures in unison, helm sorting through incoming response trajectories, all-hands flashing red. The incoming vessel was far too close to the star for comfort, on a trajectory taking him across and also insystem . . . and now a second vessel jump-flared in behind, in the almost identical spot the first had arrived.

Only now they both turned, simultaneous flares of jump-energy to shift trajectory as only Talee could, and both disappeared in a flash of power. Leaving stunned Federation bridge crew to analyse the continuing scroll of incoming data, radiation levels, last trajectory, mass and power projections . . . all impossible, of course, for human ships. Listening to the crew gave her a cold chill up the spine, as seasoned Fleet professionals tried to keep the incredulity from their voices and do their jobs.

The ships had come in on different trajectories and arrived at nearly the same moment. So they couldn't have coordinated that manoeuvre beforehand. That had been spontaneous. And therefore impossible, because when you ran into someone else's light-wave you had no idea what they were actually doing at that moment, only what they
were
doing, several seconds or minutes ago, at the light-wave's source. But somehow they just knew, turned together in perfect synchronicity, and left on the same heading on the same trajectory. Unless it was a fluke, both ships turning instinctively to a familiar destination, a safety route. But this trajectory took them toward Federation frontier space, she heard nav telling the newly awoken Captain in terse, disbelieving tones. No Talee ships went that way, everyone was quite sure. Which meant they'd probably known a rock out there in the dark that Fleet did not, some point of mass they could arrive at, reorient, and jump out again some other way.

Unless they'd short-jumped it. In unison. With no preparation. That was impossible too, even preplanning short-jumps were fraught; with the star's fading mass behind them, getting out of hyperspace was hard, and making it stick, harder. Coordinating between two vessels and emerging within the same 100 AU, really hard, even if the Talee were using the tech everyone thought they were.

Sandy looked through two more cruise recordings. Both showed equally amazing things. The pattern, she was beginning to see, was that none of them could be completely explained by technology. All involved Talee ships, always two, appearing to guess each other's actions. Unless one believed in telepathy, and even that would surely be constrained by the laws of light and the fabric of the universe.

What was Reichardt suggesting with this selection of recordings? Some great mystery that Fleet had been puzzling at for . . . decades? Longer? Were Talee simply that predictable to each other? From everything she knew and
had learned, Talee were never regarded as predictable, they were creative thinkers who often applied what seemed to humans risky or daring solutions. But then the magic act always seemed daring to clueless viewers in the audience who did not know how the trick was safely performed.

Talee were not a hive mind, and they had wrapped their minds around human psychology well enough to produce a synthetic copy like Cai. And Cai, squeezed between human wiring and Talee programming and (he confirmed) face-to-face friendships with actual Talee, had somehow turned out sane and reasonable. And was utterly loyal to them, and affectionate . . . although Talee knowing whatever they knew, perhaps they could program him that way. With human emotions. It seemed unlikely. But then, perhaps that was human bias showing, herself not wishing to believe her own mental processes were so easily manipulable by some alien species.

She sat and stared at a window, thinking as hard as she'd ever thought about anything. On an uplink she was barely aware she was accessing, she could see and hear the kids playing their strategy game in the living room, with shouts, accusations, and laughter. When she looked again, another hour had passed. If she was going to try to model this, she needed more data. She didn't see how she was going to get it though; Reichardt had gone to enough risk as it was.

Unexpectedly, she found herself looking at an image of a medieval castle. It was under assault, by swarms of armoured men, arrows pelting the walls, more arrows flying back . . . Sandy blinked and backed off her connections to view them more broadly. The kids! It was their strategy game, why was she suddenly seeing it on internal visual? Well, she was uplinked to the living room, and that . . . shouldn't have been giving her a close-up feed? Unless . . .

“Oh shit!” she said, and leaped from her chair.

She came quickly down the stairs, then slowed herself. No need to create unnecessary alarm. Best to see what was going on first.

They'd set it up on the coffee table, just a marker the house network could fix on. The rest was displayed on synchronised AR glasses, invisible to anyone else . . . but patched into the house network, Sandy could see the projection very clearly. A large old castle, under attack, the scene of ferocious battle. Svetlana was directing attacking forces, moving siege engines, directing archer fire, pushing covered battering rams into position with
flicks of her finger. And Kiril was fighting back, with help from Danya, who suggested good ideas to him while Svetlana alternately protested or made evil threats.

“Sandy, Danya's helping him too much!” Svetlana exclaimed, as one of her ladders up a wall was pushed off by Kiril's forces. Armoured men leaped clear and fell to their deaths. If Sandy adjusted her volume, she could hear their screams, above the roar and clang of voices and steel. “It's two against one!”

“He's not helping me,” Kiril retorted. “You're just losing!” Flaming oil ignited a siege engine.

“Hey!” said Svetlana. “Danya, how did he know to position his oil there?”

“Everyone knows that,” said Kiril. Danya tried to look innocent and spoiled it by grinning. Svetlana fumed and schemed, circling the table to check her flanks, while Danya whispered in Kiril's ear once more. Sandy wondered if wishing they played a less violent game made her the universe's biggest hypocrite. To the consternation of some in the Education Department, growing up traumatised in a warzone had not turned her little darlings into trembling pacifist bunnies.

As Sandy had suspected, the image on her internal vision matched exactly Kiril's viewpoint. She quietly hacked his AR glasses feed . . . and yes, there it was, a precise match. But the glasses were not sending data; the kids always ran them silent, even at home, after being taught the dangers of broadcasting their locations on the net. The only one sending data was Kiril himself.

“Kiri,” Sandy said innocently, “do you have any idea that your uplinks are sending data right now?”

Kiril blinked up at her. “No. They are?”

“Yes. In fact, they're accessing nearby networks.”

“Not outside the house?” Danya asked in alarm.

“No no,” Sandy said mildly. “Inside.” She tapped by her ear.

Danya stared. “He's accessing
your
uplinks?”

“Yep. He does know me best, I guess it's natural enough.” She kept the worry from her voice with effort. Scaring them would achieve nothing.

Svetlana took advantage of the distraction to send a hundred troops rushing to reoccupy a pair of abandoned siege engines from a previous, failed assault. Danya paused the game.

“Hey!”

“Shush, Svet,” said Danya. Svetlana pouted. “That's not supposed to happen. His uplinks are supposed to be dormant.”

“I think we'd better take him in. Kiri, you want to go visit Dr Kishore?”

Kiril enjoyed FSA medical far more than anyone else did. He sat on the bed with the little monitor band on his head, amidst small receptor paddles that captured whatever activity his uplink was generating. Dr Kishore watched his monitors, and talked with other doctors in quiet, intense conversations, while Sandy sat on Kiril's bed, Danya sitting on a chair alongside, AR glasses on and watching the little projection construct Sandy had set up using the hospital room's systems.

“Try to turn the lower part yellow, Kiri,” said Sandy. “Can you do that?” Sure enough, the little 3D puzzle changed colour, several of the lower bars and junctions turning yellow. “Good, now you see that connection node on the right? Can you fold the pattern across, using that node as a hinge?”