"Really," Pheylan said. He hadn't intended to bring this up quite yet, but she'd pushed him into it. "And your part, I take it, is to determine whether or not the Zhirrzh did more to me in those three weeks than just lock me up in a giant test tube?"
Her expression didn't even twitch. "What do you mean?"
"I mean the reason you're here is to see if I've been brainwashed," he said bluntly. "And the reasonI'm here is so that if I suddenly go crazy, it'll be in some nice, safe, out-of-the-way place where I can't do any serious damage."
Pemberton cocked an eyebrow. "That's an interesting allegation," she said. "A bit on the paranoid side, though."
"As the old saying goes, even paranoids have enemies," Pheylan countered. "I'd like an honest answer, Colonel."
For a long moment she studied his face. "All right," she said. "You're right. So what now?"
So the unpleasant conclusion he'd come to in those dark predawn hours had been right, after all. He'd hoped he'd been wrong. "I guess you set up your hoops and I jump through them," he told her. "Just show me what I have to do to prove I'm not dangerous."
Pemberton pursed her lips. "Unfortunately, Commander, it's not quite that easy," she said. "Delving the human mind is tricky enough when dealing with well-established, well-documented human psychoses. The possible indoctrination by an alien species is something well outside standard medical experience."
Pheylan stared at her, a sinking feeling forming in his stomach. "Are you saying," he said slowly, "that thereis no way for me to prove I haven't been brainwashed?"
"I didn't say that," Pemberton cautioned. "I've studied your file carefully, and I'm sure-"
There was a quiet beep from the wall chatterbox beside the door, and the display came on to reveal Lieutenant Williams. "Colonel Pemberton?"
"Yes, Lieutenant, what is it?" Pemberton asked, stepping over in front of the chatterbox.
"Colonel, we've just made audio contact with a Moray-class battle fueler that meshed into the system about half an hour ago," Williams reported. "The pilot won't give us either his assignment-authorization number or his ship's ID code. All he'll say is that he has to speak with Commander Cavanagh."
"Really," Pemberton said, throwing a frown at Pheylan. "Is he armed?"
"Only minimally," Williams said. "A pair of Melara-Vickers shredder-guns and five medium-range Shrike XV missiles. Nothing we can't handle if we have to."
"Does this pilot at least have a name?"
"He says his name's Max," Williams said dryly. "That's all he'll give me. It's sort of like being hailed by a pet dog."
"I'm glad you find this amusing." Pemberton looked at Pheylan. "Feel free at any time to jump into this conversation, Commander."
Pheylan cleared his throat. "I think there's a good chance that that's the fueler my brother Aric used to come looking for me."
"And Max?"
"Actually, the lieutenant's comment wasn't that far off," Pheylan said. "Max is a parasentient computer."
"I thought parasentients were always supposed to identify themselves."
"CavTronics parasentients are programmed only to do so in response to a direct question," Pheylan explained. "My father's always hated the way other companies' parasentients seemed so smug about themselves."
"I see," Pemberton said. "So what's this all about?"
"I don't know," Pheylan admitted. "At the time I left Edo, Aric was planning to take the fueler and go look for our father."
"Maybe he found him," Williams suggested. "Could be that the two of them are aboard and just letting Max do the talking."
"Let's find out," Pemberton said, gesturing Pheylan over to the chatterbox. "Pipe the comm channel down here."
"Yes, Colonel." The display image split, one half still showing Williams, the other blank to signify an audio-only signal. "Channel open."
Pheylan stepped up to the chatterbox. "Max?"
"Yes, Commander Cavanagh," Max's smooth electronic voice came promptly. "A pleasure to speak with you again. Are you well?"
"I'm fine, Max," Pheylan said. "Are you alone?"
"Yes."
So much for his brother and father's being aboard. "What are you doing here?"
"I would prefer to discuss the matter privately, as it pertains to personal family matters," Max said. "Would it be permissible for me to land?"
Pheylan looked at Pemberton. "Colonel?"
She was gazing back at him. A thoughtful, measuring gaze. "You have a very interesting family, Commander Cavanagh," she said. "One might almost say notorious. Go ahead and let him land. I'm rather curious to hear what they've done now."
"...and so I concluded it would be best to come here and speak with you," Max said. "I hope I have not acted improperly."
"No, not at all," Pheylan assured him, rubbing at the bridge of his nose and trying to sift through this mess. "And you're absolutely sure this Mr. X you mentioned was really NorCoord Military Intelligence?"
"I examined the ID card closely," Max said, "and I have a visual copy in my files for comparison. It was genuine."
Pemberton shifted her position on one of the fueler control room's jump seats. "Yet you won't tell us his name."
"As I stated before, Colonel Pemberton, he made it very clear that I was not to tell anyone else about him," Max said. "I'm sorry."
And whoever he was, he was very interested in finding Aric and their father. What could NorCoord Intelligence possibly want with them? "Could this be some kind of delayed fallout from their borrowing of Masefield's Copperhead unit?"
"I don't know, Commander," Max said. "Legally, though, my understanding is that the inquiry board's decision should have ended the matter. Also, if the borrowing, as you put it, of the Copperheads was the issue, shouldn't this fueler have been impounded as evidence?"
"Probably," Pheylan conceded. "Legal minutiae aren't my specialty. And you have no idea where Aric might have gone?"
"Not with any significant probability," Max said. "I assume he had already left Edo from the fact that I was unable to locate a register for his phone after I spoke with the Intelligence officer. I unfortunately have no data on when precisely he departed."
"The Edo spaceports have listings for all traffic in or out of the planet," Pheylan said. "Did you think to contact them?"
"Yes," Max said. "However, I was able to obtain only the public list, which includes commercial, merchant, and passenger transport. Diplomatic and military craft are on a separate list, which was not available to me."
"Of course," Pheylan murmured, an unpleasant feeling tugging at him. First their father; now Aric. Where in the Commonwealth had the two of them disappeared to? And could the Peacekeepers be involved? "Well, let's start there and-"
"Shh!" Pemberton hissed.
She was staring into space, her head cocked slightly to one side, an expression of intense concentration on her face. "What is it?" Pheylan whispered.
"Didn't you hear it?" Pemberton whispered back. "Like a small explosion."
"No," Pheylan said, feeling his heartbeat pick up its pace. "Max?"
"I've activated my external microphones," the computer said. "Analysis of reverberations is inconclusive."
And then, audible even in the interior of the fueler, Pheylan heard it. A cracking noise, crisp and remote, sounding like a distant thunderclap.
Except that there hadn't been any thunderclouds in the sky when he and Pemberton had entered the fueler twenty minutes earlier. He looked at Pemberton... and on the colonel's face he could see the reflection of his own sudden thought.
The Zhirrzh had returned.
They were out of the fueler and into the lift cage in ten seconds flat. "Get us down, Max," Pheylan ordered, shading his eyes as he scanned the sky. But he could see nothing up there except scattered clouds. "Can you tell where that came from?"
"Inconclusive," Max said as the lift cage started down. "But the highest probability is that the sound originated in or near the building complex."
"He's right," Pemberton said grimly, pointing toward the Zhirrzh structure. "Look-you can see smoke rising from the far side of the closest hexagon."
Pheylan nodded. "I see it. Max, are you picking up any spacecraft? Or aircraft of any sort?"
"None at all," Max assured him.
From the direction of the complex came another sharp crack, this one dragging out into almost a ripping sound, with another puff of the smoke drifting up to swirl away in the breeze. "Then it must be a booby trap," Pemberton concluded.
They reached the ground and headed at a dead run toward the Zhirrzh complex. Between the thuds of their footsteps, Pheylan could hear excited voices coming from the complex, and he braced himself for the gruesome sight of broken, bleeding bodies. He reached the first hexagon, rounded it-
And faltered to a confused stop. There in front of him, as he'd expected and feared, a meter-wide, jagged-edged gap had been blown into the smooth ceramic of the wall. Grouped around the hole were piles of equipment and a dozen or more of Williams's engineers and techs.
But none of them were lying bloodied on the ground or gazing at the hole in horror or bewilderment. Instead they were all on their feet, chattering enthusiastically to each other. And smiling.
Beside Pheylan, Pemberton skidded to a halt of her own. "What the hell?" she panted. "Williams?"
Williams's head popped into sight; he'd been kneeling beside one of the equipment piles. "Hey-Colonel," he called, snagging a rag and wiping his hands as he jogged over to them. His own grin was even wider than those of his techs. "Break out the champagne, Colonel. We did it."
"Did what?" Pemberton demanded.
"What do you think?" Williams said triumphantly, waving his rag toward the hole. "We found a way to break up Zhirrzh ceramic."
"It's real tricky stuff," Williams said as Pheylan and Pemberton joined the techs grouped around the ring of equipment by the wall. "Incredibly tough, incredibly resilient, able to handle kinetic impacts and shock waves and even flash-heating from lasers-"
"We know all that," Pheylan interrupted. The memory of those invulnerable hulls, and of the men and women from theKinshasa who had died because of them... "Just tell us what you did."
"Well, where brute force fails, you turn to chemistry," Williams said. "We'd already used a meson microscope to map out the atomic structure, so it was mostly a matter of coming up with some kind of catalytic glop that would displace enough atoms to put a strain on critical molecular bonds." He gestured to a pair of tanks with hoses attached to stopcocks. "The stuff doesn't do metal a whole lot of good, either, but fortunately you can make it up as a binary-half the chemical in one bottle, the other half in the other, and they combine on contact to make the catalyst."
"And that's it?" Pemberton asked. "You spray the stuff on the wall and it just falls apart?"
"No, actually, that's just the first step," Williams told her. "The catalyst starts the ceramic crystallizing along irregular planes, which is what we want. But it's only a temporary effect, and as soon as the energy from the reaction has dissipated, the molecular bonds reform. Usually right around the intruding molecules of the catalyst, incidentally, which maybe helps explain why shrapnel attacks don't seem to do much good against the stuff. So before that can happen, you have to give it a good, sharp rap."
"With what, an explosive?" Pemberton frowned, looking around them.
"Oddly enough, no," Williams said, waving at a hornlike metal tube connected to a bank of electronics cabinets. "It turns out that the most effective kick is a fast, precisely modulated series of ultrasonic blasts. In creating those crystallization planes, the catalyst apparently sets up a whole new set of natural frequencies in the ceramic, and when you kick all those resonances in the right order in rapid succession, the stuff just gives up.Then it falls apart."
Pemberton shook her head. "Amazing," she said. "Congratulations are indeed in order, Lieutenant."
"I see just two small flies in the ointment," Pheylan said. "Fly number one: how do you know this same technique will work against Zhirrzh warship hulls? You said yourself the ceramics weren't exactly the same."
"We'll have to check that, of course," Williams agreed. "But I've got a copy of the full analysis Command made of the hull fragments they found at the site of theJutland battle. Now that we know the approach to take, it ought to be pretty straightforward to figure out how to modify the catalyst to handle the other ceramic."
"Okay," Pheylan said. "Then fly number two: how in the world do you expect to use ultrasonics against a Zhirrzh warship in the vacuum of space?"
"That one's going to be trickier," Williams admitted. "I don't know yet. I've got a couple of ideas; unfortunately, it's going to take a lot more computing power than we've got here to sort them through. We'll have to send all the data back to Edo and let them run with it."
"Maybe not," Pheylan said, an idea slowly beginning to form in the back of his mind. "How much computing power do you need?"
"Oh, we'd need at least-" Williams broke off, his eyes widening slightly. "That's right, you've got a parasentient out there, don't you? What type and specs?"
"He's a CavTronics Carthage-Ivy-Gamma," Pheylan said, searching his memory. "With Class Seven decision-making capabilities, I think, and eight-point-something megamyncs of compressed memory."
"That should do it," Williams said, suddenly looking doubtful. "I don't know, though-we're talking a civilian computer here. Command probably wouldn't like us loading military secrets onto it."
"On the other hand, if the technique works, it won't be a military secret for long," Pemberton pointed out. "We'llwant the technique to be as widely disseminated as possible."
"Point," Williams conceded, still looking doubtful. But the chance to test his theories was apparently too strong to resist. "All right," he said, wiping his hands again and pulling a pair of cards from a recorder. "Why don't you go to your fueler and get these loaded up. I'll go to the ship and get the hull stats and join you."
"I'll come with you, Commander," Pemberton added as Pheylan took the cards. "I'm rather curious to see how this works out."
Pheylan threw her a sideways look. Could she suspect what he was thinking? But there was no hint of any suspicion in her expression. "Of course, Colonel," he told her. "Come on."
16
Commander Cavanagh and Colonel Pemberton reappear around the corner of the building 16.85 minutes after their departure from camera range, accompanied by an officer I identify as Lieutenant Williams. I magnify the image, studying their faces and comparing with my human-expression algorithms. While there is a moderate degree of tension in all three expressions, I judge the level to be far below that which should be engendered by the devastation of an enemy trap. I also note that Commander Cavanagh holds two cards in his left hand.