Adiamante (26 page)

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Authors: Jr. L. E. Modesitt

BOOK: Adiamante
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“It's an impressive vessel, as I said before.” I was impressed in spite of my secondhand recollection—pulled through the databases at Parwon—of the battlecruisers of the Rebuilt Hegemony. The old Hegemony battlecruisers had carried a few more destructive tools, but the
Gibson
had more than enough gadgetry and power to turn the country around far too large a number of locials into black glass or the equivalent.
“We hoped you would find it so.” She stopped at a silver-rimmed hatch, and pulsed a signal, coded, while sending a message on the shipnet. “There's one last stop we need to make before the demonstration.” The hatch slid open, and she gestured for me to enter.
The room was large for a starship—say half the size of my expansive Coordinator's office—and it held one console with an array of screens I couldn't see centered on one seat. Three empty blue chairs faced the console. A hawk-nosed officer with eight-pointed stars on the collars of his green uniform tunic sat behind the console. His faded and piercing blue eyes followed me into the office/command center.
“This is Fleet Commander Gibreal.”
The hawk-nosed commander nodded, but said nothing. He didn't smell either, except of unbridled power.
The incipient energy fluxes around the walls indicated that the ship's systems were focused on and around me—quite a compliment, that they thought I could be that dangerous.
“I'm pleased to meet you, Commander.” I didn't attempt to infiltrate the ship's system through the netlinks I'd unraveled. First, it wouldn't do any good, since someone, presumably the weapons officer, had a hard lock on the surveillance and power. Second, it would only make things worse.
“Sit down,” Gibreal said, brushing aside my pleasantries, and pointing to the chair on the right side of the
console. “I've read this
Paradigms
document. How can you make something like this work?”
“You can't,” I explained as I sat. “There's no way to
make
any society work over the long run.”
Kemra sat in the left-hand chair and nodded, ever so slightly, but Gibreal just frowned.
“Every society is based on trust and self-restraint. We encourage both, and we remove those who cannot or will not exercise them.”
“Power-based, then …” muttered Gibreal, his eyes straying to the console, then snapping back to focus on me.
“Not exactly. We also penalize the use of power, even for good. Because I've been Coordinator, I'll spend years at relatively hard labor, working off that debt.”
The sensors trained on me were trying to read and determine my degree of truthfulness. I'd already resolved to be truthful, but I had the feeling that truthfulness would only be read as deception if the results didn't agree with the cybs' preconceived perceptions.
“And you accepted the position? Why?”
“Someone had to, and the cost to me was somewhat less than others.”
“I've read those principles. They're all so general. How can you possibly make them work? You talk of forbearance, but everyone has a different idea of what forbearing is. And trust? How can you define it or codify it?” Gibreal watched me like the hawk he resembled.
“We don't. When you have to codify values, you've lost them. Every written definition creates more exceptions, more chance of mistrust, and more opportunities for the untrustworthy to hide behind words and legalisms. Some historians theorize that the SoshWars were caused by the ancient clan of lawyers.”
“Too many legalities aren't good,” Gibreal admitted in a mild tone, “but to blame unrest and warfare on lawyers
or programmers—they also codify … that seems excessive.”
Kemra's eyes flicked from one of us to the other, and back again.
“I wasn't alive back then,” I conceded, “but I don't think so. If a society agrees that theft is not acceptable, then theft is not acceptable. Now, let's say that an apple falls from my neighbor's tree and rolls into my yard. Is it theft if I eat it? Probably not, and no sensible individual would argue about a single apple or even a few. When a lawyer writes down and codifies theft as not including fallen apples that roll away, then that creates the opportunity for some untrustworthy individual to shake apples from a tree onto a slanting ramp that carries them off the property. Then that untrustworthy individual can claim he did not steal the apples—not according to the law.”
“No one would do that.”
I just smiled. “Before the SoshWars, people did exactly that sort of thing.”
Gibreal stared at me, almost unbelievingly. It was an expression I was getting to know too well. Then he asked, “What can you do to stop us?”
“We hope that you'll see that there's no point in attacking Old Earth. We don't threaten you, and we haven't been interested in territorial expansion for a long time.”
“That's not the question.”
“No. It's not. The question is whether you can get away with revenge for being thwarted millennia ago.”
Kemra's mouth opened fractionally, then shut, but I'd had to follow intuition. Gibreal was too sharp for my second-rate logic.
“If you would follow Subcommander Kemra to the observation room, our demonstration is about to begin.” Gibreal stood as if I hadn't spoken at all. He hadn't really heard a word. All he'd wanted to do was to evaluate me as though I were his personal opponent.
The observation room was just that—a small room with three wall-sized screens and a dozen black padded chairs. The heavy shielding was clearly designed to keep cybs or me or both from interfering with operations. If I'd wished, I could have created some difficulties, but not before the energy weapons in the shield emplacements had made even more difficulty for me.
Luna now filled two-thirds of the center screen, and a growing sense of horror bubbled up within me as I settled into one of the center chairs. Kemra sat two chairs away. No one else entered the room.
“Five minutes until commencement of demonstration. Five minutes,” came the human voice of MYL-ERA from the hidden speakers.
“What are you planning?”
“No more than others have done,” Kemra answered crisply. “No more than you.”
How did one answer that?
“Demonstration commencing in three minutes. Three minutes.”
Luna had ceased to grow in the screen and now filled almost the entire focus, blotched in white and black, the terminator splitting the moon's image into a third of darkness and two-thirds of silvered light.
The cybnet whined and strained, and a prickling burning feeling ran through the cyb-limbo that was neither underweb nor overspace, yet which bore some elements of each. The power concentrations that poured from the linked fusactors into the magbottle focus were already twisting space itself, and sending harmonics through the overweb.
For millennia the wave of disruption that was building would cross the galaxy, puzzling future astronomers—those that captured or recorded it. More than a few demis—me included—would have splitting headaches before long.
I watched the screen, as I had been directed, although I could have caught and held the images in my mind as easily.
“Demonstration commencing.”
Still, the energies built in the magbottle for a moment longer before they lashed outward, downward at the satellite below.
For long instants, nothing happened.
For minutes, nothing occurred. Nothing. One untutored in physics or deep-space might assume that, when enough energy to power half a mid-tech planet poured from an adiamante hull toward the moon, some visible sign might immediately appear. That assumption would be wrong.
The first sign was mist rising from the moon, though it was not mist, but vaporized rock and associated gases. I rubbed my forehead, trying to handle the distortions created by that much power, trying to shield my mind against the knives of power and the implications for the Construct.
Even the
Gibson
shuddered the entire length of its klicks-long hull as the energy poured forth … and forth.
Kemra's eyes flicked from me to the screen and back again.
That mist of vaporized rock and metal, lunar north of the ancient linear induction accelerator, widened and rose and shimmered.
The
Gibson
shivered, wrenching underweb and overspace, overloading low nets and shutting down the internal public net.
A smoother oval began to appear, ringed in darker material, peering through the fog of vaporized rock, growing larger with each gigajoule per nanosecond.
After a quarter hour, a molten eye peered from old Luna.
How wide was the new sea, the new crater? Two hundred
klicks? Three hundred? It didn't matter. The baleful reddish glint to the polished surface would give the moon the look of a bloodshot eye staring down at Old Earth—at least when the new crater hardened and was fully sunlit.
The old god Lyr didn't operate on Luna, where the seas were dust and rock, but was a god of Old Earth, as my mother had said.
I closed my eyes for a time, not that there was much else I could do in response to the threat and the incredible waste of power used to deliver it. Knives stabbed through my skull.
When I reopened my eyes, still watering, the diminishing disc of the moon indicated that the
Gibson
was rejoining the rest of the fleet off Old Earth—the next target for the massive particle beams and the still-unused de-energizers that had to lurk within the adiamante hull that surrounded me like a niellen cage.
I studied the screen for a moment longer, taking in the polished orb-within-an-orb that was clearly meant as a reminder that the power of the cybs was not to be disregarded.
It might prove a different reminder, one I could do without. The cybs' reliance on physical might was a problem, a problem bigger than it had ever been for our ancestors. It would be difficult—if not impossible—to reason with hate-fired anger supported by a faith in the idea that physical force able to rearrange the appearance of a solar system was the best manner in which to resolve all problems.
I tried not to take too deep a breath, knowing that Kemra would misunderstand, but the power of both the cybs' hatred and that concentrated particle beam had reverberated through me—and both had hurt. My head and tense muscles ached, and I sat in the chair for a time, wrestling with my self-system, and gathering myself together.
Finally, I stood.
“I trust that the demonstration is concluded.” My head still hurt, and I massaged my temples with the fingers of my right hand.
“That was the demonstration,” Kemra said.
I wanted to say something, but what could I say at that moment? So I asked, “Now what?”
“That's all.” Her voice held a hint of disappointment, as though I should have said or done something, but I didn't, and she touched the access plate.
The door opened.
Gorum was waiting outside the observation room, smiling. “What did you think of our little demonstration, Coordinator?”
I pushed back simultaneous waves of anger and sadness and met his eyes full. “It was an impressive display of brute power, Commander. I doubt the like of it has been attempted or seen since the high point of the Rebuilt Hegemony.”
“It would seem the Coordinator was impressed,” Gorum noted to Kemra.
“When the Rebuilt Hegemony did something similar at Al-Moratoros,” I added, keeping my voice dispassionate, “it was the beginning of its end.”
“That's an odd sort of threat, if it's a threat,” said Gorum.
“It's an observation. We don't threaten. We can't threaten.” That was as far as I could push it, and I looked at Kemra. “If you would be so kind as to return me to Deseret …”
“ … got to him finally,” gloated Gorum on the shipnet. “He admitted they don't have the power to threaten.”
“He didn't mean it that way, Commander.” Kemra's pulsed response was pushed away before she finished.
I turned in the direction of lock one, and Kemra bounded to catch me. We continued aft for several moments
before she spoke. “Why didn't you tell him what you said wasn't an admission of weakness?”
“Because that would have made it a threat.”
“I don't understand you demis. A warship boils a hole in your moon, and you say nothing. Why not?”
“As I told Gorum, we once boiled away the entire surface of another world's moon. What could I say? That it was wrong? That we're still paying for it? That any people who does that will eventually pay for it?”
“You just threatened. Why didn't you tell Gorum that?”
“It isn't a threat, and I didn't tell him, and he didn't hear what I said,” I answered tiredly. “Remember Viedras and the prairie dogs? I told Viedras to stop. It wasn't a threat; it was an observation.”

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