Fool's War (12 page)

Dobbs pulled back from the hatch and shook her head. “I already tried. Way too cramped for me. You’ve got it filled to the gills.”

Yerusha was, apparently, in no mood to let things slide. “If…”

“Wishes were fishes we’d all cast nets,” said Dobbs brightly. “Or so I’ve heard.” She put her head to one side and twiddled her thumbs pensively. “Although I don’t see why, such a mess to clean them and the smell, phew!” She coughed violently and waved her hand in front of her face.

Yerusha stared at her, possibly trying to work out all the references. As dedicated a Freer as she seemed to be, she had probably never even seen a live fish, let alone caught one.

It did, however, apparently make her forget what she was about to say.

Lipinski was also staring. “Dobbs,” he said quietly. “You’re in my light.”

She skipped backwards until her shadow fell across the unoccupied floor and bowed. She gave Yerusha a wink and an “oh well,” gesture and took her leave. As the hatch closed behind her, she willed them both to use their brains and not their tempers. They both must know that with only three hours until they made the jump, this was a dangerous fault to be left uncorrected. As such, it was no place for her clowning.

Lipinski’s hard voice echoed in her ears, This ship was in order until we got underway. This should not be happening!

You’re right, Houston, but it is, which leaves a big, burning question.

The sound of a hatch opening drifted up the shaft. Dobbs looked down automatically, and saw Ianiai’s black-haired head and stuck-out ears. She stuck her fingers into her teeth and whistled shrilly.

The sound echoed all around the shaft. Ianiai looked up and Dobbs leaned over the rail, waving. He made a gesture which, from the scowl on his face, wasn’t meant to be polite, and swung himself over the railing onto the support staples. He hitched his belt to the rail for safety.

Uh-huh, Dobbs trotted down the stairs to the galley. The off-shift reliefs are on and in foul moods. This is not a good sign.

 
The galley deck was quiet. Following the entire corridor around, Dobbs couldn’t hear any of the exercise equipment working, or any voices from the recreation rooms. She poked her head into the kitchen. Cheney was gulping a coffee beside the urn. The only other person in evidence was Dalziel, the steward, watching a cleaning drone scour the floor.

Dobbs ducked back out into the hallway. She briefly considered taking herself down to engineering to see if she could wheedle any information out of Al Shei but decided against it. One of the tricks a Fool had to learn was when to leave the crew completely alone.

I’ll bet my master’s rank that now is one of those.

 
She took herself back up the stairs to the berthing deck.

However, she thought as she entered her cabin, without accurate information, I can’t do my job either.

 
She locked the hatch and set the entrance light to red, indicating she did not want to be disturbed. She unfolded her desk from the wall and laid her first two fingers on the activation key. The board switched on, setting the keys glowing.

Dobbs sat down in the real chair and pulled her pen out of her belt pocket. She tapped it against her palm while she eyed the board thoughtfully.

Prepare to accept search and recovery program,
she wrote across the main board.

Ready
, responded the desk.

She plugged her pen into the desk’s socket. After a long moment, the desk wrote
Program loaded.

Dobbs retrieved her pen.

Is Al Shei’s pen active in the ship’s system? she wrote.

Active.

 
Timing is everything,
thought Dobbs. She wrote. Program D1 procedure name Tunnelling. Locate and copy data on search target.

 
She stuck her pen back into the socket and sat back.

If Al Shei had known what Dobbs was doing, she probably could have shoved the Fool out the airlock without any of the crew blinking. Some of them probably would even have helped. Schyler, for instance.

All computer systems had security measures that prevented someone from tapping into an active pen from a remote terminal. The Fool’s Guild had invested years in designing a search-and-recover program that could work its way around most of them. Dobbs was a couple of updates behind, but since the Pasadena under Al Shei was noted for quiet runs and a trustworthy crew, she didn’t expect to have any trouble getting through.

Then, the desk beeped.

Unable to complete request.

 
Dobbs straightened up. She pulled the desk’s pen out of its holder and wrote Explain.

Inadequate configured pathway space.

 
“Inadequate!” She swore. “Lipinski, I was kidding about the place being full…”

Then the desk wrote, Request complete. Information loaded into desk.

Dobbs sat very still for a long moment. Then she wrote, Load D1 security program and seal desk.

 
Program loaded and desk secured.

 
Dobbs pulled her pen out of the socket and shut the desk down. She folded it away and sat for a long time, doing nothing but stare at the walls.

Now, what,
she thought, over and over,
could have caused that?

 
After the better part of an hour, she still did not like any of her answers.

This was the moment. Al Shei’s heartbeat quickened even though she was doing nothing but sitting at her station. This was where it all came together, the planning and the scrambling and the inspection and the programming. No matter how well travelled their route, this was where they left known space behind and went on alone, powered and protected by the tiny world that they had made for themselves.

As always, she was torn between an almost childish excitement, and a bitter-sweet memory. Last night, in Asil’s journal he had said, “I am having Muhammad point out all your stars to me, Beloved, and when he goes to bed, I shall tell each one to remind you of my love.”

 
His voice ran strong through her mind, even as she heard Yerusha’s voice from the intercom. “Four minutes to jump.”

 
“Four minutes,” Al Shei answered. Yerusha and Lipinski had managed to fix the timing fault without killing each other. Al Shei decided to take that as a good sign for the rest of the jump.

The clock on the board turned over the seconds. She checked the pressure monitors on the pipes carrying the reaction mass from the tanks to the accumulators.

The
Pasadena
ran on magnetically confined fusion. Her mind’s eye stripped away the shell of metal and ceramic between her and the tanks and she saw the stream of boron 11 pellets rattling down the pipes into the midline injector where the electric arc fired, vaporizing the pellets and letting the electrostatic fields shoot the ionized gas through the gleaming gasdynamic mirror chamber. An upstream injector fired a thin stream of precious, and expensive, anti-protons down the long axis of the mirror chambers, providing energy and muons to spark the fusion reaction. The plasma ignited into a bright fury.

Resit once asked her what it was like to think in equations. Al Shei had looked at her blankly. Equations weren’t what you thought in. Equations were what you spouted off for the professors and the inspectors. She thought in pictures, in video sequences. If you did
this
and
this
and
this
, then
that
would happen.

The heated gas, already supersonic, speeded up as it expanded into the traveling-wavencoils that compressed the plasma in an annular magnetic field which was passed from coil to coil down the length of the traveling-wave tube.

Ancient physical principles applied over and again. Energy built and built until it had to be used up or thrown off.

“Plasma flow redirected,” reported Javerri, just as Al Shei’s board traced a new route for the burning river.

Now the plasma would not be vented out the
Pasadena
’s aft nozzle to push the ship forward. It would run upstream into the homopolar accumulators. It took a massive push to kick the ship into fast-time space, and another to bring it back into real-time. The accumulators stored up the power to make that jump.

“Jump threshold in five… four… three… ”

“Torch out,” called Ianiai.

“
Bismillahir
,” murmured Al Shei. In the name of Allah. In her imagination, she saw the bright blue flame beneath her feet wink out.

“… Two…
 
One. Now.”

Al Shei’s hand came down on her station’s central key. A barely perceptible vibration

filtered through the deckplates. Her imagination supplied an accompanying rumble.

The accumulators fired. A small weight pressed against the center of her chest like a balled-up fist, and it was over. Now light was straining to catch up with them. Now the view screens showed nothing but the curving silver refraction wall that would stay in place until they got where they were going.

Despite an unfamiliar impatience scratching at her insides, Al Shei checked her boards carefully. “Station One reports all normal and in synch,” she called out. Once she had satisfactory replies from her crew, she undid her straps and stood up.

 
“Relief!” Ianiai gave her his mocking salute. In no mood to banter, Al Shei just gave him a warning glare as he took her seat. Her silence brought him up short like no verbal warning would have and he immediately turned his attention to the boards.

Al Shei started up the stairs toward the data hold. Footsteps sounded above her. Schyler was descending from the bridge. He gave her a small wave, but he was too far away for her to see his face. She could not, however, picture a smile on it.

He waited for her one step above the hatchway.

“The moment of truth?” he inquired, attempting to sound light-hearted. His tone fell very flat.

“I doubt it.” She stepped through the hatchway into the corridor. “Not the way Lipinski works.”

“He’s glacial, I’ll admit it. Slow but nothing can get out of his way.”

“We hope.” Al Shei palmed the hatch reader for the comm center.

Lipinski was on his own in the center. If Al Shei had set her relief shaking with a quiet glance, Lipinski had probably set his running with a thunderous shout.

Whatever had happened, there was only Lipinski bent over the work table with a needle-thin tracer in his hand, talking to whatever didn’t move away, as usual.

“Could’ve managed to burn just a little more off and made it really hard for me, couldn’t you? Why do half…”

“Is there anything there at all?” Al Shei came to stand by the table.

Lipinski lifted the tracer away from the ruined surface of the wafer stack. “Not a lot.”

 
Lipinski hadn’t been exaggerating. The stack’s delicate etchings were marred by wide, black patches that made Al Shei think she should be smelling charcoal.

“So, what can you tell us?” She leaned both forearms on the bench and folded her hands.

“It’s not a regular stack.” Lipinski laid the tracer back in its pocket in the workbench drawer. “It’s for storing binary data.”

“Binary?” Al Shei felt her eyebrows arch.

Lipinski nodded. “Straight ones and zeros. Yes and no. On and off. Very blunt. If you know what you’re doing, you can work some pretty fancy programs and data storage with it, but if you try to let any binary programming loose into a regular fuzzy logic stack, you’ve got the proverbial bull in a china shop. Fuzzy boards work with gradations and percentages. Binary data is all or nothing.”

“Can you tell what happened here?” asked Schyler quietly. He had his hands jammed in his pockets. From the bulges in the fabric, Al Shei guess he also had them balled into fists.

Lipinski looked at the wall as if taking its measure and then looked back at Schyler. “Tully stored some binary data, transferred it somewhere, blanked the stack and then burned it with a pin laser.” He pushed the bench drawer shut. “Then, my guess is, he expected me to take them to recycling. When I didn’t, he apparently came looking for them.” He jerked his chin toward Schyler. “Thanks to Watch’s sticking to the rules like he’s been vacuum welded, Tully did not get them.”

Al Shei’s jaw began to work itself slowly back and forth. When she spoke, her voice was much harsher than she’d intended.

“Why didn’t he just trash them?”

“Ah.” Lipinski raised one finger. “I expect that’s because they were still important. I expect that he was storing the binary data in those reconfigured boards I had to deal with back in port. Then, he transferred the data into one or more of the chips on these three stacks, probably where it’s most covered in carbon, and I expect he’s annoyed because I’ve got it and he doesn’t.”

“And I expect,” Al Shei straightened up, “that my oh-so-clever-and-honored Houston can find that data for me.”