Proteus Unbound (20 page)

"Hope not." Aybee had the horrible feeling that he was her favorite trainee. She always looked at him in a special way. "But I'm not used to high gravity. Not like the farm. I sleep bad here. Wake up a lot in the middle of the night. If I'm all done with my work an' that happens, could I look around the ship?"

He saw the danger signs. Her smile vanished, and she was staring at him suspiciously. "Look at
what
in the ship, Karl?"

"Dunno. Whatever." He waved his arm vaguely around them. "Power supplies, maintenance shops. Anything."

"Oh, that shouldn't be a problem. But only if you still do well enough in your training. Let's see how you perform in the next few days."

She was not worried about security—she was worried that he would take too much time wandering around and flunk! Aybee made fewer deliberate mistakes on the tests, and three days later he had his permission. He was fascinated to see what was off-limits: armories, main drives, and the areas where the suits and transit ships were kept. It made good sense for them to keep him out of there until they were absolutely sure about his loyalties. It was also no big loss. So long as they were steaming along to nowhere. Aybee did not like the idea of leaving the ship until he knew exactly where he was.

There was one big unexpected freedom. He would be allowed to go to the kernels and do what he liked there. Gudrun must have decided that he was not interested in suicide by fiddling with a power kernel and blowing up the whole ship. It also tended to confirm what she had said at their first meeting. When the training course was over, he would be working with the kernels.

The first night he had permission to wander, he could not use it. A formal evening meeting was scheduled for all the trainees. After a special dinner that Aybee did not eat, they were subjected to a four-hour session of live and recorded speeches, slogans, and arm waving.

Gudrun stood up and offered her version of system history. Between the millstones of the Inner and Outer Systems, the inhabitants of the Halo had been crushed for over a century. The Kernel Ring was a borderland, a dangerous region of scattered high-density bodies. As a result, all the travelers from Sunhugger territory bypassed it on their journeys outward. They were quite willing to exploit its energy supplies, but none of the wealth generated from the Kernel Ring's resources was ever returned to it. That was unjust and intolerable. Finally, it was going to change. The balance of power had shifted. The Halo had a born leader, and the revolution had begun.

Jason came next, and he was worse: The Outer System is composed of oppressive tyrants! The Inner System is decadent! It supports an idle and growing population by the efforts of our people! Both federations deserve to fall! You are all part of a great reform that will achieve those ends—and soon!

Aybee hid his yawns, but he noticed that the other trainees were lapping it up. Gudrun, Jason, and the handful of other permanent crew of the ship knew how to whip up enthusiasm. They had enough for everybody. Gudrun stood up again for another statement. A special announcement would be made on the ship in a few days, reporting an event that was truly extraordinary. All training would be interrupted when it happened, and everyone would have two days free. The group cheered.

Aybee cheered as loudly as anyone and wondered if propaganda had a cumulative effect. If so, he would have to find a way to escape before his own brain was softened.

Escape seemed harder and harder. All the access points to suits, transit ships, and weapons were guarded not by humans, which would have been bad, but by machines, Roguards that did not sleep, could not be distracted, and could not be persuaded.

Aybee decided that he needed a radically new approach. The next night, he set out to prowl the ship.

He had no illusions about the size of the task that faced him. The ship was small compared with the central sphere of a harvester, but it was still huge. With a length of two kilometers and a diameter of six hundred meters, the ship he was on had enough internal volume to house a couple of million Earth people—or one or two space farmers. Podders and the rebels of the Kernel Ring sat somewhere between those two extremes, but Aybee could not guess at the ship's internal structure from the limited regions he had seen in training.

Fortunately, he did not need to. Overall ship schematics were held in a central data bank, and he had been studying them in the evenings for over a week. There were half a dozen blank spots in the plans, which he assumed corresponded to regions of special privacy, but all the rest of the ship was there.

As an experiment, he headed outward toward the surface. The ship had been built to carry cargo, and so all the internal bulkheads and corridors were a later addition. The whole habitat interior had an unfinished and neglected look. Mildewed partitions were warped and grimy, and at central communications nodes, masses of cables and fiber lines festooned the walls and ceilings.

Aybee wandered on, committing everything he saw to memory. If the need ever arose, he wanted to be able to run through the ship blindfolded.

No one questioned him; no one stopped him. In a few minutes he was at an observation port, peering through the outer shell of the hull to the stars beyond. He could tell from the positions of the constellations that the ship was heading Sunward, but that was all he was able to deduce. He watched quietly for ten minutes. There were no signs of other man-made vessels out there or of natural bodies of the Outer System.

When he finally moved on, easing his way along the hull toward the nearest air lock, a Roguard appeared at his side before he had gone fifty meters. It seemed to ignore him, but it moved as he did and did not respond to his questions and commands. Twenty meters before he reached the lock, it passed silently in front of him and extended a broad polymer net to block his path.

Aybee did not try to talk to it. The machine was too stupid for logic. Instead, he turned to head away from the surface. When he was forty meters from the ship's hull, the machine dropped behind. He turned to look and saw it disappearing through a service aperture. Aybee did not go back. If he did, he was sure that it or its sister Roguard would be there again to balk his progress toward the air locks. Instead he headed down the gravity gradient for the nearest kernel, two hundred meters away.

In the corridors he encountered a couple of dozen maintenance machines and three humans. The machines offered him friendly greetings. The humans, each two feet shorter than Aybee, said not a word. They hardly looked at him, and they seemed preoccupied with their own worries.

Was it his trainee's uniform, which made him so much lower in status than anyone else on the ship that they would not even talk to him? If so, that was fine with Aybee. He traveled on along a dirty passageway coated with the grime of a decade's neglect. Somehow the controller of the cleaning machines seemed to have lost the narrow alley from its memory.

He passed down a narrow final stair just wide enough for his skinny body, and he was there. The shielded kernel was not the one that had been removed from the space farm. It was a monster. Even at the outer shield's thirty-meter radius, Aybee judged that he was standing in a field of over a twentieth of a g. That put the kernel mass at nearly eight billion tons. It must have been found near the middle of the
Zirkelloch
, the circular singularity that formed the center of the Kernel Ring.

That did not mean it was particularly useful as a controllable power source. If it were a slowly rotating kernel, approximately a Schwarzschild black hole, it was useless for anything except raw heat.

Was this one rotating?

Aybee fixed his eyes on one point on the ceiling and crouched low. No doubt about it, the kernel was both massive and rotating extremely rapidly. He could feel the inertial dragging as the kernel's spin rotated the reference frame along with it, tilting the local vertical.

He turned his attention to the controls. Most of them were already familiar to him. There were a dozen superconducting electromagnets holding the charged kernel firmly at the center of its spherical shields. They appeared standard, no different from systems Aybee had seen in dozens of other energy-generation facilities.

There was the energy-extraction mechanism itself, clearly identifiable by its plasma injection units. The system was unusually finely calibrated, allowing far smaller changes to the kernel's rotational energy than any that Aybee had seen before, but that was an easy technological refinement, within the power of any kernel user. It was not clear why anyone would
want
to do it.

The first sign of real oddity came in the sensor leads. They were ten times as big as Aybee had expected, suggesting a high signal-carrying capacity, and they ran to a substantial computer sitting right on the outer shield. A computer to do what?

Inside the shield, the spinning black hole of the kernel was sending out a seething stream of radiation and particles. That random energy emission was a nuisance, and the shields were a necessity to reflect it back on itself. At the same time, the sensors monitoring the outward flood within the shields allowed the mass, charge, and angular momentum of the kernel to be measured to one part in a trillion.

Aybee crouched on the dull black surface of the outer shield, staring at the computer and its connecting cables for a long time. He would have loved to follow those optic bundles a meter or so farther, beyond the shields. It was impossible. There were hatches for robot access, but he would not have survived a moment inside the shields.

He stood up, puzzled, and stared thoughtfully at the sensor leads for a few minutes. When he finally wandered through the corridors back to his own quarters, his head was whirling with ideas and conjectures. He had theories but no way to test them. What he needed was a long spell of quiet thought.

What he found when he arrived at his room was Gudrun. She was sitting on his bed. She had abandoned her silver-blue uniform and badged cap for a brief black exercise suit and purple skin makeup. Gudrun nodded at him and patted the bed next to her.

Aybee eyed her uneasily and remained standing. "I was just taking a look around."

"I know. Sit down, Karl."

He placed himself at the far end of the bed. "I'm doing all right, aren't I?" He cleared his throat. "I mean, no problem with my work."

"Just the opposite." She inched along closer to him. "Karl, you've been doing well, but I'm convinced you could do a lot better. Some of your answers on the tests are so concise and clear, they're better than anything in the training manuals. I'm using them as reference material. Where do you get them from?"

Aybee swore internally and shrugged. "Dunno. I just write what I think of."

"If you can think that way consistently, there's more in your future than a job as a maintenance engineer. I want to do something special with you."

"What do you mean?" Aybee did not like the look in her eye. "I want to take you to meet the big boss—the head of the whole revolution and movement. We have his orders to sift for unusual potential and report it to headquarters." She misread his concern. "Don't worry, I wouldn't send you there alone. We'd go together, just you and me, on one of the special high-acceleration transit ships. I'd be your sponsor."

"When?" The training course had five more weeks to run.

"In a couple of days. Jason and the other assistants can handle the training course easily enough. It's five days travel from here to headquarters in the new ship, but we wouldn't waste the time. You have a lot to learn. I'd give you personal coaching and special training." Gudrun had moved Aybee all the way to the end of the bed, and he could not retreat farther. Her golden-brown eyes were gleaming. She took his hands in hers and stared at him possessively. "And we still haven't done that form-change, have we? The one that we talked about when you signed on. You're still too tall for comfort. We'll work on that. There might be some spare time for a form-change on the journey, too. I want to make you look more like one of us—less like a Cloudlander." She squeezed his hands. "What do you say, Karl? It's a one-time opportunity."

Five days confined to a high-g transit cabin with Gudrun. Five days of "personal coaching" and "special training." What did that include? He had horrible suspicions. Aybee avoided her gaze, but she was very close. Everywhere he looked he saw nothing but bare flesh, plump thighs, arms and shoulders and breasts.

"Well, Karl, what do you say?" She was whispering, close to his cheek.

Aybee closed his eyes in horror. Do I have a choice?

He took a deep breath. Look at it this way, Apollo Belvedere Smith: You go to headquarters and the chances of finding out if your ideas are right are a hell of a lot better there than they are here. Whatever happens on the journey, you can handle it. So say yes quick, before you decide you can't stand the idea.

He nodded, eyes still closed. "It sounds . . . wonderful."

He felt Gudrun's hand on his thigh. "I'll make sure that it is," she said. "We'll leave tomorrow. I'll put a form-change tank and size-reduction programs on the ship, too. You can use them as much as you want to. But you'd better get some rest now, Karl. You need your rest."

"Yeah." Aybee swallowed. "I think I do."

She was moving slowly away from him. He could breathe again. He looked at her red lips and half-open mouth. She seemed ready to eat him.

Just make sure the form-change tank and size-reduction program is there, Gudrun, he thought. I'll use 'em, all right. In fact, if this trip is anything like I imagine, I'll use 'em over and over. I'm going to arrive at headquarters as a two-foot midget.

CHAPTER 20

"I disapprove of every conspiracy of which I am not a part."
—Cinnabar Baker

Sylvia Fernald had agonized over the decision for a long time. Who should be told what she was planning to do, and how much should they be told?

On the one hand, her attempt to contact Paul Chu was in no sense an official mission. She had not been ordered to do it or even asked to think about it. On the other hand, Bey Wolf and Aybee Smith believed that the rebels were behind the technical malfunctions in the Inner and Outer Systems, and they agreed with Cinnabar Baker that the rebels' end objective might be to instigate an all-out war between the other two parties. If that were the case, and if Paul were part of the rebel group, a dialog with him was supremely important. Sylvia knew of no one else who might be able to open that dialog. Paul had always been secretive and mistrustful, but he would talk to Sylvia.