Demosthenes, Alkeides System
The first working prototype bridge forge was finished four days after they executed Ferid.
It took eight days with little sleep to draw as much out of the biocomp as possible. While two or three Ledanians guarded him at all times, Bellona stayed in the room with him. She didn’t know if he thought that talking would win him leniency. She did not hint that it might and neither did anyone else.
Perhaps that was why Ferid talked. He had nothing to lose and he knew that everything he said and did was being recorded. He was a Karassian. The search for celebrity was built into their bones. Maybe he thought that he might live on in this way.
While Sang worked to completely isolate an expendable AI and Vang developed a jack to connect Ferid to it, Bellona listened and Ferid rambled. She didn’t try to pick out the truth, or facts that might be useful. Everything he said would be closely analyzed later.
Her presence encouraged him to talk. Her reactions goaded him. Her questions guided. She listened, with her gut churning and her heart running too fast, as Ferid poured out the sum of his life. The murders. The torture. The lessons he had learned from watching people die by his hand. His delight in unexpected human acts. After a while, Bellona forgot that Ferid had been born, not made. His constant search for evidence of human spirit that was missing in him made him less a man than Sang.
She took a lot of showers in those eight days, using real water.
On the seventh day, Sang pulled her from the secure room to tell her the AI was ready. “It’s as isolated and secure as I can make it,” Sang said as they stood in the corridor outside, with Vang listening.
“What if Ferid can blow it up, or kill it, when we tap him?” Bellona asked.
Vang shook his head. “I don’t think he will, even if he could. He knows he’s going to die. We haven’t hidden that from him. If everything he knows and remembers is sucked into the AI memory, then in a way, he’ll live on. He won’t ruin that.”
“If the Karassian military knew how he was talking, they’d kill him themselves,” Bellona said. “Once we dig beneath the boasting, what we will learn about the power holders of the galaxy will give us unbelievable leverage.”
“He is Karassian,” Sang said. “Their individuality is more important than loyalty to the state.”
Bellona sighed. “Let’s do it tomorrow,” she said. “I can’t stand to listen to him any more today.”
The next morning, while six of them held Ferid down, Sang jacked into Ferid’s brain and, through the brain connection, to his internal servers. It took seven hours to take everything from him.
“I’m moving the data, not copying it,” Sang told them. “The more that is shifted over, the less of Ferid that will remain.”
In the last two hours of the transfer, the body that had been Ferid lay placidly, blinking at the ceiling with a peaceful expression on its face. They no longer had to hold it down. It did not have the mental capacity to consider escape or rebellion.
Bellona made herself stand and watch. Finally, she nodded to Hero, who gently drew her fingernail down Ferid’s cheek, leaving a thin, red scratch.
When the body was quite dead, Bellona escaped the room and took one last shower. A long one.
Sleep did not come easily that night. She found herself wandering the corridor to the dining hall in search of distraction from her thoughts.
All the Ledanians except Aideen were already there, gathered around one end of the long table, coffee carafes sitting in front of them. Sang, too. They were not talking and no one was smiling.
Quietly, they slid down the bench, making room for her.
Bellona settled between Fontana and Hayes and murmured her thanks as a full mug of coffee was placed in front of her. She sipped, listening to the thick silence.
While it was just her suffering from Ferid’s poisonous outpourings, there had been no incentive to find a way to move beyond them. Now she knew the others were in stress, her mind worked sluggishly, turning over ideas. Gradually, her thoughts picked up speed.
She put the mug down. “Sang, how close to complete is the prototype forge?”
Sang frowned. “The housing is nearly done. The core program has been line checked and ancillary software is coming along. Vectoring controls…” He paused, consulting some inner log. Then, “Maybe two weeks.”
Bellona nodded. “I want it finished in a week. What do you need to do that?”
“A week!” Fontana protested.
Vang smiled. Perhaps he could see what she was doing.
Sang’s frown deepened. “Ferid’s archives need to be compiled and searched.”
“They can wait,” Bellona told him. “At least until we have some distance from their source. The prototype is more important. What do you need?”
Sang shrugged. “More people.”
“How many more?”
“Everyone.”
It was the answer she had been hoping for. Had Sang anticipated her, too?
“You can’t fit everyone around the workbench,” Fontana pointed out.
Sang leaned forward. “There are subsidiary tasks that must be completed as well. A faraday room to test the device. A monitoring and recording network inside the room. The coding must be finished. Also, a routine must be built to index locations by the trinary coordinates the forge uses.” Sang smiled. “Plus a second and third shift to replace the first, for everyone must sleep and relax.”
“Sleep, at least,” Fontana said. “Relaxing is for weaklings. I want to see the housing you mentioned.”
“Why?” Bellona asked curiously.
“Thecla says it’s the size of a man’s upper body. That’s not portable,” Fontana said dismissively.
“Think you can do better, Fontana?” Hero asked.
Fontana snorted. “Yeah, I do.”
“You haven’t even seen it yet,” Hayes said.
“I’ve seen Thecla’s quarters,” Fontana shot back.
Retha laughed, his eyes in their dark, sleep-deprived pits dancing with amusement. Others around the table laughed, too.
“It’s a prototype,” Thecla said patiently. “Of course it’s going to be clunky.”
“Just because it’s the first doesn’t mean it has to be inelegant,” Hero said.
“Why not get it right, first time out?” Fontana added.
Thecla shrugged. “Be my guest. If you can miniaturize it any more than we already have, I’ll stand back and applaud.”
The discussion went on. Bellona withdrew carefully. She suspected no one noticed her leave. Content, she went back to her room. Sleep still took a while to descend, yet it was a long and deep one.
Four days later, Sang announced the prototype was ready for trial.
* * * * *
Everyone looked as tired as they had during the long night when Bellona had sipped coffee with them and challenged them to finish the prototype in a week. This time, though, despite slumped postures and shadowed eyes, they were smiling, as Thecla showed Bellona into the room they had set up as a faraday cage to contain any unexpected side effects of the trial.
The room itself was one of the bigger crew rooms. It was far longer than it was wide. The bunks and lockers had been discarded, while the metal walls were still in place. The silvery, unadorned walls made the room look even longer.
Sang stood in the center of the group waiting just inside the door. There was a small table next to him. There was just one object on the table.
“That’s it?” Bellona asked curiously.
“It is,” Sang replied.
The bridge forge looked like a workman’s toolbelt. Bellona leaned closer. It really was a belt, she realized. On the belt was a series of blank boxes made of a black, matte material.
“It’s not the size of a man,” Bellona observed.
Thecla laughed.
“Can I touch it?” Bellona asked.
“It’s not primed. Go ahead,” Sang said.
Bellona pressed her finger against the side of one of the boxes and felt coolness and unforgiving solidness. “Metal…”
“Carbyne,” Sang said.
“Of course,” she murmured. “It is very small. Will it generate a bridge big enough to step through?”
“That is what the trial is for,” Sang said.
Bellona stepped back. “Then let’s see.”
Sang rested his fingers on the first box on the belt. “There are several interlinked components, most of them more robust replicas of parts used in communications satellites. We separated them and linked them. It means the carbyne structure holding the forge doesn’t have to be as strong as it would if all the components were housed inside the same structure. This one, though, is new to the prototype. It’s a navigation AI.”
“Communications satellites don’t have navigation in them?”
Sang shook his head. “They talk to fixed locations, usually only a handful of them. There’s no need to know where to open up the other end of the bridge, because the other end is set and permanent. With a personal forge, though, the whole point is to be able to cross to wherever you want to go. We had to find a way to reference any location in the galaxy.”
Bellona wrinkled her forehead. “Can’t you use the same navigation coding that stellar navigators use for null-space?”
“Those are relational coordinates,” Sang said, “because everything in the galaxy is always moving. A navigational AI is merely told to jump to Cerce, for example. It looks up the Cerce system, figures out where it is at the moment, then jumps to local space around Cerce Prime. We can’t jump there with the bridge forge, because it has to open up the other end of the bridge before we get there. It has to know exactly where the other end of the bridge must go.”
“You can’t just tell it to put the end on Cerce?”
“Where on Cerce should we put it?” Sang asked her, sounding curious.
Bellona pursed her lips. “I see the problem now.”
“Retha was the one who came up with the idea of absolute locations,” Thecla said.
Retha grinned.
“He knows how to hit the target, after all,” Fontana said, clapping Retha’s shoulder. “Ask Vang.”
Everyone rolled their eyes. Some groaned.
Bellona shook her head and looked to Sang to explain absolute locations.
Sang held up his finger and pointed to the tip. “Pretend that the tip of my finger is the center of the galaxy.” He moved his other hand around the tip of the finger. “Everything in the galaxy revolves around the black hole, even as the systems are spinning around their own stars. The center of the galaxy is an absolute, constant reference. It’s 0-0-0.”
He moved his hand around the finger again. “There are three hundred and sixty degrees in a circle. Each degree is divided up by minutes and seconds. Seconds can be separated into fractalized digital division, down to whatever depth needed for an exact location, so the horizontal plane can be fixed by a description of degree. That’s the first figure.”
Sang shifted his hand so the finger he was moving around the symbolic center of the galaxy slid higher and lower than the tip of his finger. “The second figure is the perpendicular measurement, also in degrees, minutes and seconds and their subdivisions.” He moved his hand closer to his finger tip, then away from it. “Distance from the center is the simplest figure.”
“How accurate is it?” Bellona asked. “Can I say I want the bridge to end in front of Alberda’s desk on Cerce?”
“We’ll refine the process as we test it,” Sang said, lowering his hands. “At the moment, we think it is accurate to within a meter.”
“I will need to know all three measurements in order to jump somewhere?” Bellona asked. “No wonder you wanted hot bodies to map the galaxy.”
Sang shook his head. “Once we have mapped and jumped to a location, it will be added to a meta index. You will be able to tell the forge you want to jump to the same spot in front of Alberda’s desk on Cerce. The AI will look up the relational location of Cerce using the cartography coordinates a null space AI uses—in other words, where it currently is in the galaxy. Then it will plot the exact location you have asked for, then it will build the bridge and plant the end at that exact location.”
Bellona let out a breath. “Wow.”
“The more we use the bridge forge, the more comprehensive and detailed the meta index will become,” Fontana added. “For today, we figured out the end point by walking to the end of the room and taking a reading.”
“That’s where you’ll anchor the bridge this time?” Bellona asked. “At the other end of this room?”
Sang turned the box on the belt so that Bellona could see the screen readout on the top of it. “The end point is already set.”
Bellona glanced at the screen. It showed simple text. Demosthenes, C Barracks far end.
Sang pointed to the far end of the room. “I engraved a message on the wall at that end. You can’t see it from here. When the bridge is built, you should be able to read it through the bridge as if you were standing right next to the wall.”
“Show me,” she told him.
Everyone else backed away from the table, lining the walls of that end of the room.
Sang looked apologetic. “There is no smoke and mirrors, I’m afraid. I just start the forge.” There was an orange light next to the location readout. He pressed it. It turned red and pulsed. The boxes on the belt hummed and the speed of the pulsing light increased. Then it turned to green.
The air in front of the table shimmered, as if the surface rippled with air currents. A small oval-shaped image appeared in the air, only half a meter across. It looked as though the belt had generated a screen, an oval one.
“It’s not big enough to walk through,” Hero said, sounding disappointed.
“It is bigger than micro sized,” Fontana said.
Then Bellona realized what the “screen” was showing. The silver was the same shade as the wall next to her. There were words written there.
Liberty, prosperity and peace in our time. —S. Indigo.
“The size is a matter of adjustment, that’s all,” Thecla said. Unlike Hero, she was almost vibrating with excitement.
For a long, silent moment, everyone stared at the words showing through the bridge.
“Now what?” Hero asked.
“Throw something through it,” Hayes said in his deep, low voice.
“I have nothing on me to throw,” Sang said.
“Here.” Hero pulled a small black box out of her pocket and held it out to him.
Sang hesitated to pick it up.
“It’s lipstick,” she said and pushed it toward him again.
“Where did you get lipstick?” Thecla demanded.
“I made it,” Hero told her.
“We talk, later, okay?” Thecla replied.
Sang picked up the pot. “Black. Appropriate.”
Hero blew him a kiss.
He turned to face the open bridge, hefting the box. Before he could throw the box, the forge components on the belt whined, the pitch rising quickly to a painful note. Bellona covered her ears, as did everyone else.
Sang stared at the belt, his eyes narrowed. Then he looked up. “Everyone, step away from the walls!” he shouted. “Don’t touch anything, not even each other!”
It was a measure of Sang’s acceptance among them that everyone instantly obeyed. Hero wrapped her arms around herself. Most of them stood with their hands at their sides, carefully not touching anything.
“Crouch down!” Sang shouted, as he dropped. “Lie down, or sit! Quickly!” He hugged his own knees.
Bellona dropped to her knees and put her arms over her head. She couldn’t resist looking out from under her arm, to see what the bridge forge was doing.
The whistling note cycled higher and higher until it reached beyond audible range. A dazzling light flashed, leaping to the roof. There was a loud cracking sound. Sparks flared and sizzled where the light had touched the roof.
The whining sound stopped. The bridge disappeared. The components on the belt smoked and the middle box had crumpled into a hard mass of carbyne that made Bellona think of Pushyan and the pulverized moon.
Sang got to his feet. “It’s safe now,” he told them, staring at the belt.
“Was that…lightning?” Fontana asked, sounding awed, as everyone gathered around the table.
“It was,” Sang confirmed.
“Then all this work was for nothing,” Hero said bitterly, looking at the smoking mess on the table.
Sang laughed. “Negative results are still results,” he told her. “We have learned so much in the last five minutes. Next time—”
“Next time?” she interrupted, sounding horrified.
Sang, though, seemed very pleased. “Next time,” he said firmly, “we’ll have ironed out the problems this trial raised.”
“That lightning,” Fontana said. “I keep thinking about overloads and feedback loops. Why would that be?”
“Because nothing went through?” Thecla suggested.
“That could be,” Sang said. “The energy used to hold the bridge open wasn’t drained by something passing through it. The communications channels are constantly in use, so the problem never arises…”
Bellona turned away from them. The discussion became technical and dense and there was no need to understand it. There were more than enough experts in the room. Instead, she walked down the length of the room to the end, where the bridge had ended.
She found the carving on the wall there. Sang’s letters were ten centimeters high, perfectly formed and horizontal. She ran her hand over the words.
Liberty, prosperity and peace in our time. —S. Indigo.
“Yes,” she whispered, her heart lifting.