Supper was pretty much a rerun of the night before, only the guest had half the number of arms, legs, and eyes, and didn’t eat raw fish. Still, Aunt Trudy held the kids’ attention with stories of new games they’d probably like. When they excitedly begged to play them, she had her computer, Sam, upload them to their own computers.
“Ruth, I’ve got a nifty search engine you’d probably love. Do you have a lot of questions about things?”
Ruth shyly shook her head no.
“Oh, yes she does,” Kris countered with a soft motherly smile at all the “Why mommy’s” from her daughter. Even John was starting to ask why every time he turned around.
It must be contagious.
“Well, I have a search engine you might really like. It will find anything you ask it to on the net. It will also remember anything you tell it to. Then it builds a storage tree so you can find it anytime you want. Have you found something and then realized you couldn’t find it a week later?”
Now Ruth nodded, still silently. Apparently, the cat had her tongue.
“Then I’ll have Sam upload it to your computer. It’s a big one, so it may take a while.”
“Mommy says I have a very smart computer, but it’s not as smart as mommy’s computer.”
“Are you ready to have your computer argue with you or maybe tell you no?” Kris asked.
Ruth shook her head. She hated the word no.
After the children had cleaned their plates, except for a few widely-scattered vegetables on Johnnie’s, the two were only too happy to be taken out by their nanny to play with their new-found games.”
“Are those games, or a sneaky way of educating them?” Kris asked.
“Education should be fun, not sneaky,” Trudy said, primly. “Now, where’s the most secure room in this house?” She rummaged in her bra and produced a data chip.
“We have one in the basement,” Kris said.
“Then I suggest we adjourn for whiskey, cigars, and paranoia.”
A few minutes later they were sitting across a small table. While the walls were three layers of concrete cinder blocks thick, the inside was Smart MetalTM. That made it easy to pull three comfortable chairs and a table out of the dull gray walls, floor and ceiling.
“How many nanos did we walk in with?” Kris asked Nelly.
“My defenders nabbed three airborne trying to get in with you. Jack, you’re making noise. Not much, but there’s something working on you somewhere.”
Jack took off his coat, and a peg appeared on the wall for him to hang it on. Coatless, he crossed to the far side of the room.
“Sorry, Jack, you’re still singing,” Nelly said.
He slid out of his pants and repeated the process.
“Sorry.”
“I’m not taking off my underwear,” Jack said.
“Try your shoes,” Trudy said. “Sam thinks it’s coming from low on you.”
In his stocking feet, Jack again retreated to the far corner from his clothes.
“Bingo,” Nelly said. “It’s the shoes.”
Jack tossed them out of the secure room. Nelly sent a couple of nanos to search it out and capture it while Jack got back into his uniform . . . shoeless.
“I wonder how long I’ve been carrying that bugger?” Jack muttered. “Nelly, why didn’t you find it before?”
“I’m sorry Jack, but it was a sleeper, making almost no noise. What it did make, managed to hide in the background clutter. I would have spotted it the moment it went live and tried to move or do a data dump, but when it’s just sleeping and recording . . .” Kris could almost hear the shrug in Nelly’s voice.
“Maybe we should drop in here for a security check every day after work,” Kris said.
“Or build one of these at the office and run through it every lunch,” Jack added.
“I wonder who put all that work into a really silent bug?” Trudy muttered, half to herself.
Kris shook her head. “It wouldn’t surprise me if one of the admirals I work with, or rather against, had someone knock together something different.”
“Oh, right, it is budget war time,” Trudy said, eyes lighting up. “How I do not miss those days. But why bug Jack?”
“We cry on each other’s shoulders.” Jack said.
“Umm,” Trudy said, dismissing that from her mind. “Whoever it is, I wonder if they got the download from your visit with Ray? That will scare the shit out of them. Bugging the king’s throne room is not a misdemeanor.”
Kris shrugged it off. She had bigger fish to fry. Or maybe calamari. “What’s on that data chip?”
She handed it to Kris who laid the thing on her collar bone where Nelly rested. A moment later her computer had absorbed the chip and accessed the data.
“Nelly, put up the star map I just gave you,” Trudy said.
Hanging in the air in front of the far wall, a 3D hologram showed stars. Kris easily recognized human space. The inhabited planets glowed in yellow against the others that were white. She’d seen that map enough times that it jumped right out at her.
Human space covered less than a fifth of the map. Off to the right, a whole lot of planets glowed blue.
“And the blue ones are?” she said.
“That,” Trudy said, “is a certified accurate map of the Iteeche Empire.”
Kris’s eyes grew wide. “Someone mapped the Empire!”
“The Iteeche have, of course. What with ships dashing around the galaxy and not everyone navigating as finely as your Nelly, we finally agreed that any of our ships returning from Alwa, Susquan or that new one you found, Shown, might need to know if there’s an occupied system they could drop in on and maybe get critically needed reaction mass or air. The Wasp was lucky. We may not be so lucky next time.”
“So, aid to distressed travelers will be one of my first treaties.”
“Yes, please. All we’ve agreed to so far is not to kill any interlopers. Return is open for negotiations.”
“Understood,” Kris said, with a thoughtful nod.
“Now, Nelly, let’s show some political geography. Display the boundaries of the satraps and their capitals. You can do the same for the human alliances.”
The map took on gentle shadings. Kris got up to get a good look at what it was trying to show. She ended up walking into the map.
“You got all this from the Iteeche?” Jack asked, startled that they had agreed to give the humans a map of planets to target if there was another war.
“And they got all that from us,” Trudy pointed out. “There are a few more things you might be interested in. Nelly, show the capital planet. Since Kris is going to be living there for three to five years, you might like to know how crowded it is.”
A number began flashing. “One point five billion square kilometers of land,” Kris breathed. “Wardhaven is only 550 million square kilometers, a bit bigger than Earth.”
“And their population is over twenty billion. Ouch. That’s crowded,” Nelly added, with a comment Kris could agree with.
“You might want to ask your friend Ron how comfortable the Imperial precinct are,” Trudy said.
“Are they going to provide housing or will we have to buy something next door for an embassy?” Kris winced; what would she use for money?
“Another thing to ask your four-eyed buddy,” Trudy answered, her lips drawn tight.
Right, Trudy was of that age where the only good Iteeche was a dead Iteeche. Kris would have to make sure the kids didn’t pick up any of that language from their Auntie Tru or anyone else.
“What do you know?” Jack asked Trudy.
“Well, if you ask Nelly real nice, she can tell you the population of every Iteeche planet. We’ve also included which planets are making battlecruisers like yours and how many they’ve commissioned in the last five years.”
“How do you know that?” Kris asked.
“Because we have technicians helping them spin them out. They’re making the Smart Metal themselves, but we kind of kept a lock on the programming. They need a human to finish the build, just like we need an Iteeche to finish the powering up of our new ships. I bet you didn’t know that.”
“I know we have Iteeche on any stations building battlecruisers, but no one said why,” Kris admitted.
“You’d think somebody doesn’t trust somebody,” Jack said.
“Yeah, if things go sideways, we might find our ships with no power and they might find their ships converting to a fine mist.”
“You think so?” Kris asked.
“Despite everything I do my best to know, I don’t know that for sure,” Trudy said. “But I do know the twisted minds that came up with this trade and I wouldn’t put it past them. What do you think Ray would do faced with this kind of a swap?”
Kris rolled her eyes. “I know I’ve been told not to mention anything about some of our weapons technology,” Kris said vaguely.
“You mean the beam weapons?” Trudy said with a Cheshire cat grin.
“You know about them?” Kris wasn’t really surprised.
Trudy tossed the question off with a slight wave of her hand and a vague, “I may have overheard it in a restaurant.” Then she got serious. “The Iteeche helped us power up those beam ships that saved the adorable cute ass of that little girl I shared dinner with before she could even be born, so yes, the Iteeche know something about the beam weapon, but they were kept out of the weapons bays on those things. Reactor? Yes. Your quarters? Yes. Anything close to the weapon and a Marine would step on all four of their feet.”
“Was there a lot of stepping on feet?” Jack asked.
“You couldn’t blame them for trying, but after the first couple of incidents, the head honchos on each ship got taken aside and politely asked to control their people or some folks might be shipped back on the next slow boat. They got the word and quit trying.”
“Entirely?” Jack said, raising an eyebrow.
“No,” Trudy said with a small impish grin. “One or two folks we had already identified as intelligence plants kept right on trying. We fed them enough for the Iteeche to build something like the beam weapons, but with critical things missing and a few additional little tidbits added. If they built a prototype based on what they got from us, it’s going to make a big hole in some planet. Hopefully, they’ll test it out first on some airless rock with no population except those sneaky types who deserve what they get.”
“So, we trust the Iteeche about as far as we can throw one,” Jack said.
“Pretty much,” Trudy agreed.
Kris studied the map. “So,” she said pensively, “we now know the geography of the Empire. We know its capability for building ships, or at least we know where our people are needed to help them build ships . . .”
“You think they’re building ships behind our back?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know that they aren’t,” Kris said.
“You’re a paranoid one,” Trudy said.
“I’m a damn Longknife,” Kris pointed out, with a tight, little smile, then went on. “And we know their political structures. Trudy, do we know anything about these satraps? Who leads them? How they got to be top squid?” This was another word left over from the Iteeche War that Kris would have to be careful who she said it around.
“Not a clue,” Trudy said. “We’ve got our folks looking for any hint of the Empire’s internal mechanics, but nothing. The Iteeche know that Ray does not command all of human space and that some of the associations that work with the US to protect the other sentient species go their own way, though I’m none too sure they understand it. We had to tell them about our political divisions. As for them, all we know is that the Emperor is some kind of divine presence or representative or who knows what and that everyone obeys his will.”
“No human has ever had that kind of power,” Kris said.
“And most who were said to have it were the closest things to puppets,” Nelly pointed out.
Jack shook his head. “When we had guys running around insisting they had the divine right of kings on their side, their sway was pretty limited.”
“And usually it wasn’t long until someone came along and claimed to be more divine and more right and kicked their butt,” Kris said.
“Yeah,” Trudy agreed.
“But we know nothing?” Kris asked, again.
“Nothing but what you can make out from this map.”
Kris sighed. “So, we play blind man’s bluff.”
“With very sharp knives pointed at little old blindfolded you,” Trudy concluded.
“God help us,” Jack breathed.