Lois Bujold - Komarr

Vorthys shook his head, declining to reason in advance of his data; Miles sighed, and returned to his list.

By the end of an hour, Miles was cross-eyed from staring at meters and meters of really supremely boring inventory readouts. His mind wandered, revolving a plan to go attach himself like a hyperactive leech to all the field agents searching for the fugitive Komarrans. Sequentially, he supposed; he had learned not to wish to be twins, or any other multiple of himself. Miles thought of the old Barrayaran joke about the Vor lord who jumped on his horse and rode off in all directions. Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward. After all, Lord Auditor Vorthys didn’t run around in circles; he sat composedly in the center and let it all come to him.

Miles’s meditations on the proven disadvantages of cloning were interrupted when Colonel Gibbs called them. Gibbs was sporting a demure smile of amazing smugness. The Professor wandered over into range of the vid pickup and leaned on the back of Miles’s chair as Gibbs spoke.

“My Lord Auditor. My Lord Auditor.” Gibbs nodded to them both. “I’ve found something odd I expect you want. We finally succeeded in tracing the real purchase orders of Waste Heat’s largest equipment expenditures. They have, over the last two years, bought five custom-designed Necklin field generators from a Komarran jumpship powerplant firm. I have the company’s name and address, and copies of the invoices. Bollan Design— that’s the builder-still has the tech specs on file.”

“Soudha was building a jump ship?” Miles muttered, trying to picture it. “Wait a minute, Necklin rods come in pairs… maybe they broke one? Colonel, has ImpSec visited Bollan yet?”

“We did, to confirm the invoice forgery. Bollan Design appears to be a perfectly legitimate, though small, company; they’ve been in business about thirty years, which rather predates this embezzlement operation. They’re unable to compete head to head with the major builders like Toscane Industries, so they’ve specialized in odd and experimental designs and custom repairs of out-system and obsolete jumpship rods. Bollan as a company does not appear to have violated any regulation, and seems to have dealt with Soudha as a customer in all good faith. The invoices at the time they left Bollan were not yet altered; that was done when they arrived on Foscol’s comconsole, apparently. Nevertheless… the chief design engineer who worked on the order directly with Soudha has not been to work for three days, nor did my field agent find him at home.”

Miles swore under his breath. “Ducking fast-penta interrogation, you bet. Unless his body turns up dead in a ditch. Could be either, at this point. You have a detainment order out on him, I trust?”

“Certainly, my lord. Shall I download everything we’ve acquired so far this morning on your secured channel?”

“Yes, please,” said Miles.

“Especially the tech specs,” put in Vorthys over his shoulder. “After I look at them, I may want to talk to the people at Bollan who are still there. May I trouble ImpSec to be sure none of the rest of them go on an extempore vacation before I get in touch with them, Colonel?”

“Already been done, my lord.”

Still looking smug, Gibbs signed off, to be replaced by the promised financial and technical data. Vorthys tried to foist the financial records off on Miles, who promptly filed them and went to look at Vorthys’s tech readouts.

“Well,” said Vorthys, when, after a cursory initial scan, he was able to pull up a holovid schematic, which rotated slowly and colorfully in three dimensions above his vid-plate. “What the hell is that?”

“I was hoping you’d tell me,” Miles breathed, now hanging in turn over the back of Vorthys’s station chair. “Sure doesn’t look like any Necklin rod I’ve ever seen.” The lines turning in air sketched out a shape like a cross between a corkscrew and a funnel.

“All the designs are slightly different,” noted Vorthys, bringing up four more shapes to hang in series beside the first. “Judging by the dates, they were scaling up with each subsequent model.”

According to the attached measurements, the first three were relatively smaller, a couple of meters long and a meter or so wide. The fourth was double the dimensions of the third. The fifth, probably four meters wide at the larger end and six meters in length. Miles pictured the size of the assembly room doors in the building next to this one. Wherever that last one had been delivered to-four weeks ago?-it hadn’t been here. And one did not leave a delicate precision device like a Necklin rod out in the wind and rain.

“Those things generate Necklin fields?” said Miles. “What shape? With a pair of jumpship rods, the fields counter-rotate and fold the ship through five-space.” He held his hands out parallel with each other, palm up, then pressed them inward, in the metaphor he’d been given, the field wrapped around the ship to create a five-space needle of infinitesimal diameter and unlimited length, to punch through that area of five-space weakness called a wormhole, and unfold again into three-space on the other side. He’d also been dragged through a more convincing mathematical demonstration, in his last term at the Academy, all details of which, never called on subsequently thereafter, had evaporated out of his brain shortly after the final exam. That was long before his cryo-revival, so it was one bit of memory loss he could not blame on the sniper’s needle-grenade. “I used to know this stuff…” he muttered plaintively.

Despite this broad hint, the Professor did not break into an enlightening lecture. He just sat in his station chair, his chin cupped in his palm. After a moment, he leaned forward and called up a dizzying succession of data files from the probable-cause investigation. “Ah. Here it is.” A wriggly graph appeared, flanked by a list of elements and percentages running down one side. A fast pass through the data from Bollan produced another, similar list. The Professor leaned back. “I’ll be damned.”

“What?” said Miles.

“I did not expect to get this lucky. That,” he pointed to the first graph, “is an analysis of the composition of a very melted and distorted mass fragment we picked up topside. It has nearly the same composition fingerprint as this fourth device, here. The figures which are a tiny bit off are just the sort of lighter and more volatile elements I’d expect to lose in such a melt. Huh. I didn’t think we’d ever be able to reconstruct the source of those blobs. Now we don’t have to.”

“If that was the fourth,” said Miles slowly, “where’s the fifth?”

The Professor shrugged. “The same place as the first, second, and third?”

“Do you have enough information from the inventory to reconstruct its power supply? At that point, we’d have the whole machine mapped, wouldn’t we?”

“Mm, maybe. It will certainly supply some parameters. How much power? Continuous, or phased? Bollan had to know, to supply the proper coupler… ah.” He noodled again with the specs and fell into a study of the complicated diagram.

Miles rocked impatiently on his heels. When he felt he could no longer maintain his respectful silence without the top of his head blowing off, he said, “Yes, but what does it do?”

“Just what it says, presumably. Generates a five-space distortion field.”

“Which does what? To what?”

“Ah.” The Professor sank back in his station chair and rubbed his chin ruefully. “Answering that may take a little longer.”

“Can’t we run comconsole simulations?”

“To be sure. But to get the right answer, one must first correctly frame the question. I want-humph!-a mathematical physicist specializing in five-space theory. Probably Dr. Riva, she’s at the University of Solstice.”