Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

The other Hunter was in so many pieces they hadn’t even bothered to gather them all together.

The real question in Father Alex’s mind was, why had they attacked? If it was just hunger, and there were only the two, then the single outlying sentry would have sufficed. They could have simply dragged his body off and that would have been that; that happened all too often. Instead, they had kept coming in, kept attacking. A pack might do it, although it was extremely rare, but just two? They weren’t attacking suicidally, either; they had meant to take as many of the Family out as they could.

Father Alex didn’t like it one bit. Something was changing in a world whose only positive point was that it never changed. Twelve warriors from a related family electrocuted. Now three killed by Hunters who made an attack that was both well planned and executed and yet suicidal and seemingly without purpose.

He sighed. At least Littlefeet was back on the disabled list, so he could keep the pair together a bit longer. Not that it would help much in the end, and he wasn’t at all sure Littlefeet was going to like the pain of the next days and perhaps weeks. He just hoped that appearances were right, and that there were no deep wounds.

But why were there wounds at all?

The one problem with interstellar travel was that time was always the enemy of truth. Not only did time go at a very different rate for those within the genholes than for those outside, it was next to impossible to send accurate and up-to-the-minute data on ship positioning and tracking. Up to whose minute, and when?

That was one reason why the Navy wanted a Gene Harker along, rather than a robot, however brilliant and clever, that was not prepared to improvise and understand what was possible and what was practical. Yes, human-kind had made machines in their own psychic image who were smarter than any of their makers, and more versatile, but they still depended on being given specific instructions and goals in advance by people who could not know all the questions that might need answering. The most flexible and practical one to send on any such mission was a combination of the best of both: a human in a combat-hardened e-suit.

It was almost always the humans in their suits being dropped on hostile worlds or from ship to ship in normal space. Riding the keel was not considered a proven method of infiltration and travel. Harker wanted to prove it.

While the ship went through the genhole and those inside prepared for their own duties, watched additional briefings, or ran new simulations of their updated problems, Gene Harker slept, blissfully unaware of anything at all. There was nothing at the moment he could do, so, for now, the suit itself was awake and in charge.

The first switchover was monitored, noted, the data from the genhole gates read out and identified, and compared with known navigational charts. The suit determined that this was almost certainly nothing more than a switchover, and thus it did not awaken the man inside.

The Odysseus turned, and as soon as the automated systems on the ship and the gate meshed, it accelerated once more and went into yet another genhole, and all was quiet once more.

This happened three more times before the suit decided that there was an anomaly. The readout from the selected gate showed that it was inactive—that, in fact, it had been deactivated as leading to occupied territory. The Odysseus should have been unable to traverse the final distance to the gate, let alone go through it; collision alarms should have been ringing all over. Instead, the gate, shorn of the identifiable light system and internal glow that showed active gates to be properly functioning, swallowed the ship.

From that point on, the next two switchovers showed a variety of genhole gates that were in fact not encoded with any headers known in The Confederacy. The codes were totally different and, at this point anyway, totally unreadable. Nonetheless, the ship appeared to know the codes and the complementary mathematics and had no more trouble using them than it had any of the official ones.

The suit made a note of this. Genholes could not be reprogrammed by humans, even geniuses; it took the kind of artificial intelligence systems that required whole planets just to store the knowledge and compute the variables. The genholes had been placed by creating essentially random wormholes and then forcing the genhole gate through them. Only when this was done thousands, even millions, of times, and star charts made and compared, had it been possible to build and map a transportation network safe enough to send through real ships with living beings inside.

Going from a naturally occurring phenomenon to generating it themselves to being able to stabilize and harness what some called tunnels through space-time had opened up the universe to humanity. Its network created The Confederacy. A few other races had been encountered out there, some of which had interplanetary travel and at least one of which had been playing with generation ships, but none had discovered how to harness the wormhole principle and use it consistently.

It still wasn’t easy to do or maintain. The math involved in programming each genhole gate was so complex it was done at factories and maintenance areas; genholes were replaced every few years, or they should have been. When the Titans came, it was feared that this same network could be used as a shortcut road map to lead them to all the choicest inhabited worlds of The Confederacy. Some were simply turned off, some deactivated, but most were replaced with special gates that used a far different and totally military cipher. This allowed Naval vessels to get into enemy territory if they had to, but nobody else, and each emergence through a genhole rekeyed the codes so that only the ship emerging could reenter from that point.

Nobody was supposed to have those codes except the highest defense intelligence computers. Even ships were supplied with them only on a need basis, and with rapid expiration. The suit knew this, and knew that, too, the Odysseus was applying those codes it should not, could not know, and doing so easily enough that they might as well not have been there at all. It made a note for future debriefing, if it ever occurred: the damned superintelligence code system for occupied areas didn’t work. It probably never had. It was just too complicated.

It actually would have been a difficult thing for the Navy to discover on its own. When it used these genhole gates, they worked as they were supposed to. Nobody else even tried them because they gave off an “inactive” or “inert” signal.

It was lucky that the Titans appeared to use a totally different and still unknown means of accomplishing the same thing. Otherwise, the road map was wide open. It was in many ways a lucky break; just as they ignored all resistance, they ignored this as well.

“That is not my idea of a fair fight!” Sergeant Mogutu complained, emerging dripping wet and aching, not to mention stark naked, from the sim chamber aboard.

“I’m sorry, Sergeant,” Katarina Socolov told him. “It’s hard on me, too, but its the best I can come up with to simulate what you might face on the surface of a Titan-occupied world. Nothing—no machinery of any kind—works. Food would be present but not easily obtained. I postulated no large animals because of the cleansing they do before they allow a regrowth, but there would still be” person-to-person combat of some kind. You are back to the most basic ancestral state, Sergeant.”

He glared and quickly put on a towel, then stomped off to the showers.

Colonel N’Gana, who was about to enter, stood there wearing only a towel and a headband. “You will have to excuse my sergeant for grumbling,” he said to her in that very low melodious voice of his. “However, he will be a good man down there in those conditions. There is little call now, nor has there been for ages, for hand-to-hand combat and basic resourcefulness in the military. That is why we are able to command the fees that we do.”