Eric Flint - The Rats, the Bats and the Ugly

She'd learned to read Liepsich's elliptical utterances by now. "So what would a thinking man do?"

He grinned again. "Why don't you sign up for physics? You have too good a brain for politics. All that needs is a big mouth and the ability to lie with a straight face. You've got the mouth for it, but I'm not sure how well you lie."

Ginny was not distracted. "Answer my question, Dr. Liepsich. I might even sign up for a physics degree. Later. If you can prove to me that you're not too dim to teach it."

He gave her a thumbs-up. "Twin thrusts. The soft-cybers. The Jampad made it pretty clear that there are slaves inside that ship. The soft-cyber bias stops them rebelling. If you removed that bias, the ship would have an enemy within."

"Except that you can't do that," she said.

He raised his eyebrows. "Says who?"

She hauled him out of the seat he was flopped into. "How? Do it! Do it now." She hated and feared the fact that her mind was not entirely her own. This was indeed a holy grail.

He shrugged, still in her grasp. "We're getting there. We've been working on the source code. The Korozhet obviously hadn't counted on the fact that even if the colony is mostly back in human nineteenth-century technology, not all of the slowship's equipment is. We've been writing a section of what would be called-in old terms-a computer virus, to reprogram the soft-cyber chips. We're getting closer. It's no small job."

"Do it faster."

He looked thoughtfully at her. "Do you realize that if we get it wrong, we scramble the soft-cyber system? Destroy its memory. We can do that right now. To knock out the basic bias and still leave it intact is a lot harder. Now, can I sit down again?"

Virginia let go. She'd forgotten that she was holding him. "That would destroy my memories, right?"

"You? Maybe," he admitted. "Most of them, probably. The chip would be intact, just the programming screwed. A rat would go back to being a rat, but we could reprogram its soft-cyber."

"Except… they… we would lose our memories."

Liepsich nodded. "Yep. But you'd still be alive and you wouldn't be enslaved."

Virginia blinked. Shook her head. "I can't. I can't part with those memories. They… they're too precious. Maybe the others… I'll ask."

"Except that we can't deal with it on a one-on-one basis. We just don't have the time to do so, or even the equipment."

"But how else do you do it?"

Liepsich grinned nastily. "Use some of that plastic inside your blonde head, Shaw. The Korozhet need some way of relaying orders to all of you at once, obviously."

She looked warily at him. "What?"

"How blonde," he said. "Hadn't you worked out that you're carrying a radio-receiver in your head? It probably constantly says 'breathe in, breathe out,' in your case."

"It's too bad you weren't born a rat, Liepsich. You would have had a little more skill with insults. Although you'd probably still be considered the rats' village idiot. Can't you jam radio signals? And can't we just use radio to affect the prisoners inside their ship? And does this mean that the revolt we tried to foment among the rats and bats is a lost cause? Or will they be able to resist?"

Liepsich smiled. "You really are too able for politics. We've identified the frequencies now, and got jammers set up, we hope. Inevitably the Korozhet will target the jamming devices, but we've got as much redundancy set up as we can. The radio call uses one of the master command phrases-what they used on you to make you obey Dr. Thom. I doubt if mere semantics could help the rats and bats dodge that. So, yes. The revolt that the rats and bats have tried to set up won't work. And that pumpkin-shaped Korozhet ship, unfortunately for my attempts to examine it, is opaque to just about every form of e-m radiation, including radio. It might work if you could get transmitters inside."

"And if your jamming fails?" asked Virginia. "And our resistance fails? What happens to us?"

Liepsich took a deep breath. "Well. Either we let you go and become the utterly loyal slave-warriors of the Korozhet. Or, if that starts to get close to the breaking point, we'll have to lose Harmony and Reason's best defense against the Magh'."

Virginia knew exactly what he meant. She closed her eyes, briefly. "You said there was another thrust."

"Ah. Just an idea," said the scientist.

"Out with it, Doctor Liepsich! Or I'll get my rats to cut your tongue out. Or better, Super-Glue your lips together so you can't insult anyone."

"You play rough, Shaw. How blonde." He smiled. "Okay. Slowshields explode if they impact a force field. We think that if you managed to make a circle of them you could, theoretically, have a hole in the field. Briefly. If you had enough slowshields you could in theory overload the entire field. But-and I emphasize the 'but'-the energy discharge would be in the multimegaton level. It would fry things for several miles around and possibly destroy the ship. We just don't know."

Eric Flint

The Rats, the Bats amp; the Ugly

Eric Flint

The Rats, the Bats amp; the Ugly

Military court Complex, Court B, Judge Silberstohn presiding.

"Do you know that there are over fifty thousand people on the street out there?" said Lieutenant Capra to his senior counsel, as they did their last pre-trial preparation.

"They're certainly being noisy enough," said Lieutenant Colonel Ogata dourly. "And I assure you, Lieutenant, that's nothing to what it will be like if we lose this case."

"We're not going to lose."

Ogata turned a frosty eye on him. "Nothing is that certain, Capra. If we had a judge like McCairn, maybe. But Judge Silberstohn… He doesn't have a sense of humor. Remember that."

"And one of our star witnesses is in Korozhet custody. I'm not sure using those military animals is a good idea, Colonel. Take my advice, and keep questions to a minimum. You're better off if you stick to Virginia Shaw's testimony. She's a good witness, and she's still got shock value."

"I plan to," said Ogata, "but always remember: that's a military panel. They trust the military and instinctively… should I say 'look down' on nonmilitary persons. It's a subconscious attitude in some cases, but it is real. The rats and bats are Military Animals."

"That's something that's sure to be challenged in court soon, sir. They're not 'animals,' or at least not 'dumb animals.' And they don't see the world quite as we do. They're amoral about some things and yet honorable about others."

"Different ethos and mores. And this seems more appropriate to realms of philosophy than last minute pre-trial preparations. It's not relevant," said Ogata, sternly.

"If that's what you think, sir," said Mike Capra, "wait 'til Doc gets up to testify. He can confuse a certified genius. That's why I kept him out of the last trial."

Ogata frowned. "In the brief meeting I had with the rat he seemed relatively coherent, if a bit long-winded."

"Just don't even give him an opportunity to talk philosophy," warned Mike. "And he takes the subject to a wider reach than I would have thought possible."

Ogata looked a little startled. "I suppose it does encompass the spectrum of human thought," he said. "Now, let's get back to the case in question."

An hour later they went into the packed courtroom. The crowd outside was even larger than it had been earlier.

With her presentation, Major Tana Gainor demonstrated that she actually had no need to resort to foul means to win her cases. She obviously just preferred certainty to litigation.

"Outside, and here in this courtroom, there are those who clamor for us to follow the popular will, to abandon the law and oblige the crowds. This," she said to the judge and panel, "is not what we stand for. We are not going to pander to the mob."