The Odyssey and the Iliad (Kinsella Universe Book 7) Read online

  Senior Pilot Officer Makaa had turned into a sphinx. Trevor considered it, and decided that it was self-preservation. He carefully avoided speaking to her, and she just as carefully avoided speaking to him.

  Chapter 4 -- Parking Orbit

  Eight days and a few hours later they came off High Fan eleven light minutes from the star.

  There had been no way to compute where the planets were, but with most F-class stars the habitable zone ended at ten light minutes.

  And yes, he played Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock.” Oddly enough, it was one of the songs that had received the most votes anyway.

  The reaction was swift, but not as dramatic as Trevor had feared. His bridge was taken over by people who wouldn’t obey him. The fans and the power plant were no longer under his control. Belatedly, someone arrived to take command of the laser -- clearly an oversight on someone’s part.

  This time the people in charge were civilians, bureaucrats of the first water. He asked about Makaa, and was told that she hadn’t been authorized to reveal that she was a telepath. When he told the bureaucrat that it was Makaa’a boss who’d told him, he was ignored.

  They were polite, he had to say that about them. The Odyssey took up orbit about two light minutes further out from the primary, placing it outside the occulting effect of the B-class star, and raising instant objections from him.

  That was the first he learned that the Odyssey dominated the local news and the government was teetering. The telepaths had learned that the government wanted to increase the mutation rate among the young women on the habitat. Probably nothing had ever raised the ire of the general populace since they’d decided to flee Earth.

  The “Koopianers” as Kinsella had dubbed them, had managed for more than three hundred years without the death penalty. Then it had been handed down for more than a hundred people for whom no crime had been specified. Just the “possibility of contamination.” That had sat poorly with the public and now the indifference of the government to the fate of refugees from Grayhome did more than rock the foundations of their society.

  That, and the knowledge that the rest of the human race was locked in a life and death struggle with an implacable enemy that they had no hope of beating if they were discovered, was terrifying the populace.

  The government fell just six days after Odyssey took orbit. The new government promptly ordered them into a new orbit, a light minute inside the orbit of the major populated planet, shielded from the radiation.

  Senior Pilot Officer Makaa reappeared, looking very tired.

  “You need to rest,” Trevor told her.

  She shrugged. “Everything is in a state of flux. We independently discovered a way to detect ships on High Fan. You are not a propulsion engineer, sensor specialist or a Benko-Chang physicist, else I’d call your medic before I tell you.”

  “Mind-busting, eh? I have trouble imagining something like that. What is it? Some esoteric offshoot of quantum physics?”

  “Captain Grimes, you have to tune fans because one fan can detect another, and at short distances they interfere with each other’s operation. The first time Kinsella put two fans on an airframe, you’ve known a far, far better way to detect fans than gravity wave detectors. It works, as I said, as far away as light years.”

  Trevor swallowed. “Oh my God! If we’d understood that at Grayhome...”

  “We only have a few thousand people in our Fleet, Captain. It’s true, had you known how to detect your enemies as they approached on High Fan, the odds would have swung greatly in your favor. I, and others, feel that might have been a proximate cause of the attack. The records show that your enemies are not in overwhelming strength; rationally, they should have been. If they were afraid of you developing the technology, that could have precipitated the attack.

  “Now my government is facing the virtual certainty that some of our people in your systems are, even now, on their way here with warnings of their own of the attack. They have the ability to detect ships on High Fan, but we have no way to know if it is more effective than that used by the aliens. If it is less effective -- they could be leading the aliens here. Shipboard equipment lacks the sensitivity of fixed sites.

  “We have sent people out to the usual way stations along the route back to the Federation, but there is no guarantee they won’t be bypassed. Every ship capable of going to High Fan is heading out, to take part in a screen to try to detect any incoming ships. It is the only thing we can do. Each ship has robot message drones, and it’s hoped they can arrive in-system before any of those with warnings arrive -- leaving the screen vessels in place.

  “We know it may take months, but it’s something we have to do.”

  She looked at him. “We have been using mostly those of us optimized for space flight. That hasn’t been a high priority and there are only a few hundred of us. A contingent of our best and brightest are even now working on defining a more exhaustive list of desired traits... but it will take a decade or more to see the first results, and another decade beyond that for those individuals to gain the requisite experience. As you are aware, survival in space requires knowledge, luck -- and experience.”

  “Well, I have the first and last; you can survive without luck, but as usual, those around you tend to die,” Trevor said as calmly as he could.

  “You did have bad luck, Captain Grimes. You made a mistake. Stop wallowing in self-pity.

  “There are discussions at the highest level of the government to replace you as captain. Consider, please, that the discussion right now is how we want to tell the rest of human race that we are here and that we will not tolerate interference -- much less any attempt to enforce laws or legal judgments that we don’t recognize -- we are not now, nor were we ever, a part of the Federation.”

  “That will be tough,” he told her. “We teach it in every tech school in the Fleet. It exists as questions on just about every certificate exam for any watchstander in the Fleet. Look for such-and-such, take no action and report to the Federation with all due haste. I have no doubt that there are plans to ‘deal with’ the situation. They always have plans.”

  “And we agree. There have been a sufficiency of mistakes on both sides. It’s time we got a grip on ourselves and worked out our differences.

  “It is the position of our government that our technology could greatly assist you. But, unlike us, you will first to have to overcome your revulsion to that technology.”

  Trevor sighed. “I’ve given some thought to what you said about the way nature experiments on living creatures. I went through some books we have aboard, books that make no bones about showing the amazing forms just from Earth. Really, looking at those, nothing at the Koop labs was so earthshaking. When you consider what we’ve seen on the fifteen hundred planets humanity has explored so far -- well, it’s time we stopped trying to define ‘alien’ as something that isn’t us.”

  “We have any number of scientists who are interested in finding out if these aliens attacking you have souls.”

  “Do these ‘soul-detectors’ work at astronomical distances?”

  “No, you have to be close. Ah! Hell!” she said as she read his mind.

  He decided to reinforce his thoughts. “The smallest nuclear weapon we’ve detected that they’ve employed is 1.1 gigatons, and that was in space. The ones they’ve used against planets are ten to twenty percent larger. We’ve detected no other weapons. No chemical explosives, no lasers, no beams or other directed energy devices. Just bombs mounted on missiles. There are no reports of High-Fan capable missiles, but by now we are surely working on them.”

  “We could greatly add to the capability of such missiles if we could include the capability of detecting ships on High Fan.”

  Trevor grimaced. “I would tell them to go with your conditions,” he told her.

  She smiled slightly. “I know. Captain Grimes, one of the main reasons I’m here is to extend an invitation to you to visit our planet. I told you I can’t lie, and I wo
n’t. There you will have extensive conversations with a great many people. Some of them are telepathic shrinks, some shrinks of the plain variety. We haven’t gotten as far away from human failings as all of that. Each of us has a simply amazing ability to review the same data and reach exceedingly different conclusions from what we observe.”

  “That’s true enough,” Trevor agreed. “I can deal with it.”

  Again a faint smile. “I know, Captain. But it’s polite to tell you in advance, regardless.”

  He appointed Lieutenant Commander Robinson boss while he was gone, and accompanied Makaa to her ship. This time it appeared to be a shuttle.

  She waved him to the right-hand seat. “Captain Grimes, our technology is different than yours. That doesn’t mean you can’t be curious about ours, as we are curious about yours.”

  “You just have better access to ours,” he said sourly.

  “I have better access. I have no more ability to run your habitat than one of your bridge officers.

  “Now I wish you to extend me the same courtesy. You are going to see things in our society that you don’t understand. Even if the basic concepts were explained, you’d still have trouble adapting to the concepts. That will start at once.

  “I will make a simple statement. Please hold any questions until much later and not until you’ve given the matter much thought. I am a telepath. The brain produces electrical signals that can be detected and understood by technology.

  “What you are about to see is one of those things you need to think long and hard about. I may look asleep to you, but I assure you, that nothing could be further from the truth.”

  She leaned back and the ship moved. She touched no controls, her eyes were closed, her face relaxed and composed. The shuttle hatch closed.

  He blinked. Normally she didn’t need an atmosphere! The shuttle bay was pressurized because of him, and it had depressurized while she was talking to him. Was it a deliberate distraction?

  Thought, he considered. He’d been told to think. Clearly, he should think. If the ability to command machines by thought was commonplace for a telepathic pilot, would such a person bother to remind someone of depressurizing a compartment?

  Probably not. In that case, she had been just making polite conversation while the hanger was pumped down. Could machines detect other people’s thoughts? Non-telepaths? That had been the subject of much research for hundreds of years. Yes, it was possible. How far had they gotten?

  He glanced at Makaa, seemingly asleep in the command chair. He saw no special helmet, no special cables linking her to the ship. She just appeared to be asleep.

  He contemplated things and realized that they were a lot like humans. Everything was a test. How many times had he heard that while he’d been a Marine? How many times had he told his own people that? Sitting on a hook was a prosaic headset. He reached out and settled it on his head.

  “Greeting, Captain Grimes! Welcome to my world, what little you can see of it,” Makaa’s voice said in the earphones.

  “I’m not distracting you, am I?”

  “No more than you’d distract a shuttle pilot with a question, Captain. Actually, even less, because I’ve been adapted and trained to handle multiple viewpoints at once without being distracted. Still -- three is the best I can manage. Of course, that means I can pilot my fighter and guide two missiles towards their target at once.”

  “Your Wing Commander said each of your fighters had two weapons.”

  “So he did. Captain, the Wing Commander wasn’t much interested in providing you with militarily useful information. The number of missiles a fighter carries is classified.”

  “I understand, and I wasn’t really trying to spy on you.”

  She laughed in his ears. “It’s a waste of time lying to a telepath, Captain Grimes!”

  She laughed again. “People, Captain, are attracted to people who meet specific criteria in our brains. It is a simple thing to program that into a genome. I find you interesting, but I’m as likely to be sexually attracted to you as you would find a frog attractive.”

  He laughed. “Well, we do have our fairy tales.”

  “You need to contemplate those fairy tales more thoughtfully, Captain. The reward wasn’t a frog -- it was a prince or princess of extraordinary beauty. Pandora’s box with a reverse twist.”

  “I never thought of it that way.”

  “One day we realized that we didn’t understand what ‘humanity’ was. We started questioning all of our precepts. It’s a useful thing, Captain. Like most things, it’s not a panacea, and some people are too dense to see the most obvious things. And even the best of people can start down the wrong track. It is damned hard, Captain, to not only acknowledge that you are on the wrong track, but be able to work up the courage to jump the tracks into what is, to that person, the dark unknown.”

  “We try our best to stay on the right path, but...” he was at a loss for words. “Evidently recognizing right versus wrong isn’t as simple as we’d thought,” Trevor said.

  “Actually, you do manage quite well, but you excuse a lot of the wrong paths as ‘stupid dirty-foot foolishness.’

  “In our opinion that’s the Federation’s greatest failure: accepting ‘dirty-foot foolishness’ with a shrug and sigh.”

  Makaa turned serious. “I told you that walking down the street in one of our cities would demonstrate something to you about the difference in our cultures. Captain, I think about the issues of the day as carefully as I can.

  “I thought our streets would show you the bankruptcy of your beliefs. Now it shows the bankruptcy of both of our approaches. A minute ago I said you could program sexual attraction into people. You replied about frogs and I tried to brush it off.

  “I can’t, in all fairness. Yes, we can program a person to have a likelihood of certain personality traits, including likes and dislikes.

  “It is a simple thing to bring about variant results. Take a five-year-old child who has been programmed to like healthy foods. Force that child to consume two helpings of broccoli or brussels sprouts with every meal and the odds are you will produce a child who hates those vegetables -- whereas if you’d not made it mandatory, the result would have more likely been as you expected.

  “Nothing points out the epic failure of our methods as what happened to those children we left behind. With the exception of the six babies, none of the rest had souls. Yes, they had intelligences about that of a dolphin or a chimp, but no souls. We took the soul-bearers with us.

  “We assumed. You teach the folly of that to this day, and we knew it as well -- but we assumed anyway.

  “One of those six was programmed to lead the stay-behinds. She was heavily augmented in intelligence and a great many other things. She should have been a fellow traveler from the first she was aware of things.

  “We assumed. Her mother abandoned her husband on the plague planet to rescue humanity. We had it on good authority that she would abandon an unexpected daughter just as readily.

  “Yes, she loved her husband a million or two times more than anyone else on the planet. We assumed that meant we understood her. Her most famous quote was ‘Do the math.’ We didn’t. Yes, she did love her husband a couple of million times more than anyone else. But there were a lot more than a couple million ‘anyone elses’ involved. She saved humanity out of a sense of duty to the race, and left her husband behind for the same reason. And she was no more willing to give up her daughter than she’d been willing to leave her husband behind.

  “For her husband, she had no choice, not if she wanted to save the human race. With her daughter, she had a choice. Whatever choices we thought we’d programmed into the baby had no chance with Stephanie Kinsella as her parent.

  “Worse, the results were one hundred and eighty degrees from what we expected. We never expected all of the other parents to reject the babies; in fact, we thought just the one would. But Kinsella was the only one who did the right thing. It was so grim one of the other
five killed himself as a teenager. And honestly, there was no thought given to the possibility that one of them would kill himself.

  “And, unexpectedly, the person who had been chosen as the backup to lead the stay-behinds quit. Just up and quit. The next in command was informed, and that was it. The person who quit never broke our secrets, but never participated any further in the effort.

  “We spent our first century getting set up. We had sufficient numbers to carry us forward, but not the numbers to keep active research in anything but a tithe of fields -- and most of those were in the biosciences. We very carefully approached the Federation at the end of a century.

  “We are, you see, very big on plebiscites. We have had one about our relationship with the Federation at least once a century -- the recent one -- the one many of us think was faked -- was our fifth and only after thirty-five years. The first time we voted to return and make contact with those we left behind. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, but we managed it without detection.

  “We discussed what we learned for a decade. Those we left behind assured us they could inject some of our people into the Federation without being detected. We decided it was worth the risk. At first those selected weren’t modified very much, but within a century and a half it was clear that the Federation not only hadn’t advanced much in the field, but it was essentially stagnant.

  “It drove our biologists wild with frustration. You sat in the midst of a cornucopia of riches that we could only dream of -- and you wouldn’t even look.

  “We have, since then, expanded our penetration of your society. The exact number is classified, but it’s on the close order of a hundred, the vast majority are students attending the universities of the Federation and then bringing that knowledge home. I swear to you Captain Grimes, we made no effort to penetrate the Fleet, Aloft, Marines or even Port. None of our people hold elected office at any level of the Federation.”