CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Terrence Murphy and his staff sat around the briefing room table. Callum and Eira stood against the compartment’s outside bulkhead, still in their vac suits, while a true-scale wire diagram of a thick diamond rotated slowly in a holo above the table.
“It’s League tech,” O’Hanraghty said. “A singularity manifold for a mil-spec Fasset drive. Ours are designed a bit differently, but there’s no mistaking it. Besides—” He highlighted a flat pane of readouts at the front of the diamond. “All the maintenance LEDs and system connectors are standard RLH format.”
“Callum.” Murphy leaned forward in his seat and stroked his chin. “You’re fresh from your engineering program. What’s the cost of one of these?”
Callum had been examining his cracked helmet with a thoughtful frown that was far away from the ready room. Now he looked up suddenly and squinted in thought.
“I’m not really as up on mil-spec components as I am on the civilian-grade side,” he said, “but I’m damn sure they’re more expensive, not less, and the singularity manifold is the most expensive part of any Fasset-drive ship. They have to be manufactured to insanely careful tolerances, but the real bottleneck’s the exotic matter incorporated into one of them. Producing that much exotic matter is a royal pain in the ass. Like I say, I’m better read in on the civilian side, but my understanding is that the military version uses even more exotic matter. I’d be surprised if building one of these things didn’t eat up thousands of hours per unit.”
“And how many manifolds were destroyed on that ship?” Murphy asked.
“From the Hoplons’ video,” O’Hanraghty glanced at a slate, “two thousand four hundred and ninety-nine. That’s assuming each crate had a manifold. The scan pulse from Logan’s team detected just that in the first third of the hold his armor was able to get through, so I think it’s reasonable to assume that they all did.”
“That’s enough manifolds for…forty FTLCs,” Captain Lowe said. “That’s almost thirty percent of the Federation’s total fleet.”
“Why?” O’Hanraghty asked. “We know the League’s shipbuilding capability, and they can’t build that many ships. So why do they need so many manifolds?”
“Manifolds are one of the great bottlenecks in ship construction,” Callum said. “Laying keel and hull’s not difficult—that’s mostly automated in the yards. It’s the Fasset drives that matter, and building them is what really takes the time. Especially fabricating the manifolds. When an FTL is decommissioned, everything but the Fasset drive goes to the breakers. Not the drive fan, though. Instead, they build a new ship around it. They may upgrade by replacing the nodes, but the core of the drive is almost always recycled. My brother’s…He’s big into that. Family business.”
“Then if building these things is so hard, where were these manufactured?” Lowe asked. “And where were they going?”
“Unfortunately, Captain Buckley and his crew died when their ship blew up,” Murphy said. “The Beta Team that seized the bridge didn’t have time to un-encrypt Buckley’s ship’s logs before they had to abandon. I don’t know if they had time to download a copy.” He shook his head sadly. “None of them made it home to tell us.”
“Speaking of which, Sir,” Callum said, “how did you know Val Idrak was going to blow?”
“I didn’t ‘know’ anything of the sort,” his father said. “But whoever shipped those manifolds obviously didn’t want anybody else finding out about them. The scramblers and the demolition charges in each crate proved that. So it seemed reasonable to assume that they’d like the entire ship—and those encrypted logs, for example—to become…unavailable to us, as well.” He shrugged. “I figured there might be a scuttling charge on a timer, so it seemed like a good idea to get all of our people off. If the ship hadn’t blown in the next hour or so, I could always have put you back aboard.”
“Well, all I can say, is I’m glad you played your hunch,” Callum said.
“Actually, I don’t think that’s exactly what happened,” O’Hanraghty said. He switched the holo to a system view and a thin line of light traced itself across the plot from the inner system to Ishtar’s position. “Oh, the hunch was good, but that’s a data spike. It originated on Alramal, and at this range, even a tight beam had plenty enough scatter for us to catch it. It reached Val Idrak just about the time it blew.”
“Which presents an interesting question,” Murphy observed. “The timing is about right for that detonation command—and does anyone here really think that isn’t what it was?—to reach Val Idrak if it was sent as soon as the system sensor net could pick up our Fasset drive in pursuit of Val Idrak and transmit that information to the planet. So, who sent it, and why?”
“I doubt we’ll ever know,” O’Hanraghty replied, “but I don’t think there’s any doubt that whoever it was is working for the League. And the fact that they sent the destruct command that quickly, without even waiting to see if Buckley would be able to fob us off or if the scramblers would fool us, is an indication of just how determined they are to keep all this a secret. Callum’s just told us how expensive, in terms of both time and industrial capital, these damned things are. And they just blew up forty FTLCs worth of them on the probability that we might find them. That’s ruthless as hell, and it indicates just how much they’re willing to write off to maintain security.”
“Is that why they wanted Val Idrak to drop them off here, instead of in a League system?” Murphy mused.
“Probably.” O’Hanraghty nodded. “It gives another layer of separation from whoever built the manifolds for them.”
Callum deposited his damaged helmet on the table and opened a screen.
“But why would the League subcontract this work at all?” Tanaka asked. “Finding a manufacturer out past the blue line has to be expensive. There’s damn all for heavy industry out here, outside someplace like Hell Hearth, and they’ve been aggressively neutral from the get-go. And quality control would have to be a major issue on most feral worlds. Then there’s the risk during transport, as we just saw. Or are we going to suggest that the Leaguies built an entire secret manufacturing facility all the hell and gone way out here? Please! It’s not like they’re hurting for space closer to home to get this work done, assuming they’ve got the manpower to build it and the cash to pay for it at all!”
“I don’t think they did find a feral world to build them,” Callum murmured.
“Excuse me?” Tanaka said. “Somebody built them.”
“Sure, but I don’t think it was the League. For that matter, I don’t think it was anybody out this way. Look at this.” He pressed fingertips to a reader, then flicked them up at the holo. The wire diagram of the captured manifold reappeared, and the view zoomed in on a ring linked to the bent edges.
“You see the quantum filament readers? They’re…the string elongation buffers don’t match the Greene Theorems.”
“Not everyone here is an engineer, son,” Murphy said.
“They’re weird!” Callum raised a hand and smacked his helmet. “They shouldn’t work! But I’ve been doing the math, and it does work. And I don’t understand that. It’s an approach that sure as hell wouldn’t occur to any engineer I know. In fact, it hurts my head to even try to think through these equations—more than quantum mechanics normally do, I mean. But weird as it is, I think it’s actually more efficient than our own designs, at least marginally.”
O’Hanraghty pulled up a screen of his own and began tapping a virtual keyboard. He looked at the results for several seconds, then raised his eyes to Murphy.
“I think it’s bothering Callum because this isn’t how a human mind would solve these equations,” he said.
“Wait.” Tanaka held up her hand. “Wait. Just what are you suggesting?”
“That Callum’s right. These manifolds weren’t built by the League or to a League design by a feral planet full of humans. They were built for the League, yes. But if we have a xeno-anthropologist examine the problem-solving that went into the design, I think they’d come to the same conclusion I have. These manifolds were built by the Rishathan Sphere.”
Tanaka wasn’t the only officer present who groaned.
“Not that old conspiracy theory,” she said. “That idea’s been floating around the dark feeds since the war started. No rational person believes it.”
“Then how do you explain that?” O’Hanraghty waved a hand at the holo. “The Rish have never let anyone examine their Fasset drives. And League FTLCs—”
“Scuttle,” Lowe said. He frowned thoughtfully. “Not all of them, but a damned high percentage.”
“How high a percentage?” Callum asked, still gazing at his own data screen.
“Maybe a third?” Lowe looked at O’Hanraghty and it was the chief of staff’s turn to frown.
“Not that high, I don’t think,” he said. “More like a quarter. But you’re right, a hell of a lot of them do if they’re boarded. Or if they’re disabled with no way out of the system. And when they do, the command and engineering teams go up with the ship.”
“Exactly.” Lowe nodded. “The Federation isn’t so…committed. I’d just overload and fry the manifolds if the Ishtar was in too much trouble, and I’d always thought the Leaguies who didn’t were just plain bloody-minded. But if there’s anything to this theory, then…”
“They couldn’t let us get hold of their hardware…or of engineering people who might let something slip,” Mirwani said. “And,” his eyes narrowed, “if there’s anything to it, that might give us a rough meter stick for how many of these Rish-built manifolds—what percentage of their total FTLC force—they’ve got.”
“That’s not evidence,” Tanaka scoffed. “It’s conjecture. Is this what we’re going to do, Sir?” she asked Murphy. “Send this back to the Oval with our scientific and not-so-scientific wild-ass guesses that the Rish built a fortune’s worth of manifolds for the League? Based off a number of increasingly coincidental discoveries while we were out past the blue line?”
“There’s a lot to process here.” Murphy stood and made his way slowly around the conference table. “But this is a significant discovery. Does anyone disagree?”
He paused beside Callum to put a hand on his shoulder and squeeze, then resumed his pacing.
“I’d caution against even mentioning the Rish in your report, Sir,” Tanaka said. “It will only rile up the crazies. A hint of evidence—”
“So you agree there’s evidence of Rishathan involvement?” O’Hanraghty asked.
“Yes. I mean, no. I mean…none of us are qualified to make that judgment,” she said. “But just because a Rish was involved in the design doesn’t mean the Sphere is responsible for its manufacture.”
“No Rish ever leaves the Sphere,” Murphy said. “They haven’t since this war began. We come to them at their designated trade worlds; they don’t come to us. So let’s draw the idea out for the sake of argument. What if this is—hypothetically—proof that the Rish are giving significant military aid to the League?”
“Fuck trading with those lizard bastards ever again, for one thing,” Captain Bisgaard said.
Fury’s CO glared at the holo. The Alpha Team had gotten home battered but intact; a sizable chunk of Val Idrak’s hull had struck the Beta Team’s Moray. None of its passengers—or the Orca which had been maneuvering to pick it up—had survived.
“One thing, if I may,” Ortiz, the fleet adjutant said from the far end of the table. “Does anyone doubt those manifolds were going to League warships? No? Then where were they going? Where are the ships waiting for them? The main League yards are at Dongguan and Urumchi. Even Urumchi is five months from here for a military drive, closer to six and a half for a merchie. Dongguan’s still farther away. And for that matter, we’ve got a fair grasp of the Leaguies’ building capabilities from prisoners and our own intelligence operations. They don’t have the hulls in production for this many drives, not even at Dongguan and Urumchi combined.”
“And they degrade,” Callum said, looking up from his data screen.
“Degrade?” his father repeated, eyebrow arched.
“Manifolds need to be installed and linked together in their final configuration or the quantum—”
“How long?” Murphy asked.
“Five months—six, max—from construction, or they become worthless.” Callum shook his head. “Which is why seeing so many manifolds in one place is just plain insane.”
Ortiz tossed his hands up in frustration. Then he paused.
“So the League must have a bunch of hulls—probably within five or six months of completion—sitting around waiting for them…somewhere.” His brows furrowed and he looked off to one side.
“This rabbit hole has some potential after all, doesn’t it?” O’Hanraghty said.
Murphy continued his slow walk around the conference table, deep in thought.
“If the League has a hidden shipyard…” he said thoughtfully. “Buckley said this was his second delivery here in Alramal. Assuming he delivered the same cargo both times, then the League has an enormous fleet out here that we don’t know about. Thoughts?”
“The League’s manpower’s under a lot of strain, but they aren’t exactly desperate yet,” Commander Mirwani said. “If their reserve pools are on par with ours—proportionately; their base population’s a lot smaller—they could probably crew another fleet the size of what’s fighting in Beta Cygni, by last count. I don’t know that they could crew any more than that, though.”
“I think doubling what they already have fighting in Beta Cygni would be quite enough,” Murphy said dryly.
“So what was on that ship?” O’Hanraghty scratched his beard. “Say forty FTLCs’ worth of manifolds. That’s—what? A third of the strength they have deployed around Beta Cygni?”
“We may have poked a bear, people.” Murphy stopped pacing and his expression was somber. “Worst case: that was the final shipment this ghost fleet needed to reach full strength. Best case: we caught them earlier in the process and they’re a lot farther from ready than that. But either way, whoever sent the self-destruct signal is going to be leaving shortly for that hidden shipyard with very bad news.”
“You’re worried the League will attack,” Lowe said. “Attack with whatever they’ve got, because if the Federation connects enough dots we can find out where their hidden yards are.”
“Those manifolds had already been in transit, probably for weeks,” Callum said, “and the clock on their degradation was already ticking. Wherever they were going…can’t be too far.”
“O’Hanraghty, do an analysis of all League systems in range. We can send a number of possibilities back to the Oval,” Murphy said.
“Aye, aye.” O’Hanraghty nodded quickly.
“We’ll hit the wormhole threshold in about seven hours,” Murphy said to the ready room in general. “Attend to your duties. We’ll reconvene after we go supralight. Dismissed.”
The assembled officers stood and clicked their heels together, then filed out. Murphy stopped Callum from leaving. Only the two of them and O’Hanraghty remained.
“Well done out there, Son,” Murphy said. “You gave me a scare.”
“I’d rather not make a habit out of being aboard exploding starships.” Callum picked up his helmet and turned it over in his hands, then looked his father in the eye. “We weren’t here for slaves, were we?”
“No.” Murphy shook his head. “That was the cover story.”
“So Federation Intelligence knows about this? They sent us out here?” Callum asked.
“That take is mostly correct,” O’Hanraghty said. “We have a different intelligence source that led us to this system. He was right about every detail except for the target vessel’s actual name.”
“The Holy Oak?” Callum asked. “Buckley mentioned that before he died.”
“The Holy Oak,” Murphy agreed. “Our source didn’t realize it was an identity challenge, not the ship’s actual name.”
“And he told you about it, Dad.” It was not a question. “Not his superiors in Intelligence.”
“Not his superiors. Callum, O’Hanraghty and I are part of an effort to bring Rishathan involvement in the war out into the open.”
“Wait. You two are part of those conspiracy theories?” Callum looked back and forth between them. “The nut jobs with the scrambled feed casts and the tinfoil hats?”
“You put it like that and it sounds a lot worse than it really is,” O’Hanraghty said. “But is it really so far-fetched? Look at what you just went through. What you recovered from that ship. And you found the Rishathan design in that manifold all on your own without a single ‘paranoid’ suggestion from your father or me.”
“Oh God, I’m going to get dragged into it.” Callum sat down hard. “My name in the feeds with it. Even Grandpa won’t hire me. I’ll have to marry some girl who thinks fluoride is in the water so the Five Hundred can mind-control the rest of the population!”
“Look at this objectively,” Murphy said. “What if the xeno-anthropologists confirm your suspicion? That no human mind would’ve designed that manifold the same way. What then?”
“Then the Rish would have some explaining to do,” Callum said.
“Damn betcha,” O’Hanraghty said. “And we’ll make sure this doesn’t get swept under the rug. The Five Hundred’s trade deals with the Sphere are lucrative, but not worth the groundswell against the Rish that will rise up from the people.”
“That’s a distant problem,” Murphy said, “and we’ve got a more pressing concern. There’s been a terrible mistake. And I made it.”
“How do you figure, Terrence?” O’Hanraghty sounded surprised. “This isn’t a mistake. For the first time in decades, we’ve got evidence of what the Rish have been doing. Proof!”
“What did we find? Key components to a League fleet. Given the time constraints on installing them, they’re probably the final components for at least thirty or forty FTLCs. We don’t know where the fleet in question is, how much of it’s crewed and ready, or what their operational planning looks like. But they’re going to know what we’ve done soon…and then they’ll come for us. For New Dublin. They’ll strike before the Federation can muster a defense.”
“If they’re anywhere closer than their base in Zohar, they could be in New Dublin before we even get word back from Earth,” Callum said. “The math just doesn’t work for us. How long, Dad? How long were you part of this tinfoil-hat brigade?”
“Wow, he figured out our club’s name,” O’Hanraghty said. “We should’ve read him in sooner.”
“I’ve been a member for a long, long time, Son. Since before the Academy.” Callum’s eyes widened, and his father smiled crookedly. “The more I studied the battle your grandfather died in, the more I came to believe that the League might be using Rishathan tech. I kept going down the proverbial rabbit hole and came across others who suspected the same.”
“Like me,” O’Hanraghty said. Callum looked at him, and he shrugged. “I told you I was at Brin Gap. What I didn’t tell you is that my uncle was your grandfather’s chief of staff. They died together. And the bastard who ordered your grandfather—over his protests—to launch that Alpha strike doctored his report to make it all your grandfather’s idea. His and my uncle’s.”
O’Hanraghty’s expression was grimmer than Callum had ever seen it.
“I was a snotty on my midshipman’s cruise,” he said. “I didn’t have much of a clue, yet, but Uncle Seamus had friends on the flagship’s staff. One of them told me what really happened. It took a while, but once I had my commission, I went back and dug until I found confirmation. Couldn’t do much with it, and digging for it is one of the blots in my copybook, but I came to very much the same conclusion your father did—that you did, really, in a way—about where the Leaguie carriers’ acceleration came from.”
“And the fact that my father and his uncle were friends was how the two of us made connections and embraced our tinhattedness,” Murphy said.
“We don’t advertise for membership,” O’Hanraghty said. “That tends to bring in the real crazies. But we’re out there, and there are more of us than people like Tanaka would ever believe.”
“Is there a handshake or something?” Callum asked.
“Goat sacrifice,” O’Hanraghty said solemnly. “We’ll do it proper once we’re back on Crann Bethadh.”
“Harrison!” Murphy snapped.
“But the look on his face is priceless! No, Callum. No goat sacrifices. No secret handshakes. We don’t need them, because once you’ve gotten a peek behind the veil, you really can’t ever go back. So until and unless this goes public—fully public—you keep everything about the Rish to yourself.”
“What about Mom? Or Vyom?” Callum asked. “Grandpa?”
“Absolutely not.” Murphy shook his head, his expression sad. “I’m afraid they’ll be some of the last ones convinced. They’ve been part of the Heart World system for so long that they literally don’t know anything else. They’re about the farthest thing from idiots, all of them, but their entire worldview says this is impossible. It’ll be up to us to show them what we’ve learned, prove it to them and give them time to accept it. One can never force belief.”
“If I hadn’t been on that ship, I wouldn’t believe it,” Callum said. He looked back and forth between his father and O’Hanraghty for a moment, then inhaled deeply. “I need to go fix my gear. Maybe get cleaned up. And the whole Hoplon team saved my ass in there. I’ll write up award recommendations.”
“Protecting you is their duty,” Murphy said, “and in a lot of ways, medals are cheap. Give them your thanks instead…and maybe chop off on a few extra days of shore leave when we’re back on Crann Bethadh. If we can afford the time.”
“And in the meantime?” O’Hanraghty said.
“And in the meantime, we need to figure out how to defend New Dublin from an overwhelming force.” Murphy put his hands on his hips and turned to gaze at the holo of the manifold. “We need that plan before we get back.”