A scattering of manors marked the Hudson valley, but nobody had ever bothered to resettle Long Island or Manhattan. Thus it was free for Technical Directorate use. Beyond, the Atlantic stretched silver and immense.
"Query," the aircraft said. "Security query from Reichart Station . . . Confirmed access."
Just as well, since the orbital weapons platforms would be tracking her.
Back to work.
***
Tile-roofed cottages stood among gardens, around a few larger buildings in the same whitewashed style; lawns and brick paths linked them, centered on a square with an ornamental pond. The settlement was three and a half centuries old, at first a biohazards research institute, later branching into physics. Tied into the Web, there wasn't much need for extensive physical plant, and what there was could be put underground, A heavy power receptor showed in the distance, new construction; superconducting cable would be run underground to the centrum.
The whole population was turned out to greet her, nearly a thousand all told. A visit from a
drakensis
in person would be rare here, entry being restricted. A bow like a ripple went over them as she stepped down from the aircraft.
Gwen's nostrils flared slightly, taking their scent. Clean, slightly salty, seasoned with curiosity, excitement, awe, a touch of fear, a complex hormonal stew that signaled
submission.
The scent of
Homo
servus,
comforting and pleasant; it brought a warm pleasurable feeling, a desire to protect and guide.
Their type was more diverse in looks than her own, closer to the ancestral
Homo sapiens
sapiens;
this particular group tended to light-brown skins and fair hair, and a height about half a head below her hundred and seventy-six centimeters. There were children among the crowd. Reichart Station would be a community of its own, with its own customs and folkways, by now. The group standing to meet her were middle-aged or older, although they showed few signs of it; they'd been designed to remain vigorous into their ninth or tenth decade before a brief senescence and an easy death.
"Greetings," Gwen said.
"We live to serve," they replied.
The awe-fear scent grew stronger as they reacted to the subliminal stimulus of her pheromones.
She throttled back consciously. No sense in spooking them—the long wilderness vacation had made her a little sloppy.
"I'm Glenr Hoben," the
servus
said. "Administrator. This is Tolya Mkenni, my lifepartner and head of research on the Project." She could hear the capitalization on the name.
Tolya gave a half-bow; she smelled a little nervous, and her pupils were slightly dilated. "We've been achieving interesting results, overlord, but it's an intricate question. We're thankful for one of the Race to direct us."
Gwen smiled and shook her head. She'd been a scientist of various types—she'd started in planetography, back around the time of the Final War—but was mainly a troubleshooter these days.
"I'm here primarily to assess and report," she said. "If things look promising, more personnel will be assigned."
Introductions followed. A pair of adolescents bowed and presented her with flowers, some type she wasn't familiar with, probably a local bioproduct. The blossoms had a heady scent, rather like plum brandy with a hint of cinnamon. The two who presented them were pretty as well, a boy and girl of about sixteen in white tunics.
"What pleasant youngsters," she said.
"Mine and Tolya's," said Glenr with quiet pride. "Tomin is already studying research infosystems, and Mala quantum-gravitational dynamics. They'll serve the Race well."
"I'm sure they will," Gwen said sincerely.
Servus
were short-lived and meek and biddable, but the best of them were just as intelligent as her kind, and possibly more creative. "I'll spend the rest of this evening and tomorrow resting and assimilating data."
***
"Service," she said.
"Glory," he replied, dropping the plaque into her palm.
"Received," she said, and touched the corder fastened to his wrist. "I'd better get right on to it."
The man nodded grimly; his control was excellent for someone so young, but she could sense tightly-held fright.
"I was with the salvage crew that worked over the platform out in the Oort," he said. "Believe
me,
we're dealing with the unknown here. And I'm not entirely sure that the enemy haven't been meddling."
Gwen nodded. Contamination of infosystems was a perpetual threat, one of the few forms of military action that
could
be carried out over light-years. There was always some traffic in information between the systems, mostly scientific. The Samothracians had always been better at infosystems, just as the Race did more with biologicals—but the InfoWeb was the skeleton of modern civilization. The unspoken threat of retaliation with biosabotage, or simply with asteroids punched up to relativistic speeds, had kept anything too obvious from happening. The potential of the molehole projects . . . was that worth the risk of direct action to the enemy?
Certainly. A
functioning macrocosmic molehole would break the long stalemate. The Final War might well turn out to be less final than they'd thought.
"Service to the State," she said, in the old formal mode.
He saluted, fist to chest. "Glory to the Race."
Silence fell on the villa, unbroken save for the breathing of her ghouloon in its quarters at the back; the courier must have brought it in. The transgene was asleep, but its senses were just as keen as hers, and it would wake in the extremely unlikely event of intruders. Gwen slipped the plaque into the receptor of a pocket reader; it extended a thin diadem that she dropped over her head to rest on her brows. She lay down on a couch in the lounging room and thought at her transducer:
begin.
***
The room was not dark to Gwen, not to eyes that could rival a cat's, and see into the infrared as well. The guardbeast rose from all fours, one hand pointing to the door; somebody was approaching. A silent snarl lifted teeth from its muzzle. Ghouloons were an early experiment, the first of the sentient transgenes. Basically a giant Gelada baboon, with material from certain breeds of dog, from the hunting cats, and from human stock for intelligence, vocal cords, and a fully opposable thumb. They made superb guardians and hunt-servants, although not bright enough to operate any but the simplest machines. Crude work by current standards, but still occasionally useful.
She listened herself, drew air through her nostrils, stretched. "No, I think I know who that is, Wulka," she said quietly. "Go back to your room."
Gwen slipped out of the blacks and underclothes and walked to the door. The villa lights came up around her automatically. The door was carved wood on hinges, local handicrafts. Tomin and Mala stood outside, bearing a bottle of wine and a hamper that smelled of food. The adolescents were wearing flower wreaths in their pale hair, and nothing else.
"We—" they began.
"I know," Gwen said, laying a finger across each pair of lips.
She savored their scent, a slight tang of apprehension and a rising involuntary excitement as they responded to her pheromones. Those strengthened in their turn as she relaxed conscious control and let her arousal blossom. Her hands trailed down to rest over their hearts, a pleasant contrast of hard curve and soft, with the same quickening beat beneath both. Their flushed and bright-eyed smiles answered her heavy-lidded one. It was a feedback cycle, self-reinforcing for all three. This should be a rare and memorable experience for them—the pleasure would be as intense as they could bear—and an enjoyable one for her after six months alone in the wilderness.
"A charming gesture," she said. And just what she needed to relax. "Do come in."
***
Tolya gestured at the holographic image that hung over the table and it rotated through a figure-eight.
"This is a three-dimensional representation," the physicist said. It showed something rather like an hourglass shape. "We take a molehole from the quantum foam, pump in energy to enlarge it, and stretch the ends apart. Both ends always remain fully congruent in spacetime. It's a closed timelike loop."
That was the theory, at least. You could anchor one end and whip the other out like a bead on the end of an elastic string. Something sent through one end emerged from the other without subjective duration. The side-effects were extremely odd; if one end were traveling at relativistic speeds, you got the time-dilation effect reversibly. Observed from the outside, it would take the mobile end 4.2-odd years to reach say, Alpha Centauri. But from the fixed end back at Sol, it would be a matter of weeks until the moving exit reached across the light-years. Stepping in would move you 4.2 light-years in space, and 4.2
years in
time.
So far that was only a weird amplification of ordinary high-tau interstellar travel. Seriously strange was the fact that you could step
back
through the molehole and through time; and if you sent the mobile end on a round-trip journey to the Centauri system and returned, you'd have two gates right next to each other, separated by more than eight years in time.
FTL always was considered equivalent to time-travel,
Gwen mused. The surprising thing was that both seemed to be possible.
"Of course, as an object passes through, the molehole tries to pinch out—you have to feed in heavy energy to keep it from closing, a virtual-matter ring. We've achieved consistent results using slightly enlarged ones and passing subatomic particles through, down on a single-atom scale. Proof of concept; it definitely works, overlord."
"But."
The
servus
scientist sighed and ran a hand through her graying hair. "Yes. There seems to be some sort of asymptotic phenomenon that takes over when we enlarge. The energy inputs give extremely variable results, and the variability increases exponentially as size goes up. It's a chaotic effect, somehow.
The theory we have says that once stabilized the molehole shouldn't do that, but obviously the theory's not everything we could wish. At a guess, I'd say that there's some sort of . . . inherent linkage to the quantum foam. There could even be advantages to that, eventually, but it's not a completely understood phenomenon.
In fact, overlord, it's not even partly understood."
"What are you trying?"
"Well, we're running a series of tests; enlarging the captive molehole
without
separating the ends spatially. That ought to be easier under a relatively heavy and uniform gravitational field. We'll bring it up in size before manipulating it; still very small compared to the eventual macrocosmic applications, you understand. About on the scale of a medium-sized molecule. If we can do that, then we might be able to separate the ends later. Here's the math."
Figures replaced the holograph. Gwen let her transducer take them in, running a mental comparison with the previous attempts.
"These functions—what're you assuming?" she said after a moment, calling up a sequence of equations. "Where did you get these quantities?"
Tolya shrugged and spread her hands, "We're guessing. The experimental results should give us an order-of-magnitude answer on how wrong we are, and then we can try again. It isn't quick, I'm afraid, overlord, but—"
"—elegance buys no yams, yes," she replied, nodding approval. "Good solid rule-of-thumb work.
More productive than any simulations, when the basic metrics aren't fully known. The space-based team tried to go too far too fast, in my opinion."
A heavy wash of flattered pleasure at her words scented the air; she could feel the enthusiasm like a glow around the long plain table. Her own answered it. These were obviously a first-class group.
Progress.
Back in the times of the Old Domination, when the Draka and their subjects had both been archaic-human, it had been impossible to entrust work like this to the underclasses. She had seen the last of that herself, being the first generation of the New Race.
"We're running the first series now, overlord," Tolya said. "You could monitor from here."
"No, I'll come down," she said thoughtfully.
Not that looking at the casings of the machinery would give her more information than she could get here, but you never knew what prompted an intuitive leap. They crowded into the elevator, a bit of a tight press with Wulka in one corner. The
servus
crowded away from the transgene's fur, squeezing together to avoid transgressing Gwen's sphere of social space. She kept her dominance pheromones throttled down to the minimum in the crowded quarters, but it was a relief when the doors hissed open.
They were a
long
way underground here. The shaft opened directly onto the centrum, with another display monitor in the center of the circular room. Around it were consoles with recliners for the attendants. They sat silently, seldom moving, controlling their instruments through transducers and the relay-circlets around their temples.