Kaspar's Box

The fact that they hadn't apparently done so meant that either she had nothing to offer but the ride and that's what they were getting anyway or, possibly, that she had been fully compromised and reprogrammed not to know it. She put that out of her mind for now, though, not so much from paranoia as from pragmatism. If that were true, then it really didn't matter insofar as there was nothing she might be able to do to discover or counter it.

Chung had watched with fascination as O'Brian's operator-there was just no other way to think of it right now-had flowed rather nicely into Maslovic's hand and then through him, until he had sensed it and let go, cutting the contact. That had yielded some very interesting and possibly useful facts. First, that the more it extended into and over Maslovic, the thinner the energy field around both he and the girl had become, so there was a real limit to how much that gemstone device could put out after all. That was probably why all three were needed to do what they did aboard the Thermopylae; the power had to be combined.

Still, all three together had also been sufficient to have somehow reprogrammed the living sentry's memory of them leaving, and the memory of anyone who came close to them. The three of them together, in perfect symmetry, had been necessary to create a field that could fog the mind of anyone coming into its proximity. Nobody could create a condition where someone would be invisible to everyone and everything across the whole catalog of senses and monitors, but apparently together, the three could create a thin field that would make no one and no thing notice that they were there. Fascinating.

It also implied limits to that power, however vast. They could put in their clever little program to the ship's computer, but they couldn't stay there and keep the girls supplied and protected or, worse, controlled. They could use the girls' bodies and sensors to explore, almost like robotic probes or ferrets, but the requirement that the field, however thin, be stretched as far as possible vastly limited what they could actually do during those explorations.

She had never experienced this sort of energy, did not know its full properties or potential, so there really wasn't a lot she could do to tell more about it without attracting unwanted attention from it, but it did allow her to see the energy in its ebbs and flows and something of where it went and what it could do.

It always had at least a slender thread directly into each girl's cerebral cortex, and it also had a similar hairlike thread into the same region of the nearly fully developed fetuses. It certainly wasn't using those connections for control, at least not now, but it did occasionally send quantities of energy in short, coded bursts along those connections, sometimes to the mothers but more often to the almost children within.

What would a newborn be programmed to do? What could it do? It wouldn't even have full vision or control of its muscles for some time. Latent programming, probably, or lots of data and routines to be activated once the child was old enough for it to matter.

Were these, then, a class of invading soldiers being created by an enemy almost from the moment they had a developing brain? Or the perfect agents, or spies? What were the operators on the other side of those stones doing, and why?

As much anxiety as she felt, Chung also felt a great deal of excitement. No more pushing around little toads like Murphy or doing shows of force to get taxes from poor worlds growing poorer; this was what a military was for.

Now there was an enemy, a bit out of the shadows where those like her could see them at work, if obliquely. And if the operators were friendly, why had they spent so much time and trouble keeping in those deepest shadows?

How she'd like to follow that energy back to its source! And not in this little shuttle, either, but with her fighter, perhaps the whole fighter squadron, and on their own, without potential corruption from the mother ship's master computers!

As it stood right now, though, this ship had four weapons, all personal weapons of no real use in space, and none of them was assembled and charged.

And with the last of the gates looming ahead, they were only a few hours out from those who sent those images that so troubled Maslovic, someone who, like herself, was without the fear of death and whose entire self was devoted to the mission, and not to some intermediaries in this obvious vast interstellar plot.

She saw the wormgate ahead, quite suddenly, but it was no surprise. Directly on the flight path, just where and when it should be, here it was, out then, with only a slight adjustment, back in for one last, very short ride.