The Gordian Protocol Read online

  “Yes, actually.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously,” Philo echoed. “A lot of the combat between the Admin and NEDA was fought in space. Mars contributed the bulk of the NEDA space fleet, and their ships were the most advanced, so they’re the ones we’re interested in. At the end of the war, Mars was required to surrender all of its surviving ships before signing the Articles of Cooperation and becoming an Admin member state. Most of the ships had their forbidden tech stripped and were refitted for use by the Peacekeepers, but one was converted into a museum commemorating the Admin’s victory.”

  “Well, then!” Raibert rubbed his hands together. “That sounds very promising. Sorry I doubted you, Doc. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “The ship is a supercarrier called the FPNS Lion of Aurorae Sinus,” Philo continued, “and as chance would have it, the gunboats it carried are almost the same size as the Kleio. It was handed over to the Admin in early 2776 at an L4 shipyard, and it’s still there in 2979 in museum form.”

  “Then we know exactly where to find it,” Benjamin said. “We just need to pick the year.”

  “Let’s go with 2777,” Raibert said. “Give things some time to cool down after the war, but hopefully not enough time for them to strip the Lion of all its dangerous goodies.”

  “That should work,” Philo said.

  “Kleio, adjust course for the L4 Lagrange point, 2777 CE.”

  “Yes, Professor. Adjusting course.”

  “All right, everyone,” Raibert said. “I say we phase in, grab the most dangerous guns we can find, and phase out before anyone realizes we were there.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Benjamin said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Transtemporal Vehicle Kleio

  non-congruent

  “Now that’s just beautiful,” Raibert said as strands of microbots lifted the last components of the massive weapon out of the printers and maneuvered them into place.

  “It looked smaller on the diagram,” Benjamin remarked, gazing up at the suspended weapon.

  “They always do.” Raibert folded his arms and smirked. “Can’t wait to try this baby out.”

  “Just how much better is this compared to a twenty-first-century gun?” Benjamin asked.

  “To put things into perspective,” Elzbietá began, “the 25mm cannon on my F-21 had a comparable rate of fire, but put out one sixth the kinetic energy into each shot. And I have to assume the payload in each round is superior as well.”

  “Significantly so,” Raibert said. “And not just because of the increased caliber.”

  “I have finished expanding the weapon blister,” Kleio reported. “The new weapon can be moved there as soon as assembly is complete.”

  “What about the rest of the repairs?” Raibert asked.

  “Repairs to the hull and the shroud are nearly complete. The crack on the reactor has been reinforced, and I have not detected any radiation leakage since. Graviton thruster one is fully functional. Thruster two still requires some realignment of its exotic matter, and I should have that resolved within the hour. The chronometric array presents some problems because of how precisely the exotic matter must be recalibrated, but I expect to have it fully restored in one to two days.”

  “Good. Now start making another big gun.”

  “Yes, Professor.”

  “You’re building more of these things?” Benjamin asked.

  “Why settle for one when you can have a thousand?”

  “Professor, damage control and weapon production is placing a considerable drain on my raw material reserves. I have enough stock on board for three, perhaps four additional weapon systems of this size and configuration, but after that my bulk printers will begin running out of crucial raw materials in several categories.”

  “Three or four?” Raibert frowned. “Are those all the guns I’m getting?”

  “Yes, Professor, though if you require more I could begin to cannibalize sections of the prog-steel hull. That would free up some of the materials necessary for additional weaponry. I would also have to recycle some of my noncritical systems.”

  “What, and make us easier to shoot down?” Raibert exclaimed. “No! Hell no!”

  “Then I am afraid I am limited in what I can produce without additional supplies.”

  “Well, do the best you can, but don’t strip our armor to make it happen.”

  “Understood, Professor.”

  Microbots locked the components in place and flowed over the surface as pearly white droplets that collected along breaks between segments. The printers below whirred to life again, and Raibert gestured for them to follow him out.

  “There’s another small problem we have to contend with,” Raibert said as they left the printing bay, then took a counter-grav tube up to the bridge. “The Kleio’s thrusters are a bit oversized for what she normally does; there’s plenty of spare capacity for hauling heavy artifacts built right into her design. That’s great for me because we can move fast when we need to, and I’m in a synthoid. The g-forces aren’t going to affect me all that much, but you two are regular squishy humans. We need to make sure you’re safe if we have to push this ship to its limits.”

  “How many gees?” Elzbietá asked.

  “Five. Sustained indefinitely.”

  “No problem. Give me a g-suit and good place to sit, and I can handle that.”

  “In any direction?” he asked. “Including down?”

  “Ouch. Okay, never mind.”

  “Why’s that?” Benjamin asked. “What’s the difference?”

  “The human body has very low tolerances for negative g-forces,” Elzbietá said. “The blood pools in your head and you pass out in a matter of seconds. Doesn’t matter how good your g-suit is or how much training you’ve had.”

  “Hence, we have these nice compensation bunks on the bridge in case of emergencies.” He rapped his knuckles on a section of the rounded wall, and the prog-steel parted to reveal a row of five upright glass caskets.

  “So we just climb into these things if we fall under attack?” Benjamin asked.

  “That’s right. The microbot soup they get filled with isn’t pleasant, but it’ll keep you conscious and intact.”

  “Don’t you have some sort of device that cancels out g-forces?”

  “Nope,” Raibert replied bluntly. “We can create new gravity fields, and we can counteract existing ones, but if you’re under acceleration, you’re feeling the gees. Period.”

  “Ah!” Elzbietá’s face lit up and she snapped her fingers. “Because of Einstein’s Principle of Equivalence?”

  Raibert nodded.

  “What?” Benjamin asked.

  “Acceleration and gravity are essentially the same thing,” Elzbietá explained. “That’s why they can’t counteract the g-forces. The only way to not feel the gees is to not accelerate.”

  “You knew that off the top of your head?” Benjamin asked.

  “Oh, come on. You’ve seen my reading pile. Some of the crazier things in physics are like candy for my brain.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” He grimaced. “But if I’m not mistaken, Einstein would have had a few strong words to share regarding this time machine.”

  “True,” Raibert said, “but you’d be surprised what he said when shown our Theory Of Everything.”

  “What do you mean when he was shown?”

  “Oh, there may have been someone in ART who went back and interviewed Einstein to see what he thought of our society’s penultimate science equation. Spoilers, he had a lot of nice things to say. Really just an all-round heartwarming interview. Very touching.”

  “You did that?” Benjamin asked.

  “Nah. My Dad.”

  “So your father was in ART? That had to be rough on you.”

  “Actually, he abstracted and his connectome was transmitted to Alpha Centauri before I got involved with ART.”

  “What?” Benjamin lo
oked to Elzbietá for help.

  “They e-mailed his brain to another star system,” she translated.

  “Again, what?”

  “In truth, ART didn’t start their big downhill slide until Lucius took over,” Raibert added.

  “Who?”

  “Here’s an idea, Doc.” Raibert urged them out. “How about the two of you grab a bite to eat—it’s almost lunchtime anyway—and I’ll join you and share the story of the biggest time-traveling ass cave there ever was.”

  *

  Lucius Gwon strode into Archiving Hall Five and immediately became the center of attention. Every AC in the grand cubical chamber noted the ART chairman’s unexpected appearance and quickly informed their physical counterparts. Those archeologists looked up or down from their work and began to murmur amongst themselves.

  Discretely. Lest they come off as rude around the boss.

  Walkways cut across the archiving hall at various heights with counter-grav tubes joining them to form a scaffold around some of ART’s larger recent acquisitions: the Statue of Liberty from nineteenth-century New York City, Christ the Redeemer from twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, and the Colossus of Rhodes from 280 BCE. Several smaller monuments occupied the hall, but those weren’t grand enough to warrant physical exhibition and would probably be reclaimed once the archeologists finished their work.

  Lucius slowed his pace along a catwalk halfway between the ceiling and floor, then stopped above the Colossus of Rhodes. The monument of Helios stood over fifty meters tall when its octagonal base was included. Bronze skin blazed from spotlights hung under the catwalk, and Lucius took hold of the railing and gazed down with an unreadable face.

  His slicked-back hair matched the black of his suit, and two bold red sashes crossed his chest while twin streamers fluttered actively behind him. The sashes and streamers retained a fixed color and pattern, in contrast to prevailing fashions, but fitting in was never good enough for Lucius Gwon. He wanted to stand out from the crowd, and his evocative style made that clear to everyone around him.

  “What’s the chairman doing here?” Raibert wondered aloud from a counter-grav platform hovering behind the left knee of the Colossus. “Philo, did you hear anything about this?”

  “Gotta go!” the AC announced.

  “Wait, what?”

  Raibert reached out across the firewall, but the AC was already gone.

  “Well, that’s odd.” He turned to Teodorà. “You or Fran hear he was coming today?”

  “If we had, you would have been the first to know.” She winked at him.

  “Yeah, you’re right.” He smiled back. “Silly of me to ask, though it does look like he’s interested in the Colossus.”

  “Maybe he wants to feature it in an exhibition,” Teodorà offered. “It is quite striking when the sun hits all this bronze. For the technology of the time, the ancients really pulled off the look of a sun god.”

  “It’s big and it’s flashy,” Raibert acknowledged with a grimace. “Perfect for an ART exhibition.”

  “Oh, don’t you start that again.”

  “Sorry.” He flashed her a lopsided smile. “Old habits die hard.”

  Dating Doctor Teodorà Beckett certainly came with a lot of perks, like how ancient Greek and Roman history fascinated both of them. She could hold her own on just about any topic he cared to debate, and it didn’t hurt that her dark hair, olive skin, and almost elfin physique were easy on the eyes. Or that she’d proven surprisingly adventurous in bed. A little too adventurous in some cases, but he’d dealt with that by setting very clear boundaries in their relationship.

  No, the real problem was how he had to watch his tongue when it came to ART’s wrecking ball approach to archeology. Teodorà not only worked in the Preservation branch but had rapidly advanced to more prominent mission roles, whereas Raibert could care less about ART’s internal politics. He was perfectly happy embarking on one Observation mission after another despite Teodorà’s warnings that he needed to be more career focused.

  Sure, it impressed sponsors when ART scooped up whole monuments like the Colossus of Rhodes, and it certainly made his job easier when he could study the artifact in a climate-controlled environment with modern technology at his fingertips, but stunts like this kept missing the point.

  Raibert didn’t want to answer only how the Colossus was built; he wanted to know why, as well. Why spend twelve years constructing a towering bronze monument to Helios? Why were certain engineering techniques used over others? Why did it look the way it did? What was the thought process behind its design? What compromises were made between art and engineering? What problems were encountered during those twelve years that altered the original plans?

  So many questions remained unanswered, but Lucius and the rest of ART’s management thought that yanking the Colossus out of time and plopping it down in front of ignorant sponsors was somehow equivalent to understanding the ancient humans who’d built it.

  It wasn’t.

  And, ultimately, he was okay with that because he planned to dig into those mysteries himself. History wasn’t stone and metal and sand and architecture. It was love and hate and joy and grief and blood. So much blood. Understanding history didn’t come from pointing at an artifact and saying “Hey, look at what people without counter-grav were able to do! Isn’t that fascinating?”

  No. To understand history, one had to understand the people in history, and the best way to do that was for someone to go back in time and live among them.

  Which was why Raibert had spent every available minute scrutinizing the Colossus and the engineering techniques used to erect it. He needed to be completely comfortable with all manner of technical topics before he inserted himself into the company of Chares of Lindos, the sculptor behind its design. Did the man live to see the project completed, or did he really commit suicide as some accounts seemed to indicate? If he’d committed suicide, what drove him to that tragic end?

  “Aren’t those more interesting questions than ‘How’d they put the head on this thing without counter-grav?’” he murmured to himself.

  “Raibert!” Teodorà hissed.

  “Hmm?”

  “Hey, Raibert!” She poked his shoulder.

  “What?”

  He turned around and looked up at Lucius Gwon. The man’s strong jaw, high cheekbones, and chiseled body hinted at the lavish genetic licensing his parents had paid for, but his face remained uncomfortably stone-like, giving Raibert the impression of a carefully cultured mask to be worn in public. His integrated companion remained equally unreadable; the AC, which had integrated itself so tightly with Lucius over the years that it no longer used an independent name, portrayed itself as moving star fields within the man’s own shadow.

  “Ch-chairman!” Raibert straightened, his voice squeaking slightly. “What can I do for you?”

  Lucius stepped across the platform and rubbed a hand over the bronze back of the giant knee.

  “Would you mind telling me a little bit about what you’re working on?” he asked.

  “Of course, sir. I’m studying the engineering techniques used in the construction of the Colossus. It’s part of my pre-insertion prep.”

  “You’re going back to Rhodes?” Lucius tapped his knuckles against the bronze.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “And what’s your plan?”

  “I’m going to get a job working for Chares of Lindos. He’s the sculptor behind the Colossus.”

  “I see. A fairly standard Observation mission, then?”

  “That’s right. Not too much risk and plenty of interesting questions to answer.”

  Lucius nodded, then picked at a rivet with his fingernail.

  “I hope to leave next week,” Raibert added.

  “And after that?”

  “Well, I haven’t really thought about it. I’m going to be back there for a few months at least, so I suppose I’ll check out what’s available when I return to the thirtieth century.”r />
  “Any interest in Preservation missions?” Lucius asked, glancing his way.

  “Not really,” Raibert said, and Teodorà tensed behind him. “I’m quite happy with the assignments that have come my way.”

  “What he means to say”—Teodorà placed a hand on his shoulder—“is that he’s in a serious rut right now and would love to branch out to other assignments.”

  “No, thank you.” Raibert flashed a sour look her way.

  “Come on, Raibert,” Teodorà replied. “You could be—and should be—doing so much more in ART.”

  “I’m fine right where I am, thank you very much.”

  “Actually, I have to agree with her.” Lucius turned around, and the streamers fluttered elegantly. “I took a look at your file before coming down here, and I couldn’t help but notice how…safe it seems.”

  “I like safe. Safe is comfortable.”

  “Tavish would have been bored to tears with missions like these.”

  “I’m not my father,” Raibert said, perhaps a little too forcefully.

  But if Lucius was offended, he didn’t show it.

  “Raibert, no one expects you to be some sort of reincarnation of your father. But at the same time you can’t ignore the legacy he left behind. We know the kind of raw talent you have because we’ve all seen it in action. Which is why I find your selection of missions a little disheartening.”

  “Sorry to disappoint, I guess,” he said with a shrug.

  “How is Tavish doing these days, by the way?”

  “He finally got transferred to a more lifelike synthoid, so he almost looks like his old self again. I got some mail from him last month, and it’s actually exciting to see how the colony’s taking shape. You could probably find something similar in the solar system a few centuries ago.”

  “That’s very good to hear.” The smallest glimmer of joy in the form of a thin smile leaked through Lucius’s cool exterior. Raibert knew Tavish and Lucius had worked closely together during ART’s early days, so maybe that’s where this sudden attention was coming from. Maybe Lucius just missed his old buddy and saw helping the son along as a sort of replacement.