((co-written with Silver Night))
The room was full of colours. Pouring out of the holoprojector in a cascade of swirling equation which danced around each other and merged and reformed, following the gestures of the slender scientist who stood at their heart as a squadron of fighters follows their target, they stained the utilitarian grey of the Utopian Ideal’s laboratory a thousand bright and changing hues. Dr Nolikka Toin flicked her fingers at one number and beckoned to another and the images spun and changed and rained rainbow sparks on the floor and then hovered on the palm of her hand. Colours flared and faded: blue and indigo, blurring into purple and then flushing deep red a little further on; orange and gold always rotating around each other, each shading towards sunset pink at one end of their orbit before recovering their original hue as they looped back towards the centre of the room.
The ship’s sensors picked up the splash of the projections against the walls and ceiling of the laboratory. Because the ship was not simply a ship at that moment at time, but a ship with pilot in pod, the sensors filtered their input, focused it, translated it from data to a faint tickling and fed it to the human intelligence controlling the carrier. Instructions came back, seeking more detail, more input, and the ship responded, activating monitors and isolating feeds. The ship’s computers were capable of testing the equations that swirled around the laboratory.
The ship’s pilot was capable of appreciating them.
Incomplete, the computers judged, reached a dead-end in the line and stopped.
The ship’s pilot followed the leap past that gap to the numbers spinning on the other side.
New instructions reached the ship, and obediently, it withdrew the neural links connecting it to the pilot and subsided into somnolence as the pilot slid through the decanting chamber and into the briskly efficient embrace of what the crew called the de-gooing room. Moments later, he was dressed and walking the corridors of the ship that was now, once more, simply a ship, just as he was now once more, merely a man.
At least, as much as any pilot who had killed millions and spent billions could be merely anything.
This pilot, Captain Silver Night, paused in the corridor a few meters short of the door of the laboratory, and sent a polite comm inquiry to the scientist within. Captain Night wishes to know if a visit would inconvenience Dr Toin. Not that the Captain of the Utopian Ideal needed permission to enter the laboratory or any other room on his ship, of course. Some things, however, were done whether strictly required or not – and Silver was quite sure that Dr Nolikka Toin had not been in a position to refuse entry to her workspace for quite some time.
After a moment, an equally polite response came back: Dr Toin would welcome such a visit.
The equations had stilled their dance by the time Silver opened the door, hovering around the head of the woman who stood at their heart, staining the dark blue of her insignia-less uniform and the dull grey of the collar around her neck with splashes of vivid turquoise and green, stippling her spacer’s-tan white face with indigo and violet.
“Dr Toin,” he said. “I noticed you were working late. I hope I am not interrupting.”
“Not at all, sir. I am …” A flick of her fingers sent the symbols around her spinning lazily, and she gave a small smile. “A little stuck.”
Silver studied the rotating figures, f(x14) = a_0 + ∑ - (n=1 ) ^ ∞ µ (aπd) - ∫ cos (f (xϬ)) dx + b/n / sin (4 ﻑ /7θ) floating past his face in bright blue and dusky yellow. A faint electro-magnetic field prickled against his skin. “At the transition between Tahvulen’s paradox and the Mondmuggar equivalencies. Have you considered inverting the Elerouc transform?”
Nolikka’s smile grew wider. “Excellent idea as that is, it turned out to lead me nowhere. Or, to infinity, which in this case is identical.”
“Perhaps your colleagues in Ishukone will have a more useful suggestion, then. When this is over.”
“Yes, sir. And – is there …” A hand crept to the thin circlet of metal at her neck, inactive now but still intact as the nanites ate their way busily through the explosive booby-trap inside, and she stopped.
“Any word on when that will be? It’s my understanding that both S.C.I.D and Republic Justice are both all but ready to move. Lieutenant Etay’s colleagues have taken your deposition, I believe?”
Nolikka’s fingers tightened on the collar and the colours around her dimmed and dipped. “Yes, sir.”
Silver frowned slightly. “Is there something about that I should know, Dr Toin?”
“That you should … I don’t, I – ” She stammered to an anxious halt, the holoprojections fading to the palest transparency and then vanishing completely, leaving her a lonely figure stranded in the middle of a blank grey room. Questions without ‘right’ answers, Dr Akell had warned him, pose intolerable dilemmas.
“Please, take a seat, Dr Toin,” Silver said gently. “There is one just to your left.”
As she located the stool and perched on it, he came a little further into the room, drawing out another seat with a deliberate scrape and sitting down himself. “I noticed you’re using Isida’s convergence operation to bridge the medium and low frequency harmonic interface. I was under the impression Dr Sihorah’s work had superseded that.”
Nolikka’s expression cleared and her grip on the metal collar around her neck loosened. “Sir, I still find Sihorah’s proofs unstable past one-ten of max power.”
“That’s … suboptimal for real-world application,” Silver said, and the corner of Nolikka’s mouth twitched up.
“It’s an elegant theorem,” she said. “But unfortunately a brittle one as well.”
Silver paused, and then with careful precision, said, “You have spoken to a number of representatives from S.C.I.D. and Republic Justice, as well as my own officers, over the past week. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir,” Nolikka said readily.
“These interviews have taken a considerable amount of your time,” Silver said. “Have you found them fatiguing?”
“Sir, a little, sir. But they need to know as much as I can tell them, sir, I understand that.”
“That is, unfortunately and regrettably, the case, yes,” Silver said. A query to his internal NEOCOM sent a search program burrowing through logs and records: Nolikka Toin, Doctor: interview {with} Saernal Taerild, Colonel {or} Demen Jadat, Sergeant {or} Supreme Court Investigative Division (any) {or} Republic Justice Department (any): time/location/duration/doorlogs/personnel present.
The results returned quickly. The information they contained was also, in Silver’s opinion, suboptimal.
“The personnel from S.C.I.D. here today kept you for quite some time,” he said evenly. “Without breaks, according to the ship’s records.”
“Yes, sir,” Nolikka said.
“If they feel the need to speak to you again, one of my officers will be present,” Silver said. “Sergeant Jadat, perhaps. To prevent a repeat of that – or any other failing in manners.”
“Yes, sir,” Nolikka said, and there was unmistakable relief in her voice. I will, Silver thought, be explaining a few things to Lieutenant Etay’s colleagues.
“Dr Toin,” he said. “You are a guest aboard my ship. As such, I consider a discourtesy to you to be one done to me. And I take … a dim view of bad manners. Rest assured I will be making my opinions known to the officers you have dealt with. And their superiors.”
“Captain Night, sir.” For a moment, head bent, Nolikka could have passed for any officer on the ship, brown hair with threads of early grey tied austerely back, spacer-pale skin in sharp contrast to the dark blue of the Ideal uniform. A Deteis tube-bred crèche-child, one of many, spick-and-span and always on call.
Then she lifted her head and the thin circlet of her collar caught the light that did not reflect at all off the opaque white of her eyes, and she was not one of many, not at all.
“Sir,” she said again, and stopped.
“You may speak freely, Dr Toin,” Silver encouraged.
“Sir. They said, the Fedo officers, they said …” Another pause, and the rest of her words came in a breathless rush. “About the rest of the operation, when I go back there, for cover, with the people going inside, they said.”
“That will not happen,” Silver said mildly. Explaining more than a few things, perhaps. “Dr Toin. You have my word that no operational plan that requires your presence will be approved. You have my word that you will not leave this ship except by your choice.”
Nolikka said quietly, “I don’t want to be the cause of any problems for you, sir.”
“I am not the one who will have problems,” Silver assured her. “Believe me. Remember, I am a capsuleer.”
“Yes,” she said. “That makes things different for you, doesn’t it? I’ve never seen a capsuleer pilot before, I don’t … quite know how things are for you.”
“That’s an – ” Manners stopped him there. Odd choice of words for a blind woman.
Nolikka smiled. “Interesting way to put it? I can see you, Captain. I just don’t see what you see.”
“What do you see?” he asked.
“What do you see?” she said, turning the question back on him.
Silver considered. “You are … thirty-seven years old, one hundred seventy two centimetres tall – ”
“Which you got from my personnel file.”
“Which I got from your personnel file,” he acknowledged. “Deteis, from the Ishukone tube program, brown hair, wearing a uniform with no insignia. Your eyes have been damaged by radiation exposure and there is a scar on your forehead that may or may not be related to that. No jewellery.”
“Except my necklace,” Nolikka said, tapping a finger on the control collar.
“No jewellery,” Silver said again, and there was a small moment of silence between them, not uncomfortable.
Nolikka broke it, her voice soft. “You’re taller than I am. I don’t know what colour your hair is but your voice is the same colour as the fourteenth cosin pi function in the last repeating sequence of Ititeola’s theorem. And younger than you are. A clone?”
“Yes,” Silver said.
“You’re used to talking to people, but not so much with them. You keep secrets as if it’s second nature. You risk your life for strangers and you could have been a serious mathematician if you’d put the time in. Still could be, I think.”
“Not strangers,” Silver corrected. “Ishukone.”
“Ishukone,” Nolikka said, and smiled. “I’m right about the math, though. And you’re in love with your X.O.”
“That,” Silver said, “is not correct.”
“No?” Nolikka said. “Your voice changes when you talk to her, even giving orders.”
“You are hypothesising ahead of your data, Dr Toin,” Silver said.
She laughed a little. “You asked what I saw. Is any of it right?”
“I am,” Silver allowed, “taller than you are.”
Nolikka laughed again and leaned back, reaching up one hand to brush the equations once more circling lazily above her head, dark blue and green in a slow and sinuous orbit. Silver recognised old, old formulae, long ago established as the mathematics that ruled the speed of light and the pull of gravity wells, rotating leisurely around each other as they traced an elliptic loop around the woman at their centre, and realised he was watching the quiet background hum of her thoughts, different from and yet not entirely alien to the steady stream of data that passed beneath the surface of his own mind when the neural interfaces connected him to a ship.
The stately dance slowed further, the equations shedding complexity and reducing down to strings of simple equivalencies.
“You should get some rest, Dr Toin,” Silver said. “I can have an ensign show you to your quarters.”
The symbols coiled themselves around her wrist and curled into the palm of her hand. “Thank you, Captain. That’s kind of you,” she said gravely, and then smiled, closing her hand around the holograph until the light was just glimmer between her fingers, so faint it could have been entirely his imagination. “But I know my way.”
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