Chapter 46

The office of Dr. Len Liepsich.
A place in which you might find anything
from a book on Egyptology to a treatise on the
molecular structure of fullerene complexes.
And last month's lunch, with green fur on it.
And an espresso machine, too well used.

It was approaching midnight and the physicist was showing no signs of slowing down. The only real clue to just how little sleep he'd had in the last few days was that his eyes looked like roadmaps. And he was talking a little too fast. Virginia suspected there was something other than the ever-present cup of coffee affecting his mind. She ran the information she'd gotten from Darleth about the Crotchet's defense system over his hairy ears. You could tell he was interested because he scarcely bothered to insult her.

"For a blonde, you provide rare insights. And not just of a view of vacuum by peering into your ears. We'd figured the missiles. We've got some plans in place to try to deal with that. We'd figured heavy laser fire. There is some stuff still mounted on the slowship. I've got somebody organizing those. What we hadn't got is this business of double force fields."

"I'm fascinated by what you've figured out," she said dryly. Liepsich grinned. She continued. "What I am interested in, is what we need to do to get in there?"

He scratched his stubbly chin. "You know, there is always more than one way to skin a cat, especially if you know a lot about cats. Now, I figure that there are two ways—at least—that we can get at the ship. Their fields must be down for missile launch, as you said. We can hit them just then. It's a small window, but a window. That's the best solution a military man will evolve."

She'd learned to read Liepsich's elliptical utterances by now. "So what would a thinking man do?"

He grinned again. "Why don't you sign up for physics? You have too good a brain for politics. All that needs is a big mouth and the ability to lie with a straight face. You've got the mouth for it, but I'm not sure how well you lie."

Ginny was not distracted. "Answer my question, Dr. Liepsich. I might even sign up for a physics degree. Later. If you can prove to me that you're not too dim to teach it."

He gave her a thumbs-up. "Twin thrusts. The soft-cybers. The Jampad made it pretty clear that there are slaves inside that ship. The soft-cyber bias stops them rebelling. If you removed that bias, the ship would have an enemy within."

"Except that you can't do that," she said.

He raised his eyebrows. "Says who?"

She hauled him out of the seat he was flopped into. "How? Do it! Do it now." She hated and feared the fact that her mind was not entirely her own. This was indeed a holy grail.

He shrugged, still in her grasp. "We're getting there. We've been working on the source code. The Korozhet obviously hadn't counted on the fact that even if the colony is mostly back in human nineteenth-century technology, not all of the slowship's equipment is. We've been writing a section of what would be called—in old terms—a computer virus, to reprogram the soft-cyber chips. We're getting closer. It's no small job."

"Do it faster."

He looked thoughtfully at her. "Do you realize that if we get it wrong, we scramble the soft-cyber system? Destroy its memory. We can do that right now. To knock out the basic bias and still leave it intact is a lot harder. Now, can I sit down again?"

Virginia let go. She'd forgotten that she was holding him. "That would destroy my memories, right?"

"You? Maybe," he admitted. "Most of them, probably. The chip would be intact, just the programming screwed. A rat would go back to being a rat, but we could reprogram its soft-cyber."

"Except . . . they . . . we would lose our memories."

Liepsich nodded. "Yep. But you'd still be alive and you wouldn't be enslaved."

Virginia blinked. Shook her head. "I can't. I can't part with those memories. They . . . they're too precious. Maybe the others . . . I'll ask."

"Except that we can't deal with it on a one-on-one basis. We just don't have the time to do so, or even the equipment."

"But how else do you do it?"

Liepsich grinned nastily. "Use some of that plastic inside your blonde head, Shaw. The Korozhet need some way of relaying orders to all of you at once, obviously."

She looked warily at him. "What?"

"How blonde," he said. "Hadn't you worked out that you're carrying a radio-receiver in your head? It probably constantly says 'breathe in, breathe out,' in your case."

"It's too bad you weren't born a rat, Liepsich. You would have had a little more skill with insults. Although you'd probably still be considered the rats' village idiot. Can't you jam radio signals? And can't we just use radio to affect the prisoners inside their ship? And does this mean that the revolt we tried to foment among the rats and bats is a lost cause? Or will they be able to resist?"

Liepsich smiled. "You really are too able for politics. We've identified the frequencies now, and got jammers set up, we hope. Inevitably the Korozhet will target the jamming devices, but we've got as much redundancy set up as we can. The radio call uses one of the master command phrases—what they used on you to make you obey Dr. Thom. I doubt if mere semantics could help the rats and bats dodge that. So, yes. The revolt that the rats and bats have tried to set up won't work. And that pumpkin-shaped Korozhet ship, unfortunately for my attempts to examine it, is opaque to just about every form of e-m radiation, including radio. It might work if you could get transmitters inside."

"And if your jamming fails?" asked Virginia. "And our resistance fails? What happens to us?"

Liepsich took a deep breath. "Well. Either we let you go and become the utterly loyal slave-warriors of the Korozhet. Or, if that starts to get close to the breaking point, we'll have to lose Harmony and Reason's best defense against the Magh'."

Virginia knew exactly what he meant. She closed her eyes, briefly. "You said there was another thrust."

"Ah. Just an idea," said the scientist.

"Out with it, Doctor Liepsich! Or I'll get my rats to cut your tongue out. Or better, Super-Glue your lips together so you can't insult anyone."

"You play rough, Shaw. How blonde." He smiled. "Okay. Slowshields explode if they impact a force field. We think that if you managed to make a circle of them you could, theoretically, have a hole in the field. Briefly. If you had enough slowshields you could in theory overload the entire field. But—and I emphasize the 'but'—the energy discharge would be in the multimegaton level. It would fry things for several miles around and possibly destroy the ship. We just don't know."