Invardii Box Set 2 Page 5

  Cantalubra was Fallostrina’s eyes and ears for anything unusual that cropped up around Alamos. Most of the time it came to nothing, but sometimes there was real pay dirt. The story of Meeaniro’s ‘demon’ had the promise of a golden nugget written all over it, and it was duly passed on to the research teams at Prometheus.

  Then the day came that a team from Prometheus paid Alamos a visit. Not an official visit, because there wasn’t an official Alliance yet, but the Mersa at Prometheus passed on their own best suggestions about who was doing what in research on Alamos. Then Fallostrina provided some very interesting leads.

  Matsu Fujimi prodded the workings of the cold fusion cell in Meeaniro’s lab one more time. “Fascinating,” he said. “Theoretically impossible of course, but here it is. And, as I have seen with my own eyes, it is a working model.”

  Ursul Vangretti muttered her agreement. When Regent Cordez had suggested the research teams look at the best of Mersa technology and research during the last full meeting at Prometheus, she had not expected their time on the planet to uncover much. However, she was already being forced to change her mind.

  When her team had been given a list of research projects to assess, the work on ‘translocated objects’ and ‘inter-dimensional fields’ at Thistledown Abbey had been tagged onto the list as an afterthought. But now they were here they had already uncovered Mersa technology that was hugely innovative in its own way.

  The cold fusion cells for example weren’t important to the Alliance – they had efficient powerpak technology already – but the ability of the Mersa to discover or create things, whether they were theoretically possible or not, was extraordinary.

  “Don’t forget our own research suggested the right combination of super-heavy metals could provide a suitable catalytic pathway,” added Ursul.

  Matsu grunted, absorbed in what he was doing. Meeaniro hovered nearby, and several assistants in their turn hovered behind her. Matsu and Ursul had learned to turn off the linguist earpieces when they were working like this. The Mersa were often so helpful it was hard to get anything done.

  Cordez’ visit to the Boardroom at Prometheus had been quite an occasion. Ursul had been more than a little taken by the commanding presence of the man, and the regal dignity of Regent Ming, the woman who sat beside him.

  For a moment she felt a pang of jealousy. Who wouldn’t want to be treated like a queen? But then a little common sense crept in. Being a queen was probably all about shaking hands and wearing heavy dresses for hours on end. Out here at the frontiers she could follow her lifelong passion to see all the wonders of the universe. She was able to think new thoughts, and then test them until she understood what, if anything, she had added to the sum of all knowledge.

  Ursul thought about her attraction to the ‘royal couple’ for a moment, and realized it was probably her own social life that was causing the fascination – or the lack of one. There had been that Rothii specialist in Celia’s team back on Prometheus, what was his name, Roberto?

  He had definitely shown an interest in her when Celia’s team brought Rothii artifacts from K'Sarth to Prometheus, but she had been too busy then to follow it up. She vowed she would make some time to find Roberto, and see how deep his interest went, when she got back.

  Matsu looked about finished with the cold fusion cell. Next on the list of things to be examined was the extraordinary cylinder they had viewed briefly that morning. The complex markings on it clearly pointed to an intelligent design, and then there was the Mersa claim that the cylinder contained a ‘demon’.

  Ursul raised her eyebrows again, as she had done when the abbess had first told her this. It was hard enough working with the different ways of the Mersa without having to take such an outlandish claim seriously.

  Despite the new ties between Earth and Alamos, few of the Mersa had seen a Human in the flesh, and they still tended to bolt at first contact. But, she thought, the new spirit of cooperation had led her here, so she might as well look at the damn thing.

  “Get Gaiusino to rustle up some schematics on the fusion cells, will you?” finished Matsu, turning his earpiece on.

  Ursul nodded encouragingly. Meeaniro spoke rapidly for a moment, and the kindly male Gaiusino hurried out to one of the databases. Ursul found it was usually her that ended up having to make things happen around Matsu, so the Mersa quickness to help was a pleasant break.

  Being Matsu’s lackey might have offended her once, but now she considered it well worth the trouble, as long as she could be present when the eccentric Prometheus scientist was making his investigations.

  CHAPTER 8

  ________________

  The abbess had welcomed the Prometheus team to Thistledown Abbey that morning, and then gone about her duties. Now she suddenly re-appeared. It was more than likely one of the research assistants had notified her when the Prometheus team was ready for the strange cylinder. The abbess ushered them towards the specially modified lab at the back of the complex, and they went through the airlock together.

  Matsu looked around. There was no doubt the Mersa had taken every possible precaution to isolate the cylinder. As well as the airlock, and the absence of windows or any other entrances, the room was lined with its own power grid. It was a back up to the similarly powered cage that stood in the middle of the floor.

  Ursul was already setting up the equipment they would need to record Matsu’s investigations. Meeaniro was supervising two Mersa who were checking the status of the cages and the power supply.

  After a few more minutes with the equipment, Ursul gave the thumbs up sign, and everyone retired from the chamber. A cable had been installed through one wall and into an adjoining lab, and on the screen at the end of the cable they could see the cylinder in its cage. The airlock hissed shut behind the last Mersa, and the grid across the door dropped into place and hummed into life. The room was now completely sealed.

  Gaiusino hurried into the lab and handed a two page schematic of the cold fusion cells to Matsu. He stuffed them absentmindedly into one of his many pockets. Then he nodded to Meeaniro to begin. This was her project, and the honor was hers.

  “Turn off the cage,” she said.

  The readouts from the fusion cells powering the cage dropped to zero, but there was no other discernible sign of change.

  “Anything, anyone?” queried Matsu, looking around. They all shook their heads. The cylinder was not doing anything. It had no energy signature, it was at ambient room temperature, and there was nothing going into it, or coming out of it.

  Meeaniro was particularly frustrated by this. She wanted to make the most of the visit by the Prometheus researchers, and if they were going to help her understand what she was working with, the cylinder needed to do something. That was the only way they could measure and analyze the event.

  “One moment,” she said hurriedly, and brought over some of her own equipment from the other side of the lab. Then she told Matsu what she had in mind.

  When the cage had been powered up again she entered the chamber with Gaiusino, and they hastily rigged up some of her ‘inter-dimensional field’ receivers.

  Ursul lifted an eyebrow at Matsu, who shrugged. Meeaniro had not been able to explain to them what the principles were behind her ‘inter-dimensional field’ studies, or what her equipment did. How it would help now was anybody’s guess.

  The airlock closed as they left, and Gaiusino powered down the cage. Again, there were no readings on the Prometheus equipment, but Meeaniro thought she had something. The excited researcher pointed at the screen on her ‘receiver’, and launched into a stream of very fast Mersa words that were unintelligible through the linguist earpieces.

  Matsu grabbed the feed from the back of Meeaniro’s equipment and jammed it into an all-purpose display of his own. Then he took a lead to the Prometheus equipment. Moments later his eyes widened.

  “The goddamit thing is trying to send a sub-space signal!” he said. “Mother of . . .”

  “It
can’t be,” said Ursul quickly. “Who’s got sub-space apart from the Druanii, who gave it to us, and the . . .”

  She turned to face Matsu at the same time as he hit the desk with his hand.

  “Invardii!” they said together.

  “It’s the only possibility,” continued Ursul.

  “But if the cylinder’s sending out a distress call, why hasn’t an Invardii ship answered?” said Matsu. He turned to Meeaniro. “How long has it been since it appeared in the lab?”

  Meeaniro worked out the answer to that one, and translated it into Earth days.

  “That’s nearly six weeks,” said Ursul. “If the signal was getting through, the Invardii would be here by now.”

  “But a sub-space signal isn’t stopped by a power grid,” said Matsu, “and that’s all these things are. Nothing more than two Faraday Cages, one inside the other.”

  “Unless the signal is affected by the fusion cells in some really weird way,” said Ursul.

  It transpired the fusion cells had a number of very interesting qualities, and the grids translated some of these into strange harmonics. Whatever they were doing, it had stopped the sub-space signal from the cylinder.

  Just to be on the safe side, Meeaniro powered up the interior cage again, and made sure it stayed on at the same time as the larger one around the entire room.

  Later that afternoon the Prometheus team had come to some astonishing conclusions. Meeaniro’s work on ‘inter-dimensional fields’ was breaking new ground for the Mersa that would have led them in time to sub-space radio. That was something Earth hadn’t developed before the Druanii gave it to them.

  But on top of that, Meeaniro had managed somehow to use the properties of string theory to transport objects over vast differences. It can’t have been instantaneous, because the sub-space radio ‘tweaking’ of the strings could not affect things within the space-time world. The cylinder must have been transported to the lab by a pulse of energy similar to the star drive that powered starships.

  How had Meeaniro’s primitive device done that? There was so much they didn’t yet know about sub-space properties, or what Meeaniro’s theories were capable of!

  The one thing they did know sobered them all. It had become clear they had a conscious entity inside the cage, inside a form that was stranger than fiction would ever allow. The cylinder was a hybrid construct, something that had two states, and one of those was an energy state while the other was a material state. It was an amazing find.

  “You’ve done it!” said Matsu to Meeaniro. “You’ve captured a living, breathing Invardii!”

  “Well, probably not breathing,” said Ursul.

  “No,” said Matsu somberly. “It probably doesn’t breathe, and may not be living in our sense of the word.”

  They two Prometheus researchers looked at each other.

  Matsu began to laugh. Ursul looked at him enquiringly.

  “Can you imagine it,” he said. “A Reaper ship passes through this corner of the Spiral Arm, loaded with Invardii intent on expanding their empire, and suddenly one of them disappears! What would they make of that?”

  “And ends up here,” breathed Ursul. “Improbable, incredible, unbelievable. And yet, think of the opportunities this opens up for us.”

  Matsu laughed again, longer this time. “Mersa!” he said emphatically. “A surprise around every corner!”

  “We need Meeaniro at Prometheus,” said Ursul quietly, and Matsu nodded.

  “Make it happen, will you,” he said airily, waving a hand. Ursul didn’t even feel annoyed that she had been left with all the paperwork – again! Working with a brain as fertile as the one this little Mersa had was going be a real pleasure.

  Barely a week later, Meeaniro placed the cylinder gingerly in the middle of the specialized cage that had been built for it at Prometheus. Then she hastily exited, closing the grided door behind her. The cylinder had been kept in a small, double-grided cage for its journey from Alamos to Prometheus.

  Matsu hoped to replicate the events at Thistledown Abbey, and prod the cylinder enough to produce a sub-space signal. There were times he doubted the morality of experimenting on what they now knew to be an aware individual, but thinking of it as one of the Invardii made it easier.

  Too many good people had already died because of Invardii attacks on colony worlds, and he was not going to allow himself scruples. If they could understand how this creature worked, and what it was capable of, they might save thousands of lives across the Alliance.

  Meeaniro and her team were now part of the Prometheus staff. Her amazement at the complexity and sophistication of the place was only overcome by her interest in working on her ‘inter-dimensional field theory’.

  She was delighted to be overseen by Matsu Fujimi, and was intent on understanding the hybrid cylinder she had somehow managed to conjure out of thin air.

  “Explain to me again what you and your team did just before the cylinder appeared in your lab,” said Matsu, as they waited for the second cage to be powered up. Meeaniro hoped that turning off the smaller one could trick the cylinder into transmitting a signal.

  “Explain it as best you can in terms of string theory,” he said, “now you’ve had time to study the string theory ideas we use here at Prometheus.”

  This was hard. Meeaniro had difficulty finding equivalent concepts in string theory for the things she had discovered about dimensional fields. She suspected something was missing from the Human version, but couldn’t quite pick what it was.

  “I think we were tweaking the space-time strings in the same way you can send and receive sub-space signals,” she said. “Then I think we must have tapped into an orscantium decay chamber, presumably on a Reaper ship. The only possible explanation is that one of the Invardii, who was nearby in its cylinder state, was brought to us on a burst of space-bending energy.”

  Matsu shook his head. “That sort of transfer should require some sort of transmitting engine. At the very least it appears you were controlling the decay chamber from a distance by sub-space, which is just about as hard to believe.”

  “There’s something missing,” said Meeaniro, “something about the nineteen string version of your theory that isn’t right. But I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

  The Mersa delighted in analogies and metaphor. Meeaniro had chuckled when she heard the Human saying that placing a finger on something was to solve a problem, or locate an idea in one’s mind.

  Matsu had a distant look in his eyes.

  “But still,” he said quietly, “if you can bring something to you, then we might be able to send something of a similar size back. What if we could harness the power of a decay chamber to do exactly that?”

  Meeaniro listened with interest. She had already learned that this Human scientist was capable of some unusual leaps of deduction. For a Human, that is.

  “And if we could send a fusion device into the middle of a Reaper ship,” continued Matsu, “the shielding effect of the hull wouldn’t be able to protect the ship from the blast.”

  There was a moment’s silence as Matsu evaluated the practicality of such an idea.

  “It’s a long shot,” he said at last, “considering we don’t even know how you got the cylinder into your lab in the first place. On the other hand it would be a powerful weapon for the Alliance.

  “I’ll leave it to you to run the next experiment,” he said absently to Meeaniro, waving a hand toward the grided cages.

  “I’m going to make a call to Finch. I think he might want to put more staff, and more resources, into this project.”

  Finch had indeed wanted to put more research time and money into Meeaniro’s experiments, and that had led to this. She and her assistants were setting up their latest experiment on the lower decks of a Javelin destroyer. The whole point of conducting the experiment in space was to protect Prometheus if things went horribly wrong.

  Cordez had stepped in and insisted it be done somewhere that could not be traced
back to any place of significance within the Alliance!

  CHAPTER 9

  ________________

  Meeaniro connected the last of the cold fusion cells in the correct order, and looked over at the cylinder, still inside the double-grided cage that it traveled in. She almost felt some sympathy for it.

  The individual, the thing, the Invardii within the cylinder, was dying, they were sure of that now. Matsu had a good idea of its systems by now, and the way it routed energy to different parts of itself as the energy was needed.

  The large, hybrid brain that took up most of the bulge in the middle of the cylinder was a surprisingly large consumer of energy. Meeaniro theorized that the Invardii thought in a symbol language, something that took a lot of energy to process, though she had yet to prove this idea.

  Whatever this Invardii’s thinking processes were, it now had few energy reserves left to call upon. It seemed to have entered some sort of minimum life support state as a result. The research team had tried to feed it energy to restore it to health, but the compassionate gesture had been used against them.

  The Invardii had gained access to the lab through the power lead, and managed to destroy much of the lab equipment. It was somehow able to do all that from within the Faraday cage. The research team could not afford another disaster and had not attempted to restore the cylinder’s energy levels again.

  A decision had finally been made on what to do with the cylinder, and it was a decision that met several objectives. The research team would send the cylinder on a sub space pulse from this Javelin to one of the Invardii shipyards.

  Doing this would test the pulse theory, and it would stop any attempts by the cylinder to spy on them and their level of technology. It would also meet the preference of many of those involved to avoid killing a sentient being in cold blood.