Chapter 8
In 1943, the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation set up its Advanced Development Projects office in response to the appearance of the German Me-262 jet fighter plane. Drawing their initial complement from the team of engineers who had already produced the successful P-38 Lightning long-range fighter and the droppable fuel tank, the ADP managed to design and build a workable prototype for the XP-80, the first US jet fighter, in only 143 days. Although the F-80 production model did not see widespread line service until the Korean War, the success of the ADP made it a permanent institution at Lockheed - a highly select and secretive group of hand-picked engineers and scientists, given abundant resources and encouraged to run amok with minimal oversight by the design bureaucracy. They were soon named "The Skunk Works" in a reference taken from the 'Lil' Abner' newspaper comic strip of the time, and over the next several decades successfully designed and built the U-2 and SR-71 high-altitude reconaissance aircraft and the F-117, F-22, and F-35 stealth fighters. Their engineering legend put the term 'skunk works' into general usage for any high-level working group given a high degree of internal autonomy and minimal oversight from the rest of the organization to work on secret projects.
And just like the Americans' Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, the name and legacy of the Skunk Works had also been inherited by the Terran Confederation and was now currently bestowed upon DARPA's top-secret multi-disciplinary R&D facility at Ganymede Base.
Achievement Unlocked: Where The Magic Happens
(Successfully Get Reassigned To The Skunk Works)
Reward: 100 CP
Heartened at the unexpected CP reward, especially since I'd tapped myself out buying the
Black Computer, I immediately re-opened the Celestial Forge's interface and picked out an item that I'd already had my eye on but hadn't picked up yet. Now that I had 100 spare CP again and was about to embark on a new phase of my life where it would be most useful, it was time to pick up
PhDs (Fantastic Four).
I was admittedly courting a minor existential crisis by taking this, but Genius Patrol or no Genius Patrol I needed to properly arm myself for any upcoming conflicts with the R&D bureaucracy. Like an athletics team, showing potential might get you drafted but you had to actually put up the winning #'s to get paid the big money. And while I wasn't really concerned about my personal wealth, especially given the ultracapacitor tech I'd just sold, I was definitely going to be in some serious competition for research budgets with whatever scientists were already older and more established here and I'd need every edge I could.
And so, I picked up the item that not only promised to add several more PhDs' worth of specialized expertise to my knowledge base but also to make my records and backstory show that I'd
always had sufficient academic and professional credentials for any expertise I actually possessed, regardless of source. Which was frightening to think about, in the sense that the Celestial Forge apparently had the power to retroactively edit time and space and
my own personal history in order to insert things that had never actually happened, but... as uncomfortable as the thought made me feel, the fact remained that I'd been violating causality as I'd known it ever since I'd first started tapping a mysterious otherworldly force for knowledge and abilities from outside reality. Now I'd just have to more openly
confront that that was what I was doing.
In limited doses, at least.
So instead of arriving at the Skunk Works as a precocious young college student with some very promising theoretical math and a noteworthy commercial patent, I arrived as some type of absurd young genius who'd somehow discreetly obtained multiple PhDs in only several years, without that coming to notice until I chose to reveal it. Which had a definite affect on how much support I'd be given in my first project, because if there was one thing that people with high-end academic credentials believed in with all their heart it was that having enough high-end academic credentials was
the essential proof of smartness. Which... well, I'd been starting to learn that when you were trying to persuade other people to do something then what you could get them to believe was true was often far more important than what was objectively true.
Admittedly, I was just a wee bit nervous about how Genius Patrol was going to figure
this one, but one of the several reasons I'd taken this item was to test just how far the Celestial Forge could go in making these kinds of things happen. If they didn't react like they'd just had their own memories and case studies on me edited, then I'd know more about the extent of the Forge's powers. And if they did react like it? Well, then I'd have to come clean... and while I didn't
want to do that at all, if I ended up
needing to do so then I'd want to have that happen as early in the process as possible.
"So, Lieutenant. You have
how many PhDs?" Rear Admiral Alexis Davenport, commanding officer of the Skunk Works, asked me with a skeptically raised eyebrow.
"After the first one, they were willing to accept complete-at-your-own-pace remote coursework and dissertation-only for most of the others." I deflected. In actuality I'd never attended a graduate school or written a doctoral dissertation in my life, but my latest purchase from the Forge had promised that it would materialize records and backstories as necessary to explain my degrees, and it had certainly delivered.
"I know that the youngest person to obtain a doctoral degree since the 20th century was only 15 years old, but the only other people to obtain as many graduate degrees as you have were perpetual students for decades. You're
twenty-one." she said incredulously.
I honestly didn't have an answer for this one that didn't feel awkward, so I just nodded.
"
And you have total recall, it says here." she said, glancing back down at her desktop holodisplay. "Between that and all your credentials, it's no wonder that you've been able to cross-reference so many different scientific disciplines."
"I think that's why I've only recently started to pick up speed with my inventing." I said, happy that she'd given me the opportunity to start spinning this in a certain direction. "One of the primary bottlenecks in R&D is that normally, no one person can know or apply everything relevant to a particular problem if some of the necessary pieces of knowledge aren't part of their normal specialty. Only I'm a... general specialist?"
"Is that how you originally got the inspiration for your FTL communication hypothesis?" she asked me.
"Yes ma'am." I said. "If you start from McAndrew's fourth equation and then cross-reference that with-"
She immediately cut off my impending flow of ascended high math nerdery with an upraised palm. "I read the precis." she said. "More importantly, so did several of the other jumpspace physicists around here. But however promising the theory looks, of course it needs testing. How soon can you have a prototype design for us to look at?"
"I worked it out while jumping back from Nusku." I smiled at her, and hauled out my
Black Computer, morphed into a portacomp, and beamed the relevant file into her desktop system.
"Hmm." she said, looking at it. "According to your rough estimate, we're looking at enough expense here to almost pay for a
Crockett-class' entire jumpdrive."
"The production model will be notably cheaper, once we work out all the quirks." I said. "But yes, the initial prototype is going to be a bit of a project."
"Indeed." she nodded. "Still, the ultracapacitor speaks well of your talent for practical application as well as theory, and you come highly recommended. Spend the rest of today finishing your in-processing, and can you have your presentation ready to show the review board by 1100 tomorrow?"
"Yes ma'am." I agreed, having already written it at the same time I was busy finishing my preliminary schematics.
"Then if we can clear the final hurdle, you'll get your budget and your lab. And then, we'll see what happens."
* * * * *
"Damn, it's all just flowing together." Dr. Saunders, the Skunk Works' leading jumpspace physicist, said with a commendable attempt at masking his envy.
"Sometimes you just get... fortunate." I temporized, realizing at the last minute that crediting my victory over him to mere luck would only piss him off even further.
When I'd originally gotten the Celestial Forge I'd been like a child with a new toy. Being able to perform at a vastly higher level of ability than I ever had before made me feel
powerful, feel
important. Even if I was capable of exercising strategic patience if I exerted enough willpower - witness my career track to date - I still was full of eager anticipation at the point when I would start being famous, where everyone would start praising my genius.
And now I was finally starting to reach that point and I realized that I only felt embarrassed. Because it wasn't really
my genius at all they were praising, was it?
Case in point, my new lab partner. Dr. Saunders was 37, and had had his career marked and mentored from childhood onwards just as carefully as the Genius Patrol had marked mine. Early graduation from secondary-ed. Early National Honors on his CAT exams, but with actual entry into Public Service held back until he reached age 18. Bachelors' degree completed before he even hit his Public Service draft. Double service credit and early release, just like I'd earned mine. Two PhDs before he was twenty-five, credited with refining the Vilani jump-2 drive for even greater fuel efficiency than they could manage before he was thirty. He'd been assigned to the problem of deep-space jump breakout - finding a way to plot a hyperspace jump that didn't have to terminate in a gravity well, so that a ship with extra fuel tanks could cross the 3-parsec gulf in the stars surrounding Confederation space by doing a double-hop - and had been making noteworthy progress towards that end before I'd come along.
And now a girl slightly over half his age was about to entirely upstage him, and would soon enough render the project he'd spent the last two years working on entire unnecessary... and unlike him, neither her brilliance nor her accumulated knowledge were due to her own efforts. I suppose that the accident of birth that gave him his raw intelligence could be equated to the quirk of fate that granted me access to the Celestial Forge, but all of my alleged genius and insight into jumpspace theory was from my having taken
Ragnarok Proofing and
PhDs. A few achievements, some spent CP, and voila! I was now being welcomed and feted as the Confederation's most brilliant researcher, but what I actually was was a cosmic stenographer. The Forge was doing it all for me, all I was doing was taking credit for other peoples' work.
I'd always felt mildly scornful when I'd read fiction about heroes who had 'imposter syndrome' - you were
getting it done, so did it really matter that your gimmes were coming from the plot instead of from the normal way? The people you helped were still helped, right? The bad guys you beat were still beat?
And now I was seeing the problem from the other side and... well, younger me was still correct about that bit. What really mattered to everyone else was that the work was getting done, not about how or why. But older me was coming to realize that even if your internals didn't necessarily matter to those around you, they always still mattered to you.
"Isn't that the truth." Dr. Saunders replied to me manfully, and I pushed my woolgathering aside and got back to work.
Since I'd made sure that one of my new PhDs would be in jumpspace physics, I had all the information I needed to begin seamlessly integrating Battletech jumpdrive tech into our own native version. The actual nuts and bolts of building a jump-9 ship would still need a lot of ancillary details to be worked out, not least of them being somehow figuring a way to shrink the whole damn setup down into something of a more reasonable size, but my first project was of course the FTL communication method I'd promised that I could build, and given that I already had the full schematics for one the only thing I needed was to take enough lab time - and go through enough of the steps myself where other people could see it - that it would appear to be a process of invention, not just copying things from a set of mental notes.
The Hyper-Pulse Generator, or HPG, was the primary method of interstellar communication in Battletech. It was a variant of K-F drive technology that was used to create an artificial 'jump point' instead of pushing a large mass through an already-existing jump point. Using a giant installation the size of a small radio telescope, it fired an electromagnetic signal into jumpspace where it would omnidirectionally propagate to be picked up by every HPG receiver within range. They were also extremely large and expensive, and required equally large and expensive receivers. A 'short-range portable' HPG was one that weighed
only twelve tons and required an entire Battlemech just to move.
So for my first FTL comms demonstration I'd decided to build something simpler, a variant of the "black box" or K-Series FTL comm tech that the Star League had invented almost 50 years before the HPG. Although their transmission bandwidth was much narrower, limiting them to text messages instead of audiovisual, the most advanced models of K-series transmitters had almost
twelve hundred light-years of range, exceeding even the Word of Blake "Super-HPG" plot device from one of the later Battletech arcs. The K-Series technology had been abandoned by the Star League in favor of the HPG as soon as the latter was invented, and their capability to interfere with JumpDrives and HPGs had been given as the reason. But as it turned out, that reason was a lie - if properly tuned, the 'Black Box' technology had no such interference at all. Apparently the Star League, or possibly early ComStar, had wanted HPG technology instead because it made centralized control of communications far easier, and had been willing to mislead everyone else to get it.
Or maybe they'd just screwed up. I didn't know for certain, as I was having to reconstruct the motives of the people in the Battletech setting from what fragmentary lore knowledge I did have and their full technical database. It was entirely possible that they'd simply overlooked this in their research, especially given what had happened to systematic research and development upon the collapse of the Star League and the outright
cargo cult level of thinking that had surrounded much of their advanced "lostech".
Still, that was the Inner Sphere's problem. My problem was making this damned thing work so I didn't fall flat on my face at the first hurdle, and I was fortunate that I'd bought all my magic PhDs because I doubt I'd have gotten enough people to listen to my theories without them. But math was math, and despite the intense academic nerd fights I'd been forced to struggle through I did manage to convince the powers that be that my 'new theories' about jumpspace interface allowed for beaming an electromagnetic signal from one precisely tuned receiving station to another, so after weeks of building, testing, refining, and building again, and after several laboratory demonstrations that indicated that the thing was working as a communications device, it was time for the first field test to see if I'd actually managed to make an
FTL communications device. Because proving that we were going substantially in excess of lightspeed, let alone at the FTL multipliers we'd need to make this substantially faster than just using a jumpship, would require us to be shooting across a distance substantially further than the width of the lab, or for that matter the orbital habitat we were working in.
And so after a few weeks' of work, and some vigorous pretending on my part to have already done most of the pure theory by myself before I'd even gotten here so as to get to the field tests as soon as possible, it came down to the final hurdle. The first of our field-range paired FTL units had been finished, and one of them was sitting in front of me right now while the other one was onboard an interplanetary shuttle currently over two light-minutes away. We'd synchronized two atomic clocks to each other before placing one at each end, and at a preset time the shuttle would simultaneously transmit the same message to us both by FTL pulse transmitter and with its ordinary comm laser. The message would be several paragraphs of text to be typed in by an operator onboard the shuttle only after separating from the station, to be chosen only after the shuttle was already on-station so as to try and preclude any fraud on my part by pre-arranging a message. Obviously the validity of the test would be if both messages - the one being sent by FTL pulse and the one being sent by lightspeed laser - matched exactly, and the one of them arrived more quickly than the other. Equally as obviously, the operator for the test was someone I'd never met and who had been randomly selected from a pool of candidates at the last minute, with all suitable safeguards to prevent prior collusion.
With an incongrously quiet 'ping!', the transmitter signaled reception of the first message.
"Holy shit!" the comm tech manning the panel whispered quietly. "Um, message received, ma'am!"
Rear Admiral Davenport leaned forward to look over his shoulder and start reading it herself.
"I [name], do hereby swear, before the Great and Living God, that during my engagement, and while I am an employee of Russell, Majors & Waddell, I will, under no circumstances, use profane language; that I will drink no intoxicating liquors; that I will not quarrel or fight with any other employee of the firm, and that in every respect I will conduct myself honestly, be faithful to my duties, and so direct all my acts as to win the confidence of my employer. So help me God." she recited. "Wait, what the heck is this?"
"It's the code of conduct for Pony Express riders in the American Old West." I answered her. "Someone's a history buff, it would seem."
"Apparently so." she agreed, both of us forcing ourselves to breathe steadily as we waited and waited and-
"Second message received!" the comm tech burst out as the panel went 'ping!' again. "Right on the dot, and...
it's a match!"
"It's a textual match, but does it
hash correctly?" the admiral asked tightly.
"One hundred percent." I said, peeringly closely at my own readouts. "Every bit, byte, and checksum is identical. Both signals are the exact same set of data packets.
We did it!" I irrepressibly burst out at the end.
"You did it." she answered me, breathing heavily. "Congratulations, Dr. Nowak. Actual, honest-to-god FTL comms. You just put yourself in the history books right next to McAndrew."
I kept my embarrassment off my face and replied as calmly as possible. "Or I will have, if and when this technology is ever unsealed from 'black' status. Because we can't let the Vilani even suspect this exists."
"No, we can't." she agreed. "But we'll still have to find a way to
use it. Still, even though they'll be taking our recommendations into account, that one's for the Strategy Board. We've still got the longer-range tests to do, let alone the first interstellar-range test."
"Yes we do." I said. "And I can already see a couple things in the datalogs that-"
Quest Completed!
A Rising Thunder
Objective: Advance the Terran Confederation's tech level to be superior to Vilani Imperial Standard Technology in at least one militarily significant area before the start of the Fourth Interstellar War
Reward: 1000 CP, Terran Confederation Victory
I reeled as the notification flashed in my mind's eye. I'd finished
already? I mean, yes, workable interstellar FTL communication would qualify as both a 'military significant area' of technology
and well in advance of Vilani capabilities, and with the proof-of-concept a success Dr. Saunders and the rest of the Skunk Works could finish refining my design into a useable application even if I dropped dead at this very instant, but-
already?
"Dr. Nowak?" Admiral Davenport prompted me.
"Sorry, got distracted." I grinned at her weakly. "And yes, we definitely need to press forward with the testing schedule. Given the clarity of the results we just got, I'm thinking we might skip the light-minute test and try for a signal from beyond Pluto orbit..."
* * * * *
So,
now what?
I stood in the wardroom of Clarke Station, one of the several orbiting habitats around Ganymede that the Skunk Works' spaceside facilities were distributed among, and stared out the panaromic window at the stars.
The sheer speed with which I'd completed my main mission from the Celestial Forge had shocked me. Admittedly, it had taken me slightly over three years to get to this point but the fact was that I'd managed to avert Terra's prophesied defeat in the Fourth Interstellar War well before it had even started. Tensions on the border had been steadily worsening, but were not yet at the levels that had prefaced the Third Interstellar War, and while ONI had several indicators of a military buildup going on in the Imperial Rim Province the Imperial government had yet to so much as start enacting trade sanctions again, much less anything more overt.
And yet I didn't feel victorious. On one level that was simply common sense - the fact that we were now apparently on track to win some kind of victory in a Fourth Interstellar War in no way meant that the conflict between the Confederation and the Imperium would be permanently resolved, so obviously I'd still have
some kind of work left to do in that regard even if the Forge had yet to give me any new quests to replace the main one I'd just finished.
But on the other hand, right now I had every reason to be optimistic in my outlook. After all, one of the main forces driving the Confederation and the Imperium to keep butting heads was the fact that our expansion into the larger galaxy was unavoidably forced to be in the Imperium's direction, given the limitations of jump-2 drive and the 3+ parsec interstellar gulf surrounding Terran space on all but one side. And that was a limitation I was soon enough going to render obsolete. As soon as I could get a jump-9 drive built, we could expand rimward and trailward
away from the Imperium, into areas of space they hadn't even
charted yet. And if we could do that-
But, that would be a project for a later day. For right now, I
really needed a vacation. I'd been busting my hump flat-out on one project or another with only brief, if any, breaks ever since I'd graduated secondary-ed, and I had over a hundred million sols in the bank from my share of the advance that High Frontier had paid my family for the ultracapacitor patent license and a whole lot of accumulated leave to spend it in. My application for some time off had just been approved, and in a little while I'd catch an interplanetary shuttle back to Terra and-
And then what?
I stared at the stars, sloshing brimfull of thoughts and feelings, and realized that I couldn't think of a single solitary thing I was actually eager to do. The recreations I'd used to enjoy were childishly simple and relatively unentertaining to my newly expanded brain, but right now I felt like I'd throw up if I even
looked at a computer terminal or a lab workbench at any point in the next month. And the advice Mr. Stepczinski had given me was still filed in my supernaturally accurate memory along with everything else, so just going out and getting plastered was a non-starter as well. The last thing the Confederation needed was for their one-girl science revolution to develop a drinking problem or something.
You're just tired, I told myself. You've been working too hard for too long, and you need a rest. So go find a tropical beach, lay down on it, and sleep in and vegetate. When you get your energy back, your inspiration will come with it. That's why people take vacations in the first place.
I turned away from the window and headed off towards my compartment to start packing my bags. I'd already checked out with my chain of command, so I didn't have anyone else I needed to stop and talk to before my shuttle left. Time to start my vacation.
* * * * *
Slightly under three years ago an eager young girl fresh out of secondary-ed had entered the orbital station of Armstrong Highport, taking her first steps out into a greater universe. And now she was back there again, only now her eager innocence had been replaced by a weary… resignation? I still wasn't sure
what I was feeling, only that I wasn't really enjoying it.
"Greetings, Lieutenant Nowak." the computerized voice greeted me. I was standing in front of one of the many secure terminals lined up in the foyer of the personnel office of Armstrong Highport's naval section.
"Checking out on leave." I greeted it. Because of course you didn't start your leave time at your duty station, not when you were stationed in Ganymede orbit. Even at the best velocity possible for a milspec reactionless maneuver drive, the Jupiter-to-Earth run still took over sixty hours.
"I regretfully cannot comply, Lieutenant. There is a required administrative action to complete before your leave request can be finalized." the computer surprised me.
"Oh what
now?" I whined, before taking a deep breath. "Query; what action, and by what authority?"
"The required action is to attend a personnel meeting at your earliest convenience in secure conference room R-42, and the originating authority is the Confederation Security Agency."
The
CSA? I blinked in alarm. Why the heck did the Federation's chief domestic security and civilian counterintelligence service have a 'hold' out on
me? My brain gibbered in a fractional second of alarm before common sense reasserted itself and reminded me that if there were actually an arrest warrant out on me, I would have stepped right off the interplanetary transport into a waiting squad of CSA agents or Military Police. So this must be something else, and while I could overheat my brain trying to guess at what it would be simpler to just go and let them tell me.
"Acknowledged. Tell them I'm on my way." I told the computer, and after a quick check of the compmap to get directions to the conference room I headed off to my meeting.
"Dr. Nowak?" I was greeted by an Oriental woman over fifteen centimeters taller than I was, which put her almost six centimeters over average female height. She was what even my relentlessly heterosexual self immediately noted as an unusually beautiful woman, with striking angular features and the build of a fitness model, and her English was almost perfectly accentless. "Special Agent Mira Song, CSA." she introduced herself with a smile. Before I could even ask she withdrew her credentials from her pocket and showed them to me. I idly noted that according to her badge she was actually a
Senior Special Agent, which given that she looked to only be a few years older than I was told me that someone either had one of those faces that kept looking like a twentysomething even into her thirties or that she was fast-tracking just a bit.
This was a conference room, not an interrogation chamber, so I simply took a seat at one corner of the small table and she did likewise. After verifying her ID through the computer terminal on the table, I asked the obvious question. "May I ask what the CSA needs to speak to me about?"
Her brow furrowed slightly. "You weren't informed of my new assignment?" she asked, mildly concerned.
"New assign-?" I momentarily wondered why the heck a CSA agent would need
me to be notified of her being assigned anywhere, until my augmented brain cross-referenced the only probable explanation. "Wait, I'm getting a
protective detail?"
"Yes, and clearly there was some type of communication error if they didn't already brief you about that before you departed the Skunk Works." She nodded. "I'll get a copy of the briefing packet to you as soon as I can, but to summarize? It's not publicly advertised but there are protocols for the CSA's Protective Mission to cover people who are deemed uniquely valuable to the Federation even if they would not normally fall into one of the categories that we're assigned to."
"Such as high Confederation officials and their families." I acknowledged, as several minor oddities of the past couple of days dropped into place. "So
that's why my ride in from Ganymede was on a system defense boat instead of a cargo shuttle. At the time I'd just thought it was the first space-available, but…" I trailed off knowingly.
"You're currently in the second-highest protective category we have." Agent Song acknowledged. "And you'd be in the
first-highest except that the logistical requirements of that one would make it publicly obvious that you
are one of our protectees now, and drawing any further attention to you than you might already have is the last thing we want to do. So for as long as the threat board remains clear your detail will be only one agent – me – as opposed to surrounding you with squads of people."
I rubbed my chin thoughtfully. "If there's only one of you then you can't be expected to guard me against any serious attack. You're a deterrence against casual danger only, yes?"
"Correct." She nodded. "But primarily I'm going to be a walking panic-button. While we can't surround you with a squad without telling anyone who looks that you're a high-value target, in the event of any emergency we still want to cut response times to the minimum possible. So I'm your full-time shadow from now on, and I'll be wired up 24/7 with the best secure comms the Confederation can supply… at least until you invent some new ones?" she finished with a disarming chuckle.
"Public transport?" I asked, having already grasped the significance of them not allowing me to do even an interplanetary shuttle run in Terra's home system without making me ride on a heavily armed and armored military starship.
"If the threat board is clear, allowable – making you take an armored airlimo everywhere also draws attention." She said agreeably. "And anything short of surrounding you with full head-of-state level precautions is already a trade-off of security versus logistics, the only question is exactly where the trade-off
is. So we're going to start as discreetly as possible and only ramp up when the threat level increases."
"You said 'when', not 'if'." I noted softly.
"Doctor, while we will of course do everything possible to delay the revelation for as long as possible,
eventually the Vilani are going to figure out that the Confederation's military R&D has recruited a new game-breaker… and when they finally do, then yes." she acknowledged soberly. "At that point their attempts to kill you will almost certainly be a '
when', not an
'if'."
We let that one just sit on the table for a long silent moment, before I nodded. "Well, if I couldn't take a joke then I shouldn't have gotten drafted." I eventually acknowledged, with a meaningful wave of my hand down at my Navy uniform.
"We all do our part." she acknowledged. "But the good news is, I'm not here to tell you you're not allowed to go on vacation. I'm just here to make sure you get back
from it. So let me just cover a couple more of the most essential topics as quickly as I can. First off, while they obviously missed the boat on getting these to you at Ganymede I was also given a copy of your orders for my own information, so I can give them to you." She took out her PDA and plugged in a datacable, and I withdrew my own
Black Computer, currently disguised as a PDA of my own, and quickly read through the file she sent.
It was a formal set of written orders from a Vice Admiral Young, and my eyebrows raised in shock as my eidetic memory informed me that he was currently assigned as the Director of Naval Intelligence. According to these orders I was, with the concurrence of the Department of the Navy, officially placed in Protective Category Two-Alpha (Special) underneath the supervision of the CSA with all applicable regulations and restrictions thereto, along with several specific endorsements and clarifications.
"To translate that into plain English, the reason you're being bodyguarded by
me instead of, oh, a Marine special operations detail – in addition to the fact that executive protection is what my department specializes in - is precisely so that the military chain of command
doesn't get involved here." Agent Song nodded. "I'm not your superior officer and I can't give you orders, except to the extent that my position as a CSA agent would allow me to give orders to a civilian. Likewise, you don't outrank me and can't give
me orders, although obviously part of any protective detail assignment is to comply with the reasonable requests of the protectee as much as possible. We're bodyguards, not corrections officers." The corner of her mouth quirked. "Also, the fastest way for bodyguards to have to deal with their protectees trying to escape from them is to act like they're someone that needs to be escaped
from, and that's been true since back to when people in my career slot were still armed with shields and spears."
"I'm already guessing that part of the 'reasonable restrictions' is that I have to clear my itinerary with you in advance, so you can do things like alert the local field office that a high-value protectee will be in the area so they can keep a reaction squad ready to go if you call them." I nodded. "Also so that you can veto any particular no-go zones."
"But I'll try to be as accommodating as possible on that one." She reassured me. "As I said, the more I act like a jailer the more you'll just try to get away from me, and I
can't do my job effectively unless you
want me to do it. That having been said, yes, if you had a burning desire to go hit the beach in, oh, the West African conflict zone, then we'd definitely not be clearing you for that."
"I wasn't even sure
where I was going to go." I admitted with an exasperated wave of my hands. "I just knew I was going to go stir-crazy if I didn't get back groundside for a while."
"Not surprising." She surprised me with a nod. "According to your file, you've barely had two weeks of real downtime in three years. Between Peraspera, your carrying an almost double course-load at MIT, and then your Navy deployments-" She waved her hand. "Of
course you're feeling a little out of sorts, you've barely had a chance to stop and breathe since you've taken your CATs and your life has undergone
multiple paradigm shifts in that time."
"Your degree's in psychology, isn't it?" I gave her a knowing side-eye.
"It is." She acknowledged immediately. "That's actually quite common for law enforcement – no matter what technology does, the biggest part of our job is still the human element."
I politely didn't mention that my new bodyguard wasn't even pretending to not also be my minder, given that she herself was trying to at least pretend to be polite about it. Still, though-
"Ever been off-planet?" I asked her.
"Not yet." she said. "Although I did take a refresher on basic vacc suit and space emergency procedures when I got this assignment."
"Because when I go back to Ganymede – or wherever else the Navy sends me – you'll have to follow me." I admitted. "But the reason I asked is, I haven't been on Terra since they shipped me out to Nusku, and even that was a pretty brief stop. So, what's the current hot vacation spot on the motherworld?"
"That depends. What are you interested in?" she smiled at me.
* * * * *
"So, do you think it's everything it's cracked up to be?" Agent Song asked me as she cheerfully waved her non-alcoholic cocktail around at the venue.
It was a sunny afternoon and we were seated outdoors at a café table on the French Riviera, eating the sort of 'If you have to ask, you can't afford it' lunch I'd never have dreamed of seeing in my life several years ago. We'd come here largely on her recommendation, because she'd been stationed here for almost a year – as one of the most prestigious 'rich people' vacation spots on Earth, there was a permanent CSA station kept here to augment the individual protective details of the sorts of high officials who came here. Even if she'd never have been able to afford the prices here without my new multi-millionaire wallet being opened to accommodate us both.
"It's… certainly not my usual experience." I agreed. My new minder and I were both dressed in expensive fashions, newly-bought at the stores here, because the entire point was to look like two young women on vacation as opposed to a Navy officer and her government-issue bodyguard. Although she could have paid for her own outfit – apparently I was considered VIP enough that my bodyguard was authorized a generous expense account – the ultracapacitor royalties made me more than flush enough to just buy them for her. Besides, I was still trying to work out exactly where the boundaries
were with my new mandatory companion and I wasn't going to do that without pushing her comfort zone a little. So far my probes hadn't discovered anything except that she was an exceptionally patient woman who was very skilled at keeping a conversation from devolving anywhere unpleasant without making it look like she was pushing you anywhere. I mentally added a few more data points to my mental tally of '
is she my minder, or my handler?' and kept on keeping on.
"I still wish I'd been able to convince you to hit the concert venue instead." she said jokingly.
"Synthpop's not really my thing, thanks." I nodded. "Besides, the idea of standing in the middle of a crowd of screaming people waving a glowstick makes me twitch at the sheer
thought of that much sensory overload."
"Are you on the autism spectrum?" she asked me politely. "Because that wasn't in your file."
"Sometimes I've wondered." I admitted honestly. "But no, I doubt it. They gave me the brainscan in primary-ed just to make sure, after my fourth time in the principal's office for 'discplinary incidents'. I just don't like crowds."
"Not going to lie, a protectee whose record shows that she had a consistent problem with getting herself punched in the face is
not considered a fun time in the protective detail." She said. "But at least you haven't had any such incidents since Peraspera."
"Oh trust me, I
almost threw down a couple times at MIT. College kids are
jerks." I let slip, and then cursed that last cocktail I'd had with lunch. "But… are you familiar with Heinlein's saying on the topic of maturity?"
'It's amazing how much 'mature wisdom' resembles being too tired.' she quoted with a soft laugh.
"Yeah." I nodded. "It just doesn't seem worth the
effort nowadays."
"Degree or no, it's bad form to try and diagnose anyone you haven't clinically examined." she nodded soberly. "But while the past week of beach and socialize has definitely relaxed you, you still seem a little stressed."
I ate another spoonful of my dessert in lieu of an answer, while I tried yet again to figure out what was wrong with me.
"If you don't want to talk about it, don't." she nodded. "But if you do, I'm not the judgemental type."
"Sometimes I feel like a fraud." I said softly. "Which is a
stupid thing to feel for someone who's… invented the things I've invented." I censored myself in public.
"No it's not." She surprised me with her ready agreement.
"Excuse me?" I looked at her, more than a bit taken aback.
"Sorry, that came out wrong." She apologized. "I'm not saying I think your evaluation of yourself is
justified, because you're right, it's not. Just from what you've achieved so far you're one of the most uniquely brilliant people in
history, let alone contemporary times. What I am saying is that logical or not, your feelings are still
valid. They are emotions you are genuinely dealing with, reactions you're having to the life experience that you've actually lived, and whether logical or not they still have genuine weight that you have to learn how to carry. Or to shed."
"You know, I've been a good girl so far and not actually hacked your personnel record yet, but you are making it
really tempting." I retorted.
"If you're asking whether I'm acquainted with the 'advanced aptitude tracking' committee, then yes." She nodded. "But not the way you're thinking. They didn't assign me here, and I don't report to them."
"Then how do you know-?" I snapped my fingers at how stupid I was being. "You were National Honors too, weren't you?"
"Missed it by two." she replied. "But yes, I was one of the very top students in all of Korea in my year, and I was also a champion athlete, and a dancer, and a couple of other things. So I was the sort of high-functioning polymath that got fast-tracked through a carefully-curated Public Service just like you were, only through different categories."
"How'd you end up in the CSA?" I asked her.
"Sometimes I still wonder!" she chuckled. "I originally wanted to be an idol singer, would you believe? My plan was to just get through my mandatory Public Service tour, then straight back to the entertainment industry I'd already been training for as far back as secondary-ed. Except instead of what I applied for I ended up as support staff for a Frontier Constabulary outpost on Nusku, and that's what got me interested in police work. So psych degree in college with early graduation, then the CSA academy, and it was off to the races."
"Have you ever wished you were born in pre-Confederation times?" I risked asking.
"You mean back before we knew we were all under existential threat by an enormously larger alien imperium and had to reorganize all of human society on a permanent war economy?" she agreed. "Yeah. Sometimes." she reluctantly admitted.
"
I wish it need not have happened in my time." I quoted Frodo.
"So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." she quoted Gandalf in reply.
"Is it okay if I call you Mira from now on?" I asked slowly.
"Only if I get to call you Sofia." she smiled.
For the first time since Peraspera, I started to feel not quite so alone.
* * * * *
Author's Note: It
lives!
Well,
provisionally lives. I still have no story outline for what comes next, I'm still gonna have to wing it, and I'm still struggling to make a viable Celestial Forge fic because I've never gotten one really through the empire-building stage yet, that's where I always choke. But I am at least going to
try this one again, because I really did like it. So no guarantees, but we'll see how far I can get this time.
And I did have the one inspiration of 'Hey, you know what Sofia needs?
Another character to bounce off of.' And so the Confederation is reacting to their new supergenius by going 'Hey, Dr. Quest, we're assigning you your own Race Bannon because we really don't want you getting mugged to death by some rando in an alleyway', and so Special Agent Song joins the team.
No, she's not based on a certain character from K-Pop Demon Hunters, despite the name. She was very
very loosely inspired by, but outside of the first name and a national origin and a love for k-pop (or 'synthpop' as it's called in the 22
nd century), not much else.
Also, as this is QQ, I need to clarify straight-up – no, they're not going to be shipped. Neither of them even has that orientation. *g*
