An alarm chimed softly in her helmet. The latest integration test was due to begin, a full-scale run of the CTC-processor prototype. It would go ahead whether she was there or not, of course. But she had her duty.
She turned, made for the open sunlight, and began to bound across the plain, legs working together in a comfortable low-gravity style.
She took her place on the low ridge that had been designated as an observation area. A countdown was proceeding, she saw, a silent flickering of numerals ticking away on monitoring displays. Techs stood patiently and bots hovered, waiting for the test to begin.
The prototype CTC processor was a maze of ducts, pipes, and tubes that connected anonymous silver-white boxes. It sprawled for more than half a kilometer over the dusty lunar plain. The ground was darkened by boot prints, but as the time of the test approached the area had been evacuated, and only monitoring bots hovered cautiously over the complex central tangle.
The prototype, gleaming silver and gold in the pure low sunlight of lunar morning, looked oddly beautiful, a scattered work of art. But Torec had come to hate this thing which governed her life.
Two Virtuals materialized, out of nothing. One was dressed in a skinsuit; the other, Nilis, was not. The Commissary, hovering a few centimeters above the lunar floor, wore nothing more than his customary scuffed robe, and his feet were bare. He had never been one for Virtual protocol, but this was actually illegal. Virtuals were supposed to “dress” suitably for the environment they showed up in; it cost nothing more than a little extra computing power, and to do otherwise risked fooling a real- life inhabitant of the target environment about conditions that could be lethal. But it was typical Nilis, Torec thought. As he watched the patient countdown, his gaze was intent, his hands clasping each other, his eyes hollow.
The other Virtual was of a woman, dressed appropriately in a skinsuit. She was tall, somehow elegant despite her functional clothing. Seeing Torec, she walked across to her, leaving no footprints in the lunar dust. “You’re the Navy child.”
Torec bristled. “I’m Ensign Torec.”
“My name is Pila. I work in the Ministry of Economic Warfare.” Her face was smooth, ageless; she gazed at Torec, apparently mocking. It was a look Torec had become very familiar with on Earth, and had come to despise.
“I met you once. You work for Minister Gramm.”
“I’m one of his advisors, yes.” Pila waved a hand at the prototype. “Very impressive. And it’s all based on time travel?”
“Closed-timelike-curves, yes.” Torec pointed to the ducts. “Pilot Officer Pirius — Pirius Blue — defeated the Xeelee because his fellow pilot used her FTL drive to bring tactical information back from the future. So we have miniature bots in those tubes. The bots are the components of the processor. They fly back and forth, and actually jump through short FTL loops.”
“Little starships in tubes! And these bots travel back in time and tell you the answer before you even pose the question?”
“Something like that.”
“How marvelous.”
The dummy problem they were hoping to run today concerned protein folding. Proteins were the structural elements of life, but remained beyond the capability of humans to design optimally. There were more proteins a hundred components long than there were electrons in the universe; to work out how many ways a long protein molecule could fold up was an ancient problem, previously insoluble even in principle. “But we hope to crack it,” Torec said. She pointed to a large blank Virtual screen. “The results will be displayed there.”
Pila eyed her analytically. “Are you enjoying your posting here, Ensign? On the Moon, this project?”
“I’m here to do my duty, ma’am.”
She nodded, her mouth pursed. “Of course. And you anticipate success?”
Torec had learned how to deal with smooth-faced bureaucrats and their slippery questions. Nilis had warned her severely that if she were pessimistic, or even overly optimistic, she could trigger the funding being pulled. “This is only the first step. A proof of principle. Eventually we will have to cram this down into a unit small enough to be carried on a greenship.”
“A clever answer,” the woman murmured. “And what is your key problem?”
Torec shrugged. “Control of those flying bots, obviously. We’ve a list of issues.”
Virtual Nilis, who had ignored them both completely, now clapped his hands in agitation. Torec saw that the silent count was nearing its close; Nilis, projected from distant Earth, could barely contain his anticipation. Even Pila turned to look.
The count reached zero. The Virtual screen stayed blank, empty of protein schematics.
In that first instant Torec knew the trial had failed. After all, the whole point of this FTL-computing exercise was to send the answer back in time to the beginning.
And an explosion flared at the center of the complex. Torec was briefly dazzled. Silent, brief, the detonation kicked up an unspectacular flurry of moondust that, with no air to suspend it, collapsed immediately back to the ground.
Torec blinked and looked around. On the lunar plain, the techs were already converging on the ruin of their prototype. Some of them, she could hear on the open loop, were actually laughing.
The woman Pila had already gone.
The Virtual of Nilis was glaring at her. She had never seen him look so angry. “In your quarters,” he snapped. “Now.” And he winked out of existence, leaving pixels sparkling briefly.
When she got back to her quarters she pulled off her skinsuit, dumped it in a hopper, and climbed into her shower.
Big droplets of water squeezed out of the spigot with infuriating low-g slowness. It was typical of the earthworms to install such a luxury in a place where water couldn’t even flow properly, where it would actually have been better to have been supplied with simple honest clean-cloths. But she slaked off her sweat, rinsed her hair, and washed moondust out from under her nails.
The project’s development was being carried out on the floor of an immense walled plain called Clavius. Though this had once been the site of a major industrial facility erected by the Qax, it was far to the lunar south, and so was still outside the scope of the current paraterraforming efforts, the vast domed colonies that were turning the Moon’s face green around the equatorial foot of the Bridge between Earth and its satellite.
For a month, Torec had been stranded in this airless, dusty place. Nilis had given her a small team of scientists and engineers, to progress his designs for a revolutionary new computer. It had done her no good to protest that she had been trained as a pilot; she was a fighter, not some kind of double- domed tech. Nilis said it was important that one of what he called his “inner team” be attached to this essential development.
So she had been put in charge of what was laughingly called the Project Office. It was her job, in theory, to make sure the techs here did their work to spec, to quality, and on time.
At first she had actually welcomed the move to the Moon. Unlike the Earth, the Moon was a proper world, in her view, a world without a freakish layer of unmodified atmosphere or surging bodies of open water. This was a world where, quite properly, if you stepped out of a dome you had to wear a skinsuit, and where if you fell over you weren’t likely to break anything — if you wanted high gravity you set an inertia field; that was the way it was supposed to be. She had even liked the look of the scenery, when Nilis had shown her images of Clavius from orbit, a spectacular crater formation with mountainous walls surrounding a cluster of settlement lights.