It wasn’t long after Frank and Tony landed and took Flynn into custody before the first of the portable outbuildings arrived. They shoved him into one of the barracks buildings shortly after it landed. The building was little more than a large modular container that could mate with the bottom of a large cargo aircraft. The skin was heavy and well-insulated enough to survive a wildfire in the dry season. The people inside would survive, too, if they didn’t run out of air.
The structure could house twenty or thirty people. But it also made a fairly good impromptu prison. Even without cuffs or a restraint collar, Flynn would have had an impossible time trying to get out of it without someone opening the armored, fireproof doors for him.
Fortunately, they removed the cuffs within the first forty-eight hours, and provided relatively decent food and clean clothing. But they wouldn’t remove the restraint collar, and the comm units were completely isolated inside the new camp’s network. He could call security, and that was about it.
At least it had something of an entertainment library, since it was designed to support a working camp, though about half was porn and 90 percent of the rest was thinly disguised work-safety tutorials. Flynn and Tetsami spent most of their time playing chess against each other, and replaying variants of the same conversation.
“I don’t believe that thing is here.” Tetsami rubbed her neck, mirroring the placement of the restraint collar. “I don’t even remember how far we are from Bakunin here—”
“One hundred and fourteen light-years,” Flynn said. “You’ve told me often enough.” He moved a rook on the small comm screen.
“Those things don’t have tach-drives. It’s been traveling for a couple of centuries at least.”
Flynn shook his head. “I find it hard to believe that such an advanced society would settle for sub-light speeds. Your move.”
“The Proteans were a little weird,” Tetsami agreed, castling. “Very much kept to themselves. But I think the word ‘seed’ covers what they’re doing, propagating themselves.”
“That slow?”
“Think of the energy a tach-drive requires for each jump. That thing is what, three meters long? They get it to speed and coast and it requires the same energy to get here as it does to get to the next galaxy. All it takes is time.”
“A
Tetsami shrugged. “I can see a little of their perspective. I mean, back when I first heard of them, I never expected to be in lockup with my great-to-the-seventh-power grandson one hundred and seventy-five years later, waiting for him to move something.”
“Yeah.” Flynn moved a knight behind his rook and smiled. “Check.”
“Christ on a unicycle,” she muttered at the screen.
“One hundred and seventy-five is one thing, millions is another—”
“Millions of what?” Robert Sheldon asked from the doorway to the barracks.
Flynn blinked Tetsami’s image away and looked at his boss. The man had sandy hair gone half gray. He had four glyphs on his forehead, and like most of the people with four or more, he had a somewhat flat voice and an expression that Flynn thought of as mechanical.
“Years,” Flynn said without any explanatory comment. “Are you going to explain why Ashley security has locked me up for nearly a month?”
Sheldon walked up, shaking his head. “You’re an impulsive young man.” He sat down on the bunk opposite him and next to the comm still showing the game in progress, almost precisely where Tetsami had been sitting. “And naive as well, even for knowing one of the Founders.”
Flynn squirmed a little inside at Sheldon’s language. He never liked the way people used the word “knowing” someone to refer to what Flynn had come to see as ritualized psychic cannibalism. Having Tetsami with him as a separate person made the way it was
Flynn did something he usually avoided in conversation; he looked Sheldon in the eye. “Why did you have me locked up here?”
