They have, over the last two years, bought five custom-designed Necklin field generators from a Komarran jumpship powerplant firm. I have the company's name and address, and copies of the invoices. Bollan Design– that's the builder—still has the tech specs on file.'
'Soudha was building a jump ship?' Miles muttered, trying to picture it. 'Wait a minute, Necklin rods come in pairs . . . maybe they broke one? Colonel, has ImpSec visited Bollan yet?'
'We did, to confirm the invoice forgery. Bollan Design appears to be a perfectly legitimate, though small, company; they've been in business about thirty years, which rather predates this embezzlement operation. They're unable to compete head to head with the major builders like Toscane Industries, so they've specialized in odd and experimental designs and custom repairs of out-system and obsolete jumpship rods. Bollan as a company does not appear to have violated any regulation, and seems to have dealt with Soudha as a customer in all good faith. The invoices at the time they left Bollan were not yet altered; that was done when they arrived on Foscol's comconsole, apparently. Nevertheless . . . the chief design engineer who worked on the order directly with Soudha has not been to work for three days, nor did my field agent find him at home.'
Miles swore under his breath. 'Ducking fast-penta interrogation, you bet. Unless his body turns up dead in a ditch. Could be either, at this point. You have a detainment order out on him, I trust?'
'Certainly, my lord. Shall I download everything we've acquired so far this morning on your secured channel?'
'Yes, please,' said Miles.
'Especially the tech specs,' put in Vorthys over his shoulder. 'After I look at them, I may want to talk to the people at Bollan who
'Already been done, my lord.'
Still looking smug, Gibbs signed off, to be replaced by the promised financial and technical data. Vorthys tried to foist the financial records off on Miles, who promptly filed them and went to look at Vorthys's tech readouts.
'Well,' said Vorthys, when, after a cursory initial scan, he was able to pull up a holovid schematic, which rotated slowly and colorfully in three dimensions above his vid-plate. 'What the hell is that?'
'I was hoping you'd tell me,' Miles breathed, now hanging in turn over the back of Vorthys's station chair. 'Sure doesn't look like any Necklin rod I've ever seen.' The lines turning in air sketched out a shape like a cross between a corkscrew and a funnel.
'All the designs are slightly different,' noted Vorthys, bringing up four more shapes to hang in series beside the first. 'Judging by the dates, they were scaling up with each subsequent model.'
According to the attached measurements, the first three were relatively smaller, a couple of meters long and a meter or so wide. The fourth was double the dimensions of the third. The fifth, probably four meters wide at the larger end and six meters in length. Miles pictured the size of the assembly room doors in the building next to this one. Wherever that last one had been delivered to—four weeks ago?—it hadn't been here. And one did not leave a delicate precision device like a Necklin rod out in the wind and rain.
'Those things generate Necklin fields?' said Miles. 'What shape? With a pair of jumpship rods, the fields counter-rotate and fold the ship through five-space.' He held his hands out parallel with each other, palm up, then pressed them inward, in the metaphor he'd been given, the field wrapped around the ship to create a five-space needle of infinitesimal diameter and unlimited length, to punch through that area of five-space weakness called a wormhole, and unfold again into three-space on the other side. He'd also been dragged through a more convincing mathematical demonstration, in his last term at the Academy, all details of which, never called on subsequently thereafter, had evaporated out of his brain shortly after the final exam. That was long before his cryo-revival, so it was one bit of memory loss he could not blame on the sniper's needle-grenade. 'I used to know this stuff . . .' he muttered plaintively.
Despite this broad hint, the Professor did not break into an enlightening lecture. He just sat in his station chair, his chin cupped in his palm. After a moment, he leaned forward and called up a dizzying succession of data files from the probable-cause investigation. 'Ah. Here it is.' A wriggly graph appeared, flanked by a list of elements and percentages running down one side. A fast pass through the data from Bollan produced another, similar list. The Professor leaned back. 'I'll be damned.'
'I did not expect to get this lucky. That,' he pointed to the first graph, 'is an analysis of the composition of a very melted and distorted mass fragment we picked up topside. It has nearly the same composition fingerprint as this fourth device, here. The figures which are a tiny bit off are just the sort of lighter and more volatile elements I'd expect to lose in such a melt. Huh. I didn't think we'd
'If that was the fourth,' said Miles slowly, 'where's the fifth?'
The Professor shrugged. 'The same place as the first, second, and third?'
'Do you have enough information from the inventory to reconstruct its power supply? At that point, we'd have the whole machine mapped, wouldn't we?'
'Mm, maybe. It will certainly supply some parameters. How much power? Continuous, or phased? Bollan had to know, to supply the proper coupler . . . ah.' He noodled again with the specs and fell into a study of the complicated diagram.
Miles rocked impatiently on his heels. When he felt he could no longer maintain his respectful silence without the top of his head blowing off, he said, 'Yes, but what does it do?'
'Just what it says, presumably. Generates a five-space distortion field.'
'Which does what?
'Ah.' The Professor sank back in his station chair and rubbed his chin ruefully. 'Answering that may take a little longer.'
'Can't we run comconsole simulations?'
'To be sure. But to get the right answer, one must first correctly frame the question. I want—humph!—a mathematical physicist specializing in five-space theory. Probably Dr. Riva, she's at the University of Solstice.'
'If she's Komarran, ImpSec will object.'
'Yes, but she's here on-planet. I've consulted her before, when I investigated a politically suspicious wormhole jump accident on the Sergyar route two years ago. She thinks sideways better than any of the other five-space people I know.'
Miles was under the impression that all five-space math experts thought sideways to the rest of humanity, but he nodded understanding of the importance of this character trait.
'I want her; I shall have her. But before I drag her out of her comfortable academic routine, I think I want to visit Bollan in person. Your Colonel Gibbs is very good, but he can't have asked all the questions.'
Miles considered denying personal ownership of ImpSec and anyone in it, but recognized ruefully that he was now identified as the authority on ImpSec among the Auditors just as Vorthys was identified as the engineering expert.
The trip to Bollan Design's plant did not prove as enlightening as Miles had hoped. A hop in a suborbital shuttle to a dome one Sector west of Serifosa soon brought Miles and Vorthys face-to-face with Bollan's upset owners. Since they'd already thrown open all their records to ImpSec that morning, they had little more to offer the Imperial Auditors. The administrative people knew only of financial and contractual details with Soudha's mythical 'private research institute' that had supposedly ordered the work; some techs who'd worked in the fabrication shop had very little to add to the specs already in Vorthys's possession. If the missing engineer had been as innocent of the true identity of the customer and purpose of the device as were the rest of the Bollan employees, he'd have had no reason to flee; Bollan Design had committed no crime that Miles could identify.
However, the techs were able to recall dates of several visits from men answering to descriptions of Soudha, Cappell, and Radovas, definitely one from Soudha as recently as the previous week. Their supervisor had never included them in these conferences. They had been told never to discuss the odd Necklin generators outside their work group, as the devices were experimental and not yet patented, trade secrets soon to transmute into profit (or loss). The progression so far had looked a lot more like loss than profit.
