“Wow. And you volunteered to help them against the Administrator?”
“Well, ‘volunteered’ is a strong word. The gist is that I could be a useful source of information, or I could be taken apart. I went for door number one.”
“The reasonable choice. How realistic was the threat?”
“Not as much as you’d think. The Administrator controls everything and has all the tech. The Resistance has managed to stay mostly tech savvy and they have books, but it's been quite a few generations since they were part of a technological civilization. Stuff has slipped, you know. I doubt they actually have the tech level to reverse-engineer an optoelectronic cube, and the Administrator doesn't hold university courses for Crew. They get the training they need to do the job they’re assigned.”
“Yeah. Look, we can continue this later. Right now, where are you? Is there any way I can bust you out?”
“Well, I can tell you I'm not in a town. People are always ‘heading into town’ or ‘coming in from town’, so I'm at least some distance from it.”
“No mention of the town name?”
“Helep’s Ending has been mentioned numerous times. Hopefully it's a town and not an epithet.”
“Ah crap. Never heard of it. What else ya got?”
“Hm. If it helps, I don't think we’re too far from the town. Maybe a couple of hours for a Quinlan. And the room I'm in is very modern, looks more 21st century than 18th, if you know what I mean. May be some kind of high-tech hideout. And no windows or anything. It feels kind of like an underground military base.”
“Damn.” I sat back, leaning against a tree-like thing. Sesh, my translator interface informed me. Then I sat forward as I got an idea. “There was a transit station in the rail terminal. Surely they'd have, you know, some kind of map or transit listing or something.”
“A billion miles of megastructure, that's a lot of towns.”
“It's all we have, at the moment, buddy. But we've noticed time after time that the Quinlans think and behave a lot like humans. So if they're mentioning Helep’s Ending, there's a good chance that it's the name of the station as well as the town. Or maybe even only the station.” Then I thought. A billion miles of megastructure, but Quinlans didn't have SCUT, so light speed was a limiting factor for any communications using Quinlan technology. “Bender, I need to test transmission latency. Can you frame-jack in your current situation?”
“Yep. They powered up everything, rather than trying to figure out what was and wasn't necessary. You want me to turn around a ping for you?”
“Please.”
I cranked my own frame rate up as high as I could. “Okay. 1, 2, 3, ping.”
“Ping. It's not traveling at light speed, Bob, because this isn’t a radio broadcast. It's a packet-switched network, running on the megastructure's backbone. So, assume half light speed.”
Using the amount of time it took for Bender to return my ping, I calculated he was within 10 segments or so. The ad hoc ping method didn't allow any better accuracy than that, and I couldn't resolve a lower limit. Still, it meant that Bender was less than 10 segments away, and reachable in less than a Quinlan lifetime. That was a big improvement from 1.8 million candidates.
“So assuming I find Helep’s Ending how do I find you?”
“Look for the futuristic underground bunker?”
“Thanks, that'll work. Actually, it does narrow things down maybe. They seemed operate right under the Administrator's nose. Is it possible you’re occupying management territory?”
“Actually, Bob, it's virtually certain. The Resistance mostly survives by theft, stealth, and more theft. They have very little of their own technology.”
“How are they doing this right into the Administrator's nose – er, beak?”
“Oh, the Administrator knows they’re there. It could, in theory, obliterate the Resistance in a day or two, if it was willing to. Generally speaking, the Administrator leaves them alone.”
“That seems incompatible with Scattering.”
“Scattering keeps the majority of the population in line, and keeps the tech level pre-steam. The one thing the Administrator is consistently strict about is the technological level of the general populace. Other than that, it tries to interact as little as possible. So trying to get rid of the Resistance entirely would be like playing whack-a-mole, and would draw attention to both the Resistance and the Administrator. And trying to vet each and every use of equipment over a billion-mile-long structure, to make sure it's Crew and not Resistance, is just too much trouble, so the Administrator ignores them. As long as they don't become too much of a nuisance.”
“The Administrator seems quite accommodating.”
“Well, it doesn't have any choice. It's-”
Bender's voice cut off abruptly. There didn't appear to be any signal, even background noises were gone. I had to conclude that Natasha had sent them a message and they'd cut him off. I’d hoped that was all they’d done.
It was time to get the others involved again.
My first priority would be to find a safe place for the Manny. The radio was no longer an asset, so I could leave it. The Resistance might even give up the search if they found it. I placed the radio up on a rock so it would be visible from a distance, but hopefully without being too obvious about it. The roamer hadn't seen any movement nearby, although there was a hint of activity to the east. I remembered spotting a small stream in that direction, so that was a good area to avoid anyway.
The Quinlans wouldn't stay out after dark in a wilderness area, as Bridget had pointed out on more than one occasion, this was more of a nature preserve than a zoo, and Quinlans weren't the largest things with teeth. So, all I had to do was stay out of sight until sunset, then find a reasonably private spot. With scent an
