Edward M. Lerner by A New Order of Things Read Free Book Online Page B

existence.
    One of the agent’s ongoing duties was the investigation of human nature, research as often advanced by the study of human literature as by recourse to human behavioral sciences. His preferred literary genre was quintessentially human: the mystery. The intensely social beings of the solar system the humans named Alpha Centauri had virtually no crime, and the few misdeeds that did occur there were seldom premeditated.
    His favorite detective was among the first: Sherlock Holmes. A key clue in the Holmesian tale Silver Blaze was the significance of something that did not happen: the curious incident of the dog that did not bark in the night.
    T’bck Fwa had been drawn to the curious incident of human cutting-edge research abandoned without fanfare. Time and again, brilliant human physicists would publish a speculative paper or two about paths to a production-scale antimatter technology, only to abandon the topic forever. Too often for coincidence to explain, the scientists dropping their investigations had had, soon after their final antimatter-related publications, unexplained lengthy absences from their home institutions. When their travel could be reconstructed from public records, the destination was always the Jupiter system.
    Jupiter-region flight plans filed with the UP Astronautics Agency, also public records, disclosed another anomaly. Himalia got many more scoopship deliveries than a prison could possibly need. The shipments were uneconomically split across multiple suppliers, denying individual companies evidence of more than a small fraction of the demand. Aggregated across suppliers, the fusion-fuel consumption on the so-called prison moon was consistent with a large-scale antimatter factory.
    T’bck Fwa had for decades searched and sifted with the limitless perseverance of the inorganic for conclusive proof of a surreptitious human antimatter program. As his suspicions mounted, he had augmented his searches of public databases with more proactive means: commercial espionage. The infosphere was an ideal instrument for creating front organizations, layer upon layer, of obscure parentage and anonymous direction. Now real human investigators toiled unknowingly for the AI detective enthusiast, reporting on the purchase and delivery of specialized equipment. All clues continued to point to the Jovian moon Himalia.
    It was his longstanding study of antimatter-research-related data that made the second, recent pattern so disturbing. The newest filings in the UPAA flight-plan database showed that from across the solar system a small armada of UP vessels was converging on Jupiter at high accelerations.
    And so T’bck Fwa sent an encrypted Utmost Priority message over InterstellarNet to his distant patrons. His assertions of priority could not influence the light-speed limit—four local years would pass before his alert reached home, and four more for any advice to be returned.
    If the two anomalies, as he feared, were related—if mankind was, at long last, about to use its secret hoard of antimatter—it was unlikely in the extreme that T’bck Fwa would have the benefit of a reply before deciding whether to act.
    Why he felt there would be an action he could or should take, T’bck Fwa could not say. Any human detective would have called it a hunch.

CHAPTER 7
    Carlos Montoya was a bear of a man, Eva could never help but notice. He had broad shoulders and massive arms, and sprouted thick black hair everywhere a person could. He did not seem to mind that he dwarfed his tiny office or its battered metal desk. The door to that office read: “Jovial Spacelines.” Spaceport legend claimed Montoya had been so taken with a typo that he had abandoned his firm’s original, locale-apropos name.
    Three visitors were crammed into the cluttered office: Eva herself, Art, and the ambassador. Getting Chung to agree to a meeting had been a hard sell; she found getting him through the door into this quasi-closet even