Dimly, Jocim Marx heard distant voices from the Lynx's bridge questioning him, then shouting, then issuing sharp and harried commands. But he couldn't understand the language they spoke. It seemed like a tongue dredged up from childhood memories, the sounds put back together in random order.
He vaguely heard his own name.
But by then he was far off in yet another dream, vast and furious.
Executive Officer
"What the hell happened to him?"
"Medical doesn't know yet, sir."
"What about the scouts?"
"No response, sir. Sending again."
Katherie Hobbes tried to raise the main recon drone once more. With one fraction of her mind, she watched the fifty-second delay count tick off. With another, she followed the frantic shouting of the med techs who were moving Master Pilot Jocim Marx to the sickbay. She watched through hallway cams: The man hung limp, arms adrift in the zero-gee corridor Hobbes had cleared for the techs. He hadn't moved since the attack, or transmission, or whatever it had been. When the med techs had first arrived, he hadn't even been breathing.
In a corner of her vision, Hobbes saw Captain Zai flexing his fingers impatiently. But there was nothing she could do to increase the speed of light. The object was twenty-five light-seconds away, and the recon drone's translight capability was definitely out. Before collapsing, the scout craft's sensory grid had taken a 200-exabyte input--the equivalent of a planetary array at full power, concentrated into an area a hundred meters square: a hailstorm of information. The grid had perforated like tissue paper. But for those seconds, the drone had tried to pass on the information to the Lynx, and to its own pilot, and something bad had happened to Marx.
"Do we have an origin for the attack, Executive Officer?"
"DA is trying, sir."
"A rough idea of direction?"
"Trying, sir."
Hobbes shunted another ten percent of processor capacity to Data Analysis, forcing her to beggar the repair crews again. The captain's orders were coming fast and furious. With no determinations yet from any quarter, Zai's questions spun from one issue to the next. Lost probes, an unconscious pilot (Was Marx dead! she wondered), a mysterious attack using radio, the huge and fantastic object of unknown purpose.
Hobbes thought it unlikely that solid answers were coming anytime soon.
Tracking the source of the radio transmission was particularly tricky. The wave had been so focused that the Lynx's sensors hadn't caught a stray photon of it. Marx's numerous subdrones had been too close together to triangulate. Directionality was impossible to determine. Hobbes watched the expert program she had assigned to find the transmission's source; it was requesting more flops, eating through the frigate's processor capacity like a brushfire. Unwieldy algorithms devoured their allotted phosphorus in seconds, and screamed for more.
Hobbes assigned more processors to the problem, but the calculations' duty-slope remained hyperbolic, consuming her largesse in milliseconds. Hobbes queried the expert software's meta-software, which admitted that the entire Lynx's processors might be unequal to the task even if they had years to get the answer. But it wasn't sure. The solution might come in a few more minutes, or perhaps in the lifetime of a star.
Perhaps a little common sense was in order.
"Sir? There's only one place in the system that could generate a transmission burst of that magnitude."
Zai thought for a moment.
"The Legis interplanetary array?" She nodded.
"Raise the Imperial contingent there," he ordered.
Hobbes tried. But nothing came back. She sent hails to the few Navy bases that were equipped with their own short-range entanglement grids. Again nothing.
The planet was off-line.
"There is no translight response from Legis XV, sir. Zero."
"My god. What's our delay?"
"Eight hours one-way, sir," she estimated.
The captain thought for a moment. During those seconds of silence, the med techs reported to Hobbes that Marx was now breathing on his own. His brain wave diagnostics looked hot and unconscious, like a man in badly calibrated hypersleep.
ExO Hobbes noted that a marker in her vision was blinking, had been blinking for fifteen seconds, and she flinched. She had missed the return point for the drones' message delay.
"Sir, the drones have failed to respond again. I'll try--"
Zai interrupted her. "Send a general order to all Lynx personnel on Legis, via light speed. I want a report on the planet's comsystem status. And have DA monitor the civilian newsfeeds; see if anything's happening."
Hobbes's fingers moved to comply with the orders, but faltered. She couldn't think of the protocol phrase for Zai's order. A report on the planet wouldn't make sense to the recipients unless they knew what was going on. They were marines, not planetary liaisons. If they asked for clarification, seventeen hours would be lost.
In the meantime, a flurry of priority markers were flashing. Repair crews demanding the return of their processor space. You idiot, Katherie, she thought. She'd never freed the Lynx's computers from their potentially endless tracking calculations. The expert program was spinning its wheels while a hundred other systems needed processor power.
Her mind froze, overwhelmed for a few seconds.
Hobbes realized that she was losing control. Her fingers would not move.
One thing at a time, she commanded herself. She released the processor capacity to repair. Shot the Legis news-feeds to a rating in Data Analysis. Looked up at the captain, taking a moment to frame her thoughts.
"Marx is breathing, sir. The drones aren't responding to light-speed hails. And . . . and I think I may have reached task saturation."
Her eyes dropped. She struggled to compose the captain's message to the marines on Legis, realizing what she had admitted. But it was an absolute in her training: An executive officer must report her own failures as she would those of the crew.
Hobbes felt the captain's hand on her shoulder.
"Easy, Executive Officer," he said. "You're doing fine."
She breathed slowly. Zai's hand stayed, offering its gentle pressure.
"Priority, priority," came a voice. Ensign Tyre.
"This had better be good," Hobbes answered.
The young ensign spoke with absolute confidence. "We've amplified the final signals from the recon drone's satellite craft, ma'am."