"We believe that they're signatures of trans-half-life elements."
"Transuranium?" Zai said, trying to bring the periodic table to mind.
"Trans-everything," Tyre said. "Beyond our software. Beyond even current theoretical speculation. We had to recalibrate just to differentiate them. There seems to be no upper limit to the number of electrons with which the object can endow its virtual elements. With no change in mass. Without stability constraints: a half-life of forever."
The room exploded into chaos, scattering off into separate conversations. Everyone, it seemed, had been caught by these wild data, their minds taken over by the incredible implications of what they had seen. This had happened in the First Rix Incursion, back when Zai was a rating. The catapulting technologies of the Rix never failed to amaze, to appall, to suggest whole new fields of inquiry; they could freeze the mind.
Hobbes looked at him and pointed to the back of her wrist, an ancient Vadan hand sign he had taught her, suggesting that they move forward. Hobbes had already looked at the civilian transmissions from Legis, and from her prelim report, Zai's worst fears were likely to be realized.
He cleared his throat. Amplified by the captain's direct channel, the sound silenced the command bridge.
"Let us look at the event from Legis's perspective."
Hobbes took control of the airscreen, clearing the wild gyrations of the object's dance. She divided the screen into three contemporaneous newsfeeds, all exactly eight hours, fifty-two minutes prior to the transmission event; they had reached the Lynx at light speed at almost the same moment the event had occurred. Zai moved his secondary hearing across them: a talking head disquisitioning on local politics, a sporting event, a financial feed giving raw data--undulating line graphs that showed price-shift and volume.
"These are handheld channels," Hobbes explained, "for watching on portable devices or in your head. They broadcast with satellite repeaters for maximum coverage outside of cabled areas. Crude, but strong enough for our passives to have picked up."
She leaned back. "The transmission event happens in ten seconds."
The bridge crew waited anxiously, transfixed by the banalities of local media.
"Five," Hobbes began to count down.
At zero, all three of the pictures fractured.
The talking heads of local politicians collapsed, like faces in a shattering mirror. The image of the sporting event--some sort of obstacle soccer--froze, then horizontal jitters turned it into garbage. The financial channel was the most interesting: for a moment the graphs stayed coherent, but showed wildly shifting data, as if some tremendous cur 183 rency crash were underway. Then, like the others, the image collapsed into incomprehensibility.
"Well," said Hobbes, "it appears as if--"
"Wait," Zai silenced her.
He gazed at the blur of the three screens. They hadn't snow-crashed, hadn't reached a state of pure noise. There was a non-random signal there, an order in the chaos, like encrypted data viewed without the proper codes. The newsfeeds' audio didn't sound like the undifferentiated wash of white noise; it was more animated, like the thunder of nearby traffic, a steady roar broken by individual vehicles passing, even the high-pitched bleat of warning horns.
"Tyre," he ordered. "Compare these transmissions to the chromo-graph data from the object."
"Compare them, sir?"
"At an abstract level of organization. Do they have comparable repeating features? Similar periodicity? I don't need to know what they mean. Just tell me if there's any relationship."
"Yes, sir," Tyre answered. Her eyes dropped into the blankness of heavy second sight.
Zai saw puzzlement on the faces of his staff, which flickered with the still-coruscating lights of the Legis feeds.
"Obviously, whatever transmission hit Marx's drones struck the Legis infostructure eight and a half hours prior--exactly the light-speed delay between the two," he said. "Something hijacked their newsnets and replaced their feeds, not with noise, but with pirate data. My guess is that the polar facility then repeated that data, sending it to the object. Marx just got in the way."
"But the facility was locked down, sir," the marine sergeant complained. "My troops were there at the pole."
Zai frowned. The man was right. It was hard to believe that the Rix compound mind could get past the physical keys of a locked-down translight entanglement facility. How had it managed that trick?
"Incoming messages, sir," Hobbes said. "Light-speed."
The captain nodded. The information wake of the planet had finally caught up with them.
Hobbes shut her eyes.
"From the polar array," she said. "They're under attack, sir! Drones and autopiloted aircraft, and a Rix commando inside the wire."
The marine sergeant swore. He'd wanted to stay on Legis XV to help track the Rixwoman down, but Zai had demanded he stay aboard the Lynx.
"A message from the palace contingent now. The breakdown is global. Every net-linked com device is spewing garbage."
"Not garbage," Zai muttered. Information. The Rix mind had managed to transmit something to the object. It had broken their blockade.
"From the pole again," Hobbes said, listening intently. "They say the interplanetary array ramped up by itself, transmitting out of control."
The marine sergeant cursed again.
"What was its broadcast target?" Zai demanded. Then he realized that with the translight facility disrupted, it would be seventeen hours before any questions could travel roundtrip between the Lynx and Legis.
Tyre, back from her data fugue, spoke up suddenly. "You were right, sir. There is a connection between the Legis data and the object." The ensign stared into her second sight, trying to translate the visuals there into words. "There's a background period of twenty-eight milliseconds in both. And some sort of utility pattern: one thousand twenty-four zeros in a row every few seconds. You were right."
Zai felt no joy in this revelation. Now that information was rushing at them from every quarter, confirming his worst fears, he didn't know what to do.
Despite all the Lynx had risked against the Rix battlecruiser, they'd been beaten. The compound mind had escaped their quarantine.
"Something more from the palace, sir," Hobbes broke in. "The marines say they've regained control of the security system. The com breakdown seems to have confused the compound mind."