Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [124]
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 Bollen who are still there. May I trouble ImpSec to be sure none of the rest of them go on an extempore vacation before I get in touch with them, Colonel?"
"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 its 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 Bollen produced another, similar list. The Professor leaned back. "I'll be damned."
"What?" said Miles.
"I did not expect