"They don"t?" Mailn asked.
"No. They call us Galactics. Ever since the Pythagorean War,I they haven"t internally recognized Meridan sovereignty."
Rogers frowned. "How do you know that?"
McSchmidt blushed and cleared his throat. "I"m a political science major from the Academy," he said. "You know, the Meridan Military Academy. The one I"ve been talking to you about that I went to. You know?"
"Yeah," Rogers said. "Sure. Whatever. So, what does that mean? Are we intercepting someone else"s communication?"
"I have no idea," McSchmidt said, leaning back and shaking his head. He looked tired. s.n.a.t.c.hing up another piece of chicken, he took a bite and chewed noisily as he mumbled through a mouthful. "I curn"t imurgine who wurd say surmthing like thurt."
"Hey!" came a voice from behind Rogers. "That"s really good!"
He turned to see Tunger approaching, a tray of food in his hands. None of it, however, looked fit for human consumption; Rogers saw soon that they were sc.r.a.ps, probably for the animals. Tunger looked a lot happier than he had a week or so before. The zoo deck was agreeing with him, it seemed, and he hardly had any gouges on his face from the lion at all.
"Dur yur spurk Thelicosan too?" he asked.
McSchmidt"s face turned red and he swallowed hurriedly. "I don"t-ack!"
McSchmidt started coughing. The Viking gave him a powerful blow on the back, dislodging the food stuck in McSchmidt"s throat (and also perhaps a vertebra).
"Thanks," he said, wiping his mouth. "I don"t talk in your stupid accent. Why don"t you go somewhere and sound like an idiot to someone else?"
The whole table became silent for a moment. Mailn found something very interesting to stare at on the table, and even the Viking looked like she didn"t know who to hit in this situation, which must have confused her terribly.
"Take it easy, McSchmidt," Rogers said. "He"s just trying to be friendly. I mean, sure, he annoys the living p.i.s.s out of me and I want to open the room to vacuum every time he opens his mouth, but . . . at least I"m not a jerk about it."
"Actually, sir," Tunger said, "you were kind of a jerk about it."
Rogers shrugged. "Whatever. I outrank both of you. McSchmidt, chill out. Tunger, get the marshmallows out of your cheeks."
The two of them looked at each other with icy disdain, but there was no further hair-pulling.
"Fine," Tunger said finally, breaking his absurd staring contest with McSchmidt. "I"m going to go feed the children. You all have a great time talking normally."
Tunger sauntered off, and Rogers saw that there were claw marks on the back of his trousers.
"Anyway," Rogers said. He slid McSchmidt"s datapad across the table so he could look at it. He"d never seen a raw intelligence report before-he"d only ever gotten the distilled information through briefings-and now he realized that he was perfectly happy with that. The report was written in a style so old, it was almost comical, all capital letters with hash marks and slashes in all these strange places. It was almost impossible to read.
"What is this c.r.a.p?" Rogers asked, gesturing at the report. He could see some of the stuff that McSchmidt had talked about in the middle of the doc.u.ment, but it was bracketed on both the top and the bottom by such an incredible amount of textual gibberish that it looked like someone had disemboweled a keyboard.
"Oh, that?" McSchmidt said. "It"s a bunch of routing information. It says where the report came from and where it"s supposed to go." He squinted and leaned forward again. "At least, I think so."
Deet beeped in that sort of way that told Rogers he wanted to say something.
"What is it?"
Deet"s neck craned over the top of the datapad, and he gave another few beeps.
"This isn"t all routing information," he said.
"How would you know?" the Viking said. "You"re just a droid zombie."
"Hey," Rogers said. "I made this droid zombie."
"EXPLETIVE EXPLETIVE yourself," Deet said.
The Viking snorted. "He can"t even swear? What use is he?"
Deet hung his head. "It"s not my fault."
"Can we please focus?" Rogers said. "What is it on the top of this report that makes you curious?"
Deet looked back at the report and pointed at the top of it with one of his three-fingered hands. Rogers hadn"t done the best job of putting him together, he supposed; one of the fingers was attached at a very strange angle.
"This is all a primitive droid code," he said. "I can"t read all of it, though. I"m too new for it and this programming language was on its way out before I was commissioned."
"Oh," McSchmidt said. "That makes sense. The droids do most of the routing in the systems."
Rogers looked at him sideways. "They do?"
"Sure," McSchmidt said. "Some of the other intel guys tell me that it was part of an initiative to make things more efficient a couple of months ago. Klein signed off on it. The droids do some of the number crunching for the statistical a.n.a.lysis, and they make sure it"s all routed properly." He rubbed the back of his head. "I think they do a final proofread before it"s disseminated, too."
Rogers frowned. That was a lot of artificial intelligence working on intelligence. Did that mean that the intelligence was artificial? Now he was just confused.
Nearby, a pair of starmen second cla.s.s were chuckling by one of the new propaganda posters that had shown up, this one an unintelligible depiction of a hulking, dual-headed mythical creature sitting atop what appeared to be a mountain of chocolate bars. The caption read, IT"S SO GOOD. SO GOOD.
Rogers saw his work, and saw that it was, indeed, good.
"It doesn"t just look like routing information, though," Deet said. "It looks like access information, too. Like it"s pointing me in several different places at once. I can"t make it out, and I can"t access the network to test it out."
"That must be lonely," Rogers said. "Not being on the network for so long."
"That"s the stupidest thing I"ve ever heard in my life," the Viking said, taking a bite into a SEWR rat without even taking the packaging off first. She chewed up a wad of plastic and spit it out. "Droids can"t be lonely."
"These are Froids," Rogers said.
"Yeah," Deet said. "We"re Froids. But, no, Rogers, that was the stupidest thing I"ve ever heard."
Even the Viking chuckled.
"Fine," Rogers said. "Screw me for trying to be compa.s.sionate to a nonhuman. What if we were to plug you into the network? Would you be able to figure it out then?"
"Maybe," Deet said.
"Why?" McSchmidt asked. "What"s bugging you about it?"
"I don"t know," Rogers said. "Call it my distrust of droids. What do you need to plug into the network?"
"Just a regular power cable would be fine, I think," Deet said. He beeped. "That"s the way it"s been everywhere else I"ve been connected, anyway."
Rogers turned around to where the squadron of droids had been plugged into the mess hall"s power outlets for "lunch."
"What about there?" He pointed.
"That"ll work," Deet said. He looked around as though suspicious. "I"m not sure how the other droids will react."
"EXPLETIVE the other droids," Rogers said. "Besides, they"re already done eating. It"s not like you"re going to go steal someone"s food. McSchmidt, why don"t you let Deet here borrow your datapad so that he can look into that code? Maybe it"ll help us figure out exactly where the intelligence is coming from. If there"s some sort of sensor error, this would be a good way to find out about it."
McSchmidt, still looking doubtful, slowly handed the datapad over to Deet, whose Frankenbot body ambled all the way across the dining hall to stand next to the elongated table. Rogers watched him, thinking. If there was something wrong with the sensors, or something wrong with the intelligence, then the whole Thelicosan invasion was a mistake-or a lie-and all the changes they"d been making to "prepare for war" would just become inconveniences.
Deet stood by the table for a long time, not doing anything. Through the echo of the cavernous mess hall, Rogers heard a frustrated beeping noise.
"What"s the matter?" Rogers called across the dining hall.
"I can"t get it up," Deet called back.
At least two of the people at the table nearly choked on their food. For some really absurd reason, Rogers felt himself blushing. He hurriedly got up from the table and walked over to where Deet was standing.
"What do you mean?" Rogers asked.
"It"s my data cable," Deet said. "It"s been damaged. I didn"t realize until now since I haven"t had to use it, but this piece of FECAL MATTER won"t come out to connect to the ports."
"Oh," Rogers said. He knelt down, feeling around on the ground where the connection ports were, and opened the little hinged panel. Adjacent to the actual plugs was a backup wire that extended from a small coil in the ground. Hoping his many years of playing with electronics and not dying would prevent him from getting a shock, Rogers uncurled the cable and handed it to Deet.
"Here," Rogers said. "Stick this in you."
More snickers came from his table.
"Oh, grow up!" Rogers shouted.
"What"s their problem?" Deet asked as he plugged into the cable and put the datapad down on the table.
"Nothing," Rogers said. "Sometimes, I forget how little you droids understand about, um, human reproductive habits."
"We have a Freudian Chip," Deet explained. "To us, it"s all cable envy."
"Right." Rogers stood up. "How is it going? Were you able to access the network?"
Deet was quiet for a moment. Someone came out of the exit door to the kitchen, holding a single piece of bread that wasn"t in any way, shape, or form marred by mold or mechanical lubricants, and fell to his knees sobbing. Rogers understood how he felt. If someone had handed him a bottle of Jasker 120 or turned on the beer light, that"s about how he"d react right about now.
"It looks like a network," Deet said, "but it"s definitely not the ship"s main network."
Rogers frowned. "What do you mean by that? Is it a backup system, maybe? Were the droids coming in here to store backup data and charge their battery reserves?"
"I don"t really know," Deet said. "It"s hard to describe. I can tell that I"m in a network, but I can"t really tell what network I"m in."
"I think I understand what you mean," Rogers said.
Deet looked at him and beeped confusedly. "How could you possibly understand what it"s like to be in a network but not know what network you"re in?"
Rogers chuckled. "There"s a street on Merida Prime that has almost a full mile of bars stacked right next to each other like townhouses. By the time you get a quarter of the way down, you start to understand what you"re talking about."
"Have you ever considered the possibility that you may have a drinking problem?"
"I drink just fine, thank you."
Rogers looked back wistfully at the Viking, who was laughing heartily with Mailn, a piece of protein cardboard stuck to the bottom of her lip. Even though it was a piece of a SEWR rat, Rogers wished he could reach his own lips out and help her brush it off.
Shaking his head, he turned back to Deet. "Are you telling me the network is encrypted?"
"It"s like encryption," Deet said, "but different. It"s more like a confusing transportation system. If I had the right map, I could . . ."
He trailed off for a moment. In fact, Rogers" droid companion became so quiet that Rogers thought he"d lost power. But since the ship"s gravity generator was obviously still working, that wasn"t possible. Deet"s eyes went from their normal bright blue to a sort of dim cerulean, then came back again.
"Deet? Are you still there?"
"I found the road map," Deet said, his digitized voice breaking up as though he was at the far end of a bad radio transmission.
"What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?" Rogers asked. "Are you actually using metaphors?"
"I"m learning," Deet said. "Actually, I"m learning quite a lot. Right now."
"About what?"
"For one thing," Deet said, "this isn"t part of the ship"s network. It"s not part of the backup system, either. It appears to be completely separate. And it"s not controlled by humans."
Rogers felt his stomach start to sink, like the feeling he got when he realized someone knew he was cheating them. He asked a question, but somehow, he felt like he already knew the answer.
"Who built it?"
"Artificial intelligence," Deet said. "Droids. The top part of the intelligence doc.u.ments that Lieutenant Lieutenant McSchmidt has been reading is the access codes to get into the network and point to specific updates that are priority downloads for any droid connected to the closed system."
"That doesn"t sound like something Klein would authorize," Rogers said.
"Actually," Deet said, "Klein did authorize it. It was part of a sweeping set of changes to help the 331st prepare for the imminent conflict with the Thelicosans. Which, by the way, isn"t actually going to happen. The intel has been faked. By the droids."
"What"s going on over here?" McSchmidt called as he walked over. "Is your little droid friend finding out anything interesting?"
Rogers slowly turned to face McSchmidt. His fear must have shown on his face, because the intel officer stopped as soon as Rogers turned around.
"Yes," Rogers said. "I"m learning that we are, all of us, completely screwed."