The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(23)

“What do you mean?” Marce asked.

Roynold pointed to Marce’s briefcase, which held his tablet, display projector, and papers. “Your work. It’s not right. It’s not wrong, not entirely. But it’s not right. Fully. It’s incomplete.”

“Incomplete.”

Roynold nodded. “That’s right.”

Marce took a step toward Roynold, much to Wilt’s consternation. “My father’s data predicted the collapse of the End Flow stream to an extremely high level of confidence,” he said. “I checked the math myself.”

“Yes,” Roynold said. “It’s correct. And you’ll be correct with the Hub to Terhathum collapse, too. Look, I said you weren’t wrong.”

“But how is that incomplete?”

“That part isn’t incomplete. But your theory is. You and your father have been working on a general theory of Flow collapse.” Roynold rattled the papers in her hand. “This is the special theory.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that your father is accurately predicting when Flow streams are collapsing, and you checked the math on that. But he missed that in the process the Flow would open some streams too. You never checked that because he missed it.”

Roynold held the papers out to Marce, who stepped forward and took them.

“I got things wrong because I started out with a few bad assumptions that I didn’t check,” Roynold said as he read. She shrugged. “Having peer review would have helped, but I was being paid not to tell anyone else. It turns out my process was right, I was just plugging in the wrong initial conditions. When I got your data, I saw that your father and I were studying different aspects of the same problem. Related but nearly independent. And I incorporated his findings into my process.” She pointed to the papers. “And got this.”

Marce looked up from the papers and blinked mutely at Roynold.

“Right?” Roynold said, and waved at the papers. “It’s all preliminary, of course. But still.”

“Lord Marce,” Wilt said, more insistently this time.

Marce acknowledged his bodyguard, and then turned back to Roynold and held up the papers. “Can I keep these?”

“I brought them for you.”

“How can I reach you? To talk about this more.”

“My contact information is on the cover sheet.”

“Is there a good time to call?”

Roynold smiled awkwardly. “There’s not a bad time to call, Dr. Claremont. I’m between opportunities at the moment.”

Marce frowned. “I thought you were a professor.”

“Yes, well,” Roynold said. “It turns out when your work is used by traitors as the reason to undermine the Interdependency and attempt to assassinate the emperox, it makes going into work at an imperial university … problematic.”

“It’s not your fault they used your data like this. They didn’t tell you what they had planned.”

“No,” Roynold agreed. “On the other hand, I didn’t really ask, either, did I.” She shrugged. “And anyway I had a lot of free time to work on this. Not entirely sure how I’m going to eat after next week. But I suppose that’s what the Interdependency minimum benefit is for.”

Marce looked up at this. “Really?” he said.

“That last part was probably too much, wasn’t it. Sorry. I have a hard time knowing where the line is sometimes.”

Marce smiled and handed the papers back to Roynold. “Come on. I’ve got another one of these presentations across town, which I’m now late for. We can talk on the way there. And then we can talk after.”

“All right.” Roynold took the papers. “You really don’t mind being proven wrong. I wasn’t actually expecting that.”

“You said it, Dr. Roynold. I’m not wrong. I’m just not right.”





Chapter

6

The Flow stream from Hub to Terhathum collapsed.

The collapse was ahead of schedule but within the penumbra of the prediction cone that Marce Claremont had offered Emperox Grayland II. The last ship through the Flow shoal from Hub to Terhathum was the House of Nohamapetan fiver I’ll Always Remember You Like a Child, which entered the Flow stream six hours ahead of the collapse. The captain of the Child had been cautioned prior to entering the Flow stream that the emperox’s science advisor was predicting its collapse and further warned that the collapse was likely to spread from random points within the stream and not, as had happened with the collapse from End to Hub, beginning at one end and moving forward like a wave to the other. Hub’s traffic control suggested routing through Melaka and then to Terhathum.

The captain of the Child, Daris Moria, expressed to her executive officer Lin Burrotinol her contempt for Grayland II, her science advisor and Hub’s traffic control, and ordered her ship into the shoal, on schedule.

The ship would not arrive at Terhathum on schedule, or at all. The Child would in fact be lost to the Interdependency forever. It would tumble out of the decaying Flow stream at a point several thousand light-years from any known human outpost. This is because the Flow, while thought of as a river, or road, or another sort of linear bearer of transportation, was not actually remotely like any of those things, or remotely linear. Had the Child been tossed out of the Flow stream a second earlier, it would have been only a light-year from the star Sirius A, itself a relative hop and skip from humanity’s ancestral solar system. If it had been tossed out a second later, it would have found itself much closer to the Milky Way’s galactic core.