“What now?”
Bueller’s question hung in the quiet restaurant, and Kira raised a questioning eyebrow at him. They’d been scheduled to have this date since before the summons to the Palace, though they’d barely made it back to Blueward Station in time.
The quiet sushi restaurant wasn’t as perfect as she’d hoped, but it at least lived up to the promised ambience if not the quality of the food. Each of the low booths was wrapped in sound-deadening foam, reducing both the sounds of the other patrons and of the station in general.
“Well, we do have another order of sushi coming,” she pointed out. “And then a hotel room booked just down the hall with a nice big bed. I did rather think that part was obvious.”
The big engineer flushed, still easily teased despite the several weeks since she’d first dragged him to bed.
“I meant…” He paused, considering his words. “With the Clans.”
“Four days,” Kira said. “That was the timeline in the downloads Remington sent us. Then we move out with the Redward capital ships. This isn’t a work dinner, so I won’t ask if you know a problem with that.”
He chuckled and took a sip of his tea.
“Not really thinking about work, I guess,” he said. “If the Institute really brought the Cobras all the way out here…are we as badly outgunned as I think we are?”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Kira waved a hand in the air as the second round of sushi arrived. She waited for the waitress to leave before continuing. “There’s no question their fighters are going to be better. No idea what they’re flying today, but Estanza flew fifty-year-old Periphery fighters thirty years ago. Even those fighters would be better than ours.
“But they’re not flying off cruisers or true carriers. They’re flying off glorified freighters with almost no onboard weaponry. Cobra Squadron’s carriers aren’t a factor, just the fighters. If they’re using Rim mercs for their major ships, Deception will even the odds.”
“So, we fight the Institute,” he said. “Again.”
“What were you expecting? You did defect to the people who have the biggest grudge against them,” she pointed out.
“Fair. I just…” He sighed. “It’s not like I didn’t buy their ideals at one point. I see what King Larry’s trying to do here and it makes sense to me, but what if the Institute’s right? They’ve done the Seldonian calculations; this Ivarsson said things were proceeding as expected.”
“Estanza once told me he’d handed a copy of Equilibrium’s calculations to a non-Institute psychohistorian,” Kira said. “They told him that the calculations were flawed. Variables taken as constants and similar assumptions.
“That, as I understand, is just as dangerous in psychohistory as it is in engineering. How accurate are your reactor efficiency numbers going to be if you assume hydrogen flows the same at every temperature?”
Bueller swallowed the last of his rice roll and shook his head.
“Not great,” he admitted. “I don’t pretend to understand Seldonian math. It’s an entirely different path of super-complex math than I learned. I just… Well, I’m an engineer. I trust math by default.”
“I’m a historian by education,” Kira told him. “Not that it really ever mattered. ASDF officer training gave you one of six degrees, depending on your course selection, but we got a grounding in everything.
“And using trade pacts to avoid war has a long and successful history. Just as successful, I think, as having a superpower playing interstellar cop. Equilibrium says only one of these works, but history disagrees with them.
“I understand that Seldonian calculations and psychohistorical projections supposedly work, but I can’t help but feel that people aren’t that predictable. They’re too messy, too argumentative, for it to be that easy.”
“The math is supposed to predict societies, not individuals,” Bueller argued. “King Larry’s plans and ideals still have to exist inside the pressures and restrictions of the Syntactic Cluster’s economics and structures.”
Kira shrugged.
“I get that, but I still think people like the Institute put too much weight on it because it is math,” she told him. “And since they’ve been stirring the pot in every sector you or I have ever lived in, it kind of ruins the examples, doesn’t it? Isn’t the principle that once you observe a thing, it’s changed?
“So, once they observe these potential futures, they act to change them. They never see them come to pass and they reassure themselves that it’s because of their actions. Or maybe, just maybe, the situation they predicted was never going to happen in the first place.”
Her date raised his hands in self-defense.
“All right, all right,” he said with a chuckle. “It doesn’t matter, I suppose. The Institute was prepared to go too far for me to support them, even if I still trusted their math. Some means cannot be justified.”
“Which is why there were versions of this mission Deception would never have participated in,” Kira agreed.
She looked down at the remaining sushi. Both of them had been slowing down, and it wasn’t entirely due to being full.
“Do you really want to finish the rest of this?” she asked. “Or should we go check into that hotel?”