Merkiaari Wars: 03 - Operation Oracle Read Online Free PDF Page A

freaks—”
    Hiller nodded. “Useful, but dangerously cute freaks.” He grinned. “I don’t envy your next fight.”
    She cocked her head. “Huh?”
    “The General is going to have a few questions, Gina. I wouldn’t try to bullshit him were I you. He isn’t Jung.”
    She nodded glumly. Joking aside, she wouldn’t dare try any of her excuses on Burgton. Not really. It was fun imagining excuses, but she wouldn’t dare try anything but the truth in reality. Besides, the truth was serious enough in scope that she didn’t fear being chewed out.
    “Better get to that I guess,” she said. “Gold-one, Alpha-leader...”
    * * *
     

2 ~ Masks
     
    Aboard Flagship ASN Lincoln, Shan System
    General Burgton CO 501 st Infantry Regiment watched the faces in the room, not the presentation in the huge holotank. His processor was faithfully recording everything and hoarding it in his database like some demented squirrel with a cache of nuts as it always did. Vipers never forgot anything, nothing at all. They were physically incapable of it. If he needed to recall anything of this meeting, it would be there. Not that he would. The presentation was based upon the download obtained from Cragg before he was stored in stasis aboard Grafton . Burgton had already seen what it contained. Along with his officers, he had uploaded it to experience the fear, and the pain, and the exultation of Cragg’s last combat in Shoshon, far more intensely than any holotank presentation could possibly provide the unenhanced.
    Burgton was far more interested in the people watching than the data he already knew so well. He was always interested in people. Their reaction to things often gave him an advantage in his dealings with them. He hadn’t always been so analytical, but two hundred years of trying to predict events had turned him into an obsessive people watcher and statistician. Luckily, he was well equipped for it. Vipers had the built in computational power to do some really heavy math, and he was always running an analysis or simulation in the back of his brain; political, military, economic... all kinds of things fed into him from his sources all over the Alliance. His past accuracy could be called miraculous; his officers certainly thought so, but secretly he was worried. He had noticed a distressing number of errors creeping into his predictions. The worst failure to date had been this campaign. He had predicted another five years of relative peace before needing to confront Merkiaari in combat again. As for the Shan, they weren’t even on his horizon before this, and he feared they might be the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as his predictions were concerned.
    Combining simulations and programs based upon chaos theory with unmatched information gathering over centuries, and then allowing them to run without pause for all that time, had allowed him to guide events in the Alliance, but the complexity of the simulations was outstripping his ability to monitor and control. Billions of calculations per second, trillions? No matter the actual figure, it was too high for any normal computer to perform and maintain accuracy.
    He had begun by running the early incarnations of his chaos simulations internally while he slept. During those hours, his personal computing power was mostly idle. He had just wanted to see what would happen, and compare his predictions with actual events. The result had been startling. Not only had his predictions come true, the follow up events leading from them were also close to those predicted. Those predictions had allowed him to steer the Alliance away from a few disasters, and were how he had managed to do it with only a hundred vipers when the Council of the day betrayed him by mothballing the regiment.
    The introduction of the Shan into the Alliance would throw his calculations off, maybe way off, because they were literally alien. How could he possibly predict what they would do when everything they