Transmigrated Into A Women Dominated World

Chapter 294

"Ah. So you’re the visitor." Her gaze moved over him once, slow and easy. "I heard that thing take an unusually long time deciding what to do with you.""Maybe it’s just slow. I wouldn’t blame the hardware."

"Nothing about you reads simply. I imagine the poor thing needed the extra moment." Her mouth curved, unhurried the way it always seemed to be. "Come in."

"Is Leia here?" he asked, stepping past her into the lounge room.

"Upstairs." Hela closed the door behind him with an easy push. "She’ll be down soon enough. Given the mood she came here with, I wouldn’t stand too close to the blast radius when she gets here."

What did that mean?

He didn’t have long to find out what that meant. Footsteps announced her before she did, quick on the stairs, and by the time she rounded the corner into view she’d already traded her uniform for something considerably more comfortable, though her expression hadn’t softened to match it.

"You’re finally here," she said, stopping at the base of the stairs like proximity past that point required some kind of justification from him first.

"Yeah." He spread his hands. "Not like I had a choice. Ingrid said you were going to tell the professor.

"I said I’d consider it if you didn’t show. You showed." Leia crossed to the wide table by the window and dropped into the chair on the far side of it. "So sit down. We left this halfway through, and I’d rather not still be looking at it when the night’s over."

Zaeryn took the seat across from her. On the table between them sat a shallow dish of pale wafers. They looked delicious and after a full day of being moved around under guard he saw no reason to leave them alone. He took one.

"Those aren’t for you," Leia said, without looking up.

"Your mother left them in the room I’m sitting in. That reads like an invitation."

"That reads like my mother being softer than she should be around strays." She brought a wall of pale text up into the air above the table, dense columns unspooling faster than a person could read. "You remember where we ended. The theory’s fine. I’m not arguing the theory anymore. What I said we needed was the rest of it, and the rest of it is here. Every major breach in the last twenty years. Forty-one events."

"Forty-one." He leaned in, scanning the columns as they settled. "That’s more than I thought."

"The line has held for generations. That doesn’t mean it’s never bent." She flicked a smaller set of entries out of the wall and left them floating between them. "These eleven are the catastrophic ones. Full breaches, heavy losses, the kind that ended up in front of an inquiry. If you’re right, the switching window shows up in these and stays away from the other thirty. If it turns up scattered through the small ones too, then it’s just a thing that happens sometimes, and your disciplined-Vorthak theory is a story you told yourself on a good day."

"And if it only shows up in the bad ones."

"Then you were right, and I’ll say so once, and you can spend the rest of the evening being unbearable about it." She was already pulling the first inquiry file open. "But we check all forty-one before either of us says anything. I’m not building a case on the two we already know about."

They worked.

It was slower than either of them wanted. The defense-grid logs from that far back were a mess, half of them kept in a timekeeping standard the grid had since abandoned, and matching a swarm’s first strike against the exact position of the switching cycle meant converting one against the other by hand, entry after entry. Zaeryn took the older half. Leia took the rest. For a long stretch the only sounds in the room were the low tones of the Omni pad and the dry rustle of him reaching, again, for a dish that wasn’t his.

"Sector Four grow-vaults," he said eventually. "Sixteen years ago. That’s one of your eleven. First strike lands two minutes into a switch."

Leia didn’t look up, but she paused what she was doing. "That’s three, counting the two from before. Keep going. Three isn’t anything yet."

He flagged it and moved on.

It went like that for a while, the pile of catastrophic breaches thinning as they worked through it, and the pattern held with a consistency that started, somewhere around the sixth one, to change the quality of the silence in the room.

Not one of the major breaches had landed outside a switch. Zaeryn noticed Leia stop trusting her own conversions partway through and start running each one twice, as though she expected the pattern to break if she just looked at it hard enough, and was quietly unsettled every time it didn’t.

"That’s all eleven," she said finally, and set the Omni pad down.

"All eleven inside a switch."

"All eleven inside a switch." She sat back. The flat dismissal she’d carried since he walked in was gone, and what replaced it was narrower and more careful, the look of someone who’d expected the data to save her from an uncomfortable conclusion and had instead watched it walk her straight into it.

"Now the other thirty. This is the part that matters. If even a handful of the small ones also line up with a switch, then the Vorthak aren’t being disciplined, they’re just hitting a window that comes up often enough to catch some attacks by chance, and the eleven mean nothing." She pulled the larger set back up. "So this is where your theory lives or dies. Not in the breaches. In everything that wasn’t one."

"Then let’s find out."

She reached for the dish and pulled it away from him. "Then stop eating and help me read," she said, and moved the first of the thirty between them.

The thirty went faster than the eleven had, partly because they’d found their rhythm with the old logs by now and partly because the answer, entry after entry, kept coming back the same and there was less to double-check when nothing lined up.

A quarrel over a mining outpost, forty years back, first strike landing squarely in the middle of a full defensive cycle, nowhere near a switch. A skirmish at the northern relay, random. A probing attack on Sector Two that fizzled before it reached the line, random. One after another after another, the small breaches scattered across the cycle exactly the way ordinary swarms hitting at ordinary moments would scatter, with not one of them creeping into the four-minute window that all eleven of the catastrophic ones had found.

Zaeryn worked through the last of his half, flagged nothing on it, and set the Omni pad down.

"That’s the last of them," he said. "None of the small ones touch a switch. Not one." He looked across the table at her. "Eleven catastrophic breaches, every single one inside the window. Thirty smaller ones, every single one outside it. That’s not luck. They know our schedule, and they only spend it when the target’s worth it." He let himself sit back. "I was right."

Leia said nothing. She pulled the full spread back up into the air, all forty-one events laid out at once, the eleven clustered inside the window and the thirty scattered wide of it, and she looked at it for a long moment as though she were still waiting for one of them to move.

Zaeryn looked at her, waiting to hear her acknowledge how smart he was for this. It was thanks to him they cracked a piece of research that should have taken a long time in just a few hours.

She hated this. Zaeryn being right. But he was right, and Leia, who wanted to believe he was just an average male, had to agree that she’d been proven wrong here. The fact that he called it the first time they looked at it, with nothing but a single breach to go on, was really impressive. And she hated it.

"You were right," she said eventually.

"You could say it with a little more feeling. This is the part where you tell me I’m a genius." Zaeryn grinned arrogantly.

"It’s impressive." She was still looking at the spread, not at him. "You saw something in one breach that nobody at the Citadel has seen in twenty years of these, and the data held. That’s impressive." Now she looked at him with the same stern look, "You’re not a genius."

Zaeryn blinked. "Wait. Back up. Did you just compliment me?"

Something in Leia’s expression cooled by several degrees, as though she’d heard her own words played back and disliked them. "I stated a fact about the work. Don’t confuse the two."

"No, you said impressive. Out loud. I heard it clearly." He was enjoying this far more than was wise. "That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me since I walked through your very rude front door."

"The work is impressive. I don’t lie. You are a person who happened to be sitting near it when it got done." She started collapsing the spread back into the Omni pad, the columns folding away one after another. "A dog can dig up something valuable in a garden. That doesn’t make the dog a botanist. It makes it lucky, and briefly useful, and still a dog." The last of the text winked out. "Write the account. You get to explain the theory, since it’s yours. I’ll handle the defense-grid analysis, since that part requires knowing how to read a log. We’ll have it done before Audrey’s deadline, and you can go back to being insufferable somewhere I’m not."

"So, genius," Zaeryn said.

"Insufferable," Leia corrected, and pulled a blank document up between them to start. "I’ll write up the analysis, attach the breach set, and submit the whole thing to Audrey in the morning."

Zaeryn had been reaching for the dish again and stopped with his hand halfway there. "Hold on. You’ll submit it."

"That’s what I said."

"Why are you the one submitting it?" He sat forward. "We did this together. Your log analysis, sure, but the theory that made any of it worth analyzing was mine. If it goes in under your name and your name only, then as far as Audrey knows you cracked a twenty-year problem by yourself over an evening, and I was decoration." He held her look. "It should go in from both of us, or it doesn’t go in the way you’re describing."

Leia’s answer didn’t come because the front door opened down the hall and two sets of footsteps came in out of the evening.

Rhenna reached the lounge first, and her face lit the moment she saw him. "Oh, hey....looks like Leia hasn’t scared you off for good. Nobody would’ve blamed you."

"She tried her best," Zaeryn said. "I persevered."

Celestine, Rhenna’s friend, came in a few steps behind her.

Zaeryn looked past Rhenna to her. "Celestine," he said, with a small nod.

"Hey." She returned the nod. She turned to Rhenna. "Rhenna hurry up, don’t forget what we are here for."

"Just a second." Rhenna leaned to look at the Omni pad on the table. "So? Did you two actually finish, or is this another one of those ’we’ll pick it up tomorrow’ situations?"

"We finished," Zaeryn said. "We were just discussing whose name goes on it."

"There’s nothing to discuss," Leia said, and stood. She gathered the Omni pad under one arm and looked down at him with the cold, closing tone of someone ending a meeting. "The project’s done. Which means there’s no longer any reason for you to be in my house. You can go."

Zaeryn stared at her. Then he smiled, "You’re kicking me out? That’s rude, Leia."

"It really is," Rhenna said, twisting to look up at her sister. "Leia. That’s rude. You need to learn to be nicer, that’s not how people work." She turned back to Zaeryn with an easy shrug. "Ignore her. Stay."

Leia looked between the two of them. Didn’t say anything and just walked up the stairs.