Primary Inversion (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Paperback (13 page)

What the engine actually did was rotate the ship out of the
real universe into an imaginary one. During rotation we passed through an
ill-defined plane of existence where we were part real and part imaginary. The
transition was disorienting, to say the least; I had no desire to find out what
would happen if we spent longer than an instant there. So we got as close to
the “tree” as possible before we left the road; we accelerated as close to
light speed as our fuel allowed before we rotated in or out of superluminal
space.

Unfortunately getting close to the tree meant coming out of
inversion at relativistic speeds, blasting the area with high energy radiation
and particles. Trying that too close to solid objects courted disaster. Coming
out anywhere except in a near vacuum also meant the ship displaced molecules of
matter with explosive power, blowing up itself as well as whatever it had hit.

Inversion had brutally changed the face of warfare.
Technology advanced to the point where normal humans could no longer cope with
combat. With warcraft and missiles that could burst out of superluminal space
at close to light speed, the concept of a front line became obsolete. Our
defenses developed along with our offensive capabilities, making it possible to
protect our settled worlds in marginal safety. But we couldn’t watch all of
space. Huge regions remained contested, places where no clear boundaries existed
defining what was Eubian, what was Skolian, what was Allied.

Inversion check complete, Zabo thought.

Thruster check.
Although close
to
planets the
Jag used a fusion engine, in space it relied on photon thrusters.

Thrusters initialized and ready, Zabo answered.

And the fuel?

Containment on positrons is secure.

Good.
The interior of the magnetic containment bottle
was a universe of its own, a place that was both real and imaginary, and that
existed only while the inversion engine operated. During flight it drew on the
immense cosmic ray flux in complex space, collecting more fuel. The bottle
spread its contents through complex space by varying the imaginary parts of
charge and mass, which let it gather and hold far more charge than was possible
in real space alone. The situation was simpler than with people; the psychological
trauma of having both real and imaginary parts had no effect on particles.

A selector culled relativistic electrons from space while
the fuel bottle leaked positrons into the interaction area. Matter/Antimatter.
It interacted in glorious bursts of energy, producing our thrust. Gamma ray
shields and superconducting grids protected the ship from being destroyed by
its own waste heat while the thrust accelerated it at extraordinary g-forces.

The last element was a stasis coil that kept the quantum wavefunction
of the ship from changing during acceleration. The g-forces couldn’t hurt us
because our molecular configuration was fixed during stasis. We didn’t freeze;
our atoms continued to vibrate, rotate and otherwise behave as they had in the
instant the coil activated. The atomic clock that measured our time in stasis
continued to work. But none of the atoms could change their quantum state,
which meant the ship and everything inside of it became rigid even to the huge
forces we experienced. Without that protection, the g-forces would have smashed
us flat.

Interrupt, Zabo thought.

What’s going on?
I asked. The image of an Allied
satellite intruded in my mind, shown with so much detail that I could see the
bolts in its hull. A message appeared below the satellite, written in code. As
the gibberish flashed across my mindscape, Zabo gave me both a visual and
verbal translation.

Frigging rockets. The message was about me. The Allieds were
sending their report of my arrest to Imperial Space Command. It had been
translated from Greek into Skolian by Tiller Smith.

Zabo, why did that display come up now?

When I detected the transmission, your spinal node picked it
up and flagged on the name “Tiller Smith.”

I directed a thought to my spinal node.
Why did you flag
on Tiller Smith?

It registered 82 percent on your interest scale, the node
thought.

That made no sense. Why should it calculate Tiller Smith
would interest me so much? The last thing I needed, when I was preparing to go
into battle, was my spinal node dumping unnecessary satellite images into my
pre-flight mindscape.

Run a diagnostic on your flag routines, I thought. There’s
no reason for Tiller Smith to register that high.

Checking. Then: The name Tiller Smith did not cause the
flag. It was your response to the data in a book he gave you.

Why would a book of indecipherable poetry agitate the node
so much?
Cancel all flags concerned with
Verses on a Windowpane.

Canceled. The satellite display vanished.

Primary Valdoria, Taas thought. I’m getting a spillover onto
my grid of your satellite input. I can’t cut it off. What commands did you try?
I asked.

Stop, Cancel, Break, Quit, Exit, Bye, System, Chop, Stomp,
Flush, Dump, and Curse.

Curse? What is that?

I swore at it.

I smiled.
Try Erase.

That worked.
His Erase psicon appeared in my mind, a
buxom woman wearing a few scraps of cloth and holding a can of paint. She
painted the hem of her skirt and it disappeared, showing even more of her
thigh. Then she vanished back to Greenzabo.

I laughed. You all ready to go?

Ready,
Rex thought.

Ready,
Helda thought.

Ready,
Taas thought.

Then let’s do it, I thought.

Priming fusion engines, Zabo thought. For near-planet maneuvers
the Jag used a fusion reactor that produced heated plasma gas for thrust.

The control tower cleared us for takeoff on launchpad
twelve. But as we taxied toward it, the traffic controller’s voice crackled on
my audiocom. “Sorry, Primary Valdoria. The four of you will have to hold. We’ve
got a snag on twelve.”

“Acknowledged.” As we slowed to a stop, I thought,
What’s
the problem?

Zabo gave me an image of several ships sitting on a
launchpad we had to pass to reach twelve. These craft are preparing to lift
off.

The Trader insignia of a crouching black puma gleamed on
their hulls. The ships waited in the predawn air, the glare from lamps on the
launchpad making their hulls glitter like ice. The sleekest was a Streamliner,
the starship of preference for Highton Aristos. The three heavier craft were
Escorts, bodyguards for a Streamliner. Given that most Hightons traveled with
only one Escort, two at the most, I had a good idea what passenger this
Streamliner carried.

Rex spoke in my mind.
Qox.

Yes,
I thought.

Taas’s thought sparked like an iron arc.
We should blast
him off the pad.

Helda’s thought rumbled.
Ya.

I scowled. What you’re talking about is assassination.

Ya,
Helda agreed.

Let’s do it,
Taas thought.

I couldn’t believe it. They were serious. They wanted to go
out there and blow up a civilian ship with no provocation, murdering a major
interstellar leader.
Cut it out,
I told them.

All of my displays indicated launchpad twelve was clear. I
was sure we could have used it. I also had no doubt the tower didn’t want us
anywhere near the Trader ships. They probably feared we would do exactly what
Taas and Helda suggested.

Warning lights were flaring around the launchpad now, strobing
the darkness. Clouds of steam swirled up and around the ships. Then one of the
Escorts lifted into the sky, blasting the pad with its exhaust and lighting up
the area. The other ships followed in a staggered pattern, the rumble of their
leaving growling through my mind and my bones.

We hurtled through space, racing the specter of Qox’s flags.
In inversion, we could go as fast as we wanted, just never
slower
than
light speed.

If anyone on Delos could have watched, they would have seen
our ships get shorter and our mass increase as we got closer to the speed of
light. After we went superluminal, speeding up made our length increase and our
mass dwindle. Even when we reached one million times light speed, the ship
looked normal to me; I was, after all, at rest relative to it. But to anyone on
Delos, our mass was just a few grams and our length thousands of kilometers.

At speeds faster than 141 percent of light, time contracted.
Right now we could shoot through space for a century and only an hour would
pass on Delos. If we ever reached infinite speed our massless Jags would
stretch out the length of the universe and time would stand still everywhere
else while forever passed for us.

But we had a problem. Close to light speed, time dilated; it
passed more slowly for us than for Tams. We had skimmed too close to light
speed when we inverted and time dilation had jumped us a few hours into the
future, stealing valuable moments we desperately needed.

Zabo, plot pastward course, I thought. Compensate for the
time dilation.

Course plotted.

Good.
At faster than light speeds we could travel
into the past relative to Tams. If anyone there could have watched, they would
have seen this: after we left Delos, while we were en route to Tams, four new
ships and four antimatter ships appeared in the Tams system, pair-produced from
photon annihilations near the planet. The matter ships and their pilots were
identical to Zabo squad. In fact, they
were
us.

While the matter ships continued on to Tams, the antimatter
squad returned to Delos in a time-reversed path, flying backward at
superluminal speeds, gaining fuel rather than losing it, like a movie run in
reverse. At the point where I had just given the order to “turn around” and go
pastward, Tams would have seen us meet the antimatter ships and annihilate. The
energy of the photons created by our mutual destruction balanced that lost when
the new ships and their antimatter siblings were created.

Since we were at rest relative to our ships, we saw no
bizarre creations or destructions. We simply traveled from Delos to Tams. In
any case, the end result was the same; our four Jags arrived at Tams sometime
after we left Delos.

I vehemently wished we could reach Tams
before
we
left Delos, with enough time to evacuate the planet. But no craft or missile
had ever succeeded in thwarting the laws of cause and effect by coming out of
inversion before entering it. The best we could do was come out at our destination
the instant after we inverted near our point of origin. Realistically it took
longer, anywhere from hours to days. The farther we traveled, the more errors
accumulated and the bigger the discrepancy. I just hoped we made it in time.
Although Qox’s flags had farther to go, they carried entire systems dedicated
to optimizing spacetime variables.

But we had an advantage they could never match.

No electromagnetic signal could reach a superluminal ship.
The only way to communicate was to shoot superluminal particles—tachyons—at one
another. But no one had yet figured out how to make tachyons reliably carry information,
particularly given that
during
inversion signals could arrive before
they were sent. So inverted ships traveled in limbo, drifting apart. A squad
that entered in tight formation would leave spread but across both space and
time. The greater their shift in time, the longer they had to hail one another;
the greater their drift in space, the farther those hails needed to travel.

Except for Jags.

Rex, Helda, Taas and I were one mind. More than one mind. We
were a part of the Skol-Net, which meant we had instantaneous communication not
only among ourselves but also with the minds linked into a star-spanning
computer network. We coordinated our actions with a precision that challenged
light speed itself.

But psiberspace had limitations. If we tried to learn our
future by entering the Skol-Net after time dilation jumped us futureward, we
would link to a future timeline and
still
be in it when we returned to
the present. The time needed to dissolve and reform the link could kill us. All
our peek at the future would tell us was that we died in battle because we had
no idea what the ships we were fighting were doing when we engaged them.

We could check the future, then drop out of the Skol-Net and
re-enter it after we returned to the present. But that meant traveling through
inversion without a psilink. We would drift in space and time, nullifying the
very link that was our greatest strength. The very act of checking our future
increased our chances that we would learn we died in combat.

Zabo, I thought. Check the Net. Any readings on Qox’s flags?

An Imperial sentry has sighted Eubian warships. Their trajectory
intersects the orbit of Tams. Estimated arrival times appeared in my mindscape.

How many ships? I asked.

Different views of the Trader craft appeared. Two battlecruisers,
an orbital platform and three Shieldcraft. Also one labcraft.

I grimaced. That had to be the Trader flags. A labcraft
could convert an asteroid or moon into hydrogen to react with the Tams
atmosphere. At least the flags had no idea we were coming. I wanted to be in
and out of Tams before they showed up.

What about the Streamliner that took off from Delos? I
asked.

Zabo replaced the display of the Trader ships with images of
Jaibriol’s ships. Their present course puts them at Tams at roughly the same
time as the Eubian flags.

Any data on the Tams situation?

Our most recent intelligence reports the rebels still
control the ground defenses. However, all existing Tams links to the Skol-Net
are currently inoperable.