Visions of the Future (6 page)

She chuckled. “You looked every bit the valiant flyer they made you out to be.” Her smile faded. “But I know you, Kelric. Something was wrong.”

“I hate speaking in public. You know that, too.”

“It was more than that.”

“I don’t know what you’re looking for.” He picked up the whiskey glass. “Listen, I’m glad to see you. I don’t mean to be rude. But I’m tired. I just don’t feel like company tonight.”

She spoke quietly. “Sitting here alone in the dark won’t bring Cory back to life. And committing suicide in your fancy plane won’t bring you any closer to her.”

He went rigid. “Good night, Mother.”

“It’s been two months since her funeral.” She watched him with those gold eyes that saw far too much. “In that entire time, I’ve never seen you shed a single tear or heard you say one word about it. You sit up here surrounded by her things and brood. It’s not healthy.”

His voice tightened. “This is where I live.”

“You can change where you live. Find a place that isn’t full of memories.”

Memories? He didn’t even have those. His wife’s death had left a void with nothing but his grief to fill it. Why had he married another officer? Losing a friend in battle was hard enough. When the news had come, two months and an eternity ago, that the battlecruiser Cory commanded had been destroyed—and she with it—a part of him had died as well.

Kelric pushed down the memory. He didn’t want pity. What could he do to make his well-meaning mother go away before her solicitude started him unraveling?

“I’ll look at apartments next week,” he said.

Her luminous face lit with a smile. “There’s a nice place on Arroyo Cliffs. You could see it Tillsday evening.”

“All right.” That would be after his test flight of Schuldman’s mutant plane with its starship engine.

Dawn’s ruddy light stretched long shadows across the red sands. Sunrise turned the airfield crimson and reflected off the Glint’s hull like sparks of fire. Out in the desert, nothing but rock spires showed as far as the horizon. Only the rare boom of a snare-drum cactus interrupted the dawn’s silent splendor.

Kelric walked around the Glint. The only visible changes were the photon thrusters mounted behind the rocket exhaust. He knew what waited inside that plane, though—a marvel ready to shoot him into the heavens.

Inversion. The word had fascinated him since childhood. At the Academy he had earned his degree in inversion theory, the physics of faster-than-light travel. His people had once believed reaching supraluminal speeds was impossible. It meant going through the speed of light, where slower travelers would see his mass become infinite and his ship rotated until it pointed perpendicular to its true direction. Time for him would stop relative to the rest of the universe. Which of course could never happen. So how could he go faster-than-light?

The answer turned out to be simple.

It depended on imaginary numbers, the square roots of negative numbers. Relativistic physics said his mass and energy became imaginary at supraluminal speeds. If he also added an imaginary part to his speed, the equations no longer blew up at light speed. By venturing into a universe where speed had both real and imaginary parts, he could go
around
light speed like a hovercar leaving the road could go around a tree. But for a starship, “leaving the road” meant leaving the real universe.

Kelric pressed his hand against the plane’s hatch. “What do you say, Glint? Want to go faster than a photon?” The plane couldn’t of course. It wasn’t designed for interstellar travel. But the inversion engine could accelerate it far better than the rockets. Engineering thought he might reach one hundredth the speed of light. It would make his last flight a snail’s pace in comparison.

“I just hope they fixed the computer,” Kelric said.

“Fixed it, double-checked it, triple-checked it,” a woman’s gravelly voice said behind him. “Can’t have you blowing up out there. You and me got a debt to settle.”

Kelric turned to see Jessa Zaubern, a gaunt figure in the blue jumpsuit worn by the engineers assigned to the Glint project. Her close cut cap of fiery hair glistened in the dawn’s light.

He snorted. “You’re the one who owes me money, Zaub.”

Her grin animated her face, chasing away her usual stoicism. “Next game, I’m going to wipe your bank account clean.”

Kelric smiled. He and Jessa got along well. He was one of the few people she let see the sentimental streak under her gruffness. They understood each other, both of them plagued by the same awkwardness with words. He was also the only person who had ever beat her at Dieshan choker slam, a game invented by the base’s notorious circle of card players. And she was a better engineer than card player. If she had triple-checked his plane, it was in good shape.

Jessa surveyed the Glint. “The fusion rockets will get you off planet.” She slanted a gaze at him. “You can use the inversion engine once you’re in orbit. You got positron fuel.”

“I don’t know, Zaub. Positrons for a plane?” He grinned his challenge. “It’ll never work.”

“Like hell, Kelly boy.” She banged her palm on the Glint’s hull. “We used EM fields to suspend the fuel in a canister. You fire the thrusters, a defect in the fields leaks positrons into the beambox, same as in a starship.”

Even after his briefing, Kelric had trouble imagining the plane carrying an inversion selector and beambox. The wheel-shaped selector culled electrons out of the cosmic ray flux in space, letting only those with highest energies enter the mirrored beambox. Once inside, the electrons annihilated with positrons, creating ultra high energy photons that reflected out the thrusters.

“Just as long as it does what it’s supposed to do,” he said.

Jessa peered at him. “You really think it has a problem?”

Did he? “I’ll only be carrying a hundred kilograms of positrons.”

“That’s more than you need. It’s not like you’re going anywhere.” She shrugged. “Hell, one gram of positrons makes a million billion billion annihilations. That’s a lot of push.”

“I suppose.” He tilted his head towards the Glint. “So you really think she can reach one percent of light speed?”

“Should,” Jessa said. “We don’t have enough data at higher velocities to know for sure.”

Interesting. “You mean you don’t know its top speed?”

Jessa scowled at him. “Don’t even
think
it.”

He regarded her innocently. “Think what?”

“You be careful with my plane.”

He laughed amiably. “I’m going to wreak havoc on it.”

“Very funny.” Her voice quieted. “You be careful with Kelric, too.”

“Hell, he’ll be fine. He’s only an idiot when reporters interview him.”

“I’m not joking.” Jessa shook her head. “People look at you, they see big and quiet. They don’t think you feel. They don’t think you think.”

He shifted his weight. “It doesn’t bother me.”

“Kelric, listen.” She came over to him. “You’re smarter than all of them put together. And you feel. Too much. You keep thinking and feeling and locking it up. It will eat holes in your heart.”

Where the hell had that come from? “I’m fine.”

Jessa put her hands on her hips. “Only one dumb thing I’ve ever seen you do. And that’s agreeing to take up this plane. Schuldman had no right to push you into this mission.”

“He didn’t push me. I volunteered.”

“Yeah, right.” She poked her finger at his chest. “I want my plane back in one piece.”

“It’s not your plane, Zaub.”

“Just remember what I said.”

He did his best to look reassuring. “All right.”

“Good.” She paused awkwardly. “Good luck.”

Kelric smiled. “Thanks.”

After Jessa left, Kelric climbed into the cockpit and ran more tests. He put the computer through every one of its routines and it answered without a glitch.

Although the Glint could take off vertically, today Kelric tested it on the runway. After Tyrson gave him clearance, he sped down the asphalt and soared into the air, exulting in acceleration pushing him against his seat. He loved that sensation of speed.

As he shot higher into the sky, the world of Diesha spread out on his screens in a desolate landscape of sunrise colors. He accelerated steadily and the Glint answered like an extension of his own body. The wings folded back against the fuselage, cutting drag and preparing for the supersonic shock wave. Mach 1, Mach 2, Mach 4. Finally he hit the speed where the computer had developed jitters during his last flight.

“Glint One Eight to Control,” Kelric said. “Systems look good here.”

“I read the same,” Tyrson said over the audiocom.

“Good.” Kelric grinned. “I’m going to give it a kick.”

Captain
, the Glint thought.
I don’t think kicking me will serve any purpose.

Kelric chuckled.
Don’t worry. It’s just another idiom
. He fired the rockets, breathing in grunts to keep from blacking out from the g-forces. Mach 8, 16, 32. He hit escape velocity and kept going. On his screens, Diesha changed from a flat landscape to curved globe studded with ruby deserts.

“She’s beautiful,” he murmured.

Tyrson chuckled. “Is that someone you see up there or are you thinking about your last date?”

“Lady Diesha,” Kelric said.
Beautiful sorceress,
he thought.
Hold me in your arms until the pain stops.

We’ve cleared the planet,
the Glint announced.
Do you want to start the inversion engine?

Let’s give it a go.
Kelric fired the photon thrusters—and went into quasis.

Without quantum stasis, more commonly known as quasis, he would have died. A starship engine could accelerate a craft up to thousands of times the force of gravity, which would have smeared him all over his seat if he hadn’t had protection. The waveform modulators in the quasis coil worked on an atomic level, keeping the quantum wavefunction of the ship from changing state. During quasis, nothing could alter the configuration of particles in the plane or anything it carried, including him; on a macroscopic level, the craft became a rigid solid that no force could deform. Only the atomic clock that limited their quasis time was unaffected. Kelric felt nothing; the only way he knew he hadn’t been conscious the entire time was by the sudden jump in speed on his display.

Tyrson’s voice burst out of the audiocom. “Captain, she’s working like a dream!”

“You bet,” Kelric said.
Thanks, Zaub,
he thought. He fired the thrusters again and his speed suddenly read three thousand kilometers per second.

“Glint Control,” Kelric said. “I’m at one percent of light speed,”

“We read you smooth as silk,” Tyrson said. “It’s beautiful.”

An unwelcome thought came to his mind.
No, it’s empty. Everything is empty.
He pushed the thought away and spoke into the audiocom. “I’m going to crank it up again.”

Another voice came on the com. “Captain, this is General Schuldman. Your systems are operating well, better than predicted. The decision to exceed this speed is yours, but if you do so you will be going against the advice of the team that installed your engine. Do you understand?”

Kelric knew Schuldman wanted him to push the Glint’s limit. He also knew the general meant to make sure he knew the risks. “Understood, sir.”

He fired the photon thrusters. A vibration shook through the ship, a gentle shaking but one that didn’t feel right.

“Captain!” Static crackled in Tyrson’s voice. “I’m reading you at ten percent of light speed.”

“Captain Valdoria.” Schuldman’s voice came through the static. “That’s fast enou—”

Kelric fired the thrusters before the general finished; that way, he wasn’t disobeying orders. The display jumped to one hundred thousand kilometers per second. He hit the thrusters again and the number doubled. He was going at two-thirds the speed of light.

A voice on his audiocom drawled. “Are you recei… return to base…” The words faded away.

For a moment Kelric had no idea who had spoken. Then he realized it was Schuldman.
Glint,
he thought.
What’s wrong with the audiocom?

It can’t cope with the time dilation.

Interesting. Starship audiocoms easily compensated for the effect of relativistic speeds on radio waves, but the Glint had no reason to carry one. He wasn’t supposed to be going anywhere near this fast.

How long does Control think we’ve been gone?
Kelric asked.

Thirty-three minutes,
the Glint answered.
My clock says thirty minutes have passed for us.

How about that? We jumped three minutes into the future.
When he went this fast, Control recorded his clock as running slow. However, he recorded the clocks on Diesha as running slow. It was like when he sat in a magtrain and it looked like the train next to him was going backward when in fact his train was the one that had started to move forward. Relative to him, the other train was going backward. Similarly, relative to this plane, Diesha was shooting off in the other direction. Only when he turned the Glint around did it break the symmetry of their relative motion. What it meant was that when he returned home, he would be several minutes younger than everyone at the base.