Battlemind (12 page)

She found them at last in one corner of the cluttered bay, working together at an out-of-the-way table secluded somewhat from the rest of the activity by a wall of supply crates and empty missile transport canisters.

Cal Norris was a slight man with wispy gray hair, the slightly enlarged eyeballs of a man who’d undergone a Companion reshaping to correct extreme myopia, and a wry sense of humor. Lieutenant Tanya Coburn was a pretty, redheaded warstrider officer who’d been part of Kara’s own Phantoms, but who’d been reassigned to the
Carl Friedrich Gauss’s
science department in order to provide them with her expertise in handling teleoperated recon probes.

“There you two are,” Kara told them. “What’s all this about time travel? You have the brass all worked up.”

Norris looked up and quirked a grin at her. “They’re getting nervous, are they? Can’t say I blame them.” He nodded toward the inert probe on the table in front of them. “This thing is getting
me
damned nervous.”

“Oh, don’t mind the Doc,” Tanya said. “He’s as excited about this as a kid on Armstrong Day.”

The sleek object on the table was a Mark VII reconnaissance drone, a tiny, jet-black manta-shaped craft two meters long, with a small anticollision strobe on its back, and the alphanumerics AE356 painted in dark gray on the trailing edges of the manta’s wings aft. Normally, the craft was teleoperated. On this mission, however, the on-board AI had carried out the necessary navigational routines.

“So what happened?”

“That
happened,” Norris said, waving one arm at a cargo trailer parked by a stack of empty missile crates five meters away. Resting on the cart was another Mark VII, an exact duplicate of the probe in front of her. Without taking even one step closer, Kara could read the ID on its side, AE356.

“Maybe you should see this, Captain,” Tanya said. She led her over to a viewall on the nearby bulkhead and palmed the interface. The screen lit up an instant later, showing the familiar camera view of the Stargate. It looked like it was being shot from a remote flyer operating somewhere within a few thousand kilometers of the Stargate’s surface. In the center of the screen she could see a tiny, blinking red light.

After holding on the view for a moment, the scene zoomed in closer. Kara could just make out an elongated shape there, something black, with a shiny hull, and what looked like an oval port or sensor lens on the front. The flashing light was a standard anticollision strobe mounted on the object’s dorsal surface.

“That was about half an hour ago,” Tanya said. “Our sentry probes picked up its AI transmission, requesting clearance to return to the
Gauss.
The only problem was, we didn’t have any probes out at the time.”

“We’re not scheduled to launch AE356 until sixteen hundred hours this afternoon,” Norris said irritably.

“What did it have to say for itself?” Kara asked.

Norris shook his head, scowling. “According to it, it was launched from the
Gauss
at sixteen hundred hours today. It entered the Stargate at seventeen-fifty and some odd seconds. Twenty-one point three one seconds, to be precise. It performed its scheduled reconnaissance of the Galactic Core, in particular watching for any activity that might be the result of your raid in there this morning. It noted some activity, but nothing that could be considered threatening.”

“No buildup for a counter-raid through the Gate,” Tanya said, elaborating.

“That’s good.”

“It was pursued by a number of Web machines,” Norris continued. “Its AI was able to elude them and it returned through the Stargate, entering at twenty-thirty-two hours, zero-three minutes, twelve seconds.”

Kara blinked. “That was half an hour ago? That probe over there… is nine hours and some older than this one?”

“They are the same probe,” Norris said, nodding, “but manifested nine hours apart in the temporal dimension.”

“And how do you explain that?”

“Well, it’s been known since the late twentieth century that devices such as that should open gates in time as well as space. The equations allow space and time to be more or less interchangeable. Rotate an object this way, and the change in perspective can be manifested as a change in referent time instead.”

“Whoosh!” Kara passed her hand rapidly above her head, from front to back. “I’m afraid you just overshot, Doctor.”

“We know that spatial translation through a Stargate depends on approaching the gate along a certain, mathematically calculated path. Yes?”

“Fine so far.” The precise path for the Phantoms’ transit to the Galactic Core had been very carefully downloaded to her RAM, and she’d been warned in no uncertain terms that if she deviated at all from that path, her strider would be lost.

“Changes in the approach path can change your exit point,” Norris continued. “That much is obvious. It turns out that certain changes in your approach can be expressed not as a change in space, or not in space only, but in time as well. We’ve known this, from the math, but this is the first time we’ve seen any evidence that this sort of thing happens in the real world.” He grinned ruefully, shaking his head. “This is really going to gok up the whole idea of causality, I’m afraid.”

Kara saw what he was getting at. She patted the probe on the table. “Like for instance… what happens if you decide not to send old AE356 here through the Gate? Is that what you mean?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. Physics has always tried to erect barriers to prevent any flow of information across time. We’ve always been aware that the math, and especially the weirder aspects of quantum mechanics, have allowed for time travel. But we’ve tried to jigger things so that in practical terms, at any rate, it’s impossible to violate causality, to have the cause happen
after
the effect.”

“I’m curious about something,” Kara said. She rested her hand lightly on the casing of the probe that had not been launched yet. “For the sake of argument, this is Probe One, okay?”

Tanya and Norris both nodded.

Kara walked the five meters across to the second probe, where it rested in its cradle. “And this is Probe Two.”

“Fine,” Norris said. “What does that prove?”

Kara leaned closer, studying the alphanumerics printed on the second probe’s flank. “Doctor, come over here with me. You’re my witness. Tanya? Go to Probe One. Take a look at the letters on the starboard side aft.”

“Okay.”

“Use your cutter, the one on the table there. See if you can make a mark on the letter ‘E.’ ”

“I think I see what you’re after,” Norris said. He leaned over next to her, fixing his gaze on the gray letters. “Go ahead, Tanya.”

Across the room, Tanya picked up a small laser cutter, the size of a pen, and brought the tip close to Probe One’s side. As Kara and Norris watched, a black line drew itself slowly across the back of the E, between the middle and top horizontal arms.

“Oh… my… God…” Norris said quietly, almost reverently.

Kara walked over to Probe One, where Tanya was standing with a quizzical expression. “What happened?”

Kara pointed at the mark on the back of the E. A wisp of smoke was still curling from the blackened streak charred into the gray paint. “That happened,” she said. “Over there, while we watched. You went from left to right, didn’t you?”

Tanya’s eyes widened. “You saw it?”

Kara nodded. “These two probes
are
the same.”

“It makes no sense,” Norris said, shaking his head. “I mean, even if Probe Two
is
Probe One, several hours later in the future, what we do to one shouldn’t affect the other.” He stopped, then blinked several times. “Should it?”

“Hell, how should I know, Doctor?” Kara said. “I’m just a striderjack, remember? But you know, they say that paired electrons, the ones in quantum couplings, used in the I2C? They say that in a way those aren’t really two different electrons, but the same one. That’s why when something changes the spin of one, the spin of the other changes the same way, even when it’s light years away. It doesn’t make sense, not the way we look at the universe. But it happens, and the laws of quantum mechanics say it has to be that way.”

Norris pursed his lips, started to say something, reconsidered, then reconsidered again. “Still can’t buy it. I mean, okay. We have proof that Probe Two is really Probe One, just a few hours older, but sent back through time, somehow, to a time before it was launched. Right?” The two women nodded agreement. “Okay. So what if we decide, hell, no. We’re not going to launch the damned thing at all. What happens then? Probe Two disappears because we didn’t launch it in the first place?”

“Maybe we should try,” Tanya said, one eyebrow arched. “I’d like to know what happens.”

Kara shook her head. “I think we’d better run this one the way the orders are written. Later, when not as much is riding on it, maybe then we can play. For now, I’d say you should get the probe… Probe One, I mean, ready to go.” She looked across at Probe Two curiously. “And on time.”

Tanya laughed. “If this gets routine, we could save a hell of a lot of money on recon probes. Just get one ready, recover it before we send it out, download the intel, then forget the whole thing. We have our data without risking the probe!”

“Somehow,” Kara said, “there’s got to be some kind of a law in the universe that says you can’t do this.” She thought of her father’s comment earlier and grinned. “I’m starting to get a headache.”

Minutes later, she returned to the conference room on Deck One. Her father was still there, as was Daren Cameron. The younger man sat on the table with one knee up and the other leg dangling.

Daren was a dark-haired man in his late twenties, stocky bordering on pudgy, wearing a sharply tailored civilian skin-suit with elaborate shoulder halfcloaks. A doctor of xenobiology from the University of Jefferson on New America—he’d taken the full doctorate download by the time he was seventeen—he was Kara’s half-brother, the son of Katya Alessandro and Devis Cameron. And
there
was a strangely twisted love triangle, Kara thought, if ever there was one.

“Hey, Sis! How was the Galactic Core?”

“Hot.”

“Yeah, it’s been hot on Dante, too.” Dante—DM-58° 5564 II—was a world in the Shichiju, home of the Dantean Communes, a species of communal organisms that Daren had been studying for some time now. Their particular mystery was whether or not they could be classified as sapient; certainly, their intelligence was of a radically different order from human or DalRiss, enough so that communications with them might be forever impossible.

“I meant hot as in radioactive,” Kara said, faintly exasperated. Daren, frequently, couldn’t see beyond the limits of his own rather narrow field of vision, and he was self-centered enough that he could rarely empathize with the problems of others. Assigned to the
Gauss
as part of the xenobiology team studying the Web, he’d nevertheless continued with his own work as well, researching the question of Commune intelligence.

“Ah.” Daren shrugged. “So, did you military types find anything useful in there?”

Kara bristled. She sometimes had the impression that Daren didn’t think much of the military, or of its ability to gather data or solve problems. “We picked up a thing or two,” she said. “I’ll be uploading to the milnet later.” She turned to Vic. “You were right, Dad, about what Dr. Norris had. It was weird. I think I’m going to want to file a report on that, too.” She cocked her head. “Unless it’s classified?”

“Oh, it’ll be classified. Lately they’ve been classifying how many times the senior staff has to go use the head. But with I2C, there’s no chance of an intercept. You’re right, of course. ConMilCom ought to know about this.”

“Know about what?” Daren asked.

“Classified, brother dear,” Kara told him sweetly. “Not for civilian download.”

“Your mother was worried about you, Kara,” Vic said, as though stepping in to head off a confrontation. “I passed the word to her that you were okay as soon as I knew, but I imagine she’d like to hear from you herself.”

Kara brightened. “I was planning on paying her a visit. I’m off on a twenty-four as soon as I finish my reports.”

“ViRcom?”

“Hubot, actually. I figured since they’ve put the system in for surface leave, I might as well use it.”

Teleoperated hubots, humanoid robots ridden by the operator’s linked-in mind the way a striderjack rode a warstrider, had long been popular on Earth and some other worlds of the Shichiju, a means of visiting other places and conducting face-to-face business on the planet without actually leaving home. The robot’s electronic senses provided a full range of sensory input, giving the rider the feeling of actually being there, and concessions on Earth and elsewhere had long rented travel time to popular historical sites and tourist playgrounds.

With the development of I2C for other than strictly military applications, hubotravel, as it was becoming known, was growing more popular than ever.

Vic nodded. “Well, have a good time. Give your mom my best, and tell her how much I miss her.”

“Yeah,” Daren smirked. “And don’t do anything that’ll make you rust.”

“You should know,” she told him. Since hubotraveling had become available to researchers with the Fleet, he’d been using them to visit the wet, hothouse world of Dante. She teased him sometimes about turning into a rusted, tin-man statue on the beach next to some Commune hive.

It was five more hours before Kara could get off duty and make the trip down to
Gauss’s
communications lounge. As she stepped into the large, softly lit chamber, filled with the white ceramic commods that always reminded her of coffins or modern-era sarcophagi, she saw that most of the pods were occupied.
Gauss
boasted a crew of several hundred, and the comm modules provided access not only to conversations with loved ones back home, but to entertainment as well.

Selecting one of the empty pods, she climbed inside, snuggled back into the padded seat that adjusted itself to fit her contours, and let the cover hiss quietly shut. Her Companion had already begun growing endpoints, which quested sightlessly toward the pod’s link contacts.