Schism: Part One of Triad (45 page)

A psicon appeared in a corner of his mindscape, a smirking cat with Wellmark’s features. It lifted its paw and stretched out its claws: Too late, Valdoria. We know what you think. It vanished with a self-satisfied pop.

Althor laughed, his voice rolling through the cockpit. He sent his own psicon to Wellmark, an image of himself in the leather armor and disk mail of a Rillian soldier, holding a burnished sword above his head. You dare to mock the great warrior of Skyfall?

Wellmark’s answering psicon consisted solely of the cat grin. Hey, a sword and everything. That’s some metal stuff you’re wearing there.

It’s called armor, you know. He laughed and a pillar of flame erupted from the sword of Althor’s psicon.

Steel’s thought reverberated in Althor’s mindscape. Engine and thrusters check. Then he added, If you two are done rattling your sabers.

Wellmark sent her grin psicon to Steel.

Althor focused on an engine psicon in a lower corner of his mindscape. In response, displays formed with data for the Jag’s thrusters, both the rockets and the photon tiirusters they used in deep space. The system checked as ready to go.

Systems initialized and ready, the Goldstar EI thought.

Systems initialized and ready, Redstar thought.

Systems initialized and ready, Greenstar thought Blackstar squad initialized and ready, Blackstar thought.

The tower cleared them for liftoff, and warning lights flared around their launch pads in the half-light that presaged the dawn. Their Jags leapt into the sky, blasting the pads, four deadly works of art streaking up and out until they reached the starred darkness of space, their voracious engines devouring fuel, their pilots protected from the immense accelerations by quasis coils.

When they were well away from the orbiting planets, Steel thought: Prepare to invert.

All set? Althor asked Redstar.

Ready, it answered.

Inversion circumvented the speed of light. They couldn’t go at light speed because the ship’s mass would become infinite compared to slower objects and its time would stop. They were like runners whose path was blocked by an infinitely high tree. No matter how much energy they used, they could never climb over the tree. To reach the superluminal universe, the Jag added an imaginary part to its speed. Then it went around the light-speed singularity the way a runner might leave the road to go around an infinitely high tree.

Humans hadn’t conquered light-speed, tihey had snuck around the barrier.

Invert, Steel thought.

Go, Althor told his Jag.

The universe twisted inside out and disorientation rippled through Althor. He knew space didn’t really twist, but his mind perceived it that way. The Jag left the real universe and rotated through an eerie existence where it was part real and part imaginary. Experts claimed the process could drive a person insane. Althor didn’t know, but he had no wish to spend any longer than necessary in transition. It was why Jags pushed close to light-speed before they inverted; they could “go around the tree” in a tighter circle and so spend less time in the process.

Inversion had brutally changed warfare. Ships could burst out of superluminal space anywhere, at relativistic speeds,

making the concept of a front line obsolete. Unaugmented humans couldn’t cope with space combat. Defenses developed along widi offensive capabilities, and the military managed to protect the settled worlds and habitats of humanity, but no one could watch all of space. Huge volumes remained contested, regions where no clear boundaries existed for Eu-bian, Skolian, and Allied territory.

Blackstar Squadron was going out today as it had done every ten days for the past six months, to patrol the hinterlands of Skolia, keeping watch, guarding against incursions. Today they headed for Onyx Sector to investigate an unconfirmed sighting of an ESComm scout ship.

Inversion complete, Redstarthought.

Almor exhaled with relief as his mind and body returned to normal. Actually, “normal” was relative; compared to the sublight universe, he and the Jag now had imaginary mass. Of course, relative to his ship he wasn’t moving at all, so he didn’t notice a difference as long as his real and imaginary parts weren’t in flux.

How is my fuel? he asked Redstar. .

Positron containment secure. It submerged Althor’s awareness into the strange universe within the magnetic containment botde that held me fuel. During inversion, the bottle drew on the cosmic-ray flux, pulling in high-energy particles. It stored the contents by spreading them through complex space, varying me imaginary parts of charge and mass. As a result, the bottle could carry far more antimatter than if it were confined to real space. The situation was simpler than with people; the trauma of having both real and imaginary parts had no effect on particles. Althor doubted his fuel ever felt like throwing up.

It exhilarated him to be part of his ship. He checked various systems: the gamma-ray shields and superconducting grids prevented waste heat from destroying the Jag; the selector culled electrons out of space and funneled mem into the interaction area; die fuel botde leaked positrons into the interaction area; the electrons and positrons annihilated in magnificent bursts of energy, producing thrust for the Jag.

Quasis drop, Redstarthought.

Althor blinked. He hadn’t even felt the Jag go into quantum stasis, more commonly called quasis. It protected him against the accelerations of relativistic travel. A quasis field fixed the quantum wavefunction of the ship, including him. They didn’t literally freeze; their atoms continued to vibrate, rotate, and otherwise behave as they had in the instant the quasis began, and the atomic clock in his biomech web continued to work. But none of the atoms could alter their quantum state. It meant the ship and everything within it became rigid even to immense forces. Without mat protection, the g-forces would have smashed him flat. Apparently Redstar had jumped him in and out of quasis without his even noticing, as they continued to accelerate,

Steel’s thought reverberated in Althor’s mindscape. Quaternary Valdoria, check your time. You ‘re future shifting.

That didn’t sound auspicious. Redstar, check my temporal position relative to the rest of the squad. Am i going into their future?

Checking, Redstar thought. Stats reeled off in Akhor’s mind, processed by his node faster than he could think. Yes, you are drifting forward about three seconds relative to them per each minute of travel.

Compensate for temporal drift, Althor thought.

New course plotted, Redstar answered.

The EI displayed its calculations as graphs in his mindscape. If he stayed on his current trajectory, he would drop out of inversion several hours later than the rest of the squad. The problem was due to his Jag having traveled a bit faster than the other ships just before they inverted. When they accelerated close to light speed, their time dilated, or passed more slowly on the Jags man on Diesha. It had only taken a few minutes to invert, but by then the dilation had jumped them about a month into Diesha’s future. His speed had been enough to put him a few minutes farther ahead than the others.

However, at superluminal speeds he could plot a path backward in time. He wished they could reach Onyx Station before they left Diesha, but no one had ever succeeded in thwarting cause and effect. What happened in their reference frame had to be consistent with events in every frame. It might not be the same event; an electron traveling into the past from A to B would appear to a sublight observer as a positron going forward in time from B to A. Different events, but consistent. Theorists hypothesized that if a ship came out of inversion before it entered, it would end up in another universe. Unfortunately, no one who had tried had returned to tell the story. For now, the best they could do was leave inversion with no more time passing in the real universe than on their ships. It usually took longer, as errors accumulated; the farther they traveled, the bigger the discrepancy.

If someone on Diesha could have recorded their progress, they would have observed some truly bizarre effects. During inversion, Blackstar Squadron would go into the past for a while to compensate for their jump forward due to the time dilation when they inverted. Sometime before they turned pastward, four Jags had appeared in Onyx Sector. Those ships existed right now. They were Blackstar Squadron.

At the same time, four antimatter Jags had appeared, pair-produced from photon annihilations. While the normal ships continued on to Onyx, the antimatter squad flew backward in a time-reversed path, gaining fuel, like a movie run in reverse. The antimatter Jags and the original Jags headed toward each other, meeting in the instant when the originals turned pastward. Then they annihilated, the energy of their mutual destruction balancing the energy used to create the antimatter ships. After that, the four ships already at Onyx would be the only version of Blackstar Squadron left.

The process disconcerted Althor. He was at rest relative to his Jag, so he experienced no strange creations or destructions. He simply traveled to Onyx in an uninterrupted journey, going forward in time and space as he knew it Yet others would observe Redstar annihilated during inversion and recreated elsewhere—which meant he was annihilated and recreated as well.

The result, however, was consistent for everyone: Blackstar arrived at Onyx Station. They managed it all with an advantage ESComm could never match.

Conventional signals traveled no faster than light speed, so inverted ships could communicate only with tachyons, or superluminal particles. Although ISC

and ESComm were developing such technologies, neither could yet make tachyons carry reliable information. Too much uncertainty existed in when and where the signals arrived. As a result, ships couldn’t coordinate well at superluminal speeds; most squads suffered both temporal and spatial drift.

When diey left inversion, the ships would be spread out in space and time. The longer they traveled at superluminal speed, the greater the spread.

But not Jags.

Steel, Belldaughter, Wellmark, and Althor linked through Kyle space. Their Jags were nodes on the Kyle web. It gave them immediate communication among themselves and with any node in the star-spanning ISC network, allowing them to coordinate with a precision that thumbed its nose at light speed itself.

Althor checked his connection to the other squad members. They were all monitoring tiieir systems but otherwise relaxing. Travel during inversion was actually rattier boring.

Open gate to Kyle space, Althor thought.

Gate open, Redstaranswered.

His mindscape reformed into the red grid wim the circular peak circled by concentric ripples. Three similar peaks surrounded him, black, gold, and green, the rest of Blackstar Squadron, their ripples overlapping and blending with his. As he cast his thoughts through Kyle space, the peak of his mind changed, decreasing in height here and growing elsewhere. He drought of Onyx Platform and his consciousness shifted through the grid. It reformed near a cluster of nodes that signified several outposts of the platform.

Clock, Almor thought.

An antique timepiece appeared in his mindscape, matching the decor of his home on Lyshriol. It showed him data about the passage of time far more sophisticated than a real timepiece that old could have managed. He was about six minutes ahead of the rest of the squadron.

Commander Steel, he thought. Request permission to contact Onyx in my future timeline. If he could link with the Onyx mesh, he would be at least six minutes ahead of when they expected to drop out of inversion.

Give it a try, Steel answered. But be careful. If you ‘re still in that timeline when we leave inversion, you won’t come out with us.

Understood, sir. At the moment, Althor had some probability of being in the future relative to the squad and some of being in their time. To contact Onyx six minutes ahead, he had to collapse his wavefunction into that future timeline, severing his link with his squad. It was a risky proposition; he might not be able to rejoin his own timeline. He might just drop out of space six minutes ahead of his squad, but that was by no means guaranteed. The farther into the future he ventured, the more he risked. Ships that played too much with spacetime could lose contact with their own universe. At least, that was what ISC believed. No one knew for certain, since those ships disappeared.

To Redstar, he thought, Drop the Blackstar link and submerge into the Onyx timeline.

Disassociating with Blackstar, it answered.

Althor’s link with the other Jags faded. He was still under the security cloak, so he was hidden from all telops except those rare few with a clearance high enough to contact a J-Force unit. Althor had an even higher clearance, enough to make contact with just about any ISC base. He sent his ID codes to one of the Onyx outposts, which showed as a blurry peak in his grid. Then he thought, Requesting time check.

Static came from the Onyx Station. In his mindscape, it manifested as ragged, indistinct peaks. Time ch**)… —lete?

Repeat, Althor thought. I’m having trouble focusing your timeline.

Time check *** incomplete, the Onyx telop answered.

That came through better.

How fa—**futureward?

I’m from about six minutes in your past, Althor answered.

Six minute**… ooner?**

Can you repeat? He was growing uneasy. The longer he spent in this link, the greater the danger he would lose his squad.

***—sooner? The Onyx telop repeated.

You want us to arrive sooner than scheduled?

Yes!

Warning, Redstar thought. I’m losing coherence with your previous timeline.

Damn! Onyx, I’ll see what we can do. To Redstar, he thought, Drop me back to Blackstar.

Synchronizing with previous timeline. Then: I can’t find them.

Althor gritted his teeth. Can you extrapolate from where they were in space and time and calculate their probable position?

Yes. But I can’t guarantee you will be in the same universe.