Oh, that question, she thought. She sometimes forgot how clever he was for someone his age. She thought about trying to dissemble, but what was the point? He would work his way through it eventually.
“What was there for him to gloat about? You beat him. Your ship and crew escaped and you were the instrument of delivering yourself into captivity. He had not yet won.”
“Not yet,” Bitka repeated, and he nodded as if he expected the answer. “He let me go. Did you know he was using you?”
Te’Anna rocked her head from side to side in barely contained mirth. “Did I know? It was my idea! How else could we have engineered an escape except with his acquiescence? We had already sided with you once; he was hardly likely to trust us. Of course, I had to make him believe he thought of it. But he believes he is more intelligent than everyone, so that part was not difficult.”
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Cass thought P’Daan was waiting for something before making his move, and he was: us. They knew we were coming all along.”
“P’Daan knew, but I doubt he has shared the information with anyone else. After the ships and Troatta lives it cost Y’Areez to capture you, I doubt the news P’Daan had let you go to assist the defense would be well received.
“Oh, Captain Bitka, if you could see your face. The irony! P’Daan found your capture unsatisfying because it was your doing, not his. Now you find your escape unsatisfying because it was his doing, not ours. I would say you are suited to each other, except I know you both and you have very little else in common.”
“So, this is just going to go on and on until one of us is dead?” he asked.
Te’Anna regarded Bitka. “It distresses you to be at the center of this. Many of your species would be flattered, but not you. P’Daan may eventually lose interest, but not during your lifespan. I suspect that, for your purposes, you are correct: it will go on until one of you is dead.”
She saw the news sat heavily on him, as she suspected it would. That was why she had not told him sooner, but she had always suspected he would puzzle it out. He looked up.
“You still have my gratitude, Te’Anna. P’Daan’s dissatisfaction might have been expressed in a number of different ways, most of which would have left me dead or altered beyond recognition. Thank you for giving me back my life and my freedom. Now, I see Lieutenant Ma is waiting to join us.”
How odd, Te’Anna thought, that he considered himself free.
Another figure appeared to their side, a figure she at first did not recognize.
“Oh! Lieutenant Ma,” she said in anguish. “What we have done to you!”
He looked only vaguely Human. His proportions had changed, making him squatter, broader, rounder. His features were altered, coarsened, and had partially disappeared in facial fat. His hair was gone but he now had short, stiff, but widely spaced bristles over much of his body, at lease the parts Te’Anna could see. He had been a handsome creature before, and now was hideous.
He held up his hand and looked at it, turning it so he could see the back covered by bristles and the smooth palm in sequence. When he spoke, his words were somewhat slurred from the altered shape of his mouth and tongue.
“It’s not so bad. You get used to it and it isn’t permanent. The antidote stopped the retrovirus, but the physiological changes were so traumatic it would have killed us to change back right away. We’re building up our strength, though, and when we’re strong enough . . . well, this time we’ll have pain blockers. That will make it easier.”
She saw Bitka nod in understanding, and she remembered the heartrending sounds of his agony. What we did to them!
“Te’Anna,” Captain Bitka said, “the reason I called this meeting was the working group tells me you have held back some information about the jump drive. They aren’t sure it is critical to solving the problem, but—”
“It is not!” she said, cutting him off. “There is no need for them to know everything.”
Bitka watched her for a few moments, and he looked sad.
“Te’Anna, I owe you almost everything my life will be from here forward. There is no limit to my debt to you, and I think I know you as well or better than any of us do. I asked Lieutenant Ma to be here because I think he is the reason you won’t share this information with the working group.”
Te’Anna wanted to just turn the cameras off, get up and walk away. She wanted to be anywhere but in the presence of Lieutenant Ma, that horrific reminder of what Guardian must mean to these people, what it was beginning to mean to her. But her debt to Ma was too great to walk away from.
“Te’Anna, you don’t have to be guilty about what K’Irka did to me and the Marines,” Ma said. “You didn’t do it. You saved us, made K’Irka cure us.”
“That is not my greatest burden, Lieutenant Ma. As terrible as this transformation of you has been, my words hurt you more deeply, damaged you more thoroughly. I am so truly sorry for that.”
Bitka looked to Lieutenant Ma, who rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands and then nodded. “You mean what you told me about how the jump drive works. Well, I figure you didn’t mean to destroy my faith in reality, drive me half insane. At least half. You had no way of knowing how I would react. It was just a mistake.”
“No, Lieutenant Ma, it was not a mistake at all. What you suffered is precisely what I intended, and that is what I regret: my intent. My fault was not a deficiency of judgment, but rather one of character. I will never again be the instrument of another sentient being losing their way. Never again. Never.”
“But, Te’Anna,” Bitka said, “we are going to need that information. The working group may need it now. Later, if we’re going to resist P’Daan and the others like him, we’re going to have to understand this technology. You know that.”
She did know that, she knew all of it, but she also knew she would never again risk telling a human what she had told Lieutenant Ma.
“No,” she said.
The three of them sat in silence, Bitka and Ma staring at her, Te’Anna not knowing how the others felt, but feeling her misery as if it were a heavy, wet cloak wrapped around her, chilling her, smothering her, weighing her down. After a long silence, Lieutenant Ma nodded.
“I understand. Some burdens are too heavy to carry. But I owe you my life, Te’Anna, so I’ll carry this burden for you. Captain, if you’ll set up the holocon, I’ll brief the working group on everything I know. This is my gift to you, Te’Anna. Oh, and Captain? We need your head clear and firing on all cylinders, not full of worms. Sit this one out, sir. I’m serious.”
Choice actually felt dizzy when she saw what Lieutenant Ma had become. She had disliked him intensely, hated his arrogance and casual dismissal of anything which did not line up with his narrow and judgmental world view, but she would never have wished this on him. She looked away, her eyes falling on the others, and she saw Lieutenant Commander Nightingale’s face twist in revulsion, the physicist Walter Wu simply stared, his unlit cigar forgotten for the moment. She could not tell what the Buran linguist felt, or if it had any reaction at all.
Ma stared past them, his eyes too wide open to be actually focused on anything. After a while he winced, as if a tooth had gone bad in his mouth, or he remembered a lie he’d told years ago which still shamed him.
“I guess it starts with Einstein—”
“Well, that figures,” Nightingale, their “commander” said,
“—and Podolsky and Rosen,” Ma continued.
“Who were they?”
Ma shrugged. “Couple more physicists. The three of them came up with this thing, the EPR Paradox it’s called.”
“EPR?” Nightingale said. “What does EPR stand for?”
Walter Wu shook his head. “It stands for Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, okay?”
“Oh, sure. Okay, I’m with you. Go on.”
“This is very approximate,” Ma said, “but try to follow. Particles alternate between existing as probability waves and then sometime as actual pa
rticles. When they are actual particles, not waves, they have certain characteristics, one of which is spin. When a particle is in its wave state, you can’t tell its spin, but if you measure it, it drops from its wave state to its particle state. One principle of quantum physics is that its spin is random. Not only can we not tell its actual spin while it’s in its wave state, the universe itself doesn’t know until the instant the particle drops into its particle state.”
“That’s kind of weird,” Nightingale said, and beside him Walter Wu laughed.
“Oh, we’re just getting started with weird,” Ma said. “It’s possible for two particles to be entangled, which means we know their spin characteristics are balanced: one particle will spin up and one down, but while they are in their wave state the universe doesn’t know which is which. It just knows that if one spins up, the other spins down.
“So, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen set up this thought experiment: what if you could separate two quantum entangled particles while in their wave state and just measure one of them. Logically, the other particle has to collapse to its particle state and exhibit the opposite spin characteristic. The thing is, it has to do so instantly, and since the universe doesn’t know what its spin was before, how does it communicate that spin to it? You’ve separated them, moved them away from each other, You see the problem? The speed of light is an absolute speed limit, but somehow that information is transmitted from one entangled particle to another instantaneously, which is faster than light speed. By what mechanism does the universe transmit that information? Einstein called it, ‘Spooky action at a distance.’”
“But you said it was just a thought experiment,” Nightingale said.
“Sure, it was for those guys, two centuries ago. They didn’t have atom smashers to play with. We do. We’ve been running the experiment in particle accelerators since before the Varoki showed up. It works just as predicted: measure one particle and the other collapses from its wave state as well. We can actually watch it happen in the lab.”
“How does it work?” Nightingale asked.
“Well, that’s a hell of a question, sir. Einstein said the paradox shown by the experiment meant one of two things. It might mean quantum physics was all wrong, and the experiment wouldn’t actually come out that way. But since the experiment works, we know that’s not it.”
“What was his second thing?”
“That there’s something wrong with our understanding of the concept of location.” Ma paused and his eyes again got that far-away look. In a few moments, he came back to them and looked around at all of their faces in turn.
“If a tree falls in the forest,” he said, “and there is somebody there to hear it, does it make a sound?”
“You mean if nobody is there, don’t you?” Choice asked.
“I mean what I said.”
“No, it does not,” the Buran said in its dead, hollow voice. “Sound is made by the being hearing it. There is no sound in the universe outside the brains of living beings. There are only vibrations in a solid or fluid medium. Auditory sensors convert those vibrations to a sensation in the brain we equate with sound.”
Ma nodded. “Very good. There is no sound in the universe, except in our heads. Sound is an illusion. So is sight. There are electromagnetic waves of different intensities and wavelengths. Our eyes interpret radiation in what we call the visible spectrum as shapes and colors, but those exist only in our head. The universe doesn’t actually look like anything. Scent is an illusion. Taste, an illusion. Touch, an illusion. We already knew that. But what is far more difficult to grasp is that location is an illusion as well, although we should have known it two centuries ago, when Niels Bohr was unravelling the secret of the atom.
“Electrons are locked into orbits, and if one of them gains energy, it moves to a higher orbit. But it doesn’t do it like a spacecraft moving from one orbit to another, gradually passing through the space between the orbits. It is in one orbit, and then it simply is in another. It jumps. And the reason it does not move through the intervening space is that . . . there is no such thing.
“From here on, it gets disturbingly strange, but in a way, it is also obvious. Painfully obvious.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Five days later, on board USS John Fitzgerald Kennedy, CLS-222,
in high orbit around K’tok
6 October 2134
Sam waited for the holocon circuit to come alive and fought the urge to fidget. He breathed deeply and regularly. He didn’t want to appear out of breath or nervous.
The camera lights came on and the compartment in front of him disappeared, replaced by a sea of seated ship captains, mostly men and women, but a few Varoki and Zaschaan as well, and one Katami, its elaborate cranial crest rising above the crowd. It must be hard to face this sort of struggle all alone, the only Katami ship in a fleet of twenty-nine warships of one sort or another. As motley a fleet as had probably ever been assembled, its elements scattered through a span of space a couple hundred thousand kilometers across. USS Puebla far prograde, or spinward, depending on how you wanted to look at it, in the direction the planets moved around K’tok’s star. Rear Admiral Crutchley’s Task Force Twelve far to retrograde, or trailing, coming in fast from Mogo. Task Force Eleven with Stevens, Sam, and the other ships from K’tok in the middle, closing with P’Daan and his Troatta phalanx of ships head-on at almost sixty kilometers per second. The Troatta had not decelerated and they were not taking any evasive action.
The officers in the conference were arranged within the virtual array the same as for a large live briefing: junior officers in back and the senior to the front, with the four other flag officers of the fleet in the first row. Sam understood this was done to make the junior officers feel less self-conscious, not being under the eyes of their superiors. Sam and Stevens sat on the virtual stage facing the others. Larry Goldjune sat in the very back row, among the most junior of ship captains, and Goldjune’s face lost its color as he recognized Sam.
“Good day,” Admiral Stevens, said. “I’m going to turn this briefing over to the fleet’s new acting Tac boss. Some of you know him and most of you have heard of him—well, all of you since P’Daan’s broadcast five days ago. There’s a hell of a story behind how he managed to get back here to join us, but that’s for another time. For now, our focus is on the fight ahead of us. Lieutenant Commander Bitka, over to you.”
“Good morning,” Sam said but he paused when he saw a ripple of movement at the front of the virtual space. Three Human officers stood up. He knew two of them: Rear Admiral Victoria Crutchley, Royal Navy, and Brigadier General Robert Irekanmi, Federal Nigerian Navy. The third he did not recognize but he wore the uniform of an Indian Navy rear admiral. For a moment Sam thought this might be some sort of protest, but he had been on good terms with both Crutchley and Irekanmi. Then they began clapping.
Then the Zaschaan Squadron-Guiding admiral beside them stood and joined them, and then the others rose and applauded as well. Even the Varoki.
Even Larry Goldjune rose and clapped, although his heart was clearly not in it. Sam had difficulty speaking. The tribute, the welcome, was clearly heartfelt—well, mostly heartfelt. After perhaps a minute the applause subsided and gradually the officers took their seats.
“Thank you,” Sam said and nodded to them, particularly the flag officers in the front of the space who had begun it. “It’s good to be home. You can’t know how good it is, and I sincerely hope none of you ever finds out. It’s our job to make sure no one else ever has to.
“Vice Admiral Stevens has asked me to give you a final summary of the situation and a review of our plan of action. Task Force Eleven, under Admiral Stevens, is currently at four hundred and thirty thousand kilometers from the Troatta. Admiral Crutchley’s Task Force Twelve is at about three hundred thousand, but is closing at a lower velocity. We anticipate going to general quarters in one hour and will begin firing ordnance thirty minutes later. At Task Force Eleven’s closing rate of six
ty kilometers per second, this will be a very short, sharp fight. The task force will have passed through the Troatta fleet in less than two hours from now.
“The Troatta battle fleet is divided into six squadrons of six ships each, although the reserve squadron has only five. Each squadron has five ships deployed in a cross formation and one more ship to the rear, either the commander or a reserve ship to fill in a loss. The fleet is deployed in the same way: five squadrons in a cross formation with one more squadron behind in reserve. We have watched them practice a number of maneuvers over the last three days and know the squadrons on the periphery are prepared to wheel to face attack from several directions.
“Our plan is to force them to do exactly that.
“Their tactics are based on massed meson gunfire, and their formation reflects it. We gain no advantage from physical proximity, so our formations are dispersed and we are going to threaten them with attack from as many directions as possible: Task Force Twelve incoming from Mogo, Task Force Eleven outbound from K’tok, and USS Puebla from out in the boonies. At the same time, USS Kennedy in high K’tok orbit, will join in with some very long-range shots, once we get the jump drives working.
“One hour ago, the uBakai squadron and our sole Katami cruiser from Task Force Eleven began firing inert munitions into the path of the Troatta—what we Humans called buckshot. We don’t know what their defenses against inert munitions are, but we at least hope they will have to maneuver to some extent and perhaps disrupt their formation.
“Now, some news. Thirty minutes ago, I received word that a special working group we assembled has isolated the command code which turned off our jump drives.”
Sam had to pause for a few seconds to let the sudden exclamations and then cheers run their course.
“Yes, great news, but we’re not all the way home yet. They still have to construct a coded message which will overwrite that instruction and turn our drives back on. We’re committed to the attack and we don’t know when, or even if, they will get that work done. The good news is we’re all less than a light-minute from K’tok, so when they have the code, we’ll have it right away. USS Kittyhawk in Task Force Twelve should keep its destroyers in-cradle until the admiral gives the word to release. If we can get the drives working, Kittyhawk with its eight destroyers is our ace in the hole. One of them, anyway. Kennedy’s long-range shooting will be the other.”
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