He thought of his brother Vyrl, who had married at a younger age than Shannon was now. Vyrl and Lily had so many children, with another on the way. Shannon couldn’t imagine it. Nor could he imagine leaving Lyshriol.
Most of all, he struggled to understand Althor, who had slaughtered over three hundred Lyshrioli soldiers with a laser carbine. Shannon knew the remorse his brother had wrestled with after that day. But it never showed. Althor was by nature a warrior; he conquered his inner demons with a success Shannon could never manage. He had worshipped Althor all his life, but he could never be like his warlord brother.
Six years had passed since that day. No one fought battles on Lyshriol now. Everyone seemed stunned, the armies of Dalvador and Rillia, who had fought side by side, and those of their enemy, Avaril Valdoria, their father’s cousin, who hated Eldrinson for inheriting the title of Bard.
Shannon had never met Avaril. Those days of strife had become remote. He had dreaded going to war, and it filled him with immeasurable relief that he wouldn’t be expected to ride into battle when he reached his two octets of years. He wanted to wander the mountains, use his bow for bringing down game rather than men, let his emotions blend with the Archers beyond the Backbone, beyond Ryder’s Lost Memory, far in the north where the chill winds blew.
Instead he had murdered one of the most powerful men in an interstellar empire, and in doing so, he had robbed his family, this world, and the Imperialate of their chance to discover how Vitarex had invaded this Skolian stronghold. In the end, neither ISC nor the Traders demanded Shannon be prosecuted for Vitarex’s death, but it made no difference. Shannon knew what he had done.
For that, he could never forgive himself.
24
Onyx Platform
It was only a blip.
Just a little spike of power in a Dieshan power grid.
The tech on duty noticed and checked the fluctuations in that section of the grid. The spike was in reasonable bounds. He found nothing out of order, so he went on to his other work. He had done this shift for years, taking night duty at the ISC power station high in the Red Mountains West of HQ City and DMA. This grid served only a few defense installations—and the palace they guarded.
He glanced out the window. The palace stood high in the mountains, majestic and otherworldly, with walls of rose crystal. Its onion towers made silhouettes against an intense crimson sunset.
Ruby Palace.
Home of the Imperator.
Half an hour before sunrise, Althor jogged out to the airfield with the other three members of his squadron.
Their Jags waited on the tarmac.
Technically the single-pilot spacecraft were called JG-8 fighters. The name Jag came from “lightning jag,” the nickname test pilots had given the prototype, the JG-1. Althor’s adrenaline surged when he saw Redstar. His ship. Only he could fly this beauty. Its onboard Evolving Intelligence had become part of his brain and recognized no other pilot.
The four ships waited on the tarmac like alabaster works of art. On the ground, they were elongated, with wings extended. In flight, they could change according to their purpose: spread wings for subsonic speeds; wings pulled in tight for hypersonic flight; rounded shape to minimize surface area during interstellar flight or for stealth or battle. The corrugated hull optimized airflow. Its weapons remained hidden in bays.
Secondary Steel, their squad leader, jogged at Althor’s right. An older man with a distinguished record, he had steel gray hair and regular features. This was his last year in the J-Force; soon he would retire and spend time with his grandchildren. Tertiary Belldaughter ran on Steel’s other side, strapping on her Jumbler gun. After Althor, she was the youngest member of the squad. Tertiary Wellmark was jogging to Althor’s left. She gazed out at the red line on the horizon that presaged the dawn, her chin lifted, her queue of dark hair rustling. They all wore Jagernaut blacks, with silver conduits, studs, and other equipment embedded in the leather and their gauntlets. Their boots thudded on the field and their Jumblers hung heavy and black at their hips.
Althor was the newest of the four, proud to fly with Blackstar Squadron, one of the most resourceful squads in the J-Force, though he suspected the Traders used a far less polite term than “resourceful.” Blackstar had a notorious reputation. He intended to make it more so.
His Jag was luminescent in the predawn light, pearly and white like alabaster. As he ran alongside it, he trailed his hand along its tellerene hull, a composite threaded with tubular fullerene molecules. Lightweight and fatigue resistant, tellerene retained its strength even at the extreme temperatures of hypersonic reentry. Doped with specialized nanobots, it could repair itself better than many materials, which meant the hull showed fewer of the pits, grooves, and other damage ships took on during space travel. Like their pilots, Jags were top-of-the-line.
He stopped and laid his palm against the unmarked surface. A prong clicked out. When he pressed his wrist against the prong, or psiphon, it snapped into his biomech socket.
Connection, Althor thought.
Verified. That response came from his Jag’s EI. Redstar was sentient, its brain inextricably interwoven with his.
The airlock snapped apart. With his enhanced optics, Althor could slow the motion enough to see the outer and inner doors open together. ISC wizards were working on membranes that would act as molecular airlocks, but they hadn’t perfected the technology, so Jags used conventional airlocks with two doors.
Althor swung up into the cabin. It was small, only a few paces across, its deck tiled with white squares that shed diffuse light. Equipment filled the cabin and bulkhead compartments: a cocoon bunk, survival gear, hand weapons, waste processor, environment suit, propulsion pack, all the necessities to live—and fight—in space. Alone. Jags had to operate autonomously. A squad could spend days or even months on their own. They were the vanguard, the units that supported the behemoths of ISC, the battle cruisers, the fleets, the multitude of other spacecraft, both manned and unmanned, that made up the majority of the space forces.
The pressure of his boots on the deck activated the cockpit and it irised open like the shutter on a high-speed holocam. Althor squeezed into his pilot’s seat, and its exoskeleton folded around his body, encasing him in a silver mesh. The visor lowered over his head and data scrolled across its display. Panels moved into place around him, and their translucent surfaces produced holomaps of space and stats on the Jag. A panel to his right showed a holographic representation of the area outside, with his ship as the last in a line of four. Beyond them, the arches and magrails of the starport soared in the sky, silver, white, and cobalt in the dawn.
Althor barely even noticed as the exoskeleton plugged psiphons into sockets. Redstar linked to him by sending signals through the psiphons to threads in his body, which carried them to his spinal node. They could also use remote signals, but the prongs offered a more reliable connection.
His mind interpreted Redstar’s interaction with his node as a voice: Redstar attending.
Acknowledged, Althor thought. He needed no security checks; Redstar knew him. Some of its components had been developed from his own DNA. It was an extension of his brain just as he was of its mind. If anyone else tried to fly the ship, use its controls, or even board without permission, Redstar would lock up every system, trap the intruder within, and notify Althor, or if it couldn’t reach him, the nearest J-Force authorities. If Althor ever stopped flying, the J-Force would have to retrain Redstar from scratch. Sometimes a Jag’s EI refused to accept a new pilot and they had to transfer a new brain into the ship.
Redstar growled in his mind. Boosting to Kyle space.
Althor submerged his mind into another universe.
Kyle space obeyed the laws of Hilbert spaces, a mathematical formalism known to the Raylicans for millennia, and to the peoples of Earth well before they achieved space flight. Just as a Fourier transform shifted signals from an energy space to a time space, so Redstar had just shifted Althor fr
om real space into Kyle space.
When Althor had a thought, the quantum wavefunction of his brain changed according to the chemical processes produced by his neurons. In quantum terms, it meant the wave that described his brain evolved as he thought. Humans had known for centuries how to express such waves, but it had taken much longer to achieve the computing power to calculate them.
The waves that described Althor’s thoughts at any instant depended on the positions of the particles in his brain. When his mind shifted into the Kyle web, he entered a place where his thought defined his “position.” The more his thoughts matched those of another telop, the closer together they were in Kyle space. It made no difference if the other telop was near him in the real universe or halfway across the galaxy; they would be next to each other in the web. It made possible immediate communication over interstellar distances.
The Kyle web, popularly known as the psiberweb, spanned the Kyle universe. Its nodes provided gateways from the real universe into the web. Only telepaths could use those gates, and each experienced the web in their own way. To Althor it was a grid, vivid red against a deep black background. The presence of his mind distorted the grid into a peak that resembled the diffraction pattern from a circular aperture, as if his thoughts diffracted through the gateway into Kyle space. Circular ridges surrounded the peak, lower in height, like ripples in a lake when a stone dropped into the water. The peak was his central consciousness, and the ripples were satellite thoughts at the edges of his mind.
An emerald green spark appeared next to him and grew into a second peak, rising up out of the grid. A gold peak appeared next, as close to Althor as the green. Then the blackness itself formed a dark peak, with the red, green, and gold packets arrayed around its powerful shape.
Blackstar Squadron report. That came from Steel, the squad leader, the black peak.
Goldstar up, Belldaughter thought.
Greenstar up, Wellmark thought.
Redstar up, Althor thought. All four pilots were strong psions, but the Rhon power of his mind rumbled compared to the others. In their four-way link, he had to hold back the full strength of his mind so that he didn’t overpower the others. Their exchange flashed by in a fraction of a second. They had jumped into accelerated mode and would probably remain with it until they finished this run.
A psicon blinked on Althor’s display, a blue circle, the image of a button used to activate the lock on a piece of luggage. He focused on it and a prerecorded thought from Secondary Steel came to him: The security cloak is operating. Our presence in Kyle space can’t be detected by other telops here.
Then in real time, Steel thought, Link.
Greenstar linked, Wellmark replied.
Goldstar linked, Belldaughter thought.
Redstar linked, Althor answered.
In the four months Althor had flown with Blackstar, since his graduation, he had been integrating into the mental link they formed together as a squadron. Their minds felt right: strong, intelligent, calm, rational. They had been selected for mental compatibility; otherwise they couldn’t function as a unit.
Althor knew he was sitting in his chair, but his perception of reality receded, displaced by his mindscape. He had trained at DMA to operate simultaneously in his universe and Kyle space. Most telops couldn’t manage it, which was another reason so few Jagernauts existed. The thoughts of the other squad members murmured in the background of his mindscape. Wellmark was running checks on her Jag, synchronizing Greenstar with the other three ships. Althor had Redstar parallel his systems to hers, and Blackstar and Goldstar joined them in running checks: nav, cyber, weapons, comm, hydraulics, biomech.
Pain sparked in Althor’s head and he pressed his fingertips into his temples. Jagernauts paid a price for their four-way link; to maintain such a strong connection required concentration and resources. The more people in the link, the more it taxed their bodies, minds, and ships, and that limited the size of a squad to four Jagernauts. Nor could humans sustain that boosted connection for long. But when it worked, the squadron link was a miracle. They could communicate anywhere, under any conditions, instantaneously.
Althor smiled, thinking of the Cheshire cat he had read about in a literary work from the Allied classics. He felt that satisfied to be a member of Blackstar. He didn’t make a big deal about it, though. Some might say that Jagernauts were notorious for their cocky self-confidence, especially Blackstar Squadron. No reason to swell the already healthy egos of his squad mates.
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. 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 thrusters they used in deep space. The system checked as ready to go.
Systems initialized and ready, the Goldstar El 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, they 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 with offensive capabilities, so 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 Eubian,
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, Redstar thought.
Althor 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 bottle that held the fuel. During inversion, the bottle drew on the cosmic-ray flux in complex space, pulling in high-energy particles. It stored the contents by spreading them through complex space, varying the 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 them into the interaction area; the fuel bottle leaked positrons into the interaction area; the electrons and positrons annihilated in magnificent bursts of energy, producing thrust for the Jag.
Quasis drop, Redstar thought.
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 that 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.
Schism: Part One of Triad (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Page 35
