Relic of Empire

by W. Michael Gear

  “Any mention of Rysta Braktov in those reports? Rysta would be making some kind of news-unless they have’her on ice.”

  Kaylla’s slim fingers clicked the keys again. “Nothing. “

  “Find out. This could be very important.

  “It’ll take until tomorrow at the latest.” She watched him uneasily. “You don’t look happy.” “I’m not happy. I’ve fought him. Kaylla, this is Sinklar. After Makarta Mountain, he didn’t just shut off, or slip into a holding pattern. That boy is still running on full-throttle. He’s planning, preparing, and initiating. Find MacRuder. No matter what. Anything else I should be caught up on?”

  “I think that’s it. What’s next on your agenda?” “Broadcasts. I want you and your people to put together some programs on Seddi philosophy and on the studies your scholars have run on the economic and political situations. I’ve cleared access to the big dishes so you can send clear across Free Space. Ily and Divine Sassa will go berserk, but they’ve got control of all the media in their respective empires. Now it’s our turn to promote our own agenda, and they can’t do a pus-sucking thing to stop us.99

  “Good idea. I’ll put some of our people on it.” Kaylla smiled. “I’d like to see Ily’s face when she hears the first of our broadcasts on unilateral episternology.”

  “So would I ... but from a great distance. The last time she saw us in action together she almost killed US. “

  “And Sinklar? What do you have in mind for him besides simplified data?”

  Staffa inspected the lines on his palm as he thought. “I’m hoping that he has enough distance from Bruen’s meddling and Makarta Mountain to be able to talk rationally. I’m going to contact him, talk to him, give him the Seddi data to do with as he pleases. He has his own free will. That’s the single gift God grants us. I’ll explain the necessity for stopping the war, see if he can grasp the realities.”

  Kaylla glanced sidelong at him. “And if Sinklar and Divine Sassa both insist on committing suicide? What then?”

  Staffa turned his hand, watching the corded tendons slide under scarred flesh. “Do you remember the conversation we had on ethics? We accept that God is eternal and that observations create reality ... affect the quanta by changing the energy of particles. We know that energy is eternal, God’s data cube, if you will. We both accept that the universe will end, and this current duality will be returned to the God Mind with the gravitational collapse of space-time. Because of our free will, any increase in suffering affects the observations made by both victim and inflicter. They reinforce the reality we have created through our observations. Therefore, the ethical human being seeks to alleviate suffering and promote good.”

  Kaylla nodded. “That’s essentially what the Seddi believe, and what we discussed. Why bring it up?” Staffa stared pensively at the stassa cup. “Because if all else fails, it explains the only ethical conclusion I’ve come to. “

  “And that is?”

  “Kaylla, if Rega and Sassa do go to war despite all my efforts to stop it, I’ll have one final option open to me. I took everything you taught me to heart. I believe your philosophy and cosmology. They fit what we know about physics and quantum effects. At the same time, what we know about gravitation, and what we suspect about the universe being closed, lends credence to your eschatology. Your system of belief is rational and beats hell out of the idea of Rotted and Blessed Gods. “

  “Get to the point, Staffa.”

  He slapped the table with finality. “If it all comes undone, Kaylla, the Companions will space again. This time, we’ll make a decision, and end the war, hopefully with enough of civilization intact so that you and Myles can salvage the species from extinction.”

  She stared coldly at him and the silence stretched. Staffa finally said. “I can do it by destroying the Sassan and Regan military strike forces in deep space to minimize civilian casualties. After that, I’ll have to blast major portions of the planet Rega, destroy their governmental centers and central comm facilities to render the administration of redistribution ineffectual. Myles Roma can effectively integrate Regan redistribution services from Sassa. I will assassinate His Holiness and finally-“

  “You’d increase suffering to alleviate it?”

  “Kaylla, the ghouls still haunt my dreams. You know. You’ve heard me whimpering in my sleep. I’ve considered it every way I can. If I can’t turn Sinklar, it’s the only option left---or we’ll all die.”

  “There has to be another way.” She’d stiffened, a barely controlled agony behind her masklike expression. “Then, by the quantum Gods, help me find it,

  Kaylla, because we’re running out of time. If I can’t find another way out, I’m going to have to stop Sinklar.” He avoided her piercing gaze while his guts crawled. “And the only way I know to do that is to kill him.

  Mac stepped through the hatch and onto Gyton’s bridge. When Rysta had roused him out of a deep sleep, he’d supposed he’d find her in the command chair. Instead, she leaned over the Intelligence First’s station. Mac grimaced and walked over to stand beside her, asking, “What’s up?”

  “Thought you might like a lesson in space strategy, son. “

  Mac ground his teeth. Somehow, he hadn’t quite gotten used to being referred to as “son” and “boy.” “What are you seeing?” He bent to look at the holo

  displays. The images consisted of a series of spectral analyses.

  Rysta craned her leathery neck to stare at him. “Tell me something. Just how were you planning to catch this freighter you want to ride piggyback on into Imperial Sassa?”

  Mac pulled at his earlobe for a moment and shrugged. “I thought we’d sneak up behind her. You know, hide in the redshift shadow and grab her.”

  “Right. Good move that, hiding in the redshift shadow. The Sassan drops from null singularity and he’s moving right at lightspeed, so what’s coming into the sensors from behind him is foggy-lightspeed being constant and all.”

  “That’s simple physics, isn’t it? Starships have a blind spot there . . . don’t they?”

  Rysta smacked her lips, staring absently at the overhead. “Blessed Gods, give me strength.”

  “What?” Rysta thrust her face within inches of his. “136y, how are you going to find this freighter you’re going to sneak in behind?”

  “Well, I thought that’s why we dropped out half a light-year back. We’d watch the scanners, pick up a reading, and change vector until we matched with them.”

  “How long does that take?”

  Mac shifted from one foot to the other as if the deck on which he stood had become as slippery as his plans. “Well ... maybe a week?”

  “Uh-huh? And how many gravities will that freighter put out shedding Delta VT’

  “Twenty?” Mac took a wild guess.

  “If you’re lucky. Keep in mind, a freighter is just that. A fat hauling machine. A warship can take forty to fifty gs, because the hull is designed for it. And while we’re on it, do you know why we can get that kind of acceleration?”

  “Because of the bounce-back collars,” Mac answered proudly.

  “Good for you. Why?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why do they work?”

  “Well, they refine the reaction mass.”

  “What’s the physics?”

  “I ... uh. . . . “

  “The reaction is accelerated through the tubes at speed of light,” Rysta barked. “The fields in the bounce-back collars warp the reaction, compress it, and send it out faster than the speed of light. The result is that for each unit of mass accelerated, energy increases exponentially as you increase hyperlight velocity. Correct?”

  “Right. “Why? “Huh? “Why does it happen?” At Mac’s blank look, she added sourly, “And you and Sinklar think you’re gonna conquer Free Space? Blessed Gods save us all. Listen, boy. It’s because you can’t violate the constancy of the speed of light. Accelerating the reaction mass tricks the constant. Since lightspeed can’t be vi6lated, s
omething has to give, and in this case it’s the ship. The ship doesn’t have much mass, relatively speaking, and the universe has all the rest. Thrust builds exponentially at hyperlight speeds.”

  “Right.” What in hell is she saying?

  “Now, back to space tactics. How do you find a Sassan freighter so that you-don’t have to lose a week while their redshift shadow collapses and you get spotted and blow the whole mission?”’

  Mac frowned and chewed at his lip for a second. “Well, you draw a straight line between Myklene and Sassa. Then you figure out the rate of deceleration the Sassan will use to arrive at.”

  “The galaxy turns, right? Do you know the constant? The amount of displacement from the vector the ship traveled leaving Myklene compared to the one it will have arriving? That’s critical, boy, because the longer a ship is in null singularity, the greater the galactic windage is going to be when it pops back in.” “I guess I don’t know that.”

  “At last,” Rysta crooned. “Well, maybe I can teach you something about space after all. All right, listen. That young man over there under the worry-cap is doing a lot of things. Not only is he monitoring the ship, but he’s interacting constantly with the navcomm. The brain can visualize in three dimensions. Right now, he’s existing as Gyton-kind of like being a trout in a stream, or an acrobat performing zero g ballet. He can feel what we can only draw in a fourdimensional diagram.

  “I follow YOU.”

  “All right. Vector and galactic drift, those are the data we need to make a rough guess as to where the Sassan will pop out. But we don’t have all those data, do we? We don’t know his vector when he went null singularity. We don’t know the amount of time he’s been in that state. We don’t know his ship’s acceleration, attitude at initiation, or what his vessel’s total mass is, all of which affect his reentry point on this side.”

  Mac deflated and gave her a dull look. “I didn’t know it was going to be that hard. “

  Rysta gave him a satisfied smile. “It isn’t.” “But you just told me-“

  “I just told you what any groundhog infantry commander would think was the right way to ambush a spaceship. All right, next lesson. A spaceship radiates energy, correct? Infrared, photons, gases, microwaves ... the entire spectrum. What happens to that radiated energy while a starship is in null singularity?”

  “It goes into the nothingness outside of this universe.” “Wrong. Want to tell me why?”

  “It’s the light constant again?”

  “Nope. Try the second law of thermodynamics, the conservation of energy. Every erg of massIenergy that goes into null singularity must come out. You can’t take energy out of this universe. Period.”

  “All right, I’ll accept that.”

  “Let me tell you a story. Way back when, people trembled in fear that if the null singularity failed, you’d be stuck out there, wherever there is. The problem was, on those occasions when the null singularity generation failed, ships popped right back into this universe. Once or twice that was unfortunate because of what they ran into-traveling as they were at lightspeed-but no one got lost in a different universe. Not one photon got lost. The second law of thermodynamics can’t be broken.”

  “And that will tell us where to find our Sassan?” “Boy, you’ve got a brain like a rock. If you were looking for a sniper in the night, what would you do?”

  “Drop my IR visor and.... Rotted Gods! If you can’t even lose a photon, and ships radiate. . . . “ “That’s right.” Rysta gave him an evil grin and bent over the display. “You wondered why we dropped out so far back and have been shedding Delta V in a wide dispersal? We’ve allowed that starburst of radiation to dissipate-assuming anyone was looking for us.

  “Now, knowing that, check the readings from our detectors. See these spikes on the chart? They’re like rings on a pond, boy. That tall one with the heavy particles was a warship. These others, freighters. Notice how you get a shifting pattern here? You can see that the first particles we intercepted came in at a different angle that slowly drifted to the galactic northwest. That’s the windage we were talking about. This other variation plotted on the scattergram is the difference in ship capabilities. The acute angle created by the warship and the redshift of the reading indicate it dropped in closer to Imperial Sassa and shed Delta V at about forty gravities. They were in a hurry. Notice how the readings fall off? That’s the deceleration. See, you can estimate the rate, follow each ship in as the Doppler and mass change. It’s like a trail and fingerprint for each vessel. So what I’ve been doing is matching up their entry vector and spreading our reaction mass over a broad area as we curve our vector to match theirs. We want our radiation to mingle with theirs, mask our presence. At the same time, I’ve been guessing where the next big Sassan freighter should drop in.”

  “What about this last one? It’s barely reading at all after the first burst of energy.” Mac pointed to a fuzzy spike followed by a faint line, the signal weak. Triangulation indicated a highly dispersed pattern immediately ahead of them.

  “That’s what I called you up here for,” Rysta’s eyes gleamed. “That’s a Sassan freighter. A great big fat one-and we’re already in his redshift shadow. You wanted a Sassan ship to sneak us in ... and that’s the one. We’re dropping right onto his back.”

  Ily’s aircar settled in a grassy flat beyond a corps of armored assault vehicles. Behind the looming ranks of ceramic and steel monsters, she could see an HT, the heavy transport lifters used by the military to drop the armored forces used to spearhead planetary invasions. Targa, originally considered a matter of social control, had only employed airborne infantry. Hitting a planet like Sassa, however, would necessitate coordinated orbital bombardment, armored shock armies spearheading assaults, and infantry follow-up and mop-up. At least, that was the way Sinklar had explained it to her.

  In the twilight background of sunset, beyond a froth of bivouacked bubble huts, the roof of the Tarcee mansion could be made out. At least ten thousand troops had set up camp on the flattened grass north of the buildings.

  Sinklar’s LC stood out among the rest as the only one displaying scorching, blast damage, and the scars of combat. It looked dusty and worn beside the newer equipment. Ily stepped out onto the crushed grass and walked up to Sinklar’s LC. She glanced around and climbed the assault ramp into the murky darkness of the craft’s interior. She followed the aisle to the bulkhead, ducking through the hatch to find Sinklar in the cubbyhole of the command center. A headset looped around his ears and his attention was centered on one of the monitors. Every display glowed, each depicting movements of troops and armor.

  “Sinklar?” She got no reaction as he ordered, “That’s it, Anton, spread your people out. Your Corporals are on their own now.” A pause. “No. It doesn’t matter a damn what your Division First told you. The situation’s been changed.

  Understand? All that matters now is taking out that flanking column.” Another pause. “Screw the Holy Gawdamn Book! Get those flankers or a lot of your people are going to die-and I’ll kick your ass! Go!”

  “Sinklar!” She tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped, glaring wildly up at her before grinning sheepishly.

  “Ily. When did you get here?” He pulled the headset off, running fingers through his unruly mop of black hair. He looked weary, eyes red-rimmed, lids drooping.

  “Just now. It turns out I’ve got most of the major problems dealt with. What is all this?”

  He pointed at the monitors. “The screens to the right are Mayz, Kap, and Ayms. They’re trying to beat some sense into the Regan Divisions. On the left you see my Targans, each under a fumbling Regan commander who is trying to learn from my Targan veterans.” He shook his head. “I didn’t know it would be this bad. Some of these people make Mykroft look pus-dripping talented!”

  “I have a free evening. I was thinking perhaps some Ashtan steak, sauteed Riparian squid with klavva nut filling, orange-glazed mentha root with Etarian coffee, and something as decadent a
s a Sassan God for dessert might be in order. How about it?”

  Sinklar rubbed his eyes and glanced back at the board—only to stiffen. He clamped the headset against one ear and yelled, “No! Anton, you idiot! You don’t just march out in the middle of the field like you own the place! You’re going to be . . . “ his voice went flat, “. . . fried like an egg. “ A pause. “’I know I told you that’s all that mattered. That didn’t mean you should just run out into their guns. Use your maggot-licking brain next time.”

  “About dinner?” Ily reminded.

  Sinklar exhaled and cocked his head. “Can you give me about two hours?”

  Ily crossed her arms. “Two hours? It looks you’re mobilizin a ainst the Companions out there.”

  " He screwed his face up and wiggled his jaw around the way a tired man does, and stared up at her emotionlessly. “I can’t leave just yet. I’ve got six Sections I’m trying to coordinate. I don’t think they’re going to last another two hours against the Third Targandespite the idiotic leadership.”

  “Two hours,” she told him firmly. “I’ll have my aircar sent to pick you up. We’ll eat at my place ... and see what the evening has to offer.” Then she bent down, kissing him and drawing his lower lip away with her as she straightened. Then she gave him a coquettish smile. “See you then.”

  She turned in time to see Mhitshul frozen in the forward hatch where it led up to the cockpit. She gave the aide a saucy wink and walked out, allowing that extra little bit of sway in her hips.

  She’d felt Sinklar’s response. Tired or not, he’d be on her doorstep within two hours. Indeed, Ily, you’ve set the hook. Now, let’s play the fish a little before we reel him in.

  “I am perched on the edge of a cataclysm. Ily informs me that Staffa is aligned with the Sassans. I have begun to mobilize the Empire yet again for war. Tonight, as I sit here at the desk, I feel empty, weary, perhaps the most weary man in the universe. Staffa? With the Sassans? How can we hope to win against his terrifying forces?