“Cycling the airlock,” Saint Matthew said. After a moment, the AI said, “If they don’t fall for it, we’ll be trapped in here. They can cycle in and shoot you long before we can cycle the bay doors. Then I’ll spend the rest of my short life being disassembled by people who aren’t even technically competent enough to appreciate what they’re destroying.”
The airlock opened and Belisarius darted in.
“Martyrdom,” he answered.
He pressed his face plate to the thick window of the airlock’s second door, dialing up the infrared and ultraviolet pickup of his eyes. The tight interferences in the electromagnetic tickled at his magnetosomes.
“Martyrdom with no one to write the new gospel of Saint Matthew,” the AI said glumly. “Not that there’s any need to. I haven’t performed any miracles yet.”
The airlock hissed open and Belisarius floated into the vacuum of the bay. He closed the airlock door behind him. His hyper-sensitive eyes showed the bay in grainy, overexposed detail, with anomalous greens and blues stippling the walls like pixels. In the center of the empty space, between shock-absorbent plastic and rubber braces, glimmered the pair of ancient wormholes.
Awe washed over him.
The best theories in civilization guessed that the forerunners made all these stable wormholes eons ago, when the first galaxies were still shapeless, lumpy things. The wormhole network had endured cosmological time, even if its creators had not. But this pair of wormholes was different from all others. They touched awkwardly, the contact quite obviously not intended, and they were interfering with each other, like two macroscopic quantum objects. And in this interference, they’d curled causality around themselves. These interfering, time-crossing wormholes were a new microscope to reveal all that the universe hid from itself. Everything he’d said to Saint Matthew had been true. The Homo quantus needed to peel away the layers of obscurity from the universe. It was as important to him as survival itself, and he’d created an elaborate confidence scheme to get his hands on them. He’d distracted the Union with what they wanted, played on their passions and their willingness to con someone else, to get a chance to stare the nature of reality in the eye.
Awe.
“Mister Arjona!” Saint Matthew said. “The MPs are coming this way. They’re almost at the airlock. I’ve tied this part of the ship into a closed communication circuit. I’ve routed their comms to me and I answer them as if I was the bridge, but they’ll still shoot us.”
“Can you send them away?”
“I tried. They’re noticing anomalies.”
Belisarius moved to the shadows by the wall.
“If they come in, can you stop them?” Saint Matthew asked.
“I was only able to shock the others with the element of surprise.”
“Then we’re both dead, as is Cassandra. We’ll have gotten the Union fleet through the Puppet Axis, but we won’t have gotten anything for it.”
“Cassandra could still follow the rest of the plan and get away in the tug,” Belisarius said.
“That’s no comfort! You’ve killed us.”
“There’s still a way out.” But the cold, yawning fear beneath his ribs belied Belisarius’s words.
He increased the strength of his magnetic field. Magnetic detail in the hallways and bays nearby pressed at him. He was looking for a very specific magnetic signal, something that would tell him that his idea could work. And outside, in the hallway, he felt the tickle of a small, fast-moving magnetic signal with the kind of fine detail associated with a biological source. A Homo quantus was out there.
He took a nervous breath and induced savant. Geometric and mathematical perceptions unfolded. The thin luminescence of the time gates became a four-dimensional hyper-ellipsoid. The equations describing its curves became clear to him, and the wavelengths of its faint Cherenkov radiation told him how the edges of the singularity interacted with normal space.
Beautiful and deadly.
“Mister Arjona! They’re here!”
The bay lights flashed on in glaring white-yellow. Faces showed through the portholes in the airlock. The MPs were looking at Belisarius.
“Hide!” Saint Matthew said. “Do something!”
He was doing something. He was keeping the MPs’ attention on him. And he was preparing to enter the time gates.
“If you can’t keep rerouting their comms to you, this is all going to fall apart,” Belisarius said.
“I’m rerouting! I’m answering. But eventually they’re going to figure out what I’m doing.”
“Be creative,” Belisarius said, as he set the service band containing Saint Matthew on the floor, magnetized. “You’ve got to hold them off for about three minutes.”
“Why three minutes? What’s in three minutes? Why doesn’t anyone tell me what’s going on?”
Belisarius’s breath trembled. His hands shook. They wouldn’t be cold for long. The fugue would see to that. He clasped his fingers together and stared up at the temptation of the time gates. He’d made his gamble, playing the cards, playing the player and rolling the dice all at once, and it had come to this. He had to enter the fugue.
“Mister Arjona!” Saint Matthew transmitted. “They’re getting vacuum suits on! They’re going to start cycling the airlock!”
Belisarius’s savant mind didn’t fear. At its fastest, the airlock took one hundred and thirty seconds to cycle. He would be gone by then. Belisarius sent an electrical charge to the left temporal lobe, shutting down portions of his brain.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
BELISARIUS THE SUBJECTIVE consciousness ceased to be and the quantum intellect self-assembled in that void. It immediately acted on self-preservation priorities, triggering the suit’s cold thrusters and sliding into the wormhole.
Space-time expanded. Time slowed and widened. The quantum intellect stopped its forward movement. Its internal gyroscopic senses at first delivered nonsensical values. After some seconds, it concluded that it was floating in an eleven-dimensional region of hyper-space. The quantum intellect was only four-dimensional: length, width, height and time. Most of the seven new dimensions open around it were spatial, but some were temporal.
Wormholes, whether ship-induced ones or the enduring Axes Mundi built by the forerunners, were tunnels of four-dimensional space running through an eleven-dimensional universe. They connected distant regions of the cosmos by a much shorter bridge, and the additional dimensions of space-time could be ignored. Here, there was no tunnel. The intellect floated in a raw eleven-dimensional hyper-volume. Sensory input, whether visual, magnetic, or even tactile, was ambiguous. Magnetosomes recorded eerie warbling in strangely textured electromagnetic fields. Yawning space, lit by a sourceless light, made a blunt tool of sight.
The intellect had no ready-made algorithms for interpreting electromagnetic signals when multiple dimensions of time were present. It spent minutes constructing mathematical filters to interpret the information coming through its senses. Energy, momentum, wavelength, diffraction and wave propagation all had other behaviors in eleven dimensions.
The intellect slowly built a map of the kaleidoscopic space and recorded everything it could. Internal gyroscopes, now calibrated to eleven-dimensional space-time, detected a slow drift. The intellect was drifting along a low-energy path. Based on the map it was constructing, this path would eventually cross the entirety of this higher-dimensional space all the way to the other mouth of the paired wormholes. In eleven years, the intellect would emerge eleven years in the past.
This was not the only way through the interior of the paired wormholes, only the lowest-energy path. With eleven dimensions of space-time associated with the interior of each wormhole, the number of possible pathways through the wormholes was actually twenty-two orders of magnitude more. To exit the wormholes before the suit’s life support supplies ran out, the intellect required a shorter, higher-energy path.
It activated the vacuum suit’s cold jets, passing deeper into the conjoined wor
mholes, feeling its way through the additional dimensions with magnetic fields and brief flashes of the emergency beacon light. By timing the return signals from the beacon, the intellect continued mapping the interior. Several dimensions of the interior were only light-milliseconds across, while others extended for light-seconds of immensity. Others were dimensions of time, not space. The quantum intellect calculated a trajectory, and then activated its cold jets. It rotated across five axes, before propelling itself forward, off the lowest-energy path.
The probability of becoming lost in the immensity of this hyperspace-time was significant. The intellect in its vacuum suit could leave its current four dimensions and enter another four, and lose its bearing, perhaps even be unable to rotate back the way it had come. The quantum intellect halted after four point seven hyper-kilometer-seconds, rotated across five axes, and propelled itself forward on a new path.
The intellect stored the torrent of observational data streaming in through its magnetosomes, eyes and the limited sensors attached to the vacuum suit. The data buffers in its ocular implants quickly filled, and it dumped the information into its biological memory every few seconds. However, the data from its magnetosomes was extremely dense, tens of millions of individual data points each second. It was running into a problem. At this rate, it would run out of free memory within minutes. It stopped.
The quantum intellect was a set of interacting algorithms, each with their own level of importance. At the deepest level of importance were two priorities of equal value: the priority to understand reality, and the priority of preserving itself.
Its neural memory was near full of irreplaceable data, but the quantum intellect had travelled only partway through the conjoined wormholes. The amount of data required to navigate the whole way through this hyper-space-time was a significant fraction of its total capacity.
It could not go forward without erasing unique observations. It could not keep the observations without becoming lost. These priorities occupied the same level of primacy and it could not reassign new values. And no external intellect was available to assist in breaking the impasse.
Nothing in the memories of the Belisarius subjectivity was helpful. The Belisarius subjectivity’s memories of each discussion of his plans were deceptive and contradictory, and even occasionally self-deceiving. The Belisarius subjectivity operated on multiple levels of deception, with overlapping realities and narratives, interacting and interfering so that knowledge was less factual and more probabilistic, similar to superimposed quantum waves.
The quantum intellect could not cede this decision to the Belisarius subjectivity. The Belisarius subjectivity and the quantum intellect were binary states. The quantum intellect could only exist and access quantum perceptions in the absence of subjectivity. The subjectivity would immediately collapse wave functions, including the complex navigational data. It was at a logical impasse. The intellect could not solve this on its own, nor turn the problem over to the Belisarius subjectivity. And the Belisarius subjectivity could not coexist with the objective intellect.
This last statement was an assumption, stored deep in the parameter space of the intellect.
Under what circumstances might the subjectivity and the objectivity coexist? The Belisarius subjectivity observed, and therefore collapsed, superimposed quantum systems. What if the Belisarius subjectivity received none of the electromagnetic input that was the principal source of quantum information? Such a partitioning of memory, processing and sensation would reduce the processing resources of the intellect, but would introduce a second intellect that could solve the impasse.
The intellect partitioned its neural architecture. The intellect activated the new structure, reconstituting the Belisarius subjectivity.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
STILLS WAS GONNA shit on somebody if they didn’t let him do something. Inactivity cramped his muscles. His thick, whale-derived skin itched from lack of scrubbing and preening. The fast, dangerous dive in the depths of Blackmore Bay had been a fuckin’ trip. Since then, his water had become stale. His breathing and shitting and pissing were straining the recirc system. Only pissing on someone else would cure that.
The Union engineers had not been able to fit his chamber into the cockpit of the second inflaton speeder, so they’d bolted it to the floor of the rear cargo area and run telemetry and wired controls back to him.
The inside of his chamber had a set of piloting controls that could be pulled out of the floor near the lock. Instead of visual read-outs, the displays were electrical and sonic. Speakers inside his chamber projected the world outside in sonar echoes that appeared to him as shapes. Abstract and non-geometric information, like the status read-outs on the ship’s systems, appeared electrically, in shifting microcurrents in the water that he could read with his electroplaques.
He’d been running simulations using the little racer’s performance specs. He’d memorized engine warm-up and cool-down rates, acceleration profiles, shear force tolerances, pitch, yaw, and roll rates and balances.
He’d been holding back on pronouncing on the inflaton racer, but after twenty minutes in its systems, he’d seen enough. It had no weapons, but it was a ballsy little ship, and monomaniacal about speed. It had space for cargo, but the rest was devoted to the drive. The inflaton racer was ugly, powerful, magnificent in concept, simultaneously awkward and genius in execution, with some clumsy engineering choices in a few places. The Sixth Expeditionary Force had thrown conventional wisdom to the currents in some design features, but in others they’d clung close to traditional design in the way that prototypes sometimes did, as if this ugly drive tube with a cargo bay and a cockpit wasn’t sure what it wanted to be. It reminded him of the mongrels.
Nine other Union ships had followed the Gbudue out of the crust of Oler. Stills rode the inflaton racer in the Fashoda, the tenth and last ship. The Limpopo and the Omukama were staying on the distal side of the Puppet Axis. Stills didn’t know why, but didn’t really give a shit either.
By the time the Fashoda emerged, the defenses of the Puppet Free City would be a nest of hornets, and the foreign military assets near Oler would be like sharks scenting blood. A shit-storm of mobilizations would sound throughout the entire Epsilon Indi system, and probably farther. This was no nighttime theft without witnesses.
Stills would be dumped from the cargo bay into the middle of a major military op. Arjona had given him even odds on surviving. Enwombing water muted the shocks and accelerations of the warship’s movements through the Puppet Axis, but an unnatural bump, big enough for him to feel, shook him in his straps. Some of the Fashoda’s external telemetry fed into the racer, but it was scratchy, static-filled.
The Fashoda was rising out of the Puppet Free City. A channel of destruction had been blown out of the ice, a kilometer and a half deep, ragged-edged and cone-shaped, like the exit wound of shrapnel. There was no sign anymore of the Puppet defenses in the channel to the Axis. Nine warships had already blasted their way out before them.
But the space above the Free City was alive with artillery explosions and chaff. Lasers heated up any debris in their firing arcs. Small fighter craft, tough old Anglo-Spanish Mark 21 Daggers and bigger cast-off Congregate Perceuses, flew nasty.
Despite their ages, both groups of fighters punched hard. The Fashoda’s sensors didn’t have the short-cut notation he’d trained on for recognizing ordnance, but it looked like the Mark 21s were firing stiletto missiles. The invisible lines of fire from the Perceuses lit up in X-rays as the radioactive particles streams decayed.
Beyond a hot debris field, standing far out, a Congregate heavy battleship, maybe the Val-Brillant, was shitting its arsenal onto the disorganized line of Union warships that raced away from Oler. Precise lasers and rail-gun fire lit up the Union ships. New, ultra-fast chasseur missiles, and heavier casse à face missiles, the ones called the moon-busters, dipped towards the last warships to emerge from the Puppet Axis.
It was hot all right.
<
br /> He got no instructions from the bridge of the Fashoda. They were probably too busy pissing themselves and firing. They weren’t opening the bay doors for him to get out.
This part of the plan had always been one of the most dangerous pieces. Hopping off the Fashoda in the middle of a firefight was always going to be dicey, but the real danger had been if the Union didn’t let him off, if they decided they didn’t like Arjona’s price after all. Arjona had set up the down payment with the emergence of the Gbudue. Now that the job was done, like any contractor, Arjona had to hope his client would pay on time. Or leave someone like Stills to collect the rest.
Stills switched on comms. Hey, cocksuckers! he said electrically. Open the fucking doors! I want to make my run for it before you get close to the hot stuff!
Moments later, his translator sent him back error signals. What the fuck language were they speaking?
Speak French, gang de cons! he said. Probably not a very politic thing to say to a rebelling, air-sucking client nation of the Congregate, but he was in a fucking hurry.
Direct hit to bays three through six, his system translated after a few seconds. All bay systems off line. Incoming fire. Brace yourself and shut up!
Oh shit.
Then the Fashoda accelerated so fast that even Stills, sealed in water, could feel it. It took a shitload of weight to make a mongrelfeel acceleration. For the Fashoda to be pulling these kind of gravities on its crew, everyone must be in acceleration chambers.
His readouts started giving him good information. Thirty-five gravities and climbing.
Telemetry showed the Fashoda and the other Union warships pulling away from pursuing missiles. Even Congregate particle weapons and laser fire started missing. Their targeting computers weren’t calibrated to these kinds of accelerations. Even the tonnère, the Congregate fighter so fast that only mongrel pilots could survive flying it, topped out at twenty-two gravities of acceleration under combat conditions. Light missiles could only sustain thirty gravities and still hope to hit an evasive target.
The Quantum Magician Page 32
