Warstrider 06 - Battlemind

by William H. Keith

  Kara had been ordered to attend this briefing as company commander of the Phantoms, who would be accompanying the Gauss on Gateway. The others were the senior officers with the fleet that was now being styled the First Galactic Expeditionary Force, or One-GEF.

  Her father was there, of course. He’d been chosen to lead the expedition. So, too, was an image of Dev… looking curiously shrunken, even subdued. What, she wondered, had happened to him in the Battle of Earth?

  The others gathered there were a varied lot, a crowd of nearly fifty in a three-deep circle around Vic. She recog­nized only a few. Four of them, three men and a woman, were company commanders like herself off the Confedera­tion carrier Karyu, which would be accompanying them as their “big gun” into tempus incognito. Karyu’s skipper, Rear Admiral Barnes, was there, as well as Senior Captain Carol Latimer, the new CO of the Gauss. Dr. Cal Norris, Taki and Daren, and Lieutenant Tanya Coburn represented the science department. Captain Jorge Hernandez was CO of the cruiser Independence. Strangest in the group, perhaps, was a single nonhuman, the toweringly massive, hunched-over shape of Sholai of the Gr’tak. Representatives of the three DalRiss ships that would be going, Shrenghal, Gharesthghal, and Shralghal, were in attendance, but invisi­bly. DalRiss rarely utilized analogue images of themselves, preferring the touch and smell of living organisms.

  The rest were other senior department heads, chief aides, and the like. Kara, unconsciously seeking comfort perhaps, had moved her point of view through the crowd until she was watching from the inner ring, close by her father.

  “Operation Gateway,” Vic was saying to the assembly, “will commence at zero-nine-hundred hours, ship’s time, tomorrow. One-GEF will move in single file toward the Stargate, following the precise vectors that have already been uploaded to our DalRiss friends.”

  As he spoke, a green line of light drew itself through empty space, angling toward the Gate near one end, the path flattening out, slowly curving until it was running parallel to the immense structure. At a range of just under one ki­lometer from the object’s surface, the green line was nearly lost in the blue folds and twistings of intensely warped space.

  “Our first destination will be Tovan-Doval, the home suns of the Gr’tak. The purpose of this is to verify that the Web does deliberately make double stars like the Gr’tak suns or stars like Nova Aquila explode, and then somehow use them to build stargates.”

  “Sir!” one of the company commanders off the Karyu said, raising his hand. His name was Odin Johanssen, and he’d emigrated to the Confederation from Loki.

  “What is it, Johanssen?”

  “Sir, scuttlebutt says… I mean, we heard we already knew there was a stargate at the ’Takker home star. So what is there to verify?”

  “A fair question,” Vic said. “We know there is a stargate in place there, because we’ve sent Naga-directed probes through our Gate to Tovan-Doval and had them turn around and return. We’ve also sent some probes through, giving them a timelike translation in addition to the translation through space. We know that there’s a stargate at Tovan-Doval at least until about one thousand years in the future.”

  Vic’s final words hung in the virtual chamber for a long moment. There were some initial sharp intakes of breath—mental gasps of astonishment rendered literally by the AI generating the image, and then complete silence.

  Johanssen broke the silence at last. “Yeah, but, what I mean, sir, is if the probes have already found this stuff out, why are we going? What’s the point?”

  “We are going,” Dev’s image said, “because the further into the future we reach with our probes, the harder it is to get those probes back, and that’s whether they go in under AI or if they’re teleoperated from here. At a point just about one thousand years in the future—a thousand years give or take ten percent, in fact—we lose touch with them entirely. Teleoperators aboard the Gauss can’t maintain contact through the Stargate. AI-guided drones simply… vanish.”

  This time, a murmur of conversation broke out, as a num­ber of the people present began speaking in low, urgent whispers.

  “What makes anyone think we’ll get back?” Captain Lynn Deverest, another of Karyu’s company commanders, asked sharply.

  Dev’s image moved out of the crowd and joined Vic at the center. “Maybe I should give a quick briefing on the physics involved,” he said. A field of quantum hyperequa­tions materialized in the air of the simulation.

  “Be my guest,” Vic said with a wry grin. He nodded at the equations. “I’m a soldier, not a mathematician. I can’t follow this gotie.” The word was an old soldier’s slang term, evolved from the Nihongo gotagota, a tangle.

  Dev moved to the center of the assembly, while Vic-stepped over to stand at Kara’s side.

  “First of all.” Dev said, “let me say that our jump into the future at Tovan-Doval is only our first step. Once we have scouted that system, with the help of our new Gr’tak allies, we plan to use that stargate to jump… a considerable distance into the remote future. The stated operational ob­jective is to find possible allies against the Web… but more than that, we’re to learn about future Web strategies, if pos­sible. When we return to human space and our own present, we will, in effect, be using the information we have gained to change the future.”

  Another shocked silence followed. Several questions broke from the audience then, followed by a torrent of thoughts and exclamations.

  “How can we do that?”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “Isn’t that like changing history? What happens to us?”

  “Ah, paradoxes,” Admiral Barnes said. “The heart and soul of every discussion of time travel.”

  “Well, it’s something we need to look at,” Taki said. “Somebody a thousand years from now isn’t going to want to help us, if helping us ends their existence.”

  “Let me try to clarify this,” Dev said, holding up his hands until the conversation died away. “Quantum physics, we know now, is the central key to how the universe works. We’ve known this since the early twentieth century. A lot of our technology today, including quantum power taps, I2C communications, multiphase computers, even electronics going all the way back to tunneling diodes six hundred years ago, all depend on quantum physics.

  “Now, classical quantum mechanics tells us that we can’t pin down both the location and the vector of any given quon, a quantum particle like an electron or a photon. Hei­senberg’s Uncertainty Principle, you’ve all heard of that. An extension of that suggests that a particle, an electron, say, is somehow everywhere in a given probability zone and can’t be pinned down until an observer comes in and looks at it. The Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment suggests that if a cat in a box is either alive or dead, and its state is determined by a quantum effect—the decay of a radioactive isotope, say—then one way of looking at it is that the cat, which is represented by a quantum wave function, is some­how both alive and dead until the box is opened and some­one looks inside. When it is, the Observer Effect takes over and the wave function collapses. You’re left with either a dead cat or a live one.”

  “Which always struck me as being a bit hard on cats,” Kara put in.

  Her father, standing next to her, grinned. “Discussing quantum physics would be more enjoyable if Schrödinger had chosen… I don’t know. Rats, maybe.”

  “Schrödinger’s Rat,” Admiral Barnes said, thought­fully, from nearby. “I like it.”

  Dev pressed ahead. “The Observer Effect says, in very brief, that we somehow shape the universe by observing it. Which leads to all sorts of philosophical debate. What, ex­actly, constitutes an observer? Does he have to be con­scious? To possess intelligence? Could a dog be an observer? How about a bacillus? What if the observation is done by a recording device, which is examined long after the event by humans?

  “It gets even more gotied than that. There were some scientists back in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including, incidentally, one of the men who
first speculated about stargates like this one here, who used the Observer Effect to argue that Mankind was the only intelligence in the universe. The idea was that the universe is so narrowly tailored to our specifications that if it were only a little dif­ferent—the gravitational constant was a little higher or lower, or the mass of a neutron was just a bit different, then life would never have evolved.

  “Of course, we know now that that argument doesn’t stand up. We’ve encountered four races thus far, the Naga, the DalRiss, the Web, and the Gr’tak. More if you count really strange things like the Communes or the Maians, or­ganisms so different from us that we can’t even tell if the critters are intelligent or not. In every case, their view of the universe is markedly different from ours. Sometimes, like with the Naga and probably the Web as well, it’s so different that it’s hard to tell if we have any common observational ground at all.”

  “That’s been a major problem in our understanding of other species all along,” Daren called from the audience. “It’s been said that a man and a wild Naga could look at something, a tree, say, and there would be no way for a third party to tell from their descriptions that they were look­ing at the same thing. It’s like the old three-blind-men-and-an-elephant metaphor, only worse. The other species aren’t just looking at different parts of the elephant. Their respec­tive frames of reference are completely alien.”

  “What’s an elephant?” Kara asked her father in a whis­pered aside.

  “Large Terran mammals,” Vic replied softly. “They were extinct for a while, but I think the Imperials have some cloned specimens at Kyoto.”

  “Huh.” She was turning Dev’s words over in her mind. “Imagine what the universe would be like if the Naga were the observers responsible for shaping it.”

  “Inside out, I suppose,” Vic said with a chuckle.

  “Obviously,” Dev continued, “there arc considerable problems with the Observer Effect scenario. But there’s a second way to look at the interplay of quantum physics with the real world, and that’s the parallel universe idea. Simply stated, any time there’s a possible quantum choice, a chance for an electron to be here rather than there, say, you get a whole new universe and satisfy both conditions. The meta-verse, the cosmos consisting of ail possible universes, would be a constantly growing infinity, with new infinities, branches, being added each time a quantum decision point is reached.”

  “Actually,” Cal Norris pointed out, “there’s a problem with the parallel universe idea, too. It isn’t what physicists call elegant. It’s wasteful to invoke a new universe every time there’s a choice to be made.”

  “It’s just as inelegant,” Dev replied, “to suggest that the entire universe is tohu wa bohu… without form and void until we get around to observing it. What’s so special about us? Especially in light of the fact that we do not possess the only possible points of view in the universe.

  “One way to streamline the other-universe idea,” he con­tinued, “is to say that if you have two universes that are identical in every way except for a minor difference, that electron is here instead of there, say, then the only branch­ing that occurs is within a kind of a bubble that includes both possibilities. If everything else is identical, it’s literally the same universe, but with a pocket, bubble universe that extends into alternate realities.” He stopped, momentarily looking lost. “I’m not making myself clear.”

  “Clear enough,” Captain Johanssen said. “If we didn’t know it already, most of us downloaded a fair amount of this stuff after the Probe AE356 incident. But what does all of this have to do with time-travel paradoxes?”

  “Dr. Norris, why don’t you cover this part. This is your field, and it’s certainly not mine.”

  “Well, simply put,” Norris explained, “the little differ­ences involved in quantum choices can be extended up the scale to big choices. We have a universe where we go into the future, and another where we don’t. Actually, I should say there are an infinite number of both types of universe, since each spawns a whole, separate line of ever-branching choices, but with the choices set by that first go-no-go de­cision.

  “If we venture into the future, we’re automatically se­lecting an infinite subset of futures that have us doing so. All of the universes where we didn’t go are cut off from us now, by our decision. By our observation of the universe as it is after our decision.

  “Now if we learn something important while we’re in the future… oh, let’s say we learn how to destroy the Web, once and for all, then return to our original universe and decide to employ that secret to win the war. Okay, at that point, we’ve just selected another infinite subset of uni­verses, this time limited by the fact that we brought back vital information and destroyed the Web. But that doesn’t necessarily affect the original universe where we got the information, does it?”

  Vic grinned. “I’m not sure, Doc. You tell me. Does it?”

  “It should only change the potential of our current here-and-now universe, by shaping its possible futures.” Norris sighed and exchanged a glance with Dev. “To tell you the truth, we don’t know how it would work in practice. If we are dealing with infinities, though, and”—he gestured at the equations overhead—”with this sort of math we certainly are, then literally anything is possible, anything that can be described is, somewhere in the infinity of worlds.

  “What the math says is that if we learn the secret of destroying the Web in a universe where the Web is still around… then go back to our original universe and use that secret to destroy the Web, that universe where we got the secret isn’t really changed. It’s just unreachable now. Put beyond our reach by our observations and decisions.”

  “All these universes,” Vic said, shaking his head. “It makes me dizzy.”

  “Sometimes,” Norris pointed out, “dizziness is an asset for physicists.”

  The audience laughed, but Kara heard the nervousness there. One-GEF was preparing to leap into a very dark un­known, with no guarantees that they would be able to return.

  “We think,” Norris said, “that the reason we’ve not been able to send probes more than a few centuries into the future and have them come back to us is that they, well, they get lost among all those countless branchings of the universe. That may also explain our problems with teleoperation through the Stargate across such long periods of time. The­oretically, we should have a much better chance. Instead of sending one probe with a single AI or teleoperator aboard, we will send three DalRiss and three Confederation vessels through to the future. The DalRiss Achievers will be able to sense that new space and help prepare a kind of road map for us to find our way back. We will take each jump step by step, and not proceed unless we have a good indication that we can find our way back. We may even learn what we need to learn, about the Web, from our first translation, to the future Gr’tak system. There are indications, from the probes that have made it back from there, that… there is something strange there. A structure. An engineering proj­ect, if you will. If we learn what this is, we may learn some­thing important to our struggle against the Web here.”

  “How can we be sure we’ll always have a stargate to make these jumps?” Captain Deverest asked. “I mean, the Web uses them to just dump kickers into a target system, even when there’s no stargate there, like just before the Bat­tle of Earth. If we emerged somewhere out there and there was no stargate for the return trip, we’d be gokked, but good!”

  “All of our translations will be made from one gate to another,” Dev said, moving once more to the center of the assembly. The equations above his head unfolded further. Kara could just follow them, watching how certain specific course-vector parameters in a close approach to a stargate excluded the possibility of emerging in empty space.

  Red and green lines began drawing themselves next to the stargate image, modeling different types of approaches, and accompanied by sets of statements in calculus.

  “You see?” Dev said. “By staying within these param­eters,
we limit our choices for emergence into normal four-space. If we go in this way, we can have what’s called an open-field emergence, which means we could pop up any­where. That’s how the Web has been reaching places like Sol and Alya, where there aren’t any local stargates. They drop out of four-space and emerge in the general target area, but specifically in a place where the local gravitational gra­dient is relatively smooth. But by adjusting our speed and angle of approach into the space close to the rotating cyl­inder of a stargate, we can make sure that when we re­emerge into four-space again, it’ll be where the… call it the quality of local space is the same as the place where we dropped out in the first place.”

  “In other words,” Vic said, nodding, “alongside another stargate.”

  “Exactly. But I think you can all appreciate the impor­tance of sticking to the flight vectors exactly. Any shipjacker who lets himself drift is going to have one hell of a long walk home.”

  The audience laughed. At least their morale is high, Kara thought.

  “So,” Captain Hernandez said. The skipper of the cruiser Independence was a small, dark-skinned man with a black mustache and a brusque, no-nonsense manner. “The idea is that we travel into the future, from one Stargate to another. Looking for… what? Allies, like our orders say? Or some­thing else? Information, you said.”

  “We wrote the orders to state explicitly that we were looking for allies,” Dev said. “As much as anything else, that was to sell the idea to the Confederation Senate.”

  Briefly, Dev’s eyes met Kara’s. They had a haunted, empty look to them, and his form showed a distinct trans­lucency. My God, she thought. What happened to him dur­ing the battle?

  “That was Senator Alessandro’s idea, actually,” Dev continued. “Sometimes it’s hard to sell civilians on how a key piece of intelligence can turn a battle, or a campaign. If we tell them we’re going into the remote future to find a way to beat the Web, they’d ask why we don’t just keep sending probes. And… maybe they’d be right. If we sent out enough, we might get lucky. But I’m convinced that we’ll be luckier still if we send a sizable contingent up there, people able to get a good look and make solid decisions. Decisions that may, literally, reshape our own universe of possible futures. Instead of arguing the point, we’ve told them we’re looking for allies, somebody big enough and powerful enough to help us put the Web in its place. Simple, direct, and easy to say ‘yes’ to.”