by Sharon Lee
She paused, sipped her water, went on.
"Still, there is in your record the information that you've taken your leaves on quite a few worlds, you've managed to survive in situations that killed your creche mates, and you're a very quick study. More, when you have been in command situations, you've done well until faced with dealing with the—let us call it the weight—of decisions made above your head."
Jela permitted himself a hand signal of acknowledgment, to go along with a sigh.
"I have very much been a soldier, Commander. Alas, some 'above my head' have been raised to different rules and understandings about soldiers, duty, and necessity."
"A soldier's truth, plainly put." This time her hand did signal agreement; it was as he had supposed—whatever other training or duties she'd had, the commander was a pilot.
She paused, pushed her plate away from her as if it were a distraction, and leaned toward him, speaking quietly.
"Wingleader, I have for you some choices. There are times in a soldier's life when choice is available, there are times when it is preferable. So here, listen-up, are some choices. Alas—you have no time but the time we sit at this table to make up your mind. I will not say that I do not care which choice you make, but I expect you will know."
Jela listened, swore he could hear the sound of a leaf, rattling in the breeze. Indeed, there was a breeze now—the ventilators were running at some speed, having come up unnoticed during their conversation.
"First, you may remain Wingleader of your small squadron. It is likely to be reassigned, given that the duties of this vessel are soon to change, but it is a respectable position, in which you would do well, to the benefit of the troop."
His hand-signaled acknowledgment—information received in clear form.
"Next, rather than remain as Wingleader, you may accept assignment to another squadron as a pilot. This choice I suggest in case you expect the duties of Wingleader might wear on you over time. You would be placed in the available pilot pool and we would have no way to know what or where you might be assigned, but you would have no responsibilities but those of a pilot, which are known to you and, I think, not overwhelming."
"Finally, you may take a long-term temporary assignment delivering a very nearly surplus vessel to a long term storage area, with appropriate adjustment of rank. You would oversee the delivery crew and be responsible for seeing the vessel properly shut down in case it must be redeployed. You would also assist in assessing local unit response readiness, from a pilot's viewpoint, in areas you travel through, to and from. In order to facilitate this you would undergo a short, specialized, dangerous, and highly confidential training. It will not be an easy assignment."
She stopped. Looked expectant. Waited.
Jela hand-signaled, check me—I repeat the information.
Then he did that thing, nearly word for word, out loud.
"Yes," she agreed, "that's accurate."
He waggled his fingers—pilot hand-talk for feigned indecision—rolled his eyes, and began to laugh. He waggled his fingers harder and laughed harder, 'til tears came to his eyes . . .
"That funny?"
"Yes. Oh yes . . . ." Finally he wiped his eyes on a napkin.
"Commander, I have one question. May I take the tree with me?"
"With which choice?"
"If you make me Captain Jela and have me deliver a ship, may I take the tree with me?"
It was her turn to do the pilot's waggle of fingers.
"If the tree is on board this ship when you leave, it will be spaced, I assure you. A captain is permitted a mascot, after all."
"May I know your name, Commander?"
"If you pass the training, Wingleader."
Six
Training Base
Mission Time: 34.5 days and counting
JELA CAME AWAKE IN the night, the scent of sea-salt competing with that of wind-driven fresh water, as if an electrical storm fresh from the sea had burst upon the mountains behind, just before dawn.
A sense of energetic jubilation emanated from the youngers; a sense of restrained relief from the elders upstream who knew that the combination of the early rain, rising sun, and the continued run of fresh water from the hills would make this a wonderful day for growing.
Behind that relief, an under note of melancholy drifted down from the true elders, for in their youth, this would have been a likely morning for the flyers to come and tend those whose detached branches or tangled seed-pods might cause difficulty later in the season. The seed-carriers, the branch-tenders—they had been with the trees since the dawn of awareness—and had since vanished from an awareness that yet grieved their loss.
Awake, Jela stood beside the tree, knowing that yes, it was just about time for "sunrise" on a planet light years away from their current billeting, and knowing that in some fey fashion the tree had managed to dream too loud, so he had become encompassed as well.
The chronometer on the wall was adamant. No matter what time the tree—or Jela, for that matter—thought it was, the duty schedule indicated that breakfast, exercise, and class work were still more than half his sleep-shift away. Alas, the schedule was obviously not designed for the convenience of an M Series soldier, but to fit some administrator's concept of a busy day, or perhaps to answer necessities a mere M had no need to be aware of.
Schedule or no schedule, he was awake and likely to remain so. Sighing, Jela stretched and worked with a small weight set, the while trying to diminish the sadness he felt for the winged-things he'd never seen, but whose touch was familiar and missed.
Despite the exercise, the sadness hung on, threatening to encompass the universe. He knew better than to wallow, and hoped the tree did. But the tree might well still be in some in-between state of its own, and he felt no desire to disturb it.
Drawing a stim-drink from the small refrigerator, he broke the seal and stood sipping.
He'd spent the early evening reviewing troop strength charts, the attack patterns in the last wave of the First Phase, the siting of existing garrisons, their commanders, and their loyalties; the trading patterns and names of the major companies and players . . .
Now, he sat at the computer, and began once again to go over the diagrams and intelligence . . .
First, though they controlled a good bit of the galaxy, Command was split on how to proceed, with a group allied largely with the Inmost faction attempting to withdraw all forces from the Arm, in order to consolidate a line at the base.
This dangerously flawed plan had clearly been constructed by someone who had no sense of dimension, and no understanding of the nature of the enemy. For every time the sheriekas had been beaten back they'd surged forward again, each time coming closer to claiming the right to control man's destiny.
And now? Now the more observant of the High Commanders felt the war was almost lost, that the sheriekas were bare years away from being able to go wherever they wished, whenever they wished, to command, enslave, destroy . . .
Destroy.
It appeared that the enemy had less and less desire to control mankind and more desire to just be rid of it entirely. More, they seemed willing, or even eager, to destroy everything in existence in favor of some future where the very quarks trembled at their name.
The intelligence on this was spotty, though an M's intuition knew it for truth.
His drink done, Jela closed the intelligence data, and opened what had lately become his most-accessed files. He was in a fair way to becoming obsessed with the problem they'd set him—two so-called math instructors his intuition told him he was unlikely, after all these days of duty, to see again.
He flicked through his data, frowning. Missing space craft were one thing, missing planets another. Both events were of course disturbing, though ordinary enough in a universe where black holes and novas and other such events were known; in a universe where the math—and hence the weapons—existed that could destroy a world with chain-reacted nuclei or the casual accidental fla
re of a burping solar-storm.
But lately, some other events were unfolding, as if space were unfolding, or as if the space where humanity lived among the stars was from time to time . . . dissolving.
The word unfolding had come from the younger and quieter of the two instructors; and a sharp disagreement had followed its utterance.
It quickly became apparent to Jela that the disagreement was something more —and more serious—than simple professional sniping. The elder and more voluble instructor believed that the younger's unfolding was too simple a model; that if certain late developments were mere unfolding, the universe would simply get bigger—well, no, not bigger, not precisely, but that it would acquire another dimension, a dimension of so little moment that it would take five to ten times the known life of the universe for it to materially affect the spin of something as inconsequential as an electron.
No, the operative phrase, according to the voluble one, as he scribbled on the situation board—"Here! This is the math we have to work from!"—was decrystallization.
The instructor admitted that he had not the final proofs, that the math they were working from was the partial and not yet finished work of a mathematician who had unfortunately come to the notice of those who found his theories and equations anathema. The quiet instructor spoke of the mathematician as one honorably dead in battle, and had turned to inscribe a series of equations that looked remarkably like piloting forms onto the situation board.
"The problem we face," he murmured, "is that someone—and we must assume that someone equals the Enemy—is experimenting with dismantling the universe."
It was said so calmly that it was only in retrospect that Jela felt a flicker of dread.
The elder instructor tossed his pen from hand to hand pensively.
"Yes," he said finally, "that's a reasonable shorthand for the event, no matter what the full math may describe. It's rather as if you were able to set up a force field around a courier ship, attach it to a sector of the universe, and transition—forever."
"Good," said the younger, finishing up his notations and standing back. "That description allows us to use math that should be very familiar to our student." He gave Jela an uncomfortably earnest stare before waving toward the situation board. "Let's suppose, for example, that you wanted to visit the garrison at Vinylhaven . . . "
Unsurprisingly, the math was quite accurate for the mass of the proposed courier ship; the instructor then solved it for a location deep in the heart of the galaxy, on a heading that Jela recognized.
"Now, what we'll do for this ummm . . . trip . . . " the instructor murmured, as if talking to himself more than his increasingly puzzled student, "is restate the mass of the ship, drop it out of the locus defined by our standard five dimensions and into one defined by nine."
He did this, Jela checking the new equation on his pad . . .
"Now, the thing is—" the instructor said, suddenly turning away from the board, "— no one really wants to go to Vinylhaven . . . "
Jela had been thinking the same thing himself, Vinylhaven being somewhat too close for comfort to the remains of the ember of a brown giant . . .
" . . . because," the instructor continued in his deceptively quiet voice, "it's not there."
Jela flat out stared. "Not there?" he demanded, wondering now if all of this had been some sort of elaborate hoax to test the gullibility of intransigent Ms. "I've been there."
"Not lately," the elder instructor said simply. "I have been—or, say, I have attempted to go—within the last two Common Years. It is, as my colleague says, not there. Not the garrison world, not the brown giant. While we can use the coordinates that formerly brought us to Vinylhaven, in fact we can only come to the approximate vicinity, for pretty much everything out that way is gone. The nearest known destination we can raise is the yellow star three light years away, which is still there, though it has gone nova."
"Our guess," the younger instructor said seriously, "is that a sphere—and this is a guess; it may well be a more complex shape—approximating three-fourths of a cubic light year was—taken away. I say the space was folded; my associate says the space—actually a small portion of the universe—was decrystallized. Down to the photons and below, there is nothing. We can measure the event—are measuring it—by finding the wave front of light."
He paused for a moment's serious study of the situation board and the equations elucidated there, then looked back to Jela.
"Given the fact that Vinylhaven is gone," he murmured, "let's calculate the transport-can big enough to hold the missing volume and mass . . . ."
The lesson was not lost on Jela. They did the math, several times.
"Your answer as to the power source?" the elder instructor asked Jela.
He sighed and pushed back from his pad, though his fingers still wandered lightly over the keys, looking for a solution that made sense, granting the data . . .
"Loss-less total conversion?" he offered.
"Consider the multiple spin-states, and the mass of the photons . . . " The younger, that was.
Jela sighed again. "Are you sure there's not a black hole? I mean . . . ."
"Absolutely no sign of one," the elder answered, "and insufficient to have cleared the zone. Loss-less total conversion fails, as far as we're able to compute, if the mass actually moves somewhere else. We're talking energy levels above those in a super-sized galactic core black hole. With no trace."
"The nova you mentioned?"
"Likely not coincidence," the elder conceded, "but not nearly enough power to cause this. Perhaps there was leakage and we simply don't know what to look for."
"Not natural," Jela persisted. "You're sure? Not some rare, once-in-a-billion-year event?"
The two instructors looked at each other and a message passed between them as surely as if they'd used finger-talk.
The younger reached into a pocket, and withdrew a datastrip.
"Vinylhaven is the seventh such event that we're sure of. We have been apprized of three more since. All in the Arm. This datastrip contains a summation of the ten events and what we can deduce about the physics, the geology, and the cosmology."
He laid the strip across Jela's palm. "Tomorrow, we'll want to see if you've found a pattern."
The elder instructor placed a second strip in Jela's hand.
"Background on the commanders and garrisons, native populations. The people . . . "
Dread nibbled at the edge of Jela's consciousness again, dread and sadness.
"Do you expect me to solve this?" he asked.
They looked away, almost as one. The elder looked back with a sigh.
"No. Not solve it. But we want your help. We're looking for special circumstances. For insight. For hope. And you must know, Captain M, that your mission, when you leave here, will be in part to keep the troops in place and fighting, whether there is hope or none. It's about all we can do right now."
* * *
HOWEVER, THE NEXT day did not bring the mathematical pair back, nor the next several beyond that. Rather, Jela was immersed in an intense round of training on surviving small-arms shoot-outs, of choosing the right weapon, of avoiding detection, as well as refreshers on ships, on engines and power plants, on intra-system navigation, and more history of the First Phase.
So, he kept to the project in his so-called "off-time," eating over study flimsies, exercising with computer screens and keyboards within reach, captured by the problem and hungry to se where the data led him.
He tried to understand the locations of the disappearances, drawing simple maps of the missing sections, and more maps, over time. He'd tried analysis by local population or lack of it, since only four of the now-missing locations had any population to speak of. He analyzed by political leanings of nearby garrison commanders, by system discovery or occupation date, by the colors of the stars, even by the alphabetical orders of the names of the stars or systems or planets.
The databases he had been given were l
arge and flexible; but he strained them, joined them together and drilled through them. He pondered and set the computer to pondering . . .
In the meantime: exercise, classes, exercise, reading, exercise, classes, exercise, research, sleep.
Sleep proved its own mystery for there was no doubt that he'd found a pattern to his wakefulness that no longer matched a typical M's profile. As little as the average of the M Strain slept, he slept less. And there were the dreams, usually not so loud as to wake him, and behind them the conviction that he could almost smell the water, hear the surf on the beach, recall the dragons hovering over the world-forest, and know their names.
This last was the most perplexing— for he must assume that the dreams and wistful memories were the tree's, channeled to him by a mechanism he accepted without understanding—and how would the tree know the names of beings who rode the air currents?
He permitted himself little time to explore these personal mysteries, however, with so glorious and complex a problem before him.
* * *
IT WAS THE MIDDLE of the sixth day following his assignment to the task of the disappearances when the elder of the two instructors reappeared, interrupting a landing sim. Jela was a little disturbed by this, for the sim was decidedly trying to create unfavorable conditions and he'd yet to crash or hard-land—
"Captain," the instructor said briskly. "We will be sharing a quick meal with my colleague; our schedules will no longer mesh with yours after today, and so we seek a summary from you. In no case, by the way, will you divulge your analysis of the situation to the common troops you will be visiting as part of your mission. Most will lack your training and appreciation of nuance. Please follow me."
Though courteously enough phrased, it was an order, so Jela locked the sim and followed the instructor out of the connected rooms of his dormitory and tutoring hall, through a series of corridors on dark-time schedule.
They passed several people, none of whom acknowledged them, and arrived in a small cafeteria as the younger instructor hurried in from yet another corridor, carrying what appeared to be travel cases.
