”How were they to overcome this?” Joaquim asked. “For hundreds of years—hundreds!—they did not. For hundreds of years, the only way they could travel between star systems was by using hyper-sleep.”
Xai nodded. “They think that’s how my people got to Messim,” she said. The Me’xeit considered the day the eight Noble Houses made that information available to the people the beginning of the end of Messinian society. Xai wasn’t so sure. She’d always found the idea rather exciting.
“That is how all sixty-three of the Old Colonies were founded,” Joaquim concurred, nodding. “Some, like your people, disappeared, and were not found again until the Second Age. Others, like Rydia, Edoxia, and Malta remained in some form of contact with System Solaar. And slowly the Rydians, the Maltese, and the Edoxians gained power, at least in part because each of them had at least two habitable planets in their systems.
“There were false starts, hopes, fears, good ideas and bad. Maria von Tettorn and her Maltese crew developed sailing, using plastic sheets on solar tides. This freed them from the need for fuel but confined them to tides. They were never able to unite the wormhole theory with a plausible technological means to manipulate them. For a while they thought they might have something with Timon Andromachus’s FTL drive, but its effects on space and living flesh were so insidious it was eventually used only for emergencies.
“Over time sailing ships became faster. Eventually they approached light speed. But even that wasn’t enough. Most systems were several light years from each other. News was passed, but it was a slow, torturous business. The cultures became more or less independent of each other.
“And then Jane O’Reilly Castor discovered Weakness Points,” Xai interjected.
“Exactly,” Joaquim said, nodding. “Jane O’Reilly Castor discovered Weakness Points, and it just so happened that she was the daughter of Petra O’Reilly and Matai Castor, the interplane theorists.”
Xai nodded. This was famous in all cultures, one of the bonds that held all space-faring nations together. There were thousands of vids of this story—it often seemed that no actress could be considered to have ‘made it’ without incarnating Jane O’Reilly Castor at least once. Se’etts Sa had the record—she’d been Jane O’Reilly Castor twenty-six times. Xai had been quite disappointed when she’d finally seen a vid of the real woman, looking hugely uncomfortable as she answered reporters’ questions, a small, plain female who looked much more like what Xai had thought her mother, the scientist, should look like, while her mother—a large, florid woman with enormous breasts and the most fantastic hair—had fitted much more with what Xai had always thought a space explorer should look like—larger than life.
“So,” Joaquim said, obviously enjoying himself, “it was that—”
“First degradation approaching,” the Tellorian interjected.
Joaquim fell out of his relaxed pose, becoming once more the sharp, alert being he was when piloting. “Give me the monitors.”
The monitors appeared before him, a bank of dials, colored circles with numerical counters beneath them. The colors were darkening as the numbers slipped incrementally lower.
“Do any adjustments for course need to be made?” Joaquim asked.
“No adjustments are deemed necessary at this stage,” the Tellorian replied.
“What’s our distance ratio?”
“414:1.”
“What does that mean?” Xai asked.
“For every one kilometer we cover here we cover four hundred and fourteen thousand in the home dimension,” Joaquim replied.
“Approaching the perimeter,” the Tellorian said.
Joaquim’s eyes were fixed on the dials of color slipping incrementally down through tones.
“Activate the Quantum Drive,” Joaquim said.
“Drive activated,” the Tellorian said.
The colors paused for a moment, then leapt to a brighter tone. “Plane maintained,” the Tellorian said. “Next degradation, eight minutes.”
Joaquim shook his head, dissatisfied. “I usually make at least ten,” he told Xai. “My sense is off.”
“Why do you use color monitors?” Xai asked curiously.
“It’s a matter of taste, really,” Joaquim replied, shrugging. “They’ve found that the human eye is more susceptible to color tones than numerical scales—provided the human is not color blind. Fleet uses numerical scales, but they have an exceptionally high ratio of colorblindness. Let’s not digress.”
“Sorry.”
“Where was I,” Joaquim murmured pensively.
“Jane O’Reilly Castor,” Xai prompted.
“Exactly,” Joaquim said, remembering. He smiled slightly, his long, gaunt face taking on a pensive air. “It just so happened that their FTL Drive began acting up in the vicinity of Camata I. So they began string level sensor readings to determine whether it was having an effect on the surrounding space. And they discovered string vibrations that weren’t supposed to exist.
“Now, this might not have meant anything to most captains, but Jane O’Reilly Castor was the daughter of Petra O’Reilly who, with her husband Matai Castor, had recently won the Mandarin Prize for their theory of Weakness Points. They posited that there had to be a plurality of places in space where the dimensional web was weakened, where, that is, it would be possible to move from this plane into another.”
Xai couldn’t help it. Her eyes glassed over. Joaquim sighed.
“It’s very simple,” he said a little impatiently.
“They always say that,” Xai replied. “Right before they lose me.” Joaquim laughed.
“Fine,” he said. “We’ll go backwards. Cells.”
Xai nodded.
“Cells are made of molecules, molecules of atoms, atoms of subatomic particles, subatomic particles of quarks and electrons, and these of super strings, yes?”
“Yes,” Xai said.
“All strings are the same,” Joaquim continued. “What differentiates them is the frequency of their vibrations. Now, there should be an infinite number of vibrations. But we actually encounter only a very limited number of them. This is because most of the vibrations cancel each other out. Only a few remain, and they form the basis of matter.”
Xai nodded, to demonstrate she was still following.
“You know that subatomic particles exist in a plurality of dimensions.”
Xai nodded again. She’d helped Marcus do the experiments with a particle accelerator which proved just that.
“Basically,” Joaquim continued, “all subatomic particles that exist in this dimension do so because they are anchored appropriately in other dimensions.”
“This is where I get confused.”
“Think of it as if you were holding a chord on a lute. Let us say that the lute is tuned to C. And let us say that the only chords you can hear are ones in C which have no sharps or flats. This means that while there are a very large number of possible chords, you can only hear a rather limited number of them.”
“All right,” Xai said.
“Well,” Joaquim said, “what Castor and O’Reilly posited was that different dimensions were rather like different keys. That is, they allowed certain vibrations to exist and not others. All the dimensions were interconnected, if only because of the anchoring process of the different quarks.”
Xai’s eyes glassed over again.
“It doesn’t matter,” Joaquim said quickly, “this is all very technical and frankly I never really understood it myself. But their final argument was that there had to be points in space in which one could change keys—they called these Weakness Points. And Jane O’Reilly Castor found one.”
“Second degradation approaching,” the Tellorian interjected.
“We’ll coast through this one,” Joaquim said.
“What does that mean?” Xai asked.
“We’re not going to use the base of the dimension to try to skip back up,” Joaquim explained. “There’s a moment in which the dimension and the
degradation come into equilibrium. The force of degradation and the resistance of the dimension stop each other for a very short while. At that time you can use the Quantum Drive to leap back up into the dimension, although, of course, one never goes as high as on the earlier or initial jump. But this trip isn’t that long, so we can go ahead and degrade.”
There was another of those strange, cosmic pauses.
“11-11-26,” the Tellorian announced triumphantly. Joaquim nodded, satisfied.
“After they found Castor I,” he said, returning to his story, “it seemed as if Weakness Points started popping up everywhere. A whole branch of physics that everyone had considered purely theoretical suddenly became useful. The search was on for a manner to ‘hold the chord’ of matter—that is, to maintain the necessary relations between the quarks while in other planes. If that could be done, we could change dimensions. Finally, the Edoxians discovered the special quality of the Q-Matrix. For almost a hundred years they held a monopoly on it. And then Ma the Foolhardy stole a patch. Suddenly, Q-Matrices were being cultivated all over the galaxy.
“Everyone had known that Q-Matrices could survive in open space. But the truly distinct quality of the Q-Matrix is that it holds the relations between its particles and those in contact with its field for a surprisingly long time. Essentially, it compensates for other dimensional forces. With something to hold the chord, all they needed was something to force the quarks out of this dimension and into another one. As all quarks naturally come to rest in their initial anchored dimensions, all one had to do was force the ship into another dimension and then let it ‘surf’ back to its home dimension.
“Finally, about one thousand two hundred years ago, the Rydia Three technical group came up with the answer—the Quantum Drive. And that,” Joaquim said grandly, “was the official beginning of the Second Age, when man finally came into his own, in space.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
JOAQUIM woke Xai out of a deep sleep when they came out of the interplane, reaching over to shake her gently by the shoulder. “Xai,” he said, “we’re here.”
“What?” Xai replied breathlessly, sitting up. Something had changed, she could feel it. She rubbed her eyes and tried to shake the sleep from her head.
“We’re here,” Joaquim said gently, smiling. “The Davonian Asteroid belt.”
Before them, in a wide diagonal across their field of view, was a great swath of an asteroid belt. Millions of asteroids, varying from the size of planets to small particles, spun slowly around a distant sun, casting great and small shadows, obscuring the glimmer of the stars in the distance. Xai fought down a shiver of apprehension.
“Why did we come here?” she asked, unable to keep the worry out of her voice. No one with a matrix ship would ever willingly go into an asteroid belt. Just thinking of all those potential projectiles affecting each other with their gravity… a dumping ground was easy, compared to that.
Joaquim’s fingers danced across the board and the Tellorian adjusted its course slightly, tilting to match the angle of the asteroid belt, heading for the passage beacon flaring a brilliant red and yellow against the dark stones dully reflecting the distant sun. “I need to see an old friend,” he told Xai.
Xai gulped nervously and glared at the great, craggy asteroid looming next to the beacon.
“Base One is requesting confirmation,” the Tellorian said.
“Confirmation granted,” Joaquim replied, unfastening his belt straps. He floated up gently in the cabin. “Go on automatic,” he told the Tellorian, “and follow their instructions. Tell them we would like to keep our names, and request a docking slot. Not external—internal. The matrix wouldn’t survive an external berth.”
“Proceeding,” Annabel replied. As Xai watched, several small asteroids crept into the passageway. She shuddered and looked at Joaquim as he turned elegantly in the null gravity and began to move to the back of the ship.
“Do you have another PES?” Joaquim asked.
“Yes,” Xai replied. “Drawer E-2.” She watched Joaquim extract the suit and put it on. “Why are you putting on a PES?” Xai asked nervously. “Aren’t we going into the space station?”
Joaquim stopped half way into the suit and grinned at her, tremendously amused. “We’re in the territory of the Ruus now, Xai,” he said, slipping his other leg easily into the suit. “And no one in their right mind would ever walk onto a Ruus space station without wearing a PES.” Xai blinked, uncertain.
“Ruus station decompressions,” the Tellorian noted, “happen on average once every six point four days. This is due—”
“That’s enough, Annabel,” Xai sighed. She unclasped her seat belts and followed Joaquim to the back of the ship, to clamber into her PES once more.
“The Ruus,” the Tellorian began in a stentatorian tone.
“That will be all, Annabel,” Joaquim said calmly. Reaching over, he fastened two of the closures on Xai’s chest with swift, efficient jerks. Annabel fell into a sulky silence. Xai took a deep breath, enjoying the new, more comfortable feel of her PES, and darted Joaquim a grateful glance. Joaquim patted her on the back and grinned.
They clambered back into their seats and sat in companionable silence as the Tellorian, following the guidance of Base One, swung into another avenue. Great sheets of tiny particles swarmed toward them, gleaming in the light of the distant sun. Xai winced as the particles flooded over the ship. “Matrix integrity weakened by 4.7 percent,” the Tellorian noted disapprovingly.
“Look,” Joaquim murmured. That was when Xai realized the great asteroid in the distance wasn’t merely rock.
The asteroid was about twice the size of Starbase 42319. Hanging off it were perhaps forty large, armor plated, globular ships. Each gripped the side of the great, irregularly shaped rock, and appeared to be an independent entity, its only connection to the other ships large, translucent, apparently retractable tubes. There were people traveling back and forth in them. All seemed to be wearing PES.
The Tellorian was being directed to one of the smaller ships, off to the dark side of the asteroid. As they approached the ship Xai saw that the amour was made of great, ovular panels overlapping each other, creating a sort of carapace effect. Two of the panels slid open slowly, revealing a very small, dark docking bay. Joaquim folded his arms confidently over his chest and waited. Xai winced slightly as the Tellorian adjusted course once more, rolling slightly to the left. The aperture seemed awfully small. Joaquim hummed something under his breath. Then they were within the walls of the space station, being brought to a gentle halt in the center of the docking bay.
“Docking complete,” the Tellorian said, as the great metallic panels clanged shut behind them.
Xai took a deep breath. “Do not fear the unknown,” she reminded herself, thinking of the quote by Deng Xiang Piao, on of the great Messinian inventors of the Age of Sun and Order. “The unknown is a source of hope.”
They hung in the middle of a docking bay perhaps four times the size of the Tellorian, a small, low bay with a hatchway at the far end and yellow guiding strips. Xai looked nervously around the area, trying to see into the gloom. She heard what sounded like a deep, groaning noise coming from further in the station. It reminded Xai of the noises made by Starbase 42319 as it fell apart.
Joaquim rose, pulled himself over to the hatchway, and keyed open the Tellorian’s hatch. “Gravity’s low here,” he told her. “So keep your boots on.” With a last, reassuring grin he fixed on his helmet and stepped out of the Tellorian, activating his boots so that he stood on the floor. “Come, Xai,” he said encouragingly. It was odd to hear his voice so close to her head. It sounded almost as if he was speaking in her ear.
Xai took a deep breath, clasped the locks on her helmet, and followed Joaquim out of the Tellorian. “Power her down,” Joaquim told Xai.
“Power down, Annabel,” Xai murmured.
“Complying,” the Tellorian replied. With a slight hiccough she went dark, an opaque shadow in
the middle of the docking bay. Xai fought down a surge of anxiety.
“Come,” Joaquim said. Turning, he began to walk with the slow, steady stride of a man wearing a PES. Xai followed him, in Second, her eyes darting around the bay, looking for danger. The PES was too bulky to fight in effectively. She was hamstrung by its size and felt tremendously vulnerable.
They reached the door. Joaquim keyed it open. Xai stepped forward automatically and smacked into his back. He grunted slightly.
“Sorry,” Xai said, embarrassed. The door hadn’t opened.
Joaquim turned and grinned at her. It was a strange sight—his wide smile gleaming behind the curving reflection of herself, the darkened Tellorian, and the entire docking bay, a warped portrait of the world as he saw it, shielding his head. “You’re about to learn what a rare breed your Primer friends actually are,” he told her.
He keyed the door again. Again, the door didn’t budge.
Joaquim balled a fist and punched the console. With a reluctant whistle the door opened partially. Xai squeezed through after Joaquim. “They don’t use these bays much,” Joaquim told her. “Matrix ships don’t come to asteroid belts, and armored ships don’t need to be protected against debris. Besides—if you had the choice, where would you rather be—locked up inside a ship like this, or free to leave whenever you want?”
Xai didn’t respond, too horrified by the sight of what appeared to be garbage floating past her in the hallway.
The corridor was a hexagon with hatches set sequentially on the walls—long, dark and dirty, with red runner lights to guide the way and no other sources of illumination. There were some signs in a language Xai didn’t know, and what appeared to be graffiti. The place was rusty red from a combination of design and neglect, a filthy place, sodden with misuse.
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