Primary Inversion

by Catherine Asaro

  Rex’s jaw stiffened. He and I had been with the battalion that found CJ4 after its destruction. ISC kept the record of what we had found under tight security. They didn’t want the panic they feared would happen if our people realized Qox could destroy our worlds the same way he had done his own, should our precarious defenses ever weakened.

  “When does it happen?” Helda asked.

  “He’s sent flags,” I said. “I doubt they’re there yet.”

  “We have warn Tams,” Taas said. “Tell them to evacuate.”

  Rex spoke quietly. “Evacuate in what?”

  I felt as if my stomach dropped. What indeed? The Trader sabotage had destroyed the engines and EI pilots of the rebels’ space craft. How could Tams evacuate without functioning ships?

  Taas looked from me to Rex. “Even without factories, they could still have been trying to rebuild their ship drives.”

  “Rebuilding isn’t their biggest problem,” Rex said. “It’s the EI pilots that run the ships.”

  “Tams is a mining station,” I said. “They don’t have the expertise to create an EI pilot from scratch, especially not this fast.”

  “We can send them some,” Helda said. “We make them from the EI’s on our own ships.”

  “Yes.” Taas tensed as if readying himself for launch. “We can put them in robot drones and launch from the stand-off weapons platform in E-sector.”

  Rex considered the thought. “If the drones don’t make it through, we won’t have time for a second try before the Trader flags arrive.”

  “The rebels have control of the ground defenses,” Taas pointed out.

  “Even so,” Rex said. “The orbital defenses aren’t trifles, and the Trader military has those. We have to succeed on the first try. Once the flags get there, it’s over. We need to send in human pilots.”

  They looked at me. I knew the decision they were waiting to hear. We all knew the odds. Warfare had evolved terrifyingly beyond the abilities of humans to fight it. Although drones with EI pilots couldn’t match the human mind when it came to innovation, no human could survive against the light speed processing abilities of a drone or its ability to endure immense accelerations.

  Except a Jagernaut.

  The enhanced link between our brains and our ships boosted our minds into the ship’s EI. Add to that the advances in the stasis technology that protected humans from g-forces and the end result was a weapon with the speed and endurance of a drone and the creativity of the human mind.

  “We’re the only squad in this quadrant,” I said.

  “When do we leave?” Taas asked.

  That was it. No one said a word about our nil chance of success. They just waited to hear my answer, waited to follow me into a fight we couldn’t win. Even if we got the EI’s through to Tams, no way existed to evacuate six hundred million people in time.

  Rex’s thought came to me. If we save only one life, it’s worth it.

  Rex… I had been so afraid that what had happened tonight would destroy what I felt for him. But as soon as his thoughts touched mine, I knew our connection was as strong as ever. This was Rex, who had been with me for years, more than a friend, soon to be a husband. Now I had to do what I swore would never happen—send the man I loved into combat. Yes, I had been doing it for years, but I had never acknowledged the truth of that until tonight.

  They watched me, waiting for orders.

  “First we send a report to HQ,” I said. Backup would never reach us in time, but we had to try. “Then we leave.”

  #

  It was hours before sunrise when we jogged out of the gate at the starport. Our ships waited on the field, Jag starships, the single-pilot craft that gave Jagernauts their name. Technically the craft were JG-17 fighters. The name Jag came from “lightning jag,” a nickname test pilots had given the prototype, the JG-1.

  The ships looked like alabaster works of art. On the ground, they were elongated, with wings extended. In flight, they would change according to our needs: spread wings for subsonic speeds; wings tight against the body in hypersonic flight; rounder shape to minimize surface area during interstellar flight; more rounded for stealth or battle. Right now, their weapons were retracted, hidden in protected bays.

  I strode next to my Jag, my hand sliding across its surface like a skater on ice. It had a tellerene hull, a composite threaded with microscopic wires designed from fullerene tubes. Lightweight and fatigue resistant, tellerene retained its strength even at the high temperatures of hypersonic reentry. It was also self-repairing; the dangling bonds in a broken fullerene molecule reattached, mending the wire. The hull showed fewer of the pits, grooves and other damage from space travel, a smoothness that was one more factor in optimizing its performance. Like their pilots, Jags were top-of-the-line technology, fast and deadly.

  I stopped midway between the nose and the tail. Had I not already known about the tiny silver prong there, I might never have found it in the featureless hull. As soon as I pushed my wrist against the prong, it snicked into my socket.

  Connection, my node thought.

  Verified. The response came from Blackstar, the ship’s EI.

  The airlock whooshed opened, a tiny hole that widened into a human-sized oval so fast its edges shimmered. The outer and inner doors opened simultaneously; Blackstar had analyzed the atmosphere and found it acceptable.

  As I climbed into the cabin, the inner hull activated, glowing with diffuse light. The cabin was small, less than two meters wide and three long. Equipment filled the free space and bulkhead compartments: cocoon seats and a bunk, gear, hand weapons, food dispenser, waste processor, water line, whatever I needed to survive in space.

  As soon as I touched the membrane that separated the cockpit from the cabin, it dilated like the shutter on a high speed holocam. As I slid into the pilot’s seat, it folded around me like a glove and released its cocoon, a swath of spun material thick enough to cushion against acceleration but not so much that it would interfere with my movements. The exoskeleton snapped into place, encasing me in a frame of equipment and clicking a psiphon into the socket at the base of my brain stem. A visor lowered over my head and data scrolled across its display. As the seat registered my weight, the forward holoscreens produced a three-dimensional view of the area outside. Rex’s ship was to starboard, Taas and Helda to port. I could see other airfields, with their runways and launch pads, stretching out across the flat landscape.

  The Evolving Intelligence of the Jag spoke in my mind: Blackstar attending.

  Acknowledged, I thought. I needed no other entry procedure, no codes, nothing. Blackstar was tuned to my brain; if anyone else tried to use the Jag without authorization it would lock up every system on the ship.

  Boosting to psiberspace, Blackstar thought.

  I entered Kyle space as a black wavepacket rippling across the dark grid. A spark appeared next to me, growing into a second wavepacket, a red one with fiery glitters. A gold packet appeared next, followed by green.

  Redstar here, Rex thought.

  Goldstar here, Helda thought.

  Greenstar here, Taas thought.

  Blackstar acknowledging, I answered. Our exchange flashed by in a fraction of a second, far faster than unaided human thought could have done.

  A psicon shaped like a lock blinked on my mental display. Then Blackstar thought, Security cloak at full strength. Squad presence undetectable to other users.

  Link, I thought.

  Red linked.

  Gold linked.

  Green linked.

  With the Jags amplifying our mental link, I could pick up thoughts from Rex, Helda and Taas in the background of my mine. When I concentrated on Taas, the murmur resolved into his mental commands to Green. I relaxed my concentration and his words receded. All their displays ran in the background of mine, waiting to be called forth if I needed them.

  It had taken years of training to discipline my mind so I could separate my perceptions of that display—what Jagernauts call
ed the mindscape—from my awareness of my own environment. I had to retrain my mind so I could think within that constant background noise. Many psions never managed it, which was another reason so few Jag pilots existed.

  I rubbed my temples. We paid a price for this link; the energy required to maintain it, both in terms of our own minds and our ship’s resources, limited the circle to no more than four Jagernauts. Nor could humans sustain the intensity of that boosted connection for long. But when it worked, the Jag link was a miracle. We could communicate anywhere, under any conditions, instantaneously.

  Ready? I thought.

  Redstar ready, Rex answered

  Goldstar ready, Helda answered.

  After a moment I thought, Taas?

  Another pause. Then: Greenstar ready.

  Do you have a problem? I asked.

  No. Just took a moment to settle in.

  His delay was normal for a new squad member. But in the situation we faced, it could be fatal. Under normal circumstances, I would never have expected an untried pilot to fly this mission. But we had no choice. I just hoped his virgin flight didn’t end up as his last.

  Coordinate tests, I thought. Having each ship verify the pre-flight tests of the others gave a four-way check of our readiness. We ran the Jags through their paces: nav, cyber, weapons, com, hydraulics.

  Checking inversion engines, Blackstar thought.

  Inversion. Even after so many years, it still had the power to fascinate me. We hadn’t conquered the light barrier—we had snuck around it. To go at faster-than-light speeds, or superluminal, meant passing through the speed of light, where our mass would become infinite compared to slower objects, our length shrink to nothing, and our time stop. It was impossible. For centuries, humans had known that no ship could travel faster than light—and for centuries, humans had been wrong.

  The solution had turned out to be simple. At superluminal speeds, mass and energy became imaginary, square roots of negative numbers. To reach the superluminal universe, we needed only to add an imaginary part to our speed. Poof. The singularity at light speed disappeared. A ship went around light speed like a flycar left the road to go around a tree. Except for starships, the “road” was the real universe.

  Of course doing the math was a lot easier than designing an engine. But when our ancestors succeeded, the way to the stars had opened. We adopted the word “inversion” from the Allieds because it so aptly described how the process felt. The word actually came from a more esoteric source, referring to a mathematical correspondence between superluminal and subluminal space derived by the Earth scientists Mignani and Recami during the late twentieth century.

  The engine would rotate my ship out of the real universe and into an imaginary one, passing through a bizarre form of existence where we were part real and part imaginary. The transition was disorienting, to say the least; I had no desire to find out what would happen if we spent longer than an instant there. So we approached the “tree” as closely as possible before we left the road, which meant we pushed close to light speed before we rotated into superluminal space or returned to our normal spacetime. That meant we came out of inversion at relativistic speeds, blasting the area with high-energy radiation and particles. Trying that too close to solid objects courted disaster. If the ship came out anywhere except in a near vacuum, it also displaced molecules of matter with explosive power, blowing up itself as well as whatever it hit. So we inverted far away from planets or other bodies.

  Inversion had brutally changed warfare. With ships and missiles that could burst out of inversion at close to light speed, the concept of a front line became obsolete. Our defenses developed with our offensive capabilities, making it possible to protect our settled worlds in marginal safety. But we couldn’t watch all space. Huge regions remained contested, places where no clear boundaries existed defining what was Eubian, Skolian, and Allied.

  Inversion check complete, Blackstar thought.

  Thruster check? The Jag would use its fusion engine close to the planet, but in space it relied on photon thrusters.

  Thrusters initialized.

  What about our fuel?

  Positron containment secure.

  Good. The magnetic containment bottle that held the positrons of its fuel was its own universe, existing only while the inversion engine operated. During flight, the bottle drew on the immense cosmic ray flux in complex space. It spread its fuel through both real and imaginary space by varying the imaginary parts of the charge and mass for its contents, allowing it to hold far more charge than in real space alone. It was simple to do, unlike with people; the psychological trauma of being both real and imaginary had no effect on particles.

  As the bottle leaked positrons into an interaction area, a selector culled relativistic electrons from space. Matter/Antimatter. It interacted in glorious bursts of energy, producing our thrust. Gamma ray shields and superconducting grids prevented waste heat from destroying the ship. A stasis coil kept us from becoming a smear of plasma on our seats during acceleration. G-forces couldn’t hurt the ship in stasis because our quantum state remained fixed. We didn’t freeze exactly; our atoms continued to vibrate, rotate, and otherwise behave as they had been doing when the coil activated. The atomic clock within us that measured our time continued to work. But no atoms could change quantum state, which meant the ship became rigid even to huge forces.

  Interrupt, Blackstar thought.

  What happened? I asked.

  The image of an Allied satellite intruded into the mindscape, showing so much detail, I could see bolts in its hull. A coded message from the Allieds also appeared. It was a code we had broken; as the gibberish flashed across my mindscape, Blackstar gave me a translation. For flaming sake. The message was about me. The Delos authorities were sending their report of my arrest to ISC.

  Why did that display come up now? I asked Blackstar.

  When I detected the transmission, your node flagged “Tiller Smith.” He’s listed as the person who translated the Greek report into Skolian.

  I directed a thought to my spinal node. Why did you flag on Tiller?

  My spinal node answered. His name registered eighty-two percent on your interest scale.

  That made no sense. Why would it predict Tiller Smith would interest me so much? The last thing I needed, when preparing for battle, was extraneous satellite images dumped into my pre-flight mindscape.

  Run a diagnostic on your routines, I told my node. Tiller shouldn’t register so high.

  Running. Then: Tiller Smith didn’t cause the flag. It was your response to a book he gave you.

  I couldn’t imagine why a book of indecipherable poetry would agitate the node. Cancel all flags concerned with Verses on a Windowpane.

  Cancelled. The satellite display vanished.

  Primary Valdoria, Taas thought. I’m getting a spillover onto my grid of your satellite images. I can’t cut it off.

  What commands did you try? I asked.

  Stop, cancel, break, quit, exit, bye, system, chop, stomp, flush, dump, and curse.

  Curse? What is that?

  I swore at it.

  I smiled. Try erase.

  Ah. Yes, that worked. His erase psicon appeared in my mind, a buxom woman wearing a few scraps of cloth and holding a can of paint. She painted the hem of her skirt and it disappeared, showing even more thigh. Then she vanished back to Taas’s system.

  I laughed. You all ready to go?

  Ready, Rex thought.

  Ready, Helda thought.

  Ready, Taas thought.

  Let’s do it, I thought.

  The tower cleared us for take-off. But as we taxied toward the launch pad, the controller’s voice crackled on my comm. “Sorry, Primary Valdoria. The four of you will have to hold. We have a snag on twelve.”

  “Acknowledged.” As we slowed to a stop, I thought, What’s the problem?

  Blackstar showed me several ships on a launch pad we had to pass to reach twelve. These craft are preparing to l
ift off.

  The Trader insignia of a black puma gleamed on their hulls. They waited in the predawn air, the glare from field lamps glittering on their hulls like ice. The sleekest was a Streamliner, the starship of preference for Hightons. The three heavier craft were Escorts, which often guarded the Streamliners. Given that most Hightons traveled with only one Escort, two at the most, I had a good idea what passenger this Streamliner carried.

  Rex spoke in my mind. Qox.

  Yes, I thought.

  Taas’s thought sparked like an iron arc. We should blast him off the pad.

  Helda’s thought rumbled. Ya.

  I scowled. You’re talking about assassination.

  Ya, Helda agreed.

  Let’s do it, Taas thought.

  I couldn’t believe it. They were serious. They wanted to go out there and blow up a civilian ship with no provocation, murdering a major interstellar leader. Cut it out, I told them.

  My displays all indicated launch pad twelve was clear. I was sure we could have used it. I also had no doubt the tower didn’t want us anywhere near the Traders. They probably feared we would do exactly what Taas and Helda suggested.

  Warning lights flared across the Trader’s launch pad, strobing the darkness. Clouds of steam swirled around the ships, and one of the Escorts lifted off, blasting the pad with exhaust. The others followed in a staggered pattern, the rumble of their leaving growling through my bones.

  #

  We hurtled through space, racing the specter of Qox’s flags.

  In inversion, we could go as fast as we wanted, just never slower than light speed. If anyone on Delos could have watched, they would have seen our ships get shorter and our mass increase as we approached light speed. After we went superluminal, speeding up increased our length and decreased our mass. At faster than 141 percent of light, time contracted. Right now we could shoot through space for a century and only an hour would pass on Delos. If we ever reached infinite speed our Jags would have no mass, they would stretch the length of the universe, and time would stand still everywhere else while forever passed for us. It always amazed me that even with all this going on, the ship looked completely normal to me, because relative to it, I wasn’t moving at all.