Loralynn Kennakris 1: The Alecto Initiative

by Owen R. O'Neill

  “That’s why they go there,” Kris snapped. “They can try to wait you out on it and skate away real shallow once you’re faked out.”

  Huron continued rubbing his jaw, digesting this. “Excuse me a moment.”

  He walked away slowly a few paces, pulled out the device like a stylus and hailed the bridge. They heard him talking, fast and low, but couldn’t make out the words.

  “What’s going on?” Mariwen whispered anxiously in Kris’s ear. Kris jumped a little. She’d quite forgotten Mariwen. She turned and saw Mariwen’s eyes—large and worried. “I didn’t understand half of what you said. Is there going to be a fight?”

  “I don’t think so,” Kris muttered back, having no idea if it was actually true.

  “. . . yeah, I know that,” Huron snapped suddenly. “I didn’t say it made sense. Just run it!”

  More unintelligible talking. “Point seven’s just an estimate, dammit!” Silence. Huron fidgeting and tapping a finger on his trouser seam. Kris watching him stonily. Mariwen looking out-of-place and confused. Then the stylus-thing crackled again. Expressions kaleidoscoped across Huron’s face and ended in a smile.

  “d’Harra at point six-eight optimum. Got a ninety-eight convergence.” He looked curiously at Kris. “How did you know that? We’ve been pulling refugees off slaver boats for years—none have ever been able to tell us a thing about their routes. How did you find out?”

  “You got a system?” Kris asked by way of an answer.

  “In my cabin.” He looked across Kris’s shoulder at Mariwen. “Please excuse us, Ms. Rathor?”

  “Of course.” Mariwen had recovered a little of her customary aplomb. She brushed a strand sweat-stiff hair out of Kris’s face and played at straightening the damp jersey. “You look great, honey. Now don’t be late.”

  * * *

  Huron’s cabin was smaller than she expected. There was a narrow extrudable bunk in the sleeping niche, three cabinets with fake teak paneling, the last of which was an autovalet; a desktop piled with yellow plaspaper flimsies, two chairs, a console, a mess port in case he wanted to eat in his quarters, and an omni-lit ceiling. Two fresh uniforms hung on a hook by a long mirror and there was a stack of chips on a nearby shelf.

  Huron invited her in. “The system’s in the desktop,” he said, brushing it clean with a casual sweep of his hand. Then he took out the stylus-like device again, flipped it into the mempad-like mode and waved it over the desktop. “There. You can use it now.”

  “What is that thing?” Kris asked. It obviously also had some security functionality, since she was sure he’d just unlocked his system with it and probably configured it into a guest mode too. “Some sort of cel? Or is it more like a mempad?”

  “This?” He held up the device as it transformed itself back into a cylinder. She nodded. “It’s a xel. It’s a comm, a personal system and it’s own cloud node. You can form autonomous hives with them too. Some have a basic sensor suite, but not these. And you can’t think-link them.”

  The cels Kris knew of were just local hive or cloud clients that would run fairly simple apps. Even the tablets and the better mempads she’d seen didn’t have as much capability as the thing he called a xel. And she’d never heard of think-linking. “Do lots of people have them?”

  “Most people,” he said, sliding it into his pocket. “We restrict them onboard ship because frankly, they can be a damn nuisance. These aren’t nearly as capable as the commercial ones since they have to be fully secure—their capacity is limited and they don’t have as many configuration options and, of course, you can’t customize them as much. The good ones are about as powerful as most desktop systems—a lot of people don’t use desktop systems anymore.”

  “Oh.” She’d figured they had technology far beyond anything she was used to, but she had no idea it was this far ahead. What was his system like? Could she even use it?

  Huron pulled over a chair and gestured for Kris to sit. She did, then nervously thumbed the system on and adjusted the display the way she liked it. The screen lost its silvery-purple sheen and glowed a soft blue.

  “Can you talk to it?” she asked. Trench’s system had had a speech interface.

  “Used to be able to,” Huron answered. “I yanked it. Hate machines that talk back to you.”

  “Oh.” Kris frowned slightly as she glided the cursor over the icons. Well, so far things looked pretty much the same . . .

  “Problem?”

  “No,” Kris shook her head. She selected a couple of functions, frowned again as the display changed unexpectedly. “What OS is this?”

  “x7.01. What are you used to?”

  “x5.0.”

  “Not much different,” Huron said. “They merged a few of the libraries, and application builder is over there.” He pointed. “They updated the analyst—moved the config menus under that round thing in the upper left—no, the silly glowing one.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Kris brightened considerably. She selected a library and quickly ran its contents through the analyst.

  “What do you need?”

  “Tesseract and a copy of the TSAO catalog, if you’ve got it.” She squinted at the screen. “I can use Amber Mountain, if not.”

  “Tesseract is in the root. I called it T.”

  “You didn’t link?”

  Huron shrugged. “Why? I can type.” He was rummaging through the chips on the shelf. “I’ve got TSAO here somewhere. Don’t keep it on the machine.”

  “Isn’t it in the ship’s library?”

  “Probably. Ah, here we go.” He pulled the chip out of its case. “What do you need this for anyway?”

  “I need to build a grid.”

  Huron looked blankly at her with the chip in his hand.

  “Oh, it won’t take that long,” she added. “Probably about a half hour. Is that okay?”

  “There’s mapper, if you want,” Huron finally said in a funny tone of voice. “Type Map.”

  She did. The display switched to holo mode and grid popped up in with a point highlighted.

  “Oh, cool!” Kris breathed. “We’re here?” She pointed at the highlighted grid reference.

  “Yeah. Those are manifolds and allowed phases. Those are nodes.”

  “And where are we going?”

  “Cassandra Station. It’s NQ-147.”

  She entered the reference. The display put an amber globe around it. Now she just had to know where they jumped the slaver ship.

  “LQ-85,” Huron told her. She clicked on it. “This is great. How do I plot a transit?”

  “Hot-linking the transform from Tesseract is probably easiest. I’ve got a procedure written that’ll do an gross iterative solution, if you like.”

  “Oh that’s okay,” Kris said sunnily. With the grid up and the destination marked, this was going to be easy. “Can I just pull the transforms out of the function library and enter them here?”

  Huron lifted his cap and ran his fingers through his hair. “Well, yeah. If . . .”

  She ignored the rest of what he said and got into the function menu. Biting her lip gently, she pulled up a basic transform and started to convolve it. A red line began to wobble tentatively through the display.

  “Shit,” she muttered. “Wrong sign.” She typed a couple of key strokes and started the convolution again. The red transit line arced across to impale Cassandra.

  “There,” Kris said triumphantly. “That’s it.” Then she grinned a little sheepishly. “Of course, that’s not what we’re running exactly, but it oughta be close. Optimum’s all I can do in my head.”

  “Uh huh.” Huron stared at the display incredulously, then sat down in the other chair. “What exactly does this tell me about slaver routes?”

  “I needed a reference,” Kris answered in a cheery voice, enjoying herself immensely. “Now I can fill the rest in pretty easily.”

  “But how did you figure it out to begin with?”

  Kris’s brows rose. “Isn’t it obvious?”

/>   Huron brought up a hand to smooth the hair over his temple again; a distracted little gesture. “No. I’m afraid it isn’t. I don’t imagine they just told you.”

  “No,” Kris said, “They’re usually real close-mouthed. It was times.”

  “Times?”

  Kris nodded. “Yeah. For an optimum transit, the transit times are unique. Time enough transits and you can build a wire diagram, then you just rotate it until the ends all touch a destination.”

  “Oh.” Huron digested this for a moment. “But you need to anchor it somewhere. If you don’t know where you were when you started timing transits, you’ve got a problem. And how do you handle routes with similar timings? They don’t always run optimum—so you said.”

  Kris shrugged. “That’s easy. When you take on the same supplies, when guys start talking about the same bars or whorehouses, when you hear the same people on the comms—stuff like that. Finding the anchor was harder, but the routes are pretty repetitive and after awhile it narrows down. I got to talk to the transportees a few times and that confirmed it.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” Huron quit fidgeting. “And you figured this out all by yourself?”

  Kris’s brows quirked in a hurt look. “I had eight years.”

  “Good point.” He stood up. “Look, will you excuse me for a few minutes? I think the captain should know about this.”

  Kris shrugged. “Sure. This’ll take me a little while.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll be back in about fifteen.” He pointed at the entry pad by the door. “If that goes off, answer it.” He flashed a narrow, one-sided smile. “I’ve got my reputation to think about.”

  Before Kris could comment, he was out the door.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Huron walked quickly down the hall, his head spinning. He caught the lift-ladder to O-Deck, breezed out, punched the bridge hatch open without losing stride. Lieutenant Fitz Lee Walsh was manning the nav-station. Huron went and leaned over the display.

  “Fitz, show me our transit.”

  Walsh brought it up. Huron stared hard at it, muttering and tracing the line with his finger. Close, but not exact. Well, she’d said that. “What are we running?”

  “About nine-three,” Walsh answered. “Old Man’s in a hurry.”

  “Plot an optimum, would you?”

  “What for?”

  “Don’t give me grief, Walsh.”

  “Alright. Gimme a second.” Walsh reached out, blanked the display, brought up the nav module, started fiddling. A minute or so later he had a transform. He ran it through a pole checker to make sure there were no unallowed singularities in the solution, then did a residue calculation. Finally, he brought up the convolver, and stuffed the transform in it with the residual inputs. The thin red line arced across the display to their destination. The whole process took about three minutes—Walsh was a pretty good navigator. “How’s that?”

  “Tap up my system.” Walsh entered the link commands. Huron entered his passcode. “Grab that,” he said, pointing. “Merge the plots.”

  “What is this?” Walsh muttered testily as the two holo plots overlaid perfectly. “A fucking test?”

  “Sort of,” Huron answered, “but not of you. Son of a bitch.” He straightened and Walsh shot him a dirty look sideways. “I’ve got a girl back there who plots transits in her head.”

  “No fuckin’ way!”

  “There it is, man.” Huron pointed at the display. “Living color. I watched her do it.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “My words exactly. And she says she knows all the slaver routes in this sector.”

  “Oh bullshit! You are pulling my leg.”

  “Not a nanometer,” Huron replied coolly. “She’s plotting them up now. She got one already.”

  Walsh twisted around in his chair. “d’Harra? She gave you that?”

  Huron smiled with just the edges of his teeth showing. “You get a gold star, Fitz. What’s the Old Man doing about it anyway?”

  “He shot it over to PrenTalien. They’re whistling up Shariati’s group out of Epona. Should be able to give them bastards a big fucking surprise.”

  A quiet, self-satisfied smile warmed Huron’s features. “That’s nice.”

  Chapter Six

  LSS Arizona

  transiting the Cepheid-Sagittarian Belt

  By the time Huron got back to his cabin, Kris was nearly done with the map. She was agonizing over the last few details as he came in. “Almost,” she said over her shoulder, then muttered Shit! under her breath. He came and stood quietly behind her. She typed and muttered, poking at the holo volume with the stylus. After about five minutes, she threw her hands in the air. “Fuck it. I can’t remember anymore.”

  Huron looked over her shoulder while she rubbed her eyes. What he saw left him impressed. He glanced down at her, hesitated, then asked, “Would you mind telling me how you learned this? Hyper-navigation is a two-year graduate program. Not to mention astrocartography. It couldn’t have been easy.”

  Kris shot him a nakedly angry look. “It wasn’t.”

  * * *

  Trench had had an old navigation text and Kris had read it. That made Trench laugh; no way was she gonna understand that shit. She told him it had cool pictures. He laughed some more.

  Kris found the text when she was fourteen and for a long time he was right. Her schooling had ended at age eleven—the text assumed college-level math and physics. But there were a lot of pictures and animated tutorials, and for all her lack of formal education, she managed to grasp a few basic concepts. She took down the text and looked at it whenever she didn’t have work to do. That wasn’t often, but she wasn’t above trading sexual favors to other deck slaves to have her chores done. That gave her more time alone with the text. When she wheedled Trench into letting her log onto his system, things got better. There was a comprehensive encyclopedia and several tutorial packages in the library; no doubt installed by the original owners and never purged. Kris worked herself through calculus and analytic geometry, and all the physics she could get out of the encyclopedia. Gradually, the navigation text began to make sense.

  She learned that three things were essential to hyperlight travel: a wormhole, a statis field and a manifold. A wormhole was simply the path taken by a mass that collapsed into a black hole when its trajectory was plotted in N-space; the N-dimensional overspace in which the familiar four—real space-time or RST—resided. The encyclopedia said that the exact value of N remained unresolved. Competing theories argued for either eleven or thirteen and the encyclopedia implied that there was blood on the walls whenever cosmologists gathered to try to resolve it.

  Wormholes resulting from collapsing star cores were common in nature but not at all useful. Though once thought of as a likely means of hyperlight travel, they presented insurmountable difficulties from the practical standpoint. The encyclopedia said this was actually realized long before the popular notion died out, and practical hyperlight travel was considered impossible until the hyper-Lorenz transformations of Benjamin’s Second Modification of the Grand Unified Theory were discovered. Those provided the theoretical basis for gravitic technology: the artificial creation and manipulation of gravity and antigravity fields. The first practical gravitic technology was the bipolar gravity lens which collected gravity waves passively, and focused them to create enough virtual mass to make a wormhole. Much later, antimatter drives were invented that could create enough virtual mass on their own to make a useable wormhole.

  But making a wormhole was one thing; surviving a trip through one was something else entirely. Objects falling into a wormhole experience extreme tidal forces that at the event horizon destroy ordinary matter. What emerges is a burst of energy and uncorrelated particles that resemble decay products. But from the human perspective, that wasn't the only problem. Although wormholes do traverse N-space’s other dimensions, those dimensions are conjugate spatial, meaning that topology is conserved. This causes dimensional scali
ng effects and since a particle transits a wormhole at the relativistic velocity at which it entered, the trip’s duration from the traveler’s point of view was exactly the same as it would be in RST. Only from the point of view of an external observer did the wormhole traveler exceed the speed of light.

  The solution of both problems was the stasis field, a branch of gravitic technology. A stasis field created what was, in effect, an event horizon around the ship, encapsulating a “time bubble” that allowed the ship to subjectively experience its RST timespace. This not only canceled the dimensional scaling effects, but also protected against the wormhole’s extreme tidal forces. By preserving the RST timespace, the stasis field reduced the period of extreme gravity shear to near the Planck time, enabling the travelers to survive it. (An alternate explanation held that stasis fields scaled the electroweak force so that ordinary matter acquired the tensile strength needed to resist the shear forces. Although supportable by an adaptation of the color confinement principle of quantum chromo-dynamics, the encyclopedia said this theory was not widely accepted.)

  The final piece of the puzzle was the cosmic manifold: a 2-dimensional membrane vibrating in the N-dimensional overspace. Cosmic manifolds grew out of M-theory, an ancient fore-runner of the GUT that was wrong but led to this useful insight. The formal description was a mess but the key was that wormhole trajectories followed cosmic manifolds in predictable ways. It was by mapping manifolds that wormhole travel became more than a blind jump into the abyss.

  Taken together, it all worked. A ship in a statis field could safely traverse a wormhole along a manifold, the pseudo-velocity being related to the ratio of the virtual mass of the drive to the ship’s rest mass; a higher ratio made the wormhole go deeper—some said straighter—and took less time.

  Of course, there were limitations. A detailed understanding of them required tensor calculus, which Kris understood only vaguely, and hypergonic fractal geometry, which she didn’t understand at all. But she grasped the practical aspects well enough. One was that not all pseudo-velocities in a wormhole were permitted; they were constrained by the allowed vibrational modes of the manifold it was on. These modes, called manifold phase layers—usually just phase layers—were quantized, just as the electron states of an atom were quantized and for the same reason, so the only way to go “faster” was to have a drive “big” enough to jump to the next deeper phase layer.