Shit.
He itched to try out the racer, but his ass was tied to the Fashoda. The bridge could release the racer from the clamps on the bay floor. But that wouldn’t get him out. At this acceleration, releasing the clamps would just ram the racer into the stern of the bay.
The acceleration sharpened, pressing uncomfortably even on him. The external telemetry crackled. They were pulling away from the weapons fire, and the Congregate battleship, seeing no more warships emerging from the Puppet Axis, followed. But the Union ships were too fast.
Fucking amazing!
He felt like leaping through the deep waters of Indi’s Tear to burn away the adrenaline, like in races. If he hadn’t been under acceleration, he would have unstrapped himself and done tiny somersaults in his chamber. He could just cheer. The fuckin’ undergdogs were pulling away!
Fuck you, you arrogant, acid-scarred Congregate air-suckers! he yelled electrically in his chamber. Fly, you fucking incomprehensible, death-wish-sucking rebels!
Then he froze. Their trajectory, marked in a standing sonar wave in his display, clearly ran in a straight line from the Puppet Free City to the most heavily fortified military emplacement in the solar system: the Freyja Axis.
What the were they doing?
You run the fuck away from the Congregate navy, you shitheads! he said loudly. He switched on his comms to the bridge. Where are you dumb-ass air-suckers going? You’re faster! Run the fuck away. You’re in the clear!
A low tone in the water indicated that the bridge had shut off the comms line to the inflaton racer. Stills wasn’t a coward. He’d done some of the most dangerous shit imaginable. He’d given death the finger over and over. But he wasn’t in control here. And he’d served at Fort Freyja. Its defenses had one fucking job: don’t let anyone near the Freyja Axis. They were designed to hold off an assault by the Anglo-Spanish, the other salami-cocked navy in Epsilon Indi. The same weapons the Congregate put on dreadnoughts, they’d installed around the Axis Mundi, just more of them, and bigger. The mongrels affectionately referred to the fortificationsas the heavy shit-throwers. Stills was about to stare into the face of some heavy shit.
The Fashoda accelerated at thirty-two gravities for twenty minutes. At the forward edge of the bridge’s telemetry feed, multi-spectrum static crackled, the kind produced by the exchange of nukes and heavy particle beams. The Union soldiers and officers were brave, and stupid, and they were committing.
Only problem was they were taking him with them.
Then what-the-fuck-they-were-up-to hit him.
Bachwezi and Kitara, the Union homeworlds, were on the other side of the Freyja Axis.
The Sub-Saharan Union wouldn’t have received advanced ships and weaponry from their patron nation without a certain amount of insurance. No doubt the Congregate had a weapons platform or two orbiting Bachwezi, armed with at least one casse à face.
It wouldn’t take more than one moon-buster to turn Bachwezi into a breakfast slurry. And less than a casse à face would take care of Kitara, their orbital habitat. The warships the Union had in service right now around Bachwezi wouldn’t be able to stop retribution. Congregate political commissars stationed on each warship had lots of jobs like nag and snitch, but only one real important one: flick the fucking scuttle switch if the client nation ever went rogue. In one fell swoop, the Union could be gone, loaned warships, habitats and planet.
They raced so fast that the telemetry feed was picking up new, crackly information every second. Two Union warships, the Ngundeng and the Pibor, part of the squadron protecting the flagship, showed in the displays as debris fields.
Morituri te salutamus, you brave, stupid fuckers.
Twelve warships. Two left behind. Two destroyed. Eight effectives.
Six of the warships rotated one hundred and eighty degrees and began brake-thrusting. Two others, the Nhialic and the Gbudue, sped onward, straight at the Freyja Axis. Although the pair was still far from the axis, squadrons of tonnère fighters followed the outbound trails of their ownmissiles. The telemetry display would not show particle beams at this distance, but they would be firing too. If he didn’t get the hell out of here, he was going to be welded to his pay.
The Fashoda had rotated its stern toward the Freyja Axis and was retro-thrusting at twenty-five gravities. He had to get out of here. But even if he managed to break the clamps holding the racer, he’d just ram into the stern of the bay at twenty-five gravities.
Unless he thrust with the inflaton racer himself, inside the bay, and broke the clamps.
But that was fucking crazy.
He would need to be good enough to match the exact acceleration of the Fashoda, in a ship he’d never flown, in a design he’d never flown, with about sixty meters for error in front and behind him.
That was fucking crazy.
But like the Way of the Mongrel said—Lick your balls if you can find them.
He steadied his hands on the remote controls. He activated the racer’s inflaton drive and a sharp, thin field showed in his sonar display, right down the middle of the carbon-reinforced steel and ceramic tube that was the axis of the racer. Half a gravity of acceleration. Weird readings. Not what was in the manuals.
He increased the thrust. The inflaton field showed stronger, thicker in his display, more echo-reflective. The racer shuddered. Ten gravities of acceleration. The strain on the clamps lessened. More weird readings.
More thrust. Fifteen gravities and tremendous vibrations. The display should have shown him twenty gravities of acceleration, but he was hung at fifteen. But the acceleration of the Fashoda had slackened. It averaged fifteen gravities, darting chaotically to nineteen and dipping down to fourteen.
Shit.
His inflation field was interfering with the Fashoda’s.This would make them all sitting ducks. The fort’s particle beams were still far off, but any missiles that missed the Nhialic and the Gbudue could pick new targets and intercept in about four minutes at this speed.
The comms system lit up with electrical and sonar. Bridge to flier, turn off your engine! You are interfering with main systems.
For a moment, Stills thought to answer, but thought better of it. As always, the Way of the Mongrel had the answer: Bite every hand. Stills ramped up his inflaton field, looking for what the manuals said ought to get him twenty-five gravities.
The vibrations intensified, tickling his insides. The Fashoda’s acceleration fell to five gravities, and Stills listened to it race ahead of the other five warships that were braking.
Flier! Turn off your engine! You’re putting us into enemy fire with no control.
Then you’d better get some people down here to let me out.
There’s no time!
We’ll have all the time in the world in a second, Stills replied.
In answer, from the floor of the bay, a small swivel-mounted heavy-caliber gun emerged, turning its barrel on the inflaton racer.
Oh fuck.
Metal slugs slammed into the racer, some ricocheting around the bay, others smashing through the window of the cockpit and blasting the inside. System displays softened. The only reason he was still alive was because his chamber was too big for the cockpit and he was in the racer’s cargo bay.
I’ll take you with me, you fuckers!
Stills rammed the drive to maximum. The manual said that under peak conditions, the racer was rated to fifty gravities, although it had only been tested under crewless circumstances. His inflaton field hadn’t been damaged yet and hardened in the center of his display within the tube, but it was in some sort of resonance with the Fashoda’s field. They were locked together.
Suddenly ship’s systems darkened. The racer’s systems were still on, but the inflaton drive had gone into auto shutdown. Ninety seconds before it came back online.
No more bullets fired, but the cockpit of the racer was now a hard vacuum. No leaks yet in chamber. He got no more feed from the bridge. The racer’s sensors gave him a dim view of the outs
ide, velocity, acceleration and trajectory.
They raced almost as fast as the Nhialic and the Gbudue, but no longer decelerating. The Fashoda’s inflaton field was down and rebooting. Fort Freyja loomed ahead.
The racer shuddered and then floated. Some of the ricocheting bullets had done him a favor. His first good luck, even if it was a bit late.
Thirty seconds left until the Fashoda’s drive came online. He corrected his attitude with cold gas jets. The bay doors were more damaged than he’d thought. Dented by whatever had hit the Fashoda as it had emerged from the Puppet Axis, and then pierced or further bent by the heavy caliber fire. How soon would the Fashoda’s commander get the bay gun operational? Stills wouldn’t survive another round with the gun. Sonar grew louder, and some connections to bridge systems were coming online.
Ten seconds.
Stars peeked through a crack between the bay doors.
The airlock into the bay cycled, opening a heavy door onto darkness. Two Union soldiers in vacuum armor emerged, carrying what looked like anti-aircraft shoulder-mountable weapons. They hooked their legs into railings along the walls and shouldered their weapons.
Fuck.
They were good soldiers. They didn’t make a production of it. They just aimed and fired.
Stills gave two gravities of acceleration for a second, enough to shoot the racer twenty meters across the bay, spin and brake at four gravities. Two rockets blasted into the bay doors and shrapnel tinkled silently around the bay.
That trick wouldn’t work twice.
Stills hovered over to the weak seam of the bay doors on cold gas jets.
The soldiers fired again. Two more rockets rode silent contrails of searing gas, one on target, one aimed about thirty meters ahead.
This was going to be the most precise flying he’d ever done.
He tipped the racer so that it pointed straight at the bay doors, showing the least profile to the Union artillerists. The two blasts bracketed the racer.
The bay doors couldn’t stop the blast and blew into space.
In that moment, he throttled the inflaton drive to ten gravities and shot into the deep ocean of stars.
Alarms deafened.
Fuck you all!
His momentum threw him towards Fort Freyja. A cloud of rail-gun-launched metal pellets approached at twenty kilometers per second. On its margins flew scores of tonnère fighter craft, crewed by mongrel pilots. He probably knew most of them. Had outdived or outeaten or out-flown most of them. But he had no weapons, and there were more than a hundred of them.
Stills heard the Fashoda’s inflaton drive come online. But then a particle beam touched the warship, and a scar wrote itself in a long, turning spiral across the outside of the big tube of its inflaton drive.
Stills kicked his own drive to full and dove away from the edges of the chaff field, where he wouldn’t have enough time to escape either the metal or the mongrel pilots.
The Nhialic was thirty kilometers closer to Fort Freyja, directly on Stills’ trajectory, while the Gbudue flew twenty kilometers off-axis and ahead of him. Stills had done enough tours of duty at Fort Freyja to know that the particle beams and chaff and missiles would be focused on the big ships. Except for the holes through their middles, either ship would make an effective shield to weapons fire until he could find some way to cut laterally without being shredded by the Congregate fortifications. He settled the racer slightly off the axis of the Nhialic’s inflaton tube, through which he could see the distant little speck of the Freyja Axis, one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in civilization.
And if he hadn’t been there, he never would have seen it.
The missiles, both casse à face and chasseur, raced towards the Nhialic, clouded in a wave of lethal chaff and preceded by the darting archery of the particle beams. The light coming through the tube of the inflaton drive, perfectly translated into sonar and electrical chirps, suddenly warped, the way starlight sometimes lensed around a big celestial object. The lensing light appeared to make concentric rings of the missiles and the dark chaff and the particle beams, magnifying the southern wing of Fort Freyja, as if Stills had been looking through a telescope.
Then the lensing snapped forward, racing ahead of the Nhialic, warping light as it went. The particle beams scattered through it, refracted outward. The missiles and chaff stretched and contracted, ripping themselves to tiny shreds.
What. The. Fuck.
Sixty kilometers further, the lensing warped through the south wing of Fort Freyja.
The fortification twisted itself a new asshole made of white-hot shrapnel.
Not far off, the Gbudue had fired a similar shot, but because of where he was, Stills could hear nothing of its path. He followed it by the trail of radioactive fragments it made of chaff and missiles as it reached down to punch through the northern wing of Fort Freyja.
The great metal construct of weapons and fighter craft and barracks exploded.
Sweet fuck.
The Union had just shat in the Congregate’s mouth and made them swallow.
The rain of chaff and hot debris raced around the two speeding warships and Stills. The secondary East-West gun platforms swung into action but didn’t have the firepower to deal with what they’d just seen. They did have the firepower to punch holes in Stills, though.
Stills brought the racer closer behind the Nhialic and hung in its shadow as they entered the space immediately around the Axis. How would the Union consolidate this? No one had ever captured half an Axis before. This was military history.
Stills waited to see what deceleration profile Nhialic chose, so he could match it.
The East-West gun batteries drew uncomfortably close. This was not a good place to slow.
But the Nhialic didn’t slow.
The Nhialic and the Gbudue were following a straight line to the Axis.
Oh fuck.
Chapter Seventy
THE FUGUE SUIT changed settings to cool the Cassandra physicality. Most of the processing power of the quantum intellect was consumed in the constant navigational adjustments to the shape of the induced wormhole; its temporary joining to the mid-throat of the Puppet Axis was increasingly fragile. The calculation errors became more and more difficult to correct.
But the movement of Phocas through the wormhole had threaded a line of probability from the Limpopo, through the induced wormhole, into the interior of the Puppet Axis and out into the flat space-time around Oler. The line of entanglement vibrated in resonance with its quantum environment, acting like a microphone with which to listen to the topological flexing of the wormholes. No one had ever had access to this observational data.
The experimental insights came close to overloading memory buffers and processing capacity of the quantum intellect. It had already observed that the internal topology of wormholes was not flat, but highly textured, with higher dimensional geometries that allowed branching tunnels and throats. Whole families of wormhole theories had been disproven in the last hour. Yet every few seconds, the entire conjoined wormhole structure threatened to collapse.
The Puppet Axis flexed across the curled dimensions of space-time. This was only observable now because of the way the induced wormhole needed to change its shape to maintain contact. These rhythmic shape changes released the accumulating gravitational tensions and tidal stresses, stabilizing the Axis Mundi over galactic time. However, they occurred every four to eight seconds.
The quantum intellect had three to five seconds to adjust the induced wormhole so that it continued to intersect the Puppet Axis. It calculated a new, stable shape for the induced wormhole. One point one seconds. Finger movements of the Cassandra physicality, read by bridge lasers, shifted coil curvature, magnetic polarization and magnetic susceptibility. One point two seconds for the Limpopo to react. Point nine seconds for the induced wormhole to shift.
The intersection of wormholes was stabilized for this cycle.
Next cycle of flexing in approximately
one to four seconds.
The Cassandra physicality could not sustain the quantum intellect much longer. The Cassandra subjectivity had been suppressed for seventy-four minutes, and the last of the ships had passed through. The line of entangled particles carried by Stills had emerged from the main tunnel of the Puppet Axis, safe.
“Shutting down the induced wormhole,” the quantum intellect stated.
The quantum intellect decohered.
Chapter Seventy-One
BELISARIUS JERKED IN the eerie weightlessness. His breath sucked loudly in his ears. Outside the faceplate of his vacuum suit, spectral blue Cherenkov radiation glowed from everywhere in distorted perspective. Some of the light purpled. The angles hurt his eyes as he tried to focus.
He swung his arms in a panic. He couldn’t feel the EM field. And he was feverish. How long had he been in the fugue? The suit’s clock showed thirty minutes, but seemed to be running slowly. He couldn’t remember the fugue. Normally he could. What was happening? Was he even still in savant?
Belisarius subjectivity, spoke a voice in his head. It was his voice, speaking robotically. It was chilling.
“What?” Belisarius asked hesitantly.
The partitioning was successful, the voice said. The Belisarius subjectivity and the objective quantum intellect may process in parallel, exchanging only classical information.
“What?” Belisarius said in his helmet. “That’s impossible. We can’t coexist.”
The quantum intellect has arrived at an impasse, his dead voice said.
“What’s happening?” Belisarius demanded. “Where am I? Why can’t I feel my magnetosomes?”
Algorithmic partitions have been constructed to separate classical subjective processing from quantum objective processing. Magnetosensory information serves primarily to input quantum information. These inputs have been partitioned away from the Belisarius subjectivity to avoid the collapse of superimposed quantum states.
The Quantum Magician Page 33