“It’s not a proposal,” Husher ground out. “If I decide we’re going to Viburnum, then I’ll give you the order to set a course for Viburnum. I’m sure you know the term for when subordinates refuse to follow orders aboard a warship.”
“I’m prepared to follow whatever orders you give me, of course,” Kaboh said. “But would you just take a moment to consider how you’ll feel if we go to Viburnum, discover there’s no threat to the munitions facility, and then learn of an attack on the two colonies of Saffron?”
“In that event, I’ll hope that Commander Ternon had the good sense to evacuate the people of Cebrene to Edessa. The former’s a fairly minor colony of little more than a hundred thousand, but Edessa’s population approaches two million, and last year they were successful in lobbying the Union to install defensive platforms around their planet, despite being several thousand short of the usual population quota. Those platforms are fully operational, and with the two warships on patrol there as well, it should be possible for the Saffron System to mount a reasonable defense. If they fail, that will be tragic, but it will also be the type of thing that results from making expedient military decisions designed to save billions of lives, even when doing so means risking millions.”
Several officers around the CIC were wearing expressions of grim approval, and Husher caught a nod or two as well. That should be the end of it.
But Kaboh hadn’t turned back to his station, and his slim, blue-white shoulders rose and fell. “Captain,” he said, his voice meticulously level, “know that if you make this decision, I intend to file a formal complaint on the grounds of moral dissent. As you know, Admiral Iver is a close personal friend, and I’m confident he’ll take the appropriate measures once he learns of what transpired.”
Husher’s eyes locked with Kaboh’s for a protracted moment, each refusing to look away until the other faltered. Cheek twitching, Husher was hyper conscious of the CIC officers observing the exchange, waiting to see how their captain would react.
Without taking his eyes off the Kaithian, Husher said, “We’ll go to Saffron.” His voice came out much softer than he’d intended, and that made heat creep up his neck until it reached his cheeks.
“I’m relieved to hear you say so, Captain,” Kaboh said, breaking eye contact and turning briskly to his console. “I’ll alter our planned course into the Tansy System so that it takes us to the warp departure point as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
As Husher looked around the CIC, his officers’ eyes flitted away, and they focused on their respective tasks with unusual intensity.
Fesky held his eyes for little more than a second, and then she averted her gaze as well. That hurt most of all.
Chapter 25
Bash Back
“We’re clear of system debris, Captain, and safe to accelerate to warp velocity,” Winterton said, apparently unaffected by the tension that still clogged the CIC like an invisible smog, even eight hours after Husher’s standoff with Kaboh. “All four battle group ships have already completed warp transitions and are en route to Saffron.”
Husher gave a curt nod. “Helm?” he said, his voice clipped. He was none too happy about having his will as a captain subverted, and even less happy with himself for letting it happen.
Luckily, Ensign Vy was smart enough to know what her captain wanted. “Opening hatches and extending distortion rods now, sir.”
“Very good,” Husher said, plunging back into his dark reverie. What’s the point of placating bureaucrats, even bureaucrats disguised as Fleet officers, if it means sacrificing our military effectiveness? Still, he was convinced he’d done the right thing. Just as Snyder and Chancey had the power to burn down his career, Husher knew Kaboh did as well, but only if Husher agreed to provide the flint and tinder. That was something he refused to do.
To defeat Teth, I need to be in command. I can’t let them yank me from the command seat.
But what was the point of sitting there if he couldn’t get the correct decisions past the haze of feel-good nonsense? Husher was sure bureaucratic folly came from a place of good intentions, but that wouldn’t make the people it got killed any less dead.
“Warp bubble generating,” the Helm officer said. “Stabilizing now. Approaching superluminal speed in proportion to declining energy density.”
“Acknowledged,” Husher muttered.
“Negative mass achieved, Captain. We’re in warp.”
“Acknowledged,” he repeated, and silence fell as his CIC crew checked over critical systems to make sure nothing had been negatively affected during the transition.
Once they were finished, the CIC would become one of the most boring locations on the Vesta. Even though the feat performed by the warp bubble—contracting the space in front of the ship while expanding the space behind it—was conceptually astounding, while inside the bubble, there was virtually nothing for the CIC crew to do. The chances of a hostile ship entering the bubble were zero, and it was likewise impossible to steer the ship, since no interface existed for communicating with and controlling the warp bubble itself. Warp transitions had to be carefully preplanned, along a route that was vanishingly unlikely to contain debris of any kind, since impacting anything bigger than a pebble would likely result in the molecules of the ship and her crew getting strewn across the void.
Luckily, the chances of encountering anything at all in the spaces between stars really were infinitesimal, and since the advent of the warp drive, there had been no mishaps involving collisions with errant debris.
Husher’s com vibrated, and he slipped it from its holster to find a message from Ochrim inviting him for a beer.
For a moment, he considered which would have been more damning, once IU officials inevitably reviewed his text exchanges with the Ixan—the chummy fiction he was maintaining with the perpetrator of one of the worst atrocities in galactic history, or the truth: that Ochrim was conducting research for him with likely military applications.
Wait, I know exactly which would be more damning. The second one. Much better to continue pretending he was close friends with the war criminal.
“Be right there, pal,” Husher messaged back, standing from the command seat. “Fesky, you have the CIC.”
“Yes, sir,” Fesky said, sounding as morose as everyone else looked.
This time, the pack of protesters was waiting for Husher in the outskirts of Cybele, instead of sitting right outside the hatch into the desert. Husher assumed that was a strategic choice—they’d get more attention from other residents, this way.
“Why haven’t you signed onto the Positive Response Program yet?” one yelled, appearing from an alleyway between two residences.
“Why haven’t you joined other Fleet captains in the movement to make military hiring practices more equitable for nonhuman species?” demanded a second, screaming at him from less than a meter’s remove.
Husher opened his mouth to respond, and the protester held an air horn in his face, activating it and drowning out his words with a deafening blare.
Seizing the air horn from the protester’s grasp, Husher threw it against the side of a nearby residence as hard as he could, where it ruptured with an audible pop.
Get a grip, he berated himself even as his ears rang. You’re a warship captain, not a temperamental child.
Deciding to take the tack of ignoring the protesters, he marched straight ahead. That was when a band of them trooped into the street ahead, linking arms, digital signs above their heads flashing righteous messages:
“HUSHER ISN’T HELPING!”
“BASH BACK!”
“STOP SWEEPING ME UNDER THE RUG!”
He continued marching, coming to a halt in front of the center protester, whose angry sneer devolved into a look of uncertainty.
There must have been something suggestive in Husher’s eyes, because within seconds, the protester he was staring down decoupled himself from his neighbors and stepped out of the way.
Husher pa
ssed through them, tearing his com out of his pocket. The ability to send the Oculenses mental commands was too limited to compose an actual message, so for discretion he was forced to tap one out on his com as he walked.
“Can we get that beer at the Secured Zone instead?” he asked Ochrim. “Would that work for you?” He was actually asking whether Ochrim could discreetly show him what he’d discovered there, which he was guessing he could, since as far as Husher knew the Ixan was now doing most of his work in a simulation anyway.
“That’ll work,” came Ochrim’s reply. “I’ll meet you there in twenty.”
Holstering the com, Husher stalked through the streets of Cybele, fighting the implacable sensation that he was losing control of his ship.
Chapter 26
The Secured Zone
The Secured Zone was one of Cybele’s most popular bars. He supposed they were trying to follow a military theme, but that wasn’t the vibe Husher got—from the name or the atmosphere.
When he entered, the silence was almost total. He supposed that did remind him of certain memories from Basic, when their drill sergeant had left them to stand at attention on the parade grounds while a blistering star cooked their innards into a fine stew.
But this quiet was punctuated by soft clicking and even the occasional grunt or curse. The dim interior, lit only by multicolored neon strips that ran along the walls and floors, consisted of several enclosed booths, where patrons sat staring into space—or rather, staring into the fantasy worlds displayed by their Oculenses. Video games, panoramic vids, other media best viewed in the privacy of one’s home…that was what people gathered here to immerse themselves in. This was the new “social,” and sometimes it even justified that word, in a sense. Sometimes, the gamers played in shared fantasy worlds.
The enclosure of the booths was almost complete, with only a narrow opening for servers to bring drinks when they were ordered remotely. Otherwise, most patrons kept curtains drawn across those openings. The booths even had their own ceilings. They reminded Husher of clamshells, or maybe the wombs to which everyone likened cities like Cybele.
This is how this generation was raised. During Husher’s childhood, which had more or less lined up with the end of the First Galactic War, children had still sometimes pretended household implements were guns and chased each other around the yard, playing Marines and Ixa. Or they pretended they were Wingers taking flight, or pretended their dolls were people, or whatever. For Husher, the point was that those games had required some creative input from the children playing them. The generation he glimpsed through the clamshells’ openings—they’d been spoon-fed everything, so that they hadn’t had to tax even their imaginations.
Husher walked to the narrow window at the back of the room, placing his paycard on the sill. “I’ll have a pint of this week’s lager, please,” he said.
The man on the other side of the window shot him a strange look—whether because he’d actually walked to the window to order or because he was the captain of the Vesta, Husher wasn’t sure.
He took his beer into an unoccupied clamshell. While he waited for Ochrim, he ordered his Oculenses to go completely transparent so he could look at the shadows that were his only companions, in here. When Ochrim finally made his appearance, the Ixan was beerless.
“Where’s your drink?” Husher asked him before taking a long pull from his own.
“I don’t need one,” Ochrim said. “If they ask me to order something, I’ll get a soda.”
“Well, I could have used a second one.” Husher downed the remainder of his pint.
“Order one using your Oculenses.”
Husher grimaced. “Just start up the simulation. Show me what you have.” Reaching beyond the clamshell’s curtain, Husher found the privacy shield, slamming it across and casting them in utter darkness for the second it took a neon strip to come on, offering them enough light to drink by. Not that that was necessary, since Oculenses had a night vision feature.
At any rate, when he accepted Ochrim’s invite, the simulation washed out everything he could see of the real world.
Husher found himself in a blank void. Ochrim stood beside him, and suspended in the nothingness was a contraption for which Husher had no name. Four-pronged protrusions jutted from the top of the machine, with blue, bead-like wires running down them. A double row of tight coils marched along the sides, projecting in opposite directions.
For more complex simulations, like most video games, users needed a controller of some sort, but Ochrim was able to manipulate the strange object without one, using hand gestures.
“Hopefully the software I talked the Tyros governor into getting for you can do more than simulate a white void and a prop from a poorly produced sci-fi vid,” Husher said.
“Oh, yes,” Ochrim said. “The DeskChain program allows me to do what Baxa used to—to accurately simulate the universe, or at least its physics, along with a reasonably large region of space.”
“It makes me twitchy when you talk about Baxa in that tone.”
“Not to worry, Captain,” Ochrim said. “My estranged father actually did simulate entire universes—thousands of them at once. I can only simulate a small fraction of one. Also, I lack the superintelligence to go with it.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Ochrim,” Husher said. He nodded at the contraption. “Walk me through how this thing works.”
Husher had always assumed “creepy smile” was just the default configuration for Ixan mouths, but right now, Ochrim appeared to be frowning. He seemed just as apprehensive to go through the process of explaining advanced quantum physics as Husher was to try wrapping his head around it.
“As is often the way with scientific experimentation, I ended up somewhere quite different from my intended destination,” the Ixan said.
“I’m fine with that, as long as the surprise destination has military applications.”
“It…should. Though I’m not sure you’ll respond positively to everything that’s involved in the process I’ve worked out.”
Husher sniffed. “What parts do you think I’ll object to?”
“It’s probably simpler for me to start at the beginning. You recall the experiment during which I successfully contacted my counterpart in the universe next door, so to speak?”
“I remember you seemed pretty convinced that you had, yeah.”
When Ochrim turned toward him, his expression was one of clear exasperation, even on an alien face. “I explained to you why it’s incontrovertible that I—”
Holding up a hand, Husher said, “Yeah, yeah. I accept that you did what you claim to have done. Not saying I remember how you did it, or that I even understood how at the time, but I accept it. Let’s move on.”
“Very well,” Ochrim said, clearly still ruffled by Husher’s breadth of ignorance. “The first problem I faced—or, thought I faced, at any rate—was traveling to another reality without my double traveling to our reality at the same time. That could result in some awkward interactions, not to mention pointless, since the next universe over would be configured almost identically to ours.”
“Hold on a second,” Husher said. “When you told me travel across the multiverse might be possible, the military application that came to mind right away was perfect stealth. Is that what you’ve been thinking?”
“I’m not military.”
“Come on, Ochrim. You might as well be, with what you’ve gotten tangled up in over the years.”
The alien hesitated, then said, “As much as I hesitate to highlight any military applications to you, given the consequences almost certain to be brought by the Interstellar Union…yes. That is the obvious application, as I see it.”
“So that’s why you say it would be pointless for us to travel to the next universe over. We’d just end up swapping places with our doubles, and in a combat situation we’d be under fire from our doubles’ enemies, who are equal in power to our own.”
“Exactly. The only differe
nce between our universe and the next is whatever quantum measurement caused the two universes to diverge. That’s far from enough to change the outcome of an engagement.”
“We’d be just as likely to die over there as we were in this universe.”
“Yes.”
“All right. I think I’m getting the hang of this.”
Ochrim looked skeptical about that, but he pressed on with his explanation nonetheless. “After I identified that initial, rather obvious hurdle—” To Husher’s ears, Ochrim placed a definite emphasis on the word “obvious.” “—I set about trying to determine what would be required for us to ‘skip over’ multiple universes, until we reached one different enough to be useful to us. That was not an easy task. Remember that in the first experiment, we merely communicated with the next universe by observing a single isolated ion. What I hoped to do now was figure out how to transport an incredibly complex quantum system—namely, a starship of some size—several universes over.”
“Did you succeed?”
“No. Not nearly. But in trying, I did discover something else. This is what brings me to what scientists sometimes call a ‘happy accident.’”
Tired of prompting Ochrim to continue, Husher decided to just wait until the Ixan kept talking.
Eventually, he did. “I began with the assumption that in order to transcend the layers of decoherence separating the universes, I would first need to figure out a way to generate and then leverage a decoherence-free space. It’s been common knowledge in the field for some time that decoherence can be prevented by firing a photon at an atom whose spin is aligned in the same direction as its path. I thought that maybe travel between the universes might have something to do with repeating that action along the entire path integral—that is, every possible trajectory at once—from within a decoherence-free space.”
Ixan Legacy Box Set Page 12