Catch the Lightning (22 page)

I tried “thinking” to it.
What does that mean?

Our effect on each other gets stronger as we get closer together. Right now you are inside of me
.

Then why does Althor need to plug into you?
I asked.

His system allows far more extensive interactions than can be achieved without a physical or electromagnetic link
.

Is he all right out there?

Yes. Watch
. A holo of Althor appeared on the screen showing him skimming along the hull. His suit glittered as he changed direction.
The sparkles are my representation of gas-jet spurts made by his suit, the Jag thought. The suit plugs into his sockets and he directs it by thinking where he wants to go.

I thought of what it had said about Althor using his biomech links.
Is that safe?

It may aggravate his neural injuries. However, the audio and manual controls were deactivated by the specialists at Yeager. The neural link works because they had no idea it existed
.

Althor attached his equipment to the hull and went to work, bathed in Saturn’s golden light. When I concentrated, I could “hear” the Jag monitoring his mental conversation with his suit, as if the ship considered Althor a valuable piece of apparatus.

Yes
, the Jag thought.
He is mine
.

Its? I had no idea how to interpret that. Did the Jag see me as a rival?

The word “rival” has no meaning in this context
, the Jag thought.
He has a need for you. It is in your best interest to treat him in a manner humans consider appropriatefor the mutually agreed upon mating of your species
.

Don’t worry. I will
.

Good. We are understood
.

After what felt like eons, Althor headed back. As soon as he was inside the cabin, I floated across the cabin and plowed into him, my momentum sending us into a spin. Grabbing me around the waist, he opened his helmet and pushed it back, laughing the whole time.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

He grabbed a handhold and stopped our spin. “Will I get this reaction every time I come in an airlock?”

I laid my head against his chest. “Just don’t go out there again.”

“If I did my work right, I won’t have to.”

He put away his suit and dressed, then went to the cockpit and ran more tests. I floated nearby, watching him.

Jag, can you bring the co-pilot’s chair up again?

Yes.
The seat rose out of the cockpit deck, squeezing in next to the pilot’s seat as bulkheads shifted position to make room. Its exoskeleton lay open like butterfly wings; when I slid into the seat, the mesh folded around me, molding to my limbs to allow freedom of movement “Do you know Heather’s last name?” Althor asked. “MacDane, I think.”

A holo about six inches high appeared on the flat shelf in front of his seat, a fiftyish woman with gray-streaked hair. Hieroglyphs scrolled along a reflective strip on the bottom edge of the holoscreen.

“Entry,” the Jag said. “Heather Rose MacDane James. Nobel Prize in Physics, a.d. 2027 Developed James Reformulations of relativistic theory, making possible Allied development of the inversion stardrive.”

“Hey,” I said. “That’s Heather.”

“Full entry,” Althor said.

More people appeared: a slender man with an achingly familiar face and three girls ranging from about four to twelve. The Jag'reeled off data about Heather’s birth, life, education, and work. Then it said, “Husband, Joshua William James. Children: Caitlin MacDane James, Tina Pulivok James, Sarah Rose James.”

As I put my hand over my mouth, Althor smiled. “A good name they gave their daughter.” He leaned forward, concentrating, and at first I thought he meant to bring up another holo. Then an odd look passed over his face, as if a spirit walked over his grave. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“What?” He glanced at me. “Nothing We just need to go.”

So. This was it. “Okay.”

We moved away from Saturn smooth and steady. Althor activated a holomap to show our progress. It couldn’t show the actual ship; instead the Jag rendered an image based on its data about itself, one essentially indistinguishable from a genuine record of our progress.

Then I noticed a strangeness. The Jag was becoming less streamlined. “We’re squashed.”

Intent on his controls, Althor spoke in his own language and the Jag translated. “A blunter design is better after we invert.”

I hesitated, wanting to ask more but concerned about interrupting his work.

“It’s all right to ask,” Althor said. “I’m swapping.”

Although I had felt his mind swapping among different nodes in the Jag’s web, I hadn’t yet realized I had become another node, one he switched to when resources freed up. As Althor worked, the Jag answered my questions. It told me that if subluminal observers could record our flight, they would see our length shorten as we approached light speed. After we inverted, our length would increase, until at 141 percent of light speed it would have the same magnitude as when the Jag was at rest relative to its observers. At greater than 141 percent, length extended past its resting value.

“On this jump,” the Jag said, “we’ll probably reach thousands of kilometers.”

I whisded. “You mean, I’ll see Althor as thousands of kilometers long?”

Althor smiled, and the Jag spoke. “Relative to you, I am at rest. So you 'see no change. I alter my shape to minimize my area relative to other reference frames.” .

I wondered why the Jag was speaking instead of using a neural link. I know now it was because Althor couldn’t join our mental conversation until he healed. At the time it didn’t occur to me that a computer would have its responses programmed—or would program itself—to take its primary user’s feelings into consideration.

I motioned at the holomap. “The constellations look like they’ve shifted.”

“We’re speeding up,” Althor said.

The Jag spoke. “Forty-two seconds ago, we accelerated at one hundred times the force of gravity for a period of thirty seconds. We are now traveling at 10 percent of light speed.”

I laughed. “You’re kidding.”

“Why would I ‘kid’?” the Jag asked.

“Wouldn’t acceleration like that kill us?”

“We went into quasis.”

“What?”

It described how the ship and everything in it formed a system, a collection of particles described by a quantum state, or wavefunction. If even one particle changed one property—position, momentum, spin, and so on—its state changed. Quasis, or quantum stasis, prevents all state changes. The Jag didn’t freeze; its particles continued to vibrate, rotate, and otherwise move' as they did during the instant quasis went into effect. But they couldn’t make transitions. In theory, a system in quasis becomes infinitely rigid on a macroscopic scale. In practice, the process isn’t 100 percent effective; extreme or rapidly changing forces can weaken it.

We had, survived the missile hit at Earth because the Jag put us in quasis. A missile can tunnel through an object in quasis, that is, pass through without affecting it, by going into complex space. Often, though, the projectile detonates, its momentum going into electromagnetic energy, complex space, or its own debris, which may or may not tunnel through the quasis object. No quasis is perfect, so particles in the object may also absorb momentum, causing damage.

Althor indicated a red star on his holomap. A gold halo appeared around it—and the star “jumped.” In fact, all of the stars moved, converging toward a point in front of the ship. The color of the one Althor had highlighted changed from red to green.

He glanced at me. “We just came out of stasis. We’re at 40 percent of light speed now.”

The stars jumped again, and again, converging toward a single point. The highlighted star had turned a deep violet, almost too dark to see, and the display read 60 percent of light speed.

“How close do we have to get to light speed before we can invert?” I asked.

“It’s a balance,” Althor said. “Entering complex space is like detouring around an infinitely tall tree by leaving the road and entering an unfamiliar forest. The less time we spend in the forest, the better. So we go as near to the tree as we can before we leave the road; that is, we push as close to light speed as possible. Too close, though, and our increased mass uses too much fuel. It’s like trying to ride up the trunk of the tree. So we don’t go that close.”

The stars jumped again. The highlighted star was no longer visible, its color shifted out of optical range.

Then the Jag turned inside out.

That’s how it felt. We stayed inside the ship because the rest of the universe turned inside out with us. In the holomap, the stars jumped apart again, red-shifting back to normal colors. At first I recognized none of the constellations. After a moment I realized they were there, but flipped into inverted positions.

“Hey,” I said. “That’s why you call it inversion. Because of the stars.”

“The term comes from a conformal mapping,” the Jag said. “It was proposed by Mignani and Recami in the mid-twentieth century for generalized Lorentz transformations in four dimensions.”

Althor smiled. “That means yes, it’s an inversion.”

“How fast are we going?” I asked.

“Only a hundred thousand times light speed,” he said.

Only? “That sounds pretty fast to me.”

“In superluminal space no upper limit exists on speed,” he said. “We can never go slower than light speed, though.”

“What about all that stuff about going into the past?”

The Jag answered. “According to James theory, it is impossible to arrive at our destination before leaving our departure point. However, during inversion we can travel pastward or futureward. In theory, I can optimize our trajectory so that no net time elapses in subluminal space, assuming time passes at the same rate in both the place of arrival and departure. Due to accumulation of errors, however, I estimate ten hours and fifty minutes will actually elapse.” It almost sounded annoyed by its inability to match the theoretical limit.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Epsilon Eridani,” Althor said.

“Is that where you live?”

He shook his head. “It’s only about eleven light years from Earth, a quick jump, all I’m willing to risk on this faulty engine. The Allied Worlds of Earth have a station there.” He paused. “I should warn you: we may end up in a universe where neither of us belongs. Or the ship may detonate when I try to reinvert.” -I swallowed and nodded. As we decelerated, the constellations contracted to a point. Then the universe turned right side out and we were subluminal. I exhaled in relief as the stars settled back into their normal colors and positions. An orange sun lay in front of us, its brightness muted by the holomap, A man’s voice crackled from the com. “Imperial Jag, this is Epsilani Station. Please identify yourself!”

It wasn’t until I felt Althor’s flood of relief that I realized how much he had feared he would never see home again. He couldn’t even answer at first. He just sat with his hands gripping a forward panel.

“Imperial Jag, respond,” the voice said. “We are a civilian base. I repeat, we are civilians here. Please state your intent.” Althor took a breath. “Epsilani, this is Commander Selei, Jagernaut Secondary, ISC Sixteenth Squadron. I have a damaged ship and request docking.”

“We have facilities available, Commander. Are you requesting quarters?”

“Yes,” Althor said. “Repairs too.”

“We’ll do what we can,” the man said. “We’re just a science station, though. We’ve never seen a Jag out here.”

“I understand.”

“Do you need anything else?”

Althor touched his bandaged shoulder. “A doctor.”

“We’ll have one meet you at the dock.”

“There is one other thing.”

“Yes?”

Althor glanced at me. “Can anyone there make a marriage?”

Silence. Then: “Could you repeat? I’m not sure we picked up that last bit.”

“I didn’t notice a thing.”

“A marriage. Can anyone there perform one?”

“Well—yes, I’m sure we could rig up something.”

“Good.” Althor watched lights blink on his controls. “I am receiving your docking signals. We’re coming in, Epsilani.”

The planet Athena grew on the holomap, a gas giant banded by blue and red stripes. She had at least seven moons, and thin rings colored like caramel tally and blueberry ice cream. From our direction of approach, the Epsilon Eridani space station, or Epsilani for short, looked like no more than a tiny strip of metallic tape “above” the great globe of Athena.

As we drew nearer, the “tape” resolved into a wheel. Its small size disappointed me; I had hoped for something more dramatic. A mirror-bright disk above it reflected sunlight onto the station, where more mirrors picked it up, sparkling in the black of space. The wheel rotated serenely, six spokes radiating from a central hub. A stem extended down from the hub and a stationary grid curved out from it like sepals on a flower. The wheel continued to grow as we came in, until its “stem” resolved into a chain of spheres that resembled beads, or linked seedpods, with a small bud at the end; In fact, the entire station resembled a rotating, wheel-shaped blossom.