Primary Inversion (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Paperback (37 page)

O’Neill blinked, then
tucked the hair behind her ear. I took hold of the racer’s flystick, seeing it
through the sim and feeling it with my hand. As I shoved the stick forward, I
withdrew my awareness from the ship, arrowing back into the night. The racer’s
near-planet thrusters fired and exhaust billowed all around me, white and hot,
while the roar of our takeoff vibrated against the landing pad. We rose for
several hundred meters and hung there, our thrust just balanced by gravity.

Sauscony ...

Jaibriol?
How
could he be in psiberspace with me? Not only did he have no connection to the
ship, he didn’t even have a biomech web in his body that would let him link up.

Can’t ... dissociate from you.

Try to stay back,
then.
With no preparation for this, his brain could end up fried.

Stay back?

Think of yourself as
software running on Medline. Try to run in the background.

A sense of laughter
lightened his exhaustion.
I
will be as quiet as a node-mouse.
He
made an image of the glove on an old-style virtual reality setup. A tail
appeared on the glove, then two fuzzy ears, two eyes, and a mouth. The animal
ran under the VR apparatus.

I smiled. Then I thought,
Medline, retrieve flier.

Our port thrusters
fired, moving us over the flier. Hot gases scorched the landing pad and the
flier shook with the roar of it all. But its reinforced hull remained sound
under our exhaust. With a grinding clank, claws extended down from the belly of
the racer. They closed around the flier, seizing it like a hawk capturing its
prey, and drew it up against the racer’s belly in a cage of metal claws.

Flier secured, Medline
thought. Then: The palace defense systems are preparing to fire on us.

What the hell?
Show me.

Numerous red blips
appeared throughout the mountains, flags showing the locations of installations
that guarded the palace. Some blips made isolated gleams of red and others
glowed in huge fires. As I rushed toward one cluster, it resolved into a line
of laser cannons swiveling toward us, the rumble of their motion making a deep
growl in the night.

What was going on? I
paged the computer dedicated to the palace security systems, an Evolving
Intelligence which had named itself Zos.

Zos respond, I thought.

Here, Zos thought.

Let us leave.

I can’t do that.

Why not?

It violates my programming.

What was this? I was the one who had programmed it.
Verify
my brain patterns. Then execute the command.

I know who you are. Return to your takeoff point or I’ll
blow up your racer.

I couldn’t believe it.
How could Zos refuse to obey my commands? I was its damned mother.

You programmed me to
protect your family, Zos thought. Jaibriol Qox’s escape endangers them. So I’m
preventing his escape.

Look, if Jaibriol
and I don’t get out of here, a lot of people may die, including me. If I’m
executed it may also kill my father. So quit messing around and let us through.

No answer.

Damn! What was the infernal computer doing?
Zos, respond.

The rumbling of the cannons ceased.

Zos?

You may leave.

I want you to erase all record of this exchange.

Done.

I shifted my attention
to the computer on board the medical racer.
Medline, show me the cordon.

A grid of gold lines
appeared in the sky. Intersections mark cordon ships, Medline thought.

The grid was laid out
in a pattern of squares curved as if they lay on a spherical surface enclosing
Diesha. The pattern was perfect, a tribute to the uncompromising order Kurj saw
in the universe. Every intersection contained at least one red blip and some
had so many they merged into a crimson blaze. When I concentrated on one fiery
blur, it resolved into the battlecruiser Maxar with its multitude of
attendants. The racer’s computer flooded me with data, including intelligence
reports that only someone with my stratospheric security clearance could
access.

But my knowledge of ISC
was no help now. It only made me more aware that no means of escape existed.
How would we get through? Those ships were ready to shoot down any craft that
gave any conceivable hint it might try to flee the cordon.

So do the inconceivable.

Medline, I thought. Invert.

Restate command.

Invert. Kick in the inversion engines and get us out of
here.

That is impossible.

Never mind that. Just do it.

To achieve the speed
necessary to invert, we must leave the vicinity of the planet and then
accelerate. If we try to leave the vicinity of the planet, we will be destroyed
by the cordon.

I didn’t say speed up. I just said invert.

To invert, we must speed up.

I had no idea what
would happen if we tried to invert while we were at rest here. Popular wisdom
held that we wouldn’t be able to complete the process and would end up
evaporating in a limbo between the real and imaginary universes. Since no one
had ever returned from trying it, no one knew if that was true or not.

I’ve intercepted a
message to Command Central, Medline thought. The ship waiting to escort us to
the hospital wants to know why we’re sitting here. They also want to know why
we’re holding the flier.

We had run out of time.
Medline, invert.

We don’t have enough spee—

Invert, damn it. Now!

Engines engaged.

Then the twisting started.

Nausea swept over me. I
felt like my gut was trying to twist into a Mobius strip. The stars and
mountains blinked out of existence. No, that wasn’t true. The mountains
disappeared but the stars were still there. They smeared across the sky like
spots of paint running in a black liquid. Then I realized the mountains were
also there, but smeared into the sky, black on black. We hadn’t inverted; we
were caught somewhere between universes.

I reentered the racer
by leaking through the hull. I saw myself in the pilot’s seat, my hands
clenched on its arms and my eyes clamped shut. The psi-sim was my only link to
reality, and I was barely holding on to it. If I lost that last link to the
universe where we belonged, we were going to dissipate into this otherworld of
melting reality.

But the sim had drained
my resources too far. I couldn’t hold it. The cabin rippled around us and began
to fade.

Then Jaibriol moved. He
melted off the bunk like paint dissolving in rain. The intravenous line slid
out of his arm with a drawn-out sucking noise. He walked across the cabin in
slow motion, his face a smeared patch above the darker smears of his clothes.
His body blurred at the edges, then ran in dribbles onto the deck.

The cabin was twisting,
the fore section going to starboard, the aft section going to port. As it
contorted, O’Neill and I poured out of our seats, our bodies dripping over the
softened exoskeletons. The front of Jaibriol’s body ran to one side, the back
to the other, spreading him out in the two different directions. The cabin continued
to twist, until I realized it was trying to close back in on itself like a
Mobius strip.

As Jaibriol came up
next to me, the front half of his body dribbled across the black runnels that
were my arms. His hand melted onto the flystick and the flystick spilled
forward, splashing over the controls. I felt more than heard the thrusters
fire. Acceleration pasted us into our seats, sloshing our bodies around.
Jaibriol melted across my exoskeleton and dripped onto the deck like a surrealistic
painter’s nightmare.

I couldn’t hold the
psi-sim steady. I leaked out of the racer, passing through its hull as if it
were a thin film. Only part of me slipped, but it was enough to see the
nightmare outside. The cordon grid had degenerated into a skyscape of oozing
gold lines and red smears.

Ships fired at us,
their missiles and beams pooling uselessly in space. Eerie vibrating noises
echoed in my ears. The air slid past me like oil, smelling of exhaust.

We were moving, heading
into the cordon.
Meedliiinnnne,
I thought.
Ploooot cooourssssss ...
The
words oozed away. I tried another tack, making an image in my mind of an open
space in the deformed grid above us. Medline responded by heading for the
opening. As we approached, the gold lines smeared out wider and wider, filling
in the hole. By the time we reached it, the opening was gone. We dribbled
through the gold smears like oil soaking through a sponge.

I scraped back along
the ship and soaked through the hull, my identity re-collecting in the cabin. I
could see Jaibriol lying in a pool on the deck, his body smeared across its
surface. Its dark surface. Everything was dark. Dim. So. Dim. Fading out ...

... fading in. The data
dripping into my mind said we had just come out of stasis. Medline had cleared
the planet enough to fire the photon thrusters. The real part of our velocity
was now at 60 percent of light speed ...

... 96 percent.

...99.999999 percent.
Our liquefying mass had increased by a factor of 7000. The engine was sucking
in fuel from a cosmic ray flux that extended through both real and imaginary
space, its density far greater than the tiny fraction of it we saw in the
subluminal universe. The racer ate fuel like an insatiable behemoth, hurtling
us to Gods only knew where. For eighteen minutes, or maybe it was eighteen
millennia, we poured through space, running around the rim of light speed,
trying to invert, trying and failing.

Meeeeeeeddddliiii ... subliiiight ...

The dimming cabin went black—

And the twisting stopped.

I gasped, shocked by my
sudden solidity. My eyes snapped open into bright light. I was whole again. We
hadn’t come out of stasis properly; we were still accelerating at over one g.
But we were solid.
Normal.
No, not quite normal. Bits of my uniform were
embedded in the seat where Jaibriol had fallen across my arm, and I could see
pieces mixed in with my skin too.

“Jaibriol!” My voice
rasped. I smacked my palm against a projection inside the exoskeleton. It
unfolded, letting me twist over to look into the cabin.

He lay in a heap,
sliding along the deck. His legs were flat on the ground as if he were lying on
his back, but his torso was twisted so that from the waist up he was lying on
his side. His arm lay behind him, pulling away from the rest of his body. It
made him look distorted, broken in two.

I struggled out of the
pilot’s seat. As dizziness caught me, I slid down between the seat and a
bulkhead. Then I pulled myself over to Jaibriol. Please don’t let him be dead,
I thought. Or horribly deformed, or with his insides mixed up like paint
swirled together and left to solidify.

I lifted his arm, the
one twisted behind him, and put it in front of his torso. He groaned and rolled
onto his back, his body relaxing into a normal position. His eyes opened
slowly. As we slid along the deck together, he looked at the bulkhead above
him, his gaze unfocused. Then he started rubbing his arm, working the muscles.

I pulled myself around so that I was lying alongside of him. “Can
you see me?”

His gaze shifted to my
face. “Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

“I think so.”

“Primary Valdoria,”
Medline said. “If we continue to use fuel, we will significantly deplete our
supply.”

“Stop accelerating,” I said.

The hum of the engines
changed pitch and Jaibriol and I stopped sliding. He moved his head and the
motion caused him to drift up from the deck.

A groan came from the
copilot’s seat. I nudged the deck, sending myself floating back toward Erin.
When I reached my own seat, the exoskeleton caught my body and pulled me into
its embrace, anchoring me there. O’Neill sat in her own exoskeleton, her face
pale and her eyes open.

“We made it,” she said.

“I hope so.” The
holomaps showed images of the region of space where we were traveling now,
along with three-dimensional graphs charting fuel consumption, trajectory,
location, date—

I whistled. “We’ve jumped almost three months into the future.”

Jaibriol floated over
and grabbed the arm of my chair. “That can’t be. We’ve only been traveling for
a few minutes.”

“We never inverted,” I
said. “I had the racer drop back into normal space. So we never compensated for
the time dilation.” I paused.

“They’ll be looking for
us in the wrong place. Or I should say the wrong time. They’ll be looking for
us three months ago.”

“That means I haven’t
reported to President Calloway in three months.” O’Neill grimaced. “She must
think we’re dead.”

“Let us hope they all think that,” Jaibriol said.

Three months lost out
of our lives. Three months since my father gave his story: Jaibriol reached the
palace and captured the flier; desperate, he tried to adapt its engines for
inversion; I and “Lyra Merzon” went after him with the racer; the backlash of
his improperly inverting engines caught us—and after that no one knew what had
happened.

“Medline,” I said. “Release the flier.”

The grind of opening
claws vibrated through the deck. My holomaps showed the flier still riding
along under us, matching our velocity. I manipulated the claws so that they
nudged the flier, adding enough of a component to its velocity to make it drift
forward, out in front of the racer.

“Detonate,” I said.

The flier exploded.
Pieces of it hurtled in all directions, some coming straight at us and then
deflecting away when they hit the racer’s protected hull. By the time anyone
discovered the wreckage it would be spread out over too big a region in space
for anyone to determine that none of us had exploded with it.