Fire with Fire

Chapter Thirty-Nine

MENTOR

Downing turned toward Caine. “What is it?”

“Don’t know yet. If I’m reading this screen correctly, the signal we’re receiving is high-speed, high-compression encrypted.”

Downing turned to the suite’s operator. “Is it the same data protocol as their first communique, four months ago?”

“Looks like it, sir. Decompressing and decoding now.”

“Excellent,” affirmed Visser with a decisive nod. “Mr. Wasserman, you will please continue to share your findings with us so we can collectively assess their strategic significance.”

Downing suppressed a smile. Visser was trying to sound like she had a firm grasp of the military implications of scientific data. However, the past week of joint preparations had proven that she did not. On the plus side, she took counsel well and not only listened to all the facts, but all the conjectures and hypotheses. And that was more important in a leader than a mastery of the theoretical sciences-or of any other esoteric discipline, for that matter.

However, Wasserman turned to look at Visser with an expression that was more sneer than smile: “Which findings are you most interested in, Ms. Visser? Spectrographic analysis of their hull materials and thrust exhaust? Gravimetric anomalies? Or maybe their bizarre shift signature? Or maybe you’re interested in something that I’ve overlooked?” When the ambassador did not rise to the bait, Wasserman’s sneer became more pronounced. “I’m ready to follow your scientific lead, Ms. Visser.” Visser tried to glare at him, but looked more like a deer caught in the headlights of advanced physics.

Downing bit his lip, wished Lemuel would let Visser off the hook. Hopeless git; a genius in his own right but soured by living in the eclipsing shadow of a celebrity uncle.

Visser converted her failed glare into a severe look. “Tell us about the shift signature.”

“What-exactly-do you want to know about it?”

Visser sounded as though she had swallowed lye. “Start by telling us what a ‘shift signature’ is.”

Wasserman’s smile dimmed into a smug curve. “A shift signature is a collection of anomalous physical sequelae that result when extremely high energy-density levels induce space-time disruption of real-space interstellar superstring traces-”

Visser held up her hand. “Mr. Wasserman, please-you are the expert. Not us. In terms we understand, please.”

Wasserman leaned back, smiling, taking his time, letting Visser squirm. “So where would you like me to start, Ms. Visser? With high — chool physics?”

Visser became very pale, then very red. She was slowly raising her finger. Crikey; here it comes.

Caine stepped into the space between them. “Actually, Lemuel did a fine job of familiarizing me with the basics the other day. Major Patrone and I were, uh…napping when the shift drive was introduced, so we needed a review of its oddities. Maybe you could repeat that explanation here, Lemuel?”

Lemuel’s sneer faltered into a frown.

Downing almost nodded at Wasserman. Take his lead, man: Caine’s trying to help you save yourself, even though you are a right bastard.

Wasserman’s frown faded away. The rest of the delegation relaxed-gratefully, it seemed, since every prior word and second had been taking them toward an in-group conflagration.

As Wasserman started to speak-cocky, assertive-Downing noted that Visser’s gaze occasionally migrated over to Caine’s face. In another scenario-had the ages been closer, and Visser not already been furnished with a same-sex spouse-Downing might have suspected that she was discreetly fueling a romantic infatuation. But her expression was attentive rather than adoring: specifically, as Wasserman spoke, Visser was monitoring Caine’s reactions. She trusts his judgment. She’s listening to Riordan very carefully, and with a strong positive predisposition. That’s good-and useful-to know.

Wasserman had already warmed to his subject. “To understand what a shift signature is, you have to understand how a shift drive operates. First, get it out of your head that the ship travels faster than the speed of light. It doesn’t.”

Durniak nodded. “It is impossible to exceed or even achieve the velocity of light. Relativity.”

Wasserman seemed about to disagree, then shrugged. “More or less. The Wasserman drive works by creating a field effect that ruptures weak spots in normal space-time. Although we accelerate for weeks to make the shift possible, speed really has nothing to do with it: the velocity is just a way of storing energy.

“What?”

“Trevor, think of the mass of the entire shift carrier as a battery. At zero velocity, it has only its rest mass energy-not useful for our purposes. However, as we accelerate it, every atom in that mass is also being moved to a higher energy state. In essence, the ship itself becomes a kind of energy capacitor-which is the only way we can store the energy levels required to effect shift.”

“Then why do we need the antimatter reactors?”

“To push us over the hump. As you begin to achieve significant sub-relativistic velocities, it takes increasingly more energy to add more speed. So, the efficiency of using the ship’s mass as a capacitor begins to drop sharply. That’s where the antimatter reactor comes in.”

“It provides a final burst of speed?”

“No, Trevor. I told you: it’s not about velocity. The antimatter reactor powers the Wasserman Drive, which works by compressing a seed of superdense material into a borderline implosion. That creates what laymen call a ‘pseudosingularity.’”

“And which you call-?”

“An ‘incipient event horizon,’ Ms. Visser. It’s way too small to become a full-fledged black hole. However, it does create a strong, albeit brief, time-space distortion-which, if it’s generated right on top of an interstellar superstring, is what triggers the shift.”

Visser frowned. “Go back, please: an ‘interstellar super-what’?”

“A superstring. It’s nothing you can find in space-normal. It’s-well, how do I explain this? It’s a vestigial subquantal umbilicus that connects nearby stars. Kind of an echo of their dispersal from the same pool of matter, even though they are now almost completely discrete stellar objects.”

“Sounds a little like an interstellar version of quantum entanglement,” mused Thandla.

“Yeah. Some theorists even claim the two phenomena are related. Kind of.”

Downing looked quickly around the room: Thandla, Riordan, and Hwang were still following Wasserman. Durniak and Elena were struggling to keep up. The rest were attentively and hopelessly lost.

Wasserman continued without missing a beat. “So, when you activate the Wasserman Drive atop the space-normal ‘ghost’ of the weakest part of the superstring between two stars, you create a field effect that journalists have mislabeled a ‘transient wormhole.’ Once that hole is open, the ship goes through.”

“And pulls the hole shut after itself,” supplied Elena.

“Not exactly. Actually, not at all. When I say that the pseudo-wormhole is transient, I mean it is extremely transient. Its expression is measured in microseconds. But because the ship is traveling so quickly, it’s through the rupture before space-normal can reassert.”

“So it’s more like pulling open a trapdoor and dropping through the hole before it falls shut on you.”

Lemuel nodded and almost smiled at Elena. “Yeah, more like that.”

“So now the craft is traveling in shift-space.”

“Well-no. Shift-space is just a made-up word that the press likes to use. There really isn’t any shift-space that we can tangibly experience or measure. We can only represent it as mathematical formulae and relationships. Which I’ll spare you.”

Visser muttered, “Gott sei Dank.”

“You see, a ship doesn’t really ‘enter’ a superstring: it ‘interfaces’ with it. It’s not moving, not in the material sense of the word. What it does is more akin to electron tunneling.”

Elena’s eyebrows rose slightly. “‘Electron tunneling’?”

“Yes. To put this really simply, atoms on either side of a barrier can, under the right conditions, swap electrons. But not because the electrons physically push through the barrier: they don’t. Instead, when an electron winks out of existence on one side of the barrier, another electron blinks in to replace it on the other side. That’s called ‘tunneling.’ How it happens-well, that’s a longer topic. Suffice it to say that the cosmos is keeping score, and when it tears a particle down in one place, it has to reconstruct it in another place.”

“And that’s how the shift drive works?”

“Well, it’s the same principle. Stars are, in some ways, like these atoms. They can, under the right conditions, exchange particles-or, more accurately, they can ‘communicate changes’ along the superstrings that link them. Like a tunneling electron, a shifted ship is not being physically propelled to another place: instead, the superstring transmits its ‘potentiality’ from one place to another.”

“So, in the same instant that the Wasserman Drive makes the ship wink out in one place, the same ship has to be re-expressed further along the superstring.”

“Now you get it. And what you’d call the ‘wormhole’ is more like an entry ramp onto the superstring freeway that connects the two stars. When the wormhole’s distortion of normal space-time grazes the underlying space-time irregularities that exist at the weak spot of a superstring-boom! You get a shift. And the precise conditions of how that happens is what determines-finally-a ship’s shift signature.”

“Which is-what?”

“A bloom of high-energy particles, rays, photons, and heat.”

“What creates it?”

“Well, the Wasserman Drive’s incipient event horizon grabs everything nearby-and I mean everything: solar particles, photons, cosmic rays. All the background noise and garbage of space-normal comes along for the ride during a shift. So when all that gets re-expressed, one of two things happen. If the object was at a high-energy state when it shifted-gamma rays, cosmic rays, the ship itself-it comes out just the way it went in. But that means you get a brief Cerenkov flash and a spike in the background radiation signature, because you just imported high-energy crap into a system which is already awash in high-energy crap of its own.”

“And what about the less energetic objects that get shifted-like dust or gas molecules?”

It was Durniak who hypothesized the answer to Visser’s question. “Logically, because they are not moving fast enough, they would be torn apart before crossing the threshold. So they would come out as-what? — heat, energy, subparticles?”

“All of the above. But their annihilation is too brief and diffuse to present either a radiological or thermal hazard. However, against the background of space-normal-which is comparatively cold, empty, inactive-this burst shows up like a signal flare in night-vision goggles.”

Visser visibly drew in a large, relieved breath. “Very well. So, now: the Dornaani shift signature.”

“Well, like I said, I’m not sure it is a shift signature.”

“Why? Did they not shift in?”

“I think they did-but it’s not like any shift I’ve ever seen, or ever heard theorized.”

“Why?”

“Firstly, they came in at speed. What that implies about their power generation and/or storage capabilities-”

“You have already made very clear. For which we thank you. Next?”

“Well, there was no initial shower of particles. However, a microsecond or two after the Dornaani ship shifted in, then we got the signature. And it’s like no signature we’ve seen before. Far fewer photons, cosmic rays, radiation. Instead, we detected a stern-wave of mesons decaying back into normal space-time-”

The senior duty officer leaned forward. “Makes me want to reopen the book on the concept of tachyons.”

Wasserman shrugged. “I’m not so ready to go down that path-but it sure did look like we were watching ultra high-energy particles crossing back down through the lightspeed threshold, undergoing a rapid-uh, ‘decay’-into normative particles.”

Visser nodded. “I will not pretend to intuit the significance of all these facts, nor do we need them explicated here. Our module is scheduled for transfer to the Dornaani vessel in”-she checked her watch-“less than an hour. So tell us this: what do these facts suggest in terms of the Dornaani drive technology? Or other practical accomplishments?”

Wasserman rotated his hands into a palms-up gesture of uncertainty. “I can only tell you this much: the Dornaani approach to supraluminal travel is way different from-and way beyond-ours. But I don’t know when I’ll be able to tell you anything specific about it. If ever.”

“Why?”

“Because this is like being a paleontologist who’s shown a single fossilized footprint and is then asked to draw a sketch of the dinosaur that made it. I mean, there are certain features you can eliminate, but just how reliable and accurate an image are you going to generate from a single footprint? And right now, that’s all I’ve got to work with.”

Visser’s pout was one of grudging acceptance. “Very well. Mr. Riordan, can you tell us any more about the communication we received from the Dornaani?”

“Yes. The Dornaani relayed the accords of the interstellar organization they told us about.”

Durniak’s smile was genuine, yet rueful. “I am guessing this means many days of reading, no?”

“Erm-no.”

Downing heard the pause and looked at Caine. “How long is it, Caine?”

Caine took the hard copy from the printout tray, checked front and back. “Not quite two pages.”

“How many accords are there?”

He scanned the sheet. “Twenty-one.”

“Only twenty-one?” It was the first time Downing had ever heard Visser sound surprised.

“Only twenty-one. Here you go.” Caine started the thin stack of sheets around the room.

Trevor, the first to finish reading it, turned the document over, as if searching for fine print. “And that’s it?”

Caine nodded at him. “That’s it.”

“Makes me think we’re looking at a very hands-off kind of organization.”

Visser answered with a sharp shake of her head. “This is not an organization. It is a league of nonaligned states that have committed to a universal nonaggression treaty.”

“And who’ve made rules for how to act toward each other when they meet on the playground.” Opal’s comment earned a smile from Caine, a broad grin from Trevor.

Visser folded the sheet and slipped it into a pants pocket. “So. Much to discuss in the days to come. But, if we are done here, let us call-”

“Already here.” The drawl from the doorway seemed to carry in a long, spare man in the blue unipiece fatigues of the USSF. Captain Dale “Tex” Flannery (who was, Downing had learned, from Nevada) waved the suite personnel back into their seats. “Folks, my CPO is about to have kittens, we’re cutting it so close. According to the instructions, we are not going to make a hard dock with the exosapients. So that means we have to cut your module and its intership coupler loose in about thirty minutes. They will then maneuver to pick you up. We will observe from a range of thirty kilometers.”

“That’s pretty far off if something goes wrong,” muttered Hwang.

“Doctor, if something goes wrong, there is probably squat-all we can do about it, anyway. I’m sure you folks have been chatting about the ship that just came in so you’re probably guessing the same thing I am: that if these Dornaani wanted to put their foot up our ass and wriggle their toes out our nostrils, I doubt there’s a thing in creation we could do about it. On the other hand, if they mean to harm us, they’re going about it in an awful neighborly way. If I was you, I wouldn’t worry about any problems during the transfer-or after.”

Flannery edged back toward the door. “Now, I’ve got a ship to run and a transfer to effect, so I must politely insist that you get your asses into your module, button up, and batten down. You’ve got twenty minutes.” He paused, then saluted. “Do Earth proud, folks.” One long, lanky step had him out the door and gone.

ODYSSEUS

Caine checked his watch-just about fifty minutes since Flannery’s brusque farewell-and then felt a reasonable amount of gravity pushing him down into the acceleration couch once again. Trevor’s voice came out of the ceiling speakers a moment later. “Okay, folks. That bump you felt a few minutes ago was indeed the Dornaani connecting to us via our intership coupling node. Instruments now indicate a spin-generated equivalent of 0.97 gees. Be careful if you get up-we don’t know our rotations per minute yet, so we can’t be sure how bad the inner ear or Coriolis effects are going to be.”

Visser’s voice followed Trevor’s: “Might the gravity be natural? Could we have already shifted, and come out near a planet?”

Caine felt a sudden flush of embarrassment for Visser, was glad that Le Mule did not jump down her throat. It was fairly common knowledge-even for someone who had been asleep for fourteen years-that you couldn’t come out of shift near a planet. The proximity to a gravity well would deform the ship’s re-expression pattern and-pffffftttt: you came out as a whole lot of nothing. And as for the possibility that they might have felt a shift…

Caine toggled his own comm link. “I doubt we’ve experienced shift yet, Ms. Visser. You feel a little jolt when you shift. Not painful, just a start-like when you wake up from a falling dream.”

Movement at the entrance to his stateroom caught the corner of his eye: Opal, in a low-cut T-shirt and shorts. Which looked very fine on her. Caine tapped the commlink which was dragging awkwardly at the neckline of his own tee, rose, smiling-but then saw that her face was as rigid as a mask. He moved past her, closed the door, and steered her toward the acceleration couch in which he had been sitting. She didn’t resist or speak.

He sat down next to her, put a hand on top of hers. She clutched his fingers so quickly and so tightly that he almost cursed. “Opal, what’s wrong?”

Without looking at him, she spat words. “You heard that braying jackass, Le Mule. Shifting is just a nice way of saying that we’re going to be torn into trillions of tiny, subatomic particles.”

“It is a pretty strange concept,” Caine started agreeably.

Opal shut her eyes. “It is suicide.”

He studied her face, started at what he saw there. “Why are you crying?”

She blinked, looked even more surprised than he was, and yelped out a short laugh. “What? I’m what? Crying?”

Caine only nodded: clearly, this was more than just fear.

Opal waved an airy hand. “Oh, that’s nothing. I was just-”

Caine reached out and drew her close slowly, gently. She exhaled and put her arms around him. She was in that position, unmoving, for so long that he wondered if she might have gone to sleep. “Opal, are you-?”

She let out a long sigh. “I’m sorry. I’m-God, I’m such a coward.”

“You?” He held her back to look at her. “You? This is a joke, right?”

“It’s this whole shift business.”

He doubted that, but asked, “What about it?”

“Well, the mere thought of being shredded into subatomic particles-didn’t it scare you, the first time?”

Caine shrugged. “It couldn’t: I was in cold sleep. And by the time they woke me up, I had already been through three shifts. I guess some part of me accepted that if shifting was going to kill me, it would have already done so. But instead, here I am.” He smiled.

And then, she was grabbing his head in both hands and was kissing him. He also felt her shaking, as if she had started crying again, but a moment after he began to respond-eagerly-she stopped trembling. And by that time, he had stopped thinking.

Several seconds-or minutes-later (he could not tell), the compartment intercom toned twice: a priority message. “Folks”-it was Trevor-“if you’re still in your acceleration couches, you might want to stay there. We just received a communique from our hosts. Seems they’re ready to initiate shift. For those of you who’ve never experienced one, you might feel a little vertigo, so just make sure you’re seated or lying down. Fifteen minutes, they tell us. See you on the other side. Out.”

That reminder-about her impending discorporation-made Opal start away from Caine, who put his arms back around her. He tilted his head down until she could not fail to look him in the eyes: “Look: think of it this way. Your body is pushing around-sometimes destroying and rebuilding-electrons all the time.”

Opal shuddered. “Sorry, but logic doesn’t help. I’ve faced death a few times, you know. Getting too close to it on one occasion is what got me banished to the future. But here’s the funny thing: I always knew I wasn’t going to be killed. I have known-all my life-that I wasn’t going to die young, that I was going to outlive all my siblings and live on into advanced, and probably testy, hag-dom. But this-it makes me feel like I’m about to dissolve into nothing.”

“Well,” Caine said and his arms tightened a little more, “you certainly feel real enough to me.”

He did not expect what happened next: she pushed herself into him with a sinuous motion; her reluctant vulnerability sudden transformed into forceful wantonness. “You’d be surprised how real I can feel,” she said in a tone that sounded like fierce annoyance.

As Opal pulled herself against him, Caine imagined he felt various needs tightening her fingers-needs for love, for safety, for escape, for him, for release. But now, those separate needs were losing their distinctions, were fusing together into one impulse-

And Caine, as distracted as he was by her profoundly suggestive words and motions, finally understood where her tears had come from: she had wanted this to happen for a long time. And now, made desperate by a fear of imminent annihilation, that unfulfilled want had cracked the emotional container in which she kept herself, had started leaking out…

Caine stood away and extended a hand. “Come with me.”

She had risen and put her hand in his even before she said, “Where are we going?”

“To a therapeutic environment.”

She blinked. “And where on this tin-can would that be?”

He smiled, checked up and down the corridor, and led her aft. And as they approached the last door on the module’s central corridor, she understood: “The buoyancy tank? Now?”

“When better? You like baths; think of this as the ultimate bath.” He opened the door; a muted glimmer of moving water moired against the walls.

She seemed slightly more collected as she wondered: “Damn, is this even allowed?”

“Hey-I thought you were the bad-ass, maverick major.”

“Bad ass, yes: exhibitionist, no. How do we know that no one will-?”

“We just passed all their doors. Closed tight. Waiting for the shift. Lot of first timers like yourself. All probably a little anxious, and eager to hide it from everyone else.” Caine pulled off his T-shirt. “So this may be the one time we can indulge in a little-” he slipped into the water “-hydrotherapy.”

“Okay. Give me a sec.” She moved towards the changing booth.

“What for?”

“My grand entrance.” She slipped inside, but he still could see her: she didn’t bother to close the door. In a moment, she had shed her outer clothes. She primped for all of one second in the mirror, making sure her bra and briefs were trim and taut, showing off everything to its best advantage.

When she left the booth, she did not meet Caine’s eyes, but stepped daintily into the water on the other side of the tank and then waded across to join him. She leaned back against the rim of the tank, her body only a foot away from his. The water raised her breasts slightly. His arms-spread out to either side-suddenly felt very heavy. He felt the water lap against his side, shifted his body slightly, wondered if-oh Christ, stop thinking!

Smiling at his own awkwardness and tendency to overexamine everything-even this-he turned toward Opal.

She was not smiling.

And then, thinking became extraneous.