The Chantry Guild

CHAPTER 5

Amanda had made it to the system of Earth's Sun in five phase-shifts, where any non-Dorsai would have taken ten and she herself would have broken it into at least seven, under more leisurely conditions. The last shift brought her back into specific location deep enough in the gravitic shadow of Jupiter to hide her vessel from the instruments of the ships besieging Earth. From there, she paused to examine the situation.

There were more enemy craft on patrol about the whitely gleaming sphere of the phase-shield than there had been when she had last had a report on the situation of the Home World.

It was to be expected. But Amanda chilled as she watched. It was that strange part of her which occasionally saw, or felt - neither word was quite right - what would or might be. In this case, it was the sight of the ever-growing military power of ten worlds massing for invasion about the single planet that was their Mother World, Old Earth, and she envisioned what was coming not as clear pictures in her mind, but as massive shapes half seen, moving in a clammy mist which obscured all things.

In this instance, what she sensed was something like a huge tidal wave, growing, growing, ready to smash down on sleepy small homes and other buildings, which would be wiped clean from the surface of the land, as if a giant's hand had passed. And it would come, as soon as the wave was large enough, ordered to its hammer-strike by that small but all-powerful group of highly intelligent but self-indulgent men and women who, under Bleys Ahrens, controlled all the Younger Worlds.

But there was some little time before that, yet. For now, the enemy ships blocked entrance by any others to the sphere whose surface they dared not touch, and their coverage was good. She studied them in her viewer screen. They were divided into Wings of six ships each, and each Wing patrolled a curved, rectangular sector of the globe that was the phase-shield.

Theoretically, that gave them complete coverage. But Amanda noticed that they cut inside the corners of their rectangles when a Wing's patrol route took them past one. There was a way of making a sharp corner with a spaceship in such a situation, but it required a minuscule space shift each time.

It was not that there was any difficulty involved in calculating or making such a tiny shift. But each time, the ship making it took a one in a million chance of being lost in mid-shift. Phase-shift technology was based on the Uncertainty Principle of Werner Karl Heisenberg, which said essentially that either the position or velocity of a particle could be known at any time, but not both.

The early twenty-first century, becoming informed on antimatter and a number of such things that had only been speculated about earlier, discovered that a particle's change of Position involved it passing through a phase of positionlessness - in theory, it was spread over the whole universe for a moment of no-time, before it came into being again at its specific new Position.

From this understanding had developed a way around the limits of the speed of light, which until then had seemed to make travel between stars so slow as to be almost impractical. Humanity had once more gone around a problem, instead of through it. Spaceships did not actually move by phase-shifting. Rather, they simply abandoned one defined position, became undefined, and then redefined at a new position.

The only drawback was that once in a countless number of such movements, they failed for some reason to redefine at their destination, and stayed instead, undefined. In effect, they had been disintegrated.

So, said the history books, Donal Graeme had met his end. Attempting to move in any way except by phase-shift through a phase-shield made such a result certain. Otherwise the odds of reaching the desired destination were very good - but not perfect.

Once in a million times was not bad odds, but to risk them a large number of times a day, every day, was enough to make more than a few spaceship commanders and crew uneasy. There was, consequently, sometimes a reluctance to move closely into the corner of a patrolled rectangle and have to make that extra shift.

The patrols could of course have covered those corners or normal drive. But, at the velocities with which they must move to patrol their area, an abrupt, large change of direction would make jelly of anything as insubstantial as human bodies inside the turning ship. It was better to curve a little inside the corner.

Accordingly, the corners of the rectangles Amanda studied were weak areas. She sat at her calculations for a while, then put her craft into the series of shifts she had precalculated.

Her first shift was to a space just a thousand kilometers outside the shield above the south polar regions of Earth. This was far enough so uncertainty of the besieging ships as to exactly where she would be after her next shift would lessen her vulnerability. She quickly followed this shift, accordingly, with another precalculated shift to above the north polar regions.

She paused there for the seconds required to choose which, of several destinations she had picked as possible for her next move. She chose, reappearing suddenly above the Equator in an unprotected corner area, keyed in her precalculated shift through the phase-shield and appeared just inside the open corner.

As soon as she was inside, she brought her ship to a halt, and dropped its defenses. It was well she was as swift as she was in doing it, for eight great, slim shapes of the battle cruisers which made up a Dorsai fighting Wing were suddenly completely surrounding her.

Her ship-to-ship talk light was already blinking on the panel before her. She thumbed the stud that opened it from her end. and the tank of her vision screen came alight with the face of a Dorsai she did not know, a woman verging on middle age with an oriental face and high-arched eyebrows. "Amanda Morgan," said the other. "We were told to expect you. Hold still for a retina check... Good. You can proceed, I'm Li Danzhun. You've never met me, but I know you from pictures and your reputation." "I'm honored you'd recognize me from that little after these years here," said Amanda.

Li Danzhun smiled at her. "It may be none of us will ever see our homes again," she said, "but we're still Dorsai. And you're still one of the Grey Captains. " "Nonetheless," said Amanda, "thank you." "Now I'm honored" The other glanced off-screen for a second. "We just got the release signal from Escort Leader. Go with all luck, Amanda Morgan." "And you," said Amanda.

As suddenly as they had surrounded her, the cruisers were gone. She turned and drove northeasterly across the skies of the Home World until a mist-enshrouded sphere, looking like a miniature of the phase-shielded Earth, as seen from space, appeared on her screen, seeming to grow as she approached it. She was close now, and the mist was evaporating over a metallic port which itself was dilating to let her ship inside.

Her vessel was tiny by the standards of interstellar craft, but not so by the standards of the opening before her. Even for her small ship there was little room to spare at the entrance. Her ship could be brought in, but even with all her ship-handling experience it was going to be a tight fit.

But she made it. The vessel settled with a clang into its landing cradle. Amanda sat back in her control chair, relaxing for the first time in some days. A voice spoke on the interior atmosphere of the vessel. "This is Ajela," it said. "Come as soon as you can. Just follow the corridor beyond the door to the interior of the Encyclopedia. It's being aligned with my office right now and You'll find the entrance at its end will let you directly in here. Just walk in. Rukh's with me. We're alone."

Amanda nodded to herself. She had already changed clothes before shifting close to the star that lighted Old Earth, wearing the bush jacket and skirt she thought of as her "shore-going" wardrobe. She got to her feet, opened the ship's lock and stepped out into the clangor and bright lights of the port chamber. The ramp that led to the interior of the Final Encyclopedia was almost beside her ship. She had never been here before, but as an educated person she knew about the Encyclopedia's design and peculiarities.

The ramp led into a suddenly quiet, narrow, blue-carpeted corridor that looked exceedingly short - but, she had learned, distances would be not only variable but sometimes illusory within the Final Encyclopedia. There was a door at the far end, some twenty meters from her. She went to it, opened it without bothering to give her name to the annunciator above it, and stepped inside. "Hello," she said, smiling at the two women sitting at the desk at the far end of the room. "It's about time we met. I'm Amanda Morgan."