Kurj knew by heart the histories detailing Tokaba’s life for the public. He had read every overwritten, melodramatic word, how the Assembly searched for a Rhon man suitable to marry the beauteous Roca Skolia, a hero who together with the golden lady would produce golden Rhon children. Fodder for the web, though none of the histories put it so bluntly.
No Rhon candidate turned up, so the Assembly chose Tokaba instead, a suitably heroic figure who carried all the Rhon genes, but most unpaired. Left to chance, it was unlikely his Rhon genes would all pair with those Roca carried. So the geneticists helped matters along. Never mind that Rhon psions were so sensitive to genetic manipulation that even clones died. Never mind the vanishing probability of finding a man like Tokaba or the even smaller probability that he could produce a viable Rhon heir. History offered Kurj as living proof it had worked.
History lied.
Kurj wished he had never come to SunsReach. Once begun, the damned introspection refused to stop. As the sun descended in the sky, he relived the day in his thirty-fifth year when he had found and restored a lost cache of files in the Orbiter web. It had been erased by experts decades before, but a buried trace remained, enough for him to get back the files.
It was all there. All of it. Medical records. Fertility analysis. Genetic maps. Tokaba’s DNA came nowhere near a full set of Rhon genes. The Assembly had nothing to do with his marriage to Roca. Her parents arranged it because they knew Tokaba would make a good husband. The hoped-for source of Rhon children? Not Roca and Tokaba, but Roca’s parents, Lahaylia and Jarac, the Ruby Pharaoh and Imperator, their extended youth giving them a faint hope of fertility beyond what nature granted.
Roca and Tokaba couldn’t have children, Rhon or otherwise. It was common among couples where the people came from colonies that had been isolated for millennia. Fertility declined.
The hidden truth of Kurj’s conception turned out to be far less benign than the public histories. Desperate for more Rhon children, the Assembly had sent an agent to the clinic that both Kurj’s parents and his grandparents were using in their waning hopes for children. Unknown and unseen in the night, that agent fertilized Roca’s egg with Jarac’s seed and labeled it with Tokaba’s name. The next day, the unsuspecting doctors implanted the egg in Roca’s womb. Everyone rejoiced when the pregnancy took. Roca thrived and delivered a healthy baby.
A Rhon baby. Kurj.
In his thirty-fifth year of life, Kurj learned the truth. Tokaba Ryestar had almost no Rhon genes. He couldn’t be Kurj’s father.
Jarac had sired him. Kurj was his grandfather’s son.
His world shattered. His memory of Tokaba became a sham. Already wracked with the legacy of Darr’s accusations, Kurj saw his true parentage as the ultimate betrayal. He had refused to believe his grandfather committed no crime, that none of the parties involved even knew what had happened. Blinded by a sense of betrayal so overwhelming it was drowning him, he went to the Orbiter Lock and forced himself into the link that powered the web. He turned the Dyad into a Triad.
Kurj’s life had made him a harsher man than his grandfather. But they were matched in the quality of their thought processes: power without nuance, pragmatic, taciturn, literal, blunt. The Triad couldn’t support them both.
The link imploded, tearing itself apart from within. Rather than see Kurj die, Jarac gave his own life to the web. On an isolated observation deck of the Orbiter, holding Jarac’s head in his arms, Kurj wept while his father died.
Now Kurj sat in silence. It was dark, only a faint line of light on the horizon to mark the day’s end. Tears dampened his face. He cried for all of them, for the beloved father he had lost, for the father who had betrayed his love, for the father whose love he had betrayed, and for the father now who would have loved him, given the chance, but instead paid the price of his stepson’s ravaged heart.
12
The ISC Destrier rode through space. The destroyer carried an array of weapons: Annihilators, tau cannons, Impactors, Dusters, lighter artillery. A flotilla escorted it, eight Wasp corvettes, four Cobra frigates, four Leo dreadnoughts, and eight Jag starfighters. Humans crewed ten of the ships and Evolving Intelligence computers commanded the rest.
The ships all inverted in formation, circumventing the speed of light by adding imaginary components to their velocities. They thus avoided the light speed singularity, where mass became infinite compared to slower objects, length shrank to nothing, and time stopped. Light speed blocked sublight ships from the superluminal universe the way an infinitely tall tree blocked a road. So the flotilla left the road and went around the tree.
Faster-than-light travel did allow ships to travel pastward relative to the sublight universe, but it made a poor time machine. Ships going that fast ended up a long way from home by the time they reached their destination in the past, and coming back in space also sent them to yet another time. The paradoxes about a pilot going back to stop his own birth turned out to be red herrings. The Lorentz transformations of special relativity linked all reference frames; an event in one frame had to be consistent with observations of it in every frame, as specified by the equations. That included everything in the pilot’s rest frame. If his current self had killed his earlier self, he would have already experienced it.
As it turned out, ships that tried to reenter normal space earlier than when they left it either failed or vanished, perhaps into an alternate universe where they couldn’t tamper with their time line. Within the superluminal universe, however, a ship could go pastward or futureward. It played havoc with communications. A fleet that inverted in formation came out of superluminal space with its ships spread out in both space and time.
Enter the web.
Before Destrier inverted, its telops linked to the psiber-web. It let them communicate in superluminal space, making it possible for the flotilla to reenter normal space in perfect formation. Shrouds hid the ships; films on their hulls created illusory star fields, scramblers deceived electromagnetic probes, and shadow generators confused neutrino probes. Moving at constant speed, using thrusters only to correct course, and communicating only through telops, they sailed on, silent and invisible.
Althor Valdoria sat in the command chair suspended in the stardome above Destrier’s bridge. The officers below worked at consoles, running checks. It was standard procedure to drop into normal space during long voyages and clean up errors that had accumulated during superluminal travel.
Incoming message via the web, Destrier thought.
Receive, Althor answered. The message downloaded into his spinal node, a note from Kurj at Skyhammer verifying a change in training maneuvers Althor would conduct at Onyx.
A warning entered his mind: J frigate emerging from inversion, starboard. Q frigate to port.
Stats on the ships poured into Basalt, Althor’s primary spinal node. A second later a voice on the comm in his ear said, “Q frigate to port and J frigate to starboard.”
Althor spoke into the microphone that extended to his mouth. “Web chatter on Node 11.” It identified the channel that would print a log of the flotilla’s psiberweb communications, for crew members who couldn’t access psiberspace.
Prime Annihilators, Althor thought.
Primed, Destrier answered.
“Node 11 active.” That came over his ear comm, verifying that the Prime Annihilators command had appeared on the computer log. Destrier identified the speaker as Major Hooklore, Althor’s first officer.
Althor’s communication with the Destrier’s EI brain took only a fraction of a second. It went by so fast his mind perceived the communication as numbers and verbal symbols rather than as full words. The log of the entire exchange appeared to flash into existence all at once on Node 11:
Tau cannons loaded, Destrier thought. Dusters primed.
Backup 6, Althor thought.
Impactors primed as backup.
Fire pattern G8 now.
Annihilators fired.
An accelerated beam of anti
protons hurtled through Destrier’s focusing chambers, picking up positrons, and shot into space, seeking matter to annihilate. Both Destrier and the J were traveling close to light speed, so Destrier aimed for the expected intersection of its beam with the frigate’s path rather than at the frigate itself. Beam weapons were easier to evade than missiles, but made a better offense against quasis shields. A ship in quasis couldn’t change its quantum state, not even by one particle, so ideally weapons fire couldn’t affect it. But quasis collapsed after a few hits, and annihilating matter in quasis was easier than exploding it with missiles.
Annihilator hit on J, Destrier thought. No damage. Then: Impactor hit on ISC Wasp One.
The J frigate fired its Annihilator at Destrier—
Quasis jump, Destrier thought. Annihilator hit on deck 47. To shield against the hit, Destrier had gone into quasis for two seconds. To Althor, it seemed as if no time elapsed; hence the “jump.”
Damage report, he thought.
Basalt linked him to Destrier’s EI brain, which linked then to picowebs in other ships, all at light speed. With a direct connection to his brain, the simulation provided sensory input so authentic it felt real. He moved alongside a Wasp and touched its hull, rubbing its pitted surface.
Wasp One, he thought. Report. It was one of his crewed ships.
Fine, Commander, its telop answered. We lost an inversion engine, but we’ve two left. Releasing abdomen. His human thoughts had more life and character to them than the communications from the EI brains in the ships, but he came across with less power than did Althor, who wielded the mental force of a Rhon psion.
Barely more than two seconds after the frigate attacked, the Wasp’s abdomen hurtled after the fleeing J at relativistic speed. It caught the frigate and drilled through its buckling quasis fields. Then its Klein bottle collapsed and its antimatter plasma exploded outward, taking the frigate with it. Debris hurtled in all directions. The J’s fuel bottles collapsed and pieces of the ship vanished with the bizarre gulped-away effect of real matter sucked into complex space.
J frigate destroyed, Destrier thought. During the explosion, Destrier had gone into quasis for one second.
Don’t destroy the Q, Althor thought. Capture it. He wanted to know how the hell the frigates had found them.
Annihilators fired—
Quasis jump, Destrier thought. Q frigate damaged.
Both the Q and Destrier came out of quasis in the same instant—and rather than be captured, the crippled frigate blew itself up in a blast of silent energy.
Quasis jump, Destrier thought. Q frigate destroyed.
Althor swore. Now he would never know how the frigates had found them. They may have been pirates who happened upon the flotilla and had the bad judgment to attack. But if a breach in ISC security had occurred, they could be part of a larger ESComm force. Without a web to coordinate reentry into real space, the ESComm ships would be spread out in time and space—which meant more could be coming.
Prepare to invert, Althor thought. Randomize course. Once they inverted into superluminal space, they would be almost impossible to locate, particularly by ESComm ships with no psiberweb access. As the flotilla accelerated toward the speed needed to invert, Althor thought, All ships: damage and status reports.
Data poured into his mind. The quasis shields had provided more than physical protection during the battle; they also shielded the telops, who otherwise experienced the deaths of their enemies as their own. Military telops learned to block their empathic reception, but if they muted it too much they ceased to function as telops. However, in quasis nothing could change quantum state, including neurons, which meant telops could neither think nor receive thoughts. Quasis thus protected them, indeed, was vital to their survival. A crucial balance existed: if a ship came out of quasis too soon its telops suffered, but if it stayed too long it became easy prey for ESComm ships, which could come out of quasis earlier, having no empaths to temper their lust for death.
Jag starfighters were the swiftest, most maneuverable ISC ships, with the most weaponry per cubic centimeter. Jagernauts, the Jag pilots, became part of their ships in both mind and body. That symbiosis created a weapon of unsurpassed versatility, which was why Jags were assigned to protect the other ships and came out of quasis first. However, it also required Jagernauts be strong psions. They were chosen for their ability to endure empathic backlash as well as for their military expertise.
Crewed frigates and Wasps carried telops with low Kyle ratings, making them less vulnerable to backlash. They usually came out of quasis right after the Jags, followed by the bigger ships. It was only a few seconds’ difference, but in battles fought at relativistic speeds by computers, a few seconds could be eternity.
In Althor’s case, it became even more crucial. As commander of the flotilla he formed its central node and made full use of his immense Rhon capacity. His training and biomech web gave him formidable defenses against telepathic backlash, but the potential for damage remained.
As the smaller flotilla ships reached inversion speed, Althor thought, Activate inversion engines—
Quasis jump, Destrier thought. A flood of data followed:
ESComm Wasps incoming—
Quasis jump.
Four ESComm frigates to starboard. Coordinates—
Quasis jump.
Two ESComm destroyers to port.
Quasis jump.
Dreadnought to port—Oh, hell. That last from a dismayed telop. Firestorm battle cruiser to starboard.
Althor swore. Given the lack of cohesion suffered by ESComm forces during reentry into normal space, the appearance of this many Trader ships at once implied a much larger total fleet, one that far outnumbered the flotilla. Had the trader ships burst out of inversion just seconds later, his flotilla would have already escaped into superluminal space.
Fire Impactors, Althor thought.
Firing, Destrier thought.
More ESComm ships appeared, firing as they hurtled past the flotilla. The entire battle moved almost at light speed, in an eerie realm where ships moving at different relative velocities contracted as they raced past each other like relativistic knights jousting with high-energy lances. At such velocities, differences in speed caused time dilation to play havoc with firing times. The smaller ships, which could accelerate more easily, attacked and then inverted into superluminal space, using quasis to protect them from the crushing accelerations while they came around for a second try. The ESComm ships cut down isolated ISC craft, herding the flotilla into a wedge as it shot through space. The constant barrage forced the Destrier into continual quasis jumps and so prevented it from reaching inversion speed.
Warning, Basalt thought. Althor, your body is sustaining damage at a rate beyond the capacity of your biomech web to repair.
Nausea gripped Althor. If his environment underwent drastic changes while he was in quasis—such as his ship exploding—then when he came out of it, the new forces could tear him apart. The changes weren’t that extreme, yet, but Destrier was dropping in and out of quasis too fast. His command chair released a cocoon of foam to protect him against the buffeting, but it wasn’t enough.
Fire tau missiles, he thought.
Fired.
Miniature starships themselves, the six taus flashed in and out of quasis, unhampered by the need to protect a crew. Five hit their targets, turning their immense kinetic energy into explosions, along with their warheads. The sixth inverted into superluminal space, its path controlled by a telop on Destrier who was linked to the tau’s EI brain. The tau punched a hole into real space, coming out right “on top” an ESComm Wasp, and the resulting explosion sucked both tau and Wasp out of real space.
Quasis jump, Destrier thought.
Althor’s vision blurred. But his starscape remained clear, and he saw a weak spot in the Trader formation. It was an intuitive judgment on his part, one Destrier wouldn’t have made, but as soon as his mind formed the idea, Destrier calculated the firing patte
rn and sent smart missiles rocketing at the weak—
Quasis j—
Quasis jum—
Quasis jump, Destrier thought a third time.
Althor swallowed his bile, hit by both telepathic and quasis backlash. Death reverberated around him. The flotilla’s human component numbered fifty-eight: thirty on the destroyer, one each on the eight Jags, and twenty others spread throughout the other ships. Even without the incoming data, he would have known that over half his people had died; their deaths tore through his mind in an agony of silent screams.
He recognized the ESComm strategy. Extract and eliminate: pull out the desired prisoner and kill everyone else. The Halstaad Code of War had established rules for taking prisoners, but ESComm found them inconvenient. Althor had no intention of surrendering anyway. If any of his telops survived, they would be interrogated and then sold as providers. According to Destrier’s files, every telop in the flotilla had gone on record as preferring death to capture. ESComm would execute the rest of his people. Except for slaves of great rarity, such as providers, the Traders had no intention of letting ISC warriors contaminate the slave populations they had manipulated, coerced, and brainwashed into submission.
Quasis jump. Destrier thought.
Althor saw another opening, one Destrier had ignored in favor of better targets. In response to his shift in concentration, Destrier made the necessary calculations.
Firing, it thought. Smart-dust rolled out from the cruiser and entered the bores of tau cannons on three ESComm frigates. The few seconds the dust was active coincided with the moment all three frigates fired their cannons. Attacked by the microwarheads within the dust, the tau missiles detonated inside their bores—
Quasis jump, Destrier thought.
Althor struggled to focus on his disintegrating starscape. All three frigates had exploded. He gave a ragged laugh, realizing his hyperextended Rhon awareness had given him a hint that the commanders on the frigates intended to fire in synchronization an instant before they did it.