“Admiral Tahota!” Byr said. “They’re moving the Lock.”
On her display in the observation bay Tahota could see the Lock surrounded by the specks of ESComm ships. The Lock’s huge thrusters were firing, propelling it away from Onyx.
“Admiral, I’m disappointed,” Kaliga said.
“Disappointed?” Tahota asked.
“We’ve downloaded the Onyx web into ours,” he said. “Your codes were far too easy to break.”
Is he bluffing? Tahota asked Byr.
“Sorry,” Byr said. “It’s true. They have everything.”
“That gambit with the bottles was foolish,” Kaliga said.
“What gambit?” Tahota asked.
“We have your ‘secured’ orders. Hiding antimatter in double Klein bottles was hardly likely to fool our sensors or stop us from freezing the self-destructs.”
Tahota blew out a gust of air. “So.”
“Yes. So. Your ploy failed.” Kaliga put his hand to his ear. “We dock at New Metropoli in four minutes. Prepare for boarding.”
Boarding. Boarding. Tahota contemplated the implications of becoming an ESComm prisoner and sweat beaded on her forehead.
“Admiral Tahota,” Byr said in her ear comm. “I’ve got that spy line on their comm.”
Pipe it through, Tahota thought.
A woman’s voice came over her comm, speaking Eubic. “Over seven billion Klein bottles. Gods only know what they thought they could do with them.”
“Double-check the bottles,” a man said. “Look for anything—trick triggers, hidden web links, anything unusual.”
“We deactivated their links to the Onyx web,” the woman said. “We found self-destruct triggers, but our quasis generators countered them.”
Tahota lost the rest of the chatter as Kaliga spoke to her. “Admiral, we have the Lock secured.” Triumph glinted in his eyes. “Here is something for you to ponder while you await my guards, my dear Starjack. Eube has a Lock and Key now. Think on it.”
Tahota didn’t want to think on it. Nor did she like being called My dear Starjack by a Highton Aristo.
Kaliga’s image disappeared, leaving the screen blank. The chatter from the spy line was still going. “We’ve run double and triple checks,” the woman was saying. “The bottles look normal.”
The next voice on the line surprised Tahota. It was Kaliga. “Warn the troops boarding the stations to be careful anyway.”
Out in space, the Lock was shrinking to a point as it accelerated toward inversion, attended by its ESComm captors. The other habitats huddled around New Metropoli. A flash of light came from a station on the outer edge of the cluster.
Tahota stiffened. No! Not now.
Kaliga spoke on the spy link. “What the hell was that?”
“One of the Klein bottles had an instability in its field,” someone said.
“Is it part of a self-destruct sequence?” Kaliga asked.
“Apparently not,” another voice said. “Faulty equipment. The Klein field had a flaw.”
“I don’t like it,” Kaliga said. “Put me through to Arez.”
After a pause, a voice said, “Colonel Arez here.”
“Are you ready to invert the Lock?” Kaliga asked.
“Speed-wise, yes,” Arez said. “But I’m concerned about our proximity to Onyx. Inverting a platform this size will cause spacetime ripples all over this area. It could damage the other habitats.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Kaliga said. “As long as we get the Lock. Invert now.”
“Yes, sir. Engaging.”
Tahota directed a message to Major Byr: Can you show me the Lock on long-range sensors?
“I’m not sure,” Byr said. “I’m losing my link here. ESComm has most of—wait, here we go. Incoming.”
Got it, Tahota thought. A detailed view of the Lock came up on her display. As she watched, the space station melted out of reality. It was astonishingly beautiful, like watching sparkles liquefy and run through space in rivers of radiance. Then the light faded into blackness and the Lock was gone.
“We’ve got it!” a voice exulted.
So, Tahota thought. She felt as if she had just finished a marathon race. She looked at the chronometer psicon in her mind.
In the third second of the sixth hour of the eighth day in the tenth month of year 372 ASC on the Imperial Calendar, the Traders inverted the Third Lock, capturing a prize that had eluded their grasp for almost four centuries.
In the fourth second, the backlash from the inverting Lock hit Onyx Station—and set off instabilities in the out-of-phase fields of 7.32 billion Klein bottles.
Tahota raised her hand to salute the volunteers watching her from throughout Onyx. “Gods’ blessings to you all,” she said.
In the fifth second, 7.32 billion Klein fields on every space station collapsed—and dumped 700 billion kilograms of antimatter plasma into real space.
In one majestic sweep, every habitat at Onyx detonated. Plasma exploded, spewing out radiation, gamma rays, and brutal showers of high-energy reactions. Gargantuan chunks of debris hurtled in every direction. On the scale of a universe that knew supernovas, quasars, and black holes, the result was a splutter of energy.
In human terms, it had no precedent.
Expressed in terms of matter to energy conversion, the combined explosions produced a million trillion trillion joules of energy, greater than the output of a hot yellow star, more powerful than 100 trillion nuclear bombs. The waves of destruction swamped New Metropoli in a great, raging maelstrom of fury.
So Onyx died—and in doing so, it also obliterated two million ESComm ships.
28
Eldrin sat bolt upright in the dark. He jumped out of bed and pulled on his robe as he strode out of the bedroom. He heard Taquinil’s door snap open, then heard his son run into the darkened living room. They left the house together, racing through the soft night of Valley. They had both felt the cry for help.
The trip on the magrail seemed to take forever. By the time they reached the Orbiter’s hull, Eldrin was so tense he couldn’t stop clenching his fists. They ran through the hull corridors, their bare feet slapping the ground. Neither he nor Taquinil had taken time to put on shoes. Taquinil was wearing his black pants and black sweater, having fallen asleep at his web console, and Eldrin wore only sleep trousers under his robe.
No one was posted outside the Solitude Room. They ran inside—and found Dehya screaming in silence.
A fragile figure in a blue sleep shift, she clutched the arms of the control chair, her body rigid. With horror, Eldrin realized he could see through her. He also saw a translucent web spread through space all around them, as if she had pulled psiberspace out of itself and overlaid it on the universe they inhabited.
She kept screaming, but he heard no sound. He was at her side in two steps. As he closed his fingers around her hand and felt its solidity, relief poured over him. But when he tensed to pull her out of the chair, Taquinil grabbed his arm.
“We don’t know what will happen if we yank her out of it,” his son said. “It could rip apart her mind.”
Dismayed, Eldrin let go of his wife. She stared through him, from some other place, with no sign of recognition. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
“Can you help her?” he asked Taquinil.
“I think so.” But Taquinil’s fear saturated the air. He touched a panel on the arm of the chair, another, and another. One by one the glittering lights on both the chair and the console faded into darkness.
As Taquinil worked, Dehya became more solid. She focused on Eldrin, and he was sure she saw him now. When he touched her cheek, he felt her tears.
“Dehya?” he asked. “Are you here?”
She tried to speak, but her voice drifted like leaves blown by a far wind, over a remote plain, too distant to hear.
Taquinil came to stand in front of her, moving his lips so she could read them. “Mother? Can you understand me?”
Her lips moved. Ye
s.
“Can Father unfasten you from the chair?”
She formed more words. Yes. Hurry. Her body rippled as if it were the surface of a lake disturbed by a falling rock.
Eldrin turned to his son. “Are you sure I should do this?” What if he erred and caused his wife to dissolve into some other universe?
“I can’t do it,” Taquinil said. “My mind is too much like hers. In psiberspace we’re too close together.”
The prospect of losing them both shouldered its unwelcome way into Eldrin’s thoughts. “You mean you could fall into wherever she is?”
Taquinil nodded. “Just standing this close to her, I feel my mind trying to dissociate.”
Taking a deep breath, Eldrin leaned over Dehya and reached behind her neck. The psiphon prong felt smooth in his fingers as he tugged it out of her socket. He unplugged the prongs in her wrists next, then put his hand behind her waist and pulled out the one in her spine. Going down on one knee, he removed the plugs in her ankles. When he disconnected the last one, ripples swept over her body as if she were resetting.
Dehya fell forward, out of the chair. Eldrin caught her and sat back on the floor with a jolt, wedged between the chair and console. She felt real, the softness of her hair, the tickle of her breath on his skin. He cradled her in his arms and she hung onto him, her head against his chest. Dressed in only a flimsy sleep shift, with her childlike face, she seemed painfully vulnerable to him, ready to break at the least touch.
Taquinil knelt next to them. “Mother?”
Her thought came like the gurgling of a distant muddy brook. Dryniiiiiiii … heeeeeelp …
Eldrin held her closer. Tell me how.
Dissoooooooolving …
He surrounded her mind with his, trying to hold her close in the web as well as in his arms. Come back.
Aiiii … cold, she thought. I’m so cold.
Eldrin peeled off his robe and wrapped it around her, then enfolded her in his arms again. Dehya, come back!
Ah. She heaved in a ragged breath, holding him tight around the waist.
Dehya?
“They’ve gone,” she whispered, her voice like dust in the wind. “The warriors of light.”
A relief almost unbearable in its intensity poured over him. “The warriors of light?”
“Onyx,” she said.
“You were there?”
“They have the Third Lock.”
“Who?”
“ESComm.”
Taquinil stiffened. “Mother, are you sure?”
“Yes. We must warn Soz.” She was starting to shake as a reaction set in from whatever had happened. “ESComm put someone into the Lock and tried to link to the Orbiter. I stopped them.”
Eldrin suddenly felt cold. “If they add a fourth person to the Triad, the power surge will kill all four of you.”
“Only if they use a Key. They didn’t. Just a telop.” Dehya shuddered. “It killed him instantly.”
Eldrin blanched. It was an ugly way to die. “Dehya, you can’t go back in the web.”
“They have the Orbiter’s location,” she whispered. “We have to warn Tikal. We have to hide the Orbiter.”
Eldrin hung onto her, rocking back and forth, looking at Taquinil over her head, knowing they all shared the same thought. The Locks were inextricably connected through the web. If ESComm had a fix on the Orbiter through the Third Lock, nothing could hide them.
* * *
Soz sat in a control chair above the bridge on Roca’s Pride. Her guards wanted her on Asteroid, the hollowed-out planetoid that served as a stand-off base for the invasion. But she was needed more here; where she could hold together their corner of the web. She felt as if she were running on an edge, keeping her equilibrium only through speed, that if she paused, she would fall into the raging seas on either side.
The cruiser rumbled in her mind. Entering Platinum Sector One.
Soz exhaled. This was it. Accelerating their timetable to outrun the web collapse had fragmented some of the Radiance Fleet, but they kept most of it intact. Whatever happened now, they had no way to turn back.
Major Coalson’s voice burst over the comm. “We’ve been detected. A squadron of Solos—all right, here it is. A fleet of ESComm ships is dropping into real space. About 500 thousand ships, stats in file D5m.”
“Got it,” Soz said.
ESComm signal on channel 6, Admiral Barzun thought.
Ready, Soz thought.
A Highton voice came over the comm in her ear. “Roca’s Pride, this is Colonel Jaibriol Izarson aboard the Rapier.”
Soz’s entire body went rigid. Jaibriol. Even though she knew the name was common among Traders, the sound of it still sent her adrenaline roaring.
“You have violated Eubian territory,” Izarson said. “This sector is under ESComm protection and interdicted to ISC ships. Surrender and prepare for boarding.”
Soz knew how her fleet looked, a paltry force of 50 thousand ISC ships trying to sneak through Platinum Sector. “Colonel Izarson, this is Roca’s Pride. We don’t acknowledge your interdiction.”
“Surrender now and you will be escorted to one of our bases,” Izarson said. “If you refuse, we will have no choice but to respond with force.”
“You are holding a member of the Ruby Dynasty in violation of the Halstaad Code of War,” Soz said. In truth, nothing in the Code actually forbade ESComm from taking Althor prisoner. Torturing him violated it with a vengeance, but she had no proof they were doing it. “Release him to us and we’ll leave.”
Imperator Skolia. That came from Garr, her ISC psiberweb wizard. Our links to the ships in Klein space are slipping.
Slipping? Soz thought. Be more precise.
It’s because of the collapsing web. We can’t keep our Klein space links stable.
Izarson spoke over her comm. “Roca’s Pride, be reasonable. You’re outnumbered ten to one. Surrender and we won’t fire. You have one minute.”
“Where is the rest of your force?” Soz asked. “I thought Platinum Sector had over a million ships.”
“Admiral Barzun, you have fifty-five seconds,” Izarson said.
Barzun sent Soz a dry thought. Their intelligence leaves much to be desired, if they think you are me.
Despite his amusement, Soz felt his tension. Izarson had made the logical assumption. ESComm had no reason to think the Imperator would be on the flagship of an invasion fleet. To Garr, she thought, How long before we lose the links?
Garr thought, I can give you 1.03 minutes on the Klein bottles. Any longer and our links to the ships may become too diffuse to recover.
“I’ve picked up another ESComm force,” Major Coalson said. “Coming out of Platinum Sector Five.”
“Got it,” Soz said. It didn’t surprise her that ESComm had to reach all the way to Sector Five for reinforcements, given how many ships had gone to Onyx. Any report from Onyx Platform? She asked Garr.
Nothing, he thought. But those web links are all down.
Prepare to open the Klein bottles, Soz thought. She submerged into a VR simulation and arrowed through space with the Radiance Fleet, a cord of ships spread out over billions of kilometers and traveling at half the speed of light. The ESComm ships showed as distant specks in a cylindrical formation around Radiance.
“Barzun, you have forty-five seconds,” Izarson said. “Do you really intend to engage a battle you can’t win?”
Even though she knew her telop communications went at almost light speed, it still surprised Soz that only ten seconds had passed. Barzun, can you distract him? she asked. To Garr she thought, Open the Klein bottles.
Barzun spoke on an intership channel. “Colonel Izarson, this is Rear Admiral Chad Barzun. We demand the release of Althor Valdoria.”
“You have forty seconds,” Izarson said. Then he added, “If you’re Barzun, who was I talking to before?”
Klein bottles collapsed, Garr thought.
Space rippled.
The effect spread along the
Radiance Fleet. As the ripples intensified, Soz tensed. They had no way to be sure what would happen now. There had only been time for preliminary tests. On a small scale, matching phases in Klein space solved the instability problem. On this large a scale, who knew? When the hidden ships entered real space, the Radiance Fleet might well vanquish itself with no help at all from ESComm, disappearing in a cascade of destruction caused by massive Klein field collapse.
The ripples swept through space, first swamping the Radiance ships and then extending to encompass even the ESComm ships. A chronometer in the lower corner of Soz’s mindscape showed the countdown to Izarson’s deadline. Thirty seconds.
Garr, how are the Klein fields holding up? she thought.
We’ve instabilities in about 8%. His thought came in the blur of fast-mode, all symbols and numbers.
Soz directed her thought into the general Radiance web. Those of you with instabilities, abandon craft.
The damaged craft fell back, accompanied by recovery ships that would pick crews up out of space. Only about 10 percent of the ships in the fleet carried humans, the rest being crewed by EIs. The recovery partner of one ship was itself damaged but switched smoothly to its backup.
The distortion in space continued to increase, making it difficult to see any ships, let alone the reinforcements. Twenty seconds remained to Izarson’s deadline.
Then, with a silent majesty, in perfect synchronization, 750 thousand ISC ships twisted into real space.
Someone, on some channel, said, “Gods almighty.”
Soz spoke into the comm. “Colonel Izarson, I suggest you surrender.”
All Izarson said was, “Your time is up.” But he sounded strained now, his earlier confidence gone.
ESComm collapsed its cylinder formation around the Radiance Fleet, forming a pipe a ten billion kilometers long but only 100 thousand kilometers in diameter, with the Radiance ships in a long “cord” down its center. Traveling at half the speed of light, the ships covered 150 thousand kilometers a second. The ESComm force numbered 600 thousand ships to Radiance’s 800 thousand, a total of 1.4 million ships.
Annihilator beams and Impactor smart missiles criss-crossed the pipe. The formation favored ESComm in that it made the ISC ships easier targets, but it worked against them when the beams passed through the widely spaced ISC ships and penetrated the far side of the pipe. Unlike smart missiles, which could evade and pursue their targets, beams had no such intelligence. They annihilated whatever they hit.