“I can do it from there,” Dehya said.
“Do what?” Majda asked.
“Dissolve,” Dehya said. “Into the web.”
Majda frowned. “What?”
“Transform,” Taquinil said. He glanced at his father. “But I don’t know—” Strain showed on his face. “Father, you aren’t as interwoven with it as we are.”
“What are you talking about?” Casestar asked.
“My wife and son are—” Eldrin struggled for words to describe what he understood only on an intuitive level. “They are here, but not fully. They’ve extended into psiberspace.” He knelt in front of Dehya and took her hands. “That’s what you’ve been doing, isn’t it? Becoming part of the web.”
“Our bodies are wavefunctions,” she said. “Psiberspace is just another Hilbert space. It should be possible to transform our wavefunctions from spacetime into psiberspace.” She cupped his face in her palms, holding him as if he were a treasure. “Taquinil’s mind is like mine. But yours is different. That has made it harder to find the right transform. I don’t know if it will work yet for you. I just don’t know.”
Casestar spoke. “You’re talking about turning your bodies into thought, aren’t you? Becoming part of the psiberweb.”
“Yes,” Eldrin said.
Majda gave Dehya an incredulous look. “Even if you could do such a thing, how would you get out again?”
“Reverse transform,” Dehya said.
“How?” Casestar said.
“I’m not sure,” Dehya admitted. “But I would rather risk being lost in the web than becoming a Trader captive.”
Eldrin glanced at Taquinil and his son nodded. Standing up, Eldrin held his hands out to Dehya. When she took them, he drew her to her feet. “We have to go now,” he told General Majda. “While we still have time.”
The general spoke into her comm. “Marland, what’s the situation?”
“We’re holding off the Solos and one Starslammer,” he said. “The other slammer docked.” A murmur of voices came from the background. Then Marland said, “ESComm waroids have boarded the Orbiter. Four—no, make that five commando units.”
“We have to go now,” Eldrin said. “Or it will be too late.”
Majda made up her mind. “Do it.”
Casestar jumped to his feet. Surrounded by bodyguards, he, Eldrin, Dehya, and Taquinil ran from the house. The lighter gravity made their motions surreal, their steps taking them long and far. The magcar the Abaj had taken to the house waited on its platform, its door opening for them. Six of the Abaj jumped inside first. As Dehya reached the car, an Abaj grabbed her around the waist and heaved the Pharaoh inside as if she weighed nothing. Eldrin pushed Taquinil after her and jumped in himself, followed by Admiral Casestar and the other six Jagernauts.
As the car sped across the mountains, Casestar used his gauntlet comm to monitor the commandos and ISC teams. The unraveling communications made it difficult to track the invaders, but it sounded as if the teams had split up.
The car jarred to a stop on a platform at the hull. It took only seconds to run to the War Room. As they raced into the amphitheater, a sound came from the catwalks in the stardome above them. Eldrin looked up to see four waroids, ESComm warriors in full body armor, walking fortresses eight feet tall, ESComm’s answer to Jagernauts, better protected but slower in speed than their Skolian counterparts. Their mirrored surfaces splintered light.
“RUN!” Casestar shouted.
Eldrin, Dehya, and Taquinil raced for the amphitheater dais. Some of their bodyguards ran with them while others fired at the waroids. The Jumbler shots made a shimmer of orange sparks in the air, as their abiton beams annihilated subelectronic bitons. With a rest mass of 1.9 eV and a charge of 5.95×10−25 C, abitons only needed an accelerator with a 50 cm radius and 0.0001 Telsa magnet. The air was too diffuse to attentuate the beams any significant amount, but where they hit the waroids the mirrored armor evaporated in explosions of orange light.
Eldrin had no time to see if the beams took out the warriors as well as their armor. He and Dehya sprinted across the dais, with Taquinil behind them. One of the Jagernauts running next to Eldrin made an odd sound, like a puff of released air. His body hurtled to the side and flew several meters before it slammed into a console.
“Gods, no,” Dehya whispered. Another Jagernaut went down, shot from behind. Looking back as he ran, Eldrin saw more waroids pouring into the War Room, through the same entrance he and the others had used moments before.
Taquinil stumbled, going down on one knee. An Abaj warrior grabbed him around the waist and swung him to his feet, carrying him for several steps until the Ruby prince regained his balance. As soon as Taquinil started to run on his own, the Abaj whirled around and fired at their pursuers.
A crane swung down from the stardome straight at Dehya. Even before it stopped above her, a waroid was vaulting out of the cup at its end. With horrifying clarity, Eldrin saw the armored mammoth land behind her, the force of its impact vibrating through the dais. Still running, Dehya looked back, her unbound hair flying around her body. With one long step it caught her, its arm closing around her waist. She cried out as it swung her into the air. She looked like a small child in its massive grip, or a rag doll it could smash in one blow.
Before the waroid had a chance to take more than one step with its captive, two shots blasted into it. A Jagernaut on its right side fired a Jumbler beam that pulverized the waroid’s helmet in an orange flash, eating through the metal and beyond. On the left, a second Jagernaut fired an EM pulse rifle, hurtling razer sharp projectiles into the waroid’s armor. The projectiles couldn’t penetrate it, but the impact threw the giant to the side and it toppled, falling with Dehya still in its grip.
Eldrin was already running toward them, but he knew he couldn’t reach Dehya before the waroid crushed her beneath its massive bulk. Then the Jagernaut with the pulse rifle fired again, and the force of the shot changed the waroid’s trajectory enough so it fell on its side, missing Dehya.
One of the Abaj reached Dehya and yanked the waroid’s arm away from her body. She was already struggling; as soon as she was free, she scrambled to her feet and started running.
Eldrin skidded to a halt and reversed course, then took off again for the Lock corridor. He stopped at its entrance long enough to make sure Taquinil and Dehya made it past him, into the corridor. In that instant, an Abaj ran up behind him. Eldrin was a large man, over six feet tall, with a strong physique, but the Abaj picked him up as if he weighed nothing and almost threw him into the corridor. Eldrin caught his balance and sprinted forward, a few steps behind his son and wife, racing down the long, long hall into the Orbiter’s heart, to the First Lock, the birthplace of the Skolian web.
Translucent columns packed with clockwork machinery flashed by, lights spiraling inside pillars. Eldrin heard the clang of boots behind them, their Jagernauts running, fewer than before. The end of the hall came nearer, no longer a point of perspective, but an octagonal arch with lights racing around it.
They ran into the Lock.
The power of the web filled the chamber with a great hum. Octagonal in shape, the room was only a few paces across. A singularity pierced its center, a pillar of light that rose through an octagonal opening in the floor, rupturing the fabric of reality. It came out of a sparkling fog and disappeared over their heads back into a hazed glitter.
The pillar was a Kyle singularity, a needle piercing the fabric of spacetime. The technology to create it had been lost, gone with the Ruby Empire. The three Kyle singularities—the Locks—were all that remained of the eerie Kyle sciences created by the Ruby Empire.
Time became torpid within the chamber. Eldrin saw Dehya and Taquinil moving in slow motion as they ran to the pillar. Reality thickened, like a heavy gel. Turning in slow motion, he saw his Abaj bodyguard look back at the Lock corridor. Only a few steps behind the Abaj, four ESComm waroids were entering the chamber. With excruciating slowness, the Abaj and a
waroid fired at each other. The waroid stumbled back a step—and the Abaj slowly collapsed, shot in the chest.
Dryyyyyninini, Dehya’s voice echoed. He turned to see her coming toward him. We can’t get a fix on you …
Leave, he thought.
She reached her arms to him. Not without you …
Eldrin felt a massive arm close around his waist and knew they had run out of time. With a huge push, he shoved Dehya toward the pillar. In slow motion, her face flushed with desperation, she toppled against Taquinil—and together Eldrin’s wife and son fell into the singularity.
Their bodies flowed around the pillar. Eldrin saw their faces smear across the singularity and fade into translucence. It took a bare fraction of a second, but he felt as if he stood forever watching the two people he loved more even than his own life dissolve into unreality.
The waroid who had grabbed him around the waist was lifting him now. Eldrin’s feet left the ground and the chamber moved past his vision. Then he was facing the entrance, falling at it in slow motion as the waroid pushed him forward.
The instant Eldrin fell through the archway time sped up and he sprawled across the floor with a jarring impact. Before he could catch his breath, two waroids hauled him to his feet. Seeing the lifeless bodies of Jagernauts sprawled on the corridor floor made his mind reel. Jon Casestar wasn’t here, but Eldrin felt a void in his mind where he had once known the admiral. It was too much to absorb so fast, that a lifelong friend and his sworn bodyguards could suddenly be gone.
Before Eldrin could regain his feet, the waroids took off, one on either side of him, each with a gauntleted hand gripped around his upper arm. His toes scraped the floor as they dragged him, until he got his feet beneath him and could run with them. He struggled to breathe. The flashing lights added to the confusion as the waroids propelled him down the corridor at a speed almost impossible for him to match.
They ran out to the same magcar he had taken to the War Room and dragged him inside it. As the car sped across the mountains, the waroids reported to their superiors in rapid-fire Eubic that went by too fast for Eldrin to decipher. All he picked up was that units had broken into Tikal’s house but hadn’t bothered to search for the First Councilor when it became clear their primary targets were no longer there.
Everything seemed to speed up as his mind struggled to readjust to the wild swings in reality he had experienced in the past few moments. The time it took for the car to cross the Orbiter compressed into what felt like seconds. Eldrin knew he had gone into Kyle shock, thrust to the brink of psiberspace and then yanked back again, but he had no idea how to deal with it.
When the car reached the opposite side of the orbiter, the waroids pulled him out and took off with him, once again running through corridors in the hull, headed for the docking bays. They passed more bodies, both ISC and ESComm. Eldrin wanted to shout his protest against what he saw, his dismay and his anger, that so much violence had been committed, all for three people who wanted no more than to be left alone, to solve equations and write songs.
A docking bay blurred around him. He could no longer keep up with the waroids, so they dragged him, uncaring as his feet snagged on cables, ridges, and bodies. They threw him through the open hatchway of a Starslammer and he rolled across the deck. As the growl of engines rumbled in the ship, the surface under his body vibrated.
Eldrin tried to absorb the tumult, tried to slow down his sense of time, but it had gone out of control. He could neither see nor hear, barely even feel the deck. The Starslammer left the bay, and his nausea told him they were dropping in and out of quasis, jumping so fast that no one had yet had a chance to secure him in a berth. He lay sprawled on the deck, flattened by acceleration, while his mind imploded.
Gradually his mental tumult eased. Quieted. Slowed. He became aware of his breathing. His vision cleared and he saw that he no longer lay on the deck. He had drifted into the air, weightless.
A man wearing the black uniform of an ESComm major floated toward him across the bridge. Other officers sat in control chairs, facing away from him, monitoring their banks of consoles. At first Eldrin thought a view port stretched the length of the bridge, showing the stars in gem colors. Then he realized it was a holoscreen, giving its radiant version of the inverted universe outside.
Eldrin had little idea how to manage in free fall, but it made no difference. The major moved with practiced ease, using grips in the hull. He took hold of Eldrin’s arm and drew him to a chair at the back of the bridge. Like all Hightons, the man was tall, with glittering hair and red eyes. Watching his face, Eldrin felt as if he were falling into a soulless cavity, dragged down into the grasping mind of the Aristo.
The major strapped Eldrin into the chair, locking his wrists to its arms and his ankles to a bar along its lower edge. Eldrin spoke in his limited Highton, his halting words heavy with his Skolian accent. “You ESComm, yes? Highton major?”
“Yes.” He answered slowly so Eldrin could understand him. “You’re on the Prevailer.”
“You take me to Glory?” Eldrin asked.
“Possibly.” With brooding fascination, the major watched as Eldrin jerked his head, trying to move a lock of hair floating in his eyes. He traced his finger along Eldrin’s jaw. Then he shook his head, as if trying to clear his mind, and spoke into the comm on his gauntlet. “We’re secure here.”
“How many of them did you get?” a voice asked.
“One,” the Highton said. “The consort. The Pharaoh and her heir committed suicide.”
Suicide? Until that moment, Eldrin hadn’t realized how it must have appeared, with Taquinil and Dehya dissolving out of real space. He prayed the appearance didn’t become reality. He had felt the effect of their entry into the already besieged web.
Psiberspace had imploded.
30
At first no one knew. The implosion initially seemed a localized phenomenon. At ISC headquarters, they thought it was a glitch in new software being installed in the security web. Operators at Imperial University on Parthonia assumed the school’s aging nodes had gone off-line again. At consoles all across Skolia, users lifted their heads, tapped their psiphon prongs, checked their equipment.
Then the web began to unravel.
On every planet, habitat, and ship throughout the Skolian Imperialate, the psiberlinks that bound civilization together simply disappeared. Users tried to reach other nodes, searching for a web that no longer existed. Mail that required psiberspace connections bounced back to its sender. Complaints trickled in to systems operators. As sysop after sysop tried, without success, to access psiberspace, the effect intensified and the trickle became a river, then a deluge.
No official count existed of the electro-optical links to the psiberweb. EO systems were localized, unable to span more than a world or two, limited by light speed. The main EO networks were well-known, but smaller webs changed too rapidly to keep track of in a systematic manner. The sum total of all single-user links underwent a continuous flux, billions of changes per second.
When psiberspace imploded, those links lost their moorings. Trillions of EO connections snapped free. Outside the psiberweb, the only way messages could travel from a web in one star system to a web in another, in a reasonable amount of time, was via starship. So at first no one realized that on every planet and space habitat within the Imperialate, only moments after the psiberweb ceased to exist, the EO webs also collapsed.
No full map existed of links among the Skolian, Allied, and Trader webs. Large Imperial centers kept records of their psiberlinks to non-Imperial systems, but those only skimmed the surface of a deep, deep sea. Trillions of humans lived among three civilizations that teemed with computers. Picowebs threaded buildings, ships, habitats, every form of construction created by humanity, including the human body.
The web knew no political or spatial boundaries. It existed in and of itself, an organism that had been growing for centuries. When the Imperial web imploded, it pulled down the Eubian a
nd Allied nodes connected to it. That precipitated the failure of any EO nodes linked to those that had collapsed. The breakdown spread throughout Eube and the Allied Worlds like a roaring tidal wave, as the combined webs of three interstellar empires ceased to exist in a great, monumental, star-spanning crash.
* * *
The Radiance Fleet made no sound in space, but to Soz, clenched in the grip of the web collapse, the ships seemed to scream into the Glory star system. She sat rigid in her command chair, her muscles pulled so taut that cords stood out in her neck. As psiberspace imploded, she held onto the Radiance Fleet’s corner of the web, relying on the sheer power of her Lock-enhanced mind to hold off the implosion in this small corner of reality.
Radiance dropped into real space, proceeded by tau missiles at 95 percent of light speed, fast enough that their impacts would have the energy equivalent of many megaton bombs. Glory outmanned and outgunned Radiance, but the web collapse had crippled ESComm. The Radiance Fleet tore a swath through Glory’s planetary defenses, vaporizing drones, satellites, and weapons platforms. They hurtled past the planet, headed straight for the sun. With exact synchronization, the Radiance ships inverted and continued to accelerate, looping around Glory’s star. They arrowed back toward the planet and dropped into real space again, coming out of the sun in a silent scream of relativistic power.
In the Radiance Fleet’s second pass, ESComm vaporized 80 percent of the remaining ISC drones. The crewed ships fared better, more adept at evading the lethal energies with their telops still in the web. Nor were losses confined to Radiance; ISC destroyed most of what remained in Glory’s orbital defenses.
As the remains of the Radiance Fleet came back for a third pass, Soz sent a shout into the fragment of psiberspace she had been holding together. Get out of the web! NOW.
Her people had one instant to act. Then, with a great wrenching surge of power, the last piece of psiberspace imploded, thundering in on Soz’s mind with the crashing force of a tidal wave.
Soz groaned, slumping back in her chair, suddenly aware of her surroundings again. Medics were crowded around her, floating in free fall, plastering her with diagnostic tapes and poking things in her arms.