Counter-Measures

  "We all ask that of ourselves. Having Chrysla aboard didn't help matters either. Yours or Skyla's. " Sinklar paused. "You told me that you love them both."

  Staffa smiled wistfully. "The joke of the quanta. For years I tortured myself over Chrysla. She's . . . almost ethereal. I'll love Chrysla forever, Sinklar.

  You have to understand that I loved her with all my heart. She was the first woman who ever saw through what the Praetor had made me into. She gave me a few wondrous years of happiness. She gave me a son, a reason to plan for the future. In those brief years, someone saw me as a human being, not just a monster, or an experiment.

  He frowned. "My love for Chrysla is reverential. I didn't understand that I'd fallen in love with Skyla until I was in the desert on Etaria. She had become my most trusted friend, as precious as my right hand. We knew each other like two parts of the same functioning unit. It took losing each other to realize what we had."

  Sinklar shook his head. "Then Chrysla walked back into your life."

  "Yes." Staffa stared vacantly.

  ,'Why did you let her go? I think you know how Mac feels about her. That's like shooting protons into an unstable isotope. "

  ' 'Sinklar, to truly love, you must be willing to set someone free. Anything else is a perversion - "

  For a moment Sinklar just stared. "Pus-Rotted Gods! Maybe you really are human

  .

  Skyla cursed, muttered to herself, and continued her attack on the dining area floor. Bruises had mottled her knees, shooting pain through her with each movement. The muscles in her back and shoulders ached and burned. Her hands, already callused from combat training, had taken on a rough texture that caught on delicate fabric.

  Sweat beaded, trickling down her nose to spattering star bursts on the polished deck plating. Jaw set, straggles of hair falling about her head, she continued her assault. The pry bar in her hands had become a tool wreaking havoc.

  ". . . clears visitors for security . Ily's voice popped out of Skyla's memories.

  "Shut up, you Regan slut." Skyla grunted, throwing her weight against the bar as another strip of golden spacer yielded with a squeal and peeled back under the flat of her lever. This work took patience. The builders had used pure gold. Too much pressure and the puttylike metal pulled apart, snapped off, or bent double.

  She battled incessantly, stopping only to eat, eliminate, and sleep. She did stop long enough to inspect the cockpit, but the auto alarm had warned her twice when ship's status fluctuated.

  Puffing, Skyla pried the last of the spacer out, slinging the golden strip into the pile building in the galley corner. Another one gone.

  ". is head of the psychological department on Itreata. Doesn't that mean he .

  . . "

  "No!" Skyla bellowed and smacked the floor hard with the pry bar, chipping the tile. "Ily! Get the pustulous heil out of my mind!"

  She arched her back, grimacing at the shriek of nerve and muscle. Scooting across the silver tile, she wedged the end of her bar into the next strip.

  Skyla had no mandate for her war on the floor. This battle stemmed only from a desperate need to still the fragments of Ily's interrogation that would pop into her head if she let her mind go blank, from her desire to avoid the cockpit and the message waiting in the comm, and, finally, from the fact that she was growing sick of anything gold.

  You're as berserk as a Vermilion fog rhino! She worked the tip of her pry bar under the next strip, levering the end loose.

  At that moment, the alarm beeped. Skyla cursed, threw her bar to clatter across the floor and gasped as she pulled herself to her feet. As she passed the hatch foyer, she caught a glimpse of herself, disheveled, smudged, and sweaty.

  In the cockpit, she checked the stats, finding that one of the cooling towers in the reactor had begun to fluctuate. Skyla overrode the control, circulating more liquid through the system. Quick inspection of the diagnostics indicated a sticking valve in the primary. Dropping into the command chair, she instituted a bypass program.

  Temperature in the tower began to drop.

  Skyla leaned back, suddenly aware of her odor. Time for a shower. Time to sleep for a while.

  The message eomm light blinked at her with obnoxious regularity. She faltered for a moment, watching the light. Taking a deep breath, she accessed the signal data. From the strength of the signal, hei system had only picked up something on the subspace net, nothing directional.

  Irritated, Skyla saved it into the system and the offending light went dark.

  She tapped a rhythmic pattern with her fingers while she frowned at the message comm.

  "Not now, Skyla. " To look into Staffa's worried eyes was more than she could bear.

  Vaulting to her feet, she ducked out the hatch, followed the corridor, and entered the wreckage of her galley.

  ". . . thoroughly does security check on visiting dignitaries .

  "Fuck you, Ily, you arrogant bitch, I told you, they screen everyone. We even chem-coded you when you were there. There's no way in."

  ". . . cloned from the genetic material of Staffa's first wife? Chrysla, you say?"

  ' 'Leave ... me . . . alone!" Skyla gasped, shaking her head in a fruitless attempt to drive out the demons. "You're going nuts. You're going to drive yourself to the

  point of exhaustion, and you're going to make a mistake. Is that what you want? To kill yourself out here?"

  Her knees protested as she dropped to all fours, retrieving her pry bar and muttering to herself, "Yeah, maybe it is."

  "What do we know about the Forbidden Borders?" Sinklar asked.

  Staffa glanced up from his monitor. His son sat across the table in the small conference room. It looked as if he'd fortified his position. A forest of comm monitors studded the landscape between them. A cup of cold stassa sat to one side, next to a pile of Sinklar's flimsies. On the other stood a stack of data cubes and his portable comm unit.

  On the walls around them, stats from all over Free Space were neatly charted in an attempt to anticipate the political landscape before they went null singularity.

  Staffa leaned back, squeezing the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger. "What do we know about the Forbidden Borders? Not much beyond their gravitational effects. Over the years physicists have come to the conclusion that we're seeing filaments, or strands of some sort, very dense, probably neutronic in nature. Measurements of gravitational lensing tell us they mass something on the order of

  1022g/CMS-. That figure is backed up by studies measuring the relative effect of space-time distortion. Gravitometer readings coupled with light diffraction studies have demonstrated that each of the strings oscillates at a given frequency. Of course, we don't know the initial conditions. The vibration might have been intended when they were constructed. The other explanation is that cirrus, interstellar radiation, and even human attempts to destroy them may have generated or contributed to the oscillations."

  "If they're that massive and oscillating, they should snap, fray-something.

  "We're dealing with a physics we don't understand." "With that mass, I can understand why. " Sinklar frowned and scratched at his thatch of black hair.

  "The gravitational effects must be awesome. They'd suck up anything."

  "They have. Fission and fusion explosives, null singularity generators. Even a ship impacting at light speed." Staffa tapped the tabletop with his laser pen.

  "What kind of technology can manipulate nucleonic material? Squeeze out neutronium like it was made to order?"

  "We can create hyperons in our accelerators."

  "Yes, we can. But we can't sustain them. The best we've been able to do is prolong their existence by three or four nanoseconds in a warped stasis field.

  I don't know, Sinklar. Maybe we don't want to break the Forbidden Borders after all. I'm not sure I'd want to anger beings who wield such technology. "

  "You're assuming they think of us as bacteria."

  "That is the only reassuring factor in
this whole mess." "What? Being bacteria?"

  Staffa nodded. "It means they fear us. With fear, we always have bargaining leverage."

  Sinklar's gray eye narrowed to a skeptical squint. "Let me tell you about biology class. We kept houseflies in glass jars. We didn't fear them; it just kept the little beasts in a handy container so we could study their behavior.

  Had the flies in one of the jars got together and threatened us, a squirt of insecticide would have settled the issue with a minimum of fuss."

  "Did I ever tell you what a Idelight it is to have you around for idle chatter?"

  Sinklar grinned, finally remembering his stassa. He sipped, winced, and stood to pour it into the dispenser tray before drawing another cup. .

  Staffa watched him, a curious warmth in his chest. My son. And we can talk now like adults. The tension between them had eased. They might not have become fast friends, but that breakfast in Staffa's quarters had defused the everpresent suspicion.

  Studying Sinklar, Staffa could see the fatigue that dogged his every move. How long had it been since either of them

  had had a good night's sleep? The weight of their situation had now settled on Sinklar's shoulders, but in this case, Chrysla had been wrong. None of the burden had lifted from Staffa's own.

  Sinklar shook his head as he turned back, the cup brimful. "You'd think that strings of neutrons would collapse, pull themselves into spheres. Any angular momentum would leave them rotating like miniature neutron stars. Weak force has to play a role in this. How did they manage to manipulate strong force to keep the neutrons together? Do they have a handle on a GUT that we don't?"

  "You'd think that." Staffa shifted. "We're dealing with a physics we don't understand yet. I read a report once which suggested that the frequency of oscillation was a prerequisite for the string's stability. They need that oscillation to generate gravitational fields which in turn maintain the string's integrity. Stop the oscillation, the study said, and you'd have a cataclysmic collapse of the string."

  "With rather dramatic results."

  "The resultant radiation would sterilize Free Space if the gravity waves didn't."

  Sinklar reseated himself. "You know, if you can manage somehow to break the barriers, you could accidentally create exactly that effect. Snapping a string could kill us all. We're talking about a lot of mass and energy."

  "That thought had crossed my mind," Staffa retorted dryly.

  "So how does a colony of bacteria get out of a culture dish?" Sinklar cursed as he spilled stassa on the desk. "Once we figure that out, we've got the problem solved.

  Staffa stared at his monitor. "All it takes is one string. If it can be broken, Free Space has enough of a hole to break out. The navigation will be a little tricky. A ship has to pierce the gravitational fields exactly midway.

  The velocity will have to be a hair under light speed, say 0.97C. Any deviation to one side or the other, and tidal effects will rip a ship apart-no matter how well built."

  "Can't you build a stronger ship? Reinforce the hull?" "Sure, we could build something that would take the tidal effect structurally, but what about the most fragile part? The human beings inside? People tend to break and die at around twelve to fifteen gravities."

  "I'm not an engineer. Why can't you generate artificial gravity? That's what keeps us from turning into red mush while Chrysla accelerates at fifty g, right?"

  "The best artificial gravity I can give you-and that's with top of the line plates-is about seventy gravities. Beyond that, power-to-mass ratios become prohibitive. It's a materials problem we haven't solved yet. For greater AG, we build thicker plates to produce a stronger field effect. You need beefed up powerlead and energy production to support the field. That means you need stronger structural support in the starship frame. By the time you finish upgrading, you'll have a starship that masses as much per kilogram as that string in the Forbidden Borders."

  Sinklar accepted this reluctantly, then asked, "What about null singularity?

  Warp a hole in space-time. Let your singularity pull you through. That way, you're not even in this universe. "

  "You need more sleep. You're not thinking. Want to answer your own question?"

  Sinklar's shoulders dropped. "Okay, stupid question. Gravity is the one constant. Mass affects objects in null singularity. Which is why you can't fly a starship traveling in null singularity through a celestial body like a planet or sun. "

  Staffa stared at the ceiling panels, white squares interspersed with light panels. "They created them to oscillate. That's one of the factors which make them so accursedly difficult to deal with."

  "How's that? "

  "The tidal effects. Gravitational waves generally travel at light speed. Given the frequency of oscillation in the strands, the design is meant to pulverize anything passing within the tidal boundaries. The law of inverse squares, remember? The closer you get to a concentration of mass, the gravitational effect squares. Whip that mass back and forth, and what do you have?"

  "A giant vibraknife that cuts from the inside out." "You're Rotted right."

  Staffa smacked a fist into the table. "Comm. I need a message patched to Dee Wall at Itreata. Message is as follows: Dee. Sinklar and I were having a conversation and an idea popped up. Take a look at the overall dynamics of the Forbidden Borders. Can the oscillations act as a means of stabilizing the whole? A sort of containment system whereby a small amount of mass is utilized to its greatest extent. "

  Staffa frowned, unsure where his brain was trying to take him. "Dee, this is what I'm getting at. Mass is abundantly available in the universe. Did the Forbidden Borders have to be made to oscillate? Couldn't they have been rigid?

  I would appreciate it if you could run a statistical probability for me.

  Assuming the Forbidden Borders are a natural phenomenon, what is the probability that such a structure would form as a perfectly impenetrable barrier to humans? And while you're at it, what is the probability that the Forbidden Borders, as a dynamic system, will remain in isostatic harmony?

  Given observed parameters, have the computer estimate the probable lifetime of the system."

  Staffa gave the monitor a bleary look. "That's all for now. Let me know what you come up with. Comm clear. " Sinklar sipped at his stassa. "Do you think that hasn't been tried?"

  Staffa shrugged. "Probably, but the data are locked away in secret files somewhere ... that or blown away on Rega or Icrushed on Sassa. It's just not .

  'Go on."

  Staffa studied Sinklar, a quizzical expression on his face. "They can't be natural. Don't you see? The statistics are going to prove it. "

  "See what?" Sinklar rocked his cup on the base.

  "The quanta, Sinklar. The Forbidden Borders are improbable. Dee is going to prove what you and I are still speculating about."

  Sinklar's gaze sobered. "You mean that there really is someone on the other side."

  "When we get the answer, we really won't be able to sleep.

  CHAPTER 15

  To: The Governing Council of Farhome.

  From: Staffa kar Therma, Lord Commander of Companions.

  Greetings! Know by this order that the Companions, in association with Admiral Than Jakre, Commander of the Imperial Sassan Fleet, and Legate Myles Roma, Administrator of the Imperial Sassan. government, respectfully request the use of a section of your orbital facility. Needed are ten thousand square meters of floor space to house a complex of seven hundred and fifty high capacity mainframe computers of the Itreata 7706 series dimensions.

  It must be noted that security will be of premium importance as will the structural integrity of floors, walls, ceilings, structural supports, and any other engineering concern vital to the protection and working efficiency of such a computer station. Such a complex must be wired to power the above-mentioned number of 7706 series mainframes with at least fifty-rate powerlead to be sublaid into the structure. Electrical power must be integral to the unit in a secure, tamperproof enviro
nment accessible only through complex security.

  Please forward a floor plan of the facility you propose to offer for this project along with wiring schematics, confirmation Of Security concerns, and power plant specifications at your earliest opportunity in care of Magister Kaylla Dawn, Seddi Complex, Itreata.

  Rapid construction of this facility could be vital to the survival of your people and industry as well as to that of the empire and humanity in general.

  RespectfuRy yours, Staffa kar Therma, Lord Commander of Companions.

  Mendel Ayatayana, Imperial Consul of Farhome for His Holiness, Sassa ", closed his eyes and groaned as he finished reading the communique. He rubbed the delicate bone bridge of his brown-skinned nose and leaned back, glancing at his staff.

  "What can we do?" Ihana Maderas asked.

  "What do you think? Find them the space they need. Mendel winced at the thought of the trouble that had just landed on his desk. The giant orbiting station that had been his home for all of these years was barely making ends meet. To displace this much industry? Just to build a computer complex?

  But then, an earthquake had destroyed the Imperial comm center, and His Divinity alone knew what benefits could accrue to Farhome in the future as a result of such an asset.

  "Don't just sit there!" Mendel cried, waving his hands furiously. "Get to work! Or which one of you is going to be the brave one who tells the Star Butcher no?"

  Chrysla stepped into the observation blister at the end of the officer's deck and made her way past darkened equipment that hunched like absurd insects.

  Outside of a basic know3edge, The invicacles of spectrometers, gravitometers, and interferometers eluded her.

  Her purpose, however, was not astronomy. She stopped before the blister, staring out at the infinite blackness, puzzled for the moment by the lack of stars. The darkness of space had a quality of crystal blackness. What she saw had a flat murky appearance. Gyton had made the jump to null singularity. She would see no stars until they dropped out, decelerating for Ashtan.

  "Funny thing, " a thin voice said from one side. "People have a basic need to see with their own eyes - " "Commander Braktov?" Chrysla whirled, squinting to probe the inky shadows. She could barely make out the old woman's form where she reclined in an observation chair.,