I raced back to the Inn, calling with my mind to Rex, Helda and Taas: Get up. NOW. As I strode into the hotel, Rex was running down the staircase that swept into the lobby like the train of a blood-red wedding dress. I ran past the startled clerk and met Rex halfway up the stairs.
"I found out why the Aristo is here." I paused, out of breath. "He's Qox's son."
Rex stared at me. "What?"
"The Heir." Saying it out loud, I heard how fantastic it sounded. "That man we saw—he's the Highton Heir."
Helda and Taas appeared at the top of the stairs, striding around the corner in time to hear my statement. They made in down to where I stood with Rex in two seconds.
"His name is Jaibriol," I said. "Jaibriol Qox." I looked around at them. "It's why Rex and I thought he was familiar. He looks like his grandfather."
"How you find all this out?" Helda asked.
"I figured out where he was staying. I broke into his mesh system there. His father sent him a coded message about Tams."
"You've been busy," Rex said.
I grimaced. "I've been arrested, mug shot, lined up with five clones, questioned by the politest police alive and gone to the hospital to see two providers who escaped when I crashed Qox's mansion. They asked the Allieds for sanctuary."
"You did all that in one night?" Taas asked.
Helda smiled. "Why you need us, Soz?"
I took a breath. "Because Ur Qox is going to flood out Tams."
"What does that mean?" Taas asked.
I regarded him steadily. "At Bullseye he did it by converting part of the planet's moon into hydrogen. At CJ4 he used an asteroid. They pour hydrogen into the atmosphere and use gigantic discharges to make it react with the oxygen and produce water." I grimaced. "It's going to rain good and hard on Tams. When it's over, there won't be any oxygen left in the atmosphere and the surface will be flooded." I thought of Allied religious texts I had read. No ark was going to save Tams. When Lucifer impersonated God, nobody survived.
Rex's jaw stiffened. He and I had been with the battalion that found CJ4 after its destruction. ISC kept the record of what we had found under tight security. They didn't want the panic they feared would happen if our people realized Qox could destroy our worlds the same way he had done his own, should our precarious defenses ever weakened.
"When does it happen?" Helda asked.
"He's sent flags," I said. "I doubt they're there yet."
"We have warn Tams," Taas said. "Tell them to evacuate."
Rex spoke quietly. "Evacuate in what?"
I felt as if my stomach dropped. What indeed? The Trader sabotage had destroyed the engines and EI pilots of the rebels' space craft. How could Tams evacuate without functioning ships?
Taas looked from me to Rex. "Even without factories, they could still have been trying to rebuild their ship drives."
"Rebuilding isn't their biggest problem," Rex said. "It's the EI pilots that run the ships."
"Tams is a mining station," I said. "They don't have the expertise to create an EI pilot from scratch, especially not this fast."
"We can send them some," Helda said. "We make them from the EI's on our own ships."
"Yes." Taas tensed as if readying himself for launch. "We can put them in robot drones and launch from the stand-off weapons platform in E-sector."
Rex considered the thought. "If the drones don't make it through, we won't have time for a second try before the Trader flags arrive."
"The rebels have control of the ground defenses," Taas pointed out.
"Even so," Rex said. "The orbital defenses aren't trifles, and the Trader military has those. We have to succeed on the first try. Once the flags get there, it's over. We need to send in human pilots."
They looked at me. I knew the decision they were waiting to hear. We all knew the odds. Warfare had evolved terrifyingly beyond the abilities of humans to fight it. Although drones with EI pilots couldn't match the human mind when it came to innovation, no human could survive against the light speed processing abilities of a drone or its ability to endure immense accelerations.
Except a Jagernaut.
The enhanced link between our brains and our ships boosted our minds into the ship's EI. Add to that the advances in the stasis technology that protected humans from g-forces and the end result was a weapon with the speed and endurance of a drone and the creativity of the human mind.
"We're the only squad in this quadrant," I said.
"When do we leave?" Taas asked.
That was it. No one said a word about our nil chance of success. They just waited to hear my answer, waited to follow me into a fight we couldn't win. Even if we got the EI's through to Tams, no way existed to evacuate six hundred million people in time.
Rex's thought came to me. If we save only one life, it's worth it.
Rex . . . I had been so afraid that what had happened tonight would destroy what I felt for him. But as soon as his thoughts touched mine, I knew our connection was as strong as ever. This was Rex, who had been with me for years, more than a friend, soon to be a husband. Now I had to do what I swore would never happen—send the man I loved into combat. Yes, I had been doing it for years, but I had never acknowledged the truth of that until tonight.
They watched me, waiting for orders.
"First we send a report to HQ," I said. Backup would never reach us in time, but we had to try. "Then we leave."
It was hours before sunrise when we jogged out of the gate at the starport. Our ships waited on the field, Jag starships, the single-pilot craft that gave Jagernauts their name. Technically the craft were JG-17 fighters. The name Jag came from "lightning jag," a nickname test pilots had given the prototype, the JG-1.
The ships looked like alabaster works of art. On the ground, they were elongated, with wings extended. In flight, they would change according to our needs: spread wings for subsonic speeds; wings tight against the body in hypersonic flight; rounder shape to minimize surface area during interstellar flight; more rounded for stealth or battle. Right now, their weapons were retracted, hidden in protected bays.
I strode next to my Jag, my hand sliding across its surface like a skater on ice. It had a tellerene hull, a composite threaded with microscopic wires designed from fullerene tubes. Lightweight and fatigue resistant, tellerene retained its strength even at the high temperatures of hypersonic reentry. It was also self-repairing; the dangling bonds in a broken fullerene molecule reattached, mending the wire. The hull showed fewer of the pits, grooves and other damage from space travel, a smoothness that was one more factor in optimizing its performance. Like their pilots, Jags were top-of-the-line technology, fast and deadly.
I stopped midway between the nose and the tail. Had I not already known about the tiny silver prong there, I might never have found it in the featureless hull. As soon as I pushed my wrist against the prong, it snicked into my socket.
Connection, my node thought.
Verified. The response came from Blackstar, the ship's EI.
The airlock whooshed opened, a tiny hole that widened into a human-sized oval so fast its edges shimmered. The outer and inner doors opened simultaneously; Blackstar had analyzed the atmosphere and found it acceptable.
As I climbed into the cabin, the inner hull activated, glowing with diffuse light. The cabin was small, less than two meters wide and three long. Equipment filled the free space and bulkhead compartments: cocoon seats and a bunk, gear, hand weapons, food dispenser, waste processor, water line, whatever I needed to survive in space.
As soon as I touched the membrane that separated the cockpit from the cabin, it dilated like the shutter on a high speed holocam. As I slid into the pilot's seat, it folded around me like a glove and released its cocoon, a swath of spun material thick enough to cushion against acceleration but not so much that it would interfere with my movements. The exoskeleton snapped into place, encasing me in a frame of equipment and clicking a psiphon into the socket at the base of my brain stem. A visor lowered over my head and data scrolled across its display. As the seat registered my weight, the forward holoscreens produced a three-dimensional view of the area outside. Rex's ship was to starboard, Taas and Helda to port. I could see other airfields, with their runways and launch pads, stretching out across the flat landscape.
The Evolving Intelligence of the Jag spoke in my mind: Blackstar attending.
Acknowledged, I thought. I needed no other entry procedure, no codes, nothing. Blackstar was tuned to my brain; if anyone else tried to use the Jag without authorization it would lock up every system on the ship.
Boosting to psiberspace, Blackstar thought.
I entered Kyle space as a black wavepacket rippling across the dark grid. A spark appeared next to me, growing into a second wavepacket, a red one with fiery glitters. A gold packet appeared next, followed by green.
Redstar here, Rex thought.
Goldstar here, Helda thought.
Greenstar here, Taas thought.
Blackstar acknowledging, I answered. Our exchange flashed by in a fraction of a second, far faster than unaided human thought could have done.
A psicon shaped like a lock blinked on my mental display. Then Blackstar thought, Security cloak at full strength. Squad presence undetectable to other users.
Good. Link, I thought.
Red linked. Gold linked. Green linked.
With the Jags amplifying our mental link, I could pick up thoughts from Rex, Helda and Taas in the background of my mine. When I concentrated on Taas, the murmur resolved into his mental commands to Green. I relaxed my concentration and his words receded. All their displays ran in the background of mine, waiting to be called forth if I needed them.
It had taken years of training to discipline my mind so I could separate my perceptions of that display—what Jagernauts called the mindscape—from my awareness of my own environment. I had to retrain my mind so I could think within that constant background noise. Many psions never managed it, which was another reason so few Jag pilots existed.
I rubbed my temples. We paid a price for this link; the energy required to maintain it, both in terms of our own minds and our ship's resources, limited the circle to no more than four Jagernauts. Nor could humans sustain the intensity of that boosted connection for long. But when it worked, the Jag link was a miracle. We could communicate anywhere, under any conditions, instantaneously.
Ready? I thought.
Redstar ready, Rex answered
Goldstar ready, Helda answered.
After a moment I thought, Taas?
Another pause. Then: Greenstar ready.
Do you have a problem? I asked.
No. Just took a moment to settle in.
His delay was normal for a new squad member. But in the situation we faced, it could be fatal. Under normal circumstances, I would never have expected an untried pilot to fly this mission. But we had no choice. I just hoped his virgin flight didn't end up as his last.
Coordinate tests, I thought. Having each ship verify the pre-flight tests of the others gave a four-way check of our readiness. We ran the Jags through their paces: nav, cyber, weapons, com, hydraulics.
Checking inversion engines, Blackstar thought.
Inversion. Even after so many years, it still had the power to fascinate me. We hadn't conquered the light barrier—we had snuck around it. To go at faster-than-light speeds, or superluminal, meant passing through the speed of light, where our mass would become infinite compared to slower objects, our length shrink to nothing, and our time stop. It was impossible. For centuries, humans had known that no ship could travel faster than light—and for centuries, humans had been wrong.
The solution had turned out to be simple. At superluminal speeds, mass and energy became imaginary, square roots of negative numbers. To reach the superluminal universe, we needed only to add an imaginary part to our speed. Poof. The singularity at light speed disappeared. A ship went around light speed like a flycar left the road to go around a tree. Except for starships, the "road" was the real universe.
Of course doing the math was a lot easier than designing an engine. But when our ancestors succeeded, the way to the stars had opened. We adopted the word "inversion" from the Allieds because it so aptly described how the process felt. The word actually came from a more esoteric source, referring to a mathematical correspondence between superluminal and subluminal space derived by the Earth scientists Mignani and Recami during the late twentieth century.
The engine would rotate my ship out of the real universe and into an imaginary one, passing through a bizarre form of existence where we were part real and part imaginary. The transition was disorienting, to say the least; I had no desire to find out what would happen if we spent longer than an instant there. So we approached the "tree" as closely as possible before we left the road, which meant we pushed close to light speed before we rotated into superluminal space or returned to our normal spacetime. That meant we came out of inversion at relativistic speeds, blasting the area with high-energy radiation and particles. Trying that too close to solid objects courted disaster. If the ship came out anywhere except in a near vacuum, it also displaced molecules of matter with explosive power, blowing up itself as well as whatever it hit. So we inverted far away from planets or other bodies.
Inversion had brutally changed warfare. With ships and missiles that could burst out of inversion at close to light speed, the concept of a front line became obsolete. Our defenses developed with our offensive capabilities, making it possible to protect our settled worlds in marginal safety. But we couldn't watch all space. Huge regions remained contested, places where no clear boundaries existed defining what was Eubian, Skolian, and Allied.
Inversion check complete, Blackstar thought.
Thruster check? The Jag would use its fusion engine close to the planet, but in space it relied on photon thrusters.
Thrusters initialized.
What about our fuel?
Positron containment secure.
Good. The magnetic containment bottle that held the positrons of its fuel was its own universe, existing only while the inversion engine operated. During flight, the bottle drew on the immense cosmic ray flux in complex space. It spread its fuel through both real and imaginary space by varying the imaginary parts of the charge and mass for its contents, allowing it to hold far more charge than in real space alone. It was simple to do, unlike with people; the psychological trauma of being both real and imaginary had no effect on particles.
As the bottle leaked positrons into an interaction area, a selector culled relativistic electrons from space. Matter/Antimatter. It interacted in glorious bursts of energy, producing our thrust. Gamma ray shields and superconducting grids prevented waste heat from destroying the ship. A stasis coil kept us from becoming a smear of plasma on our seats during acceleration. G-forces couldn't hurt the ship in stasis because our quantum state remained fixed. We didn't freeze exactly; our atoms continued to vibrate, rotate, and otherwise behave as they had been doing when the coil activated. The atomic clock within us that measured our time continued to work. But no atoms could change quantum state, which meant the ship became rigid even to huge forces.
Interrupt, Blackstar thought.
What happened? I asked.
The image of an Allied satellite intruded into the mindscape, showing so much detail, I could see bolts in its hull. A coded message from the Allieds also appeared. It was a code we had broken; as the gibberish flashed across my mindscape, Blackstar gave me a translation. For flaming sake. The message was about me. The Delos authorities were sending their report of my arrest to ISC.
Why did that display come up now? I asked Blackstar.
When I detected the transmission, your node flagged "Tiller Smith." He's listed as the person who translated the Greek report into Skolian.
I directed a thought to my spinal node. Why did you flag on Tiller?
His name registered eighty-two percent on your interest scale, my node answered.
That made no sense. Why would it predict Tiller Smith would interest me so much? The last thing I needed, when preparing for battle, was extraneous satellite images dumped into my pre-flight mindscape.
Run a diagnostic on your routines, I told it. Tiller shouldn't register so high.
Running. Then: Tiller Smith didn't cause the flag. It was your response to a book he gave you.
I couldn't imagine why a book of indecipherable poetry would agitate the node. Cancel all flags concerned with Verses on a Windowpane.
Cancelled. The satellite display vanished.
Primary Valdoria, Taas thought. I'm getting a spillover onto my grid of your satellite images. I can't cut it off.
What commands did you try? I asked.
Stop, cancel, break, quit, exit, bye, system, chop, stomp, flush, dump, and curse.
Curse? What is that?
I swore at it.
I smiled. Try erase.
Ah. Yes, that worked. His erase psicon appeared in my mind, a buxom woman wearing a few scraps of cloth and holding a can of paint. She painted the hem of her skirt and it disappeared, showing even more thigh. Then she vanished back to Taas's system.
I laughed. You all ready to go?
Ready, Rex thought.
Ready, Helda thought.
Ready, Taas thought.
Let's do it, I thought.
The tower cleared us for take-off. But as we taxied toward the launch pad, the controller's voice crackled on my comm. "Sorry, Primary Valdoria. The four of you will have to hold. We have a snag on twelve."
"Acknowledged." As we slowed to a stop, I thought, What's the problem?
Blackstar showed me several ships on a launch pad we had to pass to reach twelve. These craft are preparing to lift off.
The Trader insignia of a black puma gleamed on their hulls. They waited in the predawn air, the glare from field lamps glittering on their hulls like ice. The sleekest was a Streamliner, the starship of preference for Hightons. The three heavier craft were Escorts, which often guarded the Streamliners. Given that most Hightons traveled with only one Escort, two at the most, I had a good idea what passenger this Streamliner carried.
Rex spoke in my mind. Qox.
Yes, I thought.
Taas's thought sparked like an iron arc. We should blast him off the pad.
Helda's thought rumbled. Ya.
I scowled. You're talking about assassination.
Ya, Helda agreed.
Let's do it, Taas thought.
I couldn't believe it. They were serious. They wanted to go out there and blow up a civilian ship with no provocation, murdering a major interstellar leader. Cut it out, I told them.
My displays all indicated launch pad twelve was clear. I was sure we could have used it. I also had no doubt the tower didn't want us anywhere near the Traders. They probably feared we would do exactly what Taas and Helda suggested.
Warning lights flared across the Trader's launch pad, strobing the darkness. Clouds of steam swirled around the ships, and one of the Escorts lifted off, blasting the pad with exhaust. The others followed in a staggered pattern, the rumble of their leaving growling through my bones.
We hurtled through space, racing the specter of Qox's flags.
In inversion, we could go as fast as we wanted, just never slower than light speed. If anyone on Delos could have watched, they would have seen our ships get shorter and our mass increase as we approached light speed. After we went superluminal, speeding up increased our length and decreased our mass. At faster than 141 percent of light, time contracted. Right now we could shoot through space for a century and only an hour would pass on Delos. If we ever reached infinite speed our Jags would have no mass, they would stretch the length of the universe, and time would stand still everywhere else while forever passed for us. It always amazed me that even with all this going on, the ship looked completely normal to me, because relative to it, I wasn't moving at all.
We had a problem, however. As we had pushed close to light speed, our time had dilated, which meant it passed more slowly for us than for Tams. It jumped us a few hours into the future, stealing valuable moments we desperately needed.
Blackstar, plot pastward course, I thought. Compensate for the time dilation.
Course plotted.
Good. At superluminal speeds we could travel into the past. If anyone on Tams could have watched, they would have seen this: after we left Delos, four new ships and four antimatter ships appeared in the Tams system, eight in all, each pair-produced from photon annihilations. The matter ships and their pilots were identical to our squad. In fact, they were us.
While the matter ships continued to Tams, the antimatter squad flew backward to Delos in a time reversed path, at superluminal speeds, gaining fuel rather than losing it, like a movie run in reverse. At the point where I had told Blackstar to go pastward, the observer would see our ships meet the antimatter ships—and annihilate. The energy created by our mutual destruction would balance that lost when the new ships and their antimatter siblings were created near Tams.
Of course we saw no bizarre creations or destructions. We were at rest relative to our ships, so as far as we knew, we simply traveled from Delos to Tams. The end result was the same; our four Jags arrived at Tams sometime after we left Delos. I vehemently wished we could reach Tams before we left, with enough time to evacuate the planet. But no ship had ever succeeded in thwarting the laws of cause and effect by coming out of inversion before entering it. The best we could do was reach Tams the instant after we inverted at Delos. Usually it took longer, anywhere from hours to days. The farther we traveled, the more errors accumulated and the bigger the discrepancy. I just hoped we made it in time. Although Qox's flags had farther to go, they carried entire systems dedicated to optimizing spacetime variables.
However, we had an advantage they could never match.
No electromagnetic signal could reach a superluminal ship. The only way to communicate among ships in inversion was to shoot superluminal particles—tachyons—at one another. No one had yet figured out how to make tachyons reliably carry information, particularly given that during inversion, the signals could arrive before they were sent. So inverted ships traveled in limbo, drifting. A squad that entered in tight formation could leave inversion spread out across both space and time.
Except for Jags.
Rex, Helda, Taas and I were one mind. More than one mind. We were a part of the Kyle-Mesh, which gave us instantaneous communication with a star-spanning network. We coordinated our actions with a precision that defied light speed itself.
Even Kyle space had limitations. If we entered the Kyle-Mesh after time dilation jumped us into the future, we would link to a future timeline. In theory, it could let us look ahead in time. But if we then returned to the past, as we were doing now, the timeline would be off. Given the situation at Tams, even the small amount of time we would need to dissolve and reform the link in the right time could kill us. All our peek at the future would tell us was that we died in battle because we weren't prepared for what the Trader ships were doing at the moment we actually engaged them. The very act of checking our future increased the chances we would learn we died in combat. So I kept us in the timeline consistent with the time we left Delos.
Blackstar, I thought. Check the Kyle-Mesh. Any readings on Qox's flags?
One of our sentry ships has sighted Eubian warships on approach to Tams. Estimated arrival times appeared in my mindscape.
How many?
A display of Trader vessels appeared in my mindscape. Two battle cruisers, an orbital platform, and three Shieldcraft. Also one labcraft.
I grimaced. Those had to be the flags. A labcraft could convert even moon into chemicals to react with the Tams atmosphere. At least the flags had no idea we were coming. I wanted to be in and out of Tams before they showed up.
What about the Streamliner that took off from Delos? I asked.
It replaced the display with images of Jaibriol's ships. Their present course puts them at Tams at roughly the same time as the flags.
Any data on the Tams situation?
The last reports indicated the rebels controlled the ground defenses. However, all of their links to the Kyle-Mesh are inoperable.
No surprise there. The Traders would have destroyed those links as fast as possible to make sure our intelligence was dated.
Taas sent a thought. What about their orbital defense systems?
He sounded calm, but I felt his tension. Blackstar responded to my concern by showing me an image of Taas in his cockpit. Data flashed under it: pulse, blood pressure, temperature, breathing rate, brain activity.
Hey, Taas thought. I'm fine.
I let the image fade. We'll probably find hordes of sat-bangs in orbit. Sat-bangs were a nuisance, low-value decoys that were only good for one missile or an old style laser. Their electronic signatures made them appear as high value targets, though, so they seemed far more dangerous than they actually were.
Robot drones too, I thought. Possibly a robot crewed Sentinel.
Why a Sentinel? Helda asked. Putting a platform in orbit makes it vulnerable.
I swapped that over to Rex, who had the expertise on platforms.
They have no moon to use for a base, so they need something in orbit, Rex answered. They have to have something up there like a Sentinel, because the rebels control the ground defenses. That could outweigh the Sentinel's vulnerability, especially given they've no reason to expect our attack.
The prospect of a Sentinel worried me. It would add vicious fangs to the orbital defenses. In theory, a Jag squad coming out of inversion could take on an orbital platform and survive; realistically, if we didn't knock it out immediately, with the advantage of surprise, our chances plummeted.
How about manned Solos? Taas asked.
It was a good question. The Solos were the closest Trader counterpart to our Jags.
Only a few, Rex thought. Normally ground based. But they may be in orbit here.
Especially given that Solos carry sophisticated EIs, I added. If the rebels capture even one, they have an EI to adapt for their own ships.
What about tau missiles? Helda asked.
Solos have them, I thought. Just hope it's not too many. Taus were equipped with inversion drives, which turned them into miniature starships. The Traders were concerned with what was happening on the planet, though, not in space, which I hoped meant they put the expensive and bulky tau missiles low on their list of priorities.
Of course, they could cripple the rebellion by smashing a tau into Tams at relativistic speed. The rebels had made the same assumption as had the rest of the sane universe, that Ur Qox wouldn't destroy such a desirable territory. We had been wrong, all of us. The Tams resistance was a symbol of defiance, one far more potent to Qox than we had realized, powerful enough that he wanted them destroyed in the most dramatic way possible as a warning to any others who thought to defy his rule.
Considering our options, I thought our best bet was to come out of inversion as close to Tams as possible, launching a cloud of smart missiles. Well-settled planets had defenses against relativistic attack, but Tams was a small station in a backwater region. That might give us a chance of success. Whether or not it was more than a vanishingly small chance was another story; I had seen partial stats on its ODS, or orbital defense system. It wasn't trivial.
When we reach Tams, I thought, our advantages will be surprise, speed, and our Jag link. Disadvantages: we're four Jags against a full ODS and we can't communicate with the rebels until we come out of inversion. Strategy: reinvert close to the planet, only twenty million kilometers out, in a close formation. We transmit our warning to the rebels using neutrino comms and exhaust modulation. The Traders would be hard pressed to stop either; the gamma source produced by our exhaust would be a spectacular beacon, and neutrinos went through almost anything. Immediately release a cloud of MIRVs. The MIRVs, or multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles, would be traveling at relativistic speeds with us, giving them the energy equivalent of megaton bombs. After we knock out the ODS, we deliver the EI's brains to the colony.
Understood. The response echoed from all four ships.
Ready to reinvert, Blackstar thought.
I fired the photon thrusters—and went into stasis. The only way I knew I hadn't been conscious while we decelerated was by the discontinuous change in speed on my displays. The Jag slowed down in a series of jumps I perceived as continuous. The stars moved forward, converging on a point in front of the ship. Their colors shifted toward blue, then went ultraviolet and disappeared from my screens. Blackstar created a holomap showing the stars as they collapsed into the point—
—and we roared out of inversion in perfect formation, blasting our warning to Tams as we hurtled toward the planet, preceded by a swarm of relativistic missiles.
Blackstar flooded my mind with data; the Tams ODS reacted to our attack by sending what looked like an entire fleet of Sentinels. But I recognized those signatures—most were decoys.
Enemy taus sighted—and disappeared, Blackstar thought.
Evade! The taus would disappear only if they inverted—
—and I came out of stasis. Blackstar had thrown the Jag into such an abrupt course change that the stasis coil had kicked in, protecting me from the lethal accelerations.
Taus detonated to port, Blackstar thought. Stats poured into my spinal node faster than an unboosted brain could absorb. Tau missiles equipped with inversion drives were catching our MIRVs and inverting. They targeted our positions and reinverted, exploding both themselves and their MIRV captives in violent bursts of radiation. The taus had to invert to catch us, but their foray through inversion threw them off. If they could have tracked us while they were superluminal, they might have caught us, but they came out either seconds too late or in the wrong place.
We hurtled beyond the planet's orbit and headed for the sun, accelerating, faster, faster—
Invert, I thought.
My stomach wrenched as we entered superluminal space. We kept accelerating, up to millions of times light speed. Time went faster for us than for Tams, so we could come around and re-enter the system with only seconds passing there. We came out of inversion a few million kilometers from the planet, flying "out of the sun," spraying our last MIRVs in a cloud ahead of the squad.
ODS sterilized, Blackstar thought.
Data poured into our mindscapes. We had eliminated the entire system: taus, decoys, drones, and a Sentinel orbiting platform. Helda whooped, and Rex sent me an image of his wickedly exultant grin. We had done it!
Taas's laugh rumbled in my mind. The ODS were against us, but we beat them.
I groaned. Continue dumping velocity on approach to Tams.
We "braked" down, flicking into stasis, again, again, we were nearing Tams now, slowing for atmospheric entry—
I came out of stasis to the scream of alarms. Stats reeled through my mindscape: Solos and cybernetic drones were boiling up from the planet.
Damn! Engage shrouds!
Three thoughts answered in a light speed pulse. Engaged.
We vanished. Blackbody shielding turned our hulls into surfaces that reflected no light. It was minimal stealth; the Traders knew we were here, and every time we accelerated our exhaust gave us away.
Helda, get down as far as you can, I thought. We'll cover you. Drop the EI's in a drone. I didn't know if the rebels could recover it, but we no longer had choices. We had lost our advantage of surprise and used up our MIRVs. Nor could we do more inversion tricks, because if accelerated to relativistic speeds, it would leave Helda undefended while she tried to do the drop.
Blackstar gave me its analysis of the Solos and drones. They were coming from the remains of an underground base, the only beleaguered remains of the ground defenses. It looked as if the Trader military had overcome the rebels, and the insurgents had blown up most of the defense installations rather than let them be recaptured.
Prime Annihilators, I thought. Like Jumblers and photon thrusters, these mammoths worked on pair annihilation. But Annihilators were the mammoths. They used antiprotons, with energies two hundred times greater than positrons, millions of times greater than wimpy bitons. No matter that beams were easier to avoid than smart missiles; Annihilators offered the best offense against ships in stasis. A ship with its quantum state frozen could survive immense forces—including enemy fire. They were more fragile to beams than missiles, however, because annihilating matter was easier than deforming it.
Blackstar, I thought. Do the Trader ships have inversion capability?
Yes. Blackstar showed me images of four drones and five Solos. Three of the Solos also carry MIRVs.
Damn. Those Solos could try the same gambit with their MIRVs that we had used. We had warning now and could use decoy dust to confuse their missiles, but I needed no EI to tell me how slim our chances were. At least the Solos couldn't coordinate during inversion or come out of it simultaneously, especially not with us harrying them. It meant they could hit one another instead of us when they launched their MIRVs. The question was: were they willing to kill each other to kill us?
I didn't want to find out. We had to destroy them before they had a chance to try. As Redstar and Goldstar closed on two of the Solos, Blackstar showed me a drone on an intercept course.
Get him, I thought.
Firing.
Mag-shields protected the drone, magnetic fields that deflected charged particles. No beam was perfectly neutral, but most of my shot reached its target. Where it hit the drone, the annihilations created pion showers, which started other devastatingly high energy processes, giving birth to particles and radiation that tore through the fusion engines, weapons bays, inversion engines, the generators powering the antimatter containment fields—
—and the drone disappeared in a silent burst of radiation and exploding debris. Part of it vanished with the eerie sucked away effect created when real matter collapsed into the complex space within a fuel containment bottle.
Warning: Blackstar thought. Greenstar detected.
Taas fired at a Solo bearing down on him. Blackstar highlighted his shot on my display, red for a tau missile. The miniature, volatile starship streaked out at the Solo. Jags couldn't carry many of the bulky taus; Taas had just used a fourth of his supply—
—lost a fourth of his supply. The Solo caught it with an Annihilator. The tau exploded close enough to destroy the Solo, but the ship remained whole, thrown into stasis by its EI. It sped away from Taas and toward me like a rigid body in frictionless motion. Then the Solo dropped out of stasis—and I gasped as terror punctured my mind.
Blocking, Blackstar thought.
Although the fear receded, it didn't vanish; with my boosted concentration so focused on the Solo, I couldn't shut out the pilot's reaction. He was so scared, so young, barely more than a boy, one who had never expected combat on this simple assignment
. . .I never wanted to fly a Solo, never wanted to be near one. How could I have believed it would make my dreams reality, lift me up—I'm paying for that dream—
Blackstar, block! Tears ran down my face, the tears of my enemy. The block psicon flashed futilely in my mind, over and over.
Firing, Blackstar thought.
My Annihilator caught the Solo point-blank and detonated it into oblivion. I gasped as the boy's death scream vibrated in my mind.
Blackstar. I drew in a sobbing breath. Disconnect my emotive centers.
Disconnected.
The part of my brain that cried in protest against the killing was suddenly locked in a glass-walled prison, its protests muted, unable to stop me from doing what had to be done. After the battle, if I survived, having used the disconnect would leave me feeling as if it had parched my soul, but without it, I couldn't function.
Red and Gold have been detected. Blackstar flashed images of Helda and Rex engaging two drones and a Solo. Another three drones were on intercept courses with us.
Evasive pattern two, I thought.
Blackstar fired the maneuvering rockets, using "cold" thrust from the fusion engines, changing course every second or less. The cocoon protected me against lesser accelerations, and Blackstar snapped us into stasis during lethal forces.
My Annihilator exploded one of the drones in a violent flash of radiation. An Annihilator shot from another drone stabbed through space where I had been an instant before. Robot ships had no need of stasis to keep a pilot alive, which meant they were more maneuverable than Jags. But their EI brains limited their strategy. A mature, well developed EI came close to human reasoning power, but it wasn't enough. Blackstar and I had worked together for over two decades, a synthesis that had evolved beyond what any EI or human could do alone.
My Jag hurtled past the third drone, and I caught it with an Annihilator. As the drone exploded, Blackstar showed me another Solo. It was thousands of kilometers away, running stealth, hiding in a shroud as it hurtled toward me. Even without the warning, I would have known it was there. I felt the pilot. He was a taskmaker, part Aristo, the same as Jaibriol's guards. I couldn't hit his ship with my Annihilator; the beam had no fuel left. A Jag could only carry so much antimatter, and a good portion of that went to our positron fuel.
Switch to Impactor, I thought.
The Solo came at me like a knight in a stealth jousting tournament. As we hurtled past each other, I fired the Impactor, a stream of clusters that fused on impact like little H-bombs. The Solo was veering in its own evasion pattern, however, and releasing clouds of smart dust that confused my tracking systems. My shot missed, stabbing uselessly into space. The Solo winged my mag-shields with his Annihilator, and particles spiraled madly off into space. Stats said I had been in stasis several times. Mercifully, so far my Jag hadn't sustained damage.
Meanwhile, the unrelenting clusters from my Impactor shot came around and went after the Solo. His decoy dust countered, some of it igniting the bomblets. As we hurtled away, my Jag released its own cloud of decoy dust that spread behind us in a cone, leaving a wake of explosions.
Gold hit, Blackstar thought.
Gold, report, I thought.
Lost mag-shields and Annihilators, Helda answered.
I needed only one look at her display. It was lit up with alarms like a holiday decoration. Helda, get out of here. Go back to headquarters and report. Rex, cover her.
Got it, Rex thought.
Green hit, Blackstar thought.
Taas? It looked like he had taken less damage than Helda had taken.
I'm fine, he thought—and punctuated it with a hit on a drone. In one flashing detonation, it became a note in the history files.
Solo approaching to port, Blackstar warned.
I snapped my attention to the Solo. Impactor, firing pattern K. Release decoy dust.
This new Solo evaded my shot. Its pilot fired his Impactor, but instead of targeting my Jag, he aimed to my port side—and nearly hit us as my ship jumped to almost that exact position.
Damn! This pilot was good. Evasive pattern Q!
Die, sweet Jagernaut.
The thought from the Solo's pilot hit me like a weapon. No telepath sent it, no one remotely resembling a telepath. But it formed with such single-minded intensity, I had no choice but receive it in my boosted state. It blanketed me with suffocating, choking scorn, and a lust so intense I reeled.
Die, sweet Jagernaut. Die. Slowly. In terrible pain.
The masters had come. This pilot was an Aristo warrior.
Fire Impactor! I struggled to free myself from the Aristo's concentration. I couldn't do it. The only way would be to disengage my brain from Blackstar, which was suicide.
The Solo veered in his evasive pattern, and I only winged his ship. Several of my Impactor clusters exploded on impact, but the Solo remained secure in stasis.
A second Solo suddenly registered on my detectors, matching velocity with my Jag as adeptly as the first. Its pilot's "voice" came to me: Die, Jagernaut.
—I was falling, falling, falling into a cavity, a dark hole, caught, trapped—
Blocking, Blackstar thought.
I gasped as my sense of falling receded. Fire, Impac—
As I came out of stasis, the Jag bucked, ramming my shoulder into the cushioned exoskeleton. Alarms blared in the cockpit and flashed on my mindscape.
We took a hit from the first Solo, Blackstar thought. It destroyed our starboard Impactor.
Sweet Jagernaut. The thought slid across my mind like an oily caress. You're mine.
The second Aristo him, hungering: Mine.
And then, gods almighty, a third thought penetrated: Die, little Jagernaut—and a third Solo materialized, firing out of a stealth approach even Blackstar hadn't detected.
I shouted a desperate thought at Blackstar. Evade!
The Jag shuddered violently as alarms blared. Hit to starboard, Blackstar thought. Annihilators no longer functional.
Fire taus, I thought.
My taus surged out of their cannon maws, jumping in and out of stasis as they streaked toward the Aristo ships. The first Solo destroyed the tau I sent after it. The second Solo took off with the tau in pursuit. My third tau found its target—and the Solo detonated in a fierce blast.
Anger from one of the first Solo pilot blasted my mind. Die, Jagernaut! In agony.
—and the second Solo jumped out of inversion, blasting the area with high energy exhaust that could demolish my Jag—
—and that second Solo exploded in a flash of radiation.
Got him! Rex thought. I'll—
Red hit, Blackstar thought.
REX! Stats for his Jag reeled through my mind: shields down to 8 percent, hull cohesion 4 percent. His antimatter containment fields teetered on the brink of collapse.
Fury at the Aristos burst over me, cold and icy. Fire tau, I thought. Get the bastard.
But even as my last cannon discharged, the Solo that had hit Rex also fired a tau. It matched velocity with my tau, caught it—and inverted. The two missiles reappeared to starboard and detonated together, their explosion blanked from my mind as Blackstar threw me into stasis.
Drones to port, Blackstar thought—and I was fleeing two drones, their Impactor fire crossing in space where I had been a second earlier. They hit each other instead and both exploded. I was nauseous from being clapped in and out of stasis. My node was trying to compensate by spurring my traumatized brain to release endorphins, but it wasn't enough.
Warning. Blackstar showed me a Solo accelerating toward the sun, up to relativistic speeds.
Catch it, I thought, and we leapt desperately after the Solo. I had no taus, no Annihilators, nothing. If I had to, I would ram the Jag down its—
Goldstar appeared so fast that if it hadn't been for Blackstar, I wouldn't have understood what happened. I knew only that the Solo exploded as if it had been slammed by an invisible cannon shooting straight at its nose. Blackstar told me the rest; Helda had read the position of the Solo straight from my mind—and jumped out of inversion directly in front of it with a precision impossible except for a ship in a Jag link. She came out at 80 percent of light speed, blasting the Solo with her exhaust, and before the Trader even finished exploding, she was gone.
It was damn near suicide. Had her calculations been off by even a few meters, she would have come out on top of the Solo, destroying herself as well as it. A miscalculation in the other direction and she would have destroyed either my ship or what little remained of Rex's Jag.
I had time neither to curse at her for disobeying orders nor to voice my rush of gratitude. The Jag lurched sickeningly, throwing me against the inside of the exoskeleton.
Hit to starboard, Blackstar thought.
Stats told it all: that shot had nearly finished us. One more hit, and we would be no more than radiation and expanding gas.
Soz. Rex's though came to my mind, dim but clear.
He was alive! Alive. I fought the urge to laugh, then to cry.
Suddenly Blackstar ignited the thrusters—and we leapt away from an Annihilator beam the instant before a Solo fired at us.
Lucky Jagernaut. The thought penetrated my mind, taunting, hungry, sliding like oil as the Solo hurtled away from us.
I drew in a ragged breath. It wasn't the first time Blackstar had anticipated a shot from an enemy ship. The Traders knew our weakness, that during combat our boosted state made our minds vulnerable. They played it to the hilt, taunting, baiting, jabbing at us. But any pilot who concentrated too hard on a boosted Jagernaut, particularly one with my experience and stratospheric Kyle rating, took that chance that his link would work in reverse, too. Through it, Blackstar had picked up the Aristo's more guarded thoughts—including his intent to fire.
Sweat dripped down my temples. Gold, get back to headquarters. You hear me, Helda? NOW. No more heroics. You may be the only one who can get in a report.
I'm gone, Helda thought.
The Traders who had fired on Blackstar were both out of range. Not that it mattered. I had nothing to shoot them with. As far as my scans could determine, those two were the last enemy ships. The drone was on intercept with Taas, and the Solo was accelerating toward the sun.
Based on its trajectory, Blackstar thought, I calculate the Solo will invert and jump back into the battle almost on top of Redstar.
Redstar. Rex's Jag—which was drifting helplessly in space.
Intercept it, I thought. Catch that slime scum.
Blackstar threw me into stasis. Again. Again. I was sick with the lurching jumps, my mind dizzy, my throat dry. A prong clicked down from my helmet, and water ran into my mouth.
We have no weapons, Blackstar thought.
Pump our positron fuel into an Annihilator, I thought.
The Annihilators are no longer functional.
Then dump the blasted positrons into anything that will hold them. Load it into a tau cannon.
I can use a fuel bottle. But it won't stay together for long.
It won't need to.
Solo inverting.
Follow it.
Then I dropped my mental blocks. I opened my mind to the Solo pilot in as if I were the drain in a barrel filled with acid. He poured into my mind like a caustic whirlpool: Pain, Jagernaut. Pain and fear and terror. Die—
We inverted, and Blackstar remained locked to the Solo through my link with its pilot. We screamed silently through imaginary space, chasing the Solo as it came around and headed to Tams.
Reinvert, I thought.
We jumped out a split second earlier then the Solo, but I couldn't maneuver into position to use my exhaust. As the Solo reinverted, I thought, Fire that fuel bottle into the maw of its tau cannon. Then get us the hell out of here.
In the same instant that my makeshift missile plunged into the Solo's cannon maw, the Solo fired a tau missile. My antimatter fuel bottle and its tau smashed into each other—and Solo vanished in a furious blast of radiation.
Ten drones approaching from dayside of Tams, Blackstar thought.
TEN? Gods almighty. How long until they're within firing range?
Four minutes. Only three minutes remain until the air in Rex Blackstone's emergency tanks will be exhausted.
I gulped in a breath. Green, report.
The drone that was chasing me stopped droning, he thought.
Taas, you have to get that EI to the rebels. You have four minutes to get down, make the drop, and get out.
Got it, Taas said.
Soz, don't be a fool. Rex's thought came dimly. You go in. Have Green cover you.
I nudged closer to Rex's ship, maneuvering as carefully as my Jag could manage, until we almost touched. Release accordion, I thought. Connect to Red.
Released, Blackstar answered.
Damn it, Soz, Rex thought. Tams is more important than one aging Jagernaut. Go in with Taas. He can't do it alone.
You should have more faith in him.
The accordion unfolded from my airlock. As it clanked onto Rex's Jag, Blackstar thought, Air pressure in Red at zero atmosphere. I'm sealing your space suit. One point two minutes of air remain in Blackstone's suit tanks.
Rex, get into the accordion, I thought.
I can't move, Rex answered.
Blackstar, open Redstar. Then release me.
Done.
As the exoskeleton snapped away from my body, I squeezed out of my chair and the cockpit membrane, and literally threw myself across the cabin. Blackstar opened both the inner and outer airlock doors. I shot past them and into the accordion bridge that stretched to Rex's Jag like a tunnel. The airlock to his Jag was wide open. I hurtled into Red—and into chaos.
Equipment floated everywhere, knocking past me. A section of the inner hull had buckled inward. Rex struggling to pull himself out of the pilot's seat, which had gone dead, its exoskeleton jammed around his body. He grabbed my arms, and with both of us working we dragged him out. Even free of the chair, his legs trailed uselessly behind him. I tried to contact him with my suit radio, but it didn't work.
Blackstar spoke. "Red has no more air in his suit tanks or emergency reserve."
I could see Rex's face through his helmet, see him gasping. He propelled himself through the ship and into the accordion like a human missile. He hurtled into the airlock of my Jag with me close behind. As Blackstar closed the outer door, Rex hit a side wall of the airlock and went limp.
"Blackstar, air." I grabbed Rex, clawing at his spacesuit. The two of us careened out of the airlock and into the cabin, tumbling out of control.
Rex's helmet came off in my hands. As we butted up against a bulkhead, I yanked off my own helmet. I anchored our bodies by wrapping my legs around the med cradle unfolding from the hull. Grabbing Rex's head, I pinched his nose and breathed into his mouth, a big breath for his big lungs. Breathe in. Out. In. Out. Rex, breathe. Gods, breathe.
"The approaching drones will be within firing range in forty-five seconds," Blackstar said.
In. Out—
Rex gasped in a huge, shuddering breath. As I let go of his nose, his eyes opened and he looked up at me, his face pale in the cold light of the cabin.
"Take care of Rex." Even as I spoke, the medcradle was enveloping him in its embrace.
"Thirty-two seconds until drones are within range," Blackstar said. "They have a lock on us."
I dove into the cockpit and yanked myself into the pilot's seat. The instant I plugged into the ship, I blasted out a thought: Taas pull out. Now!
No answer.
Drones firing, Blackstar thought.
Acceleration slammed me back—
Gasping, I reeled with the aftershock of having been in stasis for too long. Fixing the quantum state of a human being for that much time could be disastrous; when it relaxed, it had to respond to the forces in its surroundings. If they had changed too much, catastrophic fluctuations of the readjusting system could tear a person apart on the atomic level. My molecules managed to stay together, but I felt like hell. My vision was so bleared, I couldn't read my controls, but the mindscape told me what I needed to know; Blackstar had jumped into inversion in one step, keeping us in stasis the entire time.
Greenstar, report, I thought. Taas?
No answer.
I can't get a fix on Green, Blackstar thought.
Gold?
Nothing there, either, Blackstar answered.
No! Neither Helda nor Taas would willingly drop out of the link. Helda might have landed, but given the damage to her ship, it was more likely it had collapsed.
How is Rex? I asked.
His life functions are ceasing.
Help him!
He needs more help than I can provide.
NO! Had I succeeded in doing nothing with this desperation run except kill my squad? Not after all we had been through together. I couldn't bear it.
Blackstar, put us back into stasis. For Rex, neither time dilation nor any other relativistic effect made one whit of difference. It mattered only how long he was trapped here on the Jag. Don't bring us out until we get to a hospital than can save him.
Neither you nor Commander Blackstone may survive another—
Does he have any chance of surviving if you don't put him in stasis?
No. But you do.
Put us in stasis. Then break every transit-time record ever made getting to the hospital.
That was my final thought.