Skolian Empire: The Radiant Seas Part 35

"Can you imagine the horror it would create should that line show itself as false? A line of slaves?" He set his hands on her waist. "Imagine the shame."

Desperation touched Viquara. If Quaelen revealed Jaibriol, it would destroy everything. "No."

"No?" He tugged her slip and the lace slid off her body, pooling around her feet, baring her snow-marble body. "I wonder what one might expect in return for keeping the secret of such shame."

She forced out the words, her voice barely more than a whisper. "One might expect much."

"Indeed." Lifting her by the waist, he set her toes on the sill at the bottom of the window, forcing her to stand on tiptoe, bringing her hips level with his. "You are beautiful, my empress," he murmured. "As your consort, I will honor you."

So they merged forces, gazing into a darkened garden, their pa.s.sion reflected in a pane of gla.s.s, both of them facing outward, a woman with the sculpted perfection of heartless marble and the dark shade behind her, a power forever in shadows and forever implacable.

22.

"Klein bottles," Soz said.

Admiral Jon Casestar walked with her along a corridor in the Orbiter. He was a man of average height and features, with graying hair, but there was nothing average about his intellect. Although Soz knew little about him, she could see why Kurj had appointed him as an adviser. Casestar was no yes-man; he spoke his mind, with insight, a trait she valued. How well they would work together, however, remained to be seen.

The admiral was also evaluating her. Although he had the usual mental defenses up, she caught traces of his thoughts. He was undecided as to his opinion of her command style, but considered that it might be invigorating.

"Our s.h.i.+ps already have Klein fuel bottles," he said.

"Too small," she replied.

"We've improved the design over the past decade," he said. "They vary in size now, depending on how much antimatter fuel a s.h.i.+p needs."

"I was thinking much bigger. Big enough to carry s.h.i.+ps."

Casestar drew her to a halt. "You want to put a stars.h.i.+p in a Klein fuel bottle?"

"That's right. Crewed s.h.i.+ps."

"Imperator Skolia, that's impossible."

"Is it?" She considered him. "I've looked at the work they're doing at the Advanced Theory Inst.i.tute at Glenmarrow. In theory, we can make bottles that size."

"In theory, maybe. But the engineering is another story." He shook his head. "It isn't only the size. I doubt you can put human beings in a Klein bottle."

"Why not?"

He studied her face, obviously trying to fathom her. "What happens to people if you spread the charge and ma.s.s of their bodies throughout complex s.p.a.ce? I've no idea."

"We do it every time we invert," Soz said.

"Only for an instant. And it's only our speed that becomes complex. Even that's too much for some. There are people who never travel in s.p.a.ce because they can't tolerate inversion. To my knowledge, no one has ever existed in complex s.p.a.ce for more than a few seconds and returned alive."

"I have."

That obviously caught him off guard. "How?"

"When I went after Jaibriol Qox fifteen years ago. To escape ISC, he tried to made his s.h.i.+p invert from zero speed. I followed him." In truth, it had been her idea. Jaibriol had actually been on her s.h.i.+p while she "chased" a decoy.

Casestar stared at her. "I thought inversion was only possible from relativistic speeds."

"We never did manage to invert," she admitted. "But we did go into complex s.p.a.ce. That's how we got through the cordon."

His curiosity brushed her mind. "What was it like?"

"It's hard to describe." She tilted her head. "Reality became-well, liquid almost. There was a sense of twisting too, I a.s.sume as different parts of the s.h.i.+p took on different imaginary values."

"But did you actually experience that? Or was it just how you perceived whatever happened?"

Soz considered. "I'm not sure. We felt like we were melting. But when we dropped back into real s.p.a.ce we were solid. We never 'completed' the twist, though. We never inverted."

Casestar gave her an odd look. "'We'?"

Careful, Soz warned herself. "Myself and the pilot."

"What happened to the pilot?"

"She died when we crashed." As far as Soz knew, the pilot had actually gone to Earth. Prior to that, Erin O'Neill had been an Allied operative working undercover in an ISC hospital, with the alias Lyra Merzon. O'Neill was also the one who had married Soz and Jaibriol. Somewhere on Earth, known only to O'Neill and the former Allied president, proof existed that the Skolian Imperator and Eubian Emperor were husband and wife.

Casestar started to walk with her again. "A Klein bottle stores only a fraction of its contents in real s.p.a.ce. With a big enough bottle, you could hide a lot of s.h.i.+ps."

Soz gave a feral smile. "ESComm would have no idea what hit them."

"We would have the advantage of surprise only once."

"They've lost the advantage of surprise with the quasis-in-a-tau trick, but it still works."

He rubbed his chin. "We'll need to know what happens to the mental state of the crews in this complex limbo."

"I kept my anchor with reality by linking to the s.h.i.+p's EI." She studied the thought, turning it around in her mind. "We could have telops link to the psiberweb. The rest of the crew could go into quasis for short periods. ESComm won't be able to duplicate the technique, because it requires a full psiberweb."

"It would be effective, I'll grant that." He spread his hands. "But the questions involved, just with the engineering alone, aren't trivial."

Soz paused at the entrance to a catwalk above the War Room. "That's why I've put you in charge. I've faith in your abilities, Admiral. Make it work and we'll have a weapon the Traders can't match."

He nodded, still cautious. But she felt his mind tackling the challenge, looking at it from different sides. It intrigued him, as she had hoped it would.

After they parted, Soz walked onto the catwalk. The amphitheater below hummed with activity: telops working, aides running errands, pages soothing, cranes swinging through the air or poised above control panels. The stardome arched over her, with its holographic panorama of stars.

As she walked to the Command Chair, a few people below glanced up, then returned to their work. No one realized the significance of the moment. That was how Soz wanted it, with no fanfare. She simply sat in the chair. So it was done: she had taken her place as Imperator.

The exoskeleton closed around her, clicking p.r.o.ngs into her ankles, wrists, spine, and neck. The chaos in her mind had receded as she learned to control it, but now it surged again, flooding her with ISC data while her lone spinal node struggled to sort the deluge. She needed more nodes. Fifteen years ago she had possessed the most advanced biomech web a human body could take; today it was nowhere near the best available.

She started with a survey of her forces. Four components existed to Imperial s.p.a.ce Command. The Imperial Fleet was the largest, having grown out of the navy that had existed on Raylicon prior to s.p.a.ce travel. The Advance Services Corps had begun with the naval units that went ash.o.r.e as advance scouts or foot soldiers. When Raylicon regained air and s.p.a.ce travel about 430 years ago, the ASC became an interstellar force independent of the navy, the advance scouts for planetary landings. The Pharaoh's Army had the longest history of any branch in the military. Established by the Ruby Dynasty, it claimed five millennia of service to the empires birthed by Raylicon. Although primarily concerned with planetary warfare, it also maintained deep s.p.a.ce divisions.

The J-Force consisted of Jag starfighters and their Jagernaut pilots, both enhanced by biomech and psibertech until the line between machine and human blurred. Rank was defined relative to the navy, with Jagernaut Quaternary about equal to lieutenant junior grade, Tertiary to commander, Secondary to commodore, and Primary to full admiral. The J-Force was a.n.a.logous to an air force, however, in that it followed the development of s.p.a.ce travel similar to the way air forces followed air travel. One branch specialized in covert operations; Imperial Messengers were Jagernauts a.s.signed to the ISC Intelligence Tasking Office, a job Soz knew well, having been a Messenger Secondary in her thirties. She had become a Primary and squad commander in her forties.

ISC had several nerve centers. The Orbiter, named in Kurj's ever-literal style, orbited the Imperialate on a variable route known only to ISC security. From this chair, linked to the First Lock, she could monitor most of the giant ISC war machine. The Onyx military complex, which protected the Third Lock, had grown into a city of s.p.a.ce stations with a combined population of two billion. The planet Diesha served as ISC headquarters. Its personnel were concentrated in the city Kurj had of course named HeadQuarters City, but many other installations riddled the planet, most underground. Fifteen years ago, Jaibriol had been imprisoned in Block Three, a complex far out in the Dieshan desert.

The years had brought few changes in ISC strategy. Although the Eube-Skolia conflict had escalated, it remained a shadow war fought in deep s.p.a.ce, using a guess-and-attack mode of estimating where an enemy would drop out of superluminal s.p.a.ce and then staging an ambush. s.p.a.ce war had gone beyond the ability of unenhanced soldiers to fight it; the split-second response times it required far exceeded normal human capabilities, and the accelerations involved would pulverize anyone without quasis protection. Some battles involved only robot drones, a form of combat where chunks of metal slagged each other while humans monitored the engagement from distant stand-off weapons platforms.

Superluminal combat didn't really exist. Sublight s.h.i.+ps had no way to detect faster-than-light craft, and the sheer speed of FTL s.h.i.+ps made detection by other superluminal s.h.i.+ps difficult. If an ESComm sentry did locate a superluminal ISC force, it had almost no way to warn sublight forces in any reasonable amount of time. ISC fared better with the psiberweb. The term web extractors had come into use for telops who located superluminal ESComm forces and coordinated their capture or destruction through the web. Despite low detection rates, extraction proved useful. It was, in fact, how ISC had caught Jaibriol's s.h.i.+p fifteen years ago.

Settled planets were better protected than deep s.p.a.ce, secured by ground, orbital, and systemwide defenses. Engagements on civilian worlds were rare. Although interstellar s.p.a.ce was harder to protect, regions of heavy traffic were well monitored and rarely saw combat. However, Soz found a disquieting trend. Civilian casualties had been increasing, as skirmishes spilled into higher population areas, affecting commercial carriers and private s.p.a.cecraft.

She recognized many names on the roster of her top officers. General Dayamar Stone, commandant of the ASC, had trained her at the Dieshan Military Academy, which commissioned Jagernauts but drew its faculty from all the services. Stone had given her no quarter-and in the decades since she had thanked him for it a hundred times over.

It didn't surprise her to see Starjack Tahota in command of the Imperial Fleet. The admiral had an unparalleled record. Soz remembered the towering Tahota, bronzed and muscled, a throwback to the ancient warrior queens of the Ruby Empire. Seeing her and Kurj walk together had been like watching two giants stride out of mythology.

Primary Brant Tapperhaven was top man in the J-Force. Soz had heard of him fifteen years ago, as a brash young officer, but their paths rarely crossed. His profile revealed a leader aggressive to the point of abrasiveness, but with a record that showed he had good reason for his high opinion of his abilities. It didn't surprise her; Jagernauts were notorious for their fierce independence, a quality needed to survive the demands of a job that isolated them from ISC. They faced ESComm one on one, without the mental static of crewed s.h.i.+ps to interfere with their Kyle-intensive operations.

Naaj Majda was General of the Pharaoh's Army. She came from an old family, one of the few that could trace its lineage to Ruby Empire n.o.bility. Ties between the Ruby Dynasty and House of Majda had always been strong. When Soz's brother Kelric had been young, a test pilot, one of the J-Force's glamour boys, he had married Naaj's older sister, Admiral Corey Majda, then commander of the battle cruiser Roca's Pride. Corey died a few years later, leaving her husband a widower at twenty-four.

Soz bit her lip as the memories flooded her. A decade after Corey's death Kelric had also become a casualty, dying alone in s.p.a.ce. ISC never found more than a few slagged bits of his ambushed Jag.

"Ai." Soz blinked at the moisture in her eyes. She had to stop this, lest she drown in the memories of what this war had taken from her family.

She focused on her work, trying to pull her thoughts in line. What she found disturbed her. It was true that ISC claimed millions of s.h.i.+ps, dwarfing the Allied forces and every military in past history. But they lagged far behind Eube. Estimates of ESComm forces ranged from two to six times that of ISC, depending on the accuracy of ISC intelligence and whether pirates were included. Numbers were deceptive, though, in that ISC had better tech. ESComm inventories dwarfed ISC, but ISC could outmaneuver, outcalculate, and outcommunicate ESComm. Eube lumbered; Skolia sailed.

The ISC focus on new technology made sense to Soz, given their greater capacity for invention compared to ESComm. But they needed more s.h.i.+ps and bases. She set up committees to reorganize resource allocations and encourage research by the civilian sector, s.h.i.+fting the funding burden for research away from the military without losing the benefits of new work. She did earmark ISC funds for several areas, however, including web extraction and quasis-tau missiles. She also set up the top-secret Klein bottle program, dubbing it the Radiance Project.

Soz soon came to the same conclusion as Kurj had before her: ISC was losing the shadow war. Extrapolations into the future, by both ISC strategists and Dehya, suggested that the longer ISC drew out the war, the greater the probability that unforeseen advances in technology would provide the edge they needed to prevail. Kurj's strategy had been to wear down ESComm with skirmishes and raids, eroding the monolith to gain time while ISC worked on research. The plan was Kurj at his best: solid, ordered, designed to last centuries, with relentless attention to detail.

Soz had a different plan.

She wanted new ideas, the joker in the deck, the random jump of unpredictable genius. The wild card. ISC needed it. She had looked at the cost in human terms of a drawn-out war and found it too high.

There was also Jaibriol.

No more shadow war. She intended to invade Eube.

Solid and black, the obsidian walls and ceiling of the Lava Chamber curved around to make a circular room. The solid topaz floor glittered with geometric patterns of pinpoint lights. Ruby had been used to make the furniture, including the table where the Eubian War Cabinet sat: General Taratus and Admiral Kaliga, the joint commanders of ESComm; Izar Vitrex and Kryx Quaelen, from the two ministries that were military in nature rather than civilian; High Judge Calope Muze, the conduit for communication among the branches of ESComm; and Empress Viquara, representative for the reclusive emperor.

General Taratus sat sprawled in his chair, a large man even for a Highton, with a blocky face and thick eyebrows. Compared to the ma.s.sive Taratus, Admiral Kaliga looked, at first glance, like a shadow, with his gaunt frame, lesser height, and narrow face. But within that shadow brooded an intellect as keen as a honed knife.

"We must go ahead with this," Taratus said. "ISC wears us down like hail on stone."

"a.s.sign telops to our s.h.i.+ps and you create chaos," Kaliga said. "All our officers are Aristos or have Aris...o...b..ood. Put them in contact with providers while they are on duty and you court disaster."

Taratus snorted. "Officers without self-control don't belong in an ESComm uniform."

"The question is academic," Calope said. The oldest member of the cabinet, over a century in age, she had a full head of glittering white hair. "Our only trained telops are those we've captured from Skolian s.h.i.+ps. That isn't enough."

"We can train others," Taratus said.

"Train providers?" Kaliga leaned back in his chair. "I hardly think so. Even if they could learn, which I doubt, they will panic during combat."

Viquara spoke. "Having telops on s.h.i.+ps is no guarantee they can hack the psiberweb. We also need Kyle-capable consoles."

"We're making good progress in the Kyle tech," Vitrex said. "We have more to work with now that we've found a way to stop captured Skolian vessels from self-destructing."

Kaliga nodded. "The quasis taus work well."

Quaelen spoke in a shadowed voice. "And already ISC finds ways to counteract them."

Silence answered him. They all knew his meaning. Had ISC been slower in learning to counter the quasis trick, Ur Qox would still be alive and Kurj Skolia would be an ESComm prisoner.

Viquara exhaled. "They are creative, these Skolians."

Dryly Kaliga said, "Creativity, in the wrong places, is a recipe for turmoil."

Taratus tapped his lightpen against his fingers. "I suggest a limited experiment. a.s.sign one squad to carry telops and see what happens. Perhaps the Hawkracer Squadron."

Viquara glanced around the table. When the other cabinet members indicated their agreement, she said, "I will take your proposal to the emperor."

Starlight silvered the Solitude Room. Eldrinson Valdoria, Key to the Web, sat in the chair staring at the stars. He heard the door slide open, with no warning from his bodyguards. Then Dehya appeared, like a wraith, her long hair drifting around her body. She sat on the edge of the console in front of him.

"Twice in only a few days," he said. "I'm flattered."

"By what?" Her voice was leaves drifting in wind.

"Your presence."

"I'm always here." She lifted her hands as if to indicate all of some undefined s.p.a.ce. "Everywhere."

"My son thinks you are becoming part of the web."

Her face softened, a trace of her former vibrancy revealing itself. Then it faded again. "It all points to you," she said.

He tried to absorb her mood. Although he had shared the Triad with her for decades, he knew her only as a presence, a swirl of sublime mental intricacies he never fully fathomed. "What points to me?"

"I still haven't the right initial conditions."

"What are initial conditions?"