Skolian Empire: The Radiant Seas Part 8

Year Two.

358 ASC on the Imperial Calendar.

381 EG on the Eubian Calendar.

A.D. 2261 on the Gregorian Calendar.

Ie 5264 on the Ruby Calendar.

About 6277 on the Iotic Calendar.

5.

Of course we measure our year according to the orbital period of the planet Raylicon. That world is, after all, the ancestral home to all our peoples. But what of our surprise in learning our year equals that of Earth? A moment's reflection reveals we should have been less startled. The race that moved our ancestors to Raylicon wanted us to survive; otherwise why choose a planet that supported human life? That they found or altered its...o...b..t to ensure its year matched the one programmed into our DNA is a further indication of their intent.

Our honored Imperial Calendar dates from the magnificent founding of the Skolian Imperialate, Year One being denoted 1 ASC, or 1 Ascendant, to honor Skolia's ascendance. Earth still uses her quaint Gregorian Calendar, where A.D. 1904 corresponds to our Year One. Rather predictably, the uninspired Eubian Calendar dates from the birth of Eube, so 1 EG on the Eubian Calendar is 33 DSC on the Imperial Calendar, or thirty-three years prior to the founding of Skolia.

For those who prefer antediluvian measures of time, the Ruby Calendar began with the rise of the Ruby Empire. Our Year One corresponds to Ie 5477 on the Ruby Calendar, where Ie is believed to stand either for "Imperial Era" or "Inner Era." The Iotic Calendar derives from the advent of human life on Raylicon, a date we know with only limited accuracy.

-From The Lost Empire, by Tajjil Bloodstone The War Room existed in sharp, gleaming functionality on the s.p.a.ce habitat known as the Orbiter. The War Room amphitheater was filled with controls, web consoles, and giant robot arms that carried telops. High above the amphitheater, a power chair hung suspended under a holodome that showed views of s.p.a.ce, so that anyone looking up saw the chair silhouetted against a glistening panorama of holographic stars. A hood packed with apparatus formed a cavern for the head of whoever sat in the chair, and its arms were rectangular blocks, fifty centimeters wide, glinting with control lights. Thousands of channels fed the chair's web-and the brain of the man who sat in it.

Kurj became part of his throne. Its exoskeleton inserted p.r.o.ngs into his ankles, wrists, lower spine, and neck. A spiderweb of conduits on his head extended microscopic threads into his scalp. Today he used a virtual reality mode, drifting in s.p.a.ce with the battle cruiser Roca's Pride and its attendant flotilla, hundreds of s.h.i.+ps ranging from single-pilot Jag starfighters to Starslammer destroyers. The s.h.i.+ps were spread out through a large volume, millions of cubic kilometers.

A Wasp corvette kept pace with him. He had made his size in the simulation equivalent to his real size, which meant the Wasp dwarfed him. Yet it was one of the flotilla's smaller craft. Its crew of four rode in its two forward sections, the head and thorax. A stalk separated those sections from a detachable abdomen.

Antimatter readout, Kurj thought. The VR simulation produced a display of the abdomen's interior and superimposed it on the Wasp. Luminous red curves highlighted the invisible magnetic fields. They surrounded a Klein containment bottle, essentially a three-dimensional Mbius strip. In normal s.p.a.ce, the outer surface of a Klein bottle narrowed into a tube that curved up, looped over the bottle, and joined back into its own body, curving smoothly to form the interior, until it opened out into the mouth, so the inside of the bottle became its outside.

The Klein bottles used on stars.h.i.+ps had a quirk: when the bottle looped over itself, it also looped out of normal s.p.a.ce, its "interior" taking on both real and imaginary parts. The bottle spread the particles it contained through that s.p.a.ce by adding imaginary parts to their ma.s.s and charge. Varying the imaginary parts allowed the bottle to hold far more antimatter than it could have in real s.p.a.ce. Klein containment bottles cradled antimatter within a twist of reality.

Most Klein bottles served as fuel tanks. During flight they also collected antimatter from the cosmic ray flux in complex s.p.a.ce. A Wasp, however, used its abdomen bottle for less serene purposes. One toggle from the weapons node and the Klein bottle in the abdomen collapsed, dumping a hundred kilometers of antimatter plasma into real s.p.a.ce, creating an imbalance the plasma immediately rectified-with explosive force.

Bottle secure, Kurj's node A thought. It highlighted the bottle in a spectrum of color, red at the mouth, shading into orange as it narrowed. Then the bottle vanished, looping out of normal s.p.a.ce. It reappeared where it intersected itself, now a vibrant purple color that shaded into red as it curved outward to form its mouth.

Show image in complex s.p.a.ce, Kurj thought. The rest of the bottle appeared, yellow, green, and blue on the loop over its body. A green haze surrounded it, indicating all systems were operational.

Kurj turned his attention outward. The flotilla was in the Hammerjack star system, where sixteen planets circled a yellow-white sun. They drifted beyond the orbit of the outermost planet, so far out that Hammerjack was no more than a bright star.

Give me a readout of local s.p.a.ce, Kurj thought.

The Wasp vanished and a new display formed, superimposed over s.p.a.ce, revealing the neighborhood's secrets. The flotilla had taken up position in a disk of debris that ringed the star system, but the chunks of rock were few and far between compared to the s.h.i.+ps. Local s.p.a.ce claimed about one atom per cubic centimeter, a desolation emptier than any laboratory vacuum. Electromagnetic fields filled the "void" with a turbulent, bellicose plasma, highlighted on the display in reds and blues so intense they vibrated.

Kurj focused on the distant battle cruiser, a gleaming bar against the stars. Roca's Pride, acknowledge.

Attending, the battle cruiser rumbled.

Location of target? Kurj asked. A spark appeared, a distant asteroid highlighted in white.

The cruiser growled in Kurj's mind. Demonstration primed.

Proceed.

The Wasp arrowed toward the spark, and Kurj went with it, streaming through the vibrant fields of s.p.a.ce. The asteroid grew from a speck to a rocky body about 260 kilometers in diameter. The Wasp jettisoned its abdomen and veered away, but Kurj flew on with the abdomen, bearing down on the asteroid.

Show bottle, Kurj thought. The display of the Wasp's abdomen reappeared, its Klein bottle glowing like a ghost. Only seconds from the asteroid now, the abdomen showed no sign of slowing.

Drill extend. That came from the fleeing Wasp.

A ma.s.sive drill extended from the abdomen. Then the entire abdomen crashed into the asteroid, pulverizing its surface. The drill blasted its way through rock, embedding the abdomen deep within the small planetoid. The VR simulation turned the rocky body into a skeleton representation, showing the Klein bottle glowing within it.

Klein field collapse, the Wasp thought.

The bottle suddenly twisted into real s.p.a.ce-along with all its stored antimatter. Unable to confine so much plasma in so small a volume, the abdomen detonated the asteroid, the explosion driven by a plasma that annihilated matter. In majestic silence the asteroid flew apart, most of it annihilated, the remaining debris hurtling in all directions as the void raged with fountains of gamma photons, particle showers, and radiant floods of energy.

Data poured in from the flotilla s.h.i.+ps: photon wavelengths, nuclei distributions, energy profiles, plasma pressure, particle densities, time scales, radiation damage, impact trajectories, and so on, every datum examined, sorted, and stored.

Test successful, Roca's Pride rumbled.

Kurj sent his thought out to the flotilla. Good work.

A sense of satisfaction emanated from the s.h.i.+ps.

Proceed with tests, Kurj thought. Switching out.

Out, the s.h.i.+ps echoed.

As Kurj withdrew his mind from the flotilla psiberweb, s.p.a.ce became translucent. He could see the web now, a mesh stretching to infinity. The presence of his mind curved it into a narrow circular hill, and his peripheral thoughts ringed the peak in concentric ridges that spread out in bigger and bigger circles, like the ripples made by dropping a rock into water, or the intensity plot of the diffraction pattern for a circular aperture.

War Room, Kurj thought.

The hill sank into the mesh. His mind re-formed in a new region with many other peaks, indicating the many telops working in this part of the web at tasks similar to his.

gate, he thought.

Accessed, node A thought, and the gate transformed his mind back into s.p.a.cetime.

Kurj became aware of voices and machines humming below and holographic starlight from the dome above. He looked out at the War Room, hundreds of light-years from the flotilla war games. Still sensitized from the web, he could actually trace lines of thought in the amphitheater. Subtler tendrils were hard to pick out, but the st.u.r.dier cables glowed. They all worked together like a well-ordered machine, tuned by his mind to mathematical precision.

A disruptive cord caught his attention, a sense of ripe innocence and vitality. He focused on it and a holoscreen on his chair activated, showing him the body that went with the mind.

A fine body indeed.

She was a page, one among the group of men and women who served the telops, or telepathic operators, in the War Room. Pages brought water or food, made pleasant conversation, and in general nurtured the telops. Kurj had found it improved performance. When telops surfaced from the web, disoriented and fatigued, they preferred being tended by pleasant humans instead of machines.

This girl wore a green jumpsuit with a sparkling trim on the collar. Curly brown hair floated around her shoulders. Although she wasn't a spectacular beauty, she had a pretty face with a sweet quality.

File on subject, Kurj thought.

Accessing optics, node E answered.

Glyphs scrolled alongside the girl's image. She came from the planet t.i.trate II, in the Imperial Chemical Sector. The orphanage in a shack town there had brought this girl into an immigration center at one of the starports. Unable to support all their children, they were sending the older ones offworld, a questionable practice given that most s.h.i.+ps took them as indentured crew. To hide that violation of child labor laws, dock officials called them "wards of the s.h.i.+p," in essence claiming the s.p.a.cecraft were their guardians.

An ISC major, one G. S. R. Bozner, had been on business at the immigration center that day. Taken by the girl's sweet nature, he arranged for her employment as a page on the Orbiter. She worked hard and did her job well. In fact, an a.n.a.lysis suggested several of the telops were falling in love with her.

Kurj frowned. Pages should be pleasant, yes, but this girl went beyond agreeable. She distracted. It made no difference that she had no idea she created disorder. The mere fact of her presence disrupted the smooth operation of his War Room.

Seeker, he thought.

Attending.

Get me security team p.

Link established. Jagernaut Primary Hirsh waiting.

Give him access.

The Jagernaut who headed Kurj's private security force thought, Attending, sir. Although Hirsh had a strong mind, next to Kurj's rumbling power his thought seemed muted.

Hirsh, download the profile in my holomap file.

Downloaded, Hirsh answered.

Have the page described in that profile taken to my quarters, procedure 803.

Yes, sir.

Switching out, Kurj thought. Then he turned his attention to other matters. He still a great deal of work to do.

Cloaks of snow blanketed the long slope from the lake to the house. Inside, Soz and Jaibriol sat huddled within a blanket on their bed. They had built their one-room home three kilometers from the site where, a year ago, they found the carnivorous roots. They named the roots a Prism people trap, in honor of the Venus flytrap, an Earth plant GeoComp claimed resembled it.

A light burned in the corner of the room. To save the charge of their sole remaining motion-sensor lamp, they were using a handmade lamp fueled with oil from the bushes they called triops, for their resemblance to a triceratops.

Jaibriol s.h.i.+fted his arms around Soz's bulk. "How much colder do you think it will get?"

"Today? Or in general?"

"Either. Neither." He exhaled. "I just need to talk. This waiting grinds me down."

She readjusted her weight. "Last time I checked GeoComp's estimate of the year, it was the same. About seven and a half Earth years, and we're at the start of winter." It wasn't a true winter, though, given the way their distance from Blue varied as they orbited Red. "Maybe it will warm up again when we come back into the sunlight." She hoped so. The snow had been falling for ten hours, and seventy hours more remained until dawn.

Soz s.h.i.+fted her weight again, trying to get comfortable. "I need a stardock loading crane to move."

Jaibriol laid his hand on the swell of her abdomen. "Can you feel him kick?"

"Like a smash-ball league."

"Is that normal?"

"I don't know. I've never had a baby before."

A memory came to her, one she had long kept hidden, of her miscarriage seventeen years ago, when she lost the only other child she had ever conceived. She and Jato, her husband, had mourned deeply. But she had been unable to speak of it, leaving him to face his grief in silence. Her inability to share her feelings had been one reason he later divorced her. She blamed herself. Yet with Jaibriol it didn't matter. He understood her without words, which for some reason let her open up to him as she had never done with anyone else.

She felt Jaibriol's mind brush hers and then reach out to their son. The baby's brain hadn't formed enough for conscious thought, but at a more primitive level the three of them already shared a bond.

Jaibriol was watching her. "Are you all right?"

She nodded, then groaned with another contraction. "Except for this."

"Shouldn't you do that breathing MedComp taught us?"

"I can't concentrate on it."

"Maybe you could program your node to make you do it."

It was worth a try. Attend, she thought.

Attending, her node answered.

Can you make my body do the breathing business?

I can exert a degree of control over your muscles. However, your natural responses are better suited to delivery.

Jaibriol's forehead creased as he tried to follow the silent conversation. "It won't do it?"

"It wants me to do the work myself. Says I'm better at having babies than it is."

He smiled. "I guess so."

Soz grunted as another contraction hit. It went on forever, though her node claimed it took less than two minutes.

When she relaxed, Jaibriol said, "These are closer together than before."

Time interval between contractions is about two minutes, her node offered.

"I can't tell-what the-?" Soz frowned as a rush of water poured down her thighs and soaked into the bed.

"No!" Jaibriol tightened his arms around her. "What is it? What's wrong?"

Jaibriol needs to calm down, her node thought.

Don't you have anything more helpful that? Soz asked. Like what the h.e.l.l just happened? Am I having a problem?