Loralynn Kennakris 1: The Alecto Initiative (8 page)

“Tap up my system.” Walsh entered the link commands. Huron
entered his passcode. “Grab that,” he said, pointing. “Merge the plots.”

“What is this?” Walsh muttered testily as the two holo plots
overlaid perfectly. “A fucking test?”

“Sort of,” Huron answered, “but not of you. Son of a bitch.”
He straightened and Walsh shot him a dirty look sideways. “I’ve got a girl back
there who plots transits in her head.”

“No fuckin’ way!”

“There it is, man.” Huron pointed at the display. “Living
color. I watched her do it.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“My words exactly. And she says she knows all the slaver
routes in this sector.”

“Oh bullshit! You
are
pulling my leg.”

“Not a nanometer,” Huron replied coolly. “She’s plotting
them up now. She got one already.”

Walsh twisted around in his chair. “d’Harra?
She
gave
you that?”

Huron smiled with just the edges of his teeth showing. “You
get a gold star, Fitz. What’s the Old Man doing about it anyway?”

“He shot it over to PrenTalien. They’re whistling up
Shariati’s group out of Epona. Should be able to give them bastards a big
fucking surprise.”

A quiet, self-satisfied smile warmed Huron’s features.
“That’s nice.”

LSS Arizona
 transiting the Cepheid-Sagittarian Belt

By the time Huron got back to his cabin, Kris was
nearly done with the map. She was agonizing over the last few details as he
came in. “Almost,” she said over her shoulder, then muttered
Shit!
under
her breath. He came and stood quietly behind her. She typed and muttered,
poking at the holo volume with the stylus. After about five minutes, she threw
her hands in the air. “Fuck it. I can’t remember anymore.”

Huron looked over her shoulder while she rubbed her eyes. What
he saw left him impressed. He glanced down at her, hesitated, then asked,
“Would you mind telling me how you learned this? Hyper-navigation is a two-year
graduate program. Not to mention astrocartography. It couldn’t have been easy.”

Kris shot him a nakedly angry look. “It wasn’t.”

*     *     *

Trench had had an old
navigation text and Kris had read it. That made Trench laugh; no way was she
gonna understand that shit. She told him it had cool pictures. He laughed some
more.

Kris found the text when she was fourteen and for a long
time he was right. Her schooling had ended at age eleven—the text assumed
college-level math and physics. But there were a lot of pictures and animated
tutorials, and for all her lack of formal education, she managed to grasp a few
basic concepts. She took down the text and looked at it whenever she didn’t
have work to do. That wasn’t often, but she wasn’t above trading sexual favors
to other deck slaves to have her chores done. That gave her more time alone
with the text. When she wheedled Trench into letting her log onto his system,
things got better. There was a comprehensive encyclopedia and several tutorial
packages in the library; no doubt installed by the original owners and never
purged. Kris worked herself through calculus and analytic geometry, and all the
physics she could get out of the encyclopedia. Gradually, the navigation text
began to make sense.

She learned that three things were essential to hyperlight
travel: a wormhole, a statis field and a manifold. A wormhole was simply the
path taken by a mass that collapsed into a black hole when its trajectory was
plotted in
N
-space; the N-dimensional overspace in which the familiar
four—real space-time or RST—resided. The encyclopedia said that the exact
value of
N
remained unresolved. Competing theories argued for either
eleven or thirteen and the encyclopedia implied that there was blood on the
walls whenever cosmologists gathered to try to resolve it.

Wormholes resulting from collapsing star cores were common in
nature but not at all useful. Though once thought of as a likely means of
hyperlight travel, they presented insurmountable difficulties from the
practical standpoint. The encyclopedia said this was actually realized long
before the popular notion died out, and practical hyperlight travel was
considered impossible until the hyper-Lorenz transformations of Benjamin’s
Second Modification of the Grand Unified Theory were discovered. Those provided
the theoretical basis for gravitic technology: the artificial creation and
manipulation of gravity and antigravity fields. The first practical gravitic
technology was the bipolar gravity lens which collected gravity waves
passively, and focused them to create enough virtual mass to make a wormhole.
Much later, antimatter drives were invented that could create enough virtual
mass on their own to make a useable wormhole.

But making a wormhole was one thing; surviving a trip
through one was something else entirely. Objects falling into a wormhole
experience extreme tidal forces that at the event horizon destroy ordinary
matter. What emerges is a burst of energy and uncorrelated particles that
resemble decay products. But from the human perspective, that wasn't the only
problem. Although wormholes do traverse
N
-space’s other dimensions,
those dimensions are conjugate spatial, meaning that topology is conserved.
This causes dimensional scaling effects and since a particle transits a wormhole
at the relativistic velocity at which it entered, the trip’s duration from the
traveler’s point of view was exactly the same as it would be in RST. Only from
the point of view of an external observer did the wormhole traveler exceed the
speed of light.

The solution of both problems was the stasis field, a branch
of gravitic technology. A stasis field created what was, in effect, an event
horizon around the ship, encapsulating a “time bubble” that allowed the ship to
subjectively experience its RST timespace. This not only canceled the
dimensional scaling effects, but also protected against the wormhole’s extreme
tidal forces. By preserving the RST timespace, the stasis field reduced the
period of extreme gravity shear to near the Planck time, enabling the travelers
to survive it. (An alternate explanation held that stasis fields scaled the
electroweak force so that ordinary matter acquired the tensile strength needed
to resist the shear forces. Although supportable by an adaptation of the color
confinement principle of quantum chromo-dynamics, the encyclopedia said this
theory was not widely accepted.)

The final piece of the puzzle was the cosmic manifold: a
2-dimensional membrane vibrating in the N-dimensional overspace. Cosmic
manifolds grew out of M-theory, an ancient fore-runner of the GUT that was
wrong but led to this useful insight. The formal description was a mess but the
key was that wormhole trajectories followed cosmic manifolds in predictable
ways. It was by mapping manifolds that wormhole travel became more than a blind
jump into the abyss.

Taken together, it all worked. A ship in a statis field
could safely traverse a wormhole along a manifold, the pseudo-velocity being
related to the ratio of the virtual mass of the drive to the ship’s rest mass;
a higher ratio made the wormhole go deeper—some said
straighter
—and
took less time.

Of course, there were limitations. A detailed understanding
of them required tensor calculus, which Kris understood only vaguely, and
hypergonic fractal geometry, which she didn’t understand at all. But she
grasped the practical aspects well enough. One was that not all
pseudo-velocities in a wormhole were permitted; they were constrained by the
allowed vibrational modes of the manifold it was on. These modes, called manifold
phase layers—usually just
phase layers
—were quantized, just as the electron
states of an atom were quantized and for the same reason, so the only way to go
“faster” was to have a drive “big” enough to jump to the next deeper phase
layer.

Another limitation was that getting in and out of a wormhole
was not a simple matter. The act of accessing or exiting a wormhole was called translation
(usually ‘drop translation’ in, and ‘lift translation’ out), and the virtual
mass units required was known as the translation potential. A ship could only
create or leave a wormhole if it’s mass rating was greater than the translation
potential.

To drop translate, it was beneficial to use the gravity well
of a star or other massive body to lower the translation potential, but there
was a problem: the efficacy of a stasis field was not unlimited—it depended on
the ship’s mass rating. Above a certain limit, gravity shear would defeat the
stasis field, destroying the ship. So while using a gravity well helped a ship
translate, the gravity gradient of the well also increased gravity shear and a
ship that translated too close to a massive body, where the gradient was too
steep, risked destruction.

Once in the wormhole, translating out was, in principle,
just a matter of reversing the gravitic polarity. But a ship had to be careful
not to fall deeper into the destination well than its gravitic systems could
handle. At some point, the attraction of the ship’s virtual mass and the mass
of the primary at the wormhole’s terminus would overcome the gravitic system’s
antigravity potential and the doomed ship then raced to impact.

Finally, no adjustments to course or velocity could be made
from inside a wormhole. If you’d screwed up, there was no way to tell before
the end—probably
the end
in all senses of the word.

 All these factors limited where a ship could translate. The
boundary between the allowed and denied regions was called Fraser’s Limit
(named for the woman who derived it, not the ship captain who proved it by
ignoring it), and it depended on the gravity gradient, the local mass
distribution represented as sets of gravity isoclines known as ‘Teller rings,’ and
the ship’s virtual mass rating.

Calculating Fraser’s Limit was the critical part of
hyperlight travel. It was handled by a branch of mathematics called jump
convolution and it was here that Kris nearly gave up. Jump convolution was
based on something called C-star algebra, a weird topological algebra with
strange non-abelian operators that defied normal description.

Having successfully dodged tensor calculus and hypergonic
fractal geometry, C-star algebra finally reduced Kris to tears. Written out, it
was pure gibberish. For months, she tried futilely to understand it but when
she’d finally resolved to give it up, she figured out the navigation text’s
plotting module. C-star algebra suddenly made sense. Seen holographically, the
operators became real: changing shape, touching and melding, stretching and
splitting. The discovery made her happy for weeks—she could finally do the
problems in the navigation text. Trench never did figure out why she was so
cheerful.

One of the first advanced problems was the calculation of an
optimum transit. For any given ship mass, drive rating (in virtual mass units),
and destination, there was an optimum phase layer that gave the shortest time
for the least energy. When she finally mastered it, Kris was amazed, then
delighted, then piqued to discover that for any optimum transit, most of the
ugly stuff went to zero, and the answer was available from a few well-behaved
C-star transforms.

Of course, an optimum transit could never be realized—something
called phase noise bled off energy and prevented it—but the optimum transit
was almost always a good approximation. And if you could visualize the
operators properly, you could do it in your head.

*     *     *

“Anyway,” Kris finished, “that’s as far as I got.” She
waved her stylus at the holo volume. “I think this here is fucked up.” She
indicated a family of transits. “The numbers keep coming up weird—I must’ve
got a couple of routes crossed or somethin’.” Her voice slurred, sliding into a
lank drawl as she talked. It was an inflection he hadn’t heard from her before.

“You alright?”

“Fragged out some.” The slaver slang jarred his ears. “It’s
chill. I’ll stretch.” She shook some thick waves of hair out of her face,
pushed them ineffectually back toward the nape of her neck. “I think the nodes
are jake, though.”

“Well, that’s the most important part,” he said helpfully.

“Can’t remember too good no more,” she muttered, ignoring
him. “Had all this shit in Trench’s box. I suppose you guys blew that all to
hell.”

“ ‘Fraid so.”

“Wish you hadn’t done that.”

“Couldn’t be helped.”

“Yeah.” She leaned her head back, rubbed at her eyes as if
trying to scrub an image from them. “Say, since I did all this for you, can I
ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“How’d you guys punch us outta the wormhole? That’s supposed
to be impossible.”

Huron leaned back and crossed his arms. “Supposed to be,” he
agreed.

“Secret shit, huh?”

“Some of it. Why do you want to know?”

She gave her head a little toss. “Bugs me is all.” She
gestured at the screen. “Look, this is all secret shit, too. Wanna trade?
Secret for secret? I went first.”

Huron hid a smile behind his hand. “Fine. I’ll play. We
dropped a quantum black hole on you.”

Kris turned and squinted at him. “You what?”

Huron let the smile out. “You can bundle a quantum black
hole—a tiny one, say five or six ship masses—and sort of leave it in
someone’s way. In phase space, a quantum black hole is as close to a delta
function as you can get.” A looked of puzzlement clouded her face. “You know,
an impulse—a pure spike. Infinite amplitude and zero width. Anyway, it
interdicts all the possible phases of the manifold it’s on. Can’t form a
wormhole then.”

Frowning, Kris shook her head. “Nah. That’s fine for bunging
the path ahead of time. But if somebody’s already phasing on that manifold, you
can’t do it. Exclusion principle says so.”

“Well, yes and no,” Huron said coyly. She gave him a dirty
look and he went on. “You can’t place it
on
the manifold, but you can
drop it real close—zero width, remember? And under certain circumstances,
which I can’t discuss, the QBH can be made to go inflationary. That creates a
local
N
-space discontinuity and any wormhole nearby gets pinched off.
It’s not that the two ever coexist—it’s that you violate the boundary
conditions necessary to have a wormhole in the first place.”