Rubicon: Aurora Resonant Book Two (Aurora Rhapsody 8) Page 20

  He spread his arms dramatically as he backed toward the kitchen. “Thank you.”

  He was just showing off for their audience now, so she returned her attention to what she had experienced. “That was surprisingly exhausting—but it worked. Annie and Valkyrie, you are both brilliant beyond measure.”

  Devon flourished a hand in her direction. “And you have balls of steel.”

  “Glad you noticed.” She sighed; she really was wiped. “But there’s no time to revel in our collective awesomeness. We can move ourselves, but we aren’t ships. How do we move ships?”

  Kennedy thrust her arm into the air. “I know this one!”

  Alex laughed. “Do enlighten us.”

  “The AEGIS ships have Artificials wired into their hulls and matching Prevos onboard—everything frigate-class and larger.” Kennedy beamed. “Because I made that happen.”

  “Damn straight you did, honey.”

  Kennedy raised her beer in a salute to Noah.

  Alex sought the edge of the data center. “And if a ship more or less is the Artificial-half of a Prevo pair, and the human half decides to move through sidespace to another location, they can take the ship with them? Will it work?”

  Devon rubbed at his jaw. “Yes, I think. Valkyrie, want to try to move the ship?”

  ‘Calculating…it will require more power than we have available.’

  Whew.

  Agreed.

  Kennedy deflated. “Well, we have a problem, then. If I can extrapolate from the craziness of the last five minutes, this is due to the power required to open a hole in the world increasing at a minimum proportionally with the size of the hole. No surprise. Newton’s 2nd Law strikes again, and it’s consistent with the Rifter power requirements.

  “Anyway, the power generation capabilities of most of the AEGIS ships are spoken for as it is, and there’s not much give to play with. Of course, an individual Prevo/ship could draw power from the other Prevo/ships like Alex did here. But the other Prevo/ships need to move, too, I assume.

  “Something’s got to be situated at the end of the line providing a shit-ton of power.”

  Alex had shoved off the data center to weave around whoever was standing before she realized she’d done it. Driven by the transformative blossoming of ideas, of the act of creation, she wasn’t tired any longer. “There’s the Zero Drive.”

  “The what now?”

  “It’s an interstellar engine the anarchs use. It’s a damn marvel, and utterly gorgeous. You’re going to love it, Ken.” She paused. “Valkyrie, pull up one of the visuals you captured of Nisi’s city-ship.”

  ‘Excellent idea.’

  A second later an image appeared above the data center of a side-on view of Anarch Post Satus on the verdant planet, from their first visit. Beneath the multi-armed station, the golden ball of energy spun a web of brilliance.

  Kennedy vaulted off the kitchen table and pressed into the image until it surrounded her face. “You’re right. This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Where can I get one?”

  Alex and Caleb both started laughing. “That’s what I said—literally. This structure here? It’s a starship.”

  Kennedy took a step back. “And this spinning golden ball of beauty is its only engine?”

  “That’s the rumor.”

  “How does it work?”

  “I haven’t been able to learn the details yet, but it allegedly has zero net energy requirements. Hence the name.”

  Kennedy shook her head. “Impossible. If it’s an engine, it requires power and…end of the line? The power eventually has to come from somewhere.”

  Alex had seen so many mind-boggling contrivances in the last months, technologies so fantastical it was far easier to label them ‘magic’ than try to comprehend them. But physics still counted for something, and if history was any lesson, when a mechanism acted like it violated the laws of physics, it was simply because they didn’t understand physics well enough yet.

  She’d told Caleb once that the universe was perfectly ordered and structured, and that she understood the rules by which it was so. Those were the rules of a petri dish universe, true, but one which happened to be an exact recreation of this universe. Amaranthe didn’t get to violate its own rules.

  “Yes, it does have to come from somewhere….”

  The answer’s been hiding in the Dimension Rifter equations this whole time.

  “Alex?” Kennedy sighed. “Oh, great, she’s doing that thing she does again.”

  She fixated on the image of the lovely Zero Drive and its spinning orb of energy…and saw another spinning orb of energy, suspended above a meadow of velvet grass beside a glacier blue lake. The orb, less than five meters in diameter, had powered a cloaking/holographic projector/dimensional displacer the size of a planet.

  At the time and for most moments since, she’d been concerned above all with the practical, operating functionality it powered—yes, the how, but not the ‘how’ behind the how. Not the power itself.

  “What thing?”

  “That thing where she stares off into space for a few minutes then invents a new branch of physics.”

  When something seems out of place, wrong or merely odd…I can recognize the reality of it. The hidden object or event or force which brings space back into alignment with the rules of the universe.

  Energy could neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed from one form to another. So where was the hidden force—the hidden energy that became the power to drive objects across space or shift them into another space entirely?

  Caleb’s hand alighted on her waist, and his breath was warm at her ear. “Shine for me.”

  Siyane is perfect, sweetheart. My little star shining brightly.

  The answer’s been hiding in the Dimension Rifter equations this whole time.

  Those equations described prisms reflecting, inverting and reflecting again, sending atoms, matter, data, energy across nonspatial dimensions. Deflect the package out at one stage of the equations, and it returned to normal space at a defined point. Deflect it out at a different stage, and it fell until its energy grew so great it tore open a hole and exploded into normal space.

  What if you instead trapped material in an endless loop of reflection and inversion?

  She laughed. “Us silly, primitive humans. We’ve been like monkeys banging on a keyboard—do it long enough and random chance guarantees you’ll produce a meaningful word or two.”

  She squeezed Caleb’s hand before stepping toward the data center. “I figured out how to create a cloaking shield from the Kats’ technology, then fed the shield the power it needed to do its job. Later, I figured out how to turn the cloaking shield into a Dimensional Rifter using more of the same Kat technology, then fed it the considerably greater power it needed to do its job.

  “Now I’m trying to turn the Dimensional Rifter into a traversable wormhole generator using more of the same Kat technology, and we’re all standing here trying to figure out where to get the yet more power it needs to do its job.”

  A brief thought and Valkyrie brought to life an image of the latticed generator on Portal Prime to rotate beside the image of the Zero Drive. Its operating code scrolled on the far left. “The Kats have already figured out the answer, and I’ve been ignoring it this whole time…or maybe I wasn’t ready to see it until now.”

  The data she’d been able to piece together on the Zero Drive appeared to the right of its image. “I suspect the anarchs have figured it out, too, though less completely—or at least less efficiently, since Eren said the cost to build a Zero Drive increases exponentially with its size. The anarchs don’t traffic in dimensions the way the Kats do. No one does.”

  Caleb leaned against the data center and smiled at her. “Except you.”

  She huffed a laugh. “Maybe I’m starting to catch up.”

  Kennedy appeared on the other side of her to squint at the scrolling code for several seconds. She scowled. “Without an Artifi
cial in my head or at a minimum in my ear…nope. Can’t do it.”

  Alex nudged Kennedy affectionately. “Let me help.” A third image appeared above the table, a nearly transparent polyhedron with light bouncing around in it and spilling out the bottom. She reached up and grasped it in her hand, then flipped her hand over to let it hover above her palm.

  Kennedy’s forehead knotted in concentration. “This looks similar to the representation of the event horizon the Dimensional Rifter creates.”

  “That’s precisely what it is: a visual translation of how tangible matter can be redirected from one point in space to another point in space by traversing planar surfaces of nonspatial dimensions. But when I first created it, I based it more closely on the Portal Prime shield, and it looked like this.”

  One of the facets shifted, and the light spilling out the bottom began streaming out one side.

  “The Kats are nothing if not efficient. They never invent something new when something existing will serve their purpose.” She reached into the visual of the ball of energy from Portal Prime, deep into the center obscured by all the light, and extracted a nearly identical polyhedron.

  She held up both objects side by side, one above each palm. The one from Portal Prime was far more luminous; its facets were barely visible beneath all the light being generated inside it, with no apparent outlet.

  She lifted it higher. “This is power.”

  Next she directed her focus at the Rifter polyhedron and mentally inverted one of the facets, so that the energy ceased spilling out of it. In seconds it had grown to match the brightness of the other object.

  “And now, we have power.”

  “By harnessing…the sort of surface wave energy created by matter bouncing off dimensional planes over and over?”

  “Yes.” Her gaze swept across the cabin. “We don’t need to beg the anarchs for a Zero Drive. We don’t need to beg the Kats to allow us a peek at their precious secret technology. We can do this ourselves, and do it better.”

  31

  PALAEMON

  ANARCH POST EPSILON

  * * *

  THE CONFAB ON THE SIYANE finally wrapped up, but Mia’s day was barely getting started.

  Her first stop was to check in with Administrator Latro Udiri-jun to see if any issues had arisen in her absence. Naturally, they had. When Alex and Caleb had departed Epsilon to go help Akeso, it had effectively left Field Marshal Bastian as the primary and highest contact point in AEGIS. This had gone about as well as one would expect.

  She spent several hours shuttling between three anarch posts smoothing ruffled egos, finagling compromises out of both sides and getting everything sorted. It was late evening on Epsilon by the time she finally made it to her suite.

  When she opened the door, she found Malcolm inside, leaning against the wall and wearing a somewhat weary smile. “Welcome back.”

  She’d sent him a message earlier to let him know she’d returned safely, but he’d been on the Saratoga most of the day and they’d never had the chance to connect.

  Now she tossed her bag on the floor and sank eagerly into his arms; she’d already started missing the feel of his strong, comforting embrace. “Thanks. It’s been a day.”

  “For me, too.” He coaxed her over to the couch, then settled into one of the cushions and wrapped an arm around her. “I’m sorry I wasn’t around when you got back. I hoped I could make it up to you by being here now.”

  “And you have.” She reached up to stroke his cheek. She thought perhaps she’d imagined it in her own weariness, but he did look tired…or something else. “You look worried, or troubled, or maybe exhausted. Did something happen while I was gone? I didn’t see any official reports of note.”

  He shook his head. “No. We’re still in a holding pattern, trying to get our footing and find a way forward. It was just a challenging two days.”

  She started to tell him about the encouraging progress they’d made on solving the wormhole problem. But it wasn’t real yet, and her brain hadn’t fully wrapped itself around the details. It would keep. “But something is bothering you.”

  “I’m terrible at hiding anything from you, aren’t I?”

  “That’s a good thing.”

  “Probably.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I hate to have to tell you this. I don’t want to ruin your first night back, and I don’t want to waste our time together talking about it. But you should know, and I shouldn’t keep it from you.”

  She steeled herself for the gamut of possibilities. “Okay. What is it?”

  “Back during the OTS unrest, after the riots on Romane, Caleb used an IDCC-issued Reverb to cause Jude Winslow’s eVi to self-destruct while he was in IDCC custody. Winslow didn’t commit suicide—Caleb murdered him, and he did it using IDCC military property.”

  That hadn’t been in the gamut. Mia closed her eyes with a quiet sigh. She wondered how he’d found out, but it likely didn’t matter. Her voice was soft and resigned. “I know.”

  “What?”

  She opened her eyes to find him gazing at her in genuine confusion. He was such a good man. Too good for the reality of the world he lived in. “I said I know.”

  “How? You didn’t—were you involved?”

  “No!” She instinctively shrank away from him, but she needn’t have bothered, as he leapt up off the couch in an explosion of motion.

  “Then what?”

  “I didn’t find out until afterward. And he didn’t tell me.” In point of fact it had leaked incidentally from Morgan’s mind into hers, because they worked closely enough together on IDCC affairs that what Morgan knew, Mia eventually knew.

  “How long afterward? How long have you known? A while—since before he and Alex first came here?”

  She nodded silently.

  “So you knew about it when you called him honorable. You knew, and you still defended him.”

  She exhaled in frustration. “Are we really going to do this again?”

  “No, because this isn’t about Caleb right now. It’s about you. Do you honestly sanction…premeditated murder?”

  “It’s not as simple as that.”

  “Isn’t it? If you’d been told ahead of time, would you have tried to stop him?”

  She’d actually given some thought to the question, and he wasn’t going to like the answer. But she couldn’t manage to lie to him, as she’d starkly demonstrated. “No.”

  He stared at her aghast, all warmth gone from his eyes and expression. “How can that be true? I didn’t…do I know you at all?”

  She finally stood and left the couch. She wanted to run, but there was little space in the small suite to hide, and he was between her and the door. “The degenerate tried to have me killed—he sent a sniper to assassinate me. Of course I wanted him dead! The question I have is, why wouldn’t you?”

  His anger seemed to falter for a second. His glare softened, and he blinked several times. “Winslow should have been punished for that, and for all his crimes. Unequivocally. I would have cheered when he was locked away to rot. But the justice system should have decided his fate, not a single man. No one person has the right to take justice away from the system and into their own hands. That’s not justice at all—it’s cold-blooded murder.”

  Old memories swelled to the surface, memories of a past she’d tried so hard to bury. It was as if they’d been biding their time, waiting for the moment when they could best screw up her life, to pounce out of the shadows.

  “You’re a wee little one, aren’t you?”

  She straightened her spine, trying to make herself appear taller than her eleven years allowed. “I’m old enough. Ryu sent me. I’ve got what you asked for.”

  The man licked his lips. “Let me see it.”

  She nudged the coat draped over her arms to the side to reveal a Daemon power amplifier enclosed in a clear bag, then hurriedly pulled her coat back over it. “It’s four hundred. On a film, not a digital transfer.”

  “I a
greed to three hundred.”

  “No. Four hundred. That’s the price Ryu said he negotiated.”

  “Ryu’s lying. I’ll pay three hundred and not a single credit more.”

  Had Ryu lied? He wasn’t brave enough to try to scam a customer…unless that was why he’d sent her. But why stir up a crisis over a hundred credits? They moved goods costing a lot more than a hundred credits all the time.

  No, she resolved, this man was trying to scam her. He thought since she was young and small she was stupid. He was wrong.

  She worked to inject a note of authority into her voice. “Sir, either you give me four hundred credits or I walk out of the alley with the merchandise.”

  She saw it when he decided to kill her. His pupils contracted, the skin under his cheeks flushed and his jaw locked into this big, crooked line to jut way out from his neck.

  “How about instead, I keep the credits, take the merchandise and walk out of the alley with them both.”

  Her brother made her carry a blade for protection. She dropped the bag and the coat and fumbled in her pocket for the blade as the man lunged for her. His hands—they were no palm and all fingers—landed on her neck and began to squeeze.

  So she flicked the blade on and did the only thing she could think to do: she thrust it forward.

  The blade was tiny, barely eight centimeters long, but he was skinny. It felt squishy sliding inside him. His fingers spasmed around her neck, briefly cutting off all the oxygen, then went limp. Sticky warmth seeped out of his belly onto her hand.

  She jerked the blade out and stumbled backward. He stumbled in the opposite direction to sag against the alley wall, hands fumbling for the wound.

  She ran.

  She was five blocks away before she realized she was still holding the blood-soaked blade out in front of her. The darkness had saved her from being seen, but she couldn’t count on its protection, so she hid in another alley and hyperventilated until she nearly passed out.

  Then she ran once again. Farther, until there were stars behind her.

  She tried to force the memories away, to deflect, to strike out instead. If Malcolm wanted to fight, she’d oblige him. “You are such a hypocrite.”