[Another faction had explored something similar. The Mother Nest recovered key technologies relating to their work. From those beginnings—and the theoretical clues offered by the Exordium messages—we were able to progress to a functioning prototype.]
Remontoire recalled that Skade had once been involved in a high-security mission into Chasm City, an operation that had resulted in the deaths of many other operatives. The operation had clearly been sanctioned at Inner Sanctum level; even as a Closed Council member he knew little other than that it had happened.
You helped recover those technologies, Skade? I understand you were lucky to get out alive.
[The losses were extreme. We were fortunate that the mission was not a complete failure.]
And the prototype?
[For years we worked to make it into something useful. Microscopic control of inertia—no matter how conceptually profound—was never of any real value. But lately we’ve had one success after another. Now we can suppress inertia on classical scales, enough to make a difference to the performance of a ship.]
He looked at Felka, then back to Skade. Ambitious, I’ll give you that.
[Lack of ambition is for baseline humans.]
This other faction . . . the one you recovered the items from—why didn’t they make the same breakthrough? He had the impression that Skade was framing her thoughts with extreme care.
[All previous attempts to understand inertia were doomed to failure because they approached the problem from the wrong standpoint. Inertia isn’t a property of matter as such, but a property of the quantum vacuum in which matter is embedded. Matter itself has no intrinsic inertia.]
The vacuum imposes inertia?
[It isn’t really a vacuum, not at the quantum level. It’s a seething foam of rich interactions: a broiling sea of fluctuations, with particles and messenger-particles in constant existential flux, like glints of sunlight on ocean waves. It’s the choppiness of that sea which creates inertial mass, not matter itself. The trick is to find a way to modify the properties of the quantum vacuum—to reduce or increase the energy density of the electromagnetic zero-point flux. To calm the sea, if only in a locally defined volume.]
Remontoire sat down. I’ll stop here, if you don’t mind.
“I don’t feel well either,” Felka said, squatting down next to him. “I feel sick and light-headed.”
The servitor turned around stiffly, animated like a haunted suit of armour. [You’re experiencing the physiological effects of the field. Our inertial mass has dropped to about half its normal value. Your inner ear will be confused by the drop in inertia of the fluid in your semi-circular canal. Your heart will beat faster: it evolved to pump a volume of blood with an inertial mass of five per cent of your body; now it has only half that amount to overcome, and its own cardiac muscle reacts more swiftly to the electrical impulses from your nerves. If we were to go much deeper, your heart would start fibrillating. You would die without mechanical intervention.]
Remontoire grinned at the armoured servitor. Fine for you, then.
[It wouldn’t be comfortable for me, either, I assure you.]
So what does the machine do? Does all the matter within the bubble have zero inertia?
[No, not in the present operating mode. The radial effectiveness of the damping depends on the mode in which we’re running the device. At the moment we’re in an inverse square field, which means that the inertial damping becomes four times more efficient every time we halve our distance to the machine; it becomes near infinite in the immediate proximity of the machine, but the inertial mass never drops to absolute zero. Not in this mode.]
But there are other modes?
[Yes: other states, we call them, but they’re all very much less stable than the present one.] She paused, eyeing Remontoire. [You look ill. Shall we return upship?]
I’ll be fine for now. Tell me more about your magic box.
Skade smiled, as stiffly as usual, but with what looked to Remontoire like pride. [Our first breakthrough was in the opposite direction—creating a region of enhanced quantum vacuum fluctuation, thereby increasing the energy-momentum flux. We call that state one. The effect was a zone of hyper-inertia: a bubble in which all motion ceased. It was unstable, and we never managed to magnify the field to macroscopic scales, but there were fruitful avenues for future research. If we could freeze motion by ramping inertia up by many orders of magnitude we’d have a stasis field, or perhaps an impenetrable defensive barrier. But cooling—state two—turned out to be technically simpler. The pieces almost fell into place.]
I’ll bet they did.
“Is there a third state?” Felka asked. [State three is a singularity in our calculations that we don’t expect to be physically realisable. All inertial mass vanishes. All matter in a state-three bubble would become photonic: pure light. We don’t expect that to happen; at the very least it would imply a massive local violation of the law of conservation of quantum spin.]
“And beyond that—on the other side of the singularity? Is there a state four?”
[Now we’re getting ahead of ourselves, I think. We’ve explored the properties of the device in a well-understood parameter space, but there’s no point in indulging in wild speculation.]
How much testing, exactly?
[Nightshade was chosen to be the prototype: the first ship to be equipped with inertia-suppression machinery. I ran some tests during the earlier flight, dropping the inertia by a measurable amount—enough to alter our fuel consumption and verify the effectiveness of the field, but not enough to draw attention.]
And now?
[The field is much stronger. The ship’s effective mass is now only twenty per cent of what it was when we left the Mother Nest—there’s a relatively small part of the ship projecting ahead of the field, but we can do better than that simply by increasing the field strength.] Skade clapped her hands together with a creak of armour. [Think of it, Remontoire—we could squeeze our mass down to one per cent, or less—accelerate at a hundred gees. If our bodies were inside the bubble of suppressed inertia we’d be able to withstand it, too. We’d reach near-light cruise speed in a couple of days. Subjective travel between the closest stars in under a week of shiptime. There’d be no need for us to be frozen. Can you imagine the possibilities? The galaxy would suddenly be a much smaller place.]
But that’s not why you developed it. Remontoire climbed to his feet. Still light-headed, he steadied himself against the wall. It was the closest he had come to intoxication in a great while. This excursion had been interesting enough, but he was now more than ready to return upship, where the blood in his body would behave as nature had intended.
[I’m not sure I understand, Remontoire.]
It was for when the wolves arrive—the same reason you’ve built that evacuation fleet.
[Sorry?]
Even if we can’t fight them, you’ve at least given us a means of running away very, very quickly.
Something was following him. Details were available on request.
Clavain yawned and scratched at the now generous growth of beard that he sported. He caught a glimpse of himself in the cabin window and registered mild alarm at what he saw. He looked wild-eyed and maniacal, as if he had just stumbled from the depths of a cave. He ordered the corvette to stop accelerating for a few minutes, then gathered some water into his hands from the faucet, cupping the amoeba-like droplets between his palms, and then endeavoured to splash them over his face and hair, slicking and taming hair and beard. He glanced at his reflection again. The result was not a great improvement, but at least he no longer looked feral.
Clavain unharnessed himself and set about preparing coffee and something to eat. It was his experience that crises in space fell into two categories: those that killed you immediately, usually without much warning, and those that gave you plenty of time to ruminate on the problem, even if no solution was very likely. This, on the basis of the evidence, looked like the kind which could be contemplated after first sating his appetite.
He filled the cabin with music: one of Quirrenbach’s unfinished symphonies. He sipped the coffee, leafing through the corvette’s status log entries while he did so. He was pleased but not surprised to see that the ship had operated flawlessly ever since his departure from Skade’s comet. There was still adequate fuel to carry him all the way to circum-Yellowstone space, including the appropriate orbital insertion procedures once he arrived. The corvette was not the problem.
Transmissions had been received from the Mother Nest as soon as his departure had become evident. They had been tight-beamed on to him, maximally encrypted. The corvette had unpacked the messages and stored them in time-sequence.
Clavain bit into a slice of toast. “Play ’em. Oldest first. Then erase immediately.”
He could have guessed what the first few messages would be like: frantic requests from the Mother Nest for him to turn around and come home. The first few gave him the benefit of the doubt, assuming—or pretending to assume—that he had some excellent justification for what looked like a defection attempt. But they had been half-hearted. Then the messages gave up on that tack and simply started threatening him.
Missiles had been launched from the Mother Nest. He had turned off his course and lost them. He had assumed that would be the end of it. A corvette was fast. There was nothing else that could catch him, unless he turned to interstellar space.
But the next set of messages did not emanate from the Mother Nest at all. They came from a tiny but measurable angle away from its position, a few arc-seconds, and they were steadily blue-shifted, as if originating from a moving source.
He calculated the rate of acceleration: one point five gees. He ran the numbers through his tactical simulator. It was as he’d expected: no ship with that rate of acceleration could catch him in local space. For a few minutes he allowed himself to feel relief while still pondering the point of the pursuer. Was it merely a psychological gesture? It seemed unlikely. Conjoiners were not greatly enamoured of gestures.
“Open the messages,” he said.
The format was audio-visual. Skade’s head popped into the cabin, surrounded by an oval of blurred background. The communication was verbal; she knew that he would never allow her to insert anything into his head again.
“Hello, Clavain,” she said. “Please listen and pay attention. As you may have gathered, we are pursuing you with Nightshade . You will assume that we cannot catch you, or come within missile or beam-weapon range. These assumptions are incorrect. We are accelerating and will continue to increase our acceleration at regular intervals. Study the Doppler shift of these transmissions carefully if you doubt me.”