Primary Inversion (17 page)

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We hurtled through space, racing the specter of Qox’s flags.

      
In inversion, we could go as fast as we wanted, just never
slower
than light speed. If anyone on Delos could have watched, they would have seen our ships get shorter and our mass increase as we approached light speed. After we went superluminal, speeding up increased our length and decreased our mass. At faster than 141 percent of light, time contracted. Right now we could shoot through space for a century and only an hour would pass on Delos. If we ever reached infinite speed our Jags would have
no
mass, they would stretch the length of the universe, and time would stand still everywhere else while forever passed for us. It always amazed me that even with all this going on, the ship looked completely normal to me, because relative to it, I wasn’t moving at all.

      
We had a problem, however. As we had pushed close to light speed, our time had dilated, which meant it passed more slowly for us than for Tams. It jumped us a few hours into the future, stealing valuable moments we desperately needed.

      
Blackstar, plot pastward course,
I thought.
Compensate for the time dilation.

      
Course plotted.

      
Good.
At superluminal speeds we could travel into the past. If anyone on Tams could have watched, they would have seen this: after we left Delos, four new ships and four antimatter ships appeared in the Tams system, eight in all, each pair-produced from photon annihilations. The matter ships and their pilots were identical to our squad. In fact, they
were
us.

      
While the matter ships continued to Tams, the antimatter squad flew
backward
to Delos in a time reversed path, at superluminal speeds, gaining fuel rather than losing it, like a movie run in reverse. At the point where I had told Blackstar to go pastward, the observer would see our ships meet the antimatter ships—and annihilate. The energy created by our mutual destruction would balance that lost when the new ships and their antimatter siblings were created near Tams.

      
Of course we saw no bizarre creations or destructions. We were at rest relative to our ships, so as far as we knew, we simply traveled from Delos to Tams. The end result was the same; our four Jags arrived at Tams sometime after we left Delos. I vehemently wished we could reach Tams
before
we left, with enough time to evacuate the planet. But no ship had ever succeeded in thwarting the laws of cause and effect by coming out of inversion before entering it. The best we could do was reach Tams the instant after we inverted at Delos. Usually it took longer, anywhere from hours to days. The farther we traveled, the more errors accumulated and the bigger the discrepancy. I just hoped we made it in time. Although Qox’s flags had farther to go, they carried entire systems dedicated to optimizing spacetime variables.

      
However, we had an advantage they could never match.

      
No electromagnetic signal could reach a superluminal ship. The only way to communicate among ships in inversion was to shoot superluminal particles—tachyons—at one another. No one had yet figured out how to make tachyons reliably carry information, particularly given that
during
inversion, the signals could arrive before they were sent. So inverted ships traveled in limbo, drifting. A squad that entered in tight formation could leave inversion spread out across both space and time.

      
Except for Jags.

      
Rex, Helda, Taas and I were one mind. More than one mind. We were a part of the Kyle-Mesh, which gave us instantaneous communication with a star-spanning network. We coordinated our actions with a precision that defied light speed itself.

      
Even Kyle space had limitations. If we entered the Kyle-Mesh
after
time dilation jumped us into the future, we would link to a future timeline. In theory, it could let us look ahead in time. But if we then returned to the past, as we were doing now, the timeline would be off. Given the situation at Tams, even the small amount of time we would need to dissolve and reform the link in the right time could kill us. All our peek at the future would tell us was that we died in battle because we weren’t prepared for what the Trader ships were doing at the moment we actually engaged them. The very act of checking our future increased the chances we would learn we died in combat. So I kept us in the timeline consistent with the time we left Delos.

      
Blackstar,
I thought.
Check the Kyle-Mesh. Any readings on Qox’s flags?

      
One of our sentry ships has sighted Eubian warships on approach to Tams.
Estimated arrival times appeared in my mindscape.

      
How many?

      
A display of Trader vessels appeared in my mindscape.
Two battle cruisers, an orbital platform, and three Shieldcraft. Also one labcraft.

      
I grimaced. Those had to be the flags. A labcraft could convert even moons into chemicals to react with the Tams atmosphere. At least the flags had no idea we were coming. I wanted to be in and out of Tams before they showed up.

      
What about the Streamliner that took off from Delos?
I asked.

      
Blackstar replaced the display with images of Jaibriol’s ships.
Their
present
course puts them at Tams at roughly the same time as the flags.

      
Any data on the Tams situation?

      
The last reports indicated the rebels controlled the ground defenses. However, all of their links to the Kyle-Mesh are inoperable.

      
No surprise there. The Traders would have destroyed those links as fast as possible to make sure our intelligence was dated.

      
Taas sent a thought.
What about their orbital defense systems?

      
He sounded calm, but I felt his tension. Blackstar responded to my concern by showing me an image of Taas in his cockpit. Data flashed under it: pulse, blood pressure, temperature, breathing rate, brain activity.

      
Hey,
Taas thought.
I’m fine.

      
I let the image fade.
We’ll probably find hordes of sat-bangs in orbit.
Sat-bangs were a nuisance, low-value decoys that were only good for one missile or an old style laser. Their electronic signatures made them appear as high value targets, though, so they seemed far more dangerous than they actually were.

      
Robot drones too,
I thought.
Possibly a robot crewed Sentinel.

      
Why a Sentinel?
Helda asked.
Putting a platform in orbit makes it vulnerable.

      
I swapped that over to Rex, who had the expertise on platforms.

      
They have no moon to use for a base, so they need something in orbit,
Rex answered.
They have to have something up there like a Sentinel, because the rebels control the ground defenses. That could outweigh the Sentinel’s vulnerability, especially given they’ve no reason to expect our attack.

      
The prospect of a Sentinel worried me. It would add vicious fangs to the orbital defenses. In theory, a Jag squad coming out of inversion could take on an orbital platform and survive; realistically, if we didn’t knock it out immediately, with the advantage of surprise, our chances plummeted.

      
How about manned Solos?
Taas asked.

      
It was a good question. The Solos were the closest Trader counterpart to our Jags.

      
Only a few,
Rex thought.
Normally ground based. But they may be in orbit here.

      
Especially given that Solos carry sophisticated EIs,
I added.
If the rebels capture even one, they have an EI to adapt for their own ships.

      
What about tau missiles?
Helda asked.

      
Solos have them,
I thought.
Just hope it’s not too many.
Taus were equipped with inversion drives, which turned them into miniature starships. The Traders were concerned with what was happening on the planet, though, not in space,  which I hoped meant they put the expensive and bulky tau missiles low on their list of priorities.

      
Of course, they could cripple the rebellion by smashing a tau into Tams at relativistic speed. The rebels had made the same assumption as had the rest of the sane universe, that Ur Qox wouldn’t destroy such a desirable territory. We had been wrong, all of us. The Tams resistance was a symbol of defiance, one far more potent to Qox than we had realized, powerful enough that he wanted them destroyed in the most dramatic way possible as a warning to any others who thought to defy his rule.

      
Considering our options, I thought our best bet was to come out of inversion as close to Tams as possible, launching a cloud of smart missiles. Well-settled planets had defenses against relativistic attack, but Tams was a small station in a backwater region. That might give us a chance of success. Whether or not it was more than a vanishingly small chance was another story; I had seen partial stats on its ODS, or orbital defense system. It wasn’t trivial.

      
When we reach Tams,
I thought,
our advantages will be surprise, speed, and our Jag link. Disadvantages: we’re four Jags against a full ODS and we can’t communicate with the rebels until we come out of inversion. Strategy: reinvert close to the planet, only twenty million kilometers out, in a close formation. We transmit our warning to the rebels using neutrino comms and exhaust modulation.
The Traders would be hard pressed to stop either; the gamma source produced by our exhaust would be a spectacular beacon, and neutrinos went through almost anything.
Immediately release a cloud of MIRVs.
The MIRVs, or multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles, would be traveling at relativistic speeds with us, giving them the energy equivalent of megaton bombs.
After we knock out the ODS, we deliver the EI’s brains to the colony.

      
Understood.
The response echoed from all four ships.

      
Ready to reinvert,
Blackstar thought.

      
I fired the photon thrusters—and went into stasis. The only way I knew I hadn’t been conscious while we decelerated was by the discontinuous change in speed on my displays. The Jag slowed down in a series of jumps I perceived as continuous. The stars moved forward, converging on a point in front of the ship. Their colors shifted toward blue, then went ultraviolet and disappeared from my screens. Blackstar created a holomap showing the stars as they collapsed into the point—

      
—and we roared out of inversion in perfect formation, blasting our warning to Tams as we hurtled toward the planet, preceded by a swarm of relativistic missiles.

      
Blackstar flooded my mind with data; the Tams ODS reacted to our attack by sending what looked like an entire fleet of Sentinels. But I recognized those signatures—most were decoys.

      
Enemy taus sighted—and disappeared,
Blackstar thought.

      
Evade!
The taus would disappear only if they inverted—

      
—and I came out of stasis. Blackstar had thrown the Jag into such an abrupt course change that the stasis coil had kicked in, protecting me from the lethal accelerations.

      
Taus detonated to port,
Blackstar thought. Stats poured into my spinal node faster than an unboosted brain could absorb. Tau missiles equipped with inversion drives were catching our MIRVs and inverting. They targeted our positions and reinverted, exploding both themselves and their MIRV captives in violent bursts of radiation. The taus
had
to invert to catch us, but their foray through inversion threw them off. If they could have tracked us while they were superluminal, they might have caught us, but they came out either seconds too late or in the wrong place.

      
We hurtled beyond the planet’s orbit and headed for the sun, accelerating, faster, faster—

      
Invert,
I thought.

      
My stomach wrenched as we entered superluminal space. We kept accelerating, up to millions of times light speed. Time went faster for us than for Tams, so we could come around and re-enter the system with only seconds passing there. We came out of inversion a few million kilometers from the planet, flying “out of the sun,” spraying our last MIRVs in a cloud ahead of the squad.

      
ODS sterilized,
Blackstar thought.

      
Data poured into our mindscapes. We had eliminated the entire system: taus, decoys, drones, and a Sentinel orbiting platform. Helda whooped, and Rex sent me an image of his wickedly exultant grin. We had done it!

      
Taas’s laugh rumbled in my mind.
The ODS were against us, but we beat them.

      
I groaned.
Continue dumping velocity on approach to Tams.

      
We “braked” down, flicking into stasis, again, again, we were nearing Tams now, slowing for atmospheric entry—

      
I came out of stasis to the scream of alarms. Stats reeled through my mindscape: Solos and cybernetic drones were boiling up from the planet.

      
Damn!
Engage shrouds!