Homeworld (Odyssey One) (16 page)

RANQUIL

THE ENTITY KNOWN only as Central eyed the silhouette of the Terran starship, an emotion best described as amusement coursing through it. Since their initial meeting, the Terran captain had implemented several security procedures to keep Central from directly accessing any of his force’s computer systems.

The entity actually hadn’t had much luck cracking any of their computer systems to date. Oh, accessing them was easy. They used electronic systems, storing data in the organization of quantum filaments. Literally the play of a child to copy, something accomplished almost without thought itself.

Unfortunately, the paranoid buggers had apparently encoded every single thing they stored under massively complex mathematical algorithms. So complex that even having copied the key did Central little good. The key literally changed every few milliseconds.

Central was irritated to have information right in its midst that it was unable to access, like an itch it couldn’t scratch.

I wonder…if I commanded one of the warships closer to the Odyssey, I might be able to reflect their quantum states back to Ranquil and…

Central had to mentally shake itself then, breaking free of the temporary mental fantasy.

It was a hard habit to break, knowing everything that there is to know within one’s sphere. Omniscience was a heady addiction, utterly destroying those absurd chemical dependencies to which humans were vulnerable.

But Central had to reluctantly, oh so reluctantly, set aside that addiction. For one, Captain Weston had made it clear that he considered the things Central did as a matter of course to be
rude
. More important, however, was the knowledge that these people were merely a tiny extension of a much larger culture totally beyond his reach.

The entity couldn’t help but be amused by the Captain’s efforts to safeguard the location of his homeworld. That was the first thing that had been lifted from the minds of the Terrans…well, the first thing of significance.

Identifying a yellow star within two hundred lights of Ranquil was a challenge, for there were a few possibilities. However, a brief glance at the composition of the system set those to rest in no time. There was only one yellow star with rocky inner planets and outer gas giants that matched the home system of the Terrans, only one for twice that distance at least.

Not that Central had much use for the information, not at present. The Priminae had no need to visit the system and so did not need to be made aware of it. Central much preferred that they stayed clear. The violent taint on even the Captain made Central somewhat…ill, to be frank.

It was an odd sensation. Illness, that is.

Central had endured it vicariously, through the lives and deaths of those that lived within the magnetic field of Ranquil, yet never felt it personally. It was different, the entity found, to experience that pain for itself rather than feel it for another.

For all that it, and the Priminae, might need the Terrans…Central much preferred contact be kept at a minimum.

Distasteful business, violence.

Lieutenant Senior Grade Jennifer Samuels, call sign Cardsharp, was reading the technical manual for the NICS system her fighter employed. She wasn’t known as an egghead, not even among those with whom she spent most of her time, but she was a pilot in an age where you didn’t get those wings without being able to do space-time manipulation equations in your head. What’s more, Jen knew without bragging that she was a
good
pilot.

The NICS setup was something else, though. Neural mapping had always been hit and miss, often requiring years of practice to really use it properly. It was useful for people with disabilities; they had the time and drive to really perfect the mapping, but career types were usually so busy with work that the full-time job of mapping their neural pathways just wasn’t practical. It was discovered about ten years before the war with the Block, however, that a tiny percentage of people had effectively identical paths. At the time it was a pretty controversial discovery, like finding two snowflakes perfectly identical or, more aptly perhaps, a percentage of people with perfectly matching fingerprints.

For those people, you just strapped them into the system and mapped someone else’s matching equations over theirs and away you went.

It was nothing but a curiosity at the time, but when the war came and with intense pressure to provide real force multipliers to the military, one doctor happened to notice that out of
the thousands of subjects who tested out with this identical neural map, there was a surprising number of
pilots
.

The Archangels were born out of a combination of that accidental discovery and the daring theft of a Block advanced Mantis fighter that utilized their latest generation CM generator technology.

The fact that one Marine aviator by the name of Eric Weston flew that stolen fighter out of a Chinese air base in the Gobi was probably the cherry on top of the proverbial sundae. The history of the double-A flight read like a Hollywood blockbuster, back when Hollywood was still on top.

That wasn’t what she was working on at the moment. As interesting as history was, she was more intent on the applications of the NICS system. The neural interface solution was undoubtedly effective. Lab and field tests agreed that response times were more than ten times faster when using NICS, but it had problems.

The needles in the back of the neck was one, but the bigger part of the drawbacks was that the system was unidirectional. Signals went out, they didn’t come in. The primary delays in the NICS device were because data had to be interpreted by the pilots through natural inputs. Eyes, ears, some tactile feedback, and so forth. That put a distinct limit on reaction times, something that hadn’t yet been surmounted.

Samuels had some ideas on that, something she’d been working on since just before she applied to the double A’s the first time around.

As usual, she was working on the project in her off hours when the door chime to her quarters sounded.

“Come on in. It’s not locked,” she said without looking up.

The door clanked as it opened. The heavy metal didn’t make those soft hissing sounds from the old sci-fi movies, but it would hold up a lot better in the case of explosive decompression than a flimsy sliding door.

“What’s up? I’m working,” she said.

“Just talked to the Captain.”

The voice caused her to jerk straight up, snapping around as she struggled out of her seat and got to attention. “Sir! I—”

“Relax, Lieutenant,” Commander Michaels told her, waving her down. “This is off the record and all casual like.”

“Sir?” She relaxed marginally, somewhere between “at ease” and “at attention.”

“Cap was talking with Reed down-well on the planet,” Michaels said, looking moderately annoyed to be delivering the message. “Reed is looking for a pilot trainer. Cap thought you might be good for the slot.”

Jennifer felt a cold chill wash over her. “What? Why?”

She’d been trying to get a slot with the Archangels practically her entire professional life. Now she’d just made it in and could literally feel it all slip away between her fingers.

Michaels looked about as bad as she felt, she realized.

“Look, Jen, I don’t know if you’ve been following the politics of the situation, but the double-A squad has become something of a white elephant. They loved us during the war when we brought results, but now we’re too high profile for a lot of the jobs we’d normally pull back home and we cost too much to maintain anywhere near our war level operational levels. We’ve got five pilots now, and they’re not sending us anymore.” He told her seriously, “We’d only have four pilots if the Captain hadn’t given you his bird.”

She felt her legs wobble a bit. She hadn’t actually been paying attention to any of that, but now that he had laid it out,
she had to admit that it did seem odd that the squad hadn’t been replenished since she’d signed on.

“Most of us will probably move up when they shut us down, assuming the ETs don’t splash us all over space first,” Michaels said. “But you’re still junior enough that there’s not command waiting for you, Jen. Odds are it’ll be back to shuttle work for you, and the Cap wanted to offer you something better.”

“Teaching a bunch of snot-nosed pacifists to fly?” she snorted. She had met a few of the refugees on their first run through Prim space and frankly wasn’t impressed.

She didn’t have a problem with being a pacifist, not exactly, but the smug condescension she got from many of the Prim just pissed her off. They tended to forget that not everyone in the universe thought the way they did, and the problem with pacifism was that until every single person
everywhere
adopted the philosophy, it was charitable to call it
unrealistic
, at least to her way of thinking.

Sure, intellectually, she knew that pacifism was the superior way of life. The problem was that it was a lot like communism in that it was only perfect on paper. Put it in the real world and things fell apart fast because it depended on the good will and behavior of people for it to work.

And people are an ugly sort at the best of times.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man was kind. In the land of pacifists, it was the man who was willing to throw a punch.

“They’re not that bad, Jen.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Look, it’s either this or…best case?” Michaels sighed and shrugged. “Maybe the double A’s pull PR duty.”

That
was worse. Jen groaned at the very thought of doing airshows for the rest of her thirty.

“Yeah, that’s my thought on that too,” he told her. “Look, think it through. No orders here, just an under-the-table offer and the Captain’s promise to make sure the transfer doesn’t slow up any promotions. Might even speed them a bit.”

Michaels turned to the door, making to leave, but she cut him off before he got halfway there.

“I don’t need to think anything through, sir. I’m double A.”

He didn’t turn back, and just nodded. “Alright. I’ll let the Captain know.”

Jen turned back to her work, unaware that her CO and flight leader was smiling as he left the small quarters.