Koban 6: Conflict and Empire (10 page)

“Please note that I said
positive
Gs. It’s easier to use our armor’s pressure suit lining and our Kobani muscle contraction techniques to force blood to
stay
in our brains, and keep conscious longer. We can’t do as well with negative Gs, to prevent blood from pooling in our heads. We’ll blackout at four negative Gs, or perhaps the proper term is ‘redout,’ because our faces will turn red from the blood forced into our head. At six negative Gs for a minute, I suspect few of us would survive, and then we’d likely have suffered brain damage.”

“Max, you described Kobani tolerances. Other species want to get into the fight this time.”

Born smiled and nodded. “The AIs are smart enough to adjust for non Kobani pilots or passengers, but for Kobani combat operations, they shouldn’t even be aboard.”

“Is this new G-force protection equal to what the Dismantlers can do with people inside them? I ask, because Huwayla once completely protected a Krall’tapi pilot from a near collision with my ship, which left those of us on the Mark briefly unconscious. We had the normal clanship inertial compensation for ourselves, so clearly a Krall’tapi, who is less sturdy than a Krall, was better protected than we were because he wasn’t even stunned.” He paused and touched his lip in thought, as he dredged old memories from his wolfbat memory matrix.

“I hadn’t considered it before, but the Krall that were holding him prisoner were badly battered from that same near collision, and rendered unconscious. We encountered a number of Guardians with broken limbs and one of them, inside the control room with Pilton, had lost an arm. Yet Pilton himself, the weakest and most fragile of anyone aboard Huwayla was completely unharmed. At least until a Krall bored a three-inch Q-rupter hole through his guts.”

Max looked puzzled. “Tet, the level of inertial compensation on our new ships isn’t vastly more effective than that of a clanship. It’s surely better than what the Empire ships can do for their crews, but not by an order of magnitude for us.” Mirikami’s raised eyebrow looked as if he was about to ask a question.

Born explained. “Our inertial compensation improvement isn’t ten times better than what we have now, which is what I mean by an order of magnitude. Any Krall would be killed by the maximum forces allowed inside our new ships, which should only stun a typical Kobani. Therefore, a Krall’tapi certainly couldn’t survive either. From your recollection, you say the Krall’tapi apparently wasn’t even hurt, yet the Krall were extremely banged up. We must be missing something the Dismantler did to protect that Krall’tapi, which we can’t do for ourselves.”

Mirikami nodded, tapping his lower lip. “At least we know who to ask, don't we? I can probably reach one of the Dismantlers right now.”

He called on a general circuit, to reach whichever ship was free to talk to him. The Dismantlers had been deeply involved with speaking to the surviving Olt’kitapi on Canji Dol, instructing them on their lost history, bringing them up to date on events in the galaxy outside of the Empire, describing the millennia since the Olt’kitapi civilization had fallen. The ships preferred not to be interrupted while speaking with their creators, so the decision was made that they would take turns, with one of them always remaining disengaged, available for communication with their friends in the Federation. Remela responded this time.

“Hello, friend Tet. How are you today?”

“Hello Remela, I’m fine.” Out of courtesy, he added, “There are others included in this link with me, interested in your response to what I wish to ask you. I have questions that just one of you, based on her direct involvement could answer from experience, but Huwayla is now gone. Let me explain the background story first. The Federation is building a new class of Jump ships, and we intend to incorporate some of the technology your creators built into you. We’re using similar rounded ends for our hull design, with many Trap field emitters installed in the skin.

“My first question will require me to explain how my first actual contact with your sister ship, Huwayla, occurred. It was nearly a disaster, and I want to talk about what happened when we collided.”

“Friend Tet, my sisters and I know the details of that initial meeting. Huwayla shared all of her memories with us, as we all share our experiences periodically, at least when our minds are as healthy as they are now. Is it an aspect of that near mutual destruction, which she prevented, that you wish to discuss with me today?”

Mirikami looked around the room, wearing a perplexed expression. “Huwayla prevented our collision? But we apparently did strike her, at least hard enough that it rendered those of us in the Mark unconscious, and from later evidence, we know it badly injured some of the Krall inside her. What did she do to mitigate what happened inside her? We obviously suffered some sort of severe impact.”

“You, and the guests within Huwayla, except the pilot, suffered unavoidable trauma, which she regretted, but she took steps to reduce it from the catastrophe that was about to occur. The pilot was protected by a field cone of local inertial cancelation, similar to what you humans use for certain extreme recoil projectile weapons, which otherwise produces a severe backwards kick. She used something different for you and your ship.

“Huwayla detected that your ship was going to do what humans call intersect with her, where your ship’s mass would emerge into Normal Space, partly within the coordinates where her mass existed. She had to take action to preserve your lives, and the lives within her.”

Mirikami blinked, in confusion. “Wait. You mean she sensed we were coming, and took action to prevent a fatal intersect?”

“Yes. She later believed your inaccurate Jump was a result of incomplete and hurried measurements of the destination coordinates. Although your ship, the Mark of Koban, also possessed a significant closing velocity within Normal Space, so even if you had emerged from Tachyon Space clear of her hull, you would still have suffered a very destructive impact with Huwayla in Normal Space. She was required to execute two different and independent emergency procedures, without time to warn anyone of what was about to occur. In subsequent communications between you and her, she learned why you took such a great risk, and she was extremely thankful that you disrupted the deceptive and harmful mission that the untrustworthy Pildon had instructed her to perform.”

Mirikami and the others in the room with him, who were sharing this discussion in receive mode, seemed equally bewildered by this incomprehensible revelation.

“Remela I don't know how she could know the Mark was coming, we were on the far side of the Pittsburg II solar system, over a light hour away. She couldn’t know what our destination coordinates were, which we selected in a rush, or that they would fatally intersect with her. She shouldn’t have had time to do anything about the situation, considering our in-system Jump covered that distance in vastly less time than light could travel.

“Yet you’re saying she made us miss her in some fashion? Did she also do something to counter our Normal Space closing velocity after we emerged? We suffered a kind of impact shock instantly on White Out, which rendered all aboard unconscious. I know that when I regained my senses, that my ship was being held in direct and tight contact with her hull, motionless and without any drift. Yet neither of us had suffered visible collision damage.”

“Yes, to both questions, friend Tet. She avoided the intersect, and halted your forward motion. Any of us would have taken the same actions she did under those circumstances, because of the extremely short advanced warning received. She had to act quickly, and it was fortunate that none of you were killed. What would you have done differently?”

Mirikami smiled and shrugged, purely for the benefit of those in the room with him. “Well, for my part I’d have killed us all in a flash of intense light, since I don't see any way a collision that I didn’t know would happen could have been avoided. How did
she
manage to do that? How did she get an advanced warning that I was about to exit where she was? That transition happens nearly instantaneously for such a short Jump.”

“She knew because of the reflected time reversal wave, sensed through tachyons linked to another alternate Universe, where time flows in the reverse direction from that of this Universe. The brief but intense low energy tachyon wave passed mere seconds before the destructive event, leaving only those seconds to alter the causation event.”

Mirikami, his mouth partly open at this presumably erudite explanation, looked to his advisers for a technical translation, seeking terms a Spacer like himself might comprehend. What he saw, were the equivalent expressions from the human and alien scientists he had expected to simplify her explanation.

Absent anyone leaping forward to explain this to him, Mirikami went back to the source. “Remela, I wasn’t aware there is such a thing as a time reversal wave involving tachyons, or that there was another Universe where time flows backwards from the arrow of time we sense in our Universe.”

“Oh, yes,” she assured him. “Such alternate Universes were one of the many mathematical discoveries of the Olt’kitapi, but having only minor physical applications to our space. It is how we Dismantlers, and the Olt’kitapi via their mind enhancers, can sense the effects of the deaths of large numbers of intelligent living creatures in our Universe. Within our Universe a large-scale event, which causes the deaths of millions of minds, has an effect on certain low energy tachyons that are quantum entangled with aspects of the minds of living intelligent creatures. Many of these deaths, happening close together in spacetime, triggers a wave, or a pulse, of altered low energy tachyons. That pulse is reflected by an interaction with the boundary of the time reversed alternate Universe. We can sense that time reversed reflected wave shortly before the cause that creates it occurs in our Universe. In short, we know it is coming, in what you term a premonition.

“In the case of an event in our Universe, which is about to effect only ourselves, and is imminent, the effect is strongly focused on us, and we can detect the time reversed reflected wave that arrives a short time before the event that causes the original wave. The event will be small scale and limited in scope, and if we act fast, it is sometimes possible to alter the impending casual event before it happens to us. If we are able to do that, then a counter wave from our Universe is propagated to the time reversed Universe, canceling the reflection, because the disruptive event here never occurred. We probably could not escape a massive large-scale event, such as a nearby supernova, for example, because we would not be the focal point of the widespread event.

“Fortunately, for you and Huwayla, the size scale of the impending collision was no larger than her size, and the size of your ship, with a small focus compared to the scale of that solar system. She was able to sense the event, deduce the logical cause, and move herself out of your emergent path with a micro Jump of slightly more than her own length. She simultaneously prepared to use a projected stasis field where you would emerge, to contain your ship. This allowed her to dissipate the relative momentum between her and your ship, over an extended enough time, so the accelerations involved were survivable for you on the Mark and for her internal guests, without damaging your ship or herself. Her mass was greater than yours, so you suffered the greater inertial forces.”

Mirikami pulled at his lip, thinking, but didn’t turn to his advisers this time. “I’ll bet you believe you’ve adequately explained that to me. To be fair, even if I don't have a clue how a time reversed reflected wave of tachyons might be created, detected, or canceled, I can accept that a micro Jump, with seconds of forewarning, could permit a fast thinking AI like Huwayla to move out of the way of the impending intersect. Except, she then prevented my ship from smashing into her, because of the residual Normal Space velocity we possessed upon entering the Jump Hole. What is a stasis field?”

In another seemingly dismissive explanation of something Remela considered self-evident, she said, “It is how we catch and preserve the molten blobs of the pieces of the cores of planets we’ve dismantled for habitat construction. We need to move the hot metallic core fragment into storage orbits, where they will be kept and mined for needed material.

“That is where other tool-ships, related to Dismantlers, would promote the process of separating constituents of the planetary body, encouraging the differentiation of the various metals, stony materials, and gasses, for example. This is most effectively done while the blobs are still molten, so we prevent them from cooling during movement to the holding orbits, and the other tool-ships would maintain them in partial stasis, still molten, as they extract the various separated materials.

“A stasis field preserves the material in its current state, either molten for the core fragments, or held at the temperatures such as you and I presently have. For the core fragments, this is until they are gravitationally pulled to new orbits, and the stasis field retards changes, such as cooling in the material until they can be processed. I suppose, in Standard, you might call the ships that do this task something similar to a Differentiator, since I am a Dismantler. We don't believe any of those ships survived the revolt, because the Krall found no military value to them, and did not wish to preserve intelligent ships that they considered alive. Destruction was of interest to them, not preservation, organization, and construction.”

Mirikami offered a comment with a wry smile. “Happily, my ship and crew wasn’t a molten blob and thus differentiated. What
did
the stasis field do to us?”