Extremis (21 page)

And, hands digging into the synthetic leather of the steering wheel, he thought:
This—this is all me. This is
my
fault
.

5

No Task Too Steep, No Step Too Far

No task’s too steep for human wit
—Horace

BuShips Research Station Oscar Sierra Four, Mars Orbit, Sol System

“The Desai prime drive indeed!” Admiral Sonja Desai, TFN/PSUN, gave the sniff that, like so many facets of her personality, not everyone found irresistibly endearing. “They ought to call it the Kasugawa drive, if they must personalize it.”

Isadore Kasugawa, PhD, smiled. It wasn’t exactly the first time he’d heard this. Nor was he unused to Desai’s moods. Old acquaintances, they had come out of retirement in response to the Baldy threat, specifically to collaborate on a major enhancement to the drive technology that already bore her name. “I could hardly cope with more recognition than I already have,” he told her gently. An uninitiated observer might have interpreted his smile as fatherly. His face, a thoroughgoing blend of ethnic features even by the standards of twenty-sixth century humanity, looked older than hers. But in fact, he had less than a hundred standard years to her hundred and thirty-six, having commenced antigerone treatments at a later age. “After all, I have the Kasugawa generator named after me.”

“It’s the least you deserved for discovering what the human race and others have been seeking for almost six centuries—a way around the random natural placement and capacity of warp points.”

“But it was really just an offshoot of the principles of your phased gravitic space drive,” he rebutted.

“Oh, rubbish! It was a radical new application which had never occurred to me.”

Kasugawa laughed and raised his hands in mock surrender. “All right! All right! But if you’re going to argue that way, you must admit that the Desai prime drive
isn’t
a radical departure, just an extension of the original principle—
your
original principle. I just helped with the details.”

Desai knew better than to argue further when Kasugawa’s face wore that “
Got
you!” look. She leaned on the rail of the observation deck where they stood and gazed out through the space station’s curving transparency at the world it orbited: Mars, Sol IV.

That world’s surface stood in sharp relief under its thin atmospheric veil, with craters pockmarking its ocher dryness. A fairly useless world, she reflected. Nevertheless, it had served as the setting for some of the most glamorous and exotic interplanetary adventures imagined by pre-spaceflight humans. But then, in 2053, the exploration ship
Hermes
, en route to Neptune, had abruptly found itself in the Alpha Centauri system, having blundered through Sol’s single warp point. With a galaxy full of Earthlike planets suddenly within reach, Mars had been largely forgotten.

But once BuShips decided to place this particular test in the Sol system for its security advantages, Mars emerged as the logical candidate to serve as its orbital anchor. Isolated and having ready access to Sol’s raw-materials-producing asteroid belt, it was also located relatively close to Sol’s Desai limit, within which the phased gravitic drive would not function.

Desai turned to face a battery of screens—and one in particular, displaying the view from a small but heavily instrumented ship out beyond the Desai limit. It showed the starfields twenty light-minutes out, where Sol was little more than a superlatively bright star itself. Occluding some of those stars was an even smaller, unmanned vessel. Desai would have liked to be aboard the observation ship herself, but she needed instant access to the entire array of interpretive computer power here on the station. She ran her eyes over the various screens with heightening anticipation, for the drive should have already been activated; now they were simply waiting for the test data to wing across the light-minutes. Although the imperfectly understood warp network allowed ships to get around Einstein’s Wall between paired warp points, nonmaterial energy transmissions were still limited to the velocity of light.

“It should be anytime now,” said Kasugawa, eyeing the chronometer. They both fixed their eyes on the robot vehicle in the viewscreen.

All at once, for the tiniest fraction of a second, optical illusion made that vessel seem to stretch out to infinity. Then, in less than an eyeblink, it vanished. At the same time, the various screens came to life, flashing out a veritable explosion of data.

Kasugawa studied it intently. “As predicted. It instantaneously took on a velocity—or a ‘pseudo-velocity,’ as the purists insist on calling it—of eighty-four point nine seven three five lightspeed.” He turned to Desai, and his face looked almost young. “In fact, it matches almost exactly the theoretical figures.”

“But—also as theory predicted—it’s all or nothing. It can’t be slowed down to incremental velocities for maneuvering purposes.” Desai looked at another set of readouts. “And, also as we predicted, this speed is beyond the limit of our radiation and particle shielding’s ability to protect a crew. We’re going to have to work on that.” She smiled wryly. “In a way, we’re back where they were in the first days of manned spaceflight, before the development of electromagnetic shields, when the effects of long-term exposure to cosmic radiation looked like an insuperable obstacle to interplanetary voyages.”

“You might say that.” Kasugawa gave her quizzical look. “I never knew you were interested in history.”

“I’m not, really. In fact, I used to know nothing about it. But I met someone who was a true enthusiast. His enthusiasm was contagious.…” Desai’s eyes took on a faraway look. Then, with a jerk of annoyance at herself, she turned abruptly away to study additional data.

Kasugawa smiled. He had heard the stories about the feelings Desai had once held, long ago, for Ian Trevayne, her commanding officer during the Fringe Revolution. Like everyone else, he had found those stories hard to believe. But just maybe…

RFNS
Zephrain
, Main Body, Rim Federation Fleet, Astria System

The dazzling light of Astria’s type-F primary sun streamed into RFNS
Zephrain
’s cavernous hangar bay as the shuttle nosed through the atmosphere screen and settled down on its landing jacks with a pneumatic wheeze when its drive cut out and the supermonitor’s internal artificial-gravity field took control. The gangway extended itself, and the honor guard of
Zephrain
’s Marine detachment came to attention as the Alliance’s new supreme commander emerged.

Fleet Admiral Cyrus Waldeck, TFN/PSUN, standing at the foot of the gangway with his staff officers and task-force commanders, reflected that while he’d gone through the rituals of changing commanders many times before, it was especially unnerving when the new senior admiral had not only previously been his CO, but looked so damned
young
. The man descending the gangway looked like an Academy upperclassman dressed up in imitation of a flag officer.

Waldeck pulled himself together. He stepped forward and saluted formally. “Welcome to Astria and Second Fleet, Admiral Trevayne.”

The tall young man returned the salute with equal gravity. “Thank you, Admiral Waldeck.” Then his dark face formed the lopsided smile Waldeck remembered (although when he’d last seen it, a neatly trimmed graying beard had framed it). “It’s been a long time, Cyrus—at least for you!”

It had indeed.

Over eighty standard years ago, in the throes of the Fringe Revolution, Ian Trevayne had become a hero to the loyalist side (and something else altogether to the Fringers who had seceded to form the Terran Republic). He had held the systems of the Rim for the Terran Federation, from which they were isolated by the vagaries of the warp network. The war might have had a different conclusion had he succeeded in ending that isolation by fighting his way through Republic space to reestablish contact with the Federation. But in the apocalyptic Battle of Zapata, he had been stopped and killed…almost.

Captain Cyrus Waldeck, scion of one of the Corporate World dynasties whose pitiless exploitation of the Fringe had broken the old Federation apart, had been there. Trevayne had been preserved in a semblance of life by quick-and-dirty measures that had left him in a state of cryogenic suspension from which he could not be awakened without killing him.

However, just prior to the Baldy invasion, it had become possible to transplant Trevayne’s brain into a full-body clone of himself—force-grown anencephalic, to avoid ethical issues. Now his fifty-plus mind and personality dwelled in his own early-twenties body—and the coincidental timing of that reanimation had stirred deep mythic wells: Trevayne might not have exactly been sleeping beneath a mountain or on the Isle of Avalon, but he had returned when his people had needed him.

For his part, Trevayne now gazed at a sight that had become all too familiar: the decades-older face of someone he had last seen less than two years ago in terms of his own consciousness, but for whom eighty years had passed.

Although, truth be told, Cyrus Waldeck looked better than many: like all Corporate World’s old money, he had benefited from the anagathic regimen from an early age. His 130-year-old features remained distinctly those of his plutocratic clan, with a thin, pursed mouth incongruously placed between massive chin and prominent nose. That mouth shifted into a position that suggested an answering smile. “Good to see you, sir.”

Trevayne’s own smile became a shade more personal. “And you, too, Cyrus.” Then he put a brisk edge in his voice: the moment was over. “I’m eager to meet my new staff, particularly since I’ve only brought one new staffer with me.” He indicated the officer who had descended the gangway behind him. “Lieutenant Commander Andreas Hagen, my technical liaison officer.”

Waldeck looked slightly puzzled as he returned Hagen’s salute—understandably, Trevayne reflected. The title had been cobbled together to justify the presence of Hagen, previously an instructor at the Rim Federation’s Prescott Academy, subsequently assigned to Trevayne as…there had to be a better word than “nursemaid.” But he had fulfilled an indispensable role in the course of Trevayne’s eighteen months of intensive study, and Trevayne wasn’t quite ready to let him return to the classroom as he would have wished.

As protocol demanded, Waldeck introduced Trevayne to his own staff before progressing to his other unit commanders, and then several of the fleet officers of both the allied and alien contingents: Vice Admiral Alistair McFarland, RFN, of Task Force 21; Least Fang Zhaairnow’ailaaioun, PSUN, of Task Force 22; and…“Finally,” concluded Waldeck, “for the rebel…I mean the Terran Republic elements, Vice Admiral Li Magda of Task Force 23.”

For Trevayne, it was as though he were once again in the grand-reception room of Government House on Zephrain, staring into those uncannily black eyes.

“Yes, we have already met. And congratulations on your richly deserved promotion to vice admiral, Admiral Li.”

“Thank you, Admiral Trevayne,” said Li Magda primly. Then a twinkle awoke in the ebon depths of those eyes—her mother’s eyes. “But I thought we agreed at the time that you’d call me Magda.”

“So I recall. I compromised on that, not being quite ready for Mags. But for now, we’d better observe the military proprieties. Oh, incidentally, since then I’ve spoken to your mother, First Space Lord Li Han. She sends her best.”

“Yes, I’ve heard the story of your meeting with her. Everyone has.” She met his eyes boldly. “It’s my belief that you and she have written a new chapter into your respective legends.”

All at once, Trevayne could feel, in the small of his back, a hangar bay full of eyes focused on him and the daughter of Li Han.

The Fringe Revolution was fresh memory for him, but for the current generations it had receded into the numinous realms of legend, peopled with larger-than-life figures. Figures like Ian Trevayne, who had been forged into a weapon of vengeance by the nuclear fires that had incinerated his wife and daughters—a weapon that had killed his own son, who had joined the Fringe rebels. And like Li Han, who had been Trevayne’s prisoner and afterward had battered him to a standstill in the unimaginable inferno of Zapata. Their two names, taken together, had entered into the language as bywords for unrelenting enmity.

“That might be a trifle strong,” he said mildly. “But I daresay the sight of your mother and myself, together on the same podium, arguing in favor of the same strategy for ending this war, may have…well, made an impression on people.”

Her eyes held his and would not permit him to escape into flippancy. “It’s why this alliance is now unbreakable—and committed to that strategy. And you and Mother both know it.”

“Well, then,” said Trevayne with a briskness that almost succeeded in masking his embarrassment, “perhaps we’d best discuss that strategy. I’m sure you already know it, at least in its essentials, being your mother’s daughter. It was, after all, her brainchild. I’m also sure you’ve maintained security by not revealing it to anyone here. That’s what I’ve come for. Cyrus, lead the way.”

They proceeded to
Zephrain
’s auditoriumlike flag briefing room. It had a wide viewscreen for the two-dimensional displays that usually sufficed for displays of planetary systems, since planets and warp points tended to occur roughly in a single plane. But at Trevayne’s request, technicians had hooked up a holographic projector focused on the stage in front of the viewscreen.

The reason for the holo display wasn’t immediately apparent, for what it displayed could have been—and normally was—shown flat. It was a chart looking much like an old-style circuit diagram, with points of light representing stars (and the occasional starless warp nexus) connected by the string lights of warp lines. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the arrangement of those stars in actual three-dimensional space, nor did it need to.

Everyone recognized one segment of the warp network: the Bellerophon Arm, oriented so that the Bellerophon system itself, and its one warp connection to the rest of the Rim Federation through Astria, was at the bottom. Much else was also shown, with the stars color coded for the polities to which they belonged. Somewhat puzzling were two brilliant white star points, one in the outliers of the Bellerophon Arm, the other off to the side of the display among the lights of the Terran Republic, to which its only two warp links ran.