pressed his thumb to his comscreen to access the specs General Han’s aide had downloaded to him.
General Han had harangued him about the honor of the ForShing Yan, the honor of the
General’s illustrious warrior family, the honor of DaQing’s own family, for he too was a Han. DaQing had been careful to stand rigid, apparently bursting with pride at being chosen to test fly the shield prototype.
But what did honor mean to him anymore? After everything China and Independent ForShing both had done to his life, to all their lives. To Jiao.
He shook his head to clear it of these thoughts.
He ordered the comscreen and the light off, and lay back down, forced his eyes closed. Flying from behind the dragon shield would be a strange new environment. He didn’t know how external data might be distorted, didn’t know how his instruments would interpret the shielding itself. He had two weeks’ hard training in simulation before the test flight, on top of his missions. Best to sleep while he could.
Xandri left the dining hall, snagged a hook on the quad four elevator and rode up five levels to the Hub.
The vidscreen was running a news item on the Great Lakes War. The Canadians had sabotaged New York’s Tunnel 4 and collapsed the last ruins of the New York Public Library. At the Hub, she sat in the bar and had a few Martian beers to steady her nerves. At last, she rescued her shuttle from the extortionists at the dock office and caught the Sidestaff Airway west into USAM, to the res pod she’d shared with Chill for the last three months. The shuttle shuddered heavily all along the airway; it needed new gyros but the cost of those had skyrocketed. Americas victory over the Chinese on Earth two years ago had left her hard-pressed to resource her own needs, let alone keep up the steady stream of manufactured goods and parts her colony depended on. USAM was suffering the legacy of the European colonial structure, which kept the Martian colonies supplying raw materials while America maintained a stranglehold on the highest level manufacturing processes. If only the Chimese had acknowledged China’s right to cede its colony as spoils of war to the Americans. Instead, they’d declared independence and mired Mais in a war that neither side was well equipped to fight.
When she opened the door of the res, she saw Chill had murphied the kitchen and was chopping root vegetables on the counter. He wielded the knife heavily, and colorful chunks of carrot shot off like missiles. The two mabbits were lined up, twitching in a delirium of hope that a piece would lob through the air into their cage. Xandri picked a few up and slid them through the bars.
“Chill, stop chopping and listen to me.”
Instead, he said. “You’ve got a real problem with trust, don’t you? You brush your squad leader off when I question you and go directly to the general?”
She was amazed. “How did you know that? What did you do, follow me?”
“I was going in the same direction, yes,” he answered stiffly, turning to her at last. “But that’s not the point. The point is you won’t tell me what happened out there.”
It was true, she wouldn’t, and she suddenly realized why. Back at the base, he’d threatened her with medical decommission. She couldn’t trust him to be on her side if this came to a psych trial.
That’s when she knew Chill had to go. Occam’s razor. The simplest solution is the best one. The simplest life is the happiest one. “No, you’re right. I won’t. I can’t. Maybe,” she plunged on angrily, “maybe you should sign back on the residency board. This was a great arrangement when I wasn’t on alpha team, but we should have split up when I got reassigned.”
Her words hung in the air. “So this was just an arrangement to you?” he said at last, stony faced.
An hour-long argument later, she left, and spent the day doing a series of aimless things fueled by watery beer and frustration. She returned late, and the night that followed was long and exquisitely awkward. Chill murphied the second bed and they tossed in the uncomfortable silence, each listening with resentment to the small sounds made by the other. In the morning, vowing to swear off relationships for the rest of her life, Xandri fled an hour before she needed to, which put her on deck just in time to receive orders to report to General Kantu.
Her uncle got right to the point.
“I checked your black box. Nothing supports what you claim. What’s even more confusing is, our intelligence says nothing about a shield test. But all this worries me. If the Chimese ever manage to shield New Beijing, they’ll launch their assault on USAM the next day before cornflakes.” She didn’t know what cornflakes were, but got the point. “I’ve decided to move up the schedule for a prototype test of our own.”
“Sir?”
“A zero point energy weapon, based on quantum chromodynamics. We can easily adapt our eagles to mount it. The ZPE has twice the range of any of their missiles or l-g weapons, and it doesn’t need a straight line of sight to lock on its target. Plus, its destructive power should be on the order often times anything we’ve got now. This will be our Hiroshima—the shot across the bow that ends the war.
I’ve been very involved in the ZPE’s development, and I need you to understand how this thing works.
Because you’re the pilot who’s flying the mission.”
“Sir! Thank you, sir!” Her heart drummed fiercely against her rib cage, but she stared rigidly ahead.
“Instead of energy transmission through space in the form of electromagnetic force fields, we transmit electrogravitational potentials through spacemass/timenergy. The ZPE is based on the action of zero point energy on subatomic particles in normal vacuum. All charges in the universe are jostled through interaction with the zero point energy field, causing matter waves to propagate and giving us spacetime. In Wheeler’s spacetime foam model, the quantum mechanical state of the universe is a superposition of many different spacetime topologies. Processes that should serve to increase the Cosmological constant instead drive the production of more and more complicated spacetime foam.
What we’ve discovered is a way to explode a single unit of quantum foam—pop a single bubble.”
“Isn’t there a cause-and-effect action?” she asked. “A cascade of popping bubbles?”
“Analogies only go so far,” he answered, a little impatient. “Ultimately, quantum foam isn’t soap. The ZPE’s internal architecture is the most elegant construct I’ve ever had the honor to see. It’s the crowning achievement of quantum engineering.” His eyes bored into her. “This weapon will save America on Mars. We’ll defeat the Chimese with it, and then its practical applications will drive our society forward. And history will record that one Jefferson Kantu helped design it and another flew it.
Congratulations, Captain. Report for training to Flight Level C at 0630.”
Modifying her eagle to house the ZPE took over a week, a week of skirmishes both on and off the battlefield. Chill was living up to his name. Something had broken between them, and until he found another res she was living in a frigid zone. For a hot-tempered woman like Xandri, it was torture.
So she heaved a sigh of relief when zero hour arrived and she secured herself in her cockpit.
She flew north, following the line of the New Jersey Gardens, where Terran food plants grew in thick layers of mabbit shit and Martian soil. Beyond the controlled environment bubbles of the Gardens, the neonate Martian biosphere stretched to the horizon, a thin veneer of green fogged by red summer dust.
Her target was the Dragon Nest. In one blow, the Chimese were about to lose eighty percent of their dragons.
Six hours later she came into range, well outside the reach of any Chimese patrol, programmed the target coordinates, and fired her way into history.
The ZPE made the same jittering sound it had in simulation, but a nanosecond later, she felt the world do that shimmer-twist again, the one she had felt before she saw the green dragon. The same pain and sense of wrongness, the same spike in her meds to the top of the red zone, and the same return to normality.
Her retinal cameras were transmitting satellite images of the Dragon Nest.
No apparent signs of damage. This was impossible—had the thunderbolt of doom turned out to be a slingshot pebble?
Strangely, and in stark contrast to the satellite images she’d received just moments ago, there wasn’t much to damage beyond infrastructure anyway. Every last hangar bubble was retracted and empty.
She turned her eagle around so fast she had to fight it for control, and she sped back toward USAM over the
