blooming landscape. She was an hour out when the maydays started. By the time she got there the battle was almost over.
The USAM forces, ground and air, were battering at the Chimese dragon fleet. The missile impacts could be seen as a distortion of the visual field around the dragons, but none of the force was getting through. Could this have been what happened at the Dragon Nest? No, satellite imagery would have shown this effect. But certainly the Chimese had managed to shield their dragons, and USAM had abruptly lost its one decisive advantage—the superior amount of functional weapons technology it had to throw at the enemy.
Xandri rushed lo join the battle, her long range lasers already contributing to the apparently useless barrage. The New Jersey Gardens were exploded into smoking ruins, and she could see the financial district, and the USAM Trade Center itself, obscured in a puffball of flaming smoke.
Then she saw the green dragon and went after it. It didn’t seem to be engaging in the action, just hovering near the battlefield like some angel of death. Xandri fired her laser arrays, which of course did nothing but attract the green dragons attention, and it circled tightly to target her. With just seconds before it destroyed her eagle, she took the only option she had left—she fired the ZPE, hoping for a more destructive result this time.
With the discharge came the now-familiar wrench, but the result wasn’t anything she could have expected.
The green dragon, the whole battle scene, had vanished. She was buzzing around a perfectly intact USAM and Eagle Control was shouting at her to respond.
Two weeks after the inexplicable interference that blinded Dragon Nest’s instrumentation for more than six hours, DaQing was ordered to report to the office of General Han.
“It was a field of tachyon disturbances on the scalar electrostatic potential level, generated through quantum chromodynamics, and it emanated from a source flying at two thousand km.
Presumably an American eagle. What we do not understand is why the Americans did not follow through and destroy the Nest. We have decided it must be because this was an unintended effect and the pilot did not understand what happened.” General Han stopped speaking, and there was a lengthening silence broken only by the sound of the General’s terran crickets skittering across the floor of their cage. They were the only personal object in an office furnished with only the basics. In these interesting limes, even those at the top of ForShing Yan society had to make do with little. “I regret to inform you,” he went on, “our calculations show that the shielding you so successfully tested would not hold against this field.”
DaQing s mind flashed back to the test flight. He’d never reported the American eagle he had on visual for nine seconds after he turned on the shielding, the one that had seemed to fire on him. He knew it would be regarded as a psychological lapse on his part, a pilot tricked by the shields visual distortions and hallucinating. After all, they would argue, his dragon hadn’t been fooled—the external data receptors showed nothing. He’d checked the black box on his return to Dragon Nest. His career would end and, without Jiao or any future he cared about, his
“We had hoped we would be able to shield all of Independent ForShing,” the General was saying. “Our engineers have the design, but we lack the materials. Still, we have plans, a small sacrifice in comfort by each of the ForShing Yan, and we will soon have enough to start construction. But now the Americans force us to move more quickly. We must attack the enemy before he realizes what he has built. Do you agree, captain?”
He was surprised to be asked his opinion. “Yes, General,” he answered.
“Good. Building enough systems to shield all our dragons will take less of our resources and can be accomplished much sooner, before the end of summer. And you will be the one to lead the attack on USAM. Congratulations, Colonel. We will destroy the enemy before he can destroy us.” The general saluted him, and DaQing saluted back. The flag of Independent ForShing hung on the wall behind the general, a golden dragon encircling the red sphere of Mars, and he saluted that, too. It was a fire dragon, destructive, a dragon of war, and it had claimed him. There would be no peace now.
Xristian Jefferson Kantu had never seen skin so gray in so young a person.
“I was just about to die,” Xandri said quietly. “It’s a terrible burden, knowing how and when you die.”
“We don’t know any such thing. Here’s what we think happened. Instead of propagating matter waves, we believe, but can’t observe, that the ZPE’s discharge creates minute timeshifts on a quantum level. It would be a random and diffuse phenomenon. But then Heckler’s ironically named law of chaos comes into play, which dictates that the random cause-and-effect patterns and synchronicities initiated by random source phenomena will eventually cohere into an organized, discrete phenomenon. Because time is a constant to each observer but not to all observers, the new timeshift phenomenon is localized, with a ripple effect of variable extent. Localized to you. Felt earlier in time, even before you first fired the ZPE.”
“But what is the timeshift phenomenon? Where am I going?”
“If the universe is an infinite layering of possible timecurves, with possibilities narrowing each time we make a decision, then the ZPE has breached the barrier between two of them and you are traveling through to an intersection where particular temporal realities are mutually inhabited. A future in which USAM is destroyed, but not necessarily our future. If so, the time synch could be unstable, so there would always be the risk of getting trapped. Or maybe the ZPE has created a timeloop, a closed timecurve. In order to form, a closed timecurve would need two events within a normal timecurve—an initiating event and a terminal event—of such impact on spacemass/timenergy that they create a distortion that bends the curve in on itself and ultimately breaches the timecurve barrier at the point where the two events achieve mutual temporality.”
“So the ZPE might be the initiating event.”
They were sitting in his office, in the two carved wood chairs he’d had brought from Earth in the heady days when America could afford to shower her colonists with material goods. Xristian Kantu stood and paced, deep in thought. At last, he sat down across from her again and took her hand. She was shocked. He had never done this, not even when her parents died. She was even more shocked to find comfort in his touch now.
“How long do you think it will be before the American president announces the Last Flight from Earth?” he asked.
“What do you mean? Uncle Sam on Earth will always be there for Uncle Sam on Mars. Vincente-Riaz says it in every second speech.”
“Basically, what America won in the Sino-American War was the right to preside over the end of the human era on Earth. Vincente-Riaz has already warned President Hartwell that we’d better get this war cleaned up and get ourselves self-sufficient in a hurry. Global climate change, environmental toxins, the VAIDS and brain flu pandemics—there are five billion fewer humans on Earth than there were a century ago and the birthrate is still dropping. We need a solution to the war up here fast, so Washington can concentrate on sending us the technology we’ll need to stay alive once we’re on our own. Otherwise we’ll win this war just to die a slow death.
“You’re experiencing other points on the timecurve, Xandri. Points in the future. We need to know more. We need to know the terminal event to ensure we win this war and establish a free Mars before the lifeline is cut. This isn’t an order. It can’t be. I can’t force you to fly back to the Dragon Nest and discharge the ZPE one more time. I just ask you to remember that your name is Jefferson Kantu.
Your heritage runs from great warriors, from Africa to America and now to Mars. I was modified as an adult to survive here; you carry this planet in your genes. And unfortunately, it seems the terran race dies with my generation. So one way or another, the future is yours.”
Xandri gave the order to fire and the ZPE jittered. But she never knew if there was a spatial result because the temporal reaction kicked in. When she emerged from the time twist, she was in a dogfight with the green dragon. There was a ruined city in the distance, and she seemed to know it was New Beijing. A glance at her instrumentation sent a flare of panic up her spine. The time-twist had worked differently this time—only she seemed to have come forward, not her eagle. She was in a different bird.
It too was fitted with a ZPE, but the instrumentation had been modified, and the ZPE was the only online weapons system.
She fired. The ZPE propagated matter waves that met the dragons scalar shell, and though the shield deflected much of the energy, she could see that she’d done serious damage. But before she could change course to come in for the kill, the green dragons missile took off her wing.
