Alastiar Reynolds

There was never anyone called Jastrusiak on this ship, Molenka.
Molenka turned — so it appeared to Skade — a shade paler. Her reply was little more than an exhalation. note 349
I assure you, there was no one called Jastrusiak. This is a small crew, and I know everyone on it.
note 350
Perhaps you do . Skade was tempted, very tempted, to reach into Molenka’s head and install a mnemonic blockade, wiping out Molenka’s memory of what had just happened. But that would not bury the evident conflict between what she thought to be true and what was objective reality.
Molenka, I know this will be difficult for you, but you have to continue working with the equipment. I’m sorry about Jastrusiak — I forgot his name for a moment. Well find him, I promise you. There are many places where he could have ended up.
note 351
Skade cut her off, one of her fingers suddenly appearing beneath Molenka’s chin. No. No words, Molenka. No words, no thoughts. Just go back into the machinery and make the necessary adjustments. Do that for me, will you? Do it for me, and for the Mother Nest ?
Molenka trembled. She was, Skade judged, quite exquisitely terrified. It was the resigned, hopeless terror of a small mammal caught in something’s claws. note 352

The name Jastrusiak stuck in Skade’s mind, tantalisingly familiar. She could not dislodge it. When the opportunity presented itself, she tapped into the Con- joiner collective memory and retrieved all references connected to the name, or anything close to it. She was determined to understand what had made Molenka’s subconscious malfunction in such a singularly creative fashion, weaving a non-existent individual out of nothing in a moment of terror.
To her moderate surprise, Skade learned that Jastrusiak was a name known to the Mother Nest. There had been a Jastrusiak amongst the Conjoined. He had been recruited during the Chasm City occupation. He had quickly gained Inner Sanctum clearance, where he worked on advanced concepts such as breakthrough propulsion theory. He had been one of a team of Conjoiner theorists who had established their own research base on an asteroid. They had been working on methods to convert existing Conjoiner drives to the stealthed design.
It was tricky work, it turned out. Jastrusiak’s team had been amongst the first to learn exactly how tricky. Their entire base, along with a sizeable chunk of that hemisphere of the asteroid, had been wiped out in an accident.
So Jastrusiak was dead — had, in fact, been dead for many years.
But had he lived, Skade thought, he would have been exactly the kind of expert she would have recruited for her own team aboard Nightshade . Very probably he would have been of similar calibre to Molenka, and would have ended up working alongside her.
What did it mean? It was, she supposed, no more than uncomfortable coincidence.
Molenka called her back. note 353
Skade hesitated, almost about to tell her that she had discovered the truth about Jastrusiak. But then she thought better of it. Make it so , Skade told her.

She watched the machinery move, the curved black arms whisking back and forth and, it appeared, through each other, knitting and threshing time and space like some infernal weaving machine, coaxing and cradling the bacterium-sized speck of altered metric into the tachyonic phase. Within seconds the machinery had become a knitting blur behind Nightshade . The gravity wave and exotic particle sensors registered squalls of deep spatial stress as the quantum vacuum on the boundary of the bubble was curdled and sheared on microscopic scales. The pattern of those squalls, filtered and processed by computers, told Molenka how the bubble’s geometry was behaving. She transmitted this data to Skade, permitting her to visualise the bubble as a glowing globule of light, pulsing and quivering like a drop of mercury suspended in a magnetic cradle. Colours, not all of them within the normal human spectrum, shifted in prismatic waves across the skin of the bubble, signifying arcane nuances of quantum-vacuum interaction. None of that concerned Skade; all that mattered to her were the accompanying indices that told her that the bubble was behaving normally, or as normally as could be expected of something that had no real right to exist in this universe. There was a soft blue glow from the bubble as particles of Hawking radiation were snatched into the tachyonic state and whisked away from Nightshade at superluminal speed.
Molenka signalled that they were ready to expand the bubble, so that Nightshade itself would be trapped inside its own sphere of tachyonic-phase space-time. The process would happen in a flash, and the field, according to Molenka, would collapse back to its microscopic scale in subjective picoseconds, but that instant of stability would be sufficient to translate Skade’s ship across a light-nanosecond of space, about one-third of a metre. Disposable probes had already been deployed beyond the expected radius of the bubble, ready to capture the instant when the ship made its tachyonic shift. One-third of a metre was not enough to make a difference against Clavain, of course, but in principle the jump procedure could be extended in duration and repeated almost immediately. By far the hardest thing would be to do it once; thereafter it was only a question of refinements.
Skade gave Molenka permission to expand the bubble. At the same time Skade willed her implants into their maximum state of accelerated consciousness. The normal activity of the ship became a barely changing background; even the whisking black arms slowed so that she was able to appreciate their hypnotic dance more clearly. Skade examined her state of mind and found nervous anticipation, mingled with the visceral fear that she was about to commit a grave mistake. She recalled that the Wolf had told her that very few organic entities had ever moved faster than light. Under other circumstances, she might have chosen to heed the Wolf’s unspoken warning, but at the same time the Wolf had been goading her on, urging her to this point. Its technical assistance had been vital in decoding the Exordium instructions, and she assumed that it had some interest in preserving its own existence. But perhaps it simply enjoyed seeing her conflicted, caring nothing for its own survival.
Never mind. It was done now. The whisking arms were already altering the field conditions around the bubble, stroking the boundary with delicate quantum caresses, encouraging it to expand. The wobbling bubble enlarged, swelling in a series of lopsided expansions. The scale changed in a series of logarithmic jumps, but not nearly fast enough. Skade knew immediately that something was wrong. The expansion should have happened too rapidly to be sensed, even in accelerated consciousness. The bubble should have engulfed the ship by now, but instead it had only inflated to the size of a swollen grapefruit. It hovered within the grasp of the whisking arms, horribly, tauntingly wrong. Skade prayed for the bubble to shrink back down to bacterium size, but she knew from what Molenka had said that it was much more likely to expand in an uncontrolled fashion. Horrified and enraptured, she watched as the grapefruit-sized bubble flexed and undulated, becoming peanut-shaped one instant and then squirming into a torus, a topological transformation that Molenka had sworn was impossible. Then it was a bubble again, and then, as random bulges