Jeru laughed out loud, and just grabbed my arm. “Anyhow it’s the First Officer’s, and he doesn’t need it anymore, does he?”
I couldn’t argue with that; I accepted the injection. The pain started ebbing almost immediately.
Jeru pulled a tactical beacon out of her belt kit. It was a thumb-sized orange cylinder. “I’m going to try to signal the fleet. I’ll work my way out of this tangle; even if the beacon is working we might be shielded in here.” Pael started to protest, but she shut him up. I sensed I had been thrown into the middle of an ongoing conflict between them. “Case, you’re on stag. And show thisworm what’s in his kit. I’ll come back the same way I go. All right?”
“Yes.” More SOP.
She slid away through silvery threads.
I lodged myself in the tangle and started to go through the stuff in the belt kits Till had fetched for us.
There was water, rehydration salts, and compressed food, all to be delivered to spigots inside our sealed hoods. We had power packs the size of my thumbnail, but they were as dead as the rest of the kit. There was a lot of low-tech gear meant to prolong survival in a variety of situations, such as a magnetic compass, a heliograph, a thumb saw, a magnifying glass, pitons, and spindles of rope, even fishing line.
I had to show Pael how his suit functioned as a lavatory. The trick is just to let go; a slime suit recycles most of what you give it, and compresses the rest. That’s not to say it’s comfortable. I’ve never yet worn a suit that was good at absorbing odors. I bet no suit designer spent more than an hour in one of her own creations.
I felt fine.
The wreck, the hammer-blow deaths one after the other-none of it was far beneath the surface of my mind. But that’s where it stayed, for now; as long as I had the next task to focus on, and the next after that, I could keep moving forward. The time to let it all hit you is after the show.
I guess Pael had never been trained like that.
He was a thin, spindly man, his eyes sunk in black shadow, and his ridiculous red beard was crammed up inside his faceplate. Now that the great crises were over, his energy seemed to have drained away, and his functioning was slowing to a crawl. He looked almost comical as he pawed at his useless bits of kit.
After a time he said, “Case, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you from Earth, child?”
“No. I-”
He ignored me. “The Academies are based on Earth. Did you know that, child? But they do admit a few off- worlders.”
I glimpsed a lifetime of outsider resentment. But I couldn’t care less. Also I wasn’t a child. I asked cautiously, “Where are you from, sir?”
He sighed. “It’s 51 Pegasi. I-B.”
I’d never heard of it. “What kind of place is that? Is it near Earth?”
“Is everything measured relative to Earth…? Not very far. My home world was one of the first extrasolar planets to be discovered-or at least, the primary is. I grew up on a moon. The primary is a hot Jupiter.”
I knew whatthat meant: a giant planet huddled close to its parent star.
He looked up at me. “Where you grew up, could you see the sky?”
“No-”
“I could. And the sky was full of sails. That close to the sun, solar sails work efficiently, you see. I used to watch them at night, schooners with sails hundreds of kilometers wide, tacking this way and that in the light. But you can’t see the sky from Earth-not from the Academy bunkers anyhow.”
“Then why did you go there?”
“I didn’t have a choice.” He laughed, hollowly. “I was doomed by being smart. That is why your precious commissary despises me so much, you see. I have been taught to think-and we can’t have that, can we…?”
I turned away from him and shut up. Jeru wasn’t “my” commissary, and this sure wasn’t my argument.
Besides, Pael gave me the creeps. I’ve always been wary of people who knew too much about science and technology. With a weapon, all you want to know is how it works, what kind of energy or ammunition it needs, and what to do when it goes wrong. People who know all the technical background and the statistics are usually covering up their own failings; it is experience of use that counts.
But this was no loudmouth weapons tech. This was an Academician: one of humanity’s elite scientists. I felt I had no point of contact with him at all.
I looked out through the tangle, trying to see the fleet’s sliding, glimmering lanes of light.
There was motion in the tangle. I turned that way, motioning Pael to keep still and silent, and got hold of my knife in my good hand.
Jeru came bustling back, exactly the way she had left. She nodded approvingly at my alertness. “Not a peep out of the beacon.”
Pael said, “You realize our time here is limited.”
I asked, “The suits?”
“He means the star,” Jeru said heavily. “Case, fortress stars seem to be unstable. When the Ghosts throw up their cordon, the stars don’t last long before going pop.”
Pael shrugged. “We have hours, a few days at most.”
Jeru said, “Well, we’re going to have to get out, beyond the fortress cordon, so we can signal the fleet.
That or find a way to collapse the cordon altogether.”
Pael laughed hollowly. “And how do you propose we do that?”
Jeru glared. “Isn’t it your role to tell me, Academician?”
Pael leaned back and closed his eyes. “Not for the first time, you’re being ridiculous.”
Jeru growled. She turned to me. “You. What doyou know about the Ghosts?”
I said, “They come from someplace cold. That’s why they are wrapped up in silvery shells. You can’t bring a Ghost down with laser fire because of those shells. They’re perfectly reflective.”
Pael said, “Not perfectly. They are based on a Planck-zero effect…About onepart in a billion of incident energy is absorbed.”
I hesitated. “They say the Ghosts experiment on people.”
Pael sneered. “Lies put about by your Commission for Historical Truth, Commissary. To demonize an opponent is a tactic as old as mankind.”
Jeru wasn’t perturbed. “Then why don’t you put young Case right? Howdo the Ghosts go about their business?”
Pael said, “The Silver Ghosts tinker with the laws of physics.”
I looked to Jeru; she shrugged.
Pael tried to explain. It was all to do with quagma.
Quagma is the state of matter that emerged from the Big bang. Matter; when raised to sufficiently high temperatures, melts into a magma of quarks-a quagma. And at such temperatures the four fundamental forces of physics unify into a single superforce. When quagma is allowed to cool and expand its binding superforce decomposes into four sub-forces.
To my surprise, I understood some of this. The principle of the GUTdrive, which powers intrasystem ships likeBrief Life Burns Brightly, is related.
Anyhow, by controlling the superforce decomposition, you can select the ratio between those forces.
And those ratios govern the fundamental constants of physics.
Something like that.
Pael said, “That marvelous reflective coating of theirs is an example. Each Ghost is surrounded by a thin layer of space in which a fundamental number called the Planck constant is significantly lower than elsewhere. Thus, quantum effects are collapsed…Because the energy carried by a photon, a particle of light, is proportional to the Planck constant, an incoming photon must shed most of its energy when it hits the shell-hence the reflectivity.”
“All right,” Jeru said. “So what are they doing here?”
Pael sighed. “The fortress star seems to be surrounded by an open shell of quagma and exotic matter.
We surmise that the Ghosts have blown a bubble around each star, a space-time volume in which the laws of physics are-tweaked.”
