Chase shut off the scattershot. "I think we’re depleted," she said. The silver launch and its assault team had spurted past us and was still going, hoping (I assumed) not to be noticed in the general melee.
Another blast hit us. "A second proton burst," said the computer. "This one was well off target. No damage."
"Computer, arm a nuke."
"Alex, this is our chance to run." Something else blew up out there. Whether it was the warship disintegrating, or continuing to fire on us, I couldn’t tell.
"In a minute."
"Armed and ready to fire, Captain."
"Alex, what are you doing? It’s over. Let’s get out of here."
"The sons of bitches tried to kill us, Chase. I’m going to finish them while we can."
I listened to the sounds of the bridge: the reassuring throb of power in the bulkheads, the cadences of the data processing systems, the soft murmur of the intership commlink. Chase’s breathing.
"There’s no need," she said.
I locked in the target angle.
She stared at me. "I liked the earlier Tanner," she said. "The one who offered her arm to a mute."
Electrical fires raged throughout the stricken ship.
"Captain, it has begun to move away."
"Let them go," urged Chase. "Let’s try to do things right this time."
I sat with my finger on the presspad.
"They’ll know you could have killed them, and didn’t. They’ll always know that."
"Yeah," I said. "For all the good it’ll do anybody."
We watched them limp off into the dark.
XXV.
Boundaries have no existence save on charts or in small minds. Nature does not draw lines.
I THINK SOMETIMES about Christopher Sim’s observation that Thermopylae need not have been fought.
My war with the Ashiyyur seems to fall into the same category. It would not have happened had I not spent an afternoon revealing everything I knew to S’Kalian at the Maracaibo Caucus. That visit may not have been the dumbest act of all time, but it’s certainly up there among the top ten. We came desperately close to losing the Corsarius and all she contained.
Chase was right about the Armstrongs: there weren’t any. But a far more sophisticated propulsion system stood in their place. And, about ten hours after the incident with the mute warship, the computers gave us a few minutes warning, and the Corsarius took us home.
It was not the sickening dive into multi-dimensional space, and the dreary two-month ride down the gray tunnel that we’d endured on the way out.
It was more like a blink.
Stars blurred, and reappeared. (If we’d been watching closely, we’d have seen the constellations change, the Great Wheel vanish, the familiar configurations of Rimway’s nighttime sky emerge from the moment of confusion.) Belmincour’s sun was gone, and we were approaching lovely, blue-white crescented Rimway. The comm system crackled with traffic, and a quarter moon floated off to starboard.
There was only the briefest physical sensation: a moment during which there had been no deck underfoot, no air to breathe. It passed so quickly that I was unsure it had happened at all.
Under the pressure of that desperate war, someone, certainly Rashim Machesney and his team, had solved a series of theoretical problems related to gravity waves and derived a practical application. Recognizing that gravity, like light, is dualistic in nature, that it is both wave and particle, they had drawn the obvious conclusion: gravity can be quantized.
A wide range of implications rises from this simple fact. The one most significant for Chase and me, sitting in our ancient frigate, feeling not confident of ever getting home, was this: large physical objects are capable of the quantum jump of the electron. That is, it is possible to move them from point to point without crossing the intervening space.
The Corsarius was equipped with a tunable gravity wave collector, enhanced by hyperconductive magnets designed to reduce electrical resistance to a negative factor. The result: the ship was able to achieve displacement in the time/space fabric with a zero time interval.
Well, you already know all that. But that’s how it happens that Chase and I are not still out on the far side of the Veiled Lady.
The quantum drive.
Range isn’t unlimited, of course. It’s a factor of the nature of the drive, and of available power. Energy is stored in a hyperconducting ring, and must be applied within excruciatingly exact limits at the moment of transition. And a ship can’t move freely even within that range. The minimum distance it will cross is slightly longer than a light-day. After that, intervals are reduced by infinitesimal, but steadily increasing, variables. It’s somewhat like stations. All this is apparently tied in with statistics and quantum logic and the Hays Certainty Principle. But the result is that the method isn’t practical for voyages that are either very short, or very long.
We have a better understanding now of what relations among the various human worlds really were during the War against the Ashiyyur. (Or at least Chase and I do.) Though we had always known they hadn’t trusted one another, it came as a shock that the Dellacondans withheld their discovery from their allies. And that it was consequently lost for two centuries after Rigel.
A lot has changed since we brought the Corsarius back from Belmincour.
Political unity on a grand scale has become practical, and the Confederacy appears to be stabilizing. We may make it after all.
I’ve also been happy that the drive has not been used in any particularly offensive way against the Ashiyyur. I owe them no love, and yet, if there is a lesson in all this, I think it points in that direction. We own an immense technological advantage now. Tensions have eased, and some experts claim you can’t have a serious rivalry without a military balance. Maybe we’re looking toward a new era. I hope so.
The Maracaibo Caucus is still open down at Kostyev House. I’ve never gone back, but I wish them well.
You can still see Matt Olander’s grave outside Point Edward. The Ilyandans dismissed Kindrel Lee’s story out of hand.
There’s talk now of an intergalactic mission. Power remains a problems; the voyage would have to be made in a series of (relatively) short jumps. Recharging is slow; and the experts estimate that a trip to Andromeda would consume the better part of a century and a half. But we’re coming. There’ve already been some improvements on Machesney’s basic design; and I hope to live long enough to crack a bottle across the prow of the first intergalactic survey ship. (Promises have been made.)
The reputations of the Sims have suffered no lasting damage. In fact, most people dismiss the Belmincour story and believe firmly that the hero died off Rigel.
There’s a theory that has gained some status among scholars that I’ve found interesting: the notion that there was a final confrontation on the shelf, and that the brothers ultimately embraced, and parted in tears.
Which brings us to the inscription on the rock:
The first section is a cry of anguish, used often by the hero in classical Greek tragedy. Then: O Demosthenes. Most historians read that cry as a tribute by Christopher Sim to his brother’s oratorical abilities and hence as a demonstration of forgiveness: I am in agony, O Demosthenes, it seems to say. This also supports the view of the final parting on the shelf, attended by all the concomitant bitterness and affection that such an event would have generated.