Remontoire grinned at the armoured servitor. Fine for you, then.
[It wouldn’t be comfortable for me, either, I assure you.]
So what does the machine do? Does all the matter within the bubble have zero inertia?
[No, not in the present operating mode. The radial effectiveness of the damping depends on the mode in which we’re running the device. At the moment we’re in an inverse square field, which means that the inertial damping becomes four times more efficient every time we halve our distance to the machine; it becomes near infinite in the immediate proximity of the machine, but the inertial mass never drops to absolute zero. Not in this mode.]
But there are other modes?
[Yes: other states, we call them, but they’re all very much less stable than the present one.] She paused, eyeing Remontoire. [You look ill. Shall we return upship?]
I’ll be fine for now. Tell me more about your magic box.
Skade smiled, as stiffly as usual, but with what looked to Remontoire like pride. [Our first breakthrough was in the opposite direction — creating a region of enhanced quantum vacuum fluctuation, thereby increasing the energy-momentum flux. We call that state one. The effect was a zone of hyper-inertia: a bubble in which all motion ceased. It was unstable, and we never managed to magnify the field to macroscopic scales, but there were fruitful avenues for future research. If we could freeze motion by ramping inertia up by many orders of magnitude we’d have a stasis field, or perhaps an impenetrable defensive barrier. But cooling — state two — turned out to be technically simpler. The pieces almost fell into place.]
I’ll bet they did.
‘Is there a third state?’ Felka asked.
[State three is a singularity in our calculations that we don’t expect to be physically realisable. All inertial mass vanishes. All matter in a state-three bubble would become photonic: pure light. We don’t expect that to happen; at the very least it would imply a massive local violation of the law of conservation of quantum spin.]
‘And beyond that — on the other side of the singularity? Is there a state four?’
[Now we’re getting ahead of ourselves, I think. We’ve explored the properties of the device in a well-understood parameter space, but there’s no point in indulging in wild speculation.]
How much testing, exactly?
[Nightshade was chosen to be the prototype: the first ship to be equipped with inertia-suppression machinery. I ran some tests during the earlier flight, dropping the inertia by a measurable amount — enough to alter our fuel consumption and verify the effectiveness of the field, but not enough to draw attention.]
And now?
[The field is much stronger. The ship’s effective mass is now only twenty per cent of what it was when we left the Mother Nest — there’s a relatively small part of the ship projecting ahead of the field, but we can do better than that simply by increasing the field strength.] Skade clapped her hands together with a creak of armour. [Think of it, Remontoire — we could squeeze our mass down to one per cent, or less — accelerate at a hundred gees. If our bodies were inside the bubble of suppressed inertia we’d be able to withstand it, too. We’d reach near-light cruise speed in a couple of days. Subjective travel between the closest stars in under a week of shiptime. There’d be no need for us to be frozen. Can you imagine the possibilities? The galaxy would suddenly be a much smaller place.]
But that’s not why you developed it. Remontoire climbed to his feet. Still light-headed, he steadied himself against the wall. It was the closest he had come to intoxication in a great while. This excursion had been interesting enough, but he was now more than ready to return upship, where the blood in his body would behave as nature had intended.
[I’m not sure I understand, Remontoire.]
It was for when the wolves arrive — the same reason you’ve built that evacuation fleet.
[Sorry?]
Even if we can’t fight them, you’ve at least given us a means of running away very, very quickly.
Clavain opened his eyes from another bout of forced sleep. Cool dreams of walking through Scottish forests in the rain seduced him for a few dangerous moments. It was so tempting to return to unconsciousness, but then old soldierly instincts forced him to snap into grudging alertness. There had to be a problem. He had instructed the corvette not to wake him until it had something useful or ominous to report, and a quick appraisal of the situation revealed that this was most emphatically the latter.
Something was following him. Details were available on request.
Clavain yawned and scratched at the now generous growth of beard that he sported. He caught a glimpse of himself in the cabin window and registered mild alarm at what he saw. He looked wild-eyed and maniacal, as if he had just stumbled from the depths of a cave. He ordered the corvette to stop accelerating for a few minutes, then gathered some water into his hands from the faucet, cupping the amoeba-like droplets between his palms, and then endeavoured to splash them over his face and hair, slicking and taming hair and beard. He glanced at his reflection again. The result was not a great improvement, but at least he no longer looked feral.
Clavain unharnessed himself and set about preparing coffee and something to eat. It was his experience that crises in space fell into two categories: those that killed you immediately, usually without much warning, and those that gave you plenty of time to ruminate on the problem, even if no solution was very likely. This, on the basis of the evidence, looked like the kind which could be contemplated after first sating his appetite.
He filled the cabin with music: one of Quirrenbach’s unfinished symphonies. He sipped the coffee, leafing through the corvette’s status log entries while he did so. He was pleased but not surprised to see that the ship had operated flawlessly ever since his departure from Skade’s comet. There was still adequate fuel to carry him all the way to circum-Yellowstone space, including the appropriate orbital insertion procedures once he arrived. The corvette was not the problem.
Transmissions had been received from the Mother Nest as soon as his departure had become evident. They had been tight-beamed on to him, maximally encrypted. The corvette had unpacked the messages and stored them in time-sequence.
Clavain bit into a slice of toast. ‘Play ’em. Oldest first. Then erase immediately.’
He could have guessed what the first few messages would be like: frantic requests from the Mother Nest for him to turn around and come home. The first few gave him the benefit of the doubt, assuming — or pretending to assume — that he had some excellent justification for what looked like a defection attempt. But they had been half-hearted. Then the messages gave up on that tack and simply started threatening him.
Missiles had been launched from the Mother Nest. He had turned off his course and lost them. He had assumed that would be the end of it. A corvette was fast. There was nothing else that could catch him, unless he turned to interstellar space.