The Long Shot Pt. 05

Euclidean Space had been named in reference to the ancient Terran mathematician Euclid. He had created several axioms for the mapping and modeling of space on a flat plane -- and now, an entire dimension had been named after him purely because of how it looked to most bifocal species.

Floating out in E-space (she had to remind herself, it was a simulation of E-space), Hornet saw for the first time, the infinite plane of E-space that had been described by Starships and Navigators for millennia. It really was a vast flat square of pure black that stretched outwards into each direction, infinitely. Floating above and below it, faintly visible to her eyes, were murky shapes of chaotic, fractal clouds that interlocked and swept about one another, lit from within by deep rumbles of lightning that ripped through their banks, buzzing out at the tips of each clouds, reaching out into the darkness around them, to light the space for a fleeting moment before dying.

[Wow...] Hugh whispered.

[Acclimate yourself while I chart the course,] Carcass said, trying to sound casual -- but even he sounded impressed.

Hornet gulped. She could do that, even if her body no longer had a throat nor needed food. "So, those are dark matter clouds," she said. "And that's the plane of reality."

[Yeah,] Heinlein said, quietly. [That's the entire visible universe.]

Hornet looked down at her feet and tried to make sense of the black square that she floated over. Euclidean Space existed...above...or below, depending on your perspective, normal physical reality. The way that it had been described to her during her high school FTL physics course was that reality was essentially an infinitesimally small fraction of possible universes: Every universe that ever came into being had the same several parameters of physical law -- how much or how little gravity pulled upon matter, the speed of light, the strength of the strong/weak nuclear forces, and so on. The vast majority of those universes had combinations of parameters that created nothing but vast boring soups of undifferentiated matter.

That tiny, two dimensional sheet that spread under her feet was that tiny skein of interesting universes. What, to her, was the physical, normal, real space universe that she lived in. She was now floating above that space, in a universe where the speed of light was infinitely faster -- and, thus, matter had never clumped together to form stars and planets, because they had simply been blown away from one another at super-luminal speeds by the Big Bang, creating an infinite emptiness that anyone could fly through.

"...seriously, though, what is with the dark matter here?" she whispered, eying those shimmering clouds of fractal, interlocking matter.

[We're still working on that,] Hugh said, softly.

[Course plotted,] Carcass said. A glowing line stretched along the square below Hornet, a small etching of golden-white light. Hornet swung herself around, so that her head was angled towards her home universe. She reached out, then touched her finger to the end of the course and felt the engines in her body trigger...and then she was shoved forward and emerged from E-space and into realspace with a blaze of light.

Starship drives were, by nature of their incredibly high efficient mass to energy ratio, far more powerful than a rocket's drive. This meant that they got far higher into E-space, where the lightspeed difference was much, much, much higher than the average rocket. The practical upshot of this was that a trip that would have taken days or even weeks for a rocket instead took a few minutes for her -- and so she emerged from E-space blinking and looking around herself wildly to acquire and understand her local space and situation.

Hornet was in the Slowness that was for sure. The space around her was lit by backscatter from dozens of thick dust clouds surrounding and shrouding the system she was in, meaning the normal blackness of space was replaced with a glowing dull orange hue, which shone from every direction. The nearest star was a red supergiant and her body felt a faint gusting of nuclear wind as cosmic rays brushed along her shoulders and her belly and her through her toes. The hardening that made her body able to survive in this area of space worked -- but she could feel a faint definite degradation in her ability to focus on more than one thing at a time as the computers in her brain started to have to correct for cosmic ray impacts.

This was why Starships needed to be people in the habitable realm and couldn't be sockpuppeted by Gods: Any God or Godlike entity running in a Starship's brain, the instant they arrived in this region of space, would cease to function at all. Humans, though, had evolved in roughly the same cognition band as was allowed in the shallow slowness -- meaning that she wasn't nearly as impaired.

"Do we have any eyes on the missing transport?"

[Yes!] K'iren said, and the target acquisition indicator popped up. By looking in that direction, Hornet saw the approximation of what the ship was: A huge, E-liner rocket that looked a bit like a big fat beetle. The main hull was mostly reaction mass for sublight maneuvering, but ssurrounding that was an civilian E-jump drive, a few fusion torches, a communication antenna, and the habitation bands that were rotating in stately rings around the belly of the ship. However, even from this distance, Hornet could see glowing burn marks from near-miss or low powered beam attacks. Several polyhedral shapes darted around the ship.

[Corevores!] Heinlein said. [Three of them, they're Stringray class attack frigates -- they're built around a spinal X-beam.]

"Assessment?" Hornet asked as she focused and shot forward at her max speeds, the zero point energy field around her body flinging her forward at incredible speeds. The energy costs for reactionless thrust was bonkers bad when you were bigger than, say, a human being...which was why Starships existed in the form they did. So many pieces of technology hit a peak efficiency when they were reduced in size -- shield emitters, x-beams, grazers, fabricators, all of them worked best when smaller.

[Easy peasy, working up a targeting list,] K'iren said.

[I'm angling your screens for a forward attack, if I do not miss your plan of engagement,] Carcass said.

[Plotting their courses,] Hugh added.

The space ahead of Hornet bloomed with shimmering wire-lines that indicated the trajectories of the civilian transport and the Corevore frigates. By now, they were all close enough that Hornet could really get the details. From the bulkiness and smoothed edges of the transport's habitation ring, she saw that they had to be oceanic dwellers, which explained the sluggishness of their sublight maneuvering. The Corevore frigates were each stamped from the same mold: Each one was essentially tree spars of triangular crystal emerging irregularly from a fist shaped hunk of rock. Their engines jutted at seeming random points along their frames, giving them that distinctive 'tumbling dice' maneuvering pattern, and allowing their x-beams to be brought to bear in a rotating pattern. Each time one of their faces angled towards the transport, they would blaze. Thanks to K'iren's work, their x-beams were painted into Hornet's vision.

One purple beam slashed along the fusion torch at the base of the transport, slicing it smoothly off. Another hacked the communication antenna away like a chainsaw put to a tree.

[They have us!] K'iren said.

Hornet, reacting instinctively, corkscrewed herself to the left, flipping and zooming past the transport. She saw, for a moment, windows with dolphinoid creatures peering out at her in shock, then she was past the entire engagement, banking around in a graceful hundred kilometer arc.

"I know, that's the plan," Hornet said. "Fab me some kinetics!"

[...I like how you think, Nettie!]

The fabricator in her belly began to work, heating her stomach up as, beneath her feet, the Corevore frigates tumbled after her, bringing beam after beam to bear. Some zipped through space past her shoulders, but most of them struck her feet and shoulders. Her shields redirected them away with angled deflections -- much cheaper than taking the full brunt, even if it took great reflexes and lots of math from Hugh. "Thanks Hugh!" she said as she looked down past her feet at the frigates. To not give the game away, she pointed her finger and...

Oh wow.

The feeling of her x-beam pulsing to life along her pointer finger was intensely potent. Her entire arm flared with heat and her fingertip blazed and then she saw an explosion of ablated armor on the nearest of the Corevore frigates as her x-beam cut into the armor plating. A gout of chlorine atmosphere exploded out from the ship and it broke off on the tumbling chase, trying to buy some time for damage control.

[How hard did you run our engines for that!?] Heinlein asked.

[She can take it, we're getting tons of solar energy from the sun,] K'iren said, casually. [Fabs done!]

Hornet narrowed her eyes. The navigation lines that traced along her vision intersected...

"Now!"

Her foot popped one of its chutes open and for a moment the illusion she was a humanoid woman took a serious hit as the launch tube was revealed to the world. But then the chute snapped shut and her foot looked normal -- albeit like a normal foot that had been painted dark black and red. That time had been long enough for her kinetic to drop out and then detonate. The space ahead of one of the frigate filled with dozens of tungsten flechettes, each of them given a vicious spin by the detonation of the kinetic's shaped charges.

One Corevore frigate intersected the cloud of flechettes and ceased to exist, its armor turned to so much glowing mist by the sheer speeds of the collision. The other clipped the cloud, so that one of its projections was ripped to shred and the entire frigate started to depressurize. But, as was the mode in space war, the rest of the interior was protected by internal baffles and airlocks, and so, the ship kept tumbling forward, firing its X-beams desperately.

Hornet pointed her finger and slashed it. The frigate flew in two halves, both tumbling away from one another in a spray of ablated metal.

[Left!] Hugh shouted.

The last, surviving frigate, came in from a tangent, beams blazing. One caught her right in the shoulder with a beam that managed to get through her shields and struck her shoulder for a fraction of a second -- but she was already twisting aside and pointing her finger. Her x-beam cut into it and struck something that detonated with enough force to rip the entire thing into a spray of metal, which whipped around and past her.

She panted, her hand going to her shoulder, feeling molten, bubbling metal moving through her fingers. "Damage report?"

[Minimal damage,] Carcass said. [The ablative armor took it all, we'll have it repaired in five minutes.]

[Course plotted for the transport,] Hugh said, cheerfully. [Their coms are down, we're going to need to go in through an airlock to talk to them and get them home]

Hornet felt a warm confidence growing inside of her. She'd...just won a...a fight!

A simulated fight. She shook herself -- and realized that the kernel of disbelief was still gone. She was honestly having a hard time convincing herself that this wasn't real. A prickling wave of fear crept over her, sweeping through her body as she focused and started to fly towards the transport. There was only one thing that made sense if what she knew about psychology and computer technology. If anyone could program and run a simulation so detailed and powerful that it could fool even a human being...

Well.

It'd be a God.

Was this another test? She thought.

And, as she flew up to the transport and got ready to slide into the airlock and meet with the simulated people she had saved, Hornet swore that she heard a very soft laugh.

***

Yetna had not managed to beat her own brains out against the bars when her first visitor arrived -- and to her regret, it wasn't the Queen, a Goddess, or even just a man that she might be able to seduce. Instead, it was none other than Chevalier Tulon. The woman had been a tough bitch in a fight even when she'd been outnumbered and Yetna had had an entire crew around her. Now?

Now, she looked like death incarnate.

And she wasn't even armed beyond a short dagger hung from her belt. She stood before the bars as Yetna looked out at her, her palms resting against the steel pillars, her breath coming slow and steadily. The Stasi was asleep, exhausted from her useless, fruitless attempt to work one of the bars free, and neither Yetna nor Tulon seemed interested in speaking and waking her up.

This enforced silence gave the two women a chance to look one over. Tulon was taller and tougher looking than Yetna, with a mongrel gray-white coloration, but what really drew Yetna's attention and concern was the look in her eyes.

Tulon looked as if she was furious -- coldly, bloody minded furious. Her jaw was tight. Her lips were turned down. And her fingers brushed along the hilt of her dagger. Yetna frowned -- and knew the reason why. She had never been married, but it didn't take a huge leap of imagination to try and feel what Tulon was feeling right now. She opened her mouth, but Tulon cut her off.

"Don't," she said, as if she had known exactly what Yetna had said. "The Queen's asked me to get information out of you...and right now, I'm trying to decide, what's worth more: Your information or the pleasure I'll get at cutting your fingers off one by one."

Yetna's blood ran cold. "That's...not how the Queens treat their prisoners..." she said, slowly.

"It's an Imperial method, I heard about it," Tulon said, her voice soft. Ragged. "So, why don't you give me one good reason why I shouldn't give you what you gave to others?"

Yetna felt, not for the first time, a deep sense that she had made serious mistakes in her life. But looking back, how the hell could she have chosen anything different? She had wanted to sail. She had wanted to protect her Island, to earn glory, to not get dragged off by the Stasi in the night, what anyone wanted. But somehow, doing all the things that had seemed like the right decision had ended up with her in a prison cell, with a furious widow threatening to cut her fingers off, and part of her could even see the reason why...why...if things were reversed...

"Revenge," she said.

"Okay," Tulon said, her hand drawing away from her knife hilt. "Talk."

Yetna's thoughts skittered ahead. "The only reason we were there in the first place was the Empress. S-She sent us out to get that Godd-"

"He's not a Goddess," Tulon hissed, leaning in close.

Yetna lifted her hands. "Yes. Right." She whispered, glancing back at Lidara. She wondered if the Stasi would be brave enough to attack her, to try and silence her before she gave away any secrets, if she threatened to betray the Empire. Not that she was particularly worried, considering Lidara's physical state. But...a desperate woman could do a lot of damage. Yetna looked back at Tulon, gulping. "But that's not all. The Empress says that she invented many things -- gunpowder, cannons, canister shot, the Stasi, but...there's a rumor that this all started after an expedition to the Deadman's Coast."

"Where'd you hear this rumor?" Tulon asked, frowning.

"My mother," Yetna said. "She was a sailor, before the Empire, and...she talked to me before she died." She licked her lips, trying to wet them. "If the Empress got something from the Deadman's Coast, then maybe we can find one too."

"How? No one can land on the coast, ships die if they try," Tulon said, her voice sharp edged.

"...Imperial ships don't," Yetna whispered, her breath very soft, leaning in close. "I've run cargo, before I made captain. And I remember how they did it. Just I have one request: Get me the hell out of here and away from her!"

Tulon didn't smile. Yetna, honestly, wasn't sure if Tulon could anymore.

But nod?

She could nod.

TO BE CONTINUED