Dead Reckoning

The cloud of fighters pulled away from the Nightstalker. Every second two or three would blink out of normal space-time.

"We only have a few minutes!" cried Jolt. "Thresher -- can we jump?"

"You don't want to follow them, do you?" The First Mate was alarmed.

Thresher checked his displays. "Hyperdrives are online, charge at 80 percent -- ready when you are."

Jolt turned to the First Mate. "No, following them would be suicide. We're going to acquire their hyper-vector!"

Turning back to look at The Eye, Jolt continued giving orders. "Eye -- take helm control. Pure evasive maneuvers, we're just taking pictures."

"I see." The First Mate paused and considered. "That's actually a good idea. We can narrow down the region of space they might re-appear. I'll paint them with our targeting computer -- then we can crunch the data." He took position on the weapons console.

The Nightstalker peeled away from normal space, and entered hyperspace.

It was surrounded by a bubble of Euclidian 3-space, and moving in a region with at least 7 macroscopic dimensions. The ship's interocciter scanned the convoluted manifolds of hyperdimensional regions of equilibrium of gravitiational potentials, where similar bubbles enclosing the fleeing fighters could exist.

"Now entering the first valence. I have a drive signature! Power at 77%." Thresher monitored the ship's systems on his console.

Two bubbles of Euclidian space met and merged. The fighter blinked into and out of existence in front of the Nightstalker as the starship briefly matched the fighter's frame of reference.

"We got a lock-on! Keep going, we don't know if they're all going the same place!" The First Mate was excited.

"That was a good one. I have a full interocciter scan of the vessel." Thresher watched the data pump along a schematic progress bar from the front sensor array to the main computers.

Up left counter-clockwise an elongated bubble untwirled over a local vortex, surrounding a pair of fighters flying on the buddy system.

Shocked to see Corporate corvette spin into their context, the rear pilot, Bob-Luke, radioed his companion, Dworkin.

"Whoa! Look at that!"

Dworkin turned a key in his cramped cockpit and fumbled to enter a four-digit code on a small key-pad taped to the dashboard of his fighter. A cyan light lit by a display labelled "WARHEADS ARMED."

"Got a shot -- I'm taking it!" Dworkin's trigger finger twitched on the fighter's yoke.

Two missles steamed from the racks beneath the fighter's stubby wings. The flight path to the Nightstalker was short and straight, and the warheads detonated just behind the corvette.

A tiny nuclear charge detonated, and the pulse of radiation and neutron flux struck a thick layer of cobalt alloy, vaporizing it and transmuting the metal into a souce of bio-toxic gamma radiation. The explosion of super-heated plasma was not as brisant as a proper warhead for space combat, but the expanding wave of irradiated cobalt held on for considerably longer before decaying.

The idea behind a bug bomb is not to create a huge crater, but to spread a powerful yet short-lived gamma emitter over as broad an area as possible in on a planet with an atmosphere. In space, the plasma cloud spread and cooled quickly, attenuating the effect of the nuclear charge.

The shock waves impacted the Nightstalker, shaking the hull. A frost-like layer of radioactive cobalt alloy cooled and condensed onto the hull of the corvette, flash-frozen by the ship's shields.

"Dworkin? Are you all right?" Bob-Luke radioed his companion.

Dworkin smiled as the NIghtstalker struggled to stay in hyperspace. "Got the bastards! You go, farm boy! Make your momma proud."

"I ain't Number Seven, ma'am. Not even close." The young man sounded scared.

"Yes, you are, boy. You're the one..." Dworkin dropped out of hyperspace, leaving her wingman to continue to the target.

On the bridge of the Nightstalker, panic reigned. Thresher checked his displays.

"The data feed made it to the main computer before the rads scrambled our sensors. What a mess!" Thresher was secretly dreading the clean-up action that would come next. While he was largely radiation-proof, the clean-up and disposal protocols were arduous; it was going to be a very long extra-vehicular activity before their ship could return to settled space.

Jolt scowled as she sunk into the captain's chair. "Dammit, we've been slimed."

On the surface of Suburbia Prime, a small figure entered the courtyard of a hurriedly abandoned tent city. She looked down at her jacket.

She was wearing her M-Seven badge. She was Number Six. If anyone were still keeping lookout here, in this desolate former place of temporary industry, they might hold her for a friend and ally.

Jinx Bubastis proceeded into the courtyard, and passed by a still-smoldering firepit. Clothing and papers were blowing in the wind. A thread-bare baby doll lay in the dusty debris. Jinx looked at it, and felt a swell of memory.

She had been feeling strange since her encounter with Peter. Her powers were vastly reduced -- most of her abilities were locked up in the crude parody of the material world he had constructed in her mind. She was having difficulty concentrating, and suspected that Peter was having similar problems.

Under ordinary circumstances, she would banish the thoughts from her mind, but now her mind was not entirely her own, and she did not have the strength to push her thoughts and feelings away.

She looked at the doll, and remembered another camp, a long way from here. Her father had left an hour ago, gone to find wood for the cooking fire. She was playing with her battered doll when she heard a young hunter rushing into the camp. She threw the doll down into the dust, much like the one she was looking at now.

She did not understand what he was yelling. Behind him, two men carried a slumping form in a blanket.

She remembered being hungry, and followed them into the central clearing, hoping to get a slice of tongue from the hunters' kill. As she wobbled towards them on her little girl legs, they unwrapped the blanket.

It was not a carcass, but a corpse. Her father's chest had been torn open by shrapnel. Her hunger turned suddenly to horror, as she contemplated eating his tongue.

From inside her mind, Peter's voice begged quietly, "Make it stop. Make it stop..."

She pushed the memory away, and with it the protests of her prisoner. "Suck it up, vat-meat." The rage and shame from the memory gave her a renewed sense of focus.

Now she felt a strange sort of curiousity, a nervous, jittery drive to know. She remembered feelings like this, when she was studying sorcery, but this was different -- a heartfelt yearning for things to make sense, a joy in understanding. It was a strangely intoxicating and pleasant feeling.

She triggered the elevator to the underground warehouse. The lights went on, illuminating containers in neat rows. She opened one of them, and she felt a wave of excitement. Her incuriousity about her colleagues' plans seemed strange to her now.

Approaching the cubical console, she reached for the back and flipped the latches with an unfamiliar movement that was suddenly second nature to her. Detaching the storage module from the internal bus, she held it in her hand and smiled.

Soon, they would know for sure.

What Exactly Does Regret Mean?

Her bunk was cramped, but Jinx Bubastis had been in space so long that she felt uncomfortable in an open bed. Her quarters were orderly, yet cramped -- she used what little free room there was to store the cases for her recording equipment.

She rolled out of bed at lights-on, pulled on a robe over her nightshirt, and sat down at a table with a mirror and double-headed sonic brush. Jinx stuck the small head into her mouth and started to clean her teeth.

She saw Peter in the mirror, sitting on the case of her psychogram. She retrieved the remote control for the psychogram and started recording. "Good morning. You learn irritatingly quickly."

"You have to let me out."

"The way out is easy, but you're not going to like it. Let me finish brushing my teeth." Jinx took a swig of water between her cheek and gum and stuck the brush into the accumulated water. She swallowed and entered a trance, joining Peter in her mindscape.

The changes were subtle, but Jinx noticed them instantly. Instead of a dimensionless white space, Peter's prison had a clearly defined floor.

She looked at him, obviously puzzled. Peter explained, "I tried to reconfigure the environment into something I could work with. I've blasted my way out of extradimensional prisons before."

Jinx was agitated.

"Unfortunately, you stopped breathing for about a minute after I put this environment together. I didn't want to take any chances--" Peter seemed hopeless.

"You had the chance to kill me in my sleep and you didn't? Why?" Jinx was angry.

"Because it would be wrong." Peter seemed strengthened by saying this.

"I beat you up, tore out your throat, ate your soul and damned you to hell. I think you have the right to take vengeance." Jinx sneered.

"Then two people die instead of one." Peter stood his ground.

Jinx became angry. "I'm not a person, I'm a monster! Are you such a self-righteous moron you can't even pretend you value life?"

"I do value life--"

"If you aren't willing or able to exercise your rights, you might as well not have any. It's an empty pretense if you don't follow through."

"You want me to kill you?"

"I'd like to see you try."

"No. No, you seriously wouldn't. Because I can." A touch of fear crept into Peter's voice.

Jinx paused for a moment and felt the air surrounding her. Peter had bound vast amounts of ectoplasm together into a crude parody of matter. A rapid state transition could blast both of them apart.

"Like I said, there's another way out."

"You said I wouldn't like it." Peter was calm.

"You won't. Somewhere here is a threshold. You'll find it when you can imagine a world without you, but I very much doubt you are mentally and spiritually equipped to concieve of a world without your petty moral certainties--"

"What, over there?" Peter pointed to a grey curtain that stretched away in both directions into the ghostly mists.

Caught in the middle of her stream of invective, Jinx rallied in an instant. "You suck."

"I can't cross. I tried that first." Peter seemed nervous.

Jinx's momentum, first slowed, now stopped. She paused for a moment, and contemplated the situation, recognizing the stand-off. "It takes most people a long time before they can. Something's keeping you here."

"I... I have some unfinished business." Peter looked at Jinx.

"What?" Jinx was curious.

"I'm worried about the attack on Sedgewick Station..." Peter seemed uncomfortable, and uncertain how to continue.

Jinx tried for a few seconds to keep a straight face, but eventually burst out into laughter.

"You've got to be kidding me! You seriously think Team Evil's ill-conceived plan is going to mean a damned thing in the grand scheme of things? I think you're taking show-biz a little too seriously, man..."

"That's the thing. The scale of the operation was too large. They must have had some kind of logistical support--"

"Uh, yeah. That was my job. Seriously, if Demonslayer had anything planned after the fighters launched, she sure didn't tell anybody about it."

"But... why bother, then? Are you sure she had no plan?"

"Peter, it's... it's just a game. They blow stuff up, get a subcontractor to rebuild it -- it keeps the wheels turning. It doesn't mean a damend thing in the end. This time, they got rid of a bunch of bums without paying for relocation and rehab. It's not real."

"How can you be so sure, Jinx? I think your cynicism blinds you--"

"Lucky for me you're a rational being. I think I can prove your concerns unfounded. Just one little piece of evidence that it's all a scam, and you can go."

Jinx shook her head dismissively and disappeared.

She sat down on her bunk, looked in the mirror, and saw no Peter. She smiled, and paused the psychogram.

Follow The Leader

The Nightstalker and its six escorts accelerated in pursuit of the cloud of fighters. The Eye was on tactical, and reviewed the sensor reports.

"Five thousand, six hundred and forty-three marks, accelerating at eight standard gravities from Suburbia Prime. They're sticking together." The Eye paused for a moment, and a cloud of tiny false-color dots covered the bridge's main view-screen.

Jolt, sitting in the captain's chair, narrowed her eyes. "Their energy storage capacity is limited. If they're going to jump, they'll have to do it soon."

She regarded the cloud of mauve-colored dots. "Do we have fragment bombs?"

The Eye checked her armory display. "Yes, sir, we do."

"Give me a rack of torpedoes with frag bombs. Thresher, relay that to our wingmen. Let's take as many of them out as we can while they're still vulnerable."

Thresher was at the communications station. "Done. They'll fire at our command."

Jolt turned to the First Mate, who was standing beside her. "Fire at your discretion."

The First Mate tensed and turned to a console. "Transfer fire control now."

The Eye complied, tapping buttons on her tactical console. "Done."

The First Mate entered an attack plan, explaining as he manipulated the controls. "If I understand you correctly, Captain, you wish to deploy the bombs just in front of the leading edge of fighters, resulting in kinetic kills as the targets accelerate into the shrapnel."

Jolt nodded. "Precisely."

The First Mate consulted his display. "Between our launchers and the other six ships, we have forty warheads for the first salvo. All racks loaded -- firing."

From the sides of the blade of the spade-like Nightstalker, small cylinders rolled from the launcher racks on the side. The escorting corvettes, stubby cylinders with a pair of movable, wing-like struts with thrusters on the end mounted on one side next to a heavily-armored bridge module, fired more missiles into the cloud of ordnance from their single launcher racks opposite the bridge.

Computers traded targeting information, then the thrusters of the missiles ignited. A standing wave of neutrino pairs was constrained on one side by a nanoscopic gravity gradient, created by a thin film of stable strange matter. To oscillate at its desired wavelength, the standing wave had to attempt to push the barrier out of its frame of reference; the magnetic moment of the neutral gravity band gap skipping forwards through space-time generated blinding light and heat, which was conducted away from the apparatus by a cloud of vaporizing coolant. The missiles skipped forwards through space, leaving a trail of glowing gas.

An additional set of band gaps closed around the standing wave, this time producing thrust not in ordinary space-time, but in the curved and distorted dimensions of hyperspace. The missiles seemed to curve away as their thrust vectors were forced into a time-line with a non-zero imaginary component, disappearing from the local light-cone on a partially time-like path to their targets. This similarity to a naval torpedo, skimming under the surface of an ocean, led missiles with faster-than-light thrusters to be called "torpedoes".

The torpedoes completed their brief parabolic skip in imaginary time slightly ahead of the front of the cloud of fighters. A charge of chemical explosive sent kilogram-sized chunks of iron into a cloud of kinetic impactors.

The fighters were already traveling at a quarter of the speed of light, following a common vector out of the Suburbia system. The oncoming projectiles vaporized the few fighters that were struck; the survivors scattered, and the advance halted as the formation began to dissipate like a cloud.

Jolt watched the screen as the interrocitor observed the flashes of the exploding fighters. The computer collated the casualty figures to her command display. "Excellent. The first salvo literally decimated the targets -- 10 percent casualty rate."

Thresher, manning the communications station, registered hails from a group of a dozen torpedo frigates patrolling the Suburbia system. With the advance of the fighters temporarily halted by the barrage from the faster corvettes, these vessels could surround and bombard the cloud of small vessels, closing off the escape vectors for the small ships. "We have fire support -- I think we have them bottled up."

The Eye scowled. "Wait a minute -- something's coming!"

Twenty huge battleships materialized from deep hyperspace, re-entering normal space-time in a scattered cloud that rapidly approached the cloud of fighters. The neutral particle cannon of the Reyll war-ships fired.

The beams faded away, twisting away into hyperspace, and re-appeared as scorching beams of energy that struck the approaching corvettes. One bolt struck the Nightstalker amidships, disrupting the main power reactor. The Eye cut the throttle rather than deplete the ship's supply of stored energy, as did the other corvettes. "Twenty marks -- out of nowhere! Main power down, recovery in thirty seconds. Breaking off pursuit."

The surviving fighters -- some five thousand ships -- returned to their former vector, approaching the battleships. Jolt and the First Mate watched as the fighters triggered their jump drives and disappeared, one by one, from the screen.