The Heisenberg Corollary Read online

Page 3


  “So,” Vibeke said, bracing herself as the ship rocked from the blast. “No flowers? No chocolates? Not quite what I would have expected for a third date.”

  “I didn’t have time for the florist, Dr. Helstrom,” he said. “I was too busy picking glass out of my lab coat.”

  “Your own fault for ducking.”

  Zeke punched a set of keys on the console. “Your flight plan’s not on file.”

  “Pilot took it with him.”

  “No matter—we just gotta put some space behind us.” He punched more keys and a screen in front of him started flashing red. “What the—the navigation system’s offline!”

  “Rerouted to the retrofit,” Vibeke said.

  “So how am I supposed to fly this tub without a navigation protocol?”

  “You want to stop and rewire it right now?”

  “Fine,” Zeke said as he keyed in an override command. “Flying blind’s better than flying vaporized.” He punched the intercom. “Where are we with that coupler?”

  “Working on it,” Augie’s voice crackled back. “I’ll get ‘er loose if I have to get out and pry the docking ring off myself.”

  “No time for heroics, Augie, just get us free.” He punched the line off and keyed the commands to power up the thrusters. “Vee, initiate the super-light, will ya?”

  Vibeke hesitated. “About that,” she said. “There’s something you need to—”

  Another explosion rocked the ship, and this time, Zeke heard the distinct shriek of distressed metal coming up the docking tube. That was bad. If the docking arm came off with the Friendly Card still attached to it they wouldn’t be able to maneuver worth beans.

  But then the strong shudder running the length of the ship abruptly stopped, and now the wreck of the whole XARPA platform spun crazily outside the window. They were in free fall. Augie’s voice blared from the intercom.

  “Disengaged!” he shouted. “Punch it!”

  The ship was spinning out of control now. And with each successive roll, the massive square snout of the attacking ship got bigger. Zeke thumbed the controls to the maneuvering jets and stopped their spin long enough to pick a direction that—at least from Zeke’s line of sight—wouldn’t get them killed. Below them, between the Friendly Card and the Earth’s surface, the XARPA platform writhed in its final death throes.

  Any direction but that one, Zeke decided. He spun the ship around, aimed the viewport at the stark face of the half-moon, and punched it.

  Zeke breathed a sigh of relief as the little ship put clicks of space behind them in mere seconds. He toggled a view screen and watched the final destruction of the platform, shrinking into a vivid, little red and orange smear against the blue and white planet beyond. The attack ship was maneuvering for another pass—at what Zeke couldn’t imagine. Or why. He still couldn’t recognize the ship’s configuration, and from here, any identifying sigils or flags were impossible to see.

  Augie and Harbinger climbed up from the rear and poked their heads into the cockpit. The view on the screen caught the eyes of both men.

  “Someone at XARPA apparently pissed off the wrong people,” Augie said.

  “Gee,” Harbinger said. “Ya think?”

  Vibeke turned in her seat. “Everyone okay back there?”

  “Doctors Agosto Diaz and Charles Harbinger,” Zeke said over his shoulder, “meet Dr. Vibeke Helstrom. Dr. Helstrom, meet Doctors Diaz and Harbinger.”

  Augie bowed slightly. “Dr. Helstrom,” he said. “Your reputation precedes you.”

  “I’ll say—” Harbinger started but shut up when Augie elbowed him in the side.

  “And your lady friend?” Vibeke asked.

  “Doctor Narissa Brand,” Augie said.

  “She’s with you,” Vibeke said. It wasn’t a question.

  “And the luck that brought her to me,” Augie answered, a lofty puff of pride in his delivery, “has only today been matched. We owe you our lives.”

  “You’re welcome,” Vibeke said. “But if you all hadn’t arrived when you did, I’d be a cloud of ionized particles in orbit back there. So don’t worry about owing me any kind of life debt. We’re even Steven.”

  “How do you know she isn’t with me?” Harbinger said as if he had just been insulted.

  Augie laid a gentle hand on Harbinger’s shoulder. “Because she is a perceptive child,” he said. He turned back to Vibeke. “I must apologize for my colleague here. He’s not used to interacting with anyone he does not have to roll a dice to engage.”

  “Very funny,” Harbinger said.

  “No need to apologize,” Vibeke said. “After all, it takes a solid grasp of human psychology to make an effective game master. Maybe Dr. Harbinger could coach Dr. Travers here through a campaign or two.”

  “Ouch,” Zeke said.

  “Hey, guys!” Narissa yelled from behind as she bolted in, thrusting her head between Augie and Harbinger. “Better take a look behind us!”

  “What now?” Zeke asked. “There’s not enough left of the platform to—” He blinked at the screen.

  “What is it?” Vibeke asked.

  “Our uninvited guests are coming up fast,” Zeke said. On the screen, the pursuer’s weapons’ bores surged with red power. “And they’re angry!”

  An explosion rocked the ship.

  “They’re after us?” Augie said.

  “Why?” Vibeke asked.

  Zeke was beginning to get an idea why—a deep, unsettling, bottom-dropping-out-from-under-you idea why. But he didn’t want to even think it, let alone say it out loud.

  “Academic at the moment,” he answered. “Strap in, folks. Vee, actuate the super-light drive.”

  “That’s what I was going to tell you,” Vibeke said, alarm rising in her voice. “We don’t have a super-light drive.”

  “What?”

  “They didn’t want the Friendly Card zooming off to Betelgeuse if the NeuralNav malfunctioned. This was only supposed to be a trip around the block!”

  Another blast jarred the ship, closer this time.

  “That’s not good,” Zeke admitted.

  “Is there an asteroid field we can escape into?” Harbinger said.

  “What are you talking about?” Zeke asked.

  “Sorry, boss—just a joke.”

  “Joke later. Augie, do you think you can coax more power out of the sub-lights?”

  “We’re on it,” Augie said headed back with the others.

  “Can we outrun them?” Vibeke asked.

  “Hard to say with the navigation system offline. We certainly can’t outpace those torpedoes they’re lobbing—even though their artillery looks a bit outdated. But maybe we can keep them from getting a target lock on us.”

  Vibeke glanced at her screen. “Here comes another volley!”

  “Going evasive,” Zeke said. He punched the intercom. “Hang on, everybody.”

  He pulled back on the controls and pulled straight up on their y-axis, then maneuvered as erratically as he could to prevent the pursuing ship from getting a lock. The hostile fire detonated harmlessly, well clear of the ship.

  “They’re not as nimble as we are,” Vibeke reported as she watched the monitor. “But with those jets, they don’t need to be. They’re still creeping up. We’ll be within range of their tractor beams in a few minutes if we don’t do something.”

  Zeke glanced at the monitor. The ship’s square nose was beginning to fill the screen.

  Augie reappeared at the cockpit door. “I got a bit more oomph to the thrusters,” he reported, “even if we are burning fuel like a 1970s muscle car. I can’t do anything more without powering down. But, Zeke—I had a thought.”

  Zeke careened and corkscrewed a crazy path through the blackness, the half-moon getting bigger each time it crossed the viewport. He couldn’t afford to lose concentration on flying, but he didn’t need much extra bandwidth to know what his mentor and colleague was thinking.

  “You don’t think those guys back there are j
ust going to get tired of chasing us and decide to go home?”

  “They were willing to obliterate the XARPA platform—and now they’re chasing us. I think we must assume that this is connected with the appearance of our earlier visitor. I expect they have no intention of letting us get away. Without a super-light drive, we only have one option if we want to get out of this.”

  “Do we have enough velocity to engage it?”

  Vibeke turned. “Engage what? Who are those guys? And why do they have such a beef with you?”

  “I’ll explain later,” Zeke said. “Do we have enough speed?”

  Narissa shouldered her way in. “No,” she said. “We need to get near c and these jets don’t have the juice!”

  “We need a boost,” Harbinger said.

  “How?” Zeke asked.

  “Mars,” Narissa said, “via the moon.”

  “What are you guys talking about?” Vibeke shouted. “We don’t have enough fuel for Mars!”

  “We will if we do it right,” Narissa said. “And do it fast.”

  “Do what?” Vibeke insisted.

  “A slingshot around Mars, with a simultaneous discharge of the inertial capacitors, will give us enough speed for a jump—but only if we slingshot around the moon first.”

  In the viewport, the moon was getting bigger. On the monitor, the mysterious ship was doing the same.

  “Zeke,” Harbinger said. “We have to do this now.”

  Zeke grit his teeth. “What bearing?”

  Narissa leaned in and tapped a string of numbers on the NavCom.

  “That’s great and all,” Zeke said. “But the navigational matrix is offline. For that kind of course precision, we need the computer—otherwise, we’ll never get the necessary speed.”

  “I can do it,” Vibeke said.

  They all looked at her. She jerked her thumb at the glowing spaghetti bowl of copper and fiber optics hanging behind her.

  “It patches into my neocortex,” she explained. “If I can think it, the navigation matrix will plot the course to a tee. In theory, I’m supposed to be able to fly this tub too, but the flight control interface was still spooling when things started to blow up.”

  The big ship launched another barrage. Zeke had told Bowers he wanted to put a human in the loop. This was definitely not what he had in mind. But there were no other options.

  “Do it,” Zeke said. “I’ll do the flying. Augie, you guys get the Frogger ready!”

  “The Frogger?” Vibeke asked. “Zeke, what the hell did you get me into?”

  “I don’t have time to explain. I’m trusting you to help me execute this maneuver. You’re gonna have to trust me with the rest.”

  Vibeke glared at him for a second—then she reached behind and pulled the interface harness from the wall.

  “I’m not trusting you. I’m trusting your friends back there to keep us in one piece long enough so I can make you pay me proper for all this.”

  “Vee, if we get through this, you can throw whatever you want at me. I won’t even duck this time, I swear.”

  She slid on the headpiece and starting wiring herself up to the console. “How soppy of you. Come on, we don’t have all day.”

  Four

  Zeke leaned on the throttle as Vibeke made the final adjustments to the NeuralNav. The unit looked like a mass of copper and fiber optic seaweed growing out of the headpiece and flowing around her head.

  Meanwhile, they were coming up on the moon quickly, and the enemy ship was still closing.

  “Initiating the NeuralNav,” Vibeke said. She threw a switch and flinched, jerking up straight against her harness like she had received a slight shock. Her eyes lost focus.

  “Are you all right?” Zeke asked. “Hell’s bells, if that thing knocked you out—”

  “I’m aces,” she said, but her voice sounded different. More forceful, yet more relaxed at the same time. “I’m integrating. This will not take long.”

  “Good. We don’t have long.”

  “Transfer the flight parameters to me,” she said as if she were, in fact, the machine. Zeke found it unsettling, but he didn’t have time for squeamishness. He keyed the course heading into the nav unit. Her watery blue eyes stared unseeing into the void. “Plotting. Plotting. Course plotted.”

  “Great,” Zeke said. “Where to?”

  “Bearing three seven,” she said. “Full burn.”

  Zeke gunned it.

  “Pitch minus fourteen point two.”

  Zeke pitched fourteen.

  “Point two,” she said, urgency creeping into her tone.

  “Got it,” he responded.

  “Maintain speed and heading—” The ship suddenly lurched in the shock wave of another explosion. The Friendly Card shrieked in structural distress, and one of the control consoles flashed in a shower of sparks. The force of the blast threw the ship off course.

  “Compensating!” Vibeke shouted. “Bearing eight six nine! Pitch plus two five!”

  Zeke pulled the shuddering ship back on course. They were coming in very fast towards the moon, but now the attacker was even closer. Vibeke gave another course correction.

  “Are you kidding?” he asked. “I’m not a stunt pilot! If I blow that maneuver the Gs will kill us.”

  She turned and looked hard at him. “Do it,” she commanded.

  Augie’s voice came over the intercom. “What’s happening up there?”

  Zeke and Vibeke stared at one another.

  “Tighten your straps, people,” he said into the comm, “we’re about to pull some G-force!”

  He followed the bearing she gave him, and they shot towards the edge of the moon’s crescent.

  They came in closer—and closer. So close that Zeke could make out individual craters. He feared they were about to make another one as a line of craggy lunar mountains rose up before them.

  “You’re too close to those peaks,” Vibeke said.

  “I know.”

  “Pull up.”

  “I will.”

  The ship cleared the highest lunar peak by what seemed to Zeke to be scant meters. The enemy ship was still behind them but they had dropped below the horizon line. They launched another barrage anyway—but the torpedoes slammed into the hills and lit up the sky with a series of explosions that looked like they could knock the moon out of orbit.

  “Course correction in T minus ten,” Vibeke said.

  Zeke flipped the cover off a toggle switch and threw it.

  “Course locked in,” he confirmed as the enemy ship rose over the lunar horizon and fired again. And again the space around them flashed and the ship bucked.

  “Don’t those guys ever run out of ammo?”

  “Get ready for a course change!”

  “Say when!”

  Vibeke stared hard from under the headset, but Zeke couldn’t tell if she were actually seeing the space in front of them or something else entirely.

  “T minus three,” she said, her voice tense but with an undercurrent of exhilaration. “Two. One. NOW!”

  Zeke toggled the new heading and pulled back hard on the stick. The steady points of starlight smeared into streaks in the viewport like a windshield on a rainy night, and Zeke felt all the blood in his body trying to flow to the left side of his innards. The Friendly Card’s inertial capacitors whined, but they did their job in preventing its passengers from turning into jelly on the walls of the cabin.

  The maneuver took only seconds, but by the time they broke free of the moon’s gravity, well, Zeke felt like someone had been standing on the side of his face for an hour.

  Then they snapped free and hurtled straight on their new heading.

  “Hot damn!” Vibeke cried.

  Zeke checked the monitor and saw the moon shrinking into a dot in the middle of the rear screen—a dot that was soon occluded by the square silhouette of the pursuers.

  He checked their speed.

  “Point three c,” he said. “They’re still closing in, but not as
fast.”

  The others crowded into the cockpit doorway. “Everyone okay?” Narissa asked.

  “I’m okay,” Zeke said. “Vee, are you—”

  “That was a lulu,” Vibeke said as she whipped off the headgear, breathing hard, her cheeks flushed.

  “Yeah, I guess we’re all right.”

  Narissa looked at Vibeke. “You look like you enjoyed that.”

  “A lulu,” Vibeke repeated.

  “I’d like to try it.”

  “I wish you could. It’s mapped to my neural pathways. No one else can use it.”

  “I’m glad it’s such a kick,” Zeke said. “You’re gonna get to use it again in a few.”

  “How far out from Mars?” Augie asked.

  Zeke checked his gauges. “About seventeen minutes,” he confirmed. “How’s it going with the Frogger?”

  “You still haven’t explained this Frogger to me,” Vibeke said.

  “It’s an experimental drive,” Augie explained. “One that, shall we say, takes liberties with the time-space continuum.”

  “Is it prepped?” Zeke pressed.

  “Give us about ten more minutes,” Harbinger said. “Are you sure we have to do this?”

  Another shudder from enemy fire gave them their answer.

  “We’ll be ready,” Narissa said and nudged Augie out of the cockpit.

  “Just don’t roll a double fumble,” Harbinger said to Zeke, then he followed.

  Vibeke turned her gaze on Zeke.

  “Liberties?” she asked.

  “It accesses alternate quantum causal streams.”

  It took her a second or two to absorb his answer.

  “Parallel continua?” she asked.

  “Something like that.”

  She turned her gaze to the darkness outside.

  “Huh,” she said. “Huh. I knew you weren’t being straight with me the other night.”

  “I didn’t want to pull the neoprene over your eyes.”

  “I’m sure. But you did anyway.”

  “You wanted to see my lab,” he protested. “My work is highly classified. I couldn’t show you everything.”

  “You’re showing me now.”

  “I think current events have nudged your clearance up to ‘need-to-know.’”