The ripples washed down the tunnel at her. They were intense pulses of gravity waves. Torec saw the lead ships thrown from side to side, like bits of dirt on turbulent water. She braced.
The spacetime wash hit. The stars frothed around her. The ship pitched so violently she could feel it in her gut, even through the inertial shielding. She struggled to hold her line.
The trouble was, the grav shield was fundamentally unstable. No, worse than that, it actually was an instability, a fizzing, nonlinear flaw in spacetime. That was why it propagated in the first place, like a breaking wave. So having set it off, if you let it run by itself, it would push up to lightspeed and then disperse in a spectacular, bone-shaking explosion — or else it would collapse back into sublight, dissipating its energy. The propagating grav shield was an edge-of-chaos phenomenon, and had to be tweaked continually by the shield-master if it was to hang together.
But even here, in the calm, flat spacetime around Arches Base, it was all but impossible to hold everything together. Sailing along behind the shield was a constant strain, even when things went well. If the shield so much as wobbled, the little ships in its wake bobbed like motes of dust.
The ships handled badly, too. In theory, the prototype stage had passed, and they were into flight development, and these ships, fitted with the project’s new technologies, were the configuration they were supposed to fly into the center of the Galaxy. But it was only ten days since the first of them had come out of Enduring Hope’s workshops; they were lash-ups, and they flew like it.
Torec was having a particularly tough time. She wasn’t the best pilot in Exultant Squadron, she accepted that. And she was in Blue’s flight. Because of their complicated past, she thought — she had been with him in some other timeline, and with his own younger self now — Torec felt Blue had given her the roughest assignments, the worst ships, the greenest crews. And she knew she was never going to be allowed a crack at the most prestigious assignment of all, which was to pilot the shield- master itself.
Well, she wasn’t going to fail, not today.
As red flags flared throughout her cabin, she grasped her controls and tried to stabilize her ship. But it wallowed, its moments of inertia all wrong. Laden with its heavy singularity cannon it was desperately unresponsive; it was like trying to run with a laden pack on her back.
When she thought she had control she called, “All right. Navigator, this is the pilot. Plot us a way out of here.”
There was no reply. When Torec glanced out of her pod she could see Three sitting in her blister, strapped in like a toy, while red-flag Virtuals flared around her, and the sky wheeled. “Three. Three!”
“Give it up, Pilot,” Cabel snapped.
“No, damn it. Navigator!”
“She’s frozen. We don’t have time for this. Aim for altitude ninety. Take us straight up and out of this shit.”
A quick check of her own tactical displays showed he was right. If they weren’t capable of plotting an orderly way out, straight up and out of the gravastar wake was the only way to save the ship. She dug her hands into her displays once more, clenched her fists, and yelled her anger.
The greenship tipped up and shot out of the turbulent wake of the grav shield, and into the sanctuary of flat, smooth space.
At the end of each day Pirius Red held an “issues meeting.” Pila was at his side, quietly running the formal side of the meeting. Pirius Blue and Burden were here, along with Enduring Hope, Red’s representative among the ground crew.
Today Torec attended too. She was a bit of human warmth, alongside his adjutant, a woman from the other side of the Galaxy who hated his guts, and two flight commanders, a distracted religionist, and his own embittered future self. But Torec’s flight had crashed out today, and he knew she was bringing him issues, not emotional support.
A lot of the problems right now seemed to center on the use of the gravastar shield. So he had asked the Silver Ghost, the Ambassador to the Heat Sink, to sit in. The Ambassador’s huge, hovering form seemed to fill the little room, somehow sucking out its warmth. Burden was fascinated by the Ghost, but the two hard-faced Guardians who accompanied it everywhere ensured the only contact it had with anybody was formalized and specific.
Over a week of meetings like this, a trick Pirius had learned was to start with positives, and that was what he did now — and they were pretty big positives, too.
The main elements of the flight training program concerned the use of the new CTC processors for rapid tactical response, precision bombing, and formation flight in the wake of a grav shield. Well, there had been no significant problems with the CTC technology. Likewise the precision flying was going well. The pilots were getting used to the new dynamics of their clumsily modified ships. The starbreaker sighting technique he had come up with, perhaps because it had been figured out by a pilot in the first place, was fitting in easily with their methodology and instincts.
“The only bad news I can see in these areas,” he said, summing up, “is that it mightn’t be possible to give everybody enough time on the new gear. I’ve requisitioned as much sim time as I can…” But everybody knew simulations were no substitute for hands-on experience in a real craft. Besides, the technology was being modified so rapidly that the sim designs were quite often a day or two behind the real thing anyhow.
Pirius Blue stared at him; as always, judgmental, hostile. “And you think that’s a minor problem? That we might fly into combat without everybody even having had time to try out the new gear?”
“I didn’t say minor,” Red said testily. “It’s something we can minimize. Juggling the schedules, accelerating sim upgrades—”
They argued on about the training issues for a while. Red let it run, trying to pick out positives, and identifying actions they could take.
Eventually the talk turned to the gravastar, the center of most of their issues.
Burden passed Pirius Red a data desk. “I’ve a summary of the stats here,” he said. “To date, the longest formation flight we’ve managed is two hours.” Everybody knew they would need to fly behind the shields for six hours to reach Chandra.
Blue said, “We just have to go back and keep trying, until we get it right.”
“But that’s wearing out the crews,” Burden said evenly.
Enduring Hope raised a hand to speak. “Not only the crews,” he said firmly. “You have to think about the ships as well. Maybe it isn’t obvious to you glamour-boy pilots, but even when you don’t get a catastrophic failure, every time you fly you’re fatiguing the structure and the systems. We are going to have to use at least some of these ships in anger. And if we’ve worn them out even before we’ve done training—”
“I hear what you say,” Pirius Red said. “What I don’t know is what to do about it.”
Blue said, “Our problem isn’t our ships, or our people. It’s that damn grav shield. If it stayed stable we could track it for six hours — or ten, or a hundred. But we can’t keep it stable. We can fly our ships, but we can’t fly the shield.”
“Ah,” said Burden. “And why? Because it’s Ghost technology, not human.”
Pirius Red took a deep breath. He’d been prepared for this moment. “So,” he said slowly, “we need a Ghost to fly it.”
In the shocked silence that followed, Torec helped him out. “That is what we did with the prototype, back in Sol system, and for the exact same reasons. A Ghost has to fly Ghost technology.”
The Ghost, which had been hovering like an immense soap bubble, suddenly drifted half a meter forward. It altered the geometry of the meeting, disturbing everybody.