"Nice name," I said.
"It was randomly selected," she said. "Our first names are common names, our last names are mostly from scientists and philosophers. There's a Ted Einstein and a Julie Pasteur in my squad. At first you don't know that, of course. About the names. Later you learn a little bit about how you were made, after they've let you develop your own sense of who you are. No one you know has many memories. It's not until you meet realborn that you know that anything's really different about you. And we don't meet them very often. We don't really mix."
"'Realborn'?" I asked.
"It's what we call the rest of you," she said.
"If you don't mix, what were you doing at the commissary?" I said.
"I wanted a burger," she said. "It's not that we can't, mostly. It's that we don't."
"Did you ever wonder about who you were made from?" I asked.
"Sometimes," Jane said. "But we can't know. They don't tell us about our progies—the people we're made from. Some of us are made from more than one, you know. But they're all dead anyway. Have to be or they wouldn't use them to make us. And we don't know who knew them, and if the people who knew them get in the service, it's not like they'd find us most of the time. And you realborn die pretty damn fast out here. I don't know anyone else who's ever met a progie's relative. Or a husband."
"Did you show your lieutenant the picture?" I asked.
"No," she said. "He asked about it. I told him you sent me a picture of yourself, and that I trashed it. And I did, so the action would register if he looked. I haven't told anyone about what we said. Can I have it again? The picture?"
"Of course," I said. "I have others, too, if you want them. If you want to know about Kathy, I can tell you about her as well."
Jane stared at me in the dim room; in the low light she looked more like Kathy than ever. I ached just a little to look at her. "I don't know," she said, finally. "I don't know what I want to know. Let me think about it. Give me that one picture for now. Please."
"I'm sending it now," I said.
"I have to go," she said. "Listen, I wasn't here. And if you see me anywhere else, don't let on that we've met."
"Why not?" I asked.
"It's important for now," she said.
"All right," I said.
"Let me see your wedding ring," Jane asked.
"Sure," I said, and slipped it off to let her look at it. She held it gingerly, and peered through it.
"It says something," she said.
"'My Love is Eternal—Kathy,'" I said. "She had it inscribed before she gave it to me."
"How long were you married?" she asked.
"Forty-two years," I said.
"How much did you love her?" Jane asked. "Your wife. Kathy. When people are married for a long time, maybe they stay together out of habit."
"Sometimes they do," I said. "But I loved her very much. All the time we were married. I love her now."
Jane stood up, looked at me again, gave me back my ring, and left without saying good-bye.
"Tachyons," said Harry as he approached my and Jesse's breakfast table.
"Bless you," said Jesse.
"Very funny," he said, sitting down. "Tachyons may be the answer to how the Rraey knew we were coming."
"That's great," I said. "Now if only Jesse and I knew what tachyons were, we'd be a lot more excited about them."
"They're exotic subatomic particles," Harry said. "They travel faster than light and backward through time. So far they've just been a theory, because after all it's difficult to track something that is both faster than light and going backward in time. But the physics of skip drive theory allows for the presence of tachyons at any skip—just as our matter and energy translates into a different universe, tachyons from the destination universe travel back into the universe being left behind. There's a specific tachyon pattern a skip drive makes at a translation event. If you can spot tachyons forming that pattern, you'd know a ship with a skip drive was coming in—and when."
"Where do you hear this stuff?" I said.
"Unlike the two of you, I don't spend my days lounging about," Harry said. "I've made friends in interesting places."
"If we knew about this tachyon pattern or whatever it is, why didn't we do something about it before?" Jesse asked. "What you're saying is that we've been vulnerable all this time, and just been lucky so far."
"Well, remember what I said about tachyons being theoretical to this point," Harry said. "That's sort of an understatement. They're less than real—they're mathematical abstractions at best. They have no relation to the real universes in which we exist and move. No race of intelligence that we know of has ever used them for anything. They have no practical application."
"Or so we thought," I said.
Harry gave a hand motion of assent. "If this guess is correct, then it means that the Rraey have a technology that's well beyond what we have the capability to create ourselves. We're behind them in this technology race."
"So how do we catch up?" Jesse said.
Harry smiled. "Well, who said anything about catching up? Remember when we first met, on the beanstalk, and we talked about the colonies' superior technology? You remember how I suggested they got it?"
"Through encounters with aliens," Jesse said.
"Right," Harry said. "We either trade for it or take it in battle. Now, if there really is a way to track tachyons from one universe to another, we could probably develop the technology ourselves to do it. But that's going to take time and resources we don't have. Far more practical to simply take it from the Rraey."
"You're saying the CDF is planning to go back to Coral," I said.
"Of course we are," Harry said. "But the goal now isn't just to take the planet back. It's not even going to be the primary goal. Now, our primary goal is to get our hands on their tachyon detection technology and find a way to defeat it or use it against them."
"The last time we went to Coral we got our asses kicked," Jesse said.
"We're not going to have a choice, Jesse," Harry said gently. "We have to get this technology. If the technology spreads, every race out there will be able to track Colonial movement. In a very real sense, they'll know we're coming before we do."
"It's going to be a massacre again," Jesse said.
"I suspect they'll use a lot more of the Special Forces this time around," Harry said.
"Speaking of which," I said, and then told Harry of my encounter with Jane the night before, which I had been recounting to Jesse as Harry walked up.
"It looks like she's not planning to kill you after all," Harry said after I was finished.
"It must have been so strange to talk to her," Jesse said. "Even though you know she's not really your wife."
"Not to mention being just six years old. Man, that's odd," Harry said.
"It shows, too," I said. "The being six part. She doesn't have much emotional maturity. She doesn't seem to know what to do with emotions when she has them. She threw me across the room because she didn't know how else to deal with what she was feeling."
"Well, all she knows is fighting and killing," Harry said. "We have a life of memories and experiences to stabilize us. Even younger soldiers in traditional armies have twenty years of experiences. In a real sense, these Special Forces troops are children warriors. It's ethically borderline."
"I don't want to open any old wounds," Jesse said. "But do you see any of Kathy in her?"
I thought about it a moment. "She looks like Kathy, obviously," I said. "And I think I saw a little of Kathy's sense of humor in her, and a little of her temperament. Kathy could be impulsive."