Susan was fished out of the sea by the striking drillers who had launched the attack; they decided to make an example of her. The Elysium seas feature a large scavenger called a gaper, whose hinged jaw is easily capable of taking up a person in a single swallow. Gapers frequent the drilling platforms because they feed off the trash the platforms shed into the sea. The drillers propped Susan up, slapped her into consciousness, and then reeled off a hurried manifesto in her general direction, relying on her BrainPal connection to carry their words to the CDF. They then found Susan guilty of collaborating with the enemy, sentenced her to death, and pushed her back into the sea directly below the platform's trash chute.
A gaper was not long in coming; one swallow and Susan was in. At this point Susan was still alive and struggling to exit the gaper from the same orifice from which she entered. Before she could manage this, however, one of the striking drillers shot the gaper directly below the dorsal fin, where the animal's brain was located. The gaper was killed instantly and sank, taking Susan with it. Susan was killed, not from being eaten and not even from drowning, but from the pressure of the water as she and the fish that had swallowed her sank into the abyss.
Any celebration by the striking drillers over this blow to the oppressor was short-lived. Fresh forces from the Tucson swept through the drillers' camps, rounded up several dozen ringleaders, shot them and fed them all to the gapers. Except for the ones who killed Susan, who were fed to gapers without the intermediary step of being shot first. The strike ended shortly thereafter.
Susan's death was clarifying to me, a reminder that humans can be as inhuman as any alien species. If I had been on the Tucson, I could see myself feeding one of the bastards who killed Susan to the gapers, and not feeling in the least bit bad about it. I don't know if this made me better or worse than what I had feared I was becoming when we battled the Covandu. But I no longer worried about it making me any less human than I was before.
TWELVE
Those of us who were at the Battle for Coral remember where we were when we first heard the planet had been taken. I was listening to Alan explain how the universe I thought I knew was long gone.
"We left it the first time we skipped," he said. "Just went up and out into the universe next door. That's how skipping works."
This got a nice, long mute reaction from me and Ed McGuire, who were sitting with Alan in the battalion's "At Ease" lounge. Finally Ed, who had taken over Aimee Weber's squad, piped up. "I'm not following you, Alan. I thought that the skip drive just took us up past the speed of light or something like that. That's how it works."
"Nope," Alan said. "Einstein's still right—the speed of light is as fast as you can go. Besides which, you wouldn't want to start flying around the universe at any real fraction of the speed of light, anyway. You hit even a little chunk of dirt while you're going a couple hundred thousand klicks a second and you're going to put a pretty good hole in your spaceship. It's just a speedy way to get killed."
Ed blinked and then swept his hand over his head. "Whoosh," he said. "You lost me."
"All right, look," Alan said. "You asked me how the skip drive works. And like I said, it's simple: It takes an object from one universe, like the Modesto, and pops it into another universe. The problem is that we refer to it as a 'drive.' It's not really a drive at all, because acceleration is not a factor; the only factor is location within the multiverse."
"Alan," I said. "You're doing another flyby."
"Sorry," Alan said, and looked thoughtful for a second. "How much math do you guys have?" he asked.
"I vaguely recall calculus," I said. Ed McGuire nodded in agreement.
"Oy," Alan said. "Fine. I'm going to use small words here. Please don't be offended."
"We'll try not to," Ed said.
"Okay. First off, the universe you're in—the universe we're in right at this moment—is only one of an infinite number of possible universes whose existence is allowed for within quantum physics. Every time we spot an electron in a particular position, for example, our universe is functionally defined by that electron's position, while in the alternate universe, that electron's position is entirely different. You following me?"
"Not at all," said Ed.
"You nonscientists. Well, just trust me on it, then. The point is: multiple universes. The multiverse. What the skip drive does is open a door to another one of those universes."
"How does it do that?" I asked.
"You don't have the math for me to explain it to you," Alan said.
"So it's magic," I said.
"From your point of view, yes," Alan said. "But it's well allowed in physics."
"I don't get it," Ed said. "We've been through multiple universes then, yet every universe we've been in has been exactly like ours. Every 'alternate universe' I ever read about in science fiction has major differences. That's how you know you're in an alternate universe."
"There's actually an interesting answer to that question," Alan said. "Let us take as a given that moving an object from one universe to another is a fundamentally unlikely event."
"I can accept that," I said.
"In terms of physics, this is allowable, since at its most basic level, this is a quantum physics universe and pretty much anything can happen, even if as a practical matter it doesn't. However, all other things being equal, each universe prefers to keep unlikely events to a bare minimum, especially above the subatomic level."
"How does a universe 'prefer' anything?" Ed asked.
"You don't have the math," Alan said.
"Of course not," Ed said, rolling his eyes.
"But the universe does prefer some things over others. It prefers to move toward a state of entropy, for example. It prefers to have the speed of light as a constant. You can modify or mess with these things to some extent, but they take work. Same thing here. In this case, moving an object from one universe to another is so unlikely that typically the universe to which you move the object is otherwise exactly like the one you left—a conservation of unlikeliness, you might say."
"But how do you explain us moving from one place to another?" I asked. "How do we get from one point in space in one universe, to an entirely different point in space in another?"
"Well, think about it," Alan said. "Moving an entire ship into another universe is the incredibly unlikely part. From the universe's point of view, where in that new universe it appears is really very trivial. That's why I said that the word 'drive' is a misnomer. We don't really go anywhere. We simply arrive."
"And what happens in the universe that you just left?" asked Ed.
"Another version of the Modesto from another universe pops right in, with alternate versions of us in it," Alan said. "Probably. There's an infinitesimally small chance against it, but as a general rule, that's what happens."
"So do we ever get to go back?" I asked.
"Back where?" Alan said.
"Back to the universes where we started from," I said.
"No," Alan said. "Well, again, it's theoretically possible you could, but it's extremely unlikely. Universes are continually being created from branching possibilities, and the universes we go to are generally created almost instantly before we skip into them—it's one of the reasons why we can skip to them, because they are so very close to our own in composition. The longer in time you're separated from a particular universe, the more time it has to become divergent, and the less likely you are to go back to it. Even going back to a universe you left a second before is phenomenally unlikely. Going back to the one we left over a year ago, when we first skipped to Phoenix from Earth, is really out of the question."