‹Status?› she queried again.
‹Evolving sysfiles,› her oracle finally fired back at her.
All her systems were coming on-line now. Hard data flowed into her mind, buttressing the decohering haze of soft memory. Flesh and silicon, digital and organic systems knit themselves together. Meat and machine recombined in a quantum-faithful replica of the same Major Catherine Li who’d gone into cryo back on Metz.
She accessed her diagnostic programs and ran through the postjump protocols, checking entangled states, troubleshooting the Sharifi transforms, comparing pre- and postjump file sizes. Everything checked out.
Good; she didn’t have time for problems. She had to take care of her people. She needed to put Dalloway in for a commendation and ship him out to a new unit before all hell broke loose over Metz. And there was Kolodny’s family to see. Whatever family she had, which Li doubted was much.
Then she saw the trick her mind had played on her.
Metz had been over for almost three months. She’d taken care of everything: Kolodny’s family, Dalloway’s transfer, her own preliminary statements for the review board. She’d done it all in a manic three-day race against exhaustion and injury, wired to the gills on pain-suppression programs. Then she’d gone into the rehab tanks. And after that there would have been the cold freeze, the transfer to the jumpship, weeks of sublight travel by Bussard drive to reach Metz’s orbital relay and queue up for transfer.
How long had she been under? Twelve weeks? Thirteen?
She felt the old fear rising in her chest, caught herself flipping through directories, cross-checking, fighting to make sense of twisted fragments of soft data.
Stop, she told herself. You know the rule. Stick to this jump, this place. Let the last one go. Let the hard files pick up the slack. Don’t let the fear get you.
But the fear got her anyway. It always did. The fear was rational, reasonable, double-blind tested, empirically verifiable. It waited for her at the boarding gate and rode on her shoulder through every jump, every mission, every sweaty early-morning jump-dream. It asked the one question she couldn’t answer: what had she lost this time?
Decoherence was as slow and subtle as radiation. An unwired traveler could make five or six jumps in a lifetime without losing more than a few isolated dates and names. The real damage was cumulative, caused by the minute drift of spin states over the course of many replications—a slow bleed of information that couldn’t be stanched without sacrificing the quantum parallelism that made replication possible in the first place. It took short-term memory first. Then long-term memory. Then friends and loyalties and marriages. If you didn’t stop in time, it took everything.
Cybernetics could mask the problem. A field-wired Peacekeeper’s hard memory held backed-up spinfeed of every waking moment, on- and off-duty, since enlistment. And provided you didn’t lie to the psychtechs, the files preserved at least reasonably accurate preenlistment memories. Platformed on an enslaved AI and bolstered by psychotropic drugs, the datafiles could provide a working substitute for lost memories. But jump long enough, and everything you knew, everything that was you, flowed out of the meat and into the machine as inexorably as sand slipping through an hourglass. And Li, her oracle on-line, her hard memory fully reintegrated, could now recall that in the fourteen years, two months, and six days since enlistment she’d made thirty-seven Bose-Einstein jumps.
She fumbled for the coffin’s latch, found it at her right hip where it always was, popped the lid. It rose in a smooth whisper of hydraulics. She sat up.
The effort left her wracked with cramps, coughing up thick chunks of mucus. She couldn’t be Ring-side or on Alba, she realized; the Ring and Corps HQ were only one jump from anywhere on the Periphery, and her lungs wouldn’t feel this bad unless she’d been kept under through multiple jumps and layovers. So where was she? And why was she bound for some unknown Periphery planet instead of back to Alba for rehab?
She swung her legs over the rim of the coffin and felt the cold grid of deckplating under her feet. Bottom rack at least. Thank God for small mercies. She looked around at the cryobay. Racks of coffins rose above her in a brightly lit honeycomb of feedlines and biomonitors. Most of the other passengers were still on ice; cool green vital lines blipped steadily on their status screens. The virusteel deckplating hummed with the distant throb of idling Bussard drives. Somewhere out of sight a skeleton crew would be running postjump checks, evolving systems shut down for replication, signaling to the sublight tugs that would ferry the jumpship beyond the immense starfish arms of the field array.
Li’s uniform—or rather a quantum-faithful replica of it—lay in the kit drawer beneath her coffin, neatly folded and stowed by a Major Catherine Li, UNSC, who no longer existed. In the right-hand pants pocket she found a wad of tissue just where she always stashed it. In the left-hand shirt pocket she found her cigarettes, already unwrapped by that other Li who knew just how weak her fingers were after jumps these days.
She leaned against the coffin, uniform piled next to her, and blew her nose.
Pain rifled through her right shoulder as she raised her hands to her face. She touched the heart of the pain: eight centimeters of knotted scar tissue slicing up her triceps and across the point of her shoulder. It felt nervy to the touch, and when she twisted her head to look at it the scar stood out white against her brown skin.
Metz’s parting gift. She’d never seen the gunman, but the single shot shredded muscle, tendon, and ligament, and severed the ceramsteel filaments that threaded through her arm from shoulder to fingertip. Her oracle told her it had taken five weeks in the tanks to patch it up, but all she remembered of those weeks was painful awakenings, doctors’ questions, sharp flashes of underwater blue brilliance.
She got her uniform on without too much fumbling, but when she tried to pull on her boots her fingers wouldn’t grip properly. She tucked the boots under her good arm and staggered down the aisle, weaving like a worn-out drunk. Green arrows led to the exit. Somewhere down the corridor they’d lead her to a cup of coffee and a soft chair where she could smoke her first ritual postjump cigarette.
She stumbled into the passenger lounge just as the transport linked up with its tug and started the slow subluminal drift toward the field array’s perimeter.
Li had jumped often enough to know the protocol. They would clear the glittering crystal arms of the field array, then kick on the Bussard drives and jump to near lightspeed for the last leg of the journey. Once that happened they’d be in slow time, the communications limbo of a ship traveling at speeds that made relativity a practical rather than theoretical problem. They’d be outstream, cut off from streamspace and the rest of humanity until they dropped back into normal time.
She slumped into an empty chair, lit her cigarette, and looked around at her fellow passengers. Two Peacekeepers huddled in one corner playing a silent card game. The rest of the passengers were techs, company men, midlevel professionals. People whose expertise made it worth the multiplanetaries’ while to pay quantum-transport prices but who didn’t have enough corporate clout to get Ring-side assignments.
There were no constructs, of course. Partial constructs could theoretically bypass the off-planet travel restrictions and get clearance to hold company or even civil service posts. But geneset assays weren’t cheap, and it didn’t happen often.
The only obviously posthuman civilian in the lounge sat directly across from Li: a tall dark-skinned woman with a white scar on her forehead. West African, Li thought. Something in her bones, in the long line of her back, suggested the radiation-induced mutations of the old generation ships—ships that had dropped out of slow time after centuries in open space only to find that humanity had exploded past them in the first wave of the FTL era and their chosen planets were already being stripped and boosted into orbit to feed the voracious juggernaut of the Ring’s consumer culture. The woman wore a tech’s orange coveralls, but her hair was pulled back in spare elegant braids and she was crunching numbers on a high-powered streamspace foldout. An engineer? A Bose-Einstein technician?