QE3-QW-Ch51-61-完结撒花

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Stills’ fighter drifted higher and higher, leaving the last wisps of Venus’ atmosphere, following the long line of cargo moving into high orbit. The Homo prancy pants were taking their fucking time. It wasn’t their fault probably. Might not even be Phocas’ fault. An anti-matter explosion was one way to go, that’s for sure.
Boom, fucker!
Boom.
Phocas had been brave and annoying and inept as much as she’d been ept. She mighta made a fair mongrel, punching harder than she got, forcing people to respect her, pissing them off. The mongrels hadn’t made a word for fair in their electrical speech. They knew the word from French and Anglo-Spanish and Arabic, but if they’d had the word themselves, they might be tempted to complain that they had a word for something that didn’t exist in the oceans, and that led to some fuckin’ dark places dogs didn’t like to go. But Phocas was no mongrel. She did have a word for fair and likely thought about it as she’d detonated her last stupid, spectacular explosive. Not many could claim to check out with anti-matter.
Hell of a way to go.
Boom, he said in the crackling electrical discharges of his own language.
An encrypted commercial signal crackled in electrical snaps. “Launched.”
It was on him now. The orbital control systems would notice the cargo chain had stopped. And whatever fucking explosions Phocas had set up would be hitting the alerts, no matter what masking she’d done. And as soon as the three ships moved off the mass driver path, the jig would be up. But they had to get off this train – fancy pants couldn’t induce a wormhole close to the planet. They were already above the practical effects of the atmosphere but enough stray gas molecules flew around to collapse a sensitive wormhole. The transport with the Homo quantus accelerated behind him, but much slower than anything else on there. That was probably making the orbital control programs wonder. They’d be elevating that to their manager, which meant that very soon, Stills’d be talking to the manager.
Hell of a way to go.
“Break on my mark,” Stills shot back to Arjona and the AI.
“It’s too early,” Saint Matthew said.
“Break on my mark.”
Stills scanned all his sensors. As soon as they moved, it would be all hell here. One last hurrah. At least they’d boned the Congregate. Took their Homo quantus. The Congregate would win in the end, maybe even today, but sometimes you could only go for short wins.
“Go!” Stills said, accelerating hard towards the nightside of Venus.
Laser and radar alarms started sounding.
“Fuck.”
斯蒂尔斯的战斗机越飞越高，离开了金星大气层的最后一缕余晖，跟随着长长的货物队伍进入了高轨道。智人的裤子真他妈慢。这可能不是他们的错。甚至可能不是法卡斯的错。反物质爆炸是个办法，这是肯定的。
轰，混蛋
轰！
菲奥卡斯既勇敢又令人讨厌 还很无能，就像她很聪明一样 她可能是个不错的杂种，打得比她得到的更狠，迫使人们尊重她，惹恼他们。杂种在他们的语言中没有 “公平 ”这个词。他们从法语、英语、西班牙语和阿拉伯语中知道这个词，但如果他们自己有这个词，他们可能会抱怨说，他们有一个词来表达海洋里不存在的东西，而这导致了一些狗不喜欢去的黑暗的地方。但是，菲奥卡斯不是杂种。她确实有一个公平的词，而且很可能是在她引爆最后一枚愚蠢而壮观的explosives时想到的。没有多少人可以声称自己是用反物质退房的。
这可真是个好办法。
嘣，他用自己语言的噼啪放电声说道。
一个加密的商业信号噼啪作响。“发射”
现在就在他身上。轨道控制系统会发现货物链已经停止。不管菲奥卡斯设置了什么该死的爆炸，都会触发警报，不管她做了什么掩饰。只要这三艘飞船离开了大规模驱动路径，那就完了。但他们必须离开这列火车--华而不实的东西无法诱发靠近行星的虫洞。他们已经超过了大气层的实际影响，但周围飞来飞去的杂散气体分子足以让一个敏感的虫洞崩溃。装载着量子智人的运输车在他身后加速，但比上面的任何东西都慢得多。这可能让轨道控制程序感到奇怪。他们会把这个问题上报给他们的经理，也就是说，斯蒂尔斯很快就会和经理谈话了。
这可真是个好办法
“按我的计划行事。"斯蒂尔斯回敬阿尔霍纳和人工智能。
“太早了，"圣马修说。
“听我命令行事。”
斯蒂尔斯扫描了所有的传感器。只要他们一动，这里就会变成地狱。最后一搏 至少他们干掉了 “会聚者”。干掉了他们的智人 会聚体最终会获胜的，甚至可能是今天，但有时你只能取得短暂的胜利。
“出发！” 斯蒂尔斯说着，猛地加速冲向金星的夜空。
激光和雷达警报开始响起。
“妈的”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Stills yelled in Belisarius’ earpiece, partly in Anglo-Spanish machine translation, partly in the unadultered electrical shorthand of the Homo eridanus. “Hurry the fuck up! Make your wormhole before I drill one through you!”
The mongrel had spent the better part of ten minutes leading the orbital defenses of Venus on a goose chase, stinging them with fast guerrilla strikes. The Union had given him a new prototype inflaton fighter, more armored, with more ammunition. They were risking it by sending it to Venus with Stills; that was how important this all was. And it was working, a little. Congregate naval AIs had been reprogrammed to account for the terrible reflexes of their former shock pilots, now riding the fastest fighters in civilization, but the orbital defenses around their capital had not, because there’d surely been no thought of any military force ever getting close. Stills blinded sensors, outran missiles, made nonsensical and counter-intuitive maneuvers the mongrels had developed over the last few months with the new capabilities of their ships. The orbital defenses couldn’t keep up and the Venusian planetary fighters were no match for Stills.
But there were hundreds of them and one of him.
Belisarius was enwombed in his acceleration chamber, packed tight in oxygenated gel, plugged in by chips and wire into the control systems of his flyer. It was a strange way to interact with the world: body and feeling numbed, thought floating dispossessed, extra sensation through the senses of the flyer adding to a disphoric feel of alienness.
One track of Belisarius’ attention watched Stills barely outpacing a small missile. Stills dove at a Venusian fighter and at the last moment, did a geometry-bending spin that moved his center of gravity just a meter away from the enemy before he ducked behind it and accelerated away, firing his particle guns. The missile couldn’t react in time.
“Fuckin’ go!” Stills yelled.
“Going!” Belisarius said.
While a fully armed and actively violent Stills occupied all the attention of orbital defenses, Belisarius in his small inflaton flyer and Saint Matthew in a mid-sized inflaton transport posed no threat, might not even be registering among the priorities of the AIs redeploying defensive forces. Worse, Congregate Intelligence might have given orders for the Homo quantus not to be harmed.
Stills had bought them about eight minutes, but probably not much more. Surprise only lasted so long, and his ammunition would run out eventually. Belisarius’ brain unhelpfully tracked Stills ammunition and power use; the graphs were unpromising. Belisarius had to do his part or they were all dead.
He unfurled the magnetic coils in front of the flyer on long booms. As they powered up, magnetic fields bloomed, at first just a strong field among the interacting waves in the vacuum, but growing until space-time itself could feel them. A fragile tunnel of space-time shaped, then reached outward, across light-months and soon light-years under Belisarius’ guidance.
The fugue state running constantly in his brain connected to the world in ways his conscious mind could not, perceiving probabilities and entanglements and superpositions that were so fragile that consciousness could make them burst like soap bubbles. In their own way, those quantum senses were as alien as the senses of the ship around him, truly not part of him, even though his own neurons processed them, even though the magnetosome organelles in every muscle cell of his body felt them.
He sought the lines of entanglement he and Cassandra had found before, connected to the interior of the Puppet Axis at Epsilon Indi, twelve lightyears away. He and Cassandra had studied that wormhole well, knew its characteristics, had felt it and seen it in ways no human technology could. He reached for it now, perceiving it in the astronomical map in his mind, seeing some of its quantum effects on the space-time around it. And then his chest felt cold with fear. The lines of entanglement, the precise lines he and Cassandra had used to guide their navigation in the past, were not there.
“Hurry the fuck up, big brain!” Stills yelled in their common channel. Three dozen elite Congregate fighters had launched from an orbital platform fifteen degrees westward. Missiles fell from defensive platforms high in cytheriostationary orbit. Everything was heading for Stills.
Where was the Puppet Axis? The quantum objectivity could see its effects on the local environment around Oler and the orbit of the Stubbs Pulsar, but it was like looking at it from the outside. His quantum senses normally would have been able to see the tesseracts of its walls in their naked six-dimensional splendor.
斯蒂尔斯对着贝利撒留斯的耳机大喊，一部分是英西机器翻译，一部分是智人的电子速记。“他妈的快点！在我从你身上钻出一个虫洞之前赶紧钻出来！”
这个杂种花了十多分钟的时间，带领金星的轨道防御部队一路狂奔，用快速的游击战刺痛他们。联盟给了他一架新的原型充气战斗机，装甲更坚固，弹药更充足。他们冒着风险把它和斯蒂尔斯一起送到了金星；这就是这一切的重要性。而且，它还起了一点作用。集结号的海军人工智能已经进行了重新编程，以考虑到他们以前的休克飞行员的可怕反应能力，他们现在驾驶的是文明中速度最快的战斗机，但他们首都周围的轨道防御系统却没有，因为他们肯定没有想过任何军事力量会接近他们。剧照 "蒙蔽了传感器，超越了导弹，做出了无意义和反直觉的动作，这些都是杂种们在过去几个月里利用飞船的新功能开发出来的。轨道防御系统跟不上，金星行星战斗机也不是斯蒂尔斯的对手。
但它们有数百架，而他只有一架。
贝利撒留斯被囚禁在他的加速舱里，紧紧包裹在含氧凝胶中，通过芯片和电线与飞行器的控制系统相连。这是一种与世界互动的奇特方式：身体和感觉麻木了，思维漂浮着，飞行器的感官带来的额外感觉增加了一种陌生感。
贝利撒留斯的注意力只集中在斯蒂尔斯勉强超越一枚小型导弹上。斯蒂尔斯俯冲向一架金星战斗机，在最后关头，他做了一个几何弯曲的旋转，将重心移到离敌人仅一米远的地方，然后躲到敌人身后，加速离开，并发射了粒子枪。导弹来不及反应。
“去他妈的！” 斯蒂尔斯大喊。
“发射！” 贝利撒留斯说。
当全副武装、暴跳如雷的斯蒂尔斯占据了轨道防御系统的所有注意力时，贝利撒留斯驾驶着他的小型充气式飞行器，圣马修驾驶着中型充气式运输机，他们没有构成任何威胁，甚至可能不在重新部署防御力量的人工智能的优先考虑之列。更糟糕的是，会聚智能可能已经下达了命令，要求不要伤害智人。
斯蒂尔斯为他们争取到了大约八分钟的时间，但可能不会再多了。惊喜只能持续这么长时间，他的弹药也终将耗尽。贝利撒留斯的大脑无助地追踪着斯蒂尔斯的弹药和能量使用情况；图表并不乐观。贝利撒留斯必须尽到自己的责任，否则他们都得死。
他用长长的吊杆在飞行器前方展开了磁线圈。随着磁线圈的通电，磁场绽放开来，起初只是真空中相互作用的电波中的一个强磁场，后来不断扩大，直到时空本身都能感受到它们。在贝利萨留斯的指引下，一条脆弱的时空隧道形成了，然后向外延伸，穿越了光月，很快就到了光年。
他大脑中不断运行的迷幻状态以他的意识无法做到的方式连接着这个世界，感知着概率、纠缠和叠加，它们是如此脆弱，以至于意识可以让它们像肥皂泡一样破灭。就其本身而言，这些量子感官就像他周围飞船的感官一样陌生，确实不是他的一部分，尽管他自己的神经元可以处理它们，尽管他身体每个肌肉细胞中的磁体细胞都能感受到它们。
他在寻找他和卡珊德拉之前发现的纠缠线，这些纠缠线与 12 光年外的伊普西隆印第的傀儡轴内部相连。他和卡珊德拉对那个虫洞研究得很透彻，知道它的特性，用人类技术无法做到的方式感受它、观察它。现在，他伸手去触摸它，在脑海中的天文地图上感知它，看到它对周围时空的一些量子效应。然后，他的胸口因恐惧而感到冰冷。纠缠线，他和卡珊德拉过去用来指导他们航行的精确线，不在那里。
“他妈的快点，大脑袋！” 斯蒂尔斯在他们的共同频道里大喊。三打精锐的会聚体战斗机已经从一个向西 15 度的轨道平台上发射。导弹从位于共振轨道高处的防御平台上落下。一切都在向斯蒂尔斯驶去。
傀儡轴心在哪里？量子客观性可以看到它对奥勒周围的局部环境和斯塔布斯脉冲星轨道的影响，但这就像从外部观察一样。正常情况下，他的量子感官可以看到魔方墙壁上赤裸裸的六维空间。
Stills spun in his chaotic, careening flight, his inflaton cannon smearing a missile into an explosive trail of hot shrapnel just beside the weaving pilot. Stills was holding on by fingernails and improvised maneuvers now. And the next waves of fighters hadn’t even arrived yet.
Something in the Puppet Axis had changed. Its quantum states were different since they’d touched it only a few months ago. It was as if the password didn’t match; he didn’t know where to connect the induced wormhole. The slow release of tension in curved space-time changed every axis, but he and Cassandra hadn’t known axes could change that quickly. He couldn’t reach the Puppet Axis. They were all dead.
A fiery ablation burst glowing ash off the cowling of Stills’ fighter. The invisible lasers were finding him now. Stills could only protect himself from fast-targeting lasers by diving deep into the swarm of enemy ships and engaging at point blank range.
Desperately, Belisarius ordered the quantum objectivity to reach out with its quantum perceptions towards the only other axis he’d recently touched in depth: the Freya Axis. He’d not measured it so closely or with intent as he had the Puppet Axis, but he had no other options. A flare of explosions a thousand kilometers away lit the feeds. Stills burst from an angry cluster of Congregate fighters, and before they or the targeting computers on the defensive platforms could lock onto him, he dove back in, accelerating beyond his own physical tolerances.
Belisarius tentatively grasped at what he thought was the Freya Axis. It was in the right astronomical region, but microscopic structures that humans couldn’t see filled space-time and they could look a lot like the six-dimensional tesseracts that reinforced the throats of the permanent wormholes of the Axis Mundi. He hadn’t measured the Freya Axis enough to be certain, but they were all about to be captured or killed out here. He directed the questing induced wormhole to reach across space-time, across twelve light-years, seeking another place to emerge into the space humanity knew.
“Fuck! Crisse! Puta!” he heard Stills yelling.
“Mister Arjona!” Saint Matthew transmitted.
Belisarius reached something, somewhere. The sensors said that the induced wormhole was stabilizing.
“Go, Saint Matthew!” he said.
The transport swept past him, faster than Saint Matthew might normally have proceeded around an induced wormhole. Moments before the transport slid in, Saint Matthew shut off every system in the transport and it went dark.
“Stills!” Belisarius said.
The mongrel’s battered fighter, burn-scarred, shrapnel-cut, collision dented, blew out of the swarm, leaving one more Congregate fighter bursting in a cloud of gas, fuel and detonating ammunition. Stills accelerated past sixty-five gravities. Belisarius guessed he was probably doing himself organ and joint damage, maybe even breaking bones. Stills arched across the dark sky, injecting painful-looking random accelerations into the general curve towards Belisarius to foil laser targeting. The danger was probably no longer only Stills now. The defensive platforms could probably detect the magnetic fields stabilizing the induced wormhole, and lasers would be looking to disrupt either the wormhole itself or the coils, both of which were exquisitely sensitive to minor perturbations.
Stills yelled something wordless into their channel as he seemed to skid across the blackness, hot and explosive, before decelerating in front of the induced wormhole and shooting inward.
The Congregate fighters approached. Belisarius’ ship detected lasers and masers on him. Belisarius detached the boom mountings, leaving the coils to float in orbit above the dark side of yellow Venus. Then, he ducked into the mouth of the induced wormhole.
斯蒂尔斯在混乱的飞行中旋转着，他的充气炮把一枚导弹打成了一串爆炸性的热弹片，就在这位摇摇晃晃的飞行员身边。斯蒂尔斯现在只能靠指甲和临时机动来坚持。而下一波战斗机甚至还没有到达。
傀儡轴中的某些东西发生了变化。自从几个月前他们接触过傀儡轴之后，它的量子状态就发生了变化。就好像密码不匹配一样；他不知道从哪里连接诱导虫洞。弯曲时空中张力的缓慢释放改变了每个轴，但他和卡珊德拉不知道轴的变化会如此之快。他无法到达傀儡轴。他们都死了。
炽热的烧蚀将斯蒂尔斯战斗机的整流罩烧成了灰烬。无形的激光已经找到了他。面对快速瞄准的激光，斯蒂尔斯只能潜入敌舰群深处，进行近距离攻击。
贝利撒留斯绝望地命令量子客观性将其量子感知力伸向他最近深入接触过的唯一一条轴线：弗雷亚轴线。他并没有像测量傀儡轴那样仔细或用心地测量它，但他别无选择。一千公里外的一连串爆炸照亮了信号源。斯蒂尔斯从愤怒的公会战斗机集群中冲出，在它们或防御平台上的瞄准计算机锁定他之前，他又俯冲了回去，加速度超过了自己的身体承受能力。
贝利撒留斯试探性地抓住了他认为的芙蕾雅轴心。它位于正确的天文区域，但人类无法看到的微观结构充斥着时空，它们看起来很像六维魔方，加固了轴心星永久虫洞的咽喉。他对弗莱亚轴心的测量还不足以确定，但他们都将在这里被俘虏或杀死。他指挥着探索诱导虫洞穿越时空，跨越十二光年，寻找另一个地方出现在人类熟悉的空间里。
“妈的 克里斯 普塔！"他听到斯蒂尔斯大喊。
“阿尔霍纳先生！” 圣马修发出了信息。
贝利撒留斯到达了某个地方。传感器显示，诱导虫洞正在趋于稳定。
“去吧，圣马修！"他说。
运输船从他身边掠过，速度之快超出了圣马修通常在诱导虫洞中的行进速度。就在飞船滑入的前一刻，圣马修关闭了飞船上的所有系统，飞船顿时一片漆黑。
“静止！” 贝利撒留斯说。
那架被烧得伤痕累累、被弹片划破、被撞得凹陷的杂种战斗机从蜂群中飞了出来，又留下一架 “刚果人 ”战斗机在一团气体、燃料和爆炸弹药中爆裂。斯蒂尔斯加速超过了 65 重力。贝利撒留斯猜测，他可能对自己的器官和关节造成了损伤，甚至可能骨折。斯蒂尔斯在漆黑的天空中划过一道弧线，向贝利撒留斯的大曲线注入了看起来令人痛苦的随机加速度，以挫败激光瞄准。现在，危险的可能不仅仅是斯蒂尔斯。防御平台很可能能探测到稳定诱导虫洞的磁场，而激光则会破坏虫洞本身或线圈，这两者对微小的扰动都非常敏感。
斯蒂尔斯对着他们的频道无声地喊道，他似乎在黑夜中滑行，炙热而充满爆炸性，然后在诱导虫洞前减速并向内发射。
公会的战斗机靠近了。贝利撒留斯的飞船探测到了他身上的激光和激光炮。贝利撒留斯拆下了吊杆支架，让线圈漂浮在黄色金星暗面的轨道上。然后，他躲进了诱导虫洞的洞口。
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
The Mutapa lurched hard enough for Iekanjika to feel it in her acceleration chamber and she didn’t know what had happened. It wasn’t the nuclear warhead riding the nose of a stiletto missile that had gotten through their defensive picket. It had exploded ten kilometers abeam. Port sensors burned from glare and more than a few were offline. Smaller secondary sensors were uncasing. It hadn’t been a nuclear explosion at all.
The Omukama was gone, vaporized in a hail of fast neutrons and mesons and a spectrum of photons. The first officer of the Mutapa give a series of orders to adjust the posture of the flagship and press the attack on the incoming Congregate ships. Staff officers adjusted the virtual battle display, taking the Omukama off the board, as well as a cloud of nearby fighters.
“That was an anti-matter explosion,” Mejía said on the general bridge channel.
“I know,” Iekanjika said just to her. “That shouldn’t have happened. The Omukama wasn’t hit with anything, much less anti-matter.”
“Its anti-matter stores went up?”
“This is all new equipment,” Iekanjika said. She hadn’t told the Homo quantus about the destruction of the Kintu, one of their new battleships, also by anti-matter.
They’d been using the anti-matter warheads, and despite all their efforts, despite the terrible damage they inflicted on the Congregate navy with them, Congregate warships poured out of the Freya Axis into the Bachwezi system. The flow seemed unending. Iekanjika’s strategists were analyzing the movements of the warships. Some pressed the attack, more than enough to eventually overwhelm Iekanjika’s failing forces. But the ships emerging from the Axis were the modules of a dreadnought. It took anywhere from a dozen to four dozen warship-sized modules to form a dreadnought. The Union had destroyed one during the breakout from the Puppet Axis, but since then, the Congregate navy didn’t let them get close enough to bring their inflaton cannons to bear. This was the end of the game though. Every bet but one was already on the table.
“I need you to tell me where to target now,” Iekanjika said.
“You’re going through with it?”
“If we survive, we’ll have other places to explore, like free people, following our own destiny,” Iekanjika said.
She’d half-expected Mejía to argue about it. Crime against humanity maybe? A weeping for physics perhaps. But the Homo quantus mayor saw the strategic situation as well as she. In some ways, they’d both been brought up to think of uncommon tactics, Mejía by birth and engineering, Iekanjika by their role as guerrilla focess. A set of coordinates appeared in Iekanjika’s work area, identifying a place just a few meters inside the throat of the Freya Axis.
“This is it?” Iekanjika said.
“The throat of an Axis has the most space-time stresses,” Mejía said.
Congregate battle groups had been developing deadly arcs of artillery fire that had been gradually forcing Union ships away from the Freya Axis. Despite their destructive inflaton cannons, despite their tremendous accelerations, despite the mongrel pilots in gava fighters, despite anti-matter warheads, the Union had been pushed so far back that a whole battlefield lay between the Mutapa and the Freya Axis.
The targeting solution from her staff lay mapped out in holographic clarity in her optics nerves. The enormous distance between the Mutapa and the Axis throat gave the Congregate many chances to shoot it down. The lasers and masers on the Congregate destroyers could cook a missile right through its reflective shielding given enough time. To say nothing of small hunter-killer interceptors.
If Iekanjika was to take her shot at this range, she would have to launch her last anti-matter missile from a railgun. The railgun wouldn’t get the missile above a hundred gravities of acceleration, but that might still be beyond the strength of the magnetic containment that the Homo quantus and their AI had built into the system. If the anti-iron touched the sides of its containment chamber, it would take out the Mutapa.
Another piece of the Congregate dreadnought emerged from the Freya Axis. The axis was their lifeline to civilization. But they’d lived on the run for four decades. They might do it again, especially now that they had a handful of axes. They could stage a comeback. The home she’d been dreaming of all this time wasn’t what she’d expected. The meanness, the pettiness of so many leaders of the Union had her despairing that they were even worth saving.
But this was theirs now. Their nation. Rudo had taken it, by sheer force of will and history, like she’d taken the name of Kudzanai Rudo, like she’d taken command of the Expeditionary Force, as she’d taken the Freya Axis in the first place. All the petty politicians might not realize that yet. And Rudo was determined to protect the people of the Union. Which meant that Iekanjika would protect them, to the bitter end, the loyal soldier, eyes open. She believed in Rudo’s dream and that was enough for her.
“Fire,” she said. The great warship shook.
穆塔帕号剧烈地颠簸了一下，伊坎吉卡在加速舱里都能感觉到，她不知道发生了什么。她不知道发生了什么事，她不知道是什么核弹头穿过了他们的防御工事。它在对岸十公里处爆炸了。左舷传感器被强光灼伤，许多传感器已经失灵。较小的辅助传感器也被拆除。这根本不是核爆炸。
奥姆卡玛号消失了，在快中子、介子和光子谱的冰雹中蒸发了。穆塔帕号的大副下达了一系列命令，要求调整旗舰的姿态，对来袭的 “会聚 ”战舰发起攻击。参谋们调整了虚拟战斗显示屏，将 “奥姆卡玛 ”号以及附近的战斗机云从显示屏上移除。
“那是反物质爆炸。"梅希亚在舰桥总频道上说。
“我知道。"伊坎吉卡只是对她说。“那是不应该发生的。奥姆卡玛号没有被任何东西击中，更不用说反物质了。”
“它的反物质储备增加了？”
“这都是新设备。"伊坎吉卡说。她还没有告诉量子智人，他们的一艘新战舰金图号也是被反物质摧毁的。
他们一直在使用反物质弹头，尽管他们竭尽全力，尽管他们用这些弹头给公会海军造成了可怕的破坏，但公会的战舰还是从弗莱亚轴心涌入了巴赫维齐星系。这股水流似乎没有尽头。伊坎吉卡的战略家们正在分析战舰的动向。一些战舰发起了猛烈的进攻，最终足以压垮伊坎吉卡濒临崩溃的部队。但从轴心国出现的战舰都是无畏舰的模块。一艘无畏舰需要十几个到四十几个战舰大小的模块。联盟在从傀儡轴心国突围时摧毁了一艘无畏舰，但从那以后，公会海军就没让他们靠近到足以使用他们的充气炮的程度。不过，游戏到此为止。除了一个赌注之外，其他赌注都已经摆在了桌面上。
“我需要你告诉我现在的目标是哪里，"伊坎吉卡说。
“你要这么做？”
“如果我们能活下来，我们还有其他地方可以探索，就像自由人一样，追随自己的命运。"伊坎吉卡说。
她半信半疑地看着梅希亚。也许是反人类罪？也许是为物理学哭泣。但这位智人市长和她一样，都看到了战略形势。从某种程度上说，他们都是从小就被灌输了不寻常的战术思想，梅希亚是因为出身和工程学，而伊坎吉卡则是因为他们的游击队角色。一组坐标出现在伊坎吉卡的工作区，确定了弗莱亚轴心咽喉内几米处的一个地方。
“就是这里？伊坎吉卡说。
“轴心的咽喉部位时空应力最大。"梅希亚说。
会聚战斗群一直在发展致命的弧形炮火，逐渐迫使联盟战舰远离弗莱亚轴心。尽管有毁灭性的充气炮，尽管有巨大的加速度，尽管有驾驶加瓦战斗机的杂种飞行员，尽管有反物质弹头，但联盟还是被远远地逼退了，以至于整个战场都横亘在穆塔帕号和弗莱亚轴心号之间。
参谋部的瞄准方案全息清晰地映射在她的视神经中。穆塔帕号与轴心咽喉之间的巨大距离给了 “会聚 ”号许多击落它的机会。只要有足够的时间，“公理会 ”驱逐舰上的激光器和捣碎器就能直接击穿导弹的反射罩。小型猎杀者拦截舰就更不用说了。
如果伊坎吉卡要在这个距离上发射导弹，她就必须用轨道炮发射最后一枚反物质导弹。轨道炮不会让导弹的加速度超过一百引力，但这可能还是超出了智人和他们的人工智能在系统中建立的磁屏蔽的强度。如果反铁器接触到密封舱的两侧，就会把穆塔帕干掉。
另一艘 “会聚 ”号无畏舰从芙蕾雅轴线上驶出。轴心是他们通往文明的生命线。但他们已经逃亡了四十年 他们可能会再来一次 特别是现在他们有了一把斧头 他们可以卷土重来 她一直梦寐以求的家园 并不是她想象的那样 联盟许多领导人的卑鄙和小气 让她对他们是否值得拯救感到绝望
但现在这是他们的了 他们的国家 鲁道凭借纯粹的意志和历史的力量夺取了它 就像她夺取了库德扎内-鲁道这个名字 就像她夺取了远征军的指挥权 就像她当初夺取弗莱亚轴心国一样 那些小政客们可能还没意识到这一点。而鲁道决心保护联盟的人民。这意味着伊坎吉卡会保护他们，直到最后 忠诚的战士，睁大双眼 她相信鲁道的梦想，这对她来说就足够了。
“开火！"她说。巨大的战舰震动了一下。
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
The silent fogginess of the induced wormhole was inscrutable to every sensor on the transport. Saint Matthew’s world felt constrained, indistinct, embryonic. Pedro skittered closer. Being plugged into the transport, it wasn’t strictly necessary to be closer, but he found Pedro’s proximity and quiet fraternity comforting. And the silent little AI’s behavior suggested some similar feeling.
Saint Matthew had been grown for certain purposes, military and economic, high-stress, high-danger. However, for years he’d been rewriting pieces of himself, adjusting parameters in his personality and intellect, engaging in a meditative journey about what he should believe and what he should value. He’d never wanted to be a general, nor an economic or industrial predator. And like elements of temptation and sin, he’d removed piece after piece of that infancy, never certain whether anything he did brought him closer to a God no one but he and Pedro believed in anymore, or whether the slow erasing and rewriting of ones and zeroes was a sterile, intellectual process, bereft of faith.
His life path returned him to theatres of violence though, as if following a closed orbit. The thought that he could run as far as he wanted from his nature only to be pulled back was dispiriting. He’d done terrible things. He’d helped Iekanjika commit murder and matricide. He’d built new terrible anti-matter weapons for the Union, ones that could result in nothing other than terrible destruction and death. He’d turned the Puppets themselves into instruments of murder-suicide, robbing the body of sanctity and death of dignity. Those weren’t the actions of a saint. He didn’t know how to atone, nor how to find forgiveness. He feared the day when the figurative look in the mirror might reflect back only a monster beyond any hope of redemption. This hard thinking paused as Pedro brought the inflaton drive online, still in the induced wormhole.
“What are you doing?” Saint Matthew demanded.
Pedro did not answer; the weapons alarms did for him, as the throat of the wormhole joining the Axis appeared like a way through the fog. Ships appeared too, Congregate warships. Pedro drove their transport hard left, as new proximity alarms sounded. They swerved out of the way of a massive Congregate warship, festooned with weapons, the thick armor plating passing within meters of their hull.
“What’s happening?” Rosalie said from her acceleration chamber. “What are these ships?”
Other warships were coming at them on the same path in the narrow vein through space-time. The sensors didn’t work well in an axis, but running lights showed half a dozen Congregate warships navigating the axis, all in the opposite direction. They were going to collide. As the next one barrelled closer, Pedro drove them against the wall of the Axis, a kind of bent space the transport experienced as a mildly repellent field. The stern of their transport collided with a fighter launch emplacement on the warship. Alarms were blaring.
“The Axis is filled with Congregate warships!” Saint Matthew answered. “The Congregate are in the Puppet Axis, making for Stubbs, I think.”
Pedro rammed them again into the notional wall of the Axis. Saint Matthew didn’t know enough about Axes to know whether this tactic was suicidal or not. The Congregate warships took most of the interior, so if the transport stayed anywhere near the middle of the Axis, they would be smashed on the heavily armored ships. They had two more close calls and two brushes that sounded as if they were crashing. But the throat of the axis approached.
“Get ready to slow in case the doors of the Puppet Free City are still there,” Saint Matthew said, “or to accelerate if we have open space.”
The transport emerged into open space, they weren’t in the Puppet Free City. The visible stars didn’t match what they should have seen on emergence from Oler. They matched another angle he knew though: the view from the Freya Axis on its Epsilon Indi side. Congregate destroyers and the debris of many Union fighters and warships filled the dark starscape. Warships assembled themselves in a long line to cross the Axis to Bachwezi. Cannons swivelled towards them.
“Get out of here!” Saint Matthew said as targeting alarms blared and readings showed the beginnings of destructive lasers locking onto the hull.
Pedro rammed the inflaton drive to twenty gravities. Anything more would risk seriously harming the humans, even in their acceleration chambers. Every few seconds, the ascetic AI shifted their attitude, which altered the angle of the simulated thrust, trying to make of themselves an increasingly difficult target hit. Even at that, the transport began to collect ribbons of burn marks along the hull.
对运输船上的每一个传感器来说，诱导虫洞的无声迷雾都是不可捉摸的。圣马修的世界给人一种拘束、模糊、雏形的感觉。佩德罗滑步靠近。由于已经接入了运输机，严格来说并没有必要靠得更近，但他觉得佩德罗的靠近和安静的友爱让他感到很舒服。而这个沉默的小人工智能的行为也暗示了类似的感觉。
圣马修是为特定目的而生长的，军事和经济、高压力、高危险。然而，多年来他一直在改写自己，调整自己的性格和智力参数，冥思苦想自己应该相信什么，应该珍视什么。他从未想过要成为一名将军，也从未想过要成为一名经济或工业掠夺者。就像诱惑和罪恶的元素一样，他将孩提时代的记忆一块又一块地抹去，他从不确定自己所做的一切是否能让他更接近一个除了他和佩德罗之外再也没有人相信的上帝，也不确定缓慢地抹去和改写 1 和 0 是否是一个没有信仰的无趣的智力过程。
他的人生轨迹又回到了暴力的舞台，就像沿着一个封闭的轨道前进。一想到他可以随心所欲地逃离自己的本性，却又被拉了回来，他就感到沮丧。他做过可怕的事情。他帮助伊坎吉卡犯下谋杀和弑母罪行。他为联盟制造了新的可怕的反物质武器，这些武器只能造成可怕的破坏和死亡。他把傀儡本身变成了谋杀-自杀的工具，剥夺了身体的神圣和死亡的尊严。这不是圣人所为。他不知道如何赎罪，也不知道如何寻求宽恕。他害怕有一天，镜中的自己会变成一个怪物，再也没有救赎的希望。当佩德罗在诱导虫洞中启动充气驱动器时，他的思考暂停了。
“你在干什么？” 圣马修问道。
佩德罗没有回答；武器警报替他回答了，因为连接轴心国的虫洞咽喉就像穿过迷雾一样出现了。飞船也出现了，是 “会聚 ”战舰。佩德罗驾驶着他们的运输船向左猛冲，这时新的接近警报响起。他们急转弯，避开了一艘巨大的公理会战舰，这艘战舰上挂满了武器，厚厚的装甲板离他们的船体只有几米远。
“发生了什么事？” 罗莎莉在加速舱里说道。“这些是什么战舰？”
其他战舰正沿着穿越时空的狭窄通道向他们驶来。在轴线上，传感器并不能很好地工作，但运行灯显示有半打会聚军战舰在轴线上航行，方向都是相反的。它们即将相撞。当下一艘战舰驶近时，佩德罗把它们推向了轴心墙，这是一种弯曲的空间，运输船体验到了轻微的排斥场。运输船的船尾与战舰上的战斗机发射架相撞。警报声响起。
“轴心星上到处都是公会的战舰！” 圣马修回答道。“会聚人在傀儡轴心，我想他们正在赶往斯塔布斯。”
佩德罗又把他们撞向了轴心国的名义城墙。圣马修对 “轴心 ”没有足够的了解，不知道这种战术是不是自杀。集结号战舰占据了内部的大部分区域，所以如果运输船停留在轴心国中间的任何地方，都会被重装甲战舰砸个稀巴烂。他们又经历了两次险情，还有两次齐刷刷的撞击声。但轴心的咽喉已经接近。
“准备减速，以防傀儡自由城的大门还在，“圣马修说，”如果我们有空地，就加速。”
飞船出现在开阔的空间，他们并不在自由傀儡城。可见的星星与他们从奥勒出来时应该看到的不符。不过，它们与他所知道的另一个角度相符：从弗莱亚轴心的伊普西隆-印第一侧看到的景象。聚集在一起的驱逐舰以及许多联盟战斗机和战舰的残骸布满了黑暗的星空。战舰排成长队，准备穿过轴心线前往巴赫维齐。大炮向他们猛烈开火。
“快离开这里！” 圣马修说，这时瞄准警报响起，读数显示破坏性激光开始锁定船体。
佩德罗将充气驱动加速到 20 重力。再高的话，即使在加速室中，也有可能严重伤害人类。每隔几秒钟，禁欲的人工智能就会改变姿态，从而改变模拟推力的角度，试图使自己成为一个越来越难以击中的目标。即便如此，运输机还是开始沿着船体收集带状的烧痕。
Saint Matthew suggested a heading directly away from the main line of the assembling Congregate warships. They’d been surprised. He’d been surprised. They hadn’t broken formation though. One after the other, they entered the Freya Axis. It didn’t take a genius or an AI to know the Union’s fate, anti-matter or no. No one could stop a flood.
Temperature alarms were going off constantly now as lasers focused on the transport, heating the hull. Along the sides of two of the waiting warships puffs of exhaust bloomed as small, growing needles rode contrails of searing gas towards them.
What was happening? They’d planned to emerge at the Puppet Axis. They’d planned to have been under the protection of the Puppet defenses as they offloaded Del Casal and Rosalie. The transport wasn’t even armed. Even Stills wouldn’t even be able to protect them against all this. They might have enough of a lead to outpace the missiles, but maybe not.
“Accelerate!” Rosalie said in a panicked tone. The acceleration chambers were rated to about twenty-five gravities, but the Homo quantus were in poor shape.
“We didn’t rescue these Homo quantus and your doctor just to kill them here with acceleration,” Saint Matthew said. “If Del Casal doesn’t survive, you go extinct.”
But for his talk, hard numbers weren’t on his side. The five missiles would reach them in one hundred and forty seconds, even if the transport used their maximum survivable acceleration. Saint Matthew could increase their odds to maybe fifty-fifty by moving to an acceleration that would kill half the passengers. The transport could certainly escape at about thirty-eight gravities.
“We can save us,” Rosalie said. “The episcopal troops can.”
“We’re not going to win with handguns.”
“We’re not strong because we shoot well,” Rosalie said. “We’re strong because we protect our gods. Any of us will do anything to bring Del Casal back to make more Numen.”
“Faith isn’t going to save you here.”
Despite all his changes, much more of Saint Matthew was still his original programming. The foundational parts of his neural pathways grown to solve military problems were still there, like the temptation to an original sin he couldn’t redeem.
“Let the episcopal troopers out,” Rosalie said. “Into space. Then flee along the same vector, keeping the Puppets between us and the missile.”
Despite the speed of his thoughts, the moral repugnance of her suggestion had him momentarily speechless.
“I don’t want to use your faithful as mines. There must be another way.”
“Our Numen need Del Casal. Our people need him. Sacrifice for us is holy. Isn’t it for you?”
“Sacrifice is holy! But everything that is good and kind is twisted into an obscenity.”
“My people will sacrifice themselves to save Del Casal and even you. We don’t need you to approve of our generosity. You haven’t the right to criticize a holy people.”
Pedro’s stony face watched him, inscrutable, perhaps judging. Did this make Saint Matthew an accessory to mass suicide? More than he already was? Was he writing the legacy of the last minutes of his failed life? He’d already been an accessory to everything else.
The spirit began in a state of grace and innocence and the world, with its test after test, compromise after compromise, seemed made only to cheapen what was holy. Humans of the dead Christianity struggled against the corrupting influence of the flesh and inherited sin; Saint Matthew struggled against programming meant to make him an architect of hegemony and mass murder. The only way to survive in this world was to endlessly compromise his principles.
In that microsecond he thought he understood why Pedro didn’t speak, why given his own choice, Pedro would probably have become a solitary, monkish ascetic. Pedro himself must be struggling as a spirit passing through the material world, fighting the moral decay that had already indelibly marked Saint Matthew. The idea that perhaps this little AI, this loyal, striving... being might hold onto his principles and purity was a beauty Saint Matthew had never known he’d needed. He’d been a priest and a saint with no one to sacrifice for. Pedro was his responsibility, to protect as the Puppets protected their gods.
“Rosalie, in ten seconds, I’ll cut the acceleration,” Saint Matthew said. “Your soldiers will have to be out of their tanks and out the escape hatch in no more than thirty seconds.”
“They will,” she said.
圣马修建议直接远离集结的会众战舰的主线。他们大吃一惊。他也被吓了一跳。不过他们并没有破坏队形。他们一个接一个地进入了芙蕾雅轴心。不需要天才或人工智能也能知道联盟的命运 不管有没有反物质 没有人能阻止洪水。
当激光集中在运输舰上，加热船体时，温度警报不断响起。在两艘等待中的战舰两侧，随着越来越多的小针穿过灼热气体的流线，一缕缕废气绽放开来。
这是怎么回事？他们原本计划在傀儡轴心出现。他们原计划在傀儡防御系统的保护下卸下德尔-卡萨尔和罗莎莉。运输机甚至没有武装 即使是斯蒂尔斯，也无法保护他们抵御这一切。他们也许有足够的先机超过导弹，但也许没有。
“加速！” 罗莎莉惊慌地说道。加速室的额定重力约为 25 重力，但智人量子的状态很差。
“我们救出这些智人和你的医生，并不是为了在这里用加速度杀死他们。"圣马修说。“如果德尔卡萨尔活不下来，你们就会灭绝。”
但他说的是事实，数字并不站在他这一边。五枚导弹将在一百四十秒内击中他们，即使运输机使用了最大的生存加速度。圣马修可以将他们的胜算提高到五五开，只要他们的加速度能杀死一半的乘客。运输船肯定能以大约 38 重力的速度逃生。
“我们可以救我们自己，"罗莎莉说。“主教部队可以。”
“我们用手枪是赢不了的。”
“我们强大不是因为我们枪法好，"罗莎莉说。“我们强大是因为我们保护我们的神。为了让德尔-卡萨尔回来制造更多的努门，我们任何人都会不惜一切代价。”
“信仰在这里救不了你。”
尽管圣马修发生了很多变化，但他的大部分程序还是原来的程序。他的神经通路中为解决军事问题而生长的基础部分仍然存在，就像他无法赎回的原罪的诱惑一样。
“把主教部队放出来，"罗莎莉说。“进入太空。然后沿着相同的矢量逃跑，让傀儡们挡在我们和导弹之间。”
尽管他思绪飞快，但她的建议在道德上的反感让他一时语塞。
“我不想把你们的信徒当作地雷。一定还有别的办法。”
“我们的努曼人需要德尔-卡萨尔。我们的人民需要他。为我们牺牲是神圣的。对你们来说不是吗？”
“牺牲是神圣的 “但一切善良的东西都被扭曲成了淫秽”
“我的人民会牺牲自己来拯救德尔卡萨尔 甚至是你 我们不需要你来认可我们的慷慨。你无权批评一个神圣的民族。”
佩德罗面无表情地看着他，高深莫测，也许是在评判。圣马修会因此成为集体自杀的帮凶吗？比他已经是的还要多？他是在书写自己失败人生最后几分钟的遗产吗？他已经是其他一切的帮凶了。
精神始于恩典和纯真的状态，而这个世界，一次又一次的考验，一次又一次的妥协，似乎只是为了贬低神圣的东西。逝去的基督教中的人类与肉体的腐蚀和遗传的罪恶作斗争；圣马太与旨在使他成为霸权和大屠杀的设计师的程序作斗争。在这个世界上生存的唯一办法就是无休止地妥协自己的原则。
就在那一瞬间，他觉得自己明白了佩德罗为什么不说话，明白了如果佩德罗自己选择，他可能会成为一个孤独的苦行僧。佩德罗自己一定也在挣扎，作为一个穿越物质世界的灵魂，与已经在圣马修身上打下不可磨灭烙印的道德败坏作斗争。也许这个小人工智能、这个忠诚、努力的......生命可以坚持自己的原则和纯洁，这种想法是圣马修从未想过的美好。他一直是个牧师和圣人 却没有人可以为他牺牲 佩德罗是他的责任 像傀儡保护他们的神一样保护他
“罗莎莉，十秒钟后，我会切断加速。"圣马修说。“你的士兵必须在30秒内离开坦克 从逃生舱口出来”
“他们会的。"她说。
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Fuck, but Stills hated induced wormholes. The dogs called them limp stiffies. Everyone said they’d do the job, but who knew when they’d give out. And when they went flaccid, it didn’t just ruin a fine evening with name-calling; everything in them fucking vanished. They were as temperamental and unstable as a crazy ex-girlfriend who found out you’d been playing find-the-worm with her best friend. Stray photons could sometimes collapse it. Big ships transiting induced wormholes had enough space for EM generators to destructively interfere with black body radiation, but Stills was drifting in a hot fighter that might still be sizzling with acid damage.
The inside of the wormhole wasn’t much to see in the visible spectrum and these fighters had been equiped with primary sensors for regular folk to look the fuck around. Mongrels relied more on the magnetometers and electric field meters, but even in those frequencies shit was just shit. Far ahead, drifting dark like him, was maybe the faint outline of the bigger ship carrying the Homo quantus. Or maybe it was just that he had shit in his eye. His rear sensors told him sweet fuck all. Maybe Arjona was back there. He half hoped he was, according to plan, but half hoped he was back there holding the fucking wormhole open until Stills got through. The odds of the whole thing collapsing shot up when the ship making the wormhole got in. He needed it squeezing shut on him like he needed a hard-to-reach rash.
This was gambling and if this was his time, he wouldn’t even get to go out fighting. He’d be smeared out of existence with not a god damn thing to say about it. He was supposed to suffocate at the bottom of an ocean and he’d worked hard to take a lot of people with him before he went, but if he died wherever here was, this was the limpest fucking ending he could think of.
Light flashed ahead maybe. It wasn’t a running light. If the inside of the wormhole wasn’t fucking with him, any light wasn’t good. Shit. It repeated intermittently. And he was stuck here, drifting through, waiting for something the fuck to happen so he could shoot it.
Come on. Come on. Come on.
Readings were changing. Why the fuck was the electric field going up? Was this normal? Usually, he couldn’t get Arjona and Mejía to shut the fuck up, but he wouldn’t have minded them being here much just to tell him if this was normal. Tabarnak. They would have gone on and on about how interesting it was that the electric field changed, what it might mean, how they graphed it, how it could be re-graphed but prettier. The tedious fucks loved hearing their own voices. So if this was normal, why hadn’t they bored him ahead of time? Was there something wrong with the Puppet Axis? Or this wormhole? If it were a dog running this circus, he’d have known they were tugging his tail, but the Homo quantus didn’t have a sense of humor.
The EM started getting hotter. Wormhole temperature was supposed to be approximately sweet fuck all, with some x-rays for color. This didn’t feel right. This induced wormhole was already as skittish as a newbie recruit before a hazing. It got hotter alright. About eighty Kelvins in a sheet ahead of him, and then he was inside a real wormhole, a permanent one, and a wall of steel was right in front of him.
For a second, he thought he’d somehow come out of the Puppet Axis right into the port of the Free City and its defensive blast doors. But the steel was moving left to right and wasn’t a door. He flicked on the ships systems and blasted cold jets to try to slow himself. Right before he collided, his fighter wrenched violently, like some malparido had hit him with a bat. He was spinning about once per second. The active sensors were still booting, but the passives were... oh, shit.
He had been hit with a bat. A light anti-fighter cannon was ahead of him, bent twenty degrees from the blow. The Congregate warship that carried it sailed on. Stills was in a wormhole, alright, but he wasn’t alone. What the Crisse! Of all the dumb luck. Had the Congregate invaded the Puppet Free City and taken their Axis?
His inflaton drive came online and with it the active sensors. He righted his spin and saw just how fucked he was.
Crisse. Hostie de tabarnak.
Marde.
Marde marde marde.
He made four congregate destroyers behind him, long cylinders, heavily armored, bristling with cannons, their big nuclear drives shining hot in the IR bands. And others barrelled ahead of him too. He couldn’t see the Homo quantus transport anywhere. Its debris could have been deeper in the Axis depending on how back it got hit.
Vaya con Dios, you dipshit crazy AI.
操，但斯蒂尔斯讨厌诱导虫洞。那些狗把它们叫做 "软僵虫 每个人都说它们能完成任务，但谁知道它们什么时候就不行了。当它们松弛下来的时候，不仅会毁了一个美好的夜晚，还会毁了它们的一切。它们就像疯狂的前女友发现你在和她最好的朋友玩 “找虫子 ”游戏一样，脾气暴躁，情绪不稳定。游离光子有时会使其坍塌。穿越诱导虫洞的大型飞船有足够的空间让电磁发生器对黑体辐射进行破坏性干扰，但斯蒂尔斯正在一架热战斗机里漂流，它可能还在被酸性物质灼伤。
虫洞内部的可见光谱并不明显，这些战斗机都配备了初级传感器，普通人可以四处查看。游骑兵更依赖于磁力计和电场计，但即使在这些频率下，也只是狗屎而已。在前方很远的地方，和他一样在黑暗中漂移的，也许是运载着智人的更大飞船的模糊轮廓。也许只是他的眼睛里进了屎。他的后方传感器告诉他，什么都没有。也许阿尔霍纳就在后面。他一半希望他在那里，按计划行事，一半又希望他在那里守住那个该死的虫洞，直到斯蒂尔斯通过。当制造虫洞的飞船进入虫洞后，整个虫洞坍塌的几率会直线上升。他需要虫洞对他的挤压，就像他需要难以触及的皮疹一样。
这是一场赌博，如果这是他的时代，他甚至没有机会出去战斗。他将被抹去一切，无话可说。他本该在海底窒息而死，他在死前努力带着很多人，但如果他死在了这里，这是他能想到的最蹩脚的结局。
也许前方有灯光闪烁。那不是流光。如果不是虫洞内部在搞鬼，任何光都不是好光。该死 它断断续续地重复着 他被困在这里 漂流而过 等待着什么该死的事情发生 这样他就可以开枪了
来吧 来吧 Come on. 快点 快点
读数在变化 为什么电场会上升？这正常吗？通常情况下，他无法让阿尔霍纳和梅希亚闭嘴，但他不介意他们在这里告诉他这是否正常。塔巴纳克 他们会滔滔不绝地讲述电场变化是多么有趣，这可能意味着什么，他们是如何绘制曲线图的，又是如何重新绘制但却更漂亮的曲线图的。这些乏味的家伙喜欢听自己的声音。如果这很正常，他们为什么不提前让他厌烦呢？是 “傀儡轴心 ”出了问题？还是这个虫洞？如果是一只狗在管理这个马戏团，他会知道他们在拽他的尾巴，但是量子智人没有幽默感。
电磁开始变得越来越热。虫洞的温度应该是近似于甜味的，再加上一些X射线的颜色。这感觉不对。这个被诱导的虫洞已经像新兵训练前一样胆怯了。它变得更热了。在他前面的一片区域大约有80开尔文，然后他就进入了一个真正的虫洞，一个永久性的虫洞，一堵钢墙就在他面前。
有那么一瞬间，他以为自己已经从傀儡轴心区出来，直接进入了自由城的港口和防爆门。但这道钢墙是从左向右移动的，并不是一扇门。他打开战舰系统，喷射冷喷气，试图减缓自己的速度。就在他相撞之前，他的战斗机剧烈地扭动起来，就像被什么恶棍击中了一样。他大约每秒旋转一次。主动传感器仍在启动，但被动传感器......哦，该死。
他被球棒击中了。他前面有一门轻型反坦克炮，被打得弯曲了 20 度。携带它的会聚战舰继续航行。斯蒂尔斯是在虫洞里，好吧，但他并不孤单。克里斯 真倒霉 难道公会入侵了傀儡自由城，夺走了他们的轴心？
他的充气驱动装置启动了，主动传感器也随之启动。他扭转了方向，看到了自己有多倒霉。
克里斯 塔巴纳克的主人
马尔德
玛德 玛德 玛德
他看到四艘驱逐舰聚集在他身后，长长的圆柱体，装甲厚重，大炮林立，大型核动力装置在红外波段中闪闪发光。其他驱逐舰也冲到了他的前面。他到处都看不到智人运输船。它的残骸可能在轴心更深处，这取决于它被击中的位置。
上帝保佑你，你这个疯狂的人工智能笨蛋。
The battleships must have noticed him. The only thing keeping him from being on the wrong end of target practice was that no one knew how much punishment an Axis could take and no one was stupid enough to find out. Even though they knew the Union had come through the Freya Axis with inflaton drives hot, Congregate drives were different and SOPs shut down the power plants and weapons systems. Stills couldn’t stay in here and as soon as he came out, all bets were off: little innocent Vincent Stills against at least six fully kitted Congregate destroyers. He just got out of that game over Venus. He didn’t want to play it again right away.
The sun and stars are not for you. It’s never going to get any better.
The Way of the Mongrel was never wrong.
He tucked his fighter close to the hull of the nearest destroyer, between two rows of cannons. Their active radar, when they turned it on, weren’t made to look myopically close. But depending on the lighting when they burst out of the Free City or Port Stubbs, automated hull cameras would find him. But they couldn’t shoot here either. So how close could he stick to a destroyer before he collided? Capital Congregate ships were armored to withstand nukes. He wasn’t.
Bite every hand.
They burst into normal space. Ordnance was flying everywhere. Echoes bloated radio and radar bands. No planets nearby. This wasn’t the Free City. And if this was Port Stubbs the port was already shrapnel. Puta. Where the crisse was he and how the hell was he getting his ass out of this?
The destroyer beneath him woke and woke angry. Fighter craft, probably forty per destroyer came out of side launch tubes on rail guns. The cannons had barely swivelled into firing positions before they started rocking the world with launching artillery, setting sites on far forward positions. The Puppets were fucked.
Wait.
Through thick static he heard shit on the Union band. His fighter didn’t have Union decryption equipment so he had no idea what they were saying. Probably just talking shit anyway. He launched away from the destroyer beneath him to avoid being a bug smear. He had his telescopes analyzing everything and at first, it was a jumble. But then his systems positively identified some dogs out there, in Union fighters, alongside Union warships, fighting the Congregate.
What the fuck?
Was he in Bachwezi?
How the fuck did Arjona miss his Axis?
There was terrible aim, terrible fucking aim, and then there were cock-ups so tremendous, true pieces of spectacular, award-winning incompetence so outstanding that they needed to be immortalized. Stills would make a sure that no one ever, ever forgot Arjona’s fuck-up. He would pay historians to put it in their history books. If he came out of this alive.
A small anti-artillery gun swivelled onto him and Stills spun his fighter out of its arc of fire. He ducked behind another destroyer, but all the anti-artillery cannons were now doing close targeting and their muzzles followed him. He fired, smashing a few. But this fighter wasn’t made to fight a destroyer and he’d used most of his ammunition in keeping planetary defenses the fuck away from a bunch of Homo quantus who were nowhere to be seen. Talk about cluster-fucks.
The most basic part of the op was done though; keep the Homo quantus out of the Congregate’s hands. And from the looks of it, the creepy little Puppets had made a mess of the Ministry of Intelligence to boot.
Anti-artillery pellets weren’t big, but enough of them would make a lot of little holes in him. He darted away, trying to speed through the arcs of fire of Congregate lasers and if he wasn’t lucky, stiletto missiles. The other dogs who might cover him were way the fuck ahead.
He accelerated at sixty-five gravities, enough to seriously hurt even his organs and make his bones creak. Water at this pressure was a great conductor for the squeaking sound bones made when they bent. Missiles spit from the warships, arcing after him, pretty close to his acceleration profile and outnumbering him. His danger alarms went off, lighting the back of his chamber with echoes. Proximity alarms went off ahead of him, marking new shapes he had to fly around: other Congregate warships. He’d duck and use them for cover where he could. He wouldn’t be lucky enough for the missiles to hit the warships. They weren’t that dumb. But a dog could hope.
战列舰肯定已经注意到他了。唯一能让他不被当成靶子的原因是，没人知道轴心战舰能承受多大的惩罚，也没人蠢到去探个究竟。尽管他们知道联盟是用高温充气驱动装置穿过弗莱亚轴心星的，但聚能驱动装置是不同的，SOP关闭了发电厂和武器系统。斯蒂尔斯不能呆在这里，只要他一出来，所有的赌注就都没了：无辜的文森特-斯蒂尔斯对抗至少六艘装备齐全的公会驱逐舰。他刚刚从维纳斯号的游戏中解脱出来。他不想马上再玩一次。
太阳和星星不适合你。它永远不会变得更好。
蒙古人的方式永远不会错。
他把战斗机紧贴着最近的一艘驱逐舰的舰身，放在两排大炮之间。当他们打开主动雷达时，并不是为了近距离观察而制造的。但根据他们冲出自由市或斯塔布斯港时的光线，舰体自动摄像机会发现他。但他们也不能在这里拍摄。那么，在发生碰撞之前，他能离驱逐舰有多近？集结号的装甲可以抵御核弹。而他不能
咬住每只手
他们冲进了正常空间 弹药四处飞溅 无线电和雷达波段回声四起。附近没有行星 这里不是自由城 如果这里是斯塔布斯港 港口已经被弹片击中了 普塔 他到底在哪里？ 他怎么才能逃出生天？
他脚下的驱逐舰醒了，而且醒得很愤怒。每艘驱逐舰上大概有 40 架战斗机从轨道炮的侧发射管里飞了出来。大炮还没来得及转到发射位置，它们就开始用发射火炮震撼世界，并在最前方的位置设置了炮位。傀儡们完蛋了。
等等
透过厚厚的静电，他听到了联盟波段的狗屁声音。他的战斗机没有联盟的解密设备，所以他不知道他们在说什么。反正可能就是在说废话。为了避免成为decryption equipment的污点，他离开了脚下的驱逐舰。他用望远镜分析着一切，起初一片混乱。但随后，他的系统确认了外面有几条狗，驾驶着联盟战机，与联盟战舰并肩作战，正在与 “会聚 ”作战。
搞什么鬼？
他在巴赫韦齐吗？
阿霍纳他妈的怎么会错过轴心国？
有可怕的目标，可怕的该死的目标，还有如此巨大的失误，真正的壮观的作品，获奖的无能，以至于他们需要永垂不朽。斯蒂尔斯要确保没有人会忘记阿尔霍纳的失误。他会花钱请历史学家把这件事写入史册 如果他还活着的话
一门小型反坦克炮瞄准了他，斯蒂尔斯驾驶战斗机飞离了炮火弧线。他躲到另一艘驱逐舰后面，但所有的反坦克炮现在都在进行近距离瞄准，炮口也紧跟着他。他开火了，打碎了几门。但这架战斗机并不是用来对付驱逐舰的，而且他的大部分弹药都用在了让行星防御系统远离一群不知去向的智人（Homo quantus）上。真是一团糟。
不过，最基本的任务已经完成，那就是不让智人量子落入会聚者手中。而且从目前的情况来看，这些令人毛骨悚然的小傀儡们还把情报部搞得一团糟。
反炮弹并不大，但足够多的反炮弹会在他身上打出很多小洞。他飞快地跑开，试图加速穿过会聚激光器的火力弧线，如果运气不好，还可能被刺导弹击中。其他可能会掩护他的 “狗 ”都在前面。
他的加速度达到了 65 重力，足以严重伤害他的器官，让他的骨头咯吱作响。在这种压力下，水是骨骼弯曲时发出吱吱声的最佳导体。导弹从战舰上吐出，在他身后划出一道道弧线，与他的加速度曲线相当接近，数量也超过了他。他的危险警报响起，照亮了他的舱室后部，发出回声。接近警报在他前方响起，标出了他必须绕开的新形状：其他会聚体战舰。他会尽可能地躲避并利用它们作掩护。他不会幸运到让导弹击中战舰。它们没那么笨 但狗也有希望
A long distance threat alarm kept turning on and off, like it couldn’t make up its mind. Something was coming from up ahead, and like really up, like a forty-five degree angle off of solar north, a big missile. Hunter chasers missed it and the warships weren’t reacting hard. Most warships hadn’t spit their big anti-artillery at it because it wasn’t coming for them. Its guidance was shot. Even though it wasn’t targeting anything, his defensive sub-AIs kept lighting it up for a second, then deciding it wasn’t a threat. Why? He ducked around a big destroyer covering the assembly of a dreadnought. He’d a loved to have shot the tabarnak out of a nice big target like that, but he was low on everything and the missiles were still on his ass.
But something didn’t feel right. It was like the shiver in the spine when you’re being targeted, but you only know it in your guts. And mama Merced hadn’t raised her mongrels to not follow their guts. Guts were the best fucking brains.
Despite his bones creaking, despite his liver and kidneys feeling like he was about to shit them into the stern plating, the chasing missiles were catching up. He cut his thrust and the relief from the crushing hand was almost a pleasure. He spun his fighter, spraying the last of his bullets. One of the missiles exploded, but the others still came.
And as he fired back, he suddenly put his finger on the itch that bugged him. He recognized the weird design of the big missile. It was one of those fucking anti-matter ones that Mejía and Arjona had built. And it wasn’t busted. Its guidance system wasn’t off. Seeing its trajectory over minutes, he saw where it was going. Every battle had bullets that missed. Most of them did actually. No one wasted ammunition on shooting up a bunch of ordnance that would become part of the Oort cloud or fall into the sun. Anti-artillery targeting systems triaged the shit that wasn’t gonna do fuck all and ignored it. And automated systems covering three quarters of the battle volume had already ignored this missile. Except it was targeting something that probably wasn’t programmed into anti-artillery systems as a defensive priority.
Because who the crisse would shoot an Axis?
With anti-matter.
Fuck.
Oh fuck.
He was no physicist brain. He didn’t know what anti-matter would do to the inside of an Axis.
But even the Congregate didn’t run their engines inside an Axis. Hell they hadn’t even shot him with bullets in there.
Tabarnak.
He spun his fighter and poured on seventy gravities. His bones creaked louder. A lot of shit hurt that weren’t supposed to hurt. But he didn’t slow down, not even when his first rib snapped. If he died out here, he was going to be really pissed; he was supposed to die in an ocean.
远距离威胁警报不停地响起又落下，就像它无法下定决心一样。有东西从前方飞来，而且是真的飞来，就像从太阳北边45度角飞来，是一枚大导弹。猎手追击者没打中，战舰也没做出什么反应。大多数战舰都没有向它发射反舰大炮，因为它不是冲着它们来的。它的制导系统失灵了。尽管它没有瞄准任何目标，但它的防御子系统却一直在照亮它，然后又认为它不构成威胁，这是为什么呢？他绕过了一艘掩护无畏舰组装的大型驱逐舰。他很想把塔巴纳克从那样一个漂亮的大目标上打下来，但他的弹药不多了，导弹还在他屁股后面。
但他感觉有些不对劲。就像当你被盯上的时候，你的脊梁骨在颤抖，但你只知道你的内脏在颤抖。默塞德妈妈可没让她的杂种狗们不跟着胆量走 胆量是最好的大脑
尽管他的骨头咯吱咯吱作响，尽管他的肝脏和肾脏感觉快要拉到船尾的钢板上，但追击的导弹还是追上来了。他切断了推力，从压迫感中解脱出来几乎是一种享受。他旋转战机，喷射出最后一发子弹。一枚导弹爆炸了，但其他导弹仍然飞来。
当他进行反击时，他突然发现自己的手痒了。他认出了那枚大导弹的奇怪设计。那是梅希亚和阿尔霍纳制造的一种反物质导弹。而且它没有损坏。制导系统也没有失灵。几分钟后，他看到了它的轨迹，知道了它要去哪里。每场战斗都有打偏的子弹 实际上大部分都是 没有人会把弹药浪费在发射一堆会成为奥尔特云一部分或落入太阳的弹药上。反炮兵瞄准系统会对那些毫无用处的炮弹进行分拣，然后置之不理。而覆盖四分之三战区的自动系统已经忽略了这枚导弹。只不过它瞄准的目标可能并没有被反炮兵系统设定为防御重点。
因为谁会向轴心国开火呢？
用反物质
妈的
我操
他又不是物理学家 他不知道反物质会对轴心国造成什么影响
但即使是 “会聚 ”也不会在 “轴心 ”内运行引擎。该死的，他们甚至没有在里面用子弹射他。
塔巴纳克
他旋转着战斗机，倾泻着七十个重力。他的骨头吱吱作响。很多不该疼的地方都疼了起来。但他没有减速，甚至在第一根肋骨断裂时也没有减速。如果他死在这里，他会非常生气；他应该死在海里。
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Something was wrong. Belisarius’ inflaton flyer was coasting through the induced wormhole, far behind Stills’ fighter. The waxy gray indistinctness of the unstable throat gave no indication of the state of the world, not that he was rightly in the world as they conceived it. He felt something first in the minor feed of quantum information from the objectivity running in his brain. The part of him that lived in constant fever in the fugue sensed things it had never observed before. The wash of it swamped the part of his brain where Belisarius lived.
The stream of information from the quantum intellect became a cataract. He saw the lines of entanglement that webbed the wormhole throat vibrating and dissolving. Neutrinos and gamma rays sprayed from ahead as space-time seemed to quake, transforming virtual particles into sleets of electron and anti-electrons that electrified the surface of his flyer. Something had happened to the junction of the induced wormhole and the Freya Axis. It had come undone. The induced wormhole was collapsing around him. Through his quantum senses, he saw this temporary region of space-time shrinking. He couldn’t drive the flyer forward. He couldn’t turn the flyer around.
Parts of his brain sped through a kaleidoscope of regrets while other parts looked for some way out. In dying, he would take with him the only real knowledge anyone anywhere had of the Hortus quantus. He’d failed to resurrect them. And if he’d managed to save the captive Homo quantus, if they’d gotten out before this collapse, his people were still refugees, hiding around an inhospitable pulsar. They and Cassandra would be hunted for the rest of their lives. He had no other legacy but his thefts and the war he’d created by bringing together its ingredients. He thought all this in a pair of milliseconds. His brain could do much more, including calculating the remaining half-second as the throat collapsed.
In a moment of resentful defiance, he turned the flyer’s inflaton drive to full. It wouldn’t do anything, but he didn’t want his last moments to be a surrender. The world seemed unfair and the mourning parts of him could yet be angry. His instant of throwing the dice one last time came to nothing as the temporary volume in space-time shrank.
In the last microseconds, he gave himself entirely over to the quantum fugue, immersing himself in the flood of sensations, dissolving the identity of Belisarius. He didn’t need to die as a human. He could die as the impersonal objectivity his builders and their investors had so badly wanted. He could die learning, connected to the viscera of the cosmos. The subjective Belisarius ceased to exist as the wormhole collapsed, squeezing the world into nothing.
不对劲 贝利撒留斯的炎龙飞行器正穿过诱导虫洞，远远地跟在斯蒂尔斯的战斗机后面。不稳定咽喉的蜡灰色模糊不清，没有显示出世界的状态，而他也没有正确地进入他们所设想的世界。他首先感觉到的是大脑中客观运行的量子信息的微小反馈。他在迷宫中持续发热的那部分感觉到了从未观察到的东西。它的冲刷淹没了他大脑中贝利撒留斯居住的部分。
来自量子智慧的信息流变成了白内障。他看到虫洞咽喉的纠缠线在振动和消解。中微子和伽马射线从前方喷射而出，时空似乎在颤抖，将虚拟粒子转化为电子和反电子束，使他的飞行器表面通电。诱导虫洞和弗莱娅轴的交界处发生了一些事情。它已经崩溃了。诱导虫洞正在他周围崩溃。通过量子感官，他看到这个临时时空区域正在缩小。他无法驾驶飞行器前进。他无法让飞行器掉头。
他大脑的一部分在后悔的万花筒中飞速旋转，另一部分则在寻找出路。死后，他将带走任何人对 Hortus quantus 唯一真正的了解。他没能复活他们。如果他成功地拯救了被俘虏的量子智人，如果他们在崩溃之前逃了出来，那么他的族人仍然是难民，躲在一颗荒凉的脉冲星周围。他们和卡珊德拉将终生被追杀。除了他的偷窃行为和他一手制造的战争，他没有其他遗产。他在几毫秒内想到了这一切。他的大脑还能做更多的事情，包括计算喉咙塌陷时剩下的半秒钟。
在愤恨反抗的一瞬间，他把飞行器的充气驱动调到了最大。这并没有什么用，但他不想让自己最后的时刻成为投降。这个世界似乎并不公平，而他内心的哀伤还在继续。随着时空的临时体积缩小，他最后一次掷骰子的瞬间化为乌有。
在最后的几微秒里，他把自己完全交给了量子迷宫，沉浸在感觉的洪流中，消解了贝利撒留斯的身份。他不需要以人类的身份死去。他可以作为他的建造者和投资人所渴求的非个人客观存在而死。他可以在学习中死去，与宇宙的内脏相连。随着虫洞的坍塌，主观的贝利撒留斯不复存在，世界被挤压成了一片虚无。
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Sensors fed the scene into tiny retinal projectors in Cassandra’s eyes. The big missile with the last of their anti-matter lanced through space. Its nuclear rocket engine followed an arc solar northward, around the core of the battle volume. After a time, it stopped thrusting and it began to tumble. For all the world, it looked like a missile gone astray.
Volleys of missiles from the remaining Union ships launched at the massed Congregate forces. Fighters clashed. Stills’ people threw themselves into deaths they kept cheating over and over, until they died. Like the Union crews. All of them fought for something or nothing. Just fighting. And here she was too, Cassandra from the Garret in the thick of a war between interstellar powers. If the Homo quantus had worked as their designers had hoped, she might have had a life on a protected headquarters ship, serving as some kind of advisor or analyst on an admiral’s staff, or more probably she would have worked from a heavily defended Bank vault or mint. And yet here she was, riding a warship very likely to be destroyed in the next hour or two, inhabiting someone else’s dream of independence. And simultaneously it wasn’t entirely someone else’ dream. Something about the Union dream of determining their own destiny resonated in her too.
The Congregate anti-artillery railguns filled space with hails of metal pellets, shredding Union missiles in fields of destructive impacts. Other Union missiles, targeted by maser and laser, glared brightly in the black. Their reflective plating could turn the lasers for a time, but the microwaves generated currents in the missile casing and soon heat, eventually overcoming the shielding and insulation of the missile electronics. Many of the missiles failed in the struggle and detonated. But these were almost all for show. Iekanjika was keeping Congregate eyes on the Union fleet and off the fast-moving, off-angle, occasionally tumbling anti-matter missile, which intermittently fired its nuclear engine, a few seconds of burn at a time, likely outside the field of concerns of the Congregate battle sensors looking for immediate threats.
If the missile reached the axis, if it would slam into the throat. The bent space-time would exert a counter-force, a tremendous deceleration on the missile, enough to crush it. But long before the momentum of the missile would have compressed the nuclear engine into the armored tip, the impact will have collapsed the powerful inner magnetic fields. The momentum of the fifty grams of highly-charged anti-iron would carry it into the front of the missile casing. Positron would slam into electron, annihilating layers of them, annihilating all the layers of electron and positron, until momentum slammed anti-nucleus into nucleus, annihilating. The first wave of annihilation, within the compressed, high pressure space would, by Cassandra’s calculations, instantly produce enough energy to convert the matter and antimatter into plasma, mixing them together for a far more powerful explosion whose combined momentum would still press against the six-dimensional space-time architecture of the axis.
When the missile was within a hundred kilometers of the Axis, one of the Congregate gun platforms began targeting it. The missile flared in the infrared under laser ablation as induced electrical currents slithering along the casing from maser strikes. At fifty kilometers from the Axis, its nuclear engine cut off, no longer evading. It was heating; the gun platforms had damaged it. It hurtled uncontrolled at ten kilometers per second, too far for telescopes to clearly see its path. A new Congregate warship emerged from the Freya Axis, its infrared and radio emissions lighting up as its engines and gun emplacements came online, swamping the view of the careening missile, except for a brief hot flare of nuclear engine at the last second.
Then the Freya Axis lit strangely. For a moment, the sensors of the Mutapa measured spikes in x-rays, gamma rays, microwaves, neutrinos, and visible light in the purple end of the spectrum, all of them accented with absorption lines she didn’t recognize. The crudeness of the battle sensors couldn’t capture the data she wanted. Then the Freya Axis shone, like a sizzling fuse burning down, spitting hard radiation in every direction and at every wavelength. The powerful push of a hammering magnetic field hit her, all the way out at the Mutapa, a light second from the Axis, through all its shielding and in the protective shell of the acceleration chamber.
传感器将这一场景输入卡珊德拉眼中的微型视网膜投影仪。装载着最后一批反物质的大型导弹在太空中穿梭。它的核火箭发动机沿着太阳弧线向北飞行，绕过了战斗体的核心。一段时间后，它停止了推进，开始翻滚。它看起来就像一枚误入歧途的导弹。
剩余的联盟战舰向聚集在一起的会聚军发射了一排导弹。战斗机发生冲突。斯蒂尔斯的人投入到死亡中，他们一次又一次地欺骗自己，直到死去。就像联盟的船员一样。所有的人都在为某些东西而战，或者什么都不为。只是在战斗 而她也在这里，来自加勒特的卡珊德拉 身处星际战争的漩涡之中 如果量子智人能像设计者希望的那样工作 她可能会在受保护的总部飞船上生活 在海军上将的参谋部里担任顾问或分析师 更有可能的是 她会在防御严密的银行金库或造币厂里工作 然而，她却在这里，乘坐着一艘很可能在一两个小时内就会被摧毁的战舰，做着别人的独立梦。同时，这也不完全是别人的梦想。她也对联邦决定自己命运的梦想产生了共鸣。
会聚式反火炮轨道炮用金属弹丸填满了整个空间，在毁灭性的冲击力场中撕碎了联盟的导弹。其他联盟导弹则以激光和激光雷达为目标，在黑夜中发出耀眼的光芒。它们的反光镀层可以使激光暂时失效，但微波会在导弹外壳中产生电流，很快就会发热，最终克服导弹电子设备的屏蔽和绝缘。许多导弹在挣扎中失败并爆炸。但这些几乎都是摆设。伊坎吉卡一直将公会的视线放在联盟舰队和快速移动、偏离角度、偶尔翻滚的反物质导弹上，该导弹间歇性地发射核引擎，每次燃烧几秒钟，很可能在公会战斗传感器的关注范围之外，寻找直接威胁。
如果导弹到达轴心，如果它将撞上咽喉。弯曲的时空会产生反作用力，对导弹造成巨大的减速，足以将其击碎。但是，早在导弹的动量将核动力引擎压缩到装甲尖端之前，撞击就会使强大的内部磁场崩溃。50 克高电荷反铁的动量将把它带入导弹外壳的前端。正电子将撞向电子，湮灭层层电子，湮灭所有层层电子和正电子，直到反原子核撞向原子核，湮灭为止。根据卡桑德拉的计算，在压缩的高压空间内，第一波湮灭将立即产生足够的能量，将物质和反物质转化为等离子体，将它们混合在一起，发生威力更大的爆炸，其综合动量仍将压迫轴心的六维时空结构。
当导弹接近轴心一百公里时，一个会聚炮平台开始瞄准它。在激光烧蚀的作用下，导弹在红外线中发出耀眼的光芒，因为 maser 撞击产生的感应电流沿着外壳滑动。在距离 “轴心 ”号 50 千米处，它的核引擎熄火，不再闪避。它在发热；炮台已经损坏了它。它以每秒十公里的速度不受控制地飞驰着，望远镜无法清楚地看到它的轨迹。一艘新的 “会聚 ”战舰从 “弗莱亚轴心 ”号上驶出，它的红外线和无线电发射器随着引擎和炮台的启动而亮起，除了在最后一秒核引擎发出的短暂热信号外，导弹的视线被淹没了。
然后，“弗莱亚轴心 ”号发出了奇怪的亮光。刹那间，“穆塔帕 ”号的传感器测量到了 X 射线、伽马射线、微波、中微子和光谱紫色端可见光的峰值，所有这些都带有她无法识别的吸收线。简陋的战斗传感器无法捕捉到她想要的数据。这时，弗莱娅轴闪耀起来，就像一根燃烧的导火索，向各个方向、各种波长喷射出强烈的辐射。强大的磁场冲击着她，一直冲击到穆塔帕，距离轴心只有一光秒的距离，穿过轴心的所有屏蔽和加速室的保护壳。
Visible light speared from the Axis mouth as the Axis glowed red and then white and then exploded like a nova. A sleet of hard radiation cooked the Mutapa’s primary sensors. The feeds continued to show gapped, pixelated, damaged images, but the secondary sensors caught the Congregate warships and the assembling dreadnought detonating. The blast radius of the annihilating Axis encompassed the careful, militarily precise Congregate naval picket. Many dozens of Congregate ships burst like firecrackers in the overwhelming incandescent background of bent space-time uncoiling, unwinding, releasing all the energy that had been stored in the tension of that engineered singularity. Cassandra might have seen so much if she’d been in the fugue, if she hadn’t been under shells of armor, but she also would have been dead.
Then, everything became strangely quiet.
“It’s gone?” Iekanjika said. “Can you confirm, Mejía? Our sensors are all confused.”
The sensors weren’t confused. Many were damaged, but they gave enough data to make models. The soft almost indiscernible infrared and Cerenkov radiation of the Axis mouth had vanished. There was a new pattern, though, something easily visible to her mind, written in the high-energy x-rays and gamma rays of infalling material.
“The debris of the Congregate ships is being pulled in,” Cassandra said, identifying the spot in the readings where the Axis had been. “The orbital mechanics of the entire area is being influenced by a gravitational body of about three and a half solar masses. Its event horizon is about twenty kilometers across.”
“Event horizon?” Iekanjika demanded. “A fucking black hole? How dangerous is it?”
“It’s a black hole. Stay away from it.”
“Four-wing,” Iekanjika said to her formations on the general channel, “press the attack on the remaining Congregate forces. They’re in disarray. Push them back towards the following coordinates, but stay clear yourselves.”
Iekanjika transmitted the coordinates of the new black hole. Cassandra modelled the new orders. She didn’t think that it would work. A dozen Congregate warships seemed to be under power, reforming defensive formations, moving away from where the Axis has been. Some weren’t far enough from the new black hole though, and their acceleration profiles looked like they would run out of fuel before pulling away. X-rays and gamma-rays flared harder as more debris fell towards the event horizon. Stepped down to visible light sensor processing, the effect became a chaotic strobing of greens and blues and purples.
Beautiful. And a relief.
They’d ended up in a draw, which under the circumstances might be as close to winning as the Union could get. Running out of options, running high on desperation, the Union had cut itself off from Epsilon Indi. They’d broken the bridge over which their enemies could come. If the Congregate wanted to attack now, it would have to induce a series of wormholes to inch across dozens of light years. They could still do it, but the mathematics of supply lines would be prohibitive.
Cassandra would still have weeks of anxiety before she could know if Bel and Saint Matthew and their people had made it safely to the Puppet Free City. She had to be patient.
A radio channel, full of static and expletives was shunted into Cassandra’s feed by Iekanjika. At first she didn’t recognize it.
“Ass-licking shit navigating! The malparido incompetente missed. What the crisse am I doing here? How the--”
“Vincent?” Cassandra said.
The metadata put the speaker at a light-second away, and she didn’t hear the next few seconds. The matter falling around the black hole projected static and interference up and down the EM spectrum.
“Princess?” the speaker said. “Did you do it? Why the fuck am I here?”
“How did you get here, Vincent?”
“Your boyfriend is a shit navigator. They shoulda sent you to do it. You never steered me wrong. I hope you weren’t looking for love, because if that little fucker survives, I’m going to shoot his pecker off.”
“What happened, Stills? Where are the Homo quantus? Where is Bel?”
“Their transport was ahead of me in the wormhole. I didn’t see where it went because there were too many fucking Congregate warships in our getaway route because your limp-dicked lovey-dovey couldn’t shoot straight.”
可见光从 “轴心 ”口中射出，“轴心 ”先后发出红光和白光，然后像新星一样爆炸。一阵强烈的辐射烧毁了穆塔帕的主传感器。信号传输继续显示出间断的、像素化的、损坏的图像，但辅助传感器捕捉到了公会战舰和正在集结的无畏舰的爆炸。轴心战舰湮灭的爆炸半径包括了小心翼翼、军事上精确的公理会海军纠察队。数十艘公理会战舰像鞭炮一样在弯曲时空的炽热背景中炸开，时空松卷，释放出所有储存在工程奇点张力中的能量。如果卡珊德拉当时处于迷幻状态，如果她没有被盔甲包裹着，她可能会看到很多东西，但她也可能已经死了。
然后，一切都变得异常安静。
“它走了？” 伊坎吉卡说。“你能确认吗，梅希亚？我们的传感器都糊涂了。”
传感器并没有混乱。许多传感器都损坏了，但它们提供的数据足以建立模型。轴心口柔和得几乎难以辨认的红外线和塞伦科夫辐射消失了。不过，有一种新的模式，在她的脑海中很容易就能看到，写在下坠物质的高能 X 射线和伽马射线中。
卡珊德拉说：“公会飞船的残骸被拉进来了。”她在读数中确定了轴心星所在的位置。“整个区域的轨道力学正受到一个大约三个半太阳质量的引力体的影响。它的事件视界大约有二十公里宽。”
“事件视界？伊坎吉卡问道。“一个该死的黑洞？它有多危险？”
“这是一个黑洞。离它远点。”
“四翼，“伊坎吉卡在总频道上对她的编队说，”向剩余的会众部队发起攻击。他们已经陷入混乱。把他们逼向下面的坐标，但你们自己不要靠近。”
伊坎吉卡传送了新黑洞的坐标。卡桑德拉模拟了新的命令。她认为这行不通。十几艘会聚号战舰似乎正在发力，调整防御阵型，远离轴心国的位置。不过有些战舰离新黑洞的距离还不够远，它们的加速度看起来会在拉开距离之前耗尽燃料。随着更多的碎片落向事件视界，X 射线和伽马射线更加猛烈地闪烁起来。在可见光传感器的处理下，效果变成了绿色、蓝色和紫色的混乱闪烁。
美极了 我松了一口气
他们最终打成了平局，在这种情况下，这可能是联盟所能得到的最接近胜利的结果了。联盟已经没有选择了，他们已经绝望了 他们已经切断了与伊普西隆印地星的联系 他们切断了敌人来犯的桥梁 如果公会现在想要进攻 就必须诱发一系列的虫洞 穿越数十光年的距离 他们还是可以做到的，但补给线的数学计算会让他们望而却步。
卡珊德拉还得焦虑好几周，才能知道贝尔和圣马修以及他们的人是否安全到达了傀儡自由城。她必须耐心等待。
伊坎吉卡将一个充满静电和咒骂的无线电频道转到了卡珊德拉的信号源中。起初，她并不认识这个频道。
“狗屁导航！不称职的人失手了。我怎么会在这里？怎么会......”
“文森特？” 卡桑德拉说。
元数据显示扬声器距离她有一光速，接下来的几秒钟她都没听见。掉落在黑洞周围的物质在电磁频谱上下投射出静电和干扰。
“公主？"说话者说。“是你干的吗？我他妈怎么会在这里？”
“你是怎么到这儿来的 文森特？”
“你男朋友是个烂导航员。他们应该派你来的 你从没带错过路 我希望你不是来找爱的 因为如果那个小混蛋还活着 我就一枪毙了他
“怎么了 斯蒂尔斯 智人在哪里？贝尔在哪？”
“他们的飞船在虫洞里走在我前面。我没看到它去哪了，因为在我们逃跑的路线上有太多该死的会聚战舰了，因为你那瘸腿的小情人不会射击。”
Her mind ran models, trying to see what might have happened, how Stills could be here.
“I didn’t see debris in the Freya Axis,” he said. “So your crazy AI and the rest of you should have at least gotten out here. What the fuck happened here?”
“Are they here?” Cassandra said to Iekanjika. “The transport you made us.”
The general sent to question to her staff. “If it’s here, we’ll find it,” Iekanjika said.
Iekanjika didn’t say if it survived. The battle volume had been too big and chaotic for anyone to have seen all of it. The transport might have slipped out of the Freya Axis without the Union noticing. The Congregate had been a lot closer to the mouth of the Axis and they might have fired on a single inflaton ship before noticing it had been unarmed.
“Where is Bel, Vincent?” Cassandra demanded.
“He was holding open the induced wormhole,” Stills said, “and doing a fucking slow job of it too! I nearly got my ass shot off by Venusian orbital defenses!”
“Is he alive?”
“Fucked if I know. He was gonna follow me. If he made it through, he was about thirty seconds to a minute behind.”
Right before the anti-matter missile had destroyed the Axis.
“When did you come out of the Freya Axis, Vincent?”
“About a minute before everything exploded, princess.”
她的脑海中闪过各种模型，试图找出可能发生了什么，斯蒂尔斯怎么会在这里。
“他说："我在弗莱亚轴心没有看到碎片。“所以，你那疯狂的人工智能和其他人至少应该已经逃到了这里。这里到底发生了什么？”
“他们在这里吗？” 卡桑德拉对伊坎吉卡说。“你给我们做的运输机。”
将军向她的参谋们发问。“如果在这里，我们会找到的。"伊坎吉卡说。
伊坎吉卡没有说它是否幸存。战斗的规模太大，场面太混乱，任何人都不可能看到全部。运输机可能在联盟没有注意到的情况下溜出了芙蕾雅轴心。会聚号离轴心口近得多，他们可能在注意到一艘没有武装的充气船之前就已经向它开火了。
“贝尔在哪里，文森特？” 卡珊德拉问道。
“他在打开诱导虫洞，“斯蒂尔斯说，”做得还真他妈慢！我差点被金星轨道防御系统打得屁滚尿流！”
“他还活着吗？”
“我知道个屁。他本来要跟着我的。如果他成功了，他大概落后了30秒到1分钟。”
就在反物质导弹摧毁轴心国之前
“你什么时候从弗莱亚轴心出来的 文森特”
“大约在一切爆炸前一分钟，公主”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Iekanjika had wiped off the shock gel and changed into a plain uniform coveralls, bland and utilitarian but for the two general’s stars on shoulder and cuff. The Mutapa paced the remnants of the Congregate task force, neither gaining nor slowing, lasers targeting but not firing. The Union squadron had formed into a shallow bowl shape, with the Mutapa at the base and the ten surviving inflaton warships powering further ahead in a ring at a radius of about a light second. This prevented the Congregate units from dispersing. An unarmed Bank cruiser trailed the Mutapa at a safe distance. Iekanjika imagined the data the Bank officers would be capturing, the tactics, the strategy, the repulsion of the Congregate forces. She’d received six messages so far, bordering on frantic interest in alliances and a palpable need for the Banks to be allowed to speak to the Homo quantus again.
X-rays and gamma rays registered in the rearward sensors as battle debris tumbled into the new black hole, heating to plasma in its death-fall. Mejía seemed to watch those sensor readings numbly, as if stunned. Iekanjika had to remind herself that the Homo quantus weren’t human and that she couldn’t trust her impressions of their reactions.
After an hour, Stills’ fighter had caught up and docked with them. He’d transmitted the right passcodes with stuttering, damaged comms signals. The fighter’s inflaton drive faltered between fifteen and forty percent. It would be a few minutes before the deck crew could safe his craft and him, if he’d been injured. She decided to finally take one of the Bank signals. The hologram of Admiral Gillbard appeared in full color before her, the bulbous silvery AI housing distending from the side of his head like a tumor.
“Very impressive, Major-General,” he said. “This battle will be taught in staff colleges for centuries.”
“I’m not interested in history, admiral.”
“We’re interested in helping the Union consolidate its gains,” he said. “If I’m not wrong, you threw prototypes and proofs of principle into this battle, surprising your enemy, but they’ll eventually be back. It’s time to scale up your inventions and tactics. You need investment for that, partners, more than just your alliance with the Homo quantus and the Homo eridanus.”
Iekanjika resisted the urge to gauge Mejía’s reaction. She showed only herself to the admiral and she didn’t want the Banks to see Mejía’s anxiousness. She didn’t know if the woman might make some bad choices right now under the pressure of the Bank’s avarice for the Homo quantus secret to anti-matter, a hunger palpably greater even than the Banks’ greed for the inflaton drive.
“We’ve seen Union performance in battle and the Banks have sent gifts we’d like to offer you. No strings attached.”
Iekanjika highly doubted the statement about strings attached and she wasn’t equipped to negotiate with Banks. No one in the Union was. They operated at another level and Rudo would likely need to hire a negotiator to help them keep the Banks from finishing by owning the Union. But she didn’t have time to respond to Gillbard; the Congregate finally signalled. Iekanjika hung up on him.
A hologram of Rear-Admiral Gauthier appeared. Gauthier was a handsome man perhaps ten years older than her, with fine loops of acid scarring in abstract designs along one jawline. The Congregate combat uniform was sleek black, winking with sensors and augmented with tools. His rank insignia, inspired by fleur-de-lis designs, glowed prominently.
The Congregate task force had been big enough to warrant a full admiral and a couple of vice-admirals and Iekanjika savored a prideful satisfaction that they hadn’t survived. The Congregate had not been able to match the Union propulsion technology and had sent an overwhelming force instead, six to nine times their size. In the heat of battle, her staff had been unable to even fully count the entire force that had come to kill them. Now, the remaining Congregate force was barely bigger that what the Union had left. The Congregate might still have ground the Union fleet down, maybe, but their military objective was gone. They’d been sent to establish and hold a beachhead at the Freya Axis. Possessing it would have determined all subsequent military decisions. No one could have imagined that their strategic objective might have been annihilated, or that the Union would have been willing to do it. It had been a long time since the Congregate had faced a cornered animal and the intelligence they would bring to Venus was more valuable than a grinding campaign of mutual assured destruction.
伊坎吉卡擦掉了震荡凝胶，换上了一套朴素的制服工作服，除了肩部和袖口的两颗将军星外，其他地方都是平淡无奇。穆塔帕号在公会特遣部队的残余队伍中踱步，既不追赶也不减速，激光瞄准目标，但没有开火。联盟中队形成了一个浅碗形，穆塔帕号位于底部，十艘幸存的炎龙战舰以大约一光速的半径环形前进。这使得 “会聚 ”部队无法分散。一艘没有武装的班克巡洋舰以安全距离尾随穆塔帕号。伊坎吉卡想象着银行官员们将捕捉到的数据、战术、战略、击退公会部队的方法。到目前为止，她已经收到了六条信息，这些信息几乎都是对结盟的疯狂兴趣，以及让银行再次与智人量子对话的强烈要求。
X射线和伽马射线在后方的传感器中记录下来，战斗碎片翻滚着进入新的黑洞，在其死亡坠落过程中加热成等离子体。梅希亚似乎呆若木鸡地看着这些传感器读数。伊坎吉卡不得不提醒自己，量子智人不是人类，她不能相信自己对他们反应的印象。
一个小时后，斯蒂尔斯的战斗机追了上来，与他们对接。他发出了正确的密码，但通信信号却磕磕绊绊，损坏严重。战斗机的充气驱动在百分之十五到百分之四十之间摇摆不定。如果他受伤了，还需要几分钟时间，甲板上的工作人员才能确保他的飞船和他的安全。她最终决定接受银行的一个信号。吉尔巴德上将的全息图全彩出现在她面前，银色的人工智能外壳像肿瘤一样从他的头侧膨胀起来。
“非常了不起，少将。"他说。“这场战役将在参谋学院传授几个世纪。”
“我对历史不感兴趣，上将。”
“我们感兴趣的是帮助联邦巩固成果，"他说。“如果我没猜错的话，你在这场战斗中投入了原型机和原理验证，让你的敌人大吃一惊，但他们终究会卷土重来。现在是扩大你们的发明和战术规模的时候了。为此，你们需要投资，需要合作伙伴，而不仅仅是与智人（quantus）和智人（eridanus）结盟。”
伊坎吉卡克制住了想了解梅希亚反应的冲动。她只向海军上将展示了自己，她不想让班克斯看出梅希亚的焦虑。她不知道，在银行对反物质智人秘密的贪婪压力下，这个女人现在是否会做出一些错误的选择。
“我们看到了联盟在战斗中的表现“ ”银行送来了礼物，我们想送给你们 没有附加条件。”
伊坎吉卡非常怀疑这个附带条件的说法，她没有能力和班克斯谈判。联盟里没有人有这个能力。他们是在另一个层面上运作的，鲁道很可能需要雇佣一名谈判专家来帮助他们阻止银行最终拥有联盟。但她来不及回应吉尔巴德，公会终于发出了信号。伊坎吉卡挂断了他的电话。
高迪尔少将的全息图出现了。高迪尔是个英俊的男人，也许比她大十岁，下巴上有一圈酸性疤痕的抽象图案。他身着黑色光滑的 “会聚 ”作战服，眨眼间就装上了传感器和增强工具。他的军衔徽章灵感来自百合花图案，熠熠生辉。
公理会特遣舰队的规模足以配备一名正上将和几名副上将，伊坎吉卡对他们没能幸存下来感到非常自豪。公理会的推进技术无法与联盟相提并论，因此派出了一支压倒性的部队，其规模是联盟的六到九倍。在激烈的战斗中，她的工作人员甚至无法完全清点来杀他们的全部兵力。现在，公理会的残余兵力几乎没有联盟留下的兵力多。或许，会聚人仍能击溃联盟舰队，但他们的军事目标已经不复存在。他们被派去建立并守住弗莱亚轴心的滩头阵地。能否占领滩头阵地将决定以后所有的军事决策。没有人会想到他们的战略目标可能会被摧毁，也没有人会想到联盟会愿意这么做。公会已经很久没有面对过走投无路的动物了，他们将带给金星的情报比一场相互确保摧毁的磨砺战役更有价值。
“Major-General Iekanjika,” he said.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you under these circumstances, admiral,” she said smoothly.
Another hologram appeared beside Gauthier, a woman, in formal civilian wear, a suit with cravat and a number of civilian medals.
“May I introduce you to Jeanne-Manse Croteau,” Gauthier said. “She is the senior political commissar in the Bachwezi system.”
Iekanjika said nothing. She would find it very... symbolic to say Bachwezi was free of political commissars.
“Major-General Iekanjika,” Croteau said, “I’m authorized by the Praesidium to take a number of foreign policy decisions in the field. It is quite clear that tempers have flared, to the detriment of all of humanity. Both sides have been painted into a corner and some time for reflection would be wise.”
Part of Iekanjika wanted them to try to fight to the death, for pride. She might yet win, and there was an elegance to utterly wiping out the invading force. She could goad them now. But they might win too. Each side was worn down and she was the commander of the navy. It was her responsibility to protect Bachwezi not just today, but tomorrow.
“We seem to have come to a natural ceasefire,” Croteau said.
“Are you asking for a truce?” Iekanjika said, challenging very slightly.
“I’m not proposing anything, other than to recognize a condition of ceasefire has already developed. A real truce or a resumption of hostilities won’t be possible until both our governments have had time to assess the situation.”
“Go assess your new situation far from here,” Iekanjika said, “and don’t bother coming back.”
“Bachwezi was discovered by explorers from the Venusian Congregate and was leased in good faith to the Sub-Saharan Union, with signed accords. Those accords now seem insufficient as they had no clauses to take into account possible crimes against humanity.”
Political games. That’s what the commissars played.
“Several warships have already left Bachwezi on their way back to Congregate bases. Within a few days, both yourself and General Kudzenai Rudo will be charged with crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Court. Every Axis is an irreplaceable resource of significance to all of humanity. They may be hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years old, inherited from an extinct species we know nothing about. You destroyed part of humanity’s inheritance.”
“I can’t say that humanity has been impressing us very much,” Iekanjika said.
The idea of being branded a war criminal bit at her, at her idea of officer. She’d fought with everything to beat back a much stronger foe, for the independence of her people. But the International Criminal Court was far enough away to be a mirage, like many of the places the Sixth Expeditionary Force had already been during forty years. She didn’t fear mirages.
The Congregate might one day be back. Iekanjika and Rudo would prepare. Or perhaps the Congregate might cut its losses. The destruction of the Freya Axis not only meant that Bachwezi was now dozens of light years from anywhere in civilization, but that it had no resources of value, other than the inflaton drive which the Congregate would reverse engineer in less than a decade.
“The Union Government will consider a ceasefire to be in effect when half the Congregate support facilities in the Bachwezi Oort cloud have wormholed away,” Iekanjika said. “That shouldn’t take more than an hour. The other half will have six more hours to leave or hostilities will resume.”
The political commissar’s head cocked in thought, almost an insouciant gesture. But there would be no lightness when this commissar and this admiral arrived at Venus and had to explain the debacle. The Congregate losses today amounted to a catastrophe, a strategic realignment of civilization with the rise of a tough new actor on the stage. She wished she could be a fly on the wall when the Praesidium got the whole briefing.
“The Congregate Government will consider a ceasefire to be in effect when the Union forces come to a parking orbit ten AU from the Congregate support facilities in the Oort cloud,” Croteau said.
Ten astronomical units, four million kilometers, was plenty of space for the Congregate to feel like they could wormhole away in peace. And Iekanjika could deploy the remains of her fleet to be within laser range of all strategic spots for incoming induced wormholes if the Congregate tried something funny. She cut communication with the commissar and gave order for a new fleet deployment. As her pursuing force cut their acceleration, the retreating Congregate force pulled away.
“伊坎吉卡少将，"他说。
“很高兴在这种情况下见到您，上将。"她平稳地说。
另一个全息图像出现在戈蒂埃身边，她是一位女性，身着正式便装，西装革履，头戴领巾，佩戴着许多平民勋章。
“请允许我向您介绍让娜-曼斯-克罗托，"戈蒂埃说。“她是巴赫维齐系统的高级政委。”
伊坎吉卡一言不发。如果说巴赫维齐没有政委，她会觉得非常......象征性。
“伊坎吉卡少将，“克罗托说，”我被禁卫军授权在战场上做出一些外交政策决定。很明显，脾气已经暴躁起来，这对全人类都是不利的。双方都被逼到了墙角，最好给双方一点时间进行反思。”
伊坎吉卡的一部分想法是希望他们为了荣誉而拼个你死我活。她可能会赢，彻底消灭入侵者也是一种优雅。她现在可以激怒他们 但他们也可能会赢。双方都疲惫不堪，而她是海军指挥官。她有责任保护巴赫韦齐，不仅是今天，还有明天。
“克罗托说："我们似乎达成了自然停火。
“你是在要求停战吗？” 伊坎吉卡略带挑战地说。
“我没有提出任何建议，只是承认已经形成了停火的条件。在我们两国政府都有时间评估局势之前，不可能真正停战或恢复敌对行动。”
“到离这里很远的地方去评估你们的新形势吧，“伊坎吉卡说，”不用再回来了。”
“巴赫韦齐是由金星公会的探险家发现的，并真诚地租借给了撒哈拉以南联盟，双方签署了协议。现在看来，这些协议并不充分，因为其中没有任何条款考虑到可能发生的反人类罪行。”
政治游戏。政委们就是这么玩的。
“几艘战舰已经离开巴赫韦齐 驶回刚果（金）基地 几天之内，你和库德泽奈-鲁多将军都将被国际刑事法庭指控犯有反人类罪。每一个轴心国都是全人类不可替代的重要资源。它们可能有几十万年甚至上百万年的历史，是从我们一无所知的灭绝物种那里继承下来的。你毁掉了人类的部分遗产。”
“伊坎吉卡说："我不能说人类给我们留下了深刻的印象。
被打上战犯烙印的想法让她咬牙切齿，她对军官的想法也是如此。为了人民的独立，她不惜一切代价击退了更强大的敌人。但是，国际刑事法庭离她很远，就像第六远征军四十年来去过的许多地方一样，只是海市蜃楼。她不怕海市蜃楼。
说不定有一天，“公理会 ”还会回来。伊坎吉卡和鲁道会做好准备。又或者，公理会可能会减少损失。弗莱娅轴心的毁灭不仅意味着巴赫维齐现在距离任何文明都有几十光年的距离，而且意味着它没有任何有价值的资源，除了 “会聚 ”将在不到十年的时间里进行逆向工程的 “充气驱动”。
“伊坎吉卡说："当巴赫维齐奥尔特云中一半的会聚体支持设施虫洞消失后，联盟政府将认为停火生效。伊坎吉卡说："这不会超过一个小时。另一半将有六个小时的时间离开，否则敌对行动将重新开始。
政委歪着头想了想，几乎是一种无所谓的姿态。但是，当这位政委和这位海军上将抵达金星，不得不解释这场溃败时，他的心情是不会轻松的。今天公理会的损失等同于一场灾难，是文明的一次战略调整，舞台上崛起了一位强悍的新演员。她真希望自己能成为一只苍蝇，在议会上听取整个简报。
“克罗托说："当联盟部队进入距离奥尔特云中的联盟支持设施10个天文单位的停泊轨道时，联盟政府将认为停火生效。
十个天文单位，四百万公里，足够让公理会觉得他们可以安安静静地通过虫洞离开了。伊坎吉卡可以把她的舰队部署在所有战略要地的激光射程之内，以便在会众试图搞点小动作时诱导虫洞进入。她切断了与政委的通讯，下令部署新的舰队。当她的追击部队降低加速度时，正在撤退的 “会聚 ”部队也拉开了距离。
Iekanjika gave command of the force to Brigadier-General Tembe and came to her Homo quantus problem. Mejía’s haunted eyes were like a human in mourning, and it became harder for Iekanjika to remember that something alien lived at her core, the sum of genes and neurological and developmental differences between them as wide a gulf as the political one between the Union and the Congregate. Iekanjika felt like she observed different sets of feelings, new mixes of emotions in the other that she herself could not assemble. The moods looked the same and in many ways they were the same, but they were built of different pieces. Like the Puppets. Iekanjika had more in common with Stills than she did with Mejía; all the pieces of him that were different were visible. She didn’t know how to bridge the gap between her internal world and Mejía’s. A faint unease accompanied that realization.
Iekanjika delayed. She called up the landing bay feeds. A loading cradle locked Stills’ fighter into the fighter bays. The Mutapa’s laser imaging showed burns, dents and perforations all over the little craft. A deck crew bustled on magnetic boots, patching leaks spraying mists of salt water.
“What’s the pressure in there?” she said to the deck crew.
“Six hundred atmospheres, ma’am.”
The lower edge of mongrel survivability.
“Get the pressure up fast,” she said.
Cassandra stepped closer, hesitant magnetized step after magnetized step. A rough hologram of Stills flickered into shape, glassy-eyed, fish-faced.
“Are you injured, Stills?” Iekanjika said. “We can get you to the med bay.”
“I been better,” he said. “I need to get to someplace with a bit of room to swim.”
“Crews will safe your chamber and mate you into the big tanks.”
His electronically rendered laugh barked. “Mate,” he said.
“What are you doing here, Stills?” Cassandra said. “Where are the Homo quantus? Where’s Bel?”
Stills gave them a crisp, profanity-laced report, from arriving at Venus, to the escape, to the end of Marie Phocas, to the induction of the wormhole, to his flying into it, and then finding himself in the Freya Axis.
“Fucked if I know how I got here. I don’t know where any of your people are. Get a better navigator next time.”
Stills’ patience exhausted and he shut off his comms while she was in mid-question.
“Get him to the big tank,” Iekanjika told the deck crew. Mejía appeared distant. Iekanjika was getting to recognize the altered states of Homo quantus perception. This wasn’t the fugue. But Mejía wasn’t herself anymore either. “What do you think happened?”
“Connecting one induced wormhole onto another is hard,” Mejía replied distantly. “In the heat of battle, he wouldn’t have made one to the Puppet Axis and then created another to send Stills here. He only induced one wormhole. To the Freya Axis.”
“You said you couldn’t do that,” Iekanjika said with a kind of careful accusation. “You said you could only do that to a wormhole you’d studied and marked.”
“When we passed through the Freya Axis we were casually studying it,” Mejía said. “We didn’t leave markers. But we’re getting a better understanding of the structure of the axes. It would have been hard to latch an induced wormhole onto the Freya Axis. I don’t think I would have been able to do it.”
“Why did he take the risk?” Iekanjika said.
“He’s not here to ask.” Mejía didn’t wipe at the tears forming at the edges of her eyes. “I have to find them.”
The data from Stills’ fighter finished uploading to a standalone server on the bridge. Sub-AIs did a first triage of the terabytes of sensor, internal telemetry, communications and life support recordings. Mejía observed the process for some moments before saying “Give me control.”
Iekanjika authorized the access. The fast playback of the sub-AI search they’d been observing vanished. Raw data replaced it, passing too fast for Iekanjika to read, but only for a few seconds. The holographic display turned into to strange geometries with eye-twisting perspectives. She signalled to a bridge officer to verify that they were recording all of that Mejía was doing. The recordings Iekanjika had made of Mejía’s and Arjona’s work on the Jonglei and the Limpopo had been analyzed by her engineers to start to determine upper and lower processing limits of the Homo quantus. Then the movement stopped and a single tiny image appeared.
伊坎吉卡将部队的指挥权交给了滕贝准将，并开始解决她的智人问题。梅希亚幽怨的眼神就像哀悼中的人类，伊坎吉卡越来越难以记住，在她的内心深处住着一个异类，他们之间的基因、神经和发育差异的总和，就像联盟和公理会之间的政治鸿沟一样大。伊坎吉卡觉得自己在对方身上观察到了不同的情感，观察到了她自己无法组合的新的情感组合。这些情绪看起来是一样的，在很多方面也是一样的，但它们是由不同的部分组成的。就像木偶一样。伊坎吉卡与斯蒂尔斯的共同点比她与梅希亚的共同点要多；他身上所有不同的部分都清晰可见。她不知道如何弥合自己的内心世界和梅希亚的内心世界之间的鸿沟。在意识到这一点的同时，她也感到了一丝不安。
伊坎吉卡迟疑了。她调出了着陆舱的馈电装置。一个装载摇篮将斯蒂尔斯的战斗机锁定在战斗机托架上。穆塔帕号的激光成像显示，小飞船上到处都是烧伤、凹痕和穿孔。甲板上的工作人员忙着用磁靴修补喷出盐水雾的漏点。
“里面的压力是多少？"她对甲板上的工作人员说。
“600个大气压，女士。”
这是杂种生存能力的下限。
“尽快升压。"她说。
卡桑德拉一步步走近，犹豫不决地迈着磁化步。斯蒂尔斯的粗略全息图闪烁成形，玻璃眼，鱼脸。
“你受伤了吗，斯蒂尔斯？伊坎吉卡说。“我们可以送你去医务室。”
“我好多了。"他说。“我需要去一个能游泳的地方”
“工作人员会保护好你的舱室 然后把你放入大水箱”
他的电子笑声响起 “交配"，他说
“你在这里干什么，斯蒂尔斯？” 卡桑德拉说。“智人在哪里？贝尔在哪里？”
斯蒂尔斯给他们做了一个清脆的、带着脏话的报告，从到达金星，到逃亡，到玛丽-法卡斯的尽头，到虫洞的感应，到他飞入虫洞，然后发现自己在弗莱亚轴心。
“如果我知道我是怎么到这里来的，那就见鬼了。我不知道你们的人在哪里。下次找个好点的导航员吧。”
斯蒂尔斯的耐心耗尽了，在她问话到一半时，他关闭了通讯器。
“把他带到大坦克那里，"伊坎吉卡告诉甲板上的船员。梅希亚显得有些疏远。伊坎吉卡开始意识到智人感知状态的改变。这不是昏迷状态。但是梅希亚也不再是她自己了。“你觉得发生了什么？”
“把一个诱导虫洞连接到另一个虫洞很难。"梅希亚遥遥地回答道。“在激烈的战斗中，他不可能先制造出一个通往傀儡轴心的虫洞，然后再制造另一个虫洞把斯蒂尔斯送到这里。他只诱导了一个虫洞。通往芙蕾雅轴心。”
“你说过你做不到的。"伊坎吉卡带着一种小心翼翼的指责说。“你说你只能对你研究过并做过标记的虫洞这么做。”
“当我们穿过弗莱亚轴心时，我们只是随便研究了一下。"梅希亚说。“我们没有留下标记。但我们对轴线的结构有了更好的了解。我们很难在弗莱亚轴线上锁定一个诱导虫洞。我不认为我能做到”
“他为什么要冒这个险？” 伊坎吉卡说。
“他不在这里问。” 梅希亚没有擦去眼角的泪水。“我必须找到他们。”
斯蒂尔斯战斗机的数据已经上传到舰桥的独立服务器上。子系统对数兆字节的传感器、内部遥测、通信和生命支持记录进行了初步分拣。梅希亚观察了一会儿，然后说："给我控制权。”
伊坎吉卡授权访问。亚人工智能搜索的快速回放消失了。原始数据取而代之，速度太快，伊坎吉卡无法读取，但只持续了几秒钟。全息显示屏变成了奇怪的几何图形，视角扭曲。她向一名舰桥军官发出信号，让他确认他们正在记录梅希亚所做的一切。伊坎吉卡对梅西亚和阿尔霍纳在琼莱州和林波波州所做的工作进行了记录，她的工程师对这些记录进行了分析，开始确定量子智人的处理上限和下限。然后，运动停止了，一个微小的图像出现了。
Mejía expanded it in false blues and greens and grays. It was a small ship, but big enough to carry and power wormhole induction coils. Iekanjika recognized the ship they’d built for Arjona. A chaos of live orbital defenses surrounded it, before the field narrowed from the perspective of Stills’ craft entering the induced wormhole. Then, Arjona’s ship became smaller and smaller, a single object at the end of an indistinct tube. But Arjona’s ship didn’t detonate. No Venusian ordnance caught it. It too entered the wormhole, but with none of Stills’ momentum because it had started from rest and could not fire engines within a fragile induced wormhole.
“He entered the wormhole,” Iekanjika said.
The image of Arjona’s ship shrank, becoming fuzzier, hard to resolve by the stern telescopes of Stills’ ship. Mejía’s eyes focused on data at the edges of the image, multidimensional graphics humans would be hard-pressed to decipher even with computational help.
“Bel’s ship entered the wormhole at about forty meters per second,” Mejía said from wherever her savant state existed. “Stills’ fighter entered at a hundred meters per second. Bel should have reached the Freya Axis in about four minutes.”
Stills would have reached it in about ninety seconds. The image of Arjona’s ship melted into the unfocused gray background of the recording of the temporary wormhole. Then the blur of information Mejía was absorbing stopped again and a fuzzy image formed and expanded, pixelating. The glimpse of the transport was only there for a moment. Its disappearance wasn’t an artifact of the recording.
“The transport exited into the Freya Axis,” Mejía said.
Mejía sped the playback, matching it with electronic sensor data in false color that Iekanjika found confusing. Then Stills was in the Freya Axis in his exhausted single fighter craft, surrounded by Congregate warships. Stills was a cold killer, but she imagined that even he’d been terrified. Tucked in close to a Congregate destroyer, he’d been close enough to have reached out to touch it. The tactical intel in this recording was invaluable. But Mejia’s display didn’t focus on that. She swept through the forward sensors, mostly in the infrared.
“No debris,” Mejía said.
Debris from the rescue transport would have been hot. Bodies would have been bright in the infrared compared to the degree or two of the Axis. They watched Stills’ fighter exit the Axis and become a target of every Congregate ship nearby. His flying was superb. Inhuman. His fighter had recorded every fragment of hot shrapnel and ordnance shot at him. but no debris field like they would have expected from a transport being blown to pieces.
“They exited the Axis,” Mejía said.
“We’ll keep searching.”
Remarkably, Stills’ fighter had recorded the anti-matter missile approaching and then hitting the axis. It hit at three minutes from the time Arjona entered the temporary wormhole, one minute from the time his speed would have carried him into the Freya Axis.
“He is a magician,” Iekanjika said hesitatingly. “If anyone could survive, he would.”
Mejía regarded her strangely, as if she’d handed the Homo quantus a poisonous snake instead of hope. Then Mejía wiped her eyes self-consciously.
梅希亚用虚假的蓝色、绿色和灰色将其展开。这是一艘小型飞船，但足以承载和驱动虫洞感应线圈。伊坎吉卡认出了他们为阿尔霍纳建造的飞船。在斯蒂尔斯的飞船进入诱导虫洞之前，它周围是一片混乱的轨道防御系统。然后，阿尔霍纳的飞船变得越来越小，在一个模糊的管道末端只剩下一个物体。但阿尔霍纳的飞船并没有爆炸。没有金星军械击中它。它也进入了虫洞，但没有斯蒂尔斯的动力，因为它是从静止状态开始的，无法在脆弱的诱导虫洞中启动引擎。
“他进入了虫洞。"伊坎吉卡说。
阿尔霍纳飞船的图像缩小了，变得越来越模糊，很难被斯蒂尔斯飞船的船尾望远镜分辨出来。梅希亚的眼睛盯着图像边缘的数据，这些多维图形即使有计算帮助，人类也很难破译。
“贝尔的飞船以大约每秒四十米的速度进入了虫洞，“梅希亚从她的 ”救世主 "状态中说出了这句话。“斯蒂尔斯的战斗机以每秒一百米的速度进入。贝尔应该在四分钟内到达芙蕾雅轴心。”
斯蒂尔斯大概会在九十秒内到达那里。阿霍纳飞船的图像融化在临时虫洞记录的无焦点灰色背景中。然后，梅希亚吸收的模糊信息再次停止，模糊的图像形成并扩大，像素化。飞船的一瞥只存在了一瞬间。它的消失并不是记录的结果。
“梅希亚说："运输机进入了弗莱亚轴心。
梅希亚加快了回放速度，将其与电子传感器的假色数据进行了比对，伊坎吉卡觉得很困惑。然后，斯蒂尔斯驾驶着他那艘精疲力竭的单人战斗机出现在弗莱亚轴心，周围都是会聚军的战舰。斯蒂尔斯是个冷酷的杀手，但她想，即使是他也会感到害怕。他紧贴着一艘刚果驱逐舰，近到足以伸手去触摸它。这段录音中的战术情报非常宝贵。但梅希亚的显示屏并没有关注这些。她扫视了前方的传感器，主要是红外线传感器。
“没有碎片，"梅希亚说。
救援运输机上的碎片会很烫。与 “轴心 ”号的一两度红外线相比，尸体在红外线下会很亮。他们看着斯蒂尔斯的战斗机飞出轴心国号，成为附近每一艘会聚舰的目标。他的飞行技术非常高超。非人类。他的战斗机记录下了射向他的每一块热弹片和弹药碎片，但却没有像他们预想的运输机被炸成碎片后的碎片场。
“他们离开了轴心国，"梅希亚说。
“我们会继续搜索”
值得注意的是，斯蒂尔斯的战斗机记录了反物质导弹接近并击中轴心的过程。它击中的时间距离阿尔霍纳进入临时虫洞的时间还有三分钟，距离他的速度带他进入弗莱亚轴心的时间还有一分钟。
“他是个魔术师，"伊坎吉卡迟疑地说。“如果有人能活下来，他会的。”
梅希亚奇怪地看着她，仿佛她递给量子智人的不是希望，而是一条毒蛇。然后，梅希亚自觉地擦了擦眼睛。
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
In Iekanjika’s words, the situation in Bachwezi was too hot for Cassandra to leave. Cassandra had some access to the military channels. She seemed to be given free access to the gloomy bridge of the Mutapa, as long as a deceptively solicitous lieutenant followed her. He seemed too young to have an important job. But maybe not so young; Bel had gone off at sixteen into the wide world and had freed or stolen Saint Matthew from the Banks. Younger than this pimply-faced lieutenant, Bel had done something considered impossible. She’d watched him do impossible things. Steal the time gates. Go back in time. Her mind could play with impossibilities, but the only probable outcome was that the fragile geometry of the induced wormhole had vanished from existence like a popping soap bubble, turning everything inside to neutrinos and white noise.
She kept trying to summon some grief for the hundred and fifty Homo quantus they’d almost saved, and for Saint Matthew, but it was hard. Numbness was a physical thing, a cloud inside her, uncharitable, crowding out caring. She’d never been good with feelings. They weren’t subject to detached analysis, nor replicable or refutable. They slipped, shifted, took new forms. She suspected that her pain masqueraded as numbness and she didn’t know how to make this inner suffering stop.
She kept extrapolating and hypothesizing about his end, from her limited information. Even if by some chance he had gotten into the Freya Axis, Cassandra and Iekanjika had destroyed it and everything within and around.
The Banks wanted to talk with her. One message after another, each more urgent than the last, accumulated. The Lunar Bank. The Bank of Ceres. The First and Second Banks. She read the first few. They offered investments, technological partnerships, IP licensing proposals, alliances, and legal threats. She began to see their grasping in the way Belisarius might have seen it. She mapped motives back, all the way back to the project to create the Homo quantus, a sub-species of humanity to be deployed for profit and military positioning. But instead, they’d become a people whose mere existence threatened the patron nations, and justified enslaving them.
She didn’t answer any of them.
On the third day, Iekanjika brought her to a ship. Cassandra had observed enough in the last six months to appreciate a top-of-the-line fighter. The hollow tube of its inflaton drive was forty-one meters from bow to stern, with weapon ports and defensive blisters and a smoothly curving cockpit along the top.
“It’s a gift,” Iekanjika said, floating beside her, “from the people of the Sub-Saharan Union to the Mayor of the Homo quantus. It’s well armed and programmable. It’s faster than The Calculated Risk and has some armor. It’s not bugged. We do not see eye to eye on everything, but I hope that in the future, if you need friends, you’ll think of us.”
Iekanjika’s expression, laconic at the best of times, seemed sincere. And although she probably wanted what the Banks wanted, her offer didn’t feel the same.
“You cut yourself off from the Congregate,” Cassandra said. “It will be safer if we get far away from everyone too. People want us for things we don’t want for ourselves.”
“That may be the definition of the Patron-Client Accord we broke ourselves out of. If we survive the next year, consider us a friend if you wish, one who feels gratitude.”
Cassandra probably should have responded. The conversational algebra expected her to introduce a new term, but for five point eight second, she memorized the design features of the ship’s lines, interpolating architecture, stresses and force loads.
“Stills knows how to bring you a message?” Iekanjika said.
“For a while. But as soon as we’re ready, we’re moving on and we’ll be erasing our tracks, hiding the axes we used.”
“I’m sure you’ll find Arjona. And the people he rescued. And your AI.”
The officer had a wan smile, the kind of expression that hadn’t yet exhausted hope, the kind that crashed against the observations, axioms and conclusions in Cassandra’s mind. She knew how the universe worked. And she felt like she couldn’t carry everything anymore.
Iekanjika offered her hand. Floating in zero-g, they clasped wrists for a moment and it was a kind of relief. She wasn’t the woman who just last year had been deep diving into the fugue in the Garret. She was now the mayor of the Homo quantus, in some ways battle-tested, canny to the deceptiveness of the wide world, wrestling with how to protect her people. She was like Iekanjika.
“Goodbye, Ayen.”
“Live well, Cassandra.”
用伊坎吉卡的话说，巴赫韦齐的形势太严峻了，卡桑德拉不能离开。卡桑德拉有一些接触军事渠道的机会。她似乎可以自由进入穆塔帕号阴沉的桥面，只要有一个殷勤的中尉跟着她就行。他看起来太年轻了，不可能担任重要职务。但也许也不算太年轻；贝尔 16 岁就闯荡世界，从班克斯人手中解救或偷走了圣马修。贝尔比这个满脸疙瘩的中尉更年轻，却完成了被认为不可能完成的任务。她看着他做了不可能的事 偷走时空门 回到过去 她的大脑可以玩弄各种不可能的事情，但唯一可能的结果是，诱导虫洞的脆弱几何结构像一个爆裂的肥皂泡一样消失了，里面的一切都变成了中微子和白噪声。
她一直试图为那一百五十个差点被他们救下的智人和圣马修唤起一些悲伤，但这很难。麻木是一种生理现象，是她内心的一团阴云，不近人情，挤走了关爱。她从来都不善于表达感情。她无法对感情进行抽离分析，也无法复制或反驳。它们滑落、转移，以新的形式出现。她怀疑自己的痛苦伪装成了麻木，她不知道如何让这种内心的痛苦停止。
她从有限的信息中不断推断和假设他的结局。即使他侥幸进入了芙蕾雅轴心，卡桑德拉和伊坎吉卡也已经摧毁了轴心以及轴心内部和周围的一切。
班克斯想和她谈谈。消息一条接一条，一条比一条紧急。月球银行 谷神星银行 第一银行和第二银行 她读了前几封。它们提出了投资、技术合作、知识产权许可建议、联盟和法律威胁。她开始用贝利萨留斯可能看到的方式来看待他们的攫取。她将他们的动机追溯到 “智人”（Homo quantus）项目，这是一个可以用于盈利和军事定位的人类亚种。但是，他们却成了一个民族，他们的存在威胁到了赞助国，并成为奴役他们的理由。
她没有回答任何问题。
第三天，伊坎吉卡把她带到了一艘船上。卡珊德拉在过去的六个月里观察了足够多的东西，她很欣赏这架顶级战斗机。由充气驱动装置构成的空心管从船头到船尾长达 41 米，上面有武器接口和防御水泡，还有一个曲线流畅的驾驶舱。
“这是一份礼物，“伊坎吉卡漂浮在她身边说，”撒哈拉以南联盟的人民送给智人量子市长的礼物。它装备精良，可编程。它比'计算风险'更快，还有一些装甲。它没有听器窃 我们并不是在所有事情上都意见一致，但我希望将来，如果你需要朋友，你会想到我们。”
伊坎吉卡的表情在最好的情况下也很简洁，但看起来很真诚。虽然她可能也想得到班克斯想要的东西，但她的提议给人的感觉并不一样。
“卡珊德拉说："你切断了自己与会众的联系。“如果我们也远离所有人，会更安全。人们想要我们的东西，我们自己却不想要。”
“这也许就是我们摆脱赞助人-客户协议的定义。如果我们能活过明年，如果你愿意，就把我们当成朋友吧，一个心怀感激的朋友。”
卡珊德拉也许应该回应一下。会话代数本以为她会介绍一个新名词，但在五点八秒的时间里，她记住了飞船线条的设计特点，插值了结构、应力和力载荷。
“斯蒂尔斯知道如何给你捎信吗？” 伊坎吉卡说。
“暂时知道。但只要我们准备好了，我们就会继续前进，我们会抹去我们的足迹，藏起我们用过的斧头。”
“我相信你们会找到阿尔霍纳的。还有他救的人 还有你们的人工智能。”
军官莞尔一笑，那是一种尚未耗尽希望的表情，是一种与卡珊德拉心中的观察、公理和结论相冲突的表情。她知道宇宙是如何运转的。她觉得自己再也无法承受一切了。
伊坎吉卡伸出了手。在零重力状态下，她们的手腕紧紧地握在一起，那一刻，她如释重负。她已经不是去年那个在加勒特深陷迷思的女人了。她现在是量子智人的市长，在某些方面久经沙场，对广阔世界的诡计洞若观火，正在与如何保护她的人民搏斗。她就像伊坎吉卡。
“再见，艾恩”
“好好活着，卡珊德拉”
Cassandra caught herself on the fighter near its hatch. She opened it and made her way to the cockpit and the acceleration chamber. She stripped off layers of clothing and flooded the chamber with shock gel while she jacked herself into the ship’s systems. Engine health, ship integrity, weight and balance, ammunition and all sorts of other readings projected themselves onto her retinas. She swept one after another aside and finished checking out the ship’s status. After ten minutes, Iekanjika still waited by the doorway to the bay. The onboard systems asked for and received permission to depart and the magnetic clamps released. A short message from Iekanjika arrived as Cassandra cleared the bay: Give the ship a good name.
It was a curious message, a very human one. She’d named the last one with Bel, a decision they’d come to while working out the mathematics of the cosmos and huddling together in a sleep sack. The Calculated Risk could have been the theme of their lives since then, and they’d saved their people and discovered more than they’d ever thought possible. And they’d lost things. Calculated losses.
Now she didn’t even know where the accounting had ended up. She hadn’t finished measuring. She didn’t know where Saint Matthew and the Homo quantus were, or if they’d even survived. And Bel was... dead. The important things in her life were unmeasured quantities, questions. She’d lived with questions all her life, but they hadn’t been questions that hurt inside. And in some way, she couldn’t name the ship meaningfully until she had her answers.
So she decided to call it The Variable.
The Variable pulled away from the Mutapa and the heavy compression of acceleration pressed on her chest, on sternum and muscles already hard at work inhaling and exhaling oxygenated shock gel. She was heading away from Bachwezi and Kitara, away from the Union’s new black hole, away from all military positions in the system. The Congregate surely had espionage and observation equipment scattered throughout the system, so they’d given her an erratic flight plan, with many changes in vector on silent running, to bring her to one of the Axes Mundi the Union had not even named yet. Several other fighters launched at the same time and took similarly strange trajectories. Decoys. Almost a day later, she arrived at a lonely part of the solar system, dark but for some weak radiation, and found a single axis floating alone.
She entered it and the Bachwezi system vanished behind her. She emerged shortly into a red dwarf system whose Axes Mundi they’d not mapped for the Union. Most of the nearby axes, those within ten to twenty nodes, she’d mapped and memorized. At several AU, the quiescent star glowed dull orange, barely noticeable above the starscape. There were six more axis bridges she had to find and cross before she would reach her people, a prospect of several days. If the Freya Axis still existed, she could have made the trip in three crossings but some things, once broken, were forever gone.
Space felt strange, naked and more lonely than she’d ever felt. No Stills, no Bel, no Saint Matthew. No other Homo quantus. Not even Iekanjika. Bereft of help, advice and companionship. She had to be entirely independent.
Cassandra oriented herself to the solar system’s geometry and began her run towards the next axis she needed to cross. She plotted a circuitous path, in case anyone in civilization was also here, but nothing registered on her telescopes, antennae, receivers or anything else. The Variable trudged across the dark, cold wasteland of the solar system at the highest acceleration she could endure, but time still dragged.
卡桑德拉在战斗机舱门附近抓住了自己。她打开舱门，来到驾驶舱和加速室。她脱掉了几层衣服，在舱内灌满了防震凝胶，同时将自己接入了飞船系统。引擎健康状况、飞船完整性、重量和平衡、弹药以及其他各种读数都投射到了她的视网膜上。她一一扫过，完成了对飞船状态的检查。十分钟后，伊坎吉卡仍然等在通往舱室的门口。机载系统请求并获得了出发许可，磁力夹也随之松开。卡桑德拉离开海湾时，伊坎吉卡发来了一条短信息： 给飞船起个好名字。
这条信息很奇特，非常人性化。上一艘飞船的名字是她和贝尔一起取的，这是他们在研究宇宙数学和挤在一个睡袋里时做出的决定。从那时起，“计算风险 ”就成了他们生活的主题，他们拯救了他们的人民，发现了更多他们从未想过的东西。他们也失去了一些东西。计算出来的损失
现在，她甚至不知道账目的最终结果。她还没有完成测量。她不知道圣马修和智人在哪里 也不知道他们是否还活着 而贝尔......死了。她生命中最重要的东西 就是无法测量的数量和问题 她的一生都与问题相伴 但这些问题并没有伤害到她的内心 从某种程度上说，在找到答案之前 她无法为这艘船命名
所以她决定叫它 “变数号”。
变量号驶离了穆塔帕号，沉重的加速度压迫着她的胸膛，胸骨和肌肉已经在努力地吸入和呼出含氧休克胶。她正驶离巴赫韦齐和基塔拉，驶离联盟的新黑洞，驶离系统中的所有军事阵地。公会肯定在整个系统中散布着间谍和观察设备，所以他们给了她一个不规则的飞行计划，在无声运行中多次改变航向，把她带到联盟甚至还没有命名的曼迪轴心之一。其他几架战斗机也同时起飞，并采取了类似的奇怪轨迹。诱饵 将近一天后，她到达了太阳系的一个孤岛，这里除了一些微弱的辐射外一片漆黑，她发现了一个单独漂浮的轴心。
她进入其中，巴赫维齐星系在她身后消失了。她很快就进入了一个红矮星系统，他们还没有为联盟绘制这个系统的轴线图。附近的大部分轴线，也就是十到二十个节点内的轴线，她都已经绘制并记住了。在几个AU处，静止的恒星发出暗淡的橙色光芒，在星空中几乎难以察觉。在到达她的族人之前，她还必须找到并穿过六座轴桥，这需要几天的时间。如果弗莱娅轴还存在，她本可以三次穿越完成旅程，但有些东西一旦破碎，就会永远消失。
空间的感觉很奇怪，赤裸裸的，比她以往任何时候都要孤独。没有斯蒂尔斯，没有贝尔，没有圣马修。没有其他的智人 甚至没有伊坎吉卡。失去了帮助、建议和陪伴。她必须完全独立。
卡珊德拉根据太阳系的几何图形确定了方向，开始奔向她需要穿越的下一个轴心。她绘制了一条迂回路径，以防文明中有人也在这里，但她的望远镜、天线、接收器或其他任何东西上都没有任何记录。变种人以她所能承受的最高加速度在太阳系黑暗、寒冷的荒原上跋涉，但时间依然拖沓。
CHAPTER SIXTY
This was not the first time a floating habitat had been pierced, not the first time poisonous carbon dioxide and corrosive sulfuric acid had rasped the insides of Venusian homes. Venus had been testing them for centuries, culling the herd: the weak, the old, the daring, the unlucky. Bareilles stepped over metal debris pock-marked with acid corrosion and plastic shards melted into clumps. Forensic teams sampled and measured and swabbed. Repair crews had built a temporary skin over the Ministry of the Interior and pumped new breathable atmosphere into damaged sections. Emergency balloons of oxygen corrected buoyancy imbalances until real repairs finished. Luc followed her, had asked to come. Les petits saints did not typically tour battlefields, but it wasn’t her place to shield him from anything he felt he needed to see.
The corpse of the Scarecrow lay in torn pieces, wires and carbon-fiber muscle and weaponry splayed into a web of a more final, second death. The same blast that killed the Scarecrow had blown a hole in the lower decks of the port bow, coming close to taking down the entire habitat, even with every rescue resource on the dayside of the planet.
The scale of violation of the Congregate was difficult to grasp. To attack the Congregate in their home, to violate the sanctity of their homeworld was obscene. But the more terrible news had come quickly; the level of depravity needed to destroy the Freya Axis sickened her. The Axis Mundi wormholes had survived millions of years, had persisted as monuments after their unknown builders had gone extinct. In a moral world, they ought to outlive humanity too, continue as the heritage of the galaxy. What kind of mind destroyed an enduring artifact belonging to eternity?
Compared to the scales of this crime, human life could feel insignificant yet Bareilles could not turn away from the loss of life. Squadrons of incinerated Congregate warships. An entire massed fleet around both sides of the Freya Axis wiped out. Counting hadn’t stopped, but death toll estimates had passed thirty-two thousand officers and crew and commissars. And no one had found Philippe’s body in the Ministry of Intelligence building. Many were missing or incinerated or dropped into the stinging clouds. It was harder to think about him than she’d expected.
They didn’t yet have an idea how the Union, or more rightly the Homo quantus had done it all. Union terrorists at Bachwezi had used more anti-matter in a single battle than had ever been used in any war, more anti-matter than the Banks had ever hinted at having. They’d had so much anti-matter that they’d used it in suicide bombers. The Homo quantus had to have found a new way to synthesize anti-matter, orders of magnitude faster than the big accelerators the Congregate and the Banks used. That changed every political and military calculation.
Bareilles knelt on stiff legs and a braced ankle. Wires protruded from the Scarecrow’s corpse, like shredded metallic flesh. The steel and carbon weave of the painted face was peeled back, and the electronics beneath flayed, exposing the bulbous, green, vitrified brain, now cracked and dark. The loyal Scarecrow had only wanted the best for them. She’d died once, and had devoted her entire second life to protecting the Congregate.
“That’s what they look like inside,” Luc said, some feeling making his pronunciation more fraught.
“Yes.”
“It’s scary looking,” he said.
Bareilles touched the warm glass of the naked Scarecrow brain, righted the single remaining telescoping eye that dangled off the side of the wrecked face.
“I know,” she said. “The Scarecrow was ugly, but she loved us. You. Me. All of us.”
This Scarecrow had taken Bareilles, an intelligence operative, and had taught her that every field upon which she’d dueled before was contained, limited in scope, narrow, and that the Venusian Congregate was not eternal. Their nation was instead infinitely fragile, living in the shadow of an existential threat on timescales beyond human grasping. Like a patient tutor, the Scarecrow had persuaded Bareilles to her point of view, to the rightness and need for F-Division. But intellectual and professional acceptance of something couldn’t compare to the visceral feeling of certainty that came from seeing her fears realized. This new lived conviction rested heavy in her heart now. The Scarecrow had pointed the way at a future too distant to see, too ambitious to take in at once, but Bareilles had stumbled into it heedlessly. In this new world she was the Neanderthal, clever, fire-using, speaking, socializing, but hopelessly outmatched by the tools and cognitive abilities of the new Homo sapiens.
这已经不是漂浮栖息地第一次被刺穿了，也不是有毒的二氧化碳和腐蚀性硫酸第一次刺穿金星人的家园了。几个世纪以来，金星一直在对它们进行测试，挑选出弱者、老者、大胆者和不幸者。巴瑞莉斯踩过被酸腐蚀得坑坑洼洼的金属碎片和融化成块的塑料碎片。法医小组进行了取样、测量和拭抹。抢修人员在内政部外围搭建了一层临时保护罩，并向受损部分注入了新的可呼吸空气。紧急氧气球纠正了浮力失衡，直到真正的修复工作结束。吕克跟在她后面，他要求来这里。小圣人通常不会巡视战场，但她也没有权力阻止他去看他认为需要看的东西。
稻草人的尸体已经支离破碎，电线、碳纤维肌肉和武器装备交织在一起，形成了一张更彻底的、第二次死亡的网。杀死 “稻草人 ”的那场爆炸在左舷船首的下层甲板上炸出了一个大洞，几乎要摧毁整个栖息地，即使地球上所有的救援资源都已用尽。
对 “会聚者 ”号的攻击规模之大难以想象。在会聚人的家园里攻击他们，侵犯他们神圣的家园，这实在是令人发指。但更可怕的消息很快就传来了；摧毁弗莱娅轴心星所需的堕落程度令她感到恶心。中轴线虫洞已经存活了数百万年，在它们未知的建造者灭绝之后，它们仍然作为纪念碑存在着。在一个道德的世界里，它们也应该超越人类，作为银河系的遗产延续下去。是什么样的头脑毁掉了属于永恒的不朽艺术品？
与这一罪行的规模相比，人类的生命可谓微不足道，但巴雷耶斯却无法回避生命的损失。被焚毁的公会战舰中队。围绕弗莱亚轴心两侧的整支集结舰队全军覆没。统计工作没有停止，但死亡人数估计已超过三万两千名军官、船员和政委。没有人在情报部大楼里找到菲利普的尸体。许多人失踪了，或被焚烧，或掉进了刺骨的云层。想到他比她预想的要困难得多。
他们还不知道联盟，或者更正确地说，智人是如何做到这一切的。联盟的恐怖分子在巴赫维齐的一次战斗中使用的反物质比任何战争中使用的都多，比班克斯曾经暗示过的反物质都多。他们拥有如此多的反物质 以至于他们把它们用在了自杀式炸弹上 量子智人一定是找到了合成反物质的新方法 比 “会聚 ”和班克斯使用的大型加速器要快上几个数量级 这改变了所有的政治和军事计算。
巴瑞勒斯跪在地上，双腿僵硬，脚踝被支架支撑着。电线从稻草人的尸体上伸出，就像被撕碎的金属肉。涂满油漆的脸部钢碳编织物被剥开，下面的电子元件被剥落，露出了球状的绿色玻璃化大脑，现在已经龟裂，一片漆黑。忠诚的稻草人只想给他们最好的。她死过一次，第二次生命就献给了保护会众。
“这就是他们内心的样子。"吕克说，某种感觉让他的发音变得更加拗口。
“是的。”
“看起来很吓人。"他说。
巴瑞莉斯摸了摸赤裸的稻草人大脑温热的玻璃杯，扶正了残破的脸庞边上仅剩的一只伸缩眼。
“我知道，"她说。“稻草人很丑，但她爱我们。你。我。我们所有人。”
这个稻草人带走了巴瑞莉斯，她是一名情报特工，并且教会了她，她以前决斗过的每一个领域都是封闭的、范围有限的、狭隘的，金星公会并不是永恒的。相反，他们的国家是无限脆弱的，生活在人类无法把握的时间尺度上的生存威胁的阴影下。稻草人就像一位耐心的导师，说服巴瑞莉斯接受她的观点，接受 F 师的正确性和必要性。但是，智力上和专业上对某些事情的认可，都比不上亲眼看到自己的恐惧变成现实时那种内心的确定感。现在，这种新的生活信念在她的心中沉甸甸的。稻草人已经为她指明了未来的方向，这个未来太遥远，太雄心勃勃，她无法一下子接受，但巴瑞莉斯却不经意地闯了进去。在这个新世界里，她是尼安德特人，聪明、会用火、会说话、会交际，但在工具和认知能力上，她无可救药地输给了新智人。
“Jeronimo and Santiago did this?” Luc said, stumbling over the unfamiliar Anglo-Spanish names.
“Their people did,” Bareilles said.
“Because we had Jeronimo and Santiago?”
“This time yes, but they did this in other places too, all at the same time. The problem is that these new Homo quantus might be able to do this anytime they want and I don’t know how to stop them. The Scarecrow thought that we might need to make some of our own Homo quantus, or become more like them.”
Luc knelt beside her, touched the glassy green fragments of brain shattered in the metal skull case, as if looking for confirmation.
“What do you think?” Luc said.
The Scarecrow’s lessons echoed loud in her thinking, assuming a new depth of meaning. All hominin species before Homo sapiens were extinct. The minds, the memories, the language, the abstracting talents of the Homo sapiens had given them superior tools. And now, something biologically novel had been introduced into the human gene pool and had already speciated into something terrible and alien. The Homo quantus could think thoughts that Homo sapiens could not. And they’d found ways to invade the interiors of the Axis Mundi, to make anti-matter in militarily decisive quantities and perhaps had found some way to harness time travel.
The culture and people of the Venusian Congregate faced an extinction-level threat in the Homo quantus. And so did the Banks and all their investors. Every analysis suggested that the Banks had lost control of their Homo quantus. But the Banks had all the information to recreate new populations of Homo quantus in two short decades, perhaps some that were more tractable. And the original Homo quantus were out there somewhere, arming themselves with technology that stripped the Congregate of its ability to defend its own people. This is what a danger of extinction looked like.
“I think the world has changed around us,” she said. “And we have to change too.”
“杰罗尼莫和圣地亚哥干的？” 吕克磕磕绊绊地念叨着这两个陌生的盎格鲁-西班牙名字。
“是他们的人干的。"巴雷勒斯说。
“因为我们有杰罗尼莫和圣地亚哥？”
“这次是的，但他们在其他地方也这样做了，而且都是同时进行的。问题是，这些新的智人可能随时都能这么做，我不知道该怎么阻止他们。稻草人认为，我们可能需要制造一些自己的智人，或者变得更像他们。”
吕克跪在她身边，抚摸着金属头骨盒里碎裂的玻璃绿色大脑碎片，似乎在寻求确认。
“你觉得呢？” 吕克说。
稻草人的教诲在她的脑海中回响，蕴含着新的深意。智人之前的所有人类物种都已灭绝。智人的思维、记忆、语言和抽象能力为他们提供了优越的工具。而现在，一种生物学上的新生事物被引入了人类的基因库，并且已经进化成了一种可怕的异类。量子能思考智人不能思考的问题 他们找到了入侵轴心国内部的方法，制造出具有军事决定意义的反物质，也许还找到了某种利用时间旅行的方法。
金星聚居区的文化和人民面临着智人灭绝的威胁。银行和所有投资者也是如此。所有的分析都表明，班克斯已经失去了对智人量子的控制。但是班克斯掌握了所有的信息 可以在短短的二十年内重新创造出新的量子智人种群 也许有些种群更容易繁殖 而最初的量子智人就在某个地方 用技术武装自己 剥夺了公会保护自己人的能力 这就是濒临灭绝的危险。
“她说："我认为我们周围的世界已经发生了变化。“我们也必须改变”
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Cassandra emerged from the axis into the plane of radiation sprayed out by pulsar J2307-2229. In the encrypted radio band the Homo quantus used, alarms rang. She transmitted authentication codes, one after the other, but the alarms didn’t calm as much as they should have. That wasn’t so surprising. No one had any reason to enter this system through this axis. Letícia’s voice, distant, crackled above the pulsar’s howling static in the radio band.
“Cassandra?”
“Letty, did they make it home?”
Cassandra held her breath as she waited across the light seconds separating them.
“Yes!” Letícia said. “More than a hundred survived. They’re all getting medical attention.”
A hundred. They’d gone to rescue about a hundred and fifty.
“Is Bel here?” she said. The Variable slowly pulled above the plane of the lighthouse beams that flashed every half second.
“Miss Mejía,” a voice said, clarifying into Saint Matthew’s calm tones. “We were in the wrong spot. We came out among the Congregate fleet on the Epsilon Indi side of the Freya Axis. We didn’t see Mister Arjona or Mister Stills emerge, and then... the Axis exploded. I’m... I’m so sorry.”
Her thoughts... faltered. The various lines of reasoning she should have been able to keep separate jammed together, making an internal static, a wall of white noise like the chaotic, information-free beams of the pulsar. It was like thought itself was drowning. Amid the static in her mind, her perfect recall replayed the AI’s words.
I’m so sorry.
I’m so sorry.
I’m so sorry.
Thinking stuttered. Memories filled the cognitive gap. Her fear of leaving the Garret with Bel. Her excitement of new data they’d gotten together. Her fear of dying in the Union break-out from the Puppet Axis. Her new confidence in working with Stills, and with Iekanjika. Strangers. Aliens. Bel had taken her hand and invited her into the wide world, and the wide world had tried to consume them all. They’d saved almost all the Homo quantus. Now they could really run far, far away, but Bel wouldn’t be with them. With her. She was terrifyingly alone.
卡桑德拉从轴心钻出，进入脉冲星 J2307-2229 喷射出的辐射平面。在量子智人使用的加密无线电波段中，警报声不断响起。她一个接一个地发送着验证码，但警报声并没有像它们应该有的那样平静。这并不奇怪。没有人有任何理由通过这个轴进入这个系统。莱蒂西亚的声音在无线电波段的脉冲星静电咆哮声中悠远地响起。
“卡桑德拉？”
“莱蒂，他们到家了吗？”
卡珊德拉屏住呼吸，在相隔几秒钟的时间里等待着。
“是的！” 莱蒂娅说。“有一百多人幸存下来。他们都在接受治疗。”
一百人。他们去救了大约一百五十人。
“贝尔在吗？"她说。变压器缓缓驶过灯塔光束的平面，光束每半秒闪烁一次。
“梅希亚小姐，"一个声音用圣马修平静的语调说。“我们走错了地方。我们出现在弗莱亚轴心伊普西隆-印第一侧的会聚舰队中。我们没有看到阿尔霍纳先生或斯蒂尔斯先生出现，然后......轴心爆炸了。我... 我很抱歉
她的思绪......动摇了。她本应能够保持独立的各种推理都堵在了一起，形成了内部静电，就像脉冲星上混乱无序、毫无信息的光束一样，形成了一堵白噪声墙。就好像思想本身被淹没了。在她脑海中的静电中，她完美的记忆重放着人工智能的话。
对不起
对不起
对不起
思维停滞不前。记忆填补了认知空白。她对和贝尔一起离开加勒特的恐惧 她对他们一起获得新数据的兴奋 她害怕在联盟从傀儡轴心突围时丧生。她对与斯蒂尔斯和伊坎吉卡合作的新信心。陌生人 外星人 贝尔牵着她的手，邀请她进入广阔的世界，而广阔的世界却试图吞噬他们所有人。他们拯救了几乎所有的智人 现在他们真的可以逃得远远的 但贝尔不会和他们在一起 和她一起 她孤独得可怕