The ships stood poised on the tarmac like alabaster works of art. On the ground, they were elongated, with wings extended; in flight, they would change according to our needs: spread wings for subsonic speeds; wings drawn against the body for hypersonic flight; rounder shape to minimize surface area during interstellar flight; rounded for stealth or for battle. Right now the hull was smooth, the weapons hidden in protected bays.

I strode next to my Jag, my hand sliding across its surface like a skater on ice. Its hull was tellerene, a composite material threaded with microscopic wires made from tubular fullerene molecules. Tellerene was lightweight, fatigue resistant, and retained its strength even at the high temperatures of a hypersonic reentry. It was also self-repairing; the dangling bonds in a broken fullerene molecule reattached themselves, mending the wire. The hull showed fewer of the pits, grooves, and other damage that came from traveling in space, a smoothness that was one more factor in optimizing its performance. Like their pilots, Jags were rare, top-of-the-line technology, fast and deadly.

I stopped midway between the nose and the tail of the ship. Had I not already known about the tiny silver prong there, I might have never located it in the featureless hull. As soon as I pushed my wrist against the prong, it snicked into the socket there. Connection, my spinal node thought.

Verified. The response came from Zabo, the ship's Evolving Intelligence.

The airlock sucked open, starting as a tiny circular hole that widened into a human-size oval so fast its edges shimmered with the motion. The outer and inner doors opened simultaneously; Zabo had analyzed the atmosphere out here and found it acceptable.

As I climbed into the cabin the inner hull activated, glowing with diffuse light. The cabin was small. Equipment filled the free space and the bulkheads: cocoon seats and a bunk, gear, hand weapons, food dispenser, waste processor, water line, anything else I needed to survive in space.

I crossed to the cockpit. When I touched the membrane that separated it from the cabin, the material dilated the same way the hatch had opened, like the shutter on a high-speed holecam. Inside the cockpit, I slid into the pilot's seat. It folded around me like a glove, releasing its cocoon, a swath of spun material thick enough to cushion against acceleration but not too thick to interfere with my movements.

[...]

Coordinate your checks, I thought. Having each ship verify the preflight tests of the others gave a four-way check of our readiness. We ran the Jags through their paces: nav, cyber, weapons, tom, hydraulics. Then Zabo thought, Checking inversion engines.

Inversion. It still had the power to fascinate me even after so many years of familiarity. As Zabo ran through its checks of the engines, my thoughts followed like a spellbound child. We hadn't conquered the light barrier -- we had snuck around it. To reach supraluminal velocities should have meant going through the speed of light, where the mass of a ship became infinite compared to slower objects, its length shrunk to nothing and its time stopped. It was impossible. For centuries humans had known that no ship could travel faster than the speed of light.

For centuries humans had been wrong.

The solution turned out to be simple. At supraluminal speeds, mass and energy became imaginary, square roots of negative numbers. To reach the supraluminal universe, all we had to do was add an imaginary part to our speed. Poof. The singularity at light speed disappeared. A ship went around light speed like a flycar leaving the road to go around a tree. Except that for starships, the "road" was the real universe.

Of course doing the math had been a lot easier than making the engine, or dealing with the bizarre effects of faster than light travel. But when our ancestors finally succeeded, the way to the stars had opened.

We adopted the word "inversion" from the Allieds because it so aptly described how the process felt. But it came from a far more esoteric source. "Inversion" referred to a mathematical correspondence between superluminal and subluminal space derived by Earth scientists during the mid to late twentieth century.

What the engine actually did was rotate the ship out of the real universe into an imaginary one. During rotation we passed through an ill-defined plane of existence where we were part real and part imaginary. The transition was disorienting, to say the least; I had no desire to find out what would happen if we spent longer than an instant there. So we got as close to the "tree" as possible before we left the road; we accelerated as close to light speed as our fuel allowed before we rotated in or out of superluminal space.

Unfortunately getting close to the tree meant coming out of inversion at relativistic speeds, blasting the area with high energy radiation and particles. Trying that too close to solid objects courted disaster. Coming out anywhere except in a near vacuum also meant the ship displaced molecules of matter with explosive power, blowing up itself as well as whatever it had hit.

Inversion had brutally changed the face of warfare. Technology advanced to the point where normal humans could no longer cope with combat. With warcarft and missiles that could burst out of superluminal space at close to light speed, the concept of a front line became obsolete. Our defenses developed along with our offensive capabilities, making it possible to protect our settled worlds in marginal safety. But we couldn't watch all of space. Huge regions remained contested, places where no clear boundaries existed defining what was Eubian, what was Skolian, what was Allied.

Inversion check complete, Zabo thought.

Thruster check. Although close to planets the Jag used a fusion engine, in space it relied on photon thrusters.

Thrusters initialized and ready, Zabo answered.

And the fuel?

Containment on positrons is secure.

Good. The interior of the magnetic containment bottle was a universe of its own, a place that was both real and imaginary, and that existed only while the inversion engine operated. During flight it drew on the immense cosmic ray flux in complex space, collecting more fuel. The bottle spread its contents through complex space by varying the imaginary parts of charge and mass, which let it gather and hold far more charge than was possible in real space alone. The situation was simpler than with people; the psychological trauma of having both real and imaginary parts had no effect on particles.

A selector culled relativistic electrons from space while the fuel bottle leaked positrons into the interaction area. Matter/Antimatter. It interacted in glorious bursts of energy, producing our thrust. Gamma ray shields and superconducting grids protected the ship from being destroyed by its own waste heat while the thrust accelerated it at extraordinary g-forces.

The last element was a stasis coil that kept the quantum wavefunction of the ship from changing during acceleration. The g-forces couldn't hurt us because our molecular configuration was fixed during stasis. We didn't freeze; our atoms continued to vibrate, rotate and otherwise behave as they had in the instant the coil activated. The atomic clock that measured our time in stasis continued to work. But none of the atoms could change their quantum state, which meant the ship and everything inside of it became rigid even to the huge forces we experienced. Without that protection, the g-forces would have smashed us flat.

[...]

We hurtled through space, racing the specter of Qox's flags. In inversion, we could go as fast as we wanted, just never slower than light speed.

If anyone on Delos could have watched, they would have seen our ships get shorter and our mass increase as we got closer to the speed of light. After we went superluminal, speeding up made our length increase and our mass dwindle. Even when we reached one million times light speed, the ship looked normal to me; I was, after all, at rest relative to it. But to anyone on Delos, our mass was just a few grams and our length thousands of kilometers.

At speeds faster than 141 percent of light, time contracted. Right now we could shoot through space for a century and only an hour would pass on Delos. If we ever reached infinite speed our massless Jags would stretch out the length of the universe and time would stand still everywhere else while forever passed for us.

But we had a problem. Close to light speed, time dilated; it passed more slowly for us than for Tams. We had skimmed too close to light speed when we inverted and time dilation had jumped us a few hours into the future, stealing valuable moments we desperately needed.

Zabo, plot pastward course, I thought. Compensate for the time dilation.

Course plotted.

Good. At faster than light speeds we could travel into the past relative to Tams. If anyone there could have watched, they would have seen this: after we left Delos, while we were en route to Tams, four new ships and four antimatter ships appeared in the Tams system, pair-produced from photon annihilations near the planet. The matter ships and their pilots were identical to Zabo squad. In fact, they were us.

While the matter ships continued on to Tams, the antimatter squad returned to Delos in a time-reversed path, flying backward at superluminal speeds, gaining fuel rather than losing it, like a movie run in reverse. At the point where I had just given the order to "turn around" and go pastward, Tams would have seen us meet the antimatter ships and annihilate. The energy of the photons created by our mutual destruction balanced that lost when the new ships and their antimatter siblings were created.

Since we were at rest relative to our ships, we saw no bizarre creations or destructions. We simply traveled from Delos to Tams. In any case, the end result was the same; our four Jags arrived at Tams sometime after we left Delos.

Excerpt from Primary Inversion by Catherine Asaro, ©1995 Catherine Asaro.

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