Redemption Ark

The head snapped around to look at him, while the ebony servitor continued striding forwards. [Yes. We’re well into the field now. It wouldn’t be safe for us to descend much further, not without medical support. The physiological effects become quite upsetting. Another ten vertical metres, then we’ll call it a day.]

What’s going on?

[It’s a little difficult to say, Remontoire. We’re within the influence of the machinery now, and the bulk properties of matter here — all matter, even the matter in your body — have been changed. The field that the machinery generates is suppressing inertia. What do you think you know about inertia, Remontoire?]

He answered judiciously. As much as anyone, I suppose. It isn’t something I’ve ever needed to think about. It’s just something we live with.

[It doesn’t have to be. Not now.]

What have you done? Learned how to switch it off?

[Not quite — but we’ve certainly learned to take the sting out of it.] Skade’s head twisted around again. She smiled indulgently; waves of opal and cerise flickered back and forth along her crest, signifying, Remontoire imagined, the effort that was required to translate the concepts she took for granted into terms a mere genius could grasp. [Inertia is more mysterious than you might think, Remontoire.]

I don’t doubt it.

[It’s deceptively easy to define. We feel it every moment of our lives, from the moment we’re born. Push against a pebble and it moves. Push against a boulder and it doesn’t, or at least not very much. By the same token, if a boulder’s rushing towards you, you aren’t going to be able to stop it very easily. Matter is lazy, Remontoire. It resists change. It wants to keep on doing whatever it’s doing, whether that’s sitting still or moving. We call that laziness inertia, but that doesn’t mean we understand it. For a thousand years we’ve labelled it, quantified it, caged it in equations, but we’ve still only scratched the surface of what it really is.]

And now?

[We have an opening. More than a glimpse. Recently the Mother Nest has achieved reliable control of inertia on the microscopic scale.]

‘Exordium gave you all that?’ Felka asked, speaking aloud.

Skade answered without speaking, refusing to indulge in Felka’s preferred mode of communication. [I told you that the experiment gave us a signpost. It was almost enough to know that the technique was possible; that such a machine could exist. Even then it still took us years to build the prototype.]

Remontoire nodded; he had no reason to think she might be lying. From scratch?

[No… not entirely. We had a head start.]

What kind of head start? He watched mauve and turquoise striations pulse along Skade’s crest.

[Another faction had explored something similar. The Mother Nest recovered key technologies relating to their work. From those beginnings — and the theoretical clues offered by the Exordium messages — we were able to progress to a functioning prototype.]

Remontoire recalled that Skade had once been involved in a high-security mission into Chasm City, an operation that had resulted in the deaths of many other operatives. The operation had clearly been sanctioned at Inner Sanctum level; even as a Closed Council member he knew little other than that it had happened.

You helped recover those technologies, Skade? I understand you were lucky to get out alive.

[The losses were extreme. We were fortunate that the mission was not a complete failure.]

And the prototype?

[For years we worked to make it into something useful. Microscopic control of inertia — no matter how conceptually profound — was never of any real value. But lately we’ve had one success after another. Now we can suppress inertia on classical scales, enough to make a difference to the performance of a ship.]

He looked at Felka, then back to Skade. Ambitious, I’ll give you that.

[Lack of ambition is for baseline humans.]

This other faction…the one you recovered the items from — why didn’t they make the same breakthrough? He had the impression that Skade was framing her thoughts with extreme care.

[All previous attempts to understand inertia were doomed to failure because they approached the problem from the wrong standpoint. Inertia isn’t a property of matter as such, but a property of the quantum vacuum in which matter is embedded. Matter itself has no intrinsic inertia.]

The vacuum imposes inertia?