Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [31]
The wizards cannot dance.
They were the Dragon Guard. They were the ones who had a crush on Death. They all knew why nobody had returned from Death’s embrace—the bastard was just too damn beautiful.
Weather report!
The answer came in seconds. No solar storm yet.
Damn, Naomi swore.
With its eccentric—elongated—orbit, Mars was coming under strong electric stress in the Sun’s radial electric field, as it was hurtling into southern spring, closer and closer toward the Sun. The dust storm season. With the Mars–Jupiter conjunction, the plasmatail of Mars was flaring, drawn out more than halfway toward Jupiter. She knew that; they had hitched a ride on it.
But—no storm. Damn. Damn!
“We’ll have to make our own weather, boys,” Naomi sent. “The DareAngel—off!”
The plasma engines roared to life, the DareAngel sprouting long jets out the middle of her cylinder, for everyone to see. In just above five minutes, their enemies on Mars would get the telltale signature of synchrotron radiation in the radio range, emitted by the relativistic plasma particles accelerating in the interplanetary magnetic field.
She couldn’t feel her body, but the ship obliged to simulate the (grossly lowered) acceleration gee.
The fiends! She loved them.
Ha-ha-ha!
“The Bird of Prayer—wilco!” From the head of their second column.
“The Pearless—right on the tail!”
The next ship, just a few kilometers behind Naomi’s, executed a correction glide, accounting for the DareAngel’s jets’ displacement, so as to catch their jets inside their own cylinder and add their own engine power.
“The Peregrin….”
The ships in both columns streamed, gathering speed—like beads spread out along the common threads of plasma jets, their engines shooting plasma straight through the next ship in the same column, and their collective minds correcting with superhuman speed for any deviation of the jets from their interaction with the solar wind.
It’s time. “Umbrellas up!” Naomi ordered.
The magsails’ solenoids, wrapped around the ships’ cylinders, inflated their magnetic fields, momentum parallel to the direction of the jets—the only possible direction that did not make their ships slide sidewise, and the most difficult direction to maintain. Hitting the magnetic fields, the plasma jets decreased acceleration somewhat. More importantly, those same magnetic fields were strong enough to split the jets, displacing electrons to flow around the ships’ cylinders, compressing the remaining ion jets to stream inside—creating separate electric currents of ions and electrons, inside and out side the cylinders. In seconds, these electric currents grew so strong that the repulsive force between the opposite electric currents overcame attraction of unlike electric charges—blowing the electron jet envelope far away from the ships’ cylinders.
Naomi whistled in her mind. Our own weather we shall make, all right.
Just then, the Pearless behind her made a point of tying their jets into a knot.
Damn fine magnetic sail control. The captain, Xng, was so young.
“Hey, on the Pearless!” Naomi called. “What in the fucking hell was that? You leave me ‘peachless.”
“But…. My Dear Angel, that’s your job.”
What! That could not be Xng; that was his fucking ship. In blasted hell, my job.
“She says it is her job,” her ship confirmed.
Hey! Your job is to keep my body in one piece. I have a mind to use it once it’s over. God help them, they all will. Oh, baby, baby. What have those bastards done to you? What have we done?
“You do it once again—you hear me?—and you’ll regret that you were born.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
“Godspeed.”
The men and women under her command had so little time for pranks. Soon, their jets would be too powerful to play games with. Soon, their electron jet envelope would