Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [35]
Obvious, the DareAngel said. You have it best, this time at least.
The DareAngel had a point. This ride was the roughest they had gone through—and the most exciting. Jacked into their ship’s brain-grid, she felt the strain of computational demands as something stretching, pulling on the DareAngel’s “skin.” The other ships down the line had trouble staying on the tail. Some time ago, their columns’ envelopes reconnected, leaving ion currents running side by side, aligned with the magnetic field. Now a short-range repulsive force was added to the long-range attractive force between the parallel electric currents, keeping them apart—yet turning around each other, twisting in an ever tighter braid.
Their two columns turned into a double helix.
The DareAngel’s navigation fields suddenly jumped in disarray. Naomi smelled the danger level rise like a sharp sting of leather burning.
Shit. “All ships, wizard attack alert.” They would hear her, if their communication channels held. “Experiencing minor noise from wizard interdiction here. Over.”
Answers came, but weak and almost unintelligible at times, disrupted by the ion currents’ hum as well as by the enemy. Naomi readjusted their control scheme, shifting the load emphasis away from the ship’s binary intelligence to their human crew, their brains directly plugged into the ship’s grid. The incredible complexity of navigation through this maelstrom of plasma, mixed with challenges of networking defense, flared up with all the richness of the ship–crew shared perception.
Time to dance.
She now had a body in her virtual perception, every movement linked to flight controls, with vision used for targeting, smell standing for the tactical sense, touch for managing redistribution of resources—the crew’s consciousness virtualized, contributing their share of brainpower. A single human consciousness could not react much faster than once every hundred milliseconds. When overclocked, a parahuman mind was at least ten times faster on the conscious level, but much faster yet in pure faps. A well-tuned crew of an intelligent ship, with their personettes “zigzag-interlocking” their minds at the full speed of dedicated digital controllers, could react in microseconds.
Best of all, the parahuman minds were harder nuts to crack.
An Alfvén wave down the ion stream ran electromagnetic shudders over the DareAngel’s skin. One of the ships in Naomi’s column must have lost bearings and, for a fraction of a second, brushed the ion stream at a wrong angle, slow to adjust their magsails. A glancing shear off their magnetic fields—and they popped out of the column like a cork from a champagne bottle, half of their magsails burnt.
Naomi felt the wave as an electric shock. Her vision blurred.
She moved to compensate, exulting in the superhuman nimbleness of her virtual body, felt it merge with movements of the crew—a many-armed and many-legged beast. A flick of eyes to scan the weather data felt like focusing on something that some part of you already had in mind, applying yet another visual push to the same point in the shared field of their virtual perception. Far from having dozens of conflicting efforts pull the ship apart, this actually made the individual errors much less costly, averaging the results—provided most of them did the right thing.
“Weather data, compromised,” came from the lost ship, and she recognized the signature—the Pearless.
Oh, Xng. She noticed, from far away, the tails of Scavenger class fighters launching. “Weapons?”
“Intact.”
But not maneuverability. Not with just half the sails. Still, even crippled, any Dragon Guard ship could do lots of damage