"/ see," muttered Tyre, drinking in the data.
Zai ignored her. "Give me fifty terabits from the aft photon cannon," he ordered Gunner Wilson. "Dead center."
A targeting dot appeared on the object. "Ready at your command," the gunner said.
Zai started to give the order, but the words stuck in his throat.
The bridge's main airscreen, his personal synesthesia, even the backup hardscreens surrounding the shipmaster's chair all showed the same, unbelievable thing.
The object had disappeared.
Blind Man
Though stripped of sight and his position in the chain of command, Data Master Kax still possessed illusion.
The flying dust of optical silicon had ravaged only his eyes. The optic nerve and the brain centers were completely functional. Indeed, once the Lynx returned to Legis, implantation of a pair of artificials would be a trivial matter.
Most importantly, the tiny receivers that allowed synesthesia, the gateways to second sight, were still active. These devices surrounded the lamina cribrosa, hundreds of them in a man of Kax's profession, unscratched by the glass fragments that had destroyed his normal vision.
Kax followed the battle from sickbay, drifting among the views of various drones, watching over young Tyre's shoulder as she constructed experimental models of the object's virtual matter. Occasionally Tyre would query him, asking for advice or confirmation, using sign language to conceal the conversations. Kax had become an invisible confidant to his own replacement, like the helpful ghost of an ancestor.
Then the object disappeared.
Telescopy showed nothing but background stars; the throughput of x-ray spectroscopy was flat; infrared showed only the cold of space.
Kax overheard the shouting on the bridge, watched as Tyre spun from one drone's viewpoint to another, replaying the vanishing again and again as the captain demanded answers. Had the thing discorpo-rated itself? Tyre searched vainly for radiation and debris. Teleported? DA software plunged into the chromographs leading up to the disappearance, looking for signs of some magical substance emerging from the object's depths. The blind man stayed calm. He let the visualizations of Tyre's wild speculation fall from his false sight, and returned his view to the empty space where the object had been. He moved from drone to drone in real-time, staying in the spectrum of visible light. Watching.
The empty space seemed perfect.
Background stars shone through it, shifting slightly due to the drones' mismatched velocities with the object. The drones could see each other through the now-empty space; one of them had a view of the Lynx that had been blocked by the object before its disappearance.
"Tyre," Kax said.
She didn't answer for a moment. Overwhelmed by the captain's demands for answers, she hadn't time to spare for a noisy, blind ghost. But the old reflexes of command eventually compelled a response.
Yes, sir? she handsigned.
"Ask the drone pilots to move Recon 086. Just a short acceleration."
Heading?
"It doesn't matter. Just as long as it's sudden."
The blind man watched carefully from the indicated drone's point of view, training his mind on the familiar shape of the frigate.
Ten seconds later the image jerked as the drone accelerated in a short, clean burst. The Lynx was still visible, still there in the right place. But Kax saw what he had been watching for, a subtle imperfection that lasted less than a tenth of a second, an almost subliminal tear in synesthesia. The frigate had distorted for a moment, then the shape had re-formed even before the drone's acceleration ended.
The image was false, a mere feed coming from something between the drone and the Lynx.
Data Master Kax reserved the image in a high-definition buffer of the frigate's short-term memory, and carefully cut the few dozen frames that showed the distortion. He sent them to Ensign Tyre, marked priority, and leaned back with satisfaction, smiling to himself.
Invisibility meant nothing to a blind man. Executive Officer
"Invisibility," Captain Zai muttered.
"Controlled refraction, sir," corrected Ensign Tyre.
Hobbes glanced sidelong at the young woman. Despite her proficiency at data analysis, Tyre hadn't acquired a knack for spotting the captain's moods yet.
"Not transparency, however," she continued. "The object doesn't move the radiation straight through itself. It calculates observer viewpoints, and its surface acts like a large, highly directional hardscreen, emitting imagery appropriate to their positions."
"I believe the ensign suggests, sir," Hobbes offered, "that in the heat of battle, the unpredictability of dozens of accelerating viewpoints would make this 'invisibility' useless."
"It's playing with us, Hobbes," he said. "Testing its abilities against ours."
She thought for a moment.
"It's possible that it's trying to buy time, sir. The battlecruiser is less than an hour away."
The captain nodded. By stripping the bridge of armor, the Lynx had made six gees on the way here. But the Rix vessel hadn't turned over; it wasn't bothering to decelerate in time to match its velocity with the Lynx and the object. It was still barreling madly toward them, cutting its transit time to a minimum. The battlecruiser would pass by at a high relative, almost twice as fast as the first pass. The Rix had abandoned almost their entire drone complement, but Hobbes didn't doubt it could destroy the wounded frigate in the minutes it would be in range.
"That's likely, Hobbes. So let's see if we can hurt this thing."
"Happy to, sir." Hobbes interlaced her fingers. "Tyre, give me a target."
"May I suggest random parallax and a complex background, ma'am?"
"You may."
Tyre signaled, and the recon drones accelerated into action, whipping themselves into a froth of zigzags about the object. A decoy drone spat out chaff, light metals that the Lynx's close-in defenses illuminated with jittering arms of laser light. The object became visible against the background stars and shimmering chafe, a blur of inconsistencies as it struggled to keep up its illusion.
Zai nodded. "Gunner, fifty terabits, dead center."
"Yes, sir."
The thin lancing beam of the laser was visible for a moment as it burned through the chaff, a flashlight in a dusty attic. The object appeared for a second, revealing its new configuration . . .