Wicked gravity took up little room in the Navy's manuals. It was as cheap as easy gee, and stronger, but couldn't be controlled. It was often called chaotic gravity, its particles known as entropons. In the Rix Incursion, the enemy had used wicked gee as a devastating but short-range starship weapons. Exactly how these weapons worked was unclear--the supporting evidence was really a lack of evidence. Any damage that followed no understood pattern was labeled "wicked."
The lovely particle was truly queen of the gravitons. Lovely gee was transparent to hard gravity, and thus when the two acted upon matter together it was with the simple arithmetic of vector addition. Lovely gravity was superbly easy to control; a single source could be split by quasi-lensing generators into whirling rivulets of force that pulled and pushed their separate ways like stray eddies of air around a tornado. A carefully programmed lovely generator could make a seemingly strewn pack of playing cards "fall" together into a neat stack. A stronger burst could tear a human to pieces in a second as if some invisible demon had whirled through the room, but leave the organs arranged by increments of mass on a nearby table. Unfortunately, a few million megawatts of power were necessary for any such display. Lovely gee was costly gee. Only imperial pleasure craft, a few microscopic industrial applications, and the most exotic of military weapons used lovely generation.
As Zai sat speechless in the lovely black car, his heartbeat present in one temple, he was blind to the passing wonders of the capital. The car flew with an effortless grace between huge buildings, but he felt no inertia, no discomfort from the craft's banks or rolls. It was as if the world were turning below, and the marvelous car motionless. Zai tried to do some hasty calculations in his head, estimating the total mass of the car, himself, the corporal. It was staggering. The power consumed during this short ride would have been sufficient for the first fifty years of human industrialization.
It wasn't the medal, the promotion, or even the guarantee of immortality, Zai realized.
This moment was his true reward for his heroism: a ride on the heady surf of literal and absolute Imperial power.
Lieutenant-Commander Zai was somewhat dazed when he reached the palace. His car lifted silently above the snarl of arriving limos and jumped the high diamond walls with a flourish, rolling over so that its transparent canopy filled with a breathtaking view of the Emperor's grounds. Of course, Zai experienced only a hint of vertigo, his inner ear in the precise and featherlight grip of lovely gravitons. There was no down or up in their embrace; Zai felt as if some giant deity had grasped the fountains and pleasure gardens to twirl them overhead for his amusement.
The car descended, and he stepped from it filled with a regret suddenly remembered from childhood, the sad and foiled feeling that this carnival ride was over, that his feet were on solid, predictible ground again.
"Lovely car," came the voice of Captain Marcus Fentu Masrui.
"Yes, sir," Zai answered with a mumble, still overwhelmed, barely managing to salute his old commander.
The two watched silently as the vehicle was grasped by conventional transports, carried away to be cowled and caged like some exotic, captive bird of prey.
"Welcome to the palace, Lieutenant-Commander," Masrui said. With an outstretched arm, he gently pulled Zai's eyes away from the car and toward the diamond edifice before them. Its shape was familiar to any of the Emperor's subjects, especially one Vadan-born, but from this close it seemed monstrously distorted. Laurent Zai was used to seeing the palace rendered in the scale of votive paintings, with the sun playing on its shiny surfaces. Now it was black and looming, darker than the starless night that it threatened to crowd from the sky.
"Power has an extraordinary glare, doesn't it," Masrui observed.
The captain was looking up, but Zai still wondered whether he meant the palace or the gravity car.
"After my elevation," Masrui continued, "I took that ride. And it finally dawned on me why I'd spent all those years learning physics at academy."
Zai smiled. Masrui was famous for his doggedness. He had failed the Academy's minimal physical science class for three years running, almost exhausting the dispensations that his genius in other areas had afforded him before finally obtaining a commission.
"Not the better to command my ship, of course. A ship is men and women, after all; AIs have done the math for millennia. But I needed to understand physics, if for no other reason, then to understand fully that one Imperial gesture."
Zai looked into his commanding officer's eyes. He wondered for a moment if the man, as usual, were being cynical. But the buoyant memory of riding in the craft convinced him that even Masrui might be sentimental about those minutes of flight.
They walked up the broad stairs together. The sounds of the party flowed out between columns and heroic statues.
"Strange, sir, to have looked down on worlds, and still be amazed by a ... mere flying machine."
"It makes you realize, Zai, that you've never properly flown. We've been in aircraft and dropships, free fall and lifter belts, but the body always fights it at some level. Even the excitement comes from adrenaline, from some animal panic that things aren't right."
"But it's right in that car, sir. Isn't it?" Zai said.
"Yes. Flight as effortless and natural as a bird's. Or a god's. Did we join the Navy for service and immortality, I wonder? Or for something more akin to that."
The captain trailed off. A group of officers was approaching. Zai felt the subject disappear between him and his old friend, the words pulled back from the air and hidden somewhere like the conspiracies of mutineers.
"The hero!" one of the officers said too loudly. She was Captain Rencer Fowler IX, whom Zai, if the rumors were true, would soon displace as the youngest starship commander in the fleet. Zai saw Fowler's eyes sweep across his medaled chest, and felt briefly naked again in the covering of clever ants. The others looked comfortable in their dress uniforms, the particulate nature of the garments completely disguised. Zai knew his ants were no more obvious than theirs. He determined not to think of the uniform again.
"Only a humble servant of Empire," Masrui answered for him.
Zai and Masrui shook hands with the men among the officers, and touched closed fists with the women. Zai's head began to spin a bit with the surfeit of ritual greetings and realized how convenient the usual salute was. But this was a dress occasion, forms had to be followed, and the pattern of bare wrists as gloved hands flexed and touched seemed to hold meaning, like animals flashing signals of bare-toothed dominance at each other. The glint of Zai's metal wrist caught starlight.