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.Almost six centuries later, however, Imperial researchers had discovered how to trap each half of a paired quon in nanotechnic quantum electron cages, keying them to detectors that could read spin without affecting it, within the parameters set by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.This meant two computers could be linked together so that one could read the changes in an array of thousands of electron cages; each change, each flipped electron, could represent one bit of data in the age-old binary data structure of yes/no, on/off, spin-up/spin-down.When a particular sequence of electron spins was imposed on one array—the transmitter—the paired array registered the same sequence, light years away.In practical terms, this meant that communications could be set up between two computer systems that were absolutely secure—untappable, untraceable, and unjammable, even across vast interstellar distances.This, in turn, meant a titanic stride forward in military science.The ground military combat machines known as warstriders, and their spacefaring kin, warflyers, had long been operated by an on-board pilot who was linked—“jacked in,” in military parlance—to the machine’s operating systems and AI in such a way that the machine actually became his body, responding to the slightest thought while the organic body, cocooned in a life-support pod, was temporarily cut out of the brain’s control network.Throughout the warstrider era, military systems designers had dreamed of being able to have the pilots direct their electronic charges from a distance, teleoperating them into combat from a place of safety.After all, what did it matter if the imaging lenses feeding me pilot a view of his surroundings were half a meter away… or many kilometers? The control and sensory feedback systems all remained the same.But the modern battlefield was a poor place for experiments in remote control.Half at least of any conflict in modern warfare was waged in unseen dimensions, an electronic battle fought between opposing computers on a plane and at speeds almost completely beyond the human ken; communications, any communications, could be intercepted and jammed.Control codes, any control codes, could be jammed or broken, countermanded, and even hijacked.Any, that is, except signals propagated through quantum pairing.With I2C, not only could unit COs keep track of events on a battlefield light years away, but the striderjacks piloting a company of warstriders could teleoperate them from a distance… even when that distance was measured in thousands of light years.It meant that at planetary distances there was zero time delay due to speed-of-light limitations, that warstriders could be jacked from thousands of light years away, that the striders could be subjected to stresses that would have killed human pilots physically riding them.During the passage from the Stargate to Core D9837, the striders in Kara’s company had been boosting at over two hundred Gs—an acceleration no human could survive—and the high-radiation background of the Galactic Core itself made direct exploration of that hellish environment impossible, even with heavy shielding.It was a remarkable achievement, a military dream come true.Unfortunately, the dream so far had not succeeded in making warstrider military operations safe for the pilots.They might be well out of range of the enemy’s energy beams, but there were other, more insidious dangers in combat.Dangers affecting the mind.…Carefully, and with Jamal giving an assist, Kara sat up, then swung her legs out of the opened conmod.The pilot deck was a broad, low-ceilinged, brightly lit room occupied by dozens of coffin-shaped conmods identical to hers.Most of them, she saw, were already open and empty, their occupants moved elsewhere after their warstriders on distant Core D9837 had been junked.But a handful were clearly still occupied, their covers sealed tight, and with small galaxies of lights winking at the console life-function readouts mounted on their sides.The conning modules were the life-support pods of her comrades in the Phantoms, the warstriders still fighting for their lives in the Galactic Core [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]