Well, it was about time. And I was finally sure you weren’t fucking around, Ash. You only pull out your ace when you mean to win.
“It’s been a long time, sweetness,” said Wynne, grabbing me into his arms and spinning me around. “Miss me?”
“It’s good to see you,” I said. “Perhaps you might consider an extended stay after the current problem has been solved?”
“The problem isn’t what you think. One, it’s about making sure that the staff can be fixed – and yes, Cüinn can replace the crystal you toasted, and two, it’s about Lilith dying with a nullet in her gut.”
I was surprised to hear this, to say the least. So were the members of the Twist. “Cool,” said the one I think was Ricky. “A surprise ending.”
“We need a way to get that pos-matter over to the Battlequeen Emmeris, probably faster than they can dock. I’ll trust Cara to handle the situation with St. John.”
“You aren’t going over there…” I threatened.
“No, I’m not. But Owen says that you don’t normally induce a matter-antimatter reaction by rubbing two slabs together. He says that in an engine, it’s a controlled particle beam reaction.”
“Right, so…”
“So we need to fire a concentrated beam of pos-matter particles.”
“Is that all?” said Clive, coming up the hallway, several SSOps agents at his heels. “It’s not like firing a concentrated stream of normal matter. I have no idea if the technology we have will affect the crystalline molecules at all.”
“Let us do it,” said Marty. “We can just push the particles in front of us.”
“They are kind of enormous,” said Ricky, “but we’re strong.”
“We’ve got muscles,” said Joey.
“No, we don’t,” said Marty.
“I hear voices,” said Clive. “Exactly whom are we talking to?”
“Moving the particles one-by-one will take a long time,” I said.
“But there are a lot of Twist around here,” said Wynne. “And I’m betting that they’ll all want to help, seeing that my presence skews the probability of positive outcomes by some four thousand standard deviations.”
“Whoa,” said Joey.
“Whoa,” said Ricky.
“Also, I talked to Cüinn, and he thinks that quantum entanglement might apply in this circumstance.”
“For the lay people in the audience,” said I, “what the hell are you talking about?”
“Any particle that interacts with me will continue to be influenced by my luck,” said Wynne. “It should go a long way towards solving their decay problem.”
“But how will they get over to the ship?” I asked. “It’s already left the bay.”
“All you need to do is put in some kinetic energy,” said Marty. “Your particle accelerator should work just fine on us.”
“I have a mini-accel in the lab,” said Clive. “But Tara, there’s one problem, namely momentum. How will they stop?”
“Geez,” said Marty, “What kind of sentient life do you think we’d be if we couldn’t stop ourselves when we wanted?”
“We just use really tiny parachutes,” said Joey.
“You…what?” said Clive.
“HAHAHAHAHAHA”
“Joke. We actually just belch up a boson or two,” said Ricky.
“Right,” said Wynne. “Let’s do it.”