What is "brid"

Usage examples of "brid".

It was impossible to say where the oceans began and the Jugglers ended -- just as it was impossible to say whether each world contained many Jugglers or merely one arbitrarily extended individual, for the islands themselves were linked by organic bridges.

But to reach it she had to cross a bridge across the plaza, and her approach would be obvious to the man inside.

Hardly surprising: Palsy had set up physical breaks in the command network, chasms that no amount of software intervention could possibly bridge.

She buckled herself in and then gunned the seat away from the bridge's tiered walls, until she was orbiting the enormous holographic projection sphere which occupied the room's middle.

But that hope lasted until the walls of the bridge shuddered, as if the entire ship were an ancient sea vessel scraping past an iceberg.

It was all perfectly clear, imaged precisely on the bridge's projection sphere.

She had named the vast conic object the bridgehead, because that was its function.

Shock waves would rush up the length of the bridgehead as it hit the surface, but piezoelectric crystal boundaries would gradually bleed energy from the shock waves, energy which could be redirected into weapons systems.

The impact speed would be relatively slow, in any case -- less than a kilometre a second, since the bridgehead would decelerate massively just before puncturing the crust.

And, as she reminded herself, the bridgehead might not have very long to enjoy its sentience in the first place.

But as profound as her ignorance of the bridgehead might be, it was not so very different from the way a mother managed to create a child without knowing the precise location of every artery and nerve.

What it told her -- and what she already knew -- was that the calamitous marriage of bridgehead and Cerberus was due to happen in just under half a day, and that no one looked likely to voice any objections, let alone make any attempt to avert the union.

Not long after that, she would need to begin the softening-up procedure, deploying elements of the cache against the point on Cerberus where the bridgehead was scheduled to arrive.

She would have given birth to the bridgehead and hoped that she could prevent it completing its mission at some later point.

If the bridgehead hit an ordinary planetary surface at that speed, its kinetic energy would be converted into heat rather efficiently: there would be a colossal explosion and her toy would be destroyed in a flash.