A Sword Into Darkness (10 page)

An unknown time later, but long enough for the sun to set from the afternoon sky, there was a knock on the door.  She looked up as it opened and saw a man in his late 30’s come in.  She did not recognize him, but his plain, serious face brightened remarkably as a broad smile appeared, giving life to the laugh lines around his mouth and eyes, making him far more attractive and compelling.  She smiled back.  It was hard not to, given her usual preference for older men.

He nodded to her, still smiling, and opened his sports coat to put his hands in the pockets of his khakis.  “Hi.  How are you feeling?”

She gave a little half shrug with her right side.  “Pretty good.  I get to stay in bed all day and eat prodigious amounts of sweets.  How would you be?”

He laughed.  “That would kill me, I’m afraid.”  He stepped forward and held out a hand.  “Sorry.  I’m Nathan Kelley, from Windward Tech.”

Kristene gave it a shake.  “Kristene Muñoz, but you probably already knew that.  I’ve heard of you.  You’re Dr. Hastings’ boss, right?”

“Only in so far as you can be the boss of someone that can think circles around you.  Let’s just say that I give Hastings a direction and then try like hell to keep up with him.  He actually wanted to be here to check on you, but since I came in at the last minute, he’s checking out the remains of your lab instead.  I figured if you went to all the trouble of blowing yourself up for Windward, it’s the least I could do to come out and see how you are.”

“Well, thanks!  Protecting your investment?  Or avoiding a law suit?”

Nathan frowned a bit.  “You’re not going to yell at me like that Leo guy, are you?”

She relented and shook her head with a lopsided grin.  “Naahh, just messing with you.  Now, I may have to talk to Hastings about his priorities next time I see him, but I really do appreciate it.”

“I’m so sorry about your lab.  We knew you were close to completion.  It has to be frustrating to be so near the finish, and then have it all taken away.”

Kristene looked surprised.  “Frustrated?  That last experiment was spectacular!”  She cocked her head to one side, and put on a devilish smile.  “It was a blow-out, a smash success.”

Despite Nathan’s grin, he looked concerned.  “How many meds are you on?”

“I am relaxin’ on a little tapentadol, but I’m not that doped up.  I’m serious.  The only problem with that last test was that I didn’t understand everything going on, so I miscalculated.  It didn’t fail to work—it worked all too darned well!”

Nathan turned, grabbed a chair, and took a seat by her bed.  “I’m starting to get a little behind here.  Why don’t you take it back a few steps?”

She sighed and handed over her suite.  Nathan accepted it gingerly and saw it was full of curves and equations, only about half of which he even recognized.  She saw the confusion and relented.  “Okay.  I don’t understand everything yet either, but when has that ever stopped me?  Basically, you guys asked us two questions:  what kind of engine would produce a specific blue light of such and such spectrum and such and such energy, and was capable of massive thrust with very little or no reaction mass, and secondly, how do we create an engine capable of interstellar travel?”

“Yes, and you and about a thousand other people have been working on those questions for the past 15 years with absolutely nothing to show for it.”

She nodded.  “Okay, I’ll give you that, but, truth be told, most of those guys just took your money, shunted it to other research, and then fobbed off some old Breakthrough Propulsion Physics ideas on you.”

Nathan’s face colored slightly.  “Yeah, there were some folks with a bit less integrity than others.”

“Because you gotta admit, there are some pretty loopy rumors about what you guys are trying to do!”

“I thought you said you were going to explain why your lab blew up,” he said, waving her suite around.

“Oh, I am, I am.  It’s important to know where I’m coming from is all.  You see, I don’t think you guys are nuts.  I believe in the Deltans!”

“You believe we’re being invaded by aliens?”

Kristene’s grin faltered.  “You mean you don’t?”

“Honestly?  It depends on the day of the week.  I’m putting off making up my mind until I can see some less ambiguous evidence, like maybe from the SSBA, if they ever allow us tasking on it.”

“It’s not ambiguous.  That rogue stellar fragment theory that NASA keeps sticking by is a bunch of hooey, and it looks worse every year they refuse to change their minds.  The only reason nobody will publicly challenge it is ‘cause they don’t want to admit to believing in aliens.”

He nodded and then looked down at the suite’s screen again.  “So you’re a true believer.  How does that apply to this?”

“Well, everybody else has been focused on the usual suspects for your interstellar engine:  warps, bias drives, gravity waves, wormholes, reactionless motors, and stuff like that.  But all that stuff is either impossible, improbable, or is gonna take some sort of miraculously magical power source to run.  And the only realistic alternatives to the pie-in-the-sky dreamers have been your advanced plasma and ion engines.  They can do the job, and we’re building them now, stuff like VASIMR, and FEEP, and Hall Thrusters, but none of them have the endurance to really go interstellar, not like the Deltans anyways.”

“Okay, so what did you do?”

She beamed.  “I killed two birds with one stone.  I figured if the aliens were doing it one way already, it probably indicated all those other ideas were full of crap.  So why waste my time figuring out how to open a wormhole when some advanced extraterrestrials couldn’t even do it?  I focused my efforts on answering the first question in order to answer the second one!”

Nathan smiled.  “We actually hoped most would do that, but we didn’t want to shoot down potentially useful tangents, so we phrased it as two different questions.  You aren’t the first person to link them, but you are the first to claim to have figured it out.”

She wagged her right index finger at him.  “Figured it out and have the busted-ass lab to show for it.”

“Maybe.  That’s what Hastings is trying to do by piecing your lab back together.  He said the wreckage was very interesting.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what he’ll find.  It’s what I found and what the Deltans are likely using:  a photon drive, but better.  Inconceivably better.”

“Go on.”

“Photon drives have been on the drawing boards for years, but the negatives have always outweighed the positives.  Basically, it’s a cross between an ion drive and a flashlight.  Photons are particles, at least for the purposes of this theory anyway.  We won’t worry about the wave properties of light at the moment, so just think of them as particles.  Specifically they’re massless particles, but they still have momentum and energy because they move at the speed of light.  There’s a whole bunch of different examples of photon momentum in nature, and we’ve even tried to make space propulsion systems using solar photons for free:  solar sails for instance.

“Now a flashlight or a laser is already a photon drive, shooting photons out one end and accelerating in the other, but they’re so damn weak you never feel the push.  The best they can do efficiency-wise is a Newton of thrust for every 150 to 300 megawatts expended.  To make a useable engine you need to produce a LOT of photons at some really big energies, which takes gazillions of gigawatts of power.

“Now, you look at the spectrum from the Deltans’ ship, and it’s this high energy curve, but it’s not a blackbody spectrum like photon drives are traditionally figured for either.  Nor is it a coherent monochromatic source.”

Nathan shook his head.  “You’re losing me.  My basic physics was a long time ago and … .”

She nodded.  “It’s okay.  It doesn’t look like a star’s emissions, or any thermal source like a rocket, but it doesn’t look like a laser either.  It’s different, weird, but what it does resemble is an antenna emission, only with the central, main frequency a lot higher than we’re used to, somewhere in the high ultraviolet.  The blue light we see from the Deltans is just the tail end of their emission spectrum.

“I guessed that maybe there was some sort of benefit to having the photon drive’s exhaust in a narrow frequency band rather than a broad blackbody spectrum.  So, I tried to duplicate what they had already done.  It took a lot of freakin’ brilliant work on my part, but eventually I came up with the cone.  I call it K-Mart.”

He screwed up his face, but then said, “K-Mart?  Blue-light special?”

Kristene suddenly felt a lot warmer than the room seemed to be.  She gave him a coy half-grin.  “Oh, I knew I liked you.”

Nathan grinned back, but shook his head.  “Anyways … .”

“Anyways, it’s essentially an antenna, keyed around the same central frequency as the Deltans’, but no material I know of could handle the power output needed to give this thing any sort of thrust, so I used a pair of coupled field effect antennas.  They emit from the fluctuations of an EM field, with one field receiving and the other transmitting.  So you put power in one side, and the other side emits your photons for thrust.  It’s not reactionless, which is impossible, but you don’t need reaction mass either.  You just need power.”

Nathan stood, excited by the possibilities, but still apprehensive.  He began to pace.  “Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say it worked.  Why did your lab explode?”

She shrugged with her right side.  “I don’t know.  It shouldn’t have.  The cone should have these huge losses from one side of the antenna to the other.  It was only supposed to produce a couple of millinewtons of force, about what you’d get out of a standard ion drive.  Not the sexiest interstellar engine, but it’d work.  Thing is, not only did it not show any loss from the electron beam to the photon emission, that explosion seems to show that it released more energy than was even present in the beam!”

Nathan turned to her.  “That’s impossible.  You can’t create energy from nothing.”

“I don’t think I did.  It’ll have to be proven out, but I think the cone took
all
the available energy from one side and converted it to photon thrust.  That’s the energy in the beam, the energy in the LINAC’s fields, the radiant heat and light in the target chamber, hell maybe even vacuum energy, but I doubt it.  It took everything available and turned it into thrust.  The beam started the ball rolling and it just took off from there on its own.  If I could do it over again, I bet I could show that whatever type of energy you shove in to the receptor field, it can use it to make thrust.  It’s the ultimate rocket:  the highest possible specific impulse, at a high thrust, high efficiency, and zero need to cart around reaction mass.”

Nathan approached the bed and gripped the handrail with both hands.  “So, this … enhanced photon drive—could you do it again?  And without blowing yourself up this time?”

She pouted.  “Well, maybe, but it turns out that someone cut my funding off.”

“Assuming Dr. Hastings can translate what you have here,” he said, holding up her suite, “and assuming he buys off on it, you can consider your funding restored, and this time as a direct employee of Windward.”

Her pout became an impish grin.  “In that case, you bet your ass I can do it again, and a lot better this time.  We’re going to the stars, Mr. Kelley!”

6:  “OF PICTURES, PRAWNS, AND POSSIBILITIES”

December 10, 2039; Calvert’s Gumbo Room; Alexandria, VA

Nestled
in the corner of one of Alexandria’s oldest buildings downtown, the quiet little restaurant existed as neutral territory in the battlegrounds of scandal and ideology, enjoying the coverage of an umbrella of discretion and anonymity that few establishments retained for as long.  This sort of unspoken agreement of private civility between the press and the upper echelon patrons of the dark, wood-paneled Gumbo Room meant that Calvert’s would never be fabulously successful or famous, but it would allow the little place to become an important footnote in the unwritten history of the nation.

Here, senators could dine with their mistresses in style, without too great a fear of discovery.  At this table, the majority and minority leaders could share a drink and a laugh over how divided their public personas had become, while the actual difference between them had never been narrower.  At that table, the conservative talk show host, the liberal editor, and their respective publicists and advisors could all gather round heaping piles of steaming blue crab and divide up the political landscape, working out talking points and scathing rebukes of one another, all the time keeping a keen eye toward maximizing their individual market share.

As a direct consequence of Calvert’s unacknowledged place in the political universe, an unofficial non-meeting could be held there which might receive undue attention were the principles to meet in an actual government office.  Many a nation-altering deal had been brokered secretly and safely above the Gumbo Room’s varnished tables and embroidered maroon tablecloths.  Thus, at the table in the far corner, isolated from the rest even in this sanctuary of isolation, the Assistant National Science Advisor, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and their tardy guest could quietly change the course of the world and the human race.

Lydia Russ smiled softly and contemplated her glass of wine in silence while Carl Sykes, Lieutenant General, USAF (retired) seethed over their guest’s continued absence.  He jabbed a toothpick violently into another olive from his small plate, swished it through his untouched martini, and devoured it with a growl and yet another look toward the entrance.

No one was there.  Sykes shook his head and snapped his toothpick, tossing it negligently behind him.  “Where the hell is he?”

Lydia took a sip of wine.  “He’ll be here.  Stop worrying.”

“I’m not worrying.  I’m pissed.  It’s unprofessional and rude to make us wait.  You’d think that someone with his ego would jump at the chance to cackle at us.”

Lydia smiled more broadly.  “You don’t know Gordon like I do.  His ego wouldn’t allow him to be here on time even if he had nothing to crow about, and now that he does, he probably considers making us wait some form of payback.  He’ll be here, though.  It’s the opportunity he’s been waiting for, after all.”