Branegate (34 page)

“Good symmetry,” mumbled Myra, and scribbled something.

“Deploying Stinger, five feet,” said Wil.

Instinctively their hands grabbed the tops of the seats, but there was no lurch or other sudden motion. A tapered, solid cylinder slid out of the center of Sniffer’s beak, and locked five feet out from it. The green glow intensified, and stretched out into an oblate spheroid three feet beyond the end of Stinger. A fuzzy, amoebic-shaped patch of green flickered just beyond the edge of that. Myra took one look, and actually giggled.

“Oh, it looks
just
like the fundamental geometry,” she said, and scribbled again.

Trae saw only glowing shapes connecting, knowing that in her head Myra was performing rotations of what she saw, rotations giving the extra dimensions of the brane and its pores. She would have to show it all to him later.

Several tests later they knew the fuzzy patch near the end of Stinger detached when Stinger was deployed only seven feet. And by the time Stinger was out to its full extension of forty feet, the patch was nearly a mile away.

“Not as far as I’d like,” grumbled Trae, “but it might have to do.”

Wil looked back curiously at him, but only Myra knew what he’d meant by that.

They went back to a Stinger extension of only three feet, but charged the plenum for two minutes.

And watched in awe as a branegate opened up right in front of the ship.

All were silent, except Myra, who gave a little yelp and clapped her hands.

“We did it! We did it! There it is!”

An enormous cat’s eye, then fatter, oriented vertically, with a maximum area twice that of Guppy’s cross-section at the nose. Constant shape and size, flickering green on the edges, darker towards the center, an oblong there nearly black. A beautifully stabilized branegate right in their face, with no black holes or keeper planets to stabilize it.

“I really wondered if it was going to happen,” Trae said, and grinned. Myra hugged him.

“Remember how the Grand Portal was first opened by accident? All the black holes there had already stressed space to the extreme, and gravity did most of the work. Big masses, big force, but large size. Takes a lot of work to keep that thing stable. Should have started small in the first place,” said Myra.

She was excited, and giddy. She made him want to laugh.

“Do we go through it?” asked Wil, staring outside. Awed, he’d forgotten his checklist of tests.

“Not yet. Back to the list,” said Trae, but he too could barely control his excitement.

It seemed that while plenum energy created the gate, trickler current sustained it, but the length of Stinger determined its position, and the effect was nonlinear. By the time Stinger was out to full extension the branegate was still there and stable, but it was over two miles away.

Myra was scribbling, and talking to air. “That’s a real branegate, now. Two miles. I don’t know what that other blob was, maybe like a crack in a doorway.”

“What?” asked Trae, and then Myra’s eyes focused again.

“You’ll have a range of two miles with a full branegate.”

“Oh.”

They were down to the final two tests, one of which might end their lives. Everyone in the crew had spent years in spaceflight, but had never made transit through the Grand Portal or even seen it. Now, they were being asked to drive their ship through a miniature version of that thing, and return alive to tell about it.

This had taken some persuasion.

Myra had explained the basic concepts to them: the many extra dimensions folded up at any point in space, the extra-dimensional brane connecting two universes at each point, the unraveling and stretching of high dimensions to tunnel through the brane from one universe to another.

“When we go through the gate, we’re just following the flow of exotic particles we use for power, and the trail is the same coming back. If we do it at rest we end up exactly at our starting point when we return. The brane is supposed to be continuous, the universes simply connected.”

“And if it isn’t?” asked an engineer.

“You don’t want to think about that,” said Myra.

They were not amused.

Stinger was drawn in to three feet. The window was filled with flickering green, the gate nearly touching them and showing a distinct black patch at its center.

“Setting coordinates,” said an engineer, and loaded the pattern of stars giving them their exact position.

Wil’s eyes were large when he looked up at them. “How do we know we won’t come out in the middle of a star?”

“Hot gas would be blasting us from the gate right now, if that were true. Just pull Stinger in. If we have to leave fast, go back to three feet. We’ll have to recharge the plenum with exotic matter coming from
this
side. I told you all this,” said Myra.

A woman’s frown was a signal for a man’s action.

They’d shut down thrusters for testing, but still had a forward drift velocity of four hundred feet per second. “Coordinates?” asked Wil.

“Loaded. Clock on,” said an engineer.

“Then here we go. Retrieving Stinger—slowly—slowly.”

They were in the thing, flickering green all around them, the dark patch ahead growing rapidly. No sense of motion or turbulence, and a few anxious heartbeats later they were through. The glow around them flicked out, and ahead was only blackness.

It took a moment for their eyes to adjust after the bright green surroundings. A few blue stars glowed ahead of them, and there was a faint, hazy patch that might have been a galaxy.

“Recording,” said the engineer. Four cameras on the hull of the ship were taking pictures in every direction. “The branegate is gone!” he said, too loudly.

“Of course it is. Recharge the plenum as before, two minutes.”

“We’re still moving, same velocity. Shouldn’t I turn the ship around to return?” Wil then cleared his throat to calm his voice.

Myra rolled her eyes at Trae. She’d forgotten a small detail in orienting the crew.

“The two universes are connected at every point in space, both sides of the brane. If you keep your heading and open a gate right now we’ll come back quite close to where we started. That’s why the clock is running, so we can time our course.”

“I have the star patterns, and there are two galaxies far out there in camera range. We’re not in intergalactic space!” Now the engineer sounded excited. “Looks like we’re in a space between two arms of a spiral galaxy.”

“The home galaxy, but thousands of light years from its center,” said Trae. “The Grand Portal is there, but now we have a shorter way back.”

“We have pictures from the core area,” said Myra. “What you have on camera should be enough to locate this position when we get home.

“Now?” asked Wil, with enthusiasm.

“Yes, now. Two minute plenum charge, Stinger to three feet, and open the door just like before.” She was nonchalant about it, thinking about something else, but Trae noticed when she took his hand in hers and squeezed it.

In any experiment, there are always unknowns.

A two minute charge, and Wil moved with authority and no caution to open the gate, and it appeared before them as if by magic. With no hesitation, he pulled the gate to them as Stinger was reined in, and they were through it in an instant. The pattern of stars they’d left behind was there again. Pilot and crew laughed nervously, while out of their sight Trae and Myra breathed small sighs of relief.

“Still alive,” quipped Anton. “And one more test before bragging rights are assigned. You know where to go.”

“Yes, sir,” said Wil, obviously relieved and happy. The most dangerous test was now behind them.

They went back into normal, powered flight with Stinger and Sniffer withdrawn, and returned to the ecliptic plane. A four-minute burn, followed by a drift of four hours brought them to a ring of icy debris between the two gas giants in their system. It was a thin ring, a few thousand miles across and several miles thick, populated by fragments of frozen water, methane, carbon dioxide and ammonia. Fragment diameters ran a spectrum of feet to several miles. They picked out an ellipsoidal piece over a mile in diameter, followed it a while, worked themselves in behind it in its travels.

“Let’s start at two miles. I want the largest cross section we can get,” said Trae.

The overall test was broken into several on their checklist, with plenum charges up to thirty minutes at constant trickle current limited only by the power of the superconducting coil. Still, trickle current seemed to serve mainly as a branegate stabilizer, especially as the gate was moved farther and farther from the ship. They set up a series of gates to a range of two miles, and then started all over again when thrusters were turned on to move them within two miles of their icy target.

The mountain of ice and frozen gases loomed in front of them, partially obscured by the bright glow of an established branegate only yards from their windows. Stinger was at three feet deployment.

“Take it to forty,” said Anton softly.

Stinger went to forty feet out in seven seconds. The branegate moved with it, but faster, and growing in size as it was projected outwards.

The gate struck the mountain of ice dead center, its cross section barely larger than its target.

The mountain of ice disappeared. There was not even a flicker from the interior of the gate. And nothing came back out from it.

“End of test,” said Trae, and Myra frowned again. “It’s what we needed. Guppy isn’t just a ship anymore. It’s a weapon. Doesn’t kill directly, just sends things away. Things like attacking ships.”

“Doesn’t kill if you’re sealed in a ship, that is,” said Myra.

“So we’ll hope that’s the only use necessary,” said Anton, but both of them knew it might not be.

Myra was not satisfied with what he’d said. “We’ve done what we came to do, so let’s go home.”

They spoke only a few words to each other on the way back, while the crew chatted excitedly over their headsets. The day had been historic for them. For Myra and Anton it had also been exciting and fulfilling, but the success of the final test had turned it into a prelude to war.

The shuttle brought them down in a lazy, helical course to the sprawl of Zylak airbase. It was like sailing in a paper plane, and nearly lulled them to sleep after the stress of the day.

Meza and Wallace were there to greet them on the tarmac far out from the terminal. A limousine awaited them. There were embraces all around, and they got into the car. Wil and his crew were coming down in another shuttle two hours later, and already the techs and pilots were out on the tarmac to prepare a noisy welcome for them.

“An historic day,” said Meza grandly. “We’ll be making money from this a thousand years from now.”

“I’m just glad the science turned out to be right,” said Wallace, and smiled at Myra. The car went through a security gate, turned left, and sped towards town.

“And now we have a deterrent against invaders,” added Trae.

“It’s a good deterrent only if we don’t have to kill someone with it,” said Myra. “As far as I know, that chunk of ice didn’t have a pulse.”

“That chunk of ice wasn’t attacking us, either. Look, if we use it against ships everyone is sealed in, and they have regenerating life support, the only impact is a long trip back home on the other side. I admit I’d use it against land targets if I could, but the range is only two miles, and Guppy can only operate in space. What’s the problem?”

Myra frowned again, but had no argument. “There isn’t any, as long as we don’t kill innocent people.”

“Too bad Khalil didn’t share your opinion when he decided to get rid of me.”

“You weren’t an innocent to him, just like he isn’t an innocent to me,” Myra said coldly.

“Well, enough of that,” said Meza. “Killing or not, we’re going into production right away. By the time the invasion arrives, we should have plenty of ships to literally send them on their way.”

“More than that. We can move against the Grand Portal itself. The keepers are too large, but we can take out a generator or two and destabilize the entire gate. We can police it,” said Trae, and gestured with a fist in emphasis.

“We’re in more of a rush than you think, not just with Guppy, but Nova as well. We’d be foolish to wait until the invasion gets here. We should meet them as far out as possible. Fifty ships are coming. I’d be comfortable if we had that many, or more, to meet them. We should also take control of Grand Portal. Two or three Guppies for that, plus a number of Nova gunships. And then there’s the matter of Gan. I don’t think Khalil will sit still while the invasion is coming. He should be removed from power right away.”

“Trae!” said Myra in horror. “I can understand why you want him punished, but we have to focus on the invasion first.”

“This is nothing to do directly with Khalil having me killed. If what John says is true, Khalil is an Archbishop from The Church on Kratola. He’s a part of the scheme to invade us in the first place, and he’ll soon do on Gan what has been done on Kratola. He has to go, one way or another.”

“We can do all of that,” said Wallace, “but only if we have enough ships.”

“We can build new production lines for constituent parts, but the assembly has to be in space. We’ll have to train an awful lot of new people for weightless vacuum work,” said Meza.

“All I wanted to do was make a branegate,” said Myra, “This thing just keeps getting more complicated.” Her voice dripped ice.

They were still arguing about all of it when they reached the administration building of Zylak industries. Myra and Anton were continuing on to the research complex, so Meza and Wallace congratulated them again and reminded them of the evening debriefing before getting out of the car.

The door was about to close when another man fairly leapt into the car and sat himself down opposite them before pulling the door shut.

It was John Haight.

Myra made a little yelp and leaned against Trae as the car started to move again.

“Sorry. I guess you’ve had quite a day. Congratulations to both of you. Now we have something to work with.”

“This is John Haight, Myra,” said Trae.