Warp Speed (30 page)

Jim figured out that we could alter the warp bubble for the main habitat construction to the shape of a spheroid. The upper half would be a perfect hemisphere two hundred meters in diameter. The lower half would be a section of a much larger sphere only a few tens of meters deep at the bottom. We would go make the hole first. Come back and pick up a suitable surface area of dirt layered with several feet of insulation then covered with several feet of sand. Place it in the hole and hope the sand kept the nonspace qualified insulation from outgassing while we came back to get the town. Then we planned to pick up topsoil, fill dirt, trees, lake, fish, air, bees, birds, squirrels, and probably a lot more with the town.

After a few hours of Moon base design we decided to assign individual action items and go do them. We mutually decided that the move to the lunar surface would be priority second only to the development of the MWMs. Tabitha instilled in each of us the reality of the situation and that the Lunar Base would be a great idea and we needed to be there to hide from the Chinese if they have warp field detectors like ours. We all realized that six MWMs wouldn't be enough to keep the Chinese from developing further warp weapons. Actually, one of the bright analysts about eighteen floors above us had completed a study showing that we needed at least twelve well-placed simultaneous strikes to completely remove the Chinese infrastructure. One really big one would do, but we would risk the onset of greenhouse phenomena and God only knows what other types of global ecological nightmares. Carefully planned "surgical" strikes would be better. So, we needed to be out of reach of their missiles, and detection, soon. It would take us at least another year and a half to build that many MWMs. In the meantime, we would be sitting ducks at the mercy of our modified National Missile Defense system, unless our Chinese counterparts have a smart guy like Al to realize that they don't need launch vehicles. Then there would be no defense. This war was only going to be won by completely removing our enemy's ability to make war or by some miraculous diplomacy. Since neither side was admitting that there was a war to begin with, diplomacy seemed like a very big stretch.

Sara had asked me earlier why I thought the Chinese were attacking us. I told her a story that a friend of mine is so fond of telling about the Chinese business world. The story goes like this.

Back in the early nineteen nineties the Chinese government announced that they were going to open their borders to American businesses with hopes of moving China into the world market place. Once China had opened their doors, American businessmen rushed to the airports and headed off to China hoping to be the first to get a foothold on a billion new consumers. Well, these businessmen spent the first few days meeting their Chinese counterparts while being wined and dined and wining and dining some themselves. After a few weeks of this continued and none of these businessmen had even talked business yet, they began to start pressuring their hosts to discuss business opportunities. The response they got was that they were welcome to stay and enjoy themselves as long as they wanted. However, China hadn't needed to do business with the Western world or anybody else for that matter for thousands of years. So why should they be in a hurry to conduct business now? Needless to say most of these businessmen came home with their tails dragging and nothing to show for their huge trip expenses. That was more than twenty years ago and there are still no large western businesses based in China.

The Chinese falsely believe that they don't need the world and that they are a "chosen people." Well they sure needed the Russians to upgrade their current military. And it was real nice of former President Clinton to give them the American guidance, navigation, and control technologies required to steer the rocket that launched the warp bomb into orbit that killed fifty million American citizens. Oh wait; Clinton didn't give the missile technology away. He got a big campaign contribution in return didn't he? That's okay. I'm sure he is "feeling the pain" of those poor souls in Colorado just as he did for the boys that had to run the "Mogadishu Mile" back in the early nineties.

Oh well, I digressed and Sara was four at the time and had no idea what the "Mogadishu Mile" was. Well, I'm sure that Tabitha and I won't forget it, fellows. That is one of the reasons we aren't going to back down now. If the Chinese wanted to be diplomatic, they wouldn't have destroyed fifty million people without saying, "Give up or else!" The ironic part here is that they did need the rest of the world just as they needed the Russians before. They needed the Americans to develop warp drive for them to steal.

"Now I don't want it misunderstood," I told Sara. And by this time the whole gang had gathered around my soapbox. "I have many Chinese friends. There are no quarrels I have with any people. That is, until they let their government do something as hideous as this. You can argue that it's likely that most of the Chinese people have no idea that these events are even occurring. Hell, most of them are living peasants' lives. But, does that make them innocent? Should the people be held accountable for the actions of their government? At least on some level, yes. Perhaps the outcome of this war will change China, America, the World, and our views on how things should be. We'll see. One of the biggest problems we had back in Gulf War II is that we would never hold the people accountable for their hideous government and the crazy factions that arose during the war. That is why that war dragged on and didn't seem to have a decisive end. This war must, it
will
, have a decisive end. We had better make sure we are on the winning side when it's over. The only thing that bothers me is why now? For thousands of years China was enough for China. Why did they feel they needed to take over the world, now, so aggressively at this very moment? Doesn't make sense to me. But we'll stop them anyway!"

CHAPTER 18

Tabitha had put in the requisition to construct the "town" in a small lake area in a very large state park in Georgia. When the time came a forest fire would overtake the region. That is, after we yanked the town, trees, lake, bees, and all right out of the Earth. Tabitha hired a few ecologists and biologists to develop a closed system of plant and animal life. As far as these university types knew, this was just another "white collar welfare program." Pork, as it is referred to in political circles.

Jim and I went about designing a real-time modifiable warp field generator. This took several different sets of misshapen coils. The final product design reminded me of the old stellarator systems I worked on back in undergraduate school. The stellarators were really weird arrangements of electromagnets that were used to create tight fields. Plasmas would be captured in these fields. We would then pinch the fields even tighter with hopes that we could spark the fusion process. We were never very successful at creating a fusion generator back then. My understanding is that we're not much closer now, but I have to admit that I haven't really paid attention to that field (ha! pardon the pun) of physics in many years.

At any rate, we did create a modifiable warp field. Our new generator would allow us to modify the outer or Van den Broeck bubble simply by adjusting parameters on a three-dimensional graphic display. We soon realized that we could also modify the flat space region between the warp pole and zero. Flat space would mean no gravity or free fall. Jim and I figured out a way to create a slight curve in the so-called flat region so that we could have a one-gee environment inside the vessel, building, or whatever it was, that we planned to warp. In other words, we could build a spacecraft that had artificial gravity. That would be damned convenient. Since we could modify the gravity anywhere, we could ensure that there would be one gee environment on Moon Base 1. That way long mission duration to the base wouldn't be physically detrimental to the, uh I guess, astronauts.

Upon completion of the new warp field generator design, we sent blueprints to manufacturing a few floors up. The word we got back from them was that they would have it finished in a few days. I had yet to visit the machine shop upstairs, but those guys were on the ball. I hoped that some of them would volunteer to go to the Moon with us.

Most of my crew, besides the general, were through with their war tasks and were developing ideas of their own for the Moon base or overseeing (micromanaging is more like it) some of the manufacturing. Sara and 'Becca had been spending most of their time together. Jim and I figured that they were just collaborating on how to improve the manufacturing process for the mini ECCs. The process was slow--perhaps they could make it more efficient--thus shaving off a few days of the wait.

Al and Anne Marie and a couple of regular military girls that they had befriended focused on integration issues of the Moon base. They seemed very excited and enamored by the idea. I've said it before and I'll say it again; if I had the power, I would grant Al a doctorate in Aerospace Engineering and predate it by a year or two. I felt the same way about Jim and 'Becca as they were going through the doctoral inquisition. We used to have a saying: "You will never graduate until you can convince your committee that you know that you will never be as smart and enlightened as they are and that you will forever be in their debt and can never imagine a way to repay such a deep debt." Such is the way of American higher education.

Did I forget to mention the fact that Al and Anne Marie were spending an inordinate amount of time together? As Tabitha has always told me, I'm dense about these things. Hell, I didn't even realize Jim and 'Becca were a thing until they decided to get hitched! I think I'll just keep my nose out of that one. Or as we say in the South, "Damn, I ain't gittin' my dawg in that fight."

Several weeks had passed and I was getting a little bored. Most of my work was complete. The field coils were finished, but with no ECCs to power them, they were just a lot of scrap superconductor. I spent some of my time helping Tabitha analyze intelligence data "down the hall." When I was being a fifth wheel to Tabitha I would give her time off by just hanging out in the break room and watching television.

I got caught up in the Senate hearings deposing the NASA administrator as to why we hadn't detected the meteors before they struck Florida and Colorado. Why had NASA not done its job, the Senate wanted to know? As I listened to the hearings, the current administrator of our nation's civilian space agency held his ground.

"Well, Senator," he began, "for years we have begged for a budget to watch for Near Earth Objects, or NEOs. And we have received one. The budget has been roughly three million dollars per year. That is enough money to run one telescope, for about an hour a day, about three hundred days a year. If we got lucky and the meteor just happened to be in the minuscule percentage of the sky that we were able to cover with that one telescope during that hour during one of those days, well yes Senator we should have detected it."

Even though the problem facing the world right now wasn't due to a meteor threat, the NASA administrator was right. We're, in the first place, not seriously looking for threats from space. In the second place, we have no developed way to defend against them. I remembered seeing some movies back near the end of the last century--or near the beginning of this one, I forget which--about asteroids hurtling toward Earth and brave astronauts flying up on modified Shuttles or some such nonsense and destroying them with one nuclear weapon. That was silly then; it's still silly. Asteroids and meteors are bad enough--
they
aren't intelligent.

What if the threat from space
was
intelligent? Well, if they got here, then they must be far superior to us. We wouldn't stand a chance. If they showed up and said, "We are the Borg. Your uniqueness will be added to our own. Prepare to be assimilated. Resistance is futile." If that happened,
we would absolutely be fucked
. No polite way to say it. No amount of nuclear weapons could help. Hell, I'm not sure that warp weapons would help.

And a race as advanced as
Star Trek:TNG's
Borg might not even be the worst case scenario. What if a race showed up in our past and tricked us into worshiping them? Say, perhaps the race had wings and wore a shiny bubble around their heads since they didn't breathe our atmosphere. They could use their technology to perform so-called miracles that would convince us that they were deities. By every version of the word we would be screwed even worse than with the Borg. At least with the Borg it would be over quickly and we'd go down fighting. With these deities they could trick us into fighting among ourselves for thousands of years. Then they could, for some reason, leave our planet, leaving behind no evidence that they were ever here. We would continue to fight about them amongst ourselves for millennia and we would never know what really happened. If they showed up now claiming to be angels of the lord, at least some of us would stand up and flip them off. But you better believe that many more would jump on the fiery chariots of these creatures and help them slaughter us in the name of the very vain, loathsome, and petty Almighty.

Presently, there are no Department of Defense or Civil Defense measures in place to defend against such an attack, or at least none that I know of. Hell, people know for a fact that there are asteroids and meteors and we have no contingency plans for them. Why develop plans against aliens? After all, the SETI folks have everybody convinced that aliens are far advanced dope-smoking Utopians who will one day email us the cure for cancer.

Yeah, they might do that. And as my great aunt Meg is so fond of saying, "And if a frog had wings it wouldn't bump its ass on the ground when it hopped either."

I believe in statistics. The universe is a damn big place. Statistically there should be just as many aliens out there that want to eat us as there are who want to feed us. A lot of the Pasadena and Boston intellectual crowds would have you believe that intelligent aliens would have evolved beyond war. Then, I guess,
we
ain't intelligent.