Warp Speed (32 page)

"What are we going to do, Anson?" Anne Marie asked.

"We're about to pull a damned rabbit out of a hat sweetheart. Just hide and watch. Jim get that new ECC hooked up to the new modifiable field generator like five minutes ago. 'Becca you and Sara go get the almost completed mini ECC, divide it into two separate supplies, and get it connected to two of the completed MWMs. They may not go faster than light, but they should still pack a mean wallop and be controllable in space. Two missiles are better than none. Al you help them. Tabitha, I need a layout of this facility. I mean everything--power plant, plumbing, elevators, rats, you name it. As soon as you can get it, Annie get it to me in my office instantaneously." I didn't mean to take control and Tabitha never let on like I had, but I had things to do and I didn't have time to okay it all with the general. A good commander knows when to let her troops do what they need to do, and that is just what Tabitha did.

"Anson, I'm going to alert the President that we have an offensive weapon but most likely cannot stop the incoming weapons. Is this correct?" Tabitha wanted confirmation on what we were doing.

"That's the best we've got Tab. Sorry. I love you too," I told her. Then we each went about our separate tasks.

I went to my simulation system and I started mapping out warp fields containing large masses in the flat space of the warp bubble and stresses on the system due to slow impacts on the outer bubble. We could warp from point to point with these things but real-time steering was a bitch because you couldn't see out of the Van den Broeck bubble. Then I remembered my old
Star Trek: TNG
. Anytime the Borg would attack, you would modulate the
Enterprise
's protective shields. That's it! Modulate the damn Van Den Broeck bubble. It was so simple a child could have done it! I laughed when I thought that. Isn't that what McCoy told Kirk when he learned how to put Spock's brain back in?

Sara's lights-off lights-on method would work. I would set up a function generator to drive the outer bubble on and off every few microseconds. I would add a half wave phase shift to that switching signal and use it to drive the sample frequency of the high-speed video cameras we had in the lab. So, the video cameras and the outer bubble would be completely out of phase with one another. When the bubble was on the camera would be between video frames. When the bubble was off the camera would take a frame. Now the big question would be where to put the camera and how to connect it. Oh, connect it to what you ask? Hold your horses, I'm getting to that.

Annie and Calvin rushed in pushing a roll-around cart loaded with notebooks full of blueprints and facilities drawings.

"Great guys, thanks. Annie, find me a top-level drawing of the entire facility, preferably, one with some dimensions on there also. Calvin, find out where there are outside video cameras with the best view of the outside world. Then have somebody take these three cameras here and swap them out. Mount them however you can, but get me that video signal down here, ASAP. Also, get me a global positioning system mounted up there and route that data to me here. Figure out how. We have about twenty minutes."

Calvin rushed off with the three high-speed cameras. Annie began flipping frantically through the books. "Annie, I'll be right back. I've got to see Jim a sec." I told her. I ran two doors down the hall to the main lab where I was just in time to overhear Jim shouting.

"Owwch! Goddamnit all to hell!" He let a crescent wrench slip and fall on his fingers.

"Jim, you all right?" I asked, any other time I would've chuckled.

"Yeah."

"How's progress here?"

"I'm ready to fire it up and test it. You got the control algorithm ready?"

"Yep! I just finished it. And I know how to see to steer it. You know the problem we were going to have on the Moon making one swipe then recalculating the next trajectory or swipe? Well, to hell with that. We're going to modulate the field so we can see through it. Since we will be nonrelativistic we can see through the Alcubierre warp and by modulating the outer Van Den Broeck bubble we can see right where we're going."

"Nonrelativistic?" Jim sounded shocked. "Doc, what are you planning?"

"If you can't take the mountain to Muhammad my ass. By God, we'll rip the fucking thing right out of the Earth!"

CHAPTER 19

The next five or ten minutes were a flurry of, "Go hook that up over there. Try it now. NO! Wait a minute. Turn that on first, then connect this. Okay, I'm triggering the software. The coils are on. Do we get any readings from the detector?"

"Anson, I'm reading gravity modification as expected." Jim checked the detector twice. "It works. What now?"

"Shut it off for second. Let's get the general down here."

I ran back into my office. "Annie, check on the video system and the GPS. Have the signals sent down the hall instead. That big flat panel in there will be our window. And get me a shitload of walkie talkies will ya?"

"Jim!" I yelled down toward the lab. He stuck his head out of the door.

"What!?"

"This has now become the Engineering section of our spaceship. You're the chief engineer, got it?"

"Got it. Where will you be?" he asked.

"Somebody has to drive this thing. Do me a favor and see if your spousal unit needs help with that warp missile. We're going to need it soon."

I grabbed my computer setup and made it double time to the secure room with Tabitha. I told Tabitha to open the door and let any of our crew in. "We're going to need them on call. Also, we have to have communication with the lab, uh, Engineering."

"Anson, what are you talking about?"

I held up the overview drawing of the facility that Anne Marie had found in the pile of blueprints Calvin had supplied us. "This is what I'm talking about." I thumbtacked the drawing to the wall and drew a big red circle around the facility with a whiteboard marker. If my calculations were right, and if 'Becca's claims of the energy available from the new flubell ECC were correct, we had more than enough power to warp the entire facility out of the ground and use
it
as a spaceship and weapon. "Where are the enemy?"
Okay, I've recovered. It's time to unturtle and come out swinging and kicking!

Tabitha turned to the flat panel controls and punched in a world flat map. Six different trajectories traced out across the globe. "They got to high LEO before our missile defense systems could do anything. Now they're out of range. We're the last line of defense. The President has been scrambled to Air Force One and I'm sure Congress has been mobilized."

"Do we have any idea what their targets are? Where do they plan to hit?"

"Not exactly sure but the trajectories all track over plenty of U.S. critical targets."

A corner of the flat-panel screen sectioned off and the face of a blue-suit general appeared. "Tabitha we just got this image and we lost contact from Ramstein." The general on the other end seemed grim. A satellite image from space showed us a large dust plume where Germany used to be. The death toll must have been staggering. A second box separated on the flat panel and another satellite image popped up. "There was also an impact that looks centered on the Vandenberg Launch facility in California."

The second image showed a plume that covered all the way down to Los Angeles, California to the south and three quarters of the way up to San Jose to the north. Millions had to have been killed. I was getting to the point of being so emotionally devastated by the destruction and death, which I was mainly responsible for that I could barely function. Sheer will to see the American way of life survive and years of martial arts training pressed me to focus. I focused on what needed to get done now and I could feel remorse, and mourn, later. What other choice did I have?
Keep fighting, Anson!

Anne Marie burst into the room panting for air and wielding a walkie talkie. "Anson, here. Calvin said that the video hook-up is completed. He said just turn the flat panel to channels zero, one, and two. We also distributed the walkie talkies to everyone."

"Great," I took the radio from her. "Tabitha section us off part of the panel for those three channels." She did and three nice images of outside appeared on the screen. I touched the talk button. "Calvin are you out there?"

"Right here Doc! What you need?"

"Which direction is each of these cameras looking?"

"Okay let me see. Camera zero is looking due north, one is south, and two is a little west-northwest."

"Great, thanks Calvin. Where is my GPS?" I asked and wrote front, back, and left on three different sticky notes. Then I stuck the sticky notes on the three different images. I arbitrarily chose the north view as front.

"You're talking to him. I have a handheld GPS right here. Couldn't figure out how to get it to work down there."

"Okay, that'll have to do I guess. You hold on up there and whatever you do, don't panic. We're going for a little ride." I told him.

A third panel separated off showing an image of the eastern coast of Florida. Tabitha screamed, "They just hit Kennedy Space Center. They think we will need launch facilities."

I freaked out, "Tabitha your folks!?"

"Don't worry Anson, they were moved after the hospital fiasco. They are miles away from Titusville."

"I'm glad." I felt better. I liked her parents.

"Tabitha," the other general's face appeared back on screen.

"Yes Mike."

"Track Four will be right over you in about five minutes. Track Six will be over Washington D.C. on its next orbit, we're still guessing as to Track Five's target."

I looked at the world map and zoomed in on Track Four. In about five minutes it would be right over Roswell, New Mexico. "Well I'll be damned, that's where we've been hiding all this time." I pushed the talk button and flipped my laptop on at the same time. "Jim, you there?"

"Roger that, Anson."

"Okay, Jim. Start us up. We're about to go one thousand kilometers straight up." I opened the guidance program and started it. "Jim, are you picking up my computer signal okay in there?"

"Great, Anson. I'm getting about nine gigabits per second communication with you. More than enough." The wireless modem was working well through the walls of the facility.

"Okay, Jim, I'm starting the warp field. You tell me if there are any problems in there." I toggled the warp bubble on and the lights blinked on and off for a second.

"You must have cut the outside power line and the backup generators kicked in," Tabitha pointed out.

"Jim, did the power surge damage anything in there?"

"No, Anson. We are A-okay."

"Look at the view screen, Tabitha. We can still see out through the warp bubble. I'm going to create a hole in the bubble directly over Calvin that will oscillate at a much slower frequency. That way his GPS might still function. And our communication system might still function." The cameras worked great. But I had just thought about the sample frequency of the GPS system and our communications with the outside world. It probably worked at a much lower frequency than the high-speed cameras. The communications systems used both a satellite connection and an omnidirectional digital microwave transmitter. The satellite connection would be lost for now. But the omnidirectional signal would last as long as we could see a TDRSS satellite. The screen only flickered a few times but we maintained communications. Amazing!

"Calvin, you there?"

"Doc! It just got pitch black out here and the outside lights came on!"

"Don't panic, Calvin; that is a good thing. Listen, is your GPS still working?"

"Uh, yes. It looks fine."

"Great, just a minute." I turned to Annie, "Annie go help 'Becca get those missiles ready. Tell them that they have to carry them up to where Calvin is."

I punched the talk button again, "Calvin what are our GPS coordinates?" He responded with a set of numbers. I typed them into the program as zero point. Then I entered the command to increase the radial axis by one thousand kilometers. I pressed enter.

The images on the view panel were suddenly dark and then I could see star fields. Good thing the Sun would be to the east of us or we could have fried the cameras. I also started thinking about the amount of oxygen we had trapped in our warp bubble, but I quickly put that out of my mind--as big as our warp bubble was more than enough atmosphere would be trapped in it to keep us going for days or more.

"Tabitha, where is that oncoming traffic?"

Tabitha looked at the data a bit longer. "Anson, I think we're about a hundred kilometers too high and about eight hundred kilometers east of it."

I adjusted our location accordingly and pointed the left camera in that direction. Before long we could see a shiny spot in the view panel.

"There!" Tabitha pointed it out.

"Got it!" I put the software in joystick mode and guided the warp field with the tiny joystick on the laptop keyboard. I flew us to within a few thousand meters of the spacecraft. I called up to 'Becca, "Where are my missiles?"

"The first one is ready, Anson. I'm turning it on . . . now." Immediately following her reply an icon popped up on my desktop.

The RF link in the MWM was working! I grabbed the warp field oscillator program and dropped it into the MWM icon. This loaded the lights-off lights-on software into it. Then I opened the icon for the MWM, which looked identical to the control panel for the larger warp system of the facility spaceship. I clicked the pointer into the MWM control stick mode and activated it.

"Anson, the MWM just lifted a meter straight up and is hovering there. Nothing there but a faintly glimmering blue and red bubble," 'Becca called over the talkie.

"Great, that means it works." We hadn't had time to develop a nose camera for these things yet, so I was going to have to guide it from the facility cameras. Making sure the North camera had the enemy rocket in central view, I lifted the little warp missile straight up another twenty meters or so until it was in the north camera's field of view and then I toggled the main facility warp field.