Archaea (23 page)

There was a stunned silence from both Gene and I, as we processed this. While we do use generated pseudomass to offset high-gee course changes, to reduce mass-loading and improve course changes, she was talking about a much stronger application of pseudomass.

She was talking about making a deep hole in space, and dropping us down into it.

“Janis, are you referring to slipspacing?” Gene said, incredulously. “I can't see how that would be possible...” he trailed off, as he came to the same realization I just did.

“Janis, I am afraid that while I am without a doubt the best pilot in the known galaxy, I don't have the reaction time to follow a course like that.”

Of course, as I was saying these words, the part of my mind that likes to hand someone my beer and say 'check this out' was trying to tell me it'd be a piece of cake. Luckily, for the sake of my crew and my ship, I have learned over the years to only listen to that part of my mind when pretty girls are around.

“Sir, I could quite effectively pilot this course for us.” she said. “I am already controlling flight systems as per your input, adding appropriate translation for improved responsiveness and control. This would be a trivial process, given my current response time curve.”

I'll be damned. So that's why the Archaea handles so well.

“Janis, if you are confident in your ability to navigate the rest of this system at these speeds...I am confident in you, dear. It sounds like a winning plan to me.”

“Captain... I...” Gene began, looking for some way to say I was wrong, and probably thinking about his toothbrush and some of the nastier places I might find that need cleaning aboard the Archaea.

“Spit it out Gene, we don't have all day.”

“Well...I guess I better get back to it, then.” he said, like a true champion.

*****

“Pauli, I am going to go get some chow, do you need anything?” I offered.

Our patient was resting easy, and seemed stable. He was still unconscious, but that was probably for the best. Pauli had his handset out and was writing code on a projected holoscreen, or at least it looked like code.

“No thanks Yak, I'm good.” he said, after looking up at me for a moment, as if he wasn't quite aware of what language I was speaking.

“Are you feeling okay Pauli?” I asked. He seemed really distant.

“Oh, sure – I was just coding. It takes me a moment to mentally switch gears, that's all. When you get into the swing of it, the real world just sort of drops away from you, and you dive in to the complexity of the logicspace.” he smiled. “Our patient looks like he's resting better, and it sure feels good to be spun up to point-seven gee, that's for sure.”

“That's the truth, I couldn't agree more. I'm not a spacer by habit, but by profession. I always feel better when there's a floor.”

“I am the same way...though I guess we better both work hard getting used to it on this ship. Captain Smith doesn't seem to ever slow down, does he?”

I laughed, thinking about the past few days since I first met these folks. To call my time aboard the Archaea action-packed would be an extreme understatement.

“Oorah, Pauli. I guess we have to take what we can, when we can. Give me a shout if you need me, I'll be back in a few.”

I headed up into the gun deck and over to the galley ring.  Jane was latched on to a grabber reading her handset and eating a sandwich.

“Hey Jane, how goes?” I ask, though I know how we're both doing. It's been a long day for us.

“Hey Yak – it goes. Want a sandwich? My other half is in the crisper. I'm not really hungry, but I am forcing myself to choke something down before I pass out.”

“Thanks Jane, I'll take you up on that.” I popped open the crisper, and started working on that sandwich like it was served on a gold platter. “Do you know when we're going to get underway, Jane?” I say, though a mouthful of peanut butter and jelly, the preferred sandwich of the bloodthirsty killer – Jane had good taste.

“No, though I expected we'd be away by now...Captain Smith just called back and told me to stand down for a bit. Apparently Gene is back aboard the destroyer.”

“He is? Is that wise... I mean... the captain knows best, of course... but we missed those rats in the bilge...” I trailed off, trying desperately not to relive those moments, and failing, utterly.

“Yeah, but they had to be the only ones, Yak. I take the blame for that one, I called the bilge clear.” she said, softly.

I looked at her for a moment, remembering the smoke, the darkness. We had pushed down into that hallway, the compartments full of mechanicals, dark units, pipes, ducting. She was on point, kicking doors while I pulled rear-guard.

“Jane, I thought we cleared it completely...” I trailed off at the dark look that flashed across her face.

“Yak, we did. I opened every hatch we could get to open... with so much of that destroyer slagged and warped, how were we supposed to know that hatch was even operational, that it was locked from the inside? I called it clear, Yak, it was my fault. I am so sorry.” The look on her face tore me apart.

“Jane, that was a really hard job for two of us to do. I don't blame you. Hell, I would have made the same decision. That's what is bothering me, I guess.”

I munched the rest of my sandwich, and shared a look at her identical to thousands, millions of looks passed between soldiers on battlefields since time immemorial. We lived, that's not just an important thing, it is the most important thing.

“Yeah... I know. It's just hard Yak. I keep playing it around in my head, working at it from one direction and the next. There was almost too much for us to process. I hardly knew what deck we were on half the time.”

“I know how you feel, Jane. Trust me, I am right beside you on that. It doesn't get any easier, but it will get better.”

She laughed a bit, a weak laugh, but it was something.

“Hey folks, whaddya know?” the captain said, kicking in behind what had to be the latest in an endless series of empty coffee cups in search of a refill.

“I know that PB&J is comfort food”, I say.

“Damn skippy, son. You got that right.” He laughed, and started the process of making coffee.

His movements were methodical, almost surgical in their precision with no wasted motion. The mission was making coffee, and he was seeing that done at flank speed, and done correct.

“Captain, how many cups of coffee do you drink every day?” I ask, smiling.

He considered that for a moment, and answered with a straight face, “All of them, Yak.”

We all laughed, the tension of the moment completely overshadowed by the infectious character, the sheer animal magnetism of this man, our captain. He had that rare quality that made you want to leap to your feet and do anything he might want, the moment he wanted it. You didn't really have a choice in the matter – the man was that good at what he did.

“You did a really bang-up job over there today, and I am not just saying that because either of you could kill me sixteen different ways with this spoon.” he waggled it at us, for emphasis.

“You've really out-performed every expectation I had – you worked your butts clean off today.”

Jane and I basked in the glow of his compliment, drinking it in like it was all we needed to survive.

“Thanks sir,” Jane said, “it was just another day in the office for us, right Yak?” she added with a smile.

“Oh sure Jane...” my eyes rolled hard enough to spin up this ring section.

The captain laughed, “Well, it's good to see you standing tall. I am going to need both of you back on station soon, before we blow up that hulk.”

“Sorry Captain...It's been a long day, but I could have sworn I just heard you say that you were... blowing it up, sir?” Jane said, sharing my look of disbelief.

“That's right, Shorty. I am aiming to blow that sucker to component atoms, just as soon as we get clear.”

“Sir, she has no bridge deck... How are you going to scuttle her?”

“Well Jane, Gene is over there right now, hooking up a whatsit to a thingamajig, and he's going to overload the frammitz until it goes bang, or something.”

“Sir – please...”

“The plan, such as it is – insofar as I understand it,” he paused to pour some coffee down the hatch, “is to ramp up their tokamak to some crazy amount, phase 5 or better, then crash the cooling while at the same time shunting power back to the accelerators. Gene thinks that it should blow containment and then burn right on through the cladding and ignite her scuttle charges the hard way...the way I understand it, it's going to make a pretty big bang.”

“Damn, sir.” Jane said, a look of rapt adoration on her face, as if he was talking about making her his wife.

“Indeed. We're not really clear on the minimum time-to-safe-distance aspect of the whole equation, but Janis says it's no
problem; she'll just blast us out of here at flank speed and then some, tossing some pseudomass around to pull us down a folded hole in spacetime. Hopefully not into a moon, but hey, at least we wouldn't suffer, right?”

“What's the projected yield, sir?” Jane said in a voice as breathless as empty space.

“Big. Gene thinks he's going to pop off at least two, maybe all three of the charges, and estimates around 40 megatons” He whipped out his 'look-ma-no-hands' eyebrows. 

“Four-zero?”

“Yes ma'am. Should be pretty awesome stuff. Anyway... Gene's going to be back here any moment so if there's nothing else...”

Our stunned silence was all that remained behind, as he kicked off for the bridge.

*****

I finished clamping down the last coolant bypass and took a moment to admire my handiwork. I've done some pretty amazing things in my career, but this was going to be right up there with some of my finest work. It's too bad I was fixing this just so it could break, that pretty much ran counter to the general way I like to do things, but I could take consolation that at least I was fixing it up to fail in a truly spectacular manner.

I had measured off my best guess to the center of the three scuttle charges, though I really didn't have any idea where they were except a vague notion they were embedded in the hard wall bulkhead abaft engineering. These are zero-maintenance charges, and highly classified to darn near everyone aboard a ship like this, except the captain and officers commanding. Someone like Shorty might have specs on them, but she wouldn't necessarily be on enough of a need-to-know basis to know where they were, precisely.

I consider myself a pretty decent engineer, however, and I can trace leads with the best of them. There were three heavily shielded conduits forking from a single shielded conduit heading forward, and as far as I was able to check, none of them had distribution forks. Each of the three conduits terminated directly into the hard-wall bulkhead, so my assumption was the charges were roughly centered behind the point where they entered.

Of course, even though I knew Saint Assumption was the patron saint of failure, the more I thought about it, the less it seemed like I needed to think about it. If I could get the tokamak reaction to the seventh stage, when containment breached, if it breached at the correct location, it was going to burn everything from here to there with nuclear fire hotter than the core of a star. I guess when I thought about it like that, accuracy just didn't seem to matter all that much...if I could get it to blow in the right direction, of course.

Janis' simulation backed up what I had thought all along, that the only way to get the reaction to the seventh stage would be to maintain some cooling through the process. If I just turned off cooling completely, and fired up the tokamak, it would blow containment before I could walk out of the room, and we definitely needed more time than that.

My solution to this problem was to drill some very small, very precisely placed holes in the harness, along with some creative bypass gates in the harness that restricted the flow throughout the section I wanted to fail. The liquid helium, incredibly slippery superfluid as it was, would leak through the holes and sublimate almost immediately once it was through the insulation layer of the harness.

This slow leak should serve to lower pressure throughout the entire harness, and the flow restriction caused by my bypass gates on the aft section of the harness should reduce the cooling efficiency of this entire section. With the pressure, flow rate and temperature sensors
hacked; this is a recipe for disaster.

Of course, it didn't hurt that I had replaced the in-line pumps we harvested for the Archaea with the bypass gates, so recirculation through these sections should be much lower as a result.

The idea here was to make a functioning tokamak, one that will hold up way beyond its rated capability, but one that is doomed to fail. All throughout the work, I felt like I had to constantly remind myself that yes, I was making a Swiss watch here, but it was not meant to keep time for very long.

Starting this thing was another matter entirely. I think it will run, for a while anyway, but I was not at all positive I could light it off. I had scrounged charged fuel cells from other mechanical systems and had them wired all over the place, though once the tokamak was lit, it would power everything just fine, I needed a jump start.