Freedom Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series Book 3) (19 page)

Jack shrugged. He was just following the advice given him by his grandpa Ephraim of old Tennessee. A man who always cautioned him to pay attention first to what people did, not what they said. And to always look for the sideways move that did not involve a linear approach to solving a people problem. The man’s advice seemed to work as well for Aliens as it did for humans. He looked around the crowd of eating, drinking, chatting and relaxed people.

“Well, did we get a pile of yellow diamonds for our Tech trades?” he tossed out. “The immortality drink? A universal med healer? The solution to the reproduction of politicians?”

“Neuter them,” Maureen grunted before grabbing a bottle of wine from Gareth.

Everyone laughed, smiled or paid attention to their plate. All except two people. Max and Archibald. They both had a neutral look on their faces that told Jack something was afoot.

“All right, you two, out with it!” he said, eyeing them where they sat near each other.

Max looked down at his plate, saw it was empty, then grabbed for a bowl of purple lettuce. Blodwen winked at Jack, her long blond curls making a golden halo for her rad-tanned face. He focused on the Brit engineer.

“I surrender!” said the man with a shock of unruly reddish-brown hair, holding his hands up palms out in the ancient sign of surrender. Then he grinned like a cherub, his brown eyes twinkling. “Spent most of the last week talking with the Melagun Yellow Coats. Scientists like our Nikola there. Turns out one of them, name of Atarksis, is a Dark Matter researcher. Well, seems these Melagun have figured out the nature of Dark Matter, and even how to create it.”

“Wow!” yelled Nikola.

Jack nodded, feeling puzzled. “That’s nice. Why is that valuable to us?”

Archibald looked surprised, then turned professor patient. “In a phrase, Thorne Exotic Matter. The key to the gravity pull drive. I think I now know how to make Thorne stuff, confine it and use it to create our own grav-pull drives!”

Jack dropped his fork. “What? How the hell did you, I mean, what the heck? That’s great news. But, uh, how the hell does this Dark Matter stuff relate to Thorne Exotic Matter? And to making our own grav-pulls?”

“Yes!” Nikola said eagerly. “But I thought the superstring theory analysis of Dark Matter had failed to identify the subatomic nature of it. Other than its co-presence with normal baryonic matter.”

Archibald nodded to Nikola, then gave Jack a shy grin. “Well, she’s right. But these Melagun Yellow Coats have been studying the Cosmic Microwave Background event, their version of the Standard Model of the four major forces that run the universe. And running some hopped-up particle accelerators of their own. Comes from wanting to understand how gravity is causing stuff from the Outer Rock Fields to head in toward their world. They had their Newton two hundred Home years ago. Then their version of Einstein a hundred World years ago. Five years ago they were able to create WIMP particles in their accelerator on the equatorial continent. Their WIMPs matched the signature of Dark Matter to a 99 percent level.”

“WIMPs?” Jack said, racking his brain for his Tech studies of physics. “Like everyone I learned about normal matter, Dark Matter and Dark Energy. What the hell are WIMPs?”

Nikola chuckled, then grabbed a Melagun fruit that resembled an apple. Albeit one with green skin.

Jack peered at that physics geek. “Well?”

Archibald looked around the picnic crowd, saw he had an attentive audience, smiled like the sunrise and held up a hand, one finger lifted. “First things first. The universe is made up of normal matter and energy that we call baryonic matter. It accounts for 4.9 percent of all matter and energy that we can see. Dark Energy makes up 68.3 percent of all energy in the universe. And Dark Matter amounts to 26.8 percent of the matter that shares the universe with us. Understood?”

Jack nodded. “Yeah. Everyone studied that stuff in Remote Tutor classes. Or live Mentor classes. In the Belt at least,” he said, looking around the crowd of folks who included a few people not raised in the Asteroid Belt. “So?”

Archibald beamed. “So, it has been theorized for a hundred years that Weakly Interacting Massive Particles make up Dark Matter. Which we call WIMPs. It is the stuff that allows our galactic arms to stay together as they rotate around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way,” he said patiently.

“Right,” said Nikola, her tone excited. “The calculations of galactic rotation curves pointed out the ‘missing matter’ problem. Which led to the discovery of Dark Matter by way of gravitational lensing of light passing by a large galaxy on its way to Earth. But you say the Melagun have created WIMPs?”

“Yes!” cried Archibald, sounding happier than Jack had heard him ever be, in space or on Mathilde. “Anyway, their artificial production of WIMPs equals the theorized nature of WIMPs as predicted by the Lambda-CDM model of cosmology. They exert the same gravitational and weak nuclear force predicted by that model. And their interaction is similar to the W and Z bosons that control the weak nuclear force. Which is how radioactive decay happens. Clear?”

No way was it clear to Jack. “You and Nikola know this stuff. I don’t. But if this Atarksis has shown you how to create Dark Matter, and confine it into a Thorne Exotic Matter globe, then how soon can we do it? In the fleet? Or do we need some giant accelerator thing?”

Archibald, still glowing with his news, shrugged. “We need an accelerator bigger than the old CERN accelerator outside of Geneva. Which we have on Vesta. It belongs to the New Physics Research Institute. I know its boss. She’s an old friend.” He blushed and Jack wondered if the man who’d been born in Cornwall, Great Britain, had a secret romance unknown to any of them. “Anyway, she will be glad to modify her accelerator to produce WIMP Dark Matter. Once we get back home.”

“Archibald,” called Ignacio from Jack’s left where he sat beside Elaine. “You and Matthias did wonders with converting the neutral particle accelerators into Higgs Disruptors. Can’t you do the same for this, this Dark Matter stuff?”

Their middle-aged professor looked over at his Basque brother, who clearly understood stuff Jack and the other folks at the picnic did not, then shook his head. “Thanks for the compliment, Captain Ignacio. But no. The energies required to produce WIMPs are on the peta-electron volt level. The particle accelerators on our ships reach only giga-electron volt strengths. Strong enough for conversion to Higgs Disruptor projectors. Or to create antineutron antimatter. Not strong enough to create Dark Matter.”

Well, that fixed that. Still, it was the best Tech news Jack had heard since they had begun their interstellar roaming. “Archibald, super congratulations! Feel free to use our neutrino comlink to send the WIMP accelerator specs back to Mathilde. And to your friend on Vesta, uh, what’s her name?”

“Dr. Agnes Cumberland,” the man said, turning red again. “We were graduate students at the
Ecole Polytechnique
in Paris. Got to know each other.”

Jack nodded, feeling pleased with the man’s news. The secret to making their own grav-pull drives would allow them to ignore the encrypted data in the academy factory computer and focus on building the globular container and tubular control circuits that made up the Tech pyramid that was a grav-pull drive module. “Great news, Archibald. Anyone else with news on our Trades?”

Akemi Hagiwara looked up from her bowl of
wonton
soup. She gave him a brief smile. “My contacts with two Melagun Purple Coat merchants taught me a lesson about wrong assumptions.”

Jack noticed how everyone had stopped eating and was paying close attention to their
samurai
clan daughter. “Yes? Everyone messes up on assumptions, now and then.”

Akemi scanned the same people Jack had looked over. Her Asian manner was usually non-emotional, like Hideyoshi. But he could tell she was pleased to be the center of attention. The petite woman held up a slim-fingered hand. “My
shogun
, I had assumed these Melagun would be as interested in trading for interactive combat videos as the Nasen were. Wrong. But they did love my personal collection of sports vid-disks. Particularly the images of people playing volleyball, doing the high jump, pole vaulting and track and field. Any sport that involved jumping, or diving from a height, drove them mad to possess it. Seems they have recovered plenty of raw diamonds from their Home volcanoes, and from inner planet three. It’s hot as Mercury, but with an atmosphere. And it’s of a size to have an iron core rotating within liquid rock. Its volcanoes erupt like clockwork. Producing lava fields. The Melagun have sent down robot excavators to mine old lava fields for diamonds. For industrial uses. They were amused when I told them how our females liked diamonds for dress-up.”

Jack wondered if the captain who had grown up on the asteroid 52 Europa would be willing to sell him a diamond. He wanted to surprise Nikola with a Commitment Ring to celebrate their lifemate promise. “Oh? Did you get many for your sports vid-disks?”

The slim woman who looked years younger than her 40 chrono years fixed glistening black eyes on Jack. She tilted her head like a sparrow. “Oh, about three hundred, give or take a few. You interested in buying one?”

Jack was intensely aware of the presence of his Spy sister and lifemate Nikola on either side of him. No doubt both women had read into his question his intent to get some diamonds. And since he wore only an emerald Tech Master’s ring, they knew his question was not for his personal use.

“Uh, maybe three,” Jack said, hoping Cassie, Elaine and Nikola would not invade his private Tech study on the
Uhuru
.

Akemi nodded slowly. “Can be done. Contact me before we leave this system for my barter prices. They are reasonable.”

Jack hoped so. He swallowed, mouth suddenly dry.

“Here. You earned it,” Nikola said, holding up the bottle of red wine that he had drunk from earlier.

“Thanks. I needed that.”

This time everyone laughed.

Looking around, he gave thanks for the people gathered to eat with him. Each person here had fought with him in space, or on Sedna, or both. They had risked their lives in his crusade to overthrow a millennia-old system of Alien domination. They would risk them again in the upcoming trips to other juvenile systems, then later in their raids on subject people systems. And while they had twice as many ships for this star roaming trek, numbers did not guarantee safety. Mentally he crossed his fingers and prayed to the Odd Gods of the universe that this second trip into the Great Dark would not add new names to the memorial stele on Mathilde.

He would use every bit of sneakiness, duplicity, cunning and deadliness he had learned at the knee of his grandpa in order to keep safe these people. And to allow the budding romances of his crewmates and allies to grow into lifemate unity. His mother had said he was not a natural romantic. Perhaps so. He tended to be logical, factual and functional in his view of people, the worlds and life. But he could study how to be romantic. He smiled. Nikola, Ignacio, Max and the others were teaching him how much more complicated, and how much more rewarding, real life was.

It was a lesson Jack had never expected. But it was a lesson that gave him the strength to cope with the doubts he had about his ability to lead hundreds of people into velvet blackness of the Great Dark.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Forty AU north of the ecliptic plane of Tau Ceti, the
Uhuru
and the other fleet ships moved under grav-pull drive. The front screen’s image of stars and galaxies was blurred, reflecting the gravitational lensing caused by a drive that pulled his ship toward an external point regardless of the ship’s inertial vector. As usual, Jack felt nothing physical. Max had told their Drive computer where they wished to be, shared it by way of laser time-lock, and they all straight-line translated to the X-Y-Z coordinates of that locality.

The blurring stopped.

“We’re there,” Elaine called out, her tone sharp. “Max, cut the grav-pull drive.”

“Done,” Max said, his tone casual. “Can I catch a nap while you and Nikola play your spatial coordinates game?”

Jack grinned, wiped the grin off when he noticed Maureen watching him from her Combat seat to his right, then focused on his job. Which was setting them on track to Gliese 832.

The front screen filled with rainbow colored stars that shone with no twinkle against the depths of forever. He looked down at the Tech panel that he had pulled over his lap. It showed the status of every ship system, from fusion drive to grav-pull drive to the Alcubierre space-time manifold generator. The air mix, the oxy output of the Garden module of the ship, the emptiness of the ship’s Food Refectory, Med Station, Rest Area, EVA and Lander hold, Mech Shop and the Battle Module, they all registered on his panel. The two Compact Fusion Reactors that ran the ship’s weapons nodules and the fusion pulse drive showed maximum output. Other images showed the external impact of gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet, infrared, far infrared, neutrinos and gravitons. Mentally he gave thanks for the Autonomous AI computer that monitored every ship system to ensure it was operating within defined parameters. Finally, the panel’s infrared image of the Pilot Cabin showed everyone seated as they should be. Him, Maureen and Elaine up front, followed by Nikola, Denise and Max in the middle row, with Cassie, Archibald and Blodwen seated in the rear row of function seats. He looked up at the front screen. The laser link images of one admiral and 21 captains watched him and his crew. They all lived, breathed and perhaps felt impatient to start their next interstellar jump. Time to act.