“This is Lee. What do you want?” His employer’s voice out of the earpiece sounded tense, angry.
Nathan grinned. “Temper, temper, boss. If you trash your office again, Melinda’s going to quit on you.”
“I haven’t tossed the place yet, but if you hadn’t called, I was probably going to.”
“Something wrong?”
“Yeah. Well, no, nothing you should have to worry about. Overseas procurement issues, but nothing connected to your end of things. Forget it. Hey, was there a reason for this call?”
Nathan reached his car, opened the door to the BMW hybrid turbine coupe, and climbed in. “I’m all done at Allied. The Allocarbium fits the bill for our structural material. The only bad news is construction is going to take longer than planned. The stuff has to be welded or joined in a special way. It should all be in their spec flash.”
Settling himself behind the wheel, Nathan extended the seven inch flat screen rolled within his cellular smart-suite and scrolled through his e-mail app’s received files. The flash download from Korso was the most recent. He opened it and the screen filled with complex metallurgical jargon and equations. Halfway through, there were some attached animations showing the forming process, testing, and joining. “Yeah, it’s all in there, though it’s a bit over my head. I’ll have to get Dr. Hastings to look it over before I can give you a final thumbs-up”
“Don’t sell yourself short, boy. You surprise me on a regular basis with your insights.”
“Boy? Anyways, it should be in your stack. If Mister Master-of-All-You-Survey can find the time, perhaps you can take a look at it too.”
“Don’t get snippy with me. I’ve had more than enough provocation today to fire somebody, and I don’t want it to be you by accident.”
Nathan grinned. “Oh no, when you fire me, I want it to be on purpose. You should plan your day around it. Finally, to be free of that Nathan Kelley!”
“Smartass. What about Jackson Labs?”
“Nothing new. They haven’t beaten the differential heating problem with the diode laser stack. They still crack at any output approaching 10 megawatts. We can probably get around it by using a series of 5 megawatt stacks and then using optics to combine them, but that adds space, weight, complexity, and more stuff for Murphy to screw with. It’s workable, though, if they can’t fix the problem.”
“Fine, fine. Keep on them, but I agree we can live with a workaround. Now what about the layered armor for the Whipple shields?”
“I’ll be calling Corning’s Albuquerque offices tomorrow morning to conference with the armoring team. They’re still having problems making unitary plates more than a square meter in size, but they said they were narrowing down the problem. I’ll put some money pressure on them, see if some negative reinforcement gets the brain juices flowing better.”
Lee sighed over the connection. “No. A phone call’s no good. I want you out there in person. You’re my bulldog, and your bark isn’t nearly as intimidating as your bite.”
“Ummmmm, thanks?”
“It is a compliment, Nathan. You have a presence with these science types that can’t be denied. Maybe it’s your time in the military, that automatic assumption that the people you’re dealing with have to follow your orders.”
Nathan smiled wryly at Lee’s naiveté about order and discipline on paper versus reality. “You obviously haven’t met many sailors. Sometimes I had to do quite a bit of convincing to get my subordinates to do what they already knew they needed to do. Depended on the sailor—just like it depends on each individual scientist, engineer, or manager.”
“Well, whatever it is you do, you do it well. So, you’ll be in Albuquerque tomorrow?”
Nathan grimaced. He had a date with a bank assistant manager the next night, back home in California. That no longer looked likely—yet another sacrifice on the altar of Gordon Elliot Lee’s insane engineering project. “Yes, Gordon, I’ll be there.”
“Excellent!” Lee paused for several seconds, during which Nathan tried to compose what he would tell this latest girl. Lee interrupted his train of thought, though, and continued. “We still have time. Not as much as I’d like, but . . . . We have designs and facilities, and now we have building materials, armor, and we’re starting to get some no-shit Star Wars weaponry. We almost have ourselves a space navy, Nathan. Maybe we should start thinking about crew selection? There’s this Army light colonel by the name of Wright that’s about to retire. He’d make a great counterpart for you.” He could almost hear the grin in Lee’s voice.
Nathan shook his head, unseen. “Sure, Gordon, there are a couple of old shipmates I’d like to bring aboard too, but I think you need to rein yourself in a bit. At the moment, all we have is a really expensive ground-based weapons emplacement. Until we have some way of powering the damn thing and then getting it off the ground, it’s not a spaceship, so thinking of a crew is probably somewhat premature.”
He called up a new file on his suite and the screen filled with a CAD drawing of the project’s first design. A somewhat pyramidal wedge—bristling with weapons and sensors—surmounted a long open strut, filled in with radiator panels. Just aft of that, things became vague, with two big circles and question marks identifying a reactor section (Fission? Fusion?), and a propulsion section (Magic Space Drive goes here!).
It was almost a real spaceship, mankind’s first space-based combat vessel and their bid to save the planet from the approaching alien threat. But it would not be going anywhere until they broke the design deadlock surrounding their power source and propulsion method.
When Lee spoke again, he sounded very circumspect. “Well, I may have a line on some reactor components.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really!” Lee responded, defensive. “But you don’t need to worry about it. This is my contribution. You just worry about getting everything else together, including our drive section.”
Nathan wondered why he was being so evasive about their power source, but it did not really matter. He knew the Department of Energy had turned down their request for an experimenter’s license to acquire fissile materials, but Lee had a lot of initiatives going on at once, many about which Nathan had no knowledge. Perhaps one of them had panned out, such as a reversal by the DOE or a partnership with an established research outfit. Still, progress on one front did nothing for the complete failure on the drive front.
“You make it sound so easy, Gordon. Our problem is that every dollar you’ve sunk into advanced rockets and reactionless drives has bought us exactly nothing. This is our number one showstopper. If we don’t have something to match their super-rocket, we’ll have to make our stand within the inner solar system, and that’s a bit too close to home for me.”
“Me too, but don’t worry. Something will turn up. After all, the aliens do it, so we know there’s an engine out there that can do what we’re asking. We just have to figure out how they do it.”
“Once again, boss, you make it sound like that’s so simple.”
“There’s a way, I promise you. Faith and courage, boy, faith and courage. It’ll come to us.”
Nathan wrapped up the call and docked his suite on the dash of the Beemer. Ozone blues, Nathan’s current music of choice, surrounded him from the car’s ribbon speakers. He started the hybrid turbine up, its engine betraying only a high pitched whistling whine. Four hub-mounted electric motors propelled the metallic blue sports coupe smoothly and silently out of his space and onto the road.