“I’m Miriam,” the lady said, holding out her hand. “I’m the linguist.”
“I’m pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Mimi said, shaking her hand.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Miriam said. “Everybody else is so stuffy. It’s good to have a friend. We’re going to have so much fun!”
Mimi, for the first time since Tuffy told her she had to leave her home, started to hope that might be the case.
“What in the hell is that?” Miller asked, blinking his eyes in astonishment.
The engine room of the boat was almost blindingly white. And it had all the usual sort of stations he’d expect to see in a nuclear reactor. But… floating in the middle of the room was a big silver ball with what looked like very close longitude and latitude lines drawn all around it. Above and below it were large circular… somethings. They looked sort of like big magnets.
“That, my friend, is the coryllium sphere,” Bill said, grinning. “In the center of that sphere is the little black box we played with oh so many years ago. See that?” he asked, pointing to something that looked like a broad, squat cannon with no opening.
“And that is?”
“That is a meson canon,” Bill replied. “Turns out that was the answer. Send that thing electrons and it goes ape-maulk. Fire mesons at it and they degrade into neutrinos. Feed it with neutrinos and it generates a black hole. A stable one. And it is inside the box. Generate a large enough one and it somehow… warps reality. Creates a special universe that the boat exists in where normal Einstein physics no longer apply. More neutrinos, bigger hole, we go faster. Well, really Einstein’s General Relativity does allow for some of the things but that’s a long story and a maulk load of tensor math.
“The reason for the big sphere is two-fold. The outer layer is coryllium; it’s a room temperature Adar superconductor. So we can balance the sphere on a magnetic field and hold it there using the Meisner effect. The rest of the sphere is radiation absorption material. The Schwarzschild radius of the black hole puts out a maulk-load of hard rads. The sphere absorbs them. I figure it’s good for about four hundred thousand hours of use, then we’ll have to switch it out. Pretty much like the rods on a sub’s reactor.
“Also turns out that the effect you get depends exactly where you aim the neutrinos. That’s one reason for having the sphere floating. We can control the impact point of the neutrinos to within a nanometer and with that thing nanometers matter. The lines represent spherical coordinates theta and phi that are basically the same as lat-long, but we drew the lines on there very precisely. It helps align the ball initially. Like I said alignment is… important. There’s one point where input causes… bad things to happen.”
“Define bad things,” Miller said.
“That you don’t have access to,” Weaver replied. “I was careful to check. But I will point out that it’s one reason there are still five keys on this boat even though we’re no longer considered a ballistic missile sub.” Weaver fished into his uniform top and pulled out a red key attached to a lanyard. “You do not want me to pull this out for real.”
“Oh,” Miller said, nodding. “Very bad things.”
“Very bad things,” Weaver agreed, putting the key away. “There are probably damned near a billion combinations on the thing. We’ve only figured out about two or three. Basically, we can use it to get around but we don’t know what all it is capable of.
“The big problem with the box is you have to dial the mesons down slowly or the hole explodes. So we can go into warp fast. Coming out takes five to thirty seconds, more or less. Try to just turn it off and we go boom. Also won’t form one when we’re too near a gravity well. Not sure why. But no matter how many mesons we pump into it, it won’t form until we’re about two planetary diameters away. What it does, instead, is create a normal space drive with all the fixin’s. It generates pseudogravity, reactionless acceleration and, best of all, an inertial compensator so that we don’t get smashed into paste by the accel. Internal gravity is about ninety percent of Earth’s, so whoever created this thing likes more or less Earth gravity.
“The warp also won’t form inside Venus’ orbit, more or less; the sun’s gravity is too powerful in that region. The kicker is, if we get too close to a gravity well, it can just shut down. Fortunately for some reason the black hole doesn’t explode in that case. I’m pretty sure that’s something having to do with the engineering of the device but since I haven’t a clue about the theory on the thing, that’s just a wild ass guess.”
“Where are the mesons coming from?” Miller asked.
“Charged Higgs in the cannon,” the astrogator said. “An upgraded version of the aimer doo-hickey we started opening gates with. There’s a small Adar ardune reactor in the back of the room. That supplies plenty of power. More power than the system can handle.”
“So, you’ve got quarkium warheads on the missiles,” Miller said wonderingly.
“And the torpedoes,” Bill pointed out.
“I so don’t want to know about the torpedoes,” Miller said. “You’ve got contained quarkium in this room and a micro blackhole generator. One that, if you hit it with either electricity or neutrinos in the wrong spot, very bad things happen. And the whole ship is one big… blage. With a grapping window. Why do the words ‘warp core breach’ come to mind?”
“Because if any of the fine technicians in this room grapp up,” Bill replied, “we are going to light up like a supernova. This sucker shouldn’t ever come near a planet, much less be sitting in Newport News. But I try to downplay that…”
6
“First call!” Jaenisch said, sticking his head through the door of Bergstresser’s room. “Time to rise and shine!”
“Oh, grapp,” Berg moaned, rolling over and getting to his feet. “I’ll be right…” He stopped and ran to the head, a room he had occupied for, on average, ten minutes an hour all night.
“What time did you take the pink maulk?” Jaen asked, ignoring the sounds of dry retching.
“About midnight,” Berg answered, sipping some water and rinsing out his mouth.
“Shiny. You’re over the worst of it,” Jaen said. “By noon you’ll be back to your usual chipper Two-Gun self.”
“Grapp you, Jaen,” Berg said, too miserable to realize he’d just cussed an NCO.
“Uniform and accoutrements in thirty minutes in the bay,” Jaen said, ignoring the insult. “Don’t eat breakfast, but you’ll be fine by lunch.”
Load-out was a pain in the butt, especially in the morning.
“What I don’t get is why we’re even taking battle rattle if we’re going to be using Wyverns,” Hattelstad said. The best way to move the battle rattle, boron carbide body armor, combat harnesses and rucksacks loaded with minimal gear, was by carrying it in place. So they’d all loaded up, then toted it to a secure loading dock at the rear of the barracks. That involved climbing down four flights of stairs, and while that normally wouldn’t have even fazed Berg, at the moment it nearly killed him.
“Nobody knows if we’re going to have to go ground-mount,” Jaenisch replied. “For that matter, we might end up fighting in the ship. We can’t use Wyverns for that.”