Branegate (31 page)

The shuttle de-coupled, and pulled away. There was a low whine as the first trickle of exotic matter flowed into the plenum vacuum. A trickle of normal matter, and they were moving, slowly at first, then going to a higher orbit with a burst of energy, then again. At a distance of two Elderon radii, they left orbit and soared into space on a tangent, heading outwards from their sun. Minutes later the vernier engines had all been cycled, and the main thruster had gone to four gee. Anton and Myra listened to the pilots. Nominal, nominal. Normal flight was a dream in this ship. All at low power.

The power went up at six radii from Elderon. There was a five-minute charge of the plenum, and the superconducting current was brought up in steps of a hundred thousand amps. At five million amps the exotic matter in the plenum followed normal matter compressed to near nuclear densities. One pulse of crossed electric and magnetic fields, and exotic matter was injected back into the false vacuum of space, the burst of mass-energy distorting space-time for an instant, and pinching it. Stars flickered in and out, and for a person there was an instant of fugue, a lapse of awareness.

Trae blinked, but Myra kept her eyes closed for a moment.

“Nominal,” said the pilot calmly. “I read six-tenths of a light-year.” They were on a pre-calibrated course, and the length of their jump was measured from the change in observed magnitude of nearby stars.

“Very smooth,” said Trae. “Let’s skip the test at one, and go to two light-years.”

Again, as before. There was no change in sensation, and the coil temperature went up two degrees. They were already up to the maximum jump lengths for large ships, and just getting started.

“I think I’ll enjoy flying this one,” said the pilot, who knew Trae as Anton. “Good job, sir.”

Myra made a little harrumph at being left out, but smiled at him. “Thanks, but now we get serious,” said Trae. “Take it up to five, please.”

The pilot was confident, for the moment. The plenum was charged two minutes longer this time, but not even close to capacity, and the instant before jump the coil current was hovering at two hundred twenty million amps, about one-third of the critical value for the nano-thick layers in the coil.

They jumped. Felt nothing new. The temperature of the coil went up seven degrees. “I read five-point-five,” said the pilot. “There was a faint flash of green right at the start of the jump, along a cone ahead of us. Were you expecting that?”

“Yes,” said Trae, but then lied, “an inductive effect.”

Trae knew otherwise, and Myra’s wide-eyed look and wiggling eyebrow told him she knew, too. At higher currents the greenish flash cone should shorten, but he didn’t want to go above half critical. He could do more by increasing plenum pressure, and that was his next order.

They used the same current, and charged the plenum for five minutes this time. The high-pitched sound of it was like metal scouring metal.

“Coil T going up,” said the engineer. “Another ten degrees, and rising.” They were proceeding too fast for the radiant heat transfer vanes of the plenum.

“Go,” said Trae, and the pilot didn’t hesitate. Another lapse of awareness, and red lights flashed on the engineering console.

“Whoa! That was
bright
this time, right up to the nose of the ship and out from it. Looked like a shock wave.” The pilot was excited, but there was an undertone of nervousness in his voice.

“We’re near the end of the test course. How far do you want to push it? I think we’ve been lucky, so far.”

They’d been in the ship for forty minutes, and were now eight and a half light years from their starting point. Myra was plotting performance curves, and shook her head at him. “More plenum,” she mouthed.

“Turn the ship around to our outbound line, then go to twenty seven-point-four declination.”

“That’s hours out from Elderon at twenty-nine light years,” said the engineer. “We did twelve-point-eight on the last one.”

“But the line is clear,” said Trae.

“Yes—nothing out to—maybe fifty light years.” Charts riffled.

“We’re going to jump along that line. I want a ten minute charge on the plenum, and the current at four hundred.”

“That’s pushing it, sir,” said the pilot.

“I don’t think so, but it’ll give us one more data point and we can extrapolate a lot once we have it. We’re well below critical here. Start the charge, now.”

The hull screeched as if scraped by a steel claw. Loose metal objects, a paperclip, pen, rattled around on the console as the current increased in the monster coil behind them.

They went into the cockpit and squeezed themselves between the navigator and the pilots, getting down on their knees to look past shoulders to the outside. Only two bright stars were showing in the blackness, each window only a foot square, three inches of lutracine polymer and an interference film between them and vacuum.

They were no sooner settled in than the pilot announced, “Charged.”

“Coil steady at four hundred. T up by twenty, and rising.”

“We need bigger vanes on this ship,” grumbled Trae. “I want no T increase up to five hundred meg in the production model. We should be able to cycle regularly at that current.”

“Yes, sir. T still rising. I recommend we jump,” said the engineer.

They craned their necks to look out the windows. “Do it,” said Trae.

The same sensation, as if they’d made a long blink or drifted into a daydream. The stars outside disappeared, but as they did there was a tremendous flash of green, extending out in front of the ship in a cone. An ellipsoid flashed as if on fire in blues and reds, then flickered to blackness as the stars appeared again unchanged, at least to the naked eye.

The instruments said otherwise.

“By the Good Hand of The Source”, murmured the engineer.

“What?” Trae blinked hard to clear away a residual image of green.

“The tables say forty-four-three, sir. We jumped over forty light years that time. T went up to three twenty K, but is already back down to two-eighty.”

“We’ve overshot Elderon by sixteen light years,” said the pilot.

Myra was scribbling notes. “Not quite exponential, but close.”

“Good,” said Trae. “On the way back we can fill in some more data points, keeping the coil current where we had it.”

The pilot turned around to look at him. “Did you see all the fireworks out there? Did you?”

“Yes, we did. I’d sort of hoped to see something like that at half charge of the plenum.”

“It was at forty percent,” said the pilot. “What is it?”

“I think it was the very beginning of a branegate,” said Trae.

“Like the Grand Portal,” added Myra, “only a lot smaller. When we pinch space we create a singularity, as if an infinite mass is there. Additional energy opens up the pores of space, the pores of the brane connecting us to another universe at that point. A branegate was starting to form, but we didn’t have enough energy left to form it, and certainly not enough to keep it stable.”

“For this ship it’s a bad thing, an energy loss that could have gone into a longer jump,” said Trae.

“Oh, maybe ten percent loss,” Myra quickly added. “It won’t matter on a Guppy.” She handed the pilot a slip of paper. “Could we return to Elderon in three jumps at those values? It’ll really help me to fill out my curves.”

Trae suppressed a chuckle, thinking that Myra didn’t need any help in filling out her curves. “The Guppy is that pregnant fish-looking ship that was in orbit near us when we left port.”

Myra gave him a mock-stern look. She’d heard his thought, but taken it as a compliment. “We expect that ship to open stable branegates and jump a hundred times farther than this one,” she said. “Our thanks to you and your crew, sir. We’re having a very good day here.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the pilot, and read Myra’s note, then, “If you don’t have a test pilot yet for that new ship, I’d sure like to fly it. Wil Dietz is the name, and my crew comes with me.”

“Got it,” said Trae, “but let’s get this ship into production while we’re at it.”

They went back to sit with the engineer again. Three jumps were made back to Elderon, Myra making predictions from her data each time. She was off twenty percent the first time, ten on the second and the third time, a jump of four light-years, was right on the money. The curves were simple power laws, she explained. Later she would find a special function that fit better.

When they came back into orbit around Elderon, they saw a swarm of workers on the Guppy. During active testing they had traveled one hundred and nine light years in something over three hours. “We should move right into production,” said Myra. “Add the vanes you want. Without pushing too hard, at four hundred light years a day, it’s only five months to the core.”

Her enthusiasm was real, and justified. “Just wait til we fly Guppy,” said Trae, and they were like two kids again, playing with fascinating, expensive and very dangerous toys, for the ships were also weapons of war, a thing they’d not looked at yet.

A butterfly-shaped shuttle kite met them in orbit, and they spent another two hours on a leisurely, helical-pathed float down through the atmosphere of Elderon to make a soft landing at the private port of Zylak Industries. Meza was there to greet them with Wallace and several of the engineers. All were overjoyed by the results of the tests. There were hugs, handshakes and backslaps all around. Wallace hugged Myra, and glowed red when she kissed him on the cheek.

There was a two-hour debriefing in a conference room, everyone taking notes. Myra did a quick calculation and suggested the vane areas be scaled up by two to three times. Another engineer said it was closer to two, and they later settled on that.

Lots of questions about the green glow and flashes observed, and surprise when Trae said it was the first flicker of a branegate. Myra backed him up with her calculations from supersymmetry models. Branegate formation energy for the Grand Portal was thousands of times greater than what either the test ship or the Guppy could generate, but that was for a stable gate. For a small gate the calculations gave a range of energies, and what they’d reached in the tests was just below the edge of it.

“Why was it so visible forward, and not all around the ship?” someone asked. “During jump, the whole ship was in the singularity.”

“Remember this was excess energy being used beyond the requirements of the jump,” said Myra. “The field follows the shape of the ship, and the energy density is highest at the nose. That’s why the snout is on the Guppy. That ship will give us a branegate, I’m sure of it.”

A young engineer raised his hand. “If it’s a shaped field, it can be projected forward, so what happens if something is there?”

“If we make a branegate where the object is?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I guess that something goes away to another universe. There’s only gravity with the exotic matter; I suppose some photon showers from photinos. No, you’d just go away.”

Everybody laughed. It seemed like an amusing idea at the time.

They went to more mundane matters. Myra insisted on more tests when the new vanes were installed. If all went well, they would move straight to production, were already tooled for it. As for the Guppy, current timeline gave six months for working tests and another six to production if everything worked perfectly the first time.

The meeting ended, and the engineers stood to leave. Meza and Wallace remained seated, motioned both Anton and Myra to sit down again. The door closed, and they were alone.

“Something else,” said Meza. “It’s personal, about you, Anton.”

“Oh, I should go,” said Myra, and moved her chair to stand up.

Trae grasped her forearm. “No, I want you to stay.”

She sat down again, but looked embarrassed. Meza smiled, and so did Wallace, a bit unusual for him.

“Well, while you’ve been darting around in space, we’ve received results from some fine detective work our security people have been doing. One man in particular, he has good contacts on Galena and Gan and has apparently done a whiz of a job in the archives. He wants to see you at your apartment tonight, so be there.

“Anyway, we know for sure now who arranged for the murder of Trae, and probably why. We know who hired the assassins, and how they were paid. We know that same person is siphoning information and data on our jump craft and sending it to Gan.”

“We’ve intercepted and altered most of it,” said Wallace quickly, “but some good stuff got through. Gan will be working to build a duplicate of what you tested today.”

“Who on Gan?” asked Anton.

“Gan, the government, the new president they freely elected. Also the richest man on the planet. Pretends to be a believer, goes to church, even set up a council of Bishops to provide guidelines for lawmaking. Calls himself a Bishop, but under all of it he’s nothing more than a thief, liar, conspirator and now murderer. He ordered your murder. Probably wanted your father dead, too, but didn’t get to him in time. A man on our own trustee’s board arranged the assassination, and has been sending him information.”

Little bells were going off in Trae’s head. Council of Bishops. Something his father had said. He’d told both Meza and Wallace about the conversations with him. “If he thinks of himself as a Bishop, we’re dealing with a zealot. I don’t see how he could know about the invasion. It’s too far away.”

“Unless it was planned ahead. Azar Khalil goes back to the early years when your father was preaching freedom on Gan. He might even have arrived at the same time. I’ll give you all I have on him, and on the man he’s been working with. His family also goes back to the founding times, but here, not on Gan. Run this by your father. Maybe there’s a connection with what’s happening on the other side.”

Meza pushed a file across the table to him. “It’s all there. Get back to us soon with anything Leonid can add. This isn’t going to stop, and there’s no defense for it, only offense, and against a sovereign planetary government. We have to keep the new jump technology out of his hands.”

“Or kill him,” added Wallace, a man not known for liberal views on anything.