Edward M. Lerner (11 page)

“And how, without specifics, do you expect us to provide refueling assistance?” Eva’s sniff of frustration was no doubt translated by Pashwah Two for the Snakes. The shrug-equivalent in response made her grind her teeth.

Lothwer broke a long silence. “Keffah, could you adapt BEC techniques to our systems?”

“Some sort of interface mechanism, you mean? Something to convert from the BEC form? Not easily, but yes. I don’t see the point. That would still expose … the technology.”

“Not a problem,” Art said. System engineers think a lot about interfaces. “Take it in stages. The BEC-to-whatever conversion mechanism never leaves
Victorious
. All the UP engineers would require is a BEC canister that mates with your onboard converter. We fill the BEC container, you take it aboard
Victorious
and transfer the fuel. Give us back the empty canister, and we repeat the process.”

“A moment please,” Lothwer said.

The cruiser’s instruments reported sudden spikes in radio traffic, all encrypted. At very low power: Lothwer and Keffah infolinking. At slightly higher power: exchanges between them and the Snake aux ship floating alongside, at the end of a flexible docking tube. At higher power still: messages to and from
Victorious
. Consultations? Request for approval? Amid total silence, Art and Joe tried to read meaning into the scarcest hints of movement by their guests. Was that a twitch? A nervous tic? Or were they just shifting positions on the stools?

Lothwer’s eyes unglazed. “Our engineers agree in principle, but BECs worry them. This is technology we had abandoned as too dangerous.”

“It’s a technology we have used without incident for years,” Eva snapped. “We would never have scaled it up to mass production otherwise.”

“And that expertise,” said Keffah, “is crucial. Before we dare bring a BEC container near
Victorious
, you must convince me it is safe.”

The Vestal Non-Virgin came, as always, in a tall, naked, and anatomically improbable ceramic mug. All that went into it were cherry juice and eighty-proof ouzo. Mostly ouzo. It was a Belter favorite, in no way associated with sacramental solemnity.

Helmut didn’t care.

He sipped slowly, his thoughts not on the beverage, nor the hangover certain to follow. Kwasi’s libation of choice was the Non-Virgin, and today was Kwasi’s birthday. Would have been. The least he could do was drink to an old friend’s memory.

After all, he’d gotten Kwasi Abodapki killed. Among others.

Three Exxon-Boeing scoopships had berthed recently, and the spaceport dive was boisterous. Helmut’s glum aura kept the adjacent stools empty. “Cheers, old friend.”

The
Lucky Strike
had rendezvoused without incident with the vaguely potato-shaped rock known only as 2009 Sigma r, measuring roughly forty meters on its major axis. There was no evidence, physical or infospherical, to suggest anyone but Willem Vanderkellen had ever set boot on it.

He sipped without tasting, his thoughts far away.

The four of them—he and give-you-the-spare-oxy-tank-off-his-back Kwasi, wisecracking Bill and zero-gee polo fanatic Milos—had put in weeks of hard labor. Navigational markers planted. Exploratory shafts sunk. Ore samples collected for assay, for the UP Bureau of Asteroid Management to confirm what the four of them already knew: rich veins of platinum and palladium. Radio beacon planted and on standby, ready for remote activation as soon as the claim was registered. While he readied the
Lucky Strike
for departure, Kwasi and Milos even consulted over the preamble of a summary message pre-filing with the BAM.

It was never sent.

Helmut had had plenty of time to brood since that day, plenty of time to fret and analyze and theorize. The dust and vapors from their operations were surely detectable at a distance, surely capable of providing incontrovertible spectrographic evidence. If they had been followed, a stealthed ship lurking nearby could easily see this was a claim worth jumping.

The Non-Virgin was still half full. He drained it in one long swallow.

The claim had been worth killing for.

Actium
had excellent long-range optical and radar scanners, none of them suited to the remote detection of matter/antimatter annihilation events. It had been a tight squeeze into the forward equipment pod, flashlight in hand, to recheck the jury-rigged splicing-in of new sensors. Wriggling out unaided seemed impossible—and Art’s barely suppressed anxiety surged. He willed his voice to be low and calm. “All the connections look good. Very professional. Can someone grab my feet?”

Massive hands seized Art’s ankles and yanked. He emerged from the access tunnel sneezing from dislodged dust and streaked with grease. “Thanks, Carlos. For the extraction and for expediting our little outing.”

“Mi armada es su armada
. It helps you’re now Chung’s favorite.”

“And did you find anything?” The sensor array was Eva’s baby.

“Only that everything’s per spec.”

Eva had also been busy. Holographic blackness now obscured half the cabin. Four tiny yellow spheres defined a tetrahedron in the simulated space. Inside each sphere was the icon representing a UP ship, the icon representing
Actium
shining slightly brighter than the rest. A crimson dot at the heart of the pyramid marked the floating experimental module. To one side, in green, hung a K’vithian aux vessel. They were well off the ecliptic, far from traffic, and millions of klicks from any Jovian moon. Politics and prudence dictated that this experiment be performed privately.

“Are all ships set?” Art asked her.

“Yes, subject to fine-tuning. Sensors on-line, all ships. Display.” At Eva’s command, a virtual console materialized in a corner of the void, with readouts for each ship in the formation. She peered into the holo. “Hmm.
Endeavor
and
Blaine
aren’t exactly where I’d like them.”

Keffah remained loath to use technology shunned at home, and the Foremost supported her. Instead, they asked to meet with UP experts on Himalia, to learn proven techniques for putting an antimatter BEC into containment, storing it indefinitely, transferring it between containers, and trickling it out. To inspect the equipment. The Snakes wanted, in short, the crown jewels of the deeply classified UP antimatter project. It would not be an easy decision.

“
Blaine
, your position is now fine, but point your nose directly at the package.”

“Changing orientation will tweak our position. This could take a while.”

“
Blaine
, this is a hell of an expensive demo,” Eva said. If anything, that was an understatement. They were expecting a decigram of antihydrogen. “Our new friends are grumpy at us for insisting on this proof. We need to do it right the first time.”

“Tough,” interjected Carlos. “Himalia isn’t Six Flags over Jupiter. They are
not
getting near Himalia or our real experts—no offense—until we know they have antimatter of their own.”

“Assuming this demo goes as advertised, it will convince even you and Art.” Mutter, mutter. “
Goshawk
, maintain your position!”

Art tuned out the bickering and nervous chatter. The Snakes refused to show the UP their containers. Keffah, when her superiors weren’t around, was smugly superior—which made it productive to spend time with her. Among her boasts were occasional hints and oblique clues to K’vithian technology. Their antimatter containment seemed to derive from the same underlying physics as their interstellar drive. More ambiguous was a clue Eva had picked up on: that the common denominator might involve tapping and manipulating zero point energy.

Eva and Carlos had lapsed into Spanish. Cursing is always more satisfying in your native tongue. A glance at the holo showed Art that now
Actium
had drifted slightly off-station.

Physicists had speculated since the twentieth century about a linkage between zero point energy, the quantum-mechanical fluctuation energy of a vacuum, and gravity or inertia. Common sense—and two centuries of frustrated theorists—suggested you couldn’t extract useful work from energy already at the lowest possible level. To find otherwise smacked of perpetual motion, of getting something for nothing. Still….

Any asymmetric interaction with ZPE would be inherently propulsive. And plausibly, an asymmetric interaction could confine antimatter fuel. Few of the scientists on Himalia knew of this development, but the prospect of access to ZPE propulsion technology had those few salivating. Art thought he understood their interest: For too long, they had been all fueled up with no place to go. A technology deal with the Snakes could really be win-win.

Finally, all ships were in position. “Set,” announced Eva to the ship’s captains. On a separate link, she contacted Keffah. “On my mark. Deactivate in ten, nine….”

A fraction of a second past zero,
Actium
‘s readouts jumped on their virtual console. An instant later, slaved readouts from the other ships followed. Computer-corrected for ship positions and signaling delay, all measurements were simultaneous and consistent.

Had the meters shown instantaneous rather than cumulative measurements, the counts would have plummeted to zero faster than the eye could see. But the brief squall of neutrinos and mesons and very specific frequencies of gamma rays was unambiguous.

The Snakes had, and could control, antimatter.

Art methodically emptied the peanut basket, the dark lager before him scarcely touched. Those priorities seemed reversed, but events were confusing enough sober.

“It doesn’t add up.” He shook his head when the bartender glanced his way. What was he missing?

Fact: The Snakes had antimatter. That was now indisputable.

Fact:
Victorious
finished its deceleration on fusion drive. Why? Did its drive not work properly deep in a gravity well?

Hypothesis: Snake technology tapped ZPE. As a test, Eva had casually mentioned the Casimir Effect—a demonstration of, but not a way to extract energy from—ZPE. In the surveillance tape, Keffah startled, and for the rest of that meeting there had been none of her usual condescending double eye blinks. Casimir Effect was a very obscure term to have encountered on the infosphere … unless you were looking for human ZPE research.

The heck with it. Art took a deep swig.

If Snake antimatter containment relied on ZPE, their ZPE technology worked just fine in a gravity well. Very dependably, too, or they would not dare keep antimatter in-system. So why not decelerate the whole way by ZPE drive?

And even more of a head-scratcher: If they tapped ZPE, why bother with antimatter at all? The attraction of antimatter was its density of energy storage. Matter and antimatter convert to energy at one hundred percent efficiency, making antimatter great fuel. But that transformation was the tail end of the process. Antimatter had to be created first, by accelerating normal particles to very high energies and smacking them into each other, and then capturing the antimatter bits that sometimes flew out. End to end, the process was grossly inefficient. If the Snakes could access the energy of the vacuum, why not just use
that?

He was missing something. But what?

Mashkith paced in his cabin, an excursion possible only in this unique vessel. A harmless indulgence? Or a weakness? On no other ship of his experience would even a Foremost’s cabin accommodate such overt physical manifestation of doubt.

And as though the enormity of
Victorious
were not still, after so many years, humbling enough, now he had seen Earth.

Ambassador Chung had personally escorted the shore party: Mashkith himself and his chosen officers. There had been endless motorcades, winding through cities too vast to grasp. London. Mexico City. Beijing. Cairo. Lagos. New Delhi. New Jakarta. Rio de Janeiro. There were parades in New York City and Washington, although as far as Mashkith could see, the two were contiguous, and in the niche of Greater Honshu called Tokyo. The glow of the megalopolises drove the stars from the night sky, where space-based factories, arriving and departing interplanetary vessels, and glittering rings of habitats took their places. And the moon overhead, in its crescent phase during much of their whirlwind visit, was ablaze with its own cities.

Mashkith had known before ever setting out on this voyage that humans outnumbered Hunters thousands to one. Now, he
felt
it.

Perhaps, ultimately, twenty humbling Earth years aboard
Victorious
had been for the best. Perhaps two generations before that of maneuvering for the scraps left by the Great Clans, contriving and competing with a hundred other lesser clans for every possible advantage, had been vital preparation. He and his handpicked companions had known how to keep their own counsel, act unimpressed, observe unobtrusively, appear harmless, feign good intentions, simulate trustworthiness.

The humans had a phrase, Pashwah-qith had told him, long out of use, that described the clan’s tour of Earth: charm offensive.

And their “attack” had been effective. Polls, incredibly freely available to the public, showed broad and growing support for some sort of technology swap. Before the sheer immensity of the human home world could overawe them, Mashkith had declared it necessary to return to
Victorious
to oversee “repairs.”

In truth, Lothwer had done well in his absence. Supplies had begun arriving. Minor overhauls were getting done. Consultations had started on refueling.

Mashkith continued his pacing, having convinced himself it was a harmless indulgence.

Everything continued to unfold according to plan.

K’Choi Gwu ka was old and tired and insane, and she knew it.

She dug in the moist loam, the dirt that clung to her fur honest and comforting and somehow cleansing. The bright, yellow light overhead warmed her weary bones.

Others labored all around her: weeding, hoeing, pruning, harvesting. A steady stream of crew-kindred moved about the vast chamber. Most walked, but some—the youngest, mainly—still swung from time to time from tree branches and ceiling rails. They stopped, or at least slowed, when they passed her, in subtle expressions of support or respect. Each acknowledgement made her feel worse.