Warp Speed (29 page)

"What the hell are you talking abou-- Well, son of a bitch dog in heat." It hit me like an uppercut to the chin. "Of course we don't need a launch system. We raise them to orbit with the warp drive. Hell, I can't believe I didn't think of that. Al hold on a minute--" I ran to the door and poked my head out. "Tabitha!" I yelled. "Tabitha I need you for a second." A moment passed and Tabitha didn't show. Anne Marie bounced up instead, looking as perky and young as ever. God, was I ever that young?

"Mom heard your, uh, page. She couldn't leave what she was doing just yet. She sent me to find out what the hubbub was all about."

I looked at her and smiled. She always makes me smile. I took her by the hand and said, "Come with me." I led her back to the conference table where Al still sat. He was looking at me as though I were nuts.

"Annie, do me a favor and kiss him." Annie just shrugged her shoulders and planted a wet one right on Al's lips. "Thanks." I said.

"Uh, yeah, thanks." Al said shyly, as he turned four shades of taupe, maroon, red, and pale all at once.

"Okay," Annie said. "Now you might want to tell Al and me why you just had me give him mono." Al looked startled. "Just kidding Al."

"Well, I wanted your mother to do it, but you worked out better. Al here has just given us a rapid strike capability and no need for launch vehicles." I explained the idea of not having to use rockets to launch and that we could use the warp system for main propulsion for any application. Just because space is warped by the device doesn't mean that the thing has to travel faster than light. Heck, Tabitha and I probably didn't do that on our first warp ride. But, we did go very, very, very, very fast. The warp drive could be used for slower speeds and even just for offsetting other forces, like gravity, for levitation. The speed is proportional to the amplitude of the poles and zeroes of the Alcubierre warp. The amplitudes of the warp are also proportional to the energy required to make the poles and zeroes. The slower speed would mean less amplitude on the warp, which in turn means less energy. In fact, the ECCs running at only a couple of percent capacity could gain the amount of energy to counter the Earth's gravitational well.

The concept of designing the warp drive as the main propulsion system had immediate useful applications. Imagine using the devices as a crane or safe transportation. The road to the Moon and the planets within our solar system was now at least graveled. With a little bit of systems engineering, testing, and manufacturing, we would have the road paved. And for the immediate problem, our
Secret War
with China, I was beginning to roll some ideas around.

I called an all hands meeting of our crew. That meant the general, the Doctors Daniel (Jim and Rebecca), Al, Sara, Anne Marie, and myself. We sat down over sandwiches and "cocolas" in the conference room and had an old fashioned brainstorming session. Some people might call it a "think tank."

"Al here has kluged together some concepts as to get us to the far side of the Moon near term," I said kicking off the meeting. "What I want to do today is for us to figure out just
how
we could get there, get enough stuff there to support at least fifty people and to live comfortably, and sustain a research, development and engineering laboratory plus a manufacturing facility. I want to emphasize that we would want to be taking low-gee strolls on the lunar surface in less than four months. Is it not just possible, but also doable?"

Al turned the projector on and clicked on his presentation file on his laptop. "My idea is to take as many space-rated pieces of hardware as we can get our hands on and just warp them to the moon. We could live in a Shuttle Orbiter with the old Spacelab module in the payload bay while we integrated the pieces via EVAs. My list shows some possible hardware. There are several External Tanks we could grab, we could appropriate at least one Shuttle and the Spacelab module, there are several commercial airframes we could use. Jim and I think it could be done with a warp drive powered by three of the ECCs. Jim."

Jim nodded. "That's right, Al. I've run the simulations a couple of times. The mass requirements that we're talking about and the size of the warp field that we'd need to maintain would require three of the mini ECCs that we're currently building. One modified warp coil will suffice though."

"What about lifting these things? How do we attach to them?" Sara asked.

I explained, "Well Sara, as Tabitha and I found, you don't have to be attached to the warp drive to make travel possible. You just need to be within the bubble. Anything in the flat spacetime region of the bubble will travel with it. So we just put these things near the warp drive and away we go," I explained.

"Anson," Tabitha interrupted. "What about the construction on the moon? There could be a lot of EVA time there. All of this hardware would need to be mated with airlocks and tubes to connect them. We would need to weld and God knows what else. These are things that haven't been done in space before."

"I understand that Tab--but can we do it? You are the expert astronaut here." I put the ball back in her court.

"Well, I suppose we would have to live like cosmonauts. We better bring a shitload of duct tape." She laughed.

I felt in my pocket and found the small flattened roll that I've kept with me since the incident in Florida. I vowed then that I would never leave home without duct tape. I pulled it out and grinned, "Never leave home without it." She laughed.

"Why do we need all of these extra airframes and things?" Sara asked. "Why don't we just use the warp bubble to make a big underground dome or something?"

I did a double-take on that one. Again, an application with the warp technology that I had missed. I must be getting old and slow. From the look on Jim's face as he slapped his own forehead, I wasn't alone.

"Of course," Jim said. "We slowly poke a small hole down about fifty meters or so by having the warp bubble force its way downward. The Moon couldn't resist that. Then we slowly expand the bubble to a size we decide we need and then oscillate the diameter of the outer Van den Broeck bubble by millimeters back and forth and very fast. The oscillations would turn the lunar rocks or dirt or whatever it is to a molten material. When we turn off the field we have a huge ball-shaped cave with hardened magma walls."

"Excellent, Jim!" I was thrilled by these new concepts. "How about we do some quick analyses to decide the volume that we would need and the most stable diameter for such a cave. If we need to, we will build multiple caves and tie them together. These caves could be built in a matter of minutes or hours I think."

Anne Marie added, "I think we should carry as much of the hardware on Al's list as we can. We will need safe places in case the caves leak our atmosphere and we will need entrance airlocks. And what about living quarters? I don't know about you guys, but I'm feeling a little stir crazy here and we have plenty of room."

"Actually, Annie," 'Becca replied, "we could keep a warp field on inside the caves to maintain atmospheric and structural integrity. Once we get there we might as well put these three ECCs and the warp coil to further use. The ECCs would give us more than enough power to maintain the warp field and to power our entire Moon base. Annie, I do agree though that we should carry everything we can get our hands on, including several kitchen sinks."

"That gives me an idea," Tabitha laughed. "What if we made one of these balls higher than the rest and then warped a large part of some freshwater lake to the cave. We could then set up a gravity-fed plumbing system."

"Brilliant Tabitha! I love it. Then we warp a ball of atmosphere right out of the sky into the domes, and some fruit trees to go with them, and we also abduct some livestock. This place could be self-sufficient in a matter of days! This is great stuff." I was exhilarated with the possibilities. It was cool to take my mind off of the war for a few moments. I think it helped the rest of the crew also.

"Something else, Anson," Tabitha got my attention. "Gravity is much less on the moon, about one-sixth gee. If I understand the warp theory correctly, and I'm sure I don't, couldn't we alter the gravity in the habitat dome to equal one gee?"

"Well, General, it appears to me that you do understand the warp theory," Jim said.

"Right." I laughed. "Jim, calculate a slightly slanted flat space region for me that will add to the lunar gravity to equal one gee."

We spent the next several hours batting ideas around and revising our concepts. By the end of the afternoon we had developed a complete concept plan and a drawing of the underground lunar facility. The facility consisted of the habitat sphere and "green" sphere, a manufacturing cylinder, a research and development cylinder, and there were multiple tunnels connecting them. Of course, there was also a spaceport pad on the lunar surface. The pad would be adjacent to a long wide cylinder that connected to the side of the habitat sphere. Pushing the lunar rock around with a warp field would create the pad. Jim and I were planning to work out a bulldozer scoop-shaped warp-field geometry. Creating cylinders would be easy. Pushing a ball along a straight path would create a cylindrical shaft with spherical ends. Who cared if they had spherical ends?

Anne Marie had the idea of just building a small town with all the infrastructure, power grid that would connect to ECCs, water purification pump and tower, stocked fish pond, living quarters, and anything else we could think of and then just warping that to the main habit sphere. I liked that idea a lot. Since time was a factor, we decided to go with manufactured homes. We would have the first trailer park in space.

Al realized that we couldn't use Jim's approach, which was to make a tiny hole and then expand the bubble. How would we get the town through the tiny hole? So we modified the approach. Instead, we would make a large diameter cylinder with a spherical bottom. The warp sphere used to make this cylinder would contain the trailer park and all of its infrastructure. Leaving that warp field on, we would then use the bulldozer warp field to push lunar material on top of the bubble to fill the hole. When the hole was filled, we would then oscillate the bubbles' outer Van Den Broeck bubble to turn the lunar rock to magma and then harden the cave. The outer bubble wouldn't allow heat and shock waves into the inner static non-Alcubierre bubble. We would then construct the outer cylinders and tunnels and place the equipment in the right locations. The tunnels and cylinders should be airtight at this point. So, we pressurize them with the liquid air that we brought with us in the External Tanks. We would seal off the airlocks to the outside and then open the tanks and let the air boil off into the caves. When all of the complex excavation and construction is completed, we then would simply turn off the field in the habitat sphere for a nanosecond and then turn it back on immediately but with a diameter large enough to encompass the entire Moon base. Sara had called this the "lights-off lights-on" method. There would be some strange weather for a few moments while the atmosphere reached equilibrium, but if we calculated the pressures right we should be fine. We would bring a butt load of plants and fluorescent lights. The lake would be large enough to support twice the people planned for the facility for at least a year. We would recycle the water and everything else, but we could eventually go back to Earth with new warp ships and pick up more supplies.

But how would we get the water back into the habitat cave? This led us to a solution for heating the caves and choosing a location also. First, the complex would be placed on the far side of the moon and near one of the lunar poles where it's always in the sunlight. Six open shafts would be dug running from directly over the half-acre stand of trees to the lunar surface. Each of these shafts would be roughly ten meters in diameter and would be stoppered by large windows. The windows would be in two layers ten centimeters thick, separated by one meter, and each windowpane would be constructed of spaceframe window materials. The top window would be reinforced by a central hub airlock window one meter in diameter, the hub made of steel I-beams with steel I-beams attached radially to an outer steel I-beam rim. It would look like a bicycle wheel sort of, whereas the hub opened downward. The bottom layer would be supported with steel I-beams the same way but there would be no door. Instead, the window would be uniformly perforated with one centimeter diameter holes over the entire surface.

The windows would allow sunlight to enter the habitat sphere over the half-acre stand of trees. When we needed to bring in new water we would warp the water into the shaft above the window, then extend the main field out past the water holding warp bubble via the lights-off lights-on method. The window central hub door would be opened. Then we would turn off the bubble holding the water and it would become supported by the window. As the water drained through the door onto the bottom perforated window, voila, it would be raining onto the trees below. When the water was completely drained, the airlock would be cycled and the warp fields turned off.

Installing the windows wouldn't prove too difficult. We could countersink the shafts so that they would sit onto a magmified lunar rock windowsill. Then we would seal them off. We might even place a couple windows over the lake, which we planned to be beside the tree grove anyway.

This all seems like a lot of work to accomplish short notice whilst a war is on that we were actively helping to fight. However, the warp field technology really changed the construction paradigm. We estimated it would take less than a day to make the holes and then only a month or so to install most of the hardware. We could use parallel crews to begin manufacturing while the final construction continues.

Of course, there were also some minor details and calculations to be made like what maximum mass could be lifted at what velocities, and how we do that without tipping off our enemy as to what we were doing, how much food, what about the effect of the big heat sink at minus 33 degrees Celsius (the Moon) below us, should we put some high R value insulation under the town, and how the hell would we do that anyway, how many windows are enough to heat and light a two-hundred-meter-diameter hemisphere. Sheesh! You get the idea.