Lieutenant

by Laurence Dahners

  Suddenly Ell was embarrassed to realize that Gary would feel he owed her a present too. Her impulse was to try to get everyone up and moving, thus showing she didn’t expect a gift from him but he pulled out a small glass bottle and handed it to her saying, “My gift is the ashes of my heart.”

  Ell held it up and saw that it had a faint dusting of black ashy material in it. She turned to him excitedly, “Tori?!”

  He nodded, they aren’t all exactly the same size, but I worked out a way to make them all very close to the same size, so a lot of them should be the same size.”

  Ell gave him another hug, “Thanks Gar’!”

  Ell’s mother said curiously, “What is it?”

  “Carbon nanotube tori, or toruses. I’ve been wanting some for my research and so I tracked Gary down because he makes nanotubes.” She said grinning at Gary, “He thinks we accidentally ran into each other at 4MA, but actually I had relentlessly pursued him, hoping he’d agree to make me some tori. Now he’s probably wondering if it’s really even my birthday.”

  Gary raised an eyebrow, “Hah, it was well worth it, just for that one kiss you gave me at Tres Locos.”

  Chapter Seven

  Felton Bonapute’s eye fixed the man on the other side of the glass. “Not just her, but that red headed Air Force bitch that broke my wrist too. You’ll get the rest of your money when I hear what I want to hear about them.” He held up his good hand with a finger extended like it was a gun, then pulled an imaginary trigger.

  ***

  Nuñez rapped on Milton’s doorframe. “Come in.” Milton said, leaning back in his chair, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes.

  “Looks like we need to issue you some refurbished Mark 1 eyeballs, Chief.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you’re gonna be old someday too, Nuñez. Or,” he growled with a fake glare, “maybe not!” Then he grinned, “What’s your shit hot El Tee doing this week?”

  Nuñez rolled his eyes, “The boys are wearing gloves. I checked, you were right about the oils and acid pH being bad for several of the components. I also looked her up; she’s just as impressive as you said.”

  Milton said, “Here watch this.” He threw the video record from The Flight Risk up on his big screen and they watched it together.

  “Holy crap boss man! What just happened there?”

  “Here it is in slo-mo.” The video ran again.

  The two men looked at each other. Nuñez said, “Remind me again about how much I don’t want to piss her off, huh?”

  Milton rubbed his head, “You’re tellin’ me, that dude’s wrist ain’t never gonna be right.” He leaned back in his chair again. “So, why’re you invading my sanctum today?

  “Well it’s the El Tee again.”

  Milton rolled his eyes. “I sure hope it’s not more places where she’s caught your boys not following the book?”

  “Naw. She knows the manuals better than anyone I’ve ever met and she keeps teaching people who think they know their job how to do said job better—which can be pretty annoying when you think you know your job. But I’ll admit, she doesn’t slavishly follow the book. When it says to do something the long way and we have a shorter, better way, she pats the guys on the shoulder. She’s shown us how to do several things better and faster than the manual herself. Nowadays, when she tells us to do something different, I ask why. She always has a good reason.”

  “So, what’s the problem?”

  “Well, she’s brought in a chip she says she had fabbed just for the RQ-7 comm system.”

  “A what?”

  “A chip. Plugs into one of the spare BXA ports on the comm board just like it was made to go there.”

  “What the Hell’s it do?”

  “Improves comm, she says.” Nuñez shrugged. “She says she had it fabbed to mil-spec just for our UAVs.”

  “Why’s she talking to you instead of the Captain?”

  “Says she wants to be sure it ‘works right’ before she shows it to any brass.”

  Milton rubbed his head. After a bit he said, “And you’re thinkin’… what?”

  “Damned if I know Chief. I want to trust her. But someone wanting to put home made chips in our birds?—Chips that I don’t really know what they do? What if she’s a spy… or something… Hell I don’t know. Just thinkin’ about it makes my head hurt.”

  Milton didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he asked, “Did she say how it’s supposed to work?”

  Nuñez chuckled, “Yeah. ‘Quantum technology’ she calls ‘photon gluon resonance.’ Says she has a patent for it but because she’s in the Air Force, the Air Force has a ‘royalty free right’ to the technology.”

  “Cripes Nuñez! That sounds great, but I still don’t know how it works or how we’d use it!”

  “She’s got a matching chip that she says plugs into the control station. She says, with those chips in place data transmission won’t have any satellite transmission latency and that transmission rates will be so much faster that we can send all the imagery at full quality, not have to select the images we want to send right away and store the rest for transmission when the bird gets back to base.”

  “Won’t have satellite transmission latency?” Milton’s brow furrowed. “That latency is from how long it takes for a light speed signal to get to the satellite, get sent around the world to another satellite and back down to the control station. How in the Hell would a chip make satellite transmission faster?”

  Nuñez threw his hands up. “You wanna ask her yourself Chief?”

  “No. You install her chips. Use one of the birds that’re in for maintenance. Put her other chip on your testing control station. Then check out the maximum data transmission rate and measure the satellite transmission latency and tell me what you find out. Then we’ll go talk to Captain Danson about this.”

  Nuñez shrugged, “OK.” He got up to leave.

  “Nuñez?”

  “Yeah Chief?”

  “Slip an RF detector into your testing setup. Measure any radio transmission from the setup before and then after her chips are in there working. Then we’ll have an idea whether she could be diverting any information. I’d trust that woman with my life, but I’ve always heard that the best spies seem… too good to be true.”

  Nuñez’ head tilted as he considered, then he said, “Can do,” and headed on back down to his shop.

  ***

  Ell finished wolfing down her lasagna while Amy went over some changes in her investment portfolio that Ell’s advisor had suggested. She said, “OK, tell them to go ahead with the investments in mining and industrial manufacturing. Pull out of orbital launch and ask them to please stop suggesting communication stocks.”

  Ell looked down from her HUD at Amy, “Are you ready to look at your micromanipulations?”

  Amy shrugged as she made some notes. “Sure.” She wondered how Ell made decisions about how to invest millions of dollars in a heartbeat like this? Was she making wise decisions? Or was she just making quick decisions so she could get back to her beloved research? “Why do you hate communication stocks so badly?”

  Ell looked at her pensively, “You’ve got a PGR chip on your headband and you know what they do right?”

  Amy’s eyes widened and she covered her mouth, “Oh! You think comm stocks are gonna tank when your chips hit the market?”

  Ell tilted her head and shrugged, “Yep. I feel kinda bad about it but not bad enough to ride ‘em down.”

  They went back to Ell’s office/lab where they carefully examined Amy’s positioning of the entangled molecules around the upper member of the pair of connected portals Ell was trying to construct.

  After Amy left to go back to her apartment, Ell began assembling the new components that she hoped would filter and smooth the current output of her big power supply. It actually didn’t take all that long to place the components in series between the power supply and her port chamber.

  She switched it on and had Allan turn off the room l
ight. She slowly leaned back to look for the telltale sparks.

  “Damn,” Ell muttered. There aren’t any sparks!

  She felt the power supply, it was only warm. She leaned down and sniffed. No burning smell. Frustrated, she stared at it a minute, then disconnected it, hooking up her multi-meter to determine whether the power supply was in fact delivering the correct power. It was, but it was only about 20% of the expected current! Her “current smoothing” circuit must be consuming a lot of the power output from the power supply?

  A smile crossed her face as she had Allan turn the lights off again and began slowly turning up the control knob on the main power supply, peering under the table. Sure enough the sparks appeared and slowly drifted down, farther and farther from the chamber as she increased the power. But, they were much more tightly clustered than they were before she’d installed her “smoothing” circuit. “Yes!” she murmured. Then she sighed in frustration. If her “smoothing circuit” consumed this much power, would she need an even bigger power supply?

  ***

  Milton’s AI spoke in his earphone. “Master Sergeant Nuñez relays a message that they are about to begin testing transmission rates on the El Tee’s new chips if you want to ‘mosey on by.’”

  Milton pulled his head back from where he’d been watching tests on the airframe of one of the UAV’s that had made a rough landing. “Carry on, Sarge.”

  He wandered outside and looked around for a RQ-7 parked outside where it could get “line of sight” to a satellite. Sure enough there was one “out” a couple hangars down. Whistling tunelessly, he started that way.

  When Milton walked up to the little group he saluted Ell. She hid a smile. She had been able to tell that Nuñez was very nervous about installing her chips and suspected he’d ‘go up the chain’ somewhere. She appreciated that he’d respected her wish not to go to Danson until she was sure the chips worked.

  Nuñez looked up and said brightly, “Chief, Lieutenant Donsaii has provided us with some improved communication chips for the birds and we’re testing them out.”

  Ell kept a poker face at this transparent attempt to make it seem like Nuñez hadn’t already let the Chief Master Sergeant in on the whole thing.

  For his part the Chief raised his eyebrows and said, “How are they working?”

  Nuñez shrugged, “Well they’ve reduced the satellite transmission latency to zero.” He raised an eyebrow. “Of course if the chips were to simply transmit data from the one here in the bird to the one in the control console over there, directly, instead of sending it up to the satellite and back, we’d get the same measurement.”

  The Chief cleared his throat, thinking that had to be what was happening. If the chips were radiating directly to one another that would hardly be useful when the bird was on the other side of the world. “What about data transmission rates?”

  “Pretty amazing Chief. With the equipment we’ve got, we can only test transmission rates up to a hundred terabytes per second but it does that flawlessly. The bird doesn’t come close to producing that much data so there isn’t any reason to try to test any higher rates. How it’s doing that over a satellite link, or even direct transmission from one chip to another, I have no idea.”

  Milton frowned, sure he must have misheard. “A hundred terabytes per second?”

  Nuñez raised and eyebrow and nodded.

  Milton turned to Ell. “That’s pretty amazing Lieutenant. What does Captain Danson plan to do with this tech?”

  Ell grinned crookedly at the two senior NCOs, looking back and forth from one to the other. “Chief, I feel sure in my bones that the Master Sergeant has already told you I didn’t want to tell Captain Danson about it until I was sure it worked.”

  The chief grunted, “That’s as may be Ma’am. But we’re not sure we should be installing unapproved electronics on Uncle Sam’s birds without higher authorization than yours?”

  “Good, and you shouldn’t. But we haven’t proved much yet. I’d like you to help me do a better test, still without putting one of Uncle Sam’s birds in the air. I can hear the reasonable doubt in your voices about the results we’re getting with this test. But, if we can ship a chip to Okinawa and do a test around the world, then you’d have to believe the latency test right?”

  “Uh, yes Ma’am.” The Chief’s brow crinkled. “But how would we measure latency?”

  “Oh, there’s an algorithm in the console to send round trip ‘pings’ to a bird and measure latency. The AI needs it to determine how far ahead it has to plan during landings.”

  “How do we know the ping went there and back?”

  Ell laughed, “Good point. The outgoing signal is supposed to be modified by the bird before it’s returned to confirm it went there and back. If I wanted to cheat, I’d have to reprogram the console software so that it modified the signal all by itself. When we get to doing the test, you and the Captain might just have to trust that I’m not so devious as to trick you that way. It would be pointless to fake the test anyway because flight control sucks with latency. Any pilot can tell you when they’re flying a bird with latency. So once we tried to fly a bird it would be obvious whether there was latency or not.”

  The chief frowned, “But there’d still be latency. I doubt even the hottest pilot could tell for sure the difference between some latency and a little less latency.”

  Ell grinned back and forth at the two NCOs again. “Sergeant Nuñez thought I was crazy when I told him there wouldn’t be any latency so he didn’t relay that part of the story to you, did he?”

  “Um, he might have said it, but I might not have believed it. No one would really believe that, I don’t think.”

  “Good for you Chief. So let’s find out for sure. What I want to do is repeat this test with a bird on the ground in Okinawa so we’ll be able to prove for sure whether I’m crazy or not.” She shrugged, “In a few months no one will have trouble believing. I have a paper coming out in Nature documenting the phenomenon. Also a company based on my patent for this technology will start selling product shortly after that. Right now the company is still keeping it under wraps so they’re having me hold publication.”

  Milton and Nuñez looked at each other a moment. It was obvious to Ell that they were wondering just how far off her hinges she’d fallen. Finally Nuñez spoke, “I say let’s give this crazy notion the benefit of the doubt and send a chip over. I’ve got a buddy in Okinawa UAV maintenance; I can get him to plug it in. If it works, we can tell the Captain and congratulate each other on our wisdom. If it doesn’t, we can have the Captain call the guys with the straight jackets.”

  Milton raised his eyes to the heavens, then nodded.

  Ell grinned and clapped her hands together, “Thanks guys. If it works, you owe me a beer and I’ll owe you a car.” She handed Nuñez a box, “Just in case it works,” she winked, “here’s enough chips for all the UAVs in Okinawa so we don’t have to send another shipment.” She grinned at him and walked back into the hangar.

  The two noncommissioned officers looked at each other a moment. Finally Nuñez said, “She’s either crazy or amazing. So far the evidence points at ‘amazing.’ Did you understand that wager about a ‘beer and a car?’”

  “Nope, but Martha ain’t gonna let me buy the young lady a car, so I hope it only put me on the hook for a beer.”

  ***

  Amy raised her eyebrows as she watched Ell consume her hamburger. She said, “I don’t think I’m ever gonna be able to come to grips with the way you eat so much without getting fat! I’d be a blimp!”

  After dinner Ell showed Amy the sparks she’d been producing with the current setup. Then Amy had her examine the ring of entangled molecules that she’d completed aligning that afternoon. Despite the many days and evenings Ell and Amy had spent aligning the molecules in the two rings, the circles they had created were still microscopic. Ell sighed, but you had to start somewhere and they were bigger than the single ring that was producing the sparks. She’d
hoped that a single ring could send something through the 5th dimension to reappear somewhere and so far it seemed that she could do it but the material sent through—just gas so far—seemed to be reappearing in this universe over a pretty broad range of locations. This dashed her hope that she could send something, herself perhaps, somewhere in an instant. If she were to try to transmit herself up to a satellite in orbit, some 300 kilometers up, with a 10 percent or 30 kilometer margin of error, she could wind up a long way away from the station and in some pretty serious trouble. However, if there was a receiving ring at the space station and she could step instantly from one to the other that would still be pretty cool. Who knew what she’d learn from activating this newly built pair of rings? Tonight she’d work on assembling the equipment to energize the receiving ring.

  ***

  Ell knocked on the doorframe of Chief Milton’s office. He stood, saying, “Yes Ma’am?”

  “Hey, Chief, I just dropped by to tell you I’ve been reassigned back to flight operations tomorrow. I’d like to thank you for having your guys teach me about the insides of the birds.”

  Milton grinned, “El Tee, anytime you want to come back and pretend to learn from my team, while you actually whip them into shape for me, you’ll be very welcome to do so.”

  Ell gave him her trademark crooked smile and said, “Thanks! You might suspect that I have an ulterior motive in dropping by?”

  Milton sighed and rolled his eyes. “Yes Ma’am. Nuñez already told me your chips were in Okinawa and that I could expect you to be dragging me down to watch the testing sometime soon.”

  “Aw, Chief, you sound like someone who doesn’t want to go see what happens!”

  Milton’s eyes crinkled as he got up and came around his desk, “True, but someone’s got to keep an eye on the leprechaun. It seems I’ve been given that dread responsibility.”

  They walked over to the maintenance section’s test console where Nuñez waved Ell into the remote pilot’s seat. She sat and keyed open the microphone, saying, “Sergeant Davis? Do you read me?”