The Centauri Surprise

by Alastair Mayer

  The grouping was still lousy, a good ten centimeters between the furthest left and right shots, but at least they were centered on the target. He reached for the switch to send the target downrange again, but was interrupted by the Range Officer’s voice over the receiver in his earmuffs.

  “Rico, safe your weapon and report to Ducayne’s office.”

  Oh? What was that about? Rico sighed and unloaded the pistol, making sure the chamber was clear. He took it, his safety glasses and earmuffs and turned them in as he left the range, then went to see Ducayne.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Rico found Ducayne’s office door open and rapped on the frame. “You wanted to see me, Boss?”

  “Yeah, come in and have a seat. I hear you’ve been spending a lot of time on the range.”

  “You know me, I like to shoot,” Rico said as he sat down. “But I’m rusty as hell. Too long in that damned traumapod. I’m lucky to get a ten-centimeter grouping.”

  Ducayne shook his head slightly and looked at Rico. “I hear you’re shooting that at twenty-five meters. You know we only expect agents to qualify at twenty, with more than half the shots at less than ten.”

  “I used to be able to do that at forty.”

  “With a pistol? Seriously?”

  “Well, with my pistol. Zeroed in. Still, I should be doing better, unless you’re not maintaining your training weapons.”

  Ducayne stared at him for a moment, then said, “All right, I’ll talk to the armorer. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Fair enough. What’s up?”

  “We’ve been focusing your training on small arms and unarmed combat, mostly to help you get back in shape from traumapod deconditioning, but I think it’s time to give you some more specialized training.”

  “Like what?”

  “You’re a smart guy, Rico. Brown gave you a glowing report, and not just because he thought you’d been killed. The tricks you used to get the Blue Book photographs were very clever. We’re going to teach you a few other tricks, some of which rely on specialized equipment.”

  “You mean I get to play with some of your spook toys?” Rico said, ignoring Ducayne’s wince at the term. “Sounds like fun.”

  “It’s going to be work. You need to learn some things about starship systems, communications, electronics—”

  “I do know some of that, but I’m game. Is there something in particular you have in mind?”

  “I might have a mission coming up that you’d be well suited for, although it’s not definite yet.”

  “You mean Verdigris? You mentioned that before.”

  Ducayne glanced at his desk monitor, which Rico couldn’t see. “You’ve spent quite a bit of time there, haven’t you?”

  “You know I have. Hopkins did a lot of business there. What’s the mission?”

  “That’s just one of the places I might want to send you. I’ll tell you more when there’s an actual mission.”

  “Okay. So what do I do in the meantime?”

  “Report to Regina Elliot. She’s got a craft and technical training schedule drawn up for you. But keep up with the combat training in your spare time.”

  Rico looked up at the name. Elliot was easy on the eyes, but as Ducayne’s second in command, she was a hard taskmaster. He shook his head. “Spare time? What spare time?”

  Ducayne grinned. He had a disturbing grin. “All those months in a traumapod, and you still want sleep? Make time.”

  CHAPTER 42: THEORIZING

  Ducayne’s office

  DUCAYNE HAD CALLED Jackie Roberts in to discuss physics. She’d been a little surprised at that; she knew Ducayne had his own people with far more advanced physics and astrophysics knowledge than she had.

  “I do, but I appreciate your way of translating things into understandable English,” he said when she asked. “It’s not that I don’t understand all the words my scientists use, usually, but they have a tendency to string them together in ways that stop making sense when I try to parse them.

  “Let me ask you,” he continued, “if you were going to build a—let’s call it a faster-than-light radio, even if that is a contradiction in terms—anyway, if you were, how would you do it? Quantum entanglement?”

  “Not likely,” Jackie said, shaking her head. “We don’t know how that works, but what we do know about it suggests that it’s not useful for communication. There’s no way to control the outcome of measuring one particle, so you don’t have any control over the state of its entangled partner. We just know that the state isn’t resolvable until you do measure it.”

  Ducayne frowned. “Does that mean there’s some factor or something that gets set when a pair is entangled? We just can’t detect what that factor is?”

  Jackie smiled and shook her head. “No. You’d think that, it’s an obvious assumption, but long ago a scientist named Bell proved that such factors, so-called hidden variables, don’t exist.”

  “The guy who invented the telephone?”

  “No, that was a different Bell. Anyway, it’s weird, but that’s not how entanglement works. But why are we talking about this anyway? It’s not like you to be purely hypothetical. Do you have evidence that someone has faster-than-light communications? Other than by starship, I mean?”

  Ducayne put his elbows on his desk and steepled his fingers. “That’s the problem with hiring bright people,” he said, as much to himself as to her. “It makes it hard to keep secrets from them.” He shook his head and put his hands back down. “No evidence as such, no.”

  Jackie thought there was more to it. “So, an absence of evidence, but no evidence of absence? Is that what you’re not saying?”

  “I’m not saying what I’m not saying,” Ducayne said with a grin. “But let me tell you a little story about actions and intelligence.”

  “Okay.”

  “If someone is watching your actions, they often have a pretty good idea of what you know and when you knew it.”

  “I think I follow,” Jackie said. “If I take an action that reflects some knowledge you thought I didn’t have, then I clearly got that knowledge somehow, or I just got lucky.”

  “Right, and it’s never safe to assume an adversary just got lucky. One classic example is during World War II when the Allies could crack the German Enigma code.”

  Jackie remembered Burnside talking about Enigma back on Tanith, speculating as to what the alien artifact might be. “I’ve heard of that. There was some kind of decoding machine involved?”

  “There was, but it had so many combinations that even if you knew how it worked, the Germans felt confident that it couldn’t be broken. But a few bright lads came up with some of the first computers, and some cryptanalysis tricks, and could often crack the messages within hours of their being sent. That project was code-named Ultra.

  “The thing was,” Ducayne continued, “if the Allies took too many actions based on Ultra intelligence without some plausible other source of information—parallel construction, we call it now—then the Germans would realize that Enigma had probably been broken, and they would have taken steps to make it even harder to crack. Obviously, the Allies wanted to avoid that, so sometimes they let bad things happen, even when they knew they were going to, just because there was no other plausible way for them to have found out about it.”

  “Really? That’s a tough call.”

  Ducayne nodded, his expression serious. “One well-known example, although there’s still debate about it, is the air raid on Coventry, England. The Allies had learned it was coming, and could have warned the residents and intercepted the raid, but at the expense of losing the Allied advantage of reading Enigma messages.” He shook his head. “I’d hate to have been in that position. Although by some reports they knew the raid was coming but not where. I’m not sure that’s any better.”

  Jackie could only imagine how hard that trade-off had been, but didn’t see the connection to what they had been discussing. “What does this have to
do with faster than light communications?”

  “Sometimes you have to act on the information anyway, and hope that the opposition doesn’t figure out how you did it.”

  “You’re losing me.” Jackie wondered if Ducayne had some advance information about Velkaryan actions.

  “There are some actions that the Velkaryans have taken that, while they could be due to lucky chance or insight, are more easily explained if they have some kind of FTL communication.”

  Now she got it. But FTL communication didn’t require some kind of magic radio. “Wouldn’t a ship or message torpedo explain that?”

  “Faster than any ship or torpedo I’m aware of. Unless we’re just missing some other connection, there’s evidence of messages between Earth and Verdigris in less than a day, for example.”

  Jackie let out a low whistle. That was over ten times faster than a message torpedo. “You’re serious?” She looked at Ducayne’s face. “Of course you are. Sorry.”

  “There’s not enough data to be certain. That’s just what we deduced by analyzing their behavior after the fact. But if they do have something like that, then knowing how it works would help us find out what to look for. Maybe it is some kind of ultra-fast message torpedo, but so far we haven’t seen any evidence of that. We think there must be an FTL communication device, or at least a pair of them. But I don’t know if it’s alien technology they found somewhere, or something their own scientists came up with. Or maybe some combination of the two.”

  “But given their interest in alien technology, and the gear missing from the Pavonis pyramid, you suspect the former,” she said.

  “Roberts, if you ever get tired of flying a starship, I’ve got a desk job for you. You seem to have a talent for analysis.”

  Jackie shuddered inwardly. A desk job? “No thanks. I like flying.”

  “I thought you’d say that. But back to the problem at hand. Forget quantum entanglement. It must be something else. What about gravity?”

  “That doesn’t help,” Jackie said. “Gravity propagates at lightspeed. And that’s ignoring the size of the detector you’d need.”

  “What about through the so-called hidden or rolled-up dimensions? I know gravity leaks out through those, that’s how warp drives avoid cooking themselves. How fast does it propagate through those?”

  “Uh, we have no idea, but there’s no reason to assume it’s other than cee. Although. . . .”

  Ducayne spoke again before she could finish the thought. “Then the only way to go faster than light is to generate a warp field?”

  She nodded. “Yes. Except it doesn’t really go faster than light, it warps spacetime so you’re not really travelling as far as you think.” Roberts fished around for a comparison. “This is a bad analogy, but consider sound. You can’t yell at someone and have your voice travel faster than sound.”

  “Well, no, but we can make objects go faster than sound.”

  “Sure, but they’re not sound waves. But say you had a long pipe, a hundred meters long, and you yell in one end. How long before the sound comes out the other end?”

  Ducayne shrugged. “I don’t know; what’s the speed of sound?”

  “Let’s make it easy and call it ten meters per second.”

  “Okay, then it takes ten seconds to travel the length of the pipe. One hundred over ten. Where are you going with this?”

  “Right, bear with me,” Jackie said. “Okay, I’m vastly oversimplifying, but now close the ends of the pipe temporarily, just after you yell.” She held her arms apart with her wrists bent, palms facing each other, representing the valves at each end of the pipe. “And then you open them again just as the sound gets to the other end.” She rotated her wrists to extend her hands, palms facing downward; the valves open. “Same thing, ten seconds, right?”

  “Sure. Assuming there’s no effect from compression.”

  “Assume not; I’m simplifying. Now, I’m going to fasten a rocket to that pipe. I yell in one end, slam it shut, fire the rocket, and shoot the whole thing so it travels a kilometer in less than ten seconds.” She waved her arms, gesturing as though throwing a length of pipe. “Then open the pipe again and my voice comes out the other end. How fast has my voice travelled?”

  Ducayne frowned. “Uh, a kilometer in ten seconds? Or just the length of the pipe in ten seconds? Um. . . .”

  “Exactly. As far as the inside of the pipe is concerned, the sound is still travelling ten meters a second. To anyone outside the pipe, it just travelled at a hundred meters per second—ten times our hypothetical speed of sound. The warp drive works the same way.”

  “But, the pipe itself moved faster than sound.”

  “Right, and with starships, the warp bubble moves—for a rather loose definition of moves—faster than light. Except that it’s a bubble of warped spacetime. Einstein never said that spacetime itself couldn’t stretch or contract faster than light, and in fact cosmic inflation after the Big Bang proved that it could. Alcubierre did the math, others refined it, and Brenke reduced it to practice.”

  Ducayne sat absorbing this for a moment. Like most people he was vaguely aware of how starships worked, but that didn’t mean he could have explained it, even to himself. “So, the only way to make something seem to go faster than light is to change the effective distance; to cheat.”

  “Exactly.” As she said that, she remembered the point she’d been on the verge of realizing when Ducayne had interrupted her. Her eyes widened.

  Ducayne beat her to it. “Tell me, then. What is the effective distance between two points in the hidden dimensions that gravity leaks into?”

  “Uh. . . .” Roberts tried to remember what they’d said about that in school. “Anything from subatomic distances to nobody knows how far, depending on the dimension. But. . . .” There was another detail. What was it?

  “But?”

  “Something about the Casimir Effect, but that’s electromagnetics.” It came to her as she said it. “Oh, right. If the dimension is smaller than the wavelength, it won’t propagate at all, the radiation won’t penetrate it.”

  “But it goes somewhere, right? What’s the gravitational wavelength emitted by a warp drive?”

  “It’s complicated. I’ve never needed to know. Not very short, but I think it’s speed and size dependent.” Her instructors would have been horrified at that; speed was a very inaccurate term when applied to warp travel, and size wasn’t much better. “Or rather,” she corrected, “it’s warp geometry dependent.”

  “Which would mean that for some kind of gravity wave communicator, you’d want short gravity waves,” Ducayne mused, half to himself. “How small can you make a warp field? For that matter, how small can you make a warp generator?”

  “A single warp generator is small, but the field is unstable,” Jackie replied. This was basic warp-ship theory. “The warp modules on a starship each contain multiple generators, to average out random Finazzi instabilities and make the whole thing controllable. You also need to route a lot of power to each unit. I think the warp modules on a message torpedo are about as small as it’s possible to make them.” She looked at him, understanding his real question. “Certainly bigger than any of the alien artifacts we’ve brought back.”

  As she said that, and seeing the disappointment on Ducayne’s face, Jackie remembered an alien artifact they hadn’t brought back: the Maguffin, the disintegrator they’d found on Chara III. Their theory of how it might work hinged on the fact that the edge of a warp field disintegrated matter through tidal disruption.

  “On the other hand,” she said, “however small we could make one, I think the Pyramid-Builders made one small enough to hand-carry.”

  CHAPTER 43: INVESTIGATING THE OBJECT

  Sawyers World

  “HOW IS THE RESEARCH going?” Ducayne asked Black in the lab.

  “Not well,” Black said. “The device comes on-line and seems to be operating within parameters, but we’re not getting anything that looks like a signal.”<
br />
  “Maybe nobody is sending. If Velkaryans have the only two others in the neighborhood, perhaps there’s just not much traffic.”

  “There is that. Also, if they are the only ones out there with active devices, we want to be very careful about sending anything.”

  Ducayne shook his head. “No, we don’t want to send anything at all. It would blow our advantage if they suspect we have one. So, what’s the problem?”

  “We get powerful signals, but they’re either pure noise or not modulated at all. And they come at irregular intervals.”

  “Are you sure its pure noise? An encrypted signal should look like that.” The best encryption techniques made the output appear random.

  Black shrugged. “You’ve got a point. Anyway, I’d like to ask Jackie Roberts some questions. She was there both at St. Jacobs and at Zeta Reticuli.”

  “So was Carson.”

  “Carson doesn’t have any physics training. Roberts does.”

  “All right,” Ducayne said. “I’ll let her know you’d like to talk to her.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Where have you been testing?” was one of Jackie’s first questions when she met up with Walter Black in the lab and he’d explained the problem.

  “We first powered it up on Selene’s farside, just as a precaution. When it seemed safe, we brought it back here to the lab where we have all our instruments. Why?”

  “In the Chara system, it was in a pyramid on a mountain with little else going on around it. At Zeta Reticuli, the signal relay would have been from something at the gas giant’s L5 point. I’m thinking you may need to isolate it from noise sources.”

  “Very likely, but what noise sources?”

  “You’re assuming that it’s based on some kind of gravity wave?”

  Black nodded. “Yes, of course. And the strongest waves are going to be from a ship dropping out of warp, but that happens well away from the planet.”