Base Metal (The Sword Book 2)

by J. M. Kaukola

  The lights went down, and Firenze flipped the holotable switch. With a clank and hum-hiss, the glass case flooded with steam. A moment later, the corners began to leak, and the clinical wet stink of media-steam mingled with the Kessinwey stench. Firenze's glasses pinged, dialogued with his mobile box, and then transcribed the Plymouth blueprints from his HUD to the volumetric bath. Firenze moved his left hand, sensors in his gloves translated the motion into commands, and lasers danced in the fog. A three-dimensional projection of the Plymouth took shape, broke apart, and zoomed in on the port lift drive. The massive ARC950 rotated in the air, its cylinders and coils breaking apart and combining, labels appearing and vanishing at Firenze's whim.

  With the display under control, he excused, "I'll try to keep this quick, so we don't get a bath." He didn't bother to ask why the government couldn't afford a dry projector. The only responses would have been dismissive laughs and punchlines without context.

  The darkened room did bring one benefit, though. In shadow, the faces vanished, lit only by the neon laser-flash and half-cloaked in the diffusing fog. That alone did wonders for his nerves.

  Firenze spun his left hand, and the model rotated. He closed his fist, and it froze. With a quick flick of his index finger and thumb, the top of the Dirac Cycler popped free, internals blossoming into part-by-part views.

  Clausen's voice, deep and sure, cut through the fog. The sergeant asked, "Okay, Princess, how's it work?"

  A second voice - Rutman - added, "And try to focus on how we can avoid blowing ourselves up."

  Firenze drew a deep breath and tried to tune out the world, to focus only on the moment and the task. Finally, he'd been given a challenge he could beat - a test solely based on his intellect. No running. No shooting. No goddamn concussion grenades. For the first time in months, he got to be the Smartest Guy in the room, and it felt good. His worst self wanted to bask in that momentary glory, to salve away weeks of humiliation with short-term preening, but his better angels reminded him of the price of pride, while his pragmatism told him that he still had to spar with these guys.

  No, this was definitely not the place for posturing. Being useful was more than enough.

  He'd spent the last three nights tearing into the briefing packs, trying to translate them into a useful form. This was familiar territory, after all. The briefs contained all the data he needed, but they were constructed like the worst sorts of textbooks: walls of formulae and charts without context. He'd dealt with plenty of profs who had this problem - brilliant thinkers who couldn't express themselves to anyone not already their peer. Teaching was supposed to be about turning knowledge into an unfolding path for the curious, presentations like the white-binders he'd been handed were data-walls designed to intimidate the uninitiated. The best term for this kind of instruction was "less than useless", but he was well-versed in just this kind of translation.

  Firenze started, "Hey, everybody. How's it going?" He let the grumbled replies stand and asked, "Before we get started, I wanted to get an idea of what we know and what we need to know. I'm going to throw some terms out, let me know if you're comfortable with them. Negative mass? Drive field? Bergman occlusion?"

  "How about, 'where not to stick a wrench'?" Clausen asked.

  Firenze paused. He chewed on the question, but also on the slightly-metallic edge of the safety cup. That pseudo-joke was a flag, telling him, politely, to keep it basic. He answered, "Most anywhere, to be honest. We'll start at the top."

  He began, "These drives work on the Bergman principles, named after physicist Evran Bergman. His pre-War work proved the existence of negative matter outside of pure mathematics."

  Rutman interjected, "I thought we had negative matter pre-Collapse?"

  "No. You're thinking of antimatter, and it's far more docile. That statement alone should worry you." Firenze joked. The room stayed silent. "Okay, wrong crowd." He admitted, then continued, "Negative matter is weird. I was researching it in my spare time-" someone coughed, "-and the phrase I found that best describes it is 'stupidly, dangerously, impossibly useless'. Once it exists, it reacts inversely to ordinary matter. Most notably, it is repelled by gravity - it falls up. This makes it useful for lift drives, and it's why we use it, but it's not the only property. N-matter scatters from ordinary matter and from itself. Left to its own devices, it would break down into particles and chase itself to the edges of the universe." He paused for a moment, let the room grasp what he'd said, then continued, "It gets weirder. If you pushed an n-matter brick, it would fly back into you. If you pulled it, it would run away. It's attracted to like, repelled by opposites. You have to trick it into doing anything useful, and it's dangerous to handle. Inordinately so."

  "What, does it eat you?" Hill cracked.

  "Yes." Firenze answered.

  There was a long, silent interval that only Firenze found funny.

  Firenze clarified, "It doesn't really try to eat you. But it also kind of does. It's important to understand: this is an exceptionally rare substance, so much so that we've never seen it in nature. It's antithetical to existence. Take normal matter - what I'm describing is sloppy, I admit - but, if you're trying to 'make' ordinary matter in an accelerator, it requires a lot of energy to slam everything together and try to get a few particles out. This matter can be 'released' back into energy - think radioactive decay. At the base, the fundamental truth is: it takes lots of energy to make matter, and lots of it comes back out when you break it - think nuclear bombs. Follow?"

  In the darkness, Firenze could almost make out the bobbing heads. In a way, he felt a little guilty. He wasn't truly accurate with his descriptions, just 'true-enough' to get his points across. He'd imagine an actual n-matter expert would probably want to strangle him for this degree of simplification, but then again, how many physics classes started with the phrase, 'assume a uniform object'? Courteous lying was sometimes part of teaching.

  Firenze explained, "Negative matter, in keeping with its inverse nature, behaves the opposite way. It releases energy as it gains negative mass, and then removes energy it as it negates."

  "What?" A voice asked.

  Firenze agreed, sympathetically, "I know! It's weird. As negative matter - let's call it n-matter - is formed, it releases energy as if an inverse amount of normal matter had been annihilated. Mass and energy are linked, but n-matter perverts the normal equivalence. This is why Bergman got ignored for so long. Now, after his work with Indra Singh, there was no denying that this stuff could exist, because it did, but it's still not something our monkey-brains want to deal with. If you make two kilograms of n-matter, you get a yield of energy - mostly heat and light - as if you'd just annihilated two equal kilograms of matter."

  A voice he didn't know asked, "So, what's the issue? We've got reactors. We can do security."

  "The problem is that this seems to violate thermodynamics. The laws of the universe say that you can't get free energy and mass. But don't worry, despite being weird, n-matter is also conscientious, so it resolves that paradox for us! At the risk of anthropomorphizing it-"

  "What?" That northern-accented voice belonged to one of the engineers, Gerdoux.

  Firenze defined his term, "Making it seem human."

  "Okay. Go on."

  "At the risk of making it seem human, maybe it knows that it's wrong for our universe, and tries to slide out the back door." Firenze half-joked, then explained, "Again, inverse. Normal matter decays, releasing radiation. N-matter 'negates' - it starts pulling in energy, and rapidly. It's highly reactive, massively endothermic. Everything around it gets drained: heat, light, electromagnetism, even bonds in ordinary matter get harvested for energy, and as the n-matter gains energy levels, it sheds mass, returns to equilibrium, and it removes all the 'extra' energy injected into the system at its creation. Think of it as a big pit that needs to be filled before it vanishes."

  Firenze saw the heads bobbing in the darkness, caught in the neon flashes of the projector.

  He contin
ued, "So, yeah, it's hazardous. The theory is that in extreme situations at the edges of the universe, the negative matter is produced - but only as particles - which negate themselves against their surroundings, and never in enough mass to have a noticeable effect. Bergman provided a means to harness it in substantial terrestrial quantities - enough to lift vehicles, even cities. We're dealing with a substance that is ridiculously difficult to handle, which emits tons of energy when produced, and then tries to negate itself back into oblivion. It's completely unique and whole a lot of fun." For most people, that last statement might have been sarcasm, but most people weren't Grant Firenze.

  Lieutenant Poole interjected, "So the Greens weren't kidding when they said my car was toxic?"

  Firenze hadn't noticed any officers sneaking in. He tried to act natural, as if this didn't add any stress, and answered, "Correct, but not in the way most mean it. The Bergman drive produces an absolutely absurd amount of energy. Read that as 'heat' for most purposes, but there are some kinds of radiation that have to be shielded, hence the size of most lift casings. Remember, the n-mass is being used to lift the vehicle. Now, on something like a car, that's a small amount of energy from the sump, maybe equivalent to, I don't know, a rather large nuclear bomb."

  Firenze heard the shocked whistle from that stinger, and he tipped his safety-cup over the projector in acknowledgment. He said, "Consider that, the next time you take it for a spin. You're harnessing a nuke to fly. Now scale up for something like the Plymouth, and the energy is somewhere closer to a not-insignificant fraction of solar output. That's world ending."

  That got some whispers, including an indistinct, "That's insane!"

  He explained, "It's not crazy, it's just... let's say you have to build for safety and take advantage of n-matter's natural properties. Remember how I said it negates itself? It absorbs energy from its environment? This can be harnessed. You start small, generate a few negative particles, then a few more. You let the newly-released energy of the new particles get absorbed by the very-slightly older ones as they negate. Each cycle, you make little more, until you've got atoms. Keep increasing the n-mass, slowly but surely, until you have a few micrograms. Then kilograms. Then tons. Now you're riding on the chariot of the gods. The occlusion cycle keeps the system stable, as energy gets poured out and sucked away.

  "When it's time to lower down, you just dial it back, produce a little less n-mass than the last iteration. Slow is the key here. You make a little less each time until all you have left are the particles. There's a reason these engines take so long to spin up and down. Now, there's always waste, even in a precision juggling act like this. You know the huge radiators on any lift vehicle? Those are for the tiny, tiny fractions of stupendous heat being lost. The armored belts of variable density shielding materials? For the even smaller loss of cute little rays - like gamma. And the power plants, the giant fusion reactors on the airship? Those are to pump energy into a negative matter buildup, to give them something 'easy' to chew on."

  There was a moment of quiet, until Rutman asked, "And we're going to break this thing? On purpose?"

  "Well, fortunately, the systems are designed to obliviate themselves in the event of failure. It won't end the biosphere, it will just either detonate like a multimegaton bomb, or consume that much energy, or maybe a little less than either, but both flavors at once. I, for one, am looking forward to finding out." Firenze quipped. He sobered and added, "I'm not gonna lie: the first time I read the papers, I freaked out. Aerotech building this thing was hubris on a mythic scale. Us trying to seize it from a bunch of jumped up mercenaries? It sounds like sui-"

  A new voice interrupted him, "It sounds like the culmination of a brilliant run of gamesmanship."

  Firenze snapped around to see where the voice had come from. A man stood framed in the door, short of stature, but long in shadow. The phantom leaned casually against the frame, his hands plunged into his coat-pockets and teeth gleaming in the projector-flash. He rose, slowly, deliberately, and stepped into the steam and shadow.

  The stranger didn't so much walk as uncoil with every step, like a calamitous clockwork engine, his strides winding between barely-constrained shifts and tics. His gray eyes flashed in the darkness, and his Cheshire grin split the fog. He couldn't have been more than a few years beyond Firenze, but his eyes were older than any Firenze had ever seen.

  The stranger stopped at the projector threshold, one hand balanced against the rising steam-plume, catching lasers in the beaded condensate. He turned his palm, watched the neon-beads flash like starlight in the shadow, then met Firenze's stare with his own. There was something about the way the stranger smirked, something terrible, as if he'd been the confidant for all Firenze's darkest secrets, here to remind him exactly when and where he'd transgressed.

  Firenze fell back, felt his back press against the sticky-wet of the whiteboard. His hair stood on end. His stomach clenched. Somewhere deep in his lizard-brain, ancient memories commanded him to flee, for the man before him was death.

  The stranger slid through the shadow as a demon, his perverse grin and shining eyes piercing the flashing clouds. Firenze's breath caught. He pressed against the wall, unable to run, unable to fight. The room was filled with soldiers and killers, professionals, but even the wolves recognized the dragon, the atavistic fear impressed into all the naked apes who'd escaped their ancient cradle. This was the snake, who lurked in the grass. This was the cat that prowled the night. This was was the eagle who descended from on high. Firenze's fingers closed on the aluminum marker-shelf, grease squelching through his whitened knuckles.

  The stranger spoke, with a voice smooth as oil on water, and said, "It is a brilliant gambit. When confronted by an opponent who possesses overwhelming force, that force must be negated with a suitable shield. In this case, a shield of fire, ice, causality, and mass casualty. It is efficient. It is poetic."

  Firenze tried to swallow, but his throat wouldn't close. The stranger's smile broadened.

  Sergeant Clausen burst through the haze, interposed between Firenze and the stranger, and shattered the man's spell. "Who are you?" Clausen demanded.

  "Antonius Berenson, special adviser." Berenson made a show of clutching his hand over his heart as if struck by the lack of recognition. "I trust that my reputation precedes me?"

  "We were warned." Clausen said. The sergeant kicked the power cord from the holotable, caused the lasers to fade and the mist to settle. The lights flashed back up, and Clausen said, "We were told not to trust you." Firenze heard the tone in Clausen's voice, knew the sergeant was warning him, warning everyone, 'Stay on guard.'

  "Wonderful." The man replied, "Advising is so rewarding when everyone disregards my counsel. You would imagine Cassandra a model for success?" Berenson surveyed the room. All around him, the soldiers had risen to their feet, fanned out to control the area. Improbably, his smile widened, as if the tension in the room was fueling him. He gave half a laugh, then admitted, "I will confess that not trusting me is reasonable. I would expand the maxim, however: 'do not trust'. If a speaker is human, then they are lying." He rolled his gaze towards Firenze and declared, "I claim to speak only truth, which means I can never be trusted."

  Clausen interposed once more, and demanded, "What do you want?"

  That got another chuckle. Berenson stared up at the larger man, unintimidated, and said, "I wish merely to continue listening and to provide the context in line with my role. Mister Firenze was delivering a decent justice the direness of our predicament, but I have additional information I thought I might contribute. After all, I am an advisor."

  "What's that?" Clausen demanded.

  Berenson smirked and paraphrased back, "'Speak now and begone?' How courteous."

  Firenze had been wrong when he'd thought Berenson's voice smooth. It wasn't flat at all, but a sing-song nested in subtle, careful cadence, as if he spoke in poetry instead of prose. The realization made Firenze's skin crawl all the more.

  Clausen,
however, was having none of it. The sergeant laid out his demand, "You have something to add? Do it. Else, sit down, and stop showboating."

  Bizarrely, Berenson's grin took on a note of respect, perhaps even affection. He bowed slightly and said, "Of course, sergeant. If you would listen, I could add perspective. I know our opponent, and he is not interested in this airship or its hostages, nor even the untrammeled power of the mighty ARC950. For all their flash and thunder, these are stagecraft - the sleighted hand and spun cloak. The key is hidden within the noise: our opponent is harvesting strand."

  "How would- why?" Firenze heard himself ask. He'd already started to form the broad outlines of the engineering 'how', but the possible reasons seemed absurd on their face. He reformed his question, "Why would they want to do that?"

  "An excellent question." Berenson replied. He turned to an angle, so he could speak to everyone at once and continued, "Strand is the crystalline wonder of the modern age, the foundation of our shining Babylon. But why this, now? I have a question for you: the first lift drives Bergman drew up, the ones Indra built, how large were they?"

  The room hung silent. Firenze offered, "Stadium sized, and-"

  Berenson cut him off and pushed the question, "How much power was needed to run them?"

  "Dozens of reactors-"

  "Precisely." Berenson agreed, terminating the dialog, "The first drives were massive, ungainly behemoths, starved for power and unable to achieve sustainable n-mass. Yet now we can fit them inside a car. What changed?" He did not wait for a reply. "Strand. Deus ex." He let his words echo in the room, gave his audience just enough time to taste the leading edge of a begged question, and then pressed on, "Like those ancient stage-gods, it comes as called, and delivers as we demand. Did you ever wonder at our good fortune? When the first Massive Bore punched through the blackened Phobos skies, what did they draw out? When man ripped the fabric of spacetime and drew back the reality curtains, what did they find? Strand. Perfect in every way and just where we needed it." Berenson snort-laughed, amused by a joke only he understood.