Into the Light

by David Weber

  If Robinson did take damage that got through to the core hull, it was massively armored in five meters of what the Hegemony had called choham armor. Humanity had renamed choham “battle steel,” because the Hegemony’s name for it had struck someone as too close to “Chobham,” a purely terrestrial armoring system which had been in use for over half a century even before the invasion. Wilson was actually a bit surprised they hadn’t just gone ahead and called it Chobham, since it was very similar conceptually to the original Chobham. It consisted of multiple, thin barriers of tysian sandwiched between much thicker, and incredibly tough, layers of spun krystar and ceramic strands. Krystar all by itself was far more resistant to both kinetic and directed energy weapons than any purely Terran material had ever been, but its primary function was to absorb and channel damage, not to actually stop it. That was the task of the tysian, an even tougher alloy whose molecules had been partially collapsed. Its density was many times that of osmium, the highest-density stable element known to pre-invasion humanity. In fact, it weighed so much that only something the size of a starship could use it. On the other hand, a one-centimeter plate of tysian would have laughed at a sixteen-inch shell.

  Under the circumstances, he supposed, sixteen feet of that sort of armor might be considered adequate. In addition, however, parasite hangars and service facilities formed the next layer in, followed by the crew’s personal quarters, all wrapped around the essential power and environmental systems. In short, it would take a lot of damage to drive her out of action, and she would be pounding the everliving shit out of whatever was shooting at her in the meantime.

  Plus, of course, the fact that she could outrun—and run away from—anything the Hegemony had.

  Alec Wilson sipped coffee, watching the enormous ship growing before his very eyes, and thought about that. And the more he thought about it, the deeper his satisfaction grew.

  . X .

  SPACE PLATFORM BASTION,

  L5 LAGRANGE POINT,

  AND COLD MOUNTAIN,

  TRANSYLVANIA COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA,

  UNITED STATES

  “I’d like to open today’s session,” Warren Jackson said, “by pointing out the way this just gets more … frustrating as we go along.”

  “And what brought that up this time?” Trish Nesbitt pushed her counter-grav float chair back from her console and turned to give him a quizzical look. “I mean, aside from supervisory grumpiness.”

  “I’m not even sure what ‘supervisory grumpiness’ is.” Jackson gave her a suspicious look.

  “It’s the way you get when something is bugging you, and you decide to share it with the rest of us. Usually at great length,” she told him with a smile.

  “Should I bring this back up the next time—in, oh, like seventeen minutes from now or so—when you go off at these idiots? Trust me, this one—” Warren twitched his head at the holo display over his own console, which showed a dense spread of text and equations “—is a doozy, even for them.”

  “What have they done now?” Chester Gannon’s hologram asked in a resigned tone as he tipped back in his own chair. Unlike Nesbitt and Warren, the former Lawrence Livermore physicist was ensconced in his “home office” back in North Carolina, attending their twice-a-week conference remotely, which imposed a light-speed delay of just over one second in the conversation loop. All three of them were accustomed to that by now, however, and Warren and Nesbitt didn’t begrudge him the comforts of home. He was the Assessment Team’s lead expert on the Hegemony’s power systems, but he’d actually begun consulting with Judson Howell and Fabienne Lewis well before the team had been formally set up under Jackson’s leadership. He’d been offered the lead position, in fact, but he’d turned it down. He had many strengths; administration and patience were not among them, and he knew it.

  “Well, I was actually following up on something Trish pointed out a long time ago,” Jackson said.

  “Something I pointed out? So whatever has a bee in your bonnet or a hair up some other portion of your anatomy is my fault?”

  “Exactly.” She made a rude gesture, and he laughed. “Truthfully, you did start my mind—such as it is—along its current trajectory way back when you were pointing out the way the Hegemony fail-safed its counter-grav so that it couldn’t reverse polarity and suddenly start generating a gravity field.”

  “So this is from that long ago?”

  “Please.” He gave her a quelling look. “It’s not like we haven’t all had other things on our minds between then and now. But I was looking at something else last week—the tweak the PAF wants to make to the Starfires’ counter-grav—when I hit one of my old notes from our initial conversation about it. So this week I’ve been poking at it in my copious free time and I started by going back through your memo on the original counter-grav’s … superabundance of fail-safes, shall we say?”

  “Oh.” She cocked her head. “In that case, I don’t suppose I should feel too wary about this, should I?”

  “Only if it blows up in my face. Again.”

  “Wonderful! In that case, why don’t you go ahead and share your current ‘Why I hate the Hegemony’ with us?”

  “Well, I’ve figured out why they were worried about somebody doing it. Reversing polarities, I mean. It’s because it’s possible after all.”

  “Really?” Gannon frowned, then shook his head a second later when Jackson’s raised eyebrow reached Earth. “Oh, I agree it was probably inherent in the math, but I’d have thought that even the Hegemony would’ve followed up on it if it was really possible. Or practical, at least. Out of curiosity, if nothing else.”

  “The one thing we’ve learned is that ‘curiosity’ and ‘the Hegemony’ don’t belong together in the same sentence, Chester,” Jackson pointed out, and Gannon snorted.

  “Fair enough,” he acknowledged. “But in that case, you’ve probably just answered my question about why they didn’t.”

  “Actually, I think there might be a couple of reasons,” Jackson said more thoughtfully. “One of them is their fabled lack of interest in anything outside the existing status quo. The other is that if they got too carried away with it, it looks like they could actually generate an artificial black hole, which could be sort of unfortunate for anything around them. Of course, doing that would have presented its own nontrivial challenge—one that’s probably more up your alley than mine, really, Chester.”

  “In what way?” Gannon frowned, then raised a hand before Jackson could reply. “Never mind. I was having a dim moment. Power requirements, right?”

  “Absolutely.” Jackson nodded vigorously. “If I’m reading this right, they’d be pretty much—you should pardon the term—astronomical at the other end of the scale.”

  “Still be interesting as a purely theoretical exercise, though,” Gannon said thoughtfully, running one hand through his sandy brown hair. “Assuming we could come up with the power, at least.”

  “Oh, if we could, I think it could be a lot more than a theoretical exercise,” Jackson said.

  “You’ve got a planet you want to suck into a black hole somewhere?” Nesbitt inquired.

  “I’m sure there are a couple of planets somewhere in the galaxy that no one would miss, but, no,” Jackson told her. “It’s just that one of the reasons I’m so frustrated with our super cautious Hegemony counterparts is that the model I’m looking at right this minute suggests that a black hole might just crack the interface between normal space and phase-space without a phase-drive.”

  “Excuse me?” Gannon sat up straighter.

  “I don’t know if it would do any good,” Jackson said with a shrug. “But it could be sort of interesting to find out, don’t you think?”

  “I can see how that kind of concentrated gravity well would weaken the wall between n-space and phase-space, but you’d have to kick it with something more than just a black hole.” Gannon thought about that for a moment, then grimaced. “Did I just say ‘just a black hole’?”

 
“Sounded like it to me,” Jackson said with a smile.

  “Hmmmm.” Nesbitt frowned thoughtfully. “You know, a phase-drive uses up a lot of volume—and mass, for that matter.”

  “That may be true, but even assuming it was possible to crack the wall without a phase generator—and actually cross it in the process, I mean, instead of just making a really spectacular explosion—we’re not talking just a little difference in power requirements here. The phase-drive’s an energy hog, but this would be literally, not just figuratively, orders of magnitude worse than that. So, unless you’ve got a small star tucked away in your hip pocket somewhere—”

  Jackson shrugged, and Nesbitt chuckled appreciatively. Gannon didn’t, though, and Jackson frowned at the physicist’s suddenly thoughtful expression.

  “Chester?”

  The other man just sat there, staring at something only he could see.

  “Chester?” Jackson repeated rather more loudly, and Gannon twitched.

  “Sorry,” he said, “but I just had a thought.”

  “We noticed,” Nesbitt said dryly.

  “Well, it was sort of wild. But there might just be something to it.”

  “To what?” Jackson asked.

  “Why is the phase-drive so big?” Gannon asked in reply.

  “This is a trick question, right?” Jackson said, frowning at the non sequitur.

  “No, I’m serious.” Gannon waved one hand. “The real reason the phase-drive is so big is that it needs so many nodes. It has to rupture the p-space wall simultaneously across the entire surface of a three hundred sixty-degree sphere big enough to enclose a starship, right? And each node actually creates only a conical rupture zone. So, it’s not really just the power requirements that make it such a mass hog. It’s the fact that you need so many nodes—literally hundreds of them, for one of their dreadnoughts—spread around the hull. Right?”

  “I suppose so. But isn’t that sort of an inseparable part of the engineering?”

  “Sure, for the phase-drive. But if what you’re saying about black holes and the wall holds up, then we wouldn’t need all those nodes.”

  “No, you’d only need somewhere around … oh, ten or twenty thousand times the dreadnought’s power supply. I would imagine that many antimatter plants would tend to compensate for any savings in nodes,” Jackson pointed out.

  “Sure, but p-space is essentially an energy state, looked at the right way. A very high energy state; one of the functions of the phase-drive is to protect a ship traveling through it. And each successive ‘layer’ is a higher and even more intense energy state.”

  “Sure.” Jackson drew out the single syllable and looked quizzically at Nesbitt, who simply shrugged, watching Gannon intently.

  “Well,” he said, “assume that somehow a hole opened in the phase wall. What would that look like?”

  “Probably a vest pocket quasar,” Nesbitt replied after a moment.

  “Exactly!” Gannon beamed at her.

  “And what, precisely, besides a Really Big Explosion, would that give us?” Jackson asked skeptically.

  “I’m glad you asked!” Gannon beamed even more broadly. “As it happens, I have a theory about that.”

  * * *

  “YOU’RE JOKING, RIGHT?” Dave Dvorak asked across the table.

  Fabienne Lewis and her husband, Greg, had joined the Dvoraks for supper in their suite aboard Bastion. It was a family gathering—discussing, among other things, plans for the upcoming wedding between Maighread and Raymond Lewis, not “business”—but, Dvorak being Dvorak and Lewis being Lewis, what their respective spouses referred disrespectfully to as “shop talk” had been bound to rear its ugly head.

  “No, I’m not,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Gannon seriously wants to build this thing?”

  “Yep. I pointed out that things would get just a little lively if his numbers were off.”

  “I suppose that’s one way to describe a several megaton explosion.”

  “Oh, lots worse than that, really. He’s talking about a cascade system.”

  “Cascade?” Dvorak picked up his beer stein. “What kind of cascade?”

  “Dave,” Sharon said warningly. He looked at her quickly, and she raised an accusatory index finger.

  “Just because you’re the cook doesn’t mean you get to drag us all off into the weeds.” She gave him a stern look. “Now that Malachi’s off with the Space Marines, I’ve finally got a break from the dinnertime history discussions. You are not going to replace them with ‘shop talk.’ I thought we’d had that conversation?”

  “And you thought that because you had that conversation it actually wouldn’t happen?” Greg Lewis shook his head.

  “Anyone’s aspirations should always exceed the achievable,” she replied. “And if I use a big enough club, I might actually make some progress.”

  “Not this time.” Greg grinned. “Besides, if I have to put up with Fabienne bringing this home and pounding my ear over it, I don’t see why you shouldn’t, too. Misery loves company, and all.”

  “Yeah, sure! ‘Pounding your ear.’ Like you weren’t just as bad is she is.” Sharon rolled her eyes. Before the invasion, Greg had been a senior aerospace engineer with Lockheed, and he’d been up to his hip pockets in the design of the Planetary Union’s spacecraft from the beginning.

  “Some truth to that,” he conceded. “But I really think you should make an exception to the no shop talk at the table rule.”

  “Or we could just adjourn to the living room and get away from the table,” Dvorak suggested.

  “Don’t you dare!” Sharon shot back. “I am not leaving without my crème brûlée!”

  “I think that’s what Dad’s counting on, Mom,” Maighread said with a chuckle. Her father was an excellent cook, but he wasn’t a very good baker, and his desserts tended to be very … basic. Which was why she had prepared her mother’s favorite dessert in all the world.

  “Devious, underhanded, unprincipled, evil diplomat that he is,” Sharon said darkly. Then she sighed. “All right. I recognize defeat when I see it, and I have no intention of rushing my enjoyment of Maighread’s handiwork. So go ahead. Go ahead!”

  “Thanks, Honey.” Dvorak smiled at her, but there was genuine gratitude in his tone, and he blew her a kiss across the table before he looked back at Fabienne. “You were saying something about a ‘cascade system,’ I think?”

  “Yep. What he seems to think he might be able to do is to design a—well, call it an energy siphon, for want of a better term. The basis would be something like the current phase-drive, but with a unidirectional ‘node’ designed as a sort of phased array. It’s not my area, by any means, but the way I think of it is putting together a concentric series of nodes. The outer ring would break the phase wall; the next ring in would break the wall between alpha and beta phase-space; the next would break into gamma, and so forth. Theoretically, there’s no limit to how high he could go—assuming his model holds up and he wants to build the damned thing big enough.”

  “My God.” Dvorak took another swallow of beer and shook his head. “I’m assuming he does understand what would happen if he could manage something like this?”

  “You mean if he lost control of it?” Fabienne snorted. “Oh, I think you can assume that. I figure we could build it in, say, Ganymede orbit. I mean Jupiter’s got a lot of moons, so it probably wouldn’t miss just one of them too much. On the other hand,” her expression turned much more serious, “he’s right about the kind of power source it could represent.”

  “And it’s sure as hell something that would never occur to the Hegemony,” he said thoughtfully.

  “I’m inclined to say that it’s something that would never occur to anyone who’s sane,” Fabienne said wryly as she picked up her coffee cup.

  “Sure, but Chester’s from North Carolina.”

  “Excuse me?” Fabienne looked puzzled.

  “Beneath all that polished, sophisticated surface of his, h
e’s a Southern boy, Fabienne. Hell, Trish Nesbitt’s a Southern girl!”

  “And your point is?”

  “My point is that the Hegemony is so cautious and cowardly it makes itself stupid in a lot of ways. Round these parts, we do stupid in a whole ’nother way. I can’t quite decide whether our people’s motto should be ‘Hey, y’all! Watch this!’ or ‘Somebody hold mah beer!’”

  Fabienne laughed so hard she spilled a little coffee, and Sharon shook her head, blue eyes twinkling despite her martyred expression.

  “Actually,” Fabienne said after a moment, mopping up coffee with her napkin and an apologetic expression, “there’s probably something to that.”

  “And I think maybe we aren’t really the first species to think that way,” Dvorak said, and his tone and expression were both much more serious.

  “What?” Fabienne cocked her head.

  “I’ve been running those data searches I told Judson I would,” he said, “and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that there was something to my initial suspicions. The Hegemony’s historical record has been edited.”

  “Edited, Dad?” Maighread asked, watching her father’s face.

  “Edited,” he repeated with a nod. “Whoever did it did a really good job, but we’ve found six what you might call ‘highly suspicious’ references. Not much out of a hundred and fifty thousand years of recorded history, but I don’t see how they could be accidents.”