Freedom's Last Gasp

by M. A. Rothman

  “No,” Anna said.

  The hologram shifted his gaze to Priya, and she smiled and shook her head.

  “Okay, then. Relax, and you’ll be on your way in forty-five seconds. Thanks for listening patiently, and enjoy your trip.”

  Priya looked out the window at all the other tubes converging on the switching station. Off in the distance, some workers in vacuum suits were using a plasma cutter to service a tube car that had been lifted onto a service gurney. Then their capsule started forward once more, gliding smoothly along a magnetic rail before switching onto a new queue.

  “Do you know why it’s always quiet inside the tube?” Priya asked Anna.

  Anna shook her head. “I’m not sure.”

  “Sounds can’t travel through a vacuum.”

  “We’re in a vacuum? I didn’t know that.”

  “Of course. These cars can only achieve such high velocities when they’re in a frictionless environment.”

  Anna’s eyes widened with understanding. “That makes sense. No air, so no wind to slow us down. And we’re on a mag rail, so we don’t touch anything the entire time.”

  “That’s right. And do you know why sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum?”

  “Is it because…” The little girl pursed her lips, focused for a few seconds and then shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Because sound is actually a mechanical wave, and waves spread by vibrating particles in the air, but—”

  “And a vacuum doesn’t have air!” Anna announced triumphantly, as if making a new discovery.

  “Exactly right.”

  “Attention. Your car is next in line for departure. We are departing the Fort Lauderdale switching terminal in three… two… one…”

  Priya was pushed back against her seat as the capsule accelerated. A screen at the front of the capsule showed their speed, and in just over a minute they’d broken four hundred miles per hour.

  As Anna looked out the window, Priya settled in for the short trip, thinking about the cryptic email she’d gotten last night, and wondering what it meant.

  The sender was a Colonel Jenkins, from a part of the military she’d never even heard of. He asked to meet her in the hallway just outside her Relativistic Quantum Field Theory class when it was over. How did he know what classes she was taking?

  At first she was kind of intrigued, but now that she’d had time to think about it, the e-mail sort of weirded her out. Who was this guy? And more importantly, what did he want with her?

  Sitting in a booth at Mama Tina’s Diner, a hole-in-the-wall restaurant located just on the edge of campus, Priya’s stomach growled as she scrolled through the menu choices. She settled on a dish her mother used to make.

  “Priya!”

  She hit submit on her order and looked up as Karen Tian, one of her physics classmates, came over from a nearby table, bringing her plate of food with her. She set herself up across from Priya.

  “Hey, Karen,” Priya said. “I thought you only came to this place during late-night cram sessions when all the junk food machines go offline.”

  Karen shook her head, sawed at whatever gravy-covered thing she’d ordered, and popped a bite into her mouth. “Nah, this stuff is also good for hangovers. And let me tell you, don’t ever let anyone try and convince you that plum wine can’t get you drunk.”

  “Order ready,” announced the artificial voice of the electronic waiter. A slot opened in the device and a plate of steaming spinach dotted with cubes of cheese rolled out.

  Holding her hair out of the way, Priya leaned down and took a deep sniff of the ginger, garam masala, and garlic.

  “What’s that?” Karen asked.

  “Palak paneer. It’s a traditional Indian dish. Basically a spinach puree with Indian spices and chunks of cheese.” She took a spoonful and chewed on the rubbery vegan cheese. She wished she could find a place that used actual milk-based cheese, like her mom used to.

  She pointed her spoon at Karen’s plate. “And what’s that?”

  Karen sawed again at her steak-like object. “It’s an old southern classic. Chicken fried steak with sausage gravy. A total salt and fat bomb, but it’s great for that headache I’m trying to get rid of.” She swirled her fork in the lumpy grayish-white gravy. “Can you imagine they actually used to kill cows and use real cream for this stuff? It’s a miracle our ancestors didn’t die of embarrassment, much less heart attacks. Just the thought of what they used to eat…” She shuddered.

  Priya simply smiled. She remembered just how good the real stuff was, and her goal was to eventually find a way to get some. But she wasn’t about to tell Karen about her private little heresy. She didn’t need a lecture from someone who was barely able to keep up with the school’s course material.

  “Wake up.”

  The words were spelled out with taps on her scalp in Morse code.

  Startled, Priya popped her head up and looked around. Nobody in the lecture hall was paying attention to her. They were all busy scribbling notes as Professor Darby droned on like the giant bag of hot air he was.

  She whispered under her breath. “What the hell, Harold?”

  A barrage of taps rained on her head, and she imagined her hidden companion wagging his non-existent finger at her.

  “You shouldn’t sleep in a classroom. What if something happens that you need to be aware of?”

  “Give me a break. This QFT class is mind-numbingly remedial. Darby hasn’t had an original idea since… maybe ever.”

  At the front of the hall, the professor droned on. “An operator acting on identical bosons can be described in terms of N–particle wave functions, the first-quantized formalism, or in terms of creation and annihilation operators in the Fock space, the second-quantized formalism. This exercise is about converting the operators from one formalism to another—”

  “I can do this stuff in my sleep,” Priya whispered. “So why don’t you let me get back to it?”

  Harold remained silent. Either he had no good retort or he was just being moody.

  Harold was an AI, encased in a form that was much more advanced than anything Priya had ever encountered. It could shapeshift to physically mimic almost anything, including, as he was doing now, her hair and skin. He was also a family heirloom of sorts. Buried within him were memories of every Radcliffe from the Great Exodus until now.

  But he’d been particularly grumpy of late. Sometimes Priya wondered if he’d been mimicking her in the personality department as well. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, she got along better with Harold than with just about anyone else.

  The lecture came to a close, and the students began filing out of the auditorium. Priya hesitated to join them, thinking of the odd meeting scheduled for her in the hallway outside. It wasn’t in her nature to shy away from confrontation, but then again, she didn’t often have to confront unknown colonels with equally unknown agendas.

  “Miss Radcliffe?”

  Priya nearly jumped out of her skin. A tall man in a military uniform was standing right next to her.

  This must be Colonel Jenkins.

  “I told you you shouldn’t sleep in a classroom,” Harold tapped, still hiding in her rat’s nest of hair.

  The man extended his hand and gave her a crooked smile. “I snuck in while you were napping. Pretty ballsy to do in a level 700 class, but it fits your profile.”

  Priya shook his hand and silently fumed at Harold for not having warned her he was there.

  “I presume you received my e-mail last night.”

  “I did, but—”

  “I’ll explain on the way.”

  The colonel motioned for her to follow as he took a step toward the exit. Priya had to jog to catch up; the man’s strides were easily half again as long as hers.

  Outside the Arts and Sciences building, Jenkins turned toward the north part of the campus.

  “Where are we going?” Priya asked.

  The colonel gestured toward a tall building ahead of them.
“The Space and Science Museum.”

  The museum? Why? But Priya had a more pressing question.

  “Exactly what branch of the military are you with? Your signature in the e-mail listed UNSOC, but I couldn’t find a sensible definition for that online.”

  The colonel gave her a sidelong glance. “It stands for the United Nations Special Operations Command. We don’t advertise, but let’s just say we report directly to the UN’s First Council.”

  Priya was not that into politics, but she knew the First Council was the top of the governmental food chain. Which meant that whatever UNSOC was, it was a serious thing, with access to some serious people who controlled some serious funding. And if she’d learned anything in her recent years of rubbing elbows with folks in academic circles, it was that funding was key to making any advances in the sciences.

  At the entrance to the museum, the colonel flashed his badge at the guard on duty. The man nodded, walked them past a line of tourists, and buzzed them through a reserved set of turnstiles.

  Priya started to ask another question, but Colonel Jenkins held up a hand. “Let’s get to a secure area before continuing our conversation.”

  Priya pressed her lips together as she followed the man through the museum. To her surprise, her feeling of dread had vanished, replaced by a tingle of excitement. She hoped this was some weird recruiting strategy. She already intended to join the service after graduation, but if he asked her to join now, she might just say yes.

  As they walked past old mockups of early space shuttles from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a synthesized voice came through speakers in the ceiling.

  “On December 20, 2019, now known as 47.354 PE, Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, signed into law the formation of the United States Space Force. It would remain known as the USSF for decades, until forty-five years after the Great Exodus, on 45.30 AE, when the Space Force was moved under the purview of the United Nations.”

  Stardate 45 corresponded with the early twenty-second century. A time when the separate nations were in the process of merging under one umbrella government, led by the United Nations. It was also a period of global unrest. Priya’s history classes had glossed over that period of Earth’s history, but there was enough data on the web to glean the truth. There were riots, uprisings, general chaos. People resisted the change to a global government. That was understandable; change was hard. Some sources said that only the UN’s imposition of martial law was ultimately able to quiet things down.

  Priya followed the colonel past a scaled-down, but still huge, replica of a spaceship.

  “On Stardate 151.23, UN Secretary-General Natalya Poroshenko signed the final approval for building Voyager, humanity’s first interstellar space cruiser. Details of its construction remain classified, but the design is said to be based on a nearly two-hundred-year-old schematic drafted by Dr. David Holmes himself.”

  Jenkins ushered Priya through a door that read “For Military Personnel Only.” They walked down a hall and stopped in front of an unmarked metal door with no handle. A uniformed military policeman stood next to it, glowering.

  The colonel handed his ID to the MP, who ran it through a scanning device, handed it back, and snapped a salute.

  Jenkins hitched his thumb toward Priya. “I’ve preauthorized Priya Radcliffe for a one-day pass. I’ll be her escort.”

  “Yes, sir.” The sergeant, whose hand was never more than a few inches from the sidearm strapped to his waist, turned to her. “Miss Radcliffe, I presume you have a CAC on you?”

  Every student on campus had been assigned a Common Access Card. It was what allowed her entry into the various academic buildings. She dug hers out of her pocket and presented it to the sergeant.

  He ran it through his scanner. When a green LED lit up on the device, he handed the card back to her and pressed a button on a black box attached to his belt. Something buzzed, and the colonel pushed the door open and gestured for her to follow.

  She stepped through into a short, plain, unpainted concrete hallway. The door swung shut behind them, and Priya felt the air pressure change as it sealed itself closed. Her ears popped.

  Then a door at the far end of the corridor opened.

  The colonel started forward, Priya hurrying to match his long strides. “Getting permission to bring you here took more signatures than you could ever imagine,” he said. “But remember: everything you see and hear from here on in is classified.”

  They passed through the open door into a huge room that looked like a hangar. At its center, a large metal frame was being constructed by dozens of remotely operated devices. Some were welding gangplanks between sections of the frame, others were spooling wires from one end of the structure to another. Camera drones flitted through the air, taking images from every angle.

  “Do you know what you’re looking at?” Jenkins asked.

  Priya couldn’t suppress the smile on her face. Over the years, she’d seen plenty of space shuttles and other space-bound ships. She’d seen takeoffs and landings, sometimes from quite close. But this… this was something very different. The structure in front of her was only a small piece of a much, much larger ship. A ship she’d just seen a replica of, back in the museum.

  “I thought they were building this up in space,” she said, her heart racing. “I mean, it can’t really be—is this really a piece of Starship Voyager?”

  “It is.” Jenkins smiled and pointed from one end of the room to the other. “Priya Radcliffe, welcome to SAMER, the Starship Advanced Metallurgic Engineering and Research facility. This is the heart of Project Voyager.” With a curl of his finger, he motioned for her to follow. “Let’s introduce you to some members of the team.”

  Chapter Two

  Priya sat alone in Colonel Jenkins’ office. As she waited for the colonel to return, she fiddled with three small cubes of metal sitting on his desk. They looked identical, but they were different weights. A desktop digital scale confirmed it.

  “Harold, what do you think of these?” she said. “I wonder if it’s possible that—”

  “Be cautious.” Harold tapped on her head. “I detected a radio frequency transmitter activation nearby just as you began talking. You’re likely being monitored.”

  Priya’s words caught in her throat. Why would anyone be listening?

  Yet she trusted Harold. He was a gift from her parents, and though they didn’t have a chance to share much about him before they were killed, they had told her two things: to always keep him a secret, and to always heed his warnings.

  She pressed her lips together and tapped her teeth in a rhythm that the AI would detect. “Did I say anything wrong?”

  “Anyone listening may naturally wonder who Harold is.”

  She winced and cleared her throat, then fiddled with the cubes again and let out what she hoped sounded like a self-deprecating laugh. “I swear, if anyone heard me talking to a cat that isn’t even here, they’d think I’d gone mental.”

  “A cat?” Jenkins said with a wry smile as he walked into the office.

  “What? Oh, it’s nothing.” Priya wondered if Jenkins had been the one listening. “I have a cat at home that I’m always talking to. Anyway, I was playing with these cubes and by habit found myself talking to Harold.”

  “Meow,” Harold tapped.

  Jenkins chuckled. “So, what did you learn by studying those cubes?”

  Priya shrugged. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out they’re different metals. The lightest cube weighs a third of a pound. Assuming it’s solid throughout, and given it’s about 1.5 inches per side, I figure it’s aluminum.” She picked up a second cube. “This one is almost a pound, so I bet it’s some form of steel.” She picked up the heaviest of the three and smiled. “But this material is something new. The heaviest metal, excluding the extremely rare ones, is tungsten, and a 1.5-inch cube of tungsten would weigh just over two pounds. This thing weighs almost five.”

  The colonel leaned f
orward a bit, his elbows on the desk. “What does that tell you?”

  “Well, the highest elements on the periodic table are all radioactive, with half-lives measured in milliseconds. Since this cube is cool to the touch, it’s not obviously radioactive, and I doubt you’d have something radioactive sitting on your desk anyway. So I’m guessing someone has discovered a new island of stability. A nuclear shell construction that’s stable and off the literal charts with regard to density. There’s no other explanation I can think of.”

  Jenkins grinned. “Good. There’s no pulling the wool over your eyes. Let’s just say you’re probably right. The details of the metal haven’t been advertised outside of need-to-know circles, mostly because we aren’t sure how to make it.”

  “What do you mean?” Priya frowned. “I’m holding a sample of it.”

  “Yes, but we didn’t make it.”

  She was about to ask another question when Jenkins held up his hand.

  “Before you even ask, I can’t tell you how we’ve come into possession of it… at least not yet. We do know a lot about it, though. We’ve done an extensive analysis over the last century, and we know its atomic structure, the molecular bonds it forms, and its estimated half-life, which measures in the millions of years. More importantly, we know it’s the toughest, hardest, and strongest material we’ve ever worked with. Ideal for the construction of Voyager.”

  Priya hitched her thumb toward the hangar. “You mean you’re building with this stuff? Just that frame out there would have to be unbelievably heavy. How would you get that into orbit?”

  The colonel smiled wryly. “You’ve caught me in a little white lie. I told you that that frame out there is a piece of Voyager—whereas actually it’s more like a 3D blueprint for the actual ship. We build the prototypes to scale here on Earth, using more accessible metals, then we take detailed scans of them and have people in orbit build the real thing with that stuff.” He pointed to the heavy cube, then leaned back. “But I didn’t bring you here just to talk about metals.”