“Lord Captain,” said Mersenne, “it’s not as if people haven’t thought about this sort of thing. If rebels or terrorists could get their hands on antihydrogen, they could destroy a city. But it’s never happened.” He waved a hand. “Because units like the Howe DM-5 were designed not only to prevent such misuse, but to kill anyone who tried it.”
“I admit it’s a challenge,” Martinez said, then mentally gave himself an award for understatement. “But what other ideas do we have?”
The response was silence. Martinez turned to the video display and put up a schematic of his own yacht’s engine compartment. “This is my Laredo,” he said. “And this is what we’ve got to work with.”
Chandra stepped closer to the display and gave the image a ferocious look, as if she were trying to obliterate the problem by sheer force of will. “How can we reach the software?” she said.
“Some kind of proprietary coupling available at the factory,” Mersenne said. “And if you jury-rig a coupling, you still have layers of security to dive through, and if you fail, you get fried.”
Martinez was getting a little tired of Mersenne’s insistence that his idea was a nonstarter.
“I have an idea, Lord Captain,” said Lord Ahmad Husayn. He was a blade-thin man with a pencil-thin mustache and had been a weapons specialist on the Illustrious. “Not about the power source, but the triggering mechanism. We’re going to need to rig a proximity fuse of some sort to make sure that the weapon goes off when it’s supposed to. If we ever find out a way to create a warhead, we’re going to want it to go off at the right time.”
Martinez was deeply relieved that someone had offered a useful idea. “Very good,” he said. “Let’s look at the problem.”
Husayn called up a display and began a sketch, while Martinez and Vonderheydte watched with interest. Garcia and Elissa Dalkeith joined Mersenne and began a discussion in low tones. Chandra continued to stare furiously at the schematic of Laredo’s engine bay.
Ari Abacha continued to gaze at his coffee. Then, sighing heavily, he rose to his feet, walked to the coffee dispenser, and filled his cup. He walked carefully, as if his feet pained him. He put a pastry in the microwave oven, warmed it, then took the plate as he began a return to his seat. As he passed Martinez, he muttered, “Just go around it.”
“Sorry?” Martinez said.
“The DM-5 is armored. Don’t go through the armor, go around it.”
Martinez was bewildered. “Go around it how?”
Abacha only shook his head, then shuffled back to his table. But Mersenne had heard, and he turned around, his eyes wide.
“Quantum tunneling?” he said.
His words hung in the air for a moment, and then Chandra turned from the display. “The cladding on the DM-5 is too thick,” she snarled. “Quantum tunneling works on far too tiny a scale—you can’t jump a barrier that wide.”
She was right, damn it.
“Good idea, though,” Martinez said. “We’re on the right track. A conventional approach won’t work for us. As Lieutenant Mersenne has pointed out, all that’s been anticipated.”
Lieutenant-Captain Elissa Dalkeith raised a hand.
“Yes, Lady Elcap?” Martinez said.
Martinez was still surprised nearly every time by Dalkeith’s voice, which had the high pitch and lisping tones of a child. “It seems to me that the DM-5’s software is our problem,” she said. “We have to breach containment faster than the software can react.”
“And the software operates at the speed of light,” Husayn said. “So what can we use—a great big laser?”
Dalkeith pushed gray strands back from her forehead. “We already use defensive lasers to destroy missiles,” she said. “Why can’t we do the same here?”
Vonderheydte looked blank. “Do we have a laser large enough to destroy a missile? This is a civilian ship.”
So far as Martinez knew there were no powerful lasers on board, but he was willing for the sake of argument to assume that such a laser could be cobbled together.
“Let’s for the moment assume we’ve got a laser of sufficient power,” he said. “What happens if we use it?”
“We can’t put it at sufficient distance to be safe,” said Garcia. “It’ll be right there in the engine bay, and within a tiny fraction of a second of it firing on the container, there will be a release of energy sufficient to destroy the laser, and the engine bay, and the yacht as well.”
“But the container will remain intact,” Martinez said. “As will Conformance.”
Garcia shrugged. “I’m afraid so, Lord Captain.”
Oh well, Martinez thought. We didn’t have the laser anyway.
“A big damn mortar,” Vonderheydte said. “Fire a great shaped charge at point-blank range. Breach the cladding, flood the container with plasma, the plasma will melt the chips and set them off.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Mersenne. “The container is covered with sensors, and the software possesses enough situational awareness to detect when a projectile is on its way. There will be a release of energy sufficient to destroy the projectile.”
“Stick to the electromagnetic spectrum,” Martinez said. “We’ve got to be faster than the software.”
“The antihydrogen’s in silicon chips,” Dalkeith said in her lisping voice. “Held by a charge of static electricity. What can destabilize that, and quickly?”
“A blast of gamma rays,” Husayn said, as if reading from a mental list. “X-rays. Any kind of ionizing radiation, really.”
“No,” Garcia said. She swiped a strand of her bushy hair out of her eye. “The other end of the spectrum. But we’d need a colossal burst.”
Martinez felt he needed clarification. “A burst of what, exactly?”
Garcia blinked, then turned toward the snack counter and silently pointed at the microwave oven.
“There,” she said. “That’s what you want, only a million times more powerful.”
“Where do we get the power?” Dalkeith asked.
Garcia gave a little laugh. “Well,” she said, “we’ve got more than one yacht, don’t we?”
“What’s the matter, Ari?” Martinez asked as they left the ready room. “You seem . . . less than invigorated.”
Now that he’d set things in motion, Martinez was feeling utterly reawakened. He’d created teams to deal with aspects of the problem: Garcia, Mersenne, and Dalkeith to breach the DM-5’s cladding, Husayn and Vonderheydte to work out the fusing, and Chandra Prasad to work out ways to bypass Laredo’s safety mechanisms, the mechanisms that might prevent the boat from doing exactly what Martinez intended to do with it.
Ari Abacha had volunteered for none of the groups and had abandoned his coffee and pastry and shuffled out of the ready room as soon as the others had begun working at their tasks. Martinez had followed and intercepted Abacha in the corridor.
“Less than invigorated?” Abacha repeated. “Well, I suppose I am.”
“Is it the business with Chandra?” Martinez asked. “You’ll get over that quickly—take my word, as someone with experience. There will be plenty of girls on Harzapid.”
Abacha touched his perfectly groomed mustache. “Chandra? Oh, possibly, that’s a part of it.” He sighed. “I’m suddenly feeling very old, Gare.”
“But you’re not old. You’re only a couple years older than me.”
Abacha paused and passed a hand over his balding forehead. “I think I’m in mourning for my world,” he said. “It’s all gone, isn’t it? Or going?” He turned to Martinez, his dark eyes looking past Martinez into a shadowy future. “From now on it’s all battle and killing and looting, and us trying to turn a device that provides power and light into a bomb. That’s all we have to look forward to, isn’t it? Until the last one of us stands on a heap of corpses and proclaims himself king?”
“We don’t have kings,” Martinez said. Amid his infinite surprise it was the only response he could manage.
Abacha’s eyes shifted from the
indefinite future to focus on Martinez. “We will,” he said. “Whatever they call themselves, Megalords or Supreme Commanders or Sublime Potentates, they’ll be kings.” He touched Martinez’s arm with his knuckles. “You’re suited to this new world. You’ll do well—you’ll build all the bombs you want. You might be king yourself. Or Roland. Or maybe you’ll cut each other’s throats over it.” He blinked and touched Martinez’s arm again. “Sorry, Gare. That was uncalled for.”
“I’m not offended.” Martinez was far too surprised to be hurt, surprised not only at the bleak view of future history that Abacha had presented, but at a side of Abacha he’d never seen before. So far as he knew his friend’s attention had never extended beyond the good life, beyond drink and good company, pretty women and sport.
Abacha’s eyes glistened. “I’m going to drink some of Corona’s excellent liquor now, Gare,” he said. “I’m going to mourn the world that’s dead.” He turned away and began to walk down the corridor. “Join me later if you want.”
Martinez watched him shamble away, then returned to the ready room to help his officers build a missile.
Martinez sat in the custom seat of his simulator, lights and displays surrounding him in a semicircle, a fan purring somewhere behind his head. Chandra’s voice came out of the speakers.
“I’ve disabled the code where I could find it,” she said, “but I’m not convinced I’ve located everything.”
“You could run the simulation yourself,” Martinez said.
“I’d rather you do it.” Irritation showed in her voice. “You’re the damned yachtsman. You know which buttons to push.”
Martinez was in place to help remove recent innovations intended to preserve the pilot’s life. After Captain Blitsharts had gone spiraling off into the dark under full acceleration with his dead hand on the throttle, another element had been added to the software that allowed a third party to take command of the boat and return it safely to its berth. Martinez would use that to provide guidance to Laredo once it detached from Corona. The only problem was a second element of the new safety program, which flat forbade Martinez to accelerate the boat at a rate that would kill a human.
Martinez had assigned Chandra to the duty of altering the software because she had a diabolical talent for corrupting code and turning it to her own purposes. On Martinez’s last command, Illustrious, he’d discovered that Chandra had given herself database superuser privileges and rewritten her own personnel evaluation to make it more flattering.
Top marks for ambition, Martinez thought, as well as subversion. It was high time that she used her powers for good.
A tuneless, breathy whistle came from the speakers. As she worked, Chandra voiced whatever tune was running through her head. This might take some time.
Martinez relaxed into the acceleration couch that had been custom-molded around his body. Except that he had been wearing a vac suit at the time, as he would have in Laredo, and now that he was in his Fleet uniform, he fell into the couch as if it were an overlarge bathtub. At least the simulator had a pleasant smell, some kind of citrus-scented disinfectant, whereas fully suited in Laredo he could smell only his own suit seals.
The breathy tune came to an end. “All right, Gareth,” Chandra said. “Launch when ready.”
Martinez took the controls and shoved the throttle all the way forward. His couch shifted on its pneumatic supports to provide a convincing and somewhat exhilarating simulation of acceleration—the difference being that if the boost had been genuine, Martinez would have been mashed flat, and unconscious within a matter of seconds. Instead he watched the gauge that marked the gee force that he would have endured had his journey not been simulated, and then watched as the engine cut out at 21.3 gravities, in response to a programmed safety feature that Chandra had missed.
“Right,” he heard Chandra mutter. Then, “I found it. It’ll take me an hour or two to make sure I can disable it without also removing something we need.”
“Very good,” Martinez said. “Page me when you need me.” He hoisted himself out of the simulator and went down the stairs to the boat deck. There Laredo sat amid a scattering of components deemed no longer necessary: the acceleration couch, radiation shielding, much of the life support. The access hatches to the engine compartment were all open, and Garcia and Mersenne were involved in a discussion concerning how to attach new hardware to the DM-5 fuel source. Dalkeith watched while jotting notes into her hand comm.
“Get close enough,” Mersenne said, “and it’ll perceive it as a threat.”
“It’ll give us a warning tone if the Howe doesn’t perceive the threat as imminent,” Garcia said. “That’ll give us a good idea how close we can get.”
“At some point the warning tone turns into hard radiation,” Mersenne said. “Do you know where that point is? Because I don’t.”
Martinez saw that Dalkeith was standing on a drop cloth, and that she shared the drop cloth with magnetrons, waveguides, capacitors, diodes, and high-capacity transformers, all looted over the cook’s objections from the large, industrial-sized microwave ovens in Corona’s kitchens. She looked up as Martinez approached. “I’m generating some theoretical maximums,” she said in her child’s voice. “If we set up a proper magnetron array, we can generate a surprisingly large microwave burst before everything burns out.”
“How surprisingly large?”
Dalkeith showed him the calculations on her hand comm display. They were surprisingly large.
“What’s the range?”
“That depends. A microwave oven is a steel box that reflects the microwaves and contributes to heating the target, but we won’t have time for the microwaves to reflect even once. We’ll get a fraction of a second before either we succeed or the Howe unit destroys our array. So I’d like to do some experiments and find out exactly what the ideal range might be.”
“Carry on,” Martinez said.
Alikhan entered with a tray of cups and a vacuum flask of coffee. Martinez thanked him and poured himself a cup.
Garcia and Mersenne, in the meantime, had come to some kind of agreement to resolve their problem through experiments, and he urged them to coordinate their trials with those of Dalkeith.
“You know,” Martinez said, “if this works, we can’t tell anyone.”
Garcia looked up at him from her crouch near the scavenged electronics.
“We don’t want anyone to know this is even possible,” Martinez said. “So if we succeed, we have to hold this a complete secret. We don’t want to show terrorists a way to blow up cities.”
Dalkeith seemed relieved. “Thank you, Lord Captain,” she said. “That had worried me, also.”
Carrying his coffee, Martinez then went in search of Husayn, whom he found in the ready room.
Husayn, designing the proximity fuse, had the easiest task of all, because racing necessitated an impressive sensor array for Laredo, and all that was necessary was to define which sensor inputs would trigger the explosion. Husayn had essentially finished his work, but still needed to check it.
Martinez rolled his shoulders, undid a button on his tunic, and allowed a feeling of satisfaction to roll over him. The technical issues were being addressed and the project had a chance of success. He decided to go for a stroll to clear his head.
He took the elevator up to the dining hall with its spectacular waterfall. The air was filled with the tang of the sea. Crew were setting up the tables for supper, laying out crystal and porcelain. He saw Young Gareth standing on the lip of the fountain, staring down at the bright fish beneath the rippling water and touching a stylus to an oversized hand comm. He waved the stylus in greeting as Martinez approached.
“Hello, progenitor!” he said. “I’m trying to draw the fish, but it’s hard. I wish Lieutenant Garcia were here to help.”
“She’ll be free in a few days,” Martinez said. If we aren’t all dead.
“Are you working?” Young Gareth asked. “You’re all so busy all of a sudden.�
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“My day has been good,” Martinez said. “I’m blithe, perhaps even jocund.”
Young Gareth was impressed. “Jocund? Really?”
“Yes,” Martinez said. He plucked at the knees of his trousers and knelt by his son. “Now why don’t you show me your picture?”
Two days later, Martinez was back in the Laredo simulator, the hatch closed, the fan behind his head humming. He wore a virtual reality rig, and so a virtual navigation plot seemed to float in the air in front of him, with the yacht’s virtual controls just beyond.
He didn’t actually need to be in the simulator, but he preferred to be alone.
The weight of expectation was growing too heavy for company.
He breathed in the scent of citrus, and of gun oil. He had taken his sidearm into the simulator with him.
Corona was swiftly approaching the small yellow star Contorsi. Captain Anderson had asked Conformance for permission to do a course correction burn around Contorsi to place them on track for Wormhole Three, and Conformance had responded in the affirmative. The burn would have been the expected thing.
So far, so routine.
Martinez knew that Conformance would be doing its own burn around the small yellow sun to fall into Corona’s wake, but he couldn’t predict its track for certain. It might swing wide so as not to pile on too many gravities, but Martinez was inclined to think of Captain An-sol as the sort of smart, efficient officer who would welcome the opportunity for testing her ship and crew with a precise hard-gee burn.
But because he couldn’t be certain, his intended course for Laredo was a compromise, accelerating at a rate that would kill any human passenger, and intersecting a number of courses that seemed plausible for Conformance.
“Three minutes to course correction.” Vonderheydte’s voice came over the speaker.
“Acknowledged,” Martinez said. He really hadn’t needed the reminder—he had one eye on the chronometer.
Everyone on the ship was strapped into an acceleration couch for the burn. The fountain and waterfall had been drained, and all the fish and water tanks were secured for higher gravities. The crystal and porcelain had been placed in intelligent storage units that would provide them with exactly the amount of support necessary to survive any plausible acceleration.
The Accidental War Page 38