The Petrovski Effect: A Tess Novel

by Randy Moffat

  Now with the hanger doors firmly locked and the locals sent packing, Bear had turned the boys seriously loose on her and Q-Kink got busy adding their own modifications, mostly at night.

  In the mean time back at the Bat Cave he, Aziz, Petrovski, and Van Ziegler build a computer program and system that could calculate to the best of their ability the tolerances of the Petrovski effect on whatever chunk of matter that sat in the center of a working Alcubierre metric. It was critical head banging especially since the matter they programmed it for had the exact dimensions of a B-52.

  Bear and Q Kink Kommand arrived from Anglewood after the boys and the Wongers had been tinkering with the plane for two weeks.

  Jeeter was merciless with her looks externally, keeping her airborne trim roughly intact so she could still fly using conventional engines, but had basically given up enforcing control on the inside of the aircraft which now was only missing a few clothes lines hung with drying laundry to make it look like a poorly maintained insane asylum. The two paperclip accelerators had now been jury rigged into place. One sat roughly at the plane’s center of gravity with the rest of the Petrovski rig, while the other accelerator was connected to both the front and back of the plane so that ejected particles could travel along the mystery tubes—. A computer system to monitor the accelerator had been installed in the old engineering station located at the back of the cockpit. Off the shelf laptops, routers and power supplies were held there in a webbing of cargo straps and assorted colorful bungee cords bought by the gross at Home Depot. It made a demented spider’s web generally hooked or bolted to the bulkheads. RD-11 Computer and power cables ran like spider web through the length of the plane pretty much will-nilly—as if the spider was on Quaaludes. Cable ties secured cable to the walls and floors with a fine sense of the random. The whole was a model for what hurry and necessity unconstrained by time to seriously plan can get you. Finally came the worst time of the whole process. The power supply for the big accelerators had been put into the aircraft’s belly space. It initially formed a long series of heavy duty super capacitors that held electrical charge and released it on command. In their hurry the capacitors had been plunked down on top of many of the wires causing Johnson to cringe periodically. The Eggheads calculations showed that they would be good for perhaps two uses of the accelerators before their charge was expended. A late recalculation of power requirements and a soupcon of safety margin told them they were wrong and it needed fixing. They had required double the number of capacitors be shoved into the plane and these had almost been shoveled in on top of the original spread until they formed an untidy but nearly continuous mound, the bottom layers held in place by still more cable ties while those on top were held in place by more cable ties cabled tied to the previous cable ties. A misplaced decimal made for a final last minute correction to even that final array of conductors. They poured in a bunch more at the last minute so that capacitors now filled the bulk of the belly of the bird.

  Their mass pressed them against the fuselage side walls and ceiling. Where she once had carried bombs, now she toted electrons—and lots of them. The haphazard patch-board feel of the plane’s guts was enhanced by the fact that the pile of electrical junk meant that once the plane was in flight the aft accelerators could not be reached from forward as there was no longer any way to wriggle through the mounds of equipment in her guts.

  Bear and company’s arrival completed the Q-Kink team on hand and they promptly installed the new and poorly tested software package in the on-board computers up in the cockpit. Bear was rather startled to discover the team reporting her ready for her first operational test just four days after his arrival.

  He was standing in the hanger looking at the hulking plane when he heard the final report from a sweat soaked Johnson and Pinta. He nodded, grasped Jeeter’s arm firmly, held up a finger to the others and pulled him over to a corner of the hanger.

  “Take her up tomorrow night or the next morning and if you can keep from crashing her with the proboscis on her nose and butt and that mountain of weight, then keep on going and take her over to Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. We will run our operational test out there. O’Hara has basically squared it away with the Air Force and I will make the final call in a few minutes to set it up. Check weather for A second flight the next day. We will leave Edwards to somewhere like Puget Sound and back with holding over China Lake air space—it’s a nice empty piece of desert where crashing airplanes won’t hurt much . . .”

  Jeeter nodded and pursed his lips as if sucking a sour apple candy. It had become a habitual expression working with the quirky Q-Kink for whom the word ‘neat’ never appeared to compete with the word “fast.”

  “I can tell just by looking at her . . . she’ll wallow through the air like a whale with all that gear in her colon and the crap you got hanging off her!”

  Bear nodded and met his eyes.

  “That’s why we pay you the big bucks, man. I am not risking the rest of the team in her until you have shown us she can stay in the air long enough for Petrovski to punch a button.”

  Jeeter actually smiled at that. He and Bear saw the world through many of the same lens.

  “After I show she can fly, am I taking her up on the operational test alone?”

  “No. I will be with you.”

  Jeeter smiled again. Bear might be nuts, but he had most of the same gonads Jeeter had.

  “Gutsy or insane?” Jeeter said admiringly.

  “Well . . . I owe lots of people money. It’s a no lose situation.”

  Jeeter laughed, genuinely enjoying Bear’s gallows humor and having more fun than he had ever had in his life. He looked only fifty-nine at that moment.

  “Is anyone else coming so I can take a stab in the dark at planning a hopelessly wrong weight and balance for this tub?”

  Bear bit his lip.

  “If I read this team right, most of them will want to come. I will pick at least one more and let you know who. I may pick two though, let me think on it.”

  “I’ll plan for both loads if four of us don’t max her out—Eat light, take a crap and shave too, those capacitors weigh a ton! We gotta lighten ship somewhere.”

  Bear nodded and Jeeter swaggered away—fully busy at last as a pilot and not as a test pilot consultant constantly figuring airframe trim and parasite drag.

  Wong sidled over immediately to stand by Bear.

  “Dibs on going!” He said before Bear could speak.

  Bear shook his head.

  “Already took the seat.”

  “Dammit!” Wong ejaculated. “That ain’t fair . . . Bear . . . I mean most exalted boss!”

  “Probably not, but I will go, Number 1. I want you to take the data from the test and everything else up to this point to Admiral Dyer and explain how we all died for our country if it goes wrong on us.”

  Wong nodded dutifully—he understood duty but hated its requirements just now.

  “Nothing will go wrong.” He said dutifully again though none too certainly; he had been peering at the chaos inside the plane.

  Bear laughed.

  “We’re screwing around with the fractals of the world. ‘Wrong’ could be so many things it makes the mind reel.” He paused a moment. “I think I also want Johnson along—she has earned it and her skill set may be useful in being inside the test rather than out.”

  “No eggheads?”

  Bear hesitated.

  “I am still thinking on that one. I am not sure I can afford to lose anyone from the brain trust.”

  “What about Maureen?” Wong asked.

  “Hell no! Definitely not Maureen! I need my head on my shoulders. If anything happened to her I’d kill myself.”

  Wong grinned mischievously.

  “Gallantry! You just made me 200 bucks.”

  “What?”
Bear asked confusedly.

  “The pool . . .” Wong explained. “There were several bettors that said you could not bear to leave her behind and would take her along on the test flight, but I figured you would want to protect her. You’re an old fashioned bastard. Your armor is showing. Personally I think protecting her won’t do you any good . . . she’ll probably kill you.”

  “Hmm.” Bear said. It was the first time he realized how far knowledge of his relationship with the ‘eight’ had spread. His affair with Maureen had been done with maximum discretion to avoid any nuance of favoritism, but tongues wagged in a closed village like theirs. It probably had only taken one momentary sighting of a weak moment between them for the news to race through the whole community like a wildfire across dry grass. Of course, she was so amazingly hot to him that there had been several of those weak moments for the Q-Kink paparazzi to catch them in flagrante despite his best intentions. Bear braced his back in annoyance. Hormones could get in the way of an image of invulnerability.

  Wong himself had a girlfriend in Kansas City who visited his quarters on the odd nocturnal adventure. She was rumored to be a nice Chinese Girl who worked in a Cantonese restaurant in the city, but no one had been introduced to her and so had not bothered to learn her name. They called her simply ‘Dragon Lily;” but she was an outsider, not part of the team. There was a good chance she was an illegal immigrant, but Wong and the Lily would never be a hot topic of conversation since they were merely lovers. Bear and Maureen were more than open game for the wagging tongues since they both belonged to the necessarily limited Q-Kink population and its leadership besides. The whimsy of the gossip god was measureless.

  Bear got past it by ignoring it.

  “Anyone who wants to see the test should meet in Edwards RAPCON tomorrow at 1400 hours. They can watch it on radar.”

  Wong serioused up or at least his face did.

  “What about the communications and weapons team still working back at the bat cave?”

  “Bring them all out here. In fact . . . we have been working them pretty hard lately and I have been looking for a reason to make everyone take a break. Order all of them to come to Edwards and sleep in deep and hard until the test. We’ll make it a busman’s holiday and a little party.”

  The glowing radar screens in the RAPCON at Edwards Air Force Base had seen it all. Most US secure testing of aircraft for decades was conducted at the base isolated in the High Mojave Desert. The narrow room was basically an air traffic control facility with multiple radars along two sides—the director of operations there had objected to letting the bulk of the Q-kink team squeeze in, but the top secret classification they carried backed by Dyer’s name made them put their fur back down along their necks.

  The exasperated director of the facility had finally turned them over in defeated disgust to a bearded contactor with a gut the size of Colorado that strained his ‘Counting Crows’ world tour t-shirt. His name was Smith. Smith acted put out too, but it was clear he enjoyed the bustle and being the center of attention—things that must come rarely to a dark room in an obscure corner of a largely secret wasteland.

  The radar in front of Smith showed the military restricted airspaces of Edwards, China Lake Naval testing station to the north, NASA’s small Goldstone tracking station and the Army’s Fort Irwin. The airspaces abutted each other in the center of the greenish screen—the largest military airspace over land in the US.

  The bulk of the Q-kink team were gathered in a crescent behind him, those in back craning their necks to see around those in front, until Wong had the front rank kneel down. They were still getting annoyed looks from the rest of the RAPCON troglodytes who resented their routinely reverential hush being disturbed by tourists—either that or they simply envied Smith hogging them all for himself.

  Out on the runway the B-52 rolled into takeoff position. It had survived the test flight the previous day with Jeeter’s simple comment ‘What a pig!’ Bear filled the co-pilot station next to Jeeter because he could. Johnson sat in the seat behind him and beside her sat Aziz at the paperclip accelerator computer. Aziz was his compromise guy. He felt they could not risk Antonin, who had literally begged to come along and come close to crying when Bear refused. Bear was inflexible—damned if he would risk the inventive brain behind the drive project until they had the slightest notion of what might happen to the plane inside the effect. For all they knew it was antithetical to human life and they would croak the moment the Alcubierre Field was activated though they had half tested it on a mouse in the cave and a bit later on Dragon Lily’s miniature schnauzer and both animals survived quite unharmed. It proved nothing. Mice are invulnerable and schnauzers invulnerable ratters. Petrovski still looked like a whipped dog though Bear noticed he showed up this morning bright and early. Youth was resilient.

  Jeeter traded cocky Air Force banter with the tower and then received clearance to takeoff. Edwards went through periods of busy business. This was not one of them and the field had few customers right now so they were alone on the runway. The big plane’s engines roared and the decibel level rose enormously as the big Pratt and Whitney engines dished up power and pushed the plane rapidly forward.

  Bear lifted his cell phone to his mouth and keyed the voice feature . . . the earplug’s wire snaked up under the ear-cup of his helmet so that with the volume cranked up he could almost hear Wong in the RAPCON. It had required special permission to use the XO’s cell in the RAPCON, which was a classified area in itself.

  “Kink Zero Niner . . . this is Kink Zero Six . . .” Both phones were burn phones they had bought in a CVS pharmacy the night before. Their numbers unknown and unlikely to be monitored directly by deliberate eavesdroppers.

  “Kink Zero Six . . . Come back?” Wong’s voice came over the link using the standard commander’s call sign.

  “We are rolling Zero Niner.” Bear said simply.

  “Roger . . . burn rubber.” Wong replied succinctly.

  “Estimate 15 minutes to our ‘Insha Allah’ altitude.” The words put him for a fraction of a moment back in the half ruined Baghdad neighborhood where he and his platoon had conducted patrols. He could at that nanosecond scent the spicy smell of Swarma in the air. He could almost see the garbage and rubble, feel the blast furnace heat and hear the excited babble of endlessly excitable Arabs who seemed to live their lives in a continuously adrenal laced state when in conversation. The sensory feelings of those army days flashed across his mind’s eyes and he almost sneezed from the dust in the air. His platoon from that time had been the closest team he had ever led until this moment. He was part of that kind of team again. He was one with the many again. His stars were aligned because those around him were a good team and one entirely of his own choosing. He thanked those stars and put himself firmly in the now with a smile as the plane clawed itself into the air.

  “Tell the team it has been great working with them.” Bear said simply. The implication was anything but simple, but Wong heard it loud and clear.

  Wong was silent for a long minute then replied solemnly.

  “Roger. You too . . . Sir.”

  Bear hit the off button and watched Jeeter interestedly. The plane had cleared the ground and was climbing steadily in a large spiral that would keep it within the controlled airspace.

  He keyed his helmet microphone.

  “How we doing back there, Mr. Aziz?”

  Aziz was crotched in front of the computer consoles that ran and synchronized the two paperclip accelerators and their simplistic particle feed mechanisms.

  Aziz nodded absently, and then remembered the marbles in his head made little sound and fumbled for his microphone switch.

  He found it, craned his neck and beamed at Bear, pushing the talk button.

  “Power is good and both accelerators are perfect so far.”

  Bear glanced over at Johnson who was s
itting beside Aziz but looking uncomfortable with ragged edges that spoke frankly of heading down slope towards illness.

  “You OK?” Bear asked,

  Johnson gripped her own switch convulsively and squeaked out an answer.

  “I just this minute realized we were going to try this thing out from the inside.”

  Bear tried hard to look stern, but instead broke down and laughed. He patted her knee.

  “Look at it this way . . . if it doesn’t work you will be among the first to know.”

  She gave him a smile back that was as weak as the jape.

  Bear added kindly.

  “Nothing for it now . . . there is no way Jeeter is going to turn this airplane around. He is having more fun than he’s had in years. Right, Colonel?”

  Jeeter turned his head so that those in back could see his smile in profile while still keeping his eyes on out the windows and on the instruments.

  “Piece of cake this! I remember that in 1956 the B-52 that dropped the first H bomb on Bikini had it blow up thirty seconds too early so the poor bastards in the plane caught some of the actual nuclear blast. The report I saw said they were “Badly beaten up, but survived.” ‘Badly beaten up’ is a euphemism for ‘scared the living shit out of them.’ The trick is to keep on flying even if your chair turns brown and you suck the fabric of your seat so far up your ass you can see it on your tongue. That’s what real airmen do.”

  He laughed uproariously at his own humor and so did Bear—the response was more distant from the back, but the military style bravado oozing from the front seats must have seeped in through the olfactory nerves and settled them somewhat since Aziz especially looked barely worried at all and Johnson quit gripping her chair arms until the knuckles turned white.