THE CAMBRIDGE ANNEX: THE TRILOGY

by Peter Damon

  “You don’t mean that, do you?” the Secretary General gasped.

  “I don’t,” Allan agreed. “But don’t tell them that.

  “Mr Secretary General, we are heartily sick of the espionage on us. We are committed to keeping our core technology to ourselves, but there’s a lot of other things we can share, but only when we feel able to trade on an equal footing with the countries of earth. They have to understand that the consequences of attacking us are the same as those incurred when attacking another nation, and not the inconsequential results of attacking an individual, or entering into a trade embargo with a foreign supplier,” he explained.

  “We are working on this, Mr Blake,” the Secretary General assured him.

  “Make sure they understand; we have sufficient evidence to begin taking retaliatory steps, and we are in a much better position to harm them than they to harm us. We will rescind our threat towards their earth-based facilities, but will prepare to remove every one of their satellites. Not just communication; we will remove anything and everything currently in space that is owned by the Russian Federation should they give us any reason for doing so.”

  Allan closed the link and wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. “Where’s Michael?” he asked of Oliver.

  “Still talking to the Chinese,” Oliver told him.

  “Glen made any progress?”

  “Hard to tell,” Oliver shrugged, his fingers moving as he continued to stay abreast of the media on earth. “Young Diane is becoming a real media player,” he chuckled, keeping an eye on her electronic presence. She could be outrageous where he and Robert could not, putting views out there that only she could get away with, but which cut to the essence of their situation. He hated to admit it, but he had a suspicion that her media ‘voice’ was bringing more people over to support Freedom One than all of the articles he and Robert had written.

  “Samuel, how are we doing?” Allan asked the big man over a communication link.

  “We’ll be having meat for supper,” he answered, bringing a smile to those in the control-room. “And we also have a load more spares.”

  “The dustbin?” Allan asked.

  “The twins are testing it,” Samuel told him, getting a nod he couldn’t see as a reply.

  Allan checked his watch and sighed. “I’m going to catch an hour’s sleep,” he told the others.

  +++++++++++++

  The asteroid, visible from earth as a new star in the night sky when the light of the sun struck it full on, finished moving into orbit, the confirmation greeted with a loud roar of approval from the Freedom One lounge where the off-duty crew had assembled to herald the achievement.

  Oliver relayed the news in a dozen different articles for various media groups, then went off to catch a couple of hours sleep.

  Matt, still at his control board, watched the spacemen finish working on a large frame out on their starboard side.

  It was huge, a square of outer-space enclosed within thin metal tubular spars fully a kilometre long on each side.

  A structure so thin and constructed of aluminium should not have been able to support itself, let alone capture space debris, and yet it was there and that was its purpose.

  Matt opened a new dialog box on his screen to peek in on its information feed, admiring the work Allan and the twins had completed in creating an object whose strength was not in the design of the structure, but in the design and use of HYPORT to support the structure, and give it purpose.

  The spacemen were returning to their SUVs. The twins sitting in the back of Maddy’s vehicle, glancing at one another’s monitors, using their own tablets to make small amendments to their app.

  “Ok. We’re ready,” they said, nodding in unison.

  “Matt, please move it out to its orbit,” Maddy told him.

  “Invoking app,” Matt told her, tapping the new soft-button displayed on his control-table.

  “Quiet,” Maddy barked as a dozen spacemen whistled and whooped as the fragile looking square frame moved with startling speed to take up station at 600 kilometres above earth.

  The twins watched their screens and nodded. Matt watched the same feed to admire how the HYPORT in small lengths of the structure helped hold the whole thing together. He had privately thought the thing too complicated to work and had to admit to being wrong.

  “Yes, it’s fine,” the twins murmured. “Proceed.”

  “Proceeding,” Matt grinned at the twin’s formality. He pressed the appropriate app, and the frame moved again, now moving rapidly in orbit about the earth, each orbit designed to take it through a slightly different part of space.

  As it moved, odd pieces of debris passed through the frame where a gravity-well hit them. Exiting the rear of the frame, the debris began falling towards earth where, within the space of a few hours, it would strike the atmosphere with enough velocity to begin burning up.

  The solution was so elegant and simple, Matt thought, passing Oliver a feed from one of the cameras positioned on a spar of the frame. Items struck the space within the area of the frame with incredible speed, far too fast for the eye or camera follow them, and were abruptly seized by a huge gravity-well, and exited with new mass, their added weight reducing their orbit to have them begin to fall to earth, and now slow enough in relation to the frame to be seen by the camera. It looked magical, as if object had suddenly appeared from another dimension.

  Matt monitored it, but the real monitoring was being done by the twins in the back of Maddy’s SUV. The Dustbin began a third orbit and the twins discussed the frame’s operation, making small amendments to their app. For over 20 minutes, the frame was stopped and started as further small amendments were made, until David and Thomas were satisfied that it could continue without such detailed supervision.

  “How are things?” Allan asked, returning to his control-table a couple of hours after leaving it.

  “Fine. The Dustbin is now operating,” Matt mentioned, rising to stretch.

  “Good, good,” Allan murmured, already becoming engrossed in his feeds.

  Matt smiled and went off to catch up with his own sleep pattern.

  On the night side of earth, people, alerted by friends and neighbours, came out of their houses to watch in amazement as the night sky was filled with showers of shooting stars. Soon, the spectacle was captured on YouTube and Facebook, images racing electronically in front of dusk, preparing people for the spectacle they were about to see.

  In space, Mickey and Maddy piloted two SUVs, following the frame as it did its work. Team members sat in the back, monitoring the Dustbin as an ever broader and deeper corridor of debris-free space was created.

  +++++++++++++

  Glen Schroder followed the usual early morning procedure, nodding to those he knew as they passed in the lobby, they going about their business, he returning under guard to the meeting room in which his interrogation was continuing.

  He still referred to it as a debriefing, in order to make the non-military personnel in the meeting feel more awkward. The military clearly had their own agenda, and it had more to do with implicating him in non-American activities than in learning how Freedom One could help improve the lives of Americans.

  They went through the metal detector, he and his assigned guard for the day, and moved on to the meeting room, his guard taking up his station across the corridor from the meeting room door. Glen entered, stopping when he saw the room was empty but for one person, her first visit to their meeting.

  “Chief,” he nodded, closing the door and sitting tentatively in his usual seat.

  “Glen,” Joanna acknowledged. “I thought we’d have a chat all on our own,” she told him.

  “General Mears doesn’t believe someone could have been on that spaceship for nearly a year and not have learnt something about its mode of propulsion,” she explained.

  “That makes one of us a fool,” Glen agreed.

  “And it’s not you, I assume,” she offered.

  “O
h, I don’t know. Not many people have managed to get into the White House through killing people,” he pointed out, referring to the general’s service record.

  “I see. No love lost between you two either,” she saw.

  “Yet each of the nations who have dealt with the ARC have had to have one like him; a senior military mind wanting HYPORT for military purposes. Otherwise we wouldn’t be in this situation,” he told her.

  “And what is this situation?” she asked.

  “Distrusted felons,” he replied.

  “Are you referring to us, or to them?” she asked.

  “Both. How you perceive each other,” he explained.

  “We’re not felons.”

  “Would-be felons, then,” he shrugged.

  “Would-be is vastly different from being,” she pointed out.

  “Tell that to the people languishing in Guantanamo Bay detention camp,” he suggested.

  The Chief of Staff sighed and opened the folder in front of her.

  “I have to decide what to do with you,” she told him.

  “I would much rather you consider what the US could do with an association with Freedom One,” he told her.

  “And why should I do that?” she asked, settling down to listen.

  November 23rd.

  Michael finished talking to Ricky and ran across to the waiting SUV to climb into the back and adjust the monitors for his viewing.

  “I thought you should see this,” Don told Michael from the monitor, and pointed to one of the feeds being displayed on the facing wall. Someone on Freedom One placed the same feed on one of the other two terminals in front of Michael, and he saw an image of earth from space, the Asian continent in late morning and, in the foreground, the little van that Matt, Jake and Cheryl had used to first lift into space. They had arrived in orbit before the ARC had arrived, and then had to wait for them, anxious that nothing had gone wrong on the other side of the earth. A new and much larger dish, and a flashing amber light, had been added to its roof.

  “We’re not going to have any vehicles left, the rate you’re using them for testing,” Michael joked.

  “Watch!” the professor told him, and sat down to direct the final preparations. “The van is transmitting a signal, and we have a telescope aimed towards that signal. Wherever the van goes, we’ll be able to see it through the telescope image,” he explained to Michael.

  “Are we ready?” he asked the others.

  “Go!” Don cried, pressing his finger to his table-screen.

  The van disappeared from the screen, and just the earth remained, a pretty enough picture with vibrant brown and greens peeking through swirls and dots of clouds. Almost immediately the image shifted and the earth disappeared off to the left as the telescope panned round to the right, distant stars becoming streaks of light as the telescope sought out the van.

  The van appeared, in a completely new position.

  Michael grinned while through the communication feed came the sound of gaiety from the control-room.

  “It moved,” Michael said, wanting to prove he wasn’t totally ignorant.

  His words caused an uproar, and Don, usually so reserved, tilted his head back to roar.

  “But it did, didn’t it?” Michael persevered.

  “Actually,” the twins told him, appearing to one side of Don, “it didn’t move at all. What it did was drop out of our space-time, and re-enter at another point in our space-time,” they told him.

  Michael looked at Don who, controlling himself, nodded.

  “And we did it right above Russia,” Pavel add from off-screen. “The man they thought to kill off.”

  “It’s repeatable?” Michael asked.

  “Oh, now, hold on,” Don said while the twins held their hands up in concern. “We’re just learning here. Everything is new to us. What happens if we wait longer before returning, for example? There are hundreds of questions we need answers to before we can say, definitely, it’s repeatable.”

  “But when will you think it safe enough to send an animal though?” Michael asked.

  “An animal?” Chas and Don all but chorused, and looked between them before looking towards Michael with some disapproval. “We don’t test with animals,” they told him, unintentionally mimicking the twins.

  “We don’t need to. We have monitors on board that tell us of any changes in temperature, humidity, pressure. We’ll also know of any variations to sound or light, chemical composition of the atmosphere. What exactly would sending an animal give us?” Chas asked.

  “Ok, my mistake. So what’s next?” Michael asked.

  “More testing,” the twins told him. “We’ll analyse the information and refine our model of space-time. The next trip will confirm our understanding of something more, after which we’ll test another variable.”

  “And another and another,” Don agreed. “With each test we will confirm something new, and speculate that little bit further.”

  “And you chose to do this right above the Russian observatories. No more hiding behind asteroids?” Michael said, wondering aloud.

  Pavel nodded, appearing on the monitor. “We now feel that we are so far advanced, that earth will take decades to catch up. We could show them the chemical composition of HYPORT, and it would not help them move in this latest way,” he said.

  +++++++++++++

  Joanna entered the room on the heels of the president and looked about her, surprised by the air of excitement within the room.

  “What?” she asked, her breech of protocol earning her a look of reproach over the edge of the president’s reading glasses.

  “NASA is reporting an instantaneous move of approximately 100,000 kilometres from one of the British vehicles.”

  “Confirmation?” Joanna asked as she followed the president into sitting at the table.

  Aides were busy working the phones and getting feeds from observatories to put displays upon the far wall, none as awe-inspiring as the hurried explanation as to why they had been summoned.

  A video feed woke and David Brookes, the NASA project manager who had the most dialogue with the White House looked towards them, clearly disturbed.

  “Mr Brookes, what can you tell us?” the president asked.

  “They’ve moved a vehicle instantaneously from one location to another. There were no normal energy emissions that we could detect; no heat, no light, nothing of that nature. However, LIGO felt it, and GAIS reported a momentary spike, so we know it did something fairly massive to gravity immediately before it went,” he explained. “The gravitational spikes are consistent with previous spikes we recorded while they were still en-route back to earth, so we now know that there have been earlier tests of this technology.

  “Ma’am; this is the holy-grail. These people have now got a means of moving faster than the speed of light, and they don’t mind us knowing about it,” he told her.

  “Was it manned?” Joanna wanted to know.

  Brookes shook his head. “We’re pretty sure it was not. It’s broadcasting telemetry that gives us an insight into what it went through while moving, but there’s no voice-signal being passed through,” he explained.

  “You’re able to intercept their communication with it,” the president confirmed.

  “Only what they allow us to read,” the man from NASA explained. “The vehicle is transmitting radio-waves, as well as their proprietary laser communication system. Now, that could be because they wanted to make sure the vehicle had every opportunity to reach back and communicate, or that they wanted to let us know what they’re capable of. We’re still unable to ‘listen in’ on their laser system. It’s not just that they may have encrypted or encoded the transmission; it’s that the system packages the transmission into the laser somehow, and then un-wraps the packages at the receiving end. Unless you know how it’s been wrapped-up, you don’t stand a chance in hell of unwrapping it.”

  “Ma’am, if we want in on this, we have to move quickly,” Joanna told the
president, her sense of urgency filling her with adrenaline.

  +++++++++++++

  In contrast to the main exhibition floor of the Manege in Moscow, the sub-basement room was bare and functional, the walls and floor bare concrete, utility pipes running down and across the walls, rather than within them. The room looked bare and incomplete, but had the advantage of having no hiding place for surveillance devices under wall, floor or ceiling panels.

  Lighting was provided for each individual station around the meeting table and only four of the seven in the room had turned them on, the others preferring to use their tablets in all but darkness.

  A single large monitor stood out from the facing concrete wall, a speck of light denoting the vehicle that seemed suspended in outer-space.

  They listened to the report from the observatory, staring at the monitor or at their tablet, none of them willing to look at another in the room and see the growing dissatisfaction they knew was there.

  The report finished and the communication line was closed. “Well?” the leader asked, his voice dripping with frustration.

  “A new method of propulsion, instantaneous over the 100,000 kilometres it travelled. We know little else,” one of the team told him.

  He banged on the table and sought the eyes of his team, his frustration making him shake. “We must find a solution to these people, otherwise there will be no Russia left!” he spat, his voice rising in volume with each word.

  November 24th.

  The Dustbin, but for two unscheduled stops; once to exchange a spar damaged by a piece of debris that had hit it, and another to re-align the struts after a slow degradation of its structure, continued to run rapid orbits about the earth, extending the area it had cleared of debris.

  Freedom One moved its own orbit up, into the area it had already cleared, and the American spaceship was left behind to make its own way, slowly and laboriously, up to the new orbit as it continued to try and shadow the larger spaceship.

  Mickey flew by it as he climbed up from earth with more supplies, docking and laughing with some of the other spacemen as they joked about its size and pace.