Weapons of Choice

by John Birmingham

  “Sir, the captain regrets that he’ll be delayed somewhat, though he hopes to be along shortly. The number three catapult is acting up again. Chandler has gone down to the flight deck to personally kick its butt and curse up a storm.”

  Kolhammer smiled at the image. The Clinton’s CO had a notoriously combustible temper. It was distinctly possible he was doing just what Judge had suggested. But Kolhammer wasn’t about to second-guess the carrier’s captain. He was already too deeply mired in the political swamp to which Duffy had alluded during their interview. Indeed, a good part of each day was eaten up balancing the competing interests and agendas of the disparate forces under his command.

  The Australians and the French, for instance, maintained an icy reserve with each other at best. This was due to the decision of France’s new National Front government to renew and expand their nuclear test program in the Pacific. The relationship between the two governments had deteriorated so far that ambassadors had been recalled and billions of dollars’ worth of trade sanctions were being declared. As professional as both navies were under normal circumstances, such a climate wasn’t conducive to joint operations.

  Meanwhile the Malaysian government had flip-flopped on three separate occasions, first committing to the Multinational Force, then withdrawing, then recommitting, and so on. Kolhammer had twice personally flown to Kuala Lumpur to seek assurance from the country’s defense minister that Malaysia would meet its treaty obligations, only to land back on the Clinton to the news that they would do nothing of the sort.

  And of course, there were the Indonesians. If his feuding allies and the feckless Malays were a pain in the ass, the Indonesians were a situation screaming out for radical butt surgery. He had them out of sight and out of mind for the moment, running submarine drills to the north. But he was going to have to bring them back into the fold sometime soon. The State Department weenies were insistent.

  Kolhammer actually envied Guy Chandler for having gremlins in the number three catapult. If only his problems could be that simple.

  “Right then, Commander,” he said. “What do you have for me today?”

  Judge consulted his flexipad with an apologetic air. “How’d you feel about a quick trip to the exotic and mysterious city of Kuala Lumpur, Admiral?”

  “Oh, jeez,” Kolhammer sighed.

  Rosanna Natoli’s eyes lit up as her friend reappeared at the door of the Clinton’s Media Center.

  “How’d it go with the Hammer?” she asked, using their favorite name for the fleet commander. It was not entirely respectful.

  The New York Times feature writer rolled her eyes and replied in her best Sergeant Schulz, “I know nuffink! Naaarrffink!”

  Natoli snorted. “And the mystery ship?”

  Duffy shrugged. “Some corporate gig gone wrong. ‘Seabed mapping,’ he said. It was strange, though. Even though he made it seem routine, there was something about it that had him more excited than he was letting on. I tell you, boys and their toys. Speaking of which, you wanna go watch the bomb loaders work out? The cute ones are usually down in the gym about now.”

  “You fucking nympho.”

  JRV NAGOYA, 1233 HOURS, ZONE TIME: JANUARY 15, 2021

  As the two reporters settled themselves onto exercise bikes in the Clinton’s main gym, six senior Project researchers parked themselves in front of LG flatscreens and engaged the preliminary sequences required for a full-spectrum run on the Nagoya’s Quad System. Manning Pope stared into the soft glow of the superthin display panel that lay directly in front of him. The screen was only 4mm thick, and it seemed as though the data was floating in space. Pope’s head tilted slightly to one side as he tried to come at the dense matrix of symbols and numbers from a variety of different angles. After a few minutes of wagging this way and that, he pushed out his lower lip and turned to Murayama.

  “At point-zero-one, I’m sure we can do this,” he said, almost to himself.

  Professor Murayama grunted an affirmation, but he wore an expression of concern. Still, if he had any doubts, he didn’t voice them.

  The Project was a seventy-nine-billion-dollar effort to field-test a number of basic assumptions about the feasibility of combining a heavy-ion collider, a quark-gluon plasma imploder, and a rotating photon splitter in order to transfer a nanonic explosive package from an originating point to a target destination without having to travel through the space that lay in between. It was, in essence, a teleporter. Just like in Star Trek, except that rather than moving hopelessly complex human beings across thousands of miles of space, it was designed to move a very small, very simple warhead directly into the mass of a selected target—such as the brain stem of Mullah Ibn Abbas.

  In Manning Pope, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, had retained the world’s foremost expert on the engineering of spacetime foam, and set him working hard at the second great militarization of Einstein’s theory of relativity. They also had an overweening egotist whose only real interest was in the opportunity the Project provided to spend other people’s money on his personal obsession—FTL, faster-than-light travel.

  Pope’s incipient mania and a couple of breathtaking developments in quantum computing had moved the entire schedule onto the fast track. The senators currently overseeing the mission were understandably pleased. Their Japanese, British, and Russian counterparts were all likewise thrilled at the prospect of having an exciting new way to kill Chinese infantry and Taliban jihadis. And Pope had never felt the need to burden any of them with details concerning his research.

  Now on the verge of proving his FTL theories, Pope seemed to hesitate.

  A quick, stealthy look passed between Morley and Dunne, but neither said anything. They’d never seen Pope or Murayama look anything other than painfully arrogant, so this sudden change in character set off alarms. But nobody really cared what they thought. And anyway, this might be an opportunity for them to watch Kolhammer beating on the boss again, which was such an appealing thought that Morley had arranged to trap any incoming communications for covert storage on his own flexipad. If they blew circuits all over the fleet, like last time, Kolhammer would go postal for sure, and that sort of footage could keep a guy entertained for months on a long voyage.

  As the Quad came online, each team member responded with a slightly increased heart rate, slightly shallower breathing, and a measurable change in galvanic skin response. They were all excited, no matter what their private qualms.

  WETAR STRAIT, 1234 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

  While Pope’s colleagues set to their preparations, maybe a dozen pairs of eyes throughout the entire task force were directly fixed on the giant scientific ship. Two sailors on the destroyer trimaran HMS Vanguard, enjoying a furtive cigarette to mark the end of their watch, speculated on the contents of the oversized megatanker. Neither guessed correctly.

  The pilot of a Marine Corps F-35, climbing through five thousand meters above the task force, happened to cast her gaze down at the same moment, but the jet quickly slipped over the eight-hundred-meter length of the Nagoya, and she took in the four strange, bulbous pods on her deck without really registering. The pilot had clocked some serious hours during the last fortnight’s exercises, and the sight of the Nagoya was entirely routine to her now.

  A bored fourth officer on the bridge of the Japanese Nemesis cruiser Siranui trained a pair of vintage binoculars on the distant form of their mystery guest, but his thoughts were mostly back home where he was certain his two girlfriends must have discovered each other by now, given his ill-advised decision to start banging a couple of Office Ladies dorming on the same floor of the same singles complex.

  Throughout the rest of the task force a small number of sysops routinely scanning the threat bubble scoped out the “ghost ship,” probing her annoyingly effective electronic defenses with low-grade scans, looking to pierce the black hole that enveloped her. The temporary community of task force Elint operators were agreed that a fully amped blast from a Nemesis
array would strip her naked. But of course they weren’t allowed to do that, so during rare moments of downtime they dicked around with low-power blinkscans, feeling out the Nagoya’s electronic perimeter.

  After the infamous brownout, Commander Judge had quietly and deniably encouraged such unlicensed shenanigans. Had he known what was coming, though, he would have junked his career and ordered all of the group’s Nemesis arrays tuned in and burning bright, 24/7. But nothing had even remotely suggested that things were about to unravel aboard the Joint Research Vessel.

  PROJECT CONTROL, JRV NAGOYA, ZONE TIME: 1235 HOURS, JANUARY 15, 2021

  Pope seated himself at the command deck of the control room. With little to do as his underlings worked their consoles, he was able to sit back and savor the moment, to drink it in as a curiously loose feeling crept over him.

  He almost smiled. If he’d been wearing slippers he might have kicked them off and put his feet up. Instead he sat rather regally in the center of things on a large leather swivel chair that Morley and Dunne called “the Kirk.” The lighting was dim. The monitors threw off just enough light to read a book and anyway, he thought, there was something about the moment that lent itself to a bit of dramatic staging. The only sound, besides Morley’s labored breathing, was the deeply satisfying rapid-fire snapping of keys as the Project staffers entered Pope’s revolutionary new data.

  Having nothing to do at this point, he checked to make certain that the closed-circuit TV was recording the moment for posterity and arranged himself in a suitably commanding pose for the video.

  “Ms. Dunne,” he said quietly, causing her to jump in her chair.

  “Yes, Professor,” she replied, worried that he’d observed some grotesque fuckup in the settings she’d just entered.

  “Relax, Dunne. Nothing to worry about, I merely thought that, as the youngest member of the team and of course, as a lady,” he teased, “we might give you the honor of launching.”

  “Me?” She gaped as everyone turned to stare. “Me?”

  “My word”—Pope grinned coldly—“they really do give away the degrees at Caltech these days, don’t they. Yes, you. If everyone else is ready?”

  Morley spun on his seat, ripped out a brief string of commands in his staccato, two-fingered typing style, then continued the spin to bring himself back to facing the group.

  “Done deal!”

  Pope just shook his head. “Young man,” he said, “when generations yet unborn come to study this day, the greatest mystery won’t be how we managed this grand achievement decades ahead of time, but rather how we managed it at all with a moron piloting the accelerator. Ms. Dunne?”

  Still reeling, Sharon Dunne swiveled to face her large screen. She reached out and stroked it with one long, black-nailed finger. The image display cleared, then another tap brought up one giant icon. It had been a joke, actually, suggested by Morley. The Big Red Button That Doesn’t Really Do Anything.

  Dunne looked over her shoulder at Pope, who nodded. So she gave her colleagues a thumbs-up, then pressed the same digit to the screen.

  Belying its name, the button went click.

  The disaster was a few seconds unfolding. A coiled heavy-ion accelerator boosted two baskets of uranium nuclei to fantastic levels of energy before smashing the countercyclical beams head-on, very briefly re-creating the ten-trillion-degree environment that had existed roughly one microsecond after the Big Bang. Protons and neutrons were annihilated, breaking down into a superenergized blob of quark-gluon plasma.

  The team watched a schematic representation of the process on their personal view screens, direct exposure being out of the question. Murayama, the creator of the imploder that sucked up the plasma in the next phase, nodded briefly as the amorphous energy cloud was instantly metacompressed by explosive magnetic rams.

  The process temperature soared by a factor of 1019, reaching the fabled Planck’s constant as the quark-gluon bubble imploded to a sphere with a density of ten trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion kilograms per cubic meter. Indeed, it was so dense that Pope and his crew had just created the first synthetic wormhole, an insanely impressive achievement, worthy of Nobels for all.

  But it was only a job half done. Pope felt his heart beginning to race as his own unique contribution came online, a Casimir Inflator that set the wormhole spinning at a fractionally sublight speed before firing an array of high-powered lasers into its maw, to push the throat out before it could collapse inward.

  “Firing up the disco ball!” Morley called out as a ring of perfectly reflective mirrors began to rotate at two million rpm. Two hundred and thirty meters away dozens of beams of coherent light skewered into the mirrors, striking them at a shallow angle that reflected the negative beam pulses half a degree away from their paired positives. The negatives were shunted down a cavity resonator and into the mouth of the wormhole. The nanoscale hole sucked in the lasers, as expected. It inflated, also as expected.

  To this point everything had gone as predicted.

  And then the process went native, swallowing the chamber that was meant to contain it, sucking in energy like Poe’s maelstrom and “spaghettifying” the very matter that had given it birth, stretching and eating the world all around. Inflation took place instantaneously, the gross tonnage of the Nagoya being drawn into the throat like taffy, snuffing out the lives of the only people who possessed any chance of reversing the process, or even explaining it.

  Manning Pope died, smiling and unaware.

  Pope’s wormhole, which should have stabilized at three microns in diameter, instead blew out into a swirling lens of elemental colors fifteen thousand meters across before dissipating just as quickly. In that brief period, however, it punched through the veil separating two universes.

  HMAS MORETON BAY, 1235 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

  “Some people,” muttered Rachel Nguyen, “really get the shit end of the stick.”

  She was staring at a flexipad image showing a CNN report out of the Indonesian Exclusion Zone. A woman’s yellowed eyes burned back at her from within a sunken, malnourished face, imploring her to do something, anything, to save her children from famine and disease. But she and they were almost certainly two years’ dead by now.

  Rachel thumbed the corner of the screen, shutting down the link and pushing the thin pad across the scarred mess table, out of reach and beyond temptation. The lights in the mess flickered briefly, then returned to normal a few moments later.

  She couldn’t justify putting off her thesis any longer. The boss had ordered her to catch some sleep but she just couldn’t, not with a deadline coming. So she drained the last of her coffee and considered hassling the cook for one of the muffins she could smell baking in the galley.

  No, that would probably cost her ten minutes in conversation, and definitely an extra quarter hour in the gym. Cooky had a wicked way with a mixing spoon. Glancing up, she nodded to a lone sergeant a few tables away, who caught her eye as he savaged an impossibly large plate of sausages. Rachel quickly ducked her head back to her notes, breaking eye contact, but she needn’t have worried. The old soldier only had eyes for his food.

  The mess lights guttered again. She had time to wonder why before the world turned black, and she disappeared forever.

  USS KANDAHAR, 1235 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

  Colonel J. Lonesome Jones willingly gave in to temptation and enjoyed a leftover breakfast muffin with his espresso. At the age of forty-three, the boss hog of the Eighty-second MEU boasted a middleweight boxer’s physique, a shaved head he could forge horseshoes on, and an air of casual menace he had learned to turn on and off at will—a skill he had perfected as a kid in the Chicago projects.

  Yeah, he could have a goddamn muffin if he felt like one.

  As he lingered over the last minutes of a short break in the officers’ mess of USS Kandahar, Jones watched an immensely satisfying flexipad vid of his beloved Bulls stomping the shit out of the hopelessly outclass
ed Knicks. These few minutes of real life he allowed himself each day were sacrosanct.

  So it was that two young marine officers who entered the mess made their way as quietly as possible to the far side of the room. There they placed an order with the steward for a round of burgers and fries. They filled mugs of standard-issue instant coffee from a quietly bubbling urn, lest the hissing of the espresso machine distract the old man and lead to an unwelcome round of ferocious ass-chewage. Second Lieutenants Henry Chen and Biff Hannon were keenly aware of the colonel’s reputation, both of them from firsthand experience.

  Consequently both men nibbled quietly at their burgers like communion wafers, all the while maintaining a very low profile.

  Jones was aware of them but didn’t attend to their presence until he had disposed of the sports downloads, the local Chicago news, and the global updates, in that order. When his free time was up he stood, stretched, and slipped into character.

  “Good morning gentlemen,” he purred, turning on his two officers and frowning at their fatty meals. “You’re training with the SAS again today?”

  They both nodded. “Sir.”

  “Well, I hope you’re not going to allow those sneaky bastards to kick your asses quite so badly this time.”

  Both men bristled.

  “We’ve worked up a few surprises, Colonel,” Chen quickly assured him.

  “Surprises? That’s good,” Jones said, deadpanning the pair. “Because I was very disappointed that anyone could get the better of one of my units, get close enough in fact to light up the farts of the officer in charge.”

  The color drained out of their faces as they regarded his fixed, humorless stare. Jones paused without speaking, knowing his silence would be infinitely more effective. Eventually, a blushing Lieutenant Hannon stammered something about not letting it happen again. Jones let his stone face rest on the young officer for a moment, then softened it some. Just a touch.