Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5)

by Sudipto Majumdar

  Once Sabina was at the hatch, the first thing that she did was to measure the radiation level. The radiation emanating out of the sphere had been coming down ever since the Marines managed to shut down the mechanism of the sphere, but it was still at a very high level. The radiation suit that Sabina was wearing, like the one that the emerging Marine had worn was a specialized suit different from the combat suit that the Marines normally wore. It was stiff and didn’t have any armor. It served only one purpose, to be able to go into places and surfaces where the level of radiation was far higher than what is normally found in space. Even in this hardened radiation suit, she could spend a maximum of half an hour inside the sphere before dangerous levels of radiation accumulated in her body.

  The Marines had been able to rig up clamped wheels on one of the uncut cables near the hatch. They had made a trip to the center of the sphere along that cable and had approached the structure hanging right at the center of the enormous sphere. They had taken videos of the central structure and recorded with all possible instruments. The central structure was basically two hemispheres stuck to each other to form a sphere, but with a wide gap all along its circumference.

  The central structure was 16.2 meters in diameter, and inside those hemispheres were myriads of smaller structures that made no sense at all to any human. There were coiled structures, round and oval structures, small cylinders and all kinds of shapes stuck to the insides of the hemispheres. The only thing that stuck out was that none of the small structures inside those hemispheres had a sharp edge or an acute angle like a square, rectangle or a triangle would. Most of the insides of the two hemispheres by volume was hollow.

  Sabina knew what to expect, but she was carrying measuring equipment that the surveying Marines hadn’t carried before. The equipment she was carrying was more specialized for high energy particle science than would be available in a combat ship. She hoped to uncover the particle science happening at the core. She would leave the engineering problem for someone else to solve.

  Before she could do all that though, she had to go through the terrifyingly claustrophobic and mildly humiliating experience of being pushed through the hatch in her radiation suit. She was stuck so snugly inside the tube that she couldn’t move her hands. Anyone who has been stuck in a tube so tight as to not being able to move their hands would immediately know the primal claustrophobia it evokes in any human. In her panic she started trashing her legs, which forced the Marine who was helping her get through to hold her legs steady and push her bottom.

  Thankfully the hatch was only two meters deep, so it didn’t take long before she was inside the sphere. A Marine entered the sphere after her to accompany her and help her in the tricky maneuver of riding the clamped wheels along the cable to a distance of just over eight hundred meters. Sabina was essentially a civilian who had never been trained in such zero G maneuvers. She would have to be guided along. The Marine secured Sabina’s tethers to the clamped wheel mechanism, as he secured his own and let the wheels move towards the center of the sphere. It took about seven minutes for the journey one side, so it would barely leave fifteen minutes at the core for Sabina to inspect before she and the Marine had to head back.

  Both Sabina and the Marine had their suit lights on, bit it covered a very narrow arc in front of them. Most of the sphere was still dark, and once the eyes settled to the darkness, one could discern an eerie blue glow all along the insides of the sphere. Sabina knew what it was. It was the secondary emissions for radiation from the iron surface in the ultraviolet spectrum, that bled into the blue at the very edge of human eye sights’ capability. She had been told by the Marines that the blue glow had been increasing since they started observing it, and she could have told them why.

  As the central mechanism in the sphere shut down, it no longer produced the high energy gamma rays, and x-rays. Whatever rays has had been produced before had been absorbed by the iron, which then spit out the energy of those radiation in lower frequency of ultraviolet light. Sabina knew that the ultraviolet radiation would keep increasing for some time as the x-rays and the gamma rays reduced inside the sphere, before the ultraviolet also started reducing when all the x-ray and gamma rays were almost completely exhausted and unable to replenish the secondary ultraviolet rays.

  Sabina focused her lights on the approaching central structure. It was almost featureless except for the central seam running all around its circumference. The most outstanding feature of the structure was its color. It was shiny and made of gold! Sabina had seen the composition of the sphere. It was over ninety three percent gold! It wasn’t to save money that the demons didn’t make it out of pure gold. They could have easily done that if they wanted to. The rest of the impurity had been added to the gold to make it hard enough for whatever purpose it served.

  On closer inspection, Sabina would discover that the hemispheres were only coated with gold over ten centimeters thick, which had fooled the initial composition analysis into thinking that the entire structure was made of gold. A penetrative scan had revealed that the inner structure, which was really the load bearing structure to which all the cables were attached was made mostly out of Titanium. That was the structure built for strength, the gold plating was there for some other purpose, which the humans didn’t know yet.

  Sabina spent the most exciting and puzzling fifteen minutes of her career near the central structure, before the escorting Marine indicated that it was time to go. Sabina took the minutes on her return journey along the cable to gather her thoughts. Wild speculations were running rife in her mind. She found it hard for the scientist inside her to discipline those thoughts into cogent and coherent theories.

  She would have to start making her report the moment she got out of the sphere. The communications transmitters were in place, and all she reported would be available to her ship as well as other USC vessels immediately. It was important that Sabina transmit as much as she had learnt as early as possible. There was that unsaid risk that she may not be able to leave the ship alive in case there was a counter attack from the demons. As soon as she was through the process of an equally claustrophobic exit from the sphere, she started filing her report on the designated channel.

  “It has been speculated by some Marines and engineers that the sphere is a power generation device. It has also been speculated by another set of engineers that the sphere is a reactionless propulsion engine, given the amount of internal structural support the sphere has. In my opinion, both are right in their own way, but not completely accurate in describing the science behind this machine! The data I have collected is being transmitted as I speak, and it would need to be analyzed further before we can make solid scientific arguments, but my initial theory goes along the following lines.

  “Ever since Einstein’s theories of gravity postulated the inevitability of black holes when a large mass is crushed into small enough space, and another of Einstein’s famous equations e=mc2 made mass and energy equivalent, scientists have wondered if it was possible to make a black hole out of pure energy instead of mass. We scientists have given such a concept a name – ‘Kugelblitz’. A ball of lightning.

  “It was theorized that if multiple lasers could concentrate light into a small enough point in space, it would be the equivalent of crushing mass equivalent to the energy of the laser light into that space, which should open up an event horizon of a black hole. It is mere speculation, since we cannot even conceive of the amount of energy that would need to be pointed at an incredibly small volume less than that occupied by an atom. Needless to say, we cannot even conceive of the technology required to achieve such a feat.

  “Some scientists have speculated that such a Kugelblitz wouldn’t collapse into a black hole, but rather tear the fabric of space time and open up a wormhole. There are enough particle physics theories to support that possibility too. The problem is that we know so little about the nature of the fabric of space time, that these are mere speculations. My theory on the mechanism inside t
he sphere is that the central structure can concentrate a tremendous amount electromagnetic radiation in very high frequencies, possibly in x-rays or even gamma rays into an incredibly small point in space.

  “My back of the envelope calculations predicts that the amount of radiation amounting to terawatts would be concentrated into a volume of space no bigger than a fraction the size of a proton. Concentrating so much energy into such a small space tears the fabric of spacetime in that small region. It doesn’t matter whether we call that tear in space time a black hole or a worm hole, because the effects on the surrounding space is similar.

  “A black hole also tears the fabric of space time near its singularity, but which we cannot observe because it is enclosed in the black hole’s event horizon. Nothing can escape that event horizon, not even light for us to observe what is going on inside. What we do know is that even a black hole radiates energy in the form of Hawking radiation, and the smaller the black hole, the more vigorously it radiates radiation as it tries to evaporate and repair the tear in spacetime.

  “The Hawking radiation is nothing but virtual particles that exist inside the fabric of space time, where one of the partners of virtual particle pair falls into the event horizon, while its partner is released into open space. Some call this inherent energy existing inside the fabric of spacetime as zero-point energy. Some calculations indicate that there is virtually inexhaustible amount of energy within spacetime, which if we could somehow tap, we would never run out of energy ever again.

  “A wormhole predicts almost the same thing. A tear in the fabric of space time, through which virtual particles trapped inside the fabric of spacetime get an outlet to emerge and copious amount of such virtual particles would emerge from even a tiny tear in spacetime. The only additional prediction that a wormhole makes, is that the other end of the tear in spacetime is connected to some other point in the universe forming an instant bridge to that point.

  “Since the wormhole we are talking about is less than the size of a proton, it doesn’t matter whether the other end is connected to any other point in the universe, because no one is getting inside the wormhole, if it was even possible to do so. What we can say with some amount of certainty is that the effects would be like having a black hole with a size smaller than the width of a proton. There would be copious number of virtual particles coming out of the tear.

  “Irrespective of which theory one proposes, what is common is that there would be an equal number of particles and anti-particles that would emerge from such a tear in the fabric of spacetime. The matter particles would emerge with very high energy like cosmic rays and upon hitting matter in this universe would decay into very high energy radiation like gamma rays and x-rays, just as cosmic rays do. The antimatter particles would also emerge with high energy, but being antimatter, they would annihilate normal matter on contact in this universe proton for anti-proton, and electron for each antielectron.

  “The matter and antimatter would normally emerge from the tear in a random fashion in all direction, emanating radiation in all direction. However, if one could spin the tear in the fabric of spacetime, like the spin of a blackhole, then something amazing would happen. Just as a spinning blackhole generates a jet on both sides of its spinning axis to form a quasar, the spinning tear in the fabric of spacetime would eject particles from two jets at either end of its spinning axis. The amazing thing would be that one end of the jet would throw out all the matter particles, while the other end would eject only antimatter particles. I have seen evidence of two such collecting orifices in the central structure, that I postulate are meant to collect exactly the two ends of the jets.

  “If my theory is correct, then the collection mechanism would be able to collect copious amount of antimatter, while the matter jet on the opposite side is basically radiation waste probably responsible for most of the radiation inside the sphere. We already know that the demons had capability of handling antimatter safely beyond anything that we humans know. So once the antimatter is generated, it must be simple for the demons to harvest it into usable form in terms of beams as a weapon or store it as an incredibly compact battery.

  “From our current encounter with the demons’ antimatter particle beam weapon, we have figured out that the antimatter they use is antielectron only. We haven’t come across them using anti-proton. This is the reason, I speculate that the size of the tear that this device manages to open must be smaller than the size of a proton. Such a small sized tear would only allow the much smaller electrons and antielectrons to emerge out of the hole, although quantum tunneling means that the probability of something larger than hole emerging out of it is non-zero.

  “Weird as that sounds, it is true, but thankfully the probability of such an event is very low, which keeps our universe and this mechanism sane enough to ignore the one in a quintillion proton that might emerge from such a tear. I think that opening up a larger tear in the fabric of spacetime to make protons emerge is beyond the capabilities of even the demons!

  “The emergence of inexhaustible amount of antimatter and hence energy out of this mechanism is only half the story. The clever part of this mechanism is how a troublesome consequence of tearing a hole in the fabric of spacetime has been utilized to an advantage. As Einstein’s theory of General Relativity postulates, gravitational attraction is basically a body falling into the dimple created by another body mass in the fabric of spacetime. The higher the mass of the body, the deeper the dimple it creates in the fabric of spacetime, and the greater the gravitational attraction with which other bodies falls into it.

  “A tear in the fabric of spacetime is where the depth of the dimple is infinite, such as at the singularity of a blackhole or a wormhole. The tear in the fabric created by this mechanism is so small, that its event horizon is proton sized. Consequently, the harmful effects of spaghettification near a blackhole are limited to just a few hundred atoms length, beyond which gravity works familiarly as we know it.

  “As long as the tear is kept right at the center of the structure, gravity pulls in all directions equally and there is no net effect. This however doesn’t mean that there isn’t any gravitation stress on this ship and this sphere. The micro blackhole at the center is pulling the sphere and the ship inwards towards it in all directions. It is literally trying to crumple the entire ship and feed it to the micro blackhole.

  “Fortunately, the effects of gravitational pull taper off at the square of the distance. So, if one is ten times further then the gravity is a hundred times weaker. This means that the amount of gravitational pull that is generated when the micro blackhole is inside the sphere and this ship, tapers off dramatically at the distance of the inner surface of the sphere which is furthest from the micro blackhole. Thus, the demons and the buildings they occupy at the inner surface of the hull of the ship experience very little gravitational pull from the micro blackhole.

  “It needs to be noted though that the gravitational pull of the micro blackhole may be small, but it is not zero. If this ship were to stop spinning completely, this Goliath ship would not experience a zero G environment. There would be a very slight force that would tend to drift all unfastened loose objects and demons at the inner surface of the ship towards the central sphere! It would not be catastrophic or life threatening, but it would be a mighty inconvenience. That is perhaps one of the reasons that this ship needs to keep spinning always to provide artificial gravity to counteract the irritating drift force towards the center of the ship.

  “The micro blackhole is currently switched off, but it was functional when the Marines had boarded this Goliath ship, and some of them have reported that they would feel a very slight drift towards the sphere even when they were otherwise floating in zero G inside the central axis tube. The slight drifting force didn’t hamper the Marines’ movements, but it is strong enough to be noticeable when inside the central axis tube, the only place where the spinning Goliath ship’s centrifugal force cannot counteract the tiny gravitational attr
action of the micro black hole.

  “The gravitational pull on an individual demon or Marine may be small, but its effects on large structures with huge masses like the sphere or the entire Goliath ship is neither insignificant, not inconsequential. The large support structures holding the sphere in place inside this compartment provide structural rigidity and strength to the ship to withstand the stress of gravitational pull on the ship that is trying to crush and crumple it.

  “The massive support structures’ primary function however, is not for this reason. The Goliath ship, and this sphere are structurally strong enough to be able to withstand this tiny inward gravitational force without needing such massive support structures. First, the four massive forty meters diameter pillars are not as ridiculously massive as they look from outside. Scans have shown that those four pillars are hollow.

  “The tubes inside those pillars are over thirty meters in diameter, so most of those four massive looking pillars are hollow. Those pillars still have incredibly high load bearing capacity, which along with the other support structure provides structural support during acceleration of this ship, but not in the way the Marine engineers had speculated.

  “This massive Goliath ship doesn’t run on reactionless drives from the inside as had been speculated. In fact, the ship does not use any kind of reactionless drive at all. This ship runs on Gravitational drives!!

  “I had earlier mentioned that this ships engineering design makes beautiful use of a pesky and inconvenient side effect of opening a micro blackhole to harness energy. When this ship is not accelerating, and its gravity drives are effectively off, the structure at the center of the sphere which houses the micro blackhole needs to remain at the absolute center of the ship to balance off the gravitational pull on all sides. This induces some stress on the ship and an annoying drifting gravitational pull force towards the sphere, which are handled as mentioned earlier.