Rocky cleared her throat. “Hyperfusion project ended because had potential to create micro-singularity. Is true?”
“Yah. The amount of energy in a carbon-cycle fusion event could collapse spacetime below the Schwarzschild Radius,” he said, glancing around the table as if everyone should understand what that meant.
“I assume that means you have a passing familiarity with black holes?” Jeph asked.
“I know a little about them,” Chei said. “Enough to say that isn’t one we’re looking at.”
“Then what do you think it is?”
“I’m not even sure it’s gravity,” he said. “We worked out a theory that might explain it, but I’ve got to dust off the math a bit before I can say for sure.”
“Take your time,” Jeph said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Government Residential Hub: Galileo Station: Lunar Lagrange One:
The Homeworld was once the center of the government’s elite social life, but it had fallen into disfavor over the years. Its panoramic windows overlooking Earth and the LEO settlements had become a painful reminder of humankind’s failure. Nobody liked to think that despite all their greatest efforts, Earth was growing more hostile every year. The only future left for humanity had to lie outward. Most people preferred looking anywhere but back.
The fact that the lounge had few patrons made it Chancellor Roja’s sanctuary. Most nights, she had the opulence of the entire lounge to herself and she often relaxed here as she gazed out the windows. The earth rolled in the distance as the station’s gigantic residential hub spun to create its centrifugal gravity. It would have been dizzying to someone who hadn’t grown up in space, but for her the slow spiral of the stars was relaxing. Almost hypnotic.
She’d worked in the dark of the Jupiter Gap for twenty years, hauling gases to the asteroid communities before her predecessor promoted her to Admiral of Operations. From there, he endorsed her, and the FleetCartel membership elected her to be their chancellor. It was a position she accepted, but on some days she wished she could escape.
Reclining in a scarlet silk wingback, she rested her feet on an ornately carved real-oak table and sipped her Glenlivet from a crystal glass, staring past the distant Earth toward the emptiness.
“Do you mind if I join you Katryna?” Arun Markhas walked up behind her, snatching her back from the solitude of her thoughts. He set another scotch on the table. She shrugged and pulled her feet down to make room for his drink.
Arun had once been a scientist. One of the brightest in all the solar system. Now, he was a bureaucrat to the core of his being. Most times she hated his pompous political posturing, although she’d learned to appreciate his perception of the intricacies of the Chancellery.
He snagged one of the other chairs with the toe of his shoe and dragged it closer to the table before he sat down. She could tell something troubled him. “What’s on your mind, Arun?” she asked as he settled back and put his own drink down on the spot vacated by her feet.
“Have you thought about why Derek Tomlinson has been after eliminating FleetCom’s control over transportation?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said. “I think it’s because he just doesn’t like me.”
“Personal opinions aside, do you not think there has to be something else behind it?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Have you heard something I should worry about?”
“Perhaps,” he said, leaning back in his chair and relaxing. “DoCartel is the only ship builder of consequence and you are the biggest client they have. Why would they want to break the relationship up?”
“For economic gain,” she said. “If the other cartels were freed up to operate their own ships, he assumes it would drive transportation costs down and allow them to raise ship prices in an open market. He probably thinks we provide a downward force against their inflation of hardware value, and then artificially hold the fees we charge for livery services higher.”
“Certainly that is true,” he said. “Your cartel is in a position to dictate both those costs across the system.”
“Sounds like you might agree with him,” she said, uncomfortable with the realization that his might have been the vote that shifted.
“In an abstract sense, I see the validity of his position, but that does not mean I support changing things. At least not in the short-term. Far from it in fact. I think that under your leadership there is an unusual degree of fairness in what you charge for service,” he said. His face told her that he realized he might have offended and that wasn’t his intent.
“What are you getting at Arun?” she said, sighing as she waited for him to get to his point. If he ever will.
“What if you are looking at this wrong and it isn’t economics driving him?” he asked.
“It has to be,” she said, setting her empty glass down and picking up the one he’d brought.
“No it does not.” He smiled in the way a professor looked at a particularly unenlightened pupil. It grated on her nerves, but she clenched her jaw and tried to ignore his condescension. “What if there was something else at play?”
“Like what?” she asked. “Arun, just get to the point please. I’ve had a brutal day and I’m not in the mood for the long way home.”
“Of course, my apologies,” he said, leaning forward and lowering his voice. He looked around the room behind her. “Your cartel provides regulatory control of crews and ship charter registration. That puts you in a position of oversight on everything moving in the Union.”
“Actually, what that does is keep ships and crews safe,” she said.
“It also means nothing goes on anywhere that you don’t know about,” he added. “In a way, that makes you a system-wide police force.”
“We have no enforcement powers other than in regard to ship safety. We don’t prohibit anything legal,” she said, stopping as she saw where he was leading her. “Are you suggesting he’s planning to do something outside that?”
“I am not suggesting anything,” he said, his face broadcasting that was exactly what he meant.
CHAPTER THREE
FleetCartel Executive Offices: Galileo Station: Lunar Lagrange One:
Katryna Roja sat at the small table in her private dining alcove with Dr. Tana Drake, the Chancellor of WellCartel. Once a week, on the day after the council session, they tried to have a meal together. Although they were separated by more than a generation, they’d grown closer than allies on the Council. They were as much friends as anyone at the top of the political universe could be.
“I’ve reached the end of my patience with Tomlinson. He’s making this personal,” Katryna said, her voice a low growl.
“Not really,” Tana said, shrugging. “He’s got more to gain by being able to set his own standards and he doesn’t want FleetCartel to dictate what he can and can’t do. It’s not you.”
“His own standards? It’s Fleet’s responsibility to keep crews and passengers safe.”
“I understand what you’re saying, but he’s an engineer,” Tana said. “His cartel is all about products, not dealing with people. If you think about it, yours provides a service like we do. That’s why you and I relate to each other so well.”
“I don’t see it as that simple,” Katryna said, leaning back and shaking her head.
“Sure it is. His people provide hardware. They want to build ships and bases their way. It’s all about efficiency. Resources to conserve. Energy to conserve,” she said, pushing back from the table and stretching her lithe frame like a cat. “In doing your job, you cost him both.”
“So does everyone else,” Roja countered, frustration fueling her need to get up and pace.
“That’s certainly true, but you most directly impact their bottom line. Not you personally, but your cartel’s need to maintain absolute standards hits them at every step of their operation.” She got up and moved to the wingback chair in the sitting area. “Ships are monstrously expensive to build. Every delay in production
costs manpower. Every design change costs materials. Every time you cannot compromise safety because you see an innovation as a weakening of standards, you kick them squarely in the eggs.”
Katryna stopped and turned to face Tana. “That’s true of every cartel who orders products from them.”
“When we need something improved or changed, our entire production impact is less than the cost of a single hull for one of your multicruisers,” Tana said. “A year’s worth of bio-scanner orders from us is a few weeks work in their Tokyo Hollows factory and a few tons of precious metals. Compared to your orders, we have almost no effect on their bottom line.”
An autobot trundled up and placed two cups of coffee on the table in front of Tana. “How many people work at Ceres Alpha Shipyards? 40,000? You hammer them every time you change anything,” she said. “If you hold up production for a week to change something on a single ship, you cost them as much as we spend on four months in requisitions.”
“It’s not that bad,” Katryna said, dropping into the chair across from her.
“It might not be, but what matters is if you had a hull rupture on a ship, you could halt production and check assembly procedures at the yard that built it. And you’d be within your rights to do it,” she said. “That gives you power over his operations. If he’s after you, that’s why. He wants permission for all of us to order ships directly and to staff our own crews in our own fleets. If he can get that, he’s taking the gun you’ve got pointed at his head out of your hand.”
“Is that his argument?” Katryna asked. “I’ve never heard his side. All I have to go with is what he says in the council sessions. I know he’s campaigning in private, but he’s not man enough to bring it directly to me.”
“That is part of it,” Tana admitted. “He’s also saying, without Fleet’s bureaucratic regulation, he can bring costs down and they’ll pass the savings on to all of us.”
“I wonder if that’s how he managed to gain a vote this time,” Katryna said. “Somebody moved in his direction and that causes me some real concern.”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but it is a persuasive argument.”
Katryna sat frowning for several seconds. “Arun thinks there’s something else going on too. He’s implied that there may be something happening between Source and Do. He told me he’s got his eye on a situation and he’s hoping to get confirmation soon.”
“Do you mind if I point out the obvious?” Tana asked, going on without waiting. “Chancellor Markhas is paranoid. He’s been in politics long enough that it’s rotting his brain.”
She laughed. “Maybe so.”
“He’s been close to the top of the political world for longer than I’ve been alive,” Tana said, grinning. “You were probably still an ensign pushing reactor fuel around, when he was the Dean of Science out at the Vesta Institute. The man has more time in grad level school than either of us have in our entire education. That has to burn the brain out.”
“Is that your professional opinion doctor?” she asked, winking.
“Nope. That is my personal opinion, but you might want to keep it in mind. Call it, friendly advice. Arun will lead you down a rabbit hole you probably don’t want to explore.”
Jakob Waltz: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster:
“What are you looking at?” the commander asked as he floated up to the table in the dining area. He carried a small bunch of grapes and tossed one at the back of Danel’s head. “You have a console in your room you know.”
“The screen in my quarters is too small,” the scientist said, twisting to shoot Jeph the evil-eye.
“Is Chei working with you?” Jeph asked.
“Nah, he’s got his own theory and when I asked him to explain it to me, I got a brainache before he got off dead center,” Danel said. “I gave up and decided to tackle something simple like relativity and black holes.”
“So what’s this?”
“It’s a gravity gradient map of the L-4 Trojan Cluster. Based on the known mathematics and the position of everything we’ve mapped since we’ve been here, Dutch and I have been tinkering with the gravitational possibilities,” he said.
“Playing God with the universe?”
“Oh, hell no. Trying to decipher the stuff they sent back from the Academy Core and failing miserably,” he admitted. After several seconds, he shrugged. “You know that a Lagrange point isn’t a gravity source as much as a point where gravitational sources balance against each other and centrifugal forces to create stability.”
“Sure, Galileo Station and the Lunar Shipyards are on Earth-Lunar Lagrange points,” Jeph said, pulling down into a chair facing Danel and the screen. “They’re all over the solar system. FleetCom and SourceCartel put cargo transfer stations in most of them because it takes nothing to keep things stationary and only a little energy to get it to move out.”
“Exactly. They’re essentially very small ripples in gravity. L-1, L-2 and L-3 aren’t entirely stable because other bodies exert influence on those nodes, but L-4 and L-5 are always steady. Everything that accumulates in one of those positions moves together like it was in orbit around something that isn’t really sitting there.” Danel tapped the thinpad and added a small X to mark the center of the gravity node on the screen. Another tap and several hundred dots appeared, each of them had a small line projecting its direction of travel.
“The length of the lines I added represents the relative velocity of each object,” he explained. “Notice that the halo orbits are all in the same range of velocity, relatively speaking? Everything moves around the balance point like it’s supposed to.”
The commander nodded.
Danel added another layer to the image. “Now this is us and Payload Four.” A long red line extended from the icon that showed their current position. It was way out of proportion to the other objects on the map, but that wasn’t a surprise. The payload had a short yellow line that indicated it was traveling slower than everything else in the cluster.
“That looks like we’d expect,” Jeph said.
“Not exactly.” Danel shook his head. “At our velocity, our trajectory should be almost a straight line out of the cluster. At this scale it’s hard to tell, but it’s a circle. Shona just updated our current position and trajectory. Turns out, we’re orbiting something.”
“I haven’t gotten that memo yet,” Jeph said, wondering why she hadn’t reported it to him first.
“I asked her to do it for me specifically and she just finished a few minutes ago,” Danel said. “But here’s the interesting part, the orbit is a perfect circle and not an ellipse. Knowing that, if we project it all the way around we’ve got an idea where we’re going. And more importantly where the source of the gravity is.” The image on the screen zoomed out and the red line closed up into a ring. The X of the Lagrange point sat dead center in the middle.
“Whatever’s captured us is on the node?” the commander asked.
“It seems to be precisely on it,” Danel said. “That’s not the strangest part. Using our mass and velocity and with a known center of our orbit, we can calculate the mass of whatever it is.”
Jeph shrugged. “It’s got to be huge.”
“Not necessarily huge, but massive,” Danel corrected. “Unfortunately, when Dutch and I really looked at it, the idea of a massive object went out the airlock. Based on what we got for the object’s mass, we recalculated the orbits of the known icebergs in our region of space. Dutch, if you’re done with the number crunching, can you add the corrected orbits to the display?”
Every object on the diagram turned almost ninety degrees and its new trajectory plummeted toward the X. “If that’s correct, there isn’t anything out here that shouldn’t be diving inward.”
Jeph whistled. “How does that work?
“It doesn’t,” Danel said, shrugging. “I mean, I’m trying to work out an idea, based on the stuff we got from the Academy Core, but even that doesn’t fit perfectly.”
Another i
mage appeared on the corner of the gravity map. It looked somewhat like an hourglass that Jeph had once seen in a museum.
“Do you know what an Einstein-Rosen Bridge is?” Danel asked.
He took the basic physics requirements in the FleetCom Academy, but it had been a long time ago. “It’s a tunnel across space from one place to another, right?”
“Exactly,” Danel said, showing surprise. “They’ve always thought wormholes might be possible in a cosmic sense, but because of the immense power required to create one, the closest we’ve ever come to studying them in the real world was on the quantum scale.”
“So you’re thinking this might be something like that and not a black hole?”
“There might be little difference in reality, but I’m not familiar enough with the idea to be sure,” the scientist admitted. “It would take a huge amount of energy to support an ERB of this magnitude, but it could happen. It would need something like a neutron star to power it, but if we assume it was part of a binary system, the gravity from the second star could be what we’re experiencing. Hypothetically, if one end was anchored to a point in space in that system, and the other end was somehow attached here, it might be funneling the gravity from the other end through it.”
“But wouldn’t that be like having a neutron star on this end and we’d all be foobed anyway?”
“Probably,” he said. “Unless it functioned like a hose and was spraying gravity through it like a fire nozzle. Then it might be hitting us directly and missing everything else in the neighborhood.”
Jeph stared at the screen for several minutes and shook his head. “That doesn’t scan either. It’s pulling on us and Payload Four at the same time, and we’re almost ten million klick apart by now aren’t we?”
“Something like that,” Danel said.
“Even if the gravity spray was only as wide as the distance between us, it’d also be affecting at least these two icebergs.” He pointed at two smaller chunks of ice that were closer to the center of the cluster, but would have been within the same beam.
Shan Takhu Legacy Box Set - With an Extra Bonus Story Page 3