“Of course,” she said. “FleetCom stands at your disposal.”
She picked up her com and tapped in a message to Nakamiru:
Ariqat kidnapped before session. Send Archer in pursuit of unknown vessel (details pending from Galileo Security). Meet me in Galileo FleetOps. Roja.
When she looked up, the captain nodded his appreciation. “Then for your personal safety, I’d ask that each of you proceed to your individual offices. We will provide additional security personnel as needed and we will keep you posted on our progress as we work to determine what happened. Thank you for your cooperation and please remain vigilant.”
She glanced across the room at Tomlinson who was staring at her and talking into a comlink. He had his mouth covered and was trying to be discrete, but he had a strange look of determination in his eyes.
He’s not surprised.
Jakob Waltz: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster:
“This shit is insane. It’s decades ahead of anything they sent up from the Academy Core,” Danel said. He was staring at the screen where Chei’s theory of quantum quicksand looked like an explosion of ancient Greek letters and squiggly lines.
Jeph just nodded slowly in bewilderment.
“I’ve had a couple years to think on it,” Chei said, shrugging. “It’s based on a theory by Dr. Ian Whitewind. He was one of the original scientists on the Hyperfusion team. He thought there would be a problem with quantum gravitational acceleration and was concerned about a potential reaction that might have collapsed space itself inside a larger fusion event. His work was controversial and nobody took him seriously, so he and Stanislav parted company.” Chei yawned and pushed away from his chair to get a gojuice from the galley.
“According to Whitewind’s work, it’s compressed quantum spacetime and not physical matter that creates a singularity. That’s what caused the rift in the team that got me the position there. When I climbed into his seat and picked up on his work, I realized that he might actually be on to something.” He came back to the table with his drink and a slab of yeastcake bread.
“We were still working on boron-fusion, but if he was right, the energy levels for carbon-fusion would be above a threshold to trigger a sink in the quantum foam. The temporal flow would stop and lock the spatial field in a collapsed state.”
“That’s where I get lost,” Danel admitted.
“Can you put that in dummy words for me?” Jeph asked.
“If we had gone ahead with the test, we’d have created a self-sustaining, micro-scale singularity, with a big appetite.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” the commander said, glancing at Danel who looked like he was also struggling to follow the science.
“Nojo.” Chei said. “I was smart enough to know I didn’t want to repeat Whitewind’s argument and get into a pissing contest with Stanislav, so I tried to figure out how to say the same thing, but in a way that sounded different. That’s the basis of those equations up there.” He nodded at the screen. “I teamed up with a couple postdocs to give me some extra academic juice and we put together the paper that got the project shut down.” He stuffed a huge mouthful of the yeastcake into his mouth and washed it down with his juice. Brainwork obviously made him hungry.
“I’m not even going to try to understand this,” Jeph said. “But I have to ask if there’s any way to test your quicksand theory?”
“Circumstantially, maybe,” Chei said, shrugging. “We can look for quantum effects like what’s happening with Dutch’s core. Other than that, with the gear we’ve got on the Waltz, I don’t think there’s much we can do but guess.”
FleetCartel Operations Center: Galileo Station: Lunar Lagrange One:
“Patch me through to the Captain of the Archer,” Chancellor Roja barked as she burst through the door of the Galileo FleetCartel OpsCom. Her duties as Chancellor were often more political than pragmatic, but she spent many years working the floor so she knew the lay of the deck.
“Yes ma’am,” the officer of the watch said, never missing a beat as she handed over command. “They’re two seconds out and under full burn.”
“Got it,” Roja said. Turning to the officer standing beside her she lowered her voice and asked, “Where’s Nakamiru?”
“He was aboard the Archer,” she said. “They got him on a shuttlepod and he’s docking now, Madam Chancellor.”
And the ship’s already covered 600,000 klick? She glanced at the chrono on the console beside her. They had to be pulling some bone-crushing acceleration.
When she looked up, the face of the Archer’s commanding officer filled the wall screen, his features drawn and tight and his head pressed into an acceleration support. Below his face, someone had thought to display his name: Nathaniel Evanston. A nice touch since she’d never met the man before.
“Captain Evanston, thank you for responding so quickly to this civil emergency. Do you have any telemetry on the rogue vessel?” It would be four seconds before he could respond, so she looked around, and finding someone standing by, she made the universal gesture for a cup of coffee.
Her coffee arrived as the captain replied. “My privilege to serve, Madam Chancellor. Unfortunately, we have not seen the vessel. The heading and ship specifications came in as we made way, but I understand they have almost a ten hour lead on us. We have no guarantee that they maintained their course once they went dark.”
“Agreed. I assume you’re running full sensors and haven’t tagged anything that might fit the bill?” A multicruiser would be able to pick out a lifeboat at a half million klick, and should have the legs to run most smaller ships to ground in short order, even with a full-shift head start. It would be hard for anyone to get away.
“Put the projected course up on the screen,” she said to the watch officer. “I want to see the last known for the rogue and the current for the Archer.” The tactical plot appeared in a split screen beside Evanston’s face.
“Yes ma’am,” the captain said. “We’ve also been running a full series of most logical simulations and our best assessment for the least traceable trajectory has the ship pulling an extremely low buttonhook in Low Lunar Orbit and then a retrograde turn around the Earth. It would be a high-risk maneuver, but it would put the ship as far from the projected flight path as possible and give them a maximal gravity drop sunward. However, even this best guess has less than twelve percent odds.”
“That’s some crazy ass piloting,” she said as the plot appeared on the tactical display. “That would put them with an exit line anywhere. Actually, that makes sense if they are trying to evade detection. One of your crew came up with that?”
Admiral Nakamiru appeared beside her. “We need to talk, in private,” she whispered while she waited for Evanston to reply. He nodded and disappeared to find a room they could conscript.
“Yes ma’am, one of my helmsmen, Carlton Blood, came up with it. He claims to be a direct descendent of a pirate back on earth. Said if he was in that line of work, that’s what he’d have done,” Evanston said. “Not sure if I should arrest him or promote him.”
In spite of the situation, she laughed. “I guess that’ll depend on whether he’s right. I can tell you’re past the point where you could pursue Blood’s hook maneuver. Let me talk to the Admiral and I think you’ll stand down. No use burning reaction mass, if you aren’t seeing signs of the ship. Stand by for orders through standard channels. Thank you, captain. Roja out.”
She handed her coffee cup to the officer of the watch and looking around saw Nakamiru standing outside the command office. She joined him and they chased the three officers working inside out into the corridor. The last one through the door pulled it closed and she thumbed the lock behind him.
“What the hell is going on?” the admiral asked, crossing his arms and standing by the windows that looked out on the control floor.
“I’ve got no clue,” she said. “But someone has utterly changed the situational layout.”
“That is undeniably the bi
ggest understatement I have heard in years,” he said. “You said you thought Ariqat was coming for you.”
She nodded.
“Who else knows that?”
“Derek Tomlinson,” she said. “And Arun.”
“I wouldn’t trust either of them,” he said.
“Not Tomlinson for sure,” she said. “Markhas …” She shook her head. She wanted to trust Arun, but there was always something behind his eyes that said he was running an unseen game. She sat down and rubbed her forehead. “I didn’t see this one coming, although I don’t think anyone would have expected this kind of heavy-handed play.”
“What I find most distressing is, if someone knows you were Ariqat’s objective and opens their mouth, you will be suspect number-one in his disappearance.”
“My entire defense against him was based on being able to expose the ghost fleet and sink him deeper than he could push me down,” she said. “Now I’ve got no hard target.”
“The only other cartels that could be involved in something like this are Dev and Do,” he said.
“It’s not likely it’s DevCartel,” she said. “Arun pointed me in this direction and without him poking me to look into it, I’d still be dragging my drawers.”
“Agreed,” the admiral said. “That leaves us wondering how to connect this with Tomlinson.”
“That, and what comes next,” she agreed.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Jakob Waltz: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster:
Nobody’s schedule had settled back to anything vaguely resembling normal. The commander was still sleeping more than he was awake, and Rocky apparently decided that sleep was a waste of time. Chei took to working third shift at the galley table when it was quiet and he could use the big screen to spread his calculations out while his mind wandered Heisenberg’s halls of uncertainty.
Occasionally one of the crew would float through his awareness. Sometimes they’d stare at him or his math, but most of the time they left him alone to work. None of them understood what he was doing, but they all knew he needed to do it if they were ever going to get out of the quicksand.
“Would be useful to know propagation rate of shockwave?” Rocky asked, appearing behind him and startling him out of an equation.
“What?” he said, blinking and trying to focus on the reality of the engineer’s presence.
“I believe it would be possible to measure velocity of shockwave as it passes through ship.” She pulled herself down into the chair on the opposite side of the table. “Would this information be useful to you in your calculations?”
“It might,” he said “But how would we get that?”
“Two separate events occur every time wave hits. Power surge in HCF reactors and computer’s quantum core resets. Events are physically 208 meters apart. Light would take minimum of 694 nanoseconds to travel distance. Anything else would take longer.”
“You think the shockwave itself is causing the breakers to kick out and not a short somewhere else?”
“Da,” she said, pulling out her thinpad and handing it to him. “Primary power breakers reset from either short circuit or overload. I attached recording device to reactor primaries to determine which fault was cause.”
He looked at the graph on the thinpad screen.
“Is plot of last occurrence,” she explained. “Impulse rise time is under one nanosecond. Is not possible to be result of reactor as nominal delay of power to collector surface is just over six nanoseconds. Therefore, observed response cannot be coming from reactor, must be connected to shockwave.”
Chei stretched in his chair while he looked at her data. He realized there was a lot more in what she’d recorded than a simple power spike, but he let her go on.
“Duration and structure of waveform is same as event that triggers reset of computer quantum core. I mounted additional recorder on quantum core input buffer to determine if was similar waveform.” She reached over and touched the screen he held in his hand. A second wave overlaid the first. They were more than similar. They were identical.
Chei grinned. “So all we need to do is measure the time interval between Dutch’s core collapse and the reactor spike and we’ll know our propagation rate. How long will it take to get rigged?”
She glanced at the chrono on the galley bulkhead before she answered. “I can do before next cycle. However, I would prefer to get commander’s permission before we do this.” She wrinkled her face strangely and hesitated before she went on. “After last manual reset of quantum core, I decided to not attempt again.”
“Why?”
“Dutch is self-aware hybrid computer,” she said, the expression bending her features further out of alignment with her personality. “I realized I do not know where is point when awareness is restored. Each time, process has reached seventy-five percent before next shockwave halts system.”
Now he understood what her face was telling him. Chei ran his hands through his hair, then shook his head. “You think it’s possible that every time the computer has rebooted, Dutch wakes up?”
“Yes,” she nodded. “Is likely he has come back to life, and then died, eight times so far.”
Government Residential Hub: Galileo Station: Lunar Lagrange One:
“What the hell have you done?” Chancellor Markhas said. His voice was flat, lifeless, but his eyes darted back and forth as he watched the edges of the room like they were on fire. They were sitting alone in her usual spot in the Homeworld. She sat with her back to the door, but Arun pulled his chair around, so he could see the room rather than the windows. She trusted her greatly expanded security team to keep anyone far enough away that they had privacy.
“I have no clue what you think I’ve done, but you need to be careful with your tone,” she said through locked teeth.
“Or what?” he hissed, his eyes hit hers and stuck. “You might get away with making one chancellor vanish, but—”
“Excuse me,” she slapped her hand on the arm of her chair. “How dare you?” He glanced over her shoulder to where several heads must have turned to look in their direction.
No one was close enough to hear their conversation, but he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Do not deny this. We both know you had motive and opportunity.”
“I do deny it!” she snarled. “You can’t seriously think I’d do something like this?”
“It is irrelevant what I think,” he said. “The timing of Ariqat’s disappearance alone is enough to hang you, and possibly me. We do not know if he has told anyone of his suspicions though I suspect that he has.”
“Tomlinson,” she said. “He made sure I saw his reaction when security shut down the session.”
“That seems likely,” he agreed. “Source and Do must be working together to build this fleet and, if so, we are dangerously overexposed.”
“I agree, although regardless of how this came to pass, Tamir’s disappearance has to be concerning to Tomlinson. The sheer arrogance of it has probably given him pause.”
He leaned back and almost smiled. “He will be considering whether you will come for him too.”
“I didn’t—“
“As you say, but he likely believes you did. He will certainly be careful in how he moves and who he talks to, for fear of disappearing as well.”
“Unless he did it,” she said. “If he considered Ariqat a loose end, he might have reason.”
“Not a loose end,” Arun said, shaking his head. “A loose cannon. If they were aware you were investigating leads that might expose their collusion, it would have been a dubious decision for Ariqat to pick this kind of public fight.”
“If he needed to shut him up, why didn’t he just kill him?” She leaned back and scratched her chin as she thought about it. “They’ve already shown that they don’t mind murder as a management technique.”
“They have?”
“The woman you mistook for my contact in SourceCartel was killed and her body dumped on the Pegasus,” she said. “I’d have t
hought you’d know about that.”
He shook his head. “I heard about a murder investigation on one of your ships, but nothing other than the public info.”
“She was involved somehow in the hole in the supply chain,” she said. “Investigator General Wentworth is looking at how someone is falsifying information coming out of SourceCartel with her name on it.”
“You brought the IG in on this?” he said, his face distorting into a melodramatic caricature of shock.
“Calm down Arun,” she said, laughing at his reaction. “I’ve only involved him in looking into the falsified documents. It turns out that someone in Source signed off on a bill for materials in her name, several days after she was dead.”
“That was sloppy,” he said.
“No doubt,” she said. “I didn’t let him know that there was also reason to question the materials as being in any way irregular. As far as he’s aware, it was an order of recycled metal we received at the L-2 Shipyard.”
“I am not sure I follow you myself,” he said.
“Sorry, it’s been a busy week,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you, but then the shit typhoon started. I never managed to get word to you that we confirmed they were bleeding ships and replacing them with new manufactured materials.”
“Really?” The mask of shock reappeared on his face.
She nodded. “The dead woman worked in the department at Source that was covering it up. Whether she was party to that or not, she was close to the epicenter.”
“You’re saying her death might have been the result of discovering something she shouldn’t have seen?”
“Maybe,” she said. “At this point all we’ve proven is that someone is putting new materials in the supply chain and selling them as recycled. Clearly that shows there’s some other economic consideration, as it would be a huge loss to carry on the books.”
“We know what that is though,” he said.
“We have no hard evidence to support that assumption,” she said.
Shan Takhu Legacy Box Set - With an Extra Bonus Story Page 11