Another Word for Magic

by Mackey Chandler

  “I’ll regard that like Lee’s business,” Born said. “I’ll only discuss it with those already aware of it.”

  “Thank you,” Jeff said.

  “Oh, let me show you the friends we made,” Musical said. He pulled up a picture on his pad and turned it to April.

  Born was seated cross-legged on the floor. He had a pitcher of beer in a true hand and a young lady perched on each knee leaning back against him. His lower arms went around each of them claws fully extended and his teeth displayed in a huge smile. The girls were both displaying fake terror as well as possible while they couldn’t help smiling. Their dress was uniformly outrageous, and there were more young women crowded close behind Born, looking over his shoulders.”

  April tried to stifle laughter and it came out her nose instead.

  “Are you sure this was just a bar?” she asked as neutrally as possible.

  “It said so in the net guide,” Musical insisted. “The food was decent and everybody kept buying us drinks.”

  “Let me see that,” Jeff asked, and April turned the pad to him.

  He was made of sterner stuff and didn’t laugh, just smiled.

  “I have to have a copy of that shot,” Jeff demanded.

  “Oh, sure. Everybody wanted a turn and a picture like that,” Musical said. “No problem.”

  * * *

  Back at Derfhome, Strangelove met Jeff at the port. He was a little surprised Strangelove hadn’t joined him at the station, eager to pick up guarding him at the earliest opportunity. He had a large car hired, big enough for all of them. April and Jeff dropped Born off at his home by the university and Musical at the Badger embassy, and continued to the Old Hotel.

  Sam Burnstein, monitoring the transport systems, noted the fares paid for the shuttle down from the station and the destinations as the car dropped everyone off. The two researchers had lifted with Lee Anderson. Their associating with Lewis and Singh without Lee Anderson was a new thing. Did that signal some change in their relationship? It definitely was an inflection point and he noted it on his relationship chart. Strangelove sent the car back to the service empty, staying with Jeff. The car charge went to Red Tree, not Jeff, Sam noted. He couldn’t see any pattern there or relate it to the other comings and goings from the Red Tree safe house. Maybe it simply got charged to whoever called the car as an insignificant expense. You could over-analyze everything until you saw patterns where there were none.

  Chapter 14

  Lee looked at the report about her aircar project. She needed to talk to Sally from the bank about recruiting crew to go to Providence and review her new diminished finances. She needed to know what cash she had on hand and the rate she was spending it. She should see when her guys would have the thruster modules in hand and arrange for them to be delivered to Alonso. She needed to write out a formal plan and statement about how she intended to govern Providence and felt a fresh surge of irritation over April and Jeff being so far ahead of her recognizing her own status. She should have been thinking on this to make it go smoothly months ago since she was sure the Claims Commission would eventually cut her off. Maybe, when she had another century of experience, they wouldn’t always be one step ahead of her. The summary of money spent on the aircar suddenly seemed larger without funds being deposited faster than she could spend them. Not that she was broke but Lee wasn’t used to the numbers going down. Despite all the things she needed to do, Lee wanted to go see the aircar, not phone pix of it and touch it. Alonso was independent enough to be irritated that he was interrupted to answer the phone, and argue with her that he was too busy to show and tell. So, she didn’t call ahead, she just called a car to take her over.

  “Oh, I didn’t think we were going to be able to have the canopy open,” Lee said when she walked in. It was propped open towards the nose slightly past the vertical. That left the entire cabin wide open with Alonso sitting on a front seat in the car turned sideways working on the adjacent seat.

  “It only opens manually. I couldn’t justify the mass needed to power it open and shut. The safety aspect of locking it down permanently just bothered me too much. The docking adapter you requested is in the belly and extends to couple. That was all standard design for which I bought rights. There is a hatch to either side from the lock, but what if you crash it badly enough to jam the hatch in from the cabin?

  “Neither is it hinged very strongly. You shouldn’t prop it open like this in a strong wind. Only in a protected environment like this hangar. It will lift off straight up in this position or if you release it while full down. That way it would drop off if you unlock it while flying inverted. You have to lift the back only about ten degrees to engage the front hinge.”

  “That’s not all that holds it, front and back, is it? That’s a huge area under pressure.”

  “Nope, see the slots in the channel where it seats?” Alonso asked. “A tapered draw hook grabs the canopy frame and draws it down every forty millimeters down both sides. That locks mechanically too. That grab handle between the seats isolates the power. I’m not going to trust the computer to manage that. Not even with a completely separate command screen. But it will still release under pressure if you want to ditch it for a quick exit.”

  “What material?” Lee wondered. She laid a hand on it. “Oh, it feels as cold as metal!”

  “It was deposited on a polished metal form,” Alonso explained. “A thin layer of sapphire so the inside isn’t too easy to scratch cleaning it. Then several layers of glass with metallic salts infused. The surface layers are meant to bond and to be compatible with the sapphire. The middle glass layers are a bit less than six millimeters thick. The outer sapphire has a thin layer of diamond on top of it. After it is laid up, it is baked hot enough to make the glass layers diffuse into each other slightly. We didn’t have to etch the metal away. The annealing and diffusion temperature left it ready to pop right off after it cooled because the form had a single atom thick layer of graphene as a release agent.”

  “How fragile is it?” Lee worried.

  “It should deflect most pistol fire and some rifle fire if it isn’t armor piercing. Hail if you aren’t flying into it at speed. If you hit anything bigger than a chicken, consider your warranty voided. So, nothing living that flies on Derfhome.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” Lee said.

  “It could be made stronger, but it’s already sixteen percent of the vehicle mass if you count the subsystems and controls. The entire cabin perimeter has to be stiffer to take the loads on it.” Alonso said. His voice implied that was too much.

  “But it’s pretty,” Lee said.

  “Yeah, isn’t it?” Alonso agreed. “It can be darkened, but it doesn’t do that by reflection. It becomes absorbent, so darkening is not a protection against any source that can heat it sufficiently to melt it.”

  “Like a laser?” Lee asked.

  “Or a close nuclear explosion or flying it into an extremely hot environment.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Lee agreed. “It doesn’t seem a very serious limitation.”

  “There are better solutions,” Alonso admitted, “However, they would have to be made in Fargone or New Japan and still be heavier besides being far more expensive.”

  “No, this is fine. This is a first of concept vehicle too. I bet it’s obsolete in five years,” Lee predicted.

  “One or two, once your friends with money see it and want one,” Alonso said.

  “You may be right,” Lee said, remembering how April wanted a sports plane after their flight.

  “Do we have to swap the seats out for Humans and Derf?” Lee wondered looking at the difference between them. The seat Alonso was in was wide enough for his enormous rear end. The seat he was working on much narrower.

  “Not at all. Observe,” he said.

  There was a loop of belting hanging off the edge of the narrow seat. When Alonso pulled it wings extended from underneath and locked into place with a reassuring >CHUNK<. He then reached
under the front edge to release a catch. The wings slid down and in when pushed on them gently, until they made the same solid sound of locking.

  “The seats were much more difficult to design than the canopy. If they were only for Humans, we could get them down to four and a half kilograms each. To be convertible for Derf takes them to eight kilograms. The materials are cutting edge and expensive. Not anything practical to use in volume for the cabin structure itself yet.”

  “But give it five years?” Lee teased him to see if he’d say one or two.

  “Yeah, maybe ten,” he said being contrary. “Once they develop exotic materials, they have to get the R&D costs out early before something can be mass-produced cheaply. I could have taken fifty kilograms off the shell using the seat materials, but it would have made it cost ten times as much. It wouldn’t perform ten times better. You have to draw the line somewhere. Five years from now you can probably use the new materials at a reasonable cost but expect by that time they will probably have new better ones at an inflated price to tempt you to over-build again. It’s always expensive to be cutting-edge.”

  Lee frowned. “If it doesn’t make you start over from scratch, could you put a belt receptacle in the middle of the seat when it is opened wide for Derf? Then two humans can sit in one Derf seat. Six Humans shouldn’t be any more of a load than two Derf and two Humans.”

  “Yeah, that’s easy. And a belt on each side to reach the middle. Your humans better be pretty fond of each other,” Alonso said gesturing with his flat hands pressed together.

  Lee just nodded. That was obvious.

  “Just the back two should suffice,” she added.

  “I have a request too. Ask your people making the pods to either put a bolt circle around the top of the pods for me or affix a sixty-degree wedge that will be horizontal when the pods rotate to thrust straight ahead.”

  “Streamlining?” Lee asked. “But not a cone?”

  “It’s complicated. Just give me 10mm bolt holes and I’ll fab them,” he decided.

  “OK, I’ll tell them to give you mounting holes. I’m glad the shell is already fabbed and I don’t have to decide,” Lee said running her hand down the hull “I’d love to be able to tell you to go ahead, do anything, that money doesn’t matter, but the Earthie Claims Commission cut off all my royalties. I’m not broke, far from it, but there will be a pause in my income. I better learn to moderate my spending until I have new sources.”

  Alonso looked concerned. “May one assume you are going to do something about that?”

  “Yes. The Red Tree Mothers, myself, and Gordon are all laying plans to…correct this situation.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  * * *

  “Do you have a moment?” Mo asked on com.

  Mo was one of the few people who never called Heather without having something specific and worthwhile to say.

  “I’m always happy to talk to you, Mo. If I brush you off you can assume there are warheads inbound or the place is on fire. It’s been weeks since you called and I do read your text memos. What’s up?”

  “Two items,” Mo said holding his thumb and forefinger up to the camera. “The exotic material made to the formula from Derfhome checks out completely compatible for our uses. They require some changes to design being a glassy solid but that was easy. If anything, the new drives will be easier to fabricate than the old ones that needed to retain fluids. A prototype has been tested in an unmanned drone and we are using it to establish a conversion program for the minor differences in the jump parameters.

  He withdrew the forefinger from play.

  “What I’d like from you is permission to build a dedicated fabricating station to produce these drives as a bolt-in replacement for the current generation of jump drones. They can also serve as ship drives with suitable adapter frames for the old-style drives.”

  “That’s marvelous,” Heather said. “Do you have sufficient materials to keep it running or do you need anything?”

  “We have so much elemental material stockpiled from the French mills separating regolith that we can produce them for months.”

  “Do it. Pull resources from anything not life-critical. What else?” she asked nodding at the thumb remaining.

  “I have a technician, William Hardt, working as an instrument maker for us. He came to us through Home from Germany. He is not sworn to you. However, I have not been segregating workers and projects since you explained you and your partners found little value in unnecessary secrecy.”

  Mo stopped there, waiting to see if Heather still approved or would reprove him.

  “That wasn’t a whimsy likely to change easily,” Heather assured him.

  Mo nodded.

  “He was swapping stories at the break table with a fellow who worked on the failed Martian package. It seems the Europeans were trying to develop a quantum radar similar to the one the Martians recovered. They could never maintain reliable entanglement long enough to reach beyond orbital distances, and even then, the idler holding the local side of the entangled pair was only good for one pulse. The optical cavity in the Martian device must do better than that or it wouldn’t be useful in a spaceship. The German version he described as a manifold so it was definitely different.

  “The thing is, they developed a useful processor. That’s the part torn away and missing from the Martian device. There are no guarantees but Hardt says he knows enough about the German processor to reproduce it. The question is, even if he can do so, can it be successfully coupled with the alien component to produce a working whole? It is encouraging that both appear to be multi-qubit devices that can process one idling signal without destroying the others.”

  “You assume we can reproduce the idler container,” Heather said.

  “Well, yes. That seems likely with a physical sample,” Mo insisted. “You might assign Martin Judd to work with him. The man is a wizard with electronics. Do you think this is worth pursuing?”

  When Heather didn’t answer right away Mo wiggled the thumb, which was humor from him.

  “What are your impressions of this Hardt person?” Heather asked.

  “I’m not qualified to speak about personalities or normality,” Mo insisted.

  “Neither am I but it doesn’t stop me from trying to wing it as best I can,” Heather said. “I don’t have a psychologist on staff. The fact that you brought up normality at all, tells me you do have an opinion.”

  “He is nerdy. Socialized, but more interested in things than people. I occasionally have to tell him to stop working and go home. I’ve never heard him speak of family or home, but neither has he ever made trouble with coworkers. I’ve never run software on him. I don’t want that to become the norm between me and my people.”

  “Do you think he would be open to being sworn to me?” Heather asked.

  “Heather, I think the majority of your residents would swear to you if you conducted a poll. But I do feel in some cases it’s safer to invite people to be sworn than those who request it. Some may want the status for favor or gain and don’t appreciate the seriousness of it or intend to honor it if it becomes burdensome. Interview him and form your own opinion,” Mo counseled.

  “Bring him by,” Heather said. “I will talk to him but I want your input on my decision after. I am going to run software on him and extend the conversation well beyond the narrow topics of his work and loyalties. I don’t want unbalanced people sworn to me. Dr. Holbrook taught me that lesson. If I feel comfortable with him, I’ll offer, but I think this project is too important to risk with an unsworn resident. I can see him deciding he has a package to take back to Germany that will give him status and income to offset whatever motivated him to leave Earth. I don’t want to hand such a device to the Earth powers. Call when you can both come to supper. I find that feels less like an interrogation and gives you opportunities to bring up a wider range of conversation. Besides, I have to eat every day so the slot is always open.”

  Mo folded his thumb down,
nodded his agreement, and disconnected.

  * * *

  Sam informed his partner he was going to surveil some of the new leads he was getting from car service records and publicly posted business contracts. He loaded up a few small bugs and drones to leave behind if anything seemed worth keeping an eye on them.

  First on his list was the aircraft shop. Lee had visited there again and he had no idea why. There were no public contracts linking her to the shop and Derf don’t file incorporation papers or other sources of business information. He had no idea from the posted contract values if this would be a huge building with a hundred workers or a tiny shop with a handful of workers. He wasn’t prepared at all for it to be a single proprietor working alone.

  The business was in a stand-alone hangar. There was room inside for four small airframes and any of the small craft tied down behind the building might be his too. The front door was up and Sam could see the rear was raised a half-meter or so, probably for ventilation.

  He couldn’t believe everything was in plain sight and no netting or grill across the huge door or the office that filled one corner. He walked into the office. Seeing nobody, proceeded out on the shop floor.

  “Yo…anybody home?” he called, but not too loudly.

  Nobody answered. Sam knew Derfhome had a pretty low crime rate but there were all sorts of expensive tools on a long bench along the wall and a whole big rolling box of them pulled up to an aircar frame. Maybe the owner dropped dead and he just happened to be the first person to come by. He had a vivid imagination.

  Sam did a slow circuit of the shop. There were two sports planes with wings, a vacant area to the back corner, and the aircar. No bodies. As unlikely as it seemed the owner must have gone out to lunch or to run an errand leaving the place wide open. It seemed irresponsible. The aircar was the most exotic item in the shop so he suspected if anything here was related to Lee that would be the item. He’d certainly never seen one with such a big bubble canopy. He’d grab a couple of pix of it, toss a camera bug high up on the wall by the office, one in the office where it could see the computer screens, and get out of here. He got a side view of the whole vehicle then leaned in over the low edge and got a shot between the seats. Rather than a dashboard like a ground car it had instrument panels with screens that swung in close after you were seated, or back out of the way when not needed, and a control stick with buttons at the arm-rest level on the back of the supporting post.