Sudden Death (A Military Sci Fi Thriller) (The Biogenesis War Files)

by L. L. Richman

  How about this one? In 1883, Lord Kelvin himself said that x-rays would prove to be a hoax.

  Then there’s the Boeing engineer who remarked after the first flight of the 247, “there will never be a bigger plane built.” Anyone ever heard of the 247? It could carry ten passengers. Ten.

  The fundamental flaw in each of these cases is that they failed to take into account something known as the Chicago Pile moment. A moment like that is where a landmark breakthrough occurs, like it did in 1942 under the bleachers at Stagg Field in Chicago when Enrico Fermi successfully conducted the first human-made, self-sustaining nuclear reaction.

  Which, by the way, Einstein himself famously said in 1932 would never happen!

  With that rather long-winded caveat, I present to you the current research that is being done, right here, right now. They’re the foundation for what I call the WAGs—the wild-assed guesses—that proliferate throughout my books.

  Stealth Technology

  Did you wonder how Boone and his fellow Marines could traverse the Atliekas without being detected? In the first chapter of this book, ‘Pirate Nest,’ I mention a ‘meringue’ of aerogels and metal foams that are used to disperse and absorb all EM signatures, effectively masking them from detection.

  In the main trilogy, I mention that ship’s hulls are surfaced with MXene membranes. This fictional 2D material, spun into a 3D coating, functions as a sieve to harvest hydrogen from the interstellar medium as the ship transits through it. It’s also an integral part of the tunable stealth shielding that covers Shadow Recon ships, used to insert Unit operators behind enemy lines.

  Wait, did I say fiction?

  We’re living in a time when incredible strides in materials science are being made, where 2D materials such as graphene are playing increasingly larger roles.

  Recently, another 2D material was engineered. Let me introduce you to the material known as MXene. That’s pronounced Maxine, in case you were wondering. (I was, so I looked it up.)

  MXene is only ten years old. It’s the ‘new graphene,’ the cool new kid on the block. And when I say cool, I mean really cool.

  It can be used in all sorts of applications, from desalinization (it can trap the energy of sunlight to purify water through evaporation, with an energy efficiency that’s off the charts) to chemical sniffers (its ‘nose’ is the most sensitive ever reported). They also function as high-permeability hydrogen-selective membranes for hydrogen production and carbon dioxide capture.

  What? That’s… not science fiction. It’s science fact.

  Both these 2D materials have also been spun into aerogels, porous, ultralight materials with extremely low density. Scientists call these ‘meringues.’ They’ve discovered MXene exhibits an interesting property when it’s formed into an aerogel. When combined with nanocellulose, it turns into a high-performance electromagnetic interference shield.

  EM shielding is common today. Electronics components are everywhere throughout our homes, our cars, the places we frequent. Most require shielding so they won’t impact neighboring components or block signal transmission. But that same technology can be used for something known as multi-spectral camouflage.

  In a word… stealth.

  Boone and his fellow Marines manage to avoid detection in the pirate’s den by wearing drakeskin suits. These suits make them invisible to detection across all EM bands. Although this is a familiar and well-used trope within science fiction, real scientists have been making great strides toward realizing this.

  Ever heard of metamaterials? Metamaterials are engineered structures, created to interact with the electromagnetic spectrum in precise ways. The link in the previous sentence will take you to Nature magazine’s curated list of articles on that topic. But I have a few specific examples to share with you as well:

  A Canadian camouflage company, Hyperstealth Technology, has patented a material that bends light around an object, causing it to become invisible to the naked eye. They’re not the only organization trying to crack this code. Plenty of groups are working on ways to spoof the EM spectrum. Problem is, they may succeed at one wavelength, but fail at others. Still, it’s a start.

  One final thought before we leave the topic of stealth: Most of what I’ve shared with you thus far focuses on EM shielding. That makes sense. To remain stealthy, our heroes need to have a way to block emissions along the full electromagnetic spectrum as they fly through the black, from infrared to ultraviolet and everything in between.

  But that’s not the only thing they need to worry about. When they’re in an atmosphere, as they were on the pirate’s platform, they had to worry about sound as well. Sound waves are mechanical waves, not electromagnetic ones. They require a medium through which they can propagate.

  Studies are currently underway on graphene-based aerogel meringues that researchers predict we’ll see in use by 2023. To give you a feel for the material’s sound-blocking effectiveness, if an aircraft’s nacelles were coated in this meringue, it would reduce the deep-throated roar of a jet taking off to the whirr of a hairdryer.

  The audio chaff the Marines deploy could very well have its basis right here.

  Brain-Machine Interfaces (aka ‘the Wire’)

  How do I envision the wire working? To describe it, I need to first talk a bit about how the brain works. I’m no neuroscientist, so this is an oversimplification, but here are some of the basics:

  The way our central and peripheral nervous system works is through messaging. Messages travel between individual neurons in the brain, relayed through dendrites and axons. Dendrites bring information into the cell, axons draw them out. For communication to occur between neurons, an electrical impulse has to travel down that axon until it reaches a synaptic terminal.

  (Please don’t mistake axons for axions; those are hypothetical elementary particles some scientists believe might be a component in dark matter—if they exist.)

  The spikes are brief, one-millisecond changes in the electrical potential across the cell membrane. During this brief spike, electrical current flows in the space surrounding the cell. And that can be detected! Of course, you’d need a very sensitive electrode to do that.

  Enter the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). They’re funding a project to develop a tech that will not only detect the signals, but to translate them, and then transmit them… all without invasive surgery.

  The program is known as N3, Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology. Rice University’s Robinson Lab is part of that initiative, and they’ve developed MOANA, a brain-machine interface that uses a combination of optics and magnetism to make this happen.

  They’re not alone. There are plenty of companies out there who are making quiet advances in this field. Battelle is one of them. They’ve already developed NeuroLife (not to be confused with Elon Musk’s infamous Neuralink). NeuroLife is a neural bypass technology that has enabled a quadriplegic to move his hands using only his thoughts. Now, Battelle has been funded by DARPA to develop an injectable, bi-directional Brain Computer Interface.

  SAD 5 BROS, Truth Serum, and Medical Nano

  Truth serum is a fascinating subject. It falls under the squishy realm of neuroscience. We still know surprisingly little about the mind and the brain, though recent studies suggest we’re on the cusp of some major discoveries. Notice my use of both the words ‘brain’ and ‘mind.’ These aren’t interchangeable. The first represents the hardware; the second represents the software.

  The truth drug Boone uses in this book doesn't yet exist, but neuroscientists today believe it might soon. I researched the history of such drugs, and found out some fascinating things:

  We’ve known for centuries that certain chemicals affect the human body. Yes, you read that right: centuries. Ether was first synthesized in 1540. Nitrous oxide, laughing gas, was discovered in 1772. In both cases, the effects were treated as nothing more than parlor tricks and would continue to be viewed in that light for nearly four hundred years.


  The first time a chemical compound was used to alter a person’s mental state for a specific purpose was in 1844 when a dentist used ether to anesthetize a patient while extracting a tooth.

  The use of medical compounds as truth serums is almost exactly a hundred years old, as of this writing. The drugs used interact with the mind by inducing a desire to please. This was eventually found to be unreliable when investigators realized the drugs often 'lead the witness.' In an effort to please the interrogator and give him the answer he sought, a person under the influence of such drugs might admit to something they’d not actually done.

  We’ve come a long way since the 1920’s. Back then, the study of medicines that altered the consciousness used the black box approach of trial and error. Neurotransmitters weren’t discovered to exist until 1921, and it wasn’t until the 1940s-1950s that specific ones were identified. It took another forty years before functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) would give us a glimpse into the inner workings of the brain by mapping neural activity.

  As you can see, neuroscience is truly in its infancy, and there’s a lot of room to grow.

  Will we ever crack the truth serum code? Some neuroscientists believe we might. A 2014 article suggests the most likely candidate would be a neurotransmitter drug that would generate a feeling of trust in the subject. It would encourage truth telling, rather than saying whatever makes the questioner happy.

  Thus, Sad 5 Bros was born.

  As for the medical analgesic nano in the canister Boone altered, yes, it exists today! Granted, it’s not in bot form, nor can it alter pain-signaling from a neurotransmitter—at least, not yet.

  Today’s nanoanalgesics provide targeted medicine that delivers lower and more effective doses directly where needed, reducing toxicity to other organs.

  Nanomedicine is an exciting and rapidly accelerating field, with new medicines being introduced every year. I discussed it briefly in the forward to The Chiral Protocol.

  We’re using nanoparticles to fight cancer in a big way, both in chemotherapy and in radiation therapy. They can increase the photoelectric effect, which in turn makes that relativistic beam of electron particles a much more efficient killer when turned on malignant cells.

  We even have chiral nanoparticles. These chiral supraparticles encase cancer-fighting drugs, providing protection to their cargo while delivering it directly to the source.

  There are tons of other nanomedical therapies being developed right now. Some of them include novel new ways medics can triage on the battlefield. These encase material that promotes bone and skin regrowth in clay nanoparticles that are made to break down slowly over time.

  The research we're seeing in nanomedicine is truly extraordinary. I think you'll find the future for this particular industry is very bright, indeed.

  What does all this mean? As I said earlier, I believe the science of the Biogenesis universe is far closer to being realized than the three hundred years the stories envision. It’s an exciting time to be alive, isn’t it?

  L.L. Richman

  Leawood, 2021

  NO ONE SAID

  THERE’D BE MATH

  In addition to research, these books have a fair amount of math in them. It’s a good thing, too, because believe it or not, I have readers who check me on my calculations.

  In this book, it begins in the very first scene: “Nine Geminate Navy Marines shot silently through the black, catapulted from a destroyer’s missile tubes…”

  For a lot of folks, this might be skim-over material. But at least one physicist worked the problem, and then questioned me on it.

  Is that number believable? Let’s take a look.

  Boone and his buddies experienced 100 gs for two seconds. That time interval is based on the catapults used on U.S. aircraft carriers. But how many gs can the human body withstand?

  The highest acceleration recorded was experienced by USAF Captain Eli Beeding in 1958, on the Daisy Sled. According to the National Academy of Sciences, he “was exposed to 2,139 g per second to a peak of 40.4 g for a duration of .040 second. … The dynamic response to the impact was a peak measured on the sternum of 82.6 g, at 3,826 g per second.”

  Pretty amazing stuff for 1958, considering they didn’t have access to any of the cool tech the Geminate Marines have. If you’d like to read more about the infamous ‘G-Machine,’ check out this article in Air and Space Magazine, and if you’d like to read more about Captain Beeding, check out his Wikipedia article.

  How fast do spaceships travel? Within the Biogenesis Universe, I’ve built in limitations, given the damage the Scharnhorst drives do to the Interstellar Medium. This means that ships within a star system are limited to the use of fusion drives and are constrained by the speed of light. That doesn’t mean they can’t go fast, though!

  It's all relative, really. Ships accelerating at a constant one gravity will achieve speeds on the order of millions of kilometers an hour by the time they’ve traveled a few AUs.

  In Boone’s case, his ship began ten AUs away, at the capital planet of Ceriba. If the destroyer constantly accelerated to the halfway point before flipping to decelerate, and did so at one g, the ship would reach ten million kilometers per hour.

  Our pirates are hiding out 75,000 kilometers inside the Procyon belt. On an astronomical scale, that’s nothing. The Geminate destroyer that patrols the system is used to traveling such distances in an eye-blink, so to approach such a location stealthily will require some finesse.

  To determine how easily those nine Marines might navigate the fictional Atliekas asteroid belt, I took a close look at our own. Sol’s belt lies between Mars and Jupiter, and we’ve amassed quite a bit of information on it, thanks to missions like NASA’s New Horizons. That data is readily available, so that’s what I used for the Atliekas.

  You probably already know that these regions of space aren’t the densely packed minefields that Hollywood has made them out to be. According to Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator, Sol’s belt is so spread out that the chance of running into an asteroid is vanishingly small, much lower than one in a billion.

  “If you want to come close enough to an asteroid to make detailed studies of it, you have to aim for one,” he said. And if you were to gather up every rock in Sol’s asteroid belt into one planetary mass, that planet would be two thousand times smaller than Earth!

  We also know a surprising amount about asteroid belts that orbit other stars, and that knowledge is growing. For example, Epsilon Eridani has three belts: two rocky ones and an outer icy ring. The inner belt is nearly identical to the one in our own system, whereas the outer belt is twenty times denser than its inner twin.

  We only recently discovered evidence that asteroid belts exist in binary systems. It wasn’t until 2017 that astronomers discovered rocky debris orbiting the white dwarf system, SDSS 1557, nearly sixteen hundred light-years away!

  So… about that math.

  It takes between three and six years for our own asteroid belt to complete one rotation around the sun. That translates roughly to a speed of eighteen kilometers per second, or 64,800 kph.

  Wait. It only took Boone and the team a little over an hour to get to the pirate’s den. That 100-g boost isn’t going to be nearly enough. What gives?

  As was stated in chapter one, the Marines on the Callaghan were already traveling at a fast clip. They left those missile tubes at a velocity that added 7,000 kph to the destroyer’s existing speed. (If you want to run the numbers, I had the destroyer at 65,000 kph, decelerating to match the orbital speed of the asteroid belt.)

  But there’s one more thing to consider: you see, the pirate base does not remain still. It’s in motion, in an orbit that exactly matches the velocity of the asteroid belt.

  In the time it takes the Marines to reach the base, it’s moved nearly 33,000 kilometers spinward. The good news is that at such a small distance relative to the star system itself, we can ignore curvature and just assume the movement was in a s
traight line.

  By the time Boone reaches the pirate platform, I’ve given enough information so that if you really wanted to work the problem, you could do so. It’s just a matter of plugging in numbers and dusting off that equation you learned in high school that you swore you’d never use in real life: the Pythagorean Theorem.

  We end up with a diagram that looks like this:

  The Callaghan had to eject Boone and his companions at an angle of twenty-three degrees with respect to where the pirate den was located when they first left the ship. They also had to travel along the hypotenuse, which added nearly 6,000 kilometers to their trip.

  Whew!

  That’s one example out of many that crop up within the pages of these books. Writing hard science fiction, even science fiction adventure stories, is certainly a different beast from other genres!

  TERMINOLOGY

  ActiveFiber – a tunable material with catalytic properties, comprised of a nanoparticle superlattice that ‘listened’ on a carrier wave for instructions on how to reshape itself. Most spacefaring ships and space stations layered their bulkheads with an ActiveFiber coating, which could be used to reconfigure the interior structure. The fiber is infused with nanobots, which can absorb a contaminant, break it down into its constituent parts, and reuse the material.

  Calabi-Yau Gate – This method of folding space bends the compactified branes stacked within the Bulk of hyperspace, allowing for instantaneous travel in normal spacetime, from one location to another, regardless of distance.