Whiskey Romeo

by James Welsh

  The starling frigate was the first in its class, built like an arrowhead and it pierced into the universe like one. Weighing in at over six hundred tons and measuring the length of a skyscraper’s shadow in the afternoon, the frigate could hold over sixty settlers and years of supplies. It was not long before the bowstring of the space elevator was pulled tight, and the frigate was launched into the cool of space. It was 2165: the Silk Age was over, and the Obsidian Age had begun.

  The frigate cut through the vacuum in a way that no ship before it ever could. Running along the bottom of the frigate was a long turbine engine. The engine could inhale photons, the particles of light that shine from a star at the speed of light, and power the ship on starlight alone. There were catches in the promise, though. The ship could only travel at third the speed of light – a drop more, and the gravity induced by the speed alone would cause the ship to crumble under the weight of its miracle. And the fuel was not consistent – the quanta, or shots of photons, were endless but had interruptions between them, like a holiday parade. And so the ship was constantly accelerating and decelerating, with the engine slowing just as soon as it touched the edge of its speed. But when a ship can travel tens of thousands of miles a second, no one complains.

  And although the frigate was built to handle the demands of sub-light speeds, the speed should have massacred the crew, pulping them the moment the ship accelerated into space. But the engineers saw this scene play out in their nightmares, and they carved out gravity beams in the front and back of each frigate, each beam fueled by the captured quanta. As the ship pushed into space, the gravity beams pulled, creating a gravitational field that cancelled out the lethal g-forces. And when the ship began to slow, the beams matched the deceleration ounce for ounce. Never before did a stalemate feel like such a victory to everyone.

  When the starling frigate flapped its wings and launched into space, all of the workers of Phoenix cheered, and there were celebrations for weeks. But it was not until over two years later, when the workers had entirely forgotten the launch, that bigger news was made. The frigate, christened with the name Cheval, had landed in a star system. The captain, whose grandparents were among those who fled a collapsing Spain for the Americas, called it a vecino system, after the old word for neighbor.

  This vecino system had a red giant star with four planets orbiting it. The explorers easily conquered the system just by naming it. They named the red giant Carina, and they closed their eyes and felt its soft glow on their faces, even though the heat could not have possibly sifted through the windows of impenetrable glass. The first of the planets, Persephone, was a lump of diamond tumbling around her home star. Its surface, a sheet of black diamond, should have camouflaged the planet against the backdrop of space. But the planet dug a shallow orbit around the star Carina, and the planet inhaled the heat until it was soaked with hellfire. And so the planet glowed a deep maroon, an understudy to its star. The explorers reasoned that Persephone was just a sundried heart of its former glory. It was not entirely farfetched to think of Persephone as having been once a rocky planet, its surface blasted away long ago by the star’s heat and revealing the core of diamond beneath its ground. If only there was some of that rocky soil left – then, the explorers may have found the bacteria fossilized into the blanket of gravel.

  Pana was a gas planet that stood out in the deeper waters of the system. From there, the hulking Carina looked no bigger in the sky than the Earth’s full moon. Pana had rich blues and oranges smeared across its face like war paint. And there was a sideshow strangeness to the gas planet, as it had a ring of dust like Saturn or the other gas planets back home. But while Saturn’s ring stayed in an orbit around its equator, Pana’s ring was constantly whirling in all directions around the planet, never staying still. And even from millions of miles away, the explorers could detect an out-of-control magnetic field radiating from Pana. The explorers theorized that the magnetic field was the cause of the twisting ring, but they had no idea what sparked the magnet’s chaos. The Cheval launched one of its robotic scouts to dive into the gas planet and explore its mysteries. But, just as the scout touched Pana’s atmosphere, the intense pressure crushed the robot down to the size of a crumpled piece of paper.

  And then there was Eshu, a ball of ice that drifted on the edge of the system. The crew of the Cheval scanned the planet for its chemistry, and they were shocked to find that it was ice water down to its soul. During their travel, the explorers had found other icy planets, but they all at least had a rocky core. But Eshu was all ice, and it baffled the scientists as to how Eshu could have formed on its own. They did not read back far enough in the history. Billions of years ago, before their galaxy had even formed, it was a quasar, the egg of the galaxy it would become. The bright quasar was squeezed by its own gravity and could blind anything within light years of it. Orbiting the quasar were hundreds of billions of tons of water, marching around the quasar as orderly as planets. When the quasar began to calm down, its heavy heart dissolving into the Milky Way, most of the water wandered off into space. Some of the water, though, clumped together and began to freeze into massive icebergs. Eshu was one of those births by freezing, and it held the honor of being the oldest planet in the galaxy. Of course, the explorers did not know about any of this.

  Each of the planets was strange, but none of them were as odd as Janus, the planet that orbited in a squeezed oval around its star Carina. The explorers named the planet after the two-faced Roman god of change for good reason. This was because Janus was both two planets and one. The Apollo hemisphere had a thin crust of nickel and a thick pulse of liquid nitrogen, whereas the Diana hemisphere was geologically dead, a graveyard of volcanic basalt. Millions of years before, the hemispheres were their own separate planets, until a chance collision smashed the planets together. The heat of the impact and their sparring gravity resulted in the planets Apollo and Diana fusing into Janus. The planet spun recklessly through space for a million years before getting caught up in Carina’s pull. But its collision and its capture left Janus with strange days. While most planets spin mostly upright on their vertical axes, Janus rolled on her side like children down a hill. The constantly shifting weight of the liquid hydrogen inside the Apollo hemisphere kept the planet precariously balanced but still balanced in its orbit. But it was vertigo to stand on her face and look up at the heavens. Back on Earth, the sun and moon glided in straight arcs across the sky. On Janus, Carina and the nighttime chorus of stars spun into a vertigo, as the planet completed one of its sideways rotation in just under a half-hour.

  As if it wasn’t inviting enough, Janus was torn between extremes. The Apollo hemisphere always faced the star, and it cooked at over 1,000 degree Fahrenheit. The Diana hemisphere always faced into the night lush of stars, where it shivered at -200 degrees Fahrenheit in its night of forever. The strange rotation also meant that there was never a change in the seasons, nor was there a real definition of a day or year. The planet stayed locked in its imbalances, and the only way to experience change was to fly between the hemispheres.

  The schizophrenia behind Janus intrigued the explorers, and when their robotic scouts began burrowing into its surface, the planet’s mysteries grew deeper. The robots soon uncovered a beehive of tunnels that hollowed out the inside of the Diana hemisphere. The explorers back on the ship noticed that the tunnel walls were lined with igneous rock, a symptom of magma carving out the tunnels, but that was long ago. Now, Diana was cold and dead, and this confused the explorers even more. This was because as the robots navigated the labyrinth, they pushed against blasts of hydrogen, as if the planet was breathing in death. Some of the explorers argued that this meant Diana was still alive, while the others figured that the hydrogen had wormed its way from the Apollo side.

  As the robots dug more and time wrote their research, the Apollo hypothesis rang true louder and louder. When Apollo and Diana had collided and fused long ago, much of Apollo’s hydrogen escaped through Apollo’s wounds and bled i
nto outer space. The liquid hydrogen that stayed behind, though, compressed and heated in the core of the new planet, burning hotter until it turned gaseous. And it is in hydrogen’s blood to rise, and so the geysers of hydrogen gas streamed through the tunnels of Diana, searching for the shortest path possible to the surface above. As the hydrogen reached the surface on the other side, it instantly froze into slush, and drifts of snow hydrogen fell across the Diana hemisphere. And even with most of the hydrogen having been already lost during the collision, and the steady exhale of it since, the explorers estimated that the planet still had 30,000 years of hydrogen left inside of her.

  As the gusts of hydrogen made their way through the tunnels, the molecules scattered off the graffiti of oxygen isotopes in the rock. Joined together by the heat and pressure, the hydrogen and oxygen twisted together into drops of water. There were waterfalls everywhere as ladders of water snaked down the tunnels, towards the center of Janus. The explorers were excited, having found the first true extraterrestrial lakes. They danced, not realizing that the ancient Greeks already thought of that alien water centuries before and explored its depths through their mythology. The explorers did not so much discover as they did remember the stories of hellish Hades and the River Styx that ran through the Greek Underworld. They had forgotten those classics – the break of civilization back home made sure of that.

  The explorers then chose to scout one tunnel in particular with their robots. This tunnel was the oldest of the planet’s burrows and certainly the deepest. Tests confirmed that there was hardly any hydrogen to be found in this vent, its floor having likely caved and prevented any leaks from the Apollo side. While searching the tunnel, they found a cave dug into its wall precisely three miles deep, just buried enough to where the temperature and gravity were refreshing. And the water was particularly thick in the cavern, as whole rivers were irrigated through cracks in the rock and pooled into lakes in the corners. And it was tempting to mistake the drips of water from the ceiling for spring rain.

  And so this was where, in the year 2172, the explorers chose to settle and plant their first colony, tired of living in a ship’s hull. It took a month to terraform the cave enough so that oxygen could circulate, but that was all it took. Soon, the frigate was lowering the explorers into the tunnel by small launches, and the people took the time to make their new home right. They carved out homes in the walls of the cave, easily hollowing out the wall using heat drills that melted the stone. They rerouted the lakes into a series of canals that passed by the colony and poured into a well they dug in the center of the settlement. It was there that the people planted their crops, which were genetically modified and underwent photosynthesis solely by their glowing leaves. The only ingredient that the crops needed to grow was water, and this they were spoon-fed, as the water cascaded into the well and soaked the plants through. This water was recycled and drained into the lake once more, the people responsible for the spinning of this water cycle.

  The first controversy over the new colony was predictable: what they should name it. Eventually, though, the colonists chose a name, deciding upon the name Volans, in honor of the constellation of the flying fish. The name came about after one of the colonists had a dream, where they were sprinting across one of the planet’s many underground rivers. They ran when they should have sunk, buoyant by Janus’ weak gravity. The retelling of the dream made the other colonists think of how far they have come, sailing across the ocean of space on a wind of light, looking for a future they could export back to the Old World.

  It was not long before they found that export, and a good thing too, because that meant that Phoenix would continue financing her colony. Hundreds of years before, the Portuguese colony in Brazil could not be forgotten, because her forests of brazilwood could be crushed into a valuable red dye. At the same time, the English colony in Virginia also could not be forgotten, because her tobacco fields represented the newest dance with death. And now Volans would not be forgotten, because she orbited a massive red giant star that was more than eighty times the diameter of the Sun back home and cool enough for spacecraft to orbit closely without burning up.

  Scientists back on Earth realized that they could mine a star for her energy. By positioning a series of satellites around a star, they could capture the sunlight the star was constantly shedding. The sheer force of the starlight was more than enough to drive the quantum gears inside of the satellite. The gears, each of which was so small that they were practically invisible to almost any microscope, spun like an asylum from the current of sunshine. Countless miles away on Earth, scientists cheered in a rare moment of giddiness as exact copies of those quantum gears began spinning mythically quick in their laboratory, shining with so much electricity that the entire facility short-circuited, even though the gears were not connected to the power grid.

  Their theory was correct: it was possible for the energy the satellites harvested from the red giant Carina to be immediately transferred as electricity to transformers back on Earth. How was it possible? Before the satellites had been launched from Earth, the scientists took pains to create and mix particles that had then became entangled with one another. Then, they separated the entangled pairs, put one of the twin particles into each of the satellites, and launched it into the dark of space, with the partner particle left behind. And so, as Carina’s sunshine spun the particle inside of the satellite, the partner particle millions of miles away on Earth spun at the exact speed but in the opposite direction. The particles ignored the years of distance between them and remained just as connected as they did when once joined together. It was not so much mad science as it was love at the subatomic level.

  It was not long before the Phoenix Charter set up a series of transformers within their corporate boundaries to take advantage of the quantum mining. Within just one year, Phoenix was able to harness electricity from the red giant Carina to power every home from Alaska in the north to Argentina in the south. It was more than enough electricity, actually, and Phoenix sold more of their quantum transformers to the other two charters, Gibraltar and Malay. The business venture was simple but had a tint of conspiracy to it. Phoenix would power the entire world through their quantum transformers. Gibraltar and Malay could save face and tell their workers that they were the ones responsible for the sunshine mining. But in the end, it was Phoenix behind the curtain, and the charters paid Phoenix a secret fortune to keep providing electricity. The charter was holding Earth’s entire power grid hostage, and the public did not even know it. And the few who knew did not care, as long as the power kept rushing into their home.

  If everyone had some role in that play of conspiracy, whether it was the actors in the limelight or the crew in the shadows, was it still a conspiracy? If there was just one player who was deceiving their self about how sharp the sword of power felt between their fingertips, then yes, it was still a conspiracy.

  Carina

  2170 AD

  “No worries, Mr. Chroma. Those who fail at engineering teach. And those who fail at both engineering and teaching still engineer.”

  The hand on the graduate student’s shoulder was gnarled and twisted like ivy. The brick wall in the student’s shrunken but stubborn shoulder crumbled from the vineyard fingers.

  The fingers were weak, but the voice was strong. “Remember that when you step into that room. You’re not going to walk out of there having won, because you will win just by walking in. Few have gotten to where you are today – remember that. And fewer have a future as blinding as yours. The professors in there know this – else they wouldn’t spend a beautiful spring afternoon sitting in a dusty room to hear a lecture.

  “When I was a student like you – and yes, I was once a student too – I had a professor who said that every job was an attempt at magic. The farmer grows food out of a seed. The carpenter carves a door out of a tree. But none of them truly create something. All they do is turn something into something else, like changing clothes or seasons. The impossible
magic is when you create something out of nothing, like snapping your fingers and a bird sings for the first time in centuries.

  “You ask the writer, and he still thinks he holds magic in his writing hand. Yes, he can craft a story out of a blank piece of paper, but is that something you can feel? If you read a story about knights or astronauts, can you feel anything other than the paper? That’s why the engineer is the closest we’ll ever get to being a magician. A good engineer’s drawings leap off the page and build the world. The professors in that room are waiting for a magic show. Are you ready to give them one?”

  “Yes.”

  ***

  2195 AD

  “Yes?”

  “You okay back there, Dr. Chroma?” Winter repeated.

  “Great. Never better,” Chroma grunted stiffly, his muscles petrified into marble. Chroma was afraid to relax – he knew that if he surrendered an inch of himself, he would be a quivering puddle of engineer on the floor. He would never get used to space travel – it was diving into the dark of the shark’s jaws.

  But while Chroma was ice in his chair, Ysabel Winter was a waterfall in hers. The pilot of Ship Delta, Winter had caramel apple skin and a peppermint smile and hair richer than chocolate, and she had a left punch that could knock out a man’s sweet tooth. And she did not so much sit in her chair as she swam in it.

  The pilot’s chair on the starling launch was a sight to touch. The little launch, like her mother frigate, had a turbine engine that ran on beams of starlight. To the outside observer, the light was simply fed into the hungry cannon on the ship’s hull, which then shot the ship through space and time. But there is always more to a story than words on the page. As the beams of light passed through the engine, they were guided through a convoluted network of water-filled pipes that wrapped the ship like veins in a hand. These pipes were all connected to a single, simple computer – the two panels of iron-laden water on the console in front of Winter. By dipping a pair of gloved hands into the shallow pools, she was able to harness the light. The magnets that lined her gloves magnetized the water, and so wherever she brushed her hands, the water followed. And with water being able to bend light, Winter could command the light to break free from any of the ship’s exhausts she chose, and so being able to guide the ship on the winds of light.