by Brian Smith
It seemed like no time and a lifetime at the same time, but when Ford blinked, he saw that all four of the enemy shooters were down. Chief Hogan was sluggishly struggling back to his feet, calling out that he was okay. Danvers was their only fatality in this brief first scrum, and Ford saw that this was all just as new to the junior Marines as it was to him. Now that the first round of shooting had ended, they were acting a little frozen—no doubt the loss of Danvers was the cause of that.
“Keep moving!” Ford snapped. “Lance Corporal Suzuki, take control of the drones. Send the EMP drone aft and detonate it the moment it detects any threat. Send the snoop-and-shoot after it, weapons free. Shoot anyone with a weapon no matter how they’re tagged! Gloves are off, people! Let’s move it! Chief!”
“You heard the man!” Hogan snarled, still trying to get a full breath. “Left turn once we board, then head aft down the starboard side. Engine room is the objective! Move!”
Hutton stepped up to him as the first of Ford’s team surged aboard the gunship. “Jim! What the hell was that thing?” she asked breathlessly, referring to not-Barstow.
“Later. We’ll worry about it later,” he replied forcefully. “Follow me—keep moving, gun up. Let’s go!”
After ten more minutes of hard fighting, the gunship was theirs. The larger depot was secured fifteen minutes after that.
The butcher’s bill for the action amounted to eight KIA: three Marines and five navy, with a dozen more wounded; the MIM insurgents didn’t go down quietly. Only a few prisoners were taken, and the only conclusion Marshal Hutton could draw was that Mason Barstow remained at large: whatever it was that Ayers had mistakenly tagged as Barstow wasn’t human at all, and her other MIM fugitive was killed in the fight. As for the mysterious, obviously robotic combatant wearing a battle suit, after it burned there wasn’t enough left to determine what it was, at least with the tools and facilities at their disposal.
The weapon it carried was of great interest: a compact particle-beam weapon more advanced than anything currently available even to national militaries. The 5111 Omega factory had been mass-producing them, along with patently illegal, fully autonomous AI combat drones—drones of the type used in the Tongling massacre—so that was one mystery solved. Hundreds of the particle-beam weapons were secured, and they would amaze the military-weapons experts who tried to reverse-engineer them.
The factory itself was something of an engineering marvel, it was later learned, although Reuben James’s crew was never made privy to that.
Once the battle ended, the search for answers and evidence commenced.
Chapter 6
July 2093 (Terran Calendar)
Kasei Echigo Habitat (Kusaka Family Freehold)
Isara Valles Region, Mars
Kasei Echigo, the Kusaka-family habitat, was situated within the Isara Valles, approximately thirty-five kilometers west of Kuretashima Habitat and the Amazonis Mensa maglev line. Like many larger Martian settlements, the primary pressure of the habitat lay within a small crater, sealed over with a double-layered dome of aluminum oxynitride ceramic—transparent aluminum.
Kusaka Shiguro usually commuted to work by taking a rover to Kuretashima and then catching the maglev train down to Nuevo Rio Habitat, where the Federov Propulsion industrial park was located. It was a little inconvenient to live in the family’s freehold, which he’d loved since childhood, but worth it.
His family was stupendously wealthy even by Martian standards, and his contribution to the family fortune was no small one. Kusaka's parents had started the family pressure even before he was born, and Kasei Echigo had grown in proportion to the size of the family itself. Kusaka had two brothers and four sisters, and all of them either still lived at Kasei Echigo or visited often. It was rare for single families to have their own self-sufficient holdings on Mars, but the Kusaka clan was testament to the type of Martian success story that lured starry-eyed pioneers off-Earth in the first place.
In the center of a garden full of lush green plants and bonsai, Kusaka sat perfectly straight in the seiza posture, his back straight, his hands resting lightly and easily on the tops of his thighs. His eyes were closed, his breathing so slow and regular that a stranger might think he'd fallen asleep where he sat. The portion of the floor he occupied was covered in firm, comfortable tatami mats imported from Japan—an expense his family could easily afford. The lights were dimmed, and the hum of the air filters was barely audible. It was a scene of near-perfect tranquility—the picture of someone completely at peace.
Although Kusaka's body was still, his mind was moving rapidly through a mathematical realm that very few people could understand. His mental visualization was as clear as a snooper-generated hologram as he performed this task meditatively—intuitively, without visual or virtual aids. Unfortunately, his attempts to address the current problem through direct study had failed him, and, as was often the case for him, deep meditation brought him closer to the answers he sought. Lately he had been plagued by a deep-seated certainty that the research team was missing something important in their efforts to construct the mathematical framework needed to describe Hyman-Tsong theories on cosmology and astrophysics.
Two years before, Bill Campbell had promised Dmitri Federov help from some mysterious source, and Campbell had delivered on that promise. The entire Federov research team had asked—uproariously demanded—to meet the person or group responsible for advancing their work to a point so far along, but they’d been stonewalled time and again. Whatever the source, the data Campbell returned to them had advanced their work considerably while still falling far short of enabling a finished result. Although professors Hyman and Tsong represented the heart and soul of this growing evolution of physics and cosmology, it was Kusaka who had benefited most from the windfall provided by Campbell—with a mindfulness and perception the others still lacked, he was beginning to sense that the heart of his colleagues’ theories held the promise of more potential than the team currently grasped. He knew it was there, even if he couldn’t conceptualize it yet.
Almost thirty years had passed since Hyman and Tsong put their heads together for the first time, and there had been some amazing leaps forward since. The Federov team was building instrumentation that could produce and measure small variations in what they called the “magnetogravitic” energy spectrum. Electrogravitic energy was implied in the theory as well, but it was proving a tougher nut to crack. Other gadgets put together by the team had succeeded in bending space-time on a measurable scale, much the way gravity did. It was this aspect of their work that fooled people into calling their goal a “gravity drive”—that label wasn't accurate. They were working on a technology that would result in far more than just propulsion applications, although propulsion was the primary goal. Their eventual first prototype was guaranteed to be large, ungainly, inefficient, and tremendously power hungry, but that was nothing new. In Kusaka's view, that first breakthrough (when it finally happened) would mean the battle was won. Once there was a sound theory and a working technological model, gross improvements would follow quickly. It was just an engineering problem, and the history of technological achievement was about two percent innovation followed up by ninety-eight percent refinement.
Complex symbology circulated through Kusaka’s mind in near-perfect recall, one equation to the next, one transformation matrix to the next, guided by the intractable laws of the Tsong calculus. Like all higher mathematics, it was just the newest language derived for describing the physical universe and the processes within it. If Hyman and Tsong were correct, mankind’s current understanding of physics was analogous to living at the center of an onion, interacting with and studying the one layer you could touch and see, without realizing there were more layers surrounding it. Of course, those outer layers were dimensional rather than physical, but that was about as close as one could describe it in concrete terms.
Kusaka lost track of the time as his mind plowed through the mathematics, but after two hours he s
ighed deeply and opened his eyes. In Terran gravity he would have been numb from the waist down from having sat seiza for so long, but his lifelong study of the martial arts, in conjunction with the light Martian gravity, left him feeling fine. He smoothly rose to his feet and retrieved his snoopers, slipping them on and sitting down again, this time cross-legged. He accessed his personal data partition and called up his working notes.
"Atarashī hanpuku o kiroku suru tame ni matte kudasai.” Stand by to record new iteration.
"Ready," his cloud-based AI assistant replied in his ear.
"Theorem one, logic one," he began, and launched himself into a clipped, rapid cascade of mathematical language that his assistant was programmed to at least record, if not comprehend. Starting with the most basic premise of the Tsong calculus, he proceeded to track line by line through each theorem and transformation until he reached a branch in the mathematical path he'd been contemplating. He paused only slightly and then delved down that branch full force, speaking rapidly in what would sound like gibberish to the uninitiated. He finally hit the critical point, the place where he sensed a discontinuity between the new “dimensional sheaf” field theory and traditional physics.
Since his contemporaries’ field theories were testing out as predicted through direct experimentation, it meant there was something fundamental that didn't quite conform to relativity theory—at least where their mathematics stood now. It seemed paradoxical, since relativity had also been experimentally proven and accepted for more than a century, but here it was.
Kusaka slowed down now, his mind straining as he stopped merely reciting the equations that had brought him to this point, and instead he began substituting a few new experimental terms he was formulating to resolve the discrepancy. This was the latest version of a calculation he'd been running for several months, and each time he felt like he was getting incrementally closer to the Profound Truth he sought. All previous versions of his calculations were recorded separately in case it would be necessary to backtrack at some point.
When he was finished, the symbols displayed in his virtual notes.
Kusaka sat silently for a long while, meticulously checking his work from start to finish. He could find no errors, only the uncertainty as to whether the new terms he'd added were a true representation of reality. He was uncomfortably aware that he was slowly but surely adding a new branch to Tsong's invention, but right now that was the entire point of the work. He wasn't ready to show these calculations to the remainder of the team yet; he figured that after about two more iterations he would have probably spent himself on this topic and would need some fresh insights—that would be the time to share.
Kusaka closed his notes and jumped up, grinning to himself. A quick shower, lunch, and then he would be off to meet Dakota Ashburn at the spaceport in Nuevo Rio. He and Ashburn had struck up a ready friendship following their introduction at the Crandall Foundation annual expo sometime back, and today was his friend’s big day: Aberdeen Astronautics was delivering torchship Thuvia to Barsoom Traders, and Ashburn was her handpicked first captain. Ashburn was going to fly them up and give him the grand tour.
On Kusaka’s way out he paused, as he often did, and glanced thoughtfully at the wall painting his youngest sister, a talented artist, had completed a few years before. It was meant to be a depiction of a blue Mars in some far-flung postterraforming future, but she had titled it simply Atarashi Sekai, meaning A New World. Her picture was of a raw, virgin planet replete with blue skies, green forests, and a beautiful waterfall cascading down a moss-covered fossa. Strange-looking cranes wheeled through a pale sky where a yellow sun blazed cheerily, albeit more dimly than if it were seen from Earth.
It was odd, but Kusaka didn’t see a blue Mars when he looked at Mariko’s painting. He saw instead an alien world around a distant star, Earth-like and inviting, waiting to be settled and tamed by the efforts of mankind. It was an image that visited him often in dreams, and he always woke with the strange feeling that he had glimpsed the future. A part of him wondered if this picture might resemble the potentially habitable world orbiting Rigil Kentaurus in some way, but there was a deeper, more intuitive part of him that whispered that this was someplace else. Like the others involved either directly or indirectly in Project Daedalus, he knew how important their shared work was, and what it might mean to humanity.
With that thought in mind, he headed for the garage and his rover.
Spaceplane Banth One
Mars Orbit
Riding in what he considered the “seat of honor,” namely Banth One’s copilot seat next to his friend Ashburn, Kusaka found his breath catch slightly as their course around Phobos brought them past the nearly finished Gateway space dock built by Aberdeen Astronautics.
Construction was slated to begin soon on the outer hull of a new, experimental ship, but nobody could say what the timetable was for finishing it or what its capabilities were supposed to be. In Ashburn’s sour opinion, Bill Campbell had made a huge mistake in shelving a viable torchship design in order to wait for “pie in the sky,” as Boss Forester liked to put it. Kusaka believed more than ever that the Federov team would eventually deliver, but part of him agreed with his friend: it seemed wrong to just stop and wait when Aberdeen already had a better torchship design in hand than those currently under consideration by the Crandall Foundation. While this experimental ship languished in engineering limbo, some other hungry, ambitious firm was going to build an interstellar torchship and head for Alpha Centauri.
The prize contest on the RFP didn’t officially close for another six and a half years, but now that the presence of life-bearing planets at Alpha Centauri was common knowledge, the rush to get to them was on. Ashburn felt the sting of any delay as intensely as anyone: he had plotted out his entire life and career in pursuit of this goal; sacrificed; and ultimately made his professional bed with Forester. The problem was that Forester would probably have a hand in crew selection only if the ship itself were a Crandall Foundation project. What had initially seemed like the only horse to bet on in this race was starting to feel like an old nag—if things got hung up and took too long, Ashburn would be out of the running. He wasn’t too old now, but give it another decade or so and he’d be considered “long in the tooth” for any projected forty-year mission profile.
“They got that dock done a lot faster than I thought they could,” Kusaka remarked.
Ashburn would have scowled, but he was too pleased about today to let his recent rancor over the stalled Project Daedalus get to him. “Hopefully, when they decide on a ship design, they can get it done just as fast,” he allowed, and that was all he had to say about it. Silence reigned for a while, until Ashburn looked over and saw his friend staring distractedly out of the viewport. “What’s eating you?” he asked. “You’re usually bouncing in your seat every time you get to fly.”
“Hmm? Oh, it’s nothing, Mike-san. Just thinking about work. Have you seen Aberdeen’s new torchship design?” he asked. “The one they put on hold?”
Ashburn shook his head. “Wrong company, and way above my pay grade. I don’t even think Boss Forester has seen it. . . . Well, maybe he has, being a Crandall trustee. But if so, only in that capacity.”
“I’ve seen it,” Kusaka confided quietly. “Federov got it from Campbell and showed it to us, because Federov Propulsion would be building the reactors and torches for it. It’s quite advanced, Mike-san. It really qualifies as a third-generation design, even without taking the interstellar aspects into account. Campbell has got some real geniuses hidden away somewhere—no doubt about it.”
“Why doesn’t he just build the damn thing, then?” Ashburn grumbled, drawing a look from his friend. Ashburn had said it neutrally enough, but Kusaka knew him well enough by now to sense Ashburn’s underlying dislike of Campbell.
“I think he’s convinced we’re onto something with our research. Federov gave him all our theoretical work two years ago, and then several months later he gave us refi
nements that moved us forward by . . . well, years. I mean, we didn’t even realize how little we’d accomplished until Campbell’s people helped us along. How do you suppose that’s even possible? Nobody—I mean nobody—is supposed to understand our theories better than we do ourselves, much less expand on them. Right? And whoever these guys are, why haven’t they published anything on the theories or the mathematics if they were already so far ahead of us? Scientists normally collaborate on new theories, but we don’t even have a single point of contact. One thing we know is that Campbell didn’t come up with it on his own—it makes no sense.”
Ashburn’s face twisted into a rueful grin. “Competition, that’s why. It’s not just the science, Shiguro-san, it’s the engineering patents. Whoever gets there first is going to be worth more than the goose that lays the golden eggs. Boy, it smarts, doesn’t it? Realizing you aren’t the smartest kid in class after all?” He reached over and playfully socked his friend in the arm. “I know how you feel—it’s how I felt after getting to know you!”
Kusaka laughed. “Tomoyo arigato. Well, if it’s a competition, why give us back the refinements or offer any help at all?”
“You know the answer as well as I do, tovarich: because Federov and Campbell believe in the Crandall Foundation’s core mission statement. Getting someone—anyone—to the top of the mountain is what matters to them, not which climber gets there first.”
“So ka,” Kusaka grunted. “So, captain-san, where is Thuvia off to first?”
Ashburn grinned. Mere mention of his new command erased the Gateway dock from his thoughts even as Thuvia’s spaceplane left it behind. “The maiden voyage of the fair Maid of Mars will be to . . . Titan!” he announced dramatically. “We’re going fully loaded, too—stuffed to the gills. Have you seen all that yack in the newsfeeds about new startups? It’s no joke, tovarich—for whatever reason, Saturn’s suddenly getting really popular.”
