Vorpal Blade (ARC)

by John Ringo

  He hung up the secure phone and looked over at Miller.

  "The shipwrights are done with their survey," he said as the SEAL, very much against regulations, sipped a beer. "Six months to repair all the damage. On the other hand, we're going to get various upgrades."

  "Glad to hear that," Miller said, setting his beer down. "What about you?"

  "What about me?" Weaver asked.

  "You going?"

  "Oh, hell, yeah," Weaver said. "They're not sure if I'll keep the XO slot or not. But, yeah. You?"

  "You ever think about fate?" Miller asked rhetorically. "Mimi told me that Tuffy couldn't explain exactly why I had to be along. Was it my pointing out that there was an anomaly in the room? Was it the couple of times I kept Miriam alive? She figured it out when nobody else did. What? That mission? The next? Mimi won't say. So do I have to go on, theoretically, saving the universe every time?"

  "Do I?" Bill said. "Every day we wake up and we get faced with all these choices. Sometimes they're clearly big, yeah. But there are always choices. And every day we have to figure out which one is going to save our personal universe. So which one you gonna choose, Big Boy?"

  "Face it," Miller said. "You just want to find out what we run into next."

  "Well, that too," Bill said, chuckling. "It's a big old universe and we've hardly scratched the surface. Don't you?"

  "Oh, hell yeah," Miller admitted. "Wouldn't miss it for the w . . . universe. But this time, I'm taking some more flowers. And a bigger grapping gun . . ."

  * * *

  Proud and so glorious

  Stand here the four of us.

  Our souls will shine bright in the sky.

  When united we come

  to the realm of the sun

  With the heart of a dragon we ride!

  "Heart of a Dragon"

  DragonForce

  Afterword

  On Writing Science Fiction

  I rarely, these days, look at reviews on Amazon. As a fellow author puts it, "they are the slush (the unsolicited and mostly unreadable manuscripts) of reviews." There are rare, very rare, nuggets of brilliance in them and the "Top Reviewers" are generally very good. The rest, however . . . Sigh. One must shovel a great deal of muck to find a diamond. I have no patience for reading slush and less for Amazon reviews.

  I did, nonetheless, read some of the reviews of Into the Looking Glass, the prequel to this novel. And I, as usual, had to shake my head. Especially at one reviewer (now made semi-famous and immortal) who thought it was a good book but "there was too much science in it."

  Two words: Science Fiction.

  Looking Glass was a very strange book that came from nowhere. It had no precedents in my thought processes. But as I wrote it I became very happy. Because strange as that novel was, it had some serious science in it. I am not a scientist but I grew up with science fiction. Indeed, much of what I know about physics and astronomy comes not from classes (of which I've had few of the former and none of the latter) but from reading the "greats" of science fiction.

  When pressed by my publisher to create a series from Looking Glass (which I'd intended to be a stand-alone), I realized that I had a golden opportunity to write some serious SF. Not aliens creating a pretext for a world war. Not a science fictionalized "boat book" (a term of art about a young man exploring a world new to him). A real, old-fashioned, can-you-handle-your-astronomy-straight-up? science fiction series. Nobody but nobody has said it better than Gene Rodenberry. "To boldly go where no man has gone before." And, along the way, impart a modicum of science to the uninitiated. (While avoiding as much balonium and make-maulk-uppium as possible.)

  I knew that much of that was beyond me. I am neither an astronomer nor a physicist (as noted). I'm a former grunt with some background in biology and geology who likes SF. To do it, I needed a scientist, specifically an astronomer and physicist, to do the "fiddly bits."

  Thus I enlisted Doctor Travis Taylor, Ph.D. For those who find "Dr. William Weaver" unlikely, a snippet from Dr. Taylor's bio:

  * * *

  Travis Shane Taylor is a born and bred southerner and resides just outside Huntsville, Alabama. He has a Doctorate in Optical Science and Engineering, a Master's degree in Physics, a Master's degree in Aerospace Engineering, all from the University of Alabama in Huntsville; a Master's degree in Astronomy from the Univ. of Western Sydney, and a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Auburn University. He is a licensed Professional Engineer in the state of Alabama.

  Dr. Taylor has worked on various programs for the Department of Defense and NASA for the past sixteen years. He has been a guitarist with several hard rock bands, the 2000 Alabama State Champion in Karate, is a nationally recognized mountain biker, SCUBA diver, private pilot and is worshipped and adored by legions of female fans since he looks like a cross between Tom Cruise and a young Richard Dean Anderson.

  (Okay, I added that last bit.)

  * * *

  So much for "Yeah, like there's really a redneck physicist who mountain bikes for fun . . ."

  From my point of view, the mission of SF was handed down from the greats. Science fiction, speculative fiction, however you wish to say it, has the mission of looking at current theory and taking it beyond the realm of the currently possible. To push the boundaries and think about what could be out there. Whether that is in macrocosmic space, looking at what planets might look like beyond our solar system, or in the microcosmic, looking at what particles might really be doing and why, in biology extrapolating and questioning the ethics of bioengineering in all its manifestations, SF is now and always has been about pushing the boundaries of the known and striking out into the unknown. To speculate, not to prove. What ifness to the nth degree. And maybe get some bright young guy to invent some of this stuff thus making my job harder. What, you don't have a communicator? AKA a flip-phone?

  While, of course, hopefully having a cracking good storyline and some characters people like.

  Whether we succeed in our mission, to boldly impart some of the most advanced ideas in quantum theory and cosmology to the uninitiated, to enlighten and entertain, to develop a spark that blossoms into the flame of reality, or not, the mission is worthwhile. And maybe Doc will eventually get me to understand what a fermion is and why it's important.

  Alas . . . I have the mind of a fourteen year-old male. Whenever I even write "fermion" I get an image that is anything but cosmological . . .

  John Ringo

  Chattanooga, TN

  August 2006

  * * *

  On the Particle Physics in

  This Work of Fiction

  Thought I would add my two cents in here as well. There is an awful lot of talk about particles and such in here so I thought a quick description of the fundamentals might be useful. But then again, it might just be damned confusing. But if I were going to give the Space Marines a one- or two-page summary of particles they should keep up with I'd do it with the following information.

  Known fundamental particles that can't be broken into smaller particles are:

  * * *

  Fermions:

  Quarks: up, down, top, bottom (sometimes called beauty), charm, and strange

  Leptons: electrons, muons, tau, and the three flavors of neutrinos which are electron neutrino, muon neutrion, and tau neutrino

  * * *

  Bosons:

  Gauge bosons: photons, W+, W-, Zo, and gluons

  Other bosons (theoretical and possibly gauge): Higgs and the graviton (although I personally don't hold a lot of stock in the graviton)

  * * *

  Now, these are the fundamental particles that can't be made smaller by splitting them or smacking the hell out of them or anything else. It is these particles that in some combination or other that make up all the matter and interactions in the universe. Well, if you don't like the graviton we have to consider gravity from some other approach like strings or membranes or spacetime fabric or—oh hell, let's leave it at that for n
ow.

  Fermions are normally the ones that make up matter and stuff and the bosons are the ones that do the interacting or make up the so-called "forces" in nature that we hear about. The four forces are gravity, electromagnetism, weak, and strong forces.

  And here is how they work.

  Gravity works through the graviton (remember this is debatable as gravity can be described quite well with Einstein's General Relativity, but most particle weenies won't admit that. Einstein. Need I say more? Probably, but that'd take all semester).

  Electromagnetism works through the photon, which accounts for radio, microwaves, terahertz waves, infrared, visible light, ultra-violet, x rays, gamma rays, and anything higher energy than that. This theory also explains the interactions of electrons and the electric and magnetic fields and is refered to as quantum electrodynamics or QED and is the field that Richard Feynman is most famous for. Humanity really, and I mean REALLY, understands QED. Or at least we think we do.

  The weak force works via the W and Z bosons which were predicted by Abdus Salam, Steven Weinberg, and one of my idols, Sheldon Glashow. These guys won a Nobel prize in 1979 after the bosons were finally measured to exist in a particle collision experiment. The study of the weak force interactions is known as GWS theory for the founders. Sometimes it is apparently called quantum flavordynamics but I've never actually heard that used out loud by anyone. It is the weak force that allows for the color of gluons in a neutron to change and therefore allow it to decay into a proton. Interestingly enough, the process requires another field from which the heavy W and Z bosons can gain mass and hence we have the Higgs field (sometimes we'll hear Higgs mechanism). You see, the interaction between the electromagnetic boson (the photon) and the weak force bosons (W and Z bosons) requires a middle man to transfer various properties including mass as the weak force bosons are heavy and the photon is massless. This middle man is the Higgs boson, which by the way has never been measured no matter what drunk particle physicists might claim.

  The strong force uses the gluons and describes the way that particles in a nucleus of an atom (protons and neutrons) are held together. The study of the strong force particles is known as quantum chromodynamics or QCD. QCD was championed by Frank Wilczec, David Politzer, and David Gross who shared a Nobel prize in 2004 for their theory. The strong force governs hadrons, which are particles made up of quarks and gluons. The hadrons contain baryons, which are fermions made of three quarks (with gluons holding them together), and mesons, which are made of two quarks (again with gluons holding them together). These gluons have colors of red, green, or blue and don't forget the anticolors. Seriously, I'm not making this maulk up! When one of these gluons changes color is when there are neutrons decaying into protons as described above in the weak interaction description.

  Finally, know this, in this book we mention a new set of "make believe" bosons that are connected and when manipulated properly allow for travel from one to another. This idea of Looking Glass bosons is not unlike at all how the Higgs boson transfers the effect of mass from an all encompassing and permeating field (the Higgs field or Higgs ocean) between the massless boson and the massive bosons of the electromagnetic and weak fields. It is possible that as we understand new ideas in modern physics we will uncover some similar mechanisms that will allow for "gate travel" as Ringo and I describe in this book. On the other hand, we could have just made all this maulk up.

  "Doc" Travis S. Taylor

  Harvest, Alabama

  August 2006

  THE END

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