Rescue Branch (Kinsella Universe)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  Becky blanched, futilely trying to recall the incident.

  Commander Jacobsen laughed. “Metaphorically naked, Midshipman Cooper! Your naked desire to go into space. Twice I've seen it; believe me, I understand... oh, how I understand!”

  “Oh,” Becky said again, unsure once more.

  “Listen, learn. Go out there and do the job we both know you are capable of!”

  Commander Jacobsen strode forward, ignoring everything else until she reached the podium in the center of the stage. Someone in the audience yelled, “Academy! Ten Hutt!”

  There was a rustle as more than six thousand people stood up.

  “As you were,” Commander Jacobsen told them. There was the thunder of people once again taking their seats.

  “I am Commander Krista Jacobsen, Professor of Astrophysics here at the Academy. I'm here to brief you on an important development in science.

  “How important? Honestly, I can only speculate. The math in the patent application ties electromagnetism, gravity, the strong and weak forces of physics together in a fashion never before imagined. It is possible now to create a gravity well at a remove from the apparatus of several meters per second. The strongest gravity well created to date is a little over 2000 centimeters per second -- about twice the force of gravity at the surface of the Earth.

  “Slide one, please.”

  Becky saw the same thing as everyone else did: a vintage VW Beetle, sitting in a parking lot someplace that had palm trees.

  “The shuttle fleet was retired for a few years in 2011. They were resurrected by the new President in early 2013, and they have flown several missions in the last year. A bad landing at Cape Canaveral damaged one of the shuttles, but considering the fate of some other flights it was minor damage.

  “NASA is working on a follow-on to the shuttle. Originally it was due to fly in 2015, but now that's been moved back to 2023. President Bush wanted us back on the moon by 2020; now NASA says 2030 is a more realistic date.

  “However, the point of the VW photo is that it was soft landed on the lunar surface two weeks ago. On Friday last the VW passed into the Earth’s shadow and the instruments stopped working.”

  There was a sort of concerted “Huh?” from the audience. Commander Jacobsen ignored them.

  “Now I'm going to get a little technical; if you don't understand the math, please bear with me for a bit.”

  She then went on to explain the first page and a half of equations from the patent. She didn't get to the part that Becky didn't understand.

  “There it is. Those of you who don't understand the math will have to trust me. It is possible to create gravity wells at a remove from the apparatus. Those gravity wells can be used to accelerate a vehicle in the direction of the gravity well. Because we are talking gravity, the magnitude of the mass accelerated isn't a factor.

  “The VW on the moon was proof of principle. It made the trip in little over a day; more than twice as fast as our best rocket could make the trip. It soft-landed on the moon. If you were a scientist who wanted radio telescope time in the last two weeks -- until last Friday you were out of luck.

  “There is tape of the departure; there are classified recordings of the mission as it ascending towards the moon, without a pause to orbit the Earth. There are recordings of its sojourn on the moon. It's not a hoax; it's not a fake. The VW went to the moon.

  “Monday there was a meeting at the White House -- technically the topic and results are classified, so I'll not breach security. But I can say the topic was this patent and the results are the future of us all.

  “I could find only one newspaper article with information from a leak yesterday; there are two more today. Again, I won't get into the contents; look them up for yourselves.

  “Most of you listening me to rattle on here are officers in the US Navy; most of the rest of you will be within a few years. This is your future, if you're interested in Naval Aviation; this is your future if you're interested in aerospace in any of its myriad facets. This is your future if you're interested in physics, mathematics, and probably a dozen other fields. You owe it to yourselves to fetch a copy of the patent and study it and understand it.

  “Legions of minions in the physics and engineering departments have been working overtime to run off enough copies for all of you. Stacks of them will be available in most places around the Academy. Avail yourselves of one; you will have no future in the Navy if you don't come up to speed on this.”

  She turned and addressed the Commandant. “That's all I have to say, sir.”

  “And well said!” he replied. “Thank you, Commander Jacobsen!”

  Becky watched the commander as a swarm of faculty and students descended on her to ask questions. She was unprepared when the Commandant addressed her. “What do you think, Midshipman Cooper?”

  “Sir, I looked at the math. I know I'm only an undergrad -- but it was simple enough. I can't see anything wrong with it.”

  “I have sources you don't. Last Friday a dozen of the top mathematicians and physicists in the world descended on the White House and told the President they couldn't find anything wrong with the math either. One of those present was Stephen Hawking.”

  “Oh,” Becky replied awed. “I was going to apologize for being presumptuous.”

  “Being able to see the future is not presumption, Midshipman Cooper. At worst, a mixed blessing.” He waved around the auditorium. “I heard about this yesterday; I had trouble believing it, but people I have a great deal of confidence in assured me of the truth of it. There were perhaps a dozen people in Commander Jacobsen's audience who have any grasp of the changes that will be coming down the pike. She told me that of all the midshipmen, she was sure that you were among those who understands what this means.”

  Becky looked the Commandant in the eye. “I do believe it's time to abandon rocket ship design.”

  To her surprise, he chuckled. “Indeed so, Midshipman! Once upon a time I'd be waxing metaphorical when I told a midshipman that I wished them to go far in the Navy. Today, I simply wish you the best -- and that you travel very far indeed!”

  “Three of your six instructors laughed at the notion that you need to make up the work you missed; I'm tempted to dock the three who didn't. There will be no fall-out from this, Midshipman Cooper. You have my word.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  It was odd, Becky found over the next several days. She'd played a part, a small part in some drama and most of her peers simply ignored it.

  The most bizarre thing was the reaction of her instructors. Several of them laid on extra work; rapidly expanding her horizons. Another instructor simply dumped on her; she had to work extra hard to keep him at all happy. Then, the following April the buzz on the campus was the instructors who would be continuing, and those that wouldn't. Her main pest was one of those who would be departing.

  Her extra assignment from Commander Jacobsen turned out to be a puzzler at first. The papers she'd been given were a project plan -- the design and construction of a purpose-built spaceship, designed for the new engines. She'd never actually looked at a design before and was amazed at what she saw. Professor Kinsella must truly be a genius, she thought, to come up with all of these details.

  Yet, according to Commander Jacobsen it was all fluff, with only one real goal. Becky poured over the design; unsure what could be the one thing that Kinsella was looking for. Kinsella’s ideas were radical; no one had ever envisioned building a spaceship using titanium legos. No one had envisioned building a spaceship that would carry a crew of a hundred; usually it was tough to cram more than six or eight into a ship, and then it was something like the shuttle.

  What was it that Professor Kinsella had wanted more than anything else?

  She woke up in the middle of the night. It had to be something Kinsella wanted, right? So it had to be something she wanted from the government. In a few minutes Becky was at her desk, scribbling notes frantically.

  The simple and mos
t obvious answer was money. Four billion was a lot of dollars! She'd already read though, about Kinsella's family situation, and it didn't take an ex-rocket scientist to know that if she had ten percent of the basic patent, she was going to be wealthy beyond avarice. She could have built a smaller ship with a smaller crew and probably faster to boot.

  She curled up her lip in disgust. Reading between the lines, and for that matter in a couple of places it was there in black and white -- she didn't need or want any help from NASA -- in fact she discouraged it.

  What was the old saying? Location is everything? They were going to build the ship in deep water off Hawaii. Sure, the government could give her access to a site, but wasn't Minnesota billed as “the land of ten thousand lakes?” Surely one of those would have worked just as well for a smaller ship and cost a lot less?

  The answer finally came in the wee hours of the morning. Power. Professor Kinsella presupposed a nuclear-powered ship. With a nuclear power plant the ship wouldn't need to refuel for years; it could travel a good long way in that time.

  The whole point of going to the government was to get one of the old, mothballed naval nuclear reactors for her spaceship. Sure, she'd asked for a lot of other bells and whistles, but Commander Jacobsen was right -- it was all fluff as far as the ship design was concerned.

  She'd braced Commander Jacobsen first thing in the morning. “The nuclear power plant.”

  Commander Jacobsen had grinned. “A naval nuclear power plant; in spite of a lot of talk over the years there are no Air Force nuclear power plants, there are no Army nuclear plants; NASA has some, but they aren't suitable for this job.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  “You did good. Contemplate politics now, for some weeks to come. The President, a former Air Force officer, has given the project to the Air Force to supervise. In one way, that's a good thing: NASA isn't involved. The Navy lucked out; we have a Navy captain who will be the President's liaison -- otherwise, we'd be cut out except for a few junior officers detailed to integrate the power plant and the ship.”

  Becky tried not to be unduly partisan, but she thought that wasn't a good decision on the President's part, even if he had once been in the Air Force.

  A few weeks later came another surprise.

  Commander Jacobsen stopped Becky after class. “You have thirteen hours of computer time left for the year.”

  Becky had replied carefully. “I've been stingy.”

  “Specifically you have thirteen hours and fifteen minutes. I want you to give me eleven hours of it.”

  Time could be transferred -- that was legal. But full professors had a lot more computer time allocated to them than underclassmen received.

  She carefully balanced in her mind her needs and sighed. “I can do that, Commander.”

  Commander Jacobsen handed her a sheet from the famous patent application, with three lines of equations highlighted.

  Becky grimaced. “The rest are straightforward derivations. Those three lines look like they were written by a twisted dervish.”

  “Here,” Commander Jacobsen said, handing Becky two sheets of paper. “That's the first line, expanded and decoded. I've just about finished line #2... hopefully if I can get a few more time donations, I can finish it up.”

  “I don't understand, Commander.”

  “The rest of the patent is Stephanie Kinsella writing a patent for dummies. Those three lines are Stephanie Kinsella writing a patent for the rocket scientists of the universe.”

  “I see a section that blows the 'many worlds' cosmological theory out of existence; constraining the true number of universes to seven. Four we already know; one is very small, one is very -- obtuse -- and the last I don't know. The equations don't define it well,” Becky said.

  “That definition is, I believe, in the third line. Hints -- all I see are hints.

  “If what I think is being hinted at here, Kinsella deserves to be awarded every single scientific Nobel Prize there is. Physics, Chemistry, Medicine... too bad they don't have one for Math.”

  “What do you think?” Becky asked, fascinated at the prospect.

  “Einstein's laws work in our universe. That seventh universe -- they work there too, I think. It's just the geometry is odd.”

  “Odd?”

  “It's the same size as ours, and shares some of the dimensions. I think this here shows that points here are congruent with points there.”

  “Okay,” Becky said uncertainly.

  “Except while it's congruent with our space, its space is twisted and folded -- beyond our imagination, I think. Its physical space is just a tiny fraction of ours.”

  “That doesn't make any sense,” Becky told her.

  “Yes. Isn't quantum physics grand? Something can match our universe, point for point and be a third of a percent of the size. That has to be pretty remarkable.”

  “Every time I try to understand quantum physics, I get a headache,” Becky admitted.

  “That's because there is nothing to understand. What you have to understand is that quantum phenomena simply exist. Understanding will have to wait for someone even smarter than Kinsella, as she does an end-around and avoids it like the plague.”

  Becky finished her third year at the academy with honors, leading her class. Commander Jacobsen bid an unexpected goodbye. “I have a friend who was the captain of my last ship. He's got me a berth as the chief engineer on the ship Kinsella is building.”

  “Good luck, ma’am.”

  “At this point, I don't think luck has much to do with things. I know Kinsella; I know the Navy liaison. But before I went into astrophysics, I was a nuclear power engineer. I'm here to tell you, that there's simply no way to say what's the right place to go anymore to guarantee a ship berth.”

  “I'll keep plugging away. I'm signed up for some power engineering classes now as well.”

  “Midshipman Cooper, it has been a pleasure having you in my class; don't despair. Nepotism is alive and well!”

  Evidently. Becky found she'd been posted to the Nimitz, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, for the summer. She spent two months studying the design and operation of the power plant, learning immense amounts. Still, it was a little anti-climactic.

  Chapter 2 -- Trainee

  Becky’s last Academy year was anti-climactic.

  Without Commander Jacobsen, there was nothing but classes and while she was in several post-grad classes, it just meant more was expected of her.

  Then the day came when she tossed her cover into the air with a thousand others. She was mildly disappointed that she had orders back to the Nimitz, but consoled herself she was a first tour ensign -- not to expect the world.

  She'd boarded her ship and was berthed with three other ensigns in a single “stateroom.” She'd been asleep on her third night, when someone shook her shoulder.

  She rolled over and looked. It was a woman her own age. “Ensign Cooper, I presume?” the woman said.

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  “For reasons I don't pretend to understand, I'm now a naval rear admiral. All of the other ranks of everyone else in the Space Service follow the Air Force tradition. I think they were trying to tell me something. Please, may I have a word with you?”

  Becky remembered Commander Jacobsen's description of a woman roughly Becky's age who was a full professor. Why not an admiral on top of everything else?

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  “Out in the corridor. I suspect some of your roommates are faking still being asleep.”

  Becky was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, which was decent enough. She checked her watch. It was a little after 0200 in the morning.

  Outside they stood awkwardly in the companionway.

  “Ensign, you have many friends in high places. Krista Jacobsen; Krista has a friend in John Gilly and John has a friend in me. They both tell me what a great person you are.”

  “Everyone's entitled to their opinion, Admiral.”

  The woman laughed. “Good for y
ou, Ensign! There are exactly one hundred slots on the first starship, Ensign Cooper. Some of them have been promised twice. None that I have had any say about, but the Air Force...” she spread her hands helplessly.

  “You won't go; no matter how many fans you have.”

  “I never expected a berth, Admiral.”

  “You I believe. Krista and John -- they are going to be unhappy campers. They simply don't understand that there are only so many times I can go to the powers-that-be and invoke 'Stephanie Kinsella' and expect to be heard.

  “So, no, you won't go along on the first voyage.”

  “I understand, Admiral.”

  “Nuts to that! I value my friends! If I don't screw up, and I'm pretty sure I won't, I'll have a lot more latitude in picking the second crew. That won't be for a nearly a year, even if I do what I think I can do.

  “The question is -- what do you want to do for that time?”

  “My duty, Admiral.”

  Kinsella sighed heavily. “There is duty, Ensign, and then there is duty. Are you willing to take risks?”

  “Reasonable risks,” Becky said after a second.

  “Listen to my advice. If I say no, you say no. Simple, really. They will pressure you anyway, but just stick with ‘no.’ If you go against my advice, you will almost certainly die.”

  “I'm in no rush to die, Admiral.”

  “As I said, there will be pressure. I promise you, if you stick with my advice, no one will ever hold it against you.”

  Becky considered that, and then decided that shit happened. Admiral Kinsella might be willing to promise that, but she'd cry crocodile tears if Becky was screwed over.

  “What is it that you would have me do?”

  “I've just come from the White House. We now have a righteous Space Service, based on the naval model, not the legacy Air Force organization. John Gilly is going to head the Rescue Department -- at least when he's not off to see the rest of the neighborhood. I promised John's wife I'd only take him out once... I keep my promises, but what he is going to do after is just a whole lot more dangerous that cruising the neighborhood. I want you to get as close to him as you can and keep the gent safe.”