by K S Augustin
He knew when that time was, and it couldn’t have been more than a handful of days before. How? Because one of the clearboards contained exactly the same information earlier this evening as it did during his recollection.
Srin paced his cabin impatiently. So, less than a week ago, he somehow managed to retain memories of agreeing with Moon to plan an escape, followed by one of the most intense lovemaking sessions of his life.
He slowed, caught by the images of her tawny legs wrapping around him and her long, elegant fingers caressing his flesh. Those were memories he’d be happy to take to his death. Which might be sooner than expected, if his fever-raged tremors were anything to go by. Did he suffer from some disease that was slowly tearing his body apart? He had obviously survived more than a decade of life after his last glimpse of Yolana. The face in the mirror told him that one, maybe even two decades had passed since his visit to the Science Directorate. But was there something insidious sapping at his mortality? If he and Moon did manage to escape, was he giving her a walking corpse, rather than a living, loving man?
He gritted his teeth and snarled into the night. No, he wouldn’t think like that. The Republic was depending on him thinking like that, so he’d be happy in his ignorance. With his newfound memories, he was determined not to give them that satisfaction.
“I know what happened a few days ago,” he whispered fiercely. “I know what Moon is working on.”
Yes, he did. His mind filled with calculations from the fission packet Moon was trying to create.
“I have to make a stand,” he said to the still cabin air. “One way or another.”
The darkness swallowed his feral-edged smile.
Chapter Thirteen
“I don’t know, Moon. You’re dealing with two separate problems here and trying to solve both of them at the same time.”
She smiled. “We just take things one at a time, Kad. We’ve almost solved the re-ignition equations. Time to give that area a rest and concentrate on the delivery mechanism.”
Kad set himself down on his high stool with a sigh. Flimsies littered his workspace and the clearboards within reach were crammed with lines of mathematical symbols—horizontal, vertical, diagonal, scribed as if by a madman. Which, he had told Moon on more than one occasion, he was afraid he had become, under her brilliant tutelage and example.
“We’ve ruled out hyperspace delivery for sure?” he asked again, hopefully.
“Yes.” Her voice was firm. “I’ll admit it was elegant and uses known and robust current technologies, but—even if we found a crease close enough—the delivery of the energy packet at the destination was always the issue.”
She could see Kad was not happy but he nodded agreement. “How to begin a solar detonation without causing a supernova.”
“Exactly. Too far away, and there’s no advantage to using hyperspace. Too close, and our energy packet may cause an uncontrolled cascade reaction, especially when it’s combined with the cumulative energy of the hyperspace tachyon transport field.”
He was silent for a moment. “Did you hear?” he finally remarked, his tone of voice indicating he was trying to get their minds off the subject at hand for the moment. “They’ve got a name for our little project. They’re calling it StellMil.”
Moon leant against her bench and crossed her arms loosely, happy to relax for a few minutes. “For ‘Stellar Missile,’ presumably.”
“Better than StellMiss,” he suggested with a cynical lift of one eyebrow.
“They’re military, Kad,” she reproved. “They’ve got to call it something.”
He opened his mouth as if he was about to impart an important piece of information, but shut it again. “Of course.”
“And who else can afford to fund our kind of research?” she asked. “Best to get on with our jobs and do this right.”
“You’ll be Prime Professor at whatever university you wish, if you can get this to work.”
“We. If we can get this to work. And we will.”
“Only if we figure out how to deliver it without blowing apart an entire system.”
Moon walked over to one of her clearboards. It was a rare specimen in the lab because half its surface was still blank. She regarded the cramped writing on the other half with her head tilted to one side, musing out aloud.
“Conventional delivery is out. The corona will detonate the packet before it reaches the core. And hyperspace is out due to distance, solar density and the unpredictability of forcing a tachyon field into plasma. How hot did we say it was going to get in there again?”
Kad didn’t need to consult his notes. Every stumbling block was emblazoned on his neurons. “We’ve been using a working core temperature of 100,000 Kelvin,” he told her, looking at her through the unwritten half of the clearboard.
“We have to use a test star of at least that temperature,” Moon remarked. “Anything lower becomes too difficult to re-ignite.”
“The benchmark for the kind of fusion we’re looking for is four point five million Kelvin. Fusion of helium to carbon and oxygen and then neon to iron.”
She nodded slowly, letting the facts wash over her, grabbing and keying them into her stream of ideas at the appropriate junctures. “Okay, hyperspace is out, conventional is out. We’ve established that. But what about, say, calibrated positrons?”
Kad frowned while he thought through the ramifications of what she was saying. His brow cleared but his expression remained morose when he had it figured out. “You’re thinking about a delivery mechanism and booster shot at the same time, aren’t you?”
The smile of pleasure on Moon’s face was unfeigned. “A positron shield. Think about it, Kad—a way of increasing packet yield while retaining integrity during insertion. It’s efficient, it’s elegant. What’s there not to like?”
“The fact that it might not work?”
“I agree the computations may get insanely complicated—”
“The computer hasn’t yet been invented to solve that kind of calculation, Moon. And even if it did work, there are still other factors you haven’t mentioned. What about the risk of coronal blowback? And we still don’t fully know the electromagnetic dynamics beneath a white dwarf’s surface. It might be three million gauss, or it might be three billion gauss. How will the difference affect gas pressure behaviour? Most importantly of all, what happens to the military’s latest toy if we guess wrong on any of this?”
But Moon was undeterred. “Then we submit another proposal. And another. And another. Until we get it right.” He sat straight and relaxed on his chair, but she could read his scepticism from across the room. “The star may only live for a further handful of millennia—a tiny fraction of its usual lifespan—but that’s still millennia that we might not have otherwise had.”
“Is being a Prime Professor that important to you, Moon?”
“I create a star system and get rewarded for it, Kad.” She smiled. “What’s there not to like?”
Moon sat up with a gasp. Even in the cool, dark air, she found it difficult to take a breath. Not that there was anything wrong with the Differential. Its background hum was low and steady, stripped of the higher tone indicating that it was traversing hyperspace.
They had arrived at the Suzuki Mass. The weeks of working as if the demons of the galactic abyss were pursuing her were over. Her calculations were confirmed and fine-tuned. The crucible had been fired up and tested. The day of reckoning was here.
She glanced at the chrono. It was still almost two hours before her personal alarm was due to sound. But she felt too nervous to get back to sleep, so she stared up at the ceiling, indistinct in the blackness. A slice of unwanted memory, the dialogue between her and Kad, came back to haunt her while she was still in that vulnerable state between slumber and wakefulness, and now she couldn’t push it out of her mind. It was clear. It was accurate. And Moon cringed at how arrogant she had sounded.
She recalled Kad’s hesitation and wondered whether that was a
moment when he wanted to confide in her his misgivings, and his role as a secret rebel. But even if he had admitted his double life, she knew she wouldn’t have wanted to listen. In fact, as blinded as she was by the magnificence of what she was trying to achieve, she might have even turned him in to the Security Force herself.
It was not a pleasant thought, but this was not a time for pleasant thoughts. Even before her detention, Moon had known she was an ambitious woman. She and Kad had worked more closely than most married couples. Yet, he still hadn’t confided his personally held convictions to her. The only reason for this omission was the unpalatable fact that, even after everything they had been through, he still didn’t fully trust her. And it galled Moon to think that perhaps he had been right. Then.
The cleansing effect of time may have made Moon more of a sympathiser to his cause, but although she now found herself with the motivation for rebelling against the Republic, she had no vehicle with which to do it. The ability to significantly change anything had been effectively taken out of her hands by Drue’s confidences and her own fears of further detention, or even exile to Bliss.
And as for Srin. Her sigh came from the depths of her soul. He was as he was at the beginning, back to a time when those magical hours hadn’t happened, reverting to the reserved friendliness on the first day, and a comfortable camaraderie on the second. The endless futile loop.
Moon got up with a groan, burdened with the weight of her thoughts. She had the urge to cry, to squeeze tears out from between tight eyelids, but she just didn’t have the luxury.
Quietly, she began getting ready.
“This is an historic hour for the Republic, Dr. Thadin,” Savic boomed.
In the weeks that followed the accident—the “crease incident,” as Drue liked to refer to it—Savic had made a complete recovery. Maybe because of what she felt she was forced to do, destroy Srin’s memories in order to save his body, she found Savic’s imposing bluffness more and more irritating as time went on. And he always seemed to find exactly the right kind of comment to needle her.
Like the quip about this being an historic hour. Moon tried not to feel unsettled by his comment, but it was difficult. For a start, she wasn’t in her refuge of the lab, surrounded by her familiar equipment, but on the Differential’s bridge. It was an alien environment, one where she didn’t feel comfortable. The volume of his bass voice was also overwhelming. In such a relatively small, cramped space, his voice thundered over the sounds of navigational and engineering industry. And, of course, she wondered in what way history would record the next sixty minutes.
She was standing behind Drue Jeen’s command chair, his glossy blond hair mere centimetres from her. Although his posture seemed relaxed, she could smell sweat rising on the warm hair from his head. He was nervous.
To her right stood Savic—his height towering over her—and beside him, Srin, as impervious and loose-limbed as ever. He caught her watching him and gave her a quick smile. She looked away. To Moon’s left and slightly behind her stood a line of uniformed soldiers, their faces identical in their impassivity. It made her nervous having such hulking, armed men hovering in the periphery of her vision. What would they do if the experiment failed? Shoot her? Was their presence there for her benefit? Or Drue’s?
“Are you happy with StellMil’s parameters, Doctor?” Jeen asked smoothly, not turning around. He was in his element here, accustomed to everything—and everyone—obeying his orders. She marvelled at the contrast to the more sensitive being she had shared many a meal with. Here was Drue Jeen as an instrument of the Republic, and he was a formidable man indeed. She didn’t ever want to cross him.
Her place on the bridge was actually the culmination of her morning. Six hours earlier—at five hours, ship time—she and Srin had been working in the lab, finalising the energy packet’s specifications and double-checking them against the summary equations and simulation data sets. Unsure now that the moment of truth had arrived, Moon worked through almost the entire month’s calculations in a little more than one hour, and didn’t know whether she felt worse, or better, that she couldn’t find a mistake.
With a trembling hand, she sent the information down to the Engineering section and soon followed it. Her mind was so consumed with fragments of formulae and proofs, that she didn’t notice the crew milling around her. They were all insubstantial ghosts to her as she walked doggedly down to the launch bay, hoping for success, wishing for failure.
Srin, knowing that she needed emotional support, followed, solid and silent. Moon was grateful for his understanding. It was the second day of his cycle, which meant he could draw upon the memories of the previous day. Moon was grateful for that little stroke of luck, too. She didn’t know what she would have done if she had to cope with his blankness in addition to everything else going on.
It was strange that, after so many years of research and manipulating the varying measurements of stellar plasma, Moon had never seen a positron-shielded fission bomb before. It was there now, behind the heavy shielding in the spherical, mirror-surfaced containment vessel, being formed and stabilised by a group of stern technicians, muttering softly to each other under their breaths.
She should have gone to them, looked over their shoulders to make sure the information from her lab had been transmitted correctly, but she couldn’t move. She stared at the giant mirrored ball of the fission crucible, the engineering construct holding hopes and dreams, as well as a blinding plasma ball.
There was still a small risk of the packet initiating a supernova explosion, Srin pointed out, when he had worked through the equations several times. And it was a measure of Moon’s unease that she contemplated aborting the entire experiment based on that one comment. As she pointed out to Drue in a private conversation over a late-night drink, a supernova in and of itself would pose no danger to navigation. The Republic had made sure of this by picking an isolated cluster in which to test the first incarnation of its stellar missile. But, considering the proximity of the Differential to the target star, it might destroy the ship if the experiment went disastrously wrong.
Drue stared at her for a few long seconds.
“I had considered something of the sort,” he said finally. “I think that’s why they only sent one ship. Mine.”
“Oh.”
Standing on the bridge now, a week after that conversation, Moon wished she had pursued the topic. Was this another part of the intimidation of his family? But the pressure of the mission had won out over further confidences that night and now, staring at the large square viewscreen anchored to the front wall, it was too late.
“Yes, I’m happy,” she answered. She expected her voice to be soft and timid but it was surprisingly strong.
She saw Drue’s head nod. “In that case, begin launch sequence.”
“T minus thirty seconds,” a young officer from one of the side consoles said. Moon knew that the sequence could not be aborted once it passed the ten-second mark. The crucible and magnetic propulsion tunnel were too complex to shut down gracefully within that double handful of seconds.
Have I thought of everything? Were Srin’s calculations correct? Were our gauss extrapolations realistic?
“T minus twenty.”
Kad, you should be here. This was as much your work as it is mine. Where the hell are you, and what are you doing? You had doubts. And now I’m beginning to have them, too. Should I abort the launch?
“T minus ten.”
It seemed like the entire bridge had taken and held a breath. Everybody was frozen in position, their eyes glued to the viewscreen.
“Five…four…three….”
This is it. No time left for anything. If death comes, I hope it’s quick. And I hope it takes that bastard, Savic, out first.
“Two…one…. Launch.”
It was an anticlimactic second. The ship didn’t shudder, rock, or tilt. But neither did it break apart. Another second passed—time in which the Differential remained in one piece, i
ndicating that the crucible and launch tube had done its job—before the screen picked up a glowing, circular inferno speeding towards the small white target star. The image of the energy packet glowed orange around the edges, a computer’s interpretation of the missile’s red shift, then it was swallowed by the star’s corona.
“How long now, Doctor?” Drue craned his neck to look at her.
“I…don’t know exactly. The reaction should begin instantaneously, but the volume of the star is quite large. An hour should be sufficient to pick up the beginnings of a stable reaction.”
She knew she was hedging and he knew it, too. She could tell from his gaze. But she was comfortable with her answer. If the Differential was going to get blown into its component atoms, then the opportunity would arise in the next few minutes. But, assuming that was not the case, Moon thought it would take a good hour to verify if the resultant reaction was as self-sustaining as she hoped it would be.
He turned back to the screen. “That seems a long time.”
“Not for a star, Captain,” she answered, her eyes still on the screen. She was willing to stay in that position for every second of the next hour, willing the reaction to work, for the payload to initiate a new sustainable ignition of the star. Even if successful, this experiment would not last more than a few years. A Class M star needed fuel to feed on, and the white dwarf was already depleted. But if she could just prove that the science was possible, then the process of keeping the combustion fed with matter in order to extend its usable lifespan could easily be justified. It would lead to more missions, bigger stars, more leaps of technology, but that could only happen if there was a solid foundation to build upon.
In the end, it took more than three hours. Moon looked at, and heard, the results in disbelief. The white dwarf was still in its default equilibrium. All her work of the past months—years!—was useless.
StellMil had failed.
Chapter Fourteen
