Freedom's Last Gasp

by M. A. Rothman

  “You’ll want to work with your partner, see who is best at which role. And remember, you’re a team.

  “Your day will be over once you’ve gathered two grams of gold dust. That may not seem like a lot, but unless you luck into a nugget, which you won’t, you’ll have to compile those two grams from tiny flakes, so it’s going to take time. Now get to work, and good luck.”

  As Mike and Priya walked to the nearest station, Mike groused. “This is nonsense. We’re gathering gold by hand? How does this teach us anything useful at all?”

  But Priya was surprised to find herself thrilled at the opportunity. She’d actually done this before. Back when she was a kid, before her parents moved to the US, she and her father would go out for the weekend, camp, and pan for gold on the River Swale and then in the Northern Pennines near Nenthead Village. One time she found a seven-gram nugget, which she still had back in her apartment, hidden in a sock drawer.

  “He’s just trying to teach us the principles behind larger-scale operations,” she said. “It’s just a starting point.” She gestured toward the objects at their station. “So, do you want to handle the water or the pan?”

  Mike let out a dramatic sigh. “I’ll man the pan.” He grabbed the shovel, dug out some surface gravel and dirt, and dumped it on the pan.

  “It’s more likely that we’ll find stuff just below the surface rather than directly on it,” Priya suggested.

  Mike waved dismissively. “I got this.”

  Priya knelt next to the water pump. It had a corkscrew shape, a design first invented in ancient Egypt. As she cranked it, the water slowly crawled up the pipe and then gushed forth. Mike shifted the pan left and right in the resulting stream.

  Unfortunately, he sloshed the dirt far too forcefully and hastily. He wasn’t being patient and careful. If there were any gold flakes in this dirt, it was getting washed away along with everything else.

  “You need to swirl the water less forcefully—”

  “I got this,” he said again, annoyed.

  After a few minutes, another team cheered. Evidently they’d gotten something. This only pissed off Mike, and his panning method became even more rushed and sloppy.

  They went through two pans like this, finding nothing of course, when Priya opened her mouth to make another suggestion. But Mike cut her off.

  “You think you can do better?” he snapped. “Fine, let’s switch.”

  Without a word, Priya grabbed the shovel and dug through about a foot of the surface soil. When she got to the thicker sludge that lay below, she put a shovelful in the pan. “See how the deeper dirt has less pebbles and much more dirt, along with a bit of clay?”

  Mike’s face darkened, and he immediately turned the crank on the pump at breakneck speed, sending water splashing everywhere.

  Priya hopped away from the splash zone. “Bloody hell! You’re going to drown us. Slow it down.”

  Mike looked ready to snap at her yet again, but instead he slowed to a more reasonable pace.

  Priya swirled the water slowly, and the dirt slowly sloughed away. “Can you slow it even more, just to a trickle?”

  Mike did as he was told, and Priya continued moving the pan back and forth, loosening the dirt and then slowly swirling the mess until she needed more water. “You see, sometimes the gold flakes will settle where the soil transitions to clay. That’s why I suggested we look deeper than just the surface.”

  It took a couple of minutes, but it worked.

  “There! I see a flake!” she said.

  Mike leaned forward to see, inadvertently sending a surge of water into the pan, blasting the flake onto the ground, along with almost everything else in the pan.

  “You bloody idiot!” Priya yelled.

  The professor’s voice came over the speaker system. “Is there a problem?”

  Priya looked toward the professor and shook her head. Then she took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  Mike at least had the sense to look sheepish. “I’m sorry about that. I guess I just got excited.”

  “It’s fine.” It wasn’t, of course, but she was stuck with this idiot until they were done, so she had to get along with him.

  She grabbed the shovel and started a new pan. This was going to be a long day.

  Governor Welch laughed as she watched Priya yell at the hapless intern she’d been paired with. She turned away from the projected image and looked back at Terry and the assembled security team. “So that’s her?”

  Terry nodded. “Surveillance footage from thirty minutes ago. It doesn’t seem like she’s good working in a team.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. At least not yet.” She chuckled and shook her head. If she were in Priya’s shoes, she’d probably have decked that partner of hers for being a moron. “Did you get anything else when you dug into the records of this would-be miner?”

  “Oh yeah. The UNIB guys did a number on her record. The official report shows her as a diligent mining student, but we have a snapshot of the last semester. She wasn’t on any mining college’s roster just six months ago. Her history is totally manufactured.”

  Welch nodded and clacked her fingernails on the lacquered conference room table. “Her parents were astrophysicists?”

  “Yup.” Terry pushed a paper toward her. “It’s all in her record. Lived in the UK, then moved to the US.”

  “How about this: Let’s figure out what this girl is really made of. Pull her from the intern rotation tomorrow. I’ve got a little test for our mining girl. I’ll call Director Timpf and arrange for a class that Miss Radcliffe may be suited to work with.”

  Terry frowned. “She’s going to ask questions—”

  “Good, let her. Tell her that the professor questioned her temperament, and she’ll need to work with our Director of Education to address her shortcomings. Prove that she’s capable of getting along with others.”

  Terry nodded. She could tell he didn’t agree with her decision, but he would commit to it. He was a good soldier, a great head of security, and she was proud to call him her son.

  “What do you mean I’m not going to the mine?” Priya asked.

  “I don’t know the details,” Terry said with a shrug. He drove past the turnoff to the mine and continued down the road. “Evidently there was some trouble yesterday in your class? And Director Timpf—she heads our Department of Education here on the colony—she wants to meet with you.”

  Priya’s mind replayed the previous day. She and Mike had been the second-to-last to leave that stinking mine, but they had done what they’d been asked to do: they’d found 2.1 grams of gold. And frankly she should get a medal for not killing Mike along the way.

  Could that be the “trouble” Terry referred to? Her interactions with Mike? And how much trouble was she in? Was she going to get kicked out of the program? She was here to save lives. She couldn’t afford to jeopardize all that just because of some idiot intern that got on her nerves.

  Ranger stuck his head between the seats, whined, and gave her left elbow a lick.

  “It’s okay, big boy.” Terry gave the big dog a scratch under his chin. “We’re almost there.”

  It’s not okay, Priya thought. She concentrated on controlling her breathing. She’d do whatever it took to stay in the program. She had to.

  “I have to what?” Priya asked, her eyes growing wide. “I’m not qualified!”

  Director Timpf’s eyes bored into her. “Which is exactly why we’re asking you to do this. It’s clear that you need to work on your interpersonal skills. Acting as a substitute teacher for this class will give you the opportunity to do that. To work on your patience.”

  Priya shrank under the director’s withering stare. “Okay… If that’s what it takes, I’ll do it.”

  “Good. Follow me.”

  The petite blonde woman led her out of her office and through the corridors of the building. The place felt deserted—it smelled of antiseptic and old paper—and was eerily silent. There was no noi
se other than the clicking of Director Timpf’s heels on the tile floor and the swish of the automatic doors.

  But then they entered a new area that felt more vibrant, more like a university campus. In a long hallway lined with doors, the walls were covered with astronomy charts, math proofs, and other various graphs.

  The director opened one of the doors, motioned for Priya to enter, and walked in right after her.

  Priya found herself standing in front of approximately twenty kids who were all about ten years old. I’m not ready for this.

  “Class,” said the director, “this is Miss Radcliffe. She’ll be taking over for Miss Henderson today.” She patted Priya on the shoulder and, with no further instruction, left the room, closing the door behind her.

  Priya stared at the class, petrified. Her first instinct was to race out of the classroom and tell the entire colony to sod off.

  “Hello, Miss Radcliffe!” said everyone in unison.

  Priya took a deep breath and pasted on a smile. “Hi, class.” She scanned the room, trying to figure out what lessons they were teaching in here, but there was nothing on the walls, and the whiteboard behind her was entirely blank.

  “Can you guys help me out?” she asked. “What subject was Miss Henderson teaching?”

  To her surprise, every single kid raised their hand. Priya pointed at a boy in the front row.

  The boy stood. “Miss Henderson was covering the history of aviation.”

  Priya breathed a sigh of relief. At least she had a passing familiarity with the subject. “And where did she leave off? Are you guys using a textbook, or is there a syllabus?”

  The kids all raised their hands again—enthusiastically. Was I ever this excited to answer a teacher’s question?

  She pointed at a red-haired girl in the corner. Like the boy, the girl stood before answering.

  “Miss Henderson said she was going to cover supersonic travel next. And Miss Henderson didn’t use the textbook. She said it was full of Earth lies.”

  Priya pressed her lips together to avoid laughing. “Okay. Great.”

  She turned to the whiteboard, picked up an old-fashioned dry-erase marker, and wrote down the equation for determining the speed of sound. “Can anyone tell me what this equation does?”

  She pointed at a boy in the back, who stood. “That’s the square root of the gas constant, multiplied by the absolute temperature and specific heat of the gas. It’s how you figure out the speed of sound.”

  “Very good.” These kids were smart. Really smart.

  Priya motioned for the same boy to stand back up. “Is there anything else you can tell me about the factors involved in the equation?”

  “Well, I think the equation means you can estimate what the speed of sound would be depending on the type of gas and the temperature of the gas. My daddy also said that because our atmosphere is made of diatomic nitrogen and oxygen, and the temperature depends on the altitude, to do a proper estimate requires a math model that he said is kind of complex.”

  Priya nodded. “Your daddy was right. The modeling is a bit much even for older kids—but maybe we’ll get to it later.”

  The student smiled from ear to ear.

  “Okay, so it seems like you guys have a good grasp of the basics. Let’s see where Miss Henderson left off. Did she tell you about General Chuck Yeager?”

  The entire class raised their hands, and with a laugh, Priya motioned for them to put their hands down. “Good, then I won’t cover that. After his rocket plane broke the sound barrier in 1947, subsequent engines were developed to push airplanes faster and faster. But it turns out that air-breathing jet engines have a maximum limit of right around Mach 3.5, or about three-and-a-half times the speed of sound. That’s about one kilometer per second. There’s a reason for that.”

  She drew an outline of a jet engine on the whiteboard. “A jet engine is composed of four sections. There’s the intake, a compressor, a combustion chamber, and a turbine. The turbine is connected to the compressor via a central rotor. With the intake, the air flows into the engine through a giant high-speed fan. That fan, or set of fans, is where the air is compressed and ultimately slowed to subsonic speeds, which increases the pressure, thus raising the temperature of the air. This leads into the combustion chamber where the air and fuel are mixed. The air-fuel mixture is then ignited, causing a rapid expansion, further increasing the pressure, driving the turbines and helping to propel the exhaust out through the back end of the engine. The higher the speed, the higher the pressures and temperatures. But…”

  She paced along the front of the room. “Think about the problems that could occur when you build up higher pressure and higher temperatures. No need to raise hands or stand up, just go ahead and say what problems would occur if you try to go too fast.”

  “The engine blows up?” one student suggested.

  “It gets too hot?” said another.

  Several other students gave guesses, some of them quite creative. These kids were good thinkers.

  “You guys are all mostly right. It comes down to how hot things get due to the friction of the air and the stresses on the blades within the engine.”

  A girl at the front blurted out, “Miss Radcliffe, if you’re going high speed already, do you even need a compressor or a turbine? I mean, you said they’re connected, right? And if you didn’t need them, then couldn’t you go faster just with the other parts of the engine?”

  “Exactly right.” Priya smiled. “What’s your name?”

  “Ayanna. Ayanna Stewart.”

  “Well, Miss Stewart, you kind of guessed where I was going next. Ramjets. They were designed just like you suggested.”

  Priya drew a modified version of the engine. “In this engine, there’s no turbine or compressor. Instead we have an inlet, combustion chamber, and a nozzle to exhaust the fuel. This can take us up to Mach 6 or so… but then we again run into issues with the pressures and temperatures. Which leads us to another concept: the scramjet. This is a modification to the ramjet, but it doesn’t require slowing the airflow to a subsonic speed.

  “Ultimately, the problem is friction. Even without moving parts, these engines are flowing through the atmosphere, so friction is inevitable—and each engine is limited by the properties of the materials it’s made from. If you guys are up for it, we can talk about some mathematical models for calorically imperfect gases.”

  Another student raised his hand and hopped out of his seat as soon as she nodded to him. “Miss Henderson said you might be related to Burt Radcliffe, one of the colony saviors. Are you? And if so, can you tell us about the Alcubierre engine? Is it really the fastest engine ever made?”

  Priya hesitated. Their teacher had clearly gotten some notice about her coming. Was this whole thing some kind of setup because of her last name?

  But as she looked at the kids, she was reminded of what she’d been like at their age. She’d had a voracious appetite for knowledge, and would have given anything to learn from someone “famous.” To these kids, the name Radcliffe made her famous. It probably meant more to them than it did to her. In fact, it was a name she’d never be able to live up to.

  “Yes,” she said. “My many-times-over great-grandfather was Burt Radcliffe.”

  “And he was married to Neeta Patel!” said Ayanna. “She was a savior too!”

  Priya smiled. “Yes, Neeta was one of my great-grandmothers.” She pulled up a chair and took a seat in front of the class. “Come,” she said. “Move your desks into a semicircle and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  As far as she knew none of her ancestors had anything to do with creating the fastest engine ever made—that was David Holmes—but she could still tell them the history as she knew it. And she wanted to. These kids’ enthusiasm touched something inside her.

  As soon as they’d settled, Priya began. “I’m going to tell you guys a story about a threat that was approaching Earth—and how that threat not only became what ended up saving us all, it r
esulted in the creation of the fastest engine we’ve ever known. It all started when scientists detected a miniature black hole approaching Earth…”

  Chapter Nine

  Governor Welch couldn’t resist smiling as she leaned back in her leather chair and watched the video stream of Priya Radcliffe, of all people, laughing with a bunch of fifth-graders as she told stories that must have been passed down in her family for generations.

  She looked across the conference table to Nwaynna, who also had a smile on her face. “Nwaynna, what do you think of our mining intern?”

  “May I speak candidly?”

  “Of course.”

  “She’s no mining intern.” said Nwaynna. “I call BS on that. She maybe has a mining background, I can’t say one way or another, but she’s wicked smart. She has at least graduate-level education in the sciences. I mean, she just walked a bunch of ten-year-olds through a proof that would challenge most graduate students. And her explanation of the Alcubierre/Holmes engine is probably the best I’ve ever heard.” She shook her head. “I don’t know who she’s trying to fool, but she’s got a solid physics background.”

  The governor turned to a gray-haired man she’d known for years. “Evan, you’re a forensic psychiatrist. What’s your assessment?”