Vorpal Blade

by John Ringo

"There's a differential speed of nearly four-zero-zero kkps between E Eridani and Sol system," Bill said. "We're going to be screaming to catch up for about an hour."

  "Our heat is way up," the XO inputted. "I'd say that we only have about thirty minutes more at maximum power before we're going to have to cut power to chill."

  The problem the ship was having wasn't going to go away. While star systems moved in a circle around the galactic center at an apparently similar rate, "apparently" was only on the basis of looking at them from a long way away. In fact, their relative rate of motion was hugely different. Just as the center of a wheel moves faster than the outer rim, relatively, stars closer to the galactic axis tended to move faster than those "outwards." And even stars on the same relative point outwards from the center moved differently.

  In the case of the jump from Sol to E Eridani, the ship was having to speed up to "catch up" to the local speeds, relative to Sol. More speed in normal space meant more power from the ardune reactor and the electrical transfer system, both of which pumped out enormous heat.

  "I think we're in too deep," the CO said. The ship had stopped at three astronomical units from the star. "We'll micro-jump to the edge of the system. Going this fast, relatively to the local system, we could run smack dab into a planet or a moon before we see it. Where's that gravity wave zone, Commander?"

  "About one thousand AU, sir," Bill replied. "There should be plenty of room at about thirty AU. Farther out than that gets us into the Kuiper region and there could be literally thousands of small planetoids like Pluto floating around."

  "Set course for thirty AU out from the star towards Sol," the CO said. "We'll do a chill then start the adjustment over again. XO."

  "Sir."

  "Do up an SOP on that. Enter the system at a distance, slow down and chill, then get deeper in."

  "Yes, sir."

  "We learn as we go, gentlemen, we learn as we go. Commander, where's my heading?"

  "Ah, green eggs and ham," Hattelstad said, sitting down at the table.

  "Was Dr. Seuss in the Marines?" Berg asked, tearing at a strip of rubbery bacon.

  "I thought you were the guy with all the answers," Jaenisch said, sipping his coffee. The sergeant clearly wasn't a morning person.

  "What's up for you guys today?" Berg asked, changing the subject.

  "Dickbeating 101," Jaenisch said.

  "Ground simulated combat for the first four hours," Hattelstad said. "So we're basically in our racks playing Dreen War. Then upper body workout, then Space Marine WCT. I'm still trying to figure out the difference between a maizon and a querk."

  "One's a waiter, the other's a personal characteristic," Berg quipped. "Or did you mean a meson and a quark?"

  "Whatever."

  11

  Turn Right and Straight On . . .

  "Right arm straight up to my finger," Lyle said.

  Berg raised the arm to where he thought the finger should be, then lifted a bit more.

  "Did you have to correct?" Lyle asked.

  "Yeah."

  "Do it again," the armorer said, looking at the box in his hand. "That's where you think it should be, right?"

  "Yeah."

  "Right arm straight out, come in and touch your nose."

  CLANG!

  "Maulk."

  Once a Wyvern was fitted it was supposed to perfectly mimic actions. But it never did. Thus it had to be adjusted for movement.

  And adjusted and adjusted and adjusted. To the point where feet went where they were supposed to go, arms went where they were supposed to go, fingers closed with the right amount of force, to the point the wearer could bend steel bars, juggle eggs—if they could juggle—and jump over tall buildings in a single bound. Well, maybe not the latter.

  "And in and touch your nose."

  Ting.

  "Left hand in and touch your nose."

  Ting.

  "Hand salute!"

  Clang!

  "Little softer next time, Two-Gun. Sensor pod's not as well armored as the rest. Let's get started on the legs . . ."

  "And we're . . . done," Lyle said. "Step out and let's key it to you."

  "Hell of a job, man," Berg said, climbing out of the armor. "Like a grapping glove."

  "You're welcome," the armorer said, then hit the hatch close button. "Okay, palm on the pad."

  Under the right armpit was a hand-print pad. If the user wasn't in the armor, it could only be opened by the user, the unit armorer, the first sergeant or the CO.

  "State your last name, first name and rank," Lyle said.

  "Bergstresser, Eric, PFC."

  "Team name?"

  "Two-Gun," Berg said with a wince.

  "And you're keyed," Lyle said, starting to put away his tools. "But if you've got a few minutes, come on by the armory."

  "Okay," Berg said. "Can I give you a hand with that?"

  "No offense, but nobody touches my tools," Lyle replied, looking up at him and grinning. "You know, except good looking ladies of inappropriate age."

  "Gotcha, man," Berg said.

  "What in the grapp is that?" Berg asked, as Lyle set the gun on the counter.

  "It's a really grapped up pistol," Lyle replied. "I started with some parts from a Barrett M-63. See, the Wyverns don't have a pistol system . . ."

  The pistol was massive. Berg could pick it up with one hand, but only by cradling it. There was no way to get a hand around the grip. Forward of the grip was the magazine.

  "What's it fire?" Berg said, then paused. "Wait, the Sixty-Three is a damned .50 caliber system!"

  "I don't know if it can actually be used," Lyle pointed out. "The Wyvern's only got two fingers and a thumb. It might rotate out of your hand."

  "You don't want me to try this thing, do you?" Berg protested.

  "Hey, you're the one called Two-Gun, not me," the armorer whispered. "I don't even have a Wyvern."

  Berg paused at that. He wasn't sure what the specialty of the armorer had been before his accident, but he was probably infantry. Now he just got to fix the toys, not play with them.

  "If I strap this on, I will get unending maulk," Berg pointed out. "And Top will blow a gasket."

  "If we get the chance, though, will you at least try it out?" Josh asked. "I'll square it with Top."

  "If I get a chance."

  "Shiny. 'Cause I made two."

  "All hands! All hands! Stand by for Chill! We Be Chillin'!"

  "Maulk," Berg said. "Again?"

  "Still getting over the pink stuff?"

  "I'm never going to get over it at this rate . . ."

  "I'm dying in data!" Dr. Dean half screamed. "And now they want a planetary survey!"

  "Sir, if I could recommend," Runner said, looking up from his computer screen. "Doing a planetary survey is grunt work. I can run the scope. You keep working on the data from Saturn."

  "Good idea, Runner," the doctor said, picking up two two-liter bottles of generic cola and looking at them balefully. One was full, one nearly empty. He carefully opened the full one, poured part of it into the empty until both were slightly over half full, sealed both and shook them vigorously. Then he opened the cap on one, let the air hiss out, shook it again and took a swig. "For a soldier, you're not entirely stupid."

  "Thanks for the compliment," the master sergeant muttered, unlatching his chair and rolling it over to the telescope controls.

  The main scope for the Blade was mounted where a periscope would normally be on a sub. Runner first extended the scope, then swiveled it into working position. Then he entered the survey command.

  Now that they were in a stable orbit around the sun, the boat was probably moving at a notably different velocity than the planets. By taking fifteen-minute-long duration shots of the sky in quadrants looking "outward" from the sun, he got six "plates" of the sky. They were actually detailed Flexible Image Transport System, or FITS, graphic files but the term plate went back to when astronomers would use actual photographic plates for the same
purpose.

  Mostly older astronomers used plates; the newer ones talked about files or digital images. Dr. Dean had started out with a thirty-five millimeter camera as a kid before video cameras and frame grabbers were available. He was in the generation that was between the older astronomers and the new kids on the block like Runner. But Dean didn't think of Runner as an astronomer. He was a stupid soldier, not a scientist. Which was why Runner called the files FITS at every opportunity.

  Since planets were probably going to be moving at a notably different velocity than the boat, any planet facing the sun, and therefore bright in the sky, would turn up as a streak. What used to be a laborious human process was now all managed by computers. Stars turned up as dots. Planets turned up as streaks. A rather simple program found the streaks and highlighted them. An only slightly more complex program could determine orbits, debris, velocities, and distances.

  Each of the shots required fifteen minutes of exposure, but they could be used for purposes other than just the planetary survey. Ever since man had looked up at the stars he'd been wondering "just how far away are those damned things?" He'd eventually gotten past thinking they were glued to the top of the sky, but scientists were still scratching their heads about most of them. The easiest way to compute a distance is called triangulation. Look at something from two different angles, do a bit of simple math and you know exactly how far away something is.

  The problem with that with stars was, well, the only place they'd been observed from was Earth. Even the "parallax" of the Earth's orbit around the sun wasn't enough to help much with extremely distant stars. Astronomers, historically, would take plates of the night sky in the winter and then compare them to plates taken in the summer. This allowed for parallax with a separation between measurements of nearly two hundred million miles. But when talking about the universe, that was not near far enough for really good triangulation.

  So, clever astronomers figured out others ways to get fairly accurate measurements of star distances by using things called Cepheid Variables. Cepheid Variables are a type of star that blinks in brightness with a clocklike periodicity. The period of the blinking is directly tied to how bright the star should be due to the physics of the star's inner makeup. So if a certain Cepheid was blinking at a given rate, then astronomers knew exactly how bright it should be. By measuring how bright it looked in the sky they could determine just how far away it was, since stars appear dimmer with distance as a one over the distance squared type law.

  The Cepheid Variable measurement method was the best way to make deep sky measurements, but the process is much less accurate than good old triangulation. Now being able to use triangulation with many light-years distance on the parallax leg would allow for an amazingly detailed survey of the galaxy. But that would take time.

  Runner took as many shots as he could to store away in the database. Astronomers could use the data and analyze it for many years to come. If he ever had the time, Lieutenant Commander Weaver probably wouldn't mind taking a gander at the data in more detail himself, but Runner doubted the commander would ever have another free moment as long as he lived.

  For the first time man was looking at stars from a completely different direction. Before the mission was done it was intended that the entire sphere be swept so that every star in the catalogue could be viewed from another angle.

  And soon they would get images from really far away from the sun and . . .

  While the computer was chuckling over the planetary data, Runner extended a second scope, less powerful than the main but still good enough, and started hunting around by eye. Epsilon Eridani had two planets already detected, both gas giants. But one of the gas giants was at only two astronomical units away from the star. That was right at the edge of the potential life zone of E Eridani.

  The life zone of a star was the zone in which the star's luminosity provided enough heat to keep water from freezing but not boiling it. Between 0 and 100 degrees Celsius. For Sol, the home star of Earth, that range was from .95 astronomical units out to 1.5, technically. There was a straightforward calculation to calculate the zone based on a star's luminosity.

  Life zone was an important factor in the potential development of life. Every form of life humans had found by going through the Looking Glasses was based on water to one degree or another. So having liquid water was a given.

  Brighter stars, the really hot ones like Vega, would have very broad life zones, if they even had planets rather than just an accretion disks of debris, while cooler ones, such as E Eridani, had very narrow life zones. Based purely on that, life was more likely to be found around hot stars. However, another necessity was sufficient time for life to develop. And hot stars had very short lives. It took about three billion years for the first life to develop on Earth after it cooled. A sun like Vega might only last a couple of billion years, leaving behind cold, dead planets.

  On the other hand, smaller cooler stars such as E Eridani, while they lasted a long time, had very narrow life zones. And the life zone changed over time, generally getting closer to the sun and narrower as the star cooled. For that matter, planets close in had a tendency to become tidally locked as the moon was with Earth, one side always facing the star. While life could develop in those conditions, it was unlikely.

  That was why the current survey had intended to concentrate on stars much like Sol. G class stars lasted a long time but had relatively broad life zones.

  The kicker to all that theory was the experience humans had developed through surveying the planets on the other side of the Looking Glass portals and planets in the Sol system. The first thing that was noted was that greenhouse gases played an important part in whether or not a planet was habitable. Venus, in the Sol system, was right on the inner edge of the life zone. But Venus' atmosphere was so choked with greenhouse gases that the surface temperature was nearly 400 degrees C. Mars, too, was right at the edge of the life zone, on the chillier side. But Mars had virtually no greenhouse gases in its limited atmosphere. If humans could somehow switch their atmospheres, the two planets would be marginally habitable.

  Planets on the other side of the Looking Glass had a tendency to be pretty poor. The portals had connected mostly to planets of some long gone race that had once used a similar system and had left behind inactive bosons. Most of the planets were in fading life zones, either those where the sun was starting to flare up in death or too cooled off to support life. Some of the planets appeared to have been terraformed, that is they had had extensive work done to them to make them habitable. That long gone race, perhaps the same race that made the warp engine for the Blade, had done the equivalent of switching Mars' and Venus' atmospheres.

  But they showed that, depending on a huge number of factors, the life zone of a planet could be about twice as large as first thought.

  Furthermore, it was apparent that while life could crop up under the oddest conditions, only a certain number of types turned up. So far in all the planets surveyed only four different biologies had been found. Two of those, human and Adar, were "green" biologies. That is, both used something that looked more or less like chlorophyll as a basic energy gathering system. One was "blue" and the last was "red."

  Given that over forty planets had been found with some sort of life, there should, by straight evolutionary principles, have been forty different biologies. Instead there were four. Chloro A, Chloro B, Blue and Red.

  Biologists and paleontologists were engaged in a hot debate about just why this was the case. The arguments fell into two broad categories: statistical genesis and panspermia.

  Statistical genesis argued that when life was developing there were a limited number of functional ways it could occur. An infinite number of monkeys might try to start life, but only four were likely to take. Panspermists called this the "by guess and by gosh" theory.

  Panspermists believed that either by the actions of some long gone race or due to microscopic survivors hitching a ride on rocks scattered into s
pace, all life had originated in only four different conditions and then spread through the galaxy.

  What statistical genesists said about panspermists wasn't fit to print. "Creationism by another name . . ." and it went downhill from there.

  Runner had kept up with all the theoretical discussions even before he was volunteered to this mission. He just liked the debates and theories. So when he was hunting around he had a specific mission. The inner planet of E Eridani was well outside the theoretical life zone. But he kept in mind that word: "Theoretical." There were so many theories being crushed by this mission, he wasn't willing to settle for "theory."

  The planet itself was unlikely to have life. It was a gas giant, a super-massive planet of nothing but gas and metallic gas, gas crushed under so much pressure it turned solid. In fact, it was possible that the "planet," which was bigger than Jupiter, had been a brief-lived sun. But gas giants usually had rocky moons. And if the moon had enough CO2 . . .