Fire with Fire, Second Edition

by Charles E Gannon

  Caine studied the screens; he couldn’t make much sense of the reams of data. But he had a guess. He leaned toward the lieutenant who was the suite’s ranking officer. “Tell me: as you got radar contact just now, did it look like anything you’ve seen before?”

  She thought for a moment. “No—wait, yes: like when you’re trying to get through electronic countermeasures and then the target’s ECM goes offline. The garbage straightens out and you’ve suddenly got clean data. Except here there wasn’t any signal at all—and then, all of a sudden, there was.”

  Lemuel turned around. “What are you thinking?”

  “That they decided to give us a better look by turning off their electronic stealth measures.”

  “But active stealth measures would put out an energy signature—and we’re not getting any electromagnetic emissions at all from their ship.”

  “That’s because they must have the system built right into their hull material: probably some kind of electrobonded matrix—”

  Lemuel’s down-curving eyebrows reversed upward into an arch of surprise. “Sure, some kind of radar absorbing and reflecting material that only works when they’re pushing current through it. Like stealth materials, only you’ve got an off-switch, since the antiradar molecular structures—or whatever—only have that property when they’re getting juiced.” Lemuel smiled at Caine. “And now, I’m thinking the same thing regarding the problems with our ladar. Probably some kind of hull coating that works like a scattering prism: breaks up coherent light. Might be a good defense against lasers, too.”

  “Could be—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  “Hey—it’s like you said about the Marine sergeant: I’m just doing my job.”

  Caine smiled back. Good: Wasserman may occasionally be a jackass, but he doesn’t hold a grudge. And he may be right in another way about the parallel between him and the Marine sergeant: for all we know, the information he’s gathering in this dull little room may ultimately save us all.

  The external commo screen was suddenly bright with data. Caine moved toward it, announced, “We’ve got activity on tight-beam commo,” and thought: Here I go, Speaker to Aliens.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  MENTOR

  Downing turned toward Caine. “What is it?”

  “Don’t know yet. If I’m reading this screen correctly, the signal we’re receiving is high-speed, high-compression encrypted.”

  Downing turned to the suite’s operator. “Is it the same data protocol as their first communiqué, four months ago?”

  “Looks like it, sir. Decompressing and decoding now.”

  “Excellent,” affirmed Visser with a decisive nod. “Mr. Wasserman, you will please continue to share your findings with us so we can collectively assess their strategic significance.”

  Downing suppressed a smile. Visser was trying to sound like she had a firm grasp of the military implications of scientific data. However, the past week of joint preparations had proven that she did not. On the plus side, she took counsel well and not only listened to all the facts, but all the conjectures and hypotheses. And that was more important in a leader than a mastery of the theoretical sciences—or of any other esoteric discipline, for that matter.

  However, Wasserman turned to look at Visser with an expression that was more sneer than smile: “Which findings are you most interested in, Ms. Visser? Spectrographic analysis of their hull materials and thrust exhaust? Gravimetric anomalies? Or maybe their bizarre shift signature? Or maybe you’re interested in something that I’ve overlooked?” When the ambassador did not rise to the bait, Wasserman’s sneer became more pronounced. “I’m ready to follow your scientific lead, Ms. Visser.” Visser tried to glare at him, but looked more like a deer caught in the headlights of advanced physics.

  Downing bit his lip, wished Lemuel would let Visser off the hook. Hopeless git; a genius in his own right but soured by living in the eclipsing shadow of a celebrity uncle.

  Visser converted her failed glare into a severe look. “Tell us about the shift signature.”

  “What—exactly—do you want to know about it?”

  Visser sounded as though she had swallowed lye. “Start by telling us what a ‘shift signature’ is.”

  Wasserman’s smile dimmed into a smug curve. “A shift signature is a collection of anomalous physical sequelae that result when extremely high energy-density levels induce space-time disruption of real-space interstellar superstring traces—”

  Visser held up her hand. “Mr. Wasserman, please—you are the expert. Not us. In terms we understand, please.”

  Wasserman leaned back, smiling, taking his time, letting Visser squirm. “So where would you like me to start, Ms. Visser? With high-school physics?”

  Visser became very pale, then very red. She was slowly raising her finger. Crikey; here it comes.

  Caine stepped into the space between them. “Actually, Lemuel did a fine job of familiarizing me with the basics the other day. Major Patrone and I were, uh . . . napping when the shift drive was introduced, so we needed a review of its oddities. Maybe you could repeat that explanation here, Lemuel?”

  Lemuel’s sneer faltered into a frown.

  Downing almost nodded at Wasserman. Take his lead, man: Caine’s trying to help you save yourself, even though you are a right bastard.

  Wasserman’s frown faded away. The rest of the delegation relaxed—gratefully, it seemed, since every prior word and second had been taking them toward an in-group conflagration.

  As Wasserman started to speak—cocky, assertive—Downing noted that Visser’s gaze occasionally migrated over to Caine’s face. In another scenario—had the ages been closer, and Visser not already been furnished with a same-sex spouse—Downing might have suspected that she was discreetly fueling a romantic infatuation. But her expression was attentive rather than adoring: specifically, as Wasserman spoke, Visser was monitoring Caine’s reactions. She trusts his judgment. She’s listening to Riordan very carefully, and with a strong positive predisposition. That’s good—and useful—to know.

  Wasserman had already warmed to his subject. “To understand what a shift signature is, you have to understand how a shift drive operates. First, get it out of your head that the ship travels faster than the speed of light. It doesn’t.”

  Durniak nodded. “It is impossible to exceed or even achieve the velocity of light. Relativity.”

  Wasserman seemed about to disagree, then shrugged. “More or less. The Wasserman drive works by creating a field effect that ruptures weak spots in normal space-time. Although we accelerate for weeks to make the shift possible, speed really has nothing to do with it: the velocity is just a way of storing energy.

  “What?”

  “Trevor, think of the mass of the entire shift carrier as a battery. At zero velocity, it has only its rest mass energy—not useful for our purposes. However, as we accelerate it, every atom in that mass is also being moved to a higher energy state. In essence, the ship itself becomes a kind of energy capacitor—which is the only way we can store the energy levels required to effect shift.”

  “Then why do we need the antimatter reactors?”

  “To push us over the hump. As you begin to achieve significant sub-relativistic velocities, it takes increasingly more energy to add more speed. So, the efficiency of using the ship’s mass as a capacitor begins to drop sharply. That’s where the antimatter reactor comes in.”

  “It provides a final burst of speed?”

  “No, Trevor. I told you: it’s not about velocity. The antimatter reactor powers the Wasserman Drive, which works by compressing a seed of superdense material into a borderline implosion. That creates what laymen call a ‘pseudosingularity.’”

  “And which you call—?”

  “An ‘incipient event horizon,’ Ms. Visser. It’s way too small to become a full-fledged black hole. However, it does create a strong, albeit brief, time-space distortion—which, if it’s generated right on top of an in
terstellar superstring, is what triggers the shift.”

  Visser frowned. “Go back, please: an ‘interstellar super-what’?”

  “A superstring. It’s nothing you can find in space-normal. It’s—well, how do I explain this? It’s a vestigial subquantal umbilicus that connects nearby stars. Kind of an echo of their dispersal from the same pool of matter, even though they are now almost completely discrete stellar objects.”

  “Sounds a little like an interstellar version of quantum entanglement,” mused Thandla.

  “Yeah. Some theorists even claim the two phenomena are related. Kind of.”

  Downing looked quickly around the room: Thandla, Riordan, and Hwang were still following Wasserman. Durniak and Elena were struggling to keep up. The rest were attentively and hopelessly lost.

  Wasserman continued without missing a beat. “So, when you activate the Wasserman Drive atop the space-normal ‘ghost’ of the weakest part of the superstring between two stars, you create a field effect that journalists have mislabeled a ‘transient wormhole.’ Once that hole is open, the ship goes through.”

  “And pulls the hole shut after itself,” supplied Elena.

  “Not exactly. Actually, not at all. When I say that the pseudo-wormhole is transient, I mean it is extremely transient. Its expression is measured in microseconds. But because the ship is traveling so quickly, it’s through the rupture before space-normal can reassert.”

  “So it’s more like pulling open a trapdoor and dropping through the hole before it falls shut on you.”

  Lemuel nodded and almost smiled at Elena. “Yeah, more like that.”

  “So now the craft is traveling in shift-space.”

  “Well—no. Shift-space is just a made-up word that the press likes to use. There really isn’t any shift-space that we can tangibly experience or measure. We can only represent it as mathematical formulae and relationships. Which I’ll spare you.”

  Visser muttered, “Gott sei Dank.”

  “You see, a ship doesn’t really ‘enter’ a superstring: it ‘interfaces’ with it. It’s not moving, not in the material sense of the word. What it does is more akin to electron tunneling.”

  Elena’s eyebrows rose slightly. “‘Electron tunneling’?”

  “Yes. To put this really simply, atoms on either side of a barrier can, under the right conditions, swap electrons. But not because the electrons physically push through the barrier: they don’t. Instead, when an electron winks out of existence on one side of the barrier, another electron blinks in to replace it on the other side. That’s called ‘tunneling.’ How it happens—well, that’s a longer topic. Suffice it to say that the cosmos is keeping score, and when it tears a particle down in one place, it has to reconstruct it in another place.”

  “And that’s how the shift drive works?”

  “Well, it’s the same principle. Stars are, in some ways, like these atoms. They can, under the right conditions, exchange particles—or, more accurately, they can ‘communicate changes’ along the superstrings that link them. Like a tunneling electron, a shifted ship is not being physically propelled to another place: instead, the superstring transmits its ‘potentiality’ from one place to another.”

  “So, in the same instant that the Wasserman Drive makes the ship wink out in one place, the same ship has to be re-expressed further along the superstring.”

  “Now you get it. And what you’d call the ‘wormhole’ is more like an entry ramp onto the superstring freeway that connects the two stars. When the wormhole’s distortion of normal space-time grazes the underlying space-time irregularities that exist at the weak spot of a superstring—boom! You get a shift. And the precise conditions of how that happens is what determines—finally—a ship’s shift signature.”

  “Which is—what?”

  “A bloom of high-energy particles, rays, photons, and heat.”

  “What creates it?”

  “Well, the Wasserman Drive’s incipient event horizon grabs everything nearby—and I mean everything: solar particles, photons, cosmic rays. All the background noise and garbage of space-normal comes along for the ride during a shift. So when all that gets re-expressed, one of two things happen. If the object was at a high-energy state when it shifted—gamma rays, cosmic rays, the ship itself—it comes out just the way it went in. But that means you get a brief Cerenkov flash and a spike in the background radiation signature, because you just imported high-energy crap into a system which is already awash in high-energy crap of its own.”

  “And what about the less energetic objects that get shifted—like dust or gas molecules?”

  It was Durniak who hypothesized the answer to Visser’s question. “Logically, because they are not moving fast enough, they would be torn apart before crossing the threshold. So they would come out as—what?—heat, energy, subparticles?”

  “All of the above. But their annihilation is too brief and diffuse to present either a radiological or thermal hazard. However, against the background of space-normal—which is comparatively cold, empty, inactive—this burst shows up like a signal flare in night-vision goggles.”

  Visser visibly drew in a large, relieved breath. “Very well. So, now: the Dornaani shift signature.”

  “Well, like I said, I’m not sure it is a shift signature.”

  “Why? Did they not shift in?”

  “I think they did—but it’s not like any shift I’ve ever seen, or ever heard theorized.”

  “Why?”

  “First, they came in at speed. What that implies about their power generation and/or storage capabilities—”

  “You have already made very clear. For which we thank you. Next?”

  “Well, there was no initial shower of particles. However, a microsecond or two after the Dornaani ship shifted in, then we got the signature. And it’s like no signature we’ve seen before. Far fewer photons, cosmic rays, radiation. Instead, we detected a stern-wave of mesons decaying back into normal space-time—”

  The senior duty officer leaned forward. “Makes me want to reopen the book on the concept of tachyons.”

  Wasserman shrugged. “I’m not so ready to go down that path—but it sure did look like we were watching ultra high-energy particles crossing back down through the lightspeed threshold, undergoing a rapid—uh, ‘decay’—into normative particles.”

  Visser nodded. “I will not pretend to intuit the significance of all these facts, nor do we need them explicated here. Our module is scheduled for transfer to the Dornaani vessel in”—she checked her watch—“less than an hour. So tell us this: what do these facts suggest in terms of the Dornaani drive technology? Or other practical accomplishments?”

  Wasserman rotated his hands into a palms-up gesture of uncertainty. “I can only tell you this much: the Dornaani approach to supraluminal travel is way different from—and way beyond—ours. But I don’t know when I’ll be able to tell you anything specific about it. If ever.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is like being a paleontologist who’s shown a single fossilized footprint and is then asked to produce a sketch of the dinosaur that made it. I mean, there are certain features you can eliminate, but just how reliable and accurate an image are you going to generate from a single footprint? And right now, that’s all I’ve got to work with.”

  Visser’s pout was one of grudging acceptance. “Very well. Mr. Riordan, can you tell us any more about the communication we received from the Dornaani?”

  “Yes. The Dornaani relayed the accords of the interstellar organization they told us about.”

  Durniak’s smile was genuine, yet rueful. “I am guessing this means many days of reading, no?”

  “Erm—no.”

  Downing heard the pause and looked at Caine. “How long is it, Caine?”

  Caine took the hard copy from the printout tray, checked front and back. “Not quite two pages.”

  “How many accords are there?”

  He scanned the sheet. “Twenty-one.”<
br />
  “Only twenty-one?” It was the first time Downing had ever heard Visser sound surprised.

  “Only twenty-one. Here you go.” Caine started the thin stack of sheets around the room.

  Trevor, the first to finish reading it, turned the document over, as if searching for fine print. “And that’s it?”

  Caine nodded at him. “That’s it.”

  “Makes me think we’re looking at a very hands-off kind of organization.”

  Visser answered with a sharp shake of her head. “This is not an organization. It is a league of nonaligned states that have committed to a universal nonaggression treaty.”

  “And who’ve made rules for how to act toward each other when they meet on the playground.” Opal’s comment earned a smile from Caine, a broad grin from Trevor.

  Visser folded the sheet and slipped it into a pants pocket. “So. Much to discuss in the days to come. But, if we are done here, let us call—”

  “Already here.” The drawl from the doorway seemed to carry in a long, spare man in the blue unipiece fatigues of the USSF. Captain Dale “Tex” Flannery (who was, Downing had learned, from Nevada) waved the suite personnel back into their seats. “Folks, my CPO is about to have kittens, we’re cutting it so close. According to the instructions, we are not going to make a hard dock with the exosapients. So that means we have to cut your module and its intership coupler loose in about thirty minutes. They will then maneuver to pick you up. We will observe from a range of thirty kilometers.”

  “That’s pretty far off if something goes wrong,” muttered Hwang.

  “Doctor, if something goes wrong, there is probably squat-all we can do about it, anyway. I’m sure you folks have been chatting about the ship that just came in so you’re probably guessing the same thing I am: that if these Dornaani wanted to put their foot up our ass and wriggle their toes out our nostrils, I doubt there’s a thing in creation we could do about it. On the other hand, if they mean to harm us, they’re going about it in an awful neighborly way. If I was you, I wouldn’t worry about any problems during the transfer—or after.”