Vorpal Blade votsb-2

by John Ringo

  “Get in your grapping rack, Revells,” Jaen snarled. “You’re not supposed to be moving, yet!”

  “Get your elbow out of my face!”

  “Get your dick out of my ass!”

  The compartment was a madhouse of struggling Marines as everyone tried to get to different hatches at once, all order dissolved.

  “FREEZE!” the first sergeant bellowed from the forward hatch.

  Berg froze in place, arms over his head, most of the top of the skinsuit over his face.

  “Two-Gun, you may lower your arms,” Top said into the silence. “Carefully.”

  Berg shrugged all the way into the skinsuit and lowered his arms, carefully. He had to; the Marines were packed in the companionway like sardines.

  “The term here is FUBAR,” the first sergeant said, quietly. “Y’all can’t struggle out of this compartment in two minutes, which is the time it’s supposed to take you to settle on your equipment. So we are going to do this again. And again. And again. Until you can, in fact, exit this compartment in an orderly fashion. At that point, and at that point only, will we then move on to donning said equipment and drawing ammo in an orderly fashion. And don’t think you can cut time by keeping your uniforms on. We’re going to randomly pick which platoon has which duty. Back in your racks.”

  Berg waited at the position of attention, sucked into the bulkhead of the locker room, until Gunny Hedger from Third Platoon shouted “Third, Clear!” then grabbed the stanchion on the gear locker and drove it, hard, towards the starboard bulkhead. Staff Sergeant Summerlin was on the far side of the locker and, if anything, was driving harder.

  Falling in on the armor was a drill that had to be done as precisely as a parade. As tight as the ship was, getting everyone onto their armor, fast, was nearly impossible. But it could be done if everyone did their jobs precisely on the beat.

  With the containers spaced, the Marines darted in lockstep to their positions and almost simultaneously opened their compartments. As the seats fell they turned and, nearly in unison, sat down, reaching up and pulling their armor over their heads. The combat harnesses were attached to the armor so they came down at the same time. Two moves and the armor was latched. Reaching up, they pulled down their helmets, then snatched out their weapons and stood up.

  Gunny Hocieniec was already there, in armor, and nodded at the first sergeant.

  “One minute and forty-three seconds,” Top said. “Seventeen seconds under standard. I think we can better that, but it’s good enough for now. Fall into the missile bay.”

  “I’d say that I’m only going to say this once,” the first sergeant said, striding down the ranks of Marines standing at attention. “But I’m not. I’m going to say it over and over and over again. We do not know what we are going to encounter out here. We know the Dreen are out here, somewhere. And some of you have fought them before and know how nasty that is. But we could, God help us, run into nastier things. Or better. Or nothing, as on Dean’s World. That’s the point. We just don’t know. So each and every one of you had better be ready for anything at any time. Somebody who is ready for anything at any time is a Space Marine. I will not accept anything less in my company. Is that clear, Marines!”

  “Clear, First Sergeant!” the Marines shouted.

  “You’ve all passed Common Tasks, but to be a Space Marine means practicing uncommon tasks. We’re going to make you the sharpest, hardest group of Marines in the Corps, because that is being a Space Marine. We’re going to make you the smartest group of Marines in the Corps, because that is being a Space Marine. And if you’ve been tired of dickbeating, then you’re going to get really tired of what I’m going to throw at you. By the numbers, replace your gear and hit your racks. Tomorrow, we’re going to start adding some polish.”

  “So, mesons are a type of boson,” Drago said, furrowing his brow. “They’re two quarks…”

  “A quark and an anti-quark,” Berg said, trying not to sigh. “That’s actually pretty important.”

  As the first sergeant had said, it was time to put the polish on the apple. The Marines had been looking at their sensor systems and learned to recognize basic information but they’d never really understood what they were looking at. Berg had been drafted as an ad hoc instructor for his platoon and was trying to get the basics of particle physics through some skulls dense enough to stop neutrinos.

  “Okay, they’re a quark and an anti-quark,” Drago said. “Any particular type of quark? I mean, strange, charmed?”

  “What in the hell is a charmed?” Lovelace asked. “What’s a quark?! I mean, there’s all these particles and it’s all about quarks but nobody ever said what a quark is!”

  “Oh, maulk,” Berg muttered. “It’s in the manual but… quarks, muons, and electrons are elementary particles. That means they can’t be broken into smaller pieces. And quarks are the only fundamental particle that interact through all four of the known forces. They come in six flavors: up, down, top, bottom, sometimes called beauty for some damned reason, charmed and strange. And, no, I’m not making this maulk up, Drago.”

  “This is some crazy maulk.”

  “Oh, I forgot something else. They’re also waves, the whole ‘both a particle and a wave’ thing.”

  “How can it be both?” Lovelace asked, grabbing his head. “That doesn’t make grapping sense!”

  “Welcome to quantum mechanics,” Berg said, grinning. “Whenever you really get something in quantum mechanics, you’re required to roll a sanity check. But that’s the point; they’re both and since they’re down to the point where they can be both, there’s nothing smaller. Quarks and electrons are what make up ‘solid’ matter. Put enough quarks together and you get the basic protons and neutrons of an atom. Electrons are just… electrons and they spin around the outside of the protons and neutrons in atoms. Oh, and until the Adar came along we thought that you could only have quarks in twos or threes or some other multiples but never a single quark by itself—”

  “Why?”

  “Well, the gluons that hold them together—”

  “Gluons? Grapping gluons?”

  “…get stronger the farther apart you try to pull them until they eventually pop back together. But somehow the Adar know how to pull the quarks apart and keep them that way. And as far as I know there are probably only two humans alive who really understand how that is possible and both of them are here on this boat—”

  “Grapping maulk, here he goes again!” Drago rolled his eyes.

  “Let us guess… Commander Weaver is one of them?” Lovelace added.

  “And Mimi is the other…” Berg finished.

  “Damn, I know you’ve got a jones for the commander, Two-Gun, but the kid too? That’s serious jailbait.”

  “And as I was saying,” Two-Gun ignored the comment. “Then there’s photons…”

  “Photons! Hey, I’ve heard of that. Like a photon torpedo?” Drago said excitedly.

  “Uh, yeah, Drago,” Berg said. “Like a photon torpedo.”

  “I got one right!”

  “Light’s a particle and a wave. Sort of.”

  “What’s a tachyon?” Lovelace asked. “I heard something about tachyons.”

  “It’s what you get when you let rednecks play with particle physics,” Berg said, grinning again. “Seriously, what it is is a theoretical particle that travels faster than light only and would take infinite energy to slow it down to light speed. Most of these particles only exist when you have some sort of weird reaction, and decay in less time than I’m going to bother to explain. Some of them, though, hang around and we get to detect them.”

  “I don’t get why the sensors don’t just say ‘hey, bosons!’ ” Sergeant Lovelace said.

  “Because there are different aspects to particular mesons and bosons,” Berg said. “The real kicker is fermions and pentaquarks. So far, we’ve never seen pentaquarks in nature. If you’re getting a reading that indicates pentaquarks or other high-multiple quark formations, th
en something strange is going on. Fermions do occur from some natural processes. After all, electrons, muons, and tau particles are fermions and we are pounded by electrons and muons all the time. The higher energy ones are the key to things we are interested in. Usually, you get them as the result of a recent quarkium explosion or a Higgs boson nearby. Pentaquarks, too. So if you see a bunch of high energy fermion or pentaquark signatures, fermions that are nonstandard fermions, there’s probably been a big boom.”

  “Which means there might be another,” Sergeant Lovelace said, nodding. “I’m starting to see some point to this.”

  “Go, Brain,” Lujan said, grinning. “I think it’s a much better handle than Two-Gun.”

  “Can it, Drago.”

  “And baryons, more specifically mesons, can indicate there’s a gate around,” Berg said.

  “Wait!” Drago interrupted. “I thought it was muons that said there was a gate around?”

  “Well, yes. Muons are a fermion that is a fundamental particle like an electron and they do indicate a boson or a gate.”

  “This is confusing as hell.”

  “It is that,” Berg continued. “According to something I read on the declass science system notes, there was baryon presence after we did that dimensional shift. So baryons might indicate something is dimensionally shifting. Or, and this is sort of science fiction, it might mean there’s something out of phase. It might be invisible, in other words. It might even be able to see you, but you not see it. Possibly. Maybe sorta.”

  “Wait,” Drago said again, frowning. “I got some pentaquark readings from my Wyvern the last time we did maintenance.”

  “Ship gives off pentaquarks,” Berg said, nodding. “We’ve got a quarkium drive. That’s another indicator. But we don’t give off baryons unless we’re doing a dimensional jump. Maybe.”

  “Dude, I did not join the Corps to study quantum physics,” Crowley moaned.

  “Welcome to the Space Marines.” Berg shrugged. “Learning this is nearly as important as learning how to field strip your M-675.”

  “Everybody’s to fall in to the missile room,” Staff Sergeant Summerlin ordered. “Some sort of announcement.”

  “Shiny,” Crowley said, standing up. “Anything has to be better than this maulk.”

  The XO arrived late to the command meeting and set a stack of paper in front of the captain before sitting down.

  “That’s not only the consumables report but the data backing it.” The XO sighed. “We’ve only got two more days of air and we’ve already cut the water ration to one quarter. Unless we find some water to process we’re going to be breathing pure CO2 in another three days.”

  Standard submarines have very limited fresh water and oxygen storage. Both could be extracted from seawater so large storage areas were a waste of space. The Vorpal Blade had been designed with much more extensive storage of both, mostly by cutting down on its ballasting system, but it was still limited.

  Since the surprising find in the E Eridani system the ship had been cruising for three weeks without finding another even semi-habitable planet. And things were getting a bit grim.

  “Commander Weaver,” the CO said, looking over at the astrogator. “Suggestions?”

  “Well, it’s a bit tricky, sir,” Bill replied. “We haven’t found any planets with an Earth type atmosphere, which was what I’d been hoping for. But we can get all the air we need from gas giants. Water, too, but that’s trickier.”

  “I thought their atmosphere was hydrogen,” the XO said, puzzled.

  “Mostly hydrogen,” the CO replied. “But it’s got a lot of other stuff in it.”

  “That’s the point, sir,” Bill said, nodding. “Oxygen, after hydrogen, is about the most common atom in the universe. Stars pump it out constantly by first fusing their hydrogen into helium then continuing fuse down to iron in what is known as the CNO cycle…”

  “Chief of Naval Operations?” the XO asked, confused.

  “Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen,” Bill said, trying not to sigh. “Oxygen’s a common fusion point and is put out in quantity as a by-product of stellar evolution. Most of it ends up locked up with hydrogen, water in other words, but a good bit gets into the atmosphere of gas giants. But gas giant atmospheres are layered. We’re going to have to drop actually into the atmosphere and hover while we extract O2. There’s going to be water there, too, but it’s going to be disperse, and extracting it is going to be harder. We’ll pick up some from the oxygen extraction process, but I think we’re going to have to find the rest of it in ice.”

  “Land on a moon?” the CO asked.

  “That or get it from a ring,” Bill replied, thinking hard. “An ice moon landing has problems we’ve encountered before. The pads tend to melt the ice and if it refreezes getting out is a bitch, pardon my language, sir. But if we pull up next to a ring and grab some ice out of those… We’ve never really been close enough to a ring to see how stable the orbits of the individual chunks are, sir. And, admittedly, our people are not as extensively trained in EVA as we might like for something like this. But if the rings don’t work, we can always land on a moon. Every gas giant we’ve surveyed has had multiple ice moons.”

  “Well, that’s one for the manuals,” the XO said, making a note. “Life support consumables, lack of. Gather from gas giants and rings.”

  “Do we have the equipment to extract O2?” the CO asked. “I don’t recall it as part of our package.”

  “Nothing in the SSM,” the XO said, referring to the Bible of Submarine Operations. “Or the mission specialist’s manifests, the Flight Readiness Manifest or the Payload Requirements Document. Checked them all.”

  “You extract it with electrostatic systems,” Weaver replied. “At least preliminary extraction. Then you have to separate it with pumps. I’m pretty sure engineering can blage something…”

  “Whenever I hear that word, I’ve learned to cringe,” the XO said.

  “Sir, I can safely say that we have the finest blagers in this entire solar system,” Weaver replied.

  “As far as we know, we’re the only life in this solar system,” the XO said.

  “That, sir, was my point.”

  “The ship is running low on consumables,” the first sergeant said, walking down the compartment before the assembled Marines. “The commander’s trying to find some source of air and water. In the meantime, the water ration is cut in half and no showers. Personal hygiene issue is one pint of water a day. Use it for shaving your filthy beards. If we can’t find it, we can head back to Earth easily enough, we’re less than a day away. I’m told that one of the options may cause some pressurization issues. If so, we’ll spend some time in the racks until they get things fixed. For now, get back to training. Second, you’re up on the PT schedule next.”

  “Oorah!” Crowley said. “More PT, First Sergeant! I need to let my brain clear.”

  “Unfortunately,” Top said, grinning maliciously, “no water means no PT. When you can explain the characteristics of a fermion you back off the quantum physics. Two-Gun, see if you can help him out with that. Make sure you cover why they can’t form Bose-Einstein condensates.”

  » » »

  “It is the reverse of an ion drive,” Tchar said, holding one massive hand out. “Mangon wrench.”

  “So you polarize the molecules, then pull them in different directions,” Mimi said, handing the Adar a wrench that was about half as long as she was.

  “Yes,” Tchar said. “Fortunately, we have spare electromagnets for the drive system. Both for stabilizing the sphere and for the electric propeller drive. Gibmak screwdriver.”

  Mimi handed over the tool, which looked very much like a Phillips head if about three times the size of any screwdriver she’d ever seen before.

  “What are these tubes from?” she asked.

  They were working in a small space to the port of the main engine room. The reason she was having to handle the tools is that while the space was plenty large enough for a
human, Tchar had to lie on his belly and crawl into it.

  The space was also packed with very large piping, bigger around than Mimi.

  “A portion of the water coolant system for the reactor,” Tchar said. “Not radioactive. It was the intake system for the reactor. We’ll use this point to polarize the molecules, then extract them further on. The big problem will be installing the fans. The ship, essentially, doesn’t have any. Fortunately, they left some pumps in place so we’ll try to use those. The human machinist mates are working on that. Can you move that very large circular magnet?”

  “I would be able to if it weren’t stuck to the floor,” Mimi said, tugging at the big magnet. “But not now.”

  “I suppose I shall have to,” Tchar said, working his way out of the narrow gap. He grabbed the magnet and yanked it upwards, breaking the hold it had on the deck, then rolled it in ahead of him. “I could use some help with this. Nothing too heavy, but I’m not sure most people on the ship could fit.”

  “Not a problem,” Mimi said, squeezing past him.

  “If you could stand there,” Tchar said, pointing to a narrow gap and handing her the large wrench. “I’ve disconnected the pipes as you can see and installed a mount for the magnet the machinist mates made for me. Now we have to lift it into position and attach it. I will lift it, you will attach it.” He pointed to several large screws.

  “Got it,” Mimi said, picking up the wrench that was nearly as long as her arm. One of the screws, the size of her hand, went on the end and was held in place by another magnet.

  “You will probably have to start it by hand,” Tchar said, lifting the heavy magnet with a grunt and sliding it into the mount. “Now, if you will.”

  Mimi slid in the first screw and started it by hand, then slid three more in.

  “And on the other side,” Tchar noted.

  She scooted under the magnet and picked up the screws on the other side, sliding them in. Then she got the screwdriver and tightened them as well as she could.