“Sorry I’m late.” Rockwell collapsed into the closest empty chair.
“What happened to you?” Fenton asked with feigned concern.
“Well, first of all, some idiot in an orange Pegasus cut off my flight lane so close I almost had a midair with a Greyhound airbus.”
Eugene smirked.
Rockwell continued, “Then security gave me the third degree on the way in, asking me all these crazy questions about explosives and recording devices.”
This may have had something to do with the anonymous tip Stack security received about a man matching Rockwell’s description acting suspicious in the parking hangar.
The rest of Rockwell’s story served as further confirmation that the question “Don’t you know who I am?” is always followed by “No.” Traditionally, this exchange leads to a roughly conducted strip search. Eugene’s inner teenager laughed maniacally, while his middle-aged self bit his tongue and soldiered on.
“Well, you’re here now, safe and sound, and that’s what matters. As I was saying, we have successfully fielded our first FTL demonstrator. After some trial and error—”
“Some?” Rockwell barely had time to settle into his seat before he was on his feet again, brandishing a data pad like a hatchet. “I have copies of your own test logs here.” He made a flicking motion with one hand to transfer the logs to the central holo-projector in the conference table.
“Let’s see…” Rockwell looked up at the display and started reading down the list. “Test one: prototype exploded, cause unknown. Test two: prototype exploded, cause unknown. Three: prototype disintegrated on contact with hyper window. Four: prototype entered hyper window, but failed to reappear. Five: prototype reappeared, but was reduced in mass by one-third.”
Eugene interrupted. “In our defense, we’re still exploring the potential for the weight-loss industry.”
The room snickered.
“If you’re finished, I’d like to continue,” Rockwell said humorlessly.
“By all means,” Eugene said.
“Six: prototype returned bright purple and smelling of limes. Seven: prototype returned covered in travel stickers. Eight: prototype—”
“I believe we get the gist of it, Gladstone,” Danielle said softly. “What is your point?”
“My point, Mrs. Chairwoman, is it’s high time to let qualified professionals take the reins of the ARTists project.”
The other members stirred in their chairs. Eugene’s stomach tightened into a coiled spring. He’d suspected the hit was coming, but anticipation did little to soften the blow.
“Please don’t misunderstand me,” Gladstone resumed. “Professor Graham is to be admired for assembling the team he did on such short notice. Further, the contributions of his team are commendable. I doubt any other ragtag bunch could have accomplished what they did, but we’re reaching a critical juncture, and now is no time for amateurs.
“I move that the ARTists group turn over their research and equipment to an established, experienced R&D team, preferably one already cleared to accept government black budget contracts.”
No one had any doubt which company’s R&D department Rockwell had in mind. Half the room was looking uncomfortably at Eugene, unsure of what to say or do. Eugene loomed over the table menacingly.
“Have you finished?” Eugene asked, his voice warm as arctic midnight.
Rockwell stared back at him, but said nothing.
“I assume by your silence you have,” Eugene said. “With respect, I think you’ve forgotten a few important points. First, the term crash program was coined for a reason. When people are working under a deadline in uncharted technological territory, unscheduled explosions are the norm. Second, while we have lost prototypes, we have not lost human lives. Something, it should be added, that cannot be said for the program that developed the first gravity drive system.”
Air was sucked through teeth, and at least one person in the room chuckled. Everyone knew which company had built the AEUS Manchester, posthumously nicknamed the Mancrusher.
Rockwell boiled over. “Now just a damned minute. That was a totally different situation.”
“You are right, of course. My team had the added challenge of leaving the known universe.”
“That’s preposter—” Rockwell started, but a gently cleared throat arrested his budding diatribe.
“Please continue, Professor,” Danielle said.
“Third,” Eugene put his palms on the table. “You propose turning things over to an ‘experienced’ R&D team. Who would that be, exactly? Because as far as I know, my team possesses the sum total of all human experience in the hyperspace field.”
“True.” Rockwell keyed up a file on his data pad. “But there are other areas of experience where your team falls short of the mark.” He transferred the file, and page after page of ARTist memos, technical papers, and schematics cascaded down the central holo.
Eugene frowned. “What’s all this?”
“This”—Rockwell pointed at the parade of classified files—“is a live feed from Loose Lips Ezine. Two hours ago, they posted over a terabyte of your team’s internal communications. The Web is buzzing with it. You have a leak, Professor.”
Eugene slumped. “We can fix this. We’ve been doing it for three years.”
“No, what you had before was rumor and innuendo, not proof. Nobody can fix this.”
Eugene looked at Danielle. “You knew?”
“Yes, Professor. I was told half an hour after the documents went up.”
“And I suppose you agree with Mr. Rockwell.”
She looked at him with apologetic eyes, but nodded. “This one is too big. You can’t contain it.”
“Well, then, what’s left? Go public?”
“Yes, but not immediately. There is still the matter of our courier ship.”
“The warship?” Eugene said. “That will take months.”
“It may not take as long as you think,” Danielle said.
Eugene’s suspicion rose. “I was under the impression development of the president’s toy had been suspended until our hyperspace generator was ready.”
“That’s what you and everyone else were supposed to think.” Rockwell flashed a smile as toothy and sincere as a saltwater crocodile’s.
Danielle shot him a cold look. “What Mr. Rockwell was trying to say, Professor,” she said delicately, “was that the president decided it would be prudent to run the two programs in parallel. Construction on the Bucephalus, as it has been named, restarted the week after your team opened their first hyperspace window. The ship is basically complete and has already undergone stationary trials. All that’s left is the integration of your hyperspace generator.”
Eugene’s head spun. It was all coming apart. His lads were going to be thanked for their hard work and then pushed to the sidelines. “You’ve got this all stitched up nice and neat, hmm, Mrs. Chairwoman?”
“Don’t make this into something personal, Professor,” Danielle said. “We all had jobs to do, and your team did theirs amazingly well, but you knew from the beginning that this was bigger than you, or them, or any of us.”
Danielle put her elbows on the table and folded her hands. “Maybe it’s time to pass the baton. Why don’t you instruct your team to set up a plan to help the Bucephalus crew transition to the new equipment?”
“Yes,” Rockwell interjected. “Our techs and engineers will need to get brought up to speed before launch.”
Eugene realized he was staring at his hands. They’ve never built anything, he thought. I’ve spent my whole life impressing people by being clever, but before this, my only contributions to the world were smarmy grad students. One of whom is trying to take away the miracle my boys and girls have built with their hands.
It was no decision at all.
“No,” Eugene announced to the room at large.
“What do you mean, ‘No’?” demanded Rockwell.
“I would think my meaning was quite cle
ar. No is a simple enough word, Mr. Rockwell. It’s been in common usage for many centuries now. This has, from the very beginning, been an American/European Space Administration project. An AESA ship found and recovered the buoy, an AESA team translated the message, and an AESA team reverse engineered the tech. Now, in the eleventh hour, and after doing all the work, AESA is asked to graciously hand our research over to military-industrial complex thugs. To that, I say, ‘No.’”
Rockwell was about to go supercritical, but the chairwoman put up her hand, interrupting the process. “I assume you have an alternate proposal, Professor?”
Eugene looked at the ceiling and theatrically cracked his knuckles. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
Compromise, it has been said, is the fine art of solving problems in such a way that no one gets what they want. It is for this reason Eugene didn’t bother with it.
CHAPTER 21
Jeffery and Harris had been in space for almost two weeks by the time their deep-system transport reached Ceres. Neither had ever been so far from Earth. Jeffery had been as far as the Unicycle, while Harris hadn’t made it beyond the Apollo 11 International Monument.
Until very recently, Ceres had been the solar system’s twentysomething slacker offspring. It bounced between jobs; from being the eighth planet, to just another asteroid, to a really big asteroid, and finally back to a planet, albeit a dwarf one. It wasn’t until Lockheed-Boeing-Raytheon’s Skunk Works division built a new shipyard and testing facility on its surface that Ceres’s identity crisis finally came to an end.
It was an ideal location for the sort of off-budget black projects the Skunk Works wizards had been building for four centuries. Fusion-drive shuttles like the one that ferried personnel to the Unicycle didn’t have the endurance or speed to operate so deep in the system, and even the most powerful space-born telescopes were unable to resolve any useful details at these distances. Coupled with the ample material resources of the asteroid belt, Ceres was the perfect place for construction and testing of sensitive projects away from prying eyes.
The small yank Jeffery and Harris had been sequestered in for two weeks entered final approach. Jeffery’s face was plastered against the portal. He took a moment to check on Harris, whose cheek was also pressed flat against the glass like, well, a Peeping Tom.
The Skunk Works yard provided for their voyeurism in spades. Barely concealed under spindly gantries lay the outline of AEUS Bucephalus. Harsh white light from a constellation of work lamps cast sharp shadows on her hull from a swarm of construction bots. Here and there, tiny flickers of light betrayed the presence of welders stitching polymerized ceramic panels together like so many leather cobblers.
“Are you seeing this?” Harris asked as he stared at his new home.
“Hard to miss it,” Jeffery answered.
“What do you think?”
“She certainly looks … butch. Knew a girl in college who looked like that. Roller derby chick.”
“She’s all business,” Harris said. This was certainly true, and there was little chance anyone would forget what line of work Bucephalus was in. She possessed the esthetic subtlety of a lead pipe.
“A little on the small side,” Jeffery said absently.
“Size isn’t everything.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re as big as a decent starter home.”
At only nine hundred meters long, Bucephalus was dwarfed by most of the colony ships and ore haulers plying the space lanes. In fact, she was considerably more compact than even Magellan.
However, what she lacked in length, she made up for in heft. Military vessels have always been overbuilt, and Bucephalus was no exception. Between her stout internal structure, secondary and even tertiary systems, and the three-meter-thick cocoon of ablative ceramo-plast weave armor, the ship out-massed Magellan by 23 percent.
On a civilian yank, a tangle of coolant pipes, fuel lines, and power conduits ran the length of the hull. This arrangement both sped construction and simplified repairs and maintenance in space dock. For a warship, however, this would leave critical systems exposed to enemy fire, so they were routed through the Bucephalus’s hollow core. Her hull was mostly smooth and unadorned as a result, leaving her looking like a concrete birdbath lying on its side.
She was not completely featureless, however. Jeffery’s finger pointed at two parallel rows of ten rectangular hatches behind one of the shuttle bays. “What do you figure those are?”
Harris took a moment to answer. “VLS modules. There’s another cluster of them farther down the hull.”
“VLS?”
“Sorry, vertical launch system.”
“What, like missile launchers?” Jeffery asked.
Harris shrugged. “It’s a warship. Warships need teeth.”
“Yeah, but look at them, Thomas. Each hatch has got to be six meters wide. What the hell is behind them?”
“Beats me. Whatever they are, I’m glad they’re pointing away from the ship.”
A barely discernible vibration shook the transport yank as docking clamps grabbed the hull and locked it into place.
“All right,” Jeffery said. “Time to go find Felix and meet your new neighbors.”
* * *
Their search for Felix stalled when Harris stumbled across the armory, or as the door would have passersby believe, the “Indigenous Wildlife Suppression Equipment Locker.” Observant guests might also notice that the “navigational lasers” placed at the bow could pulverize a medium-sized asteroid. Or that the shuttles were fitted with an “Emergency Landing Zone Clearing Module” that could mow down buildings as easily as trees. Or that the “probes” tipped with “seismic geological survey charges” bore an uncanny resemblance to nuclear missiles.
“And this?” Jeffery held up what looked like an ordinary flashlight.
“Oooh!” Harris was clearly operating on the verge of excitement overload. “I’ve read about these.” He took the cylinder from Jeffery’s hand. “It’s called a Niven light. Most of the time it’s just flashlight, but in a pinch the beam collapses into an industrial cutting laser.”
“What for?”
“In case you don’t like what you see, I suppose.”
“Why a ‘Niven’ light?” asked Jeffery.
“I don’t know, probably the dude that invented it.”
“Right, then.” Jeffery paced the deck admiring all the not-weapons for the platoon of not-marines that Lieutenant Harris was definitely not here to command.
“You know, Tom, there’s something I don’t get about this ship.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, look at this room. They’ve gone out of their way to slap a ridiculously transparent euphemism onto every offensive system. Yet they named that damned thing Bucephalus, the personal warhorse of Alexander the Great, probably the most famous conqueror in our history. Doesn’t that seem like a pretty glaring oversight?”
“Freudian slip is all I can come up with,” Harris replied.
“C’mon, let’s find Feli—”
Jeffery stood in front of a large bay window. Behind the glass was a large room with rails attached to the ceiling, pointing toward a series of hatches that could only lead outside. Hanging from the rails were a dozen malicious machines that looked for all the world like giant angular bats sleeping in a cave.
“What the hell are those?” asked Jeffery.
“Those,” Harris beamed, “are orbital overlook platforms. You don’t want to get caught underneath them; they’re liable to make a mess. The official name is Gargoyle, but leathernecks just call them OOPs.”
Jeffery shook his head slowly. “Curious how all this stuff was just lying around, since space-based weapons have been illegal for four centuries.”
“Au contraire,” said Harris. “It’s illegal to deploy space weapons. No one said anything about developing them.”
Jeffery rolled his eyes. “Gotta love semantics.” He crossed his arms over his chest as if a cold snap had just come t
hrough.
“Hey,” Harris said. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I guess. It’s just all becoming real, you know? You’re going charging out there waving your guns in the air. What could go wrong?”
“It’s the life, Jeff. You knew that from the beginning.”
“Knowing and experiencing are different things.”
Harris’s oaken arms swallowed him. “Shhh. I know it’s scary. But I’ve been in bad spots before. I know what I’m doing.”
“You’d better, Lieutenant.” Jeffery let his head rest in the pocket between his lover’s neck and shoulder. “And you’d better keep Felix alive, too. I really like that little weirdo.”
“So do I.”
After finishing their tour of the not-armory, Jeffery queried Felix’s location on a nearby terminal. He was working on the bridge. They caught a tube car to the bridge, located in the center of the ship underneath as much armor and structural composite as possible. They found Felix buried up to his waist inside the navigational station, unabashedly cursing whoever had engineered the bridge layout.
“Seriously?” came his voice from the hole in the wall, addressing the universe at large. “Who in their right mind runs a high-amp conduit through a bridge station? Ever hear of transformers?” A rubber-handled socket wrench came flying out the hole and clanged against the deck plate.
“Everything all right in there, princess?” Jeffery asked with a smirk.
The undirected litany paused as Felix realized he was playing to an audience.
“That had better be Jeffery, or else somebody’s getting a face-full of electrical insulation foam.”
“Yeah, it’s me. Thomas is here, too.”
“Hey, buddy,” Harris said. “I checked the cabin assignments; we’re going to be neighbors.”
“That’s great,” Felix said.
This was one half of Eugene’s bargain. The Bucephalus got the ARTist’s hyperdrive, on loan, with Felix as its chaperone.
“Could one of you hand me that socket I just threw on the floor?” A hand streaked with white lithium grease waved from the hole.
Gate Crashers Page 17
