by Rob Buckman
“Impressive. But what if he, or she was a suicide bomber?”
“The chamber you stepped into before the gateway acts as a bomb detector, and containment chamber if necessary. The computer would detect the blast as it happened and redirect the blast into space through another ring.”
“You’ve been talking to our explosives ordinance disposal folks, the EOD people.”
Devon grinned at him. “Not me. My rascal of a son did that.”
Scott had met his son Brian when they arrived. “Good for him. Smart thinking. Where else can I go from here?”
“Anywhere you want.”
“Okay. How about the other end of the torpedo tube, or whatever they are, I saw before I came aboard?”
“Follow me,” Devon said, and walked up to the hatchways. “Mass-drive weapons deck,” he said, and stepped through.
As he did, the view on the other side changed and it looked as if they’d stepped into an elevator. After Scott entered, the door behind them closed, another in front of them opened, and they stepped through onto the mass-drive weapons deck with no apparent motion at all. Someone had been smart enough to design the elevator to look like an airlock, or airlock to look like an elevator, confusing to any would-be intruder, since he’d have no way of knowing where they were going to come out. Each manned compartment had two escape rings on each side that dropped the crewmembers directly into the escape capsule bay. The rings could also be programmed to transfer a crew person to another ship, or even back to Alpha base or the moon.
The holes he’d seen weren’t torpedo tubes as he thought, but giant linear accelerators or mass-driver cannons, and a particle accelerator much like the old high-energy research started way back in the late twentieth century. The two large top units could fire, if that was the word, a five-ton, depleted-uranium, boron ball at point-two-five percent the speed of light. These were strictly point-and-shoot weapons, using the ship itself as a giant gun. The eight smaller units fired one-ton projectiles, also at point-two-five percent of light speed.
“How come we need so many, Devon?” Scott asked as he walked around the massive casings.
“Heat buildup in the accumulator power regeneration after they’re fired. With something the size of this, you need a lot of power. Don’t forget, these run the entire length of the ship.”
“What?” Scott said, looking around. “I thought we were at the bow!”
Devon chuckled. “Nope, we’re way back at the stern, out of harm’s way, so to speak. I see these as a way to crack the major ships I expect you’ll encounter, and to break up that globe formation the aliens like to use. We saw what the big guns on the old New Zealand did to their ships once we penetrated their shield defense. It’s cracking the shield that poses the biggest problem. With something heavy traveling at point-two-five percent the speed of light, that’s 46,500 feet per second, so you don’t need to waste an expensive nuke or missile. The energy impact from a few of these should overload, or significantly degrade the lizard’s shield in no time at all.”
“Wouldn’t it depend on their shield recovery time?”
“True, but that is why you have so many launch tubes. Use the smaller ones to crack the shield, and the big ones to destroy the ship. With these, you should be able to do it a whole lot quicker.” Scott nodded, hoping Devon’s assessment of the combat videos was correct.
After that, they used the rings to move around the ship, and he saw each and every department in a minimum of time. If he’d had to walk around the ship, it would have taken days or even weeks to see it all. The place that amazed him most was the environmental section. This was a stainless steel tube flattened on the bottom, located along the centerline of the ship, over a quarter-mile long and a hundred feet across. At the moment, it was bare.
“And what happens here?” Scott asked.
“This is part of your environmental system. The one thing any ship this size produces is a lot of heat. So, once we’ve completed the fitting, we take this ship down to Earth and make a few stops,” Devon commented, pointing down to what Scott thought of as the stern with his pipe. “The first part will be a desert area, as that will take the brunt of all the hot air generated around the ship. This will flow across the desert area, slowly cooling before it passes to a tropical region in the center. Lots of rain and growing things. After that comes a temperate zone, and so on until it reaches a polar region at the far end. After that, it will recycle back around the ship to start the process all over again.”
“That’s going to take a lot of dirt and trees.”
“True, in the beginning. Plus we have to make sure we don’t bring anything dangerous or obnoxious onboard as well. Don’t want the place full of mosquitoes or red ants now do we?”
Scott agreed, and could appreciate the thought that went into creating this area. It would act as a giant filter and air regeneration system, cooling and purifying the air much as it did on Earth. It would also add something to the air as it passed through here, and the ship would be filled with the smell of growing things instead of the canned-air smell. He could see where the rings they’d discovered were a godsend, permitting Devon and his team of designers a wider degree of latitude. Now it was possible to pack so much more inside the hull than before, with very little wasted space. Everything onboard was of massive proportions, from the flight deck to the hangar, marine quarters, without having to waste space for passageways and assorted piping and conduit, since they now passed directly from the main power room next to the main engines and directly to where the power was needed through a series of rings of different sizes. This was also true for water, air, and sanitation, which meant there was a lot of space that could now be used for comfort or utility.
“How soon can I have her, Devon?” Scott said, his eyes alight at the possibilities of his ship.
“At this rate, I’d say in about three weeks or less, depending if we run into any more trouble.”
“Trouble? Sabotage?”
“No, no. Just the usual glitches. In that respect, your precautions were effective. We haven’t had one case of sabotage since then, but we’re double checking everything as well. I just wish we could’ve got a larger power plant inside her, that’s all.”
“The one you’ve got isn’t big enough?” Scott asked.
“Yes, she’s big enough, but you don’t have that much extra. I would’ve liked a larger fusion reactor, about twice, or three times as large, power-wise that is. Just in case you needed it, or ran into something larger and more powerful than you anticipate.”
“No way to do it, huh?”
“Not at our present level of technology, no,” he said, shaking his head. “Not that the fusion reactors aren’t good, they are, and very compact. It’s just the worry you might need more from them than they can put out, especially with the main armament capacitor recharge time.”
“It’s a pity the rings don’t work the other way,” Scott said with a laugh.
“How’s that?” Devon asked.
“Well, the rings compress the distance between two points. It’s a pity you can’t make them stretch it as well.”
Devon chuckled and shook his head. “It’s all right for you, I’m still trying to come to grips with that concept.”
“Oh, I still have problems with it, but then again, I do with the anti-grav plates as well. Just so long as they work, that’s all I’m concerned with. I’ll let the eggheads figure out how they work.”
Together they wandered about the ship, poking noses into odd corners. No matter where they looked, everyone was working at fever pitch, knowing they had to have her ready before the aliens turned up again. Something nagged at the back of Scott’s mind, but instead of concentrating on it, he shoved it away to let his subconscious work on it. It came to the forefront of his mind when he said that he needed to get back to the base and had started heading toward the shuttle bay.
“At the moment, only the main entrance will take you back to the moon,” Devon commented
offhandedly. “Once we finish programming all the hatchways’ destination crystals, all of them will take you to the moon, or another ship if you’d like. That was a little mind blowing, but then it made sense if you have the capacity to do it.”
As Devon suggested, Scott stepped from the engine room to the main entrance, and then back to the moon base. No sense in taking chances that someone would come aboard unannounced while she was under construction. He stepped through the doorway and found himself in the underground cavern on the moon again. Then it hit him, and he turned and looked at the ring doorway, deep in thought.
“What’s wrong, Scott?” Devon asked, seeing his expression.
“No, nothing, I was just wondering …” His voice trailed off and he shook his head. “No, it’s impossible,” he muttered.
“What is?”
Scott pulled himself back and gave Devon a funny look. “This is going to sound crazy.”
“So tell me. I heard a lot of crazy ideas over the last few months, and some of them weren’t as crazy as they first sounded.”
“Have you thought of passing one ring of a matched set through each other?”
“Huh? Why would we want to do that?”
“Just wondering.” Scott thought about it a little more. It made a mad sort of sense. “If you can compress the distance between two points in space with a set of rings, what would happen if you passed one ring of a matched set through the other while it was switched on? What would that do to the space between them?”
Devon gave him one of those, “I wonder what he’s been smoking?” looks and shook his head. “Never thought about it to tell the truth, but now that you’ve brought it up …” He scratched the back of his neck with the stem of his ubiquitous pipe, pondering the question. “The only way to find out is to do it and see what happens.”
“Probably nothing, silly thought really, forget it,” Scott answered, waving his hand.
“Not so fast. There is no harm in trying, is there?” Devon raised both his bushy eyebrows in a question.
“You could be right, but it also might be dangerous. No telling what would happen once the rings were activated.”
“Yes, we don’t want to blow the moon up, do we?” Devon chuckled, looking thoughtful.
“Tell you what. We might do it out in space, just in case. I can use two very small rings, and a couple of robots to do the actual transfer if you authorize the shuttle.”
“Good point. I can do that.”
“It will take a few hours to set up. Why don’t you head back to the base, and I’ll let you know when we’re ready.”
“Sounds good to me, I have a mountain of paperwork to catch up on.”
Scott stepped through the security doors, and back to Alpha base in New Zealand. If nothing else, the rings cut down on the amount of aerial traffic heading back and forth to the moon and other places. After authorizing the shuttle flight, he managed to get through the waiting paperwork in record time, and at last sat back and relaxed, thinking over the past few days. The troubling images of the inside of the mother ship came back to him, and the scene in the prison. It didn’t take long before he concluded that he needed to talk to all the people who’d been in cold sleep, then to the rest of his people.
He tapped the intercom. “Who’s on duty today?”
“Hernandez, sir,” the voice and picture came back.
“Jose, how are you doing today?”
“Good, sir, and you?”
“Not bad. I need to get a link up to all our people at eight o’clock tonight, can you arrange that?”
“Yes, skipper, you mean everyone?”
“Yes, no excuses accepted.”
“Anyone else?”
“No, but it’s not a secret transmission, so anyone can tap in, I just want you to make sure all of our people are online tonight.” He didn’t need to explain who “our people” meant. Hernandez knew what he meant.
* * * * * *
Devon called him several hours later, and he watched as a pilotless shuttle moved into space, well away from any installation on the dark side of the moon. A second security shuttle followed until it was in position, then pulled back to the far side of the moon, just in case. A camera inside the shuttle’s cargo bay relayed a picture back to moon base and New Zealand, showing two small rings, shaped like hatchways rather than the round rings they had been at first, sitting on a cradle inside. It was clear from the shape that these were made as hatchways for installation on a starship, and could easily pass one through the other. Two small construction robots stood by, but they weren’t on automatic, rather, under direct control of a distant operator on the moon.
“Whenever you are ready, Devon,” Scott said.
“Starting now.”
One of the small robots picked up one of the oval-shaped rings, and slowly walked over to the other one on the cradle. There, it turned the ring on edge and passed it to the other robot on the other side. Scott held his breath, expecting an explosion or something just as bad, but much to his relief, nothing happened. In many ways, it was an anticlimax. He’d expected something, he didn’t know what, some display that indicated a change, perhaps. The ring was remounted on a second cradle, and the robot moved around until its camera pointed through the opening in the two rings. At first, they saw nothing unusual, then Scott leaned closer to the video screen. They should be able to see the other robot standing in front of the other ring, but from this angle, it seemed a lot smaller than it should been.
“Oh, my!” he heard Devon mutter. “What Pandora’s box have you opened now, Scott?”
“Take the robot through the ring if you can, Devon.”
“All right, hold on.” Scott watched the split screen, seeing the robot roll through the ring on its caterpillar tracks, and grew larger as it moved toward the robot camera of the other.
“Scott! The space between the rings is definitely larger! It’s taking the robot too long to travel the short distance between them,” Devon shouted. As he did, the robot exited the second ring. The distance between the rings was ten feet, and it should have taken it less than ten seconds to move that distance … or no time at all, as with an ordinary set of rings. Yet it took almost thirty seconds for it to travel between the two.
“Non-Euclidean geometry,” Scott muttered.
“What?” Devon asked.
“The words I was looking for to explain this effect. I remembered it at last. It’s called non-Euclidean geometry, or extra-dimensional space. Something that is larger on the inside than it is on the outside. I believe it’s also sometimes called a tesseract.”
“That’s impossible …” Devon started to say, then stopped. The evidence of it was right before his eyes.
“Okay, Devon, you wanted more space in the engine room, now you have it. Stuff in the largest power plant you can find, or two of them … hell stuff three or four if you can,” Scott said with a chuckle.
“Right! But first I’m going to check this out three ways from Sunday. There has to be a catch to this.”
“Devon, did you ever hear the one about looking a gift horse in the mouth?”
“Yeah, it could bite you!”
“True, but you realize this could bring up all sorts of interesting possibilities where ship design is concerned, don’t you?”
“Good god yes! If the space inside is controllable in some way …” It was obvious his mind was going at full speed.
“I’ll let you play with it. Talk to you later.”
Scott might as well have spoken to the wall for all the acknowledgments he got. Devon was already in a world of his own. Scott just smiled and left him to it. It would be interesting to see what he could come up with. Once this got out, the eggheads would have a field day trying to figure out why the rings compressed distance one way, and stretched in another. He understood now why Solar Power Systems wanted the secret so badly.
As a transportation system, there was nothing to beat it. It did have a few drawbacks, ones he need
ed to make sure everyone understood. Unfriendly forces coming through the gate was one danger; another was diseases or something as simple as the common cold, which they still hadn’t cured. It did open up the possibility of mining on Mercury or the moons of Saturn and Neptune. Crew changes, supplies, and material transfer would be a breeze. The only question was, could they, meaning his people in New Zealand, keep control of it? So far, the only people who knew how to take them apart and control the ring’s destination was Karl and his team, and Professor Ellis and his wife.
Keying his comm unit, he asked Karl to meet him in the hangar with his team. Karl looked rumpled and grumpy when he and his team walked in, and the team members didn’t look much better. The only ones who looked wide-awake were his five-man security detail, who seemed to be looking everywhere at once instead of at the group. None of them saluted or gave any indication of who Scott was.
