Another Word for Magic

by Mackey Chandler

  “Because he didn’t level with me about his intentions. He just used me.”

  “I doubt you were up to that level of intrigue back then,” April said.

  “Yeah. I once asked him if he didn’t know presenting me would create a problem, and he said he had every confidence I would respond appropriately by my nature.”

  That seemed to mollify Lee somewhat.

  Jeff jumped back in before she could enlarge on that. “As far as making law, I think that establishing a bureaucracy and forms to certify ownership of entire star systems and back it up by force qualifies. The war part is going to happen soon enough, when the Claims Commission cuts you off. The Mothers know it and have declared themselves your ally. You have crew who will join up to fight at your word, and had no objection to hiring mercenaries. I approve of waiting to take Providence back until they break the contract, but it’s a moral quibble. You know they are going to do it. It’s what Earthies do. I’d bet anything you want to wager that they will renege within six months. It’s just bureaucratic inertia and butt covering that has kept your shares coming this long. They know cutting off payments will have consequences. They just need to know who to blame when the backlash for that decision hits. It will be some minor functionary or political opposition that gets accused to the public for the economic fallout it’s going to create.

  “It matters to me who breaks it,” Lee insisted. “I want to be able to say later that I treated them better than they treated me in the matter.”

  “You elevate yourself to being their peer in the matter again,” April pointed out.

  Jeff’s face transformed with such a sudden epiphany that April looked alarmed.

  “I know why this is so hard for you to accept,” he said smiling.

  “Why should that delight you so?” Lee asked suspiciously.

  “Because I’m not adept at social things. April and Heather have to tutor and correct me all the time. But sometimes that allows me to have a certain detachment to see past social assumptions. You have a hard time seeing yourself as sovereign because you have none of the trappings of office. We value labels inordinately. Heather is the Sovereign of Central. The Mothers are sovereign over their clan. Of what are you sovereign? I don’t believe you’ve ever bothered to name your island or holdings on Providence. You have no crown and no court. You’ve named no peers. We don’t normally apply the term to a fleet commodore or a master of a ship even though he is an absolute ruler within his hull.”

  “I think you hit the nail on the head,” April said. “It’s a deficiency of language.”

  Lee got a horrid stricken look and heaved a big sigh.

  “What got to you?” April demanded.

  “Everything. I added it all up in my mind and have to agree I am sovereign. That isn’t anything to make me happy. I already feel responsible for so much. This just makes me even more responsible for what I decide to do. I can’t put it off on anybody else.”

  “Heather would agree and empathize,” Jeff assured her. “On the plus side, I think your team will have a superluminal drive tested and ready for you to use by the time you need to go to Providence. They seemed to understand how it would need to be configured for their active material. They immediately spoke of sending orders to rapid prototyping, so they should have something for you very soon.”

  “They messaged me they want to show me something,” Lee said. “That’s probably it.”

  * * *

  “Dakota, take a message and release it to the Earthie news services in my name with all the appropriate headers,” Heather said.

  “Due to the preemptive attacks on our allies from outside the Solar System, I have determined the Kingdom of Central is not safe as long as the United States of North America is a space power. Starting in twelve hours from this notice the ability of North America to build, launch, and receive space vessels, including from civilian ports, will be removed. If other countries have spacecraft or aircraft in transit to North American destinations you should utilize this time to get them to a safe alternative destination. If you have aircraft or space vessels on North American territory now is your window to recover them. Any location attempting an orbital launch from North America or its naval assets after the grace period will be destroyed. Attempts to repair destroyed facilities will be met with escalating bombardment regardless of collateral damage. North America is out of the space business permanently.”

  “Be sure to time stamp it prominently,” Heather said and turned to Johnson.

  “Do you need to have April recalled to conduct the campaign?” Heather asked. “I can probably get her here in twelve hours if I need to.”

  “No, ma’am. She laid out a clear plan of battle with priorities and explanations for every choice,” Johnson said. “We can implement it just fine. It all makes sense and I’d be hard put to justify any real changes.”

  “Do it,” Heather commanded. “I’m giving you all the codes for kinetic weapons and low yield devices. Since the revolution, once Jeff set up a contract to manufacture rods, he never withdrew the order and let it repeat. As lunar iron became available it got much cheaper to make them. Over the years, he accumulated a cloud of near ten thousand rods. Very few of them deteriorated or were removed by opposing powers. They are simple, robust, and given Jeff’s skills at booby-trapping, far too dangerous to remove. Besides those rods, the Home militia left behind a cloud of rods when they left the Solar System. Thanks to Jon we have the keys to those too. If you encounter extraordinary resistance, I’m prepared to release strategic weapons but I’ll want to discuss it with you.”

  “You want to hit them in exactly twelve hours?” Johnson asked.

  “Give them five minutes so they can’t say we jumped the gun,” Heather allowed.

  April’s plan that Johnson followed was to expend two-thirds of those rods to severely damage every major runway in the United States of North America above thirty degrees north and Florida. Texas and Mexico were excluded. Any facility that could handle a space plane or carrier launch vehicle was to be ruined. Vertical launch facilities got hit as well as supporting infrastructure.

  The shops and facilities to manufacture the specialized materials and sub-assemblies of space vehicles got the much more precise attention of the ships carrying the gravity lance. The effect of that weapon was too subtle to render entire runways unusable and the number of runways that had to be disabled was too great for the limited number of ships still in the Solar System carrying that weapon. Many of those industrial targets were sited in areas where dropping a rod on them would cause unreasonable collateral damage.

  Mexico was privately told several shops creating composite structures and space plane tires had to stop dealing with North America or they would be removed too. Heather worried that with their spymasters Chen and Jan both snatched away in the sudden removal of Home, she might have trouble knowing if the Mexicans honored the ban. She wondered if they could be persuaded to return to Central where their Earth network expertise would still serve Heather and her partners. That would go in her next message to Jeff and April at Derfhome.

  * * *

  “We’ll be landing in the city in a few minutes,” Lee called ahead and got Musical to the screen with Born hovering behind him. “Do you want to come by the hotel and make some sort of presentation?”

  “We have some hardware it would be awkward to transport. Could you possibly come to our lab to see it?” Musical asked. His muzzle got that tight dimpled look of anxiety.

  “Sure, I have no need to go home first. I’ll take a car from the port.

  Musical’s muzzle smoothed out and his whiskers relaxed.

  “I’ll see you in about an hour,” Lee promised.

  Lee called ahead for a car to be waiting for her to land and had the car stop and get her a couple of sandwiches on the way to pick her up. Her guys weren’t gene-modified. Nobody had that available for Derf or Badgers yet. They could go on and on and never take a break to eat just like unmodified H
umans.

  Musical was waiting at the curbside when the car stopped. Lee was torn between thinking that was thoughtful and worrying that he was becoming a borderline fanboy. At least she didn’t have to worry he had a crush on her, being a Badger.

  “OK let’s go see what you guys have cooked up,” she said. He gave a perfectly adopted Human nod of agreement and looked so serious she took his hand to walk in just like she would her friend Talker. That pleased him like it did most Badgers.

  Born was waiting inside and disconnected a vacuum pump from a machine on the floor when they entered.

  “This is the smaller transportable centrifuge we modified to continue testing the gravity collapsing beam where it would be safer,” Born explained patting it. “The information Jeff gave us interrupted our planned testing. We have a place to take it as far north as the roads go for harvesting timber. We even have an older truck purchased to take it back and forth. But there was an unusual event the last run we made with the big machine we wanted to explore with this smaller machine. The last run with the big machine didn’t produce a collapse line.”

  “The Central people call it a gravity lance,” Lee supplied.

  Born gave just as good a nod as Musical’s but didn’t let it interrupt him.

  “It slowed down unexpectedly, but it wasn’t losing vacuum. The lower bearing got hot too. The bearing has very limited thrust capacity since we didn’t anticipate any load on it in that direction beyond its weight. When we tore it down there was damage and we replaced both bearings in this smaller unit with ones that have much better thrust capacity.”

  “Does it thrust the same direction when you flip it over?” Lee asked.

  “You just take all the fun out of a big presentation. Did you know that?” Born asked.

  “OK, it isn’t tied to the local field. Sorry, I said anything, carry on,” Lee suggested.

  “Yes, yes it does. So, as you seem to anticipate, this smaller unit is flipped over now. The disk is subjected to an intense electric field instead of magnetism like the… lance. We improved the smaller unit to work at a bit higher voltage without arcing too. But let’s go right to showing you what it does. But I promised Musical I would let him talk too,” the big Derf said.

  “Thank you,” Musical said but didn’t let go of Lee’s hand. “That big plate on the floor with the diamond tread pattern is a freight scale. We had to wait two weeks to get it because a one-ton scale is a special-order item in the fab shops and the strain gauges under it are from Fargone. We didn’t want one made in-house from the university because we’re trying to be more security conscious. We’re not only keeping the orders for parts of the actual machine separated to different shops but the things we use to work on it too. It’s amazing what you can deduce of their work by knowing the tools and support equipment somebody is using.”

  “And most especially, we don’t trust Leonardo, the Head of the Engineering school as far as Musical could throw him,” Born said. “I’d be happier if he didn’t even know we exist.”

  Leonardo was another Derf who out-massed the little Badger eight or ten times. Musical wasn’t going to loft him short of building a catapult.

  “I’m glad you said it instead of me,” Musical said. “I’d hate for you to think I had anything against him for being a Derf. Now, we left the scale bare so you could see there isn’t any sort of connections to pass-through power. Would you like to step on it to see it works normally?”

  “Sure, good thing I’m not sensitive about my weight,” Lee said and stepped on the plate.

  “Fifty-seven point six kilograms,” Lee read off the display hung on the wall, “that’s about right. Step up here with me,” she invited Musical.

  The display went to a hundred and four point three two kilograms.

  “OK, I feel like the person from the audience asked on stage to examine the props for a magic show,” Lee said. “If you wanted to fool me you could probably do it. You could have built something under the scale to alter its operation or be sending a false feed to the read-out. The thing is, fooling me would have bad consequences in the future. Not all that far in the future either. I think you are both too smart to think that would be of any benefit. I know we are from very different cultures, but I’ve never had any doubt you both deal with me honestly. Let's just go forward with that assumption. You can save tearing things apart and demonstrating their honesty for others who have less reason to trust you.”

  “Thank you,” Musical said. “I’m not familiar with this magic show you mention, but fraud is not unknown among the Badgers, and the Bills practically consider it a sport. We expect intense examination when we show this machine to others.”

  “I’ll send you some video of a magic show. My cousin’s children on Earth just loved them. It is more sport or entertainment in the context of a show. There isn’t any fraud because they expect to be fooled and there is no loss from it happening.”

  “That will be enlightening I’m sure. Born is going to put the machine on the scale. Fortunately, since we have him, we didn’t have to install a crane,” Musical said.

  The somewhat pointy-ended egg shape in a frame was about the size of a fifty-liter beer keg. A quarter Derf keg that is. It was still heavy enough to make an adult Derf visibly strain to tilt it and walk it until one edge was over the scale. There wasn’t much empty space inside. Besides his middle arms gripping the frame rails, he used his true hands on the top to steady it. Born then braced his foot against the bottom and eased it down on the plate. That accomplished, it wasn’t too hard to tip it up level to the plate and slide it to the center of the scale. The readout informed them it was four hundred seventy-nine point six kilograms. A good part of that was frame since they’d used cheap steel angles. The last digit flipped back and forth between 5 and 6 randomly.

  “Notice, we don’t have any sort of cables or attachments that could pull on it either way.” Musical said. “That’s why Born pumped it down and removed that connection. We have two battery packs and power supplies. One to spin up the disk and a smaller one to generate the high voltage. He declined to try to lift it with the power supplies attached.”

  They watched while Born sat the charged batteries into frames on the centrifuge and plugged and locked the cables into receptacles on the egg. The scale now read five hundred thirty-two point zero three kilograms.

  “It only runs about ten minutes on the batteries, but it’s a demonstration of concept, not a finished product. We anticipate improvements. Power it up, Born,” Musical requested.

  Born pointed a remote at the machine and delicately depressed the power button with a single claw. Two green lights came on the power supplies, using the Human color scheme for power status. The machine was too well balanced to vibrate or make any noise Lee could hear. The only change was the scale readout slowly started changing then finished its fall in a rush as the internals spun up to full speed. The display flickered back and forth briefly and settled on four hundred twenty kilograms.

  “That’s some pretty good magic,” Lee allowed. “Do you think you can get one to lift itself against full Derf gravity?”

  “I can’t make any promises,” Musical said, “but there is a lot of room for improvement. This smaller machine spins slower than the big one and neither was constructed with low mass as a priority. It’s limited by what size disk we can install and the voltage we can put across it without any unwanted discharge. We haven’t mapped the changes with where we apply the field or investigated any insulating schemes either. I think it’s hugely useful at this output level as a space drive once you are in orbit or above.”

  “Yeah, I’d like to see some graphs. Thrust versus disk area and spin, field strength and orientation, and what happens if you flip the polarity of the field. Maybe spike electrodes compared to flat and what happens with stacked disks.”

  Musical and Born exchanged shocked looks at the mention of stacked disks.

  “That hadn’t occurred to us,” Born admitted.
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br />   “Does it still thrust down on the scale if you flip it over?” Lee asked.

  “Why wouldn’t it?” Musical asked. “That was what the bearing heating seemed to indicate was happening in the big machine.” The question seemed to bother him.

  “Do you understand why it thrusts like this?” Lee asked waving at it.

  The batteries were running down already and the scale readout creeping back up.

  “No, the physicists are going to have some work to explain it,” Born admitted.

  “Well then, besides the other measurements, I’d suggest that you charge your batteries up, flip it over, and see from an actual scale reading that it pushes down when you turn it on,” Lee suggested. “I’d much rather know that before I’m depending on it to work for some life-critical function. I understand every indication from before suggests it will. If it seems unnecessary to you, please humor me anyway.”

  “Certainly,” Born agreed.

  Lee would have rather he acknowledge the idea had merit, but she wasn’t going to browbeat him into it. It was enough that he do it. She’d hate to start phrasing things as orders. Even Gordon, commanding a ship, phrased his commands as polite requests.

  “Were we correct in showing this to you privately?” Musical asked. “We just weren’t sure if this falls under your agreements to share tech.”

  “That’s a really good question,” Lee admitted. “Did you do this experiment because of anything Jeff revealed about his drive?”

  “No, we did it because of what we saw the big machine doing before he ever spoke to us. We spoke of other things and never mentioned that event to him. I have no idea if a machine using his fluid would do the same. Since he spins it up in a conducting container, I’m not sure how you could build an equivalent device. Similarly, we’re still not a hundred percent sure yet we’ll be able to make an equivalent drive to his using our different materials.”

  “But you have some ideas about what to try, right?”

  “Enough ideas from our talks that we have components let to the fab shops,” Born said. “Even if they don’t work it isn’t a dead-end yet by any means.”