A Tower in Space-Time (The Stasis Stories #5)

by Laurence Dahners

  “We’ll be building housing and office buildings in the future. As long as we had to cast panels anyway, I wanted to try out some of my ideas on them. Version two is going to be a lot better.”

  A group of workers arrived then and she said, “Let’s start opening our molds.”

  Wilson would’ve preferred letting the grunts open all the boxes for him, but Lanis pitched in and started opening boxes herself, so he did too.

  Soon he and Lanis were assembling molds for gears, sprockets, bearings, and the various pieces of their magnetic couplers. He looked up, “I don’t see anything to make a chain with?”

  “Same chain we’ll be using for the launcher. They’ve already made huge piles of it so we’ll just borrow some.”

  Wilson opened his mouth to say that surely the launcher would use a heavier chain, but remembered at the last moment that Stade was thought to be infinitely strong, so even a fine necklace-sized chain made of Stade would be strong enough. In any case, the chain and gears they were using were going to turn the sprocket for the launcher, so they would have to withstand the same kind of loading as the launcher’s chain.

  Then came the moment he’d been waiting for. Lanis said, “Do you know how to use a stazer?” When he shook his head, she said, “You know your secret employee ID number?”

  “Uh-huh,” Wilson said, feeling fairly sure he remembered it. It was supposed to be like a password, but—on penalty of dismissal from the company—it had to be different from any of his other passwords. And long and complex.

  “Okay,” she said, “Let’s plug this thing up and do some stazing.”

  They plugged the stazer into power, a USB cable from it to its laptop, and a fiberoptic and electrical cable from the stazer to the mold for a sprocket. Next, he had to put in his long-ass password and let the laptop confirm his retinal pattern. That done, his phone chimed and told him it had a permit number for this particular job. He keyed in this—also long—number. Lanis explained procedures for what to do if he stazed something incorrectly. The procedures would let him destaze the failed Stade and would then issue him another stazing permit number. She said, “For God’s sake, don’t decide to just start making yourself Stade souvenirs or widgets. The company takes a very dim view of that. You can ask for permission to make a few things out of Stade for yourself and you’ll get a really cheap price on them, but they do not want you making a Stade gun on the sly. Building weapons is verboten.”

  “Of course,” Wilson said. He thought, What a pain in the ass!

  As the day went on, he stazed component after component for the system they hoped would power the launching chain.

  Meanwhile, Lanis spent much of her time up top, bossing the team that was building or “extruding” the self-building space tower. She’d taken over that project from Lee since she had a lot more experience with construction. Lee was using her aerospace degree to supervise the design of a suborbital spaceplane for Staze to use. Staze wasn’t allowed to launch orbital craft because of their non-compete agreement with Space-Gen and GLI. They called the craft Lee was designing “suborbital” so they could claim it wasn’t competing, but even Wilson could see that once the non-compete agreement expired, they’d be able to launch Lee’s craft into orbit.

  Lanis spent the rest of her time down where Wilson was working, directing that team in assembling the components as he and an assistant stazed them. Though one of her men did most of it, sometimes she used a small “welder” to weld small wires of Stade from one component to another and solidly lock them together. Because some of the components, and all of the welds, were only a millimeter in diameter the whole assembly looked terribly flimsy. But Wilson only had to bump into them—or think—to realize they were very, very solid.

  “Dez,” he asked, “why are you casting some of the components bigger than a millimeter in diameter? It seems like that millimeter’s plenty strong enough for everything.”

  Hands on her hips, she turned to look at what they’d assembled, “Anything I thought someone might fall against or run into is bigger. Didn’t want anyone getting hurt by landing on something that’d cut them.” She shrugged, “A one-millimeter wire isn’t exactly sharp, but you wouldn’t want to stumble hard against it. Besides, casting them bigger doesn’t cost more than casting them small. The small components are most useful when you need to be able to get in around them to work on parts of the structure. I hate engineers that don’t design for later repairs or modifications.”

  “Shouldn’t have to repair Stade devices, should you?”

  She laughed, “No, but there’s a high likelihood they’ll need to be modified to correct mistakes made by their dumb-ass designer.”

  At the end of the day, Wilson reflected that he had no idea how he was going to discover the secret of stazing. I’m gonna have to sneak back in here one night and take one apart, he thought.

  But he couldn’t think of a good excuse for being down there with a disassembled stazer should someone check on him.

  ***

  Bob Mills looked out over the small auditorium at Hunting Industries. It was mostly populated with naval officers involved in ship design and construction, though a few of his engineers were there.

  Mills had shown Seba’s presentation to his own engineers first. They’d initially been disbelieving. Then, after they’d been shown the samples Staze had sent, and learned that Hunting’s own testing lab had confirmed the numbers to the limits of their equipment, they’d practically wet their pants with excitement.

  When Mills first sent an invitation to Admiral Halser, commander of the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, that invitation had been met with the same disbelief. He’d then followed the same strategy, forwarding a link to Seba’s talk with a sample of Stade and Hunting’s test results.

  He’d checked with Halser right before this session and the admiral hadn’t had his officers watch Seba’s talk, so Mills started that presentation and handed out his two, slippery, air-density samples to be passed around.

  Despite the samples, when Seba’s talk concluded there was a lot of rumbling of disbelief.

  After about thirty seconds of that, Halser stood, called the room to attention, and told them to accept the numbers as valid. “We’re not here to debate the veracity of Seba’s talk,” Halser growled, “we’re here to decide what it means to naval shipbuilding.” He turned to Mills, “Bob, tell them what you told me.”

  Mills had always thought Halser was a hardass, but he hadn’t seen the man command a room like that before. He reminded himself that he wasn’t in Halser’s chain of command to decrease his own stress. But then further reminded himself that a big chunk of Hunting’s business depended on keeping Halser happy, so making himself worry again. Mills began by summarizing his thoughts about ships with hulls so strong they couldn’t be sunk. Ships with hulls that never needed to be painted. Hulls that didn’t foul in any fashion. That slid through the water so easily the fuel savings were significant. Ones whose nuclear reactors wouldn’t emit radiation. Where, assuming Turpin was correct, even if the reactor had a meltdown, nothing bad would happen other than loss of the reactor.

  And, of course, submarines that could descend to any depth.

  Ideas started breaking out all over.

  One of the officers pointed out that a large enough explosion, close to a Stade hulled ship, could displace the ship so violently that most of the crew would suffer injuries from being tossed around.

  Another scoffed, “That’d take a hell of a big explosion. And, I’d sure as hell rather that, than being on a ship that’s broken and sinking.”

  “Damn!” someone said. “A sub that can go so deep you can’t find it. And, even if you found it, you couldn’t hurt it!”

  “Can’t fire torpedoes at those depths,” another pointed out. “They’d be crushed when you flooded the tubes.”

  “Make ’em out of Stade,” the first officer said.

  “Do that and when you set off the explosive, nothing’ll happen! The walls
of the torpedo would contain the blast.”

  “Oh! Bomb squads need Stade cans they can put undetonated explosives in.”

  “You could design torpedoes covered with segmented Stade walls like the stones in Roman arches. External pressure couldn’t crush ’em, but the explosive could blow them outward where the segments would act like the broken walls of a fragmentation grenade.”

  “I’ll bet a Stade sub’s hull wouldn’t groan and pop with depth changes!”

  The suggestions went on and on, making Mills glad he was recording the session.

  When all was said and done, the admiral said he was going to have Staze send them some larger specimens to fire weapons at and hollow specimens they could submerge to great depths. Meanwhile, they’d put the samples Mills already had in the water and leave them there to be sure they didn’t foul.

  As everyone was getting up to leave the room, a captain approached and asked, “Mr. Mills, do we know for sure this company hasn’t sold their secrets to the Russians or Chinese?”

  As Mills shrugged and said, “No,” he couldn’t miss the admiral turning like a turret to listen to his response.

  Halser did not look happy with that answer.

  ***

  Admiral Halser’s aide said, “I have Mr. Prakant from Staze on the line, sir.”

  Halser connected in, “Hello, this is Admiral Halser, commander of the Norfolk Naval Shipyards.”

  There was a moment’s pause, then an amused sounding voice said, “This is Mahesh Prakant, CTO at Staze Incorporated… What can I do for you?”

  Irritated, Halser said, “We’ve just had a presentation on your new material, Stade. We’re interested in its potential uses in warships. We’ve got some of your little sample plates, but we’d like to do some testing on something of a size more relevant to the Navy.”

  “How big?”

  “Something similar in size to a ship or submarine.”

  “Hmm,” Prakant said thoughtfully, “we have a system for forming blimp shaped Stades in the range of ten meters diameter by a hundred meters long.”

  “That’d be great!” Halser said, pleased. “That’s quite close to the size of an attack submarine. When could you deliver one?”

  “A week or two after we receive payment.”

  Surprised, Halser said, “Um, normally industry provides testing specimens free-of-charge in hopes of future business.”

  “Yeah,” Prakant said drily. “I’m aware. However, we don’t need the business so we’re not going to do it. Especially because some cash flow issues mean that we need income and can’t take on projects that don’t pay for themselves. The best we could do is to cast you a blimp upon receipt of a fifty percent deposit, receiving the remainder on delivery there in Norfolk.” He hesitated a moment, then said, “We could probably give you free samples in a few years when our money issues are behind us and we don’t have so much on our plate, can it wait?”

  Irritated at this transparent attempt to jack up their price, Halser tried to sound calm as he said, “How much would one cost?”

  “A million dollars.”

  “A million dollars?!” Halser exclaimed, trying not to shout.

  “If you wanted one made of steel it’d cost about that much.”

  “You want to charge a million for an empty shell we’re just going to blow up?!” Halser asked angrily.

  “You want us to give you a million-dollar blimp, just so you can shoot torpedoes at it? It’s obvious from the material data they won’t hurt it.”

  “If you don’t think we can hurt it, why do you care?”

  “You can’t hurt it, but we don’t have any use for that undamaged blimp after you’re done shooting at it.”

  “Use it as a blimp!”

  “We don’t need a blimp,” Prakant said, sounding exasperated. “Let me ask you this. How much does the torpedo you’re going to shoot at it cost?”

  Halser didn’t want to answer, but Prakant could easily look it up. “Four and a half million.”

  “So, you’re going to spend over four million to shoot a blimp that you want us to give you for free?”

  “This could lead to a deal that makes you billions!”

  “And in a few years, we might want that business,” Prakant said. “For now, we’re not going out of our way to seek new business.”

  “Have you ever heard of patriotism?”

  “Is our country under an imminent threat or perhaps engaging in a war that I’m unaware of?”

  In a fury, Halser abruptly disconnected the call. He thought, The country can’t let this technology get out to other nations. At least not until our military has thoroughly evaluated the risks and at the very least built a commanding lead in weapons based on it.

  He turned to his aide, “Find out what patents Staze has applied for on this tech. Then get the legal folks to work on restricting the technology under the Invention Secrecy Act.”

  With satisfaction, he thought, They won’t let us play with their ball, huh? Pretty soon they’re gonna find they don’t have a ball to play with. That’ll teach the smarmy bastards to try to cut Uncle Sam out of the loop.

  Chapter Five

  Kaem arrived early at Molly’s restaurant so he saw Ronnie come in the door. She was more… dressed-up than he was used to when he went out to dinner with a woman. She looked great and he worried he shouldn’t have worn jeans.

  Kaem said hello to her, then told the hostess they were ready to be seated. While they waited, they chatted briefly about what they’d done for Spring Break, Kaem telling her about his first airplane flight and how his family’d gone to Tuscany. He mentioned meeting his mother’s family whom he’d never seen before and told her how much he’d liked seeing some of the art, especially the sculptures by Michelangelo. He said nothing about soccer.

  “Wow! I wish I could’ve done that,” Ronnie said

  “Yeah, it was pretty expensive, but it was a big occasion for my family,” Kaem responded.

  “It’s not so much the money,” Ronnie said. “I spent spring break hitting the books since the medical college admission tests are coming up in June and I’ll have to study for finals in May.”

  “Ah,” Kaem said, thinking that if the money didn’t worry her, she might come from a wealthy family. Which isn’t a crime, he reminded himself. It’s just not where I come from.

  The hostess came to lead them to their table. As they entered the dining area, he flinched.

  Arya was sitting there with her parents. She saw him almost immediately. Her eyes narrowed and flicked back and forth from Kaem to Ronnie several times as they passed.

  He gave her a weak little wave as he walked by. I’m not doing anything wrong! he told himself.

  Then why,” he wondered as they seated themselves, “do I feel so damned guilty?

  Ronnie’s back was to Arya, but once they were in their seats, she turned to look at Arya’s back. “Old girlfriend?” she asked Kaem.

  “What? Why would you think that?”

  Ronnie gave a cute little snort, “First of all, she was giving you the stink-eye as soon as we entered the room. Second, she was checking me out like I was some kind of threat. Third, as soon as we sat down and I got a look at you, I find you looking like you’ve seen a ghost. And, with your eyes on her, not me.”

  “Um…” Kaem said. “We work together.”

  Ronnie rolled her eyes. “If that was all there was to it, you and she would’ve spoken to one another. And, you would’ve introduced me to her… though, I suppose that might simply have been poor manners on your part.”

  Kaem gave her a wide-eyed look. “Do you dissect everyone like this?”

  “Yup,” Ronnie said, grinning. “Especially when they’re all fidgety the way you are. You look like you just got caught stealing someone’s panties.”

  Kaem couldn’t help glancing over at Arya’s table.

  Arya’s back might’ve been to him, but her parents were facing him and their eyes were on him. Her mother look
ed disappointed and he thought she was asking Arya questions.

  Kaem looked away, feeling terrible.

  And guilty, though he couldn’t understand why. The fact Arya and I aren’t together certainly isn’t my fault! he thought.

  He looked back at Ronnie. She was grinning at him as if amused—which embarrassed him. He also felt guilty for looking over at Arya’s table.

  Ronnie said, “You’ve got it bad for her, don’t you?”

  Kaem blinked. That certainly wasn’t what he’d expected to hear from her. Besides, he wondered, how does she even know this stuff? “Are you planning to go into psychiatry or something?”

  “No!” she said, as if put off by the idea. “Why would you think that?”

  “The way you’re trying to pry me open and examine my soul!”

  She laughed, “I don’t have to look very deep for that. It’s right on the surface.” She turned and looked over at Arya’s table.

  When she did, Kaem looked as well. Arya was facing stiffly ahead toward her parents but their eyes were still on him when he first looked.

  They looked away as soon as he looked at them.

  When he looked back at Ronnie, she was looking at him again. “You should go talk to them as soon as we’ve ordered.”

  “What?!”

  She shrugged, “It’s the polite thing to do. Her parents like you, so if you go say hello it’ll make a lot of points with them. It can’t hurt to have them on your side. Besides, she still loves you, so it’ll go a long way toward smoothing over whatever you did to screw things up between the two you of you.”

  “This is ridiculous! You don’t know whether they like me, or even if she ever cared about me.”

  Ronnie waved a dismissive hand, “It’s all over your faces.” She turned to look up at their waiter who’d just arrived. “I’d like the dinner salad with the crusty salmon, please.”