Storiesonline.net ------- Geeks In Space by Sea-Life Copyright© 2007 by Sea-Life ------- Description: Rob Young joins Andy and Cor McKesson and the Gravy Geeks from MIT on a trip to Mars and beyond Codes: ScFi ------- ------- Chapter 1: The Reality Show Starts Now Rob Young was surprised by the question at first, more so than he had been during the bulk of his thesis defense, but he smiled as he considered it. He liked questions that made him think. "No sir, if you look at the data on field retention and feedback effects, the results show clearly that the tuned fields are sympathetically reinforcing. The math supports it here and here." Rob used his 'pointer' to interface with the holo-projector image, splitting the display to show several pages of equations from his work. "In addition, proper tuning will cause a dynamic increase in field stability that makes the increases sustainable across all the field parameters with almost no additional power required." "What are the practical limitations you expect, aside from the theoretical ones you mention?" Came another voice in the darkened room. "Well, the quantum tunneling gets us around the light speed problems, but adds its own problems with the refractive index issues causing some measurable differences between real-time and RGL sensor output. Also an increase in interference from quantum hashing begins to override the signal output as the distance increases. This is a common problem all researchers in this field are having to endure. We all agree that the math doesn't support the concept of distance being a problem, and yet it exists. My best guess without having had the chance to build and test it yet is... a light minute, more or less?" The room was silent for a moment before the last voice came again. "Thank you Mr. Young, we will have a determination for you by this time tomorrow." The lights came back up and Rob pulled the datapak out of the media console interface and reattached it to the lanyard that hung around his neck. It was only a copy, but he still felt protective of it. It represented two years of his life, after all. As he was escorted back to the elevators by the aide who had brought him to the interview room, Rob couldn't resist asking. "How do you think I did?" "You lost me almost immediately. Pretty much the last thing that you said that I understood was 'Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen'. Based on what I know of the reviewers though, I'd say they liked what you had to say, but thats a very subjective impression." "I'll settle for the subjective if its all I can get, thanks." Rob said as the elevator doors closed between them. There was no one in the villa when Rob got there. He was sharing it with two other IME candidates, none in his field, but all just as scientifically bent as he was. No matter. This was Hawaii and the beach was calling. The dreaded suit was off, the board shorts were on. A pair of sunglasses, a tube of sunscreen and his wallet in a waterproof pouch finished the switch from candidate to tourist and Rob was off. ------- Ike Dunham left his interview feeling bruised. Not only had the questions made him think, but some of them actually required him to rethink several of his conclusions. He'd changed one of them on the fly but adamantly stuck to his guns on the second one. The very same nano-crystalline composites that were being used as ultra-fast computer memory could be modified and used in constructing the processors and other components of the nanoscale computers he proposed and he was confident that his conclusions and his math were accurate. One of the reviewers had attacked the math, saying it wasn't his own work and that his proposal was derivative. "Well yes the math is derivative!" Had been his answer. "I'm not a mathematician, I'm an engineer and computer scientist. "The nano-crystallization and circuitry formation processes are all derivative too." He had continued. "That's exactly the point I made to defend my doctoral dissertation. This is not new math or science, it is new engineering." "Thank you Mr. Dunham." Had come the voice finally. The young man who walked him to the elevator just smiled and shook his hand when they got there, calling out a "Good Luck!" as the doors closed. 'A warm beach and a cold beer were definitely next on the agenda.' Ike thought to himself. ------- Wendy Fellowes steamed and stewed silently as she floated in the pool. Her interviewers had refused to take her at her word, insisting she step them through the proofs. Demanding she go into details involving the metallurgy and the simulations that showed the bonding site specifications and the resulting field integrity test results. "Of course this is all simulator work!" She had fumed back at one of the questioners. "Nobody else on the planet but the IME and Obsidian Research is willing to even talk about building this stuff, so all I can do is run simulations." In the end it had been all about the projected conversion efficiency ratios and the reduced waste heat outputs and the simplified manufacturing process. "You have been asking for a Universal Power Convertor and here it is." She had said at the end. "Is it perfect? Hardly, but it is as good as we'll get until we start building them and have something real to continue our research on." "Thank you Miss Fellowes." Was all she got from the darkened room. That and a smile and wink from the cute guy who had escorted her in and out of the meeting. ------- "Eight out of Twenty four." Arne said. "That's better than I had expected." "What surprised me was just how much original work was being brought to the table." Dave McKesson added. "We've got at least three or four workable ideas here that will bump Earth's technology right up to the Taluatan levels as soon as they can be produced." "What I find intriguing, is the unspoken communications potential that some aspects of that RGL sensor technology could provide." Chester Magill said. "If we can get improvements in the quantum hashing and the refractive index issues, enough improvement to get up to 4 or five light minutes, we've got near instantaneous communications within the inner solar system. Improve that out to light hours instead of light minutes and we've got system-wide interplanetary communications with no more delay problems than we currently have with the global cellular network." "Lets allow ourselves to be happy little techno-geeks another time." Dave McKesson said. "We've got our eight candidates, lets get them in the fold, let them enjoy the weekend at the resort and then put them to work, shall we?" When Rob's cell phone rang he was on a bar stool in the Hang Ten Bar and Grill sipping on a cold beer. It was a message asking him to please return to the Ali'i Suite. Two stools down from him, he saw another cell phone flip shut. He sized the guy up and decided to gamble. "Rob Young." Rob said holding out his hand. "Ali'i Suite?" He asked. "Ike Dunham." Came the reply as the two men s hook hands. "Guess the sword is falling quickly." "Apparently so." Rob answered. "Shall we?" Ike said, waving his arm towards the path leading back to the hotel. "Lead on Damocles!" The two rode up in the elevator together and found five others already in the reception foyer waiting. They sat down and got busy waiting for something to happen. They hadn't been waiting long, only about five minutes, when the elevator door opened again and a young woman in a bikini and a beach towel came rushing out. "Umm. Hi. I guess I'm not late?" She asked. Nice voice Rob thought, kinda smooth and smoky at the same time. A part of Rob that hadn't had much chance to express itself began blipping a signal on his consciousness. No not that! Well, not just that. 'She has a great ass', Rob thought. That part of him did threaten to respond. They got the whole story later of course, that laying in the pool sipping on a piña colada, she had not heard her cell phone, and rushed straight to the meeting on the assumption she was late once she had checked her messages. The group was shown into the conference room again. The numbers were reversed this time. There were eight of them, five men and three women, and only one interviewer, the aide who had escorted them to and from the elevator. "Welcome back." He said to us all once we were seated. "My name is Trevor Parkin. I am acting liason to the IME from Obsidian Research. I will be working with all of you to some degree or another over the next eighteen months. Welcome to the IME." The room immediately burst into what Rob's dad used to call 'Glorious Noise'. He looked around the room and there were seven beaming faces that he assumed were mirrors of his own happy expression. "Congratulations Ike!" Rob said, shaking the hand of the only person there he knew by name. "You too Bikini Woman." "Wendy." She said with a blush. That led to a round of introductions. Trevor resumed control of things once they were out of the way. "Ladies and Gentlemen, it is now 4:30 on a fine Friday afternoon. In an hour and a half, there will be a dinner held in a private dining room where you will all get to meet and mingle with your department heads. After that dinner, you have the rest of the weekend here at the resort as guests of Obsidian. Monday morning we will all be packing up and heading to the Shipyard on Nauru." More Glorious Noise! Once again Trevor got their attention when things quieted down. "With the other sixteen candidates going home today we will be doing some re-arranging of the accomodations. We can keep two of the ocean villas we are currently using if we can collapse ourselves down into them. Who here was in the three bedroom villa?" Rob raised his hand, and was the only one who did. "We'd like to move the three ladies into your villa Rob, if you don't mind, and we'll put four men in the four bedroom villa. Who here doesn't mind being moved into a room in the hotel?" Rob raised his hand again. Other hands followed. "Rob, looks like you beat the others." Trevor said. "Thank you all for generously offering to give up your villa room. I don't guess you need me to find the elevator anymore, do you? I'll see you all at dinner. Rob, if you'll stay a moment I'll get you squared away with your new room." "See you at dinner." Ike and Wendy said almost simultaneously as they all disappeared out the door. "Rob, I'll do the old routine here. I have good news and I have bad news. Which do you want first?" 'Oh great!' Rob thought. "You might as well get the bad news out of the way first." He said with a sigh. "Okay. You will not be meeting your department head at dinner tonight. You ARE the department head. We will be asking you to head the team designing and building the sensor array for the Pai Lung. We want you to base the entire array on your new system and augment that with whatever else you feel will be needed." 'Good-God-Freaking-Damn! What were these people thinking!' Rob thought. "ah - okay, if you all feel I'm the man for the job, I'll give it my best. The good news better be pretty good though, after this!" That got him a laugh from Trevor at least. "Relax, we have a lot of confidence in you, and you will have a lot of support! The good news is that the room in the hotel you're moving into is this one." "I'm moving into the Presidential Suite?" "You are, and for the next two days we expect you to share your good fortune with your team mates." He said, handing Rob the key card. "The other department heads and the rest of the support staff will be heading off to Nauru tonight after dinner. From then until Monday morning the eight of you will be on your own. Don't worry about your bags by the way. They'll be packed and brought up for you." That was said as he walked out the door. What a parting shot! ------- "What do you think?" Dave asked. "He's as close to awakened as anyone I've ever seen who hasn't been exposed to the Light." Jeni said. "He'll be fine, but we're going to want to give him lots of reassurance as he goes." Grace said. "He's going to need a father figure or confessor type that he can go to when he has doubts." "Do we push him over the threshold, or wait for him to fall through on his own?" Ginny asked. "Let him fall. We should let him have time to form a normal bond with the rest of the crew as one of them before things get complicated." Ian said. Kieran was the one who finally said it out loud. "The trick will be in keeping things sane when someone finally notices that his work can be used to communicate over distances at faster than light speeds." ------- The colors of the IME were officially red, black and blue, representing Mars, space and Earth. Rob decided if he was going to dinner tonight as a department head he'd better not show up in his cheap-ass college interview suit. He called his concierge, Drew. Yes, the Ali'i Suite had its own concierge. "Yes Mr. Young?" Drew said when he answered the line, before Rob even heard it ring on his end. "I have an important dinner in less than an hour and a half. I'm hoping you can help me find something stylish but not too extreme to wear, and I thought a hair cut would probably be a good idea as well." "Of course sir. Your barber will be there shortly and I will have your valet bring by a selection of outfits to try, if you'll trust me to make the selection?" "Of course." Rob answered. "Very well sir. Will there be anything else?" "I was thinking of inviting everyone back here after dinner for a champagne toast and then perhaps hitting the Hang Ten for drinks and dancing. Do you see any problems with those ideas?" "None sir." Drew said with a sniff, as if the idea that I might have a wish that he could not fulfill was an insult. "I shall arrange everything. Would you like me to select the champagne for you?" "Please! I will confess to being an unsophisticated rube if you promise not to laugh to much. Your assistance is a life saver!" "You do yourself an injustice sir. You at least had the good sense to consult me immediately." There was a buzz at the door. They ended their conversation and Rob went to open the door, finding a large Hawaiian man in a traditional barber's outfit. Two women were with him, both wearing the hotel's staff uniforms. Rob received a luxurious and decadent shampoo and cut as well as a shave and pedicure. Halfway through this process a distinguished looking older man came in with two bellboys in tow and it was quickly decided that Rob would be wearing a black silk shirt and white linen slacks with a black leather belt and a fancy dress wristwatch with a watchband that matched the belt. He was given black socks and a pair of black Italian leather shoes to finish things off. More wait staff arrived as Rob was leaving, carrying a couple cases of champagne. They were led by Drew himself, who gave Rob an intentionally dramatic once over. "You dress up pretty well for an unsophisticated rube!" "The generosity of the Obsidian people aside Drew, I cannot say how much this means to me. Thank you." "Thank you sir. Enjoy your evening." Drew answered with a smile. At dinner Rob was seated next to a man in his mid-thirties who introduced himself as Doctor Constantine Fylakas. In addition to the seven people He'd met earlier at the suite there were twelve others. They were all enjoying a captain's platter of seafood appetizers and margaritas when Trevor Parkin got their attention. "Folks, I want to introduce the department and group heads and get them seated with the people they'll be working with. I'd like to start with the man who'll be leading the Hull build out, Doctor Alexei Baranov." There was a nice bit of applause as a man who hardly seemed older than the rest of them stood up. "I'd like to ask Pradnesh Ravandur, Brian Conroy and Oscar Menendez to join me please." Alexei called. Next Trevor called up a woman named Natalie Simmons. "Good evening everyone. I am actually a stand in for the person who will be the head of the Fusion power team, Doctor Chen Hsu. He has obligations as head of the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing that prevented him from being here this weekend. On his behalf I would like to call up Wendy Fellowes, Peter London and David Trainor." Next up was Yuri Stepanovich, head of the Gravity Drive team. "Welcome everyone. If the following people would join me? Saalih Jaffre, Michael Westbrook and Coretta Ramirez." "Next we will have the head of the Electronics, Communications and Data systems department, and a founding member of Obsidian Research, Doctor Constanine Fylakas. Con?" The man Rob had been sitting next to smiled and stood up. "Thank you Trevor. Everyone please call me Con. My position as head of this department is something of an honorary thing. We will have no trouble filling in the ranks of people capable of building these systems. Still, we will push the envelope in a few places and it promises to be an exciting time. I will announce those joining my department, but if you will merely stand for the moment, rather than joining me here? Ike Dunham, Nicole Short and Mickey Brooks" Ike stood with a big grin as did the other two. "Thank you." Con said. "My next duty is introduce you to the head of the Sensor Array team. I will be working with this team also in an advisory capacity, as well as liaison to the electronics team. Ladies and Gentlemen, Doctor Robert Young. 'That definitely generated some Glorious Noise!' Rob thought as he stood next to Dr. Fylakas, who handed him a slip of paper. There were three names on the list. He looked up and saw that everyone was waiting for him to speak. "Thank you Doctor Fylakas. As you can all imagine, I am still adjusting to the idea that I am being expected to head a department, when as all of you were, I was merely hoping to win a place on the team." There was another brief bout of cheering at that before Rob spoke again. "This slip of paper lists the names of the three of you who will be joining me on my team. Alexandra Nascimento, Frederick Wassermann, and Tyrese Glover." In the end, they were divided into 5 development groups with a total of eight departments. Power and Propulsion were a group of two, Hull and Ship Systems were also a group of two, Sensor Arrays and Electronics were a group of two, Shielding was a group of one and Health and Safety was a group of one, even if it sounded like it was two. Dinner seem divided into two groups as well, those willing to try sushi and those who were not. Rob was definitely in the 'not' camp, figuring he was going to wind up there, but not tonight. Not with champagne and the possibility of dancing later. He had a delicious piece of fresh grilled Hawaiian Snapper with a green salad and fresh pineapple and ice cream for dessert. As dinner wound down and he saw more and more people scraping the bottoms of their dessert plates and bowls, he stood and did the traditional spoon on water glass attention-getter. "Folks, I know the Department heads, myself excluded, will be headed out tonight, but I'd like to invite everyone back to my room for a champagne toast. We are also expected at the Hang Ten later for drinks and dancing." Rob found dancing with Alexandra Nascimento exhausting and exhilarating, and watching her dance was almost pornographic. He don't know if it was a Brazilian thing or an Alexandra thing, but she was not self conscious in the least about her body, and she really seemed to consider body contact and sexual stimulation as a natural part of dancing. Dancing with Wendy Fellowes and Jocelin Walsh was exactly the opposite and yet even more stimulating somehow. Perhaps it was because it seemed to be one of those two who found him every time the music slowed down. ------- The first step in building the Pai Lung was was to build her keels. Although this ship, Earth's first true ship of space, did not need a keel in the same sense that a sea-going vessel did, there were several reasons for these. A cross-section of each keel was going to resemble a slice of Okra. She would have a central access chamber. Surrounding the access chamber there would be five smaller chambers, two for data, two for power and one for the environmental control conduit, piping in clean air and piping out carbon dioxide and other waste gases and unwanted airborne contaminants. Symmetrical construction outward from the keels would make the artificial gravity more stable and less subject to variations and 'seams' in the field overlaps. Any seams would be found where the fields for the two keels overlapped, which was actually outside the hull itself. It would also allow for increased efficiencies in the modular methods planned for the laying in of the individual sections, making it possible to build the individual sections separately and just 'lock them in' when the time came. The hull was going to come out looking something like an elongated clamshell, and each half of the clam was going to have its own keel. Picture the Atlantic Jack Knife Clam, or Razor Clam as it is sometimes called. Ensis Directus, not the one from the Pacific. It looks like a folded straight razor, and that is more or less what the Pai Lung was going to look like as well. Without the slight curve though, she would be straight. The shipyard proper was ringed by classrooms, labs and shops. For a lot of them, they were prototyping as they went. Rob spent the first two weeks in a classroom with his crew and the three Electronics guys, Ike, Nicole and Mickey. Nicole and 'Alex' as Alexandra insisted she be called seemed to just rub each other the wrong way, so they had to do things with a little more structure than Rob might have normally used. He was beginning to believe that Alexandra simply saw every other woman as a competitor and couldn't or wouldn't put that perception aside. The biggest problem Rob had was getting everyone in the room to the point where they could wrap their heads around the quantum physics the RGL required. The R in RGL stood for remote, and it was the key piece of the puzzle as far as making his gravitic lens idea work as a sensor system. He rolled out the basic explanation in their first session together. "The gravity lens is a simple concept, in and of itself. A lens in its simplest and most basic form is an object with two curved surfaces through which light passes. The curvature of the surfaces either causes the light that passes through it to converge or diverge. In our case, we are not building our lenses out of glass or plastic like you would a pair of glasses or a telescope or microscope. We are building our lenses out of tunable gravity fields." Rob got plenty of nods from everyone at that point. Optics was a long established science, and extending those well understood mechanisms to the new work being done with gravity fields made sense as well. Now to introduce the tricky part. "What makes our lenses into a sensor system then. What are we going to do differently?" He got blank stares from everyone then. "Since we are not dealing with solid objects as we do when building lenses for grandpa's reading glasses, our two curved surfaces, or series of lenses need no longer be tied to each other physically. If we want to look at a spot on the dark side of the moon, we build one face of our lens there and the other face of our lens here, and we let the light travel between the two faces using quantum tunneling." With the skeleton of the idea out in the open, the room burst into excited chatter as ideas and questions flew. Doubt and enthusiasm battled with each other, sometimes from the same person. Rob laid out some of the problems he had already encountered as well as those he thought they might see down the road, warning as well that there were always unanticipated obstacles in every project. We talked about quantum hashing, quantum level focal vagueness, lens aberrations and aperture diffractions. Some problems were borrowed from the world of optics and some were new. This generated more chatter. Rob flicked the holo display to the final image, the blueprint for his first RGL sensor. "I have built this in the Carnegie Mellon simulator. The simulated results are promising. Lets build one for real and see what we get!" ------- The main Fusion Reactor, which the lab rats were already referring to as 'The Core', was being build with the future in mind. It was the only piece of the ship which attached directly to a keel that had its own airlock. The Core powered everything except the Gravity drive and the shields. The drive had its own pair of reactors and so did the shields. The third pair of reactors were the true spares, they fed extra power to whatever system had a temporary demand for more than its usual capacity, but most of the time they simply idled along, waiting for any disaster or emergency. These six 'Secondaries' were collectively capable of providing 150% of the power of the Main. The dual nature of all the secondaries allowed each half of the clamshell design to have their own set. In theory, the ship was capable of being cut in half along its longitudinal axis and each half could still get all the survivors in it home safely. The day after they got to Nauru, Wendy and her fellow power team members found themselves in a high speed suborbital air car headed for the main construction yard for Guardian Gravitics. All four reactors and the gravity drive itself were being built there. For the first time Wendy got to see and touch a real version of the power couplers she had designed. It was used to couple a load generator to a 'bench' reactor and tested. They went back to Nauru with a couple suitcases worth of printouts and a couple dozen of the couplers. ------- Ike cleared the lower bank of displays and threw up the next series. Dr. Fylakas asked for the the mineralogical and electrical property specs for the substrate material. They were now displayed just below the specs for the circuitry material. The fact that the substrate and circuit materials were essentially identical except for an electronically induced phase state change, meant that an entire computer could be built from a solid block of the material. The same material that was already used as the Obsidian Fuel Cell medium. The trick was in the fine print of the molecular bonding, and that was the part that the lab was finally going to get a chance to bench test outside of the simulators. Six weeks into construction, Rob Young found a message waiting for him when he got up. There was a breakfast meeting in the third level cafeteria. This wasn't where he usually ate breakfast, but it was no big deal to make the switch. He spotted Wendy, Ike, Jocelyn and most of the folks from their Hawaiian weekend and joined them. He grabbed a pile of link sausage, scrambled eggs and hash browns and found a seat. Once again Wendy and Jocelin seemed to be sharing a Rob Young conspiracy, as they had saved him a seat between them. "Good morning ladies. You're both looking lovely this morning." he said as he sat down. They all began speculating, between mouthfuls, over the possible topic of today's meeting. Ike was sitting across from the three of us with DeeDee Ponders. DeeDee was in the systems group, and now that the actual hull build out had started, she found herself spending a lot of time with the other groups, as they integrated their individual projects into working ship systems. Ike's induced phase state circuitry idea was being used on a larger scale to provide wiring paths and control interfaces throughout the ship. "In theory, we could upgrade the ship's entire control system by simply plugging in an override module and 'rewiring' the entire thing with the flip of a switch!" DeeDee gushed. DeeDee was still gushing when we all heard a 'ding ding' tone come from the back of the room. We turned to look behind us. "Good morning everyone. Thanks for joining me for breakfast this morning. My name is Andy McKesson. You all have probably heard that I have been finagled into leading the expedition when it finally comes time to lift off and head for Mars." There was a nice amount of applause after this. They had all been waiting to see him become involved with the project, though they had been told it would be only occasional until closer to the launch date. "Most of you have already met Commodore Brenneman, who will be the Pai Lung's Captain for the journey. Ladies and gentlemen, we're here to announce that each of you in this room have been selected as crew. Unless you seek a deferment, you will be going to Mars with us. Welcome aboard!" This kind of Glorious Noise did not just die down after a while. It continued to echo through the facility for days. There were close to fifty of the lab rats that were going to make up the majority of the technical component of the crew. They learned that Victor Emanoff, the former Russian submarine commander who was head of the systems group was also in the command crew as first officer. The crew was divided into three sections, command, tech and service, and most folks wore two hats. When the initial bout of Glorious Noise had died down at the breakfast announcement, they were also introduced to Corycia Caldwell. She was responsible for inventing the new grav field space suits. As crew, the lab rats were going to have to get involved in the refinement and training procedure for the new suits! As things began to settle down in the labs and while they watched first the keels and then the hull begin to grow, they all soon were taking shifts off from the labs to participate in testing out the new Caldwell Suits. It took a large mental shift to finally place your trust in something that seemed so unsubstantial. The psychological factor was eventually minimized by simply darkening the nanofluidic substrates, making them less transparent. Once you could get past the mental hurdles, the suits were a revelation. No more clunky, slow motion movements. Wrapped in the milky translucence of a suit, everyone kind of looked like the robots in that Wil Smith movie 'I Robot'. A little clunkier, since the crew had real human waistlines to deal with, but there was that same frosted-glass kind of translucence, which everyone decided looked good. The two fuel cells that powered the gravity field generators were good for 30 days, but they were modular and hot swappable, and if needed, could be swapped while the field was under normal load, one at a time. After the suits passed the basic testing, the crew, including the lab rats, began training in zero G and vacuum conditions. A 'Space Harness' was added after the third week. It gave them maneuvering thrusters and some flight control software to manipulate them with. There was talk of a 'Mars harness' as well. Six weeks after that they took a couple cases full of them to Antarctica and donated them to the staff at the McMurdo Station and New Zealand's Scott Base. It didn't take very long for the people there to share the crew's enthusiasm for the suits. Rob had been there for six months when Doctor Fylakas asked him to meet with him. As the head of the Sensor and Electronics group, he was Rob's boss, but he had been pretty hands off as a boss so far. "Rob, you and Ike Dunham have become friends, haven't you?" Was the first thing he said. "Yeah." Rob said. "I'm as close to Ike as I am anyone here, though Wendy Fellowes and Jocelin Walsh would be pretty close." "Would you have problems supervising Ike's work, or worry that he might resent your supervising him?" "No, I don't think so, but I couldn't see how you would want to move Ike into my group. His ideas are the heart of his groups operations." Rob was obviously worried now. This sounded like some sort of serious shake up. "What about the others in the Electronics team. Would you have any problems working with them?" "If I can handle working with Alexandra, I can work with anyone." He answered, half jokingly. "Doc, just what the heck is going on?" "Rob, I was always supposed to be just a temporary fill-in on this project, and its time for me to get back to the lab at Obsidian Research in California. you are going to spend the next month working part time with me and the electronics team. I want you up to speed on the projects and responsibilities of everyone in the entire group." "Why? What's up?" "I intend to name you as my replacement as head of the Sensor and Electronics group when I go." 'Oh Crap.' Rob thought. ------- The initial flight of the Pai Lung was done quietly and with a skeleton crew on board. If you can use skeleton to describe a group which included the designers, the construction supervisor and the department heads. Quietly meant that the McKesson Group PR hounds that had been assigned to work for the IME leaked the news to several sources, who then went overboard covering her maiden orbital flight. The flight lasted a mere two hours and was used to do a basic structural integrity test as well as tests on all the control, flight and environmental systems. Everyone wore one of the new Caldwell space suits. They at least had already been thoroughly tested. The two hour flight officially generated one hundred and sixty one alarms, warnings and failure notifications. Most of these were from self-diagnosing indicators and gages reporting a component or wiring failure. Self-correcting features caused almost half of these to fix themselves before the first hour was up. When she finally rested back in her cradle at the shipyard, hands on comparisons to the data sent back eliminated a further seventeen alarms as actual failures of the telemetry equipment rather than the devices or circuits they monitored. The remaining seventy three alarms were investigated, analyzed and generally poked and prodded repetitively. Another thirty four were found to be poorly set or unset alarm parameters, and they were adjusted to the correct specs. The remaining thirty nine were deemed to be true failures and the equipment components were repaired or replaced. Now it was the installers, the inspectors and the manufacturers turn to get the intense poking and prodding. Some problems proved to be true unexplainable glitches, the kind of errors that didn't repeat in the lab and that no explanation could make account for. Some were install failures, mis-wirings, even simple things like using the wrong size LED in the indicator panel in one instance. They had one case of poor quality control at the site of manufacture and another, truly egregious case of a supplier substituting older, second hand components 'off-the-shelf', rather than the specially manufactured ones that had been ordered. One set of problems was eventually determined to be sabotage at the lab where the components were mounted to their sockets, a new semi-universal connector that was one of the many innovations that came along with so much of the newness associated with this project. It took several months for them to uncover the saboteur. In a fair universe, it shouldn't have been Rob's place to worry about that, but with his promotion to head of the sensor and electronics group, he was told it was one of his obligations to sit in on all the strategy and planning sessions. The unofficial 'builder's committee' was Arne Walker and Yuri Stepanovich the designers, Alexei Baranov the yard chief and Chen Hsu, who was nominal leader of the Power team, but also one of the Joint Study Group movers and shakers and the head of the Chinese delegation. They expected everyone who sat in on these sessions to contribute. "If you're not answering questions, you should be asking them." Alexei said very early on. The first thing they did was give everyone a datapak with all the specs, schematics, engineering plans, - everything related to the design and construction of the ship and all its systems. Two months in, they had almost universally adopted the use of what they called a Q-tap. Ike's amorphous material was ideal for quantum computer applications and he had quickly began churning them out for everyone in the sensor and electronics group. His initial units had been woven into a flexible material with velcro-like properties that could be worn almost anywhere. Howard Dexter and Tony Gaines chipped in and helped Ike with all the code conversion to the new system, and developed a side-by-side emulator for the old system while writing a completely new one from scratch that took advantage of the quantum environment. It didn't take Rob long to adapt the remote quantum coupling system the sensor arrays used to provide remote holo output, using a set of special glasses at first. Mickey Brooks came up with a keying system that allowed each unit to assign itself a unique id. This allowed the units to pass data back and forth at what they called FHS — Fantastically High Speed. Since the units could now identify other units as well as itself across the 'Q-Net' as they called it, short for Quantum Network, just like that they had a hands free comm system that was better than anything currently on the drawing board. The lab rats officially designated Mickey as the 'father' of the Q-net the day the entire Q-tap system was officially incorporated into the design specs for the new space suits. The flexibility of Ike's material proved itself then, when the suits were simply commanded to reconfigure a part of the control materials into an internal Q-tap. Mickey's keying system provided for an almost infinite address space, so the entire thing was an immediate threat to replace the traditional Internet - broadband, wireless and all. Few of the problems they were dealing with in boosting the sensor array into a usable system applied here because they were talking about relatively short distances compared to the sensor array's design parameters. What few there were were minimal. This breakthrough brought Dr. Fylakas back to them briefly. He helped Ike, Mickey and Rob draw up patent applications and some legal documents that set up a deal with McKesson Technology Group to do all the development and marketing work in exchange for a straight ten percent. All three of them thought that was going to be as good a deal as they were ever likely to see, so after a little due diligence by an independent lawyer they hired at McKesson's urging no less, they signed on the dotted line and got back to work. Con promised them they were going to be filthy rich by the time they got back from Mars, especially when they finished a few wrinkles that made the entire system a perfect replacement for the telecommunications system. The lab rats were just happy to have instant access to the data they wanted. Rob spent a lot of time poring over everything he had been given on that datapak from the builder's committee! Probably more time than was wise. It caused his first argument with Wendy and Jocelin. The first argument was just angry accusations and Rob being defensive. It was heated and short and accomplished nothing. Or so they thought at first. What it did was cause three people to do a lot of soul searching and ultimately caused their second argument. After putting away the datapak that night and going to sleep, Rob woke in the middle of the night from a restless sleep. He had a headache and heartburn. Rob ate a banana, drank a glass of water and tried to go back to sleep, but gave up at two in the morning and took a shower, threw on some shorts and a T shirt and went out to sit at the couch and stare at a display of log files from the datapak, but even that seemed distracting. He had a sudden mini-epiphany. The headache and heartburn hadn't been coincidental, it had been a clue. A weirdly psychosomatic clue. During today's argument - well, yesterday's argument now, he realized he had been listening to his head and tuning out his heart. He already had a relationship with Wendy and Jocelin that was based on reason and intellect. 'What was my emotional relationship with them like, and what did my heart say about it?' He thought to himself. It wasn't that He hadn't already reached a decision. It was just that he had been ignoring the decision and refusing to act upon it. Fear perhaps, or inertia, who knows? He fell asleep right there on the couch after that, no longer feeling conflicted inside. ------- Rob slept right through his internal alarm clock, right through breakfast and almost through the start of the work day. He woke to the pounding of fists on his door and the sound of yelling through it. Rob jumped up and ran over and opened it. "Its okay!" Rob said. "I was up late and overslept." Reassured that he was okay, Wendy and Jocelin began haranguing him again over yesterday's subject, with scaring them today piled on top. He stood there for a bit, just taking it before he finally did what he'd wanted to do since he'd opened the door. What he'd been wanting to do for weeks really, if only he'd been listening. Rob reached over and picked Wendy up by the waist and pulled her into him and kissed her. He kissed her long and hard and by the time the kiss ended it was difficult to say where Wendy ended and he started. "About time buster!" Wendy said looking up at Rob with shining eyes and a sweet, sexy smile. Rob stared down into those eyes for a while before they both thought to turn to look at Jocelin. She had tears in her eyes and a bittersweet smile. "I was always afraid it would turn out this way. But alls well that ends in love, huh?" She said, stepping up and onto her tiptoes to give Rob a brief peck on the lips, followed by another for Wendy. "Wendy you'd better take him in for a quick breakfast. I'll make sure the crew knows he overslept and that you'll both be in shortly." She closed the door behind her, and in a heartbeat Wendy and Rob were lip locked again. He felt a little steam rising from this one and pulled back, grinning. "You, Wendy Fellowes are one damned fine kisser!" "You will find out soon enough that I am damned fine at a lot of things Mr. Young, but not now." She said, giving me a quick kiss and a very strategically placed and suggestive squeeze. "Right now you had better be hitting the shower and getting ready for work. ------- When Rob got to work, he was just in time to put the dampers on a huge argument over the crew's latest frustration. They were having troubles linking the sensor array into the ships computer tracking and targeting systems. The quantum nature of the sensor output seemed to be confusing the digital inputs on all the targeting instruments. That was the theory at least for why they continued to get targeting inaccuracies of monumental proportions. "I appreciate the zeal you are all bringing to the problem." Rob started. "But there is a fundamental flaw with your attempts to deal with the problems in this system. Who wants to guess what that the flaw is?" When Tyrese Glover began to bring up their still infantile ability to calibrate inputs across multiple quantum devices, Rob cut him off. "Last chance. Anyone with an idea that doesn't involve quantum science or tracking software?" He drew only silence then. "The flaw in your attempts is that that this is a systems problem. Are any of you guys in the systems group?" Silence. "Has anyone here notified anyone in the systems group of this problem?" More silence. "Alexandra. I want you to get together with Victor Emanoff. Get him briefed on this problem and let his team tackle it. You and Nicole will give the systems group whatever support they need from us in their efforts." "Yes sir!" Alexandra said with a grin, snapping him a saucy salute. "Ike, lets get busy breadboarding a setup here that can be used to run tests on. Use everything off the shelf, just like it was going to be hooked up on the ship. That'll give Victor and his crew a baseline setup to compare against." Hit the ground running, Rob had heard. 'I wonder when the running stops?', he thought to himself. ------- Chapter 2: Breaching the Veil of Night Rob spent the entire afternoon in meetings, listening to people talk about money, personnel, public relations and surprisingly, religious intolerance. There were several groups of very fanatical evangelical fundamentalists out there who saw the planned trip to Mars as a refutation of 'God's word', because of course, whoever wrote the bible two thousand years ago was not a scientist, and failed to mention Mars or spaceships. 'The bible doesn't mention bullhorns either, but that didn't stop them from standing in front of Obsidian's offices around the world and shouting through them at the top of their lungs.' Rob thought. Speaking of shouting at the top of your lungs. That night he discovered that it was indeed true that Wendy Fellowes was damned fine at a lot of things. He thought he had managed to keep up with her for the most part, but sleep came far too quickly to give it the post-coital analysis that the world class performance deserved. When Rob came into the lab the next morning, he had good news and bad news waiting for him. The good news was that there was indeed a simple cause of the huge targeting inaccuracies. The sensor array system and the tracking system used off the shelf coupler components from two completely different product lines and the metal oxide coatings on the comb assemblies didn't match the metal oxide on the matching pinhole arrays. They solved the problem by throwing out the manufactured components and building their own. The bad news was that this only got rid of the seriously wild errors. There were still an entire boatload of small scale inaccuracies being measured and the system guys could find no discernible source at the system level. That brought the sensor team back to either the quantum hashing problems that had hampered so much of this project or something else entirely. At least the elimination of the gross errors would make troubleshooting the fine errors possible, even if it wasn't going to be easy. Rob thanked Victor and his crew, but the old Russian was dismissive of his teams efforts. "It was nothing. We have developed an entire series of standard tests to run on components and their connectors. Materials that conduct electricity in any fashion can produce unsuspected traits at the drop of a hat, especially since they sit inside a planet-sized magnetic field that is eternally influencing them." "We even have to subtract magnetic and gravitic field influences on some of the more delicate nano-scale components before we can be sure we have eliminated all the influences." DeeDee Ponders added. Rob put Alex on the task of pinning down the source of the remaining errors. In addition to her other qualities, good and bad, the woman had the determination and focus of a mongoose stalking a cobra. Wendy and Rob probably should not have tried getting a standing ovation from the judges at the mattress Olympics the previous night. Neither of them was in any shape for a rematch that night, but they did fall asleep with Wendy's head nestled in the crook of Rob's arm and her leg draped over his. Rob's exhaustion may have played a part in his dreams that night, and if so he would probably be insisting on regular repeats in the future. He couldn't get DeeDee Ponders's words out of his head. 'subtract magnetic and gravitic fields' she had said, and in his dreams he had one chasing the other in some form or another for half the night. Of course he was right behind the both of them in a futile chase of his own. Somewhere in the second half of the night he began dreaming of one catching the other, repeated in infinite combinations, until one snarled pairing of fields blended together and seemed to flare brightly, right in front of his face. Rob jumped back from the flare and found himself sitting up in bed with Wendy on the floor beside the bed. He apologized like crazy and picked her up and laid her back in bed. Then apologized again and threw on a t-shirt and grabbed his Q-tap and sat down on the couch in the living room with a pad of paper and a pencil. It was three in the morning local time when he flipped the tap on. He was still hard at it four hours later when Wendy came out of the bedroom freshly showered and made coffee. He had most of it then or he probably wouldn't have noticed. Rob took the cup of coffee and the toasted muffin when it was offered by a fully dressed Wendy. He took the goodbye kiss as well. "I'll tell them to expect you when your synapses stop firing. They'll understand." She said on her way out the door. By ten he had it fairly well fleshed out. Even most of his side notes made sense. 'I need to get to the office to use the scanner to get some of these hand drawn diagrams into the system.' Rob thought to himself, only then realizing where he was and what time it was. He took a shower but didn't bother shaving. On his way to the office he tripped a link in his Q-tap to Dr. Fylakas, to see if he was available today. ------- Andy McKesson's return to the Nauru shipyard was premeditated, but early. Thanks to the incredible inventiveness of the 'kiddy corp' they had brought into the shipyard, the eighteen month schedule that had replaced the original five year project cycle the Joint Study Group had proposed had been condensed to nine. The IME had also finally won concessions from the U.S. Senate, only after Senator Montgomery was threatened with censure. As it was, all they got was an official okay to invite NASA to lend them as many of their people as they could use. Of course at this point they didn't really need any of them, but Andy had a plan for them that would free up Rob Young to come work for him. The department and sector heads at the shipyards had been among those invited to attend Andy and Cor's wedding, and so their arrival at the shipyards at long last was not quite the arrival of the outsiders it could have been. They had spent a good bit of time socializing with them during the reception, and in particular they made good use of Janet Dearing and Ryan Ardmore as buffers. The shipyard folks knew them and they knew Andy and Cor. Both had been with and among the shipyard crew from the beginning, documenting in words and pictures their heroic efforts in building and testing the Pai Lung. They had asked NASA for eight people, and Cor and Andy brought them with them when they finally reported to Nauru. One of them was an NSA spy, but Andy had expected no less from their government. He was going to be free to spy all he wanted while working on the drive tuning crew. He was going to have a dedicated crew of the Awakened watching his every step outside of the power bays though. They're still not sure why the spooks felt it would be easier to sneak a spy in disguised as a fake scientist rather than as a fake pilot, but they had them out-gunned in the spying department anyway, thanks to the Gifts. The trip out to Nauru was on a modified Obsidian Aurora III. This was the same model the President rode in now as his official Air Force One. This one was laid out in something of a similar fashion, and Andy had his own office towards the back of it. He had a brief sit down meeting with each of the NASA guys one at a time. The first three NASA guys were all pilots, two were system specialists with no expertise in any of the systems they would be using, but Doctor Owen Gardner's specialty was in Astrodynamics, and him they really wanted. "Doctor Gardner, Welcome to the IME. We have big plans for you sir." "Big plans for me? What, I get to be the one standing at the big steering wheel in the publicity shots?" "No sir, though now that you mention it, you would look good in one of those old cruise ship captain's uniforms. But, a few budding romances aside, this is no love boat. You are going to be busy teaching astrodynamics to our officers and bridge crews. They will be trusting our piloting to computers, but that doesn't mean we wish to remain ignorant of the theory and methods needed. This crew is ninety percent science geek, and those ninety percent are one hundred and fifty percent geek. They want to understand this stuff." "I'm going to be teaching, in a classroom then, and nothing more?" "No sir, assuming you can learn the nav and sensor systems well enough, you will become the Pai Lung's Chief of Navigation. You have too much experience and knowledge to put you anywhere else. The key will be how well you can adapt to the new systems. The people you will be teaching Orbital Mechanics to will be the same people teaching you how to use our systems." "How much time will I have for my lessons?" "We will give you all the time available. Right now that means at least two hours in the afternoon, every day but Sunday. I want you doing two groups, an overview course open to everyone who wants to attend, and a full immersion brain scrubbing course for the command crew, myself included. When you're done, we know what you know, or as close as you can come in six weeks." "Why six weeks?" He asked, but I could see he felt he knew the answer that was coming. "Because in six weeks, the Pai Lung is on its way to Mars." ------- Rob had a bad case of Owen Gardner on the brain. He was seeing the officious bastard in his sleep. Orbital Mechanics. Stellar fixes. flight path angles, mean anomalies and position vectors dueled in his brain like kids at the carnival, clamoring for his attention, which was always somewhere else, usually riding the roller coaster with velocity, momentum and time. The bastard actually had taken to pinging him via Q-net in the middle of the night and at odd hours during the day to ask him seemingly nonsensical questions, the answers to which always seemed to fire off in his brain just beneath all those other dancing demands clamoring for his attention during his dreams. The speed of light, C, is measured these days in meters per second and is 1,079,252,848.8 kilometers per hour. We usually use the Light Second, a distance of 299,792,458 meters, as our reference when calculating solar distances. The distance from the Earth to the Moon is just over one light second, at approximately 1.282 light seconds. Why approximately? Because the Moon's orbit is not perfectly circular, sometimes she is a tad closer than average, sometimes a tad further away. They hadn't tested it yet of course, but The drive crew thought they could get the gravity drive to push the Pai Lung around the solar system at a decent 2 or 3 percent of C. Limitations in the ability of the inertial compensators meant that they wouldn't be able to hit those peaks unless they were pushing something with no crew, or really dragging it out on a long haul, stretching the acceleration and deceleration out at both ends. No Earth to Moon in 30 seconds, not unless you didn't mind scraping the red smears off the inside of the hull afterwards. As it was, with their projected launch window, and with this being one of the optimal years as far as Earth-Mars distances and orbits went,... ... The buzzer from the alarm was going off again. Dammit! Rob hated waking up with his mind already full of orbital graffiti courtesy of the good Doctor Gardner! As happened so frequently these days, Rob got pulled away from the lab by a request to attend a meeting. They had learned to adjust for this on the fly, and he had plenty of confidence in either Ike or Alexandra to handle things in his absence. Alexandra had mellowed quite a bit once she had gotten used to things, but Ike was still a bit better at the 'human touch' side of things, so Rob tended to delegate Alexandra to handle the hard charging tasks and Ike got to handle the delicate personnel issues. He was thinking these thoughts because his meeting turned out to be with Andy McKesson, and the first words out of him when Rob walked into the room had been about that very situation. "Rob, if I pulled you off your section, who would you propose take your place?" In the end, he had to pick Ike. "Ike Dunham, and I'd suggest he make Alexandra Nascimento his second." I answered finally. "Either would do fine internally, but Ike is more personable and has a finer touch when dealing with the other sections." It took him another moment to wonder where he was being shifted now, but he did finally think to ask. "I'm moving again am I? Where to this time?" "You are coming to work for me." Andy said. "Captain Brenneman likes to say my job title is assistant god. If his title is accurate, that makes you at least junior assistant god. I am understudying the Captain's job, and based on what Doctor Gardner has to say, you will at least be understudying his job as chief navigator, but you will also be learning everything I'm learning." "Why me?" Rob asked, that familiar dazed feeling creeping over him again. "Because you show the potential. Because I am a firm believer in meritocracy as a concept. Because you have earned a chance to be more than what you are currently asked to be. But there are other reasons. What would you guess they are?" Rob thought about that. Running back over some thoughts he'd already had. "You aren't planning on remaining on the Pai Lung after the Mars mission, you're a McKesson and have other fish to fry. You don't need to be here now, other than as a demonstration of McKesson commitment, and I expect you won't stick around after our return from Mars. If you're not going to be here, you want to leave someone behind when you leave that shares your perspective on things but can still get things done and you think I might be that guy." Sometimes Rob hated it when he was right! So almost against his will, and surely against someone's better judgment somewhere, Rob Young became an officer and a gentleman, a bridge officer anyway. Alexandra Nascimento had a few words to say about the gentleman part when Rob told her that Ike was getting the nod as his replacement. The volume and vigor of her vitriol were the very things that won him the argument. "It is this very attitude that makes me recommend Ike for this position over you Alex." Rob told her. "Ike is willing to take the time to hear explanations. He does not assume that someone else's actions must be intended to be hurtful. He asks for and listens to his co-workers opinions, and does not give them more or less weight because they did something a week ago that upset him." Then Rob played back for her the sound of her yelling at him. He let her listen to herself call him every name in the book, cast aspersions on his manhood, ancestry and mental fitness. When it was done playing, he pointed out that the recording had been made from the lab two doors down. When the facts sank in finally, she ran off, embarrassed. "Ike, I tore her down, but you're going to have to build her back up if you want her to be your second. Take DeeDee with you if she's free. Take Nat or Wendy with you if she's not." Ike nodded. He knew as well as Rob did that Alex would try to turn the situation sexual if she thought it would give her an advantage. It was just the way she was wired. It took three days to calm her down. 'Alex should have been thankful I wasn't working in the lab during those three days!', Rob thought, 'Because I would have ripped her a new one!'. Ike had a different management style. He was far more laid back, but he did get their Brazilian bombshell back on track, and with her filling in as the sector second, she seemed happy, so Rob certainly wasn't going to pick nits over it. In addition to everything else Rob would be doing, it was assigned to him to get the eighteen scientists who were coming along as passengers up to speed on the ship's safety systems. Mrs. McKesson, appropriately, would be handling their orientation to the Caldwell suits. Her nose crinkled cutely any time anyone referred to her as Mrs. McKesson. There were some objections from a few of the scientists when Rob began assigning them ship duties. They had all had to win lotteries held among their professional communities to get their berths on this trip. Perhaps some of them felt like they held positions of privilege. The crew disabused them of that notion very quickly. The geeks in the lab and the techno-jocks in the construction crew were used to waiting on themselves, but with extra hands aboard, it made no sense to pull someone from the Drive team to serve lunch, or have the people keeping the sensors calibrated from dropping what they were doing to do clean up. They did have a 'service section' of the crew, people whose job it was too cook the meals, wash the laundry and in general deal with the grunt work involved in day-to-day living. The rabble rousing professors settled down pretty quickly when they were shown what the rest of the crew schedules looked like. Besides, they were only assisting here and there. None of them were working more than an hour or two a day. When Rob wasn't babysitting, he spent the rest of the next five weeks either bouncing brain cells against Doctor Gardner's personal game of Astrodynamic Breakout, or madly following Andy MecKesson up and down every corridor, accessway, hatch, tube and conduit in the Pai Lung. Every step of the way they were deluged in the data, opinion, theory, surmise, suspicion, hope, fear, dream and nightmare of every person responsible for every thing everywhere on and in her. Did you know that every single airtight hatch and every doorway up and down the length of her is numbered? And that the numbers can tell you exactly which section and subsection of the ship you are in, if only you knew the scheme? Rob knew the scheme now. He'd personally verified that every hatch matched every doorway. He'd done the same thing to every fire extinguisher, emergency air pack, first aid station, radiation detector and 'you are here' sign on the Pai Lung. Every freakin' one! Today they were examining the emergency overrides for the rewiring routines in the command clusters. There are five of them, the one on the bridge, plus the one in the engineering bay, as well as three emergency reserve 'slap and go' panels in the keels. If their ship was an old Windows PC, those 'slap and go's were the equivalent of a hard reboot. They are supposed to restore basic functionality to all the drive and life support systems no matter what. Big pieces of the ship would have to have been vaporized for them not to work. That was the theory. Tomorrow afternoon they were going to test those slap and go switches, and they were going to do it while they were orbiting the moon! But before that, they would spend the morning getting a refresher course in using their new space suits, and in weightless maneuvering. Rob suspected breakfast was going to be lightly attended! Weightlessness was fun, what little of it there was. The transition time for the slap and go switches to do a complete rewire and restart of the control systems was 1.74345 seconds. During the middle .765889 seconds, they were weightless. Everyone had been given plenty of warning and they still wound up with a broken wrist, a twisted knee and a half dozen sprains and bruises. Someone suggested that the default settings for the environmental gravity controls should be 'on' instead of 'off'. They'd have to see. They were repeating the whole series of tests again in a few days. Ike Dunham and Tyrese Glover got the employee of the week title sewed up between them by the time they were halfway back to the shipyard. Ike came up with the clever idea of tying the slap and go switches through the Q-Net and into the Q-tap key-ID of the command staff. The on duty watch officer would have the ability to do a fast verbal authorization, and the rest of the command staff would be able to do one after giving a confirmation code. Tyrese then had the bright follow up idea of tying the entire command console into the Q-Net. Once they were back on the ground and the excitement had faded it was decided there were too many inherent security problems with having the command consoles tied directly into the Q-Net, but by the time Rob got out of the weekly staffing and resource meeting, they had developed an entire separate Com-Net, that was strictly for command level traffic, including accessing a virtual command console that put you in front of a holographic set of bridge controls. Now that he was an official bridge officer, Rob had to immediately dive into this whole new setup and learn it, front to back. Did you know there are a complete set of hands-free eye and facial controls for accessing the comm setup in a space suit? Even if you can't issue verbal commands you can still use what is somewhat laughingly referred to as the 'blink and twitch' system for navigating through all the drop down menus in the suit's HUD. Rob was falling into a pattern that seemed strange but which he was incredibly grateful for. He would absorb all this stuff during the day, and then somehow he would integrate it all in his sleep. He woke up many a morning feeling like Neo in the Matrix, coming out of the training program. Instead of breathlessly declaring that 'I know Kung fu', Rob would mutter "I know emergency access override codes!" or something else equally as boring. Usually Wendy would mutter "That's good baby." without even waking up. When Rob mentioned this to Andy he expressed some concern at his difficulty sleeping and invited the both of them to lunch. They had a very nice time visiting with Andy and Cor, and of course Wendy had scads of questions about their recent wedding. Rob got the impression that they were giving Wendy an evaluation of some kind, maybe just trying to get a feel for what kind of a person she was. She must've passed though, because she was still with him when he woke up the next morning! Their second trip to the Moon was slightly less traumatic as far as the reset tests went. The new defaults on the environmental gravity systems made the transition into and out of zero G almost seamless. They also tested the Q-tap assisted 'slap and go' setup, and Rob got to take his turn at running a reset through his. A few brave people who had made it all the way through the training and orientation on the OPEE suit modifications got to do the initial testing on them, and once again Rob was cursed with being ahead of the curve, and was one of the lucky volunteers. OPEE stands for Orbit to Planetary Emergency Evacuation. These shoulder harness modifications to the standard Caldwell suit were considered add on equipment at first, but they were quickly added to the basic configuration for the space suit version. The ground based hazard and climate suits didn't need them. Testing them consisted of activating them and then stepping into an emergency jettison chute and being spat out into open space. In some ways it was a peaceful ride. Rob had thirty minutes, hanging in space, nothing but the sound of his own breathing and the vibration of the suits internal systems shifting material and making minor adjustments. The HUD in his suit was keeping him updated on his progress, telling him he was locked into a rescue beacon at a particular set of lunar coordinates and giving him an ETA that was updated every few seconds. He pushed his perceptions of that to the back of his brain after a few minutes and just took in the slowly expanding expanse of Lunar scenery below him, and let myself get lost in thought. He so seldom got time to just think these days, without other demands or distractions, it was almost a guilty pleasure. He chased another one of those energy field tangles that he had seen in his dreams, one that kept coming back. It didn't clamor at him in quite the insistent fashion the one he had used for his targeting solution had, but it did show up pretty often in his dreams. OPEE began bleeping insistently, wanting to make sure Rob knew he was sixty seconds from the beacon and to warn him that he might have to do some manual overriding. A quick glance around told him he was in fine shape, but those tangles were going to have to wait for another day. A little manual assist to make it seem like he was just out for a casual stroll in the park, and he was happily in the arms of a waiting engineer. "Hello boys, nice of you all to wait up for me." He said over the Q-comm on the ship's public channel and through it to the standard radio net the rest of the world was using. "Glad you could drop in." Was the dry reply. Their rescue beacon on the moon was located at the pre-construction engineering camp at Aristarchus. The area in and around Aristarchus Crater had long been looked at when considering moon base locations, but it had finally been settled on because it was at the lunar equator, and because there was a lot of data on it. In the end, all the time spent looking at it had become a reason on its own to consider it. The engineers at ALB-1, as they called it, were technically speaking, U.N. Representatives, but mostly they were McKesson Technologies engineers working on contract to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. The idea for this base had been spawned by the same Joint Study Group that had spawned their Mars mission. Instead of spinning off into an independent operation, the Moon base had instead been handed back to the U.N. Two years later and they were still stuck handing in reports on soil samples and seismic studies. They were good people though, and not just the McKesson guys either. Unlike their predecessors in the Apollo era, these guys went home for the weekends and spent it with their families on Earth. Once the 'ahead of the curve' guys had their introduction to OPEE, it was time to let everyone else have a go. Rob got to babysit a dozen crew and staff through the same ride he had just experienced. The UN guys left them alone and went back to work, once they were confident the ship's personnel weren't going to mess up their equipment. For every drill the crew was subjected to, those who had been shanghaied into the bridge crew did two more. They did every drill the crew did before they did it, then they did it when the rest of the crew did it, and if necessary they did it again afterwards to clean up and correct anything they didn't like. Added to that were bridge drills. Emergency stops, emergency maneuvers, command disaster recovery, and scenario after scenario after scenario. They called the scenario work 'Murphy Drills'. If anything that could go wrong would go wrong, then there had to be a procedure covering it, and that meant they had to drill themselves in that procedure. Personally, Rob thought Victor Emanoff was using them to work through some personal demons left over from his years in the Russian submarine service. They called him Captain Murphy to his face during drill debriefings and he enjoyed it! ------- Finally the day came. There were some small ceremonies, mostly shipyard and naval rituals designed to ward off bad luck and encourage a safe return. Sailors are a superstitious bunch, and apparently the vacuum-based versions are no different. There were huge parties back in the U.S, Russia, China and everywhere else they could scrape up a legitimate excuse. They were used to the lift off procedure by now, and left Nauru shipyard with hardly a tremor. Wendy had been one of the people who had procurement and supply assigned as an extra duty, and she had been busy the past three days making sure the ships stores were aboard and in their proper locations. They docked at the IOH for a brief ceremony, but that was just a PR opportunity, friendly as it was. The Pai Lung broke orbit two hours later. Rob was on the bridge and got to sign the log, along with all the other official bridge crew. They then stood together for a picture, holding the log book. From there he went back to his quarters and hit the sack. As a very junior bridge officer, he got stuck serving the late watch. Thirty days to Mars should be as exciting as it sounds, but its not. Rob had three rotations through the watch schedule during that time, and one rotation off. The time spent on watch was shared with two other officers during the off watches, and there were five of us on the main watch. Main watch was shifted slightly during the thirty days so they could do live Q-net feeds back to Earth. The Pai Lung was one big mobile Q-Node, but one of their very first tasks when they made Mars orbit would be to deploy a series of permanent orbital Martian Q-Nodes. 'I should probably stop and spend some time one of these days, with my copious amounts of free time, and think about what an impact our FTL communications breakthrough was going to mean', Rob thought. They had adjusted to their new Q-tap system, and the Q-net pretty easily, but they were still not really aware of the impact of it outside of their own uses. They were more pleased by the immense increases in bandwidth that had come along with the new system. Once they had the new Q-Nodes in orbit around Mars they were going to be ushering in a new era in communications. Earth - Mars voice, data and video in real time. They were already doing it in transit, but there were some quality and reliability issues having to do with gravitic perturbations and solar flares. What Mickey Brooks called 'Fluctuations in the Aether'. Rob discovered within the first few days of travel that the junior officer is the morale officer. He got to settle disputes, calm the angry, cheer up the depressed, comfort the lovelorn and chasten the mischievous. Andy and Cor actually took pity on him after a week and informed the captain that since they were not a truly military vessel they would not follow every tradition. The two of them took over all the counseling and comforting. Rob was still in charge of the ship's entertainment though, and at first he approached that with some serious trepidation. An offhand comment by Morrie Scheufelt, one of the Gravity Drive guys, and a member of the 'Gravy Geeks' from MIT was what saved him. He commented about having to miss the Boston Symphony's annual Concert in the Commons. With all the bandwidth available, and with all this instantaneous interplanetary communicating going on, he realized they had access to an entire planet full of entertainment. They had a certain amount of name recognition, and the world was indeed watching with interest, so he had no trouble making arrangements with various movie studios, television networks and production companies to begin beaming us almost anything they wanted. Morrie got his Summer concert in the park. They got to see Rocky 17 at the same time everyone else in the United States did. Okay, not really. But they did get their pick of first run movies, and television broadcasts. Most of the TV Viewing was watching baseball and other live events. They didn't have too many soap opera addicts, or TV addicts in general. They got offers from opera, ballet and symphony companies across the globe, and they accepted every offer. Something was playing somewhere on the ship all the time. Standing a watch was an interesting experience. Rob wasn't sure that he enjoyed it, but it was educational, and provided a certain perspective on Captain Brenneman and Commander Emanoff. What time Rob had left over after doing what remained of his duties as morale officer, his continuing Astrodynamics lessons with Doctor Gardner and lending a hand to Alexandra and the rest of the Sensor team whenever some minor oddity showed up, he spent with Wendy, or he spent it 'thinking'. Rob Young was the Pai Lung's only practicing quantum physicist. Everyone else had their areas of expertise, whether it be gravitics, fusion, nanotics, metallurgy, you name it, the staff were a varied bunch, and every one of them were the cream of the new crop of post grads. They had multiples in most of the disciplines, especially in gravitics and physics. They even had two medical doctors, the only two aboard who didn't put PhD after their names. But Rob was the only quantum physicist, and in his spare time he was letting those visions of the tangled gravitic fields drive him nuts! He shouldn't be dreaming in gravitics dammit!! Wendy, lovely as she was, and sweet and all, was still arguably the world's foremost authority on nano-scale metallurgy. She was one of the people who couldn't wait to get to Mars and unpack her tools. Rob on the other hand was happy right now, and along with Alexandra Nascimento and Tyrese Glover, was up to his neck in data. They were comparing readouts from the direct instrumentation packages on the Pai Lung's hull to the inputs they got from the remote sensors. When they spoke of the Sensor Array in general terms it was always easiest to speak of the visible light components that allowed them to see things remotely, but in reality, the Sensor system got the Array tag added because it was passing the full electromagnetic spectrum as well as gravitic signatures and particle density and composition. The longer they collected data over a wider and wider set of conditions, the more accurately they could tune the array. The sensors were pretty much at 100% accuracy with the visible light components, just because they had a longer history of observations to make comparisons to. They were in the 95-98% range with infrared and radio waves, with the rest of the spectrum dropping behind them. they still felt they were at least at 85%, even with the least studied ones. The more data they collected, and the more accurately they got the array tuned, the easier it was for us to boost the sensitivity. There were the occasional 'stray' signal or 'random fluctuation' in a signal that they had no source for, or understanding of. As far as the main sensors went, they just programmed the processors to drop them out. As far as their research sensors went, they were tracking and recording everything. Just because they didn't know what it meant now didn't mean they might not understand it later. They took up orbit around Mars on day 29. Captain Brenneman suggested that they must've gone through the 'Interplanetary Date Line and moved ahead a day, or else they 'caught a tailwind' or something, but Rob smelled a Public Relations rat and kept his mouth shut when he broadcast that back to Earth. Later they learned that it is possible for computers to make rounding errors, especially when trying to do calculations based on the sure knowledge that there is no such thing as a partial day. Rob also got to watch Andy and Cor have a 'heartwarming chat' via the Q-Net with both sets of parents as well as Andy's little brother Mikey, who was at that cute pre-school/kindergarten age. There were a few ceremonies and a lot of speeches, but Rob fortunately got to miss most of it, as he was involved in deploying the three Q-Node satellites into Mars orbit. Doctor Gardner was quite annoying with his constant reminders of how in the old days artificial satellites required spot on calculations and pure orbital mechanics to keep them were they belonged in space. These days they had the luxury of being able to simply program the grav systems to maintain a precise altitude and location. Their three satellites were also serving as Mars' first Global Positioning System, and almost the first thing they had to do when they got people on the surface was to calibrate their mapping units and tracker/transponders to the new system. These systems were built into the Caldwell suit's core comm module. They had no intention of landing the entire Pai Lung on Mars. This decision was based on the familiar engineering axiom that warned against putting all your eggs in one basket. Especially when the eggs were representing human lives. Instead, they had three SAHMs. One of their few examples of succumbing to acronym-itis, SAHM stood for Surface-Assembled Habitat Module. Additionally they had the Zephyr and the Sirocco. These two birds were their orbital transports, and were actually heavily modified Obsidian Hurricane Class transports, the same ones currently used to transport people and supplies to the IOH back in Earth orbit. Their transports were based on a product engineered to a mind-numbingly long list of government-mandated design minimums, so they were incredibly over-engineered and over-powered for their size, but in a pinch the entire ship's complement of crew and passengers could make the transit back to Earth in them, crammed to the gills and living on emergency rations and reconstituted water, but they would make it back. They were also engineered with what Arne Walker described as 'a slightly excessive number' of external hard points. If they wound up needing something to be a tractor, plow, crane, bus, buoy or barbecue, they would be able to add it to the outside of one of their two birds and make it happen. There had been a lot of arguing amongst the crew, from the top on down, about who was going to be the first to step on Martian soil. The crew collectively considered it a tossup between Captain Brenneman and Andy McKesson. Neither of them wanted it. Too predictable they said. So a week out of orbit, they held a lottery. The winner was one of the systems staff, Howard Dexter. Yes, yet another asterisk would have to be entered into the histories being written back on Earth. Howard did his duty, and as his foot touched Martian soil, even managed to utter a few words that had at least the patina of inspiration. "From Earth to Mars. This first step is just a symbol for many more first steps to come." He said. Back on Earth, billions of people cheered and the name Howard Dexter once again was at the forefront of the Earth's collective consciousness. Rob lost his girlfriend for the next ten days. As a junior officer, he had to oversee the unloading and landing of the SAHMs. They had built in grav drives and shields, so it was a mindless chore. The assembly was left to those who would be living in them for the next few weeks, and he was back in orbit within a few hours. Wendy's drilling rig, which she shared with a team of mineralogists and geologists was one of three that had been brought. The second was under the control of the xenobiologists and the other life science types. The third was still packed safely away in its container and was officially a spare. If everything went well with the two in use, the third would eventually be used for sampling Deimos and Phobos, Mars' two moons. Wendy was already gone with her drill rig by the time Rob got back from his delivery Rob was one of several people designated to ferry a couple of the NASA guys over to check on the historical stuff. They were going to bring back one of the two Martian rovers and they would take pictures of everything else. Alexei Baranov was also going to be taking a crew to check on some of the old soviet era Mars landers and the one British attempt, the Beagle, which was one of the many 'failed' landing attempts on Mars. Everybody who tried had failures getting a lander safely on Mars. The two rovers that had touched down in 2004 were the biggest successes, and one of them was going to come home and take its place alongside the Mercury capsule and other pieces of space history in the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian. While Rob didn't get involved in the 'construction' phase of hooking the three SAHMs together, he did get to supervise tapping into the new orbiting Q-Node system. They had a primary and a backup comm unit in the habitat, and they also set up a local net for everyone. He flipped the switch that activated the tie in and sent out over the new node and through the ship node as well. "Mars Base reporting. Mars Net now online." He got a ragged round of cheers back on the Sensor staff's public comm channel. It was cut short when Captain Brenneman came on shortly thereafter. "Earth, this is Mars reporting. Mars Base is online." ------- Chapter 3: There and Back Again Halfway through the month on Mars, Rob would have been happy to have been going a bit stir crazy. An endless series of minor accidents, lost scientists, overdue parties and everything else, clear down to dead batteries kept him pretty busy. Those who had long speculated that the canyons of Mars might contain the Martian life that had long been speculated had to be disappointed. The deep and mysterious Valles Marineris canyons were mostly full of dust, eons and eons of slippery, dangerous dust. Perhaps there was life buried underneath the rivers of dust there, but it appeared that no one was going to be finding it on this trip. Wendy and the other scientists with reason to be looking at rocks and digging in the dirt were still going strong, but Rob was growing a little tired of being a babysitter. Playing the tourist only did it for him for a while. Mons Olympus was awesome, the great Valles Marineris canyon system made for some incredible sightseeing opportunities. They even went and checked out 'the face', which people had been tweaking over since the pictures came back from Viking in the 1970's. Rob imagined Andy sitting in front of Senator Montgomery again after their return, testifying to the mundane and unremarkable nature of the small hill. Still, the sides of the canyons, the walls and outcroppings within it were prime locations for some of the diggers, and he spent quite a bit of time hovering near or on them, watching happy scientists digging in the dirt. Thankfully, Wendy's Martian rock bug was finally satisfied! Her interests were mostly metallurgical, and even that was only a marginal side interest. A 'hobbyist with a degree' was how she identified herself. Rob would have been less antsy about her prolonged absences if Jocelin Walsh wasn't still being somewhat over-friendly. Wendy was an engineer at heart, despite her nano-metallurgical specialty, but still an engineer. The rock sampling let her get some fulfillment on an aspect of her education that she had not been able to on Earth, but now that her sample allotment was stored and ready for the return trip, she suddenly remembered a few things, Rob included, and suddenly his life was looking good again! When the decision came down that the two portable drilling platforms were going to last, the third unit was unpacked and Rob got to take two side trips to Phobos and Deimos. Since Wendy was an experienced hand at operating the drill, she went along to take some samples. Both moons are pretty sad samples of their kind. Phobos in particular is sad because it is definitely doomed. It orbits too low, too close to Mars, closer than any other satellite to its primary in the solar system at less than 6000 kilometers, and shrinking. In fifty million years or so, it will be gone, either crashed into Mars or broken up into a ring. Deimos is in no danger of crashing into Mars, but it is incredibly small, the smallest moon in the solar system. Theories abound that suggest both moons are actually captured asteroids, and with their samples taken, perhaps someone would have a chance to make some comparisons in the future! The explorers did find definite signs of water, both on Mars and on Phobos, but nothing that could be called 'free' water. Nothing flowing, though we saw signs that could have been interpreted as recent flows. Some people were suggesting a sort of hoarfrost that deposited on the sides of craters and then when the light from the sun hit them just right, the light got lensed into a focal point on the hoarfrost's interior, causing the internal temperature to hit a flash point, and suddenly and briefly, the water was liquid just long enough to run down the steep crater wall before finally flashing into vapor or sinking below the surface. One thing Wendy was keeping track of was the number of moons and planets on which she and Rob had made love. Adding Phobos and Deimos brought the count up to five. Wendy felt slightly naughty just thinking about her keeping a running tally, and her thoughts strayed back to her favorite so far, when they managed to find the time while they were doing the OPEE training on the Moon. She wondered yet again about the identify of the poor UN engineer who stumbled upon them. 'I'm not sure he'll be good for much detail though, ' Wendy thought to herself. 'I think the sight of Rob's naked ass in the air left him pretty traumatized.' The final fifteen days went very quickly for Rob. With the increased operational familiarity planet side, he got bumped 'up' off babysitter duties and back to full time shipboard duties. He spent those two weeks divvying up his time pretty equally between the bridge and the lab. Fred Wassermann had come up with a way to get multiple readings, with some automatic offsets and variances based in part on trends they'd seen in the data captured on the way out. It would in all likelihood at least triple the volume and double the 'quality' of the data they captured on the way back in. Since Fred had the team inspired, and Alexandra had them all preparing for the new setup, Rob got to do some puttering around on his own. He worked on the small subset of research sensors that he had been capturing those anomalous blips and glitches on. The Sensor system was both notoriously non-directional, and infamously direction-sensitive. The contradiction is due to the multiple input sources the sensors are designed to capture. Some, such as light, are very, very directional. Some, such as radio waves, are not. Some, such as gravity, have overlapping sources that make it difficult to isolate discrete sources. Rob had to step back from the 'array' part of our sensor setup and develop a new system, almost from scratch. A system that was more about isolating and identifying the sources, no matter which type they were. That meant rewriting a lot of the code that he had originally developed, as well as the stuff that had been added and/or modified since the lab team had come together. A lot of work had been done in giving the Gravy Geeks, and those who preceded them in the field of gravitics, the tools with which to manage, manipulate and study gravity fields. Rob went back to those and began studying them and how they worked. He had been only peripherally involved in the science of gravitics and the technology that had come out of it. It was time to take a look under the hood and get a better understanding of it. He hoped that maybe it would help him make better sense of the stray readings he continued to get as well. ------- My name is Wendy Fellowes, and I am a Geek. I am happy to have found someone to love, and who I can clearly see loves me as well. I wouldn't say I was exactly a wallflower, but I was used to being 'the brain' in school, until I got to Cal Tech. There I was either 'one of the brains', or 'the brain with the great ass', depending on who you talked to. Because I finally could, I took advantage of that ass and got myself some more experience. The guys who used the great ass modifier became tutors, though not all of them had the brains to realize their true roles. None of them even had the sense to feel objectified and cheapened by my use of them. Thank God that period in my life was over! I was glad I had the experience I did when I met Rob. It allowed me to hold back and wait for something beyond the physical to happen, and amazingly, it did. Jocelin had confided in me a willingness to share him, since he seemed to be interested in us both, and while a part of me was at least curious about where that might have gone, I'm glad I acted as I did. Don't tell him, but Rob Young flips my switch in bed as much as he does out of it! Being romantically involved with a genius, and I mean a scary smart, inspired, going-where-no-man-has-gone-before kinda genius, is its own punishment and reward at the same time. I've already had to deal with Rob being off in the zone, unaware of what's going on around him. Personally, I think he needs me. Well, he needs someone like me, and since I'm already here, no others need apply. He calls me Princess Nuts & Bolts, because I'm good at details, good at putting things together and good with the run of the mill stuff that life requires, like remembering to pay the phone bill or shut off the TV on the way out the door for the weekend. Rob is never good at those things unless it involves groups, and then suddenly he becomes detail oriented. Go figure! I guess I'd been letting my recent life flash in front of my eyes, because suddenly there was a commotion in the room, breaking me from my reverie. Rob was at least half the reason for the commotion. For a while, Earth had been one big party, with us all as the guests of honor. The celebrations, parades, parties and presentations did give way after a couple weeks to meetings and discussions. The big question was apparently what to do with the Pai Lung, and whether we would be involved. This had been one of those meetings, a rare one with most of the build teams present; Power, Propulsion, Electronics, Hull, Sensors, all the original teams that had been gathered on Nauru and guided through the process of building the ship, as well as the two guys from the MIT Gravy Geeks who had come up with the design. In fact we were meeting at Andy and Cor's place in Somerville, and this was where Arne and Yuri's original plans for the Pai Lung had been revealed. The ruckus started when Andy announced that he was technically the sole owner of the Pai Lung as well as the Zephyr and Sirocco. He wanted to know who would buy it from him, and Rob raised his hand immediately. "Okay, lets say you've just bought my ship. What would you do with it?" Andy asked. "First thing? I think maybe it would have to be The moons of Jupiter. Europa, Io and Ganymede." Rob answered. "Maybe play around in the asteroid belt on the way back." That statement was what made Rob's half of the ruckus, and it raised a clamor in the room! Even the Power and Gravity folks, who had little incentive to poke around the solar system, could get excited at the thought of getting some hands on time on those three moons! Frederick Wasserman was not the stereotypical dour Germanic type, he was in fact the lab staffs most committed and inventive practical joker. At this moment though, he chose to be the voice of doubt. "Jupiter is a lot further away than Mars. It will take much longer. Maybe even a whole year away from Earth." Yes, it threw a little cold water on the collective buzz. Maybe it was my nuts & bolts side showing, but we needed the dose of reality right now. "Fred is right." I said. "There will be more room for error, and help will be much, much further away." "We would not be able to use the two orbital transport ships as our emergency escape vessels." Brian Conroy, one of the power team added. "They would not be able to hold enough supplies for that long a trip." In the end, it was decided that nothing needed to be decided immediately. Andy invited us all to meet him again in two week's time at the McKesson Group offices in San Francisco. Rob and I got invited to show up a couple of days early and spend them at his grandparent's house in Angel's Camp, California. We stayed at the Somerville condo for an extra couple of days while Rob, Ike Dunham and Mickey Brooks dealt with a ton of paperwork involved with their invention of the Q-net and the Q-tap. Several McKesson Group lawyers had a huge stack of papers that needed signing, some decisions were left to be made on several optional pieces of the whole deal and some of the financial situations discussed. As much of the Princess Nuts & Bolts that I was for day to day things, I wasn't much interested in the money aspect of things, so when Cor invited DeeDee Ponders, Janet Dearing and I to spend a couple of days at a spa on Cape Cod, I said yes of course! We went to a place called the Cape Codder Resort, and we were indulged with their 'Girls Bonding Time' package. Except Cor said she had 'enhanced the package a bit'. Two days of facials and massages and hot oil baths, fine dining and walking through the landscaped courtyard, what was not to love? We were a little too late in the season for some of the in-season activities, but they still had a midnight bonfire every night, and live jazz in the wine bar the second night. Cor seemed to not like the wines, and stuck pretty much to the sparkling wine. We played tennis the second day, something I'd been good at in high school, but too busy for in college. Cor was quite the physical specimen, and after sharing the spa and sauna with her, I suspected she had a level of fitness reserved for world class athletes. I was no slouch myself normally, but she was in a different class than me. Even all the work running the coring rig on Mars hadn't toned me up enough to compare to Cor. We played doubles, and thanks to my high school experience, DeeDee and I managed to win both times. Cor and Janet ran us ragged both times though! Cor had an ulterior motive in bringing us here, I discovered. Janet and her fiancé Ryan Ardmore were looking for a place for their wedding, and this one was high on the list of candidates. Both of them were from the Midwest, and had gone to college in Illinois, but they weren't tied to the area as far as their wedding plans went. Still, number one on their list was a resort in Galena, Illinois called the Eagle Ridge Resort, and since Janet's parents were doing their parental duty, it would be convenient to do something relatively local. Janet herself had only a few friends from home she was interested in sharing this event with, and those friends she would gladly make sure could get to wherever she decided to be. All I knew was I'd be happy to help Cor test out any other resorts they were considering! When we got back from our two days of luxury, Rob was wearing a very noticeable grin. A very wide, noticeable grin. DeeDee noticed Ike was wearing a similar expression, and since we hadn't been around to put those grins on our boyfriend's faces, we had to ask what had caused them. Rob showed me his brand new credit card. McKesson Technologies had made a pre-payment, based on anticipated quarterly revenues from royalties, itself based on the current level of bidding by the existing telecommunications companies for access to the new communication technologies. This didn't even include governmental licensing, which they couldn't do prepayments for. Doctor Fylakas had arranged a team of McKesson Group investment advisors to assist, but bottom line was that for all intents and purposes, that credit card had no effective upper limit. Rob could have actually paid for the Pai Lung if Andy had sold it for its real cost. "I think you'd better take me home to show me off to your parents before the check bounces, don't you?" He said after we were alone. "Really?" I said. "Yes, and I think my parents should meet you as well. We've been sleeping in the same bunk in outer space for months after all, they probably know we're a couple." My name is Wendy Fellowes, and I'm a Geek. But I'm not just a geek. Not anymore. ------- Rob's parents were closest, so after a couple more days in shuttling between Boston and New York, meeting a few people who were among the group that Doctor Fylakas promised would be making Rob filthy rich, they headed there first. Rob's dad had worked for the railroad most of his life, and still did, in Fort Dodge, Iowa, where Rob had grown up. They flew in aboard an Obsidian Research executive transport. Perhaps its due to the highly regulated nature of the industries, but the move to grav cars for air travel and transport had seemed to happen overnight. Industry and government had both jumped in and quickly made changes to standards, both legal and technical, that encouraged and supported it. Still, the rapid change had caused a good deal of panic and pain in the transportation industry, and to those who worked in it. People like Rob's dad. The rail industry had been one of the quickest to recover though, because they had all these centuries old right-of-ways that made perfect surface air car and grav transport corridors. They also had the infrastructure and people in place for tracking and managing the increased traffic. The old rails themselves gave the still developing air car auto piloting systems something to lock onto. Bert and Katherine Young met them at the Fort Dodge Airport. Rob and Wendy's pilot Luke had instructions to keep his Q-Tap on and stay in the area. He could sleep, eat, play tourist or whatever until they were ready for him again. They had packed a small bag each, and the first thing they did was make a stop for lunch. The place they stopped, called the Community Orchard, was right next to the airport, and seemed to be have more of an emphasis on apples and ciders, but they served a nice light lunch, and their apple pie was delicious! While they ate, they chatted. The changes, good and bad, hit Rob and his family at the same time they had hit the rest of the people in the transportation sector. It had been the Young family's good fortune that Mrs. Young had a decent job, working as assistant principal at Fair Oaks middle school, when all the confusion hit the industry. They were able to live on her income for a couple of years while Bert 'got himself reeducated' as he liked to describe it. The Young's were very early adjusters, and Rob had been very young during those couple of transition years. Over the next four days Wendy got the dime tour of all the places Rob grew up in, the barber shop, the burger joint, the swimming hole and the old high school. They met a few old acquaintances, but only a couple. After dinner the couple went for a drive, looking at some of the out of the way places Rob remembered, finishing it off with Fort Dodge's version of every American small town's lover's lane make out spot and they gave the high school kids a little competition, but only for a little while. Rob's room was at the complete opposite end of the house from his parent's, and Rob couldn't wait to fulfill a certain goal. Wendy didn't try to be quiet that night at all, and she thought Rob appreciated it, at least as much as she appreciated his efforts to make her be noisy. The resulting round of smiling and blushing faces at the breakfast table seemed to indicate success. Over breakfast, Rob and Wendy gave them the news about potentially zooming off to the moons of Jupiter for a year or so. That news, coming so soon after our recent trip to Mars was hard to swallow, but we set them up with their own pair of Q-Taps, running off our pool of free addresses. It was still a bit complicated to tie into the existing phone system, but it was doable. "With these, you could get in touch with us pretty reliably, even if we were playing around in Jupiter's orbit." they promised. "Rob is one of the three official co-inventors of this new system, and he's probably going to be a billionaire by the time we get back from this trip." Wendy said with pride. "don't tell anyone though, okay?" Rob asked. "You'll never get a moment of peace and quiet if people think you've got money." The Q-Taps and a couple nicely printed and framed color pictures of the two of them together on Mars were what they left behind after their two day visit. Wendy got very nice hugs from both parents, and particularly Rob's mom. "I'm so happy Rob has found someone nice." She whispered into Wendy's ear when they dropped the couple back off at the airport. From the flatlands of Fort Dodge, they headed to Wendy's hometown of Port Angeles, Washington. In some ways it makes Fort Dodge seem like a large city. Nestled in the rain forests and mountains of the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, it looks and feels small, but its actually more overpowered than anything else. It is overpowered by the sea, the trees and the mountains. Luke dropped them off at the William R. Fairchild International Airport before heading over to Seattle himself for a couple of days of fun in the Emerald City. Rob and Wendy were met by Wendy's parents, Tom and Erica. Rob thought it a bit pretentious for such a small and seemingly out-of-the-way airport to call itself an 'international' airport, but with Vancouver Island and Canada just across the straits of Juan de Fuca, there was probably as much traffic in and out of Canada from Port Angeles as there was to Seattle. They didn't do the stop for lunch routine here, they did the drive-through for lunch routine, cruising through a place called Frugals to pick up burgers, fries and milkshakes — a local institution Rob was told, and always Wendy's first stop whenever she got home. "I used to work there at the pick up window when I was in high school." Wendy said as they went through. "It's where I learned the advantages of showing a little cleavage." Wendy whispered into Rob's ear. "The tips were much better on the days I didn't wear a bra." Rob filed that little tidbit away. Perhaps it could come in handy when the boredom set in during the long journey to Jupiter. Home was just a short drive away from this stop. The Fellowes lived on Park Avenue. No Really! East Park Avenue, about halfway between the Olympic National Park Visitors Center and the Peninsula Golf Club. The four of them sat at the kitchen table and ate their burgers and had a chat that had familiar echoes of the one conducted over lunch just a few days ago in Fort Dodge. Rob found out very quickly that Tom was not Wendy's biological father. Erica and Wendy's biological father had divorced when she was three, and Erica had met and married Tom a few years later. Biological or not, Wendy obviously worshiped Tom, and proved that she was a genuine 'daddy's girl' multiple times during their stay there. Having grown up in Fort Dodge, Rob found the scenery breathtaking. It was quite a bit cooler here than it had been in Iowa, and the breeze, while seemingly as unending as the ones he was familiar with on the Iowa plains, was coming off the ocean and had a bite to it that he wasn't used to as well. "Windbreakers and sweaters are more than a fashion statement around here." Wendy told him. Rob took her advice, following her example, and for the next few days hiked, boated, fished and explored. Mr. Fellowes didn't have a boat, but he had a couple friends who did, so they got to go salt water fishing one day, freshwater fishing the last day, and threw in a little kayaking in between. While in Port Angeles they met Wendy's high school science teacher, her old boss at Frugals, two of her best friends from grade school, one of whom was now teaching at the school they had gone to, and several other locals of various levels of significance in her life. Wendy seemed to have deep roots in her home town, much deeper than the roots he had put down in Fort Dodge, Rob thought. He chalked it up to her more outgoing personality. When they left Port Angeles even their Obsidian pilot said he'd had fun in the pacific northwest! Rob 'tapped' Andy through the Q-net and let him know they were on their way. Once again it seemed they were scheduled to arrive around lunch time. The Calavaras County airport had turned into what people referred to as a 'hop and go'. A small, municipal airport that was almost exclusively devoted to small private and charter grav car traffic that used the road systems for local traffic and then hit a hop and go to make the transition to city-to-city or longer range medium and high altitude air corridors. Our transport wasn't designed for surface roads, so Andy and Cor met them there in an old minivan that was still using rubber tires! "It does have a fusion engine." Andy told me when I remarked on the tires. "Its not a total antique, but my grandparents bought it for doing just this sort of thing. Back in the day, my parents and their friends used to require a lot of hauling around, and then as the first few moves towards what would become Obsidian Research were happening, my Mom and Dad hauled a lot of people in and out of town. Wait until you see their 'normal' cars." The McKesson house was almost what you would call rustic. It actually sat on some farm acreage, though it didn't look like there was any farming going on. There was a two story wooden house with a wooden picket fence in the front and a garden and patio in the back. They met Andy's Grandmother Liz and Grandfather Gerald. The six of them ate lunch together on the patio, a seemingly simple salad with sun-dried tomatoes, cheese, bell peppers and homemade croûtons. It was accompanied by an amazing wine with an apparently antique and unreadable label that Grandma Liz called an 'imported Andy special'. They sat on the patio and watched Grandma Liz tend her garden while Andy and his Grandpa talked to them about money and the Pai Lung. "Rob, your piece of the Q-net is going to be huge, but your patents on the sensor technology are going to almost equal it in the long run." Andy said. "The entertainment and news industry are scrambling to adapt to the new technology, and it's also making waves in the search and rescue community. Especially in combination with Cor's new environment suits. Security firms and the military are gobbling the stuff up as well. "As part of the development deal you signed with the McKesson Group, You gave us power of attorney to act in certain limited ways. One of these ways was in setting up an LLC and other corporate structures to facilitate creating a platform for your future financial and business dealings. One thing we've done is to create a corporation to take ownership of the ship and associated assets for you." Mac, as Andy's grandfather preferred to be called, outlined the entire mechanism. The corporation was going to be jointly owned by McKesson Technologies and Rob Young. He would have 51% of the ownership equity. This allowed the ship and assets to be transferred to him without having to pay taxes on the literally billions of dollars of actual value. Over time Rob would buy more and more of the company, if I wanted to, until it was all his. The McKessons were willing to remain partners in it for as long as he wanted them. It was up to Rob to give it a name, and he chose something that would only make sense to Rob himself, calling it QuanTangle Research. More papers were signed and then, symbolically, Rob handed Andy a dollar. He could practically feel the surge of energy that ran through him during that simple act! Wendy was surprised when Rob's business talk was followed up with a little of her own. It turns out her power coupler ideas were a little more revolutionary than even she had guessed. Obsidian Technologies was licensing her coupler technology for use in all their fusion reactors, large and small. It was going to make for a nice steady income for her. They got the money issues settled and moved on into operational concerns. The items were many and varied. Among them was word that Commander Brenneman would not be staying with the ship, preferring to move back into the previous position he had been holding "It is pretty standard for the new owners of a commercial vessel to rename her." Mac told them. "Think about it." Their second day in Angel's Camp they played golf in the morning while it was cool, and then went sailing on New Melones Lake in the afternoon. Wendy was quieter than normal, had been since the day before. Rob was thinking that she was finally letting the impact of what they were about to do hit her. The Moons of Jupiter! Rob liked the little sailboat, and the waters of the lake were great this time of year. They pulled into a quiet little finger of water and went for a swim. They laid in the sun for a couple of hours, letting the warmth of the day soak in. Rob felt himself slip into that quiet, contemplative mode that he had found while he was in his space suit slowly letting the OPEE system bring him in to the moon base. Once again he was chasing tangled waveforms back and forth in his mind. These weren't really gravitic field structures though, but somehow he knew they contained them. They wrinkled and stretched and spun and coiled as he chased them through something he couldn't recognize. As Rob and the little tangles spun off through the unknown something, little bits and pieces sparked off and fell away. He chased the sparks and saw them fall back along whatever invisible and unknown path they had been on. They were falling back into other tangles, more familiar ones. He reached out to grab a piece of tangled whatever. Splash! He woke up with a wet face and the wind ruffling the sails. "Looks like we're getting a bit of weather." Andy called. "Cor and I'll get the sails up for the run back to the dock." "Have a nice nap?" Wendy asked as she kissed Rob's cheek and helped him sit up. "Yeah." He answered, giving her a kiss in return. Dinner in San Fransisco that night was at the Palio d'Asti. It was a favorite among the staff at the McKesson Group offices nearby. The top floor of the McKesson building was divided into suites for visiting staff, and they got a corner window right across the hall from Cor and Andy. That night Wendy took Rob in her arms and washed away the brightly colored tangles of his dream with a little tangling of their own. The four of them got to play tourist for the first half of the day. Riding the cable cars down to the Buena Vista Cafe for breakfast and then spent the rest of the morning wandering through Fisherman's Warf. Ghirardelli Square was the most fascinating to Rob, mostly for the history of it, and the story of its rescue from being turned into an apartment complex back in the 1960's. The Maritime Museum was cool as well, but they didn't have the time to give it the attention that it deserved. Most of the Wharf area was a little too commercial anyway, Rob thought. The rest of the crew met them for lunch at Alioto's, right on the docks. It was a well known landmark on its own, and Andy had reserved them a large table with a good view of the boats and the water. There was a little teasing from everyone when they found out that Rob and Wendy had spent their extra time visiting both sets of parents. "Looking pretty serious there Rob." Ike teased. Rob looked at Wendy, letting thoughts of her run through his head. He smiled as he did it and Wendy smiled even brighter as he did. "Yes, I think you're right." He told Ike. "You and DeeDee seem pretty cozy too, or am I wrong?" That managed to spread the teasing a little, and everyone spent an enjoyable lunch eating fresh crab and pasta. They were in a small banquet room, which still had a nice view of the docks, but despite the privacy, didn't talk business at all during lunch. They did do some reminiscing over the Mars trip, and their days in the dock at Nauru. With Ike, Mickey and Rob all at the table, the talk had to turn eventually to the Q-tap and the Q-Node system. "I can tell you that McKesson's various holdings, the McKesson Group, Obsidian Technologies, Guardian Gravitics, the entire spectrum of companies have adopted the Q-tap." Andy said. "From top to bottom they've switched completely. We are selling systems now that have already threatened to completely replace the two way radio for police, taxi, ambulance and other 'radio dispatch' systems across the world." "Didn't I see something on MSNBC the other night about the European Union voting on moving to the new system throughout Europe?" Chester Magill asked. "The phone system in most of the European countries is notoriously unreliable, though it has gotten better in the past twenty years or so as fusion reactors and fuel cells have made their power grids more stable." Fred Wassermann commented. "They would love to find a solution that doesn't have to take the old infrastructure into account, I'm sure." "There will be a lot of resistance in some countries to this." Victor Emanoff said. "The Q-taps cannot be monitored. Every conversation is utterly private and undetectable. Governments that like to spy on their citizens, or who keep long lists of those foreign governments they want to listen in on will not be happy." "Our government will not be happy, but it will not be as bad as it was when our grandparents were our age." Coretta Ramirez added. "It will make the drug lords happy." Alexandra spat. "Perhaps it will." Andy answered. "But Rob's other big invention, the Sensor array, is already being used to flush them out of hiding within the mountains and jungles where they brew their evil." That idea was where they picked up the conversation after finishing lunch and moving themselves, en masse, to the McKesson building. "There will be unintended and unanticipated consequences to your inventions, actions and discoveries." Andy told them. "Do not let concerns over consequences sway you. You are explorers, discoverers, inventors and builders. Do those things while you can and let good people back home worry about shepherding civilization past the rough spots that might result." They were a room full of bright people, and they all had some spark of creativity to varying degrees, though Victor Emanoff might disagree with his being including in that assessment. The group could have tossed the philosophical side of life and living around for hours, but that's not why they were here, Rob thought, starting to chafe a little, tugging at the bit, so to speak. "Folks, lets get down to business, shall we?" Andy announced suddenly. Everyone settled down immediately. 'Maybe I wasn't the only one who'd been thinking it was time to get busy!' Rob thought. "Since we all saw each other a few weeks ago, I have indeed sold the Pai Lung. It is now owned by QuanTangle Research, a Limited Liability Corporation whose majority owner is Rob Young." Andy paused there for a second to sweep the room with an evil grin. "I hear that Rob might be hiring. Anyone looking for an exciting job in outer space?" ------- Chapter 4: The Jovian Jungles are Missing Rob may have taken ownership of the Pai Lung, but he didn't buy the shipyard at Nauru. That was owned by McKesson Aerospace, the company that had been created to build and operate it. Plans were in the works for an actual space dock, but at the moment the shipyard at Nauru was the only place in the world where his ship could get itself refitted and resupplied. They were renting the space for now, as part of the support contract that paid for the refit and resupply. Rob was sure he was getting outrageously good deals on everything. Andy really wanted him to succeed, and so did the rest of his family and business associates. Contract or not, they were due to be evicted in sixty days, because McKesson Aerospace was set to begin building a new ship for the European space Agency, to be used for Lunar and inner system exploration. She was only going to be two thirds the size of the Pai Lung, and would be built in half the time. They were scrambling to get things tested, tightened up and resupplied. Their two transports were going through refits as well. Some of this involved retuning and modifying some of the systems based on what they had learned during the Mars expedition, but most of that had been done during the trip and only needed documenting. Some were new. One of the things they thought to do was exponentially expand the capabilities of the fabrication shop. They were going to be too far away to ask for someone to send a spare part if they discovered a need. They doubled the size of the shop and added a dozen more large tools for cutting, bending, and shaping metal. Rob's own Princess Nuts & Bolts took care of most of that. She was as familiar as anyone with machining parts and the equipment needed. Brian Conroy had quite a bit of experience as well, but most of his was from working in the family business. They fabricated the parts for those huge trash compactors that they used in malls and shopping centers. Between the two of them they had a handle on what would be needed to rebuild just about anything on the ship, with the possible exception of the fusion reactor cores. They were actually able to beat the sixty day requirement by seventeen days, and did it by doing the last of the resupply from orbit. What did it matter whether the supply transports were landing at Nauru or in our landing bays? Rob got to do more duty as a transport pilot, but only because he put his foot down as the owner. He was probably not going to get much chance once they got where they were going, and he really liked piloting the transports. One thing that had been modified pretty heavily on both transports, as well as the ship itself were the gravity drive maneuvering control engines. The problem with a single point gravity drive is that there is only one point of reference for controlling movement. The Gravity drive gives the entire ship total control in the x, y, and z planes, but only for the ship as a whole. Unlike aircraft on Earth, you do not use the actual edges of the ship as control surfaces to allow for banking, turning or spinning. To accomplish this, smaller maneuvering gravity engines were used. There were two rings of them at the nose and stern of the ship as well as dozens of others situated at key locations up and down the length of the ship. The two transports had similar arrangements, and between these engines and the control software which had been developed and tuned over the course of our time on and in orbit around Mars, had become very sophisticated. As long as we didn't exceed the limits of the inertial compensators, the ships, and the transports especially, could do anything any earth-based fighter could do, as far as maneuvers went, and quite a few things they couldn't. Symbolically, Yuri Stepanovich and Rob flew as pilots on the last transport flights up to the ship prior to breaking orbit. As the two transports approached the landing bay, Rob called out on the system wide channel that would reach everything except personal Q-taps and restricted subnets. "Hawking, Hawking this is Viking One, requesting clearance to land in docking bay two." "Viking One, this is the Stephen W. Hawking, you have clearance to land." Came Victor Emanoff's voice over the same channel. That was it, Rob's understated way of telling the world what he had named the ship, and to offer a quite measure of respect and a salute to the man all of them in the labs thought of as the godfather of us all. "Hawking, Hawking, this is Beagle Two, requesting clearing to land in docking bay one." Yuri called out in the same fashion as soon as the channel was clear. "Beagle Two, Beagle Two, Hawking grants clearance. Welcome aboard." Renaming the two transports after two of the Martian probes was just a way to give the ship and crew a small sense of history. They were barely on board and still in the transports when a new message came over the system-wide channel again. "All Hands, All hands, Report to stations and prepare to get under way." It was Owen Gardner, the chief navigator. Rob was changed and on the bridge an hour later, and it was his turn again to break into the system wide channel. "Attention all ground stations and ships in space. This is the Exploratory vessel Stephen W. Hawking, breaking orbit." There wasn't enough orbital traffic yet to make such declarations necessary, but the traffic was increasing and the ships were being built. The exchanges would change, solidify into formalities eventually, but for now it was just a proud announcement to a somewhat wide-eyed world. ------- If you use the 'average distance from the Sun' figures most commonly used, Mars is 48 million miles further from the Sun than the Earth. Jupiter is 390 million miles further from the sun than the Earth. This calculates out to Jupiter being a distance of 8.125 times further from Earth than Mars. This didn't mean that it was going to take 8.125 times as long to get there. The Hawking would be able to really build up some speeds on a run this long. The second generation of inertial compensators were also improved and more finely tuned. Their acceleration curve was going to be steeper, as would be the deceleration curve when we got there. The Hawking didn't have a near-optimal orbital alignment as the Pai Lung did for the Mars trip, but it wasn't at the far end of the bad spectrum either. five months out and four months back was what was anticipated. They would gain a considerable closing of the distance between Earth and Jupiter in the six weeks they anticipated being 'on station'. The crew were once again the beneficiaries of prearranged entertainment broadcasts from Earth. For now that meant movies, television and sports, mostly baseball and soccer, as well as European basketball leagues. American football and basketball would kick in during the trip out. It was a mixed bag and depended on what you liked, if you even liked sports at all. They would be watching perhaps the world's most extensive and expensive Olympics broadcast on the return trip, as the coming year was an Olympic one. They were getting feeds from pretty much every broadcast outfit in the world that was covering it. There was a lot of international flavor in the crew, though it was still predominantly an English speaking one. The Spanish, Russian and Chinese broadcasts would be widely watched. Everything else would have to be defined as a niche market. A month out, the Beagle Two transport got moved over to the other landing bay. With the two transports doubled up in one bay, there was an area large enough to stage soccer, arena football and basketball events. They had their own stage, and those with a mind to were able to stage plays, perform recitals, and tell jokes. The open mike night for comedians became quite popular. Rob even tried it one night, but I discovered quickly, almost as quickly as the audience, that he had no comedic talent. Over a beer later at the Cantina, the ship's carefully monitored and regulated bar, Fred Wassermann had the best quip at Rob's expense. "Rob, we who know and love you are sure that you have some comedic talent, even Wendy. Sadly, humor is hard to detect at the quantum level." Fred could afford to make jokes, he was one of the people who had gotten a lot of compliments over his open mike night efforts. Rob took the ribbing with a smile and moved on. Rob did discover some actual adequacy on the stage, when Mickey Brooks talked him into taking a small part in a play the systems crew was putting on. Unlike some of the plays by well known authors being performed by the theater enthusiasts, this was a home-brewed script, written by one of the electricians during the Mars trip. It was a farce revolving around the Martians who spent their time cleverly avoiding the pesky Earthling visitors while at the same time behaving in ways that represented the basest and crudest behavior of people on Earth. Rob had a very minor part, a precondition of his participation, and only one line of dialog, in which he said in as annoyingly British an accent as he could manage, "Water, water, water! They're so obsessed with finding water on Mars, while all we are hoping to find is a good pint of bitter!" Yes, the entire thing was just that much of a groaner, and the audiences ate it up! Perhaps Rob and others focused their thoughts on the social side of the journey out because the actual work time was so comparatively quiet and boring. Bridge duties were very regimented and fraught with ritual and formula, Rob found. Really, that was the most effective way to make sure procedures were done correctly and things were not missed. Drills and exercises occupied most of our time when they weren't actually staring at a monitor or reading data on their suit comm displays. The big difference between running exercises and drills was that drills were designed to imprint procedures into you thoroughly enough that you could do them almost without thinking. Exercises were done to continually remind you that thinking was required anyway. At least half the emergency exercises presented situations that could not be solved by sticking absolutely to the learned routines or procedures. Rob used to curse the fiendish natures of those who devised the exercises, at length and in detail. Until Captain Emanoff appointed him to the executive committee that designed them. The highlight of Rob's command crew time happened nine weeks out when they were 'hit' by an object larger than the typical micro-bodies that were continually deflected by the ship's shields. 'Hit' meant that the object impacted the gravitic deflector shield and was of a size or had a velocity sufficient to require the grav shield to draw reserve power from the shield generators when it was deflected. The power draw was at a high enough rate to cause the alarm circuit to trip. Analysis of the automatic sensor recordings, tripped by the energy flare of the object being vaporized against the shields, suggested that the body's composition had been the typical carbonaceous type most common among asteroidal bodies. This was the extend of their interaction with the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter during the trip out. Unlike in the movies, the asteroid belt was still mostly empty space, and not a lot of dodging was involved, even at the speed they were traveling at. What they encountered might not have even been an actual asteroidal body. It could have been in a free orbit, or one of those rare hypothetical free bodies from outside the solar system completely. Not having caught it on the sensors prior to impact, there was no way for them to tell. Odds were it was asteroidal, but that was it. All they were left with was spectrographic data and percentages. The lab crew painted Jupiter and its moons pretty thoroughly with their sensors as they traveled. Every bit of data acquired on the way was potentially useful. They were also using the sensors to find and closely track all the smaller moons of Jupiter. They were going to have to keep themselves out of the way of all these smaller moons as the ship moved in and around the orbits of the larger moons and the planet itself. There were a total of sixty three known moons orbiting Jupiter, and when the Hawking began her return to Earth we wanted the same number to be there. They were gathering as much data as they could before they got close because they were not absolutely certain what the intense levels of radiation and magnetic interference from Jupiter would do to the sensors. Rob's theories suggested there would be little in the way of interference, unless there were quantum level interference sources that we couldn't detect remotely. All that data came to him, and he spent at least half his working time ignoring it. Rob spent the bulk of his 'free' duty hours in the lab playing with the little random blips that his research sensors caught now and then. That and just thinking. He had to drop his senses and his thoughts back into that place where his quantum fields lived and see what he could see, but it wasn't easy to find that place. There have been a lot of attempts, since quantum effects were first observed and quantum theories proposed, to explain existence in a way that made these quantum effects understandable. There were still some theories out there which offered possibilities that Rob could support to varying degrees. String theory, at least the modern equivalent of it, was one, but even it didn't feel right, so he chased those things around in his dreams too, and in his lab. Rob had managed to wrangle some observable quantum phenomenon into performing in a repeatable and understandable fashion, but he still couldn't explain it at a level that neatly tied it into the rest of human understanding of how the universe works. ------- "Hi! My name is Wendy Fellowes, and I'm a genius' girlfriend." Okay, there was no support group or twelve step program on board, but sometimes I felt like I needed one. Space was an environment in which Rob seemed to thrive. A part of him seemed more alive. Bloomed, I would be tempted to say. But that same part of him, once opened up, seemed to keep him from sleeping easily and quietly. On Earth, he had 'active dreams', beyond what I would call normal, though I'm obviously not qualified to draw conclusions from that observation. In space, those nights became much more frequent. He became physically less energetic during the day. Coming to rest more quickly, often content to sit perfectly still and reflective for hours at a time. He was the complete opposite once he was asleep. His dreams were filled with flashes of thought, glimpses of ideas, motes of theory and islands of unexplained images. In his dreams he chased these things far more physically than he did while awake. It was almost becoming a danger to sleep in the same bed with him. All I could do was offer him encouragement and reassurance when I felt he needed it, and move to the other bed when it got bad. I was learning to get by on much less sleep than I had though. Thank God for that! I woke every morning before Rob and slid into bed with him, so I would be in his arms when he woke up. Rob was very often quite glad to see me when he woke up, and I was then quite glad I had been there. There are sacrifices and rewards to everything in life, and Rob Young, awake, energized and horny in the morning was one of my rewards! Aside from my self-appointed Rob Young observation duties, I spent most of the outbound trip working with Saalih Jaffre and Coretta Ramirez designing a new tool for Europa. We designed, built and were dying to test the solar system's first gravitic ice boring tool. We had a platform, very much looking like a missile, that projected twin tube shaped gravitic fields in front of it. The outer gravitic tube served as a barrier and support while the second field served as a cutting head and conduit for high yield infrared radiation fed through a series of de-couplers that siphoned and converted the energy straight from the platform's fusion reactor. Thanks to embedded q-tap controls and data transmitters, our boring tool was wireless. I was very sad that Jocelin Walsh was not with us, and yet I understood that there had been an uncomfortable tension between the three of us. I was able to relax a little without worrying about having to compete for Rob's attention. I occasionally caught a hint of jealousy here and there, but as often as not it was over some work accomplishment rather than over my status as girlfriend of the ship's owner. I took more advantage of the recreational activities at first than Rob did. I ran and swam daily as well as singing in the ship's choir. It became apparent that Rob was falling out of the habit of getting any exercise, so I stepped in and along with the MIT gravy geeks, Arne Walker and Yuri Stepanovich, got him back on track. He ran with me every morning, and we swam together a couple times a week. We both signed up for meditation and martial arts classes, taught by one of the cooks, an old hand at both skills. I was the one who talked him into trying open mike night. That was a mistake, though in a sense it worked out well, because it let people see just how human Rob could be. I talked him into joining the choir with me, once he was done with his play. He had a fine voice, though he had never learned how to read music. It was a sign of just how much different Rob's mind was from most of us when he taught himself to sight read sheet music in three weeks. ------- Getting dressed down by one's girlfriend for being a slacker is embarrassing enough, but then to be accused of being too competitive, practically in the same breath, is too much. Rob had been letting the physical side of life slide a little, and getting back into running and swimming was a no-brainer, once he'd had his head removed from his ass. The other social activities had been great, minus the aforementioned open mike night. It was not Rob's fault if he took to the meditation and tae kwon do classes like a duck to water. The instructor, or Sabum, 'Chesty' Price was, for a cook, one hell of an old soldier. That was the impression Rob got. He suspected Chesty was hired as much for those skills as he was for his cooking. He was also one of those guys, like Victor Emanoff, and even Doctor Fylakas back on Earth, that struck Rob as older than their appearance. Both disciplines were just the thing for him. He needed to focus, and both were all about focus. Rob began using the meditation techniques to help him in the lab when he was working on the mystery blips. With six weeks still to go before they were in their initial orbit around Callisto, Rob decided he needed a more isolated environment in which to examine his blips. He went looking for someone in the lab who could build a platform on which he could replicate the Hawking's power core and drive assembly, as well as duplicates of all his research sensor arrays and diagnostic tools. In the end most of the physical designs were stolen from the Europa ice borer that Wendy, Saalih and Coretta had designed. Their design already included the drive and fusion combination Rob needed, and he swapped out their de-couplers and grav field generators for his sensor arrays and diagnostic gear. He had to double the size of the entire thing in any case, because the ice borer didn't include any room for passengers. Rob felt a need to be isolated with his gear, not watching it remotely. As that bit of redesign was being done in the modeler, he had a thought. "You know Wendy, if you guys took my mods and extended them a bit, keeping things in this missile shape you started with, you would have a pretty handy ice boring-submarine-kinda ship." Wendy looked for a moment like she'd been hit by a bus, but then Rob got a grin and a kiss, followed by an affectionate punch in the arm. "You caught us thinking small I guess. We'll build both, just in case we find an environment the 'submarine' will be at home in." Rob's Sensor Isolation and Signal Intercept platform was enthusiastically abbreviated to SISI, and everyone immediately began calling it the 'sissy cart'. Funny thing though how Rob couldn't find anyone who wanted to spend a second shift in her. Not that he was looking for volunteers. Whatever it was he thought he was looking for, nobody else on board would recognize it. He wasn't even sure that he would. Rob got five weeks of solid observations in before he had to stop. The interference from the Jovian system was starting to wash out everything in a sea of static and stray energy. The lab crew spent the last two weeks staring at the sensors and grabbing every bit of data they could. Finally, the strengthening of the gravitic drives output needed for deceleration, and the increased energy output of the inertial compensators kicking in started washing out the sensor inputs and they had to shut down the high definition data capture units and let the nav systems have most of the remaining bandwidth. The Hawking pulled into a parking orbit around Callisto within ten minutes of the estimated arrival time. They could have fudged their deceleration and adjustment vectors to put themselves there on the second, but Captain Emanoff said that being so precise was an easy spoof to spot, and sent the wrong signals to those back home. The folks back home were getting the signals too. Big time! Once they were in a stable orbit inside the Jovian EM field, they were able to tune the Q-Net transceiver nodes to compensate, and their signal, which had been degrading as they got closer and closer to Jupiter, was once again back to its normal self. Tectonically, Callisto is the least active of the four Galilean moons. It was also the one with the most unexpected surprises when scientists began looking at the data sent back by the Galileo Spacecraft flybys back in 1996 and 1997. The data suggests that there's an ocean, a salty ocean sandwiched between the moon's frozen icy crust and its core. They were not, however, going to try digging through two hundred kilometers of icy crust looking for an inner sea. They were going to plant some hardened seismographic units on the surface, do some up-close, high powered x-ray probes, and if things worked out, they were going to try to use the intense Jovian EM field in which Callisto was trapped to do some sort of magnetic resonance imaging. They were going to use Jupiter herself as the MRI machine. Whether it would even work or not, depended on too many things, including some sensor sensitivity parameters that no one was sure could be reached with the current gear. Or any gear for that matter. They were going to take this opportunity to put a transport down on its surface and get in a little walking around time. At only 0.126g, the walking would not be easy. Despite its size, Callisto's mass was less even than the moon's! The professional and semi-professional science teams made runs to Asgard and Valhalla, the two large impact basins that are Callisto's most visible features. Core samples were taken. Lots and lots of core samples. The thin but existent carbon dioxide atmosphere was measured. It was negligible, but there. Rob spent most of his time in orbit, in the SISI, tuning and filtering and listening. There were not a lot of surprises. There had been a lot of good science done by people over the years, and a lot of the data from the Galileo mission had produced pretty firm data on the moons, which the Hawking was now confirming. About the only thing they were able to shed a better light on was that inner ocean, and even that was going to have to wait for a dedicated expedition to answer definitively. The data, and they were getting reams of it, suggested that Callisto had an inner slushy, more than an inner sea. The official word from those folks on board who knew about such things was that it was not a truly liquid ocean, but a semi-liquid 'slush'. Its state was maintained in this state, somewhere between frozen and liquid, by the influence of Jupiter's EM field. This theory was no more solid than the one which said there was a true liquid sea under the crust, both scenarios fit the data. They left it to those who came after us to answer it definitively. Still, they spent eight days exploring Callisto and from orbit, the near Jovian neighborhood. Ganymede was the next stop. The largest moon in the solar system. Still, its surface gravity was not that much greater than Callisto's, and still less than the Moon's. What Ganymede had that made it exciting was a magnetic field. It was the only moon in the solar system to have one. That made for more tuning and filtering for Rob, up in orbit, but the science crew were all a-twitter over it. Like Callisto, Ganymede had a lot of ice. It too might have a water ocean somewhere beneath its crust, but there seemed to be less interest in that. Because there was true tectonic activity here, the terrain offered some more interesting wrinkles — almost literally. But the mostly icy nature of the surface once again prevented any truly inspiring surface features. Despite the novelty of a magnetic field, and the slight, ever-so-slight oxygen atmosphere, probably caused by molecular breakdown of the surface ice into its component hydrogen and oxygen atoms, with the much lighter hydrogen then simply not being heavy enough to stick around, Callisto was no cornucopia of breathtaking discoveries. Core samples were dug, measurements made and sensor and telemetry platforms set in place and in orbit. They spent six days on Ganymede, which was one day less than was spent on Callisto. There was not a high level of 'fun' involved here, and it would have probably been completely fun-free for Rob, except for discovering that Peter London, one of the original lab rats from Hawaii, had a 'secret' project that he was working on. Rob flew pilot for him in one of the transports to take pictures. Peter told him he had taken the same picture on Callisto and planned to do the same on Europa when they landed there, and Io too, if it was decided that it was safe enough to land. Since the four Galilean moons were tidally locked, with the same side always facing Jupiter, there was always a place, or really a band of them, where you could take a picture showing Jupiter looming over the moon's horizon. Peter had a high resolution, large format digital camera that he was using to take this same picture on each moon. They followed the band, looking for the most dramatic shots available, and Peter set himself up and took large series of pictures at each of a couple dozen locations. "I got a book for my birthday when I was twelve." Peter said over a beer in the Cantina. "Visions of Space" by David A Hardy. The book is full of space 'scenery' paintings by artists from before the space age and after. The cover particularly was what I remembered, showing an eruption on Io, with Jupiter visible on the horizon." "So when you knew you were coming on this trip, you decided you had to try and capture that image you had in your mind's eye all these years?" "Exactly. I'll be a happy camper if its the only thing I bring back with me from this trip. What's the phrase? 'Worth the price of admission', I think?" "Exactly. Good luck, and I'd love to have a complete set of the pictures when you're done." Rob said. "A lot of people back on Earth probably will too. Guard your data!" They both laughed over that, because the cry 'guard your data!' was a bit of a mock call amongst the lab rats whenever Rob asked about reconfiguring the sensor array. In any case, he promised Peter he'd be available to chauffeur him around on Europa, and even Io if it was possible. When someone decides someday to establish a permanent presence in Jovian space, Callisto or Ganymede seem ideal. There were some theorists who suggested that the human body begins to develop problems living for extended periods outside of a magnetic field. That suggests Ganymede would be best for long term stays, but there was limited evidence at this point to support that theory. If it proved untrue, then it was a wash. The other differences were too small to matter for the most part. Rob's guess was that long term, we would wind up with bases on both moons. With artificial gravity available, they didn't even need to be on one of the moons at all. On to Europa! There was a long period of time, before Hubble and the Galileo flyby, when it was thought that Europa might be solid ice. This was due mostly to Europa's extremely high albedo. The quick and dirty explanation of albedo is to say it measures how reflective a body is. Europa's albedo is 66%, compared to Earth's 30%. The winner for high albedo in the solar system though is Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, at an incredible 99%. Enceladus was yet another of the 'ice moons' of the outer planets. Someone was probably going to go poking around there sometime down the road. The Saturnian system was too appealing generally, and Enceladus' almost perfect reflectivity was a magnet to geeky minds like mine. At the moment, Rob's geeky mind was once again snuggly nestled in the SISI. He had finally found a repeatable pattern to the blips he was able to detect, and was busy finding and measuring blips. The key was in the alignment of the fusion reactor, the gravity engine and the sensor's quantum signal pickup fields. In his mind now Rob saw it as being inside three impenetrable shells, and each shell had a slit that allowed energy and information to pass through. The only time he got a blip was when all three shells were oriented so that their slits were aligned and pointing at an energy source. The 'slits' weren't really a physical thing of course. They were the visual representation in my mind for the narrow band of tuning, frequency, whatever it is, that allows the information through. You could think of it like tuning a radio too, if you wanted, except that you had three interdependent radios that all had to be tuned correctly, and in relation to each other before you could hear the music. Rob was drawing crude pictures in his mind, but the pictures were getting better and better. It was going to take time and study. He was already feeling the SISI's inadequacy. He was going to have to make himself something bigger. Something he could spend longer stretches of time in. Other than the trip with Peter to get his pictures, Rob spent his time in orbit around Europa in the SISI, or back in the lab working with Yuri Stepanovich, Brian Conroy and 'Zoo' Shimizu on his next generation SISI. He spent as much time with the three of them as he did in the SISI, and in the end, they had something very workable, but impossible to build themselves without appropriating all the resources aboard the Hawking. Rob tapped Arne Walker and Morrie Scheufelt back on Earth through the Q, and asked them to build it for him. Europa was interesting, but not that much different than Callisto or Ganymede had been, on the surface. Wendy and Saalih's Ice Borer was a bit of a bust. It really needed a surface that was more completely ice than what we found. The borer would get hung up on every piece of solid rock it came across. They never got it deeper than a few hundred meters, and the Hawking had to be satisfied with leaving the usual assortment of instrument platforms and sensor arrays in, on and orbiting the moon. Europa got its own Q-node satellite, as the others had, tied into the main orbital nodes orbiting Callisto, and then it was time to move on to Io. Io was as different from the other three Galilean moons as night from day. Its makeup was thought to be more like those of the inner planets, with an iron core and a molten rock interior. Sulfur and Sulfur Dioxide were present in great quantities, definitely due to the high level of volcanic activity. The crew of the Hawking was quickly able to give an almost complete confirmation of that data. They had a lot of things to look at on Io. It orbited Jupiter in just under two days, so Rob was able to get Peter his picture taking opportunity very quickly, despite having to be concerned about Io quakes and eruptions. Io may have been the most tectonically active object in the solar system, but that didn't mean the entire surface was constantly unstable. Though it wasn't the largest Jovian moon, it was the densest, and had a higher surface gravity than the moon, the only one of the Galilean moons that did. A pity they were so afraid to spend extended time afoot, but then again, everyone was happy doing flyovers of the dozens of active volcanoes they found and dropping grav shielded probes down into them. Can you say 'data rich environment'? They could definitely confirm by the end of the week that Io had real lava volcanoes and a magnetic field. Its field was weak, and horribly meshed into Jupiter's own field, so it was a big candidate for long term readings and data collection. The grav shielded volcano probes were unofficially called 'Pachinko Probes', and they had benefited from the lessons learned from Wendy and Saalih's efforts on Europa. They were designed to drive themselves down into a volcano's magma chamber and just 'bounce' off of anything too hard to push through, forcing themselves to 'drop' further and further down, just like a pachinko ball. Unfortunately, because they had to be a certain size to carry sufficient shield generators and a fusion reactor to power them, they seldom made it far. One standout probe, later fondly given the nickname 'Deep Throat', made it two miles down before it became stymied and stopped trying to find a way down. It sat there for six days sending back sensor data before a shift in the surrounding crust closed the magma pocket it was in with sufficient force to overcome the shield generators. They had been getting ready for a serious event like this, and had damped the reactor down to just above threshold state and then set the automatic trips to go off at the first sign of shield failure. They must've pegged it right, because the trips fired in enough time to shut the reactor down, and there was no spectacular sub-Ionian explosion from a reactor breach. The ship spent another two weeks doing follow ups, revisits and gear checks. All that time busily painting Jupiter itself with sensor sweep after sensor sweep and sending probe after probe as deep into its atmosphere as possible. The shields on their probes were good, but not good enough to survive the intense pressures deep in the Jovian atmosphere. Once again though, the term was data rich. Things had gone so smoothly, with the most serious injury being caused by a grease fire in the kitchen two weeks into the flight, that the idea of extending the trip by making a stop at Ceres on the way back got tossed around. The orbits just didn't make sense though. They would have had to go clear across the entire solar system to catch Ceres, and it was the only body of interest to anyone on the return trip. Venus would have been easier to get to, so it was decided that with everyone satisfied with what we had, it was time to head for home. The Hawking had just spent six weeks in the Jovian system, and had left instrumentation and communications gear on and around all four Galilean moons. Jupiter and its 'moons of interest' were now wired, bugged and monitored as thoroughly as could be managed. We broke orbit and headed for home. Rob spent all the free time Wendy would let him get away with in the SISI in the first couple of months of the trip back. He had enough data now to begin writing a few test equations to try and get some predictive testing in, but the equations would have to be translated into software reprogramming, sensor filter routines and changes to the automated tracking systems. Rob wouldn't be able to get that done without the simulators and modelers back on Earth. He made a note to himself to include a request to have those systems added to his lab on the Hawking, and then packed the SISI away. He wasn't going to spend anymore time sitting in the dark of space listening for blips. Blips he had. Understanding he didn't, at least not yet. Instead, he decided to spend the last two months of the trip romancing his girlfriend. Rob made her dinner and took her to plays. They watched the Olympics together, and swam, ran, and even ice skated once someone got a hair-brained idea to flood a compartment and then freeze the water. They took a cooking class and continued their tae kwan do. Rob had Plans to make for his blips and the future. He had plans to make for Wendy and the future. It was time to work on the Wendy factor! ------- Chapter 5: Out of the Deep Dark Empty There were some surprises waiting when the Hawking got home. The first of them was Infinity Station. Arne Walker and Morrie Scheufelt had gotten NASA, Roskosmos, CNSA and ESA cooperation, under UN auspices, to join forces and finance and build Earth's first space dock. Of course, the state of things being what they were, Obsidian Aerospace was the contractor hired to do the actual construction. The work was only 40% complete at this point, but the basic dock functionality was already up and running as was the Reception bay and its associated restaurant and lounge, called Eternity. The amenities had been left for last, in an effort to have it ready in time for our return. Remember Space Station V, the space station in the old Stanley Kubrik classic 2001: a Space Odyssey? Well picture that pair of wheels, but with the second wheel not connected physically to the first, but instead locked together by something new, the GravLoc™ tractor field!. The brainchild of Dave Hamlin, it was yet the latest development out of the MIT Gravy Geeks that expanded the practical applications of gravitic field generation. The Hawking's navcom tied right into the station's docking routines — again by design, they knew The Hawking was coming and knew what she had. Under Infinity's control she nosed right up to the hub and then the second wheel slid in behind us and blink! They found themselves wrapped in a gravity shield! Infinity Station had been built with the Hawking's dimensions in mind, and then 'padded' another 30%, for a little growing room. If a ship needed a serious refit, an Earth normal atmosphere and shirtsleeve environment could be pumped in, in a matter of a day. As it was, even the aluminum hull could be checked if need be. A platform with a docking sleeve, reminiscent of the movable jetways that they used at airports, extended out to match up with the forward access port. When they walked out of the docking sleeve into the reception bay, they were met by the four 'Lords of Infinity' as they were being called by the media these days, Arne Walker, Morrie Scheufelt, Alexei Baranov and Chen Hsu. The four of them were sporting very big grins, and there were hugs all around. "Quite the surprise!" Rob said to Arne. "I'm not sure how you managed it, given all the feeds we were getting from the media." "Call it the world's last great conspiracy." Morrie answered. "We filtered all your feeds before they hit the Q-net so we could have our fun." "It took some serious negotiations with a bunch of governments and networks to get approval." Alexei added. "But there seems to be a lot of good will floating around this little globe now that the people living on it see themselves moving beyond it into a larger reality." There was a small ceremony, more for the folks on the planet below than anything else, celebrating the docking with Infinity Station. The Hawking was officially the first ship to use the new facility, and a plaque was unveiled commemorating our arrival. Morrie Scheufelt spoke representing the station, and he was something of a compelling speaker. The current Secretary-General of the United Nations, Huelwen Madoc, spoke, in English tinged with a lively Welsh accent, and then, fortunately for Rob, it was Captain Emanoff who was asked to speak. Finally they all stood for a group picture. When it was done, Arne and the rest of the Infinity brain trust grabbed Wendy and Rob and a few others and whisked them off to a private conference room. Rob got to sit and drink a cup of coffee in a private room just off the Eternity Cafe with the four of them as well as Wendy, Captain Emanoff and the Gravy Geek crew members, Yuri, Nat, Traci Audra and Chester Magill. They talked about the trip, the sights, the feel of it all and in turn they got caught up on the past year on Earth. Rob discovered he was woefully out of touch with the events and happenings on Earth compared to the rest of them. Most everyone else had at least a sense of what had gone on during our absence, and except for the Olympic results, I was mostly unaware. While they were getting the VIP treatment, the 'loot' from Jupiter was being offloaded by the crew. All the soil and rock samples were being routed to the new labs at Aristarchus Base. It was going to be the initial drop off point for all extraterrestrial samples, in no small part due to concerns over contamination, 'foreign organisms' and other even more paranoid worries. There didn't really seem to be anything to worry about. Later more focused missions to the icy moons of Jupiter could concentrate on looking for life deep in the wet crusts of Europa and Ganymedede. As for the Hawking, they had found no signs of life whatsoever. They might have had to sit through an endless series of ceremonies and parades once they got back to Earth, but the crew was a bit too international and widely scattered for that, and other than a very quick and unofficial get-together at MIT for the Gravy Geek contingent, the celebrations on Earth were mostly private and personal affairs for each person, once they got to where they thought of as home. Rob discovered there wasn't really a place on Earth that he immediately thought of as 'home', not even Fort Dodge. After a brief stopover in Boston to check with the McKesson Group legal and financial teams, whose offices were there, it was time to decide where to go. Wendy headed back home to Port Angeles, and Rob promised to meet her there in a couple days. Arne was going to take him to see his new and improved SISI, though Rob had plans for another name. The new ship was small enough to have been built in a traditional shipyard, and Arne and Morrie picked a small outfit with a name Rob fell in love with immediately. Erie Precision Fabricators was in Conneaut, Ohio. The Lake Erie location was unimportant, but the area was rich in experienced metalworkers and it was out of the way. "I kinda just picked it out of a hat. The days of hardship from the collapse of the steel and coal industries in the great lakes area are not completely over, and since this kind of work isn't location sensitive anymore, I wanted to pick a place with a depressed economy." Arne said. They flew in that afternoon and met Tom Standaahl, the Project supervisor. Tom was retired navy out of the Norfolk Naval Yard, and had spent thirty years supervising the building of a variety of naval vessels. He was a loud, grinning bowling ball with legs, but Arne swore he had eyes in the back of his head and a BS detector that would make any college professor proud. "We're doing our own training for all the new stuff, and stealing people from MIT as fast as they can graduate them." Morrie said. "Your little flying space lab is our proof-of-concept craft, and once we've got it up and flying, we'll start fielding orders." "We've fattened the bank accounts of some of the original lab staff from Nauru, hiring them to train people here to work with all the new technologies. Some of our people will be moving into full time teaching/training positions down the road and then we'll contract back the training services to the McKesson folks, both on Nauru and elsewhere." Arne said. "The McKesson people are sure not shy about sharing the wealth." "When you stop and think about how well they must be doing, with all the technological and financial assets they have control of, it shouldn't be surprising. And don't forget, they're privately held. They have stockholders, but they don't have to worry about squeezing every drop of profit out of everything they do." "So you're going to compete head-to-head with the McKesson folks out on Nauru?" I asked. "Well, not so much as you'd think." Arne answered. "They've got five years worth of orders already backlogged, and they're building two more construction platforms just like the one we used for the Pai Lung. If they stick just to governmental requests they'll never run out of work." "We plan on sticking strictly to the commercial and scientific crowds." Morrie added. "MIT is third on our list after you. They want a flying classroom and are willing to pay for it." "It seems that there are quite a few recently wealthy alums making substantial donations to the Physics department these days." Arne said with a grin. "Imagine that." Rob grinned back. Considering what he had given to Carnegie Mellon, and imagining what Arne, Morrie, Yuri and the rest of the Gravy Geeks might have given to MIT, the physics department must be swimming in cash! "We hear they're negotiating to lease some lab space at Aristarchus Base." Arne added. The conversation stopped there, because they finally walked out into the fabrication hangar and there was Rob's new ship! She was a third shorter than the Hawking's transports, but she was half again as wide and twice as deep. She didn't have as big of a cargo door either, only two standard personnel hatches and a utility hatch that could handle large equipment. She would have almost looked like a Borg cube from the old Star Trek movies, but she was a little longer in one dimension, and her corners were deeply rounded. She also had a much smoother hull than a Borg cube, except for two huge flat spots at each end of the long axis where Rob could slap on external modules for power or whatever he needed. She was a truck. "Three more weeks and she'll be ready for space trials." Tom said with pride in his voice. They spent an afternoon going over the plans, but the only changes were the new equipment Rob had thought of including since sending them the original specs and a few slight modifications, needed to coexist with some of the newly developing standards being built around the GravLoc system. Rob found sources for the new equipment via the Q-net and ordered it 'live' the same way. The purchase was tied to the unique id of my Q-tap. They spent just a little time then making sure they all agreed on how and where things would be added. "What about Dave's tractor beam setup?" Rob asked Arne and Morrie on the flight back to Boston. "Can we retrofit the Hawking with his system?" They had a five way holo-conference with Dave and his crew as well as the Infinity refit teams to make sure they were all on the same page as far as the installation and configuration went. They were going to refit the viking and Beagle with smaller versions of the GravLoc. It was early evening by the time they were done, and Rob wanted to get back to Boston for the night. Arne and Morrie dropped him off at his 'office' in the McKesson building a quick hour later. Rob may have referred to his 'financial and legal team' in Boston, all hired by the McKesson people who had set up his corporate and financial 'identities'. That phrase makes it sound like more than it is, as the staff consists of an office manager, Sheila Marler, an accountant, George Lewis and a Lawyer, DeShawn McGuire. Rob had a lawyer! Of his very own! Deshawn actually was on staff at McKesson. Rob was 'hiring' her from them for now. Mostly she was in charge of filing his legal documents and supervising the legal aspects of whatever financial documents came through that needed it. She was very much the corporate-type lawyer rather than the trial-type lawyer. He personally hoped to never need the trial-type lawyer. He made sure to let Sheila know he would be back in to get a few things done in the morning and asked her to pass along and invitation for them all to meet for breakfast in the Oak Room at the Fairmont Copley. It was just up the street from the office. Rob had been offered one of the guest suites in the McKesson building for the night, but wanted to take advantage of Andy and Cor's offer to use their place in Somerville anytime he was in the area. He also had standing permission to use Andy's StarLight and who in their right mind would say no to that? It was almost nine in the evening by the time Arne dropped him off. He tapped a local pizza place and ordered a late dinner and hopped in the shower. Andy and Cor must have a service, because the fridge was well stocked and everything was fresh. Rob found some Guinness and Bass in there, remembering Andy's fondness for Black and Tans, it was no surprise. He just wanted something to wash the pizza down so grabbed a Bass. Rob turned on the TV and surfed all the news channels until the pizza arrived. He had paid for the pizza via the tap when he'd ordered it, but realized that he had nothing to tip the delivery guy with. "That's okay Mr. Young. I'd love an autograph though, if you don't mind." Was the response. That was startling, but Rob grabbed one of his new business cards from the desk in the office and signed it for him. He polished off his beer while surfing the news, so grabbed another one and attacked the pizza. Pepperoni and peppers, his favorite! He cleaned up what little mess he'd made then hit the sack. The guest room he was using had a tap-able alarm so he tied into it and set a six am get up time. With the time difference between coasts he realized it was probably still early enough and tapped Wendy on the Q. "Hi Princess!" Rob said as soon as we were linked. "Rob! Where are you?" "I'm in Somerville. Got the alarm set and my head ready to hit the pillow and decided I'd better give you a call before I went to sleep." "Ooh! Nice! Did you get to take a look at the new ship?" "Yeah, its looking good. We've got three weeks before we'll need to take her up for space trials. What do you want to do until then?" "It sounds like you have something in mind already." "Well, I was thinking we could invite your folks and mine to spend a few weeks somewhere tropical. Jamaica or Hawaii or someplace like that." "Mmm, White sand beaches and drinks with umbrellas in them? I'm game, but I'll have to go bikini shopping." Wendy said, her voice dropping into a velvety whisper that sent shivers down Rob's spine and up other places. And damned if that comment didn't make it difficult to drop right off to sleep! Especially after a few minutes of smooching goodbyes. Freshly shaved and showered the next morning, Rob slid himself into the drivers seat of the StarLight and ran her through the startup sequence. Flying her was a trivial task, tapped into the traffic net via the Q. The StarLight's brain and the traffic net hashed out what had to happen, calculated all the whens and wheres, and he was gently but swiftly wafted to his destination. Rob even got to park in Andy's spot in the McKesson building's garage. It was a short walk from the McKesson building up to the Fairmont Copley. On the way out of the Fairmont Rob saw a rack with brochures for other Fairmont hotels and resorts. He grabbed one for a resort on Barbados and spent a few minutes at the concierge desk getting more information. The Concierge took his name and told him he'd give the Resort in Barbados a call and let them know to expect to hear from him. It was a sign of his growing recognizability, or the caliber of the folks at the Fairmont, perhaps both, but Rob was met by an endless series of - 'Good morning Mr. Young!' and 'Welcome to the Fairmont Mr. Young!' - type greetings. His table was ready and he only made it through a couple sips of coffee before Sheila arrived. They went through the usual coffee prep and small talk, during which Rob learned that her husband Lloyd had dropped her off on his way to work. They had been married for five months, didn't have any children, and weren't planning any for at least another few years. By that time George and DeShawn were being shown to the table. More coffee and greetings were performed, and now that they were all here, the menu perusing began. Breakfast is one of the most consistent menus in the U.S. Fancy, plain, big city or country diner, most breakfast menus consist of eggs and omelets, bacon, sausage, pancakes, french toast, waffles and toast in various combinations. The variations and extras were many, and varied by region, but these things made up the core of almost every restaurant's breakfast menu. Fine with Rob! He ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, toast and orange juice. About as basic as you could get. "Ladies and gentleman. Lets talk shop." He said, once the breakfast had more or less disappeared from everyone's plate. "Its a given that at the moment there are more McKesson folks off behind the scenes somewhere, but other than that, the four of us are QuanTangle, Inc." Rob opened with. "I'm a geek, as close to the proverbial mad scientist as you're ever likely to meet, not a business man. Reassure me." "The unseen McKesson folks are really the businessman side of things. We are mostly just the 'face' of QuanTangle." George offered. "So you're job is to just arrange the piles of QuanTangle lucre, and DeShawn's job is to make sure those piles are arranged in a way that keeps the feds and anyone else who has a finger in them happy? What does Sheila do?" I asked, with a bit of mock aggression. Sheila saw the underlying lightness of my tone and responded in kind. "My job is to keep the two of them stocked up with an endless supply of sharpened pencils and letterhead stationary and envelopes. Oh, and I talk politely to the thousand people a day who call wanting Rob young to invest in their sure-fire scheme." "And a fine job you do of it too, I'm sure!" Rob answered over the snickering of George and DeShawn. We sat and sipped coffee for an hour, and got a few things ironed out. For one thing, I didn't want people calling with ideas or proposals to be summarily dismissed. "Sheila, when someone calls, and they have an idea to pitch, ask them to route all such inquiries to us via email. Set us up an address for that purpose. Go through it every day, and anything that is technical beyond your ability to understand, forward to a second address. I can get us as many MIT students as we need to screen the technical emails. Anything they approve will get passed on to me. Work up some form letters for both those we reject out of hand and those we pass on. Sound workable?" "Sure, we'll call your students 'the review committee', or something that sounds official." Sheila said. "What about charitable requests?" "Those you can dismiss. If they're insistent, give them our mailing address. If there are charities any of you would like to see QuanTangle donating to, we'll sit down and look at them, but I'm not much in need of outside inspiration for finding charitable causes to donate to." "We all probably have a favorite we donate to ourselves, thanks for including us in." George said. "You're welcome! Now, how come I'm not hearing from you guys?" Rob asked. "I was out of town for a year, and you didn't write, you didn't call. If I'd have known about you, I'd have missed you!" They worked out a system where Sheila would send Rob a weekly 'executive summary' wherever he was, and that George or DeShawn could send anything they considered urgent directly if they felt the need. In addition, he promised to have monthly meetings, either in person or by holo-conference on the Q. With the work stuff out of the way, it was time to reveal his true purpose. "I need to go shopping. Who here fancies themselves as a jewelry expert? " I asked? Sheila, by virtue of her relative newlywed status got elected. Her wedding ring, which she was still enjoying showing off when asked, was beautiful, and she and her husband Lloyd had spent months shopping around for their rings. "I need a jewelry store where a guy for whom the phrase 'money is no object' applies, but who's not used to it and needs some TLC." Rob told her as we stood in front of the Fairmont. "I know the perfect place, and its an easy walk from here." Sheila said. They cut across Copley Plaza to Boylston Street and headed towards the Public Gardens and Boston Common, but stopped only a block up the street. "Mr. Young, I present you with 'Shreve, Crump & Low'." Sheila said with glee. We were met with prompt and kind attention by a saleslady named Estelle, who asked us what we were interested in. I turned to Sheila. "I need secrecy. Office Manager's oath?" "Of course!" She answered with a laugh. "Take us to the engagement and wedding ring section." I asked Estelle. ------- Andy's StarLight was fun to drive, but Rob needed something he could make long hauls in and call his own, so he dropped it back off at the condo and called a cab. He wanted to buy himeself something and it was going to have to be an Obsidian, so he asked to be taken to the largest Obsidian dealer in the area. That turned out to be across the Charles River and up Commonwealth Avenue to where it ran into Brighton Avenue just past Nickerson Field. Obsidian Motors was really finicky about selling their vehicles. They had been since they were founded, even before anti-gravity brought on the advent of the gravcar. They didn't sell dealerships, they owned and operated all their own, and their sales methods were patterned after the early days of Saturn Motors before the division got folded back into General Motors. Obsidian may have been emulating the old days of Saturn, but a car salesman is a car salesman, and Dale Dennison was glad to meet Rob, and was all smiles and hearty handshake. Rob tried to head him off at the pass. "Dale, I need something that will say fortune 500 when I pull up, but still give me a full spectrum solution, back roads to orbit. Got anything to fit the bill?" They didn't have anything approaching that kind of range in their private passenger line, but had a couple of 'executive shuttles' that fit the bill in their commercial line. The only problem was they required someone with a commercial rating to pilot them off the roadway. They tapped into the Obsidian commercial showroom site on the Q-net and took a holo at the models that fit his particulars. Rob found and quickly fell in love with an Obsidian Azimuth, a sleek, powerful surface-to-orbit executive transport with room for eight as well as 500 cubic feet of cargo space in the back. These things were designed for large corporations and the very rich, and were all around luxury, inside and out. When Rob told them to wrap it up, he had to get serious himself and confess that he would need a pilot. Wayne Norman, the salesman at the commercial site had an entire roster of pilots available for short and long term hire, a quick tap away on the Q. By this time Dale was bundling Rob into a car with one of his staff to chauffeur him down to the commercial dealership in Paterson, New Jersey. It was a quick trip on the high speed Boston-New York gravcar corridor and then once again it was grins and hearty handshakes all around in Paterson. Wayne Norman met Rob personally, and walked him straight over to the Azimuth he'd been shown on the net. Except for kicking the tires, Rob don't think the process had changed much. You go for the new car smell, rub your oily fingers on the pristine leather seats and sit in the drivers seat and think 'zoom zoom'. Rob did a quick reality check with the folks back at McKesson, and they had no problem with a rent-a-pilot as long as he was licensed and bonded, though they suggested he switch to one of their staff pilots once things had settled into a more permanent arrangement. That way all the insurance, sick leave, and holiday questions would be under the larger umbrella that the three current QuanTangle staff enjoyed. They also told him that he wouldn't need any kind of vehicle insurance options if they were offered, all that would be put under the McKesson umbrella too. He thought about that for a moment. He had three weeks for sure when he was going to need a pilot, then space trials, then?? He still needed to get in some time with the simulators and modelers up at CMU, but wanted to put that on hold at least until after the sun and sand session was over. "Wayne, do you know any of these guys on your list personally? Any of them a good guy needing to catch a break, maybe have a few weeks of less than strenuous work someplace warm and tropical?" "There's a fair amount of demand for pilots, and the pay is good, so there's nobody on my list with any kind of need for a financial break." Wayne answered. "Maybe Ted Henley. He's just been through a really nasty divorce. I won't go into details, but he could sure use a few weeks of light duty in the tropics. He's also on my available immediately list." One of Wayne's staff called the pilot while they sat down and signed paperwork. All of this could have been done with a few quick taps through the Q, except the government paperwork for anything that flew still had to be done the old fashioned way. To Wayne's credit, he looked at the authorization codes that came in and checked off the 'independently insured' box on the form and filled in McKesson Aerospace. In the appropriate spot, no questions, no pressure. "There's a whole spiel I'm supposed to give you about the orbital aspects of your new ride." Wayne told him as they walked back out to the lot. "You're pilot is going to have to go over them with you again when you ask him to take you into orbit, so I'll save you from my version. You will be required to wear a Caldwell Suit for every passenger when you do, and the Azimuth comes with eight of them included, but I'm guessing that won't be a problem for you?" That was the only time Wayne Norman even hinted at knowing who Rob was. He may have had the old car salesman smile and handshake, but that was where the similarities ended! Rob had spent half his morning looking at jewelry and half looking at transportation. It was almost lunch time and Ted Henley was due any minute. "Wayne, I have absolutely enjoyed giving you my money today. What's the chance I can take you and Mr. Henley to lunch once he gets here?" "Pretty fair, I'd say." Wayne answered. Ted Henley, when he arrived, proved to be a short, thin and wiry man with a pencil thin graying mustache and ice blue eyes. He looked to be all of five feet three inches and almost bounced when he walked, he was so full of energy. Wayne introduced them, and his handshake was hearty too, though it didn't include a grin like Wayne's. "Where to boss?" he asked immediately. "Lunch. You me and Wayne for starters, if you're game?" "Outstanding!" Came the immediate reply, and I suddenly understood where the ramrod straight posture and the bounce came from. "You're flying." I said, throwing the Azimuth's activator to Ted. We walked out to the Azimuth and Ted did grin then. "Outstanding!" He said, which I began to suspect I was going to be hearing a lot. This time there was a big grin. Ted popped the doors as we approached with the activator and the three of us did a quick walk-around in appreciation. "She's orbital, so you can give her a name to use as her call sign if you want." Ted said. "Well, I probably should go with QuanTangle I, or something else, but I'm thinking of Isaac. What do you think?" "Isaac Azimuth? I think I'm really going to enjoy the next few weeks." Ted answered. Wayne just groaned. "Everyone grab a Caldwell and get it on and through the diagnostic." I said. "Mr. Young, just where are we going to be having lunch?" Wayne asked suspiciously. "Call me Rob, both of you please, and I was thinking maybe the Eternity Cafe up on Infinity Station." So of course Ted had to go into his federally mandated spiel, and they had to do a complete systems check, even though one had just been done an hour ago while Rob was still a prospective customer, and then they had to tap into the FedNet and do a self-register for the car's FAA Flight number. This stuff was all preloaded into the Azimuth at manufacture, but this was the typically cumbersome method the government required to be notified that the new ship was purchased and flying. At least it wasn't more actual paperwork. As much as they mumbled about it, it was still way faster than the old DMV days. The old chore of strapping license plates to the front and back of your car were long gone too. Every vehicle manufacturer embedded federally mandated coded transponder cores that could be queried for a vehicle's ID and owner info by anyone with the right tool. Police, fire and safety organizations got them, along with activators. People with unauthorized or stolen activators faced felony charges. The government and the manufacturers didn't want these to become some corporate tool for selling more toothpaste and hemorrhoid cream. All told the process delayed them a whole ten minutes. They were suited up and slipping into an assigned boost path that would have them at the docking ring in twenty minutes. Rob let Wayne ride in the passenger seat beside Ted. Everybody had their first trip to space, and Wayne's might as well be done with a good view. Rob took advantage of the down time to give Wendy a call now that it wouldn't quite be a crack of dawn call. This time she got it in first. "Hi sweetie!" "Hi princess!" Rob answered. "Guess where I am?" "The Beaufort Sea?" She guessed. "Ooh, just missed! I'm on my way to Infinity Station for lunch." "You're going to lunch without me?" She mock-whined. "Well, I'm pretty sure you could have breakfast while we ate lunch if you could get here in time." "Who did you find to take you up for lunch? One of the Gravy Geeks have a boat?" Of course Wendy loved a little wordplay as much as Rob did. It was one of those things that just made her more special as far as he was concerned. "Nope, bought my own and called it Isaac. You'll see it when I get there tomorrow." You've just been out to Lake Erie to see the space ship you're having built, but still felt the need to buy one?" "Ahh! But this one is street legal! I can come pick you up and take you out to dinner in this one!" "But it will still make orbit at the station? Awesome!" Wendy gushed, bless her little geek heart. "Of course, I had to hire a rent-a-pilot for now. You'll like him. His name is Ted." "So who are you having lunch with?" "Wayne Norman, the Obsidian dealer who sold me my new boat. And Ted of course." "Well, you have fun sweetie. I'm going fishing!" "Okay, but before you go. Does Barbados sound good for our sand and sun vacation?" I asked. "Ooh! Barbados sounds great!" "Awesome! Invite your parents. I'm going to invite mine too. We leave in two days." Rob tapped a link to his Mom and Dad back home in fort Dodge. "Pack your bags Mom. We're heading to Barbados for two weeks, you me, Wendy and her folks." "Oh!" She said, and then "Honey, we're going to Barbados!" Rob heard her shout into the next room. "When?" He heard his Dad shout back. "When dear?" His Mom echoed. "Tomorrow. I'll be there sometime tonight to help you pack." There was some discussion back and forth between the parents that Rob got only part of, and then "Okay Rob. See you when you get here honey." Followed by dead air. Rob's mom was no ditz, but she would never survive as a telemarketer. She had no phone skills at all. There were not a lot of private craft asking for landing privileges on Infinity Station yet, so a berth was easy enough to come by. Rob had to ask for directions to the Eternity Cafe, as little things like visitor-friendly signs were part of the uncompleted 60% of the station. It didn't take long to find, and they had a table in no time of course. The Eternity Cafe's customer base consisted mostly of construction workers and folks up from Aristarchus base wanting a change of pace from their cafeteria. Since both the station and the moon base used New York time for one of their three official shift clocks, they managed to arrive during one of the main meal hours. One man's lunch shift was another man's breakfast, so they had all three meal choices available. Rob stuck with lunch and ordered a prime rib sandwich and onion rings. Wayne had a grilled prosciutto, cheese and basil leaf sandwich with an 'Italian garden' tomato soup. Ted decided breakfast was a good idea and ordered biscuits and gravy with hash browns and toast. All of them had coffee and enjoyed the view of Earth through the cafe's view screen beside them. They talked about cars, about Mars and Jupiter, and the Hawking. After they finished their lunches Rob took them down to the hub for a gander at the Hawking. They were still in the middle of the refit and were not using a shirtsleeve environment so he didn't want to even try to take them aboard, but they did get a nice picture of the three of them with the Hawking visible in the view screen behind them. Rob wasn't there to play tourist, so they headed back to their berth on the docking ring. Ted got them in the queue for an Earth departure to the Eastern Seaboard and five minutes later they were one teir way back to Earth. The trip down was even more spectacular than the trip up, and Wayne especially was fascinated with the slowly revolving view of Earth as it loomed quickly larger in front of him. Another thirty minutes and they were back in Paterson, New Jersey, dropping Wayne off. This time it was my turn to deliver a hearty handshake, and an appreciative thanks for his help with finding me my Azimuth. "Where to, boss?" Ted asked. "Fort Dodge, Iowa." Rob answered, sliding into the back seat. Isaac had a very nice sound system, and he soon had something soft playing in the cabin. With that for background he tapped into the Q and began looking at Bahamian Resorts. He had a set of rings burning a hole in his pocket and an ulterior motive in picking Barbados, but he wasn't going to try to engineer a quickie wedding in the next three weeks. Nothing said he couldn't use this trip as a scouting expedition for the future though. He tapped the reservation desk at the Fairmont Royal Pavilion and talked to Camille. They were expecting his call, the Boston concierge having smoothed the way. "I'd like to spend two weeks, maybe three, starting two days from now. There will be six of us, plus our pilot. I don't want to stint on the pilot's accommodations, he is needing some R&R as much as the rest of us." Rob told Camille. "Can I suggest your main party reserving our Villa?" Camille offered. "There are two downstairs bedrooms and an upstairs bedroom. Your pilot can have one of our regular rooms. We used to be adults only during the high season but we've been family-friendly year round for almost a decade now." "Perfect. We'll take the villa." "Excellent Mr. Young, we look forward to seeing you here at the Royal Caribbean." "Thank you Camille." The situation in Fort Dodge was hectic. Rob's Mom and Dad had no beach wear, they had spent hours running around buying sun screen and bug dope and stocking up on their 'medications'. They were both healthy as horses and took nothing but over the counter remedies for whatever ailed them. When he got there they were both searching frantically for their passports. They stopped long enough to come out and meet Ted and take a wide-eyed gander at Isaac, then rushed back into the house. "Dad?" I called out as I followed them in. "Yes Rob?" "We're going to Barbados, in the Caribbean." "Yeah, sounds great!" "No Dad, we're going to the Caribbean, you don't need a passport to travel in and out of the Caribbean, all you need is valid U.S. ID." "Since when?" Mom asked, coming around the corner carrying a cardboard box full of old Kodak photo packages. "Since about five years after Castro died." I answered. It was true, and in fact Rob had given some serious consideration to Cuba as the sun-and-sand destination, but it was a bit too commercial and crowded these days for what he thought of as R&R. The marriage license requirements were quite a bit stricter than most of the rest of the area as well, so that was a big minus in his book. Castro's passing may have meant a normalizing of relations with Cuba, and the eventual move away from communism in the years following, and a return to her capitalistic roots made Cuba a hot spot for global tourism, but the fall of communism also meant a return of the church, and they held a good grip on some areas of Cuban life. With the great passport hunt called off, Rob's Mom returned to domestic mode, and while his Dad got most everything put away, she turned her attention to dinner. Rob put the clamps on that plan immediately. "Mom, we're headed out of here first thing in the morning and will be gone for two weeks, maybe three. Do you really want to have to worry about dirty dishes and leftovers?" That did the trick, although she managed a final shot across his bow, and his Dad's too, if he wasn't mistaken. "Rob, you brought this handsome, dapper gentleman into my home, and then won't let me cook for him? That doesn't seem fair!" Fortunately Bert and Ted both saw it for what it was and were on the same page. Rob helped his parents finish packing, his Mom called a neighbor and arranged to have them clean the perishables out of the refrigerator. When he showed up with his delivery, the paperboy got instructions on putting the paper in a safe place for the next two weeks and a ten dollar bill. The gas company got called and Bert ran through everything he could think of for buttoning up the house a dozen times. And that was all before dinner! The folks at Buford's Steak House and BBQ were glad to see them. Rob's Mom and Dad were regulars. ------- Chapter 6: On the Beach The madhouse in Fort Dodge was not repeated in Port Angeles. When Rob arrived, Wendy's parents were packed and ready to go. Rob was not willing to waste time, and neither was Wendy. As soon as he was out of the car he had an armful of voluptuous, slinky femininity, lip-locked and a-quiver. He let the kiss fade slowly, and the moment it did, he put Wendy down, an arms length away and dropped to a knee, ring box in hand and popped the lid up and held it forward. "Wendy Fellowes, you are my strange attractor. You're the sun-hot heat at the core of my reactor. If love were an equation, it would factor out to you. I love you with everything I am and can't imagine living a single moment of the rest of my life without you. Will you marry me?" "Abso-fucking-lutely!" Came the first answer, less than ladylike, but still all Wendy. Followed by a "yes, yes, yes you big doofus!" After the ring was on and another incandescent kiss exchanged, they were applauded by their parents and the pilot. "Geeky but effective." Ted said, slapping Rob on the back. "Congratulations Son!" I heard from two Dads. "And what about that potty mouth young lady?" Wendy's Mom said. "Sorry Mom. Sorry everyone, but I won a 500 dollar bet I made in seventh grade with that word." Wendy answered with a blush. "Hang on!" Wendy said, activating her tap. "Bren? Wen!" She gushed. "Guess what? You owe me 500 dollars." After a long pause she continued. "Yes!" and span around in circles like a schoolgirl as she said it, followed by giggling and jumping up and down. It must be said. The current Wendy Fellowes is far too feminine above the waist to make jumping up and down like a schoolgirl a 'proper' activity, but Rob was not about to complain! 'Bren' turned out to be Brenda Lassiter, the grade school friend who was now a teacher that Rob had met on their first visit to Port Angeles. Brenda was at the house ten minutes after Wendy's call. The pair of them had been 'Bren and Wen' since they were little. "Sometimes we were "Dee and Duh." Wendy said. "Wen-Dee and Bren-Duh." When she found out they were going off to Barbados, Brenda was excited, but bummed. The school year was about to start, and there was no way she could go with them, even if they invited her. "We'll be sure to schedule the wedding for a more auspicious time then." Rob told her. He laid out his plans. It was Saturday, the morning of August 22nd. They were going to spend three weeks in Barbados, just the seven of them. As they were climbing into Isaac, Wendy slugged him hard on the arm. "What was that for?" He asked. "Isaac Azimuth, that's what!" They lost some time heading east, and once they were checked into the hotel everyone had to decide whether they were going to wait for dinner which was a few hours away, or have something now. They decided to have a few 'bar snacks on the beach and save their appetites for a late dinner. They lay on the beach, they swam and snorkeled. Rob and Wendy made love, though they were a little reluctant to get too carried away, with both sets of parents downstairs. The reluctance faded a bit the night Rob heard his parents getting vocal in the middle of the night. That set off a chain reaction that none of the six of them were willing to discuss over breakfast the next morning, outside of the occasional blush or giggle. They played tourist quite a bit, going on tours and excursions. There were quite a few underwater reef tours, one was even using the new gravitic shielding to offer an underwater walking tour of one of the nearer reefs. That one was a little creepy and cool at the same time. As long as you didn't have a light source brighter than what was coming down through the sea overhead, you couldn't even tell their was a shield there. Once you turned on a light, the field flared into glistening obviousness. "It's possible to tune the fields so that the field stays invisible, but this way seems more reassuring to our guests." Clive, our guide told me when I asked about it. "We used to get people having panic attacks when we were first trying it out." They had small little floor lights spaced every dozen feet or so, and near them the illusion was definitely less convincing. They para-sailed, surfed, water-biked, hiked and explored. They visited Bridgetown, the capitol, and Holetown, Speightstown, Oistins and a handful of churches, plantations, forts and lighthouses. They even took in a bit of the nightlife, doing a little dancing and drinking at some of the bigger hot spots. It wasn't all vacation time. Rob was on the Q quite a bit to Carnegie Mellon and his former physics department head, Professor Jack Eieyery. Pronounce that name! Its actually pronounced 'yaw-ruh'. Rob made sure he got his way smoothed for coming up and getting some time in with the simulator and the modeler that he had used when he was first working on his ideas for the sensor array. Their third day there Rob spotted some beefy, clean cut guys lounging around the Royal Pavilion that rung a bell in the back of his brain. They reminded him of the service crew people they'd had on the Pai Lung, and to a lesser degree on the Hawking. Security types, trying to look like something else. Rob tapped Sheila and asked her to check into it. Dave McKesson himself called him back! Yes, the McKesson Group was concerned about his safety, and a McKesson security team had been assigned to provide security, with discretion, but there nonetheless. "Rob, the Earth is a better place in general than it was a generation ago, but you still have to watch your back. There are evil people out there who see the rich and successful as targets." "I can appreciate the truth of that, it just seems like someone could have been more up front with me about it is all." Rob answered, trying not to sound too much like he was whining. "Its been an ongoing problem for the McKesson's since my great-grandfather's time, and we've gotten pretty good at it." Dave said. "We train our own security, and have for many, many years. We forget sometimes that everyone else we associate with isn't necessarily aware of these realities. My apologies for that." "I understand really, and I'm not completely surprised. That's what I figured all those beefy, iron-postured cooks and laundry people were doing on the Pai Lung, and I had no problem with it." He answered. "You'd better let your pilot know too. Our team believes he has already noticed them, and our background check on him suggests he has had the kind of training that means he should be aware of them. We'd rather not have to see who has received the better training, our security team or Ted Henley." Rob asked for a copy of the background report on Ted, and read it with interest. The drill instructor attitude he wore so naturally was pretty close to the truth. He had been involved in some seriously heavy military stuff, and had spent a dozen years training people to do nasty things to bad guys with extreme efficiency. While he wondered at the kind of connections that McKesson must have to get some of the military background information, which had to be classified, Rob wasn't adverse to using it to his advantage. He contrived to find himself alone with Ted on the beach the next day and sat down in the beach chair beside him. "So Ted, what do you think of the security detail McKesson has had watching over us?" He offered as an opening. "They're good. I trust them to keep us as safe as possible." He said. After a sip of his rum barrel punch, he asked. "So they spotted me spotting them then?" "Nope, they just assumed you had based on what they knew of you." Rob took a long sip of his own drink. "So they show you their background check?" "Yup. Some interesting stuff in there. Some I was surprised that McKesson had access to. Nothing operation specific, but a lot of detail on the type of work you did in the military." "Lots of that is supposed to be secret. You still okay with me working for you after seeing that?" "Yeah, but I think you should give up this rent-a-pilot gig." "I don't think so. Its the cleanest work I can get with the skill set I've got." "No its not. You'll become my personal pilot, bodyguard and maybe even teacher. No renting yourself out, you'd be a full-time employee, retirement, health plan, the works." "Teacher?" Ted asked. "Well, Wendy and I were learning Tae kwan do from one of the cooks on board the Hawking. He reminds me very much of the guys we were just discussing, and I assume he was filling the same position there as these guys are here." "Does it mean I have to strap myself into the rocket when its time for you to go heading off into the great wide empty?" "Well other than that we don't use rockets anymore, which you knew, yes, I'd hope you'd really take it as that kind of full time commitment." "Deal." Ted held out his hand and they shook. Rob tapped Sheila back in Boston immediately. "Sheila, I need you to get some paperwork started for me. Ted Henley, rent-a-pilot, is now a full time QuanTangle employee. Get him signed up for the benefits package. Most of the information you need should be in the bonding information we got, but I'll throw this link over to Ted's tap and let the two of you get things squared away." Rob got the two of them together and then headed off down the beach to find Wendy. The parents were off to Bridgetown to do a little shopping. He was hoping for a little mid-morning delight. ------- The space trials were brief, and pretty uneventful. The lessons learned on Nauru meant that most of the problems they had experienced in the past didn't happen. There are always small items to correct or adjust though, its a given with this level of complexity. Complexity was considerably less than it had been in the old NASA Space Shuttle days though. Their systems were much more robust. Rob told Arne and Morrie to run the follow-ups without him, but to keep him posted. Once the space-worthiness was certified, he would have to do his own testing of the sensor and diagnostic systems. That was a one man show though. Rob met Professor Eierey at Wean Hall the next day. He was a thin, bearded man in his forties, and he had a tendency to seem slightly nervous, almost twitchy, but that was just a physical trait. He was really one of those calm, focused types who never seemed to get excited. He was also a bit of an elitist, and he had rubbed Rob the wrong way several times with his attitude, but his labs and research staff were operated as a strict meritocracy, so he had prospered under him. "Well Mr. Young. Welcome back. You seem to have done rather well for yourself since leaving." "Thank you. In some ways I credit you professor." He said, meaning every word. "Our personalities may have clashed frequently, but I certainly thrived under your system, and most of what I've done was possible only because you were never one to place yourself between a student and recognition." "You deserve the recognition you're getting, and you're right, I've never been one to get all bollixed up over someone else's recognition. And call me Jack, please?." Rob held out his hand and they shook, and at that point Jack Eierey stopped seeing Rob as a student and began seeing him as an equal. They certainly never again had the kind of clashes they had during Rob's years as a student. "You seem to be happy with my work, but are you guys using it here?" I asked. "Not much call for sensor arrays around here, but the quantum tunneling work is still getting a lot of follow through from most of the people in the field here." Jack answered. "I assumed that, but what about the Q-net and the Q-tap? Do you know if the computer department has begun picking up on the differences in computing power available with this new system?" Of course he didn't know, so he was going to have to ask outside of the department. Fortunately, the current situation made that relatively easy. The modelers and simulators were really the province of the computer science department, and they were housed in the basement in an area shared jointly by physics and computer science. They took the elevator down to the 'dead zone', as it was called, The small network of rooms where all the hardware lived, and took a look around. It had only been a couple of years, but Rob didn't recognize anyone at all. "Lets check with Aaron." Jack said, waving at a short, bearded student with a stack of old fashioned greenbar printouts. "Aaron Shelldrake is one of the grad students whose been working on the remodel going on down here in the last six months. They've only had to take us offline once in all that time, so I can offer a small measure of presumption of competence on their part." Just then the sound of concrete drills fill the air, and a spoken conversation was no longer possible. Aaron pulled a set of ear muffs up off his neck, but Jack and Rob were not so fortunate. Between the two of them they managed to communicate via hand gesture their need to talk, and signaled a desire to head upstairs. He nodded and followed us to the elevator. "Aaron, if you're going to be doing that kind of thing down there you need to restrict access or put up a sign of some kind. That was dangerously loud." Jack said, wasting no time in dressing the younger man down. "I agree! I wondered why the construction supervisor handed me a pair of earmuffs when I got down there. I don't think they realized we hadn't closed off the level. Someone obviously missed an item on a checklist somewhere." He said, shrugging his shoulders. "Aaron, this is Rob Young. He's going to be using the modeler and simulator gear for a couple of days and has a few questions. Can we invite you up for a cup of coffee?" Being a department head at Carnegie Mellon had its advantages, and an office assistant who brews wickedly good coffee from freshly ground beans on a moments notice has to be considered near the top of the list as far as advantages go. Candice, the office assistant was a cute, bubbly blond who wore jeans and a t-shirt in a way that made Rob ask the question. "Jack, I know you operate the labs and the grad students as a meritocracy. Do you do the same for your office assistants?" "Rob, I'm offended. After tasting that woman's coffee, you still feel the need to ask that question?" That got Aaron and him laughing, and Jack joined in. Rob had never seen him acting so pleasant and personable. "Rob, as much as I'd like to drag this out, due to the coffee and the scenery, what can I help you with?" Aaron asked. "I was wondering if the computer science department was beginning to take advantage of the new amorphous nano-substrate computers, the ones that we developed for use aboard the Pai Lung and the Hawking?" "Ah! I wondered why you seemed familiar. It makes sense now. Yes, we are beginning to. In fact the remodeling thats going on downstairs is so we can add an entire ANS computer system in alongside the existing stuff. We hope to slowly switch over to that system once we're sure of our programing. This new stuff is pretty different, and our guys are still getting used to coding in it." "I know just the guy you need. I can't say how busy he is though. Let me find out." Rob offered. Rob tapped a link to Howard Dexter. He had been one of the systems guys aboard the Pai Lung, and had been one of the leads on adapting code from their old systems to Ike's new one. Rob had no clue if he had become engaged in this process, but he was one of the few existing experts in it. "Rob! What's up man?" Howard said as soon as we connected. "Howard, how hard at work are you?" "I'm living off the fat of my back pay at the moment. Why? What's up?" "Have you ever considered the fact that you are one of the world's foremost experts on programming and program conversion for the new ANS computers?" "I hadn't thought about that. I guess its true, huh? Tony and I did a lot of the groundwork for that new system." "You guys should get your heads together. You could probably get rich contracting out to various organizations that are wanting to switch to the new system. I've got a potential first client for you too, if you decide to do it. Carnegie Mellon is implementing some of the new systems now, and could probably afford to hire someone to help with all the conversion." "Rob, are you a Tartan?" Howard asked. That was the CMU team nickname. "Yeah." Rob answered. "University of Chicago here, man. I'm a Maroon!" Ahh! Conference rivals! Rob let Aaron and Howard talk. Aaron wasn't high enough up the food chain at CMU to get this done on his own, but with a little support from Jack, it should get pushed through pretty quickly. In the meantime, getting the many months of collected data out of his Q-tap and into the instrument's data storage was easier than he thought it would be. They may still be in the middle of moving over to the new Amorphous Nano Substrate computing platform, but they had immediately installed interfaces capable of handling the FHS data stream that the Q-tap used. Rob spend three nights sequestered in the dead zone with the modeler and simulator. He let the construction crews do their thing during the day and had the place to himself at night. Aaron Hayes dropped by the first night to see how he was doing, but took one look at his outputs, smiled, and wished him luck. He called Wendy every night on his way in, and she called him to give him a wake up call every afternoon. He spent his afternoons showing Ted around Pittsburgh and visiting with some of his former professor's and classmates. Jack got him together with his entire crew of graduate assistants on the second afternoon and they just brainstormed what they knew and what they thought, and Rob described for them the kinds of data he was getting from isolating the sensor array inputs and tuning for the various energetic outputs and 'transparent bands' from the reactor and gravity engines. They couldn't even all agree about what it was he was detecting. But it was a big struggle in their area of research to even explain some of the underlying principles. Jack summed it up for us, echoing something I think all of us remember hearing him tell us as undergraduate students. "There's an old story of a committee of blind men asked to study and describe an elephant. Each man was lead to the elephant, one man felt the trunk, another the leg and a third an ear. When they were asked to explain the true nature of an elephant, one said, 'it is like a snake, round and long, coiling and writhing'. The second man said 'it is like the trunk of a great tree, solid and unmovable.' the third man said 'it is like a leather coat, thin, wide and flexible'." Jack smiled at the recognition of his story in our eyes. "As all of you can attest, students of Quantum physics are like that committee. Each of us sees the nature of the piece we study and we examine that part at length and in detail, but we cannot give in to the temptation that what we describe is the whole of it, or that in describing what we observe we are gaining understanding about the true nature of the beast." That lesson was always worth repeating, and along with a suggestion here and a comment there that Rob picked up on during the session, he felt there were some avenues to explore that he'd been ignoring. In fact that night's session in the modeler gave him the first utter failure that pointed him in the right direction. ------- They did the equipment install and preliminary software install and testing on the ground in Conneaut. The modeler and simulator gear were current versions of what Rob had been using at CMU, and other than having ANS Computer systems at their core instead of the older stuff, they were running exactly identical versions of the software that came with them. The first thing he did was dump those versions into backups and install the tweaked versions that reflected the current versions at CMU. There had been a lot of code tweaking in the years that he had been there, and probably more since. Ted was getting a complete workup on piloting and control functions while he was working on the lab gear. A day later Rob had the equipment ready for some preliminary calibration runs, and an hour into them, Wendy arrived. They let the calibration runs proceed unattended while Wendy and Rob slipped off to the hotel for a little calibration session of their own. "You've been skipping your workouts, haven't you?" Wendy said, draped across him, sweaty and out of breath. "Yeah." He said, "guilty as charged, and it wasn't even intentional. Just once again too busy being the boy genius." "Its a good thing I'm back, but from now on Ted's getting standing orders from me. No more neglecting the boy side of the boy genius in favor of the genius side." Rob reapplied himself to the current activities with renewed vigor, hoping to achieve an apology of an orgasmic nature. Back at Erie Precision in time to rescue Ted from his lessons, they whisked him off to lunch. Before they did, Rob checked the calibration runs and reset two of them with the outside set of parameters and let them run again. Lunch was across the lake in Port Stanley, Ontario. Ted had been here before, and insisted they stop into The Captain Cook's Good Times. It was a friendly bar/restaurant, with the emphasis on bar. "Its known locally as 'Jimmy C's', after the previous owner, who was well liked here for many years." Ted told us. "But he passed away a few years back. Died in bed of old age, as I understand it, and it took two days to dry the townsfolk out after the wake. I had a client up in Toronto who I flew through a regular Toronto-London-Toledo route who made me stop at the place at least twice a week, and I fell in love with the friendly atmosphere." The middle leg of that route had Wendy and Rob confused for a moment until Ted explained it was London, Ontario, not London, England. Local and friendly were the words all right, and the food was good, though Rob settle for a burger and fries rather than the locally caught Lake Erie perch. "Lets take a cab across tonight and come back for a few beers!" Wendy suggested. "Outstanding!" Came Ted's reply. That settled it for Rob! Back at Erie Precision, the calibration runs were all complete, and it was time to run a couple benchmarking routines in the modeler. Ted got back to his work learning the flight systems and Wendy grabbed Tom Standaahl and asked him to show her the ship from the frame up. "I want electronic copies of all the blue prints, schematics, wiring diagrams, certifications, everything you've got." she said as the two of them headed into the office. Princess Nuts & Bolts was still looking out for her man. Ted finished the 'book learning' part of what he needed to know, and after checking in with Rob, left to find Wendy and Tom. Once the benchmark models came out as expected, Rob dumped them, one at a time into the simulator and used the benchmark models to create a baseline with which to test the simulator. These models should produce results for which he had very precise predictions, based on repeated runs on the CMU simulator, not to mention real world results from a couple of them which were now functioning devices and installed on the Hawking. Only one simulator run produce a glitch, and that was due to a transposed number on Rob's part during the command input. The last test was to dump all the current data in and make the same runs he'd been making up at CMU and see if he got the same results. If he did, they were ready to go. If it didn't, they were back to square one, and would have to start the benchmarking runs all over again. They had cause to celebrate that night at Jimmy C's. All the runs had come out clean, and the new ship was ready, once they could get a flight certificate. That meant a 'finish flight' two days from now with a UN certification team. The process had firmed up quite a bit since the launch of the Pai Lung two years ago. The UN had stepped up and the fledgling UN Space agency had been transformed into the UNNESA, the United Nations Near Earth Space Authority. They set up certification systems, safety and traffic control systems and with some cooperation from those countries involved in the International Mars Expedition, especially China and Russia, they were given not only the authority, but a recognition that they should and would charge for the certification and other safety and traffic services they provided. This certification flight was going to cost QuanTangle one percent of the ship's construction cost. Those fees paid for the training of their inspectors, their salaries and the other infrastructure necessary to the business of regulating near Earth space. More importantly, it made them self-funding, and they could maintain a professional impartiality, keeping politics out of the certification process. In Rob's mind, the miracle of it all was that there was an inherent recognition that this authority only applied to near Earth space. It would probably come eventually, but for the moment, everything outside of Earth orbit was considered 'the frontier'. The Moon, being in Earth orbit was part of the UNNESA package deal. They had to wait a couple of days for the certification team to complete their ground inspection, and for those days the builders were needed, but the owners were not, so they took this opportunity to head back up to Infinity Station to check out the refit on the Hawking. The Hawking was a couple of days away from being completed, and they got busy for half a day with Victor, reviewing the work and signing off on what needed it. The other half of the day was spent with Sandy Buckley, the inventory and supply specialist who was the head of the Hawking's services section, deciding how and when to restock the perishables and other supplies. The upshot was that Rob had to decide when the Hawking was going back out, and had to do it then. That brought Victor back into the conversation, and suddenly everyone was staring at the owner. Rob thought about everything that had been talked about and came to a decision. "I don't know if we'll ever become more than an incidental freighter, but I think we can make some money hiring ourselves out as a research vessel. We will go to Saturn this trip. We can take on as many as twenty outside scientists and researchers. We need to market this to MIT and the other institutions with interest immediately. I'm thinking five million dollars buys a birth for two researchers. We will announce a departure date of a month from today, and lets spend some time during the month ahead thinking about how we want to handle shore leave, flight notification times, and flight availability in the future." "Excellent. We move from being Rob Young's yacht to being a working ship with a published sailing schedule someday, eh?" Victor said. "I don't know if we'll ever achieve that, at least I don't know if we will in the Hawking. But we can always build more ships if that looks like an attractive opportunity." Rob began to wonder if he had the business sense to manage this. He decided to make a bold move, and called Andy McKesson's Grandfather, Gerald McKesson, personally. "Mr. McKesson," He said, after exchanging the usual pleasantries, "It has become apparent to me that I am not a business man. I have prospered because McKesson and especially Doctor Fylakas, has taken an interest in me, and guided me to where I am now." "But you are looking at the future and realize you're a researcher, not an executive type, and worry that those people who are depending on you now are not going to be as safe and secure as they could be. Am I right?" "Yes, that's it exactly." "Its a familiar dilemma. Andy felt exactly the same way after he graduated from MIT, and he forced the rest of the family to fill in so that he could remain a scientist and researcher. He may have become the public face of the McKesson Group, but in the background it was my job and others in the family and in the company who were doing the real business." "I don't have a family with a background in business, and I'm concerned that if I continue to depend on the expertise and generosity of the McKesson companies, I'll paint myself into a corner someday." "Not because you don't trust us, but... ?" "Exactly. Trust isn't the issue, you guys are great and I don't doubt you always would be. Its more a matter of worrying that someday I'll begin feeling ignorant of my own company's potential and destiny." "Not everyone feels a spark of entrepreneurial desire when they find themselves in your position. You've seen how Arne Walker and Morrie Scheufelt are doing. They are transitioning away from their scientist roots quite successfully. You're not going to do that. What about Wendy?" "Wendy is an awesome person with details. Give her a list of things to get done, and they will get done, and nothing will get missed or short-changed in the process. You'd have to ask her if she feels she has any head for business, but my guess would be no. She's insightful and creative, but not in that direction." They decided that there was plenty of time, the entire Saturn trip in fact, to sort that out, and 'Mac', as he preferred to be called, promised to work on it during the time the Hawking was gone. Nothing needed to be solved immediately. The mention of Arne and Morrie's business acumen reminded Rob of something he meant to talk to them about. He tapped them both and quickly mentioned his conversation with Howard Dexter and Tony Gaines. "These guys should be getting rich doing code conversions and troubleshooting for people moving to the new ANS systems, but they were both sitting around doing nothing when I called. You should talk to them. They need someone to manage their skills and market their services for them." After stirring up a few hornet's nests from orbit, Rob and Wendy flew back to Earth to meet the UN certification team. The head of the certification team was Doctor Felix Levitsky, a distinctive fellow with glasses and a goatee. He spoke English with a clipped, heavy Eastern European accent. He was, in some ways, the male equivalent of Wendy's nuts & bolts persona. They spent six hours doing in-flight tests, landings, takeoffs, docking and undocking with a Moon-based station as well as an orbital one. The inertial compensators received special attention from the inspectors. The gravity drives on this ship were rated for four times as much power as the Hawking had, for the mass, and there was real concern that the compensators be able to handle the output of those engines, and that the possibility of failure be as low as possible. They may have overbuilt the engines, but really went nuts on the compensators. There were twice as many as the engines needed, and they were configured in a fluid mirror-assist pattern that pretty much guaranteed their availability no matter what. At the end of the six hours Doctor Levitsky had a big smile and Rob had an official electronic certificate of space-worthiness. It was finally time to name her publicly. He had a name in mind, but had kept it to himself so far. With the UN certification crew, the Erie Precision engineers and builders and Arne and Morrie as an audience, they broke a bottle of champagne over one corner of her and named her 'Cherenkov'. They celebrated that night, taking Tom Standaahl and most of the engineers and senior technicians from Erie Precision with them to Jimmy C's. They filled half the bar and let the beer flow freely. They even talked the staff into an unscheduled karaoke night, once the beer had worked its magic, and discovered that Ted Henley had a burning desire to sing when drunk, but absolutely no talent for it. Wendy and Rob, with their months of choir work during the Jupiter trip to bolster them, got up and sang a duet. They were well received, but the clear winner was one of the aluminum fabrication techs, who not only had a great voice, but did a spot on James Brown impression. The following morning was for recuperation and the afternoon for stocking up the Cherenkov. She had three cabins, a galley and capacity enough for three month's worth of provisions. Wendy had a check list and she triple checked everything on it. While she was doing that, Rob let Sheila know that they were going to be out of normal contact for the next twelve days. She had instructions to pass that word along to everyone at McKesson as well as Arne, Morrie and the guys at Infinity Station. The Cherenkov cleared Earth orbit just after breakfast the next morning. Rob sat down next to Ted in the flight bay and pulled up a holographic display of the solar system, drawing a line at ninety degrees to the solar ecliptic. "four days in that direction at maximum thrust." He said. "We have no target, other than getting ourselves as far from the solar neighborhood as four days of thrust can get us." "I can see this is going to be exciting for me." Ted said. "Good thing I brought all the Hawking data to study, and if that isn't enough there's the data on the Viking and the Beagle." Rob spent the four days adjusting to the space and getting used to a new and operational signal lab. He took 'sightings' every two hours on the outbound leg, looking for the same blips he'd found during the Jupiter mission. The cooking was done by turns at first, but on the second day it was decided by Wendy and Ted that since Rob actually had things to keep him busy, he wasn't allowed to cook. He did participate in as much normalcy as he could. Once on station, he was going to be strapped into his seat in the signal lab. The big difference between the setup here and what had been on the SISI was the modeler and simulator. Rob spent most of his time outbound tying the old signal interception systems into the new systems. By the time the outbound leg was complete, he had them talking to each other in a nearly intelligible fashion. Rob was dreaming tangles again. He don't know what it was about being in space, but his mind seemed to open up some part of itself that wants to be closed off back on Earth. He had colorful tangles of energy and potential chasing each other back and forth every night, and again seemed to be on the verge of understanding where things were going when the tangles collided. In his dreams he spent hours trying to pull the tangles into the simulator or the modeler, but couldn't see where the feeds should match up with the inputs. Two days on station and he was feeling restless and twitchy. He was having trouble pulling his focus away from the feeds. Now he was chasing feeds while he was awake and chasing tangles in his sleep. ------- This is the log of the Cherenkov, Chief Pilot Ted Henley reporting. I wish this didn't sound like a Star Trek episode, but here we are. I've just finished reporting back to Infinity Station and the QuanTangle staff that our flight plan is now subject to change without notice. Doctor Fellowes is currently in the lab with Doctor Young. We found him 'sleepworking' as Doctor Fellowes calls it, last night, and he had torn some of the sensor equipment apart and rewired it somehow to feed directly into the interface to one of the pieces of equipment. Doctor Fellowes is making sure he doesn't start tearing apart any essential systems, but at this point it looks like he is reprogramming the modeler from scratch and doing some weird feedback routines to the 'research' gravity drive. This drive is a research tool and has no effect on the Cherenkov's space worthiness. He has also reconfigured the research reactor's secondary de-couplers to tie into the same hairball of rewiring as everything else he added in the middle of the night. We are planning to allow an additional two days of overrun on this phase of our trip, and then we're going to pull the plug and head for home whether he is out of this 'zone' that Doctor Fellowes says she has seen him in before, or not. ------- The sandwich in front of him seemed to come out of nowhere, as did the cup of hot cocoa sitting beside it. Rob realized the moment he saw them that he was starving and grabbed the sandwich and took a big bite, washing it down with a swig of the rich, hot cocoa. "Thanks, I needed that!" He said to nobody in particular. "He's back!" Ted shouted, Rob looked up to see him standing there, looking concerned and relieved at the same time. That scene was interrupted moments later by Wendy appearing in the hatchway. She threw herself into his arms, and he was suddenly and awkwardly on the receiving end of a serious hug, accompanied by tears! "What's the matter?" Rob asked. "Rob, what time is it?" Wendy asked. He tapped the ship's chronometer. "Oh my God! I seem to have been busy." He said, looking around at the mess he'd made of the lab. That's when it came back to him, the process that he'd been on, the mad idea that had come to him in his sleep that he just had to follow up on. "You had us wondering Boss." Ted said. "Was it worth it?" "Maybe, and I won't say another word until you both swear to me you won't repeat what I tell you until I say its okay." "I swear." He got from both of them, almost simultaneously. "I think I can squirt a ship out through the Q-space, the place where quantum tunnels go. But I can't aim them. It would be shooting blind. The destination would be somewhere else in the universe, but where?" ------- Chapter 7: The Geometry of Ideas For the first time after one of his episodes, Rob saw a doctor. The UNNESA flight controller who had been on duty when the call came in insisted on it. He spent three days in the hospital giving samples of pretty much every fluid and solid available. He endured electroencephalograms, CAT scans and MRIs. He talked to therapists and counselors, doctors and medical researchers until he couldn't talk anymore, and nobody could find a thing wrong with him. Not everything was textbook normal, but nothing was off enough to be an indicator of any sort of problem. In the end the experts could only say that there was concrete evidence that Rob had experienced a period of intense mental activity and physical exhaustion. Ted and Wendy could have told them that, and did! Rob was released in time for the Saturn flight, but wasn't sure if he should go. It was only the fact that every piece of equipment he would want was available either on the Hawking or the Cherenkov, and that the Cherenkov would be coming along, attached to an external docking hard point that let her be integrated into the Hawking's structure and included in her gravitic and drive fields that convinced him to go. Twenty scientists signed up for this trip, from six different universities as well as the Chinese and U.S. Governments. Their fees alone were going to cover the costs for this trip. With Titan on the menu, they seemed heavily weighted towards the atmospheric and planetary sciences, but there were still some genuine mysteries to solve. There also was a neurologist on board, to keep an eye on Rob. The fourth berth on the Cherenkov was going to be his, and he was being paid to monitor Rob at all times when he was working. Only Wendy and Ted knew what He was working on during the trip, not even Doctor Kepler, the neurologist knew. Rob was going to have plenty of time to work on it. The trip out was going to take half again as long as the Jupiter trip. Saturn was almost double the distance from Earth that Jupiter was, but once again they were gaining efficiency, and experience with their gravity engines. The Hawking had already seen a 75% improvement since the first trip to Mars. One of the things Rob had to build for his research were modified gravitic field generators that allowed him to shape the flow and output of the standard G-drive. The Hawking was 4.5 au out, almost Jupiter distances when Rob told Wendy he needed to meet with the brains behind the power team. She grabbed Peter London and Saalih Jaffre, and he grabbed Victor Emanoff. This wasn't something you discussed without the Captain. Lunch was in the owners cabin, which was half again as large as any cabin on the ship, and the one concession to being 'the owner' that Rob had allowed. Considering how little time he spent in it these days, he might have seriously considered having it converted to another function if it wasn't already designed to be used as a conference room when needed. He had it set up for that purpose when everyone arrived. Lunch was laid out already, grilled sea bass and salad. Yummy! Once everyone had a chance to make a dent in the lunch, Rob activated the holo-projector. The lights dimmed automatically. "I have been working on my signal problem, as you all know. One of the things I needed to be able to do was focus and direct my signal sources." The projector was showing a 'blow-up' diagram of both the research reactor and the research drive on the Cherenkov. "Modifying and directing the output of the reactor is a well understood process, and Wendy's latest energy couplers are proof that this is a well researched area." I dropped the reactor from the display, and centered on the G-drive. The standard issue drive, as first installed slowly rotated in everyone's view. "In order to study this signal source, I made a few modifications to this drives outputs, putting new deflector fields around it, and then wrapped that entire system in a shell field that was designed to focus the output in a way that was more compatible with my inputs." The image, done mostly in subtly glowing shades of blue and green, sprouted a violet shell, inside of which were embedded bright red curved fields, representing something Rob called 'deflector plates' The image slowly rotated, showing the drive now looking like an old style jet engine, with moving deflectors to focus the thrust. The view changed to the next image. The red plates suddenly tripled, covering the drive in multiple layers, and covering the drive more thoroughly. "But it suddenly occurred to me that my deflector plates and tuning fields could be used in a different way." "This can't be correct, can it?" Saalih said, looking at the diagram, and then reading the data that scrolled in the air below it. "I believe it is. But of course even if it is correct, the problem is still the same as with out current drives, isn't it?" "Inertial compensator efficiency." Peter said loudly. "Exactly! Wendy said. "We've improved our compensator efficiencies, and that has let us double our existing drives to almost 6 percent of C. This new drive would appear to be able to do 80 to 95 percent of C if we can get the compensators to achieve the same kind of breakthrough." "As usual, the compensators never seem to catch up as quickly, but here's a modification using the same deflector plate and tuning field technology." Rob said, flipping the display to the appropriate image. "We need to test this. We could be in Saturn's orbit tomorrow if we had these modifications working." Victor declared. "I agree. Ideas anyone?" "How about your original SISI?" Wendy said. "Its sitting idle in the docking bay now that you have the Cherenkov to play with." "My God!" Peter said, standing excitedly. "Do you realize that this opens the entire solar system up for almost casual travel? Days or weeks instead of months and years to get from any point in the system to any other!" "I agree with both Wendy and Peter." Victor said. "The SISI is the perfect choice, and indeed, this promises to once again revolutionize travel within the solar system, just as completely as the Pai Lung did when we first took her to Mars." "Alright, here's what the simulator says about the whole idea." Rob said, flipping the display at last to the feed from the unit on the Cherenkov where he'd done all the preliminary work. A project to work on while quietly zooming through the void was always welcome, and everyone in the drive and systems crew threw themselves into it with gusto. No one was going to be so foolish as to test this new drive with a live crew. It would all be done with remotes. The first step was to dump all the data into the Hawking's own modeler and simulator, and let the crew run the data themselves. With their specialized eye for things relevant, Rob's beginning idea was quickly modified, dropping power consumption levels down to more reasonable levels from the wasteful ones he had been projecting. The biggest piece of re-engineering was the modifications to the secondary field generators that already existed on the standard drive, and the addition of a band of tertiary generators and the new tuning field generator. While those pieces were being built Howard Dexter and DeeDee Ponders began redoing the controls to allow for remote operations. The previous work done to tie the Hawking's slap and go panels into the Command Net finally got put to some real use, and that work made the tie-ins go pretty quickly. Once again the advantages of the bandwidth of the FHS connections made it possible to ensure that they were doing real-time remote controlling of the SISI. The modifications to the inertial compensators were much more straight forward, but it was even more crucial that they work right once people started being put aboard, so that work got double and triple-checked, and then checked again. The interior of the SISI got peppered with tiny little gravitic telemetry sensors that would feed us real-time reports on the effectiveness of the compensators. Dave Hamlin's tractor beam technology really proved itself when it was time to test the new drive. They locked onto the SISI through the opened transport bay and pulled her out and into position a hundred miles to port of the Hawking. The tractor was set to release its grip at the slightest sign that the SISI wanted to go faster or slower than her current velocity. The tricky part was configuring the tractor's gravity fields so that the SISI's drive wouldn't react against them. The engine startup and drive engage process had been fully automated and put on a timer, to eliminate any interference from human sources. DeeDee was the voice of 'launch control', and most of the ship was tuned in via a sensor screen somewhere, watching and hoping for success. The external tractors were very definitely a bridge function, so everyone heard from the bridge first. "Launch control, this is helmsman Krupt, your package is on station." "Roger helmsman, this is launch control initiating startup sequence." Rob was sitting with Wendy and Saalih watching the telemetry readouts, superimposed on the bottom half of a display that was also showing the SISI, via sensor array. When the board showed the warmup was complete, Saalih keyed his tap. "Launch control, we have green lights across the board. Launch is a go." "Roger that mission control. Initiating automatic drive start up and engagement procedure on my mark." DeeDee's voice came, and a few seconds later. "Mark." They watched the telemetry as it showed the gravitic drive cycling up to power, and then a brief blink as it engaged. Suddenly the SISI was gone from the view screen. They all had to force themselves to look down at the telemetry readings. It was Wendy's turn to tap into the comm and make an announcement. "Launch control, telemetry indicates we have drive activity and readings show full integrity and acceleration at .63 lights." This announcement was answered by a large amount of cheering on the ship's public channel. Several seconds later, DeeDee came on again. "This is Launch control, we read the SISI as having just passed beyond Jupiter orbit. She is currently accelerating at .82 lights and ETA to Saturn orbit is ninety minutes." That was a wild-ass guess, based on speed only. They wouldn't know for sure how practical that estimate was until they got a handle on how the inertial compensators were doing. They started pouring over that set of telemetry data immediately. Ten minutes later and victory hads turned into apparent defeat when all telemetry from the SISI suddenly went dead. DeeDee was the only even marginal voice of calm. "We don't know for sure if its gone or not. It could have hit something that forced the shield generators to draw power too quickly. It may have shut down, it may be just a telemetry failure." The effort was appreciated, but they were despondent. What bothered most was that, in their zeal to record every little iota of what happened inside the SISI, they had completely forgotten to consider recording anything external. If the ship had indeed pranged off a piece of debris, there was no way of knowing. It was back to the drawing board. A week later they had built not one, but four replacements. The new units were referred collectively as the G2s and designated individually, A through D. Telemetric sensors were slapped all over the outside of them this time. The power capacity of their shield generators were double that of the SISI and the plan was to launch them in pairs, with each unit of the pair dedicating some of their sensors to watching the other. Slight modifications to the control program were made to allow for the pair to maintain their relative positions during flight, and then it was time again. G2-A and G2-B were tractored out into position and cycled up through power up and the telemetry check very quickly, and after a minimal hold to check systems stability, the launch controller gave the word. "We have automatic program initiation on my mark." Came the helmsman's voice. "Mark!" Once again we watch the auto-sequence cycle up the drive and then the pair of G2 probes blinked and were gone. "Launch control, telemetry indicates we have drive activity and readings show full integrity and acceleration at .61 lights." Wendy's voice came through the comm. There was no spontaneous cheering this time. Everyone held their breath and waited for the next words. "This is Launch control, we read the packages as having just passed beyond Jupiter orbit. They are currently accelerating at .73 lights and ETA to Saturn orbit is ninety minutes." This estimate was no more accurate than the previous one, but the telemetry held, and the next words came again from launch control. "This is launch control, the packages are currently accelerating at .615 lights. ETA to Saturn orbit is 40 minutes. Almost afraid to divert their attention to the telemetry, they began to dig into the data to see if the compensators had done their job. "8.32147g max on A!" Howard Dexter called out. "8.37139g max on B!" came DeeDee's voice immediately after. This was not welcome news, but it wasn't unexpected. We knew the new compensators were good, but we didn't expect them to handle the new levels of acceleration. We would spend a good amount of time tweaking both the compensators and the internal governors on the drive controls to make sure we had safe speeds that didn't leave little red smears on the insides of the ships. "This is launch control. Deceleration has been auto-initiated." Came the call from the helmsman some time later. Twenty minutes after that came the announcement that finally drew the cheers on the ShipNet. "This is launch control. We have received the 'at station' signal. Telemetry indicated we have two birds parked in Saturnian orbit." This was victor's voice at the end, having preempted the helmsman for the announcement. In the end, this new development didn't really save any time on the outward leg. Modifying a few drives that had been slapped onto a couple probes was one thing. Modifying the Hawking's drives while en route was another, not to mention there would have to be a serious amount of testing with the compensators and the new settings for the governors on the drive controls. Rob got the Cherenkov's drives and compensators adapted, and so did the Beagle and Viking, but they were not going to do the main drives until the Hawking was safely in orbit around Saturn. Testing was another matter that would have to wait until we were in orbit. ------- "At the new speeds, the transports are suddenly eligible for lifeboat duties again." Rob said to begin the staff meeting. The Hawking was in orbit around Iapetus, and it had already revealed some strange news. It appeared that the mysterious equatorial ridge that had been detected during the Cassini flyby at the end of 2004 was the vestigial remains of the collision which had created it. Iapetus was the result of two nearly identical masses colliding while still forming. The ridge was the 'seam' between the two original bodies. The reasons for the light and dark regions were still a mystery, but the current theory was that the darker region was overlaid with a foreign material, probably due to internal cryovolcanism, perhaps triggered by a meteor impact of some kind. The scientists who had paid for the trip, along with the full load of geeks who made up most of our crew were all over it. Rob though, was more interested in giving the G2 probes a thorough going over and starting to test the freshly modified drives on the Cherenkov. Meetings like this were just an annoying side issue he was forced to deal with as the owner. "We'll just adjust their outfitting back to what we used for the Mars trip." Victor offered. "Even that might be overkill." Peter London offered. "Once we've got this up and running smoothly, the transports are days away from home from almost anywhere in the system, not weeks or months. Days." "We arrived in Saturn orbit pretty much right on schedule and the science types are fairly oblivious," Ike suggested. "so I think we should keep this under wraps until we're back on Earth and Rob can file the patents on these modifications and make himself even richer." "Speaking of the scientists." Fred Wassermann said suddenly. "They're really starting to make noise about a Titan landing." "We have to be careful with this one." Owen Gardner added. "There's real atmosphere on Titan. Its half again as dense as Earth's atmosphere, and there is the possibility of real weather there." "We'll be safe in our Caldwell suits, won't we?" Keith Vance asked. "We should be. The atmosphere may be thick, and the pressure higher than we're used to, but its over 98% Nitrogen. Methane makes up the bulk of the trace gases. We will definitely have to observe air lock procedures, and make sure we flood everything we plan on taking to the surface with nitrogen." Owen answered. "The methane is bad enough, but there are some trace elements that are very much instant rocket fuel when combined with oxygen. The same procedures will be necessary in the other direction because some of those traces include things like hydrogen cyanide, which is highly poisonous in even low concentrations. We don't want to bring anything back into our shirtsleeve environment." So it went, the usual sharing of details, interests and concerns followed by the modifying of schedules and assigning of duties. Rob let the parts that needed sink in, and the rest wash past in a wave of disinterest. His head was already back aboard the Cherenkov, wrapped around his ongoing work. Wendy and Ted were the only ones who might understand it, but the new drive which had everyone else so excited was mostly just a byproduct of the real idea he was pursuing. Rob stayed home for a while, working on the G2 probes, modifying them further for his own uses. Now that he could 'see' the signal that identified a source of what he was calling the 'Q3 wave', it was time to try to reproduce it. He created two rotating gravity compression fields like those used to focus the gravity drives to their new speeds, and like the inner tuned fields of a Caldwell suit. He cranked up the power until each field approached singularity strength and then meshed the two fields, closer and closer together until finally the two fields hit a 'sweet'spot' of field harmonics, and bam! It was generating a Q3 Wave, just like the ones he'd been detecting. Rob had an artificial Q3 beacon! Considering the implications of a beacon, Rob wondered about the possibility that there might be aliens out there in the universe somewhere using this same technology, and using it as he hoped to be able to, for interstellar travel, then his beacon was the equivalent of turning on the 'Open for business' sign. A Q3 wave is one thing, but moving from that to generating a Q3 field, that was another story, and one that was going to take some serious tinkering! The first thing Rob did was build a working 'quantum gyroscope'. This was a relatively old technology in a sense, based on the Josephson effect, first theorized in 1962, but the gyroscope itself came out of Berkeley at the turn of the century. The sensor array technology borrowed on these origins as well, but this time Rob was applying them to the new Q3 wave, which like so many things in the universe, exhibited two faces, wave and particle. He was using the particle side of things to make a Q3 pseudo-superfluid, and then spinning this up to match the rotating compressed gravity fields. By the time they had their first accident on the surface of Titan, Rob had a theoretically workable Q3 drive built in the modeler, and no way yet to know if it was testable. The accident was just a small 'flash blast', as Victor called it. A rock sample containing a small pocket of methylacetylene vented in an airlock that had just finished cycling back up to a normal interior Earth atmosphere. A slight static discharge caused the two gases to go boom! The small quantities involved produced only minor damage to the container the samples were in and the scientist involved was unharmed, thanks to the Caldwell suit. Safety procedures that had been taken only semi-seriously by the scientists up to then suddenly became the topic of conversation. The presumably natural Q3 beacons Rob had been detecting since the trip to Mars could be anywhere in the universe. Signal strength in this case bore no relationship to distance, and he was now able to detect them so well that he was having to refine the circuitry to include filters and rectifiers to allow for isolating individual signals. The nearest theoretical source of a natural beacon was the Sun, and after that, it would be Alpha Centauri. This was a particularly rich source as well. Alpha Centauri was actually a three star system, with Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B and Alpha Centauri C, which was the physically closest, and thus called Proxima Centauri. Armed now with a discriminating detector, Rob needed to calibrate it, and the most obvious reference point to use was the Sun. In order to pinpoint which Q3 beacon was the Sun, He would have to triangulate the signal. This was operating under a large series of assumptions of course. First, that the stars themselves were the sources of most, if not all of the Q3 signals being detected. Rob would soon have some proof one way or the other. If he couldn't triangulate a source that matched the Sun's position, then Rob's theory collapsed, possibly completely. With Wendy, Ted and Dr. Kepler along for the ride, the Cherenkov was once again loose from her piggyback position atop the Hawking, and with the new drive was quickly 'on station' a light hour north of the solar ecliptic. Here Rob took the first 'sighting' of the Sun with the Q3 detector. He isolated several dozen signals and classified them by strength, spin frequency, spin harmonics and a couple of other measurable factors. Then it was time to change positions. That meant it was time to tell Victor that the boss was going to be zipping off into the black yonder using the new and relatively untested drive! "Victor, I'm doing some triangulation work, and need to move the Cherenkov. We are going to move multiple times to shoot the Sun with some equipment I've been working on." I told him over breakfast. "Okay, how far off?" Victor asked. "No more than 15 or 20 AU." I said. "Holy! Rob that would put you on the opposite side of the Sun from us!" Victor said, spitting little flecks of omelet as he did. "Well, we probably won't ever be quite that far away, but we're shooting the Sun with my detectors, so we will at least be at the other two points of an equilateral triangle. The Hawking would be the first point and the Sun would be the center." While they shot the Sun, they also shot what it was hoped was Alpha Centauri A, and B. Rob needed to crunch the solar triangulation numbers first, and wanted to let the simulator make a few predictions based on his assumptions, but comparing the predicted results of the Sun shots with the after-the-fact reality of our readings would give a good sense of whether the direction his thoughts were heading in was likely to be a dead end or not. Not perfect, but a big help when your still in the 'chopping off hydra heads' stage of eliminating possibilities. Alpha Centauri A was the perfect candidate for comparing to the Sun. The two were startlingly similar to each other in class. The relative nearness made it possible, but just barely, to triangulate from the same three points that had been used to shoot the Sun. Rob held that data in reserve for the moment and began to run his routines. Since they were back in the vicinity of the Hawking, everyone else's lives returned to more or less normal. Saturn-normal at least. While they had been gone, the Hawking had finished its work on Titan and Rhea. Dione was the current target, but it was too similar to Rhea to generate much interest on its own. The one exception were a series of immense 'ice cliffs' first spotted by Cassini. They had proved to be as spectacular as imagined, and Peter London finally got some shots to rival his Jupiter Rising series. He had already gotten his best shots of Saturn and her rings from Iapetus. Her inclined orbit allowed for much better separation from orbital plane than the other moons, which shared the same plane as the rings. From the others, the rings were pretty much an edge-on view and not too dramatic. The number crunching Rob was doing was seriously heavy duty, and the run had not completed before it was time to move on to Tethys. This moon was another Dione and Rhea. Tethys was almost a twin to Dione, as far as size went, with only 60 kilometers difference in their diameters. Dione was almost twice as heavy though. Tethys is mostly water ice, but still no more exciting to look at than the previous two moons. Most of the time there was spent in and around the Ithaca Chasma, a big fracture valley that was 2000 kilometers long and a hundred wide and as deep as 5 kilometers in some places. One of the activities Rob took the time to indulge in as part of his 'medical mandate' to pursue non-work activities was to race Yuri Stepanovich down the length of the canyon. They staged a race between the Viking and Beagle, and with a couple of the G2 probes slaved to them to provide external points of view, shot high definition video of the race, including some nice passing and maneuvering shots. It was all a sort of homage to the old Star Wars movies and their 'pod races' and other high speed chase scenes. Once they had it 'in the can', they let Alexandra Nascimento add sound effects, which was something she liked to play with in her spare time, and fired two versions off through the Q-net to Earth. The original version was completely soundless, as it had to be with no atmosphere to conduct sound, and the second was Alexandra's version, with all the swooshing and humming of a Hollywood epic. Once Rob had the solar numbers crunched, it was time to process the numbers from Alpha Centauri A. He ran a full dozen passes through the data, using several known reliable points of comparison and multiple redundancies. It meant the numbers were going to be a little fuzzier, but it eliminated the possibility of gross error. In the end he was really only looking for the answer to a yes or no question. Was this really Alpha Centauri A they were detecting? While he ran those numbers, the crew of the Hawking buttoned up the research on Tethys and moved on to Enceladus. In addition to being far and away the most reflective object in the solar system, at least as far as visible light goes, Enceladus was another hotbed of cryovolcanic activity. The Cassini probe had actually spotted a plume from a cryovolcanic eruption as it was occurring. Speculation from astrobiologists on Earth since then had fueled a huge interest in it, and fully half our scientists were here specifically to do some up close and personal examination of Enceladus' watery interior. Chemical analysis of the Cassini data had long been thought to offer hints that Enceladus would be, if not the bearer of life, perhaps the rosetta stone that allowed scientists to gain an understanding of how life could originate. These same scientists had been gaga over the hydrocarbon and nitrogen rich atmosphere on Titan, which was another touchstone of the early Earth conditions that existed before the first living organisms existed. Rob spent his 'free' time doing flybys of the E ring and using the transport's newly installed tractor beam to scoop up samples. A popular theory suggested the material for the E ring came from the cryovolcanic ejecta from Enceladus. Cassini had pretty much confirmed this long ago, but nothing beat having samples! The numbers finished crunching two days before they were scheduled to move on to the Death Star. That was the joking nickname for Mimas, the innermost of Saturn's major moons, and the last stop. After Mimas, all they had on the list were some probes of Saturn itself, and some nice glamor shots of the rings. The Saturn probes were a bit of a toss of the dice. The surface gravity was just over Earth normal, and the atmospheric pressure was almost half again as much as Earth's, but with surface winds possible in excess of a thousand miles per hour, no one was sure how long they could guarantee the survivability of anything sent down, gravitic shielding or not. Rob was pretty much unaware of the Saturn probes, the Mimas results, the Enceladus disappointments or much else. His number crunching was complete, the modeler fired up, and the simulator humming, but he was slamming repeatedly into a hard wall of failure. Nothing he built with the modeler would produce results in the simulator. Unless of course your goal was spectacular explosions. Those he was able to produce in the simulator with ease. With frustration mounting, he finally broke down and let Wendy and the rest of the geeks in on the failures. Rob ran the modeler data past them and then followed that with a half dozen of the most spectacular runs on the simulator in the Hawking's lab. "There you have it." He said at the end. "There's some flaw in my theory that I'm missing, and until I do, I seem to be stuck simulating explosions instead of a new drive." "Is this drive built out of the same nano-ceramic composites as our current drives?" Peter asked. "Of course." Rob answered, what else?" "Well there you go." Chester Magill said. "You don't have a theory problem, you have a materials problem." "The standard composites aren't strong enough, or there is some other aspect that makes them unsuitable for this design?" Yuri asked. "That would be my guess." Chester answered. "I think Chester is right." Brian Conroy added. "Rerun your modeler to take the drive materials into account and see what you get." With his blind spot squarely before him, Rob began to test for compositional and material parameters, and it quickly became apparent that the composites currently being used were inadequate to the task. The big problem was there was nothing better to use. The Nano-composites were the state of the art in material technology, and unless something else came along, he could well be at an impasse. Rob spent the two weeks from that day until they returned to Earth orbit working on the problem and only reluctantly dragged himself away from it to play the returning explorer and 'mad genius' for the people of Earth. The new drive, and what it meant for interplanetary travel had people both cheering and booing, and most of them were at one end or the other of that spectrum. He returned to a winter of discontent. Once again becoming the target of hate groups, mostly from the religious right, who felt their biblical beliefs were being slighted by his work. He didn't understand why. The work was no more relevant to biblical positions than was the invention of the television, but for some reason, Rob became a magnet for their attention, and a focus for their anger. His McKesson security team managed to foil three attempted attacks on him, as well as one when his parents were with him. That decided it, and he moved to Infinity Station. That was fine at first, but then word came that someone with a bomb had been intercepted en route to the station on a tourist flight, and he decided he needed to find someplace he could live that wasn't reachable by public transportation. QuanTangle Base on the moon became their official home. Securely tucked away on the dark side of the moon, and far from innocent bystanders, He lived with Wendy and their parents in quiet isolation, continuing his research. That was what the public believed anyway, and they did indeed establish a moon base, and used it regularly. In the meantime, Rob bought a twenty acre island off the coast of Grenada in the Caribbean, through a dummy corporation. He and Wendy moved his parents there with them immediately and began working on her parents to join them. It was a tough sell. They had very deep roots in Port Angeles, and so did Wendy. The island's previous owner had spent considerable time and effort in renovating and adding on to the villa that had been there when he bought the island back in 2007, and all that had to be done was to add some amenities to take advantage of the modern communication and transportation options. The fusion reactor was upgraded, gravitic shark screens were added on the swimming beaches and they spent some time putting in some personal touches, mostly a little change in some of the furniture and art. Everything was done through third parties. They were also building separate homes adjacent to theirs for both sets of parents. They still had to convince Tom and Erica, but Rob's Mom and Dad were enthusiastic about the move and sinking their teeth into the project with gusto. Old railroad men have something of a reputation for planning, and being devils of detail. Bert Young was not proving himself an exception to that rule, and at this rate, Rob would definitely be glad to defer to him when it came to supervising the construction work. The main villa was, as most older building in the area, a single story. This was a concession to the power of the hurricane, but one of the modernization plans was to wrap all the buildings in gravitic 'hurricane shields' that would protect them during any truly harsh storm. The new home was going to get a second story and the existing building would be expanded even more. In some ways it was being deceptive to include Rob in the discussion of decorating contributions. Wendy and Rob's mom did most of the decorating, and along with Bert, handled the additions. The closest Rob came to decorating was to bring Sheila in from Boston to look the place over and set up a third of the ground floor as office space. QuanTangle south, she began calling it. Sheila in turn brought in some architects with an understanding of modern building materials, and they began feeding ideas to everyone. Rob only saw them when it was final decision time, and sometimes not even then. The first piece of construction was to build a hangar for Isaac. The official story was that this was going to be leased out as a corporate retreat to the McKesson Aerospace Engineering division that had become famous for hiring out orbital and lunar construction teams. After all, who wouldn't want to spend time on a beach in the Caribbean after working in space? Nobody would be surprised to see surface to orbit traffic coming from their little Sandy Isle. Their third party agents bought a couple of less conspicuous vehicles for daily use, and contracted with a 'service' to do most of the shopping. Rob spent most of his time at the base on the moon where everyone thought he lived. He was building a nightmarish device, one that he prayed wouldn't go up in a flash of harsh, harsh energy. The simulated runs said it would work, but the building of it was the hard part. Since there was no material he could use that was strong enough to handle the new drive, Rob had to find a way to make the existing material stronger. He used the only thing he knew of and coated every piece of it in its own gravitic shield. Easier said than done you say? Whoosh!! ------- Chapter 8 The Shores of Alpha Centauri Interplanetary travel had first been made possible, and then made practical, And Rob had been a part of the first and the one responsible for the second, and this had all happened in the span of less than two years. It took another two years to finally bring his next idea from dream to reality. In the interim, mankind exploded into the solar system. Well, not exploded, exactly. The G2 drive may have made it practical, but it was still prohibitively expensive. Not just anyone could afford a ship certified for trans-solar operations. This was intentional, but not elitist. The UNNESA board, of which Rob was a reluctant member, above all wanted to keep people safe. A few governmental craft had been built already, and those were being joined by research vessels commissioned by universities and international agencies. Commercial interests were clamoring to get their toes wet in the expansion, but there was a great deal of caution being exercised at the international and national levels. Too many people could envision a world where the deep-pocket corporations wound up owning all the extraterrestrial real estate merely because they got there first. An initial determination was made that private ownership of land or resources anywhere in the solar system outside of near earth orbit was illegal unless a local civil government granted it. The creation of a local civil government was subject to the review of a committee called the Extra Terrestrial Homeland Independence Committee — yes the acronym was intentional. Rob was asked to be a member of that committee as well, but begged off, and the seat instead went to Morrie Scheufelt, and no better choice could have been made in Rob's opinion. It wasn't exactly wagon trains of settlers off to Mars or anything quite so domestic. None of these extraterrestrial environments were exactly hospitable after all, but it was obvious already that the moons of the outer planets were vast sources of water, and mankind wouldn't have to export water from Earth for outposts, commercial or otherwise. Gravitic shielding allowed for safe building construction, and the economy of it was improving rapidly. It would be industrial first, mining and processing, and then a service economy would grow up around those areas, and inevitably their would be schools and churches, bars and restaurants, barber shops and bakeries. Where would those places be? It was anyone's guess, except for the water sources. Rob's hunch was that they would be mining water on Europa. There were too many other reasons to be there. He cut the Hawking loose and told them to go make money. Sure they lost a few people to competitors, smart people who couldn't say no to an offer to be captain of their own ship and crew, but not a lot. It just seemed so easy, that there was no need to headhunt crew from us. The Hawking was an experienced ship with an experienced crew though, and she got a lot of prime bookings. A lot of people who chose not to remain in space were doing well also. Howard Dexter and Tony Gaines took Rob's advice and went into business doing hardware and software code conversions from the old silicon chip systems to the new quantum computing platform. Chen Hsu was a bit too busy for adventures in space. The Q-tap and the Q-net and the unstoppable, untraceable nature of their communications, along with the social and mental shift that access to the rest of the solar system put in the minds of everyone, Chinese and otherwise, brought the communist Chinese government down. When it fell it was as swift and certain as the fall of the Berlin wall. China's creeping capitalism and the ever-growing cadre of entrepeneurs and investors withing the Chinese economy that had been growing for more than half a century, along with the truly earnest technical and scientific sectors of the population, saved things from utter collapse. Both of the old cold war superpowers had long since ceased to be the effigies of alarm at which the party leaders could point. In the end, they became benefactors. The McKesson group alone floated enough loans to the key Chinese concerns to keep them from crashing before the chaos could be sorted out. China was busy divesting itself of the fringes of its empire, shrinking inward and consolidating its economy, its society and its identity. It was dissolving its army into small local police precincts and emergency response teams. Free and open elections were in the planning stages, and if I believed the prognosticators on the public news nets, Chen Hsu, my friend Hatch, was a shoo-in to be elected the first President of the Chinese Democratic Republic.He was not only widely known throughout China, but he was well liked across all sectors of Chinese society. It was not a simple process. There were little things like drafting a constitution. There was already a democratic Chinese state on the island of Taiwan that might want to have a little input on things too. In the midst of all of this, Rob worked on his next vision. Making that new vision, which Rob had begun to think of as his Q-space Engine, required finding a way to make a gravitic field interact closely with a physical object. After two months of going it alone, he decided that help was needed from someone who had tackled this kind of problem already. He Q-tapped Dave Hamlin. "Dave, I'm trying to wrap my head around the problem of getting a gravitic field to conform to the physical dimensions of a particular piece of hardware, semi-permanently at least. You seem to have at least partially solved that problem with your GravLoc tractor beam system. What kind of advice can you give me?" "Yes, I'm fine, How are you?" Dave answered. Rob blushed, and dumped them both into full holocom mode. Dave looked good, tanned and happy. "Sorry Dave, I can get kind of overly focused. I'm doing great. You heard that I proposed to Wendy before we left for Saturn, didn't you?" "I did! Congratulations! And congratulations on the new G2 Drive." "Thanks! How's Idrena?" I asked. "She's great. She still won't say yes when I ask her to marry me, but she has moved in with me. She had some particularly bad marriage examples growing up that have her opposed to the concept in general, and she's always reassuring me its not a Dave Hamlin problem, its an institutional problem." Dave and Idrena had been dating off and on since their MIT days, and particularly since the Halloween party where Cor Caldwell had unveiled her Holo-ween™ suits. Stories about that evening had become legendary among the geeks in the lab on Nauru. We all treated it almost as part of our own history, but the Gravy Geeks from MIT would always be a special group of their own. "Well she's seen a great example or two in front of her in recent years, Andy and Cor for one, and Andy's parents and grandparents for another." "There ya go. I've mentioned Andy and Cor as examples in the past, and pretty soon I'll have you and Wendy to add. Have you set a date yet?" "Not yet. I've been pretty caught up in this current project since before we left for Saturn." "Really, not the G2 Drive?" Dave said, showing a little confusion. "Nope. I don't want to say too much yet, but the G2 Drive was more or less a byproduct of the project I'm working on, it was never a separate goal." "Awesome. I'll keep a few pesos stashed away to invest in whatever you come up with next, thats for sure." "I think you've probably got a few pesos to stow away too, I'd guess. The tractor beam has to be making you rich!" "It is amazing how widely used it is already. I've been named man of the year by the National Association of Fire Chiefs, Fire Fighters, Emergency Medical Technicians and even got recognized by FEMA! The GravLoc is right up there with the Caldwell suit in their books!" "The next time you get asked to go to an awards ceremony, take Idrena with you and introduce her as your future fiancé." "Ah! Rob, your a sneaky bastard, but I like the way you think!" "Speaking of thinking..." "Back to the problem you called about? Of course." Dave was an enthusiastic partner, and immediately got down to the nuts and bolts of finding a solution to Rob's problem. It took only a few days to realize that his tractor beam techniques wouldn't quite cut it, it tuned in on a specific object's gravitic signature, but it didn't really cause his fields to conform to the actual shape of the object he was grabbing, rather it latched on to the object's gravitic field, which, Rob had forgotten, didn't have to bear any relation to the physical dimensions of an object at all. He rolled up his sleeves and joined Rob in the lab on the moon to work on a different solution. What was eventually arrived at was mostly borrowed from Cor McKesson's Caldwell suit technology, more than anything else, but without his help it might have taken Rob a year to get to the same point that they arrived at together in only two months. In the process they both became at least lay experts in nano-fluidics, which held the key to Rob's solution just as it had been to Cor's. It wasn't all work and no play during that time. Rob had a few pleasant interludes on Sandy isle during the two months that it took to complete their work. It was early May, and with the approaching summer, Wendy announced that Rob would be making her a June bride, and would be doing it in forty days! Rob had a happy modeler, which was finally able to adjust to the concept of grav-shielded components, and even the simulator was coming around. He was only blowing up his simulated space ships every other run. Once he had it happy with an optimal working Q-space Engine, He set the modeler to designing safe systems, and left it to run while he went and got married! Ike Dunham was the best man, Rob had asked him back when he first proposed to Wendy, after the Mars expedition. He did not disappoint! Most of the Gravy Geeks were there, except for Rich Reeder and Daria Kensington, who were on a scheduled trip with the newly commissioned MIT Grav Ship, the W.B. Rogers, named after MIT's first President. Andy and Cor McKesson weren't able to make it either, as they remained incommunicado somewhere in the world. Actually an impressive feat in this day and age. Rob and Wendy were not looking for a lavish, splashy wedding like Cor and Andy's had been anyway, and had no need for a combination wedding and public relations event. The reception was not, as the seedier media attempted to portray it, a saturnalia. Someone with a clever editors pen just liked the idea of the word saturn embedded in such a naughty description. There was some couples doing a little groping on the shores of their moonlit beach, but that was about as 'orgiastic' as things got, despite some people's best efforts to paint it otherwise. A couple of the McKesson security people got to be their decoys, and spend a week in Tahiti pretending to be them, while Wendy and Rob spent the week in Paris. Wendy was fairly fluent in French, and Rob was merely comic relief when it came to the language, but they got by. The newlyweds were mostly interested in the Louvre and as much distilled romantic atmosphere as they could find. Say what you will about the French, Paris is still just inherently romantic, especially if you stick to the picturesque parts. His wife, Rob was occasionally said to mention, is aggressively enthusiastic as a bed partner, and perhaps it was just his geek perspective talking, but it was Rob's belief that she was just naturally talented! They had been together long enough that the nuptial activities shouldn't have been surprising. Wendy however threw herself into it with a will, and Rob was happily swept along and determined not to disappoint her, if at all possible. Their third night in Paris, Rob woke alone in bed. He found Wendy standing nude at the open door to the balcony, the moonlight striking her from the side, silhouetting her and casting her edges in silvery serene light. Where the moonlight struck, her skin glistened, and Rob could see her hard nipples, prominent as the Eiffel tower in his eyes. He came up behind her and pulled her into his arms, cupping her breasts in his hands and letting his fingers dance across those prominences. "I love you." He whispered into her ear. She leaned back into him. "This is exactly as I had dreamed it. Years ago, when I was just a girl, this was exactly what I dreamed for my future, and you've given it to me." What do you say to something like that? Nothing. Rob picked up his bride and carried her back to bed. # Eventually you have to give your modelers and simulators a rest and actually build the thing, and so it was with the new engine. Ted Henley ferried Rob, Dave and Wendy to Erie Precision in Conneaut, and they got to work. Rob gave the final modeler data to Tom Standaahl's crew and they began building the tools to make the parts. Fifty percent of this stuff was new and theoretical and the other half was heavily modified from their original designs. This meant every piece got checked, double-checked and then triple checked during production. While Tom's crew was busy with the engine build itself, Rob got busy designing the test vehicle it would fit into. The sleek little G2 test craft wouldn't cut it. This new engine was not petite. It wasn't even pretty! Dave built an interface to tie the engine's controls into the standard ship control systems, and Wendy adapted the previous remote interface, the one used to test the G2 engines. Once they had a complete set of parts, it became time to do fit testing, and a dry run at assembly for the various subsystems that could be built independently before final construction. There were eight major sub-assemblies, and they fit and refit them a dozen times looking for problems. They documented as they went, building a nightmare version of a technical manual for when they had something to sell. Watching and being involved in this kind of process can make a scientist really appreciate engineers. "Scientists?" Arne Walker had said to him once, "We dream shit up, but engineers? They build it!" The manufacturing time at Erie Precision took two months. The fabrication and testing took up another eight. And that was without ever so much as even bleeding a trickle of current into the engine's exciters. It would be nowhere near Earth when they fired this baby off, that was for sure. Ten months were needed to build the prototype and then another two weeks to build its backup. They had built the two test vehicles to put them in at the same time, so they were ready and waiting when the assembly was done. They both would need a G2 drive as well, and that got done during the prototype build as well. The engine space was intentionally roomy. If they had to do any troubleshooting of the assembly, Rob didn't want to have to worry about tiny crawl spaces and 'just big enough' compartments. The Hawking was on a run to Mars to pick up a group of university students. Their trip had been funded by a coalition of astrobiology programs at six European universities. The students had just spent three months in a Martian habitat built and operated by the European Space Agency. Rob had no intention at this point of including the Hawking. He was going to use the Cherenkov and her heavy duty tractor beams to get the two birds into space and where he wanted them. Dave headed home, 'time to see if his girlfriend was still interested in him', he said jokingly, and the regular work he had been doing before Rob had called was piling up. The best laid plans, as they say. Rob discovered that tractor beam-attaching cargo for lift to orbit was illegal! Seems there were some safety concerns, imagine that! He had to pay a commercial orbital hauler to take his cargo up to Infinity Station, where tractor beam haulage was an accepted practice. Both probes had perfectly good G2 drives, but to use them to get to orbit, the probes would have to be certified for it, and Rob wasn't ready to tip his hand on this yet. After a few days back home in the Caribbean to visit with the folks and to rest up, it was time to head up to rendezvous with the two test craft. They had been crated up for the trip to orbit, and there was a lot of curiosity about them, especially with the QuanTangle Inc. label on them. The Cherenkov picked them up, crates and all and headed off again into the deep dark, at 90 degrees to the solar ecliptic. She went south this time, and Rob let her run for two days at G2 speeds. The Cherenkov was equipped with all the signal detection and generation equipment that Rob had used in the quest to understand the blips he was getting through the Q-space leakage from his sensors. That was what the blips had been after all, leakage. While the Cherenkov had an access hatch, they definitely couldn't fit one of the new test craft in the cargo bay, even if it would have fit through the hatch. In any case, Rob had one of our the G2 probes in there, it was going to become their homing beacon. He activated both of the ship's gravitic shields, ran them up to maximum strength and let the blooming force of the shields shred the crates apart. They pulled the bits of wood back into the cargo bay with a tractor beam. Space was vast, but no sense littering. The test craft were designated as Q-One and Q-Two, and the next six hours were spent bringing Q-One up to full ready status. Rob locked in the 'beacon' he identified as Alpha Centauri A. Then shifted the targeting off phase five degrees. If the drive did work, he didn't want to send the ship straight into the heart of a G class star! The next step was to get the Q-node built into Q-One locked on to the beacon that was the Sun. In theory, this shouldn't matter, but when you're lighting the candle on something new, you do extra things, even if only to make yourself feel better. They let the systems sit at idle for an hour, watching the readings from the on-board telemetry. When things were stable, it was time. They were all three within a few feet of each other, so there was no need for a fancy countdown or anything overly dramatic, but Rob did give an out loud countdown 3... 2... 1... Go! and flipped the switch that engaged the Q-Space Engine. In a flash of utter violet, limned in an instant of ruby red, Q-One was gone! All three of them sat there, stunned for several seconds, before Rob thought to call out. "Telemetry?" "We're still green across the board for on-board Engine diagnostics." Ted came back with immediately. "We're reading shield integrity." Wendy added. "I've still got signal lock." Rob said, looking at his tracking sensor. "But I've got no readings from the external sensor array." A long 3 or 4 seconds later, the sensor panels blinked into life and at the same time they got a harsh audible tone that Ted quickly confirmed as Engine shutdown. "Bringing up the holographic display interface." Rob said, flipping the switch. Boom, what had been the back wall of the mission bay became a view screen, and we were looking at stars. "No way to tell for sure what stars we're seeing." Ted said. Rob began to manipulate the holographic representation of Q-one's controls. A transparent globe sprang up in front of them, and as Rob activated another switch, a red light began blinking on the surface of the globe. "That's our beacon." He said aloud. "That should be Alpha Centauri A." He accessed the attitude controls and slowly began rotating the Q-One around until the blinking red light was centered on the far side of the globe. In the view screen behind it, they saw Alpha Centauri A! "Wohoo!! Rob shouted without thinking. "Now what?" Ted asked as he was thumping him on the back. "Now I kiss my wife, for a start." Rob said, spinning in his chair and pulling Wendy into his lap. The kiss was a pretty decent scorcher, but then, they had been practicing quite a bit lately. When they finally broke apart, Wendy gave Rob a wicked smile. "Okay hotshot, now what?" Phew! You focus on a goal, and when it arrives, you get asked what next! "Okay you comedians. We've got a working sensor array in the Alpha Centauri system. Lets fire up the gravitic filters and go looking for planetary bodies." It had long been known that the gravitational effects of the binary star system would prevent the formation of gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn, and they were quickly able to confirm that there were indeed none present around Alpha Centauri A. They did find evidence of three rocky planetary bodies. It was too far for good visuals, but they began building a map in the Q-One's internal navcomm immediately. The G2 drive was brought online and began making for a location much closer to the inner orbits where habitable planets would have to be. In the meantime, the Q-Two was brought online and began cycling up to full ready status. They stared at the blinking lights and the scrolling readouts, and collectively took a mental step back. They had been working non-stop for almost twelve straight hours now. They needed food and sleep. The Q-One was brought to a dead stop two hours closer to Alpha Centaruri A, and then put in standby mode. The Q-Two was brought back down to standby mode as well, and the old G2 probe beacon was prepped and sent out the hatch as well. Her internal and external sensors looked good through the remotes, and while they fixed themselves a hurried but triumphant dinner of baked salmon, braised potatoes and sweet corn muffins, they boosted her even further away from the solar ecliptic. Two hours later, fed and happy, they brought the beacon to a stop, and then it was time for sleep. Rob woke up with Wendy in his arms five hours later, and try as he might, couldn't get back to sleep. Resigned to his fate, he got up and put on a pot of coffee and began looking through the telemetry and diagnostic data that had been captured during those long three or four seconds when Q-One was en route. He was making notes via Q-tap and tagging them to various points in the data readouts when Wendy came into the cabin. "Mmm! Coffee!" She said, sliding into his lap and taking the cup out of his hand. "What's all this?" She asked after a long, appreciative sip. "The data from the telemetry and diagnostic feeds during the Q-One's transit time. Its interesting, but I'm not sure what to make of it at this point." Wendy gave Rob a kiss and headed off to find her own cup of coffee. "Bacon and eggs sound good for breakfast? Sweetie?" He heard her from the starboard hatchway. "Sure thing honey cakes!" Came Ted's voice from the aft hatchway. "Mornin' Ted." Rob said, over the sound of Wendy's giggle from the next compartment. "Mornin' Boss." Ted said, sitting down across from him and taking a quick look at the readouts he was working from. "Telemetry readings?" He asked. I nodded my head. "From between?" Rob nodded at first and then looked up. "Ted, are you an Anne McCaffery fan?" "Oh definitely. I wanted to grow up to be a Dragonrider when I was little." He answered. "I came as close as I could to meeting that goal as reality would allow, don't you think?" Wendy was walking back in with a cup of coffee in her hand. "Pern huh?" She handed it to Ted and smiled. "Well, I hope we don't wind up battling thread anywhere. Oh, and by the way, we're having link sausage instead of bacon. The sausage was already thawed." Rob studied his notes and the readouts in silence, and saw a holo-display flicker into vague existence around Ted as he got busy with something as well, slipping into that look of 'palsied distraction' as he remembered Alexandra Nascimento describe the appearance of someone accessing a Q-tap and doing data entry and browsing through a personal holographic interface. His own data drew him in, and Rob began to see some information that would probably let him adjust the way the engine made the transitions in and out of the Q-Space. He was busy adding more notes when Wendy arrived with a plate of sausage and the coffee pot. "Hands off the sausage for now, the eggs will be out in a minute. Who want a refill on the coffee?" Ted and Rob both raised their cups, and got refills. They each snagged a link of sausage the minute Wendy was out of the compartment as well, grinning at each other momentarily. One advantage to a holo display and a 'twitch and squint' interface for doing data entry — you don't have to worry about greasy fingers on a keyboard. Wendy came back out only a few minutes later with the rest of their breakfast and the three of them sat and ate. There was an air of excitement at the table. "How are we going to proceed?" Ted asked. "I want to send the Q-Two next, to see if we can come closer to AC1 with a smaller offset. If we get a good second trip, then we'll look at bringing one of them back and seeing how close we can come to our beacon." With breakfast out of the way, they did indeed get right back to it. The first thing needed was to get both their birds back up from standby and into full ready mode. Rob took care of the remote bird and Wendy brought the local one back to life at the same time. Rob set the Q-One to detection mode, all her tracking and sensor gear wide open and looking. As soon as it was humming and happy he joined Ted and Wendy in looking at the Q-Two. They already had her at full ready and were just waiting for me. Rob halved the offset from last time, dropping it from 5 degrees to 2.5 degrees out of phase. "Final diagnostics check?" Rob asked. All three of them ran through one separately. "Green." Wendy called first. "Good to go." Came Ted's response. When Rob had the same results, he didn't even bother with a count down, and just hit the go button. Again there was the deep violet and ruby flash of light, and again the probe was gone! "Telemetry!" He called, but they were all already focused in on it. It was a virtual repeat of yesterday's performance, with that same amount of transition time. It was a lot easier to get a bearing this time, with the Q-One already there, and the two craft quickly had a lock on each other, giving a very precise location. "Cutting the shift in half made quite a difference. We're 8AU out from Alpha Centauri A, and thats still several AU closer than Q-One, after running her in for two hours." Ted announced. "We're still two AU out from the closest planetary orbit. If our data can be confirmed now as far as those three planets go." Wendy said. They did that very thing, and indeed, the outermost of the three planets was exactly where she should have been, orbitally, but the closest of the probes still wasn't close at all. Her orbit had her at two o'clock compared to the probe's six. Planet two was at nine o'clock and the innermost planet was at the probe's eight. Interesting, and good navigational confirmation, but Rob wasn't ready to become a planetary explorer yet. The beacon on the G2 probe was cycled up to full power and then they went looking for her with the Q-One's targeting array. The beacon was artificial, and easy to spot. "Target locked." Rob called. "We have green lights, across the board." Ted called. Rob looked at Wendy, nodding at the go button. "Go ahead babe, you light off this candle." Wendy grinned back and reached down and flipped the switch. Suddenly, the proximity detectors aboard the beacon began screaming, and all the displays dedicated to the Q-One's status blinked and shifted their output. A second later, the Cherenkov's external sensors began blinking a new status message. They had company, the sensors wanted them to know. Rob had used no phase offset in targeting the return, because he now believed the Q-Space Engine would inherently sheer off from interposing itself on another gravity source. It appears that he was right about that, as the Q-One appeared at a distance of a little more than a light second away from the beacon. He turned right around and with an offset of only 1 percent off phase, sent the Q-One back to Alpha Centauri A. "something went wrong!" Wendy called as we began seeing the telemetry. "Q-One is exactly the same distance from AC1 as Q-Two. You mis-set the phase setting." Ted said. Rob looked at the settings, they were exactly as he thought he had set them. "I don't think that's it." He said. "The phase shift was 1 percent." "What is it then?" Wendy asked. Rob explained his thoughts on the gravitic sheering effect that he had anticipated, and postulated that the immense gravity well of a star might impose such a large limit. "The data will tell us, eventually." Rob said in the end. They did bounce both probes back and forth a dozen times, without a hitch. "Okay, when do we go?" Wendy asked over lunch. "We don't." Rob answered. "What next then?" Ted added. "Next is the little surprise I have waiting in the forward cargo bin, beneath the emergency oxygen bottle storage." Rob told Ted, waving him towards the forward storage area. Ted headed through the hatch, and a moment later, both heard him call out. "Rats!" "Something wrong Ted?" Wendy called in alarm. "No, but we've got rats!" He said coming back with a cage in each hand. "Lab rats, to be precise. There are eight of them, all in their own individual cages, like these two." Getting a specimen into Q-One alive was a small challenge. Mostly it was that they hadn't tried a docking maneuver with either probe up to this point, nor had they tested their abilities to handle an airlock cycling procedure. They knew both probes were still holding Earth normal atmospheres successfully. And all the remote telemetry indicated they had maintained Earth normal environments throughout all the transitions, but this was going to be our real litmus test. With one of the rats in a shielded cage, the equivalent of wearing a Caldwell suit, and the other rat in a normal cage, the equivalent to a shirt sleeve environment, they were ready to go. Both rats had given preflight blood samples and stool specimens. They would have to clean their cages immediately when they got them back so more samples could be taken later. "On station and ready to go." Came Ted's call from the pilot's seat, once we were back in position. Rob nodded to Wendy, and once again she flipped the switch to send the probe through Q-space. "She's away." Came Ted's call. "She's no longer on the scope up here." "on board telemetry looks good." I called over the tap, to include Ted. "Transition complete." Wendy called. " We're green and looking good and the probe is reporting a lock on Alpha Centauri A." "We've still got two live rats." Rob called out, reading their telemetry off the board. They let them sit for two hours while they observed them closely. The two rats sat there acting normal, at least as far as rats go, and then it was time to bring them back. There was a complete set of medical standards to compare our rats against, and they ran all the tests, including taking the follow-up blood samples. They cleaned their cages so they could collect accurate post-flight stool samples, and then watched them for a couple of hours more, followed by a quick turnaround trip, where the probe was paused at the Alpha Centauri end only long enough to recycle the Q-space Engine, then jump them back. They left them aboard the Q-One and brought in the Q-Two and repeated the first jump with two new rats, giving them the same two hours of AC1 time before bringing them back. "There goes another day." Wendy called. It was Ted's turn to make dinner. Dinner was always interesting when it was Ted's turn to cook. # The Hawking had freed herself up for Rob, but they were having to put off future contracts to do so. "Lots of future contracts." Victor told me. "Doing well then are we?" I asked. "Very much so. We could be making weekly runs between Venus, Ceres and Europa." "Hmm, so a ship designed specifically for hauling freight would be even better?" "Of course, especially something that could handle the modular shipping containers." "Very well. The Hawking is not QuanTangle, and QuanTangle is not the Hawking. If we want to be in the freight business, lets do it with a freighter, not a research ship." Rob had already talked to Tom Standaahl during the run back to Earth and gave him the go ahead to build four more of the new engines. He offered him double what we had paid in the past. "I can't tell you anything yet, Tom, but if things go as I hope in the next six months to a year, Erie Precision's ability to produce this engine is going to make them very, very rich." Tom beamed when he said it, but shook his head at the same time. "We had already decided that there was a good chance of that. We're buying the yards adjacent to us on both sides and expanding our capacity." "Thats a good idea, but I would suggest you consider something on the Moon as well. It took us ten months to get the first two. How long is it going to take to get the next four?" "Three months." Tom said smugly. "We've still got all the machine tool codings stored in non-volatile memory systems. We can be machining our first parts two hours from now. Build time will be greatly reduced as well, because we took notes and holo recordings every step of the way." Rob then called McKesson Aerospace and asked what the schedule was like for getting a new ship built. They had just finished setting up their third fabrication yard and were adding a fourth that would be ready in six months. They put QuanTangle first on the list for the new yard, and Rob thought he might be getting special treatment. They asked about the design, and he told them he would get back to them shortly. Rob asked Yuri Stepanovich if he could do the design, letting him know what their needs were. Yuri promised to have something preliminary to look at in a week or two. Rob let Yuri know about the schedule at the McKesson yards, and he said he could work with that. Rob also clued him in to Erie Precision, and told him to take his cues from them as far as drive bay specs. Most of the crew got a couple weeks off, but a core group of bridge officers and the lab rats from Nauru stayed aboard to deal with the necessaries. They got together the first day in the Hawking's main conference room. "First, I have to ask everyone here to keep everything confidential." Rob said to the group once they were all settled in. "I know I can trust you all, but this is something beyond the norm, even compared to whats been our norm." That at least got him a chuckle. He wasn't really worried, just dotting the i's and crossing the t's. "While you all spend the next two weeks getting the Hawking stocked, refitted with some new gear and expanding your inventory a bit, I am going to be refitting the Cherenkov with some new equipment." Rob tapped the room's holo display and fed a view of Q-One that slowly rotated, giving a complete look at her from all sides. The sharp-eyed Saalih Jaffre spotted the odd size and shape of the drive pod immediately. "That's an odd looking configuration, you could almost fit three G2 drives in that space." "There is a G2 drive in there, but its not alone." Rob answered, switching to an interior view from the front of the drive bay. "Here's the G2, but what you are seeing behind it is something else entirely." The image in front of them moved past the G2 drive and fully into the rear two thirds of the drive bay and slowly began showing the Q-Space Engine in all its ugly glory. "That is an inelegant looking beast!" Victor said. "What is it?" "That, ladies and gentlemen is what Wendy, Ted Henley and I have been calling the Q-Space Engine." "What does it do?" Rob switched to the next feed in his prepared queue. It showed the Viewscreen of the Q-Two, zoomed in on the Sun. The view zoomed back in, past the Cherenkov, to show the distant Sun behind. The display paused for a moment and then the Cherenkov and the distant Sun disappeared from view and the star field shifted in the view screen. "What just happened there?" Fred Wassermann asked. Rob nodded at the screen where the Q-Two's viewscreen showed the view slowly shifting across the sky until a small yellow ball of light came into view. The image began to zoom in until the yellow ball filled the screen. It was very obviously not our own familiar Sun. "Oh my god!" Owen Gardner blurted. "Is that Alpha Centauri?" "Alpha Centauri A, to be precise." He added. Earning a semi-serious glare from his former instructor. The next hour or so was a mixed bag of babbling, excitement and silence. After his initial outburst, Owen Gardner just sat there staring at the screen. Most everyone else babbled and a few were downright giddy. Rob felt a little giddy himself, to be honest. The next hour, they got down to brass tacks. "We cannot expect to refit the Hawking with the new engine until we can get her into the dock at Infinity Station. Right now, the only two Q-Space Engines in existence are in the drive bay of that probe and her twin." The first thing that needed to be done with the Hawking free, was outfit her with her own copies of all the Q-space beacon and tracking gear. That included both the Viking and the Beagle. Next came stocking up the lab with everything needed to rebuild or repair a Q-Space engine. Rob sent Saalih Jaffre and Coretta Ramirez, the Hawking's top two propulsion specialists, to Erie Precision with instructions to suck Tom Standaahl's brain dry and to watch and learn during the build process. In the meantime, with the Beagle and the Viking regularly staying behind to add cargo capacity to the Hawking, there was plenty of room in the shuttle bay to bring the Cherenkov in so they could do her refit, unobserved. It was decided to sacrifice Q-Two for its engine. With the gravitic shields turned off, the outside walls of the drive bay would be easy to remove, and they soon had the engine exposed, sitting bare on her mounts. It definitely would not have as much working space around the engine as they had in the Q-Two. That bothered Rob, and he spent some time worrying about it. Finally it occurred to him that the mating rig that allowed the Cherenkov to mate herself to the Hawking could be used to mate her to the Q-two as well, if we could adapt her access hatch to match the mounting configuration. It also meant that the Cherenkov's G2 drives could be pulled. The Cherenkov had a perfectly good pair already that had just become superfluous. Half a day was spent replicating the mount, but when they were done, the Q-Two was no more. Instead, she was a decorative and useful blister beneath the main bulk of the Cherenkov. Another couple of days were then spent building control circuits to run between the main ship and her new external drive bay. It did make things a little inconvenient inside at first, as the access hatch to the Q-Space Engine was dead in the middle of a walkway between the aft cargo storage bay and the G2 Drive bay. Rob had to wait while Victor and Ike ran field integrity tests on the new configurations so they could reassure themselves that the grav engines and the shields would treat the ship as one unit. When everything was ready at last, it was suddenly as if everyone in the room stopped and took a deep breath at the same time. They were ready, and now Rob just had to find the will to strap himself into a seat on the Cherenkov and push a button. A button wrapped up with all his self-doubt and built of every shred of indecision he'd ever experienced. See how we men torture ourselves. Our minds put hills on the very roads we ourselves have built. Some men boast and brag to push themselves past these self-imposed moments, some drink and carry on, some close their eyes and pray. Rob went and found Wendy Young, and let her pull him into her arms and kiss him and whisper words into his ear. Later, in the dark, his prayers were of thanks and his thoughts were of her, and the button was just a button once again. ------- Chapter 9: Dancing with the Star Charts There was a hearty breakfast in the captain's mess, a bit of glamorous conceit that had been added to the Pai Lung when she became the Hawking and the ship became a commercial venture. It was Ted, Victor, Wendy, Ike, DeeDee and Rob, along with Alexandra Nascimento and Owen Gardner. Victor and Ted seemed a touch too cheerful, and blamed it on their military backgrounds. "We learn to be of good cheer and to eat well, of our meal and of life before we go off to battle." Victor said, raising his glass of tea in salute. "The modern soldier can't quite say 'We who are about to die salute you.' Too many movies, both the cheesy ones and the good have made those words seem too cheap." Ted added. "But that is the attitude. We're able to find joy in our commitment to our duty and our oath and ignore the possibilities that the situation might suggest." "It doesn't matter that the moment isn't a literal sword over our necks." Victor added with a laugh. "A moment of mind-boggling impossibility will do as well, eh?" Victor and Owen Gardner were going on the trip. Alexandra Nascimento had risen to second in command after taking Rob's place on the bridge, and would assume command for the duration of the trip. She had three experienced officers to rely on in Victor's absence, and Rob expected she wouldn't need them. Alexandra always was one of those 'eye of the eagle' types, and now that she had learned to master her natural inclinations in a healthier way, the position suited her. Ike and DeeDee would come as well. The rear cargo space had been emptied out and some collapsible emergency folding seats had been added. Of course the Q-Space Engines were just past the bulkhead to the aft of those new seats, but Rob wasn't going to mention it until they had made their first trip. Everyone ate their meal and left, heading to their quarters to get ready, a last minute chance for everyone to 'freshen up', empty a nervous bladder or calm a queasy bowel, and then meet in the shuttle bay. The Cherenkov, with her new blister, took up most of the bay. There was an awkward bit of ladder and scaffolding to negotiate to get to her entry hatch. A small design flaw, in a cobbled together craft. Ted took the pilot's seat in the forward command cabin. Rob took the second seat, and would be the one with access to the QSE, as Ted had begun calling it. Victor took the third seat, but he was just along for the ride today. Wendy was in the middle cabin at the sensor and communications center that had last been used for tracking the Q-One and her now sacrificed sister. Ike, DeeDee and Owen Gardner took the new seats in the converted cargo bay behind her. The Hawking's tractor beams eased the Cherenkov out of the shuttle bay, and once she was free of the shields, they fired up her own G2 drive and move a quick million miles away from the Hawking. Wendy had standard Q-tap communications with the Hawking established, and was in active contact with Ty Glover and Fred Wassermann. She also had the Cherenkov's Beacon up and actively locked in by the Hawking. Everyone was wearing full Caldwell suits with space harnesses that had added EV utility modifications. If the ship couldn't make it back, they weren't likely to make a difference, but they wore them all the same. "Systems Check." Rob called over the Cherenkov's circuit. "G2 drive is green." Ted called. Rob heard him in stereo, as his words came through the tap at the same time as he said them beside him. "Comm suite green. Tracking suite green. Beacon green and active." Wendy said through the comm. "Bringing the Q-Space Engine online." Rob said, watching the displays flicker as he did. He watched them settle into stable readings. "Bringing the QSE from standby to full ready." He said. "Power is holding steady." They sat there for a moment, collectively feeling the hum of the ship whispering through their bones. "Ready when you are sweetheart." Rob said to Wendy on a personal channel. He looked back through the open hatchway behind him, spotting her figure in the distance. "Hawking, this is the Cherenkov. All systems are at full ready and we are prepared to engage the drive." He said, switching to the Hawking's channel. "Roger that Cherenkov, this is the Hawking, we have you locked and are standing by." Came one of the bridge officer's voices. Alexandra's voice followed. "Good luck and God speed, Cherenkov." "All hands, prepare for Q-Space activation." Rob called. "Comm, what is our Beacon, and our phase?" "We are locked on Alpha Centauri A, and our phase offset is zero." Wendy replied. Rob nodded to himself and reached down, tilted the safety cover up and caressed the button for a second, and then pushed it. Nothing happened. Rob felt nothing at all. He looked at the displays. The power readings were showing a completed cycle, and the Engine showed as having engaged. "Status?" He called. "Beacon lock is still active, and I have a reading that says its 5 AU away, dead behind us." Wendy called. "Ted?" Rob said "On it!" He answered, pulling the yoke to the side to spin us around. Slowly the distant little yellow ball, so similar and yet so different, came to be centered in our screen. Rob tapped a circuit to the Hawking. "Hawking, this is the Cherenkov. We have Alpha Centauri A in our screens." They hung around for the same two hours that the Q-One and Q-two probes had for their first trips, and while they waited, put the Cherenkov's sensor array to work, trying to get a little more information on the three planets the probes had seen. All they got were some signs that the second planet, the one in the theoretical 'life zone', had an atmosphere, and that there was at least trace oxygen in it. At the end of their two hour stay, Rob avoided any sense of drama and just pushed the button. Once again there was no sensation at all. "Welcome home Cherenkov." Came Alexandra's voice. "Welcome home." The debriefing aboard the Hawking was interesting, to say the least. The entire medical staff gave them a going over like they had just spent a month in the desert without food or water. They were told to expect an MRI, CAT scan and a full work up when they got back to Infinity Station. They nodded their heads and kept on grinning. "The first and most amazing thing I noticed was that there was no perception of a transition, at all. None. We did not know we had succeeded until we looked at the data displays." Rob began. "Everything about that transition must be beyond our physical ability to experience." Wendy said. "We literally can't feel it. "The second thing I noticed was that no time appeared to pass for us." Rob said. "Did the same 3 or 4 second period that we observed with the probes occur? Did you have a loss of contact?" "Yes, exactly the same amount of time passed." Fred Wassermann said. "And Ty found something interesting." Fred said, turning to Tyrese Glover and raising an eyebrow. "I do not claim this means anything, but our standard tracking chronometer only displays 4 decimal places, and all transition periods measured out to 3.1416 seconds. However, it is internally designed to measure up to 12 decimal places, so I pulled the measurements up in the diagnostic display instead of the tracking display. The time measures out to 3.141592653589 seconds." "Wow." someone said into the silence. "Transition time is pi?" On the way back to Earth, Rob tapped Tom Standaahl and got him into a holo call with Coretta and Saalih. "We've had a good test in the Cherenkov, and we're ready to refit the Hawking and our two transports." He began. "But we gained some experience that I want to pass along. I've got some data for you. Here." Rob said, piping the data through to their Q-taps. "I see what you wound up doing with the Cherenkov. Is that going to be permanent?" Tom asked. "No, and that's what this call is about really. We did that to avoid loosing our easy access to the Engine. The damned things are just too complicated to risk tight quarters, and that's what we would have had to do to shoehorn one into the Cherenkov's drive bay." "So you want to go modular it appears?" Tom said, looking at the data Rob had sent. "Yes. I'm picturing every one of these engines being built into a vehicle pretty much like the two we already built, but I still don't want these four to have to go through the poking and prodding that surface to orbit certification would require." "So we modify the exteriors with all these mounting surfaces. Should we pull the internal flight controls and just leave the control and remote interfaces?" "No, I think the fact that every Q-Space Engine is a self-contained ship, with its own reactor and controls is a good idea, and it adds very little to the overall cost. You might want to remove all the hard seats though and replace them with the fold up and drop down seating used in emergency vehicles." They hashed things out for over two hours, but when they were done, they had a pretty good design. They also knew exactly what they had to do to the Hawking to get her ready for her new engines. Victor was not amused. "What do you mean we are pulling the existing G2 drive? We just finished getting refitted with her!" With several months to go before the first of the new engines would be ready, they had plenty of time to get everyone used to the idea, and plenty of time to reserve some time in the Infinity Station dry dock. Given the Hawking's size, they weren't going to have to alter her external appearance at all. There was more than enough room in the rear drive bay for one of the new engines, but it did mean modifying the layout of the surrounding area pretty drastically. The crew did all the internal work they could while waiting for their slot, stripping interior walls and bracings until they had the existing drive isolated in a framework of supports and control feeds. They had the cuts they were going to need to make marked and ready to go. The time in the dry dock was going to seem like an Indy 500 pit stop. A week after Rob's call to Erie Precision, Saalih called to let him know they'd be getting the first two engines at the same time. The crew took that knowledge and ran with it, prepping the Beagle in the Hawking's shuttle bay. The two transports were not big enough to add a Q-Space engine to without visible external modifications, so they tore apart her entire rear end and rebuilt it from scratch. The drive assembly would slide into the transport like a bullet into the chamber, and the rear of the Beagle would have a flared bulge that did resemble those on an old fashioned revolver's magazine. ------- There was an internal struggle in Rob's mind about making the Q-Space engine public and revealing this new ability to travel to the stars. He hadn't held anything back in the past when his weirdly wired brain fired off something new. Other than to be able to surprise a few people. This time though He felt like they needed to have some sort of handle on the new technology and become familiar with the process and the underlying reality. As long as the folks at Erie Precision were willing to keep their lips sealed, they had time. Time to adjust, time to think and time to explore. Things were kept kind of mum back on Sandy Isle too. Rob and Wendy's parents were happily adjusting to the island life, and had begun to take sailing lessons. They were shopping for a sailboat and Dave McKesson had volunteered to help. Sailing was something of a family obsession with the McKesson family, it seemed. Dave was there with his wife Ginny during one of the couple's trips down, and the two of them seemed to sense they were up to something special. Rob could see a shine in their eyes when Wendy or he talked about getting back to the Hawking. Rob hadn't really met Doctor McKesson before, except for briefly at Andy and Cor's wedding, and it was still amazing to him that someone so young and beautiful could be old enough to be Andy and Serenity McKesson's mom. He thought Wendy felt a little outdone in the beauty department with her around, but he did spend some serious time every night making her forget her concerns. They invited the Hawking's crew down for some time on the beach as well, and by the time everyone had rotated through for at least a week of swimming, soaking up some sun and being winded and dined by the elder Youngs and Fellowes, the entire crew was feeling fully recharged and ready to go. Rob almost regretted not being there during Alexandra's week. He understood she considered the beach as clothing optional, and had absolutely no problems being seen au natural. Wendy slugged him in the shoulder twice, both times they heard the story from someone on the ship. "That's for imagining her naked." She said. The practical minds of the geeks in the lab had decided that an interstellar drive that worked in so unnoticeable a fashion was not a good thing. They tied the engine's firing circuits to the ships artificial gravity, and set the gravity field to flicker just above the level of perception. It probably wouldn't wake up anyone who was sleeping, or interrupt someone's concentration, but everyone who was awake would feel a momentary flutter in the pit of their stomachs when they made a jump. That wasn't the only surprise. Someone had decided that if they were going to be interstellar adventurers, they needed something distinctive to wear. Everyone was pretty comfortable wearing synthetic mesh shirts and shorts under their Caldwell suits, and the suits were mandatory attire during duty hours. To be honest, they were so comfortable most of the crew forgot they were wearing them until it was time for a bath or a little romance. They all got a little 'zap' from a portable update module, and now their Caldwell suits sported a triple circle logo over the left breast that symbolized the three stars of the Alpha Centauri System. Rob really liked the looks of it, and decided he would have to use it officially for whatever business venture he wound up in when interstellar travel became a public reality. Saalih and Coretta came back to the Hawking to supervise the installation of the new Engines. The hardest part was shredding the shipping crates off them. The system of mounts and rails worked perfectly, and the engines slid into their new homes smoothly. The biggest difference between the two installs was the manner in which they tied the existing fusion reactors into their power grids. The Hawking had a much larger reactor for her original drive, and routing that power to the new drive assembly did take a little reconfiguration of the power couplings. Ted Henley, who had originally been hired as a glorified chauffeur after all, stayed at home this time. He parked Isaac at Infinity Station and took the Viking to their lab on the moon. The Viking may be waiting for her new engine, but she had all the beacon and tracking gear she needed to become their home base's tracking station. Even with the extra trickiness of the power tie-ins, they were done in two days. The next two engines wouldn't roll out of Erie Precision's shop for another month. Saalih volunteered to go back in the Viking with Ted and stay at Erie until the engines were done. By then it would be close to time to begin work on the new freighter at the McKesson yard, and he could shift over there to act as liaison on that build. One concern that came up was the power drain. Standard fusion reactors were considered to be good for a hundred years when powering a grav field generator, even a G2 Drive version. Examination of the power consumption from Q-One told them that those same engines would only last fifty years at the rate one of the Q-Space engines was drawing power. They would have to keep an eye on that until they were very sure of the rate, but the Hawking wasn't going to drain a reactor with a few jumps. There is always a brief 'ants scurrying' period of time before any mission. They had experienced it every time and this was no exception, but finally, the scurrying was over, the crew were at their stations and it was time to leave Infinity Station and head for space. The Hawking was, as far as anyone on Earth knew, heading for the Oort cloud, but what they really intended to do was test the 5AU limit they'd observed at the incoming end, and see if it applied to the departure end as well. They would hit the button at about 2AU, just before they got to the Asteroid belt, and if the first one didn't work, again just before they got to Jupiter at 5.1AU. An hour after leaving Infinity Station the Hawking passed beyond Mars orbit, and thirty minutes after that, with the backscatter of the asteroids providing some cover, Rob pushed the button. His stomach fluttered and the star field in front of him changed immediately. "Okay! No 5AU limit on outgoing jumps!" He said into the crowded bridge. "Definitely still holding at 5AU for incoming." Owen Gardner said from the navigation station. "Wendy, can you tap Ted back on the Moon and let him know all is well and that we'll give him more details when we've parked the ship somewhere for the night?" Two hours after arrival, they were orbiting the second planet of Alpha Centauri A, and looked down on a world with water and life and what looked like breathable atmosphere, though they would have to wait until a more complete analysis had been done. "We've got three island continents." Peter London called out. "Axial tilt appears to be much less than Earth, only 12 or 13 degrees." Carol Kingman announced. "Surface temperature at the main equatorial continent is currently reading 34 degrees Celsius." Alexandra said. They had a lot of eyes focused on the scenery below. Everyone with access to an external sensor array was looking for something. "We'll come back, but lets get the rest of the big picture stuff out of the way." Rob said to Victor. "Of course. Time to cruise around the neighborhood, before we decide where to park for the night, eh?" Rob smiled and nodded back. "All hands, we are breaking orbit on a course for planet one." Victor said over the ship circuit. He paused for the reaction he knew was happening all over the ship. "We will be back. To your stations!" The innermost of the three planets was not that much to look at. Somewhere between Mercury and Mars in size, with no atmosphere, and tidally locked on Alpha Centauri A. The Hawking spent only enough time in orbit to get the particulars of axial tilt and a gross reading of her composition. The live reads suggested the possibility that she was rich in heavy metals and carbon, but it would take some in-depth analysis by the experts to tell them more. Rob went over to Owen's navigation station and the two of them ran through the procedure of getting a beacon lock. This time the target was going to be Alpha Centauri B. The two stars' distance from each other varied between 11 and 35 AU, approximately. Currently the two were about 23 AU apart. This was little more than three light hours away, and at G2 drive speeds they could actually make that trip in a half a day. They didn't have to settle for G2 speeds though. Once the lock was set, and Owen nodded his confirmation at how exactly they had just done what they did, Rob looked at Victor. "All hands are at their stations." Victor reported. "Very well, you may proceed Captain." Rob said. "Navigator, activate the interstellar drive on my mark." Victor said, followed by a short pause. "Mark." My stomach fluttered, and once again, the stars had changed. "We have a lock on Alpha Centauri B, and our distance is 4.8 AU." Myron Kirby, the assistant astrogator called. "A sensor sweep indicated two planets and an asteroid belt." Owen called in turn. "The asteroid belt is behind us about 20 light minutes. Planet one is in the HZ." "Captain, make for the second planet at speed." Rob said. "Navigator, give me a course." Victor called. "Locked in sir." Myron called back a moment later. "Helm, put us under way at full drive." The second planet was again somewhere between Mercury and Mars in size, but this one had a hydrocarbon rich atmosphere similar to what had been seen on Saturn's moon Titan. There was a moon as well, though it was small and misshapen, half again as big as Phobos. This planet had an extreme 83 degree axial tilt, and they saw signs of atmospheric movement just in the brief hour they were in orbit around her. "Break orbit for planet one." Rob called out once they'd captured the vitals. Victor repeated his exchange with the navigator and the helmsman, and they were on their way. The distance between the two orbits, planet one and two was only 1.5 AU, but planet one was currently at their nine o'clock in relation to the star itself, so the trip in took almost as long as it had to reach planet two from the jump threshold. The crew of the Hawking were not disappointed when they got there. Not in the least. If the second planet of Alpha Centauri A had seemed a revelation, then this planet was a miracle! Air and water and life was not enough. Fred Wassermann called it perfectly over the ship circuit. "We have dinosaurs!" ------- Rob looked at the images in the view screen and shook his head. 'The religious fanatics back on Earth who seem to oppose me at every turn because I keep inventing things that they see as contradicting the Bible might well be happier with him in the future.' He thought to himself. 'Alpha Centauri is surely God's gift to the people of Earth.' Rob expressed similar sentiments over lunch with most of the lab rats, and found himself defending his position. While most everyone agreed to some degree, there were a few holdouts, mostly on the principle of science and faith being mutually exclusive. "Most of us who delve into the depths of the way the universe works are people of faith, but we are also professional skeptics." Rob said with some passion. "I cannot look at Alpha Centauri and imagine God as not existing. Why else would the Sun's near twin and its close cousin be so tantalizingly close, and why else would we find such bounteous life once we got there?" Three hours after their discovery, the dinosaurs were less of a mystery, but still amazing. Smooth skinned, long necked and thick legged, they looked like every man's memory of a cartoon dinosaur from the classic Flintstones TV cartoon. Even down to the pastel purple skin. It appeared that most living things on this planet had a bit of a purplish cast to them. This wasn't a trick of the atmosphere, or something, the sky here seemed as blue as Earth's, though perhaps a shade paler. The purple tinge was from some compound, organic or otherwise that must be ever-present in the cells of living things. The desire the crew had expressed a few short hours ago to park for the night around Alpha Centauri A's pseduo-earth was quickly switched to a desire to remain where they were. Nobody on the bridge was opposed to the new plan, and the only caution was to remind the crew that they needed to get a sufficient amount of sleep. The Hawking was not so crowded that there was a need to maintain a complete schedule of watches for all the crew. The bridge crew maintained a standard naval watch schedule, as did the reactor crew. This was mostly a holdover from the naval days as well. The reactors were not finicky creatures. This meant that there was a regular night and day schedule on board, and even when they didn't park for the night, the phrase was used to describe the time in the ships day that passed for the hours between dinner and breakfast the following day. Even Infinity Station and Aristarchus base were on a rotation, given that the people back home were potentially from any given time zone. Despite the warnings, there were a lot of grumpy lab rats at breakfast the next morning. Brian Conroy described it best. "There was a 24 hour Dinotopia marathon on the Reality channel last night." Zoo Shimizu and Carol Kingman seemed the least affected, so they won the surprise offer. "Zoo, Carol, you guys want to go for a ride with Wendy and I this morning?" Rob asked. "Sure!" Zoo answered immediately. "Where we going?" After a moment's hesitation and a glance at Zoo, Carol nodded in agreement. "Love to." She said. "Great, after you get a chance to get your teeth brushed and your faces washed, I figured we'd heat up the Beagle and test out its new engine with a quick trip to Proxima Centauri." Carol got the honors of pushing the button this time, and the jump limit for Proxima turned out to be only 3 AU. The big surprise at Proxima was the single orbit planetary system Ike immediately dubbed 'Triplanetary'. Yes, he was showing his 'Doc' Smith space opera geek-iness, but he wasn't the first of the crew to do that, and what else would you call your first planetary system with three planets all orbiting each other? The three planets were almost identical in size, each close to half again the mass of Earth, and all three had atmospheres, though once again they weren't looking at anything breathable. Wendy named them Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, after the three fates from Greek mythology. Clotho had a soupy, corrosive atmosphere, full of sulfur compounds and a variety of metallic poisons. Lachesis had an atmosphere similar to Venus, mostly carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Atropos came the closest to being hospitable, it was mostly oxygen and nitrogen, but contained far too much else, and was much thicker than Earth's atmosphere at the surface. Proxima being a flare star meant that life wouldn't have been likely to survive even if it had formed, so they did only a cursory search. Some older NASA research from the beginning of the century had pinpointed a large, rocky planet as existing here, but this was not quite meeting the predictions. Back in the 1990's, data from the Hubble space telescope suggested that their might be a large planet or brown dwarf orbiting Proxima Centauri, but no confirming data was found. This perhaps explained the problems in pinning things down. They spent the morning moving the Beagle through the relatively close orbits, taking atmospheric samples, getting better readings on the orbits and inclinations of the three bodies in relation to each other and to Proxima. These were the kinds of orbits you couldn't really calculate based on short term study though. Someone was going to be back here to do more follow up, that was certain. All the good probe hardware was back on the Hawking anyway. It took three hours to get back to the Hawking, constrained by Alpha Centauri B's jump limits and a desire to give the outer asteroid belt a quick looking over. The sensors were giving off very strong mass readings from most of the larger asteroids, and spectral data was suspicious as well. The Beagle moved in and found a small cluster of asteroidal bodies orbiting around a larger piece, and the four explorers began a little poking and prodding. This was when they discovered a great weakness. There was nothing that could be considered a weapon on the Beagle, and the Hawking was the same. Rob wanted to grab an asteroid and blast it with something to get a better spectographic analysis, but there was nothing that could be used for that purpose. There were some hand-help tools used for planetary analysis on board, but nothing that could be used from inside the ship. It would have to be added to the list of things to talk about at the next meeting. In the meantime a tractor beam flicked out and grabbed the asteroid, and the Beagle fetched it back to Dinotopia. Once Rob was back on the Hawking, he had to decide what to do next. The study of the saurians, or dinoids, or whatever they wound up calling them was interesting, but the examination of the potentially habitable planet back at Alpha Centauri A promised a larger payoff in the long term if it proved to be capable of supporting human life. They had seen plant life, trees and grass, or their local equivalents. But the presence of animal life was a presumption at the moment. Another meeting was held over breakfast in the Captain's mess. Victor and Alexandra represented the bridge crew, Ike and Nat Simmons represented the lab rats, Chesty Price was there representing the service crew and Rob was there as the owner, with Wendy of course, who introduced herself facetiously as 'Mrs. Owner'. "That the crew is completely fascinated with Dinotopia is certain." Victor said. "Is it wise to spend so much time on this place?" "People are reporting fascinating amounts of information on behavior. There are family groupings, packs, perhaps even what could be called tribes, and each of these groupings means social behavior, mating, a million things." Nat said. "And this behavior is among a dozen dominant species at least, not just one!" Ike added. "But do we have anyone in the crew who is specialized in an area that gives them particular reason to be studying the life on this planet rather than the other one?" Chesty Price asked. "No." Rob said. "That is the key point here. We are mostly physicists or students of the other hard sciences. If we are going to be conducting what amounts to amateur investigations, is this the investigation we should be doing?" "Personally?" Ike said. "I'd think we should be giving Islandia a thorough going over, because it seems like a planet with potential for colonization, and that kind of potential should represent a primary focus of our exploration." "I agree that looking for potential colonies is a very good use of our skills and resources." Alex said. "But we have no official mandate on this trip except for what Rob wanted to do. Rob brought us here, what does he want to do?" That got everyone focused on Rob, and he stared back at them. "I would be happy to be off in the Cherenkov, trying to gain a better understanding of the Q-space environment, of the nature of these stellar beacons that allow us to find our way from star to star. I wonder if a beacon can be made to give up some secrets of its star before the jump. I wonder if the jump limit can be defeated in any way. The stellar systems, the planets, the life, that is amazing and wonderful, but for the geek in me it is just a hobby, something to do during my off hours when I'm not working on these other things." "If we are going to become the committee who decides where to go and what to do, lets recognize the facts behind Alex's statement first, eh?" Chesty Price said. "When Rob wants to go somewhere or do something, we do. He's the owner. Absent a desire from Rob, we make the decisions as a committee." "As long as it is understood that the committee will not interfere with the Captain's responsibilities to the ship and crew." Victor added. "When a situation calls for a Captain's decision, it will get made by me, or Alexandra, or the officer of the watch." "Of course." Rob said. Everyone else nodded. "Remember though that we are building a commercial freight hauler back on Earth. When the time comes, anyone who wants a bit of a more mundane lifestyle will be getting first choice for a birth on the new ship." "So Rob, are we absent a desire of the owner?" Alexandra asked. "No. This time I'm involved, I guess. I believe we need to get back to Islandia and begin some serious studying there." Rob said. "Nice name by the way Ike. Did you come up with it?" "No, DeeDee did, from the title of an old book. She said it was a cult classic from her college days, but the title was perfect, and she said it was a Utopian novel, which seemed even more perfect. I guess I've been calling it that in my head since then." "We'll have to see how our naming schemes work out." Rob said. "With Islandia, Dinotopia and Triplanetary as examples, we'll want to make sure we're not being to Quixotic. It may mean naming by committee, and you can guess how dull the names might become then." "Wendy's names for the three individual Proxima planets are good though, speaking of perfect." Nat said. "Rob wants Islandia, then that's what he gets." Victor said. Rob's desires expressed and the breakfast finished, all hands were advised of the Hawking's imminent return to Alpha Centauri A, and in fact the jump was made shortly after the announcement. Some of the sampling and analysis that had already been done was re-done. Sea water and soil samples were taken and Carol Kingman headed up a team from the medical section that began looking for microorganisms, bacteria, and other potential sources of problems. They broke out the lab rats and began testing. Peter London was the first to complain about being called a lab rat. The breaking out of the cages of actual lab rats by Carol Kingman's crew prompted it. After the waters had been stirred for several days, he even stood up in the galley during dinner one evening and made his empassioned statement. "The scientific and technical members of the crew have been getting called lab rats for some time now, and I propose this stop. We have real lab rats aboard, and we are not them! We are Geeks! Geeks in space, and deserve to be recognized as what we are!" There was a lot of snickering, but amazingly enough, the term lab rat did get retired. With everyone wearing Caldwell suits, there was no real reason to stay off planet while the medical team did their testing. Some care was taken to get everything aboard the Beagle and configured for planet-side duty, but a system of bio-filters and decontamination procedures had been designed into the airlocks of the Hawking and its transports for the Mars expedition, and they were still pretty much state of the art. Life on Islandia existed in every niche where you would expect it to be, and the 'analogs' — a fun word the exobiologist used to describe organisms that performed a function similar to something else. The analogs that filled those niches were achingly familiar and yet so different. In the northern island continent's central great lake there lived an analog to the Pike that ran nine feet long and several hundred pounds. Like the Pike back on Earth, Islandia's Blue Pike, as it was being called, had lots and lots of sharp teeth. There was nothing in the way of fishing gear aboard, so those insane enthusiasts dying to try fishing for one with a hand held rod and reel were going to have to wait for a return trip. Most of the more reasonable people, having seen pictures of one considered this desire to be a tad suicidal. The southern island continent featured a great savanna, and on these warm and sunny fields ran a great pack of antelope-like creatures given the name, Youngbok, over Rob's protests. The creatures did indeed resemble the African Springbok in its markings. The biggest difference was the single spiraled horn, like the mythical unicorn. These beautiful creatures moved in herds of thousands, and were preyed upon by a large creature that quickly became known as the Lion-Bear. Shaggy all over, and a dark brown in coloring was what lent it the bearlike appearance, but it was definitely built to run the savanna, and like the lions of Earth, hunted in extended family groups dominated by a female. Mickey Brooks, Traci Stevens and 'Zoo' Shimizu were scouting the edges of the equatorial island continent's great central forest. They were mostly interested in the nature of the trees. The leaves on these trees were not quite evergreen needles, and not quite the flat leaves of the deciduous trees of Earth. The closest they came to describing them was 'semi-cedar'. The leaves were broad and rounded, but were composed of flat stiff, waxy segments that overlapped each other. The bark was mostly smooth, but where the limbs broke away from the trunk, they were surrounded by stiff spikes of crusted bark and dried sap. They had the honor of stumbling across the first Bumble Tiger, and Mickey bore the brunt of the encounter. His Caldwell suit proved its worth then, as the creature snarled and clawed at Mickey after it had knocked him down. Try as it might, it couldn't penetrate the suit's gravitic shields, and with the encouragement of a few whacks on its back from Traci and Mickey, fled after its brief attempt at mayhem. In retrospect, it was a beautiful feline analog with broad, bright yellow and black stripes that were the reason it got stuck with the impromptu name of Bumble Tiger. Fred Wassermann immediately suggested the forest be designated Tiger Woods, but that got vetoed very quickly and very officially. Once the laughter died down that is. On or off the ship, Fred's sense of humor had gained some notoriety. The encounter with the Bumble tiger reinforced a weakness that had already been spotted once. The Hawking and its crew were defenseless and weaponless, outside of a few side arms that had come aboard with some of the service crew. "We finally picked up some fallen branches and started whacking it with them." Traci said during the debriefing. The decision was quick and nobody argued. It was time to head home, and the next trip would include some of the tools explorers in dangerous places needed. ------- Chapter 10: Miracles and Messengers. The Hawking's return to Earth was very low key, as was the activity of most of the people who left the ship. Rob called another meeting in the Captain's mess, with the same group as before. Ted Henley got included this time. "We're back in a hurry because we need to get some teeth, both for the ship and for the crew. That means guns, and when it comes to this area, I will concede a lack of expertise, and cede it to those among us with military backgrounds." Rob said as an opening statement. "What are are options for non-lethal weapons?" Wendy asked immediately. "Well, we'd like to be able to offer some sort of Star Trek phaser that would have a 'stun' setting, but we can't." Chesty Price answered. "Despite a lot of technological advances in the past few decades, hand held weaponry is still pretty much confined to guns that fire bullets." There was a brief silence while the rest of us digested that. "There are some definite options as far as arming the ship goes." Ted said. "There are some seriously powerful fusion-powered industrial laser systems that can be adapted, as the military already has, and adding a couple of them to the ship wouldn't require much in the way of hull modification. Getting them to fire through the shields might be tricky. I'd have to defer to you Geeks for that." "It might be a little trickier doing the Beagle and the Viking, but not impossible." Ike said. "We would probably have to add at least part of it as an external blister on the hull, then integrate the two." "We've been throwing gravity fields around for a lot of benign purposes so far," Rob said. "Maybe we should ask Brian Conroy and Chester Magill to put their heads together and build us some sort of gravy gun. I seem to remember reading about gravy guns in a science fiction novel once." "We may not have phasers, but I think I can give us photon torpedoes, or at least something similar." Ted said. "Ted, what have you been up to?" Wendy asked. "Well, when I saw your report on having to tow an asteroid back from Alpha Centauri B's asteroid field because you couldn't blast it with anything, I had an idea." Ted brought the room's holo display up and piped an image into it from his Q-tap. "This is a RIM-162 Evolved Sea Sparrow, it was one of the US Navy's favorites, back in the day. Its twelve feet long, and ten inches in diameter. Back when they were carried on US Naval vessels they were equipped with a 66 pound fragmentation warhead. We can buy these by the thousands, minus the motors and the warheads, of course." "Missiles?" Victor asked. "I think we can modify these for use as our photon torpedo. This presumes an ability to build a fuel cell and G2 drive unit that will fit inside a ten inch tube and still leave room for a payload." "A fuel cell that size won't power a G2 drive for very long." Rob said. "We shouldn't need it to, under most circumstances." Ted answered. "We won't need inertial dampers or safety protocols on these, and at G2 speeds, even 30 seconds at .5 lights still puts the missile on a target a long ways away." "What about guidance?" Victor asked. "The electronics can be replaced by a single sensor array with a track and lock system similar to what we're using for getting a fix on the beacons with the Q-Space engine. The gear we added to the Viking takes up considerably less space than the old electronics in these missiles did." "It doesn't even need that much." Alexandra offered. "The original targeting and identification work could all be done by the ship's systems, and then the locking data gets dumped in before the launch. The missile wouldn't need any of the locater gear, only the track and lock gear." "What about misfires and loose torpedoes that loose their lock on the target?" Victor asked. The old submarine commander was in familiar territory in this discussion, "We've got full contact via a Q-tap connection, so republishing the data, or updating the torpedo shouldn't be a problem, right?" Ike answered. "True, and we can do remote aborts and manual triggering the same way, I'd think." Chesty said. "Ted, you've put some thought into this, obviously. I think you should run with it. You'll want some help, so pick whoever you think will work best and get busy." Rob said. "I think I would like to be involved in this, if you don't mind." Victor said. "I bring a certain experience to some parts of this, don't you think?" "Of course." Rob said. ------- In a small room on the Planet Obsidian, Chesty Price sipped his coffee and waited for a reaction. Dave McKesson and Constantine Fylakas, along with Arden Anderson and Fred Sabarte, all founding members of the Legion of Light, sat across from him at the table, sipping t heir own drinks while they considered his request. "This is going to take some thought." Arden began. "They are close enough on the magno-gravitic side of technology to be able to make this discovery without having to invent anything new. That part is true." "But to have you just waltz back to the ship with 'an idea' that is ninety degrees away from current thinking in those areas of research would seem suspicious." Dave McKesson said. "Actually, I was going to play on my known secret military background and show up with one, tell them I've got the solution to their problem, hint that I've acquired it from some secret government military source, and leave it up to the geeks to reverse engineer it." Chesty answered. "Major Price, your idea has merit, and your delivery method is actually better than what we'd envisioned, at least on its face," Fred Sabarte said. "but it would be too unbelievable that you could deliver something like this so quickly after the need is identified." The old soldier sighed and shook his head. That was the one weakness he'd seen in his idea as well. "I agree. Its a good idea, but not one we could do immediately." "I think we're agreed then?" Con asked. "We must wait some length of time before we introduce the Zombie Gun?" "Agreed." Everyone at the table answered. ------- Rob sat at the table, listening to the sounds of the surf on the beach and staring at the reflected moonlight on the sea. He had gotten up in the middle of the night and poured himself a glass of milk, grabbed a brownie from the plate full on the kitchen table and came out to the front porch to think. There were things bothering him The 3.14159 seconds of jump time had been bothering him. Why Pi seconds? Pi was a mathematical constant and an irrational real number, but seconds were a totally artificial human invention. Why did the people making the jump not register this time passing? Was it a property of Q-Space itself, or an effect of the jump field? What would happen if you could extend the period of time the subject remained suspended in the jump field, would they remain in Q-Space, or would they bounce back to their starting point? Perhaps they would disappear forever into the mysterious Q-Space? Could it even be done? Rob pulled up a holographic scratch pad through his Q-tap and began scribbling some notes. Next to appear were the original equations he had written when first exploring the quantum spacial possibilities for the sensor array. Finally he brought up the Q-Space engine's core series of formulae as well. Rob finished the brownie he'd brought out with him, washing it down with the last of the milk, and began reworking some of the math. In his head at first, and then on the scratch pad in the holo display. If these factors were altered here, and the series redone with a new constant, drop the second series for the endpoint coordinates and substitute those temporal parameters back in that had been transformed earlier in the process... 'Yes!' Rob thought, this could work, maybe. He pulled up a clean page on the virtual scratch pad and began scribbling furiously again. Wendy found him there in the morning, still working, in one of his zoned out phases. She grabbed the empty glass and the plate the brownie had been on and went into the kitchen to begin making breakfast. 'At least He didn't keep me awake with one of those dreams!' She thought, plugging in the waffle iron to let it begin heating. Rob worked most of the morning on resolving the questions he had. While he was tracking down an answer on Sandy Isle, Ted Henley and Victor Emanoff were quickly discovering obstacles to their acquisition of the U.S. made Sea Sparrow. To purchase them, they would have to explain to the pentagon what they needed them for and where they would be using them. Lying to the U.S. Military seemed like a bad idea, even if it was going to be a white lie. "There is a recently replaced Russian missile, the 9K37 Buk, that would be close to this." Victor said. "It is bigger than your Sea Sparrow though, probably half again as long as well as half again as wide in diameter. We could get them on the black market, no questions asked." "That would probably be better than the Sea Sparrow, we could use the extra interior space." "I hear a but that you are not saying." Victor replied. "What are you thinking?" "I'm thinking we could avoid all this by just taking the specs we want and asking Obsidian Aerospace or one of the McKesson manufacturers if they can make them for us." "You're right." Victor admitted. "We let ourselves focus too much on the availability of this old hardware. All we need is the information it provides us." "Particularly since ours will not need any of the aerodynamic features. Simple aluminum tubes would work fine, don't you think?" "Well, they should be able to be sealed at both ends, but beyond that, you're right." "Victor, lets start at the other end. We should work with someone to develop a G2 drive built to fit those kind of dimensions, add the electronics and then see what size tube we will need." "Of course, that makes sense. Chasing after these old missile bodies was a bit of a false trail." Carol Kingman was in Vienna, Austria. She was expecting two research microbiologists from the University of Vienna for lunch. She had already bagged a virologist in Anaheim two days earlier, and if she succeeded in recruiting this pair, she would be off to see an immunologist in Jakarta. Both men she would be meeting today were native Austrians. Fred Wassermann had come with her in case both men were more comfortable in German. Her German was weak, but according to their online biographies, both men spoke English. Already she had been grateful for Fred's presence when the hostess, whose English was much better than Carol's German, struggled a little with her description of the men that would be meeting them. They each ordered a glass of a pleasant Riesling, and were still sipping it somewhat experimentally when the hostess returned with their guests. "Guten Tag." Fred said, rising to meet them. "Guten Tag." They replied in unison. "I'm Frederick Wassermann, and this is Carol Kingman. We understand you speak English?" "Yes, of course." The taller of the two said. "I am Karl Prager." Carol was standing by then, and they shook hands. The shorter man held out his hand as well. "Welcome to Austria Doctor Kingman, Doctor Wassermann, I am Florian Keller." The two Austrians took their seats and the hostess asked them if they wanted to share our wine, or order something else. "Vöslauer Goldeck, Bitte." Karl asked. "It is an expensive wine Karl and I cannot afford to order on our own, but you are on expense account for QuanTangle, yah?" Florian Keller's English was not quite as smooth and polished as Karl's, but he was the more gregarious of the two men, and they got to listen to his amusingly accented description of their efforts to get picked for the Mars expedition, and the frustration they felt at not having made the cut. "But we aren't competing for a spot now, eh?" Florian asked. "No, we are here to offer you a position in the medical section of the Hawking's crew." Carol said. "You will not be the only people we are adding." "It should come as no surprise to you that we both wonder where we might be going, that you would need microbiologists." Karl said. "No, it does not, but you will also not be surprised to have me say that we cannot tell you in advance." The two Austrians glanced at each other and smiled. A promising sign, Carol thought.# Rob did not climb back up out of himself for three days. Wendy worried at first, but he was not having the dreams, and was more responsive during the day than he had in the past. By the time he did, he was happy with the progress he had made, was tired of eating meals he didn't taste, and ready for a little socializing. "Princess, I need some wake up time, and you must be going stir crazy, with me in one of my sessions the last few days. Lets do something fun." "Really, Rob? That would be great, but what?" "I dunno. Maybe Havana? The nightlife is pretty wild, and the food is great, and the music is spectacular too I hear." "Ooh! Havana! Absolutely!" Wendy said, jumping into his lap. "But I don't have anything to wear for those hot Havana nightclubs!" "How about we stop off in San Juan or Kingston on our way and do a little shopping? They'll have what you want somewhere, I'm sure." "Ted's off with Victor making torpedoes, so we have no pilot or bodyguard. We'll have to find someone else." Wendy said. "Can't we just fly ourselves for a change?" Rob asked. "Are you kidding? The people at McKesson, and Dave McKesson in particular would have a cow if we went wandering off on our own without a bodyguard." Wendy said with a snort. "Your ass is just too damned valuable these days." "Yeah, I know they want me protected, and especially with Cuba's newly rediscovered religious fervor I could run into some of those fanatics who seem obsessed with my work." Rob confessed. "Before you get your boxers in a bunch, why don't you check in with Ted and see what he's doing? He may be at a point where he's ready for a few days away too." As Wendy was making this suggestion, Rob's Q-tap flickered with an incoming call. Rob opened the channel. "Rob? It's Ted. Are you free?" "Wow, this is a bit of a psychic moment!" Rob said, waving a finger at Wendy. She interpreted the meaning of the vague gesture and linked into the call with her own tap. "What?" Ted asked. "I had just this moment suggested giving you a call to see if you were free for a couple days, and zap! You call Rob before he can so much as twitch an eyebrow." Wendy chimed in. "Hah! That's funny! Victor and I were calling because we decided we had to start at the other end of our project, and begin by designing a G2 drive that will fit inside our missile. That means getting your help." "Hmm. Well, Wendy and I were going to call to see if you were free for piloting and or bodyguard duties, since you do seem to be acceptable to the McKesson folks as a bodyguard." "Where to and how long?" "A half-day stop in San Juan, Puerto Rico or Kingston, Jamaica for a little shopping, then Havana for a couple days of tourism and a night of clubbing in between. " "I think we could do that, especially if we get your services at the end." Its not a problem if Victor comes along?" "Victor? God no!" Rob said. "We'd love to have Victor come along." "We may be doing a lot of couples activities along with our clubbing, will you two be feeling left out?" Wendy asked. "You know me, I'm still doing a little post-divorce sowing of some wild oats, so my socializing tends to be more of the meet-a-strange-woman-in-a-bar kind for now, and before I hear it from you, yes, I know this is not a very satisfactory life to lead, but for the moment, it avoids any sense of commitment, which is preferable to me for now. Victor may have someone he wants to bring though." "Is it who I think it is?" Wendy asked. "Hush now Mrs. Young, we wouldn't want to spoil the surprise of it for our oblivious Mr. Young, now would we?" "I am willing to be surprised." Rob added. "Give me another day to wrap up some loose ends with what I'm working on now, and meet us here on the island tomorrow morning." "Sounds good. See you then." Ted said, closing the connection. Wendy and Rob had begun to notice in recent months that they had begun to really firm up, physically. They attributed it to the exercise associated with their martial arts classes, and the need for activity during the idle hours aboard the Hawking, as well as their generally more active lifestyles of late. While that was true to a degree, they would both have been surprised to learn that they were the recipients of some extra-curricular Light work from Andy and Cor McKesson, as well as Dave and Ginny McKesson, along with other unseen Guardians. Rob had always been a bit thin and pale, but all the time spent recently on their island in the Caribbean had taken care of the pale part, and the new muscles and the new sense of gracefulness and physical competence hadn't been tested yet. Wendy had noticed her improved fitness as well, though she was less concerned with musculature than she was about the overall shape of the new Wendy. She still was generously equipped up top, but now she had a flat, trim stomach and dancer's legs. Her ass had always been an admirable feature, but now it was a magnitude better than it had been in college. She couldn't wait to try on a few new dresses, especially the kind made for dancing! Ted arrived mid-morning. Victor walked through the door with Alexandra Nascimento on his arm, and the both of them were smiling like the proverbial Cheshire cat. Rob stood, stunned, with his mouth doing credible caught fish impressions. "I'll be damned!" He said. "Didn't I suggest that very thing to you once?" Alex asked with a laugh. It was quite obvious after only a few moments of observation that Alexandra was quite happy to have been 'caught' by the Russian. The age difference didn't matter to her in the least. "He is my ancient mariner, eh?" Alexandra said. They took Isaac to San Juan and ate lunch at a charming outdoor cafe in Old San Juan before heading to the condado area where their waiter told them they would find a lot of boutiques and high end shops with both international and local designers. The women struck gold at a place called Moda Sabela. Sabela Oquendo was the owner and designer, and she had a selection of dresses that both Wendy and Alex said were perfect. When she was told the group was going clubbing in Havana, she led the women to a section that had them giddy with excitement. With Alexandra, there was no parade of options. She immediately settled on a short black dress, tight at the top and loose at the bottom with swirling streaks of red, like a tornado of flame. Wendy's dress was more of a challenge apparently, because the entire section of dresses were scooped up, along with a box of something from behind the sales counter, and the three women disappeared into a back room. The three men were left to cool their heels. "So what kind of work were you wrapping up yesterday?" Ted asked. "Yes, are you going to revolutionize space travel again?" Victor asked. "No its nothing like that," Rob answered. "but I don't want to say anything yet, there's still some work to go before I'll know if it will even work." "We can understand that. We had to drop back and punt a little on our original ideas as well." Ted said. "Really? I remember you saying you were starting at the other end of the project, but I didn't realize it meant you'd dropped your initial idea. What went wrong?" "We realized first that to buy the U.S. Missiles we would have to lie about what we were going to be using them for." Victor answered. "Then we looked at some old Russian missiles, a bit bigger, which was good, and less questions to answer, but in the end we dropped the whole idea of buying ready made missiles." Rob would have liked to have learned more, but right then the women returned, with Wendy in her dress and the three of them forgot all about their conversation for several minutes. The bottom half of the dress was a dark, dark green, with lighter green leaves and vines that circled and swirled their way upwards. Sprinkled here and there were delicate looking white flowers with petals like butterfly wings. It was the White Mariposa, the Cuban national flower, also known as the Butterfly Jasmine. The upper half of Wendy's dress was... tantalizing!! It seemed as if a whole lot of Mrs. Wendy Young would come popping out of it at any moment, but even when she spun around to show it off, things remained safely in place. Wendy was nowhere as heroically proportioned as Serenity McKesson, but there was a lot of Wendy above the equator. As she walked towards them, it also became obvious that to all three men that she was somewhere between unfettered and firmly held in place. The bobble and sway was controlled but not eliminated. The deep, deep cleavage seemed to indicate no bra, but something was keeping things up and in. They managed to avoid actual applause, but Victor revealed to the other two later that he had to be very, very nice to Alex later to make up for his reaction. Rob saw the secret of this architectural masterpiece later, but didn't provide the other two with much in the way of details. All he said was 'there are more uses for moleskin and spring steel than I was previously aware.' With the presentation out of the way, Sabela turned to Ted and asked why he wasn't outfitting his date for the evening in a similar fashion. "I haven't been too interested in the world of nightclubbing and dating recently, so I usually remain to the side and play the bodyguard." Ted said, but He impressed Rob and Victor with his situational awareness by following up with. "But if you have a dress to wear, I would be pleased to ask you to accompany me tonight." All three women disappeared again immediately into the back room, and as soon as the curtain separating them had fallen back into place the men could hear a wave of laugher followed by a string of rapid-fire Spanish. Rob looked at Victor and he returned the gaze. They both wore matching grins. They turned to Ted, prepared to tease him, and saw him suddenly blush. "What?" Victor asked. "She apparently likes the ah, 'cut of my jib', so to speak, so they are congratulating each other on their triumph in maneuvering me into asking her to accompany me tonight. Mostly though Alex and Wendy are begging her to slow down, their Spanish isn't good enough to allow them to keep up." "You will mention to her at some point tonight that we are staying in Havana tonight?" "I'll wait a while and then ask if the ladies told her." There was a period of time, after Castro's passing, that the city of Havana was a dangerous place. Freed of the oppressive hand of Cuba's communist rule, the pendulum swung too far back in the direction of freedom, and past it into lawlessness. Drugs, crime and violence were rampant. Slowly the quiet, enduring faith of the countryside began to penetrate back into the cities. The reactionary leadership was replaced by more moderate influences, and the rule of law again took hold. With the rule of law came the influence of the Catholic church. They flew into Havana that afternoon, landing on the roof of the Hotel Del Nuevo Siglio, the Hotel of the New Century. Although this was a relatively new hotel, with its own parking garage, there was limited grav car parking on the roof and a few extra dollars went a long way towards securing a free space. Old Havana was devoted to remaining as it had been since the 1950's, before the days of Castro, before the original revolución. The rest of it was determined to shake off the revolutionary past and a little more than a decade ago had decided to shed the seedier sides of the city that had crept into it as it expanded, and transform itself into a shining, modern city. Our hotel was in the new, modern part, but close enough to the old city to be appealing. Most of the clubs with the kind of Cuban flavor the group was looking for were on the waterfront, along the Desamparados, although the one they ended their first evening at was Sinfonia, on the Peña Pobre, right next to the National Museum of Music. It was designed to cater to the tourists, and that's what the group was content to be. There was rum, and rumba and lots, and lots of swirling dresses and close clinches. At least, thats what it tried to be. Victor and Alex came close, and Ted and Sabela were not too bad, but Wendy and Rob were still a little too tied to their old ways to cut loose as much as the others. It was after leaving Sinfonia, the three couples laughing and happily arm in arm in the warm air of the Havana night that the attack came. A car came screaming out of a nearby alleyway, and as it ran towards them at high speed, gunfire erupted from both sides. A bullet struck Rob in the thigh before anyone could react. At the sound of the guns opening up Victor and Ted had moved immediately, getting The women in their arms crouched down behind a nearby car. Victor pulled a gun from a pocket, but with the scattering of innocents caught on the street with them, was reluctant to return fire. "Everyone get down!" He yelled to the other patrons who had been exiting the club. Ted didn't hesitate, he was out in the street, headed for Rob, who lay in the street where he had fallen. He slapped a free hand against Wendy's arm as he moved "Wendy! Move your ass!" He called, finally getting through. In a single motion, Ted reached down and pulled Rob up threw him over a shoulder, and turning sideways to put the side of his own body between the gunfire and Rob, moved him back behind the nearby line of cars and out of the line of fire. "Check his leg." He told Alexandra as he laid Rob down beside her and Sabela. Ted turned back to the street just in time to see the car pull past them. A man with a black cloth masking his face held a gun out the window facing them. "Get down!" He screamed to those behind him, diving to his left towards the rear of the car. Already wrapped in a haze of pain, Rob's world went all Wendy for a moment as her image suddenly filled his field of vision, just as he had begun to lift his head in response to Ted's yell. From there his world changed focus for a moment as a new, sharp pain tore through his skull and blinded him for just a moment, until the second wave of pain found a new home and with it, popped his eyes open and tore a moan from deep in his lungs. His eyes opened just long enough to register the image of three men wearing what looked like modified Caldwell suits appearing. Unlike Victor, they were not afraid to return fire, and the attacking car was quickly wobbling and swerving towards a collision with another parked car. This was the last thing Rob saw before his whole world changed yet again and he blacked out completely. ------- The directors met, as usual, in the conference room dedicated to that purpose on the facet of Obsidian. There were familiar faces among the directors, Formerio Sabarte, Gerald and Dave McKesson, Pete Parkin and Eru Jehn amongst others. There were new faces as well, Ariana and Fred Sabarte, Laik Hulin, Grace Parkin and Titan, the Yaru. Victor Emanoff was with them, though not a director, and he was joined as well by Trevor Parkin. "Ladies and gentlemen, this will be a short meeting, but it was necessary to get everyone together for an important decision." Dave McKesson began. "We have to decide what to do about the Rob Young situation." "Is it a situation then?" Ariana Sabarte asked. "We believe so." Dave answered. "More than two years ago now we determined that Rob Young's mind was special, and in fact he was as close to a naturally ready to make the transition to awakened status as we had ever seen. Of course Laik is the only actual example of someone who had awakened naturally as we have, but he did it long before we ever found him. We decided he was so close to awakening, we would let him fall through naturally rather than trigger it in the usual manner." "Six months later, He had still not fallen through on his own, so we decided to finally go ahead and trigger it ourselves." Trevor Parkin added. "We picked a relatively quiet period when Doctor Young and his fiance were vacationing in Barbados to dump a wave of Light into him. We realized very quickly that the wave of Light did not have the anticipated effect." "Within a month of our attempt however, Doctor Young had one of his creative episodes. The fallout from that episode was the G2 drive." Victor Emanoff continued. "We promptly forgot all about our efforts for a while as we too got excited about this new breakthrough." "Indeed, and the people of Taluat have been equally excited by it. We too are opening up our solar system to exploration, and have made similar trips to the outer planets in the past few years." Eru Jehn said. "Of course we already had the ships, all we had to do was build the new drives." "Little did we realize at the time, but that development was only a stepping stone in the creativity of Rob Young." Dave added. "The development of the Q-Space Engine was a complete and utter surprise, and even caught the security teams monitoring the newlyweds flatfooted." "Seemingly before we could blink, we had a working interstellar drive thrown in our laps." Victor added. Just the tone of his voice as he said it was enough to draw laughter from those at the table. "We continue to study Doctor Young's work, but to be honest, I think Constantine Fylakas is the only one who comes close to understanding it." Dave said. "In my honest opinion I believe that Con is still paying heed to some of his old seeker instructions and is intentionally holding back his opinion on all of this. He has been very much a Rob Young supporter since the beginning. This drive is very probably the technology the last of the Seekers and Guardians used after their surviving societies merged, and that where they went we can now follow." "So what we are being asked to decide is whether we will continue to give Rob Young Light treatments?" Fred Sabarte asked. "Yes, and more than that, we need to decide what we're going to do to keep him safe in the future." Dave said. "We almost lost him with this attack, and I don't think any of us wants to risk loosing him if and when the next one happens. Who knows when another like him will come along?" "Well, I for one think we should leave his mind alone. Its very obvious that he is not going to become one of the awakened, or if he does, its not going to be in a manner which we can anticipate. The bottom line is he is too valuable to us and to humanity in general to risk any more attempts." There was a murmur of immediate agreement from around the table, and a quick mental 'show of hands' confirmed that decision. "Very well, we will leave Rob Young's mind alone, and other than the rejuvenation and health monitoring we've been covertly providing, we will completely curb his exposure to the Light." Formerio said. "Now, about keeping him safe?" "For starters, why don't we replace the security team we're using now with a Legion team?" Laik Hulin suggested. "For the short term anyway, while we look for safer more secure options?" Again the group reached quick agreement on this suggestion. "Now, moving on to a different subject," Dave said. "who wants to hear a report on our facet jumping efforts on Mars..." ------- The world of sound registered on his consciousness first, and then light, an annoying but not painful white blur that slowly resolved itself into a white ceiling and ugly light fixture. Rob moved his head slightly, tilting forward until he could see the room in front of him. There was someone bent over a pile of something he couldn't see near the door. "Hello?" Rob said, though it came out more like 'Huhhlff?'. The figure turned at the noise and smiled when he saw Rob's eyes were open. "Good morning Doctor Young." Let me get some people in here to check on you now that you're awake. The pile of something that Rob hadn't been able to see turned out to be a hamper, and with a bag full of dirty linens in his hands the older man walked out the door. Within moments of the door closing it opened again, three women came through it. Wendy was the third, and she rushed around the first two as soon as there was room and was at Rob's side in an instant, her fingers entwined with his. "Oh Rob, I was so worried!" Wendy said. Rob looked at her with a smile, but before he could formulate a response, the doctor was looking down on him from above. "Doctor Young, my name is Veronica Alvarez, and I'm the doctor who has been treating you while you've been here. I'm going to let the nurse give you some ice chips to suck on. The moisture may make it a little easier for you to talk, okay?" Rob nodded his head and the nurse came forward with a small cup. "While you're getting that in you, let me fill you in a little on what's been going on." Doctor Alvarez said. "Last night, early this morning actually, you were shot in the right thigh. A single bullet, what I've been told was a standard 7.62x39 millimeter round from an Egyptian made AK47 entered your lower thigh, tore up a little of the meaty flesh three inches above your knee and then exited. The bullet missed anything dangerous, but there was enough damage and blood loss that we did have to do some surgical repair, and get you a transfusion. You came out of surgery about three hours ago and have been resting comfortably." "I was only shot once?" Rob said in a weak whisper. "I thought I felt a second bullet hit me just before I passed out." "Sweetie?" Wendy said, patting my hand in a soothing gesture. "Yeah?" I answered. "I was the second bullet. When Ted yelled, I threw myself on you to shield you from another bullet." Tears started to crawl down her cheeks. "You? I did see you for just a second, then a glimpse of something else and then it went black." "You were just raising your head when I landed on top of you. I knocked your head back into the pavement when I did. That was what you were thinking was a second bullet. "I knocked you unconscious and gave you a concussion!!" "And split your scalp open pretty good too, I'm afraid." Doctor Alvarez added. "But, since we were in the operating room anyway, patching up the hole in your thigh, it was no big deal for us to do a little sewing at that end as well." "How long am I going to be your guest here, doc?" Rob asked. "One more day, just for observation mostly, and a little post-surgical care and pain management. You will be able to go home tomorrow afternoon, assuming things continue on their current course, but you will be on bed rest for at least a week — that means sitting up, doing whatever you want, as long as you keep off the leg and keep it elevated and clean. " "We'll have someone at the house to provide medical care, and don't worry, I'll make sure he sticks to the rules!" Wendy said. "What about a beach lounger? Can I sit on one of those?" "As long as your not being moved back and forth constantly, that would be fine. You're probably going to be fighting a headache for a couple days, and bright sunlight may aggravate those for a while, but whatever your home health care thinks you can stand will be fine as far as that goes." Rob got a light meal once the doctor had gone away. A typically bland bit of tea and Jello. A nap came shortly after the meal, and Rob insisted to Wendy that she go get some sleep herself, now that she knew he was going to be okay. Lunch woke him, and this meal was a big improvement over the first one, with a small piece of grilled perch, a half a baked potato and some toast. Wendy arrived shortly afterwards, looking much better and together they watched a little local television. The story of the attack on Rob by the group of terrorists was a highlight of the local news. Rob's Spanish wasn't up to following most of it, but there were pictures of the street in front of the club, interviews with locals. The entire broadcast seemed to suddenly move into slow motion during the ten second clip of Victor being interviewed. It was funny listening to Victor's slightly accented English being translated into Spanish. Once the news was over, the couple tried to fathom the inner mysteries of a Cuban soap opera, but were about to give up and switch to Q-tap coverage of the U.S. broadcast networks when a very large man came through the door. "Excuse me Doctor Young. Do you have a moment?" The man asked. "Yes, come on in. We were just giving up on Cuban TV for the moment." Rob answered. "Sir, my name is Cyrus Poole. I was the head of the McKesson Security field team that was responsible for your protection while you were here in Cuba." "You guys are really good!" Rob said. "I was amazed at how quickly you were there. I saw three of you, just before I blacked out, and it was like you just appeared out of nowhere!" "We were caught napping, you got shot, wound up with a serious concussion, and you still think we're good?" Cyrus said with a lopsided grin. "The response time was amazing, and the concussion was a gift from my lovely wife here, so really its just the bullet hole in the thigh that can be counted." Rob said with a laugh. "Hey!" Wendy said, slugging his shoulder. "Well, we do feel like we owe you an apology sir." Cyrus said. "We seriously underestimated the ability of this group to avoid detection, and because of it, we're going to have to insist on much more overt protection in the future." "You know something about the group?" Wendy asked. "The details on the local news were sketchy, and in rapid fire Spanish." "The group calls itself 'The Brotherhood of the Forgotten Witnesses', and they are led by a man named Martin Peer. The available information suggests to me that he is one evil, charismatic son of a bitch." Cyrus answered. "They are based in Malvern, Alabama, have less than a hundred 'disciples', but they do a lot of recruiting from Fort Rucker, so a good quarter of their members are former military. Rucker is the primary training facility for Army aviation — attack and support grav craft these days, but in their glory days this is where most of those attack helicopter pilots trained that you've seen in the movies. Combat pilots aren't much likely to be recruited into a group like Peer's, so the soldiers they are getting are service and support personnel." With some information in hand and an apology issued and accepted, even if Rob didn't feel that one was needed, the day proceeded. Doctor Alvarez came in before dinner and checked his stitches, thigh and scalp, and allowed the bandages to be removed from the one on his head. She asked about pain, checked on his appetite, and told him she would see him in the morning, and if he looked as good as he did now, he would be able to leave a few hours earlier than she had originally estimated. "You are a fast healer, it would seem." She commented. "See you in the morning." Dinner itself was also another step up, in Rob's opinion, as he got a steak sandwich, smothered in onions and a huge pile of french fries, coffee and an ice cream sandwich for dessert. The doctor's exam in the morning was almost perfunctory. "Doctor Young, I am not going to bore you with long lectures on aftercare. Your home health care provider has been fully briefed." Doctor Alvarez broke into a wide grin. "Now get out of my hospital!" Ted Henley met them at the door, grinning widely himself, and he and two large orderlies got him strapped into a special seat that had been installed in Isaac. "Welcome aboard Gimp Air" Came Ted's words over the intercom. "Our flight time this morning will be twenty minutes. Please keep your leg in its upright and locked position." Ted's comedy aside, Rob was glad to be back on familiar territory, even if Isaac had some small changes. Back at Sandy Isle, the were met by Rob's and Wendy's parents. "Welcome home Son!" His dad said. "We're doing barbecue for dinner tonight!" All was well with the universe, and his dad was giving him the important news first. Rob smiled and relaxed a little. Until they got to the house. He had a home health care provider all right. Her name was Ginny McKesson! ------- Chapter 11: The Need for Separation The next trip to Alpha Centauri took place without Rob or Wendy Young. It took place with a bevy of doctors and scientists whose job it was to decide if Islandia was going to be safe for people. In the end, it was announced that as places go, Islandia was pretty innocuous. Other than some pollens causing mild reactions, mostly just due to 'gumming up the pipes', the microbial and bacteriological studies suggested that the Islandian analogs were not easily able to latch onto anything in the human cellular structure. The few that could find something to work on, were not effective agents. These same basic differences in cellular chemistry and biology also meant that the plants and animals might not be able to provide a lot of nutritional value to Humans. While Rob recuperated on Sandy Isle, he continued to work on his latest idea, finally calling on Wendy to help machine some parts for him. Wendy was the one who got the fuel cell to work with the Jump field generator, designing a special power coupler that could take large loads from the cell, in very brief, discrete bursts. Three weeks later the day finally came when they needed something live to test it on, and another rack of cages with a dozen lab rats arrived. Ted brought them in on Isaac, and brought Victor and Alexandra with him. "We know you aren't ready to unveil anything yet, so if you'd rather we weren't here for this phase of the testing, we'll head back off to Infinity Station." "No, its fine. We're fairly confident its going to work, it just may be very undramatic at this point." Rob and Wendy led them to a large work shed behind the house. Inside the shed a pit had been dug out, and some sort of plastic lining placed inside. "This is going to be a bit odd looking, because I don't want to shoot through a cage, but I didn't want to give the rat a chance to escape either, so short of super-gluing their little feet to the floor, all I came up with was this." Rob said, as they stood on the walkway that had been built around the smooth plastic lined pit. "Sort of like shooting fish in a barrel then?" Ted asked. "Pretty much." Rob replied. They put all but one of the cages away in a corner, spending a little time getting one of the rats out of its cage and into the pit. "We've got a working prototype breadboarded into that unit you see overhead, and that's what we'll be using for testing. We get very accurate readings on power levels, field strength and duration, so we'll be able to correlate those readings with the effects." Rob explained. Rob was still limping a little bit, but not too bad, and his mobility was close to normal, but it was Wendy who climbed into the jury rigged mass to power up the overhead unit and check the settings. With the flick of a switch, the rat in the center of the tub was bathed in a blue light. "That's a very gross targeting indicator. Right now we're firing a pretty wide beam. We'd narrow that down for any kind of finished weapon of course." With the flick of another switch, the rat seemed to glow red for a brief second, and then was squealing and running in ragged circles, trying to climb the smooth walls of the enclosure. "I think we managed to scare it anyway." Rob said. "Lets up the power." Wendy manually shifted the beam and again Rob flicked a switch, just as the rat was crossing through the blue light in its frantic scramble. This time the rat froze in mid-stride, seeming to hang suspended in the red outline before collapsing back to the floor, unmoving. They had their first live success! A month later, Ted, Victor and Alexandra were back. This time they brought Constantine Fylakas, Formerio Sabarte and Dave McKesson with them. They marched out to the same work shed they had gone to the first time. "We got smart and erected some gravitic field generators to keep the rats trapped and threw away the big plastic pit. We've added guinea pigs and rhesus monkeys to our zoo, and I'll let you decide which gets the honors." Rob said. The cement and sand floor was marked by a line of black and yellow emergency tape to indicate the edges of the field. Doctor Fylakas picked one of the larger monkeys and Rob moved around to release one from its cage into the enclosure. Wendy brought out the case they had their prototype stored in. It had formerly been used to store a home telescope kit, and was one of those ubiquitous aluminum travel cases with the foam padded interiors. "We've been calling this the 'Mark I Stunner'. We want to avoid the connotations of a taser that might come with using the phrase 'stun gun'. Rob said. He lifted the rifle-like object out of the case. Without preamble Rob turned and pointed the stunner at the rat. The blue beam of a targeting laser sprang up, and with its light bathing the rat, he pulled the trigger. For a brief second the little rat seemed to be outlined in a flicker of fiery red that winked out again a long second later. "Someone can walk in there and check on it if they want, but based on our work so far, we can tell you that the animal is stunned and unconscious, and will remain so for a minimum of an hour." Wendy told them. "Well it looks effective. What about aftereffects?" "None noticeable." Rob answered. "When they come to, there's no disorientation or nausea apparent. We've done some minimal follow-up work and found no changes in heart rate, respiration rate or temperature. No obvious changes in blood chemistry or electrolyte balance. We're not equipped to test more than those here." "No change in eating habits, appetite, sexual display or performance." Wendy added. "Even their mood seems to remains unchanged." "Can you explain to those of us not familiar with your work, what is causing this effect?" "How much of the Q-Space Engine have you seen?" "Very little. None, really. We've heard some discussions, seen some reports on what you've been able to do, including seeing some truly stunning pictures from Islandia and Dinotopia, but the workings of the drive itself are still a mystery." Dave McKesson answered. Rob began to step them through the ideas, inspirations and work which resulted in the Q-Space Engine. While he did, he and Wendy quietly shut everything down, got the monkey back in its cage, and put the Stunner back in its case. "I call it an Engine, because it is not really a drive. It taps into Quantum space, the same place where our previously exploited quantum tunneling effect takes place. The Jump Field, as I call it, needs two points in our space as anchors. The blips I kept seeing in my sensor data when we were doing sensor array scans were the loose quantum signatures of stellar masses, which produce large 'beacons' that I could lock onto and use as the second endpoint for the Jump Field." "Lets get back in the house and get something cool to drink before Rob gets completely wound up." Wendy suggested. There was a big pitcher of 'Caribbean punch' in the fridge, something Rob, Wendy and their guests seemed to live on, a mix of honey, lime juice, lemon, orange and pineapple juice with some pineapple chunks and watermelon balls thrown in. A little later in the day and they might have been asking if they should add a little rum to the mix, but it was still barely past breakfast, so they poured everyone a tall glass over crushed ice and sat together in the living room. "You were telling us about Jump Fields?" Doctor Fylakas offered, once they were settled in. "The jump field is really a bubble of what I call 'quantum probable uncertainty'." The phrase drew a few snorts of laughter from several of the men, though Doctor Fylakas only smiled. "This isn't some sort of Heisenbergian mummery. Each endpoint of the field marks our reality, and within the field, the probability that our reality exists reaches almost zero the closer you get to the center of the field. This is a highly unstable state for anything to be in, so the only thing that allows it to exist is the cascade of energy across both real-world end points. In the Q-Space Engine those end points are the Engine's location and the locked Quantum beacon of another star system. With me so far?" Everyone nodded, some more vacantly than others. "We came to hear about this new stunner, but we're getting lectured on the Q-Space engine." Dave McKesson said. "I assume there's a reason?" "Yes. Well, we noticed some small oddities during the first few jumps with the new engine. Every jump was taking pi seconds. How's that for an oddity? At the same time, we immediately noticed that those people making the jump did not notice those 3.14159 seconds at all. I began poking around, examining some of my underlying work. The stunner is a result of that. It simply employs some of the originally ignored or unknown properties of the jump field." "You are saying that the same jump field you use to move a ship full of people from here to Alpha Centauri is what makes this stunner work?" Formerio Sabarte asked. "Yes, the field is tuned differently, and altered slightly, but yes, the stunner is really just a hand held jump field projector." Rob stepped his now captive audience through the development of their current stunner. They discussed the targeting system and the fuel cell requirements. "The fuel cell in this current model is good for about twenty shots if there is no appreciable time between shots. Even allowing maximum cycling time, you'll only get thirty before you've depleted the cell completely. Wendy has developed a deep discharge variant of her power coupler that can pull energy from the cell at the levels the jump field generator needs." "Considering the power needed for the Q-Space engine, I'm amazed that this jump field generator can get by with a fuel cell for power." Dave said. "The trick is that generating the jump field doesn't actually require that much power. The massive amounts of power the Q-Space engine needs are not for creating the field, but for moving mass through the Q-space from one endpoint to another. The stunner does no moving, and in fact, it would use far less power than it does if we weren't tweaking the field in a different way. By itself, the jump field doesn't cause the 'stun' effect. That is caused by forcing the field to spend less than those 3.14159 seconds, which isn't really a time, so much as it is an inherent 'dwell point'. Other intelligences might perceive the amount of time it takes differently, but the energy needed to change the field effect from that 'dwell point' to something else would be the same, and so would the duration of the effect." "Is the effect then some sort of synaptic disruption?" Doctor Fylakas asked. "I'm still investigating that, but no, it is more of a molecular stasis. For a single instant, every single molecule of the object in the field stops 'relating' to the molecules around it. This is not an electromagnetic phenomenon like a synaptic disruption would be, its again like the Q-space engine, more of a quantum level phenomenon than a real-world level phenomenon." "Can the field be made to work more like a shotgun than a rifle?" Ted asked. "Can you spray a large number of targets in front of you?" "Short answer? Yes. Long answer? I'll get back to you. Possible doesn't mean practical, so we'll have to see." "Now that the gun demonstration is over," Wendy said. "Its our turn to ask questions." "Specifically, what brought you three McKesson heavyweights out here for a prototype demonstration? It can't be just an interest in non-lethal weaponry." Rob added. Dave and Formerio Sabarte gave each other a quick glance. "Rob, what do you see happening down the road with Alpha Centauri?" Formerio asked. ------- Islandia was something of a paradise, but perhaps any unspoiled planet on which a man could walk in his shirt sleeves might seem so. The shores of Lake Andrew, named for the famous grandfather of the McKesson family, were proving to be popular, and most of the living and recreational habitats had been built around it. The forest that surrounded all but the southernmost edges of it was mostly a single species of local tree, what the experts were classifying as a hardwood, and which we were provisionally calling 'Islandia Maple'. They weren't much like maples on the outside, but the lumber that came from the small number that had been cleared during construction around the lake had a definite maple appearance. There were a few other hardwood species sprinkled in with the Islandia Maples, predominantly something we were calling Lake Ash. The forest itself varied beautifully between dense heavy woods and lightly wooded glades. The ability to travel to the stars had been kept a closely held secret while Islandia's current occupants, an army of scientists, engineers, technicians and medical researchers from the various McKesson companies poked and prodded the fields and forests, lakes and seas of Islandia. Groups like the ones around Lake Andrew were busy exploring, studying and cataloging locations on the other two continents as well, and slowly but surely some sense of what living on Islandia was going to be like was growing. The medical researchers and biologists, after six months of study had some promising leads on making the local plant and animal life digestible, if not actually nutritious. The possibility of microbial assaults from the local ecosystem had been all but eliminated, barring a discovery of something inimical tucked away in some isolated spot. The average visitors biggest worry were the local predators, who had no clue what a human being was and thus no fear. The Bumble Tigers of the equatorial continents great jungle, and the Lion Bears of the southern savannas were the worst, but not the only ones, and they were matched by the Badger Wolves of the northern forest, for one. The Badger Wolves, like the Lion Bears of the south, were reminiscent of more than one Earth mammal at the same time. 'There's probably going to be a lot of names like that.' The new administrator for the Islandian Immigration and Conservation Service thought to himself as he watched the end of the presentation the group in front of him had been watching. He had been standing in the open doorway to the conference room for several minutes now, waiting for the presentation to end. When the display finally went black and the lights began to brighten, he walked to the front of the room, nodding at the technician who had just been running the presentation so far. "Good morning ladies and gentlemen. My name is Gianni Sabarte, and I am the director of security for this installation. I'm sure your day has been quite eye-opening so far, but I have to warn you there is a little further to go before you are free to wander off on your own. You may feel you are invincible in your Caldwell suit, carrying a stunner strapped to your thigh and with an emergency rescue vehicle only moments away. But you must remember above everything, this is a wilderness planet." With a signal to his Q-tap, Gianni sent a command to the conference rooms holo display. The lights dimmed and aerial footage of a large pack of badger wolves chasing a large, shaggy creature at least twice the size of even the largest of them began to play. "Every animal with teeth and claws that you see here will have no fear of you beyond the caution they would feel over any animal your size, and as you see, sometimes size doesn't matter." Finally the pack overwhelmed the creature, dragging it to the ground, and a snarling roiling feeding frenzy began. "A full family group of Badger Wolves can number up to fifty adults, and your stunner will stop twenty of them if they are attacking in their usual fashion, maybe thirty if you're lucky. After that, you had better hope your Caldwell suit will hold until help comes." "But the Caldwell suit will hold, and we ultimately will be safe." Someone said from the middle of the darkened room. "Yes, you will, barring accidents." Gianni answered, killing the display and bringing the lights back up. "But you will be altering the behavior of the animals you encounter and altering their environment, and your jobs here are to protect the people who come to Islandia from the wildlife, and at the same time protect the native flora and fauna from them and you." "We are to be glorified park rangers then. I thought it sounded too good to be true." a Woman near him said. "You are going to be going by the title of Ranger, but you will most definitely not be park rangers! This world is definitely not a park and living on it will very, very far from a walk in the park. What you have seen so far this morning should have already convinced you of that." Gianni said. "Your job is to become completely familiar and at home in the environments of Islandia. Two years from now we hope to begin receiving our first settlement ships. Each ship will have five hundred people and everything they need to establish a settlement on Islandia. Each group of five hundred will have two trained specialists who will know the equipment and procedures developed for establishing a settlement. Each group will also have a Doctor and a trained Physician's Assistant. Everyone in the group will have received months of training before they ever set foot on the ship. Every one of them will have seen the video you watched this morning, or its replacement, but they will not be the experts on Islandia, You will. When a settlement or farm has a problem they cannot solve on their own, they will be calling on you." ------- Tom Donovan led his group of eight would-be-rangers along the stream. The trainees had identified and provisionally classified thirteen insect, four mammal, two fish and nine bird species so far. They would compare their notes against the catalog of existing identifications that evening when they were back at the Ranger compound, but the identification was less important than their observations of feeding patterns, use of habitat, territoriality, and other behaviors. They had already had a discussion about a bird called the Pennywhistle, that could almost always be found in the grassy reeds that grew alongside the river, but which they had not seen in the similar reeds in the low marsh they had passed through after their stop for breakfast. Tom was this training group's 'expert', because he had been here for three months already, and what he already knew about Islandia was important for these people to learn. Just as important was a knowledge of the land they were traveling over. This was the Maple Lake Region, and it was going to be one of the prime settlement areas when the colonists started arriving. The lake was a prime water source, and the six valleys that spread down from the hills surrounding the lake were prime farming areas. The heavy forests that grew around the lake and on the hills would have been perfect building material, if the settlers had to depend on them, but the plans were to have the Islandia Colonial Authority harvesting and producing lumber centrally and providing it as needed. What the heavy forest was, on an immediate level, was prime habitat for Badger Wolves, and despite several warnings given earlier in the day, his group had once again forgotten to keep an eye trained towards the forest edge to the east of them. A dozen Badger Wolves had broken from that forest edge several seconds ago, and were making for the group at full speed. They would get within a hundred yards or so and then there would be the 'BuHooo!!' howl from others back in the treeline, intended to momentarily freeze their prey just before the strike. Colleen Grimes, from Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, spotted movement out of the corner of her eye and turned instinctively towards it. "Oh Shit! Badger Wolves! Watch out!" Her cry was too late, and the eight students were collectively on their asses, being attacked by the creatures. Tom sent a command, fully activating all their Caldwell suits and then began firing. The Caldwell suits couldn't block the stunner field, so four of the students got stunned at the same time as the wolves. The student who had seen the wolves and cried out had managed to get her stunner up and was firing as well, though her first shot had been straight up as she lay on her back. Three others were standing with her at the end, watching the forest, looking for another wave. "Keep your eyes open. I'm calling for a transport." Tom said. The group received their debriefing three hours later, when the four stunned students were revived and had passed their medical follow up. "Congratulations." Tom started off. If you had been a party of settlers, most of you would probably be dead now." "You saw them coming, didn't you? Why didn't you give a warning?" Keith Lewis, from Eastleigh, England asked. "I am your teacher, not your bodyguard. Having been warned to watch for Badger Wolves, you should have set up a system of lookouts and kept an eye out yourselves. Miss Grimes here did the best of all of you today and even that was sheer luck. Does anyone care to disagree with that assessment?" The eight students were mute, and most had the good sense to appear embarrassed. "You all were accepted into this program because you had demonstrated wilderness and survival skills, but you are facing an environment that is different than any you've experienced. You have to be thinking in survival mode first and learning mode second. You cannot blunder around Islandia wrapped in a Caldwell suit every second, and your stunner will not save you in every situation. Understood?" "Yes Sir!" They answered collectively. "What goes for you will be even more true for the settlers you will be supporting. They will not be wearing Caldwell suits and they will have little in the way of previous wilderness or survival training." "Yes Sir!" they repeated. "You will do better tomorrow, and the next day and the day after that. Another episode like this though, will get you on the list of those being considered for the washout list. Who wants to go home?" No one answered this time, though most seemed to straighten in their seats and display their resolve. "Very good. You're dismissed." ------- Rob and Wendy young followed Dave McKesson into the chamber. Despite having seen a lot of amazing things in recent years, it was impressive. The new U.N. Headquarters building had replaced the original almost a decade ago, after some initial efforts to renovate the original were begun in 2008, they were eventually abandoned in favor of a completely new structure. The 'look and feel' of the Assembly Hall had been carefully maintained in the new version, and this was where they were. Perhaps these days the name McKesson had enough clout to get an invitation to address the General Assembly, but the President of the United States had lent his weight to the request, and once it had been scheduled, word that there would be a 'major announcement' brought worldwide media coverage. Victor Emanoff and Alexandra Nascimento were with them, and so was a somewhat bemused and befuddled Tom Standaahl, from Erie Precision. They sat in a row of chairs and waited to be introduced. The U.S. Ambassador spoke, and then Huelwen Madoc, the Secretary-General spoke, giving the usual long list of impressive sounding credentials an important and successful man like Dave always had. Finally, Dave was at the podium. "My Name is David Alan McKesson. The long litany of accomplishments that Secretary-General Madoc just gave you can be attributed, for the most part, to two things. I had smart and successful ancestors, and I was in the right place at the right time more than once. My childhood interest in science, and my parents and grandparent's willingness to indulge me in them led to my development of the modern Fuel Cell. The success that this brought contributed to my being in a position to take advantage of the breakthroughs that made first the Fusion Reactor and then the gravity generator possible." There was a nice round of applause as Dave paused at this point, and he waited it out, turning to smile at them. The applause died down and he was able to continue. "Recently, I watched, along with all of you as my son Andy and his wife Corycia led the International Mars Expedition. We all watched wide-eyed as man walked for the first time on another planet." Again applause interrupted the speech for a moment. "The true star of that trip, as it turned out was not my son Andy, or his wife, who gave us the Caldwell suit, but Robert Maxwell Young, and several others among the core of young scientists that were recruited to build that first true space ship. Those brilliant minds came together and gave us the Q-tap and the Q-net, and the first truly efficient quantum computers." Applause again, which this time Dave joined in, turning to face Rob as he did. "This accomplishment made Rob Young a rich man, rich enough to buy the Pai Lung and take it, renamed as the Hawking, to Jupiter to explore the Jovian moons, followed by another successful and spectacular trip to Saturn. During this time, he reinvented the gravity drive and made interplanetary travel a truly practical reality and opened up the planets for all mankind." Here the applause was truly enthusiastic, and Rob began to feel a little embarrassed over the accolades. But he had little time to worry about that. Here it came. "Since their return from Saturn, the Hawking has been busy shipping people and freight here and there in the solar system. Rob Young himself was working in his lab on the moon to develop yet another breakthrough invention. Almost a year ago, the first experimental tests of this new breakthrough took place. Since then, Rob, the Hawking and her crew and the McKesson Group, along with Rob's company QuanTangle Research and their partners at Erie Precision have moved beyond testing." Dave paused here, letting the moment build. "Ladies and gentleman, this new development is called the Q-Space engine, and with it, Robert Maxwell Young has given us the stars!" As Dave said this, the Assembly's large scale holo projector flickered to life, showing a shot of Alpha Centauri A that filled the screen. The members of the Assembly were abuzz, and the room was awash in noise. Dave gave it a moment, and then spoke loudly into the microphone. "The image you are seeing on the screen is Alpha Centauri A. This image was captured by the Hawking from a distance of 5 astronomical units." The image flickered and changed to show a slightly smaller, dimmer orange ball. "This is Alpha Centauri B. This image was also captured by the Hawking's sensor array from 5 AU away." The image flickered again and a small red star wan now showing on the display. "You are now seeing Proxima Centauri, the Sun's closest neighbor. And here are her planets, the Triplanetary system of Lachesis, Clotho and Atropos" The display zoomed through near orbit flybys of all three planets, showing their alien atmospheres. When Dinotopia came on the display, and the view zoomed in to show a pack of dinoids running across a grassy plain, the room approached hysteria. "Yes, we have found life. This is Dinotopia, a planet orbiting around Alpha Centauri B. Yes, those creatures do look like dinosaurs, don't they?" When the video from Islandia came on the screen, the group began to express some concern for their safety. Dave looked back at the Secretary-General, and she immediately began calling for a return to order. The rest of the presentation wound up being done as an interview with a pool of media reporters in a secure room. Rob was interviewed, and he gave some background on the development of the Q-Space Engine. The first few tentative flights by their probes and the building of new engines to install in the Hawking and the Cherenkov. Victor and Alexandra took over at this point, giving the audience a glossy, PR version of the events surrounding the Hawking's first few trips to Islandia and Dinotopia. Even Tom Standaahl got a moment in the spotlight, as he was asked about the actual building of the new engines. He spoke of the pride his company took in being selected to build the first machines ever capable of taking man to the stars. He lauded his workers, from the laborers on up to his fellow executives. When the interviews were over, it was time for Dave McKesson to make the pitch. "Ladies and gentlemen of Earth, we have been busy in the past year getting ready to accept settlers on Islandia. We will be accepting applications for emigration to Islandia immediately. All applications will be considered. Later in this broadcast you will see the the address for our online application site. That site will also feature access to a complete list of the criteria applicants will need to meet. We are looking for people with every possible range of skills, from scientists and doctors to farmers and ranchers. The skills and experience you possess may outweigh other selection criteria, so do not be afraid to apply, even if you feel you cannot meet all the criteria." Over the next several months the details and procedures came clearer, both to the people of the world and to the McKesson Interstellar staff who were riding herd on a process that constantly threatened to get out of control. The first big backlash had come when it was made clear that successful applicants would be randomly assigned to their settlement teams. No ethnic, religious or other groups would be able to form a settlement team. The second wave of anger came when it was made clear that Dinotopia was not going to become a hunting ground for the world's big game hunters. But that was a minor disturbance from a very small number of well placed individuals. McKesson Interstellar didn't expect to make money from the first round of settlers, or perhaps even from any round. But they were going to be making money from tourists and researchers and marketing, marketing, marketing. A line of Islandian labeled products were in the works, but it was the Dinotopia products that were already selling like hotcakes. Anything with a picture of a real Dinoid on it sold. Modest profits were also envisioned for sales of lumber from Islandian Maple and other species of trees from all three continents. ------- Reite Hauge and her husband Linus were two of five hundred citizens of Sliverton, and an interesting five hundred it was! There were only three other couples from northern Europe in their settlement. There were only two dozen married couples in the entire settlement as well, and the rest were all young unmarrieds, though the doctor was in his late thirties. There were some language difficulties, but almost everyone knew some English or Chinese to begin with, and both languages had been taught during their six weeks in the training camp in Montana. Their personal Q-taps gave them access to a wide array of translation tools. Sometimes it seemed like a tower of Babel when they were in the crowded mess hall. Their chief scout, Lionel Archer said it was like listening to the whistle from a tea kettle, and he seldom ate his meals in the mess. Reite couldn't blame him, it even set her teeth to gnashing sometimes. Their settlement was on the banks of a major river called the Boomerang. Their primary industry involved catching a species of fish called the Sliverfin, which ran thick in the river, seemingly year round. The flesh of this fish was moist and tender, with a slight peppery aftertaste that was currently all the rage back on Earth, particularly in Japan and the Philippines. About a third of the catch was processed into oil that was popular both locally and back on Earth as a seasoning, salad dressing and condiment. Reite worked in the fish plant, working one of the industrial vacuum packers. Linus was a fisherman, something his family had done on Earth for many generations. They had to work carefully to avoid catching too many fish in the rich waters of the Boomerang. Great care was being taken to avoid abusing the generosity of this wild, new planet. The fish plant only ran five days a week, and everyone who worked there not only had two days off each week, but had a third 'short day' once a week. Today was Reite's short day and she was getting off work in a few minutes. It was one of those rare short days that fell at the end of the week, and Linus wasn't fishing today, so as soon as Reite got home and got the smell of the plant off her, they were going exploring up Slate Creek valley. They would overnight at Kingman Falls and come back in the morning, taking advantage of the cool morning air to pick Ringberries to bring home with them. Unlike the proteins of Islandia, the sugars were perfectly digestible by humans, and this made berries and fruits very popular amongst the settlers who tended to horde their supply of the enzymatic processing supplements needed to digest most foods. Linus had the grav-mule ready to go. Their excursion was logged with the scouts and the regional Ranger. He had fresh cells in both their stunners, a spare on his belt and another ready for Reite. They were walking the entire way, close to five miles, all uphill today, but all downhill tomorrow! The Grav-mule had a cold storage area and tonights dinner was in it. Tomorrow it would, if things went well, be full of berries by the time they got back to Sliverton. Linus was checking the Grav-mule for the third time when Reite came rushing through the door, discarding her work boots in the small mudroom. He got a quick kiss as she grabbed a towel and her bath supplies and just as quickly was back out the door and headed for the women's showers. The lottery for private home building was two months away, and this would be the third year. Only six homes a year were being built, and so far they had not been lucky. Sometimes Linus wished Reite was ready for a baby, but he was willing to wait a few more years. They would be in a much better position to provide for a child in just a few years. With the mule loaded and balanced, Linus busied himself by double-checking the fuel cells charge level. It was still just as completely full as it had been when he checked it twenty minutes ago, and would remain so until he removed the power umbilical from the nearby access plate. He had heard that the settlers over in Jaffre Meadow were having some success domesticating a local creature called a Cow Hog. Linus had seen pictures of the barrel-bodied beasts. They looked sturdy and their long flat backs appeared roomy. Their would be trade-offs associated with having a local pack animal instead of a grav-mule, but it would feel more like their lives here were permanent and that they were Islandians instead of transplanted Terrans. Reite was back, and Linus helped her get her stunner strapped on, her spare fuel cell slipped into its carrier and her hiking boots, jacket and gloves on. They checked every piece of each others gear, making one final examination for tears, worn spots, anything else that might turn into a problem later. Finally they both flicked on their trackers and armed their emergency beacons. "Come my happy fisherman, Lets go exploring!" Reite called. ------- There were calls from some corners to allow the export of some of the smaller and more innocuous mammalian analogs to Earth as pets. The inability of the Islandian animals to digest anything terrestrial gave some measure of safety as far as any concerns over animals escaping into the wild and breeding went. The medical and scientific review panel that made those decisions was reluctant to approve it so quickly. Their official policy was 'not now, but ask us again in a few years'. The attack in Cuba had been disheartening to Rob, and over a year later, Wendy was still waking up with nightmares from it. They sold Sandy Isle to their parents for a dollar and moved to Islandia shortly after the big UN announcement. A decent sized community had already sprung up around the immigration and conservation training center on Lake Andrew and their new home was there, on the edge of a rugged set of hills overlooking one of the many rivers that fed the lake. It was small and warm and homey, and they were almost never home. The Hawking was out there. Taking the long route through the stars of this section of the galactic arm, looking for more wonders and surprises. Perhaps they would find them. Rob had a knack for discovery after all. ------- The End ------- Posted: 2007-03-19 Last Modified: 2007-04-22 / 02:47:25 pm ------- http://storiesonline.net/ -------