April (46 page)

"I think your friend Jan has gotten into the control center," Eddie explained. "The Chinese who tried to stop us at the elevator were in brown uniforms and I doubt he would have any patience left for them, after he let them live the first time."

"I think it's time to get out of Dodge boys and girls." Easy switched the screen to radar and took a quick look around and shut it off. He told April - "Give me the flight profile and I'll tell M3 we're coming home." She put it on his screen and he raised his eyebrows.

"It's more efficient at the higher thrust." She explained. "I'd use higher, but I'm scared to, not knowing everybody's medical status back there." Easy nodded agreement. "Also, I wouldn't send control a flight profile. It would just make us easier to intercept. I'll make sure our transponder is off too. Since we're outlaws, what difference does it make?"

He checked the antennae was tracking M3 and keyed his mic.

"M3 local this is
Happy Lewis
at ISSII. Be advised we are departing for M3 as soon as we can burn, without local clearance. Do you copy?"

"
Happy Lewis
this is local traffic control, M3. This channel is for local traffic at M3 and you should file your flight profile with ISSII local and let them negotiate with Earthside for your departure. Do you understand?"

"Local 3 - listen up guys. It isn't that I don't know how to do it. We have experienced armed attack at ISSII. Last we heard, the Chinese had seized portions of the station and were fighting station security. There is damage to the station and local traffic. There is no pressure on the boom. Local control. ISSII is off the air. There are casualties and a continuing hazard to remain here. I am declaring an emergency and burning out of here right now and I'm offering no flight profile, because we fear interception and attack. We'll contact local traffic again when we're close and we suggest you view any combat capable space craft with caution and skepticism. It's a whole new ball game boys. We saw soldiers spaced out the lock here with no suits. Get it now?"

April was instructing the ship to orient for her burn slowly. She didn't want to make the antennae lose its track on M3. Easy watched what she was doing as he talked and silently signaled his approval.

"
Happy Lewis
this is M3 local again. Earthside Control is monitoring our conversation and demands you consider yourselves under arrest and redock.The Chinese protest your slander of their mission on ISSII. They and the USNA both protest that without a profile we must warn you - you will be fired upon if you approach any sensitive sats, or your path conflicts with a military mission. You will have no further warning. Do you understand? You do not have clearance. I have no authority to grant it over Earthside veto. We have protests from China and the USNA both. China is demanding arrest for two of your passengers."

"Well isn't that special, since only one of our passengers is Chinese," Easy told him. "I suppose they want to arrest the other one for marrying her without government approval," he speculated. "I can't imagine what other trumped up crap you must have, to tell the rest of us we are under arrest. Is the USNA saying we are under arrest too?

"Earthside refuses to talk to you," M3 local control informed them. "Actually they said they refuse to negotiate," he corrected.

"Is Earthside control still listening?" he inquired in a growl.

"Yes they are."

"Then I'd like to report a possible hazard," he snarled, sarcastically. "We're burning out of here and instead of them telling us where we can go and when we have to hold, waiting for their secret flights and black satellites to get through using all of space, they can damn well watch out for me today. I'll burn their silly ass out of the sky if they get in my way. I'm not docking back to this madhouse, so the USNA can make a present of us to the Chinese. I'm not accepting arrest from some coward, who won't even come on com and say plainly by what authority they are arresting us. I'm going home and nobody better get in my way. The damn Earthies talk tough. Let's see what they're made of, with somebody that isn't scared of them. Copy that clear, Earthside?" he raged.

There was no reply, so he slapped the radio off.

"Number two," he said, voice still angry, "execute your burn at will. Hang on back there. We're going to have a fair long push for a few minutes. Antennae and laser secured for high G," he told April. "You have the conn."

"I've been updating it two minutes ahead at a time while you talked. Next automated tick in about 20 seconds." April said, slapping the yellow square and starting the count on the screen to use the window. "It will ramp up to a six G burn and hold it for seven minutes. Make sure you are laying comfortable and flat as it builds up back there.

"You know they are going to intercept us after you ripping on them like that, if they have anything at all that can match with us?" she asked Easy.

"Yeah well, they were going to do that even if I was polite," he insisted. "We gotta get some music in this boat," Easy complained. "It's hard laying in silence, waiting for the tick." Then the drive came on and it was different than they were used to. Chemical rockets all ease on to a certain degree as the turbo pumps spin up, chamber pressure builds up and the combustion stabilizes. The electric drive is just ON. So starting at a half G sounds gentle, but it isn't. It's jarring. Nobody said anymore, but you could hear the labored breathing as the acceleration peaked.  If anyone saw their departure, it was an eyeful. Two pencil thin lines of white hot plasma merged into a plume which reached out a half kilometer behind them before it started to cool. There was no way to sneak around, like you could with an older grid anode ion drive. Even a chemical rocket was not as bright to the eye, although it was obvious in the infrared.

Chapter 23

Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, USNA Space Command got a feed off a high orbit missile watcher and a stealth LEO sat at the same time. "It's the same as Kwajalein showed us awhile back," the specialist told his section commander. They watched as the acceleration numbers climbed and climbed and stayed there. "How's he going to get home? He must have run his tanks dry," the younger man said.

"Don't count on it," his unhappy superior told him.

* * *

"OK let's talk now," April requested, as the Happy assumed a temporary orbit between LEO and the Clarke level. "Will you take the conn Easy? I don't feel experienced enough to talk and keep an eye on things."

"I have the conn number two."

"Thanks. Now that I have us taking a higher orbit, we have some time and we can discuss options. We can burn out and circularize a little bit higher, among the Geostationary satellites. Tell you why in a bit. Or we could even make a burn to Lunar orbit. I'm concerned they must know our flight path pretty well from our exhaust plume, even if we are hard to paint on radar with the hull covering Dave made us."

"But I insisted in our supplies we have a compressed bale of steel wool and a can of vacuum cement. I wanted copper wool, but it's hard to find in bulk. In one of my classes they mentioned steel wool is terrific at absorbing microwaves. If one of us goes outside and glues it on all over our skin we should be almost invisible to radar and it's very hard to see optically also. Then I propose we burn the conventional rockets just a burp, so we aren't exactly where they'll be looking for us."

"What is the possibility of making an actual Lunar landing?" asked Eddie.

April put it in the computer and ran the numbers. She obviously didn't like what it told her and ran it again a few times, with different parameters.

"In theory we could. But if we'd go direct from geostationary orbit, to retain enough fuel for landing, it would be a long trip cramped up here with not enough cabin supplies and if we do a burn in toward earth to use a slingshot exit which is much more efficient, especially for our conventional drive, we expose ourselves to danger from being too close to anti-sat systems which can reach low earth orbit. Our terminal landing burn would be high G also. And  we don't know that anyone on the Moon is going to exactly embrace us. I sure wouldn't want to go to Armstrong. Maybe the Russian base. But why should they help us?"

Singh Nam-Kah spoke for the first time, so her voice startled them with its conviction.

"No, we should not be running away to Luna. My husband and I should not abandon his son on M3 and there are others there we need and they need us. The container I brought on board needs to go there, so we can resist the hand of the Chinese, or Americans, or anyone who wants to enslave us and steal our work and our future."

Easy agreed with her, but worried she'd been listening to too many strident political speeches. Maybe she was just a bit of a drama queen.

"Thank you ma'am. I'm glad to hear you speak up, but considering the danger we're in and what we may face back in M3, could you trust us more specifically, about what the package is you brought along? And how would it help us resist the Earthies?"

From the long pause, Easy thought she was going to refuse.

"It's the essential element of a larger machine, which was too difficult to bring along. We destroyed the rest so someone could not deduce what it held, or its purpose. This sample is all of this new material which exists right now."

"If you squeeze off a magnetic field which passes through a torus or cylinder of it you get a very strong effect," she said somewhat cryptically.

"A useful effect?" Easy wondered.

"Very useful. It creates a line along which there is an intense gravity anomaly. It's going to take a lot of study to see exactly what is happening. The effect along a line, through the axis of the torus is similar to a very strong tidal shear. But surrounding a straight line. You don't want to get in the way. You should see what it did to the wall of our laboratory! We were very fortunate nobody was allowed in the chamber when it was actuated, since it punched a neat hole through the wall and vented it to vacuum. The metal was pushed outward, so it was a funnel shape around the hole, like it had been punched with a big awl."

Easy was trying to picture how you could use it as a weapon, which would punch a hole in something. "So how far away will this effect propagate before it spreads out or gets weak or whatever?

"That's a really good question, we need to test better. We had two trusted colleagues on the moon drive a rover out, to overlook a crater not visible from their base and aimed this at the crater from ISSII and activated it several times. They reported a fountain of dust and regolith puffed up from the surface each time we activated it and we were trying to get a handle on the propagation time, but after three shots we had to stop."

"Why?"

"Well, we had no direct evidence to prove any connection, but they experienced a Moon-quake. They're very rare you know. And we can't tie them together, but the chance it was just coincidental seemed remote and we didn't want to endanger our friends, or the nearby base. They're not too happy with us anyway since we wouldn't explain what it was we were testing. And some of the other people on base suspected they were involved, since the quake was centered deep, off the direction they had traveled from the base. Their officials went to some trouble to check all the supplies of explosives, to make sure they had not taken any out to the crater and caused the quake some way they were not owning up to."

Easy got a really scary idea.. "Ma'am. I'm just a pilot and a soldier, who doesn't have any deep scientific training, but is there any possibility this effect would pass right through a body like the moon and maybe be as damaging coming out the other side as it was going in? Is there any chance even it would fly off to the stars and piss off somebody far away, we might not want to meet when they are angry?"

"Oh no. It interacts with matter too strongly. If you fired it off at the stars it would be attenuated from interstellar gas and dust, long before it got there. As far as pulsing it at the Moon or the Earth, there's absolutely no chance it would come out the other side. I'm sure it would only penetrate a few kilometers at most."

"OK, good. Thank you," Easy said. He still had some concerns. He had a hard time envisioning a line reaching down through kilometers of mass, to say punch a hole through a submarine deep in the ocean. "Ma'am, it must take a lot of energy to pulse this thing if it can punch down through a couple kilometers of material. Are we going to be able to power it?"

"It seems to move much more matter than the input dictated. We don't understand why yet either. One of the last tests, before we dismantled it, might help explain why. When you create the line along which the shearing takes place, the gravitational pull next to the line seems to diminish. So it may not be creating it, so much as collapsing it into a line from the surrounding field."

"In fact one of our associates suggested if we went deep into interstellar space the effect might be much weaker and the strength of the field out there could be looked at as a measure of how much matter is actually in our universe. A possible interesting basic measure of our universe, just as the background microwave radiation shows us about the early moments of the expanding universe."

It was more than Easy really needed to know.

"OK then. I agree with your plan April. I'm sure if they have anything that can reach us at all, we're going to get an intercept. Anything we can do to further reduce our radar cross section is a good idea. Let's get the steel wool glued on, because the sooner we make our burn and stand off our location, the safer I will feel. Now does anybody else here have any experience at p-suit work in zero G?" No one volunteered.

"I have something to contribute." Dr. Singe spoke up for the first time.

"Sure Ajay. What is it?"

"You wish to be off the path they expect. May I suggest leaving a decoy on our present path, so you can watch from afar?  If you orient yourself to return to it with your exhaust away from them, you can sneak up on them."

"Sounds real good but what can we leave behind that would look like us? We don't have enough steel wool to knit a replica and I don't have any big rolls of sheet metal.