2.2
23 March 2051
ESL1 Shade Station
Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1
Extracislunar Space
Igbal flung himself into the computer lab, saying, “What the hell, Sandy?”
Sandy Lincoln, buried in VR gear, looked around blindly for the source of the voice, then switched her view to translucent and swiveled the bug eyes of her headset toward Igbal in a way he still found creepy, though it had been normal human behavior for decades.
“Huh?”
“We’re doing the Mach drive test. Right now.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Your numbers are way off.”
“Okay. You checked the model yourself.”
“Well, it’s crap.”
Dead-eyed as a lobster, Sandy replied, “I’d blame the MechanoLab software before I blamed the actual model, Ig. It’s really not designed to simulate these kinds of exotic theories. It’s for gears and stuff.”
“We bought the quantum gravity package for it. For twenty-eight thousand dollars!”
“Still.”
Igbal sighed. The Mach-Fearn effect was a kind of quantum gravity assist, not unlike a slingshot orbit around Jupiter. You could launch yourself right out of the solar system by stealing an infinitesimal amount of momentum from a planet during a close flyby, slowing it down ever so slightly in its orbit. Boom. Hyperbolic trajectory for your spacecraft, right out to infinity. Unmanned probes had been doing it since the 1960s, and human-crewed missions in cislunar space regularly slingshotted around the Moon to get higher and further away from the Earth. The Mach-Fearn effect was a similar thing, except you were stealing energy from the expansion of the universe itself, pulling it back in toward you by literally the smallest possible quantum of movement. By firing a bunch of steam-powered pistons!
Actually, the pistons could be powered by anything—nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, or what have you—but Igbal had personally built a sealed, hubcap-sized prototype that ran on vapor expansion because he had the parts lying around, and it worked. He had stolen a small amount of velocity out of nowhere, or out of everywhere, without expelling any sort of exhaust or propellant. It was amazing, and for many people it could have been the signature achievement of a lifetime. For Igbal it just meant there was more work to do, so then a team of four engineers (and yes, one of them was male, goddamn it) had scaled his design way up, to a version slightly larger than a traffic roundabout, and it was outside right now, thrumming away.
“Come with me,” Igbal said.
“What?”
“Come with me, dammit. No, get that stuff off your face and leave it here. Right. Right, yes. Now come on. I need your eyes on this.”
Sandy was one of those appallingly stupid smart people. With a genetically fit body (of course), she boasted a PhD in theoretical physics from M-I-betyourass-T, and a master’s in mechanical engineering from Purdue for some reason, and she was creative and whip-smart and generally perfect for this place, except that she was a goddamn idiot. Her medical records indicated she was “cured of autism” at a young age, which was fine; a lot of smart people were on the spectrum. Hell, Igbal himself was on the spectrum. But Sandy took it to a whole new level. She was in constant danger of walking out an airlock or cutting an artery on her goddamn zipper, and Igbal should probably have sent her home twelve months ago and let her work remotely from Liberia or Suriname. Would he have, if she weren’t so goddamn gorgeous, and occasionally sleeping with him when the mood randomly struck her?
“I really like sex,” she’d told him once. “It just doesn’t occur to me.” Uh huh. She was good at it, too.
“Sandy,” he said, as gently as his impatience and general asshole-ness would allow, “You’re hooked on some wires. Jesus. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, are you ready? Come with me. I need you to see this and tell me what’s going on.”
“Okay, Ig,” she said, as though he were the weird one.
As quickly as he could safely move, he swung from handrails and kicked off from corners and hatches, ricocheting from computer lab to nanofabrication lab, past the main kitchen and through the secondary hab corridor, to his office, with its gigantic windows—the best view available from inside the station. And why not? He owned this whole place, and the Shade, too, or anyway sixty-five percent of the corporate entity that controlled them. So yes, he had bigger quarters and his own luxe workspace, right?
Pam was still there in the office, looking mournfully out at Mach-Fearn Test Probe Mark II, or MFTP2. There were two astronauts floating outside, at a presumed-safe distance, but the disc-shaped probe was decidedly not gathering momentum from the expansion of the universe. Not pulling the universe in around it like a warm blanket, or not much, anyway, and certainly not symmetrically. The probe was crawling away from the Shade, toward the blue-white billiard ball of Earth (a ten-ball, he supposed), at pretty much the exact same speed as MFTP1 had done, and it was not accelerating. Unless you counted rotation! The thing was slowly swinging its face around and around, like a quarter spun on a tabletop, about one revolution per minute. And that didn’t seem to be changing now, either.
“One of the pistons is stuck,” Sandy diagnosed immediately.
“No,” Pam said, glancing at the columns of glowing numbers marching across the windows. “Telemetry is normal on all twelve hundred of them, and we’re not picking up any vibration anomalies. Anyway, the thing’s not accelerating.”
“It’s not accelerating,” Igbal repeated. “Talk to me, Sandra.”
Sandy frowned, moved closer to one of the windows, peered out for a few minutes, and then shrugged.
“The Mach-Fearn effect is theoretical.”
“Theoretical.”
“Yeah.”
“Then why did MFTP1 work?”
“It didn’t work very well.”
“I know that. That’s why we built MFTP2, with fifty times as many pistons. Fifty times!”
“I don’t know,” Sandy said, a bit defensively. “Maybe the effect doesn’t scale. Maybe there’s a maximum impulse you can attain, and that’s all you can get before the universe starts pulling it back. Remember, the equations say the mass of the pistons is irrelevant. That’s why I was advocating for MEMS.”
Igbal huffed and grumbled and ran his fingers through his beard. MEMS stood for microelectromechanical systems, and in practice it meant little gears and motors machined out of silicon, using semiconductor photolithography techniques that had barely changed since the turn of the millennium. It would have taken a lot longer—weeks longer!—to get something fabricated, and even then there would be a lot more variables to consider. The vapor expansion design was simple to build and easy to diagnose, which is why Pam—who wasn’t even an engineer!—could tell from here that it was working flawlessly. It was the universe that was malfunctioning.
“Why is it spinning?” he asked, trying hard not to make it sound like an angry demand. “Why would the force on one side be different than the force on the other?”
“I dunno.” Sandy now sounded interested. “Some kind of asymmetry in the expansion of the universe? Hell, Ig, we might just have invented a new kind of telescope. Or discovered some new physics.”
Igbal groaned. To a physicist, “new physics” was like getting the universe to suck your dick. It was the ultimate prize. To an engineer, it simply meant your machine didn’t work, and nobody could tell you why. Maybe for years.
“Something’s wrong,” Pam said, looking up sharply from the tablet in her hands.
Igbal followed her gaze, and saw she was right; one of the astronauts had drifted too close to the spinning probe and intersected one of its edges. The probe, with considerable momentum behind its spin, had caught and heaved her toward the distant Earth. Now she was tumbling away—not fast, but at a decent walking speed.
“Ah, damn it,” he said. “Is she hurt?”
“Heart rate is one-fifty,” Pam reported. She did something on her tablet, and suddenly the room was full of the sound of screaming.
One of the astronauts was saying, “Hold on! Hold on! I’m going to come and get you! Yuehai, I’m coming to get you!”
The other astronaut was simply screaming, and even though the radio channel was full duplex entangled, her voice was stepping all over it, making it difficult for any questions or instructions to get through.
Igbal found a comm panel and pressed a button. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Both of you shut the hell up! Yuehai, are you injured?”
“Aaaah! Aaaah! I’m loose! I’m falling!”
“You’re not falling,” Igbal said, as calmly as he could manage. “You’re drifting away from the station, which is good, because the nearest thing for you to collide with—will you shut up? The nearest thing for you to collide with—Yuehai, you’ve got to quiet down. The Earth is a million miles away. Almost two million kilometers, all right? Now I need to know if you’re injured.”
“My arm! My arm is . . . broken, I think!”
“I’m coming!” screamed the other astronaut, Sienna Delao. Sometimes, but not always, known as Dee.
“Will the two of you shut up?” Igbal said again. To Pam he said, “Is her suit breached?”
Pam studied the tablet in her hands and said, “Pressure normal. Tank flowrates normal. Strain gauges say her arm’s not bent at the wrong angle, either. If there’s a fracture, it’s a hairline fracture.”
“Jesus. Sienna, do your job, all right? Don’t—will you be quiet, please? Don’t hit the probe. Take a straight line out to the side of it, and then a straight line to where Yuehai is going to be. Not where she is, where she’s going to be.”
“Are you sending help?!” Sienna shouted into the channel.
“No, I’m—No—look, Jesus. Pam, can we send Derek or Hobie out there with an inspection pod or something?”
“Hobie’s in stasis,” she reminded him, “And Derek’s in transit.”
“Oh. Right.” He leaned on the button again. “Sienna, do you need someone to suit up and come out there and rescue you? Do you expect me to do it? Those suit jets have about as much thrust as a can of hairspray, and unless you really fuck with the controls they’re going to push you in a straight line.”
“I’m not trained for this,” Sienna complained.
“You are, Dee. As much as any of us. Just stay calm for me, all right? If I come out there with a relief team, it’s going to take us ten minutes to suit up, and then another fifteen to decompress in the airlock. If we really push it, we could be out there in twenty minutes, maybe, but how far away do you think Yuehai is going to be by then? She’s, like, half a football field away from you. Just go get her.”
Sheee-it.
All of the station’s second-wave inhabitants—the women housed in Beta Corridor—had been selected mainly for their brains, and it showed. Hopefully the new ones currently en route from Earth—the Gamma Girls, as he privately thought of them—would show these Betas a thing or two. If not, he was going to have to get really serious about recruitment. Assuming Earth would even let him get another batch of colonists up here, which was looking doubtful.
It took about half an hour for the whole spacesuit escapade to sort out, for Sienna to catch Yuehai and arrest their gentle rotation, and gently nudge the two of them back to the station and into an airlock, where it would take another fifteen minutes for them to recompress to full station atmosphere.
“Is there a medical team standing by?” Sienna demanded, as she struggled out of her suit.
Sighing, Igbal cut the voice channel, though he left a video feed up on one of the windows, so he could keep an eye on them.
“Ass clowns,” he complained. “This is the best we can recruit? Really?”
“We’ve got some promising candidates in the next batch,” Pam said.
“We’d better. Jesus Christ.”
Meanwhile, outside, the probe continued its lazy retreat from ESL1 Shade Station—already a kilometer away, and shrinking. “Sandy, is it going to hit anything if we just let it go?”
“It might hit us in about ten months, if it doesn’t start accelerating again.”
He sighed. “Wonderful. Can we blow it up?”
“Then the fragments will hit us.” For once quick on the uptake, Sandy said, “We’re going to have to send a ship after it, yes. Unless . . . if I can figure out what went wrong, I might be able to upload a command sequence that will move it into a harmless orbit. We really should have put those ACS thrusters on it.”
“And cost ourselves three weeks, yes.”
The Mach-Fearn effect was admittedly a crazy idea: that dissimilar masses approaching and retreating from one another in a particular pattern could suck energy out of nowhere. But not that crazy, because the probe was clearly doing something. It had been worth trying, and it would be worth following up to see what was going on. But in terms of building a starship drive here and now, this year, it was a total bust.
“Damn it,” he said. “I thought this one might just be the one.”
Sandy put a hand on the small of his back. “Sorry. I’ll try piece together what’s happening. No matter what, we should get some great journal publications out of it.”
“Journal publications.”
“Uh huh.”
“Jesus. Pam, what’s next on the strike list? Is it the gamma ray mirror thing?”
“Yup.”
“And remind me: how long do we need, to build a testable prototype?”
“We haven’t even got the mesh simulations running yet.”
“Best guess?”
“I’m an obstetrician,” she reminded him.
“You’re a goddamn space colonist. You’re whatever needs doing, and you’ve been managing these projects, so what’s your best guess?”
“Eight months. And that’s if we can get the terahertz confinement pulsers shipped from Earth, which, I mean, your guess is as good as mine. They’re made in Switzerland.”
“Ah.”
Switzerland wasn’t a Coalition country, but they were an ITAR signatory, so even if the blockade and embargo were magically lifted, they might balk at shipping anything to Suriname that wasn’t made of chocolate. Day by day, the bureaucratic noose was tightening, and it was honestly starting to freak him out. Why did the governments of Earth care so much what he was up to?
“How long if we make the pulsers ourselves?”
“Oh, crap, Ig. Can we even do that?”
“We might not need to,” Sandy opined. “I’ve been thinking about that fractal surface for the plasma injectors. If we can induce a controlled flutter at the ignition point, we could get the same kind of ripples running through the confinement vessel, without any kind of timing mechanism.”
“The same?” Igbal asked skeptically. There was no solid material capable of reflecting gamma rays, but it appeared that relativistically moving plasma shockwaves could do the trick. Which meant, in theory, that an ordinary proton fusion reactor could be turned into a rocket engine. Possibly even the best rocket engine the world had ever seen. It also provided a pathway to a working antimatter photon drive—one of the holy grails of interstellar propulsion research. That would still be a distant second to the reactionless, propellantless miracle of a working Mach-Fearn drive, but of course you had to go with what actually worked.
“I can get started on the simulations today,” Sandy told him. “MechanoLab should do a lot better with that one.”
He felt his face pulling down into a frown. “So which is it? Are you going to simulate fusion drives, or are you going to write papers about the Mach-Fearn effect?”
“Both.”
“Both?”
“I don’t sleep much, Ig, and these are exciting projects.”
He thought about that. Local custom said he could only expect ten-hour workdays from his people here. Meals and cleaning and laundry services were all provided, so hopefully people didn’t have much in the way of personal chores taking up their extreeeemely valuable time, but he also could not afford to burn anyone out. Not here, not now. Also, he was dubious about anyone’s ability to focus on two such demanding and largely unrelated activities.
Truthfully, the work Sandy had gravitated to here on the station could technically be downsourced to any of ten RzVz facilities back on Earth. But the security risks were substantial, and he would have a much harder time directly supervising what was happening. As someone who’d enjoyed phenomenal success with personally supervised projects, he was not real interested in doing it any other way.
Sighing, he said, “Mach effect on your own time, and I’ll need you to check in with me every few days to follow your progress. I’ll have Lurch set up the calendar invitations. I also want you to meet with Pam every week to make sure you’re taking proper care of yourself. We spent a lot of money bringing you up here.”
Sandy shrugged. “Okay, that’s fine.”
Lurch was the station’s administrative assistant program—one of those autonomous agents that was always listening and learning. Igbal didn’t need to “have it do” anything (this conversation alone was enough to get it going), but old habits died hard. Employees were prohibited from having their own personal digital assistants on RzVz off-world properties, and although Lurch was technically Igbal’s assistant, it was more than capable of doing the job for all twenty-three of the people currently on ESL1 Shade Station.
He still found it creepy that Lurch rarely spoke, but okay, that was how people liked it these days, and it did keep down the chatter.
Sandy put her hand on the small of Igbal’s back again and said, “Don’t worry. The gamma mirror is a good idea, and even if it doesn’t work as a fusion drive, there’s always the antimatter. If that works even a little bit, it could be enough to get us to Centauri.”
“Yeah. The antimatter.” He clicked his cheek a few times. “Okay, well, Pam, will you please meet Tweedledee and Tweedledipshit at the airlock, so we don’t get some sort of remote workplace safety lawsuit?”
Pam scowled at that—not at what Igbal was saying, but at the way Sandy was touching him—and Igbal knew he was in trouble there, too. Pam wasn’t officially a jealous or possessive person, but unofficially he was seeing more and more of that from her, now that her time among the living was growing short.
“I’ll see if Yuehai’s arm is broken,” Pam said, “or just her dignity. You two have fun while I’m gone.”
“Thank you,” Igbal said, and watched her leave.
Jesus. It seemed stupid now, but in all honesty, during all the planning it had never actually crossed his mind that a space station full of women was going to be this much trouble.