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Part IX
April 1st, 2001
QUANTUM MAGIC
Alana Rogalle leaned over Eric and ran her fingers through his hair to sweep it from his eyes. Then she held his hand in both of hers while she waited for him to wake up. One of the sick bay physicians walked over.
"He'll be fine, lieutenant. He should wake up soon."
"What happened to him?" Alana asked.
"Let's see ... Over exertion, dehydration, smoke inhalation, some burns on his arms, contusions on his chest and chin. Nothing really serious. We fixed him up and kept him asleep for awhile. Nudge him if you like."
She squeezed his hand and tugged on his arm. "Hey. Wake up there, kiddo."
Eric opened his eyes and looked up to see Alana's long blonde hair full around her face and worried blue eyes. He focussed for a second and guessed, from the doctor's uniform, that he was in a hospital of some sort. "Where am I?"
"You're in the sick bay of the Schirra. We're on our way home," she said.
"Is Captain Kelso okay?"
The doctor sat down on the bed. "Captain Kelso suffered some severe burns and smoke inhalation. He's in intensive care, but we think he'll be okay."
"What about the rest of the crew?"
"I'll let the lieutenant fill you in." The doctor picked up a cup of ice water from the table. "Here. Sip on this."
After the doctor left, Alana slid onto the bed and sat next to Eric. "Okay, you ready?"
"Tell me everything," Eric said.
"The Schirra, Shepard and Glenn are all pretty much unscathed. It seems as thought the ETs concentrated on the Slayton and overwhelmed its defenses. There was some kind of neutral beam that penetrated the ship's magnetic fields and took out one of the Tokamaks. Then, instead of retreating like they have in the past, one of the ET ships moved in and threw everything it had at the Slayton. The Glenn and the Schirra tried to defend and think they disabled three enemy ships with the Quark Bullets, but we've been wrong before. Whenever we throw something new at them, they seem to back off and stand down. But we couldn't assess the damage."
"What about the Slayton's crew?" Eric asked, sipping on his ice water.
"Six crew were killed in the Alpha engine room. Two in Beta. Colonel Kim's pod was never recovered. Don't know what happened. We swept the area for twelve hours, but it was never found. The rest of the crew, thanks to you, Major Forney and the Captain were all recovered from the escape pods."
"What happened after the Slayton was destroyed?"
"The ETs backed off and let us recover the pods. After some minor repairs on the Shepard, we started home. We've been underway for about a day."
"You can stop squeezing my hand now." Eric said, smiling.
Alana blushed. "I'm sorry. We've all been very worried about you."
"Captain Kelso. Is he conscious?"
"No. They're keeping him under for awhile... Hey! You hungry?"
"When am I not hungry?" Eric said as he sat up and put his legs over the edge of the bed.
"Get dressed. I'll walk you to the mess hall."
"Steak. I want a steak."
"And apple pie, right?"
"How'd you know that?"
Alana smiled. "No secrets on these ships, lieutenant. Major Forney tells me everything."
General Tyler pounded his fist on the table. "I don't care! I want the entire bridge crew court martialled."
"But sir. We've just about finished analyzing the combat logs. It appears there are no grounds for that action." General Tyler's second in command, Colonel Anson, perused his vid-pad one more time. "The Slayton never had a chance, sir."
"And I want to know why the Schirra didn't reengage the enemy."
"Sir. The mission profile called for a covering retreat if one of the ships was disabled. You signed off on that."
"I'll tell you what. I'm getting sick and damn tired of these ETs. They won't talk to us. They just sit out there like snipers, waiting to pick us off. And that damn lieutenant MacDonald. First he gets my son booted out of the Air Force, then he hoses up and nearly gets Kelso killed. Nine others dead. Not to mention a fourteen billion dollar starship lost."
"Actually, sir, MacDonald is the best we have. And he saved Kelso's life. Besides. Captain Boudreau lost 260 on the Lovell, and you didn't bat an eye."
"That was different."
"How, General?"
"We weren't ready."
"Maybe we're still not." Colonel Anson looked straight at the General with a steady gaze.
General Tyler grunted, turned away, and stared out the window. "This combat loss warrants at least an Article 32 hearing. When Kelso is up and about, get him in here."
"Yes, sir. Will that be before or after he and his crew attend the White House ceremony?"
Tyler scowled. "Get out!"
Colonel John Kelso and First Lieutenant Eric MacDonald sat in the via Pacifica lounge of the Grand Hyatt hotel in Washington D.C. and sipped on their beers. There was a super-NFL football game showing on the holo projector.
"I'm putting you in for Commander as soon as we get back to Edwards." Kelso said absently, gazing at the game. "I'd put you in for a medal too, but you already have too many. Must be getting tiresome." He winked.
Eric smiled. "Commander! Very good, sir. Except, I'll probably get to spend my new time in grade at Fort Leavenworth."
"Don't worry about General Tyler. I can handle him. The captains of the other ships and I have a meeting with him next week. When we're through with him, he'll be wondering how he's going to have time to hand out all the medals we put in for."
"Did you hear that?" Eric suddenly perked up and focused completely on the game.
"Huh?"
"What the sportscaster just said."
"No, I missed it."
"He said, 'You're never gonna get to the Super Bowl without an awesome defense.' "
"So?"
"That's it!"
"That's what?"
"That's what the ETs having been trying to tell us. We keep going out there with bigger guns, but we can't defend ourselves. And if we can't defend ourselves, maybe we're not ready for Tau Ceti. Or whatever."
The Colonel took a long sip from his beer. "Go on."
"I think what's happened so far is that every time we go out there, they send us a message. A tap on the shoulder and a bloody nose. 'Yeah, you got cool toys. But you can't even get past us. How are you gonna dance with the big guys?' "
"And that's why they don't obliterate us. They just beat us up a little."
"Right."
"What big guys?"
"Dunno. But so far, they've just been upping the ante. Sooner or later, they hope, we'll figure out that we need an awesome defense."
"Damn it, we've got more maneuverability than we know what to do with. We have hardened engine rooms. We have a fire control system doing ten to the eighteenth operations per second, maneuvering us through their proton beams, or what ever. We have a magnetic field that could suck the fillings right out of your mouth from a hundred kilometers. That is, if we had any. What's left?"
"Yeah. But they planted some kind of neutral particle beam on us. May have even been something like our own Quark Bullets. What we need is something that keeps anything from touching us."
"I don't think we know how to do that," the colonel said.
"Maybe not. But I'm going to find out. Request permission to go to Lawrence Livermore next week. Maybe they've got some ideas."
"Sure. Stay as long as you need to. See what you can come up with. Tell you what. We're not going out there again without something a shit load better than what we've got now."
"I'm on it."
"It better be good. Commander MacDonald."
Eric smiled. That word, commander, sounded really good.
It was a cool, windy, rainy day in March when Eric hurried into the Physics and Advanced Technology building at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He stood for a minute in the lobby shaking out his umbrella and wiping off his wind breaker. As he looked up, a young engineer came around the corner into the lobby. "Are you Commander MacDonald?"
"Yes I am. Sorry about the water on the carpet."
"No problem. Come this way, sir."
Eric was led down a hall and through several secured doors. The engineer handed him a smart ring to wear so that he could get in and out and access the rest room. They finally entered a Faraday caged room via what looked like a bank vault door. Eric stepped over the threshold and into a well lit room with a large mahogany table in the center. He was invited to take a seat.
His escort closed the vault door from the other side, and it came shut with with an impressive ka-chunk.
Eric recognized the scientist he'd been working with, Dr. Gunther Schmidt and the deputy director, but no one else. Dr. Schmidt leaned over to shake Eric's hand and introduced him to the other people. "Commander MacDonald. This is the director of the lab, Dr. Ellen Hanaway. To her right is the deputy director, Dr. Philip Baumgarten. I think you've met. Over here are two of my colleagues, doctors Chou and Ghandir. We have something exciting to show you today."
Eric looked up at the holo screen as Dr. Schmidt waved his hand over the controls. Dr. Schmidt continued. "What you're going to see here is a simulation of something we've been working on for quite some time. Originally, it was intended as a confinement mechanism for a next generation Tokamak."
"What am I looking at?" Eric asked.
"To your right you'll see a series of particle beams striking a regime in the center of the display. Let's start with a proton beam." He waved his hand slightly.
Eric watched as a narrow, yellow 3-D beam struck the shimmering red curtain that looked like an Aurora Borealis, moving and radiating with a deep red color. The sharp yellow beam struck the red region and broke up into a hemisphere of scattered particles. "What you just saw was a proton beam of ten to the fifteenth amps strike a field of, ahem, gluon fuzzballs."
"Gluon fuzzballs?" Eric leaned forward. He'd never heard of that.
"Yes. What this represents is a field of gluons extracted from the zero point field. They only exist for femto seconds. But the field density is quite large. Actually ten to the twenty per cubic centimeter. When matter strikes this field, the gluons disrupt the particles with an effective index of refraction that is, well, considerable."
"So it should work with neutrons. Or, um, quark nuggets?"
Dr. Schmidt waved his hand again. "Let's see, shall we?" This time a blue and then a red beam struck the gluon field and were similarly scattered. Eric sat back in his chair and smiled. This was what he'd been looking for.
"Okay, I can see how the gluon field, um, fuzzballs, interact with the quarks in solid matter. But what about radiation?"
Dr. Schmidt laughed. "I knew you'd ask about that. Let me show you." Eric looked up at the screen and watched as a brilliant beam of white struck the shimmering red field and saw it reflect away, remaining coherent. "Notice the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. The gluon field interacts with this simulated X-ray laser beam because the photons act as if they have mass. There's a quantum interaction between the gluon field and the mass of the photons. Again, the index of refraction is nearly infinite."
"Holy shit," Eric mumbled under his breath.
The lab director smiled. "We thought that would be your reaction."
Eric blushed a little. "Sorry... okay. That was a simulation. How long would it take to build an operational system? One that could protect a 20,000 ton starship?"
Dr. Ghandir cleared his throat. "I have been looking into that. It turns out that the field density required to extract the gluons from the zero point field is quite a bit larger than you can generate with the Tokamaks on the Slayton class starships. By a factor of, I estimate, a thousand. We're going to need a next generation Tokamak, itself using this technology, which will weigh, let's see, about four times the current version you are using."
Eric did some quick mental calculation. "That would put our ships into the 30,000 ton range."
"Yes," Dr. Chou added. "But we think that with appropriate modifications, we can use the current design and simply add on. It's not as if we need to be aerodynamic with the hull design."
"How long would this refitting take?"
"About six months per ship," Dr. Chou responded.
"And the cost?" Eric bit his lip.
"Five billion per ship."
Eric sighed. He was already thinking about how briefing that number to General Tyler would go. He took a deep breath. "Gentlemen, this has been, um, illuminating. I will talk to the fleet Captain, Colonel Kelso, and we'll let you know. Let's download that simulation to my vid-pad." He stood up and shook hands all around.
As Eric walked out to his cab, the rain drove at him nearly horizontally and began to soak his trousers. His umbrella was nearly pulled out his hands, but he didn't care. His mind was racing as he approached the cab and jumped in, folding his umbrella. He was cold and shivering, but all he could think about was the gluon fuzzballs. Quantum magic. That would be their ticket to Tau Ceti.
Alana squinted at Eric and pouted. "What are you talking about? Of course I'm going with you. Kelso knows I'm the best computer technician in the Air Force."
"It's dangerous out there, Alana. On every trip, people have died."
Alana's voice caught in her throat. "I'd rather die with you than sit here for twenty five years waiting for you to return."
They sat silently on the swinging chair of Eric's porch for a moment and gathered their thoughts. The afternoon air was warm, and the sun was high, shining brightly, and casting sharp shadows through the overhead slats.
"You should stay here. Get on with your life."
"I thought you loved me," Alana said as tears formed in her eyes.
"I do. But ..."
"Then we should get married, and they'll have to assign us to the same mission."
"I don't know. I think I love you too much to put you in the sights of those ETs again."
Tears started to stream down Alana's cheeks. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small, white plastic packet. "I have a present for you," she said and held out her hand. "I've been waiting for the right time to give it to you."
Eric allowed Alana to place the small packet in his hand, and she clasped her own warm hands around his, squeezing. Finally, she released his hand and Eric opened the packet. It was a gold St. Christopher medal on a gold chain. Eric turned it over and saw that Alana's initials had been engraved onto the back. As he stared at the medal in disbelief, his eyes misted, and he fought to keep control.
Alana placed her hand on his forearm. "Laurette's gone forever, but I'll always be with you," she said, choking out the words.
"I really do love you." He paused for several seconds. "I think ... I think we should get married."
Alana shook her head to get her hair off her face and then wiped her cheek on her shirt sleeve. She raised her head proudly. "Tell you what, kiddo. I'll think about it."
Eric laughed so hard, he started to cry. He put the chain around his neck and hugged Alana, squeezing hard. "Tell you what. We'll always be together, okay?"
"Roger that, Commander."
He took Alana by the hand as they stood up and, arm in arm, they went inside and up the stairs.
Copyright 2001 by John
Martellaro, All rights reserved. Quantum Threads banner
artwork by Tracy Haynes.
About the Author
John Martellaro lives in Colorado at 2,800 meters above sea level with a Ph.D. wife and two cats, Nikki and Data. He holds a B.S. in Astrophysics and an M.S. in Physics. His hobbies, include amateur astronomy, downhill skiing, bicycling, and listening to piano solos. His personal Macs are a B&W G3/400 with a flat screen Studio Display and a blueberry iBook.
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