Manxome Foe

10

“Officer of the Watch,” the pilot said, looking over his shoulder. “Approaching Mu Ori multiple binary system. There’s a chill and astrophysics survey on the schedule for that system.”

The TACO, currently officer of the watch, looked over at the astrogator’s position where a newbie ensign was parked as the “secondary astrogator.” He grimaced at the thought of doing a system entry of a multiple star star system while Commander Weaver was asleep. Actually, he knew it shouldn’t be done, and probably couldn’t be done without the lieutenant commander. Not to mention that the CO was going to want to be present.

“Oh, grapp. An astrophysics survey? Astro?”

“We are now approximately one hundred and forty-three light-years from Sol closing in on Mu Ori, sir,” Ensign Waterhouse replied, seriously. Ensign Waterhouse had matriculated with a bachelor’s degree in astronomy from Colorado State University. He had joined the Navy on a Nuke track and been rather surprised when an entirely new branch was presented to him. But here he was in space about to do a close-up survey of the Mu Ori system. What could be cooler? Except checking out a nebula or a Mira variable or… gosh, there were so many choices! “We should be at the system entry distance in about an hour.”

In the TACO’s opinion, astrogator in training was actually a misnomer for what Waterhouse was doing. Manning a post, putting a butt in a seat, that was more like it. Commander Weaver was really the only one on-board who actually knew how to navigate with the ship’s computer system. If anybody started grapping around with the controls it would likely cause… problems. That’s why both the commander and the captain had ordered that on Weaver’s off shifts the manning of the navigation post meant “nobody touch a grapping thing or the maulk will hit the fan!”

“Shiny. Quartermaster of the Watch?”

“Sir?”

“Wake up Commander Weaver and the captain.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Miriam had never really had a problem with sleep. Close her eyes, she slept. Sometimes she woke up in the morning covered in sweat and with memories of some really odd and disturbing dreams. But she didn’t have a lot of problem with sleep per se. But the manual labor she had been putting in on the Blade since the ship went under weigh from Earth was beginning to take a toll on her physically. Oh, she absolutely loved what she was doing, otherwise she just wouldn’t do it. But, most things on the ship were put together with heavy mechanisms and required big, very big, tools. In fact, Machinist’s Mate Gants had referred to one of the pipe wrenches as a BGW. It didn’t take Miriam long to figure out what that meant.

Either she had picked up various big grapping wrenches too many times over the last few days or she really needed to sleep. She squirmed in her bunk hoping to find a comfortable position that would allow her to drift off.

“…a better construct…” whispered faintly through her mind.

“What?” Miriam hugged herself closer and tried to ignore the voice. It was relentless and would come and go at random, but once it got started it would go on for hours. And, she really needed some rest.

“…adjustment of the permeability factor for membrane modification during oscillations of the muon and muon neutrino density is necessary before realigning the frame dragging coefficients for entry into nonstandard metrics from modified flat spatial metric motivation…” the whisper continued.

“I don’t understand that… wait, say that again.” Miriam hugged herself even tighter just wishing she could sleep, but that damned voice had been whispering in her mind for more than two weeks. At least for the last week it was finally in English. The first few days it was pure gibberish and then it was a mix of all the languages she understood, which made it gibberish, and then it finally settled on English. Thank God.

“…adjustment of the permeability factor for membrane modification during oscillations of the muon and muon neutrino density is necessary before realigning the frame dragging coefficients for entry into nonstandard metrics from modified flat spatial metric motivation…” the whisper repeated.

“Hey! You’re listening to me.” Miriam opened her eyes and blinked them hard a few times at the darkness of her small bunk. She could see cracks of light that were seeping through the seam at her door and cast shadows of her on the bunk bulkhead. “Responding, anyway. Repeat that again.”

“…adjustment of the permeability factor for membrane modification during oscillations of the muon and muon neutrino density is necessary before realigning the frame dragging coefficients for entry into nonstandard metrics from modified flat spatial metric motivation…” the whisper repeated.

“I don’t get the first part but, oscillations of the muon and muon neutrino density I understand and entry into nonstandard metrics from modified flat spatial metric motivation I get.”

“…the background emissions due to the…”

“Shhh! Quiet.” Miriam said. The whisper stopped. It. Stopped. “Now why the maulk didn’t I think of that before.” Miriam rolled herself out of her fetal position and then like a slender cat quietly fell to the floor. She slipped on some jeans and a T-shirt and then her steel-toed spike heel boots.

“Commander Weaver?” she said, activating her implant.

“Miriam?” Weaver answered through a yawn. “It’s late; shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

“Long story…”

“Another time. What’d you need?”

“Are we about to do a system entry?”

“Uh, I uh, dunno. Hang on a sec, there’s someone at my door.” Weaver stretched and scratched and blinked his eyes hard trying to wake up. “Enter.”

“Sir,” the quartermaster of the watch stuck his head through his cabin door. “System entry into the Mu Ori system in about forty-five minutes, sir.”

“Roger that. You woke up the captain yet?” Weaver stood and rolled his head left and right, stretching his neck.

“No sir. He’s next on my list.”

“Right. Carry on.”

“Aye.”

“Bill? You still there?” Miriam said into his ear.

“Uh, how the heck…”

“Sir, we’re about to do a multiple system entry for chill and astrophysics survey,” the quartermaster of the watch said.

“Got it,” the CO said, sitting up. “Tell them I’m up there in… Wait, did you say astronomical survey, astronautical survey or astrophysics survey?” During chill times they’d done both of the former, respectively studying stars at long range but getting their “true” distance from Earth by triangulation and mapping for smaller but dangerous gravitational anomalies, potential black holes or neutron stars and the other “rocks and shoals” of deep space.

An astrophysics survey, though…

“Errr…” the PO said, looking at the written note on his pad. “Astrophysics, sir.”

“How in the hell did I forget there was an astrophysics survey?” the CO asked, standing up and hitting his head on a beam. “Mothergrapper!”

“ALL HANDS, ALL HANDS, SET CONDITION TWO THROUGHOUT THE SHIP! PREPARE FOR SYSTEM ENTRY AND CHILL. ASTROPHYSICS SURVEY TEAMS READY YOUR POSTS.”

“What in the grapp is… oh grappin’ maulk, not this again. Goddamned astrophysics survey?” The COB looked down at the ceiling of the toilet stall and with lightning fast reflexes grabbed his coffee mug from the toilet paper holder, covering it with his other hand, just before he fell on his head. But, he didn’t spill his coffee until the contents of the toilet fell on him.

“Maulk!”

“Oh maulk!” Berg grabbed a stanchion as the ship suddenly lurched, and swallowed hard against a wave of nausea. He fell to his knees heaving as his inner ear raced to find an up or a down or a left or a right. Maulk, any direction would have suited his balance system, but Berg’s head spun and he heaved again.

“Grapping astrophysics survey! I don’t remember an astrophysics survey on the schedule!”

“ALL HANDS, ALL HANDS, SET CONDITION ONE! SEVERE SPATIAL FRAME DRAGGING ANOMALY! ON-BOARD GRAVITATIONAL FLUCTUATIONS.”

“Astro? What the hell?” Spectre held onto the command chair restraints and choked down his stomach. The spin in his head was about like a flat spin at four g. He’d felt that once before in an F/A-18 Hornet, years ago, and he didn’t like it then.

“I dunn—” the lieutenant commander said, then vomited onto his control panel. Fortunately, it was the middle of the night and he had skipped supper. What came up was mostly fluids.

“Commander Weaver!”

“Working on it, sir,” Bill said, swallowing his gorge.

“Commander Weaver?” Spectre shook his head and the spinning subsided for a second. Just a second.

“I don’t get it, sir,” Bill snapped, looking at the readings. “There is not much worse gravity here than at YZ Ceti and we’re farther out. But there is some serious frame drag—” Weaver heaved but managed to use a bag this time.

“Eng reports Ball is nominal,” the XO said, then grabbed a sickness bag.

“I’m, uh, trying to figure it out sir.”

“Weaver?”

“Tchar?” Bill asked, looking at a small video screen. The Adar rarely got involved directly in the running of the ship.

“The ball particle counters are showing a largish background radiation across the spectrum of particles. We could be getting anomalous particle stream or even a-null impacting.”

“I’m getting that… data now Tchar,” Bill said, then grabbed another sickness bag and used same. The nausea from this transition was worse than anything he’d ever experienced in his life, and he’d spent a fair amount of time in both zero-g and fighters. “Thanks.”

“Commander Weaver, how is it coming over there?” Spectre was beginning to lose patience. He had reluctantly agreed to the astrophysics survey in the flight plan, but he had been assured that the distance would be safe and that they had to chill anyway. Fool me once, shame on you…

“The algorithms from previous anomalies are not helping, sir. It must have to do with the serious gravitational frame dragging due to there being an A class star with four F class stars in extremely close orbit around it.” Bill gulped again and looked down at the port side bulkhead just as down became the starboard bulkhead.

“CO?”

“Go XO.”

“We really need to chill sir. Thermal readings exceeding eighty-seven percent of max.”

“Not till we get this anomaly under control,” Spectre ordered. “Commander Weaver, can we just back out of here?”

“That has never really worked for us in the past sir,” Bill replied.

“Right. Work faster.”

“Commander Weaver?”

“I’m running a sim now sir. I… think it’s…” He paused and grabbed another sickness bag. The conn was rapidly running out. “I think it’s going to tell me what is happening at least.” Some… detritus had gotten on his screen and he surreptitiously wiped at it with his sleeve.

He was the first to see Miriam enter the conn. The linguist was normally the first to go down from motion sickness but something had changed that. As the relative “up” shifted to port the linguist easily handled the shift, even seeming to anticipate it, and walked up to his station along the top of the ballast controls.

“Is there unusual frame dragging in this region?” she asked nonchalantly.

“Data reduction and simulation is… coming in now,” Weaver said, looking at her oddly. “Why are you asking?”

“I was just thinking about what might happen in a frame dragging scenario,” Miriam said, grabbing a stanchion just before another gravity change and bracing sideways. “What do you think about, oh, adjusting the permeabilty factor for membrane modification during oscillations of the muon and muon neutrino density? I mean, if you have to realign the frame dragging coefficient for entry into nonstandard metrics from modified flat plane metric motivation?”

“Miriam!” Bill said, slapping his forehead. “You’re brilliant!”

“Well, yes, but do you think it will work?”

“Uh, let’s assume that I’m not so brilliant and explain this to me,” Spectre said. “And XO, get a work party up here with some more sickness bags!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

“Muon and muon neutrino density, sir,” Bill said. “That is what a plus pion or pi-meson decays into. That is what we use to power the box, pions. Maybe we’re pounding it with too many.”

“Well, we’re going to chill anyway, can’t we just cut them off?” Spectre asked.

“Good idea,” Weaver said. “Maybe.”

“There was one more thing.” Miriam said. “I think that the first excited state of the flavor neutral must have the required rest mass of three zero nine six point nine million electron volts in oscillating flux density but the half life of the up-type pair must be longer, frame relative, than the rest frame seven point two times ten to the minus twenty-one seconds. The modulation and control of the flux density and pair half life can increase or decrease the flat space metric within the motivation metric to accommodate potential well suitability. But it’s just a guess.”

“Why three zero nine six point nine MeV?” Bill asked.

“That question was on the tip of my tongue,” Spectre said, bracing his feet. “Yes, indeed, Miss Moon. Why… what he said?”

“I’m not a particle physicist but, isn’t three zero nine six point nine MeV the rest mass of the J/psi particle?” Miriam asked.

“Maulk. I wish my memory would do that,” Bill replied. “That sounds right. I’ll have to look it up.” He looked it up on the ship’s science net and, sure enough, Miriam was right.

“So?” Spectre glanced over at the COB, who was reluctant to release his hold on the bulkhead stanchion. “How does this help?”

“I need to think on it some more but the suggestion is to feed it J/psi particles to adjust the gravity and by increasing or decreasing the half life of the particle just means to increase or decrease its relativistic speed and therefore cause time dilation to occur, which in turn makes us in our reference frame observe that the particle lives longer than it should in a rest frame.”

“And, Commander Weaver?” the CO was out of patience.

“Sorry sir, we aren’t set up for creating J/psi particles. But it does tell us that the pions we are using are making it worse.” Bill tapped a couple more commands and hit enter with dramatic emphasis.

“We should signal the all hands for zero gravity, sir,” Bill said.

“Make it so.”

“ALL HANDS, ALL HANDS. PREPARE FOR ZERO GRAVITY AND CHILL.”

“Someone want to tell me what the heck just happened?” the CO asked. “I do recall someone promising me that this astrophysics survey was going to be event free!”

“Well, sir,” Bill said, slowly and thoughtfully. “I think the black box knows how to adjust for gravity fluctuations of all sorts by inputting different types of mesons. I never really thought of that but it makes sense that it’s got to have some sort of potential control system to deal with the effects we’ve been having trouble with. And apparently the different flavors of mesons have different effects on the thing just like electrons make it go boom. The Mu Ori system is a fairly good sized A type star of about three or more solar masses that has two sets of F binaries orbiting it at very close orbits. The F type binaries are at orbits more like planets from each other rather than like stars. So there are a lot of spinning massive objects here.” Weaver stopped as the CO held up his hand.

“And the box wasn’t set to account for mixed-up gravity. I get it. And we went to zero gravity because we don’t have these J/psi things to adjust it properly?” Spectre asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I was right! We should’ve just turned off the ball to start with?”

“Uh, yes sir. But…” Weaver decided not to finish whatever it was he was going to say. Which was that if the anomaly had been Tchar’s first guess, anomalous particle input, they might not have been able to shut off the drive. Or get it started again. Or several other bad things ranging up to making a new star in the system.

“XO, get me a damage report. Mr. Weaver, don’t you have an astrophysical survey to do?”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“And figure out how we’re going to get out of this mess!”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“I need to address the crew.”

“All hands, all hands, this is the CO speaking. What we just experienced was an unanticipated frame dragging anomaly. Following the chill and survey of this region, we will be leaving. We may encounter additional frame dragging anomalies. So grab your barf bags. Thank you for flying Vorpal Air.”

“What the pock is a ‘frame dragging anomaly’?” Portana spat.

“Search me, Portly,” Sergeant Priester said. “Two-Gun? You’re the only guy who gets this stuff.”

“You sure?” Berg asked. “Kinda technical.”

“Just give it to us straight, man,” Lyle said with a fake whine tone. “Tell us how grapped we are! We can handle it! We’re marooned, aren’t we? Stuck in the depths of space with no way—”

“We get it, Lurch,” Berg said, grinning. “Nice way to scare the newbies. But, if you really want to know. I recently found a paper in the database that Lieutenant Commander Weaver wrote about the data in the Gravity Probe B satellite…” Berg started.

“Oh maulk, here we go,” Priester said. “Tell us how much you’re in love with the astro.”

“Grapp you, Priestman,” Berg said. “Honestly, I didn’t understand the paper; it was way over my head. But he did have a simple analogy in it to explain the concept. It has to do with…”

“So, Commander Weaver,” Spectre said silkily. “Kindly explain to your CO, who you convinced over his protestations that an astrophysics survey would be a good thing, what this ‘frame dragging’ thing is, why it grapped up my ship and crew and why you failed to anticipate it.”

“Well, sir,” Bill said with a gulp. “I never really thought it would be a big deal. Until now.”

“Uh huh. Keep going. Feel free to use words of more than two syllables.”

“It has to do with general relativity, sir,” Bill said carefully.

“I did say more than two,” the CO replied. “But relativity is a bunch.” He looked down at his fingers and moved his lips. “Five, actually.”

“Then imagine that space is like a big rubber sheet that is stretched tight. Kinda like a trampoline. And assume our model is being done on Earth so we have one gravity.”

“But space is three dimensions and one of time right?” Spectre said, then winced. He was opening up himself for a full-scale Weaver-assault with that one.

“Oh, this is a two-D analogy sir…”

Whew. Escaped by the skin of my teeth…

“Anyway, consider what happens to our trampoline if you place a lead bowling ball in the middle of it. That would be the analog of the sun.”

“So far, so good.”

“Well, the space around the ball, the sun, curves in on it and is stretched.”

“That’s ‘frame dragging’?”

“Not yet, sir. But, if you spin the ball and allow for there to be friction between the ball and the rubber sheet, the sheet will twist with the ball and bunch up around it. You get my description?”

“Yeah, I can see that. So the space around you is the reference frame you are in and the spinning star drags it around it as it spins?”

“Precisely, sir! I wrote a paper about how if we prove that it exists, then we are a step closer to understanding how to do a warp drive, but that was before the Dreen and the world went to shit.”

“So, where’s the problem, Commander? This frame dragging should be around the star. Localized. We’re a couple of light-years out!”

“Well sir, there are five stars in this system and all of them spinning like maulk.”

“Oh grapp.”

“So,” Portana said, carefully. “Two-Gongoron wan’s t’ habe the astrogator babies and too many star spinning too fas’ in a small space is pad. Why you not say t’at in t’e firs’ place?”

“Hey,” Priester said, leaning back in his bunk. “Welcome to the Space Marines. Please leave your brain at the door.”

“XO!”

“Sir,” the XO said.

“Put a note in the log,” the CO said, standing up and looking around the compartment. It had taken nearly an hour of nerve-wracking and gut-twisting maneuvers to clear the system. “Unless ordered by higher, no more close studies of astrophysics anomalies.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” the XO said. “Officer of the Watch! Update the log!”

“And put a further note,” Spectre said, walking towards his quarters and pointedly not looking over his shoulder at the astrogator. “ ’And this time I mean it!’ ”