Vorpal Blade

5

“Now that’s an odd looking sub,” Miller said, looking at the boat.

The 4144 was alone in a covered pen made for six submarines. And it was odd looking. The sail was truncated and swept back with no diving plane on it. The rear section was “humped” for about a third of its length. The “hump” appeared to be a separate vessel, something like the SEAL vessel the Navy had been working on for years; there was a very definite seam where it met the boat.

Just at the tip of the composite nosecone that housed the sonar suite and other instruments was something completely different. Extending from the nosecone was a long protrusion that looked like — and Miller was sure he couldn’t be the only person to make the connection — a sword about thirty meters long, six meters high at the base where it was attached to the nose of the sub, only two meters or so wide in the horizontal dimension, and then flattened out to a point. The rest of the body of the submarine could very well represent the hilt of the blade, although it was much longer than the blade itself. It really and truly looked like the oddest, most peculiar, and largest flat-black dull sword the chief warrant officer had ever seen. Also a bit like a narwhal. He just knew that Weaver was somehow behind it.

“Uh, what the hell is the giant blade all about?” Miller asked, then paused and added, “Sir?”

“Oh, yeah, the supercavitation initiator.” Weaver shrugged. “Had to add that. Otherwise, when the ship tries to reach maximum underwater velocity there would be a serious problem with Euler buckling. Serious. Problem.”

“Oiler buckling,” the chief said. “Sounds like a game involving a football team from Texas and a bunch of gay cowboys.”

“The Oilers moved to Tennessee a long time ago, Chief. Never was a big fan of the Cowboys either.” Weaver grinned. “But it’s Euler with an E, named after the guy who understood it first.

“Uh huh.”

“You ever stood on an empty beer can slowly until the force of your entire body weight was finally enough to collapse the can flat?” Weaver explained.

“I’m more of a liquor drinker, sir.”

“Work with me here, Chief. You have seen somebody stomp a can flat before?” asked Weaver rubbing at the back of his neck and raising an eyebrow.

“Yes, sir.” Calling Bill “sir” was going to take some getting used to.

“Okay then, beer can equals submarine and big dumb SEAL equals force of water on boat at maximum underwater velocity. Flat can equals sub without initiator. Got it?”

“How does the sword help? No wait, scratch that. Euler buckling bad. Blade on nose of boat, good. Got it.” The SEAL shook his head left and right subtly.

“It’s basically the same thing that we do on supersonic stuff, plus a new trick that works kinda like the warp field. We put spikes on jets here and there to create shock waves where we want them and in a controllable manner. Ever seen the long needle on the end of a supersonic plane?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Same deal. The initiator creates a bow wave far enough out in front of the ship that a boundary layer is created around the ship. This reduces the buckling forces on the ship by about two orders of magnitude. But that only helps with the Euler buckling force some.”

“Wait a minute,” Miller said, furrowing his brow. “Nukes are built to take all kinds of unimaginable hell. It couldn’t stand up to even two or three times the normal top speed without modifications to the structure?”

“Two or three times normal top speed, perhaps,” Bill said with a grin.

“No maulk?”

“No maulk.”

“Uh, sir. I know subs. I’ve spent one hell of a lot of time around them. They’re pretty damned fast. I mean, just between us, here in a secure sub pen, a big boat goes somewhere around seventy or eighty knots. Right?” Miller wasn’t sure if he was glad he asked the question or not. With Dr. Weaver — Lieutenant Commander Weaver — explanations could sometimes create an eyes glazing over effect that could damage one’s brain.

“Actually for this boat, the terminal velocity is a little lower than that. No matter how much power we pour into the propulsion it’s not that fast. And if it was that fast, it would…”

“Crush like a beer can, got it,” Miller said. “So what gives?”

“Well, you see the initiator there has millions of little holes in it about a millimeter in diameter that are dispersed about it in a precisely calculated manner. It took us months to run that simulation and more than eight months to construct the thing. Anyway, we force air out through those holes as we come up to speed. An envelope of water supersaturated with air flows in around the vessel and dramatically reduces the friction with the water. It really is a warping of the parameters of the ocean so that the submarine can go faster through it than it should normally be able to. And, of course, it’s got a spaceship engine in it. That helps. A prop won’t work by a long shot.”

“Did you think of that?” Miller hesitated and then added, “Sir?”

“Nope,” Weaver admitted. “The Russians have been trying to figure out how to do it for fifty years. Some call it supercavitation; others call it underwater warp drive. The U.S. Navy decided to go slow and stealthy and quit trying to figure it out because the propulsion system required was a volatile rocket engine. The Navy didn’t want that on a sub. But the new drive changed their mind and DARPA was so thrilled by it that they lobbied hard for the design and even paid for most of it.”

Weaver looked at his ship with affection. Oh sure it was Captain Steven Blankemeier’s command — and most certainly it was the captain’s ship — but Weaver thought of it as his ship. After all, he’d designed most of the retrofit systems on it. Nobody understood it like he did.

“It looks like a sword. A short squatty sword with a big assed grip, but a sword nonetheless.”

“Never noticed that,” Weaver admitted. “Hmmm.”

“Sooo, we sort of ram the water with that sword thingy…” Miller said.

“Correct.”

“And we use it to make fizzy stuff that makes the ship slipperyer.”

“More slippery. Sure.”

“And that keeps us from getting crushed like a beer can.”

“You see?” Weaver said. “It is possible to explain things to SEALs.”

“Got a question, sir,” Miller said, stone-faced.

“Go.”

“So, can we ram people with that? Sort of like a narwhal skewering a whaling ship? I mean, it’s not our first line of defense but is there, like, a ramming speed? Sir?”

“Let’s just tour the ship, shall we?”

The strangest thing on the exterior of the ship was definitely the ramming blade. However, close on the heels of the blade was the odd appearance of the base of the sail. There was some sort of sliding hatch on the front that really looked out of place. It currently covered whatever was under it, but if memory served it was right above the conn.

The Navy had balked at giving a civilian “full access” to the details of the 4144. But they had admitted a willingness to give access to a SEAL chief warrant officer. Which was why Miller, wearing a brand new pair of digi-cam, carrying a seabag and occasionally rubbing his recently shaved head, was following Weaver across the gangplank to the spaceship.

He paused and saluted the American flag, then saluted the bridge.

“Permission to come aboard, Lieutenant?” he asked the officer manning the entry.

“Permission granted,” the LT said, extending his hand. “Lieutenant Jon Souza, tactical officer.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Miller replied.

“Time’s a wastin’,” Bill said, nodding at the lieutenant. “How’s the loading going?”

The boat was bustling with loading.

“We’ve got the ardune torps loaded,” the lieutenant replied. “We’re waiting until this evening to load the SM-9s. Laser Two failed the last charge cycle test. Brian’s got it stripped down.”

“While all that’s good to hear,” Bill said. “I hope we don’t need any of it.”

“Lasers?” Weaver asked. “What’s an SM-9?”

“Where to start?” Bill asked as they entered a hatch on the rear of the sail. There was a ladder there, which made Miller happier. He was half expecting a teleporter or something. Weaver grabbed the sides of the ladder and slid down rather expertly. He’d clearly been around boats. Miller was having various shocks but the worst one had to be Dr. William “How do you use this pistol?” Weaver as a commissioned officer with sea time.

“At the bow?” Miller asked as he slid down the ladder after Weaver.

“Torpedo room,” Weaver said, opening the hatch to the conn. “Not very interesting. Planetary study drones and some microsatellites. Well, and the ‘torpedoes,’ which are really Adari missiles. Range of about seventy klicks. Tracking system from an AMRAAM with some Adari additions. Ardune warhead.”

“That’s that… quark stuff, right?” Miller asked, looking around the conn. It looked pretty much like most of the conns he’d seen in his time. The big difference explained the sliding hatch. There was a big… window just under the front of the sail. And a portion of the conn had been elevated so you could see out. He was in a submarine with a… window!

“Quarkium,” Weaver said, nodding. “Gives about three times the bang of an equal amount of antimatter. Yield’s about sixty megatons. Of course, in space it doesn’t have much range. The SM-9As have a nuclear fission triggered quarkium warhead that works similar to a hydrogen bomb. The fission bomb triggers the quarkium release, which in turn releases a maulk load of gamma-rays, neutrons, neutrinos, and muons. Did I say energy? Lots of that.”

“How fast are the missiles? I mean, space is big, right, so they have to be fast?” Miller continued peering out the window, on a submarine, in front of him. The window seemed to be harder to get used to than the fact that he was standing inside humanity’s first starship. A freakin’ window on a submarine, he thought.

“The propulsion system is a mix of Adar tech and human. The thing is basically designed around the old nuclear thermal rocket concept but uses a small quarkium reactor instead of a fission reactor. No radiators needed and we use a dense Adar coolant for propellant instead of LOX or hydrogen or water. The Adar stuff gives us waaaay better m-dot. Using an Adar material for the nozzle we were able to get over eight thousand seconds of specific impulse out of it.”

“Uh, huh,” Miller said, looking at the window on a submarine! “Is that good?”

“Pretty good. They’ve got an accurate range of about four thousand klicks if there’s not a gravity well to fight, but here is the kicker. Max V is right at eighty kilometers per second so it’d take the thing a little less than a minute to travel the full accurate range. After that, they are out of propellant and would be coasting with no control. The ship can go a lot faster than that, so we’ll have to be careful and not shoot ourselves.” Weaver shrugged. “No idea if the missile’s capabilities are good or not compared to anybody else out there, but it’s the best we can do. Currently. We’re looking at some ways to extend the maneuvering range. Any other questions?”

“More of a statement, sir.”

“Yeah, Chief?”

“Sir, there’s a grapping window on this submarine.”

“Spaceship, Mister Miller,” Weaver said with a laugh. “Spaceship.”

“Where’s your station?” Miller asked, shaking his head and finally tearing his eyes from the window on a submarine!

“Over here,” Bill said, waving to a station. “It’s a bit odd. I have to be able to navigate underwater and in space.” Miller saw a paper plot charter and three separate computer screens. Bill brought up one of the latter and pointed at the planet on the screen. “Since I’m also, effectively, the ship’s science officer and they figured that Conn’s going to be asking lots of questions, they managed to squeeze me in Conn instead of the usual Nav spot downstairs. Anyway. We’re here. Terra. This system’s really easy to use until you start filling it with real data, but if we wanted to go to, say, Jupiter…”

He brought up a menu and found the planet, then punched in a command. The system displayed a series of coordinates.

“It’s at angle 233 mark 5.18, more or less,” Bill said. “We need to come around to 233 and point up about five degrees. Only problem is…” He punched in another command and nodded. “Depending on how fast we’re going, we’re liable to run into Venus if we go that way and we’re going real close to the Sun.”

“I think you need to find a different vector,” Miller said dryly, trying not to look over his shoulder. He might need to know this stuff to save the universe and maulk. But there was a…

“Sho-tan,” Bill said. “So we vector to 197, catch a slingshot around the moon, catch another around Mars and there we are…” he added, showing the movement on the screen.

“Glad you’re doing it,” Miller noted.

“That’s what everybody seems to say,” Weaver replied, grinning. “One guy I was showing how to do this grabbed his head right in the middle of the lecture and screamed ‘Rocks don’t move!’ ”

“Who designed the system?” Miller asked.

“I did,” Bill replied, shutting it down. “We paid Rath-Mirorc fifty-five million dollars for a system and they turned one in, late, that couldn’t navigate its way out of a wet paper bag. So I built one.”

“That’s… a lot of coding,” Miller said. “Isn’t it?”

“Nah,” Bill replied, waving him towards the rear hatch. “Not that much. Besides, I scagged a bunch of it from other programs.”

“Wait; what other programs?” Miller asked, as he ducked through the hatch.

“Oh, here and there…” Weaver replied. One of the crew coming the other way limpeted himself into the starboard bulkhead, so that the two officers could squeeze past.

A nuclear submarine does not have much free space. Besides the obvious areas that fill the boat — the conn, the engine room, the missile and torpedo compartments — the boat had to pack in the thousand and one things that kept it going. Kitchens, mess halls, quarters for the crew, a state-of-the-art workshop, laundries.

Because there was only so much space to work with, the boat was cramped. The corridors were narrower than a hallway in a home and much lower. Doors were narrow. Bunks in the crew compartment were four-high stacks and everything the crew carried onboard had to fit in either their bunk or a very small locker.

“You got that thing off the Internet, didn’t you,” the warrant officer said, sliding past the crewman. He’d spent enough time in subs to know the moves. “You’re navigating using some damned freeware program!”

“Only the basic data,” Bill protested. “And some of the graphics code. And the kernel, okay. But the gravitational effect algorithm is all mine! Mostly…”

“Oh, God,” Miller muttered.

“You know we’ve got to be able to pinpoint our position, right?” Weaver said, cycling open another hatch.

“What?” Miller said, stepping past the officer so he could dog the hatch closed. It was the internal hatches that, in the event of flooding or depressurization, would give the crew some marginal chance to survive. “Let me guess. Use a sextant or something?”

“Sextant’s old tech,” Bill replied. “I figured out something better.”

“I can’t wait,” the SEAL said.

“See, all you have to do is pick out bright spots against a dark background,” Weaver said. “You need to make sure they’re the right bright spots, but that’s really all it is.”

“Some sort of telescope?” Miller asked as they walked down a corridor. They had to stand to the side as a seaman walked past with a large box of cans in his arms. Besides all the other crowding, every nook and cranny of the boat was slowly filling with boxes of food. The major limitation to time “at sea,” or in space in this case, was how much food the boat could cram in. It could desalinate water for drinking, cooking and washing. It could break out oxygen from that same water for air. But nobody had figured out a way to make more food. You could pack prepared food into a much smaller area than a hydroponics department could ever create. There were some very new systems that created meat from nutrients and a “kernel” but those were still in their infancy. Until someone came up with a replicator, the menu was canned food.

“There’s a telescope involved,” Weaver said. “But the system that picks it up comes from an optical mouse.”

“An optical mouse?”

“Oh yeah, its actually kinda cool. You ever seen those optical mice that have a little red light coming out the bottom where a ball is on the old-style computer mouse?”

“Uh, huh.” Miller knew Weaver well enough to know that this explanation was not going to reassure his confidence in the ship’s navigation system. But, what the heck. They had some sort of weird sword that would go through the foot of the guy trying to crush them like a beer can, a navigation system off the Internet and a window on a submarine. How much worse could it get?

“Well, they work off a DSP chip that is actually quite remarkable—”

“Doc… Sorry, ‘Sir’… ?”

“DSP… digital signal processing. Anyway, there is a little video camera inside the mouse that looks straight down at the table surface. The little red light is just for, well, light. The DSP chip stores the image from the camera and makes note of where any spots, dust specks, scratches, or any other surface features of the table are within the image. The chip then grabs another video image a fraction of a second later and compares it to the previous one. If the spots moved within the image, the chip calculates how far and then moves the cursor on the computer screen a similar distance.”

Weaver paused for a breath and Miller stood motionless, not making a sound, but the slightest hint of a rictus grin began to form on his face. It was worse.

“I had the idea that the little DSP chip should work for any sort of scene change. I mean, after all, a video image of stars against the night sky looks about the same as dust specs on a tabletop with the contrast inverted. So, I blaged a few prototypes together to show that it would work. There are several small two-inch diameter telescopes distributed about the surface of the ship and each of these has an optical mouse DSP system fixed at its focal plane. The data is then piped into the main navigational computer where the vector changes found in each DSP chip are filtered and optimized. It actually works really well. And, the good news is we’ve got over a hundred spares on board.”

“Is the whole boat like that?” Miller finally moaned. He’d given up. He had to face it. He’d lost his hardcore doing flowers. He did not want to go fly around the universe in this…

“Yep, pretty much,” Weaver replied. “Utter blage.”

“Okay, you got me again. That’s twice you’ve used that word and I’ve no clue what it means,” Miller said.

“Adar word,” Bill replied, shrugging. “Sort of means everything from cannibalize to jury-rig. To blage, I blaged it, we can blage that, it’s a blage. Funny thing is, the Adar never had the concept of blaging before they ran into us; all their stuff is so carefully crafted and integrated it makes the Japanese look sloppy. So I don’t know where they got the word. But, yeah, it’s about as mil-spec as a fifth grade science fair project. An Adar corporation did the IT systems integration and they did a damned fine job. And Rath-Mirorc got the SM-9s right, I’ll give ’em that.”

The last hatch, as Miller recalled, would have led them to the missile compartment. The missile compartment was the one really open area on the whole boat. Three stories high, with separate decks on each story, it was lined with giant “tubes” that held the ballistic missiles with open areas down the middle and to either side. Bubbleheads called it “Sherwood Forest.” It was where SEALs traditionally did their running on-board. Instead of the cavernous area he’d expected, he was confronted by another hatch, a ladder to the side and narrow corridors leading port and starboard. There were two more hatches in the corridor and ladders at both ends.

“Now it gets complicated,” Weaver said. He turned right, to port, and went up the ladder. The hatch above opened on another corridor, this one with bunks along the inner bulkhead. Halfway down there was another hatch, just a simple door, with one more at the far end and another ladder going down.

“This is the security section,” Bill said. “We’ve got two security groups. One is Marines; they play outer security. Then each of the technical people is assigned a small security and support detachment. They’re drawn from Special Forces.”

“No SEALs?” Miller protested.

“No SEALs,” Weaver replied. “Wrong sort of mission. Anyway…”

He opened up a hatch and waved to the room. It was… small. And there were two bunks.

“You get to bunk with the Marine first sergeant,” Bill said. “He previously had the compartment all to himself.”

“He’s going to be pleased as maulk,” Miller said, tossing his seabag onto the upper bunk.

“He was indeed,” Weaver said.

He led Miller out of the room and down the corridor to the ladder. At the bottom there was a door but he turned to starboard and led Miller to a door in the center of the mission specialist section. This one had a card reader and a big sign “Authorized Crew Only.”

Weaver fished out his keycard and held it up, then opened the door. Beyond was the missile compartment. But it was much smaller than on a normal SSBN, with only four missile tubes.

“Those aren’t Tridents,” Bill said, gesturing at the missiles. “They’re 9As.”

“How many of them?”

“How many tubes?”

“Four.”

“See?” Weaver said, grinning. “It’s not true. SEALs can count to ten without taking off their shoes.”

“That’s it?” Miller asked. “The ship’s got four missiles to defend itself?”

“And a couple of lasers that probably won’t scrape the paint off of anything we find and some torpedoes that are the rough equivalent of a Saturday Night Special in space terms,” Weaver said. “But I think that the LBB is probably superior tech to most of what we’ll run into. If I’m right we’ll be able to run away from most ships.”

“Nice to hear,” the SEAL said dryly.

Down both sides of the missile compartment were new generation Wyvern Mark Vs.

The Wyvern had been in development since shortly before the Chen Event. The massive suits were “piloted” by a person sitting more or less in the abdomen. The pilot wore a harness that transferred their movements to the much larger arms, legs and “head” of the Wyvern. With wheels on the elbows, knees and belly, the Wyvern was capable of just about any movement an infantryman could make and was much better armed and armored.

The Mark V stood about three meters tall, the same height as an Adar male. They looked like a very fat man with thin arms and legs, a big butt and a low, rounded vaguely insectile head. The “butt” contained a well-shielded americium nuclear generator for power while the “head” of the suit contained most of the sensors of the suits. In the case of the Wyverns on this mission those included not only full EM sensors, capable of picking up “light” ranging from X-rays to deep infrared, but a variety of other particles and waves.

The Mark V used the newest digital active camouflage system that took a reading from surrounding coloration and pattern and transmitted it to the surface of the suit. Under certain conditions, it could make the suit virtually disappear. They were still damned big things to hide, as both Weaver and Miller knew from painful experience.

“Only twenty Wyverns?” Miller asked, taking a count.

“Three levels to the section,” Weaver replied. “Fifty in all. Thirty-eight Marines with armor, me, the three ground mission specialists, their security teams. And a few spares. I guess you’re going to be fitted to one of those.”

Each Wyvern had to be individually fitted to the user, a process that took about three hours.

“Now for the engineering section.”

“I get to see that?” Miller asked. He’d never been given access to engineering.

“You said full access,” Weaver replied, grinning.

“I’m not going to like this, am I?”

“Oh, sorry,” Mimi said, blinking her eyes.

The small compartment she’d been directed to already had a lady in it. She was sitting at a fold-down desk with a small extensible lamp over it, typing on a computer. And she wasn’t wearing a uniform like the rest of the people on the ship; she was wearing jeans, high-heels and a spaghetti-strap top. All three were black and the jeans had a dragon on the thigh.

“It’s okay,” the lady said, standing up and grinning. She had long red hair with the front dyed bright blue and blue and red streaks in it. She was also very pretty, arguably beautiful, with a small chin and nose and bright brown eyes. “Are you my roommate? Aren’t you a little young? What’s that on your shoulder?”

“I’m…” Mimi paused trying to figure out which question to answer. “I was told this was my room, so I guess I’m your roommate. I am young and it’s weird that I’m here but there’s a reason, and this is Tuffy,” she finished, fishing the creature off her shoulder and holding him out.

Tuffy extended one pseudopod towards the woman and then bowed. Mimi had never seen him do that before.

“Isn’t he cute?” the woman squealed, walking over and petting him gently. “Tuffy. You’re Mimi Jones. Sorry it took me so long. The last picture of him I saw he didn’t look so cool.”

“That’s okay,” Mimi said as Tuffy crawled up the woman’s arm. He’d never done that before, either.

“He’s tickly,” the lady said, plucking him off and handing him back. “I like you, Tuffy, but Mimi’s your special friend. So you’re on this boat, too? What’s your job?”

“Tuffy just told me we had to come,” Mimi said, shrugging. “I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do.”

“I’m Miriam,” the lady said, holding out her hand. “I’m the linguist.”

“I’m pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Mimi said, shaking her hand.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Miriam said. “Everybody else is so stuffy. It’s good to have a friend. We’re going to have so much fun!”

Mimi, for the first time since Tuffy told her she had to leave her home, started to hope that might be the case.

“What in the hell is that?” Miller asked, blinking his eyes in astonishment.

The engine room of the boat was almost blindingly white. And it had all the usual sort of stations he’d expect to see in a nuclear reactor. But… floating in the middle of the room was a big silver ball with what looked like very close longitude and latitude lines drawn all around it. Above and below it were large circular… somethings. They looked sort of like big magnets.

“That, my friend, is the coryllium sphere,” Bill said, grinning. “In the center of that sphere is the little black box we played with oh so many years ago. See that?” he asked, pointing to something that looked like a broad, squat cannon with no opening.

“And that is?”

“That is a meson canon,” Bill replied. “Turns out that was the answer. Send that thing electrons and it goes ape-maulk. Fire mesons at it and they degrade into neutrinos. Feed it with neutrinos and it generates a black hole. A stable one. And it is inside the box. Generate a large enough one and it somehow… warps reality. Creates a special universe that the boat exists in where normal Einstein physics no longer apply. More neutrinos, bigger hole, we go faster. Well, really Einstein’s General Relativity does allow for some of the things but that’s a long story and a maulk load of tensor math.

“The reason for the big sphere is two-fold. The outer layer is coryllium; it’s a room temperature Adar superconductor. So we can balance the sphere on a magnetic field and hold it there using the Meisner effect. The rest of the sphere is radiation absorption material. The Schwarzschild radius of the black hole puts out a maulk-load of hard rads. The sphere absorbs them. I figure it’s good for about four hundred thousand hours of use, then we’ll have to switch it out. Pretty much like the rods on a sub’s reactor.

“Also turns out that the effect you get depends exactly where you aim the neutrinos. That’s one reason for having the sphere floating. We can control the impact point of the neutrinos to within a nanometer and with that thing nanometers matter. The lines represent spherical coordinates theta and phi that are basically the same as lat-long, but we drew the lines on there very precisely. It helps align the ball initially. Like I said alignment is… important. There’s one point where input causes… bad things to happen.”

“Define bad things,” Miller said.

“That you don’t have access to,” Weaver replied. “I was careful to check. But I will point out that it’s one reason there are still five keys on this boat even though we’re no longer considered a ballistic missile sub.” Weaver fished into his uniform top and pulled out a red key attached to a lanyard. “You do not want me to pull this out for real.”

“Oh,” Miller said, nodding. “Very bad things.”

“Very bad things,” Weaver agreed, putting the key away. “There are probably damned near a billion combinations on the thing. We’ve only figured out about two or three. Basically, we can use it to get around but we don’t know what all it is capable of.

“The big problem with the box is you have to dial the mesons down slowly or the hole explodes. So we can go into warp fast. Coming out takes five to thirty seconds, more or less. Try to just turn it off and we go boom. Also won’t form one when we’re too near a gravity well. Not sure why. But no matter how many mesons we pump into it, it won’t form until we’re about two planetary diameters away. What it does, instead, is create a normal space drive with all the fixin’s. It generates pseudogravity, reactionless acceleration and, best of all, an inertial compensator so that we don’t get smashed into paste by the accel. Internal gravity is about ninety percent of Earth’s, so whoever created this thing likes more or less Earth gravity.

“The warp also won’t form inside Venus’ orbit, more or less; the sun’s gravity is too powerful in that region. The kicker is, if we get too close to a gravity well, it can just shut down. Fortunately for some reason the black hole doesn’t explode in that case. I’m pretty sure that’s something having to do with the engineering of the device but since I haven’t a clue about the theory on the thing, that’s just a wild ass guess.”

“Where are the mesons coming from?” Miller asked.

“Charged Higgs in the cannon,” the astrogator said. “An upgraded version of the aimer doo-hickey we started opening gates with. There’s a small Adar ardune reactor in the back of the room. That supplies plenty of power. More power than the system can handle.”

“So, you’ve got quarkium warheads on the missiles,” Miller said wonderingly.

“And the torpedoes,” Bill pointed out.

“I so don’t want to know about the torpedoes,” Miller said. “You’ve got contained quarkium in this room and a micro blackhole generator. One that, if you hit it with either electricity or neutrinos in the wrong spot, very bad things happen. And the whole ship is one big… blage. With a grapping window. Why do the words ‘warp core breach’ come to mind?”

“Because if any of the fine technicians in this room grapp up,” Bill replied, “we are going to light up like a supernova. This sucker shouldn’t ever come near a planet, much less be sitting in Newport News. But I try to downplay that…”