A Sword Into Darkness

4: “MATTERS OF STATE”

May 27, 2038; Allied Composites, Inc.; Norfolk, VA

Nathan lifted the enormous I-beam slowly and carefully under the apprehensive gaze of Dr. Emil Korso. Nathan looked back at him with a grin and tossed the beam up, catching it with ease. He flipped it over, examining its length closely. The surface was rippled, striated, and gleamed with a dull gray sheen. Nathan set the structural member down and turned back to Korso. “It’s everything you promised. And so light!”

“Foamed alloy of aluminum, molybdenum, titanium, and a dozen other trace elements, encasing a three dimensional weave of graphene and carbon nanotubes—one fiftieth the density of steel, and over a hundred times its structural strength per unit volume. And that doesn’t include the shear strength, which is so far off the charts, we had to come up with a new chart. I have the full specifications available if you, Mr. Lee, or your materials staff would like to examine them.”

“Absolutely. How’s the performance of test units under environmental test conditions? Shake it, bake it, freeze it, and nuke it? How does it hold together then?”

“Well, we haven’t been able to test full-sized mock-ups in every condition. We simply don’t have a freezer,kiln, or radiation chamber quite big enough. If the low end tests we’ve done are directly scaleable, though, it looks promising. Thermal properties are as expected and it’s withstood neutron embrittlement very well, in addition to a full gamma series. We’re going to need more time for better data, though.”

“Sure, sure. That’s understandable. I’ll tell you what, Doctor, flash me the specs and we’ll have our own testers do some independent validation and verification, but I doubt there will be any problems. We’ve been following Allied pretty closely. Out of all of our research projects, this one has been the biggest outright success.”

Korso smiled sheepishly and smoothed nonexistent wrinkles from his suit coat. “It pleases me to hear you say that, Nathan. We never could have expanded the way we did without Windward’s patronage, and we might have even closed down. As it is now, once we’ve fulfilled our contract with you we’ll be able to start marketing Allocarbium to the world. I foresee a very lucrative future in naval and aviation circles.” There was a new, greedy look in the scientist’s usually unassuming expression.

Nathan shook his head slightly at that. “No doubt, but we’re going to be taking every bit of your projected output for the foreseeable future, Doctor. Until you fill our order, you’re not to do any marketing of our material to outside interests: no samples, no flashes, and no personal tours.” Nathan’s voice took on a rather darker tone. “Allocarbium belongs to Windward until we say otherwise. Understood?”

“Certainly!” Korso responded nervously, as the gleam of avarice in his eyes faded.

“I’ll be sending you a list of required parts to be formed. Nothing too fancy—just beams, frames, plates, decking, equipment mounts, that sort of thing. I’ll need a breakdown by part type and size on when you can have it fabricated. And you’d also mentioned some issue about welding?”

Korso nodded, back to his blandly professional self. “Oh, yes. Any welders or post-fabrication people you use are going to have to be trained to work with Allocarbium. You can’t simply weld two pieces together. If you did, you’d end up with a fairly weak bond between the two foamed alloys. Welding does nothing for the graphene/nanotube substrate, so instead of welding we do joining. That’s an argon environment thermal bonding for the foamed metals and a microscopic interweaving for the carbon mesh underlayer-joining.”

Nathan frowned. “Sounds time consuming. And expensive.”

Korso held up placating hands. “It is what it is, Nathan, but what you get in return is a join which is indistinguishable from a prefabricated part. It’s just as strong as that I-beam and basically turns your structure into one big piece with no weak spots. Speaking of structure, I’d love to know what you’re building. There’s a pretty high stakes pool going over what it is. Any hints?”

“Well, when the pool makes it to a cool million, let me know and you and I can come to some fair arrangement, say a 90 - 10 split in my favor?” Nathan flashed a grin.

“I think I’d rather guess on my own. A mystery it remains then, but whatever it is, it will be the strongest whatever ever made.”

They exchanged suite addresses for the flashes of the technical specs and the fabrication order, said a brief goodbye, and Nathan left. Once outside Allied Composites’ offices, in the bright warmth of the Virginia sunshine, he pulled out his suite and called the first number in the memory, a number he called ten times as often as he called his family or the girl-of-the-moment. Before he could dwell on just how depressing that was, Gordon Lee answered.

“This is Lee. What do you want?” His employer’s voice out of the earpiece sounded tense, angry.

Nathan grinned. “Temper, temper, boss. If you trash your office again, Melinda’s going to quit on you.”

“I haven’t tossed the place yet, but if you hadn’t called, I was probably going to.”

“Something wrong?”

“Yeah. Well, no, nothing you should have to worry about. Overseas procurement issues, but nothing connected to your end of things. Forget it. Hey, was there a reason for this call?”

Nathan reached his car, opened the door to the BMW hybrid turbine coupe, and climbed in. “I’m all done at Allied. The Allocarbium fits the bill for our structural material. The only bad news is construction is going to take longer than planned. The stuff has to be welded or joined in a special way. It should all be in their spec flash.”

Settling himself behind the wheel, Nathan extended the seven inch flat screen rolled within his cellular smart-suite and scrolled through his e-mail app’s received files. The flash download from Korso was the most recent. He opened it and the screen filled with complex metallurgical jargon and equations. Halfway through, there were some attached animations showing the forming process, testing, and joining. “Yeah, it’s all in there, though it’s a bit over my head. I’ll have to get Dr. Hastings to look it over before I can give you a final thumbs-up”

“Don’t sell yourself short, boy. You surprise me on a regular basis with your insights.”

“Boy? Anyways, it should be in your stack. If Mister Master-of-All-You-Survey can find the time, perhaps you can take a look at it too.”

“Don’t get snippy with me. I’ve had more than enough provocation today to fire somebody, and I don’t want it to be you by accident.”

Nathan grinned. “Oh no, when you fire me, I want it to be on purpose. You should plan your day around it. Finally, to be free of that Nathan Kelley!”

“Smartass. What about Jackson Labs?”

“Nothing new. They haven’t beaten the differential heating problem with the diode laser stack. They still crack at any output approaching 10 megawatts. We can probably get around it by using a series of 5 megawatt stacks and then using optics to combine them, but that adds space, weight, complexity, and more stuff for Murphy to screw with. It’s workable, though, if they can’t fix the problem.”

“Fine, fine. Keep on them, but I agree we can live with a workaround. Now what about the layered armor for the Whipple shields?”

“I’ll be calling Corning’s Albuquerque offices tomorrow morning to conference with the armoring team. They’re still having problems making unitary plates more than a square meter in size, but they said they were narrowing down the problem. I’ll put some money pressure on them, see if some negative reinforcement gets the brain juices flowing better.”

Lee sighed over the connection. “No. A phone call’s no good. I want you out there in person. You’re my bulldog, and your bark isn’t nearly as intimidating as your bite.”

“Ummmmm, thanks?”

“It is a compliment, Nathan. You have a presence with these science types that can’t be denied. Maybe it’s your time in the military, that automatic assumption that the people you’re dealing with have to follow your orders.”

Nathan smiled wryly at Lee’s naiveté about order and discipline on paper versus reality. “You obviously haven’t met many sailors. Sometimes I had to do quite a bit of convincing to get my subordinates to do what they already knew they needed to do. Depended on the sailor—just like it depends on each individual scientist, engineer, or manager.”

“Well, whatever it is you do, you do it well. So, you’ll be in Albuquerque tomorrow?”

Nathan grimaced. He had a date with a bank assistant manager the next night, back home in California. That no longer looked likely—yet another sacrifice on the altar of Gordon Elliot Lee’s insane engineering project. “Yes, Gordon, I’ll be there.”

“Excellent!” Lee paused for several seconds, during which Nathan tried to compose what he would tell this latest girl. Lee interrupted his train of thought, though, and continued. “We still have time. Not as much as I’d like, but . . . . We have designs and facilities, and now we have building materials, armor, and we’re starting to get some no-shit Star Wars weaponry. We almost have ourselves a space navy, Nathan. Maybe we should start thinking about crew selection? There’s this Army light colonel by the name of Wright that’s about to retire. He’d make a great counterpart for you.” He could almost hear the grin in Lee’s voice.

Nathan shook his head, unseen. “Sure, Gordon, there are a couple of old shipmates I’d like to bring aboard too, but I think you need to rein yourself in a bit. At the moment, all we have is a really expensive ground-based weapons emplacement. Until we have some way of powering the damn thing and then getting it off the ground, it’s not a spaceship, so thinking of a crew is probably somewhat premature.”

He called up a new file on his suite and the screen filled with a CAD drawing of the project’s first design. A somewhat pyramidal wedge—bristling with weapons and sensors—surmounted a long open strut, filled in with radiator panels. Just aft of that, things became vague, with two big circles and question marks identifying a reactor section (Fission? Fusion?), and a propulsion section (Magic Space Drive goes here!).

It was almost a real spaceship, mankind’s first space-based combat vessel and their bid to save the planet from the approaching alien threat. But it would not be going anywhere until they broke the design deadlock surrounding their power source and propulsion method.

When Lee spoke again, he sounded very circumspect. “Well, I may have a line on some reactor components.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really!” Lee responded, defensive. “But you don’t need to worry about it. This is my contribution. You just worry about getting everything else together, including our drive section.”

Nathan wondered why he was being so evasive about their power source, but it did not really matter. He knew the Department of Energy had turned down their request for an experimenter’s license to acquire fissile materials, but Lee had a lot of initiatives going on at once, many about which Nathan had no knowledge. Perhaps one of them had panned out, such as a reversal by the DOE or a partnership with an established research outfit. Still, progress on one front did nothing for the complete failure on the drive front.

“You make it sound so easy, Gordon. Our problem is that every dollar you’ve sunk into advanced rockets and reactionless drives has bought us exactly nothing. This is our number one showstopper. If we don’t have something to match their super-rocket, we’ll have to make our stand within the inner solar system, and that’s a bit too close to home for me.”

“Me too, but don’t worry. Something will turn up. After all, the aliens do it, so we know there’s an engine out there that can do what we’re asking. We just have to figure out how they do it.”

“Once again, boss, you make it sound like that’s so simple.”

“There’s a way, I promise you. Faith and courage, boy, faith and courage. It’ll come to us.”

Nathan wrapped up the call and docked his suite on the dash of the Beemer. Ozone blues, Nathan’s current music of choice, surrounded him from the car’s ribbon speakers. He started the hybrid turbine up, its engine betraying only a high pitched whistling whine. Four hub-mounted electric motors propelled the metallic blue sports coupe smoothly and silently out of his space and onto the road.

Two sedans pulled out at the same time and followed.

Nathan rocketed down the access road toward Virginia Beach, foregoing the congestion of the highway for the white-knuckle thrill of speeding along the two-lane road with its nonexistent shoulders. He drove entirely too fast, which was how he first noticed the two sedans—they not only kept up with him, they were closing in.

“Damn it, Gordon. What did you do?” Nathan knew it was nothing he himself had done. He had been dealing in proprietary technology and beyond bleeding edge weapon systems, but nothing shady or illegal. Some of Lee’s plans, however, were more esoteric than others.

A third sedan, as dark and nondescript as the other two, suddenly pulled out from a hidden driveway along the access road and stopped in Nathan’s lane, blocking him. Two suited heavies scrambled out holding weapons.

Instead of coming to a screeching halt, he floored the accelerator and swerved into oncoming traffic. Alert drivers and collision avoidance logics drove all but one of the few cars there off into the tall grasses abutting the road. As Nathan zoomed by the men and their car, an old minivan appeared in front of him in the oncoming lane. They both swerved into Nathan’s right-hand lane, still headed for collision.

Nathan checked his turn at the last instant and the two vehicles scraped by one another in a shower of sparks and flattened fenders. The BMW fishtailed down the centerline while the minivan spun around and came to a stop just in front of the third sedan. Nathan got his car under control and slid back into his lane, flooring the power to the wheels once more.

It was all for naught. Apparently deciding the sedans and armed heavies were not enough, two tactical vehicles merged onto the access road and blocked both lanes. Their occupants exited bearing automatic weapons. Nathan continued to debate his options for escape, but then he saw the letters emblazoned on the sides of the tac trucks: DHS.

Nathan cursed and slammed on the brakes, bringing the coupe to a screeching sideways stop. The three sedans arrived and also came to screaming halts, arrayed behind him to block any escape he might still be considering. There were guns everywhere, all pointed at him, and he still had no idea what this was all about.

A severe looking woman in a dark gray suit emerged from the back seat of one of the first sedans. She held up an ID, though it was impossible for Nathan to read from this distance. “Mr. Kelley, this is the Department of Homeland Security. Step out of the vehicle and come with us. We have some questions for you.”

He carefully opened the door and climbed out of the low-slung car, hands held high. No sooner was he out than there were three agents in black utilities on him, his arms held painfully against his back, his face and chest pressed hard against the hood of the car. They frisked him with brutal efficiency while others began rifling through the car and cracking the encryption on his suite. He heard the rapid clipping of heels on asphalt and the female agent, undoubtedly the leader of this merry band, was behind him, whispering in his ear. “Why were you running from us, Mr. Kelley?”

Nathan fought a losing battle to keep the pain out of his voice. “Why were you chasing me? I didn’t know who you people were until your trucks showed up! You didn’t exactly go out of your way to introduce yourselves.”

“Mr. Kelley, we often find introducing ourselves to someone like you merely an invitation to bullets or the destruction of evidence. My sincerest apologies for any discomfiture you may have experienced, but you’ll have to excuse us for learning from our bloody past.”

A fresh jab from the man holding his arms elicited a long groan. Nathan gritted his teeth to cut it off and said, “What do you mean, ‘Someone like me’?”

“Nuclear terrorists, Mr. Kelley. And one of our modern war heroes as well. How very sad.”

“What!?”

Nathan’s spluttering denials and protestations went unacknowledged. They dragged him from the hood of his car and walked him into the back of one of the tactical trucks. In a few more minutes, the access road had been cleared, and their convoy moved along the highway with both trucks, the three sedans, and Nathan’s BMW. They were gone before the first regular police arrived with an ambulance to check over the frazzled occupants of the old minivan.

In the well-appointed back seat of the truck, Nathan sat with two dour-faced agent/soldiers in black utilities. The female agent sat across from him on a rear-facing bench seat. They drove in silence for several miles until Nathan could stand it no longer, exactly as they had intended. “I’m not a terrorist, nuclear or otherwise.”

“That remains to be seen. I am Special Agent Stanton, Homeland Security. We’re acting on credible intelligence received concerning you and your employer’s recent activities.”

“Mr. Lee isn’t a terrorist either.”

“Which I am sure will be either confirmed or not in the very near future, but everything depends upon your cooperation. Do we have it?”

“You have it! Absolutely. Nothing would make me happier than to help you, especially given your kind and gracious offer to chauffeur our meeting.”

“You can lose the sarcasm, Mr. Kelley. Sarcasm ends this interview and gets you safely behind lock and key as an accessory in the illegal trafficking and use of nuclear materials.”

Nathan glared. “Belaying sarcasm, aye, ma’am.”

She glared back at him for several more miles in silence. Nathan used the opportunity to try to assess his situation. They had not arrested him yet. In fact, they had not even bound him, with the obvious exception of the two hulking guards on either side. That probably meant that though they suspected him of something, they did not have enough certainty or evidence to proceed with impunity. In fact, if they did arrest him, he could probably have it thrown out of court because of the manner of his arrest. Homeland Security might have become overcautious and extreme in their procedures over the years, but they were still ostensibly a law enforcement agency. Nathan tried not to repeat that to himself as a mantra.

This was a fishing expedition. Not only that, but it had all the classic trappings of a shakedown rather than a legitimate interrogation. These people were likely experienced at this sort of thing, and did not appear to be stupid. That meant that their method of snatching him could hardly be an accident. It was intentional, calculated, probably intended to intimidate him or cow him into a cooperative frame of mind. He was unsure of what that meant for him, but it did serve to relax him somewhat.

Special Agent Stanton saw Nathan settle a bit from his earlier position atop pins and needles. It only seemed to infuriate her. No longer content to wait for his frightened, nervous babbling of what they wanted to know, especially since it did not seem to be working, she started in. “Who is Lee working for?”

“As far as I know, Mr. Lee only works for Mr. Lee.”

She smiled. “So Lee is taking it upon himself to become a nuclear power? He’s trying to acquire weapons grade and reactor grade fissile material for some perfectly legitimate reason?”

Nathan winced inwardly, hoping his poker face betrayed nothing to the Homeland Security agents. “Overseas procurement problems,” Lee had said. It had been nothing for Nathan to worry about—that is until he had been snatched up by the most paranoid, overreaching law enforcement/defense agency since Hoover’s FBI. Now, it might be considered Nathan’s problem.

“Ma’am, if something that outlandish were true, I’m sure that Mr. Lee would have a perfectly legitimate reason. As it’s not true, I think this discussion is probably unnecessary.”

“Oh, it is indeed true, Mr. Kelley. We’re not quite sure how involved you are, but since you’re the head of Windward’s Special Projects division, we would surmise that you are fully briefed.”

“Fully briefed on what exactly? Your wild speculations?”

She folded her hands demurely in her lap. “We have international data and voice intercepts of your employer attempting to procure nuclear material from several nations which are not on the best of terms with the United States. I would advise you to drop the false innocence and start digging your way out of this.”

Nathan tried to think of something. Repeated pleas of his virtue would fall on deaf ears here, and staying quiet would do no good, not when this whole operation seemed focused upon turning him into a babbling informant. Unfortunately, there was nothing for him to babble, even if he had been so inclined. He had not done anything, but Stanton and her underlings would never be satisfied with that. He had to give them something, and though Nathan’s thoughts turned at a furious rate, they uncovered nothing. Then he smiled.

There was no lie half so good as the truth.

“Okay. Though I knew nothing about the specifics of what he was up to, I do know that he has been looking for some way to power and arm a spaceship in order to defend the planet from a marauding alien force.” He paused, but she said nothing in return. “That’s probably what he was doing.”

Stanton frowned. “You’ll enjoy extra-territorial rendition, Mr. Kelley. Sun, tropical beaches, four by eight cells, no ACLU or UN interference ...”

“I’m being serious.”

“Spaceships and aliens? That is the polar opposite of serious and definitive proof that you doubt our own willingness to find the truth through whatever means necessary.”

“I’m not saying you have to believe it, and I’m not saying I believe it, even after seeing years’ worth of his evidence. But you do need to believe that Lee believes it.”

“So you’re honestly proposing that Lee is trying to acquire nuclear materials in order to hold off an alien invasion?”

Nathan folded his arms and nodded. “Yes, or at least that’s what he believes is happening. I know this isn’t the first time you’ve heard this. It’s been an internet rumor for years.”

“Yes, I’ve heard it before—the Deltan invasion, but I put it in the same category as Walt Disney’s head being frozen. NASA debunked this whole thing almost ten years ago. It’s some sort of comet or something, right?”

“A rogue stellar fragment that coincidentally happens to be between us and Delta Pavonis, but yes, that’s what they say.”

“Very well, but this also raises the very likely possibility you’re telling me this in order to shield your real activities behind some innocuous absurdity.”

Nathan leaned forward. He felt his two guards tense up in response, but he ignored them. “I’m not lying to you, and I’m not a terrorist. You have nothing on me, because I haven’t done anything. All that you have on Mr. Lee is that he’s some harmless kook with too much money and not enough sense. No one is ever going to give him nuclear materials, and if he did actually manage to buy some, you’d be there to snatch us both up. We wouldn’t be having a pleasant conversation in the back of your über-truck.”

She nodded slightly, though to what part of Nathan’s comment, he could not tell. “And what is your part in all of this, Kelley?”

“I’m building his spaceship, but we don’t have our magic space drive yet.”

Stanton sneered. “I’m going to enjoy interrogating you away from prying eyes.”

“It’s a date, then. I’ll try to bring some flowers.”

The convoy pulled off the highway and into a bank parking lot just outside Virginia Beach. The truck opened and Nathan was unceremoniously shoved out. Stanton leaned toward him from her seat. “It would be ill advised for Lee to continue with his proscribed activities, ludicrous reasoning or not. As a valued and trusted employee, and someone with a noose around his own neck as well, I would recommend you persuade him to cease and desist. This argument is no doubt being made to Mr. Lee himself by my California counterpart at this very moment, but it would not hurt to have you backing up our injunction. I do so hope that we will not be seeing each other again, Mr. Kelley.” The door slammed shut and the five Homeland Security vehicles sped off, leaving him alone in the parking lot with his beat-up BMW.

“Bye.” He walked over to his car and climbed in, one side of his mouth turned down in thought. His suite lay on the passenger seat, none the worse for wear. Nathan extended the screen and scrolled through files. Nothing seemed to be missing, but the access log did show a download of all contents, in spite of the heavy encryption he had bought for it. He grinned a bit, thinking of how confused Stanton would be when the files only confirmed everything Nathan had been saying.

Even if she believed he and Lee were not terrorists, they still would not be allowed access to nuclear materials. Windward as a company had already been denied any legitimate business in atomic energy or weapons development circles, so they could not get what they needed through the established channels. And now they were under surveillance, so they would not be able to get any through extra-legal means either. Lee’s plans now had two insurmountable obstacles: power and propulsion. And even if they somehow acquired a reactor and were able to remain out of jail, there would still be the impossibility of getting into space and out of the solar system.

Nathan was forced to acknowledge that what he had said to Stanton was indeed true: even after spending three years on this project, he was still unsure who to believe. Believe Gordon, his cronies, and their following of conspiracy bloggers that the approaching light was an invading hoard from Delta Pavonis, the Deltans? Or believe NASA and their explanation for the blue light, that it was a large, long period comet reflecting light along a fortuitous axis due to its shape and composition, and that it was neither as far away or moving as fast as Lee’s data seemed to suggest? Nathan thought NASA’s explanation involved a lot of coincidences and hand-waving, but every time he tried to put belief in Lee’s aliens, he seemed to feel the world dropping out from below him.

Nathan shook his head. It was his job to build a space combatant, not to believe in its purpose. He shut the screen on his suite and called up Lee’s home number. He heard it ring, followed by Gordon’s weary answer, “Hello?”

“Hey, Boss. It sounds like we need to have a talk.”