A Sword Into Darkness

5: “BLUE LIGHT SPECIAL”

July 26, 2039; University of Texas at Arlington, Physics Department; Arlington, TX

The conical array was innocuous—nothing but a six inch diameter, six inch long, hollow, double layer cone of cerium-strontium-silver-sulfate superconducting nanowire mesh and frost covered cooling lines, surrounding a tightly spaced series of toroidal magnetic coils. The cone was held aloft by stout bracing within the accelerator’s target chamber, which lay directly in the path of UTA’s moderate energy electron linear accelerator. The LINAC, essentially a modified injector from the old, bitter days of the Superconducting Super Collider, looked equally cobbled together and home built. This was the sort of place where C average students did third-rate science for the biggest, most apathetic commuter school in East Texas. It was physics hell.

But it was Kristene Annalise Muñoz’s own slice of heaven.

She finished looking over the cone and all its various connections and then closed the door to the target chamber. The wheeze-pop of the vacuum pump started loud but quickly faded to background, and she smiled at her contraption. There were no telltale wisps of gas from the cooling lines. No leaks, everything had held. The chamber had been evacuated and they were ready. She turned to her fellow post-grad student, Leo Buchanan, with two thumbs up, sending both her iridescent purple pigtails flailing about. “Good to go!”

“What the hell does that mean? This isn’t fucking mission control. This is us blowing the last of our damn grant on your screwed up shit. We are anything but good to fucking go.”

She sidled up next to him and batted her eyes. “Awwww, doesn’t Weo wike me anymore?” She topped it off with a devastatingly cute pouting of her lower lip.

Leo shoved her over with an elbow, but he could not stop the embarrassed grin that cast off his glowering frown. They were, in many ways, antagonists toward one another, but they both knew he carried a small torch for his oddly hued lab-mate, piercings, ink, and all.

Kris straightened up, smiled back, and moved over to her computer. “Besides, you can’t blame me for being the only one to come up with an idea that actually works when our wacko benefactors threaten to pull the plug.”

“Works, my ass. You’ve got dubious science backed up by crappy engineering, Kris. The only things that we’re going to get out of running your rig are some smoked magnets. That and a zero balance on the piss-poor pittance Windward let us keep.”

“And I suppose we would have been better off running your simulations? Again?” She shook her head and began her program. A loud hum issued from the LINAC as its magnetic fields built slowly.

“Yes, we would. Gravity wave propulsion is about as mature a science you can get in this field, and I’ve got the simulation data to back my ideas up. I’m doing real fucking physics, not tinkering like some garage inventor. I’m following in the footsteps of established trailblazers, not just throwing ideas at a wall to see if anything sticks. I’ve got a friggin’ heritage to uphold! After all, my father was with NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Group.”

Kris keyed in the parameters for the next phase of her program. The cone shook briefly, silently in her target chamber. “Please! He was a grad student attached to it for like two months before it was disbanded! Just don’t bring up your father again. If I have to hear about him at BPPG, or NASA, or JPL one more time, I’m gonna spew.”

“Screw you, chica. I’m not the one with daddy issues.”

She pointed a finger at him, and the look in her eyes froze Leo. “Do not even think about continuing what you were about to say. You will regret it. Your unborn great-grandchildren will regret it.” Kristene was a kooky, happy-go-lucky sort of genius, but there were two things that were absolutely off limits in regards to her. The first was any criticism of the way she chose to decorate the canvas of her form, whether that be her ever-changing hair color, her nose or brow ring, or the colorful tattoos crawling up her left arm. The second was the subject of her father, an abusive loser who had done only one good thing her entire life—abandoning Kris and her mother when the young girl was only ten years old. Kris hid the damage he had done to her, but the damage was still there.

Leo closed his gaping mouth. “I’m just saying that Windward would probably be more appreciative of some established, cutting-edge science. If we’d spent the money on my sims, we could have shown Dr. Hastings my gravity shield effect, we could have shown him my grav wave impeller, and the next generations of the Alcubierre warp drive, whatever.”

“Yes, Leo. Your sims are very pretty, but they also require these huge, impractical, and impossible to achieve energy densities. Face it, the only easy way to generate useful grav waves is by shaking a neutron star, and we’re fresh out of those. Now if you could come up with some sort of big bang in a box, your fancy sims might be workable, but without a suitable power source you just have some elegant theoretical physics. Thing is, Windward doesn’t want theories. They want an engine—and three guesses why, if you believe the internet about Gordon Lee. But they gave us a grant to build an engine, and K-Mart is the only shot we have left.”

Leo shook his head and turned to check the bank of gauges and oscilloscopes supporting Kristene’s experiment. “‘K-Mart’. That has to be the worst fucking name for an experiment in the history of science. Why not just call it a photon drive so everybody knows what a dead-end it is?”

She pouted. “It’s clever. It’s all about the ‘blue-light special’.”

He tapped a coolant pressure gauge and then turned back to her. “Yeah, yeah. Anyways, you’re probably right. I wouldn’t expect some soulless corporation like Windward to have anything approaching the sort of vision you need to appreciate my level of science. I mean, Hastings is all right, but with this sort of company it’s usually just bottom-line bastards like that Kelley guy.”

The cone began to glow with a soft cerulean light, and Kristene nodded. “I don’t care if what’s-his-name’s got a vision, or a soul, or anything else. As long as he’s got a checkbook and a job for me after school, I’m good.”

Leo grinned. “Mercenary.”

“Potty-mouth.” She grinned back. Kristene took one last look at the computer and blew a long, apprehensive whistle. “LINAC’s charged, K-Mart fields are oscillating at target frequency and sync’d up, and beam lenses are good. I’m ready to make me some history!”

Leo shook his head at her beaming face. “Where did you say you put that fire extinguisher?”

“Oh, ye of little faith.” She turned back to the test chamber. The blue glow from the conical array scintillated captivatingly. Her finger hovered over the ENTER key. “3 … 2 … 1 … Go!” Kristene jabbed her finger down, executing the program and triggering a stream of powerfully accelerated electrons from the LINAC.

And the lab promptly exploded.

It was not precisely true to say that the laboratory in the basement of the Physics Building exploded. It would be more correct to say that half the lab was flash irradiated to the point of brittle failure, and the other half of the lab was blown outward in the pressure wave cast by the passage of the rapidly accelerating conical array. Once the transient pressure wave passed, the irradiated half of the lab was then torn apart by the rebounding air. In essence it was closer to a linear eruption than a classical explosion. The line of demarcation between irradiation or pressure wave was defined by the test chamber and the plane perpendicular to the cone.

When the beam of high energy electrons from the LINAC entered K-Mart, the toroidal string of magnets smoothed the stream into a regimented flow of particles, while the last magnet in the string defocused the stream, spreading electrons uniformly over the inner surface and first layer of the superconducting nanowire mesh cone. The high frequency electromagnetic field generated by the mesh absorbed the significant energy of the electrons and stopped them cold, leaving them to drain off the mesh at a very low potential. The energy absorbed by the field passed without loss through a region of spacetime with some rather unique boundary conditions, and into the synchronized field set up by the closely spaced outer surface and second layer of the cone. This field, so intimately linked with the first field, sought some way of coming back to equilibrium and achieving restoration of the specially bounded region between the fields, and so it did.

The blast of photons that emerged from the cone’s outer field were more than mere braking radiation from the halted electrons. They were the universe’s attempt to maintain the conservation of momentum and energy in the face of an unstoppable force coming up against an impenetrable barrier. Photons of an energy not seen outside quasars and the birth of the universe itself rocketed out from the cone and struck the target chamber, melting and blasting off the door, and then burned down the rest of that half of the lab.

Kristene was lucky enough to be directly in front of the door. The scorched, flying plate of stainless steel struck her in the face and chest, knocking her across the room and breaking her nose, two ribs, and her left collarbone and arm, but it also served as a shield against the worse part of the radiation. As it was, she received some rather nasty second-degree burns and nearly her maximum lifetime safe dose, but she was alive.

While the cone emitted its impossible blast of radiation, it also rocketed forward, propelled by the high specific impulse and thrust of the dense, mass-less, light-speed emission. The melted struts holding the cone in place gave way, and the fragile experiment accelerated forward at a rate of over a thousand gravities. There was no way for the array to survive this incredible burst of motion, but even after it disintegrated its shrapnel continued to carve swaths throughout the front half of the lab, leaving behind torturous shockwaves to bleed the debris’ sudden kinetic energy into the surroundings.

Leo received a chunk of copper cooling tube through one of his shoulders and then was blown back against the wall. Glass, metal, and concrete blasted outward, penetrating the walls and ceiling into the surrounding rooms. Fortunately no one else was injured. The jury-rigged, venerable linear accelerator, one of the last working parts of the failed SSC, was demolished, taking with it UTA’s last bid to remain relevant in the world of experimental physics in the 21st century.

In the next instant—after the blast wave passed and the dust settled—silence reigned. Minutes later, shouted voices could be heard, and then rubble began to shift as people started to dig through to search for survivors. Leo was found, logy and bleeding, but alive. Soon after, he was able to compose himself well enough to complain, loudly.

Kristene was pulled free of the ruins by paramedics soon thereafter. She was hurt, but alive and lucky to be so. The EMT’s saw the aftermath of the explosion and simply shook their heads in amazement. Part of their shock was due to the level of damage in the lab compared to her relatively minor injuries, but most of it was due to the broad, unconscious smile plastered across her face when they freed her.

July 29, 2039; Arlington Memorial Hospital; Arlington, TX

Kristene scooped up another spoonful of jiggly red goodness and began debating the merits of doing her dissertation on the recuperative, therapeutic properties of Jell-O. She had gorged herself on enough of the stuff in the last few days to become a subject matter expert, and it had some definite plusses in its favor. For example, it rarely, if ever, exploded and put you in the hospital.

That was one thing it had over physics.

Additionally, she could probably collect a large amount of data from the comfort of her bed, unlike the large amount of data and equipment that was now, no doubt, destroyed in her last and final experiment. Her K-Mart, her Blue Light Special, her bid to join the groundbreaking minds of the age was now irretrievably lost, along with her notes, her data, and her observations.

She smiled, even as the depression began to creep through the cracks in her will. She had spent far too much time since the accident crying over everything she had lost. At least her last try had gone out with a bang—a big, bright, blue bang. It had been an “event”, an unexpected, seemingly impossible … something, something which hinted at a deeper effect, some previously unknown facet of physical law.

She thought about it, obsessed over what she had seen, what she thought she had seen, and what it all meant, if anything. Like every other conscious moment since the accident, she bent her will to the mystery, but came up short. This time, though, Kristene was still for several minutes, then her eyes widened as all the puzzle pieces finally clicked into place.

She dropped the empty cup of Jell-O from her mostly immobilized left hand and reached out with the right for her pink, crystal encrusted suite. Opening the extensible screen from the handheld tablet and tapping on it with her stylus, she winced. It was unseemly to do such potentially important work on what amounted to a pink cell phone, but her primary computer had been lost in the explosion, and something was better than nothing. She began to scribble furiously across the screen.

An unknown time later, but long enough for the sun to set from the afternoon sky, there was a knock on the door. She looked up as it opened and saw a man in his late 30’s come in. She did not recognize him, but his plain, serious face brightened remarkably as a broad smile appeared, giving life to the laugh lines around his mouth and eyes, making him far more attractive and compelling. She smiled back. It was hard not to, given her usual preference for older men.

He nodded to her, still smiling, and opened his sports coat to put his hands in the pockets of his khakis. “Hi. How are you feeling?”

She gave a little half shrug with her right side. “Pretty good. I get to stay in bed all day and eat prodigious amounts of sweets. How would you be?”

He laughed. “That would kill me, I’m afraid.” He stepped forward and held out a hand. “Sorry. I’m Nathan Kelley, from Windward Tech.”

Kristene gave it a shake. “Kristene Muñoz, but you probably already knew that. I’ve heard of you. You’re Dr. Hastings’ boss, right?”

“Only in so far as you can be the boss of someone that can think circles around you. Let’s just say that I give Hastings a direction and then try like hell to keep up with him. He actually wanted to be here to check on you, but since I came in at the last minute, he’s checking out the remains of your lab instead. I figured if you went to all the trouble of blowing yourself up for Windward, it’s the least I could do to come out and see how you are.”

“Well, thanks! Protecting your investment? Or avoiding a law suit?”

Nathan frowned a bit. “You’re not going to yell at me like that Leo guy, are you?”

She relented and shook her head with a lopsided grin. “Naahh, just messing with you. Now, I may have to talk to Hastings about his priorities next time I see him, but I really do appreciate it.”

“I’m so sorry about your lab. We knew you were close to completion. It has to be frustrating to be so near the finish, and then have it all taken away.”

Kristene looked surprised. “Frustrated? That last experiment was spectacular!” She cocked her head to one side, and put on a devilish smile. “It was a blow-out, a smash success.”

Despite Nathan’s grin, he looked concerned. “How many meds are you on?”

“I am relaxin’ on a little tapentadol, but I’m not that doped up. I’m serious. The only problem with that last test was that I didn’t understand everything going on, so I miscalculated. It didn’t fail to work—it worked all too darned well!”

Nathan turned, grabbed a chair, and took a seat by her bed. “I’m starting to get a little behind here. Why don’t you take it back a few steps?”

She sighed and handed over her suite. Nathan accepted it gingerly and saw it was full of curves and equations, only about half of which he even recognized. She saw the confusion and relented. “Okay. I don’t understand everything yet either, but when has that ever stopped me? Basically, you guys asked us two questions: what kind of engine would produce a specific blue light of such and such spectrum and such and such energy, and was capable of massive thrust with very little or no reaction mass, and secondly, how do we create an engine capable of interstellar travel?”

“Yes, and you and about a thousand other people have been working on those questions for the past 15 years with absolutely nothing to show for it.”

She nodded. “Okay, I’ll give you that, but, truth be told, most of those guys just took your money, shunted it to other research, and then fobbed off some old Breakthrough Propulsion Physics ideas on you.”

Nathan’s face colored slightly. “Yeah, there were some folks with a bit less integrity than others.”

“Because you gotta admit, there are some pretty loopy rumors about what you guys are trying to do!”

“I thought you said you were going to explain why your lab blew up,” he said, waving her suite around.

“Oh, I am, I am. It’s important to know where I’m coming from is all. You see, I don’t think you guys are nuts. I believe in the Deltans!”

“You believe we’re being invaded by aliens?”

Kristene’s grin faltered. “You mean you don’t?”

“Honestly? It depends on the day of the week. I’m putting off making up my mind until I can see some less ambiguous evidence, like maybe from the SSBA, if they ever allow us tasking on it.”

“It’s not ambiguous. That rogue stellar fragment theory that NASA keeps sticking by is a bunch of hooey, and it looks worse every year they refuse to change their minds. The only reason nobody will publicly challenge it is ‘cause they don’t want to admit to believing in aliens.”

He nodded and then looked down at the suite’s screen again. “So you’re a true believer. How does that apply to this?”

“Well, everybody else has been focused on the usual suspects for your interstellar engine: warps, bias drives, gravity waves, wormholes, reactionless motors, and stuff like that. But all that stuff is either impossible, improbable, or is gonna take some sort of miraculously magical power source to run. And the only realistic alternatives to the pie-in-the-sky dreamers have been your advanced plasma and ion engines. They can do the job, and we’re building them now, stuff like VASIMR, and FEEP, and Hall Thrusters, but none of them have the endurance to really go interstellar, not like the Deltans anyways.”

“Okay, so what did you do?”

She beamed. “I killed two birds with one stone. I figured if the aliens were doing it one way already, it probably indicated all those other ideas were full of crap. So why waste my time figuring out how to open a wormhole when some advanced extraterrestrials couldn’t even do it? I focused my efforts on answering the first question in order to answer the second one!”

Nathan smiled. “We actually hoped most would do that, but we didn’t want to shoot down potentially useful tangents, so we phrased it as two different questions. You aren’t the first person to link them, but you are the first to claim to have figured it out.”

She wagged her right index finger at him. “Figured it out and have the busted-ass lab to show for it.”

“Maybe. That’s what Hastings is trying to do by piecing your lab back together. He said the wreckage was very interesting.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what he’ll find. It’s what I found and what the Deltans are likely using: a photon drive, but better. Inconceivably better.”

“Go on.”

“Photon drives have been on the drawing boards for years, but the negatives have always outweighed the positives. Basically, it’s a cross between an ion drive and a flashlight. Photons are particles, at least for the purposes of this theory anyway. We won’t worry about the wave properties of light at the moment, so just think of them as particles. Specifically they’re massless particles, but they still have momentum and energy because they move at the speed of light. There’s a whole bunch of different examples of photon momentum in nature, and we’ve even tried to make space propulsion systems using solar photons for free: solar sails for instance.

“Now a flashlight or a laser is already a photon drive, shooting photons out one end and accelerating in the other, but they’re so damn weak you never feel the push. The best they can do efficiency-wise is a Newton of thrust for every 150 to 300 megawatts expended. To make a useable engine you need to produce a LOT of photons at some really big energies, which takes gazillions of gigawatts of power.

“Now, you look at the spectrum from the Deltans’ ship, and it’s this high energy curve, but it’s not a blackbody spectrum like photon drives are traditionally figured for either. Nor is it a coherent monochromatic source.”

Nathan shook his head. “You’re losing me. My basic physics was a long time ago and … .”

She nodded. “It’s okay. It doesn’t look like a star’s emissions, or any thermal source like a rocket, but it doesn’t look like a laser either. It’s different, weird, but what it does resemble is an antenna emission, only with the central, main frequency a lot higher than we’re used to, somewhere in the high ultraviolet. The blue light we see from the Deltans is just the tail end of their emission spectrum.

“I guessed that maybe there was some sort of benefit to having the photon drive’s exhaust in a narrow frequency band rather than a broad blackbody spectrum. So, I tried to duplicate what they had already done. It took a lot of freakin’ brilliant work on my part, but eventually I came up with the cone. I call it K-Mart.”

He screwed up his face, but then said, “K-Mart? Blue-light special?”

Kristene suddenly felt a lot warmer than the room seemed to be. She gave him a coy half-grin. “Oh, I knew I liked you.”

Nathan grinned back, but shook his head. “Anyways … .”

“Anyways, it’s essentially an antenna, keyed around the same central frequency as the Deltans’, but no material I know of could handle the power output needed to give this thing any sort of thrust, so I used a pair of coupled field effect antennas. They emit from the fluctuations of an EM field, with one field receiving and the other transmitting. So you put power in one side, and the other side emits your photons for thrust. It’s not reactionless, which is impossible, but you don’t need reaction mass either. You just need power.”

Nathan stood, excited by the possibilities, but still apprehensive. He began to pace. “Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say it worked. Why did your lab explode?”

She shrugged with her right side. “I don’t know. It shouldn’t have. The cone should have these huge losses from one side of the antenna to the other. It was only supposed to produce a couple of millinewtons of force, about what you’d get out of a standard ion drive. Not the sexiest interstellar engine, but it’d work. Thing is, not only did it not show any loss from the electron beam to the photon emission, that explosion seems to show that it released more energy than was even present in the beam!”

Nathan turned to her. “That’s impossible. You can’t create energy from nothing.”

“I don’t think I did. It’ll have to be proven out, but I think the cone took all the available energy from one side and converted it to photon thrust. That’s the energy in the beam, the energy in the LINAC’s fields, the radiant heat and light in the target chamber, hell maybe even vacuum energy, but I doubt it. It took everything available and turned it into thrust. The beam started the ball rolling and it just took off from there on its own. If I could do it over again, I bet I could show that whatever type of energy you shove in to the receptor field, it can use it to make thrust. It’s the ultimate rocket: the highest possible specific impulse, at a high thrust, high efficiency, and zero need to cart around reaction mass.”

Nathan approached the bed and gripped the handrail with both hands. “So, this … enhanced photon drive—could you do it again? And without blowing yourself up this time?”

She pouted. “Well, maybe, but it turns out that someone cut my funding off.”

“Assuming Dr. Hastings can translate what you have here,” he said, holding up her suite, “and assuming he buys off on it, you can consider your funding restored, and this time as a direct employee of Windward.”

Her pout became an impish grin. “In that case, you bet your ass I can do it again, and a lot better this time. We’re going to the stars, Mr. Kelley!”