Warp speed

CHAPTER 18

Tabitha had put in the requisition to construct the "town" in a small lake area in a very large state park in Georgia. When the time came a forest fire would overtake the region. That is, after we yanked the town, trees, lake, bees, and all right out of the Earth. Tabitha hired a few ecologists and biologists to develop a closed system of plant and animal life. As far as these university types knew, this was just another "white collar welfare program." Pork, as it is referred to in political circles.

Jim and I went about designing a real-time modifiable warp field generator. This took several different sets of misshapen coils. The final product design reminded me of the old stellarator systems I worked on back in undergraduate school. The stellarators were really weird arrangements of electromagnets that were used to create tight fields. Plasmas would be captured in these fields. We would then pinch the fields even tighter with hopes that we could spark the fusion process. We were never very successful at creating a fusion generator back then. My understanding is that we're not much closer now, but I have to admit that I haven't really paid attention to that field (ha! pardon the pun) of physics in many years.

At any rate, we did create a modifiable warp field. Our new generator would allow us to modify the outer or Van den Broeck bubble simply by adjusting parameters on a three-dimensional graphic display. We soon realized that we could also modify the flat space region between the warp pole and zero. Flat space would mean no gravity or free fall. Jim and I figured out a way to create a slight curve in the so-called flat region so that we could have a one-gee environment inside the vessel, building, or whatever it was, that we planned to warp. In other words, we could build a spacecraft that had artificial gravity. That would be damned convenient. Since we could modify the gravity anywhere, we could ensure that there would be one gee environment on Moon Base 1. That way long mission duration to the base wouldn't be physically detrimental to the, uh I guess, astronauts.

Upon completion of the new warp field generator design, we sent blueprints to manufacturing a few floors up. The word we got back from them was that they would have it finished in a few days. I had yet to visit the machine shop upstairs, but those guys were on the ball. I hoped that some of them would volunteer to go to the Moon with us.

Most of my crew, besides the general, were through with their war tasks and were developing ideas of their own for the Moon base or overseeing (micromanaging is more like it) some of the manufacturing. Sara and 'Becca had been spending most of their time together. Jim and I figured that they were just collaborating on how to improve the manufacturing process for the mini ECCs. The process was slow—perhaps they could make it more efficient—thus shaving off a few days of the wait.

Al and Anne Marie and a couple of regular military girls that they had befriended focused on integration issues of the Moon base. They seemed very excited and enamored by the idea. I've said it before and I'll say it again; if I had the power, I would grant Al a doctorate in Aerospace Engineering and predate it by a year or two. I felt the same way about Jim and 'Becca as they were going through the doctoral inquisition. We used to have a saying: "You will never graduate until you can convince your committee that you know that you will never be as smart and enlightened as they are and that you will forever be in their debt and can never imagine a way to repay such a deep debt." Such is the way of American higher education.

Did I forget to mention the fact that Al and Anne Marie were spending an inordinate amount of time together? As Tabitha has always told me, I'm dense about these things. Hell, I didn't even realize Jim and 'Becca were a thing until they decided to get hitched! I think I'll just keep my nose out of that one. Or as we say in the South, "Damn, I ain't gittin' my dawg in that fight."

Several weeks had passed and I was getting a little bored. Most of my work was complete. The field coils were finished, but with no ECCs to power them, they were just a lot of scrap superconductor. I spent some of my time helping Tabitha analyze intelligence data "down the hall." When I was being a fifth wheel to Tabitha I would give her time off by just hanging out in the break room and watching television.

I got caught up in the Senate hearings deposing the NASA administrator as to why we hadn't detected the meteors before they struck Florida and Colorado. Why had NASA not done its job, the Senate wanted to know? As I listened to the hearings, the current administrator of our nation's civilian space agency held his ground.

"Well, Senator," he began, "for years we have begged for a budget to watch for Near Earth Objects, or NEOs. And we have received one. The budget has been roughly three million dollars per year. That is enough money to run one telescope, for about an hour a day, about three hundred days a year. If we got lucky and the meteor just happened to be in the minuscule percentage of the sky that we were able to cover with that one telescope during that hour during one of those days, well yes Senator we should have detected it."

Even though the problem facing the world right now wasn't due to a meteor threat, the NASA administrator was right. We're, in the first place, not seriously looking for threats from space. In the second place, we have no developed way to defend against them. I remembered seeing some movies back near the end of the last century—or near the beginning of this one, I forget which—about asteroids hurtling toward Earth and brave astronauts flying up on modified Shuttles or some such nonsense and destroying them with one nuclear weapon. That was silly then; it's still silly. Asteroids and meteors are bad enough—they aren't intelligent.

What if the threat from space was intelligent? Well, if they got here, then they must be far superior to us. We wouldn't stand a chance. If they showed up and said, "We are the Borg. Your uniqueness will be added to our own. Prepare to be assimilated. Resistance is futile." If that happened, we would absolutely be fucked. No polite way to say it. No amount of nuclear weapons could help. Hell, I'm not sure that warp weapons would help.

And a race as advanced as Star Trek:TNG's Borg might not even be the worst case scenario. What if a race showed up in our past and tricked us into worshiping them? Say, perhaps the race had wings and wore a shiny bubble around their heads since they didn't breathe our atmosphere. They could use their technology to perform so-called miracles that would convince us that they were deities. By every version of the word we would be screwed even worse than with the Borg. At least with the Borg it would be over quickly and we'd go down fighting. With these deities they could trick us into fighting among ourselves for thousands of years. Then they could, for some reason, leave our planet, leaving behind no evidence that they were ever here. We would continue to fight about them amongst ourselves for millennia and we would never know what really happened. If they showed up now claiming to be angels of the lord, at least some of us would stand up and flip them off. But you better believe that many more would jump on the fiery chariots of these creatures and help them slaughter us in the name of the very vain, loathsome, and petty Almighty.

Presently, there are no Department of Defense or Civil Defense measures in place to defend against such an attack, or at least none that I know of. Hell, people know for a fact that there are asteroids and meteors and we have no contingency plans for them. Why develop plans against aliens? After all, the SETI folks have everybody convinced that aliens are far advanced dope-smoking Utopians who will one day email us the cure for cancer.

Yeah, they might do that. And as my great aunt Meg is so fond of saying, "And if a frog had wings it wouldn't bump its ass on the ground when it hopped either."

I believe in statistics. The universe is a damn big place. Statistically there should be just as many aliens out there that want to eat us as there are who want to feed us. A lot of the Pasadena and Boston intellectual crowds would have you believe that intelligent aliens would have evolved beyond war. Then, I guess, we ain't intelligent.

Politics and the battle for resources will exist no matter how evolved a society gets. I always find these Hollywood science fiction shows humorous when they say things like "we don't have money in the future." If one guy wanted to build a new football stadium at the bottom of the sea and one guy wanted to build a new hospital downtown, which do you think would get priority and who gets to make that decision? Unless there are infinite resources, sooner or later a similar decision must be made in any resource-limited society. So, of course, the football stadium would get built. There may not be paper money in that society but the decision itself becomes the money and is just as valuable. If the aliens have infinite resources then they must live outside our universe since it is finite in size. Ha, so take that Utopians!

Sorry; I digressed. We should have contingency plans just as we do for earthquakes and floods. At any rate I was thinking these things as I watched the hearings. I knew we now had a contingency for meteors and asteroids though nobody would ever know it. I watched and thought, "Just convince Congress to let you look Mr. Administrator. We'll knock 'em out of the sky if you find them."

Warp missiles could easily be used for defense against meteors, but we could never tell the public that. What could humans have done without warp technology? Nothing maybe. I have always been a big fan of building a mag-lev catapult on the Moon that could throw big rocks very fast. The amount of money that we spent on intercontinental ballistic missiles would almost pay for it. We could do as much damage to ourselves with it or more. We could also throw swarms of rocks at incoming NEOs until we have altered their courses or broken them up into small enough pieces as not to destroy the Earth. Needs more study, but could be viable. Now that we have warp the point is moot.

* * *

A few times a week 'Becca, Jim, and I would meet downstairs in an abandoned area of the "facility" and practice some katas or takedowns or holds. 'Becca and I were both getting well enough to do some light sparring drills.

One evening while the three of us were practicing, a guard making his daily rounds found us. He stopped and watched for a bit. He asked us if he could join the next night. Anne Marie and Sara followed 'Becca down a few days later. Before long, we had a regular class schedule with students. Jim and I ran the class for a while until one of the regular military fellows watched me make a particular arm bar. It was the sergeant that Tabitha had dressed down weeks ago.

He watched and then politely said, "Uh, excuse me, sir."

"Hey, don't sir me. I'm a civilian. My name is Anson."

"Okay sir, uh Anson sir, uh Anson. I like that technique. But, have you thought about what would happen if you are countered this way?" He reversed the hold from me having him arm barred, to me lying face down with his foot on my neck.

"Uncle!" I cried. We hit it off real quick. Jim and I asked him to jump in any time he wanted to and take over.

After some conversation, we found that his name was Sergeant Calvin Perry. Calvin had been in the security detail for over nine years and had taken multiple martial arts over the years. He had only recently taken on acquisition as one of his duties. His style was more of a useful blend of everything, rather than a set traditional style. Jim and I both liked that. Without explaining the details of why the fight took place, I told Cal and Jim about my run-in with Johnny Cache. I told them how I felt like I should have defeated him earlier, because when I finally did beat him, I was so exhausted that I couldn't have countered anything else. I choreographed the fight as best as I could from memory using Jim as Johnny. Calvin, Jim, and I began shaving off useless techniques. Before long, the three of us were developing simpler more deadly techniques. Calvin had had the advantage of not fighting on the tournament circuit. Jim and I had trained ourselves with too many scoring techniques for tournament fighting instead of deadly ones. Calvin began teaching us to unlearn some of that.

The three of us held these training sessions on our own time outside of the regular class, while we took turns instructing the regular class. Then afterwards we would practice becoming more deadly. Soon, all of the students started staying for the whole affair. 'Becca and I were getting back into real serious fighting condition. I was proud to see her doing somersaults and flips and jump spinning tornado roundhouse kicks again.

"I wish I had a black belt to give her," I told Jim and -Calvin.

"Yeah," Jim nodded.

"You want me to pick one up on my way in tomorrow?" Calvin asked.

Jim and I did a double take with a twist of confusion.

"What do you mean," I asked.

Calvin looked surprised, "I forget that you guys are bottled up down here, under protection and all. Heck, I get to go home every weekend if I want to. There's a martial arts supply not far from where I buy groceries. Besides, the general told us to get you folks anything you want or need no questions asked. I double as one of your acquisition officers, so, I'm authorized to get stuff for you. You guys want anything else?" He smiled and winked.

Jim and I hadn't really thought about it. Until now, somebody had always furnished us with anything we needed after we complained that we didn't have it. But, we had been in camping-out mode and not living mode. Tabitha had personal stuff in our room. I guess I just thought that it was stuff she was able to grab on her way here. Or perhaps she had a friend that picked it up for her. She has lots of friends and connections. I was beginning to realize that we hadn't been taking advantage of our situation. We should at least be comfortable, even if we didn't want to admit this was a long-term situation, right?

Calvin, Jim, and I made out a list of things that we needed to have for a fully equipped martial arts dojo, including kicking bags, judo mats, a well stocked store of uniforms, rebreakable boards, pads, and weapons. Calvin got all of it; it was justified as fitness training supplies. I also ordered stuff for a cookout, including an electric grill. I wanted a real charcoal one but we decided that we might set off some fire alarm system somewhere. And what is a cookout without beer and hunch punch I ask? Calvin laughed when I gave him the order. "Don't laugh, you have first duty on the keg tap," I told him.

I asked Tabitha about our material situation a few nights later when she finally made it to bed at the same time I did. She laughed, "Anson sweetie you are dense. This is a witness protection type program. You people could be the witnesses that save the country and our way of life. If you need to spend some money on R&R why didn't you ask before?"

"Too busy worrying about the country being taken over, I guess. Hey, I have never actually been at war before. Give me a break."

"I love you," is all she said. It's none of your business what we did next.

When we weren't training in the dojo or having cookouts we did tend to the war and Moon base efforts. Without my knowledge, 'Becca and Dr. Smith had squirreled away some of 'Becca's tainted blood and 'Becca and Sara had been studying the blood and the flubells extensively in their spare time. Jim had posed the question when we discovered them as to why hadn't they gone chaotic and exploded. We never got around to studying that. Apparently, 'Becca was plagued with the same question, but only more hauntingly so. The fact that she could have exploded and destroyed a county must have been a lot for her to deal with both emotionally and technically. So she and Sara had set out to solve the riddle.

Soon into their research effort, they coerced Jim into helping them. They kept all of their research a secret from both Tabitha and myself. I had later asked them why and the three of them said that they knew neither of would let them do it. We both scolded them for violating safety protocols and risking their necks; had the outcome been different they could have killed us all. Since the outcome turned out for the good we let it go. Besides, both Jim and 'Becca are good responsible scientists and Sara is becoming one. One of these days Tabitha and I will have to quit looking at them as children, our children. I doubt that day will ever come. At any rate, their research was very successful. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

* * *

It was one of those days where I was feeling useless so I spent it with Tabitha attempting to help her analyze intelligence on our enemy's war effort. I spent a lot of time squinting at satellite imagery ranging from visible to infrared to microwave to radio maps of the Asian continent. The most interesting imagery that we analyzed was one of the launch sites in south China. The site is just south of Canton and is called Hainan Island. The imagery showed a launch vehicle being moved out to the pad and integrated. From the data it appeared that we would be seeing a Chinese launch in a matter of days. There were images of other launch sites at Jiuquan, Taiyuan, and Xichang that showed identical launch preparations. We were still at least a month from the first working mini ECC. We were in big trouble!

More detailed analysis showed that there was massive naval buildup in the Taiwan Strait between south China and Taiwan. There was also major troop movement and buildup on the North Korean and South Korean border. Some bright analyst brought to Tabitha's attention that there was a launch preparation going on in Kazakhstan and near Svobodny, Russia. Was it possible that the two simultaneous Russian launches were a coincidence? The Chinese and the Russians had been allying themselves for years under the auspices of "the enemy of my enemy is my ally" philosophy. The Russians had publicly been our allies for years since the end of the Cold War, but, there had been, and will always be, factions of the old Red Party that will forever despise the United States. The other possibility is that the economically ravaged Russians had fallen into the survival-of-the-meanest mode and were overtaken by organized crime. These criminals would do or sell practically anything for the right price. Who knows the motives? The fact of the matter was simple. The Chinese and the Russians were going to launch at least six different rockets with warp missiles on them within the next day or so. They must have already tested them before we built our detector. They were probably waiting on ECCs like we were—but they apparently could make them faster. Chinese naval vessels were most likely going to mount an assault on Taiwan. And the North Koreans were going to take South Korea. World War III was about to begin.

"Oh God, Tabitha, what can we do?"

"Get everybody together, Anson. Five minutes!" she ordered.

Five minutes later we were in the conference room explaining the situation. "It's obvious that we don't and won't have enough warp missiles ready for launch for weeks. Our only chance is for our missile defense systems to save us, or to go into a preemptive first-strike posture. This will be my recommendation to the President unless we come up with better ideas," Tabitha explained.

"According to my estimates as to our progress," I continued when Tabitha stopped, "we have about seventy five percent of one mini ECC complete. Maybe we can rig something out of that. Maybe a very small more decisive missile."

"Uh, Anson, hold on." Jim interrupted. He looked at 'Becca and Sara and nodded.

'Becca continued, "Jim and Sara and I have been developing a new Casimir effect energy collection system. The system is based on the flubells and is three orders of magnitude more efficient than the original Clemons Dumbbells."

I was surprised and happy, but we didn't have time for a development program. We had at the most twenty-four hours. Maybe we could launch ICBMs at the launch sites. This would ensure that a global war would start but just maybe the U.S. would survive or even win. Boy it would be nice if we had actually developed those rapid-force deployment spaceplanes that NASA and the Air Force have been drawing pretty pictures of for fifty years.

"'Becca that's excellent work and we'll talk about it when or if we survive this upcoming war. We don't have time for a development effort," I scolded.

"Damnit Doc!" Sara cried. "You don't understand."

"Yeah Anson," Jim started, "we already built one of the damn things and it's big enough to generate more power than all three of Zephram's ECCs put together!"

"You mean you have a working prototype?" Tabitha was exhilarated.

"Yes!" was uniformly shouted by Sara, Rebecca, and Jim.

"Well why didn't you say so?" Al said.

"Okay, okay, let's calm down. So we have six complete warp coils installed in MWM bodies waiting for the mini ECCs, the modifiable warp field generator, a seventy-five percent mini ECC, and one fully operational large ECC. Not enough." I shook my head.

"How much time to make more of these new ECCs?" Anne Marie asked.

"A couple of weeks apiece." Sara replied.

"Too long," Tabitha noted. Then Calvin came in and interrupted us.

"General, ma'am! You are needed immediately." He saluted.

"At ease, Calvin. Anson keep at it. I'll be right back." Tabitha and Calvin departed down the hall.

Five minutes later she returned, pale as a ghost. "They launched!"

"What do you mean they launched? They weren't quite on the stands yet," was my response.

"It turns out that the imagery was right. But no integration was required. They just rolled out and launched. Never been done before. All six of them, launched!"

I couldn't believe it. How did they manage to integrate inside without us seeing it, roll out, and liftoff in a period of an hour or so? I have worked payload integration at the Cape before and it takes days. This was a systems engineering miracle. Now we were only half hour to an hour before they could deploy over a target and fire their warp missiles.

"Can we get real-time trajectories announced or mapped?" I wanted to know where they were.

"Yes, down the hall." Tabitha said.

"I want where they are announced every five. We're not out of this game yet. We have a modifiable warp field generator and a lot of damned power. And I ain't afeard to use it!" I put on my worst Southern.

"What are we going to do, Anson?" Anne Marie asked.

"We're about to pull a damned rabbit out of a hat sweetheart. Just hide and watch. Jim get that new ECC hooked up to the new modifiable field generator like five minutes ago. 'Becca you and Sara go get the almost completed mini ECC, divide it into two separate supplies, and get it connected to two of the completed MWMs. They may not go faster than light, but they should still pack a mean wallop and be controllable in space. Two missiles are better than none. Al you help them. Tabitha, I need a layout of this facility. I mean everything—power plant, plumbing, elevators, rats, you name it. As soon as you can get it, Annie get it to me in my office instantaneously." I didn't mean to take control and Tabitha never let on like I had, but I had things to do and I didn't have time to okay it all with the general. A good commander knows when to let her troops do what they need to do, and that is just what Tabitha did.

"Anson, I'm going to alert the President that we have an offensive weapon but most likely cannot stop the incoming weapons. Is this correct?" Tabitha wanted confirmation on what we were doing.

"That's the best we've got Tab. Sorry. I love you too," I told her. Then we each went about our separate tasks.

I went to my simulation system and I started mapping out warp fields containing large masses in the flat space of the warp bubble and stresses on the system due to slow impacts on the outer bubble. We could warp from point to point with these things but real-time steering was a bitch because you couldn't see out of the Van den Broeck bubble. Then I remembered my old Star Trek: TNG. Anytime the Borg would attack, you would modulate the Enterprise's protective shields. That's it! Modulate the damn Van Den Broeck bubble. It was so simple a child could have done it! I laughed when I thought that. Isn't that what McCoy told Kirk when he learned how to put Spock's brain back in?

Sara's lights-off lights-on method would work. I would set up a function generator to drive the outer bubble on and off every few microseconds. I would add a half wave phase shift to that switching signal and use it to drive the sample frequency of the high-speed video cameras we had in the lab. So, the video cameras and the outer bubble would be completely out of phase with one another. When the bubble was on the camera would be between video frames. When the bubble was off the camera would take a frame. Now the big question would be where to put the camera and how to connect it. Oh, connect it to what you ask? Hold your horses, I'm getting to that.

Annie and Calvin rushed in pushing a roll-around cart loaded with notebooks full of blueprints and facilities drawings.

"Great guys, thanks. Annie, find me a top-level drawing of the entire facility, preferably, one with some dimensions on there also. Calvin, find out where there are outside video cameras with the best view of the outside world. Then have somebody take these three cameras here and swap them out. Mount them however you can, but get me that video signal down here, ASAP. Also, get me a global positioning system mounted up there and route that data to me here. Figure out how. We have about twenty minutes."

Calvin rushed off with the three high-speed cameras. Annie began flipping frantically through the books. "Annie, I'll be right back. I've got to see Jim a sec." I told her. I ran two doors down the hall to the main lab where I was just in time to overhear Jim shouting.

"Owwch! Goddamnit all to hell!" He let a crescent wrench slip and fall on his fingers.

"Jim, you all right?" I asked, any other time I would've -chuckled.

"Yeah."

"How's progress here?"

"I'm ready to fire it up and test it. You got the control algorithm ready?"

"Yep! I just finished it. And I know how to see to steer it. You know the problem we were going to have on the Moon making one swipe then recalculating the next trajectory or swipe? Well, to hell with that. We're going to modulate the field so we can see through it. Since we will be nonrelativistic we can see through the Alcubierre warp and by modulating the outer Van Den Broeck bubble we can see right where we're going."

"Nonrelativistic?" Jim sounded shocked. "Doc, what are you planning?"

"If you can't take the mountain to Muhammad my ass. By God, we'll rip the fucking thing right out of the Earth!"