A Sword Into Darkness (7 page)

“And killing 103 of them, including the Captain who put me in charge.”

“I’ve read the proceedings from your board of inquiry.  The board endorsed your actions and awarded you the Navy Cross in return.”

“Medals and boards don’t stop the looks of doubt every officer has when they first meet you, every officer who
knows
they could have done it better if they had been in that situation instead.  They also don’t stop the looks you give yourself in the mirror every morning either.”

Lee spread his hands and smiled.  “Look at me, Nathan.  I don’t doubt you.  I’m not second-guessing you.  You’re who I need.  Be the architect of Earth’s first space navy.  Accept the most important calling in history:  the defense of the whole planet.  What do you say?”

Nathan turned and stared at him, shaking his head in disbelief.  This was the weirdest damn job interview in history, but nowhere nearly as weird as the job itself.

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.