Twisted Spaces: 1 / Destination Mars Page 9

  ''Good evening,'' he said, smiling. ''You are up late.''

  ''Sir,'' Chan whispered, automatically jumping to attention.

  Xao picked a file from the 'bullshit' heap, looked it over, took one from the finely aligned stack, opened it, browsing it too, put it back. ''I see you have separated the flesh from the bones,'' he smirked.

  ''I hope so, General.''

  ''Sit, please.''

  She dropped onto her seat, watching the almighty Xao squat down on a corner of her desk. Although he was a short, stocky man, he somehow radiated an aura of shady, disquieting presence.

  ''Chan Li, I want you to fully understand what is at stake,'' her highest superior addressed her. He swept with his hand over the files. ''This is all nothing. Bureaucratic nonsense. The truth we seek can't be hidden in those. Why?''

  ''There would be no need for me to sit here, Sir.''

  ''Correct. Such information is far too explosive to be overlooked, even by our bureaucrats. So the real issue persists, the challenge to locate the group that sent the message.'' He looked into her eyes: ''You do know what antimatter is?''

  ''Yes, General. A matter oppositely charged to normal matter. If the two types come in contact, they destroy each other in an outburst of pure energy, plain photons, no further radiation. Right along Einstein's famous formula e=mc2. The destruction process itself is called annihilation and is supposed to be the most efficient energy production known to mankind. We discussed it in our physics classes during university training, but our teacher said it was just a theoretical construct.''

  Xao, delighted by the extent of this girl's knowledge, nodded slowly. ''Well, I myself didn't know. Had to have it explained to me. See, I'm old school, an intelligence man by profession and passion. Grew up during the Cold War.'' He pointed at himself. ''I gather intelligence. No James Bond adventurism here. I don't hunt people, don't kill people, don't bomb enemies - I should better say: adversaries, other agents and agencies. See, killing is counter productive - there is always retaliation and both sides lose valuable assets: the carefully trained operatives. Our true business is to obtain information. Find it, gather or steal it. So I just do plain and classic intelligence work: I run a large network of field officers. I collect, analyse, validate, scrutinise, report. ''He tapped his hand on the desk, as if to underline his words. ''I pass on most of what we learn to the military or the central committee. Very rarely do I act on it. I can deal with Russians, Americans, Taiwanese, all of them, but not with such stuff as we are confronting now.'' He paused shortly, then said: ''Now, I have intelligence - you know the difference between intelligence and information?''

  Again she nodded: ''I think so General. Intelligence is information generated by an intelligence gathering process - field officers, communication intercept, satellite surveillance, the like. Collected, analysed, validated, scrutinised, ready to be presented. Like you just said.''

  ''Good enough. As I mentioned, we have intelligence that those who outsmarted my IT division so effectively can produce real antimatter - and, as I'm told, in large quantities. You have any idea what that means?''

  ''Maybe, General. That seems to me be a bigger event than the invention of the steam engine.''

  ''Why was that so important?''

  ''Well, it started the industrial revolution.''

  Xao smiled. ''What a smart girl. Well, such are the times. So what can you do with antimatter?''

  ''Produce energy,'' Chan replied flatly, ''as far as I know. Clean, radiation free energy in vast quantities. Mainly heat, or better: light, photons, if I remember correctly. In Europe they have developed a direct and environmentally neutral photon-to-electricity conversion, I read it recently.''

  ''Yes, so I'm told.'' He smirked, indicating that he naturally had his people there too. ''As we do. There are other uses of antimatter, of course.''

  ''Sure. Weapons. Undetectable nuclear bombs the size of a cigarette pack, encased in plastic boxes. Wouldn't show up on any airport scanner.''

  ''So I was also told. Now, smart girl, can you lay out what I want in this?''

  Chan hesitated: ''Well, General ...'' and paused.

  ''Come on, you have been refreshingly direct with me. Don't stop now.''

  She looked at him shortly, took a breath. ''I would say your focus must be on the long time welfare of our people. So your preferences are easy to guess.''

  That made Xao flinch a bit, he did not think of himself as easy to read: ''Explain ... please.''

  ''The antimatter technology will never stay in possession of one hand only - it's far too big for that. Like the construction details of the steam engine - that simply couldn't stay secret forever. But antimatter production is far, far bigger. Every superpower will attempt to get a hold of it - and, in the end - will have it. So we should get it too. You do know who has this production technology, right?''

  Xao smiled inwardly. The girl again had forgotten who was standing in front of her and acted absolutely natural towards him. It was such an enjoyable variation. ''Yes, you were right with that assumption too. You want to know?''

  ''Only if I need to,'' she replied carefully.

  ''The good old need-to-know rule. Nice you remember it from your military training. Well, actually I do think you need to know. It's ...''

  ''CERN,'' Chan blurted out.

  The General was caught by surprise: ''What makes you think that?''

  ''I read about such experiments in our science journal. But there it sounded like early stage testing ...'' Her eyes grew big: ''Wait! Those other people gave them a little push, right?''

  ''It looks like it. CERN seems to be getting the technology from an outside group. An unknown outside group. So what do you suggest?''

  ''Well, obviously you - and I - want the best for our people. So let's try to get our hands on it - I mean try hardest - and use the head start of knowing about it to our advantage. First let me try to locate them, and if I succeed, send in field agents - to evaluate the circumstances of their location. If I don't succeed, intensify the espionage at CERN - no, better do that right way - and try to get the info of their location from there. Then: field agents to evaluate, deploy our assets carefully around them, secure the area, strike, grab their know-how and disappear again - everything very, very discreet. Let history sort out the rest.''

  In his forty years of service Xao had never heard such a keen proposal from so young a person. He was speechless for a moment. She did not jabber childish secret-agent-lingo but used the correct intelligence terms, plotted a realistic scenario instead of an action fantasy. The secret service man in him returned: ''I just told you we don't do James Bond stuff. And how do you want to get the know-how? I mean, beside the fact that no country would look kindly on such an operation: we can't just march into a foreign nation and kidnap people - those days are over.''

  ''Sure we can,'' she countered disrespectfully. ''The Americans do it all the time. The Israelis too, as do the Brits, the French. We just have to make sure nobody gets caught. Or traced back. Plausible deniability is the ultimate keyword here.'' She giggled: ''This is like trying to teach an old hawk how to fly. You know far better than me about such things, of course.'' She paused a moment, then continued: ''And as to 'we don't do James Bond stuff', you did not say 'we don't do it', you said 'very rarely we act on it'. Now, imagine China had gotten the steam engine in the middle of the 18th century, together with knowledge about its use and fully understanding its implications.''

  Xao leaned back, feeling flattened. It did not often happen, that someone really totally steam-rolled him. But this girl ...

  After a few minutes of silent consideration he rose, laying down his final test: ''You want to lead the field team going in?''

  That made her laughed out loud: ''Oh no, sir, that wouldn't be a good idea. I'm just a desk warrior, an analyst. I'm far more useful in this office here.''

  General Lian Xao smiled shortly, then made his decision. ''Give your best, my dear. Find them. I'll order a feas
ibility study about your proposed action scenario in the morning.''

  ''Yes, sir.'' Then, after a moment of hesitation: ''Sir, from our conversation I gather that you have read my personnel file. You must know of my handicap and still decided to entrust me with this. I feel deeply honoured and promise you to do my very best. Just one thing ...'' she hesitated again.

  ''Let me guess,'' the General smiled, ''your working style is a bit unorthodox, your hours irregular. And you are at your best if left on your own schedule.''

  She looked at the floor, nodded.

  ''Don't worry. I will ensure they leave you alone. If someone jumps you, tell me.'' He pulled out a business card and put it on her table. ''Find them, Chan Li. Soon.''

  Chapter 32

  Geneva/CERN

  Saturday, 05.11.2016

  It was absolutely mind-boggling. The days passed like heartbeats, and at the end of the third day the scientists of the evaluation and verification groups had rushed through the documentation. While reading some of the excellently structured material, they could be heard moaning in frustration, slapping their foreheads or shout things like: So that's how it's done and Oh damn, I should have known this.

  The members of the science-oriented work groups were absolutely enthusiastic, babbling away in the daily project meetings like toddlers. Participating engineers acted cooler, but could hardly hide their excitement either. Only the support group stayed unimpressed, for them it just was another high-priority job.

  As promised, Margaret Mayerling had delivered the requested building materials on time, and, upon a subtle hint of CERN's director, bought everything twice. Not even Accounting had complained: with the raw iron and the copper wire purchase scrapped, the total cost for the material had dropped below fifty thousand US dollars per unit. The core of the production unit, the grav generator, hadn't even cost a single dime.

  The construction team pulled the building plans of the production unit from the web site, analysed and digested it. They were assembling the parts as fast as they could, but there was a mutual dissatisfaction. Their opinion about the machine design was divided in two: one half called it ''toy plant'', the other ''Chinese plastic reactor'', implying that the stuff from the eastern country was still trash and thereby teasing some of their colleagues from the far-east. It was the simplistic, even primitive way of the machine's design that disgusted them. They just couldn't cotton to the idea to attach a massive one hundred kilo cast-iron magnetic bottle to its support frame using dozens of plastic cable ties or to seal off the welding seams of an antimatter reaction chamber with silicone from the neighbouring DIY market, medical dressing from a local drug store and a few layers of fibreglass paste from Halfords. But in the end even the most critical engineer had to admit that the whole construction was sturdy enough. Rationally seen, the original designers had been right: if the magnetic containment field within the creation chamber, the magnetic traps or the tunnel between them failed, it didn't make the slightest difference if the chamber's hull was made of lead, steel, concrete or paper. Everything would just evaporate in one gigantic flash; nuclear explosions in the megaton range tend to do that. Even the fact that the machine could maintain the vital high vacuum over hours didn't impress the critics. Things simply weren't done that way.

  Jennings was completely untouched by such notions - he didn't give a damn. As far as he was concerned, they could have used chewing gum to glue the tubes together and seal the tunnels with mud. Every component tested easily within its design parameters, system integration was progressing well and they were ahead of schedule. These facts alone mattered to him - and to his superiors.

  Chapter 33

  Spangdahlem

  Monday, 07.11.2016

  Midnight had long passed. Ellie had settled down on the couch in their little living room and was reading a book, Louis Armstrong's song 'Hello, Dolly' quietly in the background. Mike was hunkering in front of his home workstation and concentrated on the flat-screen. It was now, in the late hours of the night, that he found time to work in his other role: as alpha-tester for the calibration software of the space-folding device, by its creators affectionately nicknamed butterfly: fold space with a flap of your wing.

  The lower third of the large TFT monitor displayed a modern graphical user interface with a dozen buttons, scales, sliders and progress bars, memorable of the graphical steering panels used to run hydro-electric power plants or nuclear reactors. Right above that panel a row of numbers formed as a clock of sorts, with six number pairs, separated by colons and followed by the measure unit nSec. A beautifully animated cutaway model was centerd above the controls, with coloured streams moving slow and steady through it. The first impression of it all was: a control station for a futuristic water pump, with two bands flowing through it - a blue-white speckled one and a single coloured green one. But the model was no pump and the bands weren't water; it showed a model of the space-folding engine complete with its flow of energy.

  Over the rim of her book Ellie watched how Mike typed a number on his keyboard's numerical pad, then clicked START SIMULATION. This kicked off the simulation process by dropping an initial amount of ten energy units into the - equally simulated - idle device, heating it up, speeding the colourful flow. As soon as some kind of equilibrium was reached, the young man raised the energy amount every five clock ticks by five units.

  Upon passing fifty energy units the picture changed abruptly: the slowly accelerating streams mutated into a chaos of wild rushes and suddenly a bluish field with force lines orthogonal to the streams appeared around the device, grew stronger in its colour and line density. The numbers in the right screen corner flashed along, the energy stream continued to rise: five units per clock tick. The field stabilized and became like a solid blue sphere surrounding the generator. It all stayed unchanged, until one hundred energy units were exceeded. Abruptly the streams became unsteady, started to swing, thereby kicking the pump-like machine into growing vibrations. The sphere started to deform, then ripped. The background of the whole simulation blinked fiercely in red-white-red a few times, then the model went black. Simulation and clock stopped.

  ''Fucking hell!''

  ''Dead again?'' Ellie tried not to sound too bored.

  ''Fucking threshold. You step over the threshold, the fucking field collapses. Like in that movie with - who was it - Captain Archer ... whatshisname?''

  ''You mean Star Trek and First Flight,'' she prompted. ''But there it was a warp field of a warp drive, not a space-time folder.'' She paused a moment, then continued: ''Two centuries later they stumbled over the coaxial warp drive; that was a folder. Didn't work either.''

  ''Not much comfort in that,'' Mike grumbled and clicked on a fat RESET button. The initial configuration appeared again. He leaned back. ''Anyway, they played with subspace fields, if I remember correctly, and we are playing with gravitons and anti-gravitons. Damn. I bet this is just a calibration problem, just like in that flick, Something not cookin. Or ...'' He fell silent.

  Ellie rose from her warm and cosy nest and came over to her man, embraced him from behind, pulling his head gently back and resting it in her considerably sized cleavage. She loved holding him like that, but Mike didn't show the slightest reaction to this treatment - and she had expected none. She knew her husband was thinking now and wouldn't be distracted, not even by her boobs.

  It took a while, then Mike awoke from his trance, looked up and pressed his head softly against her bosom: ''Oh, hey, what ear-warmers!'' Grinning he separated from her, got up and took her in his arms. ''I think,'' he continued, ''I think I know what happens, baby.''

  ''So?''

  ''The energy levels are correct. The timing is right, but the folding field collapses before the rip in space-time can develop. That behaviour is contradictory to our theory.''

  ''So something's wrong with the ...''

  ''No,'' he cut her off, ''the theory is correct. We've validated it over and over. All the antigravs run wonderfully. We can generate
up to class-six type singularities in a row and move them around like stones on a checkerboard. Just the opening of this fucking wormhole doesn't work. And it's only a class five.''

  ''So what's different? I mean ...''

  ''In comparison to opening a class-six?''

  ''Yes.''

  ''Twenty minutes ago I would have said: nothing.''

  ''And now?''

  ''I think the deciding factor is the time. I'm giving it too much time, so instead of turning inward, it turns outward, so to speak. And switches to that weird spherical force field, a kind of super-stable wall weaved from gravitation field lines. Then, after pumping much more energy into it than the field structure can absorb, the field does not invert and concentrate into a micro-dot but becomes, still outward pointed, meta-stable first, then finally collapses. Let me check something ...'' He turned, pulled a leather-bound book with the groups logo on its front from their book shelf, put it on his table and started reading. After a few minutes he mumbled a Damn, should have known, we need to get faster.

  That made Ellie wonder: ''Faster? We are already at nanosecond level ...''

  ''Yep. And noooooooow ...'' a few rapid clicks followed, ''we're talking picoseconds.''

  ''But that's far too fast for normal electro-magnetic signals ...''

  ''True. We'll need a quantum switch between the two. No sweat, just a few hours of work for Alex's guys.'' He entered the initial energy value of ten units - meaning ten terawatt - then leaned back, clicked START SIMULATION. Again the clock's digits rushed away frantically - picoseconds now, the colourful flows moved from meandering to fast-flow, then to a continuous stream.

  This time a clock's tick wasn't one nanosecond but something a thousand times faster. The golden sphere did not appear, instead at one hundred terawatt and eighteen picoseconds a microscopic black dot appeared above the butterfly, grew, became a rip, and then was forced into a black ring, steadily extending with the continued energy feeding until the butterfly-model was completely enclosed. The simulation stopped and the clock froze at twenty-three picoseconds.