War Angel: part nine

The rest of the crew seated at the table began to squirm a bit, processing their shock over everything they’d just heard. Sarah, Richard, and Ben were each taken aback by their knowledge of military malfeasance. The EAD was the last line of defense for the world, and as such, their perspective on its methods and motives was more than a bit naïve.

Jack Keys labored under no such emotion.

“If any of them are shocked by this, they’re kidding themselves,” he thought. “We’ve gone through two lengthy battles against a xenobiological opponent. Every possible advantage needs to exist in case they ever return, no matter how convinced the Earth United Government is that the Omegans are gone for good. And if that means the military defying the EUG and its ridiculous laws? So much the better,” Jack believed. “Whatever it takes.”

After a lengthy period of silence, Morrison broke in to get the gathering moving again. “As we are still waiting on Miss Almond, who I think will be sorry she missed this meal, let’s move on to Mr. Drake.” He gestured at Ben. “Anything interesting on the comm. channels today?”

Ben coughed. “Not much, Captain. Basic traffic, though some really clear moments of the Cup matches, so I worked on the equipment to make sure I could focus in on those signals.”

Richard piped in. “Can we get the important part? Who was playing and who won?”

“Seoul vs. Boise.” Ben added a dramatic pause for effect, then spoke rapidly, “andSeoulwasthewinner! 2-1.” The young engineer of Korean ancestry thrust a fist in the air in celebration.

Morrison rolled his eyes at the boys, reminded of his own youth, when athletic competition helped him define himself as a man. “Ahem, gentlemen. As you were saying, Mr. Drake?”

Ben looked a bit sheepish. “Yes, sir. Anyway, I worked on fine-tuning the equipment for a while, using the Cup match as a beacon, then eventually had to stop. There must be some massive solar flaring going on right now, because signals began to weaken and break pretty badly about an hour or so ago.”

“Across the board?” Morrison asked.

“Across the board, Captain. It was kind of gradual, but eventually all the channels went to static about an hour ago. Fairly standard for some of the weird solar storms we’ve been getting over the last couple of years. I figure that, being this far out, it degraded signals a bit more slowly than would have occurred if we were closer to Earth.”

Richard cocked his head, confused. “Wait a minute. I thought the hyperfrequencies were essentially storm-proof?”

Drake shrugged. “Supposedly. They use solar particles as carrier waves, so theoretically, a solar storm should only enhance the hyperfrequencies. However, if the nature of the solar particles was changed in some fashion, it might disrupt the frequencies in the event of a storm” Ben looked at the Captain. “That’s my best guess, at least, sir. I can’t think of anything else that would completely disrupt planetary communication.”

“I can,” a low voice said, piercing the room.

Gina Almond walked slowly towards the table, carrying a large bundle of papers and pictures. She was pale, shaking as though she was ill, stirring Dr. Gray to get up from the table and move to the young girl’s side. As Gina placed the materials on the table, Wilma placed her hand across her charge’s forehead, feeling for fever. Instead, what she found was a near-chill.

“Captain, I think you’d better look at these,” she said, shoving the bundle across the table, papers spilling out in front of her classmates. Morrison reached out a hand tentatively, wondering what had the girl upset, and began paging through the material in front of him. It didn’t take long for him to see what had Gina nearly catatonic.

Morrison spoke softly. “How long ago?”

“Best guess, Captain? Five days, maximum.” The rest of the table eyed her quizzically. “I… we are in trouble, you guys. Deep, deep trouble.”

The bundle dropped out of Morrison’s fingers and onto the table. “No…” he said. “I’d more say we’re totally fucked,” he said, rising from his seat and racing towards the bridge, knowing it was too late to do anything but pray.

War Angel: part eight

As Jack and Sarah left the engine room, Richard heard her explaining the new power ratios the shields and biogel packs could now withstand, but he was past caring. That was not his project.

His project would undergo its own test the next day.

Early science fiction, of which Richard Park’s parents had fed him a steady diet, hoping to encourage their son’s imagination, had filled his mind with wonder. But it wasn’t aliens that captured his thoughts; Earth had fallen victim to their own, and there was no glory or mystery in the Omegans. No, for the young engineer nicknamed Clover because of his relentlessly poor fortunes, what intrigued him was speed.

Light speed. Warp speed. Hyperspace. Ships that rode shockwaves. The movies and literature he had been exposed to was full of concepts for rapid space travel. Indeed, technology reverse-engineered from the Omegans did allow for nearly light speed travel. Their journey to Pluto took a little over two and a half days. But if his project worked, travel to and from Pluto would shrink down to a matter of perhaps an hour.

“It’s called a tachyon scoop,” he explained to his committee. “Very simply, it works similar to a solar sail system. As you know, a solar sail contains microscopic mirrors that allow fast-moving particles to harmlessly bounce off of them while propelling the ship forward at tremendous speeds. The versions used by the Omegans are quite remarkable and we’ve adapted them for ourselves quite nicely. But I think I can take the idea to the next level.”

“How?” asked one of the Professors that would decide his fate.

Richard called up some diagrams on the monitor that hung on the wall behind him. “As you all know, tachyons are free-floating faster-than-light particles. The design I have on-screen right now, and I do have the specs ready for upload to your personal devices, it for a ‘catcher’, if you will. It extends from the ship’s hull and uses a tuned energy field to draw passing tachyons into the primary chamber. There, a null-field generator holds the particles in place, conserving their energies until such time the ship needs to use the drive. At that point, the scoop releases a tachyon into a secondary field and absorbs the particle’s speed, using basic conservation of momentum principles.”

The committee began talking amongst themselves, and Park began to worry slightly that they did not look properly impressed. Did they not see the genius of the design? Was he going to need to go over someone’s head?

“Mr. Park,” one of them said gravely. ‘Our concern here is very simple. While your device may indeed grant a ship greater speed than ever before, at that speed it would seem that even the smallest bit of rock or dust that the ship encountered would act as a bullet through the ship’s hull, possibly creating a massive fatality. So we’re afraid the answer is…”

“Wait!” Richard held up his hand. “There is a solution to that problem as well.” He had never been one for hitching his wagon to the fate of others. And he certainly didn’t have a great deal of love for his fellow students. But if this project was going to get approval, he was going to have to make a sacrifice.

“Are you familiar with the names Sarah Matto and Jack Keys?”

The call for dinner startled Richard as he finished making final adjustments to the tachyon scoop. Captain Morrison had insisted on maintaining a standard dinner time in which they would each not only “enjoy” meal rations, but also report upon their day’s activities to one another. Each member of the crew would maintain full knowledge of where all the projects stood, as each project could easily affect one or more of the others. Thus, Morrison reasoned, he could build discipline and esprit de corps at the same time.

Everyone had a stake in Project: War Angel. Everyone.

For Morrison, a successful trip would result in more respect for his leadership capabilities, and perhaps a promotion. He knew that he had been given this assignment for the precise opposite reasons; his service record was undistinguished when compared to many of his fellows. This was due, in part, to some poor luck; each time he had been sent into a skirmish, things had basically concluded before he and whatever charges he was leading at the time arrived, while plenty of his EAD fellows had seen actual combat. In a military run by survivors and heroes from an inter-planetary conflict, his lack of experience in battle held him back. Indeed, he only held the rank of Captain due to a governmental quota regarding war orphans.

This ship, and the students under his command, were going to change that, He could feel it. Albert Morrison was meant for bigger and better things, and this would prove it.

Morrison walked into the dining area and watched as the students stood up to meet his entrance. “At ease,” he said, holding up his hand in a halting gesture. “Let’s eat.” Morrison quickly scanned the room and realized someone was missing. “Wait a minute. Where is Miss Almond?”

Wilma spoke up. “She’s going to be late. Apparently, she found something today that she wants to share with all of us, but needs some extra time to get it ready.”

The Captain coughed. “Very well. Let’s eat, then we can go through progress reports.”

That night’s meal, the actual food portion, passed without incident. It began with Jack delivering a detailed take on his adjustments of the shields’ power flow issues, followed by Sarah’s triumphant take on inoculating the biogel packs against burnout. Then, Jack thought, things got interesting.

“Tomorrow,” Richard began, “we will be fully ready to test the tachyon scoop.” The group applauded and hooted for their unlucky colleague. He smiled graciously, then continued. “I should actually say that we are fully ready to test the propulsion capabilities of the tachyon scoop. A few hours ago, I extended the scoop, testing the hydraulic arm and retraction mechanisms. And while doing so… I turned on the device.”

He paused for effect. “You guys, it worked perfectly! Captured three tachyons, held them in the null field, where they sit at this very moment.”

His fellow students gave him the plaudits that he had always desired. “Genius!” “Awesome!” “Incredible!” “Remarkable!” There may have been other words, but Richard Park heard only the ones he had been longing to hear from the moment he entered the Corps. There were handshakes, backslaps, hugs. “This is,” he thought, “the best day of my life.”

“Until tomorrow,” his subconscious reminded him, “when we actually use the tachyons to accelerate ourselves for near-instantaneous travel. That,” he smiled inwardly, “is when I go down in the history books.”

After the hullabaloo died down, progress reports continued. “Well,” Kate began, “going after Richard feels pretty anti-climactic, but I’ll do what I can to entertain, nonetheless.”

Ben gave her thumbs up. “I’m sure it will be awesome,” he said, trying to display something near sincerity. She, in turn shot him a strikingly dirty look, quieting him quickly.

“Today,” she said with a hint of resignation, “I discovered that my experiments have worked out a little better – or a little worse, depending on where you stand – than expected. The sample of salmonella we dosed here turned incredibly viral.” She paused and shook her head. “Scratch that. I suppose the only word that truly works in this case is deadly.”

Dr. Gray interjected. “As all of you know, salmonella was responsible for untold numbers of food-borne deaths prior to this century. But humans developed a passive immunity to it over the past hundred years or so. That made it ideal for these experiments; it gives us a baseline look at something that was once deadly and allows Kate to examine evolution as well as radiation effects.”

Kate continued. “What I found today was remarkably scary. The sample we irradiated in the nitrogen/methane atmosphere evolved in a way neither Dr. Gray nor I thought possible. It evolved into something that’s almost a second organism. Aggressive, violent bacteria that attacks any nearby cell and consumes it with an almost evangelical fervor.”

Morrison popped out of his chair. “Goddamn. Are we in any danger?”

“Captain,” Kate said softly, “the basic answer is no. It’s being held in perfect stasis, as we took all appropriate quarantine measures in bringing it back onboard. That said, if it were released into the air supply?” She shuddered at the thought. “It would kill all of us within the span of a couple of days.”

There was a heavy pause in the air as Kate felt the weight of what she was about to say next. “I believe, sir, that I have created a biological weapon, which as we know, is banned by our planetary government. Therefore,” she took measure of her next words carefully, finally realizing where this line of thinking had led her, “I request permission to destroy the sample and in turn… remove myself from the honors track for graduation. Clearly, in violating the law, I have failed, sir.”

The War Angel crew went silent, stunned by what they had just heard from their shipmate. Each wanted to speak, but none did, waiting on the Captain to respond first, as was most appropriate. Morrison stood and began pacing around the table, all eyes watching him carefully. How much should he share with his charges? There would be security clearance issues to deal with upon their return, but conscience dictated his response.

“Permission denied, Stinson.” She started to protest, but he cut her off. “Kate… the law does indeed ban any form of biological weapon. But I think you get some latitude here. One, because this was not intentional. You set out to perform an experiment, and this was an accidental result.”

She bowed her head and spoke softly. “Yes, sir. But if I return with it, I won’t even be able to get it planetside. Regulations won’t allow it. So I fail either way.”

Morrison smiled grimly at his young student charge. “Getting it planetside won’t even be an issue, Miss Stinson. The law is quite clear in these matters, yes.” He stopped and addressed everyone at the table. “This is now a 1-A security moment and each of you will be required to sign documents acknowledging so when we get home, understood?” They all responded in assent. “The law is quite clear in these cases. But the EAD… we sometimes believe in a higher law and a higher calling, understand?”

“Sometimes, for the greater good, the law must be secondary.”

Kate stared at Morrison. “Sir?”

Morrison walked around the table and stood over the young woman. “Not only are you going to graduate with honors, Miss Stinson, you’re going to have an immediate job offer. Do you understand?”

She began to smile, slowly at first, then as she processed what he was saying, her face displayed a broad grin. “Yes, sir. I just got myself into some next-level stuff. Seriously next-level stuff.”

He wandered around back to his seat and plopped back down to the table. “Next-level stuff, indeed, Miss Stinson.”

War Angel: part seven

Jack crawled out of a ventilation grate and began dusting himself off before realizing that it was pointless. There was at least one more journey into the ship’s duct system ahead of him today, and he was only going to gather more dirt on his work uniform.

Reaching behind him, Jack slid his toolkit into the hallway where he was now standing and plopped down next to it. Minutes passed as he reviewed what he had seen and done in the ship’s guts. “I’ve tripled the network’s capacity for power flow,” he smiled grimly. “On any other day, I’d do a cartwheel. But it isn’t enough. We need another magnitude of at least 25%, or this crate’s going to burn through biogel packs in a big damned hurry the minute they start test firing on us. And when that happens, we’re doomed.” He massaged his neck and stared at the floor. “I wonder what Sarah will do first. Crow about the fact that she was right all along, or shoot me for destroying her chance to graduate with honors?”

It had been a massive risk from the very moment he had conceptualized the project. The War Angel had been built in 2030; one of Earth’s first attempts at creating a space-worthy ship that could hold its ground against the Omegans. It relied on a combination of stolen technology and the best that Earth’s own minds could produce from their hiding places on an occupied planet. But even more than that, it was a tangible reminder of his family’s own past. His great grandfather had been there, behind the scenes, as the Revenge-class ships were first designed. For Jack, the opportunity to link to his ancestor by retro-fitting the old ship with modern technology was almost overwhelming in an emotional sense. Didn’t he owe it to the old man to give it a try?

Now that attempt was apparently going to be ending in spectacular failure. The old heap’s structure required too many workarounds to truly function how it needed to in a battle, and those workarounds wouldn’t fare much better in modern EAD equipment, either. Innovation was wonderful; but useless innovation… well, all that was left now was to figure out how to insulate Sarah from his folly and try and protect her from the fallout.

His comm. chirped. “Supersonic to Desperado, do you read?”

Of course it was Sarah. “Oh well,” he figured, “no time like the present to break it to her.” He held the responder button down on the comm. “This is Desperado, go ahead.”

Her voice rang out crystal clear through the empty hallway where Jack was sitting. “I have news. The mini-craft is coming up from the surface and they’re in a quarantine situation. Don’t approach medical for the next three hours unless you have E.V.A. gear on.” She paused. “So do you have any news to share with me, Desperado?”

Jack paused to ponder his options, and then decided to lead with his best pitch before breaking her heart. “I managed to triple the network’s capacity for power flow and dispersal.” The comm. went silent for over a minute.

“That’s pretty good, Desperado.” She paused for a moment, and Jack stared at the comm., wondering what her face looked like at that moment. “Of course, we still need about 25% more than that or the system won’t meet our standards.” He started to say something, to apologize, but the words caught in his throat.

“Guess it’s a good thing,” she said with a laugh, “that I found us another 50%.” Jack’s jaw went slack. “Perhaps you could join Mr. Pa… Clover… and myself down by the engines?”

Park held the biogel pack in his hand and marveled once again at the warm, pulsing sensation that it sent up his arm. “It really is remarkable Sarah. You know, if I had tried to create something like this network, I’d have probably created an unstoppable supervirus instead and killed us all.”

She reached out and took the biogel from his hand. “I’d try and reassure you that isn’t true, Richard, but you know what?” Sarah paused to grin at him. “You’re probably right!” The two shared a good laugh, but it subsided as Jack slid down a ladder and found the pair huddled around one of the biogel conduits.

“Congrats on the capacity enhancement, Jack,” Richard offered. “Good work.” Jack gave Park a nod of thanks and turned his attention to Sarah. “Richard. Sarah, I’m a bit anxious here.” The young woman winked at her two shipmates and then stood up, holding a biogel pack.

“As you know,” she began, “the biogel packs work on a cellular network, distributing absorbed power equally across a grid throughout the ship. It powers the running shields, and in case of a battle, it should disperse any energy impact absorbed by the quantum armor.”

Jack interrupted. “Which, as of this morning, we know doesn’t work, because it overloads the biogel packs.”

Sarah cocked an eyebrow at him. “Right. The dead pack. I went through the ship and found three others, which was more than a bit problematic. Our tests were performed using an energy device that gives off about one-tenth of something like an Omegan laser cannon. Something like that would likely cause a catastrophic collapse of the network.” Jack and Richard nodded.<P>

“I looked at the problem from every engineering angle I could think of, and frankly, I was close to giving up. Then something interesting happened.”

Richard shrugged gently. “What was that, Sarah?”

Her face lit up with a wicked grin. “I sneezed.”

Jack was bewildered. “So what does an allergy attack have to do with power distribution?”

Sarah looked a little smug. “It has everything to do with it, actually. I spent most of the day trying to solve the power problem, when what I really needed to do was solve the bio problem. The power overload was damaging and killing cells…”

“…So stopping cellular death became the issue. God, Sarah,” Jack said with no small amount of admiration, “that’s really good. How did you do it? You said you’d done it…”

She knelt down into her toolkit and pulled out the dead biogel pack Richard had handed her at the beginning of the morning. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a fresh syringe taken from medical earlier in the day, and she slowly slid the needle into the dead biogel pack. With a steady hand, she reversed the plunger, drawing a small quantity of the dead cells out of the pack. After placing the dead pack on the ground, she picked up the live one that she and Richard had been handling earlier. Once again, she steadily slipped the needle into the biogel, this time slow squeezing out the dead cells into the midst of the live ones. Sarah dropped the needle to the ground and held out the bag for Richard and Jack to see clearly. The cells in the bag began to move and jostle, their green glow dimming for a moment. Then, with sudden spasm, the bag writhed for a moment, and the cells began to pour out a powerful glow that enveloped the entire area. After a few moments, the writhing stopped, and the glow dimmed somewhat, though it was still stronger than it had been before the needle had pierced the bag.

“I sneezed because I haven’t gotten my allergy shot this week, Jack.”

He nodded in awed admiration. “You inoculated the biogel packs. Absolutely brilliant.” Richard nodded along with him. “Absolutely brilliant.”

War Angel: part six

Kate glided the mini-craft out of the War Angel’s cargo bay and down towards the surface of Pluto. Casting her gaze across the barren-looking rock where they had cast their academic fortunes, she wondered for not the first time if her entire university career was about to crash and burn, leaving her future as nothing but a burning husk of former potential. She had thrown in with Jack and Sarah, hoping that the insanity factor would add an additional element of risk to her project, enhancing her chances of graduating with honors. But so far her experiments had yielded little in the way of progress or data.

And her personal life, Kate thought. That was a major disaster.

It wasn’t like she didn’t know, or that she hadn’t heard the rumors whispered across campus. Ben Drake was the best-looking male student in the place, but he had left a trail of empty beds and broken hearts across the city. He was a user, a cad. Scuttlebutt brought stories of disease and terminated pregnancies. “No woman with even half a brain in her head,” Kate thought, “would even give that piece of excrement the time of day. What happened to self-esteem and good judgment? These girls make me sick.”

Now all Kate could do was laugh. “But not as sick as hypocrites do.”

All it took was the death of her grandmother, a bottle of aged tequila, and what seemed like genuinely caring conversation, and she had gone home with Drake that night. In the morning, she awoke alone, and the vomiting began in earnest. After a couple of days, the sick feeling subsided and the anger kicked in, and word got around quickly that Drake had better make himself scarce. Kate “F.A.” Stinson was on the warpath, and he was the target.

One evening in the dinner hall, she narrowly missed his head with a thrown plate of food and scalding hot cup of coffee. A week later, she chased him across the quad, planning on punching him in the kidneys until he needed a transplant, but he eluded her in the old tunnels beneath the student union. After that, she allowed her anger to subside. “It isn’t healthy,” she thought, “to carry it with me so. I was taught better than that.”

Indeed, Kate’s sensei had worked very hard to help her master the fire in her heart. When she arrived on campus, the first major thing she did was to find a nearby dojo where she could put her training back on track. Before leaving home, she had allowed her discipline to lapse, and she was without a trustable teacher.

“Well, that’s not technically true, I suppose” she told the owner of the campus dojo. “My former teacher and I had a… ‘falling out’ I guess you’d say.”

That falling out included six broken ribs and a punctured lung for her former sensei. A simple suggestion about different training techniques and bringing balance to her life exploded into an orgy of flying fists and feet, and suddenly the sensei realized that he had perhaps taught his prize student too well.

Discipline. It all came back to discipline. Yet the idea of doing to Ben Drake what she had done to her old teacher was a delicious one. How many drunk and vulnerable women had he taken advantage of? A hospital stay would certainly help him see the error of his ways.

Two weeks ago, the sick feeling returned. And it lingered. And lingered. The box she smuggled out of Dr. Gray’s stores confirmed her worst fears. That bastard. That total and completely worthless bastard.

Once again, Kate questioned her life’s choices. Particularly the one in which she chose to continue this mission, even after Drake was added as a last minute member of the crew. But she vowed to make sure that Drake regretted his own choices even more.

After a pinpoint landing, Kate put on an E.V.A. suit and headed toward the small research lab tent that she and Dr. Gray had set up on the planet’s surface. The experiments Kate was running (under the doctor’s watchful eye) were designed to study how radiation affected various bacteria and viruses in Pluto’s nitrogen/methane atmosphere as compared to how similar radiation doses affected them in Earth’s atmosphere. Changes had been slow to appear so far. With only two days left, Kate was beginning to despair of getting useable data. That was about to change.

“What the hell?” she said softly, peering through a high-powered electron microscope at a sample of salmonella. She refocused the device to a greater magnification. The little red bacteria had tripled in size since yesterday. What looked like small phalanges had formed along the edges, and they were pulsating in a strange rhythm. Kate stood up and stepped away from the table. This was something that required a second eye. Clicking on her radio comm, she signaled the mini-craft. “Dr. Gray? I need you to see something.”

Five kilometers away from Kate’s research tent, Gina Almond was following the sensor in her hand and rapidly losing track of time. What she was seeing was hardly possible, wasn’t it? Nothing like this could be natural. The odds of it were… well, they were astronomical.

“No,” she thought, “I’m doing this right. And I’ve checked and re-checked this thing multiple times.” The implications were staggering. From what the instrument was telling her, almost 15% of this planet’s mostly ice upper mantle was actually hollow.

Her comm. sparked to life. “Hime, this is F.A., do you read?” Gina shook herself out of her reverie. Turning off the scanner, she placed it on the E.V.A. suit’s belt, and then pressed the suit’s comm. to respond. “Go ahead, F.A.”

“Hime, we have a quarantine situation that needs to be returned to the War Angel. How close are you to being ready to return to ship?”

Gina activated the digital readout on the inside of her helmet to get a look at her suit’s performance. The numbers scared her a bit. “Umm. I guess I should go now. In fact, can you come and pick me up? I’m reading less than 45 minutes of air recycling capability left, and I think I’m a few klicks from you. Not… not sure I can make it back in time.”

A second voice ripped through the comm. channel. “Dammit, girl! I’ve warned you about this!” Dr. Gray yelled. “Stay put. We’ll be there in a few. Leave your comm. channel on so we can track you.”

The young explorer took the surveying scanner off of her belt and went back to work. It would likely be fifteen minutes or so before the mini-craft tracked her down. That was fifteen minutes more of data that she didn’t want to miss out on.