Chapter 19
Fifteen minutes later, Lex and Karter were back in the upper levels of the lab. Ma had announced that the food was ready, and had supplied yet another replacement arm. After heaping up their respective cafeteria trays, the men each took a seat.
“Uh . . . listen. I’m sorry about the . . . stuff that happened,” Lex said, legs tensed for a quick getaway in case Karter had another one of his “episodes.” Considering the fact that half of his base and most of his face had been wrecked, Lex was fairly certain he would be justified this time around.
“Meh. It happens,” he said, taking a pull off of a beer.
Lex stared at him silently for a moment. A medical probe, probably the same one that had patched up Lex’s leg, trundled into the room and started to scan and treat its inventor.
“It happens? That’s it?”
“Yeah.”
“You almost caved my head in with a crowbar for showing up in a ship later than you expected.”
“Well, it was a dicky thing to do.”
“Yet you saved my life when I first crashed here.”
“That was before I knew you were a dick.”
“And, now, after a giant corporation declares war on you and almost destroys your whole place, not to mention you, for reasons that kind of, sort of, halfway could be considered my fault, I get ‘Meh. It happens.’”
“You want me to go get the crowbar?”
“No! No, I’m just, you know, confused by the rationale.”
“I showed you the nuthouse certificate, right? That’s my ‘Get Out of Rational Thought Free’ card. Besides, this takes me back. Remember, Ma? When the crew was together?”
“Yes. Disruptions of this sort were considerably more frequent,” she said.
“The crew?” Lex asked.
“Classified,” Karter replied.
The pair finished eating while Karter was restored to relative health, then sought out a room a few levels down that Ma had indicated was prepared for their “research session.” The room looked like something out of a corporation. In the center was a long conference table. Its entire surface was a display, as were three of the walls. The final wall had the door and a long work counter covered with various old-fashioned drafting tools, pencils, and pads of paper.
“Is . . . is that a protractor?” Lex asked.
“No, that’s a compass. That’s a protractor.”
“And what’s this?”
“That’s a French curve. Quit touching my stuff,” he said, taking the odd-shaped piece of plastic out of his hand and poking him in the chest. “What do we have, Ma?”
“The analysis of the information has turned up data of two distinct varieties: stellar surveys and cargo manifests.”
Two tables of data appeared in the center of the table. Karter started to dig through, dragging text boxes aside with his fingers.
“Did you get anything on your own?”
“Significant data trends are as follows: A total of one hundred-sixteen stars are listed. All stars listed are main sequence stars. Their distribution is consistent with a random selection algorithm.”
“Wait, random?” Lex said.
Karter nodded.
“It makes sense. If they had something planned for one of these stars, they would want to bury the target of interest in a pile of garbage. What other kind of data was there, Ma?”
“The manifests are displayed on the left. Certain entries were circled. They are highlighted.”
“Arrange them by destination.”
There were a total of seven destination planets, including Operlo. Most had a few dozen different corporations and addresses. Karter stared at the data silently for a few minutes.
“Anything to add?” he asked, glancing at Lex.
“I really didn’t turn anything up when I went to Operlo.”
“Please keep in mind that you are an idiot, and you might have heard something important and not realized it,” Karter helpfully reminded.
“Screw you. Actually . . . well, I don’t know what it means, but everybody was referring to the Gemini Project.”
“Ha! Gemini. Classic.”
“You know what it is?”
“No, but the business and military types just love using mythological names for their stuff. Hercules, Juggernaut, Odin. They couldn’t come up with an original name to save their lives. Usually they just go with something vaguely related to their project. Ma. Are any of those stars in the constellation Gemini?”
“No,” replied Ma.
“Worth a shot. Anything else?” Karter asked.
“No . . . wait . . . wait, yeah!” Lex said. “Back when I chauffeured Patel around the first time. He was drunk, like he was celebrating. He said he was closing the biggest business deal of the century. And he had to make it back to Operlo for a meeting or something bad would happen . . . What did he say? They’d give bandwidth rights to the guy on the other end. Whatever that means.”
“Oh, it means plenty. ‘Bandwidth’ plus ‘other end’ equals ‘point to point communication node.’ And if they are talking bandwidth rights, then it is the EM spectrum. Broadcast stuff,” he said, glancing at the parts list, “and these components fit with that. I could see someone putting together some transmission stuff.”
“And one of those destinations is Operlo. I know for a fact that they are building something big there, because they thought I was spying on it. And they were on a really tight schedule,” Lex said.
“Okay,” Karter said, “just two problems. There aren’t enough components in any one of these locations to do anything worthwhile. And assuming Operlo is one side of the equation, there’s no indication which, if any, of these other planets is the other endpoint.”
Now it was Lex’s turn to stare for a few minutes.
“Hold on . . . this location is bogus . . . and so is that one,” he said.
“What makes you say that?”
“See this part of the location code? That’s the type of facility. This place they’re shipping to is temporary holding only. No long term, no pickup, and no local distribution. But they have it listed as the final destination. Unless the people at the processing facility are the ones planning to make use of twelve thousand kilometers of fiber optic cable, something fishy is going on. Freelancers call that a drop-forward. They are trying to cut the paper trail. Someone picked that up and sent it somewhere after.”
“Huh. Who would have thought being a delivery boy would have taught you something useful,” Karter said. “Not that it helps, because there’s no way to know the final destination.”
“Maybe not, but I could make a pretty good guess. Ma, could you put up the seven destinations on a map?”
One of the walls displayed a stellar chart with illuminated points marking the locations of the planets.
“Okay, now can you bring up the VectorCorp routes?”
The map was suddenly buried in a hopelessly complex web of orange lines.
“That might take a bit to sort through,” Lex said squinting.
“Processing . . . Removing speed-restricted routes, commuter routes, and non-cargo routes. For clarity, switching to holographic display,” Ma said.
An image flickered into being above the table. Stars hung as points of light in the air. Routes were marked with branching orange threads. It slowly rotated as Lex looked it over.
“Check this out,” he said, pointing. “All but Operlo, Draxis, and ADC-29R45 are situated at major intersections of primary trade routes. They were definitely handing off. From the looks of it, anything delivered to these three planets actually went to Operlo . . . and I’d say that ADC got the rest.”
The rest of the points vanished, and the two star systems in question zoomed to full detail.
“You heard him, Ma. Let’s combine shipping lists into those two locations.”
The data displayed on the table updated, then boxes listing the results appeared next to the appropriate planet in the hologram. Karter loo
ked it over and shook his head.
“Nope . . . still not quite enough. How about this, Ma? Both lists are pretty similar. Let’s assume they were trying to build the same thing on both sides. Add any items unique to any one list to both.”
The lists updated again. Karter nodded, picking up a pad of paper and starting to scribble some notes and diagrams. Ma must have been keeping an eye on his page, because as he traced new shapes, they appeared on the screens behind him.
“It isn’t all there, but assuming there were a few small shipments we don’t have the manifests for, it looks like they’ve got a phased array signal amplifier going in both locations. Plus a whole mess of specialized equipment that doesn’t fit into the design. Probably that’s for generating the signal.”
“Okay, so that’s what they’re doing? A phased array thing? Is that, like, experimental or groundbreaking in any way?” Lex asked.
“Nope. It is pretty much elementary transmission engineering. Nothing worth killing for. We’re missing something here. There is no reason to build these things. Those two planets are basically on opposite ends of the colonized galaxy. The design looks like it is meant to focus on a single point, but they are too far apart for them to be broadcasting directly to each other, and focusing that sort of power on a satellite or space station would be severe overkill.”
There was silence for a few seconds.
“Ma? Anything?” Lex asked hopefully.
“Analyzing planets for trends. Operlo is a minimally habitable planet. ADC-29R45 is a large, mineral-rich asteroid with a small population of workers in a number of surface facilities. Both derive primary power from solar and have a primarily mining-based economy.”
Lex looked to Karter.
“That’s not terribly helpful,” the inventor said.
“Expanding to star system level. Both planets orbit stars listed in the included stellar survey data.”
“Now there’s something,” Karter said.
“The stars are exceedingly similar,” Ma continued, zooming in to the stars.
The suns hung in the holographic display like little fuzzy fireballs, the hologram detailed enough to display prominences. Next to each, assorted stellar data began to scroll by, visually tabulating into a series of graphs.
“Look at that. Temperature, mass, age, component makeup and distribution. The two are practically identical. Even the magnetic cycles are almost synced up,” remarked Karter.
“That’s why it is the Gemini Project! The stars are twins!” Lex proclaimed.
“Yes, Lex. Very good. Ma, give Lex a cookie,” Karter condescended.
“Well, is this a big deal? I mean, this isn’t a coincidence, right? How likely is it that two stars would be that similar?”
“Eh, pretty rare. One in a billion, I’d say.”
“That sounds like an awful lot more than ‘pretty rare.’”
“There are more than one hundred billion stars in the known galaxy, Lex. One in a billion isn’t that big of a deal. But, still, I’d say we’re looking at part of the big picture.”
Several minutes passed, Karter looking over the parts lists and scratching away at his pad. A robotic arm entered the room, gripping a tray with a single oatmeal cookie on it, and presented it to Lex.
“Heh, thanks, Ma,” he said, taking the cookie.
“Ma, bring up that piece of crap engineering journal that keeps rejecting my stuff. It was about two years ago, an article about large-scale quantum entanglement,” he said.
A lengthy piece of technical literature displayed on the table, loaded down with charts, equations, block diagrams, and other nerd porn. He skimmed over it, sketched a few diagrams of his own, and slapped the pad on the table.
“That’s what they’re doing. That’s what the rest of the junk is for. They are going to entangle those stars.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Look, they are practically identical, and researchers have decent experimental results that illustrate that it is possible to produce a state of quantum entanglement in two sufficiently similar objects. They are going to entangle two whole stars.”
“I still don’t know what entanglement is.”
“Jeez! Read a book!” Karter raved. “It means connected, okay? Whatever affects one affects the other. You excite one, the other one gets excited, too. Regardless of spatial separation, they get excited at the same time, in the same way. Well, technically the opposite way, and it isn’t as simple as that, but that’s the explanation that will fit into your head. The important part is that, with a few fancy measurement techniques and these arrays, they should be able to broadcast data into the star and have it radiate out of the other one, zero latency. And with effectively the entire mass of the stars composed of entangled pairs, it would be able to transmit pretty much unlimited data streams in parallel.”
“Is that enough to kill me over?”
“Well, it would certainly represent a pretty significant profit for them. Anyone with a massive amount of time-sensitive data to deliver to someone on the opposite side of the galaxy would want to use it. That is, if it wasn’t designed by idiots.”
“What do you mean?”
“They built it on the planet’s surface! Planets orbit and revolve. Unless they built it on the pole, and the pole was facing the sun--which isn’t the case on either planet--then you are looking at a transmitter that is only optimally situated to transmit a maximum of once a day. And with an axial tilt like that, more like twice a year. Plus, both planets would need to have their transmitters aligned at the same time. Ma, how often would that happen?”
“Based upon likely construction locations and orbital and revolutionary rates, optimal transmission states would exist for approximately twenty-six minutes a day for a seven week period every thirty-three years,” she answered.
“That’s ridiculous,” Lex said.
“Yes, it is. Anyone with half a brain would have made a space station or a statite. Something that would have a guaranteed clear shot at the sun. Hell, a Dyson shell or sphere is practically perfect for this.”
“Well, what is the benefit of building one on a planet?”
“Faster and cheaper. That’s about it.”
“The Operlo folks were trying to get things done fast, so time is probably the problem. Maybe they were trying to beat someone to market?”
“You’d have to purchase two whole stars in order to do this. I don’t think there’s another entity out there that could afford to even attempt it.”
Lex stared at the walls and table, now completely covered with text, figures, diagrams, equations, and other things he couldn’t make heads or tails of. Finally, inside a clump of words he couldn’t even pronounce in the journal paper, he saw one word he knew.
“Well, what about that? It says singularity. That’s a black hole, right?”
“Yes, the study says that the entanglement procedure has a small risk of halting solar output, causing a drop in internal pressure and a gravitational collapse. Pretty darn fast, too. In a matter of years, you’d have a new black hole, which is the blink of an eye in astronomical time. It’s effectively impossible to do by accident, though, because you would have to pump several orders of magnitude too much juice into the procedure.”
“Well, you said that the thing was overkill. Could it do that?”
“Ma?”
“The required output to reliably cause a gravitational collapse is approximately five percent below the maximum output of the proposed array.”
Silence remained for a few minutes.
“W-o-ow,” said Karter, finally. “Well done, VectorCorp. That’s probably the most destructive thing I’ve ever heard of. Well, second most. Hey, Ma, when’s the next transmission alignment?”
“Without accurate location data, it is difficult to give a specific date. The seven-week window could have begun as many as eleven days ago, and or as many as twenty-seven days from now,” she replied.
“So what is i
t? A weapon?”
“A hell of a good one, too. It can take out whole star systems. Not very practical, though. Judging by the dates on those shipments, they’ve been working on this for over a year. Good luck keeping that sort of thing a secret from your enemies. However . . . if they entangle the stars, then collapse them . . . Two identical, entangled stars collapsing into black holes at the same moment? With stars of that size . . .” he said, scribbling some figures. “Yep, you’d end up with a stable, navigable wormhole. A shortcut from one side of galaxy to the other. Put it up on the hologram, Ma.”
The view zoomed out to show almost the entire colonized portion of the Milky Way galaxy, which covered a wide swath of one of the arms. The two ends of the wormhole were marked.
“Look at that. That’s a game-changer right there. It would revolutionize interstellar travel,” Karter said.
“Not only that. Ma, put up the VectorCorp routes again, please,” Lex said.
At this scale, the routes were spider web-thin strands of orange, arranging themselves into denser clusters around denser star and planet clusters. The only void was a stretch of space in the center of the display.
“Now put up the Rehnquist and JPW routes.”
The void in the center filled in with yellow and blue. The two ends of the wormhole were on either side of the contested area. Lex’s eyes widened.
“They found a way to cut out the middle men--this wormhole gives them access to both sides of the galaxy without having to pay anyone else.”
“I don’t think they’d be able to completely stop using the middle for very long. The wormhole would only be wide enough to allow a medium-sized trade route. It’d get backed up in a hurry if they used it exclusively,” Karter said.
“They wouldn’t have to use it for long. JPW and Rehnquist make pretty much all of their money off of the fees VC pays them. If VC could quit for even two months, they’d go belly up, and VC could just buy them out. They’d have a complete monopoly on communication and transit,” Lex said.
“You pretty much ‘win’ business at that point. Every email, every voice message, every bank transaction, every package, anything that needs to go between planets would owe you a cut of the profits. Civilization as we know it would depend solely upon one company. And if the governments don’t like it? Oh, we just happen to have a weapon that can collapse your sun into a black hole,” Karter said. “Yeah, I’d say keeping the lid on that is good enough reason to kill some people.”
“So . . . just to recap, sometime in the next two or three weeks, VectorCorp is going to wipe out two whole star systems and set in motion a series of events that will let them, essentially, conquer the galaxy.”
“So it seems.” Karter nodded.
Once again, they sat in silence. Karter started gathering and summarizing the data and diagrams. Lex stared blankly ahead and slowly took a bite of his cookie.