Maelstrom Strand Read online

  “We’ve been gone too long,” Lyta said, shaking her head. She still stared through the bulkhead at something none of them could see. “I have a feeling we need to get back.”

  “I’m sure everything’s fine at home,” Katy said carefully, not wanting to sound patronizing.

  “We’ll find out in a few days,” Kammy said cheerfully around a mouthful of faux-tatoes. “A few days! God, I love this ship.”

  2

  Are you seeing what I’m seeing here, Doc?” Terrin Brannigan asked, a broad smile slowly spreading across his lean and normally dour face. He straightened from the readout, pointing at a sine wave displayed across the screen. “I think we can duplicate that.”

  Dr. Kovalev ran his fingers through his greying beard as he peered over Terrin’s shoulder, a tic Terrin had first noticed when he’d worked for the man as a graduate assistant two years ago.

  “Yes, I think you’re right,” the older man said, words trailing off upward as if they were a cloud wafting away from him. He paused, eyes unfocussed, and Terrin knew he was running the calculations in his head. The man was a mathematical genius, which was one reason he’d brought him into the research staff here. “If you can manage to procure a few hours with the ship you discovered…”

  “The Shakak,” Terrin reminded him. Technically, it was the Shakak II, since the first iteration had been a conventional cargo ship destroyed in a battle with a Starkad cruiser in orbit around Terminus.

  “Yes, if you can get your father to authorize some experiments with her stardrive out away from any gravity wells, I think you could use the artificial gravity field you rigged up for her to duplicate this effect.”

  Kovalev’s interest seemed purely academic, but Terrin was about to start hopping up and down with excitement. It must have been obvious because Franny noticed all the way across the lab and hurried over from her computer terminal.

  “What is it, Terry?” she asked, eyes lighting up. “Did you finalize the sequence?”

  “We sure did!” he enthused, laughing. He wanted to kiss her, but it would have been unprofessional here in the lab, surrounded by two dozen other scientists and technicians, all of them so absorbed by their own part of the project they barely spared his exclamation a glance. “I think we can do it. We can at least set up a test.”

  “Oh my God!” Franny gasped, motioning expansively, her smile nearly too large for her elfin features. She pounded him on the shoulder with her fist almost hard enough to hurt. “If you can generate enough of a gravity field, we’ll be able to manufacture exotic matter! You could duplicate the stardrive!”

  “Maybe,” he cautioned, trying to sober up and be realistic, though it was difficult. A few heads had popped up at Franny’s words and he didn’t want anyone getting too excited. “We’re just talking about small scale experiments right now. What we’d have to do is…”

  “Save it for General Constantine,” she said, holding up her wrist ‘link to show him the time. “He’s supposed to be here in a few minutes, remember?”

  “Oh, shit!” he blurted. “I totally forgot about that!”

  Kovalev laughed, nodding towards Franny’s Spartan Navy uniform.

  “You work for the military here, boy,” he reminded. “Even when you’re the Guardian’s son, you still have to justify your funding.”

  Terrin moaned under his breath, the air going out of him a little. He wanted to ask, “Why me?” but he already knew the answer. He was the son of the Guardian and he’d also spent more time researching this technology than anyone else, which was why he was in charge of the project.

  “Get going,” Franny gestured toward the door. “He’s a general and he’s your boss, you go meet him.”

  “Right, got it,” he said, nodding. He looked down at his rumpled shirt and tried in vain to smooth it into something more presentable. “Do you want to come with me?” he asked her hopefully.

  “I’m an NCO,” she reminded him, smacking him on the arm lightly. She grinned. “A Chief Petty Officer now, but still an NCO until they get around to sending me to officer’s training. They don’t send NCOs to meet generals.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Kovalev assured him. He waved at the readout. “If you need to impress him, bring him back here and I’ll explain all this to him like I used to in class to my students.”

  “I want to impress him,” Terrin told the old professor as he headed toward the exit, “not put him to sleep.”

  A chill wind blew through the door when Terrin opened it, threatening to push it back closed before he could slip out. The rush of air funneled downward from the gap in the snow-capped Bloodmark Mountains, looming over the lab facility like giants of legend, their cloud-shrouded peaks still wrapped in the talons of winter despite the spring flowers blooming in the fields of the isolated valley.

  He paused just outside the doors, entranced as always by the jagged silhouette of the mountains and the incredible isolation of the place. There were no roads to this valley, by design. Construction equipment and supplies had been flown in on military drop-ships and the only way in or out was by a VTOL jet or a shuttle. Even ducted-fan helicopters couldn’t generate enough lift to clear the tops of the mountains. Nobody happened across this place by accident.

  Why doesn’t the lab have more windows? he wondered. Probably because everyone would just stare out them and not get any work done.

  The sun was behind him, the mountains basking in the late morning glow, which was how he spotted the jet. It sparkled against the majestic backdrop, a faceted diamond low in the sky. It was less than a kilometer away before he could pick out the whine of its engines from the background roar of the wind, and by then the lines of the plane were clear. It was small, a private passenger jet, gleaming white with the slanted grey design of the Spartan military running down its fuselage and across its wings. Just the sort of thing you’d expect the Guardian’s Chief of Intelligence to have at their beck and call to visit a top-secret research lab.

  The whine turned into a screaming roar as belly jets brought the angular little aircraft down onto the paved landing pad at the center of the cluster of buildings, touching down beside the VTOL jet they kept on hand for emergencies. The utility bird seemed bulbous and dumpy by comparison, but then, no one at the base was a general. Terrin waited until the turbines had cycled down to a tolerable volume before he jogged down the stairs from the lab and headed for the pad.

  The grass was still wet from the morning dew, soaking through his comfortable, indoor shoes almost immediately. He winced, hating the feel of wet socks and knowing it would be hours until he had time to change them. Franny kept telling him he could get away with wearing a uniform since he was technically sworn into the Spartan Navy Technological Research Division, and he thought he should have at least taken her up on the combat boots. He’d worn a set of Wholesale Slaughter fatigues on the mission to Terminus, but he felt like an imposter in a Navy uniform.

  General Constantine didn’t climb out of the jet’s side door as much as unfolded, a praying mantis of a man, a head taller than Terrin. His tan uniform was spotless and perfect, as always, and the sharp edges of his face seemed to share the pressed creases of his jacket, as if the man himself were a weapon honed to a razor’s edge. He regarded Terrin with dark eyes and a hint of a smile, approaching in a long-legged stride that ate up the meters between them in seconds.

  “Good to see you again, Terrin,” Nicolai Constantine said.

  “You too, sir,” he said, shaking the man’s hand with a bit of tentativeness he hadn’t experienced back when he’d been a student and Constantine just someone his father worked with instead of his immediate superior. “How was your flight?”

  “I feel like I’m in that damn plane every day now,” Constantine lamented, waving back at the VTOL aircraft. The whine of its turbines had died down to a low hum now, the blast from the belly jets a light breeze across the grass. “I don’t think I’ve slept in my own bed in a week. I may as well be a Captain again
and running field operations from a starship. At least then I’d get to go someplace new once in a while!”

  He was walking as he complained, long, loping steps towards the main lab, and Terrin nearly had to jog to keep up.

  “But tell me, lad, have you made any progress on all this technobabble I keep reading reports about?” Constantine went on. “I swear to whatever god is fashionable this year, between you and your wayward brother, you’re going to bankrupt the whole damned Guardianship!”

  “Actually, we have,” Terrin said, trying not to gasp the words—he was out of breath already from trying to match Constantine’s pace. They were already at the stairs and the general took them two at a time. “We just figured out…well, I think we’ve figured out a way we might be able to duplicate the stardrive.”

  Constantine stopped in his tracks halfway up the steps and faced Terrin with a look he could only describe as a starving wolf staring at a wounded deer.

  “There’s an awful lot of weasel-words in that statement, boy. What do you think you might have figured out?”

  “Come in and I’ll show you,” Terrin urged him, pulling open the door to the lab.

  “Officer on deck!” The bellow was so loud and echoing, it took Terrin a moment to realize it was Franny who’d yelled the warning. He blinked, not believing that much sound could come from the skinny, waifish woman. She was braced at attention, as were the other Spartan Navy technicians in the lab, while the civilian scientists seemed to hover uncertainly over their seats, unsure whether they should stand or not.

  “At ease, at ease,” Constantine waved at them, clucking with impatience. “I don’t have time for that shit. Show me this think-might-maybe stuff before I yank your funding and send everyone home with no supper.”

  Terrin knew the man was kidding—if for no other reason than his father would have something to say on the matter—but he still hurried over to the monitor where the computer simulation had been running.

  “It’s right here.” He waved Constantine over. “You see this gravimetic scale in the frequency of the gravitons coming off the…”

  “Son,” Constantine interrupted, raising a hand to stop him, “if I’ve done or said anything to make you think I’ve ever taken any hyperspatial physics classes, I apologize.”

  “Oh, uh…,” Terrin stuttered until Dr. Kovalev stepped up and rescued him.

  “General,” he said, “you are aware of the principles upon which the Alanson-McCleary stardrive is based? The idea that rather than moving the ship through spacetime, it contracts spacetime ahead of the ship and expands it behind?”

  “I’ve heard the explanation,” Constantine agreed. “That doesn’t mean I understand how it does that.”

  “To generate the gravimetic fields necessary for the drive to work, you need exotic matter, material with negative energy density. The only places to get such material are inconvenient to reach.”

  “Inconvenient?” Constantine raised an eyebrow.

  “The inside of a neutron star, for example,” Kovalev explained, grinning now. Terrin remembered the look from when he’d really gotten started on a subject in his graduate classes. “They require massive gravity fields. But the young Mr. Brannigan here has recently come up with a way to achieve that without the necessity of tracking down a neutron star.”

  “I read about that!” Constantine exclaimed, snapping his fingers in realization. “You worked out a way to make artificial gravity on the Shakak!”

  “And we can use the same method,” Terrin said, nodding, “to generate the conditions to manufacture exotic matter. We just need some time with the Shakak at the secret proving grounds out away from any planets.”

  Constantine snorted a humorless laugh.

  “Well, you’ll need to talk to your brother about that, but I think he’d be willing to let you borrow her for a while, as long as this won’t damage the ship…”

  “It shouldn’t,” he assured the general. “I mean,” he dithered, “there’s always a slight chance…”

  “Oh, sweet Lord,” Constantine sighed, rubbing at his eyes. “You really need to learn how to sell a proposal. Look, just put everything in writing and send it to me. When Logan gets back, we’ll run it by him together and set something up.”

  “This still won’t go FTL,” Terrin reminded him. “We know how to make antimatter, but it would just be unrealistically, impractically expensive.”

  “Even a couple more ships with that drive and the defense shield it provides could turn the tide in any future conflict,” Constantine said, the grin on his face as if the starving wolf had gotten his deer.

  He seemed about to say something else when his ‘link chimed on his wrist and he checked the notification.

  “Damn,” he murmured. “Have to take this. Excuse me.”

  Terrin let out a breath as the general stepped away and Franny put a supportive hand on his shoulder, grinning triumphantly.

  “I knew you could do it,” she whispered.

  If Constantine noticed the interplay, he didn’t comment, just said something Terrin couldn’t hear into the pickup of his ‘link, then hit the button to disconnect it before coming back over to them.

  “I’m afraid I have to take off,” Constantine told them. “Something unscheduled popped up. Tell your cooks I apologize if they’d already fixed up a special lunch.” His smile had a wry twist. “Be sure to enjoy it without me.” He waved, heading for the exit.

  Terrin started to head after him, feeling like he should walk him back to the plane, but Constantine stopped him with an upraised hand.

  “Stay,” he insisted. “I’ll see myself out. And get some sensible shoes, boy, it’s wet out there.”

  And then he was out the door, leaving Terrin between one step and the other, mouth open.

  “That was easy,” he said.

  “Selling the idea was easy,” Kovalev corrected him. “Now let’s figure out how to actually do it.”

  Nicolai Constantine didn’t like surprises. The greater part of his job for the last twenty years had been to avoid them. He wasn’t sure if it had been a personality trait uniquely suiting him to the position or whether the position had shaped him into the man he was, but it carried over from professional to personal.

  Which is likely why I haven’t remarried.

  “We’re almost there, sir,” his pilot called back from the cockpit with all the equanimity of a woman who loved flying and didn’t give a damn about any inconvenience to his schedule this detour might be.

  Would that my job were so uncomplicated.

  The sun was bright over the Bloodmarks now and he guessed it was nearly noon, but didn’t bother to check his ‘link to confirm it. Wesley Martens was a friend and he had few enough of those. He could spare the man however long he needed.

  A rich friend, he amended.

  The mountain estate was proof of that. Wesley Martens had inherited it from a line of Martens going back to the days of the Empire, a proud lineage until recently. It was large enough to be considered a mansion, though he’d never heard the man refer to it as such. Wesley kept no servants despite the size of the place, depending on cleaning robots, automated kitchen machinery, and mostly on the fact he rarely brought anyone out here. The place had intrigued Contantine nearly as much as the man when he’d received the message.

  A single gravel track stretched down from the hillside estate, winding for kilometers in switchbacks until it reached a main road. Constantine doubted anyone ever used the road, or had since the place had been built. Wesley didn’t want people out here. It was his refuge, a retreat from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

  “Set down next to his flyer,” Constantine told the pilot, gesturing to a flat area at the back of the sprawling, single-story structure.

  The rear seemed less pretentious than the front, as if the Corinthian columns and statuary were for casual passers-by even where they wouldn’t be any. In the back, the doors were smaller and more personal, the only decorat
ion some well-tended rose bushes.

  Some architectural comment on the duality of human nature? Or maybe his great-great-grandparents just ran out of money before the house was finished?

  Wesley was already standing out there, waiting for him. He was dressed casually in the sort of clothes rich people wore when they wanted to look normal. They never quite pulled it off, in his experience. There was always an air of being too clean, too well-groomed for them to pass. Wesley covered his face with his hand to shield his eyes from the clouds of dust the jet kicked up as it landed. Constantine wondered if it made him a bad person for enjoying the feeling it gave him to see people come to meet him when he arrived, to see them guarding their eyes.

  I should probably see an analyst about that, when I get the time. It was a joke with himself; he’d never have the time. He hadn’t had time for a wife, a family, friends, hobbies…and he certainly had no time for therapy.

  The jet’s fuselage sank into the suspension of the landing gear, rising slowly a few centimeters before finally settling down. Normally, Constantine would have been out of his seat already, but he stayed motionless until the turbines began their mewling, petulant decline from a roar to a whine. He was almost reluctant to cut loose his safety restraints, knowing whatever his old friend wanted from him, it likely wouldn’t be easy or pleasant. Easy, pleasant favors didn’t require last-minute urgent requests to meet in private in the middle of nowhere.

  “Nicolai!” Wesley bellowed with all the bombast Constantine remembered from twenty years ago. His arms were spread wide, giving him the look of a grizzly standing on its hind legs, challenging a rival, but Constantine knew it was all for show. The man was soft and the hug he gave was warm and welcoming. “You haven’t changed a bit!”

  “I must have looked like shit then, too,” Constantine said. “You look old as the hills, my friend.”