Boundary 2: Threshold (16 page)

Fitzgerald nodded. "I'll be the soul of courtesy, I promise. We don't want to give her any excuses, you're bloody right on that. And I think I'll keep most of my men well out of the way up here. Some of them aren't the best at keeping their mouths shut, at least around someone like her."

"That's probably a good idea. Thank you." He watched his security chief exit. And felt his misgivings intensify the moment the door closed and Fitzgerald was out of sight.

"So, how much power are we talking about here?" Jackie leaned forward, studying the modifications which reflected the wide-flung rings that had been visible behind
Odin
when the huge E.U. vessel was approaching. "Accelerating a ten-thousand-ton vessel at a hundredth of a g is a million newtons. That's not so much. But I know that building the driver for the mass-beam was a major effort, and it uses a lot more than that."

Horst Eberhart smiled. "You know the NERVA drive well, and some others, but I'm guessing not so much the mass-beam?"

She glanced at him sharply, but then saw that the smile was a purely friendly one, the smile of one engineer to another, saying:
I've got some cool stuff to show you!
It was not at all sarcastic or derisive.

And that's what he's here for,
she reminded herself. Whatever cloak-and-dagger might be going on, here at least they could be straightforward.
And that's a really, really nice smile.
"No, I didn't study anything on mass-beams except the basic concept—throw stuff from way over here to hit something there, to push it on its way."

"Yes, that's the basic idea. But as you say, the devil is in the details. That million newtons is what has to actually be
delivered
to the ship."

"Inefficiency in the driver makes that larger in actual cost?"

He shook his head.

Jackie frowned. "No, I'm missing a fundamental issue, and I know I'm going to kick myself when you tell me."

"Probably. I did." He activated a little animation showing a simplified mass-beam driver and a cartoon ship. The driver threw little balls at the ship and bounced them off a plate on the ship's base. "See, I throw the mass at the ship, it bounces off, ship moves forward. Keeps moving forward. Then I have to throw next mass, but ship is moving faster now. The best momentum transfer is when the speed of the mass is about twice the speed of the ship, so to make the best transfer throw my mass must be a little faster this time—"

Jackie smacked herself on the forehead. "Of course! When you start the ship going, you only have to accelerate the particles to twenty centimeters per second, but by the time you hit thirty kilometers a second you need to be throwing them at
sixty
kilometers a second. Basically since you're using them as the ship's fuel, you have to do what the ship would have done if it was carrying them along—spend the energy to first accelerate the fuel to your speed,
then
give it that extra oomph for the hundredth-g. So that means that you're using . . ." She did some quick calculations. "Wow! I get over a hundred gigawatts constant?"

"You
are
good," Horst said, his tone very respectful. "You picked up on the whole thing much faster than I did. I can't tell you the exact numbers for our assembly, because that's restricted information. Which is silly, in my opinion, since if we push
Odin
to the limit, you will know the numbers anyway."

"So, you could actually get a little more acceleration speed out of it to begin with by cranking up the wattage, though it'd be less efficient."

"Not much point, though. Constant acceleration builds up quickly enough. Good for launching things and getting them out of the way, I suppose."

"How exactly do you stop, though? It's like a solar sail that way."

He shook his head. "Not quite, Ms. Secord."

"Please, call me Jackie."

He flashed a white-toothed grin. "And please call me Horst. The idea is to build many collectors and accelerators and put them around the solar system, eventually. But if you know where you are going, you can send some slow stuff ahead of you. Catch as much of the regular beam as you can to store for fuel, use that, then—"

Jackie laughed. "Oh, that's clever! You can either bounce the particles off, or catch them as fuel. So after you empty your tanks on the first decel, you start slowing down using the slower cloud of stuff sent before you left. That refills your tanks, so you can do
another
stop burn, after already doing one and having the slow cloud slow you up more. Hmmm . . . and the slow cloud can be more concentrated—massive—because you have the energy to send the stuff faster. So you send more stuff slower. There'd be a lot of fancy tradeoffs, but I can see that would work nicely. How do you keep the beam focused, though? At a few hundred million miles I'd think it would be, well, a
lot
of kilometers across."

"I thought that, too. But look, here is an image of one of the fuel particles."

The image that popped up was surprisingly recognizable. "Faerie Dust? You're sending tons of Faerie Dust?"

"Faerie . . . ? Oh, yes, Mr. Baker's nickname for it. Not nearly so complex. It has to be simple. Tons of fancily designed material would be expensive, and you need many, many tons. There is a special plant dedicated to the whole operation. Very simple overall design, with just enough capability to home on target signal."

"Signal? Oh, I see. You use something like a laser pointed toward the driver, and the particles use that as a homing beacon—they can use sunlight and the solar wind to steer themselves toward you. Very nice. And they'll really concentrate down this far?" She indicated the large ring designs, which extended to a maximum diameter of about four times
Nobel
's habitat ring, or somewhat over a kilometer across.

"Yes. Not a problem. The swarm of particles tries to stay concentrated. Uses very little power and only needs small corrections every few hours."

Jackie studied some of the parameters. "It's still going to be expensive. I find it hard to believe so much has happened that makes all this possible."

"A few years makes a big difference. You left Mars two years ago for Ceres."

"God. It really has been that long." She shook her head. "If they're making superconductor cable that large, it'll be a great investment. Right now I guess your accelerator must spend a lot of time idle, so if other people were paying you for it that would defray costs."

He shrugged, something very noticeable with his wide shoulders. He seemed far more athletic than the average engineer. That piqued Jackie's interest, which had already been aroused. She was quite athletic herself and always had been.

"The money side of it doesn't interest me," he said, "but I would guess so. Do you want to go over installation details?"

"No, not right now, Horst. I know more than enough now to be able to inform Dr. Glendale and let him know that I think it'd be a great idea. Until I find out whether we're going for it, details would just be more of a tease than anything else. Besides, we've been at this for five hours."

He blinked. "Really that long?"

"Check for yourself." An impulse came to her, which she began to stifle from automatic reflex. Then . . . 

Well, why not?

"We could quit for the day.
Nobel
just finished downloading our copies of the new films you brought with you. Would you like to watch one with me?"

She bestowed her own white-toothed grin on him. Which, she knew, was quite a gleaming affair, especially against her complexion. Her mother had been Indian in her ancestry—American Indian, mostly Choctaw. Judging from the evidence, at least some of that ancestry had been of African origin, too, although that showed in her dark skin, not her features.

Horst Eberhart's eyes widened, and for a minute she thought he'd refuse. But then she realized his hesitation was simply the natural shyness of someone who, like herself, was normally cautious in personal relations. She thought of it as the Cursed Wallflower Syndrome.

"Well . . . yes," he said. "I would enjoy that very much."

She shut down the engineering station and floated up, grabbing his arm. "Then let's be off." She felt a delicious pang of self-conscious worry and anticipation she hadn't felt in years.

"I swear, these guys were animated by the Japanese," A.J. growled to himself. "
Hentai
Japanese animators. Everywhere I go in this ship's design, I find tentacles."

"That's your dirty mind reading into things. Just because the control cables are long, slender, flexible things that extend outward from the—"

"Bah, Joe. I say again, bah. Just don't blame me if Bad Things happen to our female crewmembers if we get any on board." A.J.'s real annoyance, he had to admit, was due to the sheer volume of superconducting material he kept finding—to a great extent in the apparently extendable field-control and shaping units that lay coiled and quiescent in the alien vessel's hull. Dust-Storm's best new Faerie Dust had performed magnificently, but the job was far bigger than he'd ever imagined, and they had had to ask for a number of additional supplies since. Even the highest technology couldn't fix the superconducting cable if all the materials weren't there to fix it.

"And," he muttered, "we're gonna need a buttload of power to run this thing, even if we get her working."

"If?" Reynolds' voice responded from somewhere inside the ship. "You know, that doesn't sound at all like you, A.J. Since when did you start doubting we could do anything?"

"He's in a bad mood because he met Jackie's new boyfriend last night."

"Joe," A.J. said calmly, "remind me to kill you after the shift."

"Jackie has a boyfriend?"

"Horst Eberhart," Joe answered, ignoring A.J.'s threat of mayhem. "One of the
Odin
's crew members,"

"You'd better not say
that
in front of Jackie, or
she
's likely to kill you," A.J. pointed out. Then he added: "Jackie's insisting they're 'just friends,' Ren. Which is probably true, technically speaking, given that the cramped conditions we're living in make going beyond 'just friends' pretty tricky. My guess, though, is that Jackie would be quite happy to see that status change before too long. So would Horst."

"What do think of him?" Ren asked.

"Seems like a nice guy. He's smart, that's for sure."

Ren's puzzlement was clear over the link. "But then, A.J., I don't understand why you aren't in a good mood. You aren't jealous, are you?"

"It's
Joe
saying I'm in a bad mood!"

"Well, you are. I heard you cursing at your sensors not long ago."

"I'm certainly not jealous." A slight pang of guilt. "Well, no more than I am of any other pretty girl I know well."

"
Any
other pretty girl? I really must warn Helen of your approaching midlife crisis."

"Killed after the shift, Joe! Remember that!"

"Mars couldn't do that—what makes you think you can?"

A.J. tried to glare at him, but couldn't really keep it up. He sighed. "I guess it's because I like him, Ren."

There was a slight silence. "You
do
know that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, A.J."

He sighed and rolled his eyes, putting down the imaging probe he had been using. "Maybe not. But that's the truth."

He wasn't even sure he could explain it to Joe. Not without sounding silly, petty, childish, or all three. Helen might understand.

The Bakers had invited Jackie and Horst to have dinner and visit with them the prior evening. A.J. had been ready to be suspicious and to even put the fear of God—or A.J. Baker—into Horst if necessary. Instead, just the way the tall, muscular, handsome Eberhart entered, a little bit behind Jackie with a friendly but almost apologetic look on his face, put A.J. off his stride. That was the look of a man meeting his date's parents and worried he might not make a good impression. Given that Jackie was only a little younger than he was, that seemed pretty funny. Of course, Helen was older than Jackie—not that she looked it much—and her real parents were hundreds of millions of miles off, so maybe it made sense. Sort of.

Then, during dinner—Joe Dinners, of course—Horst had responded quite openly to any questions they had. He didn't seem to much like the security chief on board
Odin
, but other than that he just admitted straight out he was supposed to watch for useful stuff but mostly just work with them. Which was only fair, A.J. supposed. The E.U. had to be going nuts trying to find a way to get what they'd see as their fair share.

Horst was also very impressed by A.J., which made it even harder to be hostile to him. When a man's telling you how much he admires your work, it's awfully difficult to maintain the right level of paranoia and suspicion.

So Horst had talked. And they'd watched a movie, and talked some more, played some four-way Trivia, and somewhere in there A.J. had realized that he really did like Horst Eberhart . . . 

Partly, he supposed, that was because Eberhart was like him. Except he was several years younger, taller, probably more athletic and certainly better looking. And apparently without A.J.'s ego problem. In his entire life, A.J. couldn't ever remember meeting someone who made him feel like he could fade into the background. Eberhart was like . . . like Glendale. Without knowing it, and that made it worse.

A.J. rolled his eyes, grumbled another curse, and cut off outside communication except for emergencies. "Fine, so I really
am
starting to feel kinda old. Stupid. And anyway, as long as he cares about Jackie, assuming something gets rolling there, that's really what matters."

He began to direct the work of a new batch of Faerie Dust motes along the next section. "Helen was right—time for me to stop acting like the brainy kid genius and instead just be who I am. And that's a guy who's got a hell of a lot going for him—not the least of it being that he's married to Helen." He grinned. "And there's one thing Horst can't compete with!"

"What exactly is bothering you, Mr. Fitzgerald?"