Felix Fletcher was on edge. This was not unusual, but his current anxiety was several standard deviations above the norm. Several factors were responsible.
First, he was on a collision course with the largest man-made object ever built. Second was the situation that had hurtled Felix away from Earth in the middle of dinner. A yank inbound from a two-decade-long resupply trip to Proxima Centauri had blown two of its gravity projectors spooling up to decelerate. Slowing it down was going to be, well … an optimist would say interesting, challenging, exciting, even. But since Felix’s nerves resembled a loose bundle of stripped, live wires, he had a different set of adjectives.
Born in New Detroit, Luna, Felix spent his childhood in the moon’s half-hearted gravity. Among Lunies, he was average height and solidly built, which meant among children of Earth, he was tall, gangly, and an unhealthy pallid color. Nature had boosted his mental-lifting capacity attempting to compensate. However, as any owner of a high-performance noggin could tell you, it just added another layer of social awkwardness.
Despite these setbacks, Felix had not turned into a basement-dwelling recluse. His talents for mathematics and constant tinkering had landed him in an exceptional graduate engineering program, and he was considered something of a prodigy inside the gravity propulsion community. Today, his abilities would be put to the test, as he’d been asked to troubleshoot the stricken yank while it hurtled through the Sol system at 40 percent light speed.
Directly ahead, and growing ominously in his field of vision, was the Unicycle, a circular particle accelerator five thousand kilometers in circumference. It was built in orbit at the L1 Lagrange point, one of the points in space where the game of tug-of-war between sun and Earth played to a draw. The sunward side was a ring of solar panels five kilometers across, powering the station and providing shade to keep the superconducting electromagnetic coils at a crisp and efficient three degrees above zero. Not the balmy zero on Earth, where thermometers are given a minus range so Northerners can puff out their chests about how tough the winters are. The real, absolute zero, which doesn’t have negatives because there’s nowhere else to go.
The array had a surface area of 24,920 square kilometers. With solar energy density at L1 of two kilowatts per square meter and 65 percent panel conversion efficiency, the Unicycle had 32.4 terawatts of electricity on tap. Or, if you like, the combined power output of forty-five billion horses, without the grain requirements or stables to muck.
It was a successor to the Really Large Hadron Collider in response to the failure of the Second (We Think That’s Got it) Theory of Everything. The few physicists brave and/or delusional enough to tackle the Third (Fine, You Do it, Then) Theory of Everything ran their experiments inside. The array could also beam power to yanks on their way out of the system, and again on the way back in, greatly reducing the reactor mass they needed to carry.
It was built by a French consortium whose institutional experience spanned centuries, all the way back to the original LHC. The drawbacks to the French team were that the Unicycle only worked thirty hours per week and frequently started smoking.
“Excuse me, but are we going to start decelerating soon?” Felix squeaked to the pilot.
“We don’t start our reverse for another fifteen minutes, Mr. Fletcher,” the pilot responded curtly.
“Oh, okay. It’s just that it looks awfully big. You have a lovely shuttle here. Very posh. I’d hate to see anything happen to it, or any of the passengers. Or crew, mind you.”
“Yes, sir, but it looks big because, frankly, it is big.”
“Right, then. I’ll just, um, leave you to avoiding collisions, and other important piloting duties.” He returned to his seat and his fidgeting. It wasn’t that he disliked space travel. The empty space wasn’t the part of the trip that worried him.
Felix glanced up from his duty-free catalog and saw the “Fasten Harness” light flick on overhead, accompanied by a three-minute countdown. This wasn’t the gentle suggestion it would be on a terrestrial airline flight, mainly because the crew didn’t want to clean up the mess if one of their passengers hit a bulkhead at five g’s of deceleration. Nor was the harness a simple lap belt, but a web of thick straps and industrial-strength buckles strong enough to tie down a shipping container. At least they didn’t waste time dithering about with safety lectures. Few people held illusions about the survival prospects of a space accident.
He got himself situated with thirty seconds to spare; just enough time to finish his drink before the shuttle flipped like a coin and the pilot pushed the throttle through the windshield. He let out a chirp as the harness did its best to squeeze his internal organs out through his nose. While the other passengers suffered under five times Earth gravity, he was subjected to thirty times moon gravity.
The beating continued for almost ten minutes before the pilot returned the throttles to neutral and Felix returned to weightlessness. By that time, the portals were totally filled by the Unicycle.
They drifted close enough to make out a few of the thin spokes that gave the facility its informal name. These spokes contained transfer tubes and power relays and connected to the docking hub and control center located in the center of the ring. Retro rockets fired. Once the shuttle had a solid lock with the Unicycle, Felix poured himself into the aisle and sloshed his way to the exit door, pretty sure he’d broken a rib or six.
After many flights into space, he’d learned not to check a bag. Anything security didn’t confiscate became subject to a sorting system seemingly governed by a roulette wheel. Some statisticians claimed just randomly grabbing a bag from a different flight increased your odds of getting the right set of luggage.
Felix made his way to the check-in desk. Within an hour, he sat with over a dozen scientists and engineers doing their level best to make the crowded conference room look like an unsupervised day care. Data pads and holos displaying diagnostic results and course projections lay strewn about like discarded toys. Shouts and hand gestures from several continents permeated the air while the countdown clock wound its way toward zero.
Felix pecked away on a tablet and sat quietly in a forgotten corner, cross-checking his own projections against the simulations being run by the facility’s Space Traffic Control computer. Math was his marble; tangents, cosigns, and vectors were his chisels and hammers. While the rest of the room argued over why their plans wouldn’t work, he tried to find one that would.
Eventually, there was a lull in the battle while the parties regrouped and retrenched. Felix used the pause to spring his surprise attack.
“I think I have a solution,” he proclaimed, rather meekly.
The announcement struck the collected scientists like a falling leaf. One of the older men broke away from the maelstrom and gave Felix a sideways glance.
“Did you say something, my boy?” Felix recognized him as Dr. Shuler of Cambridge.
“I said, I think I’ve hit on a solution.”
Shuler chuckled. “Well, son, it’s one thing to hit on a solution, but quite another to take it home.”
Felix’s eyes narrowed, and he tried to stare daggers at the man. He managed butter knives. “I’m cooking it breakfast.”
The rest of the heads in the room turned to evaluate the new challenger. Several of them licked their lips.
“All right, then. Step right up, my boy, and let’s hear all about this well-fed solution.” Dr. Shuler swept his hand wide in a mocking invitation to the table.
Felix stepped up and linked his tablet to the holo-projector at the center of the table. Numbers and schematics danced in the air before him.
“Now, as we all know, the Conestoga’s down two gravity generators, cause unknown. Normally, we’d shut down the modules opposing the failed units to bring the system back into balance, but because the crew ran their diagnostic tests late, the failure was caught late. So now we can’t afford to lose two more modules if we want to stop the ship in time.”
This was a heavily censored version of what the rest of the room had yelled back and forth for the last hour.
“Since we can’t shut down any additional modules, I’ve worked out a program that will redistribute power, reducing it to the modules opposing the burned-out ones, while increasing it to the adjoining ones to compensate.”
“That’s great, but you’ll end up with the same power levels as if you were missing four units.” The objection came from a thin, hawkish-looking, middle-aged man.
“Not really, because my program bypasses the safety limiters and gooses three of the modules to 135 percent.”
This was met by three gasps, two chuckles, and one blank stare.
The hawk swooped in to pounce. “That’s crazy, kid. You’re begging for them to fuse just like the others. Engineers don’t pick a spot to call 100 percent capacity out of a hat, you know!”
Felix absorbed the man’s patronizing tone and let it fuel him. This was his territory, and he was going to defend it. He looked straight at him, hard enough for the man to avert his gaze.
“Yes, that’s true. As it turns out, I do know a thing or two about engineering. I spent two days in a shuttle getting here, which left me with time to read the technical literature of the Mk 7a Gravity Projector Module. All of it.” He paused. “In military applications, it has been rated for 125 percent emergency output for up to sixteen hours.”
“That’s the military version; this is a civilian transport,” interrupted another scientist with an air of finality. “Those ratings don’t apply to our modules.”
“The only significant difference between the military and civilian models is the amount of shielding on the outer casings. The internal components are virtually identical. The ratings remain valid.” Felix rolled right over the objection and pressed forward.
“So we’re only going past their proven capacity by another 10 percent, and I think we can mitigate the risk of failure further if we divert the coolant flow from the fused units to the ones we’re running harder. It should be a simple matter for the ship’s engineers to reroute the plumbing.”
A sturdy-looking man with rough hands stood to face him. “That’s easy to say when you’re not the one trying to hold a pipe wrench through a vac suit glove.”
“If you can think of a way to get me out there in time, I’ll do it myself.” Felix held his ground.
The mechanic didn’t relent. “Just who the hell do you think you—”
A throat cleared. The assembled scientists, engineers, and administrators turned to face the sound, which had come from a small woman with silver-streaked auburn hair sitting at the head of the table. Where the director sat.
“I think we all agree that M’sieur Fletcher’s proposal is crazy, oui?” asked Renée Lemieux.
She was met with nods and a guffaw from around the room. They began to resume their bickering.
“Quiet.” Her tone changed from light to reproachful. “For the last hour, you’ve all argued over very safe plans that can’t work. M’sieur Fletcher has proposed a very risky plan that might.” She let the words echo in their heads for a moment. “So if a better idea hasn’t presented itself in ten minutes, we move on Fletcher’s plan.”
The advantage of having no reputation is you can bet it all and still not be out much if things go badly. The wager worked out for Felix.
* * *
Felix watched from the huge bay windows of the Unicycle’s Space Traffic Control module with several other people from the conference room. The Conestoga was still light-hours away. The only things to see were pinpricks of light, the last surviving photons of the long march from their parent stars.
Felix reflected on the millennia-long odyssey those ancient rays of light had undergone just to bounce off the back of a naked ape’s eye. It hardly seemed worth the investment in time and energy, but it was the only reason humans knew anything about their cosmos. Light speed was the great-grandmother of all speed limits. It stood on the side of the road connecting every star. It loomed over all matter and energy and demanded absolute compliance. To Felix’s mind, a just universe would contain a way around Einstein’s tyranny.
A siren derailed Felix’s train of thought, and he was back in the STC module. Technicians swarmed about, preparing to warm up the Unicycle’s particle accelerator and point it downrange. If one knew where to look, one could see tiny ripples in the starlight, like looking through an old center-spun window where gravitational lenses projected into space from the facility’s own generators would focus and aim the indescribably powerful particle beam the Unicycle was about to produce.
After decades in space, the Conestoga had burned through almost all of its deuterium fuel. Like all interstellar yanks, a receiving dish was fitted to its aft designed to catch energy beamed by the Unicycle, which served as the ship’s power source inside the solar system. If everything went to plan, the Conestoga’s crew was already busy playing plumber with the ship’s coolant system. The beam would fire in a few minutes. The crew had just enough time to finish the modifications for the beam’s arrival … in thirteen hours.
The clock reached zero. Behind Felix, Ms. Lemieux pressed a holographic toggle in the shape of a huge red button outlined in yellow and black stripes. The lights overhead flickered and dimmed for a brief time.
That was it. There was no deafening BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. No retina-melting light poured through the view ports. The only evidence anything happened at all was a very slight shimmer around the edges of the gravitational lenses as a few rogue particles were kicked clear of the stream. They looked like tiny aurora borealis. Boreali? Considering he was witnessing the most powerful machine ever built, Felix felt the whole experience was anticlimactic.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Director Lemieux asked, taking position next to him.
“I’m sorry. A what?” Felix could hardly be blamed for this naïveté. The penny had been dropped from U.S. currency more than two centuries ago. But they kept turning up.
“Of course, you are too young. It means, what are you thinking about?”
“Oh, right. Um, I guess I’m thinking about anything except what’s going to happen in thirteen hours, if I’m honest.”
“Ahh. Nervous about your plan, oui?”
“No. About the crew.” Felix ran his fingers through his hair. “The mechanic in our meeting was right about one thing. It is easy when you’re not the one taking the risks. Right now, they’re hanging off of a bit of scaffolding with wrenches and plasma cutters, because they believe my plan will save their lives.”
There was silence for several long seconds. Lemieux spoke again.
“You are wrong, M’sieur Fletcher, at least twice.” Her tone was gentle. “First, they are hanging out there because I recommended it to M’sieur Graham, who, as head of the AESA, ordered them to do so. And, second, you have also taken a risk, maybe a big one, no?”
“I don’t see how.” Felix shrugged.
“You risk your plan will not work and people will die.”
“Yes, but they would also die if we did nothing. All our other yanks are light-years away from here. We wouldn’t be able to catch them before they ran out of power entirely.”
“Granted, but that’s not how headlines are written. Instead, they say things like, RESCUE PLAN FAILS, WITH FATAL RESULTS. It’s not fair, but it’s true.” The Frenchwoman made a sympathetic gesture with upturned palms. “But maybe the even bigger risk is for your plan to work.”
This wasn’t what Felix had expected. He looked positively incredulous. “How’s that now?”
“I mean to you personally, of course. Do you really think you were the only one in the room to consider running the modules hot?” Lemieux stared straight into the younger man. “No, I’m sure it had occurred to at least three, maybe four of the others.”
Felix looked like a raccoon in headlights. “Well, then, why didn’t they speak up? The rest of the plans were garbage. It was the only thing that had any chance of working.”
“Ah, but the rest of the plans were safe.”
“Safe for who?”
“For them, of course. No one else spoke up because they didn’t want to take on the responsibility. They have interests to protect, some political, others professional. They don’t want to risk damaging their careers.”
“I don’t care about that; I just want to do the job and give the Conestoga the best odds possible.”
“I know. You have that luxury because you don’t have any position to defend. That’s why I asked for you to come out here. The rest of them are pigeonholed by success. So you see, if your plan succeeds, you risk revealing them to be cowards. Even if you’re right, you will probably make enemies today.”
She still spoke gently, staring deeply into the abyss on the other side of the glass. “Not to worry, I will not be among them.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Felix said sarcastically.
“I take it these factors did not weigh on your mind when you decided to speak up?”
“I didn’t even know they were factors. I thought professionals valued results.”
“Of course they value results, so long as they can take credit for them.” Her face was contorted as bitterness and humor fought for supremacy. Renée looked at Felix again. “Let me ask you something. If we’d had this talk before the meeting, would you have acted differently?”
“No.” Felix didn’t hesitate. “I guess I have different priorities.”
Renée gave Felix a knowing smile. “I thought not. But don’t be so quick to judge them. You may find your priorities drifting when you have the big office and a dozen subordinates clawing to drag you from it. You would be surprised how many of history’s great men can thank petty rivalries and office politics for their success.” She turned back toward the room and patted Felix on the shoulder. “But don’t be too concerned yet. You could still get lucky. After all, your plan might fail.”
“Gee, thanks.”
With that, the Frenchwoman walked away. Felix felt as though he’d survived a rather convivial scolding. He was left with the competing desires to either speed up or indefinitely delay the next thirteen hours. But time was busy keeping everything from happening all at once, and took no notice. His eyes drifted back to the stars.
* * *
Some twenty hours later, while the Conestoga and her crew bled off velocity like accumulated pounds before a class reunion, Renée Lemieux snuck away from the Space Traffic Control center and headed down to the Unicycle’s QER room.
Renée switched on a holographic keyboard, entered Professor Eugene Graham’s private email address, and typed a short message in the air.
He’s the one you want.
The director hit Send, smiled to herself, and turned off the machine.