“Does he know about the situation we have here?”
“Ah, no. They’re way behind the information cycle,” the commander said with a large grin. “The local government on Santa Maria was none too happy with the gift you sent them. They passed a resolution that I should tell you to come back. And they sent off a fast courier to Wardhaven to get the king to support them.”
“And?” Kris said, when her subordinate wasn’t immediately forthcoming with what happened next.
“These supply ships were already in orbit with orders to join you at the earliest opportunity. So, being a harebrained young officer with way too much initiative, I grabbed them and ran.”
“I think I’m glad to see you,” Kris said.
“Oh, you’re glad to see me. You don’t know how glad you are to see me.”
“Tell me why I am more glad to see you than I realize,” Kris said cautiously.
“Did you recently broach the subject with your grampa as to why the Iteeche War was not fought with nukes?”
“I did. Why?”
“Because three of these merchant ships following me have Marine guards locking down a special weapons magazine.”
“Nukes?” Kris said.
“Nope, something better. You know what a neutron star is, don’t you?”
“I think so,” Kris said.
“Well, your grampa, our king, has sent you a couple of neutron torpedoes.”
“What?”
“I’ll explain it when I can report to the Wasp. Better yet, I’ll bring along a scientist who can explain it all better than I can.”
“I hope you will,” Kris said.
19
Kris didn’t invite the admirals over, but their barges showed up right behind the gig that brought Commander Taussig aboard the Wasp. She invited Taussig and the woman who accompanied him to her Tac Center and had the admirals directed toward the refurbished Forward Lounge.
“Is anyone refusing to go to the lounge?” Kris asked Nelly.
“No. But they brought a lot fewer people. And all three of them have their own security details. They’re patting down each other and doing a first-class security sweep of the place.”
Kris could only chuckle at the visual that brought to mind. “Have Gunny Brown post a security detail at the hatch of the Forward Lounge. Also have Chief Beni join them and do a security sweep to his own high standards,” she told Nelly, as Jack looked on approvingly.
“I already suggested that to the chief. He likes to have a drink or two in the lounge after work. He wasn’t very happy while it was out of commission. He’s already got three senior Marines helping him make sure their watering hole does not end up in the body and fender shop again.”
“Good,” Kris said with the first real laugh she’d had in a long while.
Kris found her usual team had filed into her Tac Center as she and Nelly talked. It was not unusual for Professor mFumbo to absent himself half the time when she called. Science has its own schedule, he was quick to point out. Today, he sat eagerly in his place at the foot of the table.
Captain Drago was also there.
Kris let everyone settle in, then asked, “So, what is this gift my great-grandfather has sent our way? A neutron torpedo?”
“I’ll leave it to the doctor to explain the contraption,” Lieutenant Commander Phil Taussig said. “All your grandfather asks is that you not start a war with the dang contraption ‘if she could avoid it.’ His words, not mine.”
“It is not a dang contraption,” the young woman said, standing. “I am Nikki Mulroney. Some of you might have heard the story of my grandmother, Your Highness. She found the ‘vanishing box’ on Santa Maria that your great-grandfather, King Raymond, used in the war between humanity and the Control Computer there, eighty years ago.”
“So it really happened,” Penny said.
“Oh yes. It has been allowed to become little more than a legend, but my grandmother pointed the box at mountains and made them vanish.”
“And you have the vanishing box working again?” Kris said. That the box existed might or might not be a legend. Every story agreed that the power supply had been exhausted in the final battle with the rampaging rogue computer.
“Ah no. We do not have the vanishing box working,” the scientist said. She licked her lips before going on. “We do have something working that might be something like that instrument.”
“How something like it?” Kris asked. And how many bushes are we going to beat around to get a straight nonscientific answer out of you?
“We can not make matter vanish. However, we can manipulate matter at an ever-increasing distance.”
Which told Kris everything . . . and nothing . . . all at the same time.
“What kind of matter can you manipulate?” Penny asked before Kris could say something like it.
“Initially, all we could lift was a feather.”
“Excuse me if I say that’s not all that exciting,” Jack said. “What can you lift now?”
“Only a few cubic millimeters.”
“That doesn’t seem like much,” Kris said.
“You are correct,” the scientist agreed, with precision. “However, there was a second project being funded on Santa Maria. It involved a nearby neutron star. When we used the one project to see what we could do with the other one, we got surprising results. We succeeded in chipping a half cubic millimeter off the surface of that neutron star.”
“Half a cubic millimeter,” Kris finally said, when no one else would risk saying anything.
“Close to 150 tons of matter went flying off into space,” the boffin said.
That got a low whistle from the audience.
“What happened to it?” Professor mFumbo asked. “How did being free of the gravitational pull of the neutron star impact that mass?”
“It departed at nearly a third the speed of light. When it hit a cinder of a planet destroyed when the star went nova, it made quite an impact.”
That got low whistles from Jack and the colonel. Half a millimeter was tiny. At one-third the speed of light, even something that small was bound to leave a mark.
“No, I mean did the matter. No,” Professor mFumbo sputtered to a halt. Kris had never seen him at such a loss for words. He took two breaths and started again.
“What was it made of?” the professor said slowly.
“Ions and electrons,” the newly arrived self-proclaimed weapons expert answered quickly and simply.
He nodded. “Okay, did this half cubic millimeter of ions and electrons expand once it was free of that gravity well?”
“No,” the woman said. “As best as our instrumentation could tell, it departed the star in a compact, half-millimeter bullet, and it was the same size ten minutes later, when it impacted the planet.”
“Have you run further tests?” Kris asked. She had finally gotten what Professor mFumbo was getting at. The neutron star’s gravity crammed down the ions and electrons on its surface until there was really no space between them. That made for quite a dense solid. What happened to that matter after the heavy impact of the gravity was removed was a very good question.
At three, Kris had once lifted a pound of dried apricots from the kitchen at Nuu House. She’d split them with several friends. They scarfed them down with no trouble.
But in their little stomachs, they soaked up liquids. Suddenly, they needed much more space, and the only way to get it was up and out.
Kris and her little friends had spent a miserable night giving back the apricots she’d stolen.
The idea of a warhead that suddenly needed a lot more room struck her with more than the usual appalling force.