Chapter 4: What Really Happened

The story finally got out as to what happened to the Io. A team of physicists were working with a new type of high-powered field generator but they didn't use any isolation protocols. The idiots blew themselves to kingdom come along with a significant portion of their ship. A rather large packet of information was distributed to all the great ships' science departments to insure that nobody followed the same path to destruction. As the head of research and the best field design man on board I was tasked with taking it apart.

They had taken the reactionless drive equations and reformulated them in an entirely new way. Their math was elegant and made a kind of sense. I could see nothing wrong with it, and I could see what they were trying to do. However, several higher-order terms were introduced that implied extreme power densities, and the terms were inter-dependent. That meant that the equipment built around the theory had to be carefully balanced or it could easily destabilize. Computer analysis yielded two plateau domains but powering up to those states had variables running wild. This was the type of thing that had to be carefully brought online and left there, and carefully taken offline to cut power as well or it would violently eat itself. The math described two conic fields pointed in opposing directions and a third field that was modulated to provide bias. Just one of the conic fields could not be generated. It was inherently unstable as it was unipolar. The two fields heterodyned off of each other to generate a closed plenum or subspace. There were some interesting boundary effects between the inside and the outside of the cones. I informed the captain of the results of my data analysis and requested that we position the ship and the work platform on either side of a planetoid in case this thing turned itself into a short-lived pulsar. He asked, "You mean to tell me that this thing might develop stellar-level energy densities?" I replied, "Well, I'm going to need three fusion plants aboard the experimental platform to drive it." His reply? "And those idiots fired this thing up in their landing bay. Criminal. It leaves a lot to be said for their captain as well."

I took two spare fusion plants out of inventory and checked them over carefully before mounting and fueling them. I left all three ticking along under maintenance load while my team worked on the field generators. Nothing was powered up yet, but the superconducting bus bars were poured and tested, just not hooked up. That would be done through remote controlled robotics once the test bed was on site.

It took a lot of Q-bit sets to monitor and control all the settings. From the resonance measurements of the coils at various explicit frequencies the power had to be brought up to specific plateaus before the frequency generators shifted to the next safe resonance point. Besides that, they had to be brought up as a resonant pair at all stages, otherwise the impedance lock would fail and it would all go sideways.

I constructed a computerized console that monitored the frequency stability at each resonance point before shifting to the next power band and frequency. Using this technique I got the whole thing up and stable in two hours. Then I engaged the bias field on a four hour timer. It was a decision that I quickly came to regret. I'd made a miscalculation. I got the biasing field equation backward. Instead of engaging it at the first plateau, I engaged it at the top, or the twentieth plateau. The entire science platform just ... disappeared. Well, I had four hours to wait before any data would get to me. No matter how far it got, a Q-bit connection should work anywhere in the same universe. That was according to our best interpretation of quantum theory.