Chapter 15

Earth time: Wednesday, 5:49 PM, September 8, 2010 Central Daylight Savings Time

H.M.S. Resolute, depth 200 meters, speed zero knots, six kilometers from the undersea Lomonosov Ridge...

Captain Jacobs drifted over to helm control. After a moment of staring at some displays, he asked, "And what's your opinion bosun?"

John McHale looked up from his station, shrugged first and then smiled. "Warrant Officer Stevenson is the best there is, sir. But I'll bet you sterling to navy beans his e-techs find nothing..."

The captain nodded slowly as he thought of the engineering teams that were troubleshooting the sensor systems. "My gut says that too... All the diagnostics are reading fine now... Three independent systems... hell..."

"Yeah..." John typed a few commands and replayed the sensor logs. "ARCI picked it up first, big as a mountain and right in front of us. Collision avoidance systems kicked in, got a confirming pulse with both the high frequency sonar and CAVES. Managed to get one clean image, and then the whole thing vanished..."

John punched up the Conformal Acoustic Velocity Sonar image on his tactical display. "Hell is right captain. That mountain reads almost ten kilometers in diameter at the base, a very steep cone, so perfectly circular... goes all the way to the surface, a fair bit of land... Ha! Santa Claus land sir, an island dead center at ninety degrees north."

Captain Jacobs scowled. "Hell... Three independent sensor arrays... It's impossible!"

"Well sir," John replied slowly, "The plague is impossible too. Yet it exists..."

Earth time: Wednesday, 5:50 PM, September 8, 2010 Central Daylight Savings Time

The Paleo youth raised their spears as they charged. Cindy's voice screamed in Jim's mind. "RUN! Back to the house! Cut across the island! Move! Move! Move!"

Cindy's frantic plea shocked Jim out of his daze and he began racing up the short hill, away from the beach and the charging Paleo youths. In a straight line he was about 1.4 kilometers from home. Cindy's voice kept screaming in his mind the whole time he climbed the hill. It wasn't until he neared the top that he took a second to glance back. What he saw broke his heart.

Cindy's mental voice: "Don't you DARE break stride! Keep moving! As fast as you can!"

Jim's mind roared back through the mental connection: "Cindy! What the HELL are you doing?! You'll be killed!"

"No I won't! I have a plan! Trust me! Get to the house and lock up! I'll explain later!"

Cindy had spent a year living on Aina eavesdropping on conversations about the Paleo, and she was sure the Paleo youth would pursue her and not Jim. She fled down the beach to draw the attack force away from him. Cindy had been expecting to outdistance the Paleo youth, or at least stay out of spear range. She was an adult in excellent physical shape, and more importantly knew the path so well that she knew exactly where to plant her feet.

One quick backwards glance though showed the Paleo were keeping pace with her. She thought she counted eleven boys chasing her, and perhaps three of youngest were after Jim. "Shit," she thought. "The boys after Jim don't look more than six-years old! Why are they trying to kill us?!"

As she came to the peninsula Cindy realized that the Paleo boys would cut her off if she tried to angle back to the house. "So, we go with Plan A," she thought as she ran. "Sure hope this works." She kept running along the beach, along the outside arc of the peninsula and away from the path to home. The Paleo youths chasing her smiled. They had their prey cornered.

As Cindy raced down the peninsula she put on a burst of speed and sprinted with all her strength, fleeing into the rolling dunes and becoming invisible to the boys chasing her. The leader of the boys took a few moments to form a skirmish line across the width of the peninsula, placing a warrior every twenty meters across the quarter kilometer width. When they were all in position, they began an easy jog down the length of the thin arc of land. In the time it took to form the skirmish line, Cindy had built a kilometer of separation from the youths. She continued her sprint, knowing in two more kilometers she would run out of land.

Jim meanwhile reached home and dashed through the entrance in the back room, slamming the door and locking it. Panting from his run, he heard the Paleo youth approaching right behind him. He suddenly realized the front door was open, and raced to lock it. He got to it and slammed the bolt home a second before the handle turned and the door was tested from the outside. Jim trembled with relief that the bolt held. It looked very solid. He turned to the window, and saw in horror a young Paleo youth running straight towards the window with a large rock held high above his head, with another boy by his side ready to throw a spear. The youth ran full speed right up to the window and hurled his rock against the glass.

Future Interlude II: Mission Of Gravity

Aina time: 2:00 PM, day 150 of 1472 H.E., one week after the Festival of Ice and the start of winter

"Holographic generators online, manifold is stable with spherical symmetry..." Aegis took a quick look around the Level-two lab before returning to his displays. He struggled to keep his excitement under control and out of his voice. "This could be it!" he thought as he shivered.

Ajax called out beside him, "Graviton gravion flow matrix engaged. Gravity at point eight in the inner core." Except for the four directors of the Blue Spirit Quantum Labs, he and Aegis were the most senior gravity technicians on Aina. They were also twin brothers.

Ajax made a slight adjustment to a resonance control. "Neutral gravity... Mark! Gravity at negative point five... gravity at negative three... gravity at negative twelve... gravity at negative twenty... negative one hundred... Bounce mode locked and stable... Kalea, how far you want to push this?"

The young teenage girl answered without looking up from her displays. "Punch it to negative fifty thousand. Let's get a nice tight inversion before the main experiment..."

Her twin sister Mayoni nodded without speaking, glancing up from her own displays to her brother Havika monitoring the holographic generators. Havika was the senior lab director present in the room and thereby technically in charge of the experiment. He was quite happy though to assume the role of safety officer for the nested series of test chambers and let the two junior lab directors, his two younger sisters, take operational control.

When the base field of the inner core leveled off, a small 10.2 gram aluminum disk would be pushing up against the top of the inner chamber with a half ton of force. As the five researchers waited for the first gravity hologram to reach its target level, Mayoni's thoughts drifted back across her whirlwind years as an undergrad and grad student at Athens University...

It was in the winter of 1467, when Kalea and Mayoni were still freshmen, that Hiapo, Havika, Kalea, and Mayoni made their breakthroughs and began to build their first graviton generator. It was Mayoni's initial burst of insight that led to the development, modeling gravity as a holographic illusion projecting from a 2-D flatland universe without gravity. This bizarre step enabled her finally to satisfy both the surface and volumetric boundary constraints of the quantum gravity mathematics.

The resulting technology seemed like magic, enabling the construction of virtual perpetual motions machines by drawing on the almost infinite densities of the dark energy and dark momentum of spacetime vacuum. All need for hydro-electric power and hydrogen fuel cells vanished. The technology appeared to make exploration of the three worlds incredibly easy, and in the summer of 1468 the Hopewell launched their first gravity probe to map Aina from low orbit. And then something unexpected happened.