Chapter 8

The Shores of Alpha Centauri


Interplanetary travel had first been made possible, and then made practical, And Rob had been a part of the first and the one responsible for the second, and this had all happened in the span of less than two years. It took another two years to finally bring his next idea from dream to reality. In the interim, mankind exploded into the solar system.

Well, not exploded, exactly. The G2 drive may have made it practical, but it was still prohibitively expensive. Not just anyone could afford a ship certified for trans-solar operations. This was intentional, but not elitist. The UNNESA board, of which Rob was a reluctant member, above all wanted to keep people safe. A few governmental craft had been built already, and those were being joined by research vessels commissioned by universities and international agencies. Commercial interests were clamoring to get their toes wet in the expansion, but there was a great deal of caution being exercised at the international and national levels. Too many people could envision a world where the deep-pocket corporations wound up owning all the extraterrestrial real estate merely because they got there first.

An initial determination was made that private ownership of land or resources anywhere in the solar system outside of near earth orbit was illegal unless a local civil government granted it. The creation of a local civil government was subject to the review of a committee called the Extra Terrestrial Homeland Independence Committee — yes the acronym was intentional. Rob was asked to be a member of that committee as well, but begged off, and the seat instead went to Morrie Scheufelt, and no better choice could have been made in Rob's opinion.

It wasn't exactly wagon trains of settlers off to Mars or anything quite so domestic. None of these extraterrestrial environments were exactly hospitable after all, but it was obvious already that the moons of the outer planets were vast sources of water, and mankind wouldn't have to export water from Earth for outposts, commercial or otherwise. Gravitic shielding allowed for safe building construction, and the economy of it was improving rapidly. It would be industrial first, mining and processing, and then a service economy would grow up around those areas, and inevitably their would be schools and churches, bars and restaurants, barber shops and bakeries.

Where would those places be? It was anyone's guess, except for the water sources. Rob's hunch was that they would be mining water on Europa. There were too many other reasons to be there.

He cut the Hawking loose and told them to go make money. Sure they lost a few people to competitors, smart people who couldn't say no to an offer to be captain of their own ship and crew, but not a lot. It just seemed so easy, that there was no need to headhunt crew from us. The Hawking was an experienced ship with an experienced crew though, and she got a lot of prime bookings. A lot of people who chose not to remain in space were doing well also. Howard Dexter and Tony Gaines took Rob's advice and went into business doing hardware and software code conversions from the old silicon chip systems to the new quantum computing platform.

Chen Hsu was a bit too busy for adventures in space. The Q-tap and the Q-net and the unstoppable, untraceable nature of their communications, along with the social and mental shift that access to the rest of the solar system put in the minds of everyone, Chinese and otherwise, brought the communist Chinese government down. When it fell it was as swift and certain as the fall of the Berlin wall.

China's creeping capitalism and the ever-growing cadre of entrepeneurs and investors withing the Chinese economy that had been growing for more than half a century, along with the truly earnest technical and scientific sectors of the population, saved things from utter collapse. Both of the old cold war superpowers had long since ceased to be the effigies of alarm at which the party leaders could point. In the end, they became benefactors. The McKesson group alone floated enough loans to the key Chinese concerns to keep them from crashing before the chaos could be sorted out.

China was busy divesting itself of the fringes of its empire, shrinking inward and consolidating its economy, its society and its identity. It was dissolving its army into small local police precincts and emergency response teams. Free and open elections were in the planning stages, and if I believed the prognosticators on the public news nets, Chen Hsu, my friend Hatch, was a shoo-in to be elected the first President of the Chinese Democratic Republic.He was not only widely known throughout China, but he was well liked across all sectors of Chinese society.

It was not a simple process. There were little things like drafting a constitution. There was already a democratic Chinese state on the island of Taiwan that might want to have a little input on things too.

In the midst of all of this, Rob worked on his next vision.

Making that new vision, which Rob had begun to think of as his Q-space Engine, required finding a way to make a gravitic field interact closely with a physical object. After two months of going it alone, he decided that help was needed from someone who had tackled this kind of problem already. He Q-tapped Dave Hamlin.

"Dave, I'm trying to wrap my head around the problem of getting a gravitic field to conform to the physical dimensions of a particular piece of hardware, semi-permanently at least. You seem to have at least partially solved that problem with your GravLoc tractor beam system. What kind of advice can you give me?"

"Yes, I'm fine, How are you?" Dave answered.

Rob blushed, and dumped them both into full holocom mode. Dave looked good, tanned and happy.

"Sorry Dave, I can get kind of overly focused. I'm doing great. You heard that I proposed to Wendy before we left for Saturn, didn't you?"

"I did! Congratulations! And congratulations on the new G2 Drive."

"Thanks! How's Idrena?" I asked.

"She's great. She still won't say yes when I ask her to marry me, but she has moved in with me. She had some particularly bad marriage examples growing up that have her opposed to the concept in general, and she's always reassuring me its not a Dave Hamlin problem, its an institutional problem."

Dave and Idrena had been dating off and on since their MIT days, and particularly since the Halloween party where Cor Caldwell had unveiled her Holo-ween™ suits. Stories about that evening had become legendary among the geeks in the lab on Nauru. We all treated it almost as part of our own history, but the Gravy Geeks from MIT would always be a special group of their own.

"Well she's seen a great example or two in front of her in recent years, Andy and Cor for one, and Andy's parents and grandparents for another."

"There ya go. I've mentioned Andy and Cor as examples in the past, and pretty soon I'll have you and Wendy to add. Have you set a date yet?"

"Not yet. I've been pretty caught up in this current project since before we left for Saturn."

"Really, not the G2 Drive?" Dave said, showing a little confusion.

"Nope. I don't want to say too much yet, but the G2 Drive was more or less a byproduct of the project I'm working on, it was never a separate goal."

"Awesome. I'll keep a few pesos stashed away to invest in whatever you come up with next, thats for sure."

"I think you've probably got a few pesos to stow away too, I'd guess. The tractor beam has to be making you rich!"

"It is amazing how widely used it is already. I've been named man of the year by the National Association of Fire Chiefs, Fire Fighters, Emergency Medical Technicians and even got recognized by FEMA! The GravLoc is right up there with the Caldwell suit in their books!"

"The next time you get asked to go to an awards ceremony, take Idrena with you and introduce her as your future fiancé."

"Ah! Rob, your a sneaky bastard, but I like the way you think!"

"Speaking of thinking..."

"Back to the problem you called about? Of course."

Dave was an enthusiastic partner, and immediately got down to the nuts and bolts of finding a solution to Rob's problem. It took only a few days to realize that his tractor beam techniques wouldn't quite cut it, it tuned in on a specific object's gravitic signature, but it didn't really cause his fields to conform to the actual shape of the object he was grabbing, rather it latched on to the object's gravitic field, which, Rob had forgotten, didn't have to bear any relation to the physical dimensions of an object at all. He rolled up his sleeves and joined Rob in the lab on the moon to work on a different solution.

What was eventually arrived at was mostly borrowed from Cor McKesson's Caldwell suit technology, more than anything else, but without his help it might have taken Rob a year to get to the same point that they arrived at together in only two months. In the process they both became at least lay experts in nano-fluidics, which held the key to Rob's solution just as it had been to Cor's.

It wasn't all work and no play during that time. Rob had a few pleasant interludes on Sandy isle during the two months that it took to complete their work. It was early May, and with the approaching summer, Wendy announced that Rob would be making her a June bride, and would be doing it in forty days!

Rob had a happy modeler, which was finally able to adjust to the concept of grav-shielded components, and even the simulator was coming around. He was only blowing up his simulated space ships every other run. Once he had it happy with an optimal working Q-space Engine, He set the modeler to designing safe systems, and left it to run while he went and got married!

Ike Dunham was the best man, Rob had asked him back when he first proposed to Wendy, after the Mars expedition. He did not disappoint! Most of the Gravy Geeks were there, except for Rich Reeder and Daria Kensington, who were on a scheduled trip with the newly commissioned MIT Grav Ship, the W.B. Rogers, named after MIT's first President. Andy and Cor McKesson weren't able to make it either, as they remained incommunicado somewhere in the world. Actually an impressive feat in this day and age. Rob and Wendy were not looking for a lavish, splashy wedding like Cor and Andy's had been anyway, and had no need for a combination wedding and public relations event.

The reception was not, as the seedier media attempted to portray it, a saturnalia. Someone with a clever editors pen just liked the idea of the word saturn embedded in such a naughty description. There was some couples doing a little groping on the shores of their moonlit beach, but that was about as 'orgiastic' as things got, despite some people's best efforts to paint it otherwise.

A couple of the McKesson security people got to be their decoys, and spend a week in Tahiti pretending to be them, while Wendy and Rob spent the week in Paris. Wendy was fairly fluent in French, and Rob was merely comic relief when it came to the language, but they got by. The newlyweds were mostly interested in the Louvre and as much distilled romantic atmosphere as they could find. Say what you will about the French, Paris is still just inherently romantic, especially if you stick to the picturesque parts.

His wife, Rob was occasionally said to mention, is aggressively enthusiastic as a bed partner, and perhaps it was just his geek perspective talking, but it was Rob's belief that she was just naturally talented! They had been together long enough that the nuptial activities shouldn't have been surprising. Wendy however threw herself into it with a will, and Rob was happily swept along and determined not to disappoint her, if at all possible.

Their third night in Paris, Rob woke alone in bed. He found Wendy standing nude at the open door to the balcony, the moonlight striking her from the side, silhouetting her and casting her edges in silvery serene light. Where the moonlight struck, her skin glistened, and Rob could see her hard nipples, prominent as the Eiffel tower in his eyes. He came up behind her and pulled her into his arms, cupping her breasts in his hands and letting his fingers dance across those prominences.

"I love you." He whispered into her ear. She leaned back into him.

"This is exactly as I had dreamed it. Years ago, when I was just a girl, this was exactly what I dreamed for my future, and you've given it to me."

What do you say to something like that? Nothing. Rob picked up his bride and carried her back to bed.

#

Eventually you have to give your modelers and simulators a rest and actually build the thing, and so it was with the new engine. Ted Henley ferried Rob, Dave and Wendy to Erie Precision in Conneaut, and they got to work. Rob gave the final modeler data to Tom Standaahl's crew and they began building the tools to make the parts. Fifty percent of this stuff was new and theoretical and the other half was heavily modified from their original designs. This meant every piece got checked, double-checked and then triple checked during production.

While Tom's crew was busy with the engine build itself, Rob got busy designing the test vehicle it would fit into. The sleek little G2 test craft wouldn't cut it. This new engine was not petite. It wasn't even pretty! Dave built an interface to tie the engine's controls into the standard ship control systems, and Wendy adapted the previous remote interface, the one used to test the G2 engines.

Once they had a complete set of parts, it became time to do fit testing, and a dry run at assembly for the various subsystems that could be built independently before final construction. There were eight major sub-assemblies, and they fit and refit them a dozen times looking for problems. They documented as they went, building a nightmare version of a technical manual for when they had something to sell. Watching and being involved in this kind of process can make a scientist really appreciate engineers.

"Scientists?" Arne Walker had said to him once, "We dream shit up, but engineers? They build it!"

The manufacturing time at Erie Precision took two months. The fabrication and testing took up another eight. And that was without ever so much as even bleeding a trickle of current into the engine's exciters. It would be nowhere near Earth when they fired this baby off, that was for sure. Ten months were needed to build the prototype and then another two weeks to build its backup. They had built the two test vehicles to put them in at the same time, so they were ready and waiting when the assembly was done. They both would need a G2 drive as well, and that got done during the prototype build as well. The engine space was intentionally roomy. If they had to do any troubleshooting of the assembly, Rob didn't want to have to worry about tiny crawl spaces and 'just big enough' compartments.

The Hawking was on a run to Mars to pick up a group of university students. Their trip had been funded by a coalition of astrobiology programs at six European universities. The students had just spent three months in a Martian habitat built and operated by the European Space Agency. Rob had no intention at this point of including the Hawking. He was going to use the Cherenkov and her heavy duty tractor beams to get the two birds into space and where he wanted them. Dave headed home, 'time to see if his girlfriend was still interested in him', he said jokingly, and the regular work he had been doing before Rob had called was piling up.

The best laid plans, as they say. Rob discovered that tractor beam-attaching cargo for lift to orbit was illegal! Seems there were some safety concerns, imagine that! He had to pay a commercial orbital hauler to take his cargo up to Infinity Station, where tractor beam haulage was an accepted practice. Both probes had perfectly good G2 drives, but to use them to get to orbit, the probes would have to be certified for it, and Rob wasn't ready to tip his hand on this yet.

After a few days back home in the Caribbean to visit with the folks and to rest up, it was time to head up to rendezvous with the two test craft. They had been crated up for the trip to orbit, and there was a lot of curiosity about them, especially with the QuanTangle Inc. label on them. The Cherenkov picked them up, crates and all and headed off again into the deep dark, at 90 degrees to the solar ecliptic. She went south this time, and Rob let her run for two days at G2 speeds.

The Cherenkov was equipped with all the signal detection and generation equipment that Rob had used in the quest to understand the blips he was getting through the Q-space leakage from his sensors. That was what the blips had been after all, leakage. While the Cherenkov had an access hatch, they definitely couldn't fit one of the new test craft in the cargo bay, even if it would have fit through the hatch. In any case, Rob had one of our the G2 probes in there, it was going to become their homing beacon.

He activated both of the ship's gravitic shields, ran them up to maximum strength and let the blooming force of the shields shred the crates apart. They pulled the bits of wood back into the cargo bay with a tractor beam. Space was vast, but no sense littering.

The test craft were designated as Q-One and Q-Two, and the next six hours were spent bringing Q-One up to full ready status. Rob locked in the 'beacon' he identified as Alpha Centauri A. Then shifted the targeting off phase five degrees. If the drive did work, he didn't want to send the ship straight into the heart of a G class star! The next step was to get the Q-node built into Q-One locked on to the beacon that was the Sun. In theory, this shouldn't matter, but when you're lighting the candle on something new, you do extra things, even if only to make yourself feel better.

They let the systems sit at idle for an hour, watching the readings from the on-board telemetry. When things were stable, it was time. They were all three within a few feet of each other, so there was no need for a fancy countdown or anything overly dramatic, but Rob did give an out loud countdown 3... 2... 1... Go! and flipped the switch that engaged the Q-Space Engine. In a flash of utter violet, limned in an instant of ruby red, Q-One was gone!

All three of them sat there, stunned for several seconds, before Rob thought to call out.

"Telemetry?"

"We're still green across the board for on-board Engine diagnostics." Ted came back with immediately.

"We're reading shield integrity." Wendy added.

"I've still got signal lock." Rob said, looking at his tracking sensor. "But I've got no readings from the external sensor array."

A long 3 or 4 seconds later, the sensor panels blinked into life and at the same time they got a harsh audible tone that Ted quickly confirmed as Engine shutdown.

"Bringing up the holographic display interface." Rob said, flipping the switch. Boom, what had been the back wall of the mission bay became a view screen, and we were looking at stars.

"No way to tell for sure what stars we're seeing." Ted said.

Rob began to manipulate the holographic representation of Q-one's controls. A transparent globe sprang up in front of them, and as Rob activated another switch, a red light began blinking on the surface of the globe.

"That's our beacon." He said aloud. "That should be Alpha Centauri A."

He accessed the attitude controls and slowly began rotating the Q-One around until the blinking red light was centered on the far side of the globe. In the view screen behind it, they saw Alpha Centauri A!

"Wohoo!! Rob shouted without thinking.

"Now what?" Ted asked as he was thumping him on the back.

"Now I kiss my wife, for a start." Rob said, spinning in his chair and pulling Wendy into his lap. The kiss was a pretty decent scorcher, but then, they had been practicing quite a bit lately.

When they finally broke apart, Wendy gave Rob a wicked smile.

"Okay hotshot, now what?"

Phew! You focus on a goal, and when it arrives, you get asked what next!

"Okay you comedians. We've got a working sensor array in the Alpha Centauri system. Lets fire up the gravitic filters and go looking for planetary bodies."

It had long been known that the gravitational effects of the binary star system would prevent the formation of gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn, and they were quickly able to confirm that there were indeed none present around Alpha Centauri A. They did find evidence of three rocky planetary bodies.

It was too far for good visuals, but they began building a map in the Q-One's internal navcomm immediately. The G2 drive was brought online and began making for a location much closer to the inner orbits where habitable planets would have to be. In the meantime, the Q-Two was brought online and began cycling up to full ready status. They stared at the blinking lights and the scrolling readouts, and collectively took a mental step back. They had been working non-stop for almost twelve straight hours now. They needed food and sleep.

The Q-One was brought to a dead stop two hours closer to Alpha Centaruri A, and then put in standby mode. The Q-Two was brought back down to standby mode as well, and the old G2 probe beacon was prepped and sent out the hatch as well. Her internal and external sensors looked good through the remotes, and while they fixed themselves a hurried but triumphant dinner of baked salmon, braised potatoes and sweet corn muffins, they boosted her even further away from the solar ecliptic. Two hours later, fed and happy, they brought the beacon to a stop, and then it was time for sleep.

Rob woke up with Wendy in his arms five hours later, and try as he might, couldn't get back to sleep. Resigned to his fate, he got up and put on a pot of coffee and began looking through the telemetry and diagnostic data that had been captured during those long three or four seconds when Q-One was en route. He was making notes via Q-tap and tagging them to various points in the data readouts when Wendy came into the cabin.

"Mmm! Coffee!" She said, sliding into his lap and taking the cup out of his hand. "What's all this?" She asked after a long, appreciative sip.

"The data from the telemetry and diagnostic feeds during the Q-One's transit time. Its interesting, but I'm not sure what to make of it at this point."

Wendy gave Rob a kiss and headed off to find her own cup of coffee.

"Bacon and eggs sound good for breakfast? Sweetie?" He heard her from the starboard hatchway.

"Sure thing honey cakes!" Came Ted's voice from the aft hatchway.

"Mornin' Ted." Rob said, over the sound of Wendy's giggle from the next compartment.

"Mornin' Boss." Ted said, sitting down across from him and taking a quick look at the readouts he was working from.

"Telemetry readings?" He asked. I nodded my head. "From between?"

Rob nodded at first and then looked up. "Ted, are you an Anne McCaffery fan?"

"Oh definitely. I wanted to grow up to be a Dragonrider when I was little." He answered. "I came as close as I could to meeting that goal as reality would allow, don't you think?"

Wendy was walking back in with a cup of coffee in her hand.

"Pern huh?" She handed it to Ted and smiled. "Well, I hope we don't wind up battling thread anywhere. Oh, and by the way, we're having link sausage instead of bacon. The sausage was already thawed."

Rob studied his notes and the readouts in silence, and saw a holo-display flicker into vague existence around Ted as he got busy with something as well, slipping into that look of 'palsied distraction' as he remembered Alexandra Nascimento describe the appearance of someone accessing a Q-tap and doing data entry and browsing through a personal holographic interface. His own data drew him in, and Rob began to see some information that would probably let him adjust the way the engine made the transitions in and out of the Q-Space. He was busy adding more notes when Wendy arrived with a plate of sausage and the coffee pot.

"Hands off the sausage for now, the eggs will be out in a minute. Who want a refill on the coffee?"

Ted and Rob both raised their cups, and got refills. They each snagged a link of sausage the minute Wendy was out of the compartment as well, grinning at each other momentarily.

One advantage to a holo display and a 'twitch and squint' interface for doing data entry — you don't have to worry about greasy fingers on a keyboard.

Wendy came back out only a few minutes later with the rest of their breakfast and the three of them sat and ate. There was an air of excitement at the table.

"How are we going to proceed?" Ted asked.

"I want to send the Q-Two next, to see if we can come closer to AC1 with a smaller offset. If we get a good second trip, then we'll look at bringing one of them back and seeing how close we can come to our beacon."

With breakfast out of the way, they did indeed get right back to it.

The first thing needed was to get both their birds back up from standby and into full ready mode. Rob took care of the remote bird and Wendy brought the local one back to life at the same time. Rob set the Q-One to detection mode, all her tracking and sensor gear wide open and looking. As soon as it was humming and happy he joined Ted and Wendy in looking at the Q-Two. They already had her at full ready and were just waiting for me. Rob halved the offset from last time, dropping it from 5 degrees to 2.5 degrees out of phase.

"Final diagnostics check?" Rob asked. All three of them ran through one separately.

"Green." Wendy called first.

"Good to go." Came Ted's response. When Rob had the same results, he didn't even bother with a count down, and just hit the go button.

Again there was the deep violet and ruby flash of light, and again the probe was gone!

"Telemetry!" He called, but they were all already focused in on it. It was a virtual repeat of yesterday's performance, with that same amount of transition time. It was a lot easier to get a bearing this time, with the Q-One already there, and the two craft quickly had a lock on each other, giving a very precise location.

"Cutting the shift in half made quite a difference. We're 8AU out from Alpha Centauri A, and thats still several AU closer than Q-One, after running her in for two hours." Ted announced.

"We're still two AU out from the closest planetary orbit. If our data can be confirmed now as far as those three planets go." Wendy said.

They did that very thing, and indeed, the outermost of the three planets was exactly where she should have been, orbitally, but the closest of the probes still wasn't close at all. Her orbit had her at two o'clock compared to the probe's six. Planet two was at nine o'clock and the innermost planet was at the probe's eight. Interesting, and good navigational confirmation, but Rob wasn't ready to become a planetary explorer yet.

The beacon on the G2 probe was cycled up to full power and then they went looking for her with the Q-One's targeting array. The beacon was artificial, and easy to spot.

"Target locked." Rob called.

"We have green lights, across the board." Ted called.

Rob looked at Wendy, nodding at the go button. "Go ahead babe, you light off this candle."

Wendy grinned back and reached down and flipped the switch. Suddenly, the proximity detectors aboard the beacon began screaming, and all the displays dedicated to the Q-One's status blinked and shifted their output. A second later, the Cherenkov's external sensors began blinking a new status message. They had company, the sensors wanted them to know.

Rob had used no phase offset in targeting the return, because he now believed the Q-Space Engine would inherently sheer off from interposing itself on another gravity source. It appears that he was right about that, as the Q-One appeared at a distance of a little more than a light second away from the beacon.

He turned right around and with an offset of only 1 percent off phase, sent the Q-One back to Alpha Centauri A.

"something went wrong!" Wendy called as we began seeing the telemetry.

"Q-One is exactly the same distance from AC1 as Q-Two. You mis-set the phase setting." Ted said.

Rob looked at the settings, they were exactly as he thought he had set them.

"I don't think that's it." He said. "The phase shift was 1 percent."

"What is it then?" Wendy asked.

Rob explained his thoughts on the gravitic sheering effect that he had anticipated, and postulated that the immense gravity well of a star might impose such a large limit.

"The data will tell us, eventually." Rob said in the end.

They did bounce both probes back and forth a dozen times, without a hitch.

"Okay, when do we go?" Wendy asked over lunch.

"We don't." Rob answered.

"What next then?" Ted added.

"Next is the little surprise I have waiting in the forward cargo bin, beneath the emergency oxygen bottle storage." Rob told Ted, waving him towards the forward storage area. Ted headed through the hatch, and a moment later, both heard him call out.

"Rats!"

"Something wrong Ted?" Wendy called in alarm.

"No, but we've got rats!" He said coming back with a cage in each hand. "Lab rats, to be precise. There are eight of them, all in their own individual cages, like these two."

Getting a specimen into Q-One alive was a small challenge. Mostly it was that they hadn't tried a docking maneuver with either probe up to this point, nor had they tested their abilities to handle an airlock cycling procedure. They knew both probes were still holding Earth normal atmospheres successfully. And all the remote telemetry indicated they had maintained Earth normal environments throughout all the transitions, but this was going to be our real litmus test.

With one of the rats in a shielded cage, the equivalent of wearing a Caldwell suit, and the other rat in a normal cage, the equivalent to a shirt sleeve environment, they were ready to go. Both rats had given preflight blood samples and stool specimens. They would have to clean their cages immediately when they got them back so more samples could be taken later.

"On station and ready to go." Came Ted's call from the pilot's seat, once we were back in position. Rob nodded to Wendy, and once again she flipped the switch to send the probe through Q-space.

"She's away." Came Ted's call. "She's no longer on the scope up here."

"on board telemetry looks good." I called over the tap, to include Ted.

"Transition complete." Wendy called. " We're green and looking good and the probe is reporting a lock on Alpha Centauri A."

"We've still got two live rats." Rob called out, reading their telemetry off the board.

They let them sit for two hours while they observed them closely. The two rats sat there acting normal, at least as far as rats go, and then it was time to bring them back.

There was a complete set of medical standards to compare our rats against, and they ran all the tests, including taking the follow-up blood samples. They cleaned their cages so they could collect accurate post-flight stool samples, and then watched them for a couple of hours more, followed by a quick turnaround trip, where the probe was paused at the Alpha Centauri end only long enough to recycle the Q-space Engine, then jump them back.

They left them aboard the Q-One and brought in the Q-Two and repeated the first jump with two new rats, giving them the same two hours of AC1 time before bringing them back.

"There goes another day." Wendy called.

It was Ted's turn to make dinner. Dinner was always interesting when it was Ted's turn to cook.


#

The Hawking had freed herself up for Rob, but they were having to put off future contracts to do so.

"Lots of future contracts." Victor told me.

"Doing well then are we?" I asked.

"Very much so. We could be making weekly runs between Venus, Ceres and Europa."

"Hmm, so a ship designed specifically for hauling freight would be even better?"

"Of course, especially something that could handle the modular shipping containers."

"Very well. The Hawking is not QuanTangle, and QuanTangle is not the Hawking. If we want to be in the freight business, lets do it with a freighter, not a research ship."

Rob had already talked to Tom Standaahl during the run back to Earth and gave him the go ahead to build four more of the new engines. He offered him double what we had paid in the past.

"I can't tell you anything yet, Tom, but if things go as I hope in the next six months to a year, Erie Precision's ability to produce this engine is going to make them very, very rich." Tom beamed when he said it, but shook his head at the same time.

"We had already decided that there was a good chance of that. We're buying the yards adjacent to us on both sides and expanding our capacity."

"Thats a good idea, but I would suggest you consider something on the Moon as well. It took us ten months to get the first two. How long is it going to take to get the next four?"

"Three months." Tom said smugly. "We've still got all the machine tool codings stored in non-volatile memory systems. We can be machining our first parts two hours from now. Build time will be greatly reduced as well, because we took notes and holo recordings every step of the way."

Rob then called McKesson Aerospace and asked what the schedule was like for getting a new ship built. They had just finished setting up their third fabrication yard and were adding a fourth that would be ready in six months. They put QuanTangle first on the list for the new yard, and Rob thought he might be getting special treatment. They asked about the design, and he told them he would get back to them shortly.

Rob asked Yuri Stepanovich if he could do the design, letting him know what their needs were. Yuri promised to have something preliminary to look at in a week or two. Rob let Yuri know about the schedule at the McKesson yards, and he said he could work with that. Rob also clued him in to Erie Precision, and told him to take his cues from them as far as drive bay specs.

Most of the crew got a couple weeks off, but a core group of bridge officers and the lab rats from Nauru stayed aboard to deal with the necessaries. They got together the first day in the Hawking's main conference room.

"First, I have to ask everyone here to keep everything confidential." Rob said to the group once they were all settled in. "I know I can trust you all, but this is something beyond the norm, even compared to whats been our norm."

That at least got him a chuckle. He wasn't really worried, just dotting the i's and crossing the t's.

"While you all spend the next two weeks getting the Hawking stocked, refitted with some new gear and expanding your inventory a bit, I am going to be refitting the Cherenkov with some new equipment."

Rob tapped the room's holo display and fed a view of Q-One that slowly rotated, giving a complete look at her from all sides. The sharp-eyed Saalih Jaffre spotted the odd size and shape of the drive pod immediately.

"That's an odd looking configuration, you could almost fit three G2 drives in that space."

"There is a G2 drive in there, but its not alone." Rob answered, switching to an interior view from the front of the drive bay. "Here's the G2, but what you are seeing behind it is something else entirely."

The image in front of them moved past the G2 drive and fully into the rear two thirds of the drive bay and slowly began showing the Q-Space Engine in all its ugly glory.

"That is an inelegant looking beast!" Victor said. "What is it?"

"That, ladies and gentlemen is what Wendy, Ted Henley and I have been calling the Q-Space Engine."

"What does it do?"

Rob switched to the next feed in his prepared queue. It showed the Viewscreen of the Q-Two, zoomed in on the Sun. The view zoomed back in, past the Cherenkov, to show the distant Sun behind. The display paused for a moment and then the Cherenkov and the distant Sun disappeared from view and the star field shifted in the view screen.

"What just happened there?" Fred Wassermann asked.

Rob nodded at the screen where the Q-Two's viewscreen showed the view slowly shifting across the sky until a small yellow ball of light came into view. The image began to zoom in until the yellow ball filled the screen. It was very obviously not our own familiar Sun.

"Oh my god!" Owen Gardner blurted. "Is that Alpha Centauri?"

"Alpha Centauri A, to be precise." He added. Earning a semi-serious glare from his former instructor.

The next hour or so was a mixed bag of babbling, excitement and silence. After his initial outburst, Owen Gardner just sat there staring at the screen. Most everyone else babbled and a few were downright giddy. Rob felt a little giddy himself, to be honest. The next hour, they got down to brass tacks.

"We cannot expect to refit the Hawking with the new engine until we can get her into the dock at Infinity Station. Right now, the only two Q-Space Engines in existence are in the drive bay of that probe and her twin."

The first thing that needed to be done with the Hawking free, was outfit her with her own copies of all the Q-space beacon and tracking gear. That included both the Viking and the Beagle. Next came stocking up the lab with everything needed to rebuild or repair a Q-Space engine.

Rob sent Saalih Jaffre and Coretta Ramirez, the Hawking's top two propulsion specialists, to Erie Precision with instructions to suck Tom Standaahl's brain dry and to watch and learn during the build process. In the meantime, with the Beagle and the Viking regularly staying behind to add cargo capacity to the Hawking, there was plenty of room in the shuttle bay to bring the Cherenkov in so they could do her refit, unobserved.

It was decided to sacrifice Q-Two for its engine. With the gravitic shields turned off, the outside walls of the drive bay would be easy to remove, and they soon had the engine exposed, sitting bare on her mounts. It definitely would not have as much working space around the engine as they had in the Q-Two. That bothered Rob, and he spent some time worrying about it. Finally it occurred to him that the mating rig that allowed the Cherenkov to mate herself to the Hawking could be used to mate her to the Q-two as well, if we could adapt her access hatch to match the mounting configuration. It also meant that the Cherenkov's G2 drives could be pulled. The Cherenkov had a perfectly good pair already that had just become superfluous.

Half a day was spent replicating the mount, but when they were done, the Q-Two was no more. Instead, she was a decorative and useful blister beneath the main bulk of the Cherenkov. Another couple of days were then spent building control circuits to run between the main ship and her new external drive bay. It did make things a little inconvenient inside at first, as the access hatch to the Q-Space Engine was dead in the middle of a walkway between the aft cargo storage bay and the G2 Drive bay. Rob had to wait while Victor and Ike ran field integrity tests on the new configurations so they could reassure themselves that the grav engines and the shields would treat the ship as one unit.

When everything was ready at last, it was suddenly as if everyone in the room stopped and took a deep breath at the same time. They were ready, and now Rob just had to find the will to strap himself into a seat on the Cherenkov and push a button. A button wrapped up with all his self-doubt and built of every shred of indecision he'd ever experienced.

See how we men torture ourselves. Our minds put hills on the very roads we ourselves have built.

Some men boast and brag to push themselves past these self-imposed moments, some drink and carry on, some close their eyes and pray. Rob went and found Wendy Young, and let her pull him into her arms and kiss him and whisper words into his ear. Later, in the dark, his prayers were of thanks and his thoughts were of her, and the button was just a button once again.