Edward M. Lerner Read Online Free PDF Page B

Himalia’s patrol ships misunderstand this incoming, non-communicating vessel?”
    Chung froze. “I thought only the ICU had reason to look towards Barnard’s Star.”
    “Perhaps prison guards look in all directions.”
    It was Chung’s turn for pensive silence. “Perhaps it would be prudent to add an inconspicuous military liaison. I take your point that the Himalia base must be told something. A few military escort ships may even prove helpful for policing the region when the starship’s arrival eventually becomes public. I’ll see to it.”
    It was a partial victory, and for the wrong reasons, but Art was still satisfied. Once the UP military came into the picture, risk assessment would surely receive a much higher priority.

    So why are the Snakes—pardon me, the K’vithians—heading this way?
    Eva knew Valhalla City from frequent stopovers. She found her way to the town’s largest park, which the community’s liaison to the officious “environmental inspectors” had conveniently neglected to mention. An engraved brass plaque at each entrance described how the former ice-mine tunnel had been lovingly repurposed by the citizenry. Except for a few teens, whose nonstop conversation and easy laughter she envied, she had the grove to herself.
    Her solitude was sadly typical.
    Eva’s parents seemed never to tire of telling her, no matter how often she asked them not to, that she’d been born brilliant and only gotten smarter. Mom and Dad, both academics, began her home schooling while she was still a toddler. At age eight she met the first of a long line of tutors. Not until the raging-hormone age of twelve, while plumbing new depths in quantum theory and insecurity, did she first participate in a group educational setting. It did nothing for Eva’s self-confidence that her graduate-student “peers” were visibly fascinated and repulsed by her precociousness. Not until her twenties did she find near-equals among people her own age. Very much the brilliant scientist her well-intentioned parents had strived for, she did not see how she could have ended up with fewer social skills had ineptitude been their primary goal.
    Self-consciously self-isolated once more, she leaned against the bole of a magnolia tree in full bloom. Art’s question at the mission gathering—why Jupiter?—gnawed at her. His issue was a fair one: If the starship was damaged and in need of fusion fuel, why not set the more energy-efficient course to Saturn? He was correct that Saturn’s atmosphere had essentially the same composition as Jupiter’s.
    Her puzzlement ran much deeper: She couldn’t reconcile fusion power with a practical starship. It was basic physics to calculate the energy needed to accelerate any mass to a given speed; moving a habitat-sized mass between stars in any reasonable time took a lot of energy. Fusion sufficed for interplanetary jaunts, but the energy density of its fuel was impractically low for interstellar travel.
    She plucked nervously at a fallen twig taken from the packed dirt of the tunnel floor. A twentieth-century dreamer named Bussard had envisioned a loophole: gathering with enormous magnetic fields the incredibly diffuse matter, mostly hydrogen, found in interstellar space. He had imagined the hydrogen serving both as energy source and propellant. No human engineer had ever figured out how to make that work; conventional wisdom now had it the scoop’s drag more than offset the energy value of any fuel collected. Had the Snakes solved that problem? She didn’t believe it. The approaching ship gave no hint of the vast magnetic fields a fusion ramjet vehicle would deploy.
    Bark shards fell as she peeled the twig. Art doubtless considered her professional interests highly esoteric. If so, he would be only partially correct. She had been plucked, as she had truthfully told him, from academia … her other role, her occasional consulting to the UP peacekeeping establishment, she was not free to