The Genie and the Engineer 3: Ravages of War Read online

  “Another party pooper heard from,” Capie observed sarcastically. “You said there were two reasons those ideas won’t work. Dare I ask what the second one is?”

  He smiled but she could see that he really wasn’t happy to answer the question. “It’s pretty simple, really. The chutzpah isn’t powerful enough for the job.”

  She blinked a few times. “Excuse me? Not powerful enough? But how is that possible?”

  Paul shrugged and rubbed his chin with one hand. “It’s all relative. How do I explain this in less than two thousand words?” He sighed and took a deep breath. “Let’s look at it this way. Daneel 1, at our current speed, what is the ship’s kinetic energy?”

  Daneel 1’s eyes narrowed briefly in thought. “One half times the mass times velocity squared. Simple math. It is 4.36 times ten to the sixteenth joules. That’s 43.6 quadrillion joules.”

  Capie gulped. “That sounds like a lot.”

  “It’s all relative, my dear,” Paul said again. “Now, Daneel 1, how long would it take for our chutzpah to slow the ship to zero velocity, assuming a viable energy source and assuming the maximum power transfer rate the chutzpah can handle.”

  It was Daneel 1’s turn to shrug. “Two point three years.”

  Capie groaned and looked away. “I didn’t realize that.”

  Paul said, with a touch of sadness in his voice, “Yes, the chutzpah is very powerful, especially compared to an ordinary talisman. But our speed is incredibly high. The energy involved…well, the math is a real killer.”

  “But we used the chutzpah to drive the ship,” Capie pointed out.

  “Not exactly, Mom,” Daneel 2 said. “We used the power of the chutzpah to trigger a fusion reaction. We didn’t funnel the fusion energy through the chutzpah.”

  “The bottom line,” Paul said, “is that even if we had a large enough energy source available, the chutzpah can’t be used to decelerate us before we reach Mars.”

  “So, what do we do?” Capie asked, closing her eyes and bowing her head sadly. “What’s the answer?”

  Daneel 1 coughed. “Dad, we still have lithium chlorate in the tanks. Nearly enough to slow us back down. What we lack are the engines. So Daneel 2 and I hit on the idea of Project Orion.”

  “Oh, so you know about that project, do you?” commented Paul with an appreciative nod at the Scottie. “A pulsed nuclear drive, the idea going back to the 1950’s.”

  Project Orion, a spacecraft propelled by a series of nuclear explosions behind the tail end of the ship, would use the shock waves to push against a thick protective shield of high temperature, high strength metal.

  “It was used in a few sci-fi stories, back when the phrase ‘nuclear explosions’ wasn’t politically incorrect.” Paul cocked his head to one side. “The nuclear fuel we still have, apparently. But what did you plan to use as a pusher plate?”

  “We tried collecting all the pieces of the engines,” Daneel 1 explained. “Using the chutzpah, we were able to retrieve quite a bit of the pressure chambers and the nozzles. We’ve spent the last half hour trying to reintegrate the carbon nanotubes on a molecular level but it’s just taking too much time to do. Maybe in a few days, we’d have something ready.”

  “It’s already too late,” Paul announced with a small shake of his head. “Two hours of coasting. We can’t compensate for that, not with one gee of thrust.” He sighed heavily and started to push himself off the bed.

  “Here, here!” Capie admonished him. “Just where do you think that you are going?”

  “To save our lives,” he replied, shooting her a reassuring smile. “And I’m feeling a lot better,” he lied. “It hardly hurts at all.”

  “Dad, you should stay in bed,” Daneel 1 recommended. “Just tell me what we need to do and Daneel 2 and I will do it.”

  “I don’t have a clue,” Paul reluctantly admitted as he reached out to a handhold on the nearby bulkhead. “Not a single clue.”

  TWO

  Spacecraft Sirius Effort

  86.3 Million miles from Earth

  Friday 8:37 a.m. EST

  November

  Paul arrived at the Sirius Effort’s cockpit to find Daneel 2 there. Daneel 1 wedged past Paul and into the small space. To be sure, even with the two Scotties in the small compartment, Paul could have squeezed in with them too, but it would have been a tight fit, as well as totally unnecessary. Paul could see the holographic display screen at the front of the small compartment quite well from the cockpit’s doorway.

  A part of his mind noted that Daneel 2 must have cast a spell to enhance the image in the display. At least, Paul assumed that it was that Scottie’s handiwork, since it was Daneel 2—as the current pilot ‘on watch’—who was using the far more powerful ‘chutzpah’ talisman. Regardless, the tail end of the Sirius Effort could be seen quite clearly in the display, where even the detail in the shadows was sufficiently distinct and discernible.

  The image told Paul that the situation was very serious and his heart sank as he confirmed his worst fears.

  The port engine was simply gone. Just totally freaking gone.

  The starboard engine was not much better off. It wasn’t gone, not quite. The forward wall of the pressure chamber was still there along with the forward windings of the magnetic nozzle coils, the fuel pump and the feed lines.

  But everything aft of that was missing, the few remaining edges nothing but torn and shredded metal.

  “I can check ship’s stores if you would like, Dad. But I’m 99% certain we don’t have enough rolls of duct tape in the cargo hold to fix that!” Daneel 2 pointed out with his usual dry sense of humor.

  “Humph,” grunted Paul in misery. “Probably not.” He sighed while internally trying to get a grip on his emotions and deciding what to do next. “Daneels, is that the pusher plate you were building?” he asked, pointing at a dark object floating near the aft end of the ship.

  “Yes, it is,” Daneel 2 replied. “Daneel 1 told you about that, huh? It’s too hard to do out here in deep space, in a time efficient manner. We need a space dock, like Hephaestus, to repair our kind of damage!”

  “Hephaestus was destroyed in David Weber’s Mission of Honor,” Daneel 1 clucked in a disapproving tone. “I vote for Star Trek’s Utopia Planitia shipyards. Since they’re supposedly in orbit around Mars, they’d be a lot closer anyway!”

  “Daneels, please!” Paul replied before pointing at the screen. “There doesn’t seem to be an engineering solution to our problem, due to our current speed. Just not enough space and time to decelerate using known science.”

  “Not enough time to invent a warp drive then, huh?” Daneel 2 wisecracked.

  “A magical solution instead?” Daneel 1 suggested. “But how? I don’t see how a portal would help us here.”

  “Let’s go back down to Deck 3,” Paul advocated, his brow furled in deep thought. “I have an idea, but let’s discuss it with Mom first.”

  Ω

  On Deck 3, Paul ‘sat’ at the small dining table, which was tucked up next to the kitchen. He waved a hand, creating a midair display showing the planet Mars ahead of them. Seated next to him, Capie leaned forward slightly, studying the display intently. Ariel-Leira was watching from her mirror on the nearby bulkhead, listening in to the discussion.

  “At our current speed, how long until we cross the orbit of Mars?” Paul asked Daneel 1.

  “Range is 38.2 million miles. ETA is 14 hours, 21 minutes and 9 seconds,” was the response. “Assuming that we don’t find a way to start decelerating before that.”

  Paul nodded, still deep in thought.

  Capie looked a bit nervous, lightly rubbing her upper left arm with her right hand. “What are you thinking, Paul? Do you have an answer yet?”

  Her husband scowled and massaged his temples, trying to both improve his thinking and to help get rid of that infernal blasted headache!

  “Keep us waiting, please don’t,” scowled Ariel-Leira. Capie shot her a look of annoyance and the
mirror woman frowned, chagrinned.

  “Maybe,” Paul replied cautiously. “I’m trying to think outside the box here.” He pointed at Mars in the display. “Maybe Mars is the answer.”

  “A slingshot effect?” queried Daneel 1 with a hint of disbelief. “That won’t work, Dad. We will cross the orbit of Mars too far ahead of the planet. Closest approach will be, um…908,000 miles away. Aero-braking won’t work either. Same problem.”

  Daneel 2’s face screwed up in thought. “Dad, are you thinking that we could tap the planet directly as an energy source?” he asked slowly. “As you did with some of the monoliths back on Earth?”

  “You got it in one, Daneel,” Paul admitted with a sad smile, uneasy with some of the specifics of the ‘solution’ he was contemplating.

  “But that would require physical contact with the planet,” protested Daneel 1. “I’m not even sure if a portal can be created between the ship and the planet, not at our speed. But that doesn’t matter since we are not in range—not even close!”

  “You’re thinking of sending one of us on ahead, aren’t you, Dad?” Daneel 2 asked, with a raised eyebrow.

  Capie blinked and sucked her breath in sharply. Daneel 1 looked at his clone in surprise.

  “Yes, I am,” Paul acknowledged frankly.

  “I didn’t see that one coming,” admitted Daneel 1. “But it makes sense. I’ll go, of course.”

  “Wait a moment here,” Capie hissed, frowning. “You’re talking about sending one of them out into space? Without a spacesuit?”

  Paul shrugged. “They don’t need air, CB. And they won’t be out there long enough for solar radiation to hurt them.” He turned to face both Scotties. “I think that both of you should go, to watch out for each other, just in case. The buddy system, like for scuba divers.”

  “I agree,” Daneel 2 said, with a nod of his head. “One question, though. Where on Mars do we go? It’s a big planet. We need to find a large monolith somewhere, or a contiguous section of the planet’s crust.”

  “That’s a very good question,” said Daneel 1 in agreement. “No one has ever been there so we don’t know if such a thing even exists anywhere on the planet, let alone where to find it. That’s a big gamble.”

  Paul rubbed the back of his neck again with one hand. “Earth has a lot of such places. I’m willing to bet that Mars, with no weather or erosion factors to speak of in play and less tectonic activity, will have some too. That’s another reason for sending both of you. With the two of you looking, it will double the chances of finding one. There are lots of extinct volcanoes on Mars. You might find one like Devil’s Tower, with the core vent filled with a solid piece of igneous rock.”

  But Daneel 1 was shaking his head on his monitor screen. “Dad, the timing is not in our favor for a long search. It will take us time to portal to Mars, and in the process we will still have to decelerate down to Mar’s orbital speed. Then we will have to search the planet and find a ‘big rock’, as you say. And then, we will have to reach out through a portal, latch onto the ship and decelerate it. And that will take the greatest amount of time, because of the limited gee forces we can use, without killing you or Mom.”

  “Ugh. You’re right, bro.” Daneel 2 looked pained. “I hadn’t thought about the deceleration factor.”

  But Paul raised a hand to interrupt them. “I’m not suggesting we funnel energy from Mars and use that as a force to slow the ship down.”

  “No?” Capie asked, puzzled. “Then what is your idea?”

  “It will be more efficient if we take the ship’s kinetic energy and funnel it to Mars instead,” Paul pointed out.

  “Dah!” exclaimed the two Daneels in unison.

  “That’s brilliant, Dad! If it will work,” pointed out Daneel 1.

  “I’m missing something here,” admitted Capie, frowning. “Why is that different?”

  “Braking the ship would exert gee forces on you and Dad, Mom,” Daneel 1 explained. “And to slow the ship fast enough, that might require a LOT of gee force. Like what the astronauts experience on a shuttle launch. But for hours, instead of just minutes.”

  “Oh.”

  “But a transfer of kinetic energy from the ship to Mars, we routinely do that sort of energy transfer when we cast a spell using part of the Earth’s energy to make the spell happen,” Daneel 2 added. “A transference from the ship to the planet should pretty much be the same thing, except for the huge amounts of energy involved. But, in theory, there shouldn’t be any gee forces. The ship will just simply slow down due to the loss of energy. And Mars—well, Mars is so big in comparison, it won’t notice the extra energy at all.”

  Capie nodded thoughtfully and looked over at her husband. “I like the part about no high gees.”

  “So, Dad, is that the plan?” Daneel 1 asked, studying Paul’s expression intently. “Because if it is, then Daneel 2 and I need to depart post haste. The further out from the planet the ship is when we try to slow it down, the less energy we can transfer. If it takes us too long to find a monolith, then the ship might get too far out of range on the other side of Mars, beyond our reach, before we can stop her.”

  “Sending them out into space…that just seems so…well, dangerous,” Capie grumbled, her eyes downcast.

  “Mom, it’ll be okay,” Daneel 1 reassured her, smiling confidently.

  “‘Piece of pie!’” Daneel 2 said, quoting Maxim Brajlovky in the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

  Capie flinched. “One of the few sci-fi flicks I didn’t like. And don’t forget, Maxim was killed when he went EVA.”

  “Way to go, bro,” Daneel 1 said scornfully.

  “I don’t care very much for this plan,” Capie told Paul point blank, a puzzled expression on her face. “Isn’t this pretty risky?”

  “Don’t like it much, I don’t either,” muttered Ariel-Leira quietly.

  Paul’s smile faded away. “Don’t worry, CB. Yes, there is risk. I can’t deny that. But if you can suggest another, better and safer plan, I’m all ears.”

  Capie seemed to consider it for several seconds. “Couldn’t we go with them? I think I’d much rather take my chances on Mars than on a spaceship careening out of control through the Solar System.”

  “Ooh, ouch!” Daneel 2 griped.

  Paul gloomily waved a hand. “Sorry, but that is not an option. I, uh, haven’t fabricated the spacesuits yet. And even if I did have them, I don’t think we can handle the speed differential, the difference in velocity vectors between us and the Martian surface. The Scotties can handle it but we probably can’t.”

  “No spacesuits?” Capie asked, blinking in surprise. “But—”

  “There wasn’t time back on Earth to make them,” Paul protested unhappily, swinging his arms wide. “We launched the Sirius Effort early, remember? And the war in the Middle East. I never even managed to collect the materials for them, let alone start fabrication.”

  “Do we need them?” Capie asked, thoughtfully looking at the chutzpah plugged into one of Daneel 2’s USB ports. “Couldn’t we just use magic to create a force field bubble around us? Like in Star Trek: The Animated Series?”

  “I experimented a bit with that approach back in Australia,” Paul admitted, wincing a little. “I didn’t have the chutzpah then, only Hamadi’s talisman. But I couldn’t keep the field completely air-tight for more than a couple of minutes. It was a real strain too. The chutzpah would probably do a better job. But there’s only one of them. When we get to Mars, I’ll build some spacesuits there. I have a couple of ideas I’m playing with.”

  Capie frowned and then sighed heavily. “Okay, so we are stuck here on the ship.” She paused, as she thought about it further. “I guess I have no choice but to agree to it. But Daneels, please?! Be safe out there. Okay? We need you both.”

  “‘Compliance!’” chorused the two Daneels in unison, quoting Max, the alien starship, from Flight of the Navigator.

  “I’m sure that they will be very careful. Won’t y
ou, boys!” asked Paul grimly. “Let’s get the two of you set up with the right talismans and a thumb drive with all the maps of Mars. Time for a little thirty eight million mile EVA jaunt!”

  “Right, Dad,” Daneel 1 chirped cheerfully. “Come on, bro! As soon as Dad gets us the maps and I exchange talismans with him, we need to rig a portable air-lock and get off this Flying Dutchman.”

  “Luck of best, boys,” Ariel-Leira encouraged them with a wide grin. “A Scottie wish I was.”

  When Daneel 1 had McDougall’s talisman and a USB drive with the Martian maps, Paul nodded at them and sighed heavily as the two Scotties dove through the opening in the deck floor, on their way below.

  “This is not an easy plan, CB,” he confessed to his wife. “But I think it will work. It’s going to take them several hours to portal to Mars. Right now might be a good time to get a little rest. Once we reach Mars, we’re going to be really busy for the next few days with little chance for sleep.”

  “Assuming we are still alive at that point,” Capie muttered under her breath.

  Ω

  The two Daneels hightailed it to Deck 6 and hurriedly created a temporary airlock out of sheets of titanium and two rolls of duct tape from out of storage. Inside the small sealed compartment, they portaled to the outside of the ship.

  As Paul had predicted, the vacuum wasn’t a problem for them. Physically, they didn’t notice the difference at all.

  “Wow!” Daneel 2 remarked over the wireless link as he swung around slowly in the blackness of space. “Lookee at all them stars! You know, it’s really hard, floating here in space like this, to believe we are moving at over 2.6 million mph.”

  “Like Dad said, it’s all relative,” Daneel 1 observed in a distracted manner. “I have a bearing on our course to Mars. Dad was also right about the solar energy density around us. We are pretty much limited to short portal hops, say around 300,000 miles at a time. You’ve got the chutzpah. Open us a portal, if you please.”

  Daneel 2 complied, opening a two foot diameter portal.

  “‘The word is given: warp speed!’” Daneel 2 said, quoting Kirk from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn. And he ducked through, closely followed by Daneel 1.