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."