Fire With Fire

yourself, even though you are a right bastard.

Wasserman’s frown faded away. The rest of the delegation relaxed-gratefully, it seemed, since every prior word and second had been taking them toward an in-group conflagration.

As Wasserman started to speak-cocky, assertive-Downing noted that Visser’s gaze occasionally migrated over to Caine’s face. In another scenario-had the ages been closer, and Visser not already been furnished with a same-sex spouse-Downing might have suspected that she was discreetly fueling a romantic infatuation. But her expression was attentive rather than adoring: specifically, as Wasserman spoke, Visser was monitoring Caine’s reactions. She trusts his judgment. She’s listening to Riordan very carefully, and with a strong positive predisposition. That’s good-and useful-to know.

Wasserman had already warmed to his subject. “To understand what a shift signature is, you have to understand how a shift drive operates. First, get it out of your head that the ship travels faster than the speed of light. It doesn’t.”

Durniak nodded. “It is impossible to exceed or even achieve the velocity of light. Relativity.”

Wasserman seemed about to disagree, then shrugged. “More or less. The Wasserman drive works by creating a field effect that ruptures weak spots in normal space-time. Although we accelerate for weeks to make the shift possible, speed really has nothing to do with it: the velocity is just a way of storing energy.

“What?”

“Trevor, think of the mass of the entire shift carrier as a battery. At zero velocity, it has only its rest mass energy-not useful for our purposes. However, as we accelerate it, every atom in that mass is also being moved to a higher energy state. In essence, the ship itself becomes a kind of energy capacitor-which is the only way we can store the energy levels required to effect shift.”

“Then why do we need the antimatter reactors?”

“To push us over the hump. As you begin to achieve significant sub-relativistic velocities, it takes increasingly more energy to add more speed. So, the efficiency of using the ship’s mass as a capacitor begins to drop sharply. That’s where the antimatter reactor comes in.”

“It provides a final burst of speed?”

“No, Trevor. I told you: it’s not about velocity. The antimatter reactor powers the Wasserman Drive, which works by compressing a seed of superdense material into a borderline implosion. That creates what laymen call a ‘pseudosingularity.’”

“And which you call-?”

“An ‘incipient event horizon,’ Ms. Visser. It’s way too small to become a full-fledged black hole. However, it does create a strong, albeit brief, time-space distortion-which, if it’s generated right on top of an interstellar superstring, is what triggers the shift.”

Visser frowned. “Go back, please: an ‘interstellar super-what’?”

“A superstring. It’s nothing you can find in space-normal. It’s-well, how do I explain this? It’s a vestigial subquantal umbilicus that connects nearby stars. Kind of an echo of their dispersal from the same pool of matter, even though they are now almost completely discrete stellar objects.”

“Sounds a little like an interstellar version of quantum entanglement,” mused Thandla.

“Yeah. Some theorists even claim the two phenomena are related. Kind of.”

Downing looked quickly around the room: Thandla, Riordan, and Hwang were still following Wasserman. Durniak and Elena were struggling to keep up. The rest were attentively and hopelessly lost.

Wasserman continued without missing a beat. “So, when you activate the Wasserman Drive atop the space- normal ‘ghost’ of the weakest part of the superstring between two stars, you create a field effect that journalists have mislabeled a ‘transient wormhole.’ Once that hole is open, the ship goes through.”

“And pulls the hole shut after itself,” supplied Elena.

“Not exactly. Actually, not at all. When I say that the pseudo-wormhole is transient, I mean it is extremely transient. Its expression is measured in microseconds. But because the ship is traveling so quickly, it’s through the rupture before space-normal can reassert.”

“So it’s more like pulling open a trapdoor and dropping through the hole before it falls shut on you.”

Lemuel nodded and almost smiled at Elena. “Yeah, more like that.”

“So now the craft is traveling in shift-space.”

“Well-no. Shift-space is just a made-up word that the press likes to use. There really isn’t any shift-space that we can tangibly experience or measure. We can only represent it as mathematical formulae and relationships. Which I’ll spare you.”

Visser muttered, “Gott sei Dank.”

“You see, a ship doesn’t really ‘enter’ a superstring: it ‘interfaces’ with it. It’s not moving, not in the material sense of the word. What it does is more akin to electron tunneling.”

Elena’s eyebrows rose slightly. “‘Electron tunneling’?”

“Yes. To put this really simply, atoms on either side of a barrier can, under the right conditions, swap electrons. But not because the electrons physically push through the barrier: they don’t. Instead, when an electron winks out of existence on one side of the barrier, another electron blinks in to replace it on the other side. That’s called ‘tunneling.’ How it happens-well, that’s a longer topic. Suffice it to say that the cosmos is keeping score, and when it tears a particle down in one place, it has to reconstruct it in another place.”

“And that’s how the shift drive works?”

“Well, it’s the same principle. Stars are, in some ways, like these atoms. They can, under the right conditions, exchange particles-or, more accurately, they can ‘communicate changes’ along the superstrings that link them. Like a tunneling electron, a shifted ship is not being physically propelled to another place: instead, the superstring transmits its ‘potentiality’ from one place to another.”

“So, in the same instant that the Wasserman Drive makes the ship wink out in one place, the same ship has to be re-expressed further along the superstring.”

“Now you get it. And what you’d call the ‘wormhole’ is more like an entry ramp onto the superstring freeway that connects the two stars. When the wormhole’s distortion of normal space-time grazes the underlying space- time irregularities that exist at the weak spot of a superstring-boom! You get a shift. And the precise conditions of how that happens is what determines-finally-a ship’s shift signature.”

“Which is-what?”

“A bloom of high-energy particles, rays, photons, and heat.”

“What creates it?”

“Well, the Wasserman Drive’s incipient event horizon grabs everything nearby-and I mean everything: solar particles, photons, cosmic rays. All the background noise and garbage of space-normal comes along for the ride during a shift. So when all that gets re-expressed, one of two things happen. If the object was at a high-energy state when it shifted-gamma rays, cosmic rays, the ship itself-it comes out just the way it went in. But that means you get a brief Cerenkov flash and a spike in the background radiation signature, because you just imported high-energy crap into a system which is already awash in high-energy crap of its own.”

“And what about the less energetic objects that get shifted-like dust or gas molecules?”

It was Durniak who hypothesized the answer to Visser’s question. “Logically, because they are not moving fast enough, they would be torn apart before crossing the threshold. So they would come out as-what? — heat, energy, subparticles?”

“All of the above. But their annihilation is too brief and diffuse to present either a radiological or thermal hazard. However, against the background of space-normal-which is comparatively cold, empty, inactive-this burst shows up like a signal flare in night-vision goggles.”

Visser visibly drew in a large, relieved breath. “Very well. So, now: the Dornaani shift signature.”

“Well, like I said, I’m not sure it is a shift signature.”

“Why? Did they not shift in?”

“I think they did-but it’s not like any shift I’ve ever seen, or ever heard theorized.”

“Why?”

“Firstly, they came in at speed. What that implies about their power generation and/or storage capabilities-”

“You have already made very clear. For which we thank you. Next?”