*COMMUNAL: The truth hurts.
Yeah. Fine. A lot of things hurt.
***
Roll expressed the obvious concern. “The High Queen has got to be edgy right now. She’ll run as soon as the first bomb goes off. They’ll all run. We may only get two of them this way. She’ll be somewhere in the center of the blockade.”
“Valid point. Other suggestions?” asked the general.
“Have you been briefed on Project InnerEar?” Mr. T interjected.
The general thought for a second. “Yes, I recall. It is now fully functional. A quantum teleportation listening device. Please elaborate.”
Mr. T nodded. “There is also a locator device. Same project. When I last checked in, they were trying to boost the signal for use in near-Earth space. We should be able to boost the gain much more, though at the expense of useful e-cell life. If I had to guess, we could boost the signal transmission to a hundred light-minutes, but that would drain the e-cell in a couple of hours, or even minutes.”
I was confused. “Huh? I’m still not sure I get it. Project InnerEar?”
Mr. T had a contemplative look, no doubt wondering how best to explain. “I think you know we have been able to quantum teleport for at least 30 years. I’ve talked about it. It’s not on the level of what the twins can do, of course. It started out with a photon over a short distance. There were incremental advances over the years. That, at least, is what we have been told as the general public. Governmental agencies, not only in the United States, have been working on teleportation for quite some time.”
Mr. T and the general shared a glance. “Several years ago, a government agency that will remain nameless, perfected an eavesdropping device. The device is small and simple. Yet it can be effective in a variety of situations. We can teleport it anywhere. For example, to a bug ship.
“In fact, I did receive several briefing reports of InnerEar devices being teleported to locations inside bug ships. That’s how I knew about the e-cell and signal transmission data. The briefing reports were quite ... detailed. Nothing significant came of the effort for various reasons. But, for our purpose, there are those InnerEar transponders. We could teleport a hardened InnerEar transponder to an exterior location on each of the bug blockade ships. If a ship were to leave the blockade formation, we would be able to track it.”
Rock was excited. “Let me guess. The transponder has a nano-shell casing which renders the unit invisible across most of the electromagnetic spectrum using quantum cloaking technology derived from Schrodinger’s equation.”
The heads of Mr. T and the general turned to Rock so fast the movement was almost like seeing an afterimage. I blinked.
The general had a glare going. “Did you hack the NSA?”
Rock held up his hands. “Don’t shoot. No, I didn’t hack the NSA. It was an intuitive supposition. A hunch.”
The general turned to Mr. T. “Who is this guy?”
Mr. T shrugged. “That’s just Rock. Roll does that sort of thing too. They’ll surprise you like that.” He turned to Rock. “You are essentially correct. The bugs shouldn’t be able to detect the transponders. The listening device version was used during the invasion and worked well enough. The transponders will emit short laser bursts to their home satellite. There should be no way for the bugs to detect the signal, not unless another ship happened to be in line. That’s not likely.”
I’m surprised all the time at what Mr. T knows, about top-secret things. I guess, maybe, a signals intelligence officer might be told about the InnerEar devices. Maybe.
September 20th. Shockwave is getting ready to go to Darkside and take a little look around. We all have spacesuits now. Compliments of the general. We will need to take a field trip before we go to Darkside. The Moon is much smaller than Earth. The gravity is much lower. It’s a mass thing.
On the Moon you only weigh about 1/6th of what you weigh on the Earth. So, take Rock for example. He weighs about 180 pounds on Earth.
What’s that Rock? You’re pushing 190 now? You really like Ms. Findley’s blueberry muffins, don’t you? Keep that up and you won’t even be able to port yourself around. Okay, 190 then. Oh, is that right? You put on muscle mass. Roll put on an extra roll?
Anyway, muscle-bound Rock, on the Moon, he only weighs about 30 pounds. Think about that. If you have a little spring in your step, and your equipment is light, you fly like 20-feet. Well, definitely a long distance. It takes some getting used to. And we would need to move around Darkside all stealthy and sneaky-like. It was imperative to stay close to each other and inside the cloaking field. That would take some practice.
The Moon wouldn’t work for our practice grounds. The bugs would spot us. Unless we tried to maintain a cloak the whole time. Forget that. We needed a safe place to perfect our Moon walk. So, we chose Io. Io is one of the moons of Jupiter. It has a gravitational pull similar to that of our Moon. Rock says the gravitation pull of the Moon is 1.62 m/s2. Io is close with 1.796 m/s2. By way of comparison, the gravitational pull on Earth is 9.8 m/s2. Let’s take his word on all that.
It didn’t take too long to get used to moon walking. Uh ... Io-walking. Mr. T had the hardest time of it. But within an hour or so we could all do a low gravity shuffle. We were ready for the Moon.
I found I had mixed feelings about Io. Io isn’t much farther from Jupiter than the Moon is from the Earth. Yet Jupiter is so much larger that Earth. Jupiter just hangs there, looming. The colors of Jupiter are subdued, changing with the wide lines that look like strata circling the planet. It is eerie, almost oppressive. Even so, it’s beautiful. A
