“Ten years ago, my father sold our board on BugWorks,” Casimir said quietly. “He had the opportunity to fully explain it to me before he had his stroke.”
Even twenty-second-century medical technology couldn’t save someone dead on arrival with a thumbnail-sized blood clot in their brain. The elder Casimir had been brilliant, eccentric, and rich beyond belief—none of which had saved him when his body had betrayed him.
“Since we believed the technologies we were working on had major military and civilian applications, and since the United Earth Space Force was refusing to fund the research, Nova Industries—aided by a significant application of the Casimir family’s personal fortune—completed the research ourselves,” Casimir continued, his voice still calm and quiet. “You’re lucky we did, too,” he continued. “You know we’ve been testing hyperships. Without some of the tech that came out of BugWorks, those ships would be impossible.”
“You…completed an entire new generation of military technology with private funding?” Villeneuve asked, making sure he was understanding Casimir correctly. Nova Industries was a huge corporation, and Casimir was unbelievably wealthy, but he was talking a multi-trillion-dollar investment at least.
“Enough civilian and secondary applications have already arisen from BugWorks to cover a third or so of the costs,” Casimir pointed out. “Even if the military applications fall through, we will earn back our costs eventually just from those.
“But the military possibilities are…transformative,” he continued. “Including the hyperdrive, we have developed four systems we believe that the UESF will want on every ship. I brought you here today so we could demonstrate them for you.”
“If you want me to sell them to my Captains, the people who are the reason you didn’t get funding for this, they’d better be fantastique—impressive,” Villeneuve warned.
Elon Casimir grinned, managing to look even younger than his thirty-odd years.
“Oh, believe me, Admiral Villeneuve, you are going to be impressed.”
Casimir proceeded to drag Villeneuve out onto an observation shuttle—a luxuriously appointed craft over three times the size of the UESF standardized shuttle the Admiral had arrived on. Every part of the passenger compartment except the floor was covered in high-quality monitors, allowing the two men to watch the big space station drop away beneath their feet.
“Over to your left, you can see the yard where we’ve been building the XC ships,” the CEO told Villeneuve. “They’re our ‘Experimental Cruiser’ hulls, a modular design with a frankly ridiculous power-generation capacity that we’ve used as a platform for all of our tests.
“Ahead of us you’ll see XC-Zero One,” he continued. With a brush of fingers through the haptic interface suspended above the screen, Casimir adjusted the view to zoom in on the ship.
Villeneuve studied it with a practiced eye. There was little to compare its size to as they approached, but the ship seemed large for an experiment. It followed similar lines to the UESF’s current battleships, a squished cigar-shape tapering to a flat prow at the front from the engines at the back, except…
Unlike a UESF ship, the cigar tapered both ways.
“Where are the engines?” he asked.
“That’s the first tech we’re going to demonstrate,” Casimir told him. “Since I know you’re wondering,” he continued, “XC-Zero One, also known as Raptor, is five hundred and eighty-six meters long with an average beam of one hundred meters. She masses just over two million tons—though that’s due to reasons we’ll discuss in a few minutes.”
“That’s a cruiser,” Villeneuve observed dryly. “Right. A cruiser that’s a third longer than my battleships and masses almost three times as much. How much of that is fuel? Which also brings me back to my original point: where are her engines?”
Casimir held up one finger in a “hold on a minute” gesture and took a small microphone from a concealed holder on the bar.
“Captain Anderson,” he said into it. “Begin the demonstration.”
There was no audible response, but Raptor started moving…accelerating impossibly as the big ship turned into a blur that rapidly receded into a barely visible dot. Villeneuve stared in shock as Casimir used the display interface to zoom in on the ship, blurring along at an impossible velocity—only to make a physically impossible turn and blaze back to the observation shuttle at the same impossible speed.
“Raptor and the other XC ships are equipped with what the scientists and engineers at BugWorks call a ‘gravitational-hyperspatial interface momentum engine,’ he said calmly. “The crews working with them just call it the interface drive. It’s capable of accelerating from zero to forty percent of lightspeed in just over six seconds with no inertial effects.”
Villeneuve stared at the ship as it came to a halt in front of them again.
“Elon,” he said slowly, “that’s impossible. That violates the laws of physics.”
“So does the hyperdrive,” Casimir pointed out dryly. “BugWorks has spent the last ten years playing with the consequences of hyperspatial anomalies on our understanding of physics. The interface drive is, so far as our experiments can prove, almost one hundred percent inertialess. The drive pushes anything smaller than about a tenth the size of the effect field to the side and…well, you’ll see what happens when it hits something larger than that shortly.”
The Admiral stared at the strange ship, considering the potential. His current generation of warships was built around heavy lasers and lots of massive missiles. Those missiles couldn’t even catch Casimir’s XC ship.
“You said you had more technologies to show me,” he said levelly, trying to control the urge to hyperventilate.
“Of course,” Casimir confirmed. The shuttle—still, thankfully, using what looked like normal fusion thrusters—continued on its course. They orbited over the big asteroid that the Research Station orbited beside, and a second of the impossible ships appeared on the screens. The CEO gestured and zoomed the display in on it.
“XC-Zero Two, Hammer, is also equipped with the interface drive,” he noted. “She won’t be maneuvering much herself, though. She has a different system to demonstrate.”
Once again, Casimir grabbed the microphone and ordered the Captain to begin the demonstration.
Hammer moved smoothly, with a
