The lights went down, and Firenze flipped the holotable switch. With a clank and hum-hiss, the glass case flooded with steam. A moment later, the corners began to leak, and the clinical wet stink of media-steam mingled with the Kessinwey stench. Firenze's glasses pinged, dialogued with his mobile box, and then transcribed the Plymouth blueprints from his HUD to the volumetric bath. Firenze moved his left hand, sensors in his gloves translated the motion into commands, and lasers danced in the fog. A three-dimensional projection of the Plymouth took shape, broke apart, and zoomed in on the port lift drive. The massive ARC950 rotated in the air, its cylinders and coils breaking apart and combining, labels appearing and vanishing at Firenze's whim.
With the display under control, he excused, "I'll try to keep this quick, so we don't get a bath." He didn't bother to ask why the government couldn't afford a dry projector. The only responses would have been dismissive laughs and punchlines without context.
The darkened room did bring one benefit, though. In shadow, the faces vanished, lit only by the neon laser-flash and half-cloaked in the diffusing fog. That alone did wonders for his nerves.
Firenze spun his left hand, and the model rotated. He closed his fist, and it froze. With a quick flick of his index finger and thumb, the top of the Dirac Cycler popped free, internals blossoming into part-by-part views.
Clausen's voice, deep and sure, cut through the fog. The sergeant asked, "Okay, Princess, how's it work?"
A second voice - Rutman - added, "And try to focus on how we can avoid blowing ourselves up."
Firenze drew a deep breath and tried to tune out the world, to focus only on the moment and the task. Finally, he'd been given a challenge he could beat - a test solely based on his intellect. No running. No shooting. No goddamn concussion grenades. For the first time in months, he got to be the Smartest Guy in the room, and it felt good. His worst self wanted to bask in that momentary glory, to salve away weeks of humiliation with short-term preening, but his better angels reminded him of the price of pride, while his pragmatism told him that he still had to spar with these guys.
No, this was definitely not the place for posturing. Being useful was more than enough.
He'd spent the last three nights tearing into the briefing packs, trying to translate them into a useful form. This was familiar territory, after all. The briefs contained all the data he needed, but they were constructed like the worst sorts of textbooks: walls of formulae and charts without context. He'd dealt with plenty of profs who had this problem - brilliant thinkers who couldn't express themselves to anyone not already their peer. Teaching was supposed to be about turning knowledge into an unfolding path for the curious, presentations like the white-binders he'd been handed were data-walls designed to intimidate the uninitiated. The best term for this kind of instruction was "less than useless", but he was well-versed in just this kind of translation.
Firenze started, "Hey, everybody. How's it going?" He let the grumbled replies stand and asked, "Before we get started, I wanted to get an idea of what we know and what we need to know. I'm going to throw some terms out, let me know if you're comfortable with them. Negative mass? Drive field? Bergman occlusion?"
"How about, 'where not to stick a wrench'?" Clausen asked.
Firenze paused. He chewed on the question, but also on the slightly-metallic edge of the safety cup. That pseudo-joke was a flag, telling him, politely, to keep it basic. He answered, "Most anywhere, to be honest. We'll start at the top."
He began, "These drives work on the Bergman principles, named after physicist Evran Bergman. His pre-War work proved the existence of negative matter outside of pure mathematics."
Rutman interjected, "I thought we had negative matter pre-Collapse?"
"No. You're thinking of antimatter, and it's far more docile. That statement alone should worry you." Firenze joked. The room stayed silent. "Okay, wrong crowd." He admitted, then continued, "Negative matter is weird. I was researching it in my spare time-" someone coughed, "-and the phrase I found that best describes it is 'stupidly, dangerously, impossibly useless'. Once it exists, it reacts inversely to ordinary matter. Most notably, it is repelled by gravity - it falls up. This makes it useful for lift drives, and it's why we use it, but it's not the only property. N-matter scatters from ordinary matter and from itself. Left to its own devices, it would break down into particles and chase itself to the edges of the universe." He paused for a moment, let the room grasp what he'd said, then continued, "It gets weirder. If you pushed an n-matter brick, it would fly back into you. If you pulled it, it would run away. It's attracted to like, repelled by opposites. You have to trick it into doing anything useful, and it's dangerous to handle. Inordinately so."
"What, does it eat you?" Hill cracked.
"Yes." Firenze answered.
There was a long, silent interval that only Firenze found funny.
Firenze clarified, "It doesn't really try to eat you. But it also kind of does. It's important to understand: this is an exceptionally rare substance, so much so that we've never seen it in nature. It's antithetical to existence. Take normal matter - what I'm describing is sloppy, I admit - but, if you're trying to 'make' ordinary matter in an accelerator, it requires a lot of energy to slam everything together and try to get a few particles out. This matter can be 'released' back into energy - think radioactive decay. At the base, the fundamental truth is: it takes lots of energy to make matter, and lots of it comes back out
