23 hours after the loss of the Resolute and Sparta

  Gerard sat around his conference table and looked up and hologram. The German, Hans Karl was now waving his fingers over his image generator as he explained his version of what exactly the wormhole was. Gerard shook his head clear, he needed to hear this, despite what his personal thoughts about Hans were, Hans was a genius.

  “In so far as we can now determine we believe that a worm hole is effectively a tear in space. The tear is caused by the total sum of the energy and mass of the arm of this part of the Milky Way. Such is the gravitational force behind this arm that it actually tears the fabric of space. Now this causes a nothingness between one point and another point. What drives this is a little understood interaction between dark matter and dark energy, it’s the glue if you like between our galaxy and the other galaxies in our cluster. Its this interaction we suspect that drives the wormhole through massive density displacement.” Hans was now waving at the hologram. Hans rubbed his unruly hair as he thought for a moment. The forty two year old then rubbed his chin. Hans had been terribly excited about the activity and the sheer amount of new data gathered. The loss of the two vessels meant little to him. Dam his enthusiasm.

  “And the other side?” Gerard asked as he glanced around at the dozen people gathering the war room, mostly senior staff and the odd expert. Hans turned to stare at the admiral with his mouth open. He then rubbed his head once more and turned back to the map of galaxy.

  “Sagittarius is the central hub of our galaxy so radiating out from there is a set of spirals. We would assume that this tear exists between our spiral and the next in a following curve. Whilst it looks empty to us we suspect it has a higher density of dark matter and due to gravational forces, active dark energy.” Hans smiled, Gerard did not.

  The map of the galaxy was slowly rotating with reference to earth and tiny distance away, the Cube right on the edge of their arm of the galaxy. The arms were tight against the main body of the galaxy.

  “And my question stands, where does it end up?” Gerard frowned. He certainly didn’t need another lecture in wormhole theory.

  “We don’t know exactly.” Hans answered. “It could be anywhere over a 10,000 light year area and probably more then 30 000 light years away from Earth.”

  “And how do we open this hole?” Gerard rubbed his temples.

  “Ah yes.” Hans changed the hologram screen. “Now the tear is subject to huge gravitational forces of which we can not duplicate, although we did pick high levels of H6 before the sub disappeared.”

  “Which means what?” Gerard was growing irritable.

  “Ah, we don’t know yet.” Hans looked puzzled and slightly annoyed at the constant interruptions in his explanation, this was the most significant wormhole event in over two hundred years!

  “You don’t know!” Snapped Gerard.

  “Please sir.” Hans stood up. “We know that a tear is basically a gap in a wall. If you imagine that universe is basically an ocean and to travel through it you have to pass through that ocean and are limited by the laws of physics. When we use a hyper jump we are pinching time and space by causing a huge amount of mass and energy this in turn causes a vacuum in the ocean in which we can travel faster. We do not travel faster then what we normally do but we travel with out the resistance of the ocean and therefore appear to be travelling faster. Like a jet flying under water.”

  “Yes.” Gerard nodded as he waved his hand, he understood basic hyper travel but he guessed Hans was trying to prove a point somewhere.

  “The worm hole is something different. It is like opening up a door in America and finding yourself in Australia. Space and time simply doesn’t exist, it is a gap. Around this gap are huge amounts of stored energy like tectonic plates on the earths crust. You have normal movement along this fault line and that is what we believed happened to the Resolute and the Sparta. Dark matter/dark energy interaction is a still a little understood science although we do know there is some sort of interaction between complex hydrogen particles, its how we first managed to trap dark matter, in a H6 trap.”

  “So we are no closer.” Gerard nodded. It was another lecture in worm theory after all.

  “We are no closer.” Hans nodded. “But we do have a huge amount of data to dig through, our understanding of the worm hole after this event will be greatly increased.”

  “Thank you.” Gerard stood up and left, Hans excitement still grated him.

  It was a long walk back his office, still no word from Earth and he certainly wasn’t looking forward to it. Long distance coms took time and he didn’t even have any further development on worm hole theory to report back, merely ‘interesting data’. He opened his door to his office and Zhou was waiting for him.

  The small Chinese man was in his late sixties and walked with a cane but his fragile body belied the sharp mind. He was head of Karajini, the main R&D group of UNF defence based deep in the sparsely populated north west of Australia in an old Iron ore mine. The Karajini had refined nearly all aspects of space travel and armour in the last twenty years and the Karajini class sub was the ultimate device they had created. As Zhou had called it, the basket with all the eggs in it.

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  “Still here?” Gerard raised an eyebrow, it was not there was anything left investigate, there was no evidence and he was sure that if Zhou was to talk to Hans, one of them would not survive. At least Zhou was the more practical of the two.

  “I am sorry for your loss, I understand Commodore George Zorba was a personal friend?” Zhou nodded. The little man bowed his head. He was never going to get that from Hans.

  “He was.” Gerard pushed his lips together as he fought his emotions. “I still need to write to his wife and let her know, he has five daughters.”

  “I was surprised at that action I admit.” Zhou nodded as if understanding.

  “You disapproved?” Gerard looked up, no one had dared to comment on his orders to the Sparta.

  “No, not at all, I would have never have thought of it. It was probably one of the quickest and appropriate actions I have seen.” Zhou clarified his comment. “Major Ivan Gori on the Resolute has the same orders and I doubt Missy would ever let the ship fall into enemy hands but sending in the Sparta gives me a little more confidence. I can see the value in having people like yourself in command.”

  “So why are you still here, you have another five subs to commission.” Gerard opened his draw and filled a small glass with port, he indicated to Zhou who waved his hand then nodded. Gerard’s port was only top shelf. Gerard had a thousand things to do and talking to a frail looking man was not one of them but he had a great deal of respect for the man accomplishments. None the less he felt the old man was buttering him for further bad news. What ever that could be.

  “The Resolute was different.” Zhou took a sipped and paused as if gathering his thoughts. “It was the second sub completed, the Intrepid was the first and was set for this training run. You see the Resolute had been modified, unofficially modified. It was the skunk works edition if you like. All the radical ideas that we dismissed were built into that sub. It was no accident that Missy was commanding that ship, she was the project team leader.”

  “What are you saying, you just trying to make me feel worse?” Gerard did not like this at all. “Wait a minute, who knows about the modifications?”

  “You, me and Missy’s team.” Zhou answered with a lowered head. “It has bigger engines, more powerful missiles, everything not needed to wage war was removed, including armour. And Missy installed a 300mm IPAC system up the guts made of a special graphene compensate fibre and a special alloy.”

  “God.” Gerard took a deep breath. “No armour? And the IPAC, it was thought that it created too much heat for stealth.”

  “For the cloaking system to work we had to remove the armour.” Zhou answered. “As for the IPAC, it has never been tested in that configuration. It is also Transmorphic. And then there is Missy. She has no command experience, although she wrote half the simulations. But if they do survive and they do meet a Mecoid war ship, she’ll know what to do. It is unfortunate that we’ll never know.”

  “So what you are telling me is that neither of us have a career anymore, once ECC discovers what you have done, you’ll lose Karajini.” Gerard understood. He felt his body drain.

  “They will not shut down the program. But it is probably my final act.” Zhou nodded.

  “Missy.” Gerard was not filled with confidence. If he remembered the briefing notes, she was technically brilliant and a strategic genius but had a fairly flawed personality, prone to fits of anger and irrational actions. Gerard then paused. “Transmorphic, I thought that was still science fiction stuff outside armour options, what use is that in a ship that doesn’t have any armour.”

  “When they shut down the Einstein project in 46 I inherited the package. We were not allowed to kill it so we put it use on the Karajini project. Missy used it to perfect the Transmorphic.” Zhou explained.

  “The Gen 7? So that is where it went.” Gerard allowed himself a smile. “I bet ii will want that back for their devilish work, particularly after you stole Missy off them.”

  “They just need to go and get it.” Now Zhou smiled.

  “Where did you hide it?” Gerard asked seeing there was some satisfaction in Zhou’s smile.

  “The only way to run a ship as complex as the Resolute was to use the organic AI. That is where it is now.” Zhou then laughed.

  “Oh shit.” Then Gerard laughed, choking on his port. They would hang the pair of them.

  “There is more.” Zhou waited till Gerard recovered.

  “More than that?” Gerard put his glass down.

  “This ship was never designed to see service, after this exercise we were going to strip it down and study all the components. It would have formed the basis on the next model of warships. Think of it was a formula one car, designed with cutting edge technology but only suitable for a couple of races.” Zhou went on.

  Gerard could feel his stomach turning in knots. The loss of this ship was catastrophic, his career was certainly over as well.

  “There is more.”

  “More?” Gerard could think could possible anything more than that.

  “Now each ship in the fleet has a entanglement black box, you call it the EBB.” Zhou moved onto his next revelation.

  “The magic box.” Gerard nodded. “Something about entanglement theory, if you separate a particle its atoms stay in sync?” The space version of the black box.

  “Kind of, it’s a quantum physics paradox whereby one particles position, momentum, spin and polarization will be relative to the other half no matter where it is in the universe. As long as ship is healthy its twin located safely on Earth will be healthy, it if fails then the twin on earth fails and we assume the ship lost.” Zhou explained.

  “Yes, yes I understand the basics.” Gerard nodded wanting to see where this was heading.

  “As a communicating device, it somewhat limited as the two particles need to be separated then one half has to be sent to the point at which you are going by conventional means. But it does allow some limited comms but it is not renewable coms the particles breakdown very quickly under use.”

  “You telling me we can communicate with them?” Gerard was on the edge of his seat.

  “That remains to be seen.” Zhou shrugged before continuing. “Our warships have two EBB’s, one set remains on the in our Moon Base and the other always at the point of deployment, for example here at the Cube.”

  “You’re telling me how to suck eggs Zhou.” Gerard frowned and leaned back in his seat.

  “Neither the Resolute nor the Sparta have active EBB’s here at the Cube as neither ship have been commissioned.” Zhou threw him some more information.

  “You find new ways to make me feel ill.” Gerard rub his face.

  “We need to get those EBB’s transferred from MB to here and you need to use the wormhole emergency entanglement communicator. It will take far too long using the hyperlink communicator.” Zhou finally got his point.

  “Oh Zhou, we have no such thing, that’s why we built the Cube.” Gerard found something to laugh at his lowest point.

  “Oh but you do.” It was now Zhou who leaned forward, “And you need to use it right now Admiral Mouille.”