April 5: A Depth of Understanding (43 page)

"Thank you. What is the address of your cubic?"

"If you can't find out in two minutes you aren't a good enough spy for Gabriel to work with," Ruby told him and shifted the pot for an empty and turned her back on him.

Well, she had a point there, Chen admitted. But it took him five minutes. It seems somebody had made it more difficult than usual to find them. He didn't like feeling it was a test.

* * *

Jeff was at his offices already when April showed up early at 1810 hours. She had dinner in a slow cooker so she wasn't worried about it.

"You remember the suggestions you made about things we should try with the Bucky tubes after we found a way to link them and extrude them from a nano-sieve?"

"Yeah, but not word for word. I didn't bother to write any of it down," April told him.

"This is something they developed working with the idea of periodic defects in the tube wall. Remember they were able to spin them into a thread as well as for mats?"

"Yeah and it was sticky to just about everything."

"Well this is the thread produced by that sort of Bucky," Jeff said showing her a delicate black strand, about a hundred millimeters long. It was looped at each end through laser cut hole in the diamond, which was very smoothly radiused and polished. The thread was then braided back onto itself. The diamond was mounted in the eye of a forged tool steel hook, far larger and out of proportion to the thread, which looked to be no more than a tenth of a millimeter in diameter, about the same thickness as one of April's hairs.

Jeff mounted one hook to a simple frame. The other to a bin hanging just a few centimeters above a shock absorbing foam mat. He offered April a full face shield and put one on himself.

"I could buy a machine with hydraulic rams that tests materials for tensile strength, but they are heavy. It would cost a fortune to lift it and I didn't see any reason to throw that much money away when this is made of local materials and works fine."

He had a number of heavy plastic bags of iron sintering stock from the moon piled by the frame. "These are twenty kilo bags," he said lifting one into the bin, "and the smaller ones are five kilo."

April counted as he added bags, when he reached four hundred kilograms she was impressed, even at a half G. The thread looked impossibly thin to support that much weight. Then Jeff switched to the lighter bags. "When it breaks, it will be at the juncture where it is braided, one end or the other. It makes it slightly stronger if you make the loop longer, so the angle where they meet is narrower."

Jeff added five kilo bags gently, not shock loading it by dropping them. "Notice I'm staying further away than the thread could whip when it breaks. I've never had a short piece come off, but that's why I'm wearing spex with a diamond coating and the face shield."

When he got to four hundred forty kilograms the line parted and the bin dropped on the deck with a muted thud, but no bounce due to the foam.

"If you do this much your neighbors must love you. It has to be loud dropping on their overhead."

"It's commercial cubic and I promised the guy I'd call and let him know when I'll be testing. He's good with it."

"I suppose this will make us some money too? It certainly impressed me. It reminds me of the Bucky Braid the spy had, who invaded us a few years back.

"This? Yeah, but that was basically hand made from short pieces. It probably cost ten or fifteen thousand dollars USNA to have hand braided with micro-Waldos and still not quite as strong,  This is
cheap
. It'll have a lot of uses in architecture and composites for vehicles. If I'd had cloth of this stuff I could have shaved a couple hundred kilo off the
Happy Lewis
when your grandpa and I modified it. But I showed you this just to give you a base line to understand the next thing I want to show you."

"This is a similar fiber," he showed her on the bench. It was even thinner than the previous one, almost invisible despite good lighting.

"I have to use different hooks with a diamond saddle for the fiber to hang. It's a length with the ends each looped in separate holes in a single diamond. It would be awkward to make it hanging from eyelets like the last. It's made this way so the ends are electrically insulated from each other." He changed the hooks out on the frame and using the diamond as a handle hung it on the top hook with tweezers. He put the bin back in place hanging on the bottom hook, with a single bag of material to put some tension on it.

"It has about a quarter of the cross section of the first one I showed you."

"So it should suspend about a hundred ten kilo?"

"Yes, if I left it like this. But we're going to do something else." He produced a small battery holder with wires, a switch and an amp meter. The wire ends had small soft plates of gold. Jeff put one little plate in the hole with the lower loop of Bucky thread and used a cone of sapphire to wedge it against the thread until it deformed over it and made good contact, squeezing it in with pliers. He repeated the action with the other hole. "So with the diamond acting as an insulator I have a circuit through the thread," he said tracing it with his finger.

"Oh, it's conducting, I didn't realize."

Jeff smiled. "Indeed it is, watch..." He flipped the switch attached to the battery holder. There was a sharp audible tick, April wasn't sure from what and the amp meter showed it was drawing five milliamps.

"What made a noise?" April wondered. "It didn't sound like the switch."

"The thread contracted slightly when the current flowed through it, to counteract the slight elongation it already had under tension."

"Anything that strong couldn't have stretched very far."

"No and most of the noise was from the face of the diamond anvils. Now watch." He added bags back to the bin suspended below until he had as much weight as the previous thread had failed to support. As he added bags the current showing in the meter went up each time, but in smaller increments, until it was carrying eighty milliamps. The last bag had only made it increase one or two milliamps.

"That's freaky. Nothing should be that strong," April insisted.

"The defects in the side walls of the tubes carry the current from one tube to another. It is a room temperature superconductor. The doping atoms prevent the carbon bonds around it from being pulled loose and a hex loop stretching until it breaks a bond and makes a loop with an extra carbon atom in it. Once that happens it propagates and the whole thing fails rapidly. If we added more weight the same thing would happen once the current plateaus. You can up the voltage and get a little increase, but pretty soon you have failure from heating and need to very aggressively cool it to prevent failure."

"But if you lose power..."

"Yeah," Jeff reached out and flipped the switch off and the load broke the thread immediately and dropped it to the deck.

"Why isn't Heather here to see this?" April wondered.

"She saw a smaller version of it on the moon and she has a house guest and wanted to be with her mom, so she didn't care to see it twice."

April nodded at that explanation. "Is this all from your friends at Armstrong?"

"It came through them to us, but it is from the French colony, which raises another bit of news. Now that we have established a line at L1, past which Earth powers may not send armed ships, they inform us they intend to declare independence within the year. They aren't sure when yet, but when they have a supply shuttle drop off things with sufficient room to take three or four of their politically appointed administrators back to Earth. They will expel them and declare themselves sovereign."

"They'll blame us!" April blurted out.

"Who?"

"France. We're on pretty good terms with them, but I can see it now, they'll blame us for their lunar colony rebelling."

"It's funny, Heather said the same thing, except that they'd blame Central. Perhaps they will, but it's hardly something we'd impede just on the off chance they'd take offense." When April still looked unhappy Jeff added: "If Japan had wanted us to forgo our independence because North American might blame
them
for encouraging it how would you have felt?"

"I wouldn't have cared what they wanted. They weren't the ones being oppressed."

Jeff just spread his hands in a gesture that said... "See?"

"Japan ended up helping us," April reminded him, "even though they did so quietly and didn't make a big public fuss the North Americans would respond to."

"Well, we will also help...whatever they end up calling themselves. If they've decided on a name nobody has told me. But the System Bank is quietly acquiring a good variety of seeds and biological samples from Earth for them. The license rights for this material with actively powered mechanical properties is one of the payments in kind we're getting for doing that. They also got our design experience for tunnel boring machines and intend to move very quickly to be self sufficient in food."

"And wine if I know the French."

"Indeed, they do have vine cuttings among the items. As well as stock for chickens and rabbits and vat tissues. I suspect they will not only survive, but eat very well."

"Are you ordering enough to let us try raising our own food at Central?"

"I certainly can if you think it prudent," Jeff offered.

"If we need it badly later, it'll be easier to ramp up than start from scratch. Expanding into the outer system it's going to be much too far to be hauling fresh food."

"You are probably right. We'll need to take a variety of things if we go to other stars too."

"Well yeah, if people like Jelly can get us to where we can count on living three or four hundred years. I'd consider seeing other star systems. and on that long of a trip you will sure need way more than a freezer full of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches."

"Oh, I was thinking more for colonizing and maybe even a certain level of Terraforming on the far end. But as for the trip, I was reading some interesting ideas from a Japanese fellow about quantum behavior. How out past the Oort Cloud, where there isn't much gravitational influence and space is pretty flat, things could act strangely. You might be able to stimulate tunneling of macroscopic objects. Things as big as a ship even..."

April didn't ask
how
. She knew better now. She'd asked how her Lunar armor changed color and other things that all seemed to have no explanation in anything resembling English. But she was pretty sure where this was going. She hadn't allowed herself to hope for it before.

* * *

"Mr. Davis? I'm Rao Guohua. I'm second chair in the Committee of Temporary Governance. I'm a colloquial English speaker and have traveled in space as a civilian, so I was asked to speak to you about ceasing hostilities."

"China is under military rule then?" Jon asked.

"Yes, for the time being we are under martial law. I will be frank with you in saying we feel confident of holding the nation, or I wouldn't be calling you yet, but there are still forces resisting us in remote areas and some naval units not responding to our orders."

"I'm not familiar with your uniforms. Of what rank are you? Do you have authority to bind your nation to agreements?"

"I'm a Dàxiào, what you'd call a senior colonel. If you are accustomed to USNA ranks it's closer to a low level general officer. I am entrusted to negotiate with you, but any agreement we come to will have to be presented and approved by the entire committee."

"Fair enough, our Assembly would have to approve any end to a state of war. So are you offering an unconditional surrender like we received from North America?"

Rao gasped, shocked speechless. When the shock subsided it was replaced with anger.

"Despite much damage the Chinese nation still exists and is greater and far more numerous, with assets your little nation can't approach. It is ridiculous to speak of a surrender. I wanted to negotiate a cease fire, not a surrender. Your making war on us is an irritant, an inconvenience to our consolidating power, not a threat to our existence."

"You'd have been better off arguing that you are an entirely new nation, not the one who decided to make war on us. Then we could reasonably say no state of war exists with the new state. But your own words build a trap for you. It is obvious you regard yourselves as a direct continuation of the Chinese state. I'm afraid you have the same megalomaniac mind set too. As I've heard it said, that nobody can oppose two billion Chinese. Do you think that too?"

"Exactly. The old regime was in error, but we as a nation are more than the plans of a few old men. So yes we are of the same basic nature. Our race and heritage demands a certain continuity of purpose. You don't discard millennia of culture overnight. The ship takes a slightly new course," Rao explained, making a thrusting gesture with his hand that bent to a new angle part way through the gesture.

"I'm having a hard time understanding the benefit of a cease fire to you. Home has not dropped a single munition on China, we've been hitting the UN and deferred all action on China to Jeffery Singh so far, since he is also at war with you. I speak with him and know that he bombarded the dam at Liyuan. I understand that created a cascade of failures which caused damage all along the Yangtze River, but he has not dropped another warhead on you since he announced he'd suspend bombardments. He's a man of his word and I'm sure he'd serve you notice if he intends to resume hostilities, so you effectively
have
a cease fire."

"But, Shanghai!...and Guangzhou!...Our fleets hit at sea!"

"Not-our-doing fool. You don't even know
who
is bombarding you. Did you send experts to analyze the fallout plume and identify what sort of weapons were used? The weapons Singh uses are one big bomb, not a grid of smaller weapons and they have no fission kernel to initiate fusion, so all the typical fission products are missing. Is such an obvious difference lost on you?"

Rao put a hand out to his board. Jon thought he was going to disconnect, but apparently it was just to steady himself. He certainly looked rattled.