Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 10 (29 page)

           
“We’ve got as many as we can hold,”
Jon said. “We’re maxed out on capacitor size too—it just generates too much
heat to increase the size any more.”

 
          
She
continued to examine the intricate SSL components, carefully but with sheer,
unabashed awe in her eyes. She paused again at the laser oscillator unit,
forward of the laser generators. “This is what you use to combine and channel
the laser light?” she asked.

 
          
“The
Faraday oscillator,” Jon said. He stepped over to the young girl, studying her
eyes as she looked at the device. It was as big as the eight laser generators
combined, taking up a huge amount of space inside the fuselage.

 
          
Jon
had not been with Kelsey Duffield that much since her dad’s company became
one-third partners in Sky Masters Inc. But Jon had quickly learned one very
interesting thing: Kelsey’s eyes were truly windows into her extraordinary
brain. He could look at her eyes and see the calculations, the engineering, the
mechanics, and the physics coming alive, almost as clear as a computer
printout. He tried to guess what she was looking at, figure out what she was
studying so intently, and then try to outguess her. It was not an easy task—but
it was a constant challenge for him, trying to at least match her
lightning-quick mind, and he loved the mental exercise.

 
          
That’s
why he was so disappointed when she moved on. He thought she figured something
out about the oscillator. It was easily the clunkiest and most low-tech
component of the SSL—basically just a big airless can with mirrors in it and a
big lens in front. The laser fight coming from the generators was directed into
the collimator and bounced back and forth and rotated around between
liquid-cooled mirrors in the oscillator. When the light was at the precise
wavelength and all of the light waves were in perfect alignment, the lens
allowed the fight to escape out the front to the argon-filled waveguide, which
channeled the laser energy to the deformable mirror in the nose turret.

 
          
“What
are you thinking about, Kelsey?” Jon asked.

 
          
“Energy,”
the girl replied.

 
          
“What
about it?”

 
          
“How
much we need, how much we have?”

 
          
“Relatively
speaking, not very much,” Jon replied. “We added just one alternator and one
generator to the basic B-52 electrical system to power the laser. Four
three-hundred-amp engine-driven alternators, each one supplying power in a
separate circuit to four essential AC buses and two emergency AC buses.
Four twenty
-kilowatt engine-driven generators supplying
power to two DC essential buses and one emergency DC bus. Backup power is four
engine-driven hydraulically powered alternators and generators, which power
only the essential A and emergency A buses.”

 
          
“Generators
and alternators, huh?” Kelsey asked.

 
          
“This
is an airplane, Kelsey, not a spaceship. What do you want on board—fuel cells?
A nuclear reactor?”

          
She looked at him with a silent “Why
not?” expression.

          
“You want to put a nuclear reactor
on board a B-52?”

 
          
“You
have one, don’t you?”

 
          
“A
nuclear reactor? Are you craz—?” But then he stopped—he was doing that a lot,
as if the ideas that flooded his brain used so much energy that he was unable
to budget enough brainpower to move his lips. “We ... we can’t do that!” He
didn’t sound too convincing, even to himself.

 
          
“Sure
you can. We’ve had megawatt-power generators smaller than my mommy’s car for
years.”

           
“Sure—fission reactors.”

 
          
“Right.”

 
          
“Well,
you can’t put a nuclear reactor aboard an aircraft!”

 
          
“Why
not?”

 
          
“Why
not? It’s ... it’s . ..” Jon couldn’t think of a reason why right away.
“Because ... because no one wants a plane with a nuclear reactor flying over
their homes, that’s why.”

 
          
“I
guess,” Kelsey said. “We’ve had ships with nuclear reactors sailing past our
homes for a long time—but an airplane is different, I guess.” She continued to
study the inner plumbing of the fuselage. “But the LADAR is a diode-pumped
solid-state laser, right?”

 
          
“Sure.
But it’s only one-tenth the power of the SSL— not enough to destroy a ballistic
missile at the ranges we want to engage at.”

 
          
“But
if we had more power?”

 
          
“The
smallest diode-pumped laser in the one-megawatt range that I know of is the
size of a living room, and it has its own transformer farm to power it.”

 
          
Kelsey
looked up at the B-52 bomber. “This plane is a lot bigger than a living room,
Jon,” she said with a grin.

 
          
“We
can’t do that kind of engineering with .. .” But he stopped—again—as his mind
began to race. “I wonder ... if we used a different pumping system . .. ?”

           
Kelsey turned around and pointed to
the Lancelot missile. “We can take your plasma-yield warhead,” Kelsey said, “and
use it to pump the laser.”

           
“Pump a laser with. .. with
plasma?”
Jon gasped. “I.. . I’ve never
heard of that before.”

 
          
“You
thought of it years ago, Jon,” Kelsey said. “I read about it in one of the
magazine articles you wrote. You were going to use lasers to create a plasma
field— Lawrence Livermore built their inertial confinement plasma generator
based on your ideas—and then you talked about the feasibility of using a plasma
discharge to pump a laser. The system would have generated its own power and
its own fuel—a virtually unlimited power supply. Why don’t we do it? Take
similar SSL arrays you use for the laser radar. You have four arrays on the
Dragon. How many laser emitters in each array?”

 
          
“Three
hundred and forty.”

 
          
“Oh,
boy,” Kelsey cooed happily. “We shoot the lasers into an inertial confinement
chamber loaded up with deuterium and tritium fuel pellets and then channel the
plasma field into the laser generator. What was the power level of the one they
built at Lawrence Livermore?”

 
          
“Fifty
trillion watts for a billionth of a second,” Jon said breathlessly. “That’s
fifty thousand watts per second. We need at least seven hundred and fifty
thousand.” His eyes darted aimlessly as he started to fill in details in his
mind. “But that’s using only
one
ion
generator ...”

 
          
“And
a solid-state ion generator is much smaller than your diode laser pumps,”
Kelsey said. “How many can we fit in the Dragon?”

 
          
“Hundreds,”
Jon said. “No ... thousands. One generator of neodymium disks could have over a
thousand in it alone. We could fit... we could fit over a dozen generators in a
B-52. Over ten thousand ion generators, pumped by a plasma field... my God,
Kelsey, we’re talking about a
ten-million-watt
laser!
”

 
          
“That’s
two million watts per second,” Kelsey said proudly. “Almost double the size of
the Air Force’s chemical laser.”

 
          
“My
God,” Jon muttered. “A plasma-pumped solid-state laser—on board an aircraft.
Incredible! Why didn’t I think of that?”

 
          
“You
did, remember?” Kelsey giggled.

 
          
“The
plasma-yield warhead ... can we confine the fusion reaction to the laser
chamber?” Jon started mumbling to himself, the others forgotten. “How much
power will we need for that?” It was several moments later before he realized
that Kelsey was holding a school notebook up to him— with preliminary figures
already calculated. “Kelsey!”

 
          
“I
don’t know all the details on your plasma-yield warhead, Jon,” she said, “and I
need to look at the schematics of the oscillator and laser generators. But a
plasma field of this approximate size and of this density will need only this
much laser power for the inertial confinement process in the fusion chamber,
and then will require approximately this much power in the magnetic field to
channel the plasma to the laser generator. I think we can do it.”

 
          
“You
think
you can do it? Kelsey,
you've just done it!
This is it!” Jon
exclaimed breathlessly, looking at the formulas with ever-widening eyes. “This
is the answer! I can take this to the engineering department and have them
start building the fusion chambers right away! We’ve got so much work to
do—reconfiguring test article number two, getting the engineering going . ..”
To Jon’s great surprise, Kelsey started heading for the door. “Kelsey? Anything
wrong? Where are you going?”

 
          
“To
the bathroom,” she replied matter-of-factly. “I can help with the engineering
after I get done.”

 
          
“Well,”
Helen remarked with a smile,
“that’s
certainly something you don’t hear every day from a world-class engineer.”

 
          
At
that moment, Jon’s secure cell phone beeped. He looked at the caller’s ID
number, smiled broadly, then punched in a descrambling code. “Patrick!” he said
happily. “Is that you?”

 
          
“Hi,
Jon,” Patrick McLanahan said. Kelsey and Cheryl Duffield looked on with great
interest as they heard the name of the man they most wanted to meet at Sky
Masters.

           
“How are you? Any news about
Wendy?”

           
“Not yet, I’m afraid,” Patrick
replied. “Are you secure?”

           
“I’m here with our new partners,”
Jon said.

           
“Then buzz me once you’re by
yourself.”

 
          
“I
can’t do that, Patrick,” Jon said. “They’re our full partners now—they’ve got
to be told about what we’re doing. They have the proper clearances. I have no
choice.”

           
Patrick paused for a long moment;
then: “All right, Jon. We’re going to turn up the heat a little. I need some
gadgets to fly a mission.”

           
“You got it,” Jon replied. “Just
tell me where, when, and how much.”

 
          
“What
about your new partners?”

           
“I said I have to tell them—I didn’t
say they had a vote,” Jon said. “Don’t worry about it. Whatever you want, you
get, as long as it helps bring back Wendy.”

 
          
“It
will either help bring her home—or punish the ones that took her,” Patrick
said. “I’ll transmit the order of battle to you in a few minutes. They’ll need
to launch within the next sixteen hours.”

 
          
“I’ve
had the crews standing by ever since this went down,” Jon said. “Everything
will be ready. If your .. . benefactor can keep the feds off our back while we
generate, it’ll be much better for us.”

 
          
“Getting
a lot of heat out there?”

 
          
“Ever
since the new partnership deal, we’ve been getting shit on...Jon looked
sheepishly at the Duffields and shrugged an apology. Cheryl Duffield looked mad
enough to scold him for the rest of the day, Kelsey just giggled. “Yes, we’ve
been getting a lot of attention—from everyone.”

 
          
“Our
benefactor should be heading off most of the heat,” Patrick said. “Hang in
there.”

 
          
“We’ll
do whatever we need to do to get Wendy back. You just watch yourself. We’re
praying for you.”

 
          
“Thanks,
Jon.”