The Project was a seventy-nine-billion-dollar effort to field-test a number of basic assumptions about the feasibility of combining a heavy-ion collider, a quark-gluon plasma imploder, and a rotating photon splitter in order to transfer a nanonic explosive package from an originating point to a target destination without having to travel through the space that lay in between. It was, in essence, a teleporter. Just like in Star Trek, except that rather than moving hopelessly complex human beings across thousands of miles of space, it was designed to move a very small, very simple warhead directly into the mass of a selected target-such as the brain stem of Mullah Ibn Abbas.
In Manning Pope, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, had retained the world's foremost expert on the engineering of spacetime foam, and set him working hard at the second great militarization of Einstein's theory of relativity. They also had an overweening egotist whose only real interest was in the opportunity the Project provided to spend other people's money on his personal obsession-FTL, faster-than-light travel.
Pope's incipient mania and a couple of breathtaking developments in quantum computing had moved the entire schedule onto the fast track. The senators currently overseeing the mission were understandably pleased. Their Japanese, British, and Russian counterparts were all likewise thrilled at the prospect of having an exciting new way to kill Chinese infantry and Taliban jihadis. And Pope had never felt the need to burden any of them with details concerning his research.
Now on the verge of proving his FTL theories, Pope seemed to hesitate.
A quick, stealthy look passed between Morley and Dunne, but neither said anything. They'd never seen Pope or Murayama look anything other than painfully arrogant, so this sudden change in character set off alarms. But nobody really cared what they thought. And anyway, this might be an opportunity for them to watch Kolhammer beating on the boss again, which was such an appealing thought that Morley had arranged to trap any incoming communications for covert storage on his own flexipad. If they blew circuits all over the fleet, like last time, Kolhammer would go postal for sure, and that sort of footage could keep a guy entertained for months on a long voyage.
As the Quad came online, each team member responded with a slightly increased heart rate, slightly shallower breathing, and a measurable change in galvanic skin response. They were all excited, no matter what their private qualms.
WETAR STRAIT, 1234 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021
While Pope's colleagues set to their preparations, maybe a dozen pairs of eyes throughout the entire task force were directly fixed on the giant scientific ship. Two sailors on the destroyer trimaran HMS Vanguard, enjoying a furtive cigarette to mark the end of their watch, speculated on the contents of the oversized megatanker. Neither guessed correctly.
The pilot of a Marine Corps F-35, climbing through five thousand meters above the task force, happened to cast her gaze down at the same moment, but the jet quickly slipped over the eight-hundred-meter length of the Nagoya, and she took in the four strange, bulbous pods on her deck without really registering. The pilot had clocked some serious hours during the last fortnight's exercises, and the sight of the Nagoya was entirely routine to her now.
A bored fourth officer on the bridge of the Japanese Nemesis cruiser Siranui trained a pair of vintage binoculars on the distant form of their mystery guest, but his thoughts were mostly back home where he was certain his two girlfriends must have discovered each other by now, given his ill-advised decision to start banging a couple of Office Ladies dorming on the same floor of the same singles complex.
Throughout the rest of the task force a small number of sysops routinely scanning the threat bubble scoped out the "ghost ship," probing her annoyingly effective electronic defenses with low-grade scans, looking to pierce the black hole that enveloped her. The temporary community of task force Elint operators were agreed that a fully amped blast from a Nemesis array would strip her naked. But of course they weren't allowed to do that, so during rare moments of downtime they dicked around with low-power blinkscans, feeling out the Nagoya's electronic perimeter.
After the infamous brownout, Commander Judge had quietly and deniably encouraged such unlicensed shenanigans. Had he known what was coming, though, he would have junked his career and ordered all of the group's Nemesis arrays tuned in and burning bright, 24/7. But nothing had even remotely suggested that things were about to unravel aboard the Joint Research Vessel.
PROJECT CONTROL, JRV NAGOYA, ZONE TIME: 1235 HOURS, JANUARY 15, 2021
Pope seated himself at the command deck of the control room. With little to do as his underlings worked their consoles, he was able to sit back and savor the moment, to drink it in as a curiously loose feeling crept over him.
He almost smiled. If he'd been wearing slippers he might have kicked them off and put his feet up. Instead he sat rather regally in the center of things on a large leather swivel chair that Morley and Dunne called "the Kirk." The lighting was dim. The monitors threw off just enough light to read a book and anyway, he thought, there was something about the moment that lent itself to a bit of dramatic staging. The only sound, besides Morley's labored breathing, was the deeply satisfying rapid-fire snapping of keys as the Project staffers entered Pope's revolutionary new data.
Having nothing to do at this point, he checked to make certain that the closed-circuit TV was recording the moment for posterity and arranged himself in a suitably commanding pose for the video.
"Ms. Dunne," he said quietly, causing her to jump in her chair.
"Yes, Professor," she replied, worried that he'd observed some grotesque fuckup in the settings she'd just entered.
"Relax, Dunne. Nothing to worry about, I merely thought that, as the youngest member of the team and of course, as a lady," he teased, "we might give you the honor of launching."
"Me?" She gaped as everyone turned to stare. "Me?"
"My word"-Pope grinned coldly-"they really do give away the degrees at Caltech these days, don't they. Yes, you. If everyone else is ready?"
Morley spun on his seat, ripped out a brief string of commands in his staccato, two-fingered typing style, then continued the spin to bring himself back to facing the group.
"Done deal!"
Pope just shook his head. "Young man," he said, "when generations yet unborn come to study this day, the greatest mystery won't be how we managed this grand achievement decades ahead of time, but rather how we managed it at all with a moron piloting the accelerator. Ms. Dunne?"
Still reeling, Sharon Dunne swiveled to face her large screen. She reached out and stroked it with one long, black-nailed finger. The image display cleared, then another tap brought up one giant icon. It had been a joke, actually, suggested by Morley. The Big Red Button That Doesn't Really Do Anything.
Dunne looked over her shoulder at Pope, who nodded. So she gave her colleagues a thumbs-up, then pressed the same digit to the screen.
Belying its name, the button went click.
The disaster was a few seconds unfolding. A coiled heavy-ion accelerator boosted two baskets of uranium nuclei to fantastic levels of energy before smashing the countercyclical beams head-on, very briefly re-creating the ten-trillion-degree environment that had existed roughly one microsecond after the Big Bang. Protons and neutrons were annihilated, breaking down into a superenergized blob of quark-gluon plasma.