“That’s it?” David asked, clearly impressed despite his nonchalant-sounding question. “That’s our secret anti-matter ship?”
“Isn’t she gorgeous?” Bosnivic said, peering over David’s shoulder. “You feed just a little antimatter into a reaction tank full of water, a microgram at a time, and it creates enough thrust to drive her at one G for hours. That ship, my friends, could make it to Mars in one week, accelerating half the way, then flipping end for end and decelerating the rest of the way, all at a comfy one gravity! None of this seven or eight months in a cycler.”
“How long to the Moon?” David wanted to know.
“From here? A little under five hours.”
Jack pulled his PAD from its holster and typed in some numbers. “Two hundred ninety-two-point-three minutes,” Jack added a moment later. “Assuming we go in at one G, of course, and not taking into account any gravitational boost we get whipping past the Earth.”
“Good God. Last time I went to the Moon it took three days.”
“Yeah, but the Ranger can pull six Gs,” Bosnivic said. “And scuttlebutt says we’re gonna haul ass to get where we’re goin’. What does that do to the travel time, Flash?”
Jack typed in the new figures. “Just under two hours. One hundred nineteen minutes, in fact.” He looked up. “Stepping up the acceleration doesn’t cut down your travel time as much as you’d think.”
“I imagine how fast we scoot’ll depend on how bad the RAG needs us,” Bosnivic said.
“Well, that and how hard they think they can push the Ranger on her maiden voyage,” Jack said. “This antimatter stuff is pretty new technology, and maybe they don’t want to pull out all the stops, first time around.”
“Where’s the antimatter come from?” David asked.
“Oh, they manufacture the stuff right here at the construction shack,” Bosnivic said, “using solar energy and something like a miniature version of one of those big particle accelerators back on Earth. Takes a long time, even to collect just a few grams of the stuff.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” David asked. “I mean, even a microgram of antimatter will make a hell of a bang if it touches normal matter, right?”
“Hell, yeah!” Bosnivic said, grinning. “A big bang, and a lot of very hard radiation. Why do you think they make the stuff way out here?”
“I’d think it would be pretty vulnerable to UN attack.”
“Not as vulnerable as you think. From here, we can see anything on an approach vector clear back to Earth orbit. And we have a squadron of Sparrowhawks stationed here, just in case the bad guys decide to come check us out. So far, we don’t even think they know what we’re doing here.”
“Which is just as well,” Jack put in. “If we could get a nuke through to that asteroid they were trying to send our way, they could hit us with one if they were really determined. And they would be, too, if they knew the Ranger there was ready to fly!”
Bosnivic nudged Jack and pointed at his PAD. “So, you got your girlfriend in there to crank out those numbers?”
“Hmm? No. That was just the calc function. You could do it, too, Bos, if you could just keep straight which is division and which is multiplication.”
“Girlfriend?” David asked.
“Hey, you never met Jack’s girlfriend? I thought you two were related!”
“Last girlfriend of his I heard about was that v-mail correspondent you were always talking to in California—”
“Let’s not bring that up,” Jack said, his face reddening.
“I definitely sense a story there,” Bosnivic said. “But, anyway, turns out that Flash here is a genius at hacking into AI programs, getting ’em to sit up and beg. They’ve had him modifying our Marine-issue PAD OS/AI to make us a nutcracker.” Floating in mid-bay, he reached down and rubbed his groin suggestively. “And a very nice nutcracker she is! Show him, Jack!”
“Uh, I’d really rather not! Listen, Bos, don’t you have some Marine stuff to do, somewhere?”
Grinning, Bosnivic rubbed his nose with his middle finger. “Thought of somethin’ right here, Flash.”
“Careful you don’t wear that out,” Jack replied, as Bosnivic kicked off the bulkhead and sailed across to some other Marines.
“So,” David said with a wry grin. “You getting on okay with your new friends?”
“Oh, they all figure they have to harass the new guy,” Jack said. “Hey, it’s great to see you! I heard they were assigning a civilian specialist to this op, but I didn’t know it was going to be you!”