Luna Marine(132)

Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison.

It was said that the great twentieth-century Japanese admiral, Isoroku Yamoto, had warned that the Americans were above all a just people who honored justice and fair play. If the attack at Pearl Harbor was not completely successful, he’d warned, then the Japanese Empire would have succeeded only in waking a sleeping giant and filling him with terrible resolve.

So far as Larouche was concerned, France and the UN had done just that in this century, first by trying to force the issue of independence for the Southwestern United States, then by attempting to take over the American archeological finds on Mars, and finally, and most unforgivably, by trying to end a war that never should have begun by dropping an asteroid into the American heartland. There would be, there could be no forgiveness now from the Americans, not unless they were completely exterminated…or the UN threat arrayed against them crushed for all time.

And Larouche did not believe the Americans could be exterminated, not by any force or combination of forces that could now be brought to bear on them.

The UN’s last chance had been the AM warship Guerrière.

If the Guerrière could have been made fully operational, she would have been a weapon of overwhelming, of devastating power; Guerrière alone, armed with her positron main weapon, could have ended all American space operations and obliterated her cities one by one. Sooner or later, the Americans would have been forced to surrender, for they would have been unable to touch a warship of Guerrière’s capabilities.

But, inevitably, it hadn’t been that simple. The problem was the damned alien technology.

The basic physics for an antimatter-powered space drive had been understood for years. Inject a very small amount of antimatter into a large volume of water; the annihilation of a small part of that mass turned the remaining water into plasma at extraordinarily high temperatures, which could be channeled aft as a highly efficient drive.

Ordinary plasma drives worked the same way, except that the water was either heated first in a liquid-core nuclear reactor or channeled through layers of corrugated plutonium. Either way, the water was heated to plasma to provide thrust. The difference was one of degree…or, rather, of degrees. The antimatter drive produced a much hotter and more energetic plasma jet than a liquid-core reactor; more, it could sustain high thrust for days or weeks at a time, allowing steady acceleration at one G or more. Guerrière, when she was fully operational, would be able to fly to Mars in a few days; the skies would be opened, and at long last the bounty of the solar system would be free for the taking.

Unfortunately, the Directorate of Science had decided to use the wreckage found at Picard as a kind of shortcut. The ancient, spacefaring An, evidently, had known how to produce antimatter in a steady, constant, and powerful stream; the antimatter generator of one of their freighters had been recovered intact by Billaud’s team of archeologists and transported to the growing French base at Tsiolkovsky. A French, German, and Chinese team had attempted to reverse-engineer the technology.

Larouche smiled at the thought, though there was very little good humor there. Half a century ago, there’d been wild rumors that the Americans had recovered alien space-craft from various crashes—or even as gifts from extraterrestrial visitors—and were trying to reverse-engineer them at a secret base in the Nevada desert. It was possible that the rumored cover-up by the US government in the second half of the twentieth century had been responsible, in part, for the paranoid fear within the UN that the Americans were going to keep recovered technology found at Cydonia, on Mars, for themselves…a fear that had led, at least in part, to the current war.

Larouche’s own experiences with back-engineering alien technology had convinced him that those old stories could not possibly have been true. Figuring out how something worked and going back to figure out how it was made was an effective tool only when the technologies more or less matched. Merde! Could Leonardo da Vinci, brilliant as he was, have reverse-engineered a television wall screen if a time traveler had presented him one as a gift? Could he have discovered the science and engineering behind generating and propagating radio waves, behind constructing cameras, behind encoding and decoding transmissions, behind all of the myriad sciences and technologies discovered and developed from the eighteenth century onward that made modern, flatscreen digital displays possible?

Da Vinci wouldn’t even have been able to understand the plastic of the wall screen’s display.

The alien technology recovered on the Moon so far was at least five centuries ahead of current terrestrial understanding of physics, engineering, materials processing, and control technologies. Reverse-engineering meant figuring out how to build not only the device in question, but how to build the tools that made the tools that made the tools that made the device…as well as principles of physics and engineering that were balanced one atop another in a terribly unsteady tower of innovation. Less than a century and a half had elapsed between the difference engine and silicon chips; there were elements of recovered An technology at least as strange to the UN engineering team as a PAD would have been to Charles Babbage. It was going to be decades more, perhaps centuries, before the fragments of An technology were understood within the context of human science. Merely knowing that something was possible was rarely enough to transform possibility into reality.