Luna Marine(133)

There were two basic approaches to powering an antimatter spacecraft. You could manufacture the antimatter, a few atoms at a time, in a particle accelerator, and store it in magnetic bottles, an approach using old and well-established technology that had been around for half a century at least, almost certainly the route the Americans had pursued in their AM-drive research.

But the An had known how to manufacture antimatter, specifically positrons—antielectrons—in large and continuous quantities. How the antimatter reactor recovered from the dusty floor of Picard did this was still not well understood—at least in terms that Larouche could comprehend, and he suspected that the UN engineers working on the problem only dimly glimpsed the principles involved. Zero-point energy? Energy drawn from the vacuum of space? Energy converted in its creation into, not matter, but antimatter? It sounded like magic to Larouche.

Using the An AM generator as a weapon was relatively easy, so long as you knew how to manipulate positrons in a magnetic field. Using it in a controlled fashion, however, feeding a precisely measured and balanced stream of antimatter to the reaction chamber, was orders of magnitude more difficult. It must have been much the same in developing early atomic energy; slapping two chunks of plutonium together to release energy in an uncontrolled chain reaction was relatively simple; producing controlled and controllable energy from the same equations had been much harder.

They’d had the weapon portion of the project working in April, when they’d first used a positron beam to destroy an American reconnaissance spacecraft. The actual weapon emplacement had been mounted high atop Tsiolkovsky’s central peak, with power provided by a large, deeply buried fission reactor. The Guerrière, then still the Millénium, had at that point only recently arrived at Tsiolkovsky, and the engineering team hadn’t yet begun the conversion of the big shuttle. In fact, they’d used the ship as an ordinary transport, first to ferry troops to Picard during the fighting there, and a month later, at the Lunar north and south poles, to stop the American takeovers of the Moon’s only sources of water.

In June, however, the engineering team had begun the actual ship conversion, removing Guerrière’s liquid-core fission reactor and primary thruster assembly and replacing it with a much more robust thruster unit shipped up from Earth. The positron weapon had been dismantled in August and lowered down the mountainside; by October, the positron weapon was working again, mounted now inside the sleek, black hull of the Guerrière rising above the Tsiolkovsky plain. A ball turret in Guerrière’s side channeled the positron stream through magnetic conduits and directed it at any radar-locked target within line of sight. It was that ball turret that was vulnerable to enemy counterbattery fire. And if they hit the turret while positrons were actually in the conduit, the result would be the same as an antimatter attack against the Guerrière.

As for the drive, however, the engineers still were having trouble finding a way to regulate the flow of antimatter from the generator. They were confident that they would have the problem under control soon…but how soon was unknown. Guerrière could fight, but she could not fly. It left Larouche’s forces at a terrible disadvantage.

They would have been better off, Larouche thought bitterly, if they’d simply used the alien machinery to produce positrons and store them for later use, as the Americans were. The thought of using equipment that no one really understood to power a spacecraft was, frankly, a bit frightening.

Worse was possessing such a terrible weapon, but finding oneself in the faintly ridiculous position of knowing that if he used it, he would lose it almost immediately. At the same time, if he didn’t use the primary weapon, the enemy might well take the ship.

An impossible dilemma.

“Colonel d’André?”

“Yes, General.”

“Have the special weapon crew stand by to engage with the primary weapon. We may not be able to fly, but by God we can give a good account of ourselves!”

“Yes, General.”

“Get the hopper fireteams aloft.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And place the computer safeguards on active,” he added after a moment’s consideration more.

It was a measure of last resort, but a vital one.

He might sympathize with the enemy cause, might hate the fact that his countrymen had attempted what amounted to genocide against the Americans, might have the gravest of doubts that the UN cause was right.

But there was also the matter of honor and duty, virtues instilled in him by his father long before their falling-out.

He would not be known as the man who’d lost the UN’s greatest weapon to the enemy.