...And We Will Have Snow

Chapter 5-11: The Hook

After Sedna took off and was out of sight, Newt turned to Bear and said, "How long have you known about this?"

"About what?"

"The drone rocket. This changes everything."

"What do you mean?"

"Sedna told us your guy Jack modified the one in her drone. But she said the idea wasn't new with him. She mentioned R&D. Someone somewhere is turning Sun Bottles into rocket motors. If it was happening here at NASA, I think I'd know about it. But I don't. That can only mean one thing."

"DARPA black ops?"

Newt nodded. "Or something like that. Someone is trying to keep it under wraps. But the concept is so simple it wouldn't take much to reinvent it. Or merely suggest it, and see what agency shows up when word gets out. NASA pretends to be wide open, but there are a lot of people here who know more than they are telling. People with connections."

Newt got quiet. Bear said, "What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking it isn't easy to keep anything quiet anymore." He got out his PDA and said, "dark matter thrust engine."

His PDA replied, "There are 973 results for dark matter thrust engine."

"Show me the top five."

Newt looked at the display and whistled.

"What have you got?"

He handed the PDA to Bear. "It looks like a complete schematic!"

"Just a sketch, but it's enough. So word is getting around, if you know where to look."

"But you said this changes everything. What did you mean?"

Newt was practically vibrating with excitement. "The problem with rocket engines has always been the amount of fuel they have to take off with. You can only get so much energy out of chemical reactions. The fuel mass is always way more than the payload.

"From the start we knew that a Sun Bottle delivers a much higher power-to-weight ratio than anything else. But we always thought the dark matter was a waste product, because we couldn't control it. So we only had the power output to work with. If we wanted to use the power to drive a rocket, we had to use something else for reaction mass. It could be as simple as water-to-steam, but we still had to carry the water.

"Sedna's flying drone changes everything, because it means that every Sun Bottle is potentially a rocket engine, a levitation device!

"You guys brought the Sun Dome here using energy from the Sun Bottle to heat the air in the balloon and run the thrusters that guided its flight. What if instead of electric propellers the thrusters were all gimbaled sun bottles? There'd be no limit to how high the whole dome could go. We could fly it into space!"

Despite his aptitude for engineering, Bear was looking more confused than elated. Newt grabbed his PDA again and started stabbing at it.

"What are you doing now?" Bear thought he was making more calculations.

"Sending the list of dark matter rocket hits to my team. Come on, let's go join them. See what they come up with."

Back in the Dome, Newt led Bear to one of the recreational areas where people gathered after hours. Most of Newt's team was already there, deep in discussion and sharing search results. Newt and Bear pulled up chairs to join them.

They had already caught up with Newt's ideas and were elaborating on the need to modify the living quarters.

"We'll need an air tight shell around the apartment ring. That means air locks to go in and out of the vacuum."

"We'll have to make sure the farm is fully self-sustaining."

"Why? We could always resupply with shuttles from the ground."

"Not if we decide to go visit the Moon."

"Or Mars."

"Oh yeah. So how stable is the farm?"

Eyes turned to Bear. "Completely. If it's properly maintained."

"Isn't that all automatic?"

"Sure, up to a point. But if a deviation from normal isn't stabilized by a programmed response, human intervention is needed."

"Weren't the systems designed to be robust?"

"Very. But a lot depends on the natural stability of the ecosystem. And that's never been tested in orbit."

"Oh. Yeah." Eyes began to glaze over with this new realization.

Bear realized that, with Sedna's help, he had finally set the right hook. He could feel Cern and Dema smiling. Their work here was done.