Temporal Exploring 101 - Deep Future

IV.45 Game changer

"What do you mean, deep into the past is not where we ought to go?" Larissa Montreve asked. "Where else would you have us go?"

"To the future," Natty replied. "Go to the future and rebuild your Cities, is what I would suggest."

Into the stunned silence, Celia Graham asked, "What?"

Once again, Victor rolled his eyes. His signature move, or so I suspected. "You cannot use transit technology to travel to the future. You of all people ought to know that. That is, if you are who you claim to be."

"Ah, but you are so clever." Natty smiled serenely. "So very, very clever."

The boy blushed. "I am right though, aren't I? You can't go to the future via temporal transit."

Natty grinned. "Because, entropy?"

Victor nodded. "Well yes, because of entropy. Closing the loop though normal space-time, you would have to align the field in the energetically less favorable direction. You proved that, yourself, in a paper you coauthored with Sara Jenkins. That is, if you actually are"

"If I am the person that I claim to be. Right." Natty was starting to sound impatient, which was generally not a good sign. She took a deep breath. "Under ordinary circumstances, you would be right. But we are dealing with a different situation here." She paused. "To put it briefly, what's different here is that we have a got a spaceship in orbit that is equipped with a warp drive." She turned towards Brianna Vercours. "Before we continue: are you sure that the enemy 's ship actually has got a warp drive?"

"Yes, we are certain of that", Brianna Vercours confirmed. "A variety of anomalous results obtained in astronomical observations that were performed during the approach of the enemy's ships strongly imply that they used some kind of warp drive."

"Good. Let me summarize what we know about warp drives." Natty counted the items on her fingers. "One, to travel faster than light the spaceship must be enclosed within one or several warp bubbles. Two, space will be contracted in front of the ship and expanded behind it. Which brings us to three, in order to make this work, either the ship must contain a subsystem capable of creating a modified vacuum with energy below the ordinary ground state, or else that subsystem must consist of some unknown exotic matter that corresponds to a negative energy density. Is that correct?"

"Yes, that is our understanding." Brianna nodded. "That subsystem you mentioned is often referred to as a warp core, for historical reasons."

Natty raised an eyebrow. "Historical reasons?"

"The term goes back to a number of movies and television series that originated in the 20th century," Brianna elaborated.

"I see." Natty smiled. "Anyhow, I am going to argue that what you refer to as a warp core is the enemy's weak point." She tapped the display in front of her. "Can I write on this, somehow? And project it onto a screen or something?"

"Of course." Larissa Montreve touched a part of the display. "N4 interactive, display on M3." The screen was projected on one of the walls of the seminar room. She handed Natty an e-stylus. "You can write and draw using that."

"Thank you." Natty took the stylus and began to write. "Let's take a look at the part of the Lagrangian that describes the interaction of the Dursnip field with the gravitational field and with the energy momentum tensor."

For reasons that the reader may have guessed already and which in any case shall become obvious later on, I am going to skip over the mathematical and technical details here. Suffice it to say that Natty explained the procedure necessary to initiate and setup a pattern of Fogg-Williams bridges that would terminate inside the warp core of the enemy's spaceship, and how that would lead to an instability that would serve to severely compromise the structural integrity of the vessel, resulting in its destruction – regardless of the material it was made of, as she pointed out. She then went on to show how the energy from the collapse of the warp core could be channeled along the Fogg-Williams bridge that had caused the instability.