Lacuna Read online

  *****

  Sydney

  Australia

  Two hours earlier

  THE TYRES OF THE GIANT jet squealed as they touched down at Sydney airport. The giant Boeing 747 slowly rolled to a stop. As the aircraft taxied to the terminal, Liao mused angrily over the circumstances that had brought her there.

  She was a career naval officer, and she had enlisted at a young age against the objections of her parents, who had wanted her to be a homemaker.

  “If you aim for the mud and dirt,” her father was fond of saying, “but manage to poke your head out a bit, you think you’re doing pretty well, even if you’re really just a fool covered in slop.”

  A dramatic pause there. Her father loved dramatic pauses, much to Liao’s chagrin.

  “But if you aim for the stars and only make it to the moon, then you’ve accomplished great things even if you don’t recognise them.”

  Liao wanted to accomplish great things. However, there she was, visiting one of the People's Republic of China's minor trading allies to inspect their so-called advanced technology. Most of it was cribbed from the Americans anyway or reverse engineered from Chinese designs—or so she had been told in the scintillatingly boring mission brief.

  The passengers disembarked, and Liao collected her bag. She stepped out of the airport into the cool autumn air and breathed a sigh of relief. Fresh air…

  “Senior Lieutenant Melissa Liao, right?”

  Liao glanced over her shoulder, seeing a man in his midforties with a bald head and black skin standing nearby, his hands clasped behind him.

  She turned to face him, nodding. “That’s right.”

  “My name is Captain James Grégoire. I’m with the EU, here as the envoy to inspect the new technology.”

  She felt vaguely offended. “As am I, but I was under the impression it was a private invitation. I didn’t know it extended to other Australian allies.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “Well, yes and no. The Iranian Republic and the PRC have full inspection rights, as per the agreement, but the Australian Prime Minster feels that, in order to maintain diplomatic relations with the rest of the world, she should offer to permit the EU and the United States to send envoys.”

  Ugh, Americans. She rolled her eyes. “Well, where is he then?”

  Grégoire laughed. “I’m guessing the U.S. didn’t send anyone. With their economy the way it is, you honestly think they could afford to send someone to check out the latest toys? They’re still trying to fix things after the latest collapse.”

  Liao nodded along with him. America’s financial troubles were well known in the international community—since September 11, an event still influential decades after the fact, they had taken on war after war, borrowing from the international community to finance their various struggles against imaginary enemies. They had subsequently tried to inflate their way out of their debt but had gone too fast, ruining countless lives. And their debtors had indexed the debt in Euros anyway, making the deliberate inflation pointless. Now their economy lay in ruins.

  It was sad, but Liao’s country had gone through similar trials. The Americans would recover—eventually.

  She shrugged.

  “I guess it’s just you and me then. Do you have a ride, Captain?”

  Grégoire nodded. “Yes, a hired car. Follow me.” A pause. “And please, call me James.”

  The two made their way to a vehicle that was parked in a large, multilayer concrete area. Crowds of homeless people hassled them for money, but the two ignored the throng.

  “No driver?” Liao observed dryly, taking in the view of the modestly priced vehicle.

  “Times are tough,” he replied with a shrug.

  Liao glanced back at the airport building. Sydney's terminal had been completely renovated during the 2000 Olympic Games. Since then, economic pressures had prevented any significant work on the structure, and now it looked faded and worn.

  They embarked, and James programmed their north-shore destination into the car’s GPS and drove them out of the car park.

  “Not as pretty as it used to be, is it?” Liao remarked, watching the city from the passenger window. Buildings looked run down and dilapidated, and many badly needed a coat of paint.

  “Not quite.”

  “Reminds me of home,” she remarked, rolling her shoulders. “The Western world used to be an enigma for the Chinese. Something to be admired, to be feared, to look down your nose at—all at once.”

  Grégoire turned a corner, the engine humming as the electric car picked up speed. “What happened?”

  Liao shrugged again, clicking her tongue. “I guess we just realised that the West wasn’t so different from us. And that while they +had their successes, we hadn’t had as much luck. Now it’s our turn to succeed.” She paused. A barely legible sign stood at the side of the road, crookedly but proudly proclaiming the suburb as Redfern.

  “Don’t worry,” she continued, “I’m sure the Western powers will have another turn at greatness soon enough.”

  “Agreed,” said Grégoire.

  They chatted idly for the rest of the journey, and the mood picked up substantially. Given their backgrounds, politics wasn’t something they agreed on, obviously, but they did both have naval careers, and that was something they could share. By the time they approached the harbour, the two were chatting like old friends, and Liao was recalling some of the war games she’d participated in.

  “… but my first big piece of the action came during Operation New Dawn. I was the navigator for the number 404, Han class. They’re cramped and a little old, but they get the job done. Fun times.”

  Grégoire laughed. “Little Miss Melissa? A submariner?”

  “Yep. I originally wanted a surface vessel, but I guess I got allocated to the Han class. Fell in love with them, honestly.” She smirked, leaning over and giving the man a playful shove.

  “Hey, careful! I’m driving!”

  He laughed and then reached down and flicked on the auto-drive. Instantly, the car took over the work, its electric engine humming along as it gracefully took the curve. Up ahead, the front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge loomed.

  Grégoire cocked an eyebrow, examining the structure. “Pretty impressive, no?”

  Liao shrugged, smirking. “We have bigger bridges back home.”

  The car changed lanes, bringing them closer to the outermost lane of the bridge, closest to the rail lines. The thick suspension wires of the bridge flew past.

  “The Opera House is pretty, though,” Liao conceded.

  There was a pause as the car carried them over the bridge.

  “So, how’d you go from being the chief navigator on the 404, to…”

  “To being the PRC’s envoy to a minor trading ally who can’t even afford a driver to pick her up?” Liao’s tone was dry and pissy. “Well, my XO told me that I was picked because I spoke English and because I was pretty.”

  The car’s tyres gave a gentle thump as it completed the trip across the bridge, changing lanes again. The Belgian man twisted in his seat, looking surprised. “He flat out told you that?”

  “Even today, there are still powerful people in Chinese society who believe that women are better off being homemakers.”

  James frowned. “A very outdated idea, even in China.”

  Liao nodded. “You’d think so, but it’s a product of the One-Child Policy, and I guess those kinds of ideas take a long while to stamp out. Women are allowed to serve in any branch of the Chinese armed forces, but we’re expected to resign when we get married. You know, settle down, start the family—pump out the sole male heir. Spoil it rotten.”

  Her tone carried a kind of bitterness about it James found entirely justifiable. The car flew through the suburbs, making its way to the research facility on the north shore.

  Grégoire turned to face Liao again. “So, how’d you go on New Dawn?”

  Liao grinned. “Sunk some pretty impressive tonnage before they got us.
Nineteen thousand tonnes—six ships. Not bad for a bunch of women and men from China, hey?”

  With a grin, Grégoire waggled an eyebrow. “We got one ship.” A pause, letting the gravity sink in. “One hundred thousand tonnes.”

  Liao sat up in her seat, eyes wide. “What…?”

  “My crew and I nailed a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. Cost us the ship, but we did it.”

  Liao stared at her companion as the car drove itself between traffic, pulling up at one of the many sets of traffic lights that stood between them and their destination.

  “废话.”

  “No bullshit. Hand to my heart, we sank the USS George H. W. Bush. Her captain was… bushed, you could say.”

  “Surely not. I would have heard about that. The Americans would be furious!”

  “They were, but I think they kept it quiet internationally. Wouldn’t you?”

  Liao’s face screwed up in doubt. The light changed, and the car took off again. “How…?”

  Grégoire smirked, holding up his flat hand as though to mimic the aircraft carrier.

  “Pretty simple, we pulled a Thunder Child on them. You know? From H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds?”

  Liao shook her head. “Actually, I've never read it.”

  James nodded anyway. “Well, I was in command of the F1004 Leopold III. We reported that we’d struck a mine and were disabled, then waited until the aircraft carrier was in range, and rammed it when they arrived to take the crew prisoner.”

  James’s hand motored along to his other pinkie, which crashed into its side. The hand overturned, pitched upwards, and dramatically sank. “At least, we shouted over the megaphone that we’d rammed them. Actually ramming them would have been a bit tasteless.”

  Liao blinked. “Wouldn’t that violate…”

  “… all kinds of rules?” James finished, nodding. “Pretty much every ‘good conduct’ rule in the book. The administrators of the war games disallowed our kill and ‘refloated’ the Bush, but in the minds of the crew and I, we sank a one-hundred-thousand-tonne aircraft carrier for the cost of a fifteen-hundred-tonne patrol boat. That’s a huge net gain for our forces.”

  “But you all died,” Liao pointed out, “and it’s not a move you’d use in real life.”

  The car arrived at their destination, a single-storey building near Sydney’s centre. It was a nondescript sandstone building. It had no distinguishing features apart from its generic, completely normal appearance, which Liao guessed was probably deliberate.

  “Correct,” James answered, giving an impish grin. “But isn’t real life just another game with a different set of rules?”

  The two disembarked, continuing their conversation as they made their way up to the building’s glass doors. A small sign to the left of the main entrance read:

  Crown Research Facility

  Trespassing prohibited

  “Ramming your ship into the enemy’s ship doesn’t sound like a sound interpretation of the rules to me,” said Liao.

  Grégoire waved a key fob in front of a sensor, and the two panes of glass opened. A cool, air-conditioned breeze washed over Liao’s face.

  “Not if you look at it like that,” he answered, shrugging. “As far as I was concerned, the rules of the game we were playing said, ‘Ramming always works.’ I took an inexpensive ship and rammed a much more expensive ship, sinking the pair of them. That’s a net gain for us. That’s a victory.”

  The two walked inside the structure. Immediately, the atmosphere changed. The inside of the building was a stark contrast to its exterior. This seemed like the inside of a dormitory for a tech college. Technical graphs, diagrams, and posters adorned almost every inch of every wall, proudly displaying the technical aspects of devices Liao didn’t even recognise. The floor was covered in a thick, plush, blue carpet.

  “Hey, so you’re the visitors, huh?” came a feminine, nasally voice, thick with an Australian accent. A short, freckled, weedy, twenty-something Caucasian woman with bushy red hair and large, awkward-looking glasses leaned casually against a wall in a stance that Liao could only describe as a desperate attempt to look like one of the cool kids in a high school.

  “That’s right. I’m Lieutenant Melissa Liao from the People’s Republic,” Liao offered, extending her hand, “and this is Captain James Grégoire, Belgian Naval Component, EU.”

  The redhead’s bravado evaporated almost instantly, and she seemed to hesitate a moment before taking Liao’s white-gloved hand, giving it an awkward shake. She didn’t look her in the eye. She then shook James’s hand and gestured to a room farther inside the building.

  “I’m Summer Rowe. I’m lead engineer here. You’re here to see Chekhov’s Armoury, right?”

  James threw Melissa a confused look. “Sorry, what?”

  Rowe gave a nasally snort, pushing up her glasses with her ring finger. “That’s just what we call the toy box—uh, I mean, all this stuff. It's a literary term. It's, uh… it's kinda the idea that when you introduce something early on, it’s irrelevant at the time but later becomes really important—and this stuff is going to be really important in a few years.”

  “Oh,” was all Liao could say to that.

  Summer turned and began to walk farther into the twisting maze of tunnels that resembled, for all intents and purposes, a rabbit warren or the maze in some medieval wizard’s dungeon. Behind her back, the two military personnel exchanged a subtle what-the-hell glance.

  “他妈的书呆子.”

  “Be nice,” Grégoire implored in a mutter.

  Summer glanced over her shoulder. “Huh?”

  “Nothing,” Liao chirped, giving her best smile. Her heels tapped on the polished linoleum with every step as she squinted slightly in the dimly lit corridor.

  Rowe shrugged it away, fidgeting with something in front of her. Click. Click. Click. Liao saw it was a ballpoint pen, and she was clicking the top button up and down. Every repetition seemed to increase Liao’s blood pressure.

  “We don’t get many other girls in here,” Rowe admitted sheepishly as the group passed a giant trash can overflowing with soft-drink cans, pizza boxes, plastic takeaway containers, and computer printouts smeared with grease.

  “That’s probably because you work in a lightless, filthy hovel,” Liao snipped sarcastically, her tone a little more acidic than she really intended.

  Summer winced, looking away.

  Melissa gave her an apologetic smile. “Sorry, it was a long flight.”

  As they walked, Liao could feel eyes on her as they passed endless laboratories, some filled with modern-looking computers. About half of them were in use by neck-bearded scientists (and despite Rowe’s comment, the occasional woman) typically typing at a blistering pace at black-and-white terminals.

  Click. Click. Click.

  Rowe absently waved her hand as she passed several doors, her other hand abusing the pen’s clicker.

  “What do we have here? Uh… okay. This is an advanced, high-radiation resilient tungsten-aluminium-whatever alloy… that’s the pet project of the materials guys. I don’t know what it’s called—something Greek or Latin—but we nicknamed it ‘indestructium.’ Radiation resistant, really, really strong, lightweight… apparently they think it’s the bees' knees, but eh. So you can build a cool tank with it. Who cares? I hate those arrogant assholes.”

  Click. Click. Click.

  Summer paused before an unmarked door, mercifully slipping the pen into her hip pocket. The woman seemed a lot more relaxed now that they were farther inside, away from the last vestiges of the sun’s presumably harmful rays. “Let’s start at the least impressive item and work our way up, shall we?”

  Liao shrugged, idly wondering if this Rowe was a little nuts. “Sure, why not? We have to see it all eventually.”

  The redhead opened the door. Inside, a donut-shaped chrome-steel device rested on a heavy wooden table. The fairly plain metal composition didn’t give any hint as to its functionality. It had a layer of th
ick, shiny, silver paint on it that made it look like a piece of scrap they’d dragged out of a junkyard, smoothed, and then tossed up on the table.

  “We call it the Reactionless Drive,” she proclaimed, gesturing over the very simple-looking device with a hand, her tone conveying a weight that the others simply didn’t feel.

  “Looks like some kind of tacky prop from a ’60s sci-fi show,” Melissa observed, grimacing. “What’s it do?”

  Summer looked very offended.

  “Only, you know, violate Newtonian physics,” she retorted, pushing up her glasses with her ring finger yet again, a gesture Liao found almost as annoying as her voice. “This baby generates gravity waves. Observe!”

  Rowe pressed the giant, fist-sized, red button on the wooden desk. Then exactly nothing happened.

  Liao watched curiously as Rowe took the plastic pen out of her pocket, holding it near the giant donut. The tip wobbled, and then the whole pen was jerked out of her hand towards the featureless metal—hitting it with a clank.

  “Impressive, but isn’t that just magnetism?” Liao observed dryly.

  “That pen’s plastic,” Rowe retorted, turning off the device with another thump of the button. The pen clattered to the table. “But, yeah—the Reactionless Drive can attract or repel objects made of any material or even propel itself like an engine. Flying cars, here we come!”

  James nodded, giving Liao a grin. “Impressive.”

  Rowe’s smirk was a mile wide. “Yeah, I’m really looking forward to Jane Sixpack-Soccermum flying over my house all fucked up on Ritalin, typing on her cell phone with one hand and chugging scotch with the other between bouts of screaming at the kids in the back seat.” She laughed. “But seriously, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

  She led them to a different room. This room was essentially a giant corridor, stretching out beyond the single light above them. Two black metal rails at hip height followed the corridor into the gloom.

  “Lieutenant Liao, Captain Grégoire, this… is the magnetic accelerator.”

  Melissa felt a twitch building in her eye. Just like her father, this annoying woman was fond of dramatic pauses for effect.

  “What’s it do?” Liao asked, folding her arms.

  Rowe grinned proudly. “Take any three-to-four-kilogram ferrous projectile, place it in this thing, and watch as it gets shot up to about… oh, three kilometres a second. Faster, with more juice behind it and more rail length.”

  Liao was actually genuinely impressed. “Cool.”

  Rowe snorted derisively. “Cool? It’s damn near fucking godlike! Can you imagine trains built on this technology? You could get from Perth to Brisbane in, like, half an hour—allowing time for the train to accelerate or decelerate so the fleshy bodies on board don’t get smushed. Freight trains could go even fucking faster than THAT!”

  She became more and more animated the more she talked, and her breathing picked up. Liao absently worried if she was going to have a heart attack.

  “Anyway, seriously, this thing is already obsolete,” she said, suddenly relaxing and flashing a knowing smirk. “At least, the last room in this little tour is going to make even the idea of trains laughable.”

  She led them out, bouncing like a child showing her parents her prize for making the best potato battery in school.

  The last room was right at the middle of the single-level building—if Liao’s sense of direction was to be believed in this maze. Rowe dramatically pushed open the heavy double doors, throwing her hands high above her head.

  “The Spacial Coordinate Remapper. It is here, ladies and gentlemen, that we have become gods. It is here that we make physics our bitch.”

  A large, perfectly spherical object, about a meter in diameter and made entirely out of some kind of metal neither James nor Melissa recognised, stood on four struts in the middle of the room. This, much like the devices in the previous two rooms, was incredibly underwhelming, but the two naval officers had figured out that, generally speaking, the less impressive the appearance the more impressive the functionality.

  Summer’s words were a bold proclamation, Liao thought, but she held back an amused chuckle. “Right,” she said instead. “So what does this little toy do, hmm?”

  Rowe snorted, pushing up her glasses. “It teleports itself and anything around it to another location.”

  Liao blinked.

  James shook his head. “What, like Star Trek? ‘Beam me up, Scotty’?”

  “No, not quite. Essentially, it transports itself and attached mass—up to about two hundred thousand tonnes, give or take—from point A to point B directly, without any journey in between—unlike in Star Trek, where the transporters de-materialise the transportee and move the matter stream to the transporter pad. Instead, this thing just jumps itself from place to place. No de-materialising. Just pop! So it’s more like Nightcrawler from X-Men. Incidentally, “‘Beam me up!’ is a frequently misquoted line. Kirk never actually said that phrase during the whole show, nor did anyone else. It’s kinda like ‘Luke, I am your father’—that’s wrong too. Vader actually said, ‘No, I am your father!’”

  Rowe looked smug, which was the stroke that completed the unflattering picture Liao had painted in her mind.

  Melissa pursed her lips thoughtfully. “So… this ‘jump drive’… where can it go? What’s its effective range?”

  Summer grinned triumphantly. “As far as we can tell, unlimited. At least, that’s what our theoretical physicists tell us. We can’t get it to work within a planet’s gravity field; even very minute interference throws it off, so it hasn’t been tested.”

  Liao frowned. “So we can’t use it anywhere there’s even a tiny bit of gravity? Doesn’t that limit its application somewhat?”

  Rowe smirked. “You might think so, but no. You see, gravity operates on the inverse square law, so you’d think you’d have to be ages away from any sizable body to make it work, but… there are these things called Lagrangian points, points in space where there’s practically no gravity at all—I mean damn next to nothing.”

  Summer casually chewed on the end of her pen as she spoke, muffling her words ever so slightly, causing the others to have to focus on what she was saying to hear her.

  “They’re found where the gravitational forces of two strong, nearby bodies cancel each other out—between the Earth and the moon, for example, or between the sun and the Earth. So while we can’t use it to send a postcard to Canada, we could send one to a Lagrangian point near Pandora, where the Avatar people are, or to ice-planet Hoth. You know, whatever.”

  James spoke up. “How do you even know it works?”

  Rowe shrugged. “We don’t, but the math surrounding it is totally rock solid. Rock solid… ” Then she added in a soft mutter, “Pretty much.”

  An awkward moment of silence filled the room, in which it was clear nobody knew quite what to say.

  “So, um. That… concludes the great tour, you guys! Uh—Lieutenant, Captain, did you two want to head to the lunch room for a bite to eat?”

  “Actually, we have our own lunch planned,” James answered. “Sorry.”

  Liao silently nodded in agreement.

  Summer looked dejected but perked right back up. “Ah… that’s fine. I’ll walk you back to the front entrance. Then I have paperwork to do, so… work, work.”

  They began to walk back the way they’d come, and Summer pulled out her pen again… until Liao shot her a look that said it was probably better if she didn’t.

  Instead, she pocketed it and turned to James. “So, you liked what you saw of the technology?”

  The man nodded, his smile growing. “Yes. I see a lot of potential here, a lot of new technologies that the EU will be happy to trade for. It’s all in aid of our space program, you see, so—”

  Summer gave a squeal. “Oh, wow. My shit’s going to get shot into space? That’s so cool!”

  “Heh, well, if it does… I’ll make sure that they send back plenty of pictures.”
>
  Liao tuned out the conversation, instead stopping by the water cooler and plucking up one of the plastic cups.

  “What a complete fucking waste of time,” she muttered to nobody, despondently watching the small container fill with cool, bubbling water, patiently waiting as the water level gradually rose.

  Suddenly, an incredibly bright flash, like a camera only a foot away from someone's eye, exploded from further down the corridor. It faded quickly, replaced by a low glow as though coming from the headlights of a car. Looking up—and immediately forced to squint—Liao could barely see the shadowy outlines of Summer and James stopped in the middle of the corridor, both as alarmed and curious as she. The cup, forgotten, began to overflow as Melissa raised a hand to shield her eyes, trying to peer past the intense light.

  Then the roaring started. It was like a foghorn, low and loud, the vibrations so strong she could feel them in her gut. The whole building began to shake, posters and pictures thrown from the walls. The light intensified, becoming so bright that she was forced to cup her hands over her eyes.

  With a rumble, a support beam dislodged from the ceiling and caught her on the back of her head, sending her sprawling to the floor with a pained grunt. The water cooler collapsed and broke with a crack-splash, dousing Liao’s face and upper torso in freezing water. Panicked, Melissa struggled to stand, but the roof above her gave way, concrete and steel crashing down all around her, pinning her facedown on the carpet.

  White-hot pain exploded from her legs. Her agonized screaming was drowned out by the foghorn noise, which was so loud her ears could hear nothing else.

  Abruptly, the sound ceased. The debris shifted and settled, and for a moment, there was absolutely no sound except her own pained gasping for breath and the gentle trickle of water from the remains of the broken water cooler onto the carpet.

  Then, mercifully, unconsciousness took the pain away.

  Chapter II

  The Pillars of the Earth