Glory and Empire

Glory and Empire - Ch 22

Chapter 22

Councilor Agron strode onto the research base with all the confidence of a man who is untouchable. He exhibited neither the grace of a mercenary nor the purposeful shuffle of a scholar; his gait was more like a whirlwind set on a singular purpose, deposing everything in its path. He was at the same time both obnoxious and arrogant—the worst combination for moving about with anonymity, which is what the persona he had commandeered required.

Preen Engebretson was one of the two original physicists behind the discovery of stellar harvesting. His work on theoretical wormholes demonstrated that interstellar portals could be opened from one star system to another along the superstring that connected them. Those same wormholes could also be used to transfer vast amounts of energy across the cosmos, since the wormholes were thought to be just a collapse of normal space into what the navy called hyperspace. But Preen knew better. His mathematical treatise called for space-time to be folded across a fifth dimension to create a hypersurface that looked very much like two funnels connected at their tapers. It was the energy vacuum in the general field equations that made them visible in normal space, so he postulated that if you had enough energy to apply, you could force them to appear.

Fortunately for his theories, two stars provide more than enough energy to force open a wormhole between them, as long as there is a corresponding superstring connecting them in hyperspace. When he originally presented these findings, his contemporaries had laughed exuberantly, and he found little support or funding to prove his work. That was when he was introduced to Samuel Barstaad, who not only had the financial connections to back Preen’s research but had the engineering skills to help construct the first star collector portal.

The laughter had stopped when Preen and Samuel created the first stable wormhole hypersurface between adjacent stars. At once, the military weighed in and took control of the project’s funding and distribution. Additional research had led to the ability to transfer energy from system to system along the walls of these wormholes, to be collected and distributed via a central energy grid. This did prove a tactical limitation, as ships were required to “wait” between energy transfers before they were able to travel through the portals, but this was a small price to pay for a stable intragalactic energy network. And the military had no problem with working around the energy conduits, since Preen and Samuel had demonstrated a military application for the energy net: the Star Caster.

But everyone knew that Preen was an eccentric loner who was rarely seen in public. He found few contemporaries could understand his mathematical equations, so he spent copious amounts of time locked away in his study at the central university building, absorbed in his work.

That was why, on this very day, a man bearing the credentials and a very convincing semblance of one Preen Engebretson was causing no little stir on the Demetrius Prime orbital research facility. Faces ranging from shocked to awed stared back at him, but Agron did not look anyone in the eye. He mumbled to himself softly (as Engebretson was known to do) as he made his way forcefully through the complex to the doors of the Star Caster firing chamber.

Seated at various consoles were technicians and engineers who had the job of controlling the various aspects of power regulation, gate traffic control, arming, and test firing of the colossal weapon, the untested sister of the one destroyed in the Libuscha system. Managing the immense project was supervisor Albert Lankenburg, a thin, lanky man whose nose was pointy enough to always give the appearance of looking down on others.