Konrad
“You wanna see this, Konrad?”
“Huh?” Konrad jerked up, tearing his gaze away from the scribbled-on sheet of paper laying before him. His back ached, protesting the long hours that he’d spent hunched over his desk. He hadn’t managed to write anything useful down, but he felt like maybe he was getting a sense for the implant problem. A sense of how disastrously vast it was, at any rate.
A man with a walrus mustache and saggy cheeks was peering in at him from across his desk, blinking watery, heavy eyes. One of the two engineers across the hall whose names he could never remember. The ones working on the accelerometer, he thought.
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening. See what?”
The engineer squinted at him. “The engine. Lusser is opening up one of the spare engines the turtle brought with her, to see if we can figure out how it works. Do you want to come watch? Becker is already there.”
Konrad pushed himself up away from the desk, crumpling the paper up and throwing it away. “Of course I want to see it.” He hesitated, glancing around. “Are we allowed to? It’s not like it’s related to our projects...”
The man snorted, blowing out his mustache. “Our projects just became obsolete by about two centuries. Come on, can you imagine missing this?”
Konrad followed the man out of the dingy office. Replacing everything they’d been working on with the new alien technology relied on them being able to at least replicate, if not understand, how it all worked. If his progress with the implants was any indication, they’d be doing a lot of things the old way for a long time to come.
Still, he wouldn’t miss this for the world. Propulsion didn’t hold the same magic for him that computers did, but all the same he hurried to keep up with...what was the man’s name? He’d had a trick to remember it, something to do with that mustache. Walrus... Wal... Walburg. Dr. Walburg, that was it. The man huffed down the path outside of the labs to the building that held Dr. von Braun’s office, wheezing in his hurry. Konrad understood his excitement. At least with the implant, even if he didn’t know exactly how it worked, he could conceptualize it. It was just vastly more complex than anything he could ever build. When it came to the engines, no one had any inkling how they seemingly could violate the laws of physics–providing thrust without mass should have been impossible.
The propulsion engineers had thrown a dozen theories around about the reactionless drives that Reel’s people used. They’d explored and rejected ideas as mundane as microwaves and as exotic and fanciful as a system that pulled matter from another universe and then expelled it to generate propulsion. Where the implants felt like science fiction, the engines were so far beyond the German’s experience that they might as well be science fantasy.
All the speculation had done nothing for them, and so the next logical step was to take one of the engines apart and look inside. They’d approached Reel with the request, fully expecting her to shoot it down, but she’d happily agreed, going so far as to offer them a spare engine to keep and study.
“You don’t need it in case of...I don’t know, an emergency?” Konrad had asked her.
“It’s okay. I have…more than I usually would,” she’d reassured him, chuckling a little. He’d thought that reaction odd, but didn’t press the matter.
He and Walberg pushed through the doors into the testing building, turning into a large lab that had been cleared for the purpose. The room was already crowded with a dozen human spectators, and one large alien. Reel waved to Konrad cheerily from where she stood in the center of the lab, next to Lusser and von Braun. The three of them surrounded the spare engine, nestled in a rounded cradle that they’d cobbled together for this demonstration. Konrad returned the wave, but his gut twisted. He was the one who’d asked Reel for permission to open the engine, but somehow it was Lusser standing there next to her and von Braun, in the spotlight.
The engine itself, the true star of the show, didn’t look like much. It was a big, off-white egg, smooth and almost featureless, save for a gimbal mount on the rounded end with a few wires trailing out of it. Yet it drew every eye in the room like a magnet, the men already inside pressing in close to have the best view of the proceedings.
As they took their places with the other dozen scientists and engineers in the room, Lusser raised his arms for quiet, stilling the crowd. “Gentlemen!” he said, grinning broadly. “Let’s get right to it. Engineer Reel has been gracious enough to offer to walk us through how to tear one of their engines down, and how to put it back together. Reel, the floor is yours.”
She stepped forward, looking around at the expectant faces. Konrad wondered what was going through her head. Was she nervous to be speaking to all these men? Maybe, but it was hard to tell, on that reptilian face. Some expressions were clear as day, others inscrutable. Was she a little stiffer than usual? Was there a little more tension in her posture?
If she was nervous, she pushed through it. “This is a standard mid-sized engine,” she said, patting it with one green three-fingered hand. “Before doing work on any engine, it’s important to step through the task specific safety checklist. In this case, the first step is to disconnect power.” She gestured at the trailing wires. “Obviously that’s already done, though I’ve brought a spare power pack we can use to show you how it connects. After disconnecting power, you want to let it sit for a few minutes before opening it, to make sure all residual energy is discharged.”
Simple enough and obvious enough. Reel rattled it off with the air of a woman working through a long-memorized list, taking up something that looked for all the world like a flathead screwdriver as she spoke. “The next step,” she went on, prodding at something he couldn’t see behind the gimbal, “is to disengage the magnetic clamps.”
A click echoed through the room, emanating from the engine pod as a seam split it lengthwise from end to end, all the way around. The spectator’s collective breath caught. Von Braun stiffened where he stood, looking like he wanted nothing more than to rush forward and rip the pod apart with his bare hands to get into its guts, and for a moment, Lusser’s foul grin looked almost honest. He took a grip on one side of the pod at Reel’s urging. She worked her claws into the gap on the other side, and together they braced themselves to lift the top half free.
The crowd held its collective breath, leaning in and crowding each other for a glimpse. Konrad had to put an elbow into the man next to him to keep his place, and the fellow didn’t even complain, so intently focused was he. Konrad strained to see, his heart beating faster now that the moment had finally come. After the complexity of the transmission unit, he wasn’t sure what he expected to find under the casing as Lusser and Reel lifted it clear, but he was certain it would be magnificent. With a coordinated heave, Lusser and Reel pulled the top half of the egg aside, revealing the interior.
Konrad stared. The pod was empty, save for a big, tapered screw. It carved a solid silver spiral from the narrow end to the blunt, snug against the inner shell of the casing. Lusser’s eyes bulged, and he fumbled the casing, forcing Reel to catch it.
“So,” she grunted, tipping the cover over onto the ground next to the table and completely oblivious to the gathered human’s stunned silence. “That’s the Drive Spiral. You can run it either direction to generate thrust forward and backwards, and you have full rotation with the gimbal. Switching straight from forward to backwards takes a second but it-”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
The watching crowd exploded into questions, confused clamor, and scattered hysterical laughter, cutting her off. Lusser gaped at the corkscrew, making no effort to regain control of the crowd.
...
“Explain it again.”
Von Braun had managed to restore order, eventually. Mostly by bodily removing the loudest of the men, and those who didn’t need to be there. In the end, he’d sent almost everyone away, save for the two propulsion engineers, Lusser, Reel herself, and Konrad, just in case there was “some strange computer thing we might need you for.” Now he stood with his arms crossed and an intense look of concentration on his face, looming over them.
“Electrical current is fed in here, from the ship’s reactor,” Reel said, in the same patient tone of voice one might use with a small child. “The current powers the Drive Spiral. The more power you give it, the faster it spins.”
Von Braun nodded. “Okay. We’re with you so far.”
She shifted her hand to the spiral screw in question. “The spiral pushes the ship, driving it through space.”
Lusser held up a hand to stop her. “That’s where we’re getting lost.” He’d regained some of his color, but he still looked like a man who’d had a rug pulled from under him. Konrad figured that Lusser had imagined an extended dissection of the engine, with himself playing the part of lead surgeon. He felt a small stab of petty satisfaction, picturing again the look on Lusser’s face when the top half of the shell had come off the engine. He’d have enjoyed it more if he weren’t so stunned himself; the engine looked like some kind of joke.
“What is it that the…Drive Spiral,” Lusser’s mouth twisted on the words–Konrad could tell he thought it was a stupid name for the thing. “Pushes on?”
Reel frowned, wrinkling up her forehead. “Umm…you know the Dark Liquid I talked about with the transmitter?”
They nodded, if a little hesitantly. They hadn’t seen it, though Konrad had told them about it.
She waved her hand through the air. “So it’s like that, but less concentrated, and everywhere. That’s what it pushes on.”
They lapsed back into silence, broken only by a propulsion engineer scratching furiously at his gray head.
“So…A Dark Gas? But how?” Lusser pled, his voice tight and plaintive. “How is it pushing on this...this matter, where nothing else does?”
Reel shifted, looking uncomfortable. “I don’t know.” She reached up and touched the back of her head. “It’s just…It’s Drive Metal. It can do that.”
“Enough,” Von Braun broke in, cutting Lusser off before he could ask the same question again. “Gentlemen, we can figure that out later. For the moment, someone go get me a battery.”
They glanced at each other. “A battery, sir?” the youngest propulsion engineer ventured. “What kind of battery?”
“A car battery would be good,” he answered, picking up one of the trailing wires from the gimbal and rubbing it with his thumb.
“I don’t think we have any just lying around, Doctor.”
“Then go outside and rip it out of the first vehicle you find,” he snapped.
“I have that power pack I mentioned,” Reel said, forestalling them. She pulled a rectangular box out of the pouch at her waist. “Here.” She passed it to von Braun, who hefted it, grunting.
“It’s lighter than I’d expect. What’s it use for storage media...never mind, we’ll save that for later.”
“How does it connect?” Konrad asked, leaning around to see. There wasn’t an obvious positive or negative post.
“Just push the positive wire in here, and the negative on the other side.” She answered, pointing to two holes on opposite sides. “White for negative, purple for positive.”
Von Braun fumbled with the wires, pushing them into place. He nudged a dangling green wire with his foot. “That’s the ground?”
“Do you mean the reference? Yes. Normally I’d tie it into a structural element of the ship...I’m not sure what to do with it here. But probably we won’t need it for this.” She grabbed Konrad by the sleeve and drew him gently away from the nose of the engine. “I think.”
Von Braun set the connected power pack down next to the engine. “Now what?”
“Just hit the button on top there. It’s not a big power pack, so it won’t do much. We could take it outside if you wanted–”
Von Braun ignored her, punching the indicated switch. The screw whipped around in its housing, whirring in the air, and the whole pod shot across the room, ripping the wires loose from the battery. With the top half off, it slammed into the wall at waist height, cracking the wooden panels with a gunshot snap before dropping to the ground and tipping onto its side.
They stared. Reel pointed to it with two open hands. “See? Like that!”
“We see,” Von Braun conceded, his voice tired. Konrad thought he sounded like he hadn’t actually expected it to work, or like he’d hoped it would all turn out to be some kind of joke. “Helmut, Becker, would you please help Reel take this to the propulsion lab and see if you can begin teasing out what magic it runs on?”
“What’s magic?” Reel asked, but no one answered her.
They gathered it all up, and the battery too as an afterthought. Konrad made to follow them as they went traipsing out the door, but von Braun stopped him. “Not you, Konrad. You too Lusser, stay a minute.” As the door swung shut, banging into Reel’s tail, he sighed and rubbed his temples. “Lusser?”
The other man started, turning away from the dent the engine had left in the wall. “Yes, Dr. von Braun?”
“How long will it take your team to figure out how that thing works?”
“Well, with enough man hours, and if we’re allowed to tear the engine down completely...”
“Years,” Konrad whispered.
He hadn’t meant to interrupt, or even to say out loud. Lusser’s head whipped around towards him, his eyes narrowing as he tried to muster a glare. “Defeatist. We’ll figure it out,” he proclaimed, full of false bravado. “But yes, it will take...a while.”
“If we can even figure it out at all!” Konrad said. “Did you see how that thing moved? We’re like cavemen who have been given a car. I don’t think we have a prayer of figuring all this out in anything less than years.”
Von Braun sighed heavily. “I don’t think it’s as bad as all that. Besides, we don’t even need to really understand it right away...we just need to be able to replicate it. Maybe start by having a look at the metal that Drive Spiral is made of. Get it under a microscope, melt it down, run it through a spectrometer…whatever it takes.”
Lusser nodded. “Yes, Doctor. Though you know, there’s a faster way.”
They looked at him, curious, and he smirked. “We could just use her ship, or take the parts from it to build something, and worry about figuring out how it all really works later.”
Konrad stared at him, horrified by the idea. “That would strand her here!”
Von Braun shook his head, disapproving. “And it would poison any possibility of a relationship with her people. No, not an option. Not unless all else fails.”
Lusser snorted, waving a careless hand through the air. “That’s true enough, but don’t discount the option. None of this will matter at all if we lose the war.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.” Von Braun said with another huge sigh, scrubbing a hand through his hair. He looked at the destroyed wall. “Have someone patch that up, and start working on figuring out what that ‘Drive Metal’ is made of.” He turned his gaze on Konrad. “On that note…any clever insight into her computers, or her request?”
“Oh yes,” Konrad lied unhappily. “Loads. It’s about as promising as the engine is.”
That brought a twisted half smile to von Braun’s face. “Just keep at it, and keep her happy. It’s important that they know we’re putting lots of effort into delivering on our end of the deal...every moment we keep her and that ship here is an incalculable gift.” He brushed the ragged scar the engine had torn across the table with his fingers. “Alright, enough moping about. Go solve some problems. That’s what the Reich pays you for, after all.”