Read The Cold Steel Mind for Free Online

equivalent one of ours. More bang for the tonnage. But the mathematics simply does not exist to handle synchronising the two fields. Get that wrong and you end up with the two halves of your ship a few parsecs apart.’
    ‘Something to be avoided then?’
    Wallace looked at her, blinking, and then burst out laughing. ‘Thank you for putting my problems into perspective, Aneka. We have managed without such drives for the last thousand years or so, and the search for the principles behind this one could keep the next generation busy.’
    Aneka frowned, the thought which had surfaced and then hid earlier finally sneaking out from wherever it had concealed itself. ‘Yeah, a thousand years… Stop me when I get something wrong. A few years after I was taken a Xinti ship crash lands on Old Earth. The Humans of that time were able to salvage enough of the warp drive to understand how it worked and build their own.’
    ‘The mathematics behind a normal warp engine are complex,’ Wallace said, ‘even what one might describe as “esoteric,” but there is nothing that could not have been understood in your time given what I know of the technology.’ He looked at Gillian for confirmation.
    ‘Agreed. We even have a few examples of scientific papers written back then, and we know of a couple of scientists during that period who worked in this kind of area. Laplace, Einstein, Chandrasekhar, Rosen, Hawking… Though the latter may have been an early android.’ Aneka giggled and Gillian winced. ‘That’s not right, I take it?’
    ‘Stephen Hawking had a degenerative nerve disease and a brilliant mind. When his speech decayed to the point where he was indecipherable, someone built a computer with a voice synthesiser in it. He was a genius, but he was also something of an icon, like Einstein was before him, I guess. Except Einstein never got to guest star on Star Trek or The Simpsons .’
    ‘I have a T-shirt with Einstein on it,’ Wallace commented.
    ‘As do I,’ Cassandra added. ‘Doctor Wallace bought it for me. It is considerably shorter than his, however.’
    Wallace coughed. ‘Do go on, Aneka.’
    ‘Right… So this ship that crashed on Old Earth was, what? Would you say it was a first-generation warp ship?’
    ‘I suppose we’ll need to start calling them something like that, yes.’
    ‘And it crashed after I was taken off Earth by something with a second-generation engine?’
    ‘Apparently, yes.’
    ‘Oh,’ Gillian said, getting it a fraction of a second before the others.
    ‘Yeah,’ Aneka said, filling in the silence. ‘So if the Xinti had been using these second-generation drives to get to Earth, why did a first-generation one crash?’ No one seemed willing to answer so Aneka said it. ‘Because we would never have understood one of their current model engines.’
    ‘The Herosians got warp technology from a crashed ship,’ Ella commented. ‘Since the structure is almost identical to ours we’ve always assumed that was Xinti.’
    ‘Are we saying,’ Drake said into the next silence, ‘that the Xinti crashed those ships on purpose? They gave warp engines to the Herosians and the Jenlay, well, the Humans back then?’
    ‘There was nothing in the historical databases the Xinti robots gave us,’ Gillian said, but she was not sounding convinced.
    ‘Well, I’m saying it,’ Aneka stated flatly. ‘It makes sense of me. Part of an observation project leading to pushing the new race out into space.’
    ‘But you never arrived and they went ahead anyway.’
    ‘Yeah, that really worked out for them, didn’t it?’
    7.8.524 FSC.
    Aneka pushed her way through from the Agroa Gar side of the station into the central core and was a little surprised to see Delta hanging around in the corridor. Everyone else was back in the Hyde getting ready for the evening meal and there she was, holding back for some reason.
    ‘Hey, Delta, something up?’
    The girl started, not an easy feat in zero gravity. ‘Oh, Aneka…