Bonus Chapter: Post-Flight Conference
EIGHT MONTHS AFTER THE BLUE ORIGIN FLIGHT FROM ALNUS
NASA Visitor Complex, Kennedy Space Center, USA
While Carol's worldview had changed a great deal after her experiences in the Special Region, the reality of her day-to-day had not. Ultimately, she had returned to the familiar settings of offices, desks, and computer screens, punctuated by the occasional tour or presentation. Some presentations, like those about flight dynamics in the Special Region's upper atmosphere, she thoroughly enjoyed. Others, namely those that ended in questions from Cable News groups, she did not.
"Is it true that the success of the Midgetman Missile and Launcher in Falmart is responsible for restarting their production at Boeing and Lockheed Martin?"
"I can't answer that."
"Colonel Richard Mullan was moved to US Forces Korea recently. In light of the current nuclear drama with North Korea, do you feel that his experience in Falmart might be related?"
"No idea."
"An anonymous source claims that Marines from the 5th CSG in Yokosuka were deployed through the Gate based off an emergency action report from the far side. Care to comment?"
"No."
So Carol was pleasantly surprised when NASA Administrator Kosinski made her aware of a closed presentation to key American Aerospace figures… particularly once she saw the name of the lecturer and title of the lecture.
Early Aviation Experiments in the Special Region
By Greta Sareteian
This was how Carol found herself standing out in the middle of the sweltering heat in front of NASA's Visitor Complex at the Kennedy Space Center. As before, they needed her for her Japanese-English translation skills, but Carol would have gone even if they hadn't needed her skills. Letters and the rare video-conference paled in comparison to seeing an old friend face-to-face.
So when the State Department SUV finally arrived, she laughed as Greta raced over and embraced her with a warm hug. "I've missed you!" Greta exclaimed.
"It's been way too long," Carol agreed. "Look at you! You've just stepped off an international flight, yet you still look amazing!"
Greta laughed at that. "I've gotten used to it, I think. I've done more traveling in the past year than in my entire life before that!"
"Did you get a chance to do any touring on the way in?"
"Nothing big," she said, and pointed behind her. "They're still antsy about taking me to public places."
Carol glanced over Greta's shoulder to peek at the two stoic Diplomatic Security Service agents behind her. She wasn't surprised; Greta still counted as "SR Biology" and was still, if Defense Secretary Clayton was correct, a target for kidnapping.
"I'll see if I can pull a few strings," Carol said. "After all, if Itami could get Pina into Tokyo Disneyland, I'm sure the State Department can safely guide you through EPCOT."
But by this point, Greta's attention was already on the imposing Rocket Garden standing adjacent to the visitor's center. Even from the parking lot, it was easy to identify the skinny black and white Mercury-Redstone, the shiny silver Mercury-Atlas, and the stern military gray Gemini-TItan. Each was kept in such pristine condition that it seemed, with a little work, they could all be called upon to perform their former duties and haul people into space the next day. "Those are the old ones," Carol pointed out with a grin. "We've got some much better stuff elsewhere; Shuttle Atlantis, a Saturn V… you can touch a moon rock, if you're interested."
Greta laughed at that. "Then I'll have touched three worlds!"
It was an odd thing for Carol to think about, but she supposed that Greta was correct. It was just… strange. She had lived so much of her life with Earth being the only globe accessible to the general public, but now, having stood on both sides of the Gate, she had visited as many worlds as an Apollo astronaut. Weird.
The lecture hall was packed, both with civilian-sector engineers and Department of Defense Officials. Carol even recognized a handful of them from the DARPA lecture on SR-Phizons, and was both shocked and unsettled to see Secretary Clayton standing at the back of the room.
When the man noticed her, he gave her a polite smile, a nod, and turned away. He wouldn't show up if this was just a social call, she thought, something's wrong here.
By this point, Greta was fussing with the computer as she prepared to load a PowerPoint presentation. That was another strange thing, Carol reflected. She recalled, all that time ago, how confused Greta had been the first time she'd seen a computer. It was interesting how quickly she'd adapted, and it made her wonder how much equipment Greta currently controlled in Falmart.
The lights dimmed, and Carol found herself in the strangest reversal of all. Weeks ago, it had been her giving a speech on Earth technology to the residents of Falmart while Greta translated. Here, Greta was giving a speech on Special Region technology to the residents of America while she acted as the translator.
"Hello everyone!" Greta began, "For those of you who don't know me, my name is Greta Sareteian. I'm the head of Empress Co Lada's Imperial Aviation Group, and I'm one of two Imperial citizens who was given the privilege to fly with American and Japanese astronauts aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard launcher. Today, I'm here to talk about advances in home-made aircraft and rocketry in the Special Region."
She moved to her first slide, which was a split-screen picture. On the left, a messenger on a Wyvern. On the right, a picture from the last Midgetman missile launch. Carol recognized the significance of the picture, and why someone had been around to take it. Only a few audience members knew, but that picture showed the third and only nuclear attack since the end of World War II.
But that wasn't the focus of Gretas lecture. "On the left is aviation as it stood in the Special Region prior to the JSDF arrival last year. Messengers would climb aboard the Wyverns pictured here, and would carry limited messages from city to city. This poses a number of problems, namely the time and gold needed to breed, train, house, and feed new Wyvern and Wyvern flyers. The idea of mechanical flight introduced by the Earth armies was a new and novel approach, and it opened up the potential benefits that Earth had known for well over a century—faster travel, heavier loads, less training time, and, ideally, cheaper development. While we know that we will likely not match American or Japanese technology in the near future, we are hopeful that our current up-front investment in this technology will help us in the future."
She moved to the next slide, which showed video footage of a condensed wood rocket. Compared to anything that the people of Earth had brought to Falmart, even Carol's model rockets, this was an extremely crude vehicle, held together by metal straps. In the video clip, the rocket was launched from a safe distance by a magician's fire. After a two second wait, the rocket lept off its pad, and continued on a vertical path for a good three hundred feet before tilting over and careening off-trajectory before exploding. "Rocket progress, while the most popular with the people, is also the most challenging," Greta explained. "While Flamart has benefitted greatly from access to Earth Physics, a lack of access to Earth chemistry has meant that we haven't been able to find a good propellant mixture. The fact that the Empire has extremely limited metalworking options means that we've had to make do with bolted wood. Our magicians are also finding it difficult to control the rockets in-flight, and since electrical engineering is a foreign science to us, the launch vehicles usually don't go where we want them to. Aerodynamic fins give us more control than we might have otherwise, but until we can create a reliable, metal engine nozzle, it's a blessing whenever the rockets manage to fly straight."
More video clips of rocket flights, some successes, some abysmal failures, and one particularly memorable picture of JSDF observers diving for cover as a faulty rocket just barely passed over their heads. Amid the amused laughter, Carol heard one engineer whisper to another, "It's like October Sky!"
"Suffice it to say," Greta concluded, "That until we become better at metalworking, perfect propellant, and find some way to improve remote control, a home-grown space program is off the table."
Carol took a moment to glance back over at her protégé, and was saddened by the annoyed look on Greta's face. I know that feeling, she thought. She experienced that feeling every time an incoming presidential administration upended NASA's ongoing mission goals, or whenever someone brought up the idea of exoplanets as travel destinations. So much to do, so many places to go, but sometimes the world was either unwilling or unable to follow up. Both politics and technological progress only moved so quickly, and it was a pain waiting for either group to catch up with your dreams.
"Fortunately," Greta said, brightening, "We've had a bit more success with general aviation!"
The next slide showed a contraption that was at once extremely familiar, yet remarkably strange. It was a wooden biplane… of a model that wouldn't have looked out of place in a 1908 airshow, save for the fact that the vehicle pictured had no engine. For a moment Carol was taken aback; did Falmart actually possess the technology to make something like that? As she thought about it, however, she realized that the idea wasn't as far-fetched as she'd initially thought. Early airplanes were mostly wood, canvas, and rope cables, with only a tiny amount of metal for the fittings. Building an engineless airplane—or a wooden glider, in this instance—would only be a minor challenge for a team of carpenters in Italica or Sadera.
"Between observing F-4 Phantoms in practice, and reviewing aerospace physics equations in principle, we've managed to develop some of the first light aircraft in the Special Region. Like with the rockets, flyable aircraft were faced with the absence of good metalworking and propellant; we do not have the ability to build piston-engines, nor do we have the ability to refine the fuel need to run one. The out-of control propellants used in our rockets was also shown to be unacceptable, after a few… very close calls, and more than a few broken bones."
Carol noticed that Greta's left hand went to her right arm as she said that and feared the worst. She's trying to fly these things herself? It's amazing she's still alive!
"Fortunately, we have one more means of propulsion available to us in the Special Region, and that's magic!" Greta moved to another slide with a looping animation. In it, a magician was using magic to force a propeller to rotate...and it did, but nowhere near fast enough to be use for manned flight.
"Our initial idea was to copy earth designs, where you use a force to spin a propeller or jet turbine," Greta said. "But once again, we ran into the issue of power and speed. Using this method, the propellor could not move fast enough to keep the aircraft aloft, and the caster tired quickly. It seemed that we were doomed to keep using Wyverns forever, until we hit upon a solution that came—not from Earth, but from our own homeland!"
A second picture joined the first, this time a painting of a Fire Dragon. "The Large Dragons of Falmart have been the subject of a great deal of magical and scientific study. Once we had access to Earth physics we were able to confirm what had only been a suspicion until recently; Fire and Ice Dragons cannot support their own weight or speed in powered flight by normal, physical means. Instead, they channel magic to force themselves through the air. This explains how they were able to keep pace with JASDF F-4 Phantoms, even though the dragons are flapping wings instead of sucking air into jet engines.
"With this in mind, we tried a new approach; we threw out the idea of engine turbines and set up a magical ward within the airplane wings. This ward takes air from in front of the aircraft and forces it past the wings at storm-force speeds. Since producing strong winds is far less costly on the caster than physically moving or rotating solid objects, we found much more success."
She turned to switch to the next slide, and Carol heard some mutters from the audience. In particular, the words "propellantless ramjet" caught her attention, and it seemed like a reasonably accurate description. The method in question had no moving parts, yet it was still serving the function of a jet engine. In a way, the Falmart method was better than an Earth ramjet; a ramjet requires air to already be flowing through the engine to act as an oxidiser for the burning propellant, while Greta's design could, in theory, begin functioning from a complete standstill.
And this was proven by the next slide, which displayed a video of the aircraft in flight. What surprised Carol most was the sound—or, more precisely, the lack thereof. Even in electric aircraft, one could usually hear the thrumming of the propellers, but this aircraft let off soft hiss as it raced over the cameraman. The only sound Carol could compare it to was the noise of air escaping a pressurized scuba tank, but even that wasn't quite right. Compared to any Earth aircraft, Greta's flying machine was virtually silent. As she looked over the audience, she noticed some representatives from the Army and Marines suddenly lean forward in rapt attention.
In the back, she could see Clayton examining the vehicle with a furrowed brow before turning to whisper something to an Air Force officer standing next to him, who shrugged, then started up in a hurried whisper of his own.
"The current limitations of this kind of flight are based on the weight of the vehicle, and the the ward," Greta continued. "While the ward is less strenuous than rotating physical objects, it still expends the caster's energy, and it still relies on a line-of-sight relationship between the caster and vehicle. This means that you need to either fly within range of the caster's vision, or carry the magician aboard with you as a flight engineer."
The slideshow ended, and Greta turned to face the audience. "As you can see, while we don't have the technology to match Japan and America in space or aviation technology, we are just starting to explore what magic does in the context of aviation, and we're very excited about the long-term possibilities.
"Are there any questions?"
While the various academics and defense department officials remained relatively composed, the engineers from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman lunged to their feet, all shouting to be heard over each other.
"What kind of thrust do you get out of a magical ward, and is the size of the ward scalable!?"
"Is the ward fixed in place? Can it be gimbaled mid-flight?"
"If you stack wards, does the thrust remain constant, and if it grows, it is arithmetic or geometric!?"
"If you mounted two wards in opposite directions over a static rotor, would it give you vertical thrust, like with a helicopter?"
As Greta struggled to figure out what they were saying and who she should answer first, the Air Force officer raced from the back of the room to the front and, to Carol's annoyance, declared, "Okay, everyone, due to the nature of this discussion, we need to check each question individually before giving our guest from the Special Region too much to think about."
Carol approached him, and said, "What exactly are you—"
"Mr. Clayton requests your presence outside in the Rocket Garden," the officer added. "We'll have someone here to take over translations in a minute."
The Rocket Garden, Kennedy Space Center, USA
After the cool, air-conditioned darkness of the auditorium, the late-day light and humid Florida air were oppressive, and Carol winced away from both of them. What is this? She wondered. The situation with the Bomb in the Special Region is over, as far as I'm concerned. Why does he still want to talk to me?
The Rocket Garden had been completely emptied out, and Carol found Clayton in the shadow of the Gemini-TItan rocket. It was interesting, in a way. Much like the first two Midgetman flights out of Alnus, TItan had been initially designed to launch atomic bombs from missile silos situated across the country. NASA had reappropriated the rocket, and readjusted its function for scientific purposes. Despite this, the Cold War greys, whites and blacks spoke clearly of the vehicle's original function. This was a weapon.
"There's no nice way to put this," Clayton said. "So I'll be blunt. Once Greta leaves today, it is the intent of both America and Japan to prevent the Special Region from gaining any and all remaining Earth technological knowledge."
Carol looked at him, aghast. "What? Why?"
"Everything that Greta has discussed has already been analyzed by think tanks on both sides of the Pacific, and we have determined that giving the Imperials any further technological hints would produce a long-term military threat."
"Wait, wait," Carol said, holding up her hands, "let me make sure I'm understanding you correctly. You, the United States Secretary of Defense, think that model rockets and wood gliders are a potential danger to a 21st-century fighting force."
"A long-term danger, yes."
Carol rolled her eyes. "No one's going to blow up a steel tank with a cardboard rocket."
Clayton raised an eyebrow. "I thought you'd say that. I also thought that you would start quoting Special Region poetry to me by now, but since we're on the topic of creative writing, how about a line from a famous American?"
He handed her his phone, which displayed an image of… a rocket. It was small, mostly made of wood like Greta's but relied on a long pole for in-flight stabilization rather than aerodynamic fins.
"And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air… sound familiar?" Clayton said. "Francis Scott Key was referring to Congreve rockets, like the one pictured there. They were developed in 1804, using technology not much more advanced than what the Saderan Empire can access right now. By Key's time, the British had been able to mass-produce them effectively enough to rain about six hundred of them on Ft. McHenry."
"But America won the battle of Ft. McHenry," Carol pointed out. "That's why we made that poem our national anthem."
"America won that particular engagement because the Congreve rockets had a shorter range than the guns on the Fort. But now, think back to Greta's rockets. You've given Falmart the early technology to skip the guiding rod and move to aerodynamic fins. If the HMS Erberus had been armed with Greta's rockets instead of Congreve's, we might be singing a very different national anthem."
Carol shook her head. "That's a stupid comparison. If the Americans at Ft. McHenry had the weapons that we have, they would've sunk the Erberus with a fighter jet before it ever got into the bay."
"Even if the same rockets had the ability to track the fighter jet?" Clayton said.
"Greta said that they have not mastered remote control of the rockets."
"Falmart made the technological leap to their current rockets, from bows and arrows, in nine months. Where do you suppose they'll be by the end of the decade?"
"Hopefully with a government that hires smarter think tanks," Carol said. "I refuse to imagine any near-future scenario where Pina Co Lada fields domestically-produced Surface to Air Missile batteries. The infrastructure isn't there, and it won't be there for a long, long time."
"Then you're missing the big picture," Clayton insisted. "That argument might work for an Earth civilization because infrastructure setup is a tedious process; you need energy, and something to make that energy transportable, and utilizable, hence why oil and natural gas continue to dictate so much of Earth geopolitics. Now, think about Greta's airplane. There's no engine. Falmart has thrown out the entire production line of metalworking, oil drilling, and mechanical engineering—the most complicated part of the aircraft—and replaced it with magic. Next, think about Greta's rocket. They're skipping the invention of computer circuitry and imaging and using magic to give the rocket control authority. I've said in the past that having magical technology components opened up a world of opportunity, but it also allows Falmart to technologically skip ahead by centuries… and unlike us, they know how to use magic.
"That's why we need to cut off their knowledge base while we still can, before they know the right questions to ask, and leapfrog their way to even more dangerous equipment."
She was following him... barely. The natives of the Special Region had always been fascinated and envious of Earth technology, but were slow to believe in the capabilities of science until they saw a particular invention or weapon in action. Once they did, all bets were off; she vividly recalled Cicero La Moltose begging Colonel Mullan for American-made arms. Would they be willing to try and make a weapon on concept alone? "They aren't likely to try and build something that they haven't observed to be effective in battle," Carol conceded.
Clayton frowned. "And what was the strongest weapon used in the Special Region. Would you like to see them with one of those?"
Carol felt like she was going to be sick. Hadn't Lelei La Leleina been standing there as Itami described the correct name and function of a nuclear bomb? The girl was already celebrated for her curiosity… what if she'd had the chance to look it up? Perhaps the Imperial armies with their swords and arrows couldn't stand against the JSDF, but with the right application of magic, the tide could change. In a horrific flash, she had a mental image of hundreds of wood bombers, flying low to avoid radar detection and practically silent to anyone below, suddenly appearing in the nighttime skies above Alnus and dropping nuclear IEDs, blasts of magic, and who-knew what else on the base below. The Japanese could drive them off with modern aircraft, but not before taking serious casualties on the ground.
If Clayton was correct, a big chunk of this was her fault, starting with the Heliocentricity lecture and the agreement to provide Rondel with Calculus and Calculus-derived physics equations, and continuing through her conversation with Itami in front of the natives. It was, she decided, possible for a group of Falmart academics to build a crude nuclear device.
What if they were already too late?
"It's deterrence," Carol said.
"That's right."
"Why tell me this? Why not just cut them off?"
"Because you have a close relationship to the Director of Aviation development in Falmart," Clayton stated. "The Imperials will develop combined magical-technological parity to our own weapons eventually. The speed of that development will be reliant on how much Greta pushes them, and how soon someone decides to user her inventions as a delivery system. Think of her as Pina's own Wernher von Braun or Sergei Korolev. By the point that the Saderan Empire considers retaking territory from Japan, we need to have our own magic-based technology ready to counter them. In short, we need Greta to stall for us. You seem to have a knack for stalling nuclear destruction, so I figured that you would be the best person to ask."
"There's no alternative?"
"The second option is that we take Greta out onto the Atlantic, shoot her, and dump her overboard. This loses us favor with the Empire, and increases the pressure for Falmart to reach technological parity, but it would certainly help to slow them down in the short-term. I'd prefer not to do it that way, but that's our backup plan in case your plan fails."
Carol's jaw dropped at that, then snapped back shut. "You're awful," she said.
"Geopolitics in general is awful," Clayton countered with a shrug. "I'll give you half an hour to think about it. If I approve, I'll let you move forward with it."
He turned to leave and Carol shouted after him, "If what you're saying is true... if you plan on cutting off all of their knowledge sources, I'll never be able to talk to Greta again!"
The Secretary of Defense stopped, said, "Every story must end eventually, Dr. Dawson," and went on his way.
FOUR HOURS LATER
Launch Complex 39 Viewing Gantry, Kennedy Space Center, USA
Launch Complex 39A stood against the embers of a darkening twilight, brightly illuminated by powerful floodlights that revealed the imposing, white tri-core form of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.
"So that's it," Greta said, her voice barely rising above a whisper, "A real, working moon rocket."
Carol joined her at the rail of the observation gantry. This was the closest permissible viewing area to the launch pad, and the closest she could bring Greta on short notice. "The closest thing we have, for now," she said. "Falcon Heavy can throw a manned capsule around the moon… not enough stuff for the capsule to go into orbit, but definitely enough for a flyby. Depending on how Deep Space Gateway goes, they might upgrade it with motors to put it into orbit, or they might build an even bigger rocket."
"You make it sound so easy."
Carol couldn't help but laugh and shake her head. "It's anything but. We've been trying to get SLS off the ground, in one form or another, for a decade and a half. Even SpaceX has been running into trouble with the Heavy, delay after delay after delay. It became a joke in Space circles that the first launch of Falcon Heavy was six months away… and always would be. That rocket over there? It's their first attempt to launch the thing. At this point, I think most of us will be satisfied if it makes it off the pad before it explodes."
But Greta didn't laugh along with her, her eyes transfixed on the rocket. "We're never going to have anything like that in Falmart," she said.
"Greta!"
"I mean it!" She turned to Carol a fierce look in her eyes. "They don't… they just don't get it over there, Carol. All Pina cares about is keeping the satisfaction of the Senate. She doesn't care about what's up there, or how it could help people. My work is under constant supervision of the Royal Guard, and the only reason why I'm head of the Imperial Aviation Group instead of Senator La Moltose, is because I know some of the engineering and he doesn't... and because it looks good to the people to have an astronaut working for her."
Greta was shaking by this point. "And I hate it! I wish I could have taken them up on New Shepherd with me. From up there, all the politics, the popularity contests, it's just so stupid."
But, against her better reasoning, Carol found herself responding with a snort and a sad grin.
"What?"
"Congratulations, Greta. You've caught up with me."
The girl gave her a confused look. "I don't understand," she said. "You've solved the problems for weight, thrust, control… you put a probe into orbit around another planet!"
Carol laughed. "I've got one more story, for you, Greta. I suspect that you know most of it already, but it's worth repeating."
"Is this the one about private spaceflight?"
"Nope."
"Apollo and the Space Race?"
"No. Way more recent."
"Then where does it start?"
"About nine months ago...over there." Carol pointed over Greta's shoulder, down the coast towards Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
"People that are interested in spaceflight have a bad habit of jumping to optimistic predictions," Carol began. "I'm no different. I was standing outside of ULA's VIB at Launch Complex 41 when I was approached by Colonel Mullan with a story about a space program beyond the Gate. At first I was shocked, but I couldn't help but think to myself, this is it. The government is finally interested in Space for the sake of Space. We'll get to show everyone our cool technology, and learn new things, and just have a great time.
"This was a big deal for me, because NASA has been bogged down with political interests ever since the Apollo program ended. What you just said about being up in space, and how it nullifies all the stupidity down below, I've heard it before. I've heard it four hundred times before, by every other person who's had a chance to go up there and see it for themselves. I was tired about Congress dragging its feet, or the goals of NASA changing with each new administration. The Falmart project was a chance to go out there and just do good things.
"Or… that's what I was hoping it was. You know what happened, and you saw first hand how upset I was… but you know what? I've had months to think back on it, and I think that I was successful. I helped a nation pull itself out of ignorance, and I helped Falmart's best aeronautical engineer kickstart her career. And these things didn't happen because I waited around for the government to make up its mind. I did it because…"
She looked back out ot the Falcon Heavy, "I did it because...I thought it was worth it.
"But you've heard that speech already," Carol said with a sigh. "So when I say that you've caught up, it's because you're where I am right now. Not technologically, just emotionally."
Greta followed her gaze. "So where's the way out?"
When Carol had described her plan to Clayton, it had ultimately boiled down to a single question, "How did the United States keep Russian rocket engineers from running to North Korea and Iran?"
The answer?
"Leave. Start your own space project," Carol said.
"Without funding from Pina's government?" Greta asked.
"Sure!"
"How?" Greta asked. "Where would I get the funding? How would we keep the Saderan government from intervening?"
"I talked it over with Defense Secretary Clayton. Moving your aerospace group somewhere safe to play with plane and rocket tech would be cheap, compared to some of the other tricky maneuvers that the US has pulled in the past." The theory that Carol had explained to the Secretary of Defense was that if Pina's aeronautics council could be gutted, evacuated, then occupied with research tasks under US observation, then they couldn't be used for weapons development. The same principle had worked on Russia by keeping their rocket scientists involved in the International Space Station, and it had proven effective for at least fifteen years.
"And even if you had answers to both of those questions," Greta said, "we still don't have the technology to build a working space vehicle—"
"I think you might. I think you're almost there."
That stopped Greta dead in her tracks. "We can do planes," she said. "Barely. Not rockets. You can't get to space on an airplane."
Carol said nothing, but produced a postcard from the Visitor Complex's gift shop. Greta took it, and as she examined the picture on the front, her eyes widened. "And this is real?" she asked. "This actually flew?"
"Sure did! Achieved two suborbital flights the same year that Project Mercury wrapped up. It also demonstrated spacecraft reusability eighteen years before the Space Shuttle. I'd be willing to bet that a version of this, with a magic-based propulsion unit, lofted by one of your wood carrier planes, might just be enough for Special-Region built, manned spaceflight."
The girl held the picture up to the fading light so she could get a better understanding of the details before saying, "We're still a few years away from some of this, I think, but maybe… no, not maybe. I can make this work!"
Before Greta could add anything else, they were interrupted by a pair of approaching DSS agents. "Time's up, miss," one of them said. "Will you be accepting Dr. Dawson's proposal?"
"Yes, of course!" Greta said, and was about to rush back over to them when she hesitated, then asked, "How long will it be before I get to see Carol again?"
The DSS agents said nothing, so Carol answered for them. "Without alerting Pina? It might be a very long time."
"But we will see each other again, right?"
Carol could only offer a sad smile as she said, "I hope so."
In reality, of course, who knew? They grasped each other in one last, firm hug and Greta, just before departing turned, held up the postcard and asked, "Does this thing have a name?"
"No name, just a code," Carol said. "It's called the X-15. It's a spaceplane. Good luck, Greta!"
Greta smiled back at her. "I had a great mentor, I'll take that over luck any day!"
Carol Dawson watched them go, then looked back one more time at the Falcon Heavy waiting on the launch pad. Would Greta's rocketplane be as successful as the X-15? Would forces in Falmart with magical-technology weapons be a threat in the near future? And what magical deterrence was the Department of Defense planning that would outclass Special Region magic?
Would the Falcon Heavy across from her make it safely into space?
Who knew?
If all of human history could be compressed into a single idiom, it would probably be "Playing with fire." On the one hand, there was always that risk of pain, loss, and destruction. Whether through nuclear fire or any other kind of abused scientific knowledge, that danger would always be there. On the other hand, fire brought warmth from the cold, and light out of the darkness. Fire, technology in general, was humanity's big risk.
And that risk, Carol decided, was worth taking.
Author's Note:
About two months ago, I found myself looking at an article in IEEE magazine regarding electricity-driven propeller planes. While reading, I couldn't help but think back to Greta and her aerospace ambitions, and was reminded of the fact that she and Carol had never been granted a proper goodbye, and that the Calculus/Engineering equations provided to Rondel in Chapter 9 would theoretically be enough to build a magic-powered glider.
Oops.
So after fighting against it for weeks, and finally gave in and wrote the above. If you preferred the ending in Chapter 20, you can take it or leave it.
So, will there be a sequel?
I have some notional ideas for a sequel, built on concepts outlined in this chapter, but I don't want to commit to it until I see what's going on with GATE Season 2. If Yannai gets another anime for his submarine warfare story, or if I suddenly find myself with loads of free time, I might follow up with my post-war Falmart and Spaceplane story.
Like everything else in Spaceflight, we'll just have to wait and see…
8andahalfby11
October 4, 2017 - 60th Anniversary of Unmanned Spaceflight