Lacuna: Demons of the Void Read Free Page B

,” 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, chugging scotch with the other between bouts of screaming at the kids in the back seat...”
    Summer 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 in front of her.
    Rowe grinned a proud grin. “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, 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 lead 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 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 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 200,000 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