TW05 The Nautilus Sanction NEW Read Free Page A

Corps,” he said without preamble.
    They all tensed. This wasn’t mickey-mouse. A Priority One, Code Red meant very serious trouble. It was an order for total mobilization.
    “About three weeks ago,” said Forrester, “a portion of a shipment destined for the Temporal Army P.O. was stolen from the warehouses of Amalgamated Techtronics, in spite of the most rigid security precautions. In all, some five thousand temporal transponders, ranging in classification from P-1 to V-20, were stolen by persons unknown.”
    The reaction was instantaneous and tumultuous. “As you were!” shouted Lucas, surprised to hear his own voice crack.
Five thousand temporal transponders!
It was a crime of unprecedented and staggering proportions with consequences that could be cataclysmic.
    The transponders, or warp discs in soldiers’ parlance, were the most recent development in military applications of Einstein-Rosen Bridge technology. Not all temporal units had them yet, but every temporal army in the world—and on other worlds—was in the process of converting to them to supplant the already obsolete chronoplates.
    Originally, Einstein-Rosen Bridge technology had been developed in the latter half of the 26th century, based on the theory developed by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen in 1935, in which they postulated the existence of a “corridor” in space-time. It took the discovery of white holes, cosmic gushers of pure energy exploding into the universe, and the technological advances of some seven hundred years before their corridor in space-time, or “worm hole,” became accepted as a reality. In 2645, Bell Laboratories developed the first working model of the Einstein-Rosen Generator at their Bradbury facility on Mars. Using particle-level chips, the device was still of mammoth size, much like the earliest computers. It was designed to tap into the energy field of an Einstein-Rosen Bridge between two universes. The Einstein-Rosen Generator, or ERG, was in fact misnamed. It did not actually
generate
power. Rather, it acted as a power dilator, in a manner similar to how a black hole “dilated” the universe in the vicinity which it was located, with a gravitational field so great that not only could light waves not escape from it, but the fabric of space-time itself was torn, disrupted in that region to open up into another universe as a white hole. The purpose of the ERGs was to tap into that maelstrom of power and then “feed” the energy to appropriate the transponders, in this way providing free energy for everything from powering orbital colonies to turning on a light switch in a New York conapt.
    Eventually, the ERGs made possible the creation of a bridge to neutron stars within the galaxy and a number of on-line ERGs were bridging to Orion. It was not until a research scientist in the Ordnance Section of Temporary Army Headquarters came up with the idea of reversing the process, in 2615, that the principles of Einstein-Rosen were applied to military weaponry. The result was the warp grenade—a combination nuclear device and time machine.
    Lucas had used one for the first time on his last mission. Since then, they had already been refined to achieve pinpoint intensity control. The device was called a grenade only because it approximated ancient hand grenades in size and general appearance. A warp grenade could be set manually with a timer or thrown set for air burst. The result was instant holocaust—only, capable of being totally controlled. It could be set to wipe out a city, a city block, a building on that block, a room within that building, or a spot within that room no larger than a fist. The variable factor in the classification of warp grenades was one-to-nine megatons. Lucas had used one of the least powerful ones and the thought of using a nine-megaton grenade made his knees weak. He could not imagine a situation in which such a necessity could arise. At the instant of detonation, the particle-level