John Birmingham - Weapons of choice

As the Quad came online, each team member responded with a slightly increased heart rate, slightly shallower breathing, and a measurable change in galvanic skin response. They were all excited, no matter what their private qualms.

WETAR STRAIT, 1234 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

While Pope's colleagues set to their preparations, maybe a dozen pairs of eyes throughout the entire task force were directly fixed on the giant scientific ship. Two sailors on the destroyer trimaran HMS Vanguard, enjoying a furtive cigarette to mark the end of their watch, speculated on the contents of the oversized megatanker. Neither guessed correctly.

The pilot of a Marine Corps F-35, climbing through five thousand meters above the task force, happened to cast her gaze down at the same moment, but the jet quickly slipped over the eight-hundred-meter length of the Nagoya, and she took in the four strange, bulbous pods on her deck without really registering. The pilot had clocked some serious hours during the last fortnight's exercises, and the sight of the Nagoya was entirely routine to her now.

A bored fourth officer on the bridge of the Japanese Nemesis cruiser Siranui trained a pair of vintage binoculars on the distant form of their mystery guest, but his thoughts were mostly back home where he was certain his two girlfriends must have discovered each other by now, given his ill-advised decision to start banging a couple of Office Ladies dorming on the same floor of the same singles complex.

Throughout the rest of the task force a small number of sysops routinely scanning the threat bubble scoped out the "ghost ship," probing her annoyingly effective electronic defenses with low-grade scans, looking to pierce the black hole that enveloped her. The temporary community of task force Elint operators were agreed that a fully amped blast from a Nemesis array would strip her naked. But of course they weren't allowed to do that, so during rare moments of downtime they dicked around with low-power blinkscans, feeling out the Nagoya's electronic perimeter.

After the infamous brownout, Commander Judge had quietly and deniably encouraged such unlicensed shenanigans. Had he known what was coming, though, he would have junked his career and ordered all of the group's Nemesis arrays tuned in and burning bright, 24/7. But nothing had even remotely suggested that things were about to unravel aboard the Joint Research Vessel.

PROJECT CONTROL, JRV NAGOYA, ZONE TIME: 1235 HOURS, JANUARY 15, 2021

Pope seated himself at the command deck of the control room. With little to do as his underlings worked their consoles, he was able to sit back and savor the moment, to drink it in as a curiously loose feeling crept over him.

He almost smiled. If he'd been wearing slippers he might have kicked them off and put his feet up. Instead he sat rather regally in the center of things on a large leather swivel chair that Morley and Dunne called "the Kirk." The lighting was dim. The monitors threw off just enough light to read a book and anyway, he thought, there was something about the moment that lent itself to a bit of dramatic staging. The only sound, besides Morley's labored breathing, was the deeply satisfying rapid-fire snapping of keys as the Project staffers entered Pope's revolutionary new data.

Having nothing to do at this point, he checked to make certain that the closed-circuit TV was recording the moment for posterity and arranged himself in a suitably commanding pose for the video.

"Ms. Dunne," he said quietly, causing her to jump in her chair.

"Yes, Professor," she replied, worried that he'd observed some grotesque fuckup in the settings she'd just entered.

"Relax, Dunne. Nothing to worry about, I merely thought that, as the youngest member of the team and of course, as a lady," he teased, "we might give you the honor of launching."

"Me?" She gaped as everyone turned to stare. "Me?"

"My word"-Pope grinned coldly-"they really do give away the degrees at Caltech these days, don't they. Yes, you. If everyone else is ready?"

Morley spun on his seat, ripped out a brief string of commands in his staccato, two-fingered typing style, then continued the spin to bring himself back to facing the group.

"Done deal!"

Pope just shook his head. "Young man," he said, "when generations yet unborn come to study this day, the greatest mystery won't be how we managed this grand achievement decades ahead of time, but rather how we managed it at all with a moron piloting the accelerator. Ms. Dunne?"

Still reeling, Sharon Dunne swiveled to face her large screen. She reached out and stroked it with one long, black-nailed finger. The image display cleared, then another tap brought up one giant icon. It had been a joke, actually, suggested by Morley. The Big Red Button That Doesn't Really Do Anything.

Dunne looked over her shoulder at Pope, who nodded. So she gave her colleagues a thumbs-up, then pressed the same digit to the screen.

Belying its name, the button went click.

The disaster was a few seconds unfolding. A coiled heavy-ion accelerator boosted two baskets of uranium nuclei to fantastic levels of energy before smashing the countercyclical beams head-on, very briefly re-creating the ten-trillion-degree environment that had existed roughly one microsecond after the Big Bang. Protons and neutrons were annihilated, breaking down into a superenergized blob of quark-gluon plasma.

The team watched a schematic representation of the process on their personal view screens, direct exposure being out of the question. Murayama, the creator of the imploder that sucked up the plasma in the next phase, nodded briefly as the amorphous energy cloud was instantly metacompressed by explosive magnetic rams.

The process temperature soared by a factor of 1019, reaching the fabled Planck's constant as the quark-gluon bubble imploded to a sphere with a density of ten trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion kilograms per cubic meter. Indeed, it was so dense that Pope and his crew had just created the first synthetic wormhole, an insanely impressive achievement, worthy of Nobels for all.

But it was only a job half done. Pope felt his heart beginning to race as his own unique contribution came online, a Casimir Inflator that set the wormhole spinning at a fractionally sublight speed before firing an array of high-powered lasers into its maw, to push the throat out before it could collapse inward.

"Firing up the disco ball!" Morley called out as a ring of perfectly reflective mirrors began to rotate at two million rpm. Two hundred and thirty meters away dozens of beams of coherent light skewered into the mirrors, striking them at a shallow angle that reflected the negative beam pulses half a degree away from their paired positives. The negatives were shunted down a cavity resonator and into the mouth of the wormhole. The nanoscale hole sucked in the lasers, as expected. It inflated, also as expected.

To this point everything had gone as predicted.

And then the process went native, swallowing the chamber that was meant to contain it, sucking in energy like Poe's maelstrom and "spaghettifying" the very matter that had given it birth, stretching and eating the world all around. Inflation took place instantaneously, the gross tonnage of the Nagoya being drawn into the throat like taffy, snuffing out the lives of the only people who possessed any chance of reversing the process, or even explaining it.

Manning Pope died, smiling and unaware.

Pope's wormhole, which should have stabilized at three microns in diameter, instead blew out into a swirling lens of elemental colors fifteen thousand meters across before dissipating just as quickly. In that brief period, however, it punched through the veil separating two universes.