"Edward M. Lerner - Part II of IV - A New Order of Things" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lerner Edward M)

****
Art methodically emptied the peanut basket, the dark lager before him scarcely touched. Those priorities
seemed reversed, but events were confusing enough sober.

"It doesn't add up." He shook his head when the bartender glanced his way. What was he missing?
Fact: The Snakes had antimatter. That was now indisputable.

Fact: Victorious finished its deceleration on fusion drive. Why? Did its drive not work properly deep in a
gravity well?

Hypothesis: Snake technology tapped ZPE. As a test, Eva had casually mentioned the Casimir Effect--a
demonstration of, but not a way to extract energy from--ZPE. In the surveillance tape, Keffah startled,
and for the rest of that meeting there had been none of her usual condescending double eye blinks.
Casimir Effect was a very obscure term to have encountered on the infosphere ... unless you were
looking for human ZPE research.

The heck with it. Art took a deep swig.

If Snake antimatter containment relied on ZPE, their ZPE technology worked just fine in a gravity well.
Very dependably, too, or they would not dare keep antimatter in-system. So why not decelerate the
whole way by ZPE drive?

And even more of a head-scratcher: If they tapped ZPE, why bother with antimatter at all? The attraction
of antimatter was its density of energy storage. Matter and antimatter convert to energy at one hundred
percent efficiency, making antimatter great fuel. But that transformation was the tail end of the process.
Antimatter had to be created first, by accelerating normal particles to very high energies and smacking
them into each other, and then capturing the antimatter bits that sometimes flew out. End to end, the
process was grossly inefficient. If the Snakes could access the energy of the vacuum, why not just use
that?

He was missing something. But what?
****
Mashkith paced in his cabin, an excursion possible only in this unique vessel. A harmless indulgence? Or
a weakness? On no other ship of his experience would even a Foremost's cabin accommodate such
overt physical manifestation of doubt.

And as though the enormity of Victorious were not still, after so many years, humbling enough, now he
had seen Earth.

Ambassador Chung had personally escorted the shore party: Mashkith himself and his chosen officers.
There had been endless motorcades, winding through cities too vast to grasp. London. Mexico City.
Beijing. Cairo. Lagos. New Delhi. New Jakarta. Rio de Janeiro. There were parades in New York City
and Washington, although as far as Mashkith could see, the two were contiguous, and in the niche of
Greater Honshu called Tokyo. The glow of the megalopolises drove the stars from the night sky, where
space-based factories, arriving and departing interplanetary vessels, and glittering rings of habitats took
their places. And the moon overhead, in its crescent phase during much of their whirlwind visit, was
ablaze with its own cities.

Mashkith had known before ever setting out on this voyage that humans outnumbered Hunters thousands
to one. Now, he felt it.