Another excerpt from the Maroli Tango WIP serialization on Substack

Glenn Mehrenholz stood at the center of his augmented reality playground on Ghost Town deck, flying a covey of drones through Iron Arrow Vidura’s scrap orbit.

Illuminated by harsh sunlight, material floated in vacuum as if collected by a magnetic crane from the shredder bin at a celestial automotive junkyard — irregular clusters, one side flat, the other spiky, set adrift to assemble into razor-sharp, deeply textured, strobe-light-decorated navigation hazards the size of battleships.

Glenn told his wife, “I don’t know what I thought I’d find, but it wasn’t this.”

Arya touched an icon on a virtual console, adding a map layer to the scene. “Iron Arrow’s survey says we’re in the recycling mill input zone.”

“I’m looking for QA rejected plate.” Glenn pushed the scene away, moving viewer perspective outside the range of the drones’ cameras. Scene resolution deprecated. Map annotation remained in-focus, leading them to another site.

Glenn groaned. “Asteroids. Unprocessed.”

“You won’t be welding those into a sphere.” She took a moment to appreciate where she was. “Look! There’s Vidura!”

“And all three moons.” He listened to his phone’s Oma. “Do you want to accept a teleconference request from Ted Clarke?”

A minute later, Colonel Theodore Clarke appeared in the scene. He said, “We might have picked up a stalker.”

Arya replied, “Tell him to stand in line.”

“Ha ha.” Clarke walked into the sim. “One of PR’s directors didn’t like being let go. She gave Vik Abhianta an earful, making noises like a Vidura United activist.”

Glenn shook his head. “Never heard of them.”

“Communists, atheists, militant vegetarians.”

Arya said, “I thought Vidura was supposed to be a land of wholesome common sense.”

“Every culture has defective citizens.” Clarke looked around. “What are you up to here?”

Glenn said, “Trying to figure out how to test a missile defense exploit.”

“What’s the issue?”

“The device creates an N-Space disturbance. What it will do, we think, is impose a Saraf-Drive no-fly zone. What it might do is tell our enemies where we are, interfere with ansible communications and maybe even cause our souls to disconnect from our bodies.”

Clarke gave him the weird eye. “You mean like, bring on the Rapture?”

“We’ll test it on livestock.”

“Cows have souls?”

“Yes.”

“Fish?”

“Depends on which fish. An organism needs a neuron count above three hundred million to get a soul. Sharks have souls, but most cold-blooded animals do not.”

“Dogs have souls?”

“Yep, and there’s no way I’m going to send a dog.” Glenn scratched his chin. “I’m thinking we’ll do it after we figure out how Saraf Drive works.”

“Will that be soon, or …”

Glenn shrugged, “My feeling is soon. Could be wrong.”

Arya asked, “Did you really break legs at the Pentagon?”

Clarke nodded. “My guys flashed a couple of Saraf Drive vans directly into a hallway, kicked open a conference room door, and thrashed the bejesus out of a bunch of Navy pussies.”

“Holy smokes!”

“If you want to see big talkers turn into crybabies, I’ll send you the video.”

Glenn touched his ear. “Are we running an ad?”

They were shortly joined by Glenn’s collaborator at Parsanda Research on Vidura. The man asked, “Is this a bad time?”

Arya waved. Colonel Clarke waved. Glenn said, “Nah. We’re just standing around in augmented reality, which makes it a good time. What do you have?”

A magic clearboard appeared in the scene. Glenn stared half-baffled at lines of cursive notation. “You know I can’t read the modern script, right?”

“I did the calcs the hard way, then I asked your secret science modeler to posit five permutations of time using observations from all experiments, including your fast time demo, and find a solution for loopback.”

Glenn groaned. “Oh, no. Don’t tell me it was that easy.”

“Oh, yes. Negative curvature of space-time, sitting right behind the volume in a tesseract. We could have had high-performance Saraf Drive all along.”

Glenn closed his eyes. “That means the Unseen might have it.”

Read the serial novel here.