Dimitri grabbed my arm. “No. You stay here, friend. We all stay here. One point eight billion Joules of light energy was released. This is why we needed vacuum chamber and one thousand kilograms of silicon. No air to ionize. Light goes directly to silicon block. Energy is absorbed by melting the metal. See?”

He turned the laptop toward me. A camera feed from inside the vacuum chamber showed the glowing blob that was once a thick plate of metal.

“Whoa…” I said.

“Yes, yes,” Dimitri said. “That Mr.Einstein with his E = mc2. Very powerful stuff. We let the cooling system work on it for a few hours. Uses seawater. Will be fine.”

I just shook my head in awe. In just 100 microseconds—that’s one ten-thousandth of a second—Dimitri’s spin drive melted a metric ton of metal. All that energy had been stored up in my little Astrophages. Slowly harvested from the carrier’s nuclear reactor heat over time by my breeder. I mean, the math all checked out, but to see it actually demonstrated like that was another thing entirely.

“Wait… how much Astrophage did you use there?”

Dimitri smiled. “I can only estimate based on thrust generated. But was close to twenty micrograms.”

“I gave you two entire grams! Can I have the rest back, please?”

“Don’t be greedy,” Stratt said. “Dimitri needs it for further experimentation.”

She turned to him. “Good work. How big will the real drive be?”

Dimitri pointed to the video feed. “That big. That is real drive.”

“No, I mean the one on the ship.”

“That,” he said, pointing again. “You want redundancy, safety, reliability, yes? So we don’t make just one big engine. We make thousand little ones. One thousand and nine, actually. Enough for all thrust needed and much to spare. Some malfunction during trip? Not a problem. More thrust from the others to compensate.”

“Ah.” Stratt nodded. “Tons of little spin drives. I like it. Keep up the good work.”

She headed to the stairwell.

I stared at Dimitri. “If you’d set off all two grams of that sample at once…”

He shrugged. “Fwoosh! We are vapor. All of us. Carrier too. Explosion would make small tsunami. But three hundred kilometers away from land, so is okay.”

He slapped me on the back. “And I would owe you drink in afterlife, yes?! Ha-ha-ha-ha!”

“Huh,” I say to myself. “So that’s how the spin drive works.”

I munch on my burrito.

So I guess I have a thousand of those (“A thousand and nine!” I hear Dimitri’s voice in my head). At least—that’s how many I started with. Some probably went kaput during the trip. There’s probably a panel on the Spin Drive console that’ll tell me the status of each little one.

The proximity alert interrupts my thoughts.

“Finally!”