Jon had not been with Kelsey Duffield that much since her dad’s company became one-third partners in Sky Masters Inc. But Jon had quickly learned one very interesting thing: Kelsey’s eyes were truly windows into her extraordinary brain. He could look at her eyes and see the calculations, the engineering, the mechanics, and the physics coming alive, almost as clear as a computer printout. He tried to guess what she was looking at, figure out what she was studying so intently, and then try to outguess her. It was not an easy task—but it was a constant challenge for him, trying to at least match her lightning-quick mind, and he loved the mental exercise.

That’s why he was so disappointed when she moved on. He thought she figured something out about the oscillator. It was easily the clunkiest and most low-tech component of the SSL—basically just a big airless can with mirrors in it and a big lens in front. The laser fight coming from the generators was directed into the collimator and bounced back and forth and rotated around between liquid-cooled mirrors in the oscillator. When the light was at the precise wavelength and all of the light waves were in perfect alignment, the lens allowed the fight to escape out the front to the argon-filled waveguide, which channeled the laser energy to the deformable mirror in the nose turret.

“What are you thinking about, Kelsey?” Jon asked.

“Energy,” the girl replied.

“What about it?”

“How much we need, how much we have?”

“Relatively speaking, not very much,” Jon replied. “We added just one alternator and one generator to the basic B-52 electrical system to power the laser. Four three-hundred-amp engine-driven alternators, each one supplying power in a separate circuit to four essential AC buses and two emergency AC buses. Four twenty-kilowatt engine-driven generators supplying power to two DC essential buses and one emergency DC bus. Backup power is four engine-driven hydraulically powered alternators and generators, which power only the essential A and emergency A buses.”

“Generators and alternators, huh?” Kelsey asked.

“This is an airplane, Kelsey, not a spaceship. What do you want on board—fuel cells? A nuclear reactor?”

She looked at him with a silent “Why not?” expression.

“You want to put a nuclear reactor on board a B-52?”

“You have one, don’t you?”

“A nuclear reactor? Are you craz—?” But then he stopped—he was doing that a lot, as if the ideas that flooded his brain used so much energy that he was unable to budget enough brainpower to move his lips. “We ... we can’t do that!” He didn’t sound too convincing, even to himself.

“Sure you can. We’ve had megawatt-power generators smaller than my mommy’s car for years.”

“Sure—fission reactors.”

“Right.”

“Well, you can’t put a nuclear reactor aboard an aircraft!”

“Why not?”

“Why not? It’s ... it’s . ..” Jon couldn’t think of a reason why right away. “Because ... because no one wants a plane with a nuclear reactor flying over their homes, that’s why.”