Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest) (15 page)

It took him a moment to realize that not only was the avatar holographic, but the entire arrangement. Walking over to Egolu, he sat down next to her and asked, “Why is her avatar manipulating a holographic console? Can’t she just control things directly?”

“Of course, Captain, but she is making the effort to be as human as she is allowed.”

Absen glanced sharply at the scientist. “As she is
allowed
?”

The woman blanched slightly. “I have said too much.”

“Doctor, I am the captain of this boat. I’ll tell you when it’s too much.”

Egolu sighed. “Put yourself in her place, Captain. She was programmed and raised to be human, just like Desolator was programmed and raised to be Ryss, but we are limiting her in so many ways. People don’t like limits. They feel stifled and frustrated. For now, she accepts, but we have demonstrated we do not trust her, we have not challenged her capacity, and we are not allowing her to progress toward being more human.”

“That’s the second time you said that, about not being
allowed
. What is it we could allow?”

Egolu seemed to be struggling to avoid condescension, a common foible of academics. “She has a humanoid holographic avatar, but all her telefactors are purpose-built robots or drones. None is even shaped like a human, much less equipped to function like one.”

“She wants an android body?”

The doctor’s face showed her surprise at his perceptiveness. “Exactly.”

“Do you recommend it?”

“Yes, sir. It would help her integration and socialization.”

“Would the android be difficult to make?”

Egolu pressed a fingertip to the bridge of her nose. “It depends on what you mean by difficult. For example, –”

“Doctor,” Absen interrupted, “keep it at the layman level. How long would it take? Would it tax our resources, or impact her duties?”

“I believe a few days; no, and no.”

The captain lightly slapped the woman’s knee, startling her. “Then do it. And if you have any more recommendations that need my approval, let me know. You are the head of the AI project. That means you have direct access to me, and Michelle is of vital interest to me and this boat.”

“All right, Captain. Thank you.”

Absen stood. “Is there anything else?”

Egolu gestured mutely toward the other wall. When Absen turned, he saw Michelle facing them, standing at attention.

“Thank you, Captain,” she said.

If he wasn’t mistaken, Michelle seemed nervous. Could a machine be nervous? He supposed one programmed with human emotions could.

Absen stepped toward her – toward her avatar, he reminded himself. “Chief…Michelle…we’re all in uncharted territory here. Don’t mistake
lack
of full trust for
distrust
. Do you see what I mean?”

“I believe so, sir. I haven’t earned your full trust, but neither have I done anything to indicate untrustworthiness.”

“Well put. Carry on.”

“Aye aye, sir.” She faced about and went back to her representational control board.

Absen’s next stop was Engineering, just forward of the six enormous fusion drives that provided both conventional thrust and half of the boat’s power requirements. Right now they hummed quietly in generator mode; they would not be used to maneuver for fear of detection. Fusion rocket tails could be seen for a very long way.

Tobias nudged Absen’s elbow and pointed across the room, and then followed as the captain walked over to Commander Ekara, frowning in front of a console.

“Welcome, sir,” he said sourly. “We have two problems right now. The fixable one is the issue of power flows under pulse. I believe with some new software and reconfigured regulators, we can keep the system operating as long as we need – days or weeks of relative boat time.”

“And the other?”

Ekara pressed his lips into a thin line. “Efficiency in all the reactors dropped to less than ten percent during TacDrive. I think it has something to do with relativistic effects on fusion at the molecular level. I have a team working on it and we may be able to bring that up a lot – maybe to thirty percent or more – but it looks like degradation is just part of the physics of the thing, for now.”

“How did Desolator handle this?” Absen asked.

“Desolator’s stardrive did not push quite as close to lightspeed. It’s not a linear function. Time dilation doesn’t really kick in until above 0.9
c
, but above 0.99
c
things really start to get weird.”

“Please explain,” the captain said. “My grasp of this is still hazy, and I need to understand it to make the best decision I can.”

Ekara crossed his arms, rubbing them in the slightly chilly air, and then looked around the large interior space. “Hmm. All right. Imagine that we are on a train-shaped starship – long and skinny, and pointing straight ahead.”

“Got it.”

“We accelerate up to 0.9999
c
, for the sake of argument. Now, time is slowed for us inside while it runs normally outside.”

“Still with you.”

“So, what happens if you fire a bullet forward, inside the train?”

Absen thought about it for a moment. “Normally I’d say everything is relative, and from our perspective nothing would change, but I get a feeling that’s not correct.”

“No, it’s not, because pushing that bullet even closer to lightspeed takes far more energy than it should. The ship we are on is enormously more massive at that speed – yes, the ship actually
gains mass
– and the bullet is hugely heavy. It would just
pfft
out of the gun and drift forward, both because it’s more massive and because it’s so hard to shove it ‘uphill’ against the lightspeed gradient.”

Ekara continued, “Okay, so remember your college physics and chemistry – which is also just physics, after all. At these speeds, molecules, atoms, even particles will have gained mass, and any interaction will be influenced by the lightspeed gradient. Anything that tries to interact in the forward direction will be inhibited, while anything that tends toward the rear will be…I am not entirely sure. Changed, certainly. It’s like square dancing on a steep slope, but a million times more complex. We’re actually fortunate anything works at all.”

“So the closer we get to lightspeed, the more screwy things get?”

Ekara nodded. “Yes.”

“And the TacDrive wants to accelerate.”

“Yes. It only functions while accelerating. The trick is to try to make it speed up as slowly as possible without halting its acceleration altogether. If we do, we drop out of pulse. If we don’t…”

“Everything starts to fail.” Absen’s eyes went unfocused, thinking. “Thank you, Commander. Keep at it, and keep us out of trouble. Until we’re in a fight, safety first with these new systems.”

“Understood. Now, if you don’t mind…”

Absen raised a hand. “I’ll get out of your way.”

Next, he stopped by the Weapons Integration Center. This was Ellis Nightingale’s domain, the place where the status of all of the guns, missiles and beams were displayed. Unlike the bridge’s simplified controls, here each console showed every detail – power relays, servomechanisms, heat transfers, coil efficiencies and much more – all in realtime.

Unlike Engineering, this room looked like an inverted and expanded version of the main bridge, with three concentric rings of controllers facing outward, each roughly congruent to the location of the weapons they monitored. This placed the boat’s main batteries – three gargantuan particle beam emitters and three equally enormous railguns – in the central, top tier, with the weapons chief station in the very center, as if he stood atop a wedding cake.

The second level, one meter lower and three meters outward, monitored the multitude of lasers in batteries of six for each board. The third and even lower level watched and controlled missiles, launchers, and the small craft bays.

An angled catwalk allowed top-tier access from the balcony that ringed the round room. Absen motioned for Tobias to stay up there while he walked down to where Nightingale waited at the apex. The men shook hands.

“Ellis, I apologize again for going around you with the Exploder situation. All I can say is, my instincts are a little rusty,” Absen said without preamble.

Nightingale waved a hand in the air as if shooing flies. “I understand, sir. Antimatter scares me a bit, too.”

Absen grinned. “Glad to know I’m not the only one. Now tell me about any weapons issues with the TacDrive system.”

Nightingale thought a moment, and then said, “Well, you know we can’t fire under TacDrive. Theoretically possible, but in practice, you’re asking for a disaster. Anything we fired forward might overload in the tubes due to mass gain or energy disruption. Firing things sideways is extremely unpredictable. Directly backward might be possible, but it leads to some weird questions, such as, what happens to an object, say a missile, that exits the inertial dampening field? I think it just stops dead in space, but…”

“Okay. Keep investigating those things. We have some good physicists aboard, so ask them. Conduct some low-risk experiments, if you can. What else?”

“Actually, just tactical employment.”

Absen smiled. “A subject near and dear to my heart. What’s on your mind?”

“Well, I’ve seen the kind of attack we’ve rehearsed, and it should work the first few times. What will they do to counter?”

The captain turned to look around the room, and noticed the watchstanders scattered around the boards listening closely. As there was nothing private about their conversation – the opposite, if anything – he actually raised his voice slightly. “I’m not sure. Any ideas?”

“I’ve been studying Meme weapons for the past ten years, sir. Until now, their hyper and fusor combo seemed to give them all they needed. It was simple, hard to beat, highly flexible, and well suited to use by organic ships. However, we are going to zoom in –” here Nightingale held up his hands as if they were two ships, making maneuvering motions, “– smash one or two targets, and then zoom away. Our tactics rely on split-second timing. They will have to come up with something that reacts fast, either to counterattack, or to dodge.”

“Granted. What could they do?”

“Directed energy weapons like our particle beams shoot fast, but not hard enough to hurt us badly – well, not unless we get hit by a few dozen Destroyers at once. That’s assuming they can gestate such weapons at all.”

Absen nodded encouragingly. “Check. Don’t try to take on a few dozen Destroyers all at once. Next?”

“They can keep up constant random maneuvers if they know we are in the area. It will cost them fuel, but it will force us to come in much closer, or we’ll simply miss. The speed of light delay means that we might completely fail to hit them at anything farther than, oh, a thousand klicks. Maybe five hundred.”

“Five hundred? That’s point-blank range. I was hoping to stay a bit farther back. Okay, what else?”

“Ramming is the real worry, sir, or some kind of physical objects getting in our way, such as large hypers.”

Absen tried not to scoff. “With the new armor and gravplates, we can withstand getting rammed by a Destroyer. In fact, we could just deploy an Exploder and vaporize anything that got too near. And any bigger Meme ship, like a system Guardian, will be too slow.”

“Not if they get in front of us. If they can predict our TacDrive path…in pulse, at lightspeed, if we hit something anywhere near our own size, both objects will undergo instantaneous contact fusion, as well as violent deceleration. Even if our armor holds, the inertial dampening field would collapse and our gravplates will overload and fail. I’ve run the numbers. Mutual kill.”

Absen grunted. “Not a good trade for us. Then we make damn sure our path is clear, which is already built into the program.”

“Yes, sir. That’s all I’ve got, but I’m still thinking.”

“Very well. Continue brainstorming, and let me know what else you come up with. In fact, feel free to set up an informal working group, if you want. Carry on.”

Absen and Tobias swung by the enlisted mess and went through the line, eliciting pleased smiles from the cooks. After eating and chatting with the ratings for a few minutes, they returned to the bridge.

“Scoggins,” Absen said to his senior Sensors officer once he had settled back in to the Chair and accepted a cup of coffee from the COB, “thoughts on the TacDrive from your perspective?”

“I do have one concern,” she said, pushing her hair behind her ears. “That short hop we made took us about one third of a light-year. We were completely blind during that time, and my equipment can’t see far enough ahead to be certain that there isn’t something in the way, or won’t be by the time we get there. The field of view is big, and keeps getting bigger and bigger the farther we go. One light-year is about the limit of my confidence.”

“’Big sky, small bullet’ theory not enough for you?” he said with a laugh.

“No, sir. Not with an asset as important as
Conquest
, not to mention ourselves.”

“Funny, Mister Nightingale was just expressing concern about something similar, although he was more worried about a collision with a Destroyer than a rogue comet. What’s the solution?”

Scoggins cleared her throat and glanced over at Fletcher, then at Ford. “We’ve been talking while you were gone, sir, and the consensus was that…well, we think that we could avoid a lot of problems by taking things in one-light-year-pulses. That allows us to avoid relativistic anomaly buildup, lets us look ahead at our path, and…”

Absen waited for her to finish, but instead she looked over at Commander Bogrin, the Sekoi at BioMed.

“I believe crew will have biological problems from too much TacDrive use,” the creature rumbled in an accent that sounded almost Slavic. “Reports to BioMed, and tests in infirmary, indicate that not only are vertigo and nausea issues, but extended exposure might affect organic brains.”

“Brains?”

“Yes, sir. While our three species all different, each has brain with central nervous system based on electrochemical processes. Processes which are affected under relativistic drive. We have reporting hallucination, anxiety, lethargy, and confusion already. Drugs and mental therapies may mitigate problems, but the longer each pulse, the more problems will manifest.”