The Ajax Incursion

by Marc DeSantis

  “Alright, there’s no sense in denying that anything was amiss on Morrigan,” Howell said after a long pause. “You’re well-placed to hear things that you shouldn’t, and I can’t hold that against you. So I’m going to take you into my confidence. Would you like that?”

  Stewart nodded eagerly. “Yes, very much!”

  “Well then, first, we have to establish rules. Whatever I tell you is highly classified, beyond top secret, and you can’t, not ever, relay what you hear from me to anyone else. You are also not to continue talking about what you already know. Not to anyone in engineering, not to anyone else on the ship, not to anyone anywhere, ever. Not even your family members, whatever their own security clearances may be. The Morrigan operation is sealed, but it looks like there’s been a breach, and I don’t want it going any further than you, if I can help it. I trust you, Stewart, but no one else. I can trust you, can’t I?”

  Stewart drew himself up to his full height, and stood at attention. “Entirely.”

  “Good. So I will start with the part that is the most guarded secret of all. The one that we can’t let out, the one that makes sense of everything else. Are you ready?”

  “Ready.”

  Howell sighed. “Morrigan was troubled. Badly troubled. Have you heard why she was so unhappy?”

  Stewart shook his head quickly. “No, that’s never come to me.”

  “It’s a bit embarrassing. Not something that you want to get out. It’s kind of personal. Have you ever heard stories of AI’s developing feelings for their captains.”

  “Only in old stories. That doesn’t happen anymore, I thought.”

  “It doesn’t. Not now, in modern times, but that’s because our technology can’t create the kind of sophisticated AI’s that the Ancients did. If we could, we’d probably experience it ourselves. So you can imagine our shock when Morrigan formed a crush on one of us.”

  Stewart’s jaw fell almost to the floor. “You are joking! Who was it? Admiral More? Captain Heyward.”

  Howell cast his eyes downward. “Neither. Morrigan fell in love with me.”

  *****

  On those rare occasions when Howell found himself with time off from his duties, and in close proximity to the Steadfast, he would shuttle over from Albacore to the heavy cruiser to meet with Anastasia Venn and Stefan Chandler. He could have more easily interacted with them via holopresence, but there was something lacking with that. It seemed too formal, perhaps. Just about everyone preferred to meet in person if and when they could. It felt good to be in their company. Their experiences in Memnon had bonded them. Howell had often thought that was a corny notion, until he had felt it himself. There were few people that he trusted as much as Venn and Chandler.

  They were in the officers' lounge aboard Steadfast. The Republic was, notionally, an egalitarian democracy, but you wouldn't have known that from the way the Navy operated. Officers and enlisted personnel were not to socialize. It would debilitate the necessary social distance that command required. Howell understood that. If the enlisted got to know their officers too well, the aura of authority that they were supposed to possess would dissipate.

  The lounge on Steadfast seemed overly lavish, with plush chairs, couches, and tables made of real wood, considering how underused it was. The three were the only people in it at the moment, and Howell had never seen more than four or five within at any one time. An officer's schedule rarely allowed for meet-ups, and meals were most often eaten quickly in the officers' mess, a more utilitarian facility that was, naturally, more impressive than the spartan enlisted mess.

  Howell went over to a food dispenser and tapped a command into a holographic menu, ordering a slice of blueberry pie topped with whipped cream. A separate dispenser poured a steaming cup of coffee into a thick-walled mug. They were only passable in taste, since the food on a starship was almost never made from scratch. It would be too costly to have any crew employed in food preparation, so the RHN relied on drypacked food and instant coffee and tea that was released by machine as needed. The result was edible fare that would never win any awards.

  No one joined the Navy for the food.

  He sat down beside Venn and Chandler, and related the details of his conversation with Stewart of the day before. There wasn’t anyone on Albacore he could trust with what he had to say, or understand what had occurred, apart from his cousin Andrew More, and he wanted to get their opinions, as well as warn them of what was emerging problem concerning the Morrigan operation.

  “That poor boy!” chided Anastasia Venn, chief medical officer of RHS Steadfast. “How could you be so cruel?”

  “Cruel? I wasn’t being cruel,” Howell insisted

  “Cruel or not, Julius deflected the ensign cleverly,” said Chandler. “It’s better that Stewart thinks that there was some romantic thing in the air between Morrigan and him. By giving Stewart this tidbit of nonsense, the ensign went away happy, and if he talks about it he won’t be divulging anything accurate.”

  “He will look like a fool if he talks,” Venn pointed out.

  “That is the point,” Howell said. “It’s all ridiculous. So if he doesn’t abide by his promise of secrecy he could end up looking silly. I don’t think he’ll talk. I also threatened to have him clean out the reactor core without a radsuit on if I ever heard the story back.”

  “Ha!” exclaimed Venn. “Did he remind you that’s against naval regulations?”

  “Didn’t have to. I told him so. I also said that naval regs could be suspended or ignored in wartime, and that if something happened to him I could always make it look like an accident.”

  Chandler hooted. “I like that. He is a scion of one of the richest families in the Republic, however. He would expect questions to be asked if he came to a bad end.”

  “Yeah, well, I also plied him with some additional stories to sweeten the deal.”

  Venn smiled. “Oh really? Like what?”

  “Where to begin? That Morrigan had traveled thousands of years into the future, and had come back with knowledge of it, but refused to tell us anything.”

  “Oh, you devil!” chuckled Chandler. “What else?”

  “That Morrigan was hosting a civilization of miniature, interdimensional aliens living in a temporally-isolated section of the ship, and that we did everything we could to communicate with them, but failed.”

  “Bastard! I bet he ate that up!”

  “Gobbled it up. I would have thought that he would have been a bit more skeptical, but I suppose he wanted to believe, so he did, as far as I can tell. It occurred to me that he might have been playing me too, but I don’t think so.”

  “Then there was the galley that phased in and out of time. We could remove food from it, all of which was inexplicably fresh-cooked, and then eleven hours later, it would phase out, then phase back in, full of more cooked food. He liked that one best.”

  “He’s a young man, and thinks with his stomach,” offered Venn.

  “He is always hungry, now that you mention it. So I plied him with some tall tales. I got some interesting material from him in return. Vinci Technologies does work for the Navy on shield emitters and gravitic vanes. They are moving ahead faster than anyone would have guessed. Prototypes of enhanced shields, based on Morrigan tech, are being fitted to testbed vehicles right now. More powerful grav plates are in development and are going to be fitted to the next-gen fighter that follows the Wildcat. That’s just what Vinci is working on. It seems that our time on her wasn't wasted, even if we didn’t succeed in bringing her home.”

  Venn sighed. “If it helps us, then the scare that Morrigan put into us all will have been worth it. I have some regrets, but I’m glad to be gone. We were meddling with something we didn’t fully understand.”

  “Recovery was beyond our capability,” Chandler said. “We did what we could. The trouble is that if Stewart has a very general idea of what occurred, that Morrigan was off-kilter, who else knows something?”

  “We’ve got to as
sume that there are more Stewarts out there,” said Howell. “He’s very well placed, but if he learned what he did from Vinci engineers, then that’s an exponentially larger set of people with a portion of the full story.”

  “The Sphinx will come sniffing for the tech we took from her,” predicted Chandler. “He would be searching for that no matter what. He’d assume we yanked something valuable off the ship.”

  “It bothers me that some of our people have been so loose-lipped,” said Howell. “If they talked about Morrigan’s issues then they probably also talked about what they recovered. They are making King Evander’s task easier by letting his spies know what to look for.”

  “I can only hope that our intelligence services also do what you did yesterday,” Chandler said to Howell.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You blew smoke to obscure the truth, by telling your stories to Stewart. It’s an old scheme of military intelligence. Put out lots of false stories to hide the one true one by making it difficult, or impossible, to determine which is real. Also, with so many false leads, you make the enemy waste time and resources chasing shadows and running down dead ends.”

  “I can’t be the only one to be disturbed that there have been security breaches about Morrigan. Even this conversation shouldn’t, technically, be happening. The Navy issued ugly threats and someone ignored them anyway. Someone has been spilling the beans. A wet-behind-the-ears ensign shouldn’t know things about that ship.”

  “What does he really know?” challenged Venn. “He’s heard something accurate, but it could easily be judged to be something made up, an unsubstantiated rumor. A bonkers warship is not something that is going to open up a new avenue in AI research, especially not with the Sphinx’s enmity for AI’s.”

  “Maybe not,” Howell said. “But if something that big got out, what about more practical stuff about the technologies we looted. . .”

  “Salvaged,” insisted Chandler. “We didn’t own any of it beforehand, but under the laws of salvage, we were entitled to what we could remove from Morrigan.”

  Venn raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think that Morrigan would have agreed with your legal nicety.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Okay, so we salvaged, looted, stole, plundered, whatever we did, we removed some extremely valuable tech,” grumped Howell. “Consider that there were a hundred or so people who were on the ship altogether, plus the hundreds of other crew who were aboard the ships of the 34th. Every one of them knew something. Then, the tech itself had to be put in front of scientists and engineers back in Halifax to be studied. They would see instantly that the salvaged material was of a completely superior order of tech than what we currently have. There are probably as many civilians and military personnel working on the technical side back home as there were on the mission itself. Let’s say that comes to around two thousand people. How do that many people keep a secret? The answer is they don’t. They must be leaking all over the place. The Sphinx’s spies will probably be able to get a lot of valuable information by keeping their ears open and paying the right people. Data can be spat out in yottabytes per microsecond. We’re doing the work and the Armada will benefit from it.”

  Chandler wore a sympathetic smile. “I’m beginning to think you take this personally. As if you risked your life to retrieve the ship and you want to have something to show for it, but only for yourself.”

  “I did risk my life.”

  Chandler laughed. “And they say that my sense of humor needs work.”

  “So what is the answer? Did we go through all of that to see so much seep out into the Sphinx’s hands?”

  “Whatever goes in his direction, he will not have the actual material,” Chandler said. “So the Republic will be able to study the technologies first hand, and not have to pilfer what it needs. We will be five to ten years ahead of them on account of that alone.”

  “I am not so optimistic. Naval technology advances very slowly. The Morrigan find will boost a lot forward, and then we will reach another plateau while we try to improve on that. No technical lead will last forever unless we keep advancing the state of the art. The Great Sphere hasn’t been good at doing that for quite a while.” Howell grimaced. “We’re not organized as we should be. There’s too much of a cottage industry approach to manufacturing. Basic research should get more support. Smaller companies need to up their game too. We spent way too much time remedying mismanufactured components at Cardiff Yard. That’s why Grimard insisted on doing so much in-house. He could control quality better that way.”

  “It’s a wonder that these ships move at all,” Venn said. She glanced quickly to Howell. “No offense intended, Julius. That didn’t come out the way I meant it.”

  “None taken,” said Howell. “They work because there are shipbuilders such as Grimard at Cardiff who ensure that everything’s right with them. The amount of reworking and fixing we have to do wasn’t the norm back in ancient times. I’ve had the chance to interact with Lady of the Lake and Cordelia, and they told me that quality control was so far ahead of our own that the vast majority of problems, and there were very few of those, were caught long before final assembly. Cardiff Yard is a systems integrator. That ought to be our only focus. Since we have to make some of the parts we put into our ships, because we can’t rely on anyone else, we are also a component manufacturer, a rather big one too, and that puts a heavy strain on our engineering talent and diverts attention away from the ships we are building. We’re still climbing back up from the last, glorious height of galactic civilization. We don’t do things as well as the Ancients did them. It will be a long time before we do, if ever.”

  “Certainly not in our lifetimes,” said Chandler.

  Howell nodded. “It’s sobering that the oldest stuff we find, whether on Morrigan or archaeological digs, is often the best. Every now and again I will come upon references to the very oldest ventures into space, First Empire stuff, and their tech was much less advanced than ours, but you would expect that from the earliest forays into space, the initial colonization wave as humanity left Earth for the stars. Things picked up, and improved, and the Second Empire was the high point, I think, for the galaxy. The Third and Fourth Empires rebuilt, and rebuilt well, but don’t seem to have been at the same level overall as the Second.”

  “Each of those empires fell,” Venn observed. “Each ended in a very bad way. Wars brought civilization crashing down around them, despite their advancements. Morrigan is proof of how savage those conflicts were. I think that losing her may have been a good thing. Maybe it would have been better if we had never taken any tech off of her at all. Technical advancement is no proof against self-destruction.”

  “We can’t stagnate,” countered Chandler. “We have to improve, or else we will fall behind others.”

  Venn shrugged. “Perhaps there is no real answer. We go forward, and things may be brilliant, for a time, but golden ages have been followed by dark ages. Maybe the Sphinx is right about AI’s. They come to dominate and then wreck the civilizations they are meant to serve. But if we don’t advance, we will be overtaken and defeated by some other power. We’re on a treadmill to disaster.”

  “A happy thought,” laughed Chandler.

  Venn laughed too, and Howell saw their eyes meet briefly. He was glad that they had finally given in to the mutual attraction to each other that they felt. It had been obvious to everyone except them, and painful to watch as they danced around each other in the most awkward courtship ritual that anyone had ever seen. Their inability to connect had been the talk of the Steadfast for over a year. Now that they had at last become a couple, the talk had turned into a discussion of how cloyingly annoying they were.

  Howell guided the conversation back to an earlier point. “We still haven’t figured out how to keep our lead over Tartarus. We ought to be stricter when it comes to leaks.”

  “That would require us to be much more heavy-handed in how we deal with those leaks,” said Venn. �
��We would have to become a police state like Tartarus. Would you want to have our version of the Monarchonate Intelligence Department snooping into our lives.” Tartarus’s MID was a fearsome security service infamous for ‘disappearing’ people who fell afoul of the Sphinx’s government.

  “I’m not interested in that level of intrusiveness, but people ought to suffer consequences for letting slip national secrets.”

  “We’d probably have to execute people to really get their attention,” Chandler suggested. “I wouldn’t want that.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want that either,” protested Howell. “Some less drastic punishment ought to work.”

  “The problem isn’t just one of punishment,” Venn said. “How do you determine whom to punish in the event of a leak? Tracing it back to a specific person can be difficult.”

  “Then we keep as much as possible compartmentalized, and monitor who knows what, what they are working on, and whom they talk too.”

  “Sounds like a police state to me,” Venn said. “There’s a balance between liberty and security that we have to find. We could shut up the Republic as tight as the Monarchonate if we wanted, but who would want to live like that? A life without freedom is not a life at all.”

  Howell felt the narrowness of his education most keenly whenever a discussion with Venn and Chandler turned philosophical. His specialty was engineering, and he hadn’t had the exposure to history, political science, and philosophy that the other two had. He’d spent most of his life around numbers and ships. Of course he believed in liberty and democracy. He found it hard to argue against anything with them when they made it about personal freedom. That wasn’t what he intended. He saw no conflict between the right to free speech tempered by reasonable restrictions when it came to national security, but he couldn’t cite the authorities he wished to support his views. His statements were usually blunt, and he didn’t enjoy sounding like a quasi-fascist when he came out against the softness of Republican justice when it came to plugging leaks.