by D. R. Rosier
The bad news, was that the enemy fleets had reached three of the five target systems, and were heading in toward the planets. It would take thirty-six hours to reach Isyth itself, and another twelve after that to reach Xulia.
I decided to grab something to eat, and get some sleep, before I dove into my newfound knowledge. Easier said than done.
I figured out fast why stealth was so energy intensive, in essence, it surrounded the ship in a reverse gravity field that had the effect of canceling the mass of the ship. Not the mass itself, but the affect the mass had on surrounding space time. Gravity sensors wouldn’t be able to see the ships effect on the space time fabric, because there wouldn’t be one anymore. Then there were other systems to defeat as well, a counter to every different sensor type. It was complicated, and an energy hog.
The reactor was also a thorny issue, and what I’d been told about them had been misleading. Tapping dark energy didn’t require an element at all, the element was both the reactor shielding and reactive element. Dark energy in concentration broke the molecular bonds of matter quite quickly. The more energy the ship needed, the harder the converters worked to create electricity, and the more dark energy that was pulled into the reactor.
The element coated the core of the reactor, was extremely stable, and partially resistant to dark energy. It still broke down though, which was why the reactor containment had to be continuously fed the element. The element was also like the led wall in a fission reactor, used to hold back the radiation. Without it, the dark energy in the reactor would radiate outward and separate all the molecules on the ship simultaneously. The stable element limited that damage to itself, with small leaks that only effected the very nearby reactor core parts which were replaced when necessary. In short, the lifetime of a reactor core was pretty much how quickly it approached a breaching point, and would be replaced at about twenty percent molecular cohesion stability.
At the same time, it was reaction mass. Dark energy wasn’t really energy at all, it was a force, like gravity. The heavy element when broken down, released a whole lot more energy than fission or fusion because it wasn’t working with hydrogen atoms.
It was something I’d have been happier not knowing, if reactor containment failed, the ship wouldn’t blow up, it would be torn apart atom by atom, including my body.
It was also extremely inefficient the higher the power load. The converters needed more and more raw energy from the molecular bonds being pulled apart during the higher the power load. That was the most expensive part of it. It wasn’t a straight ratio. Double the power load of an idle ship, meant four times the element being destroyed. A hundred times the power load, ten thousand times the element being destroyed, which was why using the wormhole drive was so damned expensive.
I wouldn’t say it’s impossible to do better with those two technologies, but for now I had no idea where to even start. It would take study, research, and a breakthrough. Either to replace that element, or to somehow increase efficiency between the energy released in the core and how much energy the converters got out of it at the higher levels. No known energy fields could contain dark energy, it went through it like it wasn’t even there, and even the one physical element that could partially shield it, failed over time.
The rest of it though? That was more than possible with current technology and understanding. If I understood it right, energy transfer through ports wasn’t limited at all when using dimensional technology, just mass. So… transferring energy from elsewhere shouldn’t be an issue.
Dimensional ports were extremely efficient as well, since technically the energy wouldn’t have to go any distance at all, it was the joining of two points. Which made it more efficient at power distribution than a highly-shielded EPS conduit. There was some inherent power loss though, not from inefficiency, but from the energy cost in opening the connection, but even that was less than one percent of a percent at the power levels to be distributed.
I grabbed some food, and then went to sleep. Ann would wake me before the fighting started, which for the closest world of Kaprorix, was just six hours. That should be plenty to keep me mentally healthy, the nanites already had the physical part of things…
I took the time to get cleaned up, took a sonic shower, brushed out my hair, and felt awake as I pulled on my boots. It still felt a bit weird when I stopped there. With the nanites and sonic shower, there was no need to brush teeth, my mouth was already clean. Also, no need to shave my legs, anywhere I didn’t want hair, it was taken care of.
Ship’s status told me we were done with our raid, on our way back out of that solar system, and in four hours we’d be heading to a random one of our own near Earth, while cloaked just in case. I hoped Denik and his fleet had as hard a time finding us, as we had finding him. A year was a long time to hide.
They were able to steal everything we needed, though it would still take months to build the infrastructure we would need to complete things in only a year. That everything included the incidentals, like a large stash of food. I wasn’t too worried about that kind of stuff, A.I.s made perfect quartermasters, and were experts at resource management, which would let us focus on strategy and tactics.
The bridge still felt somber as I walked in and took my station. Of course it did, they were about to watch a revolution of their empire, one they loved and believed in. It must have been worse for Vik, since he was Denik’s brother.
Rilok snapped, “So, did you figure out how to save us all?”
Dick.
It was also unfair, I was just going to design a few improvements, not fight a war single-handed.
“Oh, that’s a tall order, give me a few days, would you?”
Vik said warningly, “Rilok, give it a damned rest. Lori, report what you have.”
I said, “I’m going to need time, the downloads just finished a few hours ago and I had to get sleep. I can tell you the missiles and probes are more than possible. The ships too, and I have a glimmer of an idea to save money and increase efficiency on power generation, but I’m going to need time on it all.”
No, I still had no idea how to do that last one by fixing the inefficiency of power conversion at higher loads, but there were other ways around that by using the current technology. The initial costs would be rather high if I could figure out a way to make my idea work, but the continuing operational costs should be much smaller. On Earth that would be more of a problem, but here actually building things was quick and mostly automated, which meant quite cheap relatively, the original outlay would be higher, but not that much higher.
The largest problem with it was it violated the KISS principle, it would be dynamic, and complicated as hell, if I could make it work.
Vik grunted, “Let me know.”
I nodded, “I’m going to tackle the probe first, I should have something in a day or two.”
It would be easier to start small, work out the kinks in my ideas before I went big. My mind wouldn’t shut down either now that I was rested, with all the new knowledge I was constantly making connections, coming up with and discarding ideas, and making leaps of what was possible.
No one else spoke, as we focused on the hologram of the Kaprorix system. There were two hundred enemy ships moving in, manned by people from my own planet. Enslaved and who knows what else had been done to them to get them to cooperate, some kind of brain washing or mind control.
The defenders were made up of eight cruisers, seventy destroyers, and a handful of scouts. The eight cruisers massed forty-eight destroyers, but even then, the battle odds favored the enemy at about two hundred to one hundred eighteen.
They didn’t really have a chance. A part of me wished they’d surrender, another part of me knew they wouldn’t.
Rilok reported, “Your brother is talking to them.”
Vik said, “Put it up.”
A hologram of Denik came up, he looked very similar to Vik, just a bit older, and a few small subtle differences in the facial structure.
Of course, he also came across like an oily used car salesman, which was nothing like Vik.
“My people. I call on you to stand down, and surrender. For too long, we’ve allowed the Stolavii to prey upon our shipping, and run amuck through our empire preying on the innocent. The fleet has done its best, and it isn’t their or your fault. The problem is the lack of subsidy for a fleet, with our defense fleets playing merchant and hauling resources just to keep them running, we can’t focus on dealing with the enemy.
“Mostly, the average citizen won’t be burdened by the changes I bring to the empire, and life will go on as normal. Instead of hauling resources, and drunkenly stumbling after the enemy as a result, I plan to make two changes to subsidize the fleet so we may protect the empire as it deserves to be protected. One, there will be a ten percent consumption tax, all transactions will be taxed. This will account for much of the profit we make to maintain the fleet, and also open up more opportunities for private citizens to make money hauling resources from our mining systems back to our core planets.
“Two, food will no longer be free. Still inexpensive, but even that will be pure profit for the government to ensure your lives and lively hoods are protected. We’ll need those credits to keep an eye on the Stolavii, and prevent them from preying upon us in the stars as they have for so many years.
“This fleet I bring may seem like an overreaction, but I promise you I’ve spent years trying to talk my father into this course of action. The status quo cannot stand, too many of our fellow citizens have been victims and I won’t let it stand, we need a strong fleet, one unfettered by worry of money to maintain it, and we will keep you safe. Once again, I urge you to surrender, you are outnumbered and out massed by almost two to one. Surrender.”
The hologram winked out.
That had almost sounded reasonable. Except, I recognized a pandering politician when I saw one. The speech had been an attempt to sway, and while there were grains of truth in what he said, since the empire’s fleet was hamstrung by those issues, the man was evil. He was a murderer, wanted to seize power, and had preyed upon my world and turned humans into god knows what to see it done. I truly doubted he gave a shit about the people, he just wanted power, and maybe to act violently toward the Stolavii.
That last one, I could kind of relate to.
Perhaps it was hypocritical for an assassin to call him a murderer, but I didn’t think so. Most of the men I’d killed had needed killing, and at the time I was under the thumb of my government. I wasn’t doing it for power, or for self-aggrandizement.
Vik said, “Thoughts?”
I said, “He has a point about the fleet having two masters, their credit line, and protecting the people. But that’s not why he’s doing it, there are other ways to deal with those issues, and all he cares about is his own personal power.”
Vik said, “Other ways?”
I nodded, “Making things more efficient, creating a separate arm of the military, call it a quartermaster fleet, that does nothing but pick up and deliver resources. Those funds could be put in a pot to pay for all ship’s maintenance and restock. That way the captains of destroyers and cruisers could concentrate on their real job. The downside to that of course, is a bigger bureaucracy, and more paperwork. Another obvious thing is something I’m working through, make power generation cheaper, and cut down on the amount of hauling each captain needs to do.
“There’s also one other obvious thing you could do. The artificial assistants handle the food, and it’s free. Why not turn over production and distribution of the reactor element to them? I suppose that’s probably a patent thing, and the companies making it are making money hand over fist. They also probably deserve that money for the invention they created, but they’re also not striving to make things more efficient, to keep demand up.”
I also supposed that we’re bypassing that right now, by setting up our own illegal synth lab to power the fleet we were going to build. Which we don’t really have a choice but to do, because revolutions and counter-revolutions aren’t cheap, we didn’t have the credits so we had to cheat and steal before we could restore the empire to what it was. Though, I wondered if it wouldn’t change fundamentally anyway, but it was worth doing to stop that asshole from preying on my world and his own empire.
Regardless, that money making is obviously the reason no one else had thought of the changes I was about to make. It was common sense really. Though right now it was just an idea, I had to actually design it. Maybe they had thought of it already, and the scientist got told to shut the hell up. Free enterprise could be like that, when people got too greedy. Still, it was a good system, and the empire seemed far better off than Earth was right now.
I also supposed I was passing up on a chance to make a lot of money, since the fleet would be built with my designs. Something told me I wasn’t going to get paid for it, at least, not the initial fleet. We weren’t just pirating the element, we’d be pirating my design. Maybe once we fixed things, I’d start making money off it. There would also be a lot of people pissed off at me, when the element sales dropped like a damned stone.
Vik grimaced, “The first one is a bad idea. A bureaucracy lends itself to corruption. By making each captain responsible for his or her own ship, it cuts down on that sort of thing. The third idea would blow up the economy, artificial assistants are limited to free food because the rest of us have to do something, or society would fall apart. The second idea would be a good idea, and if anything would make even more people prosperous.”
“It would? I was thinking I’d be taking money from the companies that made the element.”
Vik said, “At first look, it would appear so, but say you made it ten times cheaper. That’s ten times less each captain would make a run, which would improve our ability to react to the Stolavii, but demand for resources wouldn’t go down which would leave a gap and opportunity for others. That means more ships in space, as private citizens and corporations would take over ninety percent of the hauls. So now you have ten times the ships in space, all buying less element individually, but overall about the same amount would be sold. Maybe even more, as the upper middle class and less rich, rich people, could afford to buy their own ships and visit other worlds for pleasure and business. In the long run, they might even make more money by making space travel more accessible.”
If that was true, and it sounded right, then they were idiots for suppressing a cheaper way. I couldn’t imagine no one had thought of it before. I was a genius, but I wasn’t that unique in the universe, to believe that would be both foolish and arrogant. Maybe they were just afraid, and more comfortable with the status quo than speculating with change.
The conversation stopped as the fleets reached two light minutes, and started to toss missiles back and forth. The next few hours were painful, but I couldn’t look away. At the end of it, there were eighty-three enemy ships remaining in the system, and all empire forces had been destroyed. I wasn’t sure at all I could watch the rest of the battles, as they unfolded in time.
It seemed like such a waste, but the choices were clear. If it was a bloodless coup, Denik would not only still have his twenty-three hundred some odd ships, but also the empire’s ships. The empire would lose in the short term, but the cold hard fact was that by fighting there would be attrition to his numbers, which would make it easier to win later.
It wasn’t quite a slaughter, we’d lessened that part of his fleet by almost fifty eight percent. If all the battles went similarly, he’d have less than a thousand ships left at the end. He’d build more of course, while we built ours, but we estimated that five hundred would be enough. Especially since our destroyers will be three times more powerful than his.
It was a horrible thought, which made me feel sick to my stomach. I was cold and frosty in the danger of battle, but I was damned happy I wasn’t the one making that decision, and sacrificing so many people for the hope of the future. The emperor was aware his son Vic was working on a long-ter
m solution, though not exactly where or what we were doing. Operational security was the watchword, and we couldn’t depend on the empire’s data net being secure.
I started to concentrate on the probe idea, and scrapped and restarted the design more times than I could count, as new ideas popped into my head. An idea for a simple probe over several hours of thought, turned into an entire system.
In the end, I wound up designing a new reactor, one just like I’d use on the destroyers. Well, started to design. It wasn’t ready yet, despite using proven technology with no new theories, it would take more than one shift to figure it out. Well, I’d told him two or three days, I should be able to pull it off by then.
In the meantime, during that shift while I was doing that, we’d escaped from the system with Denik’s illegal infrastructure without him finding out, turned on the stealth systems, and headed for a star system just nine light years from Earth to set up shop…
Chapter Three
I’d met Jillintara for dinner, and after we ate we returned to my quarters. Neither of us was interested in sex after the horrific events of the day, both of us upset by the loss of life and our inability to wish Denik dead and make it happen, but neither of us wanted to be alone either.
Okay, that latter one about wishing Denik dead, might have just been me.
We laid on the bed together, and would sleep together that night, but I imagined that would be all. It was consoling to have her in my arms, and we did share more than a few soft kisses and touches for comfort as we lay naked beneath the sheets.
Jillintara asked, “Do you think this will really work? You seem confident about things.”
I smiled, “I do, if we keep operational security, maintain the secret among just us, and create a new military data net for the humans and A.I.s we create and recruit. The hardest part will be watching what happens to the empire while we get ready to dethrone Denik.”
She nodded, “I won’t argue with that last part.”
