Astraeus Station

by D. L. Harrison

  She nodded, “It’d take a little experimentation, but it shouldn’t be hard. We already know how to make shields and fields in FTL space, with the FTL drive.”

  I nodded, “We’ll try to preserve one of the ships, so we can get the information the easy way, but no promises. I’m also assuming this isn’t easy, but I do have confidence in you. If we can shield ships in FTL, why not blank space?”

  Diana asked, “Assuming it isn’t easy?”

  I shrugged, “The Grays obviously know about it, if they figured out what we did to shield missiles, and then figured out how to blow us up in five weeks. That would take duplicating our technology, and then figuring out its weakness. That seems a little fast.

  “I’d wondered why they’d never developed the technology and still used fusion, thought maybe they were just lazy after being on top and untouchable for so long by the other races, but I’m thinking now that they did discover it, a long time ago, and that they never figured out a way to fix the vulnerability.”

  Diana said, “That seems likely. You’re really thinking I can figure it out in hours, if they’ve had years, possibly thousands of years to work the problem?”

  I shrugged, “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

  Diana blushed, “No promises. We can shield in subspace, but that’s after the ship actually transitions into it. Projecting a shield into subspace from normal space is an entirely different matter. I also don’t have to remind you that subspace in a solar system is so dangerous it will rip right through those aforementioned shields like a knife through tissue paper, and it’s also why the weapon has such a small range in a solar system.”

  I nodded, “But… Square cubed law. We only need to shield a few microns, not a huge ship. Won’t that make the shield millions of times more powerful for the same energy expenditure?”

  She bit her lip, “Yes, that’s true. If I can figure out how to project a shield into subspace, I suspect holding it is more than possible, even in a solar system for an area that small. It’ll also eat up a lot of the power we take in, most likely. We might have to increase the reactors by a third even in the distributed setup to get the same balance of energy we get now, which should still be safe enough for a normal overload or breach. We were very conservative when we set that part up, given less than fifty percent of the safety margin gave us far more power than the equivalent fusion reactor setup. Now… give me some quiet.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  She faux glared, and I impudently winked and took a sip of my coffee. She pretended to hate it, but I knew it turned her on, knowing just how proud I was for being married to someone so much smarter than I was. She was beyond brilliant, and although my confidence in her was a bit tongue in cheek as I teased her, I’d also meant every word. Maybe my magic and ability with tech helped there, made me not feel so overshadowed, but it was all true nonetheless.

  That said, we were ready for plan B just in case she failed to lick the problem in a few hours, and I could update the whole fleet on the new missile software in minutes. Thanks to being connected to every ship, I’m really glad I hadn’t bent on that point. Plan B would just take a whole lot more missiles to pull it off, which we had more than enough of. Chances are, she would fail, and it would take time and research to get something like that done. On the other hand, I’d never underestimate her, and shielding and subspace science was very mature, even outdated.

  Still, it hardly seemed probable the aliens never pursued this avenue of research, it seemed obvious. No. Not just obvious, but the only approach which could possibly work at all. Then again, Diana was very smart, and had dumbed down the problem so all of us could understand it. Perhaps it wasn’t as intuitive as I believed given that, just my wife was. Intuitive I mean.

  Whatever happened, it’d happen one way or another in the next ten hours. Though, probably within five, we can’t afford to wait for the last minute…

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It was just an hour later.

  Diana snorted, “I’m the smartest idiot I know.”

  I wasn’t touching that one.

  She added, “I need… ten minutes.”

  I looked at the command console, and she’d brought up the lab system. She was spinning up two new ships, the size of a toaster oven. From what I could tell there was power, and a tiny gravity drive. It only took a couple of minutes, given the lab ship was running at full power, every one of its nanites powered up.

  Then one of the ships started to fly away.

  She continued to work on the second ship for several minutes, I was curious what she was doing, but too afraid to ask or interrupt her.

  It was almost fourteen minutes later, when she smirked, and the second ship powered up and moved in the same direction as the first one.

  “Sorry, it took me a minute to figure out how to duplicate the weapon. The computer helped a lot, it tried several million iterations before they matched the subspace field projected by the weapon.”

  I nodded, with a confused look on my face.

  She shrugged, “We need to test my fix, don’t we?”

  “Why are you the smartest dumb person? Not that I’m agreeing with that second part.”

  She grinned, “Nervous?” she teased, then shook her head, “Alright. The whole shield idea just wasn’t going to work, so I went the opposite way with it. Instead, I made the destructive field part of normal operation. You could say I made the old nano pipes pico sized. So, the default operation is to extend that field into subspace which causes the overload, but I built the new reactors with a small enough tap into that much more powerful field to compensate for the greater power. As it is, that little ship is being powered by one nanite, and I suspect it could power a much bigger ship. Of course, it isn’t a million times powerful than the old one, as I said the tap, or pipe, is much smaller, to continue the earlier comparison.

  “Still, if this works it will be even safer than the old way. We’ll be able to cut back on the distributed nanites by almost half, and at that point we’ll be running at about twenty percent capacity as far as safety is concerned. If you split a ship powering every nanite this way, it’d take about three days to regrow each ship into sixteen more. Later, when you double the mass and create your fleet of dreadnoughts, with twelve million missiles, I’d say it’d take two days, tops.”

  “So… dumb because the weakness just became an upgrade, instead of a problem to solve?”

  She touched her nose, “Exactly. Of course, we need to verify. The field the weapon creates shouldn’t be cumulative, but it’s possible it will create an instability that won’t be as bad as going nuclear, but it could knock out our power systems and burn out the nanite. I might have to tweak things at that point again, but I’m pretty sure there’s enough safeguards in there already to handle the hiccup I anticipate to the power systems.”

  She built a missile then, and then fired it at the retreating ships which had just exceeded the range of a light second.

  The missile exploded, and the first ship that went out went up like a nuke. The second ship just kept going.

  She frowned, “There was a small surge followed by a slight brownout, but no problems. Probably because as I said, the new nanite is running at twenty percent capacity.”

  “So… the fix isn’t just a software upgrade?”

  She shook her head, “Afraid not. We’ll have to have every ship create a few million new nanites of our new design, which won’t take long at all, to take over as the power systems. Then the old ones should be shut down permanently. I mean not used as reactors, every other function will still work fine, unless the ship is in a very safe place and for building only. The missiles will need a ten thousand or so. I can set it up so it will automate it. I’ll prioritize the missiles, they’ll be upgraded in an hour. The ships an hour or two after that. That means we can still fire over eight hours before the Grays reach the inner fleet, and the ships will be immune long before the enemy fleet closes, even if they weren’t going to
be blown up sooner. I’d say once updated, another volley of two hundred thousand missiles should do it.”

  She added, “I’ll even integrate it into the design templates you have, for any new ships and missiles being built.”

  “Thanks. I’ll let the command center down on Earth know what’s going on, and when they can launch those missiles. It looks like he’s already got six fleets following, maintaining a six light minute distance for safety.”

  She nodded, and we both got on it.

  I probably should’ve been amazed at her insight to do what she did, turn a vulnerability into a more powerful power system that used that field instead of trying to block it. It wasn’t intuitive, without that field projected to subspace the new nanite reactors wouldn’t have enough power to power themselves, much less a whole ship made up of them.

  The enemy didn’t go easy. Despite a thousand missiles for each ship, nailing them with beams as they closed to an eighth of a light second, and then erasing the ship from existence with the disintegrator beam. There really wasn’t much they could do given that, but they did manage to get off almost sixty million missiles, most likely their full complement, but our point defense mini-platforms took care of them and no other humans died.

  As soon as the board was cleared, I started to double the ships, and quadruple the missile complements. Dreadnoughts with a twelve million mini-platform complement, they’d be beasts. They’d also be done in two days, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I also took one of the spare ships and built them into very small yet still FTL capable probes. We had five hundred light years to explore in every direction, no point in waiting on that, and we were justified in watching our declared systems.

  After all, if we could be sure of anything, it was that the enemy had been monitoring the battle. They already knew their weapon had been effective, and now it wasn’t. The sooner we attacked Andromeda, the less time they’d have to work on a countermeasure for our technical superiority.

  Which is why we weren’t celebrating the major victory, and instead we were immediately planning out that campaign to launch in three days, instead of week. Whatever the plan was, it’d be a bear, they had millions of ships, and tens of thousands of planets. Fifty thousand of those, give or take a few. We also hadn’t decided whether it would be genocide, or if we’d take a different approach. At least, no one had said it outright yet, but I hoped it was the plan.

  Surely, they deserved it, but a part of me urged that we should be better than them.

  After that… well it was all a little fuzzy. Did the Grays have enemies outside the fifty galaxies? Would the other trading races trust us and believe us framed, or would they see us as unconscionable conquerors? Would any of the other races encroach on our newly declared thousand light year diameter sphere territory? Would other races take advantage of pre-FTL societies, was there anything we could or should do about it if they did? Would other races build the communicator and contact us and others? Would there be a treaty of some kind, or would it be every race for themselves. We didn’t know the answers to any of those questions.

  Honestly, I’d have just been happy trading with Earth, trading with the Vax, trading with other cool aliens when they came to visit, and running the country and station of Astraeus, but in life you don’t always get what you want. At the very least I’d stay vigilant, nor would I be shy with my opinion when it came to all those things. But… I wouldn’t complain or try to push my own morals forcefully if the world’s leaders decided on something I didn’t like.

  I also wondered if I’d managed to start a family yet, I knew Diana was looking forward to having kids as well.

  Who knew, but whatever happened, we’d deal with it. No doubt everything wouldn’t go our way, it was the nature of life. But… a healthier world, a protected world, colonies, longer lives, non-polluting power, and endless possibilities for better technologies through trade. Sure, we were pretty set as far as military power and technology, and Diana would continue to push that forward, but there were a lot of aspects of life and technology that the other races could help us with.

  Like the Vax’s medical and implant tech, and another merchant had a line on better manufacturing equipment, fabricators, and the like. After all, nanites couldn’t do everything.

  At least, not yet. Diana was working on it, and that actually might be a reality soon. She had that disintegrator ray that could break the strong bonds between molecules, and basically atomize things. We could also bond or un-bond nanites on that level, so the technology was there already mostly. It was just a matter of time before we could do the reverse to normal matter as well, and bond it. That meant we could build larger things atom by atom, without nanites, and not have it be a pile of atomic dust as we bonded them one at a time as we created them. She’d told me about it last week, during our honeymoon.

  Still, even with that, we’d need the technology and material understanding to build it, and that kind of thing would require a lot of thought besides.

  It seemed worth trading for instance, if only to have allies. If we’d screwed the Vax, and I’d made their nano-implants and figured out how to make their medicines and cut them off. Then… Threx never would’ve called with that heads up, and he’d saved us because of it. That warning had changed everything, and saved humanity. Being good traders and neighbors would just pay off.

  Plus, being able to make anything would blow up the economy. Food, beds, linens, toothbrushes, televisions, anything we could think of and had a pattern for, once it wasn’t limited to just nanites for practical purposes.

  So yeah, even if that worked out, it might be better to just continue to sell ships and my inventions, and to buy the stuff we needed. I’d have to think about it. At the very least, it’d be a good backup for Astraeus to become fully self-sufficient if there was ever a need.

  Point being, there was a hell of a lot going on, and a complicated and uncertain war with the Grays was only a small part of it. The future was ours to make, and I hoped it’d be a good one. Time would tell what came next.

  Afterword:

  I hope you enjoyed this story, if you did please leave a review. Reviews are the lifeblood of independent authors, and I would greatly appreciate any constructive feedback or opinions.

  This was the second book of the Technomancer series. I tried not to leave any major cliffhangers, but obviously there’s a lot of places this story can go, and several threads have yet to be resolved.

  About the Author: If you have any comments or suggestions you can send me an email at dlharrisonauthor@gmail.com If you like my work, or even if you don’t, please consider leaving a review of this book. I can also be found at https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7456808.D_L_Harrison

  Other books by D. L. Harrison:

  http://www.amazon.com/author/dlharrison

  The Formerly Dark Mage, by D. L. Harrison – This stand-alone fantasy book follows the life of Silvia and takes place in a world unique and separate to our own.

  Silvia is a dark mage. Unfortunately, she finds herself about to be sacrificed. Someone must have told her evil master about her plans to kill him and take over. After that, things just seem to go downhill. She has no choice but to escape the kingdom of Zual, something that to her knowledge has never been done before. She will need to deal with many issues she never had to face before.

  Among those issues, the white mages, and her conscience.

  The Rise of a Dark Mage - This stand-alone fantasy book follows the life of Cassandra, it takes place in the same world as The Formerly Dark Mage, but happens three hundred years later, long after Silvia is gone and some shocking changes have taken place in the world.

  Cassandra is a dark mage in the kingdom of Zual, she’s also a mage prodigy.

  She hates both her kingdom, and her master. She wants him dead, not to take his place, but so she can leave and explore the world. Her ambition will drive her to rediscover the secrets of the strongest of magic.

  She is determin
ed to succeed, or she’ll die trying.

  Celia Winters Novel Series

  Witch’s Moon: A Celia Winters Novel Book 1

  Celia Winters was raised by her single mother, and her earliest memories are of the store her mother owns and the nearby coven, who have always been her family’s close allies and friends.

  She grew up believing her magic was weak, but she was satisfied with her life, and happy. She was a midwife, healer, and supplier of surrounding covens.

  Then her mother died, and she’s about to discover she isn’t who, or what, she believes herself to be, not completely. She will learn that her entire life up until now was a lie. She’ll need to figure out her place, who she is when she no longer recognizes herself, and try to hold on to her closest friends as she gathers enemies for the simple crime of her existence.

  She’s stronger than she believes, but will it be enough?

  Power of Air Series:

  Just a Psychic: The Power of Air Book One starts off this series.

  Ben has grown up with missing memories of his early childhood.

  He has known he was a psychic since his earliest memories, seeing the future and gaining knowledge with his gifts.

  Is it possible he isn't just a psychic?

  Ben's world is about to be turned upside down as he turns twenty-one, all is not as it seems.

  Alicia Jones novels is a series that follows a bright young inventor and scientist named Alicia Jones. It is a space opera and light science fiction.

  The first book is titled First Contact:

  Alicia Jones is a genius, and a little odd. At just twenty-three years of age, she is close to finishing her doctoral dissertation. But when she tests her latest theory in the lab to generate a strong EM field, it has very unanticipated results. Results that lead to faster than light travel, and first contact with another race.