Spinward Fringe Broadcast 0: Origins

by Randolph Lalonde

  “How long before repairs and reprovisioning are complete?”

  “Forty three hours.”

  “Who will be in command?”

  “I'll be assuming command personally. While we reacquire Valent I'll be manufacturing a fleet and arranging for reinforcements.”

  “I'm surprised that Vindyne would put you--”

  “Out here? I am Vindyne. Executive Officer Meunez out.” I shut the line down.

  I closed my eyelids and looked through my mind's eye into the stasis centre's database, right where the trail led from a high speed digital storage block into the heart of the neural reprogramming and management network. The point where an artificial intelligence made the leap from digital format into a nearly perfectly formed collection of memories, personality traits and something else was marked like a golden path. There was an indescribable feeling when I accessed the port where the AI had made passage into a prisoner's brain, imprinted itself in mere seconds, and fried the wetware interface. It was like I was standing on the edge of a cliff, surrounded by the perfume of someone who had just made the leap into a place I could not follow.

  I needed to get close to this AI. Whether I found it in another computer or in human skin didn't matter.

  Chapter 1

  Preparations

  “They must have been crazy. It's the only explanation,” Minh-Chu was saying as I entered the makeshift meeting room in the core of the ship. One of the long black meeting tables and most of the chairs had somehow survived the battle damage to the observation areas. The maintenance and repair crew had moved them there on their own and then sent a message to the bridge that they had designated a safe meeting place for the senior staff. Seeing the crew take ownership of their responsibilities, putting in extra effort, was encouraging.

  My friend, Commander Minh-Chu Buu, was one of the ultimate examples of this widespread phenomenon. Only months ago he was running an oriental restaurant with his sisters. Looking at him as he spoke to the senior officers, you would have never guessed. Being in command of the starfighter compliment of the First Light had become his life, he had found his calling. He was wearing the uniform which consisted of a black high impact vacsuit, heavy jacket, and a helmet he had set down on the table.

  “Maybe they were well paid?” Oz replied with a shrug. He wore the same uniform Jason and I did; the black bridge vacsuit with golden rank stripes along the sleeves.

  “Those fighters were just escape pods with thrusters, pulse canons, and energy shielding. I mean, there was no life support, most of them didn't even have a full power plant, just a bunch of energy cells, and there were four extended models with hyperspace systems. That's it.”

  “Well, I guess it's like anything else the Vindyne built. Heavy on energy shielding and cheap everywhere else,” Ayan said as she looked through the First Light's electrical schematics. She was wearing her engineering uniform; a grey vacsuit, pouches for tools on each thigh, and she had added a black gun belt. I looked around the table as I sat down and saw that everyone but Doctor Anderson had added the same low slung, quickdraw style gun belt to their uniforms.

  “My helmet has more armour. I just don't understand how someone could climb into something like that. It wouldn't even stand up to serious radiation,” Minh went on.

  “Well, the Vindyne Corporation is a little more advanced than we are medically, so they could treat short term exposure,” Doctor Anderson replied. “I agree that you shouldn't have to, however. Even our escape shuttles can protect against class nine radiation.” He wore the light blue vacsuit uniform he had designed with his medical staff. It was much like the engineering uniform with pouches on each thigh for essential tools, but he had also added pockets for small examination utensils on the upper arm and a bioscanner in the palms of the gloves. Every medical uniform also had a red cross on the back.

  “So no one thinks that all Vindyne pilots are crazy? What about you Jonas?”

  I sat down beside Ayan, who looked away from her electrical schematics only long enough to give me a kiss on the cheek. “I think they're completely nuts. Crazier than you are, and that's saying a lot.”

  “Ha! See? And he likes flying unsafe spacecraft with overpowered weaponry.”

  “How's it going in the maintenance bay?”

  Minh leaned back in his chair and looked around the room. The real senior staff were all present. The Chief Engineer, Ayan. Head of Medical, Doctor Anderson. My First Officer, Oz. Our Communications and Legal Officer, Jason Everin. And myself. We had been meeting at the beginning of every day shift since we started our salvage operation on The Incinerator. “Considering there were twenty-eight fighters, four extended models, and two transports to dismantle, I think we're doing very well. Pulling the ships apart is pretty easy. All the systems are modular. It just takes time. The deck crew are already adapting the shields for our own fighters. By the time we're out of hyperspace, all of them should have shielding and extra energy storage.”

  “That's a relief. I'm sure your pilots feel a lot better.”

  “They do. A lot of the pilots are learning more about how their ships are put together now that they're helping with the assembly too. I'm just wondering, what are we going to do with the hulls when we're finished?”

  “I was thinking about that, and I'd like you to talk to your deck crew about leaving engines and basic navigation control in half a dozen or so. If they can think of an easy way to turn them into decoys, they could be useful. Other than that, you should have the hulls crushed so they can be sold for scrap.”

  “That'll make more room down there. With all the salvage there's barely room to breathe. We only have one launchway open until we clear things up.”

  “How are your new pilots adjusting?”

  “Most of them are fitting right in, except for one. He's put a request in to be dropped off at the next free port.”

  “I have a security officer who's requested the same. From what I can tell he can't turn and inform anyone on anything that would harm ship security,” Oz added.

  “So you think we should put them off the ship?”

  “I don't like the idea of having a pilot that doesn't want to be here. Oz is right, they haven't seen anything that would cause a problem if they went blabbing it to every Vindyne or Triad Consortium crew they could find.”

  “We'll drop them off at the next port with standard pay for the time they've been with us. Make sure they know as soon as possible. We'll be coming out of hyperspace tomorrow.” I turned to Ayan and waited for her to finish taking a sip of coffee. “How does the rest of the salvage look?”

  She put her mug down and smiled at me. "There's too much. We have enough shield emitters from The Incinerator to cover the ship twice over, since we only destroyed an eighth of her surface area when we finished the ship off. We managed to get all the emitters. We even managed to salvage her secondary control systems. The weapon systems are the same story. We were able to take six particle beam emplacements, their power systems, a load of thirty fighter drones -- which I suggest we sell as is since they're hard to reprogram -- their targeting systems, the power systems attached to the beam emplacements, and we even made off with a load of sixty two antimatter torpedoes.”

  “Just like the ones that they hit us with. Can we adapt them to our launchers?”

  “No, but that doesn't much matter,” she grinned as she took a six inch long violet crystal from her pocket and held it up. “This is the antimatter load from one of the torpedoes. Vindyne has managed to compress and stabilize it in a near solid.”

  I rolled my chair away from her very slowly. Everyone stared at her wide eyed except for Oz. “So, what you're saying is that you're holding enough antimatter in your hand to annihilate at least ten percent of all the exterior mass on this ship,” I said quietly.

  “Actually, it's a heavy near solid that's made to expand when it's triggered, so more like twenty percent. The only reason why the three torpedoes that hit us before didn't do that much dama
ge was because they all hit at the same time. If they had been more patient and fired them sequentially, each would have exploded deeper inside the ship than the last.”

  “Is it stable?” Minh asked warily.

  “Just as stable as this table,” Ayan said as she rapped it against the top of the conference table.

  Oz jumped in his seat. “Holy Hell! Put it away!” he burst. “Stable or not that's the scariest thing I've seen since I watched my oldest sister gave birth!”

  Ayan laughed and pulled a small insulated bag out of her pocket then slipped the crystal inside. “Okay, there we go,” she said as she set it down in front of her.

  There was a collective sigh of relief throughout the room and she went on. The capsule was just as dangerous, but out of direct sight people seemed to forget about it for the most part. “Vindyne Corporation has managed to invent or purchase a technology that uses a particle accelerator to create antimatter then package it in different crystal casings that have their own stable magnetic field, holding the antimatter firmly in the center under extreme pressure. That's way ahead of current known technology that stores antimatter as a gas or as a low viscosity liquid. The specifications we managed to extract from their computer core showed that these crystals can survive a sudden impact of over a thousand tons of force unless the magnetic field is disrupted. The antimatter is almost impossible to extract once it's encased without blowing yourself up, because the first thing it wants to do once the magnetic field is off-balance is expand explosively, but the size of the crystal and the amount of antimatter contained therein can be changed depending on the purpose. If we could install the particle accelerator in the ship, we could do a lot of things with it. Our engines can already use natural antimatter to increase power, using this kind of antimatter is no different. One of the power plants can use it as well, increasing our energy output by an exponent of three for several years would require an ounce or so of antimatter as dense as what's in that crystal.”

  “Could you make ammunition?” Minh-Chu asked.

  Ayan looked at the bag in front of her for a moment and considered it. “That's the easiest application. I already checked and the particle accelerator could make a hundred rounds a minute for our rail cannons, all coated with a thin layer of iron so our rail cannons can fire them. With that kind of firepower there would be no need for energy weapons at all.”

  “How dangerous would that kind of ammunition be to us?” I asked, suppressing my optimism.

  “With the crystal containment Vindyne included in the particle accelerator assembly, it's less dangerous than the high yield rounds we're using right now and they'd do five times more damage. The magnetic field inside the rounds would be strong and safe for over ten months without being reinforced. With reinforcement from a polarized magazine rounds' magnetic fields would remain stable for years.”

  I couldn't see how Ayan felt about using this new technology as a weapon, she was very difficult to read sometimes. “Do you think you could make it work as another form of generating energy as well as ammunition?”

  “We shouldn't use it as an energy reserve. Mass capacitors are safer and they can't explode. Laura and I discussed it and we agree that it just wouldn't be safe to store a large quantity of antimatter aboard. The more massive the amount of antimatter you have, the harder it is to contain, the more likely it is that it will interact with matter and explode. I suggest we enhance one of our reactors with a small amount at a time instead, minimizing the risk.”

  Ayan sighed before going on, it was becoming obvious that using the antimatter as a weapon wasn't something she'd do if she had the choice. “Ammunition and fuel is what this machinery was made for. I could rig a particle accelerator into the main engines so they would have a direct feed of antimatter in a less dense form we could use as we needed. For ammunition, well, as long as we track everything we manufacture and don't overproduce I have no objections. The torpedoes are the biggest problem. They'll have a long shelf life, but you'll have to remember to use them or dispose of them within a year of creation.”

  “So it's settled. When you can get it set up safely we'll start generating a safe amount of antimatter ammunition for each rail cannon emplacement. I'd like a few torpedoes just in case as well, but you decide how much is a safe amount. I agree that we shouldn't produce more antimatter munitions than we can safely manage.”

  Ayan's demeanour lightened as soon as I mentioned that she would be in charge of determining the safety limits. “We should have it set up before we're out of hyperspace. I'll also be able to make some rounds for the fighters, but you'll have to be careful. They may be the same size as a regular round but the pilots should treat them like missiles.”

  Minh grinned from ear to ear. “I'll make sure we train in simulation for a few hours before we load.”

  That made Minh's week. It was good to see him on cloud nine. His ships would soon be equipped with shielding and antimatter rounds, huge upgrades that were so expensive under normal circumstances that they were rarely considered in combination. I turned back to Ayan. “What else is going on in engineering?”

  “We have a couple people still working on a pattern for integrating cloaksuit technology into our uniforms, and they're close, but it won’t be fast. I expect it will take our highest resolution materializers over twenty hours to make one uniform once we're finished integrating all the systems required to make a complete cloaksuit solution.”

  “Good, that'll limit access. I suggest we only make one for each senior staff member and enough for one security team.” Oz added.

  “I agree. We don't even know how to detect someone once they're cloaked. It's too dangerous to make everyone a uniform with that feature.”

  “Well, we're a week or so from developing a final version without external components, like I said, but when we're finished we'll start making them. Put a list of crewmembers who you want to equip and I'll make sure that they're the only ones that get them. The only drawback is that we only have four high resolution materializers. That means no one will be able to just make a new uniform every week or so.”

  “So we take three steps forward in one direction, but four steps back in another. Considering the benefits, I think we can all live with it,” Doc commented.

  “Aside from the suits, we're still assessing the rest of the systems we salvaged from The Incinerator and the Marauder Corvette. There's a lot to go over, but it looks like we'll be able to sell everything we don't want for the ship. Vindyne offers a lot of what they use on the open market according to what we've been able to access on the commercial Starnet.”

  “What about that computer core you managed to steal from that super carrier?” Oz asked.

  “We were able to rig up an interface between it and the Marauder's computer core and storage systems, which are barely enough to handle the information, but Jason is sifting through it now,” Ayan said, gesturing to him.

  He straightened in his chair and smiled uneasily. “I have been, with a little help from Laura, able to use the storage systems better. Even though the molecular quantum core wasn't made to store data, it has to store it long enough for it to be processed. That's the information that we're trying to sort out. Some of it is only partial, like the navigation information we've started examining, but it's a big enough chunk so that we have several sectors worth of information on Vindyne's activities, the settlements, trade routes, patrols and even acquisition plans for several rival colonies. We could do some real damage if we wanted to. Warning colonies that Vindyne are headed in their direction, disrupting trade where patrols are weak or between rounds. We could even hit sentry ships when they're alone.”

  “Several sectors? That's got to be dozens of settled worlds,” Oz commented.

  “Ninety three, actually. That's not all of what Vindyne owns either. They have so much I just can't get my head around it.”

  “Sounds like that's worth prioritizing and following up on. Maybe we could pick a more vulnerable world and
get some boots on the ground. Save some colonists and pillage some hardware.”

  “Well, the problem is the patrol information we have is short term, some only good for another week or two. We're still piecing the rest of the information together, but we have enough now to add the locations of Vindyne military bases to our navigation database. It should help us stay clear of trouble in the future.”

  “That's helpful, anything else?”

  “Well, this doesn't have anything to do with the core, but Vindyne has posted a bounty for the First Light on the Starnet.”

  “How much are we worth?” Oz asked.

  “Four billion credits as a dead hull, twelve billion as a capture with half the crew.”

  Oz sat back in his chair and whistled. “We really got under their skin.”

  “That's not all, there are sub-bounties that I couldn't access. They're only available to registered bounty hunters and law enforcement. I suspect that they're specific bounties for crew members.”

  “Well that's not good. Did you find out anything more on our destination?” I asked.

  “Not much, but they're no friends of Vindyne, that's for sure. It's a corporate station but they have trade contracts with a few hundred entities, corporate, free traders, governments, you name it. They mostly sell products from their hull yards. Not even entire ships, just the bare exteriors and custom living space interiors. As far as the port goes, the postings I've read from traders who have reported on the area are mixed. For some it's trouble and they won't go back, while others call it home. The laws posted are over twenty years old, so I don't expect that we'll find the port authority watches what goes on very closely.”

  “A good place to sell our salvage,” Minh said. “I still think it's too bad we can't just haul it all back to Freeground.”

  “Well, the problem with that is it wouldn't be much help,” Ayan commented. “It's a lot more beneficial to develop the First Light as a prototype ship with what we find out here and then go back so they could learn from it.”