The Celaran Refuge (Parker Interstellar Travels Book 8)

by Michael McCloskey

  I desperately wanted to learn about advanced alien technology but had no access to it. Now I have no less than three different ones and not enough time to study them all!

  Marcant had always been fascinated at how great scientists with skills in two disciplines had mixed their knowledge at the overlaps to create unique breakthroughs. What could he and Adair and Achaius accomplish at the junction of three alien technologies? The possibilities staggered his imagination.

  I can’t wait for this aimless meeting to be over so I can get back to work.

  Chapter 9

  Cilreth settled in for a long VR session on the Iridar. Water, snacks, and Twitch capsules sat within easy reach. She flipped into her virtual workspace and brought up all the data collected on the engagement with the Destroyers.

  If anyone had told me a few years ago I’d be analyzing a space battle involving two alien races, I’d have laughed them to extinction.

  “What does one look for in a space battle?” Cilreth asked herself aloud.

  Which ships launched which weapons? How tough were the ships? How good were their sensors? Do they have flagships?

  Cilreth doubted the Destroyers had any flagships. It would be a point of obvious weakness; surely the fleet worked in a distributed manner to give the fleet resilience. Still, Cilreth decided to let the facts guide her rather than her intuition. The machines had been created by aliens, so she had no doubt that some surprises awaited her.

  She started by classifying the ships. There were different shapes and sizes, so she wanted to know what specialized roles they might play. It quickly became apparent that, like the Destroyer’s ground forces, they came in three sizes. She did not know if the larger ships dispensed the smaller ones like their ground forces seemed to do.

  Cilreth decided to give the Destroyer ships special names for the three sizes: battleships, cruisers, and corvettes. She also classified the ground machines in the same manner: colossals, tanks, and drones. The names were Terran-centric, and might imply assumptions that were incorrect, but it was better than nothing.

  A general picture of tactics emerged. The Destroyers split the fleet into parts based upon their resistance—the task groups of Destroyers had been formed to roughly match the distribution of the Celarans at their various points of congregation, such as the space hanger bases. She attached some questions to her notes: Did the Destroyers slavishly take cues from the enemy about the importance of targets? If the Celarans had defended a decoy base with 80% of their fleet, would the Destroyers have matched them and assigned 80% of their own force to attack the fake target?

  Within each task group, the corvettes led the way. They emitted active signals to search for enemies. Cilreth decided these vessels were cannon fodder. They located the enemy and moved in. The fact that their active signals gave them away did not really matter as they were numerous and expendable.

  The cruisers followed the corvettes and aggressively engaged with energy weapons and missiles. These ships also emitted energy to locate enemies, but much less often than the corvettes.

  The battleships did not launch missiles. They hung back and did not broadcast active signals to reveal their locations. Despite their lack of sub-light ordnance, the battleships used energy weapons liberally. Cilreth spotted many small and medium ships rendezvousing with the large ones as combat raged around them. She decided that the big ships provided resupply during the battle. She decided to change the name of the largest class to ‘carriers’.

  Cilreth emerged from her mental workspace to shift her body. Two hours had passed already. She had started to form the big picture of the Destroyer fleet, so now she considered the weaknesses of the enemy.

  Would concentration on one class of enemy ship unbalance the fleet? Kill the corvettes, and the fleet lacks detection and short-range energy weapons. Kill the cruisers, and the fleet would lack missile saturation. Kill the carriers, and the fleet would lose its powerful energy weapons, its ECM umbrella, and its resupply capability.

  Which of those would be easier? Most desirable?

  Cilreth dove back in. She watched how each task group functioned against the Celarans. The Celarans fought like they played: they relied upon complex maneuvers and hit-and-run style strikes. By forming up and closing the range at one point of the Destroyer fleet formation, they brought local firepower superiority, then after an alpha strike, they ran away before the Destroyer formation could retaliate effectively by concentrating its force or calling in reserves.

  Speaking of reserves, that last battle group never engaged, Cilreth noticed. She shifted her attention to the seventh group of Destroyer ships. She had assumed this group waited to support any other assault group that faltered because she knew that was a common Terran strategy.

  She examined the ships that had waited. She saw a slight variation on the usual ratio of 1:8:64: there were 5 carriers, 32 cruisers, and 256 corvettes.

  Something stuck out. It was a Destroyer vessel, but different than the others.

  They DO have a flagship! Or something special...

  Cilreth pooled all the data on the new ship they had collected during the entire battle; it was not much. The unique ship was only a bit larger than the carriers. Cilreth chafed at the lack of information on the intriguing vessel. She wondered if it could be a ship from some other alien race, an ally of some type, but the absorption pattern looked the same as the other Destroyer ships.

  Same race, different function.

  Cilreth put the mystery aside for later investigation and continued on another tack. She started an analysis to measure the capabilities of Celaran ships against the various sizes of Destroyer vessels. How many Destroyer missiles did it take to saturate the defenses of a Celaran ship? How many Celaran energy weapons had to focus on a cruiser to kill it immediately? She wanted all the answers. She might well just pass the estimates on to Achaius, but at this point, she had worked hard enough that she wanted an intuitive feel for the fight.

  She came across the Midway. She wanted to know if the Terran ship had made an accounting of itself, so she tracked its part in the battle. Cilreth watched the ship head toward the base where she had formed up with the Celaran attack group. The Terran battleship did not venture forward with the other Celaran ships, but it stayed close and offered fire support to the base when the swarms of Destroyer missiles threatened.

  The Midway helped that base survive longer.

  Cilreth watched the Midway accelerate away when the base’s destruction became inevitable. Several Destroyer assets chased it.

  It was slower than the Iridar, she told herself grimly. She felt guilty for leaving it behind.

  The end neared in the simulation. Destroyers moved in on the lone Terran ship. Then the Midway disappeared.

  What? Is it the new cloaking system? I don’t think so.

  On a hunch, Cilreth ran a simulation of the Midway’s energy expenditures during the battle. A simulation showed the flight path of the ship with annotations at each weapons burst point. The ship blurred along its path. Cilreth examined the totals at the end of the path.

  Cthulhu awakes!

  Cilreth opened a channel to Telisa.

  “I made some important discoveries,” Cilreth announced.

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a very special ship in the Destroyer fleet.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “The design is unique. Unlike the others in many ways.”

  “Another alien race?” asked Telisa.

  “Its absorption pattern is the same as the other Destroyer ships, so it’s almost certainly made from the same hull materials. What if it had actual members of the race aboard instead of just a battle machine?”

  “The Celarans destroyed it?”

  “No, not at all. It stayed back with a small task group,” Cilreth said. “I thought it was a reserve formation, but now I’m not so sure.”

  “Wow. That would be an amazing catch.”

  “Yes. It could be key,” Cilreth agre
ed. “I’ve called this the flagship.”

  “What else?”

  “The Midway escaped!”

  “What? How could we have missed that for so long? Where is it?” asked Telisa.

  “It left the system. I calculated they had enough energy in their rings just before it disappeared. I think it must have headed back toward Earth, or perhaps the closest Space Force outpost.”

  “That’s great news! Everyone will be glad to hear it.”

  “We need to send word back to Sol again to let them know we’ve changed locations.”

  Telisa sent a nonverbal assent over the link connection. Cilreth imagined she was having another conversation at her end, or on another channel. Cilreth waited a moment.

  “If we can make direct contact with the Destroyers, we can get them to stop the war,” Telisa said. “We have to show them that this is all unnecessary, at least fighting the Celarans is. They would never strike back.”

  “Sue for peace... oh.”

  Cilreth had been thinking in military terms, since she had just analyzed the battle. She had assumed they would be looking at the special ship as a target to be destroyed.

  Telisa wants to talk to them... but aren’t they just dangerous aggressors?

  “You were thinking of it as a strategic vulnerability,” Telisa said.

  “I admit it. I was,” Cilreth said.

  “Well, let’s see what the situation is. If we’re close enough to attempt capture, just destroying it might also be an option.”

  “Destroying it would be far easier,” Cilreth maintained. “How would you capture it? I mean, in the middle of a battle? We couldn’t even take the probe ship with us, and there was no fighting.”

  “I have to get aboard that ship,” Telisa said.

  “No,” Cilreth said.

  “I know it’s dangerous, but—”

  “Telisa, let that idea go right now. That ship is likely filled with water, or at least, a liquid of some sort. And that’s only the beginning. There will be security measures that would kill you eight ways from extinction. We could not even imagine what those might be. We know a lot about the Destroyer machines, but nothing about their makers.”

  Telisa did not reply, but Cilreth could tell she had stopped to think about the points.

  “We’ll get the Celarans to help us capture that ship, Telisa. Then we’ll study it. Maybe we can learn to communicate.”

  “Okay,” Telisa said. “Point the ship out to the Celaran engineers, and let them know our thoughts. See what they have to say about it.”

  “Will do.”

  Chapter 10

  On the second day of the voyage, it was still hard for Sarfal to believe that Rootpounders possessed such cleverness. They were aliens, so Sarfal understood it intellectually, but... vines covered in mud! It was hard to accept.

  Sarfal had dutifully traveled between the stars on the alien vessel to learn more about their new friends. The conditions inside were cramped and dark, but at least Sarfal was not alone. The aliens were friendly in action, even though they sounded so mean when they grunted along a vine, and even meaner when you understood them, as they never expressed any feelings.

  The two-legged aliens had verified that the common enemy, the Screamers, were aquatic creatures. Things that flew through the water. That felt easier to absorb than intelligent Rootpounders. Vines in the water, calm and clean. Sarfal felt that perhaps the world was backward: her kind should be friends with the Screamers and the enemies of the Rootpounders. Surely the Rootpounders, which spoke with no feeling, were more like cold robots? The Rootpounders had few feelings, it seemed. They did not laugh. They rarely played. They did not flee danger.

  At least they’re kind! Like robots sent to protect us.

  Her kind, the Thrasar, used underleaf as a description of anything hidden for nefarious purposes. Predators awaited their prey under the beautiful, broad vine leaves. The Rootpounders were more disconcerting than merely under the leaves, they lived at the roots! But at least they did not seem deceptive. They would have sprung their traps by now if they had any for Sarfal. They had even saved several Thrasar ships from a large Destroyer fleet when they had arrived!

  A Rootpounder sent a message to Sarfal, telling her it wanted to meet her. Sarfal told the Rootpounder door to allow it to enter. The large alien came in through one of the square openings. The nightmarish alien doors that closed so solidly made Sarfal feel trapped, though it helped to know they all lived in cages just as Sarfal did. This Rootpounder was one who had flown with fake wings, so Sarfal decided to name it Flyer as a joke, which was funny for an alien that moved on the ground with two giant legs. Then Sarfal remembered that two of them had flown, and this was the shorter, denser of the two. Sarfal amended the name to Shortflyer.

  “[void] I would like to integrate our imaginary environments,” it said coldly. “Then we could train together to disassemble the Screamer machines.”

  “[Examine the leaves on a bright day] Please show me how you store the simulated world so that I can render the information into my own senses.”

  “[void] Here it is. And here is a description of the structure of the data.”

  Shortflyer pointed Sarfal at stores of its data and gave permission to query it. Sarfal looked through the repositories and started to analyze the contents. The Rootpounder interfaces were slow, so Sarfal often scanned large chunks of them directly instead of using the alien connections. In sampling the data en masse, Sarfal often destroyed it, then had to put the same data back into place so fast the alien system did not notice it was ever missing.

  I should explain that someday, in case they figure it out. I hope they would not attack me.

  “[The leaves are wrinkled on our path] You made Rootpounder-specific assumptions in your intermediate format.”

  “[void] I’m sorry. We never considered it for this use. Can you work around it?”

  Sarfal had never heard such a flat apology. Yet it must be genuine, as the explanation made perfect sense. It also did not help that the Rootpounders designed everything for very specific functions! Sarfal felt so sorry for them.

  “[These vines can be untangled] I will learn to clean it.”

  Sarfal started to write a node that could normalize the Rootpounder’s abstract environment data. The new node would make its changes before sending data to the translation node that put it into a form that Sarfal’s own virtual reality processors could ingest. The problem was as hard as speech translation in its own way: once Sarfal could experience the artificial worlds from a Rootpounder host system, it would still be necessary to take commands from Sarfal’s nervous system and translate them to movements the alien machines could understand. Either that or they would have to share the same repository that held the state of their mini-world.

  It might be easier to run the entire simulation on Sarfal’s own machine and let the Rootpounder brains send their commands to it... but this was their ship. Sarfal decided to adapt to their system.

  “[The star will rise over the leaves and feed them] I should be done with this by the midpoint of the day of your time system,” Sarfal sent to the Rootpounder.

  “[From under the leaf strikes a hunter!] You can do that so fast?” asked the Rootpounder.

  Sarfal darted away.

  The Rootpounder expressed surprise!

  “[Four leaves have grown where there was but one yesterday!] You said that with such feeling,” Sarfal replied. Sarfal rolled in the tight space, flashing brightly.

  “[The leaves are almost safe now] My companion put an update into our translators. He added the part we call a preamble so that we could be better understood. Is it okay?”

  “[The sap flows on a warm day] Yes, I like it very much. You sound more friendly now.”

  The Rootpounder opened its mouth and vibrated so hard that Sarfal felt it, even though they were not alighted upon the same vine.

  “[Bright starlight upon the leaves] I’ll let him know it’s good.”
<
br />   The two-legged Rootpounder left. That disappointed Sarfal, who did not like to work alone.

  The alien could hardly have been that entertaining, though. What would we talk about? The Screamers? Though that one did like to fly.

  Sarfal decided to ask about their fake wings if the same Rootpounder came back. Only two of the aliens had played in the air. Sarfal had picked up that those two were paired to reproduce. Sarfal’s flickering lights dimmed. It tried to imagine one of them injecting the other fatally, allowing the young to feed from within its body instead of a vine. Such a horrible sacrifice.

  Oh, but the leader said they have artificial ways now. So maybe one of them won’t have to die. Or maybe they evolved amazing regenerative abilities to offset this need.

  Sarfal launched a set of experimenters and learners to start the discovery process. The jobs asked several questions of Sarfal to tighten down the goal parameters. Sarfal answered as accurately as possible, though there were uncertainties at this stage. There always were. Several solutions would be provided, and Sarfal would select the best and refine from there.

  The work continued steadily until Sarfal was ready to start testing out solutions. Sarfal participated in several test runs in which artificial sights and sounds sourced from the Rootpounder system were translated into Thrasar experiences. At first, the sensations felt muted or twisted. The learners used Sarfal’s feedback to quickly zero in on each problem and eliminate it. Step by step, the VR experience smoothed out and made more sense.

  The Rootpounder returned at the appointed time, striding into the open space where Sarfal lived. It still wore its thick artificial skin. That made sense to Sarfal; anything living down among the roots would have to protect itself well.

  “[The leaves grow strong] I’m ready to join you in your training worlds,” Sarfal announced.

  “[Starlight brighter than hoped for] That’s great! I expected some delays, so I told the others to join us in a while... let me tell them to hurry.”

  “[Shadow under the leaf] But you’re not the leader, right? Will they agree? What if you told them to fly with the fake wings, would they do so?”