by J G Clements
Every electrical system also included Life Support. There was plenty of air to last for a few minutes, and that made for less electrical noise being emitted. The Bridge was now even darker, with only small indicator lights giving any illumination. Not really noticed till now, several of the smaller displays that Jim had assumed were camera systems on the front of the ship turned out to be actual windows. He learned later that they were called periscopes, something that tickled Jake when he brought it up. Right now, everyone of the ‘scopes’ had a crew member glued to it, looking.
The next minute passed in silence. An array of green lights, more or less a long rectangle, had more and more of their lights come on. Jake watched, and waited. Then suddenly, one lit yellow, and a second later, the one next to it lit red. The yellow changed to red, and that was enough for Jake.
“Swarmers, eight O’clock position, 30 degrees high. Weapons free. Standby on fighters.” The beam weapons were springing to life, the fusion generators that powered them were spooling up. The Tactical display was lit, and the ship came entirely back to life. There was no reason to be stealthy now. So a dreadnought class ship was preparing to take care of itself. And take care of itself it did.
The Swarmers were a small group, less than twenty. It took the beam weapons an inordinate amount of time to fry each one. The tactical display showed the beams were on target, but it seemed to be several seconds to destroy each enemy ship. As if reading his mind, Jake explained. “The Swarmers are made from ice, mostly. Each of those Swarmers are an iceberg that we have to melt through. Our beams are good, we can drill through many feet a second. The trouble is, that’s slow enough for them to spin, making us constantly pour energy into fresh surfaces. We don’t get them until we hit a lucky spot, or we just have poured so much energy into it that the steam pressure more or less explodes it.”
The Recruiter, seeming to grasp what Jake was telling him, turned to face Jim. “Once you get through the hard candy shell, the gooey center is easy.” He wasn’t trying to be macabre, but make the lesson clear to Jim on how it worked. Jim got it instantly.
The tactical display was simplifying, the last couple of Swarmers being blotted out as he watched. “Damage?”
“None sir. They were not prepared for combat, we caught them off guard. No energy weapons or kinetics launched. All they did was evade.”
Jack absorbed that. And turning to Jim. “But they made no effort at running. If we had not fired, they would have operated their weapons and attacked. We’ve never seen a Swarmer run. Ever. Think about what that means when you get a chance, and if you figure it out, let me know.” To Jake, that was a throw-away comment. To Jim, it was an assignment he wouldn’t let go of.
Back to facing his crew. “Light up our picket, and get ready for friendlies.” With that, huge detectors were turned on, and the ship controlled everything around it for many light seconds in all directions. “Maintain beam weapons for manual shots. All automatic systems to stand down. Plug the kinetics.” That meant the beam weapons could only be fired by a human, not a computer. And the kinetic weapons were all physically locked out. But it also kept the fusion reactors operating. The beam weapons if called upon could continue to fire indefinitely. A high state of readiness. Jake glanced backward toward the Recruiter. “We’ll make sure the dignitaries are protected sir.”
The Recruiter knew that comment was to impress Jim, but made a small nod of approval. During this whole time, he had as little clue about what tactics the ship used as Jim did, but had to act as if he was in the loop. Somewhere he thought how a loop could be a noose, then let that thought go.
Jake seemed totally relaxed, despite having just jumped into a group of Swarmers. He was discussing something privately with one of his crew, and they had both glanced at Jim. A decision was made. “Jim. Would you like to go examine a dead Swarmer ship and give me your opinion of it? I’m needed here on the Bridge, but Tom can take you out in a skiff?” Jim nodded and the two of them were off.
Another member of the Bridge crew reported, “ETA less than 2 minutes”. No one needed that explained: The Oddjob would be here in 2 minutes. And with that, Jake took a coffee from a crewman and relaxed.
Chapter 11. On the Oddjob.
Ceres Report: Landed…sorta.
I put down just where I wanted and it wasn’t too difficult. I was sitting at my console, congratulating myself and worrying about what I had overlooked, when what I overlooked happened.
It was subtle, like maybe the ship was only settling. But it wasn’t. It was sinking. And sinking in slow motion, compliments of the low gravity. Without waiting to see how far I’d sink, I hit the plasma rocket and waited. If it didn’t pull me free, I was ready to use the chemical rocket.
The plasma was enough to get me up, though not back into orbit. So instead, I let myself drift sideways and found another place to land. Probably only four or five kilometers away, but when I landed a second time, I didn’t seem to settle.
After the Sisk blinked out, everyone on the Oddjob appeared relaxed. There would be nothing to do for half an hour. Jack took that time to help explain to Sue what was to happen. “Normally, we’d prepare for a blind jump. Turn stuff off and go stealthy. But with the Sisk there ahead of us, we can jump fully awake. Though I think turning off Life Support to the Ambassadors would be sort of funny.”
Sue had learned a lot about how things worked on the Bridge, enough where she felt she could exchange blow for blow. “If you get them riled up, you deal with them. I’m actually rather weary of them already.”
Jack nodded and said nothing more. Time passed and the helmsmen reported, “Jump time, ten seconds”.
“Fully awake. Jump”. With that command, the Oddjob was launched light years away from Earth, and fell out of space only a scant thousand miles from the Sisk. “Good shooting, Helm.” Thumbing a button on his console, “Hello Sisk. We are fully awake and five by five. We are ready to climb out of gravity lock at your convenience.”
“Copy Oddjob. Welcome along. Be advised we ran into a small Swarm. No return fire. The area is secure and we have a skiff out now to pick up some pieces. Jim-88 from McKinsie is out with one of my pilots. Say hi if you see him. Upon his return, we will navigate gravity-lock.” Sue understood all of this exchange except the ‘say hi if you see him’ reference. Jack seemed to be clairvoyant about Sue’s confusions.
“They want us to know we have a friendly out there. You know. Don’t shoot? But otherwise, we have no responsibility toward it.” That struck Sue right were it mattered.
“How would we know if the Sisk hadn’t told us?
“We try to use beacons, and it’s really simple when only one large ship is operating. Cooperative tactics are much harder. It’s a lesson for another day. Then as an afterthought, “Sisk, can you vector a skiff for us too? We’d like to show our crew?”
“Affirmative. Launch at your leisure and we will provide a vector to find something.” Jack smiled and repeated his friend’s behavior of a few minutes earlier. Sue and a Pilot were readying a skiff to retrieve their own Swarmer hulk.
****
Tom accompanied Jim to the one of the skiffs, and they were airborne immediately. Tom had taken the right-side seat, though that seat if often the co-pilot’s chair for fixed wing aircraft. Jim asked about it, and Tom confirmed that Jim was the pilot of record for this flight. Rather than be upset, he appreciated Tom’s sense of humor and asked if he had commanded a sub. “Nope. I was a fighter pilot. They recruited a number of us then decided that a change of tactics was called for. They’ve been looking at submarine warfare ever since.” Jim was a bit surprised to think that anyone had ever thought that space warfare could be anything EXCEPT submarine warfare, but kept that thought to himself.
The small talk came to an abrupt end as Tom tried to talk Jim through the operation of the ship. To Tom’s credit, he didn’t touch his own controls but used verbal explanations, and only pointed occasionally. Once away from the ship, Jim relaxed and sta
rted to enjoy it. With the gravity-dampers engaged, the ship seemed light and maneuverable. As he got the feel of it, he jinked the ship up and down, trying to get first-hand experience in how fast it responded. Tom worked the navigational equipment, and satisfied, explained they were ten minutes from their target. It was the most intact of the Swarmers, and Jim was interested in seeing it.
During their short trip, Jim asked Tom what he knew about the Recruiter, but Tom either didn’t have a lot to say or didn’t want to talk about him. Instead, the discussion centered on the Swarm “You’ll see for yourself. Either they do it to themselves or our weapons do it, but the…corpse…loses its shape. We’ll find a small pile of various materials, mostly methane-based stuff. Some hydrocarbons. There’s some metals but they seem to be part of the ship. Their ships are built almost entirely out of ice. They use it like we use metal. The thinking is, they build the engines and anything else they need from a thin framework of metal, then pour water around it and let it crystallize. We’ve looked at the ice itself. They control the crystalline structure of it. For instance, you remember that ice with no gas dissolved in it is very clear?” Jim didn’t know that but made a remark.
He continued. “It seems certain they are beings that exist at very cold temperatures, like a couple hundred degrees below zero. If humans are a bag of water, they are a bag of liquid methane. So, when our beams hit them everything cooks off and the methane ruptures.”
Jim was amazed, not so much by the chemistry, but by how little was known. “After all these years, centuries, you’ve never captured a live one?”
“No.” And with that, Tom directed Jim how to slow enough to match speeds with the drifting hulk.
In a few minutes, Jim was EVA and poking around in the hulk. Like Tom said, some metal. They used incredibly tiny fusion drives and they were as far from the front of the ship as possible. They took no chances with any waste heat since the crewman was many meters from the engine, separated by solid ice. But one thing that caught his attention was the fact the ship seemed to be somewhat streamlined. Radioing that observation to Tom, he got a curious answer. “Sometimes we find a Swarm that are more or less tapered like that, and other times they are much more blunted. Our guess it’s something they do for personal taste, but that’s a guess, really.”
Jim kept poking. No sign of clothing, but that may have been as easily destroyed as the creature itself. No sign of radio, unless you can make one entirely of ice and that melted too? “Tom, how pure is the water they use?”
“Varies. A lot if it is very pure. Purer than any water you’ve had. Other times, it’s laced with the entire periodic table.” Holding his own council, he examined the holes the beam weapon made. They were not very intact, the melting water had refrozen, erasing most of the beam’s handiwork. “While I’m thinking about it, there are volumes of data on analysis of their ships. Atomic, structural, you name it. Everyone finds them to be as big as mystery as you do. Let me know if you want to drag it back to the Sisk. We’ve done it before, and we can keep it outside while we examine it.”
“The Captain wanted something brought back, to show the Ambassadors.” In less than a minute, Tom shot out a line that perfectly wrapped itself around the hulk. Jim was impressed.
“You’ve done this before I take it?”
A chuckle from Tom. “If you have to rescue someone during combat or don’t want to leave your ship to fasten something, yeah, it’s a good skill to have.” Without waiting, Tom started reeling the line tighter, and Jim rode it back to the skiff. The trip back to the Sisk was uneventful, Jim testing his mastery of what he learned piloting. Tom concluded that he had the basics, and just needed a couple thousand hours in the seat to get proficient. Jim thanked him. He had bigger ships than a skiff to think about, but who could resist piloting a fighter ship?
When they arrived back on the Sisk, he was informed there was still 45 hours to escape gravity-lock, so everyone had lots of time to examine the Swarmer. Even better, they had a lot of time to become familiar with how everything worked. Tom asked the Captain if he could give skiff lessons, and there was quickly a waiting list. The members of the McKinsie fleet had been chosen for a number of aptitudes, and the willingness to learn was one of them. For most of the crew of the Sisk, it was a 45 hour open-house and recruitment day.
Over at the Oddjob, it was the same. McKinsie fleet personnel were everywhere getting instructed in how stuff works and often being allowed to operate the weapons. A skiff would position itself behind the Oddjob, and launch ice rocks past the ship. To make up for the lack of velocity, they let the rocks pass less than a hundred yards from the bow. To a gunner, it looked like the rock would quickly come into range and be gone. Exactly what was needed to make the gunner think fast, and move fast. Someone started to keep a score, and several of the regular crew were taking part. Sue’s score was not very good, but Jennifer was in second place. Sue as innocently as possible asked her is she knew what prize the Captain had in mind for the winner.
Not taking part in the skeet range, Jim was already digging into what didn’t make sense. The lack of data on Swarmer ships had Jim puzzled. There must be something there to give some insight into how they thought, he just needed to find it. Comfortably ensconced in his cabin, he was examining old analysis records of Swarmer ships. Already with a provisional hypothesis, he was looking for data to either support it, or deny it. Unfortunately, he couldn’t find anything that pointed to his hypothesis already being examined. Worse, of all the theories that were in the data base, his theory wasn’t. So, he had a very good idea, or a very bad idea.
Tom had said that some ships used clean water, and others were polluted. But was that data from the pieces of the ship that were examined, or did they melt entire ships and take a representative sample of the water? He went back and read reports. Often, things that are not considered important are left out. But as he read, it seemed clear that chunks of ship were retrieved, and that part examined. It appeared as if any sample taken was representative of the whole ship.
He sat there thinking about what he read, but just as importantly, what he hadn’t read. Several whole ships had been melted, but just to strain-out all the metal in the search for any fabricated products. He stared into nothingness, lost with his own speculative logic. He made a decision, but not lightly. He was going to pester the Captain.
He addressed the AI from his cabin. “I’d like to see if the Captain could grant me ten minutes of his time. I have something that might be useful in understanding the Swarmers.” It didn’t take the AI long. Either the Captain was not very busy, or Jack’s recommendation carried a lot of weight with Jake.
“The Captain will have coffee with you in his cabin in thirty minutes.” Jim was a bit stunned. With the gravity-lock now less than 24 hours from being lifted, he thought he might be busy. Instead, Jim got his thoughts together. It was only an idea, but he wanted it either proven or disproven. He spent almost fifteen minutes looking at manufacturing methods for certain devices.
“Come in, Jim. It’s open.” Jim entered and the Captain was alone with a table and 2 chairs, a pot of coffee, and some pastries. Though Jim had had a lot good food since boarding the Oddjob, two years of McKinsie rations still made him eye them. “Go ahead. If you don’t eat them, I’ll have to.” He was in a good mood. “You know, Jack thinks you are one of the most observant people he’s ever seen. So, if you have a theory, I’d really like to hear it. Anything new that we can learn about the Swarmers would sit well with me.”
“Thanks. Do you want my conclusion first, or do you want me to lead up to it with speculation?” The Captain said he wanted the conclusion first, and when Jim gave it to him, he stopped chewing. “Now I’m ready for the speculation that led up to it.”
Jim was not afraid to explain his theory, as long as everyone understood it was a theory. Maybe right, maybe wrong, but something that a fair mind could verify. “As near as I can tell, ice analysis of Swarmer ships have always been done b
y gathering up a piece or hacking it off, then bringing it back for analysis. And the elemental analysis of whats in the ice has varied, hugely. On the other hand, the only time that complete meltdowns have been done, is to sieve out any artifacts. The water from them were never analyzed. I believe that different parts of the ship were doped with various elements, and those elements were responsible for how the ship worked. It’s the equivalent of how we dope silicon wafers to make different electronic devices. Only they do it with water, and I’ll bet, at very low temperatures.
Jake chewed a second longer, but he was no longer tasting the pastry. No, he was chewing over what Jim had told him. Picking up the mic, he asked to be connected to Jack Sullivan, Commander Oddjob. He stared at Jim the whole time. And Jim for the first time saw the power distance this man could command when he needed to. Jack came on the microphone, but somehow Jakes demeanor got the attention of the other skipper. “Jake, Jim-88 has something to tell you.” He put the microphone down, nothing visual here, just voice.
Jim repeated speculation, and the underlying assumptions. Jack didn’t interrupt him once. Then, when Jim had finished. “If that’s true, it’s another whole avenue to figure them out.” A pause. “Its your idea Jim. What do you want to do for the next step?” Jim would never have presented a theory like this without a straight-forward experiment.
“We should go back, round up the Swarmers, melt them down and after making sure the samples are well mixed, analyze each one to see if the elemental analysis is anything close. Then, as icing on the cake, if we can get any other complete or nearly complete Swarmer from another system, we do the same and compare notes. If they match, it won’t be a coincidence. And if they match, we are going to have to get good really good at the physics of materials near absolute zero.”
