by J G Clements
“We thought a smaller defense was sufficient, but it wasn’t. Today, we maintain over a million picket ships around our home world, and almost that number around our foodworlds. I don’t mean to give you advice, but many of our people now man a picket ship for a period of time, then as the crew is replaced, they live on the foodworld. I’m told your submarines also have two crews and this has worked well for you?” He looked at the audience, connecting to them by soliciting their feedback. Certainly the Ambassadors from countries with navies were nodding.
“We also now have hundreds of raftcities and raftfarms, and though we love our home planet, we are spread across space for our survival. We will not let what has happened to others,” his gaze went to Ag, “to happen to us.” He stopped, and allowed a bit more of the video showing the foodworld being destroyed. As it finished he announced “Now I want to introduce a friend of mine to you. Ag.” Stepping off the podium, he was replaced by the Beetle.
Not as an accomplished speaker as Kor, he lurched right in to his prepared speech. “My homeworld was not so fortunate. Three-hundred and fifty of your years ago, a twenty-mile diameter asteroid struck my world at almost ten percent the speed of light. My people never had a chance. We lost over half our population in a single day. Virtually all our infrastructure was destroyed and we faced starvation.” The video showed scenes of the destruction, taken with whatever video equipment was still working. “If the Crekie had not arrived, many more would have died. Without our knowing it, they had already established a foodworld suitable for my people. For many of our days, they brought us food and helped evacuate us to other worlds. They showed us how to establish a picket, and how to form effective raftcities. Over the next few months, they helped us bring over a million picket ships, the same style that is now being offered to Earth. Since then, we have continued our struggle.”
He attempted to make eye contact with the crowd, but the deep gash in his head that housed his eyes wasn’t very effective. Instead, the effect was more like being scanned by some sort of weapon. But everyone was moved. Sue discreetly scanned the faces of the audience. No one doubted the authenticity of the videos, which actually surprised her. Apparently, the recent Swarm attack had convinced everyone about the seriousness of the threat.
Sue waited for the next question that she expected from the Ambassadors, which would be, what did they want? And like clockwork, that was the next subject. Ag took the question, but looked to Kor to help answer it. As Kor joined him on the podium, Ag gave them the answer, but one they probably didn’t want. “There are seven sentient species besides Humans in this galaxy, and they have all been attacked. You know about the Crekie, the Squids, Ants and Beetles, but there are three more capable of space-flight. The Shria, the Rahtts, and the Foeur. They are all creatures that require more gravity than we could handle, and they find it difficult to travel far. I have only met the Foeur briefly, but the Crekie help with communicating with the other races. All three of these races have suffered attacks, but none have ever been contacted by the Swarm.” He waited. “It is everyone’s experience that the Swarm will never communicate with any of us, and seek only to completely wipe out all races that are not their own.”
The meeting more or less ended the formalities, and everyone was allowed to refill their drinks and wander around again. In all probability, the Swarm attack seemed to have not only convinced the Humans about the seriousness of the situation, but they now seemed to have a sympathetic leaning toward the Ants and Beetles. Ag and Kor were prominently seen wandering around, and even the Ant-ships real Captain came over to the human side and tried to mingle among the Humans.
Sue had a chance, one-on-one to canvass the Ambassador’s thoughts. Many said privately they were in favor of everything that had been suggested, but there were still a lot of holdouts. Just like her experience in negotiating to fix satellites for some governments, the usual unsaid question was, ‘what’s in it for me’? The ‘me’ of honest Ambassadors seemed to mean the country they represented. The ‘me’ of some other Ambassadors meant them, and only them. Any benefits to the countries they represented were only ancillary.
One idea offered by the English diplomat, the same gentlemen who had offered the Ant Captain his condolences, was the formation of a separate military force, and it would coordinate the picket ships. It seemed perfectly reasonable, but the babble increased as everyone began to discuss who would be in charge of the fleet, and who would pay for it. Sue listened for a bit, but realized that nothing had prepared her for this sort of negotiation.
A short time later she was saved by the appearance of Jake, Jack and Jim. They seemed to just wonder in, not trying to attract attention to themselves. Either it was pre-arranged or a lucky coincidence that wine was also brought in and served to everyone. After a few glasses, Sue became a lot more sanguine about things, and tried to flag Jim down. Getting his attention, he politely broke away from an Eastern European Ambassador and his very attractive assistant to join her.
“Hi Sue. You clean up pretty well, you know?” Sue had on coveralls and the tunic of the McKinsie fleet, and it did look very nice. Jim had only the coveralls and the light-weight pressure suit.
“Thanks.” She gave him a dimpled smile, then had another sip of wine. “I think if Earth is relying on these folks to mount a defense, we might look for another planetary system to live in.” Her eyes cast over the crowd one more time, then returned to Jim. “One with a beach. And low gravity?” It took Jim a second to get that joke, then he looked at Sue anew, as if seeing her for the first time.
“This gravity seems to be working well for you.” Turning his attention toward the crowd, he muttered, “Can you imagine surfing on a beach at half gravity?” They seemed to fall silent after that, both lost in their thoughts. Jack dropped by, a full glass in his hand for him, and another one for Sue to replace her empty one.
“What’s your opinion, Sue? Are these folks up to it? Mounting a defense of Earth?” Sue said nothing, except for a little shake of her head. “I didn’t think so either. “Jim, what’s your opinion?”
“I don’t see these folks doing it, either. But I think there will be millions of volunteers that would man the picket ships. The challenge is to match the men to the ships. Responsible people, ones we can rely on. How they organize themselves, I can see several methods. I think I’d put a couple hundred ships to a group. Call it a Cohort. Then put five hundred Cohorts into a Legion. And twenty Legions into a Battalion. Something like that. The trick is, they need to be responsible, but they aren’t warriors. They are,” he seemed to have trouble finding a word and looked into his wine glass to find it, “watchers. Probably years of boredom waiting for the unthinkable. How do you keep everyone on their toes doing that?” He looked at Jack, then brought his attention back to Sue. “Maybe we could set up a wave pool and a tanning booth?”
Jack didn’t understand the joke, but Sue seemed to find it funny. “Don’t worry. The Recruiter said it’s all going to be taken out of their hands anyway.”
Chapter 15. Null-Set.
Ceres Report: Radiation
The amount of radiation I get in the bottom of the trench is several orders of magnitude lower than on the surface. There is no doubt that If I can get the tent to work, it’ll also provide a safe place to start my gardens. But I’d still like to get some sort of cover over the tent. I thought about just filling it in, but I’m concerned if I have an air leak, the whole thing could cave in.
After the presentation, Jim had gone back to his berth on the Sisk. Sue had to stay on the Tether until all the Ambassadors where taken back to the Oddjob. Despite the wine, he was unable to sleep, so he examined and re-examined the chances of the Swarm attacking this meeting. From records, the Swarm did attack this deeply into a gravity well. What he couldn’t correlate was the frequency of attacks with the amount of gravity…did they tend to attack where gravity was lower? But he’d need to correlate that to the presence of the alien races.
There
was a knock on his door, and those thoughts, already tenuous, dissolved. Phil-36 came in, with a grin on his face. “Bingo”.
“Really?” Jim could see that Phil was excited, and he had a tablet in his hand, and Jim was already trying to get a peek at it.
“The composition and amount of trace elements on each ship match. But there is an extra twist. The data breaks down into two different sets, a bimodal distribution, which means there are two types of ships in a Swarm, or at least in this Swarm. I’d bet my next month’s rations on that.”
Jim was looking at the tablet, quickly cycling through the graphs. “Confidence interval?”
“Over Ninety-Five percent. Do you care what the trace elements are?”
“I do. But not yet. I’d like you to report this to Jake. And probably Jack. Personally, I’m already sold but they need to be convinced.” Without waiting for Phil’s agreement, Jim bypassed the AI and was on the com link to Jake. It wasn’t clear if Jake took everyone’s calls, but Jim never had a problem getting through. A short conversation, and he hung up. “Jack is coming over from the Oddjob. You get to brief both Captains at one time. Twenty minutes. The mess hall.”
The two men spent the time going over the data, dissecting what it told them and what it hinted at. Some conclusions were very strong. Other correlations were not as firm. Jim wanted a very good handle on this data before Jake and Jack picked it apart. Satisfied they were ready, they trooped off to the mess.
Both Captains were already there, seemingly none the worse for having consumed as much alcohol as they had at the reception. They sat on opposite sides of a square table, and motioned Jim and Phil to take seats on the other opposite sides. Jim was a bit surprised, seeing that neither Captain was trying to maintain a power distance. But they were not trying to be subtle that they were in charge, either. Both Captains already had met Phil, so Jim started right in. As with all executive presentations, he gave his conclusions first, only after volunteering the data that led up to it.
“Its our opinion that the Swarm is using ice the way we use silicon for making integrated circuits.” He let that sink in. “Its not all that outlandish if we understand the physics of water at near absolute zero temperatures. Imagine that we built a spaceship entirely from pure silicon, then doped some of the surfaces to create integrated circuits and controls. Put a radio on one wall, a sensor on another. Or, they might just make the ships, then create all the circuitry on pure slabs of ice, and subsequently install them in the ship.” He looked at both Captains, and though neither was convinced, they were trying to understand what he was saying. It was Phil who jumped in next.
“No one has ever bothered to analyze the trace elements found in the Swarm ships. Or rather, no one has ever made sure they took a representative sample.” Jake’s look made it clear he needed to go on. “If someone takes a sample from where, say, the radio mechanism was, they might find a high amount of manganese. But if you took a sample from the back of the ship, maybe where the fusion controls are, you’d find an entirely different amount of different trace elements. Got it?” Both Captains nodded. “So, if you melt the ships into a ball of water”, he tossed a quick nod toward Jim, “all the trace elements would mix equally, and if you took a sample of that ship, and compared it to another ship, you’d be able to see if they were the same.” The two Captains looked at each other, now both intensely interested in where this was going. By some unspoken agreement, it was Jim’s turn.
“If each ship had a different panel of trace elements, then we could just assume that they were random dust particles that got trapped in the ice. But if the ships had the same amounts and ratios of elements, then it’s logical that those elements were used to help build the ships.” Jake had issued the original orders to take the samples, and still had a few questions.
“Then why did you take several samples from the same ship? You said the water would now be uniform, so one sample from the ship should be identical to any other sample from that same ship?”
“Exactly”. It was Phil. “We looked at variability within a single ship, and used that to infer how much variability should exist from ship to ship. And we can prove that our data is very good. High probability of being correct.” The Captains now were convinced, but Phil had more to say. “We can also prove that within a Swarm, there are two types of ships.” He leaned back so the Captains could now absorb that fact, on top of everything else they had heard. After looking a Phil for a second, Jake pushed his chair back and fixed his gaze directly on Jim.
“What does all this mean, both strategically and tactically?”
“Either it means there are two ship building facilities that use different methods, thus accounting for the different ratios of elements, or the Swarm makes two types of ships that are fighting side-by-side.”
“How would we figure out which it is?”
“Next Swarm fight, I need a dozen samples and I’ll know. It’ll be unlikely that they would take ships from both manufacturing facilities and mingle them again at the same ratio for each attack group.” The two Captains glanced at each other. Both Jim and Phil waited for both men to try to digest all this, then incorporate it into how they thought of the Swarm.
It was Jack that spoke first, and it was clear that both Captains were thinking along the same line. “We’ve always been puzzled about how little technology we found in Swarm ships. Normally, it seemed to be about the minimum amount of metal to control and operate a fusion reactor. We’ve never found any sort of communication equipment, and to be honest, we haven’t picked up any sort of electronic emissions from the ship.”
“But do you think the ships communicate?”
Jack was leaning back, almost looking at the ceiling. “I wish I knew. Their tactics have always seemed to be random in single-ship combat. Yet they do travel and attack in groups. We have no idea how they do that. And they can cooperate enough to build ships and drop meteors. So they are intelligent, but intelligent in a different way than we can figure.” He brought his gaze back to Jim. “I’ve got to believe they communicate, but I could make a case that they may not be communicating when they are actually in combat. Or, you can form any theory you want. I’m not sure.”
Jake wanted to end this meeting on a positive note. “You might have learned more about the Swarm in the last day than we figured out the last hundred years. Ok if I pass this along to everyone?”
Jim’s answer wasn’t what Jake was expecting. “But you should listen to what elements we found in the ships. I think it might give us a better clue on where the Swarm might hang out.” Knowing he was being a bit theatrical, he glanced at Phil to make sure he was going to go along with him. Phil, enjoying this grinned back and nodded. “Take a look at this list of elements. Can you see anything interesting about them?”
Neither Jake and Jack knew where this was going. Instead of being frustrated about the theatrics, both men were enjoying it and instinctively knew it would be worth waiting for them to get to the point. That, and the fact that they were still working off the wine they consumed helped to make them patient.
It was Phil who blinked first. “Most of these elements would not be very common in the Oort cloud. They might exist there in small quantities, but if you want to get any sizeable amounts of them, you’ll need to look in the outer ice giants.” He pointed to some of the heavy metals listed on the printout and continued. “You might get lucky and find some of this on an icy comet way out there, but if you really need several tons of any one of these, go look at the heavier planets.”
“We both think the Swarm has to come much further into a solar system than we thought in order to mine these materials. Otherwise, they’d never get enough.” Looking into the faces of both Captains, Jim was as serious as he ever got. “There have got to be traces of mines on the outer planets where the Swarm has been active. We just need to find them.”
Both Captains were digesting the information they were given, all because Jim had wanted to do a more rigorous anal
ysis of Swarm ships. It was Jake who asked the question. “Ok, we now know about their ships, and you surmised where they have to go to get raw materials. What do you think you can tell us about the beings themselves? We’ve been told their biology is a cold biology. I’ve always assumed that a cold life-form would be a low energy life-form. Do you think that is true?”
Jim had already had that thought, and didn’t really know what to make of it. But it was Phil who had a ready answer.
“No, not at all. A cold life-form could be very high energy.” He looked at the two men and could see he needed to explain further. “Look, it’s not the temperature of a being, it’s more to do with how much of a change of energy level a being could tolerate. Sort of like the Carnot cycle?” Blank stares continued to stare back. “Humans like it around 70 degrees F. and our bodies run at 98.6 or so, right? So, a thirty degree difference between our biology temperatures and the sink…the 70 degree environment…we throw our waste heat away into. Got it?” Both men were getting it but Phil had to finish the lecture.
“The Swarm can be very active beings, and they can throw their waste heat away very efficiently. After all, if they live out between the suns, they can certainly find a cold heat-sink to dump waste heat into.” His explanation seemed to wind down, but he then added a few more facts. “If the ice in the ships is cold enough, it could absorb their waste heat, yet still remain just a bit above absolute zero. Humans get rid of heat by letting water evaporate. The Swarm might have a vapor cooling system like us, or maybe they radiate it directly. Or, I suppose, they might end up placing themselves against a colder surface. Sounds pretty inefficient, but it could work.” He seemed to be almost musing these thoughts to himself, not aware of his audience. Finishing lamely, “Like putting ice cubes next to your skin to remain cool.”
Jake got all this then asked the question he really cared about. “So where should we be looking to hunt them?”
