The Memnon Incident: Part 1 of 4 (A Serial Novel)

by Marc DeSantis

  “We will need a big chunk of asteroid to get the titanium we need," Gates grumbled. "We have leftovers from the Golden Eagle, but not nearly enough to get the Star Eagle's hull together.”

  Julius nodded. “The delivery is late. It usually is.”

  Irritation showed on Gates’ face. “The admirals won’t care why I have fallen behind. They will cancel the contract. They may take the ship away from me, and give it to another yard to finish.” Gates took another swallow of tea. It had not improved with age.

  “You know that will never happen," Julius assured. "They will have to wait. No ship is ever completed on time. And who would they give the contract to? Wilmington Yard can’t handle a ship this big. Utica is too busy with frigate hulls, and Bismarck only makes escort carriers. There is no one else.”

  “No, I suppose not," Gates agreed. "But it bothers me. Seeing the hull barely started. We haven’t any place to put the systems yet. They are all stored in warehouses. That costs money. I pay good money to store weapons that ought to be in that ship there.” He pointed to the looming framework of the nascent Star Eagle. It looked more like a half-completed steel spider web than the nucleus of a starship. “I need my metal!”

  Julius shrugged. It was no use trying to talk to Gates at times like this. The man would worry because it was in his nature to worry. No changing that. Julius had suggested adopting modular construction, but Gates had only laughed, not out of scorn, but out of sadness. He had read about the old practices of ancient yards, when ships were made in sub-assemblies, transported to the construction site, and then inserted into the hull as completed. This cut down on idle time. No high-paid technicians were left waiting for the delivery of titanium from space. They could just go about their business and do their work.

  Manufacturing standards elsewhere were too poor, Gates had said, and he couldn’t trust such delicate work to outsiders. They were unreliable, and sometimes didn’t bother to ensure that their sub-assemblies would fit properly with those made in other workshops. No, everything had to be kept in-house. It was inefficient, but at least Gates could control quality. Some thought that such quasi-artisanal methods of shipbuilding were necessarily superior to mass-production, that the painstaking attention paid by the yard’s craftsmen resulted in a better product compared to the ships that might emerge from a more industrialized system of mass production. They were wrong.

  Gates had pored over all of the studies on the subject that he could acquire. They were very old, the kinds of records that just smelled of an earlier time, of an ancient era. The ancients knew better about most things. They had encountered and solved almost every problem that Gates came across in his own work, centuries, or even thousands of years, earlier. Careful mass production was always superior to the craft method that Gates was forced to employ. If he could have trusted his outside manufacturies, the makers of the drives, the fusion reactors, gravitic propulsors, weapons systems, the life support units, the sensor suites, then he could streamline his process and cut build time in half, with no loss of quality.

  There was no chance of that happening, not anytime soon. Conditions were just too primitive beyond the ringwalls of Cardiff Yard. He needed to watch everything and everyone. No one could be counted on to do things right if Gates didn’t keep an eye on him. It was also like this at the other yards, but Gates built the biggest ships - battleships, heavy cruisers, and fleet carriers - and that meant that each took a very long time to build. Constant and distressing material shortages just stretched the build-times even further.

  “The copper is late in coming too,” said Gates.

  Julius had not known that. Unlike the titanium, which was obtained from the asteroids of the outer solar belt, the copper was mined on-planet. Halifax was rich in the stuff, and it was simpler and cheaper to make wires out of the metal than to include either hard-to-fabricate optofibers or expensive superconducting electronamel in ships. Only the oldest warships had material that good. So every new vessel constructed on Halifax contained thousands of miles of primitive copper wiring snaking through its hull, connecting to fusion reactors and antiparticle generators. It was heavy, bulky, and inefficient, but it worked, and it could be repaired by nearly every mechanic on or off-world, whether at a top-notch orbital yard such as Cardiff or in a distant and ramshackle spacedock at the farthest edge of civilization.

  But without copper the ships could not be completed. Even if the Star Eagle’s hull had been finished, there remained a huge amount of work to do to get the ship into proper shape for delivery to the Navy. Everything had to be wired together in an electronic web of dizzying complexity. It took days just to complete a preliminary inspection. The Black Eagle, in common with all first examples of a brand-new ship class, had been plagued by all sorts of delays and mistakes, and her electronic systems had to be reworked four times before the Navy inspectors approved it for acceptance.

  It had been worth it. Black Eagle was a fine ship, the best in the fleet, barring the ancient warships that had survived from the Time Before which were rare beyond the power of mere words to convey. It was immediately assigned to the Eighth Warfleet, the largest in the Republic. It was better by a substantial margin than those of the preceding Sovereign class, which had been marvels in their own day, and still served in first-line fleets in many systems. The Black Eagle could make longer jumps, move faster through normal space, maneuver better, and unleash twenty percent greater firepower than a Sovereign could. When used in conjunction with a fast carrier, and supporting ships, a Black Eagle-led battlegroup was a terrifyingly formidable opponent, capable of defeating all but the most powerful of enemy fleets.

  “So much lost in the blast furnace that is history,” Gates murmured.

  “What was that?”

  "We are an old species, but we are young. We once knew more than we do now. All the names of our worlds. They meant something, long ago. But who remembers?”

  Julius nodded, and groaned inwardly. This philosophizing was usually a sign that Gates would begin a depressive spiral, ending in too much drink, followed by a day or two of recovery, which meant lost time.

  The younger man opened up a rolled blueprint, and spread it out before Gates. “I have worked out new power conduits to the main turrets, Silas. With improved superconductors, the plasma will be extra fierce.” Julius smiled.

  “I wonder if there ever was a Moscow.”

  Julius sat back in his chair. “I think there was. Who is to say?”

  “It is long gone now. Nothing left of it. Nothing left of the old world, Lost Earth, however you want to call it. So many peoples, so many cities, all gone.”

  “We will build a better future.”

  “It will end up like everything has in the past, in dust and ashes, and our children’s children to the hundredth generation will wonder if we ever existed. Everything is too old, far too old.”

  Julius turned away. He was still young, and Gates was old. He had trouble with the pessimism of the older generation. They had seen a lot - the Ajax War, the Carinan War, the Plague of ‘47, the Depression of the Sixties, and then that of the Eighties, the Big Flood of ‘72, and the Great Quake of ‘99. Julius had no disagreement that the last half century had been awful. But it had occurred in a time when things were actually improving, just ever so slightly, not getting worse. When Julius’ parents had been born, their parents could barely afford shoes for them. School was a luxury. But the economy was much improved, and Julius had moved to a new habunit on the north side of Hamilton. It wasn’t much, but the water ran hot and cold, heat was regular, and the place was clean.

  He helped his family out too. Every paycheck he received saw a portion of it go to them so they could afford to buy a place in a fancier spot. His younger brother and two sisters were going to a better school than he had. They ate better too.

  Gates never believed him when he said things were getting better. The older man had seen the fearful deprivation of the working class, and had listened, perhaps too care
fully, to the stories Julius had told him of his tough childhood. It was an odd thing, Julius thought, that Gates was more horrified by his apprentice’s upbringing than was Julius himself. What Gates had not seen was the warmth and the closeness of the Howell family. They had shared meals of a few potatoes and rice, a little meat now and again. They didn’t have much, but they didn’t mind.

  That life was far behind him. Julius was a naval architect, a very good one, and had been intimately involved in designing the Black Eagle. The Navy Board had liked the ship, and the Surveyor of the Navy had been impressed enough to grant another two contracts to the yard after its shakedown cruise had shown it to be, in his words, “a ship without major vices.” That comment was as close as the superannuated Surveyor, Cormac Grimard, was ever likely to come to effusive praise for any ship. The Black Eagle was not quite the equal of the ancient and grand Lady of the Lake, that incomparable nine thousand-year-old battleship of the Fourth Empire, but it was high praise nonetheless.

  Grimard had been a nightmare for Gates and all other contract builders for the Fleet. Once a shipwright accepted a contract from the Navy, he discovered that Grimard was a hovering gargoyle, snapping at slow progress, deriding imperfect workmanship, and being a general nuisance around the yard. The man was fortunate that the orbital was not armed, or Julius would have bet good money that the Surveyor’s shuttle back down to Hamilton would have suffered a catastrophe caused by an accidental discharge from a malfunctioning weapon. Gates had that kind of mind.

  But Julius couldn’t blame Grimard. Practices at the best of yards could become lax if not constantly monitored. Grimard acted to bolster what Gates already did, even if he also took hammer and tongs to the master shipwright more often than he should have. Gates was one of the few men who got it, those who were trying to make the building of ships into a regularized industry with products of reliable quality. The Surveyor had at least paid Gates the highest kind of compliment, if unspoken, by allowing the Master Shipwright to build the Black Eagle to his own design. Every other yard had to construct their ships according to plans drafted by the Navy Board, which was just as well, since qualified design talent was rare, and the Navy couldn’t abide defective warships made to substandard schemes.

  Gates had been much more than an employer to Julius. He laughed at the cliche, but Gates was a second father to him, a mentor and a friend. He was lucky to have gotten a job at the Yard, luckier still to have been taken on as Gates’ own apprentice. Shipping was a rising industry, new planets and routes between them were opening up to trade with every passing year, and the demand for ships was strong.

  In the shipwright’s own youth, which Julius, being a young man of just twenty-five, thought of as having occurred an inconceivably long time ago, Gates had begun his career designing cargo carriers, in particular the high-quality armed merchantmen that made the long distance runs through wilderness space, those vast regions beside and between the scattered pockets of far-flung human-populated planets. They were excellent ships, fast and heavily armed, almost a frigate in size, and much prized by their owners and crews. A lone armed merchantman could see off just about every kind of pirate craft it was likely to encounter, and run away from anything else. Planetary lore held that the ship that brought the first settlers to Halifax was an armed merchantman, at least of a kind.

  Gates had put together more ships of more types than any other shipwright in the Republic. Everything from bulk ore freighters to frigates to assault carriers to battleships such as the Black Eagle. He had even designed a supercavitating submersible cargo ship that was used on the shorter transpolar routes beneath Halifax’s southern ice caps. He was a man who knew what he was about, and yet there were still many challenges that befuddled him.

  Despite the long history of space travel, Gates and his Navy customers were often forced to reinvent solutions to unforeseen problems. The science of crossing the void in ships had been developed, lost, redeveloped, forgotten again, and then recovered more times than anyone knew. History in general was patchy. How long ago had Halifax itself been settled? That was hard to know. At least thirty thousand years before, maybe more. Halifax had never been more than a backwater world, outside the grand flows of history, until the Republic arose. Few had paid any attention to it. It had survived destruction on several occasions, its culture and technological base rising from smoking ash each time. Much had been lost. Julius would at times scratch his head when he got the rare opportunity to examine ancient technology. Sometimes the purpose of the device was apparent, but the means of its construction were not. At other times the purpose of the item was beyond comprehension. Yet it might flare to life one day, without warning, after sitting quietly for decades inside a museum, and then issue a birthday greeting from a traveling father to a child. Another might reveal itself to be a micro-orbital spacecraft after years of innocuous peacefulness in a curiosity cabinet, declaring self-importantly that it had a mission to fulfill, so please stand aside. Or it might remain silent and inscrutable, its purpose unfathomable, perhaps forever.

  The Halfaxian Navy was at the forefront of the renaissance in naval technology. It was a different thing entirely building ships for the Navy. Merchants cared about cost, above all else. Except for a handful that purchased armed merchantmen, most traders looked only to buy cogs that were as simple and cheap to operate as would survive in space long enough to pay for themselves and turn a tidy profit. They would then sell these used vessels, now battered by service on constant runs between Halifax and the outer systems, to even less careful operators - salvagers, asteroid miners, and just about anyone who wanted to escape from the government and its omnipresent tax collectors.

  The Navy bought only quality. Some of their ships, in time of war, were built with cost in mind more than anything else, especially escorts, minesweepers, and supply ships. They weren’t expected to last long. There was no sense in putting expensive, top-notch systems in a ship that was likely be blown to particles in under a year in service. But the capital ships were different, they were special. Each was expected to serve for a half-century, with periodic refits and upgrades to the weapons and other important systems. Some, the most successful classes, would cruise space for more than a hundred years before retirement.

  The battleships were by their very nature rugged and durable beyond ordinary measure. All were triple-hulled, with meters-thick armor and multiply redundant systems. Nothing short of a close-range fusion warhead detonation or a full salvo of particle cannons had a chance of doing serious damage to it. A warship such as the Star Eagle would be a sight to behold when completed. It would carry multiple marine battalions in addition to a small complement of fighters and attack craft. No expense was spared in decorating the ship either. Every first rate battleship was a testament to the Republic’s power and dignity. Like its two earlier sister ships, the Star Eagle would be painted in bands of dark gray and deep blue, with gold trim. No one sought to hide a battleship in the sense of camouflaging it. They were meant to look impressive, to awe, and to intimidate.

  The Republic was a democracy, but it had a need to awe and intimidate as much as any tyrant emperor of a single star system. Halifax might be in the midst of a self-proclaimed golden age, but most other powers had little or no interest in its achievements. They were brigand states, preying upon the weak and the unwary. Whole swathes of space were off-limits to Republican shipping because local lordlings, little better than pirates, had the wherewithal to attack merchantmen plying the routes between more civilized polities. The Navy could not be everywhere at once, and in those marginal areas where trade routes had to pass close by to worlds held by a warrior caste, buccaneers thrived.

  Most would keep well away of Republican fleets and task forces. Heavily-loaded cargo ships were tempting targets, but a Republican frigate backed up by a single escort carrier group could make short work of an entire flotilla of raiders. But there were never enough ships to deal with every threat, and never enough to prevent pirates
from reappearing months after they had been trounced by the Navy. They were weeds, and had to be managed as such. They would never be wholly eradicated until the systems that harbored them had matured politically, and saw that they had more to gain by peaceful trade than theft.

  In the meantime, Julius prayed that the Navy would nuke as many of the pirate lairs as they could.

  Chapter Three

  RHS Steadfast, Memnon System

  More brooded in his quarters. He had much to think about. The security of the ultra-classified mission that he and his squadron had been sent on had been breached. Had it been deliberate, or accidental? Did it matter, right now, with three of his ships dead around him and his own in mortal peril? Slips of one kind or another happened, sometimes with terrible consequences. Even a small bit about the range of weaponry or detection suppression could lead to higher losses, which would only become apparent months afterward when the Admiralty’s scientists compared ship losses from one period to the next and saw an unexplained spike.

  Who was behind the trap? What about Tartarus? King Evander, nicknamed the Sphinx by Halifax intelligence, was a crafty statesman. He had never abjured his claim to universal monarchy over all humanity. He played down his desire to bring all the worlds of men, as he called them, under the white and red banner of Tartarus, but few believed him. Tartarus was a rarity among the great powers of the era: culturally refined, outwardly polite, economically powerful, possessing an unshakeable confidence in its own superiority, and with enough genuine achievements to back up its boasts.

  It was the oddest of nations. Unlike most other worlds of the Great Sphere, which had been settled freely in the bygone age of exploration, Tartarus Prime had been founded as a colony world of outcasts, defeated rebels, dissidents, refugees, and a hundred other unwanted groups expelled by, or fleeing from, one or another empire of the stars. It was a grim planet, orbiting a dim red star, barely warm enough for agriculture of the simplest sort. It had been left to its own devices for millennia as empires and kingdoms came and went. Nothing of interest happened there, not ever.