Into the Light

by David Weber

  He paused, eyebrows arched, and Howell nodded.

  “Okay, I’m with you so far. I think. But where are you going with this?”

  “Doctor Jackson, you said this is more advanced than anything we found in the Hegemony’s database, yes?” Jackson nodded on the smart wall. “And Hosea said that these ‘nanobots’ use a form of counter-grav that we can’t detect?”

  “I’m not prepared to say it is counter-grav, actually,” Jackson said. “I don’t see what else it could be, you understand, but if I can’t even detect it, I’m not prepared to categorize it yet.”

  “Granted. But, either it’s a form of counter-grav we can’t detect, and as far as we know the Hegemony couldn’t produce something like that, or else it’s something else entirely, using some principle the Hegemony doesn’t know anything about. Either way, it sounds like it’s clearly outside the Hegemony’s technological capabilities, at least in so far as those capabilities are laid out in the data we captured from the Shongairi. Would that be fair?”

  “It’s certainly one way to describe it,” Jackson said slowly.

  “You’re suggesting that what we actually acquired is the … export version of the Hegemony’s technology?” Howell’s expression was troubled, to say the least, and he frowned heavily. “They gave the Puppies a downgraded version, not their cutting edge tech? We don’t have a handle on their actual tech capabilities at all? No yardstick?”

  “I didn’t say that, Mister President,” Dvorak said quickly. “I mean, that may be the case, but I don’t think so. And you might think about when Vlad was first transformed into whatever this stuff really is, too. At that point, the Hegemony didn’t know a thing about us, didn’t have any record of humanity or our planet at all. So how would he have gotten exposed to Hegemony tech?”

  Howell’s frown segued from unhappiness to confusion.

  “It has to be from the Hegemony, doesn’t it?” he asked almost plaintively.

  “Except for the fact that it can’t be,” Dvorak replied. “Unless we’re going to assume that every word of all the data we acquired from the Shongairi was deliberately ‘cooked’ before it was handed to them, and from the records we have, the tech base we captured from them predates any mention anywhere in the Hegemony’s records of us or the planet Earth. That suggests to me that if the tech base was doctored at all, it was done before the Hegemony knew anything about us or our planet. So I don’t think this is theirs.”

  “You’re suggesting another bunch of aliens?” Howell asked skeptically. “Vlad Drakulya had a close encounter of the third kind with some other group of interstellar travelers six hundred years ago, and they beamed him up to the mothership for experiments?”

  “Not exactly,” Dvorak said dryly. “But I need to go run a different search—a more focused one—on the historical data. Because there are a couple of places—only a couple, you understand—that I’ve come across in which there’s a sort of … truncated reference. All of them are from the very early history of the Hegemony, and there could be other explanations. But on the basis of what Hosea and Doctor Jackson are telling us, I have to wonder if they aren’t redactions.”

  “What kind of ‘redaction’?” Howell asked intently.

  “I don’t know, frankly,” Dvorak admitted. “And I don’t want to talk myself into any theories the evidence doesn’t support. Or, worse, to decide that the evidence does support a theory when it actually doesn’t. But if we’re looking at a nanotechnology more advanced than anything the Hegemony has now and Vlad was exposed to it less than sixty years after the Hegemony’s first scout ship ever discovered us, then that sure as hell suggests it came from somebody else. I don’t have any clue who the … call them the ‘Other Guys’ for now, might be, but if there are redactions in the historical record, and if they occur as early as they seem to, then one hell of a wildcard’s just been dropped into the game.”

  . IX .

  SPACE STATION INVICTUS,

  L5 LAGRANGE POINT

  “Really something, isn’t it?” Rhonda Jeffries murmured.

  “Could say that,” Alec Wilson agreed. He was technically head down in the microgravity as the two of them gazed through the workboat’s viewport at the improbable geometry of the Planetary Union Navy’s first true shipyard.

  The “building slips”—immense, widely dispersed, openwork frames of krystar, a synthetic alloy far stronger than anything Earth had ever dreamed of—were enormous, but they weren’t big enough to build entire ships. Not the size of interstellar vessels. Instead, they used the modular technique, with each slip building one component of the starship-to-be. The one they were examining at the moment was Golf Section, the seventh of the fifteen sections which would be assembled into the core hull of the starship PUNS James Robinson, the lead dreadnought of the Planetary Union. The entire slip appeared to be rotating on its axis, but that impression was false. Actually, their workboat was the one moving relative to it as they kept station on the slip’s rotating hub, but it did give them an opportunity to appreciate afresh the sheer size of the project. Golf Section was basically a circular slice of thickly armored hull, life-support sections, environmental and power runs, and everything else that went into creating an artificial, inhabitable world … that just happened to be as broad as five and a half nuclear aircraft carriers laid end to end.

  And it was “only” three quarters of a kilometer thick and just under two kilometers across. When completed, the core hull would be a cylinder 11.25 kilometers long and 1.9 kilometers in diameter. Of course, the final dimensions of the finished ship would be substantially greater than that.

  “It’ll be even more impressive when we’re done, though,” Wilson pointed out now.

  “Yah,” Jeffries agreed. She was from Minnesota, with straw-blond hair, blue eyes, and a strong nose. She was also three inches taller than Wilson.

  “Well, I suppose we should get to it,” he said now, reaching up and securing his helmet. His suit’s gloves extruded from its sleeves as Jeffries donned her own helmet, and he tapped a key on his sleeve pad. “Com check,” he said.

  “Five-by-five,” Jeffries replied. “All systems green.”

  “Here, too,” Wilson confirmed, and tugged on a bulkhead handhold to send himself drifting into the workboat’s airlock.

  As he stepped out into the bottomless void, Alec Wilson found himself reflecting on how far from home he was. Earth and the Moon were equidistant from his current vantage point, and his wildest dreams—pre-invasion, anyway—had never included his becoming an astronaut. At the moment, however, the “astronaut” program had been broadened quite a bit. At least ten thousand men and women worked aboard the Invictus platforms alone, and Bastion boasted a population of over twelve thousand.

  And those numbers were only going to grow. It was inevitable.

  “Any more word on that problem last night?” he asked as he and Jeffries activated their suit packs and sailed across the half-kilometer gap between the workboat and the slip’s hab module.

  “Sounds like it was human error this time,” Jeffries replied. He could almost see her shrug, even though she was behind him at the moment. “One of the foremen got his work orders confused. He sent the bots the wrong coordinates, so they went where they were told and then just stood there when there was nothing for them to do. Cost us about five hours.”

  “I thought we caught it after about two and a half,” Wilson said.

  “Sure, but while they were standing there doing nothing, they were blocking the bots that were supposed to be working that part of the site. So we lost two and a half hours in both places. That’s five, in my book.”

  “I suppose so,” Wilson sighed, and suppressed another sigh—this one of relief—as his boots touched down on the module’s landing stage and adhered. The module’s rotation reasserted a sense of up and down, although the apparent gravity was only about half of the one he’d grown up in. He couldn’t help how vastly comforting he found that, but whatever his forebrain mi
ght understand, his hindbrain couldn’t quite seem to grasp that he wasn’t really plunging to his doom down an endless, bottomless chasm whenever he went EVA. Some people, like Jeffries, said they enjoyed the experience. He found that difficult to understand, but he believed them. After all, putatively sane people had enjoyed jumping out of perfectly functional airplanes for a long time. Still, he did cherish a few doubts about exactly how much they enjoyed it. However convenient the humans and bots actually out working on Golf Section might find microgravity, even Jeffries seemed to prefer a firm sense of “up” and “down” while she worked.

  The hatch in front of him cycled, and he and Jeffries stepped into an airlock which could have comfortably accommodated at least a dozen people. Hegemony-tech techniques for evacuating and pressurizing airlocks were as advanced as any of the rest of the technological cornucopia humanity had acquired. Given what they did, the “monkey boys” from Earth, as Wilson’s Uncle Dave was prone to call them, had done far less tinkering with the software which controlled those techniques, too. Screwing up an airlock was something someone only got to do once.

  The pressure stabilized, the inner hatch irised open, and they stepped through it into the master control room for building slip Argonaut Seven.

  “Well, look who’s here! And an entire—” Marsail MacAmbrais looked ostentatiously at the bulkhead clock “—seven minutes early! My God. The millennium has come!”

  “Yeah, yeah. We love you too, Marcy.” Wilson snorted. “And, trust me, if I’d realized we were running that early, we’d have finished our pinochle game before we came across.”

  “I know. I know!” She shook her head, then climbed out of her float chair to shake hands with him as his gloves vanished once more into his vac suit’s sleeves. “Lazy, idle layabout that you are.”

  “That’s me,” he agreed, gripping her hand firmly. “Anything else interesting happen after the little snafu last night?”

  “Don’t be pushing that black mark off on me,” MacAmbrais told him with a grin. “And, no. Once we got Mister Friedman straightened out, everything went smoothly. And I’ll have you know that we’re still ahead of Echo, Juno, and Lima.”

  “Oh, I see. But, excuse me for pointing that out, isn’t that another way of saying that we’re coming in twelfth?”

  “If you want to be picky about it, I guess.”

  “I’m pretty sure the Navy’s keeping track, whether you are or not,” he pointed out. “On the other hand, all of us are ahead of projections, so I don’t suppose they’re going to be collecting heads anytime soon. If they do though, I’m nominating you as our donor.”

  “You’re always so good to me,” she said with a chuckle. “And are you and Jess coming to dinner Tuesday or not?”

  “Sure, as long as you promise not to cook. I mean, I like haggis as much as the next sane person.”

  “Oh?” MacAmbrais cocked her head, her Scottish accent abruptly more pronounced. “Ah wisnae gang tae bring it oop, ye wee nugget, boot that kedge ye fed us fer brakfast—‘grits,’ did ye ca’ thaim?—wisnae sae guid.”

  “It must be something about living on an island surrounded by sheep,” Wilson mused with a smile. “It’s so … so … so insular. You just never get the opportunity to develop a taste for the finer things in life.”

  “Yer an eejit,” she told him, then laughed. “I promise it won’t be haggis. In fact, Frank was in Argentina last week. He brought back some really nice beef.”

  “In that case, we’ll be there,” Wilson assured her.

  “Thought so.” She nodded with a trace of complacency, then rounded up her partner, Oliver Woods, with a nod of her head. “Chariot’s waiting, Ollie.”

  “Yeah, and I got a hot date with a third-grade choral presentation,” Woods said.

  “It’s all yours,” MacAmbrais continued, turning back to Wilson. “Boards are all green, and aside from Friedman’s little mishap, the shift went perfectly. Try to keep it that way.”

  “Show off,” Wilson muttered, and she chuckled. Then she patted him on the shoulder, collected her helmet, and led Woods into the airlock.

  “See you guys tomorrow,” she said, then settled her helmet over her head and checked the seal. Wilson could see her lips move as she went through the communications test with Woods. Then she waved one hand, and the inner hatch closed.

  “Well, I guess we should get to work,” he said then, and Jeffers nodded. She settled into the chair Woods had occupied and started running quickly through the standard checklist. Wilson waited long enough to collect a cup of coffee, then took MacAmbrais’ chair and began his own checks.

  It didn’t take long, not with the computer support they enjoyed, and then he tipped back, crossed his legs, and held his coffee cup in both hands as he gazed at the panoramic view screens showing every phase of Golf Section’s construction.

  He never would have expected to end up here, either, before the invasion. He’d worked for GE, a specialist in turbines, which at least meant he’d been accustomed to thinking in terms of what had then represented both high-tech and the manufacturing sector. That hadn’t really been appropriate training for his present duties, but off the top of his head, he couldn’t think of anything that would have been. The pre-invasion experts in spacecraft design had suffered heavily when the Shongairi’s KEWs went after Earth’s technological sectors. Even if they hadn’t, as advanced and esoteric as their knowledge had been, they’d been natives paddling around in dugout canoes compared to humanity’s current projects. Most of them were in really senior positions, like Claude Massengale, anyway. So the nuts and bolts of building Earth’s interstellar fleet fell to people like Alec Wilson and Rhonda Jeffers and their NET training.

  And they were doing it. They were actually doing it. The familiar wonder of that thought went through him as he looked at those view screens, thought about what those hundreds of robotic carpenter bees and their human supervisors were actually creating. Robinson would be the first Earth dreadnought; she wouldn’t be the last.

  And the Hegemony’s not going to like them one bit, he thought with somber satisfaction.

  Fleet Commander Thikair’s dreadnoughts had been about half the size of Robinson, with a third of her armament, and fifty percent slower in phase-space. And the Robinson class was only humanity’s first stab at building an effective capital ship. Wilson had seen some of the design teams’ discussions about ways in which even she could be improved, and the thought of where they might be in another fifteen years—or fifty, or a hundred—was … mind-boggling.

  When completed, Robinson would consist of an outer war hull, a geodesic basket weave krystar cage, wrapped around a heavily armored core hull. Power generation, life-support, all of the control systems, and manned parasites would be carried in or limpeted to the exterior of the core hull, which would form a spin section to create a comfortable single gravity. It would rotate on frictionless magnetic “bearings” in a normal flight regime. When docked, or going to battle stations, it would be mechanically locked in place and the crew would fight their ship in microgravity.

  The outer hull mounted the phase-drive nodes, but it also carried missile launchers, magazines, energy weapons, and defensive systems, all run by automated, self-repairing systems so efficient that the entire ship could be operated by a crew of only thirty-five under emergency conditions.

  It would’ve been really neat if they’d been able to give Robinson shields, to go with all those other goodies, but not even the Hegemony had tech that would do that. Wilson was certain some of the theoretical teams would be diving down every rabbit hole in sight to figure out if the “monkey boys and girls” could find a way to do it, but he wasn’t going to hold his breath waiting for them to succeed.

  In the meantime, the outer hull was designed to suffer major damage without losing structural integrity, although the best defense of all was to not be hit in the first place. In pursuit of that, she was lavishly equipped with electronic warfare systems and antimissile defenses
. There wasn’t much they could do about stopping energy weapon hits, but even Hegemony effective ranges for energy fire were no more than a few hundred kilometers, thanks to physical limitations on the focusing mechanism. They were quick firing and required no magazines, which made them ideal for missile defense, but the true killers were the missiles.

  The launchers were basically enormous railguns, launching self-guided homing missiles with an initial velocity of right on 25 KPS. The recoil effect of launching such heavy projectiles at such high velocity meant that even something as enormous as Robinson couldn’t fire a lot of them in a single salvo, which limited the density of the patterns she could throw. On the other hand, those launchers could spit out one missile every five seconds, which would turn her fire into a continuous stream of incoming destruction.

  Each missile massed right on thirty metric tons, which meant each of them would hit with just over the energy of an eight-hundred-kiloton explosion. Discouraging something like that when it had locked onto its target took a lot of energy delivered really, really quickly, which was what lasers were good for, but there were also the last ditch “autocannon.” Wilson thought of them as railgun Vulcans. Although their rate of fire per barrel was only two rounds a second, they were mounted in quads, giving each mount a firing rate of almost five hundred rounds a minute, and each of their eighty-kilo “slugs” would meet the incoming round with a closing velocity of just under 50 KPS … and four megatons of kinetic energy. They would drill through any missile ever built like a hyper-velocity awl, shedding energy as they went. Not all of their energy, of course—not in the microsecond or so their passage would take—but enough. The material they vaporized and displaced on their way though would radiate outward and thoroughly shatter their target from the inside out. But hitting a bullet with another bullet was always a chancy proposition, especially when the incoming bullet could dodge and would be doing its best to avoid being hit. Hence the light-speed lasers as the outer defense zone, designed to kill the incoming missile’s guidance capability. If it didn’t cause the missile to miss entirely, it would at least eliminate or impair its ability to evade its target’s defensive kinetic fire.