Intergalactic Union

by D. L. Harrison

  “So, you’ve tested it?” I asked, cautiously optimistic at that point. My daughter was terrifyingly awesome, what would she be in six years when she was a woman ready to conquer the world? I was extremely proud, and I was acting like it, while also acting like it was just normal or something, for a twelve-year-old to make such a breakthrough, but inside I felt a little over my head, to be honest.

  Sure, it wasn’t an original invention, but she’d taken my wife’s amazing invention and pushed it further along to its full limits. The tactical implications of the change were fairly large as well.

  She replied, “Only locally and in the lab. We can do that now, your fleets in the void are within fifty light years of my test ship in the lab system. Can I?”

  I grinned, caught up in her excitement, “Go ahead.”

  She filled the room with two holograms. One of the lab system and her ship, the other of my fleets. Less than a second later her ship jumped and appeared next to my fleet. Then it jumped back to the system.

  She bounced on her toes, “Can we install it, it’s all software, really. The deeper capabilities have always been there.”

  Diana said, “You did an incredible thing, Melody. We’re proud of you, but one step at a time. We’re going to come up with a test regimen, if I can’t break anything by the end of the day, or find a bug in your software, we’ll push out the upgrade.”

  I nodded, “Ditto, Mel. Sounds good to me. I’ll give you control over a hundred thousand platforms, so you can test the formation jump software. Oh, and don’t test the long-range void jump by predictive resonance outside our fifty galaxies, no starting wars.”

  “I promise,” she said excitedly.

  They got back to work, and I gave my wife and daughter a hug before I got back to designing the unique colony ships for the rest of the day.

  It’d been a long day, and a lot had happened by the time I finished it up and called it a day. The new jump system had been deemed safe by my wife, and that was being pushed out to all fleet ships, probes, and the station as well.

  Chapter Four

  The scent of lasagna and garlic bread baking in the oven hit me as we arrived at Jayna’s place for an extended family dinner, which we did at least once a week. My sister had the same light blonde hair and ocean blue eyes I did, and she was willowy at five foot six.

  Carmine answered the door. My brother in law was six feet one, with dark brown hair and eyes. He was good people and was part of the security force in the city. Their son Brock was just a year younger than Melody, and the two of them ran off to play before we could even get a greeting out.

  “Is it safe?”

  Jayna had been more than a bit upset yesterday, when Cassie threw the rich and connected American off the station who’d in my opinion, been acting no better than a toddler throwing a fit. Not to mention me throwing the committee off the station not a few hours later.

  Carmine laughed, “Good, I think.”

  Jayna’s voice rang out from the kitchen, “I heard that!”

  Diana gave me a little push, and we moved inside. Like my place, it looked like a large two-bedroom condo inside, with a whole lot of space. In the center of the middle level of the station, it was pretty much just us, the command center, and top-secret labs, so there was more than enough room to spread out.

  “So, dare I ask how your day was?” I asked as we moved into the kitchen.

  I relaxed slightly at her glaring smile, which was teasing.

  Jayna said, “The fallout isn’t that bad. At least, not on the civilian tourist side. The travel ban wasn’t good, but China never let a whole lot of their citizens visit anyway. The travel advisory by the United States did cause a few cancellations, but perversely it also caused a surge of bookings, and we got a much higher than normal amount of hits on our website today. Including our constitution page and applications for citizenry.

  “I think most fair-minded people thought Kearns was way out of line. Lastly, no one with reservations that had been up here before on vacation, cancelled.”

  “So, it was a wash?”

  Jayna nodded, “A little better than actually, but long-term that will taper off quickly. We’ll see. It depends on if things spiral further, but I know you had no choice when you kicked off the committee.”

  “What about the starting debate this afternoon, in the U.N.”

  It’d taken a couple of hours for our ambassador to get recognized and put it on the floor. I hoped my idea would be well received, to claim a small area in every galaxy, but they’d barely gotten started with it before calling it a day. The only positive indication so far was none seemed to be violently against it.

  Jayna shrugged, “It won’t affect most people, only governments will care about that debate. The average citizen will be long dead by the time we even fill in our local galaxy’s available worlds. Even the ones who choose to extend their lives and live a thousand or more years.”

  She wasn’t wrong about that, likely only the governments and people in power would care about that. Unless their governments did something they didn’t like, of course.

  I said, “I was thinking we’d start spreading out immediately, rather than putting all our eggs in our local space basket first. Better chances for humanity’s long-term survival. We could cycle through all seventy-six galaxies every seventy-six colonies.”

  Jayna shrugged, “Still won’t care, an available world is an available world. That will be a concern for some governments though, to preserve their way of life and culture if one of our galaxies are invaded by superior forces.”

  I nodded, then we’d have time to adjust and take it back from everywhere else. Assuming they didn’t conquer all seventy-six galaxies at once, that is.

  “Dinner smells amazing, Jayna,” I changed the subject, enough about work.

  She smirked, “Thanks. So how was your day?”

  So much for being done with the work subject, I glossed over the highlights of my day, a lot was done, and a lot happened.

  Cassie went next, “My contacts are all a little nervous our president cut off his feed to the joint command center. Of course, no other countries had been doing that at all, with their colony fleets, or even with their fleets right here in SOL. I don’t think they’ll do anything rash, or at least not anything else. The Vrok really spooked them with their much stronger weapons and shield systems.”

  Jayna said, “Why lie though?”

  Cassie shrugged, “Imagine it from their point of view. The U.S. worked hard to get back in space, and the president has had a hard time undoing the mistakes of his predecessor. China, Russia, Japan, and England managed to get their hands on the tech, somehow, and they all built fleets.

  “Sure, our Scott still had the biggest stick in humanity’s drawer, but they could still kick everyone else’s butt in the fifty galaxies. They were no longer dependent on Astraeus to protect the Earth, they had the Gray technology with a few weapon upgrades, but no nanite reactors or jump drives.

  “Along comes the Vrok and that all changes, their safety blanket pulled away. A fearsome predatory race that looks reminiscent of ants the size of a damned van, even if they are mammals, and their ships are so much more powerful. A race that wants to turn Earth into a snack bar with humanity as the main course. So, not only can’t they beat the new enemy, they find that once again despite all their power in space that humanity and all their countries and colonies are completely dependent on Scott for survival.

  “Those fears made them make a very stupid decision. They used manipulation and lies instead of trusting Scott to do what was necessary and distasteful. There was no way they could build or man enough of their ships for phase one of their plan, and without jumping it wouldn’t have even worked.”

  Diana nodded, “It’s a mess. My day was busy too. My people swear they’ll have the software done sometime tomorrow and we can start large scale testing.”

  Well, that was welcome news. The turret hardware was already built, so it’
d just take four hours or so to complete the upgrades once they were verified by testing. The software would go a lot quicker than that, it was building enough of the upgraded nanites that would take that long.

  Jayna said, “Three days?”

  Diana nodded, “We’re touching almost every system. We don’t want to run into a bug that makes command and control lockup during a fight, or that makes the weapons initiate an emergency shut down because the safety system is buggy, or… any number of other things. It’ll take time for exhaustive testing, before I’d even consider pushing it to our fleets, much less our customers who have our ships that are manned.”

  “So, four more days, starting tomorrow.”

  Diana kissed my cheek, “Yes.”

  The lasagna smelled perfect as Jayna pulled it out of the oven, along with homemade garlic bread that was topped with cheese.

  Jayna gave Carmine a look, and he left to go collect Brock and Melody. Obviously, he was just as well trained as I was.

  Diana said, “I have been giving it thought, if the enemy attacks before we’re ready?”

  “Tactically?” I raised an eyebrow.

  Diana smirked, “From a scientific standpoint. At a hundred gravities of acceleration, it’ll take them thirteen hours to make it from the FTL line to Earth. At halfway, at their greatest speed, they’ll be going a little over point zero eight the speed of light. If we waited and timed firing our mini-platforms as missiles from Earth, at six hundred gravities they’d take less than three hours to reach the halfway point, and they’d be moving at point one nine five of light speed at that point.”

  I nodded thoughtfully, “That would mean it would cross the light second energy range from the enemy in just five seconds, instead of five minutes. They’d only have time to take out a combined sixty billion missiles, assuming they didn’t miss once. Make that ninety billion, if they attack with six million ships instead of four million. That’d hit all their ships with almost eight thousand missiles each.”

  I shook my head, “They’re not stupid though, if we launched, they’d see it and figure that out. They’d break early, and that would give them the two point three seconds they’d needed to take out the rest.”

  Cassie said, “So fire more of them. Bring in two fleets, or three, and fire a hundred and forty-one trillion missiles instead of forty-seven.”

  I nodded, “It still might not work, if they tighten their formations that’s a lot of missiles converging in on a relatively small area, one blowing up and releasing antimatter could set off multiple chain reactions taking out all the missiles around them. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try, and it’s the best idea I’ve heard so far using our old technology, but the upgrade finishing would be far surer of a solution.”

  Assuming they’d even be attacking SOL at all, which granted seemed the likeliest. If they’d been watching us as long as I believed they had, then they had to know our center of power was on and around Earth. They also had to know taking out my station would severely cripple our defenses.

  Carmine came back with the kids, so we dropped the subject like a bad habit, not wanting to scare either of them as we moved to and sat down at the table.

  Chapter Five

  The next day started out fairly slowly. I was spending my time distracting myself from the stress of war with another project. The two colony packages were coming together and would be at the station for pickup tomorrow. I’d gotten all that figured out yesterday before quitting time.

  I’d always believed we should trade, not just to make things fair, but make the connections with other races and create friends out there. It’d paid off thirteen years ago, when Threx had warned us of the coming invasion by the Grays, and nothing had happened to change my mind on it.

  The Vax augmented reality implants required something to pair to it, which is why instead of stealing their tech and reworking it, I’d chosen to create the quantum paired smart phones for telecommunications and data services through those implants.

  My current little project was taking the next step there. We would still get the implants from the Vax, but I was working on a nanite shell for them that would be the new cell and data phone part of things, so it would all be part of the implant. Our nanites married to their device, so no external device was needed at all to marry their augmented reality tech with our data and comm systems.

  The challenge of course was our nanites couldn’t run on the body’s bioelectric field, and the thought of injecting a nanite vacuum reactor into someone’s body just sounded like a really bad idea to me. Before we’d gone with powered nanites however, Diana had come up with a weaker source of energy for our ships so they could enter atmosphere without a fusion reactor online.

  That power source was much safer, and there were only a few hundred nanites forming a partial layer over the implant device to create that data connection. So I worked on that, trying to get that alternative power source small enough to just power a few hundred nanites.

  It was about an hour before lunch when I took a break from that, and we headed toward the conference room with Cassie to meet up with Rena, Threx, Cirlok, and Uvi as planned. Unfortunately, the U.N. was still arguing about it, and to be fair it would’ve been foolish to expect anything less. Some of them didn’t like the idea, I suspected simply because they hadn’t come up with it themselves. Some also thought if the aliens we protected from the great empires around us felt they owed us, they should give us steep discounts in trades in compensation, but there were plenty of supporters for the idea as well that saw it for the opportunity it was.

  The problem was it was an extremely long-term investment for the good of mankind, and the greedy among them couldn’t see a way to line their pockets with it. Maybe that was just my newly formed pessimism showing, but that’s how I saw it.

  A part of me hoped their governments were slow as well, so we wouldn’t look stupid.

  “How’s the hiring going?”

  Cassie smirked, “Good. I have a few promising people I’m going to start grooming to take the public view on, while I slowly fade to the background and mostly work with my people. I’ll still be running things, they’ll work for me, but it’ll be hard for an outsider to make that distinction.”

  I nodded, “So you’re bowing to the council.”

  She sighed, then nodded, “I have to, and I don’t think they’re wrong. Right now, I’m doing the equivalent of several jobs, but it’s worked because we’re so small. If I take a step back, and let those others step forward in more specific positions, that should be good enough.”

  I grunted, “You’ll still tell me what to do?”

  She giggled, and patted my arm, “Yes, no fear there my presidential puppet.”

  She really ran things, at least on the presidential government side. I’d been taking her lead for years and otherwise avoiding it, to work on my projects and inventions which was my true passion. Believe it or not, I felt a lot of relief at that, even her tease was a relief. In a real way I was a cutout president, my real job and passion was being CEO and President of our technological businesses. I trusted her that much.

  “This should be a short meeting.”

  She smirked, “We can hope.”

  We were the first ones there, and we grabbed a drink as we sat down from the water pitchers and glasses that’d been set up. Water was the best thing to offer in these meetings. Foods and other drinks could be poisonous to other races, but every lifeform in the galaxy that we’d met, so far, needed water to live.

  The four them arrived together, which I took note of, as they sat down.

  I said, “My people are still discussing the plan we came up yesterday, it may be a few days before a consensus can be reached.”

  In most things, the U.N. could never decide anything in less than months, but they’d been pretty good so far when it came to presenting a unified stand toward alien matters outside human space. It even made sense, nothing brought humanity together more than an outside threat, o
r even outside opportunity, apparently.

  Rena said, “My government likes the plan, but it’s not enough.”

  Uvi interjected, “As does mine. The nature and instincts of a hunter are that past hunts fade quickly from the mind, and we focus on what’s next or what’s coming in the future.”

  Threx nodded, “Mine as well. A simple business transaction, even if ongoing, isn’t enough for my people as well. Time, especially centuries followed by millennia, will twist and change things as our descendants and yours judge our actions and even our intentions here today. Our people may one day begrudge the space given, once all our races start to grow large enough to bump heads as you suggested yesterday. Your people may also change, and over time come to decide it is their due and no longer enough of a payment.”

  Cirlok was satisfied with merely nodding his head in agreement.

  “What would you suggest to combat that instinct? I don’t disagree with you, eventual corruption of the ideals behind the idea are almost a guarantee, over that much time.”

  Even if my line continued to rule in Astraeus, and none of them were corrupted, which is kind of doubtful given human nature, it wouldn’t be enough. In thousands of years our total human population will grow large enough to support fully manned fleets of the sizes we have today, and Astraeus won’t be the only gatekeeper against the aggressive great empires around us.

  Rena said, “We don’t want you to rule us, or make all seventy-six galaxies an empire. Nor do we want a joint government of some kind, our races will always want to be independent, even the gentlest of us would resist even a small influence from other races on theirs. Yet, my people suggest an intergalactic union of sorts. Not a true government over any of us, but a step past a simple treaty or bill of lading.”