“Of course he did. Nagatha, thank you. I have spent the past seven weeks miserably thinking that I killed Skippy. Now, you know my second question, right?”
“I believe I do, yes. While my limited functioning does not allow me to keep the ship running or program the jump drive, I certainly have been able to monitor Kristang communications. The war you sparked on Kobamik has spread to almost every area of space controlled by the Kristang. At first, the Thuranin were annoyed and attempted to step in and negotiate a ceasefire, even refusing to transport Kristang warships. After eleven days, the Thuranin gave in to the inevitable, and now they simply want their clients’ civil war over as quickly as possible. From the Thuranin communications I intercepted, those little green pinheads, to use Skippy’s term for them, do not care at all which clans emerge victorious from the civil war; they are thoroughly disgusted with the Kristang. You may be amused to hear the third party most interested in the war between Kristang clans is the Jeraptha; they have actually temporarily paused their own offensive military operations to, as they say it, ‘get in on the action’. The Jeraptha government’s Central Wagering Department has been overwhelmed with a flood of requests to join the ‘action’; the delay in processing and recording wagers has caused a major scandal that may bring down the current Jeraptha federal government.”
“Holy crap. Those beetles are serious about their gambling. They aren’t, uh, putting their thumbs on the scales to influence the outcome, are they? Trying to give an edge to the clans they bet on?”
“According to odds published by the Central Wagering Department, there is only a sixteen percent chance that any such cheating by a Jeraptha party could actually influence the final outcome of the conflict.”
“The Jeraptha are taking bets about cheating?” I asked, astonished.
“Certainly,” Nagatha responded, amused. “The Jeraptha wager on everything. They assume people will try to cheat, so why not profit by it?”
“Unbelievable,” I shook my head. The Jeraptha were patrons of UNEF-Paradise’s allies, the Ruhar, but I did not think we should ever attempt to deal with them. Hell, if the Jeraptha ever learned about the Merry Band of Pirates, I’m sure they would drop everything to get bets in on how long our pirate ship, our entire species, could survive. No way could the Jeraptha miss juicy action like that.
“Your next question undoubtedly is whether the Fire Dragons still have a deal for the Ruhar to send a ship to Earth.” She paused, either for dramatic effect, or for me to speak. “They do not. When the war started, the Fire Dragons forgot all about Earth, and the Ruhar, and anything other than killing their enemies. The Ruhar had to send a query to the Fire Dragons, because the Fire Dragons had not responded as previously scheduled. When the Fire Dragons finally replied, it was to insult the Ruhar, and threaten to burn their entire species, after the Fire Dragons conquered all the other clans and came out of the war on top. The Ruhar took that answer as a simple ‘No’ and cancelled the deal. The issue of sending a ship to Earth is dead.”
“Yes!” I pumped my fists in the air. “That is great news, thank you, Nagatha. Hey, uh, what the Fire Dragons said about winning the war?”
“Do not be concerned,” she knew our goal was for Kristang society to be fractured at the end of the war. For one clan to conquer the others and emerge from the war stronger than before was the opposite of what we wanted. “Because the war unfortunately,” her voice had a mischievous tone, “began before the Fire Dragons or Black Trees were fully ready, both of those major clans were caught off-guard, and suffered substantial and unexpected losses in the beginning of the conflict. They are still fighting more defensively than they wished to, as their weakness is seen as an opportunity for lesser clans to settle long-simmering scores with the Big Two. The premature beginning of the war was dreadfully inconvenient for the Fire Dragon and Black Trees. Alliances are forming and being broken almost on a daily basis, as clans maneuver for power. You can understand why the Jeraptha are fixated on the conflict; they have to constantly adjust their wagers to keep up with the latest developments in the war.”
“Damn. I am glad I’m a human instead of a Jeraptha; being a beetle sounds like a whole lot of work. Nagatha, I’m getting into the shower now, so-”
“Oh, yes,” she giggled. “I will give you some privacy. Don’t you be embarrassed, dear, Skippy told me what you do in the shower.”
“What? That little shithead, I’m going to kill- Look, Nagatha,” I’m sure my face was burning red with embarrassment. “All I meant to say was that, when my head is under the shower, I can’t talk with you.”
“Oh. Oh. Oh, dear, I am terribly sorry. You enjoy your shower, I will, hmm. This is truly mortifying, I must apologize. I suppose it serves me right for listening to Skippy. Now I understand your human emotion of ‘embarrassment’. This is uncomfortable. Please, Colonel Bishop, call me on your zPhone when you are out of the shower.”
“Thank you. One last thing; Chang told me I could take a long shower, what we call a ‘Hollywood shower’. Is that Ok? I don’t want to strain the ship’s resources.”
“Yes, dear, Colonel Chang was speaking truthfully. As long as we have even one reactor functioning, the water replenishment system takes almost no power away from other requirements.”
“Great. Uh, talk with you in like three minutes.” Damn, that was a conversation I wanted to end quickly.
Dr. Friedlander was in the science lab, he didn’t waste any time when I walked through the door. “Colonel, we managed to complete the shutdown of Reactor Two, and we’re in the process of bringing Reactor One down to minimum standby power. Two was already experiencing problems, as you know, and One is due for a maintenance cycle that we are unable to perform by ourselves. By keeping One on standby, we can keep it limping along as a backup for when reactor Three goes down.”
“Do you know how long that will be?”
“My guess, and right now it is only a guess, is Three will run by itself for six or seven months, until it is also due for heavy maintenance. We might be able to keep it running and defer maintenance for an unknown length of time, but eventually the safety protocols will cause the reactor to shut down by itself. At that point, I’m hoping we can gradually increase power output from reactor One.”
“Until One also shuts down. I get it. Six months is enough time for us to return to Earth; is the output from a single reactor sufficient to power the jump drive?”
“Yes. Colonel, you know power output is not the problem with the jump drive. We can’t return to Earth from here.”
“Something about the jump drive coils falling out of calibration? Let’s assume I know nothing, and break it down for me Barney-style.” When the doctor gave me a blank look, I explained the US military slang. “Explain it like you’re talking to a three year old.”
“Oh,” his face turned red, he probably considered my intellect at that level but was too polite to say so. “Jump drive coils all have to work synchronously, to create the quantum-level resonance that alters-” The look on my face must have made him pause. “They have to vibrate together, at the same,” he searched for a word not too imprecise, “frequency? They drift apart with each jump. Eventually, the coils are so out of sync with each other, they can’t initiate a jump. They need to be retuned.”
“Skippy did that tuning, that recalibration, after each jump?”
“Actually, from what we’ve been able to understand, Skippy has the ability set up the coils so they emerge from a jump in better tune than they were in when the jump initiated. Somehow, he is able to predict the quantum effect of each jump, and set up the coils so they would drift closer together. It’s like he can somehow look slightly into the future. That is remarkable; we believe quantum uncertainty prevents anyone from being able to predict such effects, but Skippy is able to do it. Only one jump at a time, even Skippy has limits. The advantage to his technique is that if we had to jump again quickly, the drive coils were ready.”
“Ok, so we can’
t do that. We have to recalibrate, retune, the coils after each jump?”
“I wish. We should do that, we can’t do that either. With each jump, our drive coils will drift further apart, until the ship is unable to jump at all.”
“We can’t do it at all?” I was hoping Friedlander and his team of brainiacs had figured out a way to do the impossible, even if their solution was a messy monkey idea that Skippy would disdain. Hell, maybe us clumsily monkeying with the jump drive would be such an outrage that it would bring Skippy back from the dead, or wherever he was.
“No. We don’t understand the theory of what we would need to do. We don’t have the math,” he added, as if that would help me to understand.
“How many jumps can we perform, before the drive becomes inoperable?”
“There is a complication,” Friedlander cautioned. “Skippy left the drive fully tuned up, when you went down to Kobamik. But even without a jump, the coils began drifting apart because of random quantum, well,” he held up his hands, “they just do, over time. The answer is four jumps, before the drive is inoperable. The effect is worse for longer jumps, but even a short jump pulls the coils out of tune.”
“Four jumps isn’t enough to go anywhere useful,” I pointed out needlessly. The science team surely already knew that.
“I do have an idea,” Friedlander said with a hint of a smile. “This is, Skippy would call it a monkey-brained idea. Skippy has been using the entire coil package, all of our active coils, for each jump. Using a large number of coils means each individual coil has less power running through it; that increase the useful life of the coil assembly. Skippy’s purpose was to stretch out the life of our coils, because we can’t get new ones.”
“Ok, that makes sense, sure. What is your idea?”
“We split the coil assembly into multiple, independent packages, each with a smaller number of coils. With the power we’ll be running through each set of coils, they will burn out with one jump. The advantage is we won’t have to worry about recalibrating the coils in a package after a jump; each package will be a single-use item.”
My eyes grew wide. “We can keep jumping until we run out of coils? Doctor, that is brilliant! Can we get back to Earth that way?”
“Er, no,” he cautioned against over enthusiasm. “The quantum effect of a jump is strongest in the coils that are active during the jump, but all coils aboard the ship are affected somewhat. Eventually, even coil packages we haven’t used will be so out of tune as to be useless. We can’t predict how dormant coil packages will be affected, until we measure the effect during an actual jump.”
“Crap. Sorry, Doctor, I shouldn’t have asked about going back to Earth; you would have mentioned that first if it was a possibility. How do you know the ship can jump with a small number of drive coils?” My unspoken question was why the Thuranin had equipped the ship with a large number of coils, if they weren’t all needed.
“The number of coils needed for a jump depends on many variables,” he explained, and he ticked off the variables on his fingers. “First, the length of the jump. Second, how far down in a gravity well a jump is initiated, because the flatter spacetime is around the ship, the easier it is to initiate a jump. Third, the energy capacity of individual coils; newer coils can accept more throughput than coils that are worn out. But the fourth variable,” he gave me look meaning there were way more than four variables and he was dumbing it down for me. “The fourth variable is the mass being pulled through a jump wormhole. Star carriers are designed to jump with the mass of many heavy warships attached. Right now, the only item we are carrying is the relay station we’re using as a lifeboat, and the ship’s empty mass is much less after Skippy rebuilt the ship and made it shorter. We don’t need all the coils we have just to jump the relatively light mass we have now.”
That made sense to me. “How many coils do we need? For a maximum-length jump, I mean. For our first jump away from this system, I want to go a good long way, so no one can follow us easily.”
“That,” Friedlander glanced at the deck, avoiding my eyes, “we do not know, not exactly. It would be an educated guess. The first time. After the first jump, we’ll have data we can work with.”
I did not like the sound of that. “What if you guess wrong the first time?”
“If we use too many coils, we waste coils that can’t be used again, and we won’t get good data on the strain felt by an individual coil. If we use too few coils, the jump attempt could overload the coils and, uh, I think the best way to say it is it could go ‘boom’.”
“Boom.”
“Big badda boom,” he tried getting me to laugh. It didn’t work.
“Doctor, I am impressed.”
“Colonel, you may want to hold your praise until we perform an actual jump. So far, everything I described is theory, only theory. We have been looking at the power feeds of this ship, and we don’t see a way to make those feeds branch to multiple groups of coils. The first time Skippy went missing, I had an idea to pull power from the jump drive capacitors by running the power feed backwards. After Skippy came back, he told me that would have been a terrible idea, and when he explained why, I agreed with him. And now I’m afraid to touch that power assembly.”
“You must have an idea to make this work, right?” I figured that, as an engineer, Friedlander was not likely to talk in depth about something that was purely theoretical.
“The best idea we have is to leave the whole assembly in place, and remove most of the coils. After each jump, we remove the used coils, and replace them with another package. That way, we don’t have to mess with the power assembly. The coils draw power from the capacitor, so capacitors can’t feed power to coils that aren’t there. Colonel, having a functional jump drive is only part of the equation. We still have the problem that the jumps we program by ourselves are wildly inaccurate. The farther we jump, the more off target we will be.”
“Understood. If we can hit a particular star system, that will be good enough. We can fly the rest of the way to a planet in normal space. I won’t risk trying to jump in close to a planet anyway.” With our sucky jump navigation, we could very well emerge inside the planet.
“Do you know where we will go?” Friedlander asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Doctor, right now, I have no idea. I am hoping your team can suggest some options for us. Ultimately, that will be Chotek’s call.” It was true, I had absolutely no idea where we should go, because I had no idea where we could go. Any habitable planet within several lightyears was probably inhabited, even by a small group of colonists, or a research station, or a military outpost. We needed to find a planet, probably an entire star system, that was totally uninhabited, yet also a place we could live. Live, until, when? How long? Friedlander couldn’t keep the ship running forever, so if we were going to survive, we had to find a planet or moon with a biosphere that could support human life. And, for what purpose would we be surviving? Even if we found an uninhabited place we could live, we couldn’t guarantee an alien ship wouldn’t visit the system and find us the day after we arrived. That was too much of a risk exposing our secret. I could not see the Merry Band of Pirates setting up an isolated colony to live there forever. No, the whole point of stretching out how long we could survive would be to give Skippy time to come back to us. Maybe that was simply wishful thinking by me; there was no sign Skippy was ever coming back. After being warner than usual for a couple days, his beer can canister had gone cold, as cold as that dead AI we found on Newark. As far as I knew, Skippy was well and truly dead, and there was nothing I could do about it. “How long do you think before we can jump out of here?”
“Ten days?” Friedlander held up his hands. “We want to do as much testing as we can before attempting a jump. We can only perform limited tests without alerting every Kristang in this system to our presence. Colonel, if we try a jump and it fails, we will have a dozen angry Kristang ships on top of us before my team could replace the coil package for another at
tempt. It has to work the very first time.”
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
Eight days went by, with Friedlander growing mildly more confident about the potential of his homemade jump drive, and we still had no idea what our destination should be. What our destination could be. For the first jump, I didn’t much care which direction we went, as long as we jumped a good long way from the Kobamik system. Long enough that we would have plenty of time to remove the burned-out jump drive coils and replace them. That operation required people in Kristang suits physically yanking out connections and disconnecting coils, so I wanted to plan on a full day between jumps. Friedlander warned me a long jump posed a risk of us emerging far off target, and I told him he was missing the point. The only target was to be far away, it didn’t much matter what point in deep interstellar space we arrived at.
After eight days, we had not found a place to jump to. Part of the problem was the whole crew was probably mildly depressed; I know I sure was. What was the point of jumping anywhere if all we could do was slowly wait for the Dutchman’s reactors to shut down, the power to run down, our food supply to dwindle and for us to eventually die either from freezing to death or oxygen starvation?
Hans Chotek gave me a pep talk. As a pep talk, it totally sucked, although his attitude did surprise me. “Colonel Bishop,” he said while staring fondly at a photo of the Austrian Alps on his desktop. “We accomplished our mission. We more than accomplished our mission out here. We fulfilled UNEF Command’s original requirement, of determining whether the Thuranin were sending another surveyor ship to Earth. Beyond that, we secured a future for humans on Paradise, and prevented the Ruhar, of all things,” he looked up at me, shook his head and smiled, “from sending a ship to Earth. It would be best if Earth knew there were no ships coming in their direction, but at this point, we are expendable.” He probably thought that he, being a civilian, should not need to explain that to me.
Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4) Page 51
