by Kali Altsoba
Alliance
Volume IV
The Orion War
by
Kali Altsoba
©
Kali Altsoba
(2017)
About the Author
Kali Altsoba is the pen name used in future war fiction by a military historian who teaches at a major research university in the United States. He has published award-winning books on world history and 20th century military history
Contents
Fire
Ice
Harsa
Exile
Krakoya
Nunavut
Bantams
Gardes
Abreks
Wildfire
Minotaur
Admiral
Hubris
Wounded
Scotch
Defeat
Denial
Defiance
Appendix
“We, too, have hurled javelins.”
Anonymous Roman
Fire
Jan Wysocki and Zofia Jablonski are moving farther from each other with each passing instant. Jan on KRN Asimov, a damaged frigate struggling to make a hot-bohr from the leeside of a cold gas giant in Genève system. Alongside are two more little warships and two converted troopships, all damaged in combat. Zofia is moving the other way, racing for a different LP and exile. She’s onboard one of four fleeing KRN destroyers, each one crammed with scared fighters of the defeated Krevan Republic Army. Everyone’s families are left behind on a fallen world.
Alpha is pursued by Kaigun warships pushing fusion reactors to the limit, at All-Ahead Bendix speed and more. But even the closest are too late. The rest missed the intercept vectors, incompetently deployed by a Grün admiral who will pay for the mistake soon, with his life. The nine little ships thus reach the rims of two bohr-zones and jump. In shimmers, like Cheshire cats, they’re into the singularities. Then they’re gone, leaving grins and a grimly angry daisa behind.
Nine ships take with them the last resistance from battered and occupied Genève, one of five, then seven, now twelve invaded and broken homeworlds of the once neutral United Planets of Krevo. As the nine bohr out of system, also left behind is a ring of fire encircling Toruń City, where the Berm wall is breached, friends and comrades-in-arms are dead, and RIK by hundreds of thousands pour in. The executions begin, and black shuttles lift off for forced labor camps.
Left behind are the Old Forests. Millennia-old woods first planted and tended by AI-bot terraformers that now burn past any control, darkening the sky with defeat and powdered ash. Left behind in the widening gulf of abandoned space between Jan and Zofia is the flotsam-and-jetsam of an unprovoked invasion. Left behind are wrecked warships, dead companions, brutally interrupted civilian lives. And thoughts never spoken, tasks never finished, lovers never kissed.
***
Lieutenant-Commander Émile Fontaine is First Officer of the KRN destroyer Resolve, flagship of a five-ship Exodus flotilla known as Alpha. Or he thinks he is. Hotly pursued by eight Zerstörers, the five little ships escaped by bohring-out of Genève system just a second ago.
Wait, how long…?
Wait, a whole second, you say…?
Wait, more like a nano-second, right…?
Wait, is Time even real in there…?
Wait, what do you mean ‘in there’…?
Wait, where the hell were-are we anyway…?
Wait, who the hell is ‘we’…?
Wait, who the hell am ‘I’…?
Wait!
He’s standing under the fiddley of the portal leading from Resolve’s small Foc’sle to the Main Bridge. Or he thinks that’s where he is. His head is swirling like a last wisp of a dead star’s gas falling over the event horizon of a monster black hole that consumes it, winking all the time.
‘I was under the fiddley last time I checked ... that was ... when exactly? ... where was ... am I? ... Oh right, I asked that already … Still don’t know … Oh right, under the fiddley … Now that I think about it, I feel very odd ... tingly all over ... Yeah, there too … Sort of ... stretched.’
“Well then, things can’t be all that bad. You could use a little stretching down there.”
“You shut up! You’re not even real. Stupid cat. Stop grinning at me!”
It feels like Schrodinger's cat is peering out his missing eyes from a mirror, to see Alice’s impish Cheshire right outside, grinning in. Everything feels simultaneously wrong and right. He scratches again, puzzled. Still nothing. ‘What’s that smell? Is that hot copper?’ It’s him. He just doesn’t know that he always smells like an old electronics bench, all wires and solder and zinc.
He feels a throb somewhere behind his arresting, almost colorless eyes. In the dim ship’s light, whenever he concentrates they look gun-metal gray. But dazed like this or in normal light they shift back to clear. He tries to scratch the itch but can find neither his eyes nor any relief.
‘Why won’t the Watch Bell stop ringing? ... or is it the Collision Clarion? ... How odd that the deck’s six inches from my head and the fiddley’s under my feet ... Why do I feel like ... well, like I’m trying to pull out of anesthetic blackout with fantastical arms ... Or I have ghost hands that can’t tear away these thick nets of cobweb sticking to my brain ... Like I’m being ...’
Émile suddenly remembers that he’s not asleep. It takes a moment more to figure out which half of his brain is drifting and which part is insisting that he must wake up and look to his duty station. It’s ‘jump effect,’ an infinitesimal tidal distortion of all matter comprising his body, including the complex molecules and atoms that make-up his brain synapses. Or used to. Or will.
That’s the official explanation and term, “bohr-jump effect.” The one used by reassuring governments to all worried, because casual, spacers who almost never leave their homeworld let alone their system. It says to short haul crews and first-time passengers: “Don’t worry, we’ve got this. Just climb onboard and sit back. Relax, you’ll be there in … how long will it be, John?”
In shipboard or jack speak, navy swabbies and merchant marine long-haul mudders call it “the vapors.” By whatever name, doctors gave up trying to figure it out long ago. Now, they just treat the symptoms. For most people, all it takes is some smelling-salts and a wee lie down.
Sure, a few folks never quite come back all the way, but the number’s not enough to be statistically significant or morally deterrent. Too few to persuade shipping lines, modern navies, or vast trading and political empires to give up the immense benefits of fast interstellar travel.
Sailor societies and trade associations say, “that’s why we have insurance.” Also, medical facilities for the permanently befuddled, the vapor cases that just never come back out, the ones whose synapses never quite reconnect. It’s the humane thing to do, we all agree on that. “Better to be bohred than bored.” It’s an old sailor joke, more fatalistic than funny. Still, the civis laugh.
The few physicists still hanging around say they’re working the problem. Why not? They have little else to occupy them. Unified Field Theory and the Theory of Everything were both resolved centuries ago. Maybe. Except they still can’t explain how quantum-complementarity works on the grand scale, what if anything exists outside normal spacetime, how a bohr-jump moves a ship, or where it and you are when it and you are no longer here, but not yet there. All predictive models seem to work pretty well, though. So there’s that.
“Last boarding call! Get your bohr-pillows here!”
The latest speculation in academic physics just chases its own Cheshire tail. There was a big conference about it all. People came from all over Orion. Oh yeah, well except for Daurans. They met for three mo
nths! They reviewed everything! They came to a conclusion! It said “bohr-effect is the harmless result of squinching synapses and brain matter in hyperspace at a folded or horizon singularity, then out again under special conditions of grand quantum-complementarity.”
The public paid all expenses and didn’t like the explanation, so they had to clarify. After two weeks of one-a-day meetings held on the elite, resort world Helena, the Bohr-Effect Main Committee said: “For lay persons not familiar with grand quantum-complementarity, we wish to make clear that we of course assume that ‘in’ and ‘out’ apply.” A snarky subcommittee wanted to add: “Also assuming that you even have brain matter.” But it was overruled. And that was it.
In fact, the meaning and working of grand quantum-complementarity remains contested. It’s a point on which one half-of physicists disagree with the other half, who believe the first-half are certainly nuts, a view also held by the first-half about the second-half. Making the insanity of all physicists pretty much the only thing every single one of them agrees is true. Maybe. Well, in theory. Assuming we can all agree on what ‘half’ is, after that thing happened at the conference.
The numbers no longer came out even when a Bohr-Effect Main Committee member had a little too much of the really good scotch, you know, from Baku, and fell off her floater about two klics out and, well, she drowned. After two days discussing whether it was possible for any person to be a fraction, the conference closed with a unanimous resolution to return to Helena in a year to reconsider the whole issue of bohr-effect. Half the assembly stormed out, theatrically, saying the other half really were nuts and they’d be back to prove it beyond any doubt next year.
“You are coming to next years’ conference, dear?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for all the worlds.”
“I booked the same room. Lovely view.”
“Charming place, Helena.”
“Too bad about the … accident.”
“Well you know, some people just can’t hold their drink.”
“Are you coming, John?”
“I’m still thinking about it. I worry about jump effect.”
Most theorists just shrug in private. After a fourth scotch they’ll usually admit that the consensus is a descriptor, not a real idea or explanation of bohr-effect. “We just don’t know…”
Whatever the cause, the result of “the vapors” is that a flash of gravitational spacetime dilation during a bohr-jump leaves everyone befuddled for a few seconds, or a minute or more. A small price to pay to make interstellar bohr travel possible, convenient, and mind-bendingly fast.
As Émile’s head clears he recalls that Alpha has passed out a quantum gravity-fold that transported all five little ships instantaneously from one star system to another, via intersecting gravity ripples in spacetime detectible in the Lagrange area of any massive three-body system. He remembers seeing a central disk of bright white light as they entered ‘Minkowski hyperspace’ at the outer L2 of Genève system, inside the umbra of a blue-green gas giant falling far behind.
‘Is that true?’ Maybe. Maybe not. There’s no known scientific reason to see any light. Yet he did. Bright, brilliant. Mockingly angelic or a simple hyper-stimulation of his retinas?
Spooky rules of grand complementarity strangely defy the relativity principle of locality of influence. Émile thus traveled through a tunnel of folded gravity spacetime made by colliding waves or ripples caused by distorting concentrations of normal matter. That’s the current theory.
It says a hyperspace tunnel formed when gravity echoes from the mass of Genève’s star buckled into lapping waves of gravitational twisting by an adjacent mass, in this case the parent star of the strange planet hanging behind Repulse. Émile and Alpha rode the gravity ripples like a water strider on the taut surface of normal spacetime, from there to here in a quantum-flash.
‘Right? I remember the bit about striders. I think.’
Or was it a bridge, an autobahn or a canal? Was it a paper boat and not a water-walking strider? Did he and Alpha travel through a spacetime tunnel or on top of a quantum ripple? Or under or inside or around a crinkly-flat spacetime fold or undulation? It’s impossible to get two cosmologists to agree even on the positional descriptor to be applied to such a quantum folded-singularity, let alone about its true nature. It remains the last great mystery of the superstandard model. Yet it’s the sine qua non and superstructure of interstellar travel inside a human lifetime.
‘Leave it alone. It’s a damn paradox. A what? A couple of mallards flying overhead! What? A paradox. OK I’ll spell it out, a pair-of-ducks. Get it?’
He laughs out loud at the terrible pun as it forms in his head. Clearly what matters is that a bohr-jump works. Just like Newtonian and Einsteinian and Wangian and Ojukwuian physics all still work, in other contexts. If any of those flawed systems didn’t work, Alpha wouldn’t be here.
He shakes his head to clear his jagged thoughts and glances at Captain Magda Aklyan. She’s looking slightly unsteady, even sitting deep in the command chair. He strides as firmly as he can on wobbly legs to the Chart House on the port side of the Bridge. ‘I’ve got work to do.’
First he needs to set and declare ascension and declination in order to establish agreed upon navigation directions for effective communication among Alpha’s five ships. Normally, that’s done automatically by navsats that communicate to all arriving ships an already agreed local stellar plane, and which side is therefore ‘up’ or ‘down’ and so on. There aren’t any passive navsats in this alien system. No one ever came here before. Not one ship. ‘We’re the first.’
Next he needs to take a ‘dead reckoning’ of Alpha’s new position. He likes that the term survives from OE oceanic navigation, as does most naval terminology. Navies remain the most hidebound of services and proudest of ancient traditions, whether they make sense or not. In this case the old usage is perfect, for the method fixes on ‘dead’ or neutron stars to calculate location.
Émile triangulates on massive X-ray bursts from a known pulsar, a burned-out stellar mass with a highly magnetized core rotating so quickly its lighthouse-like emissions flash across the entire observable universe. Its ‘ticks’ are so regular they compete with the best atomic clocks in accuracy, despite the massive distance in time and space.
Resolve’s nav-computer uses a quantimeter-radioscope to compare arrival time with a predicted and set reference. The Galactic Positioning System it applies locates a jumped ship inside five klics of its real spacetime position, anywhere in the Orion spur or even the Milky Way galaxy. He confirms that Resolve and the rest of Alpha popped out the right rabbit hole. It’s a routine check, yet every time he does it there’s a 1% chance the hole is wrong. In his mind, that is. Not in fact. There’s no chance at all it’s wrong. No bohr-jump has ever come out wrong, ever.
‘Yup, the predictive model works fine. Still, as someone somewhere leering into the end of a quantum singularity said, “some rabbit, some hole.” Or was that me, just now, before we left-arrived? Shucks, I’m really not myself yet, am I? I don’t know, are you? Now cut that out!’
RCW-138 is a strange place. So strange that no ship has made the jump from Genève or any of seven star systems linked to it by detectible singularities. Why should they? No habitable world exists or is possible in the brilliant roar of Boca do Inferno.
On Resolve’s portolan chart RCW-138 lists as a close-orbiting binary. Émile validates by checking a dimmed holo composite composed by the ship’s thermal, motion, light and mass detectors, including two astro-seismology scanners and stellar-measuring instruments he operates from the destroyer’s Chart House. The holo shows a monster lurking on the planet’s far side, a vampire sucking surface hydrogen from its much larger partner.
Or are there two stars, the vampire and its victim, merging within a common envelope? Sharing a single outer region but with double stellar cores? It’s possible, given that the binaries orbit at an impossible distance, at under four hours. Their magnetic
fields are entirely twisted, entwined and deformed. There’s so much plasma flowing across a blue, glowing mass-transfer bridge to the vampire it’s impossible to understand how the binaries co-exist as separate stars.
‘I’ll get to you later. First, I need to check out Boca’s sole planet.’
RCW-138A is a Class E, cold giant, about seven standard jupiters in mass. The new L2 where Alpha sits in gravity-free rest is a long, long way behind the huge gas world, vastly further than the L2 at Genève. Fortunately, it’s in the planet’s large lee umbra.
‘A billion years ago it lost a violent fight for orbit around its parent star. A glancing blow from a larger or just luckier sibling and it was expelled from its mother’s embrace, womb of its accretion and birth, to wander as a lonely nomad, tramping through cold and unlighted space.’
He’s a better scientist than that. ‘That’s crude anthropomorphizing. Stop it!’ Blame the vapors if you like, but sometimes they let an addled mind think thoughts it would forbid itself.
