Starfarer's Dream (Kinsella Universe Book 4)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  “Starfarer’s Dream, before I joined her, had been engaged by the aliens at Gandalf, Tannenbaum and New Helgoland. Earlier, they had arrived in the Agincourt system, after it was destroyed as well, and picked up survivors of the attack who had personal observations of what happened there. There was a considerable body of intelligence that Starfarer’s Dream had developed.”

  “I’ve read the analysis that Captain Travers prepared,” he told her.

  “I spent quite some time reading those reports,” Bethany agreed. “I don’t want to sound impertinent, but I’ve read every intelligence report and digest that I’ve had access to. None of them have contained the conclusions I’ve reached, or anything like them. It was my thought that if I could talk to you, that you would have access to everything the Fleet has developed to date, and that you could tell me if I have anything important.”

  “Well,” he said dryly, “you’re here and I’m listening. What do you have?” He chuckled bitterly. “I should warn you, Lieutenant, that when I submitted my own thoughts on the war, I was told that my analysis is that of the last war, not the current one. I asked the lieutenant commander who said that which war he thought I’d fought in. He wasn’t amused, although he had no answer.

  “I am, as has been repeatedly made clear, a carryover from the past; I am, so I’m told, past my prime. Still, you’re right; they do copy me with most of the analysis.”

  “First, Admiral, I checked the timelines of all of the battles. I have no idea if it’s real, an artifact or what, but there has never been an alien ship that dropped from High Fan and returned to High Fan in less than two minutes and fourteen seconds. Several times alien ships were destroyed during that time, outside the fan well, where one might have supposed that they would go to High Fan again, to avoid destruction. There are four examples of that, Admiral.”

  “Now that,” he mused, “is interesting. And no, I know of no such analysis within the Fleet. That is sloppy work on the Fleet’s part. Unless they didn’t think it was important.”

  “Yes, sir. It is my thought that if this is real, it might be due to the alien physiology or perhaps the way their fans work. Humans experience low levels of nausea on High Fan, and transitions, particularly rapid ones, are physically uncomfortable. If, and I must emphasize the if, Admiral Cloud, if this is a real effect, it might be of some use.”

  “Aye, that’s so, Lieutenant. I will pass on that information; they have some cracker-jack analysts, when they actually bother to analyze things.”

  “Yes, sir. I assume that you are aware that the aliens appear to be able to track ships on High Fan?”

  “Aye, that I am. Although there haven’t been as many interceptions of our ships as one might expect, if that were the case.”

  “Sir, we can’t change a ship’s vector when it’s under High Fan -- it’s possible that the aliens can’t either. Thus, unless they had time to change their ship's vector before or after coming off High Fan, their vector would take them elsewhere. I believe, sir, that they are hoping that the ship they are tracking doesn’t go far. The interceptions that have occurred so far have only occurred after short hops.”

  He pursed his lips, nodded and said, “Continue.”

  “Theory says that we should be able to detect ships on High Fan, although no one has ever done it. I think it is important to note that there has been no evidence that I know of, showing that the aliens know about stimulated emission of radiation. That is, they don’t appear to have lasers or lidars.

  “I was thinking, Admiral, that it might be of benefit to ask some technical analysts if they could make a gravity wave detector, such as we use, to detect ships on low fan without lasers.”

  The admiral shook his head. “I suppose it’s possible to build a gravity wave detector without lasers, but I don’t honestly see how. We use lasers to detect small gravity waves, then more lasers to amplify anything detected. I suppose you could build the amplifier stages without having to resort to lasers, but the detector circuits need to have exceedingly high frequencies and those aren’t easy to come by without lasers. I don’t know, offhand, if it would be possible to detect gravity waves without detecting and amplifying the smallest possible frequency shift. Lasers enable that sort of detection.”

  “Yes, sir. And if they don’t have lasers, or they don’t use lasers to detect gravity waves, then they have to have something else. Exploration of what they might use, excluding lasers, could be of benefit.”

  Admiral Cloud nodded. “I’m sure you’ve read of the various experiments that have been undertaken over the years, attempting to detect ships on High Fan. So far as I know, all of those methods used lasers. It is possible that such theorizing might jog someone’s imagination.”

  Bethany’s face suddenly changed. She turned pale as a sheet, and put her hand on the table to steady herself. “Oh, my God!” she murmured. “I was thinking just now and... it can’t be. It can’t be as simple as that...”

  “As simple as what?”

  “We don’t actually track fans, we track the gravity sources they create. If the aliens aren’t able to detect gravity waves, what else could they detect that fans give off?”

  Bethany was pale and shaking as she repeated, “My God! It can’t be that simple!”

  “What do you mean?” the admiral asked, being patient.

  “I mean that the very first-ever manned vehicle that Stephanie Kinsella installed Benko-Chang fans on used two fans. Almost at once she noticed that if the fans weren’t tuned, if they weren’t running synced, they interfered with each other. Admiral! We’ve been able to detect fans since that very first aircraft! Fans detect each other!”

  For a moment, Bethany thought he was having a heart attack. Evidently, so did his aide because she came rushing to his side. He held up a hand, like a traffic cop stopping vehicles and his aide simply eyed him with concern in her eyes.

  “At a first guess, I’d say there is no proof that a vessel in normal space could detect one on High Fan -- or vice versa.”

  Bethany nodded. “That could be, sir, but one thing I remember from my work on the sensor board, Admiral -- there are a lot of meter ticks in the gravity wave equipment, and the engine output meters. Some of them are clearly from cosmic sources, but...”

  “We need to check, don’t we? My God, Lieutenant, this is...” he paused, at a loss for words.

  “Yes, sir!” Bethany exclaimed, still stunned.

  “Lieutenant Raeder, you will go to the phone. Call Admiral Fletcher’s office and tell him that I need to see him, face-to-face, sooner than ASAP, and that the conduct and outcome of the war depends on our meeting happening as soon as possible.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral,” the lieutenant said. “Shall I alert your shuttle?”

  “Yes. I want it ready to go yesterday. Tell the pilot I want clearance for the spot right in front of the entrance to Fleet HQ, and he is to ignore any order to the contrary. This is a Fleet Emergency.”

  It took surprisingly little time to get things in motion. Bethany took a deep breath as they lifted. She wondered what Admiral Fletcher would say about seeing her twice in two days? It was a bit of a coincidence and rather amusing too, because she was sure that the day before he’d come to see Willow Wolf, and not the rest of them.

  She turned to the admiral sitting next to her. “There was one more thing I wanted to say, before we interrupted ourselves.”

  “And that would be?”

  “It harks back to the possibility of a few moments of confusion that they might be experiencing after the drop from High Fan. Sir, a number of their actions don’t make military sense. I realize that no one could plan for something like Turbine Jensen’s ‘Up the middle strategy.’”

  Admiral Cloud nodded. “It’s one of the assumptions about the battle for Gandalf. That Jensen took the battle back to them, in their face, too fast for them to react.”

  “Sir, that may be so -- but would a Fleet CO have failed to react for so long? They were finally ab
le to react, albeit ineffectively, when Agrabat lifted, seven minutes after the attack commenced.

  “Seven minutes...” Bethany shook her head. “Sir, I was a Kriegspiel officer, out on the Rim. I know it’s just sims and all of that -- but no one in Kriegspiel would take seven minutes to just acknowledge that things had changed. Or to change the chain of command.”

  “The official opinion is that the attack commander was in the ship Nihon killed first. And that, along with the loss of a carrier and quite a few other ships in their center, must have been a terrific shock.” Admiral Cloud saw she was about to speak again and shook his head. “But, yes, if the commander of a Fleet ship took that long to respond to an attack, like as not he or she would face a court-martial.”

  “Yes, sir. I read Admiral Saito’s report about the battle at Gandalf very thoroughly. He expected that they would have a backup force to engage any escapees, and he assumed that they would be inside the orbit of Gandalf -- that’s where ships would be trying to hide if they were attempting to avoid all of those downbound missiles, and with the hope that if they were out of sight, they would be undetectable.”

  “There was such a force,” Admiral Cloud reminded her. “Towards the nadir, back in the direction of the rest of the Federation. Admiral Saito predicted it correctly.”

  “And that makes perfect sense, sir. But I was thinking about that in light of being able to detect ships on High Fan. Sir, before that force dropped from fans, they would have known that the cupboard was bare. Not only that, but their intrinsic was down towards the planet. They could have simply stayed on fans a bit longer and would have been well-positioned to engage Jensen’s remaining ships before they could exit the fan well.”

  “Perhaps the aliens wouldn’t have been close enough to engage,” Admiral Cloud mused. He slammed his fist into his palm. “But they would have been close to the right place and were traveling at a good clip. You think what? That they were confused?”

  “No, sir. I think that they have a plan before they drop from fans, and that they can’t afford to deviate from it, if they’re going to be out of it for a few minutes after a fan transition. While the Fleet has never had an occasion where we had nearly a hundred ships in a real attack, it’s been simmed often enough.

  “Lines of authority are always carefully delineated,” she told him. “A minute or so is all it should take. As I’ve already learned in my short time in the Fleet, Admiral, one of the hottest topics is just where we each stand on the promotion list in relationship to each other. After a minute, there would be a new commander -- no matter how far down the chain of command the new CO would be.

  “And if the aliens are experienced in such battles, why wouldn’t they have something similar? I realize that, by definition, aliens are alien, but still -- you don’t take a hundred ships into a battle and not expect some losses. They have to have a plan to deal with that. I think that Jensen hit them while they were disoriented and that the blow disoriented them further. I think that that might be an exploitable weakness -- after cautious testing.”

  He laughed. “Very cautious. We know the aliens are deceitful and duplicitous. I personally bet Admiral Fletcher that when he sent out the first survey ships after we were alerted that they would come up dry. They headed back along the axis of the attack -- and I was right, those ships were on a wild goose chase. While it was a bitter pill to win that bet, it has served to concentrate the attention of a lot of very fine minds. Do you know that now we’ve sent out a rather unique survey ship?”

  “No, Admiral, I hadn’t heard.”

  “We had been preparing to move a new habitat from the Kuiper belt, down to the Fore Trojan position ahead of Jupiter; it was a consolidated body about two kilometers by six kilometers. We’d installed a dozen fans aboard it, not being in any rush. This was, mind you, before the war. The war started and we held up moving the body closer. Then someone got the bright idea that we needed a carrier -- like back in the old days; one that held a swarm of fighter craft.

  “Wartime priorities being what they are, sixty days later we had fighters and something like a purpose-built carrier; we call her the Rome.”

  He smiled slightly. “The exact number of fighters aboard Rome is classified, but there are a great many of them. One of the bright young ensigns aboard her came up with the idea of taking her out and parking her in an unsurveyed area and sending the fighters to check out systems. Instead of doing one or two surveys, they’d do hundreds at a time. Rome is headed out where they think they’ll hit pay dirt. It’s been a couple of weeks, now, since they left.”

  That was when they landed, to the great consternation of a lot of Marine guards, directly in front of the Fleet Headquarters. Lieutenant Raeder hopped out and deployed Admiral Cloud’s power chair, and a moment later they were being escorted inside.

  A four-star admiral appeared that Bethany didn’t recognize, but Admiral Cloud did. “Rod Travis! Did they decide that you were the most useless body present so they sent you to see me off?”

  The other frowned with distaste. “Duncan, this is a very important meeting and Admiral Fletcher is in the middle of something extremely important.”

  “And I’ve got something that will change the course of the war. More important than that?”

  “It turns out that we’ve known the aliens were around for the last forty years; we didn’t realize what we were seeing. They are reviewing the entire strategy for the war.”

  “Who finally noticed?”

  “That young women who cussed out Admirals Nagoya and Fletcher to their faces.”

  “She went out with Rome,” Admiral Cloud told him.

  “Yes, of course. Admiral Kinney stopped the Rome, dropped off couriers and then continued on. She thought the message was important enough to return Captain Bachman.”

  “In that, I agree. However, what I have makes that look like a tempest in a teapot -- and will change the course of the war a lot more than ancient history will. For one thing, now we already know we’re at war.”

  Admiral Rod Travis shrugged. “Well, you’ve been warned. You can be boarded for interrupting this meeting.”

  “Lieutenant Booth has given us a fair shot at being able to detect ships on High Fan. We already know it works on High Fan and in normal space. The question is, does it work from one to the other?”

  Admiral Travis blinked. “You want to interrupt a Fleet planning meeting for a hair-brained lieutenant’s theory of how to detect ships on fan?”

  “Admiral Travis, if you continue to obstruct me, I’ll ask that a Special Board be convened to decide which one of us should be shot. I don’t think you want me to do that.”

  It was interesting, Bethany thought. Admiral Travis probably lost a lot at poker. Clearly he wasn’t a betting man.

  A few moments later they were in a conference room filled with admirals. There weren’t even any captains to take notes. Bethany squirmed when she saw her father sit up straight and stare at her.

  “Dunc, what is this?” Admiral Fletcher asked.

  “Lieutenant Booth came to see me with some analysis she’d undertaken of the conflict to date. I haven’t seen better analysis by anyone. Moreover, we were discussing the enemy’s ability to detect ships on High Fan and she had some good ideas and I told her that while I didn’t think there was anything there, perhaps her approach might jog a few minds.

  “It turns out, I was right. Two seconds later she realized that we’ve been detecting fans since the first time Stephanie Kinsella flew her first airframe.”

  “Pardon? How could we have been detecting fans for so long?” a three-star admiral asked. “You’d think we’d have noticed.”

  “Aye, you’d think so, Admiral David. You see, it was right in front of our noses all along -- fans detect each other. That’s why we sync them up. When Lieutenant Booth spoke about it, that reminded me of the event on the day that Fenris orbited in from Fleet World with the news of the war. That’s when frigates Donner and Blitzen synced the
ir drives for the lift from the Academy Basin.”

  It was, Bethany thought, the most impressive display of passion that she’d ever seen. Admiral David picked up the first thing he could reach, a glass of something, and it was hurled across the room, spattering other admirals with its contents as it flew. Then the cup holder, then the admiral’s comp... someone else’s comp followed it, and people hastily pulled things away from Admiral David’s reach.

  The admiral finally sat still in his chair, his face beet red, his breathing a harsh rasp. “I suppose it is impossible for us to do it. You should stand every Benko-Chang engineer and every sensor officer in the Fleet against the nearest handy wall -- and shoot the lot of us.

  “We have been culpable since forever,” he told the room. He shook his head, hanging it down.

  “There is a question of whether or not it will work on High Fan detecting other ships on low or High Fan and ships on low fan detecting those on High Fan,” Duncan Cloud told him.

  Admiral David buried his face in his hands. He talked through them. “When I was a young lieutenant, I thought we had too many meter ticks in our ship’s propulsion system. My chief engineer, my boss and my best friend for my entire adult life, told me not to be concerned, that there are a lot of meter ticks. He said that they happened a lot when a ship went to High Fan in your vicinity. Not a big deal, he told me.

  “I accepted it. I can’t believe that he told me that we could detect ships on High Fan and not only didn’t he recognize what he was saying -- I didn’t either. A few years later I was in his place and told another earnest young lieutenant the same thing. I should be shot.”

  “No one is going to be shot,” the admiral at the head of the table said. “Admiral David, you will proceed forthwith from this meeting, this very instant, and gather a team posthaste and start quantifying this effect. We need to know as rapidly as possible if this works, how well it works... and how to implement it, if it does.”