by B. V. Larson
We ended up with a completely repaired, fully stocked ship, except for the warheads for our missiles. Smaller ones could be substituted, made of overloaded fusion generators—simpler versions of a marine suit’s suicide bomb—but I wanted the real thing, and I wasn’t sure how to get it.
Forty or so Litho ships still waited between us and the system’s sun, daring us to turn and come back. Their position was inside the stellar orbit of the gas giants so I hoped we could eventually swing around and approach through the most far-flung planets. Their moons should provide rich sources of everything.
If we did show ourselves, however, nothing would stop them from launching another few thousand missiles, driving us away again.
We were behind the power curve and needed a solution that allowed us to get ahead of it—or something to cleverly counter their tactics.
One night while I dozed in my cabin, thinking about who had planted that bomb and killed Olivia two months ago, an idea occurred to me.
-20-
“Cryo-what?” Adrienne asked.
For the first time since this whole adventure had started, I was doing something I hated: I was holding a formal meeting. We had the time, and I needed technical input, so it seemed like a good idea. Still, I kept it small. Nothing was worse than a meeting with too many participants and a bored audience encircling them.
Along with Adrienne, we had Hansen and the senior Star Force ship’s engineer, a woman named Sakura. She was a computer specialist, but had a reputation of being excellent with all forms of equipment. Moon-faced and stocky with straight black hair and a classic Asian look, her appearance seemed to match her reputation. She was older, severe and never smiled, but I found her interesting nonetheless.
I’d also invited the lobster, Hoon. I figured it might be a good time to mend fences with the Crustacean as my idea involved solving a scientific and technical problem.
“Cryo-volcanoes,” I replied. “As I understand it, if an icy moon orbits a planet quickly enough, tidal forces will create heat and pressure that liquefy frozen water and other fluids such as methane and ammonia. This creates pockets of liquid that form geysers as the stuff is forced upward through holes and cracks.”
“Your verbiage is imprecise and unsophisticated,” Hoon said.
I stared at him then leaned slightly forward in my chair until he went on.
“However,” he continued, “your statement is generally accurate.”
I wondered if he’d taken my stare as a threat. If so, it had worked. The arrogant lobster was starting to learn how to control his insulting manner, at least a little. That was all I wanted. Prickly and annoying—I could handle that. If I wanted more, sheer crazy obstinacy for example—well, I already had Marvin.
“Thanks. Now,” I turned to Sakura, “can you reconfigure the ship for that kind of environment? Extreme cold?”
She drew together her shoulders as if she’d felt the temperature drop in the room. “I believe so. We’ll need to manufacture some really effective insulation, and then there’s the energy consumption to consider.”
“But we can do it, right?”
Sakura nodded. “Yes, sir.”
I liked that she didn’t throw a bunch of technical bullshit at me. She’d simply told me what she thought.
“Then that’s our next priority,” I said as I turned to Adrienne. “Please help her, Adrienne. See if you can work together to turn this ship into a cryo-submarine. If the Lithos hate cold liquid, then we want to be where there’s plenty of it. Of course, if we can find a place where the liquid is actually water, and it’s only as cold as Earth’s arctic, that would be a real plus.”
“What’s the point of this?” Hansen asked.
“If we can find the right environment, the water will shield us from all detection. It will also deter the Lithos from following us even if they know we’re there. And if we can set up a cozy underwater hideaway, we should be able to mine the sea floor for what we want.”
“But what do we want?” Adrienne asked. “Other than radioactives, we already have everything we need. Eventually, though, people are going to get antsy. Without an immediate crisis, this ship is going to seem smaller and smaller. Are you planning on setting up some kind of colony?” Her expression told me she didn’t like the idea.
“Not a colony, no. But a temporary base would be very useful.”
“How would it be useful? I still want to know,” said Hansen.
“To do what Star Force always did back in the Macro Wars. Back when my father defended Earth even when the old nations tried to screw him at every turn. Back when he commanded expeditions into neighboring systems so that he could fight the Macros on their doorsteps instead of ours.” I smiled confidently, knocking my knuckles on the table with a grin. “We’re going to build a fleet.”
The others chewed this over for a moment. I wondered from whom the first objection would come. I would have put my money on Hansen, but he looked interested—even eager. I supposed he figured he would end up in command of a ship and could thus get away from me.
Adrienne nodded thoughtfully, as if already planning how she would carry out the expansion of her responsibilities. Hoon, I couldn’t read, but fortunately he spoke up. “I believe this idea has merit. Of course, it must be developed. Studies must be made and algorithms written. There is much work to do. For the first time you have favorably impressed me, Captain Cody Riggs. You have recognized the inherent superiority of the hydrological environment over the atmospheric. There is hope for you yet.”
My first impulse was to boot him again, but I held my temper. In Hoon’s stalked eyes, I’d just made a concession to his point of view. It was no big deal to me what he believed as long as he made himself useful. Now that I thought about it, I was sure he’d be extremely helpful. Crustaceans thrived in cold Earth waters. Maine and Newfoundland were famous for their lobster and Alaska for its crab. Hoon might even be able to take off his suit and enjoy the native environment directly.
And if he was too much a pain in the ass, I would have some leverage. As with Marvin, I only had to know how to get a lever on him to get him to work with me.
“I appreciate your point of view, Professor Hoon,” Sakura said, “but if we make more ships, where are we going to get crews?”
“When my father first formed Star Force, there was only one crewman per ship. Did you know that, Warrant Officer Sakura?” When she shook her head no, I went on. “Later, the ships usually had three to six crewmembers, with everything else being handled by the brainbox. In fact, the squads or platoons of marines usually outnumbered the Fleet personnel. It’s only in the last twenty years, with the rise of a typical military bureaucracy that we now have ships like this one, which started out with…what? Eighty-some people aboard?”
“Small crews sound good in theory,” Sakura replied, “but we only have two real engineers, three scientists—plus Hoon, two trained helmsmen and a couple of pinnace pilots.”
I wanted to roll my eyes, but smiled instead. She wasn’t getting it.
“We’ll have to cross-train crew and marines as pilots and gunners,” I said. “Devise some aptitude tests. Clone brainboxes for every ship, turret and suit. Automate as many functions as possible. A warship may be more effective with lots of humans to direct the nano brains, but I think with crews of three or so, we can achieve enough efficiency to make building a fleet worthwhile. We need the firepower. We need the redundancy. Right now, all our eggs are in one basket—or two if you count Greyhound.”
“That’s not correct,” Hoon snapped. “My eggs are not in any baskets but are instead—” He suddenly cut himself off, and continued, “Excuse me. My translator appears to have momentarily malfunctioned.”
I couldn’t help myself. I laughed. “So your technology isn’t as perfect as you think it is?” Uncharacteristically, Hoon didn’t answer but merely folded his large claws and settled back on his walking legs.
“We’re going back to the roots of Fleet, huh?�
� Hansen asked, suddenly wistful. “I joined up near the end of the Macro Wars, you know. I was a helmsman in the Dead Sun action on a six-man ship. Things were different then.”
“They’ll be different now,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. “We’ll keep Valiant with a large crew by our new standards plus a couple dozen civilians and marines. It will be the flagship.”
Sakura said, “Why not just expand this battlecruiser? Or convert it into an even bigger ship, a battleship? With enough time and materials, we can do it.” I could see she still did not like the idea of breaking up the crew.
I spread my hands in a gesture meant to indicate a reasonable attitude. “I'll tell you what, you get all the scientists, engineers and representatives from the crew and come up with two proposals: big ship and small ships. Take your time. Figure out all the pros and cons, then I’ll decide which is best.”
They nodded and looked slightly happier. I hoped I’d taken the right course. It was my intention to delegate work and make the decisions, but I needed them to carry out my plans. I left the meeting very satisfied with the group.
* * *
It took more than two weeks, but we finally lured all the Litho missiles to their deaths by getting farther and farther beyond the edge of the system and incidentally curving around the star and back, close to the orbits of Matterhorn 6 and 7.
During this time, I watched as Marvin carefully scouted Matterhorn 7 and its several dozen moons. Looking for the ring to the next system was the top priority I’d given him, along with the secondary mission of gathering any information that might be useful. I hoped he hadn’t gotten bogged down in exploring just for fun.
Once the Litho missiles were gone and I was fairly certain we hadn’t been detected, I had Sakura set up a low-powered communications laser and sent Marvin a message, telling him the kind of place I was looking for and ordering him to report back to me using the same technique. Greyhound didn’t have a ring-based communication system as it was a civilian ship. But as long as we were both in deep space with no enemy in the background, this method should be completely secure.
When the response came back, the news was a mixture of good and bad. Marvin had located another Litho enclave on an airless rocky moon circling Matterhorn 7, the greenish, outermost gas giant. By calculating its orbital velocity against its size, Marvin pointed out that this body had an extremely low density for its volume and a higher temperature than normal. Put another way, it was too big for the way its mass acted and too hot. This made a very good case for it being hollow and colonized by Lithos.
And unless the Lithos had a special love of building hollow planets, it likely contained the ring we were seeking. I stared carefully at the sensory reports coming from that moon for long hours but never got much information out of them. Still, I believed the ring was in there, like a prize stuck in the middle of a chocolate egg.
Building a containment sphere around a ring was a novel twist on a battle station, but the Lithos apparently had the power to reshape whole planets. Probably it took the Lithos decades or longer, but if their entire race consisted of hives or cooperatives of silico-nanites, terraforming was probably the equivalent of building roads and bridges for us: just something they did to improve their living space.
I had to assume the Lithos were smart enough to learn from our breakout at Matterhorn 3. In the weeks we’d been running and lurking, repairing and planning, they would have been preparing as well. The last time, we’d surprised them. They hadn’t anticipated a new player entering their system from the Panda system. They had to expect we would make a play to get out via one of the rings.
This time, they would be ready.
There was no way we were going to make it through their defenses without reconnaissance, clever planning, and figuring out some way to surprise the Lithos. We also needed the fleet I envisioned. I didn’t like the “one big ship” approach, but I was willing to listen to my people. Dad had told me that sometimes he had already made up his mind what to do, but he’d made a show of considering every viewpoint just to make the dissenters feel better. My old man was a cynical guy, I had to admit, but most of the time he was right.
Marvin had also located a place that looked to be tailor-made for us to hide within, a cold-water moon orbiting the gas giant Matterhorn 6, which was nearing its closest approach to Matterhorn 7 at the moment. Of course, that meant the two Jovian planets were still several AU away from each other, hundreds of millions of miles, but relatively close in interplanetary terms.
Matterhorn 6 was enormous, larger even than Jupiter back home, and was therefore hotter. Its gravity was so great that some low-grade natural fusion was probably going on near its core. In other words, it was almost a sun by itself. Should it ever get close enough to one of its neighboring gas planets to collide, the resulting combination would probably be massive enough to ignite into a small companion star.
Because of this, the moons of Matterhorn 6 were warmer than one would expect this far out in the system. Rather than temperatures in the minus two hundreds, the moons had a surface temperature of around minus fifty Celsius on average, and one of the close-in icy bodies had enough tidal heating to average just below freezing. It had huge water-ice caps and a narrow band of freezing cold sea around its equator. Deep in the seas, the temperature was almost warm.
When Hoon saw the data, he declared it nearly perfect and even comfortable for his race, depending on what elements might be dissolved in the seawater. If the radiation levels weren’t too high, it was a habitable world for Crustaceans.
Sakura was happy as well. From her point of view, freezing H2O was a lot easier to deal with than cryogenic liquid methane. Really, it would only be a little worse than what a deep-diving submarine had to deal with back home. Hoon actually volunteered to advise us on underwater matters, and I was feeling pretty optimistic.
The trick was going to be getting there.
-21-
We floated silently through interstellar space with all emanations shielded. Sakura had put the new insulation in place inside the hull, which reduced our heat signature. Aimed in a carefully calculated arc, we set our course for the icy inner moon of Matterhorn 6.
Like a reaver on a misted sea, we sailed on unpowered, hoping the Lithos could not see us even as we neared the planet. Their forty ships had spread out after they’d lost track of us but still patrolled in the orbital path of Matterhorn 7. They were smart enough to know how far we could have gotten and from what direction we would come if we decided to backtrack. Without the ability to use active sensors, we used the brainboxes combined with people working overtime on the telescopes, heat detectors and radiation monitors. My greatest fear was getting noticed too early, before we could make a mad dash for the cold water.
I rubbed my eyes constantly, as they itched from too many hours of staring into glowing screens. One of the many benefits to enhanced healing was the ability to cause yourself minor irritations and even damage—only to have the nanites in your blood dutifully fix the problem. I knew marines who’d gotten into bad habits, chewing nails and the like, depending on their nano ‘friends’ to heal them again and again before it became a problem.
I could tell Hansen felt like telling me to chill out, but I was as tense as a cat sneaking past a guard dog—make that forty guard dogs.
We almost made it to Matterhorn 6. The planet loomed large on every screen, dwarfing any planet I’d ever visited.
But three quarters of the way there, I saw a change in the status of the patrolling Litho fleet. First, the nearest Litho cruiser turned ponderously in our direction. Soon others followed suit as the word of our presence spread across the system.
“We’ve been spotted,” I said to Hansen. “Punch it.” He didn’t bother to reply, he just pushed the throttles smoothly to the stops. I felt my weight shift as the Gs leaked through our stabilizers, the big modified engines shoving us forward.
Valiant really wasn’t too much faster now than she had b
een because we’d fattened up with stored supplies and spare parts, not to mention extra shield generators, gravity plates and processing gear for raw materials. Now I wondered if that would come back to haunt us.
Our estimated time of arrival on the moon dropped from six hours to two. We couldn’t make it faster because for every minute we spent accelerating, we’d have to decelerate at the end.
“It’s all right,” Hansen said confidently. “Those tubs of theirs are way too slow to catch us. Spread out as they are, not many of their missiles will, either.”
“If I was superstitious, I’d say you just jinxed us,” I replied.
“Shit. What’s this?” Hansen said not a minute later.
His exclamation drew my eyes to the holotank. The nearest Litho ships seemed to be coming apart. I’d expected missile launch, but this looked like something different. Instead of calving off their usual spearhead-shaped repeller projectiles, they seemed to be dividing themselves into pieces of approximately equal size. They were smaller than we were, but bigger than a Star Force missile—I’d call them fighters.
“Shit,” Hansen barked again as he saw how quickly they were speeding up. “They’re faster than we are!”
“I guess we underestimated them,” I said, sounding calm—only I knew I was faking it. “What would we have done in their place? Faced with an enemy that can outrun and outmaneuver us, we would have tried to match them in capabilities, right?”
“Right.” Hansen grimly tapped at his console, probably trying to squeeze out some extra speed. “They built faster weapons. They’re going to reach us just short of the moon, and we’ll be decelerating. This isn’t going to be fun.”
“That might work to our advantage. It depends on whether they’re going to take one pass and fly by or decelerate along with us. Can we get more speed?”
