Commander

by Richard F. Weyand

  What there also was, however, was a lot of radiation given off by the transition, from infrared all the way up into gamma rays. The radiation was all in the direction of the ship at transition – toward the planet, which they were using as a backstop and material collector.

  But where did all the energy come from?

  Rider worked through the numbers, and the energy release was substantial. He was tempted to put it into megatons. What does that come out to? Two megatons. That ballpark, anyway. Criminy.

  He worked with the mass of the heavy metal bars and used the nucleon mass curve to calculate the energy given off if you converted those heavy metals to iron. Two and a half megatons. Close enough. He was on to something.

  “So I think I know what happened,” Rider told Guo that afternoon. “The transition not only tore the ship to atoms, it even tore apart the heavier atoms, reducing them all to iron or its nuclear neighbors like chromium, manganese, cobalt, and nickel. The energy given off was from the nucleons moving down the nucleon mass curve. The protons and neutrons in iron and its neighbors are lighter than in any other element, and all the extra mass got turned to energy.”

  “Fission on a grand scale? That’s different.”

  “Yeah. And I have an idea for our next experiment.”

  “What do you want to try?” Guo asked.

  “Put a couple of tons of depleted uranium on the picket ship.”

  “A couple of tons?”

  “Yeah. But I want to be observing from quite a distance farther away when we do it.”

  “No kidding. How about we go for something a little smaller?”

  In the end, they settled on a thousand pounds of depleted uranium, and predicted an energy yield on transition of fifteen megatons. The depleted uranium was available, and they spent the week waiting for it to arrive in setting up the experiment, especially the detectors to monitor the radiation and determine the yield.

  When the uranium arrived, there was no device to build, no triggering mechanism to install, no setup to do at all. It came in a single container, which they clamped to an external container rack on the picket ship.

  They programmed the picket ship for its drop out of hyperspace, and remotely spaced it through the hypergate created by the hypergate projector ship which was their project headquarters.

  When the picket ship did its preprogrammed down-transition from hyperspace into normal space, Rider and Guo were watching from the projector ship. There was a tremendous blast of energy, but it was all directed in the direction of the ship’s travel in a narrow beam. From a hundred miles above the planet’s surface, that beam obliterated a twenty-mile diameter area on the backstop planet.

  From the detector data, the energy release was calculated at just over fifteen megatons, focused on that twenty-mile circle.

  The Emperor was meeting with his military commanders, Admiral Leicester, General Kraus, and General Daggert.

  “You know, Sire,” Leicester said, “that we have been researching methods to strengthen crewless ships, to see if we couldn’t enable them to down-transition from hyperspace closer to massive bodies like planets.”

  “Yes, Admiral Leicester. You informed me of this some time back.”

  “Yes, Sire. Well, part of that research has been to figure out exactly how ships break up on their down-transition, and, well, Sire, I think we stumbled onto a weapon. Potentially a huge weapon.”

  “Explain, Admiral Leicester.”

  “Yes, Sire. We’ve always known down-transition too close to a massive body caused the ship to break up. The closer you got, the more thorough the destruction. That was the scenario being tested. Down-transitioning from hyperspace within a hundred miles or so of a planet. The idea was to gather data that might fill in the curve, if you will, about how ships break up farther out.

  “What happens at a hundred miles from a planetary body is the down-transitioning ship is completely torn apart into atomic nuclei. No chemical bonds at all remain. But analyzing the fragments, the researchers noticed there were no nuclei bigger than those with roughly the mass of iron. Most of the ship’s mass is steel, but there should be some other, heavier nuclei present. But there were none.

  “So they did an experiment with a thousand pounds of depleted uranium, one of the heaviest elements. And again there was nothing left – no nuclei left – more massive than iron. The uranium nuclei had all been broken up into much smaller nuclei, in sort of a super fission. The resulting energy release was on the order of fifteen megatons.”

  “That’s impressive, Admiral Leicester. I didn’t think depleted uranium was fissionable.”

  “It’s not in the normal order of things, Sire, and neither are platinum, tungsten, and other heavy metals, but all will fission on down-transition from hyperspace in a deep enough gravitational well.

  “Further, the energy is directed forward in the direction the down-transitioning ship is moving. We’ve always known the energy of a botched down-transition is in the direction of travel, which is why down-transition is never allowed to be made when traveling directly toward a planet or manned facility. And in this case as well, all of that fifteen megatons was directed forward.

  “That is, unlike a normal bomb, which radiates it’s energy spherically, this energy was all directed on to a single spot twenty-miles in diameter on the planet.”

  “Twenty-mile diameter at one hundred miles distant. What part of a sphere is that, Admiral Leicester?”

  “A thirtieth of a steradian, Sire, or about one four-hundredth of a sphere.”

  “So the effective energy per unit area on target would be, what, four hundred times that of a fifteen megaton bomb? That can’t be right.”

  “No, that’s exactly right, Sire. It’s the same energy density per unit area on target as a six gigaton bomb. Not only is it much more concentrated, it’s much more localized as well. There isn’t stray energy blasting out in all directions.”

  “And this was from a thousand pounds of depleted uranium, Admiral Leicester?”

  “Yes, Sire. You can apparently make it as big or as small as you want. Ten pounds of depleted uranium will put one hundred and fifty kilotons on target, and fifty tons of depleted uranium – a hundred thousand pounds – would put one and a half gigatons on target.”

  “How did nobody ever notice this effect before, Admiral Leicester? Humanity has been using hyperspace for hundreds of years.”

  “Well, of course we knew transitioning too close to a large mass would destroy the ship, Sire. But nobody ever tried such a transition so close before. The fission effect only occurs when the down-transition is very close to a planet. Also, since the directed energy is within such a narrow cone, if you’re not in that cone, you don’t really see anything. But an accident would cause the effect if it happened just right.”

  “So you’re telling me if a mishandled heavy metal ore ship coming in from an asteroid belt down-transitioned too close to a planet, and was pointed at it, we could have had a major disaster at any time, Admiral Leicester. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, Sire. Or an enemy could have down-transitioned such a ship above Imperial City as an attack at any time, and still could.”

  “Is there a way to defend against such an attack, Admiral Leicester?”

  “Yes, Sire. Knock the ship out of hyperspace before it gets too close to the planet. Such as with a suicide attack by a picket ship. Knock out the engines, the acceleration stops, and when the acceleration goes below about 0.35g, the ship drops out of hyperspace.”

  “All right. It seems to me, Admiral Leicester, we need to work this from two angles. One is that it might be a nice offensive capability to have if push came to shove. So we probably ought to consider optimum yields and have some stores containers with suitable loads of depleted uranium on board for deployment if we had to. We could put as many containers worth on board as we wanted.

  “Second is that we need to build some defense against this method into our own thinking. Perhaps, as you sa
y, a suicide attack by a picket ship of any ship approaching to within some radius of the planet while still in hyperspace, or pointed toward the planet within some radius while still in hyperspace. Work out the numbers and work up a defense we can include in the programming for the crewless picket ships.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “We should also then re-evaluate the number of picket ships we will require. The original estimate of two million is clearly way below what we would need if we used them in a planetary defense mode like that.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem, Sire. Depending on the design, we may actually be able to mass-produce those on the ground.”

  “And I assume this all remains highly classified, Admiral Leicester?”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “Very good. What else is on the schedule today, gentlemen?”

  Opportunity

  “Have you seen these ship prices?” Otto Stauss asked his son as he came into Stauss’s office. “They’re ridiculous.”

  Dieter Stauss picked up the flimsy and looked at it.

  “What’s so ridiculous about them?”

  “Those are brand new ships. Modern designs. High automation levels. All the bells and whistles. And from top shipyards. That’s probably a third less than they should cost.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes. Look at this. Eighteen-hundred-container capacity, crew of twenty. Eighteen hundred containers, and only twenty crew? You gotta love the operations numbers on something like that.”

  Operations numbers, as Otto had instructed his son, was how you made money in the shipping business, and Stauss Interstellar Freight Services made a lot of money.

  “We need to find out what’s going on. Poke around and find out what you can about what’s distorting the ship market. You know, ask around to your friends.”

  “Sure, Dad. I’ll find out what I can.”

  Of course, Otto already knew the answer. The only thing that could have such a big impact on such a large market was the Imperial government. If ships were plentiful and cheap right now, it had to be because the Empire – in particular, the Imperial Navy – was buying a lot fewer ships than normal. The shipyards were large capital investments that lost money if they weren’t busy. At two-thirds their normal prices, those big freighters wouldn’t generate profits for the shipyards, but they would keep the lights on and the workers on payroll.

  To Otto, that meant this wasn’t a long-term downturn. The shipyards, at least, expected business to turn around soon, or they would be laying people off and shuttering facilities. And when it did turn around, those ships’ prices would go right back to where they had been. In fact, if the Empire had to play catch-up on this period when they weren’t buying ships, they would be buying more ships than normal, and those freighter prices could be as much as double what they were now. They would have to be worth enough to displace other business, and the warships the Empire bought were expensive.

  So Otto already knew the answer – or suspected he did, anyway – but it was no good to just tell Dieter that. It would be pulling a bunny out of the hat. A cute trick, but Dieter wouldn’t learn anything and he wouldn’t maintain the list of contacts he was building. Much better to let him work it out for himself.

  For his part, Dieter suspected his father already knew the answer, but that was OK with him. Even if his father did know, it would still have to be tracked down, checked, verified. When they made decisions about the company – and he used ‘they’ advisedly here, as his father was very much in control – huge sums of money were involved. Dieter and his father and their families would always be well housed and well fed, but the livelihoods of their millions of employees hung in the balance. Their house payments and their grocery bills, their savings and their dreams for the future.

  Besides which, screwing up would be losing at the game, and neither Dieter nor his father very much liked losing.

  He started calling around to his contacts and pretty quickly got the basic outline of what was going on. Then he started tracking down the details. He used his contacts and searches of news archives and discussion groups to nail down the particulars.

  “All right, so I think I know what is going on with ship prices,” Dieter told his father several days later.

  “Excellent. What’s the story?”

  “The Imperial Navy temporarily halted all ship acquisition about eight months ago. The Navy has about two million vessels in its inventory, and they replace them on a fifteen- to thirty-year service life, depending on the ship class. Picket ships are run the hardest, and are the single largest class, being about a third of all vessels. Those are replaced on a fifteen-year interval. Given that, the Navy buys about a hundred thousand ships a year. They are the largest single purchaser, accounting for about forty percent of the market.”

  “Only forty percent?”

  “Yes. The Empire also has about four million commercial freighters, replaced on an average thirty-year service life, and a quarter of a million passenger liners, replaced on a twenty-year service life. So the military represents about forty percent of new keels laid down. Given that military vessels other than picket ships average about three times the cost of commercial vessels, though, they account for about sixty percent of dollar volume.”

  “Ah. OK, that’s about what I thought. So why did the Navy stop buying ships?”

  “That’s the really interesting part. There are RFPs out for new ship designs. Everybody’s hush-hush about what the design parameters are, but the fact there are RFPs out is well known. And there are RFPs out for every single ship class the Navy buys.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means the Navy is completely redesigning its force structure and strategic doctrine. Which means they are going to be replacing existing ships on an accelerated schedule over the next ten years or so. There’s no way they are going to wait out a twenty- or thirty-year service life on vessels that no longer fit their new strategic doctrine.”

  “Which means when this acquisition ban ends, the Navy is going to eat up all the yards for ten years. You’ll be lucky if any new freighters are made at all.”

  “That’s my conclusion.”

  “Which means we have a tremendous opportunity right now. What say we buy, oh, I don’t know, fifty thousand or so new freighters?”

  “Fifty thousand? We only have forty thousand now. How can we even crew them?”

  “We don’t need to. We lease them out. Hell, for the next couple years, we can let them sit. The demurrage will be high, but not undoable. But if you’re right, in two years you aren’t going to be able to buy a new freighter for less than twice the current price, and we’ll be sitting on fifty thousand new ships. I like the sound of that. A lot.”

  “And if I’m wrong?”

  “I don’t think you’re wrong. It’s the only thing that fits the facts. The Emperor is a former military man, and he’s taken direct control of the military as the commander-in-chief. He’s not going to let the Navy age in place, he’s going to build a new Navy. Besides, we’ll incorporate Stauss Freighter Leasing as a separate entity. If it goes under, it won’t pull everything down.”

  “And the money?”

  “Oh, I think the Imperial Bank will want a part of this. They may even want to up my numbers. They’re not allowed to speculate on such things on their own, it has to be through a credible commercial loan. Besides, it will keep a lot of their debtors afloat. They don’t want those shipbuilding companies to fail.”

  “I never thought of that last angle.”

  “Sure. Shipbuilding companies are all over the map for solvency. Most of them owe the bank money on capital loans for their spacedocks and shuttles. This is a way for the bank to keep those big debtors from failing and torching the bank’s balance sheets. And I’ve been careful to maintain a good track record. I’ve never lost the Imperial Bank money. Ever.”

  The meeting with the Imperial Bank was a rare in-person meeting. Otto and Dieter Stauss were the
re, and Sector Vice President Gunther Kaube had two of his assistants present. They met in Heidelberg, the capital city of the planet Hesse, which was the capital planet of the Baden Sector, which is where Stauss Interstellar Freight Services was located.

  Dieter presented their plans in VR, then they dropped out of VR back into the conference room of the bank’s sector headquarters.

  “Well, it is a very interesting proposal” Kaube said. “We are, of course, aware of the Imperial Navy’s current acquisition hiatus and the stresses it’s putting on the shipbuilding sector. We also expect this hiatus to end on the near to medium term, but we are bound by regulation to carry out commercial loan terms to the letter.”

  “Which means you are going to be forced to call the capital loans on shipbuilders even though you don’t want to,” Otto said.

  “Yes. We don’t want to, because we expect the sector to become very active when the Imperial Navy resumes acquisition. We expect the Navy to go on something of a buying spree in a year or so. But we are not allowed to bridge those loans, much as we would like to.”

  “But a credible commercial loan...?”

  “Would solve many problems, yes. The question is, just how credible can we make it? What sort of capital are you putting into this new corporation, Stauss Freighter Leasing?”

  “Nothing too large, I’m afraid, Mr. Kaube. I was thinking of a few tens of billions. Nothing more.”

  Kaube got a distant look on his face as he ran some numbers in VR. He had clearly prepared for this meeting, for which Otto had sent a précis ahead. One never talked big money cold.

  “Nevertheless, that is a credible capital investment in the firm,” Kaube said.

  Otto Stauss knew that. He had worked the numbers as well.

  “I was wondering,” Kaube continued, “if we might increase the numbers, to say, oh, eighty thousand ships.”