New Frontier
An Alicia Jones novel 03
Author: D. L. Harrison
Copyright 2016. This is a work of fiction. Names, Characters, Places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Afterword:
About the Author
Other books by D. L. Harrison:
Book Description
Chapter 1
It’s been just a little over a week since we turned the Knomen home world into a jail. I liked to think of it as sending the Knomen to stand in the corner, perhaps with a dunce hat, until they learn how to share well with others.
I felt energized, it was my first day back aboard my ship, the command ship, since my vacation. I’d said goodbye to Nathan as his leave ended at the same time. It would be a while before I could see him again. Twenty-three of the twenty-seven home worlds that approached us to be added to the treaty were already on board. Things were moving fast.
Of course, that left three on the cusp of a decision either way, and twenty-three other worlds that were being quiet. The reports seemed almost endless about our neighbors. A few of those were building ships, some were just waiting, and so far there hadn’t been a hint of trouble from the Seltan. I wasn’t too surprised about that, they were probably waiting for the crap to hit the fan between the fifty old worlds of the Knomen empire before trying again. So far, things were peaceful. Granted, it had only been eight days.
“What the hell?” I whispered under my breath when I got to my latest orders, and forecasts.
Okay, the USFS board had obviously gone insane. They’d sent out orders to cut the finalized fleet sizes by more than half, and just for fun they wanted a plan to start exploring the rest of our arm of the galaxy toward the rim by the end of the week, with a target date at the end of a month.
I looked over at Kristi, “The board has gone crazy, want to come with me to ask them about it?”
Kristi snickered and walked over, and then quickly read over my shoulder before laughing.
“Yup, this should be good.”
They left and stopped by the bridge first.
“Sergei, Anthony, I know I just got here, but I need to go talk to the board, in person.”
They both nodded.
“Do either of you know what’s going on?”
Anthony shook his head, Sergei smiled and shrugged, “I’ll bet you dinner it’s politics.”
He was probably right.
Kristi laughed, “No bet. But we should be back by then, I hope.”
They started for the hangar and Kristi asked, “Did you go over the business yet?”
I shook my head, “I was going to do that when I was caught up here. What happened?”
Kristi replied, “Shelly thinks she’s done it, an AI that is a lot more lifelike and can act as a true assistant. But there’s a catch. It won’t work on most computers, since it needs the processing power of at least a mini-mainframe. To say the least, it will be a huge expense to anyone that wants one, and most won’t be able to afford it. Oh, and since we have mini-mainframes, she wants us to test market them.”
“Anything else?”
Kristi nodded as we walked into the shuttle bay and headed for the unarmed shuttle that looked like a car. We couldn’t really take an armed shuttle to the U.N. buildings. Well we could, but I didn’t want to start trouble.
After we were in the shuttle and it left the ship, Kristi continued.
“Caroline isn’t sure about the nanites completely replacing fabricators, she’s no longer sure it can be done with our current understanding of power sources. But she believes the repair nanites are ready for patent submission, and rollout.”
I grinned, “That’s neat. I want some of those for all my ships, and our house. How ready is it?”
No more repair droids, or printing out replacement dresses or shoes, or fixing a ding in the car, or… the list goes on. Everything from holes in our socks, to keeping the house structure itself in perfect shape by constant repairing and maintaining. Ships too. It would change everything, wear and tear will be a thing of the past. Even the nanites themselves would self-repair, or replicate when needed. It would also be able to do new ship upgrades when new technologies came out, within reason.
Kristi snickered at my excitement, “You’re such a geeky princess. Caroline says it’s ready. All we have to do is fabricate. I haven’t looked it over yet, I suggest we both do so before letting her loose. Also, if we do the AI thing, I think it would be prudent to lock it out of the weapons access, and use older AIs for that until it’s proven.”
I thought about that for a minute as Al drove us through the city toward the UN complex.
“That’s a great idea. Can you make that happen?”
I usually was the one to dive in, I liked to do things myself. But Kristi’s programming could run circles around mine. I’d have fun with the other invention. I mean, I’d professionally evaluate the repair nanites.
I added, “I’ll run with the nanite part. We can set them loose in the shuttles, if they behave normally I’ll put them in the house and main ship. If that works out, we’ll put it on the market, and try to get the board to buy some for the fleet.”
Of course, that brought us back around to the board and I frowned. Obviously something had happened to derail all our plans, because I hadn’t seen this coming.
Chapter 2
Board members Nadia Avdonin from Russia, and Gerald Anderson from England met us in the hallway.
Gerald looked grim, Nadia smiled tentatively, they both looked very tired.
Nadia said “We were expecting you, please follow me.”
Kristi and I shared a look and followed them down the hallway to a smaller room and took a seat around a small conference table.
Gerald said, “This meeting is off the record, officially, you have your orders. Unofficially, we feel we owe you an explanation for the changes, though it’s entirely your fault.”
I could sense Nadia’s amusement at Gerald’s words, and agreement. I sat back and imagined I looked quite confused.
“I don’t understand, this says home fleet will be cut back to five hundred ships, and the exploratory fleet to a thousand. That’s less than half of what we were promised.”
Nadia sighed, “We tried to fight it of course. You know the board has full autonomy by the laws passed in all the countries. As far as space goes, what we say is the law. However, in practice it isn’t quite that simple, our budget is cut from our home countries. So you could say we can do anything we want, unless we run out of money.”
I shook my head in annoyance, “How is this my fault?”
Nadia laughed, “We are a victim of your success of course.”
When I didn’t say anything Gerald stepped in.
“You defeated the Knomen home system with a tenth of the fleet size you requested, almost two years earlier than projected. With just two hundred ships with all the accompanying support craft, attack shuttles, and missile boats. Believe m
e, we fought hard to keep what we are now getting, the original cut was even larger. We managed to preserve over twice the numbers you had at the last battle for home defense, and four times the number you used for the exploratory fleet. It’s not so much the ships, although they are expensive, it’s more the people, training, supplies etc...
“In addition, we are no longer in imminent danger, so even that much was a hard sell. With the Knomen threat over our heads we were pretty much given whatever we asked. Now that we have some breathing room our governments’ priorities have shifted. You understand, this is human nature. This might change again, but only if one of our neighbors starts to exceed what we have, if that makes sense. Right now we are probably starting a galactic arms race as a result of freeing everyone from the Knomen, but we’re also ahead of all the competition by a few laps right now, both in technological edge, and numbers.”
I nodded, I got it now. Politics.
In a way they were also right, perhaps I was a little paranoid about our safety net. Although, considering the stakes if we get it wrong was losing the entire world and human race, I wondered if being overly paranoid possible.
“So what about the exploration part? What if we kick a hornet’s nest out there toward the rim? They aren’t willing to wait another… nine months? Until the fleets are complete?”
He shook his head, but it was Nadia that answered.
“No, but they do understand that threat. They want a plan that will lessen the possibility of the hornet’s nest, but they want you working on expansion. We have ambassadors, and of course, the council, to deal with old empire worlds. Right now you are just sitting in orbit, going over reports and overseeing things, they want to get their money’s worth. Again, you are a victim of your own success. They want you out there making things happen.”
Kristi asked, “What about unmanned?”
Nadia raised an eyebrow.
Kristi explained, “You said it’s more a manpower, food, and supply issue. What if we keep the home fleet down to five hundred, which we already have by the way, so any new ships can be in the exploratory fleet. But yeah, can we say, double or even triple our emplacements, unmanned platforms, and Shield missiles? There all controlled by AI from the command ship. That would more than make up for the cut.”
Nadia frowned, “Maybe double. But there’s still an expense to fabricate them.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I made some money every time they fabricated anything to do with the anti-mass field generation. That included FTL and shields for ships, all the missiles, even the plasma cannons. I didn’t care about the money, just about Earth being protected, but there comes a point where what other people believe will matter more than the truth. In short, perception over truth.
“I assume everyone is anxious to get out there and open up colonies as soon as possible, that’s also why they want a plan in a week, and execution to start within a month?”
Nadia nodded.
“So let’s leave the emplacements as good enough, and just make Shield missiles and unmanned platforms. We’ll be happy, because our system will be locked up tight, and the bean counters will be happy, because we can move platforms and Shield missiles to a new system as soon as we determine it can be colonized. They have FTL, so we don’t even have to ship them, just send them there.”
Nadia seemed to relax, “I think we can sell that, good thought.”
Gerald asked, “Any ideas on the exploring part?”
“Not sure yet, I have an inkling how we can do it safely, or at least not like a bunch of charging elephants, but I’ll have to test it.”
Nadia frowned, “What do you mean, aren’t we just going to send a small part of what will be our exploratory fleet?”
I shook my head, “What I envisioned for the exploratory fleet was to go where we found a place for a new colony, and protect it until local protections could be built. It would also be able to protect civilian shipping, answer calls for mutual defense, and coupled with a science ship do research and check on civilizations not yet at FTL to evaluate them. Things like that. I did not expect people would waste time flying from star to star blind, without any idea of what they would find.”
Kristi grinned, “Too Star Trek that.”
I held back a laugh and glared at her, it just bounced off my best friend though.
Gerald asked, “So what is your inkling of an idea.”
I sighed, “Well, we should do just like we did for the Knomen empire to take a look at things. Unmanned probes. They can find the interesting spots for us to go to by sending back data. There are a lot of stars in our arm, in the tens of billions, which means there are probably somewhere around a hundred million G or F type stars, just in our arm, which in theory could have a planet supporting life.
“I think the fact we can now cross the galaxy from edge to edge in less than ten days has skewed the fact that the milky way is big. Hard to conceive big. We can see light years of it with our sensors now. So we send out drones to scan, wherever they find a planet in the goldilocks zone they can go for a closer look, and drop off a smaller sensor array to stay there if it looks like something us humans would actually want to look at, or keep an eye on.
“At the same time, we should be dropping enough random sensors in a tight enough web to pick up ships going FTL, so we have an early warning system if an unknown alien craft is heading in our direction. One day, many years from now we might have all the f/g stars figured out. Then maybe we can check some of the others, it is possible non-human life could be on one of those, or at least, more resources. Then again we might check out our neighboring arms and around the core, but that is very long term planning.”
Gerald sputtered, “You just said you had to look into it, that sounds like a solid plan to me.”
I was actually a little impressed with myself, I made all that up off the cuff.
Kristi spoke up, “Well, it is and it isn’t. I don’t think she wants to use the same probes we used to peek around the Knomen empire, those show up on sensors. If I know Alicia, she wants to test creating stealth probes, probably based on what she saw on the Tressian stealth ship.”
I looked at Kristi in surprise, it’s exactly what I was thinking.
Kristi grinned, “What, it’s obvious. If there’s a big bad civilization out there, we don’t want them seeing us snooping around and following a probes trail straight back to Earth.”
Okay, it might have been obvious to Kristi, but it looked like Gerald and Nadia wanted to disagree.
I nodded, “She’s right. I want to build the probe about the size of a Shield missile, with a small fabricator on it, and very small sensor arrays for it drop off.”
Gerald frowned, “Why not just build probes.”
I shrugged, “Saving you money? We build a hundred of the stealth probe ships instead of thousands, and they just drop off a small probe where needed. The small probe will be very small, like a soccer ball maybe, or smaller if I can swing it. No FTL, just a small EM shield good enough to protect the electronics, sensors, a quantum transmitter to send the data back, and a very weak gravity drive for station keeping. We should be able to power it with solar energy, and it won’t need reaction fuel without an ION drive or a mini fusion reactor. When the probe ship runs out of the small stationary probes, it can land on an asteroid, and fabricate more, then continue its mission.”
I left off the part about the self-repairing nanites, which would enable the thing to last pretty much forever, it would never wear out. I trusted Gerald and Lydia, but there was no patent yet, and I had a responsibility to Caroline to protect her IP until it was ready, and patented.
Nadia shook her head, “So what do you have to test?”
I grinned, “I’m sure I can make the stealth probe, or small unmanned ship if you prefer, without issue. The test will be if the little probe can run off of a power source weak enough to be considered background energy but still powerful enough to run the needed systems. Likely, it will need to b
e inside a solar system, no more than one or two AU away from the star for the background radiation to hide it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll have to figure something else out.”
Gerald grunted, “Sounds good, and smart to be cautious. Just get us the plan by the end of the week.”
I nodded, and took that as a dismissal. It was time to get back to the ship, since it looked like I was going to be very busy, again. Between exploration, the nanites, and the new AI, I was going to be busy. I could leave the platforms and Shield missile production to my vice admirals. I’d take being busy and even better, productive, over bored any day. I just hoped there were no fires to put out, I’d had more than enough battles to last me a long time…
Chapter 3
I groaned later that day, and not in a good way. It was impossible.
Kristi looked over, “What’s the problem? Oh, I upgraded Al already.”
I frowned, I hadn’t even noticed. I’d have to pay attention and see how different he was now.
“It’s the smaller probes. The large one is designed and ready, and works flawlessly in the simulations. It could fly up and knock on the landing bay door without the ship’s sensors seeing a damn thing. The smaller probe has energy issues. Ironically the sensors are the most energy intensive. I have the gravity drive at one hundredth of a G, so it should be able to fly around, and station keep, as long as it doesn’t enter the orbit of a planet or moon.
“The quantum communications are even less energy intensive, just five volts to maintain the quantum frequency. The EM shield doesn’t take much, because the electronics are hardened, and it will have nanites to keep them in perfect condition, degradation isn’t much of an issue for them to keep ahead of. But… the sensors will run for about five minutes, then it takes fifteen to twenty to charge the capacitors back up, the solar panel can’t keep up with the power requirements of active sensors. That still leaves passive, but passive sensors won’t pick up a ship in FTL unless it’s really leaky.”
Kristi giggled, “Really leaky? Is that the technical term Doctor Jones?”
Alicia Jones 3: New Frontier Page 1
