Alicia Jones 3: New Frontier

by D. L. Harrison

  It was the only thing I could think of to make sense of it. Alnot disrupted my thoughts.

  Alnot replied, “Can you send us data of the current situation in your space, and of past battles.”

  When Dral scowled Alnot clarified, “Not for proof, but for us to understand the need, and the stakes. We must talk to the other world leaders, and make this decision fully informed with all the information, your words are persuasive, yet they do not bring full comprehension. For instance, do you need a place to build ships, how many must we all build to truly help hold the line, do they attack one world at a time, or do they swarm over many at once. It will also help us come up with plans, and a fighting strategy, if we know how they fight.”

  Dral nodded sharply, “Your words have reason in them. We will not allow you to send probes into our space until a treaty is signed, yet we will allow some small amount of ships to visit our colonies, and where we fight. Perhaps two ships, from each fleet gathered here. As for the records of previous battles, I can send those to you now. When you have selected, contact me,” and he cut the signal.

  I ordered, “Al, analyze the videos and data when you get them, and show me samples of how they fight. And have you scanned that ship out there, is there anything that indicates more advanced tech?”

  Al replied, “Scans came back as expected to what we know about Seltan technology. I would suggest the reason they haven’t advanced is power limitations. Without dark energy, none of the advancements you made would be nearly as effective.”

  I supposed that was possible.

  Chapter 15

  It wasn’t pretty. The bug ships were small, a little bigger than an attack shuttle. Without the data attached, I wouldn’t be able to even guess how many because it looked endless. But there were somewhere around nine hundred thousand of them swarming into a solar system. The defenders had thousands of emplacements, and a little over a hundred thousand ships.

  The Seltan launched missiles, and the swarm used some kind of energy weapon similar to a plasma cannon. Each ship had two, one on top, one on the bottom. They took out the missiles with the turrets and kept going. As they got closer, the Seltan missiles were more effective, but the swarming craft started to destroy Seltan ships by teaming up on them, often thirty or forty to one as they flew past and circled back.

  The swarm ships never stopped, and at the end they turned suicidal. That told me retreat wasn’t in their vocabulary, they either won, or were stopped. It became clear the Seltan didn’t have any advanced tech they were hiding, unless this battle was from a very long time ago, which was possible.

  I didn’t think so though.

  “Al, are there any videos of them losing a battle?”

  Al replied, “No, I’d guess they don’t want to show weakness. It is pretty easy to extrapolate, if the swarm ships come in enough waves, eventually it will wear down the defenders until there is nothing left. There is also no doubt that they don’t fight in FTL, though I cannot see a reason for it. Perhaps the Seltan do have gravity missiles?”

  I nodded, that would make sense. Or at least something similar.

  Kristi chimed in, “I think our ships would tear them apart based on these energy levels, at least until they changed tactics. These energy weapons, it would take more than sixty to breach our shields, and they swarm ships with half those numbers. Also, the enemy shields couldn’t take one shot from our plasma cannons, so we could kill sixteen at a time. Their shields would stop a plasma attack from our shield missiles or attack shuttles though. Even still, with our main ships we would tear them apart, and they’d be in our attack range long before we were in theirs.”

  I lifted an eyebrow, “Maybe, but say we had a thousand ships, which we are close to, that’s one thousand swarm ships each, per wave. Divide that by sixteen plasma cannons, that means we’d have to kill sixteen ships over sixty-two times to win the battle. Greater tech will make a difference, but against those numbers we’d be slaughtered quickly as soon as they change tactics.”

  Kristi pouted, “You know what this means right?”

  I frowned, “What? Assuming we do get into this fight.”

  Kristi rolled her eyes, “We need to vastly update how many ships we’re building. If we had a hundred large scale fabricators instead of ten, and discontinued the carriers, we could build two thousand battle cruisers a month. Why, after one month we’d be down to killing sixteen ships just twenty-one hundred times, two months, we could win a battle. Three months, we could forget defending and go wipe them out. Of course, we’d have to give them a major discount.”

  I laughed, “Yeah, who’d pay for it.”

  She shrugged, “It’s IP, it’s not as if the resources actually cost anything, it’s the right to build it. It’s not like we can spend it if we’re dead.”

  I nodded, “I’m more than rich enough already, but people don’t value what’s handed to them.”

  She frowned, “So you won’t do it?”

  I shook my head, “I’ll do it, but they’ll all be ours!”

  She snickered, “Seriously?”

  I frowned, “Yes, if I’m going to build an armada to save the galaxy, why shouldn’t I own it? The only other possibility is letting the other races buy the rights to make and sell our tech. I trust them, sort of, but if we can do it ourselves that might be wiser.”

  She sighed, “And if Earth won’t give them back, with their people on them?”

  “Platforms.”

  She tilted her head, and then smiled as she thought it through. We could build platforms even faster, no need for offices, hallways, landing bays, missiles outside of the small gravity ones, or life support including food and water. It would literally be a heavily shielded platform with FTL, sixteen plasma turrets, a DE reactor, and gravity missiles all controlled by an A.I. that would be commanded by a command ship. My command ship.

  Kristi nodded, “And afterwards we can repo them without trouble, and they’ll eventually get sold to new colony worlds.”

  “Exactly. Al, have our two fabricators replicate themselves until they hit a hundred, then start making platforms. Might as well let the government fabricators keep building the actual fleet they are buying.”

  Al acknowledged my order.

  Kristi raised an eyebrow.

  I shrugged, “Do you think they’ll say no to the Seltan? If they do… I’m doing it anyway, not in a hurry to die.”

  Kristi asked, “Do you think the Seltan are really in dire straits?”

  I nodded, “Dral looked a bit desperate, in a way. I don’t think he would bother with the chance we couldn’t be trusted otherwise. I don’t think they’ll have enough ships built up for this next wave, they must have lost a lot of production capacity in the last attack. Al, how long do we have before the next waves, and what is the usual frequency.”

  Al replied, “It is not exactly like clockwork. I estimate we have somewhere between four and eight months before the enemy attacks again. They come on average, every nine years.”

  We were all silent, lost in our own thoughts about was to come. I thought it would be another skirmish with a detestable species. Apparently the Seltan just had the same bad opinion about the Knomen that we did.

  Al announced, “Incoming call from Admiral Flores.”

  “Answer it,” I waited a moment, “Anthony, what can I do for you?”

  Anthony said, “I’m going on the Seltan tour from hell, want to join me as the second ship.”

  My mind froze, I hadn’t expected that.

  “Sure, any particular reason?”

  Anthony grinned, “I thought you would want to, but the other reason is it would be nice to have a scientific eye on what we see. I can handle the military eye. Also, our ships are geared for fighting other humanoids and what we’ve seen, I thought maybe you would see something I didn’t. Kristi too of course, looking good ma’am,” his eyes roved up and down her body.

  Kristi blushed, I guess she’d forgotten she looked rather pornograph
ic in just her skin suit. We were roommates for years, so I was used to it, I didn’t even think about not using a visual link.

  Kristi recovered, and gave Anthony a wink, “I’m at your service admiral.”

  It was his turn to blush.

  I answered his question before this got out of hand, “We do want to join you Admiral, although we’ve already been discussing steps in case Earth decides to join this battle.”

  Anthony grinned, “Good to hear, we’ll signal when it’s time to leave, an hour, maybe two.”

  I nodded, “In light of this can I make a further suggestion?”

  Anthony asked, “Anytime, what is it?”

  I said, “Regardless of what we do, it seems apparent that we should increase the speed that we are setting up the stealth sensor net in the galaxy. I’d suggest building a couple of hundred more stealth ships, and send them to the arm next to us. The bugs seem to be systematically going arm to arm, which is good for us, otherwise they’d have just popped over a long time ago, but we hardly need to follow their example.”

  Anthony nodded, “Good thought, we should know where they are, so we can go kick their asses when we beat off the waves,” then he took one more sidelong glance at Kristi before disconnecting…

  Kristi asked, “You seem really calm about all this, aren’t you worried?”

  I smiled, “Actually I don’t know how you humans do it. If I couldn’t control my body and mind, my emotions, I’d be rolled up in a ball shaking right now.”

  Kristi frowned, “I think I’m sorry I asked.”

  I shrugged, “I think we have enough time, even if they come in four months we’ll have close to seven thousand platforms. That’s only… one hundred forty-two some odd ships each per each wave. Piece of cake. And that’s just platforms, when we add in another eight hundred ships Earth will have built, and the thousand or so we have now, that winnows the numbers to kill even smaller. That doesn’t even include our allies or the Seltan’s numbers. Once the waves are done, and we go hunting, it will be even easier.”

  Kristi raised an eyebrow, “How?”

  I smiled, “With the waves we will be defending a planet so we’ll have to stand fast, when we attack, we can draw them into swarming, then move away. It will keep them in our range of attack, but keep us out of theirs for much longer, possibly the whole fight. Of course, we have no idea what kind of defenses or how they fight defensively, so it may not be that simple, but it should be easier.”

  Kristi nodded, “Okay, maybe I do feel better now.”

  I didn’t bother to mention that Al could be wrong, that the enemy could attack tomorrow for all we knew. But I was hoping for at least four months, honestly even if they came in eight we could stop building after four. We were also assuming there would only be swarm ships when we went out to attack them, for all we really knew their defenses were a lot more robust.

  Chapter 16

  Anthony signaled it was time, and forty-eight ships, two from each of the twenty-four fleets, followed our host Dral for a tour of Seltan space, to learn how prepared they were to face the bugs and where they were lacking.

  I also wondered at my first instinct to eradicate this enemy. The evidence was fairly large, they had destroyed an entire type of life in the arm next to ours, and have been trying to destroy humanoids ever since. However, all we had to prove that really was the word of Dral. It could even be he was telling the truth, as it was taught to him. Of course, if the enemy wouldn’t talk at all, it would be impossible to get the other side of the story.

  Al interrupted my thoughts, “The stealth sensor net has picked up two more worlds at around ten thousand light years rimward of Earth.”

  I tilted my head, I’d not asked Al to comb raw data and bring up finds. It was almost eerie how he anticipated things, but I had to remember he wasn’t actually sentient, it was all just calculations.

  “Tell me about them?”

  Al responded, “The first is another empty world, but it would require many years of terraforming before humans could live there comfortably. The second is another interstellar race, they haven’t reacted to the probes.”

  I perked up, “Display all data please.”

  The information came up. They were new to space, or hadn’t had a breakthrough in a long time. The scans indicated their ships were much like the first I’d built, saucers, no artificial gravity, no energy weapons although it did appear they had ports for missile launches. I imagined Earth wouldn’t have been much farther along than that without picking up artificial gravity from the Tressians. At least, we wouldn’t have energy weapons either, since it was integral to firing.

  Perhaps I would have come up with the newer designs to tighten and improve the anti-mass and EM field, but maybe not without a driving reason to push the tech.

  The world was ahead of us in different ways however, it looked like they had a single central government, I imagined we’d run into their ships in other systems in the future, hopefully they would be peaceful, not that the ships they were in could even scratch one of our shuttles, much less a battle cruiser or command ship.

  There was nothing to say what reaction the USFS board was taking, I was out of that loop now. But I knew from planning meetings in the past that the most likely response was to send in a visible probe, with a brief introduction, a copy of the treaty, and a quantum communication device with a built in translation matrix.

  We’d decided back then, once they were FTL it was a little late to be preparing for first contact, so it was better all-around to step lightly. If they were curious, and peaceful, they’d figure things out and make contact. If they destroyed the probe without investigating, we’d give them wide berth, at least until they trespassed on our space. It wasn’t perfect, but what was?

  I squashed the feeling of wanting to go make first contact, or really do anything else. I needed to be living in the moment. Sure, my scientific self did need to plan and look to the future, but the rest of me needed to be a bit steadier. Part of being a workaholic, I was always thinking ahead to what was next.

  That said, I didn’t tell Al not to distract me if more data came in on the stealth sensor net either.

  It didn’t take more than a few hours to reach our first destination. The system was right on the edge where the arm started by the core. It had a couple of gas giants that looked rather small, a colony of about a half million Seltans, and the system was riddled with thousands of emplacements, and too many ships to count.

  Dral opened a link and sent an image, “This is what the system looked like when we found it.”

  The image was completely different. The gas giants were about five times larger, and there were two asteroid belts that no longer existed.

  Dral said, “We have used all the resources in this system to defend against our common enemy for millennia, and other systems as well we will go see. This system is the front line of our endless war. We build up, they knock it down, then we build up. We never have enough resources or time to counter attack the enemy between waves, it is all we can do to keep up a defense.

  “It is the front line because this is the only system they swarm, I do not know why they don’t cross the small void between arms, but they come down the arm to the core, and swing our way to this system. It has fallen twice in our history, but then the swarm splits, and we’ve managed to beat them back and reestablish this system.

  “I know to us that tactic seems incredibly stupid, especially since it has failed them every nine years for the last thousands of years, but they do not think like us and seem incapable of adapting. That said, if you don’t join us we aren’t sure we’ll make it this time, and definitely not the time after.”

  I frowned, it didn’t make sense, “Dral, how is it you build your ships?”

  Dral looked annoyed at the interruption, but he answered, “We have several systems with ship yards that run non-stop.”

  Oh. They didn’t have fabricators? That… no wonder they could never build enoug
h. With fabricators we could build a lot in a short amount of time, it must take them months per ship. To build this many ships every nine years, they must have yards in hundreds of systems. The real issue without fabricators would be manpower, that was probably what held them back. I hadn’t even considered that, we’d had fabricators pre-FTL, it was something I’d grown up with and taken for granted.

  Dral continued when no one else interrupted, I wondered if everyone else came to the same conclusion.

  “The only way to ever stop them, is to fight and destroy them in their star systems, to not let them build more of these waves. We need allies. Follow please,” the connection dropped and he went to FTL.

  Yeah, allies, or fabricators, but I kept my mouth shut. It seemed absurd to keep back tech, but I reminded myself no matter their position, they were our enemy a few hours ago. Still, all the little logistical problems without them came to mind. Factories for missiles, then they’d have to get them to the ships, instead of simply fabricating new ones right there on the ship that needed them. There were many other issues as well.

  Dral took us to several systems, all of them had colonies with populations of a half to two million, and usually only had one small city. Was it the fighting that kept down the populations? Also, all the systems showed signs of being mined and fully exploited. He didn’t take us to any systems with ship yards, or where current mining was happening. I didn’t blame him, we were his enemies up until recently as well, and right now it was just a temporary truce until our world leaders made a decision where to stand.

  By the time we were finished, our ships were done with the upgrades, and we went straight home via wormhole instead of returning to Leira. The question was what would we do about it. The truth was, the question wasn’t if we would fight the bugs, the question was if we would attempt to save the Seltan, or not. I hoped it was the former…

  Chapter 17

  “This is… perfect.”

  I smiled but didn’t open my eyes, “Glad you think so.”