Absen cleared his throat. “There’s never enough power. Even with the new reactors and superconducting capacitors, we can blow through what we have pretty quickly, but that’s what the TacDrive is for. If we keep one jump in reserve at all times, we can run away at lightspeed far enough to leave any enemies behind. Then we stop, recharge, and reengage.”
Ekara grunted. “I foresee you yelling ‘More power, Ekara’ every five minutes, sir. I’ll want to take a look at the management software and the system specs. I’d bet you a week’s pay I can come up with some improvements, if you want them.”
“I’d be very interested, Captain.”
“Might as well start calling me Commander, sir. Get everyone used to it,” Ekara said, resigned.
“What are these?” Nightingale asked from across the room. He ran his hands along something that looked like a wine rack several stories high, with thousands of holes varying in size from ten centimeters to a meter.
Absen said, “Special ammo storage. There will be a high-speed robot that will draw out whatever you want and load it. So, besides the usual one-kilogram cannonballs, you’ll have some different choices. Frangible loads that come apart into thousands of tiny tetrahedrons – those are good for anti-hyper or anti-fighter use. Small nukes that are made to go critical on impact, using kinetic energy as a trigger mechanism. Stealthed spy drones and mines, though those have to be launched at far slower speeds. The lab rats are working on some other ideas. I’m sure you could add your own.”
“I’m sure I can. It’s really more of a variable launch system for anything that can be packed into a metal sphere.” Nightingale’s eyes shone like a kid’s at Christmas.
“Glad you like it. On to the next stop.”
“But –”
“Plenty of time tomorrow for you to dig into detail. This is the overview, remember?” Absen hopped back into the front seat of the cart. “Particle beams, Mister D. We’ll skip the lasers.” As they rolled, he explained.
“The lasers have been upgraded to perhaps twice their power, but are now secondary, multirole weapons. They can add to the offense, but will be optimized for hyper defense and anti-fighter use, or to take down anything up to a Meme frigate. Our new offensive energy weapons are particle beams. Both Desolator and the Hippos have excellent tech in this area, and combined, we’ve come up with something better than either, the absolute latest thing.”
Nightingale wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. If Absen didn’t know better, he’d have thought the big man was drooling. He had a faraway gleam in his eyes, and Absen recognized it as the look of a man with a brand-new obsession.
Something like he himself experienced when he conceived the TacDrive.
Their journey was short this time, debouching into a cylindrical room something like an old-fashioned missile silo, but scaled up, fifty meters in diameter and a hundred high. This time the control room was built into the natural floor, as energy cared little for gravity’s pull.
In the center of the cylinder, from floor to ceiling, ran a tube ten meters in diameter, with rings, heavy metallic fittings, and meter-thick conduits snaking into it at five meter intervals. It merged with the floor and exited the ceiling, which was the near the nose of the ship. Like everywhere else, robots swarmed, working.
“Are we behind the nose armor?” Nightingale asked.
Absen said, “Inside it, actually, just like the Behemoths. Each weapon is in a kind of semi-socket that gives it some traverse, but mostly we have to point the whole ship near our target. The muzzles are covered by trapdoor clamshell slabs to protect them between shots.”
“Nice,” Nightingale replied. “No more surface structures vulnerable to a lucky hit.”
“True, but we have fewer of them. Three Behemoths, three PBs, alternating in a ring around the nose, about two hundred meters between each firing port. Lasers are interspersed all over the ship.”
“What about the other weapons? Electric shotguns?” He meant the railgun-like launchers of sprays of shot, used one time as a final defense.
“Gone. The armor has been upgraded so much that it’s not worth bolting them on.”
“Missiles?”
“Reloadable box launchers near the waist, six hundred at a time, but I want you to take a look at them.”
“Why, sir?” Nightingale asked.
“I’m not at all sure I want them, not for the kind of battle I want to fight. The only reason I am considering keeping them is as a hedge against unforeseen threats. I hate to throw away tools. However, getting rid of them could make room for fuel, railgun ammo, extra power reactors…” Absen turned to Ekara. “I’ll want your input too on that. I suspect I’ll have to decide what compromises will be made.”
“Yes, sir.” Ekara’s eyes roved over the enormous particle beam generator, no doubt calculating the power it would consume.
“So that’s the list?” Nightingale asked expectantly. “Particle beams and railguns as main batteries. Lasers as secondaries, and for defense. Missiles for the Black Swan factors. Fewer weapons, but each far more powerful. I like it, except…”
“Go ahead, Mister Nightingale.”
“Before, we had a lot more of them for redundancy. In the fight to take this system, you lost a quarter of your guns to the pounding we took.” He said “your” because he had been in stasis with the rest of the civilians during the battle, but of course he had studied the reports. “Now, if we lose one railgun or one PB, it’s a very big deal.”
“True, but our damage control will be dramatically better, with all these repair drones. And, you haven’t yet seen the manufactory.”
“Manu-factory?”
Absen nodded. “Yes. Just like one of Desolator’s. Once it’s complete, it will be able to rebuild and replace anything on this ship, given time and materials. Anything. A weapon, a new type of ammo, spare parts, whatever. We’ve even incorporated EarthTech nano-construction techniques that the Ryss didn’t have. ”
“Wow.”
“Oh, yeah,” Absen breathed. “This girl’s gonna be hell on wheels.”
Nightingale sat down on the cart, craning his neck up at the ceiling, marveling.
“If you are trying to impress us, sir, you’ve done it,” Ekara remarked dryly. “Is there anything else on the tour?”
“One or two things. You ready to see more, Ellis, or is your brain overloaded?”
“I’ll…I’ll be fine, sir. Show me, oh wondrous Oz.”
“Let’s walk this time, stretch our legs. It’s only a hundred meters or so.”
Absen led the two, Tobias trailing along, to an open door and onto a ramp downward, that is, deeper into the ship. The slope quickly became a floor as the gravity adjusted, undoubtedly due to Desolator’s attentiveness. The cart followed obediently behind the Steward. A minute later they walked into another control room.
“Are these centers backups?” Ekara asked. “I mean, everything can be fired from the bridge, right?”
“Weapons are usually targeted from the bridge, but there is a central weapons control room for redundancy, then one for each major weapon, mostly for damage control. They can take detailed manual charge of every aspect of the system. My bridge officers have to fight the whole ship. They can’t be trying to optimize every gun.”
“Point taken. So what is this control room for?”
Unlike the other ones, this center was not tucked into the corner of some massive installation. As it was not yet operational, there was very little to see – just three consoles, three doors, and spaces where other things would go. The floor of scuffed metal had not even been surfaced yet. Only the lighting seemed to have power.
“This is Exploder Control.”
“Exploder?”
“That’s how the Ryss word translates. The most powerful single weapon Desolator has. Antimatter bombs big enough to vaporize everything within ten kilometers of detonation, and cause damage out to one hundred in vacuum – and when I say vaporize, that’s not exagg
eration for effect. The blast fuses particles, strips electrons from their shells, and causes fission in normally inert elements. Given the right conditions it can set up a chain reaction to continue fusing and consuming matter.”
“The Destroyer-killer bomb Desolator demonstrated,” Nightingale said. “One weapon and pfft. Gone.”
“If properly placed. But they’re expensive – not in money, but in time to make. We’ll only have a handful of them. We’re limited by the amount of antimatter Desolator can collect off the magnetic belts of New Jove, and it’s a rare commodity. It takes months for his array to get enough for one Exploder. He’d given us all he has for the trip.”
Ekara cleared his throat. “Antimatter would make one hell of a power source. Seems a shame to waste it by blowing it up.”
Nightingale drew a breath to protest when Absen held up a hand. “That idea has been proposed. There’s an R&D team working on an experimental auxiliary antimatter reactor, but using it as a controlled power source seems infinitely more dangerous than chucking it at an enemy and detonating it.”
“I’d like to look into that anyway,” Ekara replied, eagerness in his eyes.
“I’d expect nothing less,” Absen said.
“How are the Exploders delivered?” Nightingale asked.
“The warheads are stored securely within magazines deep inside the ship, and are sent up to be mated with a drone missile body right before launch. This is their weakness, in my opinion. The warheads can’t take the acceleration of a railgun launch, as the antimatter is suspended inside triple-redundant magnetic bottles, so they must be mounted on a missile.”
Nightingale nodded. “Which is then vulnerable to being shot down, not to mention it has to get well away from us before it can be detonated or it will take us with it. Kind of limits its usefulness.”
“Yes, they have to be handled with care, but at least we have them.”
A faraway look in Ellis Nightingale’s eyes alerted Absen that the man was chewing on an idea, but he didn’t press him. A month remained before earliest departure, and he was sure to have to referee at least a dozen good ideas in the next week, if the thoughtful faces of these two engineers were any indication.
“That will do it for this evening, gentlemen. Let’s hit the mess and then you can go your ways.” Absen gestured at the cart.
“You eat at the crew mess, sir?” Ekara asked, surprised.
“On Desolator, yes. He has a short crew and not really enough officers to form a wardroom. Once Conquest undocks, the usual traditions will apply.”
Ekara seemed uncomfortable at this development. Perhaps he felt eating with the ratings and petty officers was beneath him, Absen wondered, or maybe he had some kind of dietary peculiarities. For this meal, though, he’d have to put up with it.
They rode without conversation for a time, each man with his own thoughts watching the activity of machines and the occasional Ryss, Sekoi or human as they bustled about the ship. Once they reached the mess and had filled their trays, they sat down in a corner of the large, near-empty room.
“What about the other races, sir?” Ekara spoke up. “We’re human. Conquest is an EarthFleet ship. Will they be coming along?”
“Some, yes. A few dozen of each. It’s important to have a mixed crew, for political reasons, and for some good practical ones.”
“Practical?” Ekara seemed ready to object. “Extra facilities to accommodate aliens could be put to better use, I should think.”
“Possibly. But,” Absen ticked off reasons on his fingers. “What if we run into other Ryss out there, or Sekoi slaves of Meme? What if we run into completely new races? There are no Ryss Blends – they abhor the very idea – and only one human Blend in this system: Ezekiel Denham. The Hippos, on the other hand, have thousands. They can spare a few, and they may be very useful if we run into any Meme-controlled creatures.”
He went on before the others could comment. “Both races have some experts in certain disciplines that will be useful, particularly the Hippo Blends, with their accumulated memories of long lifespans. They are way ahead of us in the biological sciences, for example. The Ryss have some warriors that have asked to join the fight. Turning them down would have caused hard feelings. And then there’s the Black Swans.”
“The unknown unknowns.” Ekara looked like he was sucking on lemons.
“Right. Three races means triple redundancy if, for example, some kind of Meme human-killing plague got loose in the ship.”
“The Vulcan saves the day again?” Nightingale laughed.
Absen joined him in a chuckle. “I learned a lot from that old TV show.”
Ekara seemed to force his face into a neutral mask, and Absen made a mental note to keep an eye on the man.
Chapter 6
Desolator’s control chamber seemed like a chapel, or perhaps a mausoleum, with its three long boxes like giant sarcophagi. Absen hadn’t had to come here to speak with Desolator, but he’d wanted to see the place again for some time. He wasn’t certain why.
“Welcome, Admiral,” echoed the AI’s voice.
“Thank you, Desolator. I was walking, and a question occurred to me. Something I have been meaning to ask you for some time, about the time before the final battle at the Ryss homeworld.”
“Of course.”
“The Bite. That was the result of your war with the Meme.”
“Yes.”
“It’s a relatively dead zone. Once we learned what emissions to look for, humanity found traces of civilizations in all directions, but much less within that area. It’s why our radio-telescopes didn’t find alien life earlier. Yet, when we took Gliese 370, we didn’t wipe out the Sekoi, and therefore ten years later we have a thriving economy. Did we just get lucky, or was there some other factor in play?”
Desolator paused for a moment longer than usual. Absen realized this fact was significant. At the speed the AI thought, there was no reason for a break in conversation. Maybe it was for effect.
Unless Desolator was thinking deeply. Or perhaps dissembling? Chirom had said that the machine intelligence, like most Ryss, was not very good at lying.
“This may distress you, if I understand human psychology; or, as a military man, it may not.” He paused again.
“Desolator, I have never seen you hesitant or uncertain like this. Please explain fully.”
As the Admiral’s request was effectively an order, and Desolator had submitted himself to Absen’s authority, the AI forged ahead resolutely. “I know you humans fear me for my power, and also for my other-ness. I am a mind doubly alien, Ryss and machine. Because of this, I have felt inhibited in explaining the full implications of the Bite.”
Absen waved his hand in the air, dismissive. “Get to the point.”
“Perhaps we could have some privacy?” Desolator’s voice dropped in volume and seemed to move to a position next to Absen’s ear, probably transmitted from a directional microphone.
Absen turned to look over his shoulder at the vast command center behind him, and told the unfamiliar Ryss in the captain’s throne, “Do not disturb me while I am conversing with Desolator.”
The big cat nodded.
Moving deeper into Desolator’s chamber, Absen said quietly, “Go on.” He found a place against the wall farthest from the permanently open door and leaned against it.
“You humans count genocide a great crime, but we Ryss see little value in sparing an enemy, especially if his death is honorable.”
“Got it.”
“The Meme actually believe more as you do, for different reasons. They wipe out planets only as a last resort, because they want to enslave them.”
“I see. So what you are saying is that the Ryss, not the Meme, caused the devastation of the Bite.”
“Yes. As a more recently built ship, I never left home system until the end. However, earlier Dominator-class ships and the smaller dreadnoughts that came before us traveled via stardrive to hundreds of Meme worlds, and ruthlessly
laid them waste. It seemed advantageous at the time.”
Saddened but not surprised, Absen said, “’Scorched earth,’ we call that. Didn’t you think about helping the enslaved races revolt?”
“You must understand, Admiral, that we had no idea how large the Empire was, and we were under tremendous pressure. The situation was not so different from your own World War Two, as the Allies reached deep into the Axis powers with the indiscriminate firebombing of cities, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We were desperate, and had no time for niceties. Or, perhaps, inclination.”
“I can’t judge your people and their culture, Desolator. Maybe in your position I’d have done the same thing. Certainly it was part of our planning process for Gliese 370.”
Desolator’s voice evidenced surprise. “You considered wiping out the Sekoi?”
“Most of them. In the extreme case. If all else failed, we could have struck the planet with large relativistic projectiles and bombed them back to the stone age, and then continued on to another star. So I understand what the Ryss did.”
“Why did you not ask me this before, Admiral?”
Absen massaged his chin. “I suppose I didn’t want to press you too hard.”
“Until I had proven my loyalty.”
“Baldly stated, yes. It’s never a good thing to shame someone who has the power to overthrow you.”
“Thank you for your consideration, but if you understood the Ryss, you would realize that I owe you blood debt for my entire race. I can no more betray you, or humanity, than you could murder a child. A million children. Power doesn’t even enter the equation.”
“Ouch. But thank you for explaining that. Forgive me for doubting.”
Desolator’s tone smiled. “I understand, though, that it is your responsibility as a commander to be skeptical. I take no offense.”
“Good. I had always wondered about the orientation of the Weapon, the laser on Afrana’s moon, and why it pointed straight toward the planet. It wasn’t just to keep the Sekoi in line, was it?”
Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest) Page 5
