"Wow."
"Yeah. You know what that means, though. Full uniform at meals, three times a day. No shipsuits, no civvies."
"Well, we signed up to wear the uniform. We'll manage."
They wore their uniforms to meals. Jan's was much gaudier than Bill's, displaying the Combat Medal, the Science Medal, with cluster, the Distinguished Service Medal, with cluster, and the Victorious Action ribbon, with three silver stars. Bill's uniform, though, had Intelligence Division unit badges, and they didn't give anybody medals for anything. Medal? For what? Nothing happened. Hush-hush, and all that.
On the way to and from meals, they found themselves saluted by crew members. Force of habit, Jan guessed, from former CSF spacers. As civilian employees of the Commonwealth Star Line, they had no obligation of courtesy to salute. But salute they did, and, rather than argue with each and every one of them, Jan returned the salutes as she would to a fellow spacer.
At meals, Jan, as the senior officer of the two of them, introduced Bill as her companion, with no further details, per Commonwealth custom. It was nobody else's business, really.
The captain of the Star Surfer had retired from the CSF with the rank of captain, and took a captain's slot with the Commonwealth Star Line. He had space in his blood and would probably serve until they kicked him out. His companion was a long-time service wife who was happy that now, with him in civilian employment, she could accompany her husband on his duty tours. CSL captains spaced six months on and six months off, so they spent the other half of the year at their home on Kodu.
Jan and Bill spent the three-week trip studying up on Calumet. They couldn't review classified materials, as the Star Surfer did not have any CSF-certified secure spaces, but they could review other materials up to and including Confidential.
It was a pleasant and uneventful crossing, and they arrived at Calumet on schedule to begin their duties.
Senior Tactical Officer,
Calumet Planetary Combat Information Center
“Talk to me, Tactical.” Vice Admiral Alice Chang walked across the flag bridge to her command chair and sat down, scanning the displays.
Fleet Tactical Officer Captain Gerald Shah turned toward her with his report. “Approximately four hundred point sources at one hundred locations or so, Ma’am, distributed around this half of the system periphery. They are filling in as sensor reports come in. It looks like a globular decoy pattern. No indications yet of which of the bogies are not decoys, if any. They're accelerating in-system at one g.”
Chang pushed a stud on her chair arm. “CIC, have you got anything yet on which of these bogeys might be actual hostiles?”
“Not yet, Ma’am. But we are getting what looks like some bleed-through on Bogeys 9, 13, and 18.”
“All right. Keep a special eye on them. Let me know if anything changes.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
The decoys themselves were a robotically controlled, cheap, small powerplant and drive system, mounted on some small mass like an asteroid. They burned off extra waste heat as well, for their limited lifetimes. The problem was, while you couldn't make a decoy look like a warship, you could make a warship look like a decoy. The decoy generated enough radiation you could emulate a decoy with a warship if you were careful.
Bleed-through was the same thing as "less than careful." A failure to simulate the decoy well enough permitted the leakage of a warship spectral signature through the noise of a fake decoy signal. And Bogeys 9, 13, and 18, among the earliest reported, were a triangle at the closest point of the system periphery to the planet, below the ecliptic. Pretty much the closest bogeys, which is why their sensor signals got there in the first batch.
“Comm, what does Planetary CIC say? Have they issued any advisories yet?”
“We just got a Situation Report from them, Ma’am. They note the apparent bleed-through of Bogeys 9, 13, and 18, but they believe those are faked, an attempt to draw us out of position. They believe Bogeys 36, 43, 44, 49, and 58, or some subset of them, are more likely to be actual hostiles, although they admit no bleed-through has been seen yet. Those are all above the ecliptic, Ma'am.”
“So the desk jockeys weigh in. Anybody want to cover my bet they’re wrong?” To the answering silence Chang said, “I didn’t think so.”
Chang drummed her fingers on the arm of her command chair. She continued to watch the displays as additional sensor data came in. Additional bogies continued filling out the sphere. That was to be expected. But the Planetary CIC report was an itch she couldn’t scratch.
“Comm, who’s got Planetary CIC right now? Who issued that report?”
“It’s a Captain Childers, Ma’am. She assumed command when the first sensor reports started coming in.”
“Captain Jan Childers?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Forget everything I just said. I withdraw my wager offer. Comm, my compliments to Captain Childers, and would you request her tactical recommendation?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Jan Childers wasn’t quite a legend in the CSF – not yet, anyway – but if there was any justice, she soon would be. Chang had read her book, “The Science of Surprise: Creating Military Advantage,” and was a huge fan. So was the Navy brass, who had immediately classified the book and restricted access to command ranks. Tactical Division was considering a new tactical course beyond ATS just to teach the book, or maybe a course teaching the book to replace ATS altogether.
Of course, you always tried to surprise the enemy, but Childers had written what might be the definitive treatment, pulling in human psychology, weapons, propulsion, and sensor technologies, the new maneuver capabilities she herself had developed, and the doctrine and practices of over a dozen navies, including Earth’s, the Commonwealth’s, and the biggest and most dangerous polities in the outer colonies. It was a stunning achievement.
And it wasn't just everybody who had received both the CSF Combat Medal and the CSF Science Medal. As a matter of fact, Chang didn't think anyone else ever had. Not to mention two DSMs and four Victorious Action ribbons.
“Oh, and Comm? Tell her I read her book.”
“Ma’am?”
“Just tell her.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“They’re going for it, Sir.”
“Finally decided what they were going to do, eh?”
The passive sensor scans now showed several Commonwealth warships accelerating out toward each of the three “bleed-through” decoys. By the energy signatures and the acceleration levels, the inferred masses were right for all the heavy ships – battleships and heavy cruisers – the Commonwealth routinely deployed here in Calumet. Their complement of lighter combatants looked a little thin as compared to normal Commonwealth practice, but there had been a redeployment of lighter elements in patrol groups, trying to interdict just the sort of “drive-by shooting” they were here to perform.
The passive scans also showed a couple of dozen large freighters lumbering for the system periphery, trying to get out before the shooting started. They had started to flee the moment their commercial sensors picked up the decoys, and had kept heading out in dribs and drabs ever since. In a commerce raid like this, they were targets, and their captains knew it. They ran for the limit in the other direction from the Commonwealth warships, above the ecliptic, the safest vector to stay out of the range of fire. By luck, several of those freighters were fleeing directly toward the three actual squadrons of Samaran ships. They would destroy them on their way past, overfly the planet, destroying space infrastructure as they went, and accelerate out the other side of the system before the Commonwealth ships could get themselves slowed down and come back at them.
Captain Michael Oberlin of the light cruiser SSN Falcon turned to his navigator, Lieutenant Commander Terry Cosworth.
“Maintain emissions lockdown and decoy signature. Let’s see how long we can delay them figuring out what’s really going on.”
Admiral Chang watched the screens a
s they neared weapons range of the four inbound point sources of Bogey 44. They would find out soon whether she had decided correctly. If they were actual hostiles, they would be light units, no match for the big Commonwealth battleship and cruiser, and with nowhere near the weapons range. Still, she wasn’t going to get too close.
When they came within her weapons range, she made the call.
“All right, they’re committed, and so are we. Time to take the masks off and see who’s who. Fleet orders. Bring us up to full military power and bring up the shields. Active scanners. Commence firing plan Alpha.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Captain Oberlin studied the passive sensors.
“OK, they’re committed. There’s no way they can come back at us now. Bring us up to full military power and power up the shields. Active scanners. Those freighters will be in range in five minutes. Start working up firing solutions.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Status Change! Sir, those freighters....”
Oberlin’s attention snapped back to the display. What had been a couple of lumbering freighters headed his way now blazed with heavy warship power levels. Their acceleration had doubled. And his ships were being painted with active sensors.
“Hard to starboard! Maximum acceleration!” Oberlin screamed.
But it was much too late.
Admiral Chang watched the displays as her flagship, the battleship CSS Kriegsmädchen, and her consort, the heavy cruiser CSS Mineko Kusunoki, fired on the decoys. Just as her ships began to fire, the four point sources of Bogey 44 revealed themselves to be two Samaran light cruisers and two Samaran destroyers as they brought their military systems up.
Seven seconds later, her beams arrived. Five seconds after that, her second salvo arrived. Five seconds after that, her third salvo wasted itself on debris.
"Comm, let Admiral Bzovsky know they can stand down their power levels and order them to return to Calumet orbit. Then see if you can't raise Captain Childers for me."
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Sir, Admiral Chang advises we can stand down our power levels and orders us to return to Calumet orbit. The actual hostiles have been destroyed."
"Excellent. Pass those orders on, Lieutenant Romano. I know our captains have been fretting about maintaining those power levels. It doesn't seem right to be running power plants at maximum military power just to radiate the heat away while we're accelerating at slow-poke heavy ship levels."
"Well, it apparently fooled them, Sir."
"For as long as needed, anyway. Get those orders out, Lieutenant."
"Yes, Sir.
The destroyers and light cruisers that had been straining to maintain routine heavy cruiser and battleship power levels finally gave their power plants and radiators a break, and began to decelerate at their higher normal rates as the first step to returning to Calumet.
"My compliments, Captain Childers. Your tactical plan worked to perfection."
"Thank you. Your command carried it out perfectly, Ma'am. That was nicely done as well."
"Thank you, Captain. I have a question, though. Why were you so sure the actual hostiles were among bogies 36, 43, 44, 49, and 58?"
"The actual decoys were robots, Ma'am. They all began accelerating inward exactly fifteen minutes after their transition from hyperspace. Bogeys 36, 44, and 49 started accelerating a tiny bit later. The difference wasn't large, a few tens of milliseconds, but that indicated those bogeys were different. Probably a minor difference in the software and computer systems of the actual ships from that of the decoys, or delays in slightly different control runs. We didn't have a good read on Bogeys 43 and 58, so we weren't sure whether they were decoys or ships. I included them for safety, but as you saw, they were decoys as well."
"So three acted slightly differently, and we knew it wasn't over a hundred hostile squadrons and three decoys, so those three must be the hostile squadrons."
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Excellent work, Captain. And the use of our destroyers and light cruisers to simulate our heavies was a nice touch."
"We had to show them heavy cruisers and battleships, Ma'am, because they were expecting to see them. They let you get much closer than any commander of a squadron of light combatants should have otherwise, freighter power levels or not. And they were far enough away from Admiral Bzofsky's ships their sensors couldn't see through the disguise at that distance. You were much closer, but it's easier to simulate the lower power levels of a freighter than it is to simulate the higher power levels of a larger ship."
"I see that. Well, it was good work, Captain, and your role will figure prominently in my report."
"I appreciate that, Ma'am. If I might offer one further suggestion?"
"Go ahead, Captain."
"I would advise not issuing any public statement about this attempted attack at all. To any questions from the press about reported fleet movements, we should just say we occasionally conduct exercises against simulated opponents and leave it at that."
"So Samara sends a dozen ships and almost a thousand decoys to conduct a hit-and-run raid, and they just disappear, with no indication of what happened to them?"
"Yes, Ma'am."
"You have a mean streak, Captain Childers."
"Yes, Ma'am." And, after a slight pause, "Thank you, Ma'am."
Hyperspace
At the end of their tours in Calumet, Jan and Bill returned to Sigurdsen. This trip was not "fastest available transport," however, but "available CSF transport." So the trip back was on a light cruiser, the CSS Catalonia, making the run to Sigurdsen with crew rotations.
As the senior deadhead aboard ship, and since all the guest quarters and spaces aboard ship were full, Jan was given the visiting high-ranking officer's quarters on the captain's deck of Catalonia. The captain and first officer were happy that Jan and Bill would be sharing the quarters, given how crowded the ship would be.
The guest quarters on the captain's deck were almost as big as the business-class cabin on the CPS Star Surfer had been, but Jan did take Bill down-cylinder to see a normal guest quarters on a light cruiser. There was one empty, as transfers were still coming aboard.
"This is the same as the cabin I had on board Aquitaine when I first shipped from Earth to Jablonka," Jan said.
"OK, now that's tiny."
"Yes, but, given my history, you can see how it would have seemed a palace to me."
"Just the lock on the door would do that."
"You got it."
The crossing was uneventful. Jan got called Admiral a lot. The captain invited her and Bill to sit on the bridge during maneuvers. Jan demurred but encouraged Bill to take the opportunity to learn about ship operations. He found them very interesting.
During the trip, and with no other duties to occupy her mind, Jan started puzzling out something that had bothered her for a long time, since she had first formalized the treatment of the system periphery for her doctoral dissertation ten years before. It had been a minor curiosity at the time, but it kept growing in significance in her mind. It had become an itch she couldn't scratch.
Points in hyperspace were congruent at every point to points in normal space, but closer together by a factor of four-pi-e-cubed, written (4πe)³. Pi made sense, it was a geometric constant and it's a geometric problem. The constant 'e' was one of those numbers that just kept turning up, so it was no surprise. The '4' was interesting by itself, but you could also write the hyperspace constant as (2π*2e)³, which made it much less interesting. Twos often crept in.
But why cubed?
Sure, hyperspace was a volume, and normal space was a volume, but the hyperspace constant applied to measurements along a linear dimension. The ratio of volumes between hyperspace and normal space was (4πe)9. What's with that? You would expect the linear constant to be more like 4πe, and the ratio of the volumes to be (4πe)³.
Wait a minute. What was that again?
Jan dug back into her mathematics. It took her a week of the tri
p just to get back to where she was ten years ago. Then she checked the mathematics again.
There was nothing to prevent the constant for hyperspace from being 4πe. Or rather, the constant for another hyperspace. Or from being (4πe)2 or (4πe)4, for that matter.
What if there were a stack of hyperspaces, all of ratio 4πe from one to the next? Humanity had stumbled on one of them, call it hyperspace-3, and used it, but what if the others existed? What if they could figure out how to transition between them?
One obvious thing was that if they could get to hyperspace-4, at (4πe)4, interstellar trips like this one would go a lot faster. 4πe was about 34.16. At another factor of 4πe, a three-week trip like this one would only take fifteen hours. Wow.
That made a huge difference. CSF ships spent about ten percent of their duty time in hyper, running back and forth to their duty stations, as did CSF ship personnel. Cutting transit times so drastically would basically have the effect of adding ten percent more ships and crews to the Navy.
Of course, the system periphery would be much farther out before you got to space 'flat' enough that the gravitational gradient on transition to normal space wouldn't create sheer forces large enough to tear the ship apart. So you would probably have to use 'regular' hyperspace-3 to get out far enough first.
Conversely, though, hyperspace-2 would have a much smaller system periphery, and hyperspace-1 even smaller yet. Jan worked the numbers and was shocked. You couldn't quite hyper right up to the planet, because gravitational gradients increased faster than linearly as you approached a massive body, but you could get much, much closer. It would require a fundamental shift in tactics and defensive strategies.
If you used the ship's computer to map and track the gravitational gradients in real time as the ship traveled, you could have the ship make the transitions for you. You could go from hyperspace-1 to hyperspace-2 to hyperspace-3 to hyperspace-4 as you left a system, and conversely coming into a system. And the difference in gravitational gradient between, say, hyperspace-3 and hyperspace-4 was much smaller than between normal space and hyperspace-4, which moved the system periphery where you could transition into and out of hyperspace-4 from hyperspace-3 much closer in than for transitions into and out of hyperspace-4 from normal space.
Childers Page 15
