Finch had merely grunted when they had mentioned this last part. He remembered the unsettling images of the Invardii attack on Earth, and he was not sympathetic. One less Invardii was one less enemy Prometheus had to fight against, and he didn’t really care how their numbers were reduced. But he respected the researchers’ wishes, and he would let them solve their problems in their own way.
The cylinder had been kept inside a grided cage for the last month, effectively sealing it off from the research lab and other activity at Prometheus. Now it was time to send it home.
“Power systems working perfectly,” reported Meeaniro. “Cage and backup systems all green for go.”
Matsu adjusted the prototype he had built for the sub space pulse generator, and mentally went through each stage of the process one more time. This was a far more complex machine than the one Meeaniro had developed at Thistledown Abbey, but most of the extras were tracking and analysis systems.
It still ran essentially as Meeaniro had theorized it would, and the previous nineteen-string theory of space-time had now been modified substantially by her work, greatly simplifying it.
“How is our subject?” asked Matsu, conversationally.
Meeaniro knew he was preparing to activate the send sequence.
“No signs of activity, other than basic life support,” she replied.
“Good,” said Matsu, and tapped in the ‘initiate’ command. The pulse responded instantly, doing things somewhere outside of space and time.
There was a disorienting moment when the cylinder seemed to be on the floor, traveling toward the far wall, and entering the cage again from the left, at the same time. This was followed by the sequence reversing, and the cylinder arriving back on the floor just as it vanished from in front of them. Then it was finally gone.
“I knew I shouldn’t have watched that,” said Matsu, shutting his eyes as the room began to spin. He sat down heavily. Several of the Mersa technicians in the room staggered on their feet.
“The cylinder has arrived at the shipyard,” said Meeaniro, watching the generator readings. She recalled Fedic’s recordings of the strange structure of spars and wheels as she spoke. The platforms around the rims of the wheels were an assembly line for Reaper ships, something Prometheus had to stop.
Matsu drew in a sharp breath as the systems on the pulse generator recorded a massive spike.
“What was that?” said the Javelin pilot over his commslink armband, as a number of readings on the bridge flickered. Matsu barely had time to shout a warning before the Javelin was hit by an enormous explosion of energy. It had been towed into them on the back of a sub space pulse from the shipyard. The Javelin was instantly flung away through space, with several decks breached.
“Damn pulse came right through the Druanii shields!” cursed the pilot, as he struggled to shut down systems, and isolate the damaged areas.
“It followed the sub space pulse right back to us,” said Matsu, trying to regain his feet after the sharp jarring of the event, “and then, somehow, it found a way through the shields.”
“So Cordez was right to isolate us in case the Invardii used sub space against us,” said Meeaniro, with a sharp nod of her head. She paused.
“How much damage has the pulse generator sustained?” she asked one of her technicians. He set to work running diagnostics.
“Auto-repair working on three decks, no loss of life,” came the pilot’s voice over the commslink system, confirming ship status.
“Powering up comms and nav systems now,” he continued.
Everything except the sub space pulse generator and life support had been shut down before the experiment to isolate the ship from a possible counter-attack, and that had been a wise precaution. The pilot continued getting the Javelin functional again, so he could move the javelin out of the area to avoid any further retaliation.
“We got good telemetry on the sub space pulse from the Invardii end,” said Matsu excitedly. “With enough time to work on the prototype, I’m sure we can send in a pulse and block any return.”
Meeaniro smiled. It was good to see a Human getting enthusiastic about something. They were normally such a passive lot – well, compared to the Mersa, anyway. There wasn’t even a little bit of bouncing up and down when things got interesting!
“Everything’s back on line,” said the pilot over the commslink system.
“Moving us out. Initiating star drive . . . now.”
The Javelin seemed to stretch impossibly between the star system it was in and the next, and then it was gone.
Thistledown Abbey was modernized over the next few months. Well, the next few Earth months. Alamos had a small and very distant moon, or possibly a captured comet, that took longer to orbit the planet than the planet did to orbit its sun.
Abbess Domine remained head of operations at the research site, but the number of labs tripled, and the staff in her care grew by a factor of five.
She stared at the huge electronic noticeboard that dominated one wall of the community room, the nominated place for different departments to discuss their progress. The noticeboard was headed Lukerina Project, and the number of scientific investigations currently underway filled the whole wall. Major headings like ‘areas of investigation’, ‘research hypotheses’, and ‘progress to date’ split into tens then hundreds of ongoing projects.
She shook her head. It had been a while since she had really understood how each piece of the puzzle fitted together, even with five assistant heads now to help her. Still, she was the figurehead, the confidante, the old hand. All these busy insects seemed perfectly happy to give of their best, as long as they knew the queen of the insect nest was still in charge.
The Abbess marked six cycles of supplication to the forgiving god on the cuff of her habit. She would do them later in penance for the arrogance of thinking herself the queen of the busy nest all about her.
Still, the research center had produced some outstanding successes, and Prometheus had come to rely on them for help in quite a few areas. She was pleased that the best of the Mersa scientists didn’t now have to leave Alamos to be at the forefront of research for the war effort against the Invardii.
It had also been no small decision for Alamos to turn over its outermost planets to the Alliance for mining. Then, later, as bases for the huge nuclear accelerators that made orscantium for the Alliance star ships.
Then of course the Invardii had destroyed the accelerator on the outermost ice planet, but been beaten off with heavy losses by the extraordinary giants the Rothii had left the Humans, the Valkrethi.
Many of the Mersa working in the nuclear accelerators had died during the battle for the ice planet. It had brought home to the pacifist Mersa the meaning of their commitment to the Alliance, and in many ways deepened it.
Abbess Domine was roused from her reverie as the door at the end of the community room slid open, and a smiling Matsu Fujimi, with Meeaniro at his side, swept into the room. He was, as usual, trailing diminutive Mersa assistants and fellow researchers like leaves in his wake.
“Abbess!” exclaimed Matsu, his face beaming as he recognized her. In his many trips to the Lukerina Project the two of them had spoken at length, and he had eventually come to understand the basis for her beliefs about the spirit world. He now considered her something of a mentor in personal and spiritual matters.
“We’ve done it,” he continued, waving a pile of printouts as he advanced across the room toward her. “Longest goddammit set of calculations I’ve ever had the misfortune to work through.
“Oh, sorry, your holiness,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye, apologizing for his irreverence.
“I’m sure you’re not,” she replied with a smile. “Beside, you work out your language with your own god, don’t bother me about it!”
“Touche,” he smiled. The awkward and normally non-communicative scientific genius had finally, it seemed, found another part of himself in his relationship with the old Mersa woman r
unning the abbey. Even though she came barely to his shoulder, and was covered in pale brown fur.
“Meeaniro came through again,” he confided, causing his fellow researcher to go a noticeable pink underneath her fur. The Abbess smiled. Even when she’d been a raw novice, Meeaniro had been one of the few Mersa able to generate a noticeable blush.
“I don’t know how she does it,” he continued. “We find ourselves stumped for days, and suddenly she sees a pattern. Sure as comets trail ice, I don’t see it until she explains it to me.
“On the other hand, she can be decidedly unobservant about more mundane things,” he added, looking innocently up toward the ceiling. The older Mersa male, Gaiusino, had had to practically throw himself at Meeaniro to get her attention.
The Mersa assistants tittered and nudged Meeaniro.
“Enough,” said the Abbess in a businesslike way, not wanting to put Meeaniro through more teasing. “You have something to show me?”
Matsu sat down, and the others followed. The Prometheus scientist grew very serious.
“I don’t enjoy finding ways of killing Invardii, much as it seems necessary,” he said. He was acknowledging the abbess’ concern for all forms of life.
“But we have found a way of towing missiles into Reaper ships, or flagships, or placing them anywhere we want them, through sub space pulses.
“Technically we can’t send anything through sub space, since it doesn’t have the same physical dimensions as normal space-time. We can however send a faster than light pulse generated by orscantium decay energy, and guide it to any point in space by a sub space beam.
“We can tow small objects behind the pulse, as Meeaniro did when she first brought the cylinder to Thistledown, and that includes missiles. It’s not instantaneous, but the objects travel at faster than light speeds.
“The problem has long been whether the Invardii can track the pulse back to us, and send something back the same way. In theory a Reaper ship could send a missile back toward a Javelin before it was itself destroyed, thus ensuring a self-destruction sequence for whoever fired first. However, I think we’ve found a way to block the sub space pulses the Invardii send back at us.”
He didn’t seem all that pleased at this success, and he explained why.
“The problem,” he said, “is that the Invardii will eventually discover how to block the sub space pulses we send altogether, particularly once they see how we block their return pulses.”
He paused.
“Despite all the hard work, I think we’ve only bought the Alliance a small window of opportunity. We’ve got maybe one strike that will work perfectly, before the Invardii figure out how to stop future attacks.”
He paused.
“It’s going to be hard to decide when to use it, to maximize the damage on that one strike.”
Abbess Domine was silent for a long time. The moral questions that a first-strike capability posed tested her spiritual convictions sorely. It was only her trust in the senior people of the Alliance that allowed her to be a part of the Lukerina Project.
“Thank you for reporting to me first,” she said eventually. “I’ll check with the High Council, but I should soon be able to give you clearance to contact Regent Cordez with details of our combined work.”
Privately she wondered what First Councilors Fallostrina and Mordiselli would make of this.
Matsu nodded. It was the breakthrough he and Meeaniro had been desperate for, but it opened up as many difficult questions as it did possibilities.
Fortunately, he could hand all those on to Cordez.
CHAPTER 10
________________
Fedic surveyed the pandemonium below him. Deep within the K'Sarth planet, the spaceport was alive with the bustling forms of K'Sarth personnel loading Sumerian freighters. The first shipment of parts and resources for the Sumerian war effort were now ready for transport to Rokar, the Sumerian industrial planet.
Fedic and Sallyanne had been recalled from Aqua Regis shortly after the taking of Saintsborough. The town had been the first real fortification by the Descendants of the Prophet that the Shellport militia had encountered in their liberation of Hud. Nonetheless it had fallen to the militia fairly quickly, and Fedic felt he was no longer needed to train them.
Sallyanne was back at Prometheus, working on the Rothii archive material Finch and the research team had discovered on Ba’H’Roth, and Fedic had been recalled to oversee the K'Sarth freighters. He had been happy to leave command of the Aqua Regis campaign to Menon and Hudnee, who were proving capable leaders, along with Habna and others.
Fedic turned his thoughts to the freighters below him. They were crammed side by side into the cavernous underground spaceport. It had been no problem to procure the freighters, since many had been taken out of routine runs to Sumerian worlds before the battle on the K'Sarth surface.
Finding pilots had been another matter. The losses of ships to the Invardii, coupled with the rapid expansion of the Sumerian deep space Navy, had made it impossible to find Sumerian pilots for the K'Sarth freighters. Fedic had been offered K'Sarth engineers to work with, and there was no other choice, so that was that.
The engineers had all logged the requisite number of hours in the flight simulators, and had proved adept at handling the complexities of star drive flight – which was in essence more of the lists they loved so much. Unfortunately, none of the K'Sarth had an ounce of the intuition that a good pilot had in the seat of their pants.
Fedic glanced at the electronic tablet he’d been given. Eight of the freighters showed as fully loaded, with the crews working their way through pre-flight checks. The other three weren’t far behind.
Ah well, he thought, time to fire up the Lucky Streak, and think about his strategies for the voyage. If he was going to lead this shipment of K'Sarth goods to the Sumerian industrial world, he had better be prepared.
The Invardii hadn’t been seen in this system since they leveled the surface of K'Sarth, but it was a long way to Rokar, especially with a convoy of ungainly freighters and novice pilots.
There were two exits from the spaceport onto the surface of K'Sarth, both boasting the maglev technology that would power the first part of the ships’ flight through the atmosphere. Fusion reactors, a ring of power plants deep within the planet, would provide the acceleration the ships would need.
The reload time for the maglev system between freighters was eight minutes, so it would be a long time before all of them made rendezvous at the given point. Fedic had picked a spot in the shadow of the K’Sarthian asteroid belt, some distance beyond K’Sarth’s orbit.
It was a dangerous zone of rock and ice where two of the system’s planets had collided eons in the past. Then Fedic started thinking about the first problem the convoy would face. Could the freighters exit K'Sarth without attracting the attention of any Invardii drones that might be in the vicinity?
Only one way to find out, thought Fedic resolutely.
The rest of the freighters now showed as fully loaded, with their crews working steadily through pre-flight checks.
Then it was time to take the magic carpet ride. Crawler tugs eased the Lucky Streak over the polished floor and into position. Fedic looked round at the cavern the K'Sarth had carved out of the bedrock deep beneath the surface. It was an amazing piece of work. You couldn’t fault them for determination, he decided.
Then the loading platform sank beneath the floor, carrying his ship with it, and Fedic disappeared from view. This part of the ride was similar to the descent from the surface that had brought him to the spaceport three weeks ago.
For the first part of the take-off, each ship would be little more than a projectile flung at supersonic speeds away from the planet. It was going to be one helluva way out of the planet’s gravity well. Fedic surveyed his instruments carefully.
All systems were active, and running on their minimum settings. They blinked reassuringly. Then the maglev pulse system started up, the pale rings of l
ight appearing from behind him and vanishing into the tunnel ahead in faster and faster pulses. A warning light showed in the middle of his instrument panel, and then the Lucky Streak was hurled forward – an atom’s breadth above the single metal beam that ran along the floor of the tunnel – in an explosion of electromagnetic forces.
Fedic struggled to breath. The K'Sarth had powerful chests and arms, and it looked like they had lungs to match. It was very evident the maglev system had been set to a level appropriate for them. Fedic called on all his training to slow his heart rate, and lessen the strain on his lungs. The maglev pulses were now a continuous blur, and vacuum pumps began to remove air from the tunnel to lower the ship’s resistance.
Even under the tremendous acceleration of the maglev system, the time needed to reach escape velocity from the planet was considerable. The tunnel ran parallel with the surface for some distance before it curved upward to exit vertically into the atmosphere. As the first gentle upward curve began, Fedic felt himself jammed down into his seat, vertical forces added to the vice-like acceleration that pinned him against the backrest.
Ahead of the Lucky Streak an invisible vortex formed on the surface of the planet, fashioned by ionization fields that surrounded the exits from the spaceport. In the center of this, at least in the more concentrated lower levels of the atmosphere, air pressure would be considerably reduced. Fedic knew it would still be a rough ride.
His ship burst into a dull day under a gray blanket of clouds. The giant hand that had cruelly flattened him against his backrest was suddenly gone. He gasped for air while the Lucky Streak began to shake violently as it encountered minute fluctuations in the thin air.
The surface of K'Sarth fell away below him, and the turbulence increased again, but then it held. It began to subside as the Lucky Streak entered the higher stratosphere of K'Sarth.
Fedic let the enormous velocity of his ship bleed away as it overcame the gravity of the planet. Then he was coasting through the cold blackness of space. K'Sarth became a gray ball behind him, not even the small green seas showing through the marbled murkiness.
Invardii Box Set 2 Page 6
