“Can we identify how many ships are following the Creator vessel?” he asked.
“No. Resolving tachyon punches to that detail is not possible with our technology at the distances we have been operating. We have detected a minimum of seven unique simultaneous punch sequences, but each sequence could represent multiple vessels. This sequence contained six, for example.”
“So, forty-two potential hostiles, each more powerful than a Matrix combat platform,” Octavio concluded.
“That appears to be a high-order probability, yes.”
“Fuck me.”
“This unit is not equipped for that activity and does not understand Captain Octavio Catalan to be interested in it in general.”
“Someday, D, I’m going to tell the Chiefs to walk you through the fine points of human profanity,” Octavio told the AI as he shook his head. “Right now, however, I have to wonder how we’re going to get Interceptor past these things.”
“In theory, once we have exceeded their reactionless drive speed, basic evasive maneuvers should suffice. It is difficult to tell the difference between eighty-five-point-two percent and eighty-five-point-two-one percent of lightspeed, and that distinction is more than sufficient to evade any laser.
“Once we approach the Creator vessel’s speed, we will be as safe from them as the Creator vessel appears to be.”
Octavio shook his head again.
“Do you think they’re escorting the Creator vessel…or chasing it?”
“Insufficient data to compute. This unit believes we will not have sufficient data until we have boarded the Creator vessel and spoken with them.”
“Which is the limit for a lot of our questions right now, isn’t it?”
“This unit agrees.”
“All right, I’m accelerating that conversation with the Chiefs,” Octavio replied. “They’re going to teach you profanity…and pronouns.”
“Can I borrow you, sir?” Das asked, poking her head into Octavio’s office.
The Captain took a last look at the diagram in front of him, then chuckled.
“The likelihood that I’m going to magically divine the secret to upgrading Interceptor’s warp drive in the next few hours is low,” he admitted. With the warp ring completed and being installed in twenty-four hours, there wouldn’t be much of a chance to implement any upgrades, anyway.
The work on Interceptor was just about complete. Once the warp ring was attached, the long process of filling the ship’s immense fuel tanks would begin. They were four days from launch—three since the loss of the Matrix scouting units.
Time was starting to run out.
“Lieutenant Chen Zhou has something she wants to show you,” Das told him. “Since our Marine commander is one of the most junior officers around, she asked me to play messenger.”
There was, from Das’s tone, more going on than just that. Even if there was, though, the tactical officer and a Marine Lieutenant weren’t in the same chain of command, so even the rank difference was only a minor problem.
“Lead the way, Lieutenant Commander,” Octavio ordered. “What does our oh-so-earnest Marine Lieutenant want from us?”
Das tried to conceal her slight flush, but Octavio caught it anyway. There was definitely more going on there…and it was very much none of the Captain’s business.
“She and the Vistans have been going over what gear we could fabricate for the Spears in the time we have. Fifty Marines isn’t much to throw at a ship of unknown size, after all.”
“I agree completely,” Octavio said. There was space aboard Interceptor for them to squeeze in another hundred Marines or Spears. Unfortunately, the disadvantage of Task Force Vigil being commissioned directly after deployment was that the Admiral’s command was desperately short on Marines.
They’d broken free a platoon’s worth of Marines from the Task Force and sent them over, giving Chen Zhou fifty troops instead of twenty, but they’d been assembled from fire teams, not even squads.
Lieutenant Chen Zhou was still in command, and the speed with which she’d set to training her combined force had been enough to convince Octavio to leave her there.
Apparently, she’d also managed to find time to fall into bed with his tactical officer. That spoke to an impressive level of multitasking, if nothing else.
“Here.” Das stopped them at a hatch. “I’m not actually sure just what they’ve put together, sir,” she admitted. “Zhou tells me it’s worth it, and my knowledge set is much bigger guns.”
“So you trusted your girlfriend’s judgment,” Octavio said without censure.
Das flushed again.
“Yes, sir,” she conceded levelly.
“Good enough to start with,” he told her. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
Entering the storage bay that the Marines had taken over for training and prep, Octavio was met by the sight of twenty suits of power armor instantly coming to attention at the sight of him.
Except they weren’t human-shaped suits of power armor, and the attention pose was very different, shaped by the completely different physiology of the Vistan Spears inside that armor.
He took a moment to study the armor as he returned their salutes. The armor was an interesting mix. Parts of it definitely looked cruder than his people’s gear—all of which had been manufactured in massive facilities on Mars by the Confederacy, since the Republic hadn’t built any power armor of their own yet—but the surfaces looked smoother, rounder.
Some of that was just the different shape of a Vistan versus a human. Some of it was that this armor had clearly been built with the help of Matrix fabrication units.
“Lieutenant Chen?” he asked.
The dark-skinned young woman stepped out from behind the Shining Spears with a wide white grin.
“Impressive, aren’t they, sir?” she said. “We took our schematics and plugged the Vistans’ body shape into our CAD software, then ran the result into the fabricator gear the Matrices lent us.”
“I imagine the first few prototypes were far from comfortable,” Octavio noted. He was familiar with that kind of rough conversion project.
“Not in the slightest, from what Dancer-In-Warm-Sunlight tells me,” Chen agreed. “We weren’t sure we’d have a set of power armor we could work with before launch, or I’d have raised it sooner.”
One of the suits of power armor retracted the helmet, a far more impressive maneuver on the Vistan suits, given that the Vistan’s double shoulders were next to their heads.
“I am Under-Commander-Of-Spears Dancer-In-Warm-Sunlight,” she introduced herself. “I command the team tasked to assist Lieutenant Chen in this project. The armor is not perfect, not by a long swim, but it will serve to allow my people to stand alongside yours.”
“What about weapons?” Octavio asked. He gestured at Dancer’s hands. “The armor is matched to their hands, not ours. Strength augmentation isn’t going to make up for that.”
They could reengineer the grips, but he didn’t think they’d brought that many hand weapons to Refuge.
“The Vistans already had heavy armaments that the suits will carry with some minor work,” Chen told him. “Come with me.”
The armored Spears dispersed, with only Dancer accompanying Octavio, Chen and Das to the rack of weapons behind them.
Chen picked up the weapon with some effort and showed it to Octavio. It was a wide-barreled thing, with secondary supports clearly intended to latch on to the exterior of the power armor to account for Vistans’ short arms.
“The name for this is something along the lines of Flower-Of-Many-Swords,” Chen told him. “We’ve been calling them multi-launchers—the concept is something we might want to consider adapting for our own use.
“It’s basically a magazine-fed grenade launcher slash shotgun, capable of being loaded with any of a dozen ammunition types in three different mags. Even from each mag, it can select which round is being loaded, meaning a single weapon can carry all of those twelve paylo
ads.”
“One of each,” Dancer confirmed. “It is a squad support weapon in its traditional use, with the magazines carried by the rest of the Flower-carrier’s squad. In this case…”
“In this case, we reengineered the feed to link to a munitions case built into the power armor,” Chen said. “We’ve supplied an updated fléchette round for the shotgun mode and a modified version of our armor-penetrating grenades. For a boarding action like the Interceptor mission, that should be more than enough.
“Each Spear will have sixty rounds of each type of munition, for a hundred and twenty total. Our Marines will provide the extended base of fire with our pulse guns if needed, but so long as we have rounds for the multi-launchers, the Spears are definitely worth bringing.”
Octavio was no Marine, but everything sounded right to him—and extra hands for this mess sounded worth a lot.
“How many suits and launchers can we have ready without moving the launch date?”
“Seventy-five,” Chen said instantly. “We have twenty-five already checked out for both; we should be able to manufacture twenty-five more sets a day, assuming we’re doing inspections en route.”
“Thirty-six hours in flight, Chen,” Octavio warned her. “What about training?”
“We’ve been cycling my people through the suits we have,” Dancer explained. “It’s not perfect water, but it’s clear enough.”
“Then make it happen,” he ordered. “You’re the one boarding that ship, Lieutenant Chen. If you think they’ll augment your teams, I’ll sign off.”
“Thank you, sir!”
Developing new power armor, training her teams, modifying weapons for an alien race and starting a relationship with his tactical officer.
Octavio was definitely impressed with Lieutenant Chen’s multitasking.
52
“Fueling complete.”
Lieutenant Daniel’s calm announcement sounded almost eerie. It was the only sound in the silence of Interceptor’s bridge. Everyone had been watching the countdown on the main holographic display, falling into silence as it counted down the last few seconds.
Octavio was back in a familiar command chair, the entire bridge of the new ship having been copied from Scorpion. There was even a tactical console for Lieutenant Commander Das, though her lack of support staff gave away one of the key differences.
Interceptor had an incredibly sensitive sensor suite, including several devices the Matrices hadn’t yet provided to humanity, but she had no weapons at all. Anything that would have been excess mass to her designed purpose had been excluded from her design.
She was the size of an ESF battlecruiser, but she was defenseless. The ship she was meant to intercept was even bigger, which had been part of the complexity in designing her warp bubble.
“D, systems report?” Octavio asked thin air. Das was his executive officer, but she was junior for the role and occasionally hesitant. Both he and Das were relying on D a lot, which had ended up with the strange situation where Captain Octavio Catalan effectively had two executive officers.
And one of them was an alien AI.
“All reports are green; all systems have passed self-check,” D’s voice said out of the speakers. The AI’s vocabulary training session with several of Octavio’s chief petty officers had been even more beneficial than he’d dared hope.
D was the first Matrix to sound like a person. Octavio knew what was behind the monotone the Matrices usually used, but it was deceptive. D had spent enough time working directly with humans across the ship that they’d lost the monotone.
“Two sections of the power conduits are green and have passed self-check, but some of the readings are sufficiently variable to raise my concern,” D continued. “Commander Tran has teams inspecting them. They have replacement components, so even if there is a problem, I believe we should be on our way within the hour.”
D had also mastered personal pronouns with surprising ease. Octavio figured the “this unit” mouthful had started to sound inefficient to the intelligence.
“Tran?” Octavio asked.
“Having a sentient friendly computer aboard still occasionally throws me, but I’ll be damned if D didn’t catch the impossible,” the engineer replied. “Both of their ‘off’ conduits had stress damage from the manufacturing process. One will be fine, but I’ve flagged it for closer watch. The other would have given out within six hours at full power…and cut out a third of the microthrusters.”
Interceptor’s engines consisted of arrays of vast numbers of the high-impulse microthrusters. A third of them down would be a problem at least.
And, depending on how they “cut out,” a potential catastrophe.
“Your team has replacements, D said?” Octavio said.
“We do; already installing them. Give me twenty minutes and you’re clear for maximum power. Lieutenant Daniel is good for about twenty-five percent power without any concerns; we’ve locked out the thrusters at risk.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant Commander,” Octavio replied. “Daniel, you heard her?”
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Yonina Daniel confirmed. “Initiating separation from the yard. We’ll be underway shortly.”
Octavio nodded silently, glancing around at the deadly Amazon band that made up his senior officers. He had good people, a strange but good ship, and a straightforward mission that could go wrong in oh so many ways.
Here we go.
The half-kilometer-long ship cleared the shipyards that had birthed her, spinning in space to orient herself; then Lieutenant Daniel brought her engines online at the indicated twenty-five percent.
“Compensators are working as expected, engines are running smoothly, sensors are online,” Das ran off. “We are green and operational, other than the one chunk of the power network Commander Tran has down.”
“Get us on course, Lieutenant Daniel. Will the delay bringing the engines up to power hurt us at all?” Octavio asked.
“We have another four hours of departure window,” she responded. “Even if we run twenty-five percent power for all four of those hours, we’ll still be fine to make the intercept.”
“Are we ready to go?” he asked.
This wasn’t the general status question. This was asking the young woman who was, above all others, responsible for making a perfect intercept of a spacecraft traveling at ninety-nine point nine nine percent of lightspeed.
If they missed the intercept by even a bit, they were going to be in serious trouble. They could barely maneuver once they were up to that velocity—and every second they spent at their intercept velocity was over seventy seconds in real space. They needed to match velocities within a few thousand kilometers at most, or what was supposed to take forty objective days could easily expand to twice that.
They could lose months with a few hours of maneuvering. That was why Interceptor’s warp ring was designed to fold out and wrap around the other ship.
Octavio had worked with the massive warp cradle that had delivered the Exile Fleet to Exilium. He knew exactly what the odds of retracting that warp ring once it was extended were—roughly zero.
He wasn’t sure if the rest of his crew realized it, but his own math said that Interceptor was going to be a one-use ship. Once they collapsed the warp bubble they formed around the Creator ship, they were unlikely to be able to warp space again.
It would be worth it, he hoped. A chance to speak to the people who’d built the Matrices had to be.
“We’re ready,” Daniel told him. “We can wait until the engines are fully online or get on our way now while the Lieutenant Commander’s people work. Your orders, sir?”
Octavio grinned.
“I’m not going to pretend I’m more patient than I actually am, Lieutenant Daniel. Is your course set?”
“It is,” she affirmed.
“Then engage.”
The highest velocity any ship Octavio had been on had ever achieved in regular space was just over twenty-five percent o
f lightspeed. The Confederacy had officially restricted their military ships to twenty percent of lightspeed for regular operations, since they needed their ships to be able to safely pass through wormholes.
Half-missing a wormhole was bad at any speed and far more likely at higher velocities.
The ESF hadn’t kept the same rule, but they did most of their maneuvering in one star system, with their high-velocity needs generally met with warp drives.
By the time they reached the end of his first ten-hour bridge watch, they’d passed that. An hour at quarter acceleration and nine at full power had kicked them well past twenty-five percent of lightspeed.
Time dilation wasn’t a problem yet, but the computers were warning him of the start of it.
“This is fascinating,” D observed after Octavio had turned command over to Africano and retreated to his quarters.
“What is?” he asked the AI as he poured himself a glass of water.
“No Matrix has ever traveled faster than ten percent of lightspeed,” D told him. “We are aware of reaction engines such as those used by Interceptor, but our Creators had not reached nearly this level of efficiency before our deployment.”
“They had a reactionless drive. Why would they?” Octavio asked.
“This is true. I must speculate, then, on why they eventually did develop such engines. For a vessel of the size of the one we are intercepting to have achieved the velocity it has, the engines must approach the efficiency of yours. Otherwise, the fuel-to-payload ratio rapidly creates a barely usable ship.
“Assuming, of course, that they retained the fuel to slow down.”
“That’s a safe assumption, D,” the human Captain said with a chuckle. “I don’t know what their plan is, but they have to be intending to stop somewhere.”
“I must admit, I find the concept of our Creators intentionally avoiding the region where they know Matrices to be operating…disturbing,” D told him. “Did they assume that we were all Rogues?”
“That’s the only conclusion I see, D,” Octavio admitted. “They probably have a better idea of what the odds are, at least once they learned it was happening at all.”
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