by Tori Harris
"These are indeed interesting times we’re living in, but I can’t imagine you would have it any other way, Commander Reynolds," Logan teased.
"Proceed," Prescott said, deadpan, moving the conversation back to all business.
"Aye, sir. As you both know, we have been receiving ETSI from the Pelarans for fifty years now. Most of Ingenuity’s capabilities trace their origins back to Pelaran data in one form or another. You’ll note that I said most, but by no means all. Both of you grew up in the U.S., so I’ll assume you’ve heard the persistent rumors that the government has been in possession of extra-terrestrial technology recovered from crashed spacecraft since the early twentieth century."
Prescott couldn’t help himself. "See, Sally, with an introduction like that, I’m sure there will be absolutely nothing unsettling in anything Kip is about to tell us."
"I think I’m going to be sick," she replied, closing her eyes and rubbing her temples.
"Oh, you’re going to love this, I promise," Logan laughed, now truly enjoying himself. "It turns out that it wasn’t just the U.S. harboring alien technology. There were actually seven different countries with physical artifacts, and ten others with various forms of information, some resulting from direct contact over the years, if you can believe that. I actually don’t have much in the way of specifics on who had what information, but suffice it to say that there were Human scientists working with alien technology nearly three hundred years before we ever heard from our friends, the Pelarans."
"I’m sorry, Kip, but let me stop you right there," Reynolds interrupted. "There is no way I can ask this question without sounding incredibly patronizing, but why are we hearing this from you right now? Shouldn’t this have been part of the briefing package we received during the refit?"
"That’s a good question, and only a little patronizing. I obviously didn’t make that call, but I guess the simple answer is that neither of you needed to know at the time. The only reason I did was because of some of the equipment the Science and Engineering Directorate folks needed my help to install down in Engineering while we were at Yucca, but you’re getting a little ahead of me."
Without looking up from his tablet, Prescott gave Logan the "keep it moving" hand signal.
Logan cleared his throat and continued. "Right, where was I? Yes, so we had governments around the world hoarding whatever alien technology they could get their hands on for centuries. Interestingly, the only major advances that ever came out of any of what we received were in computer chip design. We didn’t understand the vast majority of it, but it was still apparently enough to accelerate development of computer-related technology by something like a hundred years. Those advances came almost exclusively out of the United States, but were quickly copied and used in microprocessor designs worldwide. As you might imagine, even though we weren’t learning very much, we never stopped studying the artifacts we had. Every generation of hotshot scientists lucky enough to get cleared to see the alien technology wanted a crack at figuring out things like propulsion, weapons, etc. Before the Pelaran data, however, progress was extremely slow. Even with our best and brightest on the case, it was a little like a bunch of monkeys trying to understand a fusion reactor."
"Were any of these so called ‘artifacts’ still functional?" Prescott asked.
"Yes they were. Again, the briefing I received was similar to what you are hearing now, so I don’t really know the specifics, but I believe both the U.S. and Russia both had at least a few pieces of working tech. In fact, from what I have pieced together, I believe both countries had partially functional spacecraft, so you can probably assume they had at least one example of whatever equipment these aliens had aboard their ships."
"And yet we still couldn’t do much of anything with it after three hundred years of study," Commander Reynolds remarked.
"Well, that’s actually another good segue, Commander, so thanks. If this original alien technology had been more like the designs we have been receiving from the Pelarans over the past fifty years, we probably would have figured most of it out pretty quickly. Instead, it was dramatically more advanced. We’re talking about really exotic physics that I won’t even pretend I know how to describe to you. We truly had no idea how most it worked and there is quite a bit of it we still don’t understand. The turning point came shortly after we started getting the real, classified Pelaran data streams. Some of the same physicists who had been working on the original alien technology program for decades were reassigned to look at the Pelaran data. Guess what? Some of the Pelaran designs looked vaguely familiar to them. Don’t get me wrong, the Pelaran tech was primitive by comparison, but if someone gave you the complete schematics for a Model T Ford, and then asked you to figure out the most advanced supercar Ferrari ever made, you would probably still be able to make some pretty educated guesses."
"So you’re telling us that Fleet scientists have been using the Pelaran data as a ‘cheat sheet’ to help them figure out this original alien technology – technology that we already had in our possession, but hidden away for three hundred years?" Prescott asked, his mind racing through a long series of implications based on what he was now hearing for the first time.
"That pretty well sums it up, Captain. Remember that all of the Pelaran designs were completely spelled out for us, in English, no less. In fact, I’ve talked to some of the guys who worked on the hyperdrive development program, and they said the designs were so dumbed down that it was almost insulting. I think their assumption is that the Pelarans provide a fairly standardized set of plans to all of their ‘cultivated’ civilizations. I suppose all of those species would be at a similar stage of development, but perhaps some of them are a little less technologically savvy than we are. In any event, the Pelaran designs were like a super advanced version of the Rosetta Stone."
"Okay, so it sounds like we may have a major advantage compared to other cultivated species. Are we using technology based on the original aliens’ design, or based on what the Pelarans have been giving us?" Reynolds asked.
"I guess it would be most accurate to say both. There was quite a bit of debate on this subject early on. There were a number of people in the Science and Engineering Directorate who said it was foolish to waste resources developing the Pelaran designs when we would shortly thereafter be scrapping them in favor of Grey tech."
"Good Lord, so it really was the ‘little grey aliens’ who provided the original technology?" Reynolds asked.
"It’s not clear how much of what we got from them was by their choice, but yes. There have been a number of other names applied to their species over the years, but the ‘Greys’ is the only one that ever stuck. By the way, get this, one thing we do know about them is that they are extra-galactic."
"They’re what?" Reynolds and Prescott exclaimed as one.
"Yeah, that’s what everyone says. According to the schematics they provided back around 1950, their homeworld is in the outermost arm of Andromeda."
"That’s at least two and a half million light years from here, Kip," Prescott said, not sure he was buying into the notion that intergalactic travel was even possible, let alone practical.
"Exactly, which brings us back to our original discussion regarding speed. At fourteen hundred light, traveling to the nearest star in Andromeda would take about eighteen hundred years. This is why there was so much debate about how to proceed with our first generation of hyperdrive engines. They all knew that we were already in possession of a design with the capability to take us directly from barely being able to get around our own solar system to being able to reach a big chunk of the known universe in a relatively short period of time. In the end, it was decided that Humanity needed to field a credible defense as quickly as possible. We already knew about several other civilizations based on information the Greys provided, but the Pelaran intel made it sound like we were a flock of sheep living inside a den of wolves."
"So we moved ahead with the Pelaran designs initially with the unders
tanding that we would eventually need to scrap them for the … what did you call it? Grey tech?" Reynolds asked, more as a statement of fact than a question.
"Not quite," Logan replied. "We went with a hybrid approach with a pretty well-planned upgrade path established up front. I have to say that our guys were pretty crafty in how these ships have been designed for rapid hardware and software upgrades. That’s how Ingenuity managed such an extensive refit in just a couple of weeks at Yucca Mountain. The 1.0 hyperdrive design was built only as a proof-of-concept testbed based solely on the Pelaran data. It might have eventually been good for about five hundred times light, but probably not much more than that without significant modifications. While brilliant in its own right, the design was what you might call a technological dead end. It seems pretty clear that five hundred times light is what the Pelarans wanted us to achieve, with little chance of going much faster for decades, perhaps centuries. After they had learned what they could from the Pelaran hyperdrive, the engine design teams started integrating improvements based on what they had been able to piece together from the Grey artifacts. They progressed pretty rapidly from there, leading up to the installation of Ingenuity’s production hyperdrive. Ours was initially referred to as version 4.2 and was specced for up to one thousand times the speed of light. The mods installed during our refit bring us up to version 4.5. As I mentioned earlier, we’re now good for up to fifteen hundred light as long as we don’t try to sustain it for too long."
"But you said that the 4.5 upgrade was predominantly a software change, right? What equipment did they install that required all of us to be briefed in on all of this ‘Grey-enhanced’ technology?" Prescott asked, now well beyond the point where being surprised transitioned to being overwhelmed and annoyed.
"Ah, well, that’s all about version 5.0 and beyond," Logan smiled. "The 4.5 upgrade was mostly about providing very high power output from the reactors for an extended period of time. As I mentioned, much of this was accomplished with improvements in software, but they also made tremendous improvements in our capacitor banks."
"So expanding the capacitor banks wasn’t just about our weapon systems, it was also a hyperdrive-related upgrade," Reynolds said.
"That’s right. It bought us another fifty percent speed increase. That’s getting pretty close to what was originally considered to be the maximum theoretical speed for the current hardware design."
"Wait, didn’t you say we had only scratched the surface of what this design can really do?" she asked.
"I did. About two years ago, Fleet discovered what they called an ‘anomaly’ during a series of missile tests they were conducting. They had actually figured out a way to incorporate a miniaturized hyperdrive within the body of the missile, in addition to the standard Cannae thrusters. The idea was to fire the missiles, allow them to get clear of the ship using their thrusters, then transition to hyperspace for a nearly instantaneous trip to their target."
"That would be nice," Prescott said. "Otherwise, missiles are just too slow to be effective in anything but short range engagements, or for attacking lightly defended targets. Are they close to being deployable at this point?"
"That depends, Captain. Are you going to be angry if I tell you we have had sixteen onboard since Yucca?"
Prescott just shook his head at this latest revelation. "Not angry and not surprised, Kip. I take it you were the only one cleared to know about them at the time, right?"
"Yes, sir, same as the specifics on the engine mods. We’ll actually need to brief the entire bridge crew on all of this new stuff before the next round of tests. These missiles really are game changers though. As long as they have accurate range information, their onboard hyperdrives will put them within a few meters of whatever location you specify. That makes them pretty well impossible to take down with point defenses."
"The more you talk, the more questions I have. So please finish telling us about the ‘anomaly,’ and then get on to these tests you mentioned."
"Sorry, sir, it’s just a lot of information to get across. Okay, so during the tests, they kept noticing that the missiles would transition out of hyperspace slightly earlier than they should have. Most of the initial tests were at relatively short range, so we’re talking about very small differences, but the telemetry from the missiles wasn’t quite matching the physics. After some additional testing, they discovered that the missiles were actually making a sort of hyperspace ‘jump’ from their entry to exit transition points with essentially no time in between. The scientists working on the Grey artifacts had known for some time that their engines were capable of these long range ‘jumps’ from one place to another, but they had been completely unable to figure out how to make it work."
"So I take it they figured it out," Reynolds said.
"Nope, not really," Logan laughed. "They realized that the missiles were jumping due to a malfunction in the way the small, onboard capacitor bank was feeding power to the hyperdrive, but to this day, no one has figured out exactly why it works the way it does. The good news is that the phenomenon is measurable and predictable, so the Science and Engineering guys have been modeling it on larger and larger testbeds until …"
"Let me guess," Reynolds said, rolling her eyes. "Until they were ready to try it on a Fleet starship called Ingenuity."
"Oh come on, Commander, don’t pretend like you don’t love the idea of being in all the history books once again," Logan teased.
"It’ll probably all be classified for another three hundred years, so I doubt we’ll ever make the history books," Prescott laughed, "but I’ve never once had Fleet ask me to test anything that wasn’t thoroughly vetted beforehand. What kind of performance are we supposed to expect out of this, uh, ‘jump drive?’"
"Ha! That’s what everyone wants to call it, but please don’t let Admiral Patterson hear you say that, sir. He insists on using the program name, ‘Capacitive Hyperdrive,’ or ‘C-Drive.’ I think that’s because they expect both hyperdrive modes to be in regular use aboard Fleet vessels. They want us to be very specific about which one is being used to avoid confusion on the bridge. In reality, we’re talking about the same equipment either way. The only thing that makes our regular hyperdrive function as a ‘C-Drive’ is a change in how it’s fed power. As far as performance goes, the distance travelled is proportional to the amount of power supplied. In testing, they have sent smaller vessels up to ten light years, but Ingenuity has quite a bit more power available than any of the previous testbeds. My best guess is that she will be able to make a fifty light year jump. That’s almost two weeks’ worth of distance at our maximum sustained hyperdrive speed."
Both Prescott and Reynolds simply stared back at their chief engineer in stunned silence.
"Okay, hearing no questions, I’ll continue," Logan grinned, switching the view screen to a zoomed-in image of the frigate’s Helm console. "They’ve come up with a slick new user interface for the Helm. It graphically displays how much power is currently available for the C-Drive in terms of distance. During normal ops, the capacitor banks will maintain a dedicated power supply for the hyperdrive with a separate reserve for life support, weapons, and other critical systems. In an emergency, the AI can tap this reserve, but once it does, the ship will not be able to transition to hyperspace again until after the buffer is recharged. All of the testing so far seems to indicate that multiple, rapid transitions are possible as long as power is available. The red portion of the graph you see on the Helm console represents enough power for an emergency transition of one light year. The idea is that you’ll always want to leave enough power available to make a hasty exit in case you accidently find yourself in an undesirable location."
"And how long does it take to recharge once we use all the available power in the capacitor banks?" Prescott asked.
"It depends on what other demands we are placing on the reactors, of course, but it could be as little as an hour if we are stationary and not firing any weapons. As usual, we’ll literally
be writing the manual for this thing as we go, particularly on how it can be used tactically."
"Alright, Kip, I think I’ve just about absorbed all the new information I can handle for one briefing, but what about other weapons. Are they Grey-enhanced as well?"
"That’s another interesting topic all its own, Captain. The short answer is that our directed energy weapons are a hybrid design, much like our hyperdrive. Both power delivery and range are about ten times greater than the original Pelaran designs. I’m proud to say that our railguns are almost exclusively a Human design, as is the launch system for our plasma torpedoes, which is very similar. Other than the new missiles with integrated C-Drive technology, I don’t expect there will be any major weapon systems changes in the near term. The next set of upgrades will be in power generation and improvements to the C-Drive, depending on how our tests go, of course. I also keep hearing rumors that testing is underway on a working shield system."
"That’s good news. As Commander Reynolds demonstrated on the range, our first generation of starships is remarkably powerful, but they are still pretty vulnerable once they start taking hits. Shields should definitely be at the top of our wish list. Now, I’m guessing you’re about to tell me that Fleet expects us to begin testing this thing immediately, right?"
"It’s uncanny, sir, how could you possibly have known?" Logan smirked. "Engineering will be ready this afternoon and we can assist in getting the bridge crews up to speed. I was told to ask you to contact Admiral Patterson’s office once we are ready to begin. I’m guessing they will want to run the first test as early as tomorrow."
Chapter 12
TFS Ingenuity, Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1
(The following day – 1.5x106 km from Earth)
Less than twenty-four hours later, Prescott nearly ran into his XO as he emerged from his cabin for the short walk to the bridge. In spite of the near frantic level of activity that had been required to prepare the frigate for today’s engine tests, both had managed nearly seven hours of sleep.
