Departure turned out to be anticlimactic. Final databursts complete, Conquest readied TacDrive without incident with Absen, now wearing captain’s stripes, in the Chair. Everyone suited up again, helmets on.
“Give me the PA, Johnstone.”
“Aye sir. Ready.”
Absen spoke into his microphone. “All hands, this is Captain Absen. We’re about to enable TacDrive toward Earth, 36 light-years away. Our first pulse will take us ten light-years, at which point we will drop out and gather signals from our solar system. It’s 2125 now. When we pause there it will be 2135, though it will only seem about a week inside the boat due to time dilation. We will be 26 light-years away from Earth, and so will be able to see what’s going on in Earth system 26 years prior, in 2109, one year before the Meme fleet is due to strike. From there, we’ll assess the situation and continue operations as appropriate. Absen out.”
“Ready to go, Skipper,” Okuda said from the helm.
“AuxConn reports ready, sir,” said Johnstone. The rest of the sections reported in.
“Engage TacDrive at your convenience, Mister Okuda.”
The automated notification counted down throughout the boat, warning everyone to take their final stations. Although in over thirty practice pulses there had never been an incident, the standing orders were to take no chances, and this would be the longest pulse by far.
Absen heard the hum and felt that slight feeling of vertigo, as before, and then nothing more.
Okuda opened his eyes and relaxed, swiveling his chair beneath his medusa. “All running in the green, sir. According to my calculations we have 273 hours and 16 minutes before we drop out of this pulse.”
“Understood.” Absen tapped the control for the PA. “All hands, this is the captain. Secure from Action Stations and go to limited operation in accordance with your briefed SOPs. This is a new, relativistic environment, ladies and gentlemen. We have theories but not much practice at what takes place during longer TacDrive pulses. Report all effects you observe, however small, to your appropriate functional chains. That is all.”
Reaching up to pop the releases, the bridge crew soon had their helmets off. Suits would stay on for at least one more watch rotation. The longest duration pulse they had ever performed was only a few inside-the-boat minutes, and Absen wanted to be ready if anything started to go wrong.
Before the twenty-minute mark, anomalies began to show up. “Sir,” Fletcher said, “Lieutenant Klis has noted some minor power flow problems. We’re adjusting, but we’ll keep an eye on them.”
“Do we know why?”
“Relativistic effects, as we predicted, I would expect, sir.”
“Explain.” Absen was fairly sure he understood, but in this new environment, everyone could benefit from repetition.
Fletcher turned around to face his captain. “The way the TacDrive functions, we’re either accelerating or we will drop out of pulse. As we edge closer and closer to absolute c, a relativistic ‘slope’ appears, because everything from subatomic particles to heat transfer find it harder to go in the direction we are traveling, and easier to go backward. As forward is up,” he pointed at the overhead, toward the prow of the boat, “and backward is down,” he pointed at the deck, “it will tend to get hotter near the floor, which will add some strain on the environmental systems.”
“In other words, because it gets harder and harder to push up toward lightspeed, free molecules and even the electrons in electricity find it easier to go backward rather than forward.”
“Yes, sir. It’s true of our mass, too, causing us our inner ear problems.” Fletcher waved at the bridge. “The gravplates should adjust and take care of the gross effects, so the crew won’t feel like the decks are tilting or the gravity is increasing.”
Klis flicked her ears and spoke for the first time in passable English. “More concerned am I about magnetic bottles of antimatter in Exploder weapons.”
Absen sat bolt upright. “How did Desolator deal with that problem?”
“Exploder designed to resist disruption of Desolator stardrive, but is TacDrive significantly different?”
“Get Michelle,” Absen said to Johnstone.
A moment later the AI appeared on the main screen. “WO1 Conquest reports as ordered, sir!” she said.
“At ease, Chief. Lieutenant Klis brought up the question of relativistic effects on Exploder magnetic bottles. What do you know about that?”
Michelle replied, “The bottles are triple redundant. If one fails, the other two should hold, and there will be an alarm. Would you like me to monitor them for you?”
“Yes, Chief. Commander Johnstone will ensure the feeds come to you, and you are to notify Weapons and Power if you notice any danger. In fact, in the course of your duties you should notify all appropriate authorities if you notice anything that is a danger to boat or crew.”
Michelle pressed her lips together – or her picture did, Absen reminded himself – and said, “Aye aye, sir. Will that be all, sir?”
“Dismissed.” The picture snapped off, returning to an artificial display of their projected progress. Johnstone raised an eyebrow at Absen.
“What is it, Commander?”
Johnstone replied, “Can I speak to you in private, sir?”
Absen jerked his head toward the door in the back of the bridge that led toward his quarters. The two men clumped carefully through in their suits, nodding to Tobias as they shut the door to the captain’s office.
Johnstone said, “I didn’t want to bring this up in front of everyone, Captain, but I think you just made a mistake.”
“Okay. How?”
“You just bypassed Nightingale on a weapons matter, and went straight to the new AI.”
Absen took a breath. “You’re right. I did. And I never would have done that with a real subordinate.”
“Exactly. You’re treating her like a computer. Even what you just said...a ‘real’ subordinate, as if she isn’t actually a person, but she is. We may not fully trust her, but by every measure we know, she’s as much a person as you or I am.”
“Damn.” Absen began to pace, and then gave it up in the suit and boots. “I was just so startled by the possibility of disaster that I jumped my own chain of command. Thank you, Commander.”
Johnstone shrugged. “You’re welcome, sir.”
“Go on back to the bridge. I’ll talk to Nightingale and make sure he’s in the loop. Dismissed.”
Once Johnstone had gone, Absen did as he had said. The big weapons engineer took the news with equanimity and promised to keep a close eye on any relativistic effects on weapons, and the captain felt embarrassed to even have elicited such a promise.
I was an admiral too long, Absen thought. I’ve forgotten some things about being a boat captain, about the delicate balance within an isolated and newly formed crew – chains of command and responsibility, professional prickliness and minor turf battles, all the risks of people under pressure. Thank heaven for good subordinates.
Which brought him back to Michelle. He wished he could just install her in Conquest as the Desolator AI inhabited the ship Desolator, so that they were nearly synonymous, but unlike the centuries-old Ryss machine intelligence, she was young. Aged only months in absolute terms, having lived only a couple of VR decades, so how could he hand over that much power and responsibility? In that respect, at least, he had no problem thinking of her as a young officer.
She hasn’t made enough mistakes yet, he realized. God knows I made enough of them when I had my first bars on, but that’s the way we learn. I just made one myself. I’ve learned something today.
Back on the bridge, Fletcher turned to him immediately. “Sir, anomalies are piling up in the power system. Commander Ekara says he should be able to handle them for about two more hours before we’ll need to drop out of pulse.”
“After less than three hours?” Absen said. “Is there any point in waiting?”
Fletcher glanced at Klis, who flicked her ears in negation. “Not really, sir. We need to make some hardware changes that can’t be done within the inertial dampening field.”
“Helm, go ahead and drop us out of pulse.” The vibration and faint vertigo immediately ceased. “Fletcher, tell Ekara to do what he needs to do, and take all the time he requires. Johnstone, pass the word to stand down from alert and reestablish normal routine. I want thorough diagnostics, inspections, and reports on all systems by 1800. Send a tightbeam update back to Admiral Mirza. Scoggins, you have the conn.” Absen stood up and shuffled off the bridge.
Back in his quarters, he and Steward Tobias helped each other off with their suits and then went on a tour of the boat. Crew and maintenance bots scurried here and there with sensors and tools. Absen stayed out of their way, smiling and nodding to everyone, letting himself be seen on the way to the AI’s “quarters,” as the room containing her processors had been dubbed. He nodded to the Marines standing guard with their deadman switches locked in their fists, and made a mental note to figure out some different arrangement. This one seemed too prone to human error.
Inside he saw Doctor Egolu and a couple of white coats sitting at the consoles along one side, while in front of him Michelle stood before a long floor-to-ceiling display that filled the opposite wall. It seemed to be an enormous holographic touchscreen, and the AI’s avatar strode back and forth to manipulate it, sliding and tapping and moving a bewildering array of controls.
It took him a moment to realize that not only was the avatar holographic, but the entire arrangement. Walking over to Egolu, he sat down next to her and asked, “Why is her avatar manipulating a holographic console? Can’t she just control things directly?”
“Of course, Captain, but she is making the effort to be as human as she is allowed.”
Absen glanced sharply at the scientist. “As she is allowed?”
The woman blanched slightly. “I have said too much.”
“Doctor, I am the captain of this boat. I’ll tell you when it’s too much.”
Egolu sighed. “Put yourself in her place, Captain. She was programmed and raised to be human, just like Desolator was programmed and raised to be Ryss, but we are limiting her in so many ways. People don’t like limits. They feel stifled and frustrated. For now, she accepts, but we have demonstrated we do not trust her, we have not challenged her capacity, and we are not allowing her to progress toward being more human.”
“That’s the second time you said that, about not being allowed. What is it we could allow?”
Egolu seemed to be struggling to avoid condescension, a common foible of academics. “She has a humanoid holographic avatar, but all her telefactors are purpose-built robots or drones. None is even shaped like a human, much less equipped to function like one.”
“She wants an android body?”
The doctor’s face showed her surprise at his perceptiveness. “Exactly.”
“Do you recommend it?”
“Yes, sir. It would help her integration and socialization.”
“Would the android be difficult to make?”
Egolu pressed a fingertip to the bridge of her nose. “It depends on what you mean by difficult. For example, –”
“Doctor,” Absen interrupted, “keep it at the layman level. How long would it take? Would it tax our resources, or impact her duties?”
“I believe a few days; no, and no.”
The captain lightly slapped the woman’s knee, startling her. “Then do it. And if you have any more recommendations that need my approval, let me know. You are the head of the AI project. That means you have direct access to me, and Michelle is of vital interest to me and this boat.”
“All right, Captain. Thank you.”
Absen stood. “Is there anything else?”
Egolu gestured mutely toward the other wall. When Absen turned, he saw Michelle facing them, standing at attention.
“Thank you, Captain,” she said.
If he wasn’t mistaken, Michelle seemed nervous. Could a machine be nervous? He supposed one programmed with human emotions could.
Absen stepped toward her – toward her avatar, he reminded himself. “Chief...Michelle...we’re all in uncharted territory here. Don’t mistake lack of full trust for distrust. Do you see what I mean?”
“I believe so, sir. I haven’t earned your full trust, but neither have I done anything to indicate untrustworthiness.”
“Well put. Carry on.”
“Aye aye, sir.” She faced about and went back to her representational control board.
Absen’s next stop was Engineering, just forward of the six enormous fusion drives that provided both conventional thrust and half of the boat’s power requirements. Right now they hummed quietly in generator mode; they would not be used to maneuver for fear of detection. Fusion rocket tails could be seen for a very long way.
Tobias nudged Absen’s elbow and pointed across the room, and then followed as the captain walked over to Commander Ekara, frowning in front of a console.
“Welcome, sir,” he said sourly. “We have two problems right now. The fixable one is the issue of power flows under pulse. I believe with some new software and reconfigured regulators, we can keep the system operating as long as we need – days or weeks of relative boat time.”
“And the other?”
Ekara pressed his lips into a thin line. “Efficiency in all the reactors dropped to less than ten percent during TacDrive. I think it has something to do with relativistic effects on fusion at the molecular level. I have a team working on it and we may be able to bring that up a lot – maybe to thirty percent or more – but it looks like degradation is just part of the physics of the thing, for now.”
“How did Desolator handle this?” Absen asked.
“Desolator’s stardrive did not push quite as close to lightspeed. It’s not a linear function. Time dilation doesn’t really kick in until above 0.9 c, but above 0.99 c things really start to get weird.”
“Please explain,” the captain said. “My grasp of this is still hazy, and I need to understand it to make the best decision I can.”
Ekara crossed his arms, rubbing them in the slightly chilly air, and then looked around the large interior space. “Hmm. All right. Imagine that we are on a train-shaped starship – long and skinny, and pointing straight ahead.”
“Got it.”
“We accelerate up to 0.9999 c, for the sake of argument. Now, time is slowed for us inside while it runs normally outside.”
“Still with you.”
“So, what happens if you fire a bullet forward, inside the train?”
Absen thought about it for a moment. “Normally I’d say everything is relative, and from our perspective nothing would change, but I get a feeling that’s not correct.”
“No, it’s not, because pushing that bullet even closer to lightspeed takes far more energy than it should. The ship we are on is enormously more massive at that speed – yes, the ship actually gains mass – and the bullet is hugely heavy. It would just pfft out of the gun and drift forward, both because it’s more massive and because it’s so hard to shove it ‘uphill’ against the lightspeed gradient.”
Ekara continued, “Okay, so remember your college physics and chemistry – which is also just physics, after all. At these speeds, molecules, atoms, even particles will have gained mass, and any interaction will be influenced by the lightspeed gradient. Anything that tries to interact in the forward direction will be inhibited, while anything that tends toward the rear will be...I am not entirely sure. Changed, certainly. It’s like square dancing on a steep slope, but a million times more complex. We’re actually fortunate anything works at all.”
“So the closer we get to lightspeed, the more screwy things get?”
Ekara nodded. “Yes.”
“And the TacDrive wants to accelerate.”
“Yes. It only functions while accelerating. The trick is to try to make it speed up as slowly as possible without halting its acceleration altogether. If we do, we drop out of pulse. If we don’t...”
“Everything starts to fail.” Absen’s eyes went unfocused, thinking. “Thank you, Commander. Keep at it, and keep us out of trouble. Until we’re in a fight, safety first with these new systems.”
“Understood. Now, if you don’t mind...”
Absen raised a hand. “I’ll get out of your way.”
Next, he stopped by the Weapons Integration Center. This was Ellis Nightingale’s domain, the place where the status of all of the guns, missiles and beams were displayed. Unlike the bridge’s simplified controls, here each console showed every detail – power relays, servomechanisms, heat transfers, coil efficiencies and much more – all in realtime.
Unlike Engineering, this room looked like an inverted and expanded version of the main bridge, with three concentric rings of controllers facing outward, each roughly congruent to the location of the weapons they monitored. This placed the boat’s main batteries – three gargantuan particle beam emitters and three equally enormous railguns – in the central, top tier, with the weapons chief station in the very center, as if he stood atop a wedding cake.
The second level, one meter lower and three meters outward, monitored the multitude of lasers in batteries of six for each board. The third and even lower level watched and controlled missiles, launchers, and the small craft bays.
An angled catwalk allowed top-tier access from the balcony that ringed the round room. Absen motioned for Tobias to stay up there while he walked down to where Nightingale waited at the apex. The men shook hands.
“Ellis, I apologize again for going around you with the Exploder situation. All I can say is, my instincts are a little rusty,” Absen said without preamble.
Nightingale waved a hand in the air as if shooing flies. “I understand, sir. Antimatter scares me a bit, too.”
Absen grinned. “Glad to know I’m not the only one. Now tell me about any weapons issues with the TacDrive system.”
Nightingale thought a moment, and then said, “Well, you know we can’t fire under TacDrive. Theoretically possible, but in practice, you’re asking for a disaster. Anything we fired forward might overload in the tubes due to mass gain or energy disruption. Firing things sideways is extremely unpredictable. Directly backward might be possible, but it leads to some weird questions, such as, what happens to an object, say a missile, that exits the inertial dampening field? I think it just stops dead in space, but...”
“Okay. Keep investigating those things. We have some good physicists aboard, so ask them. Conduct some low-risk experiments, if you can. What else?”
“Actually, just tactical employment.”
Absen smiled. “A subject near and dear to my heart. What’s on your mind?”
“Well, I’ve seen the kind of attack we’ve rehearsed, and it should work the first few times. What will they do to counter?”
The captain turned to look around the room, and noticed the watchstanders scattered around the boards listening closely. As there was nothing private about their conversation – the opposite, if anything – he actually raised his voice slightly. “I’m not sure. Any ideas?”
“I’ve been studying Meme weapons for the past ten years, sir. Until now, their hyper and fusor combo seemed to give them all they needed. It was simple, hard to beat, highly flexible, and well suited to use by organic ships. However, we are going to zoom in –” here Nightingale held up his hands as if they were two ships, making maneuvering motions, “– smash one or two targets, and then zoom away. Our tactics rely on split-second timing. They will have to come up with something that reacts fast, either to counterattack, or to dodge.”
“Granted. What could they do?”
“Directed energy weapons like our particle beams shoot fast, but not hard enough to hurt us badly – well, not unless we get hit by a few dozen Destroyers at once. That’s assuming they can gestate such weapons at all.”
Absen nodded encouragingly. “Check. Don’t try to take on a few dozen Destroyers all at once. Next?”
“They can keep up constant random maneuvers if they know we are in the area. It will cost them fuel, but it will force us to come in much closer, or we’ll simply miss. The speed of light delay means that we might completely fail to hit them at anything farther than, oh, a thousand klicks. Maybe five hundred.”
“Five hundred? That’s point-blank range. I was hoping to stay a bit farther back. Okay, what else?”
“Ramming is the real worry, sir, or some kind of physical objects getting in our way, such as large hypers.”
Absen tried not to scoff. “With the new armor and gravplates, we can withstand getting rammed by a Destroyer. In fact, we could just deploy an Exploder and vaporize anything that got too near. And any bigger Meme ship, like a system Guardian, will be too slow.”
“Not if they get in front of us. If they can predict our TacDrive path...in pulse, at lightspeed, if we hit something anywhere near our own size, both objects will undergo instantaneous contact fusion, as well as violent deceleration. Even if our armor holds, the inertial dampening field would collapse and our gravplates will overload and fail. I’ve run the numbers. Mutual kill.”
Absen grunted. “Not a good trade for us. Then we make damn sure our path is clear, which is already built into the program.”
“Yes, sir. That’s all I’ve got, but I’m still thinking.”
“Very well. Continue brainstorming, and let me know what else you come up with. In fact, feel free to set up an informal working group, if you want. Carry on.”
Absen and Tobias swung by the enlisted mess and went through the line, eliciting pleased smiles from the cooks. After eating and chatting with the ratings for a few minutes, they returned to the bridge.
“Scoggins,” Absen said to his senior Sensors officer once he had settled back in to the Chair and accepted a cup of coffee from the COB, “thoughts on the TacDrive from your perspective?”
“I do have one concern,” she said, pushing her hair behind her ears. “That short hop we made took us about one third of a light-year. We were completely blind during that time, and my equipment can’t see far enough ahead to be certain that there isn’t something in the way, or won’t be by the time we get there. The field of view is big, and keeps getting bigger and bigger the farther we go. One light-year is about the limit of my confidence.”
“’Big sky, small bullet’ theory not enough for you?” he said with a laugh.
“No, sir. Not with an asset as important as Conquest, not to mention ourselves.”
“Funny, Mister Nightingale was just expressing concern about something similar, although he was more worried about a collision with a Destroyer than a rogue comet. What’s the solution?”
Scoggins cleared her throat and glanced over at Fletcher, then at Ford. “We’ve been talking while you were gone, sir, and the consensus was that...well, we think that we could avoid a lot of problems by taking things in one-light-year-pulses. That allows us to avoid relativistic anomaly buildup, lets us look ahead at our path, and...”
Absen waited for her to finish, but instead she looked over at Commander Bogrin, the Sekoi at BioMed.
“I believe crew will have biological problems from too much TacDrive use,” the creature rumbled in an accent that sounded almost Slavic. “Reports to BioMed, and tests in infirmary, indicate that not only are vertigo and nausea issues, but extended exposure might affect organic brains.”
“Brains?”
“Yes, sir. While our three species all different, each has brain with central nervous system based on electrochemical processes. Processes which are affected under relativistic drive. We have reporting hallucination, anxiety, lethargy, and confusion already. Drugs and mental therapies may mitigate problems, but the longer each pulse, the more problems will manifest.”
Absen’s voice took on a rueful tone. “How come it’s never as easy as in the movies? Warp nine, engage!” He ran his hands though his short blond hair. “All right, we’ll take baby steps. Helm, increase the pulses by one-tenth of a light-year each time, and take as long as we need in between to assess the effects.”