Four men entered the captain’s workspace: Ford, Okuda, Ekara and Nightingale. Tobias shut the door behind them, leaving them facing Absen behind his desk. “Sit down, gentlemen. You look like schoolboys in the principal’s office.”
That broke the tension, and they each took a chair.
“I need some information,” Absen began. “How fast can we be going outside of TacDrive and still fire weapons?”
Ford, always quick to speak, answered. “Anything up to point nine light should be no problem. We did it at Afrana.”
“For the lasers too?”
The weapons officer glanced at Nightingale, who spoke. “There is serious degradation after point five light due to the Doppler effect within the weapon itself – you get an enormous blue-shift fired forward, or red-shift firing backward.”
“What about the particle cannon?”
“Less of a problem. They will hit harder firing forward. Sideways they act more like railguns than lasers, so the beam will actually continue the boat’s direction even as they diverge, whereas beam weapons fired sideways spread out in an enormous plane. Fired backward...well, it would be like throwing baseballs backward off a truck. Most of the kinetic energy goes into the boat, as if firing a rocket.”
Absen nodded. “I get it. So if we keep it under half lightspeed, we can still make a pretty good alpha strike off the nose.”
“Yes, sir,” Nightingale replied.
“Quan,” Absen turned to Ekara, “can the TacDrive only propel us directly forward?”
“Yes...” and then the engineer paused with a faraway look in his eye. “I think so. As currently configured, but...it might be possible to put in some auxiliary field emitters, reverse the polarity, and make it take us backward. I’m not sure how fast...”
“Get to work on it. I want that capability. Now...” he turned to Okuda. “Master Helm, tell me something. What happens to our kinetic energy when we come out of the TacDrive?”
“Like many things, sir, it depends. The inertial dampening field interacts with gravity in such a way that within about twenty AU of a star like Sol, the boat comes out of pulse nearly at rest relative to that star – or actually, relative to the sum of all the gravitational pulls in the system.”
Seeing the others’ incomprehension, he explained. “A simple rule of thumb is, whatever the dominant gravity nearby is, the boat will tend to match speeds. So if we come out of pulse near Jupiter, we will be at rest relative to Jupiter. It’s almost as if gravity sucks out the kinetic energy during the pulse. The strongest source tends to dominate.”
“And in interstellar space, where there is very little gravity?” Absen asked.
“Then we might lose a lot less kinetic energy, especially during a short pulse.”
“How much less?”
“I need a one-variable equation, sir. Tell me how fast we are going when we pulse, and how long we pulse, and I can tell you about how much speed we will retain.”
Absen sat back and put his feet up on his desk. “If we’re going half light, with a light-week pulse?”
“Out here? We’ll keep almost all of our energy.” Okuda raised an eyebrow in question, obviously wondering what his captain was driving at.
“Not yet,” Absen said. “All right, I think I have all I need for now.” He pressed his intercom. “Send her in.”
Tobias opened the door and held it, head swiveling to stare at the woman who entered. Unknown to everyone there, yet Absen could see the tantalizing familiarity that the other men felt. He stood up to inspect her, as he already knew who she was.
Dressed in a warrant officer’s dress uniform, the woman was of average height, with dusky skin and dark hair. She held her wheel cap precisely under her left arm, and her right came up to salute Absen. “Warrant Officer First Michelle Conquest reports as ordered, Captain,” she said in even tones.
Absen’s four officers all came to their feet as one, staring.
“What!” Ford cried, aghast.
“You’ve never seen a woman before? Or a warrant officer?” Absen asked with a smile.
“That’s...” he sputtered.
Okuda took a step sideways as if to get a better look, while Nightingale stood still.
Ekara reached a hesitant hand as if to touch the figure’s bare arm, and then drew it back. “That’s an android,” he said in wonder. “They were experimenting with them before we left, for certain specialized uses, but replicating the human body mechanically is a very difficult task, full of compromises. In most cases some form of robot is better.”
“It’s creepy,” Ford said.
Ekara responded by waving a finger in the air in a circle. “There’s that, too. Some people had a hard time adjusting.”
Absen finally returned the salute, but left WO1 Conquest standing at attention. Or at least, her android telefactor. It’s not as if her mind were trapped there too. She’s probably still performing a dozen other tasks, only sparing what she needs for this one.
“We’re going to have to get used to it, because she’s here to stay.” Absen stepped forward to shake the android’s hand. It felt warm and dry, and only slightly unnatural. “One more step toward humanity, Miss Conquest. I hope it pleases you.”
“Thank you, Captain,” she replied, her face slightly stiff, contrasting with her expressive voice. “I know right now I seem more like a marionette or robot than a real organic. I intend to keep improving this body, to find the limits of machine expression of the human experience.”
“I wanna be a real boy,” Ford muttered in a falsetto voice.
Michelle turned toward him with a disconcerting smile. “The wooden puppet Pinocchio to Geppetto. That story resonates with me.”
“How about Frankenstein?” he replied, his face darkening.
Absen snapped, “Ford, hasn’t your mouth gotten you into enough trouble?”
Ford straightened. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“I’m tired of ‘sorry, sir.’ Move yourself into bachelor’s quarters. No visitors, double shifts for one week, for abuse of a subordinate. Or maybe I should call it racism. I’m not sure yet. Dismissed.”
Downcast, Ford left the office without a word.
“That wasn’t really necessary, sir,” Michelle said.
Absen turned to her and spoke coldly. “Just who in the hell are you to tell me how to run my boat, Warrant First? Do you think you have some kind of special privileges because your physical processes are different from mine?”
It appeared Michelle had built her new body with the ability to change skin tone, for her face whitened and she snapped back to attention. “Sorry, sir. No excuse, sir.”
“Damn right there’s no excuse. This is a warship, underway in hostile territory. If you have something pertinent to the safety and operation of this boat to say, I expect to hear it, but you are far too inexperienced to be criticizing your captain about crew discipline, especially in front of your superiors.”
“Yes, sir!”
“You want to be human? Well, guess what: you have to take the bad with the good.” Absen calculated for a moment. An AI’s time sense was adjustable, Doctor Egolu had said, and was currently set on ten to one. That is, Michelle experienced the equivalent of ten days for every one boat day, and this factor was under human control. Absen had insisted on it. Perhaps sometime he would turn that adjustment over to her, but not yet, and here was one reason why.
“Warrant Officer First Conquest, I was considering raising you to WO Second, but I can see your judgment still needs some development, so your promotion is now suspended. Additionally, you will march your new body over to Doctor Egolu immediately and explain that she is to crate it for twenty-four hours. You will not use it or even access it during that time. Am I clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Dismissed.” Absen might have sworn the android’s eyes began to tear up, but he remained unmoved. It wasn’t as if the AI brain was being cut off from all access to her function. She just had to give up her new toy for the subjective equivalent of ten days.
Once she had departed, Nightingale rumbled, “That was interesting. You sprung it on us.”
“I wanted to see your initial impressions, without warning. It could have been worse.”
“Yes,” the big man said. “What do you think about the other races’ reactions?”
“The Ryss should have no problem. They are used to Desolator and the idea of AI. Not sure about the Sekoi.”
“I hope she’s ready to rebuild the android if one of those things gets mad and rips it apart. They make me feel small.” Nightingale rolled his shoulders, huge but still only half the size of a Hippo.
Absen sighed. “It’s an experiment. Doctor Egolu thinks letting Michelle have a body is vital to her development and sanity, because we have not allowed her to inhabit Conquest the way the Desolator AI inhabits his ship-body. It’s uncharted territory, gentlemen, but I’m going to give her the same chance I would any other young officer to make her mistakes and learn from them.”