Wimier, who was not among those looking confused, walked over. “The media love it. They’re already calling it the Neem-Jat Stardrive!”
“Well, strictly speaking,” said Neem, “It isn’t a stardrive. It just creates a rift between one point and another. The actual drive is whatever engine that gets you through the rift.”
“I think that distinction is going to be lost on the rest of us,” said Wimier. “You may as well bask in the glory.”
“No problem there,” said Jat.
Karden grew quiet. His mind was turning over what Neem had said. Then, he remembered he had to attend to the problem at hand.
“If what Tayyis’s Ara’kaa informant says is true, the Elders could have their authorization back by now, all their supporting detachments in place, and be ready to hit us with fifty Warden Ships. If they are loaded with what she said were full complements for war, they could turn the surface of this planet into radioactive waste, or hit us with a million power-armored ground troops.”
“What that says to me,” continued Karden, “is that there is no time to waste.”
The others looked at him, confused.
“Neem, how much of its fuel did the Big Surprise use to open that rift?”
“Relatively speaking, a miniscule amount…” replied Neem.
Jat interrupted, his mind clearly moving faster than his verbal powers, “Rifts don’t work like wormholes. Different curves for power, aperture, and the effects of gravity. Really short trip, under say about fifty light years, actually less power than a wormhole. Long distances a lot more than one.”
He continued. “Aperture same way. Tiny rift is a little easier than a wormhole, big one, like Warden Ship size, much more expensive and hard to keep stable. Gravity… would take silly amounts of power or maybe special tricks to get one to work on planet surface, a lot harder than wormhole, but rifts work fine in medium orbit while wormholes need to be way out at edge of solar system. The ship is fully loaded, so…”
Karden’s train of thought had been momentarily thrown off by Jat’s description of fifty light years as a really short trip, and his subsequent monologue. Now he recovered, and took his turn to interrupt.
“Flying back to ground, landing, refitting, then getting back into space will take at least a day or two. And how long did that jump just take?”
“Are you serious?” said Wimier. “You want them to jump, now, just like that?”
“To keep it a valid test, we had them fully prepare for a real jump. The only problem with it is in our minds. We’ve been thinking in terms of cruising steadily from point A to point B, like all our previous methods of travel, or like the Elders. But the rules of the game have changed. I propose we act like it.”
Jat shocked everyone with a bellowing, grating laugh, a sound like someone was cruelly torturing an innocent piece of crumpled steel.
“HA! Karden is right! What have we all been thinking! What was I thinking? With enough power to apply to the rift generators, our biggest problem in transit time is getting to and from a planetary surface. We could do it, high orbit near Malachite, in moments! Let’s go!”
“Strictly speaking,” smiled Karden, “let’s ask Varen to go.”
Varen, on board the Big Surprise, was finishing up the post-rift tests and systems checks, along with his crew. Systems were fine. As predicted by Jat, they might as well have flown two hundred feet as the two hundred thousand kilosteps they actually travelled.
A signal came in from ground control.
“General Varen, this is Haral Karden. How would you like to take a quick jaunt to Malachite?”
“What?”
“You’ve got a few minutes to spare, I hope.”
Varen thought about that. Then it hit him. “Well slag, Karden! I didn’t think of it that way. What are we waiting for?”
He grinned turned to his crew, who’d heard every word. “Anyone need to go to the head first?”
Someone piped back “Sir, I might, but I think I can wait another ten minutes!” There were chuckles.
“All right then. Crew to your stations…”
They went through their checks, and opened the rift. Before them, through the hole in space, was a warm yellow sun. Thanks to the Elder’s own galactic map, they would be coming into high orbit near the planet Malachite itself.
They cruised through the rift and…
“Look at THAT…!” said one of the gunners.
“Quiet. Hands on your controls, minds on your jobs,” said Varen.
Before them, over a green verdant world, was a colossal, many kilosteps-wide space station. Elegant and decorated, its lights glowed like a city at night. Though they’d seen Elder starbases in graphics and videos from the map, nothing prepared them for the scale of it in real life.
Around that city, floating peacefully in space, were ninety Warden Ships.
That many ships could blast through the feeble fleet they’d developed through many months of the greatest military buildup and fastest technological leap in the history of Ground. Beyond them were ninety of the gigantic transports. If their intelligence on the Elders was correct, between the transports and the Warden Ships, they could bring something like three million troops with them. Elder troops, in power armor, and backed by formidable vehicles and air power.
Assuming that is, they didn’t have clearance to simply blast the surface of Ground with orbital attacks and nuclear weapons until they decided to come down and round up the survivors. Between the planet, the starbase, and the fleet, hundreds of shuttles were swarming. A few large transport shuttles flew methodically from the planet’s green, cloud-dotted surface to waiting transport ships.
Varen watched the grand preparation for war with astonished eyes, “There’s our confirmation the Elders are coming soon. Communications officer, you’ve got good images of all that?”
“Yes sir.”
“All right then, let’s turn around and get out of here. And, count our blessings that the rift doesn’t make a huge visible flash like a wormhole. If we’re lucky, they won’t know what they just saw.”
And in another moment, they were home. It had all taken, in fact, a good deal less than ten minutes.
///
The dual news of the success of the Neem-Jat Stardrive, and the discovery of a massive Elder fleet almost ready to get underway, had an electrifying effect on the mood of the world, both for good and ill.
What were soon forty million regular troops and a hundred and twenty million militia were joined by tens of millions more irregular civilian volunteers, armed with whatever they could get hold of, and ready to fight for their lives and their homes. Others built bunkers and hid, hoping for better days. Others still panicked, had mental breakdowns, or threw themselves into desperate attempts at escape and dissipation. Governments strapped for funds, and economies short on resources, prepared to somehow increase their efforts a little more.
Haral Karden had other ideas.
He’d taken a break from GDC headquarters, and was relaxing, for the first time in months, at his beach house. Unlike last time, there were heavily armed guards on watch only a hundred steps away, but that couldn’t be helped.
His little house stood back in the shade of the trees. The sea sang its eternal song before them. The wind was mild and scented with summer blooms. Tayyis was by his side, dozing in light Baccharan-style clothes. He thought she looked lovely in the golden afternoon sunlight.
How easy to forget that light-years away, around a world that might well be lovely too, titanic forces were being gathered to destroy all of this.
No, not light years, in fact, no farther than the distance to an open rift.
He thought back to what Neem had said about the rift generator. It wasn’t really a stardrive at all. It just opened a way. Whatever got you through that way was your stardrive. Jat’s original testing satellite hadn’t gone through its own rift, it had sent a missile through. In that sense, any of their space-travelling vehicles of wa
r were now starships too. The System Defense Ships and the MSSA-2 fighters could fly just as easily and fight just as well in orbit over another world as their own.
But what were they doing now? Desperately planning to throw every remaining resource into building more of what they already had, in hopes it would be enough. They’d copied the Elder’s military technology, railguns, lasers, particle beams, deadlier and more efficient missiles, and were now hitting the same limits the Elders had hit thousands of years before.
In essence, they were starting to play by the Elder’s rules, but with far fewer resources. When an invasion force arrived that was several times what they’d imagined, twice what Skrai’kiik the turncoat member of the Elder’s own fleet had thought would come, what really would they do?
But that invasion force wasn’t ready yet. Not much longer to be sure, but not yet. How much less dangerous might it be while still docked and being supplied, than when it was blasting its way through their solar system, fully armed and ready for battle?
What if what they already had WAS enough, provided they could start the battle on their terms? Provided they could take the fight to an enemy less than fully prepared, rather than wait for it to come to them?
And what if they took the resources they were planning to pour into even more crash production of ships and fighters, and instead put it into comparatively cheap rift-generating satellites like Jat’s?
The afternoon air was getting cooler, and his drink was getting warmer. He forgot about them both, and started to make calls.
38
Abida turned to Varen and Neem, “Well, he did once talk about needing to find cheaper alternatives. Here it is!”
Varen looked cautious. Neem was excited.
“I think I could improve on the original design… make it simpler, cheaper to operate, faster to produce. That thing is just a prototype after all! If we throw everything into it, I think we could get a lot of generators up quickly.”
Varen considered, “We’ll need a lot of them. A surprise attack depends on speed, and that means getting everything we plan to throw at it through as fast as possible. Filing slowly through one rift won’t do it. Once they have time to power up, they’re going to win.”
“But,” he added, “That isn’t my real worry. The problem is that even assuming they are powered down, I’m not sure what we have will be able to deal enough of a beating to them fast enough. If we had the ICBMs to help us, maybe…”
Abida looked suddenly thoughtful. “Remember Bacchara. If we wanted to get missile launchers somewhere, and we had trucks, we’d just weld them on and clamp them down as needed.”
The others turned to look at him. He continued.
“This isn’t as simple, but still, if we want to get the ICBMs through the rifts, we should improvise. They are designed to launch under their own power, yes? That means once we get there they’ll be ok. We could find some way to rig them onto the System Defense Ships, and take them through with us.”
Neem boggled, “No wonder you and Karden get along so well.”
///
Harker was on the road, on route in his chauffeured car from one sprawling facility to another. He was agitated. He dialed in some codes to set up a conference call.
“Karden, have you gone crazy, or maybe crazier?”
“How so?”
“You want us to build a hundred and fifty rift drives in the next few days?”
“If we are even one day late, we’re done for,” said Karden.
“I understand, but that doesn’t make it possible for us to actually do it.”
“Neem’s new design is surprisingly simple, and not terribly large.”
“But we’ve still got to tool up for it, get production scaled. And, even with all the Elder generating technology we’ve got now, antimatter’s going to be in short supply at that pace. Slag! How are you even planning to get them all in orbit?”
“For the latter, we have the Elder shuttles. As to the former, perhaps you can think of how to divide the work up according to who will have to tool up the least, for each component.”
Harker pondered that, “Viris? Got anything more immediately helpful?”
“With all due respect to our esteemed friend PROFESSOR Karden, yes,” she said, “Yes I do. I’ve been working a lot on networking applications lately, expanding on some ideas from the Elder’s computing architecture for coordinating huge projects, stuff from the databases of the Vigilant…”
“And I think it may well come in handy right now. If we’re going to coordinate the work of thousands of engineers, technicians, and workers around the world, we need them to be able to work simultaneously on it. But, instead of finding some top-down master plan like the Elders, or maybe you geezers, would have done, we let everyone collaborate freely, adaptively, and creatively.”
“So basically,” said Harker, “you’re saying throw the job out there on some advanced Elder-style platform you’ve built, spread the news worldwide, and see what the geeks and wonks come up with?”
Viris laughed, “With maybe a little more direction than that, but yes.”
Harker smiled, a complex, almost rueful expression on his usually bluff face. “Well, all right. Why the slag not! Let’s get the word out!”
///
Tayyis looked across the table at Jat, listening intently to his mind-bending discussion of the physics behind space-time rifts, and frowned.
She wasn’t frowning out of boredom or frustration. Her mind was concentrating, absorbing it all, working hard, assembling the pieces of information like parts to a puzzle. Unconsciously, she took Karden’s hand. He squeezed hers gently with it, and was sipping a drink with the other. They had half-finished plates of delicious food in front of them. With them were Viris and her new girlfriend Marit, who was an apparently infamous creator of viral software. The two of them looked a bit uncomfortable and self-conscious in this, perhaps the finest restaurant in Ishnepura
Because of who they now were, and the times they lived in, a pair of armed guards stood by. The other patrons sometimes glanced over curiously, but they were busy discussing what everyone else in the world was discussing, the coming battle with the Elders.
At one of the rare moments where Jat paused to take a breath, she spoke.
“Darex, at one point, you’d mentioned that the size of a rift made a lot of difference in how much power they needed to open and to be stable long enough for something to go through.”
“Ah, my brightest pupil!” said Jat.
“Well, you’ve all at various points talked about the problems of communication. The Elders have their galaxy-wide satellite network. And, it works on the principles of their wormholes, right?”
Jat grinned, “Yes. Because even the smallest wormhole isn’t cheap, they send their interstellar communications in packets, a bunch of missives all at once, like old paper messenger delivery, but moving at ten times the speed of one of their starships.”
“All right, but you said really small rifts actually need less power than the same size of wormhole. And that applies to keeping them stable and open too? How big does a rift need to be for data to go through?”
Jat stopped, as if frozen, with a look of utter surprise on his face.
Then, he moved suddenly and awkwardly into motion. He pulled out his data pad and managed to knock his drink over in the same not so smooth motion, ignored it, and set to work.
“Hey!” yelped Viris, dodging the spill. She laughed and fired curses at him at the same time, then turned to Tayyis.
“So, you’re suggesting we make our own network of little satellites, generating tiny little stable rifts, just big enough for a beam of data, so we could keep in regular, maybe constant communication? In real time, none of this Elder parcel delivery business?”
Tayyis half-nodded, still thinking about it.
“Or,” said Karden, his mind whirling as happened so often around his friends, “we could dispense with the satellites, and just gener
ate them on board ships themselves.”
Again, he thought, the rules that applied to Elder technology didn’t apply here.
“Won’t work” interrupted Jat “They won’t stay stable inside an object, not close at least.”
Then he thought better of it “But… but you could project them outside, not too far away. From a little mobile projector combined with a communication dish I guess. Might not always be as reliable as we’d like, but it would work…”
Viris considered it “We’d need a communications architecture, and software to support it. I think I can help with a few ideas…”
Jat was busy jotting notes and performing calculations. He muttered to himself.
“I wonder how many we could get made and installed before the launch?” said Karden. He called Harker, summarized what they’d discussed and asked him the same question.
Even the others at the table could hear the stream of profanity from the voice on the other end of the call.
Karden made a wry smile, as if he’d been expecting that reaction. “All right, I’ll call Neem. So long as our ships can talk to each other, I suppose the fleet doesn’t need too many rift communicators.”
“Rift communicators? I like that,” said Jat, momentarily lifting his head.
///
A very few days later, a surprised assembly of diplomats watched a set of gigantic video screens at the Hall of Nations. Morning light shone in the plaza outside. Before their eyes, the last of one hundred and fifty Neem-Jat rift satellites was being towed into place by Elder shuttles.
They were not alone. In every city on Ground, people watched what was in motion. Newscasts, feeds on the net, home videos from the ground, everywhere were images of MSSA-2 fighters being prepared for launch, of System Defense Ships parked in space at the ready.
Karden sat in the newly completed Global Defense Command operations center, deep underground below the headquarters building. He reconciled himself to being a prime target. With its video feeds from multiple angles, its massive communication capabilities, it was far too useful to ignore. Everyone else, all the key decision makers and leaders, were safely scattered around the world. Some of them were at smaller versions of this room, others wherever they needed to be. They were as safe as could be if the Elders beat them to the first strike, as safe as anyone could be.
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