by Tony Daniel
Not, she reminded herself, without rivals . . .
As though to remind her of the existence of those rivals, she was shoved gently back in her seat, for the shuttle (which lacked such fripperies as inertial compensators) had reached an altitude at which grav repulsion’s efficiency dropped off to the point that the photon thrusters must be activated for docking maneuvers at Albion Space Station. She manipulated the controls again. All at once, the small screen in front of her showed the shuttle’s external video pickup, with the cloud-swirling blue curve of Earth below and the enormous oblate spheroid of the station growing closer. She had no difficulty picking out, from among the ships tethered to its docking flanges, the one that was her destination. It was, after all, bigger than most of the others put together.
HMSS Resolute was a Defiant-class second rater, to use the age-of-sail terminology initially adopted by the Royal Space Navy to avoid confusion with the battleships, cruisers, et cetera of the seagoing Royal Navy, and still used even though those ship types had long since ceased to sail Earth’s seas. As such, she was as large as any Imperial space warship except the extremely rare Invincible-class first raters and practically any foreign rival. (The only exception, Greater China’s new Kuan-Ti, might mass somewhat more, but it could not match the sophistication of the Defiant class’s state-of-the-art weapon systems.)
As the shuttle drew nearer, more details came into view. Grav repulsion had largely eliminated the old distinction between ships that could land on a planet and those that traveled between planets—at least for small- to medium-sized ships, such as the fourth through sixth rate warships. But for the great capital ships of space, a planetary landing capability was unnecessary—not to mention the fact that a ship of Resolute’s half-million-ton mass, even had it possessed gravs, would never be able to turn them off on a one-G planet without being wrecked by her own monstrous weight. Resolute was purely a creature of deep space. Her forward section’s ellipsoid curve was broken, astern, by the engineering spaces, the photon thrusters and the twin nacelles for the ranked superdense toroids of the Bernheim Drive, which accounted for twenty percent of the ship’s total mass. Quite a lot of the rest was accounted for by the weapons—especially the magazines of torpedoes, which to be of any use in today’s deep-space combat environment had to be fitted with Bernheim drives of their own. Thus, they were too large and massive for any but the first three rates of warships to carry in useful numbers. The fourth through sixth raters mounted only the relatively small missiles useable in orbital space and directed-energy weapons: x-ray lasers and the particle-beam projectors which were the short-range ship killers par excellence. Naturally, Resolute had plenty of these as well, and even a small planetside assault capability in the form of power-armored Royal Marines and atmospheric fighters.
All in all, a consummate killing machine. As the shuttle made its final approach, her complexity came more and more into focus, and the half-acre-sized Union flag on her dorsal surface near the bow gleamed in the station’s lights. For an instant, Jane felt a small tingle of pride, not unmixed with apprehension, as she waited to disembark and report aboard that great ship as her new helmsman.
The various dominions could—and most did—have their own spaceborne security and law enforcement agencies, operating nothing heavier than a fifth rater. But the Royal Space Navy was a unified Empire-wide service, its personnel totally integrated. Resolute’s commanding officer, for example, was from the Viceroyalty of India. In addition, Captain Ilderim Sharif was a Muslim, and Jane had heard that he tended to lean over backward on that account, given the current troubles with the Caliphate, which persistently tried—not always without success—to spread disaffection among its coreligionists in the Viceroyalty. But when she paid her courtesy call on him there was no evidence of overcompensation—only the captain’s equally renowned taciturnity. So she was able to promptly go about settling into her tiny but private stateroom. Then, with time on her hands, she sought out the wardroom, hoping she was in time to get a meal.
As she entered, her heart sank, for there were only a few officers in evidence and they seemed to be finishing up. She recognized one of them: Major Patrick O’Hara, commander of Resolute’s Marine detachment. (His rank was actually captain, but as such he received the traditional “courtesy promotion” aboard a warship, whose commanding officer alone could be addressed by the sacrosanct title of “Captain.”) She had met him on a previous posting, and knew him to be a stereotypical “professional Irishman”—which meant a staunch Imperial loyalist these days, and had ever since Ireland had acquired coequal dominion status. Then, as O’Hara departed, one of the other officers stood up and turned around, his eyes met hers . . . and both pairs of eyes blinked with recognition.
“Jared!” she exclaimed, stepping forward and extending a hand. “It’s been a long time.”
“It certainly has, Jane.” Lieutenant Jared Wilmarth took her hand, then added with a wry smile, “Or, I should say, ‘sir.’”
Jane made a dismissive noise with her mouth. She and Wilmarth had met each other on the old HMSS Audacious, he as a midshipman and she as a Reserve ensign on her first cruise. Though in different departments (his was engineering), they had gravitated together, partly because they were both North Americans, albeit from different dominions—Carolina in her case, Oregon in his. “Well,” she said, “I certainly hadn’t expected to see you here.”
“I did expect to see you—I’d heard who’d been assigned to be our new helmsman. No surprise, considering . . .” Wilmarth gave a gesture vaguely indicating Jane’s head.
What he meant went unspoken. It was one of the reasons she still outranked him, even though he was regular Royal Space Navy and she was RSNR.
Direct neural interfacing had never lived up to the more extravagant predictions, largely because very few humans had the ability to use it without suffering a terrifying descent into psychosis. But a small percentage possessed, for reasons that still baffled cyberneticists and neurologists alike, the ability to mind-link with a computer with only a brief and relatively mild initial disorientation. Even for this minority, DNI hardly possessed the near-magical properties claimed for it by its early enthusiasts. It did, however, greatly enhance the speed and precision with which computerized controls could be used—such as a starship’s controls.
It was only by coincidence that interface talent and the attributes required of a military officer occurred in the same person. When they did, such personnel were extremely valuable . . . and Jane Grenville was one. The helmsman’s station was fitted for manual control, of course, but it also had an interface jack. It helped account for the fact that the piloting of the mighty Resolute was being entrusted to a reservist. Sometimes pragmatism trumped snobbery.
“Well, at any rate, it’s good to see you again,” she said. “And anyway,” she added jokingly, “we North Americans have to stick together—especially on Federation Day.”
His expression did not match the lightness of her tone. Indeed, a shadow seemed to cross his face. “Inappropriate name,” he said expressionlessly.
“Well . . . I suppose so.” It was, she supposed, something of a misnomer for what had happened in 1781: the reorganization of the colonies into a smaller number of more rational units, each self-governing as to internal affairs while a viceroy moderated intercolonial matters, and the creation of the Imperial Grand Council to steer the Empire as a whole. But it hadn’t been until almost a century later, after many vicissitudes including the Second American Rebellion, that the great principle of imperial federation had been fully grasped: the dichotomy between the metropolis and the colonies had to go. So, by a cumulative process, the Imperial Grand Council had become a super-legislature in which the colonies (elevated to the dignity of dominions) stood on the same footing as England, Scotland, and Ireland.
“Still,” she said, “it was a necessary beginning. Britain alone could never have sustained a world empire.” This was a truism of all the history she had always be
en taught. The Empire had prevailed by expanding its power base beyond the narrow confines of the British Isles, just as Rome had once outgrown a single city-state. “The world we know wouldn’t exist.”
“No, it wouldn’t.” Wilmarth’s voice was very neutral. Then, abruptly, he grew intense. “Have you ever wondered if maybe the price of that world was too high?”
“The price?”
“North American independence.”
“What?” She looked at him sharply. “Well, I remember your ancestors came from what’s now the Dominion of New England, before they moved west to Oregon.” New England had been a hotbed of rebel sentiment in the 1770s, and later had temporarily won independence in the Second Rebellion of the 1850s, until its compulsive attempts to destabilize the Viceroyalty had exasperated the Empire into a reconquest. “But that’s all ancient history, Jared.”
“Not quite as ancient as you might think. I’ve got distant relatives on New America.”
“Really?” In 2120, the Empire had permitted a group of North American irreconcilables to attempt (at their own expense) to colonize a planet of Tau Ceti. It had been the only slower-than-light interstellar expedition ever launched, because while it was en route the Bernheim Drive had been discovered. So when their antimatter pion drive/magsail hybrid ship had finally arrived at its destination, the colonists had awoken from cryo-sleep to find the Imperials already there—a crushing disappointment. The Empire had been very decent about it, allowing New America a kind of ill-defined semiautonomy and promising dominion status whenever the colonists asked for it. (They still hadn’t.) “I never knew that. But I suppose I can see why you might have special reasons for thinking something of value was lost.”
“You ought to think so too, Jane. After all, some of your ancestors were enslaved at the time of the First Rebellion.”
“What? Well, yes, I suppose so.” It wasn’t something to which she gave much thought. Her one-eighth African ancestry had left little trace except a certain duskiness of skin and tight curliness of dark hair. And anyway, it made no difference nowadays. “But what’s that got to do with—?”
“Don’t you see? Slavery lived on in the Empire almost two generations after 1781, and various forms of discrimination lasted far longer than that. But if the rebels had won, they surely would have abolished slavery immediately after attaining independence.”
“Uh . . . are you sure of that?”
“Of course. They would have had to—their Declaration of Independence explicitly said ‘All men are created equal.’ So there never would have been a race problem in North America!”
“Umm . . . I’m not quite so sure. People don’t always live up to their declarations.”
Jane couldn’t be certain, but it was as though shutters seemed to close over Wilmarth. He spoke with a kind of overemphatic joviality. “Well, you’re probably right. Anyway, we’ve got some time. Or at least, I do—Commander Ferguson, the engineering officer, isn’t aboard yet. Let’s go back to the station, where we can at least get a drink!”
Among the many things—practically everything, actually—that the entertainment media got wrong about the RSN was the spacious, theatre-like sets used to represent capital ships’ command bridges. In fact Resolute’s bridge, like all a warship’s working spaces, was no more voluminous than it needed to be.
Jane sat in the helmsman’s chair, her head capped with a neural-induction helmet connected by cable to the interface jack of the ship’s barely subsentient brain. (A cranial implant by which the jack could be plugged directly to the brain was perfectly possible. But that Just Wasn’t Done.) She had, by now, gotten past the initial unpleasantness of direct neural interfacing, and was reflecting that it was worth it to feel the titanic ship and its sensor array as an extension of her own body and senses.
The inertial compensators prevented her from feeling it, but Resolute’s photon thrusters were producing one G of acceleration as they drove the ship outward. Presently, Jane’s neural feed informed her that they had reached that distance—in Earth’s case, about twelve and a half thousand miles from the planet’s center—where gravity field’s force was less than a tenth of a G.
“Primary Limit crossed, Captain,” she presently reported.
In his seat, behind her and slightly raised, Captain Sharif nodded. “Engage Bernheim Drive,” he ordered.
“Aye aye, sir.” Jane thought a series of commands. The photon thrusters ceased to push the ship forward and, at appreciably the same instant, the Bernheim Drive activated, folding space in front of the ship, altering the properties of space to reduce normal gravity in that direction. The ship surged forward at four hundred Gs of thrust, with her occupants in a state of free fall (or, rather, they would have been had it not been for its artificial gravity generators).
At such an acceleration, it would not take long to reach the Secondary Limit, almost out to the asteroid belt. There, with the sun’s gravity field at only one ten-thousandth of a G, the drive could generate a field that wrapped negative energy around the ship to literally change the shape of space and create an area of expanding space-time (referred to as “subspace”) that could move faster than other parts of space-time. The ship would be dragged along by this “bubble in space-time.” Inside the bubble, space was not distorted and the ship was technically traveling at sublight speeds. But the bubble itself would push through space faster than light—almost twenty-nine hundred times faster, in fact. That wasn’t quite as fast as the upper limit imposed by unavoidable deformations in the drive field at the highest pseudoaccelerations. But the closer one got to that threshold, the lower the marginal returns from building in more drive coils and pumping in more energy. Resolute represented what modern naval design theory regarded as the optimal balance. She was fast as well as big.
“Bernheim Drive engaged, Captain,” Jane reported, unnecessarily but as per custom. She raised the helmet into its housing in the overhead, and her immediate physical surroundings came back into sharp focus as her senses contracted to those of her body. “On course as plotted.”
“Very good, Mister Grenville.” Tradition mandated “Mister” regardless of the junior officer’s gender. Sharif picked up a microphone from his armrest and activated the shipwide intercom. “All hands, this is the captain speaking. As you all know, our destination is the Lambda Aurigae system, approximately forty-nine and a quarter light-years distant—a journey of six and a quarter days under Bernheim Drive, exclusive of sublight maneuvering. Our mission is to counter a recent buildup of Caliphate forces in the system. While there, we will land our Marine contingent on the fourth planet to act in support of our colony, New Kashmir, against attempted infiltration from the Caliphate enclave on the planet.”
Jane noted that Sharif used the word “colony” for the Empire’s settlement and “enclave” for that of the Islamic Caliphate. The Caliphate people would doubtless have reversed that usage. She wasn’t clear on the legalities of the competing claims to the system that had led to the current confrontation. Nor were they her business.
She also noted what the captain had left unsaid. As its name suggested, New Kashmir’s colonists mostly came from the Viceroyalty of India . . . and included a high percentage of Muslims. It was a widespread (but publicly unvoiced) suspicion among Imperial officialdom that sympathizers among the latter were facilitating that “attempted infiltration.” She couldn’t help wondering if Sharif’s religion and ethnicity might have been a factor in assigning Resolute to show the flag at Lambda Aurigae.
Not, she told herself serenely, that it mattered. Once this ship did show the flag—a very, very large flag, in Resolute’s case—the rag-heads wouldn’t dare try any nonsense. The most bellicose of the Empire’s rival space powers, the Caliphate was also, fortuitously enough, the least advanced. Unable to entirely escape the tethers of its technophobic fundamentalist ideology (for example, Allah apparently disapproved of direct neural interfacing), it had nothing to match a Defiant class. The Caliphate squadron at
Lambda Aurigae had been built up to a size sufficient to worry the token Royal Space Navy detachment there, but Resolute could by herself reduce that squadron to cosmic detritus without breathing hard.
She mentally scolded herself for feeling a slight regret that such an occasion would almost certainly not arise.
Lambda Aurigae was a G0V star slightly larger and hotter than Sol. It was also somewhat younger, and its fourth planet, though orbiting in the liquid-water zone, had not had time for life to venture out of that water onto continents of bare rock and sand. But with nanotechnology and self-replicating machines, the planet was readily terraformable and a great prize.
Hence it was the focus of one of the standoffs that frequently occurred on the frontier—and only there. It was generally recognized (even by the Caliphate’s rulers, if not always by its mullahs) that Earth could not endure an all-out war waged with today’s weapons. So a tacit agreement reigned. Earth was off-limits to the antimatter warheads and the nano-disassemblers. The rest of the galaxy was fair game.
As Resolute approached Lambda Aurigae’s Secondary Limit—slightly farther out than Sol’s due to its slightly greater mass—Jane disengaged the drive field. To enter a gravity field of more than 0.0001 G without doing so resulted in the field’s immediate collapse, the drive’s immediate shutdown, and a greater or lesser degree of physical damage to the drive and associated parts of the ship. Entering the Primary Limit with the drive activated in sublight mode had the same consequences. It was as much as a starship captain’s career was worth to allow any of this to happen. Thus, under Sharif’s watchful eye, Jane made a point of erring on the side of caution.