by Andrew Beery
I had begun to think we were out of the woods. I should have known better. Suddenly the timbre of the ship changed drastically, and two things happened at once. The lights flickered and when out and we lost our artificial gravity. My guess was we lost thrusters at the same time which was fortunate because if the inertial dampeners had gone down while we remained under thrust… we would have been subject to a bone-crushing g-force.
“Whiskers?” I said as the emergency lights came on.
“Interesting,” he replied.
“Interesting? Mister, interesting is a pretty girl on the beach. Interesting is a new beer list at the bar. Interesting is NOT when you break my pretty new starship!”
“Uh… what? Ah… yes Sir,” Whiskers said in a distracted voice. “It seems there was a stress fracture in one of the fusion reactor couplings. The reactor SCRAMed like it was designed to… the secondary and tertiary reactors should have picked up the load but they SCRAMed too.”
“Any theories as to why? I hate like hell for this to happen again… say… in the middle of a firefight.”
Rather than answer, Whiskers got up and walked over to the sensor station Mitty was monitoring. They talked for a brief second and then both of them turned to face me.
“Sir, it would seem we have a saboteur onboard.”
***
A common, but unproven, belief is that the term sabotage came from the French during the industrial revolution when striking workers would throw their wooden shoes, called Sabot, into the machinery to gum up the works. From this term we get the word, saboteur. The thought that we had somebody onboard that wanted to gum up the works was disturbing.
Even worse than the damage that was done… was the thought that we could not trust one another.
“Explain yourself Mister,” I barked from my command chair.
“Sir,” Whiskers began, “the J’ni build everything with a minimum of triple redundancy. Three separate sets of failsafe would have had to fail in order for the reactors to go through a cascade SCRAM like we just witnessed. The odds of that happening are so small as to be negligible. This was done on purpose.”
“OK, let’s say I believe you and it was not some random accident. Is it possible that it was an unintended result of some of the power-system modifications we have been making?”
“Ay, it’s possible,” Whiskers said, “but possible and probable are two very different things.”
“Understood. How long do we need for repairs?”
“The damage is minor. I can swap out the coupling in thirty minutes but… I’d like some time to walk through each of the major systems. Can you give me a few hours?”
I shook my head. “You have a day and I want you to use every last minute of it… check every critical system and then check it a second time with a separate team. I want everything logged. If something else happens I want to know whose eyes were on it last.”
I turned Colonel Morrison.
“Mike, you and Mitty are with me. Everybody else, I want internal sensor logs scrubbed with a fine-tooth brush. Any abnormalities I want flagged… backed up and investigated in that order. Am I clear?”
“Sir, Yes Sir”
***
“Well, this is a pisser,” I said. “Maybe this is all a big mistake. Different races working together for the first time. Maybe something got missed because of innocent assumptions. Maybe there is a bit of racial bigotry going on… I mean I hope not, but that’s better than a saboteur.”
Mike rubbed his forehead. I had learned that was his ‘tell’ when he wanted to say something I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear.
“Out with-it Mike. What are you thinking?”
The Marine shook his head. “You’re not going to like it.”
I snorted. “I already don’t like it.
“What if this same saboteur was responsible for the earlier problems the Gilboa had leaving GO space? Mitty has admitted he wasn’t brought online until after the ship entered the Sol system. How do we know the ship’s computer log hasn’t been tampered with to hide any earlier sabotage?”
Mitty chose that moment pipe in.
“The Colonel has a valid point. Twenty-three percent of the ship’s AI core is offline and its data unrecoverable. We had assumed that the loss of this data was due to engagement with the enemy and the resulting damage that the Gilboa suffered. Perhaps this is worth investigating.”
I had a bad feeling in my gut that we were about to open up a big can-of-hurt on ourselves, but I didn’t see a choice.
“Mike, select two volunteers with decent computer skills. Work with Lori and get them under the hair driers – I want them to know all that they can about the Gilboa’s computer systems and then I want them to start digging. Bring as many of the damaged cores back online and find me some answers. I also want you to assign support personnel to each of Commander McGraw’s inspection teams.”
I hated my gut feelings… if for no reason then they were rarely wrong. Today was no exception.
Chapter 10: Barking at Visitors…
Twenty-four hours later I was back on the bridge sitting in my customary chair. It was amazing what a difference a day could make. The sense of optimism that had accompanied our first attempt at stressing the Gilboa had been replaced with one, while not of dread, but of certainly less optimistic.
Our best efforts had not turned up any further critical anomalies. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. If we had found something, then, we would have known where we stood… even if we didn’t like it, having a traitor in our midst. As it was, we still couldn’t rule out a plain and simple accident – even given that the odds of so many interdependent systems failing at once defied reasonable probability.
“Alright, Sandy and John… let’s do this thing. Bring the navigational deflectors up and throttle up the VASIMRs. Same parameters as last time.”
The ‘timbre’ of the ship was subtly different. My gut was telling me we were OK… and for the next six days we were.
The part of the Oort cloud we were aiming for was only about 5000 AU away… still at twenty percent the speed of light, the Gilboa would take almost five months to get there. Fortunately, we didn’t need to head out of Sol’s gravity well anywhere near that far. Our actual target was just a tad over five hundred astronomical units out. An AU is the average distance between the earth and the sun. It works out to roughly eight light minutes. Doing the math, said we had about two weeks of traveling to get to where we could safely engage the Skip drive.
Our FTL drive basically warped space-time. The Gilboa would ride a ripple in space-time much like a surfer would ride a wave off a beach. The FLT engines could create a fold anywhere but if we were too close to a gravity well… we would be sucked into it… much like maelstrom could suck down a ship on the open sea.
The beauty of the Skip drive was that it didn’t violate Einstein’s pesky little rule about never exceeding the speed of light. The drive was essentially a working implementation of an Alcubierre warp drive. A theoretical physicist named Miguel Alcubierre first postulated such a drive in the late twentieth century.
The J’ni had perfected their version of the drive by developing a practical source of negative energy in the form of a massive Casimir–Polder force generator. The result was an FTL drive that could cover a light-year is as little as three days.
Not quite one week into our journey out past the orbit of Pluto we began to get some odd readings on our long-range sensors. We were seeing ripples in space-time that should not be there. Among the possibilities were a nearby collision of two massive stellar objects along the lines of super massive neutron stars or possibly black holes.
The second possibility was an approaching ship using a similar FTL drive. This was the option that had me most concerned.
Mitty had assured me that our FTL drive did not leave a trail that could be followed. That said, I reasoned, and he agreed, that a network of sensors could detect the direction and strength of a ship using a Skip dri
ve… much like we were detecting gravity waves now. Three such sensors could pin-point a ship in 3-d space. A fourth such sensor could be used to detect the direction of movement. From that it would just be a matter of figuring out what star systems existed along the flight-path.
The Galactic Order did not have such a system in place… but that did not mean the enemy did not.
Remember my comment earlier about having gut feelings that were disturbingly accurate? I was having one right now.
Our sensors were detecting a shift in the frequency of the gravity waves we were seeing. Again, this shift could be explained by natural phenomena… it could also be explained by an FTL drive preparing to drop out of warp in the next few days.
I’m a firm believer in the age-old maxim, hard preparation – easy time; easy preparation – hard time. I began to push my people to prepare hard.
I should probably mention, I’ve been known to have boundary issues when I’m excited or upset or both. I think Whiskers was going to have Lori give me a sedative if I asked him one more time if his team was doing all they could. I wanted every major system running at one hundred and ten percent. I wanted spare shield emitters stockpiled as well as major components for each of the weapons systems.
I had Whiskers run two additional special jobs. I asked that he start producing KEW rounds like nobody’s business. I also asked him to put a human team together to start producing fighters.
I was just as hard on Colonel Morrison. The fighters were for him.
The Gilboa had massive hanger bays. Surprisingly, they were completely devoid of fighter aircraft. Mitty had explained that when the Saulites were wiped out, there simply were no fighter pilots to be had. The Galactic Order had three member-races that could fight but without military leaders to set strategy the battle loses had been staggering.
Fortunately, the onboard fabrication systems were able to convert boneyard scraps into serviceable combat aircraft. The designs were modified because humans tended to be larger than most of the other races that were part of the Galactic Order. Also, some of the components needed to make the original designs where beyond the abilities of the Gilboa’s fabrication systems to reproduce. If the task had been left up to the J’ni, that would have been the end of it. Human ingenuity, however, filled in the gaps.
Morrison had had his men training on simulators. If the gravity wakes we were seeing turned out to be invaders, the Gilboa would be the first line of defense.
We were about a light-day out from Earth. That made real-time conversations impossible. Instead, I put together periodic data packets with log entries, system reports and a complete set of sensor data. Hopefully Admiral Spratt would do everything he could to beef up the Federation’s defenses. If the enemy was coming… if they were already here… these might well be Earth’s last hours.
***
Two days later our worst fears were realized. I brought the Gilboa to yellow alert. Four starships, each somewhat smaller in size than the Gilboa, emerged from Skip drive warp bubbles. Their relative speed was about fifteen percent light speed and they were on a vector that would take them further into the Sol system.
Based on the data we were able to glean from the collapsing warp bubbles it seemed that their combined mass exceeded our own. The fact that there were four of them meant that we would have to face four discrete adversaries as opposed to one. Unfortunately, that meant they could bracket us. Assuming, of course, they were hostiles.
To my way of thinking, we only had two advantages should it come to a fight. First, our weapons likely had a longer reach—although there was no guarantee that this was indeed the case. Second, we were a hell of a lot meaner… and that was most certainly the case.
“Helm, vector us to intercept. Shed our forward velocity if you need to. And Sandy, use the cold thrusters. We’ve got plenty of time to make these course corrections. No sense advertising we’re out here.”
“Aye, Aye Admiral.”
“Mitty, bring up the forward viewscreen. As soon as we come within visual range, I want to see what we’re dealing with.”
The holographic Archon acknowledged my request. We were still several hours from being able to see them. It wasn’t that they were too far away for the Gilboa’s optical sensors to detect them… it was simply that it would take that long for the light from their point of emergence to reach us.
Now I know what some of you are thinking… How did we know four spaceships emerged from FTL? The answer is simple, gravity waves riding on top of warped space-time travel faster than light. That means we could detect the interlopers long before they could detect us. I planned to use that to our advantage.
We had already reached our cruising velocity of 0.2 the speed of light. The ships that had just entered our system were much closer to the Oort cloud than we were. Their approach vector put them no closer than two astronomical units from us.
I had the Gilboa ramp her newly enhanced shields up to full power. This would effectively hide us from passive scans. I was betting these new ships would not utilize aggressive active scans until they were much further in system. Any sensor data they pulled back now would be days old by the time they received it.
I ran the math in my head… which, when you think about it… was pretty remarkable, in and of itself. I had been a low one-forties genius before this adventure had started, but even at that, a year ago, there was no way I could have pulled off what I was doing now. Thanks to the Galactic Order teaching machines I now had one of the highest IQs in Federation space.
Our two sets of ships were traveling at a little under a third of the speed of light relative to each other. Without changing the Gilboa’s speed, even with revectoring, we would only be in weapons range of the alien vessels for a few seconds. This was OK if the aliens were friendlies but what were the odds of that?
I used a quick Fourier transform to evaluate the gravity waveform that we had recorded from each of the unknown ship’s warp-bubble emersion signature. That gave me what I needed to calculate the mass of each of the other ships. When I crunched the numbers in my head, I quickly confirmed the each of the four ships were essentially the same size.
I checked what I now knew about the interlopers against the available data in the Gilboa’s library. The enemy that had attacked both the Archon and the Saulite homeworlds used ships of roughly the same mass and sublight speed.
It wasn’t absolute proof that we were dealing with the same folks… but if it looks like a pig, smells like a pig and oinks like a pig… there’s a damn good chance you can make bacon out of it.
Given their velocity, I now had a pretty good idea how much energy they would need to revector away from a pursuing Gilboa. Their mass to power ratio would need to be considerable higher than ours in order to escape us… should they attempt to flee. The question was… would they?
This was my problem. If they were the bad guys… (and I was reasonably confident they weren’t just stopping by for tea and crumpets), and they chose to flee… then we would need our current speed to chase them. On the other hand, if they chose to slow down and slug it out… then we would need to shed our speed as well.
“Mike, Mitty… with me in my ready room.”
***
“Look JD, I get what you’re saying but the bottom line is, we have good reason to believe that we have a significant edge in our power to mass ratio,” Mike said. “We can accelerate faster. That has to be the deciding factor.”
In my ready room I encouraged a certain sense of informality… names rather than ranks… that sort of thing. I found it promoted a better brainstorming session.
We had been weighing the pros and cons of our next actions for the better part of twenty minutes. My concern had been, and continued to be, how close were we going to let these guys get to Earth and the inhabited colonies on Luna, Mars and the Asteroid belt?
If I made the wrong choice… our theoretical greater acceleration would allow us to turn and catch up to the four alien ships, but n
ot until they were almost within striking range of our most vulnerable population centers.
It was a classic damned if you do and damned if you don’t. My father had always taught me to go for option three when faced with something like this. The only problem was I didn’t know what option three was in this case.
“Mike, I’m inclined to agree you,” I sighed. “But I want to look at this thing from all angles. We have the luxury of time to contemplate our next move. God isn’t always so generous.”
I took a sip of my coffee. I’d gotten the temperature right this time. I added some cream anyway.
“It seems to me… either way we go could end up being the wrong choice. I’d rather make the wrong choice having weighted all the options… than make the wrong choice because we didn’t weigh all the options.”
I turned to face the other ‘person’ in the room.
“Mitty, you’ve been very quiet,” I said. “The purpose of a meeting like this is to bang ideas back and forth. Care to share your thoughts?”
The holographic otter, sat straighter in his seat and waved his hand towards the conference table. As if by magic a second holographic image seemed to flow out of his fingers and grow to fill the space above the table.
I might have mentioned in passing before that my inner geek was seriously in love with Galactic Order tech. It was crap like this that got my juices flowing… I’m sure Mitty could have just sent a command to the ship’s computer to have the new hologram appear above the table… but where was the fun in that? No… he added the finger-flowy thing. It’s the little touches that make all the difference in tech. I was glad the Archons and the Galactic Order appreciated such subtleties.
I realized my mind had wandered and I looked at the hologram Mitty had summoned. It appeared to be a ship. Its configuration looked nothing like the Gilboa. To be honest, it looked more like something a human would build… although a heck of a lot bigger and complex.