NAGASAKI: Special Jasper controlled my mind, sir.
ARGON: For the record, Premier Lang, Special Second Class Jasper appears to have manipulated the minds of the marines and Captain Nagasaki. The telepath inserted carefully thought out yet false memories into each person. They thereupon acted on the inserted memories and staged the mutiny. At this juncture, I believe Special Jasper is solely responsible for the sedition. Moreover, I do not believe it was politically motivated, but out a desire of selfish ambition and alien manipulation against him.
NAGASAKI: Premier Lang, as we approached AS 412, the bridge officers and I carefully scanned the system. We renewed the scan after each shift and found the star system to be devoid of all signs of high technology. It appeared to be pristine, devoid of intelligent life. These scans never varied in outcome until we entered the asteroid belt of AS 412. At that point, everything became visible.
ARGON: Why did you think the Teleship’s sensors failed to pick up the telltale signs?
NAGASAKI: I have no idea.
ARGON: Premier Lang, we are puzzled and afraid. Yes, I admit to fear even though I am a chief monitor of the NKV. I do not understand by what agency the aliens were able to mask their presence in New Eden from us. I conclude it is either a technology unknown to us or some form of psi-power.
NAGASAKI: An enemy warship accelerates toward us, but more importantly, it already has a tremendous velocity. It is something on the order of forty-two million kilometers an hour or seven hundred thousand kilometers a minute. It will be in our laser range approximately three days from now. Behind the first warship comes a bigger vessel. The larger vessel has a slower velocity, but it is still incredibly fast. The second craft will be in laser range seven or eight days from now.
ARGON: New Eden swarms with spaceships and habitats. It is impossible at this point to calculate the population of the star system. But it must clearly be in the billions.
WEXX: How long until the tele-chamber is usable?
ARGON: The techs tell me ten days, no sooner.
WEXX: Then we must outrun the enemy warships.
NAGASAKI: Weren’t you listening? We have lost our tele-shifting ability. We must therefore work strictly within Einsteinian physics and the laws of motion. It would take weeks for us to decelerate enough to head in a different direction. Nor can we turn sharply due to our present velocity, but turn only at a shallow curve. We are heading in-system and the enemy warships are heading out toward us at a fantastic velocity. We are on a collision course. Outrunning them is out of the question. We can only outfight them.
WEXX: We can try communicating with them.
ARGON: Negative. The video logs show us the danger of that. It appears radio contact heightens their psi-ability against us. How this can be so, I don’t pretend to know. Maybe you have a theory, Doctor.
WEXX: I have no idea. It all sounds preposterous to me.
ARGON: At this point, we will operate practically rather than strictly, adhering to the scientific laws. What we observe to happen will take greater precedence over what we believe can or cannot happen.
WEXX: We need to figure out how to block the alien psi-powers.
ARGON: Agreed. Theoretically, Jasper should be able to block against them the best. Unfortunately, it appears the aliens have already compromised him. They may have a permanent link or control of his mind. That being the case, we dare not wake him from stasis. That leaves us, Cyrus. Special, do you feel like communicating with the aliens again?
CYRUS: I’ll do it if I have to for the good of the ship.
ARGON: How will you keep the aliens from broadcasting to the rest of the crew?
CYRUS: Are you certain they need to be in radio communication with us? Can’t they just do it?
ARGON: That is an elementary question, but we do not know the answer. At this stage, we dare not risk any experiments.
WEXX: All that is left us then is fighting our way free until the tele-chamber is repaired.
ARGON: I concur. I see no other choice.
CYRUS: I have a question. The alien spoke about the Illustrious Ones. Who do you think they are?
ARGON: A superior form of being perhaps or maybe the Illustrious Ones are like our Premier Lang. Their political organization may be theocratic.
CYRUS: Religious?
ARGON: “Illustrious Ones” strikes me as a religious term. But again, we don’t know enough to make accurate guesses.
WEXX: There is one thing that troubles me that may answer Cyrus’s question. Venice’s clairvoyant warning showed her creatures with non-flesh hands or digits. So far, we have videos of humanoids. Where are the creatures of her clairvoyant warning? Maybe those creatures are the Illustrious Ones.
ARGON: That is a reasonable question and deduction. The answer is that we do not know. We must ready Discovery for battle and see if the techs cannot speed their repairs to the shifting chamber. Are there any further comments for Premier Lang? No? Then I declare this meeting at an end.
End of Transcript #13
4
Cyrus was in the bridge module at Argon’s orders, sitting in the weapons officer’s chair. For the past few hours, the officers had been giving him a crash course on how to operate each of their stations. It was on the assumption that the aliens could successfully sleep the crew a second time. If Cyrus found himself alone again, Argon wished him to be able to make the best decisions.
“Continue to scan the enemy warship,” Nagasaki said.
Lieutenant Tanaka used radar and advanced teleoptics. It had been a day since their destruction of the alien habitat. The alien warship still accelerated toward them, but it already moved at its incredible velocity. In a little less than forty-eight hours, it would be in range of Discovery’s primary laser. In three days, the warship would have covered the distance from Saturn to Neptune—the distance from the ringed gas giant to New Eden’s asteroid belt—about three billion kilometers.
Teleship Discovery moved at a fraction of the enemy warship’s speed.
Tanaka shifted one of his screens so Cyrus could view it with him. “The enemy warship has a similar mass to a Solar Navy battleship,” Tanaka said, “although its configuration is different. Our navy uses circular vessels. The enemy warship has a teardrop shape.”
“Is that important?” Cyrus asked.
“It would be if they had particle shielding,” Tanaka said. “A Sol battleship has large asteroidal rocks or particles to protect it. Those particle shields use mass to absorb enemy lasers and missiles. Given enough time and energy, a laser will cut through anything. A Sol battleship can rotate particle shields, lengthening its existence by putting fresh protection into place.”
“We lack rotating shields on Discovery,” Cyrus noted.
“True, but we do have asteroidal mass. We can also rotate the entire ship, aiming undamaged mass at enemy lasers, providing they use such beams. Once their lasers punch through the outer rock, they will have to drill through armor. A Sol battleship has collapsium armor. We are not a warship, however, but an armed and armored colonizing vessel.”
Cyrus understood all that. “What kind of armor does the alien have?”
Tanaka licked his lips. “Analysis shows they don’t have collapsium, which is lucky for us. It appears to be regular steel plating. How thick is the plating? I’m not sure. If I were to guess from the data, it appears the thickness is much less than our asteroid rock. That means, without another form of enemy defense, our lasers should be able to punch through their armor.”
Cyrus recalled what had happened while beaming the alien habitat. “The first time, they stopped our laser several hundred meters before the armored skin. You’ve watched the video, right?”
“I have,” Tanaka said, “several times.”
“How did they stop the laser?” Cyrus asked.
“Their ability is a mystery to us. Our sensors didn’t pick up a force field or force screen. Such defensive screens have been a staple desire of military strategists for so
me time. Back home, we’ve never come up with anything remotely like it.”
“What does that suggest to you the aliens are doing?” Cyrus asked.
“I would dearly like to know.”
“Sol Specials can warp existence. By that, I mean the discontinuity windows. Why can’t the alien Specials warp existence in a different way?”
“You think their psi-masters deflected the laser?” Lieutenant Tanaka asked.
“It’s an answer,” Cyrus said.
Tanaka looked up at Nagasaki. “What do you think, sir?”
“It’s the best theory so far,” Captain Nagasaki said. He stood later, and told them to carry on as he left the bridge to get a bite to eat.
“What kind of weaponry do you think these aliens have?” Cyrus asked.
“Until we know otherwise,” Tanaka said, “we will have to assume they have more powerful weapons than we do. In another thirty-seven minutes, we shall stop accelerating and begin to deploy a P-Field.”
“A what?” Cyrus asked.
“P stands for prismatic crystals,” Tanaka said. “They are highly reflective crystals, many billions of them. If a laser strikes a crystal, the reflective properties will dissipate the laser’s energy for a time. If the laser remains on target long enough, it will turn the crystal to slag and begin the process all over again on the next layer. We call that a burn through. If the enemy uses particle beam weaponry, the crystals will not be as effective. Because of that, we will spray a lead-laced gel cloud behind the P-Field. It will take time for a particle or proton beam to burn through such a cloud. During that time, we will add more gel or crystals to the field as needed.”
“They’re extra armor?” Cyrus asked.
“Precisely.”
“So what else do we do while we’re spraying these things into space?”
Lieutenant Tanaka continued to explain the essence of space combat to an eagerly listening Cyrus Gant.
Thirty-seven minutes later, a returned Nagasaki ordered an end to acceleration, bringing weightlessness back to the Teleship.
With a push of his hands, Cyrus exited the weapons chair and floated to the side. He used the flat of his hands to ease himself to a halt by a bulkhead.
The bridge officers began to ready Discovery for the coming battle. It was interesting and a little bewildering. Cyrus was used to video games. He particularly enjoyed first-person shooter games. This was much different, especially the length of time. A first person shooter game took minutes to play. Reality—it was hard to think of a space battle taking days. No doubt, the enemy prepared for combat in a similar manner.
Tanaka disagreed with that after Cyrus made a remark about it.
“With our teleoptics we can see everything the enemy warship is doing,” Tanaka said.
“Can’t he see us just as easily?” Cyrus asked.
“Until we deploy the P-Field, yes,” Tanaka said. “Once we’re screened…”
“Will we be screened?” Cyrus asked. “There are other habitats and spaceships in the asteroid belt behind us. Can’t the aliens use teleoptics to watch us and report to the enemy warship ahead what we’re doing?”
“Certainly,” Tanaka said. “But we shall also spray a gel cloud behind us for just that reason: as a screen.”
“Why do you think the spaceships in the asteroid belt aren’t trying to follow us?” Cyrus asked.
“It appears as if the majority of those ships are haulers.”
“What are they hauling?”
“Asteroids would be my guess,” Tanaka said, “or more precisely, the minerals and other materials in the asteroids. The other reason they’re not following would be a matter of acceleration and velocity. It would take too much time and energy for those distant ships to catch us. It’s much easier for the aliens to do what they’re already doing.”
“Readying launch,” said the weapons officer, a lieutenant named Jones. He was a thin man with gaunt cheeks and a scar along his nose from an old core burn.
From his position against a bulkhead, Cyrus watched one of Lieutenant Jones’s screens. It showed the outer surface of Discovery. A dome’s upper collapsium shell rotated out of the way. From inside the dome, the warhead of a large Prometheus missile poked up into view.
After a few calculations, Jones said, “We’re ready for launch, sir.”
Nagasaki gave him the go-ahead.
Jones adjusted controls. Then he said, “Three… two… one… zero, ignition.”
Cyrus felt a shudder through the bulkhead. On-screen, the missile elegantly rose out of the dome. Fiery exhaust appeared and soon the Prometheus sped away, gaining velocity as it accelerated toward the approaching enemy. Soon, it was simply another mote of light, another “star” in space.
Lieutenant Jones launched three Prometheus missiles. Discovery had twenty. After the third launch, Jones swiveled his seat to look up at Captain Nagasaki.
“Sir, I suggest we launch three more.”
Nagasaki leaned forward, studying one of his screens.
“I realize the manual calls for three launches in this situation,” Jones said. “But it would appear we have two enemy ships to defeat before the tele-chamber is repaired and we can scoot out of here.”
“The techs are working faster than expected,” Nagasaki said.
“Something always goes wrong, sir. Murphy’s Law. I doubt the techs will repair the chamber quicker than their original estimate.”
Nagasaki rubbed his chin. “We have two possible warships we need to defeat. Afterward, we should be able to shift out of danger and head for home. I dislike depleting our missile supply so quickly.”
“Yes, sir, I agree. But if we fail to defeat the first warship—”
“Yes,” Nagasaki said. “You’ve convinced me. Launch three more Prometheus missiles. Then we shall begin to build our P-Field.”
Cyrus thought he understood Jones’s point. They might as well expend the needed missiles right away. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have to worry about tomorrow because they would all be dead if they failed the first time.
There were more shudders and Cyrus watched three more missiles head into the void. Discovery had put six missiles ahead of them. The missiles would accelerate a day before shutting down acceleration. Afterward—at least according to what Tanaka had told him—the missiles would expel decoy emitters. The emitters were dummies, with far less mass than the missile but with the same radiation signature as the real thing. A second class of devices would also spread out. They were electronic countermeasures, ECM, and jamming devices.
Later, Cyrus watched the expanding P-Field, which blotted out some of the stars but glittered with pale light. Ejectors launched packets ahead of the Teleship. A small explosion spread the crystals. Because the Teleship and crystals traveled at the same velocity, the prismatic crystals maintained an exact and unvarying position ahead of the vessel, a screen.
“One thing has been troubling me,” Cyrus said.
“Yes?” Tanaka said.
“The P-Field blocks the alien warship from seeing us and from hitting us until they burn through the crystals.”
“That’s right,” Tanaka said.
“Doesn’t the spreading field also stop us from seeing the aliens and shooting them? I mean, we still have the missiles—”
“If you’d waited a few more minutes,” Tanaka said, “you would see us launching probes. We’ll maneuver the probes to the front of the P-Field. They will be our eyes and radio information back to us.”
“Okay,” Cyrus said. “So how do we shoot through the P-Field? Will we launch mirrors at the edge of the field and bounce a laser off them?”
“That would be one way,” Tanaka said. “It takes fantastic accuracy, however, to hit targets one million kilometers away. Bouncing lasers off mirrors dramatically adds to the targeting complexities. No. When the time comes, we will destroy gel and crystals with bombs. That will create windows for us through our own clouds and fields. We’ll use those windows to fire our
lasers at the enemy.”
“Can’t the aliens use the windows to fire at us?”
“If they have magical accuracy,” Tanaka said. “Otherwise, no, it will be a one-way window.”
Cyrus nodded. “Once we deploy the gel cloud, what will we do then?”
“After that we wait,” Tanaka said. “We wait until the alien’s tremendous velocity brings him within firing range.”
“What do you think their range is?”
Tanaka nodded. “That, my friend, is the great and terrible question. Our survival will likely depend on who has the greater range.”
5
Deep in Captain Nagasaki’s mind was a latent fail-safe. Jasper had worked long and hard perfecting it in case the NKV should thwart him. Nagasaki was a stubborn individual, but had a curious over-sensitivity concerning his authority. Jasper had worked on that, and it began to operate as Nagasaki lay in his quarters, trying to fall asleep.
Nagasaki seethed at the usurpation of his authority. He lay on his bunk in his quarters, attempting to sleep before the coming battle with the approaching warship. The lights were dim. A screen on the wall showed the alien star system. He gripped a screen controller, changing the view as Jasper’s latent fail-safe caused new thoughts to tumble into his mind.
Nagasaki was repentant of his former actions against the NKV officers. The telepath had invaded his mind and twisted his thoughts, turning him toward seditious action. It was unconscionable. Jasper was in stasis, and that was a good thing. Although… in a hidden fold in Nagasaki’s brain, the fail-safe caused him to wonder if he should thaw Jasper out in order to teach the telepath the old-fashioned price of unsuccessful mutiny.
Imagine the Special’s surprise as I point a needler at his heart and pull the trigger. He would ask me why and I would tell him that I am the captain of Discovery and he had attempted to usurp my authority.
Alien Honor (A Fenris Novel) Page 15