“Well, that sounds good. Here, you either got money or you don’t, and that won’t change, for you or your kids.”
“Exactly. And one other thing.”
“What’s that, Fred.”
“Berinia and Celestia? I predict that, whatever kind of interaction they have with the Imperial Navy, they ain’t gonna like it much.”
Incursion
“Sir? I think you’d better take a look at this.”
The voice came from long-range plotting over the alert channel he kept open in VR. Fleet Admiral Dexter McGee dropped into the plot, where he met up with Commander Dorothy Conroy. As Senior Plotter Tech Dorothy Conroy, she had demonstrated the ability to see what others couldn’t, to put together the small clues. As a ship’s captain, McGee had encouraged her to go OCS. He snagged her when she got out and had hung on to her since.
“What do you have, Commander?”
“Watch, Sir.”
Conroy ran the view in timelapse. McGee was looking into Celestia space, to galactic spinward. Conroy had color-coded tracks headed toward Pannia red, tracks headed away green, and tracks headed parallel to the boarder yellow.
“Looks like more ships coming this way than going that way.”
“Exactly, Sir. And they’re not being very sneaky about it. See these concentrations here, and here, and here.”
“So they’re spacing in squadrons.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“How many ships total?”
“Perhaps a hundred, Sir.”
“All right, Commander. Good job. Let’s go to twelve hours on picket ships across the whole sector, and have them implement enhanced scanning. Send your plotting to Admiral West with my compliments. And keep an eye on Berinia.”
“Berinia, Sir?”
“If this is the feint, Commander, Berinia will be the punch. They’re trying to get us to make a spinward shift of our forces and soften ourselves up on the Berinia side.”
“Got it. We’re on it, Sir.”
Lieutenant Elizabeth Langley watched the hyperspace plot stabilize. She was captain of the picket ship IN-42391. There were so many picket ships in the Imperial Navy, they didn’t get ship names.
Her orders called for twelve-hour cycles and enhanced scanning. The issue with scanning in hyperspace was your range and resolution were limited by the vibration and general mechanical noise of a ship in motion. Also, sensors were run in a mode that reduced energy expenditure and increased their lifetimes. Enhanced scanning required them to reduce acceleration, limit shipboard activities, and run sensors in enhanced mode, which required extra electricity and reduced component lifetimes.
The first step was to reduce their apparent acceleration from the full gravity maintained for crew comfort to 0.4 g, just above the one-third gravity required to maintain themselves in hyperspace.
“Reduce acceleration to 0.4 g.”
“Reducing acceleration to 0.4 g.”
“Rig for silent running.”
“Silent running protocols in process, Ma’am.”
“Engage enhanced scanning.”
“Enhanced scanning engaged, Ma’am.”
“All right, everybody. Real quiet like a mouse now. Nobody go around stomping your feet.”
Of course, anything they did in VR didn’t count. The crew of twenty was encouraged to spend all their time in VR, and not even to move about the ship. There would be no hot meals – nothing but snacks in their cabins – until their shift was over.
And walking around in regulation boots could get you court-martialed.
The next day, after two twelve-hour cycles of enhanced scanning, Conroy called McGee to the plot again.
“What have you got. Commander?”
“I’m not sure yet, Sir. But look at this time lapse.”
He was looking anti-spinward, and saw hundreds of ships spacing around Berinia.
“OK, normal enough.”
“Yes, Sir. Now look at this.”
Conroy zoomed in on one planet. A ship in hyperspace approached the planet, then turned in hyperspace and set off on another vector.
“Wait a second. Did that ship just sail through that system without dropping out of hyperspace?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“So they’re hiding their actual vectors from us.”
“Got it in one, Sir. Now, I have sensor data for the last month, since we got here, but not at the resolution that would allow me to see that sort of thing at these distances. Not inside a system, anyway. Gravitational fuzz hides it. But if I look at the timing of arrivals and departures, looking for the ones that might be simple vector changes, here’s what I get.”
Conroy ran a time lapse again, but this time dozens of ship dots were colored green, and they left tracks as they moved. The swarm of green dots fanned out and moved toward them, bouncing off planets as they moved. They were starting to converge again.
“What’s this planet they fanned out from?”
“Boynton. Berinia maintains a major fleet base at Boynton, Sir.”
“How many ships total?”
“It looks like six squadrons, Sir. Forty-eight ships.”
“Any idea where they’re going to converge yet?”
“One of the planets in this volume here, Sir. Somewhere near Castaway.”
“Excellent work, Commander. Send these plots and the VR of our discussion to Admiral Mah with my compliments, and ask him to VR me once his people have taken a look at them.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Langley looked at her new orders. Going to six-hour cycles. Something was going down somewhere. The only reason to go to six-hour cycles on picket ships was to get information sooner. The picket ships couldn’t transmit any of their sensor information while they were in hyperspace. They collected it all and dumped it into QE radio to fleet when they dropped back into real space.
“All right, everybody. We’re going to six-hour cycles. You know what that means. Some serious shit is going to go down somewhere, and that means our people are going into harm’s way. Let’s get all our snacks and trips to the head and everything out of the way right now, and button up for super silent. The better look-see we can give our people, the easier it will be for them to give some asshole a really bad day.”
“They’re converging, Sir. It’s Castaway.”
“Go to fifteen-minute cycles on picket ships within ten light-years of Castaway,” Admiral Mah Muping said. “Prepare for hyperspace transition. Go to battle stations.”
In six systems in the neighborhood of Castaway, Imperial Navy ships lined up behind their hypergate projector ships and prepared to transition to hyperspace.
“Fifteen-minute cycles, everyone. We’re gonna be doing loop-the-loops on the hypergate. Whatever it is, it’s happening. Let’s not mess this up,” Lieutenant Langley said as her ship passed through the hypergate and transitioned into hyperspace yet again.
“There it is, Sir. They just dropped out of hyperspace.”
“All squadrons. Hyperspace now.”
Twelve hypergate projector ships cut acceleration and cast out their hypergates behind them. A hundred and eighty Imperial Navy ships made transition into hyperspace.
“What were our last plots? Were they up to anything?”
“No, Sir. No fleet hyperspace activity at all.”
“Looks like we caught the vaunted Imperial Navy napping, eh? All right. Let’s get organized. We only have twelve hours or so before they manage to get their act together and start showing up. Time to the planet at one gravity?”
“Five hours, Sir.”
“Let’s get under way.”
At twenty-thousand times the speed of light in hyperspace, the Imperial Navy units on the way to Castaway from nearby stars were covering two-and-a-quarter light-years per hour. Pannia was much farther in the spiral arm of the galaxy than Earth, and the stars here were closer together. While there was no fleet presence on Castaway – which was why it was chosen as a target – there were two planets wit
h fleet presence within three light-years, and four more within six light-years.
Ninety minutes after the Berinian ships started toward Castaway, sixty Imperial Navy warships dropped out of hyperspace behind them and went to one-and-a-half gravities in pursuit.
A hypergate projector ship looked a lot like a battleship in sensors, but there was one obvious tell. A hypergate projector ship had much more powerful engines, to power the hypergate. This meant it also had much more waste heat when running the projector, so it had much bigger radiators. At normal accelerations, those bigger radiators were shedding much less heat than they were designed for, and ran a lot cooler than a normal battleship’s smaller radiators.
Standard Imperial Navy practice was for its hypergate projector ships to take some of their radiators off-line unless the ships were projecting, so the temps on the operating radiators were up in the same range as those of a battleship. It made it very difficult to spot Imperial Navy projector ships in among the combat units.
It was a subtle point, and most other navies didn’t follow the practice. It put more stress on the operating radiators, for one thing, and their maintenance practices made that a problem.
In particular, the Berinian Navy did not disguise its projector ships.
“Projector ships identified, Sir.”
Three icons on Admiral Mah’s plot were highlighted. Mah was physically on the bunk in his day room aboard his flagship HMS Predator, in the Gujarat system twenty light-years away.
“Concentrate fire on the projector ships. Let’s trap them in the barrel. All ships, constant fire.”
All sixty Imperial Navy ships opened fire on the three projector ships of the Berinian Navy formation in front of them. The big warships shuddered with the momentum transfer of their mass-impeller tubes. The tubes ran the full length of the ships, so the big battleships could give their missiles the highest initial velocity, but all the ships let loose with their full firepower. They knew reinforcements were coming within the hour, and they held nothing back, firing all tubes at their maximum cycle rate.
The Berinian Navy formation also went to one-and-a-half gravities, and veered off from its path to Castaway, trying to get side vector away from the larger Imperial Navy formation chasing them. They needed to come around to bring their tubes to bear, but against a larger enemy formation, the better strategy was to run like hell. They tried to get their projector ships out in front for an escape into hyperspace, but they had to open up the distance to the planet before transition.
In a one-on-one fight between warships, point-defense lasers did a pretty good job of burning out the control heads of incoming missiles and rendering them inert projectiles. The cycle times of the point-defense lasers were much faster than those of the mass-impeller tubes, and there were more of them. But the combined firepower of sixty warships was just too much for the point-defense of the Berinian projector ships, even with other fleet units picking off what they could.
As the missiles, which had been ballistic to this point, came into range of the Berinian formation, they ignited their drives and bore down on their targets. The storm of missiles sleeted down on the Berinian projector ships, and, even though they were generating side vector as fast as they could, the missiles had more than enough engine life to track them down.
The three Berinian projector ships disappeared in a hurricane of nuclear explosions as missiles found their targets and set off their warheads.
“Cease firing,” Admiral Mah said.
“Ceased firing, Sir.”
“Not going to finish them off, Sir?” his chief of staff asked.
“No, Bernie. No sense burning out our tubes. They’re not going anywhere. And the Berinian commander’s day is about to get a lot worse. Watch.”
Minutes later, another hundred and twenty Imperial Navy warships, with full magazines and cold tubes, dropped out of hyperspace.
“Demand their surrender, Comm. Tell them to cut their engines and stay on that vector. And tell them if so much as one ship turns to bring its tubes to bear, we’ll blow the whole lot of them out of space.”
Under Imperial Navy instructions, the Berinian Navy sailors used their ships’ shuttles to transfer to five large troopships. When they came aboard, the speakers announced the following message.
“This troopship is being operated in VR by remote control. There are no Imperial Navy personnel aboard at all. There are no accessible controls. We are monitoring your behavior. If you violate your parole as prisoners of war, we will simply dump the air in the ship. So behave yourselves.”
Once the personnel of the Berinian ships had been removed to troop transport ships, the Imperial Navy spent the rest of the day using the surviving Berinian ships for target practice.
Fleet Admiral Dexter McGee got a call in VR. He was shocked to see the Imperial priority. He dropped into VR and was seated in a VR representation of the Emperor’s office in the Imperial Palace, in Imperial City, on Sintar. The Emperor, dressed in a business suit with the Cross of Sintar on his lapel, was seated behind the desk with his hands folded on its surface.
“Good morning, Fleet Admiral McGee.”
“Good morning, Your Majesty.”
“Congratulations, Admiral. It would have been a terrible black eye for the Empire for an attack of this type against our newest sector to have succeeded.”
“Thank you, Sire.”
“I will want a commendations list from you, Admiral. Who, by going beyond simple duty, made this victory possible?”
“Mostly we all just did our jobs, Sire. But there are two I would mention. One is Commander Dorothy Conroy, who spotted them massing their forces through their camouflage. She should probably get Captain out of the zone. The other is the crews of the local picket ships who went to fifteen-minute cycles to give us current sensor data.”
The Emperor nodded.
“Send me the crew rosters for those picket ships, Admiral.”
“Yes, Sire.”
The Emperor got up and came around his desk. McGee also got to his feet as the Emperor rose.
The Emperor reached out and shook his hand.
“Thank you again, Fleet Admiral. That was excellently done.”
“Thank you, Sire.”
The Emperor looked him in the eye, nodded once, and dropped out of VR.
Commander Dorothy Conroy was also shocked to receive a personal call from the Emperor. He told her she would be promoted to Captain out of the zone, and would receive both the Distinguished Service ribbon and a laurel wreath pin called the Gratitude of the Throne, a rarely awarded decoration for someone whose service had gotten the notice of the Emperor.
The picket ship crews that had gone on fifteen-minute cycles all received the Distinguished Service ribbon and a recorded VR transmission from the Emperor thanking them for their service.
Admiral Mah and Fleet Admiral McGee also received the Gratitude of the Throne.
“People of Pannia Sector:
“Two days ago, the Kingdom of Berinia attempted to attack the planet of Castaway, an Imperial planet in the Pannia Sector. Their large force of forty-eight warships was completely defeated by the Imperial Navy and forced to surrender. They coordinated this attack with the forces of the Kingdom of Celestia.
“While there were no direct hostilities with the Kingdom of Celestia, we have communicated to them as well as to the Kingdom of Berinia that such hostile actions against Imperial citizens in the Pannia Sector are to stop, or we will take such measures as we deem necessary to eliminate their ability to threaten our citizens.
“The Sintaran Empire will protect all its citizens against lawless actions such as these, including as full equals our newest citizens in Pannia Sector.”
“See, Howard. I told ya what would happen to those assholes if they tried somethin’ with the Imperial Navy. Forty-eight warships? That’s a pretty big chunk o’ their navy they just put through the shredder.”
“Yeah, Fred, you called it, all right. Wow.”
>
“Hey, I meant to ask you. Did your kids get the VR nanites yet?”
“No. Next week.”
“Ah. Good.”
“Why so?”
“Well, they’re gonna do all the kids, so they can get their schooling and all, before they start on old farts like me. I’m kinda lookin’ forward to it.”
Commitment
As the computer-controlled printing machine laid down epoxy-crete for the statue, the boom on which it was mounted climbed the one-hundred-and-twenty-foot construction crane. Also as it climbed, workmen erected scaffolding around the statue. They began polishing the epoxy-crete surface even as the printing machine was printing above them.
At one point, the printing machine switched to plastic. It had to build up a supporting structure for the tip of the sword so the printing machine could print the sword on its way up. It would continue to print plastic braces for the sword and the right arm of the statue as it went up. The plastic supporting structure would be removed later, once the arm was joined to the body.
Similarly for the statue’s left arm and the book it held, a plastic supporting structure was printed as the machine moved upward. It couldn’t print epoxy-crete on thin air. Smaller projections, like the statue’s chin and nose, could be printed out from the existing structure.
As the statue went ever higher, so too did the scaffolding the workers used to polish the printed epoxy-crete surface. The outside of the scaffolding was enclosed in tarps, so an air purification system could draw air through the workspaces and clear out the inevitable dust from the polishing process.
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