by J G Clements
He rolled over the information he had, and looked at it again and again to make it all fit together. All the data and observations needed to fit into a comprehensive model, or the model was wrong. Two types of small ships, they attacked even when it’s hopeless. Some data to suggest that the larger ships, the Haulers, had now and then made a run for it when they were out-gunned, a ghost-drive that made no heat, or he corrected himself, no heat that they could currently pick-up. Maybe due to the use of superconductors. One observation that the Haulers rotated, but no confirmation the small ships did that.
Perhaps more interestingly, they don’t seem to detect a directional radio signal, but certainly can detect a wide-broadcast signal. They also need to obtain certain elements and had created at least one mine on an ice giant. The particular crater had been chosen perhaps for its steep walls as much as for what was down there.
What else had he missed? With a realization that he had skipped some data, he left the Bridge. Phil was somewhere among the beam weapon systems, and he needed to speak with him.
Phil kept his own hours, and Jim was told he was in his quarters. Just as well since Jim would prefer to discuss this in private. Knocking, he was pleased that Phil hadn’t been asleep, but that wouldn’t have stopped him from dropping by anyway.
“Phil, when Mike’s ship got sliced up you had me run some spectrographic readings on the cut lines, remember?” Not waiting for Phil to respond, “You said that the cut edges were radioactive and had some short-lived isotopes, right?” Phil, still a little off-balanced by Jim’s arrival regained his composure as the discussion turned to things he understood.
“Yep. The Swarmer beam weapons are designed to not only transfer a massive energy punch, they lace it with neutrons. The effect is they form short-lived isotopes along the hull metal. Why?”
“But do our beam weapons do that?”
“No. We don’t see any benefit from it. It’s just a needless enhancement, unless you wanted to kill folks by radiation poisoning. But if you did, the neutrons have the wrong energy to make the really nasty isotopes.” Phil had decided it was Jim’s turn to explain for a change. “Why? What are you thinking?”
Ignoring Phil’s question, Jim posed one of his own. “Phil, if you had the right detection equipment set up, would those isotope decays be easy to spot from far away? Could the Swarm be painting our ships so they act like a beacon?”
Phil just stared for a second. “I don’t know. It wouldn’t be all that strong of a signal, though that might depend on how much metal you activated.” He seemed to think about it some more. “But you know, the decay signature would be unique. Those isotopes don’t occur naturally so if you did detect them, you would know that there was only one way to generate them.” Jim didn’t need to lead Phil any further along these lines. Phil was picking up speed all by himself. “I wonder how sensitive a sensor array would have to be to pick up that radiation?” It was Phil’s turn to speak to himself.
“Phil…can you do some calculations and let me know? I plan to learn a lot more about sensor arrays as soon as I can.” Not waiting for an answer, Jim was already down the hall and heading for the mess.
Just the act of Jim entering the mess hall got everyone’s attention. Fortunately, most of the McKinsie Fleet personnel were technically trained personnel, and he had their undivided attention during lunch as explained his isotope theory. But it was Dave-45, an applied mathematician that explained what Jim needed to know.
“Jim, think about a star. Not our sun, just a random star thirty light years away. It puts out so many photons, that even as those photons stream away at the speed of light, and even as they spread out to the size of an imaginary sphere sixty light years in diameter, the human eye can receive enough photons to see the star. How big is the receiving part of the human eye? Less than a centimeter. So, if the eye only needed a single photon to ‘see’ the star, take the surface of the sphere, divide by the area of a pupil or retina, and that’s how many photons are streaming away per second. Got that ?”
Jim nodded. Though he had never thought about it, like most humans he somehow imagined the light from a distant star that fell on his eye was only meant for him. But a moment’s thought and he realized how many photons…particles of light…a star emitted. But Dave wasn’t finished yet. “Now, the decaying isotopes are doing the same thing. As they decay, they emit a particular set of particles the same way. A spreading cloud moving outward at the speed of light. Not as many as a star, of course, but you said you only wanted to be able to see them at a few light seconds? What, around a half-million miles, right?” Jim nodded, and Dave, enjoying the lecture plunged on.
“An artificial detector has a couple advantages over the human eye. For starters, it can collect light for a long length of time, then look at the sum of what it has gathered. It like aiming a telescope at an empty part of space, then keeping the shutter open on the camera for a few days. The image would be something that you could never get in just a few seconds. Still with me?” Jim did and already knew where this was going.
“In the case of the isotopes, if they are unique, you can block all the other forms of radiant energy and only gather the unique ones. The bottom line…our recently attacked ships are probably easy to see from a pretty good distance. Light seconds or even light minutes.” That comment seemed to hang in the air. Everyone in the mess hall was paying attention, including the Steward. The Captain must have been told about the pow-wow because he joined them a few minutes later.
Arriving too late to have heard what the Fleet was discussing, he glanced at everyone but his eyes stopped on Jim. Needing no prodding, Jim explained it simply. “The small Swarm ships are using their beam weapons to ‘tag’ any metal they hit. The metal then emits a unique radiation that we think they are using to keep an eye on our position.” Jake looked around again and everyone seemed to be in agreement. Before he could ask for more information, he saw Jim staring into space, not really paying attention to anyone or anything in the mess hall. He was trying out a hypothesis to see if would include all the facts abut the Swarm as he now understood them
“The small Swarm ships…the Swarmers… are really suicide ships. They paint us, and this allows the larger Swarm ships to mostly avoid us.” He brought his attention to the Captain. “The larger ships aren’t looking for combat. They just want to evade us. Oh, they’ll take a shot at us if it’s free, or if it’s obvious we are out-gunned. But I’ll bet the Swarm pretty much keep tabs on most of our ships, and are using the strategy of destroying our homeworlds to beat us. They aren’t particularly interested in combat. At least not in any sort of fair fight.” He didn’t elaborate, but he thought a bit about the ships that were lost each year, and wondered if the Swarm might actually be ok with combat. On their terms.
Jim didn’t wait to see if anyone agreed or disagreed with him. He was busy analyzing his own theory. Jake didn’t press him. He didn’t want a fast answer, he wanted a good answer. Helping himself to a cup of coffee he could just as easily have obtained on the Bridge, he nodded approval to everyone and returned to his station.
Seated back on the Bridge, he analyzed what Jim had said. The more he thought it over, the more sense it made. The single Swarm ships would attack anything. There were no recordings of them retreating or trying to break off. Ever. Likewise, no one had ever found the larger Swarm ships, and they have looked for years. Instead of being merely hard to find, it made sense that they could actively avoid us. So what to do? An enemy that didn’t want combat, just victory.
Jake began to think about resources. He didn’t know what it took to accelerate a really big asteroid fast enough and then aim it at a planet. Would those resources be more difficult to organize than a combat fleet? He was mulling that over when Jim re-entered the Bridge and seated himself into what everyone was calling ‘his’ chair. Jake swiveled to face him. Taking up the conversation as if it had never been interrupted, “Then how do they escape?”
Jim had integrate
d a lot of facts. “Captain, does the implosion jump leave any traces? Can you tell we have jumped after we left an area?”
“No. In fact, it might even make the surrounding space colder.” He gave that some more thought. “I’m certain when we jump we don’t create any signs of our jump. They can’t be tracking us like that, can they?”
“Captain, that’s not what I meant. If we wanted to, could we do a series of small jumps out here, and drop back into normal space before we hit a gravity well? What if we didn’t want to ever be in a gravity well?”
“Why would we want to?” Then the Captain shut up. He just realized what Jim was leading him to. The Swarm just did little jumps, staying outside of gravity wells, to get around. It was the ghost drive, it had to be. He looked at Jim for another second, then without breaking eye contact hit the intercom. “There will be a meeting of all available Chiefs and all implosion-jump personnel in the mess in twenty minutes. Captain Dubois Out.” Jim, instead of looking back at the Captain, seemed to be looking off to somewhere else.
****
Everyone who heard the announcement was intrigued over the make-up of the meeting. It’s not often you ask for all the implosion jump personnel to get together: The jump either worked, or you fixed it. Despite them and the Chiefs making for a full mess, a few McKinsie fleet personnel were there and no one objected. Everyone glanced at Jim, sitting on the end of the front row, but it was Jake taking his place in the front that brought everyone to attention.
Without any preamble, “Jim thinks the ghost drive is really nothing more than a modified implosion drive. Only instead of letting a gravity-well force the ship back into normal space, they do it themselves.” He saw about half the audience seemed to get where this was going, so he tried to get the other half to catch up. “Imagine you can use an implosion jump to only jump a few light seconds at a time….say around a quarter million miles? Then you pop back into normal space but without the gravity barriers. So, you are able to jump again. And then again.” Now everyone got it, and they were all mulling it around in their minds.
Jim remained silent, quite satisfied that Jake did a good job explaining his theory. Instead of the distant look he had worn for so long, he seemed fully focused on the group assembled here. They would make or break his theory and he only had to let them pick it apart. Turning slightly, he looked at them, and the small conversations that were occurring. No one stood on formality, but there was a silent consensus that the Chief of Implosion drive systems should have the first word.
“To be honest, we’ve never thought much about that. We jump interstellar distances that way, and it’s only a gravity well that makes us drop out. If you want to jump from anywhere where the gravity is below our threshold, you can. But we’ve never tried to fall out of the jump before we hit gravity. So either we need to create a gravity wall on the ship, or somehow limit the power of the jump. But the theory is the jump itself is a quantum event. Either you’ve in the jump or out. I just can’t see how to make it drop out for no reason.”
That pretty much summed up what everyone thought, though there were lots of provisional ideas on how to do it. Jake let the more popular ideas get discussed, and of course, critiqued by everyone. Seeing that the information-sharing part of the meeting was over, he picked up his coffee cup and with a nod toward everyone, left for the Bridge.
The all-volunteer crew of the Sisk as well as the McKinsie fleet personnel weren’t afraid of the Captain. After all, anyone could give 30 days notice and leave. There were always more positions open around known space, and anyone could find a job if they didn’t like the one they had. Or for that matter, stop working entirely. But Captain Jake Dubois inspired his crew, and everyone wanted to do more than their share. Besides, everyone pretty much found the job they volunteered for interesting. The Stewards liked managing the mess hall, the Beam operators liked working in combat, and the Chiefs liked being on top of their specialties.
The implosion jump crew was no different, but within that group there were two types. One, a practical technical type, worried over and mastered the equipment itself. The theory behind the Implosion Jump wasn’t their concern, any more than a car mechanic spent much time worrying about thermodynamics and metallurgy. But the second group was more in tune with the physics behind the jump, a much more theoretical understanding. Having a field collapse around the ship and force it out of this universe and into another space was something that required some math to work out. There had been a running debate for some time on what happens if you leave the galaxy where the nearest gravity well might be an almost infinite distance away. Everyone knew at some point that experiment would get tried, but were busy enough just mastering what they have learned only a few dozen years ago.
As is always the case, folks are more apt to throw ideas around where no one is going to mock them. It’s ok to examine and dismiss the ideas themselves, but in a group of equals, everyone got to explain their ideas. Over the next several days, all sorts of ideas were suggested, but none seemed to hold true to the jump theory itself. About half thought that there would be some way of doing something internally on the ship to make it drop out of warp, others thought that the jump itself could be scaled way down.
If you want to test how good theories were, you only need to suggest an experiment…a practical one that could be carried out…and see if the current mathematical models could predict its outcome. If it can’t…then it might be very worthwhile to try it to see what happens. Once completed, you’ve probably added to the model used to predict experimental outcomes, but until you do, it’s only an unanswered question.
Because of that, it was one of the ‘practical’ technicians who suggested an experiment that had never been tried.: Put an entire jump field around the ship, but put a second jump field around that. Collapse them both together, but a fraction of a second apart. Wouldn’t one field knock them into the warp, but the collapse of the second field would appear like a gravity well?
Surprisingly, he didn’t have to really sell the idea. The technical guys said it would not be that hard to try. But what really looked interesting in the theoretical simulation runs was how long the ship would be out of normal space. Fifty seconds. It was Dave who figured that out a split second before Phil. “Didn’t Jim say the ship he encountered seemed to rotate every fifty seconds? Could someone ask Jim to look at his data and see if he would accept the theory that it wasn’t rotating? That it was blinking in and out of existence?”
Within an hour, every jump-trained crewman, Captain Jake Dubois, and Jim-88 were solidly behind the idea of a field-within-a-field theory. And everyone wanted to try it. Unfortunately, Jake had to be the adult and explain that they weren’t going to risk the Sisk. Instead, they needed to test it on a lessor ship. “One without a return deposit” as one crewman explained it.
Debate quickly went back and forth on jumping back to a fleet area to get a ship, or trying to outfit a skiff. Jumping back would be several days, then a few more days to obtain the ship and install a second field generator, then a few more days to steam back out where it could be tried. A skiff, on the other hand, could use spares from the Sisk and be ready in less than a day. There was no debate about which way they would proceed.
The only point of contention turned into whether the ship should be manned, or turned into a drone. A manned ship was always more versatile and intelligent than a drone: If unforeseen problems came up, there was nothing like a sentient being to solve them. On the other hand, if all the theory was wrong and the ship just disappeared forever, a drone was a cheap loss. But if it did disappear forever, wouldn’t they just re-check their calculations and send another one? After losing a couple, would they give up or finally bite the bullet and send a manned ship? These calculations ran through Jake’s mind repeatedly until he came up with a compromise.
The Captain stopped the debate without leaving the Bridge. Asking Sue to pipe him through to the Jump Chief, “I want to send a drone first. If it doesn’
t came back, I’ll endorse a manned ship, but it has to have not only the two field generators needed for the experiment, I insist it have a complete set of spares.” Not sure everyone on the Bridge who was eves-dropping understood it, “If the manned ship ends up somewhere with blown generators, I want them to be able to erect a new one and jump somewhere inhabited. I don’t want them lost somewhere with no way of jumping home.”
There was no debate on this, making Jake believe everyone thought this was a fair compromise, but he smiled to himself wondering if it would be easy to get volunteers. Sue, who was working the communications console as part of her training, made a comment to the Captain that no one could overhear. He kept a straight face, but as she left the Bridge to help oversee the fit-out, she mumbled something about the most exciting fifty seconds in the history of mankind. With a small shake of his head and a trace of a smile, the Captain seemed to relax. The experienced crew members never confused Jake’s demeanor of being patient with being relaxed. It did them all good to see how he could be distracted, if even for a second, as he operated one of the largest ships in the Crekie’s arsenal.
Chapter 26. Jump.
Ceres Report: Farming
I had hoped to use some of the soil from Ceres for growing food, but there are some problems. Like heavy metals.
I’ve sampled the sand that is leftover from my induction heater, and though its lower in heavy metals than the un-treated sand, it’s still toxic. If I would have used it for soil to grow plants, I could get my lifetime supply of mercury and cadmium in the first bite. Dang.
So, I have all the biological waste I’ve produced- dehydrated and stored. So I can use it for farming. But an extra source of safe sand or soil would go a long way.
Despite it being only a drone, there were just as many precautions taken as with outfitting a manned ship. But during the work, someone needed to have final authority on how the ship was to be modified. If it had been manned, its own captain would have the final word. In this case, it was decided the jump technician who thought of the ‘field-within-a-field’ idea should get the job.