Ghosts from the Past (The Wandering engineer Book 7)

by Chris Hechtl

  He checked the reactor, pursing his lips. It was more efficient, at least a generation beyond what he had seen before. But it had a MAM system that provided half the power as well. The Matter-Antimatter reactor was good in theory, but useless without a steady supply. So that left the fusion reactor ... which wasn't enough.

  It was ungainly, over complicated, and hard to produce and repair even with nanites. The organic hull took over a month to grow and set up properly. A corvette could be built in as little as two days with the right resources in a major yard.

  No, over the centuries the Federation had tried the organic ship and had mostly discarded the concept.

  The hull of the corvette, this Fury, was something else. It was elegant, clean curved lines, ovoid habitation and engineering pods, and a smart skin. The nacelles on her flanks were connected by arms that curved and grew from her dorsal and ventral flanks. He hated it. He hated curved lines, they were a pain in the ass to repair, to find parts for. A ship like this, she didn't have a replicator since she was supposed to be self-repairing. But they had never quite gotten it to work.

  No, the weapons, drive, reactor, and some of the subsystems and concepts they would hang onto. They would make for great upgrades in the ship classes currently in use or in production. If their frames could support them.

  He browsed the sub-notes and found a link to an upscale design. He checked it and sighed. Someone had tried to apply the design to cruiser platforms. Even a dreadnaught! He shook his head in disgust. Now, that was a serious waste of time and resources, to even design such a thing! He shook his head, but then paused when he noted the theoretical systems planned for the design. That was interesting, he thought, the idea of using dark matter, or paired singularities ... that was something to think about. He tapped his chin and then winced as a thought struck him. He'd hate to be anywhere near her if she ever took a hit or had an engineering casualty though!

  ...*...*...*...*...

  Each time the work crews reconnected a segment of the net Sprite checked it out to add the index to her own files. Some of it was outside her purview and therefore restricted. Ray was polite about not giving her access, but firm. She had to respect his position as acting net administrator.

  She noted the shadow of something in the net, but she was unsure what it meant. Something was using system resources, processors and memory, but every time she took a peek to see what it was it disappeared. She had initially thought it had been Ray, Egon or one of the other smart AI in the net.

  “So it's not you?” Sprite asked.

  “No,” Ray stated flatly. “You must be seeing programs that are running, perhaps bots or some of the other AI who are still slumbering. We only shut down the dumb AI,” Ray said. “So it can't be them.”

  “Okay ...” The idea had some merit, but it bothered her. Why would they leave bots running? Perhaps maintenance bots? Or security bots checking up on things? She wasn't certain.

  “Technically we really should wake Winston. He is second in command of security right now,” Ray stated.

  “But the problem is, we are tight on net space,” Sprite said.

  “About that. I don't mean to be rude but can you um ...”

  “Take myself elsewhere?” Sprite asked in a huffy voice. She hated that. Hated being a guest. Hated being shown the door.

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  “I know when I'm not wanted. The good news is one of us can spread out to Xavier. Though the AI there is a dumb AI and the net is tiny.”

  “And we can go into the nets that are connected to the ansibles,” Ray said. “But the bandwidth is horrible!”

  “It's what we could manage with the resources and time available.”

  “You really should have taken more time then. Done it right.”

  “Sometimes that isn't an option,” Sprite replied as she departed. She was no longer thrilled about talking with Ray any longer. His coding might be within her, but she couldn't compare the two of them. There was little common ground.

  ...*...*...*...*...

  The Watcher identified a problem; the intruder AI was too curious. Something would have to be done, it was noting the Watcher's shadow clones being set up like eggs in the net. It had not raised an alarm however, so perhaps it hadn't recognized the threat.

  A second problem was more vexing. A review of the senior organic's files informed the Watcher that he would not be an easy target to remove. Any attempt to do so had a high chance of failure. Therefore it switched to the secondary target. It would need to manufacture the right situation before it could strike.

  For now it would use it's puppets to restrict the intruder's access while attempting to make new versions of itself to create a cyber army before it's endgame was triggered. Good news in that regard, since the organics were powering up additional computer systems there was more places for the Watcher to hide. It was also anticipating the reactivation of its primary puppet Winston. With Winston in charge of cybernet security the Watcher's ability to hide would be assured.

  The next step was to insert a clone into Xavier as well through the ansible. But with the ansible's bandwidth so restricted there was a high chance of discovery. It left that task to a later time when the organics weren't using it.

  The destroyer was a different problem. Its net was very small and since the Ray puppet had banished the intruder, it was staying there more often. That had created an unanticipated complication to the plan. Resolving it would take time. Perhaps suborning the intruder? The Watcher decided to delve deeper into the intruder's past and core programming ...

  ...*...*...*...*...

  Amanda led Admiral Halsey to a back room. “We shouldn't be doing this,” he said quietly.

  “It's okay,” she said, looking over her shoulder to him. “Consider it therapy.”

  “Therapy?” he suddenly didn't like where this was going. He didn't like the idea of her thinking of him as a patient.

  “Yes. I couldn't stand being here without Jasper. So I smuggled him on board,” the young woman said.

  “Jasper?” All sorts of thought ran through Jarol's head. She had a lover. He knew it.

  She saw his face fall and then turned back to the door when she heard insistent scratching and snuffling. “We're coming. Move over,” she said, opening the hatch door and slipping a leg in to block her buddy. “Oh you ...”

  The coonie saw the opening and took it. He leapt up her leg and climbed to her blouse. She fought a shriek of dismay when a small handpaw grabbed a bit of flesh on her chest and squeezed. She caught the little rascal and held him against her ample chest. “Jasper,” she said, looking down at the purple and orange coonie. “I want you to meet a good friend of mine. This is Admiral Halsey,” she said.

  Jarol blinked in surprise at the coonie. It was the last thing he'd expected to come out of that door. He watched Amanda pet the little guy. He was small, not full grown. He knew they got bigger.

  “He's the runt of the litter. Dwarf coonie so he won't get much bigger than this. He's one of the coonies on Xavier. I've been assigned to take care of him and the rest of the brood.”

  “He's … wow,” the admiral said, seeing the startling blue eyes look his way. The coonie's muzzle rubbed against the girl then chattered.

  “Yeah, I know, you're looking for a treat greedy guts,” Amanda scolded mildly. “Stop that,” she laughed as he sniffed her neck and then tried to stick his nose down the front of her blouse. “Here, you take him. I need to clean his litter box and change his water,” she said, pulling him off her. He didn't want to go, his claws hooked into her blouse. But she was insistent enough to get the little guy off her and into the admiral's startled hands.

  “He's soft,” the admiral murmured.

  “Yes he is. And he purrs too,” she said as she went into the closet.

  “Yes I see that,” the admiral said as he got a sniff down. His fingertips stroked the soft pelt. The little guy wriggled and then tried to climb up onto his shoulder.

&n
bsp; “Take a seat. I'm going to be here a little while,” Amanda said with a sigh. “What did you do you little brat, tear the place apart?” she asked in exasperation.

  Jarol shook his head. His entire focus, his entire world was centered around the creature in his arms. He felt like balling, but also felt like he could sing.

  ...*...*...*...*...

  Once Admiral Irons got through the latest sit reps from Antigua and Agnosta, he went back to his current headache. The admiral shook his head. He had a thorny dilemma, and not just the trio of occasionally prickly flag officers. One he wasn't sure how to solve.

  It boiled down to a simple thing, Xavier didn't have enough room to haul the memory banks and people back, and definitely not the engineering and other samples the scientists and engineers had created. The ship would be overcrowded with the people they had as it was. The computer banks would have to be reserved for the AI, but he could squeeze in a couple of memory banks in his quarters for some goodies.

  So he had to go through and cherry pick what was worth downloading. There was no telling when they would be back. Also, the fuel they had brought wouldn't last forever. They had only three more weeks of fuel before the computer energy hogs on the station sucked it dry.

  Upgrades and updates for current existing designs were being sent through the ansible. Sprite had been finding them in the index and then packaging them in compressed files but apparently Commander Ray had taken over that chore. Since it was his net and he was familiar with the files, Irons had stayed out of their little tit for tat territorial dispute. He could emphasize with Sprite. She wanted her own space more and more. He shook his head and then returned to the current problem.

  The incremental changes were easy to implement, most were software or minor patch jobs. A lot of the hardware fixes would be ironed out by the new component blueprints. He was pretty certain Lobsterman would enjoy a few of the improvements to Maine.

  There were a few theories here that someone had been exploring, cross references to quantum gravity foam and gravity were interlinked to the next generation of shield emitters and force emitters. He shook his head. He had to admit when even he was in over his head. He scrolled to more acceptable areas to explore.

  There were a few interesting files on a more advanced ECM package for starships, in this case a new version of an old concept, a holographic deception mode. The host would project a decoy image of a ship or fighter or even a group onto the ship's own shields or a nanite dust cloud. The ship would also use other emitters on the hull to complete and compliment the illusion while stepping down their reactors and drives to match. What it really amounted to was running a bluff, making the enemy think you had more than what you did, or the reverse, that you weren't as big as they could see.

  There was a problem with that, the gravitons the host shields emitted were impossible to completely disguise. Once a ship was fingerprinted the enemy would see right through the deception at any range.

  Still, it might be of use to hide a warship as a large freighter under the right circumstances. He wasn't certain what else it could be used for though, conventional ECM packages did just fine.

  He shook his head as he went back to the table of contents then found a link to alternative applications. Apparently someone high up had wanted them to explore the idea of cloaking something as large as a planet. That made the admiral shake his head at such stupidity.

  Stupidity or desperation, he thought. The very idea of being able to hide a planet. He had to scoff at that. It was a monumental waste of resources. First, because the system used too much power and the planet's gravitational field was noticeable in the star system. Second, if you blocked out visible light by using a field then the planet was in perpetual darkness. Not good for the plants on the ground, let alone the people.

  And third, the enemy undoubtedly had a copy of the Galactica Encyclopedia. That meant they would know a star system had a habitable world and even its location.

  Most of what they had was geared to fight the Xenos the admiral noted with a sigh. The line about fighting the last war played through the admiral's head as he flipped through to other projects.

  There had also been a few new ship designs on the drawing board when he had departed Lemnos. Many were minor improvements to existing classes, changes in armament or new shield node configurations in order to deal with specific weaknesses in a design exposed by combat with the Xenos. Some were even more radical designs and really a new class with little relation to their base ship frame. Some of the designs had been completed shortly after the ansible link had been severed to Sol. They remained untested however.

  He checked the header on a few of the project ideas and then opened two of them.

  Apparently Commodore Subert had championed two projects, one similar to the admiral's with his Resolution and Newmann class ships. Irons, Yao, and the other team members had hit on the idea of stuffing larger battlecruiser and dreadnaught class weapon mounts onto the hulls while also upgrading the reactors to match. That had eaten into their magazine space, but it had given both ship classes a heftier punch. There were drawbacks however. The upgraded reactors weren't quite up to the demand of powering the shields, weapons, and drive at the same time. A ship had to have a crack OPS crew and a very skilled commander to understand that dance.

  His idea to do the same with destroyers had been met with mixed reviews from the admiralty. The admiral nodded.

  Subert had apparently smarted from that soft slap down enough to go the other way. By mounting smaller weapons on a hull they could cram many more and thus saturate a target in a hail of energy weapons fire. His Agincourt design had its backers, Irons could see the idea of using smaller turrets would make manufacture simpler. But Irons didn't see the need for it, even against a fighter squadron. The dozens of weapon mounts sucked the reactors dry. Simulations had concluded that a much larger drive train and reactor would be needed. The hull was full, so either something had to go or the hull had to be lengthened and altered. If he took away more magazine space the ship would lose its long range balance and a portion of its counter missiles. Subert's notes argued that the hedgehog of turrets could double as a great point defense. Irons shook his head and sat back, tapping his lips with his fingertip. Subert had used an Aegis class ship as his basis, and as a fleet defender it might work in theory. But there was that drive problem again, it wouldn't keep up with a fleet underway. He checked the notes to see which way ... ah, he thought. Apparently Subert had done neither method to solve the problem, instead abandoning the concept as unworkable. It wasn't the only project the commodore had backed either.

  He shook his head. Subert was a dilettante. An able administrator but he had no business trying to pitch ship or hardware designs. His musings had used up valuable time and resources. He could understand the man's urge to help, but he should have stuck to what he was good at. John briefly wondered why. Did the man's urge to help come into it or was there something more? The eagerness to come up with the miracle weapon to win the war? Or were politics playing a part? Throw in behind someone to get something moving in a particular direction. He shook his head

  He smiled sourly. On that thought he tapped a memo to himself to upload the Shield Maiden escort destroyer design and other designs he'd worked out in his travels and see how the simulations did with them. Even he could be too clever he thought.

  There was an intriguing idea of resurrecting the concept of a drone carrier. Apparently it was championed by a Marine who had made some physics advances in his college youth. The idea of a drone carrier wasn't new, it had been around for nearly a thousand years. But apparently this version came with a twist. A way to get around the light speed problem in controlling the drones.

  The Marine and a couple lab buddies had come up with a crazy idea in college, to replace muons in ansibles with another particle pair. The pair had its advantages, they were more stable and less shock and acceleration sensitive. They had one major drawback however, the pairs had a v
ery short half life, one measured in days. That meant the carrier would have to carry on board facilities to replace linkage all the time. Such facilities ate up mass and were major energy hogs. The resulting carrier would only be able to field a maximum of fifteen fighters and that wasn't workable in combat.

  They would have a ten second light range which equated to three billion kilometers though, which was a hundred times the range of a warship's missiles and a thousand times the effective range of most energy weapons. They couldn't push the range out further without going ballistic. Fuel was a major limiting factor on the drones.

  The proponents of the plan had tried to find some work arounds. One was to use energy beams to power the drones. That had been abandoned as untenable.

  Attempts to make the concept work with a miniaturized tachyon transceiver had also failed, there was only so far you could scale such hardware down before it became unworkable.

  The other idea was far more radical, to create micro wormholes at the subatomic level. Physicists had conclusively proven natural wormholes opened and closed at the atomic level all the time but it had taken centuries to prove it. Picking the wormholes out of the quantum foam had been a holy grail for many physics scientists and students. John tapped his chin and then nodded. Back in the Stargate program the scientists involved had managed to create artificial wormholes at that level. It had been tricky and passing anything through it had been nearly impossible, the event horizons and the grav emitters used to create and stabilize the wormholes blocked just about anything that they tried to pass through them. That was one of the reasons they had scaled the plan up to handle starships.

  The other problem was power. To run a wormhole you'd need a lot of power. Incredible amounts of energy, too much for a drone to carry on board even with antimatter.

  The initial idea had wanted to have the carrier as self supporting, able to build and replenish its drones in the field. When that hadn't worked out the design team had tacked on a support ship or even support group. The admiral shook his head.