A Sword Into Darkness

by Mays, Thomas A.

  Nathan set down the control and looked over the darkened assembly. “That’s pretty much all we can say about the rendezvous. You each have full briefing packets before you which cover the video and telemetry analysis in greater detail. If you have any questions, please ask, but remember that all we know is there in the briefing. Anything else is nothing more than pure speculation, at least until Promise II makes its rendezvous. That includes conjecture over whether or not this was an overtly hostile act, whether it was some form of defense, or even if this was just a common, innocent reaction that we’re simply misinterpreting. We won’t know the answers to those questions until we are in direct contact. Now, given that, are there any questions before I continue with current ops plans and any future initiatives?”

  The lights in the room came up somewhat, and he now faced a room peppered with expressions ranging from shock, to incredulity, to fear, and to amusement. He scanned over the room of darkly polished wood and brushed steel, hoping there would be no redirect, that he could continue before his confidence had a chance to falter, but in a room filled with people who were paid to pontificate, there was little chance of that.

  One senator stood in the third tier, behind the cabinet members, but Nathan did not recognize him. He nodded to the man, wishing again for a set of congressional flash cards or at least some brighter placards, and then sat. The tall, stately, white-haired gentleman from Nebraska looked somewhat adrift, but he flashed his most challenging glare and addressed Nathan directly, though his comments were meant for the crowd. “Aliens. You gathered us together, interrupted our very tight schedules, shoved a bunch of spurious charts and analyses in front of us for … what? For aliens?”

  Nathan responded from his seat at the table heading up the assembly. “Yes, Senator. I know it’s asking a lot. I, myself, didn’t really believe for years, but none of us now have the luxury of time to indulge our doubts. Unfortunately, you need to get on board almost immediately. There are decisions that have to be made, and you folks are the only ones that can make them.”

  The senator just shook his head. “The Deltan invasion has long been the province of charlatans, madmen, and the ignorantly paranoid. But now that you have your little movie and your charts, you expect us to join up with the conspiracy theorists and just open the coffers to you? I really don’t think so. How do we even know this telemetry is real—that your probe is real?”

  Nathan started to speak, but a hand closed over his own to stop him. Lydia Russ sat beside him, holding him still with a look. Instead, she rose gracefully to her feet, standing as the newly appointed head of Windward Inc., as decreed within Gordon's updated will. “Senator James, do we really need to start grandstanding in here? This brief is above Top Secret. None of your constituents will ever see it. C-SPAN Six won’t be covering any part of it. There will be no sound bites, and no lobbying. Today is about planning and policy, not politicking.

  “Now, how exactly do you think we even got you all in this room today? Was it because of my winning personality? Because I’m a veteran Beltway Bandit? Perhaps out of belated respect for my predecessor and friend, a man who gave so much to this nation? Not likely in this crowd. No, we did it by proving the data, to the satisfaction of the DOD, NASA, and top minds in the fields of science and industry. If you would have bothered to open your briefing, you’d have noted that every bit of it has been vetted and verified already.

  “The probe was real—we have video of its launch, as well as eye-witness testimony from our own naval ships. The telemetry is real—it was received by numerous tracking stations who will each confirm that it was transmitted from deep space. And though it’s possible that we could have performed some sort of Hollywood magic to show the rendezvous, the briefing package will clearly show that is not the case. It’s all real: the probe, the data, and the aliens, certified by your own top government experts.

  “So denying the situation at this point is the equivalent of screaming to us that the Earth is flat or that Washington is a bastion of virtue—not only is it crazy, it’s naive, short-sighted, and a waste of time. Given the evidence we’ve presented, no one should have to stretch their credulity any more than we do for any other piece of actionable intel. Face it, this is our new reality, and we’re already late in confronting it. We simply don’t have the time for business-as-usual. I recommend you start accepting that and stop obstructing the business of this committee.”

  Senator James opened and closed his mouth like a gasping fish a few times, but he soon noticed something important among his paperwork and he sat down quietly to examine it further. Nathan suppressed a grin and stood as Lydia sat. He looked at her. He could tell why Gordon had liked her so, why his will had appointed her as his successor. They were kindred spirits.

  He turned back to the room. “Any other questions?”

  The conference chamber was quiet for a moment, but eventually a congresswoman stood in the fourth tier of seats, smoothing her dress and capturing the room with her gaze. When all eyes were on her, she spoke. “Mr. Kelley, I just want to express what most of us here are probably feeling. This whole situation has taken us aback. I don’t want to be obstructionist, Ms. Russ, but briefing package or no, this is something that’s going to take some getting used to. There are questions that need to be asked, and we can’t even formulate them until we can get our minds around the basic situation.

  “Aliens? Where are they from? Why are they coming here? How can we prepare for them without making some critical misstep? Should your fears prove justified, how can we possibly defend against a capability so firmly beyond our own? And most importantly, how do we couch this new reality to the people of America and the rest of the planet?”

  Nathan nodded. “Ma’am, I cannot answer all of those for you. I’m just an engineer now. The man whose later years had been devoted to coming up with those answers is no longer with us, unfortunately. We can only carry on with his vision and try to do our best. You ladies and gentlemen have to determine what that best is.” He favored her with a slight smile. “But we do have a few answers for you.

  “If you will open your briefing package to section three, you’ll see summaries of the technical initiatives Windward and the DOD have been involved with for nearly twenty years. Realizing our best chance began with making first contact away from Earth itself, we’ve been developing a number of groundbreaking technologies in the areas of propulsion, power, structural materials, and computing. These have culminated in our first true spaceship, a vessel capable of interstellar flight within a reasonable mission-time, capable of greeting the Deltans outside of our solar system and establishing diplomatic relations, or, if necessary, of dissuading their further approach should they prove hostile.”

  Nathan turned to the screen and clicked his remote. For a moment, the room faded away from his senses, and all he could see was the display. On it, a schematic and an artist’s rendering of their ship stood side by side, the long, stark lines of its hexagonal wedge and its chevron-like radiator panels unlike anything the world had ever seen, but familiar and nostalgic just the same, an image from fevered sci-fi dreams. He could almost feel Gordon standing next to him.

  “This is the Sword of Liberty, the first in a new class of spacecraft. Numbered DA-1, for Destroyer-Astrodynamic, she is 800 feet long, with a beam of 100 feet by 130 feet, divided into three sections: mission hull, radiator, and reactor/drive. The ship masses about 6500 tons and is powered by a 10 GW plutonium pebble bed reactor, cooled by radiative emission and drive effect. Propulsion is via a breakthrough technology known as an enhanced photon reaction drive, enabling us to produce a continuous g-level thrust without need of any bulky reaction mass, and is similar, if not identical, to the Deltan’s drive.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Kelley!” Nathan stopped and turned around. The congresswoman, whose name he still did not know, but who had spoken up before, raised her hand up from her seat. “Do you mean that this is what you are planning on building or what you have built?”r />
  “I mean that the Sword of Liberty is built, fitted out, and ready for launch into orbit. As we will discuss in greater detail in a moment, our intention is to launch with our full crew aboard, conduct a brief series of trials and tests in orbit, and to proceed on our own rendezvous mission soon thereafter.”

  He turned back to the screen, clicking the remote to reveal the Sword in her floating launch hangar outside Santa Clara, laying down on her side, with cables and workers arrayed over the dark gray surface. “We have installed a wide variety of communication devices, each linked to linguistic databases, intelligent translation software, and first-contact primers developed by experts in the, until now, theoretical field of exo-linguistics. It is intended that a US ambassador and staff employ these systems to open negotiations. Room has been reserved for this diplomatic element, and we only await your guidance in order to finalize our crew.

  “And in case communication should prove futile, the Sword of Liberty is a destroyer in fact, not only in designation.” Nathan clicked the remote to reveal another schematic, this one highlighting the weapons and sensors arrayed over her hull. “We have no way of knowing what weapons would be effective, so we’ve included a variety, stretching the limits of our own technology.” A green laser point appeared over each system as he briefed them.

  “You can’t build an honest-to-God spaceship without lasers, so we installed them. The Sword is serviced by six independently powered and controlled diode laser stacks, each capable of producing a multi-megawatt beam of high-UV light, coherent out to a focal limit of 1500 kilometers. Though that seems a significant range for a direct-fire weapon, it’s fairly short for encounters in space, especially with something the size of the Deltan system. Therefore, while the lasers are capable of aimed fire out to their extreme range, they are optimized for autonomous defensive fire, and thus constitute the primary active defense of the ship.

  “The ship also mounts a spinal railgun running down the centerline, firing forward. The railgun fires a number of different projectiles ranging from electronics rounds, to explosive rounds, to tungsten kinetic rounds, all of which can be fired at a selectable velocity—up to 60,000 meters per second, at a cyclical rate of 30 rounds a minute. Given our targeting capabilities, the railgun has a longer effective range than the lasers, but it’s ammunition limited, unlike the laser stacks.”

  Nathan paused to survey the audience. They were rapt for the most part, with a few flipping back and forth through the briefing packet. Nathan reached down and poured himself a drink of water from the ubiquitous crystal pitcher and glass on his table. Those who had been reading looked up at the interruption while he drank. The cool water did little to slake his desperate, nervous thirst, though. His mouth seemed even dryer than it had been a moment before. This next part would be tough.

  Damn Kris and her bright ideas.

  He favored the audience with a half-smile and then turned slightly back to the screen. “Excuse me.” His green laser ran over a set of small, individual hatches arranged in six groupings of eight on each flank of the ship. “These hatches cover the main armament of the ship. Each of these 96 hatches tops a missile cell, much like our ships’ current Vertical Launch Systems. Within each one is a ship-to-ship offensive missile of our own design.”

  Nathan clicked to the next slide, showing a schematic of the missile in profile. “This is the Excalibur Mark 1. It’s pretty much a small spacecraft in and of itself, consisting of a guidance and sensor package, a limited AI, and a photonic reaction drive powered by a sacrificial ultracapacitor bank. Each missile carries six variable-effect munitions capable of either deep penetration, contact, or proximity detonation. Each munition also has a fourth, untested detonation mode: lasing. One of the primary tasks for our orbital trials will be to validate the performance of the Excalibur in all four modes.”

  Nathan heard a scraping of a chair and he looked over to see who had moved. Upon seeing the culprit, he stifled a groan. Not only had he inherited Gordon’s responsibilities on the project, it seemed he had inherited his headaches as well.

  Secretary of Defense Carl Sykes, formerly Deputy SECDEF, stood with an unreadable expression on his face. “Excuse me, Mr. Kelley, but might I ask what type of explosive your missile is using? ‘Munitions’ is rather vague and you seem to have left it out of your otherwise fine briefing.”

  Nathan squared his shoulders and faced off with Sykes across the room. “Not an oversight, Mr. Secretary—an intentional omission. We’ve relied heavily upon the largesse of the US government in order to get this ship built, but certain conditions and restrictions placed upon our preps could have derailed the whole effort. We knew what needed to be done, so we did it, even if it meant circumventing a few of the limits placed over us.”

  Sykes’ eyes narrowed. “What are those missiles armed with, Kelley?”

  “Thermonuclear warheads, Secretary Sykes.”

  A few representatives and senators popped to their feet, with genuine outrage in some cases and carefully crafted platform stances in others. The incensed legislators frothed so automatically that they all started speaking over one another. “Nuclear warheads!” “This was never authorized—” “What about our treaties—” “—the damn Non-Proliferation Treaty—” “I bet it was that idiot in the White House—” “Where were those missiles built? My constituents—” “Whose securing these—”

  “Quiet!” commanded Sykes, briefly returning to his former role as a senior general in the Air Force. And though the assembled indignant congresspersons were not the types to defer authority easily, his tone and their genuine level of discomfort with the situation allowed him to assert his control. “Ladies and gentlemen, I assure you that the office of the President and the agreement under which this ship was constructed did not include the outfitting or development of controlled weapons. In fact, they specifically barred the acquisition of weapons-grade nuclear materials.”

  The SECDEF glared each of the reps back to their seats and then turned back to Nathan and Lydia. “Since that was indeed our agreement, would you mind telling us how you got highly-enriched fissile material through our screening process? All you were approved for was reactor-grade fuels, and I personally vetted the nuclear-security procedures set up.”

  Nathan smiled tightly. “Yes, your procedures were very effective—effective at slowing down every aspect of reactor construction, but don’t worry. No one violated your materials control process.”

  “So how the hell did you build nuclear warheads?”

  “We did it by not using any nuclear materials at all—yours or anyone else’s. Our fusion warheads are triggered through a completely different process, developed in-house as an offshoot of our drive technology. There are no plutonium or uranium primaries. Instead we use a pure fusion process more closely related to laser ignition—the photonic compression sphere.” Nathan turned away from Sykes and addressed the audience as a whole. “I know this may be a special shock, in a day filled with shocks, but believe me when I say that this was a necessary step. Without a weapon of this energy level, we’d have no hope of competing with a tech-base capable of interstellar travel.”

  One of the senators who had stood before, the man who had cried foul about the Non-Proliferation Treaty, stood up in the second tier again to address Sykes and Nathan. “Mr. Kelley, Ms. Russ, I’m Paul Yardley, senator from Nevada. I’m sure you felt this was a necessary weapon. It’s obvious that you’ve had to make tough decisions about issues that most of us have never even imagined before, but this decision, this choice, has repercussions beyond merely your project.

  “You’ve looked at this like an engineer, finding a solution that neatly avoids the obstacles placed before you, but you’ve also just invalidated decades of armed diplomacy and enforced compromise. All our arms control safeguards are built around monitoring and controlling the use of processed radioactives. If you can get the same effect through what are essentially ballotechnics rather than controlled materials, then you’
ve just made it possible for small groups or even individuals to make their own WMD’s. You built over 500 of them in Santa Clara, and no one even noticed.”

  Nathan nodded grimly. “I realize that, Senator, which was why we took so much care with security—security so effective that the fact that our warheads were actually thermonuclear devices went completely unnoticed by our DOD overseers. They thought the missiles were armed with kinetic-kill submunitions only. The warhead components were all built by different sub-contractors under oppressive non-disclosure agreements. Not one of them knew what the components were meant to do, or what they connected to, or how they connected together. They were each assembled, mounted, and installed in the ship at our Santa Clara facility. Aside from the intended crew and the people in this room, there are only ten other people who know what the devices actually do, and I trust them all implicitly.”

  Sykes grunted. “I’m sure your personal assurances are more than enough to soothe our nerves, you know, with uncontrolled nuclear arms proliferation on the table, and all that. By the way, wasn’t there a break-in at your facility?”

  “Which we stopped—”

  “And you still have no idea as to the identity of this thief, no knowledge of who he was working for, or how many other secrets might have leaked out before this?”

  “He’s in your custody, Mr. Secretary! You should be able to answer that better than anyone! But you’re correct—our mystery man is still a mystery. However, no related tech has been seen in the outside world and we are sure that no other break-ins have occurred before or since.”

  Lydia stood, placing a hand on Nathan’s rigid shoulder. He resisted for a moment, but soon responded to her gentle insistence and sat. She looked over the room, catching Senator Yardley and Sykes with her final gaze. “You’re right to be worried, Senator. This tech changes everything, and it makes your jobs both harder and more dangerous. But this device is, if anything, more complicated and difficult to build than even a ‘normal’ hydrogen bomb. It is not something your average Timothy McVeigh or Abdul Massharaf will be able to develop on their own. Rest assured, it was a necessary and vital development for the project. Don’t forget the stakes we’re dealing with here. Our failure to go through with this possibly ill-advised step could lead to our extinction or enslavement by an alien race. Remember that.