Family Law 2: The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet

by Mackey Chandler

  Chapter 13

  "The Roadrunner and Sharp Claws can be ready to depart in thirty minutes if that is acceptable," Thor informed Gordon. "They can do it faster, but it gives the Sharp Claws time to safely double check things like loose items in the galley and give crew time to secure personal items. The Roadrunner is pretty much always stowed and ready to go. They picked Persevere Wilson and Timely Rodriguez to be their beta crew."

  "Can the Badgers have an escort ready to go in the same time frame?"

  "They say yes. They have a Badger messenger class ship, with a crew of six, that looks to be similar to our courier class. They agreed to send them along to introduce our people on system entry. Talker says such a ship always stands ready to quickly carry a message or light delivery."

  "I'd suggest to our captains they make sure the Badgers can synchronize well enough before inviting them to jump in close formation."

  "Any other instructions?" Thor asked.

  Gordon considered it silently just a moment.

  "We don't have time to make and install another docking collar. It's a lot of weight to add to a courier anyway. Have them start making another though, in case we want one another time. Try to make it light too. See if the Badgers can sell us replacement feed stock for the fabricators."

  "I suggest you charge them with protecting the Badger ship since they are kind enough to provide an escort," Lee proposed.

  "Indeed, an excellent suggestion, if the Badger Captain is agreeable. Also, tell them to withdraw if the owners of any system tells them they are unwelcome. Loop back another way even if necessary. Double check before they go, to make sure that the Biters aren't the owners of any of the systems they will transverse."

  "The Badger messenger ship is undocked already. They accept protection. The Captain informs us the Biters worlds are to the far edge of the map we were given, so that isn't a problem. He will privately transmit us an update showing extensions as they aren't listed as part of that group. The Biters he says, object to any of their three systems being listed on other's charts. They see that as an invitation to enter and don't welcome visitors. So they leave them off public charts, rather than argue."

  "Why doesn't that surprise me?" Gordon muttered.

  After the ships formed up and departed on an agreed vector and acceleration, they got a message back from the Roadrunner. " Fat Ortega sitting second board to Captain Chance Ochocinco wishes you to know that the commander of the Badger ship informs him they can jump in sync if need arises, but he doesn't wish to add the small risk without necessity. He would prefer to jump from a fifty kilometer separation. Since we are going to be announced by him and have no operational need to cloak our numbers on entry, we have agreed to that."

  "I can't fault that," Thor said. "I wonder what our boys plan to do? I'm not going to influence them and see what they choose."

  "We should have sent Ha-bob-bob-brie," Lee said. "Too late... "

  When the ships blinked out of existence they did so simultaneously. But the ships of The Little Fleet were about five hundred meters apart.

  "Ah, they decided to show some style arriving, Thor said. He seemed to approve.

  * * *

  "We are finding none of these races here have the depth of plastics technology we have," Prosperity informed them. "The situation is almost the same with paint, which is closely related of course. But some of the things they have done with ceramics we have to buy. They showed me ceramics you can dent with a hammer and they don't break. They make ceramic springs."

  "They haven't said anything about the gravity on the station?" Lee asked.

  "No and I'm reluctant to let them know we don't have a clue how they do it."

  "Don't ask straight out how," Lee counseled. "Ask how high a gradient they can generate, or what sort of power efficiencies they get. Something round-about like that."

  "The danger is with that I could be asking a really stupid question, which might tell them we have no idea of the underlying mechanism and are trying to fake it."

  "Then they'll know," Lee said with a shrug, "but we won't be any worse off than if we didn't give it a try," she said. After a little thought she added, "Have the third Mother work it into the conversation. Ask if they can turn it up a little to Derf standard. They apparently can't read her and if they try to blow her off with a lie she'll probably know. She isn't a technical person either and if her question seems silly to them she can honestly say she'd an executive and a cook, but not an engineer or a techie."

  "There's still no hint that they have nuclear explosives?" Gordon asked.

  "We touched on power generation. They found it interesting we use a helium 3 – deuterium reaction because they use deuterium – deuterium. They were aware of the higher energy reaction but decided not to build the infrastructure for helium 3. When we mentioned that we used fission reactions for power while still planet bound, they said they too experimented with that early on and dropped it because of the difficulties with waste and because of the short life of mechanical components under high radiation and decommissioning expenses. Nobody has ever hinted they conceived how to assemble an all consuming prompt neutron super-critical mass," Prosperity said.

  "Isn't a simple fission bomb pretty obvious?" Lee asked. "I thought it was 1940s technology."

  "Everything is easy in hind-sight. There was nothing simple or easy about the circumstances of humans inventing it in the 1940s," Prosperity told her. "They didn't produce nuclear reactors and then accumulate experience about nuclear engineering until eventually they knew enough to produce a nuclear explosive. They were in a global war of survival and the explosives came first with little thought to other applications until after. Some of the first reactors to make plutonium were set on a river for coolant and they just discarded the power as waste heat dumped in the river. The production of the weapons took a great deal of the national economy in a country already paying for a worldwide war. They literally built entire new towns to hold all the workers and vast machinery. Look up 'Oak Ridge' on the portion of the web we haven't released to them. It wasn't something that would have happened in peacetime."

  "And the Badgers and Bills are more peaceable than us?" Lee asked. She didn't seem convinced.

  "I can't swear to that, but their wars and technology advanced at different rates than Humans. That resulted in quite a different history. Badgers had a world government before they had a war like Humans had in 1914, the First World War. Their last war that created a world government had a few submarines but no armored tanks or heavier that air war planes. The submarines were horrible death traps really. They just barely developed repeating firearms before it was over. They never had a mechanized war like WWI, which a lot of historians would tell you was just a precursor to World War Two, or what they call the First Atomic War now," Prosperity said.

  "I could argue Derf are more peaceable because we never had worldwide wars," Thor objected.

  "So by the time they could have built them... " Lee prompted Prosperity to finish up before Thor side tracked him..

  "They had no need. Especially no incentive to spend that huge of a fortune to do so. And the limited fission tech they did develop never had a need to produce the highly enriched uranium or huge quantities of plutonium that you need for a nuclear kernel. Even if some Badger ever visualized the theoretical possibility of assembling a supercritical mass so quickly that the prompt neutron cascade consumed all the nuclear fuel before the device could disassemble itself – the stuff wasn't laying around to try it. And if you didn't have somebody at hand you were keen to drop the thing on why would you go to the expense? At that tech level it isn't a trivial exercise to assemble uranium, and plutonium requires much faster assembly not to be a dud. Why would they spend that kind of money and risk the hazards of what they already saw as a dangerous and dirty technology to go blow a crater in a desert somewhere with no enemy to use it on?"

  "So if they never had a simple fission weapon they'd have not a clue how we progressed t
o explosive fusion or use it to pump an x-ray laser?" Lee asked.

  "No, neither would gamma enhanced weapons for area EMP or neutron bombs get developed."

  "Have you told them we can run on tritium if we wish too?" Gordon wondered.

  "It didn't seem necessary to inform them, no," Prosperity said.

  "Well, it's amazing how different minds arrive at different solutions," Thor said.

  "The Derf didn't have nuclear power either did they," Lee asked Thor.

  "No, but we did have an atomic theory of matter. And we had x-rays, but never used them to the extent Humans did. We had some of the elements of relativity, but quantum theory was just way out there to us. We weren't sure you weren't pulling a joke on us to see if we'd believe it at first."

  "The Hinth didn't either," Gordon said. Perhaps a little defensively.

  "A lot of Humans still can't bend their heads around quantum theory," Lee pointed out.

  "And yet these new races, well at least one of them, developed jump ships," Thor said.

  "The Biters also, independently, because they came in their own ships," Gordon added.

  "They are also behind in electronics," Prosperity revealed. "They have the multi-component chip, but they require a whole board of them to do what one smaller device does for us. When they saw me using my pad to do what is high end machine functions to them they freaked. I suspect their superior memory and lightening fast calculation retarded their development, because they didn't need them as badly as us. But it also means they still don't need them as much as we do. They seemed more impressed with the better graphics that more computing power allowed, than the math and analysis."

  "When we spoke with Talker and Trader they were incredulous that we'd start a project to Terraform a world, knowing it wouldn't be finished for generations," Lee told Prosperity.

  "Quite a contrast with the Bunnies, isn't it? Who have been single mindedly digging at those mountains for thousands of years." Gordon said. "They'd drop a single ship on a world, put a few clumps of crab grass and kudzu out to start a biosphere, and come back in a few millennia."

  "Yes, but I'd count them fanatics," Thor said.

  "It'll be interesting to see how that shook out, if we can stop there again," Lee agreed.

  "We should introduce the Bunnies and the Biters," Thor said, with an evil smile. "They deserve each other."

  "Do you have anything to say for yourselves foul grass eaters?" Lee said in her best deep voice. "Yes, lean over and take the Teen's collar slave!" She sat and laughed at her own humor.

  * * *

  The Sharp Claws and Roadrunner popped into existence together in the next major system shown on the Badgers chart. It had their numerical designation of 78. The Badger ship appeared simultaneously. Or at least close enough to it that they could have jumped in formation. The Captain of the Badger vessel invited them to call him Fussy. That strange a name should qualify him to be an honorary Fargoer. The vessel he translated as Dart, which when they asked, did indeed turn out to be a small finned projectile with a pointy nose but an ancient weapon of war. He supplied a picture from his files and was amused to get a picture back of Humans playing darts at a bar.

  The world ahead of them was another Badger world, but they were told with a heavy Bills presence. When asked why, they said the climate was more to the Bills liking, hot and humid, it being a sterile water world. They still had to wear a mask for oxygen, but otherwise it didn't require suits. They had mining operations on the surface as well as out-system. This star system had been populated long enough to have a space station around the water world, as well as one of the gas giants.

  The numbers matched the chart, which made the Little Fleet crews happy. There was a bit more traffic than the world they'd left, but nothing like say, Earth.

  "Do you wish to go examine the station or orbit the world?" Fussy asked.

  "No, just hail them for us as we pass through and let us swing around the star and go to the your system number 76," Chance Ochocinco requested. "Since it is uninhabited let us plan on proceeding then to System 69. I'm sending you course information. We should cross this system and exit in a bit more than eleven hours."

  "76 is not permanently inhabited, but we might see cross traffic," Fussy warned him.

  "Yes, the Sharp Claws saw some of your cross traffic transiting the system we now know you have labeled as 71 on your chart. We didn't see any facilities there either."

  "Ah, so you didn't come straight in, hmm? You poked around us a bit and sized us up before popping in?" Fussy said.

  "Certainly, wouldn't you?" Chance asked.

  "Perhaps, or just quietly withdraw and go tell my superiors," Fussy admitted. "But then we run unarmed vessels."

  "Would you go armed if you had the choice?" Chance asked, very interested.

  "It isn't my decision," Fussy informed him, then... "Before the Biters I would have said no."

  Despite the disclaimer that seemed pretty clear to Chance.

  "I can imagine much worse than the Biters," Fat Ortega, lurking on the conversation, told them. Fussy didn't comment on that.

  * * *

  Prosperity and the third Mother were back at the High Hopes after another day of negotiations with the Badgers. They came back earlier today, deciding to eat supper on the ship and foregoing a social hour after their formal talks.

  "The translation software is much better," Madonna, the Third Mother reported. "It structures the grammar much more naturally and gets uncommon tenses correctly."

  "But it still isn't to the point we can speak subtly," Prosperity added.

  "Well, I wasn't planning on sweet-talking a Badger for marriage, or attempting to discuss the finer parts of theology," Gordon retorted.

  "I believe, that today what they were dancing around asking, was on what terms we'd hire out to them as mercenaries," the Third Mother told Gordon. "I'd have sooner entertained an offer of marriage."

  "Did you tell them, I'm not that sort of girl?" Lee asked, through bared teeth.

  "Honestly, I have to say it might have been our fault," Madonna allowed. "Perhaps we should not have offered protection to the Dart accompanying our vessels. It may have given them the idea."

  Lee considered that, head cocked over, lips set hard. "Crud..."

  "I think they might have been more outspoken, but they don't really understand how we defeated the Biters ship. They dropped a few hints about that too."

  "It happened right out in the open, in line of sight from the station. They knew they were coming at us aggressively, so something might happen. How could they not see?" Lee asked the Third Mum.

  "That's what I asked a couple of the instrument techs and the scan officer. They expressed no surprise that the Badgers, or others, would fail to have sensors looking at us with the right settings to capture what was happening. We have sensors for nuclear explosions, because we know for what to watch and have an interest. But what if you've never seen a nuke go off? We know for what sort of flash to watch. They'd have no expectation of such a brief, bright light. Their sensors are likely set to see and analyze a plasma drive or chemical detonations."

  "Wouldn't a nuke going off emit light on the frequencies they'd be watching too?" Lee asked.

  "Yes, but all they'd record is an intense light of much shorter than their usual scanning interval and more intense than the highest level of their metering range. It really wouldn't give them the detailed information we know to look for, to compute the actual energy release of the device, the sort of kernel it used and if it had a fusion boost. We can often get enough of a spectrum to know what sort of housing it was in or if it was used as an x-ray pump. It might take a number of tries before they could get the parameters down just right to really figure out what is happening."

  "Let's hope they don't see a whole bunch of them going off to refine it," Lee said.

  "They will just know we have something totally different than they know how to make." Thor said.

  "For a little
while," Prosperity reminded them. "If they are going to visit our worlds and have free access to our public data nets and libraries they'll know about nuclear weapons very quickly. There is enough public information to build simple weapons. And do you want to be the one to tell the Fargoers they can't sell them any?"

  "Good point," Gordon allowed. "It will take them awhile to make more sophisticated devices, like x-heads for missiles, but they will in time."

  "Having all the support tech such as battle software, electronic countermeasures and interception systems will take a long time," Madonna said. "Even among our worlds, some are always just a little ahead of others. A small advantage means life or death in such weaponry."

  "Nobody seemed concerned to keep the Hinth or Derf from learning about nukes, or other exotic Earth weapons when we met," Thor pointed out.

  "Again, it's in the public domain so thoroughly you'd have to close off the border and refuse to allow them to visit our spaces. You'd have to prohibit all trade and cultural exchange, because somebody is going to refer to them if only in an off-hand historical way. I mean, the First Atomic War on Earth was before Humans even attained Earth orbit. You'd have to refuse them all our video and history books. And all for nothing if they keep seeing us use them. They'll start altering their instrumentation and figure it out eventually," Prosperity said. "I'm sure bright people figured that out how futile that would be quickly when they met the Hinth and Derf too, just like we are now."

  "I don't have a deep gut feeling that the Badgers are war-like and skillfully covering it up to us. The others...probably not either. But the Biters are not folk I want to see have nukes," Gordon said. "Not even simple ones. I can see where the Badgers would want to hire us for protection against them, but I don't want to arm them as an alternative either."

  "But, you don't need to sell them nukes to arm them against the Biters," Lee said. "Just sell them some stuff with better range and penetration aids than the Biters have, but conventional explosives."