AL:ICE-9

by Charles Lamb

  After pausing to look around, Patti continued, “First of all, working backwards we all know Jake and the ALICEs whipped up some super radio bombs that kicked the NeHaw’s ass this last time, but not even Jake knew exactly why they worked. Even more to the point, we all had questions about how the original NeHaw crew died at first contact. There weren’t any super bombs used on them then?”

  “Next, at the end of the last engagement, we thought we knew where the NeHaw home world was, based on the reverse vector they used to transmit. That turned out instead to be home of one of the Races we just signed a treaty with, or so we think.”

  Milking the pause for all it was worth, Patti stared the room down before continuing, “And finally, why did the NeHaw send a battleship when every piece of evidence we had said that we should be seeing every ship from the adjacent sectors, the battleship was the longshot.”

  Jake glanced around the room at that point, noting his granddaughter may have a flair for the dramatic, but she had their attention.

  “Let’s start with the bombs. Jake, what gave you the idea for those?”

  Caught off guard, Jake quipped, “Sorry, I didn’t know this was group participation.”

  That brought a round of laughter and dropped the drama a notch or two.

  After Patti gave him a dirty look, he continued, “I noticed the speaker in the ceiling of an office I was working in, I then asked ALICE about it. No NeHaw ship was so equipped. From there she provided medical reports from the early dissections listing ruptured organs in the brains of the NeHaw corpses. The final link was in the early testing the NeHaw equipment, the researchers identified all the interactive consoles emitted Radio Frequency instead of Audio Frequency, or sound waves as we know them.”

  Jake took his own pause and then said, “We couldn’t nail down exactly what the right frequencies were so we created a multispectral device that we hoped would rupture those same organs.”

  Patti jumped in and offered at this point, “In our after action research, ALICE provided information associated with this same affects from earths past. Apparently, before the NeHaw attack, the world’s navies used sound wave equipment called sonar, to see underwater. Unfortunately these sound waves were so strong they would kill marine mammals, disrupting internal organs.”

  “I remember that!” Jake exclaimed, now positive that was what prompted his idea.

  “We were able to determine, that while the NeHaw do shield naturally occurring RF,” Patti continued, ignoring the outburst, “the magnitude of the explosions so close to the hull completely overpowered the shielding.”

  “But what about the first ship,” someone in the back asked, “there was nothing like that for them?”

  “I’m glad you asked that!” Patti replied, pointing to the speaker.

  That was so smooth, Jake was sure they were a plant!

  “What have we been discussing here? Naturally occurring RF. Yes the NeHaw knew we used RF on earth, yes they were shielded for it like we use sound dampening materials, but what was the difference?”

  While Patti paused looking around the room, Jake turned and rolled his eyes at Sara. Of course, no one would know this. He didn’t know the answer to this, but he gave her the moment.

  Then Patti slowly said, “H D R F. This was the time in human history where naturally occurring RF contained embedded high-density digital content. It carried four times the volume in a normal data stream, and the NeHaw were taking it in unfiltered. It fried their organs like putting 120 volts through a 12 volt system.”

  Jake wasn’t sure how many here would understand the analogy, but laughed to himself as it was her turn for the blank stares.

  “Alright, so we can now understand what happened to the first NeHaw ship and the RF bombs,” Patti continued, apparently not waiting for questions about the relevance of voltage, “so what about their home world?”

  “We presumed the NeHaw used point to point communications and thus once we knew which direction to look, we could find them. Turns out, it is not that simple. Even though they use light waves instead of sound waves, which travel much faster by the way, they still can’t reach the necessary distances in a timely fashion. What we learned from our new Treaty Partners is the NeHaw place Transmitter/Receiver/Repeater stations on every occupied world. No ship can communicate while in faster than light mode, but once they come out they immediately link with the closest receiver station. All communications relay from world to world until they reach their final destination.

  For those of you studying Computer Science, think of each planetary relay station as a router forming a huge MPLS cloud. Dropping any single node just reroutes the traffic. Whatever these Transmitter/Receiver/Repeater units use, our new allies didn’t have a word for, but they could explain how they worked. Apparently, once a station is set up, it immediately creates communication tunnels to the nearest existing stations. These tunnels can take years to establish, but once they are up, it’s like an AC power link. Rather than DC, where current has to continuously travel the circuit, it simply alternates back and forth at varying frequencies.”

  Jake could see some confused faces around the room, but before he could speak up, Patti offered, “Think of a solid pole between two people. If you push and pull one end of the pole, the push doesn’t travel the entire length, just the displacement travels. That gives them almost instant communications over great distances. And these things take no maintenance, the NeHaw just show up, set them up and leave, everyone on the occupied planets knows to stay clear of them.”

  “Finally,” Patti announced, “we have the battleship itself. This is actually a multi-issue event. First, we discovered that every time a NeHaw commander dies, his ship does a burst transmit of all relevant data at the time including video and statistical content. Why this didn’t seem to happen when the first exploration ship crashed is still a mystery, but we know the first two combat engagements definitely triggered this event. A burst from action one sent the NeHaw a log of a single human fighter ripping apart the cruiser bridge, killing her captain. Bursts from the three cruisers in action number two show a captured cruiser and several fighters ripping apart three NeHaw cruisers, killing their captains.”

  Pausing to take a much-needed breath, Patti glanced at Jake with a smile. She definitely loved this attention. She was so much like her great grandmother at this point, Jake thought.

  “The NeHaw now know we have weaponry they can’t yet defend against, so they sent the biggest thing in their fleet. We could have shot at that thing all day long and not stopped it without the RF bombs. So now, we know why they sent the battleship, but that begged another question. Why not send armored ships. I mean the cruisers hull can withstand a typical conventional 30 mm hit, but not the hypervelocity depleted uranium armor piercing rounds that Jake had in the rail guns. To defend against these would require significantly thickened hardened steel alloy plating.”

  “Again we were informed by our Treaty partners, faster than light won’t work with a ferrous metal hull. Turns out that if your ship is made of steel, the FTL field generators, those round cylinders on the outer edge of the cruisers, can’t create the necessary field to make it work. That’s why all the races the NeHaw consider modern, use energy weapons. Anything requiring ferrous metal prevents you from leaving your solar system.”

  “OH,” Patti exclaimed as if just remembering something “the stasis fields we use as shields, the NeHaw have nothing like them because we invented them here on Earth. Turns out, they are a derivative of the containment fields used in the exploration ship power generators. The passive nuclear reduction converters every ALICE facility uses as its main power source, works by placing a highly unstable radioactive core inside a containment field. As the material decays, it’s absorbed in the containment field and converted into oscillating electromagnetic energy. This energy in turn, is converted into electrical power. The more unstable the radioactive material is the better the power generation. Our scientists figured out tha
t the reason this works is the containment field actually creates the stasis effect, greatly reducing the rate of decay. This in turn provides a self-sustaining power source that lasts for as long as the core.

  For example, U234 naturally has a half-life of 245,500 years. Contained in stasis it would last almost forever. The stasis field doesn’t stop time, it just slows it way down. We altered the field generation systems and Voila, Stasis Field!”

  To Jake, that explained ALICE-1s laissez faire attitude way back when, when he had asked her about a failing power source. It was also the best news he had heard so far. The realization that we didn’t know where the NeHaw lived, we can’t take the rail-guns outside the solar system, and none of the ships they were building in Hawaii would ever be capable of travel faster than light was not encouraging. The one positive piece was, if the NeHaw didn’t know why the first ship crashed, their status, as a “death planet” was still intact.

  ----*----

  HeBak sat at the Communications Supervisor station he had operated for a very long time. Having reached the pinnacle of his career here, he had seen others come and go as they received promotions he was never destine to receive. Most of those promotions were due to family ties or treachery and guile. In a few cases, he was just happy to have survived their passing through his department.

  He had been witness to every report from every sector in NeHaw space, processing each as required and forwarding them to the appropriate departments. That is every report but the ones from a newly discovered little planet in Nu Tau Beta. He alone knew the real story surrounding the loss of the exploration vessel, crashed so many megacycles ago.

  His receipt of that first report, like so many others, was uneventful. He was preparing to process it as required when the geology data came up on his display. The world was a treasure trove of precious metals, not seen in NeHaw space in a very long time. They had drained so many of the occupied planets of resources, so long ago, as required by NeHaw expansion. It was only the remote location of this planet, which had left the world undiscovered for so long. He stripped the geology data from the analysis and buried the crash report in the archives as “lost in space”. His intent in altering the information was to return in his retirement and quietly siphon the undiscovered metals from under the inhabitant’s noses.

  Unfortunately, an automated long-range scanner, searching for the lost exploration ship, detected NeHaw technology on a planet not known to contain such. HeBak again altered the report content. He couldn’t actually delete the alert as they went straight to High Council, but he altered the associated report to his favor. HeBak needed this planet to stay off the Council radar, so he stated the planet was developing black market NeHaw technology. The planet was unevolved and was off limits due to an inhospitable environment. This stipulated there were to be no landings, and vaporization of the planet was forbidden. There were to be no actions that compromise the planetary value as a communications relay location or unskilled labor resource in the distant future.

  As such, action in the shape of a single cruiser, instructed not to engage the population, investigate the situation and if challenged, just to bomb the Technology out of existence. With the cruiser sent by the Council in faster than light, HeBak secretly sent a message directly to the planet. The message demanded the destruction of all NeHaw Technology and the return of the ship and crew. HeBak knew that with the inhabitants stirred up prior to their arrival, the ship’s captain would defend his ship and launch immediately, destroying a large part of the population and keeping his secret intact.

  This would mean no future worries of High Council investigations and HeBak would not need to sneak in when he was ready to retire. The surviving population would be devoid of any technology that might detect his presence. All his problems solved.

  However, this well-developed plan had completely disintegrated in the last series of reports. HeBak was not aware the cruiser captain had seeded the space around the planet with sensors after the bombing and left a Communications Unit on the fourth planet. While reports were completely under his control, alerts as before went directly to High Council.

  As with the first report, he altered the single cruiser engagement, making it appear a faulty bridge panel failed, evacuating the ship atmosphere and killing all aboard. In the second engagement, he had to be more creative, implying the NeHaw commander had gone rouge with the year’s tribute collection in the abandoned single cruisers hold. Attacking his own sector companions, he had rebelled, possibly convincing some to join him. All these events were not unfamiliar to the NeHaw, as HeBak had seen similar actions in reports of the past. The High Council tried to keep them quiet, but he was well aware of all the dirty laundry the Empire had to hide.

  He had hoped to buy time and delay any further High Council involvement, but in a surprise move, they immediately dispatched the newly deployed, yet unassigned, battleship to the sector. This was a bad timing issue for HeBak, as he had expected a several cycle delay. The expected behavior he had counted on was for the NeHaw to restructure the adjoining sectors to gather a sufficient force to deploy against the rogue commander. He had assumed the overwhelming force would destroy the upstarts and save his retirement.

  HeBak was disturbed beyond reason, as his retirement was in jeopardy. He had taken all his savings, a not inconsequential sum, and purchased a ship with all the automated mining equipment necessary to land and claim his prize. He had to figure out a way to subdue the usurping inhabitants and get the NeHaw High Council looking the other way again.

  What was even more disturbing to him were the rumors he was hearing of the other five species in Nu Tau Beta. Apparently, they were telling tales of the defeats in the three confrontations. Evidently, there were disturbances in other sectors based on these stories. If the truth got out and discovery of his altered reports became known, the leadership would execute him on the spot. The only bright side was the other uprisings might give him much needed time to address Nu Tau Beta himself.

  Chapter 4

  After Patti’s presentation was completed, and with all questions asked and answered as best as they could be, Jake, Sara, Patti, Linda, and Sandy all retired to Jake’s room. It was larger than most of theirs, but they really chose it more for Jake’s comfort as they could have gone anywhere. On the way to his room, they all gave Patti a bit of grief over her overly dramatic oration.

  “Really Patti,” Jake started, “it was great, but I was expecting more visuals and……”

  “Less you!” Sara completed with a laugh.

  Patti and Sara were very close. When Patti discovered her genetic relationship to Jake, Sara was the first person she confided in, besides her brother. Sara had guided her on how to approach Jake and the two became friends. That bond had grown stronger since.

  “That’s not what I was going to say,” Jake inserted before Patti could reply.

  “Oh yes it was,” Sandy contributed.

  “Look you guys,” Patti countered, “there really wasn’t a lot I could do for visuals, have any of you ever seen a video of a power containment field?”

  As they reached the door to Jake’s quarters, he asked, “OK, Patti, answer me this, do you even know what MPLS stands for?”

  Patti stopped dead in her tracks, the distinct look of panic on her face.

  “I thought not,” Jake said, answering his own question. With a laugh, he opened the door and guided her in while motioning for the others to follow, all joining in the laughter.

  Once everyone had grabbed their beverages of choice, that being wine for everyone but Jake, they all settled into seats in his sitting room. Jake was the first, grabbing one of the overstuffed chairs, as Sara had pointed him to it while handing him a soft drink, and saying, “no alcohol with the pain pills.” He was not a big drinker anyway, so there was no loss there.

  While all the other maneuvering was going on, Jake noted Sandy was wearing the same dress she had the first night she first came to him about the rotation. She l
ooked every bit as good in it now as she had then.

  With all the craziness of baby arrivals, the before and after of the battleship fight, the departure of the five Treaty ships and the recent incident in ALICE-4, any rotation activity had been all but halted over the last two months. Oh, he got the occasional whining of neglect from Becky, but the rest of the women had not uttered a peep. He wasn’t quite sure if he should feel insulted or flattered as that meant they either respected his space and need for focus or had found other entertainment.

  At that last thought, he actually laughed aloud. He was absolutely the last person on earth who could fault any of these women for finding another man. If anything, the fact that he was the father of their children had most likely condemned them to his exclusive company for the rest of their lives. If any of them should be so lucky as to find love, he would gladly dance at their wedding! Well, anyone but Sara that is.

  The laugh, however, had drawn the attention of the others.

  “What’s so funny?” Sandy asked as she settled in at the end of the couch next to Jake’s chair, tucking her bare legs under her, the movement expanding the gap exposing even more cleavage.

  Recovering quickly, Jake replied, “I just had a vision of two naked girls, both sprawled out on my bed in the next room.”

  As the others laughed and Sandy turned bright red, Patti blurted, “Multi-Protocol Label Switching!”

  “What?” Linda asked, confused.

  “MPLS” Jake offered with a bigger laugh while Patti nodded.

  For the next 30 minutes they all talked about anything but work, Linda glowing when Sara asked about the baby and then updating Jake on his daughter’s latest developments.