He suddenly looked confused. Smythe slapped him on the back and laughed, saying, “That will boil your brain, my friend.”
“Whatever we’re seeing, the ship clearly moved through it. How it did that without time is beyond me. No . . . wait, it’s always the present there. Time moves right along with the ship. Ugh.”
“I always imagined other dimensions being like capsules around us,” Cass said. “And each capsule would have different characteristics. This looks like it’s everywhere.”
Silence met this observation. No one had an answer. “More testing,” Nessaka mumbled, his eyes lighting up at the prospect. “This particular dimension seems to manifest itself in color.”
“To our probes,” Smythe corrected him. “And the magnetic probe got no response. That will take a little analysis, I’m afraid.”
“I still have more tests to run,” Cass said.
Nessaka looked to Smythe with a frown. “We should think about this before going back out, don’t you agree?”
“I do. I have more questions than I have answers at the moment.” He clapped Cass on the back, saying, “Good job, young man.”
Gertie stepped closer to the recording and studied several tiny but bright spots of color that showed in a few places. “Could these be ships?” she wondered.
Douglas had come in half way through the presentation. He was a lot less curious about equations and research than he was focused on the mission. “How far are we seeing?” he wanted to know.
Gertie turned to him. “The appropriate question at this point is what are we seeing?”
“Looks pretty clear to me. Those have to be stars. If so, how far can we see?”
“My dear,” Gertie answered, “They might be stars, but we don’t know yet. Give us some time, and maybe a higher priority for the project. We have a lot of work to do on this.”
“Give me a plan, but it has to include continuing your work on existing projects.”
“Give us the resources, and you might be able to develop a new plan for your mission,” she parried with a grin.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Several more weeks went by during which scientists proved that the images matched precisely with the positions of known stars. The colors of the stars in the images appeared to relate to the energy levels of those suns. Speculation ran rampant that with such knowledge it might be possible to predict the effects those suns would have on the flight path of the scout. Further analysis proved the speculation to be true. Computers modeled various values for the colors against previous jumps the ship had made. Eventually, a perfect match resulted that predicted the path the ship had actually taken.
This was a very major discovery. It was almost, but not quite, time to send this knowledge back to Ariall. Cass supervised a crew of engineers and craftsmen who installed new and additional probes, twelve in all, and the motors driving the probes could extend and retract the probes much more quickly. When the ship went back out, Cass took Smythe and a full crew with him.
“This isn’t running experiments in a laboratory,” Cass cautioned Smythe. “We’re inside the experiment. This is potentially dangerous stuff. We have a list of things to do, a list that you and your buddies carefully considered. We don’t go off that list without my okay. Got it?”
“I do, indeed,” Smythe answered in his jovial manner. “As a scientist, I’ve learned the value of discipline. Our findings will be more meaningful if we stick to the program. Besides, I want to come back as much as you do.”
The mission took two weeks of hard work. Most of the effort focused on meticulously calibrating the probes. When they returned to the baseship, the scientists had months of work ahead of them to decipher the results. Douglas decided it was time to get the knowledge back to Ariall where it could be more fully studied. He dispatched the experimental scout ship back to Ariall that very day, but he kept Cass on the baseship in case there was more testing to do.
When the next group of Nessaka’s scouts returned with hundreds of standard observations—the same observations they had been making all along—the scientists eagerly studied the recordings, not to determine what, if anything, the ships had seen, but to determine if these ships had shown up on the test recordings Cass had made. They had. Douglas and the An’Atee suddenly had a much more effective way of tracking the Oort. The fact that they might be able to navigate more efficiently only added to that improvement.
The scientists determined that they could accurately ascertain the position of stars out to about thirty light years, a phenomenal volume of space. Douglas could plan a whole new strategy. The engineers informed him that, with a maximum effort, they could equip all the ships with this new system in about six months, including the baseship. Douglas ordered them to proceed with all haste, and he brought both of his prime ships back from their remote missions for modification. The need now was to stay together. With the volume of space they could survey from just one ship, the bigger issue was, to him, to prevent getting carried away. It would be all too easy to become overconfident, to perhaps even become aggressive. As much as he wanted to do just that, his mission demanded that he exercise stealth.
He turned to Smythe again. “Remember our conversation about navigating while under StarDrive? Have you gotten anywhere with it?”
Smythe had to think hard. He had been buried in theories trying to determine just what they were seeing in this other dimension, and his thoughts were light-years away from Douglas’ mission. He blinked a few times, then seemed to remember. “Oh, that. Theoretically, child’s play.”
Douglas waited for further explanation, but he had to prod Smythe who appeared to be mentally returning to his pet project. “What do you mean, theoretically?”
“The field this ship generates is spherical,” Smythe said offhandedly, shrugging as if the subject was not important. “The An’Atee have not, to the best of my knowledge, ever tried to shape it. In theory, we should be able to shape it, and we should be able to vary that shape. Doing so should result in directional changes.”
“How do we do that?”
“The field is naturally spherical. It should not be too difficult to elongate the field by placing tuning mechanisms into an elliptical rather than spherical pattern. Just move them.”
“And you’re just telling me this now? Why didn’t you say something sooner?”
“Because at the time, there was no means for determining which new direction you wanted to go. Then I forgot about it. Sorry,” he said without embarrassment.
“Can you tear yourself away from whatever it is you’re doing to talk with the rest of the staff about this?”
“Of course, Admiral. And I am truly sorry I forgot.”
What Smythe proposed to do seemed simple on the surface, but it was not. Messing with the StarDrive field frightened the scientists, and the engineers put their foot down with a resounding no. Compared to what they had just done, this was truly playing with fire. The StarDrive had worked well for hundreds of years. It was almost a sacrilege to consider changing it. Such tinkering should be planned and executed by scientists on Ariall.
Douglas agreed with the last part of their argument, but if such a system was possible, no one needed it more than he did. If he could navigate, he could stay under StarDrive for longer periods of time, thereby increasing the chances of catching an Oort with its StarDrive on. He might even be able to follow it. The baseship could even become the primary scout, feeding information directly to the scientists without having to send the scouts back and forth.
He argued hard and won, but not until receiving assurances from the scientists that the baseship would not be anywhere in the vicinity of the test ship when it jumped. Smythe did not share their concern, but even he could not say with certainty what new characteristics the field would take on when they reshaped it.
So great was everyone’s concern that the engineers even asked Smythe to participate in the design of the steering mechanism. Should the units that tuned the field
into its spherical shape be moved a lot or a little? Once they modified the field, could they return it to normal? Clearly lots of experimentation lay ahead of them, but Douglas was determined to try, even if it meant placing his mission on hold for a while. This had the potential of exponentially improving the pace of his mission.
The factories went to work. Craftsmen built more sets of the sensors Cass had helped develop, then they began installing them on the scouts. When all the scouts were modified, they would install them on the prime ships and the baseship.
The first scout to receive the sensor package became the test bed for the StarDrive modifications. Moving the field controllers was not particularly challenging, though the accuracy of those movements had to be precise. Consideration was given to just moving a few tuners, but Smythe balked at the idea. If the field was not spherical, it should always be a mathematically perfect ellipse. The engineers groaned and got down to work designing a new computer to control the adjustments. There was no other way to do it and keep the shape mathematically perfect.
Douglas was amazed to discover that such work could be performed aboard a ship in space rather than in a major ship-building facility on Ariall, but this was precisely what the An’Atee had designed baseships to do: support explorers who could and did encounter problems that had not been foreseen. Surprisingly, the project did not particularly tax the resources of the ship, unless one considered the scientific and engineering staffs a resource, which of course they were. Those two groups were severely taxed.
They developed a test program for the scout and sent Cass Ayker back out. When he returned, he reported that the ship had, indeed, changed its course while under StarDrive, but not enough to matter. The engineers, muttering under their breaths, adjusted the program to allow more shaping of the field. This time, Cass reported a noticeable course change. He set out again with even more latitude given to the tuners, and the results were as hoped. It appeared that so long as the field was kept in a perfect elliptical form, he could steer the ship.
The engineers went back to work to improve the system, to make it fail-safe. It was the only way the An’Atee were willing to go into space. Unlike the Harbok, they demanded that their ships always perform perfectly.
Douglas was faced with a grave decision. Should he modify the baseship? A disaster aboard the baseship would have intolerable consequences. He agonized, and Gertie agonized at his side. Could the mission move forward with the baseship unmodified? It could, but it would not be able to keep up with the other ships of his fleet. Did he still need the baseship? The baseship had never been expected to go into combat, but if his fleet came under attack, the baseship could provide incredible support, and it was the center of the snowflake if they had to use the StarDrive weapon.
Then he got to wondering if it would even be possible to use the StarDrive weapon in the new configuration. The engineers and scientists studied the issue and decided there would be no effect on that ability provided the fields aboard all ships were placed in their spherical shapes beforehand. Any other configuration presented untested and unknown consequences.
It was one of the hardest decisions of his career, but he was not willing to gamble with 75,000 lives. Still, he had spent a whole career making deliberate choices that kept his mission going forward, and that was part of the reason Grayson had given him this command. He decided he could safely modify and test prime ships by temporarily transferring their crews to the baseship, but the baseship crew was so large that it needed a planet to empty everyone out. The baseship would have to return to Ariall for modification and testing. He would have to get by with three prime ships for a while.
When the first prime ship passed its tests, he moved his flag from the baseship to it. He brought Gertie, Nessaka, Yarbo, Smythe, and several other project members with him.
Under normal circumstances, the ship’s computer did the actual flying while pilots monitored progress, but every pilot had to know how to manually fly the ship as well. Grayson was amazed when it was his turn to practice steering the prime ship through hyperspace. It felt a bit like flying a jet fighter. The stick in his left hand was completely responsive, sending signals to the shield tuners as quickly as his hand requested a change of course. It was, perhaps, a little more like flying a jumbo jet, the responses were not immediate or large, but it worked. They could leave further experimentation to An’Atee engineers on Ariall.
During the months of refitting, he and his planning staff had considered how to proceed with the new capabilities. The new plan called for taking all the scouts aboard their respective prime ships. The three prime ships would stay together—if they could. If they failed to stay together, they would rendezvous back where they had started and adjust the plan.
The baseship returned to Ariall, and the three prime ships set out on their mission. They spread out, really far out from each other, and on command activated their StarDrives for the agreed time period. The prime ships found that they had no trouble seeing and holding position on each other, and there were no apparent speed differences between the ships.
Back to the drawing board for Smythe. Was the rate of travel through hyperspace the same for all ships? If so, why?
At the end of the first jump, the ships dropped from hyperspace reasonably close together. They attempted a longer jump, then a longer one, but a problem soon manifested itself. The longer they stayed under StarDrive, the faster they went. After an hour, the pilots feared that they were losing control. Douglas dropped from hyper, then he had to wait while the other two prime ships did the same and found their way back to him. It took a week to regroup.
Okay, that set some parameters on the plan, he decided. The goal was to spend as much time in hyper as possible, all three ships at the same time. Each ship headed out to a starting point, then all of them activated their drives for the agreed upon amount of time. When the ships regrouped, they shared their surveillance results with Nessaka, then repeated the process just as the scouts had been doing.
Nessaka’s staff reviewed the data, but they did not anticipate discovering anything that the bridge crew had not seen. They could, however, more fully analyze the trajectories of any ships under StarDrive that showed up on the recordings.
And they found ships, many ships. Douglas continued jumping, gathering more information, while Nessaka’s staff processed that information. Before a month was out, they had determined two primary vectors for the Oort ships.
That gave them two potential targets to investigate. They could split up again, sending two prime ships to further track one set of vectors while the remaining prime ship followed the second lead, or they could stay together and work one lead. It was a problem with no right answer. Douglas decided to keep his fleet intact.
Within a week, they managed to get fairly close to an Oort ship and follow it for a few minutes. It dropped out of view, and Douglas immediately did the same. His prime ships, not knowing his intentions but quickly determining what he had done, did the same. They were now probably scattered over many light-minutes of space, but Douglas had anticipated this problem and provided a rendezvous point.
It took the Oort a full day to compute each jump. Douglas waited until the Oort disappeared into hyperspace again, then he and the rest of his fleet did the same. They weren’t fast enough—the Oort had already completed its jump by the time they began theirs. They regrouped during the fifteen-minute jump, then dropped from hyperspace as a unit. They crisscrossed the area they were in for another day, jumping as a group, and discovered another ship on a similar vector.
Douglas followed until it, too, dropped from hyper. He repeated the process for several jumps. During the last jump, the crew aboard the prime ship determined the Oort’s destination—they were approaching a star, and the planets circling the star were dimly visible even under StarDrive. Douglas hit the brakes, then repeated the process of gathering his fleet together once again. He called the prime ship captains over for a meeting.
They woul
d investigate the system, stay together, and they would utilize the cloaking device continuously. Communication between ships would only be via tightbeam. Each ship would be visible for a few moments after dropping from hyperspace, so each ship would spread its jumps a day apart from the others and join up as soon as they could. The scouts would remain aboard unless needed.
The fleet headed inbound and jumped to a point far outside the system to reduce the chances of discovery. The trip into the inner system took twelve weeks instead of the usual six.
Passive sensors were active aboard all ships, and scientific staffs worked long hours. The system consisted of seven planets and two asteroid belts. Most activity within the system was taking place on the second planet. Douglas vectored his ships above the plane of the ecliptic to avoid the belt of asteroids outside the second planet, then he reconsidered after discovering heavy ship activity within the belt. An outer planet, a gas giant, appeared to hold no interest to the Oort ships. Douglas brought his ships in behind it and used it as a shield. All 15 scouts from his three prime ships exited, everyone immediately re-cloaked, and two sections of scouts headed for the asteroid belts to investigate activity there. The rest of the fleet continued inbound to the second planet with the scouts in the lead.
They discovered a world settled by the rat-like creatures reported by Angie Tolland, creatures who had been taken over by the Oort. Douglas had to wonder what had transpired during that takeover. The two asteroid belts suggested that two planets might once have existed in those orbits. Surely the Oort did not have the ability to destroy planets? Or could the rat creatures have destroyed their own planets? He dearly would have loved to find out, but that would have to wait for another day.
Douglas and his scientists studied the planet for a month. The second planet was a hive of activity that appeared to be centered on ship construction. Many ships orbited the planet. They appeared lifeless, just following orbits that did not change. Was this a defensive shield around the planet like the Harbok had set in place around Haldor, or were these newly-built ships waiting for crews? He set his scientists to studying them to see if they could learn more about the ships. He was sorely tempted to send a boarding party, but he knew it would be too risky. Besides having to uncloak, any borders might find themselves in a firefight. Worse, they might bring spores or cells or something of that nature back to his ships that would allow the Oort among his own people.
Genesis Page 31