“The simple answer is that we can put more power plants in a war vessels, and our archives have records of experiments tried with 16 power plants in a war vessel and even odd ball numbers such as 12 and 14 power plants. The issue boils down to cost v/s benefit which determines the optimum design. Other than the cost of building a power plant and the space constraints on a war vessels, both of which are not inconsiderable, the biggest issue is maintenance.
“The power plant is the one class of equipment that works nonstop throughout the entire lifetime of a vessel. Although they do not have any moving parts, the power plant is being continuously bombarded with high energy particles inside, along with a fair amount of radiation. This takes its toll and over a period of time wears down the power plant. So the builders are continuously maintaining the power plant on a vessel. The higher the number of power plants, the greater is the maintenance task. It has been found over millions of cycles of operations on our war vessels that eight is the optimum number which the builders on a war vessel can maintain properly without exhausting themselves, running out of spares or neglecting the maintenance.
“Whatever I have told you is not just validated by our experience, but by those of the Ka-Baal as well. From the analysis of their engine signature, we know that their war vessels also have eight outlets, which should translate to eight power plants, and the size of those power plants are similar to that of ours, at least in the war vessels previously encountered because they gave similar amount of thrust and hence acceleration as our war vessels.
“Even in this assault on our core worlds, the Ka-Let war vessels are equipped with eight engines, which is apparent from the eight streams of emission of their thrusters. What has changed though, is the nature of those emissions. The spectral analysis reveals that the signature of those engines have changed subtly, but more importantly, the output of those engines have increased drastically. The ion plasma signature of these new engines are now identical to those of the Ka-Let war vessels we had fought in our history. I am not going to get into speculation about how that may be so. There are enough speculations on that front floating around.
“What is evident is that the Ka-Baal have changed their engine technology in the middle of a war, which our beings would have never done. Either the Ka-Baal are foolishly reckless in putting untried technology in their frontline war vessels, or have some amount of proven confidence in the design. Whatever may be the case, the reality is that this new engine gives the Ka-Baal warships a rate of acceleration, which our warships cannot hope to match.” Seer Taste of Solidarity finished his deposition and yielded back to Seer Taste of Domination.
Domination continued his briefing to the council. “Let me brief this council of the treachery in the Kalshuk system that the Grand Coalition fleet, and the Warmaster Seer Taste of Resolve faced. This had never happened in the history of our beings! As a warrior, I cannot even begin to imagine how to go about conducting our operations, if we cannot trust our own beings in the future. This is what we need to discuss and find a solution in this council.”
The Grand Council debated for a long time, but there wasn’t anything they could realistically do about past or future potential treachery. A slow realization dawned amongst the beings that the Ka-Baal were slowly tearing their beings apart, not just militarily by from the core and essence of what it meant to be a being!
Chapter XXX
Long Grind
World #4
2166
Charlie Shens hated this run. Charlie corrected himself. This was not a run, it was a damn mistake! It was a mistake he had committed. A mistake that was going to waste a significant part of his adult life! When Charlie had boarded this damn ship, so many years ago, he was a young and ambitious man willing to strike out into the unknown, to make a name and a fortune for himself. He wasn’t the emotionally attached kind of a person, and in any case he wouldn’t miss his friends or relatives back on Earth. Charlie was sure that the feeling was mutual. With no significant ties to keep him on Earth, he had boarded this ship, MV Peerless, on a long and possibly one way journey towards potential adventure and fortune.
Although the total time Charlie had been awake on this ship was less than a year, and thus had aged biologically by a similar amount. He felt as if he had spent all of the six years of the journey of the ship awake. He hadn’t realized how tedious and boring a long journey like this could be. He felt like the ship was closing in on him, and it felt like his tomb. Charlie was looking forwards to getting off the damn ship in two weeks’ time.
One part of his brain kept telling him that the moon he was going to, was no vacation paradise. It was a dark frozen world on the surface, and only slightly warmer but even darker netherworld below the surface, where most of the residents of the world lived. To make matters worse, this was still a contested world. The Shaitans hadn’t been completely beaten on this worlds. They still held out in pockets of the moon, and would occasionally launch raids into human and heretic controlled sectors.
Charlie was entering an active warzone, and he would have backbreaking and mind numbing work to do for five years, working long hours, before he got to see the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. That pot of gold, could turn out to be fools’ gold for all he knew, but Charlie had known the odds when he embarked on this journey. All the sacrifices that he had made, could all be for nothing. That was the nature of privateering assignments, and Charlie had gotten into it with full knowledge of the perils, including the fact that he might end up dead instead of rich.
A part of Charlie’s brain kept screaming for him to get out of this tin can on to terra firma. Anything, even a dark and cold world, was better than being stuck in an enclosed vessel for six years. Humans were just not meant for such an environment. He wondered what kind of discipline it took for the crew of the USC to endure such long missions, sometimes exceeding a decade. He was glad that he had been rejected by the USC service board as a teenager, otherwise he might have been forced to make such long journeys. Here he was however, making exactly such a long journey. Fate sometimes played cruel jokes on people, especially on him, Charlie thought.
Charlie Shens was one of the first of his kind. A space privateer. He wouldn’t be the last. In fact, human expansion into the furthest reaches of space would be powered by the likes of Charlie over the next thousand years. Such privateers would form the second wave of human settlement into any part of space that humanity expanded into, after the initial exploration or conquest by the military, primarily USC. Space privateers were the pioneers who would make a world and a sector of space truly a part of the human empire. They would settle and make the worlds more human friendly. They would build infrastructure, provide basic amenities, and endure hardship during the early days, so that later immigrants could find a livable place worth migrating to.
Many of those privateers reaped rich dividends for the risks and the hardships endured, as they and many generation of their descendants would live the lives of unimaginable wealth, from the land and resources they got to own on new worlds. Like any venture, more so for a risky venture of being a privateer, not all who struck out as a privateer made it big in life. Some ended up in worlds which were not viable, or only marginally viable, while others ended up dead in some cold dark world. Yet, every generation would throw up numerous young men, and a few women, who would take that chance, and take the boat into the dark void of space in search of fame and fortune.
Like any startup business, the privateering enterprise needed seed capital, which wasn’t insubstantial. First of all, one couldn’t just decide to become a privateer and take off to any world that caught their fancy. It wasn’t just the incredible costs of spaceships. Finance was the second hurdle. The first hurdle any privateer had to cross was politico-legal.
All worlds, its land and resources outside Earth, that the humans conquered or discovered, were technically owned by the nations of Earth through USC. Those nations’ governments had financially supported the USC for the
first five decades of its existence as a matter of survival of the human species, despite the fact that it had stretched the budgets of the governments thin. After the Alpha Shaitan campaign and its subsequent conquest, those nations realized that conquered systems could generate revenue and at the least pay back some of the expense incurred on the conquests.
It had all started with the recruitment of settler marines. These were desperate humans who were lured to fight and die in a dark and dismal world in exchange of land grants. Despite pessimistic expectations, there were more settler marine recruit applications than was ever required. USC figured out that the land and resources even in a dark moon like Alpha Shaitan had value. Other than the initial settler marines, who paid for the land with their blood, sweat, tears and their lives, a lot of the land was slowly parceled out on long lease to corporations. Initial parcels of land and resources went cheap because the world lacked infrastructure, which needed to be developed by whoever leased land. As those initial settlers developed the worlds, infrastructure and comfort level in the world increased, the rest of the land parcels became more valuable, making increasingly higher sums of money for USC and the nations. It was just like any real estate business back on Earth.
Initially not many resources were worth carting back to Earth, but as new discoveries were made many resources and minerals were found in concentrations that made it worthwhile to cart them back to Earth, especially when mule trains supplying materials to the colonies were returning empty back to Earth. The first such discovery had been the startlingly high concentration of radioactive elements like Uranium U235, Thorium and Polonium on the moon AS-d in Alpha Shaitan. The Shaitan wars had suddenly caused a surge in the demand for nuclear weapons, which couldn’t be met by all of the nuclear stockpile that humans had accumulated in the twentieth century. At the time Charlie Shens was reaching Shaitan World #4, nearly half of all USC missiles were made out of radioactive material mined in Alpha Shaitan, and that proportion was only slated to increase as the Earth native nuclear stockpile decreased.
As the Shaitan wars ground on, and humans slowly started wresting control of systems from the Shaitans one by one, more such discoveries were made, and more worlds suited for human habitation were discovered. Beta Shaitan may not have been suitable for human habitation because Dante was hellish in more ways than one, including its gravity, but there were other Shaitan worlds which were far more suitable for human habitation. World #8 was a fair place for humans to live, but it was World #4, where Charlie Shens was about to disembark, which was by far the most promising of all the newly discovered worlds.
With 80% of Earth’s gravity, and an abundance of Water, it was the best habitable world that humans had found outside of Earth. Although the surface was frozen ice, there was abundant running water just below the surface due to the internal heat. The internal heat on this world came from radioactive decay at the core, just like on Earth, and not from the squishing of the planet. This meant that the planet’s surface structure was extremely stable, with very few earthquakes, making the underground structures far safer than on most other Shaitan worlds. The best feature of the world was that the indigenous microbes on this world were hyperactive. They used the heat of the core, ate the calcium and carbon laden rocks and released copious amounts of oxygen. This ensured that this world had a far richer mix of breathable oxygen than Earth, even though the atmospheric pressure was slightly lower than Earth.
The icing on the cake, as far as World #4 was concerned was the richness of mineral seams found underground. As the microbes ate through the rocks of World #4, carving out tunnels, which through the eons were broadened by running water, it exposed rich mineral seams of gold, ruby and every other conceivable mineral of value. The minerals that made this world particularly valuable were the high concentration of rare earths. These were used extensively in all kinds of electronics since the late twentieth century, and all easily mineable rare earths on planet Earth had been exhausted.
It was with World #4, that the governments of the nations had started an experiment in funding the Shaitan wars, which would lay out the template of financing the future human expansion into the galaxy. Despite the successes of the USC, the collective finances of the nations of Earth were being stretched to their limits. With the Shaitan forces on the defensive, the only constraint that humans faced in bringing the war to a quick and successful conclusion was the availability of money.
The amount of money being generated from Alpha Shaitan and other conquered territory was miniscule compared to what was being spent on the USC to prosecute the Shaitan wars, which in itself was inadequate. At the current rate, humans could take another century before they could reach the furthest of the Shaitan worlds and ensure that the threat from the Shaitans had been eliminated once and for all. It might give the Shaitans time to regroup and reorganize, which was definitely not acceptable. The Shaitans were on the run, and this was the best time to finish the job.
So civilian help was solicited and incentives given, not just to settle and develop a world after it had been conquered, but in the conquest of the world itself. Civilian capital and civilian industry was invited to join the war effort directly in a supporting role, to bolster the efforts of the USC. Civilians were invited with the promise of a share of the spoils on World #4, to support the USC in its campaign by hauling supplies, setting up and maintaining infrastructure on the part of the surface already captured, as well as in the space. This freed the USC resources to concentrate on what only the military could do, fight!
Not any Tom-Dick-and-Harry could support the USC at a forwards campaign theater over a light year away from Earth. The kind of resources a private organization would require to run such an operations would be immense. Such an organization would need to sink in enormous capital to acquire the latest ships, which were capable of making that journey in a few years’ time reliably. The USC would either have to sell such ships to the organization, or the organization would have to order such a ship from one of the yards owned by the governments. Those supply ships would have to be manned, stocked and maintained.
After all that expense, the organization would not be paid in cash on delivery. Instead, the organizations would be given lease title to land and resource parcels on world #4, which couldn’t be exploited immediately because the world was still a war zone. Such an enterprise could only be done by organizations and collective of individuals who had deep pockets, who could afford to sink in tens of billions of dollars and then wait decades for a return. It wasn’t the kind of venture an adventurous individual could do all by themselves, however wealthy they might have been.
Thus when such contracts and tenders were floated by USC and the governments of the nations, they were bagged by huge multinational corporations or large private equity firms or special interest hedge funds. These were controlled by wealthy fat cats, who could wait for their investments to give them fantastic returns after a decade or so. These large corporations had one major problem in handling such contracts though. It was a human resource problem.
Obviously such fat cats wouldn’t leave their luxurious lives on Earth to embark on a journey of hardship in a bleak and dark world. They had to employ people to man and maintain those ships. Engineers, workers and other support staff had to be hired, who would go to these dangerous worlds, still being fought over, to build support infrastructure and then maintain them for years at ends. The risk of being killed while working and living just behind the frontlines in the hostile environment of an alien world, was very real in those jobs.
Needless to say, it was next to impossible for the organizations to find skilled workforce willing to take up such a job. No amount of money was worth the risk of dying in an alien moon far from Earth. Even if one returned back alive, it would be after a job assignment that would last at least five waking years, to make the cost of the trip of the personnel worthwhile. By the time the worker returns though, as much as fifteen to twenty years would have elapsed on Earth, and
the returning worker would find all his or her ties and relations severed by then.
Even if someone didn’t care about the ties back on Earth, the huge amounts of money offered by the corporations were of no use on the moons that they would go to. There were very little creature comforts available there, and nothing to spend the money on. Very few would have to patience to wait to return back to Earth after such a long tour to spend their money. If they returned back in the first place, that is!
The corporations, with the blessings of the governments, had a solution to this human resource problem. It was a solution that was borrowed from history – it was the institution of the privateer. It was an old solution to an age old problem, last used by governments over five hundred years prior. When the governments of England and France were financially stretched to monitor and control the shipping lanes across the Atlantic from pirates and rival government navies, they turned to privateers. Many ambitious and ruthless adventurers were attracted to the profession of privateering then, and it was no different in the twenty second century.
Charlie may not have been the brightest in his class, and he may not have a moral compass that always pointed north, but he was burning with ambition. He was willing to do almost anything to make it big in life, and he didn’t care about his ties back on Earth. In short an ideal candidate to be a privateer. All that the corporation had to do was to promise Charlie a part of the land grants. For most privateers, this was a one way trip and they intended to settle on the world they went to, working their land for whatever resources that could be obtained from them.
Charlie was looking forward to building his own mansion on World #4 once he got his land grant. He was a specialized low gravity construction worker, who had training and experience in construction on the Moon. He had spent almost two years as a construction contractor on the Axis mining complex on the Moon, before applying for a job as a privateer. He and all of his buddies onboard MV Peerless were going to World #4 with a very specific task given to them by the USC – lay the foundation for the largest human habitat envisaged outside the solar system.
Triumph & Defeat (Shaitan Wars Book 4) Page 42