by Chris Hechtl
“Aye aye, sir,” the captain said. He nodded once to Jan and then took off stiffly.
“That was … mean,” Jan murmured.
Admiral Lewis looked at her briefly before he looked away. “Everyone has to have a first time. He'll do fine. And for the record,” he turned back to look at her, “we're not in this to win any popularity contests. We're here to win.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Good. Now, we need a captain and crew for the other ships. We're not accepting any volunteers unless they agree to some sort of training. On the job obviously, but I'm not trusting any critical posts to someone I don't know.”
“I wouldn't either, sir,” Jan replied.
“Good. Let's get started on that then, shall we?” he asked whimsically.
~~*^*~~
Doctor Seanex Irons shook his head as he noted some of his student's preoccupations. Just about everyone had an idea for a warship. The engineering simulation servers were booked solid, but somehow some people were slipping in the occasional project to run in the hopes of finding something they could market beyond their grad studies.
He got that they wanted to be reassured with a government job in the future. Not that the government was entirely too happy with the idea of a navy at the moment. When he got the call from several family members pushing for more family participation, he decided to get on board as well.
As an engineering exercise, he brought up a basic ship architecture program and tried it. He then pitched the idea of an extra credit project to his students. They had to design not only the basic ship, but the individual components to make it all successful. They also couldn't use any game engines, every part had to be rooted in the actual real world, fictional hyperspace modulators and gravity beams need not apply.
Those restrictions pared down the playing field considerably he noted. It also created a situation where people were actually thinking of the implications of a ship and its technology and calls to some of the other departments on parallel research and how new technologies might play a role in future design.
He got that. He got the idea of wanting something better than the off-the-shelf components; he really did. He just wasn't certain it was completely viable. But after comparing what his students were turning out to the paper studies from the navy that he'd gotten from a friend of a friend, he realized the navy needed all the help they could get.
He wouldn't mind some of the public funding too. Some of the paper studies being brooded about by the R&D firms were just that, paper studies. They had no intention of coming up with practical designs he knew just from reading some of their pitches.
Volunteers were still coming forward to build and to run the ships. He'd lost a couple promising students to their patriotic zeal. Some of the personnel were in the military as sailors running the sublight ships that ran between Earth and Mars moving troops and equipment.
When he got word of a conversion program for the existing sublight ships, he just shook his head in despair. “What?” Emily, one of his TA's asked.
“Idiots. They want to convert a freighter into a warship. I know they did that in the history books, but we're talking space! It's cheaper to build from scratch!”
Emily pursed her lips and then shrugged. “Try telling them that, Doc,” she said indifferently.
“I have, believe me I have,” he said in disgust. “I can't get through to anyone other than the navy publicist. I saw an article about people trying to engineer asteroids as armor or as a core component of the ship,” he said.
Emily blinked at him, then scowled. “Are they serious? Under acceleration it'd come apart! Unless they fuse it or use a rock asteroid, but still!”
“I know, I know,” Seanex said as he tried to put a call through to the navy again. “Damn!” he said as he hung up.
“Nothing?” Emily asked in sympathy.
“No. I don't know the players involved,” Seanex said as he looked up to the ceiling and rubbed his brow.
“They might think you are doing this for Lagroose Industries,” Emily warned.
“Don't even go there,” he growled as he opened his eyes to look at her.
After a long moment, he heard her cough delicately and then shuffle. He frowned as a new thought came to him. “I've got one more call I can place,” he said as he put a call into Trevor Hillman.
~~*^*~~
“I'm not much for tours, Doctor,” a familiar voice said as they strode through the building.
“I know you don't like them,” Seanex said soothingly. “But this is important,” he said as he led his guest into an office.
“I'm here as a courtesy to you and Trevor. But my time isn't without limits. Let's skip the dog and pony show and get to the nitty gritty,” Roman said as they entered Seanex's cluttered office. “You mentioned you have force multipliers and new tech. So?”
“I was going to demonstrate it actually, but you just said no dog and pony show,” Seanex said, a bit nettled about being thwarted in his plan. He'd wanted to show the general some of the tech, take him out to lunch, then maybe a bit more.
“I appreciate that you and your people are working on new technology or improving old technology at all given today's budget constraints,” Roman said as he took a seat. Seanex pulled up an index of files on his display.
“Well, we get our funding from a variety of sources. We see potential in a lot of it. I thought I'd point some of it out to you,” Seanex said.
“I don't know about wonder weapons or tech at this stage. Right now, getting something into space is the main goal. But I do want to explore that soon,” he said.
“It isn't so much wonder weapons as more efficient equipment. More efficient and more powerful force emitters mean better shields, better fusion reactors, and tighter confinement in some plasma injectors, more efficient inertial dampeners and grav emitters …”
“Okay, I get the last. But are they smaller? We need highly efficient inertial dampeners in fighters,” Roman said. “Or at least, the navy does,” he said with a grimace. “You should be talking to Admiral Lewis.”
“I tried,” Doctor Irons replied. “His office said he's busy.”
“Ah.”
“As to your request, we can only miniaturize things so far. Given the prohibition on using nanotech, a lot of our industry has taken several giant leaps backwards.”
“Then we'll have to work on that.”
Seanex stared at him. He shook his head after a long moment. “Yeah, good luck with that!”
“Doctor, you'd be surprised what people will be willing to do, like close their eyes and hold their nose for instance, if it keeps them alive.”
“Oh yeah? Tell it to the idiots who let their pride get in the way or their stubborn stupidity,” Seanex retorted.
Roman grimaced. “Point, I'll give you that.”
“What do you want us to focus on? I'm not looking for funding at the moment, but if you've got an idea, I can look around and see if someone is currently working on a project.”
“Hmm, miniaturization as you mentioned is good. We need better more effective missiles and fighters. But we also need far better energy weapons. Admiral Lewis pointed out to me that most of that tech was lost on Earth.”
“Eh?” Seanex asked thoughtfully. “Oh, yeah, Skynet and Ares. Yeah, you wouldn't want any of that hardware just lying around infected or not.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay, energy weapons, smaller better weapons. I'm guessing nuclear warheads?”
“Do you have any available?” Roman asked, cocking his head.
Seanex snorted. “Funny. Really funny.”
“Yeah, I thought not.”
“There are some for demolitions. Check with the Venus group and some of the terraforming people.”
Roman blinked and then nodded slowly.
“I'll look into the nuclear physics department. Ten to one we've got at least one grad student who built a pony bomb as a project at one time or another.”
“Without actual material, of course.”
“Right,” Roman drawled. Obviously, the university needed a little more checking in he thought, writing a note in his implants.
“Combining the bit about better force emitters and warheads, FYI, some of the physics departments think they can make the force of a neutron star. If it works, they could make all sorts of stuff happen and look into things that have been hypothesized up until this point. For instance, negative strangelets.”
“Run that by me again, Doc?” Roman asked.
“It is hypothesized that if you combine the forces of two neutron stars colliding, you'd create materials never seen before. One of them is strangelets. Positive-charged strangelets are mild. But a negative one, it's the zombie apocalypse.”
“Doc?” Roman shook his head. “Now you are pulling my leg.”
“No no, it's true!” Seanex protested. “See, if a negatively-charged strangelet touches normal matter, it converts it into energy and more negative strangelet material. A lot of energy goes off, and since its blowing strangelet material out, you get a chain reaction. In theory, it could destroy the universe.”
“That is … not good, Doctor,” Roman said, reemphasizing his note to have a talk with certain people about oversight.
“Well, it's only computer simulations now. We're only getting enough tech to try it in another decade or so.”
“Something tells me a lot of people aren't going to be enthused about that line of research, Doctor. I'm not,” the general said, glaring at the engineering scientist.
“I doubt anything will come of it anytime soon. There are too many variables involved, and it would take, oh, trillions of credits to try to build the necessary equipment to explore it,” Seanex replied soothingly.
“It's still not something I'm exactly thrilled about, Doc,” Roman replied.
“Yes, well, ahem,” the doctor coughed politely into his fist. “Let's, um, change the subject, then shall we?”
“I think I'm all for that for the moment,” Roman replied dryly.
“I'm actually surprised you aren't interested in the ansible project. It's still all theoretical; the actual idea was pitched over two centuries ago. We're at the stage where we might actually make it happen.”
“Ansible?” Roman wrinkled his nose. “Wasn't Jack into that at some point?”
Seanex nodded. “Yup. The holy grail of communications, the ability to talk to someone faster than light. This setup means you can talk to someone almost instantly. The transceivers are fixed in space, but you can have them any distance apart.”
“Almost instantly?”
“Yeah, you can't violate physics. There are some rules you can't break. Bend but not break,” Seanex replied with a shrug. “The cool thing about this ansible project is you can talk to someone as I said, at any distance. You have to have fixed instillations on either end, and they can't talk to other instillations unless you network them together.”
“So it's useless in a ship. That's what you are telling me,” Roman said dubiously.
Seanex nodded. “Oh, yes. That's part of our biggest problem to date, figuring out how to move the ansible core to another location.”
“I thought you said it is all theory?” Roman asked.
“Oh, it is. We have some real-world testing of course to fill in some of the variables but the rest is in the computers. It is one of the projects Athena was helping us with, crunching the numbers. Trevor's been helping now but well …”
“He's human. He's also getting up there in age.”
“Ouch. He's younger than I am, Doc,” Roman said with a shake of his head.
Seanex blinked. He started to ask about it, but Roman waved a hand. “Okay …”
“So, one of the things you are trying to do is figure out is how to move the ansible?”
“Yes. See, the theory is to split a particle, in this case a muon.” He used his hands to simulate the splitting of an object. He held his fists up. “If one turns in one direction, the quantum entanglement makes the other turn in the same direction.”
“So, spin one way and you get a one and the other a zero?”
Seanex grinned. “Right. And you can control them on either end. That's why I said transceiver. One of the things the lab has been refining is how to get them to spin at all.”
“This is sounding less and less like something ready to deploy,” Roman said dubiously.
“Well, not today or this year or even the next. But someday?” Seanex shrugged.
“Okay, so it's something to keep in mind.”
“I know it's a downer. I'd like to find a way to push it harder, honest. I'd thought you'd like to get real time intelligence from one place to another.”
Roman nodded. “Good in theory, Doctor, as you mentioned. Theory. Let me know when you've worked the bugs out,” he said as a parting shot.
~~*^*~~
Admiral Lewis nodded when he got the general's report. “I see his point; we can use better everything, especially better-force emitters and inertial dampeners. Any sort of miniaturization is good. The problem is it's a two-edged sword,” he said over the link.
“How so?”
“Any new tech comes with problems—logistics for one. Getting the bugs out is another. Then there are the fussy little things you have to go through to get to know the new system's quirks. I'm not certain disrupting our logistics pipeline at this time is a good thing but having it in the pipeline eventually is.”
“Refitting will be a pain. And you know someone will complain that we had the tech now and should have stopped everything until it was ready,” Roman retorted.
“Another point why we shouldn't go with it. It's not ready yet. We don't have the number of parts in production and ramping them up with all the other concerns will take too much time. No, we go with off the shelf.”
“Agreed,” Roman replied with an unseen nod.
“So, other than that, anything else?”
“Well, they did prove to me that we need more oversight of scientists. The old saying about a scientist getting so caught up in the moment they think of if they could do something instead of if they should.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. They came up with a universe-ending weapon. Scary shit,” Roman replied. “I've got some calls to make.”
“Did you say universe ending?” Admiral Lewis asked dubiously. “Are we talking about the hysterics that people went through with the super collider or something else?”
“This is something else. They apparently picked up on a theory from a couple centuries ago. With their new force emitters, it is possible to do it.”
“Frack. Okay, yeah, not good I think.”
“Me too. So, I've got to make some calls and teach some people that some boxes should remain firmly shut.”
“My sentiments exactly.”
~~*^*~~
Senator Joe Camp went in for a briefing with his staff and found that a publicly-pushed presidential campaign had started without him. There was increased backlash in the population to do something about the parlous state of the Space Marines and especially the navy.
He shook his head as his staff finished the briefing on a hopeful note. He knew that the administration had tried to soothe the threat away, but Roman and others kept the media fed. The fact that Earth First had been against the military and kept dragging Roman into committee hearings didn't help them he mused.
It wasn't so much as helping them anymore he realized. He wasn't interested in the office of the presidency. It was an administrative position, and he liked being a senator. But someone had to lead he reminded himself.
“What do you think?” his chief of staff asked hopefully.
“I think you've got campaign buttons and signs hidden somewhere,” Joe drawled. William looked down. “I also think I need to talk to my family,” he said just as his phone rang. He glanced at the sender ID and snorted. “Speaking of the devil …,” he tap
ped the connect button. “Hi, honey, um, it wasn't me, honest.”
He listened for a bit then nodded. “Okay,” he said when he hung up. William stared at him. “They are on board. In fact, they've been behind some of this,” he said with a rueful shake of his head.
“They have been?” William asked, brown eyes wide.
“Not directly. But apparently one of the kids mentioned something or other, and it got brooded about and as usual blown out of proportion. But they are on board with the idea.”
“And you, sir?” William asked.
“Something like this, it takes a lot more organization and funding than a senate campaign, Will,” Joe warned. “We have to appeal to everyone everywhere. That takes being on hand everywhere, which means a lot of traveling. It also means we've got to advertise. That takes money.”
“A grass-roots funding program will help. Whisper campaigns in the forums, plus your continued exposure in the media will help immensely,” Tia, his publicist said as she poured herself a cup of coffee. “You'll get the Mars vote and also, the Neo vote. I doubt President Carlton has campaigned much beyond Earth. Your war record is also a shiny star; he sat it out.”
She stirred in cream and sugar, then took her customary spot at the table. “I think we can do this if we don't confirm or deny the rumors and just let the anticipation build. Have you talked to the party?”
“No,” Joe admitted.
“Then it's something that will need to be done I suppose,” Tia said, “on the down-low, one way or another. Out of curiosity, which way are you going to go?” she asked as she took a sip from her cup. Her brown eyes looked at him over her cup expectantly.
“Up until now I wasn't sure. It's starting to sound like I've been outvoted.” He snorted. “Hell, even drafted,” he drawled.
Will cracked a smile. “So, you are on board?” he asked.
“I … yes,” Joe said slowly. Will's thunderclap startled everyone. Tia recovered and grabbed a napkin to dab at the spilled coffee.
“Sorry,” Will said, still grinning from ear to ear as he shook his stinging hands. “Hot diggity damn! This is going to be fun! And if they bring up race, we'll crucify them!”