The Imperative Chronicles, Books One and Two: The Mars Imperative & The Tesserene Imperative

by Mark Terence Chapman

Part of the reluctance was due to the amount of effort it would entail and the additional time away from home and family. We had to fly Shamu to Tral, three-and-a-half thousand light years from home. It had taken us eight days to travel the seventy light years to Richelieu. Now I was proposing a journey almost fifty times as long. But even if we’d had the food, we couldn’t afford to take thirteen months to get there. That meant we needed a faster means of propulsion.

  It was going to be a lot of work, but I hadn’t wasted my time on the Seat of Power. I knew where we were going, I knew how to get there, and I knew what to do when we arrived.

  Now it was time for the Seat to have a little chat with Shamu.

  CHAPTER 23

  We were about to head back to Tral, this time without the portals. The problem was, to get there in a reasonable amount of time we needed a much more powerful drive than we had. Unfortunately, the nearest starflight drive manufacturer was back on Earth. Besides, even if we could convince the Company to part with the money to replace the drive, there was nothing powerful enough that would fit within Shamu’s frame. Hell, humanity had nothing powerful enough, period.

  On the other hand, the Seat of Power contained all the knowledge stored in the portal computer and then some. I had everything I needed to design a vastly superior starflight drive in a tenth the space. What I didn’t have was the shipyard needed to build it and retrofit Shamu.

  Still, even given the tools we had to work with, there were many small improvements we could make that would increase the efficiency of the existing drive many times over. With those changes, the seventy light-year trip from Earth to Richelieu that had required several hops of ten to twenty light years apiece would be doable in one jump lasting only hours. More importantly, it meant that we’d be able to make the entire 3,478 light-year trip to Tral in days, rather than many months.

  Of course, the modifications couldn’t be done overnight. Using what I’d learned from the Seat, it would take us less than a week to design and manufacture the new components. Fortunately, we had the tireless nanobots to help with the minuscule stuff, and the automated machine shop to make the larger components for us.

  I didn’t feel any smarter than I was before we found the Seat of Power, but I’d retained much of what I’d learned there, otherwise none of this would have been possible.

  Even after I finished the plans, we still had to install and test everything. Plus, there was the pesky matter of eating and sleeping occasionally.

  Not all of the time was spent working on the drive, however. Our run-in with the Stromvik made it painfully obvious to all of us that the universe is an extremely dangerous place, especially for a small group of humans in an unarmed ship. Because of this, one of my goals in exploring the Seat of Power was to find a way for us to defend ourselves.

  Naturally, we didn’t have the technology aboard Shamu to build most of what I found. Hell, Neither would the entire human race—for centuries, if not millennia. But I did come across a few simple defensive weapons that I thought we might be able to build and mount onto Shamu’s hull, just in case.

  Ironically, one of the weapons was a particle beam that qualified as one of Guido’s alien death rays. Another was a super-powerful multifrequency, polyphasic laser array, capable of drilling a two-meter wide hole right through an asteroid or—fingers crossed—a ship. Then, there was a sort of heat ray. It would allow us to project deep-infrared radiation at great distances. The focus could be dialed down to a relatively narrow beam or spread out to nearly a kilometer across. It produced enough heat to slag a small asteroid, given time. An alien shield would naturally be designed to filter out infrared radiation, but it probably wouldn’t be designed to handle that kind of focused intensity—at least, that was our hope. As a weapon, it wasn’t as surgical as the laser—in fact, it was closer to a shotgun than a laser in terms of precision, but we thought it might be more useful against multiple targets (perhaps incoming missiles) than the more focused laser or particle beam weapons.

  We could have built three particle beam weapons, the most powerful in our small arsenal; but without knowing what weapons might be most effective against a given attacker, we decided to diversify.

  In a tasty bit of irony, those weapons turned Shamu the whale into Shamu the killer whale.

  The final device was a shield generator that was nearly forty-seven times as effective as the one we began the mission with. The new one could deflect anything short of a minor moon. With any luck it would stop alien weapons as well. The power plant that would pump out the enormous energy required by these various devices was, of course, our greatly enhanced starflight drive.

  All told, we weren’t ready to take on an alien dreadnaught, but we might be able to hold our own against something smaller. If nothing else, we no longer felt so…naked, so unprotected. Against a better-equipped alien ship it might be like taking a knife to a gunfight, as the old saying goes. Yet at least we’d have something to try and defend ourselves with. Besides, even in a gunfight, if you survive the initial hail of bullets, a knife can be deadly when your opponent stops to reload.

  I was a bit dismayed at myself, though, that with all of the alien technology available to choose from, practically the first things I latched onto were weapons. But, as much as I like to fancy myself an idealist, there are times when one must be pragmatic. With some opponents, turning the other cheek merely invites them to hit you again.

  It pays to be ready for all eventualities.

  * * * *

  “Okay, Cap,” I called over the intercom from Engineering, “the drive’s ready to test. I had to recalibrate our gauges, too.”

  “Initiating power-up,” Cap replied on the bridge.

  “Power at seventy percent of original rated capacity. Ninety…one hundred percent…one-ten…one-thirty. Looking good so far. We’re up to twice rated power. Everything’s operating within tolerances. Two-point-five…three…three-point-five—hold up! Ease off a bit, Cap. We’re getting some shimmy. Let me adjust the intermix. It’s a bit too rich for these levels.”

  The vibration gradually diminished as I tweaked the settings.

  “Okay, try it again, Cap. Three-point-five—no vibration. Four times rated power…five! It’s purring like a kitten. I think we’ve got it licked. Keep going. Six…eight…ten times rated power! This is incredible! Hold on a moment while I recalibrate the gauges again. We’ve improved the efficiency even more than I expected.”

  “No rush,” Cap replied.

  “There, that’s got it. Continue. Up to twelve and still going. Sixteen…eighteen…twenty times! Twenty-one. The rate of increase is slowing. Twenty-one-point-five…twenty-two…twenty-two-two. It looks like we’ve just about maxed out. Twenty-two-three…twenty-two-point-three-five…twenty-two-point-three-seven—that’s it. Folks, we now have more than twenty-two times the power we had before, while using twelve percent of the tesserene!”

  Sparks whooped. “Hot damn! You did it!” He was in Cargo Hold 4, Bin 2, which had been turned into a temporary assembly station for some of the more complex components.

  “That’s…that’s simply incredible!” Cap gushed. “That means twenty-two times the maximum range as well. Who would have imagined that those relatively minor changes could have made such a difference. The Progenitors’ technology is already paying off and we’ve barely scratched the surface.”

  “It’s nothing we wouldn’t have come up with ourselves over the next fifty or a hundred years,” I replied. “They were just refinements to what we were already doing. Look at the difference in performance between early motorcars at the end of the nineteenth century and the muscle cars of the mid-twentieth. There were thousands of improvements made, though nothing completely off-the-wall, and yet they managed to increase the speed by a factor of at least twenty. We can’t even begin to touch the really incredible stuff yet. It may take us thousands of years to understand and implement the really advanced technology. Even that’s amazing, when you consider that it took
the Progenitors hundreds of millions of years to invent some of it.”

  “If you two are done congratulating yourselves, can someone give me a hand with this death ray?” Guido was getting a sort of perverse pleasure out of building the very type of thing he was originally worried that aliens would use against us.

  “I’ll be there in a second,” Tom called from the machine shop. He was working on fabricating parts for the heat weapon. “It’ll be almost an hour until this doohickey is finished.”

  It was an indication of the advanced nature of some of the technology we were dealing with that we didn’t even have names to describe many of the parts.

  “Cap, go ahead and put her back in idle mode. I’ll see if I can help Sparks with his engine.”

  “Sure thing, Swede.” The loud hum of Shamu’s drive subsided to a barely audible whisper. “I’ll go back to tinkering with the new shield generator.”

  Once we knew the enhanced drive would be much more powerful than before, Sparks came up with the idea of fabricating a miniature version for use with the EVA pod. It would have been impractical before, due to the massive size of Shamu’s engine. But with the new efficiencies, Sparks thought he could build one—with roughly a quarter of the power of Shamu’s original drive—that would fit in the space of the thruster the pod came with. Not only would it give us much greater speed and range than before—we could actually use it as a life pod to get to a nearby planet or even another star, if needed—it would also eliminate the pod’s dependence on our nearly exhausted thruster fuel. This way what we had left could be reserved for Shamu’s use.

  “How’s it coming, Sparks?” I inquired as soon as I arrived. There were drive parts scattered all over the hold, in various states of assembly.

  “So far, so good. I won’t know for sure until I get everything put together. But you can help by programming the nanobots to make the itty-bitty stuff while I’m working on the human-sized parts.”

  “Will do.”

  I set about specifying our needs in terms of size, shape, composition and physical properties: smoothness, electrical conductivity, magnetic intensity, etc. The computer directed the nanocompositor to create the optimal ‘bots for each task. Many of the assemblies were no larger than a pea, while others were smaller than a pinhead.

  I don’t know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but I can tell you how many of each of those subassemblies would fit there—in some cases, dozens.

  * * * *

  It ended up taking us twelve days in all, but when we were done, Pod 3 was equipped with a working starflight drive. That’s right, Pod 3. It didn’t take us long to realize that replacing the thruster on Pod 2 would gain us speed but at the cost of the slow but nimble kind of maneuvering the pods were capable of. So we ended up building a new pod from spare components and some new fabrications. Sure, we could have waited until we got home and had the Company replace the missing Pod 1, but we were like kids in a candy shop wanting to sample all the goodies we’d gotten from the Seat.

  Part of the retrofit to use the new drive was adding structural reinforcements to handle the additional stresses caused by the new drive. But as a bonus we gained a shield around the pod that was several times better than the one Shamu began the mission with.

  Plus, we figured as long as we were creating a new long-range pod, we might as well make this one airtight, so we could travel in relative comfort. That meant sealing the cockpit and adding air tanks. All the extra modifications added days to the retrofit, but we ended up with a miniature spaceworthy ship as a result. Maybe it didn’t have plumbing, or bunks, or a galley, but in an emergency we hoped to be able to use it to get home, hopping from system to system a few light years at a time—assuming we could cram enough oxygen tanks, water, and food aboard to last that long. Unlike the standard pods, the combination of a starflight drive and the shielding meant that Pod 3 could actually land on a planet.

  While Sparks and I were working on the new “superpod,” Guido finished the particle beam weapon and designed a universal mount for Shamu’s nose. By extending it on a short boom, he gave that one weapon the ability to fire in any direction—except directly behind the weapon, where Shamu herself created a blind spot.

  Of course, with the particle weapon mounted on the bow, we were unable to mount the heat ray or laser there. So we mounted those weapons on booms on opposite sides of the ship, between Cargo Holds 1 and 3 on the port side, and between CH2 and CH4 on the starboard side.

  Because of the curve of the ship, we had blind spots on the top and bottom of Shamu, but that couldn’t be helped without more weapons, and two was all we had time to build hardpoints for. Besides, the odds were we wouldn’t need them anyway.

  Sparks, ever the joker, decided that in the heat of battle we needed a quicker way to refer to the weapons than Heat Projector, Laser, and Particle Beam, so he nicknamed them Holly, Lori, and Patty, after some old girlfriends.

  Cap insisted that we take turns practicing with the weapons, so that if we ever needed to use them we’d be ready. Sparks located the meteor swarm that had attacked us earlier and we took the opportunity to exact revenge by jumping nearby for live-fire exercises.

  I may be mechanically proficient, but a marksman I’m not. If the broad side of a barn ever attacked us, I thought I might be able to hit it, but forget about anything small and nimble.

  Tom, on the other hand, was deadly with the particle beam weapon. Maybe it was his pilot’s reflexes, but he picked fast-moving meteoroids out of the “sky” like they were lazing along. Of course, the tracking system that Sparks set up, using the sensors to pinpoint the targets, helped considerably.

  Guido wasn’t a “natural” the way Tom was, but his grim determination made up for it. Cap was the only one worse at shooting than I was, but in a crisis he was more likely to be giving commands and flying than firing a weapon anyway.

  In many ways it was like playing a shoot-‘em-up video game back home. At least, until I remembered that we were practicing for a time when we might be in an actual life-or-death battle.

  I was much better with the heat projector. Because it cut such a wide swath across the sky it was almost impossible to miss hitting what I aimed at. With the tremendous amount of energy it pumped out, we could vaporize a rock the size of Shamu in a matter of minutes. I have to admit, using those weapons gave me a tremendous feeling of power. I had to remind myself more than once that if we, in a beat-up old cargo ship like Shamu, could destroy asteroids, there were bound to be aliens who could destroy entire planets, if not stars.

  We couldn’t afford to let ourselves feel smug. We were, after all, merely one little ship. If I’d understood Drelx correctly, there were entire fleets out there to worry about.

  We had some tense moments when we tested the new shield. Cap insisted on verifying that it could do what I claimed it could, so we flew into the paths of incrementally faster and larger meteoroids to see whether the shield would stop them.

  It worked as predicted, but each time one of the rocks hurtled toward us I held my breath. Although I had complete faith in the Progenitors’ technology, I was less confident in our ability to duplicate that technology perfectly. The shield could work correctly a thousand times in a row, but it only had to fail once to ruin our day.

  Finally, after surviving unscathed several rocks that would have obliterated Shamu with her original shield, Cap was satisfied. We were as ready as we’d ever be. Next stop: Tral.

  * * * *

  We traveled the 3,478 light years in nine hops of varying distances, based on where suitable stellar gravity wells were located.

  “Tral dead ahead,” Sparks reported. “Yee-ha! That was incredible!”

  For me, the best part of the journey through interspace was being outside of that damn EVA suit for more than ninety hours, with only a few brief stops to get our bearings and prepare for the next jump. The worst part was having to put that smelly suit back on each time we stopped.

  The tr
ip gave us time for a first-ever mid-mission poker marathon. Having a chance to unwind and enjoy ourselves made all the difference in the world. For the first time in weeks we were all relaxed. We were almost ready to head for home with a treasure trove of knowledge and a fortune in tesserene.

  “In all my years in space, I’ve never seen anything like it!” Cap confirmed. “I never thought I’d live to see the day when we could jump more than four hundred light years at once, and in a matter of hours.

  “With this enhanced drive,” I said, “we could probably manage five hundred-plus if pushed.”

  “So, let’s see what Tral looks like from above.” Sparks activated the holoscreen and we were treated to the sight of a planet swathed in cotton—dirty cotton at that. There was nothing but ashen clouds as far as the eye could see, except for the occasional tantalizing glimpse of steel-gray ocean through small gaps in the cloud cover.

  “Not all that impressive from space, is it?” Cap said.

  “I’ve located the site of the Seat of Power,” Sparks interjected. “The coordinates are ready to be sent to the pod.”

  “All right, then. Let’s get down there.” I spoke into the intercom. “Tom?”

  “Roger. I’m heading for the pod bay.”

  “Good. I’ll be right there.”

  Two minutes later, Tom and I buckled ourselves into Pod 3. We were sealed inside what I hoped was an airtight cabin. Still, we wore our suits just in case.

  I cleared my throat nervously. “How confident are you that we can get there without materializing inside a boulder or something? Jumping between gravity wells is one thing—jumping this deep inside a gravity well is another.”

  “What’s the matter, have you lost your faith in my piloting skills?”

  “No, but this really isn’t a matter of piloting, is it? It’s more the computer being able to precisely target the landing zone within a few centimeters of the surface of the planet through a dense cloud cover.”