The Resolute

by G. Weldon Tucker

  The woman touched her arm, smiling, and said, “Please, both of you, relax, we mean you no harm. In fact, after you arrive on Resolute, one of two things can happen. We don’t want you to feel in any way uncomfortable, so Commander, you can pass on the communicator to the next in command, then we will return you here. We will wait here for you to do what you need. Simply use the communicator, rather than the system to advise us.”

  Angela asserted her authority, even if she did sort of repeat it all. “Commander, give it to Willits, and show him how it works by calling me. Then return.”

  He was in the middle of, “Yes, Captain…” when suddenly, he simply disappeared!

  Seconds later, somehow inside her head, she heard, “Safe and sound, Captain. I am calling in Commander Willits!”

  “You do not need to answer aloud. Concentrate on the wrist band for one full second, and think your response. It is all neural activated,” Syvlov said, the first half aloud, the second inside everyone’s head that mattered.

  Angela did so, finding it very easy to handle. The human techies had seriously improved over the old communicator.

  What else had they accomplished?

  CHAPTER 3

  Jack turned to Syvlov and said, evenly, “We’ll keep the wing up here for security. The rest of us are going to introduce the famous Resolute to the people of Renewal!”

  “Yes, Captain!”

  “I don’t think…” Angela began, feeling the sense of being rushed like a runaway train.

  “Nonsense, you got your security Commander right here!” and right on cue, Rogers was back, and Angela noticed that he was armed with a miniature photon pistol. The pistol might be very compact, the photons tiny, but it was very, very effective. Good call, her expression and head nod indicated.

  “See, no need to worry. There has never been an attack of any kind on this planet, or on any of our patrol wings, in one hundred years. The bullies Hope met are too far away. But you met someone or something coming across the galaxy?”

  The small ship surged under her feet and she felt it turn, then sort of drop away, heading down. Guess there was no chance to change his mind, then.

  Angela steeled herself against the unbidden and unwelcome emotions that ran rampant. Fear of separation from what she knew, a bit of fright at the unknown, and of course, who do you trust?

  She covered it all by responding to his question, “Yes, the Tal’Ken, who saved our asses, and pointed us here. So they know of you. The Zephroan, so named by the Tal’Ken, tried to kill us several times. We got two of them, the Tal’Ken got the rest. At least of that wing, or patrol. So, here we are, late, but not lost. I think we are relieved. Unless you turn out to be a ferocious lizard in disguise.”

  He laughed aloud. “Hell, we do not even have lizards or snakes on our big ol’ planet. Not that we don’t have other creatures, big and small. You get used to planet-side pretty fast. Look, we gotta strap in. We are a space – air fighter, and we can come and go a lot easier than the days your ship pulled out of the moon dockyards. Technology has come a long way… wait, you got something tangled, here.”

  He leaned over in front of her, his hair close to her face, and she realized, suddenly, she could… smell him. A kind of manly scent, with a nice aftershave, and the back of his hands brushed oddly sensitive breasts and belly as he fixed her somewhat confusing straps.

  For probably the first time in her life, she was receiving help from a man… a kind of interesting man… and she kind of… liked it.

  Jack, feeling oddly excited to find this woman, sat back, buckled up in less than ten seconds, then said, “Sorry to manhandle you, Captain, but I would be totally embarrassed to have to scrape you off the windscreen and introduce you in a jelly jar!”

  One of his crew, a young woman, hardly out of her teens, giggled. Non-regulation, long blonde hair, tall, even sitting. She was at the controls.

  Everyone is a giant, Angela thought, feeling smaller yet.

  “Oh, don’t mind her, that’s my niece, Andora Morgan. Sweet kid, talented co-pilot. She will take us in! Say hi, hon!”

  “Glad to finally get to meet the very famous Resolute and its crew, ma’am. Welcome home!”

  The Morgan line was alive and well. The Resolute had cousins in place!

  Before Angela could think to reply, the buffeting started, but with deft hands, Andora seemed to steer the plane in just the right way, and it lessened. She could feel the heat inside the bridge, Jack’s flier was a small one, barely a tiny fraction of the size of Resolute, yet nearly three times the size of her shuttles. Tthere must have been shielding, as the heat was controlled, and soon gone.

  Behind her, in a second row, Commander Rogers spoke up, “The girl knows her stuff. Would you turn Resolute over to a kid?”

  Angela growled at him. They were guests. He subsided, understanding her unquiet growl.

  Jack grinned. This little gal had spirit, all right, and probably ran a tight ship. On that he was willing to bet. But he had been struck by her, in person as well as by vid, and something he had kept at bay for a long time suddenly seemed to be checking in.

  Could be trouble. How well would they assimilate into our life? Maybe they had visions of grandeur and would want to run the show.

  He was moving carefully enough, even if Captain Washington did not know it.

  Show the world to two of them, then maybe a couple of hundred, and see how it goes. If they cannot fit in, they can take one of the other planets. There were two more planets, neither quite as perfect as Renewal, but they were more than good enough, and they were hope for the future. It all depended, as it had for Renewal, on who or what inhabited the planet.

  But, he was not anxious to send her away. Somehow, the idea of this pretty little woman leaving him, just after he found her, was not very appealing at all. He had to minimally shake his head to focus. Never was he this distracted, and he had no time for it.

  When asked, Jack responded, “The dominant native species on Renewal was quickly driven into the wild lands by our landers, and has made no effort to take it back. So far.”

  Andora called, “One hundred twenty-seven thousand feet, dropping five thousand per minute, folks. Please keep your seatbelts on, your tray table in the upright and locked position. ETA thirty one minutes.”

  Something else to understand. She and Rogers had never been on a plane of any kind. Not an air flier. They had seen movies, lots of them, but this was… the real thing.

  “How big is this… plane?”

  “As chief cook and bottle washer, I get the biggest and baddest. This one is about a thousand feet long, and with a wingspan, for air flight, better than six hundred and seventy, delta wing. In space, it all folds away and runs on thrusters. Just like Resolute. Welcome to Renewal, honey, you are gonna love it!”

  “Are you going to tell me how Hope got ahead of us?”

  “Oh, sure. But remember, this is rumor and legend. We have been telling the tale so many times it probably has a few added things that might not apply. But Hope went out almost right angles to you, 270 degrees off your bow. Your ship and Seeker had the long runs across the galaxy, and it was expected that you would be two to three hundred or more years making that initial run, maybe another couple of hundred finding a place to seed humanity. You would be, of course, not all that far across the galaxy.”

  “We were told, maybe sold on the idea of two fifty max. So, they lied?”

  “They kept you all at ease. Multi-generational travel, when there is no other alternative, does not really care, right?”

  “Well, I guess that makes sense. But I wonder why our people on board did not figure it out?”

  “No idea. But Hope was attacked by unknown forces, hardly out of the gate, fifty years out, and though she held her own, sort of, she was damaged, going on defenseless, and loathe to lose her bearing toward Earth. She reversed course and was back to the moon base in a total trip of less than a hundred years.

  They found a sizea
ble population under the surface of the moon, with no advancement in robot intelligence, meaning they still had the mechanicals under control. But the scientists and engineers were making tools like toys and having fun.

  “They refitted her and prepared to send her off just a few degrees off your bearing. At two hundred plus light years, that would be nearly three to five light years away from you, yet here you are. The residents planned some kind of total suppression of the Cyborgs, though it was unclear to any of us descendants. They must have kept it secret. Good thing, right?”

  CHAPTER 4

  Jack continued his story, thrilled at the interest and the intelligence of this beautiful, pixie like woman. “Setting the charge, or the timers, whatever, all of them loaded up, all their labs their gear, their experiments and off Hope went to a new destination. The engineers had figured out, theoretically, how to gain light speed. So, Hope got up to three times light speed, not even five years out, then four, almost five, and that made this little run only sixty-five years long, two generations, almost three. So, about a hundred and ten or so years ago, when we came down.”

  “Okay, that explains the loss of communication. No one left to receive, or if some resistance movement on Earth got it, no way to respond. But the light speed thing. That was pretty clever. Actually, we did it even more oddly. On the back of a Tal’Ken flight, we hit seven point one one times light speed. It was… fantastic!”

  “Good Chips! Fast! Now that we can almost do it, I believe you. If we had not, we would assume you have a few screws loose. But, we have Hope, at five, and fighters who can do three, so far. In essence, the engineers simply used the same nuclear plants, but moved them to the front of the bus. Then, using double sized, high power accelerators for the ten to twelve miles of the big ship, they had heavier gamma rays out the back by the billions. It was a straight shot, now pushing us to five times light speed. It is a little beyond me, but hey, it works just fine!”

  “So, how long to get there?” Angela asked, intrigued.

  “Initially, with the thrusters, getting to two times the speed of light was a single day. To five took a month. We were gaining on this technology in leaps and bounds.”

  She saw that it was obvious this human civilization was well ahead of Resolute’s. “I hope we can help Resolute realize that. Interestingly, the Tal’Ken scared us to death, because they took us to seven plus in only minutes. And the weird part? No propulsion system we could find, at all!”

  “Holy Chips! Doing it our way is almost a miracle in its own rights, but without discernible propulsion? How do you stop something going so fast?”

  “Yeah, well, the slowing down was a bitch, but that was because we had to teach it what ‘fragile’ meant! And we strapped in and asked Tal’Ken to do it in one or two minute stages, so we could get our breath. Forty five minutes from seven to one. Any longer, and we would have been a ghost ship. I am telling you, we have no idea how!”

  “Minutes? I would love to have that technology. Wow! It was a single entity?”

  “We still don’t know. Looked like an unbelievably big pterodactyl, and it was a hundred plus miles long and twenty or more wide. It stayed under us and somehow latched on, then carried us to those speeds. Effortlessly, and very impressive.”

  “Chips, that must have been… something. Well, with Hope refitted and realigned, she finally reached almost five, and like I said, we were here in sixty-five years. So they tell us. I, of course, was not here. Neither, by minutes, actually, was my mother. In any case, somehow ahead of you, but you have seriously strayed off course. How did that happen?”

  “The Tal’Ken pointed us ninety degrees off our target course, steering us away from a Zephroan owned system. Those are serious, oversized bad guys. They eat metal and lifeforms for energy. We, I guess, were a tasty looking snack. But we had teeth, and we had a friend. A good one. We would not have stood a chance. Too clumsy, too weak, too slow. And the alien carried us to seven light speed, then three light years this direction took less than six months.”

  “Okay, I am stunned. Yeah, we would love to have that technology. We are handicapped by size on the fighters, for we just don’t have the room to expand the accelerator on them.”

  “Are the basic engines, the main thrusters changed? You said they kept the old nuclear ones.”

  “Yeah, well, they also worked on the new engines. I mean a ship full of whacko scientists willing to reach way, way off the mainstream to experiment, design and install this stuff. I guess it got pretty exciting. So, as I was about to say, Hope can hit five times light speed, but get this, in just thirty minutes, with minimal effect on the crew.”

  “I will have to see that to believe it. You would be crushed to the bulkheads!”

  “We are not sure how, we only know it works. Well, I guess the engineers have it figured, anyway. But, unfortunately, it takes an hour to slow down to relative stop. We are working on how to control the exhaust from the big thrusters.”

  “What keeps you at five?” Angela asked. God, thirty minutes!

  “The gamma rays are limited by the acceleration, so there is no further kick. And we are simply running over our thrusters at that point. They had to work out displacers on the gamma beams to steer us.”

  “What about your fighters? Will you find a way to get them to five?”

  “Only three times. The planes are shorter, so even though we incorporate a circular accelerator, like universities on the planet use, it is not enough. And adding a second loop actually degrades the efficiency, and you lose speed. But in a little plane, compared to yours, you can be scared half to death at three! In the forward acceleration, it is all you can do not to black out. And we wear specialized suits just for that reason,” Jack said, gesturing to his own extra girth. It looked like a padded flight suit.

  Automatically, she mentally took twenty pounds off him. Better. “Okay, one more question about speed. The biggest problem we face in over light speed is not being able to see far enough ahead to stay out of trouble. Our forward digital optics system is not quite a mile long, and twenty yards across, one gigantic digital space telescope, and we still cannot see clearly more than a half a light year out. At seven times speed, that is three quarters of a second. No clue in time to do something, even with Spook, our system.”

  “Yeah, we have the same problem, and though our digital scope system will stretch it to one full light year out, that is not much. We are working on it… at least the descendants of those whacko scientists and engineers. We are gaining.”

  “Again, we detected no active radar, no scans, yet the Tal’Ken blew out asteroids and Zephroan we could not even see. I can understand then why too much speed without good vision would be a death trap.”

  “We now use an accelerated radar, forward, and you dare not let one of the flight get out front. It will fry any human, even shielded. But with one, quick, hard X-band, we can see, in a thousandth of a second, out ten and a half million miles, giving us about eight seconds at one light speed. Correspondingly less at high speed. And we cured the tunnel vision, too. Now we have nearly a million miles of cone out at ten million. If something is coming in, or in the way, we can adjust, quick enough, but straying into an asteroid field would be suicide.”

  Ten and a half million miles… that would certainly help. Her home ship has six, but very fuzzy.

  Then, she changed topic. “So, how about teleportation? That has got to be a phenomenal development, a giant stride forward for our species. For any species!”

  “Yes, but of course, during those traveling seventy-five years, they experimented with it. It took nearly the whole trip to perfect it, first for items, then one very courageous person. Once they broke the barrier, it was fairly easy to expand on it, hell we can teleport anything to almost any point within five hundred miles. They are still working on long range. Can you imagine bouncing from Renewal to a spacecraft nearly a light year out? I cannot, but the scientists are very excited by the potential. In any case, you w
ill be amazed when Resolute is refitted with this stuff!”

  “Unbelievable. If you had not teleported us that way, I would probably still not believe you, just as you said with light speed.”

  She was about to ask more, liking the answers, but liking his friendly, easy manner even more, when she was suddenly focused as the plane smoothed out.

  “Attention, ETA five, remain seated, and strapped, please,” Andora’s velvet voice intoned.

  They were coming in damned fast, the forward vid a rapidly expanding zoom in feeling, and it was as if Andora was going to take them right into the ground. None of Resolute’s simulators even came close. Feeling Jack nudge her, she glanced at him, and he took her hand, holding snug, saying, “Relax, honey. Be a minute!”

  Honey. And it was… A surprisingly nice minute…

  CHAPTER 5

  Angela gingerly stepped out on the descending steps of the relatively small fighter, considering her familiarity with her monster Resolute, still holding comfortably onto Jack’s firm biceps. She immediately felt earth-like gravity and it tugged hard at her. But nothing she was capable of handling, what with her extreme workouts.

  She felt a little like Alice down the rabbit hole, everything coming fast and furious, and beyond her understanding. She was pleased to see it was not just her own equilibrium out of whack.

  Commander Rogers looked a bit shell shocked, too, but then Andora was hanging on his arm, her left breast pressed warmly against him, and he was a bit pink.

  It is a wonder he can walk! she thought with a knowing smile. Friendly people. So far. And, well, handsome, too, if I let… stop that!

  Looking along the length of the fighter, she had to admit it was indeed quite long, perhaps well over a thousand feet nose to tail, large, certainly in relation to those shown in the old movies and vids.

  Still, it was a baby against the size of Resolute. Certainly sleeker, quicker, too. And it was armed to the teeth with battle lasers, older fashion photon tubes and even what seemed to be projectile weapons. Honestly, bringing a machine gun to a laser party?