TFS Theseus: The Terran Fleet Command Saga – Book 2

by Tori Harris

  “Until recently, Fleet had not spent a lot of time planning for ground attack missions — understandably, their primary focus had been developing the capability to successfully attack enemy spacecraft. When they did get around to doing some air-to-ground weapons testing, however, the Reaper was the obvious choice. The problem was, every time we sent an F-373 out to the range to attack a ground target, our engineers kept noticing small variances in ordinance delivery. That held true regardless of what type of weapons were being used. Missiles like the HB-7 you see here are generally smart enough to correct the problem for themselves, but when we attempted to drop weapons that don’t have their own propulsion systems, we experienced some pretty significant problems. There was even one case where we very nearly lost an aircraft when the lead pilot in a two-ship formation dropped a glide bomb that separated from the aircraft in an unexpected manner and came close to taking out his wingman.”

  “Anyone know — or care to guess — what the problem was?” Logan asked, looking around the room. “Lieutenant Lau, you were a physics major right? What do you think?”

  While paying attention, Lau had not been expecting a direct question and was somewhat caught off guard. “Uh, yes, sir,” he stammered as he stood up from his Tactical console. “I don’t know for sure, but it pretty much had to have something to do with the gravitic field generators,” Lau answered. “I’m thinking it was related to either inertial dampening for the pilot, or the way they manipulate the field to attenuate sonic booms.”

  “That was two guesses, Lieutenant, and they’re both wrong,” Logan laughed. “Not bad guesses, though. No, at first, the Science and Engineering Directorate didn’t suspect anything related to the grav fields because they should not have been anywhere near strong enough to cause the effects they were seeing at the time weapons were being launched.”

  On the view screens the AI now displayed a rotating three-dimensional depiction of the F-373, including a spherical bubble surrounding the fighter to represent its gravitic field. “We’re obviously not going to delve much into the physics here today, but let me try to give you a grossly oversimplified version of what they found. The gravitic generators aboard all Fleet vessels are active to some extent all of the time. They serve a variety of functions including what everyone refers to as ‘artificial gravity’ as well as inertial dampening for those of you who prefer to avoid being crushed. When we operate inside the gravity well of a planetary body, those same generators ramp up their power tremendously and create an effect we all like to call ‘mass cancellation.’ Incidentally, this whole subject area is full of misnomers and technical inaccuracies, but the real physics underlying these systems is so complex that using colloquial terms is generally accepted practice, even among Fleet engineers.

  “So you might be thinking, ‘But the Reaper has wings, so why would it need a mass canceling grav field?’ While it does indeed have wings that provide quite a bit of lift when flying in dense, Earth-like atmospheres, it’s generally not enough to sustain flight for such a large ship. This thing is a ‘hyper maneuverable’ aircraft, and there was no way to create the kind of flight envelope its mission required using aerodynamic lift and flight controls. The designers also wanted the ship to have essentially the same capabilities, regardless of what kind of environment it was operating in. To accomplish that, we ended up with a gravitic field that would look a lot like this if you could actually see it,” Logan said, gesturing towards the view screen. “What I want you to notice is that, although the field is spherical, it’s actually generated in two pieces … two hemispherical domes. That results in an interference area you might describe as a ‘seam’ running all the way around the field. It actually looks a little like the way two halves of a walnut shell come together. As you can see, the seam circles the ship’s longitudinal axis through points above and below the fuselage.

  “Alright, Lieutenant Lau, here’s your chance to redeem yourself. Now what do you think the problem was?”

  Lau had just sat back down, but now stood once again to answer the commander’s question. “I’d say when weapons are launched from the aircraft, they have a nasty habit of going right through the area of interference.”

  “Exactly, thank you. Please take your seat and I promise not to pick on you anymore today,” Logan smiled. “The engineers discovered that this grav field seam sometimes caused localized, and unexpectedly intense, variations in field strength. Once they figured out that this was the problem, it took several months of testing to accurately model what was going on and come up with a workable solution. During that testing, one of the things they did was fire beam weapons through the interference pattern to see how much accuracy was lost. That testing inspired a gifted and irritatingly lucky doctoral candidate from Missouri S&T — which happens to be my alma mater — to suggest essentially four things: first — that what was going on was actually a form of gravitational lensing, second — that the ship’s AI was fast enough to detect and respond to disturbances in the field … and by disturbances I mean things like incoming fire, third — that the AI could be coaxed into producing and controlling the lensing phenomena on demand, and fourth — that the effect might potentially be used in reverse to deflect incoming fire. The rest, as they say, is history.”

  Logan paused for a moment, correctly assuming that there might be a few questions at this point. The first came from Captain Prescott. “Commander Logan, if I can interrupt you with a question or two …”

  “Of course, Captain.”

  “I think I managed to follow you reasonably well, but I’m not sure I understand how we made the jump from some sort of distortion in the gravitic field to a workable shield system. Can you expand on that subject a bit?”

  “I can try, sir. First off, although the technology involved is quite similar to the existing gravitic systems we were already using, some additional hardware was required. To provide some redundancy, additional, dedicated field generators were installed for the shield system. There are also a number of emitters installed at various locations on the hull that allow the AI to control the local intensity of the shield on the fly.”

  “So we’re not talking about completely surrounding the ship with a single field then?”

  “No, not at all. The AI literally responds in real-time to place an incredibly intense area of gravitational distortion in the path of incoming fire,” Logan replied.

  “And what effect does this have on incoming ordinance?”

  “That depends on the ordinance. The AI classifies the type of incoming fire, then responds in a different way, depending on what it’s trying to defeat. For lack of a better term, energy weapons are ‘lensed’ or deflected away from the ship. For missiles, the system creates shear forces that tend to either destroy the warhead outright and/or throw it off target. Incoming kinetic energy rounds are usually not possible to destroy, but, depending on their angle of entry, they can be slowed to the point where their effectiveness is degraded significantly. In other cases, they are redirected much like a bolt from a plasma or energy weapon so that they miss the ship entirely. The other great thing about handling it this way is that we can blaze away with our own weapons without the need to disengage our shields. Incidentally, we really don’t fully understand how the Sajeth Collective vessels pull this off.”

  “That all sounds pretty good,” Prescott continued, “but what happens when we are being hit by more than one type of weapon from more than one direction?”

  “Yes, sir, that was one of my first questions as well. It turns out that, on the time scale we’re talking about here, it almost never happens. The duration of most shield system ‘events’ can be measured in microseconds. They also went on to say that the AI could handle ‘a large number of simultaneous events.’ That’s as much detail as they would provide, and that usually means they don’t know for sure.”

  “Right. I think we’re all growing accustomed to incomplete specs at this point. I have two final questions. Since the function of the sh
ields is primarily to deflect rather than destroy or absorb incoming fire, I assume that means the gravitic distortions are created at a greater distance from the ship than our grav field typically extends. How far out do these shield ‘events’ occur and does all of this deflected ordinance pose a threat to friendly vessels?” Prescott asked.

  “You’re making me feel smarter than I actually am, Captain, because I asked those questions as well. The distance at which the gravitic disturbances are created is a function of the size of the ship’s hull. It essentially becomes a geometry problem for the AI to ensure that the rounds either miss completely or, failing that, are degraded as much as possible before they impact the hull. I can’t give you exact distances, but the maximum distance is something like five times the ship’s beam. For Theseus, that means the first shield event should be around fourteen hundred meters out. The AI will continue interacting with the incoming ordinance until it’s either no longer a threat or it hits the ship. Now, as far as deflected rounds being a danger to friendlies, the short answer is that yes, it’s a possibility. The AI is aware of the positions of friendly ships in the vicinity, and will make an effort to avoid sending deflected fire in their general direction, but doing so is not its first priority.”

  “I suppose that becomes a problem for the other vessel’s shields to handle at that point,” Prescott smiled.

  “Hah, that’s exactly right. Hey, it’s better than the alternative, right? Oh, one other thing, the AI will purposefully deflect incoming fire towards hostile targets whenever possible, but I suspect it would take a pretty specific set of circumstances for that to come into play.”

  “Commander Logan,” Reynolds said, raising her hand slightly, “do we have any projections regarding what to expect if we come under fire, based on what we know about Sajeth Collective weapons so far? How much damage can the shields take … or prevent?”

  “That’s the money question, alright,” Logan replied, “and the one that none of the engineers want to commit to answering for fear they will be wrong. What we do have is a pretty good profile of the energy weapons and missiles used against Ingenuity at Gliese 667. Some pretty sophisticated computer modeling of that entire engagement has already been completed, and, if I can find some wood around here to knock on, it looks like she would have suffered zero hull impacts if grav shields had been in place.”

  “Wait, you said zero hull impacts? As in, nothing at all would have hit us?” she asked, incredulous.

  “Can we get a battle damage schematic of TFS Ingenuity, please?” Logan asked, prompting the AI to immediately display a slowly rotating image of the battered frigate. After a few seconds, hundreds of colored circles appeared in locations all over the ship’s hull. “As you can see, she took quite a beating out there, but her armor held up pretty well, for the most part. The green circles, which make up the vast majority of the hits, indicate superficial damage limited to the outermost layers of her armor plating, so no more than half a meter of penetration. The yellow circles represent more serious hits that penetrated up to one meter. And, finally, the single red circle shows the critical hit from the nuclear detonation. This impact was very nearly catastrophic, penetrating completely through all of her armor layers and down to the inner hull itself.”

  “That says we took over two hundred hits total.”

  “Um,” Logan said, turning to glance at the view screen briefly before facing the XO again, “two hundred forty-two, yes.”

  “And you’re saying that not a single one of those would have hit our hull if these grav shields had been installed?”

  “Please overlay gravitic shield model and show us a time lapse of all incoming weapons fire that originally impacted the hull.” The schematic on the screen was now replaced with side and top views of Ingenuity, with incoming energy weapons fire highlighted in red as the entire battle was condensed down to a ten-second clip. The result was at once unsettling and reassuring, as huge quantities of directed energy streamed in towards the frigate’s hull before glancing off in seemingly random directions in the final fraction of a second before impact. As if the AI intended to heighten the drama, the final portion of the clip was displayed frame by frame as the missile that very nearly destroyed the frigate approached her starboard side. Energy cannon fire from Ingenuity’s close-in weapon system slammed into the missile — doing significant damage, but failing to halt its progress towards the hull. In the next frame, the AI highlighted the missile in green brackets with ‘gravitic shield engaged’ displayed in the accompanying text block. Next, what remained of the missile’s body visibly distorted before being abruptly deflected at an angle well above its original flight path. Just as before, the warhead’s onboard computer switched its small nuclear warhead to proximity mode and detonated, but this time sending its deadly shaped-charge jet of nuclear fire streaming harmlessly away into space.

  Near the bottom of the view screen, a counter reported the total estimated hull impacts as zero. The background noise level in the room increased dramatically as excited conversations broke out among those in attendance. After allowing a few moments for the room to settle, Logan raised his hands. “Listen, folks, I’m just an engineer, but I know a lot of you are feeling some uneasiness about finding yourselves in battle for the first time. For what it’s worth, I can tell you that the Theseus-class is exactly the right ship with exactly the right technology at exactly the right time. The Resistance forces clearly do not expect us to put up much of a fight, if any, but I can tell you that if things go the way we hope, it’ll be an unfair fight alright … just not in the way they expect. I think I can speak for all of us who have already seen combat when I say, to hell with a fair fight. Fair fights are for those who didn’t plan properly. I’m much more in favor of the kind of battle George S. Patton was referring to when he said ‘May God have mercy upon our enemies, because we won’t.’”

  The room immediately erupted in raucous cheers and applause.

  Chapter 11

  SCS Gunov, Pelaran Resistance Rally Point

  (3.3 light years from Earth)

  Sitting at the workstation in his ready room, Commodore Sarafi allowed his mind to wander in spite of the rather urgent task at hand. Like a great many Wek, he considered himself a warrior in every sense, and on Graca, this implied much more than a state of mind or a simple choice of vocation. To be a warrior was to accept life under a strict moral code — one that placed duty above all other considerations.

  Duty, he thought distractedly. Am I truly here out of a sense of duty?

  It was certainly true that there was no duty more sacred than acting as a protector of his people. Sarafi also truly believed that allowing the emergence of yet another puppet of the Pelaran Alliance so near to his homeworld would ultimately lead to its virtual enslavement at best, if not its complete destruction. Exploration and contact with neighboring civilizations had provided plenty of evidence to support just such a conclusion, had they not?

  In fact, Sajeth Collective intelligence clearly indicated that the Pelaran Alliance was conducting a great deal of cultivation activity in the small section of the Milky Way Galaxy known as the Orion Spur. At over ten thousand light years in length and three thousand five hundred light years in width, there was plenty of room for multiple cultivated species to carve out their five-hundred-light-year spheres of influence, generally without the worry that they would come into conflict with each other. Unfortunately, the seven civilizations of the Sajeth Collective occupied a large section of space near the center of the spur, putting them in the unenviable position of eventually coming into direct conflict with as many as three Pelaran-cultivated civilizations (including Terra).

  Something else that had become clear was that cultivated civilizations tended to choose so-called “militarized” species as their first targets. In every known case of Pelaran cultivation, any worlds with a culture that produced a warrior class, a history that included at least one global war, or even the presence of long-standing professional
military forces, were quickly neutralized. As disturbing as this was, Sarafi did have to admit that it made sense from a military, and perhaps even a political perspective. In any event, the Wek people could not allow this to happen … and, therefore, he could not allow this to happen.

  Recalling the situation that led to his previous train of thought, the Wek officer glanced once again at the latest status report provided by his executive officer, who at the moment happened to be standing at attention just two meters away. The man was a Damaran, which in Sarafi’s mind automatically placed him squarely into several categories: entitled, narcissist, arrogant, incompetent, and, worst of all, coward. Looking up from the report, Sarafi regarded his XO for a long moment with an expression of open contempt. Ever since he had first encountered one of their kind, they had reminded him of the Banea, massive herds of which still roamed the plains of Graca. There was little doubt that the Damarans had descended from similar prey animals, and the image of relentlessly hunting the pitiable creature standing before him formed unbidden in the deep recesses of his mind. The commodore indulged himself for a moment longer, allowing the accompanying release of endorphins in his brain to wash over him as he relished the thought of a well-earned kill. A savage smile had begun forming at the corners of his mouth before being once again replaced by a more businesslike scowl as he continued with the task at hand.

  “In spite of sitting idle at this rally point for two days longer than expected, our forces are still incomplete. We have not heard from the two ships sent to deal with that traitor Naftur and must assume that they have been captured or destroyed. I do not have to tell you what could happen if it becomes generally known that he still lives. Worse still,” Sarafi paused, emitting a deep, threatening growl from the center of his chest, “we have been detected by the Humans, losing any possibility of surprise and rendering an attack on our forces a near certainty. Does that just about sum up the situation, ‘Commander’ Miah?” he mocked.