by Kalina, Mark
Hegemony
by Mark Kalina
Copyright 2012, Mark Kalina
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. The names, places, characters and events portrayed in this book are the products of the author's imagination or else are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to any organization, group, event or location is entirely coincidental.
Acknowledgements:
--A very big "Thank You" to Douglas D. Collins, for the epic job he did in editing and supplying feedback.
(Any remaining typos, mistakes in grammar, style, etc., are there in spite of Doug's good work, and are my own dumb fault.)
--Another big "Thanks" to George H. Hepker VI, who dealt with all sorts of formatting issues.
-- Franz Berner helped create the new cover and came up with fantastic 3D renders of the ships. The cool-looking ship on the cover is his work. Thanks!
--A lot of the technological assumptions in this story were informed by things I read on a website called "Atomic Rockets" (www.projectrho.com/rocketstub.html), maintained by Winchell D. Chung, jr. It's an excellent site with a lot of information on plausible and realistic space craft, weapons, etc. Highly useful.
(Any mistakes or nonsense regarding the "science" part of the science-fiction in this novel are either intentional or my own fault. For those that are my fault, there would be a lot more of them if not for the information I got from Atomic Rockets.)
Contents
-- Chapter 1
-- Chapter 2
-- Chapter 3
-- Chapter 4
-- Chapter 5
-- Chapter 6
-- Chapter 7
-- Chapter 8
-- Chapter 9
-- Chapter 10
-- Chapter 11
-- Chapter 12
-- Chapter 13
-- Chapter 14
-- Chapter 15
-- Chapter 16
-- Chapter 17
-- Chapter 18
-- Chapter 19
-- Chapter 20
-- Chapter 21
1
From just over a billion kilometers away, the dwarf star burned like a distant, constant flare; the brightest light in the darkness, but still only a pinpoint of red fire. And the darkness was very empty.
Any star system is largely empty. In any star system, if one were to take the combined mass of all the planets, all the asteroids and ice fragments, even of the star itself, and average it against the volume of space through which the gravity of that system's star hold measurable sway, the result would be statistically indistinguishable from hard vacuum.
But the importance of a star system isn't measured in mass. A round speck of iron and silicon wreathed in a thin bubble of gas could be a habitable world, home to millions or even billions of people. A ball of fusing hydrogen could be the sun gives that world warmth and light.
There was no such importance here; the red dwarf's system lacked any worthwhile planet within its vast volume, no living worlds and no concentrations of resources valuable enough to draw life from other places. It didn't even rate a proper name of its own, just a designation, Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II, based on the name of a more important star system; Sigma-Charybdis.
Indeed, but for an accident of astrography the unremarkable red dwarf system would have had no importance at all. The system's only value was its location. It was conveniently positioned and its galactic orbit was stable; no faster and no slower than its neighboring stars.
Most colonies were founded within one or two FTL transits of at least one other inhabited system, but the Sigma-Charybdis system was an exception to that rule. The Sigma-Charybdis system boasted such a concentration of exotically valuable resources that it was worth exploiting even though it required a minimum of three FTL transits to reach from the next nearest inhabited system. And that was what gave meaning to the Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II system; the red dwarf system served as a navigational stop-over, a waypoint on the long flight between the economically crucial Sigma-Charybdis mining colony and the greater volume of the multi-stellar Hegemony of Suns.
For an instant the vacuum of the empty Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II system pulsed with the energy of two brief wormholes; two points of space-time unfolded, opening up, bringing something out of nothing. Nearby particles of dust and atoms of hydrogen flared into high energy radiation and then fell silent as space-time collapsed back to vacuum, leaving behind two dark slivers of man-made alloy and composites. The two ships' sleek dagger shapes marked them out as warships; civilian ships had no need to adopt volumetrically inefficient forms for the sake of steeply angled armor or radar-defeating stealth.
Aboard the two ships, sensors listened and watched, seeking out any hint of visible light, infrared or radio energy which might show that anyone had seen them. Against optical or thermal sensors, the ships' stealthing would help them not at all; anti-radar stealth served only to degrade enemy targeting radar in the final, laser-blinded, close-range instants of an engagement. If there had been anyone there to see them, the two ships would have been seen. But there was nothing. And finding nothing, the two ships drifted, silent, unseen, content to wait.
More than two hundred hours passed. And then the almost empty system was again brightened by the coronae of space-time unfolding under the stress of momentary wormholes. This time there were four wormholes, each existing for a fraction of a microsecond before collapsing. Four more ships emerged from FTL transit into the waypoint system.
The four were large ships. They were cargo carriers, "freight-liners" in the parlance of the industry that created them, meant to transport huge masses along established routes. Each massed over two megatons, though more than half of that mass was cargo and much of the rest was reaction mass for the ships' plasma drives.
The four freight-liners had emerged in the empty space above the system's ecliptic plane, bursting one by one into local existence across twelve seconds of time and almost three hundred million kilometers of space, like a strobe-light illuminating the dark emptiness of the system with impossibly brief, bright flashes.
Something had gone wrong. Warnings and alarms flooded the command system of the freight-liner Ulia's Flower within a second of FTL emergence. Captain Hans Rilk scanned the data with an intense frown, then deactivated the alarms. There was no immediate danger, and the ringing announcements that the FTL emergence had gone wrong were redundant to anyone looking at the incoming sensor data that showed the disposition of the four ship convoy.
"God damn it," the freight-liner's captain subvocalized, checking data feeds from the ship's auxiliary sensors, but the data kept showing the same thing.
The FTL transit hadn't felt any different... the countdown to initiation, the checking and double-checking of systems, had all been routine. The actual instant of FTL transit had been too brief to sense, as always. The sudden thrum of the ship's power systems, which most people thought of as the moment of FTL transit, actually occurred just prior; the actual transit was over in a fraction of a microsecond.
The rest of the bridge crew were reacting, sending out queries and commands. The captain acknowledged and directed, going through the both the routine checklist for FTL emergence and the rarely used checklist reserved for an FTL emergence error.
At length the stand-down from FTL transit was complete. Hans Rilk sighed and let his head drop back against the head-rest of his command pod, squeezing his eyes tightly closed before opening them. He was the captain of the Ulia's Flower, and the second senior-most captain of the four-ship convoy.
The four ships had been intended to arrive together, no more than a million kilometers apart from one another. Instead they had been scattered across several hundred million kilometers, with none of t
he ships actually emerging in the specific volume of space they had aimed for. Still, Rilk thought a bit grudgingly, it could have been worse. Given that there had been an FTL emergence fault, the actual emergence wasn't as bad as it could have been; not a disaster.
He frowned once more as sensors gave him more and more data showing the details of the faulty emergence, and sighed again. Not quite a disaster.
There was always, he knew, a chance of an FTL emergence fault. The risk was implicit in any attempt to coordinate an FTL transit so closely between four ships. But it had been a small chance, a low probability of error. This time the probabilities had come up badly for the four ship convoy.
Actually, as his FTL navigator could tell him, had told him before, it wasn't a matter of probability so much as of intrinsic uncertainty.
Actually, thought Rilk with annoyance, the fact was that FTL Transit Navigation was numbingly complex and radically counter-intuitive. Technically speaking, Rilk knew, it wasn't actually 'FTL,' faster-than-light, at all. The momentary wormholes that ships used to transit interstellar distance took two points in space-time and made them one. The ship's velocity never exceeded the speed of light; in fact, a ship making a so-called FTL transit never actually crossed the intervening space at all. Still, the misnomer "FTL transit" was all but universal. Even the experts used the term.
Rilk did not fully understand the actual physics of how a ship's singularity reactor induced the wormhole that transited a ship from one point in space-time to another. Past a certain practical level of knowledge, that was the realm of specialists. He knew what FTL transit entailed as far as running his ship was concerned, but his grasp of the theory only went as far as the basics. Still, he did know that the principles of FTL transit involved intrinsic uncertainty. Indeed, uncertainty was the fundamental underpinning of the whole process. The more one tried to define one parameter of an FTL transit, the more uncertain other parameters became. And that uncertainty imposed limits on what a ship could do.
Some of those limits made intuitive sense to Hans Rilk; others were utterly counter-intuitive, even paradoxical.
Range was a limit. An FTL transit could not reach across more than a few dozen light years of space. That made intuitive sense, to Rilk.
Gravity was another limit; trying to initiate a wormhole too close to a gravity well, even a very weak gravity well, added enormous, dangerous levels of uncertainty to the process. It was far safer and more reliable to accelerate out into interplanetary space, where only the distant whisper of gravity from a system's star held sway, before starting an FTL transit. On the other hand, it was also dangerous to try to emerge too far from a gravity well; opening a wormhole in deep interstellar space was both difficult and risky, hence the utility of systems like Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II.
Emergence precision was another limit. An ideal emergence point was undefined, anywhere within an empty volume of space tens of millions of kilometers across. Trying to control the point of emergence too closely increased the odds of trouble. That led to a counter-intuitive corollary; very short range FTL transits, within the volume of a single star system, were more complex, and more likely to go wrong, than larger, less precise transits across interstellar space. It was, Rilk mused, as if the process that generated a wormhole somehow resented any attempt to rein in its intrinsic uncertainly.
And most counter-intuitive of all, trying to coordinate FTL transits between multiple ships increased the risk of a problem for each of the ships involved. FTL navigators talked about "non-local interactions" and "chaotic quantum resonance," but the terms were elusive to Rilk. The fact remained that trying to get ships to stay together, to enter and exit their FTL wormholes at the same time and place, pushed the limits of the process.
Of course one could, and did, push the process. Ships pushed for greater range, for greater precision, and for coordinated transits. But "pushing" the process and attempting a "high-stress" FTL transit meant accepting a certain probability of trouble.
There was a risk of a chaotic FTL emergence, with ships winding up somewhere other than where they aimed for. Other times, there might simply be a failure to initiate the FTL transit in the first place. The real problem was that when an FTL transit went wrong that way, it caused (or was caused by, or at least somehow correlated with) a severe destabilization of the femto-singularity at the core of a ship's singularity reactor, which was both the source of a ship's power and the key to being able to make FTL transits in the first place.
The man-made femto-singularities that were at the heart of a singularity reactor were never fully stable to begin with; each had a limited lifespan before instability built up past all attempts to re-stabilize, and the sub-atomic singularity collapsed into nothingness. Even a routine use of a singularity reactor for FTL transit induced destabilization, requiring the singularity reactor to be re-stabilized before it could be used for FTL again. An FTL emergence or initiation fault risked severe, possibly irretrievable, destabilization of the singularity.
It was never really safe, mused Rilk, to push around a black hole... not even a very, very small one.
There were some planet-bound religious sects that claimed that each singularity was a captive demon, or a gateway to hell; their followers refused to travel off-world, lest their souls be ripped away. There were times, when a new singularity was forced into being at the heart of the reactor, or just before an FTL transit, when Hans Rilk was not perfectly certain they were wrong.
This time, the FTL transit had scattered the four ships by hundreds of millions of kilometers, and worse for their schedule, had severely destabilized the singularity reactors on all four ships.
It could, Rilk knew, have been much worse. None of the ships' femto-singularities had collapsed. A singularity collapse would leave a ship with no power except her backup fission reactor. A singularity reactor was the only sort of fusion reactor that was viable for a ship; conventional containment-fusion reactors delivered only a fraction of the power of a singularity reactor of the same size, and they couldn't be made compact enough to serve as backup reactors. Instead, most ships used ultra-compact, high efficiency fission reactors for emergency power. A ship's backup fission reactor would provide enough power to maintain life support and call for help, but not nearly enough to power a ship's plasma drives. And of course, without the singularity, there could be no FTL transit.
For that matter, in a real worst-case, a singularity could even destabilize violently, generating a vast, uncontrolled burst of energy before it collapsed. That rarely happened unless the reactor was badly damaged, but if it did happen, it left nothing of the ship but vapor and radiation.
The emergence error could have been worse as well; there were wild stories, officially discounted with perhaps a bit too much fervor, of ships that emerged in the wrong star system, or more confusingly, in the wrong temporal framework; there were tales of ships attempting to cross light-years in an instant instead being thrown years into the future, displaced in time instead of space.
Nothing like that had happened. But there would be a substantial delay for the convoy as it maneuvered back into formation. These waypoint systems on the periphery of the Hegemony of Suns were not perfectly safe. There were independent, anomic, colonies out there, existing outside of the nomos of Hegemonic Law. Many of them harbored or spawned pirates. There were also the nomadic void-runners, the so-called "Brotherhoods," who eschewed any home world and lived in their ships, stopping only to raid or trade, as seemed best to them.
Four freight-liners together, with coordinated defenses, would give most raiders pause, while one ship alone would be a very tempting target.
So there was space to cross under conventional plasma drive; carbon reaction mass fed in towards the singularity, close but not too close; close enough for carbon to be crushed together to the point of gravitic fusion, but not quite close enough to fall into and upset the delicate balance of the femto-singularity at the heart of the ship's reactor. The resulting stream of u
ltra-energetic neon and helium plasma was fed into the ship's plasma drives. There it mixed with more reaction mass, converting thousands of times more carbon into ultra-high energy plasma thrust.
The ships' drives lit up with nuclear fire, illuminating the empty darkness of the Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II system with hundred kilometer long spikes of plasma as the four huge ships maneuvered to regain their lost formation.
Setting aside the huge power of the plasma drive, it was still fundamentally a rocket. But to Rilk, an enthusiastic student of the history of early space flight, it was hard to place a singularity reactor-powered plasma drive in the same mental picture as a historical chemical rocket of the sort that mankind had first ridden into space. The plasma drive's power output was greater than the combined power output of the entire Earth had been in the era of the first rocket flights. Had one of those old-Earth chemical rocket pioneers somehow been able to see the sight, the plasma drive's exhaust, a torrent of radiation streaming out at almost ten percent the speed of light, would have seemed more like a stellar phenomenon than rocket exhaust.
And still, for all that power, the thrust could only accelerate the multi-megaton ships at a quarter of a standard gravity. It would take more than a hundred hours for the four freight-liners to cross the volume of space they had been scattered through. For the crews of the freight-liners, the slow hours of waiting had begun.
For the crews of the other two ships, drifting silently through the Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II system, the time of waiting was over.
Hans Rilk sat in his command pod on the bridge of the Ulia's Flower and rubbed the bridge of his nose. For all the excitement of the chaotic FTL emergence, the slow business of regaining the convoy's formation was tedious. There was nothing for the captain to do except monitor the ship's systems and watch as the Ulia's Flower exactly traced her plotted vector. At times like this, even on watch, the mind tended to wander.