Hegemony

by Kalina, Mark

  Rilk could envision his ship perfectly. The Ulia's Flower was a huge teardrop shape, with a rounded bow, lightly armored to deal with the occasional micro-impact, and a narrow stern that held the main plasma drive. Forward of the drive and behind the bow were the huge cargo holds that gave the ship her purpose, and forward of those, nestled into the ship's bow, was the relatively small volume of the crew's accommodations and the command-and-control spaces from which the ship was operated. Swept-back radiator spines and sensor masts, mounted along the ship's ventral and dorsal aspects, gave the an appearance rather like some sort of deep-sea creature.

  The two megaton freight-liner Ulia's Flower was an old ship, older than Rilk, who was on the wrong side of five hundred thousand hours himself; sixty, in Old-Earth years, though Old-Earth years were a fading measurement. Old-Earth history was a hobby of his... though if pressed, Rilk would admit that Old-Earth had very little to do with humanity now.

  His thoughts were all over the place today. Momentarily, he shut off the data feeds and opened his eyes, taking in the faded metal bulkheads and worn crew pods of the bridge. There was nothing to see here, save the forms of his command crew. His first mate, who was also his wife, looked younger than her hours, at ease in her pod, eyes closed and mind open to multiple data feeds sent directly into her brain from the ship's systems. It was disorienting to try to see with both biological eyes and direct interface feeds at the same time. A glance caught his own reflection in one of the glossy backup video screens of his own command pod. The reflection showed a broad-shouldered man, balding, with a fringe of graying hair above a wide, deeply lined face, with a large nose and deep set brown eyes. His full beard was still mostly dark, though shot through with gray. He had once looked quite dashing, he knew, with a wild mane of dark hair and a thick dark beard; a bit wild. It was a good look for a space captain. He could still manage to look stern and commanding for new crewmembers, at need. But the face that looked back at him was no longer even close to young.

  It was still going to be a pretty good run, Rilk mused, even with the delay. The increased destabilization from the bad emergence meant that it would take much longer than normal to stabilize the drive's singularity before it was safe to make another FTL transit. Worse, the need to use the singularity reactor to power the plasma drive meant that it wouldn't begin re-stabilizing until the long main engine burn was done, in a hundred and thirty more hours. Then it would take at least two hundred hours, maybe more, to stabilize the singularity enough to safely initiate another FTL transit. Compared to an ideal emergence, this navigational mess would probably cost the ships at least an extra two hundred and fifty hours; added to the hundred hours or so it should have taken, with a properly executed FTL transit, it was going to be three hundred and fifty hours all told... over fourteen days, by Old-Earth measure. Rilk had spoken sternly with the ship's navigator, but there was no indication of any actual mistake. Just probability; just bad luck.

  This delay would cut into profits for the ships' owners, and that meant cancellation of both the crews' and captains' schedule-bonuses. But on this run even that wouldn't be a disaster. The margin on this cargo was very robust and despite the delay, the run was still going to be profitable. Even the crews were going to do well on this one; for a rare change, the crews' secured profit shares were much larger than the now-forfeited schedule-bonuses.

  It was an unusual cargo, really. The four-ship convoy carried almost four megatons of alloy-bearing ore; not the sort of thing that usually paid the costs of interstellar transit. Almost any sort of ore was much cheaper to mine in the same system that was going to use it. Gold, for instance, didn't even come close to paying the costs of interstellar shipping. It was almost never economically feasible to ship mineral wealth between the stars. Almost. The only exceptions were the richest ores of fuel-grade uranium, or of the platinum-group metals: platinum, palladium, iridium, osmium, rhodium and ruthenium.

  The Ulia's Flower and her sister ships were laden with the latter sort of ore; mixed platinum group metals, primarily rhodium, in astounding concentration, but with all the other platinum group metals present in high concentrations as well. Prior to stating this contract, Rilk had never heard of anyone finding ore of this quality... ore valuable enough to be worth interstellar shipping costs.

  As far as Rilk knew, the Sigma-Charybdis system, where the ore was mined, was a unique anomaly as well. To the crews that worked in the system's hellish, high radiation environment, huddling inside heavily shielded mining platforms, it was just "Charybdis," a monster that would devour them with killing radiation for the slightest mistake.

  Sigma-Charybdis had once been a widely spaced binary star system: a fast burning type O supergiant star, distantly orbited by a white dwarf star. It had been blasted apart by a type II supernova, probably less than a hundred million hours ago; barely more than ten thousand old-Earth years; very recent by stellar measure. The gravity of the small second star, almost a tenth of a light year distant from its exploding partner, had captured a fair sample of the products of its stellar sibling's supernova. The high value elements and exotic alloys that could be mined in the ravaged remnants of the system, by the megaton, would have cost a hundred times more to obtain by normal means.

  And that was enough to pay for the cost of mining operations in spite of the high radiation and the cost of multiple FTL transits. The Sigma-Charybdis Charter Mining Corporation, a subsidiary of the mighty Kerril Resource Recovery cartel, KRR, had founded the mining colony only ninety thousand hours ago (barely a decade in old-Earth years). Now the mining operation was generating profits on a scale that made major planetary economies take notice, even after tariffs and taxes paid to the Central Throne and to the relevant system-archons.

  For bulk-shipping outfits like the one that chartered the Ulia's Flower and her companion freight-liners, transporting megatons of the almost unbelievably high-grade ore from Charybdis to Yuro, the nearest major Hegemonic system, generated a massive profit margin. KRR had its own shipping fleets, of course, but moving them to the fringe of Hegemonic space had proven more costly than doing the job with more local shipping.

  All of which put Hans Rilk here, in command of a ship that had been crewed and commanded by his extended family lineage since before he was born. His uncle had been captain of this ship when Rilk first went into space. Now the Ulia's Flower was his command. Rilk supposed that when he retired, some cousin or nephew might be her next captain. But for now the ship was his. It was his fourth trip on this same run in the last ten thousand hours; just over 14% longer than an old-Earth year.

  Old Earth seemed to be on his mind, just then. His family was rich, for a demos family. It would not have been impossible for some of them attain nobility and enter the ranks of the aristokratai. But so far, no one of his family who might have had that chance had accepted. That leap had been too much to brave. Still his family could afford historical analysis of artifacts and records, so that, unlike most commoner families, the Rilk lineage had not lost its own history during the Escape. Hans Rilk knew of his ancestors. He knew his family came from a part of old Earth that had been called Holland. And he knew that his family had committed generations to the business of commanding ships.

  There were records, so old that archaeolinguists had been needed to decipher the language they were written in, that hinted strongly that there had been men named Rijlk or Rijk at the helms of pre-industrial sea-going ships, when wind and sails were the means of propulsion and the stars were only for navigation.

  More reliable records showed that there were Rilks commanding fission powered ocean-going ships a hundred years (almost a million hours) before the Escape, when the final colonization ships had left Old Earth. Very few families had records going back so far, even among the Aristokratai.

  For Hans Rilk it was a pleasant conceit, to pass slow time, to imagine his ancestors' reactions to his own life. He could show an imaginary ancestor his ship, and try to explain the singularity reactor, and
the neural interface controls. He would explain the commonplace things: the way Earth languages had been changed by the Escape and the utility of modern Translang, the way time was measured by people who rarely stayed in one place long enough to see a full orbital year of any one planet. Most humans measured their lives in tens of thousands of hours now, in place of the old-Earth years. Ten thousand hours was a seventh part longer than an old-Earth year, and though Rilk had an amateur historian's affection for the old-fashioned measurements, ten-thousand hour units, "tenkays," were, he admitted, just as functional... though perhaps lacking in the romance of ages past.

  We are a long way from there and then, thought Rilk, in time and space and even in the nature of what we call human... in things I do not quite know the measure of. We are a long way from being a single people of a single world, Rilk thought, and then admitted that the thought was folly; humans had never been a single people on Old Earth either.

  2

  Time was measured in long seconds.

  Zandy was on the beam. The interceptor was centered on the output of the Number Three Primary Laser Array, boosting hard at eighty-two gees towards the enemy ship. The enemy was focusing a tertiary laser array on her; she increased polymer flow to the bow-shields and launched another set of optical sensor-relay drones on a trajectory that ought to take them out of the dazzle-blinding pattern of the enemy laser. No joy; the enemy seemed to have it in for her, personally; all three drones flared and died, giving her no new sensor data. She was flying blind. She had the sensor feed from the Conquering Sun, her mother-ship, but it was light-lagged by almost two seconds, and her mother-ship was being laser-blinded too. The data wasn't totally useless, but it was nowhere near as good as getting some of her own sensors into the game. Seconds were a long time for an interceptor on an attack run.

  The interceptor was riding the laser of one of the Conquering Sun's Primary Laser Arrays, PLAs, catching the enormous output of the huge laser array in its variable geometry parabolic reflectors and focusing it to turn carbon reaction mass into high energy plasma thrust. Zandy adjusted the magnetic nozzle of her drive and her thrust vector changed accordingly, slewing the interceptor in a corkscrew as she signaled the vector change back to her mother-ship. She could direct thrust in almost any direction, so long as it was powered by the PLA of her mother ship. But she needed that laser; there was no way get sustained high thrust from an onboard power source in something as small as an interceptor.

  There was also no way to focus killing laser energy from the assault-ship out as far as an interceptor could be propelled, using its reflectors to focus the distant laser of its mother-ship. That meant that interceptors, propelled by laser power from their mother-ships, were the weapons of choice for deep space battle.

  For a moment she was off the beam, switching seamlessly to a burst of micro-fission pellets for thrust, before the mother-ship tracked her maneuver and tasked another PLA to propel her. The engine switched back to laser power. She was out of the glare of the enemy blinding laser now, and she triggered another spread of sensor drones to launch. This time she had a decent few seconds of new data before the enemy blinding lasers found her.

  The bow-shields were bleeding vaporized polymer fast, and she upped the injection rate of fresh polymer into the shields to maximum. The shields were deployable panels of smart-metal and composite mesh that held a fluid barrier of ablative polymer between her and the enemy lasers. Her onboard polymer reserves should hold out for the brief remaining duration of the attack run.

  More importantly, the new sensor data suddenly gave her a targeting fix on two enemy interceptors screaming out to meet her. Her closing vector towards the enemy ship was up to almost 680 kilometers per second now, and the enemy interceptors were doing about 370 kps reciprocal. The closure rate was over a thousand kilometers per second, a third of a percent of light speed.

  There might be a second wave of enemy interceptors beyond this one, she thought, but it would be too late. Interceptors launched this late wouldn't be able to engage her before she was in range of their mother-ship, especially since the enemy boost lasers would be getting dangerously hot; her own mother-ship was venting geysers of coolant trying to manage the big lasers' waste heat.

  But she had a target now and the decision to take the shot was almost subconscious. She selected half of her anti-interceptor warheads and tasked them, launching them out into the laser-saturated space around her. The small projectiles' fission motors flared for a violent second, deploying the warheads to minimum stand-off range. Lasing rods aligned at the now unseen targets' probable positions and the multi-kiloton yield warheads detonated in flashes of nuclear fire, sending out coherent blasts of X-ray energy.

  An instant after the warheads were launched she was executing another random vector variation and dropping salvos of micro-decoys, seeking to evade a possible counter-attack from the enemy interceptors. Her own blinding lasers were tracking across the most likely volumes of space where the enemy interceptors might have deployed sensor drones; their main sensors would be blinded by tertiary laser arrays from her mother-ship, just like the enemy ship was blinding her.

  She assumed that the enemy interceptors had taken shots at her too, but she never got confirmation of it. If she had scored any interceptor kills, she would find out from the mother-ship's records. Her own sensors told her nothing about it.

  Her second spread of sensor drones were fully cooked now, burned to uselessness by hostile laser energy, and she launched a third salvo. She was off the beam again, and her fission fuel reserves were falling fast to keep up her thrust. Her acceleration was jolting all along the range from sixty to almost ninety gees; a constant rate of acceleration was almost as quick a form of suicide as drifting on a fixed vector would be. The only thing saving her now was that the enemy ship's own sensors were being flooded with blinding lasers, making it impossible for the enemy ship to keep a concentrated point of laser light focused on her constantly evading interceptor. If she let her interceptor drift on a fixed vector, or even accelerated at a constant rate, the enemy's secondary laser arrays would track her and burn through her bow-shields in a matter of scant seconds.

  The enemy ship had scant seconds left. Captain Ari-Kani of the Hegemonic assault-ship Conquering Sun had chosen to gamble, dedicating all of his ship's PLAs to a long-range offensive strike, powering a salvo of twelve interceptors, two full waves, for a long duration burn and holding back nothing for powering a defensive salvo of interceptors. The huge ship still had her secondary and tertiary laser arrays for defense, to blind enemy sensors and try to burn down inbound interceptors and warheads.

  Committing all of her Primary Laser Arrays and launching only twelve interceptors allowed time for half of the Conquering Sun's big boost-laser arrays to cool down without interrupting power to the interceptors. But the lasers generated vast amounts of waste heat when they fired. Even with half the beams shut down for cooling at any given time, the Conquering Sun's radiator spines were glowing with waste heat and the huge ship was venting streams of super-heated coolant to keep the lasers from overheating. There was no margin to power a second salvo of interceptors, a defensive salvo, without cutting power to the attack salvo.

  Heat buildup would eventually force the big lasers to shut down, even with the massive coolant expenditure and the alternation of half the lasers between cooling and firing cycles.

  But not soon enough for this enemy, thought Zandy. She didn't know what her sibling interceptors were doing, but she was almost in range of the target ship, past its first defensive wave of interceptors and too close for a second defensive wave to get in her way before her own weapons would be in range. She found the beam again and accelerated on laser power; there wasn't much fission fuel left, but that didn't matter.

  Now she was just within maximum range; she could launch her ship-killers now, but the odds of a kill were still low. The power of the warheads' nuclear detonation-pumped X-ray lasers was enormous, but the focus accuracy
was very poor. Not to mention that the target ship was stealthed to degrade last-instant radar targeting and was pumping out blinding lasers to degrade optical sensors. So the weapons had to get close to work. It would take only a few more endless seconds to get the target deeper into her range envelope.

  Ideally she would have wanted to wait till her interceptor shot past the target ship, giving her weapons a clear shot behind the enemy's bow-shields, but there was too much enemy fire and the odds of living long enough for that were too low.

  The enemy's tactics were more conventional than her side's. Five or six interceptors, a single wave, had been held back as defenders, to try to stop her and the other interceptors in her wave. It was a futile defense against the dozen inbound interceptors, but it let the enemy shoot a full wave of a half dozen interceptors at her mother-ship, unopposed. But if she could kill the enemy ship, the enemy interceptors would lose power; limited to their internal fission fuel, the enemy wouldn't be able to maintain a high acceleration attack run, and without the ability to evade at extreme accelerations, the enemy interceptors would be swatted out of the vacuum like flies stuck to fly paper.

  The beam suddenly died. Fission took over again, giving her some acceleration, but there was less than 10% reserves left. No time. She frantically looked though rear facing sensors. The Conquering Sun was no longer lasing for her; all the PLAs had been re-tasked!

  Her acceleration was down to 58 gees, and the bow-shields were suddenly subliming faster than the polymer could be injected; a secondary laser array from the enemy mother-ship was trying to track her, and doing a better job now that her acceleration had fallen off. She could evade at full acceleration, but that would use the last of her fission fuel. Range was down to just over ten thousand kilometers, falling fast. Decision was instant. She pushed for maximum acceleration, straining the structure of the interceptor at eight-eight gees, ramming herself out of the focus point of the laser. Even so, the bow shields failed and the hull began to melt and sublime. If the laser had been perfectly focused, it would have shattered the composite and metal interceptor with a sledgehammer thermal shock. As it was, she had long seconds left to trigger the high-yield anti-ship warheads. A half-dozen megaton-range nuclear explosions blossomed as the anti-ship warheads generated sprays of X-ray laser pulses that were an order of magnitude more powerful than those she had sent at the enemy interceptors. A low-yield weapon might have been stopped by the massive ablative shields of the enemy assault ship; a high yield anti-ship weapon could be degraded by the shields, but not reliably; a properly focused pulse would strike with so much energy that the ablative liquid polymer would simply become the wave-front of an explosion that would rip through the giant ship's hull.