Jack turned over the grenades and headed up the ramp into the guts of the ship. Jack had never been inside a starship, and this one had once been a colonist transport ship. Whole decks had been carved out of it, when they landed a colonist ship they typically cut its innards out for housing. Things like showers, toilets, sinks, that kind of thing would be removed from the ship and installed in housing units.
Jack wandered around until he found the galley--he hadn't eaten since the day before. They served eggs, bacon, potatoes, fresh peaches, bagels, coffee, milk, and juice. They wanted food ration tickets from Jack, who didn't even know where to apply for the things. They let him eat and told him he had to go to the fourth deck to the appropriations office and get signed up for rations.
Jack climbed up two sets of ladders to deck four and found a line of people waiting. He assumed they waited for food tickets, and he asked the guy at the end of the line. Yup, they waited in line for the appropriations office. Jack waited for two or three hours. Finally the line dwindled until he faced a booth with a frail, older woman behind plate glass. She asked Jack, "Single, male?"
Jack replied, "Yes, ma'am."
"Palm on the palm printer."
Jack put his right hand on the palm printer, and why they called it a printer when it read palm prints Jack didn't know.
The lady asked, "Jack Grean?"
"Yes, ma'am."
The lady removed a plastic card from a drawer and slid it through a card reader on her desk. "You're rationed to 2,000 calories a day and two gallons of water a day. Most people save a gallon a day of water and take a 10 minute shower once a week. Once we're underway and have a more accurate count of how many people we'll have on board, the water restrictions may be lifted."
Jack took the offered plastic card. "Where do I sleep?"
The lady looked up as if she'd answered that question a thousand times that day. "Anywhere you feel like. The quarters were cut out of the ship when it was used as a colony vessel."
Jack turned and walked away from the 'appropriations' office. He headed back towards the galley for lunch. They served a kind of sandwich buffet where you made your own sandwiches. Jack ate roast beef on rye with Swiss cheese. He asked a kitchen worker, "When will we be out of regular food and be eating rations?"
The kitchen worker laughed. One of the other kitchen workers overheard and answered, "Couple of weeks, kid."
Jack said, "Thanks."
After Jack ate, he went exploring the ship again. He found himself a cutout section of the ship on deck three that nobody had laid claim to yet. He sat down to wait. He knew the trip to Orion would be six months travel time to the people on the ship. He heard on the ship's speaker system, "All clear! All clear! Liftoff in 60 seconds!"
Then a few moments later he heard, "Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One! Liftoff!"
The ship's acceleration pulled Jack down. He expected more force on takeoff. He got to his feet to look at a central view screen. He watched the city dwindle away in the distance: the only home he ever knew. He went back to the cutout he'd laid claim to and tried to rest. He hadn't slept much the night before. He started to shake--shock gripped him, his family dead, Earth, gone…
* * *
"Can I sit here?"
Jack looked up. Lexi stood above him in all her glory, even though her pants were ripped in one spot, and the shirt had sweat marks on it. Jack stood up. "Of course you can sit here!"
"Thanks." She sat down. "Did you find your folks?"
"I talked to my dad before he bled to death. My mom is dead. I'm still not sure about my sister…"
Lexi nodded and then paused for a long time. "My folks are dead."
"I'm sorry, Lexi…" Jack didn't know what to do to console her. He thought about putting his arm around her, and she sat close enough to him that he could easily have reached around her.
She moved her hand over and grabbed Jack's hand. She looked him in the eye. "I don't think anybody from our class at school survived… You saved my life, Jack…"
"I don't remember much of the fight after they shot you. It all happened very fast."
"You killed them. You killed a lot of them…"
"They shouldn't have come to Artemis."
Lexi leaned over and planted her lips directly on Jack's. He returned her kiss, as most 19-year-old boys would. She hugged her arms around him while they kissed. Then she broke the embrace and started to unbutton his shirt, revealing a well muscled chest and upper arms. She ran her hands all over his chest. Jack didn't know for sure what to do with his hands, so he grabbed her face and kissed her on the lips again. She lowered her head to his shoulder and started kissing him along the neck, sending shivers down his spine. She grabbed his hand and put it on her breast. Jack's free hand moved to the other breast by instinct. Lexi started to reach lower on Jack's stomach towards his pants…
"Stop that this instant!" A woman screamed.
Both Lexi and Jack looked up. One of the council elders, Beatrice Harpe, from Artemis, stood next to them with a very stern look on her face. "We'll have none of that here! This is a public place. There are children present! Get your shirt back on, young man!
Jack said, "Yes, ma'am."
Beatrice looked at Lexi and then back at Jack, then addressed both of them in a high, angry voice, "What are your names?"
Lexi sighed and sat back down next to Jack instead of on top of him.
"Jack Grean, ma'am."
Lexi looked far off into the distance. "Kimberly Mathews."
Council elder Harpe wandered back to wherever she'd come from. She had been accurate about it being a public place. The deck consisted of one large room with only the slightest division of spaces, no real walls.
Jack looked over at Lexi. "You lied."
"Kim and I have a deal. If I get in trouble, I can use her name and vice versa."
"What kind of deal is that?"
"It's the kind of deal girls make," Lexi said.
"I've never heard of such a thing."
Lexi just smiled and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, and they went back to waiting. After a while Jack started to get hungry. He asked Lexi, "Did you get your rations card?"
Lexi replied, "Yes, I'm getting hungry, too. Let's go eat."
They went to the galley and ate dinner, nothing noteworthy. As they finished, a Fleet Officer stepped into the galley and made a beeline towards them. Jack figured the guy intended to take away his rifle. The officer had scars on his right hand, like it had been burned in a fire. His jumpsuit fit loosely, but he was clearly well built. He had a square jaw and black hair with hazel eyes. He looked like somebody who spent his spare time wrestling with bears. The officer stood as if at attention almost and asked, "What's your name, kid?"
"Jack Grean, sir."
"You need a haircut."
Jack frowned.
"Trimmers can be found in Medical, and the girl can cut it," the officer said.
"What's this about?" Jack asked.
"Come with me please."
Jack stood up to follow him and said, "Come'on, Lexi."
They followed the Fleet Officer up three levels to Deck Five then down a corridor to a door marked, "Captain Wilson."
The man opened the door with his palm print and ushered Jack and Lexi inside. "Have a seat."
He entered after them and sat behind a good sized desk. He pulled two glasses out of a cabinet and put ice in them and poured a healthy dollop of Scotch into them. He offered one to Jack, "Have a drink with me, kid."
Jack took the glass and took a sip. It burned! He blurted out, "How can you drink that stuff?"
"That's the good stuff there, twelve years old. It's a bit of an acquired taste. I do forget. I'm not used to dealing with a minor."
Jack took another sip of his drink, smaller sips he told himself.
"You do good work, kid," Wilson said. "You held the line back there. You killed 37. I had a Sergeant count'em."
"That still does
n't really answer my question, and how'd you know it was me?"
"We met on the battlefield. I was the guy wearing the suit. I want to give you a field promotion. Technically under martial law you can't turn it down, but I figured since you're under 21 I'd ask you first, if you wanted it."
"A field promotion?" Jack asked.
"It'd let you keep the rifle. You'd get quarters. If you pass the graduation test, which I can recommend you for, you'll get paid from this day forward. For all intents and purposes you'll be a Private. You'll have to prepare for the graduation test and study Fleet courses en route to Orion."
Jack sat and thought about it. His dad had told him to join Fleet. "Yeah, I guess I do want it."
"Ok, you're now a Private first class." Captain Wilson pushed forward a piece of actual paper and a palm printer. "Sign the paper. Put your palm on the reader."
Jack, being far too trusting and not bothering to read the paper, signed on the dotted line and applied his palm to the palm printer.
"You now have quarters on deck three, room E," Wilson said. "Are you two together?"
This question stunned Jack a bit. Lexi reached out and grasped his hand, saying, "Yes, Captain, we're together."
"Put your palm on the palm printer then miss, so you can get in and out of the quarters."
Lexi pressed her palm on the device. Wilson pushed a few keys on his keyboard and said, "You're all set."
Jack and Lexi started to leave. Jack set the drink down on Wilson's desk. Wilson started in on a spiel, "Jack, you need to study up on the Fleet Boot Camp training and physical requirements, you need to be able to run for an hour straight. You need to be ready to pass the graduation expectations of a Fleet Private when we get to Orion, or I'll face a court-marshal for giving rank to a 19-year-old. Do we understand each other, Private?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Good."
Chapter 5
AD 2130
Steve Creech en route to Artemis…
On board The Nighthawk, they sped towards Artemis. All the talk consisted of rumors about the second armada, and they agreed there had to be one. Steve Creech believed it, wanted to believe it at least. They didn't have much to do on board the Frigate during travel time, and they listened to the Fleet broadcasts on FTL. They didn't dare broadcast on that channel, for it would give away their location to every receiver in the universe. Three months into their journey they traveled at well above the speed of light, and they received terrible news over FTL.
Artemis, almost destroyed. Other commonwealth planets assaulted. Earth, a cloud of radioactive dust. All Human planets relocating to Orion.
"We'll be subsisting off nothing but lasagna," Beth said.
Creech said, "You're joking!"
Captain Rivers sighed. "I wish she was."
Sadly, they plotted a course for Orion, and it would be another six months before they would be back with Fleet. The Lithor must have sent armadas to attack commonwealth planets and Earth months before the Human ships first engaged the fleet at the Lithorian homeworld.
* * *
The second armada existed, and they launched it a few months after the first one. It consisted of four ships, and they called them Apocalypse class ships. They named them Death, Famine, War, and Disease, after the Four Horsemen. Each one took almost a billion man hours to construct and had a crew of a thousand souls. They filled them with raw recruits since the veteran crews were with the first armada. The crews trained en route.
The Horsemen class had more energy weapons on it than any ship previously designed, better shielding, faster acceleration, and a very crucial addition, a device to detect Dreadnaughts even if they were cloaked. The device acted like a spray paint bomb. They would launch it, and detonate it close to the Dreadnaughts. It would paint them with a liquid that stuck to their hulls and could be detected through the cloak. At least in theory, it would work.
The Horsemen received the news of the Lithorian attacks on commonwealth planets and on Earth a few days before they reached their destination. They knew they needed to win at any cost in the coming battle.
The Horsemen decelerated at 1g, slowing down as they approached the Lithorian homeworld. They sent their paint bombs in the direction of the black cloud that they thought would be the Dreadnaughts. It worked like a charm. War fired first, all its guns at once, right at the heart of a Dreadnaught. The energy weapons proved sufficient to penetrate the enemy's shield and cut a ragged hole in its side, and atmosphere jetted out of the molten holes in the hull. The Dreadnaught steered off course. The other Lithorian ships started to fire. Death launched more paint bombs and dodged. Disease targeted a ship and fired, ripping a hole in it. Secondary explosions went off in it as if munitions had been hit. Famine cut into a third Dreadnaught.
On cue, they dropped their cloaks and launched their Mongrels. The Mongrels all went after War, a giant swarm of them, pests to War. The gunners targeted Mongrels one by one. All four Horsemen zigged and zagged to avoid the energy blasts by the Dreadnaughts. War's forward weapons recharged, and again it punched through a Dreadnaught's shielding and cut into the hull.
They cut the Dreadnaughts down, and the energy weapons on the Dreadnaughts failed to penetrate the beefed up shielding on the Horsemen. They didn't make it easy for them to be hit either--they pushed the maneuverability of their ships to the limit. They cut the Dreadnaughts into pieces, and the Lithorian crews ate vacuum. The designers of the Horsemen had done their job, and soon they just coasted through the debris pile, unchecked. They still had a destiny to achieve.
Each ship carried two hundred high density atomic devices, equivalent to a thousand megatons each. They intended to destroy the four hundred population centers on the Lithorian homeworld. Scorching the planet for all intents and purposes, just like the Lithors had done to Earth. They dropped bomb after bomb. The Lithor planet based anti-missile defenses fired, but the designers of the bombs had planned for that, and they had a force field in them. They went ahead and used the extra atomics on regions of the planet with low population. The crews cheered as they deployed the last bombs. They reveled in their revenge.
They broadcast on FTL to Orion the news of battle, but Fleet decided to keep it secret from all but the top brass.
* * *
The Apocalypse class ship had one design flaw, and in truth it could have been considered an advantage as it gave them much greater maneuverability. They couldn't carry enough fuel for two interstellar jumps. Fleet should have sent fuel ships to them, but Earth's destruction interrupted those plans. They had enough fuel between the four ships for two of them to limp to Orion, so they split up. Death and War left Disease and Famine behind.
Chapter 6
A.D. 2087
Earth, G.E.S.C. laboratories…
"I bet we can beat the speed of light."
Hans said it as if he had already proved it. Fleischman just grinned. "I know you're a genius, but you don't really think Einstein was wrong do you? The theory of relativity has been proved in labs over a hundred years ago."
"I think either the mass of the ship or the centrifugal energy from the drives will create a field around a ship. Let's call it the Goldberg field, and this field will actually invert the theory of relativity. The only thing I'm not sure about is when exactly, at what speed, the relativity will invert."
Fleischman remained a disbeliever. The new power plant and propulsion system that Hans invented would be a boon to mankind. They already planned to build a system big enough to power a small city, but they also planned to try their hands at space travel, unmanned at first. "How is the design for the drones coming?" Fleischman asked.
"We should be able to achieve twenty gravities of acceleration up to about 95% the speed of light, assuming Einstein is unbeatable."
They assembled five of the drones and launched them all in one day from a secret location in the United States. They watched the theory of relativity with part of the computer model, i.e., their mass would increase the fast
er they went, requiring them to use more fuel to maintain their acceleration. The drones had been programmed to automatically increase fuel burn based on time. Late on the fourth day, after the drones passed about twenty-percent the speed of light, the time dilation between data bursts started to grow outside of bounds. The drones' rate of acceleration went up at a dramatic rate. Hans laughed. "Better send the signal to reprogram the drone's fuel burn now, or the signal will be chasing drones going faster than light!"
"How fast is their estimated velocity right now?" Fleishman asked.
A technician punched a button. "41% the speed of light currently."
"Send the signal, all stop."
The technician punched a few more buttons. "Signal sent, Doctor Fleishman. The computer isn't sure if it will reach the drones before they reach light speed."
"The drones aren't going to pass the speed of light," Fleishman said.
"They will," Hans said. "The Goldberg field is real. We just saw the theory of relativity invert. All the drones will burn fuel up to their programmed time and then turn and slow down. They'll be light-years past the star systems they were aimed at."
Fleishman rubbed at his chin a bit and pondered. "Why are we even calling it fuel? It doesn't burn. It's just a thing of iron particles."
"We call it fuel, because it's used up in making a journey."
"Ahhh."
* * *
None of the first five drones were ever recovered. Reviewing the data they had, they knew the Goldberg field inverted the theory of relativity at twenty-percent the speed of light. They sent out five more drones with new fuel burn parameters in their software. They measured the Goldberg field and calculated the speed of the drones past the speed of light. They overshot their marks, but they had sufficient data now to rewrite the drone's software and plot new courses to star systems.
The third batch of ships made it to five separate star systems and back, bringing back pictures of planets. The G.E.S.C. decided to construct craft with Human crews, starships, with enough fuel and food on them to both jump to another star system and make it home. They launched two of the starships with four crewmembers each. They flew at one gravity, and the Goldberg field kicked in after ten weeks. The total travel time ended up being around six months. Both starships made it back and produced data on the star systems they had found. They found carbon based life on one of the planets.
R.A.E.C.E. Genesis Page 4