With that, a tightly overlapping group of five green spheres began slowly pulsating just off to their left. Without further prompting, Patterson immediately headed in their direction for a closer look.
“I don’t know about you, sir,” Oshiro said, “but the only one of those my ‘mature vision’ can really make out in any detail is the Ushant. You’ll notice that you can view the ships from any angle. The primary holo emitters are in the table down there, but there are supplemental projectors placed all around the room.”
“This is unbelievable,” the old admiral said, staring intently at the tiny carrier as it passed slowly by in its orbit.
“The actual ship is just over a kilometer in length and traveling at approximately three kilometers per second,” Guthrie said, reading from his tablet. “At this scale, the ship is a shade over three-millimeters-long and is moving at just under a centimeter each second. The Moon, if you could see it, would be located about a kilometer away at this scale, but still about ten meters in diameter.”
“Well, Charlie, clearly you didn’t make the room big enough, then,” Patterson said facetiously. “Gentlemen, I’m completely blown away. But as impressive as these holo projections are, I’m guessing they aren’t what you really wanted me to see.”
“No, sir,” Doctor Guthrie replied, smiling broadly. “During the Resistance attack, the Guardian spacecraft provided real-time tracking data of all ships in hyperspace out to about ten light years. I think you’ll agree that having that data available — in addition to Yamantau Mountain getting the Cossack’s shields operational in time — were major factors in our victory.”
“I would indeed. In fact, I’d say even with the Cossack’s arrival, we might well have ultimately lost the battle had we not been able to pre-position our ships with such accuracy.”
“Well, sir, as you correctly surmised, the reason the Guardian was able to fill in the missing pieces that allowed it to provide this data was a series of tests we had been conducting on a similar system. I use the word similar because the basic physics of the Guardian’s system appears to be based on the same principles. Once we started receiving data from our most distant comm beacons, however, we made some remarkable discoveries in hyperspace quantum mechanics.”
“Let me stop you right there, Doctor. I can promise you that you’ll be wasting your breath if you try to explain any of that to me, but I do appreciate knowing in general how and when the discoveries were made. So, I guess what I’m hearing is that we’ve found a way to detect hyperspace activity at greater distances.”
“That’s exactly right, sir, but somewhat of an understatement. The comm beacons we’ve been deploying now for over a year rely on a number of very specific — let’s call them ‘properties’ — of hyperspace itself that allow them to transmit data from point to point. The data transmissions occur more or less instantaneously, regardless of how far apart the two beacons are deployed. We knew there was a practical limit to the distance between beacons, due primarily to the precision required to establish the point-to-point data link. After we started dropping them off at greater and greater distances, however, a group of physicists with experience in optical interferometry — that’s combining a group of small images or signals to produce a larger, much more powerful one — proposed that the same thing might be possible using a group of widely spaced comm beacons.”
“That group of physicists he’s referring to was headed up by none other than Doctor Guthrie himself, by the way,” Captain Oshiro added.
Guthrie dismissed the attempt at assigning credit with a smile and a wave of his hand, then continued. “Suffice it to say that the technique worked, and better than we would have ever expected.”
“I think I may be a little confused here. I thought we were talking about detecting hyperspace activity, but you just said this new technique applied to comm beacons. So, is this more about communications or tracking?” Patterson asked. Why does it feel like I just stepped into a wad of chewing gum every time I talk to one of these guys? he thought, working hard keep the conversation moving forward.
“In hyperspace, those are essentially two sides of the same coin, Admiral. One way to think of it is that the ‘medium’ of hyperspace itself exhibits a kind of mass entanglement that we don’t see anywhere else in the universe. You can think of it almost like the surface of an infinitely large bass drum. A disturbance in one area is felt more or less simultaneously in another. Here’s the thing, I don’t want to give you the impression that we have anything more than a basic understanding of exactly why we see some of these strange phenomena. All we can do at this point is recognize certain properties that we can exploit to our advantage.”
“I’m all for whatever works, Doctor. So enough with the suspense already. Please show me what you’ve got.”
“My pleasure, sir. This,” he said, entering a series of commands on his tablet, “is roughly equivalent to what the Guardian shared with us during the Resistance attack.”
The Earth abruptly disappeared from the center of the room and was immediately replaced by a smaller, nearly transparent sphere centered around a yellowish-white pinpoint of light. Ten other objects of similar configuration were distributed at various locations around the room.
“Be aware that the scale gets a little wonky when we start dealing with interstellar distances. The AI does its best to give us as accurate a portrayal as possible while still allowing some things to be visible that we might not actually be able to see. So right now, it’s showing us the eight or so star systems along with a few brown dwarfs in our immediate stellar neighborhood, so to speak. If there were ships traveling in hyperspace within this region, you would see them here. The AI projects them into normal space for clarity and highlights their locations to make them visible on such a massive scale.”
“I don’t see any flashing spheres, so I assume that means no ships are traveling in hyperspace within this area. I don’t mind telling you that I’m relieved to see that this is the case,” he observed with a smile. “Again, Doctor, this is a truly staggering accomplishment. You’ve obviously put us on a par with what we believe the Guardian is able to do — as far as we know, of course.”
“Oh, we’re just getting started, Admiral. At the moment, we really have very little intelligence data regarding what capabilities other civilizations have at their disposal. The DEFIANT BASTION classification, however, is intended to allow us to safeguard Human technology that we have reason to believe might actually exceed the Pelarans’ capabilities. So far, that includes the fundamental designs for our C-Drive, certain aspects of our railgun technology, our gravitic shields, and now this.”
With that, the room was instantly lit by an unimaginably huge number of stars. At various locations around the room, the AI highlighted what looked like hundreds of objects within green spheres.
“Dear God,” Patterson gasped. “All of those are ships traveling in hyperspace? How far out are we looking here?”
“This is five hundred light years, and, yes, all of the green spheres represent active hyperdrive signatures. Displaying this much space at once isn’t particularly useful other than reminding us of how utterly small we really are,” Guthrie said, pausing momentarily to take in the overwhelming, majestic beauty of even this relatively small, remote corner of the Milky Way. “One really interesting thing we have noticed, however,” he continued, “is that — so far at least — we rarely see hyperdrive signatures that behave like one of our C-Drives. When we do, they appear to be taking such massive jumps that we only detect either their departure or arrival.”
“Perhaps that’s our old friends ‘the Greys,’” Patterson said offhandedly.
“It’s certainly possible, but we just don’t know yet. I doubt we would have ever been able to develop the C-Drive without having studied their technology for generations, so that’s our best guess so far as well. To be honest, though, we have absolutely no idea who most of these hyperspace signatures belong to. Frankly, sir, we’re
struggling to even begin to come to grips with the military and scientific implications of this technology, and it will take us quite a while to begin sorting all of this out. Now, getting back to your original question regarding comm … from what we can tell, this five-hundred-light-year range is something of a practical range limitation. I hesitate to say we won’t ever do any better than that, but it seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.”
“Am I to understand that our ships will also have a five hundred-light-year comm range?”
“The short answer is yes, but that’s five hundred light years from the closest virtual array of comm beacons. It takes a minimum of three to constitute an array, so the range is calculated from the geometric center of each array. This, of course, has no impact on the comm range of ships located in normal space. In order for them to access the NRD network from normal space, they will still need to be in close proximity to a hyperspace comm beacon, just as before … and the speed of light limitation still applies, of course. Once they transition, to hyperspace, however —”
“They essentially become a comm beacon themselves at that point, right?”
“Yes, sir, that’s about the size of it.”
“And when can we start making this data available to our forces?”
“Hmm … as long as everyone understands that it still needs a lot of work before it can be considered completely reliable, I’d say pretty much immediately,” Guthrie replied, obviously pleased to offer the admiral this additional bit of good news. “We will, of course, need to work out the best way for our crews to access the data in a secure manner.”
“Right. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking this will likely remain captain and first officer’s eyes only intel.”
“Probably so, sir. We’ll work on advancing some clearances to make that happen as quickly as possible.”
Patterson paused, shaking his head slowly. “Wow … I don’t mind telling you that I’m having a hard time taking all of this in. Each time I see one of these scientific and engineering miracles that have come about as a result of the ETSI programs, I always believe that I’ve finally seen the pinnacle of what we are likely to accomplish during my lifetime. Then a few months later, you people somehow manage to eclipse anything that has come before. Sometimes I don’t know whether to be elated or terrified.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Guthrie said, nodding slowly, “but I’d recommend going with elated. There are obviously a large number of civilizations out there that have been at this much longer than we have. If the past year has taught us nothing else, it’s that we have to take full advantage of every strength we have as a species if we’re going to have any hope of competing long-term.
“Now, let me show you just one more thing and then I’ll take you down to the floor and show you around. Shortly after we started encountering ships from other civilizations, our AIs discovered that hyperdrive signatures are unique. That applies to major categories like drive types, subcategories such as different versions of the same drive, and all the way down to individual ships. That came as a bit of a surprise at first, but in hindsight, it probably shouldn’t have. Nothing mechanical with that level of complexity is ever a perfect duplicate. We’ve been identifying oceangoing vessels by their unique acoustic signatures since the Second World War, for example.”
“Now that could be very useful when combined with this long range … what are we calling this thing?”
“We’re open to suggestions, Admiral. A few of the techs have been calling it ‘the planetarium,’ but everything I’ve heard so far seems to miss the mark somehow.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty weak, although the room does remind me a bit of the planetarium my father used to take me to as a kid — other than the size, of course. I’m sure you’ll come up with something. Sorry, I didn’t mean to get us off topic. Since you’re able to identify individual ships by their hyperdrive signature, can you show me Prince Naftur’s ship, the Gresav?” Patterson asked, beginning to realize some of the astounding intelligence-gathering uses for the system.
“I can’t show you her current position, sir, but I can definitely show you her last transition point. In fact, let me patch the system’s AI in through this tablet so that it can adjust the display to follow our conversation.”
A few seconds later, a single, red sphere pulsed urgently next to a star at the far end of the room.
“Excellent. And I’m assuming all of your data corroborates the location of the Wek homeworld he provided, right? Don’t get me wrong, I have great respect and confidence in Naftur’s integrity, but it never hurts to verify information when we can,” Patterson said, smiling to himself.
“I agree wholeheartedly, sir,” Captain Oshiro said, “and you could say that tracking the Gresav and the Hadeon during the last days of their trip back to Graca was the first practical test of this system. As you can see, both ships are exactly where he said they would be, as are the comm beacons we sent back with him. Incidentally, both the Gresav and quite a few other Wek warships have made a number of additional short trips over the past few weeks. We’re really not sure what that’s about.” As he spoke, the room’s AI zoomed in on the general area of space surrounding Naftur’s flagship, highlighting several items of interest with accompanying text blocks.
“I’m guessing what you’re seeing is a direct result of Prince Naftur consolidating his forces … and those sites are most likely military anchorages of some sort. We haven’t had a lot of time to iron out all the details of how we’re going to coordinate military activities between our two worlds going forward, but we have agreed that TFC will send task forces to blockade Damara and Lesheera until the Wek have had time to reconstitute their own fleet. As you might well imagine, since Graca’s ships have been integrated with the greater Sajeth Collective Fleet for centuries, suddenly reestablishing an independent Wek navy is likely to be a bit of a challenge.”
“Particularly since they seemed to have so many officers willing to join the so-called Resistance movement.”
“That’s true as well, but I think quite a bit of that was ironically due to the sense of loyalty many of the Wek have for their traditional dynastic houses — loyalty that was skillfully manipulated for their own purposes by the Damarans.”
“Is it not also true that Prince Naftur initially shared only the location of Graca with us?” Guthrie asked. “We were told that he was uncomfortable revealing the locations of the other six worlds of the Sajeth Collective until he had time to work through the myriad of political issues he was expecting in the wake of Graca’s withdrawal from the Sajeth Collective.”
“Initially, yes, that’s correct. Admiral Sexton practically begged him to reconsider for his own safety, but Naftur believed that it was critical that he be given time to handle Graca’s transition back to home rule internally before any of our forces became directly involved in the region. I’m sure he was also concerned that we might mount some sort of punitive expedition against Damara and Lesheera before he even arrived back on Graca. He thought, and I certainly agree, that it was critical for the Wek people to learn the truth about what happened in the Sol system directly from him in hopes that they would start to view us as their allies. In any event, the delay seems to have worked in our favor thus far. Politically, things have progressed for Naftur more rapidly than we would have expected. He was named Prince Regent of Graca within days of his return and immediately set about establishing formal diplomatic relations with Earth via our Leadership Council. Perhaps even more importantly for us, the intervening months have given us some time to recover from the Resistance attack. We’ve largely finished upgrading our existing ships, and we have replacements for the hulls lost in combat under construction. In fact, Captain Oshiro here assures me that we’ll start seeing initial climbs to orbit soon … isn’t that right, Captain?”
“Any day now, Admiral,” the facility commander said with a significant smile.
“That’s a pretty good answer, I suppose … as l
ong as you’re not still saying the same thing three months from now,” Patterson replied.
“Well, sir,” Guthrie said, steering the conversation back to the subject at hand, “not that I’d want us to do anything to upset our new Wek allies, but now that we’ve been tracking hyperspace activity in the vicinity of Graca — and more recently Damara and Lesheera — our AI believes it has also identified the other four worlds of the Sajeth Collective.”
With that, the holographic display reconfigured itself once again, this time showing a slowly rotating view of seven star systems, each labeled according to their primary, habitable world.
“There you are, sir: Graca, Damara, Lesheera, Ecradea, Pashurni, Shanus, and Carnide. Based on a combination of our observations and the data Admiral Naftur provided after first contact, the AI gives this model a better than ninety-three-percent probability of being correct.”
Patterson stared at the display in silence, his mind now beginning to grasp that even the vast distances between the stars would no longer provide anonymity and refuge for those who would wish Humanity harm.
“This really does change everything,” he said quietly. “We must detail every available resource to accelerate the deployment of comm beacons and extend our visibility as quickly as possible. Gentlemen, our homeworld security requires that we be able to see as much of the galaxy as possible … and we’re going to find the Pelarans for ourselves.”
Chapter 3
Damara
(489.3 light years from Earth)
Just as it had done each day for the past 5.3 billion years, Damara’s western hemisphere slowly emerged from shadow into the light of its distant star. A true jewel among worlds, much of the planet’s land mass was taken up by vast, semi-tropical savanna very similar to the Brazilian Cerrado region on Earth. Here, as was often the case when circumstances were favorable for sustaining biological life, the relentless passage of time had ultimately produced the right set of circumstances for a sentient species to arise. And, just as on countless other worlds, those same benign conditions had allowed that species to thrive until finally achieving such an advanced state of development that their mere presence had produced a negative impact on their own homeworld. Like most space-faring civilizations, the Damarans had caused systemic damage to their environment over the course of centuries in the usual fashion: accidents and industrial-scale disasters, organized warfare between nations, as well as through simple neglect and failure to act as good stewards of their own biosphere. Fortunately, just as had been the case on Earth, the same steady march of technology that created much of the damage had also allowed the Damarans to clean up enough of the mess to avoid rendering their world uninhabitable. Today, however, the threat they faced was of a much more immediate nature.
Terran Fleet Command Saga 4: TFS Fugitive Page 4