Pandora’s Crew

by Gorg Huff

  “How does it recognize us? Just from our beacon?” Jenny asked. There was a thought somewhere in the back of her mind, but she wasn’t sure what it was yet. Something she read recently. One of the lessons.

  “No. Each ship—even each mast on each ship—has its own electromagnetic signature. And they are awfully hard to disguise.”

  “What if we shot at it?” John asked.

  That isn’t it, Jenny thought. It was something else. Something about the masts.

  “Possible, but they are generally hardened.”

  “How smart is it?” Jenny asked. She wasn’t even sure why she asked that, but it was important. She knew it was.

  “Not very. It’s probably an expert system, not an artificial brain. It’s programmed with what our magnetic field looks like. It’s programmed with our location and vector from when it was launched, and while its passive sensors aren’t that great at this distance, it will mostly be able to see any change in course we make and calculate the best time to light off its rocket to intercept us. Why?”

  That’s it! She remembered. “I was wondering if we could fool it. We have two ship’s boats and we have some carbon nanotube wire.” The ship’s boats didn’t use sails; they weren’t big enough to mount the shield gold guides that focused the magnetic fields.

  “I’m not following you, Jenny,” Captain Gold said.

  “It’s in the history study program. The first wing ships used super-conducting nanotube wire to push out the magnetic field. They didn’t have the shieldgold to reflect the magnetics and control them at a distance, so they used these superconducting wires.”

  “Yes, they did,” the captain agreed. “And the wing shape and position was determined by the wire. It caused major limitations on how quickly the wings could flap. That’s why we still call them sails. The early ones really were mostly sails. So you want to send one of the ship’s boats and a coil of wire out to make like a sail and get the hunter to blow?”

  Jenny nodded. She realized that this idea wasn’t so much something grownups didn’t know, but just something they left in the back of their minds because it didn’t seem to matter anymore.

  “Pan?”

  “Possible, Captain. It would be best to wait until the last minute. If it’s too far from us when it hits the field, it will probably not detonate. Also, we will have to fake the signature of one of the masts. The brains on the ship’s boats are probably bright enough to manage it. We will have to drop the sails as we launch the boat. The trick will be getting the boat’s pseudo-sail up quick enough that it looks to the hunter like the dying flutter of the ship’s sail.”

  “Okay, Pan. Keep on as though we’re unaware of it. Go in fat and happy without showing anything. At least until we’re sure whether we can build the thing. John, get down to Shuttle One and see about rigging it to catch the hunter. Pan and I will use the drones to get the stuff to you and work out how to hook up the cable. Meanwhile, Pan, see if you can use the data from the Sicily to get a camera on the missile.”

  John ran for the shuttle bay before Danny finished talking.

  Location: The Brass Hind

  “They must not have seen it, Skipper,” Boyle said. “They haven’t maneuvered.”

  Rosalyn was disappointed. She wanted to see them running, even if it meant using more missiles. But there was no reason to waste missiles if the first one was going to kill them. It’s not too bad, she thought. What a surprise they’re going to get in six minutes.

  Location: The Sicily

  “Tell them again, Comm,” said Captain Davis. “Damn fools ought to be ducking by now.” The Pandora, aside from firing two more times to divert the Brass Ass, hadn’t changed course at all and by now Davis was starting to think Pandora’s strategy would work. The Ass clearly didn’t have a clue what the Pandora actually shot at, so was likely to put itself in position to be hit by whatever the Pandora had thrown in about three minutes. At the same time, the Pandora, if it didn’t get a move on, was going to eat a hunter-nuke in about—he looked at the clock—six minutes.

  Location: The Pandora

  “Should we tell them what we’re planning, Captain?” Pandora asked.

  “What’s the chance that the Brass Hind will catch part of the beam?”

  “Possible now that they are vectoring in our direction.”

  At first the Sicily had been on a vector fifteen degrees off theirs, but since they made themselves known and came up with their plan, the Sicily was gradually shifting its vector to intercept. Now the Pandora, the Sicily, and the Brass Hind were all pretty much in line, to the point that the Pan and the Hind were having difficulty shooting at each other. A laser is a tightly-focused beam of coherent light, but it does spread over the distances involved. By now there was a measurable chance that the Hind would pick up anything they sent.

  “In that case, leave them in the dark.”

  “Skipper, John said they might do something stupid to save us.”

  “Pan, is there anything you can tell them that would let them know that we know, without letting the Hind know what’s going on even if they pick up the message?” Danny asked.

  Three ships moved toward each other at a combined velocity that was a measurable fraction of the speed of light. And along with them, missiles of magnetic iron and wheat. Danny had Pandora make up their own grapeshot and hid it in case of inspection by the mercantile combines. They were little different from the standard, save that the Pan had made them in her own shops and they appeared on no records anywhere but Pan’s own brain.

  Location: The Sicily

  “It’s getting close, Skipper,” George Stuart said.

  “Have we spotted the actual shot?”

  “No, Skipper. I haven’t wanted to use radar. Anyway, if it’s grapeshot it’s going to be black, almost impossible to spot against the background of space.”

  “Just for the record, George, we have no reason to believe that it’s grapeshot.”

  “Right, Skipper,” George said, grinning. “No reason at all. Probably nuts and bolts from their parts inventory. Without any consideration of the difference in character between using magnetized and unmagnetized projectiles.”

  “Exactly.”

  In normal circumstances, the mercantile combines of Drake and Cordoba would search the independent traders’ ships and confiscate any grapeshot they found, fine the owners, and give them a stern warning about carrying contraband. In this case . . . well, the Sicily was a grain ship, not a customs frigate, and they were looking studiously in the other direction.

  “All right. Let’s throw some more wheat. We want them looking at our stuff, not the Pan’s.”

  “Coming up on it, Skipper.”

  The computer, long since programmed with the timing, launched the puffed wheat projectiles at the precise fraction of a second.

  Location: The Brass Hind

  “The Sicily is shooting at us again, Skipper,” Boyle said.

  “I see it,” Rosalyn said. “Adjusting the timing.” There was just the least hiccup in the rate of flap of the sails as they were positioned to catch the puffed wheat. Unknown to Rosalyn or Boyle, that adjustment opened up their sails to the attack by the Pan’s “nuts and bolts.” Almost.

  It partly worked. Thirty-seven and eighty-nine one-thousandths seconds later, the front A-sail of the Brass Hind finished the sweep that pushed the puffed wheat out of the Hind’s path. It turned off and turned back on in its full forward position, leaving a gap of over a hundred feet uncovered by any magnetic field. Into that gap slipped the first twenty-three of one hundred thousand magnetized BBs. If the timing had been perfect, it would have been half the hundred thousand, but the timing was less than perfect. The Hind’s ship brain noticed the increased pull as it swept the rest of the grapeshot out of the way microseconds before seven of the twenty-three BBs hit the ship. With their velocity, they and the material they contacted were converted into plasma.

  It wasn’t an atomic explosion. The atoms remained
intact . . . just not in contact with one another.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The Brass Hind jerked and duralloy screamed. Alarms ripped through the Hind’s bridge, and damage reports, tracking the paths of destruction the BBs produced as they disintegrated, started coming in. One of the BBs might as well have been made of shieldgold, because it deflected off a stanchion and ripped through the controlling coil of the midship A-mast, releasing a fraction of the magnetic energy within the ship.

  Pete Gannon had joined the crew of the Brass Hind as an able spacer just weeks before the mutiny but was happy enough with the new setup. There was more romance to being a pirate than to being a very minor cog in the Drake combine. And more loot. A lot more loot. He was at his station, about four feet from the midship A-mast anchor coil, when the iron BB tore a line down the shieldgold. The heat from the vaporizing missile probably would have killed him, but it never had the chance. A line of magnetic force so powerful as to make the ancient hadron-supercollider seem an ice box magnet, ripped through him.

  If it’s strong enough, magnetism overwhelms gravity. The effect was as if a line going from his right knee to his left shoulder was exposed to the gravity of a black hole while leaving the rest of him mostly untouched. He was cut in half. Of course, no one would ever know, because the steel bulkhead just the other side of him was pulled into him. And through him, as it tried to reach the siren call of magnetism.

  He never felt a thing.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  To the crew of the Hind . . . well, the rest of the crew of the Hind . . . the more important point was that the midship A-mast was gone, leaving a gap in their shielding that would be obvious to a blind gopher.

  “Turn us around,” Rosalyn screamed. “Rotate 150 degrees, turn thirty degrees to port, get that sail out of the line of fire.”

  It was done fairly quickly, but in the doing they had to shift vector, and their victim was waiting for the chance.

  Location: The Sicily

  Watching the Hind on his screens, the captain of the Sicily ordered, “Forty degrees down starboard, George. Sharply, please. And throw some more wheat.”

  Slowly, the course of the Hind and the Sicily diverged a little. Then a few minutes later, they started to diverge even more.

  “I think they’re breaking off, Skipper,” George said.

  “It looks like it, but don’t drop your guard.”

  Chapter 9

  It is not the small artificial brains that rational people object to. A wing controller, or a household cleaning bot, do indeed work a little better than a standard computer, though not necessarily enough better to justify the added expense that such one-off systems inherently require. However, as an artificial brain gets larger, the probability of mental aberration increases exponentially. By the time you get to the sort of artificial brain used in a ship’s boat or even a farm bot, the danger of the artificial brain going insane is simply too great.

  Preamble to Professor Christine Holland’s refutation of Professor Gerhard Schmitz’s Paper on Artificial Brains.

  Location: Cordoba space, Big Dark, The Pandora

  Standard Date: 05 01 630

  “O

  kay. Let’s see if we can get out of the way of that nuke now,” Danny told the Pan.

  “I doubt it at this point, Captain, but I’ll try.”

  “How’s Jenny’s brainchild coming?” Danny asked, and Pan threw up an image of John.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  John shoved one end of the cable into the open maintenance hatch on the bottom of the shuttle and jerked back, as not all the charge was dissipated until he touched it. He cursed and shoved the wire in again. With his other hand, he sprayed the wire and the leads with conducting oil, then with sealant.

  He shifted over, grabbed the coiler, attached it to the secondary power feed, and following Pandora’s instructions, went to the other end of the cable. It didn’t just have to conduct. It had to uncoil quickly while keeping both ends attached.

  Two drones were making other connections in the circuits that connected the shuttle’s brain to the shuttle’s rockets.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Pan instructed the ship’s boat brain on its new mission to mimic the Pan’s midship-C sail. It would be tricky, but it might save them.

  “The wire is loaded and the engine’s governors have been removed. John is on his way out of the shuttle bay.” By removing the governors they could max out the engines to produce enough power to look like a real sail. It would burn out the engines, but that was better than a nuke going off on top of them.

  “How long do we have, Pan?” John asked.

  “A little less than a minute,” Pan said.

  John exited the shuttle bay while the seeker decided it was time and lit off its rocket engine. It was an old-fashioned nuclear rocket, a fission energy source turning liquid hydrogen into plasma and ejecting the hydrogen out of a standard jet. The nuke was designed to reach critical mass about the time that the missiles reached the target ship. Nothing particularly new; old-fashioned, well-tested tech.

  Danny had a thought. “Has anyone ever done this before?”

  “Not that I am aware of, Captain, but it could have happened,” Pan said. “Captain, the missile has lit its drive and is homing.”

  “How long now?”

  “Thirty seconds, Captain. I am adjusting flight profile and flap timing to put it as far out on the sails as possible.”

  They waited as the shuttle launched and the wings started to drop. The shuttle started to spin in an attempt to get the wire out faster.

  Location: Pandora Ship’s Boat Polly

  The brain of the ship’s boat had about the intelligence of a parrot and the personality of a cocker spaniel. It was eager to please and serious about doing the best job it could. It did have a desire to continue, but that was completely overridden by its need to protect ship and crew. It thought the plan was just the cleverest thing it had ever been programmed with and was eagerly awaiting its chance to shine.

  The port opened and the little boat flung itself from the bay as the sails went down. It flung out the nanotube wire as quickly as it could. It didn’t know, and neither did the crew of the Pan, that the superconducting wire moving through the dying magnetic field would act as a capacitor of sorts, delaying the collapse of the stern-C sail for seven point five microseconds. It also looked surprisingly like a micro flare of the sail.

  When it happened, the boat reacted quickly, adjusting its output to try to match.

  Location: The Hunter-nuke

  As the hunter approached its target, it was disappointed to “see” the sails of the target go down. Its designed function was to blow a sail through magnetic resonance, not to simply explode like some dumb bomb. Then its artificial brain lit with joy. One of the sails, a stern sail, probably the C or D, hadn’t gone down. The hunter focused on that, shifting its aim and preparing to fire the nuke that would power the mag surge, destroying it and its target in a blaze of magnetic glory.

  Now!

  Location: Pandora Ship’s Boat Polly

  As the electromagnetic feedback through the superconducting wire fed the full energy output of a nuclear explosion into its capacitors, the last thought of the boat’s mind was to wonder if the plan worked. The boat did a pretty fair imitation of a nuke itself, but most of the force was directed out away from Pandora.

  Location: The Pandora

  “We’ve lost breakers on the stern-C, Captain,” Pan said.

  “It didn’t work?”

  “Say rather ‘it sort of worked,’ Captain. It will take analysis, but I think that the ship’s boat did indeed suck the hunter onto itself. It was too close to us when it happened, and some of the feedback jumped to the stern-C. I think that limited the damage.”

  “Right.” Danny scanned the shipnet to see for himself. Pan was, as usual, right. There was damage, but it was mostly stopped by the circuit breakers, which would not have happened if the sail had taken the brunt of the a
ttack. He focused on organizing the drones to start repairs, and once that was done he pulled out of the shipnet.

  “Call the Sicily and ask how they are doing. Pan, don’t tell them about the boat. Just tell them we got lucky. Just a glancing blow as the sail was going down.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The captain of the Sicily was happy enough that they got off lightly. Danny had to explain that they didn’t think they could dodge the Brass Hind’s full complement of missiles, so he tried to limit the damage by making it look as if they didn’t see the hunter-nuke until the Hind was otherwise occupied.

  “You’re a damned fool, Captain Gold,” Captain Davis said, shaking his head. “A brave man and you rescued us, but you’re still a damned fool.”

  “Yes, Captain. That’s what my parents said, and my teachers too,” Danny said seriously, then grinned at the screen.

  Captain Davis laughed and the two ships rendezvoused and limped together toward the next jump point.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  There was a spectrum to interstellar trade. In one sense, most colonies and almost all planets could get by just fine on their own, without any interstellar shipping. But there were still places that produced an overabundance of this or that.

  “We have a full load of grain from Hudson 3,” Captain Davis explained as the ships were making their way to the jump point.

  “Grain?”

  “Hudson 3 has millions of acres of grain fields and they have a unique type of wheat that grows really well in the planetary soil. It’s popular on many worlds, and we ship a lot of it on the Sicily.”

  “You’re owned by the Cordoba Combine, right?”

  “Yes, but the Sicily was built special for this route. Like I said, it’s a lot of grain and Hudson 3’s main export.”

  “Well, I’m glad we could help,” Danny said.

  “Do you have any room in your holds?”

  “We’re half-empty at this point, Captain.”

  Captain Davis grinned. He had a pleasant, open face with the pressure of the attack off. “Well, we dumped rather a lot of grain fighting off the pirates.”