by Ira Tabankin
“It’s called anti-gravity. My ship’s AI can manipulate the gravity field, so basically, my ship doesn’t weigh anything. I could go down there and easily lift or move it around the lab with one hand. Of course, that assumes the anti-gravity drive is running.”
Chapter 11
Kalteck began by giving Truman and Bradley a tour of the hull of his ship, Bradley noticed what appeared to be a scorched area on the far side of the saucer, “Is that battle damage?”
“Yes. If you watch very closely, you won’t be able to see the microscopic nanites weaving the repairs, but if you keep watching the scorched areas of the ship, you’ll see them slowly change color, and it will look like the ship is repairing itself, which in a manner of speaking it is.
“The damage was much worse than it appears now, the nanites have been working on repairing the ship for three days, and they don’t rest. The Xs hit me with a beam weapon which was able to overpower my shields. Had I not been equipped with very strong shields, the beam would have cut right through my ship. The shields were able to dissipate most of the beam’s energy. I was very lucky. I caught four of their ships at their base. I was able to destroy them before they knew what hit them. Their ships are larger and have more energy than my ship.
“Mine is what you could relate to a destroyer. Their ships were what you’d consider cruisers. Their weapons had more energy and they had torpedo/missile launch tubes while my ship lacks missile launch tubes in order to focus on speed. The main section of my ship’s hull was designed to spin, thus also helping to dissipate energy if the weapon managed to breach my shields.”
Bradley reached out to touch the hull, he looked at Kalteck who nodded. You can touch anything you’d like, except for any of the instruments or equipment inside the ship.”
“What is it made of? It doesn’t feel like steel.”
“It’s what you’d call a ceramic matrix combined with carbon bucky-balls. The hull is then overlaid with a polished mesh of another layer of very reflective ceramic. It’s reflective which helps dissipate energy weapons. The hull also has a layer of nanites, which is what you see repairing the hull. Our larger ships have a layer of an element you haven’t discovered yet. A few inches of it provide more protection than three feet of what you call rolled steel. When I left my home, our ship builders were experimenting with a semi-organic layer which would absorb energy weapons. The material would convert the weapon’s energy into heat the material would use to live.”
Truman shook his head, “Semi-organic, does that mean something almost alive?”
“Yes, as I’ve said, many of our technologies may be difficult for you to understand at your current level of knowledge.”
Bradley went to touch the blackened area, Kalteck reached over to stop him, “General, I’m sorry, please don’t get between the nanites and their work. They weren’t programmed about humans. They may consider your body useable material in which case they’d begin disassembling your body and using its atomic structure in their repair work.”
Bradley jumped back. “What do you mean?”
“The nanites break down materials to their atomic core which they use to make their repairs, or they can use the materials to build things I require. Everett was good enough to supply me with blocks of iron, steel, glass, and somehow he got his hands on some depleted uranium from Oak Ridge and, of course, coal, all of which the nanites are breaking down and using; to make their repairs.”
Bradley watched the hull appear to be healing itself in front of them. “Think about how this could benefit us on the battlefield, tanks that self-repair battle damage, ships that won’t sink, planes which patch themselves. My God, we need this technology, when can you give it to us?”
“General, if I gave them to you now, you’d chase me down to kill me. You don’t have the technology to make the nanites or to program them. I’ve seen the results of one of my people giving the secret of nanites to a planet that wasn’t ready for them. The unprogrammed nanites began disassembling everything on the planet. They thought they were supposed to break down the raw materials so they could be prepared for rebuilding something.”
Bradley watched the invisible nanites work. “How soon can we get them?”
“Not for at least another sixty years, maybe a little sooner or it could be a little later. It all depends on your computer technology and how your population matures. If we let even programmed nanites loose on your society today, they’d cause havoc in your civilization. Please trust me. I want and need you to mature and advance as quickly as possible. My race has assisted other races before. We have a timeline and technology maturity line. You have to reach the right points on the graph before certain technologies can be transferred. We won’t break these points for any reason. We’ve learned our lessons before. We went through a time when our council debated if we should even share technology with other races. Some thought we should just observe other races and not get involved with them. As you can guess that argument didn’t win.”
Truman and Bradley leaned close to each other, they whispered to each other, Kalteck smiled, “If you’re whispering because you think I can’t hear you; you should know the range of my hearing is better than yours. My ears are small compared to yours in relation to our head sizes, however, I can assure you my hearing is much more sensitive than yours. I can hear you very clearly. There’s nothing you can say to me which would change my mind to give you access to certain technologies. You have to be ready to receive the gifts. There’s nothing you can do to force me to give them to you. Threats of violence mean nothing to me because you can’t harm me to the point of termination. My body is filled with nanites that repair any damage. In addition, remember my self-defense systems will destroy any who attempt to attack me.”
Truman began to ask, “I could withdraw support…”
“You could, and all you’d be doing is committing suicide. If you’d like me to leave, I will be gone within minutes.”
Bradley looked at the ship, “What about your ship?”
“What do you mean, what about my ship? How do you think I’d leave? The hole in its hull? That hole was much larger when I arrived. The ship’s shields protect the ship’s atmosphere and provide a type of seal against the vacuum of space. I could easily leave, and the ship would still be continuing repairing itself. Please don’t think you can steal the ship. The ship’s AI would know someone other than I was attempting to access the ship. The AI would attempt to stop you, and if it failed, it’d drop the magnetic bottle that separates the antimatter from touching the matter in my drive unit. The resulting explosion would be on the order of 600 megatons of energy released.”
Truman and Bradley silently looked at each other and the ship. Everett began to speak to break the heavy silence. Kalteck waved towards him telling him to keep his mouth closed and allow his President to decide the future. Everett silently nodded while Truman thought over his options.
“I would like you to stay and continue helping us.”
Kalteck nodded, “An excellent decision. Let’s first review the new warplanes that were launched this year. I believe we’re making some very good progress. In the year, 1950 we saw a few major aircraft unveiled, the most famous was:
January 13 — Mikoyan-Gurevich I-330, the prototype of the MiG-17 “Fresco.”
January 25 — North American YF-93.
March 26 — Douglas XA2D-1 “Skyshark”
June 3 — Republic YF-96A, the prototype of the F-84F “Thunderstreak.
“You have now fully embraced the jet engine. Next will be increasing the thrust of the engines and making your average warplanes capable of exceeding the sound barrier. You’re fighting a limited battle in Korea using jet against jet. Your people are learning valuable experience as are your ground commanders since they have to fight in very harsh conditions and against an enemy that outnumbers them. These are very good things. The next generation of jet fighters will easily exceed the speed of sound and then they will be able to reac
h a speed of two to three times that.”
Bradley shook his head, “You believe this war in Korea is a good thing?”
“General, you have to learn how to fight for the next war. Your commanders entered the Korean War thinking they were refighting your Second World War. They have to learn to be flexible. This is a lesson Stalin is learning very quickly. In fact, he’s learning it quicker than you are. His military is learning from your mistakes. He’s building a massive war machine. He’s decided, and he’s correct, that quantity is its own quality. He knows that building low-cost tanks, but building thousands of them, have a chance that a few will wear his enemy down and accomplish the task. This is a lesson you Americans don’t seem to want to learn.”
Bradley smiled, “We believe our better-trained warriors and our better technology can deplete his greater numbers on any battlefield. Speaking of Stalin, is there anything you can do to curb him? He’s costing us a lot of resources in Germany. Our hands are currently full in Korea.”
“General, it’s critical for your people to accept the huge investment in your military complex to have a threat. What’s a better threat that one who is playing off the same playbook as you? I have laid out the ground rules to him. Believe me, he won’t deviate very far from the rule book. He’s been shown what happens if he does. It’s very critical for you and your commanders to learn how to fight multiple wars in different locations. Your Marines and Army managed to do this in your war against Germany and Japan. Then you cut your military and now you’re acting like you’ve forgotten the lessons you’ve already learned. General, it’s critical you learn the lessons of different wars and learn to look forward, not backward.”
Neither Truman nor Bradley knew Kalteck had caused the Soviet earthquake, or that he’d given Stalin permission to act in Germany. He’d asked Everett to keep his secret which he agreed too. Kalteck broke the silence, “I strongly suggest you reestablish your Air Defense Command. You need a separate force that practices defending your homeland. It is good if they practice in case additional ships attempt to fly through your atmosphere. You should learn and copy what the Soviets are doing. Remember, the two of your nations must copy each other’s actions in mirror images of each other.”
Truman looked at Bradley, who nodded, “I’ll agree to reestablish it at the start of the year.”
Chapter 12
Let me show you the inside of my ship. Bradley was shocked when he entered the ship, “It’s much roomier than I thought. How thick is the hull? It doesn’t seem to take up much space, unlike the hull of one of our battleships or the armor on a tank.”
“You will learn that the protection level of a hull or shield isn’t always dependent on the thickness of the material but on the material itself. Thick rolled steel provides good protection for a certain class of weapons. Others will slice through even a yard of thick rolled steel as if it wasn’t there while a few inches of a woven ceramic matrix armor will stop almost anything from penetrating. Remember my ship, most ships have a form of electronic shields that block or slow down energy weapons from reaching our hulls. We use them to push away small space dust and rocks. At the speed we travel, hitting even a grain of sand would be very problematic. Our best weapons are what are classified as energy weapons.
“Missiles, even the fastest are typically too slow. Our ships move much too quickly and our point defense systems can easily track most missiles and destroy them before they reach our ships. Fighting in space is much different than anything on Earth. Without an atmosphere or gravity, nothing slows down a missile. There’s no friction, no air to burn through. Once launched, a missile will continue even after its fuel is burned. Most have preset ranges if they don’t strike a target within that range, or in a set time, they explode. If the missiles weren’t so set, they would continue on through space until they either hit something or got pulled into a gravity well.
“There are some tricks I will teach you which allow missiles to get close enough with large antimatter warheads to cause problems when you reach that point of technology. One of the tricks my people use is to load many small rocks instead of a warhead in the missiles. The missiles create a dense layer of the rocks which can then overwhelm some shields. They also cause the shields to deal with the rocks while we attack with energy beams.
“Since beam or energy weapons are focused energy or light, they move at the speed of light making avoiding them very difficult to stop which is why we spend our time building shields and other defensive screens to protect our ships from them.
“One good thing about these types of weapons is their energy does dissipate over time and distance just as normal light does, so they will weaken over a distance. I know what you’re thinking, my ship was holed. That’s true because even shields can only stand up to a certain level of energy before they fail. There’s a limit to how much energy a shield can dissipate in the time it has in between strikes. If the enemy can maintain heavy energy weapon hits on a small area on the shield for long enough, the shields aren’t able to dissipate the energy, they themselves dissipate. They blow outward so, when they fail, they don’t damage the ship they’re trying to protect.
“The ship, mine, then has to rely on its woven matrix armor, which is strong but as you saw, not strong enough. Our ships have internal energy fields to hold our atmosphere in so even a hull breach won’t kill us unless the hull is breached where our internal energy field generator is located or our atmospheric controls are located. Then we’ll die unless we’re already in a spacesuit and have sufficient oxygen to survive. As soon as my ship was hit, the repair nanites, trillions of them swarmed over the damage to begin the repair. They used the inventory of rocks I picked up in the asteroid belt for the raw materials they require to perform the repair.”
Truman asked, “What about food and water if you’re trapped in a suit for a prolonged time? Won’t you die of thirst?”
“Our suits recycle our wastes…”
Everett shook his head, “I don’t think I’d like to be trapped in a suit knowing what I’m drinking, and eating was my own recycled wastes. I don’t think I could do it.”
Kalteck laughed, “You humans are funny. When your life depends on it, you will do anything required to live.”
Bradley asked, “What kind of weapons does your ship have? I don’t see anything I recognize as a weapon.”
“You wouldn’t. I have a main particle beam weapon, six laser emitters, and an antiproton generator. Some ships also have missiles, but my ship is too small to mount the launchers. And as we just discussed, missiles have a problem unless they are very fast and the ship can launch many, think in the thousands of them so that at least one will survive the defending ship’s point defense. The warheads in the missiles are usually antimatter held in a magnetic bottle. When the missile strikes the ship, the bottle bursts allowing the matter of the ship to come into contact with the missile’s antimatter, then boom, end of the ship.”
Everett studied the shrinking hole in the hull, “How long will it take until the ship heals itself?”
“Another three days, during which time I will re-provision afterward. I will then return to continue my search for any other of the enemy hiding in your system.”
Truman shook his head, “I don’t think that is a good idea. If we lose you, we’ll stand no chance of defending the main enemy when they arrive. Can you call your home and ask them to send someone else to perform the search? Or is there any way you can search without placing yourself in danger?”
“Mr. President, thank you for your concern, but as you see, my ship can take care of me. We have to know if the enemy has other bases hidden in the system. It’s critical to know what our enemy knows and what they’re planning. If I’m lucky enough to capture one of their AIs, mine may be able to get it to talk.”
Everett asked, “How long will you be gone this time?”
“I can’t say. I do have some plans I will leave with you. You will have to make sure your rocket companies begi
n work on these as soon as possible. If they follow the instructions, you should be able to make the initial launch in less than three years. You will have to develop new technologies in order to complete the production of the initial missiles. Your goal is to develop missiles which can launch the artificial moon into orbit and then carry people into space, later you will learn how to live and fight in space.”
Everett shook his head, “I thought you said the artificial moon would transmit a signal which would stop the enemy from attacking.”
“It should stop the allies from attacking, but the main enemy will come no matter what. My enemy is the main one you will have to worry about. They will come prepared for an all-out war. As we’ve discussed, you will have just under one hundred years to prepare for them. When they come, they will be prepared to destroy most of you. You will have one chance to defend against them. If you lose, you’ll lose your planet and most of your people.”
Truman looked at Kalteck, “One hundred years isn’t a long time to go from propeller planes to space war, do you really believe we’ll make it?”