There were a few million left over I had to set up a different program for.
Those would go to the closest galaxies around known Vrok space, and search for them. They would also note and investigate if they were being controlled by another empire. In short, if we won this war the Vrok’s old neighbors would become ours. We needed some data on it anyway.
But, I made that very conservative, the last thing I wanted to do was gain a new enemy for spying on other empires. At some point I would get into the Vrok’s military data, and social and civilian databases. Those would tell us the details of the surrounding empires and what they were about.
Mostly, those extra millions would just be checking for Vrok expansion.
It took a couple of hours to set up and once I checked, double checked, and triple checked the programming, I sent them all out. Six in the morning was still early, but it was at that point I woke up Cassie and Diana. I needed the former with me in the meeting, and the latter figuring out what that energy was, or at least a better weapon to use against it.
It was five after six when Cassie and I walked into the conference room and sat at the head of the table. Everyone in the room looked tired, and I imagined I was no exception. I took a seat and suppressed a yawn before sipping my coffee.
“Sorry I’m late, I wanted to get the probe blitz started. Did everyone get time to review the battle early this morning?”
They all nodded, and they looked appropriately grim.
I said, “The good news is both us and them will be unhappy with the results of the first battle, as they probed our protective forces to see how their new tech stood against ours. I’m sure you noticed in the beginning of the battle I was getting slaughtered, getting hit by one of their beams is instant destruction, which is a bad place to be.
“Does anyone disagree with the assessment only my ships, controlled by any of us, currently have a chance to face theirs, and only through quantum jumping ever two tenths of a second to completely avoid their fire?”
Natalya said, “Unfortunately, I agree.”
Chen replied, “Their shields are formidable, and weapons beyond deadly. Even their thousand point-defense turrets would make short work of our shields. Clearly, they built to make short work of the Grays’ fleets, and it would’ve been successful.”
I nodded, “It would’ve taken my ships over an hour with over six thousand to one odds in my favor to completely remove that fleet. I think it’s safe to say we’ll be focused on finding a weakness in their shields while improving ours, and they’ll be trying to overcome our jump drive defense. Of course, that isn’t all bad news, it’ll give us the breathing room we need to plot out their empire, give all our scientists a little time to theorize, and then start making plans.”
Admiral Grady said, “It would’ve been good if you’d sent one of the main ships against them, for a test. We don’t actually know how quickly one of their ships would reduce all the nanites with those beams, and our dreadnoughts can fire thousands of beams at once. If the equivalent of six hundred beams killed them in eighteen seconds than it stands to reason that six thousand beams would’ve killed it in one point eight seconds, or less.”
I sighed, “You’re correct. I recognized that lack shortly after the battle, and regret not doing it, but I’m not military minded. During the short battle my instincts had me saving the platforms, especially since I was half asleep and directing them from bed.”
I shook my head, “Not that it’s a good excuse.”
Minato said, “Understandable, however. Conversely, I do expect you were correct earlier, and we were not. This happened just seven hours after our scan of their ship, which can’t be a coincidence. Clearly, they got a different message than was intended. No one here is perfect, and the diplomacy of war is messy.”
I nodded, “Still, I’ll obviously be taking as much advice as I can get when we plan an offensive in four days, if that’s even feasible at that time. I do however have some advice for all of you to make our systems more secure. It occurred to me with the amount of time it takes to destroy their ships with teleporting platforms, they could very well decide to hostage our planets against our surrender. If they have enough ships, if those four million were a good percentage of their fleet they do not. We could wear them down to nothing long before they left the FTL line and made it to the planet.
“I mean, right now it’s a numbers game, and we don’t know theirs yet. It also seems clear to me I’ll be doing the lion’s share of offensive fighting with platforms, with a lot of advice and direction from your militaries during planning, while you can secure our worlds and space. You can’t afford millions of my ships, and we don’t have enough people to fly them.”
They didn’t look very happy, and to be fair I had just stated the bluntly obvious, that they were toast without me. If not so rudely. No one likes to hear that.
Chen said, “We don’t have the numbers of your ships, that’d be required to take down an enemy fleet of that size before they reach the planet, even combined.”
I nodded, “That’s where the advice comes in, a loophole of sorts. The limit of twelve million mini-platforms per dreadnought platform is a practical one, that’s what will fit in the vast ship. There’s no limit to creating them however, past that, as long as there is room on the ship to do so. My advice is to split up the platforms you bought from me evenly in your colony’s, then start launching and building mini-platforms, non-stop.
“You could all have several trillion of them in short order. While the ship that creates them can’t control so many directly, they’ll still have a link to all of them and they’re smart enough to defend on their own. Set them to jump five times a second and fire normal beams when encountering a Vrok warship.”
Natalya laughed, “That’s some loophole.”
I snorted, “I know, now you’ll never buy more ships from me.”
That got a few smirks, and honest smiles.
“It’s probably even overboard, but I tend to think that way when it comes to protecting our worlds. Even better, if I come up with upgrades, I only charge per mother ship, so all those mini-platforms are part of the same price package, no matter how many are there in your systems.
“I’ll still come if called, if its needed, but that will allow me to focus on our external borders and the war offensive, with your guidance. As in the war with the Grays, I intend total transparency in the actions of my fleets, and to take the advice of the Earth’s military in assigning priorities. But this war will be different, we’ll only be risking our people in the defense of our home-worlds.
“I suggest you all get started on that as soon as possible, who knows when the enemy may move. I’m hoping we have the four days, and more besides to start planning a campaign and what we’ll need for it, but for all we know they have a billion ships and are preparing for a major invasion shortly. Probably not, I tend to be overly paranoid when our entire race is at risk.”
Chen said, “I agree. The next four days we should build those mini-platforms, and also get our scientists on the enemy’s advances in shielding and weaponry, then we can reconvene and start planning the logistics and tactics of a campaign. Assuming of course, the enemy doesn’t move first.”
Everyone looked to be in agreement on that idea, we all had a plan of action over the next four days, and the sooner we got started on it the better.
Cassie once again, waited until they were all gone.
“You know they’ll be able to quantum jump all those mini-platforms anywhere they want to in the universe. You could’ve just handed them the ultimate invasion weapon if they have a programmer with half a clue. All they’d have to do is send one dreadnought there first in a wormhole, to set up the receiving quantum resonance fields.”
I sighed, “Yeah. We’re in no danger from it, they can’t attack each other, but they could define any other race or ships as an enemy target. That said, they’re own weaker ships are more than capable of taking down the tens of
thousands of races in the fifty galaxies, it’s just a shade more of power. We also have thousands of more planets to fully claim and move into, plus more than enough unclaimed space around us to make that eighty thousand instead of eight, just by doubling the radius of the sphere we control.
“Plus, we’ve pretty well established no country will do anything offensive out in the galaxy without at least a nod from the others. Maybe it’s naïve, but I don’t think they’ll abuse it. Humans can be noble when everything is going their way, and we’re living off the fat of the land right now so to speak. Or… am I being naïve again?”
Cassie said, “A little bit of both, but the fact they can’t use it against other colonies or Earth is a comfort.”
Right, food source was safe, she was just afraid some dictator type would get delusions of grandeur and start an empire somewhere.
Cassie asked, “Have you considered building up too, just in case it’s needed?”
I sighed, “I can make the six million in the void twenty-four million over the next four days, but I’ve been going back and forth on it.”
Cassie smirked, “Well, chances are you’ll need to at some point anyway. If we remove the Vrok as a threat, you’re going to have five more borders to cover, and that’s twenty million platforms for five more fleets of equal size to what the other borders currently have.”
That… was a good point, so it wouldn’t be wasted even if we didn’t need that many to match the Vrok’s fleets, and if we needed more than that I’d be in a better position to make a hell of a lot more at that point.
The macros were already there, thirteen years now, so I just chose the void fleet in augmented reality, and I ordered all six million to split four times and grow back to dreadnought platforms. It felt good to scratch that itch, I’d been worried I’d need them and begrudged the four days to find out, but I hadn’t wanted to overbuild so badly again. Sure, vacuum energy would last until the end of the universe, but that didn’t make it inexhaustible. It seemed foolish to waste it. Every time we used it to make something, we were increasing entropy. Only very slightly, I doubted all my building combined so far had shortened the universe’s life by more than a few milliseconds, if even that much, but it was a point.
The last four million would be useful too, I could use a lot of those to keep an eye on all the pre-spaceflight civilizations. Unlike in our fifty galaxies, if an empire bypassed our border fleet all the races in those twenty-three galaxies didn’t have a quantum communicator to request assistance like all the FTL civilizations in our galaxies did. That meant keeping a closer eye on that space, at the very least, and not depending on just border picket fleets.
“Alright, we’ll have twenty-four million in four days. That gives us a four million reserve fleet, once I have our new space protected. For now, all twenty-four million will be our counter-invasion fleet, so I can leave all the other fleets where they are currently. Assuming there’s only five other races to block, there could be more, or even less, but five was a good guess. We should know that much in five days as well, how many ship types there are in the galaxies surrounding Vrok space, as well as where all the Vrok standoff picket fleets are.”
She nodded, “That’s why you were tempted to wait? So you could plan exactly for the Vrok and the new defensive fleets, but it’s worth it if we get blitzed by tens of millions of Vrok ships tomorrow.”
I grinned, “True, I won’t argue with that. Right now, we have twelve fleets of four million, or will in four days, in total including the six old fleets. That’s forty-eight million, so we should be good for a ridiculous mass build if the Vrok have ships in the hundreds of millions. Which is doubtful.”
She asked, “Have you thought about the battle at all?”
I nodded, “I probably could’ve killed them in a half hour, not an hour. I held back half the mini-platforms for point defense, but honestly even just one trillion of them would’ve been overkill that way, and just a trillion short of doubling the offensive mini-platforms. So, I’d have been killing more like twenty thousand ships every eighteen seconds. Still, a half an hour is a long time, and their fleet could wormhole a lot faster than eighteen seconds and take no losses. Going on the offensive seems like a fool’s errand for either side.
“In truth, I think it’s a race at this point, we need to find a faster way to kill them and they need to find a way to overcome our jump drive advantage.”
Cassie frowned, “Do you think they can do that?”
I nodded, “Maybe? If they picked up the quantum resonance fields we were creating, all they’d have to do is send out a… quantum jamming wave of some sort to foul our resonance fields, I’d imagine. Maybe not? Depends if their sensors were tuned to notice quantum resonance. We can ask Diana. Our job is to find a weakness in their shields, or at the very least strengthen ours if not our weapons as well.
“If we didn’t have to jump, and could take an attack long enough, we have the overwhelming numbers to kill them a lot faster. We’ll lose a lot of ships, but they’ll lose a lot more.”
Cassie said, “Just one more thing, you should program them to switch to disintegration once their shields are compromised, that might cut a second or two off each batch.”
I nodded, “Good idea. I’m going to check on day to day operations, do what I have to, then take a two-hour nap until lunch if I can get away with it.”
She grinned, “Good plan, but I already know I’m in meetings all day.”
We split up at that point.
Chapter Nine
Awareness came back with soft lips against mine, and I smiled as I opened my eyes.
“Lazing about while I work?” Diana teased.
I nodded, “Every chance I get.”
She rolled her eyes, knowing that wasn’t true at all.
“Lunch is ready. And I have an initial briefing, though no real answers yet.”
I stole another kiss, and then we both got up and headed downstairs to the kitchen. Roast beef sandwich, potato salad, and a steaming cup of mushroom soup awaited me.
“I love you.”
She snickered, and we sat down to eat, my daughter making a face at the love talk.
“Before we start on our stuff, how hard would it be for them to counter their problem child of our tactical quantum jumping?”
Diana tilted her head, “I won’t say it would be impossible, but it’d be extremely difficult. They would need to figure out we were quantum jumping, and I doubt they’re sensors can detect it, they’d have to intuit it first. Second, to create a dissonant quantum field big enough would be extremely hard, they’d have to know where we were jumping to, I think. Third, there’s no indication they have the materials science required to form those resonance fields, without the same fusion reactor material that it requires. I’m not sure if I’d have figured it out in months, instead of years or decades.
“So extremely unlikely, for those reasons.”
That was a relief, and at the very least gave us some breathing room to figure out our shortfalls.
“That’s welcome news, so what have you figured out?”
Diana replied, “So, their shield configurations and new type of energy layer, matches their new weapon and is presumably the best defense against it. The new energy is remarkably like the destructive energy in subspace, and those shield configurations are very much like the shield layer required in a subspace FTL drive to protect the ship. Just… a hell of a lot more powerful.”
She paused as she took a bite of her sandwich, while my mind raced.
Subspace energy was highly destructive to both matter and most energy forms. Humanity had skipped the normal development for FTL, and never used subspace technology for it. There’d been no point, wormholes were so much faster. Point being, the energy in subspace required a specific shield so the ship wasn’t destroyed when in subspace.
That shield was relatively weak compared to energy shields, so much so it was called a subspace field, and not a shield at all.
The FTL line was because subspace was highly energized and far more dangerous near planets or the higher gravity field from the sun in the inner systems. No ship could survive in FTL past the FTL line.
“So, their beams are like the energy in subspace, in the inner system?”
She nodded, but also raised her arm and shook her hand back and forth.
“Sort of, it’s not true subspace energy, but it’s an analogous energy. It’s obvious they found a way to artificially produce it but it’s far too uniform compared to what the universe naturally creates in that subspace layer. At the same time, you’re right, the power in the beam is very much like the inner system in subspace that energy and matter from this universal layer can’t survive in. I estimate even their shields would only last five or six seconds against their beams before being overwhelmed. Of course, that’s better than us, our shields can’t resist it at all.”
She sighed, “But that’s all I know. I have no idea how they’re artificially creating a subspace energy similar to the natural kind, and I have no idea how they’re making subspace shields that strong without actually transitioning to subspace. But me and my teams at least have a place to start.”
She frowned, “Perhaps putting a small amount of their fake subspace energy in the field to slightly enhance it is also what’s preventing a transition, I don’t know. It could just be the slightly different field geometries. We’ll figure it out eventually, the Gray database has no similar technologies, but it does have a ton of practical and theoretical data about subspace we can mine.
“I have a team on the shield, a team on the energy creation itself, and I’m helping and watching both. We’ll figure it out, but I can’t say how long that will take. Especially on the latter one.”
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