"You heard your mother. C'mon, let's go. We had a wonderful day, but now it's time for bed," Bill said.
There was more grumbling, but the process finally got under way, and proceeded in fits and starts through its routine.
Saturday night, with the kids in bed, they were sitting out on the porch, looking out across Sigurdsen Fleet Base, with the towers of Jezgra on the horizon. It was a favorite spot, and a favorite time. Jan sipped a cup of tea as she sat in the old-fashioned rocker.
"Jan, I have a question for you," Bill said.
"Go ahead, Hon," Jan said.
"We don't really talk about distances between planets in light years. We always talk about three weeks transit to this planet, or five weeks transit to that planet, right?"
"Right."
"But the other planets of the Commonwealth aren't all the same distance apart in light years, or even close," Bill said.
"Correct. But the addition of a week, or a second week, makes a huge difference. The ship is accelerating for the whole first half of the trip, to keep gravity in the crew compartments. When you add a week to the trip, you add it in the middle, when the ship is at high speed."
"So each week you add, you get more than a proportional increase in distance, right?"
Jan set her cup of tea down on the table between their chairs.
"Right. One week transit is only four light years. Add a week in the middle, and two weeks transit is fifteen light years, with the ship going faster at the halfway point. Keep adding a week in the middle, and it's always at a faster speed. Three weeks transit is twenty-four light years, four weeks is sixty light years, and five weeks is ninety-four light years," Jan said.
"And Commonwealth planets are always between about twenty-four and ninety-four light years apart? Three to five weeks?"
"Well, that's a longer story. There are a lot of suns, and most of them have planets. But you need a rocky planet, at the right temperature, with enough water, with an atmosphere, which means it has to have a magnetic field, which means it has to have a molten core. It can't be too big, or the gravity is too high, or too small, or the gravity is too low. The day has to be the right length, between twenty-three and twenty-six hours. The sunlight has to be in the right range of the spectrum, so high-yield Earth crops will grow. There are a lot of factors, and relatively few planets meet them."
"But the Commonwealth planets are all pretty close to the right conditions," Bill said.
"The Commonwealth planets were the ones settled first. The ships were slower then, so the settled planets tended to cluster around Earth, because the transit times were months. At the same time, the first planets settled were the best of the ones closest to Earth. Planets settled later were either less optimum or further away."
"OK, so that's why some of the Outer Colony planets are more divergent."
"Some of them are. See, there is no real volume of space associated with the Commonwealth and the Outer Colonies. It's not like an inner shell for the Commonwealth and an outer shell for the Outer Colonies. They're all mixed together in the volume of space around Earth. If you think of an inner group of colonies, the Commonwealth planets are the better planets, in terms of being most like Earth, and the Outer Colony planets in that inner group are less like Earth and were settled later. In the outer group of colonies, those were settled after the inner group, when ship speeds had increased and made the transit times workable, and those are all Outer Colony planets. Some of those are as close to Earthlike as Commonwealth planets. We call all the non-Commonwealth planets 'Outer Colonies,' but that's not really a spatial thing, not for all of them, at least," Jan said.
"OK, so when you go from Jablonka to Pahaadon, say –"
"Ninety-five light years. Five weeks or so."
"Right. But on that trip you could space right past an Outer Colony planet," Bill said.
"Two of them, actually. Lautada and Coronet both lie between Jablonka and Pahaadon. But again, they're both between three and four weeks from either Jablonka or Pahaadon, and from each other."
"Because of the way adding time increases the distance so much."
"Right, plus they're not all in a perfectly straight line," Jan said.
"OK. Now with the new stuff –" out on the porch was not secure, as they both well knew "- the times don't matter anymore, because you're going so darn fast just adding a few minutes in the middle makes for huge differences in distance."
"That's right. All the time is spent getting up in the, um, levels. At the highest level, a couple of minutes changes the distance radically. Basically, any transit takes about the same time."
Bill looked out across the base, lost in thought. Jan picked her tea back up and didn't interrupt. It was several minutes before he looked back at her.
"How many months of stores does a current ship normally have along?" Bill asked.
"The rule is two times transit, minimum. If you get to the other end and you find the planet has had a major catastrophe or blown up or something, you have to be able to make it back without restocking. Usually, though, we stock for ten weeks. Why do you ask?"
"Well, you guys talk about the new stuff in terms of how quick it can make the transits between existing planets, which I suppose is the correct military point of view. But is it the most important point of view? It has me wondering. What is the range – you know, with the new stuff – if you were to spend five weeks at that higher level, instead of a few minutes?"
The arithmetic was trivial, the implications were not. Jan was shocked as it sank in.
"Thirty-four times thirty-four is a thousand plus. And five weeks is almost a hundred light years currently, so it'd be a hundred thousand light years," Jan whispered, almost to herself.
"And the width of the Milky Way galaxy is what?"
"A hundred thousand light years. My God."
"Yup. With the new stuff, and current travel times, you can go anywhere you want. Anywhere in the galaxy. And if you can manage to go one step higher, what's the distance for five weeks transit?" Bill asked.
"Three and a half million light years."
"Andromeda is only two and a half million light years."
They both stared out across Sigurdsen in silence for a long time.
At their next monthly meeting, Jan brought it up to Durand.
"Bill asked me a curious question a couple weeks back," Jan said.
Durand looked to Bill and back.
"Oh?"
"Yes. Consider. We've always been talking about how much shorter the transit times would be between existing colonies, especially between Commonwealth planets, using the new technology, right?"
"Sure. That's the important defensive consideration," Durand said.
"But what if you took the existing three to five week run, and did it with the new technology? How far could you go in, say, five weeks, just at one g, but in hyperspace-5?"
Durand looked over to Bill, back to Jan, spread his hands, clasped them again.
“One hundred thousand light years. The width of the galaxy,” Jan said.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I’m not. Put that fancy new hyperspace generator on a current one-g ship, and ten weeks of supplies, our standard load-out, and you could go to the other side of the galaxy and back. In less than three months.”
“That’s amazing. Troubling, too, if you think about it,” Durand said.
“Oh, yes. It represents both opportunity and hazard. We could colonize the galaxy. As far as we know, we’ve only colonized the suitable planets within a volume of space a couple hundred light years across. There were some colony ships that set out and were never heard from again, and we don’t know everything all the Outer Colonies may have done in terms of exploration, but aside from some potential strays, humanity has explored a very small part of the galaxy. We call the spread of colonies from Earth a diaspora, but compared to that, this could be an explosion.
“At the same time, Fermi’s Paradox has never be
en answered. ‘Where is everybody?’ We don’t know. We haven’t run into an alien intelligent race. Yet. But we might. And there’s no way of knowing in advance if they’re friendly or not. Now, we’ve only had civilization even in its most rudimentary form – writing – for about ten thousand years, and interstellar travel for a few hundred years. The universe is a million times older than human civilization, and fifty million times older than human interstellar travel. There could have been other races that rose and fell, or others who will rise and fall, and there’s just nobody at the same stage of development as us. Or there may be.”
“But hyperspace exists, right? I mean, it’s nothing we invented. So some hypothetical dangerous alien race could discover it, too, and come visit us any time, friendly or otherwise.”
“Oh, sure,” Jan said. “But we’ve been holed up in our little corner of the galaxy here. We haven’t done anything to draw attention to ourselves. If we go gallivanting around the galaxy, though, and they’re out there, well, it could be bad,” Jan said.
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“At the same time, it could be great. We could just settle the most perfect planets, the near-identical pseudo-Earths. Maybe even better. Ninety-five percent gravity, and a planet-wide climate like Hawaii, say.”
Jan shrugged.
“I’m not sure of the best course. I thought I would mention it to you, though, and let you start thinking about it. I’m not sure what we want to do about it, but the question is going to come up. Bill and I aren’t the only people that are going to think of this.
"There's one other consideration to think about. Our new hyperspace technology is going to leak, or be reproduced. You know that. Especially if we have to use it against the Outer Colonies. Once people know it exists, they're going to start looking into it. As I told you when I first brought it to you and Admiral Birken, it isn't hard to figure out once you look."
Durand nodded, and Jan continued.
"So is it to our best advantage to sit on it as a secret until it becomes common knowledge, or disclose it somehow to our best advantage?"
Staffing Issues
Four months later Jan got an advice the first ships would be delivered in three months. They would include CSS Shiva, CSS Athena, CSS Devi, CSS Hera, CSS Isis, CSS Odin, CSS Osiris, and CSS Thor. The Shiva was recommended as the flagship, because it had more hours of testing under its belt. One of the new ships, the eighth ship of the squadron Jan had seen as closest to completion, CSS Freyja, would take over the Shiva's role in shuttling back and forth from the yard.
Jan, Jessen, and Admiral Jeanette Xi, head of the Tactical Division, met in Jan's office to figure out a staffing plan.
"How are we going to go about this?" Jan asked.
"We can start by having the computers pick out people who graduated in, say, the upper third of BTS and ATS, for one," Xi said.
"We can also have the computer look for management teams that already work well together, so there's less time to come up on the relationship. You know, if you have an admiral and her chosen flag captain who both were in the upper third in BTS and ATS," Jessen said.
"Probably from a battleship command," Xi said.
"Why from a battleship?" Jan asked.
"Because the admiral's flag captain is already a senior captain, and so is in line for rear admiral, to take the second division of the cruiser destroyer squadron," Xi said.
"Also, the admiral will already have a chief of staff, and the senior captain will have a captain as XO who can be his chief of staff," Jessen added.
"Good points. The depth of the command staff on a flag battleship gives us a leg up on a squadron command team with cohesion going in. And a squadron already has a second division flag commander who can take over when we pull the flagship out."
"Or we could pull the second division commander," Xi said.
"True. OK, I like that as a place to start. We also want flexibility, as well as people who can come up to speed quickly. We need people who like to be challenged, operate way outside their comfort zone. What do we have in the way of info there?" Jan asked.
"We do have the psych testing done at the academy. That's old data for the senior people we need, though," Xi said.
"People's basic personality doesn't usually change much. Mostly as people age they get better at being who they already are. The data should be accurate enough," Jessen said.
"Let's start there and see where we get. If we don't find people in that data sort who strike us as right, we may have to play around with the filters. What about enlisted?"
"First thing there is to start with who's here on rotation awaiting assignment. We've got people on planet leave after a deployment right now. We can look through them before we think about calling people back," Xi said.
Jan looked at the list of ships currently at Sigurdsen.
"I think we're going to come up short, or at least have less of a selection than we might like. We're talking about a whole squadron, so 4800 total crew," Jan said.
"What about this? If we find a good command team, an admiral and his flag captain, they probably run a pretty tight ship already. If it's a battleship, there's 2400 crew right there. We could use maybe half of them across the squadron. That leaves a solid core continuing on the battleship, but also gives us a solid core in the squadron, with existing loyalties to the command team," Jessen said.
"That'll work. Jeannie, how fast can you get those sorts for us so we have something to look at?" Jan asked.
"I can have them done this afternoon and sent on. When should we meet again?"
"Not that many battleship squadron or division admirals out there. There's what? A hundred or so? Maybe a couple days to look through the likelies. Say Thursday morning?"
"Works for me," Xi said.
"Me, too," Jessen said.
"Encrypted communication for you from Sigurdsen came in on that courier ship, Ma'am."
"I'll take it in my ready room," said Rear Admiral Harmony Zhang, commanding the second division of the battleship squadron assigned to the task force protecting Bliss.
"Yes, Ma'am."
It was text-only. She read it, then punched a number on the intercom.
"O'Connor."
"Zhang here. Could you come up to my ready room when you have a moment, Boris?"
"On my way. O'Connor out."
Senior Captain Boris O'Connor, captain of the CSS Artemisia, Zhang's flagship, came into Zhang's ready room about five minutes later.
"What's up?" he asked.
"Read this and tell me what you think."
Zhang rotated the display to him and O'Connor sat and read the displayed message.
"Artemisia to report to Sigurdsen. You and I and our staffs to attend a meeting in the NOC. Huh. That must be some meeting, to drag a whole battleship seventy-five light-years," O'Connor said.
"What's weird about it?"
"It doesn't say what the meeting is about."
"At all. Not a word," Zhang said.
"Could be anything from a promotion to a court-martial, except I don't think they do either of those things en masse, and they want Bill, Natasha, Alex, and Dee to attend as well."
"Exactly. Well, orders is orders, as they say. Can we make the date?"
"Yes, just. This went out three weeks ago and has been in transit since. We're stocked for the trip, but it's going to take us almost five weeks to get to Sigurdsen. I think I want to shave a day or two off of that, maybe cruise at 1.05 g. Not too hard on the crew, but gets us there with some time to spare."
"Let's get under way, then. I'll comm Admiral Gorsky and say our goodbyes."
"Rasmussen."
"Suarez here. Can you come to my ready room for a minute?"
"Yes, Captain. On my way. Rasmussen out."
Commander Rasmussen, the Senior Tactical Officer aboard the CSS Sun Tzu, in orbit about Boomgaard, reported to the captain's ready room.
"Yes, Sir?"
"You did a stint in
destroyers, didn't you, Commander?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Good. I've just received orders you're to attend a meeting on Sigurdsen in five weeks. If I borrow a destroyer from Admiral Borega and they pull 1.2 gravities all the way, you can make it. You destroyer types are used to that sort of thing."
"Sigurdsen, Sir? What's the meeting about?"
"The message doesn't say, but it specifies the priority as urgent, your attendance as mandatory, and authorizes such vessel and such acceleration as necessary to get you there on time. So pack up, and make it snappy. There's a shuttle on the way over from the Hamilton.
"Yes, Sir."
The scene was repeated across the Commonwealth, as individual officers, groups of officers, and sometimes whole ships were called to Sigurdsen, without any explanation whatsoever as to why.
More Staffing Issues
Lieutenant Commander Stuart Miller looked over the secret files of his predecessors. He had to go back eight years before he found the files of someone who knew what he was doing. This previous naval attaché had worked Brunswick's existing contacts inside the CSF, found other former Brunswick citizens, recruited them. He was the guy who recruited the contacts in the NOC and Tactical Division who had since been found and executed. Miller admired the guy's professionalism and effectiveness.
What had ever happened to him? He consulted the terminal in his office. Bradley Clifton. Ah, here he was. He'd been promoted. Well, that made sense.
Miller looked through Clifton's notes. The contacts he'd inherited from his predecessor. The additional contacts he recruited. His payroll. Here's the guy who got caught in the NOC later, after Clifton had left Jablonka. And the guy in the Intelligence Division who got caught after that.
Wait a minute. Who were these other guys? Clifton listed at least a dozen others that were not active, but he had checked them out and they had been on his list if he needed them. Having covered his needs, he'd kept a reserve! Oh, you clever bastard. You just had to appreciate the professionalism of a guy like that. In contrast, the people who followed him had never recruited any of Clifton's reserve to make up their losses. They probably hadn't even read his notes.
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