by Jason Bourn
Without hesitation, Nadia responded emphatically “Yes. But it will take us seventy years to get there ...”
Giliad put up a hand to stop her. Sheepishly, she realized that she had started rambling, going down the same path of raising objections, even before Giliad had finished speaking. Giliad continued, “I agree that there is no hope of getting them back in a reasonable amount of time if we blindly launch what ships we have now. Furthermore, even if we did launch ships now, they would not be able to accomplish the mission. They simply are not designed for battle.
“The only reasonable course of action to pursue is to inspect the foreigner’s ships that have been left behind and attempt to reverse engineer their jump drive. This will undoubtedly take many years, but not nearly the seventy years it would take to reach Earth otherwise. Furthermore, during this time we could be arming ourselves with a new fleet of battle cruisers that would increase the possibility of standing toe to toe with the enemy’s ships. This would also allow sufficient time to train the required recruits to man the ships. In parallel, we can also search their records to determine if the foreigners indeed came from Earth, or some other planet.”
Giliad stopped talking and waited.
Nadia, trying to hide her astonishment, said “Yes, that sounds exactly like what we should do. Garth, Kadar, Saul, what do you think?”
Seeing the slight grin on each of their faces let Nadia know that their approval was a mere formality. Now they did indeed have a path forward.
– – –
Edgar was all ready with his speech to Earth’s council. Several days ago, he had sent the report of the results of the Ramos fleet monitoring activities, including his ship’s logs and the long-range sensor logs showing the escape of the Ramos ship and their jump to Ramos itself. Now it was time to let the council know what he thought Earth should do to protect itself.
“OK, let’s get started. As you know from the report I sent out, Ramos’ objective was to acquire sufficient children to repopulate their world. They have accomplished this objective. However, this is only a short-term fix. They will undoubtedly need to acquire additional children in the future. If everything works out with their newly acquired children, they will face the same problem in a few hundred years. If it doesn’t work out, then they could be back in the next five to ten years. The bottom line, though, is that they will be back.
“Also, we now know that the humans that went to Torval have become a vibrant force, populating the planets of an entire sector of stars. Our modeling shows that we can expect them to acquire the quantum jump drive capability within twenty to fifty years. This will put them at our doorstep and threaten our entire society. We are physically trapped on this planet in our virtual rooms and though we are vastly more technologically advanced than they are, it is not prudent to expose ourselves and put ourselves in a position where a lucky hit could destroy everything we’ve built.
“Therefore, I strongly recommend that we undertake the largest project that we have ever embarked upon. Specifically, a two-pronged approach. First, cloaking the entire solar system. Second, moving the entire solar system to another location in space. With these two objectives met, neither the Ramosians or Torvalians will be able to locate us. This is a huge undertaking, but with the technological capabilities inherent with our virtual collaboration, I believe it can be accomplished. I can’t stress to you enough that this long-term project is the single most important strategic program going forward.
“That is all that I have. We can discuss this as necessary and hopefully come to an agreement on our course of action soon. Thank you.”
CHAPTER 14 – NEW BATTLE LINES DRAWN
“Well,” Dorial said to Rheana, “the children have been out of suspended animation for a week. It took long enough to get the children’s play environment built and ready for use – I thought it would never get done. It’s been close to a year since we brought the children back.”
“Yes,” said Rheana, “it does feel like it took way too long. But we needed to make sure it was done right. We only have this one chance.”
“I know, I know,” growled Dorial. “Are you ready for our one-on-one talks with some of the children? This should be our first real insight as to how successful we have been with our early assimilation attempts. Who are we talking with first?”
Rheana consulted her persa. It volunteered for her that the first child was named Violet. She was five years old and had received a neural processor. Running through the rest of the information, she said “Her name is Violet and she loves to play video games. She received the neural processor five days ago, so she’s had a chance to get used to it by now. Here she comes.”
Violet walked in, dressed in a lavender stretch suit, looking nervously at the two fully body enhanced humans. They sat as still as they could, ensuring that their servo motors and all other noise-producing enhancements were as silent as possible. Violet walked up to them and sat down. “My persa said you wanted to talk with me.”
Rheana smiled and said, “Yes, you look lovely. Your name and your jump suit match.”
Violet had to reference her persa, then, when she understood, she smiled. “Yes, purple is my favorite color.”
Dorial asked, “So how are you feeling?
Shyly, Violet answered with tears forming in her eyes, “I miss my mommy.”
Dorial felt badly, but answered, “I know, we can’t find your mother, but what we can do is to give you things to make you feel better. Some are just little things that make you feel good, like the sweets and the toys. But some are much better, like what we did to help you play your video games.”
With that, Violet brightened considerably. “Oh, I really like that,” she paused to look up the words on her persa, “neural processor you gave me. My favorite game is ‘Zoo For You’. I used to get to level three, then there were too many animals so I couldn’t control them all and they would run away. Now with the neural processor, I can get all the way to level seven and I can still control all the animals. It is wonderful.”
Dorial glanced at Rheana and smiled. “I’m glad that you are doing so well and enjoying it so much. That processor is just the beginning of what we can do for you. Is there anything else you wanted?”
Smiling, Violet said “I’d really like something to give me better hearing,” she again consulted her persa, “an aural processor. None of my friends like that mean boy, Mario. He keeps sneaking up on us and scaring us. If I had an aural processor then I could hear him coming and he couldn’t do that.”
This time Rheana was the one who smiled at Dorial. “I think that we can do that sooner instead of later, just to make you happy.”
As Violet, smiling brightly, turned to go, Rheana asked, “Is there anything else that you’d like?”
Violet considered, then said “Yes, some ice cream.”
This time both Dorial and Rheana smiled and both said in unison, “OK, we’ll get you some.”
As Violet walked out of the room, she was the one wearing the largest smile.
– – –
Nadia said, “Finally! It’s been almost a year since our children were taken, coinciding with the end of the ‘No Win War’, and only now have we started making the necessary scientific breakthroughs.”
Garth, Kadar, Saul and Giliad showed up clearly on Nadia’s meeting room display. Each wore a mixture of grim expressions – they knew that there would be all hell to pay if they could not produce something for the one-year memorial anniversary. This was going to be the single biggest day of demonstrations and it was the one event that was able to pull all segments together, whether they be from Torval 2, from any of the Kingdoms or from the Periphery. The slogan that had seemed to stick was: “Our strength, by coming together, will free our children.”
And come together they had. More than any other activity before, they had pulled together the best engineering minds from all reaches, from all parts of their society, to scrutinize the three foreign ships that had been the only real fruits
of the war. They had come closer and closer to a breakthrough, until finally they had been able to get the first particle of matter to undergo a quantum jump of multiple light years. This was the biggest challenge. Once this had been accomplished, it was just a matter of improving their process and getting larger and larger chunks of matter to jump. Getting a ship to jump wouldn’t happen in a day, and probably not even in a year, but it would happen.
Saul said, “We have provided many of our best people for the engineering team. The Periphery stands united in getting back our children. On the one-year anniversary, there will be memorials held on every one of our worlds.”
Nadia responded, “Yes Saul, we really appreciate it. Your support has been crucial.” Secretly she wished that the Periphery had also provided more in the way of money and physical assets, but she didn’t want to bring that up again. The Periphery had been adamant about not providing anything that might be construed to be overtly militaristic. They still felt that they could and would get their children back and they were all in for others’ use of force, but never their own.
Garth spoke for all the Kingdoms when he said, “We have made good headway on the battleship fleet, but we are worried that we will not have sufficient ships to successfully engage the enemy.” He said this while looking at Nadia.
Nadia could feel the barb in his statement and couldn’t resist her response, “Torval 2 has put up more than eighty percent of the capital for the fleet. All your Kingdom’s combined have only put up twenty percent and the Periphery hasn’t contributed at all.”
Saul interjected, “As I said, we have provided more than our share of engineering talent ...”
Nadia didn’t want to hear the same pompous statement from Saul again, so she cut him off. “All I am saying is that Torval 2 has provided the lion’s share of the human resources and capital for the generation of the space fleet. It is more than two hundred ships strong, and should be completed within the next ten years. These are real battle-ready ships – far more capable than anything we had before. We have started the training program for the crews to staff these ships,” again she couldn’t stop herself, “again with the vast majority of the personnel from Torval 2.”
She hesitated, then finished with “We have truly come together for this to be accomplished.” She didn’t add, though she wanted to, that she wished they had come together with more support from outside of Torval 2. Then to more directly address Garth’s comment, she added, while looking at both Garth and Kadar, “We have already extended ourselves more than we are comfortable with, so there is no way that we can provide any more assets to build additional ships.”
Garth shook his head, but then nodded. “I feared as much. Kadar and I and all the smaller Kingdoms have also extended ourselves as much as possible, so we will have to make do with what we have. Giliad, do you think this will be sufficient?”
Giliad did not hesitate when he said, “The only way to be successful in a war is to not fight. As soon as weapons are used either you or your enemy, and normally both, have lost something, oftentimes you have lost a lot. The only way to truly win is to configure events in your favor to avoid war. That is your true challenge and what should always be strived for.”
Everyone pondered this for a few minutes. When no one else spoke, Garth concluded the meeting by saying, “On the heels of the ‘No Win War’ then, we need to wage a war that only we can win.”
Giliad shook his head but didn’t say anything.
Nadia thought to herself that she wasn’t sure that Garth had really understood Giliad’s main point.
– – –
Edgar was completely satisfied. After one year of research, they had finally decided on how to approach the problem.
“There is no way that we could just physically move the sun and its planets,” Dr. Jarod Yep, the speaker, said. “The mass is too big to push or pull and you couldn’t do that with the sun anyway. And any solution would have to exert a more or less constant push or pull on the system as a whole. Otherwise the planets would be flung from their orbits, kind of defeating the purpose of the entire effort of moving the solar system.”
Smiling at his attempt at humor, Dr. Yep continued, “Instead, we plan to create a temporary black hole that will exert a gravitational pull to the solar system as a whole. We will only allow it to exist for a fraction of a second, but we will repeat this procedure many times. This will gently ‘nudge’ the entire solar system, causing very little negative perturbations. Over time, several years, this will pull the solar system faster and faster in the desired direction. We will make every attempt to ensure the black hole is only temporary – otherwise it would mean the end of the solar system, and as we all know, this would be detrimental to our health.” Again, he smiled at his joke. He then produced the physics calculations to back up the committee's findings.
As they had been peer-reviewed, Edgar didn’t bother to verify the data. He was sure that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of reviewers that were hoping to find some issue, whether it be major or a small nit. The important thing was that they now had a plan in place that was realistic, although somewhat exotic. On the other hand, one had to expect something at least somewhat exotic if one wanted to move an entire solar system.
Another panel member of the committee asked, “What about the cloaking of the solar system?”
Dr. Yep deferred to Dr. Ester Stills, the ranking cloaking expert.
She started out somewhat timidly, but her voice gained strength and confidence as she went on, “Cloaking of objects is not new. We have had the ability to cloak small objects for many years. What is new, and quite frankly very challenging, is to attempt to cloak something on the scale of a solar system. Needless to say, nothing like this has ever been done before – in fact nobody had even thought about how it might be done.
“We considered multiple ways of approaching this, but we settled on the simplest to implement that would provide the best performance. Since we are trying to cloak the solar system, we first needed to decide whether to cloak the entire system, or to cloak the major elements that make up the system, namely the sun, the planets and the larger moons. We decided it was much easier to cloak the major elements since there was far less volume to cloak this way. In a nutshell, and I’ll go into the physics of it in a few minutes, what you need to do to ‘cloak’ something is you need to show what is behind the object to the viewer, so that they cannot ‘see’ the object itself. In order to accomplish this, what we do is surround each major solar system element with an active array of damper sensors and emitters.
“Let’s say, for the sake of explanation purposes, that a viewer is due north of the object to be cloaked. The damper sensor on the south side of the object picks up all electromagnetic energy, from photons to cosmic rays, that is hitting the object from the south, heading north towards the viewer. Normally, the object would absorb or deflect the electromagnetic energy away so the viewer wouldn’t see behind the object. However, the sensor sends the information on the received electromagnetic energy to the emitter on the opposite side of the object, on the north side in this example, where the electromagnetic energy is replicated. Therefore, to the viewer, the cloaked object appears as if it were not there. A lot of processing and some neat emitter circuitry, but pretty simple in theory.
“The damper sensor damps, that is it absorbs, all the electromagnetic energy it receives so there is no reflection signature by the element. So, whether the element is a small moon, a large planet, or the sun itself, all we do is surround it with damper sensors and emitters, perform some processing and we’re done. The bottom line is any electromagnetic energy that might be used to detect any major object in the solar system effectively passes right through that object and therefore it passes right through the solar system. There is no way to detect the solar system is there.”
Dr. Stills then went into the physics of the cloaking, which Edgar again ignored.
Everything was going according to plan. N
ot only had they worked out the technological aspects of the approach, but they had also received the go-ahead to implement the agreed-upon solution. Now it was just a matter of time before it was fully implemented.
CHAPTER 15 – THE LONG HAUL
“We are going to need new ships to defend ourselves, in case they come looking for their children”. Dorial wearily rubbed his neck, one of the few places that didn’t have augmentation covering his body.
Rheana responded, “I agree, but we just don’t have the bodies to control them. As you know, most Ramos natives are just too introverted, never wanting to expend the effort on something other than their body augmentation improvements. I would be surprised to find fifteen that would do it, and then only if we pleaded with them.”
Dorial shook his head in frustration. “Yes, they aren’t interested in saving their planet – they figure that someone else can do it. I would put the number at closer to ten that would actually be willing to do it.” He thought about it for a few seconds. Finally, he said, “I am going to authorize the building of ten battle ships. With our ability to integrate our body systems with the ship systems, we should be able to match up with a much large force of normal battle ships.”
Dorial’s shoulders slumped. He was definitely feeling his age. Even with all his body augmentation, he knew that his best years were behind him. He wasn’t exactly nearing the end of his life, he would probably live for another fifty years or so. But he could see it in his systems’ medical reports and, more importantly, he could feel that the natural part of his body was wearing out. Thanks to his neural processors, his mind was still sharp. And thanks to his exoskeleton and muscular augmentation, his body was as strong as ever. He just knew that as time went on, he felt tired much more easily.
Overriding his feeling of weariness, Dorial did feel some excitement. It took more and more effort to get that feeling of excitement these days, so he knew that they were nearing a milestone. It had been five years since they had starting integrating the children in to their society. And today he and Rheana were going to interview Violet, the first girl they had interviewed shortly after they had started the children’s integration. The five-year mark, their experts had said, was generally the make-or-break time frame. If things were going well, then success was likely. If not, then by that point it would most likely be too late to save the effort.