The Terran Gambit

by Nick Webb

  “You both know the program, I presume?” he asked, not waiting for their reply. “My XO is old, and cranky, just like a good XO should be, and he wants to get back to his retirement. Jim nearly decked me when I told him I was recalling him for a few months, so don’t get in his way, or remind him of the Florida beach house I’m taking him away from,” he said, grinning a thin, professional smile.

  “Sir. So you intend for one of us to take the XO’s command, sir?” Ben stood at ramrod attention, his muscular arms held firmly at his side.

  “One of you three, yes.”

  Ben glanced at Jake.

  “You, Commander Mercer here, and Lieutenant Commander Po will be my senior officers on this assignment. Doctor Nichols holds the rank of commander, and is technically senior to you all, but the old coot doesn’t even come to my staff meetings anymore.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Ben.

  “Now don’t try to turn this into some nasty competition, boys. To be honest, I think I know with some certainty who will be my XO, who will be the wing commander, and who will be the operations chief. But one never knows just from studying service records, so think of the next few weeks as the test drive, where I get to try all of you out, take you to your limits, and see what you’re made of.”

  “Yes, sir,” repeated Ben. Jake nodded, standing at attention. Wing commander. He could deal with that, being the head space jock. He knew beyond any certainty that the Captain would choose Ben as the XO, having read the man’s service record himself. Captain Watson was the spitting image of Ben—an early rise through the ranks, smart, capable, and by the book.

  The Captain, sitting in his ready-room chair, glanced at the open doorway and motioned for Jake to shut it, then he pressed a button on his data console and the room erupted with the whirling orchestral sounds and timpani crashes of a composer Jake immediately recognized as Betaan—one of North America’s Neo-Romantic composers. The Captain waved them in closer, keeping his mouth nearly motionless as he spoke in a low tone.

  “And gentlemen. Be ready. The production schedule has been accelerated, to our good fortune. The shipyard has unexpectedly sourced a shipment of Gadolinium and Neodymium, which means that all nine ships will have their gravitic drives modified with the game-changing technology within the next few weeks. We’re back on track for a D-day celebration no one will soon forget.”

  Jake replied, mimicking the Captain by keeping his voice low and his mouth still. He could barely hear himself speak with the music crashing in his ears. “So the plan is back on track? We steal the Nine, engage whatever imperial fleet the empire has sent for the commemoration and launching ceremony, and then liberate Earth?”

  “Precisely. It’s a day long in the coming, gentlemen. Political events, military posturing, and technical breakthroughs have all converged in a rather singular manner, and the High Command of the Resistance doesn’t see an opportunity like this coming around again for decades. The outrage from the senate over Dallas, the imposition of the Truth and Reconciliation commission, the reigning in of the military, and now these nine ships and their new capabilities,” he said, listing off the events with one finger after another, “they all converge on this spot, right here, right now.”

  The Captain lowered his voice even further. “We’ve even heard reports that Admiral Trajan himself will attend the commemoration on the Caligula. The brilliant imperial tactician himself. He was the one who ordered the attack on Dallas, the bastard. I never thought it would be my fortune to lead the attack that sent him back to hell.”

  Jake and Ben both grinned widely. “Yes, sir,” they said in unison.

  “Now get to your stations. Mercer, get down to the flight deck and organize your crew. They’re yours for the next few days. Start a training program, and get them out there doing engagement drills—with the fighters’ new capabilities, your boys will need every moment to learn how to use them. Jemez, get up to the bridge and report to the XO. You’ll be his right-hand man for the next several days during our war game exercises.”

  Jake asked, “And Po?”

  “Commander Po? For now, assigned to ops, but all of your positions may change in the coming weeks. She reported an hour ago, right after she got off the passenger carrier. Apparently she felt no need to make a quick visit to the shipyard bar,” he said, glowering ever so slightly at Jake.

  Damn. Jake wondered if the Captain would be tracking his every move.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Gentlemen,” the Captain continued, rising to his feet and saluting. “Let’s move.”

  ***

  The next few days were as intense as Jake had ever experienced. He ran his new squadron through the wringer and then some, granting them scant rest and no relaxation time. He wanted them to be ready. He wanted them to outshine their imperial opponents when the time came.

  He wanted to win.

  Somehow, he imagined his father criticizing every decision he made, which only made him want to win more, just to spite and humiliate the old fool. If there was ever a man that truly lost at life, it was his father.

  Captain Watson had assured him the flight crew was hand picked from among the former Resistance fighter squadrons, and that he needn’t worry about loyalties when the time came. But he warned them that only about three quarters of the ship was known to be loyal to the Resistance. The other half, well, that was the other part of their job—scout out the rest of the crew and determine where key personnel stood.

  Jake walked down the hallway near the engineering section during one of his few breaks, trying to stretch his legs. As the wing commander, he spent little time in the birds, but far too much time standing at the command station on the flight deck and at the podium in the briefing room. He wondered if Ben might not have gotten the better end of the deal.

  “Did you come back for more, you halfwit moron? I was beginning to think you didn’t know the difference between a Kasparov gambit and a Bronstein gambit.” A man poked his head out into the hallway from one of the rooms lining it.

  A man with exactly one half of a mustache.

  The right half—the right side of the space above his lip—was completely bare, and Jake couldn’t help but do a double-take.

  “Excuse me?” Jake asked, somewhat hesitantly. He hadn’t even heard the question since he couldn’t take his eyes off the half-mustache. It was almost like a freak of nature, like a slug had crawled on his face and was racing towards the space above his lip, but had died halfway there.

  “Oh, sorry. I thought it was my friend. The Russian. He’s the chief engineer—I’m his deputy. Bernoulli’s the name. Lieutenant Alessandro Bernoulli,” he said, in a thick Italian accent that Jake hadn’t noticed before his previous question. Wiping a white powder off his hand, he extended it and walked out into the hallway to greet Jake, who smiled, gripped the outstretched hand, and tried to act like he was meeting someone normal.

  “Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant. Lieutenant Commander Jacob Mercer.”

  “Please, call me Alessandro. Is better, no? We will all be together for awhile and should get used to one another.”

  “Well in that case, call me Jake. Or Shotgun—that’s my callsign.”

  “So you’re a fighter pilot? Brilliant!” Alessandro wiped his hand on his pants again, rubbing the strange white powder off, and, noticing Jake’s glance, went on, “not to worry, Jake, just chalk.”

  “Chalk? On a starship?”

  “Ha! I show you. Come in to my office. Come in, come in!”

  What a very odd man.

  Jake followed him through the open door to a cramped, cluttered space full of scattered papers, schematics, textbooks, snack wrappers, half-eaten food, a couch that looked as if it were being used as a bed, and a large slate board hanging from one of the walls, blocking the view of a gleaming new monitor behind it.

  “I love showing people this. Get a kick out of it—is that a North American term? Kick out of?” he picked up a piece of chalk and started drawing on t
he slate board. “It’s a chalk board. You write on it!”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Why not? It’s a chalkboard! It simply begs me to scrape chalk over it, and so I fill it with equations, doodles, love poems, to-do lists … everything!”

  “Why not just use a data pad?”

  “Because, my friend. Is better this way. I’m touching matter. When I write, my whole body is involved in the motion. If it weren’t, I’d never be able to understand the intricacies of gravitic field mechanics. They have an ebb and flow to them—they are physical. Almost corporeal. And if you do not treat them as a physical entity as you come into their presence, they will hide their mysteries from you. You understand, no?”

  Jake stared at the man, trying to guess whether to take him at face value, or whether to stand up to someone who for all he knew was making fun of him. He chose the former. “Sort of. It’s kind of like flying my bird. You fly it with your whole body—the twists and turns, the loops and the g-forces. Sometimes I like to turn the gravitics down just so I can feel the acceleration better.”

  Alessandro looked at him as if Jake had just risen from the dead. “You’ve got to be joking with me, friend. You use your fighter’s gravitics … how? Why? Haven’t you heard of the Heidelberg approximation? Math is your friend, friend!”

  “I’m not sure what you’re—” he began, but Alessandro interrupted with an exaggerated sigh.

  “Let …” he said, with an air of mock annoyance, “… me show you.” He picked up a piece of chalk and started furiously scribbling a long equation, which included a host of symbols that Jake was sure he’d never even seen before. He spoke as he wrote, writing faster, and messier, as he talked more excitedly.

  “Behold, in all its perverse, uncooperative, bitchy glory, is the gravitic field equations, in a generalized four dimensional metric space.” He finished scribbling and stood back from the board for a moment, staring at the thing he had written. “Ahhh. Like a naked woman, no?”

  “I—”

  “Ha! I kid you. Is horrible. Absolutely horrible. Impossible to solve. Like women. To solve exactly, would require the most advanced processor in existence—as many of them as there are stars in the galaxy, computing for ten to the fifty-six years.”

  “Wow. Sounds—”

  “But wait! There’s more.” Alessandro returned to the board, scribbling out another equation underneath. “Couple this equation, with regular old quantum mechanics,” he began muttering under his breath, “i, h-bar, … dt … the Schroedinger equation—a good old reliable Susan. You know exactly what she does, until you don’t.”

  “I’m sorry, Alessandro? I’ve got to—”

  “Combine them, make them have sweet love with each other, and when you do, you get this!” He completely ignored Jake and wrote a third equation, even longer than the first. “The combination of them both is simply … simply … there are no words to describe the magnitude of the difficulty in English.”

  Jake tossed up his hands, giving up on his attempt to weasel out of the conversation. “Try me in Italian then.”

  Alessandro shook his head. “Tampoco.”

  Jake cocked his head. “Uh, I’m pretty sure that’s Spanish. And it doesn’t mean difficult.”

  “No, it doesn’t mean that either.”

  Jake closed his eyes momentarily, trying to sort out what had been said when the half-mustached man continued without missing a beat. “But! But, but, but, but, but! That is where Heidelberg comes in, and his graduate student, Drews.”

  “Ok, yeah. I know about them. They invented gravitics back in the twenty-second century.” He felt somewhat relieved that he’d finally contributed something to the conversation.

  “Yes. You are very smart. Good for you. So Heidelberg comes along, and in a stroke of drunken, drug-fueled genius, he devises the Heidelberg approximation, which takes this,” he banged his chalk on the equation stretched out across the board, “into this!” He wrote out a new equation, this one simple—Jake even recognized all the symbols. “Energy, is equal to Heidelberg’s constant, times distance squared, over target mass raised to the thirteenth power. The thirteenth! Who would have thought? I mean, besides me?”

  Ah. A fellow narcissist.

  “Incredible,” said Jake, trying to sound halfway knowledgeable.

  “This is what enables the gravitic shift, this simple, innocent-looking equation. Distance squared. That is almost trivial—to be expected. As your potential future position changes, the probability density of your exact location squashes out onto the surface of an imaginary sphere all around you, and spheres go as distance squared. But the mass to the thirteenth power—there’s the kicker. It means the more massive your target destination is, the more it is warping the space around it, and, gravitics-wise, your journey just got that much easier. Easier to the power of thirteen. How lucky, indeed. That means it takes just as much energy to shift from here to the sun as it takes to shift from here to the giant star Antares, five hundred and fifty light-years away!”

  He began writing another equation on the board, this one somewhat more complicated. “And here is the Drews approximation. It is more quantum-based, as you can see. This is what propels your fighter, and the Phoenix when she leaves the construction ring tomorrow. When your gravitic drive propels you forward, you essentially do a series of gravitic shifts, placing you one planck-length ahead of where you started. That is why you feel no acceleration. No g-forces. It’s why we never had to invent something impossible and silly like an inertial dampener. It is because you don’t move from place to place, you simply exist here one moment, and there the next. Which brings me back to my question. Why the hell are you flying your bird without gravitics?”

  Jake did a double-take—he’d begun to become distracted, and refocused his attention now that Alessandro accused him of saying something he had not actually said. “No, I said I sometimes just turn it down a little. So I can feel some g-forces. That’s all.”

  “Oh.” Alessandro set his chalk down. “Well why didn’t you say so in the first place? And then you let me drone on and on about what you should have learned your first day of kindergarten.”

  Jake rolled his eyes, imagining what he was doing his first day in kindergarten. Not quantum mechanics, that much was sure. “So, Alessandro. You hear anything about our new gravitic drive? I’m hearing some rumors go around….” He knew part of his job was to test the crew’s loyalty to the empire, and thought this might be a way to find out who he’d been talking to recently.

  “Of course I know. It is common knowledge. Just two years ago, a new approximation was discovered. Right here on Earth.” He picked the chalk back up and began scribbling furiously, to Jake’s chagrin. “Look here. Remember D-day? The Dallas version—not the Normandy version. Remember Admiral Pritchard’s tactic of sacrificing the three ships against the imperial fleet by shifting them into the poor bastards? That gravitic shift took far more energy than the Earth-to-Antares shift. Nearly ten times as much. You might not have seen it on the vids, but I assure you that the anti-matter power plants on those three ships went nearly critical after that, and would have blown had they not crashed into the imperials. But this new approximation gets around that. Completely sidesteps it, and in the limit as distance goes to zero, the energy required falls off with the eighth power, along with another constant—the Naples constant, after the hometown of its discoverer. Now we can shift short distances at a cost of very little energy, and all that was required was infusing the crystal structure of the gravitic field inducers with a little Neodymium. Genius, no? Pure genius.”

  Jake held up a warning hand. “Careful, Lieutenant. This is pretty classified stuff you’re saying here. They told me top-secret.” He looked back at the open door, but the hallway beyond was empty. The lecture was more than he would have preferred, but the answer told him that he was probably a Resistance sympathizer, if he wasn’t already Resistance himself—Jake had not seen his name on the list of known former Re
sistance members the Captain had sent to his console, but perhaps he was a new recruit. Either way, he made a mental note to keep an eye on him—if he were just an imperial grunt, he seemed to know far too much about the Nine’s secret new capabilities than he was supposed to.

  “Now then. Friend. What do you know about chess?”

  Jake demurred. “Uh, well, let’s see. I played back in college a little bit. Had a girlfriend who liked it, and, heh, I guess at the time so did I.”

  Alessandro grinned. “Ah yes, I, too, have used chess to get pussy.”

  Jake couldn’t help but burst into a belly laugh.

  “Then you will play me now, yes?”

  “Sorry, no time. I’ve got to get to the flight deck in twenty minutes.”

  Alessandro began setting up the board. “No problem, then. We’ll be done in less than five.”

  “Look, Alessandro, I’m sure you’re brilliant at it, but I’ve really got to be—”

  The engineer held up his hand to cut Jake off. “No, no, I understand. You are too fraidy cat to play me. I get it. Is ok. You go to your flight deck.”

  “No, it’s just that I’m running some drills and—”

  “You are little boy running scared. No problem, Jake, I understand completely. I would do the same in your shoes. Go. Go fly.” He waved a hand aft, indicating the general direction of the flight deck.

  “Now look, Bernoulli, I’m not scared of playing you. You’re smart, but you’re cocky, you know? And there’s nothing I like better than beating cocky sons-of-bitches at their own game.” He leaned into the engineer, looking up into his eyes. “And I never lose.”