by Bob Blanton
“Hold up now,” Jimmy ordered.
“Cannon is off.”
Jimmy used his thrusters to take him over to the slot the Fox was cutting. He measured the size and depth and checked out the sides. “Hey, dial back on the power about twenty percent and try again.”
“Do you want me to dig deeper, or keep moving down the line?”
“Keep going down the line.”
It took the Fox all day to get the first level of the slot blown away. It was six more days before they had the slot down the hundred twenty meters or so to the floor of the room holding the stasis pods.
Four days later they had cut the metal walls to separate the asteroid into two halves.
“We’ve finished it. What do you want us to do now?” Jimmy asked Blake.
“Can you stabilize it so it stays together? We won’t move it over to Mangkatar for a couple of months.”
“We can glue it together. Someone will have to use a laser to slice it back in half, but that shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Do that, then head home,” Blake said.
Chapter 20
Final Simulations
This was round six of the simulation tournament. Team Charlie was still undefeated. After the incident with Jamison, they had been allowed to replace him with Cadet Morrison. If they won the next two exercises they would win the tournament. They had just received the parameters for the exercise.
“This is a suicide mission,” Julie declared.
“Don’t give up yet,” Miranda said. “Even if we lose this one, we still have one loss to go.”
“Hey, stop that negative thinking,” Catie ordered. She put the parameters up on the display.
“We have only one ship,” Catie read off. “That’s going to play hell with our command structure.” All the previous simulations had given them three ships. Now Catie had two extra captains to deal with. “Julie, you take weapons systems, Ivan take the sensors, Hector take navigation.”
“Aye, Admiral.”
“We also only have ten fighters,” Miranda said.
“Then you take them. We’ll put Harris on engines and Morrison on defensive weapons,” Catie ordered.
“What’s the objective?” Baker asked. “Capture solar system seems vague.”
“Here it is. We are to take the system so we can harvest the resources from it. The total period of the exercise is two years!” Hector Muñoz said.
“Two years! That doesn’t make sense,” Julie said. “Why would it take two years to win or lose; most likely lose. It says the defenders have five starships.”
“This looks suspiciously like the Artemis situation,” Catie messaged ADI.
“I concur. I look forward to seeing how you solve the problem,” ADI replied.
“Weapons?” Catie asked.
“We have forty missiles launchable from the starship. They have a yield of one hundred megatons. The fighters have ten missiles each with yield of ten megatons.”
“What about our defenses?” Catie had read the data already, but asking the question helped everyone focus.
“Point laser defenses on both the starship and the fighters.”
“Our engine status and speed?”
“We are at 0.4 times the speed of light. Our grav drives are gutless out where we are. We won’t be able to start decelerating until we get inside the 60 AU limit.”
“Reaction mass?”
“Ten percent of our ship’s mass is available.”
“How are we approaching the system?” Catie asked.
“We’re heading directly into the sun, on the ecliptic, . . .”
“So, all we’re supposed to care about is the ability to harvest resources from the system. What does that mean?” Catie asked.
“It depends on what the enemy is there for,” Baker said. “If they have the same objective, then what resources will they have put in place to defend it?”
“Let’s assume they’ve just colonized the system.”
“Then their goal will be to defend the planet.”
“Do we need the planet?”
“Not really, we just need to be able to mine resources from the sun or one of the gas giants. That and have enough to feed our crews while we extract what we’re after from the asteroid belt or the planet.”
“How would we do that without a planet?” Catie asked.
“It’s not pretty, but you can literally regenerate all the hydrocarbons. You just have to add some minerals and have access to water and you can go on forever. Won’t be appetizing, but if you have the energy…”
“Yuck!” Julie said.
“So, they need the planet and we don’t,” Catie said. “Oh, my god!”
“What?!”
“ADI, end this simulation and get me Daddy and Uncle Blake!” Catie messaged.
“Simulation is terminated,” the simulators notified everyone in the room. “Please exit the room.”
“What’s going on?” Miranda asked.
“This is a drill!” Alarms were sounding in the background.
“Fire drill,” Catie suggested.
◆ ◆ ◆
“What’s going on?!” Marc asked. “It’s 0300 here!”
“Daddy, I know why the aliens changed course,” Catie declared. “I know what they’re going to do.”
“What?!” Blake asked.
“They’re going to bomb Artemis!”
“But changing course probably makes it impossible for them to even decelerate enough to stay in the system, unless they can sustain more gravitation force than we can,” Blake said.
“They don’t care about staying in the system!” Catie said. She had Artemis Prime and its system up on the simulation table.
“Why not?!”
“Yes, their new vector will take them right by Artemis, almost head on.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Imagine a one-hundred-megaton missile hitting the atmosphere,” Catie said.
“It would burn up,” Blake said.
“But set it to explode before it burns up.”
“Hmm . . . Oh shit!” Blake said.
“Someone explain it to me,” Marc demanded.
“If a missile traveling at 0.6 the speed of light explodes in the atmosphere, it will rip off a chunk of air and push it into space.”
“So?”
“Now, imagine twenty of them, one after the other!” Catie said.
“Oh, the planet would be uninhabitable.”
“Yes, not only would you lose a large percent of the atmosphere, but the warheads will likely pollute what’s left of the atmosphere.”
“And the loss of atmosphere would make the solar radiation problematic.”
“Right!”
“So how do we defend against that?” Marc asked.
“Easy,” Catie said.
“How?”
“Drop an asteroid in front of it.”
“it’s traveling at 0.25 times the speed of light, how’s that going to work?” Blake asked.
“Use a probe. Ramp it up to speed in Proxima Artemis; jump it in and use its grav drives to maneuver it in front of the alien ship. Then open a wormhole between our jump ships in Proxima Artemis and the probe; push an asteroid through, and bam.”
“That would definitely eliminate the threat,” Blake said.
“Okay, get us set up to do that, but I want a scenario where we can capture them or force them to surrender,” Marc ordered.
“That’s not going to be as easy,” Blake said.
“Make all the teams try to come up with a plan against Catie’s invasion scenario. Someone will come up with a way.”
“My team’s going to come up with it!” Cate declared. “But to be fair, we should give all the teams access to ADI; that would improve our odds.”
“Fine,” Marc said. “Pull out all the stops, full access to the simulators, and plenty of time.”
“Wait, we’re still in the offensive scenario,” Catie said.
&n
bsp; “I don’t care about the tournament,” Marc said.
“But we do!”
“I’ll handle it,” Blake said. “Go join your friends. Be prepared to run your simulation tomorrow at 0800.”
◆ ◆ ◆
“Where were you?” Miranda asked when Catie walked into her cabin. Miranda was there talking to Yvette.
“I went out the back way,” Catie said. “I found a spot to sit and ran the scenarios using my HUD.”
“And?!”
“Easy, peasy.”
“What does that mean?” Yvette asked.
“Simple comme bonjour,” Catie replied.
“How?”
“Destroy the planet’s atmosphere.”
“Again, how?”
“Speed up, aim at the planet, launch missiles at it one after the other.”
“I still don’t get it,” Yvette said.
“Oh, over half the speed of light; yeah, that would do it,” Miranda said. “You are an evil genius.”
“Thanks, I think,” Catie said. “We get to run it tomorrow at 0800.”
“When did you hear that? Oh, I just got it, how did you the notification before me?” Miranda asked.
◆ ◆ ◆
Team Charlie was the only one to win the engagement the next day. The other teams ended in ties when the time was called. Blake had only given everyone four hours of simulator time to prove out their method. Since Team Charlie never actually engaged the enemy directly, their simulation was carried out in accelerated time and finished within an hour. Now every team had been given the mission of defending the system against the attack Catie had mapped out.
“Okay, so we know the scenario that the enemy is going to use. How do you propose we defend against it?” Miranda asked.
“We’re back to three ships and full flight wings, so everyone assumes their previous roles,” Catie instructed.
“Okay, but when we finished the attack scenario, you called the defenders idiots,” Miranda said. “So you must know how to defend against it.”
Catie shook her head, “Yeah, easy. Drop an asteroid in front of the ship.”
“What?”
“Drop an asteroid in front of the ship.”
“And how do we do that?”
“We have the jump ships,” Catie said.
“But they’re not that accurate. They only open a wormhole up within a few thousand kilometers. How will that work?”
“Oh, you send a probe through, position it, have it anchor the wormhole, then push the asteroid through from the other end.”
“You can anchor the wormhole with a probe?” Baker asked. “Where did you come up with that?”
“It’s in the document on the jump ships,” Catie said. She knew it was there because she’d written the document.
“Wait a second,” Julie said as she frantically read the document. “. . . okay, I see it here, but it also says you have to stay a few hundred thousand kilometers away from a mass that’s moving that fast.”
“Yeah, but once you open the wormhole, you can maneuver the probe and the end of the wormhole. So, you open it up, then fly the probe until it’s in front of the ship. Then you push the asteroid through.”
“Okay, so we should have a lock on this mission. Do we want to run it?” Miranda asked.
“What about the bonus points for capturing the ship?” Ivan asked.
“Do we really think anyone is going to get that far?” Miranda asked. “We’re the only undefeated team. We can afford a loss, but I don’t think anyone’s going to pull out all that detail. Which begs the question, Alex MacGregor, how have you come up with all this?”
“I like jump ships,” Catie said. “I’ve been reading up on them since they first read us in on them.”
“So why are you so distracted now?” Miranda asked.
“I’m trying to figure out how to get the bonus points,” Catie said.
“So you don’t want to run the easy scenario?”
“Oh, sure we should. But they’re going to make us keep running scenarios until someone scores the bonus points.”
“How do you know that?”
“Isn’t it in the communication about continuing the tournament?”
“It is now,” ADI said. “You’ll have to say you checked it again when you arrived.”
“I see it. There was an update put out this morning. It says everyone is running the defense scenario against the computer and that the exercises will continue until someone comes up with a solution that captures the alien starship,” Julie announced.
“Oh, then why don’t we run the first scenario, then we can start working on the bonus points,” Miranda suggested. “We might as well nail down the win.”
“Sure,” Catie said. “Baker, you need to get us an asteroid; pick an iron one, about 100 meters in diameter. You’ll have to mount three gravity drives, a fusion plant, and a control module on it. Then get it out to the fringe of the system.”
“On it!”
“Miranda, you can fly the jump ships; we’ll need them by the asteroid. We don’t want them moving in relation to each other, so they should be able to be close. The tables should be in the mission brief.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Harris, you can get the probe built or pull it from stores if we already have one. You’ll fly it. Julie, you fly the frigate that will be managing the probe. Hector fly the one Miranda and Baker will use to handle the asteroid.”
“Aye-aye.”
“Let me know when we’re ready,” Catie said as she turned back to studying the scenarios that would let them capture the starship, or have it surrender, which she guessed would be the same thing. “ADI, can you clarify if surrender is the same as capture?”
“Cer Blake says that surrender is worth more,” ADI told Catie.
It was an hour before the team announced that they were ready to run the simulation.
“All ships in place?” Catie asked.
“Yes.”
“Is your asteroid ready?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then let’s do it. Jump Frigate Alfa next to and in front of the enemy vessel.”
“Jump complete. Now maneuvering so we can release the probe,” Julie announced.
“Maneuvering probe, . . . ready to open wormhole!” the computer announced.
“Open it.”
“Wormhole open!”
“Good, now maneuver the probe to within fifty million kilometers of the alien ship and match velocities.”
“Probe in place.”
“Isn’t that too far? Won’t they be able to maneuver away?”
“The asteroid is going to show up with almost zero relative velocity,” Catie said.
“Ah, and at half the speed of light, that’s only a few tenths of a second.”
“Okay, send the asteroid through.”
“Sending asteroid through,” Baker announced.
“Blam!” Hector yelled. “Nice special effects!”
“Great. Miranda, would you take care of completing the simulation,” Catie said as she turned back to her table and started mapping out data associated with the capture scenario.
◆ ◆ ◆
“Okay, my evil master,” Miranda joked. “Tell us how we capture them?”
“I think we need to let them avoid the asteroid,” Catie said.
“How does that help; they’ll just keep going toward the planet.”
“I don’t think they’ll be able to,” Catie said. “If we force them to turn outside the gravity well, then they’ll have to use reaction mass to steer back. How much mass would it take to make that ship turn three degrees?”
“At half the speed of light, a lot,” Julie said.
“Once they turn that much, they’ll be heading out of the well, and probably won’t have enough reaction mass to turn back into it. And they’ll be heading too far away from the planet to launch missiles at it.”
“Why won’t they be able to launch missiles at
it?”
“Too much velocity and not enough reaction mass in the missiles. If they launch far enough away that they can hope to reach the planet, our fighters can take the missiles out.”
“So?”
“We don’t leave them a choice but to surrender. They either surrender or take all that velocity into deep space away from the gravity well. They won’t have enough reaction mass to maneuver toward another star system, and no hope of slowing down.”
“Okay, let’s start working up scenarios. We need to figure out what they’ll do when we mess up their plans,” Miranda said.
“Good idea. I’ll play the alien captain, you take over the defenses,” Catie said.
Chapter 21
The Victory Arrives
“The aliens reach Artemis Prime’s fringe in four weeks. We have until then to be prepared” Blake said, as he opened the meeting.
“You have to allocate time to get everything up to their velocity,” Catie said.
“I understand. I want to bring the Roebuck to Artemis also.”
“That means we need to send the Galileo to Mangkatar,” Samantha said.
“It’s ready,” Blake said.
“Do we have a crew identified?” Marc asked.
“Yes, Captain Westport will take command, he’s new, but comes with enough experience. Half the crew will be Paraxeans. All the fighter pilots will be Terrans,” Blake said.
“Terrans?”
“Human sounds weird, I keep hearing Quark saying ‘Hu Man’. I like the sound of Terrans,” Blake explained.
“Who’s going to be captain of the Victory?”
“I’m leaving its command staff in place. That gives us Captain Clements, with Frankham as XO and Fitzgerald as wing commander.”
“For the Roebuck?”
“No reason to change. Lieutenant Payne can handle the mission I have in mind.”
“Can you set the timing on the Galileo so that it would be ready to come to Artemis if you need it?”
“I’ll work with Governor Paratar to make sure they expedite the unloading of the colonists,” Samantha said.
“Thanks. It’ll be okay if they don’t get all of the cabins out of the one flight bay, three fighter wings will be enough.”
“Are you coming?” Marc asked.
“I’m already on my way,” Blake said. “I’ll reach the Victory in three days.”