Alicia Jones 3: New Frontier (9 page)

It wasn’t pretty.  The bug ships were small, a little
bigger than an attack shuttle.  Without the data attached, I wouldn’t be
able to even guess how many because it looked endless.  But there were
somewhere around nine hundred thousand of them swarming into a solar
system.  The defenders had thousands of emplacements, and a little over a
hundred thousand ships.

The Seltan launched missiles, and the swarm used some kind
of energy weapon similar to a plasma cannon.  Each ship had two, one on
top, one on the bottom.  They took out the missiles with the turrets and
kept going.  As they got closer, the Seltan missiles were more effective,
but the swarming craft started to destroy Seltan ships by teaming up on them,
often thirty or forty to one as they flew past and circled back.

The swarm ships never stopped, and at the end they turned
suicidal.  That told me retreat wasn’t in their vocabulary, they either
won, or were stopped.  It became clear the Seltan didn’t have any advanced
tech they were hiding, unless this battle was from a very long time ago, which
was possible.

I didn’t think so though.

“Al, are there any videos of them losing a battle?”

Al replied, “No, I’d guess they don’t want to show
weakness.  It is pretty easy to extrapolate, if the swarm ships come in
enough waves, eventually it will wear down the defenders until there is nothing
left.  There is also no doubt that they don’t fight in FTL, though I
cannot see a reason for it.  Perhaps the Seltan do have gravity missiles?”

I nodded, that would make sense.  Or at least something
similar.

Kristi chimed in, “I think our ships would tear them apart
based on these energy levels, at least until they changed tactics.  These
energy weapons, it would take more than sixty to breach our shields, and they
swarm ships with half those numbers.  Also, the enemy shields couldn’t
take one shot from our plasma cannons, so we could kill sixteen at a time. 
Their shields would stop a plasma attack from our shield missiles or attack
shuttles though.  Even still, with our main ships we would tear them
apart, and they’d be in our attack range long before we were in theirs.”

I lifted an eyebrow, “Maybe, but say we had a thousand
ships, which we are close to, that’s one thousand swarm ships each, per
wave.  Divide that by sixteen plasma cannons, that means we’d have to kill
sixteen ships over sixty-two times to win the battle.  Greater tech will
make a difference, but against those numbers we’d be slaughtered quickly as
soon as they change tactics.”

Kristi pouted, “You know what this means right?”

I frowned, “What?  Assuming we do get into this fight.”

Kristi rolled her eyes, “We need to vastly update how many
ships we’re building.  If we had a hundred large scale fabricators instead
of ten, and discontinued the carriers, we could build two thousand battle
cruisers a month.  Why, after one month we’d be down to killing sixteen
ships just twenty-one hundred times, two months, we could win a battle. 
Three months, we could forget defending and go wipe them out.  Of course,
we’d have to give them a major discount.”

I laughed, “Yeah, who’d pay for it.”

She shrugged, “It’s IP, it’s not as if the resources
actually cost anything, it’s the right to build it.  It’s not like we can
spend it if we’re dead.”

I nodded, “I’m more than rich enough already, but people
don’t value what’s handed to them.”

She frowned, “So you won’t do it?”

I shook my head, “I’ll do it, but they’ll all be ours!”

She snickered, “Seriously?”

I frowned, “Yes, if I’m going to build an armada to save the
galaxy, why shouldn’t I own it?  The only other possibility is letting the
other races buy the rights to make and sell our tech.  I trust them, sort
of, but if we can do it ourselves that might be wiser.”

She sighed, “And if Earth won’t give them back, with their
people on them?”

“Platforms.”

She tilted her head, and then smiled as she thought it
through.  We could build platforms even faster, no need for offices,
hallways, landing bays, missiles outside of the small gravity ones, or life
support including food and water.  It would literally be a heavily
shielded platform with FTL, sixteen plasma turrets, a DE reactor, and gravity
missiles all controlled by an A.I. that would be commanded by a command ship.
 My command ship.

Kristi nodded, “And afterwards we can repo them without
trouble, and they’ll eventually get sold to new colony worlds.”

“Exactly.  Al, have our two fabricators replicate
themselves until they hit a hundred, then start making platforms.  Might
as well let the government fabricators keep building the actual fleet they are
buying.”

Al acknowledged my order.

Kristi raised an eyebrow.

I shrugged, “Do you think they’ll say no to the
Seltan?  If they do… I’m doing it anyway, not in a hurry to die.”

Kristi asked, “Do you think the Seltan are really in dire
straits?”

I nodded, “Dral looked a bit desperate, in a way.  I
don’t think he would bother with the chance we couldn’t be trusted
otherwise.  I don’t think they’ll have enough ships built up for this next
wave, they must have lost a lot of production capacity in the last
attack.  Al, how long do we have before the next waves, and what is the
usual frequency.”

Al replied, “It is not exactly like clockwork.  I
estimate we have somewhere between four and eight months before the enemy
attacks again.  They come on average, every nine years.”

We were all silent, lost in our own thoughts about was to
come.  I thought it would be another skirmish with a detestable
species.  Apparently the Seltan just had the same bad opinion about the
Knomen that we did.

Al announced, “Incoming call from Admiral Flores.”

“Answer it,” I waited a moment, “Anthony, what can I do for
you?”

Anthony said, “I’m going on the Seltan tour from hell, want
to join me as the second ship.”

My mind froze, I hadn’t expected that.

“Sure, any particular reason?”

Anthony grinned, “I thought you would want to, but the other
reason is it would be nice to have a scientific eye on what we see.  I can
handle the military eye.  Also, our ships are geared for fighting other
humanoids and what we’ve seen, I thought maybe you would see something I
didn’t.  Kristi too of course, looking good ma’am,” his eyes roved up and
down her body.

Kristi blushed, I guess she’d forgotten she looked rather
pornographic in just her skin suit.  We were roommates for years, so I was
used to it, I didn’t even think about not using a visual link.

Kristi recovered, and gave Anthony a wink, “I’m at your
service admiral.”

It was his turn to blush.

I answered his question before this got out of hand, “We do
want to join you Admiral, although we’ve already been discussing steps in case
Earth decides to join this battle.”

Anthony grinned, “Good to hear, we’ll signal when it’s time
to leave, an hour, maybe two.”

I nodded, “In light of this can I make a further
suggestion?”

Anthony asked, “Anytime, what is it?”

I said, “Regardless of what we do, it seems apparent that we
should increase the speed that we are setting up the stealth sensor net in the
galaxy.  I’d suggest building a couple of hundred more stealth ships, and
send them to the arm next to us.  The bugs seem to be systematically going
arm to arm, which is good for us, otherwise they’d have just popped over a long
time ago, but we hardly need to follow their example.”

Anthony nodded, “Good thought, we should know where they
are, so we can go kick their asses when we beat off the waves,” then he took
one more sidelong glance at Kristi before disconnecting…

Kristi asked, “You seem really calm about all this, aren’t
you worried?”

I smiled, “Actually I don’t know how you humans do it. 
If I couldn’t control my body and mind, my emotions, I’d be rolled up in a ball
shaking right now.”

Kristi frowned, “I think I’m sorry I asked.”

I shrugged, “I think we have enough time, even if they come
in four months we’ll have close to seven thousand platforms.  That’s only…
one hundred forty-two some odd ships each per each wave.  Piece of
cake.  And that’s just platforms, when we add in another eight hundred
ships Earth will have built, and the thousand or so we have now, that winnows
the numbers to kill even smaller.  That doesn’t even include our allies or
the Seltan’s numbers.  Once the waves are done, and we go hunting, it will
be even easier.”

Kristi raised an eyebrow, “How?”

I smiled, “With the waves we will be defending a planet so
we’ll have to stand fast, when we attack, we can draw them into swarming, then
move away.  It will keep them in our range of attack, but keep us out of
theirs for much longer, possibly the whole fight.  Of course, we have no
idea what kind of defenses or how they fight defensively, so it may not be that
simple, but it should be easier.”

Kristi nodded, “Okay, maybe I do feel better now.”

I didn’t bother to mention that Al could be wrong, that the
enemy could attack tomorrow for all we knew.  But I was hoping for at
least four months, honestly even if they came in eight we could stop building
after four.  We were also assuming there would only be swarm ships when we
went out to attack them, for all we really knew their defenses were a lot more
robust.

Anthony signaled it was time, and forty-eight ships, two
from each of the twenty-four fleets, followed our host Dral for a tour of
Seltan space, to learn how prepared they were to face the bugs and where they
were lacking.

I also wondered at my first instinct to eradicate this
enemy.  The evidence was fairly large, they had destroyed an entire type
of life in the arm next to ours, and have been trying to destroy humanoids ever
since.  However, all we had to prove that really was the word of
Dral.  It could even be he was telling the truth, as it was taught to
him.  Of course, if the enemy wouldn’t talk at all, it would be impossible
to get the other side of the story.

Al interrupted my thoughts, “The stealth sensor net has
picked up two more worlds at around ten thousand light years rimward of Earth.”

I tilted my head, I’d not asked Al to comb raw data and
bring up finds.  It was almost eerie how he anticipated things, but I had
to remember he wasn’t actually sentient, it was all just calculations.

“Tell me about them?”

Al responded, “The first is another empty world, but it would
require many years of terraforming before humans could live there
comfortably.  The second is another interstellar race, they haven’t
reacted to the probes.”

I perked up, “Display all data please.”

The information came up.  They were new to space, or
hadn’t had a breakthrough in a long time.  The scans indicated their ships
were much like the first I’d built, saucers, no artificial gravity, no energy
weapons although it did appear they had ports for missile launches.  I
imagined Earth wouldn’t have been much farther along than that without picking
up artificial gravity from the Tressians.  At least, we wouldn’t have
energy weapons either, since it was integral to firing.

Perhaps I would have come up with the newer designs to
tighten and improve the anti-mass and EM field, but maybe not without a driving
reason to push the tech. 

The world was ahead of us in different ways however, it
looked like they had a single central government, I imagined we’d run into
their ships in other systems in the future, hopefully they would be peaceful,
not that the ships they were in could even scratch one of our shuttles, much
less a battle cruiser or command ship.

There was nothing to say what reaction the USFS board was
taking, I was out of that loop now.  But I knew from planning meetings in
the past that the most likely response was to send in a visible probe, with a
brief introduction, a copy of the treaty, and a quantum communication device
with a built in translation matrix.

We’d decided back then, once they were FTL it was a little
late to be preparing for first contact, so it was better all-around to step
lightly.  If they were curious, and peaceful, they’d figure things out and
make contact.  If they destroyed the probe without investigating, we’d give
them wide berth, at least until they trespassed on our space.  It wasn’t
perfect, but what was?

I squashed the feeling of wanting to go make first contact,
or really do anything else.  I needed to be living in the moment.
 Sure, my scientific
self did
need to plan and
look to the future, but the rest of me needed to be a bit steadier.  Part
of being a workaholic, I was always thinking ahead to what was next.

That said, I didn’t tell Al not to distract me if more data
came in on the stealth sensor net either.

It didn’t take more than a few hours to reach our first
destination.  The system was right on the edge where the arm started by
the core.  It had a couple of gas giants that looked rather small, a
colony of about a half million Seltans, and the system was riddled with
thousands of emplacements, and too many ships to count.

Dral opened a link and sent an image, “This is what the
system looked like when we found it.”

The image was completely different.  The gas giants
were about five times larger, and there were two asteroid belts that no longer
existed.

Dral said, “We have used all the resources in this system to
defend against our common enemy for millennia, and other systems as well we
will go see.  This system is the front line of our endless war.  We
build up, they knock it down, then we build up.  We never have enough
resources or time to counter attack the enemy between waves, it is all we can
do to keep up a defense.

“It is the front line because this is the only system they
swarm, I do not know why they don’t cross the small void between arms, but they
come down the arm to the core, and swing our way to this system.  It has
fallen twice in our history, but then the swarm splits, and we’ve managed to
beat them back and reestablish this system.

“I know to us that tactic seems incredibly stupid,
especially since it has failed them every nine years for the last thousands of
years, but they do not think like us and seem incapable of adapting.  That
said, if you don’t join us we aren’t sure we’ll make it this time, and
definitely not the time after.”

I frowned, it didn’t make sense, “Dral, how is it you build
your ships?”

Dral looked annoyed at the interruption, but he answered,
“We have several systems with ship yards that run non-stop.”

Oh.  They didn’t have fabricators?  That… no
wonder they could never build enough.  With fabricators we could build a
lot in a short amount of time, it must take them months per ship.  To
build this many ships every nine years, they must have yards in hundreds of
systems.  The real issue without fabricators would be manpower, that was
probably what held them back.  I hadn’t even considered that, we’d had
fabricators pre-FTL, it was something I’d grown up with and taken for granted.

Dral continued when no one else interrupted, I wondered if
everyone else came to the same conclusion.

“The only way to ever stop them, is to fight and destroy
them in their star systems, to not let them build more of these waves.  We
need allies.  Follow please,” the connection dropped and he went to FTL.

Yeah, allies, or fabricators, but I kept my mouth
shut.  It seemed absurd to keep back tech, but I reminded myself no matter
their position, they were our enemy a few hours ago.  Still, all the
little logistical problems without them came to mind.  Factories for
missiles, then they’d have to get them to the ships, instead of simply
fabricating new ones right there on the ship that needed them.  There were
many other issues as well.

Dral took us to several systems, all of them had colonies
with populations of a half to two million, and usually only had one small
city.  Was it the fighting that kept down the populations?  Also, all
the systems showed signs of being mined and fully exploited.  He didn’t
take us to any systems with ship yards, or where current mining was
happening.  I didn’t blame him, we were his enemies up until recently as
well, and right now it was just a temporary truce until our world leaders made
a decision where to stand.

By the time we were finished, our ships were done with the
upgrades, and we went straight home via wormhole instead of returning to
Leira.  The question was what would we do about it.  The truth was,
the question wasn’t if we would fight the bugs, the question was if we would
attempt to save the Seltan, or not.  I hoped it was the former…