Hegemony
Authors: Mark Kalina
Hegemony
by Mark Kalina
Copyright 2012, Mark Kalina
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. The names, places, characters and events portrayed in this book are the products of the author's imagination or else are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to any organization, group, event or location is entirely coincidental.
--A very big "Thank You" to Douglas D. Collins, for the epic job he did in editing and supplying feedback.
(Any remaining typos, mistakes in grammar, style, etc., are there in spite of Doug's good work, and are my own dumb fault.)
--Another big "Thanks" to George H. Hepker VI, who dealt with all sorts of formatting issues.
-- Franz Berner helped create the new cover and came up with fantastic 3D renders of the ships. The cool-looking ship on the cover is his work. Thanks!
--A lot of the technological assumptions in this story were informed by things I read on a website called "Atomic Rockets" (www.projectrho.com/rocketstub.html), maintained by Winchell D. Chung, jr. It's an excellent site with a lot of information on plausible and realistic space craft, weapons, etc. Highly useful.
(Any mistakes or nonsense regarding the "science" part of the science-fiction in this novel are either intentional or my own fault. For those that are my fault, there would be a lot more of them if not for the information I got from Atomic Rockets.)
From just over
a billion kilometers away, the dwarf star burned like a distant, constant flare; the brightest light in the darkness, but still only a pinpoint of red fire. And the darkness was very empty.
Any star system is largely empty. In any star system, if one were to take the combined mass of all the planets, all the asteroids and ice fragments, even of the star itself, and average it against the volume of space through which the gravity of that system's star hold measurable sway, the result would be statistically indistinguishable from hard vacuum.
But the importance of a star system isn't measured in mass. A round speck of iron and silicon wreathed in a thin bubble of gas could be a habitable world, home to millions or even billions of people. A ball of fusing hydrogen could be the sun gives that world warmth and light.
There was no such importance here; the red dwarf's system lacked any worthwhile planet within its vast volume, no living worlds and no concentrations of resources valuable enough to draw life from other places. It didn't even rate a proper name of its own, just a designation, Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II, based on the name of a more important star system; Sigma-Charybdis.
Indeed, but for an accident of astrography the unremarkable red dwarf system would have had no importance at all. The system's only value was its location. It was conveniently positioned and its galactic orbit was stable; no faster and no slower than its neighboring stars.
Most colonies were founded within one or two FTL transits of at least one other inhabited system, but the Sigma-Charybdis system was an exception to that rule. The Sigma-Charybdis system boasted such a concentration of exotically valuable resources that it was worth exploiting even though it required a minimum of three FTL transits to reach from the next nearest inhabited system. And
that
was what gave meaning to the Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II system; the red dwarf system served as a navigational stop-over, a waypoint on the long flight between the economically crucial Sigma-Charybdis mining colony and the greater volume of the multi-stellar Hegemony of Suns.
For an instant the vacuum of the empty Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II system pulsed with the energy of two brief wormholes; two points of space-time unfolded, opening up, bringing something out of nothing. Nearby particles of dust and atoms of hydrogen flared into high energy radiation and then fell silent as space-time collapsed back to vacuum, leaving behind two dark slivers of man-made alloy and composites. The two ships' sleek dagger shapes marked them out as warships; civilian ships had no need to adopt volumetrically inefficient forms for the sake of steeply angled armor or radar-defeating stealth.
Aboard the two ships, sensors listened and watched, seeking out any hint of visible light, infrared or radio energy which might show that anyone had seen them. Against optical or thermal sensors, the ships' stealthing would help them not at all; anti-radar stealth served only to degrade enemy targeting radar in the final, laser-blinded, close-range instants of an engagement. If there had been anyone there to see them, the two ships would have been seen. But there was nothing. And finding nothing, the two ships drifted, silent, unseen, content to wait.
More than two hundred hours passed. And then the almost empty system was again brightened by the coronae of space-time unfolding under the stress of momentary wormholes. This time there were four wormholes, each existing for a fraction of a microsecond before collapsing. Four more ships emerged from FTL transit into the waypoint system.
The four were large ships. They were cargo carriers, "freight-liners" in the parlance of the industry that created them, meant to transport huge masses along established routes. Each massed over two megatons, though more than half of that mass was cargo and much of the rest was reaction mass for the ships' plasma drives.
The four freight-liners had emerged in the empty space above the system's ecliptic plane, bursting one by one into local existence across twelve seconds of time and almost three hundred million kilometers of space, like a strobe-light illuminating the dark emptiness of the system with impossibly brief, bright flashes.
Something had gone wrong. Warnings and alarms flooded the command system of the freight-liner
Ulia's Flower
within a second of FTL emergence. Captain Hans Rilk scanned the data with an intense frown, then deactivated the alarms. There was no immediate danger, and the ringing announcements that the FTL emergence had gone wrong were redundant to anyone looking at the incoming sensor data that showed the disposition of the four ship convoy.
"God damn it," the freight-liner's captain subvocalized, checking data feeds from the ship's auxiliary sensors, but the data kept showing the same thing.
The FTL transit hadn't felt any different... the countdown to initiation, the checking and double-checking of systems, had all been routine. The actual instant of FTL transit had been too brief to sense, as always. The sudden thrum of the ship's power systems, which most people thought of as the moment of FTL transit, actually occurred just prior; the actual transit was over in a fraction of a microsecond.
The rest of the bridge crew were reacting, sending out queries and commands. The captain acknowledged and directed, going through the both the routine checklist for FTL emergence and the rarely used checklist reserved for an FTL emergence error.
At length the stand-down from FTL transit was complete. Hans Rilk sighed and let his head drop back against the head-rest of his command pod, squeezing his eyes tightly closed before opening them. He was the captain of the
Ulia's Flower,
and
the second senior-most captain of the four-ship convoy
.
The four ships had been intended to arrive together, no more than a million kilometers apart from one another. Instead they had been scattered across several
hundred
million kilometers, with
none
of the ships actually emerging in the specific volume of space they had aimed for. Still, Rilk thought a bit grudgingly, it could have been worse. Given that there
had
been an FTL emergence fault, the actual emergence wasn't as bad as it could have been; not a disaster.
He frowned once more as sensors gave him more and more data showing the details of the faulty emergence, and sighed again. Not
quite
a disaster.
There was always, he knew, a chance of an FTL emergence fault. The risk was implicit in any attempt to coordinate an FTL transit so closely between four ships. But it had been a small chance, a low probability of error. This time the probabilities had come up badly for the four ship convoy.
Actually, as his FTL navigator could tell him, had told him before, it wasn't a matter of probability so much as of intrinsic uncertainty.
Actually
, thought Rilk with annoyance, the fact was that FTL Transit Navigation was numbingly complex and radically counter-intuitive. Technically speaking, Rilk knew, it wasn't actually 'FTL,' faster-than-light, at all. The momentary wormholes that ships used to transit interstellar distance took two points in space-time and made them one. The ship's velocity never exceeded the speed of light; in fact, a ship making a so-called FTL transit never actually crossed the intervening space at all. Still, the misnomer "FTL transit" was all but universal. Even the experts used the term.
Rilk did not fully understand the actual physics of how a ship's singularity reactor induced the wormhole that transited a ship from one point in space-time to another. Past a certain practical level of knowledge, that was the realm of specialists. He knew what FTL transit entailed as far as running his ship was concerned, but his grasp of the theory only went as far as the basics. Still, he did know that the principles of FTL transit involved intrinsic uncertainty. Indeed, uncertainty was the fundamental underpinning of the whole process. The more one tried to define one parameter of an FTL transit, the more uncertain other parameters became. And that uncertainty imposed limits on what a ship could do.
