Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest) (23 page)

“What about the particle cannon?”

“Less of a problem. They will hit harder firing forward. Sideways they act more like railguns than lasers, so the beam will actually continue the boat’s direction even as they diverge, whereas beam weapons fired sideways spread out in an enormous plane. Fired backward…well, it would be like throwing baseballs backward off a truck. Most of the kinetic energy goes into the boat, as if firing a rocket.”

Absen nodded. “I get it. So if we keep it under half lightspeed, we can still make a pretty good alpha strike off the nose.”

“Yes, sir,” Nightingale replied.

“Quan,” Absen turned to Ekara, “can the TacDrive only propel us directly forward?”

“Yes…” and then the engineer paused with a faraway look in his eye. “I think so. As currently configured, but…it might be possible to put in some auxiliary field emitters, reverse the polarity, and make it take us backward. I’m not sure how fast…”

“Get to work on it. I want that capability. Now…” he turned to Okuda. “Master Helm, tell me something. What happens to our kinetic energy when we come out of the TacDrive?”

“Like many things, sir, it depends. The inertial dampening field interacts with gravity in such a way that within about twenty AU of a star like Sol, the boat comes out of pulse nearly at rest relative to that star – or actually, relative to the sum of all the gravitational pulls in the system.”

Seeing the others’ incomprehension, he explained. “A simple rule of thumb is, whatever the dominant gravity nearby is, the boat will tend to match speeds. So if we come out of pulse near Jupiter, we will be at rest relative to Jupiter. It’s almost as if gravity sucks out the kinetic energy during the pulse. The strongest source tends to dominate.”

“And in interstellar space, where there is very little gravity?” Absen asked.

“Then we might lose a lot less kinetic energy, especially during a short pulse.”

“How much less?”

“I need a one-variable equation, sir. Tell me how fast we are going when we pulse, and how long we pulse, and I can tell you about how much speed we will retain.”

Absen sat back and put his feet up on his desk. “If we’re going half light, with a light-week pulse?”

“Out here? We’ll keep almost all of our energy.” Okuda raised an eyebrow in question, obviously wondering what his captain was driving at.

“Not yet,” Absen said. “All right, I think I have all I need for now.” He pressed his intercom. “Send her in.”

Tobias opened the door and held it, head swiveling to stare at the woman who entered. Unknown to everyone there, yet Absen could see the tantalizing familiarity that the other men felt. He stood up to inspect her, as he already knew who she was.

Dressed in a warrant officer’s dress uniform, the woman was of average height, with dusky skin and dark hair. She held her wheel cap precisely under her left arm, and her right came up to salute Absen. “Warrant Officer First Michelle Conquest reports as ordered, Captain,” she said in even tones.

Absen’s four officers all came to their feet as one, staring.

“What!” Ford cried, aghast.

“You’ve never seen a woman before? Or a warrant officer?” Absen asked with a smile.

“That’s…” he sputtered.

Okuda took a step sideways as if to get a better look, while Nightingale stood still.

Ekara reached a hesitant hand as if to touch the figure’s bare arm, and then drew it back. “That’s an android,” he said in wonder. “They were experimenting with them before we left, for certain specialized uses, but replicating the human body mechanically is a very difficult task, full of compromises. In most cases some form of robot is better.”

“It’s creepy,” Ford said.

Ekara responded by waving a finger in the air in a circle. “There’s that, too. Some people had a hard time adjusting.”

Absen finally returned the salute, but left WO1 Conquest standing at attention. Or at least, her android telefactor.
It’s not as if her mind were trapped there too. She’s probably still performing a dozen other tasks, only sparing what she needs for this one.

“We’re going to have to get used to it, because she’s here to stay.” Absen stepped forward to shake the android’s hand. It felt warm and dry, and only slightly unnatural. “One more step toward humanity, Miss Conquest. I hope it pleases you.”

“Thank you, Captain,” she replied, her face slightly stiff, contrasting with her expressive voice. “I know right now I seem more like a marionette or robot than a real organic. I intend to keep improving this body, to find the limits of machine expression of the human experience.”

“I wanna be a
real
boy,” Ford muttered in a falsetto voice.

Michelle turned toward him with a disconcerting smile. “The wooden puppet Pinocchio to Geppetto. That story resonates with me.”

“How about Frankenstein?” he replied, his face darkening.

Absen snapped, “Ford, hasn’t your mouth gotten you into enough trouble?”

Ford straightened. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

“I’m tired of ‘sorry, sir.’ Move yourself into bachelor’s quarters. No visitors, double shifts for one week, for abuse of a subordinate. Or maybe I should call it racism. I’m not sure yet. Dismissed.”

Downcast, Ford left the office without a word.

“That wasn’t really necessary, sir,” Michelle said.

Absen turned to her and spoke coldly. “Just who in the hell are you to tell me how to run my boat, Warrant First? Do you think you have some kind of special privileges because your physical processes are different from mine?”

It appeared Michelle had built her new body with the ability to change skin tone, for her face whitened and she snapped back to attention. “Sorry, sir. No excuse, sir.”

“Damn right there’s no excuse. This is a warship, underway in hostile territory. If you have something pertinent to the safety and operation of this boat to say, I expect to hear it, but you are far too inexperienced to be criticizing your captain about crew discipline, especially in front of your superiors.”

“Yes, sir!”

“You want to be human? Well, guess what: you have to take the bad with the good.” Absen calculated for a moment. An AI’s time sense was adjustable, Doctor Egolu had said, and was currently set on ten to one. That is, Michelle experienced the equivalent of ten days for every one boat day, and this factor was under human control. Absen had insisted on it. Perhaps sometime he would turn that adjustment over to her, but not yet, and here was one reason why.

“Warrant Officer First Conquest, I was considering raising you to WO Second, but I can see your judgment still needs some development, so your promotion is now suspended. Additionally, you will march your new body over to Doctor Egolu immediately and explain that she is to crate it for twenty-four hours. You will not use it or even access it during that time. Am I clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dismissed.” Absen might have sworn the android’s eyes began to tear up, but he remained unmoved. It wasn’t as if the AI brain was being cut off from all access to her function. She just had to give up her new toy for the subjective equivalent of ten days.

Once she had departed, Nightingale rumbled, “That was interesting. You sprung it on us.”

“I wanted to see your initial impressions, without warning. It could have been worse.”

“Yes,” the big man said. “What do you think about the other races’ reactions?”

“The Ryss should have no problem. They are used to Desolator and the idea of AI. Not sure about the Sekoi.”

“I hope she’s ready to rebuild the android if one of those things gets mad and rips it apart. They make me feel small.” Nightingale rolled his shoulders, huge but still only half the size of a Hippo.

Absen sighed. “It’s an experiment. Doctor Egolu thinks letting Michelle have a body is vital to her development and sanity, because we have not allowed her to inhabit
Conquest
the way the
Desolator
AI inhabits his ship-body. It’s uncharted territory, gentlemen, but I’m going to give her the same chance I would any other young officer to make her mistakes and learn from them.”

Over the last two boat weeks,
Conquest
had also accelerated in normal space to 0.1
c
, only slightly off a path directly toward the enemy fleet. During that time, Commander Ekara and his team had worked around the clock to install a duplicate set of inertial dampening field emitters, along with all of the hardware and software to handle reversing its polarity. He’d tested it as much as possible, but they had yet to try a pulse in the sternward direction.

“Commander Ekara, are we ready to test our reverse TacDrive?” Absen asked on the comm. Everyone was suited up again, this time with the new snap-closed helmet rings that Timmons had ordered designed and manufactured. They looked like thickened neck ruffs, but when they sensed any danger such as hard acceleration or a drop in air pressure, they would slam shut in a fraction of a second.

“Yes, sir,” came the answer from Engineering. “I’d like to initiate this first one manually, though.”

Okuda shrugged, and Absen replied, “Very well. Sound general quarters, action stations, non-hostile.” Once all the crew was in place, he went on, “Commander, you are cleared to proceed. Give us warning.”

Though he wasn’t really sure what good that would do. If something went wrong, it was unlikely a verbal heads-up would matter much.

“Roger. Initiating in three…two…one…”

Absen expected the vertigo, but he did not expect it to be so severe. “Abort!” he yelled, and a moment later they dropped out of pulse to the sound of one young watchstander retching on the deck. Klis at the backup Engineering station yowled like a cat in distress and hunched over in her suit.

“What the hell just happened?” he asked.

“I believe the reverse TacDrive does not like forward kinetic energy,” Ekara said. “We had a huge power spike that I was only barely able to contain. The inertial dampening field cannibalized some of our forward momentum.”

“Well, that answers one question,” Absen said. “Okuda, slow us down. We need to get the reverse TacDrive to work more than we need the delta-vee.”

“Pointing our fusion drive straight forward to decelerate will show them exactly where we are,” Okuda reminded him.

“Doesn’t matter,” the captain said. “I have a plan. I just need to know what this boat can do.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Okuda said, and then, “reversing course. Fusion drive powering up.”

The rumbling vibration of the boat’s six huge fusion rockets filled the bridge, and then subsided somewhat as the bridge’s dampers and filters reduced it to background noise. Down in Engineering, Absen knew, the crew would have donned sound-cancelling ear protection, but just like the tenders of engines from the dawn of the age of steam, they probably welcomed the subsonics as familiar, even homelike.

The next day, Absen was ready to try again. They had bled off speed to below 0.05
c
. “Commander,” he said to Ekara, “set the reverse TacDrive up for the shortest pulse you can, and be ready for that power spike.”

“Roger that, sir. We’ve actually created a method of capturing the excess power and putting it into capacitors.”

“Excellent. That may come in handy if we need to recharge fast.”

“Yes, sir.” Ekara’s voice took on a slight tone of extra patience.

Absen realized the chief engineer was likely way ahead of him. “Good work, Commander. Now let’s see how much of a headache it gives us.”

The countdown came again, and the vertigo, but it was much lessened. “Let’s try a bit longer pulse, right away,” Absen ordered. “Set it up now.”

“Thirty seconds, sir…” A moment later it came again, for a perceptible time, perhaps a full second. The discomfort was bearable.

“Take the time to recharge, and this time I want to pulse
forward
0.1 light-year. Give Okuda control when you are ready.”

“Aye aye, sir. Ekara out.”

A long twenty minutes passed, with Absen musing on the image of the fleet displayed in the holotank. Eventually Okuda signaled, and then he initiated a forward pulse. No problems resulted, no klaxons wailed, and at the end of it they dropped out of TacDrive at a little over 0.8 light-year from the enemy fleet.

“All right everyone, secure from general quarters and go to normal routine. We’ll stay here for a couple of days while Engineering works things out.”

Just under eight light-years from home
, Absen thought.
Seems so close now, though according to all the readings, the year is 2153, seventy-eight years after we left, and forty-four years after the Meme conquest of Earth. By the time we arrive, the solar system will have suffered under enemy rule for fifty years.

“Aye, sir. You’re on.”

“Now hear this. General Quarters, battle stations. This is not a drill.” Klaxons whooped and Absen gave the crew the requisite two minutes to take their places, though most would be there already. He’d made sure everyone had reviewed the plan time and again, and drilled them repeatedly.

Sweeping his gaze slowly around the bridge, he made sure to make eye contact with all of his officers – his prime watch of Okuda, Scoggins, Ford and Johnstone, as well as Klis, Bogrin, Timmons and Tobias. Fletcher and several junior watchstanders rounded out the list.

And WO1 Michelle Conquest. In his effort to integrate her with the crew, he’d ordered her avatar to occupy a seat opposite Timmons, meaning to Absen’s right and a bit behind, at a backup control station. That console functioned, but its authorities had been deliberately limited. He trusted her competence, but not her judgment, and so continued to treat her as he would any other junior warrant officer.