“All the firepower in the world doesn’t matter in a place like this.”
Captain Jason Hunter was rarely at a loss for words. This time it was his executive officer who succinctly expressed what the bridge crew was feeling.
Hunter’s personality had always been geared for rushing in and figuring out the details later. His fellow officers considered that particular trait ideal for an explorer and also ideal for a starship captain. It was his crew that shared the responsibility for making sure the horses didn’t outrun the wagon. In the face of a truly new sight, it wasn’t hard for the members of a starship crew to contemplate the artificial air and light and the gnawing feeling that human beings were not at home in the cold and dangerous vastness of space.
Argent’s crew wasn’t immune. They responded to challenge with efficiency and excellence, but even that paled when confronted by the truly unknown. The battleship was at full readiness. Only four fighters in her star wing were still under repair from her encounter with the Kraken task force that had very nearly annihilated Admiral Neela Hafnetz and Strike Fleet Achilles. The ship’s port quarter was still under repair. Decks 27 and 28 had been exhibiting maddening resistance to a complete analysis of why the life support and electrical subsystems kept switching off on their own. Nevertheless, Argent was arguably stronger now than she had been in some time. Captain Hunter was still at a loss for how to apply his newfound strength to accomplishing the current mission, however.
What exactly happened to the Achaen Science Station had been a mystery for more than 100 years. A few well-thought-out theories had emerged, but because of the remoteness of the Atlantis region, they had never been confirmed. There had been unusual transmissions from the region that had gone silent after a time, only to re-emerge. They utilized a protocol that was unfamiliar to fleet signals specialists. Even Commander Tixia had struggled to discern the meaning of the strange beacons. Now, DSS Argent was at the edge of the Achaen System: The first Alliance warship to have traveled this far since the disaster. She had successfully navigated around the Omicron 474 supermassive singularity using Commander Curtiss’ new “conversion drive,” and now both starship and crew were beset with the reality of the situation.
Before them was a green star. So rare were Y-type stars there weren’t even current procedures on how to study or measure them. Hunter’s astrometrics team used their standard equipment and scanner checklists and got some data for the captain to work with, but they were forced to caution the bridge crew it would be some time before they could say for sure how the star’s unusual composition would affect the system or Argent. Hunter’s intrinsic caution led him to issue a standing order to keep his ship’s screens up until someone with enough science knowledge assured him it was safe to lower them.
Achae Prime was roughly four times the mass of the Core homeworld’s yellow sun. It sat at the center of a six-planet system. There wasn’t much about the system that was as unusual as its star. It had only one gas giant: It’s outermost world. The other five planets were relatively similar to the inner planets of home. Achae Five was about twice the average size of the others. Ultimately, it was the third planet that was of primary interest. That was where the science station was located. Orbiting Achae Three was an eerie structure apparently built from the same metal that encased at least two and possibly more artificial planets near the Omicron Singularity. Whatever the substance was, it wasn’t familiar to human science. At least not yet.
Hunter studied the high-resolution image of Achae Prime as he settled back at the conn.
“Commander, what are the chances that star affected the science station’s crew?”
“It’s a distinct possibility, sir,” Cochrane O’Malley replied. “In fact, there’s a possibility the combination of the solar radiation and the unusual metal in the station’s hull may have combined to create hazardous conditions for human life.”
“If there was an engagement here–” Hunter began.
“It would have affected them too,” O’Malley replied. “It’s creating an unusual reaction with our battle screens. We don’t see these kinds of readings in systems with G-type stars, for example. Even Rho Theta doesn’t react like this, and it’s much more powerful.”
“Makes less and less sense the more I think about it, XO,” Hunter replied. “That star was here when they built the system. If it’s dangerous, how did they finish the work?”
“Unknown, but it would be nice to have the answer to that question before we send people out into that environment.”
“Admiral Powers sent us everything they could gather at Skywatch Command. We got all the telemetry and logs from the station crew before they stopped transmitting. It must have been a hell of a fight. The only ship that got away made it home with only a few survivors. None of them made any sense no matter how many times they were questioned. The ship’s hull was generating all kinds of weird readings for months, it seems. Even their water was contaminated.”
“What’s our priority here, sir?” O’Malley asked. “I realize it would be useful if we could solve the mystery, but wouldn’t it be a better use of our time and firepower to prevent this region of space from becoming a supply route for the Kraken?”
“According to the admiral, those two objectives are related, XO,” Hunter replied. “If it were up to me, I would have followed Saint Lucia back to Core space and sent reinforcements to Mycenae Ceti Four to help get Shea out of danger. Powers thinks this is the higher priority.”
“With all due respect to the admiral, I don’t follow the reasoning, sir,” O’Malley replied. “What is the theory here? That the enemy is using the Achaen Station in some way?”
“A distinct possibility,” Hunter said. “We have to keep in mind this star system was the site of a brutal firefight in which multiple starships were lost. After all the scans and sensor sweeps and questioning of the survivors we still don’t know who was even fighting much less why. What we do know is over a thousand men and women vanished in the vicinity of that space station.” Hunter pointed at the screen as he spoke.
“Perhaps the admiral is concerned whatever killed those starships might come after us at an inopportune moment,” O’Malley noted.
Hunter nodded. “That’s my theory as well. If this mystery force gets wind of the fact the Sarn Star Empire and the Kraken Decarchy have mobilized against the Core Alliance, they might decide to join in, and if they’ve already attacked us once, there’s an uncomfortably high chance our old enemy will side with our new enemy.”
“That’s the kind of thing admirals get paid to worry about,” O’Malley said.
“Agreed, XO.”
O’Malley’s commlink beeped.
“Tixia to bridge.”
“O’Malley here.”
“We’re ready for you, sir.”
A few minutes later, Commander O’Malley strode into fusion service six, which had recently been converted into a makeshift combination electronics lab and computer control station. A rat’s nest of cables, fiberoptic relays and power junctions were splayed across the metal floor in at least 160 directions. The wiring was connected to a bank of portable terminals and a power transfer console that had been disconnected from somewhere and reconnected to the network in much the same way an android’s head could be removed from its body and attached to just enough circuitry to function. From an electrical technician’s perspective, it got about the same reaction an unattached head might be expected to get.
“Why are you building a new auxiliary control station in fusion six?” O’Malley asked, not really expecting an answer that he would understand.
“Good morning, commander!” Zony Tixia chirped. “We’re running simulations and Spades wanted a location close to the reactor this time, so we took pile six off the mains and re-purposed it as a testing platform.”
“Does the captain know you’re using a ten-story-tall fusion reactor as an experimental toy?”
Zony grinned. “Nope. We don’t tell him about stuff like this until after we build it and get it working. He gets kind of impatient if there’s wires all over the floor and things aren’t quite up to speed yet.”
“And that’s why you called me instead?”
“That’s why you’re the exec,” Commander Yili Curtiss said from one of the overhead gantries. “You know the answer before we even ask the question.”
Zony showed O’Malley to one of the chairs at the console station. “This is where all the results will be summarized as the simulations run. We aren’t going to make these modifications available as an additional flight mode until both you and the captain sign off.”
“But you’ve already used this technology,” O’Malley replied.
“That was different,” Curtiss said as she fiddled with the connections behind the electronics station. “We didn’t have a choice then. If we do this right, we’ll have a very powerful tactical advantage.”
“How powerful?” O’Malley asked.
“See for yourself,” Tixia replied.
On the screen, a graphical representation of the battleship Argent rotated until it was aligned with a tunnel-like construct.
“This is the theoretical model of the Barker-Type wormhole that we were able to replicate using the technology we discovered beneath the Lethe Deeps planetary defense base on Bayone Three,” Yili said. “It operates by connecting two points in four-dimensional space with a ‘tunnel’ or wormhole that exists in five-dimensional space. The result is that an object that travels through the wormhole can cover enormous distances as conventionally measured, giving that object an effective velocity several times the speed of light. It’s roughly the same technology in the jump gate network, but it has the added advantage of being extemporaneous instead of being confined to fixed points.”
O’Malley watched as the little graphical Argent flew through the wormhole and re-appeared in normal space.
Curtiss continued. “What we’ve done is create a spontaneous wormhole by combining the Barker-Type technology with our own navigational drive field. This creates what we’re calling a Sullivan Field. It allows our ship to navigate five-dimensional space without making any significant changes to our standard engine controls.”
“Sullivan?” O’Malley asked.
“My flight dynamics professor at the academy,” Yili replied. “It was his work on multi-phase drive fields that gave me the idea.”
The little graphical Argent on the screen formed a bubble around itself that gradually changed shape to fit the wormhole. Then it flew through the tunnel again.
“The practical upshot of all this is that we have a new flight mode: Conversion drive, or C-Drive. We can cruise at a relative velocity roughly 40 times the speed of light at 40% energy utilization.”
“I beg your pardon. Did you say forty times the speed of light?”
“That’s what she said,” Zony replied. “Don’t worry, sir. I had the same reaction.”
O’Malley took a moment to try and grasp what he was seeing. “What’s our top speed using this mode?”
“At 90% utilization, which is the highest rated velocity for this hull and engine type, we could see short bursts of up to 2000 times the speed of light. Star system to star system in between one and three days.”
“And,” Zony added, “we can do exactly the same thing with communications by using the Barker-Type wormhole as a conduit and modulating frequencies to match a continuous linear drive field.”
“We can even transport people with this,” Yili said. “Actual teleportation from point to point without matter conversion or energy deconversion. We have to keep the ranges limited, of course, because people can’t survive a very strong drive field like the ship can. But we can easily go several thousand miles. We can transport from ship to planet surface and back pretty easily.”
O’Malley leaned back in his chair. It was a lot to take in all at once, but the strategic and tactical ramifications were not lost on him.
“What about our star wing?”
“Any vessel at least as heavy as a gunship can make use of this technology. Fighters are out. But Mackinacs, corvettes, paladins and T-Hawks are all eligible.”
“Why can’t we use fighters?”
“Their drive fields are tuned for inertial protection, not long-range engine efficiency. We can convert them, but the minute they get back into close-quarters combat they’ll be torn to pieces by the hull stress.”
“This is incredible, engineer,” O’Malley said. “I’m overwhelmed. I thought it would be at least another 100 years before we could perform these kinds of system-to-system jumps without gates. Now we can explore beyond the edges of our star maps in intervals of a few days.”
“Sir, with your permission, I would like to present this technology along with my recommendations for its use in ship-to-ship and ship-to-surface engagements before we move in on the Achaen Station,” Yili said.
“It could give us an important level of protection and a big advantage, sir,” Zony added.
O’Malley didn’t hesitate. “I agree. I will brief the captain. Be ready to present your proposal first thing tomorrow.” The XO patted Zony’s shoulder as he stepped away from the console. Two technicians stood at attention as he passed through the hatch and left the reactor control room.
“Every time we talk about this I feel like I’m trying to explain electricity to a primitive tribe,” Yili said as she entered commands into the electronics console. “I know the XO is an accomplished guy, and he knows his stuff when it comes to engines and metallurgy, but whenever I get out into the theoretical weeds, I always look up and find out I’m all alone.”
“All we can do is try to make it understandable. I was there when you invented all this and I’m still not sure I understand it!”
“Yeah but you’re a natural,” Yili said. “It comes from all those frequency and resistance calculations you used to do for fun in your dorm barracks.”
“I knew you’d figure out my secret eventually,” Zony teased.
“It helps when you’re the only humanoid in the building who hear mosquitoes whispering,” Yili replied.