Archaea 3: Red (9 page)

“Sir,
I should hope not. Our new nozzles are only about a million times better than those old slagged hunks of carbon we used to have.”

“I like the sound of that. So I can go a million times faster? HANG ON EVERYONE!” I screamed, mashing the General Quarters alarm... but just briefly.
Yak and Pauli almost fell out of their couches laughing.

“Good grief sir. One of these days I am just going to up and die of fear back here.” Gene chided good-naturedly.

“I’m just keeping you on your toes, mister. Seriously though, what sort of improvement are we talking about with the new engines?”

“I was just looking over the
simulations that Janis has been working on, and they’re pretty impressive. It’s looking like at least a 500% increase, and maybe more if we overload the screens using spare current from the tokamak.”

“Woof. That is nice, Gene
… we can't actually survive that amount of acceleration, of course.”

“Dak, you don't know how glad I am to hear you say that.” Gene sounded like
a shipwreck survivor being handed a warm blanket.

“Well, sure man – I know a little bit about this stuff. We almost didn't survive our run from the Mantis when we scuttled it, though I guess that could have been more from the pseudomass generators being used to hurl us around rocks at maximum thrust, more than straight up grav-loading.”

I thought for a moment.

“Janis, giv
en our new thrust capabilities, can we generate enough pseudomass to compensate for maximum acceleration?”

“Sir, I am afraid
that would result in significant negative impact to crew viability. Given our maximum simulated thrust, with maximum compensation, the crew would be under 93 gravities, terran-equivalent.”

I whistled appreciatively. Yak and Pauli turned around with matching terror faces set to maximum.

“Wow.” Gene said quietly on comms.

“Okay Janis, let me pose another question, if you are able to simulate this, of course. Given what you know of the specs for the slipspace gear we're hoping
to get from Talus Federation, would we have sufficient compensation for a maximum flank burn?”

“
Yes, in fact, if it is needed we could go beyond compensation, up to maximum safe limits for negative gravities.”

We all sat in stunned silence for a moment, considering just how incredibly fast that would be.

“Well now, I think that is a good goal to work towards, don't you Gene?”

More silence. Maybe he fainted.

“Gene?” I asked.

“Dak, that... yes
, sir... we need that gear. Could you imagine what that would look like from another ship? We could probably outrun anything.” Gene was the type of gearhead that lived for speed, as much as he pretended otherwise.

“Gene, we could probably outrun kinetics.” Just saying that out loud made me slightly woozy, like I needed to grab something for support. I reached out for the rock solid stability of my coffee cup, just in case. A quick sip set my brain back on track, and I was ready to roll.

“We're going to have to daydream later, in any case. We are coming up on our out-system burn and it's time to get to work. Yak, please send our course track to Lunar Control, and let me know if they complain.”

“
Sending now, aye”, he replied.

I did a quick bit of math, and keyed the 1MC.
“All hands stand by for a 3g compensated burn in 30 seconds. Once I get us up to speed, I will drop to null-g and we'll secure from condition Zebra.”

“Sir, Lunar Control
has acked the request; we're good-to-go”, Yak called back.

“Very well, Yak. Stand by.”

I settled my head back into the headrest and started breathing exercises, trying to load as much oxygen into my coffee system as possible. I'm pretty acclimated to higher gravities, but you just never know when you might need to do something crazy, and a good pilot plans to react appropriately, and to avoid being asleep. That of course, reminded me to lock down the magnetic base on my cup after another life-saving sip.

“Here we go folks, out-system burn in 3... 2... 1...” and just like that, we were gone.

Chapter 2

The gun deck was adrift in wrapping, packaging, padding, blister packs, straps, crates, and various tethered tools and parts, and in the middle of it all, I was deep in my happy place.

Out with the old! In with the new! It was like a song that ran over and over in my head, as I tore into the main cannon, one system at a time, and replaced the old, dingy, cruddy parts with new, shiny, latest-gen parts.

The work I do completes me. I love working with guns, I love the way the parts slide together, the way the mating surfaces click and snap, the connections and sockets. I love the ozone smell and the arcs, the colossal vibrations and harmonics that shake you to the very core of your soul.

This was already
the most powerful gun I've ever worked on, but that was then. Once we switched it to a gateless discharge configuration with Janis on the flip circuit and unleashed it to drink deep from the depths of energy we can get out of the tuned tokamak – this isn't even really a nova-class cannon at this point. Nova-class beam cannons are rated at petawatt output – we could push exawatts.

Not only
had we boosted the output, but with Janis balancing the recharge cycle through a flip circuit, we were able to light this off for a continuous burn – and nothing I had ever heard of could do that.

In high orbit around Solis, i
t only took a ten second burn from this sweet gun to send a ten million-ton capital ship to ruin among the frozen mountains below.

The captain had his doubts that I could coerce anything more from the hardware, but he should have known better. I am first and foremost, a gun geek. While
it was true that I had hit the limit of the hardware, that only meant the hardware needed to be replaced.

And what replacements
these were. Looking across the gun deck, nearly as far as the eye could see, I had installed upgrades. Not just newer gear, but the finest parts that could be had for love or money – and I had a nearly inexhaustible amount of both. 

I guess I am really no different from Gene in many respects, though I don't scowl as much. We are both engineers and love machinery, and we both tinker incessantly.

Luckily for us both, the captain decided to burn for the belt under reac drives like a normal spaceman, rather than slipspace his way through Sol system like a crazy person.

Not that he
would have hesitated even for a moment to do so, if it was needed. I think more than anything, he wants to give us time to work on our upgrades, and as a result, we're all enjoying having the ring spaces spun up.

Normally, we only spin up the rings when we're at null-g, which means the rest of the time we have acceleration hammocks out. Now
don’t get me wrong, I love the hammocks. They are snuggly, warm, and ultimately comfortable, but I really like to be able to sleep in my bunk with cool sheets, a cold pillow, and to be able to stand up and walk around normally.

Not that I have much time to sleep, moving as I am at a
breakneck pace. The captain has requested completion and testing of all ship systems well in advance of our next rendezvous, and both Gene and I promised him we'd be ready, and we will – but we may just end up getting a little less sleep than we'd like.

Not that the captain cares, he doesn't seem to ever sleep. In his eyes, we're all terrible slackers who waste our lives away in idle rest and relaxation while he thunders along, riding the wave of caffeine addiction. I am exaggerating, of course, he does sleep – when we're in slipspace, he hardly ever comes out of his stateroom, and when he does, he is
in down slippers and flannel jammies.  

We're not in slipspace at the moment, however. Right now we are very much in a ship blasting through normal space, as I am reminded full well when a maneuvering burn hauls me sideways into a snarl of tool tethers.

“Everything okay over there Jane?” Yak emerged from the ring spaces onto the gun deck. I looked up and met his smiling eyes and mock-concerned face.

“Yeah, just peachy, Yak
” I said, hauling myself up and trying in vain to corral the tools back into some semblance of order.

“Do you need a hand with anything? I am due to be on watch in a few minutes, but I could help shift some of these crates if you wanted?”

“Yak that would be super… I am so focused on getting parts installed and calibrated; I haven't really been paying too much attention to anything else.” Now that he mentioned it, I took a good hard look around and realized the mess I was making was epic, even for me.

“So have you run into any problems getting this stuff installed Jane?” he asked, cramming packing materials and inserts back into crates and boxes.

“Well, nothing I couldn't deal with – these are very modular systems. Our main gun is pretty old, the original frame dates back to when the Archaea was created, in fact, but the technology for these hasn't really changed much since then – the individual components are another matter, entirely.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, take for example the charging chamber. It's not really something that has changed, even on the guns coming off the line today; they have pretty much the same layout, structure, and so on. The cooling system, or the focal rings, systems that affect or manage the energy being worked with, those have seen many innovations over the years.”

“Didn't you already overhaul the focal rings?”

“No, I cracked them open and cleaned them – luckily I did too, or the next time we used that gun we would have been incinerated.”

Yak looked up from a stack of crates he was bringing back from the forward stepper pumps. “Are you serious, Jane? I thought you were concerned that the gun wouldn't fire as
well or something”

“No, the focal rings are these things in this section of the gun, right forward of the charging area. On
each side, forward and aft are the stepper pumps, and they cycle the beam back and forth through the breech. The focal rings have to allow the beam to pass back and forth without any diffraction at all. Even the slightest contamination would be enough to transfer the heat of the beam into the component, and we would essentially discharge the weapon directly into the gun deck at point blank range. If I hadn't caught it...” I trailed off.

“Jane, I don't really know what to say... I normally just let the techs and geeks do their thing, and stay out of the way. The more I learn about what it is you all do around here, the less I want to know. This is a pretty stressful job!”

I laughed. “It is. I love it though, it's what I do.”

“So these new focal rings you installed... are they that much better?”

“Way better, Yak. These use deformable stasis fields rather than crystalloid, and that's a huge improvement. Besides the fact they can't be smudged like our old ones, they deform in real time to reduce the length of the charge cycle.”

“So these are safer?”

“Oh definitely, these are much safer. But that's just part of it. Because Janis can control their focal aspect through deformation, she says we will be able to charge much faster, and maintain a charge much longer when we are firing a continual beam.”

He shook his head in amazement. “The last time we fired this beast, I thought my brain was going to leak out of my ears. I can't imagine what it will be like now.”

“Well, it should be much nicer, in fact. Much of the mayhem that we experience when this baby starts screaming is from the ramp-up phase. The harmonics that give you that feeling like you're about to toss your cookies, those should be greatly reduced. I am positive that with deformable rings and Janis in control, we should be able to avoid the worst of it.”

“Well, I'd be glad if we never had to
light this off again, of course…” he trailed off.

“What? Then what would I do around here? You ba
by...” I chided, good-naturedly, but he had a point. There was really only one purpose for a gun like this.

*****

“Pauli, I am having a hard time understanding what it is you're showing me, son”, the captain said looking at me through his holos.

“Sir, this is pretty cool stuff – sorry, I may be getting a little ahead of myself. This is the new report interface I just finished with Janis. It's a swipe-in panel just like before, but instead of having to wait for the crew to post reports, you can generate and pull them in real time.”

“So these are after-action reports, but… in real time as the action happens?”

“That's correct, sir.”

“Well, that is pretty cool son. But what if I need...say, a report on the ion screen amperage for the last 6 hours plotted against the sludge levels?”

As he spoke, the report showed up in the report viewer, and continued to plot data in real time. He fixed me with a smug look. “Okay, that was an easy one. Now I want, a report showing pressure variations for our coffee press, with fluctuations overlaid on crew movements for the past 36 hours.”

As he spoke the words, the report drew on screen, expanding to contain the different parameters as he indicated them, the scale adjusting as he finished.

“
Very interesting… it looks here like Gene makes a pretty regular run past my coffee. So Janis isn’t actually doing this, son?”

“No, she is doing it sir, she's just not thinking about it. This is based on the original predictive analysis engine I built that later became Janis, but this is just an expert system.”

“Well, I don't understand why we need this, son, when we have Janis?”

“Well, that's a good point, and the truth of the matter is, we don't. Janis can do this sort of thing faster than we can ask for it, of course.”

“Well, why make this then?”

“Sir, the truth is – this was something she wanted. She is always looking for ways to improve her
efficiency; it is one of her guiding principles. This type of expert system allows her to process what she refers to as lower-order requests automatically.”

“And this is always on? I can call up any report I like whenever I want?”

“Yep! It's another tool for the box, as Gene might say.” I added, looking up as Yak floated in.

“Watch change already, Yak?” the captain asked.

“Aye Captain... I just helped Jane clear out the gun deck, it looks like she is pretty much done with installs.” he filled the captain's cup and gave me a stern look when I tried to slide my cup closer to a refill.

“Thank you Yak, just what I needed. Pauli has had enough for today, I think, from how excited reports are making him.” he smiled around his cup.

“Very funny sir,” I retorted, while Yak topped off my cup. “This is a pretty exciting system, but its drying paint compared to this cup of coffee.” I closed my eyes and took a sip, savoring the moment.

“Enjoy it while it lasts Pauli.” the Captain looked grim. “I am afraid we're going to be on short rations before too long.”

“Captain, if it will help, Pauli can have my share, sir” Yak offered.

The captain looked at him as if he had just sprouted bright pink wings. “I am honestly without words, mister. That is th
e sort of heroic act that historians write about. How can you be so... utterly selfless?” he said, in mock awe.

“It's easy Captain,” Yak said smiling, “I don't drink the stuff.”

“You don't like the taste?” he asked slyly, looking sideways at me. That was my line of defense against him on our last cruise, and it proved to be an easy hurdle for the Captain to leap – he makes a damn fine cup of coffee.

“No, it's not that, the taste is fine. I don't like the way it makes me feel sir, the jittery, antsy, always wanting to leap up and do something. I'm no stranger to it, many mornings on the firing line were spent pounding coffee... but if I am just sitting here with nowhere to run, it would drive me crazy.”

The captain considered that for a moment, accentuated by an extra-long sip.

“Well, I guess that's understandable. In that case, Pauli can have your share, which means...” he trailed off, looking at his holos.

“Sir?” I asked, momentarily worried.

“Oh, it's nothing – I was just preparing a report showing Yak's coffee usage over time. This shows me that Pauli i
s entitled to one-quarter of a cup of coffee per month, terran-equivalent. Yak, this report seems to indicate you drink three cups of coffee per year? That can't be right.”

“That sounds about right. I may have had one cup over the past three months or so.” he stated from his station, as he brought up the targeting and comms screens.

“Well, let's try to make that once every four months, son.” the captain said with a straight face, while we laughed.

“So Pauli, now that we have sorted out your rations, what else is cooking. Anything else I need to know about?”

I thought for a bit. “Well, Janis is working on a long-running analysis of some code we collected from the AV network, part of their AI, sir. She collected an enormous amount of code, but none of it makes any sense to me. Janis can read it, but I can't.”

“Pauli,
as much as I like having Janis around, I am not really comfortable with the thought that there are others like her out there. Janis did pretty well against this one, right?”