Star Force: Cascade (SF73) (7 page)

That and he needed all the ships to look alike to hide
the cradle.

Mark spun and crisscrossed his 10 skeets around the
pair of turrets on the first rise, stitching them with mauler fire from all the
ships and circling them around behind terrain to get the targeting programs to
dismiss them and chase another skeet. There was no easy way to take down these
turrets, so he just had to make it a slugging match without incurring hull
damage. If he could do that he could buzz around and recharge shields before
heading into the turret field ahead.

Those would require diving down into canyons to avoid,
for if he pulled up out of them the crossfire would be so intense it was
unlikely that he’d get all 10 ships through…and if he was really sloppy he’d
lose all of them right then and there. He’d tried it on day 3 just to see how
bad it’d get and hadn’t been disappointed, learning from the danger now that he
knew what it was rather than having to guess, and pushed the canyon approaches
with his skeets heading down multiple ones and out of sight of each other.

The transmitters were powerful enough to punch through
a limited amount of rock and dirt, so he didn’t lose his linkage to the drones,
but he had to keep them within a tight radius that he was also pressing out to
find the fail point. This entire challenge run was more about finding ways to
fail than finding a way through, for a lucky run wouldn’t do him much good.

He had to lose, over and over again, in order to build
a playbook for this new type of aerial warfare, and while he certainly didn’t
like losing, he had no problem thinking outside of the box and trying new
approaches, no matter how odd or seemingly stupid. For when he was piloting a
squadron solo he didn’t have to explain himself to anyone and could experiment
on a whim if necessary.

And that freedom was
always
necessary when searching out new ways to do something.
Success on this course was learning, not finishing it. That would be bonus, and
right now Mark seriously didn’t think there was a way through, for he’d made it
overly hard and, honestly, not entirely fair, but in the back of his mind he
just saw that as an even sweeter challenge.

Tell a trailblazer something couldn’t be done and half
the time they’d find a way to do it anyway. He recognized that tendency within
himself and the others and wasn’t above self-goading. He’d spent a long time
planning out this course before putting all thought of designing it aside and
switching his mindset over to beating it. Now it was just a fixed thing,
immutable, with no one actively changing it up to thwart him. He’d created a
monster, but it was a static monster that he was going to figure out how to
beat if he could.

Meanwhile there were many betting pools in the pilot
corps as to if and when he’d actually get around to pulling it off, with a
little over 60% wagering on completion despite their knowing how insanely
difficult the course was. They had that much faith in their top pilot to figure
out this puzzle that they were willing to put credits on it, while others were
hoping to clean up by betting against him, knowing that it would be a win/win
scenario.

Either they’d get a boat load of credits or some
valuable new tactics and equipment tweaks. Either way this was on Mark’s
shoulders for now. What he was able to achieve, limited or whole in this
endeavor, would set the stage for their contributions on this project to
follow.

7

August 2, 2890

Solar System

Europa

Daniel-002 received the package from Lens on one of
the surface landing pads that connected to the moon’s underwater cities through
the thick ice sheath protecting them from space. It was a cargo crate the size
of a house and had been dropped off via a cargo ship passing through the system
with other ports of call to attend to. The slight detour had been negligible,
but saved his fellow trailblazer the trouble of sending an entire jumpship to
get him the package when sending it through the ‘mail’ was far easier.

Time wasn’t an issue here but Daniel was glad he
finally got it, for when he brought the crate down into the Clan Westley colony
situated on the ocean floor he opened it to find a series of Dvapp aquatics gel
packages. Daniel’s Clan was only ranked 28th in aquatics, but he’d been working
with Lens for the past few decades in order to develop some new technologies in
an effort to undercut Erin’s Elarioni advantage. Eventually the tech would get
distributed out to Mainline and the other Clans, but for now it was a private
affair that had Daniel more than eager to incorporate the advancements into his
own Clan craft.

The gel had been a work in progress for a long time,
but what Lens had sent him was the prototype for a new matrix that should allow
Daniel to create the morphing properties he required for his Project Tentacle.
Unlike Lens, who was building ‘standard’ aquatics craft, Daniel was going in a
more Elarioni fashion and working on limbs rather than beams and torpedoes. He
saw the potential in the gel that, while weaker than a solid plate of armor,
had so many combat uses it was insane. First and foremost of those was the
ability to reach out and touch someone by extending a tendril of gel out
considerable distances.

The enemy wouldn’t know how far the ‘safe’ zone was
and that would cause a lot of chaos in battle. Project Tentacle intended to
create aquatic drones that could be controlled from a battleship or other
protected location. The difference between these drones and others was the fact
that these could morph into different craft as needed for the mission. They
could be long and needle shaped for chasing operations or ball up into
protective spheres for chokepoint defense.

The problem Daniel had had with the earlier forms of
the aquatics gel was that it wasn’t responsive enough to create active drones,
in that they could change shape while fighting. Those prototypes they currently
had could morph then fight, rather than fighting through morphing. Lens had
said this new gel slurry would be up to the task and had already sent Daniel
the specs through the relay grid, but rather than building factories to produce
the insanely complicated material…of which there were only two in
existence…he’d sent along a lot of packets of it, each of which could be
‘grown’ by adding a specific set of raw materials.

That had been designed into them so they could repair
themselves in the field without the need for a shipyard. They absorbed
materials like a plant did, from both solids and the water, meaning that Daniel
could take several of the packets and ‘plant’ them in larger containers in
order to grow more material. None of it was biological, but a very complex
crystalline technology that operated similar to how the Dvapp themselves were
built. It wasn’t their body material, for that, while odd,
was
still biological despite its crystalline tendencies. At a casual glance the gel
might look the same, but it wasn’t alive and never had been. Just a very useful
piece of technology.

When Daniel opened the crate he pulled out a single
packet and carried it off on a cargo sled to his research lab while the rest
was spirited off to others for immediate use in experiments or for growing
purposes. The packet that Daniel took, which was the size of a couch, he
brought to a specific lab that he was spending a lot of time in. He personally
levitated the packet up and tore a hole in the flexible casing, allowing the
mushy material to spill out into a collection basin that looked like an
elevated sandbox by the time he was done with it.

The trailblazer dipped a finger into the white ‘sand’
and tested the cloyingness. It flowed like a thick liquid, but didn’t snap back
into level shape like water did. That confirmed his suspicions and he
immediately inserted a probe into the eight inch thick pool, causing it to
solidify into armor rigidity.

He poked another finger into it…or tried. It was now
hard to the touch and would stand up to considerable pounding, but as far as
armor was concerned it was subpar. His drones would compensate for that fact by
having a lot of it on them, allowing them to bleed away material at a faster
rate while still preserving the interior components. Those amounted to three
floating orbs of traditional technology that would interface with and control
the gel, and for experimental purposes here was accomplished by the probe.

Daniel ran the gel through a simple set of commands,
confirming the upgrades Lens had made, then he dove into the task of
reprogramming it to his personal needs. Part of that work had already been done
previously, so all he had to do was download segments of the software, but the
rest had to be configured on site in response to additional test runs that he
was now going to begin to execute.

First using one of the preprogrammed ones, Daniel had
the gel change color, shifting from base white to blue, then pink, green, and
finally black before cycling back to white. Next he caused the gel to segment
into four pieces. As soon as they broke apart three of the pieces became dead
weight, retaining their shape and not doing anything while the fourth segment
that had the probe attached continued to morph into a cube while the others
were just solidified puddles.

Daniel telekinetically pushed one over to touch the
cube and it changed shape again until contact was broken, returning to statue
mode. One facet of the gel was that it could only be controlled by ‘land
lines,’ meaning that physical contact had to be made. Remote control was
impossible without alternate technology being inserted into it, such as the
probe now was. That was something that was going to remain set, for Daniel and
Lens didn’t have a clue how to program a
comm
system
into it. Maybe someday thousands of years into the future they could, but the
V’kit’no’sat database was no help with this, for they didn’t have record of any
similar technologies.

But for his goals there was no need to have a receiver
built in. It just meant that if a piece of one of the drones got lopped off
it’d go neutral and unresponsive, holding its shape until it was recovered or
destroyed. The gel did have to be powered, and this batch had come fully
charged, but when it lost power it was designed to lock into place as a solid
rather than disperse as a gel or liquid.

There were multiple versions of the gel that Lens had
developed, but the stiffer versions he was not interested in. Those were being
used to form the hulls of his friend’s bendable warships, but Daniel’s drones
had to go far beyond that, hence the even lower armor value. The more they
morphed the less rigid their matrixes were, and the more rigid the matrixes
were the higher their maximum armor value.

It was a cost of defense to include the flexibility
that Daniel required, but that too was calculated. Lens wasn’t pursuing this
path, nor were the Dvapp or any of the other four Clans involved in the
research. The
Aquamen
were the leaders and handling most
of the research, but what Daniel intended to make of it was something entirely
new and going even beyond the bounds of what the Elarioni had built.

3 years later…

Daniel returned to Europa after a 3 month stint in the
advanced training group getting beat up by Paul and Rio. It had been
educational, but he was eager to get back to work on Project Tentacle, which
his techs had continued in his absence with some late breakthroughs that had
allowed them to fashion a working prototype at minimum volume, which was about
equivalent to a big trash can.

“How do we look?” Daniel asked when he came into the
lab and saw several familiar faces working at various stations.

“003 is waiting in the water, with 004 and 005
standing in their firing tubes on the destroyer.”

“Alright, set for recording mode and let’s get to
this,” he said, stepping over to the control station and accessing the neural
interface. It was only a minimal drain on his cognitive processes, for the
miniaturized version of a command nexus didn’t have more than a few functions
that the proper ones did, and at the moment he was only controlling a single
drone.

It was sitting in the cold water outside the colony
and not far from the destroyer on station there. Daniel set the spherical globe
of gel into motion, traveling through the water at a troll then shifting into a
more aerodynamic point as the trailblazer put it through several alterations as
a general test of base functions they had established prior to his training
vacation. When everything checked out he began running it through more advanced
shapes, including the stretchable pylons that ended with fingers or hooks that
could grasp objects at range.

He played with the outer limits, finding what they
were by triggering a line too long and too thin for the minimal currents,
snapping it a third of the way out and losing control of most of the line.
Daniel withdrew the rest of it that he controlled and motored the mass over to
the floating section, making physical contact again and calling it back into a
thicker band that he then whipped around slowly, testing its strength against
the water. He didn’t have to see the data collected as it came in, knowing that
the rest of his staff was monitoring that and would alert him if there was a
problem, so Daniel just played with it, testing its limits and trying to seek
out problems if they were there.

After working through the lines he pulled the mass
back together then spread it out into a canvas, immediately catching itself on
the currents and moving about slowly in their direction. He let the material go
almost totally limp and saw it scrunch up in several locations due to
eddies
as he caused it to get thinner and thinner in order
to cover the most surface area. He had it out to nearly the size of a football
field before holes began to tear in it.

He upped the solidity to keep them from spreading, but
the moving water masses began cracking entire sections off. Daniel quickly
pulled back what he had control of then sent out lines to hit the now drifting
pieces, regaining control and bringing them back into the single mass. Next he
signaled the destroyer to launch a target buoy, with it coming out of the fixed
hull of the angular craft and speeding out to his location before slowing and
moving on a circular path that had it tracing a lazy circle around his
location.

Daniel paused, knowing this was the moment of truth,
then had his ball of gel shoot off through the water in needle form towards the
target, hunting it down and coming at it from the side in order to up the
difficulty. Approaching from the front or behind would have been easier, but
Daniel didn’t want easy.

When the drone got close to the probe the needle
balled up again then sprouted three tentacles from a central mass as it
continued to head straight towards the target. It eventually made contact,
denting under the collision speed with a silent splat, then Daniel manually
controlled all three tentacles and wrapped them around the probe, flattening
them out in some places into paddles that held it tight like cushions around an
egg. The probe couldn’t escape the grip from any angle and Daniel locked it in
by causing the pieces to solidify in their current form.

Next he tested the gravity drive buried inside the
gel, pulling against the probe’s own unit in a tug of war that saw the drone
being overpowered as the destroyer upped the thrust to continue its ordered
path. Daniels job was to stop it, and he was failing. The little glob of gel
couldn’t compete with the much larger gravity drive in the probe, meaning in
this case that traditional tech was better.

Daniel sent a signal for the destroyer to launch 004
and soon he had control of the second globe and was simultaneously driving it
over to the test area while he continued to wrestle with the probe, through
thrust multiple directions as well as reconfiguring his hold on the probe to
produce fins and even small sails to catch and redirect the water flow to give
him more tugging options.

It wasn’t enough, but when the second drone got to the
probe it latched on as well, morphing into the first one and becoming an
integrated unit. The individual pieces inside, three each, remained separate
and communicating with each other via short range signals, but the gel itself
didn’t care which unit it belonged to and would go wherever it was signaled. It
behaved as a single unit that now had two gravity drives inside it, allowing
for more pulling power as Daniel wobbled the probe off course multiple times
before it eventually dragged its way back into a circular path that was now no
longer mathematically precise, but rather a
wibbly
wobbly and ugly route, but the drones still couldn’t gain full control.

That was solved when Daniel had the third one launched
and combined it with the other two, giving him enough tugging power to force
the probe off course and over to a designated location while the destroyer crew
fought to prevent it. The wrestling match eventually went Daniel’s way, but the
delay was considerable. He mentally noted that if actual capture missions were
going to be launched, more units would be necessary for an expedient recovery
process.