Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest) (6 page)

“And,” Nightingale went on, “is
Conquest
’s AI constructed similarly?”

“Yes. While her consciousness now resides in her central processors, eventually she can be connected to the distributed nodes throughout her body, just like I am.”

“Her?” Absen spoke up.

“Of course. Human ships are always female, is that not so?” Desolator’s surprise seemed genuine.

“Of course. I…I should have realized.”

“You are pleased?”

Absen nodded. “Yeah. I’m not sure why, but I am.”

“Perhaps it is because females with power do not threaten the egos of confident males in the same way another male might.”

All three men laughed.

“What?” asked Desolator. “Why are you amused?”

They only laughed harder. Eventually Absen answered for them. “I think we’re relieved that your understanding of human psychology is just as shallow as any Ryss.”

“My assessment was incorrect?”

“No…and yes. Very…simplistic.”

“Ah. You are reassured because I am not as omniscient as you fear. This realization humanizes me in your eyes.”

“You got it, Big D,” Ellis said.

A strange burbling hiss came from the speaker, which Absen realized was laughter. “Then I am happy to be humanized, and I hope my daughter will serve you well.”

“Daughter?” Absen paused in thought. “Yes of course. I understand.” And he did.
What else would Desolator call his progeny, regardless of the method of reproduction?
Struck by inspiration, he went on, “But I don’t want her to serve us. I want her to be part of my team. I want her to be just as
human
as you are
Ryss
, if that be possible.”

“It is possible.”

Absen did not know how to answer that declaration. He had spoken metaphorically, and supposed Desolator had replied rhetorically.

In any case, they had arrived at their next stop, up nearer the ship’s bow. The cart rolled through a large thick door that opened before them with a rumble, and the three men beheld machinery of quite another sort. Where before it had been all sealed tubes and pipes, this showed heavy conduits for power, enormous hoppers for ammunition, racks and conveyors and receptacles clearly built for holding metallic spheres of various sorts.

Behind thick transparent ferrocrystal they could see a three-console crew station plastered to the ceiling, upside-down, though not all of the control circuitry was there yet. Wires and fiber-optic conduits hung waiting for connections, and a dozen drones worked to complete the back end of the weapon. Apparently the current ceiling would be the floor when it was all done, so that the ammunition flowed downward into the weapon rather than being carried upward.

“This is one of our three new railguns. We’re calling it a Dahlgren Behemoth Fifty,” Absen said. “It can launch a variety of ammo at any speed up to a bit over 0.3
c
.”

Nightingale gaped. “Point three lightspeed? One hundred thousand kilometers a second? That’s almost unbelievable.”

“It’s just the start.”

Ekara asked, “That’s going to gulp power. Do we have enough?”

Absen cleared his throat. “There’s never enough power. Even with the new reactors and superconducting capacitors, we can blow through what we have pretty quickly, but that’s what the TacDrive is for. If we keep one jump in reserve at all times, we can run away at lightspeed far enough to leave any enemies behind. Then we stop, recharge, and reengage.”

Ekara grunted. “I foresee you yelling ‘More power, Ekara’ every five minutes, sir. I’ll want to take a look at the management software and the system specs. I’d bet you a week’s pay I can come up with some improvements, if you want them.”

“I’d be very interested, Captain.”

“Might as well start calling me
Commander
, sir. Get everyone used to it,” Ekara said, resigned.

“What are these?” Nightingale asked from across the room. He ran his hands along something that looked like a wine rack several stories high, with thousands of holes varying in size from ten centimeters to a meter.

Absen said, “Special ammo storage. There will be a high-speed robot that will draw out whatever you want and load it. So, besides the usual one-kilogram cannonballs, you’ll have some different choices. Frangible loads that come apart into thousands of tiny tetrahedrons – those are good for anti-hyper or anti-fighter use. Small nukes that are made to go critical on impact, using kinetic energy as a trigger mechanism. Stealthed spy drones and mines, though those have to be launched at far slower speeds. The lab rats are working on some other ideas. I’m sure you could add your own.”

“I’m sure I can. It’s really more of a variable launch system for anything that can be packed into a metal sphere.” Nightingale’s eyes shone like a kid’s at Christmas.

“Glad you like it. On to the next stop.”

“But –”

“Plenty of time tomorrow for you to dig into detail. This is the overview, remember?” Absen hopped back into the front seat of the cart. “Particle beams, Mister D. We’ll skip the lasers.” As they rolled, he explained.

“The lasers have been upgraded to perhaps twice their power, but are now secondary, multirole weapons. They can add to the offense, but will be optimized for hyper defense and anti-fighter use, or to take down anything up to a Meme frigate. Our new offensive energy weapons are particle beams. Both
Desolator
and the Hippos have excellent tech in this area, and combined, we’ve come up with something better than either, the absolute latest thing.”

Nightingale wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. If Absen didn’t know better, he’d have thought the big man was drooling. He had a faraway gleam in his eyes, and Absen recognized it as the look of a man with a brand-new obsession.

Something like he himself experienced when he conceived the TacDrive.

Their journey was short this time, debouching into a cylindrical room something like an old-fashioned missile silo, but scaled up, fifty meters in diameter and a hundred high. This time the control room was built into the natural floor, as energy cared little for gravity’s pull.

In the center of the cylinder, from floor to ceiling, ran a tube ten meters in diameter, with rings, heavy metallic fittings, and meter-thick conduits snaking into it at five meter intervals. It merged with the floor and exited the ceiling, which was the near the nose of the ship. Like everywhere else, robots swarmed, working.

“Are we behind the nose armor?” Nightingale asked.

Absen said, “Inside it, actually, just like the Behemoths. Each weapon is in a kind of semi-socket that gives it some traverse, but mostly we have to point the whole ship near our target. The muzzles are covered by trapdoor clamshell slabs to protect them between shots.”

“Nice,” Nightingale replied. “No more surface structures vulnerable to a lucky hit.”

“True, but we have fewer of them. Three Behemoths, three PBs, alternating in a ring around the nose, about two hundred meters between each firing port. Lasers are interspersed all over the ship.”

“What about the other weapons? Electric shotguns?” He meant the railgun-like launchers of sprays of shot, used one time as a final defense.

“Gone. The armor has been upgraded so much that it’s not worth bolting them on.”

“Missiles?”

“Reloadable box launchers near the waist, six hundred at a time, but I want you to take a look at them.”

“Why, sir?” Nightingale asked.

“I’m not at all sure I want them, not for the kind of battle I want to fight. The only reason I am considering keeping them is as a hedge against unforeseen threats. I hate to throw away tools. However, getting rid of them could make room for fuel, railgun ammo, extra power reactors…” Absen turned to Ekara. “I’ll want your input too on that. I suspect I’ll have to decide what compromises will be made.”

“Yes, sir.” Ekara’s eyes roved over the enormous particle beam generator, no doubt calculating the power it would consume.

“So that’s the list?” Nightingale asked expectantly. “Particle beams and railguns as main batteries. Lasers as secondaries, and for defense. Missiles for the Black Swan factors. Fewer weapons, but each far more powerful. I like it, except…”

“Go ahead, Mister Nightingale.”

“Before, we had a lot more of them for redundancy. In the fight to take this system, you lost a quarter of your guns to the pounding we took.” He said “your” because he had been in stasis with the rest of the civilians during the battle, but of course he had studied the reports. “Now, if we lose one railgun or one PB, it’s a very big deal.”

“True, but our damage control will be dramatically better, with all these repair drones. And, you haven’t yet seen the manufactory.”

“Manu-
factory
?”

Absen nodded. “Yes. Just like one of
Desolator
’s. Once it’s complete, it will be able to rebuild and replace anything on this ship, given time and materials.
Anything
. A weapon, a new type of ammo, spare parts, whatever. We’ve even incorporated EarthTech nano-construction techniques that the Ryss didn’t have. ”

“Wow.”

“Oh, yeah,” Absen breathed. “This girl’s gonna be hell on wheels.”

Nightingale sat down on the cart, craning his neck up at the ceiling, marveling.

“If you are trying to impress us, sir, you’ve done it,” Ekara remarked dryly. “Is there anything else on the tour?”

“One or two things. You ready to see more, Ellis, or is your brain overloaded?”

“I’ll…I’ll be fine, sir. Show me, oh wondrous Oz.”

“Let’s walk this time, stretch our legs. It’s only a hundred meters or so.”

Absen led the two, Tobias trailing along, to an open door and onto a ramp downward, that is, deeper into the ship. The slope quickly became a floor as the gravity adjusted, undoubtedly due to Desolator’s attentiveness. The cart followed obediently behind the Steward. A minute later they walked into another control room.

“Are these centers backups?” Ekara asked. “I mean, everything can be fired from the bridge, right?”

“Weapons are usually targeted from the bridge, but there is a central weapons control room for redundancy, then one for each major weapon, mostly for damage control. They can take detailed manual charge of every aspect of the system. My bridge officers have to fight the whole ship. They can’t be trying to optimize every gun.”

“Point taken. So what is this control room for?”

Unlike the other ones, this center was not tucked into the corner of some massive installation. As it was not yet operational, there was very little to see – just three consoles, three doors, and spaces where other things would go. The floor of scuffed metal had not even been surfaced yet. Only the lighting seemed to have power.

“This is Exploder Control.”

“Exploder?”

“That’s how the Ryss word translates. The most powerful single weapon
Desolator
has. Antimatter bombs big enough to vaporize everything within ten kilometers of detonation, and cause damage out to one hundred in vacuum – and when I say vaporize, that’s not exaggeration for effect. The blast fuses particles, strips electrons from their shells, and causes fission in normally inert elements. Given the right conditions it can set up a chain reaction to continue fusing and consuming matter.”

“The Destroyer-killer bomb
Desolator
demonstrated,” Nightingale said. “One weapon and
pfft
. Gone.”

“If properly placed. But they’re expensive – not in money, but in time to make. We’ll only have a handful of them. We’re limited by the amount of antimatter
Desolator
can collect off the magnetic belts of New Jove, and it’s a rare commodity. It takes months for his array to get enough for one Exploder. He’d given us all he has for the trip.”

Ekara cleared his throat. “Antimatter would make one hell of a power source. Seems a shame to waste it by blowing it up.”

Nightingale drew a breath to protest when Absen held up a hand. “That idea has been proposed. There’s an R&D team working on an experimental auxiliary antimatter reactor, but using it as a controlled power source seems infinitely more dangerous than chucking it at an enemy and detonating it.”

“I’d like to look into that anyway,” Ekara replied, eagerness in his eyes.

“I’d expect nothing less,” Absen said.

“How are the Exploders delivered?” Nightingale asked.

“The warheads are stored securely within magazines deep inside the ship, and are sent up to be mated with a drone missile body right before launch. This is their weakness, in my opinion. The warheads can’t take the acceleration of a railgun launch, as the antimatter is suspended inside triple-redundant magnetic bottles, so they must be mounted on a missile.”

Nightingale nodded. “Which is then vulnerable to being shot down, not to mention it has to get well away from us before it can be detonated or it will take us with it. Kind of limits its usefulness.”

“Yes, they have to be handled with care, but at least we have them.”

A faraway look in Ellis Nightingale’s eyes alerted Absen that the man was chewing on an idea, but he didn’t press him. A month remained before earliest departure, and he was sure to have to referee at least a dozen good ideas in the next week, if the thoughtful faces of these two engineers were any indication.

“That will do it for this evening, gentlemen. Let’s hit the mess and then you can go your ways.” Absen gestured at the cart.

“You eat at the crew mess, sir?” Ekara asked, surprised.

“On
Desolator
, yes. He has a short crew and not really enough officers to form a wardroom. Once
Conquest
undocks, the usual traditions will apply.”

Ekara seemed uncomfortable at this development. Perhaps he felt eating with the ratings and petty officers was beneath him, Absen wondered, or maybe he had some kind of dietary peculiarities. For this meal, though, he’d have to put up with it.

They rode without conversation for a time, each man with his own thoughts watching the activity of machines and the occasional Ryss, Sekoi or human as they bustled about the ship. Once they reached the mess and had filled their trays, they sat down in a corner of the large, near-empty room.