Uplift (32 page)

“I am not sure you would benefit from our military policies as much detail is given to the political aspects of military operations,” the Chinese Colonel explained.

I laughed, and agreed with him. We parted in good spirits. His conversation had distracted me, and I suspected Corey had sent him my way to do just that – distract me. Did you do that to distract me?

Could be…
Corey thought.

          
Wallups Island Executive Lounge

A small ceremony was held to formally appoint Richard Patterson – a temporary Army Major General.

Evidently Corey had been working behind the scenes, and left me a uniform that fit. Both Richard, and Yaloo, had taken the Army training modules. The Graloc found many of the customs…arbitrary…but he stood at attention too as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Raymond Detweiler pinned on his rank insignia as a Navy Captain. Yaloo’s salute with his upper arm was letter perfect.

Special Forces Captain Thomas Pates was promoted to Major.

The military was not happy being, essentially, blackmailed into this action. All the military personnel who had not worked with Richard Patterson thought the idea of giving general officer rank to a civilian – even temporarily was insane, and illegal. Those that worked with Patterson, or had seen videos of the battle were willing…to suspend judgement. Everyone knew the rank was only for the duration of the emergency, and the US military is essentially under the control of a civilian – the president.

The president, and the powers to be, wanted as little fanfare as possible, but had the event videoed in case everything went as planned. The administration would say I went crazy, and assumed the command myself if it tanked – Corey had ferreted out all the messages – I hoped it all worked out. I liked being in uniform again even though I knew the military people hated it. I hadn’t been part of their heritage – no matter how many battles I had fought.

NEW EQUIPMENT FOR THE COALITION

Our newest ship, the SHEPPARD, was commissioned nine weeks after construction was started. The other nine similar, large ships were approaching completion in their accelerated time enclosures. Each ship was two hundred meters in length, and 60 meters in diameter with a slightly flattened bottom, and top. The ships had rounded ends, and everyone said they looked like huge hot dogs. They were calling them Dog 1, and Dog 2, so that custom was twisted to name them after dog breeds – instead of famous people, or dead admirals. So the SHEPPARD was the first completed, then the MASTIFF, then the LAB, then the HUSKY, the ROTTWEILER, and so on. No – they didn’t go into smaller breeds because at seven kilotons each – they were too large even with their carbon fiber hulls to be called Chihuahuas.

The cargo, and shuttle bays were large enough to hold two shuttles each, and a lot of cargo. The crew quarters easily accommodated the 250-300 personnel. The cargo bays also served as workout and training grounds. They could be used with the holographic simulators we had adapted from the commercial game centers. Corey helped me design the simulations, and they were creepy as hell when we added his memory images of other races, and their practices.

     Chinese
, and US SF troops jointly training on HUSKY

Lietenant Dyer took his SF squad up the starboard side of the alien vessel (USS HUSKY simulation drill). The Chinese Beijing Special Forces中国特种部队 took the port side moving forward from their entry points at the stern. Xeeg troops with powerful weapons blockaded several corridors. The US troops used their ‘simulated’ sabers to cut through bulkheads to flank the defenders. The Chinese troops used massive volumes of fire to move forward, and received several casualties with each scenario. It took several tries before they accepted the potential of their new weapons. They would have been safe even if they cut through the outer hull of a spacecraft – so why worry. The only real problem after they learned to bypass strongpoints after that was when they destroyed the (simulated) fusion containment system on the alien craft, and killed everyone from all teams. We did get great saber handling techniques from them as a spinoff of their martial arts training.

The new, heavy projector weapons were soon installed for testing. As target systems, we had installed Delta dimensional field projectors on drone shuttles with heavy normal shields. The Gralon ships were again going to be used for boarding practice for all the different nations troops in our new Coalition. The Chinese representative, and, the Graloc, Yaloo, were joining the SHEPPARD in orbit
. 
Several other nations were joining us with their ships, but we all stayed in fairly low orbit. We didn’t want to attract any more attention than was necessary because of the Horde detectors.

We placed the Graloc ships, piloted remotely, at the LaGrange point, L1, between the Earth, and moon. The target ships, with minimal shields, were used by the foreign troops so they could take turns in forced boardings. Foreign coalition members soon adopted our simulation training to develop the most effective offenses and defenses.

We had a couple of deaths with the foreign troops because they used their sabers to cut through the bulkhead, and left them on. When they swung it around – it cut one of their partners in half. The two-dimensional plane of the saber did not show up like a light saber in old videos. You
could
see the plane using terahertz frequencies, but otherwise it was invisible. We would have to do something about that, and solved it by a tech upgrade that projected a blade simulation on our retinal displays.

The time for target practice arrived, and we had twenty ships in space. It was hard coordinating movements, but we could just manage with Corey relaying instructions to navigation computers aboard all the ships. We were even able to do some coordinated turns, and retreats. We could pop from one place to another really fast if the nav computers were preprogrammed. We set up hundreds of prearranged coordinates around the system. Yaloo suggested having several at an optimal distance from the sun so we might disrupt any coordinated attacks trying to destabilize the sun. Our allies were appalled when they heard how the Horde would destroy civilizations by turning their sun into a nova.

The Delta Dimensional fields on the target drones were not penetrated by any of our weapons except the ship mounted saber weapons, which currently had a short range. The duplication of the Xeeg weapon worked fine on standard shields. Our upsized weapon did a particularly good job punching holes in drones at long distances, but did nothing to the Delta-shielded drones. We were not sure how our cobbled together weapon would work. It was one of those – ‘everyone hide, and get behind cover while I push the, button’ type tests. That’s what we did – we were going to activate the device remotely. We had, we thought, sufficient cutoffs.

The Delta shielded drone was placed a good distance away, and our weapon was precisely aimed. We had recording devices running everywhere to register every frequency we could. The countdown proceeded smoothly, and I keyed a short burst. The rear third of the target drone just disappeared. I readjusted aim, and left the beam on a split second longer, and the target drone disintegrated. Our own ship’s field failed at the same time, and it took a few seconds for it to rebuild. There seemed to be some feedback each time our weapon fired that greatly strained our own field. We now knew we could destroy ships that ‘turtled up’ in mid-battle, but we could lose our own protective field – a bad problem to have.

The uniform of the coalition came up when I had to go back to wearing one. The uniforms we were using were cloth – non-sentient cloth. We had started design of new uniforms for the Special Forces troops, but we needed more than was technologically available at the time. I decided we needed every edge we could so our uniforms had to:

1. Fit male, and females
   
2. Have built in kinetic armor
   
3. Built in shield generator: invisibility/energy deflector
   
4. Built in oxygen generator/CO2 scrubber
   
5. Moisture/waste regulation
   
6. Temperature control
   
7. Field generated radiation shielding/propulsion
   
8. Muscle enhancement like old Danish PolyPower
   
9. Helmet with vision enhancements tying to the computer in back of the shoulder blades – retinal displays with communications
   
10. Standard Weapons: Saber/stunner/Pulse rifle/Vibroknife
    

Corey liked the ideas, but had never seen muscle-enhancing cloth. We had nanites that made us stronger, handled toxins, and chemicals – even healed us from anything but major wounds, so strength enhancement never occurred to him. We could lift a car. He really thought adding all the features in our uniforms would give us advantages too. He said the uniforms might be more valuable than all our other weapons, but I had ideas about new weapons too.

I asked him if we could make nanite grenades that would disassemble matter – we’d be able to use them without oxygen, or gravity. He said the hard part was making the nanites, so they wouldn’t disassemble the user too. I suggested a friend-foe mechanism. He came up with a design. I didn’t want to be the one to try it first though, because, what if it didn’t recognize me as a good guy. Corey came up with great ways to integrate all the components, using a suit made up of self-assembling nanites…not to be confused with the nanite grenades. I wasn’t sure about it ‘til we were able to manufacture, and program, a prototype uniform.

The uniform simply flowed on over your nude body. It looked like black silk, and looked painted on. I couldn’t wait to see Joey with it on – whew. We’d have to program it to downplay certain features, or the troops wouldn’t get anything done. It was bioelectronics – nanite technology. Corey called it MORPH, and we had to start another couple of facilities making the stuff. Once we got the machines to grow/manufacture the stuff – it just had to be programmed to become everything. It was like having programmable matter. It could be programmed to show country, and unit insignia too. We gave that design to the Asian countries – they saw it, and how it worked – they literally fell in love.

Weapons – interstellar space ships with force fields that accelerated time – they’re cool, and all, but those uniforms – that was
it
for the Asians. They couldn’t get into them fast enough. They kept the wearer clean, and comfortable, and you couldn’t get them dirty – they tried. We couldn’t damage the stuff, and we tried. In four months (4 days normal) we had everyone in those uniforms. There was soon a bit of rivalry with the insignia – they looked stunning. Yaloo said he had never imagined such a uniform, and really fell into his role as a ship’s captain. Having a uniform with four arms was cool. Imagine asking a tailor to make one. I told him we were going to give him command of one of the original ships. He thought I was kidding. It took him weeks to realize that he was really going to be in a command position. We would sit, talk about his planet, and people, but he seemed reluctant to go into great detail. Even Cort didn’t volunteer information.

I got the impression that some of his people had fought the Horde while others made an escape. It seemed that refugee settlements of his people would be discovered every odd century, or so, and they’d fight, and flee, again. I asked him how he had been captured, and he would not tell me. I figured it was too painful, but he did explain more about the Horde, and how they used their victims. It wasn’t pretty. They would insert a small device in the back of the brain stem that could cause pain, or pleasure. I foolishly said that the pain would be horrible. He called me idiot, fool, and other names I couldn’t translate.

I asked him what I had done, and he explained – like you would to a child. He said the Horde conditioned their captives with pleasure – not pain. Victims would orgasm at their presence, and every time they did anything that pleased the serpent beings. Soon, all the captives needed no controls because they ‘loved’ their captors. Small jolts of pain were used to reinforce ‘bad’ behavior. He asked if I could imagine loved ones, and friends willingly submitting to their deaths while I watched. He admitted that he had nerve blocks that prevented any electronic stimulation. He said the Horde would activate the pleasure stimulation whenever they touched a victim to make them docile. They often ate their victims alive. I shuddered at the thought, and moved on to another topic. Corey agreed.

We finally got some nanite disassembly grenades to test. They weighed about 150 grams – about the same as a baseball so many countries felt comfortable with the weight on Earth. Our first tests were with remote detonation, and monitoring. We were doing okay until the camera dissolved. We modified the design so you could adjust the destruction radius in gravity. We were worried about the friend–foe feature so we stayed behind shields, and tested in microgravity. The results were shocking in space. Unprotected metal looked like a sieve afterward, or collapsed completely. The suits, and fields, would protect our people, but we would use concussion, and conventional shrapnel grenades when we didn’t want to kill everyone. We could set off one, and it wouldn’t hurt any of us in suits, but destroyed everything else.

We were never able, yet – I hadn’t given up yet – yet able to keep our fields from collapsing after two shots through our own field with the heavy projectors. I posited to Corey that the coalition ships could take turns firing just like the Horde did when they faced opposition they couldn’t handle. Our shipboard computers were getting more, and more savvy – just to handle positioning, maneuvering, and weapons control. Figured they could handle rate of fire. We had to give commanders the ability to override anything though – you never knew what you’d face.