Interstellar Incident: An Alicia Jones Novel 02 Read online

  I shook my head, “You misunderstand, I’m not saying we’ll build them for you, I’m saying get a handful of those advanced fabricator cubes of yours and move some of your people here in that ship that can’t be seen. All we’ll be doing is providing you a safe place to do it yourself, without getting caught by Knomen.”

  Nora asked, “What would you want in return?”

  I wasn’t answering that one, so I waited for Nadia to catch up and figure something out.

  Nadia took a moment to do that, “Well, I would say we’ll charge you for the asteroids and resources you use, but if we have a mutual defense clause, we wouldn’t need anything else to host you.”

  Nora nodded slowly, I could feel her surprise, which was probably a good thing as far as getting a treaty out of it.

  Nadia said, “Does anyone have a problem with what we discussed here? Mutual protection, protect young civilizations, free trade? Is there anything else specific you want to know about, outside what we’ve already tentatively agreed to, which is help with the Seltan problem, ship building here, and help seceding from the Knomen Empire?”

  Senna shook her head, “That all sounds good, we will do our part in any alliance.”

  Nora nodded in agreement, “Could we meet again in a day, maybe read over what this treaty will look like, and send it back to our leaders?”

  Nadia smiled, “It just so happens we already have a treaty in mind, for when we met other civilizations out toward the rim. I can provide that now and we can meet in a day or two?”

  They both nodded, and left after getting a copy of the treaty to go back to their ship to review it and rest.

  Nadia blew out a breath, “When you first said that I thought you were nuts, but it is the obvious solution to Tressia’s problem, and it will stimulate trade between us. Will it be a security issue though? Three hundred ships.”

  I frowned, “We’ll take precautions, by the time they have three hundred ships, we’ll have over a thousand, also a great number of defensive installations and tens of thousands of the combat shuttles. Plus, I trust them.”

  Kristi nodded and said shortly, “I agree, I trust them too.”

  Nadia blew out a breath, “I’ll be back when they’re ready to talk, I need to brief the rest of the board. Did you notice how smoothly that went? No males around to muck it up.

  Kristi and I snickered, and said together, “Yes ma’am,” in perfect concert.

  Nadia laughed impishly as she walked out the door…

  Chapter 17

  It was a couple of days later. I was in my office off the bridge, staring at the black hole data with confusion. I knew there was something there, I just couldn’t find it. I reluctantly put it back down, I knew it would eventually hit me, probably when I wasn’t thinking about it at all.

  I’d just read some reports from the business, Carmine had made a little progress, now it would only take a thousand years to terraform mars. In other words, he still had a long way to go.

  Caroline had made a little progress with fabrication nanites as well, but she was still having trouble drawing enough energy from a field to do the jobs that required the most energy, like bonding metals, which was a big part of both fabricating and repair. Still, it had only been a few months, I was hopeful she’d get there eventually.

  Shelly had made the most progress out of the three of them but wasn’t quite there yet. I was kind of excited about the idea of giving Al an upgrade so to speak. But it wasn’t ready yet.

  We’d met with Nora and Senna earlier in the day, and now they were heading back home with a copy of the treaty for their worlds to sign. Nora said it would be a couple of weeks before she could get back with some engineers and fabricators.

  I did get a chance to tour their ship however, and while they hadn’t given me specs, I’d picked up enough visual clues to figure out how it worked. First, it had a very large central power fusion core which powered the rest of the ship, instead of a number of smaller ones.

  The General’s scientists probably would have given me crap over that, but it was necessary, even if still problematic for the cloaking. The normal fields applied to hide the ships mass, so all they really had to do was hide the energy. That’s why they pretty much kept it in one spot. Around that fusion core, they had very large high capacity artificial gravity devices.

  What it did was envelope the core in a gravity field bubble, the bubble was about a foot thick, and only inside a surrounding chamber so nothing could accidentally enter it, then beyond that, in the middle was the fusion core. The gravity bubble itself used a majority of the energy created in the large fusion reactor, creating a bubble that was the equivalent of a few hundred Earth gravities.

  To put that in perspective, the Sun was only twenty-eight Earth gravities, and it had the potential to slightly bend the trajectory of particles travelling in space. This high gravity field, bent any scanning particles looking for energy away from the core. It was really that simple, if the particles couldn’t find the fusion core of a ship, the ship wouldn’t show up on the sensor board.

  I thought it wouldn’t be that hard to make one, but I wasn’t that focused on it at the moment, and it would require a major rework of the power systems. I still believed central power was a horrible design, especially for a warship. Perhaps we could make a spy ship or two in the future, but I didn’t believe it would ever be widely used because of the inherent drawbacks…

  My door chimed, and I opened it from the console on my desk. It was Sergei, and he walked in with a serious look on his face.

  “Have you seen the latest probe data yet?”

  At first I wondered why he cared about black holes, until my mind jumped to the right track. I had Al bring up our latest scanning data of the empire. It wasn’t until I found the Knomen data that I figured out what had him so worried.

  “They’re building,” I announced the obvious, it was why he was here after all.

  He nodded, “What should we do?”

  I frowned, “Let’s wait for the first batch to come out, take scans and see what they have as best we can figure out. If we’re building faster, I’d rather put it off for a few months. We can leave what’s here, in Earth’s solar system, and take three months’ worth of ships to Knomen later if we have to. They probably are building up for an attack, but for all we know they are simply replacing the twenty ships they lost.”

  He raised an eyebrow skeptically, I didn’t believe it either, but it was possible.

  I shrugged, “It won’t hurt to wait, if they are doing a mass buildup, I’ll recommend to the board that we should stop them, but let’s just watch for a bit first so we have something solid to tell them.”

  He nodded, “Yes ma’am.”

  “Do you have anything else?”

  He shook his head.

  “Dismissed.”

  He turned and left, and I looked at the data again thoughtfully. They only had ten fabricators, not the twenty we did. But I’d have to reserve judgement until I saw how fast those fabricators were and what came out of them…

  It was less than two days later, one day and twenty-two point four hours to be exact, that the first new Knomen ships were completely built. They were large as I’d expected, about twice the size of our battlecruisers, and maybe a little smaller than our carriers. I got as much data from the scans as I could, prepared a briefing, and then Kristi and I headed down to Earth to meet with the USFS board.

  They had their own offices now, inside the U.N. complex. Regardless, it was a no fly zone so we needed to come down outside of NYC and use roads the rest of the way. We found ourselves in a large conference room and I used Al to interface to the video systems while Kristi and I waited for the seven of them to show up. They trickled in one at a time, and then we got started.

  “Good morning. We have scans of the first ships from the fabricators in the Knomen home system we spotted two days ago.”

  I brought up a picture of the ship.

  “You can se
e they are still using a saucer shape, despite their shield configurations being able to support virtually any shape. Their shield power and speed will be comparable to ours, and you can see in the picture…”

  I rotated the craft…

  “They have twelve beam weapons, and twelve missile launchers, half again as many as we do on a battlecruiser, but less than we have on a carrier. We can’t determine from the scans what kind of beams they fire, but we know that it doesn’t match their anti-mass particle weapons. I’d speculate it’s something similar to our plasma cannons, but I can’t be sure.”

  I turned toward them, “This is where not waiting long enough to secede will bite us back a bit, even though I know we didn’t have a choice. I suggest it’s too dangerous to attack now. They still have a hundred old ships in their system, as well as fifty in each of their colony worlds. We also don’t know what defensive emplacements they may have, which are probably sitting offline until they’re attacked. If we move on them with the fleet, the Earth would have nothing but the static emplacements to protect it.”

  Gorou asked, “So what do you recommend? We can’t just sit here and let them build.”

  I nodded, “We have a slight edge in building capacity. In one month from now, we’ll have a hundred and sixty battlecruisers, and twenty carriers, to their hundred and fifty new ships. That doesn’t include the forty-eight hundred combat shuttles those ships will be carrying. I suggest we wait a month, and attack them with that. That will keep what we have now as our core defense until we can finish building up to our proposed numbers.

  “Another reason to wait, we can’t be sure they aren’t just rebuilding what they’d lost. I know that isn’t likely but… it’s a big step. I wouldn’t suggest knocking them back to the stone age, but if we do this we will have to ring their planet and keep them from regaining space until they agree to peace. Otherwise they’ll simply try again.

  “That means… we’re looking at the Knomen Empire collapsing, and who knows what would happen then. It’ll be chaotic out there.”

  Adrienne nodded, “We’ve considered that. All the races fear the Knomen, some of them will join us right away we think. The others will be suspicious, and if they have grudges against neighbors may decide to build up and start trouble. At the very least things will be tense for a while, at worst it’s a powder keg. That said, we can’t let the Knomen attack us because we fear it will lead to others doing something rash.”

  I nodded, “I agree. This is on the Knomen, they attacked us, and it looks like they won’t stop anytime soon. Regardless, does a month seems like a good time frame to everyone?”

  Jonas Baum, the German representative asked, “Do you have an attack plan?”

  I shook my head, “Not a formal one, not yet, but I imagine we’ll probe them first with some shield missiles accompanied by gravity missiles while we sit on their doorstep so to speak, just a light year or two away. Once they react we can move the ships in to a light day distance, while watching for any missiles and be ready to drop out of FTL at the first sign. Once we’re that close, we can stick to sub-light for the rest of the way in system, and not risk what we did to them happening to us. Kristi programmed the A.I.s to automatically drop FTL if they detected a possible gravity missile heading toward the ship, human reactions just aren’t fast enough.

  “I’m almost positive they’ll have gravity weapons now as well, so this one isn’t going to be a quick fight or quite one sided. But we’ll still have numbers on our side, and our ships will be surrounded by Shield and gravity missiles, and a large number of combat shuttles as we move in. I’ll get with Sergei and Anthony, and have something for you in a few days.”

  They asked a few more questions, ones I couldn’t really answer about the enemy. Scans only showed so much, until their weapons went active, we wouldn’t really know what they could do…

  A few days later, we had a few tentative plans to present. Which one we were going to use depended greatly on the enemy. However, we were taking a break from it all today, because I wouldn’t miss Kristi’s dissertation defense for anything short of an enemy attack on the solar system. Hers was taking place in Chicago, and we went a little early and had some breakfast before heading over.

  Joe showed up as well, I hadn’t seen much of him lately, but I knew Kristi had been going down to see him at least three nights a week once we were done with our work day.

  Kristi didn’t eat very much. I remembered how nervous I was when it was my turn, so I didn’t tease her… too badly. She did very well though, sometimes I forgot just how damned smart she really was, she tended to hide it, even when not acting like a bimbo, she often downplayed her opinions and ideas. She was also a much better programmer than I’d ever be.

  Afterwards, I said gravely, but couldn’t quite control my grin, “Doctor Wilder.”

  She grinned back at me, “Doctor Princess Admiral Jones.”

  I rolled my eyes and she winked.

  Joe shook his head at our antics, “So how are we celebrating?”

  “A relaxing day at home followed by dinner, drinks, and dancing. The hot tub and view should take the edge off enough to enjoy tonight.”

  Huh, Joe, Kristi, and the third wheel alien in the hot tub. Maybe I’d pass on that first part.

  Kristi looked at me as if she knew exactly what I was thinking, “Why don’t you see if Nathan can come out and play.”

  I thought about it for a minute, then shrugged and called. He was on base right now, and if I couldn’t abuse my position as the USFS Fleet Admiral every once in a while, what good was it? It wasn’t every day my best friend became a doctor, and I’d feel much more relaxed about it if we could hang out as two couples.

  He could and did in fact join us, and we had a lot of fun that day and into the night before we had to get back to work the next day.

  Chapter 18

  I spent a lot of time with Sergei that month planning out our attack on the Knomen system. Anthony was the defense fleet Admiral and I didn’t see him nearly as much, although I did keep up with his reports. Sergei would be heading up the exploratory fleet. I still thought of it that way, although we would technically be using it as an invasion fleet shortly. Still, the intent behind it was right.

  The exploration fleet would be responsible for exploring, protecting our colonies and interests away from our solar system, and sometimes that meant a good offense. The Knomen empire had started this fight, attacked us despite assurances from me, that we had no intention to harm the empire. Now… I supposed we were in a state of war. We simply had no choice but to end it, and we couldn’t do that sitting in our own solar system playing defense.

  Shelly was very close to a much more intuitive A.I. that could interpret not only what, but why a command was given and could also be creative in its response. A simple example, if I asked it to take me to a certain restaurant, it would intuit I was hungry, and if that restaurant was closed, or fully booked, it could locate and offer an alternative place to eat.

  Obviously that’s a simple example, more esoteric concepts were possible as well. The problem was it still had trouble differentiating when a good time to ask questions or offer alternatives was.

  For example, the middle of a battle where seconds meant life or death, wasn’t a good place to ask questions or give alternatives. Sometimes we would need the A.I. to just follow orders even if it thought of a possibly better option. It was a delicate balance.

  The USFS board continued to try a diplomatic solution, and kept me in the loop on their progress. None of us really believed the Knomen would back down, but the effort was important. Not only to be true to our own conscious, but to show the other races that the choice to go to war was entirely due to the Knomen. Still, it was more than just a salve for our personal sensitivities and propaganda, if the Knomen sued for peace, and meant it, we wouldn’t attack.

  Nora had come back, with a group of engineers, and they were currently working on building their fleet. Although given what
was coming, they probably didn’t need to anymore, at least not in secret that is.

  The day we left, Sergei joined me on the bridge. There had been some debate on if I should go or not, or simply send Sergei out. I was sure he could handle it, but I believed Kristi and I needed to be there to quickly assess their tech, and quite frankly the idea of sending someone else while I waited safely back in Earth orbit did not appeal to me at all.

  Regardless, those of the opinion that a fleet admiral should stay in the home system were overruled.

  When we were a few hours away from Knomen, we launched the shield missiles around our formation, when we were thirty minutes away, we launched the gravity missiles to englobe both the ships and the shield missiles. I felt a little warier the closer we got, but there were no signs of an enemy ambush outside of their system, and if there was, I was confident Al could give the command to drop us all out of FTL, if missiles came online either ahead or in our wake.

  We stopped a light year out from their solar system and ran scans. As our probe reports indicated, there were two hundred older ships, and a hundred and fifty-two of the newer ships. There were still no apparently static defenses, but I didn’t buy it.

  I nodded at Sergei.

  Sergei ordered, “Send in the initial probe.”

  Forty shield missiles, surrounded by eighty gravity missiles went for the system at FTL speed. Ten were targeted at the fabricators, and the other thirty were targeted at newer ships. The Knomen replied with defensive fire from their ships, sending out a hundred and twenty missiles to intercept.

  Our gravity missiles moved forward, and we found out right then, that they had gravity missiles as well, because they destroyed each other. Forty of the eighty Shield missiles managed to drop below light speed before the enemy’s gravity missiles got there, the other forty disappeared in spears of light.

  The remaining ones started to move at sub-light speed, and fire their one plasma cannon at enemy targets. It didn’t take long for the enemy to take them out, using their own energy weapons on the ships.