Confederation -- 13

Chapter 13

Faster-than-light travel allows you to glimpse only a distorted view of the Universe. You can see blurry stars streaming by on either side. They move slowly at first and then shoot by as the ship approaches their position. The view dead ahead is distorted by the virtual matter in the quantum plenum. FTL travel relies on the ship's engine somehow converting the vessel and contents into a wave-packet that is passed along at a small fraction of the speed of the underlying torsion waves. Since torsion waves move approximately a billion times faster than light, even a little boost by them moves the ship's wave-packet significantly faster than light. In practice, we found that our maximum velocity was roughly a light-year every two days.

Approaching the Sunnys' star, we could see our destination dead ahead, but the details of the system were blurred and could not be made out. Something about the virtual particles streaming past distorted photons' paths rendered us incapable of seeing smaller obstructions in our way. The deflection shield and bow armor plate were for those things we couldn't see.

Typically, we'd exit FTL status out far enough from the destination star to give plenty of time at sub-light speed to approach carefully. A solar system is a pretty big place; for example, light takes about five and a half hours to reach Pluto from the Sun. Progressing into a system while slowing to system speeds requires a complex calculation, but let's just say you approach at a fifth of light speed on average. It would take over a day to travel that distance, so you can see that there's usually enough time to do things sensibly.

Only this time, there wasn't. As soon as we dropped out of FTL, Frazzle let out a squeak of alarm, and the main boards lit up in yellow. He jabbed at some buttons, quickly focusing the display on another FTL ship directly ahead of us and only about two minutes-light ahead at that.

Speaking over his shoulder as he adjusted our braking speed, Frazzle said, "Dat a Pug ship. Must have dropped out just a little time ago. It's a long way out in the system."

"How soon can we close on it?" I asked.

"We closing fast, fast. I don't know, maybe three – four minutes we go by them," he answered.

"I don't want to go by. I want to match velocities with them and try to grab them with our gravity field generator," I replied.

"We can't do," he answered. "We going too fast and too close. Can't slow down fast enough. We go by."

Just at that moment, another warning light came on. He checked some things and said, "Dey's seen us. They're going faster. Turn on Em-drive. Look like they are running. See!" He pointed at the display. "They're turning away from the star. They're leaving the system."

I didn't want them to spread an alarm. With any luck, we could get the needed repairs done in maybe a week, give or take a day for contingencies. They could possibly be back with reinforcements within that time. I didn't think the enemy had any armed FTL vessels, but a whole shipload of Pugs trying to re-take the space station might be more than we could handle while laid up for repairs.

We'd been making progress training the women, and one of them was crewing the weapons station. I turned to her, "Meghan, lock the bow gun on that ship, but don't fire until I tell you."

"Target acquired, Sir," she replied after a moment's manipulation.

"Frazzle, what are they doing now?" I asked.

"Dey still speeding up, Dec."

"Any chance we can match speed with them?" I wanted to ensure we didn't have a chance before I shot at them.

"No, dey turning and speeding faster. By the time we get close, they may be going fast enough to go FTL."

In contrast to his name, Frazzle was very calm in most situations. He pointed at an indicator and said, "See, dis show they reach FTL speed in seventy seconds."

I turned to Meghan. She was watching me closely, so I just nodded.

She understood my command and triggered off an anti-matter pulse. I turned immediately to the screen and was just in time to witness a flash on the ship. Its Em-drive engine was gone, and its reactor had overloaded. There was no place for the driving energy to go, and a brilliant secondary flash suddenly appeared as the ship vaporized.

I was disappointed because we needed every ship we could capture. I tried to console myself with the thought that this one, at least, wouldn't be bringing a wasp nest of reinforcements down on our heads. I turned to Frazzle, "Okay. Let's proceed to match orbits with the space station and see about getting the repairs we need."

The situation on the space station was about what it had been like when we left it to head to Kasm's planet. The Sunnys were trying to provide material and moral assistance to their compatriots on the planet's surface.

On our previous visit, we'd dropped a huge, water-ice comet on the equatorial belt of the planet to flood the Pug-bears' breeding grounds. The planet had offered a perfect set-up for this tactic. The north and south hemispheres were mostly ocean, and there was a broad belt of land entirely around the equator. The planetary crust had moved towards the equator on both sides, pushing up large mountain ranges on either side of a high and normally dry plateau. The desert climate of the plateau had been ideal for the invading Pug-bears' nesting activities.

In my first encounter with the Pug-bears' eggs in Carlsbad Caverns, I learned that they rarely hatched in moist environments. They needed to be kept dry. When we'd dropped the comet on an equatorial trajectory, it had broken up as it descended, creating a veritable Noah's flood of rain that mostly landed on the high plateau. The resulting deluge had destroyed all of the Pug-bears' nests with the added benefit of drowning a large number of the Pug-bears.

The excess water that had landed on the outer slopes of the mountains mainly had drained into the sea. The Sunny cities were all arranged along the ocean's edge, an almost resort-like setting for the water-loving, otter-like creatures. Due to the proximity to the sea, the cities had good drainage. There were periodic storms that mandated that water control be a priority. The Sunnys hadn't suffered from the extra rain. Their suffering had come at the hands (actually claws) of the crazed Pug-bears.

The surviving Pug-bears were wildly angry over the destruction of their future on the planet and made every attempt to raid the cities. Since the Sunnys were almost pathologically pacifistic, they had difficulty defending themselves.

With the aid of the Sunnys on the space station and the six that I'd transported there from Titan, they managed to create automatic booby traps. Those caused so much damage to the attacking Pug-bears that the remaining few had retreated into the mountains, only occasionally coming down for a raid. The blasted creatures were predators, and the Sunnys were about the only animals on the planet suitable for food. As a result, the cities had taken on the aspect of forts. The Sunnys had built large, impassible walls blocking all access to the interior.

After some discussion on the comm unit, Frazzle informed me that the general consensus was that the Pug-bears were gradually starving. He estimated that the planet would be free of them within a few more weeks.

"Dec, de Pug-bears on the planet are dying!" Frazzle was excited at the news, but then his aversion to violence took over, and he momentarily looked mournful.

"That's great news, Frazzle! Don't feel bad about the Pug-bears. They don't belong there, and we have to get rid of them," I said. I was pleased with the result. That meant that I only had to figure out how to clear the Pug-bears off the other five Sunny planets.

I tried not to think of that aspect of the problem. So far, I didn't have a clue as to how to accomplish the task. The comet bomb was a "one-off" situation, and I couldn't expect it to work so well on the remaining planets.

A week later, we'd finished repairing the damaged third spaceship. Several large anti-matter weapons were being manufactured to the Pug's specifications in an asteroid facility. The Sunnys were okay with making the things. I guessed they just tried not to think about their ultimate purpose.

We'd sent the big shuttle out to pick up nine of the weapons and had now mounted four on each of our three spaceships. We replaced the waist gun that I'd moved to Rudy's ship and added another mounted where it had a clear field of fire to the rear of our ship. The FTL vanes interfered to a certain extent, which caused some problems, but we mounted the weapon near the Em-drive pod on a gimble mount with built-in limiters that kept the weapon from pointing at the vanes. It could shoot between the vanes and offered a reasonably good field of fire.

There were the blind areas where the vanes interposed, but I felt a lot more secure now that our tail had been covered. Mounting weapons on the other ships required installing better fire control consoles. Rudy's had just been a simple joy-stick rig. We hadn't had the time to create another weapons computer similar to the one on my ship.

The station Sunnys had outdone themselves in this task, and I ended up waiting for an additional half-day while they completely replaced the weapons console on my ship with a significantly advanced system. It was a significant upgrade that enabled us to track twelve targets simultaneously and switch from one target to the next automatically after a shot had been fired.

Once the work was done, we headed out again. Our destination this time was the Pug-bears' home planet. We had to make sure they were isolated to stop any attempted invasions before they started.