Confederation -- 34
Chapter 34
Our two ships exited faster than light mode, shuddering a little as they returned to the different state of being that we thought of as reality. I'd thought about FTL travel a little and, although I didn't precisely understand what happened, I did know that the ship's matter somehow changed. I thought its energy wave traveled, re-materializing at the end of the voyage when the engine shut down in response to the computer's signal that we'd arrived near our destination.
As far as humans were concerned, traveling along with the ship in its energy state, reality hadn't changed. We still existed and interacted as usual. I wondered about the temporal distortion that I'd thought would be a part of FTL travel. Frazzle put that to rest for me.
"De pieces of light, when it seems to be particles –" he started.
"Photons, you mean?" I interjected.
"Yes, photons, you calls them. Dey have no time. From their perspective, time doesn't pass. Only from our side, we see they take time to go from place to place. The waves in the basement of space that the FTL engine puts our own wave pattern on top of, those waves travel much faster than light. Maybe a billion times faster or more. Our wave pattern is carried by those waves, and we go much faster than light, not a billion times 'cause they slippages, so we don't go so fast, but faster."
He looked to see if I was following him. I nodded as if I was, even though I was somewhat confused. It seemed like he was saying we were using the torsion waves in the quantum plenum in much the same way a surfer uses ocean waves. They served as carriers for our signal, but I didn't understand the 'slippage' idea.
He continued, "So, de photons don't think time passes. We have to think time passes, 'cause that's how we're made. We can't see no-time. For us, it is impossible to understand. So, when we go FTL, we see time passing, and from outside observer position, it does pass, but we go very quick, quick so that not much time passes. This means we get where we want quickly, and our time passed that we think passed mostly matches with the time passed for outside observer."
"You mean that if we think we're traveling for ten days, an outside observer would also see about ten days passing as we traveled?" I asked.
"Dats about right. Maybe some time don't match up exactly, but about the same."
That was the extent of what I thought I understood. He went on to talk a little about patterns in the universe's basement and how those patterns served as templates for what was now and what was in the future, as he put it, but I didn't get much of that.
What I did understand was that our voyage would seem to take about the same time for us as it did for those people we left behind. I hadn't worried about it previously until I'd traveled to Kasm's planet and back. Then, I was a little surprised to find that people hadn't aged. I mean that I hadn't even considered the twin-paradox at first, or I would have been in agony, worrying that Liz would grow old and die while I was gone. She hadn't, and I learned from experience that the time went at the same speed for both parties. So, I expected to get back to Earth and find things about the same as they were when we'd left, only maybe different by about two months.
I figured Jake would still be holding off the Motherland Army. I hoped that they hadn't decided to attack again. If they had, he had the armed FTL, which should make the difference. There was no way they could withstand the firepower it mounted.
We arrived back at the second Sunny planet. The initial inspection didn't show any changes in the system. There were no ships docked at the orbital station. With this assurance, we put out a call for the ship we'd left to guard the system. They didn't answer the radio call quickly enough to satisfy me, so we tried the Ansible. That got results. They were currently at the far side of the star, nearly a light-year away from where we'd dropped in. We both headed for the Sunnys' orbital station under Em-drive at maximum acceleration. Once we'd gotten up to a reasonable speed, one where we'd be in transit for about fifteen hours, we shut the engine off and coasted until it was time to decelerate.
When we arrived at the station, we settled into orbit nearby, and Frazzle and I used the transporter system to the station. We came out of the portal to find that we faced a large group of excited Sunnys. They were practically dancing in the hallway that led to the transporter, and the noise level was deafening.
Once we'd gotten them calmed enough to communicate effectively, Frazzle determined that the exuberant greeting was due to an event that had just happened on the planet's surface.
They told us that there had been no immediate result from our spraying yeast indiscriminately around the place and, although they were hopeful, the Sunnys continued life, as usual, working for the Pug-bears and putting up with their erratic and fierce behavior.
The Sunnys had managed to secretly start creating trap systems according to the instructions we'd left, but they had no hope of them working and were, in fact, fearful of deploying them. If an intelligent Pug-bear had found out about the traps, the Sunny population would pay a high price.
The thing that they were happy about was paradoxical. There had been a slaughter, and several Sunnys were killed. They were excited about this sad event because the deaths were due to a previously intelligent Pug-bear which suddenly and irrevocably reverted to animal behavior. The individual in question was the elder on the planet, and it had been in the process of giving them a series of orders regarding production quotas.
Suddenly, right in the middle of the group meeting, the creature had suffered a sort of fit, shaking and then falling to the ground. When it stood up again, it didn't communicate. Instead, it attacked the Sunny delegation and killed most of them. It was still lurking around the city and attacking randomly, showing no sense of purpose.
It sounded as if the yeast were having some effect. We advised them to begin setting the traps and avoid contacting the Pug-bears, if possible. If the yeast were taking hold, the rest of the creatures could be expected to suffer the loss of their symbionts and regress to simple feral behavior. It didn't lessen their dangerous nature, but the loss of their grafted-on intelligence would make them far easier to avoid and to trap.
During the next twenty-four hours, the Sunnys worked at setting traps, and by the time that I'd come back on day shift, the Pug-bears were stumbling into the traps regularly. The Sunnys held such animosity towards their former masters that they overcame their antipathy towards violence enough to celebrate whenever they were able to pull a dead Pug-bear out of a trap and reset it.
When the reports from the surface came in, Frazzle hastily collated them, ran some calculations on the results, and then informed me that the Pug-bears would probably be about ninety percent gone within a week. The Sunny population was free and only had to worry about feral Pug-bears.
Without their symbionts, though they might kill an individual Sunny, the feral creatures were no longer a threat to Sunny civilization. They had been reduced to the status of wild animals. The yeast was a success.
The only drawback was that Ian wouldn't let us forget that it had all been his idea. Fortunately, he wanted to stay on the planet to study the local ecosystem, and the Sunnys encouraged that idea. I think they wanted to make sure that at least one of us stayed so that we'd have to come back again.
He went down to the surface on one of the planet's shuttles. I'd insisted on arming him heavily. The locals could manufacture power packs for the anti-matter weapons, but currently didn't manufacture the weapons themselves. Those were all created on a different planet.
We'd been at the station for a week when Rudy and Holmes showed up. A single ship dropped out of FTL far out in the system and then called in using the Ansible system. It was Holmes.
He and Rudy had gone to their first assigned planet, and the yeast bombing had gone smoothly with no problems. They'd spread the stuff and cleared the local space station of Pugs at the same time. There were only a few shuttles there, and they'd all been at the station when the Marines had attacked. The shuttles were captured, isolating the Pugs and Pug-bears on the planet's surface.
Rudy and Holmes had then gone on to their second target. Here, a serious problem had arisen. One of the two remaining Pug FTL ships was docked, and it had been armed.
It disengaged from the station before they could get close enough to capture it. Then it played cat and mouse with them around the numerous moons that orbited the planet. When they finally thought they were narrowing in on its location, it fired one telling shot that impacted Rudy's large ship's FTL vanes. Then it dove for the planet, skimmed the atmosphere, and entered light speed as soon as possible. Their escape seemed to have really angered Rudy.
Holmes was kept busy taking Rudy's crew off their ship. Without FTL ability, our spaceships were little better than shuttles. They were limited to in-system work only. Luckily, Holmes' ship had enough room for Rudy's entire crew.
There was no repair facility there, so Rudy's ship had to be left with the Sunnys. I reckoned that we'd try to pick it up as soon as we could find a way to ship a spare set of FTL vanes and an engine, since there were no readily available replacement parts in that system. Meanwhile, Rudy's people boarded Holmes' ship and finished dumping yeast on the surface.
Their voyage back to rendezvous with us had been tense. Rudy didn't enjoy riding as a passenger with Holmes in command. He'd lost his ship and failed to damage the enemy, and his ego was suffering as a result.
Nor did Holmes enjoy Rudy's constant complaining. He told me privately, "I've never seen someone so angry. I'm actually glad to get him off my ship. I thought a couple of times that he'd try to take over and go off after the enemy all on his own."
Rudy came storming through the transporter onto my ship when they were close enough. By the way he held his mouth in a tight line with the corners downturned, I could tell that he was still furious at the loss of his vessel. He started in on me right away.
"Dec, I lost my ship! Those damned Pugs! They out-maneuvered me. There were a whole lot of small moons or rocks orbiting around that planet, and they ducked into them. I didn't want to follow. It looked like a meat-grinder in there, so I tried to circle the mess and pick a way to get inside, nearer the planet. I figured they'd come out on that side. They did, but not where I expected them. Our sensors couldn't track them through the mess, and they popped out and shot my tail off, then ran."
"Calm down, Rudy. It could have happened to any –" I started to say, but he interrupted.
"Don't tell me that, Dec! I was stupid! I thought that my ship was more than a match for them. They only had a single anti-matter cannon. They shouldn't have gotten away from me. I want you to accept my resig –"
This time I interrupted, "No! I'm not going to let you resign, so you can get that out of your mind right now! You're going to take charge of the other ship we've got here. I don't have enough experienced people as it is. I can't afford to let you slink off in embarrassment."
He spluttered, "Embarrassment! That's what you think – No, I'm not embarrassed. I just lost – I mean I – Well, maybe you could do better. I don't know."
He was shaking his head in discouragement.
I said, "Look, Rudy, we're all improvising here. No human has ever engaged in combat in space. The rules are different. It's not like fighting on the ground or even exactly like airplane combat. The thing is, the anti-matter weapons are so destructive that even a partial charge will do a lot of damage. We need some kind of countermeasure, and I think I may have come up with a way to shield against anti-matter to a certain extent, but I need your help to work it out and also to work out a set of strategies for spaceship combat. We have to have some set way to operate in the future. We can't keep doing things by the seat of our pants."
Rudy just shook his head, negating my reasoning.
"Dec, I'm not a fighter pilot. I'm just an old insurgent fighter. Besides, if you can get the last Pug ships settled, there won't be anyone to fight in space," he said.
I grinned a tight grin and answered, "Well, maybe that isn't true. Frazzle indicated to me that there is another species out there. He doesn't know if they're hostile or not."
His eyes grew large as he answered, "Really? We're not done yet?"
"I don't know about that. We'll just have to wait and see. Besides, I'm going to need you. I strongly suspect that we haven't seen the last of the Motherland group, and there will probably be more like them in both Europe and Asia. We'll have our hands full getting Earth back into order."
He replied, "That's true, I guess. Look – I just made a mistake. I'm going to try and work out ways to keep from making another one."
I smiled, and we shook hands. Then he remembered something I'd said.
He asked, "What do you mean that you know how to shield against anti-matter?"
I replied, "I'm not sure it will work, but I've got an idea. Using our point gravity source to hold a bunch of dust as a physical shield should deplete the anti-matter burst. It might only work once unless we had access to more dust, but once should be enough if it allows us to shoot back."
He thought about it for a minute.
"That might work. Maybe we could rig some way to blow dust out of the hold in a cloud, then grab it with the point gravity. We could carry a bunch of dirt in one of the holds, possibly enough to shield us against repeated shots."
He was speculating, but it might work. We'd just have to test the idea.
We got underway the next day as Rudy took over our latest capture, and we headed to Earth. I wanted to regroup, check on Jake, then work out my confederation ideas. We desperately needed a new way of organizing ourselves.
Current human existence was tenuous, and we needed to rebuild. To do that, we needed a new structure. I didn't want to reinstate our old politics – there was too much wrong with them.