Second Wave - 14
Chapter 14
The next days went by slowly, but we managed to get through them without any major problems. Frank had noticeably warmed up to me. We had a number of interesting conversations about football and also about his life after the EMP.
I don't know where the Sunnys slept, or even if they slept. They seemed to be always hovering around in the bridge area or the cafeteria. The four of us humans sat watches in the bridge, but it was mostly just to have something to do. There was nothing going on except the interminable distortion of the stars as they slid in towards us and turned into colorful streaks as they flew by.
I alternated sleeping, eating, and sitting on the bridge with exploring the ship. Frank sometimes went along with me, but he found the low overhead disconcerting and preferred to stay on the bridge or in his room. Ted, taciturn as always, slept as much as possible. Erin spent the preponderance of her time watching the stars and trying to talk to the Sunnys. Her behavior towards me was cool. She seemed to be angry about something, but I really couldn't figure out what it was. Perhaps she was worrying about what the Warlord would think about her taking off into space and ignoring his requirements. It didn't compute to me and I just ignored her as best I could while I concentrated on other things.
Frazzle approached me about her. He didn't understand why she kept referring to taking the ship back to Earth. He was focused on helping his people with our aid and didn't care for her wanting to turn the ship over to her leader, the Warlord. Besides we weren't going to Earth at the moment. There was an inter-species gap in comprehension there and it made him unhappy.
I tried to reassure him that she was just uncomfortable in her own way and reaching for a resolution to the situation that would most benefit those she cared about. His response was, “You help we the way you say and we help you get rid of the Great Ones in your system.”
That was satisfactory to me. By now, I had come to consider the Sunnys friends and allies. They couldn't engage in violence even if their survival depended on it and that made them even more worthy of protection. I was counting on their mastery of technology to provide a large boost for humanity and to help us rid ourselves of the Pug-bear threat.
I happened to be standing on the bridge, watching the streaming stars flow by, when we approached our destination. One particular, reddish star centered itself in the view. The stars had been gradually elongating and moving past us, but this one didn't elongate, instead, it grew rapidly in size and brightness. We must have been slowing down, because the streaming effect of the nearby stars gradually ceased as we approached the red one.
As I watched, the ship made a sort of minuscule shudder and then the view changed. We'd dropped out of FTL travel and were back in normal space. The sub-light EmDrive kicked on, creating a low, not unpleasant sound in the background. We continued moving towards the red sun at a greatly reduced speed. There was no hurry, since I hadn't fully formulated what I wanted to do there, other than gather information and possibly help the Sunnys in some way.
Frazzle turned from his seat at the command console and motioned to me. I could sense that he was in doubt, so I made mental contact.
“There's a lot of radio communication going on in the system,” he thought. “From the conversations I've picked up, some of my people are trying to break free of the Great Ones' mental control. They're in spacecraft and are trying to reach a ring of asteroids that circles this star. It's like the belt that circles yours, although it is much denser.”
“There usually isn't much happening here. The Great Ones don't seem to worry about being attacked since my people are the only ones that have spacecraft. Even if they are watching, we're too far out for our wave-front to have reached the planet. We don't make much of a target. The ship does create a momentary flash when it drops out of FTL, but we came in far enough out to make it unlikely that anyone will detect us for many hours.”
“I've been monitoring the comm chatter and it is all Sunny communications. It's old, not in our time frame, since it's all from in-system sources. The Pugs rarely communicate although they do monitor the local comm bands just to keep track of what we do. The Great Ones are sure we're under their control and don't worry about us.” He paused in his thought stream and looked at the instruments.
I projected a question into his mind, “What about the Pugs? Won't they send out some kind of craft to intercept your people?”
“Perhaps. They do have a few shuttles that are armed. They normally use them against surface targets on worlds that are being enslaved, but they might be able to target our ships.” He seemed dubious and ill at ease discussing potential violence.
“We'd better contact your people and see if they have any plan, other than to hide in the asteroids,” I said this out loud for the benefit of Frank and Erin, who'd just come into the bridge.
“What's going on?” she asked.
“It looks like some of the Sunnys have gotten free of the Pug-bears and are trying to hide,” I explained. “I think we should carry on with our comet idea. That seems to me to be the best way to disrupt any potential reprisal against them. We don't have any ship-to-ship weapons anyway.”
“We haves a big anti-matter shooter in storage,” Frazzle unexpectedly volunteered.
“What! Why didn't you say so before?” I was upset with him. I knew I shouldn't be. His people were so unreservedly pacifistic that it made me wonder how they'd ever survived. “Can it be mounted on the outside of the ship in such a way that we can control its aim from the bridge?”
The short answer I received was, “Yes.” The long version required a lot of mental images and some mental squirming on his part. He didn't like to think of using the weapon against other intelligent life forms.
From his information, I learned that the weapon could be mounted the way I wanted. The problem was going to be getting the Sunnys to do the job. He thought that they could set up the mount and electronics with no problem, but I was going to have to install the gun in the cradle, myself. Arming a few of the short-range shuttle-craft was a task that the Pugs normally did. The Sunnys were unwilling to arm their ships and their resistance to the idea was practically disabling. The Pug-bears avoided the issue by having the Sunny technicians train the Pugs to install the weapons on the few armed shuttles they maintained.
Their stock of armed spacecraft was strictly limited. This lack of foresight could be attributed to the odd way the Pug-bears achieved their intelligence. The symbiont eggs they consumed were not very fertile and only attached to their brains rarely. This meant that the brain-enhanced Pug-bears were usually older individuals and, due to their aggressive natures, there weren't too many of them that lived out their entire one-hundred and forty-year potential lifespan.
The fact that there were few really intelligent ones paired with their history of dominance over all of the races they'd encountered made them complacent. They'd never had to face a serious challenge aside from the intractable denizens of the fifteenth world they'd attacked and those creatures were not technologically oriented, so they were very unlikely to achieve space travel. All told, I figured the Pug-bears had enjoyed success far too long. It was about time that someone slapped them around a bit. I wanted to be that someone.
With that in mind, I got Frazzle to start the other Sunnys working on installing the necessary superstructure and connections for the weapon. We inspected the anti-matter gun they had stored in the back of a cargo hold. It was wrapped tightly in opaque plastic, but when we'd cut the wrappings off, I was pleased to see that it was much larger and more robustly made than the shoulder-held versions. I looked at Frazzle, inquiringly, but he just shook his head and indicated that the Pugs had ordered it for some purpose that he didn't want to think about. I was pleased with it, though, it was large enough that it should do a lot of damage. I hoped that we could get it working before we met any serious opposition.
The anti-matter weapons generated a field that created either a continuous stream of discrete pulses or a single pulse of anti-matter particles. I didn't know how the mechanism worked, but the range seemed to only be limited by how many normal matter particles intervened between the muzzle of the weapon and the target. In space, there should be far fewer gas molecules to interfere, so the range should be much further. The weapons probably launched the anti-matter particles at a certain velocity, similar to a conventional rifle, but if the thing were mounted on the bow of a spacecraft moving at high speed, the effective velocity would be greatly augmented.
I was only speculating since the Sunnys refused to talk about the potential of the gun, but I hoped that it would be enough to give the Pugs and their masters a real surprise. The weapon wouldn't have as much range if it were used to target the ground from orbit. The density of the atmosphere would probably attenuate the anti-matter beam.
There were a lot of floating rocks conveniently located in the system's asteroid belt. These would all make very good Kinetic Energy Weapons. I wasn't above chucking a few smaller rocks down at strategic targets. Larger KEWs would make too much of a mess and probably kill some of the Sunnys; an outcome that I hoped to avoid.
The problem was that I didn't actually know how large a mass would do what. The physics was a little beyond me. I mean I could calculate momentum, but how do you know by just looking just how much an asteroid masses? There were probably any number of ways to figure it out, but I didn't know any off the top of my head. In addition, once you've got the mass and the velocity, you know the force involved, but how do you convert this into a way to limit the damage of the impact? I thought it would be complicated by such things as atmospheric density, impact angle, and the type of target, but, hey, I'm basically just a guy who causes problems for the opposition. My best guess was to ask the Sunnys, except I couldn't tell them exactly what I had in mind.
This line of thought kept me productively occupied through the rest of the morning. I spent some time questioning Frazzle about the onboard computer capabilities, specifically about whether the comp could easily calculate orbital mechanics and velocities with the objective of placing a – I told Frazzle – cargo down at any set location. He answered in the affirmative. The comp could easily handle the math. However, he did sternly warn me that any valuable cargo would have to have some means of shedding velocity or it would be destroyed.
I brushed off this admonition. I had every intention of having the “cargo” destroyed along with everything in the immediate vicinity of the “landing.” I don't think he actually knew what I had in mind. He didn't seem upset the way they usually did when I talked about harming other sentient life forms. In fact, he mentioned, of all things, parachutes as a means of landing.
I also asked him if there was some way to move a rock along with the ship. This nearly tore it because he immediately began cautioning me as to the potential destruction associated with high-V mass. I shrugged it off and finally got him to admit that the internal gravity system could be used to create a point gravity source outside of the ship. It was touchy, but he seemed to believe that a rock could be boosted to significant velocity by dragging it along behind an artificially created mass. That was what I hoped to hear and I slept well that night.
By mid-day, the Sunnys had completed the installation of the weapon mount and the electronics. The gun was self-powered and had the capability of firing about a hundred brief pulses or a shorter, continuous beam. After that, it had to be reloaded manually with another power pack. I asked them if that could be done remotely, but they informed me that they didn't have the equipment on the ship to create the required connections.
The problem then was in my hands. After some careful fitting and a lot of instructions from the Sunnys, I managed to get into a slightly modified Pug space suit. It was a combination of skin-tight fabric and a surprisingly small helmet that almost seemed like a mask. It made me feel claustrophobic, but since it provided a strong flow of cool air, I figured that I could put up with it for long enough to mount the gun.
We went to the cargo hold where the weapon was stored and here another problem became apparent. The eraser-rifles were lightweight, but this thing was much larger and far too heavy for me to move. The Sunnys had a cargo handler that could pick it up, but the exoskeleton was designed for only Sunnys to operate and they weren't going to carry the piece out to the mount.
After some thought, I had them tie a cable on the gun and simply drop it through the cargo hold door. We were all in pressure suits, so no problem there. They simply evacuated the hold, opened the door, and pitched the weapon outside with the cargo loader. It bumped gently against the hull and then floated off, free of the internal gravity field. It amazed me that the generated gravity field only covered things inside the ship. Once outside, the mass was still there, of course, but the weight disappeared.
I carefully moved out and snagged the weapon. My suit had some kind of adhesive soles on the boots and I could walk, albeit very carefully, on the side of the ship. It took a lot of careful pulling to get the mass started moving, but once it was, it continued easily as I gradually towed the gun up to the front of the ship.
It was my first chance to see what we'd been traveling in. The shape was like nothing I'd ever imagined. It was long and lean with a slim waist that sort of reminded me of a wasp. There were some large vanes attached to the rear portion of the hull. They didn't look aerodynamic and I knew the ship couldn't land anyway, so I assumed they had something to do with the propulsion system. I didn't know how it worked, other than there were two components, the sub-light EmDrive and the FTL device.
The vanes were large and mounted solidly in heavy brackets attached to the sides of the ship. They weren't smooth looking like something you might see on TV prior to the Lucas spaceships. Their surface was covered with tiny spikes that slanted slightly aft. The vane color was a flat, dead black and I supposed that was necessary for effective functioning. The Sunnys' normal color preference was for bright colors, although the Masters didn't usually allow them to waste resources on aesthetics. They'd painted the insides of their personal spaces, where the Masters didn't go, in primary colors that reminded me of the ones favored by human children.
The slim waist expanded smoothly into the main body of the ship. There were mounts for detachable cargo holds or shuttles at the top of the waist. There was a single, boxy cargo container currently attached that was balanced on the other side of the ship by a sleek shuttle-craft that made human efforts look primitive and clunky.
Above the attachment mounts, the body of the ship rose in a slant to its full diameter and extended for a considerable distance until it gradually tapered to the bow. The bridge windows were obvious as I passed them and I could see my compatriots watching me closely. I waved cheerfully, although inside I was quite nervous. This wasn't anything my previous training had prepared me to do. Most recently I'd been living a primitive existence as a mountain man, so it was a memorable experience.
The gun mount was located exactly on the tip of the bow. The bow was covered with a heavily reinforced, dome-shaped plate that curved off towards the rear of the ship. Frazzle had explained to me that a deflector field was required to protect the ship from particle abrasion and rocks. The reinforced plate did double duty as a shield for any bits that managed to get through the field and also served as the main, I guess you could call it, antenna for generating the deflector field. It also made a great hard point for the gun mount.
I'd wondered if the gun would suffer damage from particles, but Frazzle had assured me that it was unlikely. The deflector field was a powerful application of their artificial gravity generator and it rarely allowed anything to strike the bow plate. I was dubious, but there wasn't any other choice that made as much sense for the mount.
As I approached the bow, I had to remember to start the gun's mass decelerating long before I reached the mount. It wouldn't do to try and just yank it to a standstill; it'd pull me right off the side of the ship. Likewise, I couldn't snag it by looping the cable around the mount. The gently moving mass would inevitably hit the end of the cable and rebound, possibly with deleterious effect. I didn't want to be knocked off the ship or caught in a bight of cable and lose an arm or leg and I certainly didn't want the gun to swing around and impact the hull or the bridge windows.
The gun was moving along smoothly, a little behind me and above, so I simply slowed down and let it catch up as I approached the bow. It drifted gently by, seemingly all innocent, but when it got to the end of the cable, it gave me one hell of a jerk. I rapidly shuffled forward, trying to keep my arms in their sockets, all of the while pulling backward to try and bleed off some of its momentum. I finally succeeded in stopping its movement just as I was beginning to wonder if it would simply pull me off the front of the ship.
Once stopped, it was a tedious and painstaking process to get the thing lined up with the mount, but I finally succeeded and clipped it into the aiming servos with titanium pins. The electronics, on the other hand, were easy to connect. There were a couple of rather ordinary power plugs and what looked for all the world like an old-fashioned Centronics parallel connector. That was it.
Mentally dusting off my hands, I retreated to the bridge window and gave the others the 'thumbs-up' signal. They dutifully applauded and I returned to the port, came back in through the lock, and hung up my suit after spending about ninety minutes on my first spacewalk.
Altogether, it hadn't been nearly as frightening as I'd thought it might be and I was pleased to have the ship armed. Just how effective the gun would be remained to be seen. I resolved to test it at the first opportunity on some innocuous target like a rock, especially a rock that couldn't shoot back before we got into a shoot-to-kill situation.