The test opportunity came very quickly. We were still over ten light hours away from the occupied planet and we were traveling at a greatly reduced rate through a belt of rocks and debris. Apparently, the red star had undergone a very messy birth leaving behind a lot of navigational hazards in the system. This was one of the reasons the Sunnys had first settled on the planet. Along with plain rocks and water ice floating around, there were lots of metallic asteroids and the mining was good. They had a significant fleet of small mining craft designed for in-system use only; no FTL on them and only a small EmDrive unit that could move ore into orbit around their planet, where it could be refined, conveniently, in space.
Frazzle and I were the only ones on the bridge when the hull mass-proximity sensors (even though I had no idea how they worked and hadn't even known they were there) picked up a thicker clot of rock and dust almost in our direct path. I became aware of it when a chime rang and a series of lights lit up on the control console, causing Frazzle to make some rapid adjustments. As a result, the ship began to veer off its course slightly. When I asked him, he explained that the proximity detectors had indicated enough mass in our path to cause the deflector shield problems.
This was just what I'd been hoping for and I instructed him to slowly approach the mass. I told him that I wanted to see if we could clear navigation hazards with the bow gun. After a moment’s shock at the idea of using the thing, he seemed to approve.
“Dat what you do then? Clear out rocks with anti-matter – that's good idea!”
I wasn't so sure that he meant it. He was probably just relieved that I wanted to shoot at inanimate objects rather than live ones, but I encouraged him to move closer to the rocks so that I could actually see them. I wanted to have a visual on the effect of the gun. This would probably be the only chance I had to check the improvised system out. Actual combat situations would undoubtedly be at long range and there would be no sign of a hit other than the disappearance of a threat marker on the computer display.
We moved close enough to see several large rocks tumbling in a kind of arabesque. They were moving together in a path around the star and had obviously done enough grinding to reduce the ones tempted to collide into small particles. There was a lot of dust and gravel moving along with them.
I sat at the fire-control station, a video display on the corner of the long bridge console. The Sunnys had mounted a joystick there. It had only a couple of buttons plus a trigger. They'd briefed me on its functionality and it was ridiculously simple to use. The stick moved the gun and the display showed the target and range. One of the buttons activated a green laser designator and the other locked the system onto the designated target. The system was then armed and ready to fire.
The trigger would fire a brief burst for a millisecond if pushed and released. If pushed and held in, the burst would become a series of millisecond pulses, separated by a fraction of a second. It reminded me of a human ma-deuce in that respect. I felt instinctively that I could really hose down a target in the pulse mode.
Picking out the largest rock in the swarm was the work of a moment. The laser designator locked on and the gun began to track automatically. At this point, unless I moved the joystick in a large motion or thumbed off the designator, it would stay on target automatically. I watched the motion of the turret and barrel for thirty seconds or so. It worked just as advertised. The rock, spinning rather erratically, stayed right in the center of the video display where it was displayed in a lurid red color. The non-targeted companions showed in a light yellow.
I tired of watching the display and pressed the trigger. There was a slight delay as the anti-matter burst reached out to the rock. Then nothing. I was disappointed. The rock simply disappeared with not even a flash. I remembered that the eraser guns had much the same effect. We'd wondered why there was no explosion, only a crackling sound, but not having any other experience with anti-matter coming into contact with matter, I'd decided that was just the way it was.
The big weapon worked in the same fashion. No flash, no recoil – just a disappeared target. I took the joystick and sequentially destroyed the other elements of the swarm as Frazzle watched. Once they were gone, I held down the trigger and erased the gravel that remained. The space was clear.
I turned to him and said, “What is the range for the mass detectors attached to the system? I'd like to try it on a distant target.”
The answer was a little more complex. The range varied depending on the mass, as you might expect. We finally settled on a large rock that was about a hundred yards in diameter. It was traveling in the same orbit but was approximately a thousand miles ahead of us. The mass detectors had no difficulty sensing it, but here a problem arose. I tried and tried, but couldn't get the laser designator to touch the thing. It was just too far away for my relatively coarse movements to fine-tune the pointer.
After watching me fruitlessly try for a couple of minutes, Frazzle pointed out that the video display had a touch-sensitive function. He reached out and touched the image of the rock with a small forefinger and the laser instantly locked onto it. I was a little upset with him, but he acted as if he was enjoying my astonishment, so I let him feel good about the surprise.
When I pressed the trigger button momentarily, the image instantly reduced in size, but didn't disappear. The laser designator continued to illuminate the remainder of the rock and I fired another pulse. This time, the entire target was destroyed. Considering the size of the target, I figured that even the first shot would have disabled a spacecraft, opening it up to hard vacuum and doing all kinds of damage to its systems. I was very satisfied with the weapon and, in fact, couldn't wait to get a chance to try it out on the enemy.
While I'd been happily shooting rocks, the ship had continued moving closer to the inner system asteroid belt. We could now hear the comm chatter and it was almost on our timeline, delayed by a matter of minutes, rather than hours. It was nearly time to make contact with the escaping Sunnys and to move on to the next phase of our attack. I instructed Frazzle to let them know we were on the way to their location and directly a startled-sounding Sunny voice came through.
I couldn't understand what was said, so I mentally tuned in to Frazzle's side of the conversation.
They were first alarmed at the idea that an FTL craft was returning, thinking it was under Pug-bear control, but after they got the message that we were rebels who were there to help them regain their freedom, they were very excited.
They were miners who'd been only minimally supervised by the Pugs. They'd been engaged in exploratory mining in the asteroid belt that was between their planet and the next one out in orbit, a smaller gas giant on the order of Neptune in size. The Sunnys had been planning an escape from the Masters for over a year and had made a break from their routine only a couple of days ago.
They had about twenty ships, but some were very small, only suitable for a couple of Sunnys and prospecting equipment. Others were larger delivery vessels that were used to haul the ore from the asteroids into orbit around their planet. They had set up orbital refineries to keep the waste products off of the surface. They periodically boosted the waste into a higher orbit, accumulated it, and then put an inexpensive, ionic pusher-engine on the package that would eventually shove it out of the system perpendicular to the ecliptic. The refined metals were transported from the orbital stations directly to their final destinations on the surface using larger matter transporters.
I asked Frazzle why they didn't use matter transporters to move the raw ore from the asteroid belt. It seemed to make sense to me, but he indicated that it simply wasn't as efficient as enclosing tons of ore in an artificial gravity field and towing it at low acceleration with an inexpensive EmDrive.
As I previously mentioned, their EmDrive was a considerably advanced version of a concept that we humans had already invented. It was first invented (on Earth) by British aerospace engineer Roger J. Shawyer, in 2000. The magazine 'New Scientist' ran a cover story on EmDrive in its 8 September 2006 issue. I'd read the article and knew that it was considered by many of our scientists to be a dubious device, but here the Sunnys were using a high-powered version to power their in-system travel.
Shawyer's version of the thing used a magnetron to direct microwaves into a metallic, fully enclosed, conic-shaped structure. He calculated that the device would generate a directional thrust toward the narrow end of the structure. Some of our scientists maintained that it could not possibly work although the Chinese had created one that apparently did. Frazzle wasn't entirely clear on the action of their version of the device, but it seemed to rely on some kind of interaction with virtual particles found in the quantum vacuum.
It looked like we were close to inventing it for ourselves, but our society was too concerned with what our politicians deemed important social issues, rather than trying to take steps that would get us off the planet, open up a wealth of new resources, allow us to do our own manufacturing in space and begin to protect us from possible calamities such as large meteor strikes or invasion by Pug-bears and the like. I was both proud of our home-grown research on the one hand and ashamed that we'd chosen to ignore easily obtainable advancements by retreating from space. We'd last gone to the moon in 1972 with the Apollo 17 mission, but before the first Pug-bear invasion and EMP event, the USA could barely get supplies up to the International Space Station and we had to hitchhike with the Russians, if we wanted to get a person up there. That was all gone now, but the potential was still there, provided that I could somehow ensure that there would be no further invasion attempts.
In fact, if I could bring the Sunnys and their technology into contact with humans, I hoped that we might find common ground and create a union that would be beneficial to both species. We could fight, while they wouldn't or couldn't. They had technology that we sorely lacked. Maybe there was hope there for the future.
All of those considerations aside, the Sunny Miner fleet was fleeing to their asteroid belt. The Pug-bears basically didn't care what happened to groups of Sunnys as long as they continued to get supplies, but the loss of the entire fleet of haulers and prospectors had shut down the orbital refining operations and put a crimp in supplies to the planet.
The Pug-bears needed the raw materials sent both to surface manufacturing facilities and their only orbital shipyard. They currently had two FTL vessels under construction that were intended to facilitate their expansion to additional solar systems.
Their drive to expand and dominate was their primary motivation. They didn't utilize many of the elements of an established society on planet. The feral young lived as animals and even the ones that had been infected with the symbiont and gained intelligence preferred a solitary, hunting life. Unfortunately, from the Sunnys' perspective, their primary prey on the planet was the Sunnys themselves. It was not a pleasant life for them.
The miners had been planning on leaving in their ships for some time and the few that were not mentally controlled by the Pug-bears finally had screwed up their courage and made the break. This action was improvidently ignored by the Pug-bears at first, but when the raw materials ran out, they were forced to take action and ordered their local force of Pugs to take the few armed shuttles that were in the system and hunt the Sunnys down.
Altogether, the situation was strange to my mind. The Pug-bears, for all of their superior mental power, essentially acted as primitives with no really good understanding of strategy. Sure, they could make good use of the Sunnys' technology, but they didn't plan things out the way humans would have. The Pugs were war-like but didn't cooperate well with each other, since their society had evolved on a planet where resources were scarce. They tended to direct their aggression towards their fellows, competing for status and mates, even when food and other necessities were plentiful.
The whole mess was just a crazy cosmic fluke that had come together in the right combination to allow the Pug-bears to expand and control their empire of planets. They'd been lucky not to run up against another species that had space technology and the aggressive constitution to oppose them. I resolved, for the hundredth time that I was going to change that situation.