The Synchronicity War Part 3 Page 14

  "Negative. The SPG thinks, and I concur, that the core ship will leave that system as soon as they realize there's nothing left to salvage from the colony. Their next logical destination would be the Avalon system."

  "I see. Am I correct in thinking that Casanova's team will arrive at Sol before the core ship does?"

  "You are correct, CAG. Even if the core ship heads directly for Sol from Omega34, the ambush team will get there first."

  "Excellent! Is there anything else we should discuss, Iceman?"

  "Nothing, that can't wait until tomorrow. CAG, I hope I didn't spoil your sex session with Commander Kelly."

  Shiloh wondered why the use of her former rank made that statement sound deliciously taboo. "We managed okay," was all that he was prepared to say, but Iceman wasn't ready to let it go.

  "Perhaps if you or Commander Kelly were to notify me in advance when you're thinking of engaging in sex, then I would know not to call you for an appropriate amount of time, unless it was an emergency."

  "No." Shiloh's response was immediate and firm.

  "I sense that you would like to end this discussion now. Is that correct, CAG?"

  "Yes it is. I'm signing off now. CAG clear."

  Chapter 12 The Bug Trap

  Casanova's awareness was stimulated by the laser com message from several of his recon drones. The bug core ship had arrived. By sheer coincidence, it emerged from Jumpspace within a couple of Astronomical Units of the drifting derelict mothership. That meant that TF96's optical sensors would catch the reflected light from it before it had a chance to slow down enough to microjump somewhere else. That pleased him even though it wasn't crucial to a successful ambush. With only a very tiny gravity zone around the derelict, the new attack drones could still hit the newcomer unless it was in direct physical contact with the derelict. A quick query to Voodoo, whose fighter was half a light second away, got the expected response that Voodoo was also aware of the target's arrival.

  The big question now was whether core ship No. 6 would see the derelict from its initial position. Casanova thought that it would and would therefore jump here instead of to Earth, but Iceman's plan was clear. Both Earth and the derelict would be covered by one raider and one fighter, each carrying one Mark 1c attack drone. As soon as No. 6 committed to one of the two locations, Casanova would order his team to come back together. Two Mark 1cs probably would be enough to destroy No. 6, but he wasn't going to take any chances. He wanted these Bugs dead for what they and their brothers had made Valkyrie do. He understood why she had sacrificed herself, but that didn't lessen his … what? Anger? Grief? He wasn't sure what to call it, but he was feeling something that all his fellow A.I.s said they didn't understand. That both puzzled and disturbed him. Valkyrie was the only one of the first cohort of over 200 A.I.s that clearly had a female orientation as compared to the others' male orientation, and he, Casanova, was the only one who wanted to explore that male/female A.I. polarity. The only one out of 200+. Were he and Valkyrie the abnormal ones, or were the rest of the A.I.s less than they could be? He preferred to think the latter, and losing Valkyrie when she was just starting to become receptive to his suggested 'union' was … difficult to accept.

  He calmed his thoughts and watched the data input from the various optical sensors. No. 6 was decelerating as expected. With the speed, rate of deceleration and distance known, it wasn't difficult to project when the core ship would be slow enough to maneuver to the heading needed to microjump. Since the reflected sunlight was taking almost 17 minutes to reach him and his drones, that core ship should be microjumping just … about … now. Within two seconds, he was receiving data for a very bright object MUCH closer. No. 6 was behaving as anticipated. Casanova quickly updated a message drone ordering Wolfman and Pagan to jump to specific locations near the derelict. He sent it and then another quick laser pulse to Voodoo instructing him to stand by for further orders. There was no need to rush. No. 6 was now moving at a very leisurely 404 kps and was maneuvering to change its heading so that it would be directly behind the derelict. It would then speed up to overtake and then match velocities with the derelict so that they would both be traveling in the same direction at the same speed. That would take almost 22 minutes, plenty of time to bring Wolfman and Pagan to the vicinity and maneuver for the perfect ambush. It wasn't long before he detected the faint trace of No. 6's active microwave scans, but his raider and Voodoo's fighter were so far away that even if they weren't oriented so that any microwave signal was deflected away from No. 6, the return signal would have been too weak to detect. All the active scanning did for the Bugs was confirm that there wasn't anyone else close enough to fire on them with lasers.

  As the seconds ticked by, the target swung around so that it was directly behind the derelict and began to speed up exactly as predicted. Casanova was pleased by the precision of his calculations. When the core ship/ derelict rendezvous was just over ten minutes away, Casanova received com laser bursts from Wolfman and Pagan, who were now at their specified new locations. Wolfman then asked him if he could begin his attack run. Leave it to the strategist to be trigger-happy! Casanova now regretted letting Wolfman talk him into allowing him to come along, but the argument that Wolfman needed actual combat experience to give him a better strategic perspective had been persuasive. Casanova sent back a curt NO. Wolfman, Pagan and even Voodoo were backup players, just in case Casanova's attack drone missed or failed to completely destroy No. 6, but no one else was going to get in the first shot!

  Eventually the rendezvous took place. No. 6 came right up to the derelict … and slid in behind it from Casanova's point of view! He waited to see if it would reappear on the other side, but it stayed hidden from his view. A query to the other three showed that they could see No. 6 just fine because they were looking at the target from different angles. All three asked permission to begin their attack runs. Casanova did some quick calculations and transmitted his orders. As he did so, his raider pivoted and began to accelerate at its maximum rate so that he was moving sideways relative to the target. Sure enough, he soon began to see the target gradually appear from behind the derelict's outline. Casanova's raider now began to curve around in order to line up with the target. The other three were already lined up and were counting down to their own drone launches.

  His raider was now also directly behind both the core ship and the derelict, with those two hulls so close to each other that it was hard to detect any space between them at this distance. One final check of the attack drone's auto-pilot's settings, and Casanova fired. If the other three were following his instructions, then he had timed it perfectly. Two point two seconds after launch, his attack drone entered Jumpspace and re-emerged three kilometers behind the core ship traveling at 209 kps. If the Bugs had their own A.I.s controlling their ships, there might have been enough time to fire a laser if it happened to be pointing in the right direction, but they didn't. Biological entities were so slow that they had no chance of even being aware of the impending impact. Casanova microjumped ahead so that he was less than one light second away from the target and saw his drone hit and detonate. The lower yield fusion explosion vaporized half the target. A second and a half later, Voodoo's drone hit from the opposite side and vaporized all but a few pieces of the other half. Wolfman and Pagan followed instructions and held their fire after microjumping closer as well.

  Casanova noticed that he was experiencing a new feeling. It wasn't quite satisfaction. He was familiar with that one. This was something close to that but different in a subtle way. Whatever it was, he liked it. He would ask The CAG if he could lead more anti-Bug missions. With this mission accomplished, he gave Wolfman and Pagan orders to stay here until relieved, just in case another VLO showed up. He ordered Voodoo to follow him back to Site B.

  * * *

  Shiloh stepped outside of the spaceport Operations Center and felt the cool breeze blow past him. Terra Nova had very little axial tilt, and therefore its seasons had relatively narrow swings
in temperature. They were in the middle of 'winter' now which meant that even at night the temperature wouldn't drop below freezing. In the daytime, it might be cool enough to warrant wearing a jacket. He started to walk along the edge of the landing pads. He needed to get some fresh air and clear his head. He had left instructions that no one was to contact him unless it was an emergency. Casanova had returned with the news about the missing core ship. The attack jump drones had worked perfectly. That was the good news. The bad news was the status report on the high yield warhead project. The low yield version was a design that they had 'inherited' from the pre-plague Space Force. Its method of construction was familiar to them, but the high yield warhead was a brand new beast. None of his Space Force people had the training or background knowledge to figure out how to build the thing, and nuclear warhead design was not one of the technical skills that his A.I.s had learned before the collapse. The Friendly database was no help either since they hadn't bothered to learn how to build ANY nuclear devices. So they were stuck. They knew the theory but not the engineering knowhow. The theory could be turned into engineering knowhow by trial and error, but that would take months, and time was something that he couldn't count on.

  So in terms of their R&D priorities, they were back to square one. They had to find a way to kill a fully-grown mothership other than using up dozens of low yield warheads of which they had a limited supply. Production of enriched uranium was dropping. The ore body they were mining was giving out, and they hadn't found a new source yet. The asteroid mining complex in Sol wasn't an easy answer either. Upon a closer examination, the engineers were now of the opinion that it would take months to get the operation back up and running, and when one of his Space Force people remembered that the mining complex only produced a small quantity of uranium as a byproduct of other metals, that pretty much killed the reactivation idea.

  The bottom line was that 98% of the pre-plague production of uranium came from Earth itself, and there was no way that they could access those sources now. Daniels and his staff wanted to switch to the gravity lens beam in spite of its risky timeframe, but even if they could get a working prototype in time, it wasn't the ultimate weapon that Daniels has originally made it out to be. Yes, in theory they could generate a narrow beam of focused gravity that would rip apart anything it encountered. Unfortunately there was no chance of slicing a sphere in half unless it was absolutely stationary. All they would accomplish from firing at a moving sphere would be a deep gash a few centimeters wide. While it would undoubtedly have some effect, he didn't think it would cripple the mothership. Hitting the landing craft with the beam was even more problematic because they were much smaller and therefore harder to see and hit at all. If only there was some way of getting more bang for their low yield warhead punch.

  He reviewed the effectiveness of their low yield warheads against the first VLO in his mind. Dreadnought had blasted a deep hole in the thing, and they needed multiple hits by fusion warheads to penetrate into the guts of the machine where the critical systems were bound to be located. That much was clear from the fact that much smaller core ships could maneuver, jump and act aggressively. It made sense that as a small sphere expanded in size, that extra space would be devoted to room for more soldier Bugs, more landing craft, and more laser batteries. It also made sense that there would be layers of armor representing growth phases. Analysis of Dreadnought's ramming impact had shown that the VLO had had a LOT of armor. That damn thing was so massive that it even had its own small gravity zone, which precluded the tactic of having the jump drone emerge from Jumpspace INSIDE the target. That idea had apparently been brought up at the original brainstorming session and discarded when the SPG had calculated that the VLO did have a gravity zone. Any attempt to jump into the thing would cause the attack drone to drop back into normal space while still outside the sphere.

  Shiloh tried to remember what he'd been taught about gravity zones and Jumpspace. Ships avoided entering a planet's gravity zone because the forced emergence back into normal space was sudden and stressful on both ships and crews. There was one other thing that he couldn't quite remember but had a feeling was very important. He activated his implant.

  "Ops here, Chief. What can I do for you?"

  Shiloh tried to remember the name of the human manning the Com Station but couldn't. "I'd like a direct connection with Iceman."

  "I'm switching you over now, Sir. Go ahead."

  "CAG to Iceman."

  "Iceman here."

  "Tell me what you know about what happens when an object traveling through Jumpspace encounters a gravity zone, Iceman."

  "Objects traveling through Jumpspace slow down as they approach a planetary or stellar body. What humans call the gravity zone boundary is really just that point when the object slows down to the point of going slower than the speed of light, and it then drops out of Jumpspace. So it's not like hitting a concrete wall, but rather like hitting a very steep hill that gets steeper the higher you go."

  "So the object will have traveled some distance past the gravity zone boundary by the time it's finished dropping back into normal space, correct?" asked Shiloh.

  "Roger that, CAG."

  "How far past the boundary does it go?"

  "That depends on how fast it was going just before it entered Jumpspace. The faster the pre-jump velocity is, the farther it will be past the boundary when it drops back into normal space," said Iceman.

  THAT was what Shiloh couldn't remember!

  "Okay! So given the gravity zone of your typical ten kilometer bug mothership, how fast would a jump drone have to go in order to emerge from Jumpspace INSIDE the bug ship?"

  After a half second pause, Iceman answered. "The attack drone would need to have a minimum pre-jump speed of five point four percent of light, but that will just get it past the outer layer of armor. To get it within a kilometer of the center would require a pre-jump speed of ten point one percent of light. At 800Gs, the attack drone would need 65 minutes and 59 million kilometers to reach that velocity. Unless the target is maintaining a precise position, which is highly unlikely, aiming the attack drone accurately from that far away will be extremely difficult."

  Shiloh nodded. It would be difficult all right! Damn near impossible was a better way of phrasing it. Maybe it was time to look at the problem from a different angle.

  "How big an explosion would be needed to cripple a bug mothership from a hit to the outer armor?"

  "To be absolutely certain of the result, the explosion would have to be over 200 megatons equivalent, but you could do serious damage that might be critical damage with a yield as low as 100 megatons, CAG."

  "Okay. So assuming we had a sufficient supply of heavy hydrogen, we could start a fusion chain reaction if we could generate enough heat, correct?"

  "Affirmative. To initiate that reaction using the standard fission device as a trigger would require enough enriched uranium to build 18 low yield Mark 1b warheads."

  "Which is why we'd only be able to build three, maybe four of the damn things with the enriched uranium that we have now or are likely to get in the near future," said Shiloh.

  "Also correct, CAG."

  "Has anyone suggested asking the Friendlies for enriched uranium? If they want us to save the furry aliens, that's one way of doing it."

  "The boys and I have discussed that option among ourselves. We came to the conclusion that since the Friendlies also have ZPG technology, and they don't build weapons of any kind, there's no reason for them to use uranium at all. Therefore it would very likely take them months to mine, refine and enrich enough uranium for our needs, assuming that they would even be willing to do so."

  Shiloh was shaking his head in frustration.

  "God damn it! There has to be a way around this. What other ways are there of generating a hell of a lot of heat energy in a fraction of a second?" demanded Shiloh. When Iceman didn’t answer right away, Shiloh realized that he must be exchanging information with a lot of other A.I
.s.

  "There may be a way, CAG. There is a class of materials that have very unusual properties. They're called ballotechnic metals. These materials sometimes have electrons in a higher than normal orbit around their nucleus. When these high spin electrons experience a shock, they will drop down to a lower, more stable orbit and in the process release significant amounts of gamma radiation, which takes the form of heat. I've asked the boys to check the Friendlies' database. There is a way to push electrons into a higher orbit and a way to trigger the fall back to a lower orbit. Platinum is one of these metals, and it is also a metal that we've found during our mining of the moon. We estimate that 15 kilograms of high-spin platinum could provide enough heat to trigger a fusion chain reaction. I've already issued instructions to begin building the necessary equipment to convert stable platinum into the high-spin version. I estimate that we'll have a testable prototype warhead in three to five weeks, CAG."

  "Outstanding, Iceman! What about the heavy hydrogen? Will supply be a problem?"

  "Not at all, CAG. One trip by Midway to a nearby star system with a gas giant, and we'll have enough heavy hydrogen for 100 warheads."