Alicia Jones 3: New Frontier
Read Alicia Jones 3: New Frontier Online
Authors: D. L. Harrison
Tags: #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Space Opera
New Frontier
An Alicia Jones novel 03
Author: D. L. Harrison
Copyright
2016. This is a work of fiction. Names, Characters, Places and
incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living
or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of
this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
permission.
It’s been just a little over a week since we turned the
Knomen home world into a jail. I liked to think of it as sending the
Knomen to stand in the corner, perhaps with a dunce hat, until they learn how
to share well with others.
I felt energized, it was my first day back aboard my ship,
the command ship, since my vacation. I’d said goodbye to Nathan as his
leave ended at the same time. It would be a while before I could see him
again. Twenty-three of the twenty-seven home worlds that approached us to
be added to the treaty were already on board. Things were moving fast.
Of course, that left three on the cusp of a decision either
way, and twenty-three other worlds that were being quiet. The reports
seemed almost endless about our neighbors. A few of those were building
ships, some were just waiting, and so far there hadn’t been a hint of trouble
from the Seltan. I wasn’t too surprised about
that,
they were probably waiting for the crap to hit the fan between the fifty old
worlds of the Knomen empire before trying again. So far, things were
peaceful. Granted, it had only been eight days.
“What the hell?” I whispered under my breath when I got to
my latest orders, and forecasts.
Okay, the USFS board had obviously gone insane. They’d
sent out orders to cut the finalized fleet sizes by more than half, and just
for fun they wanted a plan to start exploring the rest of our arm of the galaxy
toward the rim by the end of the week, with a target date at the end of a
month.
I looked over at Kristi, “The board has gone crazy, want to
come with me to ask them about it?”
Kristi snickered and walked over, and then quickly read over
my shoulder before laughing.
“Yup, this should be good.”
They left and stopped by the bridge first.
“Sergei, Anthony, I know I just got here, but I need to go
talk to the board, in person.”
They both nodded.
“Do either of you know what’s going on?”
Anthony shook his head, Sergei smiled and shrugged, “I’ll
bet you dinner it’s politics.”
He was probably right.
Kristi laughed, “No bet. But we should be back by
then, I hope.”
They started for the hangar and Kristi asked, “Did you go
over the business yet?”
I shook my head, “I was going to do that when I was caught
up here. What happened?”
Kristi replied, “Shelly thinks she’s done it, an AI that is
a lot more lifelike and can act as a true assistant. But there’s a
catch. It won’t work on most computers, since it needs the processing
power of at least a mini-mainframe. To say the least, it will be a huge
expense to anyone that wants one, and most won’t be able to afford it.
Oh, and since we have mini-mainframes, she wants us to test market them.”
“Anything else?”
Kristi nodded as we walked into the shuttle bay and headed
for the unarmed shuttle that looked like a car. We couldn’t really take
an armed shuttle to the U.N. buildings. Well we could, but I didn’t want
to start trouble.
After we were in the shuttle and it left the ship, Kristi
continued.
“Caroline isn’t sure about the nanites completely replacing fabricators,
she’s no longer sure it can be done with our current understanding of power
sources. But she believes the repair nanites are ready for patent
submission, and rollout.”
I grinned, “That’s neat. I want some of those for all
my ships, and our house. How ready is it?”
No more repair droids, or printing out replacement dresses
or shoes, or fixing a ding in the car, or… the list goes on. Everything
from holes in our socks, to keeping the house structure itself in perfect shape
by constant repairing and maintaining. Ships too. It would change
everything, wear and tear will be a thing of the past. Even the nanites
themselves would self-repair, or replicate when needed. It would also be
able to do new ship upgrades when new technologies came out, within reason.
Kristi snickered at my excitement, “You’re such a geeky
princess. Caroline says it’s ready. All we have to do is
fabricate. I haven’t looked it over yet, I suggest we both do so before
letting her loose. Also, if we do the AI thing, I think it would be
prudent to lock it out of the weapons access, and use older AIs for that until
it’s proven.”
I thought about that for a minute as Al drove us through the
city toward the UN complex.
“That’s a great idea. Can you make that happen?”
I usually was the one to dive in, I liked to do things
myself. But Kristi’s programming could run circles around mine. I’d
have fun with the other invention. I mean, I’d professionally evaluate
the repair nanites.
I added, “I’ll run with the nanite part. We can set
them loose in the shuttles, if they behave normally I’ll put them in the house
and main ship. If that works out, we’ll put it on the market, and try to
get the board to buy some for the fleet.”
Of course, that brought us back around to the board and I
frowned. Obviously something had happened to derail all our plans,
because I hadn’t seen this coming.
2
Board members Nadia Avdonin from Russia, and Gerald Anderson
from England met us in the hallway.
Gerald looked grim, Nadia smiled tentatively, they both
looked very tired.
Nadia said “We were expecting you, please follow me.”
Kristi and I shared a look and followed them down the
hallway to a smaller room and took a seat around a small conference table.
Gerald said, “This meeting is off the record, officially,
you have your orders. Unofficially, we feel we owe you an explanation for
the changes, though it’s entirely your fault.”
I could sense Nadia’s amusement at Gerald’s words, and
agreement. I sat back and imagined I looked quite confused.
“I don’t understand, this says home fleet will be cut back
to five hundred ships, and the exploratory fleet to a thousand. That’s
less than half of what we were promised.”
Nadia sighed, “We tried to fight it of course. You
know the board has full autonomy by the laws passed in all the countries.
As far as space goes, what we say is the law. However, in practice it
isn’t quite that simple, our budget is cut from our home countries. So
you could say we can do anything we want, unless we run out of money.”
I shook my head in annoyance, “How is this my fault?”
Nadia laughed, “We are a victim of your success of course.”
When I didn’t say anything Gerald stepped in.
“You defeated the Knomen home system with a tenth of the
fleet size you requested, almost two years earlier than projected. With
just two hundred ships with all the accompanying support craft, attack
shuttles, and missile boats. Believe me, we fought hard to keep what we
are now getting, the original cut was even larger. We managed to preserve
over twice the numbers you had at the last battle for home defense, and four
times the number you used for the exploratory fleet. It’s not so much the
ships, although they are expensive, it’s more the people, training, supplies
etc...
“In addition, we are no longer in imminent danger, so even
that much was a hard sell. With the Knomen threat over our heads we were
pretty much given whatever we asked. Now that we have some breathing room
our governments’ priorities have shifted. You understand, this is human
nature. This might change again, but only if one of our neighbors starts
to exceed what we have, if that makes sense. Right now we are probably
starting a galactic arms race as a result of freeing everyone from the Knomen,
but we’re also ahead of all the competition by a few laps right now, both in
technological edge, and numbers.”
I nodded, I got it now. Politics.
In a way they were also right, perhaps I was a little
paranoid about our safety net. Although, considering the stakes if we get
it wrong was losing the entire world and human race, I wondered if being overly
paranoid possible.
“So what about the exploration part? What if we kick a
hornet’s nest out there toward the rim? They aren’t willing to wait
another… nine months? Until the fleets are complete?”
He shook his head, but it was Nadia that answered.
“No, but they do understand that threat. They want a
plan that will lessen the possibility of the hornet’s nest, but they want you
working on expansion. We have ambassadors, and of course, the council, to
deal with old empire worlds. Right now you are just sitting in orbit,
going over reports and overseeing things, they want to get their money’s
worth. Again, you are a victim of your own success. They want you
out there making things happen.”
Kristi asked, “What about unmanned?”
Nadia raised an eyebrow.
Kristi explained, “You said it’s more a manpower, food, and
supply issue. What if we keep the home fleet down to five hundred, which
we already have by the way, so any new ships can be in the exploratory
fleet. But yeah, can we say, double or even triple our emplacements,
unmanned platforms, and Shield missiles? There all controlled by AI from
the command ship. That would more than make up for the cut.”
Nadia frowned, “Maybe double. But there’s still an
expense to fabricate them.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I made some money every
time they fabricated anything to do with the anti-mass field generation.
That included FTL and shields for ships, all the missiles, even the plasma
cannons. I didn’t care about the money, just about Earth being protected,
but there comes a point where what other people believe will matter more than
the truth. In short, perception over truth.
“I assume everyone is anxious to get out there and open up
colonies as soon as possible, that’s also why they want a plan in a week, and
execution to start within a month?”
Nadia nodded.
“So let’s leave the emplacements as good enough, and just
make Shield missiles and unmanned platforms. We’ll be happy, because our
system will be locked up tight, and the bean counters will be happy, because we
can move platforms and Shield missiles to a new system as soon as we determine
it can be colonized. They have FTL, so we don’t even have to ship them,
just send them there.”
Nadia seemed to relax, “I think we can sell that, good
thought.”
Gerald asked, “Any ideas on the exploring part?”
“Not sure yet, I have an inkling how we can do it safely, or
at least not like a bunch of charging elephants, but I’ll have to test it.”
Nadia frowned, “What do you mean, aren’t we just going to
send a small part of what will be our exploratory fleet?”
I shook my head, “What I envisioned for the exploratory
fleet was to go where we found a place for a new colony, and protect it until
local protections could be built. It would also be able to protect
civilian shipping, answer calls for mutual defense, and coupled with a science
ship do research and check on civilizations not yet at FTL to evaluate
them. Things like that. I did not expect people would waste time
flying from star to star blind, without any idea of what they would find.”
Kristi grinned, “Too Star Trek that.”
I held back a laugh and glared at her, it just bounced off
my best friend though.
Gerald asked, “So what is your inkling of an idea.”
I sighed, “Well, we should do just like we did for the
Knomen empire to take a look at things. Unmanned probes. They can
find the interesting spots for us to go to by sending back data. There
are a lot of stars in our arm, in the tens of billions, which means there are
probably somewhere around a hundred million G or F type stars, just in our arm,
which in theory could have a planet supporting life.
“I think the fact we can now cross the galaxy from edge to
edge in less than ten days has skewed the fact that the milky way is big.
Hard to conceive big. We can see light years of it with our sensors
now. So we send out drones to scan, wherever they find a planet in the
goldilocks zone they can go for a closer look, and drop off a smaller sensor
array to stay there if it looks like something us humans would actually want to
look at, or keep an eye on.
“At the same time, we should be dropping enough random
sensors in a tight enough web to pick up ships going FTL, so we have an early
warning system if an unknown alien craft is heading in our direction. One
day, many years from now we might have all the f/g stars figured out.
Then maybe we can check some of the others, it is possible non-human life could
be on one of those, or at least, more resources. Then again we might
check out our neighboring arms and around the core, but that is very long term
planning.”
Gerald sputtered, “You just said you had to look into it,
that sounds like a solid plan to me.”
I was actually a little impressed with myself, I made all
that up off the cuff.
Kristi spoke up, “Well, it is and it isn’t. I don’t
think she wants to use the same probes we used to peek around the Knomen
empire, those show up on sensors. If I know Alicia, she wants to test
creating stealth probes, probably based on what she saw on the Tressian stealth
ship.”
I looked at Kristi in surprise, it’s exactly what I was
thinking.
Kristi grinned, “What, it’s obvious. If there’s a big
bad civilization out there, we don’t want them seeing us snooping around and
following a probes trail straight back to Earth.”
Okay, it might have been obvious to Kristi, but it looked
like Gerald and Nadia wanted to disagree.
I nodded, “She’s right. I want to build the probe
about the size of a Shield missile, with a small fabricator on it, and very
small sensor arrays for it drop off.”
Gerald frowned, “Why not just build probes.”
I shrugged, “Saving you money? We build a hundred of
the stealth probe ships instead of thousands, and they just drop off a small
probe where needed. The small probe will be very small, like a soccer
ball maybe, or smaller if I can swing it. No FTL, just a small EM shield
good enough to protect the electronics, sensors, a quantum transmitter to send
the data back, and a very weak gravity drive for station keeping. We
should be able to power it with solar energy, and it won’t need reaction fuel
without an ION drive or a mini fusion reactor. When the probe ship runs
out of the small stationary probes, it can land on an asteroid, and fabricate
more, then continue its mission.”
I left off the part about the self-repairing nanites, which
would enable the thing to last pretty much forever, it would never wear
out. I trusted Gerald and Lydia, but there was no patent yet, and I had a
responsibility to Caroline to protect her IP until it was ready, and patented.
Nadia shook her head, “So what do you have to test?”
I grinned, “I’m sure I can make the stealth probe, or small
unmanned ship if you prefer, without issue. The test will be if the
little probe can run off of a power source weak enough to be considered
background energy but still powerful enough to run the needed systems.
Likely, it will need to be inside a solar system, no more than one or two AU
away from the star for the background radiation to hide it. If it doesn’t
work, we’ll have to figure something else out.”
Gerald grunted, “Sounds good, and smart to be
cautious. Just get us the plan by the end of the week.”
I nodded, and took that as a dismissal. It was time to
get back to the ship, since it looked like I was going to be very busy,
again. Between exploration, the nanites, and the new AI, I was going to
be busy. I could leave the platforms and Shield missile production to my
vice admirals. I’d take being busy and even better, productive, over
bored any day. I just hoped there were no fires to put out, I’d had more
than enough battles to last me a long time…