Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) (13 page)

‘Karadon,’ Buzz informed him, ‘has a well deserved reputation as the roughest station in space – rough, tough and lawless.  Romantic, it isn’t.  Canelon is, of course, a very pretty world, with all the castles and everything, hugely popular as a cruise destination.  Klenghorn, though, is a mining system, and nobody could call
that
either pretty or romantic.  Cwmbracha is all right.  It’s effectively a deep space station, too, though established on a moon in an otherwise uninhabited system.  It’s a popular cruise destination in that sector, famous for its casinos and top class intersystem entertainment. 

‘Altarb, though...’ he grimaced.  ‘That’s not a world spacers generally enjoy going to.  They’ve a gigantic refinery in the system that spews out contaminants at a rate that makes it one of the most polluted systems in the League, and they’re very unfriendly to outsiders, too.  Nobody who has ever been to Altarb would describe it as either exotic or romantic. 

‘The worlds
spacers
consider to be exotic and romantic, thrilling to go to, are Korvold, Ferajo and Lundane.  Debate over which order you put them in and which other world you put into fourth place is a staple of spacer conversation.  Korvold, see, has an extraordinary combination of light gravity and a relatively dense atmosphere.  That’s not only created some of the most spectacular mountains on any known world but means that people can actually fly there.  I mean, fly like
birds
, with nothing more than lightweight wings.  Even spacers are impressed by that. 

‘Ferajo, of course, is famous for its wildlife – a primeval world which humans share with dinosaurs.  Going on safari to see dragons there is high on most spacers’ list of ‘must do’ experiences.  I’ve been twice, myself,
and
eaten giant spider legs, which are a Ferajian delicacy.

‘Lundane is romantic in a different way.  It is the most remote world that Fleet ships go to, for a start.  It isn’t a League world, of course.  Lundane is an independent and our primary point of contact with worlds outside our own borders.  You meet people there from worlds so remote that no League ship has ever been there, and there’s a special thrill in that for spacers.’

Mako gave the little grimace so many League citizens tended to give when worlds outside their own borders were mentioned.  That, after all, was a sensitive subject.  Some fourteen hundred years previously, what was known now as the Golden Age of exploration and discovery had been brought to an abrupt halt by the catastrophic first contact approach to Marfik, which had appeared to be a pre-space level society. 

It had turned out, far too late, that they were actually technologically advanced but just hadn’t developed space flight because they did not believe that any intelligent life could exist beyond their own world.  The discovery that there were hundreds of populated worlds out there had had much the same effect on Marfik as poking a hornets’ nest with a stick. 

The Marfikians had taken the first contact vessel and its crew apart to find out how they worked, constructed something better, faster, stronger, and come out from their world with one thought, one unstoppable purpose, to conquer.  They were a cyborg race with no concepts of mercy or of negotiation.  As far as they were concerned, the immutable law of the universe was that the strong dominated the weak.  Seeing all other species as inferior to them, their only negotiating position was encapsulated by ‘We are your masters, you will obey our commands or we will destroy your cities.’ 

It was one of the greatest shames in League history that they had fled from that threat.  They had pulled back their borders to what they felt was defensible and focussed all their efforts on protecting those worlds, abandoning all the other worlds, even some of their own worlds and former allies, to their fate.  

Worlds abandoned to Marfikian domination had endured hundreds of years of being forced to strip-mine or produce whatever other resources they demanded.  Most of those worlds carried the scars of ruined cities.  There was almost no contact between them and the League, though Mako had heard of Lundane as a world which the Marfikians were apparently prepared to tolerate as a trading post between their territories and League worlds. 

Like most people in the League, though, Mako did not even like to think of what might happen if the Marfikians became powerful enough to crush their defences.  People slept easier at night by not thinking about that, and consoling themselves, frankly, that all that was happening a very long way away and so was not an immediate problem.   

‘I’m afraid the best we’re going to be able to offer you, though, in terms of exotic destinations for this trip,’  Buzz saw the flicker of unease on Mako’s face and smiled, keeping the conversation light, ‘is the possibility of a stop off at a slimeworld.  The one the Fleet generally stops off at on Pagolis patrols is known, unofficially, as Paradise Gardens.  That’s a joke – it’s cold, stinking, and deeply encrusted with algae.  But it’s an opportunity to stretch your legs off the ship, which is welcome after two or three weeks on patrol.’

Mako looked at him in amazement.  The prospect of walking on an uninhabited, primordial world was more than exotic enough for him.

‘Really?’  He queried.  ‘We’ll actually be visiting a planet?’

‘Almost certainly.’  Buzz confirmed.  ‘Spacers maintain survival domes at convenient points along shipping routes and we usually do stop at Paradise Gardens when we’re on Pagolis patrols.  We won’t be decelerating there.  We stay outside the system in superlight orbit and go in by shuttle.  It may only be for a few hours but it’s a welcome change of scene.  ‘

Mako nodded, but set that aside as something to think about later.  For right now, he was rather more concerned about the immediate prospect of the launch.

‘I must admit I don’t really understand about the launch tunnel,’ he confided.  ‘When I’ve been superlight before, on shuttle-buses, they’ve just gone superlight by themselves and I’ve never felt more than a bit of a tremor.  So why do bigger ships need to go through tunnels?’

‘Because they
are
bigger.’  Buzz explained.  ‘‘It’s a question of power to mass ratios.  As a general principle, you see, the larger a ship is, the higher its mass, the more engines it needs proportionally to function superlight.  That’s why small craft like system buses can go superlight and decelerate under their own power with only one or two pairs of mix cores, with so much power that the launch is so fast, you only experience it as a brief surging sensation.  A starseeker, say, at 84 tonnes, can function adequately with four cores.  A ship twice that mass doesn’t just need twice the number of cores, though, it needs ten.  The bigger your ship gets, the more extra cores you need, which is the limiting factor in the size of ships we can build, see?  Anything larger than around seventy tonnes needs boost from launch tunnels.  So the size of ships is limited by how many cores you can fit aboard, and the physical strength of ships, too, because if you over-engine them they have a tendency to shake themselves apart. 

‘Mail couriers, for instance, are hellish aboard.  They’re tiny, stripped down life capsules riding ten cores.  They vibrate with teeth rattling force, not just in launch but all the time.  Courier crews have a rep for being wild-eyed maniacs and none too steady on their feet, either, when they first come off a run.  So ‘sustainable speed’ is also a determination made with some reference to the comfort of the people on board, as with liners, which cruise at a speed that creates barely perceptible ‘hum’ through the ship.  We push it a bit further on warships so there’ll be a bit of a buzz when we’re running at speed, but nothing too uncomfortable.’

‘Ah,’ Mako said, and looked at him apologetically.  ‘I suppose it wouldn’t be easy to explain in words of one syllable
why
you need more than twice as many engines for a ship that’s twice as big?  For someone who is wondering why mass is even an issue in this, since I thought that mass was irrelevant, in space, where everything is weightless.’

Buzz stared at him, and several of the crew turned their heads to gape at him, too, too thunderstruck even to laugh, before a quiet word from the duty PO recalled them to their duties.

‘Forgive me.’  Buzz said, after a very telling moment of silence, ‘but do you mind me asking how much science you actually have, Mr Ireson?’

‘I did core science at high school, and scraped a pass.’  Mako admitted, frankly.  ‘Science and maths were always my weakest areas at school – I’m a people person, see, always did better in languages and social studies.  So you’re probably safe to assume, basically, ‘zero science’, and it’s okay,’ he grinned, himself, ‘I don’t mind if people laugh.’

‘Well, we’ll
try
not to get on your nerves with it,’ said Buzz.  ‘But thank you for being so understanding, finding yourself on a ship full of science nerds, here.  But let’s see what we can do with a two minute explanation of superlight physics for someone with zero science.’  A friendly smile, with that.  ‘Firstly, the mass units we use in space are what the ship, or whatever it is, would weigh if it was in standard Chartsey gravity, okay?  Don’t get confused by perceptionism, the screwy effects when you have any two objects travelling at significantly different sublight velocities.  We will gain a few minutes during the launch, relative to the time on Chartsey, but we reset our chronometers as we go through the end of the launch tunnel and that’s nothing for you to worry about. 

‘The best way for you to understand the launch is to think of it as being like an aquaboat.  An aquaboat has to use a lot of force to push through the ocean, overcoming the friction of the water.  If it can speed up enough to rise up on aquaplanes, though, friction is greatly reduced and they can go a lot faster, see?  We use the same principle when we go superlight.  We’re generating a multidimensional field around the ship that lifts us out of the normal space-time continuum.  The more intense our field is, the less friction we experience, and the more quickly we fall through space.  We don’t power through space, you see, we’re falling, with our speed being controlled by the intensity of our superlight field and our direction by manoeuvring thrusters.’

‘Oh, I see!’  Mako looked enlightened.  ‘Why couldn’t my high school physics teacher have explained it like that?’

‘Well, it’s actually a lot more complicated than that,’ Buzz admitted.  ‘But spacers use a variety of civilian-friendly ways to explain it and the aquaboat one is close enough to get the general idea.  Think of it as aquaplaning on the space-time continuum.  We’ll experience a lot of stress during the launch because the friction of the normal space-time continuum is immense.  Mass is important in that because of the mass of particles you’re pushing against the friction of the space-time ocean, relative to the intensity of the field your engines are able to generate.  Once we overcome that inertia, though, and rise up on our aquaplanes, as it were – actually, rise up within a bubble of 24 dimensional forcefields, but same principle – we are no longer experiencing the same kind of stressing friction, so the ship will run smooth again.  You’ll know immediately when we enter wave space because all the juddering and stress on the ship will just stop.  And yes, I know,’ he added, to a rating at a nearby station who’d turned with a look on her face as if she was about to protest, ‘we’re
always
in wave space, but I’m trying to explain this in terms that Mr Ireson can understand, all right?’ 

As the rating gave an acknowledging grin and ‘Sir’, Buzz smiled at the inspector. 

‘Engineers,’ he explained.  ‘It gets on their nerves when people talk about going into wave space like it’s an alternate dimension or something, but
is
the best way for non-scientists to understand it.’

‘Ah, right, I see,’ Mako said.  ‘And am I right in thinking that superlight fuel is the most expensive substance in the known galaxy?’

‘Yes, in terms of cost relative to weight.’  Buzz confirmed.  ‘Superlight fuel is sold by the particle and current price on that is between twenty and thirty million dollars per particle.  There is not enough money in the entire economy of the League to buy a kilo of it, though since there’s less than a microgram of it in existence anyway, that isn’t a problem.  The reason we have to keep fuel particles isolated in individual mix cores, by the way,  rather than building bigger engines which ‘burn more fuel’, is that superlight fuel is already at critical mass as a single particle. 

‘To make superlight fuel, see, you first have to create highly exotic sub-particle arcons, which are made from tachyons.  Once you have your raw fuel you ‘cook’ it through a complex process that involves the kinds of physics only normally experienced inside black holes.  At a critical point, it becomes both a particle and a wave, existing simultaneously both as matter and as energy.  That is not possible under normal physical conditions so it tries to release its energy in an explosion.  But at that point, see, it’s captured into a stasis field, contained so that it can’t explode physically.  That creates a highly energetic multidimensional field within the core, which can be channelled out through towers and distributed around the ship.  The nearer you allow the particle of fuel to get to the point where it can explode, the more intense the field becomes.  The fuel is not used up by that process, it has sufficient energy to be used for billions of years.  But that is why we are so careful, always, that launch and deceleration runs must never be in the direction of a planet or parked shipping.  If a core does dephase, it will destroy everything within about twenty five thousand kilometres, which could obviously, worst-case scenario, take out a planet.’