Alpha strike, p.14
Alpha Strike, page 14
Ten minutes during which no one called them to ask what the hell they were doing. That was probably a good indicator that the alarm led to a security area not being monitored by the people controlling Port Royale.
Once Doctor Wilson extracted the laser snake, she put the original remote back in, and it scurried through the now open duct and deeper into the air system. The conduit split off multiple times and became smaller, but the spider was able to make its way through.
Their first sign of success came when the remote arrived at a tube that went up. It terminated at a vent that directed the airflow out through the bulkhead. The vent plate was screwed in with standard fasteners that he was amused to note the spider was quite adept at undoing from the inside with its tiny legs. One by one, it unwound them and pushed them out of the vent cover until the remote could push against the cover itself and send it tumbling down.
The remote climbed out onto the bulkhead to see what was there. There were a lot of crates visible in the dim light, but that seemed to be it. A sizeable internal lift made for cargo sat nearby.
The remote scurried around the crates at Wilson’s orders, looking for any markings but finding none. It even went on top of a pile of crates to make sure that there wasn’t something up there. Nada.
“Well, that’s annoying,” Hutton ventured. “We know there’s a lot of something in there, but we can’t get in to figure out what it is.”
“Who says we can’t get to it?” Mac asked. “We just watched this little thing unscrew an air vent. It can walk right up the hatch and open it for us.”
“I feel like I’m breaking into a bank vault in some entertainment video,” Wilson said with a smile. “Tell me you don’t feel the same way.”
“I’ve been thinking that for the last fifteen minutes,” Mac admitted. “I think you need to go to the right. Find the bulkhead and then look for the hatch.”
She sent the device scurrying that way and found the massive hatch. There were controls next to it behind a protective cover that the spider could open. Exiting was as simple as pressing the green button, which sent the hatch sliding open and kicked the lighting up to full.
The three of them extracted Wilson from the deck and made their way around to the hatch. Whatever was in the crates was big and looked like it might be the same item because all the crates were of a uniform size. What the hell could be in there?
Apparently, Hutton was curious enough to activate a small forklift to get one of the crates down off the top of the nearest pile. There was no room to set it on the deck inside the warehouse, so he exited the storage area and set it down in the corridor. Then he went back into the compartment and returned with a prybar.
“Can’t have crates without having a way to open them,” he confided. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
He used the prybar to remove the large fasteners and let them fall to the deck. When he had the top of the crate loose, they shoved it open. That accomplished, lowering the nearest side to see what was in it was simple enough.
Only Mac had no idea what he was looking at. The crate was filled with long pieces of high-tech machinery that were slightly curved and as thick as his body. The stacked segments inside the crate were all identical, separated by packing material and braces.
“What the hell are these?” he asked as he ran a hand along one of the devices.
“No clue,” Hutton admitted. “I’ve been in logistics for a long time, and I’ve never seen anything like them.”
“That’s because you’ve never looked in the right places, and this isn’t the kind of thing that’s just stored anywhere,” Wilson said in a hushed tone. “These are segments to a quantum gate. If they’re all connected together, they form a complete circle that’s quite large. Then fusion plants and control nodes are attached to the exterior. I suppose those must be on one of the other decks inside this storage area. If all these crates hold segments to quantum gates, they’re a means to restore access to the cluster.”
Mac chuckled before shaking his head. “I’m pretty sure Commodore Romanoff has no intention of allowing anyone easy access to areas we bring back under our control, but you’re still going to need to tally up everything and give him an update, Joby. I’m wondering why the Confederation bothered putting these here. They’d have to have the same concerns we do. Installing a new means for everyone’s favorite enemy to get from system to system that easily cannot be something they’d have wanted.”
“It’s a mystery,” Hutton agreed. “I’ll get some people to tally up what we’ve got. Now that the crate is open, I see a chip on the right-hand side. That’ll be for inventory purposes, so there’ll be hand units around here somewhere. That’ll make tallying everything a lot simpler.”
He turned to Wilson. “Do you think you can look at some of these and tell me more about them, Doc? The other ones were set up so the Navy could blow them up. Are these the same? Do we need to worry about explosives in this compartment?”
“I have no idea, but it’ll be interesting to find out,” the older woman said. “Let’s go exploring, shall we? If we find anything, Major Turner has some professionals that can advise us on what to do next.”
Mac pulled his comm off his belt and called for the ordnance disposal people. Best to have the pros on hand, just in case. He had no idea why these gates were here, but he supposed it gave them a few more options going forward.
17
Jack walked into the briefing room and waved everyone back to their seats before they had a chance to rise. He took a seat at the head of the table and swept his gaze over his officers. India McKinnon sat to his right with Kelly Danek, Charlie Ferraro, Derek Calvo, Sara Nastasi, and the professor further down the table. To his left sat Joby Hutton, Alexey Golousenko, Amanda Harris, Ahmed Adel, and Mac Turner.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “My call with Connor ran long.”
“Has he managed to get the council to agree to the treaty yet?” India asked.
“No. I even offered to speak to them myself, but he said that might make matters worse. As he’s letting us get the materials we need, I don’t want to push things if I don’t have to. Best to let things lie for the moment. We’re now forty-eight hours short of kickoff, and it’s time to nail down what we’re going to do when we get to New Copenhagen. Let’s cover everything we have in progress to be sure we’re ready. Engineering, how is the work going with the fusion plants?”
The tall, brown-haired woman smiled. “We’ve yanked the two dead fusion plants and replaced them with the two from Scorpius. Had to swap out some parts, but they’re green and operating at full power. We tore down the flaky ones and replaced anything questionable, so they’re also running at full power. The plant from Hawkwing is also running just fine, so we’re powered up and ready for anything in engineering, sir.”
“Well done to you and all your people. What is the power situation aboard Scorpius?”
“She’s as dead as a doornail. My power guys think they can get one of the remaining plants up again, and that would allow her to be a weapons platform. Her drives would need a lot of work, so not a mobile one, unfortunately. As for her independent quantum drive, it’s in pieces, and I have no time to look at it.”
“I haven’t had a chance to look at the engineering sections on the remaining ships that have power,” Turner said. “The people there are edgy at the moment, and I figured it was better to not push things since we have no treaty and we’re on a deadline.”
“That’s probably for the best,” Jack admitted. “We can check them when we finish with New Copenhagen.”
He looked over at the chief engineer. “Do you have any more information on those gates Joby found, Kelly? The engineering and scientific teams have had five days to go over everything, and I’d like to know their status.”
She shrugged. “I’ve never had a chance to examine a quantum gate before, but that’s what those are. I don’t have any civilian gates to compare them to, but those don’t seem to be the same. For one thing, they’ve got an identify friend or foe system built into their control circuits to make sure only authorized ships can use them. If a ship tries to transit, it gets queried for the appropriate codes. If it doesn’t provide them, there is no transit.”
“Two questions,” Sara said, leaning forward and resting her elbows on the table. “First, why didn’t they use something like that to the system here? We wouldn’t have had the pirates if they’d done so. Or the smugglers and Locusts. Second, just how secure can something like that be? It seems like anyone could detect someone else using the appropriate codes and copy them. That doesn’t seem very secure to me.”
“It’s a bit more advanced than that. First of all, you have to have the appropriate code generation system built into your ships. The gates generate a query based on the timestamp. The receiving system double-checks the validity of the code request, also based on the timestamp, and then generates an appropriate response through a series of algorithms to give it a one-time response that will never be repeated.”
“I’m impressed you were able to figure all that out so quickly,” Jack said.
“I know because of the specification sheets,” she admitted. “We found the code generation units, and they’re exceptionally tamper-resistant. They can also be destroyed by a ship’s crew if need be. The gates are also boobytrapped. If someone tries to get into them without the right codes—different codes than those used for jumping—they self-destruct.”
Jared rubbed his eyes. “It would’ve made a lot of sense to use a system like that as the only means of getting into this system. We can’t say why they didn’t, and we may never know. In any case, it’s not like we need gates at this point in time. We can set those aside for now.”
“It’s going to be important,” India argued. “Once we liberate New Copenhagen, we’ll need to get ships going between there and Port Royale. There’s no way we could carry all the nuclear weapons we need to transport. For that matter, the people down there may be in dire straits. We may have to bring support into the system to help them, too.”
Jack nodded. “There are millions of nuclear warheads to be moved. That’s not going to be as critical for our current fighting efforts, but we can’t leave them where the Locusts can take them away from us at will. It’s been weeks since the gates were taken down, and there’s no telling what forces the Locusts have in transit between systems even now.”
He grimaced. “Hell, I’d be surprised if the Locusts at New Copenhagen didn’t send motherships to notify nearby systems about Hunter already. We’re going to draw them like moths to a flame, so we need to figure a way to defend both systems, and I’m not sure how we manage that. Does anyone have any ideas?”
“The station and the battleships have weapon systems, so getting things prepared here will be a lot easier than at New Copenhagen,” India said. “If we have enough time, we can create orbital missile platforms and laser batteries for them. It would be simple enough to nudge small asteroids of the appropriate size into place. They’d have to be large enough to mount everything and host a fusion plant and thrusters to keep them steady. The problem will be doing it fast enough to make a difference.”
“If they sent someone for help the moment they detected us, the nearest occupied system is three months away at what we estimate their hyperdrives can move,” Jack said. “That puts the response to our incursion at about half a year now. That should be more than enough time to get ready for them, though we’ll use a more conservative estimate for the timing.”
He smiled coldly. “For that matter, if we can get the nuclear warheads we need, we should be able to take the closest systems away from them long before the motherships from New Copenhagen could arrive to ask for help. We’ve got the advantage of speed since they can no longer use our quantum gates against us.”
Even if the motherships had launched a force toward New Copenhagen when the gates were destroyed, they’d still be almost three months away. They had a window of opportunity, and they needed to use it ruthlessly.
“We have some idea of the forces we’ll face at New Copenhagen,” Ahmed said, “but not the full scope. What if we can’t take them?”
“Then it’s not going to matter what we do to prepare for holding the system, will it?” Jack asked. “We can’t go into this assuming we’re going to fail. We’re going to win this fight, though we may take damage doing so. If we get some serious breaches, what are our repair options?”
“It’s a bit time-consuming but a lot simpler than one might imagine,” Kelly said. “Basically, we melt nickel-iron asteroids and pump the material into the blast pits after driving some supports in to act as a framework. Once the metal hardens back up, we’re as good as new, other than having to drill a few new passages and mount weapons on the surface.”
“Don’t we need that now? We’ve taken some serious hits.”
The engineer shook her head. “While we got some blast pits from being knocked around, the damage doesn’t go deep enough to worry about fixing before this fight. I’ve already spoken with Connor about dedicating some of their refining capacity. We don’t have to be as picky as they are about separating the various minerals. We just want a nickel-iron asteroid melted down to the point we can fill the holes.”
“How does that work in space?” Sara asked. “Isn’t everything going to coagulate back together again?”
“Not as fast as you might think since vacuum is a good insulator. As we heat it to the point that it turns liquid, it’ll be malleable long enough to get it into place and tamp it to a good consistency. At the moment, they’re using large solar reflectors to concentrate light into a very small area and melt off portions of an asteroid they’ve captured.”
She leaned forward and smiled. “I’ve suggested something they could use for large-scale mining operations. We move a fusion plant out there and run power through the asteroid to melt it all simultaneously. We’d have to go slow and steady, but we can get a lot of metal in condition to use it with the process like that.”
Jack didn’t know about that kind of thing, so he was willing to leave perfecting the process to the professionals. If they said they could get it done, they could get it done.
“It sounds like we’ve got plans in motion for everything after the invasion,” he said. “That leaves the question of the aliens. What can you tell us about them, Professor? Any chance they’re willing to talk?”
“Willing? I believe so. Able to? Sadly, we’re not there yet. The translation program Miss Gane is working on is still primitive and error-prone. It’s getting better, but only by small increments. The remainder of the aliens are awake and in the quarters we’ve prepared for them. They seem gregarious with one another, and we have a few that we’ve managed to get started on some children’s programs to learn our language.”
He smiled a little. “I doubt they’ll be able to speak it anytime soon—other than in a basic form—but they may be faster at learning our language than we are mastering theirs.”
Jack was impressed. He’d never thought about doing something like that. “Where did you find that kind of program?”
“Port Royale, of course. Being as they have a full range of the population, there are parents with programs to help teach their children, so we’ve got everything from baby primers all the way up to tutorials and study guides for adults learning it as a second language. If any of these aliens have an affinity to learning our language, I believe we can move to speaking without an artificial translator faster than I’d guessed.”
“That’s great news,” Jack said.
“As their mouths are shaped differently than ours, they may not be able to speak our language effectively,” the professor cautioned. “Still, with an appropriate keyboard, they should be able to learn to communicate via the written word, if nothing else. We’re looking at all avenues, Jack. It’s not going to happen in a few days—or even a few weeks—but we’re making progress.”
“What about their behavior?” India asked. “These are the beings that created the Locusts, after all. Do they seem inordinately hostile?”
“Quite the contrary. I’d have expected the people that created such aggressive machines to be significantly more confrontational. It’s quite the mystery.”
Well, it would have to be a mystery they’d solve later. It was time to move on to the most important part of the meeting. Figuring out the best way to attack the Locusts at New Copenhagen.
Jack turned his attention to Derek. “I realize you’ve been working on an attack plan for New Copenhagen. It’s time to let us know what you propose.”
“Misdirection,” the young officer said. “We’ve already riled them up by drawing them to our location before jumping. They then found the quantum gate and poured resources through it, only to have it destroyed in their faces. They don’t know that we’ve destroyed every mothership that came through the gate, so they expect to get the word about where we went eventually.”
Jack nodded his appreciation of that succinct summary. “And how will we misdirect them?”
The young man grinned. “We’ll jump into New Copenhagen and power around at full speed to draw them to our location. Then, we’ll jump through a series of unoccupied systems before jumping back to New Copenhagen on the other side of the system from where we left them.”
“Could they use their hyperdrive to come at us, even if it is slower?” India asked.
“No. It has the same exclusion zone—at least—as we have. They’ll be stuck in normal space. Based on where New Copenhagen is located, we can draw them almost all the way around the star the first time. That means they won’t be able to catch us at the planet before we arrive in orbit.”
“We’ll be able to deal with what they leave there and any of the patrols that are still in the system, but we’ll have to defend the planet against the ones we lured out of position when they come back,” Amanda said. “That’s where we’ll take a beating.”
