CHAPTER 19: Paper Tigers

A Scythian voice came over the feed, saying excitedly, “We have to cut the anti-gravitational beam or we’ll risk losing the ship.”

“Belay that!” roared an obviously Terran voice. “Scythian tender two and three get your asses over to the Iowa now and put your anit-grav beams on the Iowa. Stabilize the ship if you can’t hold her aloft. Do it now!”

Two Scythian tenders turned towards the Iowa and in a few seconds they surrounded the huge battleship. They added their anti-gravitational beams to the Iowa and the battleship stabilized. Slowly it floated into the air.

Augesburcke, who’d been holding his breath, let out a whistle. “It looks as though our ships are a helluva lot heavier than Galactic vessels—that was a close one.”

The Terran yard foreman agreed, and over the airwaves he was yelling, “Who do you people have doing your calculations? I thought you were advanced; that was just plain stupid! Don’t you ever put one of my ships at risk like that again!”

The Scythian’s reply was terse, which only prompted more yelling.

“At least our people aren’t intimidated by the Scythians or their technology,” Augesburcke smiled. “Go on Doctor.”

“Another advantage we have is our naval vessels were built to be sealed against the elements, specifically water. Their compartmentalized layout and limited necessity for having any crew topside makes the modifications relatively simple given the Scythian resources. The process has not been as labor intensive as might have been thought at first glance, but it is extensive, and time consuming.

“The old American battleship Iowa is the initial test project. What we see here is a “tritanium bath;” i.e. a Scythian tender irradiates the warship with an energy bath infused with tritanium. This changes the molecular structure of the ship’s steel hulls into a tritanium alloy, making the ship even stronger than it was to begin with. We’ve already gutted the engine room, the equipment there being, of course, quite useless. The enormous size of the compartment works greatly to our advantage and we’ve used it for every type and description of Galactic equipment. The equipment comes in largely self contained units and takes up much less space than the ships original machines, while doing far more for us.”

Hashimoto clicked the display to one of the engine room. In the abandoned space were ten rows of fifteen minivan sized units. “Here are the graviton generators; they generate the necessary gravitational fields which enable the ship to maneuver in an atmosphere, create artificial gravity and dampen the enormous accelerations associated with space flight. You’ll notice they look almost exactly like all the other units, which though ridiculously small, are actually life support units, fire control units, and replication/regeneration units. Even the heart of the ship, the superluminal matter-anti-matter core, looks like anything but what it is. That’s it in the center of the bay, looking somewhat like two garage sized cathode ray tubes placed vertically and back to back.

“Fortunately, all the units are designed to be completely self contained, and little more is necessary than attaching the equipment to bulkheads and control boards. Power is supplied through from the engines through conduits, but that was not a serious engineering problem, and the enormous volume of the engine room made this relatively simple. The translight engines are mounted externally. We did this consistent with the Galactic technique, and frankly it makes our job easier. Despite their internal complexity they come intact, no assembly required so to speak, and all we needed to do was to weld them at the aft of the ship, one on either side, and attach them through energy conduits to the core.”

“What about control for the equipment?” Augesburcke asked.

“We’ve kept with tradition and practicality by keeping the nerve center of the ship on the bridge. The entire ship can be controlled from the bridge, but manual overrides and redundant controls will be available on location as well as on the battle bridge, which is deep in the hull of the ship. The new consoles, as well as every other station on the ship, will use the ship’s hull to transmit orders. The technique is elegantly simple. Each control board sends out pulses of code attuned to the molecular tritanium structure of the ship. The pulses actually make their way naturally through the metal lattice of the hull on the sub-atomic level. An engine command from the bridge will leave a coded transceiver as an energy pulse and travel by shortest pathway to a similarly coded transceiver. Should battle damage occur the signals will automatically travel to the receiver via the path of least resistance, so long as a path remains. It’s ingenious, and frankly it’s all that allows us to tackle this problem at all. There’s no need for the miles of slow electronic wiring, and the millions of connections and switches that conventional controls would require.”

“I’m impressed, Doctor, I am genuinely impressed,” Augesburcke admitted. “How soon can we make her fly?”

“Fly? That’s not such a problem; two days. However,”

“There’s always a “but” with you people,” Augesburcke sighed.

“I’m sorry Admiral, she’ll fly but she’ll be a true “paper tiger,” at least for the moment. We have a problem with the armament.”

“I thought the Scythians had more than they thought we could ever use?”

“They do. It’s all stockpiled in the navy yards; everything from small caliber weapons to battleship rated blaster projectors. We’ve got the weapons. We even have a practical method of mounting the projectors: our rifled turret guns are perfect mounts for them. The rotation and elevation of the guns in turrets is something we take for granted terrestrially, but it’s not found on Galactic guns. All Galactic projectors are stationary. Therefore, if we ever get them working it will put us in a situation similar to the United States Civil War clash between the “Monitor” and the “Merrimac.” Only this time the “Monitor” will have the same number of guns as its adversary.”

“What’s the problem then?”

“Energy transfer, Admiral,” Hashimoto said. “Galactic design uses the energy conduits to transfer the energy of the engines directly to the weapons. These conduits are laid down as the structural backbone of the ship due to the sheer size and mass of the conduits. It would take weeks to cut out enough of the Iowa to put in the framework of the conduits and then we’d have a mess putting her back together. There’s got to be a better way. We’re working on it, but the Scythians are no help. They know one way to do things, and if it doesn’t work it’s considered impossible.”

“I doubt if they really want us to arm these babies all that badly,” Augesburcke admitted, warming somewhat to the Doctors efforts. “Well done, well done, I may have spawned the idea, but if you pull it off I’ll make sure you’re known as the Physicist who taught a battleship to fly!”

“Thank you, Admiral but we’ve got a long way to go,” Hashimoto told him.

“How long until she’s ready for trials,” Augesburcke asked.

“We’re about halfway complete at this stage, so another week at least. With what we’ve learned, however, I think we can eventually hone the process down to six or seven days.”

“A week to a space ship, not bad, but a warship is what I could really use,” Augesburcke said.

“If we can figure out the energy problem, Admiral, you’ll have more than a warship. I’m not a military man, but when we’re done the Iowa will outclass any Galactic battleship in space.”

Augesburcke’s brows rose and Sampson chimed in. “The good Doctor is right. One of the advantages we have, Admiral is the homogeneity of the Galactics technology. This includes military technology as well. A Chem battleship and a Syraptose battleship are virtually interchangeable. Although Galactic technology is many years ahead of us it has remained at the same level for hundreds of thousands of years. The result is there are no secrets left. Everyone out there knows exactly what to expect from everyone else.”

“And here we come with something based on our warfare, but with their experience; something completely new. That will be quite unsettling to their military commanders,” Augesburcke mentioned, thinking hard on the matter.

“We’ll have quite a different fleet of ships than the Galactics,” the General continued. “We’ve over built our ships because we meant them for the rigors of sea duty, and the pounding of combat. The Galactic ships are like eggs, held together with energy fields. With a tritanium steel hull one hundred times thicker than any Galactic hull underneath her shields the Iowa could theoretically take punishment the Galactic battlewagons could only dream of. In addition, if we get the blaster problem worked out the Iowa will carry nine level thirty-seven blaster projectors, the largest ever designed. A standard Galactic battleship carries fourteen, but because they’re in fixed batteries the most they can ever concentrate on a target is five, only half our broadside.”

“The rifled turrets will also gain us a measure of efficiency over the Galactic projectors,” Dr. Hashimoto added, laying a square metal case on the table. Opening the top, he took out a basketball sized sphere that looked like a huge translucent ruby. A metal flange fitted around the bottom of the sphere with a square cutout in the center roughly six inches to a side. Hashimoto explained, “This is a level seven blaster projector, roughly what you would find on a tank, or a tertiary battleship projector. The way the projector works is elegantly simple. Energy enters through a conduit connected to the metal flange and is focused by the projector—which is essentially an artificial lattice. Through manipulation of an electromagnetic field, the blaster beam can emanate from any portion of the projector along a path perpendicular to the surface. In other words, the beam has a range of travel of about fifteen degrees from the center axis. This gives the Galactic blasters enough versatility to be operated from fixed mounts, but there is a price. The “sweet spot” of the projector, that is where it emits its most powerful beam, is directly along the axis from the energy conduit. A radial interference pattern is set up in the projector which focuses the beam and the wider that pattern the more coherent and powerful the beam. As you focus the beam further from the center this pattern becomes asymmetrical. The Galactics have alleviated this problem to some extent by enlarging the projector to as near spherical as they can manage, but the fact of the matter is that the power of the blaster degrades along a curve as you progress from a firing angle of zero degrees to the maximum of fifteen degrees. Hopefully, we won’t have that problem. Our projectors can remain fixed, firing from the “sweet spot” at one hundred percent efficiency at all times while the rifled turret aims at the target. While it sounds good theoretically this concept also adds another technical problem.”

“And what is that?” Augesburcke sighed.

“It’s the energy conduit tie in, Admiral. The Galactics gave up on the problem. That’s probably one of the reasons they opted for a fixed projector. Their energy conduits are fixed paths from the engines to the blasters. That’s a fairly simple concept which we can probably emulate fairly soon. Somewhere along the line we’re going to have to get that energy from a fixed conduit to a projector that is moving around on the back end of a rifled gun barrel. We can’t just strap on an accordion frame and the mathematics involved in creating a moving magnetic bottle is frankly beyond our capability. At the moment we’re stuck.”

Augesburcke sighed and shrugged. “I have every confidence you can solve the problem, Dr. Hashimoto. Do you have any other good news for me?”

“There are the engines,” Sampson chimed in. “We got fleet salvage and surplus for all the rest of the gear, but the superluminal and sub-light engines are state of the art spares for the Scythian merchant fleet. They’re pretty much brand new, and there’s nothing faster. This is especially good because our ships are so much more massive than the Galactic warships. If we had equivalent sub-light engines we’d be a great disadvantage in maneuverability, but with these we’ll at least be able to keep up with them.”

“Well that is better news,” Augesburcke grinned. “It’s a pity we’ve so few of them though, battleships, that is. The American Navy is the only one that kept any around. There’s only eight out there as either reserves or museum pieces. Now the Galactics built them in a ratio of five to a hundred. That would give the Chem Armada about thirty-seven or thereabouts to our eight.”

“Forty-two actually, discounting the Homeworld Guardian Armada,” General Sampson chimed in. “But things aren’t quite that gloomy, Admiral.”

“Forty-two to eight, I would like to know why not?”

“We’ve found out quite a bit of unexpected information on our own stockpiles since this Chem threat emerged,” Sampson smiled, and he changed the holographic display to a satellite view of remote northern Canada. As he zoomed in on Hudson Bay, he explained, “Immediately following the Second World War there was a strong public outcry for disarmament. The powers at hand realized a need to address the public desires, but at the same time the realities of the Cold War meant that we couldn’t afford to get rid of our hard to replace assets. To address this paradox the powers that be fell back on a tried and true method: they lied. We ended up putting our high visibility assets on the chopping block. On paper, that is.”

The hologram centered on an orderly group of dark specks against the blue water. As the camera zoomed in the specks grew into ships. “In reality, all the old battlewagons, heavy cruisers, carriers and the like went into mothballs in the fjords of Norway, the bays of Canada, the inlets of Western Australia, etc. They’ve been sitting there just waiting for a day like this.”

“Why those sneaky bastards, I didn’t even know about that. How many does that give us?”

“We can give you thirty-nine battlewagons for modification, Admiral. That should give the Chem something to look at!”

“Hot damn, we’ll build a real damn fleet out of this yet!”

“May I interject a point?” Sadat asked.

“By all means,” Augesburcke told her.

“I share your enthusiasm for an aggressive deterrent, Admiral, but I feel I must point out that any deterrent, no matter how fearsome, must also be creditable. We may be able to build the ships, and even outfit them with armament, but how are we going to actually use them? The Galactics fear us for what we might become, and though we would have gone a long way towards realizing that fear we’ve still never fought a space battle. I don’t pretend to know the business of the military, but do we think we could win such an engagement against a warrior race to which space is second nature?”

“Ms. Sadat makes an excellent, if sobering point,” Augesburcke admitted. “Could we win such a battle—doubtful? The learning curve in war is very steep very quickly, but the cost of experience is always casualties. I don’t think we have that luxury.”

“Maybe, but we do have the “Legend of Alexander,” Doctor Koto reminded them. “ Faced with a Terran fleet led by the heir to Alexander’s throne who knows what the reaction of the Galactics would be?”

“We’d need an heir to that throne, Doctor. What do we do, hire an actor? Still, it’s a course of action, and I think we’re at a point where things could go either way,” Augesburcke said. “That is a far cry from a few days ago, ladies and gentlemen. I commend you on a job well along the way. I think we can agree that bluff and bluster are our best options and we should pursue that route, maintaining our military battle option as a fall back plan. I think, Doctor Koto that Ms. Sadat and you had best brainstorm with me on that very issue. As for Doctor Hashimoto and General Sampson, well gentlemen, you’ve got a fleet to build.”

The meeting began to break up when an aide entered the room. “I’m sorry for the interruption, Admiral, but we thought you better see this.” A feed appeared on the hologram. It was a dark amphitheater within which a single naked Terran male stood illuminated in a pillar of light. “We just picked this up off the ethernet. It’s apparently a rebroadcast. The Chem have captured a Terran and are putting him on trial.”

“Well, well, this gets more interesting every day. Roll the tape!” Augesburcke ordered, and the five most powerful people on Terra watched the trial of Alexander.