Bayley, Barrington J - Novel 10 Page 5

  "No, I don't think so. It includes Earth, the original colonising planet, but I believe that's a pretty quiet place. To destroy the Empire, one would have to destroy the fleets. So if there is a new weapon, we shall probably encounter it in the coming engagement ..."

  Archier shuddered.

  "On the other hand, the 'weapon' may not be physical at all," Menshek mused. "As I have intimated, I think the Empire is more likely to be destroyed by ideas than by war. Already our social ideas render us an unlikely candidate for survival. Maybe Oracle has got wind of some new social message that has arisen in Escoria ... in that case any battles we fight will be superfluous. We could even unknowingly import the weapon into the heart of Diadem when we levy taxes and tribute after a victory ..."

  "Need Oracle be so cryptic? And that could be true of any other region, couldn't it?"

  "Yes, it could. But in view of Oracle's warning, I recommend we should interrogate all Escorians that are brought aboard, before shipping them to Diadem."

  Archier nodded. "I will remember your advice."

  By now the cat girl was bored with their talk. She strolled over to where Arctus was busy scanning reports on his desk screen. Over-familiarly, she stroked his trunk.

  "Find me something to do, little elephant. I need some fun."

  Removing his trunk from her caress, Arctus gave her a sidewise glance from one of his small, peering eyes. "Have you no duty station?" he asked reprovingly. "You should have work to do."

  "But I'm a pleasure girl," she said airily. "I'm one of Priapus' People, that's my duty." She tossed her head. "The Admiral has other things to attend to, it seems."

  "Hmph. You should all have something more vital to do," he grumbled. At this, her mouth opened in mock amazement.

  'What's more vital than—? Just because you pachyderms only mate once a year or something . . . Perhaps that's why you're so serious." But Arctus was ignoring her jibes. He keyed the screen, moving through the ship with a flurry, interpreting each flash-seconded scene with a practised eye.

  "There's a caryoline party going on on deck four, stateroom eighty-three," he said. "Though really, you should be resting up for this evening's relaxation." Caryoline was an inhalant drug, similar in its action to cocaine, but with an added "sociability vector."

  Her eyes sparkled. "Oh, I love caryoline," she said in a husky voice. "See you."

  She left the office, without bothering to retrieve any clothing, prowling with expectation. Menshek shared Arctus' disapproval and frowned after her as she departed. It frustrated him that though Ten-Fleet was staffed by so few pure humans there were many more on board with no military role. Some, like Priapus' People, were contracted entertainers; but others were hangers-on, along for the ride, for the fun of it, or merely happening to be visiting one of the ships when the fleet last set out from Diadem. The fleet was like a small city; when in dock citizens were able to come aboard without let or hindrance, and at outwards despatch date some did not bother to leave.

  Menshek, like many of the animal officers, would dearly have liked to be able to press some of these passengers into service, but a first-class citizen from Diadem simply could not be coerced. Clearly many of them did not take the fleet's role seriously; Archier had sometimes encountered an astonishing ignorance of what its actual business was.

  And anyway, even if they were conscripted he doubted they would be much use. He felt safer with his animals.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ten-Fleet was in Escoria, had announced its arrival by showering hydrogen-lithium grenades at random over an inhabited (though not densely so) planet. The rebel fleet had responded as anticipated to the outrage, by springing out of concealment to give challenge.

  Now the two hurtled towards one another, and Admiral Archier decided on a pre-battle inspection tour of some of the larger of the one hundred and forty ships under his command. He and his entourage stepped from the intermat kiosk aboard the front-line-o'-war class vessel ICS Lilac Willow. Among the captain and officers who greeted them there sidled a small man of erect bearing whose hair hung in a neat fringe over his forehead. His loose toga-like garment, whose cut suggested he did not hail from Diadem, was daubed with what looked like bright paints of various colours.

  Boldly the man approached Archier. In polite tones he asked if he might accompany the party into "the working areas of the ship." "Particularly the engines and gunnery," he added. "Your animals have kept me out of these places up to now."

  "This man is an item of tax," Arctus trumpeted softly to Archier while the rest of the entourage stared. "A native of Alaxis, to judge by his apparel. That was the planet we levied before we visited Rostia."

  "The ships of the Imperial fleets are reputed to be technically more advanced than those of the subject worlds," the importuner continued blandly. "Hence my interest. And after all; I shall be formally registered as a first-class citizen once in Diadem. I am one already, of course ..."

  "Oh, are you an engineer, then?" Archier asked.

  The Alaxian smiled. "No, I am a writer of space dramas. Interstellar battles are my stock-in-trade, you might say, and now I have a chance to gain first-hand experience—as well as some background information which could be invaluable."

  Archier, too, smiled. "Perhaps you will compose a suitably embellished account of the action. It should make you famous in Diadem. But actually, you should have asked Captain Prenceuse's permission, not mine."

  The captain of Lilac Willow shrugged. They moved on, the Alaxian attaching himself to the rear of the group without a further word. As they entered a traverse-elevator and were conveyed through the innards of the great ship, however, he sidled close to Archier.

  "Pardon my forwardness, Admiral, but may I introduce myself person to person? I am Volsted Magroom ... it is unlikely you have heard of me, but my works are well known on my own world of Alaxis . . . hence my present sitation, of course—though let me say at once," he added hastily, "how pleased and honoured I am to be deemed worth transporting to Diadem. Flight to Eternity is perhaps my best known composition. It deals with a journey into the Simplex."

  Archier, who had never found time for imaginative literature, looked at the Alaxian with new interest. The theme was intriguing, if hardly original. "The old dream of travel to the Simplex," he murmured. "How do you manage to convey what it's like there?"

  "The visual effects did cause problems," Magroom admitted, "but I didn't have to worry about that too much. I only wrote the script."

  "Your stories mainly take place in the future, I take it? I hope you show the Empire as flourishing and stronger than ever."

  Magroom was apologetic. "I have portrayed a number of alternative futures. They are not meant to be predictive and I have no political views of my own. In some, the Empire has vanished or has been conquered by an alien race to whom our worlds are desirable."

  "That should go down well in Diadem." If Magroom was thinking of continuing his career there, Archier thought, he could well encounter a more sophisticated audience that he was used to.

  Artists imported into Diaderh had an uncertain fate; some met with great success because of the novelty of their vision. Others found themselves outmoded.

  "Do you think man ever will reach ibe Simplex, and perhaps other facets?" he asked.

  "I have been asked that countless times," Magroom replied.

  "Yes, I firmly believe we will, one day. The idea is too fantastic for many, of course—but then the idea of interstellar feetol flight might have seemed fantastic once."

  "Might it?" Archier gave a puzzled frown. "Well, to stone age people, I suppose."

  Animals, men and women saluted with raised forelimbs as Archier and his party emerged from the travelator into a barrel-shaped hall occupied by a line of similarly barrel-shaped feetol transformers. The casings took up nearly the whole of the hall; it was no more than an outer integument with just enough room for ancillary machinery and staff.

  "Is all in order?" Archier asked the
engine room manager, a loping mandrill. The ape nodded, briefly showing fangs.

  "Tuned to perfection!" he said gruffly. "We worked all the way through our sleep period! Even the robots worked!" He indicated three constructs who cowered in intimidated fashion in one of the hall's shallow bays.

  "My engine manager is a rough and ready fellow and gets things done by direct means," the captain muttered to Archier with a knowing smile.

  'I hope they are not about to complain to their union," Archier said doubtfully, with a glance at the robots, at which the mandrill uttered a chugging laugh.

  "Don't worry on their account, Admiral. They prefer to stay in one piece!"

  Volsted Magroom, meanwhile, was staring up at the dully sheened casings in fascination. The hum that came from them was barely audible; and even this close, the effect they had on the surrounding spacetime field was not perceptible to the senses.

  "Well here they are," Archier said quietly, stepping close to the fiction writer. "These are what drive the Lilac Willow along. They are not really so very different from commercial engines, just bigger.

  'I presume you are familiar with the principle of feetol flight. As is well known, nature generally stipulates that no moving material object may exceed—or even attain—the velocity of light in relation to any other object. This, however, is a consequence of the structure of space. Put technically, it is a feature derived from the recession lines which make up spacetime. A feetol generator alters the characteristics of spacetime in its vicinity by attenuating the recession lines.

  This causes the velocity of light itself to be raised within the feetol bubble. The ship carrying the generator may then accelerate itself up to the new limit, whatever that may be.

  "Popular writers sometimes describe the feetol drive as 'breaking the laws of physics'; of course, this is not so. It remains impossible to travel faster than light in the spacetime vicinity one occupies. The limiting velocity, formerly a constant, is turned into a variable, that is all.

  "Many commercial ships carry a double drive: a feetol generator to attenuate local space and a separate drive unit to propel the ship through it. Larger generators, such as those you see before you, allow a further refinement and can serve both functions, both space modifier and propulsion unit. They do this by 'seizing hold,' so to speak, of the recession lines they attenuate. The ship is then able to move in reaction against the general electromagnetic field of the galaxy—a piece of ingenuity which considerably reduces the working machinery that is needed.

  "Under its own generators alone the Lilac Willow can move at some hundeds of times the normal velocity of light. The fleet as a whole, however, is actually able to shift considerably faster than that, travelling in formation. Feetol bubbles can merge, and the larger the bubble the more attenuated the spacetime within it becomes. Only the fleets of Star Force are permitted this facility; it is why they are able to move around the Empire so fast."

  "So that's why the interstellar service lines are practically forbidden to own more than one or two ships?"

  Archier nodded. "We don't want private operators to gain experience in meshing feetol drives."

  He felt pride as he stood by the Alaxian, drinking in the sight of the big armature-like casings. Delivering his exposition to the writer made him feel as though he were back at training academy; in fact he had largely been quoting from one of the preliminary lectures he had heard there.

  "The other facility that comes from the composite bubble method is something few who have never travelled in a Star Force fleet are even aware of," he continued. "That is the intermat system. You have probably seen it in action by now. It becomes possible when space is attenuated to a certain degree."

  "There are always rumours the Empire has developed the instantaneous transmission of matter," Magroom said. "Frankly I hadn't believed it until now."

  "It is limited in scope," Archier explained-. '"It works only within the group bubble developed by a fairly large fleet, that is to say, from ship to ship while we are formating in feetol flight. Also, the transposition is not permanent. The intermat user must eventually return to his departure point."

  He paused, then decided to add something. "There's a historical detail that will interest you. Intermatting was discovered only a few decades ago, by accident. At first it was thought to operate directly through the Simplex. You can appreciate what excitement that caused."

  "Don't I!" The Alaxian sounded stunned. "Instantaneous access to the whole of our physical universe, at the very least! To say nothing of communication with other facets! That's what my novel was about. But I hadn't thought science was even close to it yet.''

  "It isn't," Archier said, thinking to himself that the writer's concepts of what contact with the Simplex would bring were a trifle fanciful. It would open up the possibility of what he mentioned, true . . . but the realization of those capabilities would probably still be a long way off. "It soon became clear that the Simplex isn't involved in intermatting in any way. Present intermat theory makes use of Kantorian transformations, if that means anything to you. Put briefly, you know that prior to the discovery of recession lines spacetime seemed to have contradictory qualities: to be both continuous or infinitely divisible, and yet to allow discrete quantum effects which are discontinuous. We now know that this is because the recession lines of which space is composed are continuous along their direction of recession, but discrete in cross-section. Continuity of recession means that relative distances can be handled as Kantorian transfinite sets; the lateral measurement, on the other hand, is finite and irreducible, and provides space with 'grain.' If the lines are sufficiently stretched or attenuated by artificial means, the two factors together make it possible to bring about sudden changes in relative location. Once you see the maths, it isn't so very remarkable."

  "You're going way over my head, I'm afraid," Magroom said ruefully. "Are you sure it isn't all done with mirrors?"

  "That's not a bad way of putting it, actually," Archier responded with a smile. "Do you know anything about accountancy? The intermat works very much like double-entry bookkeeping."

  "I'll try to find out something about it in Diadem." "The technical details are restricted. But as a creative artist, I'm sure you'll be able to persuade the public data files to give you privileged access." Archier nodded to Lilac Willow's captain. "Very good. Now let's take a look at the gun turrets!"

  The passages of the gun system were narrower than was usual for the more continuously inhabited parts of the vessel. The main travelators did not reach there. Only Archier, Arctus, Lilac Willow's captain and (at his urgent pleading) Volsted Magroom squeezed into a small cage which shot straight towards the skin of the warship.

  The cage smelled of oil and electricity. They debouched into a dimly lit tunnel which echoed constantly to faint sounds of metal singing on metal. After the luxury and frivolity he had grown used to aboard Lilac Willow, Magroom felt chilled by the bleak air of seriousness he sensed about the place.

  He followed the Admiral along the tunnel. Archier paused at a place where a gap occurred in the right-hand wall. Separated from the passageway by a curvilinear grid was a second, parallel tunnel, slightly smaller in diameter. Along it there swept at intervals gleaming, round-nosed, gold-plated cylinders. Each lay on its side, and even then stood nearly as tall as a man.

  "You see the feeder system that serves each gun," Archier told Magroom. "Those are the shells, which are being brought up from the magazine in preparation for the engagement. They are held in a secondary magazine below the turret and are fed into the breech automatically."

  Magroom stared at the deadly missiles in fascination. "What are they—fusion?"

  "A standard shell carries a fusion charge, sufficient to destroy a ship on direct impact. But shells come in several varieties. Some carry a shaped fusion charge to punch a hole in a ship and disable it. Very few shells even reach their targets, of course. Even when aimed accurately enough they have to face short-range anti
-shell weapons of various sorts, as well as deflector shields. A high rate of fire is what's important."

  "Why are they so big? You can carry a fusion charge in the palm of your hand."

  "To give them mass. They'd have no range otherwise."

  Archier proceeded along the tubelike tunnel, which ran straight for the most part but occasionally snaked for no apparent reason. It ended in a short flight of steps. They climbed it and emerged onto the gun platform.

  The scene was one of the strangest Magroom had seen, no matter how many times he had described it in his novels. The gun turret was a huge protuberance, one of twenty that studded Lilac Willow and comprised the front-line-o'-war's main armament, the cause of her existence. The cannon, or gun, was a huge barrel-shaped structure, mounted in a spherical bearing that was a huge recoil absorber. The breech-loading mechanism was below the gun platform and out of sight, as was the main firing mechanism; it was just too big to accommodate comfortably outside the sweep of the hull.

  The gun crew was all animal: pigs, baboons and dogs who crouched before their command and data screens. They let out a cheer as their admiral entered the turret.

  Magroom knew only a little about the specifications of these weapons. They had three-axis rotation and could aim towards a large portion of the celestial globe. When in use they extended their shell-stabilising barrels to a mile's length (presumably all Lilac Willow's gun barrels were now so extended). How far they could fling their shells he did not know, but he had heard a rumoured rate of fire of an incredible one round per second.

  Archier was passing a few moments in encouraging banter with the platform crew. He strolled back to Magroom. "They're keen, dead keen. Do you know the history of the long-range Star Force gun?" he asked amiably.

  "Not much."

  "It's the only answer to how ships may fight one another when moving faster than light. Beam weapons using radiation energy are clearly useless, and the feetol drive is too bulky to be fitted to missiles—if we did that, a ship the size of Lilac Willow could carry no more than a dozen or so. Even then, they would be very much slower than the ships they were launched against! So the breech-firing cannon it is. What makes it possible is that an object expelled from a feetol bubble retains a remnant of that bubble for a while, and so may still move faster than normal light. These shells are fired off at a tremendous velocity, about a million times the normal velocity of light. They go ploughing through normal spacetime, losing speed all the time as their remnant feetol bubbles dissipate. In good conditions they can range about half a light year before dropping below c.