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Shipboard 21&22
21
Ryan slowly, carefully, pulled the heatsink in its thick layers of insulation from the generator. The Wexiks were doubtless centuries, maybe millennia advanced of humanity, but their generators were still principally using fusion.
They were better, significantly better, achieving efficiencies that human engineers would have called impossible. As high as seventy-five percent under ideal operating conditions. But basically still just taking two particles and smashing them together.
The Embuos used hyper-compressed artificial neutron stars to power their ships. Almost a black hole.
They were perfectly capable of creating, containing, and transporting black holes, and those worked fine for civilian vessels, who didn’t mind the low yield of long-lived, high mass black holes.
But for a military vessel requiring high yields, a sufficiently small black hole would be, for all practical purposes, a battery, impossible to feed, and with not enough endurance to allow the necessary sortie ranges.
He plugged the heatsink into the ship’s heat pump, and the automated systems took it from there, linking up with the heat sink and allowing the superheated coolant into the ship’s systems.
It was an ingenious system, with nothing going to waste. The excess heat had to be removed anyway, so Embuos used it for all the auxiliary systems, even for running the heat pump that carried that energy around the vessel.
He retrieved a spent heatsink and slid that into the alcove he’d just vacated.
The intricacies of the system still escaped him, but the basic idea was that the whole ship was powered by thermovolteics.
The neutron star, fed with hydrogen, provided massive amounts of heat, while the cold side was maintained with a liquid helium bath.
Still, no system was without losses; thus, the heat sinks.
He locked the device in place and activated the fluid exchange, moving on to the next.
A hand came to rest on his shoulder, and he looked up to find Escena smiling down at him. “Making progress, sweetie?”
He looked from the dark-skinned beauty to the reactor looming silently over the room. “I think so,” he said. “I understand the cooling system and the hydrogen pump, and I at least understand the principles behind the thermal electric system. But I just can’t wrap my head around creating the neutron star, containing it, keeping it stable, or hell, why it doesn’t just fall through the hull.”
She chuckled, squeezing his shoulder. “Well, this’n doesn’t know everythin’ about it herself. But she undahstands you want ta bring as much of this back home as ya can.”
He cleared his throat, ducking his head. It was a little uncomfortable how open they were about his ulterior motives. “Sorry.”
“Whatevah for?” she seemed legitimately shocked at the question.
“I don’t want to cause trouble for you.”
“You ain't gonna cause no problems,” she laughed. “So you just relax and focus on yer studies.”
Her hand slipped off his shoulder, rubbing his arms. “And yer extracurriculahs.”
He laid his hand on hers, pulling her fingers to his lips and leaning himself against her downy flank. “Behave yourself,” he said. “You’ll get your turn, but the captain will kill us if she finds out we’ve been messing around in here.”
She tried to pout, but it was spoiled by the playful twist of her lips. “Spoilsport.”
“I try,” he chuckled, grinning up at her. He loved being with Escena, being with all the crew members, but they weren’t together. Ryan wasn’t “together” with any of them. Not that he wouldn’t have loved to date Escena, or Caleste, or captain Jerevene. But they just weren’t capable of that kind of relationship.
Still, he was close with all of them, all except one.
“Escena,” he said. “Who’s the red-haired woman?”
His companion soured immediately, scowling down at him. “That girl been bothering you?”
“No!” he cried. “Nothing like that, but-”
“Then you jus’ put her out ah your mind, she’s trouble.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you worry about why; take this’n’s word for it.”
He jumped to his feet. “Escena! What is going on with this girl?”
“No,” she placed her hands on her hips. “You leave it alone; otherwise, it’s only gonna be trouble.”
He reached out, placing a hand on her forearm. “Please, I just want to understand.”
Her face softened, but she pulled away from him. “And this’n wants ya to be safe and happy.”
“She’s dangerous?”
Four hands framed his face, and Escena pulled herself forward, pressing cool lips to his. “Please, leave it alone.”
He swallowed, nodding. “Alright,” he hated lying to her but knew she wouldn’t understand why he needed to pursue this.
“Good, let’s put this behind us and try to get some work done before dinnah,” she said.
22
Nazarene looked out over the shipyard, built in orbit around the moon. The Liberty’s voice hadn’t been due for retrofit for another twenty years at least. But that had been before, before FTL, and before first contact.
Tarrki stood next to her, watching the dock at work, reconfiguring itself to the task now required of it. The dock was self-replicating and, despite its immense size, was as small as humanity could make such devices.
“This must seem terribly primitive,” she said.
Tarrki slowly shook his head. “No, the sheer scale of your construction is impressive enough, but we never pursued self-replication.”
“Really?” she asked.
“Not seriously, no,” he said. “We never needed that level of automation; our population’s needs can be met by more usual methods, so greater precision and miniaturization were a more sensible allocation of resources.”
“I see,” she said. “Perhaps we can teach each other.”
“I think that would benefit both our peoples, but would your government be willing?” Tarrki asked.
“Perhaps not,” she sighed. “They’re still cagy about all this.”
“I can ask, though; I’m sure your people will want the technology,” Tarrki said.
Nazarene grunted, and the pair lapsed back into silence, the seconds slowly ticking by as they watched the shipyard hanging in space before them.
“Do you think they’ll ever let me see Earth?” Tarrki asked.
“I couldn’t say,” she said. “That’s up to them, but I do hope things begin to warm, politically. Can you tell me more about the Chitiri?”
“Only what can be observed on the surface,” Tarrki said. “As I mentioned, we never successfully opened communication with them.”
“They’re a young species. We believe them to be exceptionally fecund, like you humans, but instead of building the manufacturing base to produce phosphorus, they expand ravenously, seeking to monopolize the limited natural phosphorus supplies.”
“I can understand wanting to build a surplus,” Nazarene said. “But their last war doesn’t seem to have been profitable. Perhaps they’ve learned their lesson?”
“Surplus?” Tarrki asked. “You misunderstand; planets like Earth, like Cantray, are freak outliers; prevalence in the universe is worse, far worse. Likely, they expand because they either can’t or won’t, limit their population growth, and their populous faces starvation.”
She nodded; it was the sort of problem she could see sneaking up on humanity. Or rather, the kind of problem she could imagine humanity ignoring in favor of some triviality or other. If things had gone differently, perhaps they would have ended up like the Chitiri, low on resources and desperately reaching for space to grab up as much as possible.
After all, you couldn’t just ramp up phosphorus production overnight. It was time and energy-intensive, and once they’d gotten into an expansionist war-like mode of thinking, there was no telling how long it would take humanity to look at other solutions, even if they knew more, better, options existed.
“How long will you need for the retrofits?”
“We aren’t sure, it’s a big job, and the new generators will need to be installed by hand. But, we’ll move as fast as possible.”
He hummed to himself. “NazareneHu, your home system is so well developed; why did your people never expand to neighboring stars?”
“We did,” she said. “Only, away from you, toward the edge of the galaxy, and at sub-light speeds. Most of our colonies are still small.”
Tarrki scratched his ear, pensive. “I fear for humanity if your population remains focused here.”
“Well, small is relative; there are still tens of millions in each of our colonies, and our efforts can accelerate now that we have FTL.”
She didn’t mention the final goal of their garden fleet, to settle Andromeda. Aiming for the edge of the galaxy, a project of many hundreds of millennia, at the right time, and ideally, with ships refitted to be capable of speeds many times the speed of light, an initiative Tarrki himself had helped, to undergo the fleet’s final journey, the colonization of andromeda, and perhaps beyond.
She ran her tongue over her teeth. “Something seems to have the government down on Earth spooked; they’ve sent orders out to our neighbors; we’re laying the keel for new star ships.”
“How fortuitous,” Tarrki said.
She grunted. “Did you happen to have something to do with it?”
He flicked his ears. “Maybe. Does it matter?”
“Not really; I wish you wouldn’t have gone around me.”
“Is there some particular reason?”
“No, I just wish you wouldn’t have.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. “Have you heard from your man?”
“Yes,” she said. “Are we expecting an Embuos diplomatic mission?”
“One can hope, but that’s a question for your people,” he said.
She nodded and, with a sigh, returned to her desk.
“Is something wrong?” Tarrki asked.
“No,” she said. “Just restless. I have a feeling like before a battle.”
“I understand your meaning, we pray for peace, but when we have it…,” the little man trailed off, huffing unhappily.
He walked around her desk, clawed fingers scratching across the wood. He paused on the other side, not turning to face her. “I fear we’ve dragged you into our trouble.”
“It is what it is,” she said. “We’ll fight if we have to.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“It is,” she said. “If there’s peace, we’ll live in peace; if there’s war, we prefer to know ahead of time.”
“I hope you don’t end up regretting it, is all,” Tarrki said.
“There are always regrets in war; it’s just a matter of making the other guy regret it more,” she said.
She shook her head. “You don’t have to worry about our resolve, and you don’t have to feel bad for any losses we sustain. If you really feel bad, humanity could use every technological edge we can get.”
“I’ll do my best,” Tarrki said. “To ensure our close collaboration."
