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Quantum Zero

~~~ Prequil - Jankin Decatur Series ~~~

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Chapter 1: The Encounter

Approaching the Serpent Swarm
Kraken Colony. 2170 CE

“Unregistered vessel; you will match vector and stand down to zero speed relative. Come directly abeam our ship or you will be fired upon.”

The North American Union (NAU) pocket-frigate had been shut-down and lying in wait on the edge of Kraken’s ring of heavy metal asteroids they called the Serpent Swarm; a belt around the planet that presented a constant threat to navigation but whose rare minerals were just one abundance found in the Tau Ceti star system that was currently making this colony wealthy. The Swarm was dense enough to hide even a pocket frigate and this sudden contact had taken them by surprise as they vectored inbound. The call had come while they were still off more than twice the distance of Kraken from its star. Even so, the captain knew they were well within the warbird’s sensor range and kill-sphere.

Jeremy Alfred, the grey-haired captain of the tiny four-spacer vessel, knew the frigate’s threat wasn’t an idle one. An NAU Captain’s powers were vast and the breed had grown hard and ruthless beneath years of never-ending war with the China Trans-Asia Coalition (CTAC). Years that replaced mercy with a vicious arrogance in fleet officers and spacers of Sol’s military for they shouldered the direct impact of constrained warfare.

The war was a long-simmering, hot war safely restricted-by-treaty to off-Earth environs. A near-constant state of moderate level combat almost forgotten by the home world’s masses while Starfleet personnel and colonists suffered and died in colonies on mother Earth’s moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, Titan, and solar Lagrange Point settlements.

On the little ship’s bridge, the ancient captain turned to a young man dressed in a spacer’s vacuum suit and simply raised his eyebrows in silent question.

The man’s work suit did little to hide the slenderness of his tall body, nor did it contain any rank or merchant unit designation beyond the perpetually spinning, tornado-shaped embedded logo of Nichol’s Transport Technologies sitting on his beast. A rarely seen and rather spartan tag that identified its occupant as corporate management. The fellow, Joshua Humphrey, hesitated to reply and to the elder’s consternation, he expended precious moments reviewing alternatives.

By charter, the star colonies on Kraken, Jasper, Brem’s World, and others even more distant were restricted in their developmental scope. Agriculture and specialty items such as the export of precious gems and rare minerals were encouraged while advanced education in the sciences and high technology industries were forbidden to them. Yet, though poor by the standards of their homeland, the distant wars of Earth provided a financial boon as the star colonies prospered through interstellar trade to both sides of a conflict that was slowly depleting the homelands of rare materials critical to their advanced manufacturing segments.

Yet, the times were a-changing, for Sol System was also losing experienced spacers at a rate they could ill afford and colonial recruits did not enter willingly into the slaughter. The nations of Earth found a natural solution to both problems, one that lay in their own history.

Impressment; the taking of experienced spacers by compulsion into military service along with the seizure of ‘contraband’ cargo at the sole, unquestioned decision of the commanding officer.

Still evaluating his alternatives, the young man ran a hand across short-cropped blond hair, thinly covering an otherwise bare scalp, before directing jade-green eyes at the captain, “No Jeremy, don’t ramp to full linkage. We don’t run. Yet.” “That would give us away as sure as allowing them to board. We could outpace their old wavedrive but they’d know we had new technology on board. They would surely fire upon us and we are defenseless. Their response and an examination of the incident would result in a senate inquiry, sending NAU inspectors waltzing through every industrial complex, on and off Kraken, looking for colonial charter infractions.” They had drawn closer and a segment of the deep green and blue globe of Kraken itself now dominated the starscape ahead, neatly split by the Serpent Swarm that gilded the sphere as a planetary ring. Josh’s mind raced as his eyes ranged across the annotated display volume now replacing their forward bulkhead and marking the frigate’s easy emergence from the Swarm.

“Captain, bring us around easy and make our vector for an intercept of our NAU cousins as requested.” Captain Alfred hadn’t grown up with the Kraken Hive Tab patch resting on the mastoid bone behind his left ear and his hand involuntarily went up to brush it as he conveyed the command into the ship’s AI. The Tab was an active interface, about the diameter of a finger but only as thick as a human hair that, upon that first installation, injected thin monomer tendrils inward into the base of the brain. There the augmentation interacted with synapses firings, providing the host with access to external databanks as well as ship’s AI and all individuals in his local HiveNet.

They altered course, slow and easy so as not to antagonize the frigate. Captain Alfred didn’t turn but spoke to Humphrey directly across the HiveNet on a tight, private channel, “Josh, tell me we aren’t going to allow them on board. We haven’t even had a chance to put her through her paces. They’ll know something’s up as soon as they open our drive capsule and see how small the drive is. They will impound our ship and we’ll be outright arrested if we’re not lucky enough to be impressed into NAU service.”

Any excuse served to press experienced colonials into NAU military service. Each impressment was a life sentence. Humphrey smiled at the oldster to whom he had grown so close these past few years, “You know me better than that. We’ll make directly for them and enter deacceleration to match vectors as directed.” “I want them to see us in full compliance. Lay in an easy but danger-near passage only I don’t want to bump spindizzy fields. Approach dead slow, close enough for their spindizzy to sense ours and assume imminent collision. Then, just wait for my call but be ready to pop it.

Except for this one small experimental ship, all starships in those early days employed wavedrive technology. The wavedrive of a starship contained two components. The main drive whose field saturates the vessel, penetrating every atom and electron of every element within its range to excite sub-electron graviton particles to higher energy states and thereby opening them to link to the huge graviton waves saturating the universe. Particle waves that travel at many times the velocity of light. The greater a ship’s phase-aligned linkage to this either, the faster the energized graviton particles of the vessel, cargo, and crew are carried along like a surfboard gliding across the face of a great wave of water. The ship and all aboard become a component of these fundamental building blocks of the universe that we call gravitons and, like the flow of an electrical current being opposite that of its electrons, the starship’s gravitic elementals are carried in a direction opposite the pull of gravity itself, away from the mass of its origin.

Ship’s AI brought them in, deaccelerating as they entered the ice and rock-filled matrix of the planet’s ring until the image of the frigate filled their bulkhead wall without need of magnification. The NAU warbird gleamed a deadly black menace that seemed to soak up light. A slightly flattened spheroid without discernable bow or stern, bridge or structural keel. Its surface rippled with shallow dimples flowing across it in fractal patterns that instilled a sinister living beauty to its awful purpose. Vectors matched; the frigate appeared to nearly rest stationary beside them.

Two ships now lay in synchronized ballet with the members of the Serpent Swarm, illuminated only by the breadth of their spindizzy fields visible as a uniform blue-white haze pulsing peacefully about each ship’s surface, giving the appearance of two great, exotic animals slowly breathing in sleep.

.....

End Novelette --  

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