Chapter 15 - Basic Qualifications

We held two of the eight ships back from our initial 'overhaul'. All we did for Appleby Castle and Bere Castle was verify that the 18 acceleration couches worked properly, and then we used them to cycle everyone through a quick hands-on course on how to run the ships.

We started with making sure that they were safe to use as is, then we did as much live testing as we could in Jupiter's shadow. We declared Jupiter's low orbital volume from the edge of the atmosphere out to half a million kilometers, behind the shadow where it couldn't be seen from Earth, and 'north' of the rings to be a ship-handling training area, and marked the whole volume as a hazardous area not to be entered by anyone with an actual job to do. With that, we could send training ships in there and all they had to worry about was running into each other.

We still had most of the pods left over from when we converted one of the freighters to be the core of Jupiter Station, so one of them got towed over to just the other side of the rings to act as the training area traffic control center. Since that was still inside the range of the transporter pads, that was all we needed to get started, and our training area was in business. Before long, the training area had its own tugs and other small craft, but when they started out all it had was that pod for traffic control.

Using those two ships, we were able to get the core ship-handling teams -the CIC, Bridge, and Engineering watchstanders- up to speed in only a couple of days for each crew. Yes, me and my team took our turns at the 'Grinder' as the Commonwealth veterans called it.

The exercises started out simple, of course, because at first we didn't know what we were doing. Navigation exercises without moving the ship. Bringing the plant up ready to answer bells. That phrase went away, though. The veterans understood it, but new people wouldn't and we had to throw away a lot of our old cherished nautical jargon to streamline the training. If there was a civilian way to say something that made sense, a lot of times us old salts gritted our teeth and changed the way we spoke. That became 'bringing the plant up ready to get underway'.

Actually getting under way. Changing acceleration. Running the ship all the way up to 30 g's. Proving that each crewman could function anywhere in the possible range of acceleration felt. We had a lot of room to play with in Jupiter's shadow, but for some of these exercises we had to stretch the outer limit of the training area.

After some discussion with the doctors, we added another step to that: Locking the engines to no more than 5 g's, then turning the damper off and running the engines up from zero to 5 g's and back. That let everyone know that it could be done if needed and that the couches still worked, and what it would be like if they had to do it for real. No one liked it, but if we were going to use these ships in combat we needed to face the fact that at some point we were likely to have to try to escape in a damaged ship, and it was best to be prepared beforehand.

After that exercise, we didn't unlock the main engine limit until we had turned the damper back on and verified that it, and all the couches, were all working properly. Then they did the original run up to 30 g's and back exercise again to prove to their subconscious minds that it was working right again.

Changing course. Navigating to a known waypoint. By the time we had gotten to that stage, the Station had provided us with some waypoints to practice with, basically the space version of a floating navigation buoy. If you'd ever played any of those space-fighter computer games you knew what you were supposed to do.

Docking with a station. That wasn't really difficult, with the AIs doing all the actual piloting, but it was still an evolution that we had every watch team do. And, rather than take a chance on something going wrong with anything important, we had the industrial people on the south side of the rings build us a pair of docking arms. Having two of them allowed us to separate them by several thousand kilometers, and it gave us some redundancy, too, in case one of them got crunched.

Each arm was just a long tube of steel, about 10 meters in diameter and about 100 meters long when they were done. They were only 20 meters long when they were first set up, though. At each end and every 20 meters down the tube as it grew there was another smaller set of tubes like crossbars, extending out 5 meters from the central tube in four directions. Yeah, it looked kinda like one of the Aurora freighters without the central habitat ball or engineering end. That's probably where they got the idea.

Anyway, every watch team had to dock with one of those crossarms, dump a couple of 'passengers and cargo' off into the 'station', undock, go around the station, and dock with the opposite crossarm and take on their 'new passengers and cargo'.

Only after the watch team had actually done all that did we certify them as minimally qualified in Basic Castle Normal-Space Operations, or BCNSO. We figured that, once we really got going, we would have that, a 'Hyperspace Operations' or HSO qual, and then when we had the weapons systems down we would add an ACO course for Advanced/Combat Operations. Since one team could train another once they had their own ship, we concentrated on getting a single 11-man watch team qualified for each crew.

It didn't take long at all for the construction guys to start adding things to the two docking arms, turning them into real stations. The first things we added were power plants big enough to run transporter networks, along with the brains to control them. No, that wasn't the first thing. Each arm got a pod first, for people to live in and use as office space.

Admiral Sykes ended up detaching his aide to go stay in one of the pods to supervise the ship-handling training program. He himself stayed back on the 'south side' on F12 to supervise the overhaul and modification program. After we had enough people trained up to act as safety crews and we had some expectation that we could prevent the worst of the training accidents, that pod we were using as a traffic control station on the 'north side' got plugged into the other arm.

Both docking arms continued growing from there, eventually becoming complete space stations in their own rights, with berthing, offices, classrooms, everything we might need to run a ship-handling school. Having both arms capable of running a transporter network enabled us to quickly move personnel, supplies, and parts around as needed on both sides of the rings. There was no need for a ship to have to make the trip from one side of the rings to the other, to unload a newly-qualified watch team and pick up another batch to be run through the 'Grinder'.

Right in the middle of all this we got another delivery. As we had been told, this was only four ships. And, thankfully, this time we knew almost everything we needed to know about them when we got them. These were the freighters we had been told about that were capable of landing on a planet.

We had plans, we had schematics, we had sleep-trainer modules for them. All we had to do was select crews, run them through the training, and let them go. Of course we would have to modify them, too, before we could use them as troop landing ships, but we didn't have to do a major overhaul before they were safe to live in.

Until we had our eight Castles overhauled, we didn't need the 50-man crews we were planning on for those ships. We kept 20 to 25 men for each ship and released everyone else for other tasks. Some moved into construction, some moved to the training center, some went to the observation posts we were leaving in all those nearby systems. Four of the crews being groomed for the next set of Castles got re-directed as crews for these ships.

That meant that when these ships showed up, we already had crews ready for them. They had no experience with this class of ship, but each crew had at least one watch team that had been through the Grinder and we could at least trust them to not run into Ganymede on their way back to the station. I still got pulled out of Allie -where I was trying to reconcile the 40-meter length of a shuttle with the 18-meter length of the hull depression we had to fit our ship's boat in- to go with the shuttles to go pick them up. I pulled Billy out of the compartment rebuild effort so I'd have some company.

Actually getting the landers, the ships we ended up calling the "Mercury" class, turned out to be a lot less trouble than getting the Castles had been. These were not 7- or 800,000 year old armed patrol ships from before the Confederacy was even created. These were modern ships, no more than a few tens of thousands of years old, and they came with all the modern developments already installed when they were built.

As we got them, they already had the Confederacy's Nav Shield and acceleration compensators. They had no acceleration couches, because they didn't need them. On the other hand, that meant that these things were restricted to the same 10 or 12 g's accel that the Auroras were limited to.

One of my assigned tasks was to find out if that could be changed at all, and, if so, if it would be worth our while to rip out that compensator and put in the Castles' damper system. If these things were going to get shot at, and maybe pursued by armed enemies, getting the absolute highest accel possible to enable escape was a far higher priority than crew or cargo comfort.

Our first 'hey, that was easy' moment was when the first shuttle landed in the bay opened for it and our prospective CO for that ship went to assume command. None of these ships cared. It just wasn't a big deal to them who commanded them or who was onboard.

The shuttle said the air was breathable, so we opened the big cargo hatch in back and just walked out onto the bay's deck in our hoods. Our arm-band monitors said it was breathable, too, so I let the CO and his doc make that call while I looked around.

These ships were just a little longer than the Castles, but they were far larger in interior volume. I mean, they had a boat bay large enough to park these shuttles in. It was like the difference between a naval 'cruiser' and a commercial 'cruise ship'. They may be the same length at the waterline, but one was built for speed and maneuverability and damage resistance, control, and repair, while the other was built for comfort and cargo space with the expectation that if they ever got any kind of damage someone would come help them.

We knew from the drawings that there was a second bay the same size as this, on the other side of the interior bulkhead. If they didn't have that bulkhead, there would have been room in the combined boat bay for three shuttles, but the design kept them separate so that two different cargos with different environmental needs could be carried at once. We were going to have to experiment. Was it better to leave them like this, to have two separate compartments in case of accidents or combat damage? Or was it better to open it up and cram a third shuttle in here, to be able to land that many more assault troops in a third location in a surprise attack?

That would be someone else's headache though. Admiral Kennedy was working up a landing force organization, according to my daily emails from Diana. By the time we had these ships ready to use, hopefully we would have some kind of landing force to put in them. Not my problem, man. I was only here to look around, answer a couple of questions, and be available to help if things went wrong on us.

While the crew went to their stations to get the ship underway, Billy and I took a tour of the cargo spaces. Often, your perception of a task depends upon your experiences. On the one hand, converting all these cargo holds into troop berthing spaces would be a lot of work. On the other hand, when we compared that work to the aggravation of ripping the Castles apart to make them usable as warships, this job seemed minor.

Accomplishing my assigned task was another one of those 'gee, that was easy' things. All I had to do was ask the ship's AI. The installed propulsion plant was capable of driving the ship at 20 g's if equipment lifetime was not a concern. Doing so long term would lead to reduced lifetime of the machinery, of course. The plant could push the ship at 15 g's indefinitely. Yes, either way the occupants would all die horribly when the compensator failed.

Yes, it was possible to install the damper system that the Castles had. The ship had plenty of excess power available for additional equipment like that, and it wouldn't take much space, either. No, the two systems could not be used together. Neither system could be started when the other was in use. The one in use would have to be shut down before starting up the other or they would probably both fry.

That would allow the crew and embarked troops to have the best of all possible worlds. When not in a tactical emergency, they could use the original compensator, keep acceleration below 12 g's, and enjoy free access anywhere in the ship with normal Earth gravity 'down'.

When necessary, the ship could put everyone in their beds or acceleration couches, cease acceleration for a few seconds, shut down the compensator, bring up the damper, and take off at 20 g's. It would probably be wise to just keep the damper on any time the ship was in an enemy-held system in case emergency maneuvers were required.

When the ship was no longer in a combat zone, they could again drop accel, swap to the compensator again, and go back to enjoying normal Earth gravity.

What happened in reality was that those four ships got sent out pretty much 'as is' at first with no mods that affected the ship itself, as soon as the cargo holds had been converted to troop berthing compartments and we had breathing bodies in those compartments. The bunks and lockers and weapons storage facilities were easy, that was pretty much just sheet metal fabrication and installation and it was faster for human crews to install them after they were built somewhere else than it would have been for the ship's internal systems to build them in place.

We needed to get this war moving. We didn't know what the enemy was like, we didn't know how far away they were, or how fast they could move. Getting something out there as fast as we could was more important than building an immense fleet that would be ready for combat in ten years. We needed both, yes, and we would work on both at the same time, but until we had established where the Sa'arm were and how well they fought, it was more important to send out something now.

Still, during my 3rd class cruise, the 'summer vacation' that the Navy sent all midshipmen on between their first and second years of college, I had spent a month on one of our oilers. The middies at Annapolis got the warships. Us Aggies got the support ships. These were the huge tankers that took fuel to the warships so that they didn't have to return to port for a fill-up. By huge, I mean that we refueled the Wisconsin once while we were out there. Yes, I'm that old, I've seen a battleship at sea. As a kid I'd been on one of those old battleships moored as tourist attractions somewhere, and they were pretty big. As an adult, though, the battleship looked pretty small, looking down on it from our main deck on the oiler.

The ship I joined was one of the oldest ships we had. Seriously. It was commissioned during WW2, and it was still doing its job in 1988 during my 3rd class middie cruise. A bit slower, and a lot uglier, but as long as it could get fuel out to the warships there was no reason to spend shipbuilding dollars on a replacement.

The point here is that Caloosahatchee still had a pair of 3" mounts on each quarter. They had been installed in 1945 to shoot at incoming kamikazes and never removed. These were both twin mounts. They were electro-hydraulic, meaning that if electric power was available then pressing pedals would spin the mount or elevate the guns, but fire control was completely manual. Aiming was still done by lining up a pair of crosshairs, one in front of the gunner and the other several feet out in front of him, mounted to the end of the barrel. In 1988! The mount also had several wheels that the gun crew could spin to aim the mount if we lost power due to combat damage.

Every time the ship went out they would have gunnery practice. Have you ever seen the horror movie spoof "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes"? The Deck department would inflate several ten-foot diameter red balloons and toss them over the side, the Captain would get on the 1MC and rant about General DelMonte and his ravenous hordes of rampaging killer tomatoes, and the gunners would shoot at the floating balloons until they hit them. Great fun for everyone, and there was even a point to it.

Those four guns wouldn't do anything to fend off a Soviet missile or torpedo, or even the radar-controlled 3" guns on the back of a Krivak, a floating pile of crap that would die within seconds of being noticed by any of our warships. Even the Soviet doctrine had considered them disposable and treated them as decoys that had to be given attention, thus allowing more effective ships to live that much longer.

However, any pirate who tried what was shown in "Captain Phillips" would get blown out of the water long before they got in AK-47 range. No one intent on piracy closes on any ship painted grey. Even the old ones that can no longer make more than 8 knots are suicide to approach without permission.

The point is that these ships needed guns too. Not to go cause trouble with, but for self-defense. They needed something that could convince bad guys to leave them alone. Nothing special, nothing that they could use to attack enemy commerce with, just something they could use to hold off enemy boarding shuttles with. I had a bad feeling about sending these ships out completely unarmed.

On the other hand, we didn't have anything to arm them with. There was talk of converting some NATO armaments like shipboard or aircraft missiles, but the AIs had a fit any time the subject came up, and I wasn't sure any real work had been done on that anyway. For now, they were completely unarmed transports. All we could do was hope if they ran into the Sa'arm the ones they ran into were just as surprised as we were.

That done-by-hand berthing installation was especially important, since each troop berthing space needed its own replicator-recycling-bathroom system. The ship pretty much had to do that itself, much as the Castles had had to do their hull modifications themselves. That kept the ships' internal maintenance systems pretty busy until they were done. Doing all the structural and sheet metal work ourselves got both jobs done at the same time, using materials provided by our growing industrial facility.

Anyway, moving the four freighters back to Jupiter Station didn't cause any trouble at all. Each crew had enough people who had been through our training program over on the north side of the rings that the movement went smoothly.

Meanwhile, our modifications to the Castle class ships were coming together and they would be ready for service soon. It was time to take the next step. We had been discussing where to put a live-fire range to learn how to use the weapons on those ships and coming up empty. There just wasn't anywhere in the solar system to do that if we wanted to avoid detection from Earth and all the satellites, telescopes, and other instruments they had learning the secrets of the universe. Our 'Advanced Course' would have to be somewhere else, but still as close as we could get it.

Alpha Centauri was nice and convenient, but at the same time it didn't have a lot of resources. Alpha Centauri was a distant double with -A and -B that varied anywhere from 10 to 30 or more AU apart, and stable orbits for objects of less than solar mass weren't easy to come up with. Yes, we could construct some if we spent enough time playing on a computer, but no mindless mass of leftover debris was going to find them without help. It was for sure that no planet could survive in the liquid zones for either star.

Worse, it was really a triple system with the brown dwarf Proxima Centauri (as the system's third star it was officially designated "Alpha Centauri C") far enough out to disrupt the system's Oort cloud. The whole volume surrounding the system for about a lightyear was clean. The only useful item in the whole system was a huge rock about a quarter the mass of Uranus in orbit around the main star but roughly in Mercury's orbit. It had been cooked clean of anything volatile billions of years ago. The lightest element we were going to find on that planet would be something like sodium. It would be a great place to find things like gadolinium, mind you. If we ever needed that in mega-ton lots. And didn't mind wading through molten lead and iodine to get it.

Proxima Centauri, on the other hand, when the survey gave it a close look, was just surrounded by rocks. Most of the debris in or near the triple system had been swallowed by the three stars, but everything that avoided that did so by finding a stable orbit around P Centauri. It had a LOT of stuff in orbit. That would be a great place to build a shipyard. We could truck in volatiles from Jupiter and her sisters.

Barnard's Star, on the other hand, wasn't good for anything that we could think of. It simply didn't mass enough to have collected enough debris to produce planets. On the other hand, it was a gravity well and massive enough to have collected the same debris you would find orbiting any normal star. We decided that we would reserve the entire Alpha Centauri system for future use and designate Barnard's Star as our first live-fire range.

We had the Darjee take one of the Auroras to Alpha C and another to Barnard's Star and wait, just in case we had trouble. Each ship had several men we could use as crew replacements if needed.

We took Appleby and Bere out for our first hyperspace jumps under human control. We weren't really up to synchronized fleet movements together yet, but their assigned crews -not the trainees they usually had doing things but the men formally assigned to those two ships- had been practicing. As long as they didn't try to do things too close together they wouldn't get in each other's way, and until we had some kind of lifeboat we wanted two ships to stay together in case one of them had a problem. I got asked to supervise the exercise, so I turned Allie over to Dickie as acting Captain and I went on Appleby Castle while Billy took Bere Castle.

I had no problem leaving Dickie in charge of Allie. I still thought of him as the Captain-to-be for Allington Castle, the guy who would take over once we were done with our training and development program. Or, maybe they'd leave me in command and give him a different ship of his own. He was wasted as my XO.

We'd have to see how busy I could keep him on this small ship. If there ever came a time when we had more ships than people -like right now, for example- these ships would probably start losing extra crew to man the others. For now, though, Allington Castle was serving as a school ship, just like the ones on the North side of the rings, and had extra people assigned. And, not only extra people, but many of those we had were grossly over-qualified people, actually. Admirals Sykes and Andrews had given me every possible advantage here. Hopefully, I would never need them.

There wasn't any reason to stress the equipment, so when we were ready we boosted at 20 G for our jump point. It took us an hour and a half just to get outside of Jupiter's HEZ.

Our first jump had been carefully planned and practiced. As a first test, all we were going to do was go straight out from Jupiter until we were past the HEZ, go into hyperspace, wait two seconds, and pop out again to look around at where we were.

We had originally proposed 5 seconds, but that just wouldn't work. The drive was too fast and we'd be out in the Oort cloud by the time we counted to 5. The drive could be tuned, of course. It actually used the normal-space attitude jets to emit a small amount of ions out through the hyperspace bubble, and the reaction of those ions with normal space made the bubble -and everything in it- scoot like a scalded cat with no inertial effects that could be felt by those inside the bubble. Those few ions returning to the normal universe also made a trail that could be tracked, if you had the right instruments and an AI to watch them and you happened to be in the right place soon enough.

These drives were supposedly set to go just under 20 lightyears per day. To be a little more precise, it was about 7100 times the speed of light. In those five seconds we should have gone about 35,500 light-seconds. Divide by 60 for light-minutes, divide by 60 again by light-hours and you are just under 10. In those five seconds we should have gone just under the distance light would travel in 10 hours.

If you prefer AUs, an AU is about 500 light-seconds, so in those 5 seconds we should have gone about 73 AU, or two and a half times further than Neptune is from the Sun. And, we were already at Jupiter when we started. Well, way past Jupiter, by the time we reached the edge of the HEZ. Once we ran the numbers we scaled that first test back to only 2 seconds. That would only put us out another 30 AU past Jupiter, out at the outer limit of the traditional solar system where Pluto was.

Once we had verified that the two-second jump had done what we expected, we were going back into hyperspace for the second part of the test. This time we were going to immediately circle around the system until we were outside of Neptune, then head in and try to pop out close to Neptune's HEZ and in its shadow from Earth. Not complicated, but I still didn't really understand how the ship could navigate in hyperspace. Steering, or making the ship go in a particular direction, was easy but navigation, which was looking around, seeing where you were, and determining which direction to steer, was still hazy. We chose Neptune for this test because it was behind us, relative to the solar system, and getting close to being behind the Sun from Earth. No matter what happened, Earth shouldn't see us.

If everything went right, we would only be in hyperspace for six or seven seconds. This drive was just too fast to use inside the system. On the other hand, that shuttle trip between Earth and Jupiter was up past 23 hours now and surely we could do something about that with these ships.

Again, once the course was set, the AIs did everything for us. We were just passengers.

This time we let Bere Castle go first. There wasn't any "one giant leap for mankind" stuff. Every one of us had gone out in the Auroras at least once, doing those surveys. Going into and out of hyperspace was no big deal. Some of the guys said they could feel it, but I couldn't.

Oh, I felt something. I could tell we had shifted, but in or out I couldn't say. Being in hyperspace wasn't any different than being in normal space if you weren't using your main engines. If you woke up from a good sleep, you'd have to look out a window to tell if the ship was in hyperspace going 7100 times the speed of light or just drifting in normal space doing nothing. If we were using the main engine, we could tell that and know we were in N-Space, but if the mains were shut down there was just no way a human's senses could tell without looking out a window. And, the only windows these ships had were on the bridge.

We were keeping 500 Km separation from each other and when we got to the calculated jump point Bere Castle stopped accelerating and then just disappeared. There wasn't anything to tell us where she went. Supposedly, if we got close enough to her entry point we would be able to detect the faint ion trail that we already knew about, but we were too far away for that. We would have to practice following that trail later, when we had more experience.

We waited the agreed 60 seconds and followed her. After two seconds, we popped out into normal space again. I was in the Fire Control Center with a couple other guys, and we had two of our consoles set to repeat the CO's and the Navigator's consoles. We had a screen showing the view behind us when we entered hyperspace, and we could compare it to the current view. In the 'before' screen, Jupiter was still visible to the naked eye with no zoom. In the 'after' screen, all we could see was a bright star, the Sun. Jupiter was too far back to be visible from here.

Determining our exact position was a job for the Navigator and the AI. From those two screens, though, it was clear that we'd moved out pretty far. Within a couple of seconds, we had an updated plot that showed the solar system and our position, way out past Pluto's orbit. The small-scale tactical display showed a ship 8,000 Km away from us, identified as "Bere Castle". For a first try, that was good.

However, that made it clear that synchronized maneuvering was going to be out until we got all the ships tuned up to the point where the drives and navigation systems all did the exact same thing, for any specific maneuver, on every ship. If we couldn't stay in close formation for two seconds, how were we going to do it for a week when we started sending fleets out to attack systems a hundred lightyears away?

There wasn't any point in trying to affix blame. These ships were the better part of a million years old and they were bound to have minor differences in propulsion or navigation equipment performance. At the same time, I sent a heads-up message to Admiral Sykes that it was a problem that we would have to address.

The captains treated my status as commodore seriously and waited until I gave my permission to do the next step. The test plan gave us some options depending upon how the first jump went. With proof that fleet maneuvers were not a good idea, we stayed with the one minute delay. Bere Castle disappeared again, and after 60 seconds we followed them.

Again, the shift over to outside of Neptune wasn't supposed to take more than a few seconds, so a one minute delay was far longer than necessary but I was still trying to be cautious and methodical. This time the Nav Plot actually showed the system moving around our reference icon as we zipped around it. It reminded me of a computer-generated video, and I realized that that was exactly what it was. The AI modules tasked with maintaining these console displays and getting our operator input were showing where we would come out, if at any instant we chose to shut down the bubble and pop back out into normal space.

This time it took us about five minutes or so to locate Bere Castle. She was a good 30,000 Km away from us. She was very close to Neptune's HEZ which was good, but at the same time she was far off to the side. We were nowhere near the edge of the HEZ, but we were far closer to being 'behind' Neptune from Earth, like we planned. Navigation was going to need some work.

I couldn't see how us humans could be at fault, since we were not actually handling any controls and had really just been passengers since we laid in the exercise plan and told the ships to execute, but it wasn't clear where the problem was. Aside from the delay in execution, the exercise course was completely identical for both ships. Was it propulsion? Navigation? Calculations and decision-making on the part of the AIs? Control system lag or slop? Something to do with the hyperspace bubble generator?

The two ships started moving towards each other so that we would have a common start point for the return leg. I was talking with Appleby's AI about how to track down and fix whatever the problem was when I was told we had instructions from Jupiter Station Traffic Control to wait half an hour before proceeding, unless cleared earlier. Then, after about 20 minutes, we got another message from JSTC that we were cleared to continue the exercise. We had our second set of eight 'Castles', delivered to the usual spot on the other side of Ganymede.

We retraced our trip out, circling the system until we were outside from Jupiter again, then went inward to Jupiter's HEZ and popped out again for the long drive back in. While we were driving in, the next set of COs and crews went out to Ganymede with eight shuttles to get the new ships.

While Dickie continued to supervise Allie's overhaul, Billy and I went out on the next exercise, the first real one. This time, Billy was right next to me in Appleby's Fire Control Center. Admiral Sykes had decided that he had to have some of the fun himself, and he was in the same place in Bere Castle with his aide in the next couch to keep him company.

This time Appleby Castle was first. Since we had such concerns about navigation accuracy, we set a one hour delay for Bere's jump.

Hyperspace turned out to be just as boring in a Castle as it was in an Aurora. We were heading straight to Proxima Centauri, where we were to check in with an unmanned scanner station. Since Proxima C was only four and a quarter light-years away, that trip only took us about six hours.

Once we were in hyperspace, we were free to walk around the ship. There was no engine at the back pushing the ship forward and messing with the ship's built-in gravity system. We talked for a while with the crew, and after a while I went back to my acceleration couch and took a nap. We had all been run ragged for weeks, and it was as good a use of my time as any.

When we popped out in Proxima C, we were a day or so away from the sensor station in normal space, so we went back into hyperspace for just a few seconds and came out again within communication range. Either the AIs are compensating for the problems, or they are fixing the problems. Maybe both at once.

We didn't really have to do anything here, the system had already been surveyed by the first Aurora we sent out. We just had to wait for Bere Castle. About 45 minutes after we entered the system we caught the flare of a ship popping out of hyperspace, and Bere Castle was here with us.

She also made a short jump to the sensor station, but she was a lot closer than we had been. Apparently her hyperspace navigation was closer to right than ours, on top of being a touch faster. That 'faster' had to be the skipper. I put my foot down on that.

I told the AIs to set Bere Castle's drive at exactly 7100 times lightspeed, and leave it there as long as she was considered in training. The instant she and her crew were certified for full combat operations, her skipper could direct her normal speed to be anything he wanted within our established standard procedures and the ship's safe limits, but until then that speed would remain at the specified setting without recorded orders from higher.

That could have been awkward with Admiral Sykes onboard the Bere, but he backed me up. I was in charge of this exercise, and he saw my point. As long as we were in training, we're trying to teach the crews and test the ships. Having every ship perform differently on purpose would only make that more difficult. And it would make group maneuvers impossible.

Once Bere Castle had closed on the station, we could move on. I ordered Bere to follow after a five minute delay, and we jumped out for Alpha Centauri. That double system was only a sixth of a light-year away from Proxima C, and that made it just a twelve minute trip to get as close to our target as we could, with a couple hours of normal-space maneuvering to go the rest of the way.

Alpha C held the manned monitoring station we had set up for the system, and the Aurora freighter we had sent out was floating nearby. Yes, Bere Castle beat us there. For whatever reason, their hyperspace navigation was better than ours, and they came out much closer to the station than we did.

Appleby's AI said it appeared to be an instrument calibration issue and they were working on it. From my point of view, it didn't matter which ship was 'off' as long as we could adjust things to where all ships were the same, as only then could we group ships together into squadrons, task forces, and fleets.

Eventually we were both floating by the station and we took off for Barnard's Star. It was Bere's turn to go first. We gave them an hour before we followed. This time, when Bere disappeared we were close enough that we could detect the ion trace.

Barnard's Star was only a little bit further away from Sol than Alpha Centauri, but it wasn't in the same direction. From Alpha C through Sol to Barnard's Star was almost exactly a right angle. Doing the math in my head from the chart, it looked like 7 or 8 light-years away but the AIs were sure it was only 6 and a half light-years. At least it wasn't on the other side of Sol.

Barnard's Star was like Proxima Centauri, an old Population II star from the beginning of the universe when there was nothing but hydrogen. The star itself had next to no elements heavier than helium, and it had created most of that by burning hydrogen. Anything heavier than that it had gotten by absorbing things formed when its bigger sisters exploded, creating heavier elements and scattering them throughout the universe.

Over the eons the star had absorbed some heavier elements; we could tell that from spectroscopic analysis of the star's light. Not that it was a significant proportion of the star's mass, but it was enough to change the light the star emitted. The reason we were here, though, was that there was a lot of junk orbiting it that it hadn't absorbed yet.

This exercise had two primary purposes. The first objective was to verify that we could use the ship's hyperdrives to travel between stars, and navigate (with the AIs helping) well enough to go where we wanted to go. With jumps to Proxima C, Alpha C, and Barnard's Star, we had accomplished that. If we made it back to Jupiter Station, we could check that task off the list. We still had some work to do before we were ready for precision navigation like surprise attacks on the enemy, but what we had was good enough to send ships out, scouting, surveying, and looking for the Sa'arm.

That left our second objective, the reason we chose Barnard's Star for this. We frankly had no idea how to use these ships' weapons. And, we had no idea what effect they would have. The AIs could talk all they wanted and give us charts and animated videos, but we needed to actually use them and observe the results ourselves.

What we wanted to do was select an asteroid that had nothing else around it, make sure everyone else was well clear, and fire our various weapons at it one at a time to see what happened. Since I was in charge and Admiral Sykes was only here as an observer, Appleby Castle got to go first.

We picked one about 200 meters across that had no neighbors for at least 1000 kilometers and came to rest with respect to it as close to 10 Km away as we could get. The ship's sensors decided that it didn't have much metal in it and from its density it was roughly half ice and half rocks.

Not that the ice was all frozen water, of course. Methane ice, CO2 ice, probably several other compounds that would be liquid or gas on Earth's surface, those conditions that we called "Standard Temperature and Pressure" or STP. Out here, a light-hour or so from a marginal star that only glowed red, even on the sunlit side the temperature was only a few degrees above absolute zero.

If our suspicions were at all correct, we'd only get one shot. We expected the immediate or direct effect of a hole being drilled in the asteroid. At the same time, the contents of that hole had been vaporized and had nowhere to go so what we really expected to happen was for the vapor pressure in the hole to rapidly rise past the structural strength of the asteroid. At that point the asteroid should split apart from the pressure.

The big question was how fast it would happen. Too fast to see? Within a few seconds? Never? Would we get two or more huge sections slowly drifting apart, or an explosion with millions of fragments going everywhere?

Bere Castle stayed about 100 Km behind us, acting as safety monitor. To keep the Darjee on their freighter calm, we were both several light-minutes away from it and we made sure that the AIs kept them reassured that our weapons were being fired away from that direction.

The weapons were a disappointment. We all grew up with Star Trek and Star Wars and exploding planets, and we were expecting the asteroid to do something entertaining. Explode, or turn purple and disappear, or something.

We started with the two "Turret-Mounted Particle Beam Projectors" that were mounted on either side of the ship, about a third of the way back from the nose. They were supposed to be the secondary armament, on turrets with 360 degree rotation to cover the entire hemisphere. They didn't quite do that; their view was slightly tilted forward, so they could 'see' about 5 degrees past the bow for some forward-arc overlap, but they paid for that with about 30 degrees from the stern out that they could not 'see'.

Taken together, between the two turrets, there was a rough ellipse centered on the stern that neither turret could reach. In the plane of the turrets, it was about 60 degrees across. It wasn't quite as bad in the vertical plane, only about 50 degrees high. Still, that was a huge portion of the sky that we had absolutely no coverage of. If anyone was behind us, all we could do was floor it and hope our exhaust did something bad to them. Either that or turn until our weapons could reach it, but that would cost us any acceleration away from them.

The ship's primary weapon was the "Plasma Torpedo Launcher" in a nose mount where it could only fire forward. It was steerable over about 15 degrees from the ship's centerline, so it could shoot at anything in an arc about 30 degrees across and was thus completely worthless if the ship wasn't pointed pretty much directly at the target.

Straight ahead, we could use all three weapons. Above or below us, we could use both of the beam projectors. Off to our sides, we could only use one of the beam projectors. Directly behind us, we couldn't use anything. More and more, we were pretty sure that these ships had been intended for day-trips with the some public safety or maybe health and immigration inspection office, not an actual war-capable navy.

It didn't matter. These ships were what we had, and until we built better we had to make them work for us. That meant making sure we could get the absolute most out of each one, using their strong points to cover their weak points.

This coverage problem was later partially solved by putting the PB turrets on an elevator of sorts that gave the guns much more visibility at the cost of making them more susceptible to damage. How far the turret would be 'run out' would depend upon ship policy, the current tactical situation, and the gunner's immediate orders. For now, though, this 'warship' could only fire everything forward, and it had nothing that could fire behind.

Our first shot, with #1 (Starboard side) Particle Beam Projector, missed. Hey, the target was 10 kilometers away, and it may have been the first time the weapon was actually fired in three quarters of a million years. On the other hand, the asteroid wasn't exactly evading, so the AI did some things to calibrate the fire control system and mounts, and our second shot -from #2 on the Port side- hit the asteroid. Not square on, it was close to an edge, but it hit.

From our end, with both shots we heard/felt a jolt throughout the ship as the mount did its thing. As far as the other end was concerned, on our second shot we saw a lot of light and a puff of smoke, or steam, or something, followed immediately by a spray of debris.

Now, I used to be a "Nuclear Engineer", and I know all about subatomic particles and radiation and shielding and the Compton Effect. However, I was having trouble with the "Particle" part of these projectors. These weapons were partly kinetic and partly nuclear.

Yes, they accelerated an ionized nuclide, but it wasn't a normal nuclide as we knew 'normal'. Helium has an atomic mass of four, with two protons and two neutrons, and the universe creates it in two ways. First, in stars, by fusing hydrogen into deuterium and tritium and then those into helium. Second, when the heavier unstable elements decayed, one common way they did it was to eject a four-baryon particle with two protons and two neutrons.

In fact, a Helium nucleus (without the electrons that would make it a charge-neutral atom) was one of the first types of radiation detected when we started investigating this 'radioactivity' thing, and it was named an "Alpha Particle" long before we understood nuclear physics well enough to realize that an Alpha Particle and a Helium nucleus were the same things. These things were far more deadly than any other form or radioactivity, but at the same time they were simple to stop. They would be stopped by anything with mass, even a few feet of air would do it. Just holding a piece of paper in the beam stopped it.

It was even named "Alpha" because, while it was the most massive and thus had the most energy, it was the least-dangerous of the several types of radiation discovered. Certainly, none of the alpha particles that killed Madame Curie penetrated the layer of dead skin on the outside of her epidermis. Only inhaling something that spat out Alphas was deadly, as that put them inside the body where no matter where they went they were damaging cells. None of those early researchers had positive-pressure respirators, and they all died of complications from breathing radioactive dust.

Traditional subatomic theory held that the discrete positive charges on two protons would force them apart unless there was enough added mass so close that the strong nuclear force overcame the charge repulsion, which was why the number of neutrons almost always equaled or exceeded the number of protons.

On the other hand, for some reason that a lot of bald people had spent their lives trying to figure out, adding too many neutrons is also unstable. And, the reason that those guys had no hair in the first place was that a neutron by itself isn't stable either. An isolated neutron falls apart into a proton, an electron, and a neutrino. Protons need neutrons to congregate together. Neutrons needed protons to be stable. No, it doesn't make any sense at all. It is, however, true.

For two protons, adding one or two neutrons made it stable. Both Helium-3 and Helium-4 could be found in nature, with no detectable decay methods. Helium-2, a nucleus with nothing but two protons, just didn't happen. No matter how hard we smashed a proton beam into other protons, they didn't stick long enough to measure. They just bounced. We could make He-5 easily enough by bombarding -4 with neutrons, but it was unstable with a half-life less than a day.

Apparently, neutrons wanted a one-to-one relationship with their protons. Having too many neutrons wasn't stable either. But, for the larger elements, the protons needed the added mass of additional neutrons to keep them together. Past a certain point, it just didn't work any more. Above lead, there weren't ANY stable isotopes at all. Not one. The most massive nuclide that didn't decay was Pb-208 with 82 protons and 126 neutrons. Go look at a chart of the nuclides. Right (more protons) and down (more neutrons) from Pb-208, every single entry has a half-life.

These things that the Particle Beam Projector projected had a mass of 5 plus a little, which meant Helium plus a baryon plus a quark of some sort. According to the best research Earth had, quarks were only stable in threes, giving you a proton, a neutron, or a few other more esoteric things depending upon which three quarks you had. Apparently, these guys had figured out how to add just one, and that kept the He-5+ 'particle' stable long enough to use it as a weapon. As one of the guys had put it when we had first gone over how this worked, "'Weird Science', indeed".

Now, in nuclear physics the likelihood of a particle interacting with a target depends on a lot of things. It is expressed as a unit of area, and the unit is a 'barn' as in can you hit a barn? Don't ask. The reference is the cross-sectional area of a Uranium nucleus, which was taken as 1 barn. However, since the unit is used for effective area for interactions, the number changes with the particle and target, what their speeds are, etc. Some things don't work well, as if the target was very small and hard to hit. Others things are easy, as if the target was larger and easier to hit.

The effective cross-section for absorption by a U-235 nucleus of a fast neutron, one just released by another fissioning nucleus, is very small (~1 b, since that was the original definition of the barn) but for a slow or 'thermal' neutron, it is far larger (~700 b), allowing reactions where an atom absorbed one, then split and released several more, to be chained together to make either a self-sustaining reactor or a cascading bomb depending upon how you put the pieces together.

As an aside, you made that choice when you built your reactor. It WAS NOT POSSIBLE to turn a reactor into a bomb. If you'd wanted a bomb, you would have built it differently with different materials. It was possible to make a reactor ruin itself, but you couldn't make it blow up. Even Chernobyl, a design intended to breed fuel for bombs, couldn't do any more than make a big mess even when its operators did everything they could to screw it up. Granted, it was a pretty big mess, but there was no smoking hole in the ground a mile across like a bomb made of the same materials would have left.

For these HE-5+ particles the cross-section for absorption was much higher, like they were homing or something. The effective cross-section for absorption by any nucleus for one of these particles was in the range of 10^8 b. No matter what the material was, it was going to be absorbed. And, for almost any nuclide, that nucleus promptly fissioned. Say WHAT? Yes, fissioned. Apparently that was the purpose of that extra quark. It made just about anything unstable.

Anyway, we had a stream of charged particles, which was just about guaranteed to kill anything living it ran into, but which was stopped in its tracks by anything solid. However, when it did run unto anything, whatever it ran into was pretty much guaranteed to undergo fission. The particle went straight to the nucleus of whatever atom it reached and got absorbed, and that nucleus promptly exploded. Not that there was an awful lot of energy released if it was lighter than lead, but it certainly tore apart the molecular structure of whatever that atom had been a part of.

Taken one atom at a time, this was an incredibly effective weapon. However, it only worked on a very small scale. Once you had done this to a few thousand atoms, you started to have effects noticeable to the rest of the universe, starting with a plasma-hot fog of material torn loose from the target. And, the beam was running into that fog, not the target. You could also make the atoms in that fog fission, but that wasn't destroying the target. All it was doing was heating up the fog.

Firing the beam for longer than a few milliseconds had no further effect on the target until that fog had dissipated. Not that this took long, as everything in that fog was moving at the speeds you would expect to see in the middle of a nuclear bomb. However, the particles in the fog weren't directed. They ran into each other and bounced back into the center of the mess and it took time to clear out of the area.

Of course, it was expected that the fog itself would cause secondary damage. There were lots of things on the hull of a ship that would be negatively affected by a plasma wash. Sensors, machinery, basically anything more complicated than a hull-plate would be degraded by that fog. Whether it was the heat, the chemical reactions that the plasma induced, or just having the fog condense on it, almost everything the plasma touched was degraded one way or another. The hull plates themselves would probably be strengthened by having more vaporized hull material condense on them, but everything else would be degraded. And everything in the area got heated up, of course.

So what happened when you fired this beam at an asteroid, a weak collection of rocks, ices, and assorted things that fell onto it over the eons? All we saw at first was the light from the nuclear and chemical reactions, then the spray of stuff knocked loose, and a change in spin from the kick in the side. Entertaining, but not real impressive as a weapon. We needed to see what it did to an actual ship.

We fired both beams at the asteroid several more times to allow the AI to get the focusing and aiming mechanisms calibrated right, then we shut them both down. By then the asteroid was completely covered by a cloud of debris and monatomic fog, so we waited until it dissipated before we brought up the big gun, the Plasma Torpedo. That dissipation didn't take long. Everything knocked loose had enough kinetic energy to escape the asteroid's pull.

The Plasma Torpedo was pretty much straight out of Star Trek. The launcher used force fields to stabilize and compress a pellet of Osmium and Gadolinium, then injected the cavity with protons from the power plants, again causing limited fission which raised the pressure and temperature to stellar core levels. Then, somehow in a way I will probably never understand, the launcher swapped out the force fields for a magnetic bottle and spit the bottle out.

Said bottle had a very limited lifetime before it collapsed, on the order of 3 or 4 seconds, and it collapsed anyway if it ran into anything at all. Like the particle beam, it was a weapon that could only be used in space. When we fired it at the asteroid, we got an effect that was "the same only more so".

The torpedo or bottle or whatever was slow enough to watch it move, as opposed to the 'ray-gun' appearance of the Particle Beams. And, since the contents were hot enough to glow, it was easy to see. If you were standing on the bridge and looking out the window, there was a definite "Star Trek" feel to watching that thing leave the ship.

When the ball or bottle or whatever reached the asteroid, I can't say it exploded but the glow grew far brighter as well as larger as the bottle collapsed and the plasma, still trying to go in the direction it had been launched, spread out over the asteroid. And, after a few seconds, as the glow was dying out as the plasma cooled, we got the 'explosion' we all wanted to see. Somewhere in that asteroid, maybe there was a pre-existing crack in the ices or maybe the particle beams had drilled some deep enough holes, the plasma reached something volatile that tried to expand into a gas when the plasma heated it up and couldn't because it was surrounded by rock and ice.

The asteroid exploded. Okay, as explosions go it was pretty wimpy. Still, we got to see a glowing asteroid come apart into several pieces. Doesn't that count as an explosion?

Yes. Yes, it does. At Earth-normal conditions, water doesn't do much when you heat it from 99 degrees C to 100 degrees, but when you try to heat it one more degree to 101 degrees, instead of getting hotter it changes phase to a gas, growing in volume by about 1500 times. If you try to hold that gas in, the pressure rises FAST. A path that let a little bit of liquid water in isn't big enough to let 1500 times as much steam out again. The pressure will rise until it overcomes whatever is holding it back.

They call it a steam explosion. It's what kills people who spill water onto a hot grease-filled pan on the stove, it's what destroys ships with a hole in the side when cold seawater rushes into the hot boiler room, and it's what destroyed Santorini Island and the entire Minoan culture when that same cold seawater leaked into a volcano named Thera that had cracks in the magma tube. We were just doing the same thing with plasma and ice.

That was fun, but we had to let Bere Castle have its turn. We picked another poor defenseless asteroid and we stood well back while they pulled up close. The AIs learn quickly. Their first shot with a Particle Beam also missed, but their second one hit in the center of the asteroid. After several more shots, they paused to let the cloud of dust, rock, and gases dissipate, then they blew that one up, too, with their Plasma Torpedo.

After that we settled down for a rational test program, beating up asteroids and getting used to how to use the weapons. The Plasma Torpedos were moving just under 35 kps (relative to the ship) when they left the launcher, and the bottle collapsed on its own just under three seconds after launch. Together they gave us a pretty hard outer limit for range, about 98 kilometers out. There was no theoretical lower range, but firing it at something touching the 'barrel' of the launcher would have undesirable effects on the launcher, right? Don't use this weapon on a ship that is docked and is boarding you unless you are willing to take damage yourself.

The Particle Beams, on the other hand, had a much longer range for effectiveness but didn't have anywhere near the destructive capability. Just to assign a number for the reports, we said it was effective from zero range out to 500 kilometers. It worked for some distance further, of course, but not too much further. The particles it was sending weren't that stable, either.

One thing we noticed: The Particle Beams never made the asteroid explode. They would knock chunks off and heat it up, but that was all. The Plasma Torpedo didn't always make the asteroids explode on the first shot. They always did if the asteroid had been hit before, whether by Beam or by Torpedo. We inferred that the first shot, whichever it was, was making cracks that the followup Plasma Torpedo was exploiting. We'd have to thoroughly instrument one of our targets to be sure, though.

So, our preliminary doctrine followed the weapon's range envelopes. Soften them up with the Particle Beams as you move in, then finish them off with the Plasma Torpedo when you get in range. Of course how well this worked with actual enemy spaceships made of welded hull plates would have to wait until we could get some mockups out here that we could shoot at.