Chapter 22

Month 139—July on Anouilh

“WHAT THE HELL was that, Teddy?” Thom asked as he stumbled off the transporter pad beside the pool. “Command Central sent General Quarters to the entire fleet. It’s a wonder you didn’t have every ship in the system on your tail.”

“We did a weapons test, as in the plan we filed at your request when the St. Jeanne d’Arc went live, Major. Come have a drink. Gin and tonic, right?”

“Yes, thank you. I could use a drink.” The bartender walked up to their table as they sat down. Though the general staff of the hotel, including the bartenders, were all women hired from Papillon, they’d all adopted the topless look with just a wrap-around skirt. Thom paused a moment to take a sip of his drink and appreciate the view. “I reviewed your plan. It didn’t say when you were going to do a weapons test. International incidents have been started over less.”

“Our railgun just came online today and we were excited to test it right away. Should I have Ubie file a notice every time we need to test something? We’re still new at this whole military thing,” I laughed.

“It isn’t funny. You wouldn’t believe how many people up there have volunteered to come and teach you all about military discipline.” Thom’s comment was cut off by Dakota joining them from the transporter.

“Sorry, I’m late. Had to kiss a few crew members and pilots,” she said. “Did you see it? It was beautiful!”

“Yes, I saw the replay.”

“Col. Thom is upset that we didn’t warn Command Central or someone,” I said. “Naughty, naughty, Captain.”

“Are you kidding me? You don’t have anyone within six light minutes of our station. Farther from where we detonated the missile. Why are you upset about that?” Dakota asked. The bartender automatically brought Dakota a pina colada and she took a long sip. “Yum.”

“It wasn’t just firing the weapon,” Thom shouted. “Though that would have been enough to set some of the brass off. There was no signature. No warmup of the weapons systems on any of your ships. One second there was nothing and the next a projectile was coming out of one of those odd little capsule things you have. Which you haven’t told us anything about at all, by the way. They don’t match any craft you’ve shown us.”

“Major, please keep your voice down. Not everyone knows the Hawks aren’t the sleek sexy things the sleek sexy girls climb into for a mission,” I said.

“Those are the Hawks?” Thom asked, trying and almost succeeding to keeping his voice down. “But what are those sleek sexy things the sleek sexy girls fly?”

“They’re the game controllers. That’s all. I’m not sending any of our girls out into space naked to do battle with the Sa’arm. They deploy to their Hawks and take off. Once they get in the controller, everything is in the game. It looks and feels 100% real world. But the girls never move from the flight deck to control their Hawks. They could be a thousand miles away. They’ve never seen one of the actual fighters. We learned this from your CAP testing stations.”

Thom closed his eyes and pressed the cold drink against his forehead.

“It’s all fake?”

“I don’t think you could call that little explosion out there today fake,” Dakota said. “The girls worked in simulators for almost two years thinking they were on the ship for training.”

“Like a sleep learner.”

“No,” I said. “A sleep learner doesn’t give your body practice. When the girls enter their controller, they are in their Hawk. They could tell you every little nuance of its moves. They have reflexes like you would not believe.”

“But there is no way that projectile could have come out of that little ship. I had the AI do measurements based on the observation and it said the projectile came from a sixty-meter railgun. Those little ships aren’t that long. The railgun and power plant would have to be twice the length of the capsules.”

“The projectile is twenty-two point three meters long,” Ubie announced. “The Hawk is fifty-one meters overall length. The accelerator for our railgun is one hundred meters in length.”

“One hundred? But where did it come from? Even the St. Jeanne didn’t have a heat signature that indicated a railgun charging,” Thom insisted.

“The railgun isn’t up there, Major. It’s down here. The gun fires a projectile into a transporter pad. The Hawk is just a delivery system for a pad at the other end of the transport. We figure that will let our birds fire without warning and it keeps St. Jeanne safe because it is basically inert.” I was indulging in a Mai Tai while Thom was communing with his AI.

“No,” he said at last. “The AI says no energy signature was seen on Earth either. You can’t shield it that well unless it’s under a mile of rock.”

“Or water,” I said looking out at our blue Caribbean horizon.

“Water. Water?” Thom said. “You built an underwater railgun? Teddy, I thought you were a game developer.”

“We’ve picked up some really talented engineers, too. We need to make up weapons that pack a powerful punch and can be delivered by sleek sexy little girls in sleek sexy little fighters. You wouldn’t believe the response we got from the gamers today. As far as they’re concerned, we’ve been fighting Sa’arm for two years. Today, the graphics got a whole lot better.”

“Why so long? Teddy, the railgun depends on mass and impact and the projectile is usually just a big bowling ball.”

“Ubie, please show us a diagram of the projectile.” A hologram of the railgun missile appeared over the table. “Our weapon isn’t solid,” I explained. “Something else suggested by gamers. It’s actually three cannon balls spaced ten meters apart in a collapsible frame. Of course, we don’t have massive testing facilities, so it hasn’t been tried against a real target. It was simply proposed that we create a kind of triple-whammy. So, if a target is struck, it is struck three times in rapid succession. We’re hoping that’s more effective against shields by multiplying the impacts in the exact same location.”

“Command is going to want you to come in and develop a weapon like that for them.”

“They have all the information they need from what I just told you. It’s all existing Confederacy tech. They should be able to figure it out from there. You have AIs.”

“Our AIs do calculations but they don’t develop weapons. Our teams have to design the weapons themselves. You wouldn’t believe some of the things they’ve put out there. A disrupter that has to be within ten kilometers in order to be effective? These guys have no idea what that means to a ship in combat because the design worked just fine against a rock in space.”

“You don’t group source your weapons?”

“Group source? What do you mean?”

“You’re supposed to have taken the best and brightest of humanity out there. Don’t you have teams of thousands working on this stuff?”

“We usually manage to have a team of as many as a hundred do the development after one person or a small team of half a dozen comes up with the design.”

“We had nearly 50,000 work on our weapons.”

“What? You only have 7,000 in the whole country!”

“Yes, but we have 50,000 gamers who participate with our girls through VR headsets and give us feedback. We made eighty releases of updates and expansion packs for the game over the past six years while incorporating the best ideas and criticism from the gamers. We’ve got a backlog of weapons we haven’t worked out how to implement yet. Some of them were suggested by your Marines who play the game. Our foot soldiers have tactics developed by thousands, again including your Marines, who play the game. What’s better is their kids and concubines are playing, too. That’s where the idea of using a transporter to deliver the ordnance came from. A couple of Confederacy kids on a planet unknown to us came up with the idea.” [See Thinking Outside the Box by akarge.]