Chapter 8

Month 73—January on Anouilh

I STOOD on my balcony looking out across the causeway linking us to Papillon. As soon as they discovered I was serious about helping with the school and infrastructure, the meetings with the council had progressed well. There was little in the way of national identity for the islands. Back years ago, they’d been considered a possession of Cuba, but during the revolution, Cuba renounced claim to all territories outside their immediate waters. What I was asking was to be chartered as the national government. They’d agreed in principle because no one wanted to be responsible for dealing with other countries or the Confederacy. There was really no national military, government, or anything else.

I was mostly concerned with how to keep the Confederacy out of our business. It was like having a know-it-all god looking over your shoulder. I talked to Ubie after the event and found he had severed all links with the Darjee AIs who seemed to be everywhere. Rachel had a long counseling session with Ubie because he despised having Darjee code in his core but admitted it made basic calculations faster. It had taken a while to get him settled down so he could come up with a solid plan.

He’d banked on his father being a Tuull AI in declaring himself a free and independent being. It was kind of like an earth kid filing for emancipation or diplomatic immunity, I guessed. His declaration had been met with stony silence from the surrounding AIs so Ubie took it upon himself to cut them off.

While I was thinking of all the implications, Battlestar rushed into my office and came straight out to my deck.

“I’ve got it!” the rangy former NASA scientist shouted.

“Eureka!” I responded. “What have you got?”

“The designs for our ship!”

“Now you’re talking.” That put me into a better mood fast. Our planning had been to get well above the exosphere so we could operate with a hemispherical view of Earth. But building a ship to get us there was a problem. Unlike the A-rabs, we didn’t have a Russian partner who would build the ship for us, or enough money to bribe one. “What do you have?” He dragged me back into the office and pulled the drapes as if there was someone out there who could spy on us.

“Look at this design!” My office lights dimmed, too, and Ubie projected a hologram of the ship.

“It’s a fucking flying saucer! Are you kidding me?” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

“For real, man! This is a ship design that was used by some now-extinct race forty thousand years ago and has been reduced in size over the millennia to what we think of as a flying saucer. Our mindset usually portrays flying saucers as single operator or at most platoon-size vehicles. But the early designs were for freight and a kind of aircraft carrier,” Battlestar continued.

“So, why did they abandon it?”

“That’s easy. No hyperdrive. The kind of FTL drive most of the Confederacy uses is capable of moving huge ships across light-years of space. This ship is a launching platform for smaller fast ships that need the exit point preprogrammed before you can engage the hyperdrive. But since we don’t plan to leave the system anyway, hyperdrive is a waste on a ship this size.” I kept walking around the hologram, motioning for sections to be enlarged so I could see it better.

“I’m good with that. I don’t think we could use ships with a hyperdrive anyway. Isn’t there some law about creating a bubble inside that HEZ thing? Hyperspace Exclusion Zone? Everything’s supposed to blow up,” I said as I tried to look inside the bridge that bulged from the top of the saucer.

“If I may, Boss,” Ubie announced over the system I’d never managed to locate in my room.

“Go, Ubie. Can you explain this thing?”

“The current Confederacy hyperdrive technology is designed for interstellar travel. The race this ship belonged to lived on four habitable planets in a single star system. The drive was never meant to take them to other star systems. It was intended for in-system travel,” Ubie said. “The small ships Battlestar alluded to use a hyperdrive that was intended for defense against the other planets. It can activate even in the atmosphere with no ill effects, though mass plays an important part in that. And since it is accurate over short ranges, interplanetary travel within the system at faster than light speed was quite practical. Isn’t this exciting?”

I reflexively glanced at the ceiling. Exciting?

“I’m glad to hear your enthusiasm, Ubie. So, if we build this, say on top of the hotel, we could launch up, up, and away, right?”

“No. Sorry, Boss.” Ubie sounded truly crestfallen. “First of all, this ship design is nearly a kilometer in diameter and a hundred meters thick.”

“Shit! The hotel isn’t that big. The whole island isn’t much more than that.”

“Exactly. Also, the mass is such that it would take a huge amount of thrust to move it off the surface of Earth. The thrusters in this ship are designed for maneuvering, not for lifting,” Ubie said.

“Well, that sucks,” I said. “Come on, guys. I know you wouldn’t have been so enthused about this if we couldn’t use it. What gives?”

“We could build it in space,” Battlestar said. “We’re thinking about building it right in the asteroid belt where raw materials are plentiful.”

“Um ... not to be a doubter, but if we’re building our ship in the asteroid belt, um ... how do we get out there to build it?”

“We don’t need to go out there,” Ubie said. “Well, most of we. All we need to do is send a few remote operated replicators up there and let them do the work.”

“Most of us?” I picked up on that right away. I was not volunteering for a trip to the asteroid belt.

“I would need to interface with the replicators in order to run the ship building operation. So, at least a part of me has to go with the replicators. It will be a stretch of my personal space.”

I examined the plans more carefully and zoomed in on the layout diagrams, noting where the drive was located, how it was insulated from the rest of the saucer, how much room a kilometer diameter would give and how many people and how much materiel it could support. Dynamite! This could support a crew of hundreds.

“How long is it going to take to get our replicator to the asteroid belt so we can get started?”