Chapter Time to Go
“RG01 has just settled into its parking orbit,” Dana Rucker reported as she entered Chairperson Eric Gourmand’s office. “All of the starcorps are now parked in Mars orbit.”
Gourmand did not look up from the tablet that he was studying to visually acknowledge the presence of his Chief of Staff. Instead of responding to this report, he barked out the question that was most on his mind at this moment.
“Any information on the Orion?”
“Nothing so far,” Rucker reported with a shake of her head.
“Damn!”
Gourmand’s outburst was due to his impatience. He knew that a message from Admiral Sloan could arrive at any time within the next several hours. But this fact did nothing to prevent him from being anxious about the wait. The departure of the BX01 Starcorp from Earth Space was done in silence for the precise purpose of keeping the United Front Pact States in the dark about their intentions for as long as possible. It was there hope that this would buy them a week of indecision within the United Front Pact states. Transmissions from Earth revealed that the Earth was unaware of their plan to leave the solar system. But their actions were the opposite of indecisive.
Gourmand and the Starcorp League were caught off guard by the quick response of the United Front Pact states. Their plan counted on the Earth states devoting a week or more to the study of their sudden retreat to Mars space. Images of a large space force rising out of the Earth’s atmosphere, less than three days after BX01’s departure, was a major complication to their plans.
“Should we start moving people?” Rucker questioned after waiting a moment for Gourmand to give the order of his own volition.
Because of his position as the Chairperson of the Starcorp League Gourmand became the administrative head of this gathering by default. It was his job to prepare and organize this fleet for the jump to Proxima Centauri. The successful completion of this task was dependent on him having enough time to orchestrate it. The fast-approaching United Front Pact Space Force was denying him the time he needed to affix the entire fleet with star-drives. The work to do this was not a large endeavor when compared to switching out the primary thrusters, or constructing a new power plant. However, it did require a certain amount of technical expertise to do it, and it did involve reconfiguring the power distribution system. This latter part meant that the ship’s thrusters had to be inoperable for three to four hours. At this time in the gathering, sixty percent of the fleet had their star-drives installed. Rigging the remainder of the fleet with them was going to require more time than what Gourmand had to work with.
Gourmand’s Chief of Staff, Dana Rucker, was inquiring about a plan they contrived after learning that the original plan was unworkable under this new time constraint. The arrival of Starcorp RG01 was the final piece to this alternate plan. Its presence gave them the capability to work this plan to its maximum potential. Star-drives were installed in the RG01 starships before they made the journey to Mars. Their presence gave them the additional room they needed to move all the people from the starships without star-drives into starships that did. Accomplishing this would be time-consuming but far less so than installing star-drives in the remaining spaceships.
The most time expensive part of this alternate plan was not the movement of the people. It was the movement of their space capsules. All the spaceships were required to have a sufficient number of space capsules to accommodate its entire compliment of passengers. Also, all starships were required to have and to maintain a five percent excess of seating within their space capsules. This was not sufficient room for the hundreds of thousands that needed seats in a starship with a star-drive. To fix this problem the space capsules from the starships without star-drives needed to be transferred into the docking bays of the starships with star-drives. Once there, they had to be secured and tied into the starship’s power supply and communication system. This was something that the starships were configured to do in the case of emergencies. But the act of doing it, especially on this scale, was going to cost them a dozen hours and probably more.
“No, not yet,” was Gourmand’s response to Rucker’s inquiry about commencing the movement of space capsules.
Rucker was surprised by this answer. After a second of thought, she dared to ask the question she thought he needed to hear.
“Are you sure about that, sir? If we start now, we could be out of here in less than fifteen hours.”
Gourmand had already computed that. He also knew that he needed twice that much time to configure the remaining starships with star-drives and that the United Front Pact Space Force was twenty hours away. What he did not know was the disposition of Admiral Sloan and his war machine.
“Let’s give him two more hours,” Gourmand returned with a soft shake of his head.
They were seven minutes away from that two-hour limit when Joshua’s communication came in. Gourmand was in his office with Rucker when he initiated the playback. All the other Starcorp League Representatives were tied into this viewing by an intranet connection. When the wall monitor came on Joshua’s face nearly filled the height of the screen. His expression was solemn. His tone was grave.
“We have just completed an engagement with the UFP Space Force. I lost seventeen mows and fourteen pilots. I estimate the UFP lost ten times that many spacefighters. The bulk of their forces is scattered. I have every reason to believe they will reform for a second attack. That should be sometime within the next three to four hours if we remain on station. The rate of fall of the UFP Space Force has been slowed by fifty-seven percent. We calculate the UFP Armada’s ETA to Mars between twenty-four and twenty-seven hours. This time-range is contingent upon how long it takes them to regroup and to accelerate to their original rate of fall. A second engagement is not factored into this.”
After his last remark, Joshua took a long pause to arrange his thoughts in his head. At the end of this, he began to speak again with greater severity in his tone.
“The UFP Armada now knows what we can do. That is what they learned in our first engagement. I have no doubt that a second engagement with the UFP Armada will take a substantially higher toll on my fighters.”
Once again Joshua paused. This time, it was done to give weight to the words he had just spoken. After this, he spoke his final words behind a plainly visible inhale and exhale.
“What are your orders?”
This report momentarily locked Gourmand’s brain into a series of thoughts about options and possibilities. He ignored the beeps on his com-link that were being generated by the incoming calls of League Representatives. Several seconds into this Rucker interrupted him with her assessment.
“It’s not enough time.”
Gourmand was fully aware that Joshua’s war machine did not buy him the time that he needed. But it did give him the hope that they could.
“But it’s more than what we had before,” Gourmand corrected with an inflection of optimism. “We need to speed up the work on the star-drives.”
“What about the space capsules?” Rucker questioned back with the intonation of concern.
“Forget the capsules,” Gourmand returned with a decisive and rapid response. “We’re leaving with everyone and everything. Nothing gets left behind.”
Gourmand knew that he was taking a gamble. He knew that they needed a minimum of thirty hours to make their escape. But Joshua’s initial success gave him the belief that this additional time could be acquired. Up until this moment, Gourmand had no way of knowing what degree of success or failure he could expect from Joshua’s war machine. This report gave him a measure of its potential. By his computation, Joshua had the numbers to buy him the time that he needed. And by his measure of importance, there was no price that Joshua’s fighters could pay that was too high.
Gourmand spent the next five minutes recording and transmitting his orders to Joshua. In the recording, he made it clear that he needed the arrival time of the UFP Armada pushed back eight hours more. This number was based on Joshua’s twenty-four-hour ETA calculation and a two-hour buffer. He stressed the importance of this time requirement. He emphasized how much was at stake. After transmitting this message into the void between him and Joshua, he sat waiting in his office for Joshua’s reply. Rucker infrequently interrupted this vigil with reports on the progress of the retrofitting and the occasional problem that needed his decision to resolve. Five hours later Joshua reported back.
Joshua’s appearance on the monitor was sullen. Several seconds after his image appeared he went into his message with a grave delivery.
“An additional one-hundred and eighty-eight mows are gone. The number of pilots lost in this engagement is unknown at this time. We are still searching for survivors. I’m down to seventy-nine Mows. Enemy losses are substantially higher. But their losses are negligible by comparison to their overall number. The UFP Armada’s ETA is estimated at twenty-eight hours, give or take three hours. A third engagement will likely decimate my fighter force. When that happens my entire command is lost. I need your permission to break away now, while the UFP Armada is reforming.”
“That’s it, they did it,” Rucker exulted after hearing the entire message.
Gourmand displayed no overt reaction to the message. More than anything else, Joshua’s report seemed to push him further into thought. It took him several seconds of contemplation to decide how to respond and little more than a minute to do it. In his return message, Gourmand instructed Joshua to remain on station until he received orders for him to do otherwise. He also advised Joshua to avoid a third engagement if possible. He closed his message with a promise to give him permission to break away at his earliest convenience.
“We have the time,” Rucker asserted with an inflection of challenge. “Why wait?”
“Something could go wrong on our end,” Gourmand explained defensively. “I need Joshua in position if it does. He has to stay within striking distance until we’re all away.”
Without the presence of the Orion, Gourmand understood that the UFP Armada could race ahead without bothering to reform into battle lines. This would subtract from Admiral Sloan’s ETA, and Gourmand wanted every bit of that time. A second fear of Gourmand’s was that UFP might get their hands on a star-drive and pursue them across the stars.
“How far along are we with the retrofit?”
“We’re at about eighty-five percent,” Rucker reported with little thought given to the number.
Gourmand pondered this report for a moment before giving Rucker her instructions.
“Okay, we’ll launch in two groups. Launch everything that we can in the first group minus any ships we need to complete the retrofitting within the next twenty hours.”
“And us?” Rucker spoke with a questioning inflection.
“You’ll go with BX01 in the first group,” Gourmand answered behind a hesitation. “Make arrangements for me aboard one of the starships leaving in the second group.”
“I’ll make arrangements for the both of us,” Rucker corrected without hesitation.
Gourmand paused to give this correction a thought before concurring with an, “okay.”
Rucker acknowledged this with a nod. She then turned away and hurried to the door.
This first interstellar jump was regarded as an uncertain endeavor. It was given this distinction because of the distance they would be traveling. The people that perfected the science of the star-drive experimented with small jumps. These trials provided them with a fairly-thorough understanding of what to expect. They knew that it was impossible to see anything external to the ship visually. Radar was effectively non-existent in null space-time. The temporal field absorbed it. It was also known that the gravity wells in real space created their own version of tides and eddies in null space. Because of these factors, plus the distance of this jump and the mass numbers of people involved, they felt a need to be extra careful.
The central worry of the scientists and engineers was that the star-drive might malfunction and cause the spaceship to drop out of null space-time. Because of the distance, they were traveling it was understood that an errant star-drive could put the lives of all aboard in peril. This was because a call for help could take years or even decades to reach the nearest receiver. And once the mayday was received the task of going to their rescue would involve finding the vicinity of space-time that the spaceship dropped into. This problem would be magnified if this spaceship drifted off course before dropping out of null space-time. This concern was the impetus behind the decision for group jumps. Spaceships in null space-time, which were nearby in distance and time, were capable of cross communication via their temporal fields. Their ability to stay close together was enhanced by their numbers. The reason for this was the magnetic fields they produce.
While in null space-time the magnetic sensors on spaceships could discern the gravity wells that existed across thousands of parsecs of the space-time continuum. The larger the time window they created, the greater their field of detection. From this data from they could etch out a single star system or dozens of them. But two spaceships launched into null space-time side by side with time dilations that were just a tad more than slightly askew would be invisible and deaf to each other. Multiple spaceships nearby and with identical time dilation windows had the advantage of a combined magnetic signature. The greater the number of spaceships the larger the signature. The increased size of this magnetic signature made it easier for the members to stay in the group. The larger the magnetic signature the further away in null space-time a stray spaceship had to be to lose contact with the group. This fact made it easier for each ship to stay synched to the same time dilation window.
It took near to an hour for Two-hundred and seventeen starships and one-hundred and fifty-seven interplanetary spaceships to ready themselves for this first interstellar jump. When all the spaceships reported in at their ready positions, the procession began to push away from Mars. From a distance, which was far enough back to see all of them, they resembled a small swarm of bees. It took ten minutes for this swarm to disappear into the void. It was estimated that it would take them another twenty hours to reach a speed that enabled all in the procession to open a time window.
Twenty-one hours had passed when Gourmand first heard that the remaining ships were ready for the jump. Within a minute of hearing that report he ordered all spaceships to commence launch. He then sent his final order to Joshua Sloan. In this message, he gave him permission to break away from the UFP Armada, and he ordered Joshua not to allow his star-drive to fall into UFP hands. Behind this order, he instructed Joshua to report to the BX01 Starcorp League in Proxima Centauri and gave his thanks and his wish for their good luck.
It was another ninety minutes later when Gourmand sent out his final transmission. He was situated inside a space capsule aboard the Starship Winstead when he recorded it. The Winstead, along with the entire second group of the BX01 Starcorp Fleet, was accelerating away from Mars by this time and had been doing so for the past forty minutes. The message was not directed at the Orion. It was sent to everyone in the Sol System and it was transmitted un-coded. In it, he outlined the motives and the intentions of the starcorp community. He then offered his best wishes to the people of Earth and then he said, “Good-bye.”