"Buckle up kiddies; we’re going for a ride. That means you too, Meredith.”
I barely had time to float over to my station and snap my harness shut before I was slammed sideways by a sudden lurch of the ship. While only a mission specialist, I understood enough of the workings of the engines to follow Captain Carlisle’s evasive maneuvers. The pute showed a 3D projection of space with our ship, the Cincinnati, being chased by squids’ ship.
At two hundred thousand klicks the squids had to keep their beams nice and tight if they hoped to hurt the Cincinnati, but that meant their chances of a hit were close to nil. Carlisle spun the engines’ nacelles at random, firing blasts of thrust as the whim struck him. Each thrust threw me about within my harness, but the resulting changes in the ship’s vector would make it difficult for the squids’ pute to get a fix on us.
And I knew, better than anyone, the squids really wanted to get a fix on us; to blow us out of space. Me, Carlisle, and the Cincinnati had just started the first interstellar war in the history of mankind.
The brass Earthside had been building up to the war for some time, priming the populace with fears about the squids. But it was much simpler than that. The squids had gravitics, and we wanted it. We had FTLC, and they wanted it. At least the squids think we have faster than light communication. It surely looks that way. The communication is instantaneous across interstellar space, but it is also light, ergo it can’t be FTL.
It has bigtime limitations, but Earth keeps those close to the vest. It is simple, really. Split a beam of light. Send one stream to a specific place in space, allowing for the relative change in location based on the distance. Take the other stream and store it in a plasmag tank. When you want to send a message, extract the photons whose mates are arriving at the destination at that moment, force the spin you want to encode the message, and voila, instantaneous transmission of the message at the other end.
Of course, it did take a bit of planning. Six light years from the squid planet to earth, so you couldn’t start two way com for six years after you got a transmitter there. But once started, you were golden. Likewise, when a ship like the Cincinnati went off its planned course, as we were doing now with wild abandon, earth couldn’t talk to us. We could talk to them, of course, because we always knew where they would be and we’d been beaming them ever since we left home. But these were little details we’d managed to hide from the squids ever since first contact.
But now they were hopping mad. Can’t blame them, really. We’ve got one of their small gravgens sitting in our cargo bay, and they don’t have a clue how we manage FTLC. Seems Captain Carlisle accidentally blew up our transceiver parked in their system on our way out. Oopsy!
The gravgen was thanks to yours truly, Meredith Campos, Mission Specialist. It was my job to seduce the squids. Your garden variety seduction is equal parts sex drive and vanity. With the squids, the sex part was out. It was hard enough to keep my lunch down when dealing with them. Fortunately, they had extra helpings of vanity, especially where there was prestige to be had in dealing with the Earthers.
Carlisle put a quick triple whammy on the thrusters that about snapped my head off. Our speed was fast approaching point-three c. I knew if we made it to point four we’d be home free. Well, free anyway. Home was about fourteen years away, ship time.
“That should do it,” he said, relaxing for the first time in seven hours. “Even if they hit us now, only the pute will notice.”
The next two seconds changed our cozy little world forever.
An object appeared in the 3D where none had been before, dead ahead of the Cincinnati. Alarms screamed from the captain’s com. Virtually the same instant it appeared, the pute locked on and drew a nice red target on it. Carlisle jammed the fire button and it was gone as quickly as it had appeared. Vaporized, the pute assured us.
“What the heck was that?” Carlisle asked of no one in particular.
“No idea, Captain,” the first mate, Jacobs, replied. “The pute says it was about three meters across, but it just came out of nowhere! It beamed us before you got it, but it was only a com beam. Can’t get any meaning out of it, only a handful of numbers.”
“Oh no!” I was up and out of my chair, hurtling down the floatway to the cargo bay. I stared through the viewport at the shapeless hunk of slag that had moments before been mankind’s first gravgen unit.
I pulled myself hand over hand slowly back to the bridge and related the news, though the pute had already told them.
“Well,” said Carlisle, “things appearing out of nowhere. Apparently we’re not the only ones with secrets. That should make for an interesting war.”