A Learning Experience

Chapter Twenty-One

Captain Perry, Earth Orbit

“You don’t look a bit like Captain Kirk,” Carolyn Harper said.

Kevin rolled his eyes. A week of hard labour had cleaned out most of the starship and allowed the human crew to move in, leaving them all tired and irritable. Edward Romford and his men would provide a security team, but Carolyn and her fellow scientists had their own role to play. If they were lucky, they might be able to understand the theoretical basis of the alien FTL drive and then start working out how to duplicate it.

“That’s good to hear,” he said. “Who do I look like?”

Carolyn considered him for a long moment. “Truthfully, I’d be hard put to say just who you looked like,” she said, finally. “That fake Native American from Voyager?”

“Thank you,” Kevin said, crossly. He’d only watched a handful of Voyager episodes, the ones that had featured the Borg. Discovering that alien technology could easily create something like the Borg Collective had led to a few sleepless nights. “I don’t want to act like him.”

He snorted, then pretended to examine Carolyn. “You look like…”

“Shut up,” Carolyn said, without heat. “I’m not the one playing starship commander.”

Kevin had to smile. Carolyn looked, in no particular order, young, pretty and nerdy. Her blonde hair was tied up in a shapeless bun, but he had the distinct impression that she would clean up nicely if she ever let her hair down. But from what he’d read of her file, she’d probably deliberately cultivated the nerdy look to ensure she was taken seriously at her former company. Like most of the others, she’d had one look at the alien technology and practically begged to join the team. It was the opportunity of a lifetime.

“I suppose,” he said. Perhaps, during the month they would be spending in transit, he would make a pass at her, just to see how she responded. Or maybe it would be unprofessional. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have plenty of other entertainments. “But you’re playing Mr. Spock.”

The banter came to an end as Commander Rodney Jackson entered the bridge. He was a Royal Navy submarine commander, recently retired after thirty years in the navy. Kevin, looking for someone with experience of long voyages in completely isolated ships, had snapped him up like a shot. Once Jackson had checked with the British Government, he’d accepted the post of XO without hesitation. It too was the opportunity of a lifetime.

“We have everything stowed onboard, sir,” he said. If he resented reporting to someone who wasn’t even a naval officer he kept it to himself. Like most submariners Kevin had met, he was short, stocky and permanently calm. “And the starship appears ready for departure.”

Kevin nodded. Like Shadow Warrior, Captain Perry’s systems were largely controlled through the interface, but there were also command consoles on the bridge. It was astonishing just how many training programs there were, programs that had allowed the human crew to practice operating the ship time and time again until they were far more capable than the Horde’s pilots. Kevin had long since lost his astonishment at just how ignorant the Horde really was of such matters. But it was an advantage the human race desperately needed. The Horde still possessed far more starships than their human enemies.

“Very good,” he said.

Choosing potential trade goods had been tricky. The alien captive — currently in a cabin on the lower decks — had recommended weapons, particularly ones that could be reconfigured for non-human hands, so Kevin had loaded the starship with hundreds of different weapon designs. They had also picked several items of human technology, various movies that might be worth selling and a handful of food and drinks. And they’d even taken several bottles of maple syrup.

But there was no way to know what, if anything, they’d be able to sell them for.

They had recovered some galactic currency from the Horde, but it was difficult to say just how much it was actually worth. The alien rate of exchange fluctuated constantly, while the more isolated planets seemed to prefer trade goods to currency that might be worthless by the time it was shipped to somewhere it could actually be spent. Kevin knew that, if they failed to make some sales, they might have to start offering human mercenaries, purely to build up a stockpile of galactic currency. But that offered its own risks. What if one alien power chose to take its irritation with the mercenaries out on Earth?

He grinned as his crew took their places. “Open hailing frequencies,” he ordered. “I want to speak to Shadow Warrior.”

It was nearly two minutes before Steve’s holographic face appeared in front of him. “Kevin,” he said. “Are you ready to depart?”

“Yes,” Kevin said, flatly. A week of intensive effort had left them all exhausted, but they would have a month to recover while the starship was in transit. According to the databanks, the risk of interception was very low. “We’ve said our last goodbyes, written our last letters… we’re ready, sir.”

He sobered. Never, not since radio had been invented, had a human crew been so far out of touch. Sailing in a wooden ship had run the risk of simply never being seen again, but modern technology had removed most of those risks, even as it made it possible for politicians and bureaucrats to peer over the ship’s commander’s shoulder. It was quite possible, he knew, that Captain Perry could set out on her epic voyage and never be seen again. There were pirates out there as well as interstellar terrorists and great powers waging outright war against their opponents.

Perhaps Steve had the same thought. “Good luck, Kevin,” he said. “If you don’t come back we’ll all be very upset.”

Kevin had to smile. Where Steve had set out to build a new society, Kevin might well have taken the starship and vanished out into interstellar space. There was a whole galaxy waiting for the human race, after all. But he wouldn’t be tempted to take Captain Perry on a long voyage of exploration. They needed to collect information and return it to Earth. If they failed, unlocking the secrets of alien technology might take longer than Earth had.

“We will,” he promised. “Or die trying.”

He took a long breath. “Give my love to Mongo and the others,” he added. “Goodbye.”

Steve raised his hand in salute. A moment later, his image vanished completely.

“Prepare the drive,” Kevin ordered.

“The drive is online and ready to go,” Jackson reported. “All systems appear to be in optimal working order.”

Kevin wasn’t surprised. The Horde’s concept of basic maintenance was terrifying — he had a feeling that they lost at least one or two ships a year — but at least they’d stockpiled a reasonable amount of spare parts. Guided by the interface, the human crew had carefully replaced everything that had been threatening to break and then sent the damaged components to Heinlein Colony. Some of them, he hoped, would be duplicable by human technology.

“Good,” he said. He braced himself. “Engage!”

He hadn’t been sure what to expect when the FTL drive activated. Some races suffered badly, according to the databanks, and needed to be sedated or held in stasis for the entire trip. Others seemed to find it exciting or felt nothing. Kevin… felt a flicker of unreality for a long moment, followed by a strange kind of queasiness. And then everything seemed to return to normal.

But the display were black, showing the unblinking nothingness of FTL.

“We are currently heading away from Earth at several times the speed of light,” Jackson said, in hushed tones. “No man has ever been this far from Earth.”

“No human-crewed starship,” Kevin corrected. Aliens had taken quite a few samples from Earth over the years. God alone knew what had happened to their descendents. Some would have been turned into mind-burned cyborgs, but the others? Were there brothers of mankind out among the stars? “But we will not be the last.”

He settled back into the command chair. “We will run drills for the first half of every day,” he added. “And then we will spend the rest of our time researching the galaxy.”

The next two weeks fell into a pattern. They ran emergency drills every day, learning more and more about the sheer variety of threats in the galaxy, then researched the vast datafiles on the starship. Kevin was used to the interface by now, but even he found it hard to keep track of everything it had to show the human users. And then there were the little hints they found that might just suggest ways to duplicate alien technology. The official files might be long on elaborate superlatives and short on details, but there were plenty of hints elsewhere. But could they be turned into working technology?

It was astonishing just how used they became to flying through space in an alien starship. Boredom started to sink in rapidly after the first week, followed by a form of claustrophobia as the researchers realised that they were truly cut off from Earth. They could no longer email their friends and research partners, nor could they go elsewhere if they wanted a break from their work. Jackson, who admitted that half the trainee submariners felt the same way too, organised an endless round of games and contests to keep everyone distracted. On a submarine, he pointed out, there were far fewer distractions.

Kevin privately understood. Anything could be happening, back on Earth. The Horde could have attacked again, he knew, or terrorists could have successfully struck at Heinlein Colony or one of the recruiting centres on Earth. There were just too many people volunteering to go to the moon for them all to be screened, even with alien lie detection technology. All they could really do was make sure that no one who hadn’t been properly screened got access to the starships or other pieces of alien technology. But his understanding didn’t make it any easier to bear.

He spent a surprising amount of time talking to the alien. Cn!lss, once he’d overcome his slight fear of the utterly inhuman alien, was a strange conversationalist. On one hand, he seemed quite willing to share everything he knew with his human captors. But on the other hand, there were large gaps in his knowledge that seemed utterly implausible. If Kevin hadn’t studied the records on the Horde so carefully, he would have assumed the Hordesman was keeping something from him. But ignorance of the greater galaxy seemed to be part of their worldview.

“The world we’re visiting will not twitch a claw at your presence,” Cn!lss assured him. “They are used to visitors who do not wish to share anything of themselves with strangers.”

Kevin nodded. He’d given serious thought to wearing something that completely covered their forms, but it seemed pointless. The human race wasn’t that different to several other galactic races, including some who looked almost identical as long as they didn’t remove their clothes. They’d be likely to be mistaken for one of those races, Cn!lss assured him, provided they didn’t undergo a medical examination. That would have revealed their humanity beyond a shadow of a doubt.

“You have contacts,” he said, softly. “People we can talk to?”

“Quite a few who do business with the Hordes,” Cn!lss said. “They will sell to anyone, provided the price is right.”

“How very human,” Kevin muttered.

He sighed. It looked very much as though they would have to hire a local to help them sell their wares, giving the local a chance to cheat them out of half of their profits. If, of course, there were any profits. He couldn’t help worrying about what would happen if their produce turned out to be completely worthless. Or, for that matter, if they were simply cheated so badly they wound up with nothing. It seemed alarmingly possible.

The thought still nagged at him as he walked into the research lab and met Carolyn. His half-hearted attempts to lure her into bed had failed, but she seemed friendly enough. Kevin had sighed and given up, more or less. Maybe she was just worried about bedding her ultimate superior on the starship.

“I think we have a rough idea of just how the alien drive works,” she told him, as she took her eyes off the screen. “It actually folds space around it, allowing the starship to cross large volumes of space almost instantly. Or at least we think that’s what it does.”

She picked up a sheet of paper and held it up in front of his nose. “Imagine you start here,” she said, pointing to one end of the paper. “You want to get to the other end, which is quite some distance away. If you have to walk normally, it will take you some time.”

Carefully, she started to fold the sheet of paper up like a concertina. “By folding the space around the starship, the FTL drive ensures that the distance the starship has to travel is much shorter than it seems. But… the more space is folded, it seems to create gravity waves that allow the ship to surf towards its destination and…”

She paused. “You’re not following this, are you?”

Kevin shook his head. He was, he knew without false modesty, pretty smart. It was why he’d gone into Intelligence in the first place. But Carolyn was far smarter than him, even though she had very little practical experience. As a theorist, she was first-rate. And yet… could she actually turn theory into technology that would make FTL a practical reality?

“We know it can be done,” Carolyn said, when he asked. “The aliens can make it happen, after all. And we also know that chinks in space-time form naturally, allowing the aliens to expand through space without FTL drives. If we’d had one of those in our star system…”

“I know,” Kevin said. “We’d have been overwhelmed long ago.”

He shivered. When he’d realised that there were over ten thousand intelligent races known to exist, he’d wondered why Earth hadn’t encountered them openly centuries ago. The answer had finally emerged from the databanks, only to give rise to more questions. Galactic society preferred to concentrate on the gravity points, even though there was a working form of FTL drive. It was odd to realise that such a towering civilisation looked so strange, when viewed on a standard chart, but it did make sense. Earth had been ignored simply because she was too far from the galactic mainstream.

They don’t have infinite power, not yet, he thought. Without it, there are limits to how far they can expand without the gravity points.

It was odd. The aliens had all the tools to create a post-scarcity society, yet they lacked the power sources necessary to make that final jump. If they managed to gain access to an infinite source of power — zero-point energy, perhaps — they would be able to transform themselves into Star Trek’s Federation or the Culture or something even more powerful. But they couldn’t, not yet. Humanity still had a chance to catch up.

Or do we? The thought was a bitter one. Humanity had fought wars that had claimed millions of lives. The Galactics had fought wars that had killed billions or trillions. They thought nothing of building starships large enough to carry an American aircraft carrier in their holds or of converting an entire star system into a warship production plant. Or they could use nanotechnology to enslave hundreds of millions of people… no matter how he looked at it, humanity’s survival would depend, very much so, on keeping their heads down and not making any enemies. But they already had one merciless set of enemies in the Horde.

Carolyn elbowed him. “Penny for your thoughts?”

“Just thinking about how far we have to go,” Kevin said. The vast majority of humanity — at least in the West — had absorbed the reports from the moon… and then gone onwards, living their lives as if Steve and his family had never existed. He rather envied their ability to stop thinking about what it all meant. “How long until you can produce a working FTL generator?”

“Probably years,” Carolyn admitted. She rubbed her forehead as she sat down. “I can see the bare bones of an FTL drive, but actually making it work would be tricky as hell. If we could open up the drive on the ships…”

Kevin shook his head, firmly. The whole system was sealed, a sensible precaution where Hordesmen were concerned. Besides, it was fairly clear from the instruction manual that any attempt to open the drive section would almost certainly disable it permanently. They couldn’t risk being stranded in interstellar space.

“I understand,” Carolyn said. She yawned, suddenly. “But it will be years before we make any real progress.”

“I know,” Kevin confessed.

“Tell you one thing,” Carolyn said. “We may be halfway towards artificial gravity and thus antigravity. It will take some work to produce enough superconductors, but once we have them we might be able to produce our own antigravity systems.”

Kevin smiled. The real problem with human spaceflight was lifting cargo out of Earth’s gravity field. Every piece of weight had to be accounted for, somehow. The giant rockets that had propelled Apollo 11 to the moon had been discarded as they expended their fuel and became deadweight. But if humanity could master antigravity technology…

“Good luck,” he said. “Make it happen and you’ll be famous right across the world.”

“That’s tiny, now,” Carolyn said. “Do you think anyone is ever famous right across the galaxy?”

“I doubt it,” Kevin said. “The galaxy is really staggeringly huge. And besides, not all of the aliens share the same tastes. Who knows — they might actually like listening to the Screaming Singer of the Week.”

“Nah,” Carolyn said, after a moment’s thought. “They couldn’t be that perverse.”