Dark Fate, Chapter 238

Chapter 238 – Naval Development

Suffice to say, the Commonwealth officers were happy to hear that the mystery ship that had been raiding the Incux was not hostile to them, though they were less happy to hear that the Kroscyl was only tangentially under my control. Having a living ship with a Tier 2 controller roaming around, using Hellspace and psychic weaponry was not exactly comforting to most people. It was like they didn’t trust people who rode around in eldritch horrors to be completely sane and reasonable!

Fortunately, the main problems were out of the way at this point, so we could focus on more important matters, like our food, or discussing future plans. Captain Ulgan said that the Admiralty for the Commonwealth was saying that if they could hold the Dauth system, then the Incux would be weak enough that they could, at last, begin a counter-offensive. I had to avoid promising any ships for the offensive, though I’m sure Ulgan would have liked me to have done so. The Ceres Royal Navy wasn’t in a position to help with another drawn-out attack just yet, since we still didn’t have confirmation on how badly the Mercurial and her group had been hurt while accomplishing their mission.

Plus, even if the ships were fine, I wasn’t going to let those crews back out on mission until they’d all had at least a couple mandatory counseling sessions with either a chaplain or a therapist. It was a dirty job I had given them, but it had to be done. I expected that even the best of them would need to unpack a few things, and talk them out. Actually, anyone who came off that mission completely unaffected was probably some flavor of psychotic, which I needed to know about before I put them back in charge of weapons of mass destruction.

Once lunch was done, I moved into a meeting with my Naval staff, since there was more we still needed to talk about. Starting with one of the projects that had been going on for a while, now. The refit of the Black Tear of Night’s Folly, the Great Horde superdreadnought that my daughter had brought me from another timeline was nearing completion.

“So, how is the Black Tear coming, Stratton?”

Slave-Commissar-General Monique Stratton took a breath, and said, “The refit is almost complete, Master. Most of the efforts have been on internal systems. Working with the ship’s onboard AI, we have been systematically replacing or recoding critical infrastructure to eliminate security vulnerabilities. The Great Horde believes in having override controls so that they can remotely deactivate critical systems on ships if they fall into the wrong hands. Our replacements have caused a slight drop in efficiency, but not needing to worry about the shields being turned off in the middle of an engagement is worth the trade.”

“Yes, that would be inconvenient,” I said, drily.

Stratton chuckled, but moved on. “The ship’s primary reactor is an artificial black hole with a relative mass equal to Mars. Despite apparently having been in a low-power state since before the dinosaurs died, the reactor still has an expected 1.2 billion years before it will require refueling. The fact that it is not altering orbital mechanics just sitting in space, or that it remains contained even when going through a Stitch event or similar is being chalked up as ‘super space tech that might as well be magic’, according to the researchers. They’ve figured out enough that we can maintain it and repair it, if necessary, but we’re nowhere close to replicating it.

“However, we have had more luck with the smaller power sources, like is used for the assault shuttles, as well as the Great Horde Marines armor, and their hand-held or man-portable energy weapons. They use a form of Zero-Point Energy, according to the scientists, and while it requires hard alcohol and several degrees I don’t have to understand the science of it, we do know enough that we can build and reproduce them at various scales. Practical power armor is now possible, beyond simple resizing of Great Horde armor, and our fighters can now fly for days at a time without needing to trade power cores, and the core energy will recharge over time. We are also looking at using single-use versions for some of the new munitions we have concepts for. However, for larger ships, we plan to use adapted Necrozian technology for power sources.”

“Speaking of, what about the tests for using Incux bioforges to create a version of the Necrozian ziadermis?”

“That was actually going to be my next talking point, Master,” Stratton grinned. “We’ve had a breakthrough in that sense. The science team is calling the new material blackstone. About 89% the effectiveness of ziadermis, but it requires 64% of the resources to make, and maintenance is 95% cheaper. Right now, we’re using it to help interface Necrozian power cores with our ships, and in hull plating.”

“So, that dream I had about ships being able to shoot off pulse torpedoes every few seconds?”

“Still a dream, unfortunately. The power generation is there, but the limit is on the antimatter production. There are safety concerns if we try and push it too far, or too fast. Fifteen minutes to recharge for two shots is what we can manage with our current tech. However, we will be able to work the improvements into the Renegades, as well as all other ships with pulse torpedoes, so the improvements will still be substantial.

“That said, we’ve designed an outer layer of hull plating that can be applied to all our warships. It adds a few centimeters to the armor, but its adaptive reflection capabilities are impressive. Basically, you can alter the frequencies of energy that the plating reflects or absorbs. Set the armor to reflect the frequencies the enemy energy weapons use, and you’ll shrug off a significant chunk of the damage. Set the armor to absorb, and you’re a hole in space. And any bleed energy from attacks that get through, or energy absorbed while in absorb mode, gets funneled through the armor to enhance its regrowth abilities, allowing the ship to ‘heal’ hull breaches.”

“You’re saying that you want to put this on top of the normal hull plating. Why?”

“Because while the blackstone plating is incredibly useful against direct energy weapons, it is far less useful against explosive or wide-area attacks, and rubbish against kinetics. However, as an outer layer to keep the ship safe from one of the primary types of weaponry out there? It works great.”

“How will this work with the hull of the Black Tear?”

“According to simulations, it should work, without interfering with any of the superdreadnought’s existing systems. We’ll need to do minor modifications on exterior hatches like airlocks or the launch bays, not to mention the retractable shielding for various weapons and sensor systems on the hull. But it should work. The result will be a Black Tear that is significantly more adaptable than the normal variety of Great Horde superdreadnought.”

“And the weapons?”

“The Quantum Resonance Cannon is fully functional, and ready for testing. According to the documentation, it works by erasing the bonds between particles on the sub-atomic scale, causing anything in its path to simply… cease being. Shields of a sufficient strength will divert the beam, or at least hold long enough that the ship might try to fly out of the path, making a glancing blow survivable, instead of just causing half the ship to go missing.”

“Definitely a ‘verify your target and what’s behind it’ weapon, then.”

“As you say, Master. We have removed all five hundred Singularity Missiles, and the Transmutation Bomb from the Black Tear, and, courtesy of Princess Lilith, have them in an extradimensional storage dimension keyed to your bloodline. And I would dearly love to forget they exist.”

The Singularity Missiles were the primary ‘ship-killer’ missiles for Great Horde superdreadnoughts, but the singularity they created was powerful enough to eat about 40% of Earth in the ‘compression’ phase, before releasing all that mass and energy in an explosion that would likely annihilate the other 60%. The Transmutation Bomb was the Great Horde’s idea of a ‘civilized’ planet-killer. You dropped it on a world, and it transmuted the world, terraforming it instantly, but also putting in pre-programed resource deposits, and simple plant life. Anything living on the rock when it was hit was transmuted along with the rock.

“And the project to do a controlled, smaller-scale version of the Transmutation Bomb for terraforming efforts?”

Stratton sighed. “Finding and editing the programming so that we could control the type of planet we’d be getting after activation was simple enough. Replicating the original device is possible, if we make it an installation on the surface of the target planetoid rather than a weapon capable of being deployed. Since the installation will be consumed in the creation of the effect, and there are multiple failsafe protocols in place to prevent accidental activation, it is ‘demilitarized’ enough for industrial terraforming use.”

“If used on Ganymede, would it affect the construction efforts already in place?”

“We could possibly program it to ignore the construction already done, but we would want to remove all the machinery and people from the surface before it went off. Honestly? It would probably push things back further, and for worse results at this point. Instead of testing it on Ganymede, and potentially wrecking the colony progress already made there, I was thinking about Titan.”

“I like it. Make the arrangements. Now, back to the Black Tear. What are we using in place of the weapons we took out? And what about the other weapons still left, besides the big gun?”

“As you know, the Black Tear is armed with twelve tri-cannon turrets with gamma-ray laser (or graser) cannons, which are effective up to twenty light-seconds, though accuracy at the extreme ranges requires properly leading the vessels. In addition, there are forty-eight point-defense gravity lances, which are effective at ranges of under half a light-second. Both of these systems have been kept, and are fully online. While not a weapon, I will include that the four tractor beam arrays are fully functional, as well.

“The eight launchers on each broadside have been replaced with an equivalent number of pulse torpedo launchers, with dedicated reactors for each launcher, meaning all eight shots can fire every fifteen minutes. However, for the two fore and two aft launchers, the designers wish to use one of the newly-designed weapon systems.”

“Which one? Not the micro-singularity missiles, I trust?”

“No, Master. They haven’t figured out how to get around the power requirements for those, anyways. However, with the new single-use Zero-Point Energy modules, we have a power supply powerful enough but small enough to create Hypermissiles and Skip Missiles.”

“What is the difference?”

“Skip Missiles are the size of the torpedoes carried by the ‘Thunderbolt III’ bombers and the ‘X-Pattern Hunters’, but could be carried by any other craft capable of launching that size torpedo. Basically, they ‘skip’ to FTL using the basic hyperdrive system, and come out moments before impacting the target, arriving faster than the light of the attack, and delivering substantial kinetic impact to the target. The Hypermissiles are larger, designed for ship-board launchers, and they have the safety features forcibly removed from the hyperdrives, causing them to impact the target at ten times the speed of light. Both are rated as Tier 2 vehicular weapons, though the design team says that if you incorporated Tier 3 materials into the impactor, then they would bump up to Tier 3.”

I took a deep breath to steady myself. “Well, I have lunatics working for me, but at least they’re my lunatics. Approve it. And I want security on the launch of those weapons equivalent to nukes. And then get the designers to work on some means of defending against those missiles that isn’t ‘avoid getting hit’. If we have people crazy enough to think it up, then you can bet someone else will, too.”

“Actually, the Inhibitor Module that we’ve been making standard on all CRN ships is a defense against such weapons. However, the size of the module matters. For the Hellspawn-pattern corvettes, they can project the field for half a light-second. The Black Tear can cover up to three light-seconds. Though I will add that these methods would not destroy the warheads, or divert their course. But point defense would then have a chance to take care of things.”

“So, not a perfect defense, but it takes things down from ‘instant doom’ to ‘we could make it’? So long as they have the field up before the shots are fired, which isn’t standard practice, since they slow our own ships, even if they aren’t stopped entirely by the modules. All right, I’m sold. Put the Hypermissiles on the Black Tear, and include them in the plans for the Repulse-class frigates and up.”

“Of course, Master. Oh, and I have news about the frigates.”