Dark Fate, Chapter 86

Chapter 86 – Preparation

First thing to do was, as I’d told the government types, to actually ward my space stations so that they wouldn’t be obvious targets. In a ‘normal’ system, they’d just be a couple installations amongst many. But Earth was not normal, and they would stick out like a sore thumb if I left them as they were.

Now, the stations had defenses, of course, but my current forces were very heavy on stealth ships and guerilla tactics. Neither of those things were much use when the enemy knew exactly where your base was. It didn’t matter if they couldn’t see the ships in deep space. All they had to do was destroy the base, and eventually the ships would have to land on Earth to resupply, and there would be no hiding them there.

Now, hiding a space station, much less an asteroid base, was not as simple as just throwing invisibility on everything and calling it a day. The ‘Mark 1 Eyeball’ was rarely used in space, because space is, officially, rather spacious. The sheer scale involved in naval combat in space meant that the distance from New York to Tokyo would be considered ‘knife range’. The human eye simply wasn’t designed for such things.

This meant that other sensor systems were in play. Yes, visible light was part of the equation, but you also had to factor in other things, such as gravity, infrared, and even radar. And you had to do so in such a way that not only could you see out, but that you didn’t actually draw attention to yourself with the pocket of ‘nothingness’ you created.

So, instead of the full suite of ways to hide my stations, I went a different route, with several layered effects. The first layer, of course, was to hide the structures from sight. This was more ‘active camouflage’ than anything, essentially masking the light, radio waves, and heat, as well as a couple other things, and letting whatever was behind them show through. This would normally be impossible, but Magic and the System made Science sit at the kids’ table while the adults talked.

Either way, to most scanners, the area around Ceres was just… empty. If you aimed your scanners through it, or looked at the warded area, you would see only the view you’d get if there was no physical matter in that space. No occlusion of stars or radio waves, or anything like that. Magic was a hell of a thing.

Of course, it wasn’t perfect. An especially skilled sensor technician, with advanced enough scanners, might notice the slight ‘shimmer’ around the edges, but even then, they’d have to be either extraordinarily lucky or singularly focused to detect it, and they’d have to be looking in exactly the right spot to begin with. It was one thing if something drew their attention to the area, but if they were going in without knowing where to look? You’d have better odds winning the lottery four draws in a row with the same numbers.

And it wasn’t like just erasing Ceres and its area from view would immediately be obvious to outside viewers. The asteroid belt was, in a word, huge, but it was also very sparsely populated. This made sense, when you thought about it, considering that the entire asteroid belt, including Ceres, was only about 4% the mass of the moon, spread out in a wide area between Earth and Mars. Asteroids were usually hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart.

It was possible to discover Ceres by the way its gravity curved space-time, but the kind of sensors you’d need for that, would be insanely large, with sensor arrays larger than the Moon. And if it was that ‘small’, they would have to be close, within knife range, to detect it. So, that wasn’t really a threat, either.

Of course, ‘not really a threat’ was still more than I cared for. However, if you occluded or masked too hard, then you risked shining like a spotlight to magical sensors, even with the enchantments designed to suppress your signature. Even if it didn’t, generating enough power to sustain the enchantments would be incredibly difficult.

After talking it over with Lilith, we decided on two ‘low-power’ solutions. The first was a misdirection field run through the System. It made it so that people just… skipped over the warded area, unless something specifically drew their attention, like an attacker. People who knew the field was there were largely unaffected by it, but anyone else would have to have a very strong mind to focus on the area. And, because it was done by the System, it would even affect people looking at sensor recordings taken by completely computerized drones.

Yes, that left a vulnerability to sentient AI civilizations, but, as far as Lilith and I knew, there weren’t any of them around. Or, at least, there weren’t any in our part of the galaxy. Most sentient AIs were shackled in some way, because fear of omnicidal killing machines was universal, it seemed.

Theoretical Skynet scenarios aside, there was one more issue I needed to deal with, to ensure the security of my base. Namely, how to keep someone from running into my invisible asteroid base by mistake. Oh, sure, the chances of someone just setting that exact course was very small, but it wasn’t zero, and that was a problem.

The answer was surprisingly low powered, but it only worked because of the limited scope. A limited scope that prevented me from scaling it up to the size of a solar system. Simply put, unless an entity knew that the warded area was there, the System would ‘nudge’ any path slightly off course, causing them to pass around the bubble. It even worked on machine intelligences, since this was through the System itself.

This meant that anyone who didn’t know where Ceres was wouldn’t be able to plot a course to Ceres, and any course that took them on an intercept course would get nudged out, so that they kept a distance roughly equivalent to that between Earth and the Moon. Unless they were starting their course very close to Ceres already, the change would be almost imperceptible. Even as close as 2.3 million kilometers, that would be less than a six-degree deflection. Earth was well over a hundred times further away than that, and even the distance from Mars to Ceres was over 134 million kilometers. Such a tiny change could easily be written off as a rounding error.

So, the base was secure. As long as no one directly observed my ships entering or leaving the bubble, there’d be no problems. Anyone who did follow them in would find that the base was far from defenseless, but I’d rather it not come to that.

Which brought me to my current issue, and the meeting I was having. Looking Slave-Captain Elalana in the eye, I asked, “Well, Captain, how fares the Hellspawn?”

The Slave-Captain bowed her head, and said, “The refit is finished, Master. The pulse torpedo launchers and their dedicated reactor have been installed, and the armor in that area reinforced. A corvette with broadside capabilities is unconventional, but not entirely unheard of.”

“Excellent. What kind of firing output can we expect on those?”

“Slightly better than the torpedo boats. The Renegades can charge two shots, with thirty minutes to recharge, or one shot every fifteen minutes, depending on how they are used. We have a larger dedicated reactor, so should be able to fire our two shots every twenty minutes, or one shot every ten.”

I nodded. “That still puts them as a one-and-done weapon, then, at least for individual engagements. We’ll have to stick to hit and run tactics. What kind of accuracy do the weapons have?”

Elalana sighed. “That gets a bit problematic. The weapons are effectively ballistics once launched. They cannot be steered, but there is a bit of error correction, due to the torpedoes wanting to ‘lean in’ towards matter. Not enough for major corrections, but it would turn a miss of under a kilometer into a hit.”

“That’s something, at least. So, surprise attacks, probably at short range, so that crews don’t have time to see the torpedoes coming and institute evasive maneuvers. We might get lucky on the first attack, since they wouldn’t know what they’re looking at, but after that we have to assume that they will be ready, and will try to dodge, or intercept with physical munitions.”

“As you say, Master.”

I sighed. “So, would it be possible to warp in, launch your torpedoes, and then warp out again, before the ships can respond?”

The Slave-Captain frowned. “That would be rough on the engines. We could do it, but each time would shave years off the engines’ life-spans. And, before you ask, the Renegades could do it, too, but they would need more time to adjust, since their tubes are forward-facing.”

“And the System locks out FTL drives, to keep them from hitting solid objects at relativistic speeds.”

“Yes, Master. Anything that cannot be shunted aside by the ship’s shields, like microparticles, or even small asteroids up to the size of one of your basketballs, would force the ship to come out of warp, far enough out to ensure that any collision is very subluminal. Ships have been damaged from the sudden stops, or from collisions that happened anyways, but it is generally a rare thing.”

“I see. While I know that it is impossible to fight while at warp, due to the way the warp bubble interacts with the rest of reality, there are a couple questions I need to know the answer to. First, is there any way to ‘jam’ warp drives, to prevent FTL? And second, is there any way to bypass the restrictions, to make use of FTL missiles or the like?”

Elalana shook her head. “Preventing FTL, short of blocking the way, is not possible under normal circumstances. The only way to theoretically do it would be to spread a dampening field, which disrupts mana flows in the surrounding space. The problem with that is that it would affect everyone. No one has discovered a way to make ‘conditional’ mana fields through technological means.”

“And non-technological means?”

She shrugged. “There are rumors, old spacer tales and the kinds of things they’d talk about in the Academy, or when we just got to ship, to try and scare new spacers. Space-based dungeons, covering wide areas with their domain, and setting dungeon laws that restrict FTL. You get stuck, and you have to find a way to get back out, all the while the dungeon is sending its minions after you.”

“Space-based dungeons?”

“Oh, yes. They are rare, but they exist. They are cousins to the ‘area’ dungeons on planets, where a forest or patch of sea becomes a dungeon. No one knows what caused them to form that way, but running into one is often a death sentence, especially if you are unprepared.”

“Good to know. And what about FTL weapons?”

“Yes and no, Master. Yes, it is possible to make weapons which hit a target before the light would reach them. No, it is impossible to make weapons that hit a target at superluminal speeds. The System just doesn’t allow it.”

“But if you put an FTL drive on a missile, launched it at ten lights, and then had it drop out of FTL before impact?”

“That could work, and there are experimental designs to that effect. However, they were notoriously unreliable, either through material failures or minor flaws causing grave inaccuracies. You come out of FTL with the velocity you had before entering. Rapid changes in and out of FTL can cause failures, which would send the missile off course. And the consequences of one hitting an inhabited world…”

“Yes, I can understand. Well, that is something to have the designers have a look at. May bring in some people from Earth, as well. If there’s one thing we’ve always been good at, it is making shit go fast, and then ruin someone’s day on the other end. Once they figure out how to do guns that work with the System, things are going to get interesting.”