“Aliens? Where are they from? Why are they coming here? How can we prepare for them without making some critical misstep? Should your fears prove justified, how can we possibly defend against a capability so firmly beyond our own? And most importantly, how do we couch this new reality to the people of America and the rest of the planet?”
Nathan nodded. “Ma’am, I cannot answer all of those for you. I’m just an engineer now. The man whose later years had been devoted to coming up with those answers is no longer with us, unfortunately. We can only carry on with his vision and try to do our best. You ladies and gentlemen have to determine what that best is.” He favored her with a slight smile. “But we do have a few answers for you.
“If you will open your briefing package to section three, you’ll see summaries of the technical initiatives Windward and the DOD have been involved with for nearly twenty years. Realizing our best chance began with making first contact away from Earth itself, we’ve been developing a number of groundbreaking technologies in the areas of propulsion, power, structural materials, and computing. These have culminated in our first true spaceship, a vessel capable of interstellar flight within a reasonable mission-time, capable of greeting the Deltans outside of our solar system and establishing diplomatic relations, or, if necessary, of dissuading their further approach should they prove hostile.”
Nathan turned to the screen and clicked his remote. For a moment, the room faded away from his senses, and all he could see was the display. On it, a schematic and an artist’s rendering of their ship stood side by side, the long, stark lines of its hexagonal wedge and its chevron-like radiator panels unlike anything the world had ever seen, but familiar and nostalgic just the same, an image from fevered sci-fi dreams. He could almost feel Gordon standing next to him.
“This is the Sword of Liberty, the first in a new class of spacecraft. Numbered DA-1, for Destroyer-Astrodynamic, she is 800 feet long, with a beam of 100 feet by 130 feet, divided into three sections: mission hull, radiator, and reactor/drive. The ship masses about 6500 tons and is powered by a 10 GW plutonium pebble bed reactor, cooled by radiative emission and drive effect. Propulsion is via a breakthrough technology known as an enhanced photon reaction drive, enabling us to produce a continuous g-level thrust without need of any bulky reaction mass, and is similar, if not identical, to the Deltan’s drive.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Kelley!” Nathan stopped and turned around. The congresswoman, whose name he still did not know, but who had spoken up before, raised her hand up from her seat. “Do you mean that this is what you are planning on building or what you have built?”
“I mean that the Sword of Liberty is built, fitted out, and ready for launch into orbit. As we will discuss in greater detail in a moment, our intention is to launch with our full crew aboard, conduct a brief series of trials and tests in orbit, and to proceed on our own rendezvous mission soon thereafter.”
He turned back to the screen, clicking the remote to reveal the Sword in her floating launch hangar outside Santa Clara, laying down on her side, with cables and workers arrayed over the dark gray surface. “We have installed a wide variety of communication devices, each linked to linguistic databases, intelligent translation software, and first-contact primers developed by experts in the, until now, theoretical field of exo-linguistics. It is intended that a US ambassador and staff employ these systems to open negotiations. Room has been reserved for this diplomatic element, and we only await your guidance in order to finalize our crew.
“And in case communication should prove futile, the Sword of Liberty is a destroyer in fact, not only in designation.” Nathan clicked the remote to reveal another schematic, this one highlighting the weapons and sensors arrayed over her hull. “We have no way of knowing what weapons would be effective, so we’ve included a variety, stretching the limits of our own technology.” A green laser point appeared over each system as he briefed them.
“You can’t build an honest-to-God spaceship without lasers, so we installed them. The Sword is serviced by six independently powered and controlled diode laser stacks, each capable of producing a multi-megawatt beam of high-UV light, coherent out to a focal limit of 1500 kilometers. Though that seems a significant range for a direct-fire weapon, it’s fairly short for encounters in space, especially with something the size of the Deltan system. Therefore, while the lasers are capable of aimed fire out to their extreme range, they are optimized for autonomous defensive fire, and thus constitute the primary active defense of the ship.
“The ship also mounts a spinal railgun running down the centerline, firing forward. The railgun fires a number of different projectiles ranging from electronics rounds, to explosive rounds, to tungsten kinetic rounds, all of which can be fired at a selectable velocity—up to 60,000 meters per second, at a cyclical rate of 30 rounds a minute. Given our targeting capabilities, the railgun has a longer effective range than the lasers, but it’s ammunition limited, unlike the laser stacks.”
Nathan paused to survey the audience. They were rapt for the most part, with a few flipping back and forth through the briefing packet. Nathan reached down and poured himself a drink of water from the ubiquitous crystal pitcher and glass on his table. Those who had been reading looked up at the interruption while he drank. The cool water did little to slake his desperate, nervous thirst, though. His mouth seemed even dryer than it had been a moment before. This next part would be tough.
Damn Kris and her bright ideas.
He favored the audience with a half-smile and then turned slightly back to the screen. “Excuse me.” His green laser ran over a set of small, individual hatches arranged in six groupings of eight on each flank of the ship. “These hatches cover the main armament of the ship. Each of these 96 hatches tops a missile cell, much like our ships’ current Vertical Launch Systems. Within each one is a ship-to-ship offensive missile of our own design.”
Nathan clicked to the next slide, showing a schematic of the missile in profile. “This is the Excalibur Mark 1. It’s pretty much a small spacecraft in and of itself, consisting of a guidance and sensor package, a limited AI, and a photonic reaction drive powered by a sacrificial ultracapacitor bank. Each missile carries six variable-effect munitions capable of either deep penetration, contact, or proximity detonation. Each munition also has a fourth, untested detonation mode: lasing. One of the primary tasks for our orbital trials will be to validate the performance of the Excalibur in all four modes.”
Nathan heard a scraping of a chair and he looked over to see who had moved. Upon seeing the culprit, he stifled a groan. Not only had he inherited Gordon’s responsibilities on the project, it seemed he had inherited his headaches as well.
Secretary of Defense Carl Sykes, formerly Deputy SECDEF, stood with an unreadable expression on his face. “Excuse me, Mr. Kelley, but might I ask what type of explosive your missile is using? ‘Munitions’ is rather vague and you seem to have left it out of your otherwise fine briefing.”
Nathan squared his shoulders and faced off with Sykes across the room. “Not an oversight, Mr. Secretary—an intentional omission. We’ve relied heavily upon the largesse of the US government in order to get this ship built, but certain conditions and restrictions placed upon our preps could have derailed the whole effort. We knew what needed to be done, so we did it, even if it meant circumventing a few of the limits placed over us.”
Sykes’ eyes narrowed. “What are those missiles armed with, Kelley?”