The Ascent

Chapter 14

"Commander Phon, why have you ordered my crews to perform a full engine inspection?" Ship Commander Brennon glared at me from my video display. "That will waste an entire day! A full inspection isn't due for nearly two weeks. A routine service inspection should be good enough."

I looked back at him coolly unimpressed with his displeasure. I had already made my request through normal channels, but it had gone ignored, so I went around the normal chain of command and had instructed his Chief Engineer, Michael Droemer, to take care of it. "Under normal circumstances, I'd agree, but we're going to be traveling under H-drive for some time."

"What do you mean?"

"If you paid attention to the daily briefing, you'd know the fleet will be traveling between two star systems that are not directly connected by transit stations. They are about a quarter light-year apart and we're going to make the trip in about a month or less."

"A month?"

"Or less."

"That's not possible."

"We may have to skip a few routine service inspections, thus the full inspection now."

"You can't do that! The QWEGs and the engines must be shut down and serviced after every ten hours of use."

"We'll have to find a way to make do with less."

"But, what about the support craft? Many of them can't even make C2."

"They'll have to forego servicing entirely."

"They'll never make it. The QWEGs will destroy themselves and possibly the whole ship as well."

I hesitated. This was true and I wasn't happy about this part of the plan, but then we were just about to take on the entire Moiarchy, and this part of the journey was the closest thing to danger the support craft were likely to face. "Most should make it."

"Whose stupid idea is this?"

"Shines Like the Sun." I thought that might shut him up, but after taking a moment to digest the news he muttered.

"That stupid Cack is going to get us all killed."

"Would you like to log a formal protest?" I asked.

"Of course not. How stupid do you think I am? But I would like to know why."

"The short answer is that Faded Glory has disabled the gate to the inner sphere. The longer answer is that this will allow us to bypass most of any defense force they might have gathered and allow us to strike deep into the heart of the Moiarchy. Shines Like the Sun has been cultivating the loyalty of various nobles for years. He believes that a strong show of force now will convince them to switch their allegiance to him.

"I sure hope it's worth it."

"If this works, the war may be over before it starts."

"Sounds like famous last words."

* * *

In interstellar space, there is no sense of movement. Not even at a relative speed of three times the speed of light. The Torchbearer just seemed to hang alone in the infinite darkness. Another ship could be inches from the hull and yet be completely undetectable without the gravimetric sensors. The cosmic dust and hydrogen we encountered along the way would simply be scooped up and carried along as it fell within the field of the Quantum Wave Effect Generator. If we were to hit a ship that was not traveling under the power of the H-drive, that ship would find itself torn apart at the atomic level and spread across our hull. No one knew what would result from a collision of two ships with active QWEG fields. Two Cybernetic Awarenesses trying to observe two objects with overlapping fields would probably collapse the fields unevenly. It would almost certainly destroy both ships, though how violently was anyone's guess.