A Larger Universe (18 page)

Seth jerked upright in his chair.  "What do you mean,
work for me?"

"He wants to be your apprentice.  Isn't that right,
Baek?"

"Yes, Tommy.  Um, yes, Master Seth, if you’ll have
me."

Seth coughed, then cleared his throat.  "Ah,
yes."  He looked around the room.  "I will need some help after all
these changes.  Come to my quarters if you're finished here." 

"Actually, he's not finished yet," said Tommy,
"and you need to move from that chair.  We're replacing the desk with
something different and he will be helping move it."

When Seth and Tommy were alone in the control room, tears
rolled down Seth’s face.  "Thank you.  I didn't believe you when you said
I would have an apprentice again."

Tommy smiled, "Of course you must have apprentices. 
You'll have too much to do alone, and you don't think I'm going to stay here to
help, do you?"

Seth wiped his eyes, "I suppose not."  He paused,
then blurted, "Apprentices?  More Apprentices?"

"Sure.  Why not?  Isn't defending the ship important? 
Now get out of the way so we can install the new control desk."

#   #   #

Having completed his analysis of the central program, Tommy
went to the nearest rail gun to examine its controlling device.  He had discovered
the main controller sent general commands, and the local controllers at the
guns computed the instructions to the magnetic generators wrapping the
tunnels.  Tommy expected to find the controller at the gun's "breech"
end, near the access port he had entered before.  Instead, Seth led him almost
to the hull, down an access corridor alongside the gun tube. 

He decided that this made sense.  Having the controller next
to the exit end minimized signal travel time to the accelerators with the
fastest cycle interval.  The rails were divided into sections, each insulated
from the next, and each having its own magnetic field generator.  When a
projectile, the magnetic field armature, moved down the gun, each field
generator accelerated it toward the next generator in line.  As the projectile
began moving, the track controllers had a relatively long interval to process
the next pulse command.  By the time the projectile reached the reached the
hull, the track controllers had only microseconds to respond, a very short time
by the processing standards of the lords' computers.

Seth also had the backup circuitry block for these devices,
and Tommy had a working model that could be dismantled.  They had more
resemblance to the process control computers in the hydroponics farms than they
did to the original control room computer.

The next day, he had the electricians pulling a double line
of cable--redundancy was important--down the access corridors, and he picked three
hundred four of the older model computers he had originally called junk to
replace the lords' devices.  Any one of them could outperform the fastest
lords' computer he had seen so far.  Each rail gun would have two computers
guiding the magnets.  If the first one failed, the second would take over.  The
next time someone took a shot at
his
ship, he wanted to be certain the
ship could shoot back.  He also chose a backup computer for the control room.

He spent the next several weeks writing programs. 
Duplicating the signals sent to the magnetic field generators worked with the
individual rail gun controllers, as it had with the hydroponics farms.  His
program was different from the program in the original controller, but it
produced the same output. 

After he finished the rail guns, he wished he had time to do
the whole thing in a different way.  He had an idea that a microprocessor
installed close to and controlling each accelerator, with some attached
sensors, would be much better.  The central computer would download the timing
sequence, and the microprocessors would sense the projectile and pull it along
at the right instant.  That would eliminate the problem of how much time was
required for one rail gun computer to talk to many electromagnets along miles
of tunnel.  He wasn't sure he knew enough to make that work, but it would have
been fun to try. 

Tommy then wrote programs for the central computer that
performed the same functions as the original control device.  Wherever he had
to--for example, with the attitude controls--he duplicated the communications
being sent and received.  For the parts of the system now under his control, he
set his own standards.  No one here could tell him different.

He also completed the programming for the second item on
Lord Ull's list, the targeting controller.  That system duplicated the
functionality in the backup circuitry block and had been installed with the
other programs in the rail gun central computer. 

Tommy asked the electricians to pull cable to the targeting
room from the rail gun control room and sought permission, through Valin, to
install the replacement system there.  The simulations had given reasonable
results.  He was eager to perform a real test.

Each day for the next week, Seth escorted him into the
lords' decks to the targeting room.  His first time into the targeting room had
given him a shock.  A thick layer of dust blanketed every surface. 

"Doesn't anyone come in here?" Tommy asked.

"The last lord who supervised this area died years ago,
and the lords' council didn't appoint anyone else.  My guild is also
responsible for the maintenance here, but I stopped sending anyone when the
last journeyman left the guild.  I just didn't have reason to."

Tommy sneezed.  "Well, this dust isn't good for
computers.  On the other hand, maybe no will care how we set this up.  We can
clean up the dust.  Catering to a lord would be a pain."

At the beginning of the next week, he had everything ready
for a test, but had to wait three additional weeks for the ship to arrive at a
star system.  Seth had strongly discouraged his firing a projectile at the
surrounding blackness while the ship traveled between star systems. 

The targeting control room had larger floor space and bigger
walls than the track control room.  The larger walls supported additional
monitors fed by video cameras and radar installations on the ship's hull.  At
first, Tommy left the additional monitors alone, but they bothered him.  Two
thousand years of service had left scratches on the glass, and, besides, they
didn't look good next to his plasma displays.  He couldn't replace them--he
didn't know enough--but maybe some group of artisans did.  After all, someone
had converted the TV interview from his home to ship's technology.  Maybe the
same group could do the reverse.  Three weeks gave him an opportunity to find
out.

#   #   #

On the day of their entry into the star system, Tommy, Seth,
and Seth's apprentice, Baek, waited in the targeting control room.  On the
walls, all the old monitors had been removed.  He had found a guild in charge
of radio transmissions, whether voice, video, or radar: the Communications
Guild.  Dropping Lord Ull's name had given his request a priority.

The plasma displays designated for outside video showed the
surrounding blackness.  The bridge, at the ship's top level, wouldn't turn on
the radar until the ship emerged from transit blackness into normal space, so
those displays were also black.  Seth had received permission to test fire one
projectile as soon as he received clearance from the bridge, so they had loaded
one forward tube from the automated rack behind the breech. 

Tommy had made good his promise to do things differently. 
He had placed graphics of his own design on the central display.  They showed
four circles of lines corresponding to the rail guns around the ship's
circumference, and two sets of four lines, one indicating the forward firing
rails and the other the rearward firing rails.  One forward line glowed bright
green with an orange dot at the breech end.  The orange dot represented one of
the solid metal, toothpick-shaped, missiles in the loading rack.  He had some
ideas about different kinds of ammunition designated by different colors, but
that was all they had for now.  The other three forward lines showed as a
darker green with no dot.  The lines in the four circles were gray.   Beside
each line were numbers in the lords' script.  These indicated such things as
time to reload and projectiles remaining in the rack.  The display might not
have everything needed, but the new information was much more complete than
that shown on the original displays.

When the operator designated a target, the display would
indicate which rails were approaching a firing time for the selected target and
a countdown to the calculated shoot.  Since firing wasn't instantaneous--it
took just over three seconds for the projectile to accelerate the length of a
rail gun--even discounting time to target, the calculations required were
complex.  With the old system, the operator had used the information provided
to shoot a gun when the moment seemed right.  That explained the multiple
broadsides Tommy had seen--shoot everything you've got and hope one of them
hits.  Faster computers and, Tommy hoped, better programs should mean more hits
with fewer shots.   Guided missiles would have helped, too, but for some reason
the lords had none of those.  The racks contained nothing but the gigantic
solid metal “toothpicks.”  Once launched, the projectiles were no better than
bullets from a gun.  A ship under acceleration could dodge even a broadside if
the initial distance was great enough.  His programs considered straight-line
acceleration to lead the target, but would be confused by evasive action. 

The human occupants of the ship might be ignorant of when
the ship entered and left the blackness that indicated faster than light
travel, but that didn't apply to those in the lords' section, at least for
those in the targeting room.  From a speaker on the ceiling came, in the lords'
language: "Breakout in thirty seconds," followed by a countdown. 

The countdown had reached twenty when Seth pulled Tommy and
Baek to their knees and said, "Lord Ull is here."

Lord Ull leaned against the wall next to the open door
behind them.  "Continue.  Stand.  I am here to see what you have
accomplished.  You cannot work if you are on your knees."

Tommy and Seth stood.  Baek had never seen a lord, and Seth
had to drag him to his feet. 

The previous time Tommy had met Lord Ull, she had been wet. 
Now, her dry fur emitted a skunk-like musky odor that filled the small room. 
This
would be a bad time to get a migraine
, he thought.  He was sure he had
taken his pill that morning, but this would be the first real test.  He forced
himself not to laugh. 
First test of his medicine, first test of the rail
guns.  Sitting all alone and programming is a lot less stressful than this.

The countdown reached zero, and the video screens revealed a
grainy picture of the space around the ship.  The plasma displays were capable
of more detail than the old cameras on the hull could resolve.  The screens
designated for radar lit, indicating an active feed. 

When the radar screen showed an almost immediate return from
directly ahead, Lord Ull pushed away from the wall and punched on the
intercom.  "What is that?"

Before the bridge answered, Tommy sat down in one of the low
chairs in front of the console and typed commands on one of the two keyboards
they had installed.  He selected and amplified a video camera pointed in the
same direction as the radar return.  A gray sphere like the one that had
attacked them floated in front of them.

A different voice confirmed that they were seeing the same
sphere.  "Ull, the ship is
The Extended Claws
.  Somehow, they are
here ahead of us, and we have arrived inside the range of their guns."

"This is impossible," Lord Ull said as an alarm
sounded.  "They could not have known what system we would visit
next."  She looked at the distance-to-object numbers on the radar display
and confirmed the pilot's assessment.  "We are too close to dodge
everything they will shoot at us, and we don't have time to calculate transit. 
It is the end."

Tommy began typing on one of the keyboards.  "Maybe
not," he said.  "We have one advantage.  Our forward guns are pointed
at them and one is already loaded." 

The loaded rail gun fired.  Even on a ship the size of the
Nesu
Tol
, they felt the recoil.  The indicators for the other three forward guns
cycled from dark to bright green and fired together.  This time the ship
shuddered and rocked beneath their feet.  The first rail gun indicator had
changed to bright green again, but the ship's pilot, whoever he or she was, had
turned the ship away, trying to dodge what had to be coming.  Tommy had
expected the pilot's actions and had already turned on the power for the other
guns.  As the ship turned and drove at an angle from their entry vector, most
of the rail indicators in the four circles on the display and for the rear guns
changed from gray to amber to dark green to bright green. 
No way to fix the
ones that are dark for now
, he thought.  That all of the guns would cycle
ready had been on the list to test after the initial firing exercise.

The radar screen indicated the other ship had gotten its
first shots away.  The center of the spread moved toward where they had been. 
Soon they would know if a projectile in the spread's edge would catch them.

Tommy designated the other ship as the target for all
available guns.  As the computer beneath Tommy's feet calculated the best
firing solution, each gun on the
Nesu Tol
--his
Nesu Tol
--that was
able to shoot launched its projectile.  The shuddering came more often.

Without thinking of what he was doing or who or what he was
talking to, Tommy turned to Lord Ull.  "You must tell the pilot to spin
the ship.  I know I can do it from here, but I cannot evade at the same time,
and I do not want to interfere with the pilot."