NOVA VIRCONIUM
COMMAND CENTRAL
HELLAS PLANITIA, MARS
DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA
MARCH 13, 1989
Yolande was typing away at her terminal - with the piles of data-plaques even taller on her desk than before - when Marya appeared in the doorway and bowed at the waist, eyes to the floor and arms at her sides. "Mistis. Chiliarch Snappdove has arrived."
The Draka saved the files she was working on and pulled the data-plaque out with relief. The Commandant-Governor's job was usually something she could sink her teeth into, overseeing expansion of colonies and mining operations and making Mars an integral part of the Domination. She had dreamed about becoming a pilot since she was a child; models of aircraft still lined the shelves of her old room back home, at Claestum Plantation in Italy. Of the Ahriman, the first war dirigible; miniatures of her parents' prop-driven Eagle fighters, from the Eurasian War; a plastic suborb missile she had put together herself from a kit; and a scramjet fighter, a long slim delta shape banking in frozen motion on its stand.
When the first scramjet flight to orbit had occurred in '59, followed by the first lunar landings and settlements in '62, Yolande's dreams had shifted higher. The Air Force had become merely a stepping stone to space, helping to drive her people's triumphant march across the solar system. Ah, Myfwany, she thought sadly. I wish you could be here to see it all.
"Send him in, by all means." She started to step around the desk as the serf did an about face and headed back out to the anteroom. Lately, though, her job had become too much like real work. Assigning military units to the alien base near Fafnir Crater, overseeing warship deployments in orbit, liaising with the Security Directorate to prevent the Alliance from getting too clear a picture of why Mars had so suddenly spiked in importance.
A spike of anger brought a scowl to her face and made her clench her fists. The Yankees. The destroyers of all happiness, the oaf-lump impediment that stood always in the Race's path. Aresopolis, a single domed green city in a crater, an ornament above a fortress, when the Moon might be laced with them like living jewels. Megaprojects to make green paradise of frozen Mars and burning Venus. The freedom to unlock the secrets of the alien base without the need for so much security. Always intriguing, threatening with their sly greasy-souled merchant cunning, menacing the future of her blood. Gwen, Nikki, Holden still unborn, whose years ought to stretch out before them like diamonds in the sun...
"Everythin' you are, we'll bring to nothin'," she said in tones quiet and even and measured. "We'll grind you bones to make our bread, and you children will serve mine until the end of days."
With an effort she brought herself back to the present and relaxed her fists, schooling her expression to calmness as her appointment walked into the room, Marya bowing and closing the door behind him. A broad-built man, bear strong, only fifty millimeters taller than she; you could see that he might have been pear-shaped among any people but Draka. A hooked nose, balding brow, and a brush of dark-brown beard with the first dusting of silver.
"Good to see you again," she said to Doctor Harry Snappdove, gripping his wrist. "Service to the State."
"Glory to the Race," he replied; his return grip was a precisely controlled machine. His accent was Alexandrian, with a hint of East European. His family was one of the rare elite - scientists mostly - given Citizen status after the conquest. "Congratulations on your promotion, Strategos," he continued with a smile.
Yolande smiled back, replied, "I do seem to find mahself in the right place at the right time." They had worked together in the Telmark IV flotilla, she commanding the operation that captured the Alliance transport Pathfinder, and he overseeing the capture of the comet and assisting in defeating the Alliance cruisers that had been pursuing her. She gestured to the chair in front of her desk and made her way back to her seat as Snappdove perched himself nearly on the edge of it, giving off an almost palpable air of energy and excitement.
"Am I to presume things are goin' well, professor?"
Snappdove spread his hands, a gesture that showed his East European heritage. "It's fascinating and frustrating all at once. If this alien complex has shown me anything, it's how much we don't know."
Yolande stared at him impassively, her gaze cold. "I thought you said you had been makin' progress."
"Of course, of course," he replied hastily. "We discovered the device that was the cause for all the strange phenomena. We've dated it to around fifty thousand years old, and it was still working! Well, barely anyway." His eyes lit as he leaned forward in his seat. "We recorded magnetic field shifts around it, but the most amazing thing are the other type of fields this core is able to create. Inside these fields I recorded a sort of compressed..." He paused as he sought out a term to adequately describe it. "A sort of compressed mass effect, created during the discharges of the core. Artificial mass shift fields!" The professor's eyes seemed to glaze in sheer scientific ecstasy.
Yolande frowned. "D'you mean like gravity? This is some sort of artificial gravity device? Strange thing to have on the surface of a planet."
Snappdove shook his head vigorously. "No, it's far more than just that."
The female Draka raised her eyebrows. Artificial gravity seemed impressive enough to her. It meant not as much exercise needed on prolonged voyages, along with countless other applications to make space travel and ship construction far easier.
He made the spreading-hands gesture again as he noticed her expression. "Think of it! A compressed mass effect field like this one could be used to push debris away from a ship in space, while in manufacturing we could use an extremely high mass compaction to create dense, sturdy materials for construction and any number of uses." A smile spread across his face. "But it doesn't stop there. Imagine if we can use this technology to go the opposite way, creating low-mass fields! If a compressed field could be used to push debris away from a ship..."
Yolande's brow furrowed as she tried to follow the professor's line of thought. A few seconds later her eyes widened. "Sweet mother Freya," she breathed. "Anti-gravity. Fo'get scramjets, we could move any amount of cargo between a planetary surface and its orbit!"
Snappdove nodded enthusiastically. "And it doesn't stop there! If you could maintain a strong enough low-mass field around a ship while it travels through space, you could potentially lower the its mass enough that it could travel faster-than-light!"
"Freya." She felt like she'd taken another surprise punch to the solar plexus at the enormity of what they had discovered. "Shitfire," she continued, slowly gathering herself. "You sayin' this could not only open up the outer solar system, but maybe so other star systems?"
"Precisely." The professor's smile faded a bit as he continued, "However, discoverin' how this core does it is a whole other problem." A deep sigh. "I'm not even sure what... how..." He stopped and raised his hands, clenching them into fists as he stared into space, obviously wrestling with how to put the problem into words. "How are these fields created? What exactly is being manipulated to cause the compression of matter? It isn't gasses like an atmosphere, and it isn't magnetic. It's like... like there's some other sort of energy at work that we haven't been able to detect so far. The only thing I can be sure of is that the core itself must be creating the energy that is used to create these fields."
"Wait a minute, I thought energy could be measured. What makes this energy so special?"
Snappdove frowned. "That's the problem. This goes into fields of physics that are way beyond my expertise. We won't know more until that shipment reaches the experts gathered at Aresopolis, but one of my colleagues believes it could be some sort of 'dark energy', as he termed it, that could be the reason for the expansion of the universe."
Yolande shook her head. Ouch. "Professor, this is all way beyond mah expertise. I'll let you and t'other scientists handle it. What can you tell me about that computer you found? Anythin' on that front?"
"Oh definitely. Whoever these aliens were, their computer architecture is much more open than ours. It appears to be almost wholly digital with no analog components we've had to locate and examine. There's definitely a large data cache stored in it, but it'll take time to decipher the alien language it's written in. We're hopin' it'll shed some light on all the questions that mass effect core has raised. The Archon has assigned all the best minds in the whole Domination to the decipherin' effort."
The professor shook his head. "This technology will push us forward centuries, Strategos. We're just barely on the cusp of even beginning to understand it as it is. If we hadn't been pushin' the space effort as hard as we have been, who knows how long it would have taken for us to find that complex?" He leaned back in his seat. "Imagine if we'd pursued rockets instead of scramjets in the early years we were just tryin' to get to orbit. They're toys, compared to even the first scramjets which could carry six tonnes to orbit. The Yankees kept tryin' to model the airflows with inadequate computers, and we ended up buildin' a gigawatt of nuclear power stations, using the whole Dniester for cooling, to get that Mach-18 quarter scale wind tunnel. Even then we still had disasters."
Yolande nodded. "The early pulsedrives were almost as bad. We lost a lot of brave people, using them in the outer solar system."
"This mass effect field technology could change everything!" He leaned forward again. "Instead of over a year from Earth to the outer planets, it might end up takin' hours."
Yolande was shaking her head in bemusement when her phone binged. She looked at it in surprise. Everyone knew better than to interrupt her when she was in the middle of a meeting. "Mah apologies," she said to Snappdove as she keyed the touchplate. "Service to the State."
"Glory to the Race." A female face was on the screen; from the background she was at the tracking station at the Nova Virconium Spaceport. "Strategos, we've received relayed sensor readings from orbit. We're trackin' multiple unidentified cruisers moving out from the direction of the Belt." She licked her lips nervously. "They on an intercept course for the convoy headin' for Aresopolis."
Sheer surprise nearly froze the Commandant-General's breathing, and she resisted the weakness that almost allowed her jaw to sag open in shock. Wha-? How the-? There aren't supposed to be any Yankee cruisers anywhere near here! An incandescent rage began building inside her. "I shoulda known it was too good to be true," she muttered evenly. All the Alliance Space Force cruisers had been conveniently either out of reach in the further reaches of the Belt and outer planets, or in the Earth-Moon system where Draka forces would be able to escort the convoy to the safety of Luna where a Yankee attack would mean full-scale war.
"Strategos?" Snappdove looked alarmed. Rightfully so, she thought. The Domination's new ace-in-the-hole had fallen into a trap. She wasn't naive enough to think the Yankees' hadn't known that anything was on Mars. But how did they know about the convoy? Where and when it was going?
"I'm afraid I'm goin' to have to cut this meetin' short, Chiliarch," she said in an even voice, all the more frightening for its utter lack of emotion. "I've got somethin' to look into."