Chapter 3
clank clank
Basil stirred out of his reverie and reminded himself that that was what knocking on a door sounded like when the door was the thick steel of a battleship hatch.
Somebody was clanking a metal tool against the large wheel mounted in the center of the big oval metal hatch that was the door to the captain's break room.
Basil said "come in", then remembered there was little chance they could hear him through the surprisingly thick water-tight hatch.
Until recently, he'd only visited his grandpa and battleship, not lived here, so he was still getting used to some things.
He could have risen from where he lounged in the sea of cushions that covered the carpeted floor, and turned the wheel on his side of the hatch to "un-dog the hatch" - also known as opening the door.
But, here in the captain's break room, he had other options.
There was a laser pointer buckled to his right index finger. He pointed it at the display which covered the full ceiling of the room. Certain parts of that display, when touched by the laser pointer, acted like buttons to control the computer which the display was part of.
Using that interface, he told the computer to turn on the intercom from here to just outside his door, and then repeated the words, "come in".
The inner hatch wheel spun, and the door swung open.
But that took enough time for him to finish the sentence he was reading and hand his book back to the long, multi-jointed robotic arm mounted in one of the very few places it could be - the junction of two bookcases. The arm inserted a bookmark in the book and placed the book back in the right spot of the right shelf among the floor-to-ceiling bookcases that covered almost every square inch of wall in the room.
Ron, stepping in through the hatch, was in time to see the last part of the arm putting away the book.
He smiled and said, "reading?"
It wasn't really a question - he was being facetious. Of course Basil was reading. The whole room was optimized for it. Bookcases were mounted edge-to-edge across the whole length of every wall, and they all reached from the floor to the ceiling. The inner side of the hatch even had a bookcase attached to it, specially-made to fit, allow for the door to be opened and closed and the wheel spun, and all while not disturbing the books it held.
Basil loved reading and had recently completed a history degree in college.
He smiled "I was just enjoying re-reading Herodotus. Did you know, by the way, that Xerxes the Great was so arrogant, that when a storm destroyed a bridge which he was having built across a narrow part of the sea, he had the sea flogged for daring to oppose him?"
Ron laughed.
Basil nodded. "Yep, flogged, taunted, and slave fetters tossed in to symbolically enslave the sea."
They both laughed.
Ron said, "You know that's one of the things I like about you. You don't let power go to your head."
He gestured around. "I mean, here you have a full working battleship all your very own - not just fully functional as a battleship, but enhanced by a genius to have what are basically super-powers like from a comic book. And what do you want to do with it? Make yourself rich or take control of something like most would? No, you want something very much like a paladin-ish quest like we've played in our Dungeons and Dragons games. You want to seek out those who harm and oppress humanity, and do so on a scale such that it'd take a battleship like this to oppose them, and, finding such folks, you want to make them stop it."
"I'm already rich, and beyond a certain point, it's just numbers in a spreadsheet. You can only spend so much before it gets meaningless," an embarrassed Basil countered.
"True, but most people take a long time before they figure that out." Ron answered.
"And speaking of figuring things out," he continued, "we have a problem. Most of the crew want to go home to the Mars One colony."
Basil sighed "How did we get here?"
Ron smiled, intentionally mis-interpreting the question to give him a chance to quip. "You know that: we decided we wanted to go adventuring, facing challenges big enough to require something like this battleship, yet still beatable, and defeating those challenges for the good of humanity. Then we set the Determine Destiny console to number 6 - almost up to Major Luck Alteration. Setting 6 took a week to charge up, and we spent that week recruiting more crew among the Mars One colonists - a very adventure-minded group that - and then rolled dice to determine the settings to use when making a dimensional portal, depending on our luck alterations to make the dice come up favorably for our quest. It worked: seconds after flying through the dimensional portal, that 11-winged thing attacked us."
Basil knew all of this, and also knew it was best to humor Ron and let him say his piece, so he spent the time musing on it.
His grandfather, Issac Fields, had focused a lot of his earlier work on Quantum Theory, and had come up with a number of effective uses for it. Console 5, labeled Determine Destiny, was one of those. In some way that Basil didn't understand, it used quantum uncertainty to basically manipulate luck. You could alter the luck of any target, for either good or bad. But the larger the alteration was, the longer it took to do. Console 5, at power setting 1, was capable of a Minor Alteration - something on the scale of making someone lose his house keys or lose a letter - with only a 1 minute delay. On power setting 4, it could do a Moderate Alteration - something like just happening to encounter a specific person on the street, or having a taxi pull up the moment you need one - with a 6 hour delay. And on power setting 7, it could do Major Alterations - such as having someone slip down the stairs and break a limb, or lose something of vast importance - but that took a month to charge up.
After use, there was a variable amount of time-delay between uses while a little red light was lit.
Without prior planning, the console was not very useful - waiting 6 hours for a taxi to happen to pull up at the right moment would be silly, for example.
But, if you thought ahead, and used the console for a taxi 6 hours before a situation where you knew a sudden serendipitous taxi would be nice, the effects could be very useful indeed.
The console had 10 power settings, and setting 10 Drastic Alteration, could kill someone outright. such as from a sudden fatal heart attack. But it took more than a year to charge up for that.
Ron stopped talking.
"I meant," the patient captain said into the silence, "how did we get to the point where the crew want to leave?"
"Oh that," Ron pretended he hadn't known that all along.
He grew more serious. "While the crew want adventure, they discovered that the reality of actual battle is more adventurous than they wanted. They like risk, and seeing new and different things. They found out they do not like actual danger. They want to go back to the less-dangerous adventure of colonizing Mars."
Basil sighed, "I guess I can see that. And we certainly can't make them stay - they are all volunteers."
"You know," he mused, "you had a really good idea back when you suggested we could combine our problem with the problem Mars One was having to get a solution that'd work for both of us."
Ron smiled his thanks and waited for a decision while Basil thought.
His grandfather had lived most of his life in England, and worked on HMS Agamemnon while there.
Issac's daughter, Basil's mom, had married an American and had lived and raised Basil there, in California.
Basil had visited his grandfather regularly in Britain, and then in the British Virgin Islands when Grandpa had moved there and taken the battleship with him.
That was an interesting and sad story.
Grandpa had loved England, but that country had eventually passed gun laws that would have required scrapping HMS Agamemnon, which Grandpa would never do.
So he'd tried to effectively stay in England while not actually staying in England.
The British Virgin Islands were an overseas possession of England, and British in many ways, but not in others. Their citizens were not British citizens, though there was talk of that.
And they weren't the same as far as laws either. A lawyer had said Grandpa could keep his battleship if it were in the British Virgin Islands.
So Grandpa, rich from some of his inventions, had bought a small uninhabited island near Tortola, the main island.
On his island, he'd built a dock, dry-dock, house, workshop, and small airfield, then moved there with his battleship.
He'd convinced Basil to move in with him.
Basil had transferred from UC Riverside, which had been so large it was impersonal and hard to meet people there, to the community college on Tortola, where he'd met several new friends.
He'd attended for 2 years, during which time he'd gotten to know his grandfather much better, then graduated but kept attending in order to hang out with the friends he'd made.
It was while in his small airplane, flying from Tortola to his grandfather's island, that they'd radioed him the news of granddad's death.
This had not been unexpected - granddad had been very old, but still active and spry. He'd been working on the battleship, with some consoles partly disassembled while undergoing upgrades, right until his death.
It had been hard for Basil, who'd lost both parents several years earlier, and had no immediate family left.
But making it harder still had been the notice, just weeks later, that HMS Agamemnon was no longer welcome in the British Virgin Islands. New restrictive gun laws had come there too, and the many fully functional artillery pieces on the battleship were most definitely not allowed anymore.
Basil's Dungeons and Dragons group - his closest friends, Ron, Simon, and Abe - had rallied around him and held a brainstorming session.
During that session, a casual comment about Mars One had eventually led in interesting directions.
Mars One had sort of been a company, sort of a project, but mostly an idea. They had wanted to colonize Mars, sooner rather than later. They believed they could afford it, and do so without further delay, by using off-the-shelf technology already available for other purposes.
They had some very smart people look into it and plan how to do it, then started fundraising and advertising for volunteers.
They were surprised to get several hundred thousand volunteers - people who were willing to go on a one-way trip to Mars to try to colonize it, without much support.
Such a spirit of adventure had driven many major advances during human history.
They sorted through the volunteers, looking for the best fits, and tried to move forward, but fundraising was slow.
And it didn't help when challenges arose, like when a big-name famous technical college said that all the colonists would die from having too much oxygen in their air because there was no way to remove it.
It didn't matter that they were totally wrong - the graduate students who had written the report were ignorant of the existence of oxygen concentrators, which were commonly used by elderly people who needed extra oxygen.
But disproving their assertion didn't achieve anything. The news had gone out, people had read the dramatic headlines and never saw the retraction.
So funding dried up.
The company, and the volunteers, held on to hope and kept trying. But it began to look like they would never raise the funds needed to buy the necessary equipment.
Then Basil came along.
He bought the failing company, directed the very smart people there to stop looking at rockets, capsules, travel gear and transit times, and focus solely on what they would need once actually on Mars.
Then he demonstrated why that approach was not actually insane: he flew them to Mars, and back, in his battleship. Each leg of the trip took under a minute, even though Mars was not then at its closest approach to Earth. The time it took to descend from orbit and land on the surface actually took longer than the trip from Earth orbit to Mars orbit. That was because the star drive could not be used in atmosphere and using gravity control to fly was significantly slower.
The battleship was airtight, had airlocks, and, in space, could use its gravity control to keep a bubble of air around it. It could easily carry hundreds or thousands of tons of gear, even big bulky gear.
That changed everything.
Fresh excitement gripped the company and the volunteers.
Equipment was bought - Basil scanned all of it with his Replicator console - and taken out to Mars in several trips.
Volunteers clamored to go too, and soon - well before enough infrastructure was built to actually sustain them long-term - small groups were staying on Mars for the short times between trips. They called it camping.
Some came back to tell family and friends, then went back to Mars again.
That was great for them, but caused problems for the effort as a whole, because governments started to hear of the effort and take it seriously. Then they got jealous.
Various governments started to claim control over the company, Mars, and everything else they could think of.
They wanted to tax it all, run it all, and control it all.
Basil and his company sped up the colonization efforts and ignored the various government efforts.
He still grinned when he remembered his secretary - a soon-to-be colonist - answering the phone call of the president of a large country and telling him "Please Hold: your call is very important to us and will be answered in the order in which it was received.'
Governments do not react well to that kind of treatment.
When it comes down to it, government is about Force. If you don't believe that, think about what happens to those who not not submit. People who don't comply with police orders get physically overcome by as many cops as it takes. If need be, they'll call out the National Guard - whatever it takes to force compliance.
And so they did with the flying battleship, at least when it was at Earth anyway.
They started with threats - flying jets menacingly near, then, when the jets were ignored, firing warning shots.
Then some of those 'warning shots' used heat-seeking ammunition; 'by accident' they said.
When the heat seekers got shot down, the gloves came off, and things escalated quickly.
HMS Agamemnon's final trip from Earth to Mars, heavily loaded with colonists, equipment and supplies, was strongly opposed.
Airplanes and the weapons they delivered had ended the age of the battleship, several decades before. Missiles had sealed that deal, since they could both deliver a harder hit, more accurately, and much further away than a battleship could, and they could also sink battleships from far enough away that the battleship could not even fire back. And missiles were hard to shoot down.
So, for decades, everybody had known better than to waste their time building battleships, which were seen as nothing more than expensive targets.
But, during that time, it became easier and easier to shoot down airplanes and the weapons they delivered, and even missiles.
With the advent of practical laser weapons - which HMS Agamemnon had, even if others did not - the day of airplanes and missiles had effectively ended, since the only real defense missiles and planes had was in being very hard to hit, and lasers made that trivially easy.
This was demonstrated on Agamemnon's final flight away from Earth, during which it shot down 417 incoming missiles - not letting a single one through - and then 3 jets as well, when those jets insisted on trying to strafe the colonists and baggage on the battleship's deck.
They'd then transited to Mars just fine, and spent a while helping the colonists get set up.
They'd done things like emplacing communication satellites above Mars, and putting large arrays of mirrors at its Lagrange points to reflect more sunlight to Mars so it could heat up a bit and eventually grow plants, at least where the extra sunlight landed.
They'd put up huge solar panel arrays in the space above Mars, set to make electricity, convert it to microwaves, and beam those to receiving stations on the Mars surface, for use as electrical power.
They'd used tightly-focused particle beams to quarry stone, then tractor beams and gravity control to position them for new building projects, then lasers on low-power to fuse them together.
The first such building was for a new nuclear power plant, kept well-distant from the colony just in case of problems. The colonists had included a nuclear engineer who had been desperately eager to prove that his new reactor designs were effective and fail-safe. But no government he had approached would approve anything including the word "nuclear".
It had looked good to Basil and the people he'd hired to look them over.
So he'd ok'ed it.
The colony would need electricity after all, and having it from more than one source was good policy. For several reasons, he wouldn't talk about where he'd gotten the uranium it used.
But everybody knew where he got the extra water Mars Colony needed - they jokingly called it the attack on Jupiter's moon Europa.
And it was rather like a hit-and-run raid. They'd flown the battleship up near Europa and fired a full broadside at the frozen seas on the planet. The various shells fired by the battleship hit the ice in a box pattern, breaking some chunks free from the rest, or at least free enough that the telekinetic tractor beam could tear them loose and lift them up to the battleship, which then took them back to Mars and soft-landed them near the colony.
They'd done just the one raid on Europa. Then someone complained about them 'vandalising the beautiful scenery and complex dance of Jupiter and her moons'.
Not that her thought their efforts would make any difference on such a scale, but rather, just to avoid argument, Boz had switched targets and run similar 'raids' on the gas giant Uranus, which gave them not just water ice, but also ammonia, and methane, which had uses as-is, and also could be broken down into other useful gasses - Nitrogen, Hydrogen, and Carbon - which Mars needed.
At a particularly cold spot near Uranus' south pole, they found a small 'lake' of liquid oxygen that had frozen solid. That was convenient, since they'd expected to have to go to Pluto for that. The frozen-oxygen-lake weighed nearly 200,000 tons, so they broke it up with telekinesis and brought it back to Mars in 3 trips.
On arriving, the oxygen ice met Mars' average temperatuure of -85 F, and immediately began to melt and become liquid, as it got warmer than -362 F.
As it became a liquid, they lost control of the blob of oxygen, but it never hit the ground, warming past -297 F as it fell and turning into a gas.
It wasn't enough oxygen gas to give Mars a breathable atmosphere - not by a long shot. Evenly distributed, it came out to just under 7 and a quarter pounds of oxygen per square mile of Martian surface. But it would help.
Just having it present meant it was easier to collect at need.
And collecting it would be easier than the original Mars One plan, which had been to find water ice locally on Mars and extract oxygen from that as necessary.
Perhaps most importantly, they had set Mars up as an independent nation, using a modified form of the USA Constitution..
And they'd tried to set the foundations for good relations between Mars and Earth, via trade.
Not that Mars made much of anything they could trade, even if they'd had a way to ship it to Earth, which they didn't.
But such things do not stop creative minds.
The new Mars colonists still knew people back on Earth. Those people handled the Earth ends of things - setting up certain companies to handle transactions and bank the proceeds for later - probably much later - when actual shipping between the planets could begin.
And then Mars started broadcasting encrypted transmissions that their companies on Earth could decrypt and sell.
So called "reality television" was a reliable money-maker, and life on Mars was far more interesting than the reality shows on Earth typically were.
But that wasn't it. People would pay for all kinds of shows, as well as "intellectual property".
Basil and his Dungeons and Dragons group - Ron, Simon, and Abe, who had all come along - had introduced many of the new Martians to D&D, and provided them with all the books, as one way to pass the time and keep them entertained when they were not working to build the new colony.
There were shows on internet video sites where people watched other people play such games.
The Martians broadcast their own such shows, as well as any new content they created - new D&D books and modules.
Martian versions of sports like golf were particularly popular, because they were so different in the low gravity and thin atmosphere, and while wearing environment suits.
Some Martians started writing and performing music, and broadcasting that.
And so on.
They would not see any profit from it for a while. But the money would accumulate in banks and eventually be quite helpful.
And in the meantime, all the contact helped the people of Earth see the Martians more as "us" rather than "them".
But, after a few months, not being particularly interested in Mars, nor feeling able to go back to Earth and have governments fight over who got to arrest them, Basil and his friends had had to come up with something else.
And the Grand Adventure was it: they would travel the dimensions fighting oppression, and making bad guys stop hurting others.
They would effectively be super-heroes by use of the super battleship.
But they figured they should probably have more crew than just the D&D club, Astronomy club, and Gun club, plus various other friends, which they'd started with.
Not that they really needed crew. Grandpa had added so much automation to the ship that he could operate it all by himself, even in combat, since even the loading and aiming of all the guns was fully automated and controllable by the consoles in the command center.
It just seemed appropriate somehow to have more crew than that.
And it sure made it easier to operate all the consoles in the command center.
HMS Agamemnon had originally had accommodations for 817 crew.
It had also had very large boilers as its engines, and very large spaces to store the coal to run those boilers.
And the propeller shafts and associated machinery had taken quite a bit of space as well.
All of that was gone now. Grandpa had replaced the boilers with 6 fusion power plants, each about the size of a car.
He'd replaced the propellers & all their associated machinery with 8 consoles, each about the size of a refrigerator, that provided reaction-less propulsion in any environment, including space, plus another one that provided the star drive.
Then he had rebuilt the crew accommodation spaces, combining it with much of the additional space made available by his other changes, into nice new roomy and comfortable cabins modeled after those on cruise ships. There were enough of those for 400 people.
So, when Basil and friends had asked the Mars colonists if any were interested in adventuring with them, they got enough volunteers to fill all the cabins.
Having no reason not to, they took them all along.
Now most wanted to go home again.
ahem
Ron had coughed, bring Basil back from his ruminations.
"Oh yah. Sorry Ron, I just got to thinking."
"I know," Ron answered kindly, "we've been friends long enough for me to recognize it."
"I promised the Astronomy club that we'd go visit Alpha Centauri. Do you think the crew would stay long enough for that?" Basil asked.
"You know we don't really need a crew for that." Ron answered.
"I know. The ship is very highly automated, and we have plenty of repair robots to fix it in case there are any problems. It just seems right to have a crew. Among other things, it gives us versatility if we run into an unexpected type of opponent or situation." Basil answered.
"And you want them to catch the spirit of the adventure." Ron added.
"That too." Basil agreed.
Ron sighed. "Danger is a big motivator. They want to go home and it will take some serious convincing to change that. I will try but," he shuddered, "there will need to be more of me."
Basil knew what Ron meant. He was referring to the most effective failed experiment around - the Star Trek transporter that didn't send you anywhere.
Grandpa had liked Star Trek a lot.
One of his earliest efforts had been to reproduce the transporters used in that show.
He'd failed, but in a way that was still useful.
His transporter room didn't send the subjects anywhere.
But he'd partially succeeded - his transporter still scanned the subject and made a duplicate, but that duplicate showed up right next to the original.
His transporter, renamed Duplicator and numbered Console 8, even though it was in a different room than the command center where most of the rest of the consoles were, ended up being a lot like his Replicator, Console 2. The chief difference was that the Replicator made only non-living things, including robots. The Duplicator made living things too.
And, through an advanced application of Quantum entanglement, the Duplicates - up to 10 at once - were all linked by telepathy, and could even share each-other's senses.
That was probably the source of the problem - the reason why it didn't get used more and why Ron didn't want to use it now.
Having up to 10 Duplicates of yourself, each of which could run around doing the things you wanted done, using your skills, insights etc to do it, and automatically feeding back to you the full information on what they were doing, should have been tremendously useful.
And it was.
But most of the time they didn't think it was worth the price.
It was probably the telepathic feedback that caused it, but whatever it was, having a Duplicate around caused toothache. And having 10 around caused 10 times as much toothache.
Grandpa had had no teeth, having lost them all long before he got the Duplicator working. So he never noticed the problem and had never fixed it.
He had always, as long as Basil had known him, had 10 Duplicates of himself helping him work on the battleship.
Basil had tried having Duplicates of himself all reading books at the same time. It had worked, but he'd been miserable with the toothache, and still associated that misery with those books.
He didn't read those particular books anymore.
Ron was offering to make a significant sacrifice here. Making Duplicates of himself to talk to the crew would be no fun at all.
"I really appreciate it," an emotional Basil said.
Ron nodded and answered stoically "no problem. How long have I got?"
"It will take a day and a half, at max star drive speed, to get to Alpha Centauri from here. Then maybe a week on site looking around, and a day and a half back. If you can get them to agree to that long a delay in going back to Mars, then I'll promise to give Mars colony something nice and helpful - I don't know what yet."
Ron nodded, said "I can do that," and started out.
Basil added, "and we can probably use the time to convince some to agree to stay."
Ron just smiled.