Space Battleship Agamemnon

by Calculonius

In another universe, a genius inventor born in future Japan would create the Space Battleship Yamato. In this universe, he was born in 1910 Britain. In 1927, HMS Agamemnon was sent to his family's scrapyard. He kept it and tinkered with it for fun for 60 years, resulting in the Space Battleship Agamemnon. This is the story of the Space Battleship Agamemnon and its crew.

2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

In the command center deep within the hull of HMS Agamemnon, a cheer went up when the Simurgh got hit, and went idle, just coasting inactive along the path she'd been taking.

"Captain, she's been hit and seems stunned!"

Another excited cheer went up from the 33 command crew in the large room.

Captain Basil (pronounced British-style, as if it was spelled Boz-Ull) Snodgrass looked up from the super-science console he'd been working at - Console number 22, labeled Probability Control, where he had just helped their very-unlikely shot to connect despite the odds, having adjusted the odds from near zero to about 55% - and said "Excellent. Keep hitting her with a steady stream of those same Confusion shells. Drop the shrapnel and beehive rounds to make it easier to hit. And make sure to get her with the lasers and positron beams she avoided before. There must be a reason she avoided them. Try other stuff too, including the big gun when it is ready. I've got to try to figure out what is up with consoles 7, 11, and 18 - the ones labeled Drain, Force Field and Nullify."

Basil, Boz to his friends, got up from his seat at Console 22 and started towards Console 18.

Ron, his second in command, or executive officer and all-around go-to guy, said "Sure Boz, will do. We'll find something that hurts that weird 11-winged thing out there that looks almost like a girl. But be advised, the Drain and Nullify consoles went quiet again when she did."

Captain Boz said "OK" and changed direction to Console 11, labeled Force Field.

The Drain and Nullify consoles had always sat there inactive, silent and dark, until a few moments ago, when that freaky 11-winged thing out there had attacked them. Then both consoles had lit up like Christmas trees.

He vaguely remembered his grandfather Issac telling him that they were potent defenses against ... he didn't remember his Grandfather's technical description, just that he'd summarized it to himself as "super-powers".

Nullify had sounded stronger, to him, since it just turned off a super-power if it was under a certain threshold.

Drain reduced a hostile super-power by a certain amount regardless of how strong that super-power was.

But now Basil had a new perspective on it. Nullify did nothing against attacks more powerful than its own rating, while Drain still affected those, and was the reason the many dents in his ship were only dents and not much much worse.

He'd grown up visiting his grandfather often. Grandpa was always working on his favorite project - the battleship - and loved to talk about it. But his thoughts had moved very rapidly, and had skipped from subject to subject quickly as well.

Plus he had had no idea what was obvious or simple from the perspective of normal people - people who were not super-geniuses - versus what was way way above their understanding.

So conversations with gramps could lose you as easily as they could bore you, and were always hard to follow.

The notes Grandpa Issac had left when he died were just as bad in all the same ways, but worse, because he scribbled down ideas as he had them, on any scrap of paper he had around at the time. He always had a shirt pocket full of such papers - some scraps, some folded sheets, some envelopes or whatever came to hand - and they got re-used often, so one note would frequently go right next to another about a totally different subject.

Even Grandpa had often had trouble sorting out his notes.

So, until they'd lit up today, Basil had had no idea if the Drain and Nullify consoles even worked at all.

Many of the consoles in the command center were like that. Some were still disassembled, awaiting some upgrade that Grandpa would never get around to.

This was why Captain Boz was playing the role of a technical fix-it guy on his own battleship, rather than standing in some dramatic pose, giving orders and such. They needed to figure out as much about the consoles as they could, and he was the only one here who had spent time with Grandpa Issac.

He settled into the seat by Console 11, labeled Force-Field. It, like all the other consoles in the big 25' by 40' room, was modeled after a video-game console in a video arcade: a free-standing bit of technological furniture with a square base and body about 3 feet wide and deep, up to a set of controls on a dashboard at the right height to use the controls if you were standing before it, and a large display screen with its center at head height.

Grandpa had liked video arcades.

Unfortunately, Grandpa had also liked an idea he'd seen on the controls of some, where you did not label the controls with words, but with little pictures meant to represent what that control did. He called them "icons" and, while they made sense to Grandpa when he'd set them up, they were often pretty obscure.

He looked at the Force-Field console and could see that some icons were now lit up that hadn't been before.

They included what looked like a rubber ducky - maybe that represented things that float, so maybe the battleship itself?

Another lit-up icon looked like a raincoat - maybe that represented protection?

And another looked like the Eye of Sauron: a circle with a vertically slit pupil and no eyelid. Boz had no idea what that represented, though he had seen it on other consoles as well.

One more lit-up icon looked like a simple silhouette of a car - Basil had no idea what was meant by that.

Other icons were still unlit & included one that looked like a tennis-racket, another that looked like a railroad spike, another...

Boz's thoughts were cut short by a buzzing sound he'd not heard before.

He looked up at the big screen covering the whole front wall of the command center - Grandpa had liked Star Trek too, and had gotten the idea from there, then had expanded the idea and covered the other walls ceiling and floor with immense display screens each showing what was in those directions, although they currently had the floor display turned off since it made the newbies nervous to look down and see mostly empty space - when he heard Ron announce "Firing the big gun now".

Ron pressed the big red button labeled Longitudinal Axially-Mounted Energy gun - a name that was one of his grandfather's little jokes - and the whole ship shuddered as it fired.

Boz saw the big blue beam emerge from the bow of his ship, hit the still-inactive enemy squarely, remain on her for several seconds, then wink out.

If the target was damaged at all, it was a trivial amount.

Ron conferred with some sensor operators and then announced "The big gun disintegrated 2 layers off the enemy as far as we can tell, but she has something like 40 of those per inch of thickness, so the damage is minor. It is, though, continuing to work on her. In another minute, she should lose one more layer, then another maybe 2 minutes after that, and so on."

A hesitant cheer went up.

Then Abe - who normally handled the movement and steering of the ship, but wasn't very busy at the moment - looked up from a hand-calculator and said "don't cheer yet: at that rate and number of layers per inch, it'll take...years at least, for her to finally dissolve."

"OK, so we'll need to try something else then," a cheerful Ron replied.

Basil spoke up. "Put the tractor beam on her & let's see if we can tow her away. If so maybe we can get her up to speed and ram her into a moon or drop her into a star or something."

Ron nodded and hurried over to that console - number 44, labeled Telekinesis - to direct and support its operator.

A moment later they gave up. "Captain," Ron reported, "We can get her in the tractor beam, but it can't move her. It says weight limit exceeded."

"Hit the icon that looks like a tow truck," Boz responded. "I think of that one as 'low-gear' and with that one on, we can dead-lift around 64,000 tons, if I remember correctly."

"We already tried that," a subdued Ron answered.

"Huh." Boz said, into a suddenly silent command center.

He looked and was reassured to see that at least the 8 gunners at their consoles were still intent on shooting their target, with both Confusion rounds and everything else.

All the other shots were good - you never knew when you might get past the layers that amounted to armor and hit something vital. She had to have something vital in there somewhere.

But the Confusion rounds were the key so far - they didn't want to let her up and start being attacked again.

"At least the Confusion rounds are buying us time." Boz muttered.

Ron heard it and asked. "How do those work, exactly? Maybe we could give her an overdose or something along those lines?"

"That is yet another case where I wish I had listened more closely to my grandfather when he wanted to talk about it." Basil gave a rueful grin.

"What I remember is that he discovered how to detect and generate thought waves. He said all thoughts involve decisions and any decision collapses quantum wave probabilities into a specific reality and that generates a certain kind of radiation - I don't remember details on that - which he could generate and detect. He couldn't generate coherent thoughts, but he could make a large amount of gibberish that would be received by, and confuse, any thinking thing in the area. Computers basically can't handle confusion and either reboot or freeze up. Humans act randomly when confused. That's what those shells do - confuse thoughts by generating a large amount of thought gibberish. And I'm glad they worked."

"The thought-detector sensors, Console 34 over there, labeled Detect Mind," he gestured, "is based on the same discovery. It can tell us the location of a source of thoughts - a thinking mind, or something making decisions like a computer - though not what those thoughts are."

"We're getting better at it." Interrupted Beth, the cheerful operator at Console 34. "We can tell animal thoughts from humans, and from machines like computers - though those are easy to tell apart since thinking isn't exactly what they do. And we can recognize a sort of fingerprint to everyone's thought patterns - Ron's thoughts always look the same in certain ways, and Captain Basil's always look like Captain Basil's, and so on."

She smiled. "Oh, and we think we can identify strong emotions too."

Her smile turned into a frown, "We're pretty sure that... thing, out there hated us from the moment she saw us. You can see the ragged edges of this little line here... Oh, not right now you can't. Her thoughts keep flat-lining every time a Confusion shell hits her, then they rapidly build from simple to more complex, until they flat-line again, but when they're complex, you can see her anger."

"Increase the rate at which you fire Confusion shells, please." Captain Boz ordered. "I don't like the idea that she may be coming close to getting online and functional again."

"Absolutely, Boz-man" Ron agreed, before hurrying to make sure it was done.

"Sorry to interrupt," Basil said to Beth. "But this does give me an idea."

He turned to address the section of the room where all the sensor consoles were clustered. "What else can the various sensors tell us about the enemy out there?" he asked. "Maybe more information about her is what we need to make defeating her possible."

He spent a couple minutes listening to various reports from the Astronomy Club - that's how he thought of his sensor operators, since almost the entire college astronomy club had joined this expedition for the purpose of seeing the stars in whole new ways and perspectives. They loved the sensors and spent amazing amounts of time using them.

The visual, x-ray, infrared, radar, and lidar sensors all said basically the same thing - an 11-winged distorted caricature of a woman was nearby, still coasting towards the battleship at a constant rate, while being hit by various shots from the battleship. And those shots did not affect the target's momentum at all. They should have, if she'd massed what a woman massed.

Those sensors, like all the rest the battleship had, constantly worked in a full sphere around the battleship, so they had no need to look above or behind them, for instance, although the sensor operators had had to learn to pay attention to all parts of their screens & interpret what it meant.

The sonar didn't work out here in the vacuum of space, and the vibration sensor - like a super-sensitive seismic sensor - didn't either, for the same reason. Their operators were currently working with the ESP console operator to make it as if their microphones etc were inside the closest city on the planet below, to try to get some idea what the people were like.

The ESP Console - number 9 - was very useful that way. While useless by itself, it could team up with other sensors to put their 'sources' - whether cameras, radar dishes, microphones etc - anywhere they wanted, within about 200,000 miles.

He had them periodically taking turns with it to use radar, visual etc from other directions and perspectives to make sure no other threats were approaching.

The electric sensor said the target did not use electricity.

The magnetic sensor agreed - all flows of electricity generate some amount of magnetism and she had none. They also said the target had no ferrous metals in her.

The chemical sensor - Boz liked to think of it as "the long nose" - said the layers being blasted off of the target were mostly the kind of silica sand that resulted from crushing quartz, and included a variety of other elements mixed in.

It also noted there were very many loose, uncombined, atomic nuclei, stripped of their electrons, plus many free electrons, which were the known result of the disintegration ray they had used - it temporarily neutralized the charge on electrons, which broke their orbits, sent them off in all directions, and split every molecular bond.

But nothing about that report stood out as a way to destroy the target.

The Danger Sense sensor highlighted the enemy's position and rated her as a severe danger to the battleship. She was near the top of the scale there.

It didn't show any other sources of danger in orbit, though the planet itself had a variety of readings on it, some of them a big reason for concern.

The Hostile Intent sensor showed that the target fully intended to destroy them immediately and was willing to put every resource it had into the effort. It also showed that none of the potential sources of danger down on the planet currently had hostile intent towards the battleship or its occupants. In this case that probably meant those dangerous things were unaware of the battleship. In other cases, it could also mean that, while they could be a danger if they chose to, they currently had no such intentions.

And the Affinity for Hurting Others sensor said their target liked nothing better than to hurt others, arbitrarily and regardless of other causes and circumstances.

It had said so since the moment the battleship had arrived here, through a portal they'd opened from another dimension.

Many of the dangerous things down on the planet had similar readings on the AHO sensor - they liked hurting others and would likely be a problem if encountered.

All of that was interesting, but far more interesting was the result of the final sensor.

The Mass and Gravity sensor operator at Console 30 spoke up in frustration "Sorry Captain, this console must be broken. It says the target has infinite mass and no gravity, and that can't be right. I keep starting over and trying again and it keeps saying the same things. But it works otherwise - I get the right readings on our missiles and shells, for example, and on everything else including the sand near the target."

Basil didn't know what to say. When rushed, he tended to default to being blunt and straightforward - inconsiderate in effect though not in intention - and that often unintentionally caused offense.

Ron usually helped Basil deal with people, but he was busy elsewhere at the moment.

Luckily, Basil's friend Simon, the third in command, was nearby and stepped in. Simon was almost as socially adept and universally-liked as Ron.

"I doubt you're doing anything wrong," he said. "So let's consider what else that could mean."

He paused a moment to consider, and unconsciously straightened his perfectly straight and impeccable suit. He always dressed in a 3-piece suit and tie, even when others were in jeans and t-shirt. It was his thing.

"One," Simon held up a finger, "we know that even small things have a little gravity - it is a function of having mass. Yet she shows as having none."
"Two," a second finger went up, "we know that the material being blasted off of her has mass - you said the sand showed up as it should."

The sensor operator nodded.

"Three," Simon continued, "we know that gravity control is possible. We're doing it here - it's why you can sit at that console instead of floating around the room weightless."

"And four," Simon finished while being somehow both very dramatic and very dignified at the same time, "we know that the target's mass is tremendous. From the calculations Abe started and I have followed up on, we know that just the layers we have seen, have her massing more than this battleship does, and we can project that if her density keeps doubling with every layer, and the layers keep a consistent thickness through her observed size, then she masses more than my calculator can express, which is at least as much as this whole galaxy masses."

He paused to let that slink in.

Simon was very smart, but Basil was no idiot either.

Boz volunteered "If she masses that much, she would certainly collapse and become a new black hole without something like gravity control. And she'd need a powerful lot of it at that."

"And therefore..." Simon prompted.

"A witch!" a cheerful Ron called from across the room, completing a Monty Python quote and amusing himself and some others.

"Heaven help us if her gravity control should fail" someone else offered in a hushed voice.

"Black holes definitely suck!" a still-cheerful Ron quipped, trying to lighten the mood.

"Yes," Simon agreed, "if her gravity control fails, or gets impaired by much, or even hiccups for an instant, she will collapse as a new black hole. That is certain to destroy her, but it will also gradually eat the Earth below and cause us problems as well."

"Well, we can't risk that!" someone said.

"But we can't just keep shooting her forever either." someone else countered.

Captain Basil coughed, "Uh, technically, we could. Keep shooting her forever that is. Oh, I know it'd get tremendously boring, among other things, but my point is we will never run out of ammunition."

He gestured. "Console 2 over there handles that. The only thing my grandfather liked about the second Star Trek series, which he called 'The Next Degradation', was something called a Replicator. They used it to make tea, I think. Grandfather saw more potential in it than that. The console can duplicate anything it has a pattern for in its memory. And it, and its remote units, can scan anything into its memory and store it there indefinitely. It uses direct conversion of energy to matter and some kind of way I didn't understand to collapse quantum probability waves into specific instances of your choice. I think.

Grandpa, who was a whiz with Quantum Theory once called it a Quantum Observation Master & said it could observe not just what was actually there, but what you wanted to be there, thus 'loading the dice' for quantum probability and creating an instance of anything it was familiar with, though if it stops 'observing it', the item will wink back out of existence."

He glanced around the room, noted the reactions, and nodded. "Yah, it didn't make any sense to me either. But the short form is, we can make as much more ammunition as we want, including shells, missiles, torpedoes, or whatever. He has boats, helicopters, VTOL jets and other things scanned as well."

"Not," he sighed, "that that will get us safely out of this predicament. Just like that metaphor - we have a tiger by the tail. We can't stop or let go."

He smiled. "But saying so has given me a moment to think, and an idea. We can, perhaps, try something new. We can try turning her into a black hole."

There was an instant uproar, which took a while for Ron and Simon, working together, to get quieted down.

When he could again be heard, Captain Basil started with "you're all correct, no one here wants to die nor to kill the planet below. I never meant that. I meant I have a safe way to try this. Hear me out."

They did.

Then they all discussed it and came up with refinements.

First, they consulted Captain Basil's notes to find an empty dimension. They'd done some exploring before they came here and had found several alternate dimensions of varying descriptions, some of which had nothing at all in them - just empty space.

They then opened a dimensional portal - the same kind they had used to get here originally - to dimension 437, a completely empty dimension. They set the portal right in front of the super-dense 11-winged monster, which was still coasting forward at a constant rate, and waited for it to pass through.

Then, keeping a safe distance and still hitting the monster with a constant stream of shells, they followed.

Once they were both through, they closed the dimensional portal.

Now if they got a black hole, it could not bother the Earth.

Then they made a Teleportation portal between them and the monster. Such portals were a bit like one-way mirrors - they worked from one side but not the other.

So the way they set it up, it didn't affect things going from the battleship to the monster. Only things going from the monster to the battleship would be teleported.

That way, Confusion shells, positron beams etc could, and did, still bombard the monster, but any gravity waves coming from it - if and when it turned into a black hole - would be teleported away their maximum Teleport range, 200,000 miles, and heading away from the battleship as if it had already been passed by them.

They figured that would make them safe.

Then they started trying to use their own gravity control to counteract the monster's gravity control.

But nothing they tried worked. The monster's control was much too strong, or their own control ability too weak, depending on how you looked at it.

After they'd tried all the variations of gravity control they could, Captain Basil got a certain look on his face.

He said, "It seems clear that her gravity control ability is too strong, and that only by weakening her control do we have a chance for her own gravity to overcome her."

Ron knew that look.

He sidled up to the captain and whispered "Boz-man, you've got that danger-defying courageous look again. You'd better be sure you know what you're doing. There are over 500 people on this ship, most of whom wanted some adventure but stop well short of the 'Paladin on a quest' type of heroics you used to do all the time in our D&D games."

Boz sighed. "Good times, eh? But yes, I know that, and if I wasn't sure we wouldn't try it."

He raised his voice to address the room. "We will move the Teleportation portal closer to her, and, staying well within it's 'shadow' get to within 50 feet of her. That will put her inside our Drain and Nullify fields, which should reduce her gravity control significantly enough for her to collapse."

There were objections, and, after some talking, they agreed to add in some refinements.

First, they'd max out the power on their own gravity control to hold their ship at its present gravity. It was felt that that may protect them, even from a black hole 50 feet away, since the strength of gravity falls off with the square of the distance, and that would give their 'local' gravity a bit of an edge over the 'distant' black hole.

Second, and more importantly, they agreed to have the ship pointed away, the star drive ready to go at a moment's notice, and the gravity sensor focused on the monster, watching for the first signs of her collapse as a new black hole. At the first signs, they'd engage the star drive and travel away faster than light.

With that agreed to, they went ahead with it.

Their crew of volunteer adventure-seekers was not highly trained. But they were highly motivated, at least in this case.

The moment the whole monster came within 50 feet of the battleship, she winked out.

The gravity sensor went crazy, indicating an unbelievable amount of mass at the center point of where the monster had been.

And Abe smacked the star drive button - made of aluminum - almost hard enough to break it.

They stopped their maximum-speed escape only 1 second later, having traveled 1000 light-seconds away in that time.

They stopped for a while to calm down and let the repair robots catch up on their various tasks.

Then they slowly retraced their steps, back towards the monster, until she came within scanner range again.

They verified that she was indeed a black hole, and was not acting in any way like she had before she became a black hole.

Not that they could imagine anything surviving that transformation, but they wanted to be sure.

Then they took a dimensional portal back to the Earth where they'd encountered the monster, flew out to Jupiter for some interesting scenery, and had a celebration.

They had succeeded in their first adventure.