Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

My shock at Mr. Dumonte's suddenly drafting me into the Navy lasted through not only the ride to the Induction Center but the formal administering of the oath of enlistment. It boggled the mind that after so much indirect observation, after he'd just told me that they preferred to use a "very soft touch", It wasn't until I'd finished storing all my civilian possessions and was being yelled at by a drill instructor to shut up, stand on the line, and wait for the shuttle along with all the other new meat that I finally realized what this whole situation was.

It was a test.

Not of my intelligence; I'd already more than proven that. They were testing my character. There were testing my patience, my self-restraint, my willingness to obey orders and defer gratificfation. Extremely brilliant young people who thought they knew everything weren't always noted for their moderation. And if their team had been finding and placing people of very high intelligence for any great length of time, then statistically it was extremely likely they'd already run into at least a few complete dupeks. They might even have had someone attempt to deliberately game their system. And I had actually had an extremely close call with making an extremely bad decision with an extremely horrifying bit of mad science, even if they didn't know about it.

... at least, I was mostly certain that they didn't know about it.

So yes, in hindsight Mr. Dumonte's demeanor during our conversation seemed to have been that of someone who hadn't been entirely sure of what he was dealing with. He'd been probing me, hitting me up for reactions, and...

"Sophia, I'm sure you learned very early on about how to tell other people what they want to hear. But what do you want?"

But despite his best efforts as an interviewer, I'd still been a mystery to him. Apparently I'd been a mystery to their whole evaluating committee, whoever or whatever it actually was. And if they'd had so much as one really bad experience with a prior genius, then it was entirely rational for them to not want to buy any pigs in a poke. And so while they probably hadn't made up their minds to draft me before calling me in, I was certain that they'd already wargamed out several possible responses ahead of time before even starting the interview, and Mr. Dumonte had decided while talking to me that the 'Draft her' option was the best one to respond with.

Achievement Unlocked: Raise Ship!
(Enlist In The Terran Confederation Navy)
Reward: 200 CP

And so I'd spent the next six months sweating it out as the youngest officer candidate in my class. Three months of Basic Officer's Course, intended to take people who already had a college degree but no military experience and train them in basic military skills while at the same time intensely evaluating them for the fitness and aptitude to become commissioned officers in the Confederation Navy, and then three months of actual Officer's Candidate School alongside the Navy enlisted men who'd been selected for officer track. Twelve-plus hours a day, six days a week, of busting my hump physically and mentally.

The mentally had been no trouble, of course. Being the class leader in everything academic or intellectually testable was not really a challenge for me. The physical fitness, on the other hand... ugh. I thought I'd been in good shape before, but that was by civilian standards. I'd seriously considered just tapping out and quitting at a couple points. And it wasn't just running and pushups, either. Basic weapons training, vacc suit training (again, and much more intensely this time), zero-G maneuvering, EVA exercises, even a couple weeks in orbit being run through a not-so-simulated series of spaceship disasters as part of the introduction to damage control training... everything that an able spacehand had to know in order to at least not get anyone else killed on a starship in combat. In addition there were all the stress tests, the 'let's see if you panic when they cut the oxygen off' exercise, the deliberate working you to exhaustion and then making you do tactical problems or field exercises, because an officer had to be able to function in combat despite already being beat to hell, and all the rest of it... all culminating in "The Crusher", a three-day test to destruction where you were lucky if you got so much as three hours' sleep.

And this was this was supposed to be the easy version. The Marines got a twelve-week conditioning course before OCS, and theirs ended in "The Grinder" - one entire week of hell.

So, this was their solution to running into someone smart enough that ordinary psychological testing didn't work on them, and even one of their best and most experienced interviewers didn't fully trust his bullshit detector in a face-to-face. Send them into the Crusher and everything associated with it, under circumstances where nobody could faultlessly keep up an act for that many entire months and where exhaustion and stress would magnify any impulses to the point that even subtle faults would become visible. Which was actually the entire point of any boot camp or officer candidate evaluation course to begin with - to find as many mental weaknesses in the prospective candidates as possible and make them pop loose before you actually send them into the field, when it was still early enough to just painlessly wash them out back to civilian life.

Pretty clever on the part of Mr. Dumonte and friends, when you looked at it that way. Whatever my mental malfunctions were - and their instincts were not wrong to have been sniffing something funny because I was actually hiding significant stuff from them, just as I'd been hiding the truths about the Celestial Forge and me having an eldritch force in my head from everyone else - Basic Officer's Course and the Crusher would give them a very good chance at seeing it, even if nothing else they'd tried so far had. And if I failed out then I just went back into civilian life, and they could just have some friend in a defense contractor's offer me a job then. After all, I'd still need to earn a living.

And if I didn't fail out? Well, then I'd be subject to military discipline for the duration, and go where I was told and do what I was told. Just as I'd told Mr. Dumonte that I'd wanted to do, to serve the Confederation. So here they were, taking me at my word.

Or maybe, I eventually came to speculate, they were just so not used to dealing with a peg as square as me. I did, after all, completely and supernaturally violate everything they'd ever learned about human learning speed or normal R&D progress curves, even if they had very little clue as to how deeply I violated those or why. And maybe they were doing this just to try and fit me back into a round hole they could understand. After all, even if they by all appearances were senior, well-connected, and highly competent bureaucrats they were still bureaucrats, and bureaucracies were not historically great at adapting to big exceptions to the rules they understood until and unless you rubbed their noses in it. So perhaps my being drafted wasn't so much a cunning plan as a reversion to type.

Maybe. Until and unless the Forge started giving me mind-reading powers, I'd probably never really know. Then again, I didn't really need to know. I just had to figure out what to do next.

But that was a problem for future Sophia. Present Sophia was at her OCS graduation ceremony, raising her right hand and being sworn in as a commissioned officer in the Terran Confederation Navy.

"I, Sophia Nowak, do solemnly swear and affirm that I will support and defend the Terran Confederation against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Confederation Charter, that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."

Achievement Unlocked: Ninety-Day Wonder
(Graduate Officer Candidate School)
Reward: 200 CP

I had my insignia pinned on me, collected my from the senior chief petty officer who'd been our OCS class' instructor as per tradition, and stood quietly to one side after the formation had been dismissed letting it all sink in. Even despite a certain amount of impatience on my part at having spent this many months away from doing any research or serious academic study, I was not indifferent to the sheer weight of the tradition that I was now an ongoing part of. The Navy was the Confederation's senior service, both the tip of the spear and the shield wall standing between Terra and the Vilani, and while it was only several decades old it drew its heritage and history from the navies of the Confederation member nations that had contributed to form it in the first place. I was the latest ensign in the latest generation to stand as an inheritor - however partial - of the legacy of men like Nimitz, Ushakov, Nelson, Jones, and Yi. As well as the legacies, and sacrifices, of many many humbler men both recorded and unrecorded throughout history, who'd all loyally stood their watches and manned their guns - and, if necessary, had died at their posts. And even though I hadn't planned on joining the Navy at all, I still wasn't indifferent to that.

Mom and Dad hadn't been able to make it back to Terra for my graduation - with Nusku 3 jumps out from Terra, it was almost a month each way just in travel time - and I didn't really have an extended family for obvious reasons, so there was nobody here at Luna Base to watch me graduate. And that actually stung a lot more than I'd expected it too. Oh, it would only cost a few sols to have a copy of the video record of the graduation ceremony sent out to them, but that just wasn't the same. Still, lonely graduation or not, I positively burned with eagerness at having finally passed this hurdle - all six nigh-endless months of it - and the prospect of actually being allowed to get some real work done.

"What?" I couldn't help gasping incredulously when I received my orders.

"You are to report aboard CSS Gladstone, homeported out of Nusku, to be her new Electronic Warfare Officer ma'am." the bored petty officer in the assignments office repeated to me.

"That is not anywhere near even the type of assignment I was expecting, or had applied for." I replied slowly with as much diplomacy of which I was capable. "Obviously BuPers had a reason to disagree with me there, but did anybody note on the file what that reason might have been?"

He raised an eyebrow, apparently at my having managed to avoid the usual 'But I didn't wanna go there!' whining that he often got from new ensigns like me, and tapped his touchscreen several times. "No ma'am, there's no special notations on your file. No flags, no gigs, nothing to show that you're on anybody's shit list." he continued, speaking to me like a human. "Everything looks entirely routine. I guess you just drew the low card."

"By any chance, do you have someone else in my class who was up for a shipyard or R&D posting that wanted space service?" I thought out loud. "Because if so, I'll go ask them if they want to swap out."

"Good idea." he complimented me, and went to look up something on his screen. "Unfortunately, no."

"Gladstone." I thought out loud. "The naming convention means it's one of the new Bannerjee-class SDBs, isn't it?"

"Yes ma'am." he said. "Commissioned just six months ago... huh, that's odd." he thought out loud.

"Why do they need a new EWO after only six months?" I agreed.

"Doesn't say here, ma'am, just that they had an empty slot and you're being tapped to fill it." he shrugged. "Someone got promoted, someone else retired and they moved him up a slot as part of filling that hole, maybe somebody got in an air car accident. It could be any number of things"

"Well, I'll find out when I get there, I suppose." I shrugged. "Could you put in a request for me to take some leave at destination on top of transit time? My folks are in Nusku colony, and I haven't seen them in a couple years."

"Absolutely." he agreed, tapping the screen. "I can approve up to one week without even asking my officer... do you need more?"

"One week should be fine." I thanked him, and I collected the datachip with my orders from him and stepped aside to let the next person come up to the window.

So.... on top of everything else that was intolerably stalling me here, I was now being assigned for a routine entry-level tour on a system defense boat. They weren't even going to assign me to something that actually had a hyperdrive.

What the heck was even going on?

* * * * *​

Despite all the insufferable aggravation of this experience, the opportunity to see my parents again did make the trip worth it - at least for a few days. I hadn't seen them since I'd originally left Plock to go to Public Service prep camp, and that had been almost two and a half years ago. And that was a damn long time, especially for a 20-year-old girl who hadn't ever lived away from home before graduating secondary-ed!​

So I got the tearful reunion, and the home cooking, and the frankly embarassing amount of accolades from the folks at my scientfic accomplishments to date. I also got the surprising news that even now was on a ship heading for Terra in its jump-mail bag, that I'd crossed paths with on my way out to Nusku. By next spring, I was going to be a big sister.

My parents had always wanted a larger family than just me and Michal, but our troubled financial situation after the destruction of Warsaw and my older brother's death alongside our grandparents had meant that I'd grown up not only as the sole survivor but as an only child. What little 'cushion' they'd been able to save up after everything the family had lost in Warsaw would have been eroded to the bone by having to support even one more mouth to feed, so a third or fourth Nowak sibling had simply not been in the cards.

But that was then and this was now - my mom's promotion and transfer to Nusku had left her making twice as much as she'd been making on Terra, and with me grown up and out of the house my dad was now available for full-time work again. So the Nowaks were solidly middle-class and comfortable now, and would bid fair to be even more comfortable in the future, and so the decks were clear to finally start having the additional children that I'd known they'd wanted for basically my entire life.

"Well, that's silver lining number two for me being assigned to a system defense boat," I said amusedly. "There's zero chance we'll be jumped out to another star system, so I can rely on still being here when it's time to welcome little Piotr aboard."

"It's still odd that you got assigned there." Dad replied. "We know that your real potential has come to the attention of at least some senior people, so what do they think they're doing?"

"Best-case scenario, they think they've got time to wait and see what I can do on a schedule they can understand." I replied at least as much for the audience as for my folks, because now that I was on ONI's radar there was a nontrivial possibility this house was bugged. "And as much as it chafes my shorts to mark time like this, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're wrong. As they see it the Confederation needs technological breakthroughs soon, but doesn't need them immediately. And while our R&D has been proceeding at a remarkable pace over the past generation by historical standards, you still haven't heard anything about teenaged supergeniuses revolutionizing the entire tech tree, have you?"

"No we haven't." Dad agreed. "So you're right, it's possible that they just aren't sure of how to handle someone like you and so are falling back on wait-and-see."

"Which I understand, but still doesn't mean I'm happy about waiting." I groused.

"Of course you aren't." Mom agreed - of course both of my folks knew about the possibility of eavesdroppers, that was one of the first things I'd discreetly whispered to them in the first safe location I'd found that would have been impractical to bug in advance without precognition. "I certainly remember hauling a certain young girl off of the roof several times in direct defiance of my 'no climbing' order, to name just one thing that comes to mind right now." she snarked. "So I'm assuming that you have a plan to try and get something done anyway."

"Actually, no." I groused. "My problem isn't just that I'm in the military and not in charge of my own anything, it's that I'm an ensign fresh out of OCS about to report aboard for her first shipboard assignment. Everyone is going to automatically presume I'm guilty of being an idiot, and I'm going to have to prove that I'm not before they'll begin to trust me to work unsupervised. Which means I'm not going to have any immediate opportunities to innovate anything. And that's on top of-" I trailed off.

"In any command, there's a whole ton of routine admin duties that require an officer to sign off on them but don't require any specifical professional expertise. And it's traditional to dump all those on the least senior one. And this is all on top of your regular assigned duties and watch-standing, of course." Dad agreed, speaking from his own Navy experience. "So even with a workaholic's schedule, even if they were willing to let you, you still woudln't really have any time for major projects. Not for your first six to twelve months there, at least."

"Agh!" I swore. "Everything is just... every step forward is just two steps back!" I burst out, and that one wasn't just a performance for the cameras.

"Well, if you don't have any options with your current toolkit, is there any way you can think of some new tools?" Dad asked as obliquely as he dared mention the Celestial Forge out loud.

I rubbed my chin in thought as I mentally opened the menu and went looking for anything that was useful for breaking my current deadlock. For the first time since I'd gotten the Forge I had enough accumulated CP to afford the 600-point options, not that I'd had any time to really get any use out of the Forge during the past six months of constant training...

... wait, what?

My jaw literally dropped as I saw one particular item on the list of 600cp options that I hadn't been able to access prior to accumulating enough points. Ragnarok Proofing (Battletech).

Battletech had started out as a late 20th-century miniatures wargame involving impractically large mecha fighting each other in a post-apocalyptic interstellar future. The only reason I knew of it is because the 21st-century computer games built on the franchise had gotten a brief revival when I was in primary-ed. Something about going out in a giant robot to stomp on other giant robots with giant laser guns still appealed, even in the 22nd century. But it hadn't been a very big revival, and were it not for my Forge-augmented memory I'd likely have never even brought to mind. I certainly wouldn't have recalled enough details from having played one of the computer games to know whyI absolutely had to buy this the instant it became available.

No, not for the Battlemechs. Even in-setting the only reason they'd been practical is because it had been in the script - the list of reasons why only pure Rule of Cool kept a similar investment of resources into building tanks or ground-attack aircraft should have let you kill any equivalent C-Bills' worth of Battlemtechs with the same tech base were legion. And while I looked forward to seeing if things like ferro-fibrous armor or endo steel were or could be made superior to modern-day composites, and our fusion plants were already more powerful (if nowhere near as robust or simple), and they didn't have contragravity, the purchase would have been worth all 600cp I'd put into it and more simply for one thing.

The Kearny-Fuchida jump drive had a range of thirty light-years in normal operation.

Thirty light-years was over nine parsecs. That was four and a half times the maximum range of the Vilani jump-2 drive.

I purchased the perk without hesitation and let the knowledge flow into my mind, and inwardly cursed. Yes, the K-F drive vastly outranged either Confederation or Vilani jump drive - but it also required much larger drives. The smallest JumpShip practical to build with Battletechnology was 2500 dtons in size... and that was a scout, the setting's equivalent to our Navy's 100 dton Crockett-class picket ship. The average size of a BT JumpShip was measured in hunrdeds of thousands of dtons. You could literally jump the collective tonnage of the entire 11th Fleet with one K-F drive, assuming you built a large enough JumpShip to fit all of 11th fleet's cruiser squadrons on the booms. Which might come in handy someday, but also meant that I'd have to convince someone to make an ungodly huge investment in prototype research just to prove this thing worked at all.

And that was before we got into how navigation was far more finicky with a K-F drive than contemporary jumpdrive. You could use jump-2 drive almost anywhere outside the 100-diameter limit of a celestial body. K-F drives couldn't enter or leave jumpspace except in very carefully calculated 'jump points' where all local gravitational influences cancelled themselves out to zero-

Wait. Local gravitational influences. The exact mechanisms by which the 100-D limit blocked our jumpdrive were not unknown, but the Battletech universe understood exactly how a K-F drive was interfered with by local gravity gradients. They could calculate such inteferences to an incredibly fine degree, and they had to be able to do that just to be able to plot jump points at all.

But the Battletech universe didn't have artificial gravity manipulation... and we did.

"Honey?" my dad asked, as I'd apparently been sitting and staring into infinity across the kitchen table for an indeterminate number of minutes.

"I think I have an idea." I massively understated.

* * * * *​

"Status change!" I announced crisply as the icon of a new emissions source flared to life in my holodisplay tank, and I hurriedly interpreted the reading and mentally matched it against what I knew of Vilani systems. "New contact just went active! Contact is designated Bandit Two, identification... emissions signature matches Kargash-class cruiser, dex ninety-three light seconds, bearing zero-three-zero by plus zero-two-zero."

The CSS Gladstone was a 400-dton Bannerjee-class System Defense Boat. She was the size of a Gashidda-class Vilani "patrol cruiser" - or what we'd call a frigate - but had no FTL capacity at all. Instead, all of the internal volume not being used on a jumpdrive was reserved for the most powerful model of 6-G maneuver drive, advanced active and passive ECM, and oversized magazines for anti-ship missiles. They were the latest concept of Confederation attrition defense - intended to be heavily seeded in critical star systems to augment available fleet firepower with something that carried a punch out of its weight class. The normal crew complement was 8 officers - of which I was the most junior - 5 NCOs, and 22 enlisted ratings.

And we also had the endurance to operate alone for extended periods of time, provided we had a few prepositioned supply caches to replenish consumables and ammo from. So even if the Vilani overran the Nusku star system and took out the main fleet elements, all of the SDBs could 'go dark' in and then leap back out to attack vulnerable supply lines after the main fighting front had moved inwards towards Terra. A Bannerjee could lurk in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant, in the depths of a planetary ocean, or as a cold drifting rock in deep space or the asteroid belt, and had multiple laser turrets and six anti-ship missile launchers for both short and long-range engagements.

Just as we were doing right now, attempting to ambush a Vilani 800-dton fleet supply ship as it was leaving Nusku preparatory to jumping inward to catch up with the Vilani advance at Agrippa. Even despite the glaring icons of damaged and nonfunctional systems on our status panels and the reduced crew we were running with, the lightly-armed bulk carrier we'd been shadowing was still a sitting duck for us. But that was before 2000 dtons of Vilani fleet cruiser had suddenly introduced themselves. Right now we were outside his active sensor range, especially on silent running, and almost 150% outside his extreme missile range, but if he was on any one of several vectors then-

"Where the hell did he come from?" Ensign Gallery, eight entire months senior to me and currently serving as acting XO muttered disbelievingly from his adjacent panel.

"Engineering, bridge, cut the drive." Lt. Garcia ordered. "Rig for minimum emissions signature." He paused and continued more thoughtfully. "They are transiting an entire task force through Nusku after all, and he must be a straggler or a replacement who's stopping off here to refuel. And that's really bad luck for us. Nowak, what's Bandit Two's vector?" the lieutenant asked me. Right now Bandit Two was just a dot in our passive sensor array, trackable only by her own lidar emissions, so the only way to figure out which way she was actually travelling would be to wait for multiple readings to come in and then plot the rate of change in his bearing-

I hurriedly ran the plotting software while simultaneously doing the raw calcs in my head. "Bandit Two's vector is... two-five-zero by zero-zero-zero, and by the strength of his drive signature he's accelerating at six G's. He's doing a full-power burn, almost straight sideways across our bow."

"Sir, we can't engage this guy." Ensign Gallery said frankly. "He's five times our size, has almost twice our armor, and mounts forty-eight missile launchers to our six. I try a long-range duel with him, he maybe takes some damage from what little I can leak through his point defense while his first salvo blows us to particles. We lay low and drift in close to try it with beams, that ends even faster for us."

"I'm well aware of that. Mr. Gallery." Lt. Garcia said disgruntedly, as we stared and saw our chance to ambush and destroy a Vilani supply ship go up in smoke. Ever since the Vilani had overrun the Nusku system, the Gallery had been lurking in the asteroid belt living off of prepositioned supply caches and just waiting for a chance to fulfill our missions as a behind-the-lines raider, and now a Vilani strike cruiser just happens to sail right into our ambush... "Nowak, put our evasion options on the plot."

Normally the navigation work would be done by the assistant tactical officer - which was Gallery's usual slot - but with the bridge running on three junior officers instead of our normal five, I was doubling as ATO as well as EWO, just as Ensign Gallery was acting XO as well as tactical officer. So, that meant this part of the exercise was up to me, and my fingers flew over my keyboard as I invoked the hard laws of ballistic mathematics to solve the problem of 'If you're drifting this way at this vector, and Bandit Two is accelerating that way at that vector, what energy expenditure on your part could keep you outside of a circular volume of death called Bandit Two's detection range without making so much noise that he sees you anyway?'...

... and then I stopped as I came to a realization.

"Nowak, I need a course." Lt. Garcia said more firmly as I cleared my workstation's desktop and began frantically going through my sensor logs looking for something else... "What's the hold-up?" he prodded gently, as I sensed the silent ghost of the Skipper leaning forward to peer over my shoulder...

"Sonofabitch, that's a decoy." I swore out loud. "Sir, look at this." I hurriedly scrolled back through our recorded sensor logs back until I spotted what I was looking for about nine minutes ago, and highlighted a very minor squiggle that our passive array had recorded that only in detailed hindsight was visible as a missile deliberately trying a stealth launch. "See that? Bandit One loaded an ECM warhead onto a missile and kicked it off the rack as we were approaching, a burst launch with no initial acceleration while he used his own hull to mask the launcher from us. And then it drifted away on this vector using silent running before the timer expired, and it lit off the drive and headed back across our path while the ECM pod went active to simulate a Kargash's sensor suite. Bandit One spotted or suspected us drifting in, and he's trying to bluff us into running away."

"I'd love to believe that, but that's just one minor blip." Lt. Garcia said thoughtfully. "What makes you so certain?"

"Sir, Bandit Two is going six G's." I pointed out. "That's possible for a Kargash-class, but that would be a max-power burn for them just like it would be for us. The only reason a real Vilani fleet unit would be putting that kind of wear on the engines is if he'd already spotted us and was racing to cut us off - but if he has done that, then why is his intercept course all wrong? He's at least forty degrees off optimum vector, and that gives us all the room we need to duck behind him and avoid his missile envelope entirely. If he knew where we were then he'd never be making that kind of mistake, and if he was still searching for us then he should be flying a search pattern, not a sprint like that." I paused and continued more formally. "Contact Bandit Two re-evaluated as Vilani ECM drone. Recommend we proceed with the attack on Bandit One."

The universe paused for a second while Lt. Garcia silently made up his mind, to resume motion again at his words. "We stick with it. Helm, maintain course. Tactical, set up for launch on Bandit One as per the original plan."

"Aaaand, exercise concluded." Lt. Prescott, the Gladstone's real CO, said approvingly as she declared the simulation over and resumed her post. Lt. Mukume, our XO, entered the proper commands in his workstation and the 'Vilani-occupied' star system whose virtual reality was being fed into all of our bridge console displays blanked out to be replaced by the peaceful expanse of the real Nusku system and the sensor readings appropriate to the routine patrol we were currently drifting through. Of course the actual state of affairs around our ship was being fed to Lt. Mukumble's XO's console the entire time and he could blank out the simulation and have us resume our normal duty stations immediately in an emergency while the Skipper walked around monitoring our performance, but any ship's bridge could be repurposed for use as a simulator as easily as feeding the right program into the central computer. Which made keeping up with your training underway a lot easier than in it had been the old wet-navy days.

"That Vilani supply ship is dead in space, and has been ever since you saw through his attempt to bluff you out. Remember, people, your job isn't just to interpret your sensor readings and operate your targeting computers. Your job is to think about what you're actually looking at and figure out what it really means, not just whether the emissions you're picking up match something in the signature database or not. Good work, Nowak." the Skipper complimented me.

"Damn." my fellow ensign swore mildly. "Yeah, we all got skunked until you caught it at the last minute. But that was a pretty elaborate trick for a freighter captain, and our simulated opponent would have had to come up with it very quickly. I thought the Vilani didn't have that kind of imagination?"

"The Vilani culturally discourage innovation." Lt. Mukumbe said, "but never confuse that for them being stupid. The Vilani fleet has had thousands of years to work out the optimum tactics for what's in their naval toolkit via both trial-and-error and detailed analysis, and they have a very in-depth sense of institutional recordkeeping. The average Vilani captain isn't at all likely to throw his rulebook out and fly by instinct, but his rulebook is an entire library and after all the centuries they've spent adding to it there's already a page in it for damn near anything you can think of."

"So even if your Vilani opponent is going exactly by his book you're still not fighting a flowchart, you're fighting a chess-playing computer." I thought out loud. "Thousands and thousands of preset and precomputed positions to work from and a sophisticated heuristic algorithm analyzing and pruning them, even if the 'algorithm' is organic Vilani brains."

"And while the best chess-playing programs still can't quite beat the best human grandmasters, they do a very good job of kicking the average player's ass." the Skipper nodded. "Excellent analogy."

For all of my burning impatience to get into a position where I could actually start working on a refinement of the K-F drive, or anything else, I was surprised to find out that I was actually learning something useful here. In hindsight, trying to figure out what miraculous innovation(s) to build to help shift the tide of the next Interstellar War in favor of the Terrans would be enhanced by actually having some kind of familarity with space combat. But it wasn't until after I'd actually gotten onboard a warship and started training like a line officer that I began to realize just how helpful it could be. Because actually knowing how the weapons were used in the field was certainly a boost to a weapons designer.

Well, if I ever needed proof that my enhanced genius didn't include enhanced common sense, that would be it. I'd just have to work harder on taking care of that end of things on my own.

And I neither had I fully appreciated the usefulness of Bolthole Protocol at the time I'd purchased it, but I was pleasantly surprised at the sheer depth of things it could be used for. In addition to allowing you to reverse-engineer unknown technology it also vastly enhanced your ability to understand any known technology you worked with. As soon as I got my hands on a particular device or system I would start mastering the hows and whys at thousands of times normal speed, especially if I was also able to get a look inside at the guts of it. And that still worked for things that the Terran Confederation already understood how to build and operate, even if it was my first time actually playing with any of these. So I hadn't needed to be assigned to my new ship for more than a week before I had an in-depth understanding of its systems and technology on a level at least equalling that of her chief engineer's.

Since in theory the next Interstellar War could start without any warning at all - after all, it's not as if the Vilani had been polite enough to send a formal declaration of hostilies before starting the last three of those - like the ballistic missile submarines of the Cold War, the SDBs of Nusku Fleet operated on a patrol schedule of 60 days out and 30 days in-port. So after several weeks' of specialty training in electronic warfare - after all, I was already a rated sensor technician - I reported aboard my new ship just in time to start our next patrol cycle, and off we went.

Of course, it wasn't all valuable new learning experiences. Just as the one-time Petty Officer Nowak had predicted I was immediately buried up to my pretty pink armpits in routine administrative duties. I was just lucky that 'VD Control Officer' wasn't really a position that existed anymore, or else they'd have stuck me with that too. But even though I was hardly immune to boredom, my faultless memory meant that I never lost track of administrative details no matter how tedious I was, and it's not as if this paperwork was particularly mentally challenging if an ensign could do it.

Still, I really wanted to get to work. I'd been onboard the Gladstone only a few months by this point, but I was already starting to feel like I'd assimilated all educational value from the experience except the sorts of things that only actual field experienced could teach you. Not that an ensign could go browsing through the entire Command & General Staff training database or anything, but I'd already memorized anything I did have access to. And even the most junior officer still had to know the broad outlines of how their particular piece of the puzzle fitted into the overall strategic picture, especially on a warship that might have to operate independently of its squadron in extremis.

The basic defensive strategy of the Terran Confederation was rooted in the concept of "aggressive defense". The first two Interstellar Wars had not even attempted to conquer Terra, and the third had had the attempt be withdrawn by internal Vilani schism of some kind. The best the analysts could figure is that the Vilani political system or cultural outlook simply wasn't structured to permit lengthy, grueling campaigns of conquest. If it started to cost too much, they'd cut their losses.

Which struck me as just a wee bit of 'whistling in the dark', but hey, I wasn't the General Staff. And it had been how Terra had survived so far. But yes, the overall strategic outlook of the confederation is that the Navy would meet any Vilani attack as far out from Terra as possible, and blunt and harass it the entire way in. If we couldn't stop their initial incursion then the Navy would harass and delay the Vilani advance as much as possible without being forced into any large, set-piece battles in which they'd have the advantage. Meanwhile, behind-the-lines commerce raiders - or stranded system defense boats like us - would attack the haft of the Vilani spear rather than the tip, inflicting as much damage as possible on their support facilities and supply lines. As the battle line moved inwards, shortening our supply lines and lengthening theirs, eventually the Vilani attack would bog down and we'd resume the offensive until the force of our counterattack could win concessions - territorial or otherwise - from the Imperial government, at which point we'd accept a peace.

In other words, Terran lives would deliberately be traded for time until the Vilani finally got discouraged enough to quit. Which might have been the only practical way in which our tiny Confederation could actually survive unconquered by the vast Vilani Imperium, but was still a very grim outlook indeed. Men and ships would be lost, possibly even mass civilian casualties like the Siege of Terra had produced, and all to just resume the status quo ante - or possibly take just a little more territory to deepen our defensive depth, as we'd taken Nusku and Procyon - but the Imperium would still be there, still be largely intact, and still be able to try again in the future.

And they would, nigh-inevitably, try again in the future. For all that they seemed to lack the ability to politically commit to a long, drawn-out and expensive war, they seemed equally as culturally unable to just stop pushing. Every single Interstellar War to date had begun with a Vilani sneak attack. Even the First Interstellar War, the only one in which the Vilani might have been able to argue a legitimate casus belli by Terran standards, hadn't had a single Vilani diplomat so much as deliver a note to the Terran government asking for an apolog or indemnities before the Vilani Navy sailed into Barnard's Star and started shooting up the place. Terra had considered that sort of behavior to be 'rogue nation' territory at least since the beginning of our Industrial Age. Even in the First and Second World Wars, only the Imperial Japanese had commenced combat operations without at least presenting an ultimatum or a formal declaration of hostilities first, and even by the standards of that era had been looked at unfavorably for doing so. But going full Pearl Harbor about everything seemed to be the Vilani's default approach. So even when things were peaceful, like they were now, there was always that underlying tension beneath everything. Even the most optimistic analyses of the Confederation high command, the architects of our current 'peace dividend' type thinking, were still of the format 'we're pretty sure the Vilani won't attack again in this generation' and not 'we're pretty sure they'll never try it again'.

Which is why, in my copious free time, I'd been working as hard as I possibly could on the mathematics for a modified Kearny-Fuchida drive. One that kept the full range of the Battletech jumpdrive, all nine-plus parsecs of it, while incorporating the best features of Vilani jumpdrive to allow it all to be fitted into a smaller installation more compatible with current ship hulls. And one that would use our contragravity technology to 'shield' the K-F drive core in an artificially sustained bubble of completely neutral microgravity, so that the drive could be safely used anywhere outside of a strong gravity well, as with normal Vilani jumpdrive, instead of suffering the K-F drive's usual limitation of requiring a specific 'jump point' in the outer reaches of a solar system where all local gravitational influences were as evenly balanced as possible. Because I needed something I could show someone to actually get the funding and facilities necessary to try it out. After all, we were talking about building an entirely new class of starship and an entirely new version of jumpdrive here, and doing that would be a project comparable to the original StarLeaper One. I would need either official Confederation or megacorporate sponsorship of some kind to even begin to get the facilities.

But even if I couldn't do any work with hardware, and was stuck on an SDB patrolling the outer limits of the Nusku system besides, I could still do theoretical work on my portacomp. And the remote-learning facilities that the Confed Navy's Education Office could arrange to allow me to start Masters'-level corresponce courses in jumpdrive physics, as well as picking the brains of the Gladstone's chief engineer - after all, just beacuse we didn't have a jumpdrive on board didn't mean our Engineering officers hadn't worked on them before. Between that and the comprehensive knowledge that Ragnarok Proofing had given me all about K-F drive theory and physics, I hoped to be able to reconcile the two similar yet hardly identical designs and the different theories of jumpspace physics besides to come up with a unified approach that would let me hybridize the best features of both, or at least to fit K-F drive theory into the picture in a way mathematically compliant with the Vilani model. After all, even if the Forge was drawing upon multiple fictional (or other?) universes for my gifts of knowledge, I still only lived in one universe - this one.

Our first patrol cycle eventually completed without incident, and my new shipmates were suitably impressed at my being unusually not incompetent for an ensign. Between that and the part where they were generous with time off during your month planetside, given that you'd be spending the next two months locked in a pressurized can, I finally had enough time - and access to groundside libraries and computer support - to finish working out a tentative set of equations.

Which is why I was here, in civilian clothes and on shore leave and accompanying my mother to the main offices of the High Frontier Development Consortium. A recently-formed venture by billionaire industrialist Umar bin-Abdullah al-Ghazali, he'd dumped most of his billion-sol personal fortune into acquiring as many assets on Nusku as possible. We'd only taken it away from the Vilani at the end of the Third Interstellar War, and with their entire political and Vilani corporate leadership gone in the transition but all of the infrastructure and the billion-plus Vilani engarii and kimashargur that had been here were still here, and despite the obvious risks was still a rich and profitable field of expansion for Terran... entrepreneurs.

High Frontier had been chosen by me for two main reasons. First, I was trying to find someone who could fund a new jumpdrive research project, and High Frontier had taken over almost all of the Vilani-built shipyards and spacedocks that they'd left behind here, and were already one of the Confederation Navy's latest contractors for warship construction. And second, it was the only megacorporation where I already knew anyone who worked there.

And even if my mother was only a middle-management administrator at the starport, that meant she could at least still speak to someone senior at the starport. Who could then speak to someone senior at the corporate HQ, also here on Nusku. Who, given that I already had the reputation in scientific circles of having been a key part of the Peraspera terraforming breakthrough - a breakthrough that the Terran financial sector was also paying attention to now, given the future investment opportunities there - meant that dropping my name and a sincere entreaty of how 'my supergenius daughter thinks she has something else you'd be very interested in, but she got drafted into the Navy and they interrupted her research' meant that someone senior in High Frontier's shipbuilding division would actually be willing to give me an appointment.

And so, datachips filled with all my math and theoretical research notes in hand, I stepped into the office and sighed inwardly in relief that they'd actually taken my mom seriously enough to send not just an exec to talk to, but also a senior enough person from their R&D department to hopefully understand the math I was about to show them. After almost three years of traveling, training, and being drafted several times over, I'd finally gotten a chance to show someone a real live invention of my own and not just a refinement of existing work (or a nanotech terror weapon I destroyed before daring to so much as mention its existence to anyone else). And all I had to do was convince them that not only did a brand new Navy ensign who technically speaking couldn't even be legally working for anyone else yet and only had a bachelor's degree (so far!) really genuinely have the greatest scientific breakthrough of the age in the palm of her hand, but that it was worth believing her theories enough to authorize, oh, I'd guesstimate at least half a billion and change in research budget to let her try and prove it.

But even though the manipulative, uncommunicative nogdoodnik wouldn't even hint at what or why, the fact remained that the Forge had picked me for a reason. And it was about time that I got started on showing why it had made the right choice.

* * * * *​

Author's Note: Giving birth to this chapter, metaphorically speaking, felt like trying to pass a kidney stone the size of a softball. But hey, I was well aware that my readers' patience could survive to showing only so much setup arc and that eventually we'd have to start building shit. So, here we are.

And no, you're not going to get Battlemechs stomping Vilani planets into rubble. Let me just dispel that expectation right now. Battlemechs are vastly impractical in any environment outside their native setting, and the only reason they're practical there is because for some reason people who are able to build things like exowombs, genetically-engineered supersoldiers, neurohelmets, and FTL drives still can't build any battlefield targeting system substantially more accurate than unstabilized guns firing over iron sights. Fuck's sake, a Russian tank can hit more often and at longer ranges while on the move than your average first-line Battlemech - at least they have laser range-finders, ballistic computers, and two-axis hydraulic main gun stabilization - let alone an Abrams.​

But even if the Battletech setting makes vastly inefficient use of the parts in their toolkit, they have a veyr nice toolkit that meshes well with the Traveller setting. So, let's see what kind of uses we can find for those tools.

Plus, of course, the fact that K-F jumpdrive range (and also jumpdrive speed, as K-F jumps are, IIRC, instantaneous) is a major gamebreaker in the Traveller setting even out of the box.

Unspent CP: 200
Purchases: Ragnarok Proofing (Battletech)