MAIN CARGO DOCK, 7 IRIS
POV: Martina Wright, Terran (Executive)
Two figures disembarked their shuttle, their figures casting long shadows on the metallic ramp. Deep in an animated discussion, they barely noticed the bustling activity of the hangar.
“Senator Blake Wald, Senator Marco Reis, welcome to Iris,” Martina greeted jovially.
“Martina!” Marco’s voice boomed. He turned to Blake, a playful glint in his eye. “Have you two been acquainted in person before?”
“I don’t believe so,” Blake said with a reserved smile. “We don’t tend to… mingle… in similar circles.”
Marco’s chuckle resonated in the large hangars. “You doves need to broaden your horizons. Just because they make things that kill people for a living doesn’t mean we can’t all be friends… Blake, meet Martina; Martina, Blake.”
Their handshake was formal.
“Nice to meet you, Senator— Blake,” Martina said with a twinkle in her eye. “And don’t mind the Senator from District 7. We make more than just destructive weapons of war.”
Blake waved away the need for an explanation. “I know, I know. You have some kind of a facility making medical equipment in my district. But… we are in a state of existential war. And even doves have survival instincts. I know I’m not exactly here to see what the solar system’s premiere plowshare maker has in store for us.”
Martina nodded, her expression turning serious. “Straight to the point. Fair enough. Follow me.”
They walked through a secure hallway, flanked by serious-looking security guards, into a series of walkways that led to the entrance of yet another large underground hangar.
Hiss.
As the heavy blast door opened, the chamber revealed a single, gargantuan monster, a ship about the size of ten of the Terran Republic’s old parasite carriers. It sprawled several sports stadiums wide and about as tall, and they could see the relatively tiny maintenance robots dwarfed against its giant hull, working on dissecting its exterior like ants on a rotting carcass.
Marco’s jaw dropped. “This is—”
“Znosian battleship, production serial number 42228, or as the Buns called it: ZNS 2228, the former flagship of Znosian Datsot Invasion Fleet,” Martina declared, a prideful smile evident in her voice. “Its mass is around the 9th or 10th exponent of a kilogram, or as our senior engineers describe it: enough to contain every single ship in our entire modern destroyer fleet in its volume.”
“Wow,” Blake breathed out. “What do they use all that space inside for? From the specifications I’ve seen, these don’t seem to fire a whole lot of missiles for what its size implies.”
“Orbital invasion craft, mostly,” Martina said. “And systems to support its large complement. This ship is a planetary invasion all-in-one. When Raytech engineers first saw these things from Republic reconnaissance decades ago, they were confused.”
“About how they built such big ships? Yeah, I’d bet you were,” Marco said, his gaze still anchored to the prize battleship.
Martina shook her head. “No, they were confused about why. The Malgeir have ships almost this big too. But from everything we knew about the Znosian species, they are a highly specialized society. Many of their workers or Marines were bred for a single purpose, doomed to do one thing with their life from birth to death.” She gestured at the ship. “You would expect them to have a dozen different types of ships doing dozen different things. Yet… here you see the opposite, a multipurpose ship designed for a bunch of different tasks. And we know from our own experience that building such large vessels creates massive potential for inefficiency. So, when we initially observed these ships, it challenged the way we thought about ship design.”
“Maybe they just did it wrong by accident,” Marco shrugged. “Or it was the result of compromises in domestic politics, as some of our ship designs end up being.”
Martina gave him a tentative nod. “Those were the most popular hypotheses among our engineers at the time. But a small group of dissenters at Raytech looked for an alternative explanation. They called themselves… the Elephant Mafia. Their contention was that there was a reasonable justification for the scale of these ships. As neither side had actual evidence, this mostly became an academic discussion — until we captured an intact sample. As it turned out, the Elephant Mafia was right, but none of them really guessed the correct reason. It only took hours of examination, but the sample revealed one thing, and one thing stood out. It shocked our engineers.”
The two Senators leaned it closer, waiting to hear the answer.
“There are two drives on this ship and all our extrasolar combat ships. The blink drive, and the constant acceleration Alcubierre drive,” Martina began. “The blink drive scales linearly with mass. Here, it composes about a fifth of its total volume — a little smaller than expected, but still a substantial portion of the Znosian ship’s volume and mass. Their Alcubierre drive, however, is over there.”
“Where?” Blake craned his neck, scanning the area.
She gestured to a modest heap of parts, the size of a small ground car, mere meters away.
“But that’s tiny! That’s for the whole ship?!”
Martina nodded. “As we’ve long known, the Alcubierre drive doesn’t only operate with Newtonian principles. If it did, each one of our ships with its years of drive-life would need to contain more energy than the Sun itself. The high school explanation is that by creating negative mass, we can contract space and use a tiny amount of energy to generate constant acceleration for a long period of time. Enough to traverse a system in a reasonable amount of time, at least.”
“I don’t know which high school you went to, Martina,” Marco quipped. “But they definitely skipped magic drive design at mine.”
Her smile mirrored his. “So did mine. My implant wrote this explanation. Apparently, the high school it went to didn’t… Anyway, our solution of the Alcubierre field equations almost a century ago ran into an issue: the more negative mass we generated, the more heat it accrued inside the system, and this did not scale well in vacuum. We could alleviate the problem by having a bigger negative mass generator in our Alcubierre drive with some engineering, but that meant the larger our ships… the larger the drive was. Our largest fast combat ship — the retired parasite carriers — their sizes hit an upper bound around the size of a Malgeir destroyer, and even that was incredibly inefficient. This limitation was what our engineers called the ‘tyranny of the drive equation’.”
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“Was?” Blake asked, his voice tinged with expectation.
“Was. The Znosian ship’s Alcubierre drive provided us the answer to not just miniaturize drive design, which was the holy grail of ship scale engineering; it provided the answer to size-agnostic drive design, as in we can make our ships as big as we want.”
Blake’s eyes widened. “How?!”
“That’s a question for the scientists, who you will meet later. I won’t even pretend to understand the math fed to me by the implant in my eye. But the point is, after a year of experimentation, we’ve figured it out,” Martina announced. “The Elephant Mafia came back in from the cold with their decades of wild hypothetical concepts, and we started to study their feasibility. And since the war was on our minds, despite the misgivings of some of our strategists, we began studying the idea of superweapons.”
Blake’s skepticism surfaced. “Superweapons don’t win wars on their own,” he insisted. “I’ve seen this pitch a hundred times before.”
“No, not on their own they don’t,” Martina agreed, nodding slowly. “Which is why our project didn’t make a superweapon, not in that sense. You’ll see. Follow me.”
They followed Martina into a side compartment built into the hangar, displaying a window into a reactor room with a thruster venting into vacuum. It seemed unimpressive.
“Behold, the Iris Engine.”
Marco pressed his forehead against the window, peering into the dark room. “Cool, that does seem smaller than our normal drive engines. Which ship is this engine for?”
“Excuse me for not being clear, Senator. The Iris Engine isn’t for a ship. When we discovered that scale no longer mattered for engine design, we began designing bigger ships with slightly higher acceleration. But they were still limited by other factors, as the ZNS 228 is. These improvements might give us some of the biggest advantages for our cargo spacecraft, but that in itself is not enough to qualify it as worthy of a full weekend trip from two esteemed Senators of the Republic.”
“So, what is this for?”
“As I said, scale no longer matters. This… is an engine for Iris, the asteroid we are standing on. This asteroid contains about another nine or ten orders of magnitude more mass than the Znosian battleship we have out there. The specific impulse our propulsion devices have is tiny, and the acceleration is low, but it is constant. With this engine, we can use a Hohmann transfer orbit to shift 7 Iris into orbit around Ceres in… about six hours: three hours to get it going, and another three for the actual orbital transfer.”
Blake’s mouth gaped in disbelief. “You intend to move this entire asteroid… into another’s orbit.”
“As a demonstration,” Martina confirmed. “And because a mining company on Ceres will pay us for the rights.”
“How— how—” Marco stammered, struggling to comprehend the scale. “How much— rock are you moving?”
Martina read the figures off her implant. “Roughly, 7 Iris is about… five hundred thousand times smaller than Terra, and about ten billion times bigger than that ship outside.”
“Wait,” Blake said, piecing together the implications. “You’ve clearly thought through this. And you said scale doesn’t matter… This means… you can change the orbit of Terra if you have one of these on it… You can hurl Terra into the Sun.”
Martina’s nod was solemn. “We can.”
“You can change the orbit of Mars and Jupiter.”
Another nod, calm and certain. “We can.”
“And the Sun itself.”
“That one is a little trickier to land on, but theoretically yes, we should be able to change the orbit of Sol.”
“This isn’t a new engine design. It’s a weapon of mass destruction,” Blake declared, voice hard. “In the wrong hands, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.”
Martina’s eyes reflected a grave acceptance. “That it is.”
“Wait, what about the Znosians? They figured out the engineering first, right? Do you think they’d have something like this?” Blake asked, the danger dawning on him.
Martina nodded her head slowly in affirmation. “We don’t just think they do; we now know they do. And that’s how what we’ve seen about their home system Znos fell into place. It’s why their Znos-4 has not one, not two, but three habitable moons. This must be how they tow asteroids into orbits for mining and processing, and why their shipyards seem to be next to so many rich asteroids. We think we can eke out a bit higher acceleration than they can with some engineering optimizations, but broadly speaking: yes, they have these planetary scale tugs.”
Blake’s tone turned urgent. “But we haven’t seen them blow up planets or tow them into stars, and from what you said, it seems like that’s something they can easily do!”
“That seems more like a deliberate decision to us. Maybe they are hiding their capabilities. Maybe they simply do not wish to waste colonizable planets. Maybe it’s religious.”
“And if they ever get into Sol and drop their inhibitions?”
“If they ever put one of these on one of our asteroids, they can attempt to tow it into Terra,” she said, but held up a hand to forestall their reaction. “But… we have thought up a countermeasure.”
“Oh God, this is where you’re going to sell us some sophisticated asteroid defense system for a king’s ransom,” Marco smiled, seemingly in relief.
“Not exactly. If they throw one of our asteroids at Terra, we can simply tow another bigger one into its path. These things can’t accelerate very well, so they’re easy to intercept. Now, if they land on one of our larger outer planets, and try to throw one of those at us, we will need to tow Terra, Luna, or Mars out of their orbits to dodge out of their way. Further the larger it is.”
Blake looked deeply alarmed. “Tow out of orbit? Planetary dodgeball? Wouldn’t that take Terra out of the goldilocks zone? New ice age and all that.”
She dismissed the concern with a wave of her hand. “Only temporarily. Even if we towed it that far — which we won’t need to — it’ll just be like a longer night. Not great for the ecology, no, and the tidal waves that will ensue from the gravitational shift might break the Pacific Levee System. And plenty of things will break. But if we are forced to keep Terra away from its natural orbit for long enough to change the climate and screw with everyone’s calendars, then we presumably have more problems than those. The nightmare scenario is if they land on one of the planets we care about, like Terra, Luna, or Mars, then blow up or disable the orbital engine we’re about to sell you for lots of credits, and setup their own on it.”
“Because then they can simply throw it into the Sun, and there’s nothing we can do at that point,” the Senator concluded.
“Yes. If they can control Terran orbit and successfully land on it with a planetary tug, even for a few hours, we will have lost the war.”
There was a short silence as the Senators contemplated the implications. Marco broke it first. “Wait, but what about them?” Marco asked. “Can’t we do this to them too?”
“Sure, and I’m betting your first meeting after this is going to be with one of the Deep Strike mission planners to see if you can simply drag their home planet into their sun.”
Blake frowned. “Those mission plans are classified, Ms. Wright,” he chided her.
“Oops.”
“And I’m not sure if our people have the stomach for that kind of… xenocide. Destroying an entire planet just because— well, they do deserve it. But do we deserve to be their executioners?” Blake continued, his voice softening into a contemplative murmur. “At the end of the day, someone has to press the button and go home and face their loved ones knowing— knowing what they’ve done.”
“And that is a problem for you politicians, philosophers, and admirals. We merely make the plowshares; you must still plow the field. Now… you’re here for the technical demonstration. So, get comfortable. My people will bring in the drinks, and we can get started…”
Then, Martina turned the Iris Engine on.
It took exactly as long as she said it would, and it worked exactly as she said it would.
And when they were done, a new moon rose over Ceres.