Sentient 02

Chapter 11

End of the world or not, Kris's pleasurable morning exertions before and during his shower with Stacey had him feeling relaxed and in a good mood. Seeing Aide in a real flesh and blood body had been a bit of a shock, but a pleasant one. It wasn't as if she was hard on his eyes. Stacey stayed with him after they finished breakfast and he went to the bridge.

He was startled when he first walked onto the bridge; there were no controls, no anything really except a large room with plain silver walls, luminescent floor and ceiling, and a handful of comfortable looking chairs. He just stood there for a while, how was this a bridge?

He'd been expecting consoles, blinking lights, and all manner of other devices.

"Take a seat Kris," he heard Aide's sexy bedroom voice.

He sighed and took a seat. Immediately he was surrounded by holographic views and displays showing the solar system and where he was in it. Past the displays in the rest of the room was a three dimensional display that he found hard to read, although he was able to find the ship and Earth easily enough.

When he wondered if he could zoom in because the scale was so small to encompass the entire solar system, it just happened. He zoomed in on Earth and froze at the view of it. It looked like he could reach out and touch the planet. It was so clear and looked so real he'd have thought the Earth had shrunk and was in the room with him.

The clouds were moving and he could see the movement of storm systems.

Aide said softly in his mind, "I have created a tutorial for you to get used to what it can do, at the end of it we can simulate some battles with the thirty enemy craft."

He blew out a breath wondering how long that would take. Then the tingling started and he laughed, of course the tutorial would be a download, no need to learn things the hard way. He closed his eyes as he learned how to control the ship, along with any other ships in his control. He knew though that this was just the easy part, it would still take practice and simulations to make it feel natural and improve his response times.

It was extremely simply, yet impossibly hard. All he had to do was think what he wanted to happen. The problem was keeping a clear mind and not thinking about what might go wrong. The first simulated battle was a nightmare and he got his ass kicked. Every time he thought of a plan, or counter to the enemy tactics, by the time he implemented it was too late.

He looked depressingly at the burning ball in the center of the bridge.

Stacey who had watched the battle took his hand and squeezed, "Well love, you can only get better from here."

He snorted at the amusement in her voice and took a deep breath to relax, and then tried again, and again.

The room paused and Aide said, "You're trying too hard. Don't try to explain what to do in your mind, just send me a picture of what you want to happen. For instance, when you sent those two ships to intercept the enemy trying to break through and fire on Earth, instead of thinking about which ships and what way they need to fly, and how to shoot, just think of the ships you want to react to that enemy.

"I am designed to follow your orders, leave the details to me, just run the battle. Think of me like your crew, concentrate on the end result, not all the little steps in between, those are what I excel at."

He considered that for a moment and they restarted the simulation. This time he prepared a little better, setting three ships in the back with orders to intercept anyone that got through the front lines. The more he was able to focus on the big picture, and the responses to the enemy's gambits, the better things seemed to go.

He realized she had been right, he was trying to micromanage and do everything, but his job was to simply come up with a planned overall response. He worked throughout the day on it, every new trick the enemy, or rather Aide, threw at him helped him learn a bit more. He also needed to get used to three dimensional tactics. All his tactics as a soldier involved two dimensions for the most part. As his focus improved he stopped making as many random thought mistakes as the system became more familiar to his mindset.

Still, he knew he'd be in here every day trying new ideas and responses.

He was depending on the scientists making innovations for the later waves, but the responsibility to survive the first one was all on him. He had to be ready. He only quit that day when his mental acuity started to flag and caused mistakes.

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Olivia was rested on the couch in her suite as her mind pondered all the new knowledge. There was no point to being in a lab until she has some idea of what could be done. She had been assigned to improving the shields, but right now she was busy catching up to where they were already technology wise.

Her mind was also a bit awed, she could think of many things with her new complete knowledge of quantum physics that would improve the world. It was a shame they weren't allowed to share the knowledge of it with Earth. She wondered what would happen to them all after, when the threat of the Sthellan were gone.

How could they ever go back to their lives and ignore the knowledge they now had? It would be difficult. Plus, she had the feeling if they weren't already, that most governments would desire to get their hands on the technology, or failing that anyone currently on this ship. Still, despite those dire thoughts she was excited to be here, this beat modeling any day of the week.

She went over again how the shields worked now in her mind. There were the shields from physical objects, such as meteorites that she really didn't have to do anything with. That field worked much like anti-gravity, the faster and harder the object hit, the harder the shields repulsed the object.

The specific shields she needed to work on improving were the plasma shields. Like their ships, the enemy craft used primarily plasma to power all their systems, including weapons. Right now the shield was more of a containment field, similar to the field that surrounded fired plasma balls, or contained the plasma streams inside the ship.

It's just the containment field in this case kept the plasma out, away from the ship, instead of inside the field. So an attack could almost be considered the same as an internal plasma surge, if the containment field was breached, they'd all have a very bad day. So she had two approaches she could take, either increasing power to the containment field, which really was a power issue which is what Nate was working on, or figure out a second way to stop the attacks.

Rather than work the same problem as Nate, she would try to come up with another shield type altogether that could either stop or attenuate an attack. Right now though she wasn't sure what that would be.

Her mind wandered to the sexy AI again and she blushed. She couldn't help but be attracted to her. Aide couldn't have picked a better body type and look to attract her if she tried. Aide was also smart, so she wouldn't have to worry about an imbalance there, if anything she was the dumber of the two. Add the bedroom voice the AI had, Olivia found herself interested, or at the very least attracted and intrigued.

But she wasn't sure about the whole artificial intelligence thing. Even worse she was sure the AI was monitoring her every thought, which made her feel, embarrassed and a bit off balance.

She was here to try and save the human race, not pick up an alien girlfriend for god's sake. But her traitorous thoughts kept picturing the woman in that body hugging suit. She was wearing one of her own now and she thought she looked good in it. She frowned and tried to clear her thoughts and get back to work, this stuff wasn't important right now.

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Paula frowned as she went over the plasma weapons. The containment shield that kept the plasma together as it travelled to the ship was self sustaining for the short time it took to reach the enemy vessel. If she increased the plasma amount per shot much more than it was already it became unstable and would break apart before it hit the enemy ship in simulations.

Ironically if she made the containment stronger, it wouldn't fail when it hit the enemy's shields and would simply bounce back, exploding some distance away from the enemy's ship and doing no harm at all. No, if she was to increase the offensive weapons, it would have to be a new one all together. The tech was too advanced to be endangered by physical damage; those gravity shields were just too good. So what did that leave?

She wasn't sure, but off course neither was the Alion so she didn't think it would be easy. Hopefully inspiration would strike. The problem with breakthroughs was they couldn't be done on command, even if the Earth was in danger.

She had a crazy idea, but the knowledge she was given didn't cover it.

"Aide?"

Aide replied, "Yes Dr. Rodriguez?"

She smiled, "Call me Paula. I have a question, those quantum connections, would they work in or close to a black hole?"

There was silence for a moment, "I imagine you consider using it as a weapon of some kind? No, black holes are... an exception in quantum physics. It's almost as if the very laws of nature are broken down. Even if we could open a quantum connection the space around it would be bombarded by deadly exotic particles killing us if the intense gravity waves didn't crush us.

"They may work close to the event horizon but even then it is risky, and our ships can counter gravity of that magnitude so I'm not sure it would help."

She nodded and dismissed the idea, she'd come up with something, "Thanks Aide."

She took a quick break for lunch and ran into Nate in the dining hall and kitchen. She felt so exposed in this suit that tightly hugged every curve her body had as she ordered a meal. She could feel his eyes on her. Last night he'd given her a really bad impression when he was obviously checking out and staring at all four of women on ship. Though it seems he had eventually settled on her as a target by the time they all turned in.

At least that showed he had intelligence, Stacey obviously doted on Kris. She'd been a little disappointed herself when she saw that. As for Olivia, well it was obvious she had a better chance at the woman than any man did. As for Aide she wasn't sure why he'd dismissed her, but all she knew was she was his target, despite her sending shots across his bow to back him off. If anything that seemed to have backfired in a major way.

Lucky her, he was a damned pig.

The problem was he was an attractive pig. She considered cutting him some slack, his body had reverse aged quite a bit and she imagined his revived libido had hit him hard. Even to her who didn't switch teams at all, had noticed all four of them were quite attractive. At least he had stopped looking at the others like a dog when he realized they weren't available.

"Hey gorgeous, how's your day going?" he asked.

She turned her head annoyed and caught him staring at her ass. Perhaps she wouldn't be cutting him slack after all.

"That's Dr. Rodriguez to you," she spat out in annoyance.

Her pasta salad was ready so she grabbed it and sat as far from him as possible.

He smiled at her and said, "I don't bite babe, come join me for lunch."

She closed her eyes for patience but it didn't help.

She muttered crossly, "Pig."

He shrugged, "I was seventy yesterday, I'm too old to change my ways honey so get used to it."

She glared, "Where is everyone else?"

He grinned at her, "I imagine that cutie Stacey is shacked up with her man somewhere. I'm not sure where the other morsels are, but I'm happy with your company babe."

She snorted with laughter in spite of herself, "You're incorrigible."

He nodded in agreement.

She finished her salad in peace and quiet, she was surprised that she was a bit disappointed he hadn't spoken at all the rest of the time.

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Nate grinned as he watched the short firecracker walk out of the dining hall. Getting back his libido had been a shock, but it was obvious to him in short order the others were already taken. That was actually fine with him, he found himself attracted to Paula the most anyway. He doubted at first she was available, but he was slowly changing his mind on that count.

Oh, the other three were gorgeous, but two out of the three were out because of either sexual preference or already with someone else. He'd also caught the way Aide looked at Olivia the most last night, so figured if those two ever got a clue they'd be hooking up soon.

He was slightly ashamed of the reason why he was so attracted to Paula. It was because she reminded him of his wife. It wasn't her looks, Paula was a hot and exotic Latina, his wife had been a redhead with porcelain skin and about eight inches taller. Their body types and looks couldn't have been more different.

No, what attracted him to her was she didn't take his shit. His wife was the same way, a damned firecracker. He'd always been an irascible bastard and tended to drop offensive comments just for the fun of seeing the reaction. The other three women just ignored his antics in the hopes he'd go away. That was no fun at all, and he'd grown tired of the game. Besides, they were all taken anyway.

But Paula responded with fire and passion, even if she needed to work on her insults a little more. So no, it was her personality in addition to how much her tight curvy petite body turned him on, and she was so different in looks from his wife he didn't feel odd about it. In short she'd be a challenge.

He finished his lunch and went back to the lab. His job here wasn't as difficult as it was for the ladies. He didn't need to make a breakthrough, he just needed to rework the current power systems to be more efficient.

He could see the problem easily enough, if they wanted more power, the ship had to be bigger. If they simply added more plasma lines around the ship, or increased the amount of plasma in each line, it would play merry havoc with the electromagnetic fields used by the equipment.

In short, he needed the ship to be bigger, or he considered, he could completely rework the power distribution systems. He considered the idea that with quantum connections, the power system didn't even have to necessarily be on the ship itself, or at least some of them didn't. There were a lot more and diverse systems than shields, weapons, and engine.

He opened up a simulation and started to work. To increase the power they would have to build a power ship that was quite large and the gains were determined by the cubed law. So it would only have to be twice as big to generate four times more energy, or four times bigger to be sixteen times as powerful.

On the other hand by the same square law, the smaller the ship, the less area for the shields to cover, the less power it would take for even stronger shields. This was an automatic win, even if Olivia failed to find a better way to shield just the increase in the power systems would strengthen the containment shield that kept plasma from the ship.

The trade off is the new large ship would eat a tremendous amount of power for its own shielding, so it would have to be well protected from attack. The best way would be to completely avoid the combat area with the control ship so it didn't need strong plasma shielding.

He considered the idea of combining those two ideas. He looked over the specs on the attack craft which were unmanned. He immediately removed life support and lighting systems from the design as they weren't needed as well as artificial gravity.

Then he shrunk the size of the craft by four times making it extremely small, maybe the size of a compact car. He was sucked into the project and jumped back and forth between the extra small ship, and the new super large one, which he was now considering a carrier for the smaller ships. On the smaller ships he removed the need for a FTL drive lowering the power requirements even further.

The idea was simple enough, the higher powered systems such as the plasma cannons on the new tiny ships would be powered directly through quantum connections from the powerhouse carrier. It would enable the small ship to be much more deadly than the current ones despite their smaller size.

He figured if he made the command or carrier ship twenty times larger than the current one, it would support up to four hundred of his mini attack ships. He whistled, that would make the ship five miles wide and a half mile high. Granted, most of that can be empty space, and large hangers...

He had a lot to do, and not much time to do it, not if he wanted this all built before that second wave came. He gave Aide a brief overview and told her to get started on nanites, they would need a lot more to get it done in time. He wasn't too worried about what Olivia or Paula may come up with, once the power systems and ships were built, any additions or modifications would be quickly accomplished by the nanites.

He actually lost his sense of time, and was surprised when he heard Aide's voice.

"It's time for dinner and to get some rest."

He frowned, "Save where I am please, what do you think about the idea?"

"It should work great for our situation. Ideally we should have at least two, preferably three of your carriers before they attack in the second wave to cover the approaches. That would give us twelve hundred attack craft to defend; I expect their second wave will be a little less than that. If we succeed we can build more, we will have plenty of time before they can build a bigger attack wave."

He nodded and closed down his station and headed for dinner. He had a lot of work to do yet, barely scraping the basics of the new configurations required so far. He smiled at the idea of his next round of banter with Paula and picked up his pace toward the dining area...

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The next week seemed to go quickly for Kris as he spent his days in the bridge simulations. He wasn't sure if Olivia and Paula were making very much progress, but he was briefed on the new command ship and power systems. The damn thing would be as big as a city, but would support all the little fighters.

Everyone seemed to be getting along as far as that went. Even the sniping between Paula and Nate seemed more and more to be like foreplay than any true hate, but it was getting old and he wished they'd just get together already.

He felt like he was falling deeper into love with Stacey every day, she was perfect for him and he was glad she didn't seem to notice or care how wrapped around her finger he was. If it wasn't for the serious nature of his work, she'd made the last week more like a honeymoon than anything else.

He just hoped Olivia and Paula came up with something soon. The advantage of the upcoming ships helped even more during simulated battle, but he still wanted more of an edge if it was at all possible before the second wave. He was confident however even with the old ships he was now competent enough to fight off the first wave of thirty. Not that he wouldn't continue practicing, he still had four days before the enemy arrived...

Chapter 12

Olivia stared at the simulation as it failed once more. She had come to the conclusion two days ago that there wasn't a realistic way to stop the plasma. Instead she'd been focusing on figuring out a way to disperse the containment field before it even reached their shields. If she could figure out how to do that safely then the plasma would fall apart and harmlessly stop at their shield even at the shields lowest setting.