Human Legion: Marine Cadet Part 54

* INFOPEDIA *

Category: Strategic context: - FTL communications The principle behind faster-than-light (FTL) communication is quantum entanglement allied with bit hybridization. Channel-linked paired particles (known as chbits) are split into two, but retain a ghostly connection between them that is unaffected by distance (but only when measured in the three main spatial dimensions). Although 'FTL comms' is the standard term, a better practical description would be instantaneous communication.

Tech specialists would decry both terms because the information transferred across the channel link is neither truly faster than lightspeed, and using the term instantaneous obscures the potential for this method to transmit information across entangled chbits that are separated not by distance but by time.

Whatever you call it, the key is that a tiny item of information can be pa.s.sed from one particle to its entangled twin, and by using many particles, data can be transmitted along the channel in the same way as, for example, electrical pulses along a copper wire. The drawback is that in pa.s.sing this information to its twin, both particles lose their entanglement.

For each particle, transmission and reception is strictly single-use only, but of course the solution is to have large blocks of entangled chbits that wear away gradually with each transmission.

However, producing entangled pairs of communication blocks is a very expensive process, and transporting one half of a block of entangled material to another star system is only possible at sub-light speeds, which can take decades. As a result, although there is no theoretical limitation, these practical considerations mean that FTL bandwidth is extremely restricted. An admiral could use FTL comms to issue orders and receive reports from a fleet 60 light years away, for example, but would not expect to receive detailed telemetry, nor remotely control combat drones.

Even the local fleet commander faces the problems of sub-light communications when maneuvering the forces at her disposal. A s.p.a.ce battle is typically fought over an area up to a light minute across. If a targeting laser reports to its weapon system that it has a firing solution for an enemy cruiser one light minute away, what it is actually reporting is that it knows where the enemy used to be located one minute earlier. If the weapon responds by sending a lethal energy pulse at the target (taking another minute), then an enemy vessel at 0.2 lightspeed would have traveled over two million miles during the intervening two minutes.

One critical difference between FTL and conventional communications is that the equipment required by the former is so compact. There is no need for the kind of concave dishes, aerials, or power sources that might reveal the location of a transmitter to an enemy. Nor is it possible to intercept or jam the signal. A node in the quantum telegraph network could be small enough to embed inside a battlesuit, or bury deep within an unremarkable asteroid. Nonetheless, even pa.s.sive FTL capable comms are detectable by patient and numerous observers. And such observers exist because at a microscopic scale, war is underway in all star systems in which minuscule spy robots from enemy powers try to evade detection and report back on the location of FTL communication nodes, amongst other intelligence.

If the FTL nodes are uncovered, an enemy might launch a raid, such as in the following scenario.

A fleet of raiders descends upon a lightly defended star system, overwhelming local military forces. This could be tens of light years behind a contested 'frontier' (there are no 'front lines' in s.p.a.ce).

One of the first acts of the attackers is to destroy FTL communications facilities, because that immediately cuts the system off from the rest of the defending empire. Almost certainly the defenders will retain hidden a.s.sets within the defeated star system, reporting back on what the attackers are doing. These may be sentient observers but will also include nano spies dispersed throughout the star system. But if the invaders are successful in eliminating the FTL comms, any further reports will be limited to the speed of light. Given the typical distance separating inhabited systems, that means a gap of 10-20 Earth standard years during which the defending empire is completely blind.

Raiders will usually take a few months or years to plunder and refit before heading off for their next target, confident in the knowledge that any relief force from the defending empire would be decades away. History also records more imaginative uses of this blind period, such as using a raid to screen the arrival of a full invasion fleet that will use this blind period to construct battle cruisers deep inside enemy territory.

*A note on the use of gender. The Trans-Species Union recognizes four princ.i.p.al genders as well as a neuter state. Gender neutral literature will use all possible p.r.o.nouns in such phrases as: "An admiral will use FTL comms to issue orders to his, her, sie, ser or its fleet."

Within military organizations, language needs to be fast, concise and clear. Using all five gender p.r.o.nouns every time is unthinkable. The convention developed within the Human Marine Corps, and inherited by the Human Legion, is to use the female p.r.o.nouns 'her' and 'she' - to represent gender neutrality. Most senior officers of the Jotun race are female, and this convention was adopted from them.

This infopedia section was extracted from humanlegion.com

INDIGO SQUAD.

Start reading the second book in the annals of the Human Legion now...

* INDIGO SQUAD *

* Chapter 01 *

Arun McEwan's heart swelled with pride when he accessed the internal camera feeds, and saw himself lined up with the rest of Charlie Company in the Beowulf's dorsal hangar. The Marines twitched with eagerness to emerge and take the fight to the enemy.

Whoever the frakk they might be.

But it was fear, not pride, that made Arun so impatient to launch. He was scared that in the action to come he would reveal himself. Fed a constant dose of combat drugs, even while in cryo sleep, all his other comrades were doped-out mental wrecks, left with as much initiative as the dumbest robot. Well, maybe not the slightly smaller armored figure to his left: Springer. Marine Phaedra Tremayne, known to Springer to anyone without a deathwish, was his best friend and fire team buddy. The drugs had less effect on her, as with their comrade, Umarov, but they all acted as if they were as doped as the others. Hidden conspiracies swirled around Arun like a persistent stink. He'd hoped all that had gone away when he left Tranquility System on the Beowulf, but here it was even worse and felt more urgent. Playing dumb now might just give Arun the edge he needed when the traitors made their move.

"Ready to launch on my mark," ordered Staff Sergeant Bryant, on behalf of their silent alien officer, Captain Mhabali. Bryant had become an unexpected ally back on their depot planet of Tranquility, but now he had succ.u.mbed to the drugs along with almost all the other humans.

"Ten... nine... eight..."

From his camera feed, Arun watched the ACE-2 combat suits flick from field gray to matt black, shimmer and then disappear. Charlie Company had activated stealth mode.

"Seven... six..."

With the waiting over, Arun's worries were draining away.

"Five... four..."

Arun McEwan had an advantage over everyone else in the company: his future had been foretold by the strange alien creatures known as Night Hummers. Unlike the others he had a destiny. The cause of human freedom would not let him die today.

"Three... two..."

Arun knew he would be coming back.

"One... go!"

Arun placed his life in the virtual hands of his battlesuit AI, Barney, who hurled him into s.p.a.ce a split second after the hangar doors snapped open. The Marines emerged into a bloom of light across the electromagnetic spectrum as the Beowulf simultaneously launched a barrage of kinetic torpedoes and blew smoke, both intended to cover the real attack, a close a.s.sault by the stealthed Marines.

The 'smoke', which consisted of sensor-reflective streamers, semi-intelligent decoy drones, and a dozen types of EMP flash-bombs, obscured the Beowulf as the warship pivoted through 180 degrees and used her main engine to brake, applying enough power to keep out of effective firing range, but not so much that she fried Charlie Company in the quantum-effect cone extending hundreds of meters out of her zero-point engine.

Within minutes, Arun had left the Beowulf far behind and drifted slightly to one side. The smoke had dissipated, and the kinetic torpedoes - which were on a parallel vector to the Marines - were dark in the visible spectrum, though still launch-hot in infra-red.

None of that mattered. What counted was whether the enemy warship had seen the Marines. That would determine whether most of them lived or died over the coming hours.

Beowulf's attack plan was simple. The enemy ship was 20,000 klicks ahead and Charlie Company was on an almost identical vector to the enemy ship, except the Beowulf had been moving slightly faster. That extra velocity was enough for the barrage of torpedoes to hit in about an hour, and the Marines to arrive, ready to board, about ten minutes later.

Missiles and x-ray bombs from their sister ship, the Themistocles, had crippled the enemy's main propulsion in a brief firefight as she'd flashed past 26 days earlier. The hostile ship's maneuvering thrusters could spin it in any direction and nudge to either side, but that made negligible difference to its velocity of nearly 15% lightspeed. Unless the enemy repaired her main engine, the target ship was essentially headed in a straight line that would not stop until the end of time.

Barney estimated they would reach long range for beam weapons in approximately ten minutes. Until then, Arun was alone with only the sound of his breathing, and the fears in his mind for company.

He tried to get a visual on the target, but at this range it was no more than a faint dot. So he stared instead at home. Tranquility, or rather its sun, was still less than a light year away, making it the brightest object in the blackness of interstellar s.p.a.ce. He thought back to happier times, messing around with his mate, Osman, in novice school, and chatting late into the night with Springer. Then there had been that night on the moon when he held in his arms the most beautiful woman he'd even known.

But his maybe lover, Xin Lee, was on the Themistocles, only about two light days distant, but the difficulty in matching vectors meant she might as well be a galaxy away. As for Osman, he had been killed in the rebellion Arun had helped to put down. Springer lost her leg in the same fight, and was out there now, practically within touching distance, but as invisible to Arun in her stealthed battlesuit as, hopefully, they all were to the enemy.

He smiled. Thinking of Springer always did. Arun's life had mysteries and threats by the bucketload - not least the mysterious purple girl that the pre-cog Night Hummers had talked of - but thinking about them wouldn't help him now.

Springer would be by his side in the fight.

As she would be afterward, when they celebrated victory.

That was more than enough.

After closing for fifteen minutes, when the target vessel had grown enough for Arun to see it was a rough cuboid shape, the enemy opened up with lasers.

The kinetic torpedoes were dumb bullets, without maneuver capability of their own, which made targeting them child's play.

Unlike in an atmosphere, there was nothing in s.p.a.ce to scatter a beam weapon, robbing it of power. What limited a laser's effective range was diffraction, the inevitable spreading out of beam diameter. What started as a tight beam at the laser's focal point, had spread to a five-meter diameter disk by the time it played over the torpedoes.

Diluting the laser's energy over a wider area turned it from a death beam to a pleasant heat lamp.

Nonetheless, in the near-absolute cold of s.p.a.ce, that relentless heat lamp was deadly, warming the torpedoes in an uneven way.

After another ten minutes secondary lasers opened up, pulsing their energy, so that the torpedoes rapidly heated then cooled It didn't take much longer before the outer surface of a few torpedoes cracked. The material pitted, ejecting little plumes of debris.

To Arun, the effect looked so gentle, but it was enough. The torpedoes slowly tumbled and drifted.

There! The first collision. One torpedo had knocked into another, causing both to fly off on a new vector, narrowly missing others on their way out of the barrage spread.

And with every meter they grew closer to the enemy ship, the business ends of the laser beams narrowed, increasing the effect.

Arun grinned. The torpedoes were only a distraction, cover for the most deadly weapon in the Beowulf's armory: its complement of human Marines.

The fact that the enemy hadn't fired on the Marines meant they hadn't seen them.

Yet.

Oh, but they would do soon.

By the time they were ten minutes away, Arun was counting down the seconds before boarding, impatience adding a rasp to his breath.

He'd been bred and engineered to fight.

3,000 klicks and closing.

He couldn't wait.

The story continues in INDIGO SQUAD...

available Jan. 2015.

HumanLegion.Com.

If you enjoyed this book, please consider leaving an online review at Amazon or elsewhere. Even if it's only a line or two, it would help me enormously and I would be very grateful.

Thank you.

Tim.

end.