Two-thirds of the way through the trip, the shuttle flipped ass over tea kettle to point its fusion rockets at the rendezvous point and throttled up to decelerate for a clean zero-zero intercept. The pressure of deceleration pushed Susan back into her chair, gently but firmly. It felt good to have the reference point of gravity back again. For a woman who’d spent her entire career in and around starships, she’d never really gotten used to zero g. She’d done well enough in training to pass her quals, but she’d just never taken to it the way many of the other spacers had, which was even stranger when one considered how much she loved to swim.
“Captain,” Okuda whispered. “Look at this.” She passed a tablet over to Susan’s waiting hands. The 3D screen showed a false-color image of their approach to the Chusexx. It was big, but they’d already known that. Still, witnessing it from this close was different from sensor estimates on a plot. Size wasn’t everything, but Susan was suddenly very relieved her enemy broke of its own accord instead of her people having to fight it out with the leviathan.
The ship’s details were softer, her lines more graceful than the Ansari, whose designers still held to a more faceted approach to stealth, due in no small part to the ease, cost, and speed of manufacture and repair. The CCDF had been born of desperation, converting cargo-haulers and colony ships into battle wagons in months when the first war broke out. “That’ll do” was still an overriding attitude among the legacy engineers, and corporate budget considerations still played their role in warship development, although the economic austerity was nothing compared to the fleet’s early days.
The fundamental physics of the universe, biology, and their relatively parallel lines of technological development dictated that the Chusexx didn’t differ all that greatly from her human-designed counterparts, at least externally. There was still a large habitable section at the front of the ship that housed the crew the majority of the time, as well as most of the sensor platforms mounted as far away from the interference from the fusion engines at the back of the ship as possible, an engineering section in the middle where most of the important moving parts lived along with their Alcubierre rings, although the Chusexx mounted a fully-redundant set of four rings more like a CCDF Space Supremacy Ship or Planetary Assault Carrier than a three-ringed cruiser.
The rings caught Susan’s attention. She froze the image and zoomed in. Xre ships were distinctive in that they mounted oval rings instead of circular. The intel people thought it was to reduce their radar/lidar return in the side aspect. The engineering obstacle of regulating negative matter flow as it raced at varying speeds around the oval rings had prevented the adoption of the design among human vessels so far, but it wasn’t what had grabbed Susan’s attention.
“So you see it, then?” Okuda asked.
“What the hell are those?” She pointed at small, secondary rings built into the inside surface of the outer edge of each of the four main rings, right at the apex of the ovals.
“That’s what I wanted you to see, mum. Trim rings? Some way to fine-tune their bubble? Maybe even steer it?”
Now that was an unsettling thought. Since the dawn of Alcubierre drive, it had been taken as an immutable law of physics that bubbles, once set in motion, could only travel in an arrow-straight line through space until they were popped. That line would be distorted by sufficiently massive gravity wells just like anything traveling through the fabric of spacetime, but once a bearing was set, it couldn’t be altered.
But if the Xre had found a way to make midcourse corrections from inside their bubble …
Susan wasn’t an engineer. She could only stab wildly in the dark for answers to the mystery. “There’s no point speculating. Tell Ansari to whisker laser this footage back to the skip drone just in case something happens to us. The R&D kids back at fleet will have a field day chewing this over.”
“Aye, mum.”
Before long, the fight deck was chattering away with the final approach as they navigated the shuttle through the morass of instructions coming from the Xre’s version of a space boss, filtered both coming and going through an imperfect language translation matrix. Docking between two objects moving independently through open space was harrowing enough when everyone spoke the same language, had trained on the same protocols, and used the same equipment. Injecting variables into all three was nothing short of a nightmare, but through patience and professionalism, the shuttle’s flight crew soon had them in position for a clean capture.
“My compliments to the chefs,” Susan shouted from her seat.
“Thank you, mum,” the pilot called back. “That was … interesting.”
“Do they have a treaty seal?”
“Yeah, they’re still fuckin’ around trying to get it in position. Might be a couple of minutes yet before we’re green.”
Susan nodded. As part of the treaty settlement after the Intersection War, it had been decreed that all ships, of both the human and Xre navies, would carry an adaptor that would make their docking rings compatible with the standards of the other in case of emergency or a sudden need for face-to-face diplomacy. They’d been nicknamed “treaty seals,” and coordinating their development had been a three-year experience in pulling teeth. For seventy years, they’d acted as ballast collecting dust and burning up reactant mass. Today was, to anyone’s knowledge, the first time any of the thousands of them had been put to its intended use.
Lot of firsts today, Susan thought.
“I’m taking point,” Okuda said quietly from Susan’s shoulder.
“The hell you are.”
“I need to secure a perimeter to ensure your safety.”
Susan rubbed her eyes. “Staff Sergeant. I respect your dedication, I really do. But if they mean me harm, there’s not a
