Courier Boat Charles Davenport
Galton System
The streak drive courier boat decelerated steadily towards the heart of the Galton System.
The system primary was a K5v, with six planets and two asteroid belts. Its innermost three planets were of no particular interest to anyone, but Galton-IV, known as Tschermak to its inhabitants, was an Earthlike world. Its surface gravity was about twenty percent greater than Old Terra’s, which produced an atmosphere a bit thicker than humanity’s birthplace, and it was only about six light-minutes from the primary, which gave it a year only half a T-year long. Its size and slow rotational speed, on the other hand, produced a “day” that was over sixty-seven hours long. That was…inconveniently lengthy, so the Tschermakians divided it into two somewhat more manageable thirty-three-hour “day-halves” divided by a seventy-seven-minute Compensate.
The combination of that long day and heavy gravity explained why many of the system’s inhabitants preferred to live elsewhere, although Tschermak did have some spectacular scenery, and the surf and sailing to be found among the Leonard Ocean’s Sanger Islands had to be experienced to be believed.
Of course, ninety-nine percent of all Tschermakians were barred from ever setting foot on those islands…except in menial and closely supervised positions.
The inner asteroid belt, between Galton-IV and Galton-V, was well within the system’s 15.4 LM hyper limit, but not particularly rich in resources. The outer belt, however, was quite another matter. Once upon a time, Galton had boasted nine planets, but that had been before its current outermost planet, Galton-VI, had arrived. Between them, Galton-V and the “nomad” gas giant—a superjovian so massive it fell just short of brown star status—had wreaked havoc on what had been the system’s outermost planets. The astrographic models for what had happened were…confused, but all of them agreed that the nomad’s arrival had knocked the previous outermost planet out of its orbit. Exactly what had happened then was less clear, but evidence suggested a collision—or at least a very, very near miss—between the displaced planet and the next planet in. After that, all bets were off. Everyone agreed it must have been lively as hell, at least on the time scale of a star system, but it had all happened long enough ago that the murdered planets’ broken bones had long since settled into a stable, extraordinarily wide, and even more extraordinarily valuable asteroid belt.
Benjamin Detweiler sat in the small but palatial craft’s main lounge, watching the viewscreen as Galton’s brighter and steadily growing pinprick of brilliance emerged from the starfield. It wasn’t his first visit here, by a long chalk, although only a handful of people in the system knew who he truly was. And, as always, the Charles Davenport’s approach could have served any dictionary as an example of “extreme caution,” because Galton was not a welcoming star system.
The courier boat had emerged well outside the hyper-limit, on a least-time vector for Tschermak. At that range, not even a superdreadnought could have posed a threat to the system, but the diminutive courier’s crew had been only too well aware of the multiply redundant sensor platforms watching their approach. And of the ranks of multidrive missile pods poised to obliterate them if those sensor platforms saw anything they didn’t like.
By the standards of the Grand Alliance, the sensor net was big and clunky, because the Alignment’s FTL communications technology still lagged well behind its adversaries’…and because weapons refits took first place just now and there were only so many things even a system like Galton could upgrade at the same time. As a result, Galton’s current FTL net required a far larger transmitter and a much higher power budget, both of which drove up the size of the platform in which it was mounted, and its bandwidth was far narrower. But it worked, which was what really mattered. And the Alignment’s stealth technology was at least as good as the Grand Alliance’s, which made the passive sensor platforms themselves—and the whisker lasers which connected them to their control platforms—almost impossible to detect.
The control platforms, on the other hand, were almost impossible to hide once they brought their FTL transmitters online; the Alignment’s inability to generate directional grav pulses was another aspect in which its capabilities lagged the Grand Alliance’s. That was why each cluster of sensor platforms was linked to a total of three widely separated control platforms. Only one of them at a time would transmit data to Tschermak and the enormous habitats in orbit around it. The other two provided redundancy, standing ready to replace the first if an enemy managed to localize and destroy it.
Galton’s multidrive missiles were also big and a bit crude by the Grand Alliance’s standards. The Alignment remained unable to match the capabilities of even the Republic of Haven Navy’s current-generation MDMs, far less those of the Royal Manticoran Navy’s FTL-commanded Mark 23. On the other hand, the Alignment had been able to engineer its graserhead down to something that could be stuffed into a really, really big MDM. Those graserheads couldn’t match the multi-targeting capacity of a conventional laserhead, but each hit they did achieve would be devastating.
And all of that concentrated lethality stood ready to blow Charles Davenport out of space if it strayed a single kilometer from its designated vector.
Detweiler wasn’t particularly worried about that, though. It was the job of Davenport’s crew to sweat the details of their approach, and the courier’s recognition code had been transmitted and acknowledged the better part of two hours ago.
No, what worried Detweiler was the reason he’d come and the message he had to deliver. That, and the fact that he was about to find himself admitting—and apologizing for—a rare and potentially painful error. An error whose cost could be high, indeed. He wasn’t looking forward to delivering either of those, but neither would he flinch from the task. Avoiding things like that had never really been an option for him or his clone brothers, and that was even truer now. With their parents’ deaths, leadership of the entire Alignment had devolved onto Benjamin Detweiler’s shoulders, and he would not shirk his responsibilities…or fail the memories of Albrecht or Evelina Detweiler.