David Weber - The Apocalypse Troll

troll n. 1. Obsolete. A creature of Scandinavian myth, sometimes portrayed as a mischievous or friendly dwarf, sometimes as a destructive giant, living in caves in the hills. 2. A cyborg fighting machine of the Shirmaksu Empire. [Norwegian, from Old Norse trЪll, monster] -Webster-Wangchi Unabridged Dictionary of Standard English

Tomas y Hijos, Publishers

2465, Terran Standard Reckoning

TNS Defender, flagship of BatDiv Ninety-Two, was forty light-months from anywhere in particular, loafing along under half drive and no more than four or five translations into alpha-space, when the atonal shriek of General Quarters howled through her iron bones.

Her crew froze for one incredulous moment. Ridiculous! They were headed for the barn, and the Kangas were penned up in a miserable three star systems, the nearest of them almost exactly one hundred light-years away. What kind of nit-picking silliness could have possessed the Old Lady to call a drill now?

Then wonder was forgotten as they thundered to their stations.

Colonel Ludmilla Leonovna, commander of BatDiv Ninety-Two's strike group, was immersed in the new history text on her book-viewer when the alarm's high-pitched shriek jerked her away. She was into the passageway outside her quarters before she realized she'd moved, and halfway to the hangar deck before she remembered she'd left the viewer on.

She made a sliding turn around the final bend, ricocheted from a bulkhead in an experienced rebound trajectory, and emerged into the cavernous hangar to find her flight crews already assembling.

"Make a hole!"

Personnel scattered as they recognized her voice, and she went through the sudden opening and into the ready room like a more-or-less guided projectile, then came to a rocking halt beside the duty intelligence officer bent over the battle plot repeater. His face was intent, and her own lips pursed in a silent whistle as her eyes joined his on the crawling light dots on the screen. Her left hand rose to touch the ribbons on her tunic as if in memory, but she caught herself and lowered it deliberately, concentrating on the plot.

There was something odd about this, she thought. Very odd... .

Commodore Josephine Santander's stern, composed face appeared on Captain Steven Onslow's com screen almost before the echoes of the alarm had died, though he knew she'd been in her quarters when it sounded.

"Talk to me, Steve," she said without preamble.

"Scan reports a Kanga force closing slowly from about sixty light-hours, Ma'am. Azimuth one-four-niner, elevation two-niner-three. I don't have a firm track yet, but it looks like they'll cross our wake about twenty light-hours behind us. Preliminary IDs look like an Ogre with escorts."

"An Ogre?" Commodore Santander allowed herself a raised eyebrow.

"Yes, Ma'am. It- Just a moment, Ma'am." He glanced at a side screen connecting him directly to Central Scanning, and his black face tightened.

"We're getting better data now, Ma'am. Scan confirms the Ogre. It's a full battle squadron-so far we've picked up three Trollheims siding her."

"I see. Put it on Battle One, please."

Onslow touched a button, and the big holo tank on the flag bridge lit with a three-dee duplicate of his own display. Commodore Santander studied it for a moment.

"We've got their course, Ma'am," Onslow said, and a thin red line appeared on the plot, predicting the hostile force's movements. "They're pulling about four lights relative and translating steadily."

"Gradient?" the commodore asked sharply.

"Steep, Ma'am. They're eight or nine translations out already. The computer estimates they'll break the beta wall in-" he glanced at his readouts "-about five hours."

Commodore Santander frowned and swung her command chair slowly from side to side. It was unlike the Kangas to pile on that sort of gradient. They must be in one hell of a hurry to run that big a risk of acoherency.

She wished there were someone she could turn this over to, but Admiral Wierhaus had detached only half of Battle Squadron Ninety for a badly needed overhaul, and she-for her sins-was the senior officer present. They were just over three light-years out of 36 Ophiuchi, and no one closer than the fleet base there could have taken the responsibility for her. She sighed silently. What she wished didn't change what she had.

"All right, Steve. Get Commander Tho to work on a pursuit course. Maximum drive and optimum translation curve."

"Optimum, Ma'am?" Onslow asked carefully.

"You heard me. Toss out the safety interlocks. They wouldn't be translating that fast if they weren't in a hurry, and there wouldn't be three Trollheims riding herd on them if it wasn't important. So get that course worked out soonest, then put the squadron on it."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Captain Onslow said just a bit too expressionlessly, and Santander turned back to her plot, forcing herself to project an aura of confidence. She understood his unhappiness at pushing the multi-dimensional drive that hard and only wished she had another choice.

Unfortunately, she didn't. The multi-dee could be dangerous, but the old Einsteinian limit held true, more or less, in normal-space. As it happened, the most recent hypotheses suggested that there were ways around that after all-in theory, at least-but the relativity aspects still turned theoretical physicists' hair white. Until they worked the bugs out (if they worked the bugs out) practical spacers would stick with something which at least let them predict the decade of their arrival.

Theoretically, the multi-dee was an elegant solution. If light-speed was inescapable, simply find yourself another dimension in which space was "folded" more tightly, bringing equivalent points "closer" together. That was a horribly crude description, but the commodore had yet to meet anyone who could describe it any better without resorting to pure math models. For her purposes, it worked well enough to visualize the galaxy of the FTL-traveler as consisting of concentric rings of dimensions; by moving "higher" in multi-dimensional space, a ship translated itself into rings with shorter and shorter radii, which meant that the same absolute velocity seemed higher in relation to normal-space. The physicists assured her she wasn't really moving at more than light-speed, but the practical result was FTL travel.

Still, there were limitations. The multi-dee was unusable inside the "Frankel Limit," a flexible point in stellar gravity wells which varied widely depending on spectral class and vessel mass, and though one theoretically could simply translate directly from normal-space into whatever other dimension one chose to use and vice versa, it was far wiser to translate gradually from one to another.

Dimensional energy flux could be vicious, and many things could happen to people who took liberties with the multi-dee. Few were pleasant. The alpha band-the "lowest" of all-was only about twenty dimensions across. At its upper limit, the maximum effective velocity of a ship (relative to normal-space) was about five times light-speed. Higher bands offered greater effective speeds, but at the cost of increasingly unstable energy states and consequently increasing risk to the ship. And there were barriers, still imperfectly understood, between the bands that meant cracking the wall was always risky. If a ship hit the wall just wrong or with the slightest harmonic in her translation field, she simply disappeared. She went acoherent, spread over a multitude of dimensions and forever unable to reconstitute herself, a thought which broke a cold sweat on the most hardened spacehound, for no one knew what happened inside the ship. Did the crew die? Did they go into some sort of stasis? Or did they gradually discover what had happened ... and that they had become a galactic Flying Dutchman for all eternity?