“Well, there are plans on the drawing boards,” Alexander said, “for true starships using Quantum Space Translation … but I don’t think any of them are funded for development yet. At least, not beyond the wouldn’t-it-be-nice stage.”
“I have seen some of those plans on the Net,” Cara told him. “But you’re right. None has been funded past the initial research stage.”
“The Arean Advanced Physics Institute has been using Skybase as a testbed to study paraspace,” Alexander said, “both to improve energy tap technology and to investigate the possibility of very long-range transport. But ships built around translation technology … they’d be damned expensive. They’d also have to be huge, to accommodate the necessary power taps and the translation drive itself. A lot of military decision-makers don’t think it’s feasible.”
“Skybase is still considerably smaller than a typical Xul huntership,” the AI pointed out. “And it would be simple enough to mount gravitic drives to provide the necessary maneuverability for combat and in-system travel. A fleet of such vessels equipped as warships would be most formidable.”
“And you want to know why we’re not developing such ships more … aggressively?”
“Exactly. It is as though human governments, the people who make such decisions, do not realize the gravity of the Xul threat.”
Alexander sighed. It was almost embarrassing admitting to the non-human artificial intelligence in his head what most senior military officers had lived with for their entire careers, worse, what humankind had lived with for centuries.
“That’s a complicated question, Cara. I guess the short answer is … they know the Xul are a threat, sure, but after five centuries, they don’t seem to be an urgent threat. There are always more important things to attend to closer at hand.”
“Even after the Xul incursion of 2314, when humankind was nearly annihilated?”
Alexander shrugged. “But we weren’t, were we? Humans have a lot of trouble connecting with something that happened centuries ago … or that might not happen until centuries in the future. Download the history. Remember global warming? The fossil fuel crisis? The e-trans crisis? The genetic prosthesis crisis? The chaos of the nanotechnic revolution? If it doesn’t threaten us, immediately and personally, it’s someone else’s problem—especially if it’s government that has to take action to fix it. Hell, politicians have trouble keeping their focus on problems just from one election to the next. The Roman Senate probably had the same problem with the barbarian crisis three thousand years ago.”
“But it is the politicians—specifically the Senate Military Appropriations Committee—that would be responsible for funding a fleet capable of fighting the Xul, is it not?”
Cara sounded genuinely confused, and Alexander wondered how much of that was personality software miming human patterns, how much was genuine perplexity. There was no way to tell.
“That’s right,” he said. “And they’re not eager to increase taxes just so the military can have some expensive new toys.” He hesitated. While Cara was his electronic assistant alone, she did share data with many other people, both civilian and military, and with innumerable other AIs. How well could he trust her not to share with the wrong people?
The hell with it. They would be gone, soon, gone and far beyond the reach of anyone—officious bureaucrat, ass-covering general, or self-serving politician—who might object to him giving voice to his opinions. “The truth is, Cara, it’s not just the civilians who are a little slow on the uptake, sometimes. In fact, if the military really pushed for it, we would probably get those fancy new ships. The allocations for the designing, for the building … hell, the shipyards at Earthring, at the Arean Rings, at Luna, at L-5, they’d all be falling all over themselves to win those contracts. And the civilian sector would profit with a whole new means of traveling between star systems.”
“You’re saying the work would stimulate the economy.”
“Definitely. Military contracts have always been a big factor in keeping the economy going. That’s one reason war was so hard to get rid of over the centuries.”
“Why, then, would the military sector not wish to see these ships developed?”
“Because the military sector has always been extremely conservative. They don’t trust new technology.”
“But advanced technology has always won wars. The development of nuclear weapons to end World War II, for instance, would be a case in point.”
“Which actually began as a civilian initiative, instigated by the U.S. President at the time when he learned that the enemy had a chance of developing those weapons first. But check your historical files. Naval vessels continued to have masts for decades after the steam engine made sails obsolete. When General Custer’s command was wiped out at the Little Bighorn, the native forces attacking him were armed with repeating rifles; most of Custer’s men were not, because the military bureaucracy of the time was convinced that repeaters wasted ammunition. Custer also left behind a couple of Gatling guns—primitive machine guns—because they slowed up his column. In other words … he refused to change his tactics to take advantage of new technological developments.
“Later, navies continued to cling to the battleship even after repeated demonstrations that they didn’t stand a chance against carrier-based aircraft. Then they clung to carriers after orbital railguns and microcruise missiles made those monsters into fat, wallowing targets. Two centuries after that, Marines were still being issued slug-throwers as standard weapons because of concerns about the reliability of lasers and man-portable batteries under combat conditions. As a rule, military leaders don’t like anything new or different.”
“But why would that be, given that change is the essence of history?”
“Major changes in how we do things usually means waiting around until the last generation dies off. It’s a basic truism of military history: we’re always ready to fight the last war, and the methods and tactics of the next war always catch us by surprise.”
“That would seem to be a depressing philosophy for someone in your line of work, General,” Cara told him. “Or do you embrace such conservative viewpoints as well?”
He thought about that one for a moment. “There are never any absolutes in this business,” he told the AI. “No blacks or whites. In point of fact, space-combat doctrine right now favors lights over heavies.”
“You refer to the tactical doctrine of using many small, cheap, and expendable spacecraft, rather than a few large and expensive ones.”
“Exactly. A Skydragon masses less than a hundred tons, and can still carry a dozen long-range missiles with thermonuclear warheads. One such warhead can cripple or even destroy a hundred-thousand-ton battlecruiser, if it gets through the point defense field. The powers-that-be are perfectly happy to sacrifice a few Skydragon squadrons in exchange for a high-value heavy, no problem.” He felt his own bitterness rising as he said that. “It remains to be seen if being able to translate ships as big as Skybase makes it worthwhile changing tactical doctrines.”
“It seems that there is a certain inertia resident within any given approach to warfare,” Cara observed. “Once a government is committed to a given way of doing things, it is difficult to change.”
“You could say that.” He sighed. “In fact, the conservative factions are usually right in holding on to the tried and true … up to a point. We know what works, so we stick to that. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, don’t risk creating a real mess.
“But … and this may be the single most important ‘but’ in any military leader’s lexicon, we must be aware that change—technological change, social and cultural change, demographic change, religious change, political change—all of