Rise of the Empire 1: Olympus (16 page)

“That is one thing I will never understand about humans, how can being
s so reliant on communications with others of their kind, be so deaf and ignorant of one another.”
Iris said.

“I don’t know.”

“What?” Bethany said softly. Adrian looked at her and realized that he answered Iris out loud. He went on his knees in front of Bethany and took one of her hands in both of his. He smiled awkwardly.

“We are such idiots, you and I.” He said.

Bethany looked at him funny but didn’t respond.

“If only we talked sooner we could have put this behind us a long time ago. There is no need for you to feel inferior to me, or to be embarrassed, it was my fault as well, I was too scared to talk to others at the Academy, I didn’t even know how. I am not like you and the others, my age isolated me from the rest of you. And I didn’t ma
ke any attempt to bridge the gap between us.” Adrian said.

Finally, she released a nervous laugh
. “Yes, we certainly are alike in that manner.” Bethany said.

“You don’t need to avoid me, or to blame yourself for what happened before.” Adrian said, he
smiled and stood up, he still held Bethany’s hand, so he pulled her to her feet. Adrian looked her in the eyes and said.

“
Are we good now?” Adrian asked.

Bethany let out a relived sigh and nodded. “And I am truly sorry for the way I treated you in the Academy.”

“It’s forgotten.” Adrian said.

“Thank you.” She said relived.

They shared another moment, and then Adrian started towards their room with Bethany walking beside him. When they entered the room their teammates looked at them and released a collective sigh of relief. Bethany and Adrian looked at each other, then at them, and said simultaneously.

“What?”

They all looked at each other and Sakura responded.

“We thought that you killed each other.” She said dead pan serious, Adrian tried to keep his face straight and not reveal his amusement, which was
fuelled even more by the fact that they could have killed each other. He kept a straight face and put a hand on Bethany’s lower back pulling her closer to him.

“Why would we kill each other? We are best buds.” He said in a bewildered voice.

Bethany caught on to his ploy, and put left hand on his shoulder, then she turned and leaned into Adrian putting her right on his chest.

“Yes, why would we kill each other?” She said softly. The startled looks on their teammates
’ faces were too much for Bethany and Adrian and they burst out laughing. Adrian laughed so hard that he had to lean on the wall holding his stomach with his hands, and Bethany wasn’t much better off, she was laughing so hard her eyes started to tear up. The rest of the room joined them after a moment of stunned silence.

After they managed to get themselves under control Tania looked at Bethany and Adrian.

“You two almost had me there, for a moment I thought that all that tension between you was an act. So what happened?” Tania asked.

“We worked some stuff out.” Bethany said.

“Well I am happy that you finally straightened things out, but we still lost the match.” Alexander said.

“Yes.” Bethany said somber, it was her tactics that led to their defeat.

“The tactic was solid.” Adrian said, getting the attention of everyone in the room. “It’s just that we forgot something.”

“What?” Sakura asked.

Adrian looked over the others, making a brief eye contact with Bethany.

“The other teams had been
fighting amongst themselves in these matches from the beginning, while we chose to focus on only one type at the time. They have much more experience, and if we want to beat them, we will need to improve quickly, and change our game.”

Part Three – The Divide

Chapter Seventeen

January 2103

Tomas Klein sat in his new Office aboard the Mars station, he had moved his headquarters from Cloud station in Earth’s orbit to Mars, as it was becoming increasingly more difficult to hide his moves in the vicinity of Earth, ever since the Earth’s major players started increasing their presence on the Moon. About half of Olympus population was living on the Moon, mostly families, the other half was spread out on Mars, and on the stations they had inside the system, they had very little people living on the Earth, besides those who worked there, Tomas had slowly transferred all of his people to space, leaving the underwater cities to Concordis, all save for Sedna. He still had some employees working on Earth but their families now lived in space. Earth economy was still dependent on things that Olympus produced, he tried to lessen that somewhat by giving them some of their facilities, it was still not enough, he had hoped that the countries of Earth would unite and start exploiting the resources of the Solar system, but they were unwilling, content to leech of Olympus, while expanding their military influence in space, that was one of the reasons why he didn’t share Olympus tech with them, they were not ready yet. Tomas managed to keep most of his actions secret from the Earth governments, he kept the true number of his ships under wraps, and Earth believed that he had somewhere around 20 transport and mining ships, but they weren’t sure, as Tomas kept moving them outside of their area of influence. In truth Olympus had around a 100 ships, most delegated to work inside the asteroid belt, not counting several stations, two in deep space outside of any planets orbit, and four shipyards/space stations that were spread out in the solar system. The secret to their rapid expansion and unprecedented building capabilities was the fabricator technology. With it they managed increase their manufacturing speeds by more than 500%, while the powers of Earth still relied on manual labor, and their industrial assembling lines. Tomas knew that the word of his fabricator technology got out and that Earth knew about it, but they had no way of getting it. Tomas kept the technology heavily guarded, and had moved all his fabricators outside of Earth influence. Tomas has kept a lot of Olympus technology out of the hands of Earth governments, and while he wanted to see all of humanity advance together, he knew that the governments of Earth wouldn’t allow it, any technology they acquired was tightly controlled and used for their individual progress, rather than the progress and improvement of everyone’s lives. They were still too set in the old rivalries, still remembered old wars, and while they did make progress, The League and Concordis being a part of it, it was still not enough. He knew that there was still corruption, and an enormous gap between those in power and those bellow them. So Tomas kept it all out of their hands, some could say that he was doing the same thing those on Earth would, but Olympus wasn’t like them, there was no division by class in Olympus, everyone was equal in opportunity. Everyone was able to choose their own path, all for free, the only thing Tomas asked in return was that they use their freedom to better the lives of those in Olympus. So while on the surface it seemed that Tomas was doing the exact same thing the corrupt politicians of Earth would do, the difference was in motivation, they would do it for their greed, while Tomas for the good of all. He hoped that he would live long enough to see the day when Earth finally unites under one banner, he didn’t need it to be him, anyone worthy would do. Tomas only feared that it would never happen. He looked at the report that floated above his table. The report held the latest news regarding the Concordis, Coalition, and Leagues warships, for the past few years they were building warships, and increasing their shipbuilding capabilities with more construction post in Earth’s orbit. His shipyards were now orbiting Jupiter, with only one orbiting Mars. Olympus also now had 8 warships, they didn’t have a need for any more, even the decision to build those ships was badly received by his advisors, and were only built because Tomas feared that Earth would turn to force to acquire Olympus tech. Now his fears didn’t feel at all foolish. Concordis had 3 warships, currently in orbit above Europe, League had 4 orbiting above Australia, and the Coalition had just finished building their second ship, with more planed, there was no need for them to have warships, there was no threat to their territory from space, unless they knew about Olympus ships, which was unlikely, as they never went anywhere near Earth. There were of course tensions between the three Earth powers like there always were, so Tomas assumed that they wanted to have their space interest covered. Both the League and Concordis had built colonies on the moon in the last year, they were small by Olympus standard, but monumental for those involved. But overall their space operations paled in comparison to Olympus, not just in technology but also in scope, all three combined barely had half the number of ships that Olympus had. They had limited mining operations on the moon, and none in the belt. They relied on Olympus for raw materials, which Tomas gladly provided, he didn’t want to impair their progress no matter what it looked like to them, he wanted them to catch up to Olympus, to became Olympus’s equals.

Tomas sighed
and closed down the report, there was nothing he could do about them arming themselves, that was one of the reasons why he didn’t want to share their technology with them, he knew what they would do with it. He opened up the next report, this one from Professor Hyeon Seo-yun. It informed him that their first interstellar trip was a success, the exploration ship Star Gazer has arrived from its trip to the Alpha Centauri system, the system closest to us. It started its journey more than a year ago, with their version of the alien hyperdrive they were able to travel at ten times the speed of light, making the 4.3 light years trip in just over five months, they spent another month there collecting data and looking around the system and then spent another five months back, it’s now traveling at sub light speed from the edge of our solar system, the edge being the place where Sun’s influence was low enough for a ship to enter hyperspace, which was a few light hours past Pluto, it will take it a few months more to travel back to Mars. The drives worked perfectly even on a trip that long, as did the stasis pods the crew used while in hyperspace, just as Seo-yun assured him they will, but Tomas was still a bit skeptical, he wanted to wait a bit more before they undertook such a long trip, but Seo-yun insisted that there was no need, that they understood the technology and had everything under control, Tomas chose to defer to her judgment and gave her the permission. The report contained a mountain of scientific information that Tomas didn’t understand, sensor readings, readings from the planet orbiting one of the suns in the system and others, he scrolled down until he found Seo-yun’s translation of the data, she tended to leave Tomas notes on the more scientific reports she sent him, he insisted that he get any report on matters she deemed important. Her notes told him that while this was a giant leap and a momentous event in human history, the system itself wasn’t impressive, there was nothing there of interest to them, the one planet was unremarkable, nothing more than a rock, with no or very little materials that they used, she didn’t recommend colonization of that system. There were talks between Tomas and his “council” on colonization of other star systems, they all agreed that if they started colonization they would start with a planet with more hospitable conditions, preferably an Earth like world, but based on the map recovered from the Alien ship, those planets were so far away that it would take them decades to get there from the Solar system. For now they would stay in their birth system.

Just as he finished the report, his second
, Nadia pinged him and informed him that Seo-yun wanted to speak to him, he told her to send her in.

A moment later Seo-yun
walked in, she had her hair tied in a knot on top of her head, and was holding a datapad in her hand, it was amusing to Tomas how most of those who were born before the age of implants had tendency to review information on their datapads rather than their implants.

“Hello Seo-yun, I have just finished reading your report on the Alpha Centauri mission.” Tomas said.

“Hi, well, I have something even more exciting to show you now.” She sat down on the chair in front of his desk, they had abandoned any formality between them a long time ago. She smiled brightly, with a mischievous glint in her eyes.

Tomas raised an eyebrow. “More
monumental than a trip to another star system?”

“
Oh yes, much more.” She said.

Intrigued, Tomas motioned for her to continue.

“I have two things to tell you, I waited until we were sure about both of them, it was coincidence that the final test results came within a day of each other.” She said. Tomas knew that Seo-yun had a lot of experiments going on, and that she didn’t bring them to him until they were successful. He kept silent and waited for her to tell him more.

“First, we have been experimenting on faster than light communications, there were some mentions of it in the alien databases, but the data was too corrupted to be recovered, but it helped us by telling us that FTL comms were possible. So we threw ourselves on the problem. First idea we had was to use hyperspace capable
comm drones, but since ships or in this case drones can only enter hyperspace when they were sufficiently away from a star’s influence we rejected it, but kept it as a possibility for communication between star systems. Then we got the idea to use gravity. We had discovered that gravity propagates at the speed substantially faster than the speed of light, when we were developing artificial gravity generators. But our understanding of gravity is not yet large enough to pull it off efficiently, we don’t have a power source strong enough to create a gravity pulse focused and strong enough to reach any distance that would be of use to us. So after these failures we tried to follow more abstract and unconventional paths. We tried speeding up the light, at which we of course failed.” She grinned. “We played with the concept of micro wormholes, but decided that at our current level we weren’t proficient enough to pull that off safely, if at all. And then we went back to hyperspace, we know that the law in hyperspace are different than in regular space. We studied the laws of hyperspace and finally discerned that the reason ships can only enter hyperspace when the stars influence was low enough has to do with the mass of the object trying to enter the space. After an object with mass passes certain point of gravitation pull on it, it can safely pass through the barrier between regular space and hyperspace, if it tried to enter hyperspace while the gravitation pull on it was above that point, the gravity would hamper it, and it wouldn’t achieve, for the lack of a better word enough “thrust” to be pushed through the barrier, resulting in it being destroyed. Theoretically one could enter hyperspace within a star system, but it would require insane amount of energy, the closer to the sun you are the more energy you would need, while after it crosses the “passing point” the amount of energy drops off sharply. So after we learned this we set on to find a way to pass communications through hyperspace. We discovered that if we send a charged luxon particles, particles that move at the speed of light, into hyperspace they became tachyons, particles that move faster than the speed of light, and move in the direction they were moving prior to entering hyperspace until they run out of charge. So we devised a way to send information with these particles, we devised computers that can interpret the information once tachyons leave hyperspace and become luxon particles again. So now we have FTL or rather near instantaneous communications, the lag is so small that it is negligible, with a few little problems, one is that the communications are instantaneous in the range of 50 light years, after that the tachyons lose speed rapidly, even if they are still charged, but it will still be much faster communication than anything else. The lag increases substantially after 50 ly point. But we won’t need to worry about that for a long time, we even have some ideas that could effectively remove the problems, we could place rerouting stations that would receive the communication and then relay it for another 50 ly, if we ever need to communicate over such vast distances. The other problem are the calculations required to send the communication on target, the math is abysmal, the biggest problem is that space, our galaxy even is in constant motion, while hyperspace is not, and as such we need to calculate the amount of charge the communication needs, then the coordinates of the receiver, as they will be after the communication exits hyperspace. The only computers that are able to calculate this are our most advanced quantum computers, and only those that have an Ai in them, the Ai’s ability to manage multitude of problems simultaneously lowers the margin of error to barley 0.001%”

Tomas raised his hand. “Wait. Why c
an’t a quantum computer do the calculations without the Ai?” He said.

Seo-yun grimaced. “It can, but an ordinary software can’t do it as pr
ecise as an Ai can. The Ai’s have the ability to coordinate and use quantum computer’s assets in such a way to increase its capabilities by a factor of 12. We have still not been able to figure out why.” She said. Tomas saw that their inability to find the cause of the increase in ability was annoying her. She had never liked unsolved puzzles, it was one of the reasons he hired her, and showed her the alien ship so many years ago.

Tomas sighed. “Alright, I know that you feel that the Ai pose no threat, if they are treated right, but I still want you to be careful. The aliens shackled their Ai’s for a reason, and I don’t want us to make any mistakes.” He said while looking Seo-yun in the eyes. She held his glare, and was about to say something when she changed her mind and nodded.