Exodus: Machine War 1 Supernova. by Doug Dandridge Page A

could on the way in,” said Nguyen, looking over at another
of his officers, a statuesque redhead.  “Commander Bergland here, my staff
intelligence officer, also read some other sections, and has advised me on her
impressions.  Commander.”
    “First, I must
say, Captain,” stated the Commander.  “You have done as well as could be
expected with your limited resources.  But we need to mobilize a much greater
response if the Empire is going to take advantage of this resource.”
    “Resource?”
    “Yes, Captain,”
said the Admiral.  “Resource.  Of course we do not want this species to go
extinct, and the Command has an obligation to make sure their genotype does not
die out.  But this, telepathy of theirs.  This could be a game changer.”
    “It’s not really
telepathy, sir,” said Sekumbe.  “It only works between siblings from the same
birthing.  It’s like before the separation process, while the siblings are
still only one being, an entanglement occurs in one piece of neural tissue,
which then separates when the brains pull apart in the individuation process
about the fourth month of the pregnancy.”
    “Excuse me,
Commander,” said the Admiral.  “The explanation is all well and good, and I’m
sure we’ll have many biologists assigned to this phenomenon.  But it acts like
telepathy, for all intents and purposes.  And I, for one, can think of a lot of
uses for that kind of ability.”
    “I thought the
wormholes were giving us instantaneous com, sir,” said Albright, pulling on an
ear as she thought about what the Admiral had just said.  Not that she hadn’t
thought it herself, but she had tried not to get too excited about the
prospect.
    “The problem
with the wormholes, Captain Albright,” said Captain Susan Lee, Nguyen’s Chief
of Staff, walking into the room, “is that we only have one station that
generates them.  They can make about two dozen a day, or about eighty-seven
hundred a year.  And all of that is spread among ships, planets, bases, more
places than we can possibly service with wormholes.  Especially as the Fleet
itself has over a hundred thousand major vessels in service.  Add in five
thousand inhabited planets of developing rank or above, the ships of our
allies, and the hundreds of thousands of small craft used for reconnaissance
and strike duties, and you can see that there are nowhere near enough to go
around.  And with combat losses, there probably never will be.”
    “We’re starting
to deploy subspace coms in all of our ships as soon as they hit a major base or
repair ship,” stated the Admiral.  “In fact, your ships will be equipped with
them as soon as my engineering people can get the equipment over to them, in a
day or two.  That will give you the ability to communicate at over ten times
light speed, in most conditions, which is nothing to complain about.  But it is
short ranged, no more than a score of light hours, and doesn’t really give us
that instantaneous com we really want.”
    “Still, sir,”
said Albright after digesting what she had just heard.  “It would seem that if
flagships were equipped with wormholes, and everyone in the task group is
equipped with subspace com, everything is solved.”
    “Not quite,”
said Nguyen with a frown.  “Two factors make that proposition just a little
more complicated.  One is the fact that a wormhole equipped ship cannot traverse
a wormhole.  Something to do with the twisting of space when two space warping
connections interact.  Any ship that tries is totally destroyed, converted to
energy that comes spewing through the other end of the wormhole they are trying
to traverse, as well as through the hole that the ship’s wormhole connects to. 
Not something that the other ship or base would really be looking forward to. 
And the wormhole they are trying to traverse also goes up in a blast of energy,
at both ends.  Ships with com departments with one or more of these,
Klassekians, do you