But What Will The Gods Eat Tomorrow?

I was almost glad when Tempest interrupted me.

"A duty? You sound like a recruitment vid, Jonny." The Dragon began to move slowly through the asteroid field, cautiously picking a path through the crossing vectors of several million chunks of rock. There were times when I was glad to have a true AI onboard.

"You might have joined the Stellar Fleet, Jonny," he lectured, "but I was drafted. Just because you can order me around doesn’t mean I’ll willingly fly this ship into danger. In fact, I’d like to take this opportunity to file a formal complaint…"

There were also times when I didn’t like it so much.

I ignored Tempest’s ranting and adjusted the view on the vid screen. Aside from the Aardvark, there were no other offensive ships in the convoy, not that it needed them. The convoy was flew in V-formation, the Aardvark out front and the freighters fanning out behind it. I stared at the readout for a few minutes, then called up the specifications for the Aardvark.

I let out a whistle, low and long. I’d never been aboard an Aardvark before, and only saw one once, from a great distance. The ship was imposing. The hull was cylindrical, but tapered at the end. The outer shell was composed of pure vitrilium armor, the strongest armor available to the FEDs, though a bit heavier than trix-polymer armor. The hull was polished to a near-perfect shine, to better reflect any laser energy that managed to pass through the energy fields.

The fields themselves were a work of art. They were the latest in multipurpose, rotating-frequency energy fields, so new to the FEDs that they hadn’t even been assigned an acronym yet. These were different from classic fields in one significant way. Energy fields have to be optimized for either energy or particle-based weapons. The screens on the Aardvark were no exception, but their balanced setting was more than capable of stopping all but the most determined attacks. Additionally, the Aardvark could shift its fields from one setting to another in a few seconds, while traditional fields took much longer.

The critical systems of the Aardvark were housed deep within the core of the ship, surrounded by an inner hull of vitrilium. Weapons control, field generators, engines, even the bridge were far from easy targets. A pilot had a better chance of winning the pick-24 than crippling an Aardvark.

Its speed and maneuverability were impressive as well, but paled in comparison to its armament. The Aardvark carried no blast cannons or heavy projectile weapons. Such things were too easy for experienced fighter pilots to dodge. It had two fixed, anti-cruiser turbolasers mounted at the front of the ship and a third at the rear, but the Aardvark was equipped with more than a thousand of the smaller, anti-fighter laser turrets, each capable of independent or coordinated tracking.

The AI for the Aardvark was nowhere near as sophisticated as Tempest, but was top of the line when compared to other ships in the Fleet. It was capable of coordinating all laser turrets simultaneously, and used probability distributions to guess where an attacking pilot was most likely to go. The AI collected data throughout a battle and added the information to its database. So the longer a pilot fought against an Aardvark, the more likely the ship was to guess the pilot’s next move.

After looking at the specs, I wasn’t too thrilled about being on the receiving end of an Aardvark’s attack.

The Aardvark was the Fleet’s golden child. It had already been used to stop a multitude of terrorist attacks and put down several in-FEDs rebellions.