The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier Invincible

Her reply was interrupted by an incoming message. Captain Smythe had a look of bliss as his image appeared. “By my ancestors, Admiral, these creatures are engineers!”

“Why do you say that?”

“Look at what they did! Have you spotted the systems on the exteriors of the hulls yet?”

As Smythe spoke, the fleet combat systems began updating the images of the alien spacecraft, highlighting subtle features that were tentatively identified as the weaponry, sensors, shields, generators, and thrusters, which had been unseen earlier. “Look at them!” Smythe said. “They’ve faired everything into the hulls. It’s all smooth, as unbroken as possible. The engineering required to do that and retain functionality for those features is . . . it’s awesome, Admiral.”

Geary tried to see it from Smythe’s point of view. “You think the creatures here are excellent engineers?”

“Excellent and perhaps intuitive,” Smythe agreed. “This work—the design, the construction—is simply elegant. There’s no other word for it.”

Geary turned to Desjani. “Captain Smythe thinks the creatures here are all born engineers.”

“Oh, great,” Desjani said. “Just what we need. Another species lacking in social skills.”

“What do you think of their formation?”

She spread her hands. “It’s gorgeous. The individual subformations and the interlinking patterns of those into the overall formation. But in terms of function? Assuming their weapons are roughly equivalent to our own, that formation will certainly work. Is it better than our cruder arrangements? I wouldn’t say that. We achieve interlocking fire zones and concentration of fire without the same . . .”

“Elegance?” Geary asked.

“Yeah. That’s a good word for it.” Desjani pondered the images for a moment, then shook her head. “I’d be willing to bet that maintaining that beautiful arrangement would complicate maneuvering so much that it would create significant difficulty for them. We could do that. We could tell the maneuvering systems to generate formations based on fractals like a Mandelbrot set or by replicating Fourier series and stuff like that, but it would involve a lot of extra work when we maneuvered. I can’t see any benefit from that to compensate for the complications.”

“So they’re doing it that way because they want to, not because it’s superior in any absolute or physical way.”

“That’s my assessment,” Desjani agreed.

“Captain Smythe, from an engineer’s perspective, do you think the design of those ships produces better results?”

Smythe tilted his head slightly as he thought. “How do you define better results? In terms of pure functionality, they may perform less well. They probably perform less well. I mean, clearly, a hull as smooth as possible offers no angles or weak points where any force striking them can concentrate. Any force or object the ship encounters will more likely be deflected. But our own hulls are curved over the great majority of their surfaces to get the same results. Making everything else as flush with the hull as possible would create some major challenges in terms of effectiveness. I would think, and this is only from what I know as an engineer and not taking into account whatever the creatures who built those ships can do, I would say they’ve probably lost some functionality and added some complexity by fairing in everything so smoothly.”

It added up to a consistent picture. Whatever these creatures were, engineering and perhaps mathematical aesthetics mattered a great deal to them. “They like beautiful things, the same sort of beauty we can appreciate.”

“In terms of their ships, yes, Admiral.”

“Thank you, Captain Smythe.”

Geary looked over at Desjani. “Maybe that’s a good sign, that they produce things we also find beautiful.”

She raised one eyebrow at him. “May I remind the Admiral that we got chased to this star system by a horde of cute little teddy bear-cows who exterminate just about everything else they encounter?”

Geary pulled out the scale a little more on his display, studying the star system at which they had arrived. A white dwarf star, bright but unwelcoming to life. Only two planets, one a bare ball of rock orbiting rapidly less than two light-minutes from the star, the other a bloated gas giant, large enough to qualify as a brown dwarf. Based on the few minutes of tracking they had, the fleet sensors were estimating that the brown dwarf had a highly eccentric orbit. Right now it was ten light-minutes from the star, but according to system estimates, it would swing out perhaps as far as two light-hours before looping in again. “Unless they’re a very exotic life-form, this isn’t their home star system.”

“They didn’t evolve on that rock,” Desjani agreed. “And that brown dwarf looks like a capture. If that orbit estimate is right, it got caught in the star’s gravity field not too long ago. A couple of million years, maybe.”