Re: Dawn
Nekkar III
Colonial Dawn Council Meeting
Corporate Headquarters…
The meeting was underway, and the council department heads were updating the chairman of the status of each department. The research council led off, and the presentation of the development of the ECM .
“Ladies and gentlemen, the procedure is, in theory, simple…”
Defense interrupted him. “All theories are simple, aren’t they?”
The presenter continued on, undeterred.
“The problem was to improve our ability to interrogate signals and discern their origin. We have devised a way to improve on the procedure.” He picked up a piece of paper and wrote his own name on it.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen…”
He fed the paper into the shredder, and picked up the basket with thousands of small slivers of his document, and others that were shredded.
“Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you I can reassemble my original document from this canister of paper shreds. I only need two things. First, I have to know what the original document was – which I do, because I created it – and second…”
The financial officer chimed in.
“Second, you need time. A lot of time.”
The presenter smiled.
“Exactly, madam. Time. I would need about one month; working every second of every day to examine the shreds, sort out my shreds from the rest, and reassemble the document.”
Chairman Lomax asked the next obvious question.
“And you can now do this with interrogation message from these countermeasure pods?”
The presenter looked off to the side for just a second.
“No, Mr. Chairman. We don’t do it to the interrogation message. We can, and have, done it to the code that makes up the interrogation message. Not only does an enemy need to rearrange the letters of the message, they have to reassemble the letters from the shreds the same way I have to reassemble my paper to get to the point where they could then try to reassemble the code.”
Nobody spoke as they tried to visualize what was being said.
Defense tried first.
“You mean you can…”
The presenter cut him off – not normally a good idea, but the presenter was still a bit flush with excitement.
“Yes, Admiral. And it doesn’t take a month, or a day, or an hour. We can reassemble the interrogation code in thirteen-millionths of a second.
The presenter played his final card.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we - in fact – didn’t need more time.”
He smiled.
“We needed a faster clock.”
Dawn now had ECM.
The remaining briefings went on, albeit with less flare than the research announcement. Finance announced it would be able to reduce expenditure requirements for maintenance of the empire’s facilities, ships, and units. Marketing reported the population was solidly behind the chairman and his policy of isolationism. Resources announced there were plenty of materials to continue to build and expand the known areas of Dawn space. They also announced an improvement in their storage facilities. Finally, Defense announced the creation of Operation Loophole. The plan was to take the Velocitas system and hold it as a choke point. Velocatis had warp gates to both the Pantrissa and Haphik systems. Taking the system would reduce the threat to Dawn as any ship or ships no more than 500kT. Of course, with such a small warp point, an enemy would logically need to send in a lot of smaller ships. There was some thought given to leaving Velocitas as a buffer system, but the decision was made to try and clear Velocitas and then block the warp point to whatever was on the other side.
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