Chapter 24
Let me tell you about blackships, as Hadja once explained them to me.
“Indeed. Blackships are silent world-killers waiting in the deepest dark. Every blackship is designed, once it has dropped into its watch zone, to run cold, reflecting no radiation nor emitting any of its own. The enormity of space makes it very unlikely that they will be discovered. Not impossible – sometimes an engine leaks, shielding cracks, an alert astronomer may find a patch of dark, darker than the dark. However, it is more likely they will be discovered via comms. A blackship still needs to receive orders. Sub-light communication is out of the question – it is simply too inefficient to issue an order to fire two hundred years before it will actually be received, even for the slowest of the slow.”
“I once flew a courier ship to the middle of nowhere – just coordinates in the deepest black – in order to ping a canister no bigger than my hand out of the airlock on a trajectory towards nothing,” I mused.
“You were most likely delivering military orders to a blackship, yes. Such methods are viable, but have flaws,” Hadja conceded.
“Risks include: masking engine heat, Pilot inaccuracies and errors. Military astronomers are always looking for anomalies. Tanglecomm is a far more efficient means of communication.”
Tanglecomm: take one entangled matter/antimatter pair.
As one particle oscillates up, the other oscillates down and so on, regardless of the distance between them.
Now split that pair. Deposit one half on a blackship, the other in secure headquarters on the far side of the galaxy, creating a means whereby both parties can communicate with each other – and only each.
Disadvantages: expense, technical expertise required.
Also: once one half of a pair is destroyed, the entire thing is broken. Secure, but vulnerable.
“The third method of secure communication is arccomm,” Hadja concluded. “And it is the preferred method of the Shine.”