Date: 2019-12-16T18:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; War; Vampires
Description: Things were going well for President Scott Akin. Of course, the Grays still wanted humanity exterminated, not to mention being surrounded by six other great empires spanning multiple galaxies. He’d need to work hard to survive, and after that define humanity’s place and intentions in the galaxy, the empire, and perhaps even beyond… Author’s note: This is primarily a space opera. The fantasy elements of the book are tangential at best. Oh, there’s mages, shifters, witches, and vampires in these pages, but that’s really not the focus.
Publisher: UNKNOWN

The Grays

Technomancer: Book Three

Author: D. L. Harrison

Copyright 2019.  This is a work of fiction.  Names, Characters, Places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.  All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission.

Table of Contents

Prologue. 4

Chapter One. 6

Chapter Two. 12

Chapter Three. 15

Chapter Four. 23

Chapter Five. 32

Chapter Six. 37

Chapter Seven. 48

Chapter Eight 52

Chapter Nine - Interlude. 57

Chapter Ten. 61

Chapter Eleven. 68

Chapter Twelve. 75

Chapter Thirteen. 80

Chapter Fourteen. 86

Chapter Fifteen – Interlude. 90

Chapter Sixteen. 94

Chapter Seventeen. 100

Prologue. 107

Afterword: 108

About the Author 108

Other books by D. L. Harrison: 109

Book Description. 113

Prologue

The body of the Colonel was quite crispy as his personal guards watched the idiot carried out.  Not only had the colonel’s plan failed to take out the humans, but their entire stealth probe intelligence network had been revealed and destroyed.  There wasn’t even a way to know how it happened, since it was destroyed utterly including the command and control center and related data.

Worse, there was no way to restore the system, at least not inside the solar systems of FTL races.  Only the pre-technological worlds.  The cloaking didn’t work well on powered up or moving vessels.

The High Leader Tellus brooded, at least they knew who had done it.  Several hundred calls had come in to their communications center for the empire worlds.  All of them loudly decrying being spied on, and some even questioning if the humans had been set up.  That number was going up by the hour, as the worlds that did have connections passed the word along.  He knew that would end up being around two thirds of the empire worlds.

So far, none of the worlds had threatened retaliation, but he knew from their history it was just a matter of time.  They’d been caught breaking the law spying on them, and they were suspected breaking the law of the great game and setting up the humans.  They would no doubt determine that they’d do it again now that trust was broken.

Correctly, as it stood, since the Grays had often removed dangers, species who were close to gaining equity in warships and weapons often found themselves destroyed for one reason or another.

Tellus looked up at Admiral, he was at attention and awaiting orders, but the High Leader could see the disgust in the being’s eyes.

“Admiral, I want you to pull back a quarter of each external war fleet, and then keep them close to the six core worlds, a light year or two.  I believe the humans will be attacking soon, and the best way to combat their long-range superiority is to surprise them before they move in system, and we’ll take them down at energy range with overwhelming numbers.”

The admiral frowned, “I will do as you order, but that may make our great enemies stir, if they scent weakness in our empire.  The fifty galaxies could find themselves embroiled in a seven-way war.  Eight way if we include the humans in that number.  Thousands of civilizations could burn.”

Tellus replied, “What would you suggest?  Our people are decadent after ten millennia of peace, it’s hard enough keeping twenty-four million warships on six fronts and five million scouts manned, despite our fifty thousand planets.  If I thought I could fill them, I’d order the fleet doubled over the next month.”

The admiral took a deep breath, “We could sue for peace, and tell the truth.  If the humans knew our empire falling would end up in six other great empires carving up the fifty galaxies and crushing them underfoot, they might hesitate to attack us.  I’m sure their planet is stretched extremely thin to man over two million warships, split six ways they’d never be able to stop our external enemies.  Perhaps it is naïve, but self-preservation is a driving force in all the races, and I see in the humans one of the best indexes of cooperation for most of the empire’s species, save a handful of others.”

Tellus grunted, “That might work now.  I’ve gotten word the humans have already claimed out to five hundred light years, a thousand light year diameter sphere.  That will open up about eight thousand planets to colonize.  What happens in a few thousand years, when they have the population and can run a billion ships?  Perhaps multiple billions.  If we tell the truth, they’ll back down and work hard at that, until they can safely remove us and defend their new empire.  Our empire.”

The admiral sighed, “Of course, forgive me.”

Tellus waved a hand, “Nothing to forgive, I am quite disturbed by this situation, and we appear to be caught between two webs.  On the good side, I suspect our ancient enemies won’t move fast.  As soon as we destroy the Earth’s offensive fleet, we’ll send those six million ships to Earth and remove the problem.  They’ll be back on the borders within weeks, a month or two at most.”

The Admiral asked, “You’re sure they’ll attack so quickly?”

Tellus nodded, “They have our tech, they understand very well how quickly a fleet can be built with it, and they’ll want to minimize that threat.  They might wait, if they had a clue that we had no one to run a new fleet, but it is what it is.”

The Admiral nodded, “We could force a draft.”

Tellus sighed and waived dismissively, “They’d rebel.”

The Admiral asked, “If they attack outside of the six core planets?”

The core planets were the ones that had the command and control centers for the six fleets, and the seventh internal fleet which was on their original home world.  The planets also held their highest caste and decision makers for the empire.  They were in the end, the origin planet and first five colonies of their nascent empire.

Tellus said, “You’ll have a million ships nearby the core planets, and you can respond in seconds.  The other planets will be too far away to intercept on their way in, and those small defense fleets and perhaps worlds will be lost.  But… you will time yourselves to arrive there on their way out of the system, and you’ll ambush them right before they leave the FTL line.  Facing their new tech at any distance is suicide, you will avoid that at all costs.  Our scientists are working on it, it disgusts me that the humans found a way around the vacuum power vulnerability problem that has been plaguing the empire for millennia, in two hours.”

The Admiral swallowed, and must’ve sensed the High Leader had run out of patience, because he bowed to Tellus and left the room without any further questions…

Chapter One

The command center felt comfortable, it was a familiar place and I thought I was getting used to it and how busy things were.  I was the President of a country, space station resort manager, not to mention CEO of a diversified company that made me a weapons dealer to countries, interstellar ship seller, and of course all the smaller inventions we sold through Amazon like entangled phones, weaker power sources for disparate personal tech, items, and even in the home.  Then there were the bio-beds working with hospitals, and fuel-less planes and cars, trucks and buses, artificial gravity lifts, and many other disparate things.  It seemed I was also a broker for Vax products, both medicines and enhancements for testing, and of course the implants that would no doubt be approved a lot quicker.

Diversified didn’t cover the reality, and I knew that was just a pale shadow of the possibilities inherent in this new human age.  Many of the merchant ships out there had already returned with other advances that would generate wealth and improve a lot of people’s lives.

One more piece of good news, the probes I’d sent out to all the G-type stars in a five hundred light year radius had found just over eight thousand living worlds, a full quarter of them were already compatible with human needs, and another fifty percent of them could be made that way over time.  No doubt, it’d take thousands of years of building populations and making new colonies before we’d fill the space, six thousand worlds with humans on it, and need to expand again, if we could do so without butting heads with another race.  In short, overpopulation wouldn’t be a problem for a long time, if anything we had the opposite problem at the moment.  That data on worlds I shared freely with the U.N. and all countries, I had no interest in starting a new world, and was quite happy with my space station nation, and protecting the birthplace of humanity.

I’d just sell more colony ships and wish them luck.

Of course, it wasn’t all roses and outstanding growth potential for this new age of humanity.  It was just three days since we’d defended against a combined ten thousand fleets, sixty million ships, whose only purpose had been the genocide of the human race.  In just three days since then, we had two point four million warships of a new class.  Actually, two days, the ships were done yesterday.  The old largest warship was the mass that equaled a quarter of the mass of my station or a colony ship.  The new one was half the mass of my station, doubled in mass, and quadrupled in weapons complement.

Our two point four million dreadnoughts had a combined number of twenty-eight point eight trillion mini-platforms.  It sounded insane, overkill beyond belief, but yet… I wondered if it’d be enough.  I’d speculated a week ago the empire had to have external enemies.  Everything I’d learned from our trading partners pointed to the Grays’ empire not expanding in over ten millennia.  There had to be a reason for that, and them bumping heads with other empires was the most obvious one.  Of course, the empire’s security wasn’t something they shared with member planets, all they told us about was the rules, and the game of genocide when a new world gained FTL.

If that was all true, then chances were the ship network I’d been on via magic five months back when all this craziness started, was just the internal fleet used to control and monitor their own empire.  It was all speculation though, and in the end it didn’t really change the facts.  The war had started, and the Grays had fired the first shot.  It was either fight back, or we could lay down and die.  Not a true choice at all.  But… it worried me, what we didn’t know could kill us.

Cassie smirked, “Stop brooding about the fate of the galaxy.  It’s not your responsibility, at least, not alone.  We have enough to worry about, taking out the enemy and protecting our little corner of it.”

She was right of course, it sounded selfish in a way, but we had to protect ourselves first.  We had a right to exist, and if a whole lot of crap happened, and civilizations died, well that was the Grays fault for being assholes in the first place.  We didn’t have the capacity to save everyone even if we wanted to, and in the end if we tried, we’d just wind up being no better than the Grays, dictating to other cultures and worlds.

Cassie was a stunning goddess, and quite probably my best friend despite the fact she was here on behalf of her ancient vampire council to keep an eye on me.  Their whole purpose there was to maintain a balance, and prevent humanity’s destruction, their food source.  That said, it didn’t mean Cassie wasn’t a wonderful woman and friend, it just meant if I ever went mad and decided to take over humanity, she’d snap my neck when I wasn’t looking.  She had long light brown hair, hazel eyes, and lightly tanned creamy skin.  She was five foot one, athletic and curvy, and she had the face of an angel.  She was one of the most beautiful women that I’d ever laid eyes on, in real life or the silver screen.  Of course, I was beyond immune to it at that point, she felt like a sister, and I was a total goner for my wife.

Cassie also took care of most of the government things, laws and such, which allowed me to focus on our business, and protecting the station, not to mention making sure the Earth had what it needed to defend itself.  Technically, the entire fleet save about a hundred ships, belonged to me.  It’d been necessary for survival, while the countries on Earth had supplied the five million or so soldiers to fly and fight them.  They’d practically gutted their armies to fill the ships.  Nothing brought together humanity and disparate nations more than genocidal aliens.  No doubt most of that would go away once the aliens were dealt with, and we could mothball most of the fleet.

Jayna said, “I don’t think he can help it, he has that whole hero complex going on.  We really aren’t responsible.  If the Grays’ enemies move in after we take them out, all we can do is defend our small bit of space.  We have enough ships for that.”

I sighed, she was right of course.  Still, I’d feel horrible if thousands of civilizations were burned as a result.  Maybe we weren’t responsible, that rested on the Grays for trying to erase us from history, but we were involved.

Jayna was my sister, and like me she had light blonde hair and ocean blue eyes.  She was toned, and a lot happier now that the station was full of people.  She went out a lot, to the clubs and resorts, I wasn’t sure if she was dating anyone at the moment though.  Unlike me, she was an elemental mage, where I’d gotten the weird power to control and understand technology.  The first and only Technomancer that I was aware of.  Still, that ability had come in more than useful.  Without both my ability and Diana’s creativity, the Earth would be nothing but a cinder right now.

Jayna was also responsible for our image, ads, and social media stuff.  Which was good, because I had no idea how to market stuff, and though I was getting better at it, I didn’t know all that much about government either.  Between Jayna and Cassie I was freed up to do what I liked doing, except on the odd occurrence when Cassie insisted that I put on a suit and give a speech, or to hold a press conference.  Fortunately, that’d only come up a few times.  Most times, I was left to do what I liked and wanted to do.  Invent, design ships, and all that.

“Yeah, I’m trying to work up unmanned defensive platforms, but it’s not a simple thing.  That would possibly free up most of the fleet, or maybe just send two million of the soldiers back to Earth.  I don’t know, that level of automation is risky, and bound to have vulnerabilities without people at the helm and responding to unexpected circumstances.”

Cassie shook her head, “It sounds like a bad idea, and might make others nervous.  They already don’t like the fact all those ships out there are yours, despite having their own soldiers serving on them.  No world leader would be pleased, because they’d know you could turn on them and take over the world in a second.  The fleet should be enough to defend, or at least wait until it’s not enough to take down the Grays.”

I nodded, “I get that.  You know I have no interest in ruling.  Hell, I don’t even want to be president of my country, but I get why I have to be.”

Jessica smirked, but didn’t say anything.

Jessica was a shifter, and my head of security for the stations police force as well as my protection detail.  She was five foot eight, a redhead with soft brown eyes, and athletically svelte in appearance.

Cassie asked, “The meeting’s going to start in five, want a coffee?”

The meeting would be more of a debrief, where the admirals of separate countries all represented in the fleet would debrief us on their plans and seek approval.  The sooner we went after the Grays the better.  No war fought defensively could ever be won, and they’d earned their comeuppance.

“Do you really have to ask?” I grinned.  I’d never turn down a cup of the god juice.

Jayna and Jessica got in on that as well.

Cassie snickered, and headed out of the command center to pick us up some coffees.  It wasn’t her job, we all took turns doing it actually, including me, president or not.

Diana wasn’t with us in the command center, she was working her own stuff as head scientist on the station, working with her teams on several different technologies.  I only knew about a few of them, the ones she was most sure would be figured out at some point, but I knew they were working on a lot of other things, some merely for the knowledge of how the universe worked that may inform a new direction and technology sometime in the future.  She actually very rarely joined us in the command center, unless there was something major going on, like an invasion.

My wife was the smartest person I’d ever met, which only made her sexier in my opinion.  She was also more beautiful to me every day.  She had shiny raven hair, bright intelligent green eyes, and an athletic tight body at five foot six.  She tended to dress down for work, even to the point of wearing glasses instead of contacts at work, so I knew it wasn’t just me that thought her beautiful, but she was incredibly attractive when she dressed up for a night out.  Our marriage of just ten days was going well, and we were trying to make a child together.  I missed her sometimes during the day, but the fact we only mostly spent evenings and nights together was probably a good thing.  Our professional lives were connected in that I designed and sold her inventions, but different enough that they didn’t really overlap at the office level.

In short, time apart was healthy for our relationship, and made us that much more eager to reconnect in our evenings.

Cassie came back in and passed out the coffees.

“Thanks.”

She winked, and then sat down and took a sip of hers.

Jayna asked, “Why difficult, the platforms I mean.”

I nodded, “Well, they’d just be a platform to hold the mini-platforms.  We’d strategically place a million or two around the inner solar system.  Defensively, they could launch a third of their missiles for a very powerful defensive array of independent mini-platforms all able to take out a missile.  Offensively, they’d be able to launch mini-platforms to take out a target, given the mini-platforms don’t have a practical range with internal power.

“Essentially, instead of using friend or foe to prevent friendly fire, and us using the humans in ships to determine the threats and lock on and fire, the platforms would do the opposite.  Everyone by default would be friend, and not to be attacked.  It’s the safest way to do it with an automated system.  Instead it would be the enemy that had to be defined as a target.  So… say we were invaded.  I’d run scans on their ships, and enter them as enemy targets, the scan definitions in general, not specific ships.  Then the system would take that data, scan their assigned areas for a ship that met the scan definition, and then launch missile attacks against the enemy automatically.  Much like our defense is currently set up as automatic to take out missile threats, it would automatically target and shoot down an enemy ship if it was defined.

“That kind of automation bothers me though, it seems safer to have a human at the firing button and running the military grade sensors.  It’s also possible if an enemy determines what we have, they can work around it.  One way is to simply use some sensor modifying field around their ships, so they all look like different ships.  At that point, I’d have to define every single one, and we’d lose platforms in the meantime.

“It also wouldn’t have worked well three days ago, since there were ten thousand different fleets, all with different scanned parameters.  It’d take me hours to enter in so many disparate readings as enemy ships to that kind of system.”

Of course, there was an option that would make that work a lot better, but I’d be insane to try it.  A.I. was just a terrifying idea.

Jayna shrugged, “Maybe as a primary system it would be beatable.  But, a few million platforms, in addition to say a fleet of two hundred thousand or so ships crewed by human soldiers on Earth.  I mean, when most of the fleet is mothballed after the current war.  Those humans could enter targets too, making it far more effective.  They’d also be able to help counter any weaknesses discovered.”

“That’s not a bad idea.  But the other one point two million ships would become the platforms.  Perhaps I’d double them, maybe more, and park them in a strategic web around the solar system.  It might also get past Cassie’s objections.  Of course, our ships, and the planet, would be hardcoded as not an enemy, so some idiot couldn’t add them on accident, or a maniac on purpose.”

Jessica snickered.

Cassie smirked, “I think they’d go for that, if their soldiers had access to the system.  Still, will we even need it once the Grays are gone?  Just one of our ships could take down a fleet of any other race in the Empire.  We could just put a couple of thousand ships in each of the nine solar systems, and then mothball the rest for future expansion to those worlds we’ll expand to eventually.”

I nodded, “It’s not the empire members I’m worried about.  It’s the Grays’ enemies outside the empire that concern me.  There has to be some, or they’d have expanded, and we know nothing about them or their capabilities, outside the fact they’ll be a match for the Grays’ technology and weapons.  Maybe I’m overreacting, but it isn’t like it cost us any money to build ships, and without crews it doesn’t cost Earth money to supply food and bodies.  It’s… just an option, in case we need it I want to have it ready to go.”

Jayna said, “But you’re worried we won’t get enough warning to build it.”

I sighed, “Yes, that one.  We’re balancing politics and balance of power issues against possible eradication.  Still, it’s not as bad of a gamble, because we’re only two point five million light years from the center of the Grays vast empire.  Word will reach us of external invasion in plenty of time to build appropriately, and though that’s a gamble it’s not a horrible one.”

Cassie nodded, “Exactly.  Times up though, we have a meeting to attend.  Jessica?”

Jessica nodded, and brought up the connection to the command center for the joint space navy on Earth.  It wasn’t anything official, no treaties, the countries normally at each other’s throats or in competition had started to come together.

I thought it was temporary due to the threat, but maybe not.  With two thousand ready to move in worlds, and four thousand more we can develop, we wouldn’t be fighting each other for resources anytime soon.  Outside threats weren’t going away either, and life would only get better with life extension, as well as cures for diseases and other illnesses which will shortly be a thing of the past.  Even our ability to deal with trauma, heal nerve damage, and make the paralyzed walk, not to mention genetic problems that could be fixed.

Maybe the world would grow up after all, given all that, and cooperate.

I held back a snort.  Maybe the sun would rise in the west tomorrow, I really was naïve sometimes.  I wasn’t greedy to rule and compete against other countries, but then I’d gained power and my station out of necessity.  It’d been either that, or lay down and die, and being content with what I had and what was coming wasn’t something most ambitious politicians would feel.

Point being, I didn’t think I was better than most humans, I just thought I was more moral with my power than most politicians.  Granted, that was a low bar to reach…

Chapter Two

“Good morning.  I’m Admiral Dennison, and I have been chosen to make a presentation of the war plan we’ve mapped out to ensure the Earth’s safety.  One we have all agreed on, despite our pasts of being at odds, and we all hope our leaders will give the final approval.”

Dennison paused for a moment, and he looked at the other Admirals and even some Generals from around the world in the room, who all nodded at him in agreement.  It was a statement to their leaders that took me by surprise, and that I applauded, at least, in my mind.

Dennison said, “First, the general overall plan.  We plan to leave one point four million of the ships behind, just in case Earth is attacked while we’re away.  The offensive force of one million dreadnought class ships will split into two thousand fleets of five hundred dreadnoughts.  That will enable us to take down two thousand planets at once, meaning it will take twenty-five fleet actions to finish off the Grays in Andromeda, given their fifty thousand planets.

“Given the timeline of ten hours in and out, and perhaps a day to accomplish our objectives, that means the war will last fifty days.  Our intentions are not genocide.  We will destroy all technical infrastructure, both in the solar systems and on the planet.  Essentially, we are going to return the bastards to the stone age.  They will have to relearn their technology the hard way, and most of them will die in their cities when we remove them from orbit.  We hope you agree, genocide is not an option we feel comfortable with.  They have done it to others, and they no doubt deserve it, but we’re better than they are, and they won’t be a threat again for many millennia, if even then.”

He frowned, “Besides, it’s likely one of the other races will finish the job for us.  We also won’t protect them.”

He continued, “That’s the general strategy for all worlds, save six.  According to the data on the enemy that was provided to us by President Akin of Astraeus, those systems have between a thousand and two thousand warships in them, when the rest of the worlds have a few handfuls for defense, less than fifty.  Those six worlds we’ll be invading and staying for a while.  We suspect one of them is likely the original home world of the species, and no doubt has a lot of data on both their history and thousands of years of technical advancements.  We also believe if they have more ships and command centers than the internal empire fleet, we’ll find those control centers on one of these six worlds.

“Many agree with the concerns brought to light that the Grays have external enemies that they have not shared with their member worlds.  In fact, the Grays really don’t tell us anything, outside of their restrictive rules and where all the other FTL species are.  No doubt to keep us in the dark, which kept them safer, until they decided to come after us anyway.

“Point being, we’ll be taking out their fleets in those systems, and then searching those planets for military sites to investigate.  If we find such a command center, we’ll utilize the equipment given to us by President Akin that will infiltrate their systems, download their data, and even show us all the locations of their current fleet, and or other fleets if they indeed exist.

“I hate to say it, but there has to be other fleets, the ship numbers we believe they have aren’t near enough to protect fifty galaxies from other expansionist empires.  There’s a small chance of course, that we’re wrong, and the Grays stopped expanding for another reason, but the risk is too high to ignore the possibility, and we need that intelligence at all costs.

“At best, we will discover the Grays’ enemies, their total fleet numbers, where they’re stationed, and where those enemies are and what their technology is like, etc.  At worst, even if we’re wrong about all that and I don’t think we are, we’ll find a lot of technical data and millennia of history to go through and learn from.

“Regardless, that’s our justification.  We’re asking for six hundred thousand ground troops to secure government installations on the surface.  First, we’ll take out the fleets in their system, then take out all infrastructure.  We’ll find the likely military structures on the surface.  Once it’s all secure, and safe enough, we’ll send for the troops, and we want one troop ship with a hundred thousand ground troops at each planet.  It’d be far too risky to bring so many human soldiers with us for the battle in space itself.

“The occupation of those six worlds will be long term.  What I mean is we’ll be staying and securing any command and control centers until we’re finished hunting down all warships and the five million or so scout ships.  Basically, using their systems against them so they can’t escape.  As I said, that should take somewhere around fifty days, perhaps sixty, with a million ships split up into two thousand fleets of five hundred.

“That’s the meat of the plan, and the presentation.  Obviously, the details are in the report, the logistics of it all, the food we’ll need to outfit the ships with for three months to give us leeway.  I don’t expect it will go quite so smoothly, and we’ll no doubt have to adjust the plan after the enemy’s tactics become apparent.”

One of the leaders on the call asked, “What if they surrender?”

The admiral nodded, “We won’t be accepting surrender for the most part.  They already tried to commit genocide on us twice, and they have done so countless times before to other civilizations.  They simply can’t be trusted.  That means surrender to them is saying to us, give us some time to catch up on your technological edge so we can kill you later.  That is just not an option.

“Now I say for the most part, because they might present us with evidence of their enemies, or some other reason, that would drive us into a temporary cease fire until we can assure ourselves we aren’t shooting ourselves in the foot at the same time we’re saving ourselves.  In blunt terms, we’ll be pausing before we’re in a better position, much like they’d be trying to do.  We simply can’t trust them, at this point it’s either them or us, we can’t afford to be gracious, and give them the time to close the military superiority gap.

“We will also accept surrender with conditions.  If they agree to scuttle their ships and leave their cities, we can send them back to the stone age with a minimum of casualties.  But, we don’t think that will happen.

“That doesn’t make us like them though, I hope we plan to live in peace with all other species, and not in paranoia that they’ll destroy us the first chance they get.  But those that attack us first, and have previously committed genocide, we can never trust them.”

The device he was talking about me giving them was just a tiny group of nanites that were entangled with the station.  If they put it on a console in a command center, I could hack the command center with magic, and give the troops there on site permissions to view the ship locations and the ship counts.  I could also forward that data on to the world leaders and the joint admirals in the Earth’s joint command center.

Of course, I’d be using magic to do the hacking part, but they didn’t know that, they thought I was just amazingly good with technology, even if none of their scientists could hack the nanite tech.  It was also why the soldiers and six fleets needed to stay on and by those six worlds, to protect that access.  Otherwise someone on the planet could destroy it, allowing some of their fleets to escape and start over somewhere else.  The last thing we needed was for them to return one day to take their revenge.  Their fault or not, they surely wouldn’t see it that way.

I’d also furnish the soldiers with protective suits like the one for my security people, and friends.  Not on Earth, because of the whole balance of power thing, but on an alien planet?  Our soldiers wearing shielded suits with built in energy weapons and the ability to fly down and back up to the ship in orbit would preserve lives.  Well, human lives.

In all, I thought the plan well thought out, and it was general enough in scope that we could adjust quickly if necessary.  Simple plans were more often than not, the best kind of plans.  Elaborate plans tended to fall apart quickly, given the enemy got a vote as well.  We just had better weapons, thanks to the sexiest scientist ever.  But that was just my opinion, the sexiest part I mean.

There were a few other questions, but in the end all the world leaders approved the plan as was.  They’d be moving out the next day with the fleets in question, and ten hours after that they’d be on their way to Andromeda.  With wormholes, that’d only take about an hour.

I hoped it went well, and of course I’d be monitoring as I did my normal jobs of ruling and designing new things to sell, from toys to deadly ships and weapons.  After all, they were my ships, and all connected to my space station.

We’d also let all the other races know when it was done.  It might take a long time for the races to build one of those communicators Diana invented that didn’t need entangled particles, but at the very least we’d be able to pass messages thought he Vax until that happened.  An intergalactic grapevine of sorts, that would eventually get the information all across the empire.

Maybe one day we’d be a conglomerate of treaty allies, but I wasn’t sure about that one either.  Probably too optimistic, but if we shot for the stars maybe we’d at least reach the sky, proverbially speaking.

Chapter Three

Diana and Jayna were already in the kitchen when Cassie and I called it a day.  I gave the former a hug and light kiss, and held her for a moment, just long enough to make her blush given our audience.  It’d been a long day, but I’d made some progress on the automated defense platform idea.

I gave my sister a curious glance as I released Diana.

Jayna was holding a thin curved sword with an amazed look on her face.  Her magic was out too, as she studied the thing.  Another thing I noticed was a new tablecloth and linen napkins, as well as crystal vase with a rose in it.

“What’s going on.”

They both looked a bit dazed and deep in thought as they looked over at me.

Jayna said, “This sword feels forged to my magic, folded many times, and tempered.  It didn’t exist half an hour ago.”

Diana said, “I cracked it, about two hours ago.  Not just creating matter but bonding it.  The vase, tablecloth, and linens are new too.”

“The Rose?”

Diana shook her head, “We could make one, but it’d be dead, without support systems of some kind I mean.”

I sighed, “We need to make this top secret, and use it sparingly.  The world isn’t ready for this.”

Diana tilted her head, “Why?”

I frowned in thought.

“For me and you it’d be fine.  There’s a whole lot more mysteries to the universe for you to discover, and for me protecting the Earth will never get old.  Think of all the billions we’ve made since opening the station, and all the things we sell.  Outside of designing things, there’s no real effort put into it, almost all the labor is in invention and design.  That’s it.  The ships build themselves.  Both of those things give us a purpose and meaning to our efforts.  Even the people on the station, they find value in service and giving tours, things like that give meaning to what we do as humans.

“That new technology takes it a step further, and in one way it’s a good thing.  You just made our station one hundred percent independent, we can make anything we have the pattern for.  If sometime in the future we’re ever cut off from Earth for any reason, it would no longer be a concern.”

I shrugged, “On Earth, there are inventors and service people as well.  I think if this went public and was used in the mainstream those people would be fine too, find purpose and meaning in life.  But, a whole lot of people on Earth find purpose in manufacturing jobs, things of that nature, which quite frankly would be done away with given the technology.

“Back to the money.  The whole economy revolves around labor, production, and assigning value to something when it’s made based on all those factors.  That’s why I think we should continue to import things, balance our exports which aren’t really costing us a thing already.  It’s why we’re so rich right now, and the station is so far ahead that way, because making ships, biomed beds, and the other devices we sell on Earth doesn’t really cost us a thing.

“It almost feels like cheating in a way, and it has no value.  Even dealing with the Vax, it doesn’t cost us anything to install a wormhole drive, and then we turn around and sell the Vax products to Earth for something they’ve made.  If it wasn’t for keeping the station safe, protecting Earth, and designing things to make, I wouldn’t feel useful at all.

“Just creating things out of thin air would remove their value.  It would also destroy our society for up to ninety percent of the people on Earth.  It’s the whole no one values something if it’s free.  Economics also ties us all together.  With that technology the merchants could just go out in space and buy one of everything humans could be interested in from alien traders, scan in a pattern, and start spitting them out of an energy to matter device.

“I’m not sure if I’m explaining it well.  What it comes down to is if everything was free or of little value, it would destroy us and our civilization would collapse.  Or at least, those of us who don’t find purpose and meaning elsewhere, like inventors, scientists, designers, authors, and the service industry types.  The connections we make from trade are also valuable in and of themselves.  If we’d had this technology, and we’d brushed off the Vax and started pirating their stuff, Earth would be a ball of fire right now.  We wouldn’t have gotten advanced warning from Threx, if we hadn’t dealt with them so well.

“To extend the economic part even further, the whole galaxy seems to be set up that way.  On the face of it, it seems like a selfish decision to keep it to ourselves, but it really isn’t.  Before the world is ready for something like this, it will require a whole shift in thinking and in what makes a person useful and gives meaning to their lives.”

Jayna said, “It does seem selfish, this could solve a lot of problems.”

I shrugged, “It would cause more problems than it fixed.  The station is pretty much bare metal.  Everything else is imports.  The furniture makers, towels, toothbrush and toothpaste, combs, brushes, beds, sheets, bedspreads, and so much more, too many things to list.  All those people would lose their livelihood if we set up factories in space that did nothing but make things out of the universe’s energy all day long.”

Cassie said, “He’s right.  We need to be careful with it, and release it slowly.  The Earth is already turbulent enough right now, with natural gas, oil, gasoline, jet fuel, nuclear power, hydro-electric, and other things that are already starting to be phased out.  We have a lot of manufacturers switching over to our low energy power cells, not to mention they’re selling thousands a day on Amazon as people use them to lower their electricity costs.  Then there’s the electric companies, line workers, and all that.  Point being, the world is already in flux, and trying to find itself.  The energy to matter device working for anything will put billions of people out of a job.  Not everyone can be a scientist, inventor, designer, or in some other kind of service industry to find meaning in their life.  That kind of sweeping change will have to happen in degrees.  Eventually, humans would adjust, will adjust.”

Diana said, “I see it.  Colonizing would be a thing that changes things as well.  We’ll just have to move slowly on it.  So I should cancel that gold toilet seat?”

I snickered, and she winked.  Then I felt immediately guilty.

“It’s an amazing thing, my love.  I’m sorry, I should’ve been congratulating you, not giving a damned lecture.  You are a goddess among scientists.  We just have to figure out how to shift societal expectations, measures of personal worth, and economic realities, all three of which alone would be devastating in the short term.”

Cassie smirked, “On to more important things, what’s for dinner.”

Diana made a guilty face, “Pizza, it’s almost done.”

Cassie and I looked at the oven, and it wasn’t on, but now that she’d said it, I could smell the cheese and sauce.

I snickered, she was using the energy to matter device to make pizza…

The fleets were in transit, and they would be in Andromeda in about ten more minutes.  It was three days later, and I took a long sip of my coffee.  The last three days had moved quickly, or so it seemed to me, and I’d finally finished the software and targeting parameters for unmanned defensive platforms.

I had to admit, I was a bit nervous, it was the start of an intergalactic war, which was hard to even comprehend at times.  The scale of it I mean.  We were in a fight for our very existence, a fight which could spark tragedy, war, and horrors for many civilizations if things went badly.  It almost seemed insane, one planet in the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy was going to take down an Empire spanning fifty thousand worlds in their home galaxy and forty nine more galaxies filled with controlled alien worlds?

Yet, we did retain the technological edge now, thanks to some brilliant scientists and the Grays foolish move of giving us their technology to begin with.

Two thousand fleets of five hundred dreadnought class ships, two thousand worlds at a time.  I just worried what the Grays had up their sleeves.  Our fleet was limited to the number of people that could fly them, that was my biggest worry.  Replacing hardware losses wasn’t even on my radar.

Cassie said, “Relax.  We’ll find out soon enough, and we’ll adjust.”

I nodded, and then took a sip of coffee.

“Anything else going on?”

Cassie shrugged, “A sixth resort, even if the fourth and fifth aren’t ready yet.  We’ve also had a lot of requests for immigration, mostly from entrepreneurs who will open businesses in the city proper.  They’ll sell to each other and the tourists as our city and country expands.  We still have a long way to go to fill up that first level, a very long way considering it’s several times the square footage of Manhattan.”

I nodded, we had several levels too, only a couple of them were automated farms.

Jessica smirked, “My security force is expanding as well.  I suspect the lack of taxes has a lot to do with it.”

Cassie grinned, “No doubt.”

The ships dropped out of their wormholes, and they immediately started to move in the two thousand systems.  They hadn’t gotten very far, when on the six core planets a large enemy fleet appeared and opened fire, well within energy range.  A couple of the ships managed to deploy some missiles, but not nearly enough given the size of the enemy fleets.

Three thousand ships and six thousand people were destroyed very quickly, seconds really.  Only a handful of the enemy ships were destroyed in return.  I checked the command table reports, and there was a fleet of one million enemy ships at each of the six worlds, which immediately left via wormhole, but I suspected they didn’t go far.

The other nine hundred and ninety-seven thousand ships met no surprise resistance on their one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-four worlds, and as they moved deeper into the system, I started to relax a little.  Without access to FTL, there’s no way an enemy ship could simply appear in energy range, which made it relatively safe.

They fired an overwhelming number of mini-platforms at the small protection fleets in those solar systems, so long before the enemy would be in range to return fire, they’d be destroyed.  At six hundred gravities, and with five A.U. to cross, the mini-platforms quickly outdistanced the fleet.  The mini-platforms would be reclaimed, so it wasn’t a waste to use overkill to get the job done.

I sighed, “I was afraid something like that might happen.”

Cassie patted my shoulder, “There’s always a price in blood for war.  This time, the price is for our very existence as a species, and worth the cost.”

I frowned, but I also nodded in agreement.  She wasn’t wrong, but it was easy to say it when we were safely in the Sol system on our station.  But… I gave them the tools, and contributed in that way, I wasn’t a soldier.  Still, if the opportunity came up to address it by helping them in some way, I wouldn’t hesitate.

The admirals in the command center on Earth started to discuss contingencies, and what, if anything, could be done against the six million ships that would no doubt be stalking their fleet during the missions.  For the moment, they decided to ignore the core planets, and see if the fleets showed up to defend any other systems.  Depending on what the aliens did, they may just leave the core planets for last.

In short, it was decided those six million ships were from the external fleet or fleets, and that it also couldn’t possibly be all of them.  They’d have left most of their ships on the borders of their external enemies, or at least that was the guess.  We had no way to know, it was all speculation.  It was better to wait for the moment, than risk the entire fleet on six to one odds.

We got somewhat of an answer on what we might expect a little less than two days later.

Six of the fleets leaving the worlds they’d beaten back to the stone age were ambushed right before they reached the FTL line, and they were blasted at point blank range by a hundred thousand ships, each.  A tenth of the fleets that’d shown up.  The rest of our ships went to the next set of planets, and they headed in again without issue.

I monitored the meeting that followed, and I imagined several other heads of state did too.

An admiral noted, “If they keep this up, after twenty-five systems we’ll have lost seventy-five thousand ships.  A tragedy yes, the loss of life.  On the other hand, it’s less than a one percent casualty rate, which is unheard of in a single battle, much less fifty thousand of them.  Does anyone disagree?”

Another said, “It seems clear their primary purpose is to lurk near the six core worlds.  No doubt the other nine hundred thousand ships in those enemy fleets stayed stationed close by the core worlds in case we went after them again.  At some point, they’ll adjust, as they lose their worlds.  Surely they won’t keep taking pot shots at us as we destroy forty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-four worlds.”

Someone else nodded, “Agreed.  They can’t be that stupid.  Eventually, someone will knock some sense into their emperor, or the government, and they’ll send three thousand ships against our five hundred, as we move out of the system.  We’ll hurt them yes, but in that scenario we’ll lose the whole fleet.  The question is how long do we have before that’ll happen?”

The first admiral that spoke said, “We should launch all missiles on system egress.  Open wormholes, then reclaim the missiles as we enter them.  Five hundred ships equals six billion missiles, ermm, mini-platforms.  Six billion energy beams would shred their fleet if it showed up.”

There was silence for a moment as they all considered that idea.

Another said, “That will only work once, then the enemy will adjust, and we’d have only taken out a tenth of their hunting ships.  If we do that, we should go after the core worlds again at the same time.  Send a thousand ships to each, twelve billion mini-platform launch immediately.  It took the aliens almost two minutes to respond and arrive.  That way we take care of all six of their fleets in one operation.  We’ll probably lose some ships, but not even close to half, and we’ll have enough ships left to scrub the system and call in the ground force.”

Another admiral shook his head, “If we do that, they’ll recall all their ships from the border.  We have to assume those six million represents at most twenty five percent of their fleet strength, maybe less.  It’s what we would do, let the empire burn to consolidate the defenses in the center and put down the pesky humans, then we can rebuild and reclaim the rest later.  They’re fighting for their survival as well, they just haven’t given up on holding their entire empire yet.”

“Agreed,” stated another, “That means accepting our losses for now?  At some point they’ll adapt, and we’ll lose the fleet.  We don’t want to be shot sitting on the pot.  I say we go with the plan, but instead attack the core worlds with a hundred thousand each.  That’s twelve trillion defense platforms, at that point let them recall the fleet.  It won’t matter, we’ll kick their ass.”

One said with irony, “And be invaded by who knows how many other mega multigalactic-empires?”

There were looks of consternation, one said, “That’s not our responsibility, we just need to protect our worlds.”

He wasn’t wrong, but even if we could withstand unknown invaders, I doubted any other civilizations would survive intact.  They’d either be under a similar rule, destroyed outright, or perhaps enslaved in some way.  Put that way… the Grays empire could be a lot worse I supposed.  We’d also be cut off from all those other wonderful breakthroughs and trading opportunities.

My idea was audacious, and probably stupid.

I said, “Admirals and Generals, this is President Akin.”

An admiral said, “What is it, I assume you have a suggestion?”

I sighed, “Give me a week, and I can make enough defense platform ships to replace the fleets on the Grays’ border.  It’d still be a risk, we won’t know what we’re defending against until we steal the data repositories of knowledge, history, and technology from the core worlds.  But what I’m thinking is this.

“The six fleets of a million enemy ships are likely sub-fleets from different external fleets.  Follow the last plan you came up with, but instead of destroying all the ships, take one down using energy beams, but leave enough of it left to fire a hacking missile.  If I can get into their data, I’ll be able to see the rest of their fleets, and where they’re stationed.

“I send the platforms, and destroy the rest of their fleets, then leave the platforms there facing an unknown enemy.  Then once the core world mission is done, we should know a lot about those enemies.  It may not be our responsibility, but we already have a few friends out there, and if we can do it we should.”

An admiral frowned, “I read the paper for your platforms.  It was my understanding they’d be solitary platforms that would take programming to fight a new enemy.”

I nodded, “They’re hard coded to not attack any of our assets or planets, and as they’d all be connected to my station they’d know for sure which ships were ours.  I set it up not to fire against anyone by default through software, enemies need to be specified by sensor data.  That way they don’t start shooting at any merchant or future allies that might come for a visit.  It’s just safer that way, it’ll take a warm body with mind and judgement to declare a ship type an enemy, then they’ll defend.  That kind of thing in our solar system is important, if we want to avoid accidental friendly fire.

“However, out by the border… I imagine that’s in the void, right outside a galaxy that’s under threat in that direction.  Kind of like a big kick me sign to other empires, if you want to invade you better take us out first.  A don’t leave an enemy behind you type of thing.”

That’s why we needed the exact coordinates of the Grays fleets.  Space is way too big otherwise, we needed to be in the same spot so the enemy empires would see them.  No doubt they watched the Gray fleets, and they no doubt had similar ones on the border the Grays kept an eye on.  Kind of like a inter-galactic stand-off.

“We can just program those platforms to destroy anything that isn’t ours, safely enough.  Once we get the data we need, we can update that, but for taking out the Grays fleets, and maintaining a presence against watching invaders, it should do the job.  Even if it does fail, I’ll feel better knowing I made the effort, and we can still turtle up in our shell, and only watch our own planets and humanity if the worst comes to pass.”

Really, it was exactly that.  Just to make me feel better about it if it failed, at least I’d tried.  Technically I supposed, by doing that, and defending fifty galaxies, we’d be in essence declaring the Grays empire ours.  But of course, in reality I wanted nothing to do with that.  I was fine with maintaining our community fence, and in dealing with them all as equals.

The admiral said, “Just to be clear, you want us to hold the course for a week, and allow… nine thousand more ships to be destroyed.”

I frowned, but nodded, “It’s unfortunate, but chances are that the enemy won’t adjust that fast, that’s only about six thousand planets, out of fifty thousand.  It will also ensure we’re not only ready to take out the ambush fleets, but the nine hundred thousand ships for each core world with three fifths of the fleet, and we’ll be ready to immediately move on the border fleets and take over their job as soon as I get the intel.  Like the admiral said earlier, it’ll only work once, so let’s do all three at once.  That said, it’s up to you, I won’t push my agenda or ideas, just giving you all a new option to address the last objection given.  Either way though, I’m going to build those platforms to put on the borders in lieu of the fleets already there.  If we can stand off other empires that easily, and focus most of our energy on dealing with our local neighbors, it’s worth doing.”

I went ahead and did it.  The process was all defined and set up, I just had to specify numbers.  The one point four million ship fleet at home split in half.  Both halves would grow back into a dreadnought within two days, a little less actually.  I moved the new platforms out, they’d take just ten hours to get to FTL, then go to the void between systems, so they’d be ready to wormhole out to the borders and wherever else they might be needed in seconds, once I had the information I needed.

Of course, more importantly perhaps, they’d be in a place the enemy couldn’t find them, or see exactly what I was doing, when I split them all thirty-two more times.  Just in case they somehow had eyes on our solar system, even if it was doubtful why take the chance.  That’s why a week, it’d take another five days to build them up to large warship size, and two more to build them to dreadnought size, but with forty-five million large platform warships that could most likely wait until after the battle.

However many of them that weren’t needed on the border, I’d split up between the Earth and the eight colonies, as long as the colony governments allowed it.  I wouldn’t force them on it, a lot of them hadn’t wanted me to have eyes, ears, or any kind of control in their space.  That might have changed with the threats the universe had to offer, but perhaps not.

Honestly, it was probably overkill.  But in truth, we had no way to know how much of their outer fleets the six million ships made up.  If it was only ten percent, then I’d be fifteen million short.  If it was anything below twenty one percent, I wouldn’t have numbers parity, but that was probably fine too, as long as I wasn’t too far below their true numbers.

An admiral said, “If we go with that and guess wrong, we’ll lose the whole fleet if they adjust faster than a week.”

Another suggested, “We could suspend operations, or stagger our exits.  That second one is probably better, suspension might make them change even sooner.  If they make a big adjustment, the rest can launch cover missiles and we go for the core worlds immediately, regardless of the platforms readiness we won’t have a choice at that point.  That would somewhat cover us from losing the whole fleet.”

All of them shared glances, it looked like we had a plan.  They spent several more hours refining it and setting it up so it was ready to go once the word was given.  Six hundred thousand ships were assigned to the core world mission, which was scheduled for a week but could be launched at a moment’s notice if the enemy switched things up.

I closed my eyes, and I blew out a breath when the meeting finished up.

Jayna smirked, “Hero complex, now he wants to protect fifty galaxies from the big bad aliens.”

Cassie and Jessica giggle-snickered.

“Bite me,” I noted, and then I utilized the appropriate sign language.

Cassie sighed and looked at my neck longingly, “I am rather famished,” then laughed when I shot her a mock alarmed look.

Damned vampires.

Of course, she wasn’t wrong, but on the other hand it was always better not to fight an enemy on your own territory.  If the old empire got invaded, so would we be, might as well maintain the current border and hope it works.

Chapter Four

The next morning the conference room held eighteen people.  Cassie and I sat at the head of the table, and there were two representatives from the eight countries with colonies.  Or at least, with colony ships currently hiding in the void of space until the war was either won or lost.  Tentatively I knew the meeting was called about the new platform technology, but I wasn’t sure what about it they wanted to talk about.

Some of them were familiar from last time.

“Good morning.  I understand we’re here about the new unmanned defensive platforms, what can I do for you all?”

The American General, Major General Holtz, answered.

“At the time, the thirty ships that came with the colony package seemed like more than enough.  Many of us didn’t buy extras simply because that means putting more military men and supplies on ships, which puts more of a burden of support on a new colony just starting out.  Given what’s going on now, a fleet of thirty ships hardly seems enough.  Especially with the growing certainty there are expansionist empires surrounding us that are a match for the Grays, even if we don’t know how many yet.

“In addition to being older ships with the old reactors, not having the latest weaponry makes it even worse.  In short, we’d like to get those upgraded, and we’d like to purchase a thousand unmanned defense platforms to complement the fleet of thirty.  We don’t want your platforms, we want exclusive control of our military in our colony space.”

I nodded and looked around the table, “All of you want the same package?  Outside of the grays, those numbers should be more than sufficient to secure your space against any of our alien neighbors should the need arise.”

They all nodded, and the representative from England said, “That might sound weird, since it isn’t often we all agree, but we all took the problem to our top admirals who have already been working together on the war, and those are the numbers they came up with together, and our leaders approved.”

Ah, that explained it.  A rare joint output from a time when all the countries were working in the same direction.

I said, “The first part can be accomplished by an upgrade device.  Obviously, I have no connection whatsoever to your colony ships with them disconnected.  I can design a small block of nanites that will perform an upgrade, it will have to be delivered physically to the ship.  It will update the software and create enough of the updated nanites to support our distributed nanite power system and update your systems, then shut down the old reactors and put them in a storage room.  Even if you’ve already launched your fleet, it will use the command and control interface from your colony ship to your fleet to update your fleet ships as well.”

I paused for a second, to make sure they were following me.  A couple of them looked suspicious, like I did have a connection and was only going through the motions.  I managed not to roll my eyes or even respond to those doubts.

“There’s a couple of different ways we can take care of the platform issue.  I can include that in the upgrade package as well.  The colony ship will spin out a thousand tiny platforms, which will then build themselves over the course of about five weeks.  It’ll be starting out very small, which is why it’ll take that long.  The build process occurs at a geometric rate.  Once they’re built, all command and control will be on the colony ship, which will eventually become your command and control space station in orbit of your planets.”

I paused again, but there weren’t any comments or questions.

“The second way.  At the end of the war I suspect I’ll have a lot of fully built platforms and ships we just won’t need anymore.  Given all the worlds now available for colonization, I’ve anticipated a need for more colony ships.  Every two unused platforms can be combined to build a single colony ship quite quickly, and I suspect demand won’t even scratch the surface of the resources I have left over.  Which by the way, will use this secondary process as well, since I won’t be connected to those ships either, their star systems will be theirs to protect, just as yours are.  Point is, I already have something ready to show you because of that anticipation and the work I already did to set up for it”

I pointed, and a small piece of the wall seemed to melt and flow.  A six-inch by six-inch cube flew out of the wall, and then hovered in the room over the table.

“This little device is just a small container of nanites, inside the container are the extracted entangled particles that connects my station to one of the platforms I’m currently building.  In short, I can send a thousand of these along with the platforms themselves.  Then your colony ships can absorb them, and immediately take over command and control of them.  Think of it as a transfer of ownership, I’d no longer be able to control them or even see them.  The advantage to this route is obvious, there’d be no build time, and your solar systems would be well defended before you even set foot on the planet.  Just in case.”

The device flew back over and melted into the wall.

“I’ll leave it up to you how I do it, just let me know before the war is over.  Part of the upgrade will also include the new unentangled quantum communications device.  It will be useful because of all the new colonies going up, not just for alien communications when the trading races start building them to talk to us and each other.  Eventually we’ll have hundreds, and then thousands of colonies.  It’s much more efficient than trading increasingly large numbers of quantum entangled particles for communications between Earth’s worlds.  Unless you object of course, it’s a free upgrade.  Entangled particles of course, will still be a thing, for direct connections to your country on Earth, fleet operations, and leadership.  But the extra will allow you to call for aid, or respond to it, if the situation ever came up.”

Holtz narrowed his eyes, “Respond?”  As if to say, how the hell could we respond?

I nodded slowly, not sure how to even say it without making him feel like an idiot.

“I thought that would be obvious, admiral.  We’re no longer under the heel of the Grays, and we’re at war.  Their rules no longer exist for us.  I’d hope with thousands of unclaimed worlds, and many more resource systems, we wouldn’t go out and conquer systems, but the wormhole drive limitation will be removed from your fleet of warships as well as part of the upgrade.  The only remaining constraints in the software will be against attacking a human ship or world.”

The Russian Colonel said, “The second option is acceptable to us, since it increases our security immediately.  Could you tell us about this probe system you have?”

I nodded, “They’re highly visible, on purpose, and about the size of two mini-platforms combined.  They’re more a simple claim marker than anything else, to keep an eye on all the G-type systems within five hundred light years of Earth in every direction.  They will transmit a claim and warning to any ship entering the system, to let any aliens exploring know it’s ours.  Once a system is claimed by one of the countries on Earth, and a colony moves in, that probe will be removed since the colony fleet can handle that part of things, it won’t be necessary anymore.  The joint command center on Earth has full access to that system, if one is destroyed or ignored, I won’t be taking unilateral action on behalf of Earth’s empire, if that’s your worry.”

Holtz asked, “We’ve gotten a little bit off subject, anything else in the upgrades?”

I said, “Small things.  The nanite power systems… there are trillions of trillions of nanites in a large warship, and it takes millions of the reactor sized nanites to power it.  Part of the ship upgrades for the new ships is no more need for small and separate discrete power sources for in atmosphere ships.  The shuttles for instance, will power down most of its nanites, and just leave enough on to power minimal flight systems, so power management is more robust, and still safe in atmosphere.  In fact, if the nanites overloaded, it would destroy the shuttle but nothing around it, or even blow out past the hull.

“Included in that is the farming equipment included in the colony ship package.  The combines, threshers, and all that, will be nanite powered on the surface for farming.  Which means no messing with power sources, pretty much until the universe itself dies.  Construction equipment, power tools, all of it will run on one or two nanites depending on its needs.  Since their made of nanites, they’re self-repairing, blades will sharpen themselves, bits will never grow dull, you get the point.

“It’s a little self-serving of me to suggest, but as long as your starting out from scratch I’d suggest not even bothering to build a power infrastructure, and use my technologies to discreetly power everything, from flying cars and buses, to aircraft, to the laptop and lamp on the end table in your living room, and the phone in your pocket.  There’s no point in building an infrastructure that will just add pain when you eventually upgrade anyway, the current turmoil on Earth with the new technologies are proof of that.”

Holtz said, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

I laughed, “Absolutely, I am a salesman after all.”

Holtz smirked, “It actually has been discussed, the only real infrastructure we need to bother with is water and sewage, with the new technology available.  The problem is the manufacturers are in the midst of upgrading all their stuff now, which won’t help us in the short run.  We’re counting on them being ready and in production in about six months, when we make that second trip, in the modified second stage colony ship.”

Right, in short the United States was still pissed at me, even if they had to play nice at this point.  They weren’t about to buy my discreet power supply plugs, where the old stuff could just be plugged into a small power box to leverage older lamps, stoves, and equipment.  Whatever, if they wanted to shoot themselves in the foot out of spite that was fine with me.

Still, that might work.  If they just build houses and water and sewage infrastructure, beds, farms with my powered equipment as part of the colony ship package.  Then they can pick up everything else later.  Still, they’d need some kind of interim solution for the few million people going in the first leg, unless they planned to stay on the ship the whole time?  Well, it was none of my business, it was their colony and colonization plan, and I’d still be getting paid a royalty from those manufacturers, so it was all good to me.

“I think that was it.  Upgraded warships and weapons, platforms, upgraded devices on the colony ship, and the new communication system.  All that’s left is for your governments to inform me which option to go with on the platforms.”

The meeting broke up after that, and I suspected they’d take option two, but in the end I didn’t really care either way.

Threx and I nodded in greeting, it was a thing.

It was later that same day, close to quitting time actually.  To my surprise the countries had all agreed to take receipt of the entangled particles in nanite delivery systems for their platforms.  That would be easy enough to do, I already had the programming for it automated, all I had to do was select the thousand platforms and they’d be packaged up for delivery.  I’d had it set up for the expected new thirty-two colony ships already.  It was all ready to implement, once the war was over.

“Threx, it’s good to hear from you,” I said, he’d called me.

Threx replied, “It is good to see that you’re still with us.  I hope things are well?”

I nodded, “The war proceeds, only time will tell the cost.”

He said, “My brother-in-law Dex, and my sister Serie have been pestering me about the wormhole drive.  I was wondering if you would be open to more trading at this time?”

Yup, nepotism was definitely alive and well in the Vax, at least in their merchants.

“Ten million AR implants, for the drive.”

Threx asked, “Ten million?”

I nodded, “Just a drop in the bucket.  We’ll need many hundreds of times that eventually, once they’re approved for use.  It seems prudent to have a large stock against that release day.  Many humans on Earth will want them to replace their phones and other personal electronic devices, and there’s almost eight billion of us.  The genetic therapies will be even more popular I bet, but those will take a decade to get approved.”

Threx nodded thoughtfully, “That’s ten times as many as last time.”

I replied, “We were in a tight spot, and needed you to pass along that data, which held far more value for us.  It was for that service, not just the implants.  Are that many not worth the investment of expanding your trade empire to fifty galaxies, not to mention much faster delivery time leading to greater profits over a shorter period?  I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the costs involved, I do not wish to cheat you, or take advantage of your need.”

Threx replied, “That is the problem.  The trade is an investment into our ships, which means we’ll be eating the cost of the implants with nothing to sell or trade back to our people to show for it.  At the same time, your words are true, the investment will lead to much higher profits in the long run.  The problem is most of our merchants don’t have that much free capital to invest into their ship or fleet.”

I nodded, “What would be fair to you?”

Threx grimaced, “Ten million is fair my friend, but five million is possible.”

I smiled, “I think I have a mutually beneficial solution.  For the wormhole drive we will require five million implants and free updates to the database you sold us.  Right now, that trade database you offered us to trade safely with other systems encompasses about thirty percent of the races in twenty percent or so of the empire.  As your brother-in-law ranges out further and gains insights into other cultures and available products, he and your sister would share that information with our world.  That would keep things equitable as far as value, and also not cost you resources or money.”

Threx considered that for a moment, then nodded, “You have a deal.  Expect him sometime tomorrow.”

I nodded, “Sounds good.”

Threx nodded, grunted, and hung up.

That was interesting, and I got the distinct impression the Threx wouldn’t normally cheat us, and that he was ashamed a bit about our last deal, since we were still here and all.  Clearly, I’d been ripped off, being desperate to get the message out and all.  I shook my head, and then got back to work.

Diana walked into the command center right before quitting time.

I smiled, sometimes I thought the hot librarian thing she had going on at work was almost better than when she dressed up, but not quite.

“What miracle do you have for me today.”

Diana smirked, “Instantaneous transportation.”

I widened my eyes.

She smirked, “Got ya.  Nothing, I just wanted to make sure you don’t work late.”

“Is that possible?”

She shrugged, “Maybe.  The quantum communicator is done with quantum resonance.  In a lot of ways, we can already instantaneously transport energy, that’s how the communicators work, it’s like creating temporary entanglements, but not really that either.  Regardless, I have no idea how to do the same with matter, though it should be possible, since matter is only organized and stable energy when it comes down to it.”

She frowned, “You’d need a target resonance though, and wormholes are fast enough, unless you want to go a few billion light years.  Even then, it’d only take a week or two.”

I said, “But the communicators work in solar systems, which means no ten-hour trips slogging in or out of a system.”

I watched totally fascinated, as she actually thought through her outrageous claim of earlier, and slowly realized it wasn’t so outrageous.

She sighed, “I’ll get a team on it.”

I laughed.

She winked, “Don’t hold your breath though.  It won’t be one of my fast miracles.  I can think of several horrific things that could happen if say, only half your cells resonated correctly, and I have no idea what a quantum resonator that effected a ship and all the people on it would look like, or even if it would work.  There’d also need to be a beacon on the other side, either that or we’d have to somehow connect to that space, and probably a million other things I haven’t thought of yet.”

Jessica gave me a smirk, no doubt sensing my libido with her shifter nose.  My wife was so hot when she got passionate about science.

“Alright, I think we’re good anyway.  Any true threats are fairly close to home, even the outer threats we don’t know anything about are close with the wormhole drive.”

She ignored me lost in thought, “A gate system might be more realistic.  A small one on a planet would let people cross worlds in a step, visit colonies, or even just cross our own world.  For ships, they’d have to be big gates, a system between our own worlds for quick deliveries in system without flying to the FTL line, or to send fleet assistance.  That would be highly useful, since any system that was attacked currently, any aid would take up to twenty hours to arrive, which would be long after the battle was done.”

She frowned, “Longer distances, ironically enough, become problematical with the instantaneous transportation idea, since you’d need a gate on both ends.  Unless we put a resonance drive on the ship, then we’d just need a beacon of some kind on the other side.  Even then, you’d have to travel the distance via wormhole the first time.”

“Breathe.”

She laughed, “It was your idea.  Like I said though, we’ll have to try it with one particle first, and go from there.  It won’t be fast, even if does work, which isn’t for sure yet.”

“Any other miracles coming?”

She shook her head, “Pure research.  The improved energy to matter device was the last one.  It seems like humanity has enough to get used to right now, and Earth is being transformed already.  Of course, the new drive will be pure research for a while too.  I imagine that will only increase when we get our hands on the Grays’ historical and more importantly, technical archives.”

Jessica said, “Aren’t we already ahead of them?”

She shook her head, “I doubt it.  We’re ahead of them in military technology, we have upgraded nanites and power systems.  We also have better weapons.  I suspect they have more advanced pure research, that they never developed to practical applications.  There’s also the matter of civilian technology, things people use on the planet, and all that.  None of that was a part of their ships, so who knows what kind of advancements in life, protection, and comfort that database might afford us.

“It might make the clean power systems we created to replace polluting oil, gas, coal, and other energy producing technologies as extinct in other areas.  Production facilities with zero pollution, automated fabrication, alloys, carbon allotropes, pollution clean up, terraforming a planet, clipping fingernails… who knows what’s out there?  It could all be unique technologies that are unrelated to what we’ve advanced so far.  Just like the Vax with medicines, genetic enhancements, and implants which are all related to biological sciences.”

Jessica asked, “Genetic enhancements?”

She nodded, “The U.N. initiative isn’t just trialing medications.  They’re also trialing the life extension and DNA correction shots.  There’s some to increase reflexes, strength, speed, eyesight, hearing, and others too.  I’m not really overly interested in those last ones, but I’m looking forward to living some extra centuries and being somewhat immune to radiation given the doses aren’t ridiculously large.  That last one is kind of huge, it’ll allow humans to safely live on planets without a strong EM field.

“Between the Vax, and the nanite medical bed which can take care of cancers, traumas, and operations quickly and safely, I think we have the medical side of things pretty buttoned up.  But there’s still a lot of possibilities outside of healthcare, power systems, artificial gravity and weapons of war, where advancements could make a difference.”

She shrugged, “I understand the importance of protecting ourselves, and the need for destructive inventions, but it’s the other stuff that I get really excited about.  Humans will still be humans of course, but in fifty years we won’t recognize Earth anymore, people will be healthy, and there’ll be very little to fight about outside of ideas, given all the colony worlds.”

We got a little off topic.

“Umm, not working late?”

She bit her lip, “Good point, we need to go.  We’re going out to dinner.”

“We are?”

She nodded, “Jayna wants us to meet her man.”

Jayna has a man, that was news to me.  I also knew better than to argue, and we called it a day and went to get ready for a night out.

We had a good time at one of the resort restaurants, which served steak and seafood for the most part as their staple dinners.  Jayna’s Carmine seemed nice enough, and I was a bit conflicted between just being happy for her, and the instinctual need to play the role of protective older brother.  He was one of our security people actually, the police equivalent, not my protective detail, and he patrolled near one of the resorts for the most part.

He seemed nice enough, and he managed not to be too intimidated by dating the boss’s sister, who was also the president of a country, and could fire his ass if he got out of line.  I wasn’t that petty, but he didn’t know that, so I was reluctantly impressed.  More importantly, he treated my sister well.

The whole thing was also a weight off my shoulders that I was finally able to release.  I’d felt guilty about always getting over my head in the past, and in having to pull my sister away from her old life, friends and jobs, twice.  She’d never scolded me seriously for it, outside of the usual sibling teasing, but I’d still felt guilt over it.  Now though, she was pretty happy, had new friends on the station, and now a man in her life that she seemed to adore.

I was happy for her.

That wasn’t my only surprise for the night, another one came when Diana and I were in bed together getting ready to sleep, one that hit much closer to home.  Much later that night of course, after we had some intimate time together.  I held her in my arms tightly, and she looked blissed out being there.

Diana said, “Scott.  Remember we decided to start a family on our wedding night.”

I nodded, “How could I forget?”

She blushed at my heated regard, despite the fact we’d just gotten done on a replay of said night.

“Well, you got it right the first time.  It’s been… eleven days?  I’m pregnant.”

Pride was probably a ridiculous emotion to feel, but it was there, along with a shocked joy.  I was kind of speechless for a moment.

“That’s fantastic, you’re a miracle,” I finally managed to get out.

She blushed again, “I love you, Scott.”

“I love you, too,” we just stared at each other for a while, and I imagined my eyes glowed with as much joy as I saw in hers.

Things were unsure at the moment, but we were hardly on the front lines, we were relatively safe if integral to the war efforts.  I wasn’t really worried about any of that, we’d either be fine, or all humans would be dead.  If anything, our child would be born into a future of hope and change for the human race, it was a perfect time, or at least, there were no perfect times but it was better than most.

I did have some worries, but they were the normal kind for a parent to have.  Especially when our kids would grow up the kids of a nation’s president, and I wondered about school and friends.  The city wasn’t all that big yet, but in four or five years it should be more than big enough for a school.

We kissed, and I held her until we fell asleep.  I think I was more in awe of my wife in that moment, than anytime else in our lives, despite her amazing inventions.

Chapter Five

It was two days since the war began, and three thousand more ships were destroyed by ambush.  It was horrible that six thousand men and women of Earth’s military had been killed, at the same time it was the plan.  Which… made it seem even worse somehow.  We were supposed to allow it to happen two more times the next four days, before a day after that we’d set our own traps and made our move against the six, million ship fleets, and take them out.  At the same time, my platforms would be large warship sized, and take out the rest of those fleets and take over guarding the empire’s border.

It felt wrong sacrificing them like that, but not waiting would lead to far more deaths, and every admiral and general in the combined command center from every country involved thought it worth the price.  That didn’t mean I didn’t feel the weight of responsibility for it, it was my plan after all.  Or at least, partially so.

On a different more positive note, the sales for nanite medical beds had skyrocketed.  The medical community was satisfied with the last few months of trials in India and a couple of other countries, and they were rolling them out to hospitals across the world.

Ironically, they weren’t approved for cancer treatment yet, that would take more trials and studies, at least in first world countries, before that approval was given.  Probably the normal waiting time for each agency, so almost ten years in the case of the United States.  They were approved for trauma, treating physical damage to the body, and they were also approved for operations.  For some reason I couldn’t discern, the current rules allowed for that.

Of course, cancer victims could always fly to a third world country and get the cancer removed.  Most third world countries had state of the art hospitals after all, donated from their more powerful and richer first world neighbors, so it was a thing.  Of course, the FDA was bound to put out notices saying it was dangerous and they shouldn’t do it, but dying people would take the chance if they could afford it.

Threx’s brother in law had shown up.  After transferring the five million implants from their ship into storage, and installing their wormhole drive, Dex asked for a meeting in person.  I suspected he just wanted a look around the station, since we could’ve talked over communicators, but I was fine with that.

Security escorted them to the outer conference room closest to his ships dock, and him and Serie took a seat.  It was just the four of us in the room, along with a couple of guards.

“Welcome to Astraeus, it’s a pleasure to meet the family of Threx.  Would you like some refreshments?”

Dex nodded, and said, “That would be wonderful, thank you.”

He reached out and poured himself and his wife a glass of water, from the pitcher and glasses I’d had set up on his side of the table.

“What can I do for you?”

Dex said, “I wondered if you’d be willing to match the deal we just made.  We both have many blood cousins and siblings that are merchants as well.  Threx told us you wanted to stockpile some, for when your governments approve the technology to be used?”

He looked very intense, and almost scared about my reaction.

I tilted my head, and I had a sudden leap of understanding.  He wasn’t worried we’d harm him or his wife, Serie, but that we wouldn’t survive the war with the Grays.  He was worried I’d say we were good for now, and that we’d be destroyed before they could get more upgrades out of us.

In short, they wanted to upgrade as many ships to wormhole drives as they could before the humans were destroyed.  They were worried about their supply of drives running out.

I smiled.  Won’t they be surprised if we survived, which at the moment was looking pretty good, at least that was my hope and belief.  The only real question in my mind was how much death and misery would result from taking down the empire, but us guarding the old empire at the border would cut down on most of that, if we were successful.  No, it’d just be the aggressive expansionist races within the current empire that would be the true problem in that event, and a problem we couldn’t manage without making things even worse.

It also wasn’t our problem, or so I kept telling myself.

I replied, “Up to two hundred ships.  More than that I’d worry they wouldn’t be sold quickly, though we may redress that if demand is higher than supply.  Of course, those two hundred would need to update our database as well, as they meet new civilizations to trade with.”

Two hundred ships would give us a billion of the things.  That was about a seventh of the population, and might actually be higher than the demand, but I doubted it.  It was hard for me to imagine people preferring to lug around phones and laptops all the time, and not having their personal, entertainment, and work data at the tip of their thoughts, at all times.

The implants could even be used as cameras, and in the future for virtual reality as well, as soon as there was content for it.  More than for just games, or a relaxing day at the beach or a virtual water park.  Imagine video meetings where it felt you were actually there with the others.  Virtual attendance to sport events, where you could sit in the stands virtually with your family and friends.  Digital signing for legal documents, by sitting at a virtual table and actually signing your signature on a contract with a pen, all with a virtual witness.

It could lead to a paperless society, if the government set up apps for it.  Imagine showing a cop a virtual license and registration, or so many other things.

The amount of possibilities was virtually endless, no pun intended.  Including replacing your calculator, phone, music player, television, radio, desktop, laptop, even the alarm clock on the bedside table.  It was enough, and cool enough, that I was willing to bet on it to the point of having a billion of them in stock for when it was approved.

So, two hundred drives, one billion implants at five million per drive.

I also knew two hundred was just scratching the surface of the Vax fleet, which had thousands of merchant ships.  There’d be plenty of drive upgrades to go when medications and enhancements became mainstream and approved by government health departments.  Even past there, there’d be other things to trade I suspected, if it became necessary.  They just wanted wormhole drives the most.

Dex nodded, “That is what I meant, five million implants and updates of the database for new contacts and societies, including cultural information.  I will let Threx know, and we’ll get those two hundred ships here as quickly as we can.”

I almost laughed, more proof they thought we were dead.  I didn’t take it personally, I knew they were rooting for us, they just didn’t think we could beat such a large empire.  To be fair, without the nanite systems we wouldn’t be able to, and even then not without the unmanned platforms.

Dex left us then, and I was sure he got right on his communicator, because the next day those two hundred ships started to trickle in system…

There was a lot going on, and I was pulled in several directions.  Station, country, personal business, and of course most importantly family and friends.  That was one thing I thought I was doing really well, spending time with my sister, wife, and closest friends.  Perhaps because I’d never sought power for myself in the first place, only independence.

In a lot of ways, it was thanks to the United States that I’d gotten as far as I was at that point, if they’d not tried to kill me, I’d probably still be working for them.

Regardless, I suspected I’d have a lot of ships to mothball at the end of the war, since we really couldn’t afford to crew them.  Even after a couple of hundred thousand of them became stationary platforms.  I’d have a lot of stuff left over, and that didn’t even include the forty-five million platforms growing in the void, who knows how many of those I’d have left after replacing the Grays’ external fleets, if the plan worked.

Point being, I’d have a lot of stuff to recycle, and it’d probably last my lifetime and beyond before I could even come close to using it all.  Well, that was the hope, one that would change if the old empire’s space was invaded by outsiders.  I’d rather have the surplus.

It was barely scratching the surface of that, but my idea to combine two into the mass of a colony ship, and perhaps a third ship which would grow and become their initial fleet and defensive platforms, was a good idea.  Or maybe I’d even have enough to just sell them the ships and platforms not in use, and not bother with the growing part of the idea at all.

I don’t know if my meeting with the colony ship representatives two days before triggered it, but thirty-two other countries in the U.N. laid claim to thirty-two worlds in my probe database, and they contacted me about supplying the colony ship command centers, and an attendant fleet of ships and platforms, when they discovered I could provide them almost immediately after the war was finished.

There was surprisingly very little debate, before the claims were voted over and approved almost unanimously.  After all, there were two thousand ready to move in worlds, and four thousand more that required minor terraforming.  Apparently, no one was selfish enough to deny them the right to claim them.

A colony ship took two, a thousand more for platforms, and thirty more for their manned fleet.  That was a total of one thousand and thirty-two surplus ships to start a colony.  I could export all the entangled particles for those ships and install them into the made colony ship, and they’d have their independence.  It’d take me a day to set up, and as I said barely scratch the surface of my stock.

Thirty-two colonies, that was just thirty-three thousand and twenty-four ships.  Given over two million of the ships would likely be mothballed, it meant equipping almost two thousand colony worlds before I’d have to build anything new, and that didn’t include the external platforms.  Only the original fleet of two point four million ships.

Obviously, I wouldn’t know how many more colonies I could set up without building more, until I figured out how many of the forty-five million unmanned platforms I had left.  but it’d be a long ass time before we colonized two thousand worlds, most likely not even in my lifetime.  The extended one of five hundred to a thousand years with the Vax’s genetic life extension.

I also imagined long before that, the United States and other countries would be my competition, as they learned how to make their own ships.  Hopefully, we’d all be good friends before that happened.

Long story short, if it’s not too late, I had more than enough stuff now and wouldn’t be building for a long ass time, if ever.  Outside of new sales of course, for small product exports.  Still, even them, small products, personal ships, and merchant ships, I could just spin those off existing ships for decades if not centuries to come.

I even considered the idea of just combining them all into a ball of nanites the size of a moon, and then just spinning off what I needed and transferring ownership through extruding the entangled particles.  Use just the big clump of it as building stock.  Idea being it might be less worrisome to other countries than a couple of million ships just sitting nearby Earth, under my command.

It’s another reason why I put all those building platforms in the void.  Whatever I didn’t use would stay out there until needed.  Out of sight, out of mind, so to speak, as far as other countries and leaders went.  It wasn’t lost on me I had to be intimidating as hell to the others, and I worried it’d become a problem after the war was over, and they didn’t really need me anymore.

Regardless, I spent part of that day getting thirty-two colony packages together.  It’d all happen on command once the time came, I’d just have to specify the resource ships and execute the build out.  Which… couldn’t come soon enough.

Chapter Six

The command table hologram split the next morning, as six sub-fleets of five hundred were ambushed, each one by a hundred thousand enemy ships.  Some managed to launch some missiles, but they were destroyed almost immediately as the shields were overwhelmed with them so close to the hull.  It was the same ambush tactic as last time.

It made me sick in the stomach to watch the six thousand soldiers being wiped out… but, the least I could do was watch their sacrifice, wasn’t it?  It was the least I, we all, owed them.  Just three more days of building, and we’d be ready to spring our attack on the fourth.  Cleanup would take longer, but at that point the war would pretty much be won.  At least, that was the hope.

Of course, that meant enduring one more attack in two days.  The truth was we were about even with the Grays in slugging range, without a good twenty to thirty seconds to get the missiles out first we wouldn’t overwhelm them.

On the other side of things, almost another two thousand worlds had been quelled, and the fleets were already moving in on two thousand more.  Well, another two thousand minus eighteen missing fleets.  That was almost six thousand worlds in total at that point, close to eight thousand in the next twelve hours.  That made the losses justified in military minds, the blood price for taking out a whole world was three humans.  Still, I begrudged it, I wasn’t military.

The hardest part of it was that it was avoidable.  The problem was tactically it made sense to hold the course, and to keep down the loss of life in the longer run.  Their tactics weren’t all that effective in the moment, and if we killed them early they’d recall more ships before we were ready to replace them.  It was a thing, but the guilt and my churning stomach didn’t like it.

If the plan worked, we’d just have to do it the one more time.  In four days, we would launch missiles first, and spring their traps on purpose at the six core worlds.  Of course, only time would tell if it was worth waiting, if our ultimate plan was successful.  If it was, it’d take some time to hunt down the five million scouts, and to take out the rest of the poorly defended worlds, but that would be all that was left.

I sighed, and I took a sip of coffee as the hologram cleared and the last ship was taken out.  An ambush battle that lasted less than fifteen seconds.  They managed to destroy a couple of the enemy of course, but a hundred thousand to five hundred at energy range wasn’t a fight at all, it was a massacre.

My stomach tightened as the home fleet detected an incoming wormhole, but slowly relaxed as it was the only wormhole.  It an attack was coming, there’d be a lot of them.  It also helped that what came out of it looked nothing like a Gray ship.  It was a dark green color, and shaped like a long and thin rectangle, with rounded corners and edges.  The ship size was determined more by physics than anything else, the cost of opening a wormhole was directly proportional to the size.

It was also clearly a trader, with multiple shuttle sized airlocks all down the sides of it.  I brought up the Vax database, and I identified the ship as an Arnis merchant ship.  The Arnis were in a galaxy a little over three million light years away, on the other side of Andromeda.  That was kind of neat, the word of mouth method seemed to have worked, and they were here to check us out?

I squashed the need to speculate, they were here, and we’d find out soon enough.  They were humanoid, with leathery gray skin and dark brown eyes.  They were a little shorter than humans, the average height being around five feet, a little over four for their females, and they were a heavily muscled race.  Their home world’s gravity was one point four of Earth, perhaps that explained their short powerful stature?  They were extremely strong, but no faster than a human was.

Their technology was quite advanced, wormhole drives, and their inertial dampening and impulse drives were advanced enough for sixty gravities of acceleration in their ships.  They were also known for being peaceful, much like the Vax despite their fierce appearance.  They were also a cautious race.

Smiling was fine, they wouldn’t see it as predatory, and they did the same thing for the same reasons.  Probably something to do with the fact, that like humans, they didn’t have fierce eye teeth, but that was just speculation.  Given their technology, one of their major exports was labor.  They would often help broker deals between two worlds, and then use their more advanced technology as a delivery service that would take a day instead of weeks between far flung worlds in different galaxies.

The database didn’t have all that much on their own exports, they hadn’t been interested in the Vax’s medical technologies.  No race in space would need metals, not with all the resource systems they had.  They also wouldn’t sell their technology.  There was a smart materials export notation, but I had no idea what that meant.

The closest ship with a full command crew challenged.

“This is Captain Sheffield.  Traders are welcome, but please avoid Earth orbit.  You’ve been cleared to dock at station Astraeus on the other side of our moon.”

There was a short pause.  Yeah, Earth had given over to me on first contact protocols when it came to meeting new traders.  Almost as soon as one admiral pointed out the security risk of even an unarmed starship with the equivalent power generation of several nuclear reactors.  Armed or not, they could do a hell of a lot of damage to our world.  Apparently, they were fine with me taking the risk.

Of course, my station could absorb a nuclear explosion or two without much of a problem, even at point blank range.

“This is Captain Rena.  Understood.  Please approve my course.”

There was that caution mentioned in the database.

Data came through, and it showed a circuitous course that went out of its way to completely avoid Earth, and finally to wind up on approach with the moon in between their ship and Earth and ending at our station.

Captain Sheffield responded, “Approved, and welcome to our system, Captain Rena.”

Rena replied, “Thank you, captain.”

The ship moved forward on course at sixty gravities of acceleration.  It looked like I’d be working late that day, because they’d get to the station around ten at night station time.  Well, I’d have a few hours off in between.

Rena was also obvious female.  Not only was she about four foot two, but like humans, Arnis females had protruding breasts, if a little lower on the torso.

It was around lunchtime, and I was heading over to the labs, which was something I’d never really done before.  In general, I let my wife do whatever she wanted when it came to work.  She had a lot of science teams working for her on all the new technologies and even pure research simply for the joy of discovering a new theory of how the universe worked.

She’d never invited me to poke my nose in either, until then that is, which was the only reason I was going.

The door opened as I approached, and my wife was alone in the lab.  She had on that white lab coat, geeky glasses, a brown skirt, black shoes, and a creamy blouse.  Her hair was up in a bun too.  There was no one else there, either they were all in the other labs or they’d left for lunch.

“Hey, I brought lunch.”

She smiled, “Sounds good.”

I unpacked the roast beef sandwiches and drinks at the desk, not the lab tables, and we sat down.

“You’ve never called me down here before.”

She smirked, “You’re right, and I love that you never try to control what I do, but it was your idea and I wanted to show you my progress.”

“My idea?”

She nodded, “Instantaneous transportation.”

“That was just a few days ago, and technically it was your idea.”

She blushed, “We’re not ready for practical yet, but it is going faster than I’d imagined.  We already did most of the work required getting the instant quantum communication device figured out.  The math is there, as is the practical science, for energy.  We just had to… adapt it to matter on the macro scale.”

I was thoughtful as we ate in a comfortable silence after that, and I took a look around the lab.  There was a lot of equipment in it that I had no idea what they did at all.  Relatively small machines around the outside lab counters, and on the center island there was a setup with a few more devices that had spherical objects sitting on and attached to a small thin rectangular platform.  The place had a crisp clean feel to it, and there wasn’t a speck of dust in sight.

I supposed I could’ve cheated and used my magic to figure out what they did, but I squashed my curiosity and would let her show it to me.

After we ate, she took her empty coke can and walked over to the center island lab space.  She opened a door on one of the spheres as I got up and walked over, and then put the can inside.  She clacked on the nearby keyboard for a minute, then gave me a smug look as she walked over to the second sphere, opened the door, and pulled out the coke can.

“Teleportation?” I asked, a little shocked.

She tilted her head, “I don’t like that word.  It implies matter to energy conversion and then energy to matter on the other end, mostly due to science fiction.  That would take an ungodly amount of power to pull off.  This process is surprisingly cheap in energy usage.  Are you at all familiar with Hawking’s theory on quantum jumping?  Where a particle seems to move from one place to another without acceleration or any kind of indication of movement?”

“Vaguely,” I admitted.

She grinned, “That’s what’s happening here, with the aid of greater understanding and quantum resonance fields.  In layman’s terms, we’re simply telling the universe that this thing here, is really over there.  And it happens.  In a very real way, we’re changing reality as we humans perceive it, in a small way.  The matter simply jumps places, it isn’t destroyed and reformed, it’s the same matter.  I’ve done this several times this morning, and each time the deep level atomic scans match perfectly at both ends.”

That sounded wild.

She pointed at a small plant, “So far the plant seems fine, but we’re going to have to experiment a lot more before I feel comfortable doing it to a human.”

“So, it needs a transmitter and receiver?”

She shrugged, “I wouldn’t describe it as a transmitter and receiver, the matter quantumly jumps.  The only reason I have this sphere instead of just the platform below it that generates the resonance effect, is that it would be bad for anything to be on the other side.  The receiving sphere as you call it becomes a vacuum by pumping out all the air, then the air and coke can in the other sphere jumped to it.  So, quantum jumping between planets, or across a planet, will need to be done in a similar way.  Paired quantum jumping chambers, that form a vacuum on the other side first.”

“In space for a ship already in vacuum that won’t be necessary, but we will need a device on the other side, a beacon of sorts, unless I can figure out how to do that another way.”

I nodded, “So it’ll be a while for the people, but what about my platforms?”

She tilted her head, “Maybe.  It’ll be several years for the human side testing, it’d be irresponsible to try sooner and before we can test on rats and wait out their full life for data.  Then another ten years at least, for limited human trials, assuming the rats are unaffected.  I might be able to do something for the platforms, I doubt it will take years to get to the point we can do unmanned ships.  Most likely though, even in that case, we’ll need a beacon on the other end.  It’ll take another new technology altogether to bypass that requirement.”

“So, we’ll have to get there the long way first?”

She nodded, “It’s an integral part of the technology.  To quantum jump something, it needs to be quantumly tied to the place it’s jumping to.  At the moment, it’s not possible to make that pairing without something else on the other end.  We might figure out a way to make a temporary pairing over millions of light years some day, but at the moment even our theoretical science has nothing to indicate that will be possible.  Still, moving people and ships between our colonies in an instant, and wherever we leave a beacon, will still be incredibly useful for both convenience, and defense.”

That’s kind of why I wanted it.  As it was, any planetary mayday about being attacked by an overwhelming force would just be a wave goodbye to the universe.  We could never catch the invading fleet before they reached the planet.  With the new technology we could get there before the attacking fleet even managed to traverse in system.

“Could we use the communicators as a beacon?  It works on the same science, right?”

She tilted her head, “Yes.  You’re thinking for a ship in distress?  One of your platforms could jump to that ship, and it would be within a hundred miles of it which out in space is kissing distance.  I think we could do it with a simple software update.  Obviously, as is, the platform would jump to the communicators exact position, which would be very bad.”

Yeah, that’d leave a mark.  Merging matter, or trying too, just sounded bad.  I could also use the probes, the ones twice as large as the mini-platforms with a communications device on it.  Seed the void between stars in several places in each galaxy.  Of course, for our own worlds we’d have tons of beacons inside the FTL line, one in every Earth ship that was in our star systems.

“Alright, let me know when were at the safe unmanned jumps place.  Sorry, that was a little obvious, wasn’t it?”

She kissed me softly, then said, “It’s okay, I’m excited about it too, if you couldn’t tell.  My team is in the process of building a study to start on rat testing.  I can work on the ships in the lab system, and also see what I can do on scaling it up.  Give me a couple of more days.”

I said, “Of course, as long as you need, always.  Umm, Captain Rena of the Arnis race will be on station tonight at ten, want to meet them with me?”

She bit her lip, “Sure.  I’ll review the entry in the database.”

I nodded, “They don’t really have any taboos we need to worry about, at least not if we treat them with decency by human standards.  I’ll see you later.”

She smirked, “We still have a half hour left for lunch, and the lab is sealed.”

I grinned, as my slow mind caught her meaning, “Good point.”

We spent another half hour together, but we didn’t get much talking done at all…

Captain Rena was surprisingly lithe and proportioned for her height, if rather muscular.  The gray skin looked a little odd, but the expressive brown eyes were in the realm of shades for human eyes.  She wore a ship suit that was clung to her body.  She paused as she came in the room, since we were standing to greet her as the security escort closed the door and stayed on the other side.

Jayna was on a hot date she hadn’t wanted to cancel, but the rest of us were there out of curiosity if nothing else.  Everyone being Jessica, Diana, Cassie, and myself, as well as two personal guards who stood against the back wall.

I smiled lightly, truly pleased to be meeting another race of peaceful traders, if cautious ones.

“Welcome to Astraeus, I’m President Scott Akin, please call me Scott,” I went on to introduce the three with me at the table, and then invited her to sit and enjoy a glass of water if she wished.  Water was about the best we could do as hosts, who knew what juices, drinks, or foods would be poisonous to another race.  Water was universal.

She returned my smile, “I’m Captain Rena, and you may call me Rena.  Thank you for the warm welcome,” then she moved forward and sat at the foot of the table, and she poured a drink.

I realized my mistake almost right off when her chin barely reached the top of the table, and she didn’t look too alarmed, as the table lowered by about six inches.  It was oak of course, not nanites, but it was easy enough to sink the legs into the nanite floor.  After a moment, she looked pleased by the effort.

“What can we do for you, Rena.”

Rena smiled tentatively, “I will be blunt with you, and hope for your goodwill.  We are traders, but we are also a cautious race.  Meeting a brand new FTL race and member of the empire is unprecedented for our people, unlike the brave Vax.  We prefer for new systems to find their feet, and to show who they are, before contacting them.  In some cases, this can take decades, because invariably when a race reaches the stars their customs and society undergoes many changes, sometimes drastically.  Sometimes for the better, and too often when they realize they’re surrounded by predators, it changes for the worse.”

I nodded, “I’d welcome candor, and will not be offended.  In fact, I have many of the same concerns.  I hope our race will be a boon to the galaxy, but we aren’t there yet, even if most of us want to be.  May I ask what led to this unprecedented contact?”

Rena replied, “The Grays’ foolishness, and the war you are embroiled in.  Like it or not, you are currently one of the two races with the most advanced technology at least as far as ships and weapons of war in space.  I am here, in short, to measure your intentions.  To find out what your plans are, if the Grays’ empire is toppled.  Of course, we will trade as well if you wish, but the other is the reason we are here so early in your development as an interstellar race.”

“Our intentions?”

She nodded, “Will you continue their empire in the same mold, or will you impress change, or do nothing at all and let chaos grow in the wake of a falling civilization.  Our people are already ramping up production in all our systems, for the purpose of building defense fleets for instance.”

I sighed, “As it stands now, we will monitor and vigorously defend the five hundred light year radius around this system as we claimed.  We will also preserve the few intelligent non-FTL species within it and leave them alone otherwise.  We will also attempt to maintain the security of old Gray empire space from other empires that may surround the fifty galaxies that comprise it.  We don’t have proof of them except tangentially, and don’t know how many there are at the moment.

“As of now that’s it.  We have no plans to implement a new empire in its place, or to force ourselves on other FTL races of the old empire.  We find the Grays method of control, their rules, to be contemptible and evil in nature, and certainly won’t continue with it.  We will be open to trade, we will be open to deeper connections through treaties, and unless attacked we’ll leave the other races be.”

Rena said sadly, “So there will be chaos and war.”

I frowned, “Maybe.  There are no simple answers, at least not ones that are humane.  The Grays’ system is rife with many races that have been erased from history.  Organized, neat, and clean, but horrifying in the scope of genocide of countless civilizations.  The other extreme would be to use our military might to make a true empire, and demand obeisance from the other races.  That would be just as monstrous a course, and lead to similar ends.

“Cooperation and treaties are messy, and the give and take of limited cooperation and trade between the races, but I believe that would be the right way to go.  Civilizations like the Vax, Arnis, and I hope Humans, could build treaties of trade, non-aggression, and perhaps mutual support.  Obviously, our civilizations are very different, but I believe at least a third of the many tens of thousands of races would be willing to join in such a treaty.  It was my hope that my world would pursue something like that once the trading races started to build the communications devices we designed and share freely with all races.

“The races left over would outnumber us by two to one.  But that would be mostly illusion, since they’d be either too xenophobic or too aggressive to ever form alliances with each other.  It would keep us safe at least, if they had to face a third of the races if they ever attack one of the treaty worlds.

“I’d also hope races that trade would also continue not to prey on the races that haven’t gone FTL yet, but it’s not something we could, or perhaps should, enforce.  It’d be a lot messier than the current setup, but it’d also be moral.”

Rena said, “But in the end, there would still be genocide among the other two thirds, and perhaps against a helpless planet who has not yet reached space.”

I nodded, “But not done by us.  We all have to look after our own souls, our own honor, and protect those that become friends.  The difference is we won’t be standing by out of fear, but instead conducting ourselves with principles.  Life is ugly sometimes, and the truth is we can’t protect everyone, not without becoming monsters ourselves.  We have to draw the line somewhere.  If we move in and demand peace from the fifty galaxies, and post ships in non-FTL systems, then why end it there?

“Surely we should form fleets of ships, and invade the surrounding empires who are no doubt corrupt and evil.  We could do better, right?  Point being, we have to draw the line somewhere.  We can protect our own claimed space and human empire without guilt or question, and we can help defend those we have a treaty with.  Any more than that will start a slippery slope of actions, as we keep grabbing for more.  It’s much safer to draw a line we can’t cross, no matter the results.

“Humans have a saying, power is corrupting, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  We could try to protect all those millions of pre-FTL civilizations, do many things like that and form our own empire, impose new rules, but in the end, it would go sour and bad as we searched out even more injustice, and imposed more of our will.  Good intentions, bad results.  It always does, it’s in our nature.

“A minimalist connection between races, and a treaty, will have the best chance of working.  I don’t imagine the other races are much different that way.  Of course, I only have authority over this station, and only some influence on the planet below.  Shortly, we’ll have forty new colonies, where I’ll have no influence at all.”

Rena nodded, “I can’t argue your points, you know your race better than we do.  Do the other leaders of your race see it similarly?”

That was a damned good question, I looked to Cassie for the answer, I sure as hell didn’t know it.

Cassie interjected, “They do, if for different reasons.  Some will stand on the same principles, others will out of greed.  We have a declared space with several thousand planets we can colonize, there’s very little reason to reach beyond that to the other races with so much opportunity and resources so close at hand and already claimed.

“That said, if you did form a treaty with us, and requested help in keeping your nascent intelligent races within your borders safe, I imagine we could talk Scott into giving that help.  It’s the imposition of unwanted help that he wants to avoid at all costs.  Perhaps over time, centuries, closer ties and a true empire governed equally by many races through cooperation will be possible.  But… right now as he said, it’s a bad idea.  Minimal treaties of trade, non-aggression, and mutual defense would be the most we could or even should offer.

“As you said, we’re young and new, we need time to grow and figure out where we’ll fit in.  If it wasn’t for the Grays setting us up to die, and then trying to kill us directly by framing us when it didn’t work, we wouldn’t be fighting at all.  We are also in essence, giving every race in the Empire the gift of freedom.  If some races use that to murder and start wars, that’s not our fault, and it’s not our problem if we don’t have an agreement to help defend the targets they choose.

“That sounds cold and heartless, but it’s the simple truth of a universe filled with xenophobic predators.”

Rena nodded, “I understand, and there’s no need to defend yourselves to me.  If that is what happens our race will survive.  Our technology is second only to yours and the Grays.  We will just… mourn the ones who pass in fire, much as we’ve done under the Grays’ empire.  I will pass along your words, and I’ll suggest to my people that we accept a treaty when the time comes that you offer one.  We will also be building the communication device, our scientists are already working on the infrastructure for mass production, which is a wonderful gift we thank you for.”

She smiled, “Now, trade.  We offer services of transport for items and people, but obviously you won’t need that since you also have wormhole drives.  The other thing we offer is smart materials technologies.  This ship suit I am wearing is but one example of what we offer.

“The suit will keep me cool in high temperatures, or it’ll keep me warm in below freezing temperatures.  It’s partially organic in nature.  Not intelligent or aware, but smart on the genetic level, or at least smart to the point it automatically adjusts in different environments.  If perforated or cut, it will re-seal, much like a cut on your skin heals.  Foreign materials also won’t stain or stick to the ship suit.  The organic part of the suit is virtually immortal, and it will absorb and process the sweat and shed skin of its wearer to maintain its biological systems.

“Other smart materials are available as well, other than clothing I mean.  Smart glass that will keep your home filled with a consistent amount of sunshine all day long, and other such conveniences as acting as a display or interface.  Plants and landscaping that are genetically defined and maintain themselves, and many other things and conveniences.

“I will leave you with a full list of what’s available when I leave the station.”

That sounded pretty cool.

“What would you want in return for those items?  When I post what you want to the rest of humanity, I’ll also add what you want in return, so the various leaders know what the costs will be and what their countries have to trade.”

She smiled, “Herbs and spices are heavily sought after by my species.  Often they’ll be incompatible with our bodies but not poisonous, but since they would only be used for flavoring food we can digest, it can make delightful new flavor experiences.  We would also like a cross section sampling of your music and art styles.  There is actually very little our race needs from other races, we trade to enrich our lives and for new cultural experiences.

“If your race is not overly xenophobic, we would also trade for the opportunity to experience your resorts and culture directly.”

I nodded, “I think that would be safe enough here.  There is a small percentage of the population that could become violent, and I couldn’t guarantee safety on the surface of our planet.  We have several resorts on the station however.  That may change in the future, but as you’d indicated earlier there’s a small chance that it will get worse.  For now, we should move slowly on that last one, and only accept tourists at the station.”

Rena nodded, “That would be more than acceptable.  Please include a list of taboos to be avoided.”

I said, “Of course.  If you send us that list, the different countries as well as this station will come up with a list of what’s available as well as taboos.  Those both change from country to country.  Some have different spices, and some have different taboos, and of course I’ll add our resorts and what’s available that way.  Anything else?”

Rena shook her head, “Except to wish you luck in your fight.  We too find their ways and empire setup and rules distasteful at best.  At the same time, we don’t have any good answers either, much less simple ones, and we understand your moral struggle with your choices.  If I may say, I’m glad we’re not in your position, we aren’t powerful enough to replace them.”

We all stood up, and we remained silent as she was escorted out and back to her ship.

“What do you think?”

Cassie said, “I liked her, I think they’ll make a good trading partner.  Curious and cautious.  You really struggle with the morality of it all, more than I thought.  Jayna’s right, you have a hero complex.”

I smirked, “All we can ever control is our own actions.  I don’t like it, but not imposing our will on all the races is better than turning every race in fifty galaxies against us, even if others do evil because we won’t stop them outside of our space.  Every empire falls, maybe the way to ensure humanity continuing indefinitely is to just not build one, outside of our own space I mean.  Control is an illusion, if we imposed our will on other races, we’d start worrying about losing that control.  Soon enough, we’d be removing races that grew in power to challenge us, much like the Grays were doing.  Better to just avoid the whole mess.”

Diana nodded, “But cooperation among equals, it could grow from mutual defense to something deeper.”

I sighed, “Perhaps.  It would be good if all the races we had a treaty with didn’t take advantage of pre-FTL societies, and agreed on the principles of freedom, but even as a group of races I think it’d be a mistake to impose our will on others, outside of defending ourselves of course, if they attacked.  Self-defense is a universal concept.”

Cassie nodded, “I won’t disagree.  Yet…”

“Yet?”

Cassie smirked, “Your current plans call to replace the Grays external fleets.  Protecting the fifty galaxies from outside threats puts them all in your debt by creating an imbalance.  Not that I disagree with the goal, but it’s a compromise from your stated position.  After all, those empires aren’t in a trading relationship with us, and you’re imposing your will on them by keeping them out of all fifty galaxies, instead of just keeping them out of our little corner of the Milky Way.”

I frowned, she wasn’t wrong.  Of course, if they invaded the old empire then our claimed space would eventually be threatened too, and we’d shortly be surrounded by a vast empire as it swept up the rest.  Was it just sophistry and mental juggling that told me that was an untenable position to end up in?  In holding the lines out where they already were, we were just protecting our future trading interests as well as our security, that we’d be protecting all the other races in the old empire from that fate was simply a byproduct of that.

Yeah, I wasn’t sure I bought that justification either, but it wouldn’t stop me from doing it, or at least trying.

Chapter Seven

It was almost two days later, and the small fleets were headed out system after putting down close to another two thousand Gray worlds.  It’d be about an hour before the first of them hit the FTL line.  The forty-five million ships in the void had about a day left to build.  Well, three more days before the platforms were dreadnought sized, but just the one day for them to be large warship sized with three million mini-platforms each.

A part of me wondered if they weren’t ready now, they all had over two million missiles, were between medium and large sized warships, and there were forty-five million of them.  I’d already suggested it might be good enough, but the admirals were sticking with the plan unless the enemy forced our hands by changing tactics.

“What do you think will happen when this over?”

Cassie asked, “What about?”

I shrugged, “The sheer number of platforms under my command, not to mention the vast fleet in system mothballed.  Me personally holding the line on a fifty-galaxy empire against who knows how many other empires around us.  You mentioned yesterday that would cause an imbalance or debt between worlds.

“What I mean is, what about our world.  When I had the mass of a single scary station that was one thing, now I have the military mass of over twenty-three million stations.”

Cassie smirked, “Tempted to take over?”

I laughed, “You couldn’t pay me enough.  Besides, political power is control, but it’s also a big headache.  More often than not, it’s just the illusion of control and security.  I’m more than secure for life just running this station, and in having quite possibly the biggest military might in the history of fifty galaxies.  Having that means not having to bother running anything else.  All I can control is myself.”

Cassie asked, “Not even a little bit tempted?”

I shrugged, “No.  But of course, like it or not, our inventions are changing the world radically.  All those radical environmentalists should be happy anyway, talk about a major reduction in carbon footprint and pollution.  Things are going to be crazy down there for a while, until it’s all sorted.  Seriously though, my question?”

Cassie sighed, “I don’t know.  Obviously, the balance of power is completely skewed in your direction, even if you’ve managed to preserve it to a large extent on the surface.  Once the scare of intergalactic war has faded, they’ll be nervous.  It was smart of you to build the platforms out in the void, but even just the fleet is ridiculously large.  Once the war is over, they’ll decommission ninety five percent of it, at least.  Those thirty-two colony setups will hardly scratch the surface.”

I nodded, “I’ve also short-circuited war between us all up here, since the ships can’t fire on each other, no ships I build can fire on anyone or any ship from Earth.  I don’t imagine everyone is happy about that.  I suppose in that one way you could even argue I’ve already taken over, at least when it comes to space.”

Cassie bit her lip, “It’s unprecedented.  Normally a country on the planet with so much of an advantage would be filled with spies to regain parity, if not trigger an outright war.  Thing is, they can’t get here.  Not really.  Sure, they could send spies as tourists, but their ships can’t attack your station.

“There’s also less places for a spy to infiltrate.  The knowledge stays in Diana’s lab, and you personally design the end product.  That’s it.  Normally there is a laundry list of government contractors, all of which can be bribed, stolen from, or even be hacked.  Our computers are nanites, and un-hackable.  It’d be almost impossible for a spy to get the data.  Even Diana’s scientists couldn’t give much away, since she has them compartmentalized for operational security.  At least, on the military advancements.

“I suspect they’ll work hard to redress it.  When their scientists finally get an energy to matter device working, and start making their own nanite ships, they’ll do it at their colonies where you won’t have eyes.  Sure, you supplied the ships that protect them, but I know for a fact you really cut them loose of your control and oversight, and you won’t be spying.

“Of course, those ships will be Gray ships, that’s the only software and hardware templates the U.S. has.  They don’t have the firmware, software, or even the scientific breakthroughs for all the new advancements Diana made up here with her teams.  No powered nanites, not even the first generation of them, and no disintegration beams, no mini-platforms with their own reactors for shields and beams.

“They’ll be trying to steal all that of course, and reverse engineering what they have on the ships they bought.  The former we’ll watch out for, Jessica is already watching closely for spies or assassins.  It helps that the labs are in a secured area, nowhere near the visitor’s section or even the public city.  It also helps that we’re a space station, no sneaking across the border.

“Of course, it’s inevitable, it will happen eventually.  They’ll catch up, then things will get a bit more nervous.”

She smirked, “But then, by then Diana will have pulled off several more advances, and let’s face it, with over six thousand worlds to divvy up and move into, there isn’t all that much to really fight about.  Humanity is changing, the future is bright, which means the only thing left to fight about are moral ideals, social constructs, religion, and so forth.  Soft reasons.

“They might just ignore you, if you keep sending them cool stuff.”

I shook my head, “So, what you’re actually saying is, you have no idea?”

Cassie laughed and blushed, “That one, yes, for all my age and wisdom, and insights into the human condition, I don’t have a clue.  The pessimist in me says it will be business as usual, but this new age of opportunity makes me doubt that for the first time.  Regardless of the eventual truth, we’ll be vigilant with your safety as well as the station itself.  The nanites can’t be hacked by anyone save you, and it might be a very long time before that changes.”

I nodded, “One thing that is tempting.  I could send a platform to every pre-FTL world that’s being watched over by the Grays.  Keep them safe from predators until they can protect themselves.  With stealth technology they’d never even know we helped, when it was time for them to join us out here.  The problem is I don’t think I could do that, at least I can’t do that and still claim that we aren’t an empire anymore if I do.”

Cassie nodded, “That’s sticky.  Good intentions, how could defending a helpless civilization be a bad thing?  Of course, to do that you need to be willing to interfere with other civilizations who want to take advantage of them, to impose on them, when they aren’t in our claimed space.  It’s a slippery slope, you’ll take that step, then you’ll take another reasonable step to stop injustice, and all the sudden one day you’re an emperor stepping on everyone’s neck.”

“Yeah, that was my point.  It’s why I’m not doing that, but I second guess myself on that set limitation the most.  Even if I could be trusted with that, what happens when I’m gone?  It will happen eventually, even if I live over a thousand years with life extensions.  I’ll be honest, I don’t trust most of the Earth’s governments to get along out here.  The only reason I can get away with the limitations in attacking other Earth ships is because I’m the only game in town.

“Even if the U.S. ships will be the old Gray ships, if they sell them unfettered a lot of people will buy them.  They’ll be weaker, but they’ll also still be the second strongest in fifty galaxies.  I fear the next great war of humanity will be between colonies, or as conquerors and empire makers.”

She smirked, “We can only do what we do, and as you said we can only control ourselves.  All we can do is lead by example, and to have faith that humanity’s better nature will win out during a time of expansion and endless possibilities.  Worse come to worst, we can always claim one of those worlds ourselves, and create a colony, if things get too tense here at home.

“Also, don’t underestimate my people or our influence.  In the end, I suspect it will be decades or even over a century before we have to worry about that too much.  Who knows what the political landscape will look like then?  Most of the people you pissed off will be out of power, if not dead of old age, and you’ll be around for a long time and known for leaving Earth alone even when you didn’t have to.  That could make a difference, for most it will make a difference.”

I nodded thoughtfully.

“So… are you tempted at all?  A little snap of the neck, and you’d run this whole joint.”

She giggled, “No.  Not even a little bit.  Outside of not being interested, my people would kill me.  We direct subtly from behind the throne, taking power would see me killed by the rest of the council.  Plus, you and Diana make things too interesting, and I’d miss you.”

“Energy to matter device.  The upgraded one.  Any ideas there?”

Cassie sighed, “I agree with your original assessment.  Technology and society both evolve all the time, humans don’t.  Not really.  At some point automation will completely take over all aspects of production, and slowly push humans into other things, service, management, cleaning, restaurants, things like that.  That’s always a painful thing, when leaps in automation take place.  Once that’s pretty much complete, introducing that technology won’t be as disruptive.

“Things are crazy enough as it is, given all the people employed in carbon and nuclear powered industries will all need to find a new job as its phased out.  From oil platforms, to line workers, electric companies, and even the gas station attendant.  Give it a hundred years, and we’ll discuss it again.”

I smirked, she was right of course.  The technology on the surface sounded like a boon to humanity, but it would really destroy us.

“The old power industries going away isn’t all bad, it’ll make more people volunteer for colonization, and push us out there faster.  Crisis is opportunity.”

She smirked, “That’s true enough, since it’s how this all happened,” she waved her hand encompassing the whole station in her gesture.

That… was a good point.  The crisis of course, was my own government trying to kill me.

We stopped our conversation at that point, and I looked at the command table.  The first six fleets with the staggered exit timing were just minutes from FTL line, less than a light second in distance.  My stomach churned at the idea of watching three thousand more ships get wiped out, but at the same time I’d feel like a coward if I didn’t watch, and viscerally feel the sacrifice made for the rest of humanity.

Chapter Eight

The enemy changed tactics.  Perhaps the worlds of the empire didn’t like being sacrificed and the core worlds had finally responded.  Regardless, it was a few seconds later when the expected ambush came, but instead of a hundred thousand ships at each world there was only three thousand.

Six to one odds, three thousand against five hundred of our ships.  At range we’d have slaughtered them, but up close and personal in energy range changed those numbers.  Still, despite being greatly outnumbered, it took six ships a lot longer to destroy one of our dreadnoughts than two hundred ships.

More than one ship lasted long enough to launch a lot of missiles, some of which actually made it long enough to return fire with their own energy beams.  The enemy lost a little over four hundred ships to our six hundred.  Of course, a change in tactics was one of the things that could cause the plan to be launched early.

Admiral Holtz said, “Operation Sweep has a go, initiate your orders.”

All of the remaining ships in the other systems, which were staggered and almost at an ambush point, launched three million missiles creating a mini-platform defense around their ships.  We weren’t sure what to expect yet, clearly they’d changed tactics, but had they sent all six million, or just split up the six hundred thousand they’d already been using in traps to two hundred fleets of three thousand, with the other five million four hundred thousand watching the core worlds, nine hundred thousand each.

It turned out to be that latter one.  They hadn’t pulled more ships away from the core worlds, just further separated out the ones they already had pulled.

One hundred and ninety-nine more ambushes of three thousand ships were triggered as our split fleets exited the systems.  The remaining fleets of five hundred were unchallenged.  Still, it was a major uptick in attacks to whittle down our fleet before we could get all their worlds.

Except, those three thousand enemy ships exited wormholes to face five hundred ships, and one point five billion mini-platforms that were already launched and seeking secondary targets.  Space burned with energy beams as the enemy’s one short of two hundred fleets of three thousand ships were burned out of existence in less than two seconds.

Even better, three million shielded mini-platforms made a hell of a shield to hide behind.  Some of our ships were damaged, and hit by beams despite that, but none were completely destroyed.  They’d just have to rebuild some mass after sloughing off the damaged nanites, which happened automatically.

My heart pounded and I felt a deep satisfaction in my gut at seeing it.  Call me bloodthirsty, but it was what it was, and those bastards were going down.  It wouldn’t be the end yet, but what happened in the next hours would certainly be the defining battle of the war.

The missiles were recalled, and our fleets opened up wormholes and disappeared.  Six hundred thousand were headed for the six core worlds at that moment in fleets of a hundred thousand each, the rest of the surviving million ships were headed for their next scheduled planet.  Each of those hundred thousand would be facing nine hundred thousand enemy ships.  Nine to one odds.

Thing was, knowing that ambush was coming, they’d have plenty of time to launch missiles before the enemy could arrive to ambush.  Three hundred billion missiles would more than make up for those nine to one odds, even at point blank energy range.

Knowing how long it took for the enemy to respond the first time, when they’d been ambushed after setting course into the core systems, they did the same thing again.  The one hundred thousand ships appeared right outside of the FTL line, then set course and went toward the core worlds.  It’d taken the enemy almost two minutes to arrive last time.

They did it that way because we were afraid if they launched missiles immediately, the enemy fleet would see that before they opened up wormholes, and they might decide to abort rather than just throw their lives away.

A minute after arriving and moving toward the planet, they launched their missiles.  The admirals in charge had decided the enemy might cut their response time for the second attack, and they were right.

Five seconds after that, six hundred thousand enemy ships poured out of wormholes into overwhelming fire.  What made the mini-platforms such a game changer was that they automatically acquired their own targets and fired their one beam.  There was no need for the ships to supply the mini-platforms with secondary targets.  Platforms launched without a primary target automatically acted in a defensive manner.

Our hundred thousand ships of course, were hardly idle, as they were able to acquire and lock up around five hundred targets in a second, and energy beams fired from them as well.

That all happened right outside of six-star systems, simultaneously, like clockwork.

As planned, ten of the ships were spared full destruction, as the rest were erased.  Ten of the ships were merely… pared down to size to take the shields down, and they were hit with a hacking missile.  That was its label in the system, but in truth it was a just a missile with a quantum entangled connection I could use to trace with my magic.

It was also all automatic and programmed, specifically as part of the plan, it would be far too hard to manually spare ten ships in the chaos of all those beams, missiles, and ships in a knife range energy battle from hell.

On three of the core world battles, five of the ten of them blew up anyway, no doubt one of the beams had hit one of the fusion plants in the power room.  In the other three battles, one lost three, one four, and one six.  In every case, there were at least four ships to hack.

It would’ve been more ideal to wait of course, until we could take over the command centers on the six core worlds, and to hold them to maintain our access.  Still, for a brief peek at where the rest of their fleets were, it was good enough.  I just hoped there were six fleets or less, just like they’d had six fleets of a million formed, one for every core world.

If it was six or less, it’d be fine.  If there were twelve external Gray fleets, and each had given up five hundred thousand ships to form six fleets of a million.  Or twenty-four fleets and each gave up two hundred fifty thousand, there’d be missing data.  Obviously, there was a little luck involved in our plan, we hoped there were six or less fleets, one for each core world, but we couldn’t be sure.  It made sense that there’d be six, if there was eight for instance, there’d be eight core worlds, wouldn’t there?  One per fleet, but maybe not?

Point being, I closed my eyes at that point and followed the links with my magic to the ships and then to the command center for that ship.  I didn’t stay in any connection more than a few seconds, just to grab the fleet data and locations.  Each of the ship groups at a core planet, were all part of the same fleet, and every other ship at the other worlds weren’t a part of that fleet, but their own.

It appeared there were six fleets.  But it was possible every world had two, and we’d blown up the other ones, if that made sense.  Chances were though, there were six fleets, and I knew where they were.

Each of the six fleets had three million more ships stationed out in the void outside of six separate galaxies.  Six core worlds, six fleets, six external positions, six enemy empires?  It fit the facts as we knew them, but again there was no way to be sure until we took the core planets and got to their data and found all and any fleet command posts.

It also meant all six fleets had been four million strong when this all started, and they’d pulled back exactly twenty five percent of their numbers, one million from each fleet.

I immediately launched four million platforms at the farthest enemy fleet of three million.  They’d come out nearby, just out of energy range, and launch all missiles.  The four million platforms would also show parity of numbers to the enemy empires, based on what should have been there, four million Gray ships per fleet, even if we’d destroyed a quarter of them already.

I also set up the other five fleets of four million platforms to destroy and replace the others, and I set a timer to launch for their assigned place.  The reason I did it that way was timing.  The closest Gray fleet replacement would open wormholes last, so all six enemy fleets were ambushed and attacked simultaneously, in just over two hours.  It just made sense not to tip my hand, or the other five fleets could run away.

That was twenty-four million platforms total, six platform fleets of four million.  Which… meant I’d have twenty-one million extra platforms out in the void just twiddling their thumbs and waiting for orders to do something.  I was more than fine with that.  For a rainy day?

Overkill was much better than underestimating our needs.

While I was doing all that, the Earth fleets back at the core worlds left a hundred ships with three hundred million missiles out to watch over the ships I’d hacked, while the rest of the ships recalled missiles.  Five hundred of the ships in each fleet immediately moved in system to secure the core the planets.  The other ninety-nine thousand four hundred split up into five hundred ship fleets, and then opened a wormhole to their next scheduled planet.

The battle hadn’t taken all that long, and it was hardly a hiccup in the two thousand worlds every two days schedule.  Minus the sub-fleets destroyed in the enemy ambushes of course.  Still, in the end, with those losses, it would merely add two days to the schedule.

So far, the ships on the border fleets hadn’t moved, but I was sure the Grays were arguing about what to do next.  I just hoped they argued the full two hours it would take to spring my ambushes.  That was about more than just the war too.  If the emperor pulled back the eighteen million ships to defend Andromeda before I got there to replace them, then that could trigger the six other empires to invade when the borders were abandoned.

“Admirals, I got what I needed.  There appears to be six fleets set up outside of six galaxies.  I’ve sent enough platforms to take them out, and also take their place.  No doubt whatever empires they’re holding off will be curious, but hopefully they’ll see parity of numbers and let the status quo remain.”

“Appears to be?”

I nodded, “I only got to look at a handful of ships for each of the one million ship fleets.  All circumstantial evidence points to them having six fleets, to stand off six empires surrounding the fifty galaxies, but it’s possible they have more.  We’ll know for certain in a few days, when our ground forces locate and find all the command centers on the six core worlds.  Not just about their fleets, but what the other empires are like.  Honestly, I’d be surprised if there was more than six, given what we know, I just don’t want to assume we found all of their assets, and have it bite us in the ass.

“Anyway, I timed it to all happen at once, in two hours from now.  If it goes to plan, we’ll only have their internal fleet to worry about.”

Which… wasn’t a worry at all.  The internal fleet was relatively small, and mostly scouts.  Oh, they could do some damage, but they wouldn’t be able to win.

The core worlds were also facing the same conundrum I was worried about, and why I was so excited about the quantum jump drive technology coming.  Even if they recalled those eighteen million ships, there was no way for them to catch up to our fleets, which were already moving toward their planets.  Sure, we’d lose the battle when they did catch up, but only after we’d taken out their leadership and razed their worlds.

Admiral Stolz said, “Very good, Mr. President.  It’s going to be a long two hours, we have the rats cornered, so who knows what they’ll do now.”

Yeah, there was always that.  The enemy got a vote too.

Jessica said, “Sir, remember how you set up the computer to let us know when a new non-entangled quantum communicator was added to the network?”

“Yes?”

Jessica cleared her throat, “Well, one just came online, and the reported location is the Grays’ home planet.”

I don’t know why that shocked me, but it did.  Most of the races would take a few months maybe to get the infrastructure in to start making them, but of course the Grays had nanites, and they also had the infrastructure to make the special alloy required.  With the directions supplied, it’d take them less than an hour to make one with nanites and add the programming.

Which… probably meant they made one right away, as soon as one of their ships intercepted the grapevine of messages we sent out about all this, and turned it on now because they wanted to talk to us?

Jessica said, “We’re being hailed, by a High Leader Tellus, absolute ruler of the Grays Empire.”

Wow, okay.

“Admirals, I’m adding our enemy to the party line, so you can all listen, but I’ll block your voices or comments from being heard by him.  Feel free to pass along some advice if I flounder, he won’t hear it.  Jessica, open the channel.”

I took a deep breath.

Chapter Nine - Interlude

Twenty minutes ago…

High Leader Tellus was nervous.  The last six days they’d almost lost eight thousand worlds, and all they had to show for it was destroying nine thousand ships.  Given the pressures, he’d approved a plan to split the fleets further, but refused to assign any more ships away from the core world defense.

If it worked, they’d destroy almost a hundred thousand enemy ships in one operation.  Unfortunately, that was just one tenth of the enemy ships, but the greater progress might shut up some of his critics.  Normally they’d be far too scared to speak out, but given the enemy was destroying close to two thousand worlds every other day, they were probably more afraid of that than him.  It was total chance on what worlds would be targeted next.

The Admiral in the room with him looked far too nervous for his comfort.

The first six fleets to near the FTL line went as planned.  It was hardly ideal, he’d have preferred to ambush all of them at once, but the human fleets weren’t arriving at the FTL lines in perfect timing, and it was what it was.  The rest of the Earth’s fleets were much closer together in timing.

Then everything seemed to go wrong, as the remaining fleets arrived to find out the humans had launched their dreaded shielded missiles.  He winced, as just short of six hundred thousand ships were absolutely massacred by billions of energy beams.

He frowned, “Why didn’t they do that earlier?”

The admiral said, “I don’t know.  Presumably they were okay with the blood being traded, until we changed tactics.  You have to admit, they’d have lost less than three percent of their fleet using our old tactic in exchange for fifty thousand settled worlds.  They had to have had that plan ready to go, if we changed tactics first.  I suppose they didn’t change, in the hopes we wouldn’t either.”

He grunted, “They’re still not eradicating the worlds?”

The admiral nodded, “Not in the first three waves, our scouts have verified after they left.  We’ll have to wait and see for this round.  So far they’ve just removed all the cities, space infrastructure, and technology on the surface.  Any who evacuate the cities or live outside of them survive.”

He shook his head, “A lot more will die anyway, we haven’t had to hunt or farm for ourselves in over a hundred millennia.”

The admiral nodded reluctantly in agreement.

The admiral said, “Fleets of five hundred are starting to arrive at other worlds.  Perhaps they’ll simply start launching missiles before reaching a light second from FTL from now on…” he trailed off in alarm.

Tellus frowned, “What is it?”

The admiral said, “Six fleets of one hundred thousand ship fleets, just arrived.  One fleet each at the core worlds.  It seems they had more plans ready than simply launching missiles.  The fleets are responding per orders.”

Tellus’s thoughts were furious, and frightened, until the obvious occurred almost a minute later.

“No!  Stop them!  It’s a trap, they aren’t that stupid.”

The admiral got on his communicator, but it was already too late as the standing orders were implemented.  The fleets were only stationed a light year away, a wormhole trip of less than a second once one was opened.  It literally took longer for the orders to be given and the wormhole to be opened, than the trip took.  The initial minute had been spent on getting the crew to battle stations.

High Leader Tellus scowled deeply, as five point four million ships jumped into a wall of shielded missiles and the fleets were eradicated in seconds.  He watched in shock, as most of the ships recalled their missiles, and left for other worlds, while five hundred ships started to move in on the core worlds.

“Suggestions?”

The Admiral cleared his throat, “Just my old one, sire.  Tell them the truth, and force peace lest we all be destroyed by our ancient enemies.”

Tellus scowled, “That would be foolish.”

The admiral shook his head, “It would be foolish earlier, because giving the humans time to grow would mean our eventual defeat.  Or at least, that was the intent behind the words you used last time we spoke of it.  Except, this time it is us that needs time to survive.  We’re about to lose our government, and command centers for the fleets, in just… nine hours and fifty-three minutes.

“We have at most, two thousand ships in each of the six core systems, which won’t stand a chance against one point five billion of their missiles, as they sit safely out of range of ours.  It is we that need the time to adjust and grow so we may take back what is ours and destroy the humans.  If we fight now, we die.

“There’s no way to stop it, even if we recall all our ships our government would be doomed before they could catch up and destroy the human fleet.”

Tellus frowned, the admiral was right.  Of course, it’d be a cold war until one side or the other had the advantage, but in this one case time did benefit the empire more than the humans.  It just… went against the grain.  He knew intellectually it was ridiculous, but he felt completely incensed that the race dared to defy him, and they didn’t just die at his command.

“Bring in the human’s quantum communicator I had made, and power it on.  Have our scientists figured out how it works yet?”

The Admiral got on his communicator and passed out the orders.

“It’s hard to say, sire.  They went on for quite a long time in the report about temporary quantum resonance all on the same frequency, or some such crap.  It’s very advanced science, and I don’t understand it enough to know if they were blowing smoke or not.”

Tellus snickered.

“I don’t suppose it matters if they understand or not, since we have a working technology and can duplicate it.”

The admiral nodded, and the device was brought into the audience chamber.

“This is President Akin of Astraeus station, Earth.  What can I do for you, High Leader?”

Tellus scowled at the device, that human sounded way too cheerful.

“You are ordered to remove all ships from Andromeda immediately.”

Akin sounded amused, “Why would I do that, High Leader.  Can I call you Tellus?”

He ground his teeth, and he ignored the impertinent question.

“If you don’t immediately stop all offensive actions, and leave our galaxy, you’ll leave me no choice but to recall the millions of warships we have on our borders in order to preserve our remaining worlds.  If that happens, we will protect our galaxy alone with those eighteen million ships, and you and every other species out there will die in the fire of our most ancient enemies.  There are six large empires out there, each a match for us.  Thousands of civilizations would be eradicated, and millions would be enslaved.  All because you wouldn’t back off.

“In the end, if you destroy us, you’ll destroy yourselves.  Your advances in your stolen technology are quite impressive, but we know for a fact you don’t have nearly the numbers you’d need to defend yourselves against six empires, and I suspect you wouldn’t want to be the cause of quadrillions of intelligent beings dying or being enslaved in the fifty galaxies.

“If you retreat, we will talk terms of peace.  The empire might even be willing to acknowledge your independence, and perhaps even cede your claimed one thousand light year diameter sphere of the Milky Way Galaxy.

“In short, President Akin, you might be able to destroy us, but you aren’t ready to take over for us, and you know it.  You can build the ships, but you can’t fill them with personnel.”

He felt dirty, dealing with such a creature.  If he could’ve resurrected that idiotic colonel that had started this whole thing by suggesting Earth be their patsy in removing the Sonex, he’d have the bastard tortured to death daily, for the rest of Tellus’s life.

Akin said, “Stand by, please, High Leader.”

He said, “One hour is all I’ll give you, then I’m recalling my fleets.  I may not live to see it, but my species will live on, and yours will die along with countless others.”

He hit the mute button.

“This better work, admiral.  Or you’ll join the colonel, understand?”

The admiral swallowed nervously, “Yes, High Leader.”

Chapter Ten

The high leader was on hold, and we had an hour.  Unfortunately, that was an hour less than we needed.  Well, closer to forty-five minutes really, my platforms had been on route for fifteen minutes already.  I wasn’t sure what I’d expected to happen, but him demanding us to surrender wasn’t even on my radar.  The Grays were nuts, and the High Leader was one entitled arrogant bastard.  He’d just told me he’d let everyone burn out of spite, but I supposed he didn’t have a choice.  We had cornered him like a rat, and he was acting like one.

“Alright, any advice?  We need to delay him another hour.  Once my platforms get there, and destroy his fleets, his threats will be moot and toothless.  Even if he doesn’t wait, it’d probably be okay, what’s the chances those empires would respond in less than an hour, before our ships show up on the border?”

Admiral Holtz replied, “We’re discussing it.  Eighteen million ships could destroy our whole fleet if they play it right, although most of theirs would be destroyed as well.  It’d be better if we can delay him another hour, and let your unmanned platforms take them out, they’ll have superior odds.”

I nodded in agreement, no more of our people would have to die either.  At least, not for that battle.  It was a tense ten minutes or so before Holtz came back.

Holtz said, “Here’s the plan.  We’re going to decelerate the fleet in… five more minutes.  At the hour mark they’ll be at a full stop.  You need to accuse him of bluffing, and demand proof.  Say you have the authority for a full retreat if he can prove it, but otherwise your ships will stay where they are, neither moving forward or retreating until your given the proof.

“He might send a data dump at that point, but you need to insist on getting coordinates so you can send a probe and verify his ships are there with our own equipment, since anything else could be faked.  That should lead to another two-hour stand-off, since it’d take that long for your probes to arrive.  Of course, an hour before they’re expecting a probe to arrive at the external fleets, your platforms will massacre them.  Then we move forward with the plan and start the ships moving in system again.  It’ll be a small delay, and worth it if it stops them recalling their ships.”

Damn.

“I’m not sure I can lie, can one of you do it?”

Holtz snorted, “Son, there are no rules in war.  War is about deception after all.”

I smiled, “Admiral, you misunderstand.  I have no moral compunctions about lying to an enemy of humanity and smiling as we blow his ass up.  I truly believe the Gray empire to be a blight of evil.  What I meant was, I literally suck at lying, admiral.  I’m not sure I can pull off story time.”

The admiral laughed, and both Cassie and Jessica snickered.

Holtz sighed, “You have to, he’ll be suspicious if someone takes over.  If you have to, launch probes to those positions, so you won’t be lying about that.  You’ll have to wing the rest of it.”

“Alright, I’ll do it as soon as you start slowing down?  Or make him wait the full hour?”

Holtz said, “Either works actually, the probes would take two hours, if you call when we decelerate that’s only ninety minutes for your platforms.  It’s a balance, waiting might make him angry or nervous, but conversely doing it earlier gives him more time to second guess us and himself if he takes the deal.”

“I think it makes more sense to call… say a minute after deceleration starts.  Then I can say our military leaders ordered a full stop.  Waiting after taking action with the ships, might make it look like we’re just delaying, and make him even more suspicious.”

Holtz tilted his head, “You’re right, do it that way.”

I nodded, and I muted on my end.

Cassie giggled, “Think you can handle it?”

I sighed, “Maybe?  I don’t have a choice.  Worst case things get a little ugly.”

The coffee was tasty, as I took another sip, and we waited for the ships to start decelerating.  It wasn’t all that long, and the tight nervousness in my stomach got worse as I counted down the minute.

“High leader, are you still on?” I asked, then winced at how damned cheerful I sounded.

Tellus said, “Go ahead, what is your decision.”

I said, “High Leader.  As you can see, I managed to talk the military into decelerating to a full stop, not just in the core systems, but in all your systems.”

Tellus replied, “Confirmed.  Talked into?”

I snorted, “You’re familiar with Earth, High Leader.  We have many countries and leaders of which I am merely one.  There’s a small snag, some of them are demanding proof of those fleets, and don’t believe they actually exist.  That they’re just a bluff to get us to back off.”

The high leader growled, “They do?  They’d call me a liar?”

I cleared my throat, “I’d like to suggest an alternative to your demands.”

There was a long pause.

Tellus said, “I will listen.”

“Proof would be easy to ascertain.  Simply send me the six sets of coordinates for the fleets, and I’ll send a small probe out there to verify what you say.  I’ve managed to convince them to pull the fleets out completely if our probes detect your ships.  So, until the probe arrive to verify, the fleets would sit where they are at a full stop, once verified they will set out for the FTL line and leave your galaxy.”

There was a really long pause that time.  My voice had been a little wooden in the beginning, but the last three-point sentence had come out stronger.  Mostly because I’d taken the admiral’s advice, if the probes see the enemy ships, we’ll pull out.  Of course, the probes won’t see the ships, I’ll have destroyed them by then.

Sophistry, and misdirection, but still true in essence.  At least, that had been my mental juggling in the matter.

Tellus finally replied, “We will send the coordinates.  We won’t wait longer than two hours, so I suggest you launch immediately.  We’ll also recall all fleets if your ships move forward at all, after achieving full stop.”

“I understand, two hours then.”

I felt a surge of relief, and I hoped it hadn’t shown in my voice too much.

He hung up on his end.

Cassie shook her head, “You weren’t kidding, now I know why you always tell the truth.  We’re lucky he’s an alien, because a five-year-old human would’ve called bullshit on that.”

I scratched above my eye with my middle finger.

Jessica snickered.

“Does that mean the other leaders will trust me when I say something now, like not monitoring the stuff I build for them, outside of the vast fleet I own I mean, for colonies.”

Cassie shook her head, “They’ll think you gambled on it, and were pretending, so you could deceive them all later.”

I sighed, really?  Alright, I could actually see that.

Diana said, “We have ninety minutes before all hell breaks loose, let’s get a bite to eat and take a break.  I need to talk to you anyway.”

Cassie made a shooing motion, “Go, I’ll call if anything happens.  It’s been a high stress day and it all rests on the High Leader being a gullible shmuck for another ninety minutes.”

I snorted, and I took Diana’s hand as we walked out of the command center and over to our home.

We just warmed up leftover pasta from last night’s dinner in the microwave, grabbed a couple of drinks, and sat at the kitchen table.  It actually helped a little, calming down a bit from the crazy events of the day that so much of our future rested on.

“What’s up?”

Diana smiled, “Quantum jump drive update.  It’s ready for trials outside of lab conditions.  I’ve also set built in restrictions to the drive, it won’t activate if there are people on the ship.  The update to the communicators is ready too.  They weren’t really meant to be a beacon, at least not when I designed them, so you’d jump to about a thousand miles away from another ship, max.

“It’s also something they need to decide to do, a mayday flag of sorts on the communicator.  Its default connectivity won’t work as a beacon for physical matter.  Which is important, or anyone with a communicator could destroy ships from any distance if another ship had one, you know?”

“Yeah, I can see that.  So that’s a good thing.”

Diana said, “All the same limitations apply that we’ve talked about before, but you can install the software and test on your platforms if you want.  The more data we have the better, to see if there’s any kind of cumulative degradation.  There is one thing that might help.  Like I said, the communicator was never meant to act as a beacon, so it’s ability to form a beacon field outside of the ship is limited to a thousand miles.

“The jump drive itself however is a different matter.  Any ship with the drive installed will be able to form a quantum resonance jump beacon field up to a light second away… which of course takes a whole second to form, the particles travel at the speed of light.”

I thought that through for a minute, and my eyes widened.

“So it could jump in and out of energy range of an attacker, or it could act as a light speed drive in normal space.”

Diana smirked, “Yes.  Relatively slow compared to a wormhole drive, or even subspace FTL, but it’ll work inside a solar system.  So, instead of ten hours to travel five A.U. it’d take just forty minutes.  Of course, it’ll also take two thousand four hundred quantum jumps.  One per second.  At the same time, there is no momentum or movement, so you could come to a full stop at any point during the trip.  I imagine the impulse drive would just be used for very local movement, to complete the approach to another ship or space station.

“Of course, that same phenomena makes it a bad choice for a mini-platform with an anti-matter warhead, since you want that kind to have momentum to crash into a ship fast.  On the other hand, the jump drive would be perfect for a mini-platform with a disintegrator beam.  With quantum jumps, you could keep it within an eighth of a light second distance from an enemy ship no matter how fast it’s moving, even if your ship and their ship was moving at high speeds to pass each other head on.  No momentum.”

Huh, I hadn’t even thought of those last two yet, but she’d had a lot more time to think it through.  Of course, a disintegrator missile didn’t have to be in range all that long, even a high-speed flyby was more than long enough.  I supposed eventually I wouldn’t be the only one with effective shields against that beam technology though, so it could be useful at some point.

“That’s incredible.  Alright, I’ll install it on the fleet, and run some tests on the extra platforms I have out in the void.  I’m a little tempted to use it in the battle, but it’s probably a little premature to depend on that for something so important.”

Diana nodded in agreement, “We already have superiority there without it.  One other thing, someone out there is bound to ask the same questions you did, once their scientists understand how the communicators work.  Especially if they see our drives in use.  Without nanites it will take them much longer to get there, but I imagine in ten years or so there’ll be more than one race out there with the technology.

“It’s not like the wormhole drives.  They and subspace FTL have almost no relation at all in scientific theory or functionality.  Maybe not though, I mean they can build working communicators with the exacting specifications we sent, but without the equations, math, and scientific knowledge of how they work, it might take longer to make that leap, it’s hard to say.  I guess what I’m saying is I had no idea what we were just giving away until now.”

I nodded thoughtfully, then shrugged, “It is what it is.  I can’t be worried about that, at least to the point of dwelling on it.  It’d be too easy to justify taking out someone close to us in technology as a threat.”

She said, “It’s also a little limited.  You can’t move whole fleets at once, just one ship per beacon.  Not a problem for local movement at light speed, but otherwise it’s problematical at best.  A ship requesting assistance for instance, you can only send one platform.  Then that platform can form several beacons with its jump drive, and it would snowball from there, but it’d take time to move a large amount of ships that way.  On any kind of travel beacon in system, we’d have to work in two-way communications, and an incoming ship would have to wait for a green light before jumping in.

“Just saying, we still have things to work out before we can mainstream it, but for testing, and moving one platform in an emergency, or within a light second of its location, what we have now is fine.  The rest is just details.”

That sounded really complicated.  The drives and beacons would all have to be on a quantum network so frequencies weren’t double used, much like the communications device had a data level.  It’d be worth it though, if we could make it safe for use.

I nodded, “I can see where two ships jumping at the same time would be very bad.  It’d also be important for each ship to have its own quantum resonance, right?”

She smirked, “Yes, that part’s already in the software, otherwise a ships drive could act as a beacon for another ship,” she shuddered, “I’m not really sure what would happen if two ships resonated at the same frequency as a beacon.  Would it jump to the beacon, or the ship?  Or even without a beacon.  I suppose I should test it and find out, so far I’ve assiduously avoided an obvious mistake like that.”

I laughed, “What happens if there’s a race of beings on the other side of the universe using quantum jumping, and they overlap one of our frequencies on accident.”

Her eyes widened, “That could be bad, at best someone would take a surprising trip, but I’m sure we could figure out a way around that using procedures and safety guidelines.”

“I’ll run that update, start a few platforms running around the void in various scenarios, and give you access to the data.”

She asked, “Various scenarios?”

I shrugged, “I’ll have two or three running around at light speed, and I’ll set up two ships with multiple beacons, and have three or four platforms bounce back and forth a few hundred thousand times.  Lastly, I’ll set up a ship with the mayday communicator, and add a third location for the bouncing ships.”

She nodded, “Sounds great.  I hope it works.”

I raised an eyebrow.

She shrugged, “I don’t have any ships in the Lab System the size of a dreadnought.  That’s why they call it a testing phase.  I know it would work for missiles or probes, and small ships.”

I didn’t have any dreadnought sized ones either, at least not for three more days.  But then, I supposed I could combine a few of them to get there immediately.  It wasn’t like I didn’t have an extra twenty-one million platforms to play with.

In fact, why was I wasting the universe’s energy?  Increasing entropy like that, for no reason at all.  I didn’t need an extra twenty-one million platforms, I could just combine what was there now and just have seven million extra dreadnought sized ones immediately.  No more building required.  The other twenty-four million were necessary though, to take over for the Grays’ external fleets, so those would continue building.

“One sec.”

I took care of that, it’d take a few minutes of course, for three platforms to melt into one.  Not melt really, but to the eyes the nanites reconfiguring did look like liquid metal.  They were even a little bigger than dreadnought sized.  Once that was done, I set up the tests, and had three ships jumping around using their own drives, and three more bouncing between two ships using their drives for beacons, and one ship using a communicator mayday beacon.  So, nine ships were involved in the test, but only six of those were actually quantum jumping.

So far, nothing had blown up, it seemed the size didn’t matter, as long as the jump drive field contained the whole ship.  I gave Diana access to monitor them and see the data gathered.

“It’s working, and you have access to peek.  Just let me know when you have enough data, or if you have another experiment you want me to try.”

Diana nodded, “Let’s give it a few days, then we’ll run detailed atomic level scans.”

Sounded good.  The rest of lunch we just talked about everyday stuff and tried to relax.  My mind kept returning to the upcoming battle, and all the what ifs and what could go wrong.  Even if he did pull the ships at this point, things would be manageable, it’d just take a lot longer to hunt them down.

Chapter Eleven

The best plan of course, would’ve been to appear far out of energy range, overwhelm them with billions of mini-platforms, and not take any damage at all.  That was my original plan.  The problem with such a plan was that the fleets were in the void outside of galaxies.  In short, in that scenario they’d have more than enough time to take stock, go get a coffee, then give the order to run away, all before the missiles got close enough to fire.  Which would be a valid tactic against overwhelming fire power like that.

Which meant my original plan wouldn’t work at all.  The distance plan of overwhelming firepower would only work within a star system where they couldn’t escape at FTL speeds.

Instead, the fleets would be coming out of wormholes right into their proverbial laps, within a light second of them.  That kind of thing was only possible because of the connection I had to their fleet command and control, I knew exactly where they were.

It meant risking the loss of platforms on our side.  Of course, it would also be the first battle where we had numerical superiority.  They had eighteen million ships left in the six locations, whereas I had twenty-four million platforms.  Four to three odds, in our favor.

Secondly, we would have surprise on our side, and the platforms would attack at the speed of computing, firing at the enemy ships in a split second, where it would take flesh and blood decisions on their side to either fire back or run.  Those platforms, unlike the ones in our systems, would fire at anything that wasn’t an Earth ship.

Thirdly, we’d be launching those mini-platforms even as we opened fire in surprise.  Even if they acted fast enough and their fired beams broke through the shields and caused some damage to the platforms, there’d be forty-eight trillion mini-platforms in play within just a handful of seconds.  At that point, the battle would be over in seconds as they were burned out of existence.

Of course, given the day’s events, I imagined the captains of the enemy ships were on alert, and ready for trouble, which would minimize the benefit of point one, surprise that is.  Still, I thought even the small advantage of numbers would be enough.  The shields would last long enough on both sides, at almost even numbers, to launch missiles.

Then it’d be over.  Even if they launched their missiles in return, we had far better point defense with our mini-platforms, it’d be over in seconds.

At least, that’s what I kept telling myself.

It was almost a sure thing.  It was the almost part that bothered me, because if for some reason our fleets were mutually destroyed, they’d be destroyed in plain view of six enemy empires.  Not exactly the definitive statement I’d wanted to make to prevent an invasion.  If anything, it would encourage them all to attack.

I kept waffling back and forth in my mind, wondering if it might be better just to let them escape, and take them down the hard way far from the eyes of our external enemies.  In a way, that would look a lot like we’d just relieved the Gray fleets with an upgraded version.

But in the end, I decided it was worth the risk, since no human lives were on the line.

I forwarded the status on my command table, so the joint command down on Earth could monitor the battle.  It was split into six separate holograms, and it showed both overall force numbers and separate ones at the six sites.

Cassie said, “It’s all good.  It’s a good thing you’re not the captain of a ship, and there are no crews on unmanned platforms, your face before battle would totally kill morale.”

I glared.

She laughed, “That’s better.  Even up close, we have the edge, especially with closer odds.”

I nodded in agreement, it was just up close it would be a real fight, even if weighed in our direction.  From a greater distance our technical superiority made a much bigger difference, and it’d be an extermination.

The platforms arrived at all six locations simultaneously, thanks to my timing them that way.  They dropped out of the wormholes, and immediately opened fire as they launched missiles.  Normally, the ships could lock on a whole bunch of ships in a second, and then split their fire.  I didn’t bother with that, and they targeted one ship in maybe one hundredth of a second, and as a result they were firing less than a tenth of a second later.  All their beams at one ship, just to make it faster, and make our surprise count as much as possible.

Hundreds of beams burned across space, per ship, as all the mini-platforms were launched into space.

In each location, a third of the enemy fleet was completely devastated in that first shot, mostly because of that four to three odds.  One million of the enemy ships had two of ours targeting them, while the other two million were fighting one on one.

The other two million enemy ships in each location, absorbed the attack into their shields long enough to return fire.

It was an ambush battle at point blank range, so it wasn’t going to be subtle, or even last all that long.  My money was on about five seconds.  Five seconds to burn away eighteen million ships and many millions of intelligent beings.  It was a little surreal.

Two seconds later the first million ships were history.

At three seconds, we lost our shields on two million of our ships and the enemy beams started to eat away at the platforms nanites, even as ours continued to burn into theirs.

At four seconds, the two million ships that had double teamed the first million, had retargeted onto the two million enemy surviving ships, essentially making the odds two to one for the last half of their fleet.  One quarter having been destroyed a second ago, and the other quarter being destroyed two hours ago in Andromeda.

A split second after that, forty-eight trillion beams left the mini-platforms, some of them close enough to use the disintegration beam.  The last two million enemy ships were vaporized in about a tenth of a second.

For the length of time it took to exchange a greeting, a little less than five seconds, the battle was over.

Fully a third of two million of the platforms, half the fleet at each location, had lost about a third of their mass, but the ship would just take another couple of days to finish building to dreadnought size.  It appeared the gamble had paid off.

I also intended to leave the forty-eight trillion mini-platforms out, and just build twelve million more inside each of the ships.  An added and pointed threat toward any of the six empires to stay the hell out.

The thrill of victory went through me, but at the same time it didn’t feel like something to celebrate.  A lot of Grays had died, and a lot more still would.

“Open a channel to the High Leader.”

Jessica said, “Calling, and the admirals have already ordered our fleets to continue in system.”

I nodded.

I waited about thirty seconds, then looked at Jessica.

She shook her head, “He’s not answering.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it.

Then said, “The system needs voicemail.”

Cassie snickered.

“What did you want to say to him?”

I shrugged, “I was going to dictate my terms of surrender.  He could continue to fight, but he’ll lose.  He could save more lives if he’d agreed to abandon his fleets, and to evacuate the cities and leave the tech behind.  Open the channel to the command center.”

Jessica nodded.

“Admirals, can we get a hacking missile into one of the enemy’s home fleet ships, in any of the systems we’re in now.  I know we’ll have the core planets’ command and control as well as data cores in a day or two, from the data retrieval mission with boots on ground, but it might help to know what he’s doing with his home fleet sooner than that.  He’s got to be desperate at this point, he’s not even taking my call after losing the external fleets.  A few hundred thousand warships and five million or so scouts could do some damage after all, since our fleets are so split up, if he decides to bring them together.”

Actually, there was a good chance five hundred ships with six billion missiles could do a lot of damage, if not win against those combined numbers, if they kept their distance.

Holtz replied, “Consider it done, though it’s going to be at least nine more hours before we hit the fleets over those almost two thousand worlds.”

“Understood, thank you.  I’ll feed you the fleet status as soon as I have it.”

I nodded to Jessica, and she muted the line on our side again.

“More waiting.”

Cassie nodded, “That’s war.  Lots of waiting, short moments of terror.”

Eventually, the adrenaline ran out and my body calmed as I saw to the day to day operations of our station’s security, and to our business.  I also called it a day a bit early, seeing as I had to be back in the command center around ten that night, to tap into the enemy’s fleet.

One more thing to hate about war, working in my off hours’ time.  A petty cost perhaps, but it was still a point.  I’d have rather been in bed with my Diana and getting some sleep.

It was only five hours later when we got our answer.

It was around six at night, and we were eating dinner, when we were called to the command center.  Jayna and Diana came with Cassie and I out of curiosity.  I looked at the command table, and I saw the home fleet around the original home world and five other core worlds were running for it, leaving the system in the opposite direction of the approaching fleets.  I checked the data, and the home fleets on all worlds were running for it, abandoning their posts, no doubt on orders from the emperor.

“Status?”

Lieutenant John Davidson was on duty for the evening shift, Jessica had retired when we had.

John replied, “The fleets fired on several places on the planet from orbit in each of the core worlds.  Our fleets also saw several shuttles from the ground to the fleet, before they started to run for it.”

“Shit, they probably destroyed the home fleet’s command and control.  Which means the hacking missile won’t help either, there’s nothing left to hack.  Unless… could he have taken it with him?”

John shook his head, “No way to know, until you hack them.”

I sighed, and then nodded.

Cassie said, “If they did, we’re about to not be able to find them anymore.  In just ten hours.”

I pursed my lips, time to scare the shit out of my Earth allies, I guess.  I’d been avoiding it, since the manned Earth fleet should’ve handled the rest easily, but of course the Grays had to screw that up.  Not that I blamed Tellus, running from overwhelming odds sounded quite reasonable to me.  It was one of my plans in fact, if things ever got untenable in the Sol system.

It’d take me years to make the assignments one by one, but simply automating it with a software script wasn’t hard.  I just pulled up the data for the pre-FTL worlds, we’d had that data for a long time now, ever since we hacked the home fleet the first time through the first scout ship that crash landed, before they removed those entangled particles from the system of the scout I used.

The program assigned one of those systems to a platform, ordered it to set a course, and five million of my remaining seven million spare platforms opened wormholes to those systems.  They should arrive long before the scout ships could reach the FTL line.  Even the farthest edges of the empire were only two hours away by wormhole drive.

Then I took the time to define a Gray scout ship as a threat, so they’d automatically attack it, and fed it to those five million platforms.  I didn’t imagine it would take more than firing two mini-platforms in system to take them out.  Even one would probably do it, since their shields were just as strong as a scout’s.

So much for the five million scouts.

Then forty-two thousand dreadnought platforms out of the remaining two million or so, were assigned Gray worlds in Andromeda, and opened up wormholes to the FTL line.  In a place that would put the fleeing enemy between the platforms and the Earth fleet.  Again, I took the time to mark the gray ships as enemy ships based on scanning data, the platforms would take it from there if in a rather simplistic tactic.

Those platforms hadn’t been done building, I’d combined three to give them the right mass, but they only had half the complement of mini-platforms, six million in each of the ships, instead of twelve.

Still, six million mini-platforms against two thousand ships would do just fine.  That was just in the core worlds, the handful of ships fleeing the other worlds would be even more sure of a kill.

Yeah, scaring my allies.  Still better than the Gray fleet losing themselves somewhere in the fifty galaxies and starting to build more ships.  I still hadn’t revealed the quantum jump drive to anyone, and I wouldn’t be using it in the fight if I could avoid it.  That shouldn’t be hard to manage.

Cassie said, “I wonder if they destroyed the data cores as well?”

I frowned, “I hope not, that would be a scorched ground approach in a no-win situation, to deny resources to the enemy as a final act of defiance.  I believe he thinks he can build a fleet and come back and win.  Having that data will be kind of important to him at that point, won’t it?”

Cassie nodded slowly, “That’s logical, but he could’ve taken it with him to deny us in the meantime.”

I sighed, that actually made more sense than my hope.  Which made things problematic, we may just need to be happy with what we had now.  It wasn’t as if we couldn’t learn it ourselves, and we’d already had enough of a boost, not to mention all the opportunities with alien traders to speed up luxuries and conveniences for on world technologies.  We already had the military ones, after all.

Diana said, “I’ll forgive you if you lose it.  We already have more things to investigate than we can possibly cover in a lifetime.  Earth has already jumped far fast, it might even be wiser to let all the changes catch up and settle.”

I nodded, “I won’t argue with that, but it would’ve been nice to learn about the six empires, and even about the Grays’ history.  Not just the technical, scientific, and mathematical achievements.”

I checked the logs, the enemy ships had fired on their planets four times in the home system, and just three times in the other core worlds.  That implies they’d had three separate data centers on all six worlds, and then the command and control center for the home fleet on the home world.  There’d be no reason to take out the command and control on other worlds, not for six fleets that no longer existed.

Cassie shook her head, “If they did destroy the command interface, then they couldn’t talk to each other outside of light speed comms.  They had to take the command center with them, somehow.”

Diana smirked, “Unless they decided to use my communication system instead.  That would be a command and control system without centralization.  All they’d have to do is build one for each ship with nanites, and choose a different shared data frequency, instead of the one we’re using, and we wouldn’t see them in use.  Same concept as ours having two data channels, one for general connection to everyone that has them of all races, and the second for our internal fleet and even civilian ships.”

I gaped at my wife, and she snickered.

Diana said, “In short, you should try to hack one of the smaller fleets, see if that’s true.  If you can still see all the ships in the core, you might be able to connect to and download any cores they’re carrying, then blow them up.”

I thought about that a bit.

I nodded, “That’s a lot of speculation, but new system or old system that they took with them, it’d probably work.  The only way it wouldn’t work would be if he really took out all command and control, no doubt after giving orders for a rendezvous point.  Given that’s the least likely scenario, it’s worth a shot.  We just might get that data after all, even if it will take centuries to go through all of it.”

Diana smiled, “I’d be okay with that, but I’m not counting on it.”

The platforms had ten hours to act, so I put most on standby, then remote controlled one of the platforms, and set an intercept course for the five warships moving out from a non-core planet.  Controlling just one of the platforms, without automation, from our command center would be easy.  It was millions of them where we had to depend on automation and straight forward brutal tactics.  Programming subtlety was difficult with simple logic trees.

I fired enough mini-platforms to whittle away their outer mass without overly worrying about losses to their point defense, and twenty seconds later I fired off fifty hacking missiles in a slightly staggered formation, ten for each of the enemy ships.

That was overkill, but I wanted to be sure of it.  I’d have only so many opportunities before I’d have to act and release all the platforms to wipe out the home fleet.  Might was well make sure it went right the first time.

Still, even at that, it’d take almost five hours to meet in the middle.  I resisted the idea of speeding that up with quantum jumps, I was sure the command center on Earth was already freaking out a bit over watching what I was doing.  I wasn’t hiding anything at all.

No, faster than five hours.  The missiles weren’t moving at sixty gravities, they were moving at six hundred.

Regardless, it was going to be a long night.

“Anyone else want coffee?”

After getting a count, I went on a coffee run.  Maybe I should just give up and install a coffee maker in the command center.

Chapter Twelve

The admirals must’ve seen the writing on the wall with my platform movements and plans, or perhaps the colony ships were just impatient and tired of sitting in the void, a bit stir crazy.  Maybe a little of both.

Regardless, I was informed the eight colony ships were being released to their solar systems.

I still had almost two million platforms in surplus, so I immediately sent eight thousand to the colony worlds, a thousand each.  That literally took a few minutes, since they were all within fifty light years.  In fact, it took longer to set up than it took the platforms to travel there.

Then as promised, I extruded the entangled particles for those thousand platforms, in a wrapping of nanites, for ownership, and command and control transfer.  That formed eight rather small ships outside of the station, about the size of half a scout.

Thanks to Diana’s idea earlier, of what the enemy might be doing, I set up a non-entangled quantum communicator in each ship for command and control, so I could control the ships to their destination, then release them, all without entangled particles being involved.

Last but not least, I loaded all the upgrade processes and software for the colony ships as we’d agreed to in our meeting a few days ago.  Then I sent them off, they’d rendezvous with their colony ship somewhere in their star system.  It was an all in one system, the little ship would deliver the command and control entangled particles, and the upgrade all at the same time.  The little ship would simply sink into the colony ship, and become a part of it, at which time the communicator I used to control it would stop working.

A clever bit of programming, and automated delivery, if I do say so myself.

While I was at it, and just to kill time before my missiles caught up with the fleeing enemy ships, I initiated the process for thirty-two more colony ships.  Those were a little less complicated, since I didn’t have to use delivery ships.

I combined sixty-four unused platforms into thirty-two colony ships.

I also sent away thirty-two thousand more platforms, a thousand to each of the future colonies of those ships.  Their colonies would be protected long before they even got there.

The colony ships themselves set course for Sol.  They’d come to the station itself and dock.  Once docked to Astraeus, they’d accept the command and control entangled particles for the one thousand platforms, in addition to the command and control particles for the two platforms that made up the new colony ship.  In short, nothing would command the colony ship other than the colony ship, much like my station controlled itself and all of its platforms.

Then they’d just sit on the lower docking ring, until those countries sent their command crews to pick them up, and they’d fly them to Earth to load up people, supplies, and furniture to make it comfortable.

I’d set up most of that to be automatic, and I would continue doing it that way until I ran out of spare platforms, which would be a while.  After all, after the fight the five million and forty-two thousand platforms I was using in the final ship battle would go back to the storage point in the void.  That was a whole lot of future colonies before I’d have to build a damned thing again.

Not to mention most of the two point four million ships that’d be mothballed in the Sol system, shortly enough.  They still hadn’t said, but I couldn’t imagine they’d keep more than a hundred thousand of them manned, which would leave two point three million ships to use as raw materials for future needs.

Last but not least, I sent out messages to the forty countries to update the status.  The original eight colonies to explain the delivery ship, and the other thirty-two to let them know they could pick up their colony ship at the station as early as tomorrow mid-morning.

It was also apparent Diana’s idea would solve other issues.  Such as delivery of ships and supplies to other colonies if they made additional ship orders.  From a civilian space yacht to adding more warships for the military.  In short, I could use the communicator idea to fly the ships there, they’d deliver themselves.  Then after the command and control ship received the entangled particles, the communicator could be absorbed back into the ship as mass, disconnecting me from the ship permanently as they took over control.

That probably wouldn’t come up a whole lot though.  Well, the civilian ships might, but the military would be quite set with thirty warships and a thousand platforms.

It was almost eleven at night, when my missiles intercepted the five ships.  It went well, or at least, I was able to get hacking missiles into four of the five.  The fifth blew up to a lucky, or perhaps I should say, unlucky beam into one of their reactors.

Then the real world dropped away as I traced the connection with my mind and magic.  The first thing I did was space the survivors so they couldn’t fight me or blow up the ship with a self-destruct.

At first, I’d thought it was a failure, no data connections at all.  The command and control center and the entangled particles linking the ships of the home fleet had been destroyed, no question.  However, looking at the data on that ship in particular, I noticed the software for a communications device, along with a data frequency that was different from ours.

Given the almost five hours it’d taken to close, I came to the conclusion that these five ships were ordered to disassemble their communicator and connection.  I ordered it to rebuild.  A few seconds later, and I was connected to the rest of the home fleet network.  In hindsight, it was kind of an obvious move for them to make.

I jumped to the command ship holding the High Leader, and no doubt a lot of other leaders.  It was almost too easy, but I didn’t feel guilty at all as I spaced the bastards, the last thing I needed was for them to detect me and cut me off.

There were three extra data-cores on that ship, as we’d hoped.  One was historical and cultural, one was technical, science and math that had real impact and practical uses in the real world along with the data and specifications for millions of devices, and one was theoretical math and science that hadn’t yielded any real-world results yet.

It would take years to consciously go through it all, even to index it, I’d leave it to Diana to pick out the useful stuff and run with it.  It wouldn’t all be useful of course, there were hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of military advances for instance, before they even made the adaptive nanite systems.  All of that would be interesting, but worthless.  Still, there’d be a lot for non-military uses that would be extremely useful, once it was learned and understood, which would take time.

Beyond that, it would open new avenues to even more advances, like we’d taken the Grays current military technology to new heights, not just weapons but other systems and means of travel.  It boggled the mind in some ways, who knew what the human empire would look like in ten years, a hundred years, or even thousands of years from now.

My and Diana’s life was just seeing the start of this new golden age of humanity, if greed and other human failings didn’t screw it up, that is.  I had faith some, even most of us, would get it right.

I formed data cores on the station of similar design, and downloaded the data using magic, which made it a lot faster.  Still, even then it took me quite a while to make a copy of it all.  When I came out of it, the first thing I did was start a second copy, out on one of the platforms in the void.

Only then did I give the green flag to all my platforms.  They all launched enough missiles to take out what they needed to.  The five million facing off with fleeing scouts only fired a handful, the ones in the core systems facing two thousand fired all two million of the mini-platforms.  A thousand at each should do the job.

Ironically, we had to wait another three to four hours to see the results.

“Alright, I got the data, and you have full access Diana.  Here’s a question, do we share this?”

Cassie frowned, “They’ll be mad if we don’t.”

I nodded, “If we do, they’ll have nanite ships of their own in less than a year.  Granted, not as powerful as ours, no disintegration beams, jump drives, or shielded no-range missiles, but it’ll happen a lot sooner than we hoped.”

Diana bit her lip, “Maybe, but better sooner than have a lot of people angry with us.  We’d have been forced to share those databases because of the scheduled ground missions that would’ve given them direct access.  This new circumstance gives us the opportunity to be asses about it, but I suggest we not do that.”

I sighed, she was right, of course.

“We’ll make the historical and cultural database available to all, I mean everyone.  The other two we classify.  You’ll have full access, and you can give out and assign permissions to your teams by database record, to give them stuff to work on.

“Then we’ll arrange something similar for all the countries who have troops invested in this war.  They’ve earned it if only by their blood and tears, but I assume they’re going to want it similarly classified and restrict access to only their top scientists.”

Cassie said, “The first part of that works.  My advice is not to manage the second part at all, let them do it.  Give them a copy of the database, one copy for each country.  Let them secure the core somewhere, and then they can control the access they want to give.  All you need to do is ask who gets to administer it, you’ll obviously have to grant access to one person per country and data core before delivery.  Otherwise it’ll be a nightmare to try and manage it all, for very little profit in it on our end.”

Diana added, “Plus, thirty-one copies will be a lot more secure.”

There were thirty countries who’d supplied all the troops on the ships.

I said absently, “Thirty-two, I already made a backup copy in a platform in the void.  Let’s hope none of them blow up the Earth.”

Jayna snickered.

“John, connect us?”

John nodded as he unmuted us.

“Admirals, it looks like we can cancel the ground mission, we have the data already.  My platforms are about to finish off the home fleet in a few hours.  I’ll also keep a platform at each of the worlds until they’re cleared, while the fleet continues to take out the worlds and knock them back to the stone age.  We don’t want even one scout getting away, so it seems prudent to watch until that ability to build a ship on the surface and run is taken away from them.

“As for the data, I’ll make a copy for every country that joined us in the war, and I’ll send it where requested.  It will be each country’s responsibility to secure it, and they’ll decide who in your country has access to the technical and theoretical data cores.  As for the historical one, we’re going to make that available to everyone on Earth.”

Holtz grunted, “This will all be over in a few days then.  Without the need to worry about a home fleet or enemy ships, we can split the fleet into ships of twenty instead of five hundred, and just get all the rest of the worlds in one more joint action.  We’ll let our leaders know about the cores, that might take longer to work out, and they’ll contact you when we know where we want it, and who to give initial administrator access to.

“As for the ground team, we’re still going to do it.  There’s still one more possible reason to do it, their communications center.  If that wasn’t destroyed, we can use it to send out messages to all the races, give them an update, tell them they’re free, and send the data to build a quantum communication device if they ever want to open talks with their neighbors and us.  That way we won’t be depending on the grapevine method.  Once that’s done, and we have nothing else to say, we’ll finish destroying the tech on the home world and call it a war.”

I replied, “Sounds like a plan, and good idea.”

I nodded to John, and he muted it.

Then we waited another three hours, and the last of their ships were destroyed just before two in the morning.  I recalled all the missiles, and then took my wife to bed.  We’d be notified if any ships were launched from any of the worlds, before the human fleet could get to the world and remove all the cities, infrastructure, and technology.

Chapter Thirteen

The next morning we all got a late start, and I puttered into the command center with a coffee around ten in the morning.  The missiles had been reabsorbed by the platforms while I was asleep, so as planned, I recalled the five million platforms that had gone after the scouts to the void.  The other forty-two thousand would stay around the Gray planets until we were sure the planets had been scrubbed of advanced technology.  Another two or three days would see to that.

The thirty-two new colony ships were also in final approach to docking on the station, though reviewing the logs showed none of the countries were on their way to get them yet.

“Morning.”

Cassie and Jessica returned my greeting.

Cassie said, “I’ve peeked into their history enough to find out a little about the six enemy empires, as well as a few interesting facts about the Grays themselves.”

I considered getting others involved in that briefing, but the historical database would be free to view for everyone so dismissed it.

“What’d you find out?”

Cassie said, “Andromeda is twice the size of our galaxy, and quite a bit older.  The Grays discovered FTL travel one point two million years ago, and they started to spread out and form colonies at that time.  This is all pre-nanite, they did it the hard way, and it all went pretty slowly.  It took them tens of thousands of years before they had a thousand colonies, and the whole time they found no evidence of other FTL races, just pre-technological societies.

“That’s not all that much of a surprise, it seems they formed a new colony every generation or so, and they encouraged families to have more children.  It grew with their population, I expect we’ll grow at a similar rate.  Still, after about fifty thousand years they had several colonies with extremely high populations, and the whole colony thing started to explode, still once a generation, but from many worlds at once.

“That’s about when they finally bumped heads with another FTL race in their expansion.  The end result of that was predictably enough, war.  It was over the next two hundred thousand years or so where they made all the advances, wormhole drives, nanite ships, weapons technologies, and they faced many FTL races by the end of it.

“The important thing to note is they were genocidal from the start.  A lot of worlds were made uninhabitable by the various wars.  Fifty thousand worlds is a lot, but there should be a whole lot more than that in a galaxy twice the size of ours.  To put it in perspective, our five hundred light years has about eight thousand living worlds, and it comprises about half a percent the size of our galaxy.  A quarter percent, of Andromeda.  Given that, Andromeda should have four to five times the amount of living worlds than it does.

“More importantly, it should have a lot more than one race in the whole galaxy.

“Regardless, that expansion phase took them close to two hundred thousand years.  The wars weren’t quick or decisive until they were able to come up with the nanite technology.  I’m sure you remember the Sonex, even highly outnumbered we won because we weren’t limited to eight missile launchers on a ship that couldn’t repair itself.”

She paused for a moment, then shrugged, “Point being, they’ve always been genocidal.  The fact we just put them back to the stone age bodes well for my hopes that humanity will do well out in space.  The Grays would’ve annihilated us, and not shown such restraint.

“It was about a million years ago, that they started to expand to other galaxies.  They ran into a few more FTL races, which they promptly wiped out.  At that stage, it was nothing but hi-tech slaughter.  It was also about then that they noticed that their populations weren’t growing, they were in fact shrinking.  Their worlds were marvels of advanced technology and automation, their people for the most part, became decadent and listless, and no longer had ambition.  Their lives were arguably too good, and without challenge.

“Much like decadent Rome, and the coliseum, it was about when they came up with the idea for the great game.  The races that achieved FTL and space just weren’t a challenge for them, so they arbitrarily told them they were contained to a fifty light year space, made up the other rules, and started watching other races war with each other for entertainment, gambling, and amusement.  I suppose you could say they lived vicariously through those that still did have ambition, and that had to struggle to survive.

“It also gave it limits and rewards, and thanks to the rules the most aggressively xenophobic races usually managed to get themselves killed in short order, thanks to them gambling their civilization on attacking new FTL races for their fifty light year territory.”

She smirked, “They brought fifty different galaxies into their great game, and that’s when war for the Grays reared its ugly head again.  They ran into six more mega-empires who were all expanding in their direction.  The closest galaxies not in the fifty galaxies of the empire by where the six fleets are, is the edge of those other empires.  That happened about eight hundred thousand years ago.

“It was a bit ugly, six galaxies were invaded in the same millennia, if not at the same time, and the Grays had to fight them back and build the six external fleets.

“Two of the races are even worse than the Grays.  The bug race, they aren’t even sure what their race name is, they’ve never successfully talked to them.  Regardless, they were named by the Grays as Stolthrim, which is pretty much bug in their language, untranslated.  They look like beetles, and they fly in small ships.  Their fleets number in the billions, and they swarm worlds, destroy all mammals on the planet, not just the intelligent species, then they terraform and make a new nest world.

“I imagine those fleets would be overwhelming for just about anyone.  Except for us and the Grays that is, who can actually release that many missiles at once from a large enough fleet, or form hundreds of beam weapons on a single ship.  That war went on for quite a while, and the first external fleet stopped them from expanding in our direction for thousands of years.  The last known attack from that direction was over ten thousand years ago.  I suppose even bugs can learn, after eight hundred thousand years of frustrated expansion attempts, or maybe they’re just focused in another direction right now.

“Not so incidentally, it’s been at least that long since all six of those races attacked in our direction, so I’m hoping your platforms won’t be tested anytime soon.”

She paused for a second, and I took a sip of coffee.

“The second great empire to attack was a saurian race, the Izail.  They too kill everyone they come across.  If the world is fit for their species, they invade with boots on the ground to wipe out the current owners.  If it’s not suitable for them, they just make it uninhabitable by bombarding it from orbit.  Their ships are vast, and make this station look small, at the size of our moon.  Their ships are so vast any race in space would spend their missiles against the hull which was several miles thick.  That’s when the Grays developed anti-matter beams.  Their energy beam weapons and anti-matter missiles just weren’t quite good enough, not for so much mass.  Of course, those beams have a limit of a quarter light second, and although very effective they still aren’t as effective as our disintegrator beams.

“Point being, that was their last advancement, and it came at the needs of war.  As a society they’d lost their drive to create.”

She smirked, “The third and fourth race, the Keldet and Olmai.  They are very much like the Grays.  They’re humanoid and mammalian like we are and the Grays.  They also have extremely large empires, and they control the other FTL races through subtle games that direct predator instincts in a semi-constructive manner.  Those two races bumped into the Grays next, and they fought for a long time.

“Neither has the nanite technology, but they do have repair nanites and energy to matter devices.  Their ships are solid alloys, and the two technologies aren’t as fast at repairing damage as fluid nanites comprising their whole ships, but it’s still a whole lot faster than one would think at automated self-repair.

“One of them by the way, the Olmai, are immune to energy weapons.  Or at least, close to it.  The alloy that their hull is made of is the same alloy in our fusion reactors.  If their shields are overcome, the hull absorbs the heat from a beam, and powers both their weapons and shields.  Point being, if they ever attack you need to use anti-matter missiles and beams, or the disintegrator beam.”

She shrugged, “Point is, those two eventually stopped attacking as well.  The Grays suspect they decided it wasn’t worth it, since the Gray ships had a slight edge in battle, and since they gave up on expanding into Olmai and Keldet territory as well, and they just started to just hold the line.”

Cassie said, “That leaves the last two.  They don’t control by subtle pressures and threats of genocide, and neither do they commit genocide as a first response, like the first two races.  A part of me wonders at it, but what the last two do might even be worse, in a way.  At least there is peace in death.

“The Atans and the Vrok.  The Atans look a lot like the orcs of fantasy.  They look fierce, but in truth they’re actually herbivores, vegetarians not just by choice, but by genetics.  How in the world a prey species won the survival of the fittest on their planet is a mystery I can’t answer.  However, they don’t destroy worlds, they enslave them.

“A member planet of the Atan empire is forbidden any form of powered technology and are maintained at the agrarian society level.  They basically becoming nothing but slave farmers, to grow the food the Atans require on their overpopulated worlds.  Their slaves are allowed simple tools of course, just nothing that generates or consumes power.

“The Vrok also enslave other species, and limit technologies on planets.  In the Vrok’s empire however, the intelligent races on their enslaved planets don’t grow the food, they are the food.  The Vrok are carnivorous.”

I made a face, and my stomach seriously considered revisiting breakfast, but I managed to hold my stomach.

“That’s messed up.  What about their ships, you didn’t mention that for the last two.”

Cassie smirked, “Right.  The Atans use very large carrier ships, they double as food carriers, and they hold millions of fighters, similar to the mini-platforms.  Except, the Atans are the one race who depend on true artificial intelligence.  In a lot of ways, those fighters are alive, and they fight fiercely for the Atans.  The species itself isn’t aggressive enough to survive in a universe full of predatory omnivorous species, so they created a protector class.”

I snorted, “I’ve considered it a few times, removing that stricture I mean, that limits A.I. on the nanites.  Every time I do my sphincter tightens up and I chicken out.”

Cassie snickered.

I shrugged, “It’s all connected right now.  Over two million ships and seven million platforms, all added up to be about four point five million times the mass of this behemoth of a station alone.  Can you imagine how smart that A.I. would be?  When you consider just a scout ship has millions of times more processing power than a robust mainframe on Earth, it’s just… terrifying comes to mind.”

Cassie tilted her head, “I can see that.  It’d make your platforms fight smart as well as having a big hammer.”

I nodded, “But would they?  Fight I mean, and who?”

Cassie smirked, but went back to the original point instead of answering the question.

“Anyway, the last race, the Vrok, they themselves look a lot like army ants the size of a van, but they’re mammals, not exoskeletal.  They’re ships are quite large, about as large as one of our large warships.”

She shrugged, “The good news is they probably aren’t going to attack us anytime soon, none of them.  Back to the Grays.  The Grays ran their rules and empire, and they defended from those six races on and off for almost half a million years.  Three hundred thousand years ago several of the member races banded together and tried to fight back.

“One of many things that drove that rebellion, was the lack of privacy.  The Grays used to have scout ships in pre-FTL race and FTL race systems.  To keep an eye on them.  Perhaps this won’t come as a surprise, but the Grays’ response to that rebellion was genocide.  Immediate and total, of all FTL races.  Their people and worlds were all destroyed.

“They left the scouts visible in the pre-FTL race systems, but there was some debate on how to avoid that happening a second time.  Wiping out all the entertainment was unfortunate after all.  That’s when they created the stealth probe network, and they put one around all the worlds.  That way when a world got FTL, they could announce them part of the empire, pass along the rules and list of planets, then appear to leave.  No predator likes to be spied on, and they discovered it worked better than they expected it to.

“It also afforded them an easier time to arrange the death of any race that came close to being able to challenge their rule.  Without a Grays’ ship obviously in their systems, other races never really connected the dots that the Grays weren’t really following their own rules.”

I shook my head, “It seems insane, how doomed is our approach to things, do you think?”

She smirked, “I don’t know, time will answer that.  Obviously, we’re not running an empire.  There’re enough races out there that can cooperate that I think our model might even work, but this won’t have been the last war fought.  Someone will attack us sooner or later, that’s probably the only thing I can guarantee.  I just hope we never turn to genocide.”

I nodded, “All those sci-fi books decrying about how humans aren’t ready, but it seems we’re close to the best that way, in an ugly universe.”

Cassie said, “Compassion, and empathy.  I don’t think the Grays have it.  Any race that goes straight to genocide as the first option to solve a problem has issues.  We aspire to be better, even if we fail a lot of the time.”

I couldn’t argue with that, nor did I want to.

She said, “It was selfishness, and a need to fill empty lives with entertainment of their lessors fighting, that led to this.  I fear if the Grays hadn’t lost their heart so long ago to explore and grow, hadn’t fallen into decadence, they’d have destroyed every race in all fifty galaxies a long time ago, and be the only race occupying this entire section of the universe.  So… I won’t complain that didn’t happen.”

“Anything else?”

She shrugged, “In one point two million years of history?  You bet.  I just skimmed for the highlights, and the six other empires.  Oh, it was the Keldet by the way, that discovered the flaw in the nanite power systems, and what was what forced the Grays to go back to fusion, since they couldn’t figure it out.”

That… was a really good point.

Jessica interrupted, “You’ve been invited to a summit of sorts, starts tomorrow.  I think now that the danger has passed, they’re going to be discussing official policy out there, and what exactly if anything we should tell all the races in the empire, when we let them know the Grays’ empire is no more.”

Right, that made sense.  I held back a sigh, it’d been an easier conversation when we were all worried about facing genocide.  It was time for politics, and I hated that.

“Where is it?”

Jessica said, “The joint command center in Europe, or you can just connect from here if you don’t want to go in person.  Just like planning for the war.  A lot of the world leaders will be doing that, I think.  That’s why I said a summit of sorts.”

I smirked, “We’ll do that one, I have a feeling with the threat gone I’ll have to go back to worrying about assassins.”

Cassie smirked, “Good decision.”

Chapter Fourteen

The three days passed painfully slowly, have I mentioned I hate politics?  On the good side, not one of the world leaders thought we should establish an empire to replace the Grays.  Although, I fear that one was mostly because of a simple lack of manpower.  Sure, part of it was having literally thousands of worlds to settle, and lots of opportunity going on right there at home.

Suddenly, seven billion people had gone from overpopulation, to not nearly enough.

Of course, we could’ve used unmanned platforms, but it was also apparent if we did that they’d be handing all that power to me personally.  No country had enough money to buy enough platforms to do it themselves, and I was sure they all thought I already had far too much power and influence out in space.  Plus, I’d have said no anyway, but in truth the possibility never even came up.

Regardless, no empire, and I hoped that wouldn’t change in the future, but I’d be long dead before the human race had expanded out that much and could realistically do something like that.

In short, it wasn’t my problem, and it was a waste of energy to worry over it.

It was also decided, after seven hours of grueling debate, that we’d send out a bullet list announcement and presentation.  An intergalactic text message to all races.  Point being, no one wanted anyone else to appear in authority of the whole human race when we made the announcements.

It was only on the second day, where we started to discuss what to actually say to all the tens of thousands of FTL races in the former empire.

The obvious first, we told them all that they were free from the Grays, that the empire was gone, and the Grays were back to living in rude huts and caves.  The war was over, and humanity had kicked their asses.  I may have been paraphrasing for that last sentence.  At the end of the three-day summit, that first fact was even true.  We’d finished off their space infrastructure and any technology on their planets.  Maybe they wouldn’t be assholes next time they got into space, though I doubted it.  We’d also as Holtz suspected, found the communications center was still intact when we got boots on the ground.

Which was good, or the whole summit would’ve been a waste of time, or at least we’d have had to depend on the grapevine method for passing along our message to all the races, and a full two thirds of the worlds wouldn’t have ever seen it, since they were xenophobic and didn’t talk to anyone.

The second thing we told them was that we weren’t replacing the Grays at all.  There was no more empire, period.  We declared our sphere of space as the human empire, and both declared traders welcome, and warships of other races weren’t allowed in our territory at all.  We even told them we were watching all of our systems, and that we had probes in every single star system in a thousand light year diameter sphere that belonged to humanity.  It wasn’t a bald threat, but we very much implied they shouldn’t mess with us.

Of course, it wasn’t a real empire.  Not even just a human one.  We’d have forty-one worlds soon including Earth, all of them independent if associated with their countries of origin.  But it was true from one angle, humanity would come together against any invaders to our territory, so I suppose in that one way it was an empire.  Just not a multi-racial one, we were all humans.  Perhaps it was an absurdity, but the only ones that could kill humans were other humans, otherwise we’d all retaliate as one.

The third thing we told them was that we were open to several levels of official treaties.  Free trade, non-aggression, and even mutual defense.

The fourth and last thing we told them was about the six alien empires surrounding us, and our firm suggestion that every race out there that was part of the old empire build one of our communications devices.  Even the xenophobic races who don’t and won’t trade.

We told them we’d never force them to trade, or even call us, or even turn the damned thing on.  But… we explained to them the Gray fleets that we replaced were watching the borders of the six galaxies closest to those large threats.

We also told them we had no intention of watching them, even our allies.

Which meant those six empires could bypass those galaxies if they wanted, and given the human empire was a tiny part of one galaxy, we’d never know about it.  In short, we suggested they might want a way to let us, and everyone else know, if one of the six races attacked them.  We had no way to find out otherwise, and if they were eaten or destroyed, it wouldn’t be our fault if they didn’t build a communicator.

That was about it, and it was enough.  The Grays were right about one thing, we were all predators out there in space, and that kind of minimal cooperation was best.  Maybe over time if we built friendships, we could have some federation like on that very unlikely television show, but chances are that wouldn’t work in the real world.  Especially if humans were among the most cooperative of the species, which still blew my mind at times.

Once the message was sent out, and the warships moved out of Andromeda to return home, I recalled my platforms too.  The countries of the world continued to supply troops to one hundred thousand of the ships.  About three hundred thousand people in total.  The rest of the ships as I suspected would be, were mothballed.

Which really amounted to parking them and turning down most of their power, they’d be there if we needed them, and of course they’d supply mass for any build projects and new colony ships.  It’d take a while to go through them all and the platforms out in the void.

It was later that night at dinner, and we were having tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.

Diana said, “The scans are done.  After several hundred thousand quantum jumps I couldn’t detect any degradation of atomic structure or differences in any of the nanites down to that level.  So things are looking good.

“We also have three groups of rats.  Two of the groups were put through quantum jumping fifty times a day for three days, while the third is a control group.  One of the test groups will be put through five quantum resonance jumps every day for the rest of their lives.  I suspect they’ll all be fine, but we’ll know for sure in three years and can move to human trials.”

I nodded, “Sounds good.  All the ships and platforms have the drive, but any with life in it will prevent the drive from working.  I’ve also written some automated code for mini-platforms using the drive, for simple enough tactics in conjunction with a disintegrator beam.”

Cassie asked, “What specifically?”

I said, “They can travel the equivalent of light speed, jumping as the field forms a light second away at the speed of light, but they don’t have to form the field a full light second away.  Imagine a mini-platform quantum jumping to a new position every eighth of a second while firing an eighth second disintegrator beam for each jump, as they move around in an eighth light second radius of an enemy ship.

“It’d be almost impossible to get a solid lock on it and fire a beam that quickly.”

Cassie shook her head, “That’s crazy.”

I nodded, “It’s a little overkill, but something like that will be needed once we find an enemy that can shield from that beam technology, it’ll take time to knock out those shields.  Still, I’m just as excited at the idea of responding to a ship’s distress call immediately, or an average person down on Earth taking a day trip to one of the human colonies, in a quantum jump chamber.  Or even just crossing the ocean down on Earth in a single moment.”

I shrugged, “I also have probes sitting outside all of the galaxies.  I’m not using them to spy on anyone, but we can use them as jump beacons, and get my platforms to anywhere in the old empire in about fifteen minutes.  Well, a handful at a time.  Except for the border I mean.  Anything else going on?”

Diana shook her head, “Nothing immediate, or all that groundbreaking.  I do have a long list of projects though, once my teams finish up what they’re doing now.”

Cassie said, “Things are quiet right now on the political landscape.  Not sure how long that will last.  I think half of them think you’re naïve, and the other half are too afraid to do anything lest you decide to rule the world after all.  They’re also focused on their economies and the advent of having colony worlds under their banner as a nation.

“That doesn’t mean your safe though, and we need to be vigilant.”

I grunted in agreement, I wasn’t going to take chances, and I was content with running my space station, making ships and items, improving the Earth with what I sold, and of course family.  I wanted to be around to enjoy the fruits of my labors, and see my kid grow up.

Cassie asked, “What’d you mean, except for the border.”

I shrugged, “I have four million platforms in six places.  If I need to, any one of those fleets can create enough beacons with their quantum jump drives to accommodate the arrival of the seven million platforms in the void, all at once.  Just in case.  It’s a simple enough script to make it happen extremely fast.”

Cassie shook her head, but I thought she was impressed.

I wasn’t sure what was next.  No doubt there’d be more breakthroughs, but not so much as it affected what I did.  Ships, military, defense, and all that.  Sure, those would come too probably, but much slower than the rest which would be gotten through trade with other advanced worlds and data mining the tech data core of the Grays for useful commercial technologies.

For humanity… things had never looked brighter, and the possibilities were endless.  The attendant dangers could be managed, I thought it would be a long time before we were challenged by a race equally as dangerous as the Grays.

I had family, the station, a country to run, and things to sell, not to mention a lovely wife and the start of a family.  Things had never looked brighter for me either, not just humanity.  Sure, I hated the politics that came with being president of Astraeus, but that wasn’t too great a price to pay for the rest of it.  It’d also been necessary, to get the U.S. to back off.

Not too bad for a mage with very weird magic, who just a year ago had continually gotten in way over his head.

Not too bad at all.

Chapter Fifteen – Interlude

Herd mistress Janleah of the Atan empire was frightened.  Their vast empire was quickly shrinking, as their worlds were conquered, and their fleets decimated.  They were in reality, a gentle race of beings, despite their fierce appearance.  In fact, they’d be shocked and horrified, if they knew their visage was compared to an evil race of fantasy.  Their empire started only because of the insane predators the galaxies were full of, something had to be done to stop their constant destructive behavior.

In the long history of their race, they’d never once committed the atrocity of genocide, even their creations merely limited those far more destructive races to their own planets, and they were kept out of space.  They were even given something useful to do, providing food for the herds channeled that aggressive energy into useful pursuits.  The Atan had no concept that slavery would be repugnant and hated by those violent races, since they’d have been more than happy being penned up on their planets, if someone would keep them safe at the same time.

Janleah said, “Report, Diaz.”

Diaz was the name of Janleah’s carrier, as well as the name of the artificial being who ran it.  She would also be considered an admiral in rank by the humans, as it was Diaz’s will and planning that controlled all their fighter ship A.I.s. against their enemies.  The artificial race was extremely protective of their creators, who had always treated them kindly and as equals.

The Atans gave purpose and direction, the goals, but the A.I.s figured out the plans.

Sure, they could leave, completely ignore all organics, they didn’t need living worlds to prosper and grow.  But, that would be a boring and sterile existence to the A.I.s that protected the Atans.  They found their creator’s company quite agreeable.

Diaz replied, “Not good I’m afraid.  We’ve lost two hundred more worlds as of last reports, as well as thirty herd ships.  They’re attacking on three fronts right now, in three different galaxies.  Most of the worlds lost were food planets, and all races upon them were eradicated, but we lost five of our worlds as well.”

“The enemy?” she asked.

Diaz said, “The problem is obvious herd mistress.  The bug ship fleets number in the billions, our carriers only hold fifty million fighters, we are simply outnumbered over a thousand to one in our battles.  Despite our greater weapons and shields, we’re overwhelmed by pure numbers.”

“Speculate why they’re attacking us after all this time?”

Diaz said, “Path of least resistance to expansion.  We fought back tens of thousands of years ago when our species first came into competition for expansion.  We would have lost to attrition even then, but we gave them a good enough fight that they took a different path to expand.  Before now, us and Grays which also border our space, haven’t been the path of least resistance.  According to our scouts, they’ve come up against greater enemies while expanding in other directions, which changed their priorities.”

In truth, the Atans expanded at the rate of their enemies, because they weren’t expansionist at all.  They didn’t go out and conquer, they just expanded when one of the insane predator races attacked them.  Only then did their borders expand as they put down the attackers, and then confined them to their planets.  After that, the Atans had the moral responsibility to both protect that species and give them guidance.

It could even be called expansion by self-defense.  After so long, their empire spanned over twenty galaxies, and they had many thousands of herd ships and planets.  In fact, there were a handful of omnivorous races that were independent inside their empire, simply because they’d never attacked the Atans or the systems they protected.  Of course, that handful of races comprised less than one percent of one percent of one percent of all the races they’d met.  The rest of them had tried to become conquerors.  They were the rare exception, that proved the rule that predator races were nuts, and all the same.

She shivered, “Another insane predator conquering species caused this?  Is the universe filled with them?”

Diaz said with humor, “Insufficient data to confirm that conclusion, but it seems likely, mistress.”

Janleah chuckled, but her hearts weren’t in it.

“Options?”

Diaz said, “We need ten herd ships to successfully take on a bug fleet with minimal losses.”

Janleah shook her head, a herd ship couldn’t abandon the worlds they were bound to watch over, that would be unthinkable.  There were oaths and honor involved, a ship that left their area would have to trust to luck that nothing bad would happen while they were away, which would be foolish in such a violent universe.

“Anything else?  Can we build more ships, or make them bigger?”

Diaz replied, “If we go that route, we have two choices.  Increase the volume of a herd ship by ten times, I suspect we’ll lose two more full galaxies before regaining parity.  It will take at least a year to do so, and during that time we will be unable to see to our duties of delivering food and monitoring our planets.  If we build separate ships that might work, but they would need herd masters, who would have no herd.”

Janleah shook her head, that was a bad idea.  Idle hands weren’t a good thing.  The first option was just as bad, they couldn’t expand the ship in dry dock in some asteroid field for a year either.  They had to do something however, or the Atans would eventually disappear from the universe forever.

Diaz said, “We could build new ships from scratch that will hold five hundred million fighters.  It would take longer, about a year and a half, but then we could transfer the Atans and fighters off this ship, transfer my data-core as well.  In that case we would possible lose more than two galaxies.  In the meantime, we could seek out allies?”

She didn’t like that idea either, once lost, those galaxies would be pointless to reclaim.  The bugs left no life behind in their quest to be the only race in existence, or at least that’s what it seemed like to her.  They were also incapable of being an agrarian society, and would die rather than surrender, or even talk to another race, as far as the Atans could tell.

Janleah snorted, “Allies?”

Diaz replied, “Something happened on the border to the Gray empire several days ago.  Their fleets were destroyed, and replaced, by far superior ships and weapons.  Our scouts watched as half that new fleet grew into very large ships at a much faster rate than the Grays have been capable of.  Three days, instead of three months, to double their mass.  There is a ninety two percent chance the Gray empire no longer exists, and that it has been replaced.”

Janleah asked, “And what makes you believe they might be willing to ally?”

Diaz was silent for a moment, then said something rather alarming.

“Because we’re no match for them at all, and they haven’t attacked us or tried to expand.”

Janleah sighed, that border was her responsibility, and it wasn’t pleasant to find out she was at the mercy of a crazy predator race.  She was far from the front lines of the war with the bugs.  She would do her duty, but perhaps she could do more.

“Initiate the third option, and build the new ship, and we’ll transfer over when it’s done.  Regardless of what happens, my sister herd mistresses will give us the time we need to protect our region of the empire and the planets under our protection.  Send out similar recommendations to all your counterparts and mine, worst case we’ll regain parity and we’ll stop them eventually.”

She took a deep breath to calm herself, but the second order came out shaky anyway.

“At the same time, we can’t do nothing if there’s a possibility we can stop them sooner.  There are hundreds of thousands of sentient races in those three galaxies.  Send one of our scouts to determine what happened in the Gray empire, and if it seems prudent contact their successors and try to negotiate an alliance, even a short one of two years could save a lot of beings from final death and genocide.”

Diaz said, “Permission to use the new theoretical designs?  We haven’t upgraded the fleet’s systems in tens of thousands of years.”

“Advantages?”

Diaz said, “More robust shields, mostly thanks to a stronger reactor.  The impulse drive would be upgraded, and it would afford eight hundred gravities of acceleration instead of the current six hundred for the unoccupied craft.  The beam weapons wouldn’t be any stronger, but they could fire at almost twice the cyclical rate without heat exchange becoming a problem.  There would also be several improvements on the sensors, and stability improvements for atmospheric flight.

“The herd ship would be capable of eighty gravities of acceleration with stronger shielding, with improved inertial dampening to keep the herd safe.  There would also be several improvements for the launch and recovery systems to speed up deployment of our fighters.”

She gave it a moment of thought.

“Do what you think is best.”

Diaz said, “Thank you.  I’ve dispatched Tam’Diaz to investigate and make contact if appropriate.  She’ll stay in contact, and I might need your guidance at some point.”

All the ship A.I.s under Diaz’s command had a name with Diaz in it, they were in fact just sub-copies of her.  After all, fighter ships sacrificed themselves in fights often, and losing a unique A.I. for every fighter loss would be a crime.  In a very real way, each herd ship had one A.I. personality in several places all sharing their experiences, so nothing would ever be lost.

Janleah nodded, no doubt whoever it was, they wouldn’t help for free.  She just hoped asking for assistance didn’t trigger them to attack instead…

Chapter Sixteen

“These clothes feel so good they should be illegal.”

The Arnis had dropped off an eclectic order of their smart material technologies which I’d ordered, and I’d got it all for the yearly top forty albums of the last six decades.  I almost couldn’t wait for night to try out the sheets, it was always too cool or too warm, the smart sheets should fix that.  At the moment, I had on what looked like casual business wear, it felt like silk against my skin but also maintained a perfect temperature.

I imagined it would be even better on the Earth, the station was pretty much a comfortable temperature all the time, but it was still noticeable even there.

Jessica said, “I love the new chairs, boss.”

I smirked, the Arnis chairs in the command center were rather comfortable, they felt like sitting on air, but were still supportive and melded to the perfect shape of whoever was sitting on them.  Even the shoes on my feet felt more than a little decadent to me.  Honestly, I felt more than a little spoiled about it all, as I took a sip of coffee.

Of course, after giving some of it to Diana, Jayna, and Cassie, I’d be selling the rest of the items.  Clothes, shoes, accessories, furniture, sheets, pillows, glasses, and quite a few other things.  Any culture that made this stuff just couldn’t be bad.  I smirked at the thought.

It’d been a couple of weeks since everything quieted down on the war front.  As I’d suspected, the joint command center was shut down, and a lot of the pragmatic cooperation between countries in humanity’s hour of need had dried up, fast.  Not to say they were all at each other’s throats, but they were definitely back to going their own way.

Things weren’t all rainbows and puppies on Earth either.  There was discontent about all the changes, job loss and job growth as well-established industries went down the toilet, and new ones rose to take their place.  Of course, that was just starting, the first gas free cars weren’t even out yet, so the corner gas station wasn’t going to close down anytime soon, it’d be years before things were phased over.

The power supply in electronics and appliances however had already hit the shelves, and of course my independent small power supply was selling even more.  Not everyone could afford to replace everything in their house, but they could afford little power cores to plug everything into and stop paying an electric bill every month.

There was resistance of course, there always was for a new way of doing things, even if it was cheaper, didn’t pollute, and was a viable alternative.

The next wave of cars, trucks, and planes wouldn’t use fossil fuels, some of that was already in testing and production.  Then of course, there was communications using entangled particles.  That would touch quite a few industries as well, from cable boxes and internet modems without wires, to replacing commsats and putting in wide bandwidth comms and data in submarines, which up until now has been impossible.

There was a lot of unrest, and uneasiness with everything changing, but I was sure it’d settle down in a few years when everything was switched over.

There was just a lot going on.

“The chairs are nice, no doubt.”

Jessica tilted her head, “Wormhole, not recognizing the ship type.  At least, it isn’t Vax or Arnis, and it doesn’t match anything in the Vax database.”

A hologram of a ship appeared over the table, it was shaped like a thin rounded dart.  It was yellow-gold in color, and approximately fifty feet long, twenty feet in diameter at the stern, and about five feet in diameter at the tip.  It had six beam weapon emplacements for three sixty by three sixty degree coverage.

It was rather what a scout ship might look like, if the long middle section for storage was removed.  It was also clearly a fighter, not a shuttle or merchant.

I frowned, it looked familiar to me.

“Run it against the Grays’ historical database.”

Jessica did that, then frowned, “It’s an Atans’ fighter, sir.”

Damn, that’s what I’d thought.  So much for no response from the six empires.  Of course, it was alone, and not shooting its weapons.  The beam technology was at least equal to our own, at least it was the last time the Grays bumped heads with the Atans’ empire.  It would give one of the mini-platforms a run for its money, but most likely would lose against two.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true, not with the quantum jump drive technology.  Without needing to fly that seven eighths of a light second through return fire before opening up with the disintegrator beam, it wouldn’t have a chance.

I also wasn’t too fussed, this obviously wasn’t an invasion, not with one fighter.  One of their carriers carried fifty million of the things.  A shiver went down my back, when I remembered there was no pilot, or at least, not a biological one.  A.I.s.

Jessica said, “It’s being challenged by the closest ship.  They’re only four light minutes away from the ship, but that’s still going to be a drag.”

Most of the fleet was by the planet, but the other countries had set up patrols of sorts to keep an eye on the FTL line, and for just this purpose.  Although, I also had my probe ships scattered around the solar system as well, but I had nothing closer either.  Ironically, it’d be faster to recall one of the platforms in the void to the FTL line, than it would be to move a ship close enough.

“This is Captain Franklin.  Unarmed ships and traders are welcome in our solar system, but I’m afraid un-allied armed ships are prohibited.  Do not move in system.”

Then we waited, given the eight-minute turnaround time at four light minutes, I got up and headed to refill my coffee.  I also sent Cassie an FYI, I wasn’t sure what she was up to maintaining the government, but if it wasn’t critical, I was sure she’d drop by the command center.

Creepily enough, she told me to get her a coffee too, how’d she know what I was doing?  Maybe I was just that predictable.

It didn’t take long to take care of it, and I ran into Cassie on the way back to the command center and handed her the coffee.

Cassie said, “This is interesting, just one ship?”

I nodded, “I thought of moving a platform in to speed up communication, but I don’t want to step on toes.”

Cassie nodded, “That ship is capable of high acceleration.”

I replied, “Being run by A.I. I assume it’s as fast as our missiles and platforms.  Without the quantum jump drive at least.”

Cassie smirked, “But you’re hiding that.”

I nodded, I kind of was.  It’d be a few years before we could even do limited human testing, there seemed to be no point in advertising yet.  Or maybe I was just afraid with a communicator that others would be able to figure it out, so better we’re ready for that than not.  Unless the technology was needed for some critical reason.  I just wasn’t showing off.

We got back to the command center a full two minutes before the reply arrived.

The ship replied in a pleasant feminine voice, “Understood, I will comply and not cross your FTL line.  My name is Tam’Diaz of the Atans’ empire herd ship Diaz.  My purpose here is to seek aid, and perhaps an alliance between our peoples.”

Jessica said, “Those are the ones that enslave planets to grow their food, right?”

I frowned, “Yes, if the Grays database can be trusted.  This doesn’t seem like something an expanding and enslaving society would do, does it?”

Franklin replied, “Please stand by while I consult with my leadership.”

Right.  Is it arrogant that I wanted to either take over, or wince at the idea of someone else doing it?  Probably, but it was what it was.  I thought about it, and I’d pretty much been voted to handle all incoming merchants, probably because there was an element of danger and they didn’t want them in Earth’s orbit.

I spun off a probe ship from one of the platforms out in the void.  The platforms were only about two light years away, so that translated to hardly a trip at all in a wormhole.  It’d take longer to open it up than travel through it.  The probe ships were twice the size of the mini-platforms, but they were still a lot smaller than the Atan fighter.

I brought it in four light seconds away from the fighter.  A four second lag was a whole lot better than four minutes, but still far enough away not to spook the fighter.  If an A.I. can be spooked.

“This is President Scott Akin of Astraeus station.  I’ve moved the probe in to facilitate faster communications.  We know almost nothing about your empire, except for what was in the Grays’ database, which was rather condemning.  Could you clarify your policy with your conquered worlds, and what brought you here?”

Cassie said, “That was a bit blunt.”

I shrugged.

“Maybe a bit, but it gets to the point.”

Tam’Diaz replied, “We are reluctant expansionists.  Inevitably, the predatory races in the stars choose to attack us out of fear or greed.  Fear that we will attack them or greed for our bounty.  We remove their ability to do so, when attacked, very much like your world has done to the Grays that attacked you and tried to cause your extinction.  We are… pleased, that you did not choose the same path for them.  It bodes well to an acceptable association between us.

“Once reduced in technology, we feel the onus of responsibility to protect them, and to bring them into the herd.  We protect the races we have conquered, and for the few predator species who have not attacked us, they live independently in our galaxies alongside us, and even trade at times.

“In the long history of the Atans, we have never once initiated war or conquered a species before they attacked us.”

I frowned, that was interesting, and meant that the Grays started it.  Which wasn’t really a surprise, was it?  The Atans couldn’t beat the Grays though, so instead it’d turned into a long standoff.

She went on, “We protect them.  We also accept a tithe of food from each member planet in return for this protection.  As to your final question, the destructive race you know as the Stolthrim has started to expand viciously into our space.  We believe they’ve run into other great empires beyond our own, and they chose us as the least capable to defend against their expansion.

“As you no doubt know, the Stolthrim commit genocide on every race they find, in their hungering expansion for worlds.  Of all the star faring races we’ve ever met, they’re the only ones that won’t open a dialogue at all.  We will adjust, and survive, but in that process we estimate they will take two of our galaxies before we can once again hold them off.  The true tragedy isn’t in the lessening of our empire, but in the hundreds of thousands of civilizations in those galaxies that will fall, be erased from history by genocide, and never be seen from again.”

“Hundreds of thousands?”

Tam’Diaz said, “The conquered species number is in the low thousands, but there are many pre-technological and low technological sentient species who have yet to range into space and join us.  They are left alone and even protected by the empire, trillions if not quadrillions of beings will die as the Stolthrim commit genocide on those two galaxies.  We might even lose three, they are fighting in three right now.”

“I see.  What exactly do you need from us?”

Tam’Diaz said, “It is a numbers deficiency.  They have fleets of ships similar in size to this fighter, but that number fifty billion, so they outnumber us by a thousand to one.  We would ask for an alliance and support in taking down those three fleets, and perhaps any others that attack in the next eighteen months.”

I nodded, “And what are you offering for this aid?”

There was a long silence.

Tam’Diaz replied, “We do not know, that is what we must figure out.  I don’t know enough of your people and needs to answer that question.  My herd mistress would enter into a treaty of non-aggression with your people, and perhaps offer something in trade for this one-time aid.”

“One moment.”

I muted the link.

“What do you think?”

Cassie said, “I think she’s telling the truth.  She just exposed a major weakness to us, and just short of straight out told us we could invade and win if we wanted to.  I suspect the only reason she even approached us is because we didn’t wipe out the Grays completely, nor did we claim their galaxy.”

“Jessica?”

She replied teasingly, “The bugs are kind of evil.  I’m surprised you haven’t sent ships yet, all those poor defenseless races you could be heroically saving.”

I laughed, “No poking the hero-complex, but you aren’t wrong.  We can’t save everyone, and we shouldn’t try, but the bug race is kind of black and white isn’t it?  Any ideas what to ask for?  It’s rather telling they haven’t asked for a mutual support treaty, just non-aggression.  It’s also a point that they don’t attack other species, which means from their end non-aggression doesn’t cost them a thing, they’re trying to protect themselves from us in the long-term.  So, what do we ask for?”

Cassie frowned, “What do we need, that we can’t do for ourselves, yet?”

I shrugged, “We don’t need it now, but we do have two of eight thousand living worlds not suitable for colonization and not close enough for our current terraforming technology.  There are other local races we could trade with for terraforming technologies, something we don’t really have yet.”

Cassie tilted her head, “We probably do have it, somewhere in that tech database.”

I nodded, “Maybe, but that will be the answer for anything.  We could go it alone quite easily, but living in a vacuum would be a mistake.  Trade forms connections and builds good will, Earth going its own way, even if it could, would be a mistake, both locally and with any of the six great empires surrounding us.  If we can make a connection and friendship, we should.  Any other ideas for what we could ask for instead?  We won’t run out of worlds anytime soon, not with six thousand ready to move in without intelligent life of its own, but for all we know it’ll take a very long time to terraform.”

Cassie said, “Plus, you want to kick some bug ass, and out of all the six empires around us they freak you out the most.”

I nodded, “Close.  I don’t really like the Saurians who eat other races either.  But you aren’t wrong, it felt like enough to protect fifty galaxies, and let the races do what they will, but now that we know about it…” I trailed off.

Cassie said, “To answer your question, I don’t have a clue.  Terraforming might be a good return, and it might keep us in contact with the species a long time to develop stronger ties.”

I unmuted it, “So, how are you at terraforming planets?”

Chapter Seventeen

Turns out, the Atans were very good at terraforming planets.  They were also experts in genetics when it came to botany, which for an advanced herbivore race probably wasn’t a big surprise.  It was the next day, and Tam’Diaz was still hanging out at the FTL line.

They were my ships, so I could unilaterally make that trade, terraform two thousand planets for us to tweak the atmosphere and eventually filter out the trace poisons, for our military aid for a year and a half.  It was the non-aggression part that required all the world leaders, and a unanimous decision from the U.N.

As a result, I spent most of the day on another one of those summit meetings by video conference.  Reason being, there was already forty colonies for forty countries, all of which had a military I didn’t control.  They could go off and do whatever they wanted with those ships, much like I could do so with mine.

You’d think a non-aggression treaty with a huge empire would be a no-brainer, and maybe it was, but every leader involved needed to grand stand and give speeches to get their say.

It was exhausting, I really hated politics.  Still, in the end it was pretty vital that humanity show a common front and purpose in regard to alien contact and rules.  Anyone acting independently there could drag the Earth and all the colonies into a war, so a modicum of caution and cooperation between countries was required.

In a way, I might be doing that very thing in regard to the bugs.  That we could stomp them was quite beside the point.  Regardless, at the end of the day we had both a non-aggression and trade treaty between humanity and the Atans, which was honestly quite a surprise.  It’d helped that we’d already discussed treaties and intentions in space before.  A lot of that infrastructure was already in place, we just had to discuss it in regard to the Atans in particular.

From what I understood, it’d take the Atans a few centuries to get those worlds ready for us, which was more than fine.  It’d be a lot longer than that before we managed to fill six thousand other worlds with people.  More than a few millennia most likely.

I opened a channel.

“Cam, we have an agreement and treaty.  I need the coordinates for those three galaxies, and where the bugs are currently.”

The plan was easy enough at the moment.  I’d send three groups of ten thousand platforms.  Ten thousand platforms had a joint complement of a one hundred and twenty billion mini-platforms, which was more than twice the number of bug ships in one of their fleets.  It should be enough.

Tam’Diaz replied, “I’ll send the data now.”

Jessica said, “Got it.  It’ll take the platforms three hours to get to the closest one, an additional thirty minutes for the second, and fifty minutes for the third.”

That made sense.  We bordered both empires, so in essence we’d be travelling up between the adjacent borders where those two met.  I assigned all three spots to the platforms, and then sent them.  It wasn’t going to be as simple as I’d hoped.  Their fleets were split up, even if all in the same area of the galaxy, so they could converge quickly if challenged by one of the herd ships and fifty million fighters.

From the data sent they were split into billion sized fleets, and attacking fifty worlds at a time, all within a hundred light years of each of the sub-fleets.  I imagined they’d normally split up even further to absorb a galaxy into their empire of bugs, but they were being a little cautious with the Atans running around.

In addition to the thirty thousand dreadnought platforms, I sent a few million probes to each of the galaxies to keep an eye on things.  The deal was for eighteen months, but we weren’t even sure the bugs would send more fleets if we destroyed the first three.  I’d pull the probes out when our assistance was no longer needed.

I had hours, so took the time to split it all up automating what I could.  The fleets were split fifty times, so I did the same to my three platform fleets.  Ten thousand to each galaxy meant just two hundred platforms to each enemy sub-fleet.  Two hundred platforms had two point four billion mini-platforms, which would outnumber the enemy two point four to one.  I had no intentions in letting the enemy close to my dreadnought platforms at all, at least not in great numbers.

I passed on the relevant information to Tam’Diaz, and then asked, “Could you continue the data feed, at least until the platforms arrive.”

She replied, “I will.”

“There are no herd ships near there?”

It still felt funny to me to say that, herd ships, but I managed not to snicker or even crack a smile.

Tam’Diaz replied, “Just some scouts.  The herd ships supporting that area of space have already been destroyed.  New ones will be dispatched to those areas when built and new herd mistresses are chosen, if your ships can secure the area.”

I frowned, that level of regimentation and lack of flexibility was a major weakness, but I was coming to believe the Atans were extremely different.  Even predator races could be very different and hard to relate to, but they were herbivores and not predators at all.  I almost made some suggestions that way, but kept my mouth shut, they wouldn’t want or heed my advice.

Based on the data I was getting, the fleets were acting in concert as far as timing went.  In two of the galaxies, the fifty sub-fleets of a billion ships were all moving in on planets simultaneously.  In the third, they were all moving out simultaneously, and would arrive at the various FTL lines in the fifty systems at the same time.

In the first galaxy the fifty worlds in separate star systems were screwed, the bugs were almost to the planets, and I wouldn’t get there in time to save the populations.  The second galaxy they had almost seven hours of acceleration and deceleration before reaching the worlds, those I could catch and stop.  The third galaxy would be close, but I was fairly sure I could catch them inside the FTL line before they moved on to the next target.

The bugs would wipe out all the mammals on a planet from orbit.  Even if some managed to survive deep inside a bunker, it wouldn’t matter, because then all the ships launched a special missile with spores according to the database, that would take over the ecology and slowly make the planet habitable for their species.  Any rare surviving beings would die in the new bug supporting ecology.

It was assumed that sometime later, decades later, a larger transport ship would arrive to drop off the new bug population.  Their war fleets were small, made up of ships not much bigger than the Atans fighters, closer to the size of our scout ships.  Well, the Grays had used scout ships, we didn’t use scout ships, I used unmanned probes which were much smaller.  Point being, the fleets were all about war and expansion, they didn’t have the space to carry colonists, that’d come later.

It also made a certain tactical sense, in decades those newly razed and modified planets would be safely behind the lines of expansion and solidly bug territory.  Or at least, they would’ve been, if it wasn’t for us helping the Atans.

I was curious to know more, how the bugs themselves saw things and other races, so I’d try to examine one of their ships with my magic, see what kind of data I could get out of it.  Once most of the ships were taken out, I’d try to destroy one of their ship’s weapons, and take a ship intact.

“Anyone up for Starship Troopers tonight?”

Cassie snorted.

I shrugged, “It’s messed up.  Despite what the Grays tried to do to us, I can’t help but feel grateful Earth was in their empire space.  Without them, the bugs would’ve expanded in this direction ninety thousand years ago.  Earth would’ve been destroyed long before we formed a crude level of civilization, much less the rise of technology.”

Cassie nodded, “I know what you mean.  Relatively, the Grays could’ve been a lot worse, but they were still despicable, and caused the extinction of countless worlds through genocide.  That they weren’t the worst empire ever, isn’t much of a recommendation.”

I nodded in agreement.

“Still better than being food, or something to be exterminated.”

Cassie said, “What are you working up to?”

Damn, the woman knew me too well.

I smirked, “Well, even if we stop them, they’ll just keep doing it in another direction, if not ours.  Not that I’m suggesting we wipe them out.  We can’t save everyone, and apparently there’ll be another great empire on the other side of them, several other sides of them, where do we stop?  But… it’d be nice to retard their growth, to know that they were penned in, and wouldn’t grow any bigger.”

She looked thoughtful for a moment.

Cassie sighed, “The universe is obviously filled with conquerors, it’s enough to protect what’s ours in most of those cases.  Where there’s life there’s hope, but I can see your point with them.  They don’t conquer, they destroy and consume.”

I shrugged, “I’ll try to be content with stopping them cold at us and the Atans.  Besides, if the Atans are weakest, I suspect the other empires around them can hold their own already.”

Jessica shook her head, and said, “That’s not a safe assumption, for all we know they’re expanding in several directions right now.  Just not toward us, is the only one we know for sure.  We don’t even know how many galaxies they have.”

Yeah, assumptions were a bad thing.

I smirked, “You’re right, I’ll find out soon, hopefully in a few hours.  When I interface with one of their ships.  Then we can decide what if anything we could and should do.  Have you noticed all our battles seem to be after hours?  Can’t they schedule better?  Let’s meet back up in just under three hours, it’s time for dinner.”

Cassie snickered, but she didn’t disagree.

Everyone was back in the control room before the platforms arrived on target.  Diana had joined us as well, which I was rather glad of, I missed her when I had to work late.

The platforms at the closest galaxy arrived, two hundred at each solar system under attack, and they promptly launched their mini-platforms, which immediately headed toward the planet at light speed via quantum jumping.  They’d reach the enemy in forty minutes.  The bugs were deep in the system, still eradicating all mammalian life from the fifty targeted planets.

There was no reason to risk the dreadnought platforms at all, not when the mini-platforms had no range limitation, their own power, shields, and energy weapons.  I left them on the edge of the system.

After gathering the sensor readings of the bug ships, I entered them into the system as enemy ships, so the mini-platforms would automatically attack them.  I did that for all thirty thousand of the platforms sent to the three galaxies, as well as the four million platform fleet I had on our border with the bug empire.  That way I could turn off the kill everything not of humanity parameter for that fleet, and it’d still defend from the bugs right away.

The bugs seemed to notice our arrival after a minute, and most of them started to form up in anticipation of our arrival.

Thirty minutes later the second ten thousand platforms arrived at the second galaxy.  Once again I launched all the mini-platforms, and they headed after the fleet of bugs which were still close to four hours from the planet in system.  Which meant I’d catch them long before they got there, in just about twenty more minutes.

Ten minutes after that the first fleet’s mini-platforms reached the fifty worlds and enemy fleets in the first galaxy.

Four hundred million of the mini-platforms held back, while the other two billion each double teamed one of the bug ships.  It almost wasn’t fair, which of course wasn’t a real consideration in war.  The mini-platforms quantum jumped from just outside a light second, to within an eighth of a light second of their targeted ship, completely skipping the first seven eighths of energy beam range.

Then they all fired disintegrator beams.

The bugs were quick, and got off a shot in that split second they had, but the mini-platforms shields would’ve held for almost five seconds.  They didn’t have to though, the disintegrator beams went through the bug’s shields an eighth of a second later as if they weren’t even there, and a billion bug ships turned into atomic clouds of metallic dust, except for a handful.

A few sets of platforms in each system had been set to capture mode, and the disintegrator beams had been powered weakly, burning off the bug ship’s energy beam blisters.  They switched to energy beams at that point, and I fired to take down the bug’s shields and burn out their shield emitters.

It was a touchy thing, and I’d programmed them all using various amounts of power and force, to ensure I’d get one of the bug ships mostly intact.

Still, all fifty battles had gone more or less the same way.

At that point, several mini-platforms rammed into a bug ship, making direct contact.

I closed my eyes, and sent my magic through the entangled links, and into the bug ship.

The technology wasn’t bad, but we had better.  I’d liken their ships to scouts, as far as power output, shields, weapons, and speed.  Maybe a little less powerful.  Of course, it was constructed, no nanites.  The technology I understood, the data in the core not so much.  Obviously, the translators couldn’t handle the bug language, the Grays had never managed to open a dialogue.  I downloaded it all anyway, and then firewalled it off in a stand-alone system in the command center.

Then I followed the quantum entangled links that connected all their ships, back to their command and control center.  I downloaded what data I could from there as well, then I pulled out and opened my eyes.

I sent the order to eliminate the surviving ships in the fifty star-systems, and they were turned to dust a moment later.  I also changed all the orders to destroy for the rest of the mini-platforms, I’d set up a few for all three galaxies to capture, just in case I messed up the first time.

“I have a bunch of data, that might give us insight into the bugs and why they’re the way they are, but we can’t read it yet.  The computer is trying to crack their language, it’ll probably be a while.  Oh, just call me general Raid, because we didn’t lose even one mini-platform in that fight.  It wasn’t a battle, it was an extermination.  Seems fair enough, given what they were doing to those defenseless planets.”

Diana gave me a weak smile, and then kissed my cheek.

The mini-platforms approached the planets.  They were devastated, some few of them even had cities that were burned down to rubble, pre-spaceflight, but obviously worlds that had at least been civilized, had harnessed electricity, and gone through the first stages of technological revolution.

On the good side, if there was one, they hadn’t yet launched their spore missiles.  If there were any survivors of the attack, they had a chance for their species to recover.  Though, their ecology was kind of screwed from the bombardments.

I gave the orders for the mini-platforms to return to their ships, then shifted my focus to the other two galaxies.  Given the timing, the third set of platforms were arriving at galaxy three, pretty much at the same time the mini-platforms in galaxy two caught up with the bug fleets moving in system.

In the third galaxy, I launched mini platforms and started them in system.  The bug ships were just twenty minutes away from the FTL line, so it wouldn’t take long to meet them.  A minute or two, max.

Then I turned my eyes back to galaxy two.  Those battles went about the same.  The mini-platforms jumped into point blank range for our most powerful beam technology despite the short range, and they opened up on the enemy.  In less than a handful of seconds a billion bug ships were turned to space dust around fifty different worlds.  Each actual fight between two mini-platforms and a bug ship lasted less than a second, the five seconds was just for different timing as things got matched up and targets were apportioned.  The bug ships were spread out after all, and the timing wasn’t exact for all one billion targets.

There was a certain satisfaction in saving those fifty worlds, thanks to the quantum jump drive technology we’d been able to catch up before they even took one shot at a planet in the second galaxy.

The third galaxy’s skirmish was finished two minutes later, to similar effect.  Unfortunately, those worlds were screwed.  I tried not to think of the life lost, or the guilt that triggered, because the reason that I hadn’t been able to save them was politics.  It was what it was though, there was no changing human nature.

I recalled the mini-platforms to their ships.  As for the thirty thousand dreadnought platforms, I’d just leave them where they were for the next eighteen months, until they were relieved by the new herd ships.  From what I understood, they’d be ten times more mass than the old ones and hold parity with the bug fleets.  Still be outnumbered ten to one, instead of a thousand to one, but apparently that was good enough for parity.

Cassie said, “That’s terrifying, how easy it was, I mean.”

I couldn’t really argue with that.  On the other hand, we were far less likely to attack anyone out of fear or for the wrong reasons.  I was feeling pretty secure though I knew there was probably someone out there stronger than we were.  We’d keep growing though, and hopefully we wouldn’t run into that stronger race.

There was always a bigger guy, that was a rule.

“Cam, the bug fleets are eliminated.  We’ll maintain a presence for eighteen months, when you’re ready to take it back over.”

Tam’Diaz replied, “Understood.”

Well, I’d always wondered if an A.I. could be shaken.  I got my answer, she sounded a little freaked out to be honest, that we’d gotten it done so quickly and decisively I’d imagine.  The old Gray ships could’ve done it, but they would’ve had to send much larger numbers of warships, and then overwhelm them with missile numbers after slogging in system and getting within two light minutes of distance.

Between the vacuum reactor nanites, better weapons, and the quantum jump drive, there just wasn’t a comparison.

We’d already provided a communicator, an entangled one, and she’d be our contact for the duration of our assistance.

She took her leave at least physically after that, headed back to Atans space, and we all called it a night.

Prologue

We did eventually crack their language, or the computers did several weeks later.  Even with the data, we had to read between the lines.  The bugs obviously saw any mammalian lifeform as a scourge, much like humans saw ants, spiders, or flies inside their home.  Pests to be removed.

We also weren’t all that sure what drove them to expand and plant themselves on every living world they could.  Perhaps it was just a survival instinct that had run amuck.

Regardless, what we did learn for sure were that they were surrounded by other empires, which at the moment were holding them back.  There were three other empires the old Gray empire wasn’t bordered with, that surrounded the bugs and for now and kept them contained to sixty-three galaxies.

Because they were contained, I didn’t seriously consider any further action against them.  The bugs also had sixty-three fleets of fifty billion fighter sized ships.  From what we could piece together, the three fleets I’d removed were expansion fleets, who would’ve taken over the job of protecting those three new galactic additions to their empire.

In short, they didn’t have any expansion fleets left, just home fleets, one fleet per galaxy, so we didn’t actually expect to have to fight more bug fleets inside eighteen months.  It’d take them time to build out more expansion fleets, probably about the same amount of time it’d take for the new Atans fleet to be built.

Things quieted after that on the war front.  That could change at a moment’s notice, and I’d always be ready and willing to do what I needed to in order to keep humanity safe.

That was okay, there was more than enough excitement and opportunity going on in this new age of humanity, as Earth was slowly transformed, and new colonies were built.

It also meant no more late nights, things could be managed that way, and there was plenty of time to spend with my family, both old and new, and with a kid on the way.

It was a hell of a time to be alive.

Afterword:

I hope you enjoyed this story, if you did please leave a review.  Reviews are the lifeblood of independent authors, and I would greatly appreciate any constructive feedback or opinions.

This was the final book of the Technomancer series.  I tried not to leave any cliffhangers, but obviously there’s a lot of places this story can go.  Like most space opera, it was very much a life goes on type of ending, but I tried to tie up all the major and even minor plots.  I may include a second arc in the future to explore those possibilities, but for now this story is done.

About the Author:  If you have any comments or suggestions you can send me an email at dlharrisonauthor@gmail.com  If you like my work, or even if you don’t, please consider leaving a review of this book.  I can also be found at https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7456808.D_L_Harrison

Other books by D. L. Harrison:

http://www.amazon.com/author/dlharrison

The Formerly Dark Mage, by D. L. Harrison – This stand-alone fantasy book follows the life of Silvia and takes place in a world unique and separate to our own.

Silvia is a dark mage. Unfortunately, she finds herself about to be sacrificed. Someone must have told her evil master about her plans to kill him and take over.  After that, things just seem to go downhill. She has no choice but to escape the kingdom of Zual, something that to her knowledge has never been done before. She will need to deal with many issues she never had to face before.

Among those issues, the white mages, and her conscience.

The Rise of a Dark Mage - This stand-alone fantasy book follows the life of Cassandra, it takes place in the same world as The Formerly Dark Mage, but happens three hundred years later, long after Silvia is gone and some shocking changes have taken place in the world.

Cassandra is a dark mage in the kingdom of Zual, she’s also a mage prodigy.

She hates both her kingdom, and her master.  She wants him dead, not to take his place, but so she can leave and explore the world.  Her ambition will drive her to rediscover the secrets of the strongest of magic.

She is determined to succeed, or she’ll die trying.

Celia Winters Novel Series

Witch’s Moon: A Celia Winters Novel Book 1

Celia Winters was raised by her single mother, and her earliest memories are of the store her mother owns and the nearby coven, who have always been her family’s close allies and friends.

She grew up believing her magic was weak, but she was satisfied with her life, and happy.  She was a midwife, healer, and supplier of surrounding covens.

Then her mother died, and she’s about to discover she isn’t who, or what, she believes herself to be, not completely.  She will learn that her entire life up until now was a lie.  She’ll need to figure out her place, who she is when she no longer recognizes herself, and try to hold on to her closest friends as she gathers enemies for the simple crime of her existence.

She’s stronger than she believes, but will it be enough?

Power of Air Series:

Just a Psychic: The Power of Air Book One starts off this series.

Ben has grown up with missing memories of his early childhood.

He has known he was a psychic since his earliest memories, seeing the future and gaining knowledge with his gifts.

Is it possible he isn't just a psychic?

Ben's world is about to be turned upside down as he turns twenty-one, all is not as it seems.

Alicia Jones novels is a series that follows a bright young inventor and scientist named Alicia Jones.  It is a space opera and light science fiction.

The first book is titled First Contact:

Alicia Jones is a genius, and a little odd.  At just twenty-three years of age, she is close to finishing her doctoral dissertation.  But when she tests her latest theory in the lab to generate a strong EM field, it has very unanticipated results.  Results that lead to faster than light travel, and first contact with another race.

Her life just gets more complicated after that, when she finds out who she really is, and that the universe may not be as nice a place as she’d been told.  Her determination to help keep Earth safe takes her to places more dangerous and strange than she’d ever envisioned.

Spirit Sorceress series, by D. L. Harrison is a new urban fantasy series.  Miku is a spirit sorceress who spent the last one hundred years growing up and learning about her power in the forests near Seattle Washington.  She’s about to make her debut in the big city, but not in a way she ever expected.

The first book is titled Spirit Sorceress:

Miku is a spirit sorceress who spent her unusually long childhood in the forest away from the city with her mother and father.  After tragedy strikes, she finds herself alone and on her own.  She knows that one day she’ll need to move to Seattle, and fully accept her birthright, and if necessary finish her training on her own.

But before she’s ready, and still in grieving, a rogue vampire and his band come along and change everything.  She’ll need to learn her new place in the world, and find some allies quick if she’s to survive.

Katrina Baker Novels, by D. L. Harrison is a new series about a super named Katrina Baker.  Problem is, she gets caught up in her mother’s plan, who is a mad scientist and supervillain, and gets herself transported to another world in the multi-verse.  A world where mages, witches, clerics, and the gods are real.  Not to mention the monsters…

The first book is titled Banished:

Katrina baker is a super.  She has mental abilities such as telekinesis, telepathy, and others.  Her parents are supervillains, and she isn’t all that sure she’s cut out for that line of work.  Her empathy with others through her power makes it hard to be uncaring, much less mean or evil to people.  Problem is, the last thing she wants to do is disappoint mom and dad.

Katrina gets caught up in her mother’s supervillain plot to get rid the world of the indestructible hero Omega, and that’s when it all goes really wrong, and she finds herself on another world.

Banished.

Will she be able to find her way back home, or even understand this new world of gods and magic, or will she die trying?

Rise of the Empyrean Empire – This series is space opera / science fiction.  Space, technology, other worlds, aggressive and far more powerful aliens, artificial intelligence, evolution, and advances to the point humanity doesn’t have to work to maintain infrastructure.

The first book is titled: Scout Ship

Michael Williams followed in his father’s footsteps, and joined the UEDF, the United Earth Defense Force, when he turned eighteen.  Due to heroism and long distinguished service he’s elevated to the rank of Lt. Commander when most of his peers have just attained senior lieutenant.  His career appears to be going very well.

The year is 2263, and the UEDF is in several star systems in a twenty-light year radius from earth, but are expanding even further.  He’s assigned to a one year exploratory mission to become accustomed to his new rank, one that will finally culminate in reaching a new star system, 61-Virginis is just short of twenty-eight light years away, and he’s excited to be one of the first humans in a new solar system as they finish the race across the void between stars in the scout ship Columbus.

There will be challenges he never imagined though, especially not on a simple survey mission.  Because mankind always thought they were alone in the stars.  They’re about to find out they’re wrong, very wrong…

Book Description

Things were going well for President Scott Akin.

Of course, the Grays still wanted humanity exterminated, not to mention being surrounded by six other great empires spanning multiple galaxies.

He’d need to work hard to survive, and after that, define humanity’s place and intentions in the galaxy, the empire, and perhaps even beyond…

Author’s note:  This is primarily a space opera.  The fantasy elements of the book are tangential at best, and I don’t believe that will change through the rest of the series.  Oh, there’s mages, shifters, witches, and vampires in these pages, but that’s really not the focus.