Date: 2016-07-25T18:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction & Fantasy; Science Fiction; Space Opera
Description: Alicia Jones has a life that just keeps getting more complicated and ever more dangerous. Toward the Rim of the Orion arm lies the unknown. She’s tasked to start exploring it, and Earth’s leaders don’t want to wait a couple of years to build the fleets first. Then there are the Seltan, a race that lives in the core, they could attack at any time. Technology is another struggle, as she continually pushes herself for the next breakthrough in both new fields, and redesigns of the old. Especially as she starts to grasp the truth behind the design of those that seeded the galaxy with life. It’s a g

New Frontier

An Alicia Jones novel 03

Author: D. L. Harrison

Copyright 2016.  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.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Afterword:

About the Author

Other books by D. L. Harrison:

Book Description

Chapter 1

It’s been just a little over a week since we turned the Knomen home world into a jail.  I liked to think of it as sending the Knomen to stand in the corner, perhaps with a dunce hat, until they learn how to share well with others.

I felt energized, it was my first day back aboard my ship, the command ship, since my vacation.  I’d said goodbye to Nathan as his leave ended at the same time.  It would be a while before I could see him again.  Twenty-three of the twenty-seven home worlds that approached us to be added to the treaty were already on board.  Things were moving fast.

Of course, that left three on the cusp of a decision either way, and twenty-three other worlds that were being quiet.  The reports seemed almost endless about our neighbors.  A few of those were building ships, some were just waiting, and so far there hadn’t been a hint of trouble from the Seltan.  I wasn’t too surprised about that, they were probably waiting for the crap to hit the fan between the fifty old worlds of the Knomen empire before trying again.  So far, things were peaceful.  Granted, it had only been eight days.

“What the hell?” I whispered under my breath when I got to my latest orders, and forecasts.

Okay, the USFS board had obviously gone insane.  They’d sent out orders to cut the finalized fleet sizes by more than half, and just for fun they wanted a plan to start exploring the rest of our arm of the galaxy toward the rim by the end of the week, with a target date at the end of a month.

I looked over at Kristi, “The board has gone crazy, want to come with me to ask them about it?”

Kristi snickered and walked over, and then quickly read over my shoulder before laughing.

“Yup, this should be good.”

They left and stopped by the bridge first.

“Sergei, Anthony, I know I just got here, but I need to go talk to the board, in person.”

They both nodded.

“Do either of you know what’s going on?”

Anthony shook his head, Sergei smiled and shrugged, “I’ll bet you dinner it’s politics.”

He was probably right.

Kristi laughed, “No bet.  But we should be back by then, I hope.”

They started for the hangar and Kristi asked, “Did you go over the business yet?”

I shook my head, “I was going to do that when I was caught up here.  What happened?”

Kristi replied, “Shelly thinks she’s done it, an AI that is a lot more lifelike and can act as a true assistant.  But there’s a catch.  It won’t work on most computers, since it needs the processing power of at least a mini-mainframe.  To say the least, it will be a huge expense to anyone that wants one, and most won’t be able to afford it.  Oh, and since we have mini-mainframes, she wants us to test market them.”

“Anything else?”

Kristi nodded as we walked into the shuttle bay and headed for the unarmed shuttle that looked like a car.  We couldn’t really take an armed shuttle to the U.N. buildings.  Well we could, but I didn’t want to start trouble.

After we were in the shuttle and it left the ship, Kristi continued.

“Caroline isn’t sure about the nanites completely replacing fabricators, she’s no longer sure it can be done with our current understanding of power sources.  But she believes the repair nanites are ready for patent submission, and rollout.”

I grinned, “That’s neat.  I want some of those for all my ships, and our house.  How ready is it?”

No more repair droids, or printing out replacement dresses or shoes, or fixing a ding in the car, or… the list goes on.  Everything from holes in our socks, to keeping the house structure itself in perfect shape by constant repairing and maintaining.  Ships too.  It would change everything, wear and tear will be a thing of the past.  Even the nanites themselves would self-repair, or replicate when needed.  It would also be able to do new ship upgrades when new technologies came out, within reason.

Kristi snickered at my excitement, “You’re such a geeky princess.  Caroline says it’s ready.  All we have to do is fabricate.  I haven’t looked it over yet, I suggest we both do so before letting her loose.  Also, if we do the AI thing, I think it would be prudent to lock it out of the weapons access, and use older AIs for that until it’s proven.”

I thought about that for a minute as Al drove us through the city toward the UN complex.

“That’s a great idea.  Can you make that happen?”

I usually was the one to dive in, I liked to do things myself.  But Kristi’s programming could run circles around mine.  I’d have fun with the other invention.  I mean, I’d professionally evaluate the repair nanites.

I added, “I’ll run with the nanite part.  We can set them loose in the shuttles, if they behave normally I’ll put them in the house and main ship.  If that works out, we’ll put it on the market, and try to get the board to buy some for the fleet.”

Of course, that brought us back around to the board and I frowned.  Obviously something had happened to derail all our plans, because I hadn’t seen this coming.

Chapter 2

Board members Nadia Avdonin from Russia, and Gerald Anderson from England met us in the hallway.

Gerald looked grim, Nadia smiled tentatively, they both looked very tired.

Nadia said “We were expecting you, please follow me.”

Kristi and I shared a look and followed them down the hallway to a smaller room and took a seat around a small conference table.

Gerald said, “This meeting is off the record, officially, you have your orders.  Unofficially, we feel we owe you an explanation for the changes, though it’s entirely your fault.”

I could sense Nadia’s amusement at Gerald’s words, and agreement.  I sat back and imagined I looked quite confused.

“I don’t understand, this says home fleet will be cut back to five hundred ships, and the exploratory fleet to a thousand.  That’s less than half of what we were promised.”

Nadia sighed, “We tried to fight it of course.  You know the board has full autonomy by the laws passed in all the countries.  As far as space goes, what we say is the law.  However, in practice it isn’t quite that simple, our budget is cut from our home countries.  So you could say we can do anything we want, unless we run out of money.”

I shook my head in annoyance, “How is this my fault?”

Nadia laughed, “We are a victim of your success of course.”

When I didn’t say anything Gerald stepped in.

“You defeated the Knomen home system with a tenth of the fleet size you requested, almost two years earlier than projected.  With just two hundred ships with all the accompanying support craft, attack shuttles, and missile boats.  Believe me, we fought hard to keep what we are now getting, the original cut was even larger.  We managed to preserve over twice the numbers you had at the last battle for home defense, and four times the number you used for the exploratory fleet.  It’s not so much the ships, although they are expensive, it’s more the people, training, supplies etc...

“In addition, we are no longer in imminent danger, so even that much was a hard sell.  With the Knomen threat over our heads we were pretty much given whatever we asked.  Now that we have some breathing room our governments’ priorities have shifted.  You understand, this is human nature.  This might change again, but only if one of our neighbors starts to exceed what we have, if that makes sense.  Right now we are probably starting a galactic arms race as a result of freeing everyone from the Knomen, but we’re also ahead of all the competition by a few laps right now, both in technological edge, and numbers.”

I nodded, I got it now.  Politics.

In a way they were also right, perhaps I was a little paranoid about our safety net.  Although, considering the stakes if we get it wrong was losing the entire world and human race, I wondered if being overly paranoid possible.

“So what about the exploration part?  What if we kick a hornet’s nest out there toward the rim?  They aren’t willing to wait another… nine months?  Until the fleets are complete?”

He shook his head, but it was Nadia that answered.

“No, but they do understand that threat.  They want a plan that will lessen the possibility of the hornet’s nest, but they want you working on expansion.  We have ambassadors, and of course, the council, to deal with old empire worlds.  Right now you are just sitting in orbit, going over reports and overseeing things, they want to get their money’s worth.  Again, you are a victim of your own success.  They want you out there making things happen.”

Kristi asked, “What about unmanned?”

Nadia raised an eyebrow.

Kristi explained, “You said it’s more a manpower, food, and supply issue.  What if we keep the home fleet down to five hundred, which we already have by the way, so any new ships can be in the exploratory fleet.  But yeah, can we say, double or even triple our emplacements, unmanned platforms, and Shield missiles?  There all controlled by AI from the command ship.  That would more than make up for the cut.”

Nadia frowned, “Maybe double.  But there’s still an expense to fabricate them.”

I wasn’t sure what to say.  I made some money every time they fabricated anything to do with the anti-mass field generation.  That included FTL and shields for ships, all the missiles, even the plasma cannons.  I didn’t care about the money, just about Earth being protected, but there comes a point where what other people believe will matter more than the truth.  In short, perception over truth.

“I assume everyone is anxious to get out there and open up colonies as soon as possible, that’s also why they want a plan in a week, and execution to start within a month?”

Nadia nodded.

“So let’s leave the emplacements as good enough, and just make Shield missiles and unmanned platforms.  We’ll be happy, because our system will be locked up tight, and the bean counters will be happy, because we can move platforms and Shield missiles to a new system as soon as we determine it can be colonized.  They have FTL, so we don’t even have to ship them, just send them there.”

Nadia seemed to relax, “I think we can sell that, good thought.”

Gerald asked, “Any ideas on the exploring part?”

“Not sure yet, I have an inkling how we can do it safely, or at least not like a bunch of charging elephants, but I’ll have to test it.”

Nadia frowned, “What do you mean, aren’t we just going to send a small part of what will be our exploratory fleet?”

I shook my head, “What I envisioned for the exploratory fleet was to go where we found a place for a new colony, and protect it until local protections could be built.  It would also be able to protect civilian shipping, answer calls for mutual defense, and coupled with a science ship do research and check on civilizations not yet at FTL to evaluate them.  Things like that.  I did not expect people would waste time flying from star to star blind, without any idea of what they would find.”

Kristi grinned, “Too Star Trek that.”

I held back a laugh and glared at her, it just bounced off my best friend though.

Gerald asked, “So what is your inkling of an idea.”

I sighed, “Well, we should do just like we did for the Knomen empire to take a look at things.  Unmanned probes.  They can find the interesting spots for us to go to by sending back data.  There are a lot of stars in our arm, in the tens of billions, which means there are probably somewhere around a hundred million G or F type stars, just in our arm, which in theory could have a planet supporting life.

“I think the fact we can now cross the galaxy from edge to edge in less than ten days has skewed the fact that the milky way is big.  Hard to conceive big.  We can see light years of it with our sensors now.  So we send out drones to scan, wherever they find a planet in the goldilocks zone they can go for a closer look, and drop off a smaller sensor array to stay there if it looks like something us humans would actually want to look at, or keep an eye on.

“At the same time, we should be dropping enough random sensors in a tight enough web to pick up ships going FTL, so we have an early warning system if an unknown alien craft is heading in our direction.  One day, many years from now we might have all the f/g stars figured out.  Then maybe we can check some of the others, it is possible non-human life could be on one of those, or at least, more resources.  Then again we might check out our neighboring arms and around the core, but that is very long term planning.”

Gerald sputtered, “You just said you had to look into it, that sounds like a solid plan to me.”

I was actually a little impressed with myself, I made all that up off the cuff.

Kristi spoke up, “Well, it is and it isn’t.  I don’t think she wants to use the same probes we used to peek around the Knomen empire, those show up on sensors.  If I know Alicia, she wants to test creating stealth probes, probably based on what she saw on the Tressian stealth ship.”

I looked at Kristi in surprise, it’s exactly what I was thinking.

Kristi grinned, “What, it’s obvious.  If there’s a big bad civilization out there, we don’t want them seeing us snooping around and following a probes trail straight back to Earth.”

Okay, it might have been obvious to Kristi, but it looked like Gerald and Nadia wanted to disagree.

I nodded, “She’s right.  I want to build the probe about the size of a Shield missile, with a small fabricator on it, and very small sensor arrays for it drop off.”

Gerald frowned, “Why not just build probes.”

I shrugged, “Saving you money?  We build a hundred of the stealth probe ships instead of thousands, and they just drop off a small probe where needed.  The small probe will be very small, like a soccer ball maybe, or smaller if I can swing it.  No FTL, just a small EM shield good enough to protect the electronics, sensors, a quantum transmitter to send the data back, and a very weak gravity drive for station keeping.  We should be able to power it with solar energy, and it won’t need reaction fuel without an ION drive or a mini fusion reactor.  When the probe ship runs out of the small stationary probes, it can land on an asteroid, and fabricate more, then continue its mission.”

I left off the part about the self-repairing nanites, which would enable the thing to last pretty much forever, it would never wear out.  I trusted Gerald and Lydia, but there was no patent yet, and I had a responsibility to Caroline to protect her IP until it was ready, and patented.

Nadia shook her head, “So what do you have to test?”

I grinned, “I’m sure I can make the stealth probe, or small unmanned ship if you prefer, without issue.  The test will be if the little probe can run off of a power source weak enough to be considered background energy but still powerful enough to run the needed systems.  Likely, it will need to be inside a solar system, no more than one or two AU away from the star for the background radiation to hide it.  If it doesn’t work, we’ll have to figure something else out.”

Gerald grunted, “Sounds good, and smart to be cautious.  Just get us the plan by the end of the week.”

I nodded, and took that as a dismissal.  It was time to get back to the ship, since it looked like I was going to be very busy, again.  Between exploration, the nanites, and the new AI, I was going to be busy.  I could leave the platforms and Shield missile production to my vice admirals.  I’d take being busy and even better, productive, over bored any day.  I just hoped there were no fires to put out, I’d had more than enough battles to last me a long time…

Chapter 3

I groaned later that day, and not in a good way.  It was impossible.

Kristi looked over, “What’s the problem?  Oh, I upgraded Al already.”

I frowned, I hadn’t even noticed.  I’d have to pay attention and see how different he was now.

“It’s the smaller probes.  The large one is designed and ready, and works flawlessly in the simulations.  It could fly up and knock on the landing bay door without the ship’s sensors seeing a damn thing.  The smaller probe has energy issues.  Ironically the sensors are the most energy intensive.  I have the gravity drive at one hundredth of a G, so it should be able to fly around, and station keep, as long as it doesn’t enter the orbit of a planet or moon.

“The quantum communications are even less energy intensive, just five volts to maintain the quantum frequency.  The EM shield doesn’t take much, because the electronics are hardened, and it will have nanites to keep them in perfect condition, degradation isn’t much of an issue for them to keep ahead of.  But… the sensors will run for about five minutes, then it takes fifteen to twenty to charge the capacitors back up, the solar panel can’t keep up with the power requirements of active sensors.  That still leaves passive, but passive sensors won’t pick up a ship in FTL unless it’s really leaky.”

Kristi giggled, “Really leaky?  Is that the technical term Doctor Jones?”

I growled, “Yes Doctor Wilder.  If the doohickey on the thingy is really leaky…”

I shook my head, “I think I need a break, forget I said that.”

Kristi snorted, “Send the design to me, I’ll take a quick look.  Give yourself a break, it’s not like people design things to run and last forever every day.  Even with known tech.  It would be a lot easier with a reactor in it.”

I nodded, “But it will eventually run out of reaction mass.  I figured at the power this takes, it would last for fifty years.  But who would want to service tens of thousands of these little sensors, much less into the millions a few hundred years from now when we’ve mapped out the whole galaxy.  If I can’t figure it out, we’ll have to go to large probes, they can FTL to a gas giant and refuel themselves.  But who would want to pay that bill?”

Kristi shrugged, “What if you nix this design, make it a box where the flaps unfold, maybe a few times, all with solar cells.  Sounds to me you just need four times the amount of solar cells as you have.”

I frowned, “But the larger it is, the more energy would need to be used for EM shielding.  Twice the size, four times the energy.”

Kristi rolled her eyes like I’d just said coffee was black, and asked, “Could the nanites keep up with the degradation if the solar panels were unshielded?  Just shield the little box part for radiation.”

“Maybe, I’ll check.”

I set up the new design, it looked like the size of a kids lunch box, against the sides the solar panels were folded twice, once unfolded twice sideways, they would unfold again up and down.  Then I ran some simulations.

“Huh, it will last a thousand years.”

Kristi looked over, “Just a thousand?  That’s a lot less than forever.”

I laughed, “Yes, because the nanites will run out of spare material to perform maintenance.  Who knows, by then we’ll have the tech to scan the universe with our minds, and won’t need it anymore.”

Kristi snickered, “With our minds?”

I shrugged, “I told you already, I need a break, possibly hours of sleep, let’s go eat.”

She nodded and jumped up, “On the ship?”

I shook my head, “Colorado Springs.”

We took a flight down to Earth on the sports shuttle, and before I got out I broke a few things.

Kristi looked at me with concern, “Are you okay?”

I laughed, “Yes, I promise I’m not going nuts.  I’m testing the nanites.  If we are to include them in the probe, we need to make sure they work as good as they do in the simulations and get patented before I submit my plan for looking rimward.  We’ll see if the shuttle is fixed after dinner, run diagnostics, and check and make sure it’s working right.”

The next week was fairly quiet.  Nothing changed, no new systems were added to the treaty, no one attacked anyone, or as far as I knew even stubbed a toe.  I even finally got some sleep.

The nanites proved out, and so far the AI upgrade seemed okay, if a little annoying at times.  The new type of nanites were patented, and we’d started to fabricate our fleet of one hundred stealth sensor unmanned ships.  They gave me a month to get it implemented, but rather than mess with the large fabricators building the rest of our fleet, I gave orders for one hundred ships to build one each.  It should take a little under two days for their ship fabricators to build one, since they were already designed to replace Shield missiles all they needed was the new pattern.

Caroline was still working on power systems for the nanites, but I wasn’t sure if her heart was really in it.  For now, I’d let her just go with what she was doing though, and hope she either had an unexpected break through, or moved to something different on her own.  I didn’t doubt the woman was brilliant.  Her invention as it stood would already bring us both millions if not billions, I could afford to pay her salary while she wandered a bit before picking a new project.

Shelly was successful, but the AI system was high end, so she was working on either making it run on slower hardware, or finding out a way to make the faster high end computers a little cheaper.

Carmine was making slow yet sure progress on improving the terraforming technology we had.  It wasn’t ready yet, but hopefully it wouldn’t take too much longer, I had a feeling we were going to run across a number of world’s that were almost but not quite compatible with human life.

Kristi, besides being my best friend, and forcing me to be social and have fun, thank god for that, also had her own projects.  I wasn’t sure what exactly she was working on, but I knew it was weapons related.  She was my business partner, so I wasn’t going to butt in unless she asked for my help.

Having everything in hand again since keeping up with the day to day was easy, I was able to spend more time going through the black hole scanning data and tried to make sense of it.  There was a lot there, and it was confusingly different from anything else in our universe.  Something about it was tickling my mind, but it still remained out of reach.

I had a feeling it would be obvious in hindsight, but whatever it was, it was buried in so much data it could take me years to find it.

I have to say, I was a bit nervous when the time finally came to launch our stealthy exploration.  We couldn’t see the probes on our ship’s sensors, but that didn’t mean no one could, did it?  Still, I hoped they would find a suitable planet to support human life, or even just a place to study that already had intelligent life living there.  It was just a matter of time.

Chapter 4

“You busy?” I asked while I turned around.

I suppressed a smile when I saw a website with a shoe sale on her monitor.

Kristi replied, “Very, what’s up?”

I couldn’t help it, I laughed.

“Well, I think I might have figured what’s messing up this data so much, the black hole data I mean.”

Kristi narrowed her eyes, “What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s breaking up matter too quickly.  Faster than can even be accounted for knowing the forces involved in such a high gravity and energy rich environment.”

Kristi looked thoughtful for a minute, “Are you sure it’s not time dilation making it appear that way?”

I shook my head, “I thought of that, but no.  There is nothing there, which leads me to guess based on observation.  I think it’s vacuum energy, maybe it is a universal constant, except where black holes are involved.  It’s almost as if the binding forces on matter are weakened, so it gets pulled apart faster than we expect.”

Kristi sighed and shook her head in faux despair, “Dark matter, really?”

Ugh, I hated that appellation.

“Maybe, yes.  What do you say we test it out?”

Kristi’s eyes narrowed, “How?”

“We’ll build ourselves a ship, with a series of very powerful gravity emitters, to form a micro-singularity and contain it.  Then we can perform tests, and see if there is any indication of a buildup of va… fine, dark energy.”

I felt dirty, like I’d sold my soul to the devil.

She snickered, “So a dark energy reactor?  I have some bad sci-fi books you could borrow.”

I frowned slyly, “Of course, and we would need to build an en…”

She interrupted with a gasp, “Don’t you dare say it!”

“What?” I asked with faux innocence.

She said in a voice filled with horror, “Engine room,” and then shuddered as if I’d suggested torturing kittens.  It was all I could do not to laugh.

I shrugged, “We are just doing an experiment, who knows if it will yield anything.  I also suggest we do testing with manufactured black holes in the void, outside of our galaxy, that’s the only reason I suggested building a ship.  We need our lab to be mobile.”

She rolled her eyes, “Fine, let me check out what you got before you start the build.”

I started with a normal battle cruiser, and created an engine room in it, just a blank space.  I rolled my eyes at myself, really it would be more accurate to call it a lab space, but teasing Kristi was worth it, so I labeled it as Main Engineering.

I designed a chamber surrounded by gravity emitters from twelve equidistant points, forming a sphere of sorts.  Even if one or two failed, the singularity wouldn’t.  Just in case it actual did accumulate dark energy above the universal constant, and the singularity failed, I couldn’t help but think the ship would fall apart, all the matter weakened and pulled apart by the mass of exploding dark energy.

Of course, I was probably wrong, I was just guessing.

Because it was artificial, and wouldn’t have actual mass, the gravity would be ridiculously strong, strong enough to collapse the ship, except that it wouldn’t, because the gravity would be confined to the field size of the emitters.  I wasn’t sure if that would change, in theory it could capture any particles passing through, and eventually gain enough mass to start growing, but that would take a very long time.  Still, it was a good enough reason to justify putting it in the void.

I also created an ejection system, just in case it did start to run out of control, so we wouldn’t lose the ship due to an experiment.  I was rich, but I wasn’t eager to throw away millions of dollars either, due to negligent planning.  Then with an evil grin on my face, I labeled the containment system as the core.  I knew the phrase, eject the core, would annoy the hell out of Kristi.

Okay, maybe I needed to grow up, but I was having fun.

I also built into the lab a great number of very sensitive sensors.  I added the nanites and an upgraded AI as an afterthought.  I would also launch the Shield missiles to run scans, just in case I missed something that causes a catastrophic failure.  I couldn’t think of anything else, so I sent the design and testing parameters over to Kristi.

It didn’t take her long, thirty seconds later she started to laugh.

“You’re a bad friend, and an evil alien,” she said in a mirthful voice.

A few minutes later she sent it back, “Looks good.  I only fixed two things.”

Of course, the two differences were she relabeled the stuff to lab, and singularity generator.  I started fabrication on one of our personal fabricators on the asteroids we owned, it would take a few days, and then I went to track down my vice admirals to see how things were going.  I’d been keeping up with reports, but I hadn’t seen them face to face in a while outside of very short conversations.

They weren’t difficult to find this time of day.  With a quick check I saw both were on the bridge.  I wondered if I was being selfish keeping them with me on the command ship, should they have ships of their own?  Surely, at some point, we would need to be in three different places at once.  Anthony with the home fleet, Sergei with the exploration fleet going from post to post to check on his admirals, and me… wherever I needed to be.

The truth was, I could run the fleet from my hot tub in a bikini with Al, an aural and a visual interface in my head, and not much else.  I’d already done something similar for a month from my jail.  But I was a soul reader, and I liked to see people face to face, hear what is in their soul along with what they wanted to share.  Did that make me untrusting and nosy, or did it make me a better fleet admiral?  I got the idea it was a little of both, I needed to give them their own ships, and then visit them, as they would visit those under their command.

They both stood when I walked in and I waved them back down and took a seat nearby.

Sergei asked, “What do you need ma’am?”

I smiled, “Funny you should ask that, it’s the reason I’m here.  The reports look good, officially everything is roses, but… is there anything either of you are concerned about?”

Sergei frowned, “There have been some problems, nothing big enough to put anyone on report, but since the Knomen were put down the mixed crews are letting their…. Let’s call it nationalism.  Their nationalism is coming to light.”

I nodded, “That makes sense, the same thing is happening on Earth to an extent.  Hopefully we’ll find a nice distraction soon, planets to investigate.  Have the newest ships and crews had a chance to participate in maneuvers and training?  Maybe we could make it a contest.”

Anthony asked, “A contest?”

I smiled, “Sure, bragging rights, best ship in the fleet.  Instead of people saying the Japanese this, or the Russians that, they’ll be saying those bastards on this ship, or that ship, need to go down next time.  It should be good for moral, and change the gossiping and complaining from nationality to ship, unit, and fleet.  Surely Anthony, you’d like an opportunity to put Sergei here in his place as the best tactician.”

Sergei laughed, “That’s a good idea, it won’t erase the problem of course, but it will help.  But are you sure Anthony’s ego can take such a horrific loss?” he added slyly.

Anthony snorted, “In your dreams.”

I changed the subject, sure they would run with the idea without further discussion, “I was also thinking you both needed your own ships, a command ship for each fleet, and then of course the fleet admiral’s.  So can you have two more command ships built out in the next rotation?  They should all be able to interface together so we can stay in close touch.  I have a feeling when we start finding new worlds the three of us will have to start splitting up, for obvious reasons.  Anthony, you’ll have to remain here, and Sergei, you’ll be busy keeping an eye on a fleet spread out all over the place, and making in person inspections.  You can both pick your own staffs, you can’t have mine.”

I smiled to take the sting out, but it was true.  Currently we were sharing the bridge staff here, and they sure as hell weren’t taking Kristi.  They didn’t have any comments, but I could tell both of them were excited about getting their own flag vessels, like little boys on Christmas morning.  I wisely decided not to comment on it.

I asked, “Anything else going on I should know about, or even not know about officially but be aware of?”

Both of them shook their heads, Anthony spoke, “No Ma’am, we’ll get on those ships, and the competition training idea right away.  Maybe we could give out three day passes to the best ship, and give the best unit priority for their shore leave… or something.”

“Okay, good ideas.  I have one more thing, what about rotations.  I don’t want our people getting bored patrolling the same spot in space all the time.  We’ll also have to keep an eye toward shore leave, so how often does a stint last at watching over a colony world, or…”

They both exchanged looks.

Sergei said, “We’ve discussed this.  We were thinking three month tours, after that long without a break efficiency and moral will plummet.  We still have some things to iron out though, that’s why we haven’t brought it up with you yet.  We were all so fired up to get the fleets going, and make sure Earth didn’t get knocked back down to rubbing sticks together for fire, that it hasn’t been an issue until recently.  For some, it has been three months already.”

I asked the obvious question, “What’s to iron out?”

Anthony sighed, “I want to give the crews shore leave together.  Some don’t have a family and will want to go out and cut lose with their shipmates.  So that’s one out of every thirty ships will be unavailable at any given time, a little over three percent of the fleet.  Sergei thinks that’s too much, and we should rotate shore leave inside ships instead.  So each ship will have one or two people missing at any one time, but still be combat ready a hundred percent of the time.”

I nodded, “Are you all confident in the executive officer’s ability to fight their ship?”

They both replied without hesitation, “Yes.”

“Then go with the latter, but work out the Captain’s leave per the former, so only one out of every thirty ships doesn’t have their captain at any one time.  Does that work?”

Sergei nodded, “Yes Ma’am, we’ll get you a leave schedule soon.”

I nodded and stood up.  Then made my way back to my office and work area.  I could do my work on the bridge, but I didn’t want to give the impression I was always looking over their shoulder.

Chapter 5

It was only a couple of days later when we found our first worlds that supported life.  Three of them, all within hours of each other.  None of them were available to colonize, they already had intelligent life.  I could hardly believe how fast, and how close, we had found them.  Out of a hundred probes, three percent of them had found something, dropped off a stealth sensor, and moved on.  I knew there were nosy scientists no doubt using those sensors to spy on our, until now, unknown neighbors, only a few hundred light years away.

I suppose it wasn’t too surprising, there were thousands of pre industrial worlds inside the twenty-seven thousand light year stretch of the old Knomen empire.  Only fifty in that vast space had achieved interstellar spaceflight.  The galaxy was full of life, and I wondered if we’d ever figured out who, or what, had seeded humanity across the stars.  We may not be exactly alike, but we were all too similar for any other possibility to be true.

Two of them looked to be in an iron age.  Swords, wagon parts, farming implements, and so much more, all made with a hammer and anvil.  I think the most bizarre part is the pictures I took a look at looked… familiar.  Like it could be Earth, if the people didn’t have red skin, or more compact bodies.  The forges looked like something right out of the middle ages.

The third was even more advanced, well into the industrial revolution.  A lot like the nineteen fifties on Earth.  They had no space presence yet, not even a satellite, but the sensors picked up weak television, radio, cars, dirigibles, and other such markers.  The inhabitants had more body hair, and were a bit taller.  I think they were more peaceful too, like most of the races that survived the Knomen, I didn’t see any signs of huge wars or a large military in the data.

A small part of me wanted to go have a look, after all, I could even go down there and morph my body to look like a local.  But it was a wishful thinking moment, I was happy where I was and with my life.  The inventions and science more than the admiral part, but I liked being busy.  Plus, I could always look into the scanner feed, and be one of those nosy scientists myself.

So far we hadn’t seen any indication of an interstellar presence out toward the rim, but then we’d just gotten started.  Three hundred lightyears was just over one percent the distance we needed to go before we ran out of stars and hit the void.

“Stand up, step away from the console, and help me pick out a dress.  We’re going out tonight.”

I sighed and logged out as I glared at her.  Sure, I was kind of happy she didn’t let me become a hermit, but then I didn’t want her to know that.

“Where to?” I asked plaintively.

“We’re way to young and sexy to be stuck in this tin can, drop the whining and let’s go.”

I suppressed a smile, “You didn’t answer the question.”

She shook her head, “Come along,” and turned around and walked out.

I rolled my eyes and followed, of course we went straight to the landing bay, and took a shuttle down to the house.  We wound up having a good night.  First, I got to enjoy the house and view, it was a couple of hours until sunset, so we got in the hot tub and watched the mountains out back, while drinking a little wine.  It was a great way to relax, unwind, and remind myself I wasn’t a stuffy old admiral, but a young woman that needed some fun every once in a while.

After which, we got dressed up, went to dinner, and then went dancing.  It was a blast, thank god for my best friend…

Our test ship was built, and we flew it straight up above the disk of our galaxy just over ten thousand light years.  Probably overkill, but Kristi and I had no idea what to expect from our experiment.  I also had those shield missiles launched, to be used as sensor drones.  A few were close, some were almost a light year away.

“You ready?” Kristi asked with a grin.

Of course, we were sitting safely on my command ship, the A.I. was flying the test ship, and with quantum communications we had real time data and connection to make decisions.  I felt like a child lighting their first fire cracker, there was no way I was going to hold it in my hand so to speak.  I took a moment to verify all the sensors were running and recording data.

I grinned back, and turned it on.

Where once there was a back wall in the chamber, there was nothing.  It wasn’t black exactly, it was void.  Of course, without the sensors we wouldn’t have seen anything with the naked eyes, it was as designed, a micro-singularity, or black hole.  Way too small to see without sensor enhancement.  Nothing crazy happened either, so at least I knew it was contained.  For now.

“Al, start the testing.”

It was a little tricky, we had to test for effects, since dark energy was invisible, and wouldn’t show up on the scans directly.

Kristi asked, “Anything, besides the expected gravity and other expected forces I mean?”

I shook my head, wondering if my guess had been wrong.  I’d been so sure.

“Not yet.”

Al finished the battery of tests about fifteen minutes later, it looked like a bust.  I’d been so sure though.

“Al, rerun the tests please.”

Kristi raised an eyebrow.

I shrugged, “Maybe it’s like a trickling spring?  It might take time to build up and pool.” my voice full of doubt.

Kristi snickered, “Maybe.  So… a black hole is the pool, and it will take time to fill with water?”

It sounded so stupid when she put it in those terms, even if I was the first person to compare it to water.

Al interrupted, “The results are slightly different, I suggest rerunning the tests until equilibrium is reached.  It seems the singularity is both the containment and attractant for some type of energy of phenomena we are unable to directly measure.  However, I’d suggest using the comparative concept of charging a battery, rather than filling a pool.”

Kristi and I stared at each other.  Sometimes, since the upgrade, Al’s suggestions seemed a little bit too human.

“That… sounds like a plan Al,” and then added banally, “Let’s do that.”

I took a deep breath, “So what do you think now?”

Kristi shrugged, “It could be dark energy, or it could be something else, completely different, that we can’t scan for or measure for directly.”

I shrugged, “I guess we’ll find out.”

Hours passed, and the data just kept getting more skewed.  According to the data, there was more energy contained in the singularity than any reactor known.  It was a huge leap from the fusion reactors that powered the ship.  If the fusion reactors were a candle, the singularity, or dark energy reactor, would be a volcano.

Of course, I had no idea how to tap that power.  No more than we knew how to tap gravity.  We could convert all sorts of things to power systems, heat, pressure, motion, magnetic fields, and much more.  But like gravity, we didn’t really understand how dark energy worked, it was like trying to build a puzzle around a missing piece.  I wasn’t giving up, all that power, there had to be a way to convert it to usable energy.

Kristi broke me out of my delusions of grandeur, “This is… crazy.  I can’t believe you were right, but based on the indirect evidence, you built a dark matter reactor.  Or is it a black hole reactor.”

She laughed a little bit, it sounded unsure.

“Both.  Yeah, we have a lot of work to do as well.  We have to one, figure out how to tap the energy, and two, we need to figure out how to safely shut it down.  If it was shut down now, I imagine the dark energy would tear the ship apart.  That’s why I put in so much redundancy, and an ejection system.  I think to start I’m going to go over the gravity equations, dark energy isn’t really energy at all, it’s more like a force, like gravity.  So, we’ll see.”

She frowned, “How about adding shields and weapons?  Dark energy would ignore all shields, and tear a ship apart.”

I snorted, “Sure, and while I’m at it, I’ll build a wormhole device, after all there is more than enough power to do so.”

We both frowned and looked at each other, as we realized my sarcastic joke… wasn’t really out of the realm of possibility.  The biggest restraint on opening a wormhole through space and time was lack of power.  Let me amend that to the biggest restraint to trying to open a wormhole, and testing those very old theories, is lack of a power source that even came close to the theoretical requirements.  Of course, this brought us back to actually figuring out how to extract the fantastic amount of power we’d just discovered.

Kristi lost her mirth, “Umm, we shouldn’t share this with anyone, at all.  This isn’t something we’d ever build on Earth anyway, so when we come clean we should specify space only if the powers that be aren’t smart enough to.  You realize we slanted the balance of power with Shield defense missiles, and especially the gravity anti-FTL missiles.  This will turn balance on its head.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t do this, but we need to be wary about how we present it.”

I nodded, “Maybe even military only, civilians don’t need it, at least not right away.  So you can run with the weapons and shields?”

Kristi frowned, “Fine, I’m the weapons person anyway, and our projects aren’t interdependent anyway.”

I shook my head, “How so?”

Kristi shrugged, “You want to build some kind of power converter right?  To power the ship, which by the way makes you evil to want central power like that.  To make it a weapon or shield, I’ll need to manipulate the dark energy itself.”

“Right,” I said softly, “That hadn’t occurred to me yet.  Don’t worry, we’ll keep the fusion reactors around in case we need them.”

Kristi snickered, “Very wise, those EPS manifolds are always breaking down at the worst possible time.”

I shook my head, hoping neither of us would ever grow up.

I added, “And hey, we might not figure out anything, it could be a dead end.”

Kristi looked at me like I was an idiot.  What did I miss?

She shook her head, “You’re too naïve sometimes Alicia.  What would happen if you flew that ship into a solar system, and then shut down the sixteen gravity emitters on purpose.”

Holy shit.  I turned white as the blood drained from my face.

She nodded, “That’s right, you just built the first bomb that may be capable of ripping a solar system apart down to its component atoms, sun included.  Assuming our theories are correct.”

She was right, oh, probably not the way it was right now.  But it could take out a good chunk of the solar system.  To take out the whole thing we would need to increase the size of the singularity, which would be really easy, simply expand the field generated by the gravity emitters.  I had a feeling I was going to have nightmares tonight.  To put in perspective though, the anti-mass FTL system has the potential to create an extinction level even on Earth, we just need to make sure there are enough safeties and protocols to make it as safe as the current fusion reactors, ones that can’t be bypassed.

Chapter 6

I groaned, as I read over the recent report and set of orders from the USFS board.  Apparently a representative, Marlon, was coming from one of the Knomen colonies to discuss the treaty.  Nora, Senna, and a number of other races would be represented as well.  A few on the board wanted me present during the talk to even out the Knomen’s unfair advantage of soul reading.

Not that there was anything to truly negotiate, the treaty was pretty much take it or leave it.  But they wanted my presence to make sure the Knomen were serious in their intentions, and that it wasn’t simply an attempt to spy for the royal family.  That I was part of that royal family wasn’t lost on me at all.  I also had the idea there would be hard feelings from some of the other races.  Knomen had us under their thumb for months, which meant I was only slightly annoyed at my birth race.  For some of the people present it would be years, and in some cases, centuries.  That’s a lot of pent up stress, and plenty long enough to develop a deadly grudge.

I wasn’t naïve enough to believe some of those races would’ve rather we’d destroyed Knomen for their enslavement of the galaxy for their high handed bureaucratic madness.  Perhaps enslavement was too strong a word, it’d been more like many kingdoms being forced to be vassals and pay tribute to one central kingdom.  Or maybe like the mob going around the neighborhood for protection money.

No matter how it was defined, it meant there was some potential for nastiness.

When the Knomen ship arrived outside the system, and started their approach at sub-light speed, I sent him an invitation to shuttle over, so we could travel together.  At least they were respecting our no FTL in system rules.  I thought it wise to evaluate him first, and then the large group of aliens at the meeting, rather than attempt to do both at the same time.  I stopped by my quarters on ship to make sure both myself, and my uniform was presentable, and then headed down to the shuttle bay to await our guest.

I’d expected an arrogant person.  Instead, Marlon was rather nervous and tentative as he exited the shuttle.  I walked over and shook his hand.

“Welcome aboard.”

Marlon smiled, “Thank you, it is good, but strange, to be here.”

I returned his smile and waved for him to follow me over to my sports shuttle.

“Oh, in what way?”

He didn’t respond right away, and I could sense his feelings shift around from nervous, to hopeful, to doubtful.  It was almost painful, but I realized he either thought we’d reject him, or… something else bad.

When we took off he said, “If we sign this treaty, your, and the other worlds, will truly defend us?  Many of our people find this hard to believe, because of the way our race has treated them over the millennia.”

I sighed, “You would understand, you were in much the same position weren’t you?”

He shrugged, “Perhaps, you could say we were second class citizens, under the people at the home world, but that would mean every other race was third class.”

I frowned and decided to be bluntly honest, especially since he could read me as well, “Earth would come.  I believe the rest would as well, maybe not out of love for your planet or race, but because if they fail to answer a call through the treaty, they would be kicked out, and no one would come to their call.  Maybe in the future that can change?  Have the Knomen colonies started to trade with others yet?”

He shook his head, “What we have to offer, they can get elsewhere.  We have nothing unique.”

I laughed, “That’s not entirely true.  But I can see why you haven’t even considered it.”

He looked over at me in surprise, “What do we have?”

I shrugged, “In the Knomen empire there were spies and facilitators.  Obviously facilitators are a thing of the past, but spies would be a good export.  Consider exploration, one of the things the Knomen empire did well was recon on societies entering the stage where the FTL discovery was imminent.  The emperor kept all that in the family, but obviously that is no longer the case.

“You can charge for some of you to go out, recon a world and its laws, society, along with its customs and taboos.  Our race is the only one that can do that easily, since we can change our aspect so readily.”

He sighed, “But not many are needed.”

I shook my head, “Not many were needed.  Without that ridiculous five light year exploratory limit per year expansion and new worlds are going to start popping up a lot more than in the past.  Another thing you have going for you is soul reading.  Imagine showing up hired for one world to make sure the other world is honest in their dealings.  Then that world will want their very own soul reader for negotiation.  In other worlds, use the strengths of our race to serve and help, instead of dominate.

“And of course… for a price.”

I wasn’t sure if I was doing the right thing with these suggestions, but I didn’t think it could hurt.  They would need some kind of export to afford imports, and the export of singular talents seemed obvious to me.

Marlon nodded, “I will think on this, and bring it up with my leadership when I get back to our worlds.  If I may ask, what is your intention toward the Knomen home world?  I only ask, because I fear if they once again regain power, they will call us all traitors if we sign your treaty.”

I shrugged, “They are under enforced protection.  They will remain that way until my cousin sees reason, or the people grow tired and overthrow him.”

Marlon muttered, “Enforced protection?”

I nodded, “We are quarantining the planet and won’t let them off, but we will also defend them if anyone tries to attack.  We bear the responsibility of their lives, since we took away their ability to defend themselves on their own.”

Marlon asked thoughtfully, “And the other treaty worlds?”

I shook my head, “The Knomen home world is not a part of the treaty.  They aren’t required to weigh in, since it was only us who took the system.  I don’t expect anyone else would lift a finger if they were attacked, a hard truth, but I’m sure it comes as no surprise.”

Marlon shook his head, “The colonies would, for the sake of the population, if you could trust us not to try and displace your Earth fleet.”

I pondered that a moment, “I would trust you, but I’d need to meet the command staff in person before I’d feel comfortable with it.”

Marlon didn’t seem the type, but I imagined some of the power hungry in the colonies resented Earth from taking their exalted position in the galaxy away, even if their worlds will probably be richer for it, not being under the thumb of my cousin any longer.  We ran out of time for discussion when we arrived at the U.N. complex.

I knew the way, so I escorted him through the building to the large meeting room.  The entire board was there, as well as fifteen more people, including Senna from Leira, and Nora from Tressia.  Seven of the worlds weren’t present, but it was hardly a requirement.  There was no voting someone in, if a world signed they were in, if they violated the treaty they were out for at least fifty years.  It was that simple.

At a guess I’d say all fifteen people were only there to work out trade and other agreements, not because of the treaty itself.  At least, that was probably the case before they heard a Knomen colony wanted to join.  I could feel how tense the room was, but I believed Marlon could win them over if they gave him a chance.  He was the first Knomen I’d met that wasn’t ridiculously arrogant and blind to reality.  Even my grandmother, who I liked, was arrogant beyond belief.

When I caught Nadia’s eyes, I nodded almost unperceptively, just to let her know that Marlon at least, was on the level.  I stayed in the back, and gave half an ear toward following the conversation.  It was basically a very flowery way to go over the blunt questions we’d covered in the shuttle together.  Marlon wanted to make sure his colony would be equal in the eyes of everyone else in the treaty, and everyone else questioned him about why he wanted to join and probed for ulterior motives.

As far as my perceptions, he didn’t really have one.  As far as the others, there was definitely anger there, but no one threatened to walk out if we let him sign on.  I felt a little sorry for him, but then that was life.  It would take years before they would ever be trusted, and many times that for the home world when that finally got sorted out.

At least no one tried to kill him…

Chapter 7

A month went by before anything exciting really happened.  The fleet had their first tournament, the computers keeping score.  To my surprise the ship that won didn’t take leave on Earth, they exchanged some money for gold, left at FTL, and headed to Tressia which was just hours away in our newest ships.  I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise, one of the perks of fleet should be meeting aliens and stepping foot on other worlds.  I just hope they don’t wind up in jail somewhere.

The moral in the fleet seemed to be up, especially with the shore leave schedule fully in swing.

I’d spent a lot of time running simulations, and pouring over the multi-dimensional math for gravity, and seeing how exactly dark energy fit into it.  I knew the forces were related in some way, or at least, that was the theory.  It was at the end of the month that theory, and my work, paid off.  I’d designed a power converter, and power conduits that reached through the whole ship.  I let the fabricators take care of the big stuff, and put the nanites on the smaller tasks.

It still took a few days.  Every system on the ship now had two power sources, I wasn’t sure if that would ever change.  Having fusion backup local to every system just made sense.  Just in case the ship did take damage, and wasn’t destroyed, and an important powerline was cut.  Doubtful, but possible.  Plus, if I didn’t leave it there Kristi would make fun of me.

“Al, go ahead and bring the converters online.”

Al replied, “Converters are active, and are running at eighty-six point four percent efficiency.”

That… was actually really good.  All it meant was compared to what we figured on paper, it was fourteen percent less power that it could draw.

“Al, switch all systems from fusion to the dark energy reactor.  And then run diagnostics and put the systems through their paces.”

“Power switched, the tests will take fifteen minutes.”

I nodded and looked over at Kristi.  I could tell she was deep in VR, probably trying to get the weapons to work.

“Any luck?”

Kristi shook her head slightly, “Not yet, I have some ideas but they’re too impractical.”

I nodded and started going over the data as it came in.  The anti-mass and EM fields were about twice as strong due to the higher energy availability.  That meant they could make it across the old Knomen empire space in a day, instead of two.  Across the galaxy in just four days.  That was insane.  I also saw that it would be hard on the equipment, the converter was capable of more power, but those systems would fail if any more was applied.  Unfortunately, the plasma cannons were already operation at their limits.

It also meant the ship could take about twenty missiles before the EM field failed, at least twenty of the ones currently in use.

I looked down at the percentage of power being used verse how much was possible.  It was sitting at point zero zero five percent.  My eyes widened, this much from a micro singularity?  I couldn’t imagine the power surplus if we made it even bigger.

Well, that’s not true, I could calculate it, but it would be a number so large as to be meaningless to a human perspective.  The power of stars.

“Impractical?” I finally asked.

Kristi frowned, “Well the only thing that concentrates or attracts dark energy is a black hole.  Even a collapsed dwarf star, or something with close to the gravity of a black hole isn’t good enough to affect vacuum energy.  So… a dark energy weapon would have to create a singularity, and have powerful enough emitters to push it out at another ship.  Considering most battles happen at thousands of miles, to millions of miles, it’s flat out impossible.”

I nodded, “Well, running the ship twice as tough and fast, we still have ninety-nine point nine nine five percent power available.  Can we redesign the plasma turrets to be… I don’t know, a whole bunch more powerful?”

I frowned at my next thought, “We could probably make dark matter torpedoes, but let’s not.  Sounds like overkill.”

She shook her head, “They’d be too big, it would take a fairly large fusion reactor to create a singularity.”

I nodded, “Unless we armed them as they went in the tubes.  The ship could connect and provide power to form the singularity, then the missile would be self-sufficient if it used that power until it came time to explode.”

She snorted, “Okay, I’ll buy that, but it’s still a bad idea.  I can design plasma weapons that make the current ones look like pop guns against artillery.”

I frowned, “Also, I’m thinking the attack shuttles, Shield missiles, and missile boats need to stay the same.  The former lands on planets, the latter are recalled to the ship, and for some reason having sixty-one dark matter reactors on a ship makes me very nervous.”

She nodded and grinned, “Me too.  So we have a lot of power to burn, I’ll design those plasma cannons, you start working on a wormhole drive.”

“I almost forgot about that, I’ll see what I can do, we definitely have the power, and if not we can double the size of the singularity.”

She tilted her head, “Is there a practical reason?  From what you said we move pretty damned fast already.”

It only took me a moment to think of it, “Sure, if the Seltan attack Leira again, getting there in five minutes is a whole lot better than a day.”

Kristi looked a little sobered at that comment, “And I call you the naïve one?”

I grinned, “Does it feel like to you, that we just put an eight-cylinder engine on a tricycle?  I keep trying to think of something to add to eat up that energy.  Maybe you can not only update the strength of the plasma cannons, but add a bunch more to the hull.”

She pointed in mock anger, “Bad alien, wormholes, now.”

I sighed, “Yes mom.”

I read something in the morning reports that woke me up even better than coffee.  Two thousand light years away rimward, and we ran into another species in space, but only stellar, not interstellar.  All indications were they didn’t detect the stealth ship dropping off a probe.  This made me think of Marlon, surely they were a species we should find out all we could soon.

Of course, if they didn’t take my suggestion, we’d have to depend on the probe we dropped off and what we could glean off of television and radio signals.  Considering how skewed aliens would see Earth based on our television, I was sure the Intel wouldn’t be very good.  Not much was known about them yet, but they were on par with what Earth’s technology was just last year, before I’d stumbled onto anti-mass and FTL.

We weren’t even sure what they looked like yet, all I knew was there were several artificial satellites in orbit, as well as a couple of larger space stations.  The planet itself was larger than Earth, a little closer to their sun, and had a slightly weaker electro-magnetic field.  It had a slightly longer day, twenty-five point three hours long, and the gravity was at point nine two of Earth normal.

I was sure future reports would have a focus on that world compared to others, and looked forward to it.  Again, a part of me itched to take my ship there and take a look myself, but I had plenty of work to do as admiral of fleet, and a scientist with my own project, and watching over the company.

We also now had over a two thousand light year buffer that was covered by sensors, so assuming any craft coming from that direction travelled as fast as we did, we’d get at least a couple of hours’ notice.

It took me a couple of days to design a wormhole generator, and according to my calculations it would take forty percent of the dark energy reactor’s potential energy generation to open one.  To put that in perspective, that much energy from the reactor, would be enough to power eight thousand ships of our current configuration.

We really did have energy to burn, and outside of the wormhole generator we would be barely scratching the surface.  I considered the idea of layered EM shielding, increasing the size of the ship by many factors to make use of that power, and by placing many plasma cannons.

However, it occurred to me it might send the wrong message to the rest of the galaxy.  It would be a juggernaut, and something built for war.  Perhaps if the galaxy went to hell, we could build a few of them, but for now I’d have to be happy to at least have one system on board ship that used the higher energy now available to us.

I had other concerns as well, I had no worries about the current board, or me, trying to take over the galaxy, but human nature also had me reluctant to design such a ship.  I wasn’t naïve enough to think no one else would, once the patents were in and the designs were in the hands of the governments.  But I was also sure the tech would eventually leak out to other worlds and restore the balance.

I believed most wanted a peaceful state in the galaxy of trade and defense, but power corrupts.  Sometimes those thoughts made me wonder if even the dark energy reactor, and wormhole drive was too much.

I snorted, maybe it won’t be in the budget for them to buy any?

The ironic thing was I’d be only able to patent the energy converters and wormhole generator if it worked.  There was no new tech in creating a dark energy reactor, it was a rather simple, if intense, artificial gravity device.  I considered the idea of classifying the dark energy reactor, even with the dark energy converter and wormhole patent, no one else would be able to make use of it because of not meeting the energy requirements.

Wormhole generation was something purely on paper.  I had a design, but didn’t know if it would even work.  And if it did work, there was the matter of aiming the other end.  I thought about creating a second test ship to keep experiments separate, but in the end decided to just to use the same one.  Hopefully Kristi’s newer and bigger plasma cannons wouldn’t blow up my experiment, and I wouldn’t blow up hers.

I also spent time with Al to get a test regimen.  We’d need a lot of test probes, and to experiment how to determine size, direction, and distance.  It would be a tedious time consuming activity, but one easily monitored by an A.I.  Once I monitored the first one or two openings, assuming it worked, Al could take it from there and get the thing calibrated.

Chapter 8

The next few days I went back and forth in my mind as the wormhole drive, or generator, was built.  Moral science, what did it mean?  Some purists would say I should just publish everything and the consequences be damned.  Others would say the knowledge was too dangerous and should be suppressed.  I believed there was a balance in the middle somewhere.  Cautious, hopeful, but not without giving weight to the possible outcomes.

I decided in the end to highly classify the power source as much as was possible, but I would be submitting patents for the power converter, and wormhole drive.  Even with patents, it would take others time to figure out how it actually worked, and then they’d be without a power source capable of making use of either.  It wouldn’t hold forever, or even all that long, but all I could do was hope that was long enough for cooler heads to prevail to avoid the negative outcomes.

Al said, “You have a call from Nadia Avdonin.”

“Answer it please,” after a moment I said, “Good afternoon ma’am.”

Nadia sighed in disgust, “Call me Nadia, and that’s an order.”

I smiled, “Of course… ma’am,” I said teasingly, “Nadia it is.”

She snorted, “Are you and Kristi free tonight?”

“I believe so, what do you need?”

Nadia replied, “Need?  Nothing.  Nora and Senna want to get out of the complex and see what life really is like on Earth.  I was wondering if you two wanted to join us on a girl’s night out.  I was thinking dinner, then something fun like a pool hall, followed by a late show on Broadway maybe?”

Huh.  Sounded like fun to me.

“Sounds good, should I bring security, or you have that covered?”

Nadia made a considering sound, “I have it covered, but I wouldn’t mind if you provided the transportation.”

I grinned, “Sure, I can do that.  I think the sports shuttle is big enough for the five of us, I assume our escorts are following?”

I knew the sports shuttle was secure enough, New York could be nuked and the little shuttle wouldn’t even get scratched.

Nadia grunted, “Good, be here around five?”

I agreed and hung up.  And then I called Kristi to fill her in.  It was going to be tough to dress and fit in at both a pool hall, and a Broadway show.  I supposed Nadia wanted to show them diversity…

We left work early to stop at the house, get out of our skin suits, and take a shower.  I wound up wearing a black skirt and a red blouse, with red three inch heeled shoes.  I did my normal light touch of makeup, hair, and some matching jewelry.  Of course, I was wearing the protective bustier underneath.  Not one person had tried to kill me yet, at least not anyone from Earth, but it seemed prudent.  I’d probably be a little overdressed for a pool hall, but better that than trying to wear jeans to a nice restaurant, or a Broadway show.  At least, that was the theory.

I thought I looked pretty good, although it wasn’t very hard to achieve when I could control my body and looks.  The hard part was not overdoing it in that area.

Kristi looked great in a dark green summer dress, and a pair of black high heels.  When we got back into the shuttle and headed east toward New York I realized we’d only be a couple of minutes late.  I was proud of Earth, the world I grew up in.  Yet… I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday.  I was hoping there wouldn’t be any problems, but the fact was this girl’s night out was two humans, and three aliens all of different races.  I had purple eyes and spots, Nora was blue, and Senna was extremely tall and thin.  We would stand out pretty well.

Well, we’d have security to keep an eye on us, and I had my gravity ball just in case, Kristi most likely had hers too.  The truth was though, I’d been welcomed most places I went outside of a few stares, surprisingly so, hopefully this night would go the same.

It was a small production once we got there.  Security arranged us in cavalcade of sorts with two black SUVs in front and back of us.  They were probably bulletproof, but next to the shuttle they might have well been tissue paper.  At best, they were calling attention to us, at worst, they were putting themselves in danger for no reason.

The good thing was Nora and Senna were thrilled to see me and Kristi.  They both had huge smiles that reached their eyes and I gave them both a light hug on impulse, then found myself in one with Nadia.  I hoped they’d enjoy a night on the town in New York.

Nadia wore a similar sundress to Kristi’s, but black instead of green, with a pair of red two inch heels.  Nora and Senna had similar attire to me, skirts and blouses, but done in their own culture and home world.  It was similar, but really stood out for the slight differences, styles that had never graced our planet before, yet, were somehow still familiar.

“Where are we eating?” I asked.

Nadia winked, “Planet Hollywood.”

Huh, I hadn’t been expecting that, but it would work.  I’d eaten there once a long time ago.  We all piled into the sports shuttle.  Nora, Senna, and Nadia fit into the back, barely.  It was a good thing they were all slim and petite in nature.  We made our way out of the complex and into the streets of Manhattan.  The streets were packed this time of day, but no huge traffic snarls.

When we got out I told Al to circle around if he couldn’t find a spot, there was no way I was letting a valet in a shuttle that could go FTL.  Not that he’d have been able to operate it.

It was hard not to notice the people staring, but outside a few catty looks that told me I looked good tonight, most of the faces were friendly.  An extremely large and intimidating man in leather, he had the look of a biker, opened the door for us, and shocked me with his words.

“Thank you Alicia Jones, for all you did for us.”

I paused for a second and smiled at him before walking in, not quite sure how to say your welcome for saving the planet.  I never did learn how to take a compliment gracefully, and that one is always seems to big.

I almost choked with laughter at what I heard from two random men outside as the door closed.

“God, she’s a hot one.  Did you see those purple eyes, and that body.”

“Don’t I know it?  I wouldn’t say no to one of her friends either.  That blue one has a really nice…” the rest of the words cut off as the door closed.  Even with my stronger than human hearing it was too loud in here to hear what he liked about Nora.

Nora blushed, which was interesting, her cheeks turned a purplish color.  What I didn’t expect to see or sense was the intrigued look in her eyes.  For some reason it never occurred to me Nora would be interested in human men.  Which was stupid of course, since I’m an alien interested in one particular human man myself.  Sometimes I forget that little fact, despite what I see in the mirror, I grew up native after all.

Nadia cleared her throat and the host looked up.

“Five, for Avdonin.”

He smiled and grabbed five menus, “This way please,” and led us to our table…

Dinner was excellent, and fun.  Especially when we got a couple of drinks in us, and I finally relaxed and killed my inner hermit.  Senna actually won the most reserved award out of the five of us, which was a change for me, but she was definitely having fun.  I got the impression she didn’t get out of the palace very much back on Leira.

After, letting Al drive, we went to a pool hall with a full bar.  There was more staring and comments, but it was kept to a minimum, and I was pretty sure our security was the reason for that.  They weren’t loud and crude about it either.  Mostly, it was just that my sense of hearing picking up things most people wouldn’t.  Some of it was very flattering actually.

The first game, Kristi and Nadia played a game of nine ball, while I explained the rules to Senna and Nora.  They didn’t look all that excited about it at first, but before we left they were quite addicted to the game.  It almost came to the point where we just skipped the show, but we decided to stick to the plan.

I’d have rather gone dancing.

However, it wasn’t meant to be.  On the way to the Broadway show we got stuck in traffic, just sitting still.  Manhattan was one of the places I wasn’t allowed to fly, so I couldn’t just go over the traffic, at least not legally.  Accidents weren’t that common an occurrence anymore, so I didn’t think that was the problem.  Not since A.I.s could drive, and although the cars weren’t like my shuttle, they did run off of small fusion reactors instead of gasoline, and were extremely reliable.

We all exchanged looks.

I asked curiously, “Al, what’s going on up ahead.”

Al took a moment to respond, I assumed he was checking the net for information, “There is some kind of hostage situation on the roof of the nearby building, a man holding a woman at the edge.  The man is threatening to kill himself and take his wife with him.  There has also been an accident because of the gathered crowd before the police arrived, and some people are stuck in their car, emergency vehicles are in route.”

I thought about it for a second, then moved to get out.  Kristi just looked at me and followed outside of her door.

I smiled, “I thought you’d argue with me.”

She replied, “Only if you went alone.  I followed you into space battles, did you think I’d stop you from dealing with a jumper, and an accident.”

I snickered, she had a good point.

We heard the others get out and follow as we walked between the card toward the scene.  Outside of some strange looks by the other drivers, no one stopped us until we got up to the police barricade.

The officer said firmly in a strong New York accent, “Go back to your car ma’am, everything is in hand.”

I looked up and saw the jumper on top of the six story building, standing on the edge with who I assumed was his wife, in a headlock.  I could also see the car crushed against the telephone pole.  I wasn’t exactly a hero, but I was here and had the technology to help.

I shook my head, “I can help.”

The officer looked me up and down with a doubtful look, until his eyes reached back up to my face, perhaps seeing it for the first time, and he froze a moment.  Then he noticed the people behind me.

He still looked unsure, “How exactly can you help?”

I smiled, “Gravity.”

Kristi coughed to hide a laugh.  I had to admit it wasn’t much of an explanation.

“I mean, I have a device that can create gravity fields, it isn’t in the open market yet but it is available to law enforcement.  Don’t you guys have them yet?”

He frowned, “It’s part of the riot gear, how would that help here?”

I shook my head, “It can do a lot more than just make people feel heavier.”

Maybe I’d have to talk to someone in charge and educate them about what they now had access too.  This thing could move a tractor trailer off the side of the road easily, much less a jumper on the edge of a roof.  For that matter, during a police pursuit it could lift a car a few inches off the road.  There were so many uses and I wasn’t even thinking that hard about it.

Figuring that asking forgiveness was better than permission, I took my mine out.

“Al, get those people down, and subdue the man so he can’t hurt the woman.”

The last thing I wanted was for the man to snap his wife’s neck when he realized he could no longer throw her off a building.

The ball disappeared from my hand and shot up into the sky.  The roof was too far away for the field to work, way further than fifty feet up, but then the gravity ball could fly itself up there.  I really needed a better name for my invention…

The crowd gave a gasp of horror as the unhappy couple were pulled right off the roof, and the man’s arms were pulled to his sides.  Perhaps I should have specified to Al how it should be done, that poor woman must be terrified.

The gasps gave way to sounds of confusion as the couple did not fall to their deaths, but floated down sedately toward a couple of police officers in the middle of the street.

I shrugged sheepishly, “I can use it to pry open the car too.  It’s capable of subtlety but also brute force.”

He gave me a look of speculation, “A person could fly with one of those things.”

I laughed, “Yes, they could.  They could also make a car fly, if I can ever get approval for public sales we’ll finally get those flying cars they’ve been promising for the last hundred years or so.”

Obviously mine didn’t count, it was actually a spaceship.  The good thing about using artificial gravity for flying cars was that they wouldn’t be able to exceed light speed.  I wasn’t sure that kind of power would be good in the general public’s hands.  It would only take one suicidal nut deciding he wants to take the world with him or her to do it, or some kind of crazy terrorist.  Granted, safety protocols were involved, but someone determined enough could probably find a way.

The cop laughed and his voice was a little wistful, “That would be something.”

Nora said without a trace of condescension, “It will come, when we first discovered the technology it took years before it was commonplace on Tressia.”

The emergency vehicle finally made it, and I did wind up assisting them in getting the doors off.  It was probably better this way anyway, let a medical professional decide if it was safe for the occupants to move or not.  There was no danger of the vehicle exploding after all, without gasoline that simply didn’t happen anymore.

Regardless, our little side trip made us late for the show, so we decided to go dancing after all…

Chapter 9

Kristi joined me in my workspace with a smile on her face, she looked excited.

I looked up at her and waited, and her smile grew wider.

She said in anticipation, “Want to watch me blow something up?”

I laughed, “Sure.”

Instead of sharing the feed on my overlay, she put it on the wall screen.  It was probably just in our heads, but somehow that made it more real, and shared, than watching the same feed internally.

She said breathlessly, “So, I’ve got one built.  It draws the equivalent energy of a large scale fusion reactor instead of the smaller ones we have locally attached.  It’s about thirty times more powerful, and the effective range has almost doubled.  I’ll send you exact numbers later.  The truth is, this isn’t much of a test, outside being able to fire it.  The shield missile has no chance of survival if hit.  Hell, the attack shuttles, battle cruisers, all of it, including the test ship which has shields twice as strong as anything else we have won’t take more than one hit to be vaporized.”

She made a face, “Still, it will show it can aim, fire, and not blow itself up.  I also have a number of normal missiles out there, just for target practice against incoming attacks.  Ready?”

“Fire away,” I said bemused by her excitement.  Not that I blamed her, who didn’t like to watch stuff explode?

Kristi nodded and muttered under her breath, I assumed she was giving commands to her A.I.  Kristi paused to let the suspense build up for a few more seconds, and we watched the gun fire from both the perspective of the missile, and the laboratory ship.  The shield around the missile didn’t even slow the pulse of energy down, the shield missile just blew up.

A few more whispered instructions and I saw ten missiles start approaching the lab ship.  With the new shields they weren’t even a threat if the plasma cannon missed, so I wasn’t worried about losing the lab ship.  However, it didn’t miss.

The plasma cannon fired ten shots in just over three seconds, and vaporized the attacking missiles.  It was… impressive.  I couldn’t help but worry that our offensive capability had far outstripped our defensive capability, though I knew I had the ability to change that.  It gave me second thoughts despite the fact our shields were still more than good enough to defend against any non-Earth ship.  Eventually, the new tech would get out, and then whoever shot first would be the winner.  I was still against building a huge juggernaut of a ship, but updated shields were starting to look a lot more reasonable.

It shouldn’t be hard, if I built it right not only would the two shields stack, but they would resonate and reinforce each other, making them more than double the strength.  Even then, it may only absorb one shot at a time, if two of the new plasma cannons hit at the same time the shields wouldn’t be able to regenerate fast enough.  Of course, the final question was, would I be able to get the board to pay for it.  Essentially it would take twice as many of the EM and anti-mass rods per ship.  The fact that it would line my pockets and wasn’t necessary against what the rest of the galaxy had would weigh against it.  They would only be necessary against our new tech, which wasn’t a threat to us, yet, and already doubled our current shield strength which was considerable.

I decide it was a political battle I’d lose, especially considering the cuts I’d already seen.  It would be hard enough to get the rest of the upgrades approved.  Though, of all of it the power converters would be the only real additional cost, the rest of it would just be material cost, which was ridiculously low considering we were using asteroids for that.  I made some notes about a new possible shield configuration and saved them in the maybe someday pile…

“That… was impressive.  How many you think on the ship?”

Kristi smiled, “We can power thousands of course, but practically because of hull space, we can double the number.  Maybe triple on the command ship and carrier.  So, sixteen on the battle cruisers, and twenty-four on the carriers and command ships.”

I nodded, “Can you update the design, and then implement it?  I think we’ll have a new ship design by the time the wormhole drive is done tomorrow, if it works.  Do you think the attack shuttles, and Shield missiles, have a place with this new ship?”

Obviously the anti-FTL missiles would stay.

Kristi shrugged, “For now.  I’d say stop building them, and carriers.  They do have a place because they still have an edge over the rest of the galaxy.  Until we lose that edge, and they catch up, they’ll still be quite effective.  Should we update emplacements and platforms with the new stuff too?”

I frowned, “Maybe the platforms, at least the ships and platforms can get out of the solar system if something goes wrong with the singularity.  Shit.”

Kristi raised an eyebrow.

I didn’t curse often, or ever really, except when I’ve been extremely stupid and thick headed.

“What happens if our new ships are defending Earth, and one of them are destroyed in near orbit.”

Kristi frowned, “Oops?”

I snickered.  Oops sorry, destroyed our planet.  My bad… didn’t think of that.  Talk about an understatement.

“I’ll finish the black hole drive, but we need to figure out the answer to that before we even consider rolling this out.”

Kristi shrugged, “We need to figure out how we can turn it off.  Once that’s solved we can set up strict shutdown protocols if the ship is about to buy it, same as what we do with the fusion reactors.”

“You know, we’ve just been assuming it would be that destructive.  For all we know the dark energy would collapse with the singularity, or perhaps be reabsorbed in that spot and not explode outward.  That actually makes more sense if you think about it, dark energy isn’t really energy like plasma, it’s more like gravity.  Last I checked, gravity doesn’t explode.  All we really know about dark energy is that it’s attracted by black holes.

“Of course, even if that’s the case it would still be bad to turn it off normally, but only for the ship the dark energy would come in contact with.  I think we should find out, but I don’t want to risk the battle cruiser.  I’m going to build a small shuttle with the singularity device system and very little else… and give it a try.”

The design only took a few minutes, I just had to take our current lab design and shrink it enough to fit inside a shuttle.  Truth be told, all I really did was tell Al to do that and then checked and approved his solution.  I was even able to build it out there on the big lab ship in the landing bay, since it was a fully functional battle cruiser with its own fabrication equipment.  It would only take a day to build, and be finished around the same time as the wormhole device.

Kristi frowned, “Anything else?”

I shrugged, “I don’t think so.  Once we prove it’s safe and we have a wormhole drive, if it is and we do I mean.  We update the carriers, command ships, battle cruisers, and platforms with the new dark energy reactor, plasma cannons, and wormhole drives if we get approval.  Everything else stays the same.”

Kristi frowned, “If we get approval?”

I nodded, “Now that we aren’t in danger of imminent destruction, the countries of Earth have started pinching pennies.  Our blank check has been filled out, so to speak.  Regardless, we will update our command ship either way, we own that one, and we own the ship out here.  Worst case, we own the two most powerful ships in the known galaxy for a while.  Not bad for two young blondes with doctorates.

Kristi giggled…

The Nairan.  Another update came in about the world that reached space but wasn’t interstellar yet, about five thousand light years rimward.  No surprises, they were humanoid.  On average they were shorter by about five inches, the tallest male generally around five foot seven, and the shortest female around four foot five.  There were shorter and taller people than that of course, but those were the more common numbers.

They had golden skin, and were hairless.  There was some debate about that, it might be cultural.  Their heads were a bit less oval and more rounded, with eyes set a bit further apart, and they had longer necks.  The people in charge of reviewing and gathering data managed to get access to their version of the internet, sort of.  They could only see what others were looking at in the data stream.  They also had the television and radio, though there wasn’t a full translation yet of their language.

The probes had also found another two worlds.

The first was uninhabitable, with cities crumbling.  Looks like that world didn’t get past their entrance to the atomic age.  Maybe in a few thousand years we could move in, if the tattered remains of the populace couldn’t hold on.

The second world was actually more exciting news than the update about the Nairan’s world.  We found a planet that was marginally inhabitable, and most importantly was unlikely to evolve its own higher life forms.  There is some smaller life in the oceans, and some sparse plant life along with insects, but no animals at all.

The good news was the atmosphere was breathable according to the sensor readings, and most of the oxygen was suspected to come from kelp like plants in the oceans, which was over four fifths of the planet.  The land masses were generally small, relatively, small island chains dotted around the planet.  The board was calling for an expedition to do a real survey, and see if this could be our first colony planet, there was still a lot to learn before we could be sure.

It was also only five and a half thousand light years away, although on a much different vector from the Nairan world, so it was less than a day to get there.  I got the itch to be one of the ones to go, and this time I decided to scratch.  This place was worth seeing.

I contacted Sergei who was on his command ship, and had him pick out twenty of his ships to go on a cruise.  I also told him I’d be coming to take my own look, but he was in command and I’d stay out of his way.  It should be fun.

We were about halfway there when the time came to test the wormhole drive, and to test shutting off a dark energy reactor.  I supposed it was my turn for show and tell.  I locked the door, just in case.

“Kristi, come take a look at this.”

She came over, “What’s up?”

“Testing the wormhole drive.”

Kristi tilted her head as I brought up the view in front of the ship.

“Okay Al, turn it on.”

Al said, “Activating.”

For the first two seconds nothing seemed to be happening, then we saw a point of darkness in space, which we could only see because of the sensors.  The lab ship was in the void above the galaxy and it was already dark there.  It grew larger, then seemed to stabilize at four feet in diameter circle.  I realized I’d been holding my breath and started breathing again.

Kristi sighed in disgust, “You know, I should have known.  I’m ashamed to admit I expected the pretty exploding lights like on deep space nine, or the blue stuff on Stargate…  Something, other than just a hole.”

I giggled, which morphed into a hearty laugh.

I asked as innocently as possible when I caught my breath, “I could add something to the overlay, would that help?  There is radiation, I could have Al show it as a pretty color pattern.”

Kristi glared at me for kicking her while she was down, “Isn’t that thing a little small to fit the ship through?”

I nodded, “Of course.  Al, send in the probe.”

A probe shot into the inky spot that looked as boring as a hole in space.

A moment later Al reported, “Receiving telemetry, probe travelled twelve thousand five hundred and fifty-two light years.”

Kristi asked, “Why so small?”

I frowned, “There are a lot of variables.  Size is the easiest, it will be the size of the gravity imprint we generate.  How far away and direction will come from many other variables, including power levels and how long we feed it various types of particle energy.  I’m not watching it all, it’s going to take a lot of openings and closings to figure out how size effects the power requirements for distance, and other factors for direction.  Al, go ahead and run through the tests and see if what I lined out is enough for calibration.”

Kristi nodded, “My presentation was better.”

“How so?” I raised an eyebrow.

She grinned impishly, “Mine had explosions,” and there was definitely an implied duh at the end of her sentence.

I smiled, “Well, stick around, I’m not done yet.  Of course, we aren’t exactly hoping for an explosion here.”

I switched the view to the shuttle on split screen.  There were Shield missiles all around it, at various distances.  The test shuttle was also extremely far from our battle cruiser, a few light years farther into the void.  The shuttle already had the dark energy reactor on for hours, so it had a lot of dark energy built up by now.  The second view had the inside of the reactor with the micro-singularity enhanced to see it.

“Al, turn off the gravity emitters in the shuttle please, shut down the dark energy reactor.”

The black hole just collapsed, like a bubble popping.  Nothing happened, it was decidedly anticlimactic.

A second later Kristi sighed, “This is boring, it isn’t doing anything at all.  At least the black hole was a…”

The shuttle exploded in an expanding ball of fire and gases.  After waiting a few seconds and verifying nothing happened to the missiles did I relax and sit back a bit in my chair.

I turned to Kristi with a smirk, “You were saying?”

Kristi was speechless, so I ordered, “Analysis please Al.”

Al replied, “I think it was the ship moving slightly.  Even at all stop there is some movement.  While the black hole is active, it drags the dark energy along with it, contains it relative to the sides of the reactor.  I believe if the shuttle had been stationary, the dark energy would have eventually dissipated without harm.  The delay was because the ship moved slightly, but the dark energy didn’t, when it encountered the walls of the reactor, it overcame the forces holding matter together, releasing a nuclear explosion.”

I frowned, that was really specific.

“What data are you basing that on Al?”

Al replied, “The delay before the explosion because the sensors saw the ship’s drift rate, and the radiation indicating a nuclear reaction detected by the missiles’ scans, and the scan that detected the missiles EM shields holding back the explosion.  I am also sure the EM field around Earth, or any life sustaining planet, could easily block that radiation.  It was not that high a yield due to the materials involved.”

Kristi grunted, “Well, at least we won’t destroy any planets on accident.  Note to self, don’t use plutonium for reactor containment.”

I snorted a laugh and nodded, “Also, unless there is catastrophic failure, and we have some warning that the singularity is failing, we can safely eject.  I suspect catastrophic failure is only likely if our ship is being blown up, which kind of renders the point moot.  What do you think?”

Kristi nodded, “I’d say patent your new converter and wormhole generator, and start the upgrade on our ship at least, for those two things and my plasma cannons, or do you not trust it enough to sit on one yet?”

I shrugged, “I think it should be fine.  The nanites keep the gravity emitters in constant top condition, and we’d need to lose over half of the emitters before we were screwed.  Since they’re powered from the black hole itself, and also have a very large and proven fusion reactor to get it started and as a backup in case the energy converter fails, I can’t see a reason to wait.  Al, submit the patents and start all upgrades on this ship.”

Kristi grinned evilly, “Plus it will make your admirals jealous when you have twenty-four turrets, and wormholes, so they’ll help fight for the upgrade.”

I snorted, “That’s so wrong, but true.  Even better, if I turn out to be wrong about it being safe, we’ll never know it.  Unless of course, there’s an afterlife.  Want to get some food?  Not sure when Al will be done with calibrations.”

Kristi nodded and got up, “Explosions always make me hungry.”

As we walked out I asked, “Al, put my toys away please, from the shuttle test?”

Al replied, “Recalling shield missiles to lab ship.”

Kristi shook her head, “That’s uncanny.”

I nodded, “I’ve been challenging him, part of the test.  It kind of proves he can figure out what I really mean, the old Al would have patiently said he didn’t understand the command.  Understanding figurative speech is fairly impressive.”

Al interrupted Kristi’s response, “Started fabrication, and patents are pending.  I’m not finished testing yet, but I have a few recommendations regarding the wormhole drive.”

I lifted an eyebrow, “What are they?”

Al replied, “There seems to be a point zero two percent variation so far.  In other words, if we target something ten thousand light years away, the destination aperture could show up exactly at that point, or anywhere in a two light year spherical radius.  Because of that, I suggest we never aim right at where we want to go, but at least two point five light years outside our target solar system for every ten thousand light years we attempt to travel.  I suggest that feature be automatic.  It shouldn’t have much impact, even if we come out four light years away, that’s less than a minute at full speed FTL.

“Secondly, I suggest each wormhole drive be calibrated independently, and at least every three months because of the minor variations in emitters and energy signatures even though each part is built exactly the same under tight tolerance.”

“Fair enough, I agree.”

Coming out inside a sun or other planetary body was less likely than winning the lottery, but why take the chance?

I waited a moment as we walked in the dining room.  He didn’t have anything further to say so we grabbed some lunch…

Chapter 10

I looked down on a planet that wasn’t pretty, but was at the same time.  The water was a deep blue that lightened slightly around the island chains.  There were two tropical storms I could see from orbit and wondered if that would be a constant issue.  We could build for them, but it would certainly make it harder to plant and farm.

About four fifths of the planet was covered in ocean, the atmosphere was breathable, a little lower in oxygen than ours, and higher in carbon dioxide, but not to toxic levels.  I’d imagine some light terraforming, plant life, trees and the like, would change that.  The atmospheric pressure was a little higher than Earth at sea level, and the gravity was one point one of Earth’s gravity.

The island chains seemed to be stable, and there was very little apparent volcanic activity.  It actually made me wonder if the race that had apparently seeded the galaxy with humanoid life, hadn’t had a hand in the planets as well.  Mostly, the life giving worlds we found were suitable for human habitation.  No thicker atmospheres, or gravity we can’t live in, the list goes on.

I had no proof of course, but the coincidences associated with life in the Milky Way galaxy just never seemed to end.  Even the axial tilt was similar to Earth, although a little smaller.  It looked like this planet would wobble between eighteen and twenty degree tilt, opposed to the twenty-two to twenty-four degrees of Earth.  That would, I believe, make the seasonal changes a little milder, but the North and South poles a little less livable than on Earth.

That was the limit of what our sensors could tell us, compositions, forces, and elements.  Several shuttles with scientists were sent down for a survey, looking for any virus or bacteria that may be inimical to human life or the kind of life, such as animal and plant, that we needed to transport here to make it an independent colony.

The scientists of course would be wearing their skin suits sealed up, and go through decontamination protocols when returning to the ship.  I was curious to go down there, but didn’t see the point if I couldn’t breathe the air, so I’d wait.  It shouldn’t take more than a couple of days I’d imagine.

If the planet did pan out, and so far we’d seen no indications it wouldn’t, the plans called for leaving behind twenty ships with a rear admiral lower, and moving twenty platforms and five thousand Shield missiles to the system.  At that point… the civilians would get a shot at creating Earth’s first colony.  I was kind of excited about it, but at the same time I knew I was getting ahead of myself, the planet needed to fully check out first.

It would be about twelve hours.  The various groups would release a cloud of medical grade nanites to check for anything that might be poisonous and couldn’t be managed for humanity.  Without the power of the human body, the nanites would run out of power in that time, but it was plenty long enough for them to dig into and sample everything they came across.

Al said, “You have a priority call coming in.”

Priority call?  “Answer it, Hello?  This is Admiral Jones.”

I was surprised by the voice of Vice President William Tanner.  Although from the country where I was born, he wasn’t my favorite member of the board, and he wasn’t around very much.  I could also tell by his voice he was very angry.

“You have a damned leak.”

My mind immediately jumped to my latest round of inventions, thanks to the power jump of dark energy.  But I dismissed it after a moment as ridiculous.  Kristi would never betray me, and Al was incapable of it.  No one else even knew yet.

After a few seconds I answered, “Could you explain that sir, what was leaked?”

The VP said loudly, “The damned planet, what else would I be talking about?”

Huh, I was at a loss, “So, what happened exactly, and what do you want me to do about it?”

He growled, seriously.  Growled at me.  I rolled my eyes, but only because it was an audio only call.

“Someone leaked we found a planet we could colonize to the press.  It all snowballed from there, all the governments in the USFS are being pressured by companies and individuals to allow them to go to the colony.  All the board members are being pestered by calls to make sure that their country is the first to be able to reach out to the stars.  It’s a damned nightmare!”

Oh.  I was still waiting for him to tell me what he wanted me to do about it.  I was in charge of space, by their authority, rules, and laws.  What the hell did the problem have to do with me?

“So, what did you want me to do exactly?  Sir.”

I frowned at the silence, wondering if he was having a heart attack or something.  Finally, he spoke.

“Find the leak, throw them in the brig, or out a damned airlock.  I don’t care which.  We planned originally to have a lottery of sorts, with seven entries, to decide who gets to go first.  I don’t think that’s going to be possible now.”

To be fair, I had no idea what political pressure he was under, but whatever was happening, he needed to get a grip.

“Alright, I’ll do my best to track it down.  The problem is, I don’t think this information was classified at all.  It came in as part of the scan data report, and I sent my admiral to handle it along with twenty other ships.”

It was probably my fault, since I didn’t tell Sergei it should be treated as sensitive.  Who knew the world would go crazy over it?  Then again, it probably would have happened anyway, it wasn’t like the information could have been hidden for long.  But then, if who was going was announced with the information of the find, it probably would have cut most of it off before it built up so much momentum.

Yes, I was completely waffling back and forth in my mind, and arguing both sides.

He sounded a bit less mad, and tired, when he replied, “You do that, let us know what you find out.”

He disconnected the call.

“Al, contact the other ship AIs, find out who made personal calls right after I sent those orders out, and up to a half hour later please.”

Al replied, “On it.”

I grinned.  Not only was Al understanding imprecise speech, he was using it.  Granted, on it wasn’t a very obscure way to say acknowledged, but it was progress.  I pondered the dilemma, there were a lot of large Island chains out there.  Maybe… we should just share the first colony world.

I closed my eyes and sighed.  Right, and then we could have a bonfire and sing songs together.

I spent a little time going through the news reports to see for myself.  If anything the vice president was understating things a bit.  There were a lot of commercial and private groups that actually had vessels built and ready to go, sitting on the ground on Earth and waiting for word to take off.  Apparently they were waiting with baited breath.  Even worse, nationalism was resurging, rather than coming together when there was an alien threat, the old competition to beat out and become the front leading country was resurging.  Kind of like the race to the moon, everyone wanted to be the first to start a colony.

I’d say it was a human thing, but hadn’t I just raced out here to take my own look?

There wasn’t anything inherently wrong with that, competition is the reason we advance so quickly, as opposed to the more sedate races of humanoid live out in the galaxy.  However, it could be a problem at this stage, we should be working together to reach out, and defend from other races, even if those other enemies were a little shadowy right now.

I wasn’t worried war would break out on Earth or anything, but I was worried the USFS could lose their mandate, if enough people demanded change things may break down again.  The last thing Earth needed to do is have seven plus space navies roaming the stars, anything they did would be reflected back on Earth.  It was the one place we had to present a united front, and I hoped I was worrying about nothing.  Overreacting.  I guess I’d find out.

The planet checked out.  I also read the report I was about to submit, with Sergei’s report appended.  It not only described the planet, it also had the information the VP had asked for.  It turned out to be more than one person.  At least three hundred people had called someone, family, friends, etc…  None of them had called the press directly, so I didn’t append any of the names or arrest anyone.  After having time to think about it, I realized it wasn’t their fault.

There was nothing from the board to say the scanning data was top secret, but then it probably should have been, which means it was down to a failure of communication, from the top.  I couldn’t tell them it was their fault, and I would only admit to partial fault.  I should have thought about it myself, but in truth, it never occurred to me.  I did make some recommendations now, for them to send out official orders that discoveries through the stealth sensor net be classified until they could be reviewed.

I’d have been happy to do it myself, to my vice admirals on down, but it really needed to come from them.  However, thanks to the VPs call, I did send out orders to classify any information gathered on the planet until it could be reviewed and disseminated by the board.  Sure, it was closing the airlock after the air was gone, but it would prevent it from getting worse.

I sighed, wondering if I’d have a job this time tomorrow, because I was sure the board would never admit they’d messed up to the various world leaders, and that meant they needed a scapegoat.  I ordered Al to send it anyway, what else could I do?  The one thing I wouldn’t do is order any of my people locked up for violating orders that didn’t exist outside of the vice president’s imagination.

Strangely, the idea of upgrading shields popped into my mind.  Maybe the board would say no to that one, or for all I knew all the upgrades Kristi and I had come up with would be shot down.  But in a weird way, advancing science was what I lived for, and for me it was a lot like comfort food would be.  Sure, I was a beautiful young woman, but I was undoubtedly a huge geek.

“Al, access the double shields file and implement two more levels on the test lab ship.  I want to see what the gains are in shield strength with double and triple shielding.”

I shrugged to myself, even if the board wouldn’t buy it, that doesn’t mean I couldn’t put it on my personal ships.  It might even improve things with the old fusion reactors powering it, although it would almost double the cost of each missile, even I flinched at that.  Still, the ships that held actual people, it was hard to put a price tag on their safety…

I took one more look at the planet, and decided I needed to get back to Earth before the board called me down to yell at me, or shoot me.  As long as I was in the doghouse, I compiled a presentation for possible upgrades.  I knew we were at the point where my suggestions wouldn’t be so readily accepted, and they’d think about it for a while before deciding if they were necessary.

I put in that the dark energy reactor, and converter, were necessary to the other upgrades, but also included that shield strength and speed would double without changing anything else.  Then I talked about the other upgrades separately that could be built upon those two initial upgrades.  Wormhole drive, vastly more powerful plasma cannons, and newer shield configurations.  I knew they would say no to that last one, but if we ever met an enemy we needed them for, I wanted the option already known and out there.

The old ships could take about ten missiles before failing, all at the same time.  It would be more accurate to say they can take ten missiles a second, because the shield is constantly being maintained and regenerated.  With the more powerful power source, they can take twenty in a second.  I still had to verify it, but the math indicated it would take forty with dual layered shields, and sixty with triple layered shields.  The shields were separate to a certain extent, but they were interdependent, the second would equalize with the first, and the third would equalize with the second, and they were all being constantly regenerated.

It also illustrates how strong the new plasma cannons were.  What would in theory take sixty missiles, would be accomplished by three plasma shots within a second.  Of course, none of it was necessary for today’s threats, the question was what would humanity run into tomorrow, as we continually mapped out the galaxy, and other races followed the path I was taking?

Chapter 11

The new shield system was in, it wasn’t a major change, and according to sensors I was right about the effects.  The new triple shields were six times more powerful than the old ones.  It boggled my mind that it could take sixty missiles, and they had to hit all within a second, to destroy the ship.  I enabled the change for the command ship as well and thought about bringing in the lab ship, we had nothing else in the works really, until the next time I got a new project.

Then I decided just to leave it there, it was a good platform for a highly hazardous lab out there in the void for next time, hopefully there would be a next time.

Strangely, with all that was happening that thought was extra depressing.  I was back to just my admiral job, and keeping an eye on my company.  Creating was a joy to me, and I had no idea when inspiration would strike, or even just interest in investigating something else.

“You look like someone shot your dog.  Let’s go home tonight, relax, kick back.  Have you talked to Nathan lately?”

I looked at Kristi in surprise.  The idea of leaving the ship right now hadn’t even occurred to me with what was going on, but I supposed that was foolish, going home after my shift shouldn’t matter.

“I talked to him last night.  He won’t be eligible for leave again for months, and he’s deployed right now.  Best case scenario is I can visit him at the base when his current mission is completed.”

Kristi frowned, “That sucks.  But still.  Wine, hot tub, wine, dinner, wine, really bad sci-fi moves on Netflix… in the hot tub, and of course, wine.  Should take care of everything.”

I smiled despite myself, “Fine, after you doctor Wilder.”

Kristi waved her arm, “No, after you doctor princess Jones.”

I snorted, she was right, I needed to wind down.

The next morning I felt a lot better.  I was also glad I was an alien, because Kristi had a massively nasty hangover, we did overdo it a bit on the wine, and she looked absolutely miserable as I flew the sports shuttle up to our ship.  Of course, being her best friend I was very understanding.

“What a beautiful morning,” I said cheerfully.

She glared at me, “Damn aliens.”

I tried for innocent hurt, but completely failed as I giggled.

“Sorry.”

She snorted, and then held her hand to her head as if it hurt.

“Liar.”

When we entered the hangar, I saw an extra shuttle there, and wondered what was going on.  I didn’t have long to wait once we got out.

One of the marines said, “Miss Avdonin is in your office ma’am.”

I sighed and nodded, suddenly not feeling the beauty of the morning.  I knew I’d done a lot for Earth, and was by most a hero even if that made me a little uncomfortable.  But I also knew politics was a bitch sometimes.  This couldn’t possibly be good news.

Kristi even looked concerned past her misery.

When we got into my office, Nadia looked over with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.  She also didn’t look like she’d slept in days which made me feel a little guilty.

Nadia said, “We need to talk off the record.”

I nodded as the butterflies in my stomach all took off.

“Al, discontinue recording in my office for the duration of Nadia’s visit please.”

Nadia frowned, “It’s a mess.  A compromise was reached last night, wheeling and dealing, politics,” she spat out the last word in disgust.

“Okay, what’s the damage?”

Nadia sighed, “The Americans made an offer.  They offered to foot the bill for all the upgrades you submitted, and pay for the lion’s share of the remaining fleet, if the other six groups in the USFS would allow them to colonize the new planet as an American territory, with the assurances they wouldn’t seek another until the other six got a colony of their own.”

“I see, and the others went for this?”

Nadia shook her head, “Yes and no.  The other leaders decided to wring more concessions for it, because of its value.  Most of those don’t have anything to do with you, however, Russia made a demand that directly affects you, and I wanted to tell you personally, before the orders come in, which should be in about an hour.”

I had a really bad feeling, and Nadia confirmed my fears with her next words.

Nadia said, “They demanded that their admiral, Sergei Abramov become admiral of the fleet for the USFS.  So, we are cutting your contract short,” she looked slightly ashamed, but I didn’t blame her.

I frowned, “I see, is there anything else?”

She nodded, “There was, at first it was planned to take this ship, with payment of course, since you’ll be a civilian again and shouldn’t be in command of a ship with weapons.  However, that was shot down.

“It seemed very ungrateful for all you’ve done.  You have a special status for putting us in space, and protecting us once we got there, that no other citizen will be allowed.”

I frowned, “That is appreciated, but seems… rather nice.”

Nadia barked a laugh, “Yes, there are other reasons, although I would have been fine with just the one.  I really do hope we can still be friends after today.”

I could feel her sincerity, but couldn’t do more than nod.  I didn’t have many friends really.  Kristi was my best and closest friend, and the others could be counted on one hand, and two of those weren’t from Earth.  Point was, I couldn’t afford to throw them out.

She continued, “The other reasons are just as valid but more selfish.  You have consistently come up with better, stronger, and faster technology.  Letting you as they say in America, keep your toys, and play making new ones, seems to be the course of wisdom for the planet.  The last reason stemmed from fear as well as being selfish.  They felt you would think it a slap in the face, and simply take your toys and go somewhere else, or worse, sell them to the other races in the treaty.

“You will of course be removed from the command structure, no more morning orders, reports, and all that.  But you won’t be cut out of any systems.  Much like a security company has access to the buildings they protect, you will have access to upgrade the ships, access to maintain the new stealth sensor net, etc.  So I suppose if you get curious, you still have access to raw data.  So consider yourself at this moment, a top secret contractor to all the countries involved in the USFS.

“Of course, you may tell us to shove it, and go work in Denver, and sell your ship.  But we all hope you won’t, or at least, you’ll continue doing both.”

Sell my ship?  Not happening.  I would take care of my company, but I wasn’t giving up space just because I wasn’t an admiral anymore.  In fact, running a company, being an inventor, exploring new things and ideas was all I wanted to do.  I never cared about the power I had as admiral of fleet, it was a responsibility to protect the Earth.

I was so worried I would be fired, but now that it happened I felt lighter, free in a way, like someone took a great weight off of my shoulders.  Not all of it, I still felt a need to keep pushing the edge of technology, just in case Earth did run into an enemy.

After all, the phrase pinnacle of technology was a lie.  Nothing was unbeatable, and there was always more to learn, always another impossibility to overcome.  I just hoped my best work wasn’t behind me, most scientists didn’t get more than one or two breakthroughs a lifetime, never mind as big as the two I had have been.

“Well, I won’t tell you no.  And yes, taking my ship would have pissed me off.”

Nadia snickered.

“Anything else, or was that everything?”

Nadia shook her head, “Wasn’t that enough?”

I sighed, “I suppose it is.  I’ll wait for the orders before I start the upgrade on the ships.  You want to get a peek at the new planet?” I asked with a teasing lilt.

Nadia shook her head, “I can’t take off for the day, too busy.  I need to be back down in an hour.”

I smiled, “But… I can have you there in five minutes.  My wormhole generator came on line early this morning.  That’s a whole fifty minutes of peeking.”

Nadia grinned, and this time, it reached her eyes.  Somehow not losing her as a friend seemed like the best thing that happened to me this morning.

“If you insist Alicia.”

So, we went to take a quick look, maybe getting back to just the science was for the best anyway…

Chapter 12

When the orders came through, I initiated the upgrade for the fleet.  The upgrade was designed to not impact operations at all.  For instance, in the case of the battle cruisers the eight new plasma cannons would be in place and active, before the old eight were touched at all, just in case we were attacked during the upgrade.  There were other similar things going on to prevent any ship downtime.

However, I was aware that where humans are involved, mistakes are possible, so I was doing half the fleet at a time, and of course, all new ships would be built to the new specifications.  As I suspected, the missiles wouldn’t be getting the triple shielding, but the attack shuttles would.  Even on the older power sources, it would still triple the shield power, so it was worth doing, and would make them more effective in battle.

Al reported, “A hundred ships, and admiral Sergei’s command ship, just went to light speed.”

I frowned, “See if you can figure out what’s going on.”

I felt suddenly nervous, it wasn’t my problem anymore, but it wasn’t easy to shut off.

Al said, “According to scanning data from the probes, three of the systems in the old Knomen empire, all separate species, just sent a combined six hundred ships toward the Knomen home world.”

I frowned, “ETA on enemy ships?”

I knew our ships would get there in a day.  Half a day, or immediately, when the upgrades were complete.

Al replied, “Thirty-two hours.”

I frowned, Sergei would have five to one odds against him, with the twenty carriers stationed there.  But then, they’d have sixteen hundred attack shuttles as well, not to mention Shield missiles, and a few missile boats.  The upgrades wouldn’t be completely done, but the shields would be, so they’d be at triple strength, but not yet at six times strength when the dark energy reactor came online.  They’d only have the old plasma cannons as well.  Still, whoever was attacking would most likely lose, as long as they didn’t have any nasty surprises or new technologies.

Whoever they are, they are either out for revenge, or want to ensure the Knomen can never rise again.

Al said, “New data coming in I think you might want to know about.”

I shook my head, “What now?”

Al said, “The Seltans are gathering close to Leira, there are close to a thousand ships present, and it looks like those numbers are growing.  Fifty more ships have left Earth space at FTL, and I am detecting several other small fleets from allies moving toward Leiran space.”

Holy crap.  I’d figured the Seltan were waiting until something broke out here before trying to attack Leira again, but I had no idea how closely they must have been watching to act so quickly.

“How many treaty ships.”

Al answered, “Including ours, twelve hundred and nineteen, so far.”

I frowned, “Have all treaty worlds sent ships yet?”

Al said, “Yes.”

I tilted my head, “Then why the qualifier?”

Al was silent for a moment, “I estimated there was a seventy-eight percent chance you would make the number twelve hundred and twenty-one.”

Would I?  I did have my own fleet of two after all.  That’s entirely crazy, I was a scientist.  I wasn’t even in the damned military anymore, and I’d be crazy to get involved.  Kristi had been oddly silent on the other side of the room.

I smiled, “Kristi, want to go pick a fight?”

Kristi giggled, “Okay.  But we should’ve built our death star first.”

I shook my head in bewilderment, “Death star?”

Kristi laughed, “You don’t remember?  Last night when we got really drunk on wine.  Something about thousands of plasma turrets, and eight levels of shielding, a huge ship half the size of the moon powered by a dark energy reactor.  Full of millions of anti-FTL missiles, Shield missiles, and attack shuttles controlled by A.I.  You even talked about a city, and farms.  It was a completely self-sufficient world in and of itself.  I thought you might wind up conquering the universe, but you passed out in the middle of Empire Strikes Back instead.”

I… didn’t remember that at all.  No juggernaut ships for me, but apparently I hadn’t forgotten the concept, it had even grown.  I shook my head, hopefully she was just getting me back, for me teasing her this morning about the hangover.  Surely I didn’t really… I shook my head, again.

“Al, go ahead and follow the ships heading to Leira, slow down and match after we catch up.”

Al said, “Engaged.”

Kristi’s eyes widened, “Oh. My. Goodness.  Did your A.I. just reference and make fun of star trek?”

Al asked, “Was it not amusing?”

I laughed, “Yes, a little.”  Just a little shocking as well…

The hundred ship Earth fleet heading to Knomen would get there eight hours before the enemy fleet.  Eight hours after that, the attack would start.  And we and the other fifty Earth ships, would still have at least a day to get to Leira.  With the updated ships, I could get there before that happened, hell, I could be there now.  But I wasn’t going to face a thousand plus Seltan ships with only the Leiran ships there, of which there was an impressive four hundred of right now.

The Seltan ships were still showing up, gathering at the edge of sensor range, and were in excess of that twelve hundred ships we would have.  With the fifty Earth battle cruisers, we would have a thousand attack shuttles, along with three thousand Shield missiles, plus whatever emplacements the Leirans had, but if the Seltan kept building up I wasn’t sure even that was enough.

I had a feeling they would attack the same time the Knomen were hit, though I’m not sure why I had that impression.  Either way, we would be late as well.  I didn’t like that concept at all.

“Al, what is the most efficient rendezvous point for all the ships that won’t get to Leira before the Knomen battle starts?”

Al was silent for a second, “I assume you mean all the ships from our side of the Knomen, all the ones past Knomen will reach Leira in that time frame, four hundred and fifty ships.  The last three fifty will arrive late as they live on our side of the old Knomen empire.”

“Yes, that’s what I mean, what’s the most efficient rendezvous point for those three hundred and fifty ships?”

Al replied, “Just past the Knomen home world.  Some of the races are past the Knomen world already, but so much slower than even our old ships, that it would be faster if they turned around and came back.”

I nodded.  I also hoped Earth wouldn’t be mad at me for revealing the tech already.  I compiled a message to those three hundred and fifty ships, with instructions to meet us and where, and I’d open a wormhole to get them the rest of the distance.  I just hoped we had that long, if I was wrong about the Seltan’s intentions it would be bad, they could attack sooner after all.  Even now.

I sent the message.  I wondered for a moment, if any of the other races would even believe me.  Or worse, fear me for once again throwing the galaxy’s balance of power out of alignment.

Al said, “You have an incoming message from vice admiral Anthony Flores.  Apparently he is now the admiral over exploratory fleet.  Upper admiral Kara Barnes was promoted to vice admiral home fleet.”

That made sense, they’d need to once they promoted Sergei to fleet admiral.

“Answer it.”

Anthony said, “What are you doing?”

I smiled, “Hi Anthony, well the board left me my toys, so I’m getting ready to hit the playground.”

Anthony replied, “Are you insane?  This isn’t a game.”

I sighed, “Of course it isn’t.  You should know me better by now, banter is stress relief.  Did you sit on a stick or something?”

Anthony sighed, “Fine, but what about that message you sent?”

I didn’t know quite how to answer him.

“A gut feeling, that we won’t make it in time otherwise.  I’m probably wrong, but if we can get there faster, we should.  Don’t tell me you wouldn’t already be there if the upgrades were finished.”

He grunted, “Fine, but be careful.  You’re too important to Earth, and our future, to throw yourself away in a skirmish.  Especially now that you don’t even have the responsibility as admiral of fleet.  That said, I can’t order you, I can only ask you.  Watch your ass out there.”

Was I crazy?  Why did I feel the need to do this really?  Was it the adrenaline rush, was I a danger junkie now?  I didn’t think so, although I’d be hard pressed to completely deny it, but it was more than that as well.  It was the same reason I said yes to fight in the first place, to protect my adopted home, and now everyone that was a part of the treaty.

To prove I wasn’t like the rest of my people.

Was that shallow and stupid?  I didn’t know, but I knew I couldn’t just sit back, especially when for the next couple of days, as I had the two most powerful ships in the known galaxy under my command.

I said grudgingly, “I’m not going to play hero, or martyr, but I won’t sit it out either.  Jones out.”

It was the truth too.  I had Kristi with me, I would never sacrifice myself in an empty gesture, and I sure as hell wouldn’t sacrifice my best friend…

Chapter 13

“Al, has anyone tried talking to the ships heading for Knomen?”

Maybe they could be talked out of it?  Probably not, but I thought it might be worth an effort.

Al replied, “No.”

I wavered in my decision.  Perhaps talking would be better, but if they were after revenge on the Knomen, perhaps I wasn’t the best person to talk to them, despite the fact I was a big part of the reason they were free right now.

Sergei was probably busy, so I had Al send him a message with the suggestion.  There was still over a day before that battle happened, so there was no real rush.  It felt odd to be relegated to the sidelines again though.

I took some time to go over the projects in my company.  There weren’t any new breakthroughs on replacing the fabricators with nanites for all building.  The other projects were similarly slow.  I also had no idea what I should work on next.  I took a deep breath and blew it out.

To kill some time, I started designing a behemoth of a ship, nothing the size of a moon, but about four times the length and width of the current ship.  That would fit over two hundred and fifty plasma turrets easily.  Of course, I had no practical reason to want to actually build it, and it would take just over twenty days to build, whereas we could build almost seven battle cruisers at the same time, which had almost the same amount of cannons between them.  It seemed to be a wash really.

Al said, “Call from Sergei.”

“Answer it.”

His face came up in my view, “Alicia.  I got your message.  Not sure if I see the point, they clearly want revenge, and those worlds haven’t contacted anyone in a while.”

Hearing my first name from him was odd, but the message was clear, I was no longer in command and he was humoring me with this call.  It could have been worse, at least he wasn’t angry I’d stuck my nose in.

I shrugged, “Call it politically covering your ass.  It probably is a waste of time, but it isn’t like you don’t have some before the fight starts, and at least we can say we tried.”

He raised an eyebrow, “We?”

I suppressed rolling my eyes, that wouldn’t go over well.  Did he really think I was trying to take credit or something?

“I mean Earth.  Protecting the Knomen we are keeping on their world, essentially jailed and quarantined, has nothing to do with the treaty.  However, it will reflect on us, and inform the other worlds involved in the treaty how we conduct ourselves.  It will be especially important to those worlds still on the fence about joining us.”

He grunted, “I’ll consider it.”

Then he nodded before I could respond and hung up.  Well, it was the best I could do…

It had been a very long twenty-four hours, or so it seemed.  Kristi found me on the bridge, she was wearing nothing except the skin suit which hugged every curve.  I obviously wasn’t in uniform anymore, but I had a pair of dark jeans and a light blue shirt on over mine.

“It’s too damned quiet on this ship,” Kristi complained.

I happened to agree with her.  It also explained her clothing choices, it was just the two of us up here.  We got to keep the ship, but of course all the pilots, marines, and our staff had to go, they were all part of the USFS.  I didn’t mind the solitude, or rather, sharing it with only one other person and my best friend, but I knew Kristi was more social than I was.

“Yeah, we’ll get some people soon.  I imagine it won’t be too hard to hire some people, although the ship pretty much runs itself, all we have to do is point and tell it where to go.”

Kristi grunted, “At the very least we need a cook.”

I laughed, neither of us were very good at that.

“Well, outside of this jaunt, we don’t have any driving reasons to stay on the ship all the time anymore, and we can start to actually use our home.”

She looked around, her eyes narrowing.

“What is it?”

She sighed, “No wood to knock on anywhere on the bridge, now that you said that, something is sure to come up.  I love being out in space, but yeah, going to go nuts up here.”

Curiously I asked, “Are you working on anything?”

She shook her head, “Not really, I’ve been running a few tests for a new weapon idea, but even with the crazy amount of power we have available it doesn’t look good.”

She obviously didn’t want my help, so I let it go there.  She kind of had a point too, I didn’t want to give up the ship, and some testing and ideas would be better off in space.  But did I really need to be on my ship all the time?  I also had the idea to keep up on what came in on the stealth sensor net as it expanded toward the rim, but really, even if I saw something it wasn’t like I could do anything with it.

It would just be me being nosy, not that I wouldn’t do it, but I needed to be more productive than that.

I also had the feeling that it was all just another way for me to try to be a hermit.  Also, without the military job I could relax a bit more, maybe even take another vacation?

Relaxation, why did the idea of that bother me so much?  Maybe I should stay on the ground when we got back, at least until I had a real reason to come back out here.  New idea to experiment with, or a visit to one of the other treaty worlds… something.

I changed the subject, “We’re almost to the rendezvous point.  You’re okay with doing this right?”

Kristi shrugged, “Yup.  It’s all our inventions they’ll be fighting with, and I’m not letting you do it alone.”

I nodded, “This should be it for a while, it took me being bored to realize we don’t really belong out in orbit all the damned time anymore, not without a fleet to look over.”

Kristi looked relieved, “I thought I was going to have to fight you on that.”

I laughed, “No, not much anyhow.  I’m sure we’ll want to visit another planet at some point, and we have a ship for that, and maybe the next time we have an experiment that could blow up Earth.  Other than that,” I shrugged helplessly.

Kristi snickered, “You know, we could run the lab ship just as well from our office in Colorado as we can on this ship.”

I glared at her, “A true friend wouldn’t have pointed that out.”

She giggled, but held her hands up in a peaceful gesture.

Al said, “We’ve arrived at the rendezvous point.”

“Open a wormhole to Leira, and launch all our Shield missiles.  Just in case the Seltan attack when they see us bringing a few hundred ships through.”

Al asked, “Should I recommend it to the fleet?”

I shook my head, “No, Sergei has eyes, he’s in command.  Just me doing it is hint enough, I’d rather not step on his toes any more than I have already.”

Al was silent for a few seconds, “Understood.  Shield missiles launching.  The fleet is following suit, and heading into the wormhole, missiles first.”

“Put it up on the screen.”

We watched as the fleet moved through, and then the other fleets followed.  I wondered if they were reluctant, and what they thought about the fact we could do this at all.  It wasn’t the first time that thought had crossed my mind.  We went through last, because we needed to continue to feed the wormhole energy to keep it open, even as we travelled through it…

“Report,” I ordered.

Kristi rolled her eyes at me playfully.  Damnit, habits to break, and I wasn’t even military all that long.

Al replied, “We are two light years from Leira, the fleets are already moving off.  The Seltan are still holding and haven’t attacked, they have nineteen hundred and twenty-three ships.  As far as I can tell the last one arrived hours ago, no more have trickled in since then.”

I shook my head and whispered, “Why haven’t they attacked yet?”

It didn’t make sense, which meant I was probably missing something.  Waiting until we were all gathered and ready was stupid.

Al replied, “Unknown at this time.”

I smiled, at least the AI wasn’t perfect.  I didn’t bother to tell him I hadn’t expected an answer.

“Move us alongside the Earth fleet, and launch our anti-FTL gravity missiles.”

Kristi shrugged, “I guess now all we can do is wait.”

We waited for hours, and no other ships came on the Seltan side.  It was tense, and horribly boring at the same time.  It was hard to stay alert for hours at a time, but I could control my body and reactions pretty well.  When something happened it would take but a moment to regain my sharpness, but right now I wouldn’t bother.

Kristi and I kept an eye on the status of the fleet at Knomen, and it looked like that battle was going to happen.  The three attacking fleets were well informed, they dropped out of FTL before any could be destroyed by the small gravity missiles.  After that, the battle was almost painful to watch.

The first two volleys the enemy sent at FTL, and all the missiles were destroyed before they could get close.  After that, the battle was fought at sub light speed in its entirety.  The enemy ships had a throw weight advantage at five major ships to one, but with all the Shield missiles and attack shuttles, those attacks were held off.  The enemy had no problems keeping up with Sergei’s missile strikes either, though both sides lost a few in the first eight volleys.

For the Earth fleet, we lost fifty-two shield missiles, and four battle cruisers before Sergei could adjust to their concentrated fire.  The enemy lost fourteen ships in return fire.  Considering the attrition rate of both sides, it would have been a close battle.

But then the two sides came within range of the Earth ships’ plasma cannons.  Even before the new ship design, the old ones packed quite a punch.  Every battle cruiser, carrier, attack shuttle, and even the shield missiles, all opened fire at once.  The enemy fleet was torn apart.

I bit my lip, I was happy we’d won of course, but it was a slaughter.  And that was before the upgrade, the new plasma cannons would put the old ones to shame in both destructive power, and range, and there would be twice as many on each ship.  I loved the Earth, and believed in humanity, I just hoped they would be worthy guardians of the weapons I had built them, and would not abuse that power.

“Status?”

I don’t know why I asked, I was looking at the screen which showed me we were having some kind of weird standoff.  Neither our fleet, nor the Seltans, had moved since we got here.

Al replied, “No change.”

Kristi stretched, and yawned, “I’m hungry.”

I nodded, there was only so much time I could wait.  Of course, as soon as I stood the Seltan fleet started to move.  My mouth dropped open when the fleet turned around, and went to FTL, disappearing back to Seltan space and out of sensor range.  All of them, except for one that stayed behind.  Then that one started our way, at a slow speed, relatively, he was still going several hundred times the speed of light, but he was ten light years away, so it would take a while for him to arrive.  At least an hour if he didn’t speed up.

“Al, transfer bridge status views to my overlay.”

I figured we had time to eat…

Chapter 14

Kristi asked, “What do you suppose they want?”

I shrugged, “I don’t know, they’ve never tried to communicate before as far as I know.  They must want something.”

The Seltan ship had slowed down gradually until they dropped out of FTL at thirty light minutes almost a half hour ago.  I was hoping we’d find out soon, without quantum communications it would take about a half an hour for us to receive a message.

Kristi sighed, “Well, hopefully they want to talk, because this is a really bizarre battle tactic.”

Al replied, “I’m receiving a wide area laser communication, the whole fleet should be picking it up.  It isn’t sound or video, just some data.  Stand by a moment.”

A few seconds later he continued, “It’s a quantum signature, along with a translation matrix, shall I program it in?”

“Go for it,” I said softly, “And retrieve all our missiles and shuttles, I don’t think we’ll be fighting today.”

I was surprised to have rather mixed feelings about that.  Mostly relief, but there was some disappointment in there as well.  I guess with the adrenaline build up I’d turned a little savage.

“Incoming message ma’am.”

“Put it on Al, and call me Alicia please,” I replied.

I heard Kristi gasp, and had to admit the Seltan had an intimidating appearance.  He looked at least seven feet tall, and had dark black hair, and brown eyes sunken into a craggy and angular green face.  His ears were rather larger than human, and the nose was bulbous.  He looked more built than a linebacker without an ounce of fat on his bulging muscles.

What really stood out however, was his two sets of arms.  The bottom set were huge and defined by large muscles, and he had them crossed over his chest.  The upper set were rested on his sides and were even more muscular.  I wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley, that was for sure.

“I am Dral, force leader of the Seltan empire.  I apologize for the subterfuge that brought you here, but I had reason.  One, I wanted to see if this new treaty I have heard about was worth anything, or just a piece of paper.  Two, I wanted to talk to all of you, and honestly this was the easiest way to get you all here.”

He smiled disturbingly, “I wish to broker a peace, and perhaps more, there is much you don’t know.”

What the hell could he mean by that?

“This is Alnot, leader of Leira.  What do you mean by that, and why would we ever trust you?”

Dral nodded, “Because those cowardly Knomen no longer pull your strings, we have hope that you will deal with us honorably.”

Alnot replied, “What do you want of us?”

Dral was silent for a moment, “I would have at least peace between us, perhaps even join you in your treaty, there is much to explain.  Much that has been hidden from you by the Knomen in times past.  I ask that you hear my words, and spread them to the worlds and their leaders that you’re allied with.”

Alnot frowned, “We will listen, beyond that I cannot say.  There is much blood between us.”

Dral bowed his head, “Yes, that is regrettable, and part of my words to come.  Yet, we have never threatened your world itself, when we could have.  Our actions were…  I get ahead of myself, let me start from the beginning.”

I was fascinated, and despite the translation his words… now he had me doing it, his speech was a little odd.  I told Al to bring us some coffee, one of the maintenance droids could handle it, with the repair nanites all over the ship they no longer had a job anyway.

Dral started talking, his tone of voice oratory, as if teaching us, “Long ago, when we first discovered FTL, when most of your worlds’ populations lived in caves, we joined the Knomen empire.  They came to us, much like many of you, and we fell for their good sounding words and lies.  Yet, when their dishonor became apparent, we had no choice but to break off, and go on our way.

“It was a large war, the largest the Seltan had ever seen or been a part of at that time.  Eventually, we beat them back, and they started to fear our border, if not respect our honor.  We hold all the stars between the Orion arm, and the Core.  Next to us, we were surrounded by two other races.  On one side we had the Drenil.  The Drenil are a peaceful species, and quite strange.

“They have no true shape, and are amorphous.  Thankfully, they are as peaceful as they are powerful.”

I frowned when Alnot interrupted him, “Amorphous, all life is like we are, what tales do you spin?”

Dral growled, “Be patient, listen to my words, but hear this.  Implicate me as a liar again and I will burn your world to ash.  We have honor, something you dogs perhaps wouldn’t understand.  If the situation wasn’t what it was, I probably wouldn’t even bother trying.”

When Alnot didn’t answer, he went up in my estimation a bit.

Dral continued, “To the other side of the core were the Reilan.  The Reilan were peaceful as well, and hard to describe.  They weren’t humanoid either.”

The fact he was describing them in the past tense made me pay even more attention to his words, and it gave me a sense of foreboding.

Dral nodded, “So in short, we were alone.  We had two peaceful neighbors, but they weren’t humanoid, and were hard to speak to and understand.  Up the arm we had the Knomen empire, an empire without honor.  Many millennia passed, and then the Reilan were invaded from the other side.  Many millions of small ships, the size of what we would consider a shuttle or troop transport, invaded their space.

“We watched, and waited, thinking we were next.  But when the Reilan were destroyed, the swarm of ships headed up the arm.  We’d escaped a nasty war, but only for a time, and we never forgot, we built up our ship numbers knowing that they would be back someday.  Five hundred years later, they swarmed back down the arm, and attacked us.”

He paused for a moment, and I wondered if they were so different after all.  He clearly had a good handle on the theatric.

“We have been fighting them off ever since.  We tried once again to get the Knomen to see true honor, and join us in defending our arm of the galaxy, but that wasn’t to be.  More than once, the Knomen saw us as a threat and considered attacking us.  We have the ability to find out such things.  Whenever that happened, we invaded Leira with a small force, made up of older ships, and old warriors that wished to die in battle.

“We regret the loss of life, but true to form, the Knomen are cowards, every time we invaded they would change their mind, until the next time they remembered us.”

Alnot replied, “So you want to join the treaty, and have us fight with you against these invaders, is that it?  Why should we?”

Dral frowned, “Do you not understand?  I thought from my words, this would be clear.  This… galaxy is some kind of experiment.  Whoever seeded our galaxy with life, only gave one arm to humanoids.  On one side we have amorphous forms that are peaceful but so alien we can’t have meaningful contact, the other aliens that were destroyed are beyond my ability to describe properly.  The enemy that attacks us came from the fourth arm, the one opposite us.  We use words such as swarm to describe them because they swarm like insects.

“The creatures themselves have exoskeletons like many insects on our worlds, they even have an amalgam to mandibles, and the way they feed.  Beyond that though they have no relation to us at all, they are entirely alien in nature.  Even the insects on our worlds contain up to sixty percent of the same DNA, not so for this race bent on destroying all life in the galaxy that is unlike them.  They do not live in atmosphere like us, they thrive on gases that would poison and kill us.  They do not communicate at all, we are unable to even learn the name of their race.

“To answer your question, why help, if we are destroyed, they will swarm up the Orion arm with millions of ships, you will not have a chance.  It is the way of honor, something we hope is possible between us now that the grip of the Knomen has been broken.  If we join your treaty, we will be allies, and you can help defend our lives along with your own.  Or, you can say no, I’ll leave, and when my race dies, yours will surely follow.  The truth that you have until now been unaware of, is we have guarded you for millennia, against a brutal and merciless enemy.

“We are running out of resources, colonies, and warriors.  The truth is, without allies we will not last much longer.  When I say that, realize we have in excess of a million warships, we could have invaded the arm long ago, and easily won, but we would see that as dishonorable, and frankly we need these defenses to fight off the swarm ships.  They come in waves every few years, and they are due soon.”

Millions of ships?  Holy crap.  I smiled, the board had thought four thousand overkill.  Granted, we were the baby FTL race, ironically we were also the most advanced.  Or were we?  It made no sense.  I could understand the peaceful races, like Tressia and Leira were limited in technology, especially as they had the Knomen breathing down their neck until recently.  But the Seltan had been fighting in a war for millennia, how the hell were they less advanced than Earth ships?

Granted, we got a boost in tech when I visited Tressia and bought some.  But it only took me a few months to make all of that tech obsolete.  Yes, I was smart and innovative, but I wasn’t arrogant enough to think I was the smartest being in the galaxy.  Why were the Seltan stuck.  War should drive innovation.  WW One brought the tank, WW two brought fighter planes, and nuclear bombs.  Humanoids excelled at advancement when under pressure.  Either it was something societal, or the Seltan held back to older tech when attacking the Leirans, to prevent their current stuff from being analyzed after the battle.

It was the only thing I could think of to make sense of it.  Alnot disrupted my thoughts.

Alnot replied, “Can you send us data of the current situation in your space, and of past battles.”

When Dral scowled Alnot clarified, “Not for proof, but for us to understand the need, and the stakes.  We must talk to the other world leaders, and make this decision fully informed with all the information, your words are persuasive, yet they do not bring full comprehension.  For instance, do you need a place to build ships, how many must we all build to truly help hold the line, do they attack one world at a time, or do they swarm over many at once.  It will also help us come up with plans, and a fighting strategy, if we know how they fight.”

Dral nodded sharply, “Your words have reason in them.  We will not allow you to send probes into our space until a treaty is signed, yet we will allow some small amount of ships to visit our colonies, and where we fight.  Perhaps two ships, from each fleet gathered here.  As for the records of previous battles, I can send those to you now.  When you have selected, contact me,” and he cut the signal.

I ordered, “Al, analyze the videos and data when you get them, and show me samples of how they fight.  And have you scanned that ship out there, is there anything that indicates more advanced tech?”

Al replied, “Scans came back as expected to what we know about Seltan technology.  I would suggest the reason they haven’t advanced is power limitations.  Without dark energy, none of the advancements you made would be nearly as effective.”

I supposed that was possible.

Chapter 15

It wasn’t pretty.  The bug ships were small, a little bigger than an attack shuttle.  Without the data attached, I wouldn’t be able to even guess how many because it looked endless.  But there were somewhere around nine hundred thousand of them swarming into a solar system.  The defenders had thousands of emplacements, and a little over a hundred thousand ships.

The Seltan launched missiles, and the swarm used some kind of energy weapon similar to a plasma cannon.  Each ship had two, one on top, one on the bottom.  They took out the missiles with the turrets and kept going.  As they got closer, the Seltan missiles were more effective, but the swarming craft started to destroy Seltan ships by teaming up on them, often thirty or forty to one as they flew past and circled back.

The swarm ships never stopped, and at the end they turned suicidal.  That told me retreat wasn’t in their vocabulary, they either won, or were stopped.  It became clear the Seltan didn’t have any advanced tech they were hiding, unless this battle was from a very long time ago, which was possible.

I didn’t think so though.

“Al, are there any videos of them losing a battle?”

Al replied, “No, I’d guess they don’t want to show weakness.  It is pretty easy to extrapolate, if the swarm ships come in enough waves, eventually it will wear down the defenders until there is nothing left.  There is also no doubt that they don’t fight in FTL, though I cannot see a reason for it.  Perhaps the Seltan do have gravity missiles?”

I nodded, that would make sense.  Or at least something similar.

Kristi chimed in, “I think our ships would tear them apart based on these energy levels, at least until they changed tactics.  These energy weapons, it would take more than sixty to breach our shields, and they swarm ships with half those numbers.  Also, the enemy shields couldn’t take one shot from our plasma cannons, so we could kill sixteen at a time.  Their shields would stop a plasma attack from our shield missiles or attack shuttles though.  Even still, with our main ships we would tear them apart, and they’d be in our attack range long before we were in theirs.”

I lifted an eyebrow, “Maybe, but say we had a thousand ships, which we are close to, that’s one thousand swarm ships each, per wave.  Divide that by sixteen plasma cannons, that means we’d have to kill sixteen ships over sixty-two times to win the battle.  Greater tech will make a difference, but against those numbers we’d be slaughtered quickly as soon as they change tactics.”

Kristi pouted, “You know what this means right?”

I frowned, “What?  Assuming we do get into this fight.”

Kristi rolled her eyes, “We need to vastly update how many ships we’re building.  If we had a hundred large scale fabricators instead of ten, and discontinued the carriers, we could build two thousand battle cruisers a month.  Why, after one month we’d be down to killing sixteen ships just twenty-one hundred times, two months, we could win a battle.  Three months, we could forget defending and go wipe them out.  Of course, we’d have to give them a major discount.”

I laughed, “Yeah, who’d pay for it.”

She shrugged, “It’s IP, it’s not as if the resources actually cost anything, it’s the right to build it.  It’s not like we can spend it if we’re dead.”

I nodded, “I’m more than rich enough already, but people don’t value what’s handed to them.”

She frowned, “So you won’t do it?”

I shook my head, “I’ll do it, but they’ll all be ours!”

She snickered, “Seriously?”

I frowned, “Yes, if I’m going to build an armada to save the galaxy, why shouldn’t I own it?  The only other possibility is letting the other races buy the rights to make and sell our tech.  I trust them, sort of, but if we can do it ourselves that might be wiser.”

She sighed, “And if Earth won’t give them back, with their people on them?”

“Platforms.”

She tilted her head, and then smiled as she thought it through.  We could build platforms even faster, no need for offices, hallways, landing bays, missiles outside of the small gravity ones, or life support including food and water.  It would literally be a heavily shielded platform with FTL, sixteen plasma turrets, a DE reactor, and gravity missiles all controlled by an A.I. that would be commanded by a command ship.  My command ship.

Kristi nodded, “And afterwards we can repo them without trouble, and they’ll eventually get sold to new colony worlds.”

“Exactly.  Al, have our two fabricators replicate themselves until they hit a hundred, then start making platforms.  Might as well let the government fabricators keep building the actual fleet they are buying.”

Al acknowledged my order.

Kristi raised an eyebrow.

I shrugged, “Do you think they’ll say no to the Seltan?  If they do… I’m doing it anyway, not in a hurry to die.”

Kristi asked, “Do you think the Seltan are really in dire straits?”

I nodded, “Dral looked a bit desperate, in a way.  I don’t think he would bother with the chance we couldn’t be trusted otherwise.  I don’t think they’ll have enough ships built up for this next wave, they must have lost a lot of production capacity in the last attack.  Al, how long do we have before the next waves, and what is the usual frequency.”

Al replied, “It is not exactly like clockwork.  I estimate we have somewhere between four and eight months before the enemy attacks again.  They come on average, every nine years.”

We were all silent, lost in our own thoughts about was to come.  I thought it would be another skirmish with a detestable species.  Apparently the Seltan just had the same bad opinion about the Knomen that we did.

Al announced, “Incoming call from Admiral Flores.”

“Answer it,” I waited a moment, “Anthony, what can I do for you?”

Anthony said, “I’m going on the Seltan tour from hell, want to join me as the second ship.”

My mind froze, I hadn’t expected that.

“Sure, any particular reason?”

Anthony grinned, “I thought you would want to, but the other reason is it would be nice to have a scientific eye on what we see.  I can handle the military eye.  Also, our ships are geared for fighting other humanoids and what we’ve seen, I thought maybe you would see something I didn’t.  Kristi too of course, looking good ma’am,” his eyes roved up and down her body.

Kristi blushed, I guess she’d forgotten she looked rather pornographic in just her skin suit.  We were roommates for years, so I was used to it, I didn’t even think about not using a visual link.

Kristi recovered, and gave Anthony a wink, “I’m at your service admiral.”

It was his turn to blush.

I answered his question before this got out of hand, “We do want to join you Admiral, although we’ve already been discussing steps in case Earth decides to join this battle.”

Anthony grinned, “Good to hear, we’ll signal when it’s time to leave, an hour, maybe two.”

I nodded, “In light of this can I make a further suggestion?”

Anthony asked, “Anytime, what is it?”

I said, “Regardless of what we do, it seems apparent that we should increase the speed that we are setting up the stealth sensor net in the galaxy.  I’d suggest building a couple of hundred more stealth ships, and send them to the arm next to us.  The bugs seem to be systematically going arm to arm, which is good for us, otherwise they’d have just popped over a long time ago, but we hardly need to follow their example.”

Anthony nodded, “Good thought, we should know where they are, so we can go kick their asses when we beat off the waves,” then he took one more sidelong glance at Kristi before disconnecting…

Kristi asked, “You seem really calm about all this, aren’t you worried?”

I smiled, “Actually I don’t know how you humans do it.  If I couldn’t control my body and mind, my emotions, I’d be rolled up in a ball shaking right now.”

Kristi frowned, “I think I’m sorry I asked.”

I shrugged, “I think we have enough time, even if they come in four months we’ll have close to seven thousand platforms.  That’s only… one hundred forty-two some odd ships each per each wave.  Piece of cake.  And that’s just platforms, when we add in another eight hundred ships Earth will have built, and the thousand or so we have now, that winnows the numbers to kill even smaller.  That doesn’t even include our allies or the Seltan’s numbers.  Once the waves are done, and we go hunting, it will be even easier.”

Kristi raised an eyebrow, “How?”

I smiled, “With the waves we will be defending a planet so we’ll have to stand fast, when we attack, we can draw them into swarming, then move away.  It will keep them in our range of attack, but keep us out of theirs for much longer, possibly the whole fight.  Of course, we have no idea what kind of defenses or how they fight defensively, so it may not be that simple, but it should be easier.”

Kristi nodded, “Okay, maybe I do feel better now.”

I didn’t bother to mention that Al could be wrong, that the enemy could attack tomorrow for all we knew.  But I was hoping for at least four months, honestly even if they came in eight we could stop building after four.  We were also assuming there would only be swarm ships when we went out to attack them, for all we really knew their defenses were a lot more robust.

Chapter 16

Anthony signaled it was time, and forty-eight ships, two from each of the twenty-four fleets, followed our host Dral for a tour of Seltan space, to learn how prepared they were to face the bugs and where they were lacking.

I also wondered at my first instinct to eradicate this enemy.  The evidence was fairly large, they had destroyed an entire type of life in the arm next to ours, and have been trying to destroy humanoids ever since.  However, all we had to prove that really was the word of Dral.  It could even be he was telling the truth, as it was taught to him.  Of course, if the enemy wouldn’t talk at all, it would be impossible to get the other side of the story.

Al interrupted my thoughts, “The stealth sensor net has picked up two more worlds at around ten thousand light years rimward of Earth.”

I tilted my head, I’d not asked Al to comb raw data and bring up finds.  It was almost eerie how he anticipated things, but I had to remember he wasn’t actually sentient, it was all just calculations.

“Tell me about them?”

Al responded, “The first is another empty world, but it would require many years of terraforming before humans could live there comfortably.  The second is another interstellar race, they haven’t reacted to the probes.”

I perked up, “Display all data please.”

The information came up.  They were new to space, or hadn’t had a breakthrough in a long time.  The scans indicated their ships were much like the first I’d built, saucers, no artificial gravity, no energy weapons although it did appear they had ports for missile launches.  I imagined Earth wouldn’t have been much farther along than that without picking up artificial gravity from the Tressians.  At least, we wouldn’t have energy weapons either, since it was integral to firing.

Perhaps I would have come up with the newer designs to tighten and improve the anti-mass and EM field, but maybe not without a driving reason to push the tech.

The world was ahead of us in different ways however, it looked like they had a single central government, I imagined we’d run into their ships in other systems in the future, hopefully they would be peaceful, not that the ships they were in could even scratch one of our shuttles, much less a battle cruiser or command ship.

There was nothing to say what reaction the USFS board was taking, I was out of that loop now.  But I knew from planning meetings in the past that the most likely response was to send in a visible probe, with a brief introduction, a copy of the treaty, and a quantum communication device with a built in translation matrix.

We’d decided back then, once they were FTL it was a little late to be preparing for first contact, so it was better all-around to step lightly.  If they were curious, and peaceful, they’d figure things out and make contact.  If they destroyed the probe without investigating, we’d give them wide berth, at least until they trespassed on our space.  It wasn’t perfect, but what was?

I squashed the feeling of wanting to go make first contact, or really do anything else.  I needed to be living in the moment.  Sure, my scientific self did need to plan and look to the future, but the rest of me needed to be a bit steadier.  Part of being a workaholic, I was always thinking ahead to what was next.

That said, I didn’t tell Al not to distract me if more data came in on the stealth sensor net either.

It didn’t take more than a few hours to reach our first destination.  The system was right on the edge where the arm started by the core.  It had a couple of gas giants that looked rather small, a colony of about a half million Seltans, and the system was riddled with thousands of emplacements, and too many ships to count.

Dral opened a link and sent an image, “This is what the system looked like when we found it.”

The image was completely different.  The gas giants were about five times larger, and there were two asteroid belts that no longer existed.

Dral said, “We have used all the resources in this system to defend against our common enemy for millennia, and other systems as well we will go see.  This system is the front line of our endless war.  We build up, they knock it down, then we build up.  We never have enough resources or time to counter attack the enemy between waves, it is all we can do to keep up a defense.

“It is the front line because this is the only system they swarm, I do not know why they don’t cross the small void between arms, but they come down the arm to the core, and swing our way to this system.  It has fallen twice in our history, but then the swarm splits, and we’ve managed to beat them back and reestablish this system.

“I know to us that tactic seems incredibly stupid, especially since it has failed them every nine years for the last thousands of years, but they do not think like us and seem incapable of adapting.  That said, if you don’t join us we aren’t sure we’ll make it this time, and definitely not the time after.”

I frowned, it didn’t make sense, “Dral, how is it you build your ships?”

Dral looked annoyed at the interruption, but he answered, “We have several systems with ship yards that run non-stop.”

Oh.  They didn’t have fabricators?  That… no wonder they could never build enough.  With fabricators we could build a lot in a short amount of time, it must take them months per ship.  To build this many ships every nine years, they must have yards in hundreds of systems.  The real issue without fabricators would be manpower, that was probably what held them back.  I hadn’t even considered that, we’d had fabricators pre-FTL, it was something I’d grown up with and taken for granted.

Dral continued when no one else interrupted, I wondered if everyone else came to the same conclusion.

“The only way to ever stop them, is to fight and destroy them in their star systems, to not let them build more of these waves.  We need allies.  Follow please,” the connection dropped and he went to FTL.

Yeah, allies, or fabricators, but I kept my mouth shut.  It seemed absurd to keep back tech, but I reminded myself no matter their position, they were our enemy a few hours ago.  Still, all the little logistical problems without them came to mind.  Factories for missiles, then they’d have to get them to the ships, instead of simply fabricating new ones right there on the ship that needed them.  There were many other issues as well.

Dral took us to several systems, all of them had colonies with populations of a half to two million, and usually only had one small city.  Was it the fighting that kept down the populations?  Also, all the systems showed signs of being mined and fully exploited.  He didn’t take us to any systems with ship yards, or where current mining was happening.  I didn’t blame him, we were his enemies up until recently as well, and right now it was just a temporary truce until our world leaders made a decision where to stand.

By the time we were finished, our ships were done with the upgrades, and we went straight home via wormhole instead of returning to Leira.  The question was what would we do about it.  The truth was, the question wasn’t if we would fight the bugs, the question was if we would attempt to save the Seltan, or not.  I hoped it was the former…

Chapter 17

“This is… perfect.”

I smiled but didn’t open my eyes, “Glad you think so.”

My body was too relaxed in the hot tub to move even my eyelids.  The water was up to my chin as I slouched down and leaned back my head.  I hadn’t heard much about what was going on, but the talks about what to do about the Seltan, and our newest enemy, have been a large matter of speculation on the news programs.  I knew how I hoped they’d go, I found the Seltan to be honorable, if a bit too stuck on it.

They’d only been enemies of Leira, because Leira had submitted to the virtual slavery of the Knomen empire, in other words they’d dishonored themselves.  It was something I could at least understand, even if it was a bit harsh.  I was pretty sure the Leiran’s wouldn’t even get that mindset at all.  Admittedly, I only understood it because of certain fiction television shows although I knew some of Earth’s past societies were very similar.

Joe said, “I’m glad you are both here for a while, I worry about you both.  Especially when you go off to fight a battle, or tour enemy space.”

I was happy my best friend got to have her boyfriend around, but it made me miss Nathan that much more.  It was all my fault though, since I was the idiot that fell in love with a soldier.

“I still haven’t decided if I’ll go when the swarm comes back, if Earth goes I mean.  I guess it isn’t my problem anymore.”

Al said, “Incoming call from Admiral Sergei.”

“Answer audio only.”

The admiral didn’t really need to see us in a hot tub and bikinis.

Sergei said, “Alicia, the board wants you and Kristi available to give some answers, apparently Anthony told them you’d gone along to give a scientist’s point of view, and they have some questions.”

Well, crap.  I guess it was my problem after all.  Then again, I was a civilian again.  I could say no, but the truth is I wouldn’t.

“When do they want us?”

He replied, “Tomorrow morning.”

I held back a groan, “Where do I need to be?”

“Usual place in the U.N. complex at nine eastern.”

I wanted to ask why I couldn’t do it from here, but held my tongue.  Obviously it was politics.  Plus, in person was always better for me anyway, since I could read people.  I just didn’t want to move right this moment and it was leaking into my thoughts of tomorrow morning.

“I’ll be there.”

He disconnected.  This should be fun, or so I told myself.

I was only half awake, since it was only five minutes to seven, mountain time, as I made my way into the building with my travel mug of coffee.  I took a sip, that I almost spit out in shock as I walked into the room, but I somehow managed to swallow it down.  It wasn’t the members of the USFS board that had shocked me, it was the screen showing several world leaders on it.

People I’d never needed to talk to before.

Nadia said, “Good morning, take a seat.”

I nodded respectfully at the screen, and then I smiled gratefully at Nadia as I slid into one of the chairs.  I was wide awake now, but I still sipped on my coffee as we waited.  A few more people joined remotely, including Admiral Abramov.  I wanted to complain, why did Sergei get to not be here?  I had a feeling it would just be Earth people in this meeting, and not all the treaty holders.

Gerald asked, “Before we get to our questions, I’m interested on your take on things, what did you think of the Seltan, and the new enemy?”

I considered that for a moment.

“I believe that for them, honor is paramount above all other considerations including death.  For what it’s worth, I believe they would make an excellent ally, as long as we never mislead or deceive them.  As for the new enemy, I would say we need to help take care of the next group of attack waves, and then scout them out to determine what we need to attack them successfully.”

Jonas asked, “Why not just attack, doesn’t fighting them off tell us what we need to know?”

I shrugged, “Maybe?  But I doubt it.  If we stick to the bug description, a swarm of insects comes from a hive.  Who knows how many millions, perhaps billions of ships they have, and do those ships dock to something?  We know very little.  Do they swarm to establish a new home because of overcrowding, or do they have a holy mission to eradicate any life in the universe that isn’t theirs, or are they just having a bad hair day every nine years?  We don’t know enough.

“We do know they already live in half the galaxy, there are only four galactic arms, and they own two of them.  Suppose we don’t scan, and we do attack them, and that drives them crazy enough to break their normal operation, and they follow us across the void straight back to Earth.  It’s too great a risk, when we can build a thousand stealth vessels and seed the galaxy with sensors within a few years.  We have superior technology, but we need more information to know how much we’ll need to win.”

Nadia asked, “Why would it matter why they’re attacking?”

I held in a sigh, “Because it speaks to how they would react to an attack.  If they think this is some kind of holy war or mission, not much will change if we attack them.  However, if this is just a normal migration when the hive gets too large, and we attack the hive, their response in that case would be drastically different, they would attack us with everything.  Perhaps they’d even call for help, and we’d be attacked by all hives, all at once, from all over the galaxy.

“Obviously this is all speculation, and that last example was a worst case scenario, but without scouting them with stealth ships to expand our stealth sensor web first, speculation is all we have, and that’s ultimately the problem.  We need to define the issue to create a viable solution, if we try to make the problem what we want it to be, we’ll get ourselves killed.  I for one would rather not depend on luck.  After we help destroy the waves we’ll have nine years to prepare and take the war to them, why hurry when we have time to do it right?”

After that, they asked me what I was doing with my building capacity.  I explained my thoughts about the platforms, and how I could use them now, and then sell them later to colonies, and how that would avoid any issues of payment for the moment.  I could probably sell all the extra fabricators too.  I didn’t make a similar offer for the stealth ships.

I also illustrated how many swarm ships one of ours could safely take fire from, and basically all the rest of the ideas and statistics I’d talked over with Kristi when we were on the Seltan tour.  At that point I was dismissed so they could rejoin the inter-world discussion about admitting the Seltan to the treaty.  While it was true anyone was supposed to be able to join, an old enemy needed to be an exception to that rule.  They were going to have a vote.

I finally discovered the answer two weeks later from a news release of all things.  The Seltan were now a part of our treaty, and we now had a new enemy we’d still be fighting.  The question of course was, if we’d have enough platforms made.  I didn’t want to discount the other twenty-three members, but they didn’t have the technological edge we did, and it wasn’t something we wanted to give up.  Besides, we only had around a thousand ships, the Seltan had hundreds of times the number we had, and the rest of our allies had nowhere near what we did.  Selfish?  Perhaps, but it also put the onus on Earth to really step up and make a big difference in the coming battle.

It was just a matter of time.

The fabricators were finished duplicating themselves and could start making platforms now.  Each fabricator could make one every two days, so that would be fifteen a month, times a hundred fabricators was fifteen hundred a month.  If we really had three and a half months left, we’d have in excess of five thousand platforms.  I believed that would be a huge difference in lives and ship losses for us and our allies because of our weapon and shield superiority, they would count more than ten times that many allied ships.

Chapter 18

Murphy’s law struck of course.  It wasn’t Al’s fault his estimate was off, it probably wasn’t the fault of fickle fate either.  Regardless, it was only sixteen days later when we received word that the first swarm wave was approaching the Seltan’s colony system.  Earth sent what we could, but had to keep some back to protect our solar system, and the Knomen home system.

It would be despicable for any of the twenty-seven systems that stayed out of the treaty to attack during such a time, but it would be shame on us if we didn’t leave anything to defend.  In all, Earth sent a thousand battle cruisers, and the eight hundred platforms I built were mine to command, so I sent them all.

That left plenty to defend Earth, all the carriers, the platforms that Earth bought before I started my enhanced build plan, and the emplacements.

As for what else had gone on in the interim?  The colony was getting built by the Americans, and we had twenty ships there as well, though so far there were no threats rimward, and they were just five thousand light years away.

So far we’d mapped out about twelve thousand light years which was halfway to the rim from Earth, and found a couple of more pre-FTL societies.  We also found one more planet that would support life with some terraforming.

That wasn’t bad, with time, we already had three potential colonies, although two would have to wait for now.

As for the FTL society we ran into, they’d taken in the probe, but hadn’t called us yet on the communicator.  Who knew when or if they would.

As far as my own research, it was obvious to me the limitations were what we were powering.  In other words, our power source was incredibly powerful, but our shields and weapons although very strong, were limited by their inability to use more power.  If I tried to pump more energy into the shields, I would blow the devices that generated them.  Same with the weapons.

I had to admit so far I hadn’t done more than a halfhearted effort to design systems that could take the power that we now had available.  I also had to admit I was a little guilty of what I’d accused others of, we were so far ahead in those areas it was hard to find a reason to push that envelope right now.  Nothing else had caught my eye either.  I did want to understand dark energy better, for I knew that would make the ultimate in weapons and shields, if dark energy could ever be manipulated for those purposes.

In short, I was waiting for my interest to strike upon something new to research, and try to understand.  There was still so much to learn.

When the time came, at Sergei’s insistence, the fleet went through first, and I followed with my platforms to the Seltan system.  We were powerful, but our numbers were few in comparison to the Seltan fleet.  The other treaty systems managed to send just over four thousand ships.  It seemed an unimpressive number, but it was also four times more than they’d ever sent before, with only twenty-three worlds instead of the original fifty, which was notable.

Ironically, one of my worries would be when our allies saw just how much more powerful our ships were, this would be the first time they’d really see the difference in battle.  Would they try to demand we share our technology for the greater good?

Our deployment was interesting, we were all on the front, rows of ships stacked on top of each other like a wall as the swarm came toward us.

We were close enough to the system for their emplacements to support us, and all sixty thousand shield missiles and twenty thousand attack shuttles were launched.  The missiles and shuttles couldn’t take them out in one shot, but they could if they doubled and tripled up, and there were enough of them that it would make a decent impact to the enemy’s numbers.

The enemy dropped out of FTL almost thirty hours away by sub light speeds.

“On screen please Al, let’s take a look.”

Al brought up the screen, and I heard Kristi gasp.  It was a true swarm, there was no regimented lines of ships, they twisted among each other in a cloud of randomness as they moved toward us.  There was so many we had to rely on sensors to get an idea of the numbers.

“Al how many?”

Al replied, “One million, fifteen thousand, two hundred, and three.”

Kristi’s voice was tense, “And this is just the first, six to eight waves like this?”

My voice was a bit tense as well, “Yes, that’s the theory.”

She laughed a little nervously.

Al reported, “Signal coming in from Dral.”

“Open it.”

Dral looked almost cheerful but wasn’t quite smiling, “It is good to see you friends.  Their tactics are pretty straight forward as you’ve seen in the sensor data we gave you.  They’ll swarm our fleet until no more stand against them before moving on into the system.  That is our job, to stay alive so that doesn’t happen.  This is only the first battle of several.  Keep an eye on your sensors, when the enemy gets below a hundred thousand or so, they will start suicide runs, turning their ships into manned missiles.

“We’ll be starting our missile barrages soon.  Good luck, Dral out.”

Kristi snorted.

I laughed, “Yeah, that wasn’t much of a pep speech was it?  More of a good day to die speech.”

Kristi sighed, “Is this really the best tactic?  Can’t we do anything different than be a wall for them to bang their head against?”

I shook my head, “I considered a few things, but the swarms target is the system.  If we try to flank them and drag some of them off, it won’t work.  Our best hope is to destroy as many as we can before they reach our lines.  I imagine even though they’re hours off, we’ll be launching missiles soon.”

As if the Dral heard me, thousands of missiles were launched from the Seltan ships and the emplacements behind us.  It made me a bit nervous as they streaked through our lines, but I realized they were used to doing so.  We started our barrage as well, of course it was only from the ships, the platforms I built only had energy weapons.

“War is such an odd pursuit.”

Kristi nodded, “Coffee break?”

I almost laughed, although Al could toss missiles by himself, the enemy wouldn’t be in range of our energy weapons for almost twenty-nine hours, and only about fifteen minutes before we were in their range, and our allies were in range.  Regardless, until they closed we would be eating and sleeping, so a coffee break was sounding very reasonable.  It was just really hard to get out of the command chair when over a million ships were coming to kill us.

“Fine, let’s go.”

A few hours later, and we’d shot every missile the fleet had.  I had to assume the Seltan had more held back in storage for the next wave.  With the fleet we had at ten to one odds, plus the emplacements, we’d launched around a million missiles with each volley, a staggering number.  However, the enemy though incomprehensible in some ways, were not caught off guard, and with over a million ships they were able to fend the waves of missiles off rather successfully.

We had some impact, they lost almost a full third of their ships, all before they even came close to firing a shot at our ships.  But they still faced us at almost seven to one odds.  I had no doubts this first battle would go to us.  I just wasn’t sure how ugly it would be.

When they reached the range of our plasma cannons, we opened fire.  With eighteen hundred ships or platforms, we had twenty-eight thousand turrets, all firing three times a second.  In a perfect world, that was enough firepower to destroy the seven hundred thousand swarm ships in a quick eight seconds, long before we were in range of their weapons.

Of course, real life isn’t that easy.  For one, they were still light minutes away, which meant by the time our shots got there, they’d had plenty of time to move out of the way.  With the way they swarmed around each other randomly, it was extremely hard to estimate where they would end up exactly.  The second issue of course, is it was impossible to move the turret to aim at three ships every second which meant larger delays between firing.

Still, a little luck and some very powerful AI’s, and just the Earth ships cut their fleet in half again before everyone else was able to open fire, including the enemy.  And not only the allies, the twenty thousand attack shuttles, and sixty thousand Shield missiles added another eighty thousand turrets to our numbers.

The rest of the fight was short and brief.  They were no longer far enough away to dodge something at the speed of light, but then, neither were we.  The good news, they never reached us to swarm past and turn around for a second pass.  The bad news is they targeted twenty thousand different ships with fifteen fighters each before they died.

Fifty of them were against Earth ships or platforms, and nothing much happened thanks to the new stronger shields.  The other nineteen thousand nine hundred and fifty however destroyed over a thousand Shield missiles, six hundred and three attack shuttles, and eight thousand allied ships, most of them Seltan.  There were also several thousand ships that were damaged.  We started search and rescue operations right away, none of us were sure exactly when the next wave would come.

The loss of life was ugly, nasty, and all things considering, quite light in comparison to how bad it could have been.  I felt the sadness of it, but I was glad I was no longer in charge.  Perhaps that was selfish, but at least I didn’t feel like it was my fault.  However, I did have an idea, better late than never.

“Al, contact Admiral Abramov please.”

“Standby,” he said shortly.

The admiral came on the screen, he looked busy.

“Sorry to bother you, but I had an idea if you have a moment?”

Sergei frowned, “What is it?”

“Well, we have millions of those gravity missiles, and we know where the last swarm dropped out of FTL.  Perhaps a trap laid a light year past that?”

He frowned, “It’s not a bad idea, I’ll talk to Dral about it and see what he thinks.  What if they monitor each other, it might work once and not again, or it might backfire and cause the rest of the waves to gather together.  Who knows how the aliens think.  I just want to make sure Dral’s people never tried it before.  If the bugs are familiar they may have systems in place to drop them out of FTL at the first sign of a missile.  If it does work though, they won’t even get a shot off.”

I nodded, “Thanks Sergei, let me know if I can do anything.”

It wasn’t true that I didn’t feel any guilt, because if we’d shared our tech no ships would have been destroyed, but then none of the races have shared tech.  In fact, it’s been a sticking point, and the Knomen’s forced scans were one of the things all the humanoid races found distasteful to the extreme.  It would be up to the Earth’s leaders to share.

Still, even just the triple shielding without the dark energy reactor would have been enough to resist sixteen simultaneous shots from the enemy’s ships.  Nothing I could do about it, at least, not without being thrown in jail for treason.

It was close to an hour later, when the Earth ships launched two thousand gravity missiles each.  That was less than half their inventory, but at two million it was overkill for a wave with half those numbers.  If this worked, they’d be able to do it over and over again.  I was happy the admiral had taken my advice, it could save us a lot of pain for the rest of the enemy waves if it works.

Kristi looked over at me, “I know this probably isn’t the best time, but the gravity balls are selling like crazy right now.  Apparently your little live demonstration reached a lot of people.  Not only more for the police, but for fire, search and rescue, special forces in the military, even the secret service just ordered a bunch and the FBI is making inquiries.”

I nodded, “I knew they were underutilizing it, and trying to suppress it, I’m just not sure why.  Maybe some civilians will demand its release as well.”

Kristi jumped tracks, “Any idea when the next wave is?”

I shrugged, “Anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days based on the past.”

Kristi sighed, “Let’s go eat, or something.  I’ll go crazy just sitting here waiting.”

I smiled, “Too late for that.”

Kristi glared, “Damn alien,” and got up and left the bridge with false haughtier.

I giggled, and followed her out.

Epilogue

The rest of the waves, seven in all, came over the next week.  It wasn’t a battle; it was simple extermination.  It not only worked the first time, but apparently the following waves had no idea of what happened and didn’t adapt.  All seven waves when they reached just four light years away were ambushed by the anti-FTL torpedoes, and had their anti-mass particles stripped away destroying their ship.

The next step was still undetermined, the treaty races were all deliberating whether or not to attack right now, since we had all these ships left after the waves.  The Seltan were not happy with the idea of waiting a couple of years before striking.  I’d said my peace, indicated we should scout first, and then went back to Earth as I really didn’t have an official standing anymore.  As far as I knew, Earth was already doing that regardless, mapping the galaxy with stealth probe ships, and dropping off stealth sensors to expand the sensor net into the adjoining arm.  Hopefully they would wait, at least long enough for me to build out my goal of five thousand platforms, it would take a few months.  At least by then we’d attack with numbers that could do the job, and we’d also have partial recon data, although not even close to complete.

It would also be time to try and make more improvements, although I wasn’t even sure what yet.

So much has happened this last year, I’d never have imagined myself out here doing what I was doing back then.  Between the bugs, exploring toward the rim, improving our technology, and all the little things we ran into and discovered doing those things, it has been a little overwhelming.  Even if we face all those challenges, what about the amorphous race, they’ve been peaceful, but what if they were just already in a war.  It was entirely possible that they are fighting off a similar invasion from the bug arm on the other side of them.  Will they stay peaceful if we manage to remove the bug threat?

I also wondered about the race that seeded this galaxy.  What kind of race seeds a galaxy with four galactic arms, with several versions of four disparate lifeforms?  Will they ever come back to see the results of those actions?  Were we an experiment of some sort as the Seltan believed?  It seemed absolutely absurd on the surface of it, and yet…

If nothing else, that told me I needed to push the envelope of knowledge and continually strive for the next breakthrough, because I had no doubt we weren’t ready to face a threat like that…

Afterword:

I hope you enjoyed this story, if you did please leave a review.  Reviews are the lifeblood of independent authors, and I would appreciate greatly any constructive feedback or opinions.  I was a little torn about how I left the ending, but it seemed a good place to stop.  I was a little short there about the other waves, but I didn’t want to bog down the story with battle after battle, that’s not what the series is really about.

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.

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.

Book Description

Alicia Jones has a life that just keeps getting more complicated and ever more dangerous.

Toward the Rim of the Orion arm lies the unknown.  She’s tasked to start exploring it, and Earth’s leaders don’t want to wait a couple of years to build the fleets first.

Then there are the Seltan, a race that lives in the core, they could attack at any time.

Technology is another struggle, as she continually pushes herself for the next breakthrough in both new fields, and redesigns of the old.  Especially as she starts to grasp the truth behind the design of those that seeded the galaxy with life.

It’s a good thing she flourishes under pressure, of course there is one more thing that might be more disturbing and dangerous than all the rest that she’ll need to deal with.  Politics.