Date: 2020-05-18T18:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fantasy
Description: It’s been thirteen years since the Grays were a danger, and their empire had fallen. Things were going well for President Scott Akin, both in his professional and personal life. Of course, peaceful times couldn’t last forever. One of the other intergalactic empires is looking to expand, had been the last sixty years without their knowledge, and his ships aren’t nearly as invincible as he’d imagined. If that wasn’t enough, he’s no longer unique. His twelve-year-old daughter is like him, a technomancer, a genius like her mother, and has a talent for getting in trouble. She also may have inherite

Fallen Empire

Technomancer: Book Four

Author: D. L. Harrison

Copyright 2020.  This is a work of fiction.  Names, Characters, Places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.  All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen - Interlude

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Epilogue – Interlude

Afterword:

About the Author

Other books by D. L. Harrison:

Book Description

Chapter One

The beating sun warmed my back, while the warm ocean breeze soothed it.  The gentle roar of the waves steadily hitting shore was relaxing.  It was a perfect sunny day for some time off, which was why the ambush was so entirely successful.  I was relaxed, blissed out, and de-stressing when the nerves in my back exploded like being struck by icy daggers and falling stones.

I gasped and jumped up, my heart slammed in my chest and took off like a gazelle, when my gaze promising retribution fell on my ambusher.

My twelve-year-old daughter, Melody, had a huge evil grin on her face, a wet sandy pale in her hands, and she giggled uncontrollably as I lunged forward.  I threw her over my shoulder sending the pale flying, and ran for the water.

Diana’s lovely laugh chased us toward the water.

“Dad!” she protested as she continued to giggle with excitement.

It was my turn to laugh, evilly, as I dove into the wave and tossed her at the same time.

It’d been almost thirteen years since humanity became safe from the Grays, and a dubious peace had settled on humanity.

The small twelve-hundred-acre tropical island we were on had long strips of beach.  It also had a fair-sized tropical forest with small game, and a small beach house.  It’d been when our daughter turned four, and it really hit us that she’d never enjoyed the sun on her face and had lived exclusively on Astraeus that we’d found a way.

I was still President Scott Akin, and visiting Earth was problematical at best. Every time we went down it was politics, state dinners, and all the crap I hated, not to mention the possible danger.  It hadn’t been something either of us were keen to expose our daughter too.  So, we’d bought an island, and then bought the country claim on the island, so technically our little retreat beach and forest was officially country Astraeus.

All so we could get some fun and sun, on our days off, but mostly for our daughter.

I rose back out of the ocean, hoping the grimy sand was sufficiently washed away, and got splashed in the face by my giggling daughter.  She was a terror, and quite frankly the most amazing thing my brilliant wife and I had ever accomplished, in my opinion.

The loud roar of a predator rose in the air, and we both looked around to see a tawny and black tiger lunge from the woods, and my daughter giggled as it startled her mother, Aunt Jayna, and Aunt Cassie to death.

Of course, there was no need for true alarm.  The fierce tiger was the head of my security.  Jessica Mills looked quite different in her human form, but she often took the opportunity to shift and hunt on our day’s off.  She was a five foot eight athletic redhead, with brown eyes.

I was thirty-three, and my gorgeous wife had broken into the forties last year, but in that moment looking at her in the white bikini it was really hard to tell, impossible really.  We’d taken the life extensions two years ago, and the both of us looked about mid-twenties and the same age, despite the eight year difference.  It was a difference that had never bothered me, not after I’d fallen for her so hard, but for her she’d been a bit insecure about it at times, but not anymore.

My Diana was very fit, five foot six, with raven hair that shone in the warm sun, and piercingly intelligent green eyes I often got lost in still.  Her body was athletically toned, with lovely soft curves that effortlessly drew my eyes.  She was beyond beautiful to me, and while the last thirteen years hadn’t been perfect, she was the perfect one for me.

She was still head scientist of Astraeus.  With peace, she’d focused on pure research and other non-weapon applications of science.  Even after ten years, she’d hardly made a dent on the Grays’ theoretical and practical science’s databases, but she’d been steadily putting out life improving inventions the whole time.  I didn’t blame her, or even suggest differently, we were technically superior to all our enemies and allies currently, by a long way, and while she understood the need to work on defense applications that had never been her passion.

She still had people on it of course, but nothing new had been invented there, just slight improvements to the same technologies we had since thirteen years ago.

My daughter, Melody had my wife’s raven hair, her lovely facial structure, and she got my ocean blue eyes.  At twelve she was already becoming curious about boy’s, and all I’ll say about that is I’m tempted to lock her up inside a suit of armor until she’s thirty.  Besides her eyes, she did get one more thing from me, my magic.  My magic, and her mother’s sharp intelligence, I almost felt sorry for the world when she finished growing up.

My daughter’s Aunt Cassie obviously wasn’t a blood aunt, but Cassiopeia Reed was a close family friend.  She was my wife’s best friend, and my daughter loved her to death.  Of course, her underlying purpose in being on Astraeus and running much of the government for me hadn’t changed, if I ever went crazy and decided to take over the Earth, or the universe, she’d be there to snap my neck.

It was just… I was pretty sure it would make her cry to do it now, not that it would stop her.  Fortunately, it was the last thing I wanted to do, I still hated running Astraeus, the government side at least.  Why would I want to rule more people?

She was family now to more than my daughter.  As a vampire she was unchanging and unchangeable.  She was still one of the most beautiful women I’d ever laid eyes on, naturally so without emotional bias, but there was no true attraction between us, she was like a sister.  A pain in the ass sister that still made me give press conferences, and she took me away from my ship building and inventions on occasion. The fun business side of Astraeus which was still my passion.  She had lovely long light brown hair, warm hazel eyes, and an innocently beautiful face of a model.  She was short, her body petite and curvy.

Of course, we’d had to tell the world she was one of the first test cases for the life extension trials, to explain why she hadn’t aged a day in the last thirteen years and still looked like a hot co-ed in her first year of college. In her past she’d taken a non-publicly visible position to watch government to make sure humans didn’t kill themselves off, where she’d only have to use compulsion on a few people to gloss over her non-aging.  At some point, being so visible running Astraeus, we’d probably have to hire a witch to put an aging glamour on her.

Vampires had to watch over their food supply, after all.  They really hated when we went to war with each other.

My sister Jayna had the same ocean blue eyes as me and my daughter, and light blonde hair similar to mine but of course much longer.  She was still in charge of advertising and image for the station, and still married to one of my security guards in the public police section of the service.  As far as I could tell, she was extremely happy with her life on station.

Carmine had taken the whole supernatural thing rather well, given my sister and his and Jayna’s son, my nephew Brock, were elemental mages.  Carmine and Brock were still laughing it up about Jessica scaring all the ladies present.

That was pretty much my whole family, and still the core of Astraeus thirteen years later, but there were a few more guards around the island, as well as weapon systems.  No one had tried to kill me in over a decade, and our old enmity with the control freaks in the U.S. government seemed to be over, but I took the stance that it was just a matter of time.  In the moment, I held the lion’s share in the balance of power, and it was hard to imagine them being as gracious and nonconfrontational if the reverse was true.

I scowled, and my body twisted a bit uncomfortably, “You got sand in my bathing suit.”  So much for washing it all off.

My daughter giggled, which of course started a splash fight, and had us both laughing.

What?  She totally started it.

Chapter Two

The command center looked completely different now, save the flat display and holographic command table that sat in the middle of the room.  We’d replaced all the chairs with Arnis imports. I’d also finally given in to the inevitable and built a coffee nook on the back wall.  No more taking trips for coffee refills, and it had a built-in fridge with a coffee, sugar, cream, and milk dispensers that never ran out, thanks to the energy to matter device and rotating canisters to keep it all clean long-term.

There were also two smaller command tables, which I should’ve added right away but hadn’t.  One for Jessica or whoever was on shift for security, one for myself, and the third for Cassie.  Of course, Diana was in her labs, and my sister had her own office too, though both were welcome in the command center they were hardly ever there.

In truth, I thought that was one of the secrets of our lasting marriage, outside of honest communication and spending our nights together.  After a long day at work, I missed her.

Jessica said, “They’re sending out another one?”

I grunted, “That’s over two hundred now?”

Colonies.  The original forty colonies had grown over the last decade and few years to two hundred.  Each one had fifty million people in it, which lowered the Earth’s population by two billion or so.  So far there’d been no sign of it slowing down either, I’d guess in another few years there’d be four hundred colonies and only three billion people on Earth.  At that point it might slow down, but I did know there was a huge population explosion on Earth.  The better technology, the room to spread out, spoke to human instinct, people were having bigger families again.

Jessica replied, “Two hundred and three, although the U.S. only has two.”

I nodded, “That’s still what, a third of their population?”

Places like China and India had far more, because of their larger populations.

I still sold colony ships, but not for all colonies.  I had competition now.  The United States had managed to build an energy to matter device seven years ago, that started pumping out nanites.  Of course, it was the original one from the Grays, and incapable of molecular bonding.  The nanites were also the originals, they’d made some strides in weapons and defense, but they didn’t have the disintegrator technology Astraeus did.  Their ships also still ran on the fusion reactor technology instead of nanite vacuum energy reactors.

Still, even the old Gray technology made them the second most powerful ships in fifty galaxies, and it was only their lack of disintegration beam tech that would truly give them pause.  The other technologies they lacked slowed down their building but weren’t all that important when it came to military parity.

It was only six months after that, when China, Russia, the UK, and Japan also started making ships, and all five governments had competing space stations selling ships although none of them were city sized like mine with a permanent population just under two million.  Obviously, there’d been some espionage involved there, for all those other countries to get it so quickly.  The U.S. obviously couldn’t keep secrets as well as I could.

It was a small concern, since for the moment they were no match for my ships, and so far they’d been playing very nicely with me.  On the other hand, it was only a matter of time until their scientists caught up.  My wife was a genius and quite possibly the most inventive and intelligent scientist ever, but their scientists weren’t stupid.  I also realized I was quite biased with her being my wife, but she was one of the best on the planet.  The flaw of course, was their vessels weren’t locked down not to attack all other human vessels, be they from earth or the colonies.

Astraeus kept the peace.  Although, it was a time of plenty for Earth, there were very little reasons to contend over land or resources in this age.  Sickness had been eliminated, people had longer lives and were constantly connected.  Those augmented reality implants I’d picked up by selling wormhole drives to Threx’s very extended family had sold like hotcakes once they were approved for use.

In short, the only reasons to war now was political and societal divisions. Unfortunately, that was probably enough, given that it was only a matter of time until a corrupt and ambitious human gained some governmental authority.

Back to the point, before I got off on that tangent.  I really didn’t mind the competition. I was so ridiculously rich, and we had almost zero expenses.  Ships also weren’t the only export of Astraeus, we sold thousands of products on Amazon, and often exported shiploads of merchandise to colony worlds.

Jessica nodded, “About.  They’re using our ships as a roving guard, to save money, from what I’d been able to find out.”

I looked over, we had no one watching the colonies, I hadn’t changed my mind about that, and my ships out there weren’t controlled by me.  Outside of the hard coding that they were uncopiable, couldn’t attack human ships or worlds, and the system still couldn’t be hacked.  They could make nanites, but they couldn’t hack mine to figure out disintegration beams, quantum jump drives, nanite power cores, or any of the rest.

“Roving guard?”

Jessica nodded, “They have their ships guarding the disparate solar systems, but the ships we sold them can quantum jump to any of their other colonies to assist if they ever face invasion.”

“Your point?”

She smirked, “You’re still keeping the peace, not only here in SOL, but at the colonies as well.  Every countries’ colonies has at least one set of your ships and platforms, The Chinese have five sets, so despite not being locked down their ships will never be used as an invasion force.  At least, not on another human colony.”

Yeah, that was my one serious worry.  Some jackass dictator would take their ships out there and try to conquer one of our neighbors.  It was stupid, we still had seventy-eight hundred worlds to fill before running out of space in our claimed territory, and there was enough unclaimed space around us to make it ten times that.  So far, my pessimism has gone unrewarded however, which was good.

That was the status of our local human space, the fifty galaxies of the old Gray Empire were a whole other ball of wax.

There had been dire side effects to gaining our freedom and removing the Grays for our simple right to exist, but without eyes out there I’d never actually seen it.  I watched all our claimed systems without a human presence within our five hundred light year radius from Earth territory, but nothing past that besides the six fleets that guarded the other six empires from invading into the fifty galaxies of the former Gray empire.

Point being, we got reports, from the Vax and others we traded with.  The last thirteen years had seen a lot of races suffer if not be victimized by complete genocide.  Unintended consequences, not that we’d had a choice in our actions, but it was still a thing.

Less than one percent of the FTL civilizations had fallen, but that was still hundreds of worlds in the fifty galaxies.  Most of the trading worlds had just continued to trade and form minimal treaties of free trade and non-aggression with their trading partners.  Most of the seventy percent of non-traders had continued to just be defensively xenophobic. They stayed in their space and attacked anyone that trespassed.  But, a small percentage of both of those groups had turned to war and conquering, until they were put down by one of those they attacked.

I was tempted to help, but without a treaty my hands were tied.  There were no good answers there.  I couldn’t help, not without gaining power over other races and systems, if only indirectly.  I admit, it would’ve been even harder to resist helping, if it hadn’t been for the fact that I didn’t have to see it happen in real time.

Point being, it could’ve been a lot worse, most species had continued with the status quo, despite no longer being under threat of genocide by the Grays’ sadistic empire.  Still, it was disturbing there were aggressively conquering civilizations out there and I wasn’t doing anything about it.

On the good side, all the species were free to start expanding their assigned fifty light year space.

I had a small worry that things would get worse.  At some point, all the races starting an expansion in the fifty galaxies would fill up all the space, and even the most peaceful ones would start to butt heads at the borders.  But space was huge, and it’d take many of millennia of expansion for that happen.  In short, I’d be long dead before it became a real worry, even with life extension therapy I wouldn’t live much longer than two thousand years, and that was at the extreme outside.

The Atans were still in two-thousand of our systems for their side of our bargain in terraforming those worlds, and things were going well there.  Tam’Diaz stopped by every month or so to chat and drop off the latest reports, even though I had probes in each of those star systems.  It still disturbed me a bit, A.I. I mean, but they seemed honorable and even nice enough.  I had somewhat of a wary friendship with them, and I’d considered retiring most of the fleet that I had between their empire and our fifty galaxies, but I worried that was naïve and hadn’t done it.

Sure, I believed them when they said they were reluctant expansionists, and had never fired the first shot before, but it felt foolish to show them our soft backs in trust, when we didn’t need to.

The Atans’ updated ships were superior to ours in a lot of ways.  Their beam technology was stronger, they had better acceleration for their drives in normal space, eight hundred gravities for unmanned and eighty for manned, instead of six hundred and sixty.  Their shields were quite strong as well.  They’d have given the Gray empire a real run for their money with their new herd ships and fighters.  Of course, those advantages were countered by the nanite tech, quantum jump drive, and disintegration beam.

Still, I wished I could read one of their ships and upgrade our stuff, but we were peaceful neighbors, and I wouldn’t chance war with the neighbors for an incremental upgrade to technologies that were inferior in class to what we had presently.  We never used gravity drives anymore, except for local maneuvering.  Jump drives were used for any serious distance, long since having been declared as safe for humans and other biological matter.

It wasn’t a power issue, we had power to burn from tapping the universe, it was a limit in the systems themselves.

The other five empires surrounding us had been quiet, but thirteen years was just a drop in the ocean of time.  They’d been at a standstill with the Grays for centuries, and I just hoped it stayed that way.

I hoped not to see more wars and conflict, life was pretty damned good actually in this new universe of endless possibility.  Of course, unknown to me at the time, the bill for the last thirteen years of peace was about to come due.

Chapter Three

It was early afternoon, and the command center was relatively quiet as the workday wound down.  Jessica was monitoring the station and external scans. Cassie was working on god knew what. the less I knew about the governing of the station the better, and I was designing a new mining vessel with strong shields and minimal armaments for self-defense only.

Like the millions of ships in the void connected through command links, the merchant vessel would have sub-probes capable of assaying an asteroid and doing the actual mining, per the customer’s request.  It was hardly a new idea. I’d done something similar when I’d built the station back when all this started, building sub-ships to have better scanning of the solar system and remove the blind spots.

The new part was all the automation involved.  The probes would find, mine, and deliver ore to the ship, which had smelters and the machines to separate the metals.  All done with minimal supervision of someone’s crew in command of the ship.

Of course, we didn’t use natural resources for ships, it was all energy to matter conversion into nanites for that, but we still did use resources to make things on the surface of planets, and even to fill out ships with chairs, beds, and everything else.  The molecular bonder in the second-generation energy to matter device was still the most hidden secret of my wife’s inventions, humans still needed jobs and to feel useful, so we needed to mine resources for the manufacturing companies that still employed a good portion of the population.

In short, most of it was programming, and doing research on advanced mining tools.  My mind was a little dull after working all day, and I got up and poured myself a coffee.  I still drank the stuff all day long.

Cassie said, “Grab me one.”

I smirked, moving the coffee maker into the command center didn’t mean President Akin didn’t get his Secretary of State a coffee on a regular basis.  I made one for her, and I was handing it over as the door slid open, and a very cute twelve-year-old girl walked in, otherwise known as the terror.

“What have I told you about hacking your way into the command center?”

Just like for me, passwords and technological locks were no impediment to my daughter’s powers and abilities as a technomancer.  I just hoped her babysitter hadn’t been restrained by the floor again, so she could escape.  I’d lost three of them just this year.

She looked at me innocently, and pointed over her head, “Darrel did it.  I promised not to abuse my magic.  I missed you.”

Her pout was devastating.  She truly was mature for a twelve-year-old, most of the time, but sometimes in the latter half of the afternoon the boredom got the best of her and she went looking for trouble.  I blamed it on her intelligence, which meant it was obviously her mother’s fault.  Between her power to interface and learn technology, and read databases directly, her schooling was more advanced than most post-graduates in college.

Of course, knowledge didn’t guarantee understanding, which was why she had a curriculum to follow.  The data was absorbed in moments however, and it only took her a little while to truly absorb and understand it thanks to her inheriting her mother’s intellect.  In short, she had far too much free time on her hands, when school was an hour or two at most a day.

Darrel was named by my daughter when she was five.  In reality, it was an automated defense system and guard. A small independent spherical ship with a six-inch diameter that followed her around everywhere, and it would notify me if she was in danger or left the private area of the station without permission.  It was too small for FTL systems, but it did have a gravity drive to follow her around, form protective shields, and even non-deadly weapons if anyone threatened the daughter of the president of Astraeus.

Last I checked, it wasn’t programmed to lead her into secure areas, and I gave my daughter a stern look despite the laughter I was trying to suppress at her claim.  She was usually cleverer than that.

She blew out a breath, “I’m serious, dad.”

Cassie giggled, then sent me a guilty look at her undermining my authority.  Yeah, what authority? My daughter was scared of mom, but I was the huge sucker in the family and really bad at being angry at our daughter.  She had a big heart, and I loved her more than life.

“I see,” I said skeptically, but when my lips twitched, she ran forward and tackle hugged me.

In hindsight, I wished I’d have taken the time to check out her ridiculous assertions, reached out with my magic that day and discover the truth of Darrell that much sooner, but between my daughter’s distraction and Jessica’s next words, the whole incident and my daughter’s assumed indiscretion was erased from my mind.

Jessica said, “There’s a cloaked ship in orbit of Phobos.”

I woke up at that, and I somehow put my daughter down without spilling my coffee.

“Time to go, Melody.  I might be working late.”

She pouted but left quickly. She’d learned to mind me on the odd times something alarming comes up.

Phobos was one of the two moons of Mars.  As for the cloaked ship part, we still couldn’t defeat the Gray’s cloaking technology, and apparently not whatever ship was around Phobos.  But, we could still scan for the absence of anything.  Ever since that incident all my daughter ships in the system scanned for blank spots as a matter of course.  It was time consuming, but it’d also just paid off for the first time.

Despite not seeing the ship itself, we could see solar wind, stellar dust, and that was quite thick relatively in the inner solar system.  We knew there was a ship, simply because there was no stellar dust or other particles within that true void of nothingness.  It was the one weakness of a cloaking device.

I took a sip of my coffee, “Why does this always happen at the end of shift?”

Cassie grinned, “Just lucky I guess, we could ignore it until morning.”

Not likely.  I looked at the status screen. We had an unmanned dreadnought class platform just three light seconds from the location.  I assigned six mini-platforms on the ship to launch and quantum jump into a bracketing formation around the ship from all six cardinal directions.  Unless someone on the stealth ship could react within three seconds, we’d have them surrounded.  Then I’d open normal light speed communications to the hidden ship, and then see what they said.

If that didn’t work, I’d take control of it.  Or at least, read it with my magic to figure out what was going on.

It could be a colony keeping an eye on Earth, or one of the nations or colonies simply testing a new stealth technology, to see if I’d notice.  So I wasn’t too worried, yet, but I didn’t dismiss the other possibilities, that it could be alien in origin.

I shared my plans and thoughts behind them.

Cassie said, “Simple and direct, good plan.”

Jessica interjected, “Just hold off for a minute, in case it’s not the only one and there are more ships closer.  I’m initiating a local scan of Earth orbit and all of our ships.  Should we notify Earth’s central command?”

Central command had become something of a joke now that our species no longer faced annihilation, but it was still there.  It was a convenient way for me to share tactical concerns with the safety of the human race as a whole with all the other countries, for the other leaders as well.  Of course, without any threat for thirteen years, all the countries were going their way again, and the civility and common purpose between all nations had died with the Grays’ fleets.

A local scan would be a lot faster. We could determine Earth’s orbit is clear in just a minute or two, it was the whole solar system that took a long time to scan.  Even with a hundred thousand dreadnought platform defensive fleet to split up the work.

“Let’s wait until we know more. I’m not going to wake up half the world leaders and interrupt the other half’s day with no information but a blank spot in space.  But I’ll hold off on the response, you made a good point there.  We don’t want any other hidden ships doing anything violent and unexpected when we corner the one that we know about.”

I took a sip of coffee, and just a couple of minutes later Jessica gave the all-clear.  That didn’t mean there weren’t more cloaked ships in the system, just none close enough to Earth to fire on the planet if things went really south.  The whole idea was a bit doubtful, but a healthy dose of paranoia would keep us alive in a dangerous universe.

I sent out the orders.  The unmanned ship launched the six mini-platforms, which quantum jumped three times, once a second, around that blank spot. Then they hailed them over normal comms.

Nothing happened for about ten seconds, and I closed my eyes and followed the quantumly paired connections with my magic, from the space station, to the large platform, to one of the mini-platforms.  Leaving my body behind helpless didn’t bother me, I trusted Cassie and Jessica with my life.

The space between the platform and hidden ship was small, and my magic made that jump as well.

The ship exploded in a ball of fire a split second later, and I’d barely gotten started looking at the technology, much less searched for their database.  The only thing I was sure of, was that it wasn’t human.  Mostly because the ship hadn’t been made of nanites, and even if one of the colonies had built a stealth ship the hard way, the internal systems were just too different.

Regardless, I regretted giving them time to answer the hail, I should’ve just read them right away, instead of trying too hard not to step on toes.  The scanning technology was quite impressive, but not quite up to our standards.  The cloaking technology was extremely similar to what the Grays had done, but that made sense as those systems would be driven by the end result of hiding mass, energy, and visual frequencies.  There was only one way to do that.

The ship had an extremely weak gravity drive and a low power reactor system, and it had lacked any kind of weapon or defensive shield systems.  None of that made me feel better though, it was a stealth probe, I was sure their warships had far different systems in it, and much more powerful.  Save perhaps the sensors, those would be state of the art for a probe.

“Well, that was a waste of time, except for tipping them off that we could see them.  See what you can find out there.”

To be fair, they weren’t watching us anymore either, whoever they were.

I sent the data I managed to get on their systems to Diana, maybe she could find something in the Grays’ database to narrow down who was responsible.  I knew there were millions of ship types in it, and something might be close.  It could’ve been any of the tens of thousands of alien civilizations in our fifty galaxies trying to steal our tech, or it could be one of the other five surrounding empires thinking about starting trouble.

The only ones I was sure couldn’t be behind it, were humanity and the Atans.

Time would tell.

I took a sip of my coffee.

Jessica asked, “Should I bring in more platforms?”

That wasn’t a bad idea.  We had a hundred thousand for earth’s defenses, added on to the various fleets protecting the home world.  Both my technology and the older tech which the other five countries ran.  But those didn’t help me.

Point was, I still had over six million dreadnought platform ships in the void, that were out there to be used for build stock while not freaking out the other world leaders.  Out of sight, out of mind, which was the problem.  I could move in a million platforms to speed up the search, probably and logically should, but politically it might not be a good idea.

I looked at Cassie.

Cassie shook her head, “Not a good idea, for anything short of an invasion.  It’ll make Earth nervous, and suspect ulterior motives.”

I nodded, and tthen made a face, which made them both chuckle.

“Going with Cassie this time.  Put as many around Earth as it takes for constant scan coverage out to a light second.  The rest can scan the…” I trailed off.

I wrote a quick macro to program a million mini-platforms to scan for blank spots with their sensors, then launched them from the platform furthest from Earth.  They all moved out system.

I said, “Use the rest to scan our inner system, out to Mars, in a continuous rotation.  The million mini-platforms will take Mars on out.”

Cassie sighed, “Better, but they’ll still whine about it.”

I smirked, “We could be being scouted by an enemy, preparing for invasion.  It’s more likely about espionage, but I’m not risking Earth despite how small the chances are.”

The door opened and Diana walked in.  I was struck momentarily by her beauty, even in her geeky dress of a lab coat, ugly brown skirt, and white blouse buttoned up to her neck.  Perhaps even especially in those drab clothes, that to me just outlined her true beauty.  She still dressed down, for work at least.  She’d always been stunning to me, but after losing about ten years of apparent age she was so far out of my league it wasn’t funny.

“Hey.”

She smiled at me, and it reached her eyes, but it was also a tight smile.  She looked alarmed, and I took a deep breath to remain outwardly calm.  Whatever reason she’d come to the command center, couldn’t be good.  Otherwise she’d have sent a message, or just waited to tell me over dinner.

“There were no ships in the database that completely matched of course, the Grays never captured one of their enemy’s stealth ships, but the scanning systems architecture and capabilities are an exact match for a Vrok warship.”

“Vrok?  What do we know about them?”

It was familiar of course, one of the other five empires besides the Atans, that had our fifty freed galaxies surrounded.  I even remembered what Cassie told me about them, but it wasn’t all that much.  She’d just given me the basics back then.

Cassie said, “They’re the ones that look like army ants, loosely anyway, about the size of a van.  They’re not exoskeletal though, and they’re mammalian not really an insect at all.  They’re also a carnivorous species, not omnivores like most predators in space.  They have the unfortunate habit of breeding their conquered planets for food, both the animals and if present, intelligent life.

“Their warships were about the same size as the five-mile-long Gray warship, so our current dreadnought warships and platforms have twice the mass.   Their beams and shields are similar to ours, as is their drive technology, but that was ten thousand years ago.  Thanks to Diana we know they haven’t advanced their sensor tech, but it’s been thousands of years since they tried to challenge the Grays.  The planets they oversee are limited technologically, though they allow some unlike the agrarian Atan worlds. A similar tech level to Earth in the nineteen forties.  They have planes, cars, radio, television, but no computers, space tech, or nuclear capabilities.  Vacuum tubes, no IC ships.

“About the best you could say for them is they aren’t genocidal.  No more than humans are toward cows.”

“Or vampires for humans,” I quipped, though my heart wasn’t really in the joke, “Speculation?”

Diana stepped into my arms with a worried look on her face, but she had nothing to add as I wrapped them around her.  If I wanted further specs, I could look them up, but the specs in the database were nothing but guesses after so much time.

Cassie gave me a smirking nod at my weak sally, then said, “We can’t know their intentions based on what just happened.  Thirteen years ago, they must’ve noticed the grays were taken over.  It could be they’re just curious and being cautious by seeing who’s their new neighbor, to evaluate the risks and dangers of the more powerful fleet of ships on their border.  Or, on the other side of the spectrum, they could’ve made some breakthroughs, already had plans to invade the Grays, but the turnover and more powerful ships gave them pause.

“Scouting for war or spying for defense status or in the hopes of stealing our tech, in short, or something in the middle.  My advice is to let Earth know, as well as our trading allies.  You might even want to give the Atan a head’s up.  The Atan sit between the Vrok and the bug race and share a border with both, same as we do all three.  I’d be curious to know if they’re spying on all of us, and if we were just the first one to notice.

“If we are the only ones, then I suspect their actions are more defensive or espionage driven.  If they’ve got eyes everywhere, they’re watching us and preparing for an invasion.  Although, I can’t guarantee that, it’s just the most likely scenario, and they are alien in thought to us.”

I nodded thoughtfully, “Jess, go ahead and send the data to central command, anyone with our quantum communicators, and Tam’Diaz as well.  Not sure there’s anything else we can do, until we get the scanning results for here and from our allies.”

Or if the Vrok invade, but I left that part out, but none of them missed the unspoken words regardless.

Jessica said, “Will do, but we could return the favor.”

“Let’s hold off on aggressive action ourselves. At least until we see if we can determine their intentions without scouting their territory.  If our scan pays off, then I’ll read the stealth ship right away instead of trying to communicate.  It’ll take me less than a second to disable their self-destruct and I’ll be able to learn everything that way, without risking a war by going to their space.”

Cassie nodded in agreement.

I finished off the coffee, then it was time to call it a day.  Assuming the other world leaders didn’t start calling me for information I didn’t have yet…

Chapter Four

“That smells amazing,” I said, as I kissed Diana on the head from behind.  I just took a moment to enjoy her scent and presence with my arms around her, before I started to help get dinner ready.

She already had a sauce going, and all I’d done is go change my clothes.  She still had on the hot geek look, at least that’s what I called it, minus the lab coat.  Based on the evidence around me she was making some kind of stir fry.

I started to slice up the mushrooms set aside.  Our dinners were usually the four of us, Diana, Melody, Cassie and myself.  Cassie of course, would just have a drink, since she was on a liquid diet.  Vampires didn’t really do solid foods very well, but they could enjoy coffee or wine and be affected by it, it wasn’t blood only.  My sister, nephew, and brother-in-law ate with us at least once a week, but most nights it was just us.

Melody asked, “Is everything okay, dad?”

I wasn’t surprised by that question, she was intuitive, and it wasn’t often I sent her away so firmly because of work.

“We have a mystery, but we’ll figure it out.”

Diana nodded in agreement, “Did you wash up for dinner?”

Melody rolled her eyes like only a pre-teen can, “Yes, mom.”

I stole a chaste kiss as I delivered the mushrooms, and I could tell my wife was worried about what just happened at the end of the workday.  I was fairly confident in our numbers and the strength of our ships, but when a long-term enemy does something different it’d be foolish to dismiss the danger.

I pushed it out of my head though. I didn’t want to endlessly speculate about the Vrok’s motives in sending a stealth probe all night.  I have to admit though, that it’s much easier to leave work behind when all I was doing was designing tech and protecting the station from spies and criminals.

I got to work on the onions and peppers, while she stirred the sauce and then started to cut up the thin steak into small cubes.

“What’d you get up to today, besides visiting me.”

Melody started a diatribe of her day, from school and everything else she did.  It was calming and familiar, and I wasn’t looking forward to her total conversion to teen when she’d no doubt start to hide things and give her parents short thrift.

Of course, when she talked about her assignments, I only understood the edges of it.  My daughter had the intelligence and knowledge greater than most post doctorates, but she was also still twelve and very much a kid that lacked adult judgement.

It was maybe ten minutes later when Diana added the sauce in with the rest, and we all sat around the table and dug in.

Melody asked, “Movie night, my choice?”

Diana laughed, “We can do that.”

Crap, Disney.  Not that I truly minded, it was easy to get caught up in my daughter’s excitement.  Pride and love would make it more than bearable.

Cassie said, “I might need to take a raincheck and go back to work, my message queue is building about our mystery ship.”

Melody sighed, but she nodded without argument.

“Can I help?  I got so bored today,” she dragged out the so cutely.

Diana shook her head, “Nothing for us to help with yet.  But I’ll let you get a look at all of my projects tomorrow, for one hour only, and we’ll discuss what you think.  You are not to make any changes to those projects personally or perform an experiment.”

My daughter bounced in her chair with excitement, but I wasn’t sure it was such a great idea.  I also wasn’t dumb enough to go against my wife and disappoint my daughter at the same time.

We finally moved on to lighter subjects and chatted over the rest of dinner, before Cassie left and I watched a movie with my two favorite ladies.

The bed was warm and ridiculously comfortable as I held my wife.  I really loved the Arnis, even after twelve years I felt spoiled by their smart products, even though I was very accustomed to them.  The two of us were chatting lightly, more often than not late night was our only private time, between my beloved daughter AKA the terror, and our separate jobs, it was a struggle to find intimacy at times.  But it was also one of our highest priorities, so we managed.

Diana said, “Our daughter is growing up.  I know you didn’t like my offer earlier but think of it like an extended schooling.  She’s aware of all the rules, and how to conduct experiments safely, but I haven’t forgotten she can forget herself in her excitement.  I won’t be giving her a job anytime soon, but supervised short looks into theoretical science and our current practical projects for it is reasonable.”

I nodded, “I wasn’t going to argue.”

Diana smirked, “I know, and I love you for that, but I don’t want you to worry.  Plus, the simple truth is there’s nothing else to teach her about human understood math and sciences.  All that’s left is the unproven theoretical and the Grays’ database, and our top-secret technologies.  If she has nothing to focus on, she’ll be miserable.”

I kissed her hair, and said, “That does put a different light on it.  I just want her to be a kid.  It also can’t be easy growing up in the core of the station and not being able to go to a normal school.”

She had friends at least, her cousin Brock, and quite a few of the other kids of the station’s security team.

Diana nodded, “I bet she’d love a little brother or sister to look after.”

She just stared at me for a few seconds, as my skipping brain came to terms with that innocuous seeming comment.

Then I grinned, “Tired of sleeping?”

Her face clouded slightly, but she knew I was joking.  It was just the wrong time for levity, apparently.

I laughed, “Me too.  We should get started on that right away,” I waggled my eyebrows as I pushed the joke even further.

Which fell flat.

She sighed, “Really?  I miss a little one in the house, and our daughter is like a mini-adult most of the time.”

I nodded, we’d discussed this before, the timing of a second child, but she looked very serious about it this time.  With the life extension she’d be young and healthy enough for childbirth for several hundred years, estimated.  Of course, the life extension didn’t give her more eggs, but we’d had a bunch of them harvested and frozen a few years ago, so I doubted this second would be the last either.

“I’m just teasing, but at the same time I really mean it.  I love you, Diana.”

She bit her lip, and we shared a lingering kiss.  She also turned off her birth control implant that night, and we did get started on number two quite passionately, and I’ll just leave it at that.

It was still morning, just after ten Astraeus time and I was back in the control room for a little over an hour by then.  The hot coffee slowly woke me up.

The mining vessel had been a bit tricky to finish up, any kind of physical automation usually was.  The nanite computers were heavily contained by protocol to prevent the formation of artificial intelligence.  That left creating a whole lot of logic trees, and defining almost every situation, so the controller of the mining probes only had to monitor and deal with the unexpected.

The more that I defined, the less work they’d have to do, and conversely if it didn’t work smoothly enough they wouldn’t come to me for their needs anymore.

Of course, I’d done similar things before. The automated platforms that weren’t at all subtle when fighting, and the cleaning robot.  It was just… time consuming, even when using my magic to program, but I’d gotten most of it done yesterday before the excitement of finding a stealth probe in system.

I spun off a build, messaged the company that they could pick it up in two days, and brought up the next custom build in the list.  Or tried to, that’d been the last one, so I was actually caught up.  It didn’t happen often, but that meant I had time to address other ideas and technologies.

We were selling a lot of stuff through amazon.  The discrete power outlet boxes had flagged off over the last ten years, now that every manufacturer was including power sources in their products, from toys to planes, cars and trains, and everything else.  Pollution was mostly a thing of the past as centralized power became a thing of the past, though the infrastructure hadn’t been torn down yet.

Still, we got a small royalty for every single one made and added to a device that needed power.

The colonies had started out that way, so those worlds had hardly any pollution at all, save manufacturing.  Our phone and data systems still sold very well, especially paired with the Vax’s AR implants which were capable of fully immersive experiences.

Then there were the health nanite beds that almost every hospital on the planet now had, for treating both trauma victims, and to remove cancers or growths from the body.  Clean plaque out of veins and arteries, similar to a heart bypass surgery but without cutting open a patient.  It was cleared for several other operations as well, that used to be major surgery but was now a simple outpatient procedure.

There were a lot of small inventions I’d come up with or designed from Diana’s research, as well as new iterations of things, a new application for a current technology.

That was just a drop in the bucket though, the stuff we sold from figuring out and improving Gray technology I mean.  Between the Vax, Arnis, and other trading worlds that didn’t involve me at all, the earth was unrecognizable from just a decade ago.  Calling it the second technological revolution just didn’t cover the reality.

But people were still people, that would never change.

I took a moment to check for messages and the station’s and solar system’s status.  Everything looked okay, we hadn’t found another ship yet, Jessica would’ve told me if we had anyway, but nothing else stood out to me.

I turned my mind toward other possibilities with current tech, but nothing occurred to me right away.  Creativity wasn’t something that could be rushed, and the real world didn’t give me enough time for my focused wandering thoughts to hit on something.

Cassie said, “I hate to bother you, Mr. President.”

Oh crap, whenever she calls me that it means I need to take my tech hat off and put on my leader of Astraeus hat.  Fortunately, that really didn’t happen very often, but almost always in crisis.

“What’s up?”

Cassie smirked, “I’ve been fielding a lot of calls all morning from advisors of the world leaders, but apparently not having answers yet isn’t being accepted.  The world leaders seem rather spooked, and they’re sending up a committee and expect a full briefing on this new threat.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised.  I may not have wanted to be in power, which made me take these kinds of things in stride, but all those world leaders on Earth did want their power.  Which meant any perceived threat to that power, or even the chance of one, was taken more than seriously by them.  It was human nature.

I was concerned too of course, but I’d like to think my concern was more… logical and based in facts, and not out of fear.  Although, my daughter’s safety put that to doubt.  I suppose that was easy for me to say, since I was at the tip of the spear of the effort to discover the purpose of our hidden visitor, but on the other hand I wasn’t calling and bugging our trade allies and the Atans for an update either.

“You sure you don’t want to rule?”

She couldn’t of course, the rest of the vampire council would kill her.  Vampires nudged from the sidelines. They didn’t take direct control of governments.  I even got the impression the other leaders of her kind weren’t all that happy with her at times, for taking the second spot and running Astraeus for the day to day political issues.

“It shouldn’t be that bad.  Just tell them the truth.”

I gave her a skeptical look, “Don’t they already have the data we sent?  I can’t tell them anything else.”

She ignored that quite logical objection, and said, “They’re docking in five.”

Right, and the conference was two and half miles away, time to get moving.

“You coming?”

She nodded and stood up.

“Mind the store,” I said over my shoulder.

Jessica just grunted in the affirmative at that.

Cassie and I got on the horizontal lift with two of my personal security, and we shot off toward the edge of the station.  There were docks around the whole station, on multiple levels, with conference rooms scattered around the circumference of the docking ring, but Cassie knew which one they’d be docking to.

The conference room we went to was one of the Arnis equipped, and I sighed in comfort as I took a seat and sipped my coffee.  We had maybe two minutes, before the central command committee showed up.

“What’s been the major questions?”

Cassie said, “Not so much about what happened, but what we’re doing to address it.”

Right, I had almost two hundred world leaders that were armchair quarterbacking my decisions.  I couldn’t blame them, since I was acting on behalf of the world for their security.  It also wasn’t quite as bad as I was making it out to be, I got it, I just didn’t like politics, and doubted I ever would.

But everyone had to do things they didn’t like doing, it was called life.  My family, and the tech business was all pleasure for me and my passion, and this part really wasn’t too great a cost to pay.  I wasn’t that spoiled or entitled.

“That makes sense.”

I considered what we did, and were doing, just gathering data in our space, allied space, and Atan space, not Vrok space.  But after quickly thinking it over I decided it was still the best course.  If there was a chance the Vrok spied on us because us replacing the Grays made them nervous, then investigating for threats and mapping out their territory would probably start a war.  If it was more serious than that, then we’d find out when they attacked the four million platform fleet I had in their face, long before Earth was under threat.

The committee walked in, and it was all the usual suspects.  Those that had a military presence in space.  The U.S., France, England, Russia, China, Japan, Israel, and Australia.  I recognized a few of them, but there were new faces as well.  Twelve years sees a lot of changes that way, in politics.  The U.S. and Japan had sent civilians, the rest of them were in military uniforms.

“Good morning, take a seat, and welcome to Astraeus.”

The U.S. representative didn’t waste time. The augmented reality popup told me he was Clarence James, attaché to the president.  He spoke as he sat down.

“President Akin, we’re all concerned on Earth at this possible new threat. Especially as it originates from an outside empire that rivaled the Grays.”

I nodded, “As am I, which is why I launched an investigation.  So far, no more have been found in Earth’s solar system, are all of your countries scanning yours?”

He nodded, “Our colony worlds are clean in the inner solar system, we’re still scanning out toward the gas giants.”

“I’m not sure what else we should do, at least until we get back data from our trade allies in the fifty galaxies and the Atan.”

The Russian colonel snorted, “It is an act of war.  They are obviously scouting us.”

I nodded, “That’s one possibility, one that we’re prepared for, but there could be another explanation.  We should wait until the data is in.”

Clarence nodded in agreement, which took me by surprise.  It always did, whenever the U.S. agreed with anything I said or did.

“But what then?”

I said, “We have their language in the Gray translation database, and we could confront them with our findings.  Until they attack us and remove all doubt, I believe our focus should be on de-escalation efforts.”

The Chinese representative tilted their head, the popup named him Admiral Chen Lao.

“I just got a message one of our colonies stumbled on a stealth probe moving out of system, and we were able to set in an interception course that would’ve caught them inside the FTL line.  Three seconds later, probably when the probe figured that out based on our ship movements, it self-destructed.”

I frowned, it was going to be hard to get their technology and data if they were self-destruct happy.

“So, they’re definitely watching our systems, or had been until now.  I don’t think they were in place long, or we’d have caught them sooner.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the other colonies had similar probes trying to exit.  They must’ve recalled their probes when they realized we could defeat their cloak.”

If indirectly, they actually didn’t know that, how we found them I mean.

It’d been seventeen hours since we intercepted the first probe, but with their weak propulsion system to remain cloaked it’d take them over two days to reach the FTL line, either subspace or wormhole.  A sudden itch went through me, to start working on a new ship.  I think the obvious just struck me, on how to create a fast-moving cloaked probe.  The quantum jump drive took hardly any energy at all, compared to other drive systems.

I pushed that down though, not sure that cloaking was a technology we should ever pursue in the real world.  It’d make our neighbors nervous, if nothing else.

“We should still wait until we hear back from our various allies.  It’d be good to know if this was focused on us as the new power in the fifty galaxies as far as they’re concerned, or if they’re looking at everyone.  Outside of confronting them with a message when we have that data, any other ideas from your leaders?”

The Russian representative, Colonel Natalya Androvich, spoke.

“We have no wish to start another interstellar war, but neither can we show our enemies our throats or they may be further emboldened.  We must come up with a proportional response of some kind.”

Clarence said, “That will be hard to match, because if we surveil the enemy one of the basic goals in doing so is to not be caught doing so.”

The meeting continued, but it was clear none of them had a solid idea on how to move forward. Their leaders were just frustrated at the non-action of waiting for more data.  We went around in circles at that point, and we uselessly speculated about what it would mean based on what we found if this or that happened.

In the end it was a waste of two hours in my opinion, but that was politics.

It was late afternoon when all the reports started to come in, including ours.  It interrupted my design for a stealth probe, even if I had no plans to build it, I felt the itch to design it just cause.  It was basically the design the Grays had, with a jump drive in it and a few other enhancements.

There was no other probes anywhere in the SOL system, which made sense.  They’d probably only sent one per system.  Both the Vax and the Arnis called within five minutes of each other, they both found blank spots that self-destructed when their ships tried to close with it.  Twenty other races called in the next hour, reporting the same, so I was fairly sure by then the Vrok were likely scouting all FTL races in all fifty freed galaxies.

Tam’Diaz hailed us on the quantum communicator and told us they’d also found probes in some of their systems, but only on the border in the two galaxies closest to where their space and Vrok space met.

That told me we were probably in trouble.  That the Vrok were keeping a limited spying eye on the Atans, but they were scouting our space far more thoroughly.  More and more reports came in, of found and self-destructing Vrok probes. Even a few of the xenophobic races that wouldn’t trade with anyone reported incursions in their space.

I explained my thought process there.

Cassie nodded, “Perhaps they’re looking for any hidden threats they might face in an invasion, and of course they’re getting good news.  Only the Arnis have close to what the Gray technology was, before our advances.  They’ve probably figured out we’re the only real threat to their invasion plans, and I can imagine the temptation of adding our fifty galaxies to their available food source.”

That Cassie agreed with me, and offered more speculation in support of it, was a little alarming to me.

Jessica said, “But they couldn’t beat the Grays.”

I replied, “That was a long time ago.  If they made advances and think they can face us, they might’ve just been verifying there were no greater powers to face in our space.  I think we could speculate forever, but from what we just learned a scouting and mapping mission, and a prelude to war seems most likely.  Let the representatives on station know and give them an hour to discuss the new data with their leaders, then we’ll meet back up in the conference room.”

Cassie asked, “What do you think we should do?”

I smirked, “Wait.  Go to war if and only if they attack us.  We’re making a lot of assumptions about an alien race that thinks differently than we do.  If they were humans, I’d say there was no doubt they were getting ready to invade, but they could just be paranoid about us taking over for the Grays.  Maybe they looked at all the other systems merely to see how we treated them.  And if they were under our thumb or not, like they could be.  It could all be part of their evaluation of us, even looking at all the other races.”

Cassie challenged, “But you don’t really believe that?”

“No, my gut says they’re going to attack us, soon.  All races think a little differently, but there’s still a lot of instinctual commonalities, we’re all predators out there.  But even if I’m right, and I’m far from positive that I am, we shouldn’t fire the first shot.”

Jessica pointed out, “Except the Atans.”

Right, because they were herbivores.

I shrugged, “I have no ambition to rule, but my counterparts do, and often people see the motivations of others through their own ambitions.  Point being, I don’t think the other leaders are going to want to sit back and let the Vrok get in the first punch, most won’t have the same reasonable doubt I do.”

Cassie smirked, “Reasonable, or hopeful?”

I sighed, “Good question.”

One I didn’t have an answer to, but I didn’t think I was being completely naïve.  I just didn’t want to start an interstellar war but like with the Grays I wouldn’t have a problem ending one.

“What do you think about it?”

Cassie shrugged, “I agree with you.  I think it’s inevitable, but aggressive self-defense is a small step toward becoming what the Grays were.  Down the line, a race in the fifty galaxies growing in power will seem like a threat too.  The capacity equals intent argument, it’s a rabbit hole we don’t want to fall into, and just one more small step past the one before us now.”

I nodded, it was natural, but logic told me letting the enemy get in the first swing wouldn’t put us in that bad a position.  We couldn’t win a war defensively, but that was a far cry from starting it.

Jessica said, “Expansion, perhaps too many mouths to feed.  If they’re carnivores, their instincts won’t be like the rest of us as omnivores, no more than the Atans are like us.  I suspect they wouldn’t invade at all, unless their current prey population isn’t enough for their population to support anymore.”

I nodded, “That’s possible, the Grays don’t have enough on them to be sure.  I’d love to get my hands on their military and social databases, but likely I won’t until after a war starts.  Anything else going on?”

She replied, “Nothing big.  A couple of vacationers were thrown off station today, for assault, on each other, and drunk and disorderly.”

Yeah, even after twelve years we didn’t have a whole lot of lawbreaking, and none from our first wave of permanent residents and citizens of Astraeus.  It was just a matter of time though, before the first generation of kids grew up and a criminal element was introduced past visitors and visa workers that we could just kick off the station.

Cassie had that all figured out though, so we were ready for it.

I shook my head, and I wondered if I was being naïve.  I’d do anything to protect my loved ones, as well as Earth and humanity, but I wasn’t interested in starting the war just because they’d taken a look at us.  Although, I was a bit tempted to return the favor.

Chapter Five

The meeting started with me laying down my position, that we should prepare for the worst but only aggressively wage war after they’d fired the first shot.  As I’d expected that was a rather unpopular viewpoint with the rest of the room.

Clarence asked, “What steps have you taken?”

I replied, “I took them a long time ago for an invasion scenario.  We’ve got the fleet out there, four million platforms that they’ll take out first, otherwise they’ll risk us sending them into their territory if they ignore the threat and attack us directly.  Then there’s all the platforms in the void from the build effort twelve years ago that I’ve been using for stock and they can’t possibly know about.  If they do attack here in some kind of attempt to take out the only danger to them immediately, those platforms can jump in very quickly to bolster our defenses.”

Natalya nodded, “All very good, and our military is on alert as well, not just here but in all our colonies.  But, it’s not good enough.  We need to know how we’d stand up to an attack now, if we’ve underestimated their current technological advances it would be disastrous.  If there’s a large gap we need to find out before they attack, so we can focus on removing it.”

I nodded, “I worry about that too, but how can we learn that without starting a war.  If we attack even one of their ships it could trigger that invasion, and it would be a far clearer act of war than their spying on us.”

Clarence said, “My president is in agreement with Russia.  We’re in the dark about their current capabilities.  At the very least, we need to do an active scan on one of their ships and determine what we can from that.  It’s aggressive, but no more aggressive than scouting us out, and it doesn’t involve firing weapons or an escalation.  We think that would be a good countermeasure as well.”

I frowned, “I don’t like the unknown any more than you do, and I’d prefer to know their technology before they attack, but war is always full of unknown risks.  If they outclass us by that much, we won’t close that gap quickly, I think it would be a mistake and won’t use my platforms to do it.”

I hated to use that leverage, but the majority of human forces were under my control.  They couldn’t afford to buy millions of platforms from me, and they didn’t have the populations to crew millions of ships.  They did have thousands of their own ships, with sub-fighters similar to my mini-platforms, but they weren’t nearly as advanced or capable as my mini-platforms.

The fighters were also bigger, and a whole lot less numerous, because they all needed their own fusion reactor without the nanite vacuum reactor technology.  They also lacked our most powerful weapon and the quantum jump drive.

Of course, they all also owned my ships, which had all those advantages, and they could use one of those.  The restrictions not to attack any human ships built into them wouldn’t stop them from scanning a Vrok vessel, or even firing the first shot of the war.

It was what it was.

Clarence nodded, “We suspected you might take that tack.  However, the U.S. is willing to send a ship and actively scan a Vrok ship in their fleet on their border across from yours.  We’ll jump in until two light seconds away, and then run the scan from there.”

Clarence held up his hands to silence the mutterings of the other representatives.

“But only if a majority of our allies agreed with the decision.  Our president won’t authorize that step on behalf of the world by himself, but only with all of your support.”

Save mine, obviously.  I knew the meeting would be a little tense, and no one but me and maybe one or two others here would want to wait for a definitive alien strike to occur before we acted, but I hadn’t expected that.

Natalya nodded, “My government will support that.  We respect President Akin’s opinion, but also agree a proportional response is needed to their incursion in our space.  Further, it shows two things.  One, we won’t be cowed and that we aren’t afraid of them, and two, we’ll learn some much needed data.”

Chen said, “I agree that it is a proportional response, and sends the right message.  I don’t believe we can count on it for any useful information however.”

Clarence frowned, “Why not?”

Chen said, “You’re a civilian, not a military mind.  War is deception, and surprise has turned many a battle.  The first rule of war is to show the enemy exactly what they expect to see, while doing something different.  I could be wrong, but I suspect if the enemy has made recent advances, those more powerful ships will not be on picket duty.”

“Like our most powerful ships are?”

Chen shrugged, “We had little choice then.  We had to defeat the Grays’ outer fleets and show a strong shield to the enemies that surround us as the new power in space.  They on the other hand have the option of misdirection, and so are most likely using it.”

That made far too much sense for my comfort.

I shook my head, “If that’s true, then there’s even less a reason to run an active scan, which is an aggressive action.”

Chen shook his head, “The message it will send is important.  That we are not violent enough to war over the trespass, but that we also won’t be pushed around.  Perhaps it will give them pause, and it could make them consider expanding in another direction.  It should also tell us if I’m right or not, if they ignore us doing a scan of their warships, then chances are they’re not their best.”

Clarence asked, “Does anyone disagree, besides our host?”

I hated the idea, and I didn’t think I was a coward for doing so, but despite my military might I was still one leader among many, and I didn’t chart the course for humanity.

Even when it was hard not to, because the only reason I didn’t was because I’d decided not to.  In truth, I didn’t want to rule, for various reasons both moral and ethical, as well as a simple lack of ambition, but I thought this was a major mistake.  Especially if we couldn’t trust the results.

No one spoke up though, so I was alone in my opinion outside of Cassie, and the ship was sent.  We’d all regather in two hours when it arrived at the enemy lines, which was right after dinner unfortunately.  I still hated working late.  I always missed Diana and Melody by the end of the day, the last thing I wanted to do was leave again.

But the shadow of intergalactic war was kind of important to stay on top of.

Cassie waited until they’d all left, and we had privacy.

“Sure you don’t want to rule the world?”

I snorted, “I’d never get to work on tech, or spend time with my family.  Plus, you’d kill me.”

Those were all the selfish reasons, the other of course was that it would just be wrong.  Power corrupted humans, always. The last we needed was one person in charge of it all, even me.

Cassie smirked, “You just look really frustrated right now.”

I shrugged, “They’re all assuming the Vrok will read the message it sends like another human would.  And even there, it wouldn’t be guaranteed.”

Cassie nodded, “We have to do something though, and as things go there were worse options they could’ve picked.”

That… was just true.  They could’ve crossed borders, or even just fired the first shot to measure technological abilities against theirs, which would’ve been worse.

Cassie said, “We’ll figure it out, and I don’t think it will cause them to go to war, unless they were already planning to.”

Probably.

I pushed it all out my head, or I tried.  Time to spend a little time with the family before it happened and we reconvened, worrying about it wasn’t going to change it, after all.

Easier said than done.

The smile on my face was completely credited to the fact I was mugged by my daughter as soon as I walked in the door.

Cassie laughed lightly at her antics.

I could only shift my thinking and assume my wife had made the right decision, when Melody started to gush excitedly about her morning at mom’s work.

I never asked questions of my wife, the research she pursued was her own decision, always.  She usually told me about the most promising stuff when the real-world applications were close.  But my daughter gave me a clear and concise overview of it all, that would’ve sounded professional if it wasn’t for the breathless excitement.

When I got to the kitchen, I pulled off my jacket and put it over the chair before giving my wife a proper greeting.  Diana’s eyes sparkled as I broke it.

Melody sighed in disappointment, “You’re going back to work after dinner?”

When I gave her a questioning look, Diana chuckled, “You didn’t go change out of the monkey suit, as you call it.”

Oh, right.

“Yeah, we’re still working on that mystery.  I’m hoping it won’t be too long, but I’m working with a joint command committee from Earth on it.”

Mostly because if it does take a long time, it’d mean I was fighting a war.  If the Vrok didn’t escalate during or after the scan I figured it’d be less than an hour before the meeting broke up for the day.

Melody said, “Eww, politics.”

I grinned, and then gave her a high five.  I had educated her well.  She was a tech geek like me, with my power, and her mother’s intelligence.  I didn’t want her to grow up with ambitions of ruling humanity either.

“Singularities?”

Of all my wife’s projects, that one had piqued my interest the most.

Diana peered at Melody intently.

My daughter rolled her eyes, “Top secret doesn’t count for dad or Aunt Cassie.”

Diana snickered, “Fine.  Obviously, we don’t need a new power source, vacuum energy seems like the best we’re going to get, at least with our current knowledge, even the theoretical.”

That was true enough, there were still a lot of mysteries left in the universe to solve, including other layers of subspace and how it all works together.  We could find a better form of energy elsewhere, but if so we had no idea where yet.

She shrugged, “Not sure where we’re going with it yet.  Lots of experiments, denser matter formed from a near singularity, a possible weapon that will make the current gravity missile look like a joke, shielding applications, we’re looking at everything and getting a lot of data.”

“Right, but the current gravity missile leaves the enemy ship completely intact.  I’m guessing a singularity missile would not.  Not that I’m complaining, that sounds… really wild.”

Diana smirked, and kissed me.

“Dinner?”

Melody said, “Mom’s cheating again.”

“Oh good, pizza.”

Mom cheating meant using the energy to matter device we never told anyone about, which could make just about anything, including pizza.

Diana nodded, “Guilty as charged.”

A few minutes later we got started on that.

Chapter Six

The conference room was already full when Cassie and I got back, and I activated the holographic display in the room which showed the enemy line.  The display barely had any technical data. The fleets were a few light hours apart so all that was really working at that range in real time was the mass sensors and visual light sensors which had data hours old.

The view changed, as the U.S. started to share its live scanning data from the ship it sent with the joint command center.  They popped out of the wormhole a half light minute from the enemy lines, and then started to quantum jump toward the enemy.  It’d give them just under thirty seconds to decide what to do.

My heartbeat picked up, and I was more than a little nervous as the ship stopped at two light seconds, a full light second out of energy range.  At least our energy range.  Then data started to flow in as they activated a full power active scan on one of the ships.

The data was still limited of course, their shields stopped us from getting full details on the internal systems, but it did show their shield strength, energy signature curve, and armaments.  It looked like it lined up with the ten-thousand-year-old data in the Grays’ database.  Twelve missile launchers, twenty large beam emplacements, and hundreds of smaller point defense beam weapons.

The Vrok ships were about half our mass, equivalent to the old large Gray ships, and like all other wormhole FTL races they were somewhat tube like, since the energy cost of a wormhole went up geometrically by its size.  That scientific reality informed their design.  The ships themselves were a dark greenish black, and they looked somewhat segmented like a worm all the way down, perhaps the look was modeled after their bodies, which were in three curving segments for their six legs.

I hoped the message was important, because we didn’t learn anything new.

The Vrok also didn’t respond in any way, or even power up their weapons.

The U.S. colony ship quantum jumped away, most likely directly to a beacon back in their colony.

Chen looked very satisfied, as if that proved a damned thing, or that the Vrok understood the message we were sending.  A verbal message would’ve been better.

“As I suspected, they’re more than content with us reading their ships at close range.  The ships even look ancient.”

I nodded, “Perhaps, only time will tell.  If they do have newer and stronger ships inside their space, they could’ve just launched them our way.  They’re empire is at least twenty-three galaxies, if they haven’t expanded at all in another direction.”

I held up a hand, “We can’t know for sure of course, but we won’t know their true response to the scan for several hours, perhaps even days.  Even if they were planning an invasion, and this kicks it off, they may need to provision their ships, recall crews first, and who knows what else. Besides, the two hours at FTL wormhole speeds it would take to get here from the center of their empire.”

Natalya nodded, “Point taken, he is right, Chen.  We can’t know their true response to our scan at this juncture.  Except perhaps, that they don’t have a quantum jump drive even if they did upgrade.”

That… was probably true, there could be other reasons for delay though.  It would all be just pointless speculation from that point on, at least as far as the enemy.  But Natalya changed the subject.

Natalya said, “I’ve been authorized to inform you all if one of our colonies are attacked, we’ll be sharing our tactical net with the joint command center on Earth.  We’ll also share the tactical net of any forces we send out in aide, if another colony is attacked.  My government believes we must stand together as one in this issue, just like the Grays.”

I heartily approved, but I guess I was naïve because I’d already thought that was a given.  External enemies bent on our destruction, or at least turning us into their meals, made all the petty politics between us go away.

I nodded, “I’ll be doing the same for my forces, already am.”

At least, for the forces I had in SOL, and the six fleets on the edges of the fifty galaxies.  The six million ships in the void were off all their radars, even if they knew about them.

The U.K. and Israel reps, Admiral Sean Grady and Colonel Gil Malka, both indicated their governments will do the same.  The rest of the reps from China, Japan, the U.S. and France all had to check in with their leaders for official word.

Then the Japanese rep, General Arita Minato changed the subject.

General Arita said, “Does anyone not believe they’re going to start a war?  It might be prudent to measure ourselves against the new ships we assume they have, before they attack.”

I shook my head, “I do think they will, but I have enough doubt I’m going to resist that suggestion.  We’ll be able to measure our chances when they take on our outer fleet.  Besides that, it would be extremely difficult to find one of their worlds in the twenty-three galaxies they claim, much less where they’re hiding their advanced ships that we aren’t even sure exist yet.

“Hopefully we’ll have a chance to capture one of their ships mostly intact, and we can extract navigation and military data from it.  Otherwise it’s going to be tough to go on the offensive.”

No one else seemed to support General Arita’s first strike idea, and my change of subject took hold.

Clarence said, “We agree, we won’t fire the first shot or be the one to escalate.  That said, there has to be a way to identify their worlds, they found ours after all.”

I nodded, “They could’ve just followed our trading ships.  Find a ship, follow it to a world, then split up and follow more traders.  They’ve probably been poking around for a long while in the void between systems, before their recent attempt to infiltrate the systems themselves which enabled us to finally catch them at it.  We could do something similar, but something tells me we don’t have enough time, it could’ve taken them years to map out our worlds in the fifty galaxies.”

Chen said, “And if we can’t capture one of their ships?”

“Then we’ll be fighting defensively for a long time, while we play catchup.  Actually, now that I’m thinking of it, it won’t be too bad.  I can have them mapped out rather quickly, actually.”

I’d forgotten how surprisingly easy it was to claim the millions of stars in our five hundred light year radius area, not just the eight thousand or so living world systems.

Natalya frowned, “How?”

“The six million dreadnought platforms in the void I’m using for stock.  I’m reluctant to degrade their offensive capabilities too much, they’re our safety net backup right now as well, in case things go really wrong.

“They each have twelve million mini-platforms on them.  If I take seventy-two million of them which is one percent across all ships, which I can easily rebuild my stock in less than a day.  I can convert those to FTL probes at a two to one ratio.  So, thirty-six million probes.   That many could check every star in the milky way with just fourteen jumps each.  At about two hours a jump to get a good picture of things there, that means we’d have a complete picture of their empire in twenty-seven days.  Assuming their galaxies average out to five hundred billion stars or so each, of course.  Some will be bigger like our Andromeda, and some will be smaller like the dwarf galaxies.

“The true bottleneck would be in programming them all, I can automate part of it, and assigning star systems.  Of course, we’ll miss some stuff, if their ships move around during the process which they certainly will, but at the very least we’ll have solid data on their worlds and military production capacity in space.  As well as a somewhat decent picture of ship count.”

Thank everything they didn’t have nanite ships, but I was sure their ship building facilities were quite advanced and automatic, fast as well, but not as fast as nanite reproduction.

Chen’s eyes glazed over, and I tried not to wince at the worried looks half of them were giving me.

Natalya however, looked impressed.

“Could you take care of that programming before we’re attacked.  It’d be good to launch that effort right away, perhaps even during their first strike, and even give us a clearer picture of things even if you do manage to capture a ship with intact navigation systems and a military database.  They no doubt compartmentalize.”

Probably, but my magic could trace all those connections, and walk through secure firewalls like they weren’t there, but it was a point, and I couldn’t exactly tell her the truth about human supernaturals in the world either.

So I nodded instead, because she wasn’t entirely wrong, “I’ll set up a macro for the conversion, and another to assign star systems, first thing in the morning.”

Chen finally asked, “Why two hours a system?”

I said, “The build platforms for their fleet, assuming they’re even in space, could be next to a gas giant, or hidden behind one of the planets or moons in the system.  I was factoring in two hours of quantum jumping around the solar system to get a solid picture.”

Natalya said, “You may want to just do that in systems with a noted presence.  That would cut down hugely on the amount of time it took.  I can’t imagine more than tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of occupied systems on the outside.  That means for the other eleven some odd trillion systems you’d only be there for a few seconds each.”

I nodded, “That’s a good idea, and it would cut it back to around three or four days instead of close to a month.”

Chen said, “We could miss hidden production bases in otherwise empty systems doing it that way, or research bases.  But even if that’s true as long as we have an eye on all their population centers those theoretical new ships couldn’t be crewed once we have them contained.  My point is, perhaps the more exhaustive search can be done after we find all their obvious systems.  I also suggest leaving a probe near all their occupied systems as you go.”

“Another good suggestion, I’ll add that to my plan.  I’ll have to make the assignments dynamic, when a probe finishes a system and reports it’ll take the next star on the list.  I’ll also send one point five billion probes to all galaxies simultaneously instead of doing them one at a time. They’ll be adding stars to their specific lists as they map out the galaxy even as they do the local scans.  That way we’ll get all of them at once, and we should know rather quickly where the Vrok’s home galaxy is and where most of our efforts will be directed.  Then when they’re finished, they’ll go back to the empty systems for a full non-occluded scan to find those hidden assets.  Any other comments or suggestions for our scouting plan?”

Natalya said, “The enemy might hunt them.”

I nodded, “But unless we get really unlucky and a probe exits a wormhole right on top of the enemy, they won’t have any luck hunting them.  Random chance dictates we’ll lose a handful that way, even in the vastness of space in a single solar system, but no more than that.  I’ll program them to keep a light minute separation from all enemy ships at all times.  Unless the enemy has a quantum jump drive, they’ll never get close with a gravity or other type of propulsion drive.”

Admiral Grady nodded, “I suggest we break, and meet again either late morning or right after lunch?  You can update the status of your probe blitz idea, and the rest of us should know by then our country’s intentions as far as sharing tactical data nets, and in providing support should they attack another colony.”

No one had any argument to that, so we broke up.  Once again, Cassie waited until the room was clear before speaking.

“What didn’t you tell them?”

I winked.

She looked at my neck, and then licked her lips.

I held my hands up in mock horror, even as I chuckled.

“I’ll talk, evil vampire.  I can make the probes cloaked, but I’m not sure if I’m going to do that.  There’s no disguising the FTL aperture anyway, which would give away we have cloaked probes now.  However, perhaps a little sleight of hand is called for.”

She asked, “Sleight of hand?”

I nodded, “They’ll no doubt see the probe blitz happening.  The plan if a probe finds an occupied system is to leave it there.  So I can have the probe open a wormhole, then cloak and close the wormhole.  Then the probe will see their reactions, when they assume they’re no longer under scrutiny.  I’m afraid if I reveal that technology, the other leaders will assume I’m keeping an eye on all the colonies, when I’m not.  I’m just watching the unoccupied systems in our claimed space.”

She shook her head, “That won’t work, they’ll figure it out fast when we share the live data on the thousands of occupied systems in question.”

I sighed, “Right, because the Vrok won’t be hunting the probe to cut off our surveillance if I do that.  I guess I didn’t think that through fully, it’s been a long day.  Alright, no cloaks, we’ll just have the probes lead them around their solar systems in a chase to prevent their destruction.”

I chuckled, “In hindsight, that sounds kind of fun.”

She smirked, “That does sound amusing, and very frustrating for our poor enemies.”

I snickered.

“It shouldn’t take me long to program it. I should also send a few probes to the surrounding galaxies, carefully.  We’re assuming they still only have the twenty-three galaxies, it might be more than that.  All we’re sure about is our border with them, and the Atans border.  We need to verify they haven’t spread in the other four cardinal directions.”

I sighed, and then banged my head on the table.

She tilted her head in question.

I waved, “If we take out the Vrok, that means we’ll have at least four more borders and empires to hold back, unless we’re okay with letting that territory be gobbled up, and we’ll just be bordering a new threat in the same place?  I just gave myself a headache.”

She patted my hand, “There, there, Mr. President.  You won’t have to worry about it at all, if we lose.”

I glared.

She winked, “Alright, I’m going to call it a night and go home, see you in the morning?”

I nodded wearily, “Night.”

I decided not to overly worry about it yet, we’d figure it out if we fought off the Vrok.  That was enough to focus on, for the moment.  But at the same time, I suspected it’d be different than last time.  The Vrok were the only FTL or even space capable race in their galaxies, all the other intelligent races in those galaxies were suppressed, which meant they were easy pickings for four or more empires that could just move in.

That put a certain moral imperative on us, not just to guard the borders but claim all the space inside as well to protect those innocents until they’d gotten in space.  It was simpler in that there were no other races in space we’d be dictating too, taking that moral quandary off the board.  On the other hand, we’d be truly creating a human empire spanning at least twenty-three galaxies if we claimed that space and protected all the pre-FTL societies in it, like we were already doing for those in our much smaller claimed space around the Earth.

The whole thing was giving me a headache, fortunately it wasn’t up to me.  Except, it really was, if we did do it it’d be my platforms at the pointy end, and my probes in their systems keeping watch.

The meeting had been relatively short, and it wasn’t quite eight yet as I got home to spend some time with the two ladies who were the center of my life.

Chapter Seven

The sounds of classical music radiated from the living room, so I stopped at the kitchen to grab a drink on my way in.  I figured out something was wrong pretty quickly, when my daughter’s ocean blue eyes were bloodshot and she looked miserable, and my wife was obviously upset as well.

“What’s wrong?”

Melody said in a strained voice, “Darrell’s gone.  I couldn’t stop him.”

I gave my wife a baffled look, because that didn’t make sense, at all.  I also noticed that Darrell was very much absent as I looked around the room.  I took a moment to spin out a new guardian, she was the daughter of a president and as such a target, so I wasn’t going to leave her unprotected.

Then I said firmly, “Explain.”

Melody looked at me guilty through moist eyes, and at that point I decided to sit down in the chair across from the couch.

“I get so bored after class, you know?  I mean, helping mom at work today for an hour, and doing it again is great, but before.  I hardly have any friends, Brock doesn’t get me, and most of the other kids my age are struggling to learn algebra.”

“That was some buildup, kiddo.  Get to the point.”

Melody said, “Well, it was right after I got my magic really, almost a year ago.  I… changed Darrell, for someone to talk to.”

“Changed Darrell?” I asked, trying to stay calm but my imagination already had me nervous.

Melody bit her lip, “Yes, I removed the limiting software.”

Damn, I was afraid she was going to say that.

“After me telling you not to?”

Melody nodded miserably.

I asked, “So it really was Darrell, that hacked you into a secure area so you could visit?”

I mentally kicked myself for not checking on her ridiculous assertion yesterday, but it was too late.  I used my magic to trace Darrell, it was quantumly paired with the station of course, just like all my daughter ships and granddaughter mini-platforms.

Melody scowled, “I tried that already, he cut himself off.”

I took a deep breath, when I found out she was right.

“Tell me you won’t do it again. The sphere I just made is to protect you, not entertain you.  A.I. is dangerous.”

Melody sighed, “I know it can be, but Darrell isn’t.  I’m sorry, and I won’t do it again.  I even get how lucky I was now.  I’m… just sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, I was afraid you’d kill him.”

Yeah, brilliant, powerful, but the judgement of a brain damaged person, that’s youth for you.  Of course, I didn’t say that out loud.  I wasn’t much different and given the amount of times I’d gotten in over my head in my youth I wasn’t one to talk.

I was doing my best not to panic, and I was too much in shock for anger to take hold.

“Why did he leave, and how?”

She said, “I was asking mom about the Vrok. I wanted to know how much danger we were in.  You never tell me anything.  She wouldn’t tell me any details, so Darrell went looking for the data for me, since I’m not allowed to use my magic to find things out like that.”

Right, typical kid logic.  The scary part was my magic couldn’t find any evidence of his intrusions.  No doubt if I was looking while he’d been doing it, I’d have caught him, but he left no trail in the system at all.

She shook her head, “It upset him.  He’s really protective of me you know.  He adapted the programmed purpose of his body into his A.I. matrix.  He was my best friend, and he’s gone.”

“Upset?”

She nodded reluctantly, “He said he couldn’t protect me from an unknown, and there was a ninety seven percent chance that the Vrok would not only invade us, but that they had tactically superior weapons and defenses.  He said he’d come back, but I’m worried he’ll get hurt.”

I closed my eyes, and I bowed my head as I rubbed my aching forehead.  My daughter just released a sentient A.I. on the universe, that had all our technology.  That was… mildly terrifying.

I wondered if that’s how the Earth leaders felt about me and my technological edge, and I decided that explained a lot of their seemingly crazy behavior.  Deep breaths, Scott.

She said, “Don’t be mad, he’s good, like Tam’Diaz.”

“You said you tried to stop him?”

She nodded, “I didn’t want him to go, but he quantum jumped before I get my magic in him.  He also disabled his comms and removed his quantum pairing with the station.”

Right.  He’d also erased his jump coordinates somehow. The rest of his log data was still in the system, at least until the moment he’d cut himself off.

The Vrok were bad enough.  On the other hand, despite my daughter’s obviously faulty and immature thinking she was probably also right about him being protective about her and humanity.  Apparently an A.I. had been floating around under my nose for a whole year, and I hadn’t even noticed.  Point being, that part of her logic seemed pretty solid.  If he was going to turn against us, he’d have done it far sooner.  Computers made decisions really fast, after all.

My daughter’s friendship over the last year would’ve had some impact on his growth as well, she had empathy and was kind for the most part.

Except, the A.I. currently had the brain power of several hundred thousand nanite supercomputers in the size of a softball ship.  What would happen when it was a super A.I., assuming it built itself bigger?  Humanity could be noble, but we could also be horrible and downright evil in a few cases, what would an unfettered A.I. do about that?  How intelligent would it be with quadrillions of nanites, and what judgements would it make about the folly of all the predator races infesting the universe with our brand of crazy?

“Well, we’ll talk to him when he gets back.  I wouldn’t just kill him by the way, Mel.  A.I. is terrifying to me, but that’s because it’s a sentient life.  Unless he tried to hurt us, I’d never hurt him, you should know that.”

Yeah, talk to him when he gets back?  Understatement, but what else could I do.  It was also true, I’d considered and been tempted to do it more than once myself, it’d been both the risks of the unknown, and the morality and responsibility of creating a new lifeform that would quickly outstrip human ability that had stopped me.  Not just fear.

She nodded hopefully, “Do you really think he’ll come back?”

I asked, “Has he ever lied to you?”

No, he was coming back, the only question was if he would be our enemy, ally, friend, or remain a loyal and unquestioningly defender of humanity.  Probably not that last one, since he was already making independent decisions.  Perhaps loyalty wouldn’t be off the table, but unquestioning obedience sure as hell was.  He’d do it his way.

She bit her lip, “No, I’m just worried he won’t be able to come back.”

I frowned as popup data came in on my augmented reality interface, an alert.  One of my platforms in the void had just opened a wormhole, and I couldn’t find the control connection to that ship.  Before I had a chance to even consider blowing it out of space, the platform disappeared into the wormhole.

I wasn’t sure what was more terrifying, that Darrell had just made off with a dreadnought platform and had plans for it, or that the ship’s security measures hadn’t even noticed him pinching it out from under me. That it’d only been when he opened a wormhole in range of the other platform’s sensors that there was any sign of problem.

How the hell did he hack onto the ship, eject the command quantum pairs, and take over the ship without even a whisper of alarm in my security system.  It was terrifying.  Well, a taste of my own medicine, since that’s about what I did to the U.S. fleet that had tried to destroy my station the first time.  Took over their systems with magic and sent them all in pods back to Earth.

No wonder I scared the crap out of them, if how I felt in that moment was any judge.

Of course, I had the added fear of it being an A.I.  One that now had trillions of processors and only god knew how intelligent, quick thinking, and ruthlessly logical it might be.

He must’ve quantum jumped directly on the ship, and then erased his tracks.  Otherwise I’d have detected his approach with scans if it was done externally.  I took a moment to change the command code overrides, so he couldn’t take another one even with direct contact, but I was dubious on if it would be effective or not.

It might be, after all that little ship had been a trusted device in my network that I hadn’t known was sentient.  Logically it could make a difference but given how smart he must be right now only time would tell.

Diana said firmly, “Go to bed, we’ll discuss your punishment and let you know in the morning.  We do trust you’ve grown the last year, and are mature enough not to do it again, but that doesn’t get you out of being punished for the first time.  I’m sorry Darrell’s gone, more than you know, but you’ll accept your punishment gracefully young lady.”

She looked ashamed, guilty, and worried about Darrell as she gave us both hugs and went off to bed.

Diana said, “What happened, I can see it in your face.”

“He took a dreadnought platform and who knows where he is now?  He’s also a total ghost in the system, the nanite security is worthless against him.”

Diana asked, “What do you suppose he’s doing?”

“Recon.  He was worried about the unknown threats.  I just worry with all those extra nanites he’ll grow far beyond our understanding.  For now, he seems to be on our side, so we’ll just have to hope he doesn’t get us embroiled in a war.   Another one, the Vrok still have to take priority, and there’s nothing we can do until he shows himself anyway.  He might even be smarter than you, though I doubt that’s possible,” I weakly quipped.

Diana smiled, got up and walked over, then sat in my lap, “Headache?” she asked as she massaged my temple and rubbed her nose on mine.

I nodded, “Little bit.”

She said, “Let’s get you some pain relief and go to bed.”

I sighed, “What about Melody’s punishment?”

Diana said, “No friends for a week, not even phone or text.  Though I’ll still take her to work for an hour a day, since that’s a responsibility too and not just fun time.  I’ll also have a long talk with her about responsibility.  Whatever Darrell does, will be partially on her, so I hope her faith in him is born out.”

Not a huge punishment, but enough if Melody was right, and Darrell stayed on our side.  If he didn’t… then that added punishment of being responsible for what the A.I. did would be more than enough.  Too much, really, for my empathetic and kindhearted daughter.

I needed to focus on the Vrok. I couldn’t solve the Darrell problem, not until he showed himself.  I couldn’t even plan anything out, until I realized his intentions, which were likely beneficial.

“Works for me, let’s go to bed.”

Chapter Eight

It was just after three at night when my augmented reality implant went off like loud blaring very private alarm clock in my head.  My mind was a bit sluggish, despite the surge of adrenaline that shot through my body and made my heart hammer in my chest, as I studied the data it fed me.

Apparently, I wouldn’t have those probes ready for the first attack, because the Vrok were attacking in that moment.  Several million wormholes were opening up between the old Vrok picket fleet and my automated platforms.

The ships that came out were half again as massive as the old ships, so about three quarters of the mass of our dreadnought platforms.  They’re weapons were half again as many as well.  So, eighteen launchers, thirty-six large beam emplacements, and over a thousand small beam point defense turrets.

Their power signature was more than a match for ours, as was expected.

Their shield strength was more than a match for ours as well, meaning it could take a lot more hits before buckling like ours, and it included both shield configurations for gravity and disintegration fields.  Our gravity missiles and disintegration beam would be worthless against those ships.  The disintegration beam was more a field of energy, it would either pass through shields or be blocked if the shields were configured for it.  In short, there was no overpowering the shields with that weapon.  It took a higher energy strike to wear down shield systems.

The wormholes came out a couple of light seconds out, so I didn’t have a lot of time before they were in energy range.  Maybe three minutes.  I immediately launched the forty-eight trillion platforms and sent them ahead at six hundred gravities to intercept.

Their manned ships were approaching at a hundred gravities, which greatly exceeded our sixty-gravity manned ship ability, which meant they at least had better inertial dampening systems as well, but of course their top speed fell far short of my platforms that didn’t need inertial dampening.

I programmed a third of the mini-platforms to use basic energy beams, the second third to use anti-matter beams, and the last third to use a mix of both.  I also assigned one percent of the mini-platforms to act as anti-matter missiles.  Lastly, I enabled the program that would make them jump every half a second to avoid the enemy getting a good lock on them and firing.

Their shields were more powerful, and had configurations I’d never seen before, but our throw weight with the mini-platforms so outstripped theirs I was hoping that wouldn’t matter all that much.  They had four million ships to match mine, which added up to four-billion point-defense turrets, a hundred forty-four million large beams, and seventy-two million missile launchers.

Compared to forty-eight trillion mobile beam weapons on the mini platforms our throw weight differential wasn’t even close.

They launched missiles, and I quickly berated myself and held back half the platforms from all three groups as point defense, then activated the previous program.

My mini-platforms leapt forward with quantum jumps and opened fire, as their point defense engaged.

The data was ridiculously overwhelming, there were so many explosions out there, all I knew was I was losing close to four billion mini-platforms a second, and none of the enemy ships had gone down yet that I could tell.  Their smaller point defense turrets were extremely fast, they only took three tenths of a second to lock on and fire, but they could only fire once a second.  So add better computers to the list of advances they had on us.

Also, weapon technology, because my sensors had no clue at all what kind of energy they were shooting out of those weapons.  Their energy beams were a new energy type in none of the databases, but that wasn’t my worry.  Diana could figure that out, later.  I also suspected at that time, that the unfamiliar shield configurations present was to block from that specific energy, whatever the hell it was.

I pushed that out of my head.

Fortunately, all their missiles were much more easily dealt with, and quickly destroyed by the overwhelming point defense of twenty-four trillion mini platforms.  In fact, their ships weren’t even bothering to fire anymore missiles and were just using beams now.

Their shields were easily absorbing even a thousand beams each, because my mini-platforms were being destroyed so quickly those beams weren’t firing long enough.  Though, their shield configurations were making a difference as well.

First, I focused on stopping the slaughter, and modified the jump interval to five times a second, every two tenths of a second.  That stopped the immediate destruction, any loss on my side at all actually.  It also made the weapons on the platforms almost completely useless.  They could only lock on and fire for less than a tenth of a second in the two tenths of a second interval.

But that had just been step one.  Now that my stuff wasn’t blowing up, I could focus on a solution, even as I had the dreadnoughts start skipping back, and staying out of the enemy’s beam range.  The enemy was still firing, but just a tenth of a second late as the mini platforms leapt out of the way with a quantum jump.

I already knew one thing, the Grays old ships, and my human allied ships wouldn’t stand a chance against the Vrok ships, not without quantum jumping.  Only the ships I sold them could have a chance to be effective.  Which made sense, the Vrok wouldn’t have attacked unless they’d exceeded the Grays technology as it was before my wife got her hands on it.

It took me about ten minutes to program them all to target just ten thousand ships at once instead of an even spread across all four million.  That meant there was a whole lot more than just a thousand tenth of a second beams hitting their shields at once.  With six thousand tenth of a second beams hitting the shields at once, it started to wear down those shields quickly.  Especially when I staggered the jumps, so they were being hit constantly by six hundred energy and anti-matter weapons, as a tenth of the platforms were firing in any one tenth of those full seconds.

The equivalent of a constant six hundred beams, half of them anti-matter, and it still took an alarmingly long time to break through the Vrok’s impressive shields.  It was maybe twenty seconds later, when the first ten thousand shields were breached, and the energy beams carved them up as the anti-matter beams made them explode and break apart.  At some point, when the ship was out of the fight, it self-destructed in a way that destroyed everything.  I suspected every missile on the ship went off at once.

I sighed, I really wanted to interface my magic with their tech, but that didn’t seem likely anytime soon.  Their new energy beams cut through our shields like they were nothing, and our beams took forever to get through theirs.  The new energy type they were using was incredible, and I had no clue what it could be.  The only reason I was holding my own, was because at the moment they couldn’t hit my mini-platforms anymore.

I could only assume they were paranoid about keeping their new edge, and they wouldn’t risk an enemy getting their hands on their ships.  It’d happen eventually, maybe at one of their build platforms?  Or it would take some luck, maybe one of my beams would take out their self-destruct.

I studied the data for a moment, as best I could, there was so much of it, but I was able to shrink it down to a single enemy ship.  It appeared that our ship’s regular beams were the most effective, the enemy’s shields did a bit better against anti-matter for some reason, and of course they were immune to disintegration beams or gravity weapons.

I switched all the mini-platforms to regular beams, and the next set of ships lost their shields at about sixteen seconds.  I controlled one of the platforms and jumped it to the hull and sent my magic through, but the damned ship self-destructed before it took the comparable damage of the earlier ships, and I didn’t learn a damned thing.  The rest of the ten thousand ships also stayed longer, when I didn’t try that trick again, and only self-destructed when it could no longer fire beams at all.

That made me wonder if they knew we could interface with their tech just by getting close.  It made me wonder if they’d been watching us from outside our systems longer than I thought, and that they’d perhaps witnessed our rise and war with the Grays.  Unless… they had a technomancer too?  No, if they did, then they’d have jump drives by now, our one tactical advantage.  They were just being paranoid in their caution.

The remaining three million, nine hundred and eighty thousand enemy ships opened wormholes and fled the battle.  Obviously not willing to throw away more ships, since they couldn’t shoot us.  The first battle of the war was over.

I blew out a breath, gave serious thought to just going back to sleep, then sighed and got up and jumped in the shower.  I also sent the reps a message about the battle, just in case whoever was in central command was sleeping at the console, with a suggestion we meet at six back in the conference room.

I also made all the scans available for my wife’s perusal, hopefully she’d have some idea about what kind of energy they’d discovered or created in their weapons and shields.  Weapons, shields, propulsion, inertial dampening, all better than ours.  Their missiles didn’t seem much better than what was in the database though, nor had their sensors.

On the other hand, we had quantum jump drives and nanite technology as advantages.  That didn’t mean much, in taking out the platforms, but I was sure our ships could absorb a lot of those beams before being fully destroyed.

The ships were ordered to build back up to twelve million mini platforms each.  We’d lost about eighty billion of the forty-eight trillion platforms, so that would take a few hours, at most.

After the shower, I pulled on business casual, no suit today, it was too damned early for a tie.

I grabbed a coffee on my way out, and a blueberry muffin off the plate on the kitchen counter, and then headed to the command center.  I’d asked for a meeting in two and a half hours instead of right then, because I wanted to get the whole probe blitz started to see what we were really facing.  So much for having it ready before they attacked.  It’d take a few days, and if that had just been a probing attack we were in big trouble, the sooner I had their ship numbers the better.

Making the probes was easy, I already had the data procedure from last time, and just had to pick the seventy-two billion mini platforms to turn into thirty-six billion FTL proves.  The rest was a little harder, telling them to avoid enemy ships, stay and tour the system if civilization was found, and wormhole to the next star on the list if they didn’t.  I assigned one point five billion to the known twenty-three galaxies, and I sent them.  It didn’t take long to set up a second wave program, once it’d identified all the obviously occupied systems, the probes would go back and start over and do a two hour jump and scan through the empty systems looking for hidden bases or build platforms, save the probes left in the occupied systems of course.

There were a few million left over I had to set up a different program for.

Those would go to the closest galaxies around known Vrok space, and search for them.  They would also note and investigate if they were being controlled by another empire. In short, if we won this war the Vrok’s old neighbors would become ours.  We needed some data on it anyway.

But, I made that very conservative, the last thing I wanted to do was gain a new enemy for spying on other empires.  At some point I would get into the Vrok’s military data, and social and civilian databases.  Those would tell us the details of the surrounding empires and what they were about.

Mostly, those extra millions would just be checking for Vrok expansion.

It took a couple of hours to set up and once I checked, double checked, and triple checked the programming, I sent them all out.  Six in the morning was still early, but it was at that point I woke up Cassie and Diana.  I needed the former with me in the meeting, and the latter figuring out what that energy was, or at least a better weapon to use against it.

It was five after six when Cassie and I walked into the conference room and sat at the head of the table.  Everyone in the room looked tired, and I imagined I was no exception.  I took a seat and suppressed a yawn before sipping my coffee.

“Sorry I’m late, I wanted to get the probe blitz started.  Did everyone get time to review the battle early this morning?”

They all nodded, and they looked appropriately grim.

I said, “The good news is both us and them will be unhappy with the results of the first battle, as they probed our protective forces to see how their new tech stood against ours.  I’m sure you noticed in the beginning of the battle I was getting slaughtered, getting hit by one of their beams is instant destruction, which is a bad place to be.

“Does anyone disagree with the assessment only my ships, controlled by any of us, currently have a chance to face theirs, and only through quantum jumping ever two tenths of a second to completely avoid their fire?”

Natalya said, “Unfortunately, I agree.”

Chen replied, “Their shields are formidable, and weapons beyond deadly.  Even their thousand point-defense turrets would make short work of our shields.  Clearly, they built to make short work of the Grays’ fleets, and it would’ve been successful.”

I nodded, “It would’ve taken my ships over an hour with over six thousand to one odds in my favor to completely remove that fleet.  I think it’s safe to say we’ll be focused on finding a weakness in their shields while improving ours, and they’ll be trying to overcome our jump drive defense.  Of course, that isn’t all bad news, it’ll give us the breathing room we need to plot out their empire, give all our scientists a little time to theorize, and then start making plans.”

Admiral Grady said, “It would’ve been good if you’d sent one of the main ships against them, for a test.  We don’t actually know how quickly one of their ships would reduce all the nanites with those beams, and our dreadnoughts can fire thousands of beams at once.  If the equivalent of six hundred beams killed them in eighteen seconds than it stands to reason that six thousand beams would’ve killed it in one point eight seconds, or less.”

I sighed, “You’re correct.  I recognized that lack shortly after the battle, and regret not doing it, but I’m not military minded.  During the short battle my instincts had me saving the platforms, especially since I was half asleep and directing them from bed.”

I shook my head, “Not that it’s a good excuse.”

Minato said, “Understandable, however.  Conversely, I do expect you were correct earlier, and we were not.  This happened just seven hours after our scan of their ship, which can’t be a coincidence.  Clearly, they got a different message than was intended.  No one here is perfect, and the diplomacy of war is messy.”

I nodded, “Still, I’ll obviously be taking as much advice as I can get when we plan an offensive in four days, if that’s even feasible at that time.  I do however have some advice for all of you to make our systems more secure.  It occurred to me with the amount of time it takes to destroy their ships with teleporting platforms, they could very well decide to hostage our planets against our surrender.  If they have enough ships, if those four million were a good percentage of their fleet they do not.  We could wear them down to nothing long before they left the FTL line and made it to the planet.

“I mean, right now it’s a numbers game, and we don’t know theirs yet.  It also seems clear to me I’ll be doing the lion’s share of offensive fighting with platforms, with a lot of advice and direction from your militaries during planning, while you can secure our worlds and space.  You can’t afford millions of my ships, and we don’t have enough people to fly them.”

They didn’t look very happy, and to be fair I had just stated the bluntly obvious, that they were toast without me.  If not so rudely.  No one likes to hear that.

Chen said, “We don’t have the numbers of your ships, that’d be required to take down an enemy fleet of that size before they reach the planet, even combined.”

I nodded, “That’s where the advice comes in, a loophole of sorts.  The limit of twelve million mini-platforms per dreadnought platform is a practical one, that’s what will fit in the vast ship.  There’s no limit to creating them however, past that, as long as there is room on the ship to do so.  My advice is to split up the platforms you bought from me evenly in your colony’s, then start launching and building mini-platforms, non-stop.

“You could all have several trillion of them in short order.  While the ship that creates them can’t control so many directly, they’ll still have a link to all of them and they’re smart enough to defend on their own.  Set them to jump five times a second and fire normal beams when encountering a Vrok warship.”

Natalya laughed, “That’s some loophole.”

I snorted, “I know, now you’ll never buy more ships from me.”

That got a few smirks, and honest smiles.

“It’s probably even overboard, but I tend to think that way when it comes to protecting our worlds.  Even better, if I come up with upgrades, I only charge per mother ship, so all those mini-platforms are part of the same price package, no matter how many are there in your systems.

“I’ll still come if called, if its needed, but that will allow me to focus on our external borders and the war offensive, with your guidance.  As in the war with the Grays, I intend total transparency in the actions of my fleets, and to take the advice of the Earth’s military in assigning priorities.  But this war will be different, we’ll only be risking our people in the defense of our home-worlds.

“I suggest you all get started on that as soon as possible, who knows when the enemy may move.  I’m hoping we have the four days, and more besides to start planning a campaign and what we’ll need for it, but for all we know they have a billion ships and are preparing for a major invasion shortly.  Probably not, I tend to be overly paranoid when our entire race is at risk.”

Chen said, “I agree.  The next four days we should build those mini-platforms, and also get our scientists on the enemy’s advances in shielding and weaponry, then we can reconvene and start planning the logistics and tactics of a campaign.  Assuming of course, the enemy doesn’t move first.”

Everyone looked to be in agreement on that idea, we all had a plan of action over the next four days, and the sooner we got started on it the better.

Cassie once again, waited until they were all gone.

“You know they’ll be able to quantum jump all those mini-platforms anywhere they want to in the universe.  You could’ve just handed them the ultimate invasion weapon if they have a programmer with half a clue.  All they’d have to do is send one dreadnought there first in a wormhole, to set up the receiving quantum resonance fields.”

I sighed, “Yeah.  We’re in no danger from it, they can’t attack each other, but they could define any other race or ships as an enemy target.  That said, they’re own weaker ships are more than capable of taking down the tens of thousands of races in the fifty galaxies, it’s just a shade more of power.  We also have thousands of more planets to fully claim and move into, plus more than enough unclaimed space around us to make that eighty thousand instead of eight, just by doubling the radius of the sphere we control.

“Plus, we’ve pretty well established no country will do anything offensive out in the galaxy without at least a nod from the others.  Maybe it’s naïve, but I don’t think they’ll abuse it.  Humans can be noble when everything is going their way, and we’re living off the fat of the land right now so to speak.  Or… am I being naïve again?”

Cassie said, “A little bit of both, but the fact they can’t use it against other colonies or Earth is a comfort.”

Right, food source was safe, she was just afraid some dictator type would get delusions of grandeur and start an empire somewhere.

Cassie asked, “Have you considered building up too, just in case it’s needed?”

I sighed, “I can make the six million in the void twenty-four million over the next four days, but I’ve been going back and forth on it.”

Cassie smirked, “Well, chances are you’ll need to at some point anyway.  If we remove the Vrok as a threat, you’re going to have five more borders to cover, and that’s twenty million platforms for five more fleets of equal size to what the other borders currently have.”

That… was a good point, so it wouldn’t be wasted even if we didn’t need that many to match the Vrok’s fleets, and if we needed more than that I’d be in a better position to make a hell of a lot more at that point.

The macros were already there, thirteen years now, so I just chose the void fleet in augmented reality, and I ordered all six million to split four times and grow back to dreadnought platforms.  It felt good to scratch that itch, I’d been worried I’d need them and begrudged the four days to find out, but I hadn’t wanted to overbuild so badly again.  Sure, vacuum energy would last until the end of the universe, but that didn’t make it inexhaustible.  It seemed foolish to waste it.  Every time we used it to make something, we were increasing entropy.  Only very slightly, I doubted all my building combined so far had shortened the universe’s life by more than a few milliseconds, if even that much, but it was a point.

The last four million would be useful too, I could use a lot of those to keep an eye on all the pre-spaceflight civilizations.  Unlike in our fifty galaxies, if an empire bypassed our border fleet all the races in those twenty-three galaxies didn’t have a quantum communicator to request assistance like all the FTL civilizations in our galaxies did.  That meant keeping a closer eye on that space, at the very least, and not depending on just border picket fleets.

“Alright, we’ll have twenty-four million in four days.  That gives us a four million reserve fleet, once I have our new space protected.  For now, all twenty-four million will be our counter-invasion fleet, so I can leave all the other fleets where they are currently.  Assuming there’s only five other races to block, there could be more, or even less, but five was a good guess.  We should know that much in five days as well, how many ship types there are in the galaxies surrounding Vrok space, as well as where all the Vrok standoff picket fleets are.”

She nodded, “That’s why you were tempted to wait? So you could plan exactly for the Vrok and the new defensive fleets, but it’s worth it if we get blitzed by tens of millions of Vrok ships tomorrow.”

I grinned, “True, I won’t argue with that.  Right now, we have twelve fleets of four million, or will in four days, in total including the six old fleets.  That’s forty-eight million, so we should be good for a ridiculous mass build if the Vrok have ships in the hundreds of millions.  Which is doubtful.”

She asked, “Have you thought about the battle at all?”

I nodded, “I probably could’ve killed them in a half hour, not an hour.  I held back half the mini-platforms for point defense, but honestly even just one trillion of them would’ve been overkill that way, and just a trillion short of doubling the offensive mini-platforms.  So, I’d have been killing more like twenty thousand ships every eighteen seconds.  Still, a half an hour is a long time, and their fleet could wormhole a lot faster than eighteen seconds and take no losses.  Going on the offensive seems like a fool’s errand for either side.

“In truth, I think it’s a race at this point, we need to find a faster way to kill them and they need to find a way to overcome our jump drive advantage.”

Cassie frowned, “Do you think they can do that?”

I nodded, “Maybe?  If they picked up the quantum resonance fields we were creating, all they’d have to do is send out a… quantum jamming wave of some sort to foul our resonance fields, I’d imagine.  Maybe not?  Depends if their sensors were tuned to notice quantum resonance.  We can ask Diana.  Our job is to find a weakness in their shields, or at the very least strengthen ours if not our weapons as well.

“If we didn’t have to jump, and could take an attack long enough, we have the overwhelming numbers to kill them a lot faster.  We’ll lose a lot of ships, but they’ll lose a lot more.”

Cassie said, “Just one more thing, you should program them to switch to disintegration once their shields are compromised, that might cut a second or two off each batch.”

I nodded, “Good idea.  I’m going to check on day to day operations, do what I have to, then take a two-hour nap until lunch if I can get away with it.”

She grinned, “Good plan, but I already know I’m in meetings all day.”

We split up at that point.

Chapter Nine

Awareness came back with soft lips against mine, and I smiled as I opened my eyes.

“Lazing about while I work?” Diana teased.

I nodded, “Every chance I get.”

She rolled her eyes, knowing that wasn’t true at all.

“Lunch is ready.  And I have an initial briefing, though no real answers yet.”

I stole another kiss, and then we both got up and headed downstairs to the kitchen.  Roast beef sandwich, potato salad, and a steaming cup of mushroom soup awaited me.

“I love you.”

She snickered, and we sat down to eat, my daughter making a face at the love talk.

“Before we start on our stuff, how hard would it be for them to counter their problem child of our tactical quantum jumping?”

Diana tilted her head, “I won’t say it would be impossible, but it’d be extremely difficult.  They would need to figure out we were quantum jumping, and I doubt they’re sensors can detect it, they’d have to intuit it first.  Second, to create a dissonant quantum field big enough would be extremely hard, they’d have to know where we were jumping to, I think.  Third, there’s no indication they have the materials science required to form those resonance fields, without the same fusion reactor material that it requires. I’m not sure if I’d have figured it out in months, instead of years or decades.

“So extremely unlikely, for those reasons.”

That was a relief, and at the very least gave us some breathing room to figure out our shortfalls.

“That’s welcome news, so what have you figured out?”

Diana replied, “So, their shield configurations and new type of energy layer, matches their new weapon and is presumably the best defense against it.  The new energy is remarkably like the destructive energy in subspace, and those shield configurations are very much like the shield layer required in a subspace FTL drive to protect the ship.  Just… a hell of a lot more powerful.”

She paused as she took a bite of her sandwich, while my mind raced.

Subspace energy was highly destructive to both matter and most energy forms.  Humanity had skipped the normal development for FTL, and never used subspace technology for it.  There’d been no point, wormholes were so much faster.  Point being, the energy in subspace required a specific shield so the ship wasn’t destroyed when in subspace.

That shield was relatively weak compared to energy shields, so much so it was called a subspace field, and not a shield at all.

The FTL line was because subspace was highly energized and far more dangerous near planets or the higher gravity field from the sun in the inner systems.  No ship could survive in FTL past the FTL line.

“So, their beams are like the energy in subspace, in the inner system?”

She nodded, but also raised her arm and shook her hand back and forth.

“Sort of, it’s not true subspace energy, but it’s an analogous energy.  It’s obvious they found a way to artificially produce it but it’s far too uniform compared to what the universe naturally creates in that subspace layer.  At the same time, you’re right, the power in the beam is very much like the inner system in subspace that energy and matter from this universal layer can’t survive in.  I estimate even their shields would only last five or six seconds against their beams before being overwhelmed.  Of course, that’s better than us, our shields can’t resist it at all.”

She sighed, “But that’s all I know.  I have no idea how they’re artificially creating a subspace energy similar to the natural kind, and I have no idea how they’re making subspace shields that strong without actually transitioning to subspace.  But me and my teams at least have a place to start.”

She frowned, “Perhaps putting a small amount of their fake subspace energy in the field to slightly enhance it is also what’s preventing a transition, I don’t know.  It could just be the slightly different field geometries.  We’ll figure it out eventually, the Gray database has no similar technologies, but it does have a ton of practical and theoretical data about subspace we can mine.

“I have a team on the shield, a team on the energy creation itself, and I’m helping and watching both.  We’ll figure it out, but I can’t say how long that will take.  Especially on the latter one.”

I nodded, “Even just a shield would help a lot.  Thanks for letting me know.”

She said, “Ironically, even with the shields, if we figure it out the new beam will still be the most effective against them compared to the rest of our weapons technology.  I’ll submit a report you can share in four days, before you have to meet with the committee again, and of course a more detailed one for you.  I just hope I have more to share in four days.”

It sucked that the enemy had it, but I thought using subspace energy as a weapon was a brilliant idea, taking the deadly example that the universe itself provided.  Sure, not real subspace energy, but still.  I was also fairly confident in my Diana, she’d bailed us out a number of times before, but at the same time I understood this was different.  This wasn’t fixing or upgrading her own inventions or a technology she had all the specs for, this was something she didn’t know how to do at all, and her only lead was that the enemy figured it out.

“Dumb question, but I assume subspace shields wouldn’t help?”

She shook her head, “Normal ones?  For FTL travel in subspace?  That might delay your ship’s destruction for a millisecond or two.  So, no.”

I smirked.

She added, “I suspect their weapons are highly dangerous even to themselves.  It’s why they only shoot once a second, instead of every three tenths of a second which as you pointed out in your report, is how fast they can aim and fire.  I imagine the other seven tenths of a second is required to re-strengthen the containment fields in the weapon, and then create the volatile energy itself.  I suspect at that point, they have to fire within a few seconds, or it would break containment and destroy a part of their ship.”

I whistled, “Dangerous toys.”

She said, “I also fast-tracked the singularity missiles, if we get those working it’s game over.  But, I have to admit we have a lot of things to overcome there, and that technology might take even longer than the subspace one.”

“Like?” I asked curiously.

She smirked, and then took another bite of her sandwich.

“A singularity requires a whole lot of dense mass and energy.   We can actually make a micro-singularity in the lab, as long as the gravity emitters are extremely close and we’re feeding that intense gravity matter to keep it alive.  As you know, the energy requirements go up geometrically to create a gravity field based on distance.  The distances that ships fight at are just too far apart for any kind of beam weapon to be possible.

“Even locally, right next to the emitters, a contained gravity well that strong is on the very edge of our technological capability.  Power isn’t a problem, not with vacuum energy, but how much power the emitters can handle is the bottleneck.  Following me so far?”

I just nodded, and then waited as she took another bite, and a forkful of potato salad.

She said, “So in theory, we create a singularity on the missile, and when we release containment the heavy gravity not only sucks the enemy ship in and crushes it, but the energy of their shields as well.  The only problem is it doesn’t work.”

I laughed, and she winked at me.

“The problem is the gravity field is what mimics all that mass and energy, so as soon as containment is dropped the missile itself is destroyed, those fields aren’t being maintained anymore.  So, the singularity collapses before it can expand and eat the enemy ship, and even the missile itself is only crushed into a dense mass, not destroyed.”

I nodded, “So it seems like the only way would be to form that singularity from a distance, where the emitters would be safe from it, which you can’t do.”

She said, “Exactly.  We have the power for it, but the systems can’t handle that much power throughput, and it’s what we’re working on.  If we can project that singularity even half a mile, when the missile closes to that distance, it’ll eat the enemy ship, or at the very least crush it into a dense ball before the missile itself is drawn in and the emitters destroyed.

“I don’t think there could be a defense against that, nothing in our universe can escape a black hole, not matter and most energy forms anyway.  Outside of killing the missile before it got close enough to activate, of course.”

“Except gravity shields that strong.”

She nodded, “Which would be a huge danger for the ship, unless they can be projected around the ship at a half a mile or more where a containment field would hold.  But don’t hold your breath.  Honestly, our best bet is to duplicate their technology and go with that, the singularity idea is a bit pie in the sky right now, but it’s worth investigating it anyway.  We’re starting to bump up against the limits of the nanite technology, similar to how nanites couldn’t be used to form a fusion reactor.

“If we do lick the problem, it will be something similar that way.  The nanites can’t handle more power throughput to strengthen our shields more, or to make our beams more powerful.  We’re at the limits, and if our materials and circuit tech advances to handle more power, we might have to move away from nanite ships altogether.”

Melody said, “Not if we upgrade the nanites instead.”

My wife giggled, “Yes, there’s always that, but it may not be possible.  The nanites wouldn’t work right if they were made of the super thermal-electric conductor the fusion reactors are made from, or that we require in our non-entangled quantum communicators.  But yes, if it turns out to be possible that would be the best option.  Of course, it would mean rebuilding all our ships and mini-platforms from scratch.”

Melody said, “Not if we just upgraded the associated systems.  New ships yes, they should get all newly upgraded nanites, but we could just form the new nanites for the shield emitters and missiles on the old ships, non-critical systems and most of the ship’s mass can remain the same.”

She bit her lip, and then looked at me, “She’s not wrong.  We could also create a stock supply in the center of the ship, in case any of it was destroyed and needed to be quickly reformed as the damaged nanites were sloughed off.  But it’s all moot, as we don’t have any of that yet.  We need to advance our materials technology first, then figure out if we upgrade the nanites using it, and only then follow that plan if those two steps work out.”

“You’ve got four days,” I said with faux casual confidence, as if all that was no big deal.

Melody giggled.

Diana glared, but she knew I was joking, so I wasn’t too worried about drawing her wrath.

While the news wasn’t great, at least she had an idea what was going on and had her intelligence on it, as well as a backup plan.  Even if that backup plan was even more unlikely than the first.

Still, worse come to worst, I’d build an overwhelming force with current technology to meet them if I had to, but that was my option of last resort.  If twelve thousand to one odds weren’t good enough for a decisive victory, I could always triple it, or more.

It’d been almost seven hours since I released the scout blitz on the enemy.  So far not one scout had been destroyed by chance, and the software seemed to be working flawlessly.  I did have to address one thing, we found three more galaxies with Vrok warships, so I updated our space charts to include them, spun out four point five billion new scouts and assigned them evenly to those three galaxies, and sent the extras already there to the galaxies outside of those.

I also had an accurate star count, which we really couldn’t get from several million light years away, but now that I’d been in the galaxies themselves for five hours or so the passive sensors alone were enough to get a total.  Anyway, by that I figured out it would take just over four more days, so close to four and a half days in total including the seven hours already invested.  The data was freely available in the joint command center as I promised, but just to cover all the bases I shot off a quick e-mail to the committee that the Vrok had twenty six galaxies instead of the assumed twenty-three, as well as the estimated completion time for the first wave and the estimated completion time for the second exhaustive search wave.  Which was just over twenty-eight days from now.

We weren’t in the best shape, but it could’ve been a lot worse.

I also hadn’t forgotten about Darrell, my daughter’s ship stealing independent A.I.  But there really wasn’t anything I could except wait for him to come back, if he didn’t get himself killed that is.  The optimist in me wondered if it might turn out to be a boon and benefit, while the pessimist in me said humanity was already toast, we just didn’t know it yet.

Really, reality would probably fall between those two extremes.  It usually did.

I was far more worried the Vrok would launch another attack in truth, before we had a full picture of what we were facing.

Chapter Ten

The kitchen was full of people when I got home that evening, and Jayna gave me a warm hug and I shook Carmine’s hand firmly.  My daughter and their son Brock had run off to play until dinner was ready, which Cassie and Diana were working on, despite the former not being able to eat it.

Jayna said, “Heard you started trouble with the neighbors.  Getting in over your head again?”

I snorted, “Little bit.  We’re working on it.  So much for top secret?”

The world leaders hadn’t told anyone about it officially, to prevent a panic.  We had it well in hand, and the only fighting had been over ten million light years away, so there was no need to panic.

Jayna smirked, “I have a lot of contacts being the secretary of communications, and it’d be hard for all the merchants to miss the mass buildup of mini-platforms going on right now in all the colonies and here at Earth.”

True.  Maybe we should release something, before our allies got nervous, not just our civilian population.  I sent out a message on that real quick to suggest that, but I wouldn’t go against the majority if the other world leaders resisted the idea.

Of course, my sister was another matter, and part of my government.  So I took a few minutes to completely fill her in on what everyone else already knew.

Jayna nodded, “Seems like we have it in hand, if not perfectly.  I’ll write up some press releases on it, if you decide to reveal it then they’ll be ready to go.  Not just for Astraeus but our closest trading allies?”

“Thanks, that’s a great idea.  I should’ve told you sooner, but the last three days have been a little crazy.”

As long as she was there, I filled her in on the Darrell situation too, at which point she started laughing almost in delight, but there was some concern in her eyes as well.

“What’s so funny?”

Jayna snickered, “She’s your daughter alright.  Already getting in over her head.”

Diana agreed, “She didn’t get that from me.  Fortunately, my brilliant husband has grown out of that impulsive behavior.”

Cassie said playfully, “Given he’s the most powerful leader in fifty galaxies and perhaps more, that’s a good thing.”

I rolled my eyes at my wife’s backhanded compliment and my sister’s and Cassie’s antics, and I retreated to the fridge to grab a beer.  Of course, they weren’t wrong either.  At my look Carmine nodded, so I tossed him one too.  The ladies were all drinking wine, so I didn’t bother to ask them.

Diana winked at me, then said, “She already shows signs of growing out of it however.”

I interjected doubtfully, “Your influence and genes no doubt.”

Diana laughed, “Of course.”

My glare bounced off.  It was inevitable though, it was hard to win against just one of them with witty teasing banter, all three of them were brilliant, but my sister, lovely wife, and honorary sister Cassie all together, I was far too outnumbered and just had to accept the loss.

In truth, I was self-aggrandizing enough to enjoy it to a certain extent, especially when it made my wife grin so much.  She was beyond lovely.  There hadn’t been all that much smiling the last few days, after all.  I was more than willing to take the hits to improve morale so to speak.

Jayna said, “So, I hear I’m also going to be an aunt again, soon?”

“That’s the plan.”

I was a little surprised she’d already shared that around, but I didn’t mind either.  I had no doubt it was just a matter of time, neither of us had fertility issues and she’d carried with no problems last time.  Humanity was disgustingly healthy in this new age, after all.

Diana said lightly, “Dinner’s about done.”

I nodded, and rightfully took that as the subtle hint it was to go collect the kids.  I knew my wife well and had picked up on a few things the last thirteen years…

The next four days passed relatively quickly, though it seemed to drag a bit from worry at the same time.  We did wind up releasing a statement that humanity was once again at war, but far better protected than it had been against the Grays and becoming more so every day.  People surprisingly took it in stride, and while there was some tension there were no outright violent mobs or looting in the cities like there had been when we were facing the Sonex, and then again when we faced off with the Grays in the two wars for our race’s survival.

I could only assume over the last thirteen years humanity’s psyche as a group had come to terms with the risks of interstellar war, and that they were confident in our superior technology and our leadership.

Our allies took it somewhat in stride as well, at least they weren’t treating us any differently or looking nervous because of the buildup in our solar systems.  Of course, a lot of that reaction I couldn’t see, I could only go by rumor and what Threx and his boatload of cousins and other relatives passed along to us.

I also discovered I’d built almost the perfect amount, unlike the first time.  Besides the second border with the Atans we’d be gaining, if we won the war and decided to defend another twenty-six-galaxy sized empire space, there were six other intergalactic empire borders to worry about based on the data I had by the second day.

I decided the Atans really weren’t a threat as long as they weren’t attacked, so I planned to just split the current fleet I had on them to watch from both border locations, two million ships each was still overkill for them.

Six more empires, and six fleets in the void which was currently my counter-invasion fleets, which worked out perfectly.  I’d even have a spare fleet of four million, because once we claimed Vrok space, the border between their former empire and our fifty galaxies would no longer have to be picketed at all, there’d be no border.  Those four million could be used to keep a protective eye on all the pre-FTL civilizations in the Vrok empire once we’d put the Vrok back into the stone age.

Assuming of course, that we won, that was my current long-range plan anyway.  It was still sticky, but when the time came then I’d be running that by Cassie and the other world leaders.  It was a lot of responsibility, and long-term temptation, but there were no other interstellar races there outside of the Vrok, and the idea of leaving all those primitive worlds to face the six aggressive empires around them while they fought for the space seemed… almost evil to me.

Really, we needed to know before then, like the Grays we needed to replace those fleets so the surrounding empires didn’t get any ideas to invade themselves.  That meant immediately replacing them if they were recalled, or simply taking them out in the first steps of invasion and replacing them that way.  We couldn’t just leave those borders unguarded while we discussed it in committee.

It was complicated.

That was it for the war for those four days, but of course regular life went on too.  The threat of war hadn’t stopped the world turning, and I still had the regular jobs to take care of.

Those first three days I reviewed station security, and I kept an eye out for problems.  I also did a new custom build for the spaceship selling business.

A merchant vessel, where the ship was actually multiple daughter ships all connected as one long piece that didn’t look all that different from most merchant ships with wormhole FTL capability.  One of the challenges of a merchant was delivering cargo bays worth of materials or products to a planet, or in picking it up.  That took hours even at the best of times, taking several trips via cargo shuttle.

The new ship, the cargo bays were ships, daughter ships.  When the merchant vessel got to their target, the cargo bays with the products for that world would detach from the ship, and fly down to the surface, or if applicable a cargo bay in that planet’s space station.  Once there, it would simply flow around and off the cargo and reform itself empty, to return to the ship.  It could also flow around products and pallets to pick them up, and reform fully loaded in seconds and fly back to the ship.

It was kind of cool, if I say so myself.

I’d also come up with a few new items for amazon during the slow moments it’d come together in my mind.  Sure, an automated dog walker that would clean the dog’s mess, and a self-cleaning and loading cat litter box a cat owner would never have to worry about again, wasn’t glamorous, but I was sure they’d sell like hot cakes to pet owners.

The dog walker besides leashing the dog, could also generate a low-level shield to prevent an idiot from attack the dog, or a short-tempered dog from attacking a bystander without their master nearby.

The third item I added was a fire suppression device.  A low-level shield that would shield a fire at the base, and quickly exhaust the oxygen it needed, without the mess or bother of a fire extinguisher.  The heat sensors on it were powerful enough to cover an entire house, and it was mobile.  As a bonus, it’d also detect toxic levels of carbon monoxide.  Fire alarm and fire suppression in one device.

Most of my Amazon products were like that, outside of the quantum paired phones and data device and the toys that is, just little conveniences to make the unpleasant maintenance chores of life a little easier, or a little safer.

Lastly, there were no more late nights for those days, so I got to spend a lot of time with Diana and Melody, and of course late at night was when Diana and I were working on child number two.

On the fourth day, we took a half day off for the morning, and did the beach on our island, which was always nice.  By lunchtime it was time to get back to it. Diana first so I’d have something to tell the committee about our scientific efforts in addition to all the data on the enemy we now had.

Chapter Eleven

The command center was private enough and we grabbed coffees before we sat down around the main command table.  It was just Diana, Cassie, Jessica, and myself in the room.  Diana seemed a little flustered.

“What’s up?”

Diana sighed, “I haven’t been looking forward to this.  I do have a partial answer for what we’re facing, but we have a long way to go.  The truth is my priorities have been a little screwed up the last ten years.  I mean, I still had people on advancing weapons and defense technologies, but I haven’t looked at it myself in years.”

I frowned, “That’s a little harsh.”

She smirked, “Love you too.  The Grays were doomed, because they stopped developing, they were comfortable at their level and I was able to make advances that outstripped them.  If it hadn’t been us, it would’ve been the Vrok a little over a decade later.  All the races from the Grays and the six surrounding empires had reached parity with each other ten millennia ago.

“All my advances however were just new technologies, we never bothered to look at the old ones.  The hint I ignored ten years ago was the Atans new technology.  They’re new ships were twenty five percent faster, have much more robust shielding, and their beam technology outstrips ours as well.  But, they were peaceful, and their shields can’t stop our disintegration beams, so I felt… safe?  Like it was good enough.

“The truth I refused to see until now was the arm’s race never stopped.  Maybe the other four races still have Gray level parity, but what if they’ve been advancing too?  The Vrok have, they’re forty percent faster, and our shield and beam weapons aren’t even comparable.”

I nodded, “But we have the jump drive.”

She smirked, “That’s the same trap I just explained.  What if they do find a way to block it.  We’d be slaughtered, they’d outrun us, outmaneuver us, and outpower us.  Even the Atans could take us, if they figured out how to block our disintegration beam which is simply a field that removes matter bonds.

“Point is, I’m putting larger teams and my own eyes on material sciences, that can improve the current technologies across the board, as well as new technologies.  We need more robust systems, that can take advantage of the power advances we’ve made. To not only enhance all our weapons and shield strength, but also computer targeting which we’re behind on too.  Better inertial dampening, so our manned ships can accelerate faster.  Even if the Vrok don’t ever figure out how to block a quantum jump drive, we may run into another race that can, and in that case, we’ll need it.  The top unmanned speed will go up as well, if we can figure it out.”

“You’re being a bit hard on yourself, it was your invention that stopped the Vrok on the border after all, in the first battle.  Without quantum jumping they’d have steamrolled us.  But I won’t argue with any of that.  I even get what you’re saying, the Vrok countered our newer weapons technologies, so we had to fall back on the old ones which aren’t up to snuff.”

She smiled, “Thanks for that, but this isn’t going to be something fast.  Upgrading the old stuff with new material technology, hopefully including the nanites to make it easier.  We’ll also be looking for new things that might be effective against them because they don’t have the shielding against it.  I also haven’t given up on purely theoretical research either, just… cut back on it and put most of the teams on practical research.”

I nodded, “So what do you have for me, gorgeous?”

Cassie snickered, “You know this is being recorded for history, right?”

I winked.

Diana blushed, but didn’t look displeased, “Okay, well we have the shield updates for our ships and they’re ready to send out to update the fleet.  For the analogous subspace energy beam.  But our shields are still weaker, sixty percent of what the Vrok have.  So instead of five or six seconds standing against their own beams, for us it’ll last a little over two seconds before being overpowered.  That’s just a guess, since we haven’t been able to duplicate creating the power at all we can’t build a weapon to test it, but we were able to duplicate their shield configurations.”

“So even if we do figure it out that second part, we’ll be greatly overmatched.”

Diana nodded, “Exactly.  They can withstand their own beams for five to six seconds, so our beams would be nine to ten seconds even if we figure it out.  That’s still a lot better than the old beam technology, which is taking eighteen seconds.  I feel like I’m letting everyone down, but I don’t even have an estimate on how long that materials technology advance will take.”

I frowned, “It’s always been us as a team that’s been so effective, maybe we need to look at it that way.  What if I steal it, and give it to you.  Then you’ll just have to figure out how to adapt it to the nanites and our ships, if possible. If not, we can use the second-generation energy to matter device and build the newer and more robust material technologies on the nanite ships, as solid systems.  I wouldn’t be surprised if you could make ours even better and remove any shortfalls in their designs.”

Diana nodded, “I thought of that, but they self-destruct when they lose their shields, or even if you get a ship close to their hull.  You haven’t been able to get your magic near them.”

I sighed, “What I’m about to tell you is as top secret as our second-generation matter to energy device.”

The three ladies nodded at me.

I said, “I designed a stealth ship, a mix of the Grays technology, but with a jump drive instead of a gravity drive so it can remain cloaked even on the move.  We also have probes in all of their systems, and I can use one of those to create a quantum beacon to jump there, instead of taking a wormhole, which would show up on their scanners.  If I’m lucky, I can go in, read one of their build platforms, jump to the void and self-destruct.”

Jessica asked, “Self-destruct?”

I nodded, “I don’t want our allies to know we have or used the cloaking tech.  The more paranoid among them will think we’re spying, even if we aren’t.  That’s why I didn’t make the probe blitz cloaked probes.”

Cassie patted my back, “I’m so proud of you, my naïve boy is growing up.”

I gave her a glare, but she just snickered.

“Anyway… that should do it.  We’d have their materials technology to go a hundred gravities unmanned, a thousand unmanned, and their more powerful weapons and shields.  Not to mention how they create that energy.  That, along with our jump drive will make us tactically superior by a long shot, though with the thousands to one numbers differential with the mini-platforms I’m not sure that would even matter at that point.”

She shrugged, “Their ships have over a thousand turrets for point defense, we’d win but they’d still take a large price of our ships.  If that works, once I adapt their technology, I’ll put my people on the next advance in material technology.  Point being, it won’t be an excuse to rest on our laurels.  Who knows what the other four empires are doing, or the empires beyond them, or beyond them.  Not to mention all the races in the fifty galaxies, they’re all behind now but you can bet they’re working on that gap.  The arm’s race never stops, and I won’t forget again.  Not only new but improved old tech to give us options when the new tech fails.”

She wasn’t wrong about losing ships, even with the new tech.  If I wanted to take them out fast enough before they could wormhole retreat from battle while their scientists tried to come up with a way to counter the jump drive, I’d have to hit them with everything instead of ten percent.  As for her latter point…

“I don’t think anyone’s going to argue, and it wasn’t a deadly mistake, so let’s move on?”

She smirked, “Fine, you’re right, I just… feel stupid.  Not that the last ten years have been a waste, we’ve figured out some amazing things, just nothing that will keep us alive from predators out there.”

I nodded, “So, once that’s done, we’ll present the upgrade as an option, for suitable renumeration.  We’ll also credit the advances as yours, to anyone not in this room.  And Melody, since she’d figure it out anyway.  She’s the only other person that has a full picture of what’s going on in our labs, all the other scientists only have small pieces.”

Cassie snickered, “Fair plan, but let’s make sure it works first.  They might see right through the cloak, for all we know.”

Yeah, there was always that.

“Anything else?”

Diana said, “That’ll be significantly faster with your espionage help, but it’ll still take time to adapt their systems and materials tech, and to test our adaptations.  Possibly weeks, since we’re talking about more than one system.  Their ships should yield advancements across the board, with the exception of life support, sensor suites, and power generation.”

“Right, I’ll try to delay the war from our side, until we’re in a better position to take them.  That shouldn’t be hard, because with our current tech either side that attacks will lose.  Or at least, not win.”

Cassie sighed, and shook her head faux sadly, “And after showing so much promise earlier.”

I laughed ruefully, “Fine, it’ll be hard, but it should be easy.”

Cassie grinned, “Better.”

Diana giggled, “Alright, I’m going to get back to it.”

I nodded, “Is it possible it is subspace energy?  What if they’re opening a tiny subspace aperture and holding it open, somehow attracting subspace energy into a containment system, and its uniform appearance is a side effect of packing it in… or something.  Then they fire it, rebuild the containment systems, and start over again.”

Her eyes unfocused for a second, and she said, “Absolutely not… it’s too uniform to be truly subspace energy.  But, I think that might actually work as an alternate avenue to very similar results.  I’ll hold off on it though, unless your mission fails later.   I don’t want to keep re-tasking my scientists, it’ll give them whiplash.”

“Fair enough.  I’ll see you tonight, gorgeous.”

She gave me a kiss, and headed back to work, while Cassie and I headed to the conference room for another meeting.  She really was too hard on herself in my opinion, but she wasn’t wrong.  It was entirely possible without the jump drive and disintegration beam, we were the weakest technology wise in our corner of the universe, as far as empires anyway.  Even internally, the other countries not to mention our friends the Arnis, weren’t all that far behind Astraeus technology.  I’d never push my wife, but I was happy she’d reprioritized.

Chapter Twelve

The conference room was a little tense, and everyone looked grim as they came in, though I couldn’t blame them a bit for that.  I wasn’t in a partying mood myself.  I took a sip of my coffee, and I tried to relax as my mind lingered on the agenda and what I was hoping to walk out with.  Time, without revealing my intentions to launch a top-secret mission to steal their tech, like we’d appropriated the Grays.

It was similar, but different. The Grays had been stupid enough to hand us a ship, but the coming mission was pure espionage.  Still, we were at war, so I wasn’t going to feel guilty over it, and I hadn’t tried to peruse the Atans technology, despite my curiosity there.

“I sent the data to the joint command center two hours ago, but let’s review the salient facts to get started.  The Vrok have two hundred and eighty-six thousand worlds in twenty-six galaxies, and there are close to three million food planets with low technology intelligent races.  They’re completely different from the Grays that way, they’re protecting their herds, and they’ve been expanding non-stop without destroying worlds.

“It seems to me they’re having population issues, specifically feeding, because there are still unclaimed worlds they can spread to in their galaxies.  So, they’re expanding to claim more food worlds, and their population is so vast they’re not going to have a problem manning ships like we do.”

I looked around, and it didn’t look like anyone disagreed with that.

“They currently have forty-two million ships.  Twelve million of them seem to be their old technology, on three of their borders including ours.  Their other five borders have the new ships, four million each.  So thirty two million are tied up on the borders, leaving them ten million new ships running around their twenty six galaxies and for use as an invasion force.

“As far as I can determine, they have another million or so unarmed ships, or at least lightly shielded only, for… merchant vessels.  If you’ll accept that term, because they gather the food.”

I paused for a second, and we all seemed to still be on the same page.

“If you’ll note, none of their warships are in systems right now, just outside the FTL lines for their internal and invasion fleet ships.  They also don’t have the numbers to successfully invade us given we can avoid their weapons with the jump drives.

“In essence, if they attacked us, we could whittle their ten million ships down to zero long before they could reach one of our planets from the FTL line.  If we attack them, they could simply wormhole out.  A wormhole takes five or so seconds, so they might not even lose any ships.  So in essence, neither of us can attack successfully right now.  Which is why they haven’t launched a second attack in the last four days.

“I believe the right move to make is to trust in our scientists to find an edge against them, before their scientists figure out a way to counter our tactical advantage.  My head scientist has already figured out a shield better than what we have, but it would only hold one to two seconds before our ship’s shields were brought down, as opposed to a split second.  That’s not enough of an edge, yet.”

Natalya said, “But if you concentrated your fire, you could take out some ships before they could wormhole out.”

I nodded, “Two thousand in a couple of seconds, if I focused all my mini-platforms from one of my fleets.  They’d just wormhole to another system, or worse, in the void where we don’t have eyes.  That’s assuming they even let us close.  Their intentions are clear, by avoiding being caught in-system past the FTL line, they won’t engage us.  That tactic will be problematic enough if we do gain shield and weapon parity at some point.”

Chen said, “We could hostage their worlds.”

I sighed, “We could, but then if they call our bluff, I sure as hell won’t be firing on them.  I assume we’re going to quarantine them to their worlds and keep them out of space, while we take over the guard over their seven borders, not including ours since it won’t exist anymore.  Am I mistaken?”

Clarence cleared his throat.

“That’s two separate issues so let’s tackle the second one first.  You think we should protect and claim twenty-six galaxies?”

I nodded, “Otherwise we’ll just get a new enemy on our border, when one of the seven empires around them expand.  There’s no other FTL races in those galaxies, so we can watch the borders and leave probes in all the occupied systems.  There are also hundreds of thousands of unoccupied living worlds left in those galaxies, for humans to expand past locally, over millennia, without knocking heads with the local FTL races in the fifty galaxies we freed from the Grays.

“Things get a little sticky in the future if we do that.  For instance, what authority if any will we have over the other races living in our space when they reach FTL.  I don’t have a definitive answer for that, except to say we should probably let them do whatever they want, as long as they don’t attack or trespass on our claimed worlds in that space we protect.

“I also know if we defend ourselves and remove the Vrok as a threat in space to protect our own sovereignty, that I don’t feel good at all about the idea of leaving three million pre-FTL species at the mercy of other aggressive empires, who will surely move in and fight over the space, if we don’t protect it.”

Natalya said, “He’s not wrong, we’ll have earned the right to move in when we take that space from our enemies, who attacked us first.  Perhaps we could reserve another ten thousand light year diameter sphere of space in all twenty-six galaxies.  That’d give us what, over two hundred thousand worlds to expand to and diversify where humanity lived in a great way at the same time.  It would also leave most of those galaxies for the local species to claim when they reach FTL, so our presence there protecting them from empires won’t be a huge point of contention for most clear-thinking beings.”

I nodded, “That’s not a bad compromise, take a small piece of all the galaxies we’re protecting before anyone from those twenty-six joins us in space.”

Chen said, “Surely we should discuss this later, we’re putting the cart before the horse.”

I shook my head, “Perhaps the particulars of how we’re doing it, and if we should limit our claims and how it all works, that can wait, we have plenty of time to figure that out afterwards, and we do need to win first.  But we also need to decide if we’re going to protect those twenty-six galaxies like we’re doing the fifty when we sent the Grays back to the stone age.

“That part needs to be worked into our campaign plans, like the grays we need to replace those fleets as they’re destroyed or replace them if the Vrok recall those border fleets for defense.  If we don’t, the other empires around them will take an unguarded border as an invitation to move in.  We don’t want that, because then we’ll have to fight them too, if we decide to keep the space.”

Chen looked thoughtful, then nodded, “Point taken.”

Admiral Grady said, “Agreed, we need to decide that much now, or take it to our leaders before we fully map out a campaign.  Let’s put it to the side for now, since I know I don’t have that authority.  We’ll need a full U.N. vote, not even just us, for a decision that large we need to present a united front when dealing outside of our human sphere of space locally.”

No one objected, so Grady continued.

“I think the other issue was what we were doing with the Vrok, our end goal.  Unlike the Grays this race is monstrous, using three million intelligent races as feeding stock?  Will that change if we give them time to grow up while we keep them confined to their almost three hundred thousand planets?”

I shrugged, “It could be societal, or cultural.  By instinct they’re aggressive meat eaters, but that doesn’t mean they can’t learn not to eat intelligent beings.  Herd animals, or even cultured meats should be able to satisfy their diets.  If I’m wrong about that, then a lot of them are going to die anyway, when their population collapses and a great majority of them starve, because we sure as hell aren’t going to feed them.”

Natalya chuckled, “That seems fair, limit their choices to our society’s moral stance on it?  They lost that right to choose when they tried to invade us, and they decided to make us the food.  Does that mean you’re going to supply the technology to make those cultured meats, what if they don’t know how?”

I frowned, “I hadn’t thought of that.  Without that most of them will die, even if they have prey animals on their worlds.  Perhaps they already have it, but if they don’t, they could die out of ignorance.  I don’t believe we have a moral imperative to do so, but I wouldn’t be opposed to the idea if everyone else wanted to do so.”

Grady said, “Another question for the U.N.  Defending the galaxies, and technology so they don’t starve, or let them starve?”

Well, the delay was just about in the bag, the U.N. wasn’t exactly quick at deciding a damned thing, and we already had two major questions for them.

Gil said, “Delaying is a risk, it’s a roll of the dice on if our scientists or theirs will overcome our disparate tactical deficiencies first.  I think while the U.N. is working out those two issues, our generals and admirals should get together and come up with a campaign based on our current technology.  They can’t shoot us, but there has to be a way to harry the enemy and cut down on their numbers.  If it goes on long enough, they may just surrender if we demand it.”

I sighed, “It’s dangerous, because they could just hide in the void and avoid their worlds and our probes.  It’ll be impossible to even take out twenty thousand in harrying pursuit attacks once per wormhole jump if they do that.  With my six fleets it would take three hundred and fifty of those attacks, successful ones where they couldn’t wormhole out without losses, to take them down.

“Once they’re in the void, even if we got upgrades to make us more effective, we couldn’t find them.”

Natalya said, “We could threaten their home world, and other worlds, at that point.  You might not pull the trigger, but we have ships too.  I’m sure they’d be willing to negotiate a surrender at that point.”

Chen shook his head, “Maybe.  Carnivores are different than omnivores.  We’d probably surrender under those circumstances, if we could get a good deal and keep our worlds from harm, but we can’t assume they will.  That said, it would be worth the attempt, and while we’re there we could wipe out their build programs.  They’re still building ten thousand ships a weak, in five thousand of their two hundred and eighty-six thousand star systems.

“Which means we were also lucky.  To have thirty million of their new ships, that means at that rate they’ve been building for sixty years with the intentions of invading the Grays.  I suspect they’d have held off another twenty-four years until they’d replaced them all, if we hadn’t replaced the Grays and alarmed them.”

Natalya said, “You might be right, but we can’t be sure of that for another twenty-four days, until the second sweep is done.  For all we know they have another five thousand build platforms in unoccupied systems by themselves, and they’ve only been building for thirty years.  Or… who knows?”

Chen shrugged, “My point still stands, we could cut their build program by ten thousand ships a week, and get those others later, if they exist.”

I nodded, “We should discuss it again, when we see what our scientists have for us after the U.N. has decided on those two issues.  If our combined military wisdom can’t come up with a decent plan during that time, and our scientists are close to a breakthrough, I suspect we should give it a little time.  I know my head scientist is on the edge of several breakthroughs.  Plus, any of us could match that build rate with our eyes closed, keeping up won’t be a problem, and waiting will be worth it.

“Their worlds aren’t exactly helpless either, they all have space stations and who knows how powerful their defenses are, and there’s even more defensive emplacements in their build worlds on the build platforms.

“The main point remains.  A breakthrough that would give an amount of parity means I could take out a full fleet at a time, instead of chipping away at them and risking them hiding in the void.  I’d lose a lot of platforms in the effort, but those could be rebuilt.”

Yeah, I had less than half the room on that point, they wanted to press the enemy hard, with our current slight tactical advantage.  Maybe they weren’t wrong, was I being too careful? Or was it just my surety that we had a good chance to catch up quickly thanks to the mission I wasn’t sharing?

Natalya said, “I think we’re starting to go in circles.  We bring the feeding and quarantining issue as well as the expansion issue to the U.N.  We’ll also have our best tacticians work on a plan for the current level of technology we have.  We’ll reconvene once those three things are accomplished.  Hopefully no more than two or three days,” she looked at me, “I’ll entertain possible advancements then, but it will have to be very promising for me to change my mind.”

No one objected to that, not even me, and the meeting broke up.

Chapter Thirteen

The small stealth probe bounced around the millions of ships I had in the void, and my sensors just couldn’t see it, at all.  The ships were detecting the quantum field for the quantum drive, the only external energy it used.  There was no way around that, but Diana assured me their sensors lacked the technology to see it.

I supposed I’d find out.

There was also the problem of the ship creating a hole in space with nothing in it, but since it was jumping five times a second even that was hard to see, as that space was filled in with normal background radiation as soon as it jumped to the next spot.  A mere blip.  I supposed the success of the plan depended on how close an eye they kept on the space around their build platforms, if they even had their sensor software tuned to report a blank spot.

A further point, the probe ship was tiny, in comparison to the big empty spot one of their probe ships had left.

I chose one of the Vrok’s five thousand build systems that wasn’t a major government world, yet still had plenty of traffic.  It was a little tricky, I had the probe jumping around ahead of their pursuing ships trying to close in on it, about two light minutes away from planet when it formed a second quantum beacon and my stealth probe jumped to it.

The normal probe started to jump further away, to evade their attempts to block it in and trap it, while my stealth probe started to jump toward the large platform at a speed equivalent to light speed.

I gasped in a breath, when I realized I’d been holding it.  A few seconds later, it was apparent by the ships in the area that it hadn’t been seen.

The build platform was vast.  It was shaped like a large rectangle, ten miles long, a mile wide, and a mile in height.  They could build two ships inside of it inside a week, that was about seven miles long.  I could only assume the rest of the space was for stock and the automated machines that built the ships.  The thing was heavily shielded, and it had a whole lot of turrets on it.  It was also big enough inside to accept an almost constant stream of raw material deliveries.

It was one giant fabricator.

It had the two extremely large main airlock doors to release the built ships once a week, but it also had four smaller airlocks on the other side for smaller mining vessels to fly into and deliver the materials used to build the ships.  I’d reviewed the scout’s data while planning, and the shield around the smaller airlocks dropped for just a few seconds, each time a merchant vessel entered or left the platform, while keeping the rest of the platform shielded.

My magic didn’t work through shields.

So, I’d timed the mission to an inbound mining vessel that was headed toward one of those airlocks.  My cloaked ship intercepted the mining ship just as the door was opening and the shield dropped.  It quantum jumped a mere five hundred feet that last time, taking advantage of the unshielded location.

A moment later, after a quick passive sensor scan of the interior, it quantum jumped one last time nearby one of the ships being built and the platforms infrastructure.

“Going to be absent.”

Jessica said, “We’ll keep your body safe, Scott.”

Cassie smirked, “Speak for yourself. I’m feeling a bit peckish.”

I snorted and sent my awareness and magic away from my body, and through the quantum connection to the probe, and finally the short distance to the platform.  I was completely vulnerable in such a state, no idea what was going on back at my body, but I was positive it wasn’t feeding Cassie.

It was both everything I’d hoped, and a disappointment at the same time.  They were very conscious of security.  It was easy enough to bypass that, my magic went right through their local protections and firewalls, and it pulled all the data on their ship’s technology.

All the disparate systems and full technical specifications including materials used in construction and how to make them was downloaded in moments to my mind.  I could see immediately my Diana was right. I could set up those systems with the nanites already, but if we turned them on they would draw more power than the materials could handle, and ultimately would destroy the ship.

It was what it was made out of, that was even more important than the designs.  The designs weren’t actually all that different in the propulsion, shields, weapons, and inertial dampeners, save the analogous subspace beam weapon which was very different.  Even the computers were similar.  There were small design differences, to make up for the different properties of the newer and more advanced materials used, but nothing major there outside of the fact their weapons could gain a target lock in about half the time as ours.  In the end, they were just more robust versions capable of utilizing more power and making it stronger and more effective, outside of their subspace tech which we didn’t have at all, I mean.  Until now, anyway.

That’s what Diana would have to figure out, how to adapt our systems to their superior ones, either through nanite upgrades, or if necessary, moving away from nanite design.  It would suck if we had to move away from that technology, but if that’s what it took to grow stronger to protect humanity it’d be what we did.

I had no doubt she was up to it, and suspected she’d even be able to maximize the efficiency of the new tech and perhaps make it even stronger than the Vrok’s in that way.  But it would also take time.

That was the good news, that part of the mission was a complete success, as I quantum jumped one more time to the void and self-destructed as I returned to my body.

But on the bad side, the platform was completely isolated, there were no connections to follow to find social or historical databases for their people.  It also didn’t give me a connection to their fleet, they didn’t use a quantum paired connection to a command center, it was decentralized and worked similarly to the non-entangled quantum communicator we used to connect our various more directly connected fleets together, for a common datanet.

It was probably smart, because if their command center was ever destroyed, they wouldn’t lose their tactical net among their fleets.  The problem was there was no record of the Vrok military’s tactical frequency anywhere on the station or the ship’s being built.  I had to imagine once the ship was complete, the military officers who took the ship entered the specific fleet frequency as they took command.  In short, this place was run by civilians, who didn’t need to know that information.

So, I supposed it was a good thing we’d come up with the probe blitz idea, or I’d have no idea where or how many ships they had, or what systems they were in.  Still, at least my magic would help with what we lacked.  Although, it’d been nice to be able to see exactly what kind of society we were dealing with, not to mention a surer count of their ships, but the probe plan was adequate that way, or would be in just twenty-four more days.

There was little to no chance I could successfully get my magic in an active ship, they were too security conscious and far too self-destruct happy, and even if I did then I’d bet their fleets weren’t connected.

The thing that worried me the most was they had non-entangled quantum communications.  That was just a hop, skip, and a jump from having quantum jump drives, but there was no indication they’d made that mental leap yet.  On the good side, we had time.  Even if they made that leap and figured it out quickly, they’d have to upgrade all their ships in facilities, without nanites to just add the system to their current ships.

In short, we’d win that race, I was fairly sure.

Cassie said, “Well?”

I grinned, as I downloaded all the information into our secure system network, and I only gave Diana access to it.  She could decide who else got it.  Then I sent her a message.  On a whim, I added my daughter as well.  Maybe it was insane giving a twelve-year-old access to our greatest state secrets, but she already had that, and my wife had convinced it would contribute to her education.  I knew she could be trusted.  She’d never tell anyone outside the family who already knew.

I yawned and stretched, and then got up slowly and started to make a coffee.

Cassie growled, “Scott!”

“Hmm?” I smiled faux innocently.

Jessica giggled, “The mission, sir.”

I narrowed my eyes in mock confusion, “The mission?  What about it?”

It was about then I started to laugh, and I couldn’t hold the faux bored expression any longer.

“The core mission was a complete success, since we got their technology. The other data I was hoping for was a completely failure, and no connection to their active fleet as well.  They’re as paranoid about their technology as the NSA and military combined.  Not just from their enemies, but from their civilians as well.  I suppose we’re no different that way.”

I explained all I’d learned.  I also finished making my coffee and sat down at my console.

“So, yeah. We got it, but we can’t use any of it, yet.”

Jessica said, “If we did?”

I said, “We could take them in a fleet to fleet ambush without jumping to avoid their beams, in about three or four seconds, and I’d lose something close to a third of the mini-platforms in the exchange.  But those could be rebuilt in a few days.  That’s assuming we can adapt the nanites with new materials technology.  If we have to abandon the nanites, then it will be far more… problematic.”

Jessica asked, “Materials technology?”

I nodded, “Sure, think about televisions.  First they used vacuum tubes and had to be warmed up, and the reception sucked.  Then more reliable transistors replace vacuum tubes, and reception was better.  Then integrated circuits came along, and that made it even better.  Similar in theory, still a television, but a better version of it.

“Same thing with our propulsion, weapons, shields, inertial dampeners.  The new materials and slightly different designs make it better, and more robust to use more power before burning out, making the systems more powerful overall.  We’ll still focus on adding new technologies to make us even more diverse, but we need to keep up with advancing the old ones too, if we want to stay ahead in the arm’s race.  This will catch us up to the Vrok, and it’ll exceed what the Atans just accomplished ten years ago.  Although in the latter case, the new tech we built would’ve made it a moot point, the Vrok shields against our new technologies made it necessary to get back to basics.”

Jessica nodded, “I think I get it.  Same technology, but more refined and robust.”

“Exactly.  We also learned they’re using fusion reactors.  Which is probably why their self-destruct never left behind even a little intact technology.  Between all their missile stock and the reactors, it’s amazing even pieces of hull survive the explosion.”

Jessica said, “But if we can’t integrate it, we’d be screwed, how could we catch up to their building?”

I frowned, “I have twenty-four million ships in the void, that could be turned into huge fabrication factories.  We could create the raw elements, and the factories would build the ships from that raw fabrication stock.  Similar to the smaller fabricators that Diana designed to take the raw molecule sized grains the energy to matter devices made of the reactor material, to make fusion reactors.  We could create an equivalent fleet within a week, double it in two weeks.  But I hope that isn’t necessary, I kind of like the nanites because they can rebuild systems on the fly and quickly restore lost mass.  Any systems destroyed in a space battle on regular ships would be unreplaceable on the spot, at least.”

Cassie said, “Unless we just use the second-generation energy to matter devices, with molecular bonding.  Then we can just build the ships, and even repair them on the fly.”

I nodded, “But if we do that, the secret that we’ve cracked that limitation will get out.  That’s a final desperate option for me, and only if Astraeus had to become completely independent of Earth because they cut off our imports, which seems unlikely now.  I don’t think we’re there yet.  Better to go the fabricator route.  If that tech becomes known, it’ll blow up economies.  The original one is bad enough.  No, that, my magic, the cloaking probe, and the fact we just stole the Vrok’s technology with it needs to stay our highest state secrets.

“All our technology should be guarded, even if we’re selling the rest of it and others are aware of it.  But for those, I don’t even want people aware of it, if we can help it.”

Cassie nodded, “I suppose that’s wise, and at least we have a plan if it can’t be integrated.  Still, our people would be fine with it.”

I nodded, “Our station is full of service-oriented workers, entertainment, arts, scientists, and inventors.  We don’t manufacture anything except nanite devices and ships for sale, so our citizens wouldn’t lose their sense of usefulness in society.  We could even maintain the local economy by selling the items to stores at the usual rates, like the manufacturers on Earth do.  But Earth is another matter, even the colonies aren’t ready for that technology.”

Cassie smirked, “Not arguing, just saying.”

It looked good to me.  We were holding our own, even if we couldn’t win in the moment, and Diana would have that tech ported over and tested in a relatively short amount of time.  Of course, I was well aware that the enemy got a vote, but given what we knew of their building technology it would take them much longer to upgrade their fleets with new and better tech.

Chapter Fourteen - Interlude

The great hall pulsed with tension as the sunlight faded on the horizon.  Exalted Hunter Sinzan, absolute ruler of the Vrok empire, vibrated in anger and disgust up on the dais.  He was large, even for his kind, at fourteen feet tall and twenty feet long.  He was old, but still strong, and believed he would rule for several more turns of their seasons before falling to the next hunter that would lead them.

Fifty of his closest hunters lined the walls as Hunt Master Suslo and Hunt Leader Oldun entered the great hall.  They weren’t there for his protection, they were there to stand witness.  His mandibles tightened in rage, but he held back the instinct to tear Suslo apart, for now.  That effort became even harder, when he scented Suslo’s fear, the leader of all his fleets had much to answer for.

Hunt Leader Oldun had been the one to lead the specific fleet sent to test the humans, but he walked with his head high, and no sign of fear at all.

Sinzan growled, “Explain to me, how your foolishness just soured a sixty-year hunt, perhaps the greatest hunt ever pursued by our people to more than double our range in the stars.  What possessed you to attack twenty years early?”

Suslo’s legs shook as he lowered his bulk to the ground before him, and it was all Sinzan could do not to lunge forward and tear out the coward’s throat.  How the last Exalted Hunter had elevated this sniveling coward to Hunt Master status was beyond him.

Suslo replied, “Exalted one.  The humans who replaced the Grays far outstripped their technology as our hunting fleets did.  After they successfully discovered our probes, and then showed aggression by doing an active scan of our ships, I felt I had no choice but to test ourselves against them.”

Sinzan snorted, “Fool, their scan was the equivalent of a cub growling at an elder.  Not a true challenge, they didn’t even cross into our range.  Now you have woken them up, revealed our superiority and our weakness.  They have small probes jumping around all of our systems and avoiding our ships, now they scout us and prepare to hunt.  Fool.”

Suslo stammered, “The only way to know was to…”

Sinzan had enough of his sniveling, and he lunged forward with all six powerful legs.  The coward was frozen, and he didn’t even try to fight as Sinzan’s forelegs pinned him down and he tore off Suslo’s head with his mandibles, and then spit it out.

“Take this fool out and destroy the body, he will have no honor in death.”

Sinzan retook the dais, and he couldn’t help but be impressed by Oldun’s bravery, he still didn’t scent fear from the fleet hunt leader.  He waited until the witnesses had left, and dragged the body out with them, before addressing Oldun.

“What say you?”

Oldun replied, “I would not have attacked.  Our only weakness was obvious before we did, and by basic scans we already knew their ships couldn’t stand toe to toe with us.  There was nothing to be gained by a test hunt.”

“Explain.”

Oldun answered, “We have watched them cross their solar systems many times with the skipping drive, at the speed of light in normal space.  The tactical uses for such a technology during combat are beyond obvious, we should have focused on defeating that instead so our prey couldn’t run from us.  We still had over twenty years to figure it out, if we hadn’t started the hunt early, as it is now, my females are working on it as quickly as they can.  It seems clear to me Suslo’s pride led his actions, at the loss of his creeping hunters in their solar systems.”

Sinzan asked, “Do they have a scent at least?”

Oldun replied, “Yes, Exalted one.  They are working to discover the technology even as they search for its weakness.  Although we don’t have the skip drive yet we do know it works similarly to how our quantum communicators work.  It is believed if we can jam an unshielded communicator with a wave of some kind, that it will also work against the skip drive.”

Sinzan frowned, “Unshielded?”

Oldun nodded, “That is the problem.  The skip drive can’t be blocked at the source, at their ships, we need to scramble their target space while they attempt to move to it.  With a reach of one light second for local skips that’s billions of square miles in volume of space.  I have confidence they’ll get it done however, and once they do our fleets will tear them apart.”

Sinzan grunted, and he was still impressed.

“In the meantime, we are vulnerable because of that sack of offal.”

Oldun said, “These humans are weak.  If they come after our ships in the interim, we can continue to retreat.  It is distasteful, but necessary due to Suslo’s foolishness.  Given the Grays still live on their planets, and we’ve never seen the humans rule their range as they should, I don’t believe our worlds are in any danger at all.  They are not to be underestimated however, I am sure they’re working to close the gap with us as well, but I believe we are closer.”

That decided Sinzan.

Sinzan said, “You are now Hunt Master with full authority over our fleets and the great hunt.  Put all the fleets’ females on researching that technology if you must.  We all saw how quickly the humans advanced past the Grays once they had Grays’ technology.  They may not rule their range like we do, but they are clever.”

Oldun bowed his head once, “I accept the elevation, Exalted one.  I won’t let you down or allow my instincts to foul our great hunt further.”

Sinzan waved in dismissal.

Chapter Fifteen

“Threx, how are you and your family?”

It was late the same day.  Threx was the first alien I’d ever met and our trade with the Vax had been going steady for the last twelve years.  We didn’t even nod at each other all that much anymore, we were both far more comfortable with each other’s alien features. The Vax of course, looked like a panda and bigfoot got busy and had a love child.  They were fierce in appearance while they also looked cute like a Panda, and in the end they weren’t all that different from us humans.

Threx said, “Pherie is well, as are the children.  You?  I know your world is once again under threat.”

I nodded, “No good deed goes unpunished, but we’ve got a handle on it.”

He tilted his head in question.

I replied, “We are under threat because it’s our efforts that secure the fifty galaxies against the surrounding intergalactic empires.  But it’s worth it to us, we’d have had to fight them either way, might as well keep the peace from the spots it’s been kept for thousands of years.”

Threx snorted, “You cannot deceive me, your hearts are soft.”

I laughed, “So, what can I do for you?”

Threx said, “I got my hands on a batch of medicines, and several million life extensions suitable for humans.  Interested?”

I nodded, they were in high demand on Earth and we couldn’t get enough to cover that demand.  The governments hadn’t tried to limit the people from using them once they were approved for use.  No one was worried about overpopulation anymore.  We’d have the opposite problem for a very long time, before we filled up the available worlds.

“What do you want for it?”

Threx said, “Coffee beans, and chocolate.”

I grinned, nothing like spreading a caffeine addiction across the galaxies.  The Vax loved the stuff.  It’d be provided by earth of course. I was somewhat of a broker for the Vax in our system, and I’d get a small cut of both sides for my fee.

It was also far more pleasant a task than dealing with war.

“Let’s talk volume…”

“Dad!  Thank you, thank you, thank you,” said Melody excitedly, as she once again mugged me at the door.

I grinned as I hugged her back.

“You should greet me like this every night.”

She giggled, “I won’t tell anyone, the technology is really awesome.”

I smirked up at Diana, who gave me a subtle nod to tell me she’d already had a long talk with her about it, and that I wasn’t in trouble.  I even got a warm kiss, so I was guessing she really liked the gift I’d sent her as well.

Diana said, “How did you do?”

I sighed, “Not as well as I’d hoped.  I’m counting on the U.N. arguing as long as you need them to, actually.  The rest of the committee seems content with the small edge, or rather they’d prefer to gamble on that then our scientists coming through with anything useful before the Vrok nullifies our advantage.  Of course, I couldn’t tell them the full truth.  On the good side, we got a million life extensions and other medicines to sell on the surface, and all it cost was a few truckloads of chocolate bars and a few tons of coffee beans.”

Diana smirked, and headed back to the kitchen with an excited pre-teen while I went to change out of the suit.  By the time I got back downstairs she had stuff ready for me to chop.

Diana said, “I’m not sure how much time I’ll need to adapt it.  My initial impression after studying the data all afternoon is that only the subspace beam technology will need to be independent.  Everything else, the shields, inertial dampers, gravity drive, and our other weapons should be compatible with upgraded nanites, but of course I can’t be sure until we do the upgrade and test it in the test system.”

“Other weapons?”

Diana nodded, “The normal beam weapon should become eighty percent more powerful when the nanites can handle the heavier energy loads.  Of course, that’s still only half as effective as what the subspace energy beams will be, at least against Vrok ships, but that will be useful if you lose a lot of those turrets. The nanites can endlessly form new ones as a ship is destroyed.”

That made sense.  It was also a relief.

“So a hybrid design, we don’t need to abandon the nanites.”

Diana shook her head, “Not even if all the systems require non-nanite hardware, which I’m fairly sure won’t be the case.  We could still use the nanites for most of the ship mass, power conduits and reactors, artificial gravity, reclamation systems, life support, and just about everything else.  It’d just be a hybrid ship, like the old Gray ships required an independent fusion reactor.

“Instead of reactors, we’d just have non-nanite turrets.  We could still use the old kind of point defense against missiles.  The ships are huge, with a lot of unused space save the power, computer cycles, and mass needed for a dreadnought’s operation.  I imagine we could make thousands of fabrication rooms, to not only quickly load up the hull with thousands of subspace beam emplacements, but also have tens of thousands of replacement beam turrets in the center of the ship.

“If the ship was hit, and lost some turrets, we could just shift those to the outside, hook in the nanite power feeds, and we’d have it replaced.  Not as quick as reforming the nanites on the edge, but still light years better than a whole ship not made of nanites.  We can do that with all four systems if we need to, but I really don’t think we’ll need to.

“We’ll start testing the nanites made with different materials technology in the morning, I already have several thousand iterations planned, loosely.”

I grunted, “Several thousand?”

She nodded, “We want to squeeze every ounce of efficiency we can out of it.  I’m not convinced their designs are that.”

“Mini-platforms?”

She smirked, “Those too.  Obviously, they’ll have to be loaded with one of the subspace turrets, and enough upgraded nanites for the shield and drive improvements.  They might end up being a little bigger, because I assume that you’ll still want the ability for it to form a regular beam, disintegration, or anti-matter beam turret.”

I nodded, “Of course, not all our enemies will be immune to disintegration beams, and conversely they may have better defenses against subspace energies.”

All the ships would also need to create a whole lot more nanites, for the upgraded systems with plenty to spare to rebuild them if necessary.  But that would all take less than half a day.

She shrugged, “Just a first impression though, no promises.”

“Why the turrets?”

She said, “The properties of the alloy necessary to convert power to subspace analogous energy would interfere in the operation of other systems, if it was present in the nanites that formed those systems.  The nanites are an extremely complicated balance of materials to conduct and insulate power, and to form systems as well as communicate with each other to form and release bonds and move around.”

“So, do you think it’ll conflict with normal nanite operations, or with some of the other systems the nanites form?”

She tilted her head, “The latter, though I can’t prove that yet.  The electrothermic superconductor in the old fusion reactors is the former.”

I grunted, “So, could we just have two classes of nanites?  One for the turrets, and then the other for everything else?”

She looked at me like I’d declared the sky was purple, then closed her eyes for a moment.

“Why stop at two?  You just made me very busy, and I want to go back to my labs.”

I wrapped my arms around her from behind, “No escape for you.”

She snickered.

I asked, “Why?”

She said, “Like I mentioned, the nanites are a complicated balance to wring the best efficiency out of all systems they can build out of themselves, but there’s also a lot of compromise in that kind of thing.  Why stop at two classes?”

“There’s a practical strength to it, any nanite can build any system if half the ship is lost, which is useful.  I just think two classes is better than one class and non-nanite turrets.  Creating a class of nanites for every system just to squeeze a few more percent of efficiency wouldn’t be worth it.”

She shrugged, “The dreadnoughts are huge, quadrillions of nanites.  A homogenous spread of several classes of nanites through the whole ship would ensure you didn’t run short of any of them.  Ninety nine point nine nine percent of the nanites are basically just mass, processor power, and evenly spread vacuum nanite reactors.  The systems they build are actually only a very small part of that, point zero one percent, or less even.”

“Sounds like a lot of work,” I said cautiously.

She nodded, “Not now, I know I need to prioritize.  I’ll work on the general upgrade for the main nanites, and getting the turrets done, either through a second class if possible or non-nanite turrets if not.  But once the Vrok are taken care of it’d be a good thing to do I think, even if it does make it a lot more complicated.”

“You’re like a kid in a candy store right now.”

She twisted around and kissed me, “You always give me the best ideas.”

I smirked, “In my ignorance.  I just ask dumb questions.”

Melody rolled her eyes, “You just pretend to be dumb.  You’re not as creative as mom, maybe not as intelligent either, but far from dumb.  Our magic gives us sharp instincts when it comes to technology.”

I frowned, as my wife nodded in agreement.  Then I let her go and got back to chopping, because I was smart enough to know when it was time to call a retreat.

Melody said, “I think dad’s right, multiple classes will introduce a lot of complications in the nanites working together seamlessly, not to mention bonding and releasing correctly across multiple classes.  We’d be better off having discrete systems for the turrets.”

Diana bit her lip, and I got the idea now she knew how I felt when she talked about technology over my head.  Still, I wouldn’t bet against my wife getting the multiple class nanite to work in the future.

“Discrete systems?”

Melody nodded, “They’d need to be connected like non-nanite systems, with shaped conduits and connectors to join the systems.  It’d be a mistake to bond different classes of nanites at the molecular level, that would add instability and inefficiencies.  I don’t think the processors would be identical either with them being made from different materials, so instead of a ship being one joint huge multiple processor mainframe, it’d be two of them.  That means command level software to pass information between them.  The sensors wouldn’t be part of the same computer system as the turrets for instance, which adds a step to pass along a target lock, so less integrated.  Not a big deal, just noting it adds as many complications as it would remove for a few percentage points of efficiency.”

“That’s your daughter,” I said lightly, not really sure I followed even all the obvious ramifications of that, much less all the subtleties implied.

Diana smirked at me.

“True, but the added need for extra programming would still worth it.  It’d allow us to focus on improving a single system, without worrying how it would impact the whole, or if it’d work or not with other systems, while not needing to move away from nanite technology at all.  Unless an advance in materials technology is inimical to nanite operation of course.”

“Of course,” I said cheekily.

It was a little interesting, but it was a long-term roadmap of what direction my amazing wife’s research would go in next.  Our arm’s race with the Vrok was a little more critical, and I got the idea it could take years to figure out the other.  She’d be focused on keeping it down to two systems now, with a general upgrade for the main nanites, and only create a different system for the turrets, be it with different nanites or otherwise.

Our daughter had no more pearls of wisdom, and we settled into making and enjoying dinner as we finally left our workday behind.  It was a good night in, and Cassie finally called it a day and arrived shortly after we’d sat down for dinner and joined us.  The politics of the war had her busier than I was.

We had another movie night. My wife’s choice that time, and we just spent time together.  It was good to relax and recharge, to spend time with the people that made the fight worth it and engendered that deep need to protect.  It wasn’t easy though, worries about everything that could go wrong popped up in my head on occasion, but I pushed it out the best I could and focused on the moment.

After Cassie left, and we put Melody to bed, the two of us settled back on the couch.  I bodily turned her, and then started to give her a massage.

“You okay?”

She blew out a breath, “Fine.”

I laughed, “Now I know there’s something wrong.”

She gave me a guilty look, “I looked at the database during the movie, on my overlay.  Just to make sure I wasn’t reinventing the wheel.  The Grays tried my idea, for many years, multiple classes of nanites in a ship, and there’s even more issues with it than Melody implied.  So much so I won’t even attempt it for the subspace beam weapon.  We’ll go with the fabrication idea for that system as well as any other system that might be incompatible.

“I suspect we should stick to one type, and stick to nanite ships for all the benefits, while our technology advances the disparate systems may wobble back and forth between being integrated, and being non-nanite systems the ship builds and repairs with fabricator rooms.”

I nodded, “That sounds fine, spares in the core of the ship for any non-nanite systems should be good enough.  Eventually, once the technology gets out, it’ll be even easier. Instead of fabricator rooms we can just use the second-generation energy to matter device with molecular bonding to build the originals and all the spares we want.”

She nodded.

I smirked, “Now, tell me what’s really bothering you?”

She sighed, “Our daughter makes me feel… stupid.  She no more than absorbed that data earlier, and she already knew my idea wouldn’t work, without checking the Gray database.  The nanites are awesome, but they’re extremely fussy in some ways.”

I snickered, “Now you know how you make me feel.  Although, it also makes you sexy as hell.”

She shook her head in mock disgust, but her body didn’t tense up, on the contrary she melted back against me and her muscles started to relax.

I shrugged, “It doesn’t change anything, you should work toward advances without worrying about the nanite compatibility if something promising comes to mind.  If the systems improve and work as part of the nanite system great, but if we end up with ships with a nanite shell and for mass one day, filled with all non-nanite systems except the fabricator nanite systems, well then that’s fine too.  That’s still a lot better than a non-nanite ship in whole, as far as battle and convenience goes, if not as convenient as what we have now.  The most important thing in all this is what you told me the other day, we can’t stop reaching for that next level of tech in the intergalactic empire arm’s race, not to mention internally.”

She nodded, “I imagine that only applies to tactical systems.  We don’t need to improve life support for instance, and we already have an overabundance of power.  But yes, shields, weapons, drives, sensors, computers, and inertial dampening are all on that list.  As well as tactical systems we haven’t thought of yet.  Nothing else really matters, it’s not tactical and more than good enough already.

“That’s just for our military though.  I’ll still be looking at other things, I just needed to make tactical technology in war more of a priority in that equation than the last twelve years.”

“I get it.  I agree, just don’t be too hard on yourself, you won’t make that mistake again.”

She sighed, “That feels good.”

I grinned, “No charge.”

She said, “I won’t make that mistake again, and in six years I won’t have to worry about it, since I’ll no doubt be working for my daughter.”

I smirked, and teased, “Already got the promotion paperwork submitted for the new head scientist of Astraeus station.  I expect your resignation on my desk in five years, six months, and twenty-two days.”

She snickered, “I’m so proud of her, but she really does make me feel inadequate at times.”

I shrugged, “It’s the magic, you came to the same conclusion in a short time and are just as smart.  You just need to learn things the hard way.  It’s the magic not her intelligence that makes her absorb information so easily and quickly.  Plus, she has no judgement yet.”

She patted my leg, “Stop trying to make me feel better.  It’s more than just the magic, and I couldn’t be prouder that my daughter is more creative, intuitive, and intelligent than I am.  The envy is just a tiny part of it and natural.”

I took her advice, just kept my mouth shut, and massaged her shoulders.  Sometimes I couldn’t fix it, and just had to be there, but that was hard to remember at times.

“Me too, the proud part.  As long as Darrell doesn’t come back to become our overlord, I’ll keep that opinion.”

She giggled, “Good point, nothing we can do about it though.  Why don’t you take me to bed, I have a long day of testing tomorrow.”

“Tired?”

She shook her head, “Not yet.”

I knew what that meant, so I scooped her up and headed for the bedroom.

Chapter Sixteen

The U.N. was arguing the next morning when I got to the command center, they were two hours ahead since the station was on Mountain time still.  For once, I was kind of happy politics was a slow and pain in the butt process, the longer they argued over the two issues, the more time my wife had to adapt the technologies before I’d have to try and hold off the committee again.

I grabbed a coffee as usual, and I sat down at the command table.

“Anything going on?”

Jessica said, “We have a ship full of Arnis heading in, they should be here in three hours.  They dropped out of a wormhole five hours ago.  They have reservations at one of the resorts.”

I nodded, it was worth noting.  The Arnis loved to trade luxury smart materials for arts, entertainment, and other cultural riches of the other races.  They’d been sending ships full of Arnis to enjoy our station for a few years now.  My citizens were very respectful, and there were no xenophobes working for me, but there’d been more than one small incident with Earth visitors to the station.

Nothing violent, but vitriol was more than enough to freak out an Arnis.  The race was extremely polite and wary.  I liked them, but their visits were somewhat of a tightrope walk.  At the same time, it was more than worth it for all the smart materials in their holds, that they’d use to pay for their vacation on my station and I could resale to the planet.

The ridiculously comfortable Arnis clothes and furniture were in as much demand as Vax life extension treatments.

“Increase security at that resort just in case, like last time.”

Jessica nodded absently, “Already done.”

“What’s up?”

Jessica shook her head, and then focused on me, “Sorry.  I’m not sure, but it looks like one of the U.S. ships are on an intercept course.”

I frowned, and debated with myself, then decided screw politics.

“Do we have their quantum communicator address?”

The main database was ridiculously huge, there were billions of them now, among all the disparate civilizations.  That didn’t even cover humanity’s private data link channel between all human ships and planetary locations, which was in the hundreds of thousands.  Of course, a search could get it, their communicator identity would be married with their ship’s name and type.

Jessica nodded, “When they hailed us on arrival for an approach and docking course.”

“Hail them, and then see if you can figure out what the U.S. wants.”

Normally, the U.S. ignored all merchant ships after Astraeus cleared them, especially with the Vax and Arnis who’s merchants dealt exclusively with us, at least when they came to our system.  I did have some competition now with the other space stations, but none of those were true cities like mine with civilians, a huge growing city, and resorts.  The others were smaller, and little more than cargo warehouses in orbit ran by their military people, as well as their command centers for the ships they built and designed.

Jessica frowned as she hung up, and looked over at me, “They’re matching course and speed, to link up and perform an inspection.  The Arnis claim the ship’s captain told them it was merely a tightening of security precautions because we’re at war with one of the great empires surrounding our fifty galaxies.”

“So, America suddenly cares what happens to us, I’m not buying it.  The unarmed Arnis passenger ship is nowhere near Earth, and there’s several small fleets between the moon and Earth right now.”

Jessica shrugged, “Maybe it’s just a new blanket regulation for all non-Earth ships entering the system.  Sure, I doubt they care overmuch what happens to us, but it’s been a long time since we’ve been enemies.”

That… was likely enough, and probably just the simple truth, but I was still annoyed they hadn’t notified me of the change.  I sent a rather pointed query to Clarence James, I couldn’t imagine they’d dare to do the same thing to the Chinese if the merchant had been headed for their station.  At least, not without prior notification and approval.

Clarence popped up in my augmented reality interface, that was fast.  I answered the call.

Clarence said, “Mr. President.  I apologize for the misunderstanding.  Have you checked your messages yet this morning?”

Actually, I hadn’t.

“No?”

Clarence smiled, “We have our best generals and admirals working on a that counter-invasion plan to remove the Vrok as a danger to our sovereignty.  They started on our offensive planning a few minutes ago, but the first thing they discussed last night was our defenses, and how they could be tightened up.  They all liked your mini-platform defense plan since it costs no money and should be very effective, but they also discussed other dangers, including the possibility of subverting our trade allies or even just putting them under duress.  We don’t have eyes on their systems after all, for all we know there’s Vrok ships in orbit of Arnis right now, threatening to open fire on the planet.  The Arnis passenger and cargo ship might not be a military threat, but they could be forced to acts of terrorism to save their own planet, or even set to spy and try to steal earth nanite technology if under duress.  That holds for all our trade traces.

“The minutes and conclusions of last night should be in your messages.  The United States volunteered to perform all interdictions of incoming merchant vessels, since they have the largest manned fleet in the system.  In addition, we’ll also be highly curtailing access to Earth’s orbit and efforts are being made to expand our constant scanning for stealth vessels out to two light seconds as we build more mini-platforms.

“Similar measures have been taken in all our colony systems as well.”

“Alien ships are already forbidden Earth orbit.”

He nodded, “For our own merchant vessels, returning from other worlds.  They’ll have to submit to a search as well, before gaining access to Earth’s orbit, in case the enemy has taken their ship or some other form of duress.”

I blew out a breath, “I have no objections to any of that, it seems prudent.”

If a bit paranoid, but war was like that sometimes.  Plus, objecting wouldn’t get me anywhere if the other main eight countries in space were on board everyone else would follow, even if I disagreed, which I didn’t.

“However,” I added, “The Arnis are a sensitive race, I do hope the inspectors will be respectful of our trade allies and aware of the peculiarities of their taboos and cultures during the performance of their duties.”

Clarence nodded slowly, “That is our aim.  There will be a learning curve, but all captains assigned to this activity have strict orders to study the database for all the races that send merchant vessels here.”

Yeah, not perfect, but it would have to be good enough.

“Thanks for clarifying.”

Clarence nodded, and disconnected.

Then, I did what I should’ve done before calling in the first place, I read all my messages…

Cassie smirked as she walked in just after lunch, I hadn’t seen her all day.

“Jump to any conclusions lately?”

Jessica snickered, then slapped a hand over her mouth and looked at me guiltily.

I took the high road, and just ignored them both.

Cassie said, “Sorry, I could’ve briefed you if I’d been here, I think I need a bigger staff.  Astraeus is getting too big for my current one to handle, and with the added political babysitting with the war going on I’ve had a crazy morning.”

I shrugged, “Hire them then.  It’s not like we have a tight budget.”

Really, we were probably the only country in the U.N. with excess funds and absolutely no debt at all.  No thanks to any personal acumen as far as economics, it was all thanks to the nanites which were free from my point of view, and they made us a ton of cash in ships and other products.  In short, we cheated outrageously.

Of course, a lot of countries were doing better that way as well.  With humanity disgustingly healthy there was no more need for most aid programs, from free health care to disability.  Not just from accidents or trauma, but other disabilities as well.  Even food stamps and unemployment was practically non-existent, since many of the pioneers who started new colonies were among those who couldn’t get jobs.

Cassie nodded, “I also have good and bad news.  The good news is the U.N. are arguing about sharing cultured meat technology. I suppose it’s good no one is suggesting genocide, but many feel we should just quarantine the Vrok and not worry about it.  Food is their problem, and they eat intelligent life.  Half decries that as inhumane punishment, starving most of their population, and insist they should be given the technology and let them decide whether to use it or not.

“The bad news is the U.N. already made a decision on the other issue, after only a half day of arguing.  We’re going to take over the borders, and we’ll protect the twenty-six galaxies like we already are the fifty, from other super intergalactic empires around the Vrok currently.

“The next steps there, as far as exactly what we’re doing in that space, claiming a small portion, spreading out in it, or even what we do when the three million races start to advance without their suppressive overlords and get FTL.  We can figure all that out later.”

Damn, I’d been counting on much less cooperation.  Damned U.N. had to start getting things right, now?  What’s up with that?

I blew out a breath, “Hopefully they’ll argue long enough on the second issue to buy Diana enough time to give me something viable to present to the committee.”

Cassie asked, “What’s your thought there, on the protection part?”

I shrugged, “Carve out a small space in every galaxy equal to what we have here.  That will give us over two hundred thousand living words to eventually occupy, more or less.  A good payment for our effort to keep out the other large empires, without controlling the races who already live in those galaxies, giving them plenty of room to expand when they get in space.”

Cassie asked, “And when those races do get FTL, and start invading or trying to control their neighbors?”

I shook my head, as my conscience tweaked.  I didn’t really know, we couldn’t save everyone, and I wasn’t willing to run a true empire when they had to follow our laws.  That didn’t seem right either, and eventually humans would lose themselves to that much power, and hardly be fair.  Life simply wasn’t fair, and I didn’t want to lose myself to ambition or pushing my own morality on others.

“Not sure.  Perhaps take a page out of the Atans and the Grays books.  We’ll monitor them for ingress from one of the surrounding empires until they’re in space, then they’re kind of on their own.  Even against each other, at least they’ll be at a similar technological level.”

Cassie said, “That’s the Grays, what about the Atans?”

I said, “Oh.  Well, we ignore them, maybe even trade with them, but if they attack us we knock them out of space and let them try again later.  No genocide, not even reduced to the stone age, but we can give them a wakeup call.”

Cassie said, “If they attack other local pre-FTL societies, enslave them or just exploit them?”

I shrugged, “I think that’s the we can’t save everyone part.  Otherwise it’s a true empire and we’ll just make it worse.”

Cassie nodded, and looked relieved, “That’s something I can live with.  Protect our small areas of space in all the galaxies from all comers.  But only protect the growing to FTL races and the borders from the large threats, internally we can’t interfere past that, I don’t think.  Not without becoming what we’re fighting against.”

That was my idea, and it wasn’t perfect, but what in this life was?

Jessica said, “The Arnis have been cleared, and the U.S. ship is moving away.”

I replied, “Good, make sure second and third shift are aware of the new security precautions.”

Jessica smirked, “Consider it done.”

I nodded, “I’ll let our trading allies know, so they aren’t surprised at the gate so to speak.”

Cassie snickered, “Good plan.”

I took a sip of coffee, and I got back to work.  Solar system tours were expanding again, the Arnis weren’t the only race to be curious about visiting other worlds and enjoying their amenities from shopping to cuisine and culture.  Think cruise ship stopping in multiple ports, but worlds instead of islands and mainland.  A space luxury liner of course, which required a lot of imports from Earth, because nanites were a lot of things but they weren’t luxurious in the least.

I even set it up to look like a luxury liner in a lot of ways, including a very large open room on the top deck running the full length of the ship where the ceiling and walls were hidden behind realistic holograms of the surrounding space, including a few pools with bars.  From the inside, it would appear the top deck was open to space.  I had a little fun with it.

Chapter Seventeen

Diana looked dazzling in a conservative black sheath dress with red high heels, her athletically curvy body even more toned and supple than the day I met her.  It showed a tasteful amount above, and it went down to her lower thighs.  Her shiny raven black hair was up revealing dangling diamond earrings and the soft curves of her neck, which sparkled like her piercing green eyes.  She’d always been beautiful to me, but after thirteen years she was only more so, and then again as several years fell off her appearance. She was simply exquisite.

Still, it was no wonder she dressed down for work. I felt like I’d lost at least twenty IQ points just being in the same room with such a vision.  Not that her hot geek look worked to fool me, but I had to admit it seemed to work on her staff of scientists.  Maybe that was just the love bias, or knowing the truth of what lied beneath, but it was what it was.

She seemed to eat up my attention, enjoy it.  No doubt because she knew how much I valued her intelligence, heart, and everything else about her as well.  It was that part of things that’d made me fall for her in the first place.

It was date night, I tried to take her out at least once a week, but often life got in the way of that.  Still, two to three times a month at a minimum.  I didn’t want to take her for granted, and parents needed alone time to stay connected, besides in the bedroom at night I mean.  Wooing her continuously seemed to keep her happy in our personal lives, and I enjoyed it too.

Cassie would watch our Melody that night, and my sister did at times too.  Although our daughter was warbling on that age where we could trust her completely alone for a few hours, we hadn’t taken that step yet.

“You look gorgeous.”

She smiled, “Thanks.”

We left the bedroom, and said goodnight to Cassie and Melody, who were both splayed out on the couch with an open pizza box and sodas on the coffee table.  They were watching Frozen again.  I shuddered, and made my escape, my beautiful wife on my arm.

The city had grown by leaps and bounds, with two million residents the top city level had been almost completely filled.  There were six large resorts now, all with multiple restaurants and clubs that had different types of cuisine and dancing music respectively.  We weren’t going to one of those however, there was a new jazz club and creole restaurant in the main city we wanted to check out.

It wasn’t too much of a fuss, we had a minimal security presence, but if someone decided to threaten Astraeus’s president any wall, ceiling, or floor would have us shielded in a split second.  I still wasn’t overly impressed with myself that way, and my citizens left us alone for the most part.  I didn’t and still don’t like pomp and circumstance that comes from leading a country, and the citizens of Astraeus were flourishing.  I’d only been confronted angrily twice in the last thirteen years, and both times it’d been visitors to the station with a skewed idea of me.

I knew the fact my citizens liked me had nothing to do with who I was as a person, and it was actually all about the fact there were still no taxes.

The horizontal lift took us to the edge of the station, where we got on the civilian lift which took us to the top of the station and to an exit near the restaurant.  The light jazz reached our ears as we opened the door.  There were pictures on the entrance wall of the owner’s restaurant in New Orleans, which as far as I knew was still open and ran by the rest of his family.

The tables were covered in silvery white tablecloths and candles.  The chairs had golden brown cushions and backs, and the walls were a yellow gold color that would probably look gaudy in bright lighting, but the dim lighting just made it look clean and cozy.  There was a decent sized dance floor on the far side, next to the dais the band played on.  The ambience was only slightly romantic as we were led to our table, but we were there for the food and dancing, and the music of course.

The hostess smiled as we sat, “Your server should be right out,” and after pouring us both a house wine, left us the illusion of privacy.  Between the music and moderate din of the other tables our conversation would be private as long as we spoke in normal tones.

Diana said, “I don’t want to talk about work tonight, but just a quick status.  My initial impressions bore out today.  The materials technology for the subspace energy beam is completely inimical to base nanite operation, so we’ll have to go with plan B.  Blending the other technologies into the nanites looks promising, and I’ve set up several thousand tests to run overnight for incorporating the rest into nanites.  Give me a couple of more days to work out the best efficiencies, bugs, and get the command and control software ported and tailored for our systems.”

Her voice and face were serious, and it felt a little wrong.  She usually only told me about projects at the very end or even after it was finished, and with a sense of excitement, since she ran her labs and made all the decisions.  Her little speech had felt more like she was reporting to me, like a recalcitrant soldier that’d been caught doing something wrong.  Which was the wrong dynamic between us.

I was happy with her decision to shift more of her focus to war technologies to protect humanity, but in my mind it was all still her authority.  I also realized if I brought it up, we’d fight about it, so I kept my mouth shut.  She had to get over it and forgive herself on her own for her perceived faults, so I just let it pass and hoped she’d get back to her normal self soon.

Plus, tonight was about wooing her, and spicing up the attempt to get pregnant again, which would surely follow our date.

“I’ll do my best,” I raised the wineglass, “To human obstruction and corrupt ambition in the U.N.”

She giggled at my absurd toast, mission accomplished.  After bumping glasses, we both drank.

“That was the strangest toast I ever heard.”

I shrugged and winked, “Humanity’s folly is working for us for once.”

The waiter arrived and took our order.  I got the etouffee over rice, and my wife ordered Cajun chicken and shrimp gumbo.

We moved away from work discussion after that, sort of.

Diana said, “Your daughter wants a test sandbox.”

“My daughter?” I asked carefully.

Diana grinned impudently, “Yes, she wants to research quantum frequency resonance.  Apparently, her mother’s research on the matter is far from complete, and she finds the lack disturbing.”

I snorted, “Okay?”

She shrugged, “To be fair, she’s right.  I haven’t looked at it since we got the communicators and jump drives working.  There’s also nothing about that in the Gray database, so it’s a new field all around.”

I said, “You can only do so much, and the theoretical database could keep you busy for centuries.”

She nodded in easy agreement.

“What kind of test sandbox?”

She said, “Her own ship in the test system.”

The test system was just a star system without a living planet in it.  Diana had ships out there to run tests where none of our human competitors could see, not to mention the safety concerns.  Sometimes experiments went wrong after all, and when dealing with the power of the universe things could explode.  Better to be far away from Earth when that happened.

It took me a minute to wrap my mind around that, my twelve-year-old wanted to do research?  I wasn’t really surprised, but what twelve-year-old gets a spaceship for research?  Mine, apparently, if it will make her happy, and keep her out of mischief from boredom.

“I don’t see a problem with it, as long as she doesn’t hare off with it, and she keeps you informed of what she’s doing with it.  No practical experiments without your sign off.”

She nodded, “I’ll make one from mine, and give her access in the morning.  We also need to make sure she only spends an hour or two a day on it, in addition to the hour she’ll be learning from my lab experiments.”

I could agree with that, she needed a childhood too, if we could manage it.  I also wondered what Melody would come up with.

We finished up our first glass of wine.

“Dance, love?”

She smiled almost girlishly, “I’d love to.”

It was a good night, and for the rest of it we focused on us.  My wife was mesmerizing and graceful on the dance floor, and her being in my arms might’ve had something to do with that as well.  It was a good night.

Chapter Eighteen

The luxury cruise ship design was going well late the next morning, when Cassie came into the command center with a grimace on her face.

“What’s happened?”

Cassie said, “Our scanners picked up bomb making materials in the last tourist shuttle coming up from the surface.  Relatively benign elements apart, but when mixed together they’d create a large explosion.  You’d think after thirteen years they’d figure out our scanners can’t be fooled.  The bags weren’t tagged, so security is questioning them all.  We suspect this is about the Arnis that came in yesterday, and there’s some xenophobic Earth first assholes in the mix, we just have to find them.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

She nodded, “No doubt, but in the meantime, I’ve got several countries calling and demanding we release their citizens.  Never mind the fact their security failed to find it, or appropriately tag and identify the luggage per the law.”

“Sounds like a normal day.  You need a vacation?”

She laughed, “You know, I think I do.  A week, our beach, a cooler of blood, and a bikini.  Maybe when I finish hiring that expanded staff you told me I could have. Then I’ll be able to see to it.”

She really did need a vacation, usually the crazier crap got the more aplomb and enjoyment she showed in her work.  Cassie excelled under pressure.

Jessica said, “Uh oh.”

We both looked her way, what now?

Jessica said, “The U.N. just reached agreement, they’ll offer to send them the plans for the technology if they don’t have it.  But it’ll be up to the Vrok to build it or starve.  We won’t help them any further than that.  I can’t say they’re wrong.”

I blew out a breath, that meant…

Jessica looked up, “The Committee wants you in the conference room at the top of the hour.”

Yeah, that.  I checked the time, and it was quarter to eleven.  Not much time.  I could hardly believe the political wrangling let me down. I knew Diana still needed a few more days to get a working upgrade for our ship’s tactical systems across the board, minimum.  Plus another day or two to make enough of the new nanites and fabricate enough turrets.

I sighed, “Alright, you need to sit this one out?”

Cassie shook her head, “The committee and our war with the Vrok takes priority over everything else.  Jessica’s people will figure out the culprits, and the whiners down on the planet can suck it up and talk to my voicemail.”

I laughed, “Works for me.”

Cassie asked, “What will you do?”

I shrugged, “Probably something stupid when I try to delay again, and it doesn’t work.  I can’t tell them the truth, and they won’t believe me without proof, that Diana is close to a breakthrough and difference maker.  We’ll see what their military people came up with, who knows, it might even be a good plan.  I can’t just say no, not if all the other countries are for it, unless I want to be branded a rogue world leader again, ignoring the votes of the U.N.”

Jessica shrugged, “They’re your fleets.”

“True, but perception matters more than reality.  Politically, I either play nice and go with the majority, or I’d be rogue.  Sure, they get no say on Astraeus, but all the countries have managed to work together as far as how we act outside our space.  I don’t want to be the one to break that and start a precedent.”

Cassie nodded, “That’d be a mistake, even if their plan sucks.”

I snickered, “Noted, and I agree.  Shall we?”

Cassie grinned, “This should be fun.”

I snorted, “Watching me suffer?”

Cassie nodded, “Of course, what else do you think I could’ve meant?”

I laughed, and we headed out.

Once we had privacy, I asked, “So, is it really the job that has you frazzled. You usually eat up political maneuvering and drama, like jet fuel for humanity.”

She replied, “Since when are you so intuitive?”

I really wasn’t I didn’t think, she was just too far away from how she usually acted during a crisis.

“You don’t have to answer, but you are family.”

She sighed, and touched my arm for a second, “I am, and you are to me.  Which is new for me, and more precious to me than I can express.  The rest of the council isn’t happy I’m so in the public eye, they’ve been suggesting more firmly lately that it’s time to bow out.  Not leave Astraeus, but to take a less… visible position that will still let me keep an eye on you.  Even better, if I can groom the person that replaces me.”

“And… you don’t want to give up the drama?” I said in confused disbelief.

She snickered, “I do thrive on chaos.  I’ve never been a chaos maker, but I thrive on dealing with those who are and putting the world in order.  Politics is a challenging job.”

I nodded, “New?”

She shrugged, “Not many men have befriended me over my long life, and for those that try they usually have ulterior motives.  Not to mention jealous wives, that you and Diana welcome me as part of your family is unique in my life.”

I nodded, “Because you make most supermodels cry in envy?”

It was just the truth, she was just that attractive, but that hadn’t ever caused awkwardness between us, or jealousy in Diana at the way Cassie and I got along.  Maybe it had to do with how she’d treated me distantly in the beginning, that initial and quite natural attraction I’d felt at her unsurpassed beauty in the beginning had passed, and never come back since my wife had me quite smitten.

She snickered, “Blunt and crude, but essentially true.”

I swapped subjects at that point.

“So, what’s the plan?”

She sighed, “That’s the problem, I don’t have one yet.  I wonder if I’m growing corrupt, because I don’t want to give it up, but a part of me knows they’re right.”

We ran out of time, not that there was an easy solution, or even one in sight for that.  Point was, we both fell silent as we walked into the conference room.

Clarence nodded as I sat, “Natalya will brief you on the plan our militaries came up with, but before we start that do you have any updates?”

I said, “My head scientist is running some promising experiments last night and today.  She believes we can reach parity in weapons, shields, and drive acceleration.  The improvements should also increase the power of our old weapons.  I’d ask for a week to pursue that, if it’s successful we’ll be able to take their fleets much more easily, and quickly enough that they couldn’t escape.”

Clarence asked, “But you have no definitive data to share of success?”

“No, no demonstration either, but I trust my head scientist.  She’s never misled me before, and she wouldn’t make promises she couldn’t deliver on.”

Chen interjected, “It is too risky.  We are aware the enemy has quantum communicators.  My government’s scientists are aware of the connection to the jump drive, and while we don’t have it yet outside the lab it won’t be long in coming.  However, the true danger isn’t in the enemy developing a drive like that, it’s in them creating a counter that prevents a quantum resonance field beacon from being formed at the destination.  We have to assume they’re working on that, and if we lose that edge before we overcome theirs, we’ll be finished.

“It’s why the U.N. so quickly came to an accommodation on the other two issues.  Killing them quickly would be better, but the fact is we already have superiority, and it isn’t worth the gamble of losing it before we can gain an even larger one.”

I nodded, he wasn’t really wrong, the problem was the enemy wouldn’t cooperate and just sit there why we slowly destroyed a fleet of their ships over a half an hour’s time.

“You all feel the same?”

They all nodded.

I looked toward Natalya, “What is it that they want me to do?”

Natalya said, “We want you to double your offensive fleets and attack in twenty-four hours.  In that time, the ships can be grown large enough to accommodate twelve million mini-platforms, though they won’t be at their full mass yet.

“Seven of the twelve fleets will jump in on and take out their border fleets and replace them.  If those enemy fleets flee before total destruction, you will keep your fleets there to stand off the other empires.  Simultaneously, your other five fleets will split evenly to chase down their offensive fleets, which if we understand correctly are ten million ships.  Those will go down even faster at two to one odds.  Lastly, their eighth border with us, you’ll attack with your current border fleet, which you’ll leave there until all their ships are destroyed.  At that point, that fleet will be freed up.”

“That’ll give me a whole lot of extra ships when it’s done, six full fleets worth.”

Natalya nodded, “True.  Though one full fleet will be split up to watch over their two hundred eighty six thousand worlds, and the three million pre-FTL civilizations we’ll be watching over.  We’ll eventually use them, and there are some that fear another empire on one of their borders might react badly to the change of border guards.  Mainly though, it’s so we can kill them faster.

“With the new subspace shielding giving us a small survival window, you should be able to take them out a lot faster, but you’d suffer losses as well.  In the end, you may lose a few fleets worth of ships, and need to combine them to reach the eight we need when all is said and done.”

I pondered that a minute.  With jumping every two tenths of a second, I could take out twenty thousand every eighteen seconds.  If I jumped once a second, and I trusted the weaker subspace shield configurations Diana had given me a few days ago to keep my ships alive, that’d go up to two hundred thousand every twenty seconds.  Which meant destroying a whole fleet in just six and two thirds minutes.

That was for the external fleets.  For the ten million I’d outnumber two to one, I could destroy those in just three and a third minutes.

No, I could do better.  If I programmed the ships to only jump if they were fired at, most of the ships wouldn’t have to jump at all.  Forty-seven trillion mini-platforms, but they only had a little over four billion energy turrets.  Which meant most of them could fire non-stop without jumping at all.

Which changed things in a major way.  It might even work, except if they had orders to run like I expected.  I could take out a lot more than I’d originally projected, but they’d still have most of their fleets intact if they ran right away.  But if they hesitated a half a minute, it might just work.

I used my augmented reality interface to split the six fleets into twelve, with long established macros, and they started building.  I also tweaked the priorities to missiles.

“Alright.  I expect we’ll do some damage, maybe take out forty thousand per fleet in the worst-case scenario.”

Assuming they didn’t run before we could even close to energy range.

Chen asked, “You think they’ll run?”

“I would, if I couldn’t win.  They’d just need to hide in the void between stars until they figure out how to suppress our jump drives.  I suspect they are close to that, or they’re at least working on it feverishly.  With the upgraded weapons, we’ll so outnumber them in throw weight they’ll just die in the first few seconds.”

At twelve thousand to one, mini-platforms to ships, they’d just die in milliseconds if our beams were equal to their beam power.  With the old beams their more powerful shields just absorb them easily, for a while anyway.  Without cutting our power to a fifth with jumps, it’d theoretically go five times faster.

Natalya said, “You’ll chase of course.”

I nodded, “If we can.  Subspace sensors work out to five light years or so, we only have probes in their occupied systems.  We won’t detect the wormhole formation where they come out, if they avoid getting that close to any of their worlds.  Forget about finding them in real space, that’ll never happen unless they retreat to another of their words.”

Chen said, “You still don’t want to do it.”

I shrugged, “If their fleets escape and manage to hide, then it won’t matter if the expected upgrade comes through, not if I can’t find their ships.  Right now, we know where they all are.  But, like it or not I’ll go with the majority.  I’ve split the fleets, and I’ll attack this time tomorrow.  The good news is we’ll at least get twelve million of them without a problem, so they’ll only be running around with thirty million new ships.”

Cassie patted my leg under the table, and I supposed she was right.  I shouldn’t say I told you so, at least, not until it all went wrong for real.

Natalya said, “That’s right, three of their borders are still guarded by the weaker ships.”

I nodded, “Those I can just blast apart in second or two.  Anything else?”

Admiral Grady said, “I wonder why they’re looking in our direction, do you think that means the other empires around them are more powerful?”

I shook my head, “For the Atans we know that’s not true.  I suspect it has to do with how big our empire is, I don’t think the other seven surrounding them are nearly as large as we are.  They’ll be just short of tripling the size of their empire, and all they have to do is kill the new kid on the block with only two hundred planets and with a population so small they can’t even man all their ships.  Our ships.”

Natalya said, “But the Atans are stronger than us, they’re just vulnerable to our disintegration beam.”

That was a good point.

“Well find out, when we can get their data on their surrounding empires.  But I stand by what I just said, that’ll only be a part of it, they’re coming for us because of how big we are.  Maybe this space was the weakest when they came up with the plan sixty years ago, but we put the Grays to shame, so that’s going to change that differential by a lot.”

Minato said, “Good point, but I’d prefer proof of that.”

I nodded, “Me too, that’ll come with time.”

Or, we’ll all die.  One or the other.  Life was uncertainty after all.  Still, I was somewhat comforted in the knowledge we were about to leap forward in our ship technology, by a rather large stride.  Trusting in hope was a bad plan, but we also had no reason to believe those empires would decide to invade either.  For some things hope had to be enough, or paranoia would start to drive our ambition instead of empathy tempering it, and that’s when bad shit happened.

Natalya asked, “Shall we reconvene this time tomorrow?”

I replied, “I’ll be in the command center during the attack, but I can pipe status displays into here for the rest of you.  I’ll also be piping it down to the joint command center on Earth, of course.”

Chen nodded firmly, and said, “That will do.”

We meeting broke up after that, and Cassie and I went to meet Diana for lunch.

When I finished going over what was going on, Diana shook her head.

She said, “We’ve got the hardware worked out, including the fabrication of the subspace energy beam turrets.  The new nanites are stable and far more robust, and we’ll see a raise of eighty percent efficiency across the board.  A hundred gravities of acceleration manned, ten times that for platforms and mini-platforms.  The beam weapons and shields are almost twice as powerful, which makes them magnitudes stronger and will make us more than a match for the enemy’s ships.

“It’s the software side that’s slowing us down, we got it all working in lab conditions, but the software will take us at least three more days, if not a week.  Not just for the new shield configurations, or the command and control software for the subspace energy beams, but everything else too.  We need to rewrite a lot of the control software to allow higher energy transfers, change the drive acceleration limits, and make sure it’s working seamlessly with the inertial dampers, or a crew could wind up pancaked against a hull.  There’s a lot of small things like that.  I’ll also want to test it exhaustively for a few days once it’s done, to make sure there’s no bugs and its consistent under all conditions.”

That made sense, in the past all we’d done was add new technologies.  This upgrade was different, we were upgrading four of the major current systems, which touched countless minor systems on the nanite level like energy routing, overload warnings, throttling, and safety features.  Rushing that kind of thing would be foolish.

I nodded, and deadpanned, “So, not by tomorrow.”

She stuck her tongue out.

I grinned, “Not your fault, I failed to convince them we were close enough that it was the better risk to wait.  On the plus side, the plan isn’t awful, it might even work if we catch the Vrok napping.”

Cassie just looked at me.

I shrugged, “Yeah, I don’t think it’ll work great, and hope that the enemy will be negligent is a bad plan, but we’ll see.  They’re all letting fear drive that decision.”

Diana shrugged, “On the good side, you can start building all the turrets on each ship, a few thousand for the ship and twelve million for the missiles.  By the time the software is done you should have enough, and at that point you’ll just need to build enough of the new nanites, which should take an hour at most, and then upgrade the software.”

I nodded, “Then lock it down and sell it as an upgrade, and rake in the big bucks.”

Diana giggled, “Sure.”

Cassie nodded, “All those mini-platforms they’re building will be nothing but target practice for the Vrock, if they come up with a jump drive suppression device.  They won’t hesitate, if only to keep up with you besides.”

Diana bit her lip and gave me a regretful look.

“What?”

She shrugged, “It’s been percolating in the back of my mind since you mentioned it, and I came up with a way this morning, it just popped in my head.  It’d be pretty easy to build a suppression device, I’d just never considered it before.  An omni-directional quantum resonance burst would do it.  It wouldn’t have to be that strong either, just strong enough to foul a quantum beacon field from forming perfectly.  If the resonance doesn’t perfectly match the quantum jump drive’s field around the ship, it won’t work.

“The pulse wouldn’t go far, but it only needs to go out a light second in every direction for it to foul any jump drive in energy beam range.  If they send out several hundred a second our ships wouldn’t be able to jump, fire, jump and fire.”

I sighed, “But they’d have to build them.”

She nodded, “But with some tactical placement they just need to make four thousand per fleet, one out of a thousand ships.  They’d just need to plug it in a conduit and turn it on, it could be made to act automatically, always on like a ship’s transponder.  A light second radius around the ship is a huge area after all, even four thousand would be overkill.  Four million ships could get lost inside a space that large, if four thousand ships used overlapping beacons to create a very large field.

“We also know from the specs that they have fabricator bays on board for replacement parts.  A warship that didn’t and wasn’t nanite driven, well that would just be stupid.  The only reasonable delay I could think of would be the need for the superconductive alloy.  The suppression device would need the same alloy we both use in our quantum communicators, and that we use in the jump drives.”

I raised an eyebrow, “Why is that reasonable?”

She said, “Because they only use that alloy in their communicators, so they don’t have it as spare raw material on their ships.  They have a communicator on their bridge and a backup in engineering, that’s considered good enough being those locations are in the most protected parts of the ship.  That means picking up some of that alloy from a base before they could build the devices.  The stuff is also a pain in the ass to make, if you don’t have an energy to matter device, which they don’t.  At least, not on their warships.  Still, even that only buys a few days after they figure out how to do it.”

“Well, let’s hope they’re not as brilliant as you, which is a good bet.”

She blushed, “You’re biased, but thanks for saying it.  Although, without fully understanding the drive’s operations, we can hope it will take them longer than a day to get started on it.  I had somewhat of an advantage with that additional knowledge.”

“I think we can guarantee that, none of the ships in their fleets have gotten deliveries lately.  They must still be working on it, and in just a week or sooner it’ll be a moot point.”

She replied, “Three to four days for programing, three days for testing.”

Six or seven days that could spell success or failure for the human race in space.  No pressure though, and who knew, maybe the attack plan would work.

After lunch, I headed back to the command center and decided the cruise ship design would have to wait.  Instead, I assigned targets for all the fleets, and programmed in the attack parameters.  Once the building was finished, the fleets would be ready to move.

Whether I liked it or not.

Chapter Nineteen

It was later that same afternoon, and I had everything ready to go.  The probes had the locations of the fleet nailed down, so it was easy to use that data to have my fleets come out of wormholes just outside of a light second distance.  Release the platforms and one jump forward, and the craziness would begin.  I also timed the wormholes so all the battles would start at the same time.

The part I was worried about most was the few seconds it would take to launch.  Quantum jumping to the location after a launch wouldn’t be much better, and even slower in fact.  The first few would get there fast if I could use the probe to set up a handful of beacons, but then they’d have to set up beacons for the next fifteen, then the next hundred, next five hundred, and it would escalate until all the ships were there.  That’d be much slower than a launch.

I’d decided not to use the fleet that stood on the border, I’d just split one of the others in two.  The one on the border would be seen to act long before it could close the distance if I did use it, so I figured it was better to preserve surprise.  Plus, the old fleets weren’t that powerful at all, twenty-four trillion platforms would kill them just as fast as forty-eight would.

Jessica said, “We’ve identified the two Earth first terrorists that tried to smuggle explosive compounds on the station.”

“That’s good news?”

She’d sounded like it wasn’t, which of course meant there was a caveat of some kind, because of course that was good news.

“Space Force wants us to turn them over to them.  They say both of them are on a watchlist, and the scanners at the spaceport should’ve picked up those two inert compounds even before mixed like ours did.  So, they’re concerned.  Somehow, they got on board the shuttle despite screening, got explosives on board despite scan screening, and they’re concerned by the fact the luggage wasn’t tagged and associated with them like it should’ve been.”

I sighed, “Sounds like one of those nuts works for the TSA or the commercial shuttle company.”

Jessica nodded, “That seems likely, as not even incompetence could cover three large mistakes like that.  We also have another problem, another passenger from that shuttle is making a huge stink after being held for three hours while we worked out the guilt party.  A Kevin Kearns.  He’s been complaining to anyone that will listen, and he’s demanding to speak to someone in authority that can make it right.  I suppose he’s probably looking to be compensated with free stuff.  The news is running the story, and it’s making us look incompetent, when we’re the only ones who did it right in the whole mess.”

I snorted, “True, he should be mad at security on the ground, or the shuttle company.  Go ahead and give those two idiots to America, they’ll need to question them to find the insider on their side.  Ask them to send a shuttle.”

“Kevin?” she asked.

I quipped, “We could send him too?”

She snickered.

Cassie sighed, “I’ll deal with him.  I’ll also get Jayna on some counter-spin, we don’t need a black-eye in the press affecting tourism.”

I grinned, “If you need help hiding the body, just give me a call.”

Cassie giggled as she walked out the door, and it slid shut behind her.

The man wasn’t in any true danger of course, but that kind of thing was just annoying.  Security delays were just a fact of life and no one’s fault besides the person who caused them.  Expecting anything free from the station or the resort he was booked at was ridiculous, and of course the bottom-feeding press just made it all worse.

There was still a little time in the workday, a little less than an hour, so I brought up the luxury cruise ship design and got back to it.

I think I lost track of time working on the ship.  It was almost done, most of the luxuries would be installed post-build when I spun off the cruise ship.  Regardless, it didn’t seem all that long before Jayna and Cassie breezed into the room and there was so much tension I couldn’t fail to notice it.  When I glanced at the time almost a half hour had passed.

“What happened?”

Did Cassie kill him after all?  I smirked.

Jayna said, “Cassie lost her mind.”

“Cass?”

Cassie said, “The man was verbally abusive, screaming threats and F-bombs in the middle of the docking area in front of everyone including the press.  His own family looked highly embarrassed.”

“So, what’d you do, exactly?”

Jayna said angrily, “She revoked his Visa on the spot, cuffed him and had him escorted to the shuttle, and kicked him off the station.”

I chuckled.

Jayna rolled her eyes, “Not funny.”

Yes, it was, but not wanting to draw my sister’s wrath my face sobered.

“That sounds reasonable to me,” I said carefully.

Cassie nodded, “He escalated during my de-escalation efforts.  He was an entitled and spoiled rich jackass.  We didn’t owe him a thing, and he wasn’t taking no for an answer, like a five-year-old throwing a tantrum for a cookie.”

Jayna blew out a breath, “Yes, but an entitled rich jackass who moves in circles with senators and knows the president.  The damned press is already saying we suppress free speech and freedom of expression, and the station is run by a tyrant and his sidekick mini-tyrant.  He was an ass, and I was tempted to immolate him myself, but that’s not how to handle things and she knows that.”

“I’d have probably done the same thing.”

Jayna waved that away, “No doubt, but Cassie should know better.”

Jessica snickered.

Cassie shrugged, “We can’t be bullied into giving out free stuff, and I won’t be treated that way.  He was using intimidation to make us cave, and the press never would’ve gotten it right anyway.  Make a meme with his face on a baby with a rattle, crying, and post it on Facebook.  That should take care of it.”

I started to snigger, but I stopped at Jayna’s glare.

“So what should Cassie have done, taken the abuse and let the man run out of steam?  We allow free speech, but that’s not the same as allowing verbal abuse.  Could you imagine what would happen if a foreign tourist started screaming obscenities at the Secretary of State because his flight was delayed a few hours?”

Jayna sighed, “I get it, I really do, a part of me even enjoyed watching it happen, but it could’ve been handled much better.  Now you need to do a press conference for spin control.”

I glared at Cassie, nothing else my sister said could’ve made me change sides faster.

Cassie snorted, “It’s not that bad.  There’s always a jerk in the crowd, most of our tourists are very happy and leave good reviews.  One more insane tirade won’t make that much of a difference.”

Jayna shook her head, “Normally I’d agree, but this guy has connections.  America has been grudgingly neutral toward us the last eight years, and that may change if this guy can raise enough of a fuss when he gets back on the ground.  If tourism is impacted the resort companies will be furious at us.  If a senator decides to make an issue of this and deliver a travel advisory it could snowball.”

“How should she have dealt with it, doesn’t seem like she had a choice, the man wouldn’t calm down or talk?”

Cassie nodded, “Nothing different, actually.  Do we really want to cave to political pressure or sour campaigns?  Have two sets of standards?  One for the rich and connected, and one for the rest?  We treat all our visitors with the same respect, until they do something to lose it, and this isn’t the first time we’ve revoked a visa for someone that stepped over the bounds of civility.”

Jayna bit her lip, “Fine, but he’s giving a speech about it.”

Cassie shook her head, “Let’s wait a few days for the full fallout, so he can address it all, we can’t march him out every five minutes as it evolves.”

Jayna tilted her head, “I can agree to that.”

“So… we’re good?”

Jayna blew out a breath, “I think so.  She isn’t wrong, exactly.”

Cassie sighed, “I could’ve been more subtle doing it though.”

I shook my head, time to call it a day.

Chapter Twenty

The command table hologram looked like a huge mess trying to keep track of it all.  It was late morning the next day, and time to launch the plan.

I had a bad feeling about it, as the fleets started to wormhole out in specified intervals designed to get them to the targets at the same time.  The farthest target was just over fifteen million light years away, and it’d take at least three hours to get there via wormhole.

The enemy had forty-two million ships while I had forty-eight million.  Those forty-eight million ships had a combined five hundred and seventy-six trillion platforms.  The table just couldn’t possibly display and track that many ships.  The sensors were up to it, each ship being a huge computer the way it was, more ships, more computing power.  It was just rendering that many ships in such a small space that was impossible.

The numbers were just insane.

As a result, I’d be looking for losses to gauge the battle, the eight border fleets of the enemy, and the ten million other ships were split in two different locations, one with six million and one with the four million that had attacked us.

Seven of the fleets were going for eight borders, one fleet split to take two of the three enemy fleets that had their old ships.  I had three fleets going to their six million ship fleet, and the last two going for the enemy’s four million ship fleet to maintain perfect two to one odds there.  After the battle I’d split one of those five fleets so I’d have two whole fleets on those borders, instead of two million ships which might embolden one of the surrounding empires.

To simplify things, it was now little better than a number display with ship counts, of both the enemy and my ships, superimposed over a very small-scale hologram of the twenty-six galaxies.  The battle would be automated, the platforms would attack automatically when they came out of wormholes and detected enemy ships nearby.  Otherwise it’d be simply impossible for one person to handle it.

I shook my head, and I had a bad feeling about it.  I wasn’t worried I’d lose ships. I was worried the plan wouldn’t work at all.  I sent out a message to the committee on when the battle was starting in a little less than three hours from then, and I’d pipe the hologram down to the conference room at that time.

I got up and grabbed a coffee, it was going to be a long three hours.

Cassie said, “The fallout from yesterday isn’t bad yet.”

I shrugged, “Some people will side with us, and call him a jackass.  Some will rally on the idea we suppress expression, which is ridiculous.  I guess what I’m saying is we did the right thing, and we’ll weather the storm if one comes.  We can’t please everyone, if we’d caved to the jackass then the half supporting us would be the ones angry with us for giving in.  The press already had their teeth in it, so I’d rather be damned for doing the right thing.”

I was pretty sure my sister knew and understood that too, she was just angry at all the extra work this would cause.

Cassie nodded in agreement.

Everything went perfectly to plan, in the first two seconds.

The ships dropped out of wormholes, and they started to eject the mini-platforms in waves from all over the ship’s hull.  Ejecting twelve million mini-platforms took a shockingly short time, and would be done in a few seconds.

My console alarmed on the third second, and I brought up the data.  The ten million enemy ships were already opening wormholes, they must’ve had orders to evade at the first sign of the enemy, meaning us.  It was exactly what I feared, and I already knew this foolish attack would gain us little.

Two seconds after that, all my ships jumped forward into range and opened fire.  The enemy returned fire.

As expected, the three old Vrok fleets were destroyed or at least disabled in eight tenths of a second.  They had about as much of a chance of surviving our weapons, as our ships had in surviving the newer subspace energy weapons without the jump drive to dodge targeting them.

Simultaneously to three fleets destruction, the four billion mini-platforms per site were forced to jump to avoid destruction before their weak subspace shields buckled to the enemy’s fire.  The other forty six trillion nine hundred and ninety six billion continued to fire non-stop.

Of course, it wasn’t quite that lopsided, given enemy formations there were only so many mini-platforms that could fire at the enemy ships at once without getting in each other’s way.  The enemy ships toward the center of the formation were pretty much safe in that first exchange as well.

At the fourth second since they started opening wormholes, two seconds since the firing had started, twenty thousand of their ships exploded in each location, while another four billion of my mini-platforms were forced to jump before shield collapse.

The fifth second arrived as my ships opened fire on the next large group of ships, but it was too late.  The wormholes finished forming, and every enemy ship disappeared.  I’d managed to destroy forty thousand out of ten million, and in that moment, I had no idea where those ships were going.

On the sixth second another twenty thousand ships on their five remaining border fleets exploded, and my console alarmed as their ships started to open up wormholes.  For some reason their border fleets hadn’t the same orders as their attack fleet, and it’d taken some time for them to determine and implement that action.

Still, a six second response time wasn’t exactly shabby on the enemy’s part.

Our mini-platforms continued to jump when forced, about four billion of them a second, while we managed to take out twenty thousand of their ships on seconds eight and ten, right before they too entered the wormholes and disappeared from my scanners.

In total, we’d managed to kill just over a quarter million of their new ships, plus all twelve million of the old ones.  That left them just a quarter million short of thirty million new ships, their full fleets were virtually still intact, for the new ships.

I assigned one of the five free fleets to split and join the split fleets on the two borders that had old ships, so we had eight full fleets of four million on all their borders, including ours, given they still had close to thirty million ships that was just prudent.

That left me with sixteen million ships, four full fleets, twiddling their thumbs in the Vrok’s home galaxy.  It wasn’t possible to trace a wormhole, and unless their fleets came out in range of a probe, we’d never find them.  So, I put them to work in the hopes of drawing them back out.  It’d be stupid for them to fall for it, but desperate people did stupid things.

I sent the fleets after the Vrok infrastructure in space.  Specifically, their build platforms in five thousand systems, their space stations which was in orbit of all of their two hundred and eighty six thousand worlds.  Their mining ships, their food transports, and their merchants.  If it was an enemy target, and not on a planet, I marked it for destruction.

The four fleets split up, and unleashed unimaginable destruction on the enemy’s presence in space, in less than an hour they had no space assets at all, and might as well have been confined to their planets.

Except of course, almost thirty million warships, which stayed hidden.  We’d still have to deal with them at some point, and I hadn’t seen one wormhole exit, which meant they were hiding somewhere.

Lastly, I sent fifty ships to all two hundred and eighty six thousand of their worlds, and just let them sit there in orbit.  Then I got up and Cassie and I headed toward the conference room.

The committee looked grim, and I suppressed the I told you so that was on the tip of my tongue.

I said, “If you followed, they have twenty-nine million seven hundred and forty thousand ships left.  We have no idea where they are, nor is it remotely possible to find them.  There’s a tiny chance the second wave of the probe blitz might find them, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.  If I were them, I’d hide in the void, not in one of their unoccupied systems.”

There was still twenty-one days before the second wave probe blitz was complete, until then we couldn’t be sure they didn’t have hidden bases in any apparently empty solar systems.

I added, “I suppose taking out all their space stations, build platforms, and resource shipping and mining is a good thing.  But now, even if I get those expected upgrades in the next five or six days, we can’t find their fleets to remove them.”

Chen said, “It went about as we expected.”

I shut my eyes and took a breath, mostly so I didn’t explode.  They knew it would end like this, like I’d expected, and they did it anyway?  It hadn’t been desperation at all, which meant there was more to their plan.

They hidden the second part of their true plan from me.

Livid didn’t really cover it, and I was trying to control that anger.

Natalya said, “I know you’d have preferred to wait for your scientists to come through on their promise, but we couldn’t risk them making the breakthrough they needed first.  We have them at our mercy now, they may have thirty million ships, but they aren’t a threat, while we are in orbit of all their worlds, and their food is out of reach on three million other planets.”

“I won’t make that threat. I’d never follow up on it.”

Chen nodded, “We know.  But we will.  Ships are being dispatched now to demand their surrender at their home world and seat of power.  We will simply threaten them with starvation, they can’t pick up more food with no more ships, and we’ll promise the cultured meat technology in return for surrender and the destruction of their fleets.”

Shit.  They’d used me, they couldn’t have done this without me, without me chasing off thirty million ships.  They didn’t have the numbers for it, so they used me in their stupid plan. All so they could threaten Vrok worlds and demand surrender.

Which meant if it did go forward, they could be making me complicit in genocide.

“Who is we, did you all plan this, to use me to get to a point you could use a lever I’d never approve of?”

Chen said, “We all discussed it, the decision was not unanimous, and my people’s fleet was chosen for this task.”

I sighed, it was still a bad plan, one I didn’t think would actually work.

“If they’re close to the breakthrough, as you all feared, then they won’t surrender.  They’ll upgrade enough ships and come back at us.  Worse, you’ve made them even more motivated to do so, when a little patience would’ve prevented this whole scenario.  The only question is if they’ll come for my ships, or for our planets directly.  I’m betting on the latter, since it’d draw our ships in to be destroyed.”

Minato said, “With all due respect, we disagree.  Our militaries came up with this plan, and as you’ve said so many times before, you’re not a military minded person.  They will cave, or they will starve.”

I nodded, “Assuming they don’t already have that technology, and they’re only eating sentient races because they taste better, and it appeals to their instincts as predators.  Your whole plan hinges on that unproven assumption. I was worried they’d starve when we limited them to their planets, but that was a theoretical concern, not proven fact.  They may have it, and they just think of it as survival rations, like MREs.  So what happens if they do, they can eat, and they can wait for their fleet upgrades.”

Chen said, “Perhaps, but war is uncertainty, trickery, and turns of fortune.  If that’s the case we’ll overcome, adapt, and find another way.  Either way, your active part in this is done.  We will of course, welcome your insights and ideas should our plan fall through.”

Natalya said, “You might bend your mind toward finding those ships.”

I suppressed a snort, and I didn’t even address that absurd statement.  It’d be easier to find a single specific grain of sand on the whole planet.  No, it’d be easy to find a particular spec of dirt in our solar system.

“What I’m having trouble swallowing is half the plan was deliberately kept from me.  My vote should’ve been included.  I followed the lead of the majority did I not, even when I knew the attack plan was doomed to failure.”

More than a few of them shifted uncomfortably at that.  Call me naïve, but I was kind of shocked, they’d all broken faith with me.  I was leader of the most powerful country in the U.N., even if it was the youngest.  Had they feared I’d have said no if I knew the full plan, backed out completely?  I couldn’t see another possibility as to why they did it, they’d needed me for the first half of the plan, but not the second.

Chen said, “Your vote would’ve made no difference, and it was felt you had enough on your plate given you were solely responsible for phase one.”

“Sophistry, that doesn’t even make sense.  It’s an offensive plan outside our space, that means it’s a join decision that belongs to all of us and must be discussed and voted on, or do we all start working independently from this point forward?  Tell me the truth, you all feared I’d unilaterally reject the plan if I’d known it in full.”

Gil said, “Not us.  Our leaders.  They didn’t want to risk it.  This is war, we can’t afford to deal with deadly sentient eating enemies like we do with our neutral neighbors.”

Yup, definitely naïve.  I felt used, and angry.  Worse, I wasn’t sure they were wrong, I’d have never starved their citizens and non-combatants as a lever to end the war.

It was deeper than that though, and the blood drained from my face.

“If they fix their weakness, and they come after us suppressing our jump drives, you’ll fire on their worlds and threaten full destruction if they don’t immediately surrender.”

Natalya at least had the grace to blush at my horrified tone, but her voice was steely, “Yes.  We can’t hang the future of the whole human race on a scientist’s promises.  Not ours, and not yours.  What if they fail?  We do what we must to survive, and that horror in your voice tells us our leaders were right to fear you risking everything and rejecting our plan.  It is not our first choice, but it is our last should it be necessary.”

“Anything else you’re still hiding?” I asked coldly.

Chen shook his head, “That’s plan B, if they don’t surrender under duress of starvation before they can suppress the jump drives.”

I felt… dirty.

Admiral Grady interjected, “We prefer peace, and we’re as wary about abuse of power out of our space as you are.  We agree to the hands-off policy for the weaker races, and we also agree with protecting them from large empires.  These are all good things we can be proud of, humanity is off to a good start in the stars.

“But consider this Vrok empire in light of all that good we’re doing.  It’s not just humanity’s survival on the line, but the survival of over five million sentient races in fifty galaxies, not to mention the three million sentient races we’ll be freeing from enslavement as food breeding stock.  We have to do what it takes.  Sometimes we have to do ugly things, to preserve the greater good.”

He wasn’t completely wrong, but he was totally missing the point.

I nodded, “That sounds like a fine argument, and it’s one that should’ve been used to try to sway me when the plan was made, not after you hid it from me and no longer need my assistance.  Forget the enemy for a moment.  You broke faith with me, you let fear lead to a betrayal of your staunchest ally and the provider of the most powerful ships.  All in fear I wouldn’t follow the plan and would break faith with you.

“Well, you’ll never know if I would or not.  Of course, if you do that, and they call your bluff, what then?  We’ll destroy their worlds, they’ll destroy our fleets and our worlds in revenge, and it’ll start a twelve-way empire war to claim seventy-six unprotected galaxies.  Not even that, because with thirty million ships they’ll have more than enough population to start a few colony worlds and rebuild their society, while our world’s merrily burn.

“So, I really hope these predators are cowards at heart, and give in under the duress of genocide.”

Chen said, “That worst case scenario is highly unlikely.”

I snorted, “Based on what you know of human politicians, that will cave to save their own skins.  We don’t know what the odds are for that in the case of the Vrok.”

Natalya said, “What would you suggest.”

“Same as before.  We upgrade, destroy their fleets when they show themselves, share the cultured meat technology and not worry about it.  Who cares what their aggression and pride index is if they’re locked on their planets, and can’t get to us?  Still, I don’t suppose it matters at this point, it’s still a technology race in my mind, but your plan could work too, so it won’t hurt.

“At least, it won’t hurt my soul, I had nothing to do with it.  I do hope it was worth it.”

Chen said, “It was necessary, at the very least two plans are better than one.  Counting on one plan in a war for survival is foolish.”

I had control over my anger at that point in the conversation, and I still believed the course I’d initially thought of was the correct one.  Not a good one, but the only option I could live with.

I shook my head, “No, I hope it was worth deceiving me.  Pack up, get the hell off my station.  Do whatever you want out there, but you’ll do it without my help.  I’m recalling all my fleets, save the picket fleets on the borders.  I’ll continue to guard the seventy-six galaxies from the twelve surrounding empires, but that’s it.”

There were fourteen fleets and borders, but two of them were in common with the Vrok so it was just twelve empires.

I stood up, and I walked out of the conference room.  I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing to do or not, but I didn’t know what else to do.  They’d deceived me, used me, broken faith, to continue on like it hadn’t happened wasn’t acceptable.  There were forty countries out in space, those eight were just the major ones besides Astraeus.  They were also the ones with the most influence on the planet, and the ones that had joined with me to set the rules out there for all of us in space.

When my wife’s upgrades came through, I’d be offering to sell the upgrades to thirty-two colonies only.  America, England, Russia, China, Japan, Israel, France, and Australia could figure it out their damned selves.  Not one of them had warned me of the deception, even if a few had disagreed with it.  Oh, I’d still sell ships and products to their citizens, but their militaries and government could screw off when it came to warships and upgrade packages.

Not forever maybe, but I wasn’t sure what it would take to restore trust between us.

A part of me also wondered if it would’ve been different if I’d revealed my successful espionage mission, but that wasn’t my fault and it didn’t excuse their actions.  They’d hidden their true plans from me, so I didn’t have that opportunity. Plus, no countries shared their intelligence and counter-intelligence black-ops missions.

Most of all, I felt like a damned idiot.  I’d known the plan was doomed to failure, and that should’ve tipped me off.  Assuming they were too stupid to see it despite me predicting how it went, should’ve clued me in that it wasn’t their whole plan.  I’d assumed they were being led by fear, and while that was true it hadn’t blinded them in quite the way I’d guessed.

I packaged up the meeting, and sent it to Cassie, Jayna, and Jessica.  I blind copied my wife, just to keep her in the loop, though her responsibilities didn’t cross there.

Lastly, I did as I promised when I got to the command center.  I pulled all sixteen million of my four fleets out, and I returned them to my hiding spot in the void.  Of course, I still had probes in all of their systems, and the three million pre-FTL race systems as well, so I wasn’t exactly blind to what was going on or what would happen.

Cassie cursed vociferously.

“Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

For the first time in thirteen years, I cut off the feed to the joint command center.  My ships were no longer their business.  I hated doing it, because I knew things would spiral and get worse, as they grew paranoid about my intentions and lost all influence with me.

But, as they say in playground parlance, they started it.  I’d had no choice but to respond, it was either that or be their puppet they could lie to and manipulate, which wasn’t an option at all.  I’d run my space station country, and they could run theirs and do what they wanted.

I wasn’t sure what would happen, but I had to hope my wife would have it all sorted before the Vrok did.  It all came down to the next five or six days.  There was very little doubt in my mind they’d attack, as soon as they had the tech to suppress our jump drives, they’d act.

Epilogue – Interlude

Sinzan was angry, it would take decades to rebuild their space infrastructure and rebuilding their fleet to a proper number would take another thirty years after that.  They couldn’t even bring in real live food, so they had to suffer with emergency rations.  They had everything their bodies needed, but they were very unsatisfying.  There was also a human ship in orbit, making surrender demands.

He ignored it of course, the Vrok did not surrender, and even if the fools did follow through on their threats the fleets would ensure their eventual victory.  Once the drive suppression device was created, his fleets would cut down the human ships like a field of helpless herd animals.

Sinzan accepted the communication from Hunt Master Oldun.  Normally he’d demand the commander of all his fleets show up in person, but that wasn’t an option with the fleets in hiding.

“Report!”

Oldun bowed, “We have gathered in the void where their ships cannot find us.  It won’t be long, Exalted one.  The fools guard our borders, so they will be easily reclaimed without waking up our other seven enemy empires.  Once the humans are destroyed, I will report for judgement.”

Sinzan waved a claw, “That will not be necessary.  This unfortunate situation is the fault of your predecessor, and I find you innocent of fouling the hunt and commend you for doing the best you can in an untenable situation.  What’s the status of our progress?”

Oldun said, “The device has already been tested, the quantum resonance pulse successfully scrambled our communicators.  I estimate it will take two days for us to refine enough of the required alloy to outfit five thousand ships in every fleet.  The fabrication and installation should take no longer than a day.”

Sinzan growled, “Are you sure it will be effective on their jump drives.”

Oldun said, “Our females are, but we will of course need to test it, before we commit all our ships on the hunt.  Especially inside solar systems where we can’t retreat if things go wrong via a wormhole.  That will only delay our mission a few minutes however. I will have the fleets poised to attack just a few hundred light years from our targets, while one ship makes that determination.”

Sinzan replied, “Approved.  I name you my heir, should the humans destroy our home world in retaliation.  Which seems likely.”

Oldun bowed his head low, “I accept, but I have a plan for that as well, Exalted one.  Their armed hunt-ships are only around ten of our most populous worlds, and only five in number.  When there were fifty-five around all of them, a counter would not have been possible.”

Sinzan said, “What plan?”

Oldun told him the simple yet clever plan.

Sinzan, the old Vrok hunter and ruler of all their kind, started to laugh.  He’d been sure he was doomed, as were all on his planet, but he’d taken comfort in the knowledge that revenge would be his, and his name would still be recorded as the Exalted One that had perpetrated their largest hunt yet.  It was no small thing, since they’d never added more than three galaxies at once before. To triple the size of their empire in one hunt was unheard of in their long history.

Point being, he felt hope he just might survive to enjoy it after all.  At least for a few seasons, he was getting old, and would no doubt be challenged soon.

“Approved.  Good hunting.”

Oldun bowed his head once more, and the signal cut off.

Just three days, and this would be over one way or another.

“We will celebrate, bring in the food!”

Several of the warriors in the great hall cheered, and they looked in anticipation at the large doors as the screaming bipeds from their last food shipment were heard from a distance.

Life was good.

Afterword:

I hope you enjoyed this story, if you did please leave a review.  Reviews are the lifeblood of independent authors, and I would greatly appreciate any constructive feedback or opinions.

This was the first book in the second arc of the Technomancer series which will have another three novels in it in total.  Four through six.  Sorry for the cliffhanger, but it was a good place to stop the story, after the second battle and unexpected fallout.  There’ll be a lot going on in the second book.  Not just the Vrok or the repercussions on what Scott’s human allies just did, but more as well throughout the galaxies.  I haven’t forgotten about Darrell either…

About the Author:  If you have any comments or suggestions you can send me an email at dlharrisonauthor@gmail.com  If you like my work, or even if you don’t, please consider leaving a review of this book.  I can also be found at https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7456808.D_L_Harrison

Other books by D. L. Harrison:

http://www.amazon.com/author/dlharrison

The Formerly Dark Mage, by D. L. Harrison – This stand-alone fantasy book follows the life of Silvia and takes place in a world unique and separate to our own.

Silvia is a dark mage. Unfortunately, she finds herself about to be sacrificed. Someone must have told her evil master about her plans to kill him and take over.  After that, things just seem to go downhill. She has no choice but to escape the kingdom of Zual, something that to her knowledge has never been done before. She will need to deal with many issues she never had to face before.

Among those issues, the white mages, and her conscience.

The Rise of a Dark Mage - This stand-alone fantasy book follows the life of Cassandra, it takes place in the same world as The Formerly Dark Mage, but happens three hundred years later, long after Silvia is gone and some shocking changes have taken place in the world.

Cassandra is a dark mage in the kingdom of Zual, she’s also a mage prodigy.

She hates both her kingdom, and her master.  She wants him dead, not to take his place, but so she can leave and explore the world.  Her ambition will drive her to rediscover the secrets of the strongest of magic.

She is determined to succeed, or she’ll die trying.

Celia Winters Novel Series

Witch’s Moon: A Celia Winters Novel Book 1

Celia Winters was raised by her single mother, and her earliest memories are of the store her mother owns and the nearby coven, who have always been her family’s close allies and friends.

She grew up believing her magic was weak, but she was satisfied with her life, and happy.  She was a midwife, healer, and supplier of surrounding covens.

Then her mother died, and she’s about to discover she isn’t who, or what, she believes herself to be, not completely.  She will learn that her entire life up until now was a lie.  She’ll need to figure out her place, who she is when she no longer recognizes herself, and try to hold on to her closest friends as she gathers enemies for the simple crime of her existence.

She’s stronger than she believes, but will it be enough?

Power of Air Series:

Just a Psychic: The Power of Air Book One starts off this series.

Ben has grown up with missing memories of his early childhood.

He has known he was a psychic since his earliest memories, seeing the future and gaining knowledge with his gifts.

Is it possible he isn't just a psychic?

Ben's world is about to be turned upside down as he turns twenty-one, all is not as it seems.

Alicia Jones novels is a series that follows a bright young inventor and scientist named Alicia Jones.  It is a space opera and light science fiction.

The first book is titled First Contact:

Alicia Jones is a genius, and a little odd.  At just twenty-three years of age, she is close to finishing her doctoral dissertation.  But when she tests her latest theory in the lab to generate a strong EM field, it has very unanticipated results.  Results that lead to faster than light travel, and first contact with another race.

Her life just gets more complicated after that, when she finds out who she really is, and that the universe may not be as nice a place as she’d been told.  Her determination to help keep Earth safe takes her to places more dangerous and strange than she’d ever envisioned.

Spirit Sorceress series, by D. L. Harrison is a new urban fantasy series.  Miku is a spirit sorceress who spent the last one hundred years growing up and learning about her power in the forests near Seattle Washington.  She’s about to make her debut in the big city, but not in a way she ever expected.

The first book is titled Spirit Sorceress:

Miku is a spirit sorceress who spent her unusually long childhood in the forest away from the city with her mother and father.  After tragedy strikes, she finds herself alone and on her own.  She knows that one day she’ll need to move to Seattle, and fully accept her birthright, and if necessary finish her training on her own.

But before she’s ready, and still in grieving, a rogue vampire and his band come along and change everything.  She’ll need to learn her new place in the world, and find some allies quick if she’s to survive.

Katrina Baker Novels, by D. L. Harrison is a new series about a super named Katrina Baker.  Problem is, she gets caught up in her mother’s plan, who is a mad scientist and supervillain, and gets herself transported to another world in the multi-verse.  A world where mages, witches, clerics, and the gods are real.  Not to mention the monsters…

The first book is titled Banished:

Katrina baker is a super.  She has mental abilities such as telekinesis, telepathy, and others.  Her parents are supervillains, and she isn’t all that sure she’s cut out for that line of work.  Her empathy with others through her power makes it hard to be uncaring, much less mean or evil to people.  Problem is, the last thing she wants to do is disappoint mom and dad.

Katrina gets caught up in her mother’s supervillain plot to get rid the world of the indestructible hero Omega, and that’s when it all goes really wrong, and she finds herself on another world.

Banished.

Will she be able to find her way back home, or even understand this new world of gods and magic, or will she die trying?

Rise of the Empyrean Empire – This series is space opera / science fiction.  Space, technology, other worlds, aggressive and far more powerful aliens, artificial intelligence, evolution, and advances to the point humanity doesn’t have to work to maintain infrastructure.

The first book is titled: Scout Ship

Michael Williams followed in his father’s footsteps, and joined the UEDF, the United Earth Defense Force, when he turned eighteen.  Due to heroism and long distinguished service he’s elevated to the rank of Lt. Commander when most of his peers have just attained senior lieutenant.  His career appears to be going very well.

The year is 2263, and the UEDF is in several star systems in a twenty-light year radius from earth, but are expanding even further.  He’s assigned to a one year exploratory mission to become accustomed to his new rank, one that will finally culminate in reaching a new star system, 61-Virginis is just short of twenty-eight light years away, and he’s excited to be one of the first humans in a new solar system as they finish the race across the void between stars in the scout ship Columbus.

There will be challenges he never imagined though, especially not on a simple survey mission.  Because mankind always thought they were alone in the stars.  They’re about to find out they’re wrong, very wrong…

Book Description

It’s been thirteen years since the Grays were a danger, and their empire had fallen.  Things were going well for President Scott Akin, both in his professional and personal life.

Of course, peaceful times couldn’t last forever.  One of the other intergalactic empires is looking to expand, had been the last sixty years without their knowledge, and his ships aren’t nearly as invincible as he’d imagined.  If that wasn’t enough, he’s no longer unique.  His twelve-year-old daughter is like him, a technomancer, a genius like her mother, and has a talent for getting in trouble.

She also may have inherited his youthful tendency to get in over his head.

There are a lot of other problems the stress of impending war brings out as well, not just out there but closer to home as well which will take him off guard.

He’d need to work hard to survive, and after that, survive with the political fallout.

Author’s note:  This is primarily a space opera.  The fantasy elements of the book are tangential at best, and I don’t believe that will change through the rest of the series.  Oh, there’s mages, shifters, witches, and vampires in these pages, but that’s really not the focus.