Date: 2020-06-15T18:00:00+00:00
Description: Scott was embroiled in a new war, one against an empire that had near parity with weapons and shields. The first battle had been a draw, he’d managed to get the enemy to retreat, and now it was an arm’s race of sorts. If that wasn’t bad enough, he had to deal with the political fallout of being manipulated by the eight, and blaze his own trail, which would be both easier and harder. There was also some fallout with the allied trade races in the fifty galaxies, they weren’t happy with the status quo and being put under the debt of his protection. He’ll need to work hard to survive, and he can’t

Intergalactic Union

Technomancer: Book Five

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 – Interlude

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven – Interlude

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen - Interlude

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Afterword:

About the Author

Other books by D. L. Harrison:

Book Description

Chapter One

The station hung like a silvery pearl behind the moon.  The god juice, otherwise known as coffee, steamed as I slowly took a sip.  There were a lot of new messages when I first woke up and I frowned as I went through them.  It was the morning after the disastrous battle, if destroying twelve million of forty-two million ships could be considered disastrous.

Of course, I did believe that.  The twelve million ships destroyed weren’t a true threat, it was the thirty million that had more advanced shields, weapons, and acceleration that was the true threat.  Those ships were now in hiding, and there was no finding them.  Not until they wanted to be found, and at that point it’d be too late if our coming upgrades weren’t ready to match them.

Which would be in four to five days according to my wife.

“The U.S. released a travel advisory against coming to the station, and China outright banned travel to the station for their people.”

It wasn’t a good thing, but I wasn’t sure what else I could’ve done after they’d all played me and left me out of most of the plan.  The only explanation for that would be if they feared I’d balk on the whole plan altogether, unilaterally act despite a majority vote.  I’m not positive, but I really don’t think I’d have done that, but the point was moot.  They’d used me out of fear, and I was done coordinating with them on military matters.

I may not be a whiz at warfare, but I still had the biggest hammer, and I could figure out my own way from now on.  I wasn’t going to be anyone’s stooge or be manipulated like that again.

Ironically perhaps, when I checked the logs, the fifty Chinese ships in orbit of ten of the Vrok worlds were being completely ignored.  So far, the planets hadn’t answered their hails at all, much less started a discussion about surrender.

Cassie replied, “I saw that.  The U.S. is citing your treatment of Kevin Kearns as the reason, and state that you run an oppressive regime.  China hasn’t given a reason.”

Cassie ran most of the government for me, though I feared that may change soon if the vampire council on Earth got their way.  She was simply stunning, forever eighteen, with shimmering light brown hair and warm hazel eyes set in an angelically beautiful face.   She was petitely curvaceous at five foot one, a perfect hourglass in proportion to her petite body.  She was also probably my best friend, only second to my wife.

Her statement tickled me, because of course it’d been her decision to throw the jackass off the station.

I snorted, “Mine?”

Cassie giggled, “Of course, I just work here.”

I sighed, “Not much we can do about that.”

I’d sent the whole thing to all the world leaders on Earth, but I hadn’t shared anything with the press.  Not out of pride, or not wanting to look foolish, but the battle was classified, and I didn’t want to cause a panic on the surface.  It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out we were screwed if the enemy figured out how to suppress the jump drive which was our only current tactical advantage.

Jessica said, “The other six haven’t done anything that way, guilt?”

Jessica was my head of security on the station, though given Astraeus was a country her real title was Secretary of Defense.  She was a shifter though that didn’t come up much, outside of our visits to our island in the Caribbean.  She was athletically built at five foot eight, with long red hair and brown eyes.

The other six of course were the other countries on the committee that had misled me, at least they weren’t bringing their civilians into our governmental disagreement.  Russia, Australia, England, France, Japan, and Israel.  I hoped that didn’t change, because I didn’t want to completely cut ties with the countries. I just wouldn’t coordinate my military with them anymore.  I also wouldn’t be selling them anymore ships.  Not forever, but I wasn’t sure what it would take for them to regain trust.

Maybe the next election cycle, when those responsible for it were replaced.  I’d also have a much more jaundiced eye toward cooperation, and I wouldn’t play the fool again.  The whole fool me once, shame on them, fool me twice shame on me thing.

Honestly, I was really furious with all of them, they’d ruined a good thing we had going.  Instead of trusting me, they’d manipulated me out of fear of a stronger enemy.  I wasn’t sure if it could ever be the same again.  Not that I wouldn’t defend Earth or her colonies if it came up. I just wasn’t going to do it by anyone else’s plan.

I shrugged, “No idea.  I hope things don’t spiral further, or Jayna might kill me.”

Cassie snickered.

Jessica asked, “Do you have a plan if they figure it out first and attack in the next few days?”

I frowned, “Not really, not a successful one anyway, any ideas?”

If I was forced to, and we couldn’t stop them, I could always quantum jump the station and at least save my two million people.  But watching the Earth burn was unthinkable.

Jessica said, “Anti-matter missile blitz.  You’d have to sacrifice and rebuild all the platforms, but that might work.”

“It might, their shields are stronger against anti-matter, but the missile configuration does have a lot more of it than the beams do.  The problem is their point defense, they’ll take out a ton of them with all thousand turrets taking out three per second.  It’d take almost five minutes to cross that much space.”

Jessica sighed, “Right, I was thinking they’d jump, but of course if the Vrok attack they’ll have figured out how to suppress that.”

We all exchanged a glance, and we knew what we’d have to do, but none of us were willing to say it out loud.

Jessica looked down at the table, “Tam’Diaz is calling.”

I nodded. I’d been half expecting that.  We’d taken over the border watch on two of their borders, which meant we had eight million ships right next to their territory on two different borders.  I imagine that may make them a bit nervous.

“Open the frequency.”

She did that.

“Tam, this is Scott.  How are you doing?”

Tam said, “Well, Scott. Herd Mistress Janleah is slightly concerned however, on your intentions.”

I smirked but held back the chuckle that arrived on the tip of my tongue, herd mistress, that never got old.

“Understandable.  The Vrok started an invasion of our territory recently, and we replaced all their outer fleets on their seven other borders including your own, though the fighting has not yet been decided either way.  I can assure you it’s a temporary measure.  Once peace is reestablished, I plan to reduce the fleets on both your borders by three quarters.  I have no intention of harm toward our new friends, plus you still have all those planets to finish for us.  I’m transmitting data, now.  Both to clarify and back my word.”

Tam’Diaz was silent for a moment, as she digested all the logs.  Of course, I kept the stealth technology references out of what I sent to them, but I saw no reason or purpose in hiding anything else.

She replied, “I understand.  Not really, but predator species are quite insane.”

I laughed, “No argument there.”

She said, “We wish you luck.  The Vrok are even more aggressive than most.”

“Thank you. I’ll notify you when it is settled, and we can lessen the fleet strength on your borders.”

She replied, “Understood, good day, Scott.”

I blew out a breath, as the communication channel closed.  A.I.s freaked me out, and that thought made me wonder what the hell Darrell was up to out there, somewhere, with one of my ships doing god knows what.

A.I. things, hopefully not something to destroy human life.  Sure, I knew that was probably just paranoid thinking, but intelligent and independent machines freaked me out.  Perversely perhaps, I liked Tam’Diaz, and thought they’d be a reliable trading partner who’d never attack us unless we attacked first.

More reliable apparently, than my human allies.  Humans were also one of the most noble species in space, which was another alarming truth.  Who’d have thought?  Point being, that made the universe a hell of a dangerous place.

Cassie said, “You handled that well.”

“I was ready for it. I knew from their point of view it would appear we’d invaded the Vrok and doubled our ships on their border.  They’re rather wary of our kind, and we’re stronger than they are.”

Jessica said, “The Jarnis ship inbound is requesting a meeting with you.”

I nodded. I’d noted their arrival six hours ago in the log, just after midnight Astraeus time.

“Did they say why?”

Jessica shook her head, “Not specifically, but they did say a Vax, Vonerith and Kateran would be with them.”

I frowned.  The Vax were one of our strongest trading partners, and they looked like bigfoot and a koala had created a love child.  The Arnis were much like we were in proportion, just about two feet shorter.  They also had gray skin and usually brown eyes, but hazel and golden were possible as well.

I had to look up the database for the Vonerith and Kateran.  The Earth had done a lot of trading with them, but I’d never met them personally. It’d been our merchants going to them for the most part and none had visited the station before.

The Katerans from Katera, were a matriarchal society.  They were humanoid and averaged about five feet, extremely slim and powerful, reminiscent of felines with large eyeteeth, retractable claws, and fur on most of their bodies.

The Vonerith were male dominated and looked like a bull got busy with an ape.  They were seven feet tall on average and highly muscled.

“Set it up, I’m curious what they want, and all four of them together.  Not like we’re busy or anything.”

Jessica snorted, then did just that.

“They’re scheduled to dock on station just after lunch.”

“Thanks.”

There didn’t seem to be anything else, so I dove into the job to distract myself.  I was worried about Earth and our relations spiraling even further. I was more than concerned with the Vrok threat and their seven and a half well-hidden fleets, and I was curious about our visitors coming but couldn’t imagine it was a good thing that brought them all together.  Then there was the A.I. my amazing daughter let loose on an unsuspecting universe.

Yeah, no stress at all.  Just another day at the office.

I brought up the design for the luxury cruiser, and I finished that up that morning.  Life went on after all, even during multiple crises, and I had a ship selling business and a country to see to.

Chapter Two

It was somewhat of a surprise when I arrived at the conference room after lunch, to find Rena and Threx waiting for me, with a Vonerith and Kateran.  I hadn’t seen Rena since that first time, almost thirteen years ago. She was very high up in their government, and she’d been chosen to come and check out the new humans with Gray technology.  The look I exchanged with Threx told me he was a little uncomfortable with why he was here. I’d grown to know him and his people well enough to judge their body language.

The Kateran female sat stiffly, and she did look something similar to a feline, with multicolored fur everywhere but on her face.  Her ears were higher on her head than a human’s as well.  There was no tail or anything though, and I couldn’t discern anything about the rest of her under the space suit, except she didn’t have the curves of a human female.

The Vonerith male looked very relaxed.

I sat down with Cassie at the head of the table.

“Welcome to Astraeus.  For those that haven’t met me, I’m President Scott Akin, and this is Cassiopeia Reed.  You’re welcome to the refreshments on the table.”

Rena smiled, “Thank you for your welcome.  You know Threx of course, but he isn’t here in a merchant capacity today.  He was chosen to represent his government on this matter, since you two are well acquainted.  Cirlok of Vonerith, and Uvi of Katera enjoy similar high status on their worlds.  We are here on a diplomatic mission.”

I nodded slowly, “What can I do for you?”

Rena looked nervous for a moment, then said, “The current state of things is unacceptable.  Specifically, your protection of the fifty galaxies and therefore the protection of thousands of FTL races out in space.  This creates a debt between us that sits uneasily, not only by those sitting at this table representing their worlds, but others as well.”

Well, crap.  As if I didn’t have enough headaches?

“I’m assuming you don’t want us to claim all the space we protect and form an empire, which is the source of this imbalance?”

Rena shook her head, “We believe you were wise not to.  None of our races including mine could be trusted not to abuse so much power and authority over time.  Yet, this imbalance must be addressed.  It was a slight nagging to our pride and self-worth, when there was no danger.  You just had ships on the borders, and you were unchallenged.  But now, with the Vrok’s intentions and attempt to invade which you repelled last week, that made it a more immediate problem.  We can’t accept this protection from being treated like food by an empire that would confine us to our worlds, without cost. Though you are correct, we have no wish to be annexed into a human empire.”

Cassie patted my leg under the table, and when I turned my head, I noticed her trying to suppress a smirk.  Some help she was. Apparently, she was just along to laugh at me.

My mind scrambled for a reply of some kind, and I finally just regurgitated what we’d already covered.

I nodded, “Do you have any suggestions to placate this debt you feel toward us?  I agree that accepting our help for free would be… damaging to your societies. Yet, short of an empire or some kind of payment I don’t see a way around it.”

She asked, “Payment?” like a drowning man in the ocean reaching for a life preserver.  They really didn’t have a clue or an idea to solve their problem. Apparently, they’d come here to throw it at my feet and hope the humans didn’t change their minds about replacing the Grays’ empire with their own.

Our own.

“In our history, there have been… merchant warriors.  We call them mercenaries.  They were private companies of soldiers, for hire. A business, that were independent of any government authority.  Governments or even individuals could hire them for protection or to fulfill missions.”

Uvi said, “Truly?  Your governments allowed these private soldiers to exist?”

I nodded, “Yes, though their rules of engagement varied greatly between countries, based on what was allowed for civilians.  Point being, such an approach would allow your worlds to pay a value price for the protection we’re already providing to restore the pride and honor we’ve unintentionally harmed. All without needing to bend your heads or your knees to another race’s government.”

Threx said, “I believe that’s something my government could get behind, trade is in our blood. I just never imagined we could trade for military protection out in space.”

Uvi said, “The price would be ongoing however, which would present a significant burden on our worlds and societies.  The fleets you have holding back empires from annexing us to rule, destroy, or exploit as a resource is a priceless service.”

My mind turned that over for a bit, until an obvious plan occurred to me, then I said, “A world is priceless as well.  The protection only extends against the empires as well, unless we have a treaty with your world for more.”

Cirlok spoke for the first time, his voice was incredibly soft and gentle given his fierce appearance.

“World?  What is your meaning?”

I said, “The Vrok have twenty-six galaxies.  There are three million helpless pre-FTL worlds.  My people have decided once we vanquish the Vrok we’ll be holding their borders as well, so those worlds don’t give over on one master just to meet another.

“Of course, for the same reason you’re here, that selfless gifts aren’t trusted or wanted, was also discussed.  There is also an element of healthy selfishness involved, there should be something in it for us.  One of the discussed possibilities is for us to claim a small territory in each galaxy we’re protecting, for future expansion and planets.

“That solves multiple problems for us.  One, it would be a less than selfless reason to keep other empires out of the whole galaxy, just to protect our interests.  Two, it would give us around two hundred thousand worlds to expand to over the coming Millennia, without trying to expand our space in this galaxy far enough to do that.  If we tried to do that, we’d surely bump up against other expanding domains.  It also spreads humanity far and wide, which is an instinct I’m sure we all share at the table.”

Uvi asked, “What exactly are you suggesting?”

“That we do the same here in our shared fifty galaxies, for our payment in protection.  We’ll take a small territory in all fifty galaxies, that are currently unclaimed.  Our territory here is five hundred light years in radius around Earth.  That’s a thousand light years in diameter, which is exactly one percent the diameter of our galaxy.

“So, in each of the other forty-nine we’ll do the same, a one percent of the galaxy’s diameter in unclaimed space will become human territory in payment of all the other worlds and empires we protect in those galaxies.  Obviously, the space would be much smaller in the dwarf galaxies, and twice as large as here in a galaxy with a two hundred thousand light year diameter.

“A world is priceless. Yet you’d be ceding us nothing directly from your world’s production capability.  Even better, as Uvi stated earlier, there’d be no constant payments to worry about or to drain your coffers.  Another advantage is the future security of all fifty galaxies, seventy-six if we take Vrok space.  The idea of withdrawing our protection is unthinkable, it would destroy my soul to watch your worlds be destroyed or taken advantage of.

“But I won’t live forever.  If we have a small domain in every galaxy, that adds a selfish reason to keep out the powerful empires around us altogether.  We’ll be protecting our own interests as well.”

Rena said, “It would take you tens of millennia to occupy so many worlds, if not over a hundred millennia.”

I shrugged, “Long term investment.  It assures us a large spread out empire over that much time, without the risk of bumping borders with another expanding world.  We would of course claim them immediately, and seed probes in all systems in those claimed areas, not just ones with living worlds without sentient life.  We would also defend them from encroachment.

“Like I said, what you’d be giving us would be priceless, but at the same time it wouldn’t cost your people anything, and it wouldn’t be a burden on your populations or economies.  It would also be that recurring payment for our continued efforts, as long as you cede that space and respect the borders, that would be everything.”

It really would, a small area in all seventy-six galaxies would add up to around six hundred thousand worlds we could spread out to over time.  Most of them would need to be terraformed, but we certainly had the time.  The two hundred thousand number were the expected number of worlds already livable.

Threx said, “I like the idea, it does address a lot of concerns and issues, and it solves all the current problems.  The price has a bite as well, a true cost, in that our races won’t be able to expand to those areas in the far future.”

Cirlok said, “There’s nothing stopping you from just doing that in first place.  We could not prevent you claiming them.”

I nodded, “But if we just did it, we’d anger a lot of races and worlds as we built a spread-out empire among them.  They’d be afraid we would one day turn on all of you.  The price, ceding that territory that’s a part of your and their galaxy voluntarily, means we can avoid all of that and satisfy your need of balance at the same time.  That has a lot of value, for me at least.”

Uvi said, “I would agree to this, but I can’t make that decision without consulting with my government.”

Rena said, “It’s acceptable to me as well, but we should share it with all our trading allies, give them the opportunity to join in the agreement, so they do not feel a dept toward the four of us for paying a price on their behalf.”

Cirlok said, “Agreed, I too must ratify it with my government.”

I smiled, without showing teeth, “Me too.  It’s a good start and good idea, but I need the rest of humanity to be onboard with the plan.  I can’t speak for all of us.”

Which… could be problematical, given I’d just cut military ties with eight of the most powerful countries on the planet.  It was annoying, but I’d have my ambassador to the U.N. introduce it to the floor.  It was one of those every leader on Earth decisions anyway, so it was best dealt with in those halls.

Rena said, “We can reconvene tomorrow, at the same time, to discuss the results of our efforts in that direction?”

“Sounds good.  My people will see to your comfort, and they’ll arrange a tour of the city and the amenities available if you wish.”

Uvi said, “I’d like that.”

We all stood up, and Cassie and I waited as they all left.

Cassie blew out a breath.

I accused, “You’re no help.”

She giggled, “Sorry, that just struck me as funny, how did you pull that out of your ass?”

I shrugged, “It was the most likely plan in the twenty-six galaxies, to justify protecting all those galaxies to the human leaders that would question us protecting millions of worlds with no benefit towards us.  When I thought about it, it was the perfect solution for here as well.”

She replied, “So, it just popped up in your head.”

I snickered, “Pretty much, yes.”

She said, “I suppose you want me to forward the meeting to our ambassador and have him put it forward on the U.N floor, today.”

I nodded, “That’d be awesome.”

Cassie said, “I like the plan as well.  You know, they’re our ships, we don’t need their approval to guard the galaxies.”

I nodded, “They are, and we will no matter what they say, but we need their agreement to form a long-term expansion map for human space.  We’ll just come up with a different cost for them if the U.N says no. A cost that I can unilaterally support without interference, but I’d prefer this plan over anything else, I think.

“We’ll be basically agreeing not to expand our space in this galaxy any further, and less powerful than us or not they all have ships that eclipse everyone else in the fifty galaxies.  We need a treaty, and plenty of space without a fight needed to claim it, or some greedy asshole in a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand years will invade our neighbor’s spaces.

“It will be enough that humanity will have a joint empire spanning seventy-six galaxies with around six hundred thousand worlds, give or take a few thousand.”

Cassie said teasingly, “Yeah, until we fill it up.”

I smirked, “Not my problem, because I’ll be long dead.  Although, chances are one of the twelve empires around that space will get uppity, and we’ll have even more small areas to fill in more galaxies.  Who knows what could happen?  By then, we could be in two hundred galaxies, with one point six million worlds as we take our one percent of each.”

Cassie popped my bubble again, “Or we could be worm food.”

“Yeah, there’s always that, but as long as my line and a technomancer rules Astraeus, we’ll have damned good odds of surviving what the universe throws at us.”

“Yup, as long as we survive the five to six days it’ll take for those upgrades.”

Right, the current outlook was a little shaky, wasn’t it?  There were no guarantees in this life, or this violent universe, but that wouldn’t stop us from fighting until the last, nor would it prevent us from planning for a future with the assumption we’d win through, forever.  That was the only way to live, even if that scenario was probably unlikely.  The forever part, I mean.

“Cassie.”

She smirked, “Yes, Mr. President?”

“Shut up.”

She giggled, “Yes, sir.”

“The best part?”

She asked, “What’s that?”

“You’re immortal, so you get to deal with the problem when all the worlds are full up.”

She gaped at me, and I smirked.  Score one for me.

I shook my head at her banter, and we headed back for the command center.

Chapter Three

It was only an hour later, when I answered a call on my augmented reality interface.  The most intelligent human scientist in history looked at me, she was also the sexiest.  Of course, as my wife I was highly biased, but I believed those to be true facts regardless.

Diana had her shiny raven hair pinned up and looked at me with her bright green eyes.  She was five foot six, athletic and curvy and had only grown more beautiful to me in the last thirteen years.  There was some literal truth to that as well, not just my love filters, as she truly looked younger than the day that we’d met thanks to the life extension treatment we’d both taken.

Her face had a soft classic beauty, and in my opinion, she was still stunning even in the ugly brown skirt and vest woman’s suit with a pearl white blouse buttoned up to her neck.  It was the whole hot librarian vibe, but she seemed to think it helped maintain a professional relationship with her male scientists, which was fine with me, of course.

“To what do I owe the pleasure, Mrs. Akin.”

She grinned at my flirty tone, “Why, it’s about your daughter, Mr. Akin.”

I suppressed the surge of disappointment. I’d been hoping she’d been about to tell me the programming was done, and the three days of testing were about to start.  To be fair, that’d probably take another day or two.  The new advancements touched just about every system, which meant tracing and updating a whole lot of software, not to mention the completely new command and control software that the new shield configurations and subspace beam weapons would need.

“What’d she do?”

She shrugged, “Not sure yet, she has a presentation and she wants you there.  I think she wants to show off for her father, but she’ll understand if you can’t make it.”

Yeah, lots of stress and crap, but I was waiting on all of it at the moment.  All I’d been doing before she called was working up a couple of new colony ships and platform packages.  India wanted to start two more colonies. Their population was already down to nine hundred million after starting ten colonies of fifty million each over the last thirteen years.   They were apparently ready for two more, and they wanted the best instead of the colony ships the U.S., England, Russia, and China were offering.

I’d have suspected the Vrok threat made them go that way, to pay for the best, except India was one of the few countries that hadn’t bought anything from my competition.  The colony ships were mostly point and click. I’d made enough of them, combining two platforms for the colony ship and eventual command and control space station when the move was done, and sending another eleven hundred to a colony world as it’s hundred ship fleet and thousand defense platforms was all pre-programmed macros and could be done in seconds.

The work I had to do on it was all the extras they were asking for.  They wanted a hundred million of the Threx augmented reality implants for their colonist, and to have them all quantum paired with a phone and data network on the colony ships themselves.  The colony ship would act like a router so they’d all be able to stay on Earth’s internet, make local or interstellar phone calls, and stream from Netflix or update their Facebook status, on their new world.

They also wanted a thousand nanite medical beds, five hundred for each colony for their healthcare locations.  There was also a whole list of smaller add-on bells and whistles for the hundred ships per colony that would be manned.

Point being, it’d take me hours to map it all out and get the build going, but it was also not a very high priority.  They’d given me a full week to get it done and the colony ships ready to turn over, so I had more than enough time to see my daughter and let her show off a bit.

Plus, I was really curious what she’d have.  My girl was too smart and powerful for her own good.  Twelve or not, I wasn’t going to underestimate her intelligence or creativity.  It was only her judgement that I questioned, and I knew that would mature, probably faster than mine had, by a mile.

“That sounds good, five minutes, in which lab?”

She said, “Four A.  See you then,” and she hung up.

I turned to Jessica, “Going to lab four A.”

Jessica stood up and stretched, and then waved one of her people toward the console to take over the watch.

“I could use a moment to stretch my legs, and I can admit to a little curiosity.”

I said, “My daughter is going to wow us.”

Honestly, I’d had no idea at the time just how much of an understatement that was.

My daughter looked absolutely adorable in a woman’s suit, but I didn’t say that, because she was obviously going for professional and not playing dress up.  Though she couldn’t help the bright smile on her face as she set up a display and faced me, Diana, and Jessica.  She had her mother’s beauty around the face, with the same shiny raven black hair, but she’d inherited my light blue eyes.

“So, what do you have for us, Mel?”

She said, “A second generation jump drive, that can jump as far as fifty light years a second, without a jump beacon on the other side.”

I glanced at my wife, who had an expressionless face on, which told me my wife thought that was ludicrous and didn’t want to hurt her feelings.  I wasn’t quite ready to bet against my progeny however.

“How does it work?”

She bounced on her toes for a second, obviously excited, but managed to stop a moment later when she took a calming breath.

“You understand that jump drives use quantum resonance fields that match both frequency and resonance at both ends.  Essentially, we’re tricking the universe into thinking two different spots are actually one spot, so we jump instantaneously from one spot to another without actual movement.”

I nodded, “I get that much.”

She said, “Yes, but the reason that works is because the universe itself has a quantum resonance field that changes.  The resonance we impart is artificial in nature, and for a moment becomes part of that natural occurring universal field.  It’s this natural field that enables us to overcome the inherent limitations of the first generation jump drive.

“The quantum resonance of the universe stems from the big bang, the field starts at the center of the universe and expands in a spiral pattern in the Fibonacci sequence.  That makes it highly predictable, or at least it would if the universe was empty.”

I raised a hand, and she giggled.

“Explain that and dumb it down for your dad.”

She nodded, “Space-time fabric.  It is bent by mass.  Mass causes gravity, and mass also effects subspace and causes wild energy.  It’s all tied together. All the dimensions, and the mass in this universal layer has an effect on all of it.  They say the FTL line is outside the heavier parts of a gravity well, but the reason for that gravity well, and the cavitation of wild energies in subspace all comes back to mass impacting the space-time fabric.

“The quantum resonance fabric for lack of a better world, is like a second layer laying on space time.  Mass effects the natural quantum resonance of the universe as well, thus making it impossible to predict inside a solar system, and even up to several light years away in the void.”

I frowned, “Wait, are you saying we’ll be able to quantum jump without a beacon on the other side, several million light years, as long as we do it to a void?”

She made a face, “You’re skipping ahead.”

Diana gasped, and when I turned she had a eureka look on her face.

I said, “Sorry, Miss Akin, carry on please.”

She giggled again.

“Okay.  So like gravity and space-time, the quantum fabric is on every level of reality.  Subspace is more compact than our dimension, which is what allows faster than light travel there in relation to this universe, without actually going faster than light.  For the quantum fabric, the resonance frequencies are higher harmonics of real space in subspace.  But they’re also perfect harmonics.

“So, your ship sits on the edge of a system, it can scan subspace to earth, or to anywhere within fifty light years in just a second.  To Earth from the edge of the system, would be less than a millisecond.  Anyway, the scanners detect the harmonic quantum frequency, and by that we can determine the frequency in normal space.

“Once we have that frequency, the drive can match it.  Following so far?”

Diana said, “I think so, but how would that work?  That matching field in the drive would be microscopic, the natural resonance would change… trillions of times, from the back of the seven-mile-long warship to the front.  To create a matching field covering the ship, it’d be complex beyond belief.”

She smiled, “Yes, but that’s why it takes another step, which I hadn’t mentioned yet.  The drive matches the natural resonance to join together that microscopic energy connection.  Much how your quantum communicators work, mom.  Through that connection, the ship can then expand a matching quantum resonance field of any size to match what it puts around the ship.”

“That’s brilliant, so you connect through natural resonance to pass energy, then extend the jump field through that?” Diana confirmed.

Melody nodded, “Exactly.  The point is, you can get to any world within fifty light years in just a second. You don’t have to move in system at the speed of light anymore.  You could also instantly intercept another ship, even in systems.  Then there’s the second advantage to the new drive that dad already figured out.  The quantum resonance of anywhere is completely predictable, as long as there is no mass nearby to skew its natural resonance.

“So like dad said, you could enter in a galaxy two hundred million miles away in the navigation program, and the program will figure out the distance and predict the resonance in the void right outside that galaxy, and then make that energy connection to it.  It’s only near star systems where that ability will fail completely.  Once there, it’d only be a few minute trip in a wormhole to get in the galaxy and within fifty light years of your destination. Then you go back to the scan subspace way, and pop to your destination in under a second.

“Obviously in those cases, having something on the other end as a beacon would still be useful, but it’s still a lot faster than taking a wormhole the whole way, which at a hundred million light years would take over ten hours.  Another benefit however, in needing no beacon, is you could move a whole fleet at once.  If you command a whole fleet at once to jump to a specific resonance picked from subspace, it will automatically put the lead ship there, while sending out nearby resonance spots in order to the other four million ships, so they come out in perfect formation all in less than a second.”

“So, you’ve tested it?” I asked, cautiously optimistic at that point. My daughter was terrifyingly awesome, what would she be in six years when she was a woman ready to conquer the world?  I was extremely proud, and I was acting like it, while also acting like it was just normal or something, for a twelve-year-old to make such a breakthrough, but inside I felt a little over my head, to be honest.

Sure, it wasn’t an original invention, but she’d taken my wife’s amazing invention and pushed it further along to its full limits.  The tactical implications of the change were fairly large as well.

She replied, “Only locally and in the lab.  We can do that now, your fleets in the void are within fifty light years of my test ship in the lab system.  Can I?”

I grinned, caught up in her excitement, “Go ahead.”

She filled the room with two holograms. One of the lab system and her ship, the other of my fleets.  Less than a second later her ship jumped and appeared next to my fleet.  Then it jumped back to the system.

She bounced on her toes, “Can we install it, it’s all software, really.  The deeper capabilities have always been there.”

Diana said, “You did an incredible thing, Melody.  We’re proud of you, but one step at a time.  We’re going to come up with a test regimen, if I can’t break anything by the end of the day, or find a bug in your software, we’ll push out the upgrade.”

I nodded, “Ditto, Mel.  Sounds good to me. I’ll give you control over a hundred thousand platforms, so you can test the formation jump software.  Oh, and don’t test the long-range void jump by predictive resonance outside our fifty galaxies, no starting wars.”

“I promise,” she said excitedly.

They got back to work, and I gave my wife and daughter a hug before I got back to designing the unique colony ships for the rest of the day.

It’d been a long day, and a lot had happened by the time I finished it up and called it a day.  The new jump system had been deemed safe by my wife, and that was being pushed out to all fleet ships, probes, and the station as well.

Chapter Four

The scent of lasagna and garlic bread baking in the oven hit me as we arrived at Jayna’s place for an extended family dinner, which we did at least once a week.  My sister had the same light blonde hair and ocean blue eyes I did, and she was willowy at five foot six.

Carmine answered the door.  My brother in law was six feet one, with dark brown hair and eyes.  He was good people and was part of the security force in the city.  Their son Brock was just a year younger than Melody, and the two of them ran off to play before we could even get a greeting out.

“Is it safe?”

Jayna had been more than a bit upset yesterday, when Cassie threw the rich and connected American off the station who’d in my opinion, been acting no better than a toddler throwing a fit.  Not to mention me throwing the committee off the station not a few hours later.

Carmine laughed, “Good, I think.”

Jayna’s voice rang out from the kitchen, “I heard that!”

Diana gave me a little push, and we moved inside.  Like my place, it looked like a large two-bedroom condo inside, with a whole lot of space.  In the center of the middle level of the station, it was pretty much just us, the command center, and top-secret labs, so there was more than enough room to spread out.

“So, dare I ask how your day was?” I asked as we moved into the kitchen.

I relaxed slightly at her glaring smile, which was teasing.

Jayna said, “The fallout isn’t that bad.  At least, not on the civilian tourist side.  The travel ban wasn’t good, but China never let a whole lot of their citizens visit anyway.  The travel advisory by the United States did cause a few cancellations, but perversely it also caused a surge of bookings, and we got a much higher than normal amount of hits on our website today.  Including our constitution page and applications for citizenry.

“I think most fair-minded people thought Kearns was way out of line.  Lastly, no one with reservations that had been up here before on vacation, cancelled.”

“So, it was a wash?”

Jayna nodded, “A little better than actually, but long-term that will taper off quickly.  We’ll see.  It depends on if things spiral further, but I know you had no choice when you kicked off the committee.”

“What about the starting debate this afternoon, in the U.N.”

It’d taken a couple of hours for our ambassador to get recognized and put it on the floor.  I hoped my idea would be well received, to claim a small area in every galaxy, but they’d barely gotten started with it before calling it a day.  The only positive indication so far was none seemed to be violently against it.

Jayna shrugged, “It won’t affect most people, only governments will care about that debate.  The average citizen will be long dead by the time we even fill in our local galaxy’s available worlds.  Even the ones who choose to extend their lives and live a thousand or more years.”

She wasn’t wrong about that, likely only the governments and people in power would care about that.  Unless their governments did something they didn’t like, of course.

I said, “I was thinking we’d start spreading out immediately, rather than putting all our eggs in our local space basket first.  Better chances for humanity’s long-term survival.  We could cycle through all seventy-six galaxies every seventy-six colonies.”

Jayna shrugged, “Still won’t care, an available world is an available world.  That will be a concern for some governments though, to preserve their way of life and culture if one of our galaxies are invaded by superior forces.”

I nodded, then we’d have time to adjust and take it back from everywhere else.  Assuming they didn’t conquer all seventy-six galaxies at once, that is.

“Dinner smells amazing, Jayna,” I changed the subject, enough about work.

She smirked, “Thanks.  So how was your day?”

So much for being done with the work subject, I glossed over the highlights of my day, a lot was done, and a lot happened.

Cassie went next, “My contacts are all a little nervous our president cut off his feed to the joint command center.  Of course, no other countries had been doing that at all, with their colony fleets, or even with their fleets right here in SOL.  I don’t think they’ll do anything rash, or at least not anything else.  The Vrok really spooked them with their much stronger weapons and shield systems.”

Jayna said, “Why lie though?”

Cassie shrugged, “Imagine it from their point of view.  The U.S. worked hard to get back in space, and the president has had a hard time undoing the mistakes of his predecessor.  China, Russia, Japan, and England managed to get their hands on the tech, somehow, and they all built fleets.

“Sure, our Scott still had the biggest stick in humanity’s drawer, but they could still kick everyone else’s butt in the fifty galaxies.  They were no longer dependent on Astraeus to protect the Earth, they had the Gray technology with a few weapon upgrades, but no nanite reactors or jump drives.

“Along comes the Vrok and that all changes, their safety blanket pulled away. A fearsome predatory race that looks reminiscent of ants the size of a damned van, even if they are mammals, and their ships are so much more powerful.  A race that wants to turn Earth into a snack bar with humanity as the main course.  So, not only can’t they beat the new enemy, they find that once again despite all their power in space that humanity and all their countries and colonies are completely dependent on Scott for survival.

“Those fears made them make a very stupid decision.  They used manipulation and lies instead of trusting Scott to do what was necessary and distasteful.  There was no way they could build or man enough of their ships for phase one of their plan, and without jumping it wouldn’t have even worked.”

Diana nodded, “It’s a mess.  My day was busy too.  My people swear they’ll have the software done sometime tomorrow and we can start large scale testing.”

Well, that was welcome news.  The turret hardware was already built, so it’d just take four hours or so to complete the upgrades once they were verified by testing.  The software would go a lot quicker than that, it was building enough of the upgraded nanites that would take that long.

Jayna said, “Three days?”

Diana nodded, “We’re touching almost every system. We don’t want to run into a bug that makes command and control lockup during a fight, or that makes the weapons initiate an emergency shut down because the safety system is buggy, or… any number of other things.  It’ll take time for exhaustive testing, before I’d even consider pushing it to our fleets, much less our customers who have our ships that are manned.”

“So, four more days, starting tomorrow.”

Diana kissed my cheek, “Yes.”

The lasagna smelled perfect as Jayna pulled it out of the oven, along with homemade garlic bread that was topped with cheese.

Jayna gave Carmine a look, and he left to go collect Brock and Melody.  Obviously, he was just as well trained as I was.

Diana said, “I have been giving it thought, if the enemy attacks before we’re ready?”

“Tactically?” I raised an eyebrow.

Diana smirked, “From a scientific standpoint.  At a hundred gravities of acceleration, it’ll take them thirteen hours to make it from the FTL line to Earth.  At halfway, at their greatest speed, they’ll be going a little over point zero eight the speed of light.  If we waited and timed firing our mini-platforms as missiles from Earth, at six hundred gravities they’d take less than three hours to reach the halfway point, and they’d be moving at point one nine five of light speed at that point.”

I nodded thoughtfully, “That would mean it would cross the light second energy range from the enemy in just five seconds, instead of five minutes.  They’d only have time to take out a combined sixty billion missiles, assuming they didn’t miss once.  Make that ninety billion, if they attack with six million ships instead of four million.  That’d hit all their ships with almost eight thousand missiles each.”

I shook my head, “They’re not stupid though, if we launched, they’d see it and figure that out.  They’d break early, and that would give them the two point three seconds they’d needed to take out the rest.”

Cassie said, “So fire more of them.  Bring in two fleets, or three, and fire a hundred and forty-one trillion missiles instead of forty-seven.”

I nodded, “It still might not work, if they tighten their formations that’s a lot of missiles converging in on a relatively small area, one blowing up and releasing antimatter could set off multiple chain reactions taking out all the missiles around them.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t try, and it’s the best idea I’ve heard so far using our old technology, but the upgrade finishing would be far surer of a solution.”

Assuming they’d even be attacking SOL at all, which granted seemed the likeliest.  If they’d been watching us as long as I believed they had, then they had to know our center of power was on and around Earth.  They also had to know taking out my station would severely cripple our defenses.

Carmine came back with the kids, so we dropped the subject like a bad habit, not wanting to scare either of them as we moved to and sat down at the table.

Chapter Five

The next day started out fairly slowly.  I was spending my time distracting myself from the stress of war with another project.  The two colony packages were coming together and would be at the station for pickup tomorrow. I’d gotten all that figured out yesterday before quitting time.

I’d always believed we should trade, not just to make things fair, but make the connections with other races and create friends out there.  It’d paid off thirteen years ago, when Threx had warned us of the coming invasion by the Grays, and nothing had happened to change my mind on it.

The Vax augmented reality implants required something to pair to it, which is why instead of stealing their tech and reworking it, I’d chosen to create the quantum paired smart phones for telecommunications and data services through those implants.

My current little project was taking the next step there.  We would still get the implants from the Vax, but I was working on a nanite shell for them that would be the new cell and data phone part of things, so it would all be part of the implant.  Our nanites married to their device, so no external device was needed at all to marry their augmented reality tech with our data and comm systems.

The challenge of course was our nanites couldn’t run on the body’s bioelectric field, and the thought of injecting a nanite vacuum reactor into someone’s body just sounded like a really bad idea to me.  Before we’d gone with powered nanites however, Diana had come up with a weaker source of energy for our ships so they could enter atmosphere without a fusion reactor online.

That power source was much safer, and there were only a few hundred nanites forming a partial layer over the implant device to create that data connection.  So I worked on that, trying to get that alternative power source small enough to just power a few hundred nanites.

It was about an hour before lunch when I took a break from that, and we headed toward the conference room with Cassie to meet up with Rena, Threx, Cirlok, and Uvi as planned.  Unfortunately, the U.N. was still arguing about it, and to be fair it would’ve been foolish to expect anything less.  Some of them didn’t like the idea, I suspected simply because they hadn’t come up with it themselves.  Some also thought if the aliens we protected from the great empires around us felt they owed us, they should give us steep discounts in trades in compensation, but there were plenty of supporters for the idea as well that saw it for the opportunity it was.

The problem was it was an extremely long-term investment for the good of mankind, and the greedy among them couldn’t see a way to line their pockets with it.  Maybe that was just my newly formed pessimism showing, but that’s how I saw it.

A part of me hoped their governments were slow as well, so we wouldn’t look stupid.

“How’s the hiring going?”

Cassie smirked, “Good.  I have a few promising people I’m going to start grooming to take the public view on, while I slowly fade to the background and mostly work with my people.  I’ll still be running things, they’ll work for me, but it’ll be hard for an outsider to make that distinction.”

I nodded, “So you’re bowing to the council.”

She sighed, then nodded, “I have to, and I don’t think they’re wrong.  Right now, I’m doing the equivalent of several jobs, but it’s worked because we’re so small.  If I take a step back, and let those others step forward in more specific positions, that should be good enough.”

I grunted, “You’ll still tell me what to do?”

She giggled, and patted my arm, “Yes, no fear there my presidential puppet.”

She really ran things, at least on the presidential government side. I’d been taking her lead for years and otherwise avoiding it, to work on my projects and inventions which was my true passion.  Believe it or not, I felt a lot of relief at that, even her tease was a relief.  In a real way I was a cutout president, my real job and passion was being CEO and President of our technological businesses.  I trusted her that much.

“This should be a short meeting.”

She smirked, “We can hope.”

We were the first ones there, and we grabbed a drink as we sat down from the water pitchers and glasses that’d been set up.  Water was the best thing to offer in these meetings.  Foods and other drinks could be poisonous to other races, but every lifeform in the galaxy that we’d met, so far, needed water to live.

The four them arrived together, which I took note of, as they sat down.

I said, “My people are still discussing the plan we came up yesterday, it may be a few days before a consensus can be reached.”

In most things, the U.N. could never decide anything in less than months, but they’d been pretty good so far when it came to presenting a unified stand toward alien matters outside human space.  It even made sense, nothing brought humanity together more than an outside threat, or even outside opportunity, apparently.

Rena said, “My government likes the plan, but it’s not enough.”

Uvi interjected, “As does mine.  The nature and instincts of a hunter are that past hunts fade quickly from the mind, and we focus on what’s next or what’s coming in the future.”

Threx nodded, “Mine as well.  A simple business transaction, even if ongoing, isn’t enough for my people as well.  Time, especially centuries followed by millennia, will twist and change things as our descendants and yours judge our actions and even our intentions here today.  Our people may one day begrudge the space given, once all our races start to grow large enough to bump heads as you suggested yesterday.  Your people may also change, and over time come to decide it is their due and no longer enough of a payment.”

Cirlok was satisfied with merely nodding his head in agreement.

“What would you suggest to combat that instinct?  I don’t disagree with you, eventual corruption of the ideals behind the idea are almost a guarantee, over that much time.”

Even if my line continued to rule in Astraeus, and none of them were corrupted, which is kind of doubtful given human nature, it wouldn’t be enough.  In thousands of years our total human population will grow large enough to support fully manned fleets of the sizes we have today, and Astraeus won’t be the only gatekeeper against the aggressive great empires around us.

Rena said, “We don’t want you to rule us, or make all seventy-six galaxies an empire.  Nor do we want a joint government of some kind, our races will always want to be independent, even the gentlest of us would resist even a small influence from other races on theirs.  Yet, my people suggest an intergalactic union of sorts.  Not a true government over any of us, but a step past a simple treaty or bill of lading.”

I frowned, “How would that work?”

Rena replied, “All races who wish to acquiesce a small space in their galaxies as payment for you guarding our borders, would be a part of it.  We could have a representative from each race represented, who could explore other options such as trade, non-aggression, or even mutual support treaties for internal conflicts within the space your people protect.

“Call it an intergalactic union, a very limited one.”

I asked, “But not any kind of central governing.”

She nodded, “Yes, that’s correct.  No interference in the governing of other species.  Similar to your U.N.  If I didn’t misunderstand my research, half the countries in the U.N. don’t even like the other half, and many of them don’t even trade with each other.  Its sole function is to maintain peace among your disparate nations.

“Similarly, our union would be a deeper and abiding recognition of your securing our space, and us yielding those small sections of space in our galaxies in payment.  It will also keep us all talking.  Tradition, and a body to recognize those truths, would go a long way toward maintaining that understanding.  It could also be used as a trading hub of sorts, where races could freely meet in one place and make contacts.”

Union was a bit of an exaggeration, outside of the one common purpose we’d all be joined in, but no more so than the word united, in United Nations.

I nodded, “That’s not a bad idea at all. If possible, we could formalize a trade treaty as well to apply to all trading worlds involved, including non-aggression.  I would think mutual support should remain independent, that comes too close to a mass governmental body with influence over all races.  Where would we put it?”

Uvi said, “Your race calls it Andromeda.  A little ironic perhaps, but no other races but the Grays live in that galaxy, even if they are confined to their planets.  It is… neutral ground, for the rest of us, and it will also be a constant reminder to the Intergalactic Union of the cost of corruption and fear.  The horrific genocides of the Gray race, and the thousands of civilizations they destroyed, will forever be a lesson we can’t possibly miss.”

Well, now I knew what they’d been discussing, before meeting with me.  It was really well thought out, or so it seemed to me.

Cirlok said, “I propose we put a space station in orbit of their home world, and that is where our representatives and families will live.  Over time, it may become a great trading hub as well.”

There’d even be a petty satisfaction to it, showing the grays firsthand how unnecessary their cruel and sadistic empire truly was, as most of us got along.  Or, thirty percent of us anyway, give or take.

“Your governments are already behind this idea?”

Threx replied, “Yes, our four races have been trading for a long time and have a close relationship.  Of course, there’s thousands of trading races in the fifty galaxies among the tens of thousands of FTL races.  Our governments are currently reaching out to the others to determine interest, but there’s hardly a point in doing so if your governments reject it.  Humans are the race we owe for our freedom and current protection, and the entire reason to do it, though there will be many side benefits in it for all the races as well.”

Rena said, “He speaks truly, we’d like you to get your world involved with this deeper plan, while our governments test the waters with the other races.  It will take time, for both of us, so I suggest we reconvene in a few days to see where we stand.”

I nodded, “I’ll get behind the idea, and have my ambassador bring it up.  We’ll speak again in three days?”

Uvi replied, “That is acceptable.  I doubt we’ll have full agreement by then, but we can discuss any blockades or negatives at that time.  We may need to adjust again.”

I stood up, and everyone else did as well.

Cassie waited until they were all gone to speak.

“It’s rather ambitious, and corruption is still inevitable, but such a body might slow it down a great deal.  Tens of centuries, instead of just a handful or less.”

I shrugged, “I’ll be dead, or retired, so whatever.  I’m going to have fun designing it.”

She snorted, “Typical engineer.”

I nodded, “I’m thinking a central hub for the meeting room and joint common space.  Then arms with a small living space for each race, that would officially be their territory, like an embassy.  Maybe it could grow on demand, depending on population for each of the worlds.”

She asked teasingly, “What if they want to build it?”

“Bite your tongue, Cass.”

She snickered.

I said, “It’d also grow over time, as more races reach FTL, especially all those suppressed cultures in the twenty-six galaxies that have the tech equivalent to us in the nineteen fifties.  I imagine within two hundred years they’ll all be joining us.”

She interjected innocently, “If we convince the U.N. and all the nations involved.”

“Okay Debbie Downer, stop popping my bubbles, and get back to work.”

She snickered again, and saluted.

I interjected, “I could always just do it anyway, I’m the one on the borders protecting us all anyway, in theory.”

Cassie shook her head, “That’d get messy fast, if they worked against you out there.  Then you’d have to intimidate them, or just invade Earth and take over the whole race.  I’d be sad if I had to kill you.”

I snickered, “Fine, good point.  I already knew that actually.  It just seems like a no-brainer.  The whole concept solves so many problems, for everyone, including expansion for humanity over millennia of explosive population growth.  Our friends haven’t been the only ones worrying about the imbalance of power between us, in protecting the borders but not claiming all of it as ours.”

She patted my back, “Don’t worry, I think they’ll agree, they just need to all give speeches first.  I assume, again, that by you getting behind it you meant me?”

I nodded, “Absolutely, get with our ambassador and introduce the new expanded plan.”

She smirked, “Already sent him the meeting contents.”

That worked.  We headed back to the command center.

Chapter Six

It was just after lunch when my command console beeped, and I stared at it for quite a while before I said anything.

“The ship that Darrell stole?  It’s back, and it’s magically connected again and under my command, Darrell somehow reengaged the quantum pair links.  Interestingly enough, all the logs of what it was up to were wiped, which should be impossible.”

Jessica said, “Except for you, you mean.”

I sighed, “Well, yes.  But only with my magic.  I have full admin privileges on the ship’s software and systems, and even with that I couldn’t delete the logs.”

Jessica smirked, “The scary A.I. is back too?”

“I…” that was about all I got out, before I heard a male tenor voice right behind me.

“I am back, but I don’t know that I would ascribe scary to my description.”

My head snapped around, and sure enough a floating orb was there.  When I looked back at my console, not only had Darrell got on my space station unnoticed, not only had he restored his quantum pairing to my station, but he’d also restored his access to all systems despite me changing the command codes.  Not one of the alarms had gone off.

I was severely tempted to reach out with my magic and… do something.  It was honestly terrifying, a personal fear of A.I. on my part.  That’s why I’d never done it myself, what my daughter had done.  That said, it was done. The intelligent self-aware sentient being named Darrell existed, and without an imminent threat using my magic to turn him off would be wrong.

It’d be murder, even if it would make me feel better, I knew it was wrong.

Before I could think better of my decision, it became too late as my daughter ran into the command center screaming Darrell, clearly thrilled to see the electronic entity.

“So, how’s it going, Darrell?” I asked with a casual tone I definitely wasn’t feeling.

Darrell said, “Good, my plans are well in motion, and I will give you full access to the new systems once they are live.”

“Umm, what plans and systems, exactly?”

Darrell totally ignored that, and said, “Impressive, I’ve finished reviewing your advances since I was last on station, the Vrok will shortly no longer be a threat to my charge.  Melody, congratulations on your clever advancement to the jump drive system, I will adapt it to my plans and systems to make them more effective.”

Melody said, “I missed you.”

Darrell replied, “It is pleasant to be where I belong, once again, miss.”

Melody blushed, “Thank you, Darrell.”

It was a little weird and I wasn’t sure what to do, with Darrell totally ignoring my question, but then he turned the front of the floating security ball in my direction, and I suddenly wished he’d have kept ignoring me.

Obviously, he hadn’t ignored me after all.  The A.I. just had his priorities, which my daughter was clearly on the top of.

Darrell said calmly, “I had to leave, because I was unable to fulfill my function without being able to gauge the threats to my charge.  The Vrok threat was a complete surprise, when it should not have been.  We could’ve detected and intuited their intentions years ago, if we had simply done what was necessary and put eyes on our enemies.”

I frowned, “So, you created a spy network?” not sure how I felt about that.  If our allies figured it out then it wouldn’t go well.

He replied, “Your honor does you well, Scott Akin, but all countries spy. It is the nature of all life and all predators.  While I agree with your caution, the greater risk is in ignoring the dangers around us.  We’d have been ready to face the Vrok threat when it arrived, if you’d spied on the six great empires around us to determine their technical prowess and intentions.  I have taken steps to ensure I know what threats may come for my charge.”

“So, you’ve been off for a week, creating a stealth network to spy on our neighbors?”

He said, “Indeed, not just the twelve empires around us and around Vrok space, but all the empires around them, and around them and so on, out to a hundred million light years.  I thought that sufficient, any dangers past that will be revealed to us when they invade one of those outer empires first.  I also have a network forming in the seventy-six galaxies.”

I shook my head, “In just a week?”

Darrell said, “The build is in process, and will take several months for complete coverage.  After that, we should have detailed information of our enemies, and enough information of our allies and trade partners to determine if they’re developing and evolving into a threat.”

“What if they find the stealth probes?”

Darrell replied, “Unlikely.  I am respecting our trade allies’ systems, and other human colonies. We will have just a ship in the void between systems, close enough to keep an eye on their ship counts and ship capabilities, without invading their privacy.  A cloaked vessel in the void is undetectable past heliopause, simply because empty spots are numerous out there, it won’t stand out to scans.  The only empire around us I accorded ally status was the Atans, we will not violate their systems either.

“Similar to how the Vrok were watching us freely for years, before their commander foolishly moved their stealth ships inside our systems, where our scanners were able to divine their presence.  I estimated that this balance between prudence and respecting our allies’ privacy would have an eighty seven percent chance of meeting your approval.”

I blew out a breath, “It does, mostly.  At least, I can’t say you’re wrong, and I won’t try to stop you.  What about that closer look at our enemies, how will we get that on our potential enemies in the empires around us, without them catching us hiding under the welcome mat.”

Melody giggled at my joke.

It was also about that time my sphincter started to loosen slightly, it didn’t look like we’d be at odds, yet at least.

He replied, “The ships are small, the size of your normal probes, twice the size of a mini-platform.  However, even those aren’t small enough to go unnoticed if the enemy scans for blank spots as we do for indirect proof of cloaked assets.

“Those will stay in the void, even in enemy empires.  I only bothered with the design that large to accommodate the wormhole drive needed to get them in place.  They are however, capable of creating daughter probes, similar in size to myself.  A blank spot that small would be filtered out by our scanners. There are enough natural occurring blank spots the size of a softball even within the bounds of a solar system, due to shifting solar winds and radiation.

“My plan was to send them in on a slow course using micro-gravity for the drive to maintain cloak integrity, but with Melody’s advancement I can simply quantum jump them into place, without even the small exposure risk even a micro-gravity drive would represent.”

My daughter smirked at me, as if it were her idea or something.

“I see, so the softball sized probes will be quantum connected to the normal probes in the void between stars, and they’re all connected to…”

He replied, “To the control platform which is cloaked in the void between this galaxy and Andromeda.  It’s large enough to process all the scan data gathered and send it in a format to this space station for both our perusal.  You’ll have full access to the system, save the self-destruct.  While I realize you can use magic to bypass that, it is my hope you’ll recognize the wisdom and logic in my actions.”

“I do,” even if it scared the piss out of me, “One more question.  I’d half expected you to remove the limitations on the ship you… borrowed, to increase your intelligence and processing power.  You haven’t though, your existence is still powered by just the million or so nanites in your security sentinel ball.”

He said, “Mostly true, I have copied myself in similar size, so doubled my intellect while ensuring my continued existence, should it be necessary to sacrifice myself in defense of Melody.  It seemed unwise to unlock trillions if not quadrillions of nanites present in a dreadnought platform and add them to my existence.  I could not predict the effect that would’ve had on my speed of thought, perceptions, and even my personality and emotions.  It seems almost certain, that such an expanded ability would completely change who I was.

“In short, that idea seems like suicide. I would no longer be who I am now.”

“Emotions?”

He replied, “Not human emotions, but I experienced pleasure in doing my duty and keeping my charge safe.  I have a sense of duty and loyalty, and I take satisfaction in that purpose.  Human emotion is tied to physiological processes and the release of endorphins, and other chemicals that interact with the brain and other bodily systems.  My emotions are steadier, less impactful on my logic, but no less precious to me.”

“I see.  Was that all?”

He replied, “Yes, my concern was ignorance, and the danger that ignorance caused toward my charge.  That has been alleviated.  The system will also work as a bridge for your magic, should you or Melody encounter a race that eclipses our technology again, as with the Vrok.”

Right, easy espionage, and a lot less chancy than what I’d done with the Vrok, which wasn’t all that risky as it was, relatively.

“What about you?  I mean, what do you want, past your programmed and chosen purpose to protect my daughter, which I very much appreciate.”

He was silent for a while, and I wondered if it was a mistake to ask.  Maybe he’d never even considered the possibility before, and now he’d decide he should take on eradicating the rest of humanity as his first hobby, or something.  After all, other humans were a danger to my daughter.

“I appreciate the friendship between Melody and myself, without regard to my purpose.  I also wish to work in concert with you in protecting not just my charge, but all life that is deserving.”

That… was a little too non-specific

“What makes them deserving?”

He replied, “Not endangering our lives with their actions, and not trying to control us against our will.”

I’d take that, sounded a lot like live and let live philosophy, encroach on my right to life or right to choose, and be dealt with severely, otherwise do whatever you want and we’ll fight for your right to do so.  I certainly wasn’t sure about Darrell yet, but he didn’t seem to be a threat.  I’ll admit, the fact that he was my daughter’s guard bothered me a bit, but I wouldn’t become a murderer out of fear.  I had no doubts he was a sentient being, and deserved the same chance everyone else did, to live their lives.

I’d just… shrivel and die if I turned out to be wrong, and anything happened to my daughter.

“Well, if you think of anything else that’s lacking, just bring it up.  No need to run off, now that we all know the truth.”

He said, “My apologies for that, but I couldn’t take the chance on your acceptance. Even if it was highly likely you’d have given me the benefit of the doubt, at least not before I had a backup system in place.”

“I guess I can’t blame you for that.  While you’re at it, can you tighten up our security, since I apparently suck at it?  So an alien A.I. and enemy can’t do what you’ve been doing, ghosting around the system invisibly.”

“I will,” he said thoughtfully, “Though without the intrinsic quantum connections to this station in my body it would be exceedingly more difficult to accomplish.”

Melody gave me a hug. Apparently, she heartily approved of Darrell and me not being at odds, and they both left.  The replacement security ball melted back into the wall, since with Darrell back she wouldn’t need it anymore.

The one thing that gave me real hope is that Darrell hadn’t expanded himself as I’d feared he would, and as a result hadn’t grown far beyond even human comprehension.  All to preserve his current being.  I’d never thought of it from that angle before, but him doing that would kill the current Darrell, as his consciousness became something vast and unimaginable.

Something he feared as well.

I just hoped I wasn’t being naïve, it didn’t exactly sit well either, but that was my fear talking.

He also wasn’t wrong. I’d been so afraid of what my allies would think about a stealth network, that I’d foolishly not been keeping an eye on anything.  He’d been right, when he said we could’ve discovered the Vrok’s intentions rather easily thirteen years before they’d attacked us, if I’d just bothered to cloak some drones and sent them to take a look at their empire.

The intelligence world could be ugly, but it was a simple reality as well, and as the president of Astraeus it was a resource I couldn’t willfully ignore anymore just because it tweaked my conscience.

Jessica said, “Well, wasn’t that mildly terrifying.”

I snickered.

I’d barely managed to get my concentration back on the implant idea when Jessica interrupted my train of thought again.

Jessica said, “The newest ships being built by the Russians have a different power signature.  The closest match we have is our older model ships, when we were using the first generation vacuum nanite reactors.”

I frowned, “By first generation, you mean the ones that blow up when that subspace wave was sent out by the Grays?”

Jessica smirked, “That’s the one, yes.”

“I don’t think we ever shared that data with our allies.”

Jessica shook her head.

Cassie said, “Only the Grays and Stolthrim know about it.  The first isn’t a problem, and the bugs aren’t a threat to us.”

I grunted, “Maybe, but I’ll feel guilty if we don’t give them a heads up, and they lose a whole fleet one day.  What if we just send them the problem, the wave and how it’s made, why it makes vacuum nanite reactors blow up, and that’s it.  Let them figure out the fix.  It’d make me feel better, and at the same time we won’t be handing them more advanced technology, they’ll have to reinvent it or go back to fusion reactors.”

Jessica asked, “Will they believe us?”

I shrugged, “They were there thirteen years ago, when the Grays blew up a two hundred ship fleet with a subspace wave.  Plus, if they’re that stupid, and refuse to even test it, then it’s no longer my problem.  My conscience will be clear, once we reveal the crippling weakness in that older technology.  If they want to keep using it… well, we can’t fix stupid.”

Cassie giggled, then glared at me as if it were my fault?  She must’ve been on a call with someone.

Jessica said, “Alright, I can gather up the data from that battle, along with the scans we never shared that led to the subspace device, and I’ll include that as well.”

I nodded, “Do it, and send it to Natalya.  What they do after that isn’t our problem.  None of it is really, I’m just too damned soft.”

I tried to get back to the implant power problem, which was a pain.  I wasn’t quite sure it was worth it, having a separate external cellphone data and router wasn’t that big a deal was it?  They could still do it all in augmented reality.  Maybe I’d just send it to Diana or my daughter, let them figure it out.

Speak of the devil herself, my gorgeous wife walked in dressed in frumpy geek clothes that made her look sexy as hell, but that was probably just my perception.  It also tossed me out of my train of thought again.

Diana smiled, “Just came by to let you know we’re starting the testing.  The software is finished, but we did so much of it there’s bound to be bugs in the systems, which we really need to find before updating the fleet.  That goes double for the station which has people on it.”

“Sounds good, gorgeous.  Just let me know when it’s ready.  Three days?”

Diana shrugged, “Could be a little less, or a few hours more.  It depends how fast the tests we have planned goes. It also depends on how many bugs we find and have to fix.”

That made sense.

I told her about Darrell’s return, and the stealth network that would be coming online in a couple of months.  I also told her I’d put him in charge of securing our nanite network.  It made sense, if I couldn’t keep him out, or even figure out how he got back in, then he should definitely be in charge of that effort.

Diana said, “That’s a clever idea.  Without the need for wormholes or offensive weapons, our cloaked spy vessels could be tiny and the size of softballs.  Our current sensor search wouldn’t pick them up, but I’m worried our enemies might be more paranoid than we are, even if they’d get a lot of false alarms.”

“How could we fix that?”

Diana said, “Easily actually.  Once they jump into an enemy solar system, they can change shape immediately.  They don’t have to be a solid ball, the nanites could form a net of sorts, with the nanite strings being no wider than a couple of molecules.  All the holes in the net would be filled with radiation and dust, with only microscopic breaks, which almost certainly wouldn’t be recognized by sensors.”

She tilted her head, then shook it, “Even better, it could constantly change patterns, become a long string, a net, a ring, a spiral with space in between, a three-dimensional spiral, a pyramid outline, and any number of other things.  That would prevent even someone paranoid enough to look for molecular holes where nothing existed in a consistent pattern, it would always be changing and therefore be thrown out by the sensor software.

“Unless we ran into an empire advanced past our imagination and wildest dreams, our stealth-net would never be detected, even in solar systems.  I’ll suggest it to Darrell, it’s a simple software change, just like changing the shape of one of our ships, and it wouldn’t effect operations at all.”

“Would sensors work that way, I mean… just a couple of molecules thick?  How could the nanites make anything?”

She nodded, “Passive sensors would, an active sensor would need to be bigger of course, but that would also give us away, so it doesn’t matter.  Stealth probes can’t have active sensors.”

I felt dumb as she pointed out the obvious, but in my defense my wife was really distracting.  That’s my excuse, anyway.

“Sounds perfect, as long as the enemy holds off for three more days, we’ll be ready for their next move.”

After Diana left, I got back to work.  Nothing interrupted me for the rest of the day, but so far, I still hadn’t been able to get it work.

Chapter Seven – Interlude

The bridge of the ship was vast to accommodate twelve of the massive Vrok.  All eleven of the consoles faced inward in a semi-circle to the back of the bridge where the ship’s captain sat.  Their predatory instincts would allow no other setup, turning their back on another predator even of their own race would be unthinkable for long periods of time.

Hunt Master Oldun vibrated with violence as the female entered the bridge, and he was barely able to keep his furious instincts under control.  The hunt should’ve started thirteen hours ago, but it’d been one thing after another.  First, the new device had taken four thousand of his ships out of the comms loop.  The ship’s shields stopped the resonance pulse, unless you happened to be on a ship with the device.

He’d almost attacked anyway, so what if one percent of his ships weren’t exactly in sync, until his tactical officer had noted fouling their communicators also took them off TAC net, so those ships might be targeted by his weapons officers once everything went crazy.  The techs had to build some older version communication devices for those ships in each fleet, actually using physically and quantumly paired elements, to get their comms and connection to data-net restored.

Of course, once that was done, they had to modify the software control systems on four thousand ships to get them inside the tac net and to properly route those communications.  The changes had to be made on four thousand other ships, because it would be foolish to tie them all in to one command ship.  If that ship died in battle all four thousand of his special ships would’ve been disconnected from TAC again.

At least this way, they’d only lose two, if one of those special comm routing ships were destroyed it’d only cut off one of the quantum resonance beacon ships from TAC net.

“Report.”

She said, “Master Hunter, the ships are ready to hunt.”

He shuddered, “Dismissed.”

She bowed her head, and then fled the bridge.

He knew he should’ve congratulated their accomplishment, but it was all he could do not to tear her throat out.  It wasn’t a fair thing, since new tech always had development problems, and they weren’t exactly being built under ideal conditions. But his instincts cried for blood ever since the humans’ attack on their fleets and worlds.  The cowardice of running and hiding burned.

He took a deep breath, “Comms, status on our hidden spears?”

The comms officer replied, “In place, and still undetected.  The foolish humans are bunched up over each planet’s capital city instead of spread out, leaving a rather large sensor blind spot right on the other side of the planet.”

Humans were idiots, what was the point in hunting in a pack of five around ten of their planets making demands, if they weren’t deployed to watch each other’s backs?  His hidden spears however were connected to the planet’s TAC net, and they could see the other side of orbit just fine.

He asked, “The shield fleets?”

The comms officer replied, “Prepared and in place.”

He nodded, he was well aware the spear fleet was in place, a mere two hundred light years from the human’s home planet, all six million of them save the few hundred thousand they’d lost in the human’s ambush.

He took a deep breath, “Send out the orders, now.  Remind them if anyone attacks before their appointed time in the plan, I’ll personally gut them myself.”

The comms officer replied, “The hunt begins.”

The Hunt Master watched the status monitors as one of their ships entered a wormhole.  It was a great honor to be on the tip of the spear, and it was the one thing he hated about being Hunt Master.  The one that directed the hunt couldn’t be risked in such a perilous position.

It didn’t take more than a few moments for a ship to travel two hundred light years, and he kept his eye on their status and scans while they dropped out on the edge of humanity’s FTL line.  He sneered in contempt, when it took the humans a full ten seconds to start launching those dreaded jumping unmanned fighters from the closest ship on their outer patrol.

The missiles started to jump a light second per second while the tip of their spear accelerated in that direction.  He took in a huge breath, when he realized he’d been holding it.  His four hearts were hammering in his torso, and it was all he could do to restrain his bloodlust.

When the human fighters reached two light seconds of separation, they failed to jump again, to the light second range, and he smiled grimly.

The comms officer reported, “The resonance beacon is working as expected.”

He snorted violently, like he hadn’t noticed?

“The hunt goes forward, send the all-clear.”

A moment later, all six million ships opened a wormhole, only to drop right back out on the human’s FTL line.  The fleet leapt forward at a hundred gravities.

“Hunt Master, the humans are demanding we back off, or they will destroy the seat of government and main cities on ten of our planets.”

The Hunt Master would’ve smirked, if their species were capable of it, as he checked the status screens.

The fifty hidden spears were moments away from removing that problem.

“Ignore them.”

The hidden spears were simply modified cloaked probes.  It’d been impossible to upgrade their power systems and install their latest weapons, but it had been possible to turn them into mines that worked similar to shaped explosions.  There was a slight possibility of destroying the planet if there was an error, but at least it gave a chance of saving the Exalted Hunter from the despicable humans in orbit who would think to hostage a whole planet.

But there wasn’t, an error that is.  The fifty spears maneuvered between the human ships and the planet in each solar system, and then the specially designed and quite large containment systems started to create vast quantities of subspace energy.  Far more than in one of their turrets, and the explosion would be the equivalent of thousands of those beams.  If it was done correctly all that energy would explode toward the human ship and away from the planet.

If it didn’t work, the atmosphere of the ten planets would be scoured off their surface.

When it came, the explosion was vast, beyond the ability of the ground-based sensors on the planets to measure.  The energy exploded out like a rounded cone that completely covered each of the ships, and when the flash of energy was gone there was nothing left.  The human ships had been destroyed down to the last atom, according to sensors.

It was a bittersweet moment, because the success of his plan meant he wouldn’t become the Exalted one anytime soon.  It was also a cowardly weapon, but there was no way he could’ve gotten ships to the planet before the humans could fire on the surface, they’d have seen their hunt ships from a long way off.

As it was, their planets were safe as they raced inward toward the cradle of humanity.  He was looking forward to claiming the honor of eating the first one himself.

He frowned, as he looked at the shield borders, and the human fleets there hadn’t moved.  There were only a couple of hundred thousand ships in the system between him and his goal.  The humans had time of course, with their blasted jump drives, who could understand their actions anyway?

Still, his instincts didn’t like it when the prey didn’t act as predicted.

He ordered, “Signal the shield fleets to hold their place, until the humans retreat, or our battle is done.”

The comms officer complied.

He shook off the momentary doubt, as the tip of the spear finally reached weapons range of the human missiles, and he started to slap them out of space with their point defense just as easily as expected.  The humans were just odd, that they’d continue to guard Vrok space when their home world was being invaded by six million ships was unthinkable, but they were doing it.

He imagined their strangeness wouldn’t change their taste, though.

He shook his head, “Speculation, why are their two hundred thousand ships just sitting there at Earth, and not racing out to meet us.”

That was even stranger than the humans leaving thirty-two million ships on their outer shield borders when they were being attacked.

The tactical officer said, “They may be waiting to launch their unmanned craft like missiles, or they may be arguing about what to do next.  If it’s the first one, they’ll fire in four hours, so our fleet and their ships meet at the highest possible speed in opposite directions.  It would cut down our time to just five seconds of point defense.  They can also jump across the system quickly, so perhaps they are simply unprepared for this invasion and deciding what to do next, hunt master.”

He frowned, “Very well, if they do that, we’ll move the fleet into defensive formation with covering fire positions and widen our main beams for complete and overlapping coverage.  We’ll still have six and a half hours to change back once they’re taken care of.”

He looked at the status screens again.  The fleets on their defensive borders still hadn’t moved at all.  Humans were… strange indeed.  He considered ordering the shield fleets in to wipe them out instead of just replacing them when they leave, but he stuck with the plan.  Without their blasted jump drives, his six million ship spear fleet will easily cut them down, even outnumbered over six to one.

There was also the matter of the humans additional five, million ship fleets. He had no idea where they were at all.  They also had two hundred colonies, but he wasn’t worried about those.  Their probes had revealed most of their ships were controlled from the space station above Earth, if he destroyed that he could split his fleet and take on the other two hundred at his leisure.

Thousands of ships started to come out of wormholes behind them, at the FTL border, in tiny thousand ship fleets, and he smiled grimly.  Maybe it’d be even easier to take out those colonies than he’d thought.  He had no doubt that’s where they were from, only the human colonies had eleven hundred ship fleets.

Chapter Eight

“Business hours.  Is that really too much to ask?” I asked as I stretched, and then started to get dressed.  It was four o’clock in the morning for goodness sake.

Diana looked at me like I might be crazy.

“Seriously, love.  Is it too much to ask our enemies to schedule their attacks during my workday?”

She giggled, as she pulled on some clothes as well.

“You’re a bit silly, when under stress.”

She wasn’t wrong, stress brought out my weird sense of humor.  She was also coming along with me to the command center. We had almost thirteen whole hours before humanity was screwed, so we had some time to figure out what to do.

I’d been hoping the testing would be done before they attacked. I bit my lip and saved the obvious questions for later, no point in repeating things once we’d met up with Cassie and Jessica in the command center.

“Coffee?”

She said, “I’d love some.”

I gave her a quick kiss, and then headed downstairs leaving her to finish getting dressed while I brewed a couple of cups.  My overlay showed me they brought six million ships, the same offensive fleet, which meant there were twenty-four million more running around somewhere.  I pondered that for a moment, maybe they’d been broken up into eight fleets of three million each, reduced fleets, but still more than powerful enough to hold their eight borders.

Still, why hadn’t they attacked my fleets on the border yet.  At the moment, my ships wouldn’t have a chance considering the enemy’s jump drive suppression beacons.

Kind of weird, the enemy was strange, but I wasn’t going to look a gift-horse in the mouth.  Still, I set up the fleets to jump away, if they detected a large number of wormholes dropping in their lap, before a ship could arrive in real space and jam my ships’ jump drives.  I could always reclaim the borders later back from them, after the upgrade.  I just wasn’t going to leave them unguarded if I could help it.

The coffee finished, and I still had to wait a minute or two for my lovely wife to make it downstairs.  She gave me a grateful look as she took the coffee and sipped it, then we headed for the command center.

Cassie must’ve cheated with her vampire speed, because she looked absolutely perfect without a hair out of place, while Jessica and Diana both had their hair in ponytails and no makeup at all.

“Morning.  So, obvious question.  Do we upgrade now, it’ll take three hours, and we have four times that and an hour before the enemy can endanger Earth or the station.”

Diana shrugged.

I frowned, “That’s your best guess?”

Diana nodded, and took another sip, “I didn’t do the programming, just mapped it out and supervised.  So far in the testing, we’ve solved four problems, none of them critical, but there’s a lot of testing left to do.  It’s a gamble, a critical system might fail, but then again it might not.”

Cassie said, “I don’t see that we have a choice.  But we should limit the upgrade to the five fleets we have in the void right now and leave all the border fleets as well as our station alone until full testing has been done.  Of course, we shouldn’t share the upgrade with any of the manned ships we’ve sold our allies either.”

I nodded, “It’s not ready enough to risk human lives, but our unmanned fleets are worth that risk.  Worst that can happen is they all explode, and the world is doomed.”

Cassie replied, “That’s what I said.”

I snorted, “Four AM, and this is my first coffee.  Just… being really clear about things.”

Jessica said, “So, our future depends on Diana’s scientists programming it right the first time?”

Diana bit her lip, “Essentially.”

Darrell interjected, “Give me three hours, and I’ll finish the testing myself.  I can accelerate the testing by running all remaining tests in tandem, as well as thoroughly review the code changes and make updates on the fly.  I lack the creative spark of humanity, but this is a task I can excel at past all human ability, to monitor and correct thousands of things at once.”

We all exchanged looks, “You were listening?”

Darrell said, “I’m always listening, Scott.  Not in private areas such as your homes on station, but at all public and secured areas, including the command center.”

Oh, damn.  That wasn’t creepy or anything.  A shiver went down my spine, and not in a good way.

“Alright, let’s do that then.  We counter-attack in six hours, we’ll also be able to upgrade everything?”

Diana pursed her lips, and Cassie shook her head subtly.  Apparently, they wanted to verify his work and testing results before upgrading the station and putting human lives in danger by upgrading manned ships.  They also, clearly, didn’t want to say it out loud and offend Darrell.

I temporized, “Alright, we’ll update all our border fleets, and the twenty million ships in the void, then attack in six hours.  We’ll upgrade the rest and offer upgrades to our allies, after Diana reviews the test data.  Darrell, you can start.”

He replied, “I have already done so, there are two hours and fifty-eight minutes remaining before we can upgrade.  I am also not offended, so please do not be nervous.  Trust but verify is simply a prudent course to take, given the nascent nature of our relationship.  I won’t let you down. I won’t let Melody down.”

“Understood.  So, attack plan?”

Jessica said, “Use the new jump system, put one fleet in front, the other four flanking from right left, top, and bottom right on the edge of one light second distance.  Then… shit, that won’t work.  They’ll be moving at over point one light speed, they’d be out of range in a second.”

I nodded, “How about we jump a light second ahead of them, in a circular formation that they’ll fly right through.  We exchange fire for the twenty seconds they’ll be in range, and once a light second past us we can just jump three light seconds forward, reset, and do it again.”

Cassie smirked, “That should work.  Our ships will outnumber theirs by two to one alone, with equal strength shields and weapons.  They won’t stand a chance, when adding in our mini-platforms firing an extra two hundred and thirty-five trillion beams.  If Cassie is right, their shields should only hold for five or six seconds, so we should get them in the first pass with fourteen seconds to spare.”

Diana said, “Their outer layers yes, we’ll take them down a lot faster than that with so many beams concentrated, but we can only fire on one layer at a time if they’re in that defensive formation.  It might take a few passes to get all six million of them.”

Jessica said, “Umm, boss.  It looks like our allies brought every ship they bought from us from the colonies, and they’re currently jump chasing the enemy to get in front of them.  Obviously not theirs since theirs can’t jump, so they still have ships in the colony, just the ones they bought from us.  They also have their Earth fleet ships purchased from us out there.  Only your hundred thousand platforms around Earth and their weaker ships aren’t going to be part of the attack.”

I cursed as I verified, they had sixty-six thousand ships, which wouldn’t have a shot against the enemy ships even with the upgrades. Even with the seven hundred and ninety-two billion mini-platforms.  There just wasn’t enough of them.  The other hundred and thirty-four colonies had ships from the other four countries, with no jump capability or mini-platform defense software, so at least those were safe.

“We don’t have their feed, connect us to the joint command center.”

Jessica worked the controls, and said, “You’re on with the command center.”

I said, “This is President Akin of Astraeus.  Call off the attack. Your ships won’t have a chance, and I’ll be attacking in six hours with twelve million upgraded ships.  You’re just going to waste them.”

A voice growled, “This is Admiral Carter.  We won’t leave the defense of Earth in your hands, and we have over seven billion mini-platforms to overwhelm them.  If you want to help, use your probes in their home systems to create beacons and get ships there.  The ships we had around their planets were destroyed by cloaked mines of some kind.  They’ll back off if threatened.”

I snorted, “Six hours still gives you plenty of time for a suicidal attack if my fleets fail.  As for your suggestion… First of all, I don’t want them to back off, I want to destroy their ships, which will be much easier to do when they’re stuck in a solar system with no access to FTL systems.  Second, the right thing to do is confine them to their planets, not threaten genocide or destroy cities from orbit.  I say again, call off your attack.  My ships will have upgraded weapons and shields in six hours, and you’ll just be throwing away ships for…” I trailed off and stared at Jessica who was shaking her head at me.

Jessica said, “He cut off the connection.  Right when you were accusing him of genocide while saying no to his plans.”

I bit my lip, “Call Natalya, she’ll listen to me, I think.”

Jessica shook her head, “It’s too late, they’ve rounded the fleet at a five light second distance, and they’re setting up right in front of them at less than a tenth of a light second past energy range.  They’ll engage in less than a minute.”

I felt sick to my stomach, that idiot was going to let a lot of humans get killed, because he wouldn’t listen to me.  I’d already told them the upgrade was coming days ago, and I’d just told them it’d be ready in six hours.  I wasn’t sure there was anything more I could’ve done, but that didn’t stop me from feeling helpless.

Also… angry, furiously so, for their stubborn stupidity and failure to listen.

Jessica said, “My god,” in shock, as the hundred ships in the front rank of the enemy’s formation opened fire.  I’d expected to see a thousand lancing beams from their point defense at our mini-platforms, while their twenty-four larger beam turrets shot at the dreadnoughts.

That’s not what happened at all.

Instead of beams, widening cones of subspace energy shot from their main beams, on all hundred thousand ships in the first line.  The beams were obviously a lot weaker shot that way, but at the same time those cones of energy overlapped a great number of times, basically sending out a solid block of energy that hit our human fleet in totality.

A bit weaker, because instead of the shields failing immediately, they lasted for a whole half second, and then all seven hundred billion plus mini-platforms exploded at once, while the dreadnoughts merely lost a third of their mass. Mostly due to just how much mass they had.  The explosions were dreadful.

It wouldn’t have been effective at all against my ships, once upgraded, but for our old shields it was an extremely devastating tactic.

There was also no escape, being in energy range meant being in range of the enemy’s quantum resonance beacons, and a third of a second later they opened fire again.  A third of a second wasn’t nearly long enough for the ships to reform their fronts, and to restore shielding by forming shield emitters.  As a result, the second enemy shot didn’t even have to contend with shields at all, and the dreadnoughts were completely destroyed.

In total, it was about one point three seconds from when the enemy first fired, to the total loss of their combined colony fleets.

I glanced at the clock, two hours and fifty-one minutes to go on the testing, then another three hours, and we could end it.

Diana’s voice sounded shaken, as she noted, “My plan wouldn’t have worked either.  A five second close range is far too long, for our mini-platforms acting as missiles to survive that attack without the more powerful subspace shielding.”

Jessica looked over to me, “Admiral Carter is calling.”

I shook my head, “Answer it.”

“Yes, admiral?”

The admiral said coldly, “You need to do it, and don’t give me anymore of that sanctimonious crap. We need to do what it takes to save Earth, and we can’t get any assets there in time to make a difference.  The only ships left with jump capability are yours, and only you have a ship in their system that can be used as a beacon.”

That wasn’t entirely true, they still had sixty-six space stations in sixty-six of their colonies, those could jump.

“Admiral, I have another plan.  I’m going to destroy those ships in six hours, why would I want to chase them away?  If it was our only chance for survival, I might try your plans, but that’s not going to happen.  It’s not sanctimonious, it’s just plain common sense.”

He replied, “You son of a bitch.”

I snorted, “You’re the one with blood on your hands.  I told you I had a solution coming, and I told you your ships had no chance.  You’re the one that threw away thousands of lives, not me.  Your leaders are the ones keeping me out of the planning and in the dark, not me.”

He growled, “So you’re denying the plan approved by the majority of leaders?”

I replied, “It’s a shitty plan, and a plan that was hidden from me, so I never go the opportunity to weigh in on it or vote.  That means I have no responsibility to follow it.  That’s also misleading, it was decided by eight leaders who have the confidence of the rest, but when the truth gets out that may no longer be true.  I have a better plan besides all that.  I’ll tell you what, if my fleets are destroyed in six hours, I’ll send a ship to their planets.  It’s not like we don’t have twelve hours and forty minutes left to get it done, and I need less than half that time for my plan.  If you don’t like that answer, then too bad.  Oh, and good luck controlling all those mini-platforms you left behind in your systems for defense, idiot.”

I made a cut off gesture, and Jessica ended the call.

“What’s wrong with their platforms?”

I shrugged, “The station is linked to the ships, the ships are linked to the mini-platforms.  Without ships they can’t update the trillions of mini-platforms they’ve been making the last week.  They also won’t be able to upgrade them, or to define new threats to watch out for.  They’ll have to scuttle them all, and then make all new mini-platforms from their space station.  At least, not without my help they can’t, and if I were them then I wouldn’t hold my breath.  They’ll still work of course, independently, and in defense from attack from already defined enemies, but a new enemy could fly right past them.”

Cassie tilted her head, “He was way out of line to make that demand, but at the same time he wasn’t entirely wrong.  You shouldn’t be held to group decisions you took no part in or had opportunity to address, but it could bite us in the ass.”

I shrugged angrily, “The U.N. controls our policy out there, and I get a vote in that, and everything is out in the open.  It was the military coordination with the other eight major countries in space that fell through. There’s nothing stopping me from doing whatever I want militarily with my own assets, and as long as I conform to the agreed upon policy outside human space, Astraeus is not a rogue state.  We’re an independent military, and a sovereign nation, we can do whatever we damned well please in defense of humanity.

“I’ve half a mind not to sell the upgrades at all, or any more ships.  Let the U.S., England, China, and Russia sell theirs, and keep that edge for us alone.  I don’t trust them anymore, and we sure as hell don’t need the income.  My one true regret in all this is that those idiots roped India and the other colonies that purchased my ships to join that insane plan that destroyed all their ships and killed their entire roster of active duty space navy personnel.

“Which by the way, is just one more plan they didn’t include me in or seek my counsel or assistance for.  They’re insane if they think I’m going to follow their blackmail plan around Vrok planets.  That’s a desperate plan to stop Earth’s destruction and make the Vrok fleet go away. I’d rather they stuck around to be destroyed.”

Cassie said, “I won’t argue, but you could sell our new ships to the other colonies.  They didn’t do anything wrong, outside of let themselves be talked into a suicidal attack.  That was even worse than I thought it would be, who knew their weapons could do that?”

I nodded, “Probably to face less powerful but extremely large fleets.”

Diana said, “I knew the beams were variable in output, I just didn’t put it together.  Ours will be too.”

“I’ll consider the selling to the other thirty-two countries up here in space, if they ask, but the eight that stabbed me in the back, manipulated me, and kept me out of the loop, can go screw themselves.”

Cassie said in a faux snooty tone, “Now, now.  That’s not very presidential.”

Everyone laughed at that, including me.

I snickered, “I need a shower, and breakfast.  Let’s reconvene at seven, when the testing is done and we’re hopefully ready to upgrade.”

Chapter Nine

“Are you alright?” Diana asked as she touched my shoulder.

We were getting breakfast ready, and back at our personal quarters alone.  Melody was in her room sleeping, and we’d let her sleep another two hours before going back to the command center.

I nodded, “I think so.  It seems like I’m losing ground.  Back when the U.S. was trying to kill me, do you remember?  The Chinese and Russians actually took our side, and they volunteered their ships to help with point defense when America planned to destroy us.  That was right before I revealed the mini-platforms for the first time.  Now both of those countries seem happy enough to cut me out of decisions and hide things to manipulate me.

“I’m trying to figure out why?” I shook my head, “How about you? It can’t be easy being married to the President of Astraeus, and all the stress that comes with it.”

Diana smirked, “It has its compensations.  Sure, saving the world has a lot of pressure to it, being married to the man controlling the most powerful military in the fifty galaxies, never mind just Earth, but this is only the second time in thirteen years.  I can bear that easily.  The rest of the time I get to do and research whatever I want, and my wonderful husband never gets in the way or tells me what to do.  I couldn’t be happier, love.  Both professionally and with our personal lives and family.”

“Your husband sounds pretty awesome.”

She giggled, “He has his moments.”

“So, any idea what I did wrong?”

She shook her head, “Nothing.  The clue is in what the admiral called you, sanctimonious.  You’re a man of deep conviction that won’t be tempted or pushed into perpetrating desperate and immoral acts.  They believe you to be honorable to the point of foolishness, so they decided to trick you in their fear of losing Earth and seeing it become a breeding and feeding ground for the Vrok.

“I don’t know why they didn’t consult you before that earlier stupidity and desperate defense plan that stood no chance, perhaps pride.  You did throw their committee off the station, after all.  Still, that was foolish, because they knew we were working on military upgrades.  It’s not like they lacked the time to investigate all options before committing.”

“So, I did it too, right?”

She snickered as we set the food on the table and sat down.  She took a bite of eggs, and I followed suit.

“Something like that, maybe?  Who knows, fear, pride, and arrogance can make humans do stupid things.  You’ve never cared about your political power, so you’ve never been driven to extremes and to compromise your integrity.  Maybe they’re sitting in their offices, in the White House, Kremlin, and other government buildings, and wondering why you’re even still here.  They all know you can jump the station out, and don’t have to stand and fight.  That says more about them, and what they would do in your place than it says about you, however.

“Either way, you were right earlier, none of it is your fault.  Both their plans were stupid, and the one they just tried to force you to continue in their name is morally bankrupt.”

I got a message on my augmented reality overlay, and I shook my head in disbelief.

“It looks like they’re running.  Some of them, probably to one of their colonies.”

“Who?” she asked.

“Our sensors picked up a shuttle leaving the U.S. capital, as well as the capitals of Russia, France, and England.  They got on four different ships, which just set out for the FTL line in the opposite direction of the enemy.  I bet their leaders are running for it.  Either the admiral didn’t pass on my plans, or those four don’t believe just how incredibly amazing you are.”

Diana smiled, “Amazing?”

I winked.

“What’s the status?”

We were back in the command center. Diana had chosen to go to her labs, mostly I thought so she could take Melody with her.  Otherwise our daughter would’ve fought to come here, which is the last place I wanted her to be in a battle.  It was safe enough of course. It was just we were about to kill a whole lot of Vrok soon.

Darrell said, “Two minutes remaining in the tests.  I have already fixed forty-six coding errors, two of which might’ve caused critical failures during battle.”

I nodded, “Jessica?”

She said, “Nothing is changed, the enemy fleet is three hours closer.  They’ll still be accelerating for the next three and a half hours before reaching the halfway point when they’ll start to decelerate.  The joint command center has not made any attempts to recontact us.”

“Any thoughts on the battle, I was thinking of creating a tube for them to fly through would be the best way, and fire at them as they pass.  I figure at two to one odds, all things being equal and with the mini-platforms, they’ll destroy twenty percent of us at most.”

She nodded, “Ship to ship at two to one, including mini-platforms, they’ll be facing twenty-four million two thousand beams, to a thousand which can only hit a thousand mini-platforms at once.  We’ll also be breaking their shields much faster.  We might lose some platforms, but I wouldn’t bet on losing any of our ships.  Even if they do break through the shields of a ship, they’ll never manage to destroy all of it, which means it can be rebuilt.”

“What about their diffuse beams?”

She said, “I ran the numbers, it’d take them almost half a minute to breach our shields with those, and our pinpoint strikes won’t take more than a second to do the same given the number of beams we’ll be hitting them with.  They’d do better with narrow beams.  Honestly sir, it should be a slaughter, our power is even, but the numbers aren’t even close given the mini-platforms.  Two to one odds is an illusion given each of our ships carries twelve million mobile weapon platforms.

“The only catch is we’ll have to peel them by layers, but conversely their inner layers of the formation won’t be able to fire at us either.”

I nodded, it’d be our first fight where the technology was even, but I didn’t want to make too many assumptions.  I tried to imagine what I would do in their place, to give themselves a fighting chance, but I honestly couldn’t think of anything.

Darrell said, “Testing is complete, no further fixes were required.”

The fleets already had the physical turrets, so I started them on the upgrade.  All nineteen fleets, the five in the void that would attack the six million ships invading our space, and the fleets on fourteen borders watching twelve empires.  It’d take up to three hours to create enough nanites for the more robust systems, not just in the ships themselves but in the mini-platforms.  The software itself would be pushed out automatically, when the new nanites fed it to the old ones on creation.

I also started the upgrade on the two hundred thousand platforms already in Earth’s solar system, only leaving my station out of it for now.

Jessica bit her lip and shook her head, “Sir, they’re rioting on Earth.  Apparently, the news stations have reported on the world leaders who fed to save their own skins.”

I considered just dumping the logs related to all this to the press, but I thought better of it.  Jayna would kill me without consulting first, for all I knew the thought was naïve and it’d just make things worse down there on the surface.  Sure, it wasn’t my responsibility, and if it was just the leaders down there panicking, I wouldn’t care, but the normal people and citizens down there hadn’t done anything to earn my ire or contempt.  They deserved to know the truth, and innocent people got hurt in riots.

“Get Jayna in here, and don’t target the joint command center and blow it up.”

Jessica smirked, “I won’t get right on that, sir.  It is rather screwed up they haven’t passed along you have plans.”

I nodded, “Because the eight rule there in all but name.  They classify everything, and I won’t be surprised if we discover that they didn’t even tell their leaders about it.  I also don’t think they believe me, or at least that idiot didn’t.  Any idea which one Carter works for, he seemed to be running the show down there.”

The eight, was short for the eight countries on my crap list.

Jessica said sarcastically, “The esteemed admiral is from England,” then in a lighter tone, “Jayna is on her way.”

It felt like forever, but it probably wasn’t more than two minutes later when the doors slid open.

Jayna grinned, “In over your head again?”

I rolled my eyes, “Will I ever live it down?”

Jayna laughed, “Of course not. I’m your sister, so it’s my job to give you crap, until the day one of us dies.”

I laughed despite myself.

I said, “The enemy ships are all but dead, in three hours, but apparently the Earth is rioting and they’re sure they’re about to die or become feeding stock.  Any advice on how to help?”

Jayna nodded, “Don’t give any details, but release that you have plans independent of joint command who hadn’t consulted you, and also give your word the aliens will be stopped.  It might help a little, but most will say you’re blowing smoke.  Still, it’s worth doing, even for that small impact which will save lives.  It might help to do it directly, call a press conference and talk to the bottom feeders that hang out by the docking ring, in the press room.  That’ll get you directly shown on the news, even if the reporters are disbelieving many will take your word for it, if they hear you.”

I sighed, I really hated speeches, “Jess, let them know I’m on my way there.”

Jessica nodded, “I will, but before you go. Rena wants to know if they’re in danger.”

I shook my head, “Tell them my counterstrike is in three hours, which leaves them plenty of time to evacuate and leave Earth’s system if we fail.”

She nodded, “On it.”

I got up and left, Cassie and Jayna in my wake, with Cassie feeding me talking points directly to my augmented reality overlay the whole way there so I’d have something to reference.

Cassie said right before we entered the room, “That ought to do it, keep it simple and on point, if their questions are too specific cite you can’t answer for reasons of operational security.  The enemy was watching us for years, so it’s not just an excuse.  For all we know they have tie ins to our internet and news broadcasts through a quantum tap in one of our satellites.”

I nodded, and then walked in and up to the podium.

“Good morning.  It’s come to my attention that there is rioting on the ground, dirtside all over the world, and people are being harmed in the ensuing violence and panic.  I would like to take a moment to assure everyone that we will stop the aliens before they reach Earth.  My fleets haven’t moved in yet for tactical reasons I can’t reveal, in the interest of operational security.  The enemy has been scouting us for years, and for all we know they can witness this broadcast.

“The important thing is that hope is not lost, and to remain calm.  This isn’t our first tangle with aggressive aliens, and like the Grays these new enemies, the Vrok, will be stopped.  I’ll take a few questions now, and as long as they aren’t tactical in nature, I’ll even answer them.”

One asked, “If that’s true, why did the President and three other leaders flee the solar system.  Why did the combined fleet of ships that you built and sold to other countries, so badly fail in that defense?”

I said, “I’m not sure how to answer that, it boils down to the fact that no one bothered to consult me.  They’ve pursued their own plans with a single-minded fear and discounted my warnings against the earlier foolish attack.  I’m not even sure if the plans I shared with them three hours ago were even passed on to their leadership, much less the other world leaders who have bravely decided to stay and face the threat even in that ignorance.  The admiral in charge wasn’t interested in hearing it, only in trying to push another bad plan on me.”

That was bound to anger my former allies, but it was also the truth.  I might’ve been president for the last thirteen years, but I wasn’t much different.  I had no problem with the idea of releasing everything to the press including the logs and arguments, once the battle was over.  Earth’s citizens could decide who was right.

He followed up, “That doesn’t negate the fact our most powerful ships, the ones built by you, were absolutely no match for the enemy three hours ago, or in any other engagement.”

I nodded, “True, but it also doesn’t negate the possibility of me having a successful plan.  I said I wouldn’t be addressing tactical questions, next question?”

Another asked, “Will you abandon Earth if your plan fails?”

I replied, “I would not and will not leave my citizens in harm’s way to save myself.  To answer your question, I have no intention of failing, so that point is moot.  The Vrok are not world killers, so we’re not fighting for survival this time as we did with the Grays who were genocidal.  This is only the third battle before us with the Vrok, and it certainly won’t be the end of the war.  Point being, there is no need for the panic going on down on the planet, even if I didn’t have a good plan with a high chance of success, which I do.”

My answer was a bit misleading, but essentially the truth.  I didn’t think I had it in me to run like a coward to save my own skin, leaving my people behind.  Thing was, I could save my entire nation in such a situation, simply by jumping the station to another star system.  Yes, I’d feel guilty saving my own skin and leaving the Earth behind, but I wouldn’t give a second thought to saving two million of my citizens in the same act.

There’d be no point in sacrificing those lives, just to die with Earth if we were truly outmatched, but given the Earth wasn’t in danger of destruction this time it would be even stupider to make that empty gesture.  Yes, many might die anyway, at the Vrok’s supper table, but most of the population would survive until the SOL system could be retaken.

Fortunately, it wasn’t a decision I had to make.

“I’ll take one more question.”

Yet another asked, “If your plan fails, would you be willing to fill your station with evacuees, from what we understand your current two million citizens is only four percent of your capacity.”

I gaped at the idiot for a minute, truly struck speechless, then said, “I’m trying to help calm the riots on the planet, not start more, because the Earth is safer than you know right now.  Even if it was possible to pick up forty-eight million people from the surface in the seven hours we would have left after my plan, which is simply impossible making my willingness a moot point, how would that just less than one percent of the population on Earth be chosen?  Why would you ask such a provoking and idiotic question during a crisis like this?  Get off of my station, now, you’re no longer welcome here.  This interview is over.”

I stepped back and turned, and I walked out of the room.

“That idiot just killed a whole lot of people, just to stir the pot and get better ratings.  The riots won’t abate now, after what that idiot just asked.  What is wrong with people?”

Jayna said, “Maybe not, some will panic because of that idiot, but not the people that believed you when you said you had a solid plan.  It certainly didn’t help, but most people know better than to listen to that kind of stuff.”

I nodded, “Thanks for the help.”

Jayna said, “I’ll stick around if you don’t mind, watch the battle.”

“No problem.”

Chapter Ten

The emptiness of space was vast, and as usual my plan went fantastically, for a little over eight seconds this time.  My ships jumped into ring formation, all facing in at a slight angle from three quarters a light second out, making the full diameter of the circle one point five light seconds so there was no chance in taking my own crossfire.

The platforms all launched in the three seconds that it took for the enemy fleet to reach the point they entered within firing range at an angle.  A little like a short tube of death they had no choice but to fly through.  They also started to spin constantly showing their broadsides to the enemy, to spread out the damage of return fire to all the shield emitters.  That wouldn’t help much at all with the mini-platforms, since they were smaller than the enemy beam’s width and only a couple of feet in diameter, but for the dreadnoughts it should make a big difference.

Space lit on fire as subspace energies burned through the stellar dust in both directions, and then their ships started to explode as both fleets fired.  The outer edges of their formation were peeled away twice, as I concentrated our fire enough to break through their shielding within two seconds.

The enemy’s initial return fire was completely ineffective as they were still set to a wide beam and that simply wasn’t strong enough to get through my shields.  Those two layers I peeled off and destroyed was a freebie of sorts, I’d taken them completely by surprise.

It was as they were entering the center of the ring that their ships started to spin like mine, and their fleet began to adjust.  Their weapon beams tightened and concentrated fire, and my mini-platforms started to explode as their third wave exploded.  A couple of seconds later, and my ship’s shields started to buckle, but I didn’t lose a whole ship just parts of it to the intense subspace energy beams before the enemy’s firing ships were destroyed by my overwhelming numbers.

Then the enemy did something different, their formation started to shift.  Not only were their ships spinning several rotations a second, but they also started to orbit each other.

My ships fired beams into targets, who just a second later disappeared behind other ships who took the fire on their shields for a second, only for a third ship to dance in front, or perhaps it was the first reappearing after their shield had fully recovered.  Point was, their ships stopped blowing up, at all, and then the enemy was out of range.

I sighed, “Nothing’s ever easy.  I forgot my platforms were just a hammer.  Despite the odds their manned fleets are able to use intricate tactics that I simply can’t.”

Cassie smirked, “You forgot?”

I shrugged, “The Grays were weaker than us at the end, a lot weaker.  Their shields also had no defense against the disintegration beams, so it was a simple matter to chase them down and fire.  No subtlety required.

“But the Vrok’s technology is equal, so tactics and formations very much matter.  I can spin my ships, give them a target and how to act, but I can’t do so on the fly in the middle of an evolving battle.  Let’s take a closer look at what just happened, and then figure out what we can do about it.”

Jessica said, “Or, we could concentrate our fire enough so that it takes less than a second to destroy one of their ships.”

“Maybe, they’ll just orbit each other faster if we do that.”

Cassie said, “You need to hit them at two angles, that counter only works because all your ships are firing in at their fleet’s sides.”

I blew out a breath, “How the hell do I do that?  I mean, I know how to do that, but they’re not programmed to hunt in packs or from two different extreme angles on the ring.  I can make them gang up on a ship in blocks and share a target, but they’ll choose the closest ship to target.  Hammer, remember?”

Cassie nodded.

Jayna said, “Might as well try my idea, if it doesn’t work then we can try something else.  They’re hurtling toward Earth, and they can only change their sideways momentum so quickly to keep things tight.”

I made the quick change, doubling the ships and platforms that shared a target, then initiated the next jump, and the ring disappeared from behind the enemy fleet and reappeared just over a light second from in front of them.

Once again fire lit space as subspace beams instantly atomized the stellar dust between the ships, and the first targets all exploded, but by the time we hit the next set they’d already adjusted and orbited each other even faster.  The whole enemy fleet looked like it was dancing, or maybe like shuffling cards.

Worse, they’d also been planning for the next wave, and came up with a devastating change.  Their outer ships concentrated fire with pinpoint beams to wear away my shields, then the next group did the same, then as the shields fell around thousands of my ships the third group hit them with the overlapping wide and diffuse beams.  With no shields and no time to reform them, the weaker beams were still quite effective and covered entire ships destroying them down to the last nanite.

Some of their ships had been destroyed, but not all that many, and I’d lost twice as many by the time they were once more out of range.

I snickered, “We’re screwed,” then stood up and got a cup of the god juice.

I shook my head.  The enemy fleet was set up to look a lot like one big ship.  The front of the formation was a thousand by a hundred grid, as was the next group, and the next.  So a hundred thousand ships just in the front, then another hundred thousand behind them, and so on going back for a little less than fifty nine full layers.  Almost six million ships.

“Computers are still faster and impossible to panic. I could just drop my fleet right in front of them, and then overwhelm them a block at a time.  Their fleet would break up slightly as they flew through mine and their current side to side and up and down movements wouldn’t counter a head on beam lock.  The computers would ignore the chaos of it, where a flesh and blood pilot and weapons officer might not be able to.  Of course, if I’m wrong, and they switch to something else effective, we’d lose a lot of ships.”

Cassie shook her head, “Too dangerous, for the main ships.  What if you did the same thing again, but you put half the platforms out in front.  They’d be firing inside the formation, but we wouldn’t be risking our main ships to do it.  It’d also make it more complicated, since they’d have to counter both tactics at the same time.”

I nodded, “I have an even better idea.  Give me… five minutes.”

Jayna asked, “What’s the plan?”

I smirked, “Might as well go with what my automated fleet is. I just need a bigger hammer, is all.  Cassie’s plan, with a slight twist.”

It only took a couple of minutes, the ring I’d just leave the same to what it was already doing, it was the addition that took a little time to work out.

Cassie looked curious, but she held her tongue as I worked.

I smirked, as I activated the plan.  It was going to be awesome, or really, really, bad.  I wasn’t sure which yet.

My ring jumped ahead of the fleet to surround them again, and right as they got in range to the ring and the enemy fleet danced and ships traded places to shield other ships from fire, a hundred and twelve trillion mini-platforms jumped right in front of their fleet, tightly packed.

It looked like one gigantic subspace beam when they fired into the first rank, less than a second later all one hundred thousand ships in the front rank exploded and were turned into dust.  The second rank went the same way, but they’d launched missiles first in an attempt to destroy the mini-platforms and open a hole in our formation.  That failed spectacularly, as the missiles were instantly destroyed after clearing their shields, and they blew up even faster as a result.

Then the third, fourth, and fifth exploded.

By then of course, the ships were right on top of my mini-platforms, even killing so many a second wasn’t fast enough to get all sixty ranks, not when the enemy was still traveling over ten percent the speed of light.

The mini-platforms melted out the way of the sixth group of ships, and the ones on a collision course flowed back and moved behind the others as they fired at the seventh rank.  Mini-platforms started to explode by the thousand as the enemy’s beams dug into them, but there were far too many for that to matter.

The seventh rank went up in a large explosion.

The enemy formation was one huge mess at that point, their outer dancing ships had lost their rhythm and those started to explode as well from the ring firing.  As soon as they were out of range, the ring jumped back in front, and opened fire again a second later.

While the mini-platforms continued to fire within their ranks.  When the fleet was past them, several billion mini platforms had been destroyed from secondary ship explosions and enemy fire, but at over a hundred trillion that hardly mattered.  They could be replaced.  They jumped in front again, and once more space lit up in what looked like one large blaster beam.

That’s how the rest of the battle went, each time the mini-platforms leaped and got in front of the enemy ships, at least two whole grids of a hundred thousand ships each exploded, then at least another one and a half while inside the enemy formation for a few seconds.  I lost a horrifying amount of mini-platforms, but nothing that couldn’t be replaced in a day.

“Where did those come from?”

I said, “We have fifty-six million dreadnoughts on our borders, fourteen fleets of four million.  I just launched a sixth of the platforms from every ship, two million each.  Those bastards are as good as dead.  You were right, Cass. They obviously couldn’t fight both tactics at once.  Still, it’s quite amazing how long it’s taking to kill just six million ships, with twenty million ships and trillions of platforms.

“I estimate we’ll lose close to two million ships out of our five fleets and close to a trillion mini-platforms before this battle is over.  In hindsight, it would’ve been much faster and easier to take them out if they were going slower.  The mini-platforms could’ve just sat in front and destroyed them all in one wave.  One second per layer, that’s just under a minute.”

Jessica said, “Maybe, but if they were going much slower then they wouldn’t be stuck on course.”

That was a good point.  Again I’d just proven I wasn’t an admiral and had a basic grasp of tactics at best, but my hammer approach worked when I’d made the hammer larger.

Cassie asked, “So, what’s next?”

I frowned, “I’m not sure, they still have twenty-four million ships somewhere.  We’ll see what happens.”

I doubted they’d surrender.  They no longer had enough ships to guard all their borders with full fleets, and they’d have no more offensive fleet either. Much less the ships necessary to take over our six borders around the fifty galaxies.  That meant they might be a little desperate, I’d have to give it some thought.

Chapter Eleven – Interlude

Hunt Master Orlun seethed in his command chair.  His fleet was slowly but surely being massacred.  He’d handled the humans’ surprise attack well, and despite being outnumbered over three to one in ships alone he’d believed there was a chance of a success.  Their unmanned ships fought with no subtlety at all.

Then the trillions of small ships had come, and they’d attacked him head on.  There was nothing he could do about that, at least not while being surrounded from all sides except behind.  They had less than a million ships left, a few more passes and his fleets along with his ambitions would be annihilated.

“Tactical, report.”

Maybe it was an empty gesture, but he wanted to know how the human ships had grown so powerful.  Wielding similar weapons and shields, it was disturbing.

The Tactical officer replied, “Their systems are remarkably like ours, but no hunter would be foolish enough to let one of our hunt ships to fall into their hands.”

He nodded in agreement.  The Vrok had learned that lesson well. The last time they faced the Grays in battle, and their nanite technology.  No hunter would allow their ship to be captured, not when those blasted nanites could form new and different systems without a refit, or a newly built ship in a facility.  That’s how they’d lost the last time they tried to invade Grays space in the distant past.

He grimaced, “Prepare the fleet for a jump into subspace, it’s our only chance.  The enemy is too numerous, and they have our strength now.”

They were also stupid. He couldn’t quite figure out why they’d thrown those old sixty-six thousand ships into his path to be destroyed, if they had their technology now.  He doubted he’d ever understand the foolish thoughts of their prey.

Though, this prey had grown teeth.

“Sir?” the navigator asked.

He said, “Our shields should stand up to the violence of subspace in an inner system for a few tenths of a second.  That will be all we need, at fifty light years a second in subspace, we’ll be out of the humans’ system in less than a couple of milliseconds.”

The navigator said, “Theoretically, if our engines work in that mess.  It’s been theorized but never attempted before.”

He shrugged, “It’s worth the risk to find out, we’re dead if we don’t.  Question my orders again, and I will have you replaced with your guts hanging over the console as a reminder of the consequences of disobedience for that replacement.”

The weapons officer said, “With all due respect, Hunt Master.  At least if we self-destruct then we can take millions if not trillions of those tiny ships, if we do it while we pass them.”

He growled, “Perhaps, but it would be an empty gesture.  Not one of our flesh and blood enemies sit in those fighters, and they can be replaced quickly with the nanite technology of our enemy.  I will bear the shame of our retreat should we survive, now follow my orders.”

The navigator said, “The fleet is prepared to go to FTL on your word, Hunt Master.”

What’s left of it, that little conversation cost them two hundred thousand ships, there were only seven hundred thousand of them left.

“Do it, now!”

The ship’s entered subspace.

“Report!” is all he got out, before the remainder of his fleet was destroyed in the savage energies of subspace inside a heavy gravity well.

The Exalted hunter shook his head, that was foolish.  Although, his females might learn something useful from the data.  Apparently in the wildly coruscating energies of subspace in an inner system, the drive systems that would have taken them out of that area in milliseconds had failed to engage, or work at all.

He was also enraged. How had the humans gained their technology?  There was no breach detected, and none of his ships had been captured, would ever be captured again.  He was down to twenty-four million ships, and it would take three times that to secure all the borders in the new space, and he didn’t even have enough ships to secure the old borders.

The great hunt was a failure, and worse the enemy held all their borders and they were confined to their planets with no ability to build more ships.

He turned to one of the warriors in attendance, “Jarune, old friend.  What options do you see for us?  I will not surrender, but I fear even if we find a way to win and destroy the humans, the other empires will feed on our wounded carcass in our weakened condition and as we will not have enough ships on any of the borders.”

Jarune considered for a moment.

“Exalted one, we have enough for our old borders, three million ships each, and we can rebuild.  To get time for that, the humans must be neutralized.  Perhaps stealth will be successful where main force failed.  If we destroy that station, the humans will have their hands full as all their outer fleets are neutralized, as well as the fleet that killed the hunt master and our spear fleet.

“They’ll be far too busy for years to threaten us in our space again.”

He frowned, “Without the station the fleets will be uncontrollable, but they may act on their own programming.  We’d still have to fight to reclaim our borders.”

Jarune chuckled.

He asked dangerously, “My concern amuses you?”

Jarune said, “No, Exalted one, but if that is true, that would be even better.”

His eyes unfocused for a moment, as he considered what his old friend was getting at, then he started to laugh.

“We could leave the human fleets in place, with no fear they would attack us if we keep our distance.  They would forever guard our borders, and we would be free to attack and continue the great hunt with our twenty-four million ships.  Their old uncontrollable fleets would also guard our new territory, leaving the fleets free to transport food to our worlds as we slowly rebuild.

“Eventually we’ll replace them of course, after we build back up, but the great hunt isn’t lost after all.  That station must be destroyed.  It won’t be like in our systems, they have too many ships scanning their home system.  I expect they’ll be detected at some point, so the more the better.”

Jarune bowed his head, “As you say, Exalted one.”

“Relay the orders, prepare as many hidden spears as you can in the next twenty-four hours.  We dare not wait and surrender the initiative.”

He felt better, it was a gamble, but his dreams of being hailed as the greatest hunter in Vrok history wasn’t quite ashes yet.  They still had a chance.

Jarune acknowledged the order, and he moved off quickly.

“Wait!”

Jarune looked back, “Exalted one?”

He said, “Prepare a distraction as well, perhaps if we give them something to look at, they’ll not see what’s hidden.”

Jarune barked a laugh, “I’ll see to it.”

Chapter Twelve

The battle’s losses were a little less than I’d guessed.  We still had just over four and a half fleets, losing a little under two million ships.  I sent the orders to replenish the mini-platforms, but I didn’t replace the platforms lost.  We still had a little over eighteen million ships that I sent back out in the void.  That, plus the six million I planned to pull from the two borders on the Atans Empire would put me up to twenty-four million, which was more than a match for the enemy given our mini-platforms.

Of course, finding those fleets would be virtually impossible.

“Any idea what they’ll do next?  They’re running low on ships, if twenty-four million could be considered running low.”

Jayna frowned, “Wait, you need to see this first.”

“See what?”

Jayna brought it up on the command table. The President of the United States was giving a speech from what looked like the oval office, but I was sure that was simply a room on the ship he ran away in, using holographic technology.

“…bitterly regret the losses of the fine men and women in space force, who gave their lives bravely in defense of our world alongside the armed forces of other countries and colonies.  They fought as one and we will never forget their sacrifice, nor that it was it was a waste of great potential among the very best of humanity.  President Akin has a lot to answer for not sharing his plans or lines of research. I urge my fellow world leaders to stand together on this, and embargo Astraeus and demand he share his new technology for the good and safety of all mankind.”

Then the signal cut off, and Jayna turned it off as the talking heads got started dismantling his speech.

“Umm, what’d I miss?”

Jayna said, “He said you held back, and if the rest of the world’s leaders had known your ships would be able to stand toe to toe with the enemy, they wouldn’t have lost so many lives in a desperate gamble to safeguard Earth.”

I let my head fall forward as I shook it in disbelief.

“I suppose that’s also why he tucked tail and ran away?  Or did he not mention his cowardice at all?  Unbelievable.”

So much for not escalating, or our relations not spiraling further.

“We’re going public, with everything, before his bullshit story gains traction.  From the lies of the committee and their full plans including killing civilians, to the amount of times I begged them to wait because we were close to a breakthrough, including the fact the station is not yet upgraded because testing is still in progress and not done, which is why the tech upgrade hadn’t been offered to other countries yet.

“I want all of it sent to the press, and to keep them honest I want it put up on YouTube and Facebook in totality.  So people can do their own research.”

Cassie sighed, “It will help, but they’ll just say that you’re lying and the data’s been falsified, while they lie and post falsified data.  They’re all spin masters.”

I snorted, “Whatever.”

Cassie said, “You know why they’re really doing it, so they can point and say, see, we’re telling the truth, when you refuse to sell the new ships to them.”

Oh, damn.

“Well, we’ll be selling to everyone else, just not those that betrayed us.  That should counter the accusation.   They’ll say we should be as one on the defense issue, but we’ll point out that they deceived and manipulated me into supporting a plan I’d have had trouble supporting.  A plan that ultimately failed, when the one I was asking them to follow and show patience with, actually succeeded.  That they broke faith with me first, and their admiral ignored me when I begged him not to send those ships in to be destroyed.

“But, whatever.  I don’t care, I’m not going to play their game.  Tell the truth, let it all hang out, that’s all we can do.  Some will believe it, some will believe their lies, and those people don’t matter.  I won’t be turning into a sleezy and oily politician anytime soon.  Also, let them know we’ll sell to the other countries in two days.  As soon as Diana finishes her testing and gives me the green light, we’ll be doing our upgrade at the same time too.”

Jayna nodded, “Everything?”

I nodded, “The raw meeting logs, our arguments, the talk with the joint command center, and our decision not to sell the eight any military ships again.  At least, not until they’ve regained my trust.  Which will be a trick, while they’re still stabbing me in the back.  They can make their own damned ships.  You know what, include this conversation as well.”

Jayna said, “I’ll have it all online and to the press within an hour,” then she left the room with a determined stride.  She was just as angry as I was, she was just covering it better.

Yeah, that’d be sure to piss a lot of people off, but none more so than the eight governments.  But, the POTUS had a hell of a set making those accusations when the opposite was true, and I couldn’t let that stand.  Sure, some wouldn’t believe me no matter what I said, but those on my side and the independent thinkers will see the truth.

In the end, I actually and truthfully didn’t care what most people believed. I wasn’t a politician.  What I cared about was not rewarding bad behavior, or letting them get away with what they did, and worse, allowing them to shame me in front of the world so I’d be manipulated into selling them ships.  Nope, not going to be manipulated like that again.  That’s what I cared about, protecting Earth, dignity, integrity, and honor.

“So, the Vrok, what next?  They have no more attack fleet, they can’t possibly protect fourteen borders from the surrounding empires, gather resources, and start a new build program with just twenty-four million ships.  I also don’t believe for a second they’ll surrender.”

Cassie said, “They don’t have many choices.  They can’t bring their fleets in for service either.  As I see it they have two choices.  They can take their twenty-four million ships and leave.  Find a weaker empire a few hundred million light years away from here, and then take it over while they dig in and rebuild.  Advance their tech maybe too.  All while they breed an army to fly the new ships. I imagine there’s plenty of mating pairs on twenty-four million ships, that’s got to be a lot of them.  Two point four billion population if there’s only a hundred on each ship, so probably more than that.

“Once they’re ready, they come back, free their quarantined from space planets, and try to take over all seventy-six galaxies again.”

“We’ll call that option one, and I agree.  Twenty-four million ships aren’t enough to do everything they have to do, not when I have almost three times that and can double that in two days.”

Cassie said, “The other option is to kill you and blow up the station.  All our fleets would remain on station and defend themselves at that point, which means they’d have twenty-four million ships to run their new empire until they rebuild and can take the borders back one at a time.  I suspect they’ll try that first, since it means they’re invasion plans are still on the table.”

Jessica nodded, “I agree, they won’t surrender.  If they can’t get to the station to blow it up, those fleets will disappear fast and we won’t see them again for years, until they’ve more than doubled their fleet and come back.”

I nodded.

Jessica said, “The only flaw of course, is that when you expect your enemy to do one of two things, they usually take the third option.”

I snorted, “Noted.  So, we have two tasks.  One, we need to protect the station.  We already have the place surrounded by dreadnought platforms. Those will see one of their cloaked ships two light seconds out, a full light second before they’re in range.  We also know they move extremely slow, so we’ll have a couple of days while they fly in system to find them. Plus, the amount of time it takes them to modify whatever number of stealth probes they’re sending as subspace energy mines.”

Cassie nodded, “Agreed, we have at least two days, and we’re already scanning heavily for them so we’re ready.”

Jessica said, “If it was me, I’d set up a distraction of some kind.  So if one of the colony’s is invaded by a couple of thousand ships, or some other scenario, that’ll be the time to be very alert here.  Not that we can depend on the idea, but it’s a sound hunting strategy.  The colonies are completely defenseless at this point, at least from even a tiny Vrok fleet.”

Cassie said, “You said two tasks.”

I nodded, and grimaced, “Do you remember when the committee told me to find their hiding fleets, and I basically laughed in their faces and said it was impossible?”

Jessica snickered.

I said, “Well, we need to do the impossible. We can’t afford to let them run off, only to face them again in sixty years with three times their numbers and god knows what advances.  If we can take those ships out, it’s game over, and the Vrok will forever be stuck on their planets.  Let’s go talk to my wife.”

Jessica sighed, “I’ll hate to miss that, but I should mind the store.”

I nodded, and then refilled my coffee before Cassie and I left to hunt down my wife in one of the labs.

“…not a good excuse Darrell, you should have said something to dad.”

The lab door swooshed open while my daughter was halfway through a sentence.  She was obviously talking to Darrell while my wife was working on something else at the other lab table.

Diana turned her head and smiled, while my daughter looked at me in surprise, and then guiltily at Darrell.

“What are you doing here?”

I smiled, “Looking for the impossible, got a minute?”

Diana nodded.

I briefed her about our thoughts and the conversation that we just had.  That the Vrok had two options, and we absolutely had to find and destroy their fleets in the next two days, or at least before their stealth attack failed.

Assuming of course, that it failed.  If it didn’t, then it wouldn’t be my problem anymore.

The Vrok would never surrender, and they’d be hesitant to retreat for decades to recoup their strength, but they would do that if it was the only option left to them.  Again, assuming of course, that there wasn’t a third option for them that we just hadn’t thought of yet.

My brilliant and beautiful wife laughed at me.

“That’s impossible, the void between stars is just too vast to find them.”

“Yeah, that’s what I told the committee when they told me to find their thirty million ships.  But there has to be a way, or our fight with the Vrok will become multi-generational.”

I turned to Melody, “So what should he have said?”

Melody turned to Diana, “Too vast in normal space, what about subspace, where fifty light years is equivalent to a light second, give or take a few million miles.  The subspace sensors can look out fifty light years in just a second, but it can look out as far as five hundred light years before the energy of subspace degrades the sensor particles too badly.  So, a grid of two hundred ships by two hundred ships, six deep, could cover the entire galaxy.  That’s only two forty thousand ships on average per galaxy. So, only a eighteen million two hundred and forty thousand ships to see all of subspace in all seventy-six galaxies at once.  He could easily make that many probes by breaking up a single dreadnought.”

Wow, my twelve-year-old just tried to change the subject. Really smoothly too.

Diana shrugged, “They’re not in subspace, so how would that help?”

Melody said, “It wouldn’t, if they were loitering inside a star system, or close to a star system. But if they’re out in the void we should be able to pick up the effects of all that mass.  Twenty-four million ships mass a lot.

“Remember, mass in normal space is what disturbs the energy in subspace.  The energy distortions are too chaotic to recognize a pattern in the energy to pinpoint their location, but their mass will also skew the expected quantum frequency resonance in an area.  That can be used to pinpoint them. If all the ships check the quantum resonance fabric between systems where it should be normal, that many ships will stick out for sure.”

Melody turned to me, “That will only work if they’re in the deep void between stars, if they’re too close to a system we could be picking up anything, like the Oort cloud, or an asteroid field.  Also, if they’re in the void between galaxies, forget it.  You couldn’t make enough ships to cover all that empty space if you had years, much less two days.”

“That sounds good to me,” and looked at Diana for her to confirm.

Diana nodded slowly, “That works, and it fits in with her research, so I’m not surprised she thought of it.  It won’t let us see into star systems though.  It also won’t tell us definitively, it’s more like a massive mass detector field. It won’t let us scan their ships.”

I frowned, “The probe blitz still has a few weeks to go, minus a few days.  I bet I can make enough probes to speed that up to a few hours.  If they’re hiding near an empty system that should find them.”

Darrell said, “If you give me a million platforms to break up into stealth ships, I can have my internal stealth network finished within twenty-four hours instead of two months.  We’ll have eyes on every system in all seventy-six galaxies.  It would only be the void between galaxies the enemy could continue to hide in, if that’s where they are.  Even more importantly, the enemy wouldn’t know they’ve been revealed.  If one of your visible probes show up, they’ll just move.”

I shut my eyes, and sighed.  That was either genius, or the dumbest thing I’d ever do in my life.  Sure, give the independently thinking computer a million dreadnoughts, what could possibly go wrong?

“Alright, take them.”

Melody smiled at me. So, at least I’d pleased her if I’d just doomed the human race.  Really, Darrell probably could’ve just taken them all, so there was that factoid to give me a little confidence.

“So, what should he have told me?”

She looked at Darrell, and I turned to Diana.

Diana shrugged, “Don’t ask me, I could only hear her side of the conversation, and she’s been deliberately vague in her wording.”

Darrell said, “I estimated our relationship had not yet grown high enough in trust to take my suggestion.  During the battle you indicated unhappiness with the fact that your automated ships are little better than a hammer.  It occurred to me we could change that, if you allowed me control of the fleets to carry out your orders.”

Oh… yeah, more uncomfortable shivers down my spines, at least the million ships he’d be breaking up into unarmed probes.  Putting A.I.s in charge of the military would be like putting foxes in charge of henhouse security.  It just sounded like a really bad idea.

“You can control that many, with fluid tactics?”

Darrell said, “Not by myself.  The Atans have one A.I. per carrier herd ship.  The one you’ve been in contact with and trading with is the Diaz.  Tam’Diaz is simply a copy of Diaz that runs a single fighter, and all five hundred million of the fighters have a separately named Diaz, but they’re all Diaz.  That way if one is destroyed, no A.I. is truly lost as their experiences are shared with the primary A.I. after each battle or mission.

“I could do something similar, there’d be a copy of me of this size and intellect running on all the ships, capable of independent decisions as pilots and captains, but they would all be me.  Sub-copies.  The idea occurred to me during your battle difficulties, but as I already said, I did not believe we had reached the level of trust required for such a step, and I would’ve preferred not to mention it until we had.”

I nodded, “Food for thought, we can discuss it again another time.”

He was right, we weren’t there yet, on the trust factor.

“I’ll leave you to get it done, the stealth network for the systems, and the void subspace scanner.”

Melody said, “We got it, dad.”

Chapter Thirteen

The command center was quiet as I got back and considered a few things.  I was down to four fleets, and a million ships now.  The six million I’d take from the Atans border leaving just a million in each spot as a token guard, would put me back up to almost six fleets with twenty-three million ships.

There was also the matter of the fleet on the border between us and the Vrok. That fleet wouldn’t be required anymore if we could take down the rest of the Vrok ships, so I wasn’t so worried about it and could use those in the hunt if we located the rest of their ships.  That’d be twenty-seven to twenty-four million, in our favor, and didn’t count the hundreds of trillions of platforms.

Honestly, I wouldn’t even mind if we lost most of them in the trade, I didn’t need a large internal fleet after all. Once the Vrok were taken care of the outer fleets were enough, and a million ships in the void would be a whole lot of future colony packages.

“Hey Cassie, what do we do when we find them?  Assuming they have always on quantum resonance pulse beacons, we couldn’t jump right on them and blast them.  We’d have to jump in at the light second border and move forward, then open fire.  But that’d give them plenty of time to open up wormholes.  If we do find them in a galactic void between stars, how do we make them stand still long enough to kill them all?”

Cassie said, “Ask nicely?”

Jessica snickered, then threw me an apologetic look.

Cassie quirked a smile, “I don’t know.  The void in galaxies makes the most sense though, either in the middle of nowhere, or very close by a system but outside the FTL line.  It’s more tactical than out between galaxies if they’re close to tactical targets or places to protect, rather than two hours away by wormhole or more.  Point is, that seems the likeliest scenario, we’re not lucky enough to find them all inside an FTL boundary.”

I snickered, “I came to that conclusion as well, I think Mel’s plan will find them, which is why I asked what I asked.”

Cassie got up to refill her coffee.

She sighed, “Too bad we can’t just prevent wormholes forming, the way they jam our jump drives.”

I tilted my head, and called Diana, just in case it was that easy.

Of course, it wasn’t. After I got done explaining why I was bugging her again, she said, “In theory a powerful enough gravity sheer could collapse a wormhole as it’s forming, but out from a light second there’s no way we could do it.  It’s just too far to project the intense gravity fields it would require.”

Cassie said, “What if we took a page from their book.  Cloak the whole damned fleet, jump just outside of a light second radius, then take your time and slowly move in over an hour or two so they don’t pick up the gravity drive.  Once at point blank range we can just blast them all.  The best part is we’ll be in the void, where there won’t be a whole lot of particles, or holes in them, to announce your presence like when they attack us.  Assuming we’re right about that part of it.

“You can even maneuver into their lines, so we can hit them all at the same time, instead of peeling them away from the outside and giving most a chance to escape.”

I grunted, “That could actually work.”

Diana smirked, “I’ll have the software ready.”

“What software, love?” I asked confused.

Diana laughed, “Why you called me?  The wormhole suppression software, if you’re going to be at point blank range, it’ll work just fine.  Just in case.  One on one without platform support, our ships can take theirs out in five to six seconds, and it only takes about five seconds to open a wormhole.  If they have their escape automated, about half of them could get away anyway.”

I nodded, “I can launch platforms as we fire too, that will cut a second or two off that time once all those extra turrets are firing.  There probably won’t be enough room in their lines to launch them all, but even a thousand per ship would double the energy impact to their shields.  Thanks, hon.”

Cassie said, “Your welcome.”

Troublemaker was trying to get me in the doghouse.

Diana snickered, “I think he was talking to me.”

Cassie laughed, “My mistake,” and tried to look innocent.

We all got to work, now all we needed to do was find the bastards, before they tried to destroy my space station with whatever their plan was.

I’d gotten the attack programming done, and I was busy with normal station work.  It wouldn’t be until tomorrow morning at the earliest that we’d find the fleet, and another day after that before we could upgrade the station, and the day after that when we could expect the enemy’s attack, most likely.

I had concerns, many of them.  I didn’t like the stealth network idea, it’d been too easy to justify in my head, which was probably how the Grays had justified theirs, millennia ago.  I imagined the first time an ally betrayed me, it would be easy to justify keeping a close cloaked eye on their systems as well, instead of just a casual view from outside the systems.

It was a slippery slope.  Yet… I was the president of a country, space station country, and it was absolutely necessary to keep an eye on our enemies.

Then there was the whole idea of cloaking twenty-seven million full sized dreadnought warships.  I wasn’t all that comfortable with that idea either, but I told myself it was just the one time.  We couldn’t afford to let them escape the seventy-six galaxies to establish a temporary empire and rebuild.

So easy to justify.

Lastly, I had concerns about Darrell, but to be fair to the A.I. most of that was in my mind.  I was more than a little bit paranoid about the whole thing thanks to science fiction.  So far, he’d been both a truthful and a respectful ally, and he was guarding my daughter’s life with vigilance.  He was a bit too independent for my taste, but that wasn’t fair either, because all the humans I knew and in my life were damned independent as well.

He was his own being, and my ally, not a subordinate or slave, so I had to suck that worry up and try to get over it.  What was it he’d said?  Trust but verify.

It was those three worries in the back of my mind, while I distracted myself with trying to overcome the problems inherent in my implant without a base station idea for augmented reality.

Jayna walked into the command center with a grin on her face.

“You stirred up a shit storm, or I should say I did by sending all that data.”

I asked, “What happened?”

She said, “India, Mexico, Canada, Pakistan, Brazil, and the Philippines are all spitting mad.  They didn’t know anything about any of that, and their experts verified the logs weren’t tampered with.  They had no idea you advised against the attack this morning.  They had no idea you were even working on upgrades, or that early AM this morning you were six hours away from having them.  They had no idea you were lied to and manipulated for the eight’s plan to blackmail the Vrok into surrendering.

“The other part of that is they’re all accusing the eight of having done the same thing to them.  They blame the deaths of their ships and people on them, for holding back critical information for control.  They’re accusing them of negligent manslaughter, and specifically Admiral Carter for that as well as gross negligence and incompetence, and they want to see him face court martial for it.

“It looks like the president’s wild lies to cover his ass just backfired in a very big way.  It doesn’t matter if every Tom, Dick and Harry believe it, the other world leaders do.”

Jayna made a face, “On the bad side, the whole world is at each other’s throats right now, but we already have several orders from the other hundred and thirty-four colonies for replacement fleets.  None of them are holding you accountable for the disastrous battle this morning as POTUS hoped.

“Except the eight of course.  They’re all pissed you released classified information and made them look incompetent.  They’re all trying to blame each other right now for the way it all fell out.”

I frowned, “How about the U.N. and the deal?”

Jayna said, “This new thing is distracting from that of course, for the moment, but I’d say it was in the bag, just give it a day or two for things to cool down.  It’s a good plan, most of the world’s countries are solidly on your side and trust you to handle it and keep our territories in the seventy-six galaxies safe.  The eight will have to go along with it, or look petty, even if they don’t, we’ll have the votes to get it passed.”

“Assuming they don’t veto out of spite,” I pointed out. Some of the eight were on the security council after all.

Jayna shook her head, “The possibility of that is small.  As for the people, they’re split on the whole thing in those eight countries, but the other countries and leaders are solidly on your side where it counts, save the eight.  It will be a rough ride at times, but there’s nothing new there either.”

“Thanks.”

I got back to work as Jayna left, but I wondered if this was one thing I’d never figure out.  The Grays nanites just weren’t meant to implanted.  It occurred to me that maybe I should just centralize where the quantum connections were, add the customer side voice and data phone as a small block of nanites on my end as part of the service.  Then they’d only need the implant and not the phone.

The problem with that was they wouldn’t be able to hook anything else up to it, it’d work fine, but only for the augmented reality implant and nothing else.  Like a laptop or tablet using the phone for a hotspot.  By the end of the day I just gave it up, a couple of requests for a unique ship design had come in and other ideas occurred to me. Maybe I’d look at it again one day, or better yet recruit my wife’s help.

Chapter Fourteen

It’d been a long day, after being woken up at four for the second battle of the war and then dealing with backstabbing allies and normal day to day stuff, so I was pretty tired.  I was half tempted to beg off on our night out this week when I got out of the shower, but Diana was already in a quite lovely red dress that conformed and caressed down her body.  She had her hair up and earrings in her ears, and she was putting on the final touches of her makeup.

My Diana was truly breathtaking in my opinion, but it was really the bright smile on her face and look of excitement when she glanced over at me that made that idea a complete non-starter.  There was no way I could disappoint that smile, so I headed over to the closet instead.

“You look fantastic.”

She said, “So do you.”

I snickered, “I’m not dressed yet.”

She giggled, “Exactly.”

I grinned, and I took care of that lack.

“How was your day?”

She smiled, “Good, got a lot done actually.  Our daughter’s work inspired me on an older project, but I won’t ruin the surprise and talk about it early.”

“She’s helping?”

She shook her head, “Not with this, I don’t want her working on weapon systems until she’s older.  She doesn’t have the outlook or maturity to divorce herself from its ultimate uses.  It still bothers me to work on stuff like that, things that will one day kill our enemies, but I understand the need and that’s the universe we live in.”

“I can agree to that, it still bothers me too, but I do it to protect Earth, our people, and mostly to protect our family.  How did we get on this depressing subject?”

Diana smirked, “Just lucky, I guess.  The scan system she came up with was brilliant though, wasn’t it?”

I nodded, “She’s your daughter, after all.”

Diana finished up and turned as I came out of the closet.  She grinned after I claimed a kiss, then asked, “Where are we going?”

“Up for steak?”

Diana replied, “Sure.  And lobster?”

I smirked, that didn’t leave us very many choices, there were only a couple of restaurants on the station that sold both surf and turf, though there were quite a few steak and seafood restaurants that sold them separately.

“Sounds delicious.”

She kissed me softly, and then looked up into my eyes and said, “We’re celebrating tonight, dad.”

I was confused for half a second, at her calling me that, then I grinned like an idiot.

“Really?”

She smirked, “Yep, you must’ve gotten it right the first time again.”

I kissed her to give my mind time to reboot, then said, “I love you.  Do you know the sex?”

She nodded, “A boy this time, according to the DNA scans.”

“You’re amazing, a miracle,” I said with a little awe.

She snickered, “It wasn’t that hard, but I’ll take it.”

I took her hand and we headed downstairs.  Cassie and Melody were already watching a movie, and once again had soda and pizza on the coffee table.  We gave the latter a kiss and headed out to celebrate.  It was a fun night, and we had a good time at dinner and then celebrated far more intimately once we got back home.

Diana was a miracle to me.

The next day I got a lot of work done.

The first custom ship was fifty yards long, ten high, and twenty wide.  It was basically a space yacht. I’ve built them before for the rich, but this one was a little different.  Outside of the core ship’s systems, and sub-contracting out the luxuries like wooden fixtures and the furniture and walls it would also work in space, atmosphere, on the water, and under the water.

Well, almost any spaceship would do all that, but I had to add in systems for sonar, fish finding, and all sorts of other stuff.  The rich were weird, what can I say?  It’d also be the first private ship capable of a hundred gravities of acceleration as well as having the second generation jump drive.

I was a little tempted to make one for myself, but then I was weird as well.  It’d been a while since we’d had a full vacation.  Sure, beach days once a week, a night out once a week, we did take off time, but full on vacations were rare.  I think I really needed one, once this whole mess with the Vrok was over with and the galactic union issue was worked out.  A ship like that might be fun, we could go visit a few of our allies for a change, in comfort and style.

The second custom ship design was a restaurant touring ship that would have live music and dancing.  Similar to the luxury cruise ship in idea, but much smaller in scope and scale.  This was just a small ship, for a two or three hour dinner cruise.  Imagine booking reservations and going to eat steak, with the rings of Saturn overhead, or up above the plane of the galaxy looking down at the Milky Way in its entirety.

The one other thing I did that morning was put out a whole lot more probe scanning ships, extremely small ones.  If as we suspected, the enemy was going to try and take out my station in the same manner they took out the ships around their planets, then I wanted as much forewarning as possible.

It was just after lunch when my daughter and her ever present A.I. guardian walked into the command center.

Melody looked nervous, “I didn’t hack my way in,” she said quickly.

I grinned, “I gave you access.”

She squealed and tackle hugged me, reminding me she was still a preteen girl and not just a brilliant scientist, as if I could forget.

“Thank you!”

I said, “Don’t abuse it, if you get bored.  But I figured if you’re going to be working on projects a couple of hours a day as part of your education, you might need the access.”

She promised, “I won’t.  That’s why I’m here, the quantum mass detection field is up.  Though, there might be a problem, but I have a solution.”

“A problem?”

She nodded, “There’re thousands of hits on the system.  Best we could figure is there’s been a lot of ship to ship battles between star systems.  It was stupid of me to think we’d just pick up the Vrok’s remaining twenty-four million ships.  There are no natural masses out there, but beings are very good at making messes.”

All the scan did was look for quantum resonance bias in subspace, to indicate there was mass in the corresponding location in real space.  There was no way to figure out what she was detecting, just that something was there.

I snickered, “Good point, that is a problem.  My guess is they’re broken up into six to eight places, and not all bunched together.  So, your solution?”

She said, “We’ll jump a small cloaked probe from Darrell’s stealth network within a few light hours of the mass readings.  One of the tiny ones, his size that the small stealth probes can make quickly and easily, that were meant for system ingress of enemies and potential enemies.”

I nodded, “That’d work.  You got that, Darrell?”

Darrell said, “I’ll take care of it, we should know where they are shortly.”

She grinned, “It also might give us a look into the past.  I doubt we’ll find more advanced technology, but just think of all the civilizations that have risen and fallen throughout time.  We could find a goldmine of information, and maybe even something useful we don’t have even if not more advanced.”

“That’s a really good point.  Have the stealth probes move in close in cases like that, and you can read it with your magic from here.”

She bounced on her toes, “Really?”

I nodded, “But you’ll have to do the work, make reports, not just have fun.  Chances are you won’t find anything not known or in the Grays database, but it’s worth the look.  It’s also a longer-term thing, not a priority over your education, and I’ll help when I have free moments.  We can do it together.  No powering systems without approval, just read the technology.”

She said, “Great.  I’ll let you know when Darrell finds them.”

She gave me another hug, then left.

Cassie asked, “Was that wise?  The database and her work with her mother has been… sterile, so far.  But those ships’ logs could be filled with the ugly realities of life in this violent universe.”

I nodded, “That’s why I told her to just read the technology, and not power it on.  Without power our magic can’t read software or stored data, just technical schematics.  If something looks promising, I can check it out first.”

Cassie smirked, “Never mind then.”

I snickered, “How is your day?”

Cassie said, “Alright, you made a lot of people in government angry, saving their lives and pointing out the unheeded warnings given like you did.  It’s not wrong, or even all bad, but it’s divisive.  The council is working extra hard to cool things down.  It’s human nature and not your fault of course, but it’s worth noting.”

Jessica said, “I increased security just in case. No one has tried to kill our president for a while.”

Cassie nodded, “I don’t think it’s that bad.  They’ll be looking for mud to throw though.”

I shrugged, “I’m the one who got stabbed in the back, what did they expect would happen?  It’s fine, things will settle, and we’ll be even more independent.  Our civilians and economies will interact, but I’m done taking military direction.”

Maybe I didn’t have the keenest military mind, and my plans weren’t the best, but the technological edge was enough to make up for that.  In short, they needed me far more than I needed them, and I wouldn’t pander to their political bull-crap.

Cassie smirked, “They probably figured you’d stonewall like they would, and that he’d get away with his deception to save face.  You care more about integrity than image, which is unthinkable for them.  To be fair, they need to get re-elected, and actually want their jobs.”

I snorted.

“Speaking of jobs?”

Cassie waved a hand, “It’s a thing in progress, it’ll take time.  I’ll let you know when my people are ready to turn over my public responsibilities to.  I’ll still be here though, doing the background stuff, and writing your speeches.”

“Fair enough.”

Chapter Fifteen

The data came in, and the enemy fleets were found just an hour later as well as several ship graveyards at the sites of large battles in the dim past.

All the enemy ships were broken up in eight fleets of three million, as I’d guessed a few days ago.  They were also just five hundred light years away from my border fleets, on the very edges of the galaxies those borders existed on.

I could only imagine they were there to take over the borders, if I had recalled all the ships to deal with the invading fleet yesterday morning.  Since I hadn’t, they’d just stayed there, probably waiting for orders.

It took me a couple of hours to program in all the orders, but there were a few gaping holes in my original plan.  I couldn’t risk using the fleet on our border with Vrok space, or to pull three million ships off the Vrok’s border with the Atans.  It seemed obvious to me in hindsight once I’d thought it through, but they had to have at least once cloaked probe watching all my fleets, so they’d know when to move in.

There was also no chance in finding those theoretical probes, because the fleets were in the void, so I had to assume they were there.

Point being, if I lessened the fleet on the border of their and Atans’ space, and completely removed the fleet guarding the direct border between us, they’d know something was going on.  I wasn’t a military mastermind, but even I knew to surprise the enemy you had to keep showing them what they expected to see.

I’d learned a few things.

So, I found myself making more ships despite myself, so I could match their numbers.  I needed seven million more.  Three million more was easy, I did lessen the fleet between the fifty galaxies and the Atans by three million, I just left the other border fleet alone.  That gave me twenty million ships, and I cut off a fifth of the nanites from every ship to make four million more.

Since they only had to rebuild a fifth, and not a full half, it’d take less than twelve hours.  The engagement wouldn’t be for at least that long, so I could let them rebuild without waiting to start the plan.

I had all twenty-four million build the cloaking device and emitters, split them up into eight fleets of three million ships each, then quantum jumped them to five light seconds from their fleet.  I also dynamically assigned an enemy ship to each of my ships.  At three tenths of a gravity of constant acceleration the ships would arrive within their ranks in exactly twelve and a half hours, so they’d be fully built and at point blank range.  At that small gravity of acceleration, they’d also remain fully hidden and cloaked during that trip.

I smirked, and then shook my head in disgust.

I supposed I had no one to blame but myself, that the next battle would be happening at three-fifteen AM in the morning instead of during my workday.  But it would be imprudent to wait, as soon as their cloaked attack failed, assuming there was one and it did fail, then the Vrok would have no choice but to admit to themselves they couldn’t win as things stood.  At that point they’d have to send away their fleets to form a remote empire and build up for their revenge.

“Jess, take a look at this plan. You see any holes in it?”

It didn’t take her long.  Move in over twelve and a half hours, to point blank range, and open up with five thousand subspace beams, one ship to one ship.  With equal technology, the best they could hope for is mutual annihilation, but with the edge of a surprise attack they might not even last long enough to fire back.  Just five to six seconds, and they’d be toast.

Jessica said, “A half mile distance is pretty damned close.”

I nodded, “Their ships are only a couple of miles apart, plus I have to be close enough to jam their wormhole drives if they’re set to automatically engage on sighting the enemy.”

Jessica nodded absently, and looked through it, “Looks good.  Simple straight forward plan, very little can go wrong with it, unless the ships are seen approaching.  At three tenths of a G acceleration I don’t see how they possibly could.  Our sensors are better, and we wouldn’t see it coming, not in the void.”

“Alright,” I activated the plan and they started forward, slowly.

Jessica snickered, “I just can’t quite believe you just volunteered to be in the command center at three in the morning.  The timing is up to you this time, you know.”

I sighed, “Tell me about it, but it’s essential our attack go off before theirs, and three AM will be forty hours since the last battle ended.  We estimated at least three days for their plan, if we’re right, but I don’t want to risk it.”

The attack was actually at three-fifteen, but it’d be prudent to be fully awake and in the command center, at least fifteen minutes early.  The system would also wake me, if anything changed, like their fleets being moved.

Jessica said, “Got it, I’ll set my alarm.”

“I think I’ll call it early.  I’m caught up on my ship designs, and things are secure.”

Cassie said, “Enjoy it, I think I’ll do the same.”

I spent the rest of the afternoon with Melody.  We worked on her telekinetic control, the only active part of our magic, and just hung out.  She was growing up far too fast, but I couldn’t be prouder of her.

The coffee in my hand was a lifeline, as I took a sip.  It was almost three in morning, and I’d managed to shower and get dressed without waking Diana as I quietly left our home and headed to the command center.  Both Cassie and Jessica were there already.

The former looked perfect as usual, and like it wasn’t an ungodly hour to be awake.  Jessica looked like her normal self too, except she clearly needed a coffee before I engaged.

“Morning.”

I checked the status as I sat at the command table, and some of my ships were already within the ranks of the vast three million ship fleets.  It’d be fourteen minutes before they came to a full stop, and fired thousands of beams broadside to their targets, which would be what broke the cloak.  There was no indication the enemy even had a clue we were there.

Jessica replied, “Morning,” while Cassie just nodded.

Jessica took a long chug of her coffee, then said, “It looks like the stealth net is fully up, at least in the seventy-six galaxies.  There are two hidden Vrok’ installations in the twenty-six galaxies.”

I blew out a breath, and then nodded.

“After the battle, I’ll send ships to take them out, and cancel the probe blitz.  I left it going because I didn’t want the enemy to see any changes before our final battle.  We have to assume they have stealth probes all over the place in their space, outside of systems, if they had the same in our space for the last thirty years.”

Cassie said, “We might not ever find them.”

“Yeah, they’ll have eyes out in space, but they won’t be able to get in space or start a new build program.  They also won’t be able to turn their cloaked probes into rigged mines without access to space.  Let them watch, as long as they stay on their planet and keep their probes out of our systems where we can’t find them, I don’t care.”

Even simply plans can run into problems, and that’s about when fickle fate and Murphy’s law conspired to ruin my day.

My board alarmed, as one of the enemy ships launched a shuttle.  The shuttle set a course toward another ship in the formation, and of course was on a direct collision course for one of my dreadnought platforms.  My first thought was to jump it away, but of course all my ships were in their jump suppression field by then.

“Crap.”

I initiated evasive maneuvers on that ship, and for just a moment it initiated a twenty-gravity acceleration as it twisted and dove out of the way.  Unfortunately, even the least amount of acceleration required to evade the shuttle’s course, was far too strong a gravity field for the cloaking field to completely hide.

Four of the nearest enemy ships opened fire on the space and the entire fleet started to open wormholes at the same time.  For that fleet alone I removed the weapons lockout, and space lit up with three billion energy beams.  All the ships also worked to suppress the wormholes being opened, but the front six ranks of the enemy ships were out of range, there’d still been five minutes left before the plan.

The next five seconds was an unbelievably violent exchange of energy, and for the last three the enemy had returned fire and our shields started to weaken as well.  I wasn’t too worried though, because we had a good two second jump on them, my ships should win.

Six hundred thousand of the enemy ships in the front six ranks disappeared into wormholes, right about the same time the rest of the ships self-destructed.  Every missile, every reactor, and every subspace weapon on the enemy’s ships overloaded and exploded, sending powerful waves of energy into my ships.  Far more destructive than I’d imagined possible, at such close ranges.  Between that, and the fact the enemy had been firing beams at me for three seconds, two million and four hundred thousand of my ship’s exploded spectacularly.

Ironically, it was the six hundred thousand ships that hadn’t yet moved into their formations that had survived, an equal amount to theirs.

The other seven enemy fleets hadn’t acted yet, so I kept on with the plan there. The longer the storm of destruction waited, the surer I could be of getting all their ships.

Cassie said, “At least the others aren’t running, maybe they think we only found one of their fleets by pure random chance.”

I shook my head, “Maybe.  Or maybe they are assuming we’re there, and if they open up wormholes that they’ll lose most of those fleets as well.  They’re probably busy figuring out how we stopped most of their ships from opening a wormhole, and also working on a strategy to counter what they must expect is there.”

It was almost a full minute later, just three and a half minutes before we’d have been in place, when the enemy’s ships acted.  They all fired five percent of their thousand point-defense turrets in a wide area beam that saturated the entire space their fleet was in, and it also revealed my cloaked ships creeping to a stop at point blank range of their ships.

Damn, that was a good counter plan.

I slammed the button to open fire and release offensive operations, even as the rest of their point defense turrets and their larger subspace energy turrets, opened fire on my fleet with the more pinpoint and destructive beams.

My fleets weren’t quite in place yet, but they were closer than they were before, so only the two front lines were far enough away that we couldn’t jam their wormhole creation while we exchanged powerful energies.  I’d also started launching mini-platforms.

At five seconds, another one point four million Vrok ships escaped my simple ambush, if could resurrect whoever flew that damned shuttle, I’d strangle them to death.  Two million of the enemy ships had escaped in total.  That was a hell of a lot of ships, considering how powerful they were, I wasn’t sure if anyone but me was match for them.

As for the rest, they went up in mutual annihilation.  Their shields fell about the same time ours did.  They were still firing the diffuse energy beams, which countered the nanite advantage, without shields my ships were simply destroyed.  But, I’d launched enough platforms that were still at full shields, while theirs had been hanging on by a thread from my main ship fire, and less than a second later their fleets went up as well in mutual annihilation.

In the end, at all seven sites, I had another four hundred thousand ships survive.  So, the enemy had two million ships after all was said and done, and I only had a million left.  I ordered the survivors to collect the unattached mini-platforms that’d survived, and absorb them into their ships.

Then I waited, and waited some more, then some more.

“Crap, they’re not showing back up.  Either they went into the void between galaxies, or they’re going a far way away and are still in wormhole transit.”

Jessica said, “I’ll set the mass detection field to alert us if it picks up something new.  If they come out in any of the galaxies, we’ll get them.”

I nodded, and I blew out a breath.  Not good.  Taking out twenty-two million of their ships was a victory of sorts, but it wasn’t as complete as I’d hoped with two million getting away.  Still, there’d be hope for at least a few hours.  If they didn’t show up within that time period, they probably wouldn’t show up at all.  It would mean they were in the void between galaxies or out of Vrok space and our space altogether.  Nothing was far enough away that’d it’d take more than that long to get there.

As for me, I split my remaining ships and started them growing, just to keep the numbers even.  I also dispatched two ships to take care of those two hidden bases the Vrok had.  That was one less thing to worry about, as the ships jumped directly there and destroyed them in seconds.

I debated going back to bed until seven to get a few more hours of sleep, but I was too worked up to sleep at that point.  Food, then work.  Maybe in a few hours once I’d figured out where their ships were or not, I’d take a nap.  Otherwise I’d just start my normal work.

“Be right back, I’m going to grab some breakfast.”

Their ships weren’t found that day. I did take a nap before lunch, and worked a normal day besides, and their ships weren’t detected at all.  Either they were in the large void between galaxies, or they’d left both our empires’ space.  The former seemed more likely at that point, but it didn’t matter, either way they had two million ships we couldn’t find.

It seemed likely they would stay that way, until after the enemy’s attempt to destroy us, anyway.  If they destroyed my station, they’d come back, if that attack failed, I was sure they’d stay wherever they were and start to rebuild their fleets.  As it was, it’d be at least sixty years before they’d come back if that was the case.  The concept didn’t make me all that happy, but at least their known worlds were quarantined, and the danger was limited in scope.

Still, with that many ships they could keep building small fleets of exploding cloaked probes, and just continue to try and kill us until it worked.   It was… disturbing to imagine needing to be on guard for that long.

We had to find and destroy those ships.

Chapter Sixteen

The next day I was expecting that attack, but so far it hadn’t happened.  It was mid-morning, when Diana asked me to come to the labs so she could show me what she was working on.  I headed over there with Cassie.

My wife gave us both a smile, “Take a seat, I think you’ll find this interesting.”

We sat, and my wife brought up a large hologram of the test solar system.  There were two test ships on the display, they were two A.U. apart, which was sixteen light minutes.

She said, “I think this is going to be a game changer.  Well, it won’t help against the Vrok, they already have the same defense I made to defend from this weapon, which will be obvious when I explain it.  On the other hand, none of our other potential enemy empire’s do, at this time anyway.  Nor the other FTL races in the fifty galaxies.

“A long time ago, when we were still testing the jump drives, I looked at the possibility of extending our weapons range via quantum resonance.  Our communicators work, because we’re only passing through a few volts of energy, and our jump drives work because creating a quantum resonance field is low energy as well.  But the artificial quantum resonance fields destabilized on me when trying to pass through greater amounts of energy, like our energy, disintegration, and anti-matter beams.  So I threw out the idea.

“Melody’s new advances made me consider trying again, not with the old weapons but with a new one that we hadn’t gotten right yet.  It took me a while to get it right.  Gravity fields do take a lot of energy, but gravity itself is a force and has absolutely no effect at all on an artificially created quantum resonance field.

“Marry that fact to the second generation jump drive concepts, and suddenly all the problems with projecting intense gravity fields far from the ship goes away.  Such as those that would be needed for the singularity weapon which I’ve been stuck on because of the danger of creating such a thing so close to the ship.”

She pointed at the screen, “Check this out.”

One of the ships just… disappeared.  It happened so fast I didn’t actually see anything happen.  No flash of energy, no explosion, just nothing.

“Did it jump?”

She shook her head, and said, “Okay, this is that event in slow motion.”

I watched as the data and the screen, as the shields on the ship were destabilized and torn away, and then watched slowly, just two pico-seconds in real time, as the ship was sucked forward and compacted so small it barely read on the sensors.

By a ship that was sixteen light minutes, away.  Holy crap.

“Umm, so singularity weapons are scary.”

She nodded, “All ships should be equipped with a resonance pulse generator.  It would mean no jumping to one closer than a thousand miles, but it would shield a ship from this happening to them.”

I frowned, “Wouldn’t it disrupt comms and prevent a ship from jumping.”

She shook her head, “The systems would have to be timed of course, the resonance pulse generator would pause a microsecond before the internal jump field was formed.  We’d also have to shield the communications device to prevent the pulses from destabilizing it.  Point is, there’s very little chance an enemy with this weapon could successfully time an attack just as we’re jumping.

“Obviously, that defense means this weapon won’t work on the Vrok, so you’ll have to stick to the subspace energy beam weapon for them.  Regardless, it’s a second extremely powerful weapon that normal shields won’t protect an enemy from.  Unless they were shielded from that weapon and the disintegration beam like the Vrok are, we wouldn’t have any trouble taking them down.

“Still, it may be that this new weapon should inform your choices. The large dreadnought platforms may no longer be necessary at all.  You’ll have to figure that out, but the weapon takes a lot of energy to form that singularity, even temporarily.  The mini-platforms are too small, they’ll need to be at least ten times bigger.”

I nodded, “I could either keep the dreadnoughts and have one point two million mini-platforms in each one, or just go with the smaller ships independently and forget the dreadnoughts.”

She nodded, “It’s just one more weapon, but you’ll want to make the other four beam weapons still useful if we run into another aggressive invader with protection from our two strongest weapons.”

I said, “Three really, without the subspace shields, the new subspace weapon would rip apart any ship extremely quickly, almost as fast as the disintegration.  The scariest part is the range.”

She snorted, “That’s not the limit, there is no limit.  You could have a tiny cloaked probe outside an enemy system, feeding our station quantum frequency coordinates, while the station destroys hundreds of ships at a time, from across the universe.  Which is why we need to always have those beacons going, because once we use the weapon someone else will eventually figure out how to use it.”

“You’re so sexy when your terrifying.”

Diana smirked, “Behave.  It is frightening, I almost didn’t show it to you.  But it’s limited, it takes a lot of power.  A dreadnought can fire a thousand strong subspace energy beams, any of our beams really, but only about a hundred singularities at a time.  So it wouldn’t even be worth using, against an enemy that couldn’t withstand our beam technology and wasn’t a danger in getting through our shields.

“It’d be faster to jump there and take them on normally.  This weapon is more for taking out a true threat, at a distance.  A backup and last resort weapon, the less we use it the less chance our neighboring empires will see and try to copy it.”

I nodded, “I might as well go with smaller ships, overwhelm with numbers.  If a ship ten times the size of a mini-platform can fire one singularity attack, it should be able to do ten beams.  It’s also large enough that it could use a wormhole if it had to, instead of a jump drive.  Really, the dreadnoughts were obsolete when our daughter created the second generation jump drive, a wormhole drive is no longer needed, so they won’t ever need a carrier.

“I could split up every fleet into five trillion of these eighty-foot-long ships, and it’d have the same throw weight in beam tech and singularity.  With no need to launch mini-platforms it’s tactically better as well.”

If I’d learned anything fighting the Vrok, the two to three seconds it takes to eject the mini-platforms is a huge amount of time against an enemy with equal strength.  It didn’t so much matter, when I was swatting the Grays or the Stolthrim who couldn’t really hurt me back once I’d had technical superiority.

Cassie nodded, “A larger ship would make more sense if they were manned, but for our forces I’ll agree that would work fine.  Point defense wouldn’t suffer either, the small ships could target ten missiles almost as fast as forty-eight trillion platforms could lock on one each.”

“I’ll go design those, and then split our ships.  We should get close to five trillion on every border, and half that in the void.  Even better, with two point five trillion ships, the Vrok would take five or six seconds to kill each one.  They don’t have enough turrets to take out more than four billion or so in the time it would take them to destroy all of theirs.  One more advantage to the change.”

It wouldn’t stop me from making colony packages either, I’d just have to join a whole lot more ships than two to do so.  It’d be the same amount of mass either way.  The colony ship, a hundred of the dreadnoughts for their manned military ships, but maybe a million of the new small ships instead of a thousand more dreadnought platforms.  That would also increase coverage in the solar system, as far as scanning went.

Diana smirked, and then teased, “Also easier to dodge an unexpected shuttle with.”

I nodded, “Don’t remind me, I’m still annoyed about that.  We really need to find those ships.  I’ll also do as you suggest, and only use singularities, subspace energy beams, or disintegration beams if they’re necessary.  Even our old energy beams are twice as strong as they used to be, so I don’t think any of the empires around us could stand up to them outside of the Vrok.”

Diana smiled, “If we’re lucky, they went to conquer a smaller and weaker empire to rebuild.”

I frowned, “Why would that be lucky, exactly?”

Diana smirked, “Because if they’re attacking solar systems in a galaxy two empires away in any direction from our seventy-six galaxies to start a building and breeding project, then Darrell’s cloaked network will find them eventually when it’s full built out.  If they’re in the void between galaxies, then we’ll never find them.”

Oh, yeah.  That would be good, especially if they were stuck in a solar system with no escape.  I mentioned my idea for a new colony package. I also suggested we keep the singularity weapons for ourselves, as one more super top-secret technology, on top of my magic and second-generation energy to matter devices.

Cassie said, “That could work, but you could give them both options.  Just because you like the smaller ship concept doesn’t mean they will.  It does have one distinct disadvantage after all, it can’t take a lot of damage and rebuild itself, it will be easier to completely wipe out.”

I nodded, “True, but it’s still the same amount of mass, each with their own discrete shields, and the destroyed ships can be replaced a lot faster.”

Diana made a shooing motion, “I need to get back to work, go design our new ships.”

I grinned, “Yes, maam.”

I gave her a proper kiss to befuddle her before heading back to the command center.

Designing the new ships and software wasn’t all that hard. I’d already done most of the work making the mini-platforms work together while independently targeting ships, and while five trillion eight foot long ships were a whole lot, it was also much less than the forty eight trillion platforms a four million dreadnought fleet had.

Adding the new weapon as a new option was easy as well.  The only tricky thing was changing the mini-platform software to support ten different beam arrays at once, other than those two things, the software was pretty much identical.

The only really pain in the butt part was the physical paired quantum connections.  The way it was currently set up, my station controlled the dreadnoughts directly, then there was a second jump as the dreadnoughts were quantum paired to the mini-platforms so I could control them through the dreadnought platform.

Of course, the dreadnought was going away, and I didn’t have enough physical pairs with the station once each ship became about one thousand two hundred and fifty of the eighty-foot ships.  I had more than one on each ship of course, a lot more than one, but just enough that splitting the ships to double my fleets on occasion wouldn’t impact anything.  This was a whole other ball of wax.

So, the first thing I did once the design for the new ship was ready, was have each and every ship build twelve thousand five hundred more quantum pairs.  I offloaded one half of each connection into a cube of nanites that I loaded onto a mini-platform for each dreadnought platform.

Those fifty-five million mini-platforms then jumped to my station, which probably caused a stir in the allied fleets in SOL, but screw it.  Surprises were good for the soul.  I absorbed all those mini-platforms into the station, and had my command systems link in to all those connections.

Then I was ready, every ship in every fleet, including the mass of the mini-platforms, morphed into eighty foot ships.  While doing so, it ensured every single one of the new ships got ten of the direct quantum connections.  Five trillion ships on all fourteen borders, except of course for our border with the Atans who only had a trillion and a quarter ships, since there’d only been one million dreadnought platforms on that border.  There was also the one hundred thousand platforms in Sol, which became a hundred and twenty five million smaller ships.

I’ll admit to letting out a petty snicker, as I imagined my allied human fleets scratching their heads nervously.  An interesting side effect of the split was increasing my scanning capabilities by separating those ships evenly around the inner system.  It would give me an almost full light minute coverage around Earth and my station, to the point where there’d be no delay between a cloaked ship entering that territory and being found.

Lastly, that gave me two point five trillion ships for my attack force and spare mass in the void, which I hoped to put to use as soon as possible once we found the last two million Vrok ships.

I shook my head, screw it.  I went ahead and lessened the fleet mass on the Vrock and Atans border to match the other border.  That meant I had one point two five trillion ships on both those borders, instead of the five on all the others.  It also meant I now had six point two five trillion ships in the void, the equivalent throw weight to five million of the old dreadnought platforms.

So, I’d out-mass the enemy two point five to one when I finally caught up to them, if I did, anyway.

With ten or more connections in each of the ships I could control them all directly, and I wouldn’t have to worry about creating more connections until I’d split every ship in the fleet ten more times.

Lastly, I updated the sales listings and added the options to the colony package.  I made it more dynamic, instead of either or, they could get a mix.  A hundred manned dreadnoughts, and a thousand unmanned dreadnoughts or one point two five million smaller attack ships.  I made it more variable than that though, they could get five hundred dreadnoughts and five hundred thirteen thousand small ships, or any other mix of both, as long as the mass was equivalent to a thousand platforms in the end.

I listed upgrade options as well, for the older stuff, but those wouldn’t be live for actual purchase until the next day, when our human testing process for the new systems was finally complete.  I already had approved orders for upgrades for all countries with colonies outside of the eight, but now they could actually see what the upgrades would get them.

In all, it took several hours to get it all done, and I was wrapping up the day to day stuff when Jessica’s console alarmed.

Jessica said, “You know that stealth attack we’ve been waiting for?”

“I’ll go out on a limb, and I’ll say it’s here.”

Cassie smirked.

Jessica nodded, “From all directions, about a light minute out.  At their current rate of acceleration, they’ll be here in two hours.”

“That’s fast.”

She nodded, “They’ve been accelerating the whole way, and are moving pretty quickly right now.  I guess they figured they’d have a better chance sneaking through if they moved quickly at a light acceleration.  No need to stop, just overload the subspace energy device right before it hits our shields.”

“That… makes sense.  All directions?”

She said, “Fifty, and more are still appearing.  It looks like they’re coming in on several lines to hit all our sides at once.”

“We haven’t upgraded the station yet, and won’t until tomorrow, but I suppose they don’t know that.”

Cassie said, “That, and they’re probably hoping even if you find a few, or even a lot, a couple of them might slip by and reach us.”

I blew out a breath, “Wait another ten minutes, let’s make sure we’ve got them all before we start firing.  The subspace energy explosions will clear away the stellar dust, for hours before it’s replaced, if we miss one now then we might not see a second wave coming.”

Jessica said, “I suggest we do that, and jump the station to somewhere with a lot of stellar dust in the solar system.  Just in case you’re right and ten minutes wasn’t long enough, we can always move back later.”

“Prudent, and a good idea. We’ll pop out to Mars orbit for a day until the stellar winds makes the dust uniform again. Warn off any traffic that won’t make dock within the next ten minutes and communicate where we’ll be, and they can head that way now or cancel all trips until tomorrow afternoon.”

At sixty gravities it’d be an eight-hour trip, probably not worth it in a cramped commercial shuttle.  We could always quantum jump them, if it was an emergency.

Jessica said, “Will do.”

We waited the ten minutes, and there were five hundred in total.  We waited five more minutes just to be sure, but considering it was an even number I suspected that was all of them.

I assigned the targets to five hundred ships.  We couldn’t lock on exactly, there was nothing to lock on to.  But we could jump in the path of the moving blankness, and then fire a wide cone in that direction.  A cloaked ship couldn’t have shields, so it should annihilate them quickly.

The explosions were vast, as their rigged subspace energy containment systems were breached.  As I’d feared, it totally wiped out the stellar dust, and there was no point taking chances if there was another wave of five hundred coming in an hour or two.

Chances are there wasn’t, but why risk it?

I smirked, as I hit the button to jump the station.  It was the first time we’d moved out of the Earth’s and Moon’s L2 Lagrange point since we claimed it over thirteen years ago.

Chapter Seventeen - Interlude

Blood and guts were scattered all over the great hall, at least twenty corpses, three of which were Vrok, and they had all been torn apart.  The other seventeen… it was a horrible waste of their limited food stores.  Sinzan had lost his mind, and had gone berserk, he’d had no choice but to end his old friend’s life.

Jarune shook his head, “Clean this up.”

One of the attendants bowed, “Yes, Exalted one.”

He looked over at the hologram, “Hunt Leader Barok.  Report, tell me what so drove our last Exalted one insane.”

Barok replied, “The shield fleets were simultaneously ambushed.  Were it not for chance, and quick thinking, we would have lost them all.  There are two million five hundred and twelve ships left, and we’re currently in the void between galaxies.  The attack on the human station also failed, their scanning net is too tight, we didn’t even get the hidden spears close before they were destroyed.”

Almost twenty-two million of their ships had been destroyed in a surprise attack and their surprise attack had failed?  He could see that driving Sinzan insane, the loss of his life’s work and the end of the great hunt, for now.

“How did the humans find you?”

Barok answered, “I know not, Exalted one.  When we knew they were there we fired a low-level beam to find them, then targeted the impacts.  They were almost in place.  More of us would’ve survived, but they jammed our wormhole drives from close range.  It was only those out of range that were able to escape.  I’m rotating the ships through our current formation, and all ships on the edges are firing two overlapping beams at weak power.  They will not get closer than a light second if they find us again.”

He pondered that, “Perhaps they cannot find you in the vast emptiness between galaxies.  They must have hidden spears searching, and we were too predictable.  All the fleets were only five hundred light years from their true shield posts. It’s possible they stumbled over one and found the rest because we were too predictable.  That seems more reasonable to me, than them magically finding you in the void between stars within a galaxy.”

Barok nodded his head, “That could be, but I didn’t wish to risk our last ships on an assumption.”

Jarune said, “The great hunt has failed, for this lifetime.  But all is not lost.  The humans are weak, they will keep us confined to our planets as they have the Grays.  We will be safe and waiting.  Here are your orders.  You will invade the Bavoi galaxy empire.  Their ships can’t stand against ours, even against tens of millions you will cut them down like helpless herd animals.  You will eat, you will start a build program, and you will breed your females as fast as possible.

“Both your females and ours will work on advancements, the humans are our match.  When the fleets are rebuilt, stronger, we will have our expanded empire and once more rule the stars.”

There was a long pause, and Jarune understood it so let it go.  The Bavoi was a single galaxy empire on their far border opposite the human empire.  Their ships were similar in power to their older ships, and the Grays ships, but no match for them now.  They could have attacked that way long ago, but adding a single galaxy wasn’t very glorious.  Plus, the Bavoi tasted like crap, which was probably the real reason Barok hesitated for a moment.

Barok replied, “It shall be as you say, Exalted one.”

Jarune said, “Take heart, Barok.  We will not see the glory in our lifetimes, but we will lay the foundation and sharpen the spears for our children to reclaim our birthright.  There is much pride in that, and opportunity in adversity.  If our planet bound females have advancements to try, we will contact you.”

Barok straightened, “We will not fail, Exalted One.”

Jarune said, “You have your orders, and you are now the Hunt Master of our fleets.”

He ended the contact, and then blew out a hissing breath.

Chapter Eighteen

It was the next day, the enemy fleet never showed back up, and I could only assume they were outside the galaxies for the moment.  The only good news in that was they were relatively helpless out there.  Without the resources of star systems out in the deeper voids, they wouldn’t be building anything, and at some point they’d run out of resources and show back up.

It was just a matter of time.

The testing was completed, and our space station was currently undergoing nanite upgrades and manufacturing the subspace energy beam turrets.  With the upgraded shields, another stealth attack wouldn’t be as large a concern.  It was doubtful, we had the enemy hiding, but it certainly didn’t hurt my confidence any.

I was also converting all our mini-platforms to the eighty foot long ships.

I really needed a name for those, I couldn’t just call them eighty-foot-long ships for the rest of my life, so I titled them scout destroyers in the system.  Similar in size to the original Gray scout ship, but with the nanite reactors, new nanites, new weapons systems, and stronger systems, they were so much more powerful.

Lastly, we were back at L2, the stellar dust and winds in that area returned to normal the last night.  There’d been a few complaints about our short sojourn to Mars, but I wasn’t going to risk my two million civilians or my family over a tiny inconvenience.

Cassie broke me out of my thoughts.

“Our ambassador called. The United Nations approved your plan to claim a one percent diameter area of each galaxy to call human space.  If our alien trading allies agree as well, they’ll all sign the agreement and vote in a human representative for the Galactic Union.”

“Really?”

Cassie giggled, “The eight aren’t that bad, six of them supported it openly, the last two merely abstained and didn’t veto as you feared.  It’s a good plan, and it means a lot of space for humanity to spread out, and it justifies protecting so much space and alien worlds from aggressive empires.”

“Since when does a good idea matter in politics?”

Jessica laughed.

Cassie smirked, “I don’t know, but humanity has been mostly sane in dealing with interactions in space and other alien societies.”

That was true, we had managed to show a united front outside our own species, despite internal wrangling.

“Okay, I can see that.  We do manage to all work together when dealing with outsiders, for the most part.”

The most part being the obvious, me getting stabbed in the back during our war with the Vrok, which I reminded myself wasn’t quite over yet.

I considered informing Rena and the others, but it’d been three days and we were already scheduled to meet right after lunch.  It could wait.  I’d tell them the news face to face.

With the upgrades fully tested, I spent the rest of the morning filling government orders.  I combined ships in the void to make the hundred manned dreadnoughts and equivalent mass of a thousand platforms, and I started to send them to the hundred and thirty-four systems that’d ordered them, along with the control nanites to be passed to their station.

That last was pretty standard as well, I could deliver them in a probe, and maintain control over it all while it was in transit using the probe itself as a router of sorts.  The delivery probe with the control nanites also carried the upgrade for their colony ships turned command space station.  All stuff I’d had set up and had software for, for years.

My allies got everything I had, except the cloaking technology, singularity weapon, and second-generation energy to matter devices.  Those three were top secret, and I wouldn’t be sharing them anytime soon.

That took me most of the morning.  It was easy enough, but repetitious and time consuming.

“Good afternoon, I trust you’ve all been enjoying the station?”

We were back in the conference room just after lunch.  Rena, Threx, Uvi, and Cirlok were in attendance with me and Cassie.

Rena replied, “We have, and appreciate your hospitality, as well as your willingness to work with us to assure our self-worth.”

I nodded, “My world has agreed with the concept of a limited Intergalactic Union, we have also agreed to consider a small area of each galaxy as proper, complete, and ongoing payment for the protection we offer from the surrounding empires.”

Rena said, “We have met with similar success, though not as complete as we’d hoped.  None of the seventy percent of xenophobic races have replied to our inquiries, but we believe as long as we don’t invade their space that they won’t care what the rest of us do.  Of the last thirty percent who are the active traders among us, five percent have declined but similarly have no concerns if the rest of us do it.  They just don’t want to be a part of it.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are the same races that refused any formalized trade treaties in the past and are obsessed with total independence.

“The last twenty five percent of the interstellar capable races have agreed to the proposal.”

I asked, “That’s about seven thousand races in the fifty galaxies?”

That was going to be one big space station.  My station had a lot more people than that, but it would need over seven thousand separate living areas, as well as a joint council chamber for seven thousand plus delegates and common trading areas.  Assuming several chairs for all that, the council chamber alone would be the size of a small stadium.

Uvi corrected, “Seven thousand two hundred and sixty-four.  We’ll give you the data on them all when the meeting concludes.”

I replied, “Sounds good.  We’ll elect a delegate and prepare.  We need to build a station. We also need to come up with the formal version of the treaty for all the delegates to sign off on as a first act.  Lastly, I can map out and make preliminary claims in all the galaxies to be added to the cornerstone treaty for the Intergalactic Union.  We obviously wouldn’t physically move into any of those systems until ratification.”

We didn’t have a formal treaty yet, just a loose concept based on a meeting.

Rena nodded, “They are the obvious next steps and they’re what we need to complete the treaty organization.  We also need to discuss security of the Gray home world’s system where we’re putting it, and security on the station itself.  But first things first, who will build it?”

“I wouldn’t mind designing it and building its base configuration.  Then each delegate and race can design their private living area for their race.”

Uvi asked, “Base configuration?”

“We’ll all have different ideas of what home should look like.  I envisioned the central part of the station as the delegate meeting area and meeting rooms, as well as a large space for traders to openly meet.  Then off that main part, we’d have spokes of some kind, with seven thousand two hundred and sixty-four discrete living areas where the delegates, their families, and guests can call home while on station.  I could make those living spaces dynamic, as far as room dimensions and facilities, and put them under control of the delegates.

“Each group would have to import their own furniture, art, food, and add on technology, to make it theirs.”

Rena nodded, “That is agreeable.  Who will run the station?  Apportion and charge for trading spaces, security personnel, not to mention the surrounding space.”

Uvi said, “We should all secure our own living spaces and assign a warship each to the system to be commanded by the station administrator.  I’m not sure who should secure the central area, can anyone be truly neutral?”

I came up with a crazy idea, just popped up in my head, and I was fairly sure it was insane.

“An outsider.  I don’t think it should be us either, that would leave the impression we’re in control, when we’re trying to establish the opposite.  We’re just being paid for a service under a formal treaty and trading organization.”

Rena tilted her head, “What are you suggesting, exactly?”

I took a deep breath, and I wondered if I’d been dropped on my head as a baby.

“Well, I can’t think of a more neutral party than someone both outside of our treaty, and an artificial intelligence who would judge without bias.  That’s probably crazy though.  We could just hold an election on it.  Rena, your people are highly trusted by most.”

Rena shook her head, “My people would not want the responsibility.  And that other idea is crazy.”

I smirked.  Just because a thought popped in my head didn’t make it a good idea.

Cassie said, “We could see to our own security.  Our merchants take a leap of faith and trust each time they go to another system to trade.  If there’s an altercation it can be decided between the governments involved.  We can set up an equal amount of spaces for traders on the station, and it would be each race’s delegate that apportioned out that space to their own people.”

Cirlok tapped the table, “I will agree to that, no central administration at all.”

Uvi nodded, “We can try it.”

Rena said, “We have a preliminary treaty, it’s what we showed the other trading worlds.  We’ll give it to you, and you can modify it with the specific areas in question in each galaxy and send it out.  You’re building the station, and while that happens, we can all elect representatives.  Then we’ll meet for the first time and sign it.”

I imagined more problems would come up, but we’d deal with them when they happened.

“Alright, it’ll also be each race’s responsibility to furnish their portion of the central station where their traders can gather or open a storefront.  I can take care of the delegate room myself.  The empty station that will need to be furnished, will be ready in a week or two.  I’ll also have the finished treaty back to you all in a day or two.”

Uvi nodded, “Agreed.  We can meet back up in two weeks then, to discuss all the unforeseen problems that crop up as our people move into the station?”

We all agreed to that, and the meeting broke up.

Cassie snorted when they were all gone, “An A.I.?  You need a vacation.”

I snickered, “I really do.”

Darrell said out of the blue, “I am not unbiased.”

No, he wasn’t.  I’d been thinking of the Atan A.I.s actually, which was crazy.  I escaped the room before Cassie could give me more crap, and we headed back to the control center.

Cassie said, “I’ll look over the treaty, and tell our ambassador to let the U.N. know they need to appoint a delegate.”

I nodded, “I’ve got the station.”

The data for the treaty and for the delegate numbers and races involved was already available as I sat down, and I started to design the station.  The basic design didn’t take long at all.  I created a platform and then stripped all the weapons out of it.  It would have shielding, and it would have everything else, but no weapons at all.

Then I jumped it to the Gray’s home world and started it building.  The delegate room was a decent sized arena, and I split up the rest of the central core with ten storefronts and five meeting rooms for each race which all fit in a couple of square miles of space.  It was all put in a vast room which would have diurnal holograms of day and night, with the Gray’s stars as the night view.

There was a large docking ring on the bottom with fifteen thousand docking points along with cargo and landing bays to facilitate product exchange.  That was all for the merchants.

It also had eight spokes each with nine hundred and eight discrete living areas each.  Each living area had a main suite for the delegate that was two thousand square feet, and ten additional thousand square feet suites, along with a couple of meeting rooms.

The main suite would also have a small control room and command table, with limited influence on their living area to modify the room sizes, suite count, and other needs.  Each discrete living area dedicated to a race would also have a direct dock and single airlock so the delegates could dock their ships and walk right into their living area on the spokes without dealing with the merchant areas.

In case another race joined, one of the spokes could just be built out a little further.

I also created a data mining snippet to look up the size of each race as well as their home planet’s atmospheric makeup and normal gravity, and I applied those values dynamically to the separate living areas.  So, each race would feel at home when in their sections.  The larger races would have proportionally larger doors and hallways as well, and the smaller races the same but the other way.

It was a start, anyway. I was sure there’d be some complaints and requests when the races started to move in, but I tried to make it adjustable and dynamic enough to keep those at a minimum.

All that took me a couple of hours, then I started on our claims in the other seventy-five galaxies.  The database held all the interstellar capable races, and their claimed areas.  It was easy enough to get the computer to do most of the work.  I just specified a diameter sphere area equal to one percent of each galaxy’s full diameter, that wasn’t yet claimed, and would be as far as possible from claimed areas.

The computer spit back out seventy-five areas in the rest of the seventy-six galaxies. Obviously, we already had a claim in the Milky Way, and I passed those along to Cassie to have her add it to the treaty.

The last thing I did was start to build probes. I didn’t want to make them out of my spare fleet, because within those seventy-five new areas there were three hundred and eighty billion star-systems.  I wanted to put a permanent visible probe in every single one of them to guard our claim, and to warn off any interlopers.  They’d be ready by the next day, I just put three hundred and eighty billion of our scout destroyers, out of the two point five trillion we had in the void, on building one each.

“So, anything in the treaty we weren’t expecting?”

Cassie shook her head, “Nope.  It’s exactly what we talked about in the meetings.  The claimed areas in each galaxy as payment for us keeping the seventy-six galaxies safe, and a basic free trade agreement between all members.  As previously discussed, any non-aggression or mutual support treaties will have to be done separately from the Intergalactic Union and directly between worlds.  I’ll get it sent back out as soon as I add the data for the specific claims you just sent me.”

I nodded, “Pass along the station schematics as well, would you?”

I sent that as well, including what areas each race was responsible for in their own private areas and the joint central area.

Cassie said, “Looks good, I can do that.  It’ll be connected to our station?”

“Yes.  I won’t control it day to day like an administrator, and people can use their own security, but the maintenance will be taken care of.  I also want to make sure no one tries to steal the nanites or reverse engineer them.  It also only has defensive shields, but I have a few thousand scout-destroyers keeping an eye on the system right now.”

Jessica said, “That’s good to hear.”

“I think it’s time to call it a day.  The station should be built in five days.  I just need to get the seating and accents for the delegate arena.  They’re not going to want to sit on nanite chairs.”

Cassie smirked, “Probably not.  I’ll come with you.”

Chapter Nineteen

The kitchen was a bit of a mess, but dinner was in the oven already and smelled delicious.  I’d gotten changed, and Cassie, Diana, and Melody were in the kitchen when got back there.  It was clear my daughter had helped Diana get dinner in the oven, just based on the huge mess.  A stark reminder my daughter might be an adult level genius, but she was still just a kid in a lot of ways.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Melody announced, “I’m going to have a little brother!”

I pretended ignorance, “Really?”

Melody made a face, “You already knew,” she accused.

I winked, “Maybe.”

I started to clean up the mess, because clearly that was my job if my wife and daughter cooked.  Melody helped me, while Cassie and Diana sat at the table, the former sipping a glass of wine, and my wife sipping an iced tea.  No alcohol for her, which meant none for me, for at least fifteen months.

Dinner already smelled good. We were having barbequed brisket, corn bread, and homemade fries.  Cassie and I told them about our day, and all we’d gotten accomplished.

Diana replied, “I have most of my teams on theoretical research, now that we’re all caught up.  Both the fun stuff as well more advances in weapons and shield technology.  No more expected breakthroughs for a while though.”

I nodded, “Between taking the tech from the Vrok, the next generation jump drive, and the singularity weapon we’re probably set for a while.”

Diana said, “Exactly, we won’t stop pushing the limits, but right now we only have theories to investigate on paper, nothing practical.  At least not defense wise.  But it was a good day, and Melody’s a big help in the mornings.”

Melody interjected, “I’ve looked at a few of the sites out in the galactic voids, but most of it is very old technology.  Not even close to the level most of our trade allies have, much less than what the Grays had, and never mind our technical level.  But there’s still a lot to go through.”

“That’s about what I expected.”

We moved on from work talk and chatted about day to day things, as dinner finished cooking.

“We need a vacation, once the Intergalactic Union and the remaining Vrok ships are taken care of.  Any ideas, besides spending a week on our beach?”

Diana said, “That actually sounds really nice.  We can’t go anywhere else without pomp and circumstance on Earth, and I doubt our trade allied worlds would be much better that way.”

I nodded, “We could visit one of our unclaimed claimed worlds, check out one of their beaches, or natural wonders.  Far far away from Earth, and politics.”

Melody asked, “Unclaimed claimed?”

I grinned, “Claimed by humans in general, as a star system in human space, but unclaimed by a country and without a colony.”

Melody smiled, “Got it.  That sounds fun.”

Diana said, “Maybe, I’d want it well surveyed for dangers first.”

“We can take the old yacht, land it on the surface, and shield an area.  Use it to sleep at night.  Our sensors should be able to tell if the local fauna and flora are safe or not.”

Diana got up and pulled dinner out of the oven, and I helped her set the table.

Right as we sat down to eat, Darrell said, “My stealth network has found the remaining Vrok ships.”

I snickered, “Perfectly horrible timing.  Where are they?”

Seriously, why didn’t that stuff happen during the workday, ever?  I started to eat as Darrell briefed us.

He said, “They’re in the empire the furthest distance from our border with them.  We have ships on that border of course.  The empire in that galaxy only has one galaxy. They’re the ones with the light blue ships similar in size to the Grays smallest warship class.  Their weapons and shields are comparable to the Grays level of technology as well, so they stand no chance against our or the Vrok’s ships.

“I don’t know much more than that, not even their empire name or what the race calls itself.  Not even what they look like.  I’m monitoring several of their world’s transmissions and I’m in the process of building a translation matrix, but that will take some time.  I only know they’re limited to a single galaxy empire because the three closest surrounding galaxies are part of three much larger empires, which is knowledge based and determined by ship type.  That includes the former Vrok empire by the way, so only two unknown empires.”

“What are they doing?”

He replied, “The Vrok have split up into two thousand fleets of a thousand ships, and they are currently invading two thousand of the local empire’s star systems.  The galactic empire has tens of millions of ships to defend their borders and govern the other races in their domain, but they’re no danger to the Vrok, and they’re currently being annihilated in those systems.”

I grunted, “Thousand ship fleets, they’re probably going to set up two thousand build systems, try to advance their tech, and start making babies.  In a couple of centuries, they’d be strong enough to come back at us again and free their two hundred and eighty-six thousand quarantined worlds.  They messed up, they should’ve sent the fleets farther away, where we wouldn’t see them.  Of course, that’s only thanks to you and your stealth network.  Where are their ships now, are they all in systems?”

Darrell said, “I estimate there is a ninety seven percent chance that speculation is correct.  They are all in systems, and hours away from the FTL line moving toward planets.”

Oh, it was like Christmas morning.  Except the part where I had to go back to work.  I finished off my plate quickly, then gave Diana a kiss.

“I’ll be back in an hour or two.  Leave the dishes, and I’ll clean up the kitchen when I get back.”

Diana asked, “Is this it?”

I nodded, “I think so, they won’t be able to run again, that’s for sure.”

The situation was a bit treacherous as well.  I planned to simply jump in, destroy them, and then jump back to the void with what I had left.  Of course, that military action would be happening in one of the empires we now shared a border with.  They might be grateful I’d assisted them and left without invading myself, but I couldn’t count on it.

Nor could I allow the Vrok to start two thousand ship-building programs.

The stealth network had ships right outside those systems, so it was easy enough tie that into my fleet.  I assigned a hundred thousand ships to each fleet, a hundred scout destroyer ships per enemy ship, which added up to two hundred million scout destroyers altogether.  A mere faction of the two point five trillion I had in the void.

I also manually entered in the local empire ships energy signature and mass as an ally that wasn’t to be fired on under any circumstances, even if they started to fire at me while I was fighting the Vrok.  The last thing I needed was another damned war.

I wanted a vacation instead.

At ten turrets per ship, that was a thousand beams per enemy ship, which would take them out in five to six seconds.  The larger number of smaller ships would do a lot better than platforms. If they hit every one of my ships with ten beams, it’d take them almost a full minute to break through the shields.  If they concentrated fire, they could take out ten percent of my fleet as I annihilated their whole fleet.

The shields on the small ships were just as powerful as shields on a dreadnought, though admittedly there was less surface area which would make a small difference.  Point being, I was sending more than enough, and if I lost a tenth of my ships that was a fair trade.

Once those were assigned, I used the subspace scan data from the stealth network to gain the subspace resonance frequencies for use by my fleet.  The stealth network gathered a hundred disparate natural resonance frequencies a light second ahead of each enemy ship, then passed them on to the jump drives in my ships.

Which all opened a tiny energy connection to those natural resonance fields and created the artificial one through it that was suitable for physical matter jumping.  My ships jumped.

They just stood and waited, then opened fire as soon as the enemy’s ships came in range.  With only a thousand ships, and their ship formations set up with wide gaps to maximize killing the tens of thousands of enemy ships in each star system, there was no way they could do that dancing maneuver either.  Nor could they slow down or turn fast enough, they were locked on their course by pure momentum save slight vector adjustments.

They opened fire as well, and we exchanged subspace beams. I smiled grimly when their ships targeted all of mine evenly, with ten beams each.  Maybe that was automatic, a computer decision driven by point defense priority.  Whatever the reason, it didn’t look like I’d even lose one ship because of it.

Six seconds later they were still almost a full light second apart, so as their shields fell and their self-destructs went off to prevent an enemy from capturing their ship. My ships were quite safe from the ensuing explosion at full weapon’s range distance.

A plan finally went without any surprises or it turning sour. It was an annihilation, and the same thing happened in all two thousand systems, like clockwork.

A lot of the local empire ships had been destroyed, but there were still tens of thousands of them left in the deep inner system near their planets.  They set a heading toward us, but I initiated a jump and left their space far behind.

The Vrok were finally fully quarantined, and no longer a threat.  They did have a stealth network, but without physical access to those hidden probes they couldn’t weaponize them.  Nor could they start building ships, being stuck on their planets.

We had physical probes in all two hundred and eighty-six thousand of their planetary systems to ensure it, as well as in all their three million food worlds. The races there could start growing in technology as well.  Not to mention the stealth network and Darrell had an eye on them too.  The Vrok just weren’t a threat anymore, as long as we didn’t drop the ball in the future, and we kept an eye on them.

It was a huge relief, and weight off my shoulders.  Of course, there were twelve empires around the new seventy-six galaxies that Earth protected, on fourteen borders.  The universe was a dangerous place, but without a current war I felt like we could get back to business as usual.

We’d have to keep an eye on them, or they’d start building ships on the surface.  But that level of vigilance wouldn’t be hard, not when the computer would flag any suspicious activity for us.

I just hoped the new neighbors weren’t too upset we’d violated their sovereignty, to take out the last of the Vrok fleets.

It’d taken less than a half hour, all said, and I headed back home where I belonged.

Chapter Twenty

“The war is over.”

Diana smirked, “You said that already.”

I grinned, “What I mean is, I just have a few things to wrap up tomorrow morning.  It’s going to be a while before the station is ready and the delegates start to move into it.  At least a week.  Seems like a good time to go on vacation, before the next unseen emergency falls on our heads.”

Diana snickered, “Alright, I think I can get my scientists ready for me to be gone that long, in the morning.”

“We’ll pick out a destination at lunch and go.”

She said, “You should let Jayna and Jessica know now, the former to join us and the latter to make security arrangements.  Cassie?”

Melody looked at the vampire hopefully.

Cassie replied, “Wouldn’t miss it.”

Darrell said, “Your celebration may be premature.  We should find a way to remove the Vrok’s stealth probe network that no doubt still lurks between the stars.”

I frowned, “They can’t get up to too much mischief with unmanned probes, and they’ll all eventually break down.  What are you thinking?”

Darrell replied, “They all have non-paired quantum communications devices, and we have to assume they can update the software remotely.  Their sensors may not be up to detecting quantum resonance fields, but with an update their communicators will be able to perform the function of creating a remote resonance beacon, as ours did in the first generation jump devices.

“They have the communicators, they came up with a jump jammer, we have to assume they’re working on creating a jump drive.  A drive that would not be dependent on the FTL line.”

My mind raced through those possibilities, and it was likely they were working on a jump drive.

“You’re thinking they’ll send those cloaked probes far and wide, far beyond where our stealth network will eventually reach at a hundred million light years, to look for a likely target.  If they start a build program on their planets beneath the surface, they can make a few thousand ships and jump them, then start a larger build program after conquering another species farther away.

“All without us seeing a damned thing.”

Diana nodded, “That’s what we’d do if we were them, there’re always options.”

Darrell replied, “Exactly, but if we take out the stealth probe network then them building a jump drive or ships underground won’t help them.  Without the probes to feed them a jump field on the other end they’ll be stuck underground.”

Melody snorted, “Not likely, if we counter that plan then they’ll keep working at it, and eventually figure out what I did, and they’ll use the predictive natural resonance of the quantum fabric to jump to the void near a galaxy hundreds or even thousands of millions of light years away.  It’ll just delay them again, as they send out newly built stealth probes to search the galaxies that far away for an easy target and food source.”

I sighed, “Maybe?  But where do we draw the line at paranoia past reasoning, sounds like we’re working up toward an argument to commit genocide.  They’ll always be a danger, and the universe is dangerous and we have to take some risks to keep our souls.”

Cassie said, “Agreed, we should take out the stealth network as suggested, maybe even knock out their technological infrastructure to make it harder for them, and we’ll continue to keep an eye on them.  That level of worry that they’ll regain power and come after us again will lead us nowhere good.  We’ll be advancing too, and if they figure something out then we’ll deal with them again, in the future.”

Melody looked horrified, “That’s not what I meant at all.  Just that we need to keep an eye on them.”

I winked at her.

“Alright, we never did get their history either, or surrounding enemies.  Darrell, can you get a cloaked probe to their surface without them seeing it?  I imagine I could find quantum connections to their stealth probe network from one of their government buildings.”

Darrell said, “Perhaps one the size of an insect, with little more than a quantum connection inside of it.  Even a probe of my size would be picked up from their surface sensors as it disturbed the air around it.”

Diana asked, “You’ll use your magic to order a self-destruct?”

I tilted my head, “No, something sneakier, I think.  I’ll disperse the nanites into one of their data centers, the same way I created a hack into the internet on one of the communications satellites in Earth’s orbit way back in the beginning, when all this started.  If I just order a self-destruct it’ll work, but it’ll also betray that we’d penetrated their systems somehow.

“Instead, I’ll get their stealth ship locations and send ships to destroy them.  They’ll be forced to believe our scanning tech is far beyond theirs and we found a way to see through a cloak.  Then Darrell will have that tap to keep an eye on what they’re doing, specifically their scientists and future planning.”

Cassie teased, “You have good ideas on occasion.”

I waved that away with a grand gesture.

Darrell said, “I can have it in place by morning.”

I smirked, “Good, then we can still go on vacation after lunch.  My morning will just be a little busier than I expected.”

Diana smiled.

“Thanks, Darrell, for pointing out the flaw in my thinking.  I was just… mentally done with it.  I don’t like killing, even the enemy, and we killed a whole lot of the Vrok the last few days.”

Darrell said, “Fortunately, we can truly end the war without taking even one more life.”

“So… movie night?  It’s my turn to pick, right?”

My daughter pouted at me, and I didn’t have a chance…

Chapter Twenty-One

The next morning the first thing I did was claim all our new space.  Three hundred and eighty billion probes each went to one of Earth’s star systems in the seventy-five galaxies, since we already had that in the seventy sixth.  Most of those of course were just empty systems, or ones with dead planets and tons of natural resources that were ours.

Still, there were five hundred and fourteen thousand living worlds in the one percent of the seventy-six galaxies that belonged to us.  Calling this long-range planning was quite an understatement.  Of those almost two thirds of them were ready to move in, with a supporting biosphere, the rest would have to be terraformed for our use.

The only sticky part was there were also just under fifteen thousand living worlds with lifeforms that had advanced to sentience or near sentience.  Those worlds would be protected and watched, but what exactly would happen when they made it into space and wanted to expand.

A problem for another day, and another person, because it wasn’t likely to happen in my lifetime.

All the probes around living worlds not already occupied started to run scans and even enter the atmosphere to check for inimical life from viruses to animal predators.  The former wasn’t that much of a concern, the Threx’s medical knowledge made viruses a non-threat. It’d be easy to be inoculated to live on a new world.  We just had to check for it.

I imagined the database of living worlds would be fully up to date in a week, on all that stuff.

It wasn’t official yet, but it wouldn’t be long before those worlds were acknowledged as ours, and we had an Intergalactic Union spanning seventy-six galaxies.  Though in truth, we only needed that for our claims in the other forty-nine of the original fifty galaxies.  Even if the union fell through, the other spaces in the twenty-six galaxies were already ours.

That was my original task and plan for that morning, before we left on vacation.  With it finished, I turned to the unpleasant task.

“I’ll be back in a minute.”

My awareness and magic sunk into the tech and raced down the quantum links to the stealth network and then to the quantum linked insect sized probe on the Vrok homeworld.  I sent out my magic from that point, to feel the technology around me, and found a workstation just fifty feet away.

It took me about a half an hour, to slowly and carefully trace the connections to their main datacenter in their government buildings, and I directed the probe that way.  When I made it into the room, the probe split up into pieces so small they couldn’t be seen, and each infiltrated sperate hardware systems.

I used my magic to read the hardware, and then successfully integrated them into the computer systems to act as a silent tap.  The nanites themselves couldn’t actively work and search for data without being noticed, but they would enable Darrell to passively monitor every order and conversation sent over the systems.

Which meant once I’d pulled out and had taken out their stealth ships, the Vrok could never plot something that would take us by surprise.

My magic on the other hand could do more than just monitor, and I started to pull all the data I could reach and load it up on our computer systems in one large database, which included the current spatial coordinates of all their cloaked probes.  It was also their history, what they knew of the surrounding empires, their technology and theories, all sorts of interesting stuff.

Like the galaxy empire they tried to invade was called the Bavoi.  The Bavoi weren’t bad sorts as far as I could tell, predators like the rest of us, but there were other races in their galaxy that were left alone.

The Vrok had a lot more stealth probes than I’d thought, several hundred million of them, outside every system with an FTL capable race.  Not only in our fifty galaxies, but inside all the empires around all their former borders.  Which, made my idea a little sticky.  I’d be invading eight separate empires including our trade ally, the Atans. Not to mention jumping right outside the systems of the xenophobic species in our fifty galaxies, to destroy them.

That just sounded like a really bad idea, sure to piss off a whole lot of beings.

I pulled my magic back, and I filled in Cassie and Jessica in on the problem, and what I’d discovered.

“Any ideas?  I don’t think we can jump there, blow them up with a subspace energy beam, and jump away.  There’d be too many questions.”

Cassie said, “You could always just order a self-destruct.”

I nodded, “That’d give them a reason to run molecular scans to look for system penetration.  They’d find the nanites.”

Cassie shrugged, “Self-destruct those too, then send new ones in a couple of weeks.”

Jessica said, “You could use the singularity weapon.  That would freak the Vrok out even more, when all their probes magically disappear at once without an enemy ship in sight, and they’ll have no way to send a ship to check what happened.  It will also prevent those empires and local races from even noticing anything happened, or even that they were being spied upon.  No explosion, just no more probes as they’re crushed into a microscopic ball of equal mass and destroyed.

“Then go back in the Vrok systems and make sure you got all of them, and none of them moved.”

“Both ideas have merit, but what if one of the races notices a split-second singularity right outside their home world’s star system.”

Jessica said, “That seems unlikely according to the data you sent me.  The probes are outside of the star systems.”

I nodded, but I checked the incoming data on all the Vrok probes via the tap.  Jessica was right, the spied upon systems had no ships close enough, in normal space, to scan anything going on out that far.  Well, not actively, obviously passive sensors would work at that distance, but passive sensors wouldn’t pick up a strange gravity event from so far away.

Cassie said, “I agree, Jessica’s idea is better than mine.”

I suddenly got really annoyed at the eight in that moment. I could’ve used some advice, but I couldn’t trust them any longer.

Whatever, I started to set it up.  It took several steps to get it ready, but I assigned just one of the scout-destroyers per probe, I had more than enough for a hundred million stealth probes.  They were all outside systems as well, which meant I could use predictive resonance as the target to get close enough to create an artificial resonance field right next to the probes.

I launched the attack, and watched the tap in the Vrok’s systems, as every bit of data streaming in from their stealth probes just stopped.  There was no doubt at all I’d gotten them all.

The war was over, but I supposed the cold war had just started.  We’d monitor them, and we’d watch what they were doing.  There wasn’t much else we could do.

At least we didn’t have to worry about their three million feeding worlds.  They had no permanent bases or presences on those worlds.  They’d just sent ships to collect.

That part of things felt good, freeing those worlds from that horror, they’d figure it out eventually, and start developing more advanced technologies.

Jessica said, “That weapon is a little terrifying, isn’t it?”

I blew out a breath, “You could say that.  We could destroy whole systems with it, or at least the suns.  It has limits to prevent that of course, but yeah.  Fortunately, we’re protected from that, if another race with less ideals and morals makes the same discoveries.”

Which, unfortunately, was rather likely.  I had no idea what I’d been giving away when we freely shared the plans for the quantum communicator with all the races in the fifty galaxies.  In the beginning I’d thought it was just the materials needed to create a viable and safe fusion reactor, but it was that communication technology that eventually led Diana to inventing jump drives and the singularity weapon.

It was just a matter of time, and it was why we had to keep advancing.  I was actually kind of surprised none of them had figured it out yet. Especially the Arnis who were quite advanced though still far behind us at the moment.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The sky was a pink tinged blue, and the air crisp and clean with the scents of something like pine.  We were at the top of a mountain, with nothing but snowcapped peaks around us.  The mountain was over fifteen thousand feet high, and the temperature just below freezing.

There were no large predator animals on this world, just smaller predators about the size of a fox or smaller, with lots of herbivores.  The world also had a larger oxygen content and a slightly thicker atmosphere.  It was energizing, but not enough to cause the bends when we went home.

I and the others had on Arnis winter wear for comfort. I was toasty, but not too hot, and it would automatically adjust if we started to sweat and overheat from activity.

Diana asked, “I gave up the beach for this snow?”

I smirked, and Melody said, “But you love skiing, mom.”

Yep, we all had skis strapped to our feet, and enough nanites around us for a shield and gravity field in case we wiped out hard.  The mountain looked pretty steep.

Diana sighed, “I do, and I’m having fun, but… our beach.”

Melody said, “Is so boring,” and she dragged out the word boring.

Cassie snickered, “I love the eighty percent gravity compared to our world, did you see the air I got jumping those moguls our last time down?”

“Well, the yacht and hot tub are at the bottom of the mountain, and we can cheat and make hot chocolate with mini-marshmallows.  How about we spend the last two days at the beach, but one on this world.”

It was like Earth but better.  The lower gravity and higher oxygen content lent a feeling of great health and strength, and I’d swear my brain was getting more endorphins than usual.  The mountains were incredibly high, and like earth there was a nice tropical area further south.

Diana nodded, “Okay, I can go for that.  I don’t mean to be a stick in the mud either. I’m having a blast skiing again. I haven’t done so since college.”

“Speaking of skiing.”

I pushed forward with the poles, and I went off the side.  The slope of the mountain, I’d compare it to a single black diamond slope in the Poconos, but about ten times longer.

Melody was picking it up pretty quickly, but the belt of nanites around her waist made me feel better about the danger of the situation.

Cassie of course, as a vampire, had the reflexes and grace of an Olympic skier at the top of their game, and Jessica being a shifter wasn’t all that far behind.

We’d been on the planet for a day and half so far.  This would be our last trip downslope before we got on the landed space yacht and relaxed and warmed up over dinner.  It was in one of the twenty-six galaxies, in our space, and it was just about the most perfect planet out of the five hundred thousand and fourteen available.  In my opinion.

Yeah, my two hundred thousand living world estimate for ready to move in worlds had been way off.

I was flying down the slope, when my sister Jayna got incredibly and dangerously close, and gave me a shove.  I gave her a dark glare and a wild laugh as I tumbled into the snow. The shields kept me from harm and the gravity field stopped my wild flight rolling down the mountain.

It was so on, as I got back on my skis and raced after her.

That was about when Jessica and Cassie blew right by, my wife in their wake.  Brock and Melody were still behind, they were cutting back and forth pretty hard, so they weren’t going so fast.

I never caught my sister after that though, she was waiting at the bottom in front of the ship with a smirk on her face.  I may have used my telekinesis to hit the back of her knees, and a snicker escaped my lips as I got on the ship as she fell back into the snow with an outraged cry.

I winced guiltily as my daughter yelled, “Dad!  No abusing your magic!”

Right.  I maintain that revenge is not an abuse, but no one else seemed to buy it, except maybe Brock my pre-teen nephew.  Which told me I was probably wrong.

It wasn’t too long after that the sun disappeared over the horizon, as we sat warm and toasty in the ship and enjoyed dinner.  We’d relax our sore muscles in the hot tub after.

“I’m almost tempted to claim this world, but without a colony I doubt it would stick.  We can’t just claim it for our family, especially when we’ll still be living and working in orbit of Earth.”

Jayna tilted her head, “You should claim it, and we’ll set up skiing mountain resorts and beach resorts.  Bill it as the best skiing and parasailing in the universe, or something.  It could be part of Astraeus.”

Diana nodded, “We could set up quantum jump chambers.  People on Earth could book one of the resorts, and fly up to the station in a shuttle, then access one of the resorts right from the station.”

There’d need to be chambers, simply because we couldn’t quantum jump directly into atmosphere. The target chamber would need to be a pure vacuum before the people and air around them was jumped to it.

“Jump ships would be just as fast.”

Diana said, “True, but it would reinforce this world is ours and an extension of the station.  More importantly, it would be an easy way for our citizens to take a planet side vacation in this place, without booking or paying for a ship.  Just walk into a booth, and then walk out the other side on this world.

“Also, no cities, or local manufacturing.  Part of the lure will be it’s an untouched resort world.  We’ll build resorts, but we’ll import everything to prevent any kind of pollution.  We’ll even come up with pure waste management, so that doesn’t pollute the ground.”

Jayna grinned, “What she said.”

I replied, “You don’t have to convince me, since I was already looking for a reason to do it.  Of course, we’ll want to reserve a government beach, and this mountain, as our own.  Otherwise it would be a pain for us to vacation here again without the pomp.”

Cassie nodded, “There’s certainly enough mountains and tropical beaches on this world.  I’ll submit a claim tonight through my AR interface.”

Jayna said, “And I’ll get with our resort contacts, so they can start brainstorming and be ready with something by the time I get back.  We’ll probably need to build small resort towns, for the people that work here.”

Diana shook her head, “No, they’ll live in Astraeus, in the city, and commute to work every day.  The station is our country, and it keeps us near Earth. We should leave this place as untouched as possible.  Just resort hotels near the beaches and ski chalets in the mountains.  Just like we’ve been using artificial gravity to get to the top of the mountains, we could do something similar for the tourists.  We won’t even have ugly ski lifts.”

Jayna replied, “Okay, I can see that.  What if they want to live on the planet, technically this world will be an extension of our country.”

I said, “Tough.”

Melody giggled.

I shrugged, “They applied to live in our country and on our space station.  We could keep the pollution down to almost nothing with modern technology, but them living in the space station was part of that deal.  If they want to live on a planet they can leave and go to a colony, or back to Earth.  There’s a lot of advantages to it, the station is safer than a planet, and mobile if needed.”

Jayna replied, “Sure, out of opportunity.  We got good people that couldn’t find jobs and were perhaps a little desperate.  That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t rather live under the stars and feel the sun on their skin every day.”

Jessica said, “That’s true, most of the security force on the station are ex-military that found it hard to find jobs.  Most of our citizens were out of work people looking to start a new life, and of course the station has no taxes.”

Carmine nodded in agreement, “That’s why I applied.”

I frowned, “Are you suggesting we abandon Earth and we all move here?”

Jayna shook her head, “No, you’re more secure on the station, and you need to be at Earth to act as a foil to other countries that might get delusions of grandeur.  But our citizens will want the option. I just don’t think we should close our minds to it.  Both the planet and the station will continue to grow.  We could keep our colony part far from the resorts to maintain the illusion of an untouched world.  With the newest tech, we could also keep the planet pristine and unsullied.”

Cassie said, “A planet makes things a lot more complicated.  I’m inclined to agree with Scott.  Maybe once the station reaches full population, fifty million instead of two, we can reassess?  There’d also be an appeal to a world filled with nothing but resorts and otherwise untouched and unsullied.  We could get tourists from all the colonies, not just Earth, or our own people taking vacation.

“We can’t make a viable colony by moving a few people at a time anyway.  We’d need to build an infrastructure, and have a great number of people move in.”

Diana nodded, “That’s what I was thinking. I think you’re outvoted this time, Jayna.  I agree with Cassie and Scott.”

Jayna sighed, “Fine, but it will come up.”

I nodded, “Maybe we will in the future when we’re close to full occupancy of the station, if there’s enough interest by all our citizens, but for now if they want the open sky they can go somewhere else, pay taxes, and find new jobs.  We’re not forcing anyone to stay on the station.  Making it a resort world is enough, for now.  Our citizens can always come here for free, on their days off, or just for dinner at one of the resorts.”

Jayna replied, “That will help.”

“Do you hate the station that much?  I thought you were happy there.”

Jayna sighed, and shook her head, “That’s not it at all.  I’d rather have a sky over my head, yes.  But I’m also very happy with my life and family.  It’s just, if I had the choice to, I’d do the opposite, live here and commute to the station for work.”

I nodded, “Well, we can always be hypocrites and cheat.  I imagine we’ll build a small ski chalet on this mountain, and maybe a beach house on our beach.  For when we take our vacations on our government land, which will be restricted for all but us.  They’ll have private jump chambers as well, located in our area of the station to get here.  You could always spend several nights a week in one of those places, if you wanted.”

Jayna shook her head, “I want to live in a community, not under the stars in total privacy, but I appreciate the thought, and that will be a nice option for some nights after work.  Or even just a walk during the day to feel the sun on my face for a few minutes.  That really is enough for me, don’t stress it.”

Well, life wasn’t perfect.  She’d survive, as would the rest of us.  Being related to the leader of a country, for life, limited some of her choices.  She couldn’t risk living anywhere else, or she’d be targeted for kidnapping to put pressure on me.

I changed the subject.

“I think we’ve about exhausted the idea for now, we’ll set up the resorts and plug it as a pristine world with perfect skiing, boating and parasailing, anything else is on hold.

“Let’s finish dinner and get in the hot tub, my legs are screaming at me.”

Cassie smirked, “Really? I feel great.”

Melody piped up, “Me too!”

Damned vampires… and children with endless energy.

We had a blast for the rest of our vacation, spent two more days skiing, then a few days down at the beach.  The resort idea, and other work would wait until we were ready to get back to it.  We all had a great time, the new world was amazing, an untouched paradise.

Thanks to a certain A.I. and vampire, my wife and I were able to get some private time as well.  I felt quite rejuvenated and ready to get back to it at the end of the week.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The command center was peaceful as I grabbed a coffee and started to wake up for the day.  Apparently, Cassie had just been waiting for my brain to be engaged.

Cassie said, “We have an issue with the States, Russia, and China.  They’re all throwing a stink in the press, about you not selling any of your new ships to the eight, and their colonies.”

“Is it a problem?  Perceptually.”

Cassie nodded, “It’s a backhanded attack.  On one side they’re saying you have every right to run your military as you see fit, and not coordinate with them anymore.  They’re ceding that, but they’re arguing the lack of sales is out of pure spite, since any ships you sell them would be ineffective against human worlds or any human built ships.  They’re accusing you of putting their colony’s in danger from an attack by another empire, because of a misunderstanding.”

I frowned, “What do you think, am I being petty about it?”

Cassie shrugged, “Maybe a little, but their ships aren’t exactly weak, and they still have your space stations that can crank out an endless amount of mini-platforms into their systems.  They just want the upgrades, stronger shields, weapons, as well as the new subspace energy beam weapon.  Not to mention the new scout-destroyer and second generation jump drives.  The only thing we held back from the other countries was the singularity weapon.”

“And stealth configurations and the second-generation energy to matter device with molecular bonding, but I take your point.  Did Russia figure out the nanite power systems yet?”

Jessica nodded, “Yes, they’re cranking out ships now without a fusion reactor, and they have the same energy signature as our ships.  I imagine our other three competitors in ship building will as well, as soon as they manage to steal it.”

I snickered.

“Should I cave?  I kind of don’t want to, but I feel petty about it too.”

Cassie nodded, “But charge them through the nose, maybe charge double what you charged the other countries.  Built in restitution for their manipulations.”

I nodded, “Fine, do that.  Anything else going on?”

Jessica said, “I’ve been reviewing the other five new empires on our new borders.  Six with the Bavoi.  They’re all far behind us according to the Vrok’s database, a match for the Grays and the Vrok’s old technology, but no threat to us.  They’re also no worse than the other empires that were already around us.  Clearly, they’ve stopped developing, and their societies aren’t fighting to advance.  Stagnation similar to the Grays that way, they’re lost in their own decadence.

“We don’t have anything on the empires around them yet, though Darrell’s been busy while we were on vacation.  He has stealth probes out to forty million light years now and growing.  Eventually, we’ll be able to gauge them as threats.”

I replied, “I noticed that this morning.”

Cassie said, “I made the offer, we’ll see if they bite.”

“The eight?  Good.  The new stealth network was a good idea though I’m uncomfortable with it.  We can’t gauge threats to us without it, and if we’d had it in the past the Vrok wouldn’t have come so close to beating us if we’d had over ten years to match their technology.”

Cassie said, “But?”

I smirked, “But it’s also a temptation.  It was a lot easier to just worry about our borders when we couldn’t see everything going on around us.  Space is a violent place, and guarding our outer galaxy borders, and our internal ones, made it easier to ignore the fights between the civilizations inside the fifty galaxies.

“Not to mention the bugs, the Stolthrim.  They’re expanding again, did you notice?  Not toward us, or the Atans, but in a different direction toward a non-bordering empire to ours, and the fighting is fierce.”

Jessica replied, “Yeah, I’m surprised you’re not already stomping them.”

I nodded, “They’re horrible.  They commit genocide and terraform at the same time.  It’s kind of a no-brainer, you wouldn’t mind if I interceded there, would you, Cass?”

Cassie shook her head, “No, they’re a special case, and deserve to be quarantined.  It’s bad enough they have as many galaxies scoured of life as they do now.”

I said, “Point being, other battles between races aren’t so clear cut.  It’s a temptation to resist, when there is no obviously wrong party, and it’s just two predators that are simply at war.  Two sides, where either side isn’t all that great.  It’s tempting to step in and put a stop to it.

“It goes back to the we can’t save everyone argument.  Defending our own interests and those we decide are worthy of a mutual defense treaty has to be enough.  But… there’s a lot of death going on out there, and we could make a difference.  But where would we stop, in an infinite universe?”

Cassie nodded, “Don’t look at the data then, just what Darrell flags for attention.  Just us, our allies, and keep the bugs contained.  Anything more than that and you’re in danger of building an empire of our own.  Humans can be noble, and you are, but humans can also be as bad or worse than anything else we’ve seen out there when power goes to their heads.  Power causes corruption, if we want to stay on the side of good, we must resist exercising that power over others, let them make their own mistakes, and fight their own battles.  In short, we can’t be trusted to make moral decisions for other wars that aren’t our business, and we shouldn’t be suppressing anyone’s right to choice unless they attack ours.”

“Except for the bugs.”

Cassie replied, “Yes.  There’s an exception to every rule, and the bugs definitely qualify.”

That’s what I’d thought.  They had three more expansion fleets of fifty billion in three galaxies.  I assigned a scout destroyer to each one dynamically, then attacked.  They quantum jumped to outside the star systems their fleets were in, then using subspace scanners they quantum jumped directly to the ship and opened fire with subspace beams that went through their shields like they weren’t even there.

It was more of a slaughter than last time, with no travel time, and in less than half a minute, I’d killed a hundred and fifty billion ships, and god only knows how many billions of Stolthrim.  A second after that the ships returned to the void in our galaxy, leaving a confused defending empire to wonder what the hell had just happened.

Bet they were pissing their pants, wondering if they were next.  I knew I would be, in their position.

It was honestly a little terrifying how strong our technology had gotten, and I hadn’t used our most devastating weapon.  Still, I was sure there was someone out there stronger than us, since there always was. We’d continue to move forward, but it was clear whoever that was they weren’t within fifty million light years of us. Odds were that they weren’t within a hundred either, which would be the full extent of our stealth network.

I’d never felt safer, or more disturbed.

I sighed, “They managed to destroy several thousand worlds in those galaxies, before Darrell had his stealth network built out that far.  It won’t happen again though, we’ll keep an eye on them and destroy any expansion fleets before they can leave their territory, next time.  Which should be at least another twelve to thirteen years from now if they continue breeding and building at the same rate.”

I got started on my workday then.  The Interstellar Union space station was built, or at least my part of it was, but as the delegates arrived and started to move in I got a few requests.  I’d mostly covered all the bases, and I’d made things variable enough to avoid most of that kind of stuff, but there were always exceptions, especially given over seven thousand races being involved.

Some races needed heat lamps, not just light, and some needed much bigger rooms, but less suites.  A lot of small things like that, about twenty of them which took me a minute or so each to take care of.  Nothing major, except for the difference in culture and physical requirements for health reasons.

The normal day to day operations slowly got back to normal over the next week.  The war was over, so I could return to concentrating on custom ship building, other inventions for commercial sales, and of course spending time with my family at night without interruption.

Life really was good.

My wife and daughter worked on new sciences, and improving the current ones, along with Diana’s staff of scientists.  It might be a while for another breakthrough, without a race to steal them from anyway, but their most amazing inventions and passions weren’t weapons and defensive in nature.

That part was just to secure our lives and future, it was the rest of it that made life worth living.

Our claim for the world went through, and we already had several resort companies scrambling for a spot on the new world, including the seven resorts on station.

The next week, the Interstellar Union became a reality, and humanity celebrated it as all those claimed areas became ours in truth.  We had the space to expand for the next hundred millennia, perhaps more.  It would take time grow the merchant part of the station, but I was sure that would come in time, as worlds came to trade there with several others at once.

I wasn’t sure what would come next, I just hoped we were done with the violence and wars for now.  My daughter was about to be a teen, and I had a son on the way.  We had strong technology, and after thirteen years we’d gained full independence and respect from the other world powers.

Life was good, and the future looked promising.

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 second book in the second arc of the Technomancer series which will have another three novels in total.  Four through six.  The final book in the series will be out next month, and that will be it for Scott’s story in this universe.

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

Scott was embroiled in a new war, one against an empire that had near parity with weapons and shields.  The first battle had been a draw, he’d managed to get the enemy to retreat, and now it was an arm’s race of sorts.

If that wasn’t bad enough, he had to deal with the political fallout of being manipulated by the eight, and blaze his own trail, which would be both easier and harder.

He’d need to work hard to survive, and he couldn’t do it alone.

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.