Starship Engineer

Chapter 126 Gaians

We opened comms with the ice planet and announced that we were a trader from human space. The human colony took it upon themselves to contact us directly. Haily was dealing with the reps from the human colony while I was working with Elias to get our docking permissions. Suruchi was already at a bridge station with Vickey, working on planning our trade. This system’s biggest asset was water and the orbital farms, so I wasn’t sure if we would make much profit. It was not essential, as we had an abundance of Alliance credits.

When the docking berth was confirmed, I switched my attention to Haily, who relayed what the local human colony had told her. The colony was part of a religious colonization fleet. The religion was called the Church of Gaia. Their ship’s subspace drive failed, and they made it to this system and were allowed to land and establish a colony. The rest of the colonization fleet was unaware they had drive difficulties as you couldn’t use comms in subspace. The current elected leader of the colony wanted to come on board the Void Phoenix for specific trade talks.

When we docked at one of the larger orbiting farms, I dispatched a shuttle to the surface to pick up Senate Leader Alfonso Pander. When the shuttle returned, the leader had an assistant with him, and we moved to the conference room with Suruchi and Kara while Cori had her bots serve us dinner. I patiently listened to the colony’s history while waiting for Alfonso’s response. Unsurprisingly, only having water as a commodity meant the human colony was fairly poor. What he wanted, and presented to me with a smile on his face, was for us to transport 120 of the brightest young adults back to the industrial planet in the Alliance. The young people would seek employment and return most of their income to the colony.

It took a while to realize that their religious indoctrination had everyone recognize that the Church of Gaia controlled every aspect of everyone’s lives. I immediately declined, but Senator Alfonso tried to convince me by saying the colony was limited to 100,000 individuals and they were already overpopulated. They either needed an influx of funds to expand the colony or send people away; this solution addressed both. I still declined to serve as a transport for the young men and women. It brought back nightmares of my time being sent to the Naval Academy to spend decades serving on a ship, paying off debt I did not accumulate.

Suruchi and Kara talked to me after the Senator left. Suruchi wanted to take the contract, and Kara wanted me to take the contract but to free the young people. I shook my head, knowing after a lifetime, they would not be able to break their training. We shelved the discussion and focused on trading, refueling, and resupplying.

I ordered to start manufacturing the new subspace emitters for the Void Phoenix and to install them. If we could get a fivefold increase in speed, we might be able to catch my brother in less than two months. Then, this foray into unknown space would come to an end.

Most of my time in port would be spent doing my captain’s duties. This was mostly working with Abby, Buckie, Kara, and Francis on operation liberate. I had decided not to negotiate or even ask my brother if he wanted to flee. Instead, I planned to use my Marines to sneak in and extract my brother. We had a complete list of Union personnel on the ships, and I knew Nila was still in the fleet. I planned to save her as well. Our current discussion was who else on the lists we should make an effort to retrieve and possibly convince to join our crew.

It might sound all well and good, but locating and creating an operation to retrieve everyone at the same time. Our list currently has forty-two people. Twenty-nine marines, nine engineers, and three naval officers. Of course, the list was created based on interactions our crew had with these Union people years ago. They could have changed drastically during the war and the exodus.

In the end, we decided we were going to pose as an Alliance trade ship with ties to the Church of Gaia when we located the Union fleet. Since the senator admitted they had next to no resources, they would have no agents to contradict our claims. We would then use Julie’s hacking ability to hack and locate the people we were looking for and delve into their personnel files to see if we still wanted to try and extract them.

We were going to use all four remaining shuttles for the operation. The two Brotherhood shuttles had their own stealth, but we were working on adding the phasing technology to LUX shuttle and my old Union shuttle. That old Union shuttle still had the test emitters on it, so they could be repurposed for phasing out from real space. That meant we would have four teams of Marines.

While the Void Phoneix and the shuttles were being prepped, I was working with the Squirrel and my engineers to miniaturize the solid-state holograms. Miniaturization was a lot easier than I thought—powering the device was the issue. The heavy Gorilla suits had enough surplus power to handle the emitters, but the other suits did not. Even with the Gorilla suit powering the hologram at full capacity, the image had the integrity of a balloon. Easily popped and reassembled in a split second. Bob ‘Tech’ was working on adding a ventriloquism unit to the suits to give the illusions more believability.

The project that was meant to give me some time away from Celeste did the opposite, and Bob ‘Tech’ thought it was fun to create holograms of fantasy creatures to entertain the kids on the ship. Once the base unit was created, all he had to do was tap the base code from the Sword and Sorcery game. Dragons, unicorns, trolls, elves, fairies, and griffons….were now commonplace in the lab. All were easily slain with a stab from a small magnetic drill.

In the twelve days, we were in the system, Suruchi kept trying to get me to reconsider taking on the passengers. The Senator was paying us almost nothing for the tickets, so it didn’t make any sense to haul them to our next destination. At first, I had thought Suruchi was itching to have passengers again, but her reason was vastly different. She wanted to help spread humanity. One hundred and twenty humans could grow their numbers over time. She even had a plan to help the ice world colony.

Her idea was to buy the older ships in the graveyard that were scheduled to be scrapped by the Alliance in the ring’s forges. As long as it could get the old ships here in subspace, each old cruiser could land and help the colony expand by five hundred people. She was going to use all her savings to buy one of the cruisers herself. When I asked why, she admitted the Senator had persuaded her. She wanted to be part of something bigger than herself.

I didn’t want to become involved, and if Suruchi wanted to throw away her credits, that was her decision. She did break me to take 100 passengers in the end. With our new emitters, I planned to make a seven-day subspace trip, traveling the equivalent of thirty-four days prior. If all our data was correct, the Union fleet would have stopped in this next Alliance system to resupply. It was the Homeworld of the Glyth and was one of the industrial centers of the Alliance. We would alter our timestamps and get there long before the Alliance communicated our dealings on the ringworld. The system was called Marquis when translated.

When the Gaians were boarding, I was shocked by how young they were. I had flashbacks again to my academy time, as they were mostly young teenagers. They were going to be packed onto the luxury deck with our other guests, the Union personnel we liberated but failed to pass our crew requirements.

I did something slightly deceitful. I gave the Gaians access to the VR systems and asked Doc and Julie to use their time in VR to complete psych evaluations. I wasn’t even sure if they would use the system as the Alliance didn’t have VR since it required AIs to run. Abby was actually happy since the extra passengers forced her Marines to be more diligent. They were suffering from boredom, and VR training wasn’t enough for them.

I checked the manifests and found that Suruchi had done an excellent job in making a profit, even though we didn’t need it at this juncture. She had even sent funds to purchase one of the old cruisers as promised. I just shook my head. I was beginning to like the Alliance, as Edmund and Francis had not found any attempts to track our ship or put spies on board. Well, besides the Glyth scientists, but we were fairly certain that was more of an individual effort.

On our way out of the system, I needed to decide if the Marines would be allowed to fraternize with the passengers. The Gaians were sixteen to eighteen years old, while my Marines were all in their late twenties or older. I asked Gwen for advice, and she said socialization with people outside of our crew was healthy. I told Abby it was ok but to keep a close eye. I remembered how impressionable others were at that age.

The hospitality staff treated the passengers like normal luxury passengers with events and use of the facilities. Unfortunately, the young Gaians had no funds and couldn’t get extras like renting the steward bots. We made the VR system free for the trip just so I could evaluate them. They didn’t shy away from the technology like the member races of the Alliance, in fact, they embraced it. They played VR games, worked on certifications, and researched humanity’s history among the stars.

The senator had said these were the colony’s brightest young men and women. Julie’s impression of them was they were mildly smarter than average. I then asked her if any of them might be recruited to the crew. Over the course of the seven-day subspace trip, Julie gathered data and tested them in VR, with them being unaware. She identified five with decent engineering aptitude.

Julie worked with Doc on a psych profile. And four of five passed. I had Suruchi and Dora approach them to recruit them. All four, three females and one male, agreed to join the crew. They understood they were being sent to work for low-wage positions in an industrial world. They had been told it was to help their families and alleviate overcrowding. Nero was happy to get the engineering trainees because that is what they were. Raw trainees that needed to learn the new technology. The good thing was they were motivated, intelligent, and quick learners.

I gave them the option to send their salary back to the colony, and they all met privately and decided they would send half their salary back and retain the rest for expenses. I think Gabby and Luna had something to do with their decision, as they were hanging out with them during the subspace voyage. Nora Vargas, Kristina Contreras, Mina Heath, and Ransom Krueger were added to the crew.

Before reaching the Glyth system, we installed our first projector and worked on the Gorilla suit. It was the Tirani suit for Mozzie, and he was having a blast with it in the cargo bay. That was the only place in the ship where the floor was reinforced enough to use the Gorilla suits.

When we exited subspace, the alarms went off on the bridge. Elias and Elvis were sorting it out as I had the shields come online. We were in the middle of a massive sensor field. Sensor buoys had been placed every 100,000 kilometers. Elias’ navigation calculations had also been off by nearly 180 million kilometers. That was to be expected, as not only were we using a new subspace system, but with the distance we were traveling, any tiny miscalculation would result in a large deviation. Of course, Elias was upset and said he would be better next time.

Right now, we were dealing with challenging calls to our presence and also having appeared inside the sun’s safe range. We should have had to deal with massive gravitational forces on exiting subspace; instead, it felt like a normal transition even though we were much closer to the sun than we should have been.

We had incoming fighters, frigates, and two cruisers to our position. Finally, our hails were being responded to, and we used the SID number we had been given for our trader. This didn’t calm the defense forces much, and we were expected to follow an escort into the system.

They were going to want an explanation as to how we had come out of subspace so far in the system. I wanted an explanation as to how it happened as well. There should have been an emergency shutdown of the subspace drive when the sun’s gravity field hit us. The Squirrel physicists thought that maybe there were less subspace shearing forces at the higher bands. So the emergency shut-off was triggered much later than normal. I couldn’t decide if this was a good thing or not. Right now, we had to deal with the Alliance and Glyth Navy.