Starship Engineer

Chapter 96

I sat in my quarters, playing with some shaped blocks with Celeste. The blocks were all unusual shapes and fit together to form a perfect pyramid. According to Julie, Celeste had good spatial awareness but needed more work on her 3-dimensional thinking. This simple puzzle would help with that. Amos was progressing faster with his pieces. Chloe praised his progress which caused Celeste to smash his partially completed pyramid, ruining his progress. He just gathered the pieces and started again while Celeste wandered off to the corner to use the painting screen. She did love to paint and had creativity for being just over one year old.

I sighed. Amos was on the path to becoming a good engineer. My daughter, Celeste, was on a path to constantly seeking to be the center of attention. My PerCom beeped, and Julie’s hologram appeared to remind me I had a four-hour shift on the bridge to start my day, followed by combat training. Eleven days into our seventeen-day trip, I was 7th in the unarmed combat hierarchy. I was still floating in the low 20s on the ranking board with melee weapons. We did our combat suit training in VR, and surprisingly I was ranked 3rd. I had the advantage of designing the suits and getting a fair amount of practice before we added more marines. I doubted I would be able to remain atop this board once the new marines got more and more practice.

On the bridge, I pulled two large screens from the ceiling. Kara had installed a chair to my right so she could work with me. Kara spent 12 hours a day on the bridge. And Julie said she worked for an hour in her quarters as well. Most of what she was doing was monitoring the crew and making sure they were doing their certs. It had taken two weeks acting as my first officer before Kara learned I wanted all my briefs to be as brief as possible. Today we quickly paged through crew bonuses. The crew got bonuses for completing certs, hitting certain scores on combat simulations, and successfully doing emergency sims. The bonuses were small, but it quickly identified crew members who were hard workers and competent. Credits were not an issue, but I still tried to keep a tight purse.

The combat training went well. I won three out of four matches. My only loss was to the 4th ranked, one of the new marines. Abby said my ranking would remain unchanged, but my points total had increased. Gwen came off the treadmill as I finished my last bout. She wanted to play the sword and sorcery game this evening. My VR time had been filled with emergency sims with the new crew and practicing in combat armor. I disappointed her. I had a full schedule and wanted to play with Celeste and Amos after dinner. She told me that I needed to have fun. Otherwise, I would burn myself out. I did have sex regularly with Danielle, which was my retort. Gwen rolled her eyes and said fun….use my imagination, and turn off my brain to constantly tackle the next problem. Then she said I probably planned out everything I would do and in which order when I had sex with Danielle.

I paused as I had no witty response because it was true. My plan with Danielle was a series of acts that I found got her aroused and helped her reach a climax, but sometimes I varied the order. Seeing me concerned, Gwen said I needed to be spontaneous. She suggested I bring Danielle into the sword and sorcery game and branch out my sex life with Danielle there. Danielle had dinner with Gwen and me in the evening; I guess they were friends. I caved. Tonight was going to be my return to my half-giant barbarian.

After a shower, I traveled to the robotics lab. Gabby was working on assembling a Venom bot. She had gotten me to send her the plans. We still didn’t have a viable power source, but Gabby planned to attach the bot to a power cable so it could draw power from the ship. It would give the bot a very limited range and could be disabled by cutting the cable. As I worked with Gabby, Julie materialized. An object had been picked up on sensors. My mind turned over….we were still in subspace. I rushed to the bridge and the sensor station. The crew member moved aside as I started bringing up the scan history. Elias had been activating the sensors every 4 hours in subspace. It was a practice in futility, but I hoped we could scan another ship in subspace.

The data scrolled, and I brought up the images….what was that? I started talking with Julie on the bridge during the analysis. We had passed an entire planet in subspace. With Elias’ help, we identified the star system where the planet would be located in the real world. Alpha 4-Zeta 92 was the star. The data archives showed the system had been scanned by three separate human explorer ships in the last century. The system only had a star. No planets and no asteroids. I asked the dreaded question….if we hit the planet in subspace, would we have been destroyed? Julie took a few moments to run some calculations and hypothesized yes.

Damn. If we kept the sensors on in subspace, how much warning would we get to avoid an object? At maximum sensor range, about 88 seconds. Was this enough time to avoid a collision? Julie said she could monitor the sensors and drop us from subspace if an object was detected in front of us. I would have to get Danielle on it to upgrade Julie. For now, the on-duty sensor operation would have the responsibility.

Now the bigger question is, what the hell was that? It was not the sun, according to the plot. The planet was about 410 million kilometers from the sun. Although I was curious, I was not going to turn around. I gave Elias back his seat and told him to start collecting data on subspace objects. It seemed a little too fantastical. I was going to have to look at all my subspace data. I had hit a dead end. I needed an experienced theoretical physicist specialized in subspace. As more pieces of the mysteries of subspace were falling into my lap, I became more interested, like a certain detective trying to bring the clues together to get the whole picture.

Leaving the bridge, I had to go to the conference room. Kara had put together a quick information session on the Silca. This race had multiple stealthed ships in the Hofstra system. Since it was possible that our ship might engage this species, Kara had delved into the ship archives and presented an hour vid with a racial profile and threat.

The Silca breathed a toxic atmosphere and preferred heavy gravity worlds. They had eighteen subspecies, each specialized in various aspects of society. Interestingly their genome had all the subspecies, and when they grew up, they specialized in the role the society needed the most. They communicated through visual lights on their skin but could also make high pitch sounds like speech. They were not aggressive….at least until they met humanity. Humanity had colonized a planet in a star system. The Silca had colonized another planet in the system that was rich in metals. Humanity, in their greed, attacked to remove the Silca. They easily removed them, but that was the last easy battle for humanity. Kara then detailed the evolution of the Silca spaceships. It was clear they were learning from and incorporating human technology. The Silca spaceships could take a pounding and still function, and their weapons were slowly reaching parity with humanity.

Edmund was in the room and offered the Brotherhood’s viewpoint. The Brotherhood’s view was that any alien race would need to be eradicated or put in a zoo eventually. Part of the doctrine was placating alien species publicly and then working on their genocide in the background. A lot of research was done on Earth to develop weapons for specific species. His rank in the Brotherhood didn’t give him access to information about these weapons. The Brotherhood also only focused on one race at a time. Right now, they were focused on removing the Chameleons, a lizard race that had superior camouflage and stealth hunting skills. When the Brotherhood destroyed their home world, they scattered across the galaxy and were slowly being tracked down and eliminated.

There were a lot of dangers out in the universe, and so far, the biggest seemed to be humans.

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Desdemona looked at her screens. The frigates, Beowulf and Dartanian, had just entered the system. She sighed. She had spent the last week questioning the passengers from the Void Phoenix. She only managed to question five of the eleven as the other six had left the Hofstra system. It was enlightening.

The passengers had thought the Void Phoenix had parked at an abandoned pirate base for months. The ship had received quite a bit of work from the noise they heard through the hull but they never got a visual on anything. They did add some more passengers during their stay on the pirate base. Some of those people departed with them.

It had taken her four days to track down the first passenger. First, get video from shuttle ports, identify the person, and then track them. Her team was efficient. What she found out disturbed her. It was a secret Union base, not a pirate base. Her subject never saw what upgrades the ship received, but he was certain a lot of work was done on the hull. So the ship was now disguised, very clever. Deven Wellspring had to have been involved in Union black ops. It didn’t fit with her psych profile on him, though. Maybe he was just a supporting character? At least it now made sense why he had visited General Briggs.

How many more secret Union bases did Deven have access to? The Brotherhood’s information was incomplete on all Union activities, and now that the Union had collapsed, she would have to get answers from people. She had agents seeking the answers for her, but time was not an ally.

She needed to do something she hated to do, guess. If she was Deven, where would she go? He knew he was being chased….so independent human space or alien space would be appropriate. That would be probable if he had access to another Union dark supply base. She had 13 possible locations on the vector the Void Phoenix was on when it left the Hofstra system. 13 systems and four ships. The most probable was Huntington Eaves, an independent human colony. Resupply and cut off completely from all communication with human space. She would take her ship there. The least likely would be the Tirani system. Not much there but he could resupply.

She sent a comm message to Hanson. He was to go to the Tirani system and investigate. If the idiot got himself killed by the large warrior bears, then so be it. Her two new frigates would sweep the possible systems to the right and left of her own vector. Of course, Deven could have stopped and altered his vector completely. It is what she would have done.

Desdemona wanted to wait until she could track down more of the Union navy personnel but time was fleeting. She would leave seven agents behind for the task. She sent out orders to her ships.

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Admiral LaRoche transitioned out of subspace. He checked his plot as his massive, albeit weak, fleet started appearing around his flagship. He had to wait seven minutes before the elven city ship and Anderson station appeared on the map. It looked like fortune was favoring him. Two War Chariots were interceptable before they could rejoin the main force. He quickly started giving orders to cut those two ships off and lay into them. With luck, they would be destroyed before….he looked at the ships around the city ship….damn it. This was going to get messy very quickly.