Jane stopped walking, and wondered where Walsh had heard of the gripping hand. Could be the predominance of three arms here, and her urging him to read and watch more science fiction, had made him look for anything about three armed aliens. It had been something Jon used to say all the time. Memories poured in, and she had to make an effort to push them away. Time it seemed, wasn’t dimming the memories which made her sad. Just for a nano moment, she wished she had the normal human capacity for memories to dim with time. She sighed, and continued on to the airlock.
On the other side a search and rescue droid was waiting for her. She hopped onto the sled, shifted her suit into spacesuit mode, and had it connect to the nearest air points. She didn’t need any of this, but she wanted to look the part when she arrived.
The SR droid took her out of the main hanger, and around to the nearest airlock of the Owl liner.
The channel to the ship was still open.
"We will not let you in," said a voice, Jane guessing it was the ship's captain.
"I'll let myself in," she responded, grinning to herself.
The droid brought her up to the external emergency controls hatch. She pulled it open without trouble, and plugged herself into the airlock controls. The outer door slid open, and she jumped across. The door closed immediately behind her, and once the airlock was aired up, she changed her suit to full protection mode, and opened the inner door.
A dozen heavy slugs hit her as soon as the door was half way open, and she stood there and took them. She drew her Gatling stunners and calmly shot her assailants down two at a time. She left the only unarmed Owl standing there.
Her suit shifted back to 'slinky red', and the Owl visibly trembled.
"What are you?" it said.
Jane laughed.
"Your worst nightmare," she responded. The Owl visibly cringed. "Take me to your ambassador."
The Owl started walking away from her, so she followed.
At a four way intersection, the Owl she was following threw itself on the deck, and Jane took fire from three directions at once, her suit changing to full protection mode to protect her face. With a sigh, she pulled her guns again, and methodically stunned everyone in view, before continuing on the way she was going, until she came to a computer terminal. She hacked her way in, and downloaded the ships schematics. She continued on towards the Bridge.
At each intersection and major compartment, she was again ambushed. She continued stunning as she went, without even breaking her stride now.
The hatch into the Bridge was closed. She plugged herself into the nearest console, and opened it. More fire came through the doorway, but she ignored it, and stepped inside. They kept shooting at her. She stood there for a full minute and let them do it. Finally she lost her patience, and gunned down all those with a gun in their hands.
It left three Owls, two standing and one sitting. The sitting one was at the helm. Standing behind this one was presumably the Captain, and well off to one side away from everyone else, was the one she assumed was the ambassador. Her suit shifted to reveal her face, but remained in protection mode.
"You have a strange way of greeting people," said Jane.
"Keep away creature," said the ambassador, backing into the bulkhead behind it.
Jane holstered her guns.
"I mean you no harm, but as I keep telling your people, if you shoot me, I'll shoot you. Leave me alone and I'll leave you alone."
"Where is our fleet?" asked the other standing Owl.
"Out there," said Jane, waving toward the window. "I warned you, I showed you, and you kept coming anyway. What kind of stupid are you beings?"
The two of them looked at each other. The helm Owl stared at its controls, trying to appear invisible.
"Do you intend to kill us too?" asked the ambassador.
"I haven’t killed anyone on this ship. They'll all wake up again in due course. Which can't be said for your warship crews."
"What do you want?"
"For you to withdraw to your original space, and to stop sending poison to the rest of the galaxy."
The two of them laughed.
"Impossible. Why would we even consider it?"
"Because a lot of Owl lives will be lost if you don’t, and the same thing will happen. It'll just take a bit longer."
Actually it wouldn’t, she realized as soon as she said it. The time for her to cross every system and kill every fleet, would be a lot less than if she waited for all the fleets to return to their own space at full speed.
"We don’t believe you."
"I repeat the 'what kind of stupid are you' question."
"You stoop to insults?"
"No, I'm seriously asking you why you think six ships, which took out two hundred, cant roll you back to your space, and keep you there indefinitely?"
"No-one can do that."
"I can. And I will."
"It cannot be done. If you attempt it, we will destroy you."
"Is that a declaration of war?"
"It is a declaration of fact. But if you want a war, then yes, we are now formally at war."
"Thank you for declaring the war in front of all these witnesses."
"What witnesses? Are you mad? There is only the four of us here, and three of us will deny this meeting even happened."
"On behalf of the Kingdom of Hunter's Run, I accept your declaration of war on us. In the interests of future diplomacy, this diplomatic vessel will be allowed through our territory, in order you can reach the council system in the fastest possible time. However, I must caution you that now war has been declared, your warships and settlements are now my primary targets, and will be destroyed on sight."
"Who are you to make that threat?"
"The Queen of Hunter's Run."
The two of them stared at her for a full minute.
"You will please leave our ship."
Four
"I'm confused," said a voice from the far left.
"How so?" said Walsh.
"When did these events take place? Admiral Jane seemed to be aware of this chamber's support for pushing the Owls back into their original space. And yet this cannot be possible if these events happened days ago."
"Days ago? No. What you've been seeing is almost live. The delay from here to the Admiral is just less than fifteen seconds. Before she left her ship, I sent her a recording of the council meeting up until that point. She's been feeding me a live feed since she arrived outside the Owl ship's airlock. I've been sending it to the screen here."
The chamber erupted. Walsh waited for them to subside.
"So you're telling us we just watched two hundred warships be destroyed, and the Owl declaring war on you, almost as it happened?"
It seemed most of the chamber were confused.
"Yes, of course."
"How is this possible?" asked Ganshura.
"How is what possible?"
Now Walsh was confused.
"How can we be seeing what occurred only fifteen seconds before?"
"How can anyone have communications across eleven systems so fast?"
"Fast?" Walsh blinked rapidly. "I have communications with my home system, over thirty systems away, within a minute. I find it slow, being this far away."
"How?" asked Ganshura.
"I don’t understand," said Walsh. "As far as I know, our communications systems are not dissimilar. And the speed of your transmissions are not that far behind ours."
"How have you solved the problem of moving message traffic from system to system when there is no continuity of ships at a jump point to move it through in an orderly fashion?"
"Ships? Let me understand this. You send message packets from planets to stations, to ships near a jump point, wait for them to reach the jump point or even jump through, before sending it on to another ship, station, or planet?"
"Yes."
"So in an uninhabited system, it might not be sent on at all, but take a day to cross it? Or if it's sensitive, it
might wait for a suitable ship to be sent to?"
"Yes."
"Ah. Okay. We solved that one centuries ago."
The chamber was silent. Walsh only knew this from fiction written in the last few hundred years, since the tech itself was part of what he'd lost in the big memory wipe. But plenty of novels with copyright dates centuries before had used the tech, and the tech did exist now.
"Next you'll be telling us you can track ships in real time too," said a sarcastic voice from the back.
Walsh walked over to the chamber's computer, mimed plugging in a device, but actually plugged himself in. He quickly narrowed down the feed to just those systems between Jane and A001, and sent it to the chamber's wall screen. Immediately they could see the Owl ambassadorial ship moving away from Jane's ship, which was now itself moving to jump; each Owl fleet in the systems beyond, and the flow of civilian freighters heading in many directions.
"Who do we approach to buy this technology?" asked the Mushroom, breaking the silence.
He was immediately drowned out by incredulous discussions among the other ambassadors. Walsh waited. They knew the rules, and the chamber quieted.
"I'm not sure who owns the coms tech these days. But the tech to see the movement of ships is owned by Admiral Jane personally, since she was the one who first merged several different technologies into one. Human space is currently being added to the network, but I should add, only the coms part of the network is available to civilians. I doubt it will ever be for sale, but if systems wish to be connected to our network, I'm sure Queen Jane will be happy to negotiate a fair rental fee. It is something the Kingdom can offer the sector, and perhaps the galaxy, over time; and until we can begin trading properly, it would supply us with a modest income. How long it will take, will be limited to how fast we can move ships through the sector establishing the network. But once enough interest is established, I'm sure Queen Jane will allocate resources to getting it done as fast as possible."
"You over sold it dear," said Darlene in AI mode. "I have requests to be added to the network from half the ambassadors already."
He winked at her.
"I will convey all interest to Queen Jane, but in all likelihood, nothing can happen until our war with the Owls has been resolved. However, in the meantime, we can arrange for suitable ships to be built. While not specifically warships, such ships will be capable of defending themselves, so you will need to authorize them entering your space."
"We thank you for this briefing ambassador," said Ganshura. "This session is ended."
Walsh sent the rest of the session off to Jane.
She grinned at his salesmanship. It had occurred to her before, but she'd been waiting for a good time to introduce the subject in council. She was glad Walsh had done so, however it was a great deal earlier than she'd anticipated. His point about the ships being able to defend themselves was a good one, but had missed her greater concern. The comnavsats were just the last part, a small satellite which could be easily captured should someone make the effort to go looking for them. She needed to redesign them into something which was either invisible, or could defend itself. Invisible was better, but the power requirements might be too much. It had been done before, but she wasn’t sure if it was feasible to mass produce them. She sent off a request to investigate, and if need be, design something new, to one of her avatars who didn’t have much to do. She added an afterthought to see if the range could be increased.
Design of a new ship required some thought. She now had four AMS Hive Cruisers, which had now completed scouring human space for new jump points, and found no new ones. Along with five AMS Corvettes, they were waiting at the G036 A001 jump point, for the blockade to end. Walsh had taken several weeks to design his dream AMS Command ship, they'd taken another week to gather input from the other AMS pilots and modify the original specs, and it was now being built by the Hunter shipyard now located in G036.
Jane had moved a lot of her stations there, ready to move to the Run. This included Sphere station, a good two thirds of her shipyard capacity, as well as her three general fabricator stations, four of the twelve food stations, and all three zoo's. Their mining station structure hadn't stopped in G022 after all, but was now fully active in one of the G036 asteroid belts. The station which had once been Outback Orbital was also here, earmarked for picket duty on the first of the Run core systems. Three other stations were also there, which had been abandoned in space after all the people were resettled down on one of the Gaia planets. Once empty, Jane had simply moved them away from the Gaia planets, and no-one had really noticed they'd left the system completely. Three more were on their way, again taken over by Jane once they were empty. All six were being rebuilt internally as a commerce base, with provision for the hugely varying requirements of the sector's life forms. Jane had borrowed freely from the council station design, and accommodation was being built so any suite could be easily changed to suit a different species at short notice.
No actual people were living on most of the stations at this point, and she was still pondering how to attract the right ones. But until each station was positioned somewhere, she wouldn’t know the mix of what it needed, and thus the sort of people to attract.
Borgcubia still wasn’t empty yet, but large sections of the station were also being rebuilt. The estimate was only another week to get the last of the people off her, leaving only the penal enclave at her center. Their new home was already complete and waiting for them in G001, and Borgcubia would deliver them as it passed through.
Jane blinked. She'd managed to side track herself without realizing it. She brought her focus back to a ship design. She had need of ships to explore the galaxy looking for jump points, and anything else interesting which had so far been missed. She needed to seed comnavsats everywhere any of her ships went as well. So why not merge both functions? Have the Drone Cruisers also make the comnavsats, and the Hive fighters could seed them across systems as needed. Walsh's new ship was designed to dock four of them, which she already had, but she had five additional AMS pilots with too slow and too limited Corvettes, who could be given versions with Concorde style accommodation on them. Ironically, this was going back to how the original Apricot flagship had been designed. She set an avatar to do the design changes for both drone and manned ships, and allocated shipyard bays for all nine ships. Within minutes, the existing four were moving towards their bays.
She checked on the progress of her Lightning building program. It was on track, with five dozen already built. She was aiming to hire out one to each ambassador on the council, which meant more than three hundred custom interiorized builds. Not all of them would want one, but she was going to make sure one was available if it was wanted. If the ambassador didn’t want it, she was sure some bigwig of the same species would, or it could be used as a species specific taxi.
Concorde was now heading for the one habitable planet in this system, now she knew the inhabitants were not Owl.
In the meantime, she turned her attention to planning a war. This was a new thing for her. Her first war hadn't had any real planning. They retreated until they found a stand point, survived making the stand, and then pushed the aggressors back where they came from. The second war had been entirely defensive, with a couple of suicidal offensive moments mixed in, and hadn't needed any real planning other than logistics.
This was a different matter. She was starting with the need to defend two areas of space, and liberate the area between them. She had ships at both ends, and none of them were where they would be most needed. What she needed, was a plan.
With time to go before arriving at the planet, she decided a personal visit to G036 was appropriate. There were four AI's there she could bounce ideas off, and each of them could head up a fleet if need be.
In one of the droid bays on Palomino, Stryker's new Concorde class ship, Jane took control of one of the advanced AI bodies. She walked to the Armoury, found a suit belt, put it on, and shifted into her n
ormal self. The internal sensors said there was movement in one of the suite's living areas, so she headed up there.
On opening the door, she froze, then burst out laughing.
Five
She hadn't checked who would be there, but had expected Stryker and maybe Cayuga. Perhaps Intrepid might be visiting. Instead she found all the senior AI's, and several she didn’t know.
That wasn’t the funny part.
They were seated around a large oblong table. This also wasn’t funny.
They appeared to be using actual hard playing cards, dating back more than half a millennia in origin. Strange, but not funny.
The funny part was most of them were half naked, including Stryker down to only boxers, and a particularly attractive woman in only briefs. Very skimpy briefs.
All eyes had turned to the door, but only Jane was laughing. She made a huge effort to get a grip.
"What are you lot up to?" she asked.
"Playing strip poker," answered Stryker.
Jane started laughing again, and this time most of them joined in.
Stryker rose, showing a moon on the front of his boxers, with the words 'Fly me to the moon' underneath, moved his chair over, and pulled another one from a corner. He indicated Jane should join them.
Jane lost it completely. She stepped back out, closed the door, leaned up against the wall, and slid down it laughing hysterically.
Several minutes passed before she had herself under control again, and she realized just how badly she'd needed a good laugh. And how rude she'd just been.
The door opened and she looked up. Intrepid was standing with his head around the door looking at her, now dressed in 'slinky red'.
"Is it safe for me to come in now?" she asked him.
He grinned at her, but only nodded.
She picked herself up, put some dignity back on her face, and walked back in. The chairs had been repositioned, leaving her with the empty position at the head of the table. They were all back in uniform.
A.I. Destiny 2: Queen Jane Page 2
