Hunter's Terminus

by Timothy Ellis

  "You have a go."

  "I'll have the special freighter ready to rift here as soon as we go back. Can I tell the Hurndalls they have somewhere to trade? Richard can probably be waiting with the comnavsat freighter. As could the others if I give them some warning. I could also load up a few of mine with possible trade items, and see how they're received. And if no-one minds, I’d like to send some of the faster limos, as I'm sure there are people who'd like to get from A to B a lot faster than they do now."

  "We don’t have any sort of exchange set up yet."

  Thorn cleared his throat. We all looked at him.

  "I suggest we organize the appropriate people now to go back with you. Before we go, we can connect the two frontier stations to mine, and mine to one of yours. This gets communications started, even if it slows down once here. Hopefully getting banks to sync up won't take long, and by the time your traders are ready, we have a basic exchange system in place. Even if it takes a few days, I'll cover their costs while docked anywhere waiting."

  I grinned at him.

  "That sounds like a plan."

  Fifty Three

  It wasn’t until after they left I realized the translating had all been done by my PC.

  I was sure Thorn was still providing it for the politicians, but I hadn't needed it myself. Nor had Jane.

  Thorn had taken them back to wherever he'd taken them from, and come back to see Syrinx. By the time Angel and I were ready for dinner, Thorn had figured out how to do rifts himself, and the three of us ate together discussing how to go about it.

  That is, Syrinx ate with us, not Angel. Angel had her own food in my private kitchen, supplied by Jeeves. After eating, she normally went to sleep on one of her kitty castles.

  Jane provided details of the freight handling system on our stations, which happened on the level below where people got on and off ships. The freight came out the same airlock, but was moved down on special lifts by cargo droids. Obviously it would be better if the cargo rifts went direct, bypassing any need for lifts. It also made sure people going through rifts wouldn’t interact with cargo at all. Or more importantly, cargo didn’t go through people accidently.

  Thorn was surprised when Jane also popped up the freight system on the station next to us, and he confirmed this was the standard here. With all its systems turned back on, Jane now had access to pretty much everything. We just hadn't told anyone. Thorn surprised me by not asking.

  Joining his station to this one proved to be easier than expected. He knew exactly where both were, and the layout of both, and all he needed was a hand on Syrinx's shoulder so she could guide him through doing it correctly.

  When we'd finished eating, he took her over to the station, and they walked the four rifts they'd created methodically. I'd have done two way rifts, but they decided it was better to do one way rifts, so accidents were less likely to happen. While on his station, he had security there start putting in place a customs and immigration booth, having chosen where people arrived and departed from, so proper screening could be done.

  He didn’t bother consulting with station security here, but simply reformed a rarely used airlock into a receiving rift, replacing the outer doors with solid hull, and one of the inner doors with the two rifts for people. The two freight rifts were placed in a convenient place to join the station's freight system. Next to all four, he placed another set of four, joining the station we'd been at earlier in the day. It was a start.

  By the time they'd finished both sets of rifts, the teams were back on board, the fighters were back on board, and we had the prisoners locked down on the cargo deck. And when I say locked down, I mean locked down. Jane had them under five gees. A few had made an attempt to move around, and proved they could, but when one of them broke a limb and passed out, the rest stopped moving. Jane had to send in a doc droid to attend to the break.

  I did the rift back to the other station myself. The second time was quicker than the first. Given a few more, and I thought I’d be able to do combat jumps by myself.

  The teams stood down, ate, and sacked out. Lacey launched a Combat Air Patrol of six Excaliburs just on principle, and once they noticed we were back, there was a message from the local admiral, asking how much the Excaliburs were to buy. I replied they were untested in local battle conditions as yet, and until they were, they weren’t. But I also suggested he contact his chain of command in order to put military appropriation possibilities on the list of trade discussions to come.

  I didn't bother telling Lacey there was no need for a CAP. His command, and all that. Besides, each had an AI which could fly the ship while the pilot got some sleep. It was why they were called a privateer after all. The privateer class was all designed with proper living facilities akin to a small hotel room, so a pilot could go weeks if need be without needing to land anywhere, especially without needing a carrier. All the same, carriers were more comfortable between missions. I wondered what the six pilots had done to incur Lacey's displeasure enough to be the first CAP.

  There was a quick message from Arthur saying they'd be in touch, and a screen popped up so I could see a rift form, and Round Table fly into it. Seems Arthur had convinced Thorn to use his new skill to bypass the Keerah fleet in the next system, and hopefully let them get back into plant space without any more trouble.

  With the other lot of prisoners transferred by Jane and several platoons of combat droids, Gunbus back on board, and a new set of rifts back to Thorn's station coming out next to the previous ones, Thorn, Syrinx and I jointly opened the rift back home.

  Jane goosed BigMother through, and as soon as we were clear, Hurndalls Stallion and several other freighters, followed our comnavsat laying freighter through the rift. Richard had sent a thankyou message before going in, and looked really happy to be on the move again. Behind the freighters, a dozen mixed yachts went through as well, all of them with a Jane avatar on board. Jane was serious about making some personal credits.

  The comnavsat freighter had a foundry on board to make them, and would progressively explore the entire area of space, adding each system to our active navmap. At some point I’d have to let John Slice go there as well, but this needed to be negotiated first, and it was well down the list. I closed the rift down, and nodded to Thorn.

  He jumped Syrinx over to Redoubt, Janet took them to where the rifts to his station could go, and shortly after, we'd completed the first rift network. The navmap popped up five systems, and this time they stayed there. One system from each human group, and two Keerah systems. It was a start.

  The first thing I noticed after the rift closed, was all of my ships, and also Redoubt, were crawling in little critters. When I zoomed in on one, it turned out to be a repair droid. Instead of hauling ships into the shipyard, Bob had gone nuts making repair droids. I looked over at Jane.

  "All the turrets are being upgraded by repair droids," she said. "Seems they not only were able to use the upgrade Thorn did on the fighters, Bob and his team made a breakthrough beyond that, using an intact Ralnor turret. When the upgrades are done, all our guns will be harder hitting, but using less power. Not quite up to Keerah level yet, but our battleship guns will certainly do more damage now."

  I nodded.

  "Shielding?"

  "Nothing further for the fighters, but the upgrade is being added to all ships now. By morning, even Gunbus should be able to take a few hits without hull damage."

  "Good. Anything else I need to know?"

  "It's been quiet here since we left. Hence the furious activity going on. But you might like to take a look at this."

  "Which this is that?"

  An image popped up of a ship. It looked vaguely familiar, but also not. It was also obviously still being worked on.

  "That's Preserver."

  "Really? Wow."

  Now I knew, it was obvious it was one of the two escort carriers. The shape was basically the same as BigMother, but she was only battlecruiser length, where BigMother was battl
eship length. So her triangle shape was smaller all around. However, the big change was in two wings on each side, coming off new shoulder sections, with an assault frigate dock in the middle behind the bridge. Each wing ended in a round enclosure, with ten battleship guns. They were fixed, not turrets, meaning the pilot aimed the ship to fire them. The specs popped up alongside the image, and I could see she was reduced to two squadrons of conventional heavy fighters, but she had the same marine capacity as BigMother, and could also dock an assault frigate externally. We didn’t have another one, but give it time. And much more than BigMother was, this was a heavy hitting fighter in its own right.

  Might be, I could entice Lacey into flying one of them. Except now the underside image changed, showing a titan turret like BigMother's in the process of being built. He wouldn’t like that at all, but damn me she'd be a nice ship to fly now.

  "Will they have enough power to fire the big turret?"

  "Bob thinks so."

  "Not particularly encouraging."

  "No. If this was fiction, she'd get off one shot, and blow the entire power grid out. Leaving the ship and crew stranded in the middle of a firefight, completely defenseless."

  "You read too many novels."

  "Possibly. But for now, it's probably a real danger."

  "So for now we just use the battleship guns, until we're sure the titans can be powered properly."

  "Yep. They need new names."

  "Scimitar class," I said without even thinking. "And Deliverer can be called Katana. When do we get them?"

  "Day after tomorrow."

  Amazing what you could do with an old hull. Junk Heap Two and Three had barely been able to move, let alone fight, when I’d captured them from pirates. They'd been upgraded to use as fighter carrying refugee retrieval ships, the same as the Explorer ships had been, and now were significantly better than they'd ever originally been as Midway class escort carriers.

  The stupid thing was, I didn't have the captains for them.

  "Jon?"

  "Yes Aline?"

  "Bed."

  "Coming."

  For the first time all day, I felt a grin plastered on my face, which had no danger of coming off in a hurry.

  Fifty Four

  Two days later, we rift jumped into the Karn system, ready for anything.

  I was desperate to be anywhere other than Haven by then. Three teams of diplomats and bankers had walked onto Redoubt the morning after we returned. I'd pulled David Tollin out of his government planning meeting, and told him to sort out treaties, and put anyone who knew something about finance in the same room as Jane and the bankers, to work out how we paid each other for stuff.

  He asked me what he used for a name on any documents, and I told him I didn’t care, so long as it wasn’t mine. He could use 'We the Fifteen Thousand' if he wanted to, to which he said that wasn’t the actual number. Although I was able to get out of there fairly quickly, they kept pulling me back into one or another meeting, and asking me questions I didn’t feel adequate enough to answer, but did anyway.

  David made a point of telling me this was the cart before the horse, and I told him to ride it anyway. I knew we needed a government first, but we also needed treaties and banking as well. And the government was going to take longer. David said it didn’t have to. I told him to do it right, however long it took.

  Finally I went and hid in the shipyard, discussing power ratios with Bob, much to his amusement as I didn’t really understand any of that either. When they dug me out of there, I escaped again, and spent some time in the spa with the team, who regaled me with stories about how punching tigers in the face felt like.

  When Thorn turned up to pull me back into yet another meeting, he was greeted with the sight of so many naked breasts, he went bright purple, and vanished. It was Annabelle turning up and literally pulling me out of the spa, leaving me naked and dripping in front of everyone, while she stripped off and jumped in herself, which finally convinced me I was more than prune skinned enough anyway, and it was time to find somewhere else to hide. Grace turned up while I was showering the spa water off, and showed she'd overcome her shyness by gawking at me with a grin on her face on the way in, and then stripping off as well, and joining the rest of the team. I left them to it.

  I decided on an inspection tour of the ships, and spent some time talking to Miriam about what she wanted to do in the future. When I showed her Scimitar, she'd almost begged me to let her captain one of them. I explained the likely power problems, and she said she'd keep them in mind. She'd been getting worried about the power systems of the dreadnaughts as well. While they'd told her the battleship guns would use less power, she couldn’t see it in the simulations. I started to worry as well, but when we brought Bob into the conversation, he assured me everything would be fine. Sounded like famous last words to me.

  The following day had seen the two Scimitar class ships delivered. I'd picked up Miriam and the team, and we'd done an inspection of Scimitar. She turned out to be a delight to fly, her fixed battleship guns took a little aligning to get the perfect cones of hitting power, and the titan turret and its battleship turrets did fire without blowing out the power system. The recharge time on the turret was really bad, indicating it was a one hit wonder when you really needed a king hit, at least for now.

  Both Miriam and George took turns flying her, and I was surprised to find George flatly refused to leave the captain's chair. He flew us back to BigMother, docking nose to nose, and we left him there. Miriam stayed with him, and he took the new ship back to the shipyard, and Miriam went over to take delivery of Katana. The two of them put both ships through every evolution they could think of, including dogfighting each other, sent the results to Bob for his experts to figure out how to improve what needed improving, and came back through the rift to load fighters from Orion.

  The standard heavy fighters of 617 wing had all been rapidly upgraded. Missile launchers were removed, torpedo launchers installed, shield emitters replaced with brand new ones, and the power cores and fixed guns upgraded. The result was a standard heavy, which could take the same few hits as an Excalibur, and could pump out torpedoes. What they lacked in shielding, they made up for in being substantially faster and more maneuverable than anything shooting at them would expect. I hoped it was enough.

  Split into two half wings, the fighters launched from Orion, landing on one of the two new carriers. Chet Hallington wasn’t too happy seeing them go, but on the other hand, it left mainly AI controlled fighters on Orion, and no longer wasted the talents of my pilots. Orion herself had started making new replacement fighters immediately, and within a few days, she'd be back up to being one thousand strong, and in a week would have double that. Instead of making drones, she was now making heavy fighters.

  Jane and I spent some time discussing the standard heavy fighters, and between us, we knocked up a specification for a new heavy fighter. It was larger than a normal one, had a lot of the Excalibur about it, but was able to fit the smaller launch bays of the Scimitars, by virtue of having shorter wings than Excalibur, and a third wing added over the top of the cockpit. The guns were moved to the wing mounts, and eight became twelve. We overpowered the ship to support future upgrades, and the result was a heavy fighter we thought could survive current battle conditions. It didn’t have anti-missile protection, but the Scimitars did so, and they should never be out of the range of the mosquito system. We sent the design to Bob for his comments, codenamed Brawler.

  In order to keep the ships making their own fighters and drones, many of the dormant freighters had started running between the mining station and the ships, keeping them topped up with raw materials.

  Chet, being CO Carriers, immediately the pilots had settled into quarters, had them launch again to test the launching tubes, and started drilling captains and pilots in working together, with emphasis on the fighters using the mother ship's shields to stay alive while delivering a fatal blow to the enemy. One more point on the
'I'm not needed here' list, as far as I was concerned.

  By the time Thorn turned up with a young woman and a great big dish, I was back on BigMother, looking over the specs for the updated drones Unassailable was now carrying. While the drones themselves couldn’t take a hit from a Ralnor big gun, the hive combination of twelve of them certainly could. And each hive would be firing twelve torpedoes at a time. Unassailable's guns had been upgraded with the rest, and she'd spent days now using her own fabricators to churn out new drone fighters, the latter ones to the new specs, and the early ones being upgraded. Now she carried seventy five hives. And had the makings for more in case they needed to be replaced.

  The huge dish went onto my desk in front of me, before I even registered they were there. Water appeared in it so suddenly I pushed back hurriedly thinking it was going to slosh all over me. It didn’t. Neither of them laughed.

  "How soon can you send a fleet to another system?" asked Thorn.

  "Now would be good," said the woman.

  "Where do we need to be?" I asked.

  "There," she said, pointing.

  The water in the dish fogged, and an image appeared. It rapidly changed to scenes both above and on the planet. Things had turned serious.

  "Jane?"

  "Recall the teams?"

  "Yes. And strip the fleet of combat droids. As many as you can pack onto BigMother, the Scimitars, and Unassailable."

  "Confirmed."

  "Was Lacey's Gunbus upgraded?"

  "Yes. So was yours."

  "Get it over here. I’d rather he flew something bigger than an Excalibur."

  "Confirmed."

  "Do you know where we're going?"

  "Yes. It's on Thorn's part of the navmap. You want me to tell her?"

  "Yes."

  Fifty Four

  We appeared over the planet, with about an hour to spare before the Ralnor fleet arrived.

  Madone, the seer, had been showing me the future. Before I opened a rift, I had her show me the present. The image wasn’t particularly useful, but when Thorn put a hand on the dish, the image cleared, and when I did the same, I was able to quickly scan the entire system. The Ralnor fleet was identified and positioned in the system, and the frantic efforts of the people on the ground to hide themselves were very apparent when I turned the skrying that way.