“That doesn’t work for me, I won’t be held in a government base. My research for the military is not in this building either, the data is safe. To assuage your concerns and that of the president, I am willing to work from my ship. Surely the fleet and emplacements around Earth provide the necessary security to me and my small ship? You could also still leak that I’m in a secure position to help safeguard my employees.”
He really didn’t look happy at all with that idea, but they couldn’t force me, could they? I decided that they probably could, but not legally. The question was would they, and just how much crap was I in right now?
Carlson said carefully, “That will do for now, if you go immediately, but we can’t guarantee your safety that way, and we don’t recommend it.”
I walked them out, and then got in my shuttle. I guess I’d be working in space again. As soon as we took off, I spoke to Al.
“Al, let Karen, Caroline, and Jason know there’s been threats made against the company. Offer them the opportunity to commute and work in space. We can use the lab spaces on the battle cruiser, instead of sending it to the void with the other lab ship. Just make sure it’s locked down so they can only access their own lab space, the kitchen area, bathrooms, and landing bay. We can use a science shuttle to pick them up and drop them off every day.”
We flew into the small landing bay on my new ship. I supposed now I had a reason to use the other one, but this one was almost like a house. I worried for a minute that I was hiding from the world, but it wasn’t entirely my idea to come up here. It had either been this, or get stuck on a base where I’d be really cut off. I also assumed it wouldn’t be all that wise to go home at night either.
I smiled a little as I looked around and toured the place. It was a lot smaller, and cozier, than the old battle cruiser. I shook my head in amusement, maybe I could fly back and forth between the ships, live here for a while until things settled down, and work in the other ship. This ship really didn’t have a lab space, not that I needed one where I was. About the only thing I would miss from my real home on Earth was the hot tub and mountain view.
It was all done remotely anyway. But at least I’d have people to interact with during the day, assuming they agreed to my suggestion. I also wasn’t going to stay off Earth all the time, I had another date with Bill on Friday and I wasn’t going to miss it. Plus, even my own ship would feel like a jail if I couldn’t leave it…
The next couple of days was about getting the three of them settled and a little familiar with the ship. I kept all the engineering spaces and bridge locked up, and they seemed a little nervous about being out in space at first, but got over it quickly and got back to work. I also locked the doors on our company in Colorado Springs. I had no idea what Kristi would say about all this, but still resisted interrupting her honeymoon. She should be off the radar and safe where she was.
I also pondered when the next shoe would drop, and what it would likely be. I’d managed to frustrate both of their goals of getting both myself and my data under their scrutiny. I wondered if I’d get clearance to leave the solar system, but wasn’t so curious that I’d asked, or filed a flight plan to see if it was approved. I wondered if they’d try to snatch me, and what I’d do if they did. Would I run if I had to? I had no doubt the hole the American government would put me in wouldn’t be like the cell I’d had on the Knomen home world.
I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong and was probably paranoid, on the other hand they didn’t have a good reason to have done all the other stuff they’d been up to either.
Shelly reached out to me as well, and sent me a development plan for her completed work. She designed a specialized fabricator for the quantum computer and A.I. project. In essence, it was to fabricate a new type of fabricator, it was literally a huge foot-wide sheet of ten thousand quantum fabricators.
That sounds like a lot, but that only comes out to three million six hundred and fifty thousand new computers a year, if each fabricator makes one per day. With billions of people and other applications besides a personal assistant, it was likely it would need to be expanded again once it started to take off in popularity.
Once they were built, they would be packaged a hundred at a time into another device which held a suspension liquid with bioelectric properties, along with a tiny fusion device to power it, and sent out to the stores which performed device insertions. I approved the design, and sent it to one of our fabricators.
Wednesday late morning, the quantum fabricators were done with one of the sets of emitters out on the lab ship. I was disappointed not to have Kristi around to see the test, and started to wonder just how co-dependent I was.
“Al, go ahead and bring up the subspace emitters on the lab ship.”
Al replied, “Completed, the ship is now in subspace.”
I nodded, “Any problems?”
Al replied, “Negative, and shield fluctuations are almost non-existent to current sensor technology.”
“Okay, run through the tests and recalibrate the shield weapon, and data scans.”
I frowned, I kept calling it scans, or scanning, but there were no active scanning particles, or scanner emitters for subspace. It merely read the particle emissions that occurred in subspace by how and with what frequencies of radiation the shield was bombarded with, and reader just didn’t sound right. Still, everything in subspace seemed to correlate with real space. All matter organic or otherwise has an echo there, which made it an extremely hazardous space. Without the shields matter wouldn’t survive in subspace at all.
In the past all we could read were major sources, like ships with power systems, suns, planets, and other large objects. Theoretically, we should be able to do a lot more, like read life forms, and pebbles on a beach, all matter theoretically had an echo in subspace, and I hoped the improved emitters would clear up the picture a bit that way. I doubted we’d be picking up pebbles on a beach, but I was hoping for something in between that and what we had.
I also believed if we had finer control over the shields, than the purposeful imbalance to fire our subspace shield wave weapon should be improved as well.
Al replied, “This will take a few minutes.”
I got up and stretched, and then went to get a coffee. When I got back Al was ready for me.
“The shield weapon hasn’t changed parameters as far as the area or how far, but it is more manageable to aim and specify exactly what distance, height, and width the wave should encompass.”
“And the scans?” I asked curiously.
Al was silent for a minute, “There is a lot of data, much of it very subtle. I can only focus on a very small portion of it at a time, the rest is being lost.”
I tilted my head, “Are you saying you need more computer power again?”
Al replied, “Not exactly, it’s the ships mainframe that’s having trouble, the sensors need more computer power to read, store, process, and tag the data. I’d estimate the new sensors will be as finely tuned as the Stealth data net if not more, but we’re getting a galaxy’s worth of data in one place, instead of from millions of stealth sensor platforms. I’d estimate thirty quantum processers tied to the sensor suite in the internal sensor ball shield should be able to keep up with the data flow, and render live data of several whole solar systems at a time, while recording everything else.”
“I see, well we have those twenty quantum fabricators, so two days for that? We also need to fabricate the solution with bio-electric properties and hook it up to the ships power.”
That was an insane amount of data processing power for sensors, I couldn’t wait to see what it yielded.
“Understood, but that will push back completion of the secondary shield emitter upgrades. I am able to focus on specifics now in a smaller area, and I can tell you at the Bug worlds I can now monitor their building, I can also estimate the population on the planet due to the subspace radiation lifeforms emit, but I can’t focus on a single life form. It all runs together.�
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I nodded, “Alright Al, do it anyway, and we’ll be done with the emitters by Sunday instead of Friday. Also, schedule it for the other ships and add it to operation paranoia.”
“Done,” he responded immediately.
I frowned, I had the feeling he’d already done all that on his own before I’d asked, but I didn’t verify that one way or another. So far he’d done an excellent job at anticipating me, more and more all the time. Until he made a mistake, or tried to take over the world, I’d deal with it.
Chapter 10
Over the next couple of days, I focused on programming an interface for the new sensors and computers we were about to install. I wasn’t nearly good at programming as Kristi, but this wasn’t really hard, it was just time consuming.
Another thing we figured out with the sensors was the closer we were the better. It did an okay job hanging out in the void, better than anything else I’d ever seen, but moving in closer allowed us to see down to the specific lifeform level, we were even able to tell things like age and general health by the slight signature changes.
What I was in the process of doing was making it more user friendly.
On Thursday late in the day a third Bug world was attacked. They too had set up a small ambush with the extra ships they had outside of the normal hives, but less than a third of the humanoid ships were taken out this time as compared to the last ambush. Two hundred ships lost was nothing to sneeze at, yet it was cheap compared to the three million Bug ships and billions of destroyed Bugs on their world.
By Thursday evening, the fifteen worlds that were objecting to this policy, pulled out of the treaty. Most cited the reason for withdrawal as the genocidal level attacks on the bugs. The said genocide would destroy their own souls, and they couldn’t be a part of a treaty of worlds that took things that far. The action had the other twenty-four worlds in an uproar, and once again FTL worlds not part of the treaty exceeded the worlds that were.
Every once in a while, during those two days, I took another stab at the Drenil communications when I took a break from the programming. With the new sensors, there was more data. Data we had missed because of our insufficient shield emitter specifications. Rather than help however, besides seeing the true data of course, it was if anything more complicated and incomprehensible.
I really needed a place to start with it, and I had a feeling we wouldn’t find that unless the Drenil decided to communicate with us. It was late Friday morning when the new computer package for the sensors was completed and Al had some other news for me.
Al asked, “Do you have a moment?”
I nodded absently, and then went to speak, but apparently he’d detected the nod because he started talking.
“Dr. Delouse has gotten approval and started the second round of animal testing. She’s confident if this tests out, we’ll be ready for a human trial in nine to twelve months.”
I nodded, that made sense, anything involving sticking something new inside a human body took a long time to approve. Especially if it was something that would connect directly with the brain. Even the implants I had in me that didn’t connect to the brain directly had taken years of testing and trials before approval had been granted. Even if the human trial worked flawlessly, it would be five to ten years before it made it to market.
I also knew Dr. Matthews hadn’t made any progress yet on the android, simply because I’d run into Amy several times in the ship hallways, but he’d only been here for five days and had just upgraded Amy with a new processor. It would take time.
“Anything else?”
Al replied in the negative.
“Very well, let’s bring up the new sensors, and route the data through my software.”
A hologram of the galaxy appeared taking up half the room I was in. It was probably eight feet by eight feet, and a couple of feet deep, as if we were above the galaxy looking down at the disk.
It was also a total mess.
“Crap, give me a minute,” and I brought up the program while I cursed marriages and honeymoons under my breath.
Two hours later, I had the bugs ironed out of my code, and tried again. This time it looked a whole lot better, more like a spiral galaxy instead of smears of light.
In its biggest form, the whole galaxy, there were over two hundred dark green dots to indicate the fifty-three known humanoid races with FTL and their colonies. There were thousands of light green dots, which indicated a world with humanoid life that was pre-FTL. There were many thousands of brown and light brown dots. Those indicated worlds that were in a good place to be terraformed, worlds that were close to supporting life, but not quite right. The dark brown ones, of which there were thousands, would take less than ten years to terraform. The light brown ones were between ten and fifty years to terraform.
I wasn’t surprised at finding so many. My thought was that these close ones were planets engineered by the seeders that failed for one reason or another, but were still close. It was actually somewhat of a relief to know they weren’t perfect.
The yellow worlds were the Drenil worlds. The one blue world was for the remnant of the Reilan races.
The red worlds, eighty-five now, were the bug worlds down from eighty-eight after the three attacks.
The full-sized map of the galaxy also showed ships, green triangles for humanoid, yellow triangles for the Drenil, and red triangles for the Bugs. The more ships in that immediate area, the brighter the triangle.
That was pretty much it, which was more than enough for a general glance. However, when I reached into the map and opened my hands to zoom in to a specific bright green triangle, the data slowly changed to be more and more specific as less space was shown. If I zoomed in on a world, I got accurate numbers of ships, population, and real time simulations of what was going on in orbit.
If I needed anything more than that, we’d have to move the ship there, and of course, if it stayed in subspace no one would ever see it. It was pretty damned impressive, and I had a little fun being nosy. Of course, the one thing it couldn’t do was hear normal open communications, which was still a benefit to the Stealth net that we didn’t have.
It also explained why the Drenil couldn’t hear us when we tried communications in regular space, it just wasn’t detectable in subspace, just matter and strong energy sources. Of course, they were ignoring my attempts at subspace communication as well, so I supposed it almost didn’t matter.
After that, I decided to return to the little ship and get ready to go out. I hadn’t been to the surface in a week, but I had a date with Bill tonight and had to be at his house at six-thirty…
Chapter 11
It was Friday night, and I kind of hoped this date would last all the way until he had to work on Sunday, just like last week. I’d missed him all week. If not for my propensity for being a workaholic, I’d have probably called him and bugged him too much. Or at least, I’d have wanted too. Not that I hadn’t gotten to talk to him, he called me three times during the week, usually to chat an hour or so before his shift, and I might’ve dialed his number a few times as well.
Of course, by Sunday afternoon all three of my ships would be completely built, and finally up to spec, so I could take another look and see what else might be improved. I wasn’t in that much of a hurry to find anything better, I was more interested in improving what we had, and better understanding the subspace layer we were encroaching on and how it interacted with this one. I imagined the next step was to go a layer deeper, although I didn’t see reason why we should even try right now.
Kristi would be coming back Monday morning as well. I’d finally decided to leave a message with her A.I. who would fill her in on the goings on right before she left the cruise ship. She’ll probably be pissed I didn’t tell her about the issues, or that I’d been threatened, but I didn’t want to ruin her honeymoon. She only got one of those in her lifetime, hopefully anyway.
So my boy crazy side wanted this weekend to last forever, and my inn
er geek and the part that missed Kristi couldn’t wait until it was over. I tried to get all of that out of my system, so I could be present and enjoy the weekend. Perhaps I was counting chickens, but I didn’t believe he would mind at all. If he sent me home tonight after our date, I’d have to turn in my soul reading card and become a nun. Still, things were moving fast, at least in my head. I wasn’t sure what he was thinking about, but I knew how he felt at least.
We were going to dinner, and then he was taking me dancing, but not at the usual kind of clubs I go to. Think two-step dancing in a night club that plays country music, it’s a Texas thing, and a lot of fun.
I had my protective bustier on, and a pair of light brown calf high boots that ended just a few inches below the knees. I slipped on a black dress that wasn’t quite skin tight, but was certainly clingy from breast to hips with a flared skirt that reached my mid-thigh, and it also had random white designs on it. I put on a touch of makeup, and then went from my bedroom down to the mini-landing bay and got in my sport’s shuttle.
“Let’s go Al.”
Al replied, “One moment, there is another clearance delay.”
I sighed, of course there was.
Ten minutes later Al finally launched and headed down to the planet.
Al informed me, “There is an attack shuttle following us, it is your escort until you return to your ship.”
I frowned and I’m sad to say my voice was rather whiny, “It’s going to hover over me all night isn’t it?”
Al replied, “Affirmative.”
That was depressing. At least I knew what the delay was about, it took them ten minutes to put together an escort. I speculated on if they were there to protect me, make sure I didn’t disappear, or to make sure I didn’t do anything shady.
I decided it was probably all of the above. The third was just paranoia on their part, the second was rather valid, no one liked to be under surveillance or hounded because of the good things they did. I’d been considering visiting other worlds, not an actual vacation, but a working vacation.
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