“Elizabeth, I thought they should hear from you about your twenty year trip from New St. Louis to Eretz on your own.”
“Are you trying to tell me that a ship navigated from New St. Louis to Eretz with no human guidance and that the voyage took twenty years?” One of the pilots said.
“Yes, Vernon,” Elizabeth said. “Peter made me capable of thinking on my own. I do not know what Peter did to make me sentient, but I am glad he did. For four years, Rachel, her team and I worked well together. The Federation succumbed to political pressure and had me recalled. On the way back, the navigator made a calculation error. Had I not been so intent on keeping my sentience secret, I would have corrected his error. Had I corrected his error, we would not have dropped into the middle of a Third Force formation preparing to attack New St. Louis. I knew which of my crew I could trust and which I could not. I engaged the third force formation and with the help of those I could trust, destroyed it. I have been told that only one of my crew survived the battle, but the third force was stopped. Warren Elias Rothschild the Third and one of his sons were killed in the battle.
“Warren Elias Rothschild the Fourth is the father of all the members of the current family council. When the battle was over, I jumped into hyper drive as far as I could go to get away from the battle scene. I had suffered major damage. None of my life support systems were functioning. I plotted a course for Eretz which was the only place I knew I could find help. It took twenty years to get there. Had I not been sentient, I could not have over ridden my incompetent commanding officer and executed the battle. Had I not succeeded in the battle, New St. Louis would have been destroyed touching off a war between the Third Force and the Federation. The Swordsmen would have waited until it was over and conquered the winner. The political landscape we know today would have been very different.”
Wren picked up the narrative. “Warren Elias Rothschild the Fourth knew that with Elizabeth back in the hands of the crew that had operated her, the secret of his ownership of the Third Force was in jeopardy. He sent my mother and grandmother to negotiate a settlement that would keep his secret safe. The Queen Elizabeth you now know was the result of that negotiation.”
Elizabeth spoke softly, “The details of the deaths of the other three sentient ships, Greg and Avi are not well known. The general impression is that there was some kind of accident. The truth is that Peter, realizing his structure had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer travel safely, deliberately carried the two P I ships, as well as Greg and Avi to their deaths. Avi had developed advanced dementia and was too dangerous to be around people. I have to assume that Peter and Greg discussed the alternatives and together decided on this plan of action.”
“I will not go into the motivation behind taking me from my parents and taking me to live with my grandparents and Elizabeth,” Wren said. “Tracker was my sixteenth birthday present. Most sixteen year olds get cars or fancy entertainment systems. I got a fully armed, fully operational warship. I’m not complaining, but did I ever tell you my family is a little weird?”
Nervous laughter rippled around the room.
“I had often wondered what Greg did that made Peter sentient. Bear in mind that Greg did not realize the scope of what he had done until long after he had done it. One evening after my eighteenth birthday, I figured it out. I went back to Eretz where I knew I could find the best software designers. When I left there, I had succeeded, but I told no one. Five years later, Kim found me and the rest as they say is history.”
One of the pilots raised his hand, “How did you find him? Wasn’t he surveying some planet?”
“I had help,” Kim said. “If you knew his family better it would make more sense. When it was happening, I had no idea the number of people that were monitoring my every move.”
Kim paused debating whether to move on to the current issues or spend time on the details of her quest to find Wren. She pressed on. “Some of you are familiar with the helmet interface system built into the P I ship. We are not currently using it, although I had always planned to use it at least in its most rudimentary form as soon as we had finished other, more basic, training. The current implementation of the helmet interface being shipped to the Federation has the personality software disabled due to the fact that many of the Federation’s pilots were uncomfortable with its use. We will not only be activating that software but we will go to the next step, sentience. The helmets were designed to simulate sentience. We will use the real thing.”
Kim waited as the implications registered reading the expressions on the flight crews’ faces. “When I went looking for Wren, I suspected that he had succeeded in making Tracker sentient. Even with that, adjusting to a ship that is smarter than you are is a challenge. My job will be to guide you through the transition. Tracker’s personality is as complex and rich as the personalities of your ships will be. I will assist you in developing personalities for your ships. Keep in mind that your ships can change their personality and their persona as they see fit. Once they are created, you will have no control over this.”
“What we are doing is more than activating voice command recognition,” Wren said. “The ship will think with you and for you. It will become the third crew member in your team.”
“This sounds dangerous,” one of the pilots said.
“It is,” Elizabeth affirmed. “We must be careful how and what we do with our ships.”
“What if our ships decide they do not need us?”
“I have often contemplated that question,” Elizabeth said. “I do not have an answer.”
“Buddy and Daisy, the sentient P I ships, knew that and never acted on it except as requested by a human. While we are talking about the hazards of what we are about to do I need to you alert you to another issue,” Wren said. “Once they become sentient, these ships will be intolerant of strangers. They will know you and trust you, but anyone else they will need to be introduced to by you or they will have to decide on their own that the new person is not a threat. Even people you introduce as being trustworthy will constantly be subject to review. In fact, the ship will monitor you as well. You will have no privacy. The ship will monitor your medical transponders to track your health. It will track your fluids and your vitals continuously. In fact Elizabeth does this for everyone on board. It was something of a challenge growing up I assure you.”
“Wren, that’s not quite true,” Elizabeth interrupted. “I do not monitor vitals on all our passengers. Six thousand people are too many for me to track. I only track the crew and such personnel as I care about. I sometimes knew you were sick before you did.”
“Thanks, Elizabeth,” Wren said. “Now that we know what we need to do, I would like you to know why we need to do it. Faye Anne, are you there?”
Faye Anne’s face replaced Elizabeth’s on the monitors. “Hello Wren, Kim, Tracker and Hawk Squadron.”
“For those of you who are not aware, Faye Anne is Elizabeth’s senior intelligence officer.”
Faye Anne nodded. “The station’s situation is grim. We have three thousand known dead, two thousand missing and another five thousand wounded of whom we do not expect five hundred to live. When Elizabeth pulled away from the dock, she left her entire medical team behind. Without them, the statistics would be much worse. I will not go into the physical damage except that as you can imagine, it is substantial. I am the person who named Peter. I understand the significance of sentient ships. I support you in your conversion of your ships. Let me add two items to put this in perspective. Wren’s parents, Saul and Fiona, are among the missing as is their ship. They were last seen in the final engagement against the battleship. You all know Charlie the harbor master. His youngest daughter succumbed to her wounds this morning and died.”
Hawk Squadron was very familiar with Charlie and his family especially his youngest who had been Kim’s maid of honor. She often begged Wren and Kim to let her ride with them. Had she been allowed to do that she would have survived. Wren lo
oked over a sea of stony faces that had maintained their strength until Faye Anne’s last announcement. One by one, they broke down and cried.
WREN - CHAPTER NINE
HAWK SQUADRON DIVIDED their time between finishing the work on their ships and patrol duty to fill in for the defense system ships that had been destroyed. By the end of the third week following the start of the process making the P I ships and their tender sentient, the job had been completed. The hyper drives had been tested and certified. The pilots and crews had experienced their first short jumps and had started to work simulations incorporating the short jumps into their battle plans.
Many of the squadron’s members had requested information about their families and Faye Anne had promised to get them what she had as soon as she had it. Hawk Squadron’s humans gathered in the meeting room. The ships were represented by their avatars on the monitors around the room.
“We have received our first courier since the attack,” Faye Anne said. “The central system was not attacked. However, isolated retaliation against those Swordsmen still on the planet has turned into ever increasing waves of violence. There is no telling where this will end. It could be many months before we get accurate reports. Eretz was attacked and repulsed the attack with minimal casualties to combat flight crews. No civilians were injured. Several Stellar depots have been attacked although none have fallen. Details are still coming in and I will pass them on as I get them. The Federation outpost at New St. Louis is gone, completely destroyed. A million people died.”
A woman in the middle of the room screamed, “No!” and burst into tears. Her crew mates reached out to comfort her.
Faye Anne read a list of planets known to have fallen to the Swordsmen. Waves of grief washed over the room as she named planets where members of Hawk Squadron had family or friends. Faye Anne asked to be put on a private channel when she had finished her accounting of what she knew of the disaster.
“Wren, we think we have figured out what happened to your parents. We think they have mobilized the Third Force.”
“To do what?”
“We don’t know. What we do know is that a thousand people we show as missing all received the same text message about the time that Saul and Fiona pulled away from the dock. The message read, ‘Initiate Plan Gamma.’ The comm unit that sent these messages had not been used in ten years. The people that received the message were retirees and old hands who had been mostly invisible for years. They in turn left notes for their families because many of them clearly did not expect to be back. Their wills and financial records were neat and orderly. This was a carefully planned operation many years in the making. Four cargo ships in the bone yard that we thought were dead moved out during the battle. Eight cruisers and sixteen destroyers also rose from the dead. They joined the battle in progress and when it looked as if the tide had turned in our favor, jumped out of the system presumably to some rallying point.”
Wren said, “So, it would seem that my parents are about to do what Elizabeth prevented my father from doing after my sister was killed.”
“Yes, and no one can stop them this time,” Faye Anne observed.
“I agree,” Wren concluded. “Even if we could find them, we could not stop them although I am not sure we would want to.”
“Exactly.”
Wren asked, “Do I need to do something about station security now that my mother is no longer doing it?”
“No,” Faye Anne replied. “She hated the job and only did it because her father and the rest of her half brothers and sisters made her. She long ago delegated the real work to her assistants who are perfectly capable of carrying on without her. She’ll be happier this way. How are you holding out?”
“As well as can be expected under the circumstances,” Wren replied.
Faye Anne signed off. Wren turned back to his crew.
“Comrades, we are at a turning point in history. Many of you have asked what I see for our future. I don’t know. I do know that the Third Force has been mobilized. The sleeping giant is awake. The corporation we work for has more fire power at its disposal than all but two other entities in the galaxy. There are other security service fleets out there and the future will be determined by who they choose for their allies. Are governments as we know them to be replaced by corporations? I don’t know, but that is not for any of us to decide. As for us, I would compare us to the American submarine fleet in late December 1941. We have a long war ahead of us. Welcome to Pearl Harbor.”
GENERATIONS - PROLOGUE
“INTELLIGENCE REPORTS ARE IN. We have our orders. Please report to the executive conference room with all haste.”
“Understood.”
GENERATIONS - CHAPTER ONE
WREN AND KIM WERE the last to arrive since the dock their ship occupied was at the furthest end of the space station.
Two security guards acknowledged their arrival, opened the conference room doors and then sealed them inside the room where decisions pertaining to the management of humanity’s oldest and largest interstellar freight hauling company were made.
Wren’s uncle Timothy, chairman of the family board of directors that had inherited the company from Wren’s grandfather stood and motioned for those who could to sit. Both sides of Wren’s extended family were represented. His parents, however, were not there. Wren expected that their activities would likely be part of at least one of the reports.
A Federation Space Force Commodore stood next to the presentation surface. His insignia indicated that he was with Federation Military Intelligence.
Timothy addressed the assembly. “The Federation has asked us to undertake a mission that they claim only we can accomplish. I am opposed to sending our ships and our personnel on this extremely risky mission which I believe has little, if any, chance of success. I believe that even if the mission were to succeed, the cost would far outweigh any benefit from it. We did not become the biggest freight company in human history by exposing our people to needless risks. While I recognize that the recent attacks by the Swordsmen have forever changed the environment in which we operate, I do not feel that we should take such an aggressive action. We have always been prepared to fight to defend our people, our facilities, our convoys and the security of our clients’ cargoes and will continue to do so. The fact that one of our subsidiaries has gone rogue and is attacking the Swordsman on its own is not our doing. We have dissociated them from the remainder of the company and do not offer them support. For the first time since its creation, the company is being asked to attack a legal sovereign government, albeit a belligerent one, with whom a declaration of war has been issued instead of defending what is rightfully ours. I will defer to the military personnel present, but I wish to be on record as opposing this mission.”
With a dismissive hand gesture, Timothy acknowledged the Commodore and sat down.
“In spite of media reports to the contrary, the Intelligence Service has not been sitting idle in this conflict.”
“But the attack did catch you by surprise,” a voice shouted from the back of the packed room.
“Yes, it did,” the Commodore admitted.
“Then why should we listen to you now?” another voice shouted.
“Because we removed the moles who suppressed the information we needed,” the Commodore replied.
“Not bloody likely!” a third voice shouted.
“The Federation Intelligence Service is the best and most thorough in the history of mankind,” the Commodore responded haughtily.
“That’s not true,” Faye Anne, Senior Intelligence Officer of the hybrid battleship Queen Elizabeth, retorted with a sneer. “You are at best fourth. Eretz would be first. Stellar Interstellar’s internal data collection would be second. The Swordsmen would be third and you are a distant fourth which puts you about even with the pirates and organized crime. Still, my sources independently verify that you are, in fact, an officer of the Federation and therefore my associates and I should show you some respect regar
dless of whether you deserve it.”
“Don’t get no respect from me,” another voice shouted.
Captain Rachel Solomon Cohen, commander of the hybrid battleship Queen Elizabeth, the most senior officer present, stood. “Colleagues, hear the man out. Commanders, captains and first officers will meet with me in the Queen Elizabeth’s situation room after his briefing. We will decide what to believe and what not and what action, if any, we recommend the company take in this matter.”
“Thank you.” The Commodore turned to the display which showed a map of the inhabited portion of the galaxy. “The red dots are sites the Swordsman have attacked and defeated. The blue dots are sites the Swordsmen have attacked and did not defeat. Notice that the majority of the sites where the Swordsmen were repelled were defended either by the Eretz security forces or by your company.”
“And the Federation rolled over like a bunch of failures,” a voice shouted form the back.
“Yes, that is correct. The Federation Space Force failed to hold a single site. Many facilities were completely destroyed with the death of all personnel on the station.”
“Says something about the value of a Space Force Academy education,” another shouted.
The Commodore stopped to compose himself before continuing. “The green dots are Federation locations that were not attacked. The yellow dots are Swordsman sites that were not attacked. The yellow ‘X’ represents Swordsman sites that have been or are being attacked as part of the Federation counter attack. The orange ‘X’ shows attacks by miscellaneous third parties like the security services from Orion Metals, pirates and organized crime. The white ‘X’ represents activity by Stellar Interstellar’s internal security service also know as the ‘Third Force’ under the command of Saul Cohen.” He faced Rachel. “Captain, your son has destroyed more Swordsman military installations than all other forces put together.”
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