《Project: Outreach》


 Prologue: Promotional Offer

    Prologue: Derek


    The P027 solar system unfolded; a majestic golden star at the heart, mostly empty of all but the grim void of unforgiving space. One massive deep blue gas giant, its surrounding cluster of dozens of moons, and two smaller worlds, one closer to the size of the earth, another barely enough to be called a world, not much bigger than Pluto; and all completely devoid of life.


    As Derek seemingly floated in the endless void, he made small gestures with his hands. Practiced movements that bring up displays. Showing the relative masses of worlds; orbital trajectories. As he studied the two worlds of the inner system, he called out. "Icon. Get me every object here that has water, whatever form its in, and amounts."


    A tiny white orb flickered as it orbited the young man''s head, the AI-driven software processing his request; and projecting a long list of those objects in the system readings show with any amount of ice at all. Derek''s eyes kept being drawn back to that one world, only 7% larger than earth.


    With a gesture of his fingers, he zoomed in over the rough grey-red globe. Tiny bits of movement could be seen; no terran life could exist here, but those patches of grey were clearly moving; and with purpose. Herds of animals? Mobile forests, following the sun? As tempting as this world was, with its almost-there gravity, whatever those things were, they might be dangerous. Clearly everyone would be focusing on this world. Whether trying to adapt existing life to their own needs, or to wipe it out and bombard the world with enough ice to make it livable, its orbit and size made it the obvious candidate; even if its elements were highly toxic to anything from earth.


    He zoomed back out, shifting to one of the moons of the gas giant. As the Icon''s listing moved across his screen, a plan formed. These two rocks in the asteroid belt... here, and here. Very high water ice content. And with just a few months of pushing with a fusion torch, they could be put into the right path... But no. They''d hit too hard.


    Derek spent hours working out orbital mechanics; picking a long series of stellar objects, including the gas giant itself, to borrow raw materials from, to cause collisions, to seed with fusion engine arrays or photosynthetic bacteria. As he worked, his Icon; having adapted to his methods over numerous events; automatically brought up the sort of refueling equipment a given project would need; the best engine for the job.


    After hours of work, he believed he had everything he needed in place; two moons of the gas giant could be turned into worlds humans could live on without any sort of outside support... eventually. One would be a touch cold, with the seas that would eventually covering its surface being icy most of the year, the other would be almost perfect.


    Before he could move on to simulating the results, however... everything flashed red. His Icon blinked, and a message appeared.


    Derk cursed, tapping the Icon, hitting the glowing ''Save'' button... moments before the timer reached zero...


    And he awoke. Derek wasn''t the tallest of young men; perhaps a little under six feet; but his black-haired head almost scraped the ceiling of his apartment. The intense pressure in his bladder; unfelt while he was still in the sim; almost made him groan in pain before he rolled out of his tiny bed onto the floor and half-crawled his way over to the toilet. He gently removed his headset after taking a seat; the heavy, sophisticated orb of grey metal shutting itself off as he set it on the foot of his bed; and leaned back against the wall, relaxing as he relieved himself, listening to the steady whine of the air conditioner.


    Only bothering to pull on a pair of synthetic pajama pants, he rose, opening his refrigerator to fish out a meal bar, grumbling at the taste of rough protein. In the sims, everything tastes perfect. Or, well. Better. As he looked over the tiny efficiency apartment, the long-familiar despair of the real world sets in. No job. No hope for anything better than what he had now. But hey... at least he wasn''t starving. And continuing to win awards in the Outreach game kept earning him freebies and promotions for other games, so long as he kept playing; so that was okay.


    He opened the apartment door, his palm on the panel unlocking it, letting him smoothly slide it aside... revealing a long, gloomy row of hundreds of identical chambers. He slowly, groggily made his way down the hall; ignoring Mrs. Peterson, the old retired woman who always seemed far too interested in him, seeming to compare Derek to her son who spent so much time offworld she never saw him anymore.


    She seemed excited today. Afraid? Whatever it is, Derek waved her off as he headed on to the distant light... the outside hallway. The window. He leaned against the warm glass, staring down at the millions of cars, the other towering superstructures filled with their own people; imagining them just like his own. A wide ring of ''good'' apartments, with windows and balconies... surrounding hundreds of tiny cramped boxes like his own. As he looked up at the sky; even during the day the numerous structures floating in orbit leaving a vague haze over the daylight; he wished he were there. Really out in space, rather than buried in some coffin, dreaming. But he knew why that could never happen. That ship had sailed. And crashed.


    After a few moments of staring, he saw something. A light. A strange pinpoint that shouldn''t be visible in the daylight. As he squinted, trying to make it out, he noticed a strange quality to the movement of the cars and people below. Crowds moving. People... fighting? Trying to get inside. Mrs. Peterson had stopped yelling. Her door slammed. The light started to get brighter.


    The news. He needed to check the news. Derek turns from the window, running back towards his apartment. The hallway is completely empty now. Not even the rare handful of doped-up lunatics hanging out by the vents, blowing their vape clouds into the abyss. He reached his own apartment, not even bothering to shut the door before slapping his helmet back on.Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.


    Normally, the device wouldn''t even turn on with the door open. A safety measure, to keep him safe while he was zoned out. This time... it came up immediately.


    A beautiful, spacious home appears around him. A luxurious couch, a TV covering one entire wall, bowls of various snacks, a digital copy of his long-dead cat, Fluffbucket, his Icon floating in a slow orbit around his head... as the TV activates.


    A young woman, leaning forward. Her makeup is smeared, her dress ruffled. Built-in frabrications of the program to emphasize stress, trouble.  At the corner of the screen, a countdown timer. Showing two minutes. One minute fifty eight. "This is Kelsey Danvers for CNN on our final broadcast... Well, the artificially generated version anyway. When that timer ends, they reach earth, and its all over. The fleet is gone. Mars is gone. You booted me up with only two minutes and ten seconds to go. Not much point to warnings now."


    Derek was shocked. He didn''t have time for anger, or grief. He picked up FB, hugging her to his chest as he stared at the screen. The cat.. supposedly a complete digital copy of his old cat''s mind.. hissed and struggled, upset at the manhandling. He didn''t care. He let her claws dig in, as he stared at the countdown timer. He imagined his ex-girlfriend, Kelsey... the one whose likeness he''d programmed this newscaster AI to have years ago. She was in space. On the fleet. Did she die already? Or would she somehow be okay?


    For the last few seconds of his life, Derek held an imaginary cat and wished that, somehow, he''d been fit enough to make it to space. To join the fleet. To be somebody. A wave of light and heat suddenly hit... everything went white.


    Prologue: Kelsey


    Somehow, she''d always imagined space would be exciting, Kelsey thought, sitting against the wall of the bridge on the third shift of the UNS Shanghai. The Damage Control screen was up; predominantly a holographic display only she could see through her implanted lenses, showing a full diagnostic readout of the vessel.


    The Shanghai was perhaps 12 years old; one of the very first models of the Tokyo-class ships. Five hundred and seven meters long, a heavy blend of clearly alien technology with rough-hewn human ingenuity, this class had been developed when the treasure trove of technology the Survivor had brought back was still only partially understood; and as such wasn''t completely reliant on that technology to keep its crew alive and healthy. In addition to artificial gravity, the crew quarters were mounted to a spinning cylinder running down the spine of the ship. Advanced molecular conversion systems in life support to provide air and food were supplemented by onboard algae farms, capable of providing plenty of air and tasteless sludge for the crew to eat if everything broke down.


    Duty stations like her own were, of course, part of that cylinder; only the engineering and weapon sections were completely reliant on artificial gravity. Right now, she could feel that it was off. Nothing to complain about, but the steady spin of the vessel was mildly disorienting, even if she was used to it by now.


    She studied the damage readout closely; a few micrometeorite impacts had reduced the outermost hull integrity in section seven. Two holes in....panel Beta. A few keypresses, and a drone starts to slowly crawl its way along the ship''s spine, preparing to fix whatever gaps it finds; the automated systems already sealed the tiny space off, preventing much air from escaping.


    "No problems, captain. The Drone is en route to do a patch-job. I''ll suit up and inspect it myself once the chamber holds air."


    For a moment, the captain reviewed his own display, giving a slow nod. "We want to be at 100%. We''ve been in the strike window for six months now.. If anyone''s coming, today is one of the most likely days." His own display was far more complicated; showing the communications network with the dozens of other ships in the Ceres Project fleet; sixty ships running a steady patrol around the mammoth engines driving the project, as well as the smaller connections with the remainder of the UN fleet spread around the inner solar system.


    His display shifted. Warning lights. Directions. He didn''t need to say a word, as the point defenses came online, his crew, likely assuming this was all a drill, activating weapon and defense systems. As he started reading the data, expecting the warning he''d long feared, that the Enemy had finally arrived, the Survivor''s grim prophecy come to pass, and it was time for the fleet to rise to earth''s defense.. reality set in.


    Every signal emitter in the inner system had gone dark. His signals weren''t a direction to join up with the fleet; but rather warnings about battles already occured. Already lost. Every single defense fleet; from the smallest Mercury exploration support fleet to the thousands in earth orbit; had already suffered the same fate before he''d even become aware a fight was ongoing.


    As he made small, subtle gestures; engines warming up. Missile bays loading. Crew called to positions for what would in all liklihood be their final shift... he stopped. He could hear something. Music?


    ~Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the lord..~


    Where was it coming from? It was a signal. FTL, displaying the thousands of ships across the solar system... overwhelmingly outnumbered by the red dots of enemy ships.


    ~He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.~


    "Officer Danvers, isolate that. We''ve got a war to fight, even if there isn''t much time left."


    ~He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword~


    Danvers was staring at her own display. Showing the same thing as every other display in the ship. An overlay of the solar system. The red dots showing enemy vessels; long, sleek, almost organic-looking craft, all identical numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Already in control of every meaningful thing in the solar system. Eight hundred of them speeding towards Ceres, faster than the missiles the Shanghai carried. But the heart of the display.. "Sir, look at the sun!"


    ~His truth is marching on~


    Everyone on the bridge stared. The sun... was expanding. Whatever signal that song was on, was giving an FTL view of the sun as some sort of device... something that must have been there for years.. had been activated. Some desperate, vengeful ploy, ensuring that if humanity passed, so too would its attackers.


    ~Glory, Glory hallelujah~


    The alien ships turned. The intercept course vectoring away, attempting to flee the system. There was no point. No time. They could only see it happening because the display itself was being fed by faster than light sensor data; which should be impossible. Or perhaps it was all computer generated; predictions of events. Of a wall of firey death expanding out towards them at the speed of light. Maybe it was all a fake, an illusion?


    ~Glory, Glory hallelujah~


    ~Glory, Glory hallelujah~


    The ships that had been about to reach his command; a tiny splinter of that massive fleet that he''d just watched obliterate all of the Earth''s defenses; was swallowed up by that deadly wave.


    ~His truth is marching on~


    Danvers looked at her board. Looked at her hands, wearing the classic dark blue uniform of the UN space force. Something she''d worked so many years to earn. Something so ultimately pointless. As the wave of death overtook the ship, the last human life within the asteroid belt snuffed out instantly, she had one last thought; a wish for a final swim in the waters of earth.

 Chapter 1: Wake-up Call

    The room was white; if it was even a room. Pure, pale white. He wasn''t breathing. He didn''t feel hungry, thirsty, or sleepy. It could have been death; but it felt all too familiar. Many of the fully immersive games he''d played had something like this in their opening. A void from which to design the very body you''d be playing the role of. Who you''d live and die as in some strange fantasy world. The only visible object other than himself was his Icon; a tiny, glowing, white orb, against an endless sea of white.


    He doesn''t have hands; but the same impulses that would have moved them cause his Icon to blink. Normally, he''d see a radial menu; a circle of options. To exit the game, shutting off the headset. Waking up. This time, he''d see nothing of the sort; just a single choice. Coldly labeled.


    [Introduction]


    He touched it. He had nothing else to do.


    A figure appeared before him; an older man, perhaps in his late fifties, behind a gleaming white desk. A few books are stacked on a corner. A screen; of the antique, LED sort popular two decades ago; sitting at its center. The scarred, burned face, hairless, calm. Familiar. He''d know those ocular implants and their steady blue glow anywhere. Harkness. The Survivor.


    "This recording will only play if the earth has been destroyed. If all hope has ended, and I''ve killed the earth to save a remnant of her children. I suppose this is a depressing thing to record. Shows a certain pessimism on my part. You probably don''t know the whole truth, about the ''Enemy''. Frankly, I hope you never will. A few minutes ago, a series of devices took hold of the heart of our sun, and launched it into the alternate universe we call ''Hyperspace''. In both universes, this caused a small-scale supernova. Here, it wiped out all life in the solar system. In Hyperspace, it did two things."


    An enormous starmap appears. Derek''s ghostly form floating among the stars as if he were one of them; he could see the labels for stars he knew; Sol. Sirius. Proxima Centauri. A tiny red dot appears at Sol; becoming a reddish sphere, expanding outward, rapidly.


    "It created a sort of bow wave; a narrow band on which a vessel can travel much more swiftly than normal... followed by a superheated mass of energy that will make hyperspace impossible to travel for decades or even centuries to come. The effect in the real world will be limited; Proxima Centauri is the only other system that will have any serious impact. In essence, a ship that launches at just the right moment, in just the right way, could ride that wave for thousands of light years. Emerge far beyond the reach of our Enemy; and either emerge in our own universe somewhere along the way, inside a region where no FTL travel will occur for quite some time... or ride it all the way to its edge. The vessel you are currently on is exactly this."


    The starmap vanishes. Replaced by... what appears to be an asteroid. A solid chunk of space-rock, with engines on one side. A diagram appears; showing a thin wedge of construction embedded in it.


    "Obviously, this killed you. Your organic body died when the wave hit wherever you were. If you were wearing one of my headsets, you didn''t even notice; it was a smooth transition from your news program or game to this simulation. Anyone on earth who wore one of those headsets long enough had their entire mind copied; and updated when they put it on; to the databases on the Outreach fleet. When this message ends, you will either wake up as part of the crew, or on a newly established colony, somewhere far beyond earth."


    He smiled. "I won''t be on one of these vessels. This is the last you''ll see of me. Enjoy your second chance."


    At this point, the recording stopped. Harkness vanished; alongside his desk. The Icon. Everything. For a moment, Derek would panic; was he going to be trapped in this void forever? Why would he even feel anything?


    But then... Cold. Icy, terrible cold.


    *****


    He could feel a table beneath him; colder than ice. He still wasn''t breathing. But he could see. He could feel. He... was a machine. It responded as if it were flesh and blood; he could move each finger on the dark grey metal hands as if they had always belonged to him.


    He was inside a room.. cold steel walls, glowing strips on the ceiling for light, a grid of tables like the ones he lay on, each holding an identical skeletal humanoid machine. With a single person standing just a few feet from his table. Not a person. A machine, just like his own. He was a robot now, clearly. Not sure how to feel about it.


    "Derek Thompson? You should turn on your Icon overlay. It''ll help."This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    For a moment, he was confused. His Icon was fake. Just a little artificial intelligence that he used like an interface in his headset. Then he saw it; the tiny, glowing white orb. His... sensors told him it wasn''t real. But when he touched the illusory orb, a familiar radial menu appeared.


    [Holographic Overlay] [Off] [Standby Mode][Off][Equipment][Configuration]


    He tapped the Overlay button, flicking it to [On]. Suddenly... everything changed. He felt as if he were breathing again. Alive. Warm. The cold machine in front of him now looked like... a man. Wearing a solid black uniform, with closely shaved hair, the darkest skin Derek had seen outside of a fantasy game, and a vibrant smile, as if he were in on some joke Derek hadn''t yet heard. He also had an Icon floating around his head; a tiny golden fox, playfully moving through the air in leaps and bounds.


    Derek glanced down at himself; he looked as he had just moments before. Before he died, at least. Wearing the same skintight black outfit.He could tell he was the machine. The room was cold and dark; that this man... who his Icon identified as Captain Peterson.. was also a machine. But so long as the overlay was in place... the walls were bright and vibrant. He was alive and warm.


    The Captain just kept up that grin for a moment as he watched Derek adjust to the overlay; and then clapped him on the shoulder. "So, son. If you want to, you can lay back down on that table, go to sleep, and stay there until we''re building our own new earth, and can give you a more permanent body. I can wake someone else up... though the ship is being built as it goes, slowly converting that giant rock the engine is embedded in into a real ship, so I might not need that body for a while yet. But if you''d like, I can offer you a job instead."


    He studied the captain. Despite their almost identical mechanical bodies, the overlay gave the impression of a tall, fit, military man. Perhaps what Derek might have hoped to be; but definitely not what he was. "I always wanted to go to space... just couldn''t handle the artificial gravity for some reason. I''d be glad to work on a real spaceship, if there was something I could actually help with. You''d need to teach me how to maintain this thing, and, well. You could teach anybody that."


    Peterson offered a low chuckle in response, before turning. "Follow me, Mister Thompson." Derek stepped after him quickly enough; he''d always dreamed to ride a starship, and apparently his holographic overlay was doing an impressive job of simulating his quickened heartbeat and excitement. "Right now, we''re still in hyperspace. The plan is to be there for months. Years, even. We ride the wave till it starts to break up, and come out somewhere that, even if the Enemy knew where we were, and was still around, would take them centuries to reach. When we get there... we''ll need to build a new home."


    The ship seemed to have a long, central corridor; with spacing every ten meters for what was once an airlock. Derek''s mechanical feet could feel the vibration... at the end of the corridor, through two airlocks, someone was drilling. As the captain led him into an open room where others were standing, talking, going over diagrams of components and structures of the ship they were on, Derek''s gaze flickered over the crew. Mostly looking like military; rank insignia on the shoulders, perfect shape, short haircuts, tiny animated creatures or objects floating around them. Finding his gaze drawn to one particularly curvy redheaded girl, he was surprised for a moment to realize his heart was beating faster, he was feeling attracted to her; he had even become distracted from what Captain Peterson was saying as he simply followed in the man''s wake.


    Only to discover that his body had perfect recollection, as his Icon replayed what the captain had said.


    "S-tech built a series of ''games'' that weren''t really games so much as tech demos, tests, and training tools to gather and build some of the skills we would need to establish new colonies in project. Hyper-realistic pilot training programs, simulations for all of the various crew positions. You inadvertently acquired the skills needed to fill a role as a navigation officer in Galactic Wars, and the systems in those ships almost exactly mirror the real thing. More importantly, we''re going to need to sort through hundreds of star systems, probably without a single habitable world, and pick the best choices to build a new home, using the tools we have to hand."


    He turned to Derek, as Derek looked at a starpmap; this one showing the space in the real world flowing by, as the ship moved through hyperspace at a ridiculous pace. Even as he watches, a star flickered by as if it were just a roadsign on the highway.


    "Earthforge."


    "Exactly. The Earthforge program included projections of numerous real and fake star systems.. but was mostly just training to adapt candidates to the idea of working on terraforming projects with the sort of decades or centuries-long timetables we''d be working with, and the sort of equipment we''d be able to use.To be as good as you became would need an in-depth understanding of orbital mechanics and terraforming. To be blunt... your job will be helping decide just which star system we settle down in. Or, well. Which systems. As well as, of course, taking alternating shifts at the navigation console so that Shiraki can actually take breaks without leaving the system unmanned. Technically it doesn''t need to be watched constantly in hyperspace, but..."


    The captain nodded towards a young japanese man, whose overlay was... confusing. It took a moment for Derek to parse it out; there were no chairs in the room, not real ones, but for some psychological reason his own overlay included him sitting at the console. One which did, in fact, look almost identical to what Derek had used in the past.


    "This... entire place is confusing as all hell. I suspect if I were still alive, I''d be in shock. Or having a nervous breakdown. I''d like some time to look the place over and get used to it before I get started... but I''m definitely in. I don''t think I could stand to sleep through this."


    The captain shrugged. "Thats what most of them said. Take a few, get used to the idea. And welcome to the crew of Outreach 13."

 Chapter 2: Outreach 13

    At first, Derek believed Captain Peterson was going to give him a tour of the ship himself. When the cute red-head; who immediately was flagged as Weapons Officer Leanna Smith by his Icon; stepped over to introduce herself, he carefully kept his eyes on her face, and subvocally asked his Icon if he could shut off the kind of blushing idiot response that his overlay was currently giving.


    Which, of course, turned out to be a no. He could either deal with being a human, deal with being a robot, or program a new overlay himself.


    As she led him out of the current impromptu bridge; which clearly was not meant to be one, but with this sort of tech, you could set such a thing up anywhere; she looked him over; before focusing on his Icon. Her own was a snake; or perhaps a dragon; with red-gold scales, perched on her shoulder; with the overlay, it undoubtedly actually felt real, as it would in games.


    "So, this is the main corridor. Its a little over a kilometer long of finished product; in front of that is a wide open space full of construction materials. We''ve got a nice big hollowed-out spot in the rock now." She led him forward; the more they interacted the easier it was to see her as a human woman, walking forward with easy grace, rather than a machine, clamping along, only stuck to the ground thanks to magnets.


    "Mind if I ask what the story is with the Icon? You''re the only person I''ve ever seen with one that still has the default look... but has enough underlying programming to be a low-grade AI. Percy reached that point years ago, but she''s been some sort of variant of dragon from the beginning." She absently patted the creature; which rubbed itself affectionatle against her hand.


    As they reached the forward airlock, Derek looked down at the tiny white orb, and touched it with one finger, bringing up the same options he had seen before. "It used to be a cat. I had this cute one, Fluffbucket. Long, grey fur, just adorable. My Icon was a kitten version of her. When she died, and my ex paid the vet to make a digital copy of the cat... I didn''t want the confusion. Honestly, I probably had an unhealthy obsession with that digital furball."


    When the airlock cycled open, he felt a moment of cold. His Icon warned him that the atmosphere was being removed from the chamber.. and that he had seventeen hours before the lack of airflow would cause his mechanical body to begin overheating, if he kept moving.


    As the outer door opened, it revealed an enormous, cavernous space. Fabrication drones; squid-like robots with bodies dotted with reaction thrusters, and dozens of long tentacles each ending in some sort of tool; be it cutting, grasping, or welding; were everywhere. Stacks of metal plates on the rough-hewn rock floor. Storage tanks with release valves. Large metal hoppers full of what looked to be a sludge of some sort.


    Leanna gave a broad wave at the surroundings. "In the beginning, all that was here was a few fabricators, the genetic samples for our cloning tank, and the hyperdrive. Broke apart a few asteroids, melted things down, and started working. Now... we''ve used up all the raw materials from the first rock 13 was hooked up to, and are about a third of the way through melting down this one. We''ve got enough metal to build a small fleet, mostly nickel-iron, and enough carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen to provide it with atmosphere and crews. Eventually, when we''ve got a habitable world, we''ll pressurize this baby and switch to cloned bodies, let the robots just do grunt work."


    Derek looked over the wide, cavernous space from the metal platform at the airlock''s opening. A series of girders spread out,showing the final frame of the still-progressing vessel. He looked it all over, comparing mental notes. Hookups for extra fusion torch engines would go... there. Weapons bays in the event the ship encountered hostiles would be... here.


    "The layout is a little different. But this is an Earthforge Seeder Ship. This... Do we actually have all of that tech? The kind of fuel efficiency you''d need to actually move rocks that big, or cool something off that quickly..."Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!


    Leanna laughed, and tapped her snake on the head. After a few moments, the completed layout of the ship sprang to life. It did, in fact, look just like the ships for Earthforge. "Subtract the living crew, and you''ve got it. You''ll notice the engines and weapons are a bit smaller... we managed to improve the design since releasing the game. We are going to be running low on iridium, so we''re cutting back on the main gun so we have enough to build a couple of scoutship hyperdrives."


    A disturbing notice popped up on his Icon. "You have 16 hours remaining before lack of atmosphere will cause overheating." He stared at it for a moment, then studied his internal clock... before looking at the machines. Busily moving about the vast cavern. Carving out chunks of rock. Delivering them to smelting machines. "I''m running slow. Why am I running slow?"


    "We all are. Its going to take months, or years, from our perspective, to get to the edge of the red zone, reach a place where we can settle down. Actual time-wise its going to be decades, or centuries. Captain Peterson has us running about a twentienth speed right now. One hour every three minutes. These rigs can handle up to ten times, or twenty overclocked; and if an emergency comes up, we''ll go on that automatically."


    As Derek watched machines; both the purely AI-driven fabricators and the humanoid crew; working, he could see where the front of the ship would be when it was done. The ship was mostly finished, and most of the rock was still there. As he turned back toward the airlock, he glanced over at Leanna. "Its crazy to imagine all this is real. I can''t wait to get to work once we get close enough to see our new home."


    As the airlock began to repressurize, the overheating warning vanished. She glanced at him. "Well, first you''ll get to spend a few months helping build systems, and learning how they work. They picked this oversized rock for a reason; we want a whole flotilla of ships by the time we drop out, and every hand helps. With that bow wave giving us all the momentum we need, some of the other ships grabbed rocks half the size of Ceres."


    As they walked back down the hallway, she pointed out finished structures; doors leading to elevators that currently led nowhere. Doors that would be crew quarters for the forward deck; mostly weapons officers so they could be physically on station in seconds in the event of a network outage. Everything was brand new, and completely empty; not a single fixture or piece of furniture; only the piping for air and water flows present.


    They passed the two robot bays; one full of squids, hanging from numerous ceiling racks, at various stages of completion; though a single damaged one hung close to the entrance, tentacles hanging off-center as the central body was partially crushed. The other, where he''d awoken just... well, hours before, though it didn''t feel like that. Long rows of humanoid robot bodies... waiting for a passenger to bring them to life.


    The fabrication bay and engineering were intimately familiar. He''d seen these in his Earthforge games, in an almost identical layout, numerous times. At this point, as he studied long-familiar equipment, one of the engineers stepped over; and offered to show him the ropes.


    His tour guide would step away, leaving him to it.. as Derek began to learn the difference between real-world technology and the simplified versions he''d toyed with for years in his games. A checklist appeared over his Icon. An amusing listing, as if he were playing the tutorial of Earthforge all over again. But this one... promised to take weeks. He could already see that he''d need to learn new math just to understand how the hyperdrive worked... and he was a master of orbital mechanics but still needed a better understanding of ship''s functions.


    Training Checklist for Head Navigation Officer Slot:


    [Learn Navigation Functions: 87%]


    [Learn Hyperdrive Functions: 32%]


    [Learn Fusion Torch Functions: 77%]


    [Learn Basic-level functions, all positions: 88%]


    [Build Own Quarters: 0%]


    [Optional: Learn Terraforming Functions: 162%][Complete]


    [Optional: Learn Hypercannon Functions: 18%]


    [Optional: Learn Missile and Point Defense Functions: 36%]


    [Optional: Learn full-level functions, all positions: 39%]


    [Optional: Furnish Own Quarters: 0%]


    Pausing his study of the hyperdrive for a moment, he examined the details clearly. Apparently the captain had set him a ''quest''... and if he accomplished his primary objectives, he''d be the head navigator. For the moment, he was confused; surely they had some former military who''d been uploaded to handle that job. Still. Time to get to work. He tapped his Icon, sending a request to the captain to stop underclocking him for a while.. and started reading basic Hyperdrive theory.

 Chapter 3: Overclock and Underclock

    VR Headsets had a certain limited ability to accelerate time; and a much greater ability to slow things down; putting its subjects to sleep. Taking an organic brain and speeding it up grew less and less reliable the more speed you tried to get out of it; for Derek, he''d never been able to get more than perhaps twenty or thirty percent out of his own flesh and blood.


    While the overlay was running, he looked human. He felt human. What he breathed felt like air. But the simple reality is; he was a machine. A machine running at less than one percent of its mental capacity for the past few hours, since he awoke. His body could easily move at five times the rate of a normal human; so when the captain approved his request for overclocking, he simply matched things up.


    From his perspective, the crew as now moving at a crawl. The tech who had been showing him the operation of the hyperdrive appeared to be moving in a sluggish way; hand creeping towards the button. Watching it was... disturbing. He had access to every piece of data about the ship; but as of yet, didn''t understand it. That would take effort; and time. Something of which he now had plenty.


    He had worked extensively with orbital mechanics and fusion torch ships in his old life.. in his favorite ''game''. He knew what would happen if you applied just a enough force and twisted the path of one object to intercept another. How a miscalculation of a millionth of a percent; an object''s shape, composition, and center of mass being just a bit off; could completely ruin an attempt to accomplish his objective. AIs could help; he''d carefully tailored his Icon to help gather information and provide estimates over hundreds of scenarios. His navigation was almost there. He just needed a bit more work.


    Hyperdrives, though? The idea of an alternate reality where physics worked differently? Where mass actively decayed if it wasn''t protected, there was no speed of light, and nothing worked right? That was going to be hard.


    Hard, he could handle.


    ***


    For Technician Adrian Jacobs, watching Thompson work was amusing; reminiscent of his own wakeup call just a few subjective days before, as the skeleton crew of Outreach 13 woke up more people to help speed progress on the ship. His primary job was an intricate and complex one; as the mining process went on, he had to constantly manipulate the field that kept hyperspace from obliterating them all; or just dumping them in realspace; to sync up with the minor changes of the bow wave pushing them along, as well as the changing center of mass of the ship.


    For the most part, the former naval officer was able to cruise along at the same low time-rate as the rest of the crew; only 5% of real. Sometimes, however, some unforseen shift caused by a broken squid sending a hull plate crashing in the wrong spot would require him to pump all the way up to 100%, 1000%, or even higher to make sure the field didn''t collapse. A few of his adjustments had been because part of the asteroid had fallen out of the field, and he''d been forced to spend a few minutes that, to him, seemed like days, working through thousands of field configurations to keep things together.


    He was seriously looking forward to the final completion of the hull; when that happened the crew would be able to drop all the way down to less than 1%, and spend the rest of the journey in, subjectively, seconds. The overlay was nice; he''d gone on a few ''dates'' with one of the comms techs, but the idea of ''dinner and a movie'' just didn''t work right when you knew you didn''t actually have to eat, that the food was fake, and that, in reality, you were just standing together in a perfectly empty room.


    He needed a body. That cloning rig couldn''t be ready fast enough.


    After making a few more minor adjustments to the field, he glanced down at the blurring form of Thompson. There was no need to be in such a hurry. They had months before navigation would really need to do anything; their path was free and clear for thousands of light-years. Still. It''d be interesting to see if the kid could really build them a new home out there.


    ***


    Outreach 13 was a smoothly running machine. With each passing day, the raw materials of the asteroid were converted from rough rock walls and raw ore into tanks full of useful materials, smelted out into hull plates, or used by technicians to fabricate advanced components. For Captain Peterson, this wasn''t the job he''d signed up for. He''d been a starship captain; and hoped to be a commodore, leading a fleet of ships defending the earth. Not babysitting a bunch of trainees and has-beens, building the crew for a colony ship loaded down with robots.If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    On the other hand... it was difficult to fault the plan. As he looked over the starmap ahead, he called up the raw materials assessment; and the planned ship construction. He had enough iridium to either build out four new hyperdrives, or three of them and a pair of Hypercannons.


    He''d seen a Hypercannon fired before. The weapon opened a nice clean line several light-seconds long, and transited everything in its path to hyperspace for a fraction of a second; obliterating anything along that path when it returned to normal space. Moments before his real body had died, he''d witnessed one fired on the Mars base. It hit so hard debris had cascaded up from the other side of the planet. There was no defense. Nothing could survive it.


    He tapped his Icon; patting the golden fox, the fur feeling real and warm against his skin. "Skyler, call up the staff. We need to make a decision on this, and I''d like some input."


    The signal went out. The overlay... warped. Time compression turned up, everyone going from 5% up to 500% in a few moments; when the meeting was over, unless it laste for hours, they''d have lost only seconds, as comms synced up... and they all appeared to be seated around a conference table.


    At one end, Captain Peterson sat. Resource assessments and ship plans before him. Along the row the top-ranking officers on the ship; Engineer Adrian Jacobs; a bit older, pale-skinned, bearded, and, from Peterson''s Trek-fan perspective, unfortunately american rather than Scottish; Weapons officer Leanna Smith; the definitely scottish freckled redhead; and his Fabrications Officer, Ichika Amari; who Peterson very definitely was not supposed to be looking at the way he did, nor should he be taking her hand and smiling before starting off the conference. But hell. There''s no more navy. No more earth. Who cared?


    "Alright, people. I got Amari''s latest assessment. The Iridium situation is better than we hoped. We''ve got three possible plans here, each with advantages and disadvantages. Following standard procedure, we should, if possible, fully kit out the Outreach ship itself, build two Destroyer class vessels complete with Hypercannon, and then however many scout ships we have the material for. We all knew that wasn''t likely to happen. If I build two Destroyers, that''ll leave us with enough Iridium to make, probably, four Hypercannon; one for each ship, including 13, and a replacement spare. This is what core doctrine would have us do."


    *The image appears over their heads. Two six-hundred meter Destroyers; long, sleek craft, completely lacking the redundant spin gravity generation older ships had kept.


    "Alternately, we can build four scout-class ships, and if we do build a Destroyer, which we already have the spine laid down for, it would be without a main gun. Making it completely helpless if there''s anyone here with shielding worth a damn." The next diagram appears; showing four 350-meter scout ships and a somewhat different version of the Destroyer. "Frankly, that idea is absurd to me. The best option to me seems the third."


    *A new diagram appears; showing three new constructions alongside the 13. "For me, the obvious choice is to ignore doctrine, build two scout-ships, one destroyer, and get hypercannon for the 13 and the destroyer. We can keep the Destroyer with the 13 for protection, and scout nearby stars with the others. Its marginally more risky than building a pair... but allows a compromise between effective firepower, and still being able to scout without bringing the entire flotilla to each system."


    Jacobs toys with his beard as he studies the tiny fleet before him. "That''ll leave us with a substantial amount of additional raw material. The plan already calls for fully loading the 13 up with drones, torches, and prefabs. Are we just going to dump the excess into hyperspace once its all done?"


    Amari coughs gently, smiling. "Actually, we''ve already got a plan for that. Once we''ve built as many ships as we''ve got, and have them all fully loaded, we''ll use the remaining materials to build as many solar panels and prefab station blocks as we can... and when we get where we''re going, already have what we need to build a rudimentary orbital habitat. No artificial gravity.. but we can set it spinning and have a solid base of operations big enough to fit our ships inside if need be once the drones finish assembling it."


    Smith brings up the image; zooming in on the 13. "I noticed the hypercannon here seems... wrong. Too thick, too short. This thing won''t have the sort of range it needs for a real fight."


    "Thats the thing..." Peterson grins. "Its not meant to be just a weapon. Its a terraforming tool. As ridiculous as it sounds, that thing can be used to release truly ridiculous kinetic energy, and help redirect the path of objects in orbit. If we go with this plan, each of us here at this table gets their own ship. All Captains, myself on the destroyer as Commodore. Though..." He turns to Amari. "If he turns out as well as I think he will, Mr. Thompson should probably be your XO on the 13. He''s probably going to be the best one to figure out how to use that thing, but he needs a captain with enough time in service to keep the naval people working for him."


    Amari nods for a moment. "Perhaps. I''ll make that decision when we get there; it might be best to just create a new position for him. Earthforger, or some such nonsense."


    Peterson tilts his head. "Once the ship is yours, I''ll leave that up to you. For now. We''ll go with plan C. One destroyer. Two scouts. Once everything''s complete we can crew up our own ships... and just drop down to a percent. Fast forward to the end, as it were, and really get to see some strange new worlds for ourselves."

 Chapter 4: Broken

    Derek was in the unfinished space that would be his own personal assigned crew quarters when all was said and done; practically on autopilot as his mechanical body gently wedged the panel a few more milimeters, allowing it to lock into place. It was a surprisingly generous 4x4 meter space; but then, the Outreach ships were bigger than anything humanity had built before, and had plenty of space to spare. Everything had its own exact space it needed to go. Furniture would be able to reposition; but the walls, the doors... everything needed to be just so. If a hole passed through the ship, the gel inside this wall needed to be able to seal off the wall. The door; which doubled as an airlock; needed to seal properly.


    Right now, it was a box. A holy box, with gaps for the fitting of wiring and piping in progress. For Derek, it was mind-numbing, easy work, of the sort he hadn''t done for years. It occupied his hands while he read notes about the Hyperdrive. He was on a fairly interesting passage, apparently penned by the Survivor himself, about the two types of FTL travel known to exist, when he head a knock at the door; or, rather, the doorframe. There was no door, yet. He tapped his Icon, bringing up his checklist.


    Training Checklist for Head Navigation Officer Slot:


    [Learn Navigation Functions: 101%]


    [Learn Hyperdrive Functions: 89%]


    [Learn Fusion Torch Functions: 78%]


    [Learn Basic-level functions, all positions: 93%]


    [Build Own Quarters: 55%]


    [Optional: Learn Terraforming Functions: 163%][Complete]


    [Optional: Learn Hypercannon Functions: 42%]


    [Optional: Learn Missile and Point Defense Functions: 36%]


    [Optional: Learn full-level functions, all positions: 43%]


    [Optional: Furnish Own Quarters: 0%]


    He shut it down, and looked over at his door; to see the slow-moving image of Shiraki; a relatively short asian man of an age he simply couldn''t guess. Either he was terrible at it, or the man had tweaked his overlay to make it difficult. He saw a line floating over his Icon;


    [Sync Timeframes] [Yes][No]


    He tapped [Yes], and felt a sudden lurch. Gravity wasn''t weaker while time was slow; it just felt like it. Instead of slowly drifting towards the ground, a tool would slam down abruptly. Fortunately, nothing heavy was in motion; other than his own body.


    Shiraki studied him for a few seconds as he almost fell on his ass, carefully balancing himself as he settled back into a standing position. "The captain tells me you''re going to be my boss for the rest of the trip. Khaleesi is currently spelling me on Navigation. I was a bit pissed at first. I spent three years in the academy, and had been on a destroyer for six months before it all ended. We were dodging around and trading shots with the Enemy... for about a minute and a half, before we were overwhelmed. Then I saw the guidelines he sent you."


    He crossed his arms. "You had more orbital mechanics and navigation training before you died than I do now. He basically mandated you be dramatically better than me to get the slot. Why the hell weren''t you in the navy? There were millions of slots open that last year. We were expanding like crazy."


    Derek froze for a moment. If not for the slow swirling of his Icon, Shiraki might have taken him for being out of sync. "I... didn''t make the cut. I went to the academy with my ex, and all of my friends, but... training incident. I had a brain defect, some sort of neurological disorder... I was fine with real gravity, and spin. But the artificial stuff? I had... episodes. They said hyperspace would probably do the same thing."


    A vision spun through his head. Blood. Screaming. One of his classmate''s face in his hands, the steady meaty thunk of flesh against metal, the cracking of bone. Everything going red. And then black.


    "The first time was on the shuttle into orbit. They thought it was just a fight between a couple of classmates that went a bit too far. I''d passed the sims, was on track for officer training, they didn''t want to waste all that time; after all, medical technology had both of us up and moving in days, and its like you said... millions of slots to fill. The second one... was worse. Only a few dozen people like it ever showed up... and one was my uncle. I didn''t find out until the discharge hearing. Me and my family, grounded. Permanently."


    Shiraki gave a slow nod. "A genetic defect. Something they couldn''t fix. And something that doesn''t really matter for a robot body. Is that gonna be a problem when we start getting real bodies?"Stolen story; please report.


    Derek blinked. "I... hope not. Hadn''t really thought about it yet."


    "Maybe you should take a break. Go talk to Sheila. Right now she''s just sorting through the database for the captain, finding the right minds to upload for positions, but we aren''t slated to add more crew until the 13 is finished, and we start in on her escorts. Still." He extended a hand.


    Derek reached out and took it, giving a firm squeeze. Perhaps a bit too firm; he heard the faint screech of metal before he abruptly relaxed his grip.


    Shiraki chuckled. "I''m sure it won''t be a big deal. Maybe they couldn''t fix it when you were alive, but this time they''ll get to build your body from the ground up. None of it should be a problem."


    ***


    The robot bay was a bit creepy, with or without the overlay. On the Earthforge ships from his sims, this didn''t exist; it was the medical bay, where the fake crew would be treated for their fake injuries, after fighting some equally fake aliens trying to stop him from terraforming their world. There was a real medical bay in the deck that was most different from the sim; the cloning bay. In the sim, if your character ''died'', you''d ''respawn'' as a clone. Actual defeats were rare; scores were about how well you did at making the star system ready for colonization, and there weren''t even threats in most of them.


    Dr, Sheila McCloud was another redhead; one whose overlay, unlike those of the bulk of the crew, actually showed what was likely her true original body; a motherly figure in her mid-50s, with a blend of red and grey hair, and a less-than-perfect figure, but a firm, steady stride as she walked among the tables, studying the information only she could see about the robots in mid-activation.


    She raised a hand as Derek entered. "Hold. One of our construction engineers managed to completely wreck himself and his team securing the net on the outer shell, and I''m having to load the lot of them in new bodies."


    "A... net on the outer shell?"


    "You''ll have to ask him. I''ve been underclocking when I haven''t been needed. I''m a cybernetics expert, not a starship engineer."


    For the next few minutes, Derek would wait; not able to see just what was going on, to him it just looked like she was standing in place, making tiny twitching movements with her fingers. He drifted off in place... and even started to absently read another passage on the influence of black holes on hyperspace.. before the three men abruptly sat up.


    It looked strange, with the overlay in place. One moment, three identical skeletal machines lay there. The next... three men; drastically different in skin tone, height, build, everything... were rising up in their place.


    The first one off the table, an impressively stout asian figure that Derek guessed might be chinese, gave a long sigh. "Again!? Seriously? Wait. Is this the body I was in the first time?"


    Dr. McCloud scowled. "Precisely. It took subjective days to get it back to one hundred percent. And from what I hear I won''t be doing that to the replacement at all?"


    "Well. Yeah. I shut down and uploaded just before I shoved these two back towards the ship, and, well. That body is somewhere out in hyperspace."


    She sighed. "Each computer core uses elements that we have a very limited supply of here. We can afford to lose rocks more than bots."


    Derek blinked. "Wait. So thats why you need a net? To keep the rock from escaping into hyperspace?"


    The man glanced over at Derek. "Oh. The Earthforge guy.... Thompson, right?"


    At Derek''s nod, he shrugged. "Essentially. We''re about to start breaking through, and the rock is gonna completely collapse soon. This whole thing is packed full of juicy bits of iron, gold, iridium... if I knew that outer shell was all iron, I''d just let it go, we''ve got kilotons of it. But maybe, just maybe, I can find a few more grams of the good stuff."


    He pats Derek on the shoulder as he heads for the door. "Enough of a break. Lets get back out there. As soon as this is done, we can get back to the fun part and making ships."


    As the other two men followed, Derek could hear one of them mutter.. "..As soon as we start on the ships you''ll be trying to move on to something else. Crazy old man."


    He heard the footsteps rapidly fade as they moved out of the room, heading for whatever airlock they were working at. Two badly crushed robots were being dragged into the room by another of the construction engineers. "Here we go, doc. Almost lost two of them entirely, but the other guy pushed em back so we could grab em with a mag line."


    Derek helped the two load the broken machines onto empty tables; tables which, now that he had a closer look, were covered in various implements; tiny robotic tendrils, charging cables, spouts for chemicals of various descriptors. Once the second machine was in place, and the engineer was on his way out, Dr. McCloud immediately turned to one of them, assessing the damage.


    "So, what is it that brought you in here? I was under the impression you were fast-forwarding your way into officer-hood."


    "Oh, thats easy enough. Back when I was alive.."


    "You are alive. Just... not organic. At the moment."


    "That''s actually what I wanted to know about. The becoming organic bit. I had a fairly.... irritating neurological condition when I was.. organic. When we clone me so I can... be organic again, will we be able to fix that problem?"


    Dr. McCloud''s response would, of course, fill Derek with dismay. "Of course not. Why would we clone you a new body to begin with?"

 Chapter 5: Replacement

    McCloud rolled her eyes at Derek''s expression. "God, you daft twit. You''ll be getting some organic bits, yes. Just not a clone of your old body. We don''t have a DNA sample of it, and if we did, I doubt we''d want it. God knows where ''goes berserk when space is warped'' sits on the chain."


    He tiltled his head at her. Dismay replaced with confusion in a fraction of a second. "Okay. So is it just going to be some random body, or..."


    She stopped her repair work for a moment to glance up at him. "Okay, look. The computer running you right now? Can run faster and store more than a human brain. What we''re going to end up with... Hm. You ever watch the terminator? Old classic movie, robot skeleton in a meatsuit?"


    He nodded along, not sure he liked where this was going.


    She tapped a button on her icon. A humanoid robot appeared.. only this one looked like a skeletal human. A perfectly formed; albeit metallic; human skeleton. "We''re gonna put the brain you''ve got now in a shell. Then grow organs, flesh, skin, on it, so you can feel, and eat, and all that craziness. You''ll even be able to turn some food into chemical energy for your shell... though the best route is just to plug in to recharge every month or so. When its all done, you''ll feel perfectly normal... except, well. Better."


    "That... actually sounds kinda cool. But if you don''t have my DNA, what will you use?"


    "We''ve got samples from over tens of thousands of donors; some voluntary, some not, from all over the world. Pick a set and you''re good. Now look. We both have things to do. Why don''t you get back to your overclocking research bull and let me do my job?"


    Derek was still a bit concerned; but less than he had been before. He was reasonably confident that things would turn out fine in the end; he could look and feel how he used to, only without his... problems. He did wonder whether Shirkai had known all of this the whole time, and just decided to toy with him; scenarios running through his head of whether the man he was replacing was more upset than he revealed; perhaps trying to sabotage him.


    Abruptly, Derek realized he''d been standing, lost in thought, as a clearly irritated Dr. McCloud was working on her machines just a few meters away. He backed up, heading out of the machine bay.. and started overclocking again. He had a checklist to finish. Time to get back to it.


    ***


    A small pack of squid-shaped drones swarmed over the rock, their movements as fluid and seemingly random as their shapes predicted.Three of them dragged the bulbous masses that would someday be point defense lasers, charging them from their own internal capacitors, as the more humanoid machines completed the outside safety net; the last of three hundred and sixteen tiny nodes forming a rough ovoid shape, redirecting any loose debris back... towards the shape of 13. A minor flux in the bow wave as they passed a star system flexed the protective hyperdrive field; a few rocks broke free; and rather than passing out into relative nonexistance, simply drifted slowly towards the center. Breakthrough. The shell of the asteroid that was had finally started to develop cracks.


    The outer hull of the ship was almost complete; deceptively thin scaffolding that had held things in place was being taken down in places; and in others, expanded, as the spine of a smaller; but still massive; vessel was precisely arranged among a spiderweb of connections, there to hold it all in place in the event of whatever manuevers the ship had to make.


    Even before it settled into place, more drones were moving. The skeleton of what would soon be a destroyer was forming in the ghostly, distorted light hyperspace seemed to give over the cavern now that it was open to space.


    ***


    Shiraki settled back into his duty station on the bridge. The actual bridge; buried in the heart of the ship, but arranged as a proper bridge should be, a rough, armored sphere surrounding the captain''s chair, with screens and controls for every device on the ship being hooked into place. at the various crew stations surrounding it. His own system was fully operational already; he carefully checked the upcoming stars; the long, slightly twisted path the 13 would take on its route through hyperspace. There would be a minor course-correction to stay on track in a few days; a black hole they''d passed had slightly more of its gravity project into hyperspace than expected. Even without the course correction, they''d still reach the targeted sector; but that was fine.


    Might as well enjoy the view for a few more shifts. The maddeningly competent upstart who would be replacing him would likely take over soon, and from the crew''s perspective it''d be only a few weeks left til arrival. For just a moment, he imagined what it would take to fake a bout of whatever psychosis had taken over the civilian... former civilian... in his mechanical body. But no. He was navy, as much as one was left.


    When Captain Peterson entered the chamber, Shiraki glanced up from his station. The old man seemed remarkably calm about all this. How long had he been up before he''d started turning the others on? Or had Dr. McCloud been the first? He''d been awoken before the bow wave hit; the captain wanted a real navigator to keep an eye on things for that first few tricky minutes. He''d even had the disturbing moment of integrating a last memory packet... his organic flesh-and-blood self had died a few minutes after the machine Siraki had woken up. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    Two sets of memories with identical timestamps occuring at the same time. One of calm planning and preparing. The other of sheer panic and fear. Enough to drive a sane man mad.


    Behind him, he heard a throat-clearing. Obviously a brief call for attention. He set his console to standby and turned to the captain.


    "Alright, people. In a few hours, we''re going to be starting up the reactor of our new Destroyer. We haven''t given her a name yet... we won''t until she''s ready for independent flight... but she''ll be a somewhat upgraded version of the Dragon class that came out of the yards in Shanghai a few months before the... event. In the sector of space we''re going to be in, she''ll be the only real warship."


    "Some of you may have noticed that I''ve been bringing on extra crew. Replacements, in some cases, for your jobs. I''m going to be blunt here; while some of the replacements might have an edge on you in select areas, you were my first choices for a crew, for a variety of reasons. All of you are navy. All of you have some of the very little actual combat experience of any human ship; either during the last battle or those pirate incidents a few years back. I know this will come as a touch of an irritant for you, having fabricated quarters you''ll never sleep in.. but I''d like to bring all of you over to the Dragon-C when its ready. This platform we''re on, for all its size, is a civilian ship. That ship over there is going to be the founding flagship of the navy for sector 13."


    "Thats not to say this will be mandatory. While you were my first choices, there are over a million minds stored in the database, including numerous competent naval officers. If you want to stay on in a civilian capacity, you can feel free to remain here. This is not a warship; its a terraforming and fabrication platform. Our current fabrication officer, Amari, is going to be taking this chair when we go, and I''m sure she''d be glad to have you as she gets to work building the future homes of humanity in the stars."


    Shiraki smiled, and gave a short nod. "I''ll be glad to take the job, Captain." A chorus of agreement filled the room. Half of the bridge crew had been looking at future replacements with varying degrees of irritation; for a less disciplined group, it might have caused problems.


    "As you were, then. Our future Captain Amari needs to finish building my ship before she can claim this one. Until then... this might be Outreach 13. There might be dozens of other ships like it out there. But we can''t count on that. Assume we''re all thats left, because we might just be. I wouldn''t put it past old man Harkness naming the only one to make it out alive the 13 just to give us hope that there were at least 12 others."


    For a moment this last line strained everyone. Shiraki had assumed there were dozens, or even hundreds, of ships out there, and that someday they''d meet other survivors, even if long after they''d built a thriving new world of their own. He had a few friends he hoped to see again one day, given how long these new bodies and minds could last.


    But no. Best not to dwell on that. He had a job to do; making sure this ship reached its designated star cluster safely.


    ****


    In his freshly completed quarters; featuring a toilet, shower, and other fabricated fixtures that there were no living humans nearby... or possible even in existance.. to use.. Derek was standing in the midst of the room, engaging in yet more simulations. After what had seemed to him weeks and months of time passing; and subjectively really had been; he''d achieved what the ''quest'' his captain gave him considered an acceptable knowledge of hyperdrives and navigation. He was actually supposed to go on for his first actual shift as navigator in almost day of real time; which, for the crew still running at 5%, meant less than two hours to go. Every officer on the shift had at least basic training in every position to run them in emergencies; but for Derek, that wasn''t enough. He knew from his academy days that promotions generally went to people who both excelled at their field; and were competent at every other field. There were no Captains who didn''t have at least a good understanding of every piece of their ship; even if not enough to rebuild a hyperdrive.


    Training Checklist for Head Navigation Officer Slot:


    [Learn Navigation Functions: 110%][Complete]


    [Learn Hyperdrive Functions: 100%][Complete]


    [Learn Fusion Torch Functions: 101%][Complete]


    [Learn Basic-level functions, all positions: 100%]


    [Build Own Quarters: 100%][Complete]


    [Optional: Learn Terraforming Functions: 163%][Complete]


    [Optional: Learn Hypercannon Functions: 81%]


    [Optional: Learn Missile and Point Defense Functions: 68%]


    [Optional: Learn full-level functions, all positions: 81%]


    [Optional: Furnish Own Quarters: 0%]


    The primary thing he was lacking at this point was combat training; which led to where he was now. Earthforge had never been about fighting; the Seeder ships could fight, sure, but he''d mostly left the weapons on automatic and just focused on moving the ship. That being said, the ship was much larger than a Destroyer, and more powerful than the ship his Ex had been serving on when she died.


    For a moment, he almost checked the database, to see if a certain name was among the contents.. but he stopped. Went back to focusing on his simulation.


    Space combat was relatively simple, in the grand scheme of things. Two sides would launch missiles at each other from extreme range; point defenses would try to intercept them all before impact. The attacker would balance how many missiles arrived at once; versus how much time the enemy had to observe the missiles and get a good trajectory. Either trying to overwhelm the enemy with more missiles than they could shoot down; or sneak the missiles in before they could get a good shot in.


    Then, at a few light-seconds of range, the Hypercannons would come into play, and even closer, the point defenses would start hitting enemy ships as well. At this sort of range, with a main gun that traveled faster than light, generally an enemy ship would be destroyed once every few shots. The action would be so fast that no human could follow it; gunners and captains would make decisions during the long missile duel, and then during the few seconds of closing the AIs would handle everything; no human could aim point defenses and weapons during manuevering at the sorts of speed a hyperdrive-equipped ship could handle.


    Still. If he overclocked all the way, he could take a few weeks to focus on what he lacked during the time available. And, admittedly, the captain giving to him as if it were a ''quest'' seemed to be providing exactly the sort of motivation such things had with his fellow students back at the academy; a subtle compulsion to get those numbers all to nice round 100s, or more.

 Chapter 6: Practice Makes Imperfect

    As much as Derek''s favorite game had been Earthforge; in part because it was one he truly excelled at; he had been one of the millions of fans of the various space combat games out there. The only problem being that these were made by companies like the megaconglomerate Disney, and while Earthforge was based on equipment that could actually be built, the online wargames were based on classic fictional properties.


    Experience ramming a corellian corvette into an Imperial-Class Star Destroyer and somehow making it out alive didn''t have any real-world applications.


    Fortunately, he''d learned the basics in the academy; and studying up on the hyperdrive had helped; as it was the lynchpin of everything about fighting in space. In order to pass the weapons course, he''d need to start out by making passing marks on every weapon system in various combat situations; but that wouldn''t be enough.


    In the academy, they used low-grade hypnotic medications and techniques to convince their students they were truly in the field fighting for their lives to learn just how they''d react when lives were on the line. The Survivor himself had pioneered the technique to find the best men for the top ranks of the UN fleet; all the way down to refusing to hand over some alien tech if they didn''t let his choice; a Russian submarine captain; run the organization.


    While the models had updated over the seventeen years of the fleet''s existence, there had always been only three classes of combat ships in the fleet; and the Enemy only had one, that we knew of.


    The Destroyer; around 500-600 meters long, ranging from the old-school London class; his... final incident had occured on one such ship, the Washington, and his ex had ended up serving on another, the Shanghai; to the most recent Dragon class. The final Dragon class was essentially tailor-built to fight the only enemy warship class, a similarly-sized Destroyer built around the same main gun.


    The Scout; typically 200-300 meters, a strictly slower-than-light ship, built to hook onto a Destroyer and be dragged through Hyperspace. Only a few dozen had been built; mostly training platforms. Amusingly enough, the Scout, in turn, carried pairs of the smallest class;


    The Gunship. Unlike the Scout, these continued to be made right up til the end; their whole point had been to give the Scouts more sensor angles and point-defense envelope. It was hoped that having a modest swarm of these between the fleet and the enemy would help burn away the incoming waves of missiles if a real fleet combat ever occured.


    Of course, in reality, the fight had gone simply. Tens of thousands of enemy warships had emerged, in overwhelming numbers at every point of contact, somehow remaining unseen until they were revealed in hypercannon range, and obliterated every installation they''d seen from outside the system within minutes, taking only a handful of losses, then moved on to the smaller sites they hadn''t seen from the outside.


    ***


    For a moment, Derek was confused. He wondered where he was, what he''d been doing. But... no. He''d made it through the academy, and was currently the gunner for a Ranger-class Gunship. A tiny, compact thing. Just how he got here was a touch confusing; but he could feel the cold metal of his console against his skin, hear the steady thrum of the microfusion reactor keeping the ship''s capacitors charged up.. and see the pilot carefully working them on his pattern through their formation.


    He checked his weapons. This was a classic, old-school Ranger; she had two weapons, a whole array of single-shot flak cannisters; essentially railguns that fired with such force they shattered themselves and sent a spray of debris forward in a cone; and a point defense cluster; a heavy laser whose lens could be reoriented to fire anywhere other than directly behind the gunship at a moment''s notice.


    He reviewed his status screens, checking the ammunition load on the tubes, and glanced at the logs; he didn''t remember it, but he must have done the standard maintenance just a few hours ago, since the timer read 44 hours before he should check it again.


    The Ranger moved in a slow, just slightly randomized, orbit of the Moscow; so much slower than the steady spin of the destroyer''s gravity cylinder that making out details on it was impossible from this distance.


    A loud blaring siren sounds for just a moment. The lights in the gunship cockpit shift red, the three men on duty all shifting in alertness; as a warning is passed along. Enemy ship closing in. Just emerged from hyperspace two light-minutes away and closing; already firing missiles. A steady count of incoming ordinance rising as the Rangers all sprang to alert; and Derek primed his weapons. The other Rangers and the Moscow all sent out signals, computers syncing up.


    He had less than thirty seconds to setup his firing plan before the missiles were in point defense range; and if he failed, it''d be his own fault the Moscow died, with dozens of naval officers at minimum lost no matter how well emergency protocols were followed.You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.


    He knew how to do this. He analyzed the missiles in his own corridor; and ones in nearby ones that might pass over. Judged which ones were likely ECM drones, and which ones penetrators. Fired the Flak tubes immediately; releasing half of the gunship''s sixty tubes in a long controlled burst, creating a region of space enemy missiles would need to swerve to avoid if they wanted to strike the Moscow; and then designating a priority list. First, the missiles he was reasonably certain were real; only hitting the drones if all of them were taken out.


    He felt the increased weight against his chair as the Ranger pushed forward. The comms officer behind him switching on the tiny vessel''s own ECM, the pilot accelerating hard. No more patterns. No more orbits.


    As the gunship kept moving, he noticed something. A change in trajectory, with only seconds left to spare. One of the missiles was shifting to target him. Without hesitating, he shifted the cycle... pushing that missile to the end of the line. The laser''s capacitor would probably be dead before it reached that far.


    The actual shooting was over in seconds. The harsh manuvers of an attempted dodge. The explosions of missiles slamming into clouds of flak; of point defense lasers setting off warheads prematurely; and a single bomb-pumped laser erupting; a missile exploding moments before everything goes white.


    ***


    It was like an abrupt splash of cold water as he came back to himself. The artificial limiters on his mind; so much more effective than any blend of drugs and hypnosis could hope to be; let him recall that he''d been running through a test. He hadn''t been fighting. He hadn''t just died. Well, he had; not not in a gunship. On earth. In bed.


    He leaned against the wall with an involuntary shiver. If he''d really been in a gunship like that, what would have happened? Would he have actually died to save someone else? He knew if it had been the Shanghai he would have. But... the Moscow? He knew there was a real Moscow, but never even heard of anyone on its crew... Maybe, on some deep level, the limiters had failed, and he''d known it was a test. Or maybe he''d secretly wanted to die all along.


    He did have a long history of ridiculous suicide charges in the various online games, and they did a pretty good job of making you feel immersed.


    Regardless. He''d passed that test. His weapons training had been bumped up significantly, and he was sure the results had been passed on to the captain. The mental impact though... he needed some time. Some real time. Maybe he''d start training on the Scoutship''s weapons listing after his first shift.


    ***


    Captain Peterson was still on deck as Derek entered the bridge. A real bridge, like he''d seen in the Earthforge game, not the improvised chamber they''d had when he awoke. Somehow it all felt more real as he stepped beneath a UN logo at the doors, the airlock gently hissing open before him; and glanced back to see ''13'' marked on the inside.


    "Navigation officer Thompson, reporting for duty, sir."


    "Shiraki, you''re relieved."


    As the young asian man easily slid free of the straps at his station, Derek moved in, strapping himself down, and studying the console.


    "Should be an easy first shift. I''ve got a manuevering burn scheduled in about six subjective hours."


    "I''ll look it over. I doubt I''d have any reason to make changes, but sensors might show us something different as we get closer."


    At first, Shiraki seemed almost upset Derek would consider making changes to his commands; but he settled almost instantly. If he weren''t a machine with perfect recall he''d have doubted the emotion even flickered across the man''s face.


    "Of course. Captain." Shiraki gave a nod, as he stepped out of the airlock.


    Derek had already begun studying the upcoming course; a very slightly curved line as their ship followed its path and was just slightly pulled by the nearby stars. He glances at their eventual destination; thousands of light-years away. They were already so far from home.


    The captain glanced down at Derek. "Spot anything our former navigator didn''t?"


    "Oh, of course not, sir. Just wondering; if our assigned target is this cube here we''ve marked sector 13..." He flicks his icon, and the starmap appears over their head; the designated region highlighted; containing a substantial star cluster and a few isolated stars off at the edges. "Why don''t we emerge early, use telescopes to see possible targets before we enter? Maybe drop out here, at this system.."


    He taps a small binary pair near the very edge of the designated area. "Then we can sweep the whole region, look at old light, see what our prospects are. And if the cluster is already occupied, maybe find out before we step in something."


    The captain studied the layout. "What makes you think this area might be occupied? This isn''t a game, son. There are only three starfaring nations we know of, and we only have a hyperdrive because we salvaged it. We''d have better odds of winning the lottery than finding a fourth out here."


    "According to the Survivor''s logs, there were dozens of other intelligent races there that might''ve been out here if the Enemy hadn''t... eaten them. We''re far beyond their space now; its fully possibly we''re running through the middle of some other empire just as bad right now. I''d honestly recommend dropping out in deep space, but an isolated system that couldn''t support a habitable world is a nice second choice."


    Captain Peterson gave a low chuckle. "Shiraki had a very similar recommendation when I gave him that target star. Really, the main factor is speed. This bow wave is going to be mostly gone by the time we reach this cluster. If we drop into realspace, that eighty lightyears to the cluster from this binary pair will take a few months instead of eight days."


    "An ounce of prevention..."


    The captain mulled over the screens. "Give me a few possible targets. I''ll consider your request." He tapped the tiny golden fox perched on his wrist. "Shiraki, send me that system you recommended we stop at instead of the primary. We''ll be on the other ship before we drop out, but it doesn''t hurt to hash everything out before we start moving."


    He released the illusory animal. "For now, stick to the existing course, and make sure you keep engineering updated. It might look like a long ways to go... but we''re almost there."

 Chapter 7: Tisiphone

    He''d had a few shifts running the navigation console; a fairly boring assignment, generally involving making one or two course adjustments across the entire shift. When he wasn''t on-shift, he was learning more about the weapons systems that the slowly forming fleet supported. How to fix them when broken; how and when to fire them. What went wrong. What went right.


    He had every course taken he needed for the crew. All he needed now was to pass the larger-scale versions of the combat test he''d taken before. But in some deep, primal way, the way he''d acted in the simulation had disturbed him.


    He sat at the forward entrance of the 13''s cargo bay, looking out at the assemblage of girders supporting the flotilla''s construction. Right now, the three smaller vessels were, to all appearances, complete; simply piggybacking on the 13''s hyperfield until they reached the end of the ride.


    He was currently on real time-rate, watching his overheating warning slowly count down. He''d discovered that he actually had to sleep; that apparently no matter what body you put it in, the human mind would eventually go mad without taking a break on occaision; and while his room had no bed, yet, he could simply shut his body down, and sleep standing up; even accelerate it if he wanted. For the moment, he didn''t want it. He had plenty of time before his next shift.


    More crew were being awakened, constantly. The ships were ready. Captain Peterson had even given them names; Tisiphone, Alecto, and Megaera. There was talk of renaming 13 Nyx; but he was leaving that decision up to its new captain, when she took over. Which would likely be any time now.


    Behind him, the airlock opened. A tiny puff of atmosphere escaped; destined to be forever lost to hyperspace; as footsteps emerged. At least a dozen new crew, out to look over their new ship most likely. He glanced back to wave at the newcomers. And his gaze froze.


    Black hair. Green eyes. Pale skin. A smiling, happy face. A body that was perhaps just a bit shorter, wider than she''d prefer. His Icon helpfully denoting her name. As if he needed it. Kelsey Danvers.


    The smiling face disappeared. For a moment, fear flickered across her gaze; then anger. She dropped into a defensive crouch, hands raised, as the other new crew kept moving, oblivious... but only for a few seconds. A single foot smashed into his upper body; he went limp, simply letting her strike; with enough force to send him flying over the edge.


    If not for the net of emitters surrounding the cluster of ships, his body would have been lost to hyperspace; though even as he considered it, he knew McCloud would just give him a new one. His rapid exit was gently twisted back around; and he smacked face-first onto the outer hull of the Tisiphone; just a few meters from an observation window where Captain Peterson stared at him in a blend of amusement and confusion.


    ***


    That face. That black-haired, smiling, cute, monstrous face. She''d never thought to see it again, outside her nightmares. The other crew with her... new people. Soon to be her fellow crewmates on the Tisiphone. No idea of the past that had filled the space between the two; and all looking as if she were the crazy one; keeping a wary distance; several were already reporting the incident via their Icons.


    She taps her own; a tiny black dragon that had come to alert the moment she''d seen his face, as f it could burn the offending surface off for her. "Captain Peterson. This is your new engineer, Officer Danvers. We need to have a few worlds."


    "Does it involve the reason Thompson just slammed into my ship?"


    "Yes sir. I''d recommend he be restrained indefinitely. He''s a hazard to anyone around him. I''m not sure how he passed muster, but he was medically discharged and forbidden from leaving the surface or owning a weapon. He was lucky not to get away with prison time."


    "Ah. Come meet me on the Tisiphone and we''ll talk. I''ll have him head back to the 13."


    She clenched her fists. She could just faintly feel the metal scraping, at the upper limits of what her overlay would allow her to exert in terms of force. She needed to get this straightened out. Immediately. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    Another tap on her icon; a bit more firm than necesary, the tiny black creature she''d nicknamed Onyx long ago giving a hiss as she pulled up directions; and started climbing one of the ladders, leaving a group of befuddled crewmates behind; though a pair of them started to follow. Good. They might be confused, but that was the right instinct.


    Tisiphone was, first and foremost, a warship. A modest cargo bay predominantly filled with neatly packaged spare parts, all freshly sealed and bound.  This was the most open space on the ship; every cubic meter was filled with a field emitter, power cable, bunk, or storage compartment; the sleek, speartip-shaped vessel quite different from the bulky, expansive craft she''d awoken on.


    She saw Captain Peterson sliding down a ladder just a few feet in front of her; and the airlock slid closed behind her. She hadn''t seen the man; aside from her briefing by an old Survivor recording, the rest had been filled in by a mildly irritating old doctor and a few of her new engineering team. Onyx, of course, helpfully displayed his name beneath his feet as she watched them descend.


    She gave a quick salute as the captain pulled to a stop. "Sir."


    "Danvers. I''m fully aware of the man''s medical discharge. It was fairly clear that the issue was biological, not mental. Not likely to ever be a problem again."


    She grimaced, looking down at her hands; then up at the captain. "Sir. They couldn''t completely prove it was biological. The only real evidence they had was that his uncle did the same thing on his first flight up. That man... One of my best friends was dead for a few minutes. Barely revived. He tore her throat out with his teeth. Broke my arm and three ribs when I was helping hold him down."


    "I understand that they couldn''t prove that at the time. Do you know how and why you''re here?"


    "I''m... a copy of my old mind. Taken from just before the Enemy killed me."


    "Every headset, navy or civilian, had equipment in it that steadily recorded your brain. Every synapse firing, every thought, every memory. By six months before the arrival, we had almost a billion people''s minds copied and saved. An analysis so finely detailed that we could stick it into a robot and it would wake up feeling as if it were that person. Do you know what that means?"


    "...No sir."


    "Not only did McCloud confirm that his issue was biological, but she isolated enough information to find that hundreds of other spacers had a less intense version. One that merely moderately heightened agression, rather than inducing a psychotic episode. Most of them ended up with dishonorable discharges. I plan to give them all a second chance... without that problem."


    Could she have been wrong? She''d seen his face. The hate. The malice. She''d been convinced for so long that he''d somehow just hidden what he really was. That he''d planned to hijack the shuttle somehow, and turn pirate. There were always criminals hidden somewhere. She''d done her best to make sure he wasn''t a threat to anyone again.


    "I''m.. still not convinced, sir, but so long as we aren''t working on the same ship, I doubt it''ll be a problem."


    "Good. I''m officially taking over as ''Commodore'' Peterson now, captaining from here on the Tisiphone. The layout should already be in your Icon; familiarize yourself. We''ll be starting regular duty shifts here once all my people have been relieved over on the 13."


    "Yes sir." She turns... trying to put that murderous image out of her mind as she heads to the nearest ladder; distantly hearing Peterson explaining that no, she isn''t being punished for assaulting a fellow officer, to the men who''d followed her.


    Looking over the Tisiphone, comparing it to the Shanghai... it was like night and day. No spin gravity cylinder. Fifty missile tubes. Thirty-six point defense clusters. A Hypercannon with a full six light-second range; the maximum even the Enemy had achieved with the weapon. The ability to hit eighty percent of lightspeed in less than an hour. All told, this thing was slightly more than a match for an Enemy destroyer.


    As she slowly ran her hands along one of the auto-loader tubes, she closed her eyes. Imagining the last stand they''d had over earth. That she hadn''t been a part of. She hadn''t scored a single kill. Untold thousands of officers dying, struggling to reach escape pods, trying to stop incoming missiles.


    And on the ground. It would''ve been even worse, to know it was coming, and not be able to do a damned thing to stop it. Opening up her gaze once more, she started to carefully examine the autoloaders. Brand new. Freshly built. Not even dust. Still. She wouldn''t be worth a damn as an engineer if she didn''t check every single circuit and servo, front to back, before they left hyperspace.


    She tapped Onyx; more gently this time, petting the tiny dragon, before calling up a list of her subordinates; giving them all a ping to meet her in the main engineering section. Time to get things started.


    ***


    Derek shut off his overlay as he entered the ship. He wanted to cry; to break something. To call her and apologize for the thousandth time. To scream at her that it wasn''t his fault. But he definitely didn''t want anyone to see him like this. Some of these newbies would be under him; better they see a blank robot than a man in his late 20s weep over a girl who hated him; and with good reason.


    He still had a few more combat trials to run. He knew the weapons. Best prove he could use them, if it came down to it. Perhaps a touch of his old life had followed him here; but he could still make this one count. Maybe after he''d inevitably gotten himself killed a few times he''d be in a better state of mind.

 Chapter 8: Kill, Die, Repeat.

    "Shields up on the right side. Max acceleration towards the planet, dump all missiles. Keep the range out for as long as you can."


    Crewmen moved quickly. The Oberon gently shook in a steady rhythm, as every few seconds another load of missiles was dumped out into space; starting out at the ship''s impressive .7C momentum and accelerating from there.


    "Stagger the engine activations. We''re only gonng get one shot at this, lets have all of the missiles hit at once. Have them start off heading for Enemy Alpha, then switch to Bravo right at the edge of point defense range. Hold most of the ECMs for the last wave."


    The Oberon slowly twisted space, pushing away from its existing intercept course of the Enemy destroyer; which of course corrected to aim for a faster intercept.


    "We''re seeing missile seperation on both Enemy ships. Not head-on... they''re aiming to nail us as we pass the planet."


    Derek studied the tactical map. His plan was to slingshot around the planet; originally hoping to do it without being noticed and already be close to safe hyperspace range by the time the enemy even saw him. "Hm. Weps. Set aside six of the ECM missiles, set them as mimics, and hold. We''ll fire them during the few seconds the planet''s atmosphere is between us."


    The three ships twisted and moved, every moment their calculated intercept shifting. The enemy would have a fraction of a second; enough time to fire its hypercannon at range once; before the orbital path gave them the only cover big enough to shield them from a Hypercannon; an entire planet''s atmosphere


    The weapon fired faster than light. If this didn''t work, he''d be dead before he even knew it. He could shift so that only one of those ships could fire before he was out of range; but that required a very specific trajectory, which made impact. The obvious approach was to aim every missile at alpha, and make sure only alpha could hit; and then pray the missiles did the job. Too predictable. The two ships were close enough to support each other''s point defense. His only hope of damaging either ship was that just maybe those 409 missiles; every piece of ordinance he had other than the 6 ECM drones he was saving; would surprise them when they made their final course corrections at over .9C.


    One minute til intercept point. The missiles all make abrupt turns; the last ones fired having to burn the longest, manuvering the least; the bait and switch did just barely good enough.Between them, the two ships both volleyed at the wrong spots for the first pivotal half-second; and then for the next second and a half, destroyed over three hundred missiles. He watched the tacnet as seventeen missiles detonated, bomb-pumped lasers smashing into Bravo. The rest... deflected off the shields. They''d been in flight too long, clearly the enemy had simply picked out and ignored the unarmed ECM warheads, letting them deflect off the rough field of


    Bravo lost power. Advanced alloys earth had yet to manufacture kept it intact; some of its crew were likely alive, despite the minor venting of atmosphere at several points, and the direct strike on the fusion core. That Destroyer would, eventually, be repairable. But not in time to shoot.


    Alpha dropped shuttles without slowing down; likely for search and rescue or repair efforts; and added a few more missiles to that volley that would be waiting for the Oberon when it came around the planet. Then... it fired.


    This course left him with options for dodging; and he knew right when the enemy needed to fire before he lost line of sight. Unfortunately, he overestimated the amount of cover the gas giant would provide. He made his dodge at full acceleration at tjust the right moment; and then, afterwards, the enemy fired. Clipping the planet''s atmosphere, sending boiling gas away from a mammoth storm system... and clipping the Oberon''s tail. An abrupt shake. Systems went offline, damage control warnings sounded, the scoutship going ballistic.


    A few seconds later, she passed the other side of the planet, completely without control; and it all ended in a flash of light.


    ***


    Derek jerked awake in his room, suddenly recalling reality. The Oberon wasn''t real. He wasn''t playing cat and mouse with Enemy destroyers in some unknown system, trying to escape to bring a report home. A statistics screen popped up over his Icon.


    Scoutship Evasion Program Trial


    Attempt: [17]


    Passing Score: [80/100]


    Most Recent Score: [78/100]


    Base Score: 28; Bonus: Elimenated one enemy Destroyer, +50 Points.


    You have failed.


    High Score: [86/100]


    He could remember every single attempt. The mission was the same. Enter the star system. Scout out the planet; escape alive. During one of his early attempts, he''d made a slow sweep of the outer system, launched a few drones to make passive scans, and picked them up on the other side. His only passing score. A perfect score would be a 200; 100 for getting the ship itself in range so that you received full scan data, and escaping undamaged. 200 for killing both Destroyers that caught you. Getting the full data netted you 25 points. Escaping undamaged got you another 75. Getting any data at all; as he had with the drones; would net you 10 points.


    There had to be a way. Enemy Destroyers had the same top speed as everyone else.. usually around .8C before traveling in a star system was simply too dangerous; but the smaller scoutships could get there faster. The only problem being that he couldn''t plan out with foreknowledge... he''d forget about everything the moment the simulation started again. He had to do it honestly. Actually get better at handling a ship. He might have passed... once. But if he hoped to command a ship he needed to do things right.Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    A gently rap at his door. He looked up... to see a familiar freckled face. Officer Smith. He thought for a moment... and turned his overlay back on. Suddenly, everything felt warm again. "I''m not on duty for another... two hours. What can I do for you?"


    "In a few minutes, I''m transferring over to the Alecto. I''ll be a captain, and putting together a crew. I was looking through scores to pick out my new tactical officer, and noticed you were going through this test... again. I''d filled out every position in my crew, talked to them, got them settled, and we''re officially starting up soon. And here you were. Repeating the same test... that you''d passed already. Whats the story?"


    "Well. I barely passed. Once."


    "You passed with an 86. I saw the records. You spotted a destroyer from outside the system, sent through some probes, got some data, and left. One extra point for blowing up an enemy sensor platform with a missile on ballistic. I probably wouldn''t have blown the platform, but otherwise thats exactly what I''d have done. Exactly what you should have done, rather than going all kill, die, repeat on the same test."


    "I need to get a higher score. Captain Peterson has a 100; and enough bonus points to technically make it higher."


    "For a Destroyer captain, someone flying a ship whose job is to hold the line, he had exactly the right instincts. Risk the ship, cause damage, survive if you can. He still failed his mission on his highest-score run. Frankly, if I were his CO, I''d have never given him command of a scout after seeing that performance. He got the data and killed two destroyers; but he died. The scans never left the system. Its not a video game; the score isn''t everything. If I were making the program, you''d have gotten zero points for kills, and only earned any at all if you made it out alive."


    Derek grimaced, absently rubbing his head. "Fine. I''ll leave it there."


    "Good. Captain Amari wanted me to have a chat with you. I''ll let her know."


    Moments later,  his Icon lit up. A message from Captain Amari. "Please come to my office. Now that I have an office. We''re going to be going on slow-time for the final leg soon, and we need to talk."


    "Well. Good luck with your ship. Captain."


    Captain Smith smirked. "I won''t need luck. And neither will you." She turned, heading back down the hallway, heading for her own ship. For just a moment, he watched her leave, enjoying the feeling; however fake it was; of admiring an attractive woman walking away. Except that she was technically just a robot right now.


    He shook his head, and stepped out.. heading back towards the bridge; and to meet Captain Amari, who he couldn''t recall having met before. The ship was... crowded. It felt alive, with dozens of people moving. American, african, asian, european; people of every part of earth, working together. Something did seem odd. Different from how he always recalled his days in the academy; though he couldn''t quite pinpoint what it was.


    ***


    Stepping into the office, he was struck by the drastic difference Captain Amari made compared to Peterson. Tiny, slender, with dyed purple hair as opposed to the practically bald and overpoweringly massive former captain. This desk would''ve been too small for Peterson. Was it a real desk? He checked for a moment. Yes; Amari had a real desk fabricated already.


    "Officer Thompson, reporting, sir."


    "Have a seat, Thompson." At first, he started to toggle the setting in his overlay to make it appear as if he were sitting. Only to notice an actual set of chairs. It was amazing how quickly you could get used to something. He carefully set down; he could hear the faint creak of the metal chair under his weight; something he hadn''t noticed the lack of with the overlay.


    "There''s been a bit of a shake-up of crew. We''ve gone from one ship and a solid mass of rock to four; and from one captain to three captains and a commodore. Peterson''s idea was to name them Tisiphone, Alecto, and Megaera, after the furies, and to rename the 13 after Nyx, their mother. The only Captain who went along with that was Smith... Jacobs named his ship the Megalodon, and there''s so much back and forth on that one that we''re considering officially calling it the Meg just to stop the arguing and let whoever''s calling it fill in the blanks. I''m calling this ship the Lucky 13; but just leaving the labels as 13. Call her either as you choose."


    "Now. I''m going to be blunt here. The 13 isn''t a warship. She has guns, yes; but her primary purpose is building and terraforming. I''m building as much of a civilian crew as I can for the positions outside of weapons, but its a bit difficult; Nasa, CNSA and Roscosmos lost most of their people to the UN Navy, so I''m going to be at least mostly former UN people regardless"


    "You''re more familiar with the Earthforge-class ship.. which is based on the Survivor''s plans for the Outreach.. than anyone else I''m bringing on. I''d been dead for months before you got to see the final updated version; though I''ve had more time with the real thing, since I did most of the construction here. I''ll want you to overwatch our new navigation officers until we''re confident in them, but you''re going to be my XO; your official job is Terraforming Officer, but you''ll be in command while I''m off-shift, and since this ship is primarily a terraforming and construction platform, the new org chart will be placing you as second in command."


    "I... I''m not sure I''m ready for that."


    "Peterson''s XO just took over the Alecto. Jacobs is primarily an engineer; I honestly think he isn''t the best candidate for a Scout captain, but... Our new rank structure is going to be a tangled mess for a while, and the commodore wanted to give the captain slots to our most experienced people. And like it our not, technically you''re the most experienced man for the job here. And you''ll be good at it. So. Are you going to go out on the bridge and run things while we go on slow-time... or are you going to shut down and take a long nap in the robot bay while I give someone else the job?"


    Derek seriously considered shutting down. His encounter with Kelsey had reinforced the self-esteem issues he''d had since being kicked out of the academy, and he almost wanted to just die... or at least sleep until he could be another mindless cog in whatever nation the 13 built out here. But no. This had been his dream. As a machine he''d be able to actually slow down and watch the processes of terraforming a new world; smashing rocks together to make planets and carefully manuevering things to make the desolation into paradise.


    "I''m in. Thank you, captain."


    "Don''t thank me yet. You''ve got quite a bit of work ahead of you."

 Chapter 9: Insertion point Charlie

    To some of the crew of the four ships, the voyage had seemed to last years; the first few aboard had as much as a decade of subjective time spent on the mining and refining of the chunk of rock the ''seed'' that would grow into Outreach 13 into the tiny flotilla. The reality was a very different story. Eighty-seven years of transit, crossing tens of thousands of lightyears to reach another spiral arm of the galaxy, going slower by the day on an ever-diminishing bow wave.


    They''d long crossed the point where the detonation made hyperspace unsafe. They could have dropped out over a decade before; but the loss of momentum would have added centuries to their journey. The core region around Sol would be impassable to hyperspace for decades to come; a region that, if all went well, would include the entire Enemy empire. Even if hyperspace became passable again today, however, and the enemy knew where the 13 had ended up; it would take centuries to reach normally. All part of the plan.


    On the bridge of the Tisiphone, Shiraki studied the starcharts. "Sir, we are go for emergence in thirty. If you wanted to change your mind and go for the heart of the cluster, this is the last chance to switch."


    "No... you were right. An isolated system, outside the cluster, is the best place to start. We''ll get a good look at the place before we dip our toes in."


    On the screen, the heart of the 13''s hyperfield was shown; seconds left to go. Ten. Nine.


    A loud metallic pop sent vibrations through the deck.


    "Sir! The Meg just blew its mooring supports and is detaching prematurely! Its."


    Suddenly, the ship shuddered. The screeching and tearing of metal as support girders twisted and the Alecto and Tisiphone suffered a low-velocity collision, scraping against each other as the vivid lunacy of hyperspace was replaced by a relatively normal starfield. The scoutship and the destroyer remained vaguely attached to the 13; and a light-week away from their target system; a pair of beautiful stars in glowing white and blue-white, surrounded by a halo of debris.


    The Meg; representing a quarter of the personel and about a sixth of the firepower of the flotilla; was nowhere to be seen.


    ***


    "It was deliberate, and planned carefully... but not hostile. They''d planned it in advance... Jacobs and half of his team were forcibly underclocked so far that they never noticed anything went wrong... and their bodies had been strapped into place so that they wouldn''t go far when we emerged." Security Officer Reynolds; someone who, frankly, Peterson hadn''t expected to need for months or even years; was going over the irregularities on the board.


    "They deliberately fed improper construction algorithms into the squids; the Megalodon''s left missile battery reported as full, but instead of two hundred and fifty missiles, she''d had a fabricator installed and a copy of the 13''s computer core. Give them enough time.. longer than it will take us, but not a terrible inconvenience... and they''ll be able to start a colony almost as well as we can. If we''d been looking, it''d have been obvious; she weighed about seven tons more than she should; but nobody was looking. We all thought we were working together on this."


    "Any patterns to the people who arranged this?"


    "Predominantly Chinese and Russian nationals. The motivation... well. I''m not sure if the Survivor was racist or simply anti-china, but while chinese nationals made up over a quarter of the UN navy, they made up less than two percent of the databse we''d received. We only woke up two of them, which was even worse in their mind. They didn''t destroy anyone; just hid their cores and underclocked them. I''ve got one of the crew who they secretly woke and attempted to enlist, and he''s revealed quite a bit."


    Commodore Peterson held his head in his hands. Even without a real brain he felt a headache coming on. Was that even possible? "I don''t supposed the thought occured to them that each ship likely held people who knew and worked with each other as much as possible?"


    "Somehow they got the master list. The one each ship only received part of the database on. Whatever criteria he used, he filtered out nine out of every ten chinese sailors. About half the russians. A quarter of the americans. A tenth of the europeans. And simply didn''t save enough of their data to bring them back."This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.


    "Well, fuck. I''m assuming they thought I was in on ths?"


    "Essentially, yes. While their actions piss me off, I can understand where they''re coming from."


    "And their plans?"


    "Take off. Keep riding the bow wave for a while, establish their own colony using what few chinese minds we had. Multiple copies, if necesary."


    Peterson shook his head slowly. "Alright, Reynolds. If anybody is under suspicion as part of this, let them know. I, at least, am fine with having chinese crew. If they''re worried about counts, put a priority on reviving some of their friends from the service if any of them are useful. Now... lets get back to work. We''ve got half the scout ships to do the same job that two wasn''t enough for. Shiraki, whats the story about this place?"


    "Well sir, we''ve completed a survey. Looks like one of these stars had a fully planetary system millions of years ago; which is now a debris ring forming an elliptical pattern around the pair. Honestly, it looks promising; we have everything we''d need here to build a fleet bigger than we had on earth, given time. It''ll take thousands of years to process it all. Tens of thousands. Unless we find someplace more promising, I''d highly recommend building a shipyard here."


    He glances at the central console. "Thompson. How far are you on the survey of the cluster?"


    "Just a low-grade survey so far, but the results are... a bit troubling. Either some sort of enormous interstellar dust cloud is intersecting the cluster from the rimward side, something caused a solid chunk of the stars to lose much of their energy, or we''re looking at something completely unknown. This system here..."


    An image of the cluster; 187 stars all within a few dozen light-years in a rough sphere around a single black hole, making transit time between them an extremely short thing; and making this an excellent place to start building humanity up once more. Two images appeared; one showed what almost looked like a bite taken out of the rimward side of the cluster.


    "This one star on the edge has approximately thirty percent less brightness than expected. The next several stars, about ten, fifteen. And then about a dozen more that are only a few percent lower. We really need a closer look at these systems; any sort of dust cloud intense enough to muffle a star that much might cause problems trying to live here."


    "Hmm. Well, we needed to check the cluster out anyway. Captain Smith."


    An image of Leanna''s face popped up in the center. "Commodore?"


    "Double check everything, make sure our recent departures didn''t leave any surprises; and then head to one of the systems that has lost just a little light. Don''t come out in-system, just observe for a few days, and come back. Ichika?"


    Another face appeared; Captain Amari leaning back in the chair of the 13''s bridge. "I''ll have the fabricators put together the best telescope package we can fit in the Alecto''s hold. Should be done by the time they finish their checkup."


    "Perfect. Everyone else... lets scout this system out. Find the best spot to start... and we''re going to go ahead and deploy those station pre-fabs. There''s definitely enough raw materials here to make it worthwhile, and even if we find something better... a nice, isolated base of operations sounds perfect if we find something hostile. By the time Alecto gets back from scouting we might have the keel laid for a replacement Megaera."


    "Isn''t it bad luck to name a ship after one we just lost?"


    "As Jacobs will insist, it was never the Megaera, it was the Megalodon. And yes. It''d be terrible luck to name the next ship that."


    ***


    For Amari, this was almost business as usual; aside from the capability and quantity of resources she had for the job. She''d already picked out a chunk of rock big enough that it had gravity; granted, only about 0.08G; but enough to keep things together. As the Alecto prepared for her 85-lightyear journey to the proper region of the cluster; a trip that would take amost 70 days each way; the 13 was moving into position to start yet another building project.


    Squids swarmed out across the open space, moving in to scan the rock; now apparently called the Anvil due to its odd shape, somewhat more narrow in the middle, bulging at the top and bottom. Soon, she''d be blasting a few nice new holes in it.


    Thompson glanced up at the scans of the Anvil, continuing his survey of the nearby systems; counting planets, using the ship''s extensive sensor suite to estimate orbital positions and chemical components. As the Alecto gave the characteristic flicker of vibrant light, and vanished into hyperspace, he noticed something odd.


    A pattern in the background radiation. Something that shouldn''t be there. Something almost like... radio signals. Millions and millions of radio signals, so many overlapping that it was difficult to make them out.  He wasn''t sure whether this was just a natural phenomenon of one of the nearby stars... or something vastly more important.


    He glanced across the secondary bridge at the empty Comms station; only the actual bridge always kept its positions filled, and the secondary was in a different part of the ship, just in case the main bridge was taken out. He tapped his interface for a moment. "Officer Murphy, could you switch over to radio and check this signal for me? I''m not sure thanks to the sheer quantity of them overwhelming each other... but this looks like it might be radio broadcasts."

 Chapter 10: Alectos First

    For Captain Smith, the idea of being abot to just speed her crew up or slow them down at the tap of a button seemed insane. Of the fifty-two people aboard the Scoutship, each of them would take two turns each way spending the day at full timerate, just in case. If they hit an emergency? Everyone could be realtime with the tap of a button. Ultimately, this meant for each of the crew; aside from the captain and the navigator, the entire trip only lasted a couple days; unless they wanted it to be longer.


    Leanna knew full well that some of her crew wanted to be on the same ship with one or another of her people for the sake of the romantic possibilities; the fact that about a third of her team ended up doubling up when they didn''t need to let her easily sort them out as well; and while this wasn''t the navy anymore, she''d made it clear that nobody was going to be ''serving under'' the person they dated. At least, not in the official sense. A few minor schedule adjustments made sure of that; and if anyone objected, she''d play a video of the first two watch-standers spending a solid six minutes making out on the bridge rather than paying attention to their jobs.


    Still. Even for her, the seventy days felt like less than a week; though everyone was at full-time, on-shift and ready now. Shields were prepped to go up the moment they left hyperspace; which seemed to have a vivid purple tint here in the cluster; missiles ready with a solid blend of 10 bomb-pumped-lasers, 4 ECM and 6 nukes. During the fifth day of transit, the Tisiphone had briefly popped into Hyperspace to give her an update; possible radio signals coming from twenty-seven stars in that sector of space; ranging from just a few dozen for stars that didn''t have any apparent visible change, to millions for the one system which was most drastically dimmed. There were even a few signals picked up that seemed to come from deep space.


    The conclusion seemed obvious; she was to assume a highly-developed but slower-than-light civilization was moving into the cluster. This would be the first time humanity initiated contact with another intelligent race; but she was to take every precaution.


    The Alecto''s hyperdrive fired up. A careful, precise rupture of its hyperfield; and the real stars appeared once more. Most still as distant pinpricks of light; but one particular red star showed up as a malevolent eye. Somehow knowing something intelligent spun round it made it seem malicious; perhaps because the only two known sentient races out there were either completely apathetic towards outsiders, or overtly hostile.


    "Comms, go ahead and start in on the radio signals. See if you can pinpoint the sources. Nav, get me a single orbit of the star; keep it wide and slow, and well above the ecliptic. For right now we''re in survey mode. Lets get a good picture before we start firing off probes."


    The general picture of the system was swift. One gas giant; two dwarf planets. One out in the distance; the closest to them in its cold white icy splendor; though its primary component was nitrogen rather than water ice. One of them had such a tiny gravity well that it shared its orbit with a veritable swarm of objects any larger planet would.. No.


    "Captain. Look at the first planet. I''ve got a debris cloud consistent with something impacting the surface with significant force. And... I''ve got signatures from that cloud. It looks like.... definitely detect some unnatural formations on quite a few of those asteroid chunks. And one of the radio signals is coming from.... this."


    An image came up on the central scanner. At its heart, a rough rock in a vague U shape; with beautiful rainbow of colors streaming out in every direction in the form of what appeared to be a sheet of hexagon-shaped material. At its center, an almost torpedo-like shape with long, then tendrils trailing behind; an almost squid-like shape attached to the sheet, tendrils out among them.


    "At a guess, thats a construction ship, building, probably, solar panels. I''m catching more of these panels all over the place.."


    More images flit about the screen. Massive sheets of hex-shaped panels attached together; some hooked to a piece of rubble; some floating free. The largest is dozens of miles across, while the smallest is only a handful of the panels; each perhaps a dozen meters to a side.


    For a moment, the crew was speechless, just watching as more and more images appeared. Thousands of clusters of solar panels, scattered across the system. There was almost as much construction here as there had been in Sol before the fall; and this was one of the lightest presences of whatever they were. To have so many solar panels to blot out thirty percent of the sun...Stolen story; please report.


    The weapons officer pulled up an image of the dwarf planet. Massive impact craters dotted its surface. "From the looks of things, most of that debris field came from this planet. They pound it with whatever weapon they use.. something not as bad as a hypercannon, but bad enough... and capture the pieces to use for construction. Eventually they''ll just make the planet break apart. If they can do the same to the the gas giant and that other dwarf, they won''t have enough for a dyson sphere... but they''ll have enough to make a ring around the entire star at the distance of the closest panels."


    Captain Smith studies the debris clouds. The scattered debris from truly incredible impact forces. "Alright. We need to learn more. See if we can do any better of a job translating now that we have some context; I''d assume part of the signals are some sort of directions about manuevering; and launch probes. Target them to come out... here." She designates a course that will take the probes on a flyby of various parts of the system from above, and then just drift down ''below'' the ecliptic.


    "Nav, set us a course to reach that point in a week. If they spot and react to the probes, that''ll tell us something, but I don''t think we want to really get in close until we can understand them, at least a little."


    ***


    For three days, the crew watched in fascination the manuevers of the strange ships. Using ultra-high efficiency drives, mostly some sort of ion engine, they made slow, careful tracks around the system. Each journey would take years or decades; the only reason enough signals came through to even be translated is that there were over ten thousand of the ''construction'' and ''cargo'' ships.


    Ultimately, four basic classes of ships were identified; a giant, bloated ''carrier'' sort of ship that seemed to handle smaller versions of the construction ship. A ''cargo'' ship that simply pushed chunks of rocks to others. The original ''constructor''... and a final, unidentified type, which seemed to be keeping its distance, staying inside the ring of solar panels at the system''s heart.


    The Navigation officer showed images of the four subtypes. "This last one. The smallest ship that moves on its own. We... have yet to see any of them move, but they''ve got a higher energy signature than the others. One of our probes is going to pass less than a light-second from one in a few hours. Hopefully we can get a good view."


    The Comms officer glances up. "We definitely aren''t going to be having a conversation anytime soon. But we''ve managed to recognize the patterns and have a few that seem to basically mean ''I''m about to leave here'', ''I need more supplies'', and ''I''m bringing more supplies''. Also... every single signal carries coordinates of sender at the beginning, and receiver at the end, so we know who each is directed to. If we''re going to translate anything else... we just need more context."


    "I''m surprised you were able to get so much."


    "That represents roughly four hundred hours of work on over ten thousand transmissions, ma''am. But the type 4 ships? Haven''t seen a single signal from them. No manuevering other than very tiny bits of thrust to keep them in the same orbit."


    "Alright. Keep an eye on the probe. We''ll see how they react... if they even manage to see it."


    ***


    A tiny metal cylinder; a mass of chemical thrusters, almost impossible to detect unless they were actually firing, wrapped around a sensitive package of sensors of a variety of types, drifted through space. A classic type-1 UN Navy Probe; it just barely fired off its manuevering thrusters; jetting out tiny amounts of hydrogen to tilt its center to focus on the type-4 it was dritfing by.


    At this distance, it looked like a cigar-shaped mass, bulging out somewhat in the middle, without the various tendrils the construction ships had. At present, the probe transmitted nothing; recording every single bit of information to be retrieved when it was picked up. It had a laser transmitter to send burst transmissions; but only used those if it was already detected.


    Which, clearly, it was. The cigar-shaped object shifted. Subtly at first, rotating to point the narrow forward end at the probe. The probe recorded with interest; and once the target ship clearly noticed it, started sending off its transmission; laser firing, spitting out terabytes of information in seconds.


    A flow of information abruptly cut off when a sudden burst of neon green light emerges. Its temperature sensors abruptly spike; and the probe detonates. Shards of metal and clouds of chemical propellant scattered in every direction.


    ***


    Out on the Alecto, the response seemed immediate. Every type-4 they could see immediately began moving, heading out into the system, accelerating at a steady 2Gs; the only one not moving out in an apparent search pattern was the one which had fired; which moved in to examine the wreckage.


    Captain Smith studied the recording for a moment; the final signal the probe sent was of the weapon being fired at it. "Weps, what are we looking at?"


    "Looks like a plasma weapon... and a laser, at the same time. I''d need more data to get a better reading, but its clearly solid mass, not just light, but travels at least .9C. Definite overkill; that shot would be hopefully mostly deflected by shields, but if it hit an unshielded target... that thing would go in one side of the Alecto and out the other without losing much of its power."


    "So. No attempts at communication first?"


    "None."


    "So we''re sharing the cluster with an overpoweringly numerous slower-than-light empire. And one we can presume is hostile. Keep on course. We''ll retrieve the probes that make it through and then re-enter hyperspace until we can contact the Commodore."


    She looks around at her crew with a somewhat sad look on her face. "I suspect we''re not going to be settling down in the cluster after all."

 Chapter 11: Close Observation

    For the moment, the Alecto simply drifted in hyperspace; transmitting its data back on a tightbeam aimed at IPC; the current acronym for Insertion Point Charlie, the as-yet unnamed system they''d arrived in. The Tisiphone had a specific schedule, and would drop into hyperspace once a day to send and receive signals; and when it happened, a solid connection was established.


    "Commodore Peterson. Full scan data of several of the targets is coming up. We''ve got them classified by five types. What appear to be three civilian models, a combat model, and a smaller ship that is most likely a shuttlecraft; but might possibly be closer to a gunship, and is only seen accompanied by a type-1. While there is a very minor superficial resemblance to the organic forms ot the ''Deep Ones'' from the Survivor''s files, this appears to be an entirely new.. and potentially hostile.. species."


    There was a delay. Hyperspace had no speed limits, the way the real world did; but not even messages passed simultaneously.


    "We''re reading you, Smith. While I concur that this species is probably hostile, we can''t be one hundred percent certain; they might have simply perceived the probe as a weapon. We need to see how they actually respond to one of our ships up close. We''ve put together an altered version of the first contact package. Have your Comms officer adjust it however they feel is appropriate... and then go here. Insertion point Beta, the location that I''d originally planned to stop at, is only a few light-years away from you; and has radio signals."


    "I want you to load computer cores onto your gunships, set them in stealth mode, and move in to hail one of the civilian craft; an isolated one if possible. Keep everyone''s personalities, and the sensor readings, updating on the computer core... just in case we lose the Alecto. I''ve already got a now version of the Megaera almost ready to go. Set the Alecto to self-destruct; we definitely want to ensure the hyperdrive is vaporized."


    "Sir, why don''t we send in one of the gunships instead? Less risk."


    This time, the delay was much longer. "...Smith, thats perfect. No hyperdrive for them to get their hands on at all. Send both gunships; we can afford to lose them. Run the whole mess by remote. Get it done, Captain. We''re eagerly awaiting what happens."


    ***


    Compared to the long voyage from IPC, the trip from one system in the cluster to another was far less dramatic; the entire cluster was only a couple weeks travel across at the furthest. The fabrication bay was using what raw materials it had to alter the two gunships; adding a tiny, 65-meter version of the Alecto''s 600-meter shield, since they theorized that should stop whatever weapons the enemy had. The system would use an array of artificial gravity emitters to shape a shell of raw materials, hopefully causing incoming fire to deflect away.


    This star system... was very different. IPB was the original planned entry point, close to the heart of the cluster, and looked like a much more useful system. There were only perhaps a dozen of the type-4 ship here, and hundreds of the various civilian models; likely what IPC would look like in a year or so, if it had as much raw materials as was expected.


    Four gas giants were the only planets, though one of them had dozens of moons, some of them large enough to support a terraforming effort; and just like the last system, it appeared as if one of those moons had been bombarded from space to create a ring of debris for building purposes. Mile-long masses of solar panels were the prime locations the civilian ships worked at.


    Once the survey was finished, Smith picked just the right spot. A Type-1 ship, off on its own beside a cluster of solar panels slowly expanding their way out of a rock. The large, central craft was at the rock; while the smaller ones swarmed about the massive sheet of hexagons.


    The Alecto made its slow, quiet way to the outer edge of the system; several light-hours from its target, within safe hyperspace distance; if the target charged right at lightspeed, they''d still have hours to get to safety; and detached the gunships.


    For the first time, active scanners turned on; and the transmitters on the gunships both opened up on a modified first contact package. It contained what little of the alien language was known; in that each segment had the sending gunship''s location, and then the type-1''s location; and a string of mathematical formula; essentially a ''we are intelligent'' message with no other real content.


    The response was immediate. The smaller vessels swarmed together, moving behind the Type-1; and rather than the strange laser/plasma weapon the Type-4 had used, a volley of projectiles was launched at the gunships. While these were large, solid spikes, mostly composed of silicon, and hollow, possibly containing a warhead of some sort; they weren''t a threat. The gunships easily avoided the stream of projectiles, manuevering carefully and continuing their broadcast. A few of them were even shot down by the gunship point defense lasers; though the gunships weren''t built to deal with the sheer volume of fire.Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    As the signal went out; they now seemed to have a signature for a distress call; all around the system they saw two responses. The type-4s began to accelerate; clearly aiming to join together in a formation a distance away, and arrive at the location of the battle within the next few days... while the rest, using much slower thrusters, seemed to be forming into clusters; all aiming to take shelter at one of the chunks of rock the massive solar panel networks were forming from.


    The gunships continued to weave and shift until a lucky projectile shot hit the shields of one of them; and the projectile ruptured. The liquid inside the vessel clung to the gunship, and it immediately shut down... visibly melting apart under the assault of whatever substance was inside it. Its halted manuevering allowed more projectiles to hit.. and within seconds, it was gone; shattered bits of debris scattered around, all visibly growing hotter by the moment.


    The second gunship immediately turned; accelerating back to an intercept with the Alecto. A single sample of the lost gunship was retrieved; held away from the gunship with its shield emitters. The increasing distance made even a lucky shot vanishingly unlikely; and eventually the Type-1 stopped firing; either due to lack of ammunition, or simply seeing the gunship as too distant a target.


    The Alecto remained there at the outer system; with days of safety before the type-4s arrived, the gunship was retrieved... and the sample tested; safely in space, outside the ship.


    ***


    Dr. Howe didn''t expect to be very useful on the scout-ship. He was a doctor and a biochemist first and foremost; and thanks to the unusual vagaries of this job in Outreach, he had undergone extensive training in cybernetics; knowing full well that the first generation of colonists, and possibly all generations going forward, would be cyborgs.


    Floating in space, held gently in place by an artificial gravity generator dangling out of the Alecto''s cargo bay, he began carefully studying the bluish glowing lump that had once been part of the gunship. He''d taken a sample, put it in a glass jar... only to have the glass jar dissolve on him. The iron-titanium hull of the gunship seemed slightly melted, if mostly intact; but the fiber-optic cables and carbon fiber protective sheathing were completely gone, having somehow been changed into more of this goop.


    Studying it as closely as he could without touching it, at the microscopic level he could see... short-lived, quickly reproducing microorganisms, The contents of the projectile were alive; clearly artificial life, as their metabolism would clearly kill them within minutes, but life. After estimating that the substance would die in perhaps ten to fifteen minutes if it ran out of ''food'', he sent back a call.


    "I need a storage container of some sort. Tungsten preferably. This stuff seems to be a blend of multiple micro-organisms, each of which eats something different; and generates extreme heat while it does so. If let loose inside the Alecto... it would eat everything but the hull, and generate so much heat that the hull would start to melt. Definitely a weaponized bio-organism."


    "Understood. Send back whatever data you can, and remain in place. We''re going to slag the sample, and you, just in case, and depart the system."


    "Wait! You don''t need to do that, I haven''t even touched it."


    "Your body is only about half metal, doctor. If even a droplet of it gets on you, you''re saying it would eventually turn you into a molten rod... and possibly the Alecto with you."


    "I... Understand. Well. In that case.." Throwing caution to the wind, the doctor shifted a bit; directly coming into contact with the glowing blue mass. His fingertips, completely metal, wouldnt interact at all... but the tiny sensors that gave him the sensation of touch immediately lit up in vibrant blue. He could feel the intense heat as if his arm were on fire; and shut off his overlay.


    As the blue glow steadily moved its way up his arm, he focused the incredibly precise optical sensors he possessed on it; as well as the microscope he''d brought with him. During the last few minutes of his body''s existence, he provided invaluable data to the Alecto.. even as he felt the disturbing sensation of his body going on backup power... and then his mind shutting off, moment before the transmitter started to melt.


    When he awoke in an auxillary body in the Alecto''s ''Medical Center'', he shook himself, and turned his overlay back on.


    "I''m no longer in that body, captain. Slag away."


    ***


    This time, the Tisiphone was already in hyperspace when the Alecto emerged. The response was almost immediate; even if it was simply a ''Reviewing Data, will contact with further instructions.''.


    Full sensor readings of the one-sided battle, and Doctor Howe''s results on testing the alien bioweapon, as well as the first active scanning images of one of the alien ships.


    At first, the scans seemed to indicate the entire ship was alive; and considering what the ship was armed with, it being some sort of bio-ship was likely. Closer analysis, however, indicated that the ship did contain some sort of substantial fluid compartment; and smaller life-forms aboard. Most likely, some aquatic species that had somehow used biotech to build ships and weaponry. Some of the components inside the ship were metallic, others read as carbon, hydrogen, silicon... but the entire ship had ''veins'' of a sort running through it, and a central ''heart''-like organ, with a circulatory system.


    After a few minutes of processing, the Tisiphone sent out a response.


    "Captain Smith, orders from the commodore. Return to base. Run sensors en route and drop out of hyperspace at the following coordinates; there were deep-space signals there, possibly slowboat craft going from one system to another. If we can spot a solo alien vessel in deep space, Peterson''s going to gear up and go after it; we need to board one of these things and capture some of its crew to talk to."


    Captain Smith nodded at her navigation officer; the ship started its steady manuevering; missing both gunships and one of its crew shells, but otherwise intact; she had multiple pit-stops to make, and then a couple months of flight time before she could get her ship back to full complement.

 Chapter 12: Shadow Intercept

    As Derek looked over yet another stack of reports; his Captain had him running through the catalogue of people stored in the database, feeding Dr. McCloud the names of people who looked like good candidates for revival here in IPC; he glanced up at the central viewscreen on the bridge; looking at the enormous project the Anvil had become.


    At the moment, the entire region was chaos. All of the prefabs had been deployed, in many cases broken apart and reshaped, to build a structure larger than the 13 herself; albeit, initially, just a mass of box-like empty structures, airlocks, and tiny power cores built to help maintain a construction-in-progress. The new; possibly temporary; shipyard had the clean lines of four ship''s spines leading away from them; and hundreds of workers moved over them, spending however much time their robotic frames were able to working on the construction.


    Inside the temporary structures, the 13''s compliment of Squids were working on the single most complex job the machines could be tasked to perform; building yet more squids. The multi-limbed construction bots were loosely based on something the Survivor had seen before returning to earth, and once the assembly line had been complete, more machines had poured out each day; to join the others working on harvesting raw materials or building the ships.


    He''d been running at roughly 250% for a while; allowing him to do in-depth reviews of candidates; while at the same time doing prelimenary analysis of the telescope reports of the systems. The cluster had 187 stars in it, split into sixteen binary pairs, one trinary, and 152 single stars; an exceedingly unusual blend. He would have expected most of the stars to be parts of binary pairs; but having so many single stars, and so many of those with planetary systems...


    There were over one hundred systems that he might be able to build a habitable planetary surface on. And a few that might already have such a thing; one world had almost the perfect orbit and composition, and a human could walk on its surface with only a breathmask to keep out the toxic; but properly temperate; atmosphere. This place was a gold mine. The reasons for targetting it were clear.


    But... they might be running away. He''d seen the reports on the aliens; and the weapons their military and civilian craft were armed with. Nothing that the Tisiphone, or even the Alecto, couldn''t handle... but not if they were outnumbered thousands to one. If the aliens discovered hyperdrives, these creatures could be a bigger threat than the Enemy.


    Which brought him back to his current job... Helping the captain find marines.


    ***


    Twenty-five unique humanoid machines were standing in formation on the cargo bay floor; clean and freshly assembled, they were very different from the much lighter, almost skeletal-looking robots the others inhabited. The machines were built on a solid Tungsten skeleton, and components that were carbon and silicon in the standard model had been replaced with gold, silver, and iron as much as possible; looking almost like 2-meter tall armored knights as much as robots.


    One of these robots could trudge waist-deep in that goop the aliens fired at the Alecto''s gunships, and only be hurt if a projectile pierced to its computer core.


    Magnetic rail-pistols built into the shoulders, monomolecular-edged vibro-blades extending from the forearms, and even a plasma rifle with attached net-gun, and a head-mounted laser. No visible camera lenses; these machines strictly ''saw'' through sonar while their visors were shut. On the outside, they looked like an army of armored death machines. To the men inside...


    With the overlay activated, twenty-four UN Marines in uniform stood in two lines of twelve. The heights varied; the skin-tone varied. But they all had an identical close-cropped haircut; and none of their expressions showed the shock and fear they''d had just subjective hours before. These people had trained hard; some of them had fought hard. Before them marched a clearly hispanic man who had a nasty scar running from his forehead down one eye, reaching his nose. The cybernetic eye had been there on his original body; and unlike some others, Sergeant Vasquez had tuned his image to perfectly match the original.


    As he marched down the line of soldiers, the way they stood so perfectly unmoving disturbed him at some level. For him, it had only been a few dozen subjective hours since he was awoken; and asked if he''d be willing to try to capture some aliens.


    The answer, of course, was hell yes. He''d immediately looked over the roster of marines they''d been trying to foist off on him; the absolute highest-capability people they had ''in the databse''; and rejected half of them immediately; and included his people. About half of them, at least. That meant that three of his six fire-teams would be ones he could be sure of.


    "Alright, boys and girls. In one real-time hour, we''re going to be loading up on the Tisiphone. For those of you educated in america, thats one of the Furies; which means her job is to seek out and hunt down the evil in this world. You people are good. Half of you were with me when we took out those pirates over Phobos. But thats not what we''re facing here. We''re facing a completely unknown alien creature; one that lives in an aquatic environment, and we need to capture at least one for questioning."The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    "That is one. Only one. Once we''ve got at least one netted... feel free to kill the rest of the bastards."


    ***


    The Tisiphone entered Hyperspace with a target in mind. Two days previously, the Alecto had returned to EPC, bringing with it a complete and detailed map of every radio signal it had found; and of one target, moving through deep space at less than 0.1C, heading from the most heavily populated system at the edge of the sector to one of the more sparse ones. With the remarkable efficiency; and incredibly low power; of those engines it must have been accelerating for years; and had at least a decade left to go.


    The target was classified as a Type 1; the largest classification of enemy civilian ships. It most likely contained some unknown number of Type 5s, and while it was the same roughly cylindrical shape with tendrils on one end as the others, it had massive bulges of what were most likely cargo bays, as well as bays for storing the smaller vessels all the Type 1s were seen accompanying.


    She was probably loaded down with fuel to make her trip; and they knew exactly what her weapons looked like, after the encounter with the Gunship in emergence point Beta. She was alone; and the perfect target.


    As the ship reached the appointed spot in hyperspace; according to readings she should be right about... there.. Peterson called out the order. "Navigation, bring it to realspace. Weps, light her up, fire plan alpha, as soon as we emerge. Vasquez, get ready."


    The Tisiphone emerged from hyperspace ten light-seconds away from the target, deep in the void between stars, and fired missiles almost immediately; while she could launch up to fifty at a time, they''d pinpointed eight of what they believed were the weapon sites; and so, with shields active, launched precisely eight laser-head missiles.


    The alien swiftly turned; firing hundreds of spike-like silicon projectiles at the incoming missiles, as well as at the Tisiphone; and actually shot down two of the incoming missiles, before the silmultaneous detonation of the six survivors slammed bomb-pumped lasers into the ship''s hull; melting and burning long holes through the vessel, sending its internal liquid atmosphere spilling into the void, even as some internal process worked to seal the hole.


    The Tisiphone manuevered to ensure the projectiles couldn''t reach it, firing four more missiles; and with four final detonations, the remaining launchers were removed. A few seconds of acceleration ensured none of the projectiles could even come close.


    After waiting a few minutes; ensuring the enemy wasn''t doing anything but remaining in place; the shuttle bay opened.


    A long, sleek shuttlecraft, most of its internal structure torn apart to convert it into a simple frame with twelve humanoid robots attached, emerged; curving as it headed for the target. Almost immediately, a second jury-rigged frame, holding 13, emerged, following its own course. A single point-defense laser had been mounted at the front of each shuttle.


    The Tisiphone launched twelve more missiles; only these lacked the high acceleration of the others; practically drifting through space. Their course would be simple; they''d hold position in a rough sphere around the alien; and detonate if the ship showed hostile moves. None of the type-5s had emerged yet; Peterson half expected to have seen a swarm of them by now.


    "Vasquez, watch yourself. She hasn''t deployed any of the fighters, shuttles, or whatever they are. She might be a different model from what we''ve seen. Expect heavy resistance."


    "Always do. Its why I stayed alive."


    ***


    For the marines, it was the strangest combat drop they''d ever been through. No screaming atmosphere. The shooting already stopped; not that they''d heard a round fired. And zero information about their targets. Based on close-in scans of the previous enemy, the first shuttle attached where it was believed the enemy crew was; and fired up her point defense laser. The steady humm of capacitors discharging, the faint tingle of EM fields running through their bodies; and then the spray of liquid jetting out of the ship.


    The hull looked like a solid black mass, with faint glowing blue lines running beneath the surface, emanating away from the point of impact.


    Improvised clamps slam into place, forcing the opening to remain, just in case the hull has some sort of auto-repair function... and the first marine leaps forward into the enemy ship, weapon raised. The emerging liquid... has that faint blue glow. Just like the dissolving mess from the video. Of course. He casually shoves a handful of gel-like mass aside; it doing nothing to his rigid tungsten fingers; and dives headfirst into a pool of it.


    The other soldiers hesitate a moment... but then follow. While the thick glowing blue jello was more dense than water, the machines easily push through it, built-in sonar painting a picture of the nearby passageways. They could see that these jello-filled corridors move all the way across the ship, accessing the guns that the missiles had taken out.. and further on, all together in one central chamber, the crew.


    As they moved together, weapons raised; though almost immediately, the plasma rifles gave warning signals that something inside them was failing, leaving only the net-gun portion of the external weapon operational. The corridors were oppresively cramped, sections of them leading off into paths too small for a marine to pass; and some sort of thin mass, more grey-blue than the surrounding black and grey walls, barred access to that final crew chamber.


    The ship shook as the marine cut through the wall, forcing his mono-blade through it to reach their target; outside, the other marine shuttle had burrowed its way through the thicker hull at its own location; and encountered one of the type-5 craft. All across the ship, dozens of the same hull sections opened; and twenty shuttle-sized alien ships blasted free, firing at the waiting missiles and sending out the ''Distress'' radio pulse the Alecto had recorded previously.


    Hopefully, nothing was close enough to listen.

 Chapter 13: Slain Demons

    It was impossible to be completely certain what the tentacles were meant for. The officers who looked it over had estimated that in all likelihood they were used for grabbing small pieces of debris for processing as part of an overall process for assembling the raw materials the larger alien vessels needed in order to build. While the shape and composition was incredibly different, there were enough similarities for them to assume they were something like the squids the 13 used for harvesting and construction purposes.


    The most important thing for the sergeant however, was the grim reality that they made a startlingly effective anti-personnel weapon. With each passing moment the tentacles thrashed away at everything within range, crushing the spine of the shuttle that had brought them over instantly, sending pieces of the laser that had just bored a hole through the hole off into the void. Vasquez and his men didn''t respond with panic, fear or any other normal response; they were Marines. As chaotic and random as this event was, they were ready for it.


    One moment the new mechanical bodies were being crushed and broken by Massive limbs, the next they were using their new blades to jam into the craft, firing with plasma rifles if they still held them. It didn''t take many injuries, including one of the mass of tendrils being flung off into space, before the craft gave an abrupt thrust; of more power they even knew these tiny craft had, fleeing off into the void after its companions.


    ***


    The surrounding space would not prove any sort of safe haven for the craft however. As he watched veritable swarm of small craft leaving the ship, CommodorePeterson didn''t even say anything; he didn''t need to. They had planned for exactly this sort of scenario; and were in fact surprised it had taken this long; though of course it was possible the enemy crew simply took time to board and launch. He just nodded at his weapons officer.


    "Firing, sir."


    The tiny craft had managed to subdue three of the missiles; but nine of the others opened fire in a cascade of high-energy death, slamming into each tiny vessel; and in two cases, through that tiny vessel and into the larger ship.


    A new, previously unknown radio signal emerged; not the distress signal. Something different.


    "More targets than expected, sir. All missiles down or detonated; still eleven targets. One looks like it was damaged by the second boarding party and is weaving an interesting course."


    "Two additional volleys. Ten each, but don''t activate the missiles on the second; we might want to collect them. Ignore the damaged one for now; we might be able to catch it."


    As the new wave of missiles emerged; the first speeding ahead rapidly, the second barely drifting along; the tiny alien craft moved to put the body of the larger vessel between themselves and the threat; making only a few random volleys of shots before taking what cover they could; without any real success.


    Each of the first ten missiles detonated successfully; and all the remaining targets vanished in the same second. The final mobile, damaged unit turned and fled; off into the abyss, heading towards the distant star system which would undoubtedly take it years to reach.


    ***


    As the door; or wall; was hacked through, the marines encountered a fairly strange obstacle; the enemy crew, previously visible through the goop they lived in, suddenly seemed to vanish from sensors. The corporal in charge called out, tagging locations with his icon. "Nets out!"


    The first two fire-teams through the breach all fired, launching nets at seemingly nothing; and two of the creatures suddenly appeared on sonar once more, writhing and struggling as the gravity-emitting nets jammed them against the wall, the bulbous, almost caterpillar-like creatures squirming and struggling to move.


    Suddenly the others became visible; swimming with ease through the currents, a swarm of dozens massing on the marines at the breach point; and being met with numerous tiny needles from shoulder-mounted rail weapons. Their blood was a different consistency than the surrounding blue liquid; and, surprisingly enough, the injured began to heat up dramatically; dissolving much like anything else did.


    Unfortunately, however soft and caterpillar-like they might appear, the claws they more were deadly; two of the marines at the breach had arms sheared cleanly off, and a third actually had the protective seal around his core ruptured; and the key non-metallic components within his CPU started to dissolve much as the wounded enemy were.The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    The marines ended up backing up into the corridor, keeping the range hopen as they maintained fire... until all of the crew in the chamber but the two pinned by nets were gone. More might still be there, invisbly lurking in the depths; but the corpses of the defenders were being rapidly dissolved by the contents of their own ship.


    One fire-team remained at the door with the two damaged marines; and the one who was now, at least in this body, killed. The others moved ahead; finding that while one of the two prisoners was still bound, the other had cut itself free of the net; and was gone. Probably killed during the recent encounter.


    Hoping to prevent their final prisoner from performing a similar feat, three more nets were fired; thousands of tiny filaments wrapping around the creature, hopefully binding it in place.


    It was only after the fighting inside was over, and the sole prisoner secured, that the second boarding party; down five of its members, crushed by the smaller alien craft; emerged into the ship''s corridors.


    Sergeant Vasquez studied the results; examining the alien creature up-close, its dozens of short limbs lining its bulbous body. "Good work, corporal. I''m not sure how the hell we''re going to take this thing prisoner if the shit it breathes eats through our walls... but good work."


    ***


    "Look, I''ve only handled the stuff once, and it killed me that time. That does not make me the expert."


    Commodore Peterson smiled down at the doctor from his chair. "You built us a storage tank to put a sample in if we got one. My team is fabricating a bigger tank... for a much bigger sample. I just want you to figure out how to safely get that thing onto my ship."


    Doctor Howe rubbed his forehead for a moment. He''d been bald in the last years of his life, and wasn''t quite used to this new hair.. except that he didn''t really have hair, did he? "Obviously the issue is tracking down any breaches, and containing them. Probably a three-tier approach. We know this stuff eats carbon and silicon like crazy. First, we need to completely coat every surface in an airlock with metal plates. Have a single camera inside with a wireless transmitter... and dust it with a bottle of sanding powder. If we get a breach, it''ll be visible as it reacts to the powder... just a few grains at a time to hopefully make a slow reaction."


    He brought up a diagram of one of the outer airlocks on screen. "We basically take apart a few missiles and use scrap from that broken boarding craft for the inner layer. What are we putting it in?"


    "Fuel tank. Currently holding pure hydrogen; we''ve got a set of manuevering thrusters designed to run cold so we can make some small manuevers without giving off any energy signatures; or if the reactor is offline. We''re dumping it into space right now, and once we''ve made sure its clean, and run it through the fabricator for some modifications, thats going to be its cell."


    "Hmm. Okay, just make sure that''ll fit. We use gravity plates outside the cell walls to hold it in place, cover the tank in powder, and just keep the outer airlock door on a hair trigger. No promises... but best compromise between getting the thing home and not melting the ship."


    "Good. Get on it. You''re in charge of retrieving the sample."


    "...I''ll do it, but only if you let me trade bodies with one of those marines. Those bodies are literally built for this."


    ***


    The Tisiphone slowly moved near the damaged alien craft; scanning it with every available sensor. Observing its internal structure as best it could. Soon, they''d be heading back to base with their samples; but one last look before they finished it off couldn''t hurt.


    The Comms officer looked over the readings closely; . "Commodore, I''d estimate at least sixty percent of these corridors are too small for the crew member we captured to pass through. Either there''s a second subspecies here, or they have some sort of drone made of the same material. Also... there''s no connection between the inner walls and the chambers those type-5s were in that we can see."


    Peterson looked over the slowly updating plans of the alien ship. "She''s still just moving in a straight line. No more manuevering, nothing. Not moving straight away from us, just... dead. Whatever doors there are likely just sealed off... hopefully we can learn more from this thing."


    He nodded at a different screen; showing the scans of a tank carefully held in place inside one of the forward airlocks; and the netted caterpillar squirming and struggling inside.


    "Weps, ready the hypercannon. No sense in wasting the ammo."


    "Go for activation at your command, sir."


    "Blow it."


    ***


    A vivid purple slash across space intersected with the ship; the central heart of the vessel suddenly partially entering hyperspace and attempting to accelerate far more than realspace would allow. The resulting detonation left nothing behind... but a single, solitary, wounded type 5, slowly trying to reach the next star system.


    A second shot dispatched it as well; and the Tisiphone turned away; nothing there to mark its presence but chunks of debris no larger than a pebble.


    ***


    The Alecto emerged from Hyperspace right as scheduled; and just as predicted, it carried a message from the Commodore.Seconds after she re-entered the real world, Captain Amari received a message.


    "Well, Ichika, we''ve got a weird one for you. We need to figure out how to hold a critter that lives in that glowing blue goop so that it can''t escape.. and so that we can talk to it. Those marines worked perfectly, by the way. They literally had to swim in the stuff in the boarding action, and only one of them failed from it."


    "So we''ve got a prisoner. Do we know what it eats or drinks? How are we keeping it alive?"


    Captain Smith grimaced. "I have no idea. Neither does Dr. Howe. The thing is still alive, so far, and hasn''t eaten in weeks... or responded to any attempts to communicate with it through the tank... so there''s at least some hope that it''ll make it back here. We might be on a limited timetable to question it."


    "No pressure."


    A soft chuckle at that response. "No pressure at all."

 Chapter 14: Abysmal Failure

    When Commodore Dorian Peterson emerged from hyperspace in the now-familiar ''Charlie'' system, the difference was truly startling.


    Four full-sized Destroyers were almost complete, the long, sleek hulls bristling with the attachment points for the armor plating still being manufactued. A roughly spherical space station, the outside hull studded with hundreds of artificial gravity emitters much like the net that had been used for the 13''s trip, hung in place well beyond the system''s rim. And the Anvil...


    The Anvil was a full-fledged shipyard. After over two years of objective time, its population had grown into the thousands; still mechanical, no actual life signs apparent; with the long spines of hundreds of under construction starships, mostly of the Gunship size, but blended in with at least a dozen larger hulls.


    As he studied the system layout, he brought up an image of the sphere. "Nav, get me a course here. This is where we''re going to be releasing our prisoner."


    With a nod, Shiraki gave the ship the subtle, steady shift to start bringing them in line with the station; as the Commodore called down to the cargo bay. "Sergeant Vasquez. Follow the good doctor''s advice as much as possible, but you''re in charge of moving that thing into the containment sphere. The plan is to ''feed'' that blue jello some mass once its in there, but we still want to keep at least a small amount of the original mass for study. I''m leaving you in charge of the transfer."


    After a few seconds, the Comms officer glanced up. "Captain, I''ve got incoming calls from Captain Amari as well as a Doctor Kent."


    "Summarize whatever Kent wants, and bring up the captain for me." He leaned back in his chair, the seemingly young japanese woman emerging on screen as the officer spoke. "He''s a xeno studies specialist who has studied everything we''ve got about the different races the Survivor learned about. Was added to the list to wake up once we knew we had aliens to deal with."


    "Nice! Hey, Ichika. I''m going to come see you in person. I''m going to have this Kent guy work with Howe and Vasquez on the alien interrogation. Me, you, Jacobs, Smith, and anybody else you feel is worth letting have input, bring them all into the 13. We''ll meet in the conference room as soon as you feel is reasonable."


    She gave a low chuckle. "Well, I''d wanted you to come aboard anyway, but I suppose we can have some company for a while."


    "No worries.. we can take some time for ourselves after. However much of a threat these guys might be, they certainly aren''t a fast one."


    Captain Amari tapped her own icon a few times, bringing up information. "Everyone is fairly close, the Alecto is scanning an iridium-rich rock over on the other side of the ring. I can get us all together in... two hours, if she takes a gunship."


    "Good. I''ll see you as soon as we drop off our cargo."


    ***


    The containment sphere was a relatively simple device; a solid iron core with a wall that caused it to form a shape vaguely like the ''crew quarters'' of the alien ship, twelve electromagnets, and a ring of dozens of artificial gravity generators, all emplaced to keep that iron core distant from the outer tungsten sphere; as well as to push everything firmly towards the center, creating a relative 1G for the central section of the sphere; and a much higher 10G right at the rim to help push away any splashes of liquid or escape attempts.


    As the fuel tank was carefully ruptured at the sphere''s outer edge, and some of the blue liquid was allowed to spill inside, a blend of ''feeder materials'' were added; which the blue liquid consumed, generating massive heat in the enclosed space; that the sphere bled off into a series of external heat sinks, which would, in turn, take hours to reach a comfortable temperature.


    The tank was slowly lowered down; once a roughly 2-meter depth of the liquid covered that iron core; and broken up; the creature immediately swimming outward... and then flopping down onto the iron surface.


    The pale, almost maggot-like consistency of the caterpillar was only expected for the moments it was visible; before sonar was required to view the unmoving form at the depths of the sphere. Vasquez studied the screen for a few moments. "Who the hell built this thing?"


    Dr. Kent; who, at present, appeared to be a young, vibrant man with long blond hair and an overly enthusiastic disposition; clapped him on the shoulder. His own robotic form was a blend of designs; no built-in weaponry, but a fully robotic shell. Less capable of the ridiculous acceleration and speed of the standard models; but immune to the strange dissolving liquid. "That would be myself, sergeant! According to our diagrams, the whole compartment they were in was mostly just smooth surfaces, and we couldn''t identify where the controls were. Aside from the lack of a roof, this matches the layout of where it was retrieved from. Granted... we''re assuming it somehow draws nutrients from this fluid."Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.


    Vasquez gave a slow look over the construction. Then at the figure on the sonar screen, of the prone alien caterpillar. "You just dropped a creature that, from what we can see, never moved at more than a fraction of earth''s gravity into a 1G tub. The ship it was on couldn''t accelerate at 1G unless it was thrown. Did you see anything about artificial gravity plating in my reports?"


    "I.... No. I..." The doctor stared at the screen. "Shit. Is it hurt?"


    "Hurt? Probably. Killed? Maybe. If any of my men had actually died acquiring that thing I''d be throwing your dumb ass into the sun right now."


    Doctor Kent grimaced as he looked out at the orb; toying with a tiny labradoodle puppy that appeared to have his icon controls around its collar. "Ahh... Engineering, can we turn down the artificial gravity at the core to, say... one percent?" He turned to look at the sergeant. "I apologize. I know full well that earth is on the higher end of gravity for sentient species. I should''ve known better. I was just considering our own comfort in operating down there... when we won''t even be feeling it, really."


    "Ehh. It deserved it. These things are monsters. Don''t try to talk, just shoot and run the moment they see you... or shoot and charge. Hopefully we just end up wiping the damn things out."


    ***


    Captain Peterson looked around the table. This conference room had once served as the bridge of the 13 while it was in transit; and easily fit the small gathering of officers inside. "Alright, people. Here''s what we know." At the center of the conference table, a map of the 187 systems of the cluster appeared; with one star at its very edge highlighted in red, and nearby stars highlighted in orange or yellow. "We are near the outer edge of the milky way galaxy here. The black hole in the center of the cluster is why these stars are so close, most of the stars out here have dozens of lightyears between them. This one red dot is where the aliens who we are now calling the Mags... first entered the cluster."


    "Mags?" Derek questioned.


    A small image of the prisoner appeared; solid white, bulbous, and fat, covered with a thin layer of some sort of slime, and with a long row of greyish-yellow legs down its bottom; with a long, prehensile tongue emerging from its mouth, where its claws centered.


    "Short for Maggots. They bear a vague resemblance to a blend of caterpillars and maggots, and they don''t have a spoken language, so we went for it."


    The crowd around the room mostly looked in disgust; though a few looked in fascination.


    "This slime they cover themselves with, which we have a sample of, protects them from the liquid; and we believe it allows them to filter nutrients from the substance, while making it hostile to any life-form but themselves. If we replicate it, we can use boarding parties with non-metallic components; we''re working on that now, but that''s a low priority. Our top priority. Do we stay, or do we go?"


    Derk glanced up. "As much as I''d like to avoid a fight, I''ve got to say. Wherever we go, these things are going to be a problem... eventually. And its always possible some isolated group will discover hyperdrives and then the whole mass will snowball like crazy. In fact... I had the fabrication team spread receivers throughout the system, and it gave us some... disturbing information."


    The starmap suddenly expanded, covering the region up to five hundred lightyears away; and showed hundreds of purple dots between the cluster and the galaxy''s edge.


    "Either the Mags were born out here, on the galaxy''s edge, in one of these systems, or they''re extragalactic. Regardless, they seem to have begun at the edge of our spiral arm and started to slowly work their way inward; The one thousand eight hundred and forty-three systems marked in purple represent probable radio signals from Mag developments; getting more intense the closer to the galaxy''s edge they go. A few of them don''t even seem to be coming from stars... meaning that they likely have a full-fledged dyson sphere."


    A soft murmur filled the room as Peterson looked over the map, giving a slow nod. "Excellent work, Thompson. So, flight is an option; but will only delay the inevitable. We have an enormous tech advantage. Can we use that?"


    Captain Smith gave a small grin, her freckled face filling with malice. "They have no hyperdrives, and their acceleration is worthless. I strongly suspect we could even imitate their radio signals and hull and infiltrate their systems with ease. Maybe there''s millions of them... but its millions of bugs that we can crush in vast numbers. Their core systems might be unbreakable, but we can stop their expansion cold."


    "Nothing is unbreakable."  Jacobs gave a long look at the gathered officers. "If Leanna''s right, we can mimic one of their hulls... and slip a starship right up by their star. We have enough iridium here to build thousands of hypercannon. Destabilizing Sol in such a way that it wrecked hyperspace took sixty-four high-scale hypercannons firing in perfect sync. If we just hit the star with three or four of them, we''ll create a mini-nova. Enough to be irritating in nearby star systems, but absolutely fatal for everything in the system itself. There could be a billion of the damn things and that would do the job. Hell. Drop a chunk of antimatter into the star''s heart directly from hyperspace, and you''ll kill the launcher and the star at the same time."


    For the moment, everything was quiet. Peterson looked up at the starmap. "So. We start out here, at the cluster''s edge. Work our way out. If the concentration is too big to kill... we nuke the star. If its thin enough, we wipe it out. What sort of timetable are we looking at?"


    Jacobs studies the map. "It''s five hundred and seven lightyears to the galaxy''s edge from here. If we can figure out how to copy the enemy hulls... Nine years to build enough ships, and another couple years to get them all into position. I''d recommend we do it as close to simultaneously as possible for the systems outside the cluster; reduce the odds of one of the systems figuring out a hyperdrive... and clean out the stars that have witnessed us ASAP."


    "Alright folks. Operation Orkin is in effect. Unless the interrogation team figures out some way we can live in peace with these creatures, we''ll just have to clean them from our skies."

 Chapter 15: Post-Mortem

    At first, they simply watched. Letting the alien lay on the rough iron surface, submersed in the glowing blue liquid, for hours as they ran imaging scans over it. Soon, a pair of marine drones, and the customized drone of Dr. Kent, were surrounding the unconscious... or dead.. alien.


    "No pulse, no heartbeat. Granted, we don''t know for sure these things have a heart, and if they do, the heartbeat might be closer to once a year... or hour."


    "Doc, we stapled this thing to a wall, bound it up in a net, dragged it out of its home and locked it up without food for months, then dropped it in what, to it, is some riodiculous gravity. I''m sure a robot could make it, but the number of earthly life-forms that could survive this sort of mishandling is... well. Close to zero. Tardigrades?"


    "Thats true, but we can''t... Get it out of the water! Cut that piece off!"


    Suddenly, heat started to blossom. The protective layer of slime around the alien had worn away; and the blue liquid came into contact with one of its limbs. Before the thing could be lifted up above the liquid, the body was practically on fire; and only a quick slash with a monomolecular blade allowed most of it to survive; the marine carefully lifting it over his head.


    "Well. I guess that answers that. It survived all the way here and probably died when we dropped it. Once it stopped making its protective barrier...."


    "Damn. Alright. Lets drain this crap and setup a surgical table. Might as well see what we can learn from the body."


    ***


    "While it might have a vaguely organic appearance, the hull is clearly metallic. Black tungsten and carbon form layers across the skin, and the blue glow comes from the liquid running beneath it; notably the ships themselves simply look flat black until they get ready to fire. It looks like the goo doesn''t dissolve carbon that''s been alloyed into the other materials; and I''m guessing especially dense carbon, like diamond, would drastically slow things down."


    Commander Peterson and Captain Amari were sitting in her quarters as she went over the research data, both looking a touch messy, partially buttoned uniforms, wild hair, and even smeared makeup. Despite the fact that a simple button-press could restore them both to perfect condition in an instant thanks to the overlay, they left it this way; seemingly enjoying these signs in their time alone'' thankfully plentiful, thanks to their ability to drastically accelerate time.


    "I can make you a reasonable fake type-5 shell by mounting a squid''s limbs to the front of a gunship... or I can purpose-build you a fake version of any of them that will look like the real thing."


    He wrapped his arm around her shoulders. "Ichika.....Do we seriously need to be talking work right now? We can take a few real hours off while everyone works on their own things, and spend a week subjective together."


    "Talk work with me long enough for me to send out the fabrication orders, and I''m yours til we''re ready to do something."


    He gave a low chuckle. "Fine. We might as well build them from scratch; we need each one to have at least two hypercannons on it, and none of our ships are built for that."


    Amari managed to actually get a full-fledged design sent off to the Anvil before turning off outside comms, leaving the ship in Thompson''s hands, and focusing on just the moment.


    ***


    Sitting in the captain''s chair still felt strange to Derek; he''d done it hundreds of times on an almost identical bridge in Earthforge, but even with the overlay, it was different here on a real ship. Granted, it shouldn''t be.


    The current scenario wasn''t really so strange. Dozens of times Earthforge had presented him with native wildlife; or small encampments of the Enemy; that needed to be dealt with during the terraforming process.


    Sometimes, just completing the process solved everything; a hostile alien race might be wiped out when their desert world was struck by enough ice-filled meteors to eventually form oceans. Sometimes, the aliens weren''t hostile; and creating preserves to maintain any non-hostile species was one of the secondary objectives those games would have. Only rarely did some sort of actual space combat have to happen to resolve the situation.


    Unfortunately, it was necesary this time. And it seemed he was at least reasonably good at it. He''d finally passed the various trials to ensure he could handle it, whatever he ended up having to do... but now, he was writing his own trial. His primary job at the moment was just keeping the ship running while the captain was taking some time off; frankly, an easy task while the ship was sitting out in space eighty lightyears from any possible threat, surrounded by enemies.This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.


    So he decided to create more work for himself. Using the sensor data from the various sources; the Alecto and Tisiphone sensor logs primarily; he started piecing together simulations; a long series of test encounters between terran ships and the Mags, assuming that the dangerous type-4s had both the point defense seen on the civilian ships as well as their laser/plasma hybrid weapon. He made the point defenses somewhat more effective than they''d been shown to be in reality, added in the ''sprint'' capability that a single type-5 had been witnessed using in the deep space encounter; and then gave the weapons officer the bridge for half an hour as he ran the trial himself at max timerate.


    The trial was fairly simple; a dozen type 4s and hundreds of the civilian types scattered around a star system. One crippled terran ship, slowly fleeing the system the type 4s pursuing. The longer the trial went on, the closer together the type-4s would be; with, typically, the ''player'' able to hunt down seven of the type 4s before the last group got into fire support range; where their mutual point-defenses meant that missiles needed to be used at close range, in unpredictable sprint modes, to get reasonable kill chances.


    The remaining civilian ships, of course, had already clustered into such groups. The first stage of the trial would be taking out the type 4s to save the crippled ship. The second stage, working with other, simulated, destroyers to take out the clusters of civilian vessels. A perfect score if every enemy was killed and no allied ships were damaged; a task that could be achieved by careful and judicious use of hypercannon rounds and long-range missiles.


    Calling everything ''type 1s'' and ''type 5s'' seemed a touch absurd. These alien craft were larger than the destroyers; only the type-5s were close to the size of any human military ship. Peterson and Smith had hesitated to put clear names on the ship types without more information; but hell. They could change them later if they wanted.


    The type-1 became the Carrier; holding a swarm of 24 type-5 Gunships; as the type-5s, while clearly not made for combat, had their own point defense weapons.


    The type-2; bigger than a destroyer but smaller than the type-1; became the Tug; most of the ones they''d seen had been attached to and moving rocks of various descriptors, usually towards existing solar panel clusters; but in at least one case on a collision course with a dwarf planet.


    The type-3; smaller than the type-1 but bigger than the type-2; the Constructor; breaking apart rocks and building these nexuses of solar panels wherever they went.


    And finally, the type-4; the Defender. Smaller than the other types, aside from the Gunship, but substantially faster and deadlier, equipped with a sort of ''plasma lance'' that had traits of both laser and plasma weapons.. and still bigger than a Destroyer, at roughly a kilometer long. They believed it had four point defense weapons, based on their more distant analysis, but he programmed it with six, just in case.


    He played through the trial at max speed several times; and every time the conclusion was fairly similar. Getting damaged, or getting the cripple damaged, happened fairly often while fighting off the Defenders; as, theoretically, that plasma lance might be able to get lucky hits out at hypercannon range; and the hypercannon has a limited firing rate. Once only the ''Civilian'' ships were in play, careful manuevering and hypercannon rounds made ultimate victory inevitable; even if every single civilian ship charged, the terran ships were simply too fast and too long-ranged to lose.


    After a few test-runs, he forwarded the trial to the rest of the crew on the 13; and after some hesitation, to the other, complete, ships, and those under construction as well. Hopefully not stepping on any toes.


    ***


    On a clean steel table, Doctor Kent carefully began to slice into the unique alien specimen using a smaller-scale version of the marine mono-blade to pierce the soft, thick, outside mass; a digital readout overhead showing the internal structure of the subsections he was slicing into.


    The Mag was somewhat disgusting; as could only be expected. Each of its numerous limbs contained a gland for producing the slimy protective coating, and its soft white back did as well. The foreclaws; mounted above and to either side of its long, prehensile tongue, were predominantly high-density, roughly diamond-equivalent, carbon; and the force with which they could push against one another was truly horrific.


    Its blood; which at first seemed somewhat clear, though it had a yellowish tinge while inside the body; was mostly cobalt-based. Once exposed to the air it acquired a strange, greyish-pink sheen.


    As Doctor Kent carefully lay the creature''s parts aside, it seemed that it operated in some ways like terran life, and other ways completely alien. Numerous organs which simple couldn''t be identified while deceased and nonfunctioning were observed, scanned, and catalogued. The circulatory system was obvious; a heart, blood vessels. The rest... unknown. No stomach analogue at all; the slime seemed to somehow process nutrients from the blue liquid it lived submerged in.


    He preserved several of the slime-oozing glands for the other experts to examine; perhaps they''d be able to duplicate them, eventually. While the autopsy had told him all sorts of things about the alien, its chemical composition, and how they lived, it hadn''t told him a single thing about how to communicate with them, or live in peace. There were no apparent means of communication at all; the things apparently saw in sonar, much like the marine combat units, and if they spoke to each other, the means were unknown.


    Conflict, it seemed, was inevitable.

 Chapter 16: Tools of the trade

    Dr. McCloud was growing somewhat frustrated. Every single one of the ten thousand humanoid shells they''d arrived at Charlie with had either been filled or modified to serve as the basis for some other machine; and now she was being tasked with being essentially a factory foreman; overseeing the production of stacks of new machines; humanoid shells here on the 13, which were being loaded with new crew personalities as soon as the body was finished, and Squids to add to the continuing expansion of construction outside.


    She''d taken pleasure in helping sift through minds for those that could handle it best, adjusting their initial experience to help break them into reality and their overlay; now it was simply pulling the requested datafile out, plugging it in, and starting to build the next one before the first was even out the door.


    For most of the journey, once the 13 had been crewed and prepped, she''d been able to just fast-forward, letting the long, boring parts continue on; but now, she had to deal with an overabundance of those long, boring parts.


    She hadn''t planned on this; she''d expected not to do mass production until it was time to make organic bodies for whatever new home they''d assembled. But no. Humanity needed navigators, gunners, and engineers for the fleet so they could make the region safe; before building that home.


    She went over the checklist for the latest body. Minor fault in the left arm actuator. Pull. Replace. All green. Activate. And as the confused person trapped in their new mechanical body rose up, she was already moving on to the next one. "Good morning, welcome to your new robot body, please step out into the hall, check your Icon for your assignment."


    Ugh. At least she wasn''t the only one working on this.


    ***


    Commodore Peterson leaned back in his chair, smoothing back his still nonexistant hair as he looked at his command screen; images of the now seven captains under his command; four of them freshly awakened; looking back at him. "I''ve been studying the new simulation Amari''s XO put together and distributed, and it looks to be exactly what we need. We''ll continue tweaking it as we gather more info, but it seems clear that, so long as we have hypercannons, the only real threats will be these ''Defender'' class enemies. Everything else we can take our time with."


    He tapped his keys, bringing up an image. System Beta, where the Alecto had first detected the Defender-class ships, came up on-screen; and the vague ring of Defenders in the star''s orbit; seventeen of them. Roughly cigar-shaped blobs, running at higher energy than any of the ''civilian'' craft; and unlike the civilians, not giving off any tell-tale radio signals.


    "To say the Mags are slower than our ships is a drastic understatement. Keeping out of range will be trivial; but this plasma lance these things have looks to be lethal at up to several light-seconds in range.. even if it''s lightspeed rather than instant, it still means that every moment in hypercannon range is a risk. We should also assume they have just as good, or even better, point defenses than the civvies. Still. We now have five destroyers to bring to battle; and if one of these things can handle two hundred and fifty warheads in a single wave... we''ve got problems."


    "The Tisiphone will, of course, take point. The Minotaur, Hydra, Griffin, and Cyclops will accompany her. The 13 and Alecto will remain here in the unlikely event something threatens our construction operation. Captain Amari has built us a pair of Hyperspace relays; basically just a hyperdrive hooked onto a comms sattelite; which we can let remain outside the system and send signals back and forth."


    He turned to Amari. "Focus on some of these mimics. You''re in charge of building the best imitator you can, and fitting it with hypercannons... just the single-shot variety, of course."


    "We''ll have it tested before you get back. If you take long enough, we''ll even pull it up beside one of these deep-space contacts to see if it reacts."


    The commodore nodded. "We''ll keep you updated. If we can clear out the Defenders easily enough, we''ll completely clean the system before we go. If not, we''ll be back to re-arm... and head back out with a larger fleet for round two."


    ***


    During the extended trip to the Beta system, the five ships drilled extensively; knowing the enemy weapon would melt through armor like butter, the vessels had been equipped with a deeper, 3-layered system of shields. The ultimate idea being that they could, hopefully, reform layers faster than the enemy destoyed them; though it was only conjecture that the shields would stop the plasma lance.


    They determined that, at first, the five ships would work together, firing a full volley of missiles at each enemy; just to see how well the Defender point defenses worked. They could move around the system, picking off each ship in isolation; and then move on to cleaning up the system.


    This plan, of course, didn''t even last through the transit into realspace just outside the beta system. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.


    ***


    "Relay deployed, Commodore. Sweeping the system for the Defenders. And... Well. Found them. All of them."


    Peterson sat up abruptly. Some of those ships should be on the opposite side of the sun; and certainly far enough away to take time to pick out. Had they somehow received a warning? "Show me. Keep shields and point defenses ready, just in case."


    The central holographic screen lit up once more; showing a loose formation of seventeen Defender-class Mag ships clustered around the region the probe had been launched from in the outer system, clearly investigating the area. This left the Defenders quite distant from the various civilian ships; and only a few light-minutes from the flotilla''s equally cautious emergence point. Still; a few light-minutes was vastly outside the range of any sort of direct-fire weapon. But... easily within missile range.


    "Shit. Alright. They''ll be smotting our emergence in just a few minutes." He taps a button on his icon. The other four captains conferenced into his communications. "I''m designating enemy targets one through seventeen. We have to assume that being up close and personal will let them help support each other''s defenses. So lets keep our distance. We''ve got enough between us for twenty volleys of missiles. Scale up in launch speed for each volley so that they all arrive at the same time, and we''ll target just one enemy with each volley. Save the last three for later. Execute when the clock hits seventeen."


    Still lingering from back home on earth, where the UN navy operated on GMT even while working on planets with days that lasted weeks; that gave everyone just over a minute to prep their firing pattern; and let them launch just before the enemy saw their arrival.


    Over the next thirty seconds, each of the Destroyers spat out a long stream of missiles; carefully timed so that they formed a wave of death, steadily building in speed towards the Defenders; who saw the Destroyers seconds after they launched, and began moving in closer to each other; and accelerating towards the Destroyers.


    The Defenders... were substantially faster than any of the civilian ships. Accelerating hard, at least 10Gs, a speed which should''ve been enough to kill the Mags on board; though a tiny increment compared to the terran drives.


    All of the missiles were the bomb-pumped laser variety, designed to detonate as far from the enemy as possible and still inflict damage; and the Defenders didn''t seem to be firing a hail of projectiles the way the other ships had. Instead... they simply fired the plasma lance they''d used against the probe. Rather than a single heavy burst, the vivid green wave of superheated gas swept across the incoming missiles as if it were drawing a line in the sky; each of the Defenders detonating dozens of them with each shot, and the deadly spray actually intersecting the path of the Destroyers; forcing abrupt manuevers to avoid intersecting with the beams.


    The Minotaur didn''t manuever quite fast enough; the shields failing within seconds, the plasma melting a path through her and setting off the missiles she had yet to launch; but the sturdy ship yet survived, channeling the explosions outward as damage control teams rushed to seal the gaps and make what repairs they could.


    The missiles were destroyed by the dozen, the hundred, the thousand... only a few dozen managing to pass through the beautiful arc of death weaved by the seventeen plasma lances scoring a pattern through the void. The lasers detonated, high-intensity lasers skewering the vessels at the points where, if they matched up with the Carrier that had been boarded, the ''heart'' and crew quarters would be located.


    Vivid fountains of bright green, glowing fluid sprayed out of the vessels, matching those lethal plasma beams in color. Three of the Defenders were badly damaged, and seemed to stop moving at all; while two others received only glancing blows, leaking atmosphere but continuing to charge headlong at the Destroyers.


    They stopped firing when the last of the missiles were vaporized; but only for seventy-two seconds. Seeming to detect Minotaur''s difficulty in manuevering, several of them fired a second extreme-range volley; and the Minotaur ruptured in dozens of locations, the already stricken ship at first simply critically damaged, then flashing a vivid white... as a self-destruct device, a nuclear fusion munition intended to ensure the enemy couldn''t retrieve a functional hyperdrive, obliterated the engineering section, reducing the entire vessel into slag.


    "Shit! Scatter. Fire remaining missiles and manuver as much as possible to avoid incoming fire. No waves this time... scatter the missiles to come in from as many arcs as you can. Force them to shoot as many times as possible to take them out. Target the damaged ones from the first volley."


    The four surviving ships came to an abrupt halt, accelerating at what would have been an unbelieveable rate before they''d adapted Enemy engine technology; and began to turn back; working to open up the distance before re-entering hyperspace.


    While the terran ships retreating, firing missiles off in a variety of random directions only to loop back in, some of them dropping down to as little as a thirtieth of light speed in order to come in at the enemies from behind, all four survivors emptied their magazines, delivering six hundred more missiles into the void.


    The Defenders fired one more extreme-range burst; all fourteen that were still in the fight working with precision, firing in arcs to make it more likely to nail one of the manuevering terran vessels; and the Griffin lost her outermost two shield layers to a glancing blow, the beam that struck her deflected just enough by the loose spheres of gaseous matter to only slightly melt a few hull plates, and fuse one of her crew to the wall as the some of the component metals abruptly reached melting point.


    After that second burst, they redirected their attention to the second wave of missiles; the alternate firing pattern, however, made their defense much less effective; fully a third of the missiles managing to bypass their massed defensive fire, hundreds of detonations sending holes burning through the five damaged craft; as the Destroyers re-entered hyperspace, they bore witness to the final, dramatic detonations of the Defenders, vivid explosions of green energy and black hull scattering into the void.


    The amount of energy the beams used should have been impossible. Nothing should be able to fire a beam light-minutes away and draw it around such a wide area to strike a target.


    Still; clearly, they existed. As he gathered the ships to return to Charlie, Peterson reviewed the video of the battle. He had been far more confident the enemy were too primitive to mimic a hyperdrive without a sample a few minutes ago. Now... he thought it was a miracle they didn''t already have one.

 Chapter 17: Skulduggery

    Reviewing the data from the battle in the conference room; and sending a listing to Dr. McCloud to add the crew of the Minotaur to the front of the revival listing; Captain Amari considered the sight before her. Three of her new Mimics; cruiser-sized hollow shells in the shape of one of the Mag tug-class ships, their enormous size belying the fact that each of them had barely the weight of a scout ship. Still; each of the craft was, essentially, a hollow shell containing a trio of hypercannon; of a design using less than half the usual amount of iridium. She''d bet they''d fire once. Maybe a 60/40 shot of firing a second time.


    "Get the Typhon ready. As soon as Captain Laurent gets a new body, he''s going to be in charge of the defenses here.. we need to test these mimics. We can''t afford to simply assume that we have an endless amount of time to solve this problem. If we had witnessed a ship passing in and out of hyperspace, and killed it... even if the wreckage was slagged we''d probably figure it out anyway."


    Derek glances up from his own seat. "These things... have power sources that are either completely unknown or require an amount of antimatter we can''t safely produce. We should... check our roster. See if anyone has anybody from the old weapons division on Mercury has been revived. We need a solution for these Defenders.. though I suppose we could just plan on piling on enough thousands of missiles to do the job."


    "...Thats possible. Assuming that they didn''t learn from last time and are better able to counter a missile swarm; and even if they are, we can at least pull that in one of the other systems."


    Dr. Kent taps the controls for the screen. "The atmosphere on board these things. Same rough consistency. But green rather than blue. More advanced weapons, and absolutely no radio emissions."


    Captain Amari tilts her head a moment. "Is that significant?"


    "We already know these Defenders are very advanced, and very different, from the civilian craft. And its unlikely they lack any sort of communication. What if, rather than simply running silent they have some other sort of communication? Every system in their empire might already know about us."


    Beside him, Sergeant Vasquez nods. "The Survivor''s reports were clear about that. Instant communication was something that the race that saved him from the Enemy had. Those creatures didn''t use hyperdrives, either, but still caught up to the abduction fleet."


    "We need to face the grim concept that, right now, some system that has a population to support so many space stations they blot out a sun might be researching hyperdrives. Care to gamble how long it takes?"


    ***


    The only craft in the system larger than the Mimics was the 13; and unless they intended to waste a hyperdrive on what were, essentially, giant missiles, they needed something to carry them to the target. Which meant that, after having spent objective years in the Charlie system, the 13 was moving once again... with three enormous fake aliens hooked onto her sides.


    The transit to hyperspace was swift; setting her on course to intercept one of the thousands of deep-space Mag vessels emerging from the one primary system at the cluster''s edge.


    "Thompson. You''ve got the bridge. I''m taking command of the Mimic for the test." She tapped her icon. "Danvers, Ericson. Meet me on Mimic-1. McCloud... keep a few empty bodies waiting, just in case. These Mags are just full of surprises."


    As Derek watched her stepping out of the bridge, he settled down into the captain''s chair once again. "Alright, people. Hopefully this is just a quick drop-off and retrieval."


    He studied the starmap, and watched the readings as Mimic-1 powered up. Tiny emitters that gave exactly the same light frequencies off as the irritating blue goop that shone through the Carrier they''d encountered. A radio beacon test-broadcast. A familiar string; coordinates. Where the ship was, and who it was sending the message to. The message itself was a copy of one of the other deep-space radio signals heading for the same star.


    "Mimic-1, you''re looking good. As far as our scanners are concerned, you''re just another Mag. If you weren''t so close we wouldn''t be able to tell."


    Over on the Mimic; on a small, improvised bridge, containing only three people, suspended inside the massive, mostly hollow construct, Kelsey grimaced... but relayed the message. "Captain, we are go. Are you sure you want to be in here, and leave him in charge?"


    A soft chuckle. "Don''t worry about it. If they blow us to hell, we''ll wake up on the 13. We''re safer than you were walking out of your house back on earth."


    "Thats a very... poor safety standard, ma''am."


    A slow blink. "Ahh. From one of those cities with the... grave towers?"Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.


    "Coffin towers. They joked that the apartments were the size of a coffin... and that once you were stuck in one, thats where you''d end up buried."


    "Ahh. Still. Charge up one of the hypercannon. If it sees through the ruse, I''d prefer to leave a dead Mag ship than have to wake up in a new body."


    "Aye, ma''am." Kelsey glanced over to her side, carefully increasing the draw from the fusion core; as Ericson funneled that power into the hypercannon. After a few seconds, Ericson gave a thumbs-up; and she gently lowered the draw; this ship was built quickly, and built for one purpose; to take one shot, and then die. Everything was bare-bones and required careful, direct, control.


    "We are go for Hypercannon."


    "Signal the 13. Lets do this."


    ***


    Emerging from hyperspace a few light-hours away from the Carrier, the 13 came to a relative stop; even after months of accelerating, the Mag carrier was only moving at about 0.1C; and the Mimic would need to be just slightly faster for its flyby.


    The navigation officer carefully tuned the engines... until the 13 was only moving perhaps 15% faster than the Mag; at this distance, it would take sixteen hours to catch up. "Speed matched. You are go for launch."


    The ship shook. Even as massive as the 13 was, and as hollow as the Mimic was, it was still thousands of tons of heavy metal. "Opening hyper portal. We''ll see you on the other side."


    After a few moments; making sure the course was set, and the Mimic was flying on the right course and speed; the 13 burst back into hyperspace; planning to, of course, match speeds with the Carrier; a few light-hours ahead, allowing the Mimic to catch up.


    Being in command of a starship was an exhilirating feeling; even if it was only for a few days.


    ***


    The Mimic kept up a steady acceleration; but only at a fraction of 1G, the same as what the Carrier leading them was at; but her existing velocity allowed her to draw closer by the minute. Before reaching a light-minute away, the Mimic broadcast a radio signal; a cloned copy of a recorded signal, with coordinates replaced for the Mimic and the target carrier.


    For Kelsey, this was a mind-numbingly frightening experience. She''d already died once. She didn''t want to die again. Sure, she''d get a new body. But would it really be her? Was she really the same Kelsey who''d died? No. A copy. And if she died... the new one, on the 13? Would be another copy. Not her.


    While Captain Amari seemed calm, relaxed, confident in the idea that no matter what, she''d be fine... Kelsey had to carefully control her own response. She pulled up her overlay controlls from her Icon, Onyx''s familiar chirping presence helping sooth her frazzled nerves, and tuned down her own simulated emotions. Something that, technically, she shouldn''t be able to do, and definitely shouldn''t do even if she were.


    But she was an engineer. This body was a machine. It was inevitable she''d be able to fine-tune her own equipment. Every time she heard Derek''s voice over the comms array she did this again; in fact, she''d nicknamed this option on her icon the ''DT'' button. Muting down the blend of rage and loss that she felt when she heard the voice.


    The ship carefully turned, keeping the one active hypercannon aimed near the Carrier.... but... it was unnecesary. The Carrier gave a response signal; its own coordinates, those of the mimic, and a string of unknown gibberish; and just kept accelerating. With a speed difference of a little over 1% of lightspeed, they went from max weapons range to point-blank, and all the way out the other side in just a few minutes. When they reached four light-seconds past, slowly moving further ahead, she relaxed.


    "Captain. We''re going to be passing out of hypercannon range in... One minute, seven seconds. Shall we begin stepping down and dissipating the capacitor?"


    "No... We''re definitely going to take these things out at some point. No time like the present.  Ericson! Line up your shot to go right down the center of it, and fire."


    "Ahh... yes, ma''am."


    Kelsey gave a slow exhale. Stay calm. Everything is fine. She tapped a key, the fake tentacles in the path of the hypercannon moving out of the way... and just before passing out of range, Ericson fired. A long string of distorted, purple space appeared and vanished in an instant. The Carrier exploded in a vibrant burst of vivid blue and purple light.


    Ericson smiled. "Target destroyed ma''am."


    Kelsey smiled. She''d be getting back to the ship safe after all. She tapped the button. Letting her emotions normalize once again... as she looked down at the controls. Her timesense instantly shifted, running at maximum capacity. An broadcast brought Ericson and Amari up to the same timescale.


    "Captain, the hypercannon ruptured. We''re suffering a cascade failure. We have... less than a second before the whole ship fails."


    Amari looked back at her; down at the controls. "Well. I guess this saves us the long flight back to the 13. Upload any data on what caused the failure and broadcast it. I''ll see you on the ship, Danvers. Ericson. Good work." She smiled, giving a salute.


    Kelsey stared at her in horror and panic. Even at her accelerated timeframe, she had less than a minute to live. She thought back to her life. Her first one, a successful starship engineer. Her life in the city. School. Derek. The navy. Her second, new, life. Technically her own real birth, since she was, by no means, the real Kelsey Danvers. The most striking memory was punching Derek. Trying to send him flying off into hyperspace.


    The look of stunned horror at the betrayal on his face. Her own regrets. Would she do it all over again? She watched the hypercannon starting to come apart. The ship breaking up around it, as bits and pieces of it were scattered into hyperspace.


    And it all went black.


    ***


    Sitting up in the robot bay, Kelsey looked down at her hands. Ignoring McCloud''s directive to get out of the bay as the roboticist moved on to wake up... probably Ericson... she shut her overlay off. This was a new her. Literally; she''d been born just seconds ago, in this new body. She was navy. She''d probably be stepping into the line of fire again. Her new lifespan might be measured in thousands of years... or in weeks.


    For a moment, she considered just giving up. Then... Onyx perched on her shoulder. The tiny dragon chirping at her as if it were a bird. She smiled. Turned her overlay on, letting herself feel human once more... and stepped out of the bay. For now, she could get back to work. But she wasn''t the old Kelsey. She needed to make her own, new, choices.

 Chapter 18: Destructive Testing

    As Captain Amari emerged from the hallway, Derek gave her a nod. "You have the bridge, Captain." Her body was just subtly different than her old one; no significant differences, but the limbs moved differently in a way she might not have been able to identify if she had been organic.


    *She nodded as he vacated the seat, stepping off to the side; just a touch awkwardly, as  he didn''t actually have a bridge station while the captain was on duty; they normally simply swapped out the seat, or in a crisis where both were up, he''d be on the secondary bridge.


    Amari smiled, shifting in her chair. "So, we have at least one confirmation the Mimic works. We can do a few more intercepts to be sure, but go ahead and tell Dorian we have his weapon to finish the job."


    "..Dorian?" The Comms officer blinks for a moment. "Oh. Commodore Peterson."


    "Yes. Commodore Peterson. Put together a data packet for him and we''ll move on to a new target."


    Derek studied the data packet for a few moments as the comms officer was piecing it together. "Are you sure we want to do more of these deep-space intercepts? Its good to get confirmation that something other than a carrier can fall for the ruse... but what we really need is to test how a Defender responds. The Defenders tend to hang around in the heart of the system, near the star... if they spotted the difference, and there were enough of them..."


    "They could intercept our doomsday weapon. It seems very likely that the more dense systems would be able to do such a thing. Well then. It seems like our next target is obvious. Set course for the Bravo system. We''ll see if the ones that took out the Minotaur can spot the difference. And if they let them close enough... we might be able to just clear this system out on our own."


    She glanced up at the central screens for a moment, tapping her icon. "Danvers."


    "Yes, ma''am?"


    "Any progress on that hypercannon?"


    "We simply used insufficient iridium on the intake channels. Once it discharged, the power flowed too quickly and it all fell apart. We should be able to fire all three cannons before the ship blows, and I can modify them to give us a few additional shots... but I still wouldn''t bet on either Mimic giving us more than six to eight shots from all three hypercannon combined."


    She smiled. "Have at it. We''re going to be deploying both of them in a few days... and if we''re lucky, cleansing the Beta system."


    ***


    For Kelsey, this was a nightmare. She knew full well that the old her had died on one of these deathtraps; and that was going to see only one of these Mag ships. Now they were going to deliberately pull a flyby on the substantially more capable Defenders... and intentionally fire until their cannons were spent or the enemy all destroyed.  She knew the odds.


    She was about to die. Part of her was tempted to go to the robot bay, steal one of the empty shells, and make a copy of herself to send instead. Let some -other- Kelsey go die for it. But... that might get her shut down. And while dying was bad... at least part of herself was left behind this way.


    She boarded a Mimic; the haphazard way they were built meant they looked just a bit different inside, as opposed to, say, the way the Minotaur and Tisiphone had looked virtually identical, or the Alecto had probably looked just like the Megalodon; while she''d served on the Alecto, she''d never seen the inside of the Meg before it left.


    Most of the internal structure was made up of the three long, skeletal Hypercannon structures. They looked strange, not built into a gun-barrel or encased in a ship. Delicate frameworks that probably wouldn''t handle any extreme acceleration. She rested her hand on the spot she''d ''fixed'' earlier. Damn. She knew full well her ''fix'' would last three shots, at most. No way Amari would leave it at that. They''d be firing until they died.


    She heard the captain stepping in behind her. "Alright, Danvers. Are we ready?"


    "Yes, captain." In her head, she considered asking for a transfer. Somehow, she was too cowardly to broach the subject. Ridiculous.


    "Well, we have just a few days before arrival. Might as well underclock it once we''re ready for..." She stopped.


    Her icon blinked. A tiny orange exclamation point; an incoming message. "Go for Amari."


    Kelsey could see Derek''s face appear in midair, facing the captain. On his end, Amari likely appeared in the same way. "Captain, I see another intelligence-gathering opportunity. We have these hyperspace relays that hop in and out every hour. If I hook a bomb and some telescopes to one, we can drop them on the edges of the systems we pass, and get more data on these things; and if they notice, the whole mess will just destroy itself. We have five relays... we could drop off four of them at other Mag systems, and come back here to drop the fifth before our own test."The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    "Excellent idea, Thompson. Get it done. How long will it delay us?"


    "We can drop one off on a system thats very lightly occupied with only an hour''s delay. Deploying in four systems would take us an extra week."


    "More than worth it. I''ll remain on the Mimic until then and simply underclock until the time comes."


    Amari slowly nodded to herself as Kelsey looked on. "I know you don''t like him, but he''s an excellent XO. Once that ship is being used for what its meant for, he''ll be an equally excellent captain."


    "I suppose. I know that what happened wasn''t really his fault. It... sank in a bit more firmly after the last time I died. But its still hard to look at a face that''s been covered in blood and snarling like some sort of vicious animal in your nightmares."


    "I can feel you on that. Go ahead and perform a full system''s check, then you can underclock until the time comes."


    ***


    For Derek, the time passed fairly quickly. The star systems here in the cluster were typically only a few days away; a distance that, if humanity settled and colonized this region, would make trading and travel far easier, and securing the area against threats actually possible. That black hole at the heart of the cluster had seemingly picked a bunch of useful stars up in its orbit as it travelled.


    They would reach the right spot in hyperspace; simply shove the relay out of the airlock, its sleek design now made bizzarely distorted with the addition of a telescope and a small-scale nuke. The batteries and the hyperdrive would last for tens of thousands of transits; enough to give them years worth of data on the Mags.


    The first system reported back in. Only a few solar panel clusters. Not even a single Defender in sight; the 13 could easily clean that system out on its own. Still; potentially useful data.


    By the time they arrived at Bravo, they had four maps of the other stars, looking at various concentrations of enemies; including one star system which had literally millions of civilian vessels, and thousands of Defender-class ships. A sobering promise of how badly things would go if they couldn''t slip a mimic past these aliens to reach the star.


    He contacted the captain. "Ma''am, we''re ready for emergence in Bravo. All systems green?"


    "All systems green, XO. Keep my ship safe for me. Lets start the test."


    ***


    The system looked a touch chaotic when the 13 emerged, and the Mimics detached. Light-hours away, twelve Defender-class ships were clustered around the remains of the Minotaur and their brethren; very little of the debris remained. It seemed that, in all liklihood, the remaining ships had absorbed what was left of the damaged and the destroyed; a few of the Defenders read with higher mass than they had when the Tisiphone had fled the system. The two Mimics began their slow, steady progression; a path that would lead them within Hypercannon range of the cluster of Defenders... but also right past.


    As the 13 pulled further out of the system, the Mimics sent out the standard civilian radio pings of location and destination; indicating they were heading towards a solar panel cluster.


    Onboard the Mimic-2, Kelsey was quietly containing herself; keeping her emotions muted. Twelve enemy ships. Two mimics, six hypercannon. If everything went perfectly, and they got the jump on the Defenders, she might just live through this. They''d need to kill every single Defender in one shot, and each Hypercannon would need to fire twice... but it was possible. Hypercannon being so ridiculously deadly was, after all, the reason the Enemy had stopped building bigger ships; what was the point of spending ten times the resources on a Battleship if a Destroyer could still kill it in one shot.


    With each passing hour, the two Mimics drew closer to the gathering of Defenders. Signs looked... good. They were already past the range at which the Defenders had begun actively seeking to fight the flotilla that they''d previously encountered.


    She glanced over at the captain. "Ma''am... honestly, while killing these things would be good... this is honestly good enough. If they were to react to us now, clearly the fake hull fooled them for a while. Even if there were tens of thousands of Defenders in a system, this would be good enough to get us within range of the star."


    "Possibly. But at least one of those ships has taken on what was left of the Minotaur. Someone over there might be wondering what configuration of iridium and platinum let her reach this system so fast. Besides... these are the only ships that are actually dangerous at Hypercannon range. How long til we''re in range?"


    "Honestly, based on the Tisiphone''s reports, we''re inside the outer edge of their plasma lance. Give us... two more minutes and we can nail them, ma''am."


    "Good. Full charge on all three ships. Share targetting with the other Mimic; lets not waste our shots."


    Something eventually gave them away, it seemed. Whether it was the charging hypercannon, or simply a matter of proximity; the group of Defenders abruptly closed in together, mere kilometers between them, forming a group that, if the terrans were using missiles, would be optimal for striking down swarms of missiles coming in from every direction.


    But one which meant that a single hypercannon shot might strike two targets at once.


    Even as they started to fire; lower-power spirals of plasma bursting out towards the two mimics; six hypercannon fired simultaneously. Eight Defenders were struck; six head-on, the other two in glancing blows. As the Mimic-3 began to come apart from incoming plasma fire, she let loose another volley; and when the Mimic-2 started to melt apart around Kelsey, causing the entire ship to self-destruct... she clenched her fists, gripped her controls; and died once more.


    **


    Out at the system''s edge, the light-show was spectacular. The twisted purple ribbons of torn space-time, the rupturing Defenders, the sprays of deadly green plasma...


    Knowing Kelsey was aboard the mimic gave him a twinge of fear, and regret... even if he knew she was probably starting to wake up down in the robot bay already. She was fine. She''d just acquired a new body.


    More importantly... all but one of the Defenders was done for. And the last one? Heavily damaged, leaking atmosphere.


    "Go ahead and set a course for that last Defender. Captain Amari can override me if she wants... but I think we want to get a closer look. Laser warheads already loaded?"


    "Of course, sir. We only have eighteen tubes, but even if she were intact we could probably kill the one solo before it reached range."


    "Check for the aperture that plasma weapon comes out of. If its still intact, set our missiles to try to nail it. If it isn''t... we''ll fire one to just miss them. See if it has any other defenses. Either way... soon enough we''ll hopefully figure out how these plasma lances work. Imagine if we could use that stuff ourselves.."

 Chapter 19: Operation Impending Doom 2

    When the ''warning shot'' passed cleanly by the Defender, Captain Amari decided, still, not to pull in close. They hadn''t been expecting a boarding operation; and as such had neglected to carry along Vasquez and his goo-proof marines; but apparently, that wasn''t strictly necesary.


    Derek pulled up a diagram on the main screen. "This thing is big, and extremely high-energy... and if its internal atmosphere is anything like the civilian ships, dangerous to move. However... we have a full terraforming package. Most of you aren''t familiar with the Earthforge ships this thing is based on, but down on deck two we have a system for deploying massive foil mirrors; mostly intended to refract sunlight and creating a nice, warm area on an icy world. With enough raw materials we could keep a city warm indefinitely by mounting a few rockets to keep it mobile... and with what we already have, we could easily completely wrap this thing up. Deploy some grav emitters and a few of the torches, and we could drag this thing all the way back to Charlie to examine it safely. Even better, while we''ll need to keep it close while we make it into hyperspace... once we''re there, the torch can push it the rest of the way; we can even salvage the components from the relay we were going to leave here and let it have its own bubble, completely unable to reach us... until we get there."


    Captain Amari studied the plans. She hadn''t even looked at the tools down on deck 2; had even considered dumping the lot of them before going on this mission; but the 13 was built as a workhorse platform, able to move massive amounts of rock on its own, and even more by using the torches. This... seemed workable.


    "This looks like a great concept. And having one of these things back at Charlie.... if its weapon is disabled... would be a great way to really study these things up close and personal. But dragging one of these things into hyperspace.... If these things have any sort of FTL comms, and clearly they have at least our own level of intelligence... that''d be all the data they need to figure out how things work. I appreciate the idea. And we should use that method to get any pieces we can confirm as inert. But.... Weps. Charge the hypercannon. We''re going to clean out this system, and they might get that weapon back online any time now."


    "Yes, ma''am..... Charged up. Ready to fire on your order."


    "Hit it."


    ***


    It wasn''t intended as an anti-ship weapon; the hypercannon on the 13 would''ve been a dramatically effective orbital bombardment tool, but its real purpose was to create a wider, shorter beam; that would deliver maximum kinetic energy to target. Instead of focused precision to take out a distant enemy ship... this was a short-ranged sledgehammer built to knock an asteroid out of orbit.


    While the earlier shots from the now-slagged Mimics had bored enormous holes in the Defender''s hulls and sent shockwaves through them that broke the ships apart; the 13''s main gun essentially splattered the Defender; reducing it into a loose cloud of gas with a few small bits of debris scattered inside. If the ship had any surviving crew after the earlier incident, it certainly wouldn''t now.


    Moving on a steady trajectory, the 13 shifted its orbit; heading for the nearest Carrier. So long as they kept their distance, the enemy point defense would never be able to hurt them at hypercannon range. With the Defenders gone... everything else was just mopping up.


    Derek couldn''t help but imagine what the crew of a human ship would feel, watching an impossibly fast alien ship roving the system, destroying everything in sight one ship at a time, meticulously murdering everyone from beyond any chance of fighting back. And the plan from Peterson was what... exterminate the entire species?


    If the Mags had responded with anything other than instant hostility.... but no. As sad as it might be, it had to be done.


    ***


    The 13''s steady cruise back to the Charlie system, hauling along sacks filled with broken enemy starship components, was slower than its trip out; but not by much. While Hyperspace might not have a speed limit, they still needed to accelerate up to speed, and then deccelerate back down; and while possible, travelling more than about a lightyear every 20 hours started to cause... problems.


    By the time she arrived, she was greeted by an intimidating sight. Sixty smooth, black, Carriers appeared on sensors.... all attached to Anvil station. A conference was called up of the senior officers once again; with the former captain of the Minotaur now gracing the Typhon, a newly-built destroyer with some interesting adjustments.


    ***


    Commodore Peterson looked out over the gathered officers. He almost instinctively adjusted his uniform... before remembering he hadn''t worn one in over a century at this point. "Alright, people. When we started this project, we brought in some people from the old weapons division back in Sol.. and while we''ve been mass-producing these Mimics, they''ve been coming up with ways of handling the less dangerous systems... and came accross an amusing reference. Apparently, the Survivor wanted to do exactly what we''re doing now to the Enemy."This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    A diagram appeared over the conference table. While Anvil Station held larger facilities, he''d chosen to use the 13 for this meeting again once it returned. The diagrom showed the other spiral arms of the galaxy, including the current one; and the far distant region containing Sol; and the somewhat more distant than that one, containing the Enemy.


    "The whole thing was discarded because we had no way to make a ship that could sneak past the Enemy.. but he had a team trying to figure out how to bypass their fleet and take out their whole empire... one star at a time. He called it Operation Impending Doom. But here, thanks to our much greater speed, and the Mimics... we can actually accomplish this goal against the Mags."


    The screen shifted. A new display emerged, showing a massive ring of thousands of interconnected hexagonal solar panels, including one cluster the size of Jupiter which had a veritable swarm of craft either docked to it or moving around it.


    Derek sat up abruptly. This was an almost-live display; probably just a few hours old; from one of the systems he''d left the relays in. He watched closely as steadily more data emerged; showing orange dots for the millions of swarming civilian craft; and red dots for the thousands of Defenders.


    "Jesus. How the hell do you take out something like that..."


    "Surprisingly easily." Peterson zoomed in on the star. "Everything here is gathered around the ecliptic. Their standard procedure seems to be to convert everything in the system to their own stations and ships if it has useful materials... ending up in either just a big mass of stations, a solid ring, or, from one system we''ve hypothesized but not confirmed, a complete dyson sphere closer to the sun than mercury was back at Sol. If we come in from above or below, while this inner ring of ships could intercept us... we -might- be able to reach hypercannon range before they did. And with the mimics?"


    He showed two projected lines. One of a ship emerging right at the edge of where a hyperdrive could emerge in a star system, as close to the star as possible; and the Defenders turning on it immediately. The other, showed them failing to turn on it until the same range at which the Defender in the Beta system had responded to the mimics. One just barely reached range. The other... had enough time to fire and plenty of time to spare; hours, even.


    "Now, one thing to be clear... this actually assumes the Mags try to keep us from hitting the sun, and begin pursuit the moment the ship enters the system rather than just trying to intercept at usual agression range. If they keep acting the way they have been... we can reach hypercannon range of the star with almost complete certainty. In fact, if we were to drop one ship above the star, let it go, and then drop the other below... so far, even if its only one threat, every single Defender moves on it. We could lure them out of position, back off into hyperspace... and then hit the star unopposed."


    "As such, we''ve continued production of additional Mimics, but also saved some of the hull material to make, simply, more mini-nova weapons. While we''ll probably be cleaning up smaller support bases for a while, I plan to complete buildup in one year and fifteen days... to launch Operation Impending Doom 2. A touch silly, perhaps. But by the time its done, we''ll be able to start focusing on colonizing and building new homes, rather than fighting."


    Nods around the table. While a few might be hesitant about the plan, or the idea of essentially exterminating an alien species we had yet to talk to; none objected enough to actually speak.


    "Lets go ahead and break for now. Feel free to relax for a while. We''ll maintain a patrol just in case, and I''m sending the Alecto out to deploy more relays.. but we''re not going to launch this operation until we''re ready to hit every single enemy system at once."


    ***


    She''d died aboard one of these ships. Twice. Kelsey couldn''t help but stare at the entryway at the front of the Mimic; she''d literally have to climb down the same bopening that fired the hypercannon to get inside. She''d seen far more of these Mimics than she''d ever want to.. but now she was considered the primary engineering expert on them just because she''d fixed the problems with the first one.


    And, of course, been dragged along on them to her death... twice. She''d spent more time aboard one than any other... living... person. In theory.


    The inside was a mostly hollowed-out compartment. Familiar. They''d actually brought in long containers of the blue goop, that terrible alien slop that threatened to tear people apart... and had it laying near the outer hull. Apparently in case some distinct radiation it gave off would alert the Defenders for its lack.


    This was it. Where the current her was going to die. The mission hadn''t been launched yet. She had months. A year. And if she overclocked herself, that could be a subjective century. She could do so much. Learn more than she ever did in her actual, organic life that had been cut short before she reached thirty.


    But no matter what she learned, this body was going to die right here, on this ship, in an alien star system. Either when a hypercannon misfired... or when their shots pushed enough mass out of the sun''s core to cause the mini-supernova they were going for.


    There were a few other crew from the Shanghai that had been awakened. People she knew, that she could talk to. But despite all the years of hate, she wanted to go back to talk to Derek again. He hadn''t died again after getting this robot body. Did he still feel like he was the same person? Clearly she did, or she wouldn''t hate him anymore. Did she still hate him? Not really.


    It was strange, knowing with complete certainty the day and hour of her death. She could avoid it. But if she did, she''d ''die'' anyway. She''d heard of others having such feelings. They''d been shut down, restored to the database... and someone else got the body. They''d be ''woken back up'' once everything was settled.


    Which really just meant killed. And that another copy might come back. Maybe.

 Chapter 20: Darkness Within

    Derek was.. relaxed. He was likely going to either be commanding the 13 on her way to deliver a pack of Mimics to one of the systems, with Captain Amari once more flying in... or he''d be commanding one himself. They had samples of the aliens to go over, a constant string of data coming on, every hour, about the activities of the Mags in their systems... and a plan.


    It was all going to work out. The bad guys would be crushed, humanity would expand and start to build real, flesh and blood, colonies on new worlds.. and even if they didn''t, hell. The fleet could gather up its operations and repeat the whole Outreach scenario with the Anvil. Go off to some other part of the galaxy.


    He was the one who came up with the idea to drop relays in the alien systems; so he was in charge of interpreting the feeds and putting out any useful information. He''d pulled in Dr. Kent; occaisionally annoyed at the doctor for using an idealized handsome blond-haired version of himself from his youth... and been disappointed that the doctor had absolutely nothing to contribute, insisting that fleet movements were a tactical, or perhaps economic issue.


    In the end, Derek was watching things on his own. Every time another of the hourly bursts was delivered, tacking it onto his existing video to build out more of a pattern. As much as he hoped to find something interesting, it seemed that the Commodore was right; all that needed to happen was a strike from off the ecliptic. No oddities at all.


    The display flickered. A team was modifying the 13 right now; Kelsey included. A few minor power reroutes going on. He shook his head and turned back to the display, noting some... strange activity in the swarms of defenders. Two of the groups were starting to move towards each other. What were they doing?


    ***


    "Look. There''s a reason we don''t just leave exposed power cables hanging out in open air. One micrometeorite impact and all the power going to whatever system you want can end up... anywhere. Crew walking down the hall? Engines? Everything needs to be secured and protected."


    Kelsey crossed her arms, glaring with irritation at the two intruders on her engineering deck. The men hadn''t been awoken until recently; apparently part of the experimental weapons projects back in Sol.


    "We have months to do this right. Give me the power requirements and we''ll either cut open the walls, or just remove the entire subsection to run cables. We don''t do jury-rigged mods like this at the shipyard."


    One of the men gave a low chuckle. While both seemed vaguely similar; aside from one being perhaps darker-skinned than the other, they both simply reeked of ''arrogant old idiot''; this was the first time one had the audacity to actually laugh at her.


    "Look, young lady. We were building railguns before we had all this alien technology available. We know this system better than anyone alive, because I invented it."


    At a cough from the other scientist, he added.. "With my friend Dave''s assistance, of course; he was vital in combining gravity and magnetic tech to hold the rail together."


    Dave, apparently, continued the foolishness. "The sort of power draw we need, while significant, simply isn''t enough to be hazardous on a ship like this.. and we don''t have enough time to disassemble every ship. We''ve got dozens of ships to put these systems in. Yours is only the first because its the oldest. Just... stay out of the way and let us do our jobs."


    She gave a slow nod for a moment, looking the two men over. Punching them would be pointless. It wouldn''t really hurt them. No. She needed a better approach. She tapped her icon. "Commodore Peterson. I''ve got a couple of scientists here trying to do a slipshod job of installing a jury-rigged mix of a railgun and a gravity gun. They want to bolt cables to walls... including one to the wall immediately adjacent to the secondary fuel tank. The design has some promise... but these two clearly have no place working on a warship. Any vessel they work on will be substantially more likely to suffer a catastrophic failure if it takes damage."


    She hit a few buttons. Relaying the men''s proposed diagram to the Commodore.


    Seconds later, the two men stood abruptly upright. She could only hear half the conversation; but the men looked to be on the verge of panic. "Yes sir. No sir! I meant no disprespect sir, its simply that the odds of... But..."


    Looking deflated, ''Dave'' turned to Kelsey. "Ahh... Officer Danvers, I apologize for our behavior. We... have been advised to request your assistance in optimizing these weapons for the Destroyers."


    She shakes her head. "Great. Look, tweedle-dee. This is an extremely complicated system. It needs power run to every part of the barrel, an auto-loader, and enough gyrojet rounds to choke a herd of elephants. But. Every ship has its own engineering officer and numerous techs. Four of whom have more experience with these ships than I do, and we''ve got plenty of time. The 13 is going to be a unique one-off. She has so much open space and rooms dedicated to non-combat equipment that I can simply tear out a.... Deployable dehydration tower array? and we can add it onto the side. We need to call in those other four officers and work out a design, together. In a warship, every cubic centimeter is accounted for. "


    "So lets get down to basics. How important is this thing, and how big do we want it to be?"


    ***


    At first, Derek was confused. Every time he received another hourly update from the relays, he saw sighs of conflict between multiple groups of Defenders... and now that he even considered such a thing possible, he saw what looked like the remains of a Carrier-class ship that had been torn apart by a Defender.Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.


    Civil war? Pirates?


    Three months into his study, he started flagging individual civilian ships, backtracking them to the initial observation. Spotting an unusually small Tug-class ship, he backtracked it... to the swarm of Gunships moving around a Carrier. Sorting through the ships, looking for size variations, he came to a realization.


    These ships had organic elements, yes. But more than that; they were alive. Aside from these Defenders, the rest of the ships all seemed to be the same ship. At first a gunship... then once it grew big enough, becoming a tug... then the Constructor... and finally, the Carrier. At which point, it created the Gunships, continuing the cycle.


    Were these things ships at all? Were the Mags actually their crew, or perhaps some sort of larvae, a step before becoming the gunship? Were the Defenders a seperate species, or yet another life stage?


    He called in Kent. This... might be important.


    ***


    Objectively only 12 later; but subjectively weeks worth of intent study of the figures, during which Derek requested another officer cover his admittedly unimportant shift watching the bridge while the 13 was at dock; Dr. Kent and Derek had contacted Commodore Peterson... and flown by shuttle to meet him on Anvil station.


    The structure had been here for years now, constantly tunneling deeper into the enormous chunk of rock. Numerous hangars and construction bays were present, and the facility had the lived-in feeling of a real human settlement. Wide open spaces; even an indoor park in progress, where they were carefully creating the first living versions of terestrial life that this particular band had seen in over a century.


    Ideally, in a few years, they''d have a full-fledged forest growing inside the rock; though organic human bodies weren''t yet on the agenda.


    Commodore Peterson had built an office for himself just off the docks; a nice, easy stroll from where the Tisiphone was undergoing her own refit; but still, Derek saw hundreds of people moving busily about, enjoying their lives and getting off to work in the sort of crowded bustle he hadn''t seen since the bad old days of the apartment building.


    He stopped to watch it for a moment outside the commodore''s door. It was nice to feel so... alive again. Human. But still. Something was... off.


    It wasn''t until he stepped into Peterson''s office that it hit him. Of course. No children. No particularly old, no disabled; just... hundreds of perfectly fit, capable machines. The station might be huge; and house thousands of people... but it was still navy, even if not the UN navy.


    ***


    "We''ve spent weeks looking over the data. Mr. Thompson here had the initial idea... and once I saw what he was looking at, I realized the pattern. We haven''t been looking at some hyper-advanced alien race at all. We''re looking at a spaceborne ecology."


    For a moment, Peterson looked dumbfounded. Startled. He just stared at the two for a moment. "I... Thompson, is he going crazy, or am I? Are we talking about a living, breathing, organism that flies around in space... and has a plasma lance for a face?"


    Derek grimaced. "Almost, sir. From what we can tell, there are three seperate species of spacegoing life. The first, we''re tentatively calling the Hexes. Almost completely immobile, they basically eat rock and sunlight, and make more baby Hexes. The second... we''re calling the Mags, simply because thats what we already call them... fly around, absorb sunlight, eat Hexes, and whatever proto-Hex material there is."


    Dr. Kent smiled as he brought up the images of the different size disparities among the ''Mags''; ranging from Gunship all the way up to Carrier. "These things probably live for millions of years. They probably start as the caterpillars we saw... and then bud off to the ''Gunships'' inside their mothers. They grow fairly quickly at first; then more slowly, and as they get bigger they take on different jobs in the herd... til they start having babies themselves."


    "And the Defenders?"


    Derek shrugged his shoulders. "Actually... quite the opposite. If the Mags are the fish, the Defenders are the Sharks. They mostly stay near the sun to keep their temperature up... and very rarely go out as a pack to eat a Mag. The remains in-system suggest they last did this.. out of the thousands of Sharks in the system... at least a decade ago. Maybe more. We''ll probably need to watch for years to witness an actual hunt. But.... they aren''t uniform."


    "Aren''t uniform?"


    "The sharks have... packs, as it were. We haven''t seen it in the sparser systems, but in this one... they split up into territories, and while they don''t seem to kill each other, fire plenty of warning shots and harass at some sort of imaginary line. In the months since we started observing, there have been five such minor clashes along one of these ''borders''. The sharks most likely see our own ships, since we don''t seem to be Mags, as rival shark packs."


    Peterson looked at the data, piece by piece. While the suggestion sounded ridiculous on its face... it certainly seemed to be where the evidence was pointing. "Interesting. What implications does this have on the campaign?"


    The two men started speaking at the same time, overlapping each other, before Peterson held up a hand. "One at a time, children. Dr. Kent?"


    The blond-haired doctor smiled, spreading his arms. "These aren''t a hostile alien race. They aren''t going to develop hyperdrives. They aren''t a threat. They certainly aren''t endangered; clearing a few systems for us to live in should be fine; but aside from that, I think we need to call the whole operation off. Killing any that aren''t coming at us is just mindless butchery."


    "I suppose I can see where you''re coming from. Thompson?"


    "They need to be eradicated or controlled. The fact that they aren''t an empire with some central organization means it will be a longer, more difficult process to track down all the sharks scattered around... but however long it takes, every single one of them needs to be captured or killed."


    "Thats... a very dramatic difference of opinions."


    Dr. Kent glared at Derek for a moment. "This lunatic thinks that either one of them will someday, randomly, evolve a hyperdrive, or humanity will devolve to lose space travel, or some other equally unlikely claptrap."


    Derk looks coldly at Dr. Kent. "The third possibility was that despite being slower than light, when they consumed all the resources of that Dyson Sphere system, they''d eventually consume the sphere itself, unleashing swarms that we simply couldn''t stop. The spreading we see right now is just a few random lost stragglers. Imagine dealing with billions of sharks and trillions of Mags... slower than light, yes... but pouring out in an endless, unstoppable tide. We need to kill that system before it reaches that point... assuming it hasn''t already."


    "We have no indication that will happen!"


    Derek''s cold gaze never wavered. "We didn''t when we thought they were an empire that might try to build a dyson sphere as some sort of long-term settlement project. As non-sentient animals? I''d say its inevitable."


    The commodore looked between the two men for a moment. He tapped a button on his icon. Dr. Kent... suddenly seemed frozen into immobility. "I agree with you, Derek. More importantly, I think if we let this get out, we might have more people agree with Dr. Kent."


    "..Yes sir. I''m assuming he''s being downclocked til after the campaign?"


    "Perhaps. Go ahead and shut down the relays. We''ll have to deal with the good doctor long-term, one way or another."

 Chapter 21: Reconciliation

    Derek studied the operations plan for the upcoming assault. Someone had divided the original number of estimated Mimics needed by 20 somewhere along the line; by picking out 85 star systems which had stars that, if caused to go nova, would eradicate all Mag activity within a substantial radius. Unlike the incident at Sol, most of the star''s mass would be left in real-space; but still. The resulting detonations would make hyperspace travel difficult in the region for years to come, and possibly even cause a few secondary supernovas; a few of these stars were over 200 times the size of Sol, and would create a radius of almost 100 light-years in which few, if any, of the Mags would survive.


    If he''d caught the change of plans before the revelation, he would likely have argued against the idea; just in case the enemy had FTL comms, and could build hyperdrives to escape. Instead, he was going along with it; and carefully shutting down the hyperspace relays and scrubbing their data. For the moment, things needed to be kept secret. These relays could be re-used as a communications network once humanity started colonizing the cluster.


    As he looked over the patterns with a grim acceptance of the sheer amount of life that would be wiped out in the coming years... a knock came on his office door. A knock? He shut down the display, and glanced at his icon, no message alerts waiting... and then looked up at the opening door. Of course he hadn''t set any sort of security. Its not like... Kelsey?


    As she stepped into the room, he stared at her face for a moment. Pale skin, long black hair, green eyes. A more muscled, athletic form than when he''d first met her... but she''d acquired most of that in the academy right alongside him. Even Onyx, the tiny black dragon who he''d helped design for her... and was surprised she kept. But then, even if it wasn''t real, it was probably rude to stare.


    "Ahem. Ahh... Officer Danvers. How can I help you today?"


    "Oh, screw off with that. The version of me that hated you died on the Shanghai, and the version that pretended to still hate you died in the Beta system. God knows how many of me will die before this is over. We were friends once. Should still be. Derek."


    He smiled. "Well. I''d be lying if I said that I hadn''t been hoping for that for a while...Though. Well. You didn''t so much die as just.... switched bodies."


    "I was alive, then I died. Then a new me woke up in a machine body." She lifts up her fingers, studying them. "One of ten thousand robots jammed into a ship to go build a new world. And... I was still clinging onto this fact. Which I knew was false. That the old you was some homicidal maniac, hell-bent on hijacking a ship and turning pirate, or causing some mass-murdering terrorist attack with its engines. I knew you for over a decade... and let what that brain malfunction did to you ruin any chance for us. I knew you weren''t a killer the whole time. I just refused to admit it."


    Derek glanced down at the console. "I don''t know. Maybe I am a killer after all. How many people... and how many Mags.. are going to die from my decisions?"


    She gave a low chuckle. A sound that he could remember his fake Kelsey AI back home give as she reported the news. A beautiful sound... but..He abruptly decided that she did not, under any circumstances, need to know about that.


    "Look. I''ve died to kill these things now. And I''m gonna do it again. I''m not just a killer, I''m a suicide bomber. Did you know they aren''t even sticking full bodies on the Mimics for the final run? I''m just going to be a computer box, running the controls, and as soon as the mimic leaves... I wake back up on the destroyer. And get two sets of memories later for its terminal dive into the sun. Both diving in... and watching myself dive."


    "That.... seems like it would be a bit unnerving. Being unable to walk, move, or feel..."


    "Oh, it''s not as bad as it seems. It''ll feel like I am the ship... the guns my fists, the engines my feet... swimming through space, with emotions dialed down so I don''t panic. Tons of people had emotion overrides, but everybody gets them for this part."


    She rests her hands on the desk. "The me thats here, right now... I know the truth. But with my emotions turned up... I can''t handle being around you. I''d still like to talk. Be friends. But... when this is over, and we get flesh and blood bodies again... I want to die one last time. I want to get rid of this robot... erase all my memories of the war... and go back to who I was at the academy. Start over."


    "I..." He thought back to his last conversation with Commodore Peterson. Who was, even now, selectively editing Dr. Kent''s memories. "They can do that. But are you sure you want to?"This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    "Yes. And honestly, I think you should, too."


    ***


    The gathered fleet was massive; back in Sol, the five hundred and seven ships gathered together would have called for an Admiral to lead them; even if most of them were Mimics, essentially single-use weapons platforms. Even so; some of the members had yet to be built. It would take 2 years to reach the outermost Mag systems... so while the ships destined to cleanse the close-in systems, and nova the mid-range ones; were still being built, this fleet would move for the very heart of the Mag presence; or, at least, its presence in the Milky Way, as it was very possible the initial source was extragalactic.


    Compared to what they were facing, however... it was tiny. The idea that it would work was absurd... but they had to make it work.


    In a now-familiar pattern, most of the ships had substantial chunks of asteroid or other raw materials attached or stuffed into the mostly hollow Mimics; allowing them to continue fabricating weapons and parts throughout the journey. The 13, of course, was following suit; and in addition to three mimics, had a giant chunk of rock secured against its side.


    An enormous wave of purple and red formed in front of the fleet; the strange bright purple of local hyperspace flickering in the darkness in the moments before the fleet departed. The most dramatically outnumbered assault in all of human history; making even the last stand of the 300 at Thermopylae look like a fair fight; was underway.


    Once there in hyperspace, the fleet split off into dozens of subsections, at different acceleration rates; all aiming for different stars, at different speeds. Only the dyson spheres and absolute most concentrated stars had multiple Destroyers heading their way; any of the lesser systems that the mimics failed at... would simply have to be left be until a new attack could be formed.


    ***


    Captain Derek Thompson. It should''ve been a moment of joy. He''d dreamed of being a captain someday; and while playing Earthforge, he''d always dreamed of commanding exactly this sort of ship. But now... here he was. Captain of the 13, cruising off to command one of four potential dyson spheres that they needed to cleanse.


    Ones which, if he were right, might have already consumed everything in their systems and be ready to burst open in a tide of death for every non-Mag life-form in the galaxy. Or have already done so; radio strictly traveled at lightspeed, after all.


    Even more impressive, he was technically a commodore himself at the moment; when Captain Amari moved on to command the Anvil station rather than the 13, she''d placed him in charge of the ''Task Group'' sent to the target system. He had a moment''s thought that perhaps Peterson had wanted her safely out of harms way for personal reasons... but no. Two destroyers, nine mimics. And enough raw materials to build a veritable host of railgun slugs; and even some smaller, Gunship-class mimics.


    Which, Derek fully knew, were essentially Mag children. They were disguising weapons to wipe out all of the Mags as those that the they would most want to protect. Looking at the video of the marine boarding encounter... it even seemed thats what the carrier had tried. Once it was wounded, telling its children to flee, to hide behind it, as it tried to hold off its attackers.


    He put aside the moral ramifications of that... though it did make Kelsey''s idea of turning back time on his memories a touch more appealing... and focused on the future. To him, the two years of the transit were speeding by. The engineers knew what they needed to do; and were fabricating things at, to him, an insanely rapid pace. He sped up now and again to respond to questions... but the cruise through hyperspace wasn''t the time for any of that.


    Some of the crew were concerned about the timing; that the enemy might be able to figure out what they were doing, and defend against it, if some systems fell while others lived. He wanted to reassure them that the Mags simply weren''t that smart. That they didn''t have guns, shields, or point defense systems; but essentially teeth and claws.


    Best get this over with. Days ticked down like minutes as he watched the screen. Kelsey; commanding one of the Mimics attached to the 13; had pinged him, once, at the beginning; but then left him alone. He''d responded, after a while, with a simple, terse message.


    "I''ll think about it. If you''d asked me when I first saw you, I''d probably have said yes without a second thought. But right now.. we need to focus on the work."


    ***


    Derek''s task group emerged from hyperspace a full light-month away from the Mag system designated ''D-3''; the third of four massive clusters of radio signals with no associated star, believed to be a Dyson sphere. When the group arrived... it established almost instantly that that was, in fact, the case.


    So many trillions of solar panels encircled the star that it was only visible through modest cracks and gaps in the continuously swirling sphere of panels; most of those gaps at the top and bottom of the star relative to what was, once, the ecliptic; with no more planets, it was clear there was no true ecliptic anymore; the only evidence of its former existence was the pattern of spinning objects.


    "Task group D-3, advance. Launch all probes, active scans, in a good circular pattern around the star. Fire up railguns. Once we get a good picture of whats going on inside that sphere, we can ready our plan of attack."


    This thing was massive. Sure, it was an organic, living thing, rather than some artificial construction. But the sheer scale of such a thing... it almost seemed blasphemous to destroy it.


    And there was always the possibility that there was some later life-stage of the Mags he didn''t know about; but if there were... he''d find out soon enough.

 Chapter 22: Extermination

    When the results came in from the inner system, showing the contents of that dyson sphere.. everyone on the bridge was shocked; and most of them were confused as well. This star system had an enormous ring of solar panels, billions upon billions of Mags of various sizes... but...


    At the comms station, the young woman glanced up. "Sir... I''m not reading a single Defender-class ship. No planets, either... only the immobile structures and civilian ships."


    A weapons officer; also a new replacement for the one now serving on a Mimic, chimed in. "Maybe they moved out already. This system is so far from any threat, they could have sent all of their Defenders out to frontier worlds. If they were humans they''d keep a fleet here to defend it... but, well. They aren''t humans."


    As he looked over the screen, Derek gave a slow nod. There were two prime possibilities here. Either he and Dr. Kent were disastrously wrong, and the enemy had somehow built FTL drives, sending its Defenders out to swarm the galaxy... or once there reached enough Mags, they became too good at defending themselves from Sharks; and the predatory species eventually died out. Even as hopelessly outmatched as the Mag vessels were against the plasma lance of the sharks, if you had millions of them in a swarm....


    Still. That exacerbated the problem, to an extent. In any natural ecosystem, if you had no more predators... the herds would grow too big to feed, and either starve, or simply deplete all the food and move to a new area.


    He shook his head. "Doesn''t matter the why; aside from meaning we''ll want to keep a careful watch on our rimward borders as we get the cluster fully settled. The only thing that really matters is that we don''t need to deploy many Mimics here. In fact... we can probably just deploy some of the Gunship-class mimics on autopilot."


    He taps his Icon. He had a chief engineer aboard; but his best engineer was commanding one of the Mimics. "Captain Danvers. We''re looking at essentially an unopposed entry. Assuming every unit we send manages to set off its weapons, how many will we need to set off the nova?"


    The response was immediate. "One of our full-scale ones could probably do the job; if we have time to aim carefully and nail the highest density of matter in the core with each shot, we can set it off with four shots; five to be certain. The gunship-scale ships have a smaller weapon... but not enough to matter as much. We''d need to position them more carefully, but six of them would do the job."


    "Get me a programming package for the gunship-class to head in unaided. Aside from the Defenders, the other Mags will let a Mimic just glide right by. We''re probably going to make them all panic and cluster up with the probes we launched; just keep the mimics in the spaces between, just in case. Launch when ready."


    "I''ll coordinate with our other engineers and get it done."


    It was almost instant. A team of engineers between the 13, the two destroyers, and the mimics all overclocked for less than thirty seconds; and the gunship-class mimics were programmed.


    "13, we are go for launch."


    "Repeat, launch when ready."


    All of the larger vessels remained there, clustered far beyond the system''s edge... as six tiny dots emerged from the larger Mimics. Gunship-class vessels, designed to look like a Mag ''child''; somewhere between the ''Tug'' class and the ones still dependant on their ''Carrier''.


    As the six dots moved steadily further in the system, millions of Mag vessels shifted and moved; like an ocean of mass, so great that the gravity distorted the path of the gunships; a fleet that massed more than jupiter moving in response to a set of probes that barely massed a few tons each.


    The Mags... ignored the mimics. The gunships moved to a set of pre-programmed spots, aiming into the star; and firing. The largest hypercannon such a ship could pack was tiny compared to what the 13 could carry, and enormously wasteful of Iridium; but enough to make a path a few light-seconds long, going in one side of the star and out the other; each of the six shots displacing more than the mass of a dozen Sols when they fired.


    The effort destroyed the mimics, of course. And created six enormous solar flares; jets of superheated starmatter that projected out... vaporizing enormous subsections of the dyson sphere, destroying billions of Mags in seconds. But that was only the beginning. Freed from the crushing restraint of gravity, the core matter expanded dramatically... creating shockwaves through the star.


    And the beginning expansion of a ''small'' supernova; one that, for this star, would eradicate any Mags within at least a dozen light years; and likely injure them out to a dozen more. This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.


    The task group hovered there in the darkness, watching, as trillions of lives were snuffed out., the star itself likely shortened in its lifespan by millions of years through this effort... and then re-entered hyperspace.


    So much effort and planning for what was considered to be a vital, incredibly dangerous mission. It seemed... absurd. "Set course back towards the cluster, but take it slow. If anyone ran into trouble, we still have a full load of Carrier-class Mimics to deploy... and the Defenders had to go somewhere."


    The lie hurt more than he''d expected. But then, he''d never really been military, had he? Classified information... this was the first, and only, piece he''d ever had. What kind of secrets had Peterson been forced to keep, in his decades of military career?


    ***


    For Kelsey, watching the starmap on her screen was.. anticlimactic. She''d been expecting to die here; that maybe they''d been on a suicide mission for the whole task group, and the other vessels would die to create an opening for the Mimics to slip in. And after all that work... getting psyched up to die yet again... nothing.


    The other four Dyson Sphere teams had the same results; Peterson''s team even reported that their target had begun to cannibalize the dyson sphere, and there''d been a hole in their sphere light-hours wide at the edge; they could have easily flown in even without the mimics.


    Everyone was heading home. The remaining Gunships were to be deployed in systems they weren''t otherwise going to be targetting; but... it was over. Maybe they''d need to keep defenses, to prepare in case these missing Defenders showed up, or some other threat. But that was years away. If ever. Today? They could start building a home.


    ***


    "I was reasonably certain of mine and Dr. Kent''s conclusions already. The population patterns we''re seeing, as well as traces of old wreckage, confim it. Once the population of Mags gets high enough, some Sharks flee the system, but most of them get killed attempting to hunt. If a system has enough mass to form a dyson sphere... and most won''t.. then eventually there will be no sharks at all. And looking at the one you encountered... in another hundred thousand to quarter million years they''d have cannibalized all the mass there and left. I think we caught it in time. But..."


    Peterson gave a slow nod. Each of them was in their own office; the signal was encrypted. They were in hyperspace. As secure as they could be without speaking in person. "But?"


    Derek looked at him on the viewscreen."There are naked stars out there. No planets at all. I doubt it, but its possible one already had this happen, and a tide of Mags could already be expanding through deep space. Most likely there was never anything there to eat, so the Mags never settled in. But..."


    "But there''s a chance we might be facing a swarm."


    Commodore Peterson looked at the starmap. So much more detailed now, as they made their slow path back to the cluster. "Only a chance. But... we need to be ready for that chance. That won''t be your job, though. Your job will be making us homes. I believe you said there was a world people could walk on?"


    "Ahh... yeah, there''s this one planet with solid timespans where a human could walk, unsuited, if they had a facemask and an air tank. Thats not actually the easiest one to terraform, though."


    "I''m sure you''ll figure it out. I want you to get a team together. Build more Earthforge-class ships if you need them." Peterson leaned back in his chair. "To be honest, when I first looked you up in the system, I thought this is where we''d start. I''d send you off to play with the terraforming tools, and we wouldn''t even need a fleet until we had enough people for human stupidity to take its course."


    Derek nodded.. then had a curious glint in his eye. "Why did you look me up, anyway? I was great at this sort of thing, but not the -best-... and you couldn''t even be sure I''d be useful til we arrived. Hell.. you could''ve trained some of your naval officers on the job."


    Peterson grinned at the monitor for a moment. "Oh, thats easy enough. I knew you from before the fall."


    "Before... What? I never heard of you. Did we meet at the academy?"


    "No. You helped my mother get her computer working. She lived a few doors down from you. Honestly, the fact that you convinced her to learn how to use the headset so she could watch the fully immersive soap-operas, is the whole reason her mind is on file. You''re the reason I''ll be able to see her again, once this is all settled. Once I realized that, well."


    "You could''ve been completely useless and I''d have found -something- for you to do."


    ***


    In the cargo bay of the 13, Kelsey examined the airlock connection to the Mimic. Was it even really an airlock? There was no oxygen. Nobody was breathing; the gas on board was completely inert. Nonflammable. But soon... that would change. Once...


    The airlock sealed with a hiss of escaping gasses. And there he was again. Derek. That cute smile that still gave her flashbacks of pain and hate. She gave a hesitant smile. "So. The mission''s done. It... feels interesting, to be a human again, even if I was only a starship for a while... and never really got to stretch my wings. I almost want to take it for a test drive, but... hopefully everybody has as easy a time as we did, and I don''t have to."


    Derek gave a slow, sad smile in response. "I''ve considered trying that myself. Instead of moving controls around with my hands and icon, just becoming the ship, feeling everything as if it were me. But... I like who I am now. I''ll get an organic shell when the time comes...but I''m not going to be changing anything else. As terrible as the memories are... they make me who I am."


    She sighed. "I get it. Big-shot captain now, living the dream, flying the spaceways and making a brave new home for humanity. But if I get my memories erased, and you don''t... things could never work. I''d always know something was wrong."


    "For the longest time, I clung to you. I.. actually had an overlay of your fave for the news anchor in my little digital living room. Your face, your voice, giving me the news."


    Kelsey gave an amused chuckle, though Derek held up a hand.


    "That wasn''t a good thing. It wasn''t healthy... or even really sane. I needed to move on. And if you really want to change your memories, thats fine. I''m sure we can work things out somehow. But really... neither of us should forget. And both of us should move on."

 Epilogue: Fresh Air

    The first breath of fresh air on a new world wasn''t exactly the scent of roses.


    As Derek slowly moved down the ramp of the shuttle, getting a feel for real gravity.. and real muscles.. for the first time in over a century, the smell was, frankly, that of dead fish. He''d personally directed every drop of water that graved this world, and every bit of it smelled like something had died in it. Because, of course, it had.


    The current stage of terraforming; where endless seas of algae were allowed to grow on Stronghold''s new seas, and then harvested for fertilizer; only to be allowed to grow all over again; wasn''t exactly pleasant or pretty. But it was necesary. He could see men and women... real, flesh and blood men and women.. working on boats, harvesting giant tanks full of the green stuff.. and the occaisional fish being sucked in by mistake.


    Even as he watched, the fish were being seperated out, dropped into a smaller tank... probably lunch, for later. Still. Thats not why he was here.


    He turned from the lake, stepping away from the shuttlepad; a pair of security drones.. well, not drones. Marines. Looked him over; briefly scanning the bulky plastic container he carried; and nodded as he walked away, heading up a nice, smooth hill leading to Minotaur Tower; a beautiful building that had spread far beyond the barebones skeleton it had been at the founding, years ago.


    The lobby also had a pair of marines; who, just like the first two, simply nod. Everyone knows him on sight, even if they didn''t have his ID the moment he walked by. As he rides the elevator; a smooth glass cylinder, showing off the vast internal lobby of the tower; he sees a few familiar faces, waving as they slide by. The package seems to be trying to escape from him as the elevator rises, but he still keeps hold of it.


    He reached the top, stepping out. Yet another pair of marines. Not a single crime more violent than a drunken brawl, but still. Marines everywhere. Well. At least at this building. He walks towards the apartment at the end of the hallway; the doors sliding open as he approaches, and the first flesh-and-blood marine he''d seen so far smiled and nodded.


    Finally, he reached the living room. "Governor Peterson."


    "Ugh. Ichika, Derek." The obviously quite pregnant young-seeming japenese woman was leaning back on the recliner, with Dorian sitting beside her. "I swear to god, if anyone else calls me governor today I''m going to have them thrown into the sun. Do you want me to call you Director? Or Commodore? Or ''The Earthforger''? Maybe we can have a pretentious nickname and title contest."


    For his part, the former Commodore rose to his feet, offering Derek a handshake; firm, steady. A grin. "Finally got a flesh and blood shell. Whats the occaision? And whats in the box?"


    "For the first... the biosphere here is actually stable now. It''d take centuries, but if we stopped work now, this planet would thrive on its own. Oh, and the latter... a baby shower gift. While I know you normally wait til the end for opening, and I''m the first one here, you might want to go ahead and open this one."Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.


    When he took the package and felt it abruptly shift in his hands, Dorian glanced down for a moment. "Wait. Seriously?"


    "Yup. Not the first litter, but the first adapted for Stronghold. The ones in the dome are pure earth stock."


    Dorian shook his head with a smile as he carried the box to Ichika, sliding it open; the gentle mewing sound that had been so muffled before emerging loud and clear as the woman burst into tears, gently lifting two tiny, fluffy kittens from the box. "Oh god I haven''t seen a real kitten for so long!"


    "I''d make a snarky comment about posting this video for the news, but when I saw my own little FB Junior meowing at me I may have shed a few tears myself."


    They made small-talk for a few minutes. Talking about how different things would be with children running around. And pets. And real, vibrant, life. Studiously avoided the topic of Kelsey and her new husband; aside from inquiring if there were any new ladies in Derek''s life on the part of Dora Peterson; Dorian''s mother, and Derek''s old neighbor. At the end, when the shower was over, the remaining gifts; none going over quite so well as the kittens; handed out, Derek made his way back to the shuttle. A few nods. A few salutes from the marines he passed.


    That was a nice break, for now. Time to get back to work. As the shuttle rose into the atmosphere, and he looked over the surface, he could see the trees. The cloning labs, producing new plants, new animals... new people. Thousands of cogs working together to try to turn this place into a new earth.


    That part, he could leave to the experts. He might have spent years putting the pieces into place to, eventually, make more habitable worlds, to turn the cluster into a place with dozens of new earths... but if he wanted a nice, stable future for humanity, there were still jobs to be done outside the cluster.


    ***


    The world was a confusing place. Kelsey had awoken here on Stronghold a few years ago; one of the first actual biological bodies to be completed; but wasn''t completely certain why. She knew the whole spiel; but she''d had most of her academy training complete. She should''ve been out earlier, helping with the grand war against the Magpillars, but no. She''d slept through it all.


    It was fully expected that more Mag ships would randomly pass into human space sometimes; so of course the navy was being upgraded, just in case it turned out to be an overwhelming wave. But she really wanted to go explore. See something outside the cluster, or the distant Charlie system where humanity''s fleets were still being built.


    She''d finished off her academy training easily enough; and there were hundreds of open slots, more than there were recruits; in fact, it seemed that until new kids started being born to take up the slack, there''d be more ships than crew for years to come. She kept passing up chances... but sooner or later, she''d need to either join a crew or give up on it.


    The most recent listing popped up on her icon as she relaxed in her apartment; a nice, expansive dwelling not far from what she liked to call the icky sea for the terrible smell. "Mmf. What is it this time... Patrol destroyer? Interceptor Mimic?"


    After seeing the first few lines, she sat up abruptly in excitement.


    [With the completion of initial Terraforming efforts at hundreds of sites in the cluster and ongoing work being largely automated, the Director of Terraforming Operations is stepping down. He has requested; and received; permission from Fleet to modify the Earthforge-class vessel #13 and seek out the lost Alecto-class scout vessel Megalodon; to establish friendly communications and, if necesary, provide assistance.]


    [97 additional crew are required for this mission, duty slots required including...]


    She skipped down; and immediately clicked on the Engineering post. She didn''t really know Director Thompson, aside from what she''d seen on the news... but the idea of leaving the cluster to maybe find a long-lost scout ship?


    Now that sounded like an adventure.