by S. H. Jucha
* * *
Tatia attacked her need for a Dischnya academy commandant by sending a lengthy comm to a retired New Terran TSF sergeant major, Myron McTavish. Tatia had expected to hear promptly from the sergeant, but, when the expected time period elapsed and she heard nothing, she was severely disappointed. Myron had been her singular hope.
The admiral spent the following days searching her lengthy list of New Terran contacts for a suitable replacement for Myron. She found likely candidates, but none possessed the qualities she knew were needed to deal with an alien race of warriors.
Tatia had finished a review session of Reiko’s battle scenario training program when she received a comm from Killian.
The SADE was supervising the unloading of the Dark.
Tatia had burst out laughing. That was the Myron she knew, often doing the unexpected and probably too blunt for his own good, but, quite possibly, the perfect individual to train the Dischnya queens and warriors. The sergeant major hadn’t waited to have a long-distance conversation with her or bide his time waiting for passage on a liner. He’d grabbed the first ship out of New Terra, which happened to be the freighter Dark.
Tatia met with Myron, laying out her expectations and requirements, specifically, that the sergeant major would have to agree to an implant and cell-gen injections.
Myron had replied, “Why don’t we visit these little creatures, Admiral? I’ll see for myself if I can turn them into soldiers before we go on talking, if you don’t mind.”
Tatia kept a straight face and arranged for a pilot and a planetside trip. She realized she’d failed to include images of the Dischnya with her comm that she sent to Myron. At her request, Julien sent messages to Pussiro and Homsaff to meet at the Omnians’ traditional landing site.
Before Tatia exited the craft, she started to explain the niceties of Dischnya communication, but Myron interrupted her, saying, “First impressions unsullied by others’ perceptions are best, Admiral.” So, Tatia bit her tongue and kept silent.
Julien signaled the hatch to drop and preceded Tatia and Myron off the traveler. Myron demonstrated senior officer decorum and manners to motion Tatia ahead of him.
Myron jumped from the shuttle to the ground, his boots crushing a small shrub, which had recently bloomed. His first impression was of heat and dryness, which he approved. In his mind, rigorous climatic conditions created tough people.
Homsaff and Pussiro were waiting, and, as Myron straightened, he let out a soft whistle. “This is more like it,” he said softly, taking in the Dischnya’s rangy build, height, powerful legs, rows of teeth, and clawed feet. “Am I seeing this correctly, Admiral, the female is the larger of the two?”
“You’re looking at a queen, Sergeant Major,” Tatia said tersely, but before she could utter another word, Myron had stepped close to Homsaff and reached out a hand toward her muzzle.
The young queen’s tail arced overhead and slashed down at the impudent stranger. Myron blocked the attack with a forearm, and the tail vectored in on another angle. In all there were five, quick, whip movements of Homsaff’s tail, of which Myron blocked four. The fifth landed neatly across Myron’s cheek, slicing it open.
For a moment, Tatia and Julien were hesitant about what to do next, but Myron wasn’t. He grinned in the queen’s face, while wiping at the blood pouring from his cheek. When Homsaff returned the smile with a display of her own, Myron remarked, “Now that’s impressive.”
Julien calculated that no translations were necessary. The entire process appeared to be one of appraisal and approval, best left to warrior types.
Myron stepped in front of Pussiro and eyed the wasat, noting his scarred and slightly gray muzzle. “This one might be a little old,” Myron said, turning his head to speak to Tatia, but it was a feint. Myron launched a lightning strike of his right hand, aimed to slap Pussiro’s face, only to find it blocked.
Pussiro chuffed in amusement, waited a couple of heartbeats, and struck back, but he didn’t catch Myron off guard either.
The sergeant major stepped back and nodded respectfully to both Dischnya. “Admiral, I could do a great deal with these individuals. I’d be pleased to discuss employment conditions, but I believe that now we should have proper introductions.”
So Myron met the Dischnya, had his cheek repaired by Pia, and signed up as commandant of the Dischnya warrior academy. Struggling with retirement on New Terra, Myron felt relieved to discover a second life. His favorite cadet, although that term wasn’t used, was Homsaff. As a queen, she was a natural leader, but, more than that, she thrived on the strategies and tactics of military action. Homsaff frequently practiced with her warriors outside their domicile, planning battles with mock stun guns. The weapons fired lasers, which triggered the harness on the wearer.
Often, as Celus’ light dimmed, Myron, sitting on a boulder, would watch Homsaff direct her troops during an engagement, and he would puff up with pride.
However, Myron knew he wouldn’t have made half his accomplishments without the support of the many who knew the Dischnya well. Myron counted Alex, Julien, Miriam, and Glenn, as key Omnians who guided his early understanding of the Dischnya society.
* * *
Almost a year earlier, the first scout ship had been completed, and Alex chose that time to gather his senior staff and tell them what he’d found on Sawa. He laid out the means by which the stone was discovered and gave credit to Renée for providing the clue to solving the strange overlay of twin images.
Mickey piped up, teasing, “So you mean to tell us that the incomparable quartette of Julien, Z, Miranda, and you couldn’t solve the mysterious glyph, and your partner, watching entertainment vids, comes up with the critical clue.”
Mickey’s taunt brought laughter from around the table, and Alex smiled good-naturedly, but Renée felt one of them should fire back. “Mickey, I’m surprised. You mean to tell me that Pia has never given you an idea or helped you solve a problem.”
Had Pia not been present, Mickey might have weathered Renée’s rebuttal, but she was sitting next to him. Pia’s silent stare had Mickey raising his hands in submission, and the table’s second round of laughter was even louder.
Alex sent Renée one of his favorite images of her. He captured it soon after he received his first implant. Renée was stepping from the refresher and smiling at him. It might have seemed an odd choice to send as a compliment to Renée for her defense against Mickey’s tease, except the image was wrapped in the warmth of many of his memories with her.
The avalanche of Alex’s emotion threatened to overwhelm Renée, and her breath caught in her throat. To help Alex focus on his presentation, she sent,
The audience heard Alex chuckle and could guess the interplay he had with Renée, who was smiling up at him.
Julien activated a holo-vid, projected the stone’s dual images and separated them. He overlaid the present planets’ positions, which didn’t match the glyph. Then he rotated the planets, spinning them backward in time until they coincided with the stone’s positions. “The temple’s stone enables us to calculate a narrow span of time when the sphere entered the Celus system and the approximate vector when it did so,” Julien said.
“This will narrow the search by an enormous magnitude,” Killian said.
“Agreed,” Alex replied, “although, as all of you know, we don’t know if this sphere came to the Celus system directly from its home world or wandered here by some odd route.”
“Doesn’t the presence of the Swei Swee on this planet suggest that there was at least one stop before the sphere came here?” Ophelia asked.
“The permutations of the sphere’s possible visitations are endless,” Z commented. “For instance, the sphere might have picked up the Swei Swee, returned to their home w
orld, picked up more inhabitants, and then come here.”
“Z’s correct,” Alex said, “I don’t expect our scout ships to go out and find the Nua’ll home world. If I did, I wouldn’t send them out until we have a squadron of warships. My expectations are that if we start the search now, then long after we have our warships, we might, just might, pick up the trail of the Nua’ll. Unless fortune is on our side, the search promises to be a long one.”
“Alex, one question,” Perrin said. “Why not tell us this before now?”
“To assist your focus, Perrin,” Alex replied. “If you knew this two years ago, what would your thoughts have been on … your work or on the future encounter with the Confederation’s colony destroyer?”
Perrin and Ophelia shared private thoughts that they didn’t necessarily agree with Alex’s reasoning, but because the others at the table hadn’t objected, they remained quiet.
“We’re finalizing the search protocols and grid, now that we know the terminal’s production rate of scout ships,” Alex said. “As soon as I choose the first SADE team, we’ll start the search.”
* * *
Alex had appointed Hector to captain the Our People for two reasons. One, it would keep Hector busy and prevent him from focusing on his ugly, last years with Mahima, and two, the city-ship did need a SADE to manage the myriad tasks that would take place onboard the vessel.
What Alex forgot was that Hector had been part and parcel of Mahima’s machinations, which allowed her to grasp the power of Council Leader, and, while Hector deplored Mahima’s scheming, he did have extensive records on how business could be conducted.
It was the entreaties of Harakens, who requested transportation to Omnia, which launched Hector down the path of entrepreneurialism.
The Our People’s deliveries of shells reduced Haraken’s decades-long backlog of traveler orders and created a massive flow of credits to Omnia Ships and the associated banks run by the SADEs.
In the early days, Haraken companies wrestled with a problem. They needed people who were skilled in the advanced technology that the travelers’ internal components required. Many of the capable people had immigrated to Omnia with Alex. So, they reached out to Méridien and the Confederation-at-large for workers, who could support the traveler industry.
Many Méridiens answered the call, especially those individuals in danger of being declared Independents. They came to Haraken, worked, earned credits, and immigrated to Omnia. The companies were constantly searching for new employees, as they lost workers and the delivery of shells accelerated.
While at Omnia, Hector communicated frequently with key SADEs, such as Trixie, Killian, and Miriam to build an extensive list of business and job opportunities favorable to humans in Omnia’s near future. Hector was sympathetic to the Méridiens, who immigrated to Haraken over concerns of being ostracized by their society, and he quietly solicited these individuals with his list.
The Méridiens and Harakens paid for their transportation to Omnia, and Hector offered the money to Omnia Ships. Alex accepted the funds and placed them in a subaccount for Hector to use for the refit. Hector had calculated Alex would do that and was pleased when it happened — not for the credits themselves but that he was understanding the human he admired.
During the course of Omnia’s first three years, 522 more SADEs chose to emigrate from the Confederation, and the SIF offered three-year stipends to them to join Alex’s Omnia Ships. The Allora had transported the first annual group of SADEs to Haraken and wrongly assumed Hector would freely transport them to Omnia.
Hector sent to the lone SIF director aboard the Allora,
The SIF director considered the many arguments he could make about working for passage, the ship’s great emptiness, and several others, but what was plainly obvious was that Captain Hector was resolute in his offer. So, the director agreed.
Of course, Alex accepted the SADEs readily, as Hector considered that he would. What made the SADE’s day was when he told Alex the story of his discussion with the SIF director. Hector carefully stored Alex’s booming laughter with other files, such as Alex’s response to discovering Hector had made his august friends work for their free passage.
Within two years and with Hector’s extra efforts, the Our People’s refit was complete. Once again, the Our People was truly a sister-ship to the Freedom, and Hector was a proud captain.
* * *
When Trixie and her team completed the military academy outside the city center, Tatia approached Alex to discuss the crew the warships would require.
Renée made them thé, while Tatia broached the subject.
“Alex, we need a plan to recruit and train crew for the warships. I suggest we look to New Terra.”
“And I suggest a mix of humans and SADEs. It’s always served us best.”
“Whatever the outcome, we’ll need credits to pay the humans’ stipends, and, in time, you’ll need additional funds to pay the SADEs when their three-year stipends end. How much does Omnia Ships have in its account? We’ll need to work out how many crew members we can hire for the next … maybe ten years. No use building too many warships if we can’t crew them.”
“We can always sell a couple of Tridents to fund the expedition,” Alex replied.
Tatia’s laugh was scornful, and she responded, “This from the man who tells me he believes another sphere might be under construction or underway, and he thinks the ship might be heavily armed after the message sent from the Libran sphere. Alex, I’d vote for more ships, not fewer.”
“Well, Tatia, before we engage in conjecture, let me see how many credits Omnia Ships does possess.”
For the first time since Alex launched the Freedom from Haraken’s orbit, he checked the balance in his accounts.
The Bank of Omnia’s controller confirmed Alex’s bio ID and responded to his request for the balance of the Omnia Ships’ account. Alex looked at the number, blinked, and braced a hand on the table next to him. Hurriedly, he checked his personal account and that balance sent him to a chair.
“We don’t have the credits?” Tatia asked with concern, glancing from Alex to Renée. “Are you and the company broke?”
Alex held up a hand to silence her questions.
Receiving the bank controller’s notification that Alex had finally accessed his accounts, Julien, Cordelia, Z, and Miranda signaled one another simultaneously.
Alex stared at the balances in his implant and shook his head to help him focus.
I know you will, Julien thought to himself. The SADE received a short vid from his friend. Julien stood in the middle of a white background and from the right streaked a pair of giant, wet lips, dripping from an enormous amount of red coloring, which dripped onto the floor. The lips were larger than Julien, and they hit him with a smacking sound and bowled him over before flying off to the left. Julien sat on the white floor, red smearing his avatar and the floor, and he wore a silly smile on his face.