Alison and her coffee. The team and their coffee. An obsession I didn’t share, since the stuff made me throw up. The fact the coffee came from effectively an alternative universe and was not replaceable, wasn’t going to stop them drinking it. Gunbus could only carry the equivalent of a medium freighter load, so it wasn’t an inexhaustible supply either.
Janet broke into my thoughts.
"Where do you want Gunbus after unloading?"
"The next battle is coming here, so dock her on Sceptre. Custer as well."
"Will do my lord."
I shook my head and walked over to the grey doorway. Inserting myself into the line where someone let me in, I followed someone else through, and stepped out into a similar place on Haven.
The view out the windows above us was spectacular.
Thirteen
When I left Hunter's Haven about a week ago, for what I thought was the last time before we all ceased to exist, the station had been outside the Outback system. The system had been largely destroyed by the sun, which I prematurely turned into a red giant. So all there was to see in the distance, was a red blob.
Not that you could see anything, because everything including the station and all my ships, was enclosed in a cube made up of my titan class ships, and titan sized cube modules, all of which had titan weaponry on the outside, and civilian specialty station modules on the inside.
As a Battlestation, I doubt anything like it had been built before, or ever would again. Alas, its completion had been after our final battle with the Darkness, and so it had never fired a shot in that configuration.
It wasn’t until the fourth day after we ceased to exist, the next day in fact after the team and I had been sent on a series of missions by an unknown higher being through alternate fictional universes, that the cube had been disassembled.
We'd found ourselves in high orbit of a planet. I was looking at it now, and I'd only seen a sight like this once before. Gaia Three, in the other galaxy beyond the now gone Outback jump point, had been a pristine paradise planet. The one below us looked the same. We already knew it was teaming with animal, bird, and aquatic life, but little else.
Melissa Gordon, my non-military courier pilot, had taken a survey team down there, including Jane using a security droid for an avatar, a platoon of combat droids, and a small group of civilians who'd volunteered to go down there, who also had various skillsets useful for a survey team.
I’d been too busy since to find out if they'd returned yet, but I didn't need to know until there was something worth reporting to me. Apparently not yet.
My eyes lingered on the planet, before shifting to the boxes which strung out in front of and behind the planet, in the same orbit around the sun. Each one was effectively a titan sized station, with titan guns on the side facing the jump point, and whatever its specialty was on the side facing the sun. A lot of them were various types of food production. Some were fabricators. Everything needed to keep a large station population alive indefinitely.
Most of it had belonged to me, although some of the stations had been abandoned in Outback, and I’d simply appropriated them, with Bob Derr using them to create what I saw now. I'd expected a long trip through interstellar space, and Bob had been tasked with making sure I'd survive it. I hadn't counted on having so many people along for the ride though, even though what we had could not be called a large number. Still, I'd assumed some people wouldn't make it before the closing of the door into Gaia, and I'd need to be able to save them somehow.
So here we were. Wherever it was.
I shifted my gaze, and looked at a series of other titan modules in a higher orbit from the station. Work was ongoing extracting modules from storage, as Bob recreated a merged shipyard. Part of it had been his, part mine, and parts abandoned on the long rearguard action up the spine over the last few months, and salvaged by my teams. We'd salvaged everything we could along the way, including resources.
Thinking of which, I pulled up a nav hollo of the system, and found our mining station in the orbit of the only asteroid belt. Mining was already underway, and the mining freighters were already bringing resources back for the shipyard.
I added Bob to my list of people to talk to. If we could get the tech, every ship we had was going to need to cycle through the shipyard, or we'd need to build some specialist ships to go and do upgrades elsewhere. Might even be a need to divide the shipyard in two, and send part of it to join the fleet. Talk to Bob.
I shook my head, getting a squawk from Angel, and headed for the nearest travel car.
Haven was a large station. This particular one was quite old, but after appropriating it as a spoil of war nearly two years ago, I'd had it rebuilt inside. The center section was like two dinner plates placed together, forming a large internal space. Around the middle were docking bays, which could service anything up to battleship size, although never did. The largest allowed to dock were conventional cruisers, of which size I had a lot of freighters. Most of these were actually docked, since there was nothing much for them to do.
Above the dock level was the main promenade levels, providing for parks and gardens, shopping and services areas, and in the middle, a giant lake. Below the docks was all freight handling facilities.
Out of the main levels were varying length spires, or space scrapers as I called them, all dedicated to different purposes, although most were living spaces of various standards. Station administration had a major spire, which included a ballroom at the top, now empty embassy space, security facilities, and the main admin offices, including mine.
As owner, I had my own spire, which included my massive suite at the top, with the same view as the ballroom. My team had their own individual suites, as did my parents. But most of the space was still unused.
Over by one edge of the disc section, were spires going both ways. One was used by Hunter Security as a base, and which was where I had another office. The other was originally leased by the Australian sector military, and the Apricot Mapping Service. Both were also largely empty, but the HS spire was home to all my troops, and had a full set of facilities including training ranges. The docks adjacent to both spires were military only, and George's Fearless, Bonko's Club, and Homer, were all docked here. All three were Assault Cruisers. Homer belonged to Jack O'Neill, and Bonko was another story, but both ships had been leased to me for the duration of the War.
Note to self, I needed to talk to both O'Neill and Bonko about what they wanted to do with their ships now. Bonko especially since he was technically now a free agent.
Janine was the station AI, and she had a travel car waiting for me. It dropped me off a few steps from my admin office.
I stopped in the entrance way.
The waiting room was full.
Fourteen
Jeeves stepped up to me first.
He was brandishing a carry cage, and outside there had been a grav sled.
"My lord, Angel is late for a play date, so if you wouldn’t mind?"
Angel kissed me on the neck, and practically jumped into the cage. Jeeves closed the door, put the cage on the sled, and pushed it towards the travel car I’d just vacated.
Behind the reception desk, a man in a turban caught my attention. He looked vaguely familiar.
"Your first appointment is waiting in your office, my lord," he said in an accent which seemed to go with the turban.
"I'm not a lord," I said automatically, and he gave me a partial bow in a Namaste sort of way, and everyone else smiled politely.
I walked into my office, and found David Tollin waiting for me. The door closed quietly behind me, and I sank into the chair behind the desk.
"You've had a full day already I hear," said David, grinning at me.
David was a relative by marriage, and had spent the last couple of years doing the admin work I never did. Or more correctly, getting others to do the admin work I never did.
"You could say that. I've been meaning to ask why you're here."
True, but that wasn’t the question, and he knew it.
"Why didn't you go to Gaia to be with the rest of the family?"
"You know why. My part of the family have always been the available face we presented to anyone who bothered to take an interest in Outback. Even guessing your plans, my place has always been on this side. I put it to my family before the Door closed, and they agreed. Besides, Ravi outside has maintained from the day we met you, that one day we'd have to decide if we wanted safe, or wanted to do the right thing."
Ravi Singh. Now I remembered. My first link with Kali and Ganesha. The two statues he'd given me still followed me around wherever I went. And I was pretty sure it wasn’t Jeeves doing the moving.
"So where are you living now?"
David's family had lived on Outback Orbital, right up until it too had gone through to Gaia.
"I took the liberty of requisitioning one of the apartments a few levels up."
I shuddered.
"Janice?"
"Yes lord?"
"Stop calling me lord."
"Yes lord."
I sighed.
"Have one of the suites nearby my parents prepared for David and his family to move straight into."
"Already done lord."
"Why wasn’t he moved in there to start with?"
"He didn’t ask."
"Why wasn’t I consulted?"
"Jane wouldn’t let me."
David was grinning now. I was gritting my teeth.
"Have them moved right this instant please."
"Yes lord."
I didn't remember Janice calling me lord before. Just Janet and Jeeves did it. Both were clones of Jane without memories, and lord was something Jane only used in jest. Jeeves was a different matter, since I'd chosen British butler as his character style, before turning him on the first time. But sometimes Janet made me wonder if she was a clone of Jeeves, and not Jane, although I knew this wasn’t possible. I shook my head and concentrated on David again.
"Was there a reason for seeing me?"
"Yes of course. I figured it could wait while you found where the natural block point was around here, and once we knew what we could claim as ours, we could start to make plans."
"Plans?"
"Technically, the duchy is gone. No matter what changed back in human space when the timeline shifted, the one thing we know for sure is the duchy ceased to exist. Without the prophecy, there would be no Midgard War, so no rewards, and therefore no duchy. But the key stations the duchy owned, are still with us, so technically, the duchy still exists. Only the real-estate around it has changed."
"No," I interrupted.
"No to what part?"
"The duchy ceased to exist is the correct part. The stations and ships are mine, but personally, not politically. We don’t have any sort of government anymore, just a series of despot AI's running things in my name."
"Hey!" came from the room coms.
"Ok, not despot, just big sister."
"Better."
"So you don't want to continue with the duchy?" asked David.
"I always hated that name. The Duchy of Hunter's Run was what the media called it, and it stuck because it was referenced by parts of prophecy. But it wasn’t my choice."
"So choose another name."
"Under what basis do I do that? I own some stations and ships. I can make the rules for station life, but if people want to go down to one of the planets, they are free to do so, and set up their own communities."
"So we do have more than the planet below us? I heard there are five more systems going around in a circle around this one."
"True, and there are three more habitable planets, although two of them are marginal at best. What's your point?"
"We have a ship full of refugees, I hear."
"Yes, but I don’t know how many, or anything about them."
"But they may want to stay here?"
"They might."
"So we need a political entity, or all we’ll get down the track is an inter-species war."
He had a point. I just didn’t want to be saddled with it anymore.
"Jon, there are not a lot of civilian leaders among our people. All the ones with ambition went to Gaia, and the ones with a frontier spirit who trusted you to lead them, stayed. Those who feared death went, while those who stared it in the face at your back, stayed. And that includes the store owners and service people, who chose to remain under your rule."
That was true. I’d recognized some of them on Redoubt, as being the original tenants on the station when it was Pompeii Orbital. About two thousand had chosen to stay then.
"What's the deal with the store owners back on Redoubt?"
"It's where they prefer to live, so once they found there was a direct connection between there and here, they moved back."
"But Redoubt is now in a war zone again. Better shift them back again."
"I doubt they'll listen. They've been moved too many times now."
"Fine. How about this? They get free better accommodations here in addition to their accommodations there, but will need to vacate Redoubt before any impending battle."
"I'll sell it to them."
"How are we selling anything? There is no economy anymore, or any sort of monetary system. It all went to Gaia."
"Not all. The duchy had its own bank run by Jane, and it survived just fine. The station was originally from the corporate sector, so had all the banking computers and coms arrays, and once it was abandoned in Outback, Jane appropriated it, and Bob built the modules into one of the titan stations out there. So the credits of the people who stayed are intact, including yours, and the banking system has never stopped. And before you ask, your balance is so healthy, you can pay your armada and army for as long as you want without any danger of running out of funds. And that is without touching duchy funds."
"So we have funds a political entity could be given in order to govern?"
"Yes, but they are still really your funds. You and the duchy were one, just separated out to make accountants earn a living."
I chuckled.
"I assume the accountants came with us?"
"Just about everyone critical to the running of the duchy stayed."
"What are they all doing at the moment?"
"Some are doing what they were always doing. We have enough people for some sort of economy to work, and it is doing so. Some people are officially on holidays, pending some operations starting up again. Troops are training. Everyone is helping everyone else as they can. We have some newcomers who as yet don’t have jobs, and we have functions which need people to do them. But the faster we can sort out how things will work into the future, the sooner we can get everyone contributing to this new society."
New society. I sighed. Could we even feed everyone? I voiced the question.
"Food is not one of our worries. Even if the planet below proves to be poisonous, we have enough food production stations to feed several million. You really overdid that you know."
"Where did you put our four new alien friends?"
"In embassy accommodation near the top of this tower. As yet, I'm not sure they realize just how much has changed for them."
"They worked it out today. Neither Hobbes nor Roo were recognized by their own people, and they used to be regional governors out here. It's going to be the same for Syrinx and Tanith when we meet their people the first time as well. They are going to need to adjust. For now though, they crew with me while we figure out where we are, and how we fit into it."
"So what are my priorities?"
"Keep the administration running as always, and get some sort of referendum going so people can vote on what sort of political entity they want to be governed under. I'm going to be too busy keeping us alive for the near future to have any time for it. If I end up just being Admiral Hunter, I'll be happy. At least that rank was honestly given to me."
He l
ooked like he was going to argue the point, but decided not to.
"No problems. Ravi offered to be your private secretary for the time being, as your Alison seems to have returned to her team."
This seemed true. Back when admirals had aides, and I'd been promoted to the level where I had to have one to look like a real admiral among other real admirals and generals, Alison had agreed to fill the role, since she was the only one on the team with any real admin experience. She got her oak leaf as a result. It was no surprise she wanted back on the team fully, and she wasn’t the only one I suspected.
"Fine with me, at least for the time being."
He rose, flipped me a one fingered salute, and left.
"Jon?"
"Yes Amanda?"
"Are you joining us on the training ranges any time soon?"
Walter Harriman appeared in the doorway, and paused there.
"Apparently not. Bureaucracy has me tied down at the moment."
"Need a rescue mission?"
"Not yet."
"Well don’t be too long, or you'll get one anyway."
She would too. The channel closed, and I waved Walter in. Dick and Jane followed him in.
Fifteen
I hadn't seen any of these three waiting outside when I came in.
Dick Burnside was on my list of people to speak to. He was wearing a cheap suit, fedora, and trench coat. Ominous. Detective Jane was wearing a similar outfit, without the fedora. Both of them were middle aged, with grey taking a hold of their hair.
Dick had been an Earth system detective until he retired, been brought out of retirement to spend two years hunting what he thought was a serial killer, and had ended up working for me.
Walter was in uniform, but not using the slinky look my team preferred. Instead, he was wearing what looked like Australian military fatigues, only in the dull red Hunter colour.
I knew all three were using the same belt suit I did, so the choices were deliberate.
"Nice fatigues," I said to Walter. "Fashion statement?"
"Just personal preference. I thought I'd seek your approval. When you get to my age, that skin tight look gets a tad embarrassing. A lot of people prefer good old fatigues."
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