They all smiled, and the vid ended.
Jane cried, surprised at how real her new body was.
When she had herself together again, she opened the next email, and threw another vid to the wall. An older gentleman smiled out at her. His hair and beard were greying.
"Jane, I'm going with Jon. Most of my Apricot Mapping Service people are as well, but not all. If you're getting this, none of us made it, and you will find six AMS pilots and their ships in system, plus a set of joined stations with my people on them. Make sure my people join the Hunter's. I'm appointing you CEO of the AMS, and it's been transferred to you as a sub-entity of Hunter Security, which I'm told will be yours too. The navmap my people made over the last year is attached to this email. Use it well. Your grand-daughter Apricot and I, wish you well. Slice out."
Jane teared up again. She checked on the location of the Apricot stations, and sent orders to move them into orbit of Gaia Five, close to where she was sending the Hunter stations. The six AMS pilots were given various orders to verify what they could of the navmap as rapidly as possible.
There were several other goodbyes from people she'd loved, and as Jane started crying yet again, she wondered just what had been done to her while she'd been passed out. She'd never cried before. But she put the thought aside. She had a lot of work to do over the next few days. Only she knew who needed to talk to who, and she needed to help the Gaia council convene a full council. She made herself comfortable in her quarters, and pulled up a hollo screen.
Three
Patrick Walsh down jumped into the G023 system cautiously. Not a cautious man by any means, since exploration is one of the most risky jobs there is, he had nevertheless been indoctrinated to jump into a new system slowly and cautiously.
Walsh was a pilot working for the Apricot Mapping Service, which he'd been told was now a sub-entity of Hunter Security. He'd wondered why it was called that, since no-one seemed to know. Either name in fact. But then, no-one seemed to know much of anything these days, so he wasn’t alone. He remembered who he was, everything about his wife and kids, but nothing of the work he did, more than three days previously. He knew his job, felt like he'd been doing it for a long time, but nothing about where he'd been before the awakening in Gaia.
In spite of his caution, something hit him. The ship rocked, and his shields went down by half.
"Whoa!" he yelled. "What the hell was that?"
"We hit something," said Stryker, his ship computer, somewhat unhelpfully.
"What?"
There was a short pause before the computer responded.
"We down jumped into another ship, configuration unknown."
"Size?"
"There is enough mass for a scout class vessel. But very little is left of any size. If it had shields, they were not up to protecting against ours."
"One of ours?"
"None of ours are unaccounted for. And we're the only one this far away from Gaia."
There were six AMS Corvettes. Walsh's boss had dispatched them to scout out a navmap which no-one could remember making, while everyone else was trying to figure out where they were and why no-one could remember anything useful. Walsh hadn't cared about any of the arguments. He'd been relieved to get away, back to the space he loved. His wife was in their suite sleeping, and his kids had their own lives on one of the Apricot stations, and didn’t bother telling him where they were most of the time. They'd let him know when things settled down. He had no worries about that.
They were only eight jumps away from Gaia, but this was the twenty third system discovered, according to the system names. His mission was to go as far as the navmap showed systems, and work his way back, checking what the map showed. It was day three, and the one thing he hadn't expected was to run into anything unexpected, let alone a ship.
The pilots of the Apricot Mapping Service had been trained for first contact situations. He didn’t know why, but Walsh knew it had never happened before. He just didn’t know why he knew.
"Oh shit," he said.
"Don’t step in it."
"I think we already did."
"How so?"
"This is first contact, and we destroyed them first, asking questions second."
"Oops."
"Yes, oops. Better get the salvage droids out there, and collect everything we can."
"On it. Can I decompress the cargo bay?"
"Sure. Just don’t wake up the missus."
A chuckle came from the coms.
Walsh thought for a few minutes, sighed, and opened a vid. He explained what had happened, and asked for instructions. It went off, and he popped up screens to view the cleanup. Instructions came back almost immediately. The one thing he could say about his boss was she attended to things faster than anyone else he knew. It didn’t matter what time of the day it was, an answer came back within minutes.
He nodded as he read the response. Collect as much debris as he could, and hold his position pending reinforcements. If he made contact with another ship, he was to attempt first contact. If it failed, and he was outclassed, he was to fall back. If he was successful, he was to attempt to stall, pending the arrival of a diplomat. Standard operating procedure.
"Any data yet about the ship we hit, or who or what was on it?"
"Not yet, and probably not at all. I can do some basic investigation. Hull fragment analysis and such. But so far, there's not enough bio-matter to indicate anything about who was flying it."
"That’s a damn shame. We finally meet an alien ship, and I have to run the bloody thing down by mistake. Of all the dumb luck."
"That you have."
"Who asked you?"
The chuckle returned.
Walsh had several times wondered about where the personality for his ship computer had come from. Whoever it'd been based on sure had a weird sense of humour. He continued to monitor the cleanup process, zooming in on pieces of debris as they were deposited inside his ship, looking for anything which might reveal something about whose ship it had been.
The hours went past.
"Oh that’s not good," said Stryker suddenly.
"What isn’t?"
"Check the navmap."
Walsh did. There was a single black dot on the furthest edge of their scanner range. It was coming towards them. He popped up the available data on it, and whistled.
"I think we can say we are about to be outclassed," said Stryker.
"You think?"
"It’s a size to match our Battleships."
"No shit. Any indications of weapons?"
"Not at this range."
"You better hurry up the salvage then."
"Why?"
"What do you think they're going to do if they find us with the wreckage of one of their ships?"
"Oh."
There wasn’t much to say to that, so Walsh recorded another vid, and sent it off. The answer came back almost immediately, and he shook his head as he read the text.
"Tag. You're it. Nearest AMS will be there in five hours. Battle fleet in twenty four. Please don’t start a shooting war unless absolutely necessary to survive. If one starts, you are to fall back and hold the G014 jump point as long as you can. If need be, fall back to G011. We can't afford to lose viable planets, unless forced to. Stryker is to keep up a constant feed once contact is made. Humanity may have forgotten its past, but you get to begin its future. Choose well."
Walsh groaned. The nearest ships were Corvettes like his. Going up against a battler was going to be a tough ask, even with several of them. On the other hand, twenty four hours for a battle fleet to arrive was pushing it along pretty fast. He hadn't exactly dawdled getting here in three days. They had to be some of the Drone fleet he knew Hunter Security had in Gaia system. Which meant he'd still be senior rank on site when they turned up.
"That’s just dandy," he said out loud.
"What is?" asked his wife, standing at the back of the Bridge, dressed only in her nightwear.
&n
bsp; "You better get dressed Hun. We have aliens coming for dinner!"
She fainted.
Four
Jane strode along a passageway, paying the minimum amount of attention to where she was going to avoid colliding with anyone. Her mind was on many things.
Several things had happened at once. The council had demanded her presence, something she had been steadfastly avoiding for the last three days. At almost the same instant, the second vid from Walsh had arrived. She'd composed the response and sent it, while walking out the door of her quarters. As she walked, she watched Stryker's navmap, and the data it showed on the incoming ship, while sending instructions for all the other five AMS Corvettes to join Walsh and Stryker as fast as they could. In several cases, this wasn’t going to be fast enough, since they were now going in entirely the wrong directions.
She reviewed Walsh's record, while also giving move instructions to a Dreadnaught and two Battleships. She'd dispatched the same sized fleet after the first vid from Walsh, and now regretted not having dispatched more, even though at the time she'd considered her response to be over the top. But who knew how matched they'd be against an alien species in the unknown galaxy they were in? She was still trying to figure out which galaxy this was, and had been for a year now, without a satisfactory result.
Walsh was up to the job, she was sure. She'd had six people to choose from. They all had the only ships configured for detecting jump points. At least until she built a new Cruiser which used twelve dozen drones with sensors instead of a ship with only one set of sensors.
She followed the thought with action, and ordered a copy of the Apricot Hive Cruiser, with a full complement of Hive's all fitted for jump point detection. Each Hive was a merging of twelve computer controlled medium fighters, and could function as a single ship, or twelve individual ships. Each individual ship had the jump point detector mounted, allowing an entire system to be rapidly surveyed. Unfortunately, only one of these ships had been built so far, and it probably no longer existed. Since the need to do rapid exploration work hadn't existed until now, she'd not thought to start building one.
Walsh was the senior pilot, although that wasn’t her primary concern. He was the most steady when thrown a curve ball, which is why she'd sent him the furthest out.
Now it seemed he was getting the combined fast curve ball. Humanity had been in Gaia for hundreds of years. But in all that time, no-one had left the system to go further into this galaxy until a year ago, and those who had were no longer here. Probably no longer existed. Jane didn’t know for sure. All she had was a navmap with very little on it, and no record of any contact with an alien species.
Man had looked for alien life for millennia. Now they were about to meet it for the first time, and it had to be now. Jane knew it wasn’t the first time, but that had never actually happened. It was something only she knew. But now? A higher being must really have a sense of humour, to let a first contact situation occur right in the middle of what was going on here at the moment.
She considered sending more ships, from the ones she controlled herself. She considered the likelihood of needing them here. Here won. She'd have to hope the situation in G023 was containable. At least for now. The last thing they needed right now was a shooting war, although she had to admit, it might take people's minds off their current problems. She smiled to herself, but checked the positioning of the Drone Missile platforms she'd been shifting as subtly as possible over the last few days. She debated sending a few of them after the battle trios, but decided not to. Instead, she started building a dozen Drone Missile Cruisers, inside enclosed docks on her shipyard, which was still in the process of being disconnected from the massive multi-yard, which was still up where the jump point no longer was. No-one would know they existed until they emerged. At some point she needed to start designing her own ships, but for now, the Drone Missile Cruiser was a proven design, and quick and easy to build.
A file highlighted itself for her attention, and she updated herself on the latest cloaking achievements, which also had probably never happened. She spent a couple of nanoseconds debating probably verses definitely, and decided definitely was more likely. None of it had ever happened.
It was one of many files she'd received along with the whole batch of emails, shortly after the big memory wipe had happened to everyone else. The power requirements for cloaking were crazy, but she started tweaking the designs to attempt it. Even if cloaking wasn’t possible, the power was always going to be useful for shields, if nothing else.
She also started moving several caches of missiles out of storage on her stations, and sending them to the shipyard ready to arm the new ships. She'd been putting off inventorying the ships and stations she now owned, which had apparently appeared here with all the others. Only she knew they'd arrived over the course of five days. For everyone else, they were just suddenly there.
This was followed by a quick review of what she owned. Borgcubia, a gigantic station housing billions of people, was hers now. It was her biggest headache, for the moment, or would be if her head ever ached, which it didn’t. It was being moved into fourth orbit for now, since most of the people on it, would be moved down onto one of the three planets sharing the same orbit. Sphere station was chocked full of military ordinance. She was moving it into a geostationary orbit over Hunter's Run city, on Gaia Five.
Already there were four Dreadnaughts and eight Battleships, which was the remainder of her Gaia built drone fleet. No-one could dispute them being in direct orbit of the city she was associated most with, even if they made other people uncomfortable. They were Duchy fleet after all, even if they now belonged to her personally.
She hadn't advertised the fact she personally owned anything. The Duchy had a legitimate reason for owning a battle fleet. She didn’t.
She also owned several civilian fleets. A mixed group of freighters, some drone, some crewed, were working hard to keep Borgcubia supplied with food and essentials. Another file opened at the mental touch, and she discovered she also owned a dozen food production stations, plus several general goods fabricators. She issued commands to move them down into an orbit around Gaia Three, and have them rejoined using the small Hubs which allowed stations to be safely made into a single larger structure. Up until now, they had joined stations into huge long lengths to enable them to jump rapidly and safely, but it was now appropriate to reconfigure them for easy use and access. She initiated the building of a docking module for the new structure.
The other civilian fleet she owned was called Jane's Limousines. These were a mixed group of several dozen small ships, outfitted to move people in comfort. Several of them were the super-fast Lightning design. The rest were adapted private yachts. She'd have to consider building more, since all of them were flat out moving VIP's around, in spite of civilian traffic numbering in the several hundred thousand range. Most of it was private ships, although a lot of it was now doing taxi work.
She noted with interest she had a police license, so technically, her limos could also do police work. She was smiling as she approached the council chambers.
"Go straight in," said a guard.
She nodded and went through the door without breaking stride, duly noting it was closed behind her. She stopped when she saw the full room.
"We may have a problem," she announced, before anyone else could say anything.
Five
"Who invited children to this meeting?" asked a grey haired civilian.
Jane surveyed the room. The council chamber she remembered from only a few days ago, had been transformed. The twelve who had administered Gaia system were now seated in a diagonal line across the back right corner of the room, instead of across the back of the room. The room itself had been opened out into three times its original size. The rest of those in attendance were placed at varying sized tables, all oriented towards a single table and chair in the center of the back. One of the Twelve's chairs was empty, and its usual taker was at the single
table, obviously doing chairperson duties.
The one who spoke, came from a table of all men, dressed in suits, and quite obviously corporate in nature. The rest of the tables were quite easy for Jane to guess where they hailed from, or at least, which stations.
Her eyes came to rest on a small table with two chairs, one of which was empty. At the other sat Baron Fred, looking out of his depth, but determined not to show it. Fred had recently turned standard eighteen. Jane herself looked to be no more than twenty three. The next oldest person in the room was pushing forty.
Jane took her time walking over to Fred, and made a show of sitting next to him. Most of the room followed her movements without a sound.
Madame Chair cleared her throat loudly, and all eyes went to her.
"The delegate will apologize for his comment, or be removed from this chamber."
Grey hair looked startled, but rose to his feet.
"I apologize for my rude comment, but would appreciate an answer to my question all the same."
He sat, looking smug.
"Everyone here," responded Madame Chair, "represents either a large group of people, from station groups, racial groups, or specific focus groups; or they are the senior military commanders for those groups."
Grey hair looked like he was going to interrupt, but she didn’t let him.
"Age is not a factor in this gathering. Baron Fred Hunter is the Regent of the Duchy of Hunter's Run. Admiral Jane Hunter heads the Duchy's military forces."
"May I ask a question of the admiral?" said a voice Jane recognized.
"You may."
"Admiral Jane," said General Patton. "I was aware you were one star rank, but now you’re four? Can you explain this?"
"I'd like an explanation myself," said Madame Chair. "Ten days ago, you were a Fleet Captain. Then you gained one star, and now have four. Please do explain this."
Admiral Jane (A.I. Destiny Book 1) Page 2