Jane hauled him up off the mat.
"It does if you understand my purpose in being there."
"What's to understand? You're the military stand-in for Admiral Jane, and military representative for Hunter's Run."
"Technically."
"Technically? What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means my real job is done."
"What real job?"
"Fred, I wasn’t there representing anyone. I was there to keep everyone talking long enough to avoid a civil war. The agreements are being released this morning. Much of humanity is moving out of this system in the next day or so. The threat has ended. Time for me to move on to my next task."
"And that is?"
"As soon as I clean up here, I'm off to a ship to act as a jump coordinator. Someone has to make sure stations and ships jump out without collisions due to stupidity."
"When will I see you again?"
Jane looked Fred in the eyes. He had a hang dog look on his face, like a puppy watching its master go to work without it.
"I don’t know."
"What about my training?"
"Fred, you're never going to be military. You simply don’t have it in you."
"I can do it!"
"Why? Your cousin was born to be an Admiral. You were born to be a Baron. Neither of you knew it, but you were both destined to lead, but he was the soldier, you're the administrator. You can train to keep fit, but you are never going to reach a basic soldiers' level of combat awareness. It's not about the training, it's about your mindset. Yours is focused on the Council and the needs of your people. A soldier can't be dealing with that level of focus."
"So why have you been training me?"
"You needed it to realize your focus is elsewhere. And you did need some regular exercise. I've also enjoyed it."
"So why stop?"
"Situations change. I'm going to a ship now, and it may be some time before I'm back. There is no why. It's what I have to do. You go to Council this morning. This afternoon, some Hunter seniors are going to start educating you with the administration skills you're going to need."
"Gee, swell. More school."
"Don’t be like that. A day will come when you need to be a real leader. In the meantime, there is always more to learn. The faster you learn it, the better the leader you'll be when the time comes."
Fred shook his head as he took in the circular logic.
Jane gave in. She grabbed him by the shoulders, pulled him towards her, and kissed him full on the mouth.
"You need a shower," she said to him when the kiss ended, and she stepped away from him.
"Yeah. How is it you never do?"
"I never break a sweat."
"I always do. Am I that bad at this?"
"No, but any recruit fresh out of boot camp is going to eat you for breakfast."
"Breakfast, yes. Good point."
He looked at her.
"Stay in touch?"
"Of course."
"You better."
He headed for the showers. Jane cleaned up the area, and headed for her Lightning.
About forty five seconds away, Jane smiled to herself as the conversation reached her.
Concorde's ride down jumped into yet another ambush, four systems along the way. The battles were repetitive now, each set happening much the same as the previous set. Down jump, fire once or twice depending on where the enemy fleets were positioned, cross the system, trash the guarding fleet as soon as in range, and jump.
"What's up chuckles?" said Walsh, seeing her face as the dust settled, so to speak, behind them.
"Conversation from an avatar caught up with me as we jumped."
"Nice conversation?"
"Yes."
"And?"
"Do I pry into your conversations?"
"Got you there," came through the coms.
Fred found it difficult to keep his mind on the Council session. The announcements were made, assigning groups to systems. Hunter's Run was the last one on the list, and offered a system with no viable planet. It came as no surprise to him, as his elders had anticipated this outcome. He politely accepted. There was no point in moving his people to stations. Yet. If they moved from the city which was more than adequate for their needs for a long time to come, it would be for something a lot better than a useless system.
Not totally useless though. It had resources. One of his smaller stations had been converted into a mining station already, and it could now be moved to where he legitimately owned all the dirt. The Duchy also had a small fleet of drone mining ships, and a few ships using crews, docked at the station awaiting somewhere to go. One thing the system was not short on was miners, both human and automated. The Duchy had already hired a crew for the station, and the ships needing people. He sent the confirmations out, and the station began the long trip. Some of the Duchy's freighters would be tasked to hauling ore, as soon as there was some to be moved.
Fred couldn’t quite shake the thought all this had been planned well in advance. He also couldn’t shake the feeling Justine was part of it. It never occurred to him though, that Justine might have been the architect of all of it.
Justine-Jane looked over the final assignments to systems.
G001 didn’t have a habitable planet, and had been designated as a resource zone for Gaia. Two had gone to the Spanish.
Three to what had been the Sci-Fi sector. The planet was pretty good, and their sector had been spread out, but with few planets with really big populations. They'd still end up using a lot of the stations more than they had before, but it would work.
Four had gone to the Italians. Six to the Japanese, and they did have a half reasonable planet. Five was uninhabitable, and designated a resource zone shared by the Japanese and Italians.
The Canadians were moving to Seven, the Germans to Eight, Australians to Nine, and Indians to Ten. The British were getting Eleven, and the Americans Fourteen, as they'd wanted, and mainly because the planet might need defending. The Greeks received Twelve, and the Earth Torus would be reassembled in Thirteen.
The Portuguese had lucked out with Fifteen, the Egyptians had received Sixteen, and the Arabs Seventeen. Seventeen was a larger than normal system, and they had a lot of room in it to spread their stations around in, giving them space between the main factions. All the Scandinavian systems were collectively getting Eighteen, with the Israelis in Nineteen, and the French in Twenty. Twenty One of course was where the Corporates were already headed.
Hunter's Run had been given Twenty Two. Jane knew Fred was disappointed, but the notations Jane had seen on the navmap indicated the system had some advantages in terms of what was there to be mined. It needed verifying, but for now, Hunter's Run didn’t need somewhere to go, only resources for future building.
Everyone else was assigned to cities on one of the three Gaia planets.
All in all, Jane was pleased with the way it'd turned out. Gaia would be left with slightly over fifteen billion people, but the rest had homes to go to and build.
She quietly gave orders for a dome to be built on a particularly large asteroid in G001, to be a penal colony.
Forty Eight
Barf was back on the Bridge now. They'd down jumped into their ninth system since beginning this journey, and this was the first one to be distinctive. Jane had the navmap up, and was looking ahead.
"What's this line of systems ahead?"
"They call it the Gauntlet," answered Barf.
"Why?" asked Walsh.
He'd just arrived back on the Bridge himself, in time to hear the question. Jane knew exactly where he'd been for the last few hours, and what the two of them had been up to. Her kiss with Fred was still on her mind, and her thoughts between battles and receiving data from avatars and the other AI's, still moved back to that kiss. She knew what she was missing out on, courtesy of the love birds who shared her ship now. She pulled her attention back to the question at hand.
"It's an almost unheard of string of nine
systems in an almost straight three dimensional line."
"I can see it on the map," said Jane. "Gauntlet?"
"Only four of the systems have viable planets, but whoever owns all four, will dominate the entire Gauntlet. The center system not only has one of the best planets in this sector, it also has four jump points, linking most of this end of the galaxy to the sector capital. So whoever owns, or even just controls the Gauntlet, controls the movement of traffic around this end of space."
"Gauntlet?" repeated Walsh.
"No-one has been able to achieve dominance here. The Owls have tried, but as soon as one species or political entity seems to get a toe hold here, someone else drives them back."
"So it’s a battleground?" asked Jane.
"Not really. Mainly just the central system. The Owls have, had, this end of the Gauntlet at the moment, so once we reach the center, we should be able to stop fighting."
"How do the drug freighters get through then?" asked Walsh.
"A treaty was signed a long time ago, which limited combat to military ships only. There is a lot of traffic of essential products in all four directions, and no-one can tell which ships carry drugs."
"We can help with that," said Jane.
"Really? That alone could change everything."
Jane had an idea, and started working it into a plan.
"What's going to happen once we've destroyed all the Owl fleets?" asked Walsh.
"It's never happened before, so who knows. In the short term, probably nothing, since no-one knows their fleets are gone. In the middle term, the Owls will rush more ships in."
"So we'll have to do all this destruction on the way back as well?"
"Most likely, yes."
"We need another solution," said Jane. "One which renders the drug impotent. Either a cure, vaccine, or something which can be dropped on a planet and kill all the plants, without effecting the rest of the ecosystem."
"Working on it," came through the coms. "It's an interesting academic challenge."
"Only you would call it that," laughed her husband.
"Well it is. I have a grounding in the basic sciences, and there is centuries of research materials in the archives. Essentially, I'm training myself with as wide a focus as possible, as fast as I can understand things, so I can tackle all three at the same time."
"All three together? How?" asked Barf. "You're only one person."
"Once I understand the problem, I can program the computers effectively."
"Your computers are that good?"
"Yes," said Jane.
Jane thought she knew what Darlene was going to do. It was what she would do. Clone herself twice, and each clone would handle the research of a different focus, using the same knowledge base and data pool. Once again, Jane was glad she had someone else to do the grunt work, and someone who was perfect for the task as well.
"Are you willing to share your technology?"
Jane froze. Now that was a question which needed research. She'd read and watched a lot of fiction where it was always portrayed as a bad thing to artificially boost the technology of an alien race. More often than not, they destroyed themselves with it, or became oppressive or warlike. On the other hand, she was well aware that withholding the technology always led to attempts to seize it. But that was human fiction. How it would play out in the real galaxy was anyone's guess. All the same, she needed to prepare herself for when the question was asked seriously, and accompanied by exchange offers.
"At the moment, no," she responded. "We'll need to assess what impact our tech will have on other races first. The last thing we'd want is the Owls getting any of it, say through one of their dependent species. And we know nothing of the other species here. Maybe in time, but not immediately. There would also be the matter of determining what a fair exchange would be."
"Fair enough."
"In the meantime though, we consider solving the addiction problem as necessary for our own survival."
"But will you share it with everyone else?"
"If we receive the right kind of co-operation, yes."
"What will you need?"
"Access to the DNA of each affected species," said Darlene.
"DNA?"
"Genetic information. We will all share certain building blocks of life, but there will be key differences from species to species. Before sharing a cure for us, we need to make sure it won't do something worse than the drug to another species."
"I understand. I'll see what I can do to make the information available."
Walsh looked at Jane. She understood. Neither of them thought obtaining such information was going to be as easy as Barf thought. Information which a more technologically advanced race might use to wipe you out completely, was something no species was going to part with, not without a lot of trust being established first. On the other hand though, there was the desperation factor of species enslaved to a drug which killed if not taken. It might be enough to make normal considerations void.
"I'll prepare a list of what I'll need," said Darlene.
"Thank you," responded Barf.
They settled back into silence, as Concorde's ride sped across the system.
The time factor between Jane and Justine-Jane was more than fifty seconds now. The latter was in the pilot's seat of Phoenix, the second Concorde class ship to be built. After she'd left Fred, she'd gone from Five to her shipyard, to collect the just completed ship. Now she was at the jump point, co-ordinating the order in which super-stations jumped out. A channel opened.
"Permission to leave the system Colonel," laughed Queen Liz.
"Permission granted," answered Jane with a straight face.
The British stations were the next to leave, escorted by the Queen's military escort, including Repulse.
"Would it be possible for me to buy the specs for that ship you have Colonel? Its looks a lot safer to fly around in than a Lightning, for one of my station."
"It might be considered, but you’d need to ask Admiral Jane directly. The ship design is hers, built with her personal resources. She might build you one rather than sell the specs, if you make it worth her while."
Now Jane grinned.
"Hmm, a Queen's command is not enough?"
"She's not British ma'am."
"More's the pity. I was just thinking of the speed she showed when leaving here, which would allow me to commute between the British system and Gaia much faster, and much more safely than a Lightning would offer. Just thinking of the Council, but also the little ones having enough contact with each other as they grow."
"I'll put in a good word for you."
"I appreciate that. Thanks for your help Colonel. I assume we'll see you the first time Fred and Sarah come to visit?"
"If I'm not reassigned by then, I should be there."
"We'll say goodbye for now then."
"Goodbye for now, ma'am. Good trip to your new home."
The Queen nodded, the channel closed, and the station structure jumped. It was quickly followed by the other British stations, their shipyard structure bringing up the rear. Repulse was the last to go through.
Fred was watching a hollo screen, showing the British stations departing. He watched Repulse jump, and had the display focus on the Phoenix. He wasn’t able to see Justine, but he could imagine her in the pilot's chair.
"Fred!"
He'd snuck away for a few minutes. They'd obviously become aware he wasn’t back when he said he would be. Council was actually so much more interesting than learning what was going on behind it. He sighed.
"Coming," he yelled.
Forty nine
Satoshi brought his Corvette in to a hover a meter above the ground, over the unseeded continent of planet G023. He'd already been to one of the other continents, and confirmed the ship scanner worked detecting the plant on board, and the hand scanner worked detecting both the plant and the cow. He'd had to get his Admiral to shoot the cow, using a sniper rifle, to get the hand scan
ner in range.
The airlock opened, and the ramp slid out. On the end of it was a small cargo droid carrying gardening implements.
He poked the ground with an ordinary garden fork, breaking through the top soil, and loosening it enough for collection. Next, he used a scoop to bring up a sample of the soil, which was tipped into a sample container. He put these aside, and used a gripper to pull up various plants, which also went into sample containers.
The ship moved a few kilometers, coming down over a river. He took samples of the water at various depths, samples of the wet soil along its banks, and samples of the vegetation growing both in the water, and nearby.
The ship moved again. This time he took samples of the ocean water, the sand on the beach, shellfish he found in the sand, and on the rocks nearby. A defocused laser was fired into the water, stunning a few fish, which went into sample containers as well.
When satisfied there were enough samples to make a determination of risk assessment, the ship headed back to orbit.
On the way, Satoshi tried the ship scanner. It remained silent. The cargo droid brought each sample into touching range of the new hand scanner. Nothing. He sealed off the armoury, and subjected each sample to specific tests sent by Jane. They were all clear.
"This continent appears to be safe Admiral," he said to Hikaru, sitting patiently in the center chair.
He gave the Admiral a rundown of the tests done and the results. Hikaru opened a channel to Central Command station.
"The continent appears to be viable General," he said to Patton. "No signs of the poison in the soil, water, or indigenous life."
"Good."
Patton turned to his aide.
"The landing is authorized."
"Yes sir," said Jane.
"Admiral? Would you please do the same tests on the other continents? It would be nice to determine how large the area we need to work with is."
"No problems sir, I'll have the squadron all go down this time, and we'll be systematic about it."
"Keep me apprised of what you find."
"Aye sir."
The channel closed. Satoshi reached out across his small fleet, and took control of a cargo droid on each ship, telling the crews they were now under computer control from his ship.
Admiral Jane (A.I. Destiny Book 1) Page 19