by Chris Hechtl
The tactic worked, but it was a long game. It took time, and the information they got could be spotty. Now that they had an outline about the subject, they keenly wanted more information about how they could look into the prisoners and see who might have heard this or that and try to glean a little more from them.
~~~^~~~
Agnosta
“Pasha, welcome,” General Jersey Forth said to his army counterpart as General Pasha 1010111 came into the room. The two men shook hands and then the Marine General indicated they should take a seat.
“I thought Anheuser would be with us, but he's wrapped up with that mess back home,” Pasha said with a shake of his head.
“Bad?”
“Not as bad as it could have been. The Spacebees were real force multipliers—well, them and their equipment. But you know the drill, it's one thing to provide tools, equipment, vehicles, and such, but they don't amount to much if the users have minimum training to operate and maintain it and lack the necessary background and mindset,” Pasha said with a shake of his head.
“I heard there were some accidents and some deployment snafus,” Jersey said cautiously.
Pasha nodded but grimaced. Some people were learning the hard way that you couldn't just treat an air car or ground car like a horse and buggy. For one, the speed was a lot higher. Also, when you came, cropper things got messy.
But, they were coping. And as time marched on, some people were beginning to adapt and pass on what they'd learned to others, those that survived. There were some accidents, some painful ones that could have been avoided. Some governments were beginning to wise up and require training and licensing to operate machinery.
“So, Nuevo Madrid. What do we do? Are we sending in follow-up units or not?”
“At this time, I don't know. Obviously, SNHH is off the table. It is on the front, and we can't have units cut off. If the navy can recapture the initiative and momentum, then we'll need those army units to move in to Nuevo Madrid.”
“So, catch twenty-two? Do we position them in Protodon for a jump-off or not?”
Jersey shrugged and then spread his hands. “Not my call. I do know that I'll have to recall Valenko's division for mandatory rest and refit when we do a swap out. He's not going to like it but that is how the game is played. I'm seriously thinking about staging him through Protodon or Kathy's World though. Kathy's World is particularly tempting since there are Marine facilities already there.”
“And he'd be conveniently closer to the front,” Pasha replied with a nod. “I wonder if I can send some of my units there too? To you know, move into Nuevo Madrid when the time is right?”
“Or Protodon. Or both. We can bring it up to the joint chiefs,” Jersey replied with a nod.
Pasha nodded and made a note. “So, the Eastern Front. What are we to do? I've got personnel moving into Destria. Are you going to send a unit to OTBP? And what about this Konahagakure I've been hearing so much about?”
“OTBP I'd like to do. We can probably get away with that. We might even get away with sending a mixed army and Marine unit,” Jersey ventured cautiously, with a nod to Pasha. Pasha nodded in return. “The other one, Konahagakure is up in the air. At the moment, we're going to interdict it. From the intel we've got, it might be a tougher nut to crack than anyone expected.”
“Oh. Cadre?” Pasha asked, wrinkling his nose.
“And then some. But it's off the table according to the powers that be. So, we can focus on Nuevo, Nuevo Madrid, clean up everywhere, New Texas, and OTBP. And I understand you've got other headaches with New Texas and Tir na Nog?”
Pasha grunted. “Don't get me started on the last one. New Texas is bad enough! I think I'm glad you got the ball rolling here. I didn't realize the headaches involved in setting up a base let alone a series of bases on a planet! The politics alone is taking up a good chunk of my time!”
“I know,” Jersey said maliciously. Pasha gave him a dirty look.
“Oh, come on,” Jersey chuckled. “Like you said, you inherited basing from me. You never set up anything in Nuevo, did you?” Pasha shook his head. “See? New experience. And, just think. Once we've got regular contact with Tau, Pi, and Sigma, we get to do it all over again!”
Pasha groaned loudly enough to make Jersey chuckle some more. “Come on, it's not that bad.”
“Says you,” Pasha grumbled. “If it is all the same to you, let's focus on what fronts we can deal with like you said. Now, back to OTBP …”
Chapter 31
Antigua
Governor Randall looked out the air limo over to the sight of the Skyhook landing. It was one massive construction project, one of the biggest on the planet. The entire base of the structure was swarming with construction equipment, personnel, robots, and the like. A concrete pour was going on off to the west; he could see the carefully-crafted schedule of cement trucks moving in to dump their loads and then move out. No wonder traffic on the ground in that area was a constant nightmare.
He craned his neck, but he still couldn't see the speck of the slowly lowering skyhook itself. He'd seen an image of it though, robots spinning carbon fiber and other materials as they dropped from an asteroid that had put in an anchoring orbit. It was still a year or so out based on his last look at the schedule.
He glanced to his left and down to see a red and white shuttle pass by. Antigua SAR had shuttles as well as the ascraft. This one was moving at a leisurely pace, so she didn't seem to be on the job. His eyes returned to the skyhook base as they banked around it.
The airspace was tightly restricted of course. There were also ground fences and security patrols after the last incident. Security was increasingly becoming a concern. The terrorist Skeletor was only one of several headaches his people had on their top-ten catch list.
They passed over the rail line, and he pursed his lips. The old rail line had been diverted. This one crossed over the river and was a full maglev set up. Antigua had a special love affair with trains; he was glad they were still of use in the modern time, even if they were covered in panels to make them sleek and aerodynamic over mechanical.
“There is an accident on the ten, sir. We're being rerouted,” the driver said over his shoulder to him.
“No problem,” he murmured, still playing tourist.
Once the maglev was completed, it would loop around the base station, taking passengers and cargo in and out. There was an airport on the other side of the river with its approaches set up to avoid the skyhook. That was another headache; air traffic control was increasingly becoming a problem. They'd just had to pay for an overhaul last year, and another was due next year.
His implants beeped, and he looked down and then guiltily brought out his tablet to go over the brief again. “Back to work,” he muttered as he reluctantly focused on the briefing material. His lips pursed as he remembered what he'd told the girls about how he had to do homework too. The constant reminder had finally silenced the griping or at least muted it within his ears.
~~~^~~~
Nara checked in on the Agnosta Resurrection project. Things were going about as she'd expected. The initial effort had been to secure cooperation. That had taken up the majority of the first two years. At the time she'd waved it off, after all they hadn't completed building the lab let alone staffing it.
And then there were other considerations too. Communications with the fallow Orca in the oceans were hard. The Orca refused to stay put for long even when they came into favorite coves to rub parasites against the rocks or to play. They were disinterested in contact after first being curious about the robots the team had used. They refused uplift and demanded to be left alone to the point of destroying robotic subs sent to communicate with them. One group had allowed skin and blood samples to be taken but only for vast quantities of food.
DNA samples taken from them as well as the bodies of dead Orca that were found coupled with the data from the Encyclopedia Galactica gave the scientists a base substrate to work from. They w
ere making great strides in the reconstruction of the uplifted bottlenose genome variant. The latest generation were gestating in artificial uteruses. Just getting those set up and working properly without observation of a living one had been trial and error. Quite the chore she'd noted from the reports.
She frowned as she checked another report. This one was of sterner stuff; there were still security concerns. Most of it she judged as minor, but the security team lead wanted to force the team to relocate to a more isolated place or even another planet.
She frowned and scanned the report. One was dated years ago, apparently Jethro had dropped in. Her eyebrows rose over that. There were several reports of looky-loos, off duty personnel who had gotten their long noses snipped short, plus a couple of incidents on the beach nearby with party goers and such.
She shrugged such considerations aside. There was such a thing as too much paranoia after all. They were on a military reservation island, what more did they want? No, they didn't have it in the budget to abandon the project. Not to mention what the impact would be on their progress. The location was good; the people involved just needed to be reminded that the breaches were nothing of the sort. Besides, all those involved were military personnel. She tapped out a missive to that effect and then hit send.
Nara shook her head as she sat up and considered the other projects. The three species were just the first they were tasked with, though the others had been put on hold for the time being. There were concerns in the scientific community that their work would all be for naught, but she didn't see it that way. The Aquarius mission had finally reported back but the Ssilli had fled when the crew of the cruiser had tried to contact them. Based on cursory exploration of their habitats there couldn't be more than a few hundred left. That was a dying population. It was also one fraught with inbreeding and other concerns.
A follow-up mission was in the works but there was no way a robot would do the job. That meant someone else, an organic. She had flat-out refused to countersign either of the Ssilli going. At least not until they had at least four adult Ssilli clones to prove their process worked. So far, she had her doubts.
Sending a Selkie or mermaid might work. The first team had tried to use their onboard water dwellers but hadn't gotten a response. She'd put in to Helen to get someone on ET involved but Helen hadn't responded.
She remembered her breezy assurances to Tra'l and shook her head once more before closing her eyes. How had she been so arrogant to assume it would be that easy? How? It hadn't become apparent that there was a problem, a subtle corruption in the data until they'd tried to use it to clone the Ssilli as well as the Malekians. There were sections deliberately missing as well as pieces of false strands in the record. That, she thought, was unheard of from the Encyclopedia! It was the crowning achievement, the biggest publication from New Alexandria. They had been known for their relentless quest about keeping all data pure! They were legendary for fighting to keep the basics of any scientific process in the Encyclopedia. Their fights with the military and government on the appropriate detail on some things were the stuff of legends!
But, it was true; they'd run enough comparisons to see it. Why she wasn't certain.
She pulled up the files she had received from the latest convoy. Captain Standish, aka Stitches, still had the Malekians in San Diego. They had finally made a breakthrough in progress a year prior. The arrival of a Bekian geneticist had helped push the progress into actual eggs and hatchlings. But therein was a problem.
She checked the latest series of videos and images from the Malekians. There was a proposal on her desk from the team to consider moving them to Agnosta. She believed it might be the right call and had signed off on it but Agnosta had balked.
She frowned as she watched the video. The reports through the ansible didn't do the situation justice. Now that she could see what Stitches was talking about she understood. There were serious issues with the clone chicks. They had feather pit and were despondent or violent. They expressed frustration by an extreme social pecking order and were quite vicious about domination to the point of pecking and clawing each other and ripping feathers out. One chick had been killed; two others had lost an eye.
Separation had caused anxiety and depression to the point of the chicks refusing to eat or going to the point of self-mutilation. Several chicks sported Elizabethan collars and were medicated.
A full ornithological team was needed. The closest experts were in ET, though there were self-trained individuals in Agnosta, Seti Alpha 4, and Gaston. She'd heard a couple chicken farmers had also offered their two cents.
A lot of what the experts who had been consulted liked to point out was about social learning during the early stages of life. Social learning was one, learning from observation, imitating others. If there wasn't enough of a group around them, they bonded with other species or had mental problems.
She typed out another agreement to Stitches and then set about finding the money in the budget for the team. Not only their salaries, but also equipment, lab space, transportation, housing … she winced as she mentally began to tally things up.
Maybe it would be a good idea to transfer the program to a planet somewhere. If they could find a receptive one that was she thought with a brief exhaled sigh.
~~~^~~~
Admiral Irons regretted that politics were driving him further and further away from his first love, engineering. There was little he could do about it most of the time. Oh, sure, from time to time he felt rebellious and acted on his impulses to do something, like the replicator run he'd last organized. He sometimes regretted it later but not always.
His latest way to get a minimum fix was to look into the designs BuShips was presenting, as well as some of the new tech. For instance, the new missile designs from BueWeapons. He had been curious about them. When he noted that both Mercury and Proteus were in the author lines, he grew even more curious and had Protector block out a half hour to go over the designs so he could familiarize himself with them.
The first was the Shiltrun, named for a four-meter-long Greek spear. There had been another Shiltrun in the past. It looked like they had dusted the basic design off and then updated it using modern tech including a little bit of drive efficiency improvements gleaned from the Lemnos files.
The missile class was billed as a cruiser grade platform. It hardly seemed like anything earth shattering so he switched to the second missile.
This one was another ancient missile class revamped for the modern age, the Ballista. In the past, the Ballista class had been used as a long-range capital ship missile, system defense missile, or even a hyper missile.
Their new version was a defensive version. The Ballista-C came with a long-range booster with counter missile cluster munitions. A smart warhead could detect enemy fire and on its own initiative or in coordination with other platforms deploy decoys, chaff, flares, and counter missiles to take on enemy missile swarms. He liked the idea, though the scale was a bit daunting—definitely a capital ship or missile pod platform.
There was another issue with the design. If it was fired from a capital ship or missile pod, it was one less offensive missile that ship could deploy. I also took up a fire control slot no matter how much its vaunted smart warhead could do.
It wasn't up to him yet to sign off on the design. He frowned and then left it as is. His support would no doubt push it through faster, but he wanted to see it in a simulation and even in a full-up exercise before he committed to anything.
He played with the 3D models for a moment and then shut them down and then pulled up a stellar map.
Since distances were so vast he had been forced to delegate the tactics, trusting in the initiative of the officers on the scene to make the right call. He knew the hard lessons in micromanaging so he tried to keep his hands clean. But he needed to get a handle on the Federation's long-range strategic goals.
First was of course to take down Horath. More weight had been put to that when they'd l
aunched their capital ships. No offense had been renewed but he knew if Amadeus let them go for too long they'd do it and there would be hell to pay getting that territory back.
Second was expanding the Federation with missions in Rho as well as in the neighboring sectors while reducing the pirates there. That was easier said than done.
One goal he could scratch off his list was getting Bek back into the fold. The JAG, NCIS, and Bureau members were wrapping things up in Bek, but some of the trials were being dragged out, Childress's included. He needed those people back, but they were more or less stuck there for the duration.
Now that Bek was producing though, they needed more helm teams to force open the rapids bottleneck and get more shipping through it. There were warships stacking up in the Sargasso star system, and that was unacceptable. But, he had no choice but to accept it since they didn't have the damn people to get them out fast enough.
He inhaled, nostrils dilating before he exhaled and put the matter aside for the moment.
On the local front, returning to the rule of law and civilization was of a mixed blessing. Politics were really becoming the bane of his existence. Just setting up the Federation along with the various branches of government and military took up increasing amounts of resources, time, and attention.
Vetting the downloads from Lemnos were taking time. He'd hoped there would be some qualitative material there, but he'd forgotten that a lot of the research had been geared to fight the Xenos. And then there was the subtle sabotage the Wraith virus had inflicted. Everything had to be vetted in the computers, then prototyped and tested, and then fixed if necessary. That was taking time.
That led him to one of his biggest question marks, what had happened to the Xenos in the Milky Way. Something told him they hadn't gone away.