Sure, I believed them when they said they were reluctant expansionists, and had never fired the first shot before, but it felt foolish to show them our soft backs in trust, when we didn’t need to.
The Atans’ updated ships were superior to ours in a lot of ways. Their beam technology was stronger, they had better acceleration for their drives in normal space, eight hundred gravities for unmanned and eighty for manned, instead of six hundred and sixty. Their shields were quite strong as well. They’d have given the Gray empire a real run for their money with their new herd ships and fighters. Of course, those advantages were countered by the nanite tech, quantum jump drive, and disintegration beam.
Still, I wished I could read one of their ships and upgrade our stuff, but we were peaceful neighbors, and I wouldn’t chance war with the neighbors for an incremental upgrade to technologies that were inferior in class to what we had presently. We never used gravity drives anymore, except for local maneuvering. Jump drives were used for any serious distance, long since having been declared as safe for humans and other biological matter.
It wasn’t a power issue, we had power to burn from tapping the universe, it was a limit in the systems themselves.
The other five empires surrounding us had been quiet, but thirteen years was just a drop in the ocean of time. They’d been at a standstill with the Grays for centuries, and I just hoped it stayed that way.
I hoped not to see more wars and conflict, life was pretty damned good actually in this new universe of endless possibility. Of course, unknown to me at the time, the bill for the last thirteen years of peace was about to come due.
Chapter Three
It was early afternoon, and the command center was relatively quiet as the workday wound down. Jessica was monitoring the station and external scans. Cassie was working on god knew what. the less I knew about the governing of the station the better, and I was designing a new mining vessel with strong shields and minimal armaments for self-defense only.
Like the millions of ships in the void connected through command links, the merchant vessel would have sub-probes capable of assaying an asteroid and doing the actual mining, per the customer’s request. It was hardly a new idea. I’d done something similar when I’d built the station back when all this started, building sub-ships to have better scanning of the solar system and remove the blind spots.
The new part was all the automation involved. The probes would find, mine, and deliver ore to the ship, which had smelters and the machines to separate the metals. All done with minimal supervision of someone’s crew in command of the ship.
Of course, we didn’t use natural resources for ships, it was all energy to matter conversion into nanites for that, but we still did use resources to make things on the surface of planets, and even to fill out ships with chairs, beds, and everything else. The molecular bonder in the second-generation energy to matter device was still the most hidden secret of my wife’s inventions, humans still needed jobs and to feel useful, so we needed to mine resources for the manufacturing companies that still employed a good portion of the population.
In short, most of it was programming, and doing research on advanced mining tools. My mind was a little dull after working all day, and I got up and poured myself a coffee. I still drank the stuff all day long.
Cassie said, “Grab me one.”
I smirked, moving the coffee maker into the command center didn’t mean President Akin didn’t get his Secretary of State a coffee on a regular basis. I made one for her, and I was handing it over as the door slid open, and a very cute twelve-year-old girl walked in, otherwise known as the terror.
“What have I told you about hacking your way into the command center?”
Just like for me, passwords and technological locks were no impediment to my daughter’s powers and abilities as a technomancer. I just hoped her babysitter hadn’t been restrained by the floor again, so she could escape. I’d lost three of them just this year.
She looked at me innocently, and pointed over her head, “Darrel did it. I promised not to abuse my magic. I missed you.”
Her pout was devastating. She truly was mature for a twelve-year-old, most of the time, but sometimes in the latter half of the afternoon the boredom got the best of her and she went looking for trouble. I blamed it on her intelligence, which meant it was obviously her mother’s fault. Between her power to interface and learn technology, and read databases directly, her schooling was more advanced than most post-graduates in college.
Of course, knowledge didn’t guarantee understanding, which was why she had a curriculum to follow. The data was absorbed in moments however, and it only took her a little while to truly absorb and understand it thanks to her inheriting her mother’s intellect. In short, she had far too much free time on her hands, when school was an hour or two at most a day.
Darrel was named by my daughter when she was five. In reality, it was an automated defense system and guard. A small independent spherical ship with a six-inch diameter that followed her around everywhere, and it would notify me if she was in danger or left the private area of the station without permission. It was too small for FTL systems, but it did have a gravity drive to follow her around, form protective shields, and even non-deadly weapons if anyone threatened the daughter of the president of Astraeus.
Last I checked, it wasn’t programmed to lead her into secure areas, and I gave my daughter a stern look despite the laughter I was trying to suppress at her claim. She was usually cleverer than that.
She blew out a breath, “I’m serious, dad.”
Cassie giggled, then sent me a guilty look at her undermining my authority. Yeah, what authority? My daughter was scared of mom, but I was the huge sucker in the family and really bad at being angry at our daughter. She had a big heart, and I loved her more than life.
“I see,” I said skeptically, but when my lips twitched, she ran forward and tackle hugged me.
In hindsight, I wished I’d have taken the time to check out her ridiculous assertions, reached out with my magic that day and discover the truth of Darrell that much sooner, but between my daughter’s distraction and Jessica’s next words, the whole incident and my daughter’s assumed indiscretion was erased from my mind.
Jessica said, “There’s a cloaked ship in orbit of Phobos.”
I woke up at that, and I somehow put my daughter down without spilling my coffee.
“Time to go, Melody. I might be working late.”
She pouted but left quickly. She’d learned to mind me on the odd times something alarming comes up.
Phobos was one of the two moons of Mars. As for the cloaked ship part, we still couldn’t defeat the Gray’s cloaking technology, and apparently not whatever ship was around Phobos. But, we could still scan for the absence of anything. Ever since that incident all my daughter ships in the system scanned for blank spots as a matter of course. It was time consuming, but it’d also just paid off for the first time.
Despite not seeing the ship itself, we could see solar wind, stellar dust, and that was quite thick relatively in the inner solar system. We knew there was a ship, simply because there was no stellar dust or other particles within that true void of nothingness. It was the one weakness of a cloaking device.
I took a sip of my coffee, “Why does this always happen at the end of shift?”
Cassie grinned, “Just lucky I guess, we could ignore it until morning.”
Not likely. I looked at the status screen. We had an unmanned dreadnought class platform just three light seconds from the location. I assigned six mini-platforms on the ship to launch and quantum jump into a bracketing formation around the ship from all six cardinal directions. Unless someone on the stealth ship could react within three seconds, we’d have them surrounded. Then I’d open normal light speed communications to the hidden ship, and then see what they said.
If that didn’t work, I’d take control of it. Or at least, read it with my magic to figure out what was going on.<
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It could be a colony keeping an eye on Earth, or one of the nations or colonies simply testing a new stealth technology, to see if I’d notice. So I wasn’t too worried, yet, but I didn’t dismiss the other possibilities, that it could be alien in origin.
I shared my plans and thoughts behind them.
Cassie said, “Simple and direct, good plan.”
Jessica interjected, “Just hold off for a minute, in case it’s not the only one and there are more ships closer. I’m initiating a local scan of Earth orbit and all of our ships. Should we notify Earth’s central command?”
Central command had become something of a joke now that our species no longer faced annihilation, but it was still there. It was a convenient way for me to share tactical concerns with the safety of the human race as a whole with all the other countries, for the other leaders as well. Of course, without any threat for thirteen years, all the countries were going their way again, and the civility and common purpose between all nations had died with the Grays’ fleets.
A local scan would be a lot faster. We could determine Earth’s orbit is clear in just a minute or two, it was the whole solar system that took a long time to scan. Even with a hundred thousand dreadnought platform defensive fleet to split up the work.
“Let’s wait until we know more. I’m not going to wake up half the world leaders and interrupt the other half’s day with no information but a blank spot in space. But I’ll hold off on the response, you made a good point there. We don’t want any other hidden ships doing anything violent and unexpected when we corner the one that we know about.”
I took a sip of coffee, and just a couple of minutes later Jessica gave the all-clear. That didn’t mean there weren’t more cloaked ships in the system, just none close enough to Earth to fire on the planet if things went really south. The whole idea was a bit doubtful, but a healthy dose of paranoia would keep us alive in a dangerous universe.
I sent out the orders. The unmanned ship launched the six mini-platforms, which quantum jumped three times, once a second, around that blank spot. Then they hailed them over normal comms.
Nothing happened for about ten seconds, and I closed my eyes and followed the quantumly paired connections with my magic, from the space station, to the large platform, to one of the mini-platforms. Leaving my body behind helpless didn’t bother me, I trusted Cassie and Jessica with my life.
The space between the platform and hidden ship was small, and my magic made that jump as well.
The ship exploded in a ball of fire a split second later, and I’d barely gotten started looking at the technology, much less searched for their database. The only thing I was sure of, was that it wasn’t human. Mostly because the ship hadn’t been made of nanites, and even if one of the colonies had built a stealth ship the hard way, the internal systems were just too different.
Regardless, I regretted giving them time to answer the hail, I should’ve just read them right away, instead of trying too hard not to step on toes. The scanning technology was quite impressive, but not quite up to our standards. The cloaking technology was extremely similar to what the Grays had done, but that made sense as those systems would be driven by the end result of hiding mass, energy, and visual frequencies. There was only one way to do that.
The ship had an extremely weak gravity drive and a low power reactor system, and it had lacked any kind of weapon or defensive shield systems. None of that made me feel better though, it was a stealth probe, I was sure their warships had far different systems in it, and much more powerful. Save perhaps the sensors, those would be state of the art for a probe.
“Well, that was a waste of time, except for tipping them off that we could see them. See what you can find out there.”
To be fair, they weren’t watching us anymore either, whoever they were.
I sent the data I managed to get on their systems to Diana, maybe she could find something in the Grays’ database to narrow down who was responsible. I knew there were millions of ship types in it, and something might be close. It could’ve been any of the tens of thousands of alien civilizations in our fifty galaxies trying to steal our tech, or it could be one of the other five surrounding empires thinking about starting trouble.
The only ones I was sure couldn’t be behind it, were humanity and the Atans.
Time would tell.
I took a sip of my coffee.
Jessica asked, “Should I bring in more platforms?”
That wasn’t a bad idea. We had a hundred thousand for earth’s defenses, added on to the various fleets protecting the home world. Both my technology and the older tech which the other five countries ran. But those didn’t help me.
Point was, I still had over six million dreadnought platform ships in the void, that were out there to be used for build stock while not freaking out the other world leaders. Out of sight, out of mind, which was the problem. I could move in a million platforms to speed up the search, probably and logically should, but politically it might not be a good idea.
I looked at Cassie.
Cassie shook her head, “Not a good idea, for anything short of an invasion. It’ll make Earth nervous, and suspect ulterior motives.”
I nodded, and tthen made a face, which made them both chuckle.
“Going with Cassie this time. Put as many around Earth as it takes for constant scan coverage out to a light second. The rest can scan the…” I trailed off.
I wrote a quick macro to program a million mini-platforms to scan for blank spots with their sensors, then launched them from the platform furthest from Earth. They all moved out system.
I said, “Use the rest to scan our inner system, out to Mars, in a continuous rotation. The million mini-platforms will take Mars on out.”
Cassie sighed, “Better, but they’ll still whine about it.”
I smirked, “We could be being scouted by an enemy, preparing for invasion. It’s more likely about espionage, but I’m not risking Earth despite how small the chances are.”
The door opened and Diana walked in. I was struck momentarily by her beauty, even in her geeky dress of a lab coat, ugly brown skirt, and white blouse buttoned up to her neck. Perhaps even especially in those drab clothes, that to me just outlined her true beauty. She still dressed down, for work at least. She’d always been stunning to me, but after losing about ten years of apparent age she was so far out of my league it wasn’t funny.
“Hey.”
She smiled at me, and it reached her eyes, but it was also a tight smile. She looked alarmed, and I took a deep breath to remain outwardly calm. Whatever reason she’d come to the command center, couldn’t be good. Otherwise she’d have sent a message, or just waited to tell me over dinner.
“There were no ships in the database that completely matched of course, the Grays never captured one of their enemy’s stealth ships, but the scanning systems architecture and capabilities are an exact match for a Vrok warship.”
“Vrok? What do we know about them?”
It was familiar of course, one of the other five empires besides the Atans, that had our fifty freed galaxies surrounded. I even remembered what Cassie told me about them, but it wasn’t all that much. She’d just given me the basics back then.
Cassie said, “They’re the ones that look like army ants, loosely anyway, about the size of a van. They’re not exoskeletal though, and they’re mammalian not really an insect at all. They’re also a carnivorous species, not omnivores like most predators in space. They have the unfortunate habit of breeding their conquered planets for food, both the animals and if present, intelligent life.
“Their warships were about the same size as the five-mile-long Gray warship, so our current dreadnought warships and platforms have twice the mass. Their beams and shields are similar to ours, as is their drive technology, but that was ten thousand years ago. Thanks to Diana we know they haven’t advanced their sensor tech, but it’s been thousands of years since they tried to challenge the Grays. The planets
they oversee are limited technologically, though they allow some unlike the agrarian Atan worlds. A similar tech level to Earth in the nineteen forties. They have planes, cars, radio, television, but no computers, space tech, or nuclear capabilities. Vacuum tubes, no IC ships.
“About the best you could say for them is they aren’t genocidal. No more than humans are toward cows.”
“Or vampires for humans,” I quipped, though my heart wasn’t really in the joke, “Speculation?”
Diana stepped into my arms with a worried look on her face, but she had nothing to add as I wrapped them around her. If I wanted further specs, I could look them up, but the specs in the database were nothing but guesses after so much time.
Cassie gave me a smirking nod at my weak sally, then said, “We can’t know their intentions based on what just happened. Thirteen years ago, they must’ve noticed the grays were taken over. It could be they’re just curious and being cautious by seeing who’s their new neighbor, to evaluate the risks and dangers of the more powerful fleet of ships on their border. Or, on the other side of the spectrum, they could’ve made some breakthroughs, already had plans to invade the Grays, but the turnover and more powerful ships gave them pause.
“Scouting for war or spying for defense status or in the hopes of stealing our tech, in short, or something in the middle. My advice is to let Earth know, as well as our trading allies. You might even want to give the Atan a head’s up. The Atan sit between the Vrok and the bug race and share a border with both, same as we do all three. I’d be curious to know if they’re spying on all of us, and if we were just the first one to notice.
“If we are the only ones, then I suspect their actions are more defensive or espionage driven. If they’ve got eyes everywhere, they’re watching us and preparing for an invasion. Although, I can’t guarantee that, it’s just the most likely scenario, and they are alien in thought to us.”
Fallen Empire Page 2