On the way back to my plane, I call Jason to inform him of the new reactor and have them pause production of the ships until the new reactors become available and begin building more antimatter capture stations. It shouldn’t take long from the looks of it. After all, the setup is fairly basic and we capture far more antimatter than we currently need. However, that is likely to be changing sooner rather than later. Hence, building more capture stations. Plus, I remind him to send all updates to Calvin so our colonies will have the most current developments.
Currently, there isn’t a plan to have the fleet in service retrofitted for the moment since we aren’t deploying them outside of the Sol system. Once the new ships are built, they will be the new tip of our spears when we take the fight to the Alkarin again.
I should be clear. We will not retrofit the ships we currently have since we need them until the new ships have been built and we have more than enough of the soon-to-be new and improved battle satellites to help defend the system. Once we have all that, if the Alkarin come here, they are in for a rather rude greeting.
With the new antimatter generators able to provide much more power to our ships, and assorted spacecraft, the designers have dove down the rabbit hole and are redesigning them, and I don’t blame them. They were designed around the capacity of the cold fusion generators for each class. With nearly unlimited power available now, they are adding many more energy weapons points to our ships and battle satellites. When they finalize their redesigns, I’ll share their new specs with you.
The next thing I should mention is the CAIis, or Kites as they are colloquially named. The setup for production of them went rather quickly, and currently, they are being deployed to the military and selected government officials first. Namely: Congressional members, pilots, bridge crew, and once they’re done: ground forces followed by regular crew members. Thankfully, it shouldn’t take long until everyone has one since we have several sites producing the nanites for them, and each site can produce enough for several hundred thousand people a day. That said, when everyone has one, we’ll retask some of the sites to make something else.
As an aside, though an important one, after much debate between the developers, me, and Congress, we decided on a limited level 3 AI. It’s not fully sentient, but even after all the tests proved they couldn’t, too many were worried about an AI taking people over. Sometimes, people freak out over the most inane things.
By tests proving that, I mean that we obtained permission from the families of several people that were in an irreversible coma to attempt to have an AI make the jump from hardware to wetware in a dual attempt to one: see if it could be done, and two: if it could be done, to see if the AI could help them recover. It didn’t work. No matter how the AI tried, it could only interact with the damaged person's brain on a surface level.
As for myself? I already have the latest design with one change: it has a linked copy of Freya as my AI. I had several people complain about my doing so, but I think their fears are irrational. As always, I find her to be extremely helpful, especially when I’m out and about and need something. Plus, she is extremely adept at anticipating my needs, so there is always that.
As a completely irrelevant aside, the last time Chinatsu, Ryo, and I made love, we connected our Kites at the deepest level to share our experience. At that level, everything you think and feel is shared. Honestly, it’s so intense that it’s almost overwhelming, and I believe it only served to deepen our love and commitment to each other. All of us want to continue to link together when we make love from now on.
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I’m going to dive into a bit of logistics here to give you a better idea of how we build ships. Yes, we use nanites for most of it. Regardless, some, though not much of the work, has to be done by humans, which, by far, takes the longest. Although that is relative in terms, as in, depending on the ship, 2 to 10 days, which isn’t much considering that it used to take the US a couple of years to build a new ship. Nanites make everything so much easier.
We recycled what was left of the shipyards around Mars, and moved all production to around Mercury and Venus. Between the two planets, Mercury has the most shipyards at 367, and Venus has somewhat less at 194. Due to that, Mercury has virtually disappeared from the night sky as far as human eyes can tell. Venus has tethers and we are still building an arc to attach engines to to speed it up, remember? Hence, why it has fewer shipyards. Plus, why build all of them just to have to move them when we finally have Venus habitable? That is going much faster than any of the geoforming teams' projections. The main holdup is speeding up the planet's rotation, which the new engines should help with. That, and we are going to build another arc to mount them to as well.
In light of our desperate need for more resources gathered by the belt miners, I decided to allow civilian mining ships to jump to other systems to collect the resources we need. With that in mind, I directed ship designers to make an armed mining ship for their use since they might need to protect themselves. Hopefully not, but, as they say, better safe than sorry. I don’t expect them to be able to stand toe-to-toe with a battle group, but simply to be able to dish out enough punishment to deter and/or delay pursuit to give them time to jump away. Of course, humans being humans, safeguards have to be considered to keep the ships from being used for piracy, as in the AI halting any attack against another human-crewed ship. Of course, if you try to take the AI out of the loop, you will disable the ship.
Mole-class Armed Asteroid/Ice miners:
265 m x 75 m x 50 m.
Max acceleration: 1000 g
Jump Speed: Gamma band - 4.4 ly/hr
Crew complement: 12 and AI
Armaments:
2 50cm 2-gun turret 75-gigawatt laser cannon.
4 50cm 6-barrel 2-gun turret-mounted antimatter Gatling gun.
12 CIWS 6-barrel 15-gigawatt pulse laser.
4 CIWS 15mm Gatling gun Anti-personnel.
Defensive shielding:
20 Mark V multi-layer phase-synchronized shield emitters.
As you can see, not only are they jump-capable, but they are faster and a little larger than the Sumo-class ships.
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It’s taken us just over a year to upgrade and rebuild our fleet and system defenses. During that time, the Alkarin came to ‘visit’ 5 times. Considering that I’m here telling you this, you know we made it through just fine.
The Alkarin, however, did not fare nearly as well. The new battle satellites did massive amounts of damage before the fleet even arrived to engage them. Every incursion was extremely large with a huge contingent of troop ships. They’ve also learned a thing or two about warfare from us, and they’ve managed to improve their technology slightly, by way of copying ours. Fortunately for us, and unfortunately for them, it was the shielding technology from the Odyssey. While they were great shields at the time, against our current generation of weaponry, they might as well not even be there.
The five attempts they made cost them dearly. Read that as over 80,000 ships of various classes, and now we know where the Alkarins' other two colonies are as well. Personally, I would have scrubbed the information from the fleet computers before deployment, but that’s just me. I’m sure they had to know that we were clueless as to where they were located. Of course, with as many scout ships we have out, we’d have found them eventually and dealt with them.
They are at Groombridge 34, and the other, Gliese 1061, is more of a mining colony than anything else from the data. Considering that Groombridge 34 is just a military outpost for them, we shall be taking the system and then occupying it permanently since it does have a habitable planet.
Needless to say, several stealth scouts have been deployed to each system in advance of the fleet. Groombridge is our foremost concern at present since they have a very large number of ships. Therefore, they'll be getting a visit from all three PAGs at the same time. The plan is to simply overwhelm them with firepower. I’m just hoping that we don’t have to glass the planet(s) in the system.
We also built the ships Cal requested with AI pilots and sent them to join them. So far, all reports from Beta Hydri show steady progress on the colonization efforts, and system defenses that were the primary responsibility of the fleet are up and running in massive quantities. The command staff there seem to be rather excited to receive all the updated ship and battle satellite specifications.
Even with all of our technological advances, I plan to continue to push humanity as far and as fast as I can. The Alkarin were a rude awakening for us. Many, myself among them, believed that if a race had become sufficiently advanced enough for interstellar travel, they would’ve advanced enough to leave behind warfare. Sadly, we’ve been proven wrong. I’m hoping the next race we meet isn’t both more advanced than us and aggressive.
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[Thursday, Aug 3, 2079]
Just short of three hours after they entered jump space in Groombridge, Admiral Abrams sits in her chair as the null space they had been in suddenly disappears. The AI’s tactical display of their course on the main screen is replaced by the view of the star in the center of the Groombridge 34 system. Other than the single bright point of the star, not much is to be seen from a quarter of a light-year out.
The newly outfitted and updated HMS Goliath along with the 4 megacarriers, 20 supercarriers, 900 carriers, 900 dreadnoughts, 600 escort dreadnoughts, 2,250 battleships, 400 strike fighter carriers, 4,500 assault carriers, 2,250 troop carriers, 4,500 battlecruisers, 9,000 cruisers, 4500 missile cruisers, 22,500 destroyers, and 45,000 frigates that make up her PAG, quickly begin to sort themselves out.
Around her, the ship’s bridge is a flurry of activity. The bridge crew is busy making sure that the Goliath’s PAG is deploying as planned and ordering corrections where needed. Soon the tactical officer sings out, “Emergence… It’s the HMS Titan and her PAG,” and before Abrams can reply, he states, “Emergence… It’s the HMS Colossus and her PAG.”
Abrams replies, “Roger that. Please ask Admirals Romero and Murat to join me on the Goliath at their convenience.”
The comm officer begins to reply, “Aye, Ay…” when she is cut off by the tactical officers shout of, “What the fuck?!”
Abrams calmly states, “Settle down, Mr. Densen. Report.”
“Apologies, Ma’am. We had a ship decloak 50 kilometers off our bow. It’s one of ours.”
“I see someone forgot we were being met here,” she says.
“Admiral? Captain Merritt is requesting to speak to you. He's the Cap…”
“I know who he is. Patch it through to my ready room, and I’ll take it there. XO, if you’ll join me, please. Commander Stanley, you have the con.”
“Aye, Ma’am. I have the con.”
As the two of them leave the bridge and make the short walk to her ready room, she states, “And now we find out what we’re up against.”
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