After Jason reports the findings from the Hobbs, my first order to him is to immediately deploy a full survey/geoforming team to Darvin. If they have to wipe the biosphere, I’d much rather they have the time to do it without a ship full of colonists having to sit waiting in orbit for them to finish their job. Then I tell him to speed up the construction of the HMS Tyche and her escorts. The Tyche is large enough for 275,000 colonists and will be the last colony ship we’ll build for a while. The colonists and troops we’ve sent out so far are enough to ensure the survival of the human race, and we need to concentrate on constructing our fleet to fight the Alkarin. Though we will be sending additional fleet ships as they become available.

Of course, we’ll still keep our survey ships busy looking for resources and other habitable planets, as knowing where they are will be helpful when the war is finally over, and of course, we have the ships and crews for the survey ships, so we might as well put them to good use.

　◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇

[July 20, Wednesday]

So far, the draft has gone surprisingly well. There was one person that didn’t report when ordered to, and his trial was publically broadcast. The judge gave him a chance to go ahead and report to the intake station for duty, and he adamantly refused, saying that he was a pacifist and didn’t believe anything that had been said by the government and that somehow, we started the war with the Alkarin.

I have no idea where he got all his ideas, but he’s right and wrong. Yes, we unintentionally intruded into Alkarin space, but they attacked our ship first and killed many of our people. So, no, in effect, we didn’t start the war. Had they just informed the crew that they aren’t allowed there, they would have left, and we’d have left them alone from then on. They could have done that even without a common language. One way that would have sufficed would have been to show a chart of the system and clearly show our ship leaving.

Anyway, he was convicted and sentenced to life on Unalaska Island. It’s a harsh punishment, yes, but everyone was informed of the consequences of failing to report. Regardless, the trial served to bring home the reality of what refusing would mean.

On to other things, a rather excited Katsuo calls while I’m eating lunch with my family, and informs Akari that he needs to see me, immediately.

When I return, she tells me he called. I ask, “Did he tell you why he wants to see me?”

She shakes her head. “No, but he was unusually excited.”

I think, ‘As if I don’t have enough going on already,’ but then say, “Okay, well get him for me. I don’t really have time to mess with something minor, but if it’s really important, then,” I shrug as if saying, ‘I’ll go if absolutely necessary.’

Thankfully, Akari has been with me long enough that she knows what I mean, so she merely nods and turns to do it as I head into my office to read over some progress reports I hadn’t finished this morning. I get partway through a production report on the new generation of fleet ships before Akarin interrupts me to tell me that Katsuo is on the line.

Tapping an icon on my desk, I close the report, and then I tap another to open the holo call. A small image of him appears standing on my desk as I say, “Good afternoon.”

“Hi, Sora. Good afternoon. You have no idea how good either, and that’s why I’d like you to come to see me.”

My brow wrinkles as I ask, “About?” I admit it, I’m curious, but at the same time, I am rather busy.

He cocks his head and smirks, “Now Sora, do you really think I’d ask you to come here if it was something I was comfortable telling you on the phone? Especially since I know how much you have to deal with.”

I sigh. “You’re right, I am busy. I barely get to see my family, but I also know you wouldn’t basically demand to see me if it wasn’t really important… Okay… give me an hour or so, and I’ll be there. I have a few things that I have to sign off on before I can leave. Will that work?”

“Certainly. I think you’ll find the trip more than worth your time,” he says while still smirking.

I love the man, but he can definitely irritate the hell out of me at times. “Alright. See you then.”

I end the call and return to work.

　◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇

Just under two hours later, my Peregrine lands outside of DTI HQ. Of course, Jason’s with me, like always, as I walk into the building, take the elevator to the 5th floor, and walk to Katsuo’s office.

His secretary stands and curtsies. “Welcome, Your Majesty. Mr. Yoshimori and Ms. Peters are in conference room 1, and would like you to join them there.”

I think, ‘He could have told me and saved me the trip to his office,’ but smile at her and reply, “Alright, thank you.”

There’s no reason to take my grumpiness out on her. It isn’t like she has any control over what’s going on. Jason and I return to the elevator, take it down to the second floor, and walk to the conference room. As soon as I enter, everyone stands up, and all of them bow or curtsy, except for Erica and Katsuo, who know not to.

I immediately say, “You may be seated.”

They sit down, but Katsuo comes over and gently hugs me. “You look really stressed, are you getting enough rest?”

I chuckle sardonically. “What’s that? I haven’t had more than 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night since the start of all of this.”

He releases me and looks me in the eye. I can see that he’s going into overprotective grandfather mode. “You have plenty of subordinates that you can pass a lot of that off to. You need your rest, little lady, so make use of them. You don’t have to try to deal with everything personally.”

“Okay, Grandpa. I’ll try to relegate more of the less important things to others.”

He stares at me for a moment, then says, “Do that. Now, have a seat; there’s a short briefing that you need to hear.”

He escorts me over to a seat, pulls it out for me, and I sit down. Then he takes the seat beside me and nods to a man across the table. “Alright, Paul. This is your show.”

A man stands up, walks over to the podium in the corner, and taps a button to bring up a diagram of a reactor?

He nods to me and says, “Your majesty. I’m Paul Wilson. I run the antimatter research section. Alexandre Guérin is running a power research project in my section. He, and his team, had a breakthrough yesterday. They created an antimatter reactor that was theoretically capable of generating an astounding amount of power. The kicker is, they had no way to turn that into usable power… Until now.

“I’m going to stop here, and allow the project leader to take over. Alex, if you would.”

He walks over to his seat to sit down as another man gets up and walks to the podium.

He nods to me and says, “Your Majesty, thank you for coming.”

I merely nod and gesture for him to continue.

He taps another button on the podium, and the screen changes to another diagram with a picture of the device beside it.

“This is a plasma manifold. Before I get to explaining what it is and what it does, I need to explain what we did differently than the other power projects.

“Most of the other projects had been using a 1:1 mix of deuterium and antideuterium to build their reactors. I’m sure you know that creates lots of power in the form of gamma rays heating up a surrounding water bubble. The energy would then be extracted in much the same way that nuclear reactors capture the expended heat and energy from fission reactions. Quite inefficient, if I do say so. Much less efficient than the fusion reactors Ohta developed.

“We,” he gestures to the other men and women sitting across the table, “were having a drink one night and, as usual, were talking about work. Anne, I mean Anne Kristiansen, said something that got several of us thinking. Then we began bouncing ideas off each other, and we decided to change a few things.

“We began by playing around with the mix. We tried several mixes and eventually found that a 3:1 mix of deuterium and antideuterium produced the most plasma with the least wastage of the deuterium. Plasma, as I’m sure you know, is highly charged. The problem is, or rather was, how to turn that into something we could use. One of our engineers, Hanna Schuster, came up with the idea of a transfer manifold, which we call a plasma manifold. The plasma is pumped through it, and it picks up the charge from the plasma and converts it into usable energy at an amazingly high efficiency rate, which, by the way, is even higher than one of Mr. Ohta’s cold fusion reactors. A bit of tweaking here and there, and we ended up with a 91.738% conversion rate.”

He stops there and looks at me. Then I ask, “How big is it? How much antimatter does it use? How much power can it generate compared to a similarly sized cold fusion reactor? How dangerous is it? By that I mean, how apt is it to explode?”

His smile says that I asked exactly what he wanted me to.

“Your Majesty, would you care to take a walk and see the reactor for yourself, and I’ll be happy to answer all of your questions?”

He definitely has my interest. If they’re smaller and generate more power with less fuel, they would be perfect for the fleet and battle satellites.

We walk over to a new building and enter. Inside, he leads all of us back to a shielded room with a thick glass-like wall.

He knocks on it with his knuckle as he looks at me to say, “5 inches of transparasteel, and the whole room has the new Mark V shields as well.” He gestures for me to come over. “You’re Majesty, if you will… This is the Mark II antimatter reactor, which we call the Onyx Reactor.”

I look inside to see a meter tall vertical tower about 30cm in diameter with an ellipsoid sitting on top of it. It’s about a meter in diameter and looks like it’s made of transparasteel as well. Another transparasteel pipe of about 10 cm leads out of one side, then spirals around it before connecting to the other side of the ellipsoid. In the middle of the spiraling pipe is a dark rectangular device connected up to a rather thick set of cables. On opposite sides of the room are two large tanks. The one on the left has a small pipe that connects it to the bottom of the tower, and the one on the right has a small pipe that connects to the top of the ellipsoid.

After looking it over, I look back at him and raise an eyebrow. It’s obvious he’s rather proud of what they’ve done.

“The tank on the left contains deuterium and the one on the right is antideuterium. The transparasteel device on the top of the tower is the actual reactor, you can see the injectors on the top and bottom of it. The transparasteel pipe surrounding it channels the plasma to the plasma manifold, the black device you see in the middle.”

“How much power does this produce?”

His smile gets even bigger. “Well, this demonstrator can produce up to 10 terawatts. In other words, about 500 times more than a similarly-sized cold fusion reactor.” He smiles at my astounded expression. “To answer your other questions: Running at 100% capacity, it uses 3 grams of deuterium and 1 gram of antideuterium. It’s no more dangerous than an antimatter warhead on a missile as long as the magnetic containment vessel for the antideuterium is running, which is quintuple redundant. The vessel itself has a Mark 5 shield with a redundant backup.” He shrugs. “It’s as safe as can be. Of course, we already have plans for a shipboard design that’ll be far safer and incorporate an automatic ejection system for the antideuterium vessel.

“AI modeling has shown that if this is the same size as a supercarrier power plant, it should produce roughly 2.5 exawatts.”

I stare at him for a moment, then look at Katsuo. “Get them into production,” I state flatly. I look around at his team and finally back to Alex, “You just made it so that all of our ships will be able to enter the delta band in jump space. Oh, and congratulations, you all are quite wealthy now.”

I smile at his flabbergasted expression, turn on my heel, and motion for Jason to follow me out. I have other things to do, but I believe this was time well spent.