Chapter 121

Once all stations were secured, I moved to medical to check in on the injured marines.  I knew all the Marines by name and trained with them in the gym and VR.  Doc, Scrubs, and the medical bots were very busy when I arrived.  The Squirrel was already sedated and in the tank.  Doc said they were going to reattach the limb.  His human squad mate had retrieved it.  He lost it when a flight bay fighter lift came down and sheared it off.  He had been knocked into the area by a grenade and was too disoriented to react in time.  

The other serious injuries were all being treated, and I was amazed.  We had assaulted a massive station with forty marines and didn’t have one casualty.  We didn’t succeed in all our objectives, but that was due to an innovative alert by a crew member on the station.  I met with each marine, thanked them, and told them not to miss the party.  We had real food!

My next stop was the brig to talk with the new additions.  I talked with the daughter of the Commander first.  Her name was Rain Jaques.  She was 34 years old and a naval liaison.  She had been in the employ of the Admiral as his assistant.  It was as I had guessed, that Rain was leverage against her mother and had been locked up in the cell for months.  I told her she would be freed once my marines were sober again.  

I talked to the other seven as well.  They had been briefed.  Two were cousins of our current crew, one was a sister of a crew member, and the fourth was an uncle.  I told them they would be vetted and given a psych evaluation before being asked to join the crew.  Until then, they would be interrogated by Francis and Edmund.  That was probably the only bright spot with the entire incident.  Edmund never picked up any Brotherhood signals.

I spent an hour answering questions before leaving for the party.  The luxury deck was active with music and bad dancing.  Actually, the Squirrel were not bad dancers.  I did send two Squirrel children and a Tirani back to their cabin to put on skin suits.  It was policy to wear a skin suit when not in your quarters.  Other than that, I enjoyed the party and danced with the female Tirani mercs, Danielle and Gwen.  

When I got to my cabin, much later, I found an upset Celeste pouting about Eve not taking her to the party.  Celeste wasn’t throwing a fit like she used to, so I told her that Eve could bring them to the party next time.  Tora’s two boys had been running around with Squirrel children, but I didn’t mention that to her.  After spending time with Celeste and Amos, I moved to the Julie’s AI core room with Danielle.  We had the archive device, and Danielle was attaching it to Julie’s core so she could use the dual hacking devices we obtained from the Brotherhood.

Danielle reminded me this was the room where she had thrown herself at me.  Gwen had advised her that forcing the issue was the only way to get my attention back then.  I remembered Danille pinning me to the memory banks and kissing me.  Right after the archives were connected, I pinned her and kissed her.  It didn’t take long before we were naked.

When I returned to my cabin later with Danielle, Julie’s hologram appeared in my cabin.  She made a bad joke that her core housing room needed a good cleaning, but I ignored the witticism.  Danielle had finished extracting all the data, and I sent the files to my cabin terminal and began spreading them out on the screens.  Julie highlighted that my brother was alive when the fleet had been with Admiral Dyson.  His ship had moved on with the majority of the Union exodus fleet.  But I now had their entire planned route and estimated layover times for maintenance.

I brought up the star charts and had Julie add the data to them.  They would be about here…more than halfway to their destination if they were on the schedule.  We were 79 days of subspace travel behind them.  The longest subspace trip we could safely do was about 22 days.  Any longer, and the subspace emitters might overheat.  

But if we could do 29 days…then we could reach the Helliphante system.  The fleet was scheduled to stop there, and the data suggested it had a massive orbital multi-race trading ring.  The ring surrounded a planet that was being mined for metals, had massive industry, and even had a space elevator to transport the material into orbit.  The data the Brotherhood had on this planet suggested the ring and space elevator were actually remnants abandoned by another civilization.  The Brotherhood data referenced dozens of other files that we didn’t have.  The surface was covered in industrial smog that blocked out the sun, and no pictures of the surface were available.  No life existed, and the atmosphere was toxic.  

The Tirani had never been this far out, so I was relying on the Brotherhood data.  The aliens were considered advanced and had a strong military presence.  This was one of the hard borders the Brotherhood had set for humanity.  So, I doubted the Union fleet could have supplanted the aliens controlling this system.  But if my human predecessors pissed them off, I could be unwelcome.  Then, we would be stranded since we would be nearly out of fuel.  But we could always use our stealth shuttles to steal some fuel if it came to it.  I sent the coordinates to Elias’ station on the bridge.  

Our current subspace trip was just to a nearby system with nothing of interest.  From there, we would make for the Helliphante system.  

I sent the info to Damian as well.  My FTL engineer was probably going to have some words for me in the morning.  Danielle was waiting in our bed for round two, so I tore myself away from the terminal.  Nope, Daniele had her VR headset on, and I checked the feed.  She was playing the Sword and Sorcery game with half the crew, according to Julie.  Well, maybe it was time to break out my barbarian.  I put on my own VR helmet and joined them.

The next morning, I had to listen to Gwen and Danielle at breakfast berate my low-level barbarian.  I had been killed six times in the troll cave.  It was mostly due to them insisting I was the meat shield and had to go first.  Eventually, Suruchi’s samurai joined us and took the center.  She was twice my level and had much better gear.  I felt out of place.  If I played this VR again, I would go solo.

My prediction came true as halfway through breakfast, Damian knocked on my cabin with two of the Squirrel scientists behind him.  I was ready to be told I was being reckless, but instead, the two Squirrel physicists were explaining their theory in subspace bands and how we could build all new emitters to travel in a different band.  We could potentially move four times the distance in the same amount of time, maybe as much as ten!  Except they wanted to try the lesser emitters first.  The more powerful emitters would require a higher amount of phased fuel.  

The fuel needed to be phased in order to synchronize with the new emitters.  When I asked what the chances of this working were, they said about 60%…well, 40% because we hadn’t made the fuel yet.  The scientists were ready to go full-scale on the Void Phoenix; instead, I told them they could try it out on my old Union assault shuttle.  This shuttle had the Brotherhood micro subspace drive on it.  Although they were disappointed with the small scale test, they agreed.  I think Damian was disappointed as well.  He wanted to be a pioneer of subspace.

We came out of subspace in the adjacent system the next day.  We skirted the perimeter while Elvis scanned the system, and Damian worked on the subspace drives for the really long trip.  The system was boring: a star with no planets and a single asteroid belt.  There were a lot of rouge asteroids in this system as well, so I had us move above the ecliptic while we worked.  The Squirrel had the shuttle moved to the large cargo bay to work on it and set up some specialized emitters to try and make their super fuel.

Damian wanted five days before we attempted the long jump.  I ended up helping him get us prepared by installing additional subspace emitters on the hull.  The Squirrel thought they successfully fabricated the fuel, but the process tripped the shipboard radiation alarms.  So, all future attempts would have to be done outside of the ship.  They made a platform that could be moved out into space to make the fuel in the future.  Unfortunately for them, we were ready for our long-haul trip in subspace.   Doc did medical scans of the crew before we entered.  There was a chance of some negative physiological effects when taking such a long voyage.  Generally, the rule was you took as much time off in real space as you spent traveling in subspace.  Well, we had a good doctor and a lot of very expensive medical equipment.

Zoe took us in on the bridge, following Elias’ prepared vector in subspace.  

I spent much of the trip’s start in the cargo bay with the Squirrel engineers and scientists.  They really wanted their experiment to work.  They were working on the shuttle, and I was just trying to understand the math behind their hypothesis of subspace bands.  The shuttle took a week to outfit.  If the Squirrel theories panned out, the advanced micro subspace drive range would increase from 20 to 100 light-years.  That sounded incredible—no, impossible.  From my education at the naval academy, even having a ship as small as the shuttle could travel 20 light years in subspace was outside mathematical calculations.  I was only just beginning to comprehend how it was possible, and now the Squirrel were expanding on the equation. 

Getting the new crew through vetting took two weeks.  We had their entire personnel file from the archives, and the sister of Eldon Dunning, one of my Marines, had fervently supported Admiral Dyson.  Just from this, she was blacklisted and confined to the luxury deck.  We would offload her when we returned to human space.  We added four Marines: Osian Guzman, Travis Kim, Monty Fletcher, and Alina Weaver.  Abby and Buckie would handle their training.  They would be monitored for six months before being given the ability to work unsupervised…well Julie would still monitor them. 

The weapons engineer was Carla Lawson, Abby’s cousin.  When I received her cert evaluations from Julie, I was thoroughly unimpressed.  She wasn’t even close to the minimally accepted standards—well she was Union Navy trained.  Abby convinced me to give her a trial period to work on her certs and with our Squirrel weapons engineers.  Carla was difficult to motivate from her psych evaluation, and maybe the threat of being removed from the ship would help her.  She was definitely happy to be rescued.  We learned over half of the Union personnel in the exodus fleet went unwillingly.

The final addition to the crew was a navigator, Iona Solis, a distant cousin to Haily.  They had been fast friends growing up, and at least her certs were not mediocre.  The issue was Elias was the best navigator I had ever seen.  I actually didn’t want to trust anyone but him when plotting subspace vectors.  But we did need more bridge crew, so Iona would be given shifts in the co-pilot/navigator’s seat when Elias was off duty.  It seemed to work out as she deferred to Elias, and Gwen told me they were sharing a cabin after only a week.  Gwen was still my line to the ship’s gossip.

That brought up a discussion I had been having for a while.  Permission to have children on board the Void Phoenix.  We already had Celeste, Amos, Tora’s twins and the Squirrel children already.  I was constantly worried about combat and endangering the children on board, but that was life living on a spaceship.  I would be hypocritical if I didn’t allow it, so I told Doc all they had to do was log a request with her, and it would be approved.  Hopefully, the Void Phoenix wouldn’t become a nursery ship.