Chapter 129

The cat named Bella got a complete genetic profile.  The cat was going to be white with gray stripes and mostly a Bengal tiger from old Earth, except more muscular and with a more powerful jaw.  He would have slow working camouflage ability where he could alter the colors of his individual hairs, similar to an octopus’s camouflage.  If healthy, he would live around 210 human years.  What concerned me was his full-grown size of 200 kilograms.  Doc had a solution.  She was confident she could map the cat’s genetics and stop the cat’s growth closer to 100 kilograms.  She professed it might even slightly extend his life expectancy, or at my direction, she could work to create SNAIL treatments for the beast. 

The cat was also highly intelligent, much smarter than a canine but slightly short of the level of defined sapience.  Would this be a good thing for another company for my daughter or not?  If I had to remove the beast from her side, would she be angry at me in the future?  Julie advised pets were a great way for children to learn responsibility.  My compromise to let the cat into our abode was a collar that could paralyze the cat at a moment’s notice.  The collar linked to an implanted chip on Bella’s spinal cord.

I admit the small cat was cute, and three days into our trip, the cat was in our quarters.  Celeste was furious, though, as Bella chose to sleep in my bed between me and Danielle instead of sleeping in her bed.  This meant most nights, Celeste crawled into our bed and either dragged the unfortunate cat to hers or just curled up in our bed, hugging the cat.  There was not a lot of research on the species in the Alliance database, but Dr. Zaire was pretty sure the cat was demonstrating a genetic predisposition to sleeping with the alpha for protection.

I admit the furball grew on me.  Even Zed, Gabby’s dog, seemed to like Bella’s antics.  I decided the feline needed its own skin suit and manufactured it.  Since he was growing so fast, I was going to need to refit the cat every six days—which didn’t bother me at all.  Bella was quite affectionate and even tolerated Celeste’s need to hug something furry all the time.  Maybe when the cat was fully grown, I could make a suit of powered armor for him.  No—that would be silly.

Danielle was still working on purging the AI code of the backdoors.  She was quickly becoming frustrated as she discovered numerous feedback loops.  These loops rewrote backdoors if they were erased.  She admitted the programmers were geniuses and couldn’t match them, but she was slowly gaining ground.  She had to write her own sifter program for the code and then remove all the code at once.  It was still going to be an extremely long process, but she was confident it would work.  Julie, for her part, was morose, knowing she could be subverted.

At least the fabrication and installation of the holo emitters were progressing smoothly.  The exterior engineering bots dropped a new one into place every nine hours.  Then Hans Anders would run the diagnostics and tie it into the holo matrix for the ship.  Hans was our shield engineer and took the job of running the holo system so he could get a seat on the bridge crew. 

He was a valuable member of the engineering staff, and Nero hated to lose him, but one of our new Gaians, Nora Vargas, was focused on her shield certifications and would be able to take over for Hans in a few months.

Gabby got bored and began to put synthetic skin on all the humanoid bots of the ship.  It was a project I had started but never finished.  It was mostly for her to continue to practice and refine her robotics skills.  The faux muscular was not as advanced as the steward bots.  Gabby had wanted to create bots of all the alien races we had encountered to date, but I did not want to invest the resources in the project, so skinning all the bots was the backup plan. 

I also promised her to get medical scans of Bella when he was full-grown to map his skeletal and muscular structure so she could recreate him as a bot.  Gabby started calling Bella, Abell, instead.  She thought she was being clever in juxtaposing the A in his name to give him a more masculine name.  Celeste was incensed that her kitty cat was being called something other than her designation for the beast, even more so when he started answering to Abell instead of Bella.

Most of the Marines and scientists were preparing for the encounter with the Union fleet.  I reviewed reports every evening, and most of the staff meetings focused on the preparations.  The shuttles were ready, and we had reorganized our Marine squads into five teams of nine.  The were now mixed-race squads.  Each team had a leader, three recons, two heavies, a tech specialist, a sniper, and one demolition expert.  Each team would take a shuttle, and the fifth team would be held back on the Void Phoenix in reserve.

The competition among the squads was quite intense.  Abby and Buckie fostered this as it helped the learning curve.  There was a lot of prestige in being the top team on the ship.  Bragging rights came with few bonuses, other than other teams having to buy drinks at Edmund’s bar. 

The planned exit from subspace was far out in the system where we expected to find the Union fleet.  I wanted to get a lay of the space before we moved into the system.  If I sensed some hostility, we would have the Void Phoenix go dark and spy on the ships before trying to extract our targets.

The bridge was packed when we made our exit.  The ripple effect from our ship exiting subspace would be detected as we currently did not have the means to mask it.  The scanners went live as we cloaked to map the system.  Our sensors were gradually being fine-tuned for further and further range but still had their limitations.

There were no Union ships close to our exit point, which made sense as the vector we approached was atypical.  We detected our first Union ship near the expected transition point that lined up on a vector to an inhabited star system.  The Union ship was a light carrier cruiser.  It carried flights of screening fighters and had external docks for gunships.  It was a support ship for thirty-six fighters and sixteen gunships. 

Zoe informed me from her station that the gunship she was assigned to was called the Ravana.  It had minimal defenses, and this ship matched that ship in its configuration.  Two wings of three fighters each were doing sweeping patrols.  They obviously detected our transition because two gunships were dispatched to our area of space. 

Zoe angrily said the gunships were being sacrificed to draw out whatever threat had just entered the system.  Gunships were the pawns of the Union fleet.  Relatively cheap with crews of three to six.  Zoe survived being sent on suicide missions multiple times due to her amazing flying skills.

We were already moving in the system under stealth, and the gunships would find nothing when they investigated.  Two other light cruisers were quickly found doing the same task at other expected transition points.  Our sweeping scans focused on the largest gas giant in the inner system, and vessels started appearing one after another.  We had found the Union fleet.

Julie sent a relay probe to try to hack into the fleet’s comms systems.  I wanted to maintain our distance from the fleet to give us a clear path of retreat.  We had been scanning for seven hours when Elvis said a new ship had just transitioned and was moving in the system.  It was a Union heavy cruiser and was transmitting openly to the rest of the fleet.  They had FTL drive trouble and needed assistance. 

Once the probe settled, I had the Void Pheonix do the same.  We would start the mission by gathering intelligence.  I had the ship stand down from alert and rest up. 

It wasn’t long after that Julie infiltrated the fleet’s communications systems and dug through the archives.  The fleet size was projected in the holo tank on the bridge.  Eight battleships were the core of the fleet.  This was four more than we had been expecting.  Julie informed us the four unknowns were all corporate battleships that had not been registered and had gotten out here on their own to rendezvous with the fleet about three months ago.  They had brought dozens of support ships with them. 

The explanation of how a corporation could build and operate a battleship in the Union was simple.  They built the battleships for the Navy, double-charged them on everything, and turned the profits into their own private fleet.  They then stashed their fleet in a remote system.  Of course, they refused to commit their own ships to the war effort. 

Overall, the entire fleet in this system was much larger than expected.  More cruisers, frigates, destroyers, and supply ships.  Julie figured out it was actually three different fleets that had merged.  Edmund was on the bridge and discovered Brotherhood communication traffic.  They were infrequent, but it was clear that agents were within the large fleet. 

Maybe this entire exodus was orchestrated by the Brotherhood.  It would make sense as their goal was to make humanity the only dominant species in the galaxy.  Seeding a human colony outside of human-controlled space would help with that aim, expanding colonization behind the wall of the Alliance.  I was already aware that the Brotherhood perpetrated the Sapphirean attack takeover of the Union.  The Union had grown too weak and corrupt for the Brotherhood’s needs.

We settled into our position and continued gathering data.  Julie was already bouncing from ship to ship and focused on retrieving crew rosters for review.  I eagerly awaited to find out if my brother was among them.

A list began populating the main screens on the bridge.  It was the list of the crew we hoped to liberate.  When Nila’s name went green, my heart leaped.  I knew the Bastion’s Shield was one of the battleships in the fleet, and I had hoped she would still be alive.  Seeing it confirmed brought back youthful memories.  Back at the Naval Academy, I could not understand or act on my feelings.  I was going to be the hero and come and save her now. 

My mind went to Danielle, who had been at my side and bed for over a year.  Would I replace her with Nila at the first opportunity?  Danielle was a great companion and lover.  She never expected much from me and treated Celeste like her own child.  I had deflected her questions about having her own child with me.  Was this the reason I wanted to reconnect with Nila?

The names began to highlight mostly green, some yellow, and a few were red.  Red meant the fleet records showed the person had died.  Julie also had thousands of new names from the two additional fleets that had merged with the one we had targeted.  One of those fleets was the corporate fleet.  I didn’t hold much hope of finding good candidates for our crew there.  The third fleet, as far as Julie could tell, was a fleet of mothballed ancient ships that never managed to be brought to full functionality before the war ended. 

The fact those mothballed ships had made it all the way out here showed the superior construction of the older FTL subspace drives.  My eyes flashed up to the screen.  My brother’s name had just turned green.  He was alive and on the cruiser Artemis’ Spear.