LOCATION: EDEN’S END

  SYSTEM: UNOKANE

  DATE: 2404

  Alexander and Lucas watched from the control room as the twelve EFEC Swordfish undocked from the old temporary ring station, which had been upgraded many times over and turned into a military anchorage.

  “How long did you say it would take for these to reach the Shican’s border?” Lucas asked as the ships maneuvered into formation.

  “A week to be on the safe side,” Alexander replied.

  Technically, they could be there the same day, but he didn’t want to push the new drives too hard. They were tested, but it was such a new technology that anything could go wrong. It was why each ship was outfitted with enough explosives to turn it to space dust.

  They could not afford for the Shican to gain access to the Nova drive or even the EFEC technology.

  Once the ships reached the Shican border, they would need to locate the best targets. Despite working with the aliens for hundreds of years, the Collective didn’t know much about the Shican’s core systems or which planet the Emperor resided on.

  As a lower caste member, they hadn’t ever been allowed to enter the core territories of the Shican when they were undercover, and the Collective’s rules about non-interference had kept them from bothering to investigate in person.

  Alexander understood their hesitation, but he still found their strict adherence to such rules stupid. The Collective could have gathered information without interfering, but much like with his stay on their rogue planet, they were terrified that the Shican would come for them if they learned of their existence. It annoyed him that the Collective could have stopped the Shican long ago, but there was nothing he could do to change the past.

  The synced Swordfish activated their warp drives and vanished into the black of space. The Nova drives didn’t have any inherent issue with activating within a gravity field, but Alexander had discussed the possibility of having a drive failure near a planet with Lucas, and the pair decided that it would be better to limit how close the drive could activate near a gravity well. It was just another safety feature to prevent the strong gravitational field produced by the drive from escaping its confines and causing severe damage to the local planetary bodies or worse. Eventually, he hoped to remove that concern, but that wasn’t something that was going to happen any time soon.

  Alexander knew all too well what would happen if the drive failed around a planet, and the damage would be catastrophic. He had tested some of his gravity bombs, both the missiles and the larger self-propelled vessels, in Lund’s Star. Technically, his automated ships had tested the weapons and relayed the results via a courier back to the secret production facility.

  Having to retrieve that data manually was annoying, but it ensured complete secrecy. It wasn’t so bad; he needed to head out there anyway, to update the orders for the ships. Originally, he was going to hold those ships in reserve to wait and see how the Shican reacted to the EFEC strikes, but the Shican advance had continued despite the loss of their supply fleet. They had already attacked four worlds, and their direction was pretty clear; they were heading toward Unokane.

  He knew their destination, but he didn’t understand why the Shican weren’t just skipping those worlds and making their way directly to his system. Not that he would complain. The extra time allowed him to add additional ships and defenses.

  Krieger provided a possibility for their actions in the form of securing their route.

  Clearing their rear did seem like a sound strategic choice, but Alexander wondered why the loss of their supply convoy had pushed them to accelerate their attacks instead of pulling back. Now, instead of staying in a system to clear it entirely, they only gave a token effort to destroy planetary infrastructure and orbital assets before moving on. The lack of nuclear weapons certainly accounted for some of that, but it didn’t explain all of their actions.

  The fact that the Shican weren’t glassing entire cities was certainly a boon for those living on the planets, since it meant far fewer deaths, but he would have thought they would pull back and wait for replacements. That’s what he would have done. If not for supplies, then to replace the ships they were losing.

  Alexander hadn’t expected much from static orbital defenses, but the laser pods were so quick and easy to produce that it was worth packing as many around a world as possible. EFEC planetary defenses would be a much better alternative, but they required a much larger platform and support systems than the lasers to the point that they were almost frigates in their own right. At that point, it made more sense to build the automated ships instead of static platforms.

  If the Shican knew just how easy it was to replace the laser pods, they might have gone back and done a better job of clearing out those last two systems. They missed a few important sites on the surface, and those locations had already started replacing the lost orbital infrastructure the same way he had during his early days on Eden’s End, good old low-orbit launchers.

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  The multifunction bots made that process even quicker, because they could be shoved into a pod and launched into space as well. The bots couldn’t move far from the pod with their slow ion thrusters, but they didn’t need to. The bots could move the pods together to form the basis of a rudimentary station. Once that was built, the rest of their pods were cannibalized to start producing more advanced manufacturing methods.

  Alexander hadn’t been certain that the propagation coding would work, but it was turning out far better than he had hoped. Assuming even a single multipurpose bot survived, it could rebuild. It would take an enormous amount of time, but it would carry out that task with tireless dedication.

  Thankfully, he didn’t need to worry about the paperclip issue, since the bots weren’t mindlessly fulfilling a task to the detriment of everything around them. He would never have implemented such coding if that could have occurred. They would cease their efforts after a certain threshold was reached, and anyone in the Union command could order them to stop.

  Alexander’s attention returned to the present as Lucas spoke.

  “Transition successful. Good hunting.”

  Alexander nodded his head in agreement, and the pair headed out of the control room.

  “So, what’s next?” Lucas asked.

  “Hmm?” Alexander wasn’t sure what his friend was getting at.

  “Well, you solved Lund’s little math problem, you know how gravity plates function, you have started growing your own ship’s—”

  “—Ship parts,” Alexander corrected.

  Lucas chuckled. “Yeah, fine, ship parts, but you will be growing ships eventually. It’s only a matter of time. What I’m trying to say is, what technology do you plan on tackling next? Please say gravity manipulation,” the man smiled broadly.

  Alexander shook his head in exasperation. “What makes you think that’s even possible? The Collective hasn’t managed to figure it out, and they’ve been at it for over a century.”

  Lucas shrugged. “They’ve been at a lot of things, I imagine. It doesn’t mean it isn’t possible, just that they haven’t figured it out. Did they know the Nova drive was possible?”

  “They did, actually,” Alexander smirked, telling Lucas how Rush had funded Dr. Lund’s research.

  “Well, shit,” the man replied. “There’s got to be something.” The man paused, then looked around to ensure nobody was nearby, before speaking in a low tone. “What about that secret project you’re working on?”

  Alexander froze for a moment, and that was enough for Lucas to smile.

  “I knew it,” the man said. “What is it?”

  He knew he wouldn’t be able to hide the project from his curious friend forever, but he thought he would have more time.

  “How did you figure it out?” Alexander asked in an equally conspiratorial tone.

  “I was bored, so I was doing some data analysis on the drive tests, and it came back with a few irregularities. As you can imagine, that set off all sorts of alarm bells in my mind, but I thought there was a problem with the drive at first. It wasn’t until I dug deeper that I realized the data was fabricated. Since there are only five people in the Unokane system capable of bypassing the encryption on the ship, it wasn’t hard to guess who was responsible.”

  Alexander grunted in annoyance. If he had gotten Rush or the others to hide the data, there probably wouldn’t have been any sign of tampering, but he wanted to keep the project secret from everyone.

  “Please, just drop it,” Alexander said.

  “So it is a weapon,” Lucas hissed out, causing Alexander to throw his arms up in exasperation and walk away.

  The man hurried to catch up.

  “How did you jump to that assumption?” Alexander eventually asked once there was nobody around again.

  “Not really an assumption,” Lucas smirked. “I know you, Alex, and there are very few things I could think of that would get you to hide them from everyone you knew. Weapons were at the top of that list. And not just a normal weapon, but something that could do a whole lot of damage.”

  “I’m not telling you anything about the project,” Alexander replied in annoyance. “Stop asking about it.”

  This time, Lucas was the one to pause when he heard Alexander’s sharp tone. “Sorry,” the man apologized after recovering. “I sometimes let my curiosity get the better of me. I won’t bring it up again or speak of it unless you come to me.”

  Alexander stopped to look at the man. “Thank you for understanding. I’ll tell you more if and when I can. I promise.”

  “So,” Lucas said awkwardly. “What other projects can you talk about?” he asked, going back to his previous topic.

  Alexander chuckled at the man’s undeterred nature. “I honestly don’t know. We still have to figure out how to apply the molecular lock to an entire ship. The biological production method needs a lot of work as well, so if you’re interested in that, you could help there.”

  “Hard pass on both of those,” Lucas said. “I spent enough time beating my head against a wall to figure out that molecular lock field issue, and I have no interest in growing things, even if they are ships.”

  “Fair enough,” Alexander replied.

  He had a few other people he planned to approach about the genetic engineering of the microbes, but that could wait. He tried to think of other projects he had planned, but came up blank. Most of his to-do list was complete, which felt oddly weird now that he thought about it.

  The other items on the list weren’t yet feasible with his current level of technology, and wouldn’t be for a long time, if ever. Stuff like real shielding, gravitational manipulation to replace current thrusters, yes, he had considered the problem, and other esoteric technologies pulled from his memories of old-school science fiction. He supposed he could toss in how the hypergates functioned as well, but with the Nova drive, the hypergates weren’t really needed any longer. That didn’t mean he wasn’t curious about them.

  The only thing that the hypergates would provide over the Nova drive was range, assuming they were indeed artificial wormholes as Lund had postulated. It didn’t seem like enough of an upside to open that can of worms at the moment. If the Shican had access to the hypergate network, who else might?

  With those technologies firmly out of his grasp, that left miniaturization and improvements to existing technologies as the only real goals left.

  He told Lucas as much.

  The man didn’t deflate at the news; instead, he took on a thoughtful look. “I’ve been pondering creating a true AI for some time, but seeing Rush and the others, I don’t know if that’s a route I want to take anymore. Perhaps I will focus on improving our computronics and other technologies instead.”

  Alexander agreed that it was probably for the best. Maybe once the war was truly over, he could go back to his early work with thrusters. The whole plan to break up Omni’s near monopoly on that technology was still in the back of his mind, but now he had so many other options to push for something even better than compressed plasma ejection.

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