Chapter 2: The Vandergast Project

“Are you completely crazy?” Governor Culhane was livid, yelling at the AI. “You tell me that making our fleet vaporize itself when a Sa’arm ship shows up is a BENEFIT?”

“Sir, it is the price, not the benefit. The Confederacy allows you to build ships for your project, manned mainly by non-Confederacy personnel, namely concubines, with modern FTL engines so you won’t need six months for a single flight to Earth. The price for that is that at least the captain and two officers must be sponsors and their responsibility is to prevent modern equipment from falling into the hands of the Sa’arm. I only mentioned that the easiest way would be to prepare the engines with a self-destruct device.”

The Governor was fuming. The repetition by the AI didn’t make it sound any better for him. He was so enraged that he wasn’t able to think straight. When the Governor didn’t calm down after ten minutes and continued swearing at the Confederacy and the AI’s, the AI came to the conclusion that it might be wise to get help from someone who was better prepared to handle the Governors emotional state than the AI was. The AI’s first choice would have been the aides to the Governor, but since the AI hadn’t expected this severe reaction from the Governor, it wasn’t sure if other humans might react the same way. Fortunately it had other opportunities.

“Excuse me sir, I would like to offer my help here...”

The calm voice penetrated the rage of Governor Culhane for a moment. He was totally surprised to hear the voice of Winnie, the avatar toy he had created for his children two years ago. The avatar had the shape of a teddy bear and the Governor never had discussed anything of importance with it. “What the hell are you doing here? Has the AI no more arguments than to throw my children’s toys at me?”

“No sir, sorry sir, but the AI isn’t really able to handle you when you are in a rage like this. Though I don’t know much about space ships, I might call for support from Wanda and Tinkerbelle, the avatars of Centurion Fred Fish and Lieutenant Joacim Zelle. They know much more about technology than I do.” Of course that was not true. But the Governor had never thought of Winnie being more than a plaything for his children and therefore wasn’t expecting him to know of these things. Winnie was good enough to penetrate the emotions but he was not the avatar to present complex solutions out of this mess. “We might call the Lieutenant or the Centurion if you like.”

“No, the avatars will do for now.” Culhane was not willing to throw his anger at his aides. They weren’t responsible for this. By making this decision he calmed a little more, preparing him for a more rational discussion.

Within seconds, the two faerie-like avatars appeared. Normally the avatars were not forced to appear somewhere by an AI, so they were momentarily surprised and showed it. “Huh?? Where am I? Uh oh, the big big boss! Hello sir. What’s the matter, sir? Ah, the AI is informing me ... I totally understand that you are furious. I would kick some AI’s ass if I were more physical.”

The Governor could not hold back a little grin seeing the avatar Wanda acting like this. His anger subsided a little more. “Winnie said you might have some suggestions that don’t raise my blood pressure. I’m willing to listen to you since you might be more qualified than the colony’s AI here.”

“May I summarize first?” Tinkerbelle asked. Without waiting for an answer she continued “You might be allowed to build ships with modern FTL drive but the modern engines are not allowed to fall into the hands of the Sa’arm under any circumstances. Forget the self-destruction for a while. We have several options here. The first option might be to not be detectable by a Sa’arm ship. Do we have this option with old technology ships? Do we have this option with modern ships? The answer is no. There are several known circumstances where Sa’arm ignore a ship, but it isn’t a safe bet.”

“Second, we might get away fast enough if a Sa’arm ship shows up,” Wanda spoke. “In most cases this will be the solution used. Unfortunately there might be encounters where we can’t run fast enough, even with the damn biggest engines available. Therefore we have to look at our other options.”

“Third, we might fight the enemy,” Tinkerbelle took over again. “Unfortunately your plan doesn’t include trained gunners and the ship will be unarmed. Right sir?”

“Yes, that’s right. The whole concept was about concubines operating the ships and it was clear from the beginning that we won’t build armed vessels. Maybe that’s the problem and we have to build a regular armed fleet instead of our defenseless old-timer fleet.”

“Just wait a second before you dump your plan,” Wanda interrupted the Governor. “Your currently planned ships are not allowed to carry heavy weapons, but the suicide bomb attached to the FTL drive is a weapon too. It is not necessary that it explodes within the ship. Did you see the Star Trek series? They ejected their warp cores all the time to save the ship.”

“Yeah, that leaves a ship without FTL drive making it easy prey for the incoming Sa’arm,” the Governor said.

“Not necessarily,” Wanda disagreed. “A self-destructing FTL drive can be as destructive as the heaviest torpedoes. It might blow the follower or it might distract them. In addition, our ship is not necessarily without FTL drive after ejecting the modern engines. How about ancient technology FTL engines as backup? Backup systems are an uncommon concept in Confederacy ship design because modern Confederacy machines don’t fail or can be rebuilt by replicators, but under the special circumstances of a battle, backup systems are a good concept. So given the distraction of an exploding FTL engine, there is a chance of escape even if there was no chance before ejecting the FTL engine.”

Winnie shook his head. “This is so confusing for my little head...”

Governor Culhane sighed, “I understand what you are suggesting. Why didn’t the AI offer this solution to me?”

Tinkerbelle answered, “The AI offered the best solution for the problem from its point of view. An AI believes in thinking objectively most of the time and so it has its problems with subjective thinking. It thought that its goal was the most important and so the disposal of some property and only a few sponsors was absolutely worth it, as long as the Sa’arm don’t get our engines. Your goal on the other hand is to protect your people, and that includes concubines. You are willing to send your men into a fight when they are prepared for it and you accept losses in those battles, but you are not willing to dump your men. That is very noble and that is the reason why this whole colony follows your lead. For the concubines you are better than anything they expected after their pick-up.”

“If you ever tell this to anyone I’ll order the wipe-out of your entire memory,” the Governor growled.

“Oh, oh, time to go,” Winnie said. “He’s obviously cured and on course again.”

Things had changed a lot on Vandergast in the past year. A whole mountain was eaten up by replicators. They had created thirty cargo-lifter shuttles that were each able to lift 800 tons of freight off planet. They had created sixteen haulers that were able to transport 10,000 tons and had an old-fashioned FTL engine, good enough for interplanetary transport but too slow for effective interstellar travel. They had created the geostationary space station that was now orbiting Vandergast. People had been trained as pilots, scanner specialists, mining engineers, facility administrators and other new jobs. While a few key positions were reserved for sponsors, the main contingent was filled with concubines.

Six months ago there had been a small crisis. A lot of Marines had been jealous of their concubines who had something useful to do while the Marines were sitting around waiting to be called for battle. The problem was solved by letting Marines join the program as supernumeraries. That opened the way for six-hour shifts and two free weeks every month. The only stipulation set by the Governor was that at any time the industry had to be able to run without the Marines. It was easily fulfilled. The Governor was still hoping that ‘his boys’ would fight the Sa’arm soon.

The next project had been building a shipyard at the Lagrange-point L3 of the moon of Vandergast. The resources for that were not coming from Vandergast or its moon, which was only a useless silicate rock. The haulers were carrying replicators and the material for small warehouse stations to various asteroids. The last part of the puzzle was a hydrogen mining station at the ice planet Van-5. The mining at the surface of the planet was fully automated. The hydrogen was stored in five-ton pressure tanks and carried through a local transporter nexus to a geostationary storage station. From there a hauler would carry the hydrogen to the fuel station at the shipyard near Vandergast.

At the end of the year they had created their first Africa Class Destroyer and five Castle Class Corvettes, ready to be taken into battle whenever the Navy or Fleet Auxiliary was able to send transfer crews.

Currently the replicators were turning out automated armed battle platforms like crazy. Fred Fish was working on the design for the first Vandergast fleet vessel. Fred had abandoned the idea to take the plans for an old ship and modify it. All those ships had been designed for specific races and specific uses. None of them would really be a fit for the humans and their use of it. The newly designed ship was a heavy transport, 450 meters in length. It would be equipped with a modern and an ancient FTL engine, a set of ion thrusters and two ancient fusion power plants. More than three quarts of the ship’s volume was used for the machinery. That still left more than enough room for passengers, freight and shuttles. The final design had 560 cabins for crew and passengers and two hangars for a shuttle and 12,000 tons of freight each in containers. Sixty crewmen would be needed to man the ship. A hundred crewmen would be there to handle four-hundred passengers from Earth.