Chapter 95A

This area of the galaxy had stellar systems much more dispersed on average than areas closer toward the centre. It was also closer to our neighbouring dwarf galaxy that seemed to have a great many nasty beings living there. They may not all be bad but the surviving ones must certainly be strong to have remained among the living. With death and destruction coming this way in more than wholesale lots I started to make more of the relative class ships and their smaller brethren. They could move fast enough in their patrol area to warn me of an approaching ship or fleet.

All this was accomplished with Mom and Bennechi going on patrol with me to the many abandoned bases or to ships Mom and I had coopted. The AIs or Tandra were building the ships very quickly, with me only moving the computer further back into the maze. We had not found out yet how to have Mom do this task even though she could link to the many computers from the maze itself.

We had worked out some of the problems of producing some of the better crystals by putting the fabrication facilities in the maze. This was not without difficulty because the physics we were used to was not the same here. We did find enough workarounds that it became practical. Our communicators were made this way as were all the improved crystals our Empire needed to survive.

After the small ships were able to move their thinking apparatus into the maze we found that I could do my part in only two minutes. The days were long and I went back to Mom and Bennechi only to sleep. The number of ships and bases were only a few metres apart in the maze and in the course of twenty hours I was able to get 570 units processed.

I did this for three days before Mom called me from this task. "Henry, I think we have a Thonas system ahead." I left the current ship I was working on and walked the twenty metres to one of our ships.

Mom gave me the data and I could see that there was a considerable amount of shipping here. The only way we remained undetected was because we used the Misto or the Fassoot senors that worked at a much greater range.

The Thonas had always been a thorn in the side of any race weaker than them. They were completely xenophobic in nature with no redeeming qualities I could see. The Tandra had spent millions of years and even billions of lives and I could not find any reason to keep them alive beyond their flawed ethics. The Tandra agreed to let them live though as long as they stayed on their planets. This never lasted for long.

I was going to be much more stringent than the Tandra empire had been. I asked Mom to make a very powerful gun for me. It could be used in only one place and that was the maze. It would shoot one of three rounds of antimatter. To do so in any other place would not allow me to remain alive after firing the first shot.

Sleep claimed me and I had nightmares about being like the current three members of my major opposition. It looked like I was becoming more like them in the way I wanted to prosecute the war. When I awoke, the gun had been completed and I had to make a serious commitment whether to use it or not.

The weapon looked very insignificant but even the smallest shell I had would be as powerful as a hydrogen bomb. The largest ones were even more deadly. A shielded container held the various sized shells and either a one, two or five grams of the dangerous substance could be expelled. A one second delay in the individual shields allowed more than one projectile to be expelled before the first exploded.

As I had done with the Misto, I now did to the Thonas. This time the effort would be much less. I walked into the Tandra maze and found the area I opened to the area used by the Thonas. This had been a long time coming. I felt much more like a pest exterminator than a murderer. The thoughts of being like the Thonas, Misto or Fassoot more than just occurred to me again but I fought the thought off. It was an agonising decision that I had come to since I first ran into the Thonas but it was something I knew had to be done.

I started in one area and found thousands of small dimples. I just put my weapon to the area and used my mind to activate the trigger and expel a small amount of antimatter. This time I was going to use the smallest loads to just destroy the computer and the area around it. The Thonas that survived would soon learn to not build computers if they wanted to flourish. The computer though was what allowed them to prosecute their vendetta.

After the first shot the dimple disappeared as if there were no computer there now. The larger dimples meant larger computers and a correspondingly larger mass of antimatter. My hand was able to go very fast and usually I was able to get two shots per second. After an hour I had to switch hands and continue after reloading the weapon.

Looking back to the area I had just done made me realize just how many Thonas communities there were. Many were ships, residential or manufacturing concerns but all got the same treatment. I figured that I killed very little with my weapon but many more would die now without the computer assistance. In later years they would settle down to a simple but stable existence that would only require a periodic inspection by me to see if another computer had been built. My only fear was that they would learn the way they were being harassed and build another type of computer. They knew how to make the Tandra variety and many others too.

When I came out of the maze for some much needed rest and food, I found that there was little in the way of a time penalty. My weapon had little to do with the various computers and time was almost linear. The family talked to me but they didn't know what I was doing. Mom had transmitted images of us searching various systems in this general area. The Thonas colony was still before us. I had not got to this location yet through the maze.

Mom gave me information about our forces observing some Samutz and Thonas forces around a planet not yet taken. The Thonas ships were suffering explosions within their hulls equal to an atomic weapon. The hull usually contained the explosion but there was not much chance that there was anything remaining alive within. Another explosion on the planet's surface did rupture the containment vessel but little else was damaged.

After a rest I went back to work. It was actually three days later that the planet before us suddenly found themselves under attack. Every ship emitted some gamma radiation then nothing. Some ships had ruptured but most had not. The planet's surface was the same way and I saw that I must have used three hundred charges in this area and it was only one planet. Some outlaying posts suffered similar problems and I knew that any survivors would have to get home on manual.

There were thousands of planets but some were unimportant. I did find some dark dimples which I felt compelled to peek into. I had enough practice with this computer to find my way around. Some were dead units on dead ships or installations. These were spared so that I could find out more about them later.

Others locations were being run on minimal power. Interfacing with the sensors I found the majority of the ship to be in stasis. This gave me a hint to how the Thonas came back so well after each and every war. They would harbour some ships and crew in out of the way locations. Periodically they would awaken to inspire the Thonas living under the control of the Tandra to go to war one more time. None of these locations were spared.

One location toward the end of this section of the maze was much more isolated than the rest. I had to assume that it was far out on one of the arms of the galaxy and trying to keep isolated. Thousands of small dimples surrounded the cancerous looking hole. The large hole got the largest charge yet because I knew that it was so large that it needed all of this destructive force to destroy it. Some of the smaller dimples close by winked out too as their computer was wrecked. The remainder of the dimples though got my attention till they were completely done.

One more day was all it took to clean the Thonas area. On the way back I only spotted one new dimple and that was removed too. I would have to come back here quite often I feared or they would start to spread one more time like a cancerous growth.

Mom and the rest of the AI family were spreading substrate in every direction. Soon I would have to walk on it to get from one place to another. If the substrate was encouraged to grow into the Thonas area she could keep track of each and every addition. If the Thonas made Tandra computers then they too could be detected and silenced. This process was beginning to snowball and in perhaps as little as fourteen months every Tandra computer in the entire galaxy would have been covered.

The Samutz too were on the decline. They used Tandra equipment and Mom and all the other computers were building substrate to line all of the Tandra section of the maze used by them too. Our policy of allowing the Samutz to live till we knew more about them had continued. They still fought the Moldeg and other even nastier races. The Samutz bent on the conquest for conquest sake had their ships taken from them and the survivors put into stasis. The ships now gave us additional eyes and ears to what was happening in our ever widening view of the galaxy.

I even toyed with the idea of letting the Samutz fight for us now that we were much more technologically advanced but dropped the idea quickly. Too many Tandra died under their care and other races were needed to run the ships for them. Susan I knew would really give me a problem with this. Even the chance of using the Samutz as infantry that would get killed off did not sit well.

The Kadork had a similar situation happen to them and most were completely oblivious to this. Their computer though was now really part of the Alliance and any serious matter was brought to our attention. We had stopped two Moldeg evasions and seven more in other systems. Usually we had some of the small peaceful creatures with us and some now served on Alliance shipping. These were usually rotated with others that patrolled with their own ships. This gave them the training they needed and gave us some very dedicated workers that saw their Human or Tandra captain as the equivalent of their queen.

The Bintuu queens now enjoyed much more security but there was still a good portion of their worlds left to incorporate into our union. The queens here liked to talk I found and much of it was conversations that would be heard over a fence in any Human neighbourhood. This gave me a good feeling that they were fitting in so well and their differences were not so bad.

The T'aut, Dolson and other races we ran into were usually given a job if they could handle the interaction with another race. In any case they were repatriated if possible and with a few ships stationed nearby to provide some sort of protection. The Softay and to a lesser extent the T'aut were the only ones that had their own computer systems. Invariably they were of Tandra origin though.

Some races learned to coexist like the Dolson and the Kadork. To be honest the Softay and T'aut worked well with the other two races very well because they were not that aggressive.

Humans were the ones I thought had to be watched but after they accepted the Tandra culture as their own, they became much like the former but just a bit more assertive. Cocky would also come to mind but they were shown up enough times to let them know that they were not top dogs anymore.

The Tandra though found that their leading position was in jeopardy and usually worked much harder now to stay there. A mixed crew did much better now than a strictly Tandra unless they had been around Humans enough to pick up their outlook. Young Matthew, Jeremy and Jonathan had proved enough that a mixture of all of the races working together would make the best crews possible. A few of the Softay and T'aut exhibited antipathetic tendencies to their old way of behaving. If this had happened a million years ago the Samutz would never have been able to subjugate their planets.

Our search for more hot spots was fairly uneventful after encountering the Thonas world. We didn't even find another of the Thonas systems with these beings living in them. We did find deserted bases. I assumed that these were just another of the systems hidden away for when they were needed.

The dark Thonas areas did give me a bit of joy. I went through the veil and into the remnants of the Thonas computer. I took four of the smallest probes with me. When I cast them out beyond the first hull I found that this was one of the many dead spots in the galaxy. It was also dead for many reasons. A major battle had taken place here at one time that seemed to have annihilated both the Tandra and the Thonas. There were at least a thousand Tandra ships in this area alone.

The probes flew out to make a survey. I did my own survey of the old Thonas ship and found none of the original crew in stasis. In all the Thonas ships I had ever dissected, I had only found a maximum of twelve units even in a large warship. This ship was at least a battleship and had none of the units. Thonas outlook on life, even their own, was not what we would have.

I went back to Mom and Bennechi to get more of the intelligent probes. The AIs in our group were able to give me seventeen possible places that this dead zone could be from records and observed data. With a bit more data the real one would emerge.

Two dozen more units went to this area and began their search and survey. Within an hour the choices were narrowed down to three and then we awoke one of the damaged Tandra ships. This one was already under imperial edict and didn't accept my orders.

Such ancient battles gave the Samutz and other races the Tandra war craft that allowed the new races a chance to expand. I now had many thousands of ships, but I didn't want any race to find these and begin their own empire by warring with us or any other group. The AIs though are considered sentient and I didn't want them just languishing here all alone.

The probes found a hundred and three ships in fair to good shape. Some had instigated repairs but had been ordered by the Tandra of the time to remain here in case the Thonas came to this area to recover their wrecks. Orders to leave after a certain time had been promised but had never materialized. The biological captains were just as shortsighted as the AIs sometimes.

We found almost three million Tandra in stasis but sadly, only three quarters of a million had survived do to breakdowns and the systems running out of fuel. This group of Tandra had seen battle but most Alliance crews had little actual experience in this. The veterans in stasis did represent a sizable force that could be used for may good purposes. Even though, just helping them now was important to us. Some of the ships had spare fuel but I had them make mining equipment instead. Though there was few stellar objects there was a lot of natural material around including some very cold planets.

I returned to Mom a day later with the location of the battle from one of the computers and a dedicated rebuilding project begun. Mom gave orders and soon a contingent of mixed races began to race to the ancient battle scene to give assistance. The Tandra would wake up with both Tandra and Humans helping them to get over their long sleep.

I explored the other dark Thonas dimples but only found dead ships. They had died in small battles or were actually part of the original large battle we had already found. A salvage operation was started and the original biological and mineral material was scooped out of the computer and a Tandra one started. If this worked well perhaps it could integrate itself with the rest of the ship and teach us a bit more about the Thonas and their odd technology.

A week passed and I wanted to see the family in person and we raced to Defren. Ingrid and Taylar had gone back to Earth rather than return here. I had a very enthusiastic welcome. Susan and Bassinda did their own reception later that left us all happy. Their abdomens had grown a bit but it was hard to tell. It took two days to get me to feel sated enough. The poor girls walked around bowlegged till I used the med units on them. I didn't have any complaints from them either. As usual we had Tandra voyeurs that met me later with a real hunger in their eyes. This was not proper conduct toward the Emperor but I liked it a lot better than the usual stuffy approach.

Mom and Bennechi had pulled a pod behind us containing the three metre crystal. It was too large to be carried in our ship and I could not tell everybody how it was really carted around. The computer could probably hold this large object but that too would give different kinds of problems. It was much better to continue this subterfuge.

In one of the computers on the planet's surface I started to make another two crystals in a matched set. They would be similar to the single crystal I had previously made. Their fabrication took an enormous amount of energy on my part and I had to rest in between. My two wives put aside the running of the planet and took to taking care of me. I thought the next day that I was more tired than when I just worked in the maze.

The second crystal was made eventually. I compared and tinkered with each to make them much closer than what the equipment could even detect. When I was done, the scientific community was given the set to run some experiments on. The first would be passive but soon enough they would be power added to both the transmitter and the receiver to see how much I could bend the inherent properties of each crystal. As it was, the pair would only work together if perfectly aligned and at a natural distance governed by the doping, size and crystalline structure. The energy provided would twist the crystals to see how much they could alter this distance.

One more crystal was made that mimicked the original crystal except for the properties I could alter with my mind. Even before this crystal was half done the scientists were euphoric with the two I had given them. The crystals worked faultlessly as a pair for over a hundred lights. Individually they went to 1,148 lights. This larger figure was great but it meant that something had to be in the exact place. It was like a very long road of fixed length that constantly moved with the crystal doing the transmitting.

When power was used on a single crystal the range went as short as 173 lights with a lot of power or to 6,490 when pushed to the maximum. The only way this information was found was because our intelligent probes went out and reported their locations before making a long trip back. If not done correctly the probes would not be able to be recovered. The practical distances turned out to be in the range of half of the natural distance of 1,148 to 3,623 lights or about three point two times more. This followed the usual transmitter physics found out millions of years ago.