Chapter 12: Orbits and Influence

The dinner with the 'Fleet Officers' as I was thinking of them went well. Arden and Constantine were besides themselves with the excitement of finally getting to share their research with military thinkers, and the newcomers, though they had heard him speak during the history part of our presentation, were amazed to get a chance to meet an artificial being. Andy and Serenity were also a big hit, and not just because of their precociousness and their uniqueness.

In addition to Stephen Brenneman, Randall Tyler, Geoffry Symington and Victor Emanoff from Ambrose's recruiting, the Officers from Mor's efforts included Alic Resta, Hav Sheye, Tri Deov, and Grig Steprev from the Western Alliance and Franz Frel, Gurid Sprec, Iala Ianda and Tymon Bru from the Eastern States.

Dinner was the same fare as the crew on Cascade were getting. Prime rib, baked potato and salad. Pretty standard stuff, as was the dinner chatter.

We did not linger long after dinner, and we were soon all ensconced in the Arena. I had made everyone run through the security access ID process as we arrived. I wanted them to have free access, and encouraged them to take advantage of it.

Con and Arden had reconfigured one of the control rooms to something resembling a war room. We had what I could only call a Holo-Sphere, a globular holographic display that rose high above our heads. On one side of the room a more traditional flat display hovered above a long tabletop littered with displays and readouts. The walls as well were covered with monitors of various kinds.

"Welcome to the War Room." Con said as we gathered around the table.

"The central display can obviously be used to project spacial data, and that is its normal use, but we're going to use it as something of a 3D modeler for now." Arden said.

"First, in order to give you some idea of the range of information left for us by the Seekers, here are some examples of a few ships we won't be building anytime soon." Con said. As he did the display flickered and shifted, revealing a globular ship. "We call this one the Death Star, for obvious reasons. A reference to an Earth American movie, for our Taluat officers."

The screen flickered again and a long rectangular ship was on display.

"We call this the Super Carrier, and it is comparable to the ships the Sh'kxu have in low orbit." Con added.

"There are dozens of other ships in this range which we could show you, and they all suffer from one flaw." Arden said, as the display flickered through a series of ships of various shapes and sizes. "We would first have to build an orbiting space dock of almost unimaginable size and complexity in which to construct any of these ships. These ships represent the products of an advanced and existing space dwelling civilization, which we are not."

"Even with the advantages the Seeker gifts give us, we do not have the time, the resources, or the manpower to build a fleet that could challenge the Sh'kxu ships, assuming their ships do have weapons beyond the bombs which were dropped on the people of Precipice." Con said.

"What do we have that we can build then?" Victor Emanoff asked.

"We can build engines. We can build missiles and bombs of our own. We can build smaller craft, up to 1200 feet in length by 300 feet in diameter. We can provide stealth shielding for everything we can build, and if we have a Guardian aboard we have their ability to jump those ships instantaneously from point A to point B."

"And can any of the ships we can build take out any of theirs?" Tri Deov asked.

"No." Arden answered. "I'm sorry, but No."

"God Dammit!" Randy Tyler spat out. "We need some damned intel, and we need some time to think, and we need some serious alcohol intake. In inverse order!"

"I agree comrade." Victor said into the silence. "Lets go get drunk."

As they left, I looked at Arden questioningly.

"You seemed so bursting with good news during dinner. What happened?"

"They asked us the wrong question." Arden answered. "They asked us what we could build, not what we could do. If I'm ever going to be considered one of them, I'd better go get to getting drunk with them. Are you coming?"

I declined, for a couple of reasons, but mostly because I felt a little defeated by the meeting, and I didn't want to let these men see that. Instead I went home to my wife. Ginny consoled and comforted me. Passionately.

It was my turn to be awakened in the middle of the night. My internal clock said it was 4am when my cellphone began ringing. I grabbed it off the nightstand next to me and answered it.

"Dave!" It was Arden. He sounded very drunk. "How big an object can you jump?"

"I've always assumed that size didn't matter, as long as I could make contact with the object. And size probably doesn't matter if I can actually see the object, but I've never tried anything larger than a fully loaded PSP."

"Great! Okay! We'll have to do some testing then. See you in the morning! Thanks man!"

"Good night Arden. Get some sleep!"

Hung over, and with only four hours of sleep, if that, the entire group was at my doorstep at eight am sharp that morning. Only Con was his normal sharp and efficient self. I took pity on them all and used the Light to flush their hangovers away and give them all a wake-up boost.

"I can see why all these people like working with you Dave, if this is the kind of service they get!" Ducky Brenneman said over coffee and waffles.

Over vodka, beer nuts and karaoke last night - Karaoke! - they had hatched an idea, but that idea required the Light jumping skills of the Spirit Master class individuals. Right now that meant Me, Eru, Ria, Zaia and Ginny. I intentionally excluded Andy, Serenity and the other children who were Light aware. Andy and Ren quickly re-included themselves.

"You need us there for the testing, if not for anything else." Andy argued.

"What can you provide that makes you necessary?" I asked.

"Point of view. Perspective." Ren answered. "Don't forget that none of you were able to solve the sandbox problem until we showed you all the proper way to see."

The curse of precocious children strikes again. I looked at Ginny.

"All right." She said. "But only during the testing phase. You are not going to be involved in any aspect of the operation itself! And just you two. I will not make this kind of decision about anyone else's kids, and that includes yours Arden."

We had to stop there and explain the old sandbox game, and how we had learned to use the techniques that the kids were developing as part of a self-invented game, to build more subtle tracing and tagging mechanisms than we had thought possible.

"The Light signature of any object can be considered to be an information engram that is fractal in nature." Andy said.

"The level of information does not degrade as you follow the levels of recursion. Since it is Light, and not matter or normal energy, the recursive levels carry new information that is just as complete and accurate as those at the preceding level." Ren added.

"In theory you could follow the recursive layers of Light information back to the origin of the universe itself, but we found the work tedious and time consuming, so we haven't pursued it." Andy said. With a straight face.

With those precocious pronouncements, we entered the real research phase of what we called 'Operation Slingshot'.

The idea had begun with a semi-drunken comment from Iala Ianda, who had been in charge of The Western Alliance Near Space Defense Net, the Western Alliance's version of NASA, whose mission on Taluat was asteroid defense. According to the story as the group collectively told it, Iala had sighed and offered with bitterness tinged in her voice,

"We have an entire sky full of potential missiles, all sitting out there in the asteroid belt. Too bad we do not have a way to accelerate them to lethal velocities undetected. Too bad we don't have a way to deliver them close to their targets undetected."

Franz Frel had agreed immediately, pointing out that even the Taluat technology could provide motors which could turn an asteroid into a lethal missile, if only we could deliver it undetected.

Con had pointed out that the Seeker anti gravity engines we could build were at least three times as efficient as the Taluat ones and without the range limitations, and we did have the Seeker cloaking technology, but that it wasn't perfect, and couldn't cloak the gravity drives while they were in use.

"It is too bad we cannot build engines that can perform these facet jumps, like the Spirit Masters can, then we could do the accelerating in one facet, and then jump them through when they get close to the target." Geoff Symington had slurred into the conversation.

That had sobered Arden instantly, and refocused Con's attention. They had been forgetting about that possibility.

"We don't need to build jump engines." Arden had said into the despondent room. "We've got human jump engines!"

A PSP was modified that morning, its engines augmented to provide maximum thrust, and was launched for the asteroid belt around Pearl. Even with the speeds possible with the gravity engines, and crewless, minus the need to keep the speeds within the abilities of the g-force compensator, it was going to take a week for the PSP, designated 'Trebuchet', to arrive, decelerate and be on station.

In the meantime, things began to happen, and quickly. Several of the facets unfit for settling, were mineral rich and easy choices as sources for our raw materials.

We added two more teams to the Legion, full of familiar faces who had made it through the Soul Diver and Legion training sort of on the sly, as long term family projects. Team four was A.J., Sheb and Violet Halliday, and Brin Dolin. Team Five was Doc Aillard, Porter Burgess, and Nicco and Gianni Sabarte. Particularly the folks from Chocowinity were a big story in a way. They had found that being retired and the rejuvenation treatments we had been giving them didn't mix. It was also becoming apparent that the repeated exposure to the Light during the extensive rejuvenation sessions did indeed flip the switch in people when it came to the gifts.

Now that our Fleet Officers were on the job I sent Arden back to Legion Team One. With as many bodies and minds in place as possible for the moment, we began 'stealing' Preci from the Sh'kxu. We assigned a 'Spirit Master' to each of the five Legion teams and began working a random pattern across the face of Precipice. Ginny had a medical station up and running on Cascade, at a separate receiving station that had been built for the purpose.

The initial reports were that the Preci were a bit of the proverbial blank slate. There was just no predicting how the individual Preci would react to being free from their Sh'kxu masters. None of them had ever known anything else. At first, fully half of those we rescued were deemed unable to serve, and given a gentler path to reintegration. Most were farmed out the settlers on Meadow, where they could work at farming, something most of them knew, even if the crops and work conditions were not quite what they were used to. The farmers and ranchers of Meadow were urgently bumping their production up to the maximum to meet the needs of our growing army. Half of those eventually 'came through' within the first six months of freedom and asked to join the army. We would have been stuck with that percentage if it wasn't for Eru and Andy. They came up with something they called a persona recording of one of our earlier successes.

If there had been one among the Sh'kxu who tracked such things, he would have noticed that in the spring of the 197th cycle since conquest, the infant mortality rate among the Preci rose two whole percentage points, and accidental deaths and disappearances among adult Preci rose five percent. But no such being existed. When there is no chance to resist, why should you be looking for signs of resistance?

The only speed bumps in the blur that my life became were caused by four events.

The first was the birth of Borthun and Yela's baby, a boy they named Dave. I missed the actual arrival of my namesake by a couple of hours, but by the time I got there the baby and both parents were doing fine. Borthun was still a bit deer-in-the-headlights when I got there, but Yela was serenely happy. Ginny, Dad, Grandpa A.J. And I had been quietly filling a little nest egg for them from the Obsidian patent profits, and with Little Dave's birth we immediately doubled it, setting up a separate account for him. Actually two accounts, as we were building fortunes on Earth and Taluat now.