Existential Threat: Chapter 4 Part 1 of 4 (Patreon)

Chapter: 4

08/07/2242

Dana checked over the last of her messages on her screen, looking up as she reached the security gate, human security guards checked scanners as people tapped their screens to the gates, running through biometric scanners before passing through to the armored rooms beyond.

She joined the Navy line, tapping her screen to the reader and passing through the scanner, passing the watchful guards wearing armor and clear face screen helmets, diodes illuminating their faces, relaying information to them.

[Suit 17-C-5]

She tucked the screen away, passing through several blast doors that would seal the area off at a moment’s notice. More in the walls that would release armed bots to defend the area.

People walked towards the scanners and out to the rest of the station, some chatting with one another, others stifling yawns, tired, or just waking up. All of them wearing Legion uniforms.

Dana turned down a corridor, bathrooms, kitchenettes with stocked fridges and sitting areas, even several sleeping quarters.

Past the amenities were rows upon rows of doors, people stepped out or into them, each identical to one another.

The noise of the hallway settled, people breaking up to go to their rooms, the many turning into a few.

“Here we are,” Dana tapped her screen against a door’s panel, it clicked unlocked and slid open. Lights illuminated the net suit that clicked and hissed with the sound of metal running against metal as it opened.

Dana pulled the zipper from her cuff down her arm, side and to the floor, slipping out of it she stored it in the room’s closet, she pushed her feet into the net suit’s boots, and her fingers into the gauntlets, feeling the scroll balls at the tips of her fingers she pressed them altogether.

Her net suit lined up with her sleeve’s ports, coolant running through the sleeve as it contracted and then relaxed, the suit closing around her and locking against her body as a third skin.

She rose on her arm from the cradle, breathing in the metal, the heated plastics, the chill of the recycled air, her helmet closed over her head, locking into place as she accessed the net.

>Biometrics confirmed.

>Welcome Admiral Huang.

Dana went through the list of lobbies, each one a different star-system or net-space.

>Joining Minnie’s Workshop

Dana appeared outside a cartoon website with a tow-truck waiting outside. She wandered around the side, opening the door to a garage turned living room. Comfortable couches ringed a coffee table with magazines covered in weapons, warships, tanks and all manners of war-tech.

Snores rose up from a large architectural drawing board.

Minnie shifted in her sleep, her feet not touching the ground from her chair.

A spanner dropped somewhere, pulling her out of her bleary sleep.

“Have to increased the ceramic pads! Attune with gems like a sapphire for defraction,” Her brain caught up with her state of wakefulness as she made notes on some weapon system she was building.

“Reactive blow outs, work with our ships, won’t work wit the others, humans all using nukes and rails.”

“Minnie?” Dana asked carefully.

Minnie looked over with one cracked eye, waved her hand in a ‘yeah I know you’re there, one second, make yourself at home’.

Dana, smiled, the architect of over two thousand ships. Manager of nearly a hundred shipyards, thousands of factories and nanite vats, and unapologetically herself.

Wasn’t everyday that the Iron Admiral got waved off for bothering someone else with their work.

Minnie yawned and stretched, dropping out of her chair to press her lower back and lean back. “Ouff, that feels gouod,” Her last words pulled by yawn.

Her avatar was a few inches over four feet, more cartoon than human. Red hair stuck out in tufts from her hat and oversized goggles on a jaunty angle.

She pushed her pencil over her ear into her hat.

Scuffed work boots, stained blue jean coveralls and a bright clean yellow shirt finished out her ensemble.

She looked ready to fight every person she saw, or wrap them in a hug and protect them, like a bear-a small bear.

She held up her hand a machine streaked across the floor, vibrating from stopping so suddenly next to her, holding out a cup of coffee.

“That’s a good boy.” Minnie patted the machine, letting out cooing noises in electronic before running off on its treads.

Into the ‘workshop’.

Beyond the garage ‘living room’ bays upon bays that disappeared into the distance, ships, bots, gear of all kinds, parts appearing and disappearing in just seconds. People called out to one another in a low rumble.

“Ah the good stuff,” Minnie just held her coffee for a moment, closing her eyes and looking up at the ceiling.

Dana watched the different bays, breaking Minnie’s rituals was to invite unholy wrath upon thyself. They respected one another’s quirks and silence.

Minnie took in a deep breath and let it out in an exhale. “Also I looked into reflective blow out panels you were talking about. I was thinking more like a shotgun of light reflective chaff.” She rested one hand on her hip, looking at the drawing on her desk. “Thing is, it’s a good idea but how useful?”

“Ah, fair, it will be useful in our fights against one another, but there are no other ships in the human arsenal that have a weapon that uses lasers or high energy weapons like us.”

“And none of the Builder blueprints got anything like it in them either. Not saying that we shouldn’t use them in the simulations, but also think that it be best to have as a template to build out, heck we can modify a rail cannon round to hold a bunch of say barium sulfate, test out metals shards and see what works best. It also got me thinking about maybe upping the punching power of the hellbore.”

Dana raised her eyebrow, she hadn’t even thought of increasing the power of the dreadful weapons.

“We add in focusing lenses, say cheap sapphire. We fire through that, really focus the attack even more. Sure the sapphire might crack but the nanites can fix it between attacks. At longer distances it goes wide to assure a partial hit, and then narrow, thin and targeted when in-close. Needs some kinks working out,” Minnie waved off her hand.

“How are we looking out in the secondary systems?”

“Mitch has his three farm planets, nearly two hundred asteroid eaters and five manufacturing planets. About three dozen systems with their cache locations building out larger operating bases.” Minnie nodded to herself. “On the offensive side we have six Armadas, all armed and ready to act as needed. We’ve got as many freighters in human space as we do between the dark systems. Then we have the three ‘bait’ fleets around Sphere World two in the Azirith system and in Orion system.”

“How are the ground forces updates?” Dana asked.

A grin stretched up one side of Minnie’s face. “Terrifying, we took the internal repair systems, upgraded armor from the fleet, updated their weapon systems and turned them into something going from useful to terrifying. The builders knew about building but they didn’t really know about war, didn’t know how to combine the things they had.”

“But the warships?”

“Sure they have warships, but internally they’re the same as freighters, but with redundant systems and honeycombed armor. Rail cannons aren’t exactly special or hard to make.”

“Like they knew how to convert fissile material into near instantaneous energy,” She let out a low whistle. “We started to wonder, ‘you know what, can we use what’s happening in the reactors of the ships in our weapons?’ That led to the V type rounds, all that bang, without any of the radiation. Then we started looking at how to direct that nuclear fury, which turned into the hellbores. We’ve just taken their tech and combined it with our knowledge of war, theorized through game or used in reality.”

There had been tens of thousands of games created throughout humanities history, wars and conflicts still broke out. While forces rarely fought in the real, it had never stopped, it had just changed to the net, bleeding off that desire to fight.

“You said that Mitch is still using miners, I though that he was going to use the nanites instead?”

“Complicated answer to that. Basically the nanites took too long digging through. Instead we came up with this.” An asteroid eater appeared in space. A square of compressed blocks and automated miners creating a wall of miner bits. Now there were several layers of more compressed blocks behind.

“Miners shred up the asteroids, then it passes through nanite layers, one that sorts, another that forges, creating ingots that are shoved into containers that are hauled to waiting freighters.”

The miner expanded to several times the size, the face quadrupling as the rear levels doubled.

“We can get much bigger than before, without using nearly as many factories. Also we don’t have to deal with the belt runs that were becoming an issue.”

“It’s like a layered sieve, rough materials in through one side and usable out the other end,” Dana said.

“Exactly, a Sally clone seed can run an eater with ease. We just have pilots to haul off the containers.”

“I hope that’s speeding up outfitting the Armadas?”