I sent a vid and battle feeds to Admiral Jedburgh’s aide, in which I recommended any ground forces allocated for squadron support include at least one dragon or wyvern unit, if at all possible. I also suggested we needed meson based heavy weapons for said dragon and wyvern troops, and for Fina and Dorm in any case. The dinos hadn't had any form of armour on, but if we had enough battles with them on the ground, they would start equipping themselves better. At which point, we needed more than teeth and talons to counter it.
Almost immediately, a message came in from Admiral Jane, forwarding a request from Arthur’s trader friends. They’d changed course as soon as they’d heard we’d taken a station back from the Rawtenuga, but hoped we could speed up their journey. Jane had recommended rifting them in.
The message had a location, and it was inside our comnavsat network. In fact, since yesterday, the freighter dropping the satellites had filled in the whole cluster we’d sealed off, and was working on the area around it. I brought up a navmap, zoomed it in until I could see exactly where the ship was, and put a rift in front of it, coming out about a half hour away from the station at their current speed. It took a minute before they changed course once through, so I guessed there was a surprise factor to moving systems in a blink, even when you’d asked for something like that to happen.
It took another few minutes before a channel opened, showing me the rat captain, and the frog standing next to his seat.
“We thank whoever was responsible for moving us,” said the rat.
“You’re welcome.”
The frog whispered something in the rat’s ear.
“You appear to have been promoted?” asked the rat.
“I was. Thank you for noticing.”
“Do we thank you for our rapid transit?”
“You do, but the request came from Jane.”
“We see you have two ships docked at the station. Are we allowed to visit them?”
“You are allowed on one of them. It is promoting some of our trade goods, particularly food and alcohol, and anyone may visit it. The other is accommodation for trader’s representatives, here to find trade. You’ll find them on the station. I would presume the station has ways of letting our people know if you want to meet with some of them on your own ship, or you can meet them on the station.”
“Excellent.”
The frog had a big grin on its face, the rat was rubbing its hands together.
“Perhaps we’ll see you on the station?” asked the frog.
“Perhaps.”
“Then for now,” said the captain, “we repeat our thanks, and let you get on with your business.”
I nodded to them, and the channel closed.
“Message from Hubaisha,” said Leanne, through room coms.
“Play it.”
“You can speak to her live if you want.”
I’d forgotten we had live coms with my home system. Even though it was a long way from Haven, the rifts made real time talk possible. Which triggered another thought.
“Leanne?”
“Yes, Bud?”
“Why have we been losing touch with the network when we go outside it?”
“Why wouldn’t we?”
“We have rifts back to Haven station open all the time.”
There was silence, and I let it hang there while she figured out how to answer that.
“Okay. I’m officially the dumbest AI, ever.”
“Why?”
“Because that was so obvious, it never occurred to me. We get the feeds through the main sensors. No-one, not even Jane thought to focus the sensors on internal rifts.”
“So that makes all AIs dumb, not just you.”
She laughed.
“I won’t suggest that to Jane.”
“No, better not. It also means we have a direct link to my home planet, and the station via the beach link on my island. So yes, real time conversations are possible.”
“You do that, while I figure out how to subtly tell all the ship AIs to start including internal rifts as com channels.”
“That should take all of a millisecond, shouldn’t it?”
“How long did it take you to learn subtlety and diplomacy?”
“I’m still working on it.”
“Exactly.”
I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t.
“Open me a channel to Hubaisha then.”
A full figure, if somewhat downsized from the original, popped up on my desk, causing me to have to look up.
“Whoa,” I said. “How about a resize, please.”
The image changed to being head and torso, so it now looked like she was sitting on the other side of the desk from me, except she was in fact sticking out of the desk.
“What took you so long?” she asked.
“Ramifications of rifts.”
She laughed.
“I wondered how long it would take for anyone to notice that.”
“You knew?”
“It was pretty obvious. I keep track of you wherever you are, and the first time you vanished off the navmap in Long Water, I didn’t lose contact with you.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” said Leanne, still using room coms.
“Why would I? I’m a station AI. Not my place to tell you ship AIs anything, especially when you should have figured it out yourselves.”
“Let’s not go there,” I suggested. “Was there a reason for wanting to talk to me?”
“Of course. There is a rumour going around the station AIs at the moment that there is consideration being made to sending a Trixone station we captured early in the war, over your way. And the station in question is getting a lot of work done on it at the moment, so it seems like it might be true.”
“And?”
“Think about it. If they send a station, it will be so your locals can dock at a station we control. But they won’t want a rift into the system, either for ships, or connected to the trade network, because of the danger of it being used to attack Haven. So they’re going to need to transfer goods to and from this station using contracted freighters.”
“And?”
“So do you want me to bid on the contracts?”
“Do we have enough freighters?”
“I’m still working on the last of the derelict hulls, but yes, we do. More freighters than I can use in our local space anyway. I was working up a request for you to move some of them, but this is better.”
“They won’t be any use without jump drives.”
“True, but the Imperium will need to supply them for whatever ships get used, so it’ll be part of the contract. And I’m pretty sure they’ll prefer to use your ships in preference to civilian shipping outfits, given jump drives are not yet authorized for sales to civilians.”
“Okay, fine. Put in a bid, or at least, let whoever is organizing it know we want to put in a bid. Anything you need from me?”
“Other than the decision to go forward, no. Although, I noticed you dumped a lot of broken hulls into a system recently. Any chance of claiming some of them?”
“None of them have intact drive sections. And even if they did, they don’t maneuver like ours do. It would take a lot of work to get them usable.”
“What else do I have to do?”