The people and butlers who’d been operating kiosks on Diplomat were mostly now living on the liner, and had actual retail and office premises on the station. The corridors were half covered in dirt, to allow plants to walk more comfortably. The station itself was divided into an Imperium sector, and a Trixone sector, the latter mainly being dirt floors. It had no rifts of any kind.
My orders were to use it as a home base for now. The diplomats were hammering out an agreement for a Trixone presence on the station, and as soon as proper exchange rates had been put in place, leasing of space to the locals would begin, as would local freighters being able to start docking. There was already a bidding war going on for shuttle services between our station and the Trixone one, for traders either not willing to dock at our station, or for some reason not allowed to.
Half the docking was for Trixone ships, or their vassals, and the freight handling had an extra level to it, where anything destined for the Imperium was loaded into containers, and anything coming from the Imperium was unloaded before being moved to the docks. There was of course going to be a charge on the container rentals.
Before I set us going on our first patrol, several freighters jumped in, and I recognized them as being mine.
They had “Bud’s Boxes – We move anything anywhere.” on the sides, in large letters, in several languages.
I face palmed when Serena zoomed a screen in one of them.
Twenty Seven
Serena and the team ran the squadrons ragged.
I let her run the bridge, and retreated to my ready room. As we moved around the cluster, all the squadrons were jumping out and in, and moving into and out of different formations, none of them the same as any other at any one time. The squadrons of pilots new to actual ships at first had trouble not colliding with each other, and the AIs had to jump them out of trouble quite a few times. But they settled down after a while.
In the meantime, I looked for what the comnavsats were telling us in the way of planets, shipping, and possible problems or threats. There were a lot of Trixone fleets, but all of them were in orbit of a planet, and a lot of them were militia ships smaller than a destroyer, which still made them bigger than ours. Not much of a threat in the general scheme of things though.
On the other side of the closed off jump points, Rawtenuga fleets were still on the move, still finding themselves blocked, and obviously looking for a way in we’d missed. There was still a titan transport in the area, and it appeared to be heading towards what I knew was an inhabited planet. We knew almost nothing about who inhabited it though, as the comnavsat freighter hadn’t yet seeded the whole system.
“Leanne?”
“Bud?”
“Can you get me a call with Jane?”
“Sure. Now?”
“If she’s available.”
“Hold on.”
I blinked twice, and Jane’s head and torso popped up on my desk.
“What can I do for you, Commander?”
“Can you re-task your comnavsat freighter out here to put a comnavsat in orbit of the inhabited planet the titan transport is heading towards?”
“Why?”
“So we know if we need to go help them or not. Maybe contact them, and see if they want help?”
“You think they might?”
“I don’t know. I think we should check.”
“Can you deal with one of those on your own?”
“Possibly. I’d need to think about it.”
“You think about it then. We don’t have any backup for you at the moment. I will get the comnavsat laid for you. Anything else you want?”
She sounded bothered, but I didn’t let it put me off.
“Any chance we have a station in poor repair we can use as a real training ground for dinosaur actions? The training courses don’t really cut it, and the pilots I have simply don’t have the experience of anything to apply to what the courses can provide. Sending them into an actual station environment, and having them fight real dinosaurs would be much better training.”
“We could use the same thing,” said a female voice, I didn’t recognize. “We could set it up for any species we want to practice a station situation against. Come to think of it, if we’re wishing for things, we could use a few of those titan transports for ourselves.”
“We don’t have any spare stations,” said Jane. “If you find an abandoned one, by all means appropriate it. If you find one with purely dinosaurs on it, by all means take it, if you can. And likewise, if you can take a titan transport without completely destroying it, the general will be in your debt.” She didn’t say which general. “We won’t hold your breath though on that one. But if we’re going to do realistic dinosaurs for such a real station training facility, we’re going to need an actual dinosaur body to dissect. So far, no-one has bothered to collect one.”
“That I can do.”
I zoomed the navmap into my penal planet, and looked at the area where I’d dropped the dinosaurs in. And yes, there was a body unmoving, a distance from the others. It looked relatively intact. I pinged Leanne for a plan of where Jane was, received another screen with a floorplan showing me where on a station she was, and an empty space away from the occupants, and with a thought, I moved the body there.
It occurred to me about a second later, that hadn't been a good idea.
“Bloody hell!” exclaimed the Imperator.
I don’t know who cut the channel, but it ended, and I sat there for a moment.
Three women laughing their heads off came through the door from the bridge.
“Guess who’s never getting another promotion?” roared Serena.
I face palmed.
Twenty Eight
“Damnit!”
“What?” asked Leanne, even though I could hear her still laughing out on the bridge.
“I meant to ask when we were getting the new sidearms.”
“Shall I reconnect you?”
Her laugh intensified out on the bridge, even though the other two were starting to wind down.
“No, don’t do that.”
“We did get new combat suits.”
“Why new ones?”
“Changing the arm stunners to meson blasters took a lot of doing, apparently. It was easier to issue us with new ones, than to change the existing ones. They came in with the station last night.”
“So not just a matter of swapping arms?”
“No. They had to improve the power supply as well. The meson guns have their own power storage, and just take a top up from the suit after every pulse. But the new arm variants have no storage of their own, and so are taking all their power from the suit.”
“So running the suits out of power is a real thing?”
“Probably not in terms of a station boarding or a single ground action, but yes, it’s an issue.”
“Do we have enough for all the pilots?”
“Yes. Even all the cats have special cat versions. Someone was planning this for a while, even if it happened suddenly.”
Jane. Had to be. Of course, she’d know the feeling among fighter pilots all too well, and know exactly what Eagle was up to.
“Do they have a reserve?”