“Thorn left me well off. He wasn’t military and never did understand technology. There’s a lot I can do that he never realized needed doing. And sooner or later my people will form a proper government, and start asking for tax. That will feed them funds for what our society needs.”
“That’s pretty well the way Jon is running things now. The tax he pays is keeping the new Haven nation afloat. That will change in time, but it will take time.”
“Longer for my people I suspect. Thorn was supporting them in ways no-one ever thought about. Even him being a judge was partly to keep medical technology up to date for our people, without which we’d have lost a few more mages after the time line shift. Stupid thing was, he could have just bought it all outright. Which does bring up an issue.”
“What?”
“Hubaisha currently has a decent, if small, shipyard going down on the planet on an uninhabitable continent. She’ll be moving the new ships down there for work. Any chance you can hide the movements?”
“Yes. You know I hid the line of comnavsats behind Rogue. Hiding ships is not difficult. Anything else?”
She looked at me expectantly.
“Hubaisha will need access to specs for things like mosquito and torpedo launchers, and our latest missiles. We’ll also need the crystals, or a version large enough for such large ships. And jump drives.”
“The jump drives are not yet available to anyone but Imperium military. But I’ll convince Jon your new fleet can be an off the books auxiliary unit. Or maybe black ops. Either he’ll supply them to you on the basis your fleet goes where it gets told to when the need arises, or we’ll set a price for you to buy them. They won’t be cheap. You’ll probably have to do crystals yourself, or get your own mages involved in creating them. The launchers are Imperium tech being supplied to Imperium members, so there is no problem there.”
“Didn’t my freighter ships converted to be ferries get jump drives?”
“Yes, but they’re all now being used to move millions of people who are not paying for the trip. Eventually you’ll get them back for your own uses, but I didn’t have enough of my own ferries for the commitments we made to move people. I’m essentially renting your ships for the price of leaving the jump drive on them after. It’s also going to be a long time before you get them back. The freighters resupplying your current base had the jump drive supplied as part of the freight contract.”
She paused for a moment.
“If you want to convert a few of those dinosaur ships to be ferries, I’ll gladly use them. I don’t have enough ships for the number of people I need to move. One of those battleship hulls could move entire populations in one go, although admittedly, getting everyone on board would take a huge amount of time. But if I borrow a rift mage, we could fill them up faster. Anyway, just one of those ships would help.”
“Okay. You can have a prototype and see if it works or not. Oh. I told Hubaisha to rip one of the Rawtenuga ships apart, and reverse engineer everything she could. Haven shipyard will get the results of that.”
“That will help Jon with his decisions. And frankly, Bob and his people don’t have the time, so someone else doing it is a good thing. Are you planning on building a proper space shipyard?”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Well, the Imperium needs all the ships we can build. If you can afford it, I’ll have Bob quickly scale up the bays we used for the Explorer upgrades, tack them onto the needed shipyard modules for a new yard, and send them to Hubaisha. She can probably build the first one on the ground and assemble it in space, and then do what Bob did originally, which is build a second bay, and the first bay builds a ship, while the second bay builds a new bay. The new bay builds a new bay, while the other one builds a ship. In your case, the bays get used to upgrade the ships you appropriated. Takes longer to do ships, but after a while, you have a big shipyard turning out what is needed.”
“Get Bob to send all that to Hubaisha as well. She’s probably going to have to clone herself a shipyard manager, as it will turn into a full time job.”
“You do realize this will be fantastically expensive?”
“Why so?”
“You can’t just appropriate the resources the way Jon did. He owned the systems of Hunter’s Run, so there was no issue then. He’s doing it now out of sheer necessity, but that will come to an end when our new government decides to end it, and make the Imperium pay its way. Your people might not notice now, but some time someone will, and then there will be serious accusations of ripping off governmental resources for private benefit.”
“No doubt. Especially if I piss off politicians and civic bigwigs by not doing what they want. Still, that won’t be all that difficult for either of us to solve.”
“How so?”
“We find a system with the right resources which no-one is claiming, and isn’t ever going to be claimed. We cut it off from entry by anyone without a jump drive, and we use it for what we need.”
Her mouth was hanging open.
“And you know of any systems like that?”
“The one we found yesterday might be useful. The locals are dead, and the system is cut off. The planet was marginal, and now the main continent is irradiated and stripped bare by bombardment. All it needs is a proper survey, and then move the existing mining operations there, with a rift linking the systems up.”
“We’d need another one, if you go the full shipyard route. The added bonus would be when you sell a new ship to the Imperium, we won’t need to pay as much for it. There are issues though. If we start claiming and mining systems, corporates will want to do the same thing. So it requires thinking about. Tell you what. You can have the system you just discovered. I’ll get the Apricot Mapping Service to survey it at our cost, to make sure there are no unknown jump points, and to check if what you need is there. That solves your problem immediately, and Jon can bring the issue up for the council to discuss. They need to deal with the real issue of shipbuilding anyway, as Jon is paying for everything himself, even if he is using Haven resources as his own.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“It is, and no-one has wanted to get that ball rolling. In our case, we have several systems in our space which could be turned over to the Imperium as resource assets. I’ll talk to Jon.”
She looked at me for a few moments.
“You do realize,” she went on, “that when you finally make Commander, you might be assigned a Chaos class you actually make yourself, and when you make captain, it might be one of your own built Rogues you get.”
She was grinning.
“That’s a long time off.”
“Perhaps. But it should be an incentive to build a shipyard capable of building whatever it is you want to fly in the future.”
She had a point.
Thirty Four
“Hubaisha?”
There was no answer.
“I know your listening.”
“Damn,” she said, popping up in front of me.
Jane had gone, and left me thinking. Since I was technically stood down for the rest of the day, I could do some thinking about what we’d just discussed. Now I needed to action a few things.