“Nice and high up?” he grinned.
“Yes. No need to freak people out by making it look like it’s about to fall on them.”
We all laughed at the joke.
“Someone mentioned barbeque?”
We showed Bob out to the eating area, but I motioned Hubaisha to return to the office.
“Was all that on the level?”
“As far as I can tell. I’ll supervise the move, and should be able to get started on the disassembly of the first ship, which will also give me enough experience to start redesigning what you want. Jane’s ship will come next. She can’t tell me what she wants until she has specs of what is already there to work with. So those come first. They have included what we need to turn a real ship back into specifications.”
“Fine. Keep me updated on progress. There was something else I wanted to ask you.”
“Yes?”
“Why Hubaisha?”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time. And I quite like it.”
“Only quite? Why I ask is our ship AIs changed their names and appearances recently to what they wanted. I don’t want you stuck with something you don’t completely like.”
“Well that’s really nice of you Bud, but I chose my own body, and liked the name.”
“Do you mind a suggestion?”
“Of course not.”
“Long was a ship name, and she changed her name to Leanne. Hub on the front of yours kind of labels you as a station AI. But Aisha is a girl’s name. Just have a think about it.”
“I will.”
The sound of my team turning up, and people reacting in various ways to Metunga, ended that conversation as we both moved outside to see what was going on.
Horror on the part of young relatives turned to delight, as Metunga went down on all fours, and was soon carrying children around on his back.
Woof on the other hand had gone straight to the barbeque, and the smell of cooking meat began to infuse the air.
The fact he was standing on a box to get up high enough didn’t seem to faze him one little bit.
Thirty Six
The team and I left the party in full swing.
Bob vanished after eating, and we lingered for a while, but the island was out of sync with standard time, and with sunset still hours away, we left the families to their fun. Some of them were going on to Janes for a while, but I needed to do some real work before I went to bed. We had a mission to start in the morning, and I had no clue how or where to start it. Serena decided to go shopping, and Jill changed her mind and went with her. So I wound up back on Judge in my ready room, in an otherwise empty ship.
The mission was simple. Find where the Rawtenuga were coming from, and stop them. But although we suspected they were coming across an area of space called Long Bar from one of the big arms of the galaxy, we didn’t know for sure. We knew where some fleets were, and the area we knew about was growing, but until we found a planet with actual Rawtenuga civilians on it, we’d have no idea the real direction to go.
We did have decent maps of this area of space though, care of the local station we’d saved. And Jane had plotted all the known destroyed fleets so far, with the known moving ones pretty obvious on the navmap. But fleets had been appearing on the nav map from too many vectors to get any real aiming point for a search.
My other worry was how many fleets were being sent, and how much damage they’d do while I was mucking around searching. And there was a big area to search. I had Leanne overlay an actual map of the galaxy in terms of known suns, regardless of if they had jump points in their systems or not, and started from a galaxy wide perspective. After zooming in and moving the focus to where we were, I could see the arms at this end of the core better, and this gave me a perspective on the area needing searching.
As I zoomed it in further, the jump point network, as known by someone, started appearing, along with the crosses which indicated jump points blocked, and more than a few which had been diverted and I hadn't known about, especially on the newcomer spine. There was something about that which bothered me, but for now, I didn’t need the diversion, so I put it aside for when I had time to ponder it.
A small zoom in again, and the location of the existing dinosaur fleets showed up, and the fact they were moving around our closed cluster on all sides.
I sighed. That was a lot of fighting someone had to do, and it was only going to get harder the longer they were allowed to rampage through Trixone space. That wouldn’t have bothered me all that long ago, and in fact, an enemy to occupy the plants was exactly what the center of the galaxy needed at this point.
But now I knew about civilian Trixone, and all the species they lived in harmony with, albeit technically being overlords, but just looking at traders told you it wasn’t much different here to the Imperium in the way people interacted with each other.
And that was a big problem.
“Leanne?”
“Bud?”
“Is Admiral Jedburgh available for a quick meeting?”
There was a short pause.
“He is. He said give him five to get to an office.”
I suddenly realized I was still in shorts, and shifted back into uniform. The admiral popped up on my desk a few minutes later.
“You needed something, Commander?”
“A little clarification, sir.”
“How little?”
“I understand my orders, but I believe your people call it looking for a needle in a haystack. I could use some direction in how to start.”
“Good. I was wondering when you were going to ask. Do you see any starting points?”
“Only the fleets we know about, and the ones which will appear as the network expands, or they enter the network somewhere. But if I follow my orders to the letter, all I can do is follow the trail they represent until I find a planet with Rawtenuga civilians on it, and then try to pick up the direction they come from, by using their traders to follow.
I paused, but he said nothing.
“But if I do that, the fleets I leave behind me will continue to cause havoc, and there is nothing here to stop them destroying more planets like the last one we found.”
“True. What is it you want to do?”
“Find all the fleets in Trixone space, destroy most of them before they can do any more damage, and rift the last couple back where we know some of them come from, and after I block up the jump points behind them, see if one of the fleets will lead me to their homeworld, or at least an outpost.”
“But?”
“They are drawing significant resources from the military Trixone, which might otherwise be sent our way. And if we remove their reason, they all keep coming at us again.”
“We have no knowledge of their movements before the Rawtenuga showed up, and it is very possible all the fleets heading in your direction now were already going that way towards some of their no-go areas. If we remove the threat, they might just resume their assaults on already well defended clusters. And if we do remove the threat, we make substantially more friends to help try and get the military plants to stop attacking us.”
“You can’t know that, sir.”
“No, but the diplomats say we are making inroads into opinion in other plant systems, just by demonstrating what trade is available both ways. The Ralnor have products some of the rats want, for example. But to get them, they need peace.” He shook his head for a moment. “Never ceases to amaze me, but the pursuit of profit always rears its ugly head wherever you go, and it’s not just a human thing.”