Starship Engineer

Chapter 134

When we entered subspace the Marine compliment had rotated with the exception of Abby. The Marines were glad to be home on the Void Phoenix. From the Marine’s conversations, I learned the tanker and battleship had a large dating pool but lacked the entertainment platforms of my ship. So that meant they missed Julie the most. The Sword and Sorcery game being at the top of their list. We had one extra Marine on this rotation. One of the recruits that Buckie had vetted and said was ready for his badger suit training. His name was Jackson Jones, or JJ for short.

On the first day of travel, I reviewed the fleet logistics. The situation just seemed weird to me. Me—overseeing fleet logistics. I was an engineer, not an admiral. Vicky Charity had prepared everything for me, so it was easy to read. Provisions were going to be a problem. We had just thirty days left, give or take two days on the battleship. The Void Phoneix and tanker were going to be fine. Cori had actually repurposed many of her cooking bots for agriculture. She was using the luxury deck promenade and two abandoned labs to grow. With our small crew of 21, she could grow about 20% of our needs with special fast-growing crops. Nero was processing fertilized from our human waste.

Was all this necessary? No. But it did give the crew a side project and pride in the fresh vegetables, tubers, and greens. Looking at the dense vegetation on the luxury deck, it was actually hard to remember hauling passengers.

My next headache was the fuel situation. If we did not get refueled in this next alien system, we had only one more subspace trip before running out. The damn battleship was a pig when it came to reactor fuel. I also had a standing order not to engage the maneuvering thrusters unless imperative for the safety of the ship. The beast of a ship took almost twelve times as much fuel as the Void Phoenix to make a subspace trip. It was definitely an incentive to equip the behemoth with phased emitters and fuel, but I did not want to waste time on the conversation of the ship. It was destined to be an orbiting station anyway.

I reviewed all the research data, Suruchi’s civilian reports, and Buckie’s Marine training reports. That was in addition to maintaining the FTL drives on my ship. I missed having Kara Briggs as an intermediary. Usually, in a staff meeting, she could boil down a ten-page report to two sentences. She made a request to take command of the battleship after it was transformed into an orbiting station over the habitable planet in the Bradbury system. We still needed to make that planet safe for colonization, but I approved her request. I wouldn’t need a first officer anyway. I was planning to stay.

The new Marine, JJ, was a natural in the badger combat armor. He was already scoring in the top 10% on all VR and real-world testing. He was still getting better as well. He was as good at piloting a suit as Zoe was at flying. I guess that was why they became a couple. I found the two of them having sex in the shuttle. Well, I didn’t find them, it was Julie who asked me to confirm the shuttle’s navigation suite had been replaced. Julie, the ship’s AI, was trying to be funny. JJ was embarrassed, Zoe swore at me, saying she hadn’t finished, and I was left as the bad guy trying to explain it was Julie’s doing.

Scolding Julie later, I found out they had been disconnecting her surveillance cameras to have sex throughout the ship, so this had been her revenge. I tasked Abby to discipline JJ for the security lapses, and I personally cut a month’s pay from Zoe. Then being my paranoid self planned to have Edmund come on board and go over every spot they had turned off security cameras on the ship. JJ’s file looked clean, and Edmund had cleared him, but why was he hiding from Julie? I had Danielle permit Julie to commandeer the special steward bots whenever she felt the need. Abby had built a number of new steward bots with security suites in case we had trouble with passengers in the future—now it looked like we might never have passengers again.

We had very little information about the alien star system we were entering. The Alliance had called the race the Chu’liks. Tall thin humanoids, but no pictures were available. We entered in stealth and scanned the system. An excited Elias said there were five planets and moons with atmosphere. Five in one system was unbelievable. Getting a system to have five planets in Goldilock zones—is incredible. Two orbiting the sun, and three moons orbiting a gas giant. Spaceship traffic was minimal, but each habitable planet did have a single large space station.

We moved closer, and Julie got to work on translating the language from their transmissions. We had three days until the battleship arrived to set up communication and barter for fuel. I gave Julie twenty-four hours to compile data for making contact.

The results a day later were surprising. They did not have FTL capability. The Chu’liks inhabited all the worlds and had slow intersystem spaceships. Elias suggested this star system was just so far off normal travel routes that maybe no space power wanted to colonize it. I doubted that. Five habitable worlds were a dream colonization scenario. There were also enough races out there with expansionist and specist views that genocide was not out of the question. Humans were one of those races.

Julie’s presentation uncovered that the Chu’liks had multiple contacts with alien races. Every time the local ruling family turned away the visiting spacecraft and didn’t allow them to communicate with the civilians. The Chu’lik spacecraft weaponry was not impressive, so I wondered why they remained unmolested.

I really wished I had my team on board. Suruchi would have been much better for first contact. We dropped a comm buoy with what we had learned so far for the battleship. Then I moved the Void Phoneix close to their most populous world—an estimation of three billion inhabitants. I broadcast and requested to talk to the leader of their people.

It was an hour later when a video conference was enabled. As expected, he asked me to leave. I refused and offered him technology for faster in-system travel. I had to wait for three hours while he met with his advisory council. When he returned, the negotiations began. In the end, we were going to help expedite the construction of a fuel refinery station over the gas giant with the three habitable moons. In exchange, we would fill all our fuel tanks. I don’t think they realized how much fuel that was actually going to be. We would also give them the technology for gravity plating, inertia dampeners, and high-efficiency thrusters for the fuel we would be generating.

We would not be allowed any communication with the civilian population, and the construction of the refining station had to be done on the dark side of the gas giant. When the battleship arrived, the locals were furiously starting the manufacturing. We would need to pick up the materials planetside with our shuttles and assemble the refinery ourselves. The battleship and Void Phoenix were also using our fabricators to build the more technologically advanced parts.

The best estimation was it would take four weeks to build and six weeks of refining to fill all our tanks. The good news is we would have enough fuel to get into Alliance-controlled space, and things should be much easier. The tankers were going to be docked to the refinery as it was built and send its own siphoning lines to the gas giant to start refining immediately. It could, in theory, refill itself this way over six months, but I didn’t want to wait that long.

The Squirrel were refining their own fuel to test the highest subspace bands they thought we could reach. The shuttle had long been ready for the flight, but the radiation created in the phased fuel processing required it to be done off-ship. I also didn’t want to use any fuel until I knew we had a resupply for the tanker.

Things went smoothly for a month. The Chu’liks did their part. They put the planet-manufactured pieces in an open area, and we sent shuttles to collect them at night. The refinery started functioning after two weeks, and we were just increasing the capacity from there. Things never go smoothly, though. It was Elvis who detected the local fleets moving in. They thought that we couldn’t see them because we were on the dark side of the gas giant.

They only had eight frigate-sized ships with rail guns and heavy lasers. These eight ships were the eight largest ships in the Navy. Our deflector shields could easily handle both types of weapons at their current level of power. It might have been amusing except for the fact Julie learned this was a coup. The Navy was trying to overthrow the Emperor.

Suruchi was back on the Void Phoneix. We could support the Emperor and destroy the rogue fleet or just let things play out. The plan of the Navy was to capture the three moons and the refinery we were building. Then they could overhaul the ships with the new technology and take the remaining two planets in the system. It was a multi-year plan by a group of eight captains commanding the ships. The reason why they were doing it was becoming more clear as Suruchi deciphered their culture and intercepted communications.

They had a four-tier caste system of government. The ruling class was composed of only the Emperor and his direct heirs. The next class was the working class, responsible for industry, art, and farming. The third tier was the soldiers who devoted their lives to defending the people. And finally, the endless was the bottom tier. The endless were the bottom rung of society, and were workers that had been sterilized so they could not have children. This was because they had a genetic defect, committed a crime, or offended someone in a tier higher than themselves. They worked the lowest of socitey.

How a society had functioned by putting its military in the third lowest caste, I did not know. The discord was that many of the endless classes came from the military because they operated in space, and radiation damaged their tissue over time. Suruchi wanted to intervene, I did not. We would defend the refinery. Promise to turn it over to whoever was present when we were done and leave.

Things do not always go the way you hope. All the remaining ships, loyal to the Emperor, assembled over the capital world and sped toward us to deal with the rebels. The rebel captains said they were joining the fleet to overthrow the Emperor. So the captains were trying to drag me into this whether I wanted to be involved or not.

I had four options. Help the Emperor, help the rebels, do nothing, and defend the refinery or pack and leave. Our tanker was at 68%, and I hated to waste all the effort we had put in to top off our fuel reserves. Suruchi was talking with the Emperor, trying to convince him we were not part of the coup. He did not seem to be convinced.

Elias gave me a read on Emperor’s fleet. It was fifteen ships, all smaller than the eight frigates orbiting on the other side of the giant from the refinery. I had the two fighters launch and circle wide into deep space under stealth. If I needed them involved, I would. The tanker drew up its siphons from the gas giant and was preparing to leave at my order. For the first time, the Void Phoenix’s weapon capacitors were being charged for possible battle.

I asked for advice, and Kara Briggs from the battleship command deck advised me not to be on the losing side. It was not a joke. She meant to make sure, if we did fight, to ally with the side that would end up in power. You never knew if we would have to return here one day to resupply.

Elias and Zoe were running their projections for the battle, and Julie was running thousands of combat scenarios in based on the fleets fighting each other without us. The rebel fleet was 69% likely to win. The two enemy fleets engaged, and six of the Emperor’s fifteen ships turned on their comrades. The win percentage of the rebels went to 98%. Thirty-eight missiles were launched from the three moons. Four targeted the refinery, and the rest the rebel frigates. The Void Phoenix interposed itself and handled all four missiles coming our way.

Elias asked if that was a missile attack on our fleet or not? I sighed and sent the two fighters to attack the Emperor’s ships. My mind was considering everything. The warrior caste made up only 5% of the population of the Chu’Luk. Even if they won, they only controlled the weapons and spacecraft. Resupplying their military was through the second-tier cast. How were they going to get ammunition and fuel…it seemed this revolution was doomed to fail.

The two Sapphearean fighters took out three ships on their first pass. It effectively ended the space battle even though the missile swarm destroyed three of the eight frigates. The Emperor had cut off communication with Suruchi. Well, I had decided to be on the winning side of the battle, but maybe not the war.

I ordered Elias to track the Emperor with our sensors. The best way to win these battles was to cut off the head of the snake. Our fighters made one more pass, destroying two more ships, and then returned to the battleship. I sent the rebels constant updates on the Emperor’s location as their planetary forces swarmed the palace. The Emperor’s escape was to a mountain range, and the ground craft of the rebel army got there just after him. His entire family was slaughtered.

I got a thank you from the lead captain and asked to open peaceful trade relations. I declined as I felt sick. We were definitely the bully on the playground. We were granted rights to the gas refinery until we were fully fueled and asked continuously to open trade again. Instead, I watched in horror as the rebel military rolled through the planets, taking over without mercy.

I was on the winning side but was I on the right side? I was grateful when we were able to leave. Elias sent me the butcher bill. Our fighters had killed 481 lives on the five ships we destroyed. The rebel about was upwards of having killed 150,000 people. I made a note never to become involved in alien politics again. We transitioned to subspace for the next leg of the journey.