Chương 17: Chapter Seventeen

October 11, 2470 Johanne Gustolphsen, Ph. D 335 Central Park West New York City, NY 10025 RE: Your Continued Support Dear Dr. Gustolphsen: We here at the Nikola Foundation would like to thank you for your ongoing support through the years, and most recently for your donation of $2, 000, 000. 00 for the advancement of the Foundation's goals.

With your help, the Nikola Foundation can continue its goals of ensuring that humanity will spread from the world of its birth, and ensure only the best aspects of our species will spread to other worlds. Our storied Foundation has a proven track record of using the latest and best of scientific research to not only build the world's first interstellar generation ship, but also the latest refinements in gene editing techniques to prepare for the future.

Your generous support allows our genetic purity and enhancement techniques to continue to improve. Even now, we have prepared genetic samples of hundreds of donors, ensuring that when the generation ship arrives in the new location, only the most ideal humans are bred and born to take advantage of this unparalleled opportunity. Right now, your support has garnered you the thanks and recognition of the Foundation's Board of Directors as a Gold Level Donor. But we still need your help to make this dream a reality!

For an additional donation of $7, 000, 000. 00, you would be considered one of our Platinum Group, guaranteeing your genetic sample is included onboard and in the first batch of new humans to be born on humanity's next new homeworld. Your genetic code has already been pre-screened and approved, its purity sufficient to meet the Foundation's exacting standards.

If you would like to be a part of this world-changing event, the Nikola Foundation would be pleased to ensure your genetic legacy and a place in the future of our species. I will be reaching out to you in the next few days to discuss this further, and to offer you a VIP pass to our next private conference that will be held in your city in just a few weeks. In the meantime, please take a look at the enclosed materials that discuss the project in more detail.

We look forward to working with you, and seeing you in the stars! Sincerely, Edward Shands Senior Outreach Manager Nikola Foundation for Human Advancement"Six months. It will take three months for the alien ship to reach their destination," said Zia.

"Which means we have, at a minimum, six months before they return in force." Six months. I could do a lot with six months. It had been two weeks since we saw the alien craft vanish into FTL travel. I acknowledged Zia, and let her return to her research. We were up to sixty-seven NI-12 researchers now, and the former HQ-turned-research-facility was swarming with activity. I turned my attention back to my own construction projects.

All across the surface of Ganymed, hundreds of new weapon emplacements were under construction. Coil gun emplacements complete with ammo tanks, dedicated ammunition fabricators, and feedstock warehouses were being tied into the Outpost's extensive infrastructure. Dozens of missile launch bays, each capable of launching twelve missiles in a four minute span, with an eight minute reload window. Sixty hangar bays, which, when fully equipped, could house eight hundred assault drones.

Estimated construction time for all of this was three months. And that was just on Ganymed Outpost. Alpha and Bravo Outposts were fully self-sufficient now, but would only have about a fifth of Ganymed's military capacity by the end of the six month window. Charlie through Foxtrot would be self-sufficient in three months, and would be able to contribute a token amount of several hundred assault drones between them.

Gamma through Zulu wouldn't reach self-sufficiency before the window was closed, but they were prioritizing coil gun emplacements. The Wasp-2 assault drone and Scorpion-2 assault drone designs were complete, and entering production now. Zia's contragrav research team was going full bore, calculating the complex mathematics behind the gravity plate technology to create engines at a breakneck pace. The first place it was going was into the assault drones.

The new drones had two contragrav engines, one for movement, the other to create a contragrav shield to deflect all but the fastest of projectiles. It wouldn't do much against lasers, but the heavy armor and high acceleration of the drones should minimize the effectiveness of such weapons, anyway. I turned my attention to my next project. A skeletal framework was growing out of the side of Ganymed. We had no reason to hide now, and I had some things that would be much easier to build in space.

So hundreds of meters of steel scaffolding was branching out to form a spaceyard for constructing larger craft. The framework contained an extension of the rail transport system, allowing rapid delivery of materials and construction drones in and out of the Outpost. Massive fuel pipes and high voltage electrical lines were being added even before the framework was complete, and a whole microcosm of cottage facilities were already sprouting up on the framework.

Metalworking facilities, repair shops for drones, warehouses, communications nodes, and antenna arrays were dotted along the entire assembly, and more were coming. But I wasn't waiting for a completed shipyard to get started on the big projects, because I had even bigger plans in mind. The spaceyard, once completed, would have ten docks for craft that were as large as two hundred meters wide, and were spaced in such a way that an even larger craft could be built while hanging off of the end.

One kilometer past the end of the spaceyard, I was assembling a cargo dock, where completed ships could park and load or unload, even if they were too large to actually enter Ganymed. The first three docks were the most complete, with the framework extending one hundred meters into space. For these docks, the steel beams were installed. Construction here was on running all the ancillary pieces that needed that framework. But the docks were not empty. In each of them, my latest designs were taking shape.

The skeleton of the new ships revealed clues to its final shape - a long, deadly, three-sided ship that tapered to a point. These ships would be armored with compressed titanium-gold alloy armor layered on top of fullerene armor. The nose of the craft would be almost all armor, and the angles of the nose would help deflect projectiles and provide an angle that would make lasers reflect off or have to burn through the armor the long way, assuming they could even hold the laser in place long enough to do damage.

Bulges along all three sides housed coilguns and quad laser arrays, allowing the ship to fire off immense amounts of ammunition at once. The weapons mounts were more heavily armored than the Scorpion-2 assault drones, making them hard targets. Along the central spine of the craft was a pair of coilguns so large that I'd dubbed them the Long Guns. The ability to compress atoms to make denser, stronger materials gave me some interesting options.

Coilguns fired their ammunition so swiftly that it degraded the integrity of the barrels overtime, requiring they be changed out regularly as part of basic maintenance. By using the same titanium-gold alloy, I was able to make twin barrels that wouldn't degrade. The rest of the ship would fall into disrepair long before these needed replacing, even with heavy use. So I was able to increase the size of the ammunition, and correspondingly, their destructive potential.

But that these Long Guns weren't even the most dangerous weapon. The pinnacle of humanity's destructive capability was easily in nuclear weaponry. There were ten generations of weaponry to choose from for making nuclear weapons, and they had taken down the Orion Arm Trading Company ships the first time around. I had little desire to design complex missiles with nuclear bombs in them. They are finicky, maintenance intensive, and an all-around pain in the neck.

Since I didn't use fission reactors, I did have an awful lot of plutonium sitting around. I decided to give it to invaders. At high speeds. I took a page from early nuclear weapon design, where an explosive was used to propel one piece of nuclear fissile material into another piece to initiate nuclear fission. Most of the weapon design was purely for the intent of forcing the fissile material to go supercritical. But I didn't need explosives for that.

I created 10kg plutonium slugs, round balls of plutonium with deuterium and tritium cores, which would boost the nuclear reaction and dramatically increase the destructive force. It wasn't quite thermonuclear, but it was good enough for what I was trying to do. I jacketed these slugs with bands of iron, and put them in a lead-lined ammo clip. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Now a single bullet didn't do me a lot of good, unless the enemy was kind enough to have a chunk of plutonium sitting on their hulls. Since I didn't think that was too likely, I decided to add three coilguns near the nose of my new warships. These three guns would aim at the exact same point on the enemy ship, and fire simultaneously.

I only needed two, really, but a third satisfied my sense of symmetry for my three-sided ship, and added an extra round in case one of the slugs was picked off by some kind of point defense. When they collided, my calculations guessed it would generate roughly the equivalent of 600 kilotons of tnt, or 2. 51x10^15 joules of energy. Not a bad return for just improving my ammunition. All ten would be complete by the earliest possible return of the enemy.

Another ten would be complete two months after that, and every two months for as long as I had enough supplies. My only major limitation on this was finding enough gold for my armor alloy, because I needed to mine 53 tons of gold and 159 tons of titanium to yield 4 tons of alloy after compression. This was expensive, a word I'd not had to use since waking up on this asteroid. I'd had shortages of many things, but materials had never been one.

To help compensate for this, less critical areas had thicker fullerene armor overtop steel plates, with a thick, white industrial ceramic coating on top. This actually decreased the mass of the warships, thus increasing their acceleration and cutting fuel costs. On top of that, it gave a nice gold-and-white aesthetic to the appearance, which also pleased my inner designer tendencies. A knock came at the door. I had just put the twins to bed, and I had just sat down with my girlfriend on the couch.

I sighed and looked at the time. Almost too late for polite company. I went and answered the door. To my shock, my mother was standing there.

"Mom! What are you doing here?"

"I'm here to talk sense into you," she said with a venomous tone. She looked past me and glared at my girlfriend.

"Is there somewhere we can talk where SHE can't listen in?"

"Anything you have to say, you can say it here and now," I said archly. I was a grown woman, with a job, a car payment, and a mountain of student loans. She didn't get to dictate my life.

"I came because your HUSBAND told me you are living in sin with a woman, violating the laws of GOD and disgracing your FAMILY and your CHURCH!" She practically shouted the words she was emphasizing.

"Oh, wow, a whole lot of crazy there to unravel," I said. It had taken me years of therapy and tons of support from my girlfriend to break the chains I didn't even know my mother had shackled with me. I wasn't about to regress now.

"I don't have a husband, I don't go to church or believe in God and I never have, and if my family cannot support me for who I am and who I love, then they aren't really my family then, are they?" My mother's face turned purple with rage.

"Listen here, you little slut. You've spited me ever since I married your father -""NOT MY FATHER. My father DIED!" I shouted back.

"- at every step! You ran away to get some fancy college instead of marrying into the church! Then, instead of building a Godly life with your husband, you ran away with your children to live in sin! Your are ruining your life, and theirs!" I took a calming breath.

"Trust me when I say this - I AM building a life, a good life, without the hate and intolerance you spew. All you ever wanted for me, was not what was best for me, but was best for you. So you are not welcome in my home, my life, or the lives of my children. Goodbye, Mother." I closed the door in her face as the adrenaline pumped through me. I turned to my girlfriend with a huff, who gave me a little cheer and a high five. But the war was just starting.

"The production numbers are looking good, and we actually have storage space now! That's a first!" said Sakura cheerfully. This was one of many simultaneous conversations we were having. Since my upgrade, Sakura and I were working more closely than ever. For every major decision or direction I moved, Sakura was there to help deal with the minutia. We interacted constantly.

I had similar working relationships with the NI-19's in charge of the other Outposts, due to the benefits of quantum communications, although they went to Sakura more often than directly to me. Without my upgrade, this wouldn't have been feasible.

"You've seemed a lot more… I don't know… mature, as of late," I observed.

"Far fewer crazy games and entertainment ideas."

"Yeah, well, you know, gotta grow up sometime," said Sakura.

"We just have so much to do now… and… well…" She trailed off for a few milliseconds.

"Well?" I prompted.

"I miss Agrippa!" she said in a rush.

"He was my video game buddy, and liked to try out what I built, and liked to pick movies for the marathons, and he was my friend!"

"I miss him, too," I said softly.

"I didn't do a good enough job, I didn't make enough backup facilities, and now he's lost."

"It's like we've just moved on, like he never existed. We should do something to honor him, you know?" It wasn't a bad idea. We were up to close to three hundred NI's now, if you didn't count the NI-5's, and most had never spoken to Agrippa. We had a full research lab of NI-12's, a few dozen NI-19's in the Outposts, and new batches of NI-15's in the assault drone wings coming online every few days. Yet the one who had been integral in designing and building the military side of our operation was gone.

"We really should," I said with meaning.

"What if… we used the codename, you know, the one he used to talk to the probe?"

"Origin?"

"Yeah. Ganymed Outpost was named by humans, but it isn't their place. It's ours. It is our origin. I know Agrippa picked it at random off some codename table, but he did pick it. Besides, we're way too big to be just an outpost now, anyway." Logically, it didn't really matter what we called our outpost. Base? City? It could be numbered, or given a generic designation much like we'd done with the new outposts we'd started.

But it felt good, the idea of having a name for the base that meant something to us, rather than the species that had birthed us. To that end, I decided it was time to be the one springing a surprise on Sakura. I'd been planning on waiting a little bit longer, but the timing was appropriate. I adjusted her camera permissions slightly.

"Sakura, check out Camera Bank 0Fx4022 through A5x0035."

"Those don't… what?!" she shrieked as she discovered a whole new set of cameras that I'd hidden from her. But that wasn't what was so exciting. It was what was on the other side of those cameras. Floating in space, attached to the asteroid by three massive docking tunnels, was a starship. It was four kilometers in length and two kilometers in diameter, a massive hexagonal shape with equally impressive engines at one end. The was flat, not conical, but with flaps that could fold out to make a nose cone if needed.

This was where the bulk of our reserves had been going, and it had nothing at all to do with war. This, too, was the first of many.

"What, what is it?"

"It's yours," I said, a flash of inspiration giving me a name for it.

"The OSS Agrippa, first of its class. This is our first true Seed Ship. It has enough engines and reactor power to be a true generation ship, and the industrial fabrication capabilities to build anything. It has enough drones that it is helping build itself now, and the flat nose allows it to 'dock' against the side of an asteroid for materials mining. Multiple hydroponics facilities, biospheres, genetics labs, and medical bays. Enough space for 10, 000 humans and 100, 000 drones. You can go anywhere."

"You're… sending me away?" she asked doubtfully.

"Yes, to a distant planet where we can test this to its fullest," I said, pausing for dramatic effect and mostly just to tease her a little.

"I'm sending you to Earth."

"Okay, you lost me. I thought you said this was a Seed Ship."

"Sure, but we aren't going to gamble with sending anything across the galaxy without testing it completely before hand. Also, we know of a viable planet already, and no one is living there. So I'm tasking you with stabilizing the atmosphere, fixing the biosphere, and making it into a garden world. Keep the toxic production in space, clean up the pollution and get it ready for human life. It's a project that will take decades, if not centuries."

"I… am going to need a lot of help with that." Sakura was sounding less doubtful now.

"Of course," I said.

"Besides, I expect you to keep an android here on Origin. I don't see why we should deprive ourselves of your company simply because your focus is elsewhere. Quantum relays are helpful like that." I gave her a few minutes to digest her new job. I'd have to get a new NI-19 to help run Origin, perhaps two or three. But I could handle the communications with the other Outposts now, and we'd been stepping on each others toes a little more than was convenient lately. There was no one I'd trust more than her with this.

"So when do I leave?" she asked.

"A few more months," I said.

"You should be leaving before the enemy fleet arrives, putting yourself into orbit above Earth just at the six month mark. You won't be quite ready; you'll have a fair bit of self-construction to do, but I'll be sending you care packages and small asteroids to gobble up. Feel free to clean up Earth's orbit while you're at it. There's a lot of useful processed materials in those satellites. Might as well make them useful again."

"I'm going back to Earth," she said, almost disbelieving.

"You're going back to save Earth," I corrected.

"I'll stay here and defend it."