Beyond Pi is publishing!

 

About:

Admiral Horatio Logan has been through a lot of ups and downs in his lifetime. He survived the Xeno war after his ship was shot out from under him, centuries in stasis, a time as a virtual slave in Pyrax, and then the dawning hope and rebirth of the Federation.

He survived a near civil war and kangaroo court martial in Bek. He survived the pirates in Pi and completed his secret mission with the Stargate project. He thought he was done with politics until they surprised him, rearing their ugly head once more.  He is a survivor though.

In a neighboring sector nightmares from the past begin to waken…

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CK6Q24FD

B&N: Beyond Pi

Beyond Pi Snippet 3

 Sitrep: So, I checked my mail and Goodlife sent Beyond Pi back early! So, this is the last snippet. I'll publish the book later today or this weekend.

Chapter 3

 

In Hyperspace

 

The rogue science ship, Lois Pasteur, made her cautious way across the void to the Omicron sector. The AI on board had argued with the doctor many times about the idea of abandoning their normal route. He had overruled them by simple force of will and his role as owner of the ship. They were committed now anyway.

The ship’s AI Loi managed the internal systems carefully. It controlled a legion of robots of various sizes and capacities to keep the ship running smoothly. It was his diligence that had allowed the ship to remain functional over the centuries of the dark time.

Nikki, his android AI counterpart, was the second half of the equation. She managed the day-to-day operations of the ship as well. She was too limited to pilot the ship though; that task fell to either Loi, the doctor, or one of their subjects.

Doctor Mathis had been trying for centuries to recreate his lost love through cloning and memory implants. To date he had failed utterly or so he insisted.

In truth the bodies were perfect copies of the genetic template. There was no drift; each clone was a copy made from the original, carefully maintained subject in a stasis pod. Her cells were cultured from samples and rigorously checked for genetic damage from the lethal amount of radiation she had sustained in life.

Since the subject’s DNA had been unstrung and encoded into their files before her accident, she was carefully preserved.

No, the fault laid in the improper copy of her mind or so the doctor insisted. In truth he could not and would not accept that any copy of the original would hold those intrinsic flaws. They were growing up in a different environment and time, under different circumstances. They were effectively sisters of the original template.

The other issue was that the memory implant process was flawed. If they pushed the memory implants too far, it damaged the subject. It involved reprogramming the entire brain neuron by neuron. Which was a problem since the original subject’s brain had been damaged before death and the process of sampling her mind to upload it to an AI hadn’t been complete because of that damage.

And then there was the doctor himself. Doctor Mathis, or, at least the original organic version had died years prior. He had also been preserved but this time in the science lab mainframe. He had maintained his bewilderment and grief over the loss of his beloved and had continued with his obsession to bring her back no matter how long it took.

There were seven subjects currently being cultured. The first had been woken early to help pilot the ship. Her inherent helm skills had ensured their survival in the arduous trek across the void. Nikki was caring for her now. Loi checked on her and then went back to his duties.

>>><><<< 

Doctor Mathis sighed as the inevitable signs of failure manifested itself in the latest MRI and GRI scans of subject Z981A. The young clone had begun to formulate her own memories and personality that differentiated from his beloved.

He could trace the change to when she was woken to take the helm and endure the first scans. They really needed a better method of implanting the memories into the subject brain while monitoring it. However, MRI and GRI scans were not reliable in the detailed nanometric level his work required within the close confines of the pod.

Just the act of transferring the subject from the artificial uterus to the pod might be another factor for failure.

It was all so frustrating. But he would play politics and allow Nikki to continue to coddle the youth until they found a proper place to drop her off and start anew once more.

>>><><<< 

Beyond Pi Snippet 2

 Sitrep: I received the manuscript back from Rea and passed it on to Goodlifeguide. Shelley said she'd get it back to me in a week. Fingers crossed.

In other news, I managed to get a little work done on my R2. Unfortunately, the work bench is now occupied so I am back to a holding pattern there.

I have been working on Expanding Horizons. It is slowly coming together.

Anyway, on to the snippet!

Chapter 2

 

Port Royal

 

Vice Admiral Horatio Logan stared pensively at the reports. His eyes didn’t really see them; he was deep in thought. After a moment, he tossed his stylus down that he liked to fiddle with and then sat back in his chair.

He was a sleeper, someone who had been born during the era of the old Federation. He had served in the navy during the Xeno war and had been marooned in deep space near Pyrax. Centuries had passed before he had been picked up and sold to the Anvil space station in Pyrax.

He had spent a lonely century there until he’d married and had a single daughter Shelby. He had aged terribly, but when Admiral Irons had turned up like a breath of fresh air, he had been reborn like the phoenix of legend, undergoing a full anti-geriatric treatment and officer upgrade.

He had held the fort for the admiral in Pyrax for years before the admiral had settled in Antigua and the real work had begun to restore the Federation while simultaneously fighting off the Horathians. In a way, the pirate threat had been a spirit send; it had been an external threat for everyone to rally around. The escalation to xenophobia that the late pirate emperor had imposed on the galaxy had ramped up the threat and nearly overwhelmed them before they got the upper hand.

He had several adventures but now he was in Pi sector, holding the sector while building the gate complex and then doing some strange shit. Now he was spinning his wheels. Well, more or less, he thought with a pang.

He was tempted to get another cup of coffee but held off. He’d had four cups already and although he had an iron constitution courtesy of years of sucking down navy coffee and his implants, he didn’t want the caffeinated beverage at the moment. Though it did help to clear his thoughts from time to time.

The first units that had come through the gate had been Vice Admiral Blechley’s TF 1.4 fast reaction force. Two super carriers, a squadron of battle cruisers, and a couple squadrons of cruisers and destroyers plus support ships. It had been made clear that they were on loan. That was how Admiral Irons had gotten around the limits Congress had imposed at the time.

Not that they were in place anymore. A recent naval appropriations bill had clarified the status of Seventh Fleet and the other paper tigers around Federation controlled space. After the attack on the Sigma gate complex, Congress launched their usual committees and investigations. They had been horrified by the parlous state of the defenses at some of the gate star systems. They had pointed fingers at the navy but had backed off from demands of someone’s head when the media had flipped the script and pointed out that Congress had savagely cut back on the navy’s budget.

Well, that was changing now, for good or ill. He knew the jury was out on which it would be. He welcomed more hulls for his deployments. And he was amused that Congress had been irked that Blechley had left to conquer Tortuga under their orders, yet also irked that she wasn’t there to defend the gate star system.

Which meant that they’d have to agree to deploy more ships and build a proper budget for Seventh Fleet.

Which was a welcome thing as far as he was concerned. Seventh fleet had just the one shipyard in New Cornwall. Commodore Vestri Sindri had gotten it up to building modern battle cruisers but had been stopped short of building them in quantity or building larger units. They had spent the past ten years building up the infrastructure in the star system, the manufacturing processes, and thus laying the groundwork for when the leash finally came off.

Which it had for the most part. They finally had permission to go to full production in New Cornwall. He was grateful for that. Now they just had the little matter of finding the warm bodies to populate the ships.

Fortunately, the gate was here and open. He knew that veterans would be coming through the gate and shipped on to New Cornwall to take possession of those ships. Depending on how things went on the Tau and Sigma fronts, some of those ships might even ship to Rho or even across the sector and into Sigma to help out there.

He had Blechley for a limited time. Shannon was a good officer but looking for more. Admiral Irons had made that part clear. Two years, which meant she could punch out Tortuga and possibly Devil’s Anus in the north and then return. By then ships should be coming through that would be assigned permanently to Seventh Fleet to replace her.

In a way, it was good. Blechley would get her combat ticket punched, and he would have two out of three of the remaining pirate nests in his AO taken out. He would have to follow up with pickets to secure the star systems though, which meant more cruisers.

Then there was the problem of the damn pirate plagues. He shook his head over that one. At least the enemy commanders had stopped trying to spread the disease. The prowlers that had been dispatched to scout behind the enemy lines and sow sabotage had reported that the enemy had not cut their own throat and destroyed the civilian populations they were trying to exploit. Far from it, they had occupied many of those worlds and even started to get their manufacturing up and running again. There were two reports of industrial equipment being returned to worlds in order for them to be installed and used. That was a surprise to him.

The occupiers were not gentle in their treatment of the population, nor their demands for tribute. But the civilians were alive at least for the moment. With luck and a bit of grit from Blechley, the pirates would be driven out and the populations could be mended and restored.

His biggest headache at the moment was the northern pirate base, the ‘Dante’s Playground.’ The Prowler Meridian had scouted the pirate base. It had the remains of a battle moon quadrant there acting as a hellish orbital fortress and base. A dreadnought had also managed to get there, and worse, the enemy had a bone yard and a lot of incentive to sort themselves into one hell of a threat to his northern border.

So far, his people had managed to fend off a couple raiding parties from that direction. They had been quiet since then so he had to wonder if there was a bottom to their resources.

He might need to send another scout to find out, he mused.

>>><><<< 

Lieutenant Beau noted her principle was thinking and allowed him to do so without interruption. It meant the paperwork was not getting signed, but for the most part, he was just signing off on decisions that had already been made.

Admiral Logan was a good partner. She appreciated him, and she knew that he appreciated her. She ran a scan through the document lists and then moved the priority ones to the top of the pile again. The electronic shuffling would not be seen by her principle.

If she had to guess at the train of thought he was going through, he was either concerned about the strategic situation in the sector, his daughter’s safety in Tau, politics, or the overall strategic situation. Those came in the order of likelihood. Of course, he might be having paper fatigue and a desire to “play hooky” and work on some engineering project. He was an engineer after all.

She had received stories from other AI who had principles with similar mindsets. The most famous of course was Admiral Irons. They made for excellent leaders because they led by example. They dug in and were not afraid to get their hands dirty. They also cared about their people. But they were not the best administrators and did not care for office politics or petabytes of reports and such things.

That was where she came in. She acted as an electronic assistant; she handled the bulk of the paperwork among other duties. She filtered the reams of paperwork to spot glaring errors for him to act upon. But she couldn’t shield her principle from all of it nor would she. She also knew his strong sense of duty would invariably lead him back to work in a few more seconds.

As if on cue, the human admiral picked his stylus up again and began to fiddle with it as he got back to work.

>>><><<< 

Beyond Pi Snippet 1

 So I sent the manuscript off to Rea. 

Chapter 1

 

Port Royal

Vice Admiral Horatio Logan stared at the schedule. So far so good but they were hanging in there by the skin of their teeth and tips of their fingernails.

He snorted at his thought. He had started the project with the factory ships Ptah, Io 11, and the engineering spaces on the various ships in the Hero's Rise flotilla. Oh, and the mountain of material that had come in from Rho. Building the industry to build the Dyson shell and the industry to build the gate had been a bitch. But there was a reason he'd released Io 11 and Ptah to other duties; they were no longer needed. The industry was self-sustaining at this point.

Well, with a bit of help from shipments from Rho of course. Like the convoy that had recently come in. Six more large and eighteen smaller force emitters had arrived. They were halfway to building the gate at this point and he was happy.

It had only cost them a half a dozen moons, an unknown number of asteroids, and a couple of dwarf planets, not to mention a lot of the stockpiled material the pirates had stolen and hoarded to get there on his end.

He checked the latest news. Beau would of course highlight anything relevant to his command or to the sector. There were a couple of dozen entries; the couriers had picked up news along the route to him but nothing about Port Royal or the gate. That was a relief.

One damn leak was all it had taken to ruin his day almost five years ago he thought blackly. He didn't want another—hence, the additional security at the jump points.

Ships now unloaded at the jump point, transferring their contents to orbital warehouses under the guns of the picket and orbital fortresses there. The orbital forts were Mulberry class affairs, one command fort at each jump point that controlled an array of mines and weapon platforms.

He wanted, nay, craved more, and he'd get it in time, but for the moment he was stuck with what he had. The other forts had been redirected to New Cornwall. He had the State Department and Admiral Irons signing off on it to thank for that.

Politics he thought in annoyance.

"My, you are in a mood," Lieutenant Beau, his A.I., observed in a soft contralto in his ear.

"A little."

"Why? Aren't you happy we aren't in the news?"

"No news is not necessarily good news. But in this case, I'll take what I can get I suppose. At least our people are taking the security classification seriously. Finally," he growled.

It had only taken a couple of court-martials and captain's masts to get the point across. Most of the leakers had acccepted NJP or Non-Judicial-Punishment and a removal of their security clearance for the leak. Forfetier of pay, reduction in rank—none of that would get the secrecy of the star system back.

At least they'd gotten the media to censor the information from feeds that were sent to nonincorporated worlds. ONI and SIS were keeping an eye on them to make sure of it.

It wouldn't be forever. He knew it, and they knew it. But until they took down the pirates in his Area of Operations it was technically still classed as a war zone. Hence, the legality of the censorship.

He shook his head as he rocked his chair a little. "Just moody I guess. It started with annoyance over the leak and then went to politics."

"Ah. So, situation normal?"

He snorted. "Something along those lines. I'd like to get a handle on state. Or better still, get someone to sit on them and or duct tape their mouths shut so they will stop dipping into our toy box. I don't have the ships to deploy in endless supply like they seem to think," he growled.

"Agreed and understood, sir," Beau said in a sympathetic tone of voice.

"In other words, preaching to the choir and you've heard it all before. Sorry."

"That's what I'm here for, sir, sounding board among other job descriptions," Beau replied with a smile in her voice. He knew it was designed to get him to buck up a little. It did help.

His command had its share of mixed luck over the past five years, but he had to admit it was better than what was going on in Rho and Sigma.

Rho had suffered the battle of Horath and the seeming end of the Horathian threat. To him and other naval personnel, it was a painful thing; they'd lost a lot of good freinds in the nova bomb. A lot were still classified as missing in action too, though hopes of any of them turning up five years later were dim at best.

Admiral Irons had weathered the political storm from it but it hadn't been easy. It had left a lot of scars, but the admiral was hanging in there, grimly determined to see it through. It being the reestablishment of the Federation as a galactic government and civilization, the end of the pirates, and a few other things along the way.

One of which was his project for his sins.

He was a sleeper like the admiral, having grown up during the golden age of the Federation over seven centuries ago. He'd fought in the Xeno war and had been lost in an escape pod when his ship had fallen short of getting to safety in Pyrax. He'd drifted for centuries in sleep. When he'd awoken, it had been over a century prior. He'd been a borderline slave, chief engineer of the mining station Anvil.

He'd had been lonely and nearly driven insane by his implants wanting him to suicide. But he'd doggedly persisted in what he percieved as his duty to keep the lights on in the station. He'd met and married a beautiful woman, had a daughter, mourned his wife, and had been nearly killed trying to keep things together just before Admiral Irons had shown up to save the day.

He'd reenlisted when the pirates had threatened to attack. They'd salvaged ships like Firefly, built a task force that had captured the enemy task force, then used their resources to build a growing shipyard and naval complex before Admiral Irons had been forced out of the star system.

He'd been stuck in command for years until Admiral Irons had set up a capital in Antigua. Then he'd had a series of misadventures in Bek, another last minute save by Admiral Irons, and then he'd been sent here.

Where he was still trying to hang onto things.

Sigma on the other hand was a mess. Fifth and what was left of Second Fleet were out there somewhere, hunting for “Catherine Ramichov, pirate empress” and her fleet as well as her salvaged battle moon. So far, no such luck finding either.

Her father had started a course of genocide, unleashing plagues first in Rho, then Tau, Sigma, Pi, and quite possibly beyond. Rho had stamped out the plagues, but the other sectors were still struggling.

Well, he had it out and most of the populations vaccinated in Federation controlled space. Unincorporated space and neutral star systems were a different story.

He held command on his space station Command One. From here he could see and direct the progress on the two titanic projects under his control. But he had another mission too, one that had so far failed utterly.

He had been tasked with clearing his Area of Operations of pirates. That had turned out to be easier said than done. Part of it had been due to bad luck, another to a lack of resources, and a third reason was the meddlings of politics.

Four years ago, he had felt confident enough to reform the Hero's Rise task force and dispatch the ships to Tortuga. Unfortunately, they hadn't gotten far and had been brought back due to a collision with a rogue grav wave. The escort carrier and several other ships had hit it and suffered engineering casualties onboard. There had been twenty-six deaths, and thirty-nine injured on Hero's Rise alone. Murphy, the spirit of mischief, chaos, and bad luck, had certainly put in an appearance that day.

They had nearly lost the ships; they'd lost grav nodes and had suffered hull and internal damage. The task force had dropped out of hyperspace to make what repairs they could. They had limped back to Port Royal at low octaves of Alpha nearly a year later.

It had been another black eye for the navy to handle right after Horath. The media had gone into a bit of a feeding frenzy over it.

He hadn't been able to follow the attack up with a proper one since. The attempts to scout Tortuga with prowlers had so far failed. He'd finally signed off on a long shot to try it from another angle.

It was going to be months before they got there and months more before the intel got back to him. Only then would he allow another mission to be planned and launched.

It bothered him to let the pirates have all that free time. They had a mothball yard and plenty of motivation to do something about it. But for the moment, his hands were tied.

"Just … moody I guess," he said again.

~~(O)~~

Lieutenant Beau monitored her principle's vital signs and realized she wasn't going to be able to cajole him any further at the moment. She searched for a bit of good news, but there wasn't anything there for the moment. Not even a letter from Shelby, the admiral's daughter. Pity about that.

She had been grown within the admiral's implants when he'd upgraded to flag officer. She'd become a smart A.I. after the events in Bek. She wished she'd been more sentient then; she could have and would have helped him in some capacity to endure his captivity better. At least, she liked to think she could have done something.

At the moment, she was realizing that helpless “feeling” again. She hoped it wouldn't last and that Horatio would see the glass as half full again soon.

~~(O)~~