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.

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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.

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