Starship Engineer

Chapter 146 Fateweaver

My office was inside the largest asteroid base we had. It was our primary shipyard and had been my home for the last fourteen years. The Caladrius was docked at an airlock just down the hallway. A floor-to-ceiling glasssteel wall looked out into the hollowed asteroid with four cruisers under construction, the Fateweaver-class cruiser. Two of them were near completion but had yet to launch. We were still waiting for the original Fateweaver to return from its shakedown voyage to make alterations to the shielding and subspace drive. The Fateweaver had been completed two years ago and was the combination of all the technology we had pulled together over the years from dozens of different races. At one point, we decided we had to stop developing, researching and testing and finally just build the ship to test our concepts. It was also my ship to replace the Void Phoenix, whose stripped hull still sat on the surface of a nearby asteroid.

The Squirrel would not let her be scrapped and planned to rebuild her when they got a chance. We had plans for twenty-four cruisers of the Fateweaver design to replace our current fleet. Before the Fateweaver, we had manufactured seventeen of the Brotherhood cruisers for the defense of the system and to send out on stealth missions to seek out scientists in the region of space from the other races. We had some successes and failures on this objective. A successful mission would voluntarily relocate the target scientist and his family. A failure was the ship leaving empty-handed and our presence revealed.

Still, we had assembled an impressive array of minds in the Bradbury system from two dozen different species.

For the Brotherhood fleet, Desdemona was crucial in helping the initial construction of the fleet get off the ground. She has even wormed her way into commanding the core defense fleet guarding the Bradbury system. Edmund and Desdemona formed our intelligence and counter-intelligence operations. Edmund was always going with an exploratory recruitment ship while Desdemona secured the system. Desdemona had settled down and had six children with an engineer named Brodrick.

Every one of those children carried the gene that allowed Desdemona her powers to manifest, according to Doc. Doc revealed that Desdemona was genetically engineered by the Brotherhood as well. She actually had Sylvan DNA spliced into her genome.

As promised, she had discovered an exotic material that blocked her ability. We sprayed the material as an ablative paint on all our combat helmets and flight suit’s helmets.

After we completed the twenty-four Fateweavers, we would work on designing a new class of ship. I wanted to focus on a smaller fast attack destroyer, but the Squirrel Admiral wanted to scale up to carriers to carry more heavy fighters. The Fateweavers had room for nine heavy fighters and four assault shuttles. He wanted carriers capable of carrying 96 of the new heavy fighters.

We had a separate asteroid construction facility for the assault shuttles and fighters. We designed our version of the Warpath Interceptor called the Slipstream. The Slipstream was a heavy fighter equipped with a microjump drive. It had all the advantages of the Warpath, powerful maneuvering, heavy weapons, and durable armor. We upgraded the armor and added powerful shields to improve the fighter’s design and pilot’s survivability.

A wing of three of these fighters could wreak havoc on a fleet. In the sims, our top pilots showed the utility of these mobile and agile fighters. They were still susceptible to subspace disrupters, which would cancel their ability to micro-jump. But if their command ship was close enough to relay the gravimetric data from the sensors, then they could micro-jump safely in the interior of a star system. Making them the only craft we needed for fast response to any attack on the Bradbury system. Each of our nine asteroid facilities had fifteen of these fighters. The problem was the lack of qualified pilots.

Zoe was in charge of the fighter pilot school and would not pass anyone she deemed unfit. It meant the graduation rate was an abysmal sixteen percent.

The other small craft we were producing were assault shuttles. The assault shuttles were primarily designed to jump close to a ship and drop off our Marines in Badger combat armor. The Gorilla suits had been mostly retired due to their high cost to manufacture, mostly due to their power source. We still had manufactured fifty-two of the Gorilla suits for my personal guard of Tirani, Squirral, and human Marines. Most of whom had been with me on the Void Phoenix. The Marine armory on the Fateweaver was stocked with fifty-two personally fitted suits for each Marine in each class, the light Gecko, medium Badgar, and heavy Gorilla. This was in part because Abby commanded my Marines on the Fateweaver, and we only had fifty-two of a possible one-hundred and sixty Marines.

My PerCom beeped. Abby was escorting Celeste, Amos, Neon, and my Dartanian to the brig again. Celeste had the fiery hair of her mother and was my hyper-active teenage daughter; Amos was her sidekick. They had been born on the same day and grew up together. Amos was beyond loyal to Celeste. Neon was Doc’s son. He was secretly genetically engineered, and it showed in his test scores. He was fourteen, as was my son, Dartanian.

Dartantian was a daredevil. He tended to act before thinking, taking unnecessary risks all the time. Together with Neon, the pair was an absolute menace to the security staff. When they paired with Celeste and Amos the sky was the limit for the amount of trouble they could get into as a group. That did not even include the other partners in crime, Ezra and Emil, Tora’s twin patherkin Wren. They were brutishly large like their tigerkin Wren father Saabir. They had completed all the Marine training but had chosen not to enlist and instead continued to help the group of misfits cause trouble.

I looked at the report. They had broken into the flight deck and had tried to steal one of the assault shuttles. It was actually a productive game for them. Abby had challenged them to break her security. If they succeeded, then they got cockpit time in the Slipstream fighters. If they failed, then they got 24 hours in lock up. They succeeded more than half the time, to the dismay of Abby. I laughed as another alert came across my PerCom.

Unauthorized launch of an assault shuttle from the aft of the asteroid. Ezra and Emil were piloting. I did not even know they had completed the certs and checking with Julie they had but not posted their results. Abby was going to be infuriated that she had lost again to the young team of masterminds.

The best thing about settling down in the Bradbury system, the kids, both a blessing and a curse. And there were a lot of them running around the stations and planet. They gave you purpose in life, meaning for everything you were doing. And all I was trying to do was save the universe from extinction, according to Desdemona.

Six years ago, Danielle, my wife, left me to live on the planet with our other three children. Luca would be nine now, and Nova and Venus would be seven. It resulted from two arguments I had with Danielle. The first was she had wanted to raise the children planetside, and the second was Doc, and she had inserted the Sylvan gene into the twins, Nova and Venus. It was done without my knowledge and had crossed a line I couldn’t forgive. I had not visited them in the six years they had been gone. I had commed Luca a few times in the early years, but eventually, Danielle cut me off completely.

Every time I thought about visiting them, I could easily find a hundred excuses for things to do. For the last four years, I had an on-and-off relationship with Gabby. Her robotics lab was on another asteroid, and whenever I visited her, it always ended up with me staying with her. Her father, Nero had died under my command, so the whole relationship with his daughter was some type of compensation for my failure. She had cared a desire to be with me since I took her and her father on board at Silverstream Station nearly eighteen years ago.

My PerCom beeped again, and I checked the alert. The Fateweaver had returned from its voyage and was transmitting data to all the necessary scientist enclaves. I perused the data it looked good. We would need to go with a different option for the shield capacitors and change the material on the subspace emitters to the new alloy, but it looked like the ship was ready. We could now work on finishing the fleet’s first wave of Fateweaver-class ships.

I waited for Edmund, who had been commanding the Fateweaver in my office. He arrived all smiles and gushed about the performance of the ship. It exceeded expectations, and the crew was phenomenal. He wanted one for himself but was regulated to gathering intelligence in the greater galaxy.

Humanity had split in the last decade. The Brotherhood still puppeted the core systems but a new Alliance had formed under Admiral LaRoche. All humanity in this region of the Rim was under his control and his government. By all accounts, it had remained mostly uncorrupted and resistant to Brotherhood influence. Not in small part to Edmund revealing a number of agents in their midst. The Brotherhood on Earth had finally recovered from losing the Battleship fleet to Rae’Ver.

They still were not aware of everything that transpired. Only that Katsu Oshiro took the fleet to the Rim and disappeared after a year.

Edmund got my attention. He asked if I wanted to proceed with the diplomatic mission to go meet Admiral LaRoche and form an Alliance with them. It was the next step in our grand plan to fight the Malevalants. We had built our base of operations and fortified it. Now we needed allies. We were on good terms with the Alliance of aliens, and now I needed to see if Admiral LaRoche was free of the Brotherhood’s biases against aliens.

I told Edmund yes. I will be launching in a week’s time. My crew was already selected and just awaiting the order. It was time to travel back into the galaxy.