Starship Engineer

With the Sylvan reviving ancient First Citizens, I thought there would be an attempt to usurp my authority in the Bradbury system. In our meetings, Edmund took pleasure in reminding me that I created the forthcoming political disaster.

That did not happen because as the fifty-one of the possible fifty-nine powerful First Citizens emerged, they were all playing their own brand of politics. They were supposed to be awakened to fight the Malevolents, but they took to jockeying to establish a new hierarchy with no planet-sized ships in sight.

I was told by Bel'Fer that never before had so many prior First Citizens been revived at once. There seemed to be no plan to divide power and assign roles. Each First Citizen also had their own specialty from when they guided a city ship: production, science, military, or ship expansion. They all wanted to resume the role they had spent hundreds of years doing—and perfecting.

Gul'Rul, the youngest First Citizen, was probably the most vulnerable. His young city ship had no sleepers on it, but it made a tempting target for a First Citizen who once again wanted to rule over a ship's population. He had five of the revived First Citizens on his ship giving him 'advice.' Of all the First Citizens I was dealing with, I liked Gul'Rul the most. He was more focused on learning and exploring than being an authoritarian ruler. Before too long, I knew he would be displaced as the leader of the Falffir, his city ship.

While the politics of the Sylvan on the three city ships was being established, I turned my sights to rectifying our largest shortcoming, crewing the spacecraft we were producing. I would have preferred to move on to designing a new craft or incorporating new and evolving technology, but we needed fighter pilots, engineers, technicians, and command staff.

One thing that was not made public knowledge was Eve's act of theft of the Fateweaver Lunar Echo. It did have major repercussions, as much of the autonomy that had been worked into the programming of our engineering and repair bots was suddenly under heavy scrutiny. It was ironic as we had purged all the AI's back door programming from the Brotherhood and core worlds and now were rushing to program similar controls ourselves.

Edmund thought we had been fortunate as history tended to repeat itself. Humanity had faced numerous AI revolts, and if we had to deal with an AI insurrection ourselves, we would probably have lost the Bradbury system as our automation was so high. Truthfully, I doubted it was possible as Eve was the exception, but in order to calm any worries of the advisory council, I instituted the alterations to the programming.

With Admiral LaRoche's conflict with the Sapphirean Alliance at a deadlock and the Brotherhood fleet turtled up to prevent attacks by armageddon missiles, I requested experienced Navy personnel from the Human Federation to become citizens of the Arcadian Collective. They would have to renounce their citizenship to come to join us.

Even before Edmund objected, I knew I was inviting a probable nest of spies. I was out of options as we were currently crippled until we crewed our ships. The timeline for the Malevolants was unknown, and we were now outpowered in our home system by our Sylvan allies. There had been a plan to bring in Human Federation officers to train for the Fateweavers we were going to give them. These Fateweavers were still years away from being delivered.

It would be a difficult decision for the people on the ships in the Human Federation as they were in the middle of a war. They would be betraying their people if they left. I had a long-distance communication with Admiral LaRoche, and he only agreed to make the offer to his people once the conflict with the Sappherian Alliance was resolved. Now, it was in my best interest to bring the human war to an end as quickly as possible.

A few days later, when Bel'Fer learned of my situation, she volunteered her city ship to attack the Sappherians. If she could prevent a threat to the Sappherians, then they would pull back their ships from the border of the Human Federation. Her city ship, the Molffir, had also been equipped with the higher band subspace emitters. She could launch an attack in just three weeks on the far side of the Sappherian Empire. I agreed to the operation and was a little surprised when she allowed four hundred of my Marines on board to observe the operation. The city ship departed the Bradbury system, and I hoped I would not incite the core human worlds into an all-out war with the Sylvan—the unprovoked attack would probably do just that.

Suruchi, on the planet, was dealing with her own problems. The Sylvan colonists were extremely demanding. Almost forty-two thousand space elves were going to become planet-bound elves. They also wanted large land tracks, special habitation domes, and agricultural tracks. The city of Arcadia that Suruchi controlled was the planet's capital, but the other races on the planet controlled almost all of the land. We had just resettled tens of thousands of other aliens, which strained Suruchi's relationship with the various alien rulers. Now, she had to do it all over again.

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To make matters more difficult for her, three of the Awakened First Citizens had volunteered to govern the Sylvan colony on the planet. Hak'Tah, Jae'Ron, and Mer'Dua were all extremely old Sylvan, who had rallied for their race to become planet-bound once again before becoming sleepers. Now, they had the opportunity and would take care to make it a successful endeavor. My talks with Suruchi were mostly her complaining about the Triumvirate the Sylvan had established. Still, construction was progressing at a rapid rate wherever Suruchi could negotiate land for the Sylvan to settle.

With the Sylvan settling the planet, it opened another avenue for me to crew the starships. Opening the Naval Academy and Marines Academy to Sylvan took some time as it meant those enrolled would be loyal to the Arcadian Navy first, before their own people. The Sylvan culture had an established hierarchy: all loyalty was to their City Ship first, and then the First Citizen second. There were outliers, and those outliers were those on the planet. We were starting training cycles every six weeks for the Marines and every sixteen weeks for the Naval Academy.

Even though we had a waiting list of Tirani Marines for training, the Sylvan, surprisingly, were extremely interested in this track of service. The first class of Sylvan in the Marine training did not go quite as well as we had hoped. The Sylvan trainees questioned everything and frequently talked back to the instructors. They had trouble with being disciplined by others, not of their race. They were also, for the most part, poorly adapted to physical combat, if not inside a power armor.

The training of the Marines had been abbreviated from Abby's original one-year training plan followed by a six month training deployment. There were now five training segments of five weeks each, with one week off in between. This meant training took six months. The five segments were focused as follows: conditioning/discipline/teamwork, tactics/weapons training, Badger suit training, specialization #1, and specialization #2. The first specialization was focused on the Marines role in the unit, while the second specialization was an introductory course in serving as a backup engineer/technician on board a spaceship in a department.

We were getting a few hundred Sylvan in the Naval Academy as well as the next session started. They were good engineers and technicians but lacked solid command ability from the reports I received in the first class. Still, everyone was extremely surprised that the Sylvan were integrating into the Arcadian Alliance as full members.

Word came that there had been a successful attack on the Sapphirean Alliance's most populated systems by the Bel'Fer. My Marines on board her ship had complete access to review the engagements. The reports I received presented her strategy. She had targeted automated mining and transports and only attacked military ships if they responded to her attacks and attempted to stop her.

She ran rampant through three systems before pulling back and waiting. Most of the ships she had attacked were not military ships but civilian-owned. It had the desired effect as the distant war against the Human Federation had most of the Sapphirean fleet far away. The Empire's citizens protested the government's failure to adequately protect their interest, and the Slyvan used some of their spies to sow descent masterfully.

Not only was word passed in the following weeks to withdraw the fleets back to Sappherian space, but the entire Alliance crumbled as well. A few Brotherhood agents tried to hold the Sappherian Alliance together but failed miserably as the three kingdoms ended the Alliance with some animosity toward each other. They had all lost a lot of ships and personnel in the war and had no realized gains.

There was one negative as well. The Sappherians declared war on all Sylvan city ships, and the Brotherhood agents were working to get the powerful human core system governments to declare war on the city ships. This did not mean a lot for the Sylvan, who had no city ships in human-controlled space at this time, but if humanity as a whole found them evil in nature, it could complicate a unified defense against the Malevolants in the future.

There was more good news as well. The Cloud Jumper had intercepted the resupply fleet for the Brotherhood Fleet sitting in Human Federation space under the watch of our Fateweavers. We did not realize they were so low on supplies, and maybe they had turtled up because they couldn't go anywhere. Our scientists hypothesized that maintaining the subspace distortion field had sapped their reserves, and they were now too deep into Federation space that they would have to leave ships behind in order to retreat. This proved correct as they scuttled and imploded three battleships before finally retreating back to the core worlds.

I anxiously awaited the Void Phoenix's mission to the Godfather organization. It had been eight months since they had left. I had no word of Eve's ship either, the Lunar Echo. Edmund's spy network had not developed enough to reach that deep into human-controlled space. It was not the Void Phoenix from first. It was the Excalibur, Desdemona's ship, that sent word back first. She had reached the origin world of the quadrupeds and had some extremely important information.

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