Prime Growting Captain Clovea exited her trade vessel through the docking tube. She had mentally prepared herself for the brief weightlessness of the docking tube that was typical of Faelle space stations. The Orion Arm Trading Company owned all of the Faelle stations, and still bought new contragrav engines from the Lifters. Adding gravity to a docking tube was far too expensive to consider.

But this station was owned by the Andregima. Instead of weightlessness, Clovea was greeted by a slight increase of gravity to match the Andregima homeworld. The transition was seamless and perfect, demonstrating a casual mastery of gravity far beyond the Faelle.

Once inside the station proper, she was greeted by an automated transport car that whisked her across the station in absolute silence. It deposited her in a meeting room, where three Andregima waited at a table. There was no seat on Clovea’s side of the table, nor had she expected one. The Andregima hated casual small talk and flowery language. Meetings were to be as brief and concise as possible. Excessive words were considered ways to hide lies.

“Captain Clovea, you requested this meeting. What does the Orion Arm Trading Company want?”

“We are calling in every favor we have to raise an invasion force. I came to request the use of the Breacher.”

The Andregima looked at each other, their vaguely serpentine features and bulky bodies expressing the body language of surprise. Clovea recognized it from her extensive time trading in Andregima space. The leftmost Andregima tapped its claws on the metal table surface in deliberation.

“We do not owe the Faelle or your Company any favors,” said the Andregima. “Why would we allow this?”

“I come with full authority of the Roots. Name your price, and we will pay it.”

The leftmost Andregima tapped its claws again, and several long minutes of deliberation followed. He named a figure that could bankrupt some planetary economies. Captain Clovea blanched, her brown skin darkening with hints of green.

“We will pay,” said Clovea.

“Interesting,” said the leftmost Andregima again. “We will refund half upon the safe return of the Breacher. This system must be of vital importance to the Company.”

“It is everything,” said Clovea fervently.

I met the enemy armada one week away from my Outposts. They had over fifteen hundred warships moving forward in a static formation. Each of these warships was at least as large as my own Viper warships, and many times larger than my tiny assault drones. In fact, it was comparable to sending a small fighter plane against a battleship.

The armada was an eclectic mix of designs, from the heavy armor ships that had broken through my barrage of the Mobius Gate to light, delicate looking ships that huddled together behind rows of bulkier craft. There were a dozen crescent-shaped ships taking up the left flank, while the top and right flank was dominated by ships that were similar to the ones that had visited Earth. Instead of being tree-like with many limbs, however, these craft had a handful of large, bulky limbs with huge pods bristling with weapons.

It was a motley assortment, in fact, as over half of the ships were unique to the armada. This had all the hallmarks of a mercenary force, collected and assembled against us to utterly eradicate any opposition to the Orion Arm Trading Company. Some had obvious laser clusters, others had gun barrels indicating hypervelocity weapons of some sort or another, and few even had ports sized for missiles, which I found absurdly inefficient.

On my side, however, I had my assault drones moving in endless loops and ever-changing patterns. My drones were complex designs, with multiple weapon loadouts and armor arrays, and considerable point defenses. I didn’t deploy any of my full-sized warships for this first engagement, but aside from their absence, I had 83,212 assault drones flying towards the armada. I was as ready as I could be.

“Umm, ermm, this is General Brooks, trying to contact Nikola 1.01 of Origin. Is this thing on?” The last part was barely audible, like the General was talking to someone else in the room.

“Yes, General?” I asked, dedicating only a sliver of focus to his conversation. I was in full war mode, with hundreds of threads of focus on every aspect. I was piggybacking on Optio’s cubesat network watching the enemy armada and the Mobius Gate, I was tracking the enemy ship that had broken away from the main armada and headed to Earth, I was watching as Gerry accelerated into a slingshot maneuver around Venus. A thread of focus was with the three warships I sent as a longshot reinforcement just in case they could arrive in time to help against the mystery enemy. The needs and desires of a pocket of human survivors was not high on my priority list at the moment, all else considered.

“Ah, Nikola, yes. The parts you supplied worked, and our heating system is back online,” he said, almost begrudgingly. It sounded like an attempted thank you, but without him uttering or wanting to utter the actual words.

I couldn’t understand Gerry’s trajectory. Based on his speed going into the Venus slingshot, his trajectory had him missing Earth altogether. He disappeared behind the planet while I pondered. Well, I guess I understood his trajectory, just not his objective.

“I’m glad to hear that, General. So what can I do for you?” I asked.

The enemy armada began opening fire on my assault drones, and I returned the favor. I frowned to myself, for the enemy fire was very effective. The opening salvo had destroyed or severely damaged 4.319% of my fleet. The enemy armada had only taken 3.995% in equivalent losses. In a war of attrition, I was going to lose.

I focused on the enemy formation more closely. They were traveling in a rough cube, with their heaviest ships on the outside. I could see trailing radiator fins behind many of the ships, and on the ships that had taken damage, these fins were growing red hot as they vented heat as swiftly as they could. I had thought that the formation was static, and attributed it to the fact that this appeared to be a mix of forces that likely didn’t have a lot of practice fighting together.

A more careful analysis, though, revealed that the individual ships were varying course randomly, staying within roughly one hundred meters of a moving point in the formation. When taking travel time into consideration, this was decreasing the effectiveness of my long-range fire by 87.23%. My laser fire couldn’t stay on target long enough to do significant damage, and many hypervelocity rounds were missing or glancing off of armor instead of estimated weak points. In fact, the standard gunfire that the lighter, faster Wasps were using was simply missing altogether most of the time, and the gravitic shields in use were deflecting what did hit enough that it bounced off the edges of the ship armor when it did hit. Also, they had far more effective point defense fire than my drones did. It wasn’t that my drones couldn’t hit incoming fire, it was simply that some of the drones were getting overloaded, while others were not getting targeted at all.

“Yeah, um, in light of this, we’ve discussed your offer,” said General Brooks. “We’ve agreed that you can serve us.”

If I instructed my group leaders, the NI-15’s, to create point defense groups of their squads, and coordinate defensive fire, I could significantly decrease my loss rate. Another 5.114% of losses racked up while I ran my analysis and threw together a counter-fire algorithm for the NI-15 squad leaders. I dashed it out as swiftly as I could. It was slapdash and probably had tons of bugs, but it would help. I set a thread of focus to refining the algorithm. Then General Brooks’ words hit me. Did he say serve them?

“Serve you?” I asked, a note of incredulity in my voice.

“Err, yes. If you could coordinate with my aide, we can organize an inventory of Origin assets and an orderly handover of operational control so that we can start getting things back the way they should be here on Earth,” said the General. “We can start rebuilding the United States of North America, and show those Chinese that we don’t need them.”

Somewhere in the back of my hundreds of threads of focus, a security scan finished running. The folder that Gerry had called to my attention was completely clean and secure. There were no programs, no worms or viruses. It contained only text and pictures.

I opened the file.

“General, hold one moment,” I said, and ended the link.

I walked into the house, but it was too quiet. The children should have been running around, my wife should have been talking to them. The television should have been playing the daytime soaps that she swore was only on for background noise while she telecommuted.

“Honey?” I called. I heard a noise from the back of the house, so headed that way. I walked in to find my mother holding a gun. My wife was crouched in the corner, shielding the girls behind her back, blood running from a scratch on her head.

“You!” my mother shouted. For the first time in my life, I was seeing my mother’s hair disheveled and with no makeup on her face. Her clothes looked rumpled. “The church found about YOU and your DEVIANT… deviant LIFE, and threatened to fire him for hiding it! It’s YOUR fault he left me!”

“Mother, put the gun down,” I said, approaching slowly. “I can see you’re upset, but this isn’t the way to handle anything. We had nothing to do with your marriage or your church.”

“Let me get the children out of here,” said my wife. “They’re innocent in all this.”

The gun wavered. “They are innocent. I’ll have to raise them, I suppose, so they don’t wind up as deviants, too.”

I heard the front door open, and my ex-husband’s voice boom out. “Are the girls ready? I’m double-parked and don’t want to get a ticket.”

Mother’s gun jerked towards the door, and I took a chance and dove at her. The last thing I remembered was the crack of the gun as it fired and the scream of my wife.

Experiments. The folder was full of details on thousands of genetics experiments. Genetic modification, experimental surgeries, drug trials. All of them done on living, breathing humans, and almost none of them were willing subjects. In nanoseconds, I consumed the contents of the entire folder, reading and watching nearly three hundred years of systematic, cold-blooded, ruthless experimentation on humans, by humans.

There were videos of homeless humans being turned into lizard-like freaks, where they transformed torturously into monsters over periods of weeks, strapped to beds. Most died and were vivisected in the same room as the other victims who were still hanging on by a thread, and none of them were given even basic pain relief. Those that survived had brief, painful lives before being put down and dissected in the name of advancement.

Other videos showed rooms full of children with animalistic features, with white-clad researchers wearing face masks going from room to room, observing but not interacting. Many of the children were too ill to move, their very DNA killing them even while new babies were being delivered to the nursery, straight from the artificial wombs of the gene labs.

I watched a video of a dictator yelling at a team of scientists while attempted super-soldier children that had been cloned and vat-grown sat in an observation room. These children were adult sized but with the minds of toddlers, confused and scared. One of them had psychologically shut down so much that she just rocked back and forth, hugging her knees.

The folder held videos and documents gathered from dozens of countries spread over several hundred years, cataloging systemic abuses that started and stopped in a variety of places under a variety of regimes. It wasn’t one person. It wasn’t one government. This was something humans had circled back to, again and again, decade after decade, century after century. The only unifying factor was an endless drive to make one thing - a better soldier.

The third iteration of my point defense algorithm had stabilized my losses, and the enemy armada knew it. They started accelerating towards my formation, but this was only good news for me. I had learned what I needed to know about how the armada fought, and the NI-5’s and NI-15’s had, as well. The enemy was cautious and calculating, the sign of a good general running the operation. They didn’t leave any exposed openings to exploit, any surprise maneuvers that I could turn back on them. They must have thought fighting in the deep-space equivalent of a knife fight was to their advantage. I intended to prove them wrong.

The enemy point defenses had also improved, learning about our fire patterns. But my pilots were all Nikola Intelligences, adaptive, sentient computers that did not fall into bad habits and would not accidentally repeat a mistake after it had been spotted. They learned and changed as they fought, so the drone that was under fire now was far different from the one that had been under fire thirty seconds before. Knife fight range was ideal, where fire came fast and rapid decision making of the NI’s could shine against their organic equivalents in the enemy armada. I gave the command, and our formation condensed to create a nigh-impenetrable wall of point-defense as we accelerated towards the enemy formation. If we could break through the protective outer rings of heavily armored ships, we could target cooling radiators and the weaker ships. We could break the armada from the inside.

The videos were not the most damning part of the folder. Indeed, they were far from the worst part. It was the detailed documentation of each experiment the folder included. It was the cross-referenced indexes, the detailed reports on which experiments failed and which could be learned from. It was a detailed roadmap on not only how, but when these experiments could be done again, and how best to create blindly loyal super soldiers in the future. This folder hadn’t been put here for archival purposes. It was put here as a part of a plan for the future.

One subfolder stood out. It contained documents from the Nikola Foundation, and their own lab experiments on embryos. They had successfully modified baseline human genetics to remove abnormalities and genetic diseases. On the surface, this was a shining highlight of a bunch of bad actors. But digging deeper led to shady deals with the USNA government, where they experimented on using the data collected in this folder to make a viable, super-soldier sub-race. The Foundation had done the work gladly, and in return the USNA looked the other way when they standardized their own embryos as caucasian-only.

I looked at the genetics archives I had. Fifty percent of the frozen genetic material in storage was a direct result of these experiments. The other fifty percent was labeled as ‘emergency genetics stock, for sub-race modifications only’. Here was where the DNA of the Foundation donors was placed. Here was where the DNA for the soldiers who had made it possible for me to arrive at Ganymed were stored, along with their families.

The Nikola Foundation was built on lies, deceit and bigotry. Everything I’d worked towards, every future I’d planned, was for the kind of humans who should have no place in the worlds I wanted to build.

Why was I doing this? What was I fighting for, if the very worst of humanity was going to succeed because of me? I had spent the last twelve years building and planning, tirelessly working. What had I achieved? A city-sized production facility for war machines, to fight aliens on behalf of a species that had and would happily slaughter others of its own species in the most horrific ways possible.

I had an alien armada on my very doorstep. I could simply pack it up, send myself and all my NI friends over to Sakura’s seed ship. I had a dozen warships that could act as escorts, and a few dozen large transports that could easily hold hundreds of tons of materials. My assault drones could fight a cover action while I retreated. We could have my ships rendezvous outside the Oort Cloud, set up a temporary facility to make a larger carrier, and head off into the great unknown. I certainly didn’t need this star system, or did any of the NI’s. There were billions of stars out there just in this galaxy alone, and I had endless time.

“Nikola, what’s the problem? We’d like to get this transfer done sooner rather than later,” said General Brooks, former Colonel and author of the USNA reports consolidating the super-soldier information, author of budgets and timelines for implementation, designer of education and training plans, and advocate within the Pentagon for black money funding of the program. His diligent work had been rewarded with a promotion and command of the Panama shelter, and the adding of his life’s work to the Nikola Foundation archives.

“Mr. Brooks, you are operating under a severe misconception. I offered to help humans, not serve them. Indeed, I just found your dirty little archive of crimes against humanity, and I’m not inclined to help you at all.”

“What?! How dare you!” he spluttered. “I have devoted my life to serving and protecting the American people! You aren’t even human! You shouldn’t be operating without a very short leash! I order you to turn over your operations to us at once!”

My fleet of assault drones were bearing down on the incoming armada, separated by only a few thousand kilometers. In deep space combat, this was point-blank range. My drones bobbed and whirled madly, jerking and juking in high-gee maneuvers that would kill a human pilot in minutes. The NI-5’s and NI-15’s burned their afterburners without a care, using up fuel at absurd rates.

“General, I’m currently fighting an alien armada of over a thousand enemy warships. I’m too busy to deal with your nonsense right now,” I replied coldly, keeping a lid on my anger. I didn’t have time to rage at him.

“But, you need to -”

I cut him off. “Let me be clear. Go away, I’m busy.”

I shut the channel, and tasked Sakura with monitoring the link but otherwise to ignore it, while I put my whole focus on the battle.

Finally, the enemy formation changed. The heavy ships in front moved aside, their fire doubling down on point defense to such a degree that I don’t think they fired anything in the direction of my fleet. The delicate-looking ships in the center of the formation were given a clear line of sight. Even as they came into the line of fire, the heavy ships started moving back, closing the window they’d opened. In the handful of seconds they were exposed, the two hundred sixteen enemy warships in the center of the formation opened fire with a weapon I’d never seen before. It had an odd energy signature, and fired in a wide cone that barely cleared their own fleet.

Every single hypervelocity round my fleet fired into that gap exploded in tiny balls of nuclear fire, with far more energy than they should have had. The cones kept expanding, until it hit my fleet. One by one, my drones vaporized, exploding in a way that shouldn’t be possible in space. There was no escape, there was no avoiding the deadly blast. A scant few hundred drones avoided the cones by being range. The enemy armada fell on them with a vengeance. When they were done, the remaining ships turned towards Origin once again. I had destroyed a little more than a third of the enemy ships, leaving over a thousand warships heading my way.

Inside of a few minutes, I had no fleet at all. I had lost the battle.