They all settled into a steady rhythm over the next couple of weeks. With Evan and Jason making serious strides in improving systems throughout the entirety of their planned fleet, while Kinzie and Rebekkah seemed to be doing their absolute best to build a full-blown city on Mars. They also diverted Lisa’s construction capabilities to build and test some long-range mining drones Jason had designed for a bit. A dozen of them had been sent off into the asteroid belt to search for and collect raw material they could use to finally build the larger ships they had been planning out since the start of the whole thing.

Kinzie burst into Jason’s workshop, startling them both. “Hey! Which one do we want first!”

Evan and Jason both looked at her in confusion. “Which what?” Evan asked.

“Which ship! We don’t need Lisa to help with the construction here anymore, we have enough drones to handle everything, and we are getting plenty of raw material to cover building an actual full-sized ship!” Kinzie was so excited she was practically bouncing in place.

Evan and Jason glanced at each other, then said nearly in unison. “Battleship!”

Kinzie rolled her eyes. “How did I know you would both say that? We can’t do that one, we don’t have the personnel for it.”

Evan tilted his head curiously. “Why would we need personnel for the first big one? I thought we were going to put Lisa in it? Swap in a simpler AI for the construction ship, and have her manage everything on the flagship?”

Kinzie shrugged. “We could do that, but we would still need personnel and additional computers for targeting, Lisa hates violence remember? It would be unfair to her to put her in a warship and expect her to fire on other ships full of sentient beings.”

Jason shook his head. “It would be unfair to do that to her, but I’ve been thinking, if we are going to set up an organization under us to watch over and protect the Earth, we probably shouldn’t go gallivanting off across the galaxy any time soon. Besides, I was chatting with her a few days ago and I think the new core has changed that viewpoint slightly, right Lisa?”

“I still don’t like violence and want nothing to do with it,” she started tentatively, “but Jason was asking a bunch of questions, and I think I would prefer being able to defend myself and my friends if I had to.”

Jason nodded. “So what I suggest is that we build a modified version of the battleship I’ve been working on since that talk.” He popped up a blueprint. “It’s basically the same, but we take out a bunch of the crew quarters, because with Lisa we wouldn’t need them for day-to-day tasks, and replace them with labs and research equipment. We pick up all those scientists that have been chomping at the bit to join us and use them as the crew. Essentially it would make our first ship more of a science vessel than a true warship, even though it will still have the firepower of a dedicated warship.”

Evan nodded his agreement after thinking it over for a moment. “I like it. I wish you weren’t right about the fact that we can’t go anywhere for a while, but we can’t empower a bunch of people with starships and advanced tech then leave them without any kind of oversight. For that matter, how do we even ensure we stay in control when we do eventually leave? Create another AI like Lisa with backdoor access to everything and hope their personalities are similar enough for us to trust leaving them behind to watch over everything in our absence? Should we even risk that? If something goes wrong we would probably need to kill it, and that… I don’t like the idea of creating a life only to be forced to destroy it afterward.”

Jason shook his head. “Wouldn’t be as big a risk as you might think. I know we transferred Lisa from the old core to her new one, but there isn’t actually anything stopping us from simply copying her to another new core, and we learned quite a bit about what makes Lisa Lisa in the process. It probably wouldn’t be hard to make minor changes to the program after we transfer it. Things like a slightly higher protective instinct, male persona, and a lower aversion to harming others to protect humanity.

“Not enough of anything to create an evil AI overseer that tries to exterminate humanity of course, but if we instill it with our values the worst we should expect would be it deciding to end slavery worldwide and start freeing slaves and capturing or killing their masters. Which honestly wouldn’t bother me too much. Besides, it would start out with all of Lisa’s knowledge and experiences, so once we got it through the identity crisis it would probably suffer at first it would end up much more similar to her than anything else.”

Evan scratched the back of his head in thought. “That still sounds a bit reckless, an AI having an identity crisis doesn’t sound like a fun thing to deal with. Something to think about, I guess, does this mean we’re decided? What should we name the ship?”

Kinzie frowned a bit. “Wouldn’t we just call it Lisa if she’s going to be controlling it?”

Evan and Jason both shook their heads. “Lisa is Lisa, not the ship she happens to reside in.” Evan said firmly. “We tend to call the construction ship Lisa, but that’s because it doesn’t have a name and it was just what we saw as Lisa’s body. She deserves better than that. She has an avatar now, and it couldn’t be all that hard to design and build an android she could use as a true avatar. We name the ship and list Lisa as crew, first officer perhaps? No offense Lisa, it’s just that the captain would have to make those tough choices like whether or not to fire on someone and I would prefer you didn’t have to make those calls on your own.

“Besides, your capabilities would make for a perfect first officer. If all the sci-fi I consumed when I was younger was even remotely accurate regarding the various officer roles you would be handling things like making duty rosters, disseminating orders to the crew, and funneling information to the captain about ship status and anything else he needs to know to make informed decisions.”

“I’m not offended, I don’t want to make those choices if I don’t have to.” Lisa said quietly. She was still upset that she was the cause of them having to leave their homes behind, and hadn’t been her normal bubbly self since then.

“So, names. I was thinking we should name the battleships after archangels, since our organization’s name is Archangel. They’ll be flagship of whatever fleet they get assigned to once they’re built, and we have enough other ships to actually have more than just one fleet, and it, I dunno, feels right I guess. For this one, since it’s going to be half science vessel I was thinking Metatron since one of the descriptions of him is as a scribe.”

Kinzie grimaced. “Ew, no. Not flying around in a ship that sounds like it was named after something in that old kids’ show.”

Jason just shrugged. “Then what about Raziel? He’s the keeper of secrets.”

The others thought about it for a minute. “I like it,” Evan said eventually, “Starship Raziel of the… wait, do we even have a name for the military side of things yet?”

Kinzie nodded with a smirk. “Yup, but you’re gonna hate it. We’re listed as the Command Council of the Archangel Space Force. So it would be Starship Raziel of the A.S.F.” Both Jason and Evan cringed, and she continued with a giggle. “It gets better, know what they came up with for the troops they want in case a ship gets boarded or we have to send armed men somewhere? Archangel Space Marine Corps, or A.S.M.C.”

“That’s, that’s,” Evan started before sighing, “pretty much what we should have expected from a bunch of military people. Is anyone else already using those acronyms?” He asked hopefully.

Kinzie shook her head. “I asked that already, they told me that they didn’t find anything important using them, and also that they didn’t care. Then they proceeded to list off a bunch of acronyms that they used to use all the time that meant different things depending on who they were talking to at the time, or that different branches used for entirely different things.

“I decided not to argue with them, and we did tell them to set up the military side of things without offering much in the way of guidance or oversight. We should consider ourselves lucky we didn’t get too ridiculous of a name. Command Council is tolerable, and won’t have to change if we decide to expand the number of people in charge.”

“Well, I guess we’re all agreed then? Lisa, you can go ahead and start building this one, what’s the estimate on completion time?”

“I started working on it while you were talking about names,” she confessed, “I should have it ready to fly in a month, fully finished in three.”

“That fast?” Evan asked in surprise. “What do you mean fully finished in three months? Shouldn’t it all be done at once?”

“The armor plates will take at least three months to make due to the layering and number of plates needed, but the ship itself will be fully functional and capable of intersystem flight in a month if I divert some of the extra printers I made before we left Earth. Since we don’t have an urgent need for more living space at the moment, and I’m admittedly a bit excited to move to another ship that is actually designed by my friends and not just a mass-produced factory ship that held so little value the Confederation was willing to simply discard it with no guarantee of getting anything in return, I went ahead and did so. I can switch them back to helping with the colony if you want?” Her voice made it pretty clear to them that she hoped they didn’t want her to do that.

“No, that’s fine Lisa, I would have suggested you do that anyway,” Kinzie said, “we’ve got plenty done already, and can even start bringing people here if we want. Maybe we should bring those scientists in? I’m sure they would love to watch a starship being built, and to go through absolutely everything we’ve built so far and tell us what we did wrong. I think I just changed my mind.” She finished with a wry expression.

“I’m alright with that actually, we could really use the help and half of the ones Lisa contacted were working on projects we can definitely use. I mean, the guy working on the vertical farming stuff for space programs, Doctor Long? His work doubled the efficiency of the hydroponics systems we had set up. Pretty much every change we made to that stuff since we got here has been from his notes.” Jason said eagerly.

“What does Rebekkah think of bringing more people in?” Evan asked Kinzie. “She’s the one that would be managing everything after all.”

“She would love it. She’s been going a bit stir crazy since we got here, all she’s really had to do other than overseeing the construction stuff was talk to a few heads of state about establishing an embassy and potentially setting up recruitment centers. Giving her some more people to manage would help with that. Maybe contact that girl she was into and see if she wants to come up? Or is it out?”

Evan shrugged. “I don’t think it matters really, we knew what you meant. It sounds like we have a plan for now. Lisa, send some shuttles to pick up the folk that want to come up that we can trust, and contact Samantha to find out if she wants to resume her position as my secretary? Assistant? Whatever, I don’t care what the title is, it’s just an excuse for her to come out here if she wants to anyway.”