Reia stretched a bit, as she heard the hum of the engines. As she slipped out of bed, it took her only seconds to realize that they were at warp again. It had been a few weeks since they had last been at warp. They had been in that last system for nearly a month for scientific experiments. Evidently they must have finished those experiments, and were underway again.

She was still in the very same quarters that Countryman had gotten her all those years ago when she first came aboard the Enterprise. Back then this was supposed to be a temporary assignment, but it ended up being rather permanent. Thanks to what fleet historians now called the Valorian Conflict, she had ended up staying aboard the Enterprise. Now she wasn’t even a Valorian anymore. She still looked like one, but she had gained all the same adaptations that the former humans did. They now considered her to be a member of a cousin race. As for the roommates that used to share her quarters with her, they had all settled down and had children.

The quiet one Delilah had surprised her a bit as she had eight children now. That was far more than the norm around here which is currently four. However many mothers now that their children were grown were either considering or trying for a new child. Something the state readily encouraged. So it came as no surprise that Delilah was currently pregnant with her ninth, and tenth child. Speaking of children, a lot of mothers were pregnant with twins. If this trend continued having twins would become the norm. As for her other two roommates, they had been a bit more conservative in regards to children. Aya currently had four with two more on the way, and Seri only had two, but she had another pair on the way as well.

This had been on her mind a lot lately, since she had never quite found the time to settle down, and have a kid. She had started dating recently, but finding a completely unattached man was rather difficult nowadays. Something society had adapted to, by allowing polygamy. That had actually been proposed by the younger generation, and passed in the council. It did solve the problem of having a surplus of unattached young women, but a deficit in unattached men. Although it came with its own set of problems, looking at the captain was a good example of that. Countryman regularly had to shrug off the advances of women that wanted to hook up with him. Especially considering he was one of the few men that weren’t attached, although rumors had placed him with three women. Some said he was dating Megumi, others said he was dating Misaki while another placed him with Ruri. One of the rumors placed him with all three at once, but all of them remained unsubstantiated. There just wasn’t enough evidence to confirm he was dating any of these women. Though Reia did think something was going on between Megumi and Countryman. Those two actually spent quite a bit of off-duty time together, but beyond them spending time together there was nothing else to add weight to the rumors.

Dismissing the rumors, she took the steps to the closet and pulled out something nice to wear. Today was her day off, and she had a date lined up for the day. He was younger than her, but finding someone looking for a mate around her age was rather difficult. Almost everyone her age had already settled down. Regardless, she found the young man rather cute and was hoping to enjoy a nice day with him. They were going to meet in the market in an hour, and browse a few shops. Maybe buy something, and then go to lunch together. After lunch, the plan was to head down below and watch a wargame. That one was his idea, but she had managed to get what she wanted after the wargame on the schedule. There were a few new movies showing later today, and they already had their tickets to one. Like all the new movies it was an animated movie. The ship didn’t exactly have a live-action studio. At least they could make reasonably realistic-looking characters for them. Of course, not all used the realistic style for artistic reasons.

After checking her outfit in the mirror and going over her schedule for the day in her head, she glanced over at her three sleeping roommates. Those three had moved in after her old ones had left. Today was their day off as well, and they were apparently choosing to sleep in today. She didn’t blame them, sometimes it was nice to just sleep in every once in a while. Satisfied with her appearance, she double-checked that she had important things like her ration card. She didn’t think she would need it, but she also made sure she had her security card. It was used mostly to govern access to secured zones, and some sections even coupled the card with a biometric scan to be certain only authorized personnel entered. The ship’s science labs were a good example of the highly restricted zones. They had to keep the kids out of the labs, so they didn’t do something stupid. No one wanted to be the person that had to tell some mother her kid was injured or even worse dead because they were doing something stupid in the lab. It was the same reason all the armories and the factories were locked down. Mostly to keep kids out of danger.

Satisfied she had everything, she left the room. Heading straight for the lift to meet her date. Already looking forward to her day. The fact the ship was at warp, was not high on her list of concerns. Being stopped was only a temporary affair, and if it was important the ship news channel would mention it, or someone would tell her.

Ruri was currently locked up in her private lab. Sitting in her office was the mattress she had used to sleep last night. Her lack of sleep had caught up with her yesterday, and she had slept for a few hours, but she was getting close to completing her project. While most everyone else was working on various projects involving hyperwarp technology she was working on something else. Ruri had taken something different from the dreadnought. Nothing all that important, but the study was proving illuminating. Most particularly in how the Cylovans detected ships in the vicinity of their vessels. They had taken several sensor modules that had survived the battle. Having these had given her the inspiration for her little project, but she wasn’t working on better sensors instead she was working on adapting their stealth fields to better shield their ships from detection. Cylovan sensors were actually inferior to their own, but they did detect ships in a different fashion. That was why they had been able to penetrate their stealth fields as well as they did.

A few days ago she had a major spurt of inspiration on her new and improved stealth fields and she had been working away on it ever since. She had just finished putting together her prototype when she had crashed last night. Looking herself over she noted that her lab coat was torn, and rather dirty. The clothes under it were also in a sorry state, mostly it was just stains, but somehow she had torn her shirt. Just she couldn’t recall how she had done that. Not that it really mattered how she did that. Ruri sighed and stripped out of her clothes. Tossing the old ones in a trash bin, she pulled a spare set out of a locker. They weren’t anything fancy, just a simple t-shirt and pants. Along with a standard-issue lab coat. This wasn’t the first time she had ruined a set of clothes while working on a project. Nor was she the only scientist to keep spare clothes in a locker. As for the ruined clothes, they would be broken down by nanites, and the material recycled. Most everything nowadays was recycled if it could be. Of course, even with the help of nanites, there was some waste, and most of that was dealt with via antimatter reclamation units. Small reactors that were fired up and used to convert waste matter into usable energy. Not as efficient as the main reactors, but they still netted a positive in energy gains. Nowhere near enough power for the engines or weapon systems, but they got enough back to power the lights and other low demand systems.

Using a mirror attached to the locker door, she made sure she looked at least presentable, and then glanced at her new prototype. It represented a small leap forward in active stealth technology. Not as glamorous as true cloaking shields would be, but this new generation should render them completely invisible to strategic scanners at half the distance they previously did. In other words, they would be able to get closer than they could before without being detected. At shorter ranges, it would make them harder to track, and introduce a little more uncertainty into their exact position. Combine that with a decent ECW suite, and they could make it very difficult to get a target lock on a ship. Most importantly, survival out here was all about picking your battles, and the best way to do that was to remain unseen. You can’t attack what you can’t see, and on the flipside remaining unseen helps with launching attacks on unsuspecting targets.

Feeling she was presentable enough, she found a crate and carefully packaged the large generator. Pulling out a stowed grav sled, she lifted it onto the sled and pulled the device out of the room. Making sure to lock up as she left. She didn’t want to be scolded again for failure to lock her lab. Satisfied the door was locked, she headed down the corridor towards a cargo lift. There was an LPC down in the shuttlebay that was reserved for equipment testing, and she needed to talk with the engineers there about testing her device. The installation would be simple enough since it was just an improved stealth field generator, and she had kept the dimensions roughly the same. In fact, her device was a little smaller than the old generators. Though it would need more power, and the extra space could certainly be used for other components. Nothing all that large, maybe an extra battery or a power node. She was going to let the engineers decide what would be best placed in the space.

Reia found her date already waiting for her in Aka district. He seemed rather excited, almost like a kid half his age, as he looked around the courtyard. He was only slightly taller than her, and didn’t have much in the way of muscle. Just enough to look toned, but not so much that it was too much. He had taken the time to put on a nice shirt that paired well with the nice pants he had picked out. His brown hair was well-trimmed and combed. He came from the human line so his skin was a nice pale white. No one really tanned as that required time in the sun to do naturally and they didn’t have one. As for the other option, that was a bit of a luxury, and most people had better things to spend their credits on. As for a beard, he didn’t have one, no one seemed to grow body hair or facial hair anymore. She remembered this part of Aka district used to look like a collection of stalls and crates. Now it looked a small town with metal buildings in orderly rows and nice courtyards like this one where people could meet up. The center had a decorative statue that presented the exterior view of the Enterprise and in a circle around it were benches so people could sit and rest for a bit. Naturally, to add to the mood small gardens were planted in front of the various buildings. None of these buildings were meant to be houses, but the shopkeepers often lived in them with their families. As a result, the market district also provided extra housing for people on the ship. The courtyard also had a few trees planted out of the walk paths. This greenery also helped the life-support systems scrub the atmosphere of Carbon Dioxide, and produce oxygen. Even if they were more valued for their aesthetic appeal. Speaking of aesthetics, someone had even taken the time to apply treatment to the walk paths to make it look like flagstone roads. It wasn’t actual stone, but rather a layer of faux stone applied over the metal floor plating.

Many of the buildings also had their own little aesthetic touches added to them. All of them were metals, but some looked to be made of stone or wood. Since metal was so readily available for the fleet natural materials were the in thing for style. Since those were hard to come by, it was cheaper and easier to just make faux facings to give the appearance of natural materials. Reia was always impressed with how much this part of the ship had changed over the decades. Having evolved from a makeshift frontier market into something resembling a colonial market square. It was just one of the many signs if you looked around that showed that the People of Sol were actually quite wealthy for a nomadic group. Like any nomadic group that made some of their income from raiding, but they tended to avoid hitting alien trade routes. Instead, they profited off of pirate hunting. Pirates were viewed as parasites by almost any established government, and they often overlooked pirates disappearing. For most this resulted in a win-win situation. The locals benefited from a reduction in pirates, and they got whatever the pirates had looted along with anything salvageable from their wrecked ships. Pirates were never any good at keeping their wealth, so normally they tried to hit them after they had come back from a successful raid.

As soon as she got close to her date, he stepped closer saying, “Look what I can do!”

So maybe he was acting like a kid. Suddenly his arm was wrapped in a wreath of flames. A number of people were startled, and then he raised his arm into the air, and weak flamethrower flew from his palm. After that happened the flames wrapped around his arm got hotter and a bit bigger. Then he did it again, and the flamethrower was stronger this time. Reia was dumbfounded as watched him do it. What most surprised her was what her eight sense, her mindsight, revealed about these flames. They were fueled by pure psionic energy, and each time he used this spell it grew stronger. The energy was also wrapped around his body in a fashion that she suspected meant he was shielded against the effects of fire both natural and psionic. In fact, it looked like the spell would fuel itself on any fire type energy directed against it. Little did she or anyone there realize that this young man had invented what would eventually be called the Ancestral Arts. These arts would naturally be considered the very first magic, a term used more often than the more accurate Transcendent Psionics.

It wasn’t hard for the People of Sol to reach the Transcendent level they just lacked a formal system of training and were still exploring the basics of Psionic ability. Pseudo hiveminds just being one of the concepts they have been exploring. After taking a couple of moments to compose herself, she quietly asked, “How are you doing that?”

The rather excited babble that he answered with was difficult to decipher, to say the least. While listening, she led him to an isolated storage room just outside the district. Someplace that would be a little safer to play with strange fire. She wanted to at least try this trick as well, but it turned out that she couldn’t do it. Instead, she ended up doing the opposite, instead of fire she was channeling a frosty beam of energy that froze anything it hit. Other than that it had all the same characteristics. Weak at first and grew with each use. Rather quickly in fact, and she found that she did indeed absorb similar energies and redirect them into the attack. Opposing energies however actually weakened the psionic field that it generated. On another note, she was glad that injuries healed rather quickly. Not that they hurt any less