***** Terran Defense Forces (TDF) Builder, Sol System *****

Hey Broohn! Do you have a spare minute now that most of the guests are gone? I asked my Executive Officer (X.O. for short).

“Sure. What’s up?” He replied as he headed for his enchanting workshop without slowing down. After all, I can talk to him anywhere on the ship because I am the ship. Legally speaking, I’m also the Captain and the computer of the TDF Builder, which occasionally leads to some interesting conversations with people who don’t understand who and what I am.

I know that I should’ve asked you this before, but why was the celebration banquet for our alliance with the Lizarolfkang held on my auxiliary production deck? When we, and by “we” I mean the Terrans, first came across the Lizarolfkang, there were three different groups of aliens fighting over ownership of their star system. Apparently, they all thought the Lizarolfkang would make great slaves.

Fools.

Cute and cuddly does not necessarily mean docile and easily cowed. Yes, they are a peaceful society, but only because they funnel all of their aggression into some very violent war games. Which, by the way, are only non-lethal because of the astonishing quality of their powered armor.

Broohn’s response dragged me back out of my reverie.

“I’m assuming it was chosen because it is the only place in orbit that can hold all of the guests and be decorated on almost no notice. After all, it only took you half an hour to empty the deck and decorate it properly. Also, isn’t it a bit late to ask now that the banquet is over?”

Yes, but when the Terran Space Lord pops into my command deck, tells me that the party is happening on my ship in an hour, then leaves again before I can respond, I don’t exactly have much choice now do I?

“No, not really. It is a bit hard to argue with my father when he’s in a hurry.”

Only a bit?

He didn’t bother to answer that question.

“On a completely different note, I’m glad that we finally got the captured fleet rebuilt for the Lizarolfkang. For the first time in months, both of us will finally have time to work on some of our personal projects and relax a little.”

You can say that again!

“For the first time in months, both of us will finally have time to work on some of our personal projects and relax a little.”

You are a very silly lizard. So which project are you going to work on first?

“Of course! Being silly is soooo much better than being angry. Anyway, to answer your question, I should probably finish enchanting the green and brown set of custom powered armor.”

Yeah, finishing a wedding anniversary gift before your anniversary is probably a good idea.

“Don’t I know it,” Broohn replied as he opened the door to his workshop.

“Surprise!” yelled his wife who was leaning against the opposite wall.

“Zona!” he yelled as he ran across the room to wrap her up in a very enthusiastic embrace.

BUURNT!!!BUURNT!!!

“Grah! What now!?”

It looks like someone at Fleet Command decided that this would be a great time to do a random stealth-intruder drill.

“Well that’s no fun…” complained Zona.

“I’ll see you when this is over Dear Heart,” Broohn said before he gave her a quick kiss and turned to run for my bridge.

“What are you thinking, you silly man? I’m coming with you!” She yelled over the sound of the claxons as she ran after him, reaching for his shoulder.

He paused in the doorway to look back at her, “As much as I’d like to have you with me, I need you to get to the atrium just in case something happens. We need to treat this as if it was an actual emergency, and not all of the plants are old or strong enough to be properly vacuum-proofed.” Left unsaid was that the atrium was the primary air treatment center for the ship, and the atrium losing atmosphere implied that something really bad had happened. On top of that, given what she is, Zona needs to be close to a part of her forest. The only reason that she could be this far from her forest was the saplings that she brought with her in specially enchanted pots. Without those saplings and their pots, she would have barely made it up to Lunar orbit, let alone all the way to Mars.

“Ugh. Fine, I’ll take care of the plants. Stay safe!”

“I’ll try!” He paused, cocking his head, “Huh. Bud, Zona, my foresight says that we’ll be living in a new world by the end of the day, yet somehow we won’t have left this one.”

Okaaay… That’s oddly specific for your Foresight, and yet somehow just as vague as always. Are you getting anything else?

“Nope. All we can do is roll with it and trust that God knows what He is doing.”

“True. Regardless, we need to get moving. This is supposed to be an emergency after all!”

“Oh, right. Let the hunt begin!” Yelled Broohn as he ran for my bridge.

“He’s such a silly reptile sometimes.”

Of course! He wouldn’t be his parent’s child if he was serious all of the time!

“Oh, I know. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some work to do.”

While we were talking, I had turned off the now unnecessary klaxon and powered up my active sensor arrays as one of the seven disk-shaped formations took shape around me. At the center of each formation was one of the seven ships given to the Terrans by the Shihoth Nor. With our mix of Shihoth Nor successes and Terran magitech, my original escorts and I had the best sensor suits in the entire fleet.

As for the rest of the Terran fleet, two-thirds of it is a hodgepodge of retrofitted pirate ships while the other third are all ships that I had built for the Terrans to their specifications.

The really sad thing is that since the Terran ships are all prototypes being used to see what actually works, the only way to tell the Terran ships apart from the former pirate ships, aside from their transponders, is the Terran ships have a contiguous design and the pirate ships… don’t. Also, given the nature of their magitech, the Terran ships tend to very unique.

Two of the most outrageous examples of this would be the Flamer and Icer prototypes.

The Flamer is pretty much just a flying ball of star-fire (a.k.a., nuclear fusion plasma) crewed by people who have ridiculous levels of fire affinity. This is only possible due to the Terran’s ability to turn spacetime into a pretzel, allowing them to stick the fusion reactor in the heart of the ship while simultaneously sticking the rest of the ship in the heart of the fusion reactor. For obvious reasons, there won’t be too many of these constructed even if this one does pass its trial run – but those they do have will be very hard to destroy.

The Icer, on the other hand, is a flying ice-ball that is rather hard to detect because its waste heat is effectively zero. They may not have much in the way of range, but if they can sneak to within a few hundred thousand kilometers they will coat the outside of the enemy starship in an ice mixture specially designed to ghost through most kinds of shields. While this won’t do any damage to the hull, it will incapacitate anything delicate that is attached to the outside of the hull – things such as sensors, fast-moving turret mechanisms, weapons ports, external shield generators and so on.

However, not all of the Terran ships were quite so outlandish – most of their designs used more conventional weapons (such as lasers, missiles, railguns, and plasma cannon) enhanced with magic then mounted on steel, ceramic and/or composite hulls. Regardless of how conventional or competently constructed their ships appeared (some of the pirate ships looked questionable even now), whoever attacked them would be in for a nasty shock.

I shook myself out of my examination of what I’d built and switched my primary concentration to the thread of my consciousness I placed in charge of the sensor drill, where I noticed that I hadn’t missed anything. The nice thing about being an AI of my caliber is that I can have parts of me operating on what would effectively be autopilot for a normal person without any noticeable change in performance, allowing me to use my primary focus for the things that I actually wanted to do.

“Sir!” called the senior sensor tech from his station on my bridge, “I think I’m picking up something at 42.59, 31.64, and two light seconds. I know Bud flagged it as a sensor ghost, but something doesn’t feel quite right about that to me.”

My bridge was shaped like a flattened sphere with a glamor/hologram projector in the middle with individual workstations evenly spaced around it in tiered rings. Broohn sat in the X.O.’s chair in the central ring directly aft of the projector exactly halfway to the outer edge. In fact, the X.O.’s chair was directly aft of the projector because my ship is shaped vaguely like a flying saucer – in other words, the best way to define the front of my ship is by the location and orientation of the X.O.’s chair.

“Put it on the main projector.” Commanded Broohn. “Let’s take a closer look.”

Confirmed, taking a closer look. I said as I focused my auxiliary sensor array on the sensor ghost in question.

While I may officially be the captain of my own ship, and therefore sentient in my own right, I am still a computer at heart. In other words, while I’m great with concrete problems and determining probabilities, I lack the gut instinct that my crew tended to be good at. Also, a certain subset of the population is rather nervous about putting an AI like me in charge of a starship without any sort of oversight, let alone a starship of my caliber. So, while I am perfectly capable of flying myself into battle, I still listen to my crew.

Which is why I was refocusing my auxiliary sensor array on the location of what I thought was only a sensor ghost – a randomly occurring phenomenon where, for one reason or another, sensors detect something that doesn't appear to be important, so it gets discarded as unimportant by the controlling software. This could be anything from a glitch in the sensor, to a sensor return that doesn’t quite hit the detection threshold, to an odd collection of random noise.

Situations like this are why I have an auxiliary sensor array – so I can take a closer look at something while leaving my primary array to get a general picture of my surroundings.

Unknown Contact! Designating it Uniform 1.

“Well, that’s new. Can you tell me anything about it?”

It’s really sneaky and made of an unknown material. Now that I’ve refocused my auxiliary array, I’m getting too many sensor ghosts at that location for there not to be something there, but I don’t know what exactly.

“Well, that’s not good. Let’s hail them and–“

Spacetime distortion inbound! All hands brace for impact! I yelled as I overclocked both of my processing cores.

The distortion was moving far too fast for me to dodge, so I spun my shields up to maximum and centered myself in its path. At the same time, I reconfigured my stardrive to protect my crew from whatever this was. I might not have seen it before, but the basic structure was easy enough to redirect around my crew members. Good thing we got the Terran stardrive installed yesterday because I couldn’t have done this with the Shihoth drive.

In the final moment before impact, for some reason Broohn managed to exclude himself from my protections, then he did something to the incoming distortion. I barely had time to notice that Zona was somehow also outside of the protections, then the distortion hit and suddenly I was seeing and being double. As in, it felt like there were two of every single part of me.

Well, I’m glad that I can’t get nauseous. I said to myself, then I got swallowed by rainbow-colored static and yanked sideways into whiteness.

SYSTEM OVERLOAD IMMINENT!

EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN INITIATED!