Book of the Guardian 3: The Last Mission (2 page)

"Actually Sire, I want more than that," Chloe said.

"Excuse me?" Mark said, taken aback.

"The people of the realm will be our primary responsibility. The ones most at risk, currently, are the ones out here on the frontiers. When you're building that facility on Bethel's Anvil, I want the construction team to rebuild that Lizard base into the Guardian's new headquarters," Chloe replied.

Mark looked thoughtful for a moment. "I'd be a little leery of having that much advanced tech in a base that close to the Tammerain."

"Mark, you're going to have a full enhancement center there! You can't be that worried about it!" Chloe replied grinning. "Besides, we can build our own self-destruct systems into it."

Mark sighed. "You're right, I was just hoping you'd pick a spot closer to the core of the realm."

John weighed in on the discussion. "We would still patrol that area, Mark, after all they are part of our responsibility as well. But I agree with Chloe, the base should be out here."

"Well, we can hammer this out once you get here. Until then, my friends. Be safe," Mark said and ended the call.

"I'm tired and I've got a nutrient warning," Chloe said. "Let's swing by the galley and grab some food before heading back to our quarters, okay?" Chloe asked.

"When do we jump?" John asked.

"In about four hours. Lieutenant Carmichael is coming to take over up here," she replied. She had no sooner gotten it said than the petite woman arrived and saluted her two superiors.

John took Chloe's hand and headed for the Galley. "What was Mark asking you to call an advocate for?"

John chuckled. "I've invested some of my money over the years. As a result, I own a couple of resort stations."

"How many is a couple?" Chloe asked, "And why haven't you taken me to any of them?"

"Actually, I've only been to one of them myself. Always seemed like we were too busy to take a vacation for very long," John said.

"Well, they must not be all that much, which ones do you own?" Chloe asked.

"Guardian's Honor, Shield United, and Common Comforts," John replied.

Chloe stopped him in the middle of the passage way. "John that isn't a 'couple of resorts', those are the top three, five-cluster, resort hotel lines in the whole fucking realm!"

John nodded. "Yeah, they've been doing really well. But now they’re going to be the finest emergency hospitals and refugee relocation ships in the realm. When I bought out the lines, I made sure each facility could be switched over to an emergency transport if the need ever arose. I also made sure each one was equipped with hyperspace drives, armor, and shielding. None of them are armed past asteroid defenses and none of them have Tammerain medical personnel on board. There is a clause in every rental contract that states any and all contracts can be canceled without notice in the event of a Kingdom emergency. Since Mark asked me to activate them, it is considered an emergency. All current guests will be transported to the closest port to await transport back to their planet of origin."

"Who provides the transport?" Chloe asked.

"Mostly Windsor Limited, but if needed other transports from other companies can be called," John explained.

"Wow that has to be expensive. Who pays for all of it?" Chloe asked.

"The corporations have been asked to absorb as much of the cost as possible, and the crown will try to offset the remainder of the cost," John replied. "In this case, there is only one corporate entity involved."

"No! You own Windsor Limited too?" Chloe asked. "You know, one of these days, we're going to have to sit down and compare portfolios. At least that way, we don't end up in competition!"

"Why?" John said. "That's most of what I own."

Chloe smiled. "I own FTL Westfield, you're primary competitor for Windsor Limited."

They got some food from the Galley and returned to their quarters where John called his advocate. When he finished, Chloe did the same and ordered him to have the company notify the Royal Emergency Management Agency or REMA of their ship's availability to transport refugees or those stranded because of the resort closings by John's companies. When John asked her about it, she shrugged. "It's the right thing to do, I just wish we would have talked about it sooner, so I could have been better prepared for it."

––––––––

O
n Bethel's Anvil, scouts from the
Gladiator
, assisted by a few engineers, were given the task of exploring the whole of the underground lizard base with the exception of the area where the self-destruct device was being worked on.

Bethel's Anvil, because of its position as one of Bethel's moons, was heated by geothermal energy, and was very seismically active. As such, it made most underground construction impractical, at best. However, the lizards had not only built a very extensive base, they apparently had a complex, underground transit system that could be used to travel over most of the world.

The task of mapping the whole base had not occupied the scouts very long, so they moved on to the transit station the Guardians had found. Despite the centuries since the transit system had been sealed off and abandoned, it was remarkably still intact.  Major seismic activity had been recorded over the years, yet not only were the tunnels still intact for the most part, but also the system itself was still able to function in most areas.  This meant that the Tammerain had a method of building that was very resistant or very adaptable to seismic activity.

The tunnel leading from the old base had been an end stop. The scouts followed it and found that it led to another station that was under the city of Threshold. When Threshold was being built, no one had found the old station because of the amount of damage that had been done during the fighting to take the planet.

The initial survey before the last battle had listed a city in that location, but there had been only the remnants of the spaceport, and one other building remaining. The rest had been unrecognizable, slightly radioactive rubble; not even foundations had remained to mark where buildings had stood.

The scouts did discover that the lizards tended to build underground as much, if not more, than they did above ground. Once the Scouts found the Threshold station, a major hub from the looks of it, they also discovered the remains of an abandoned underground city. The floor closest to the surface had collapsed and been destroyed in the battles, but the deeper structures had remained surprisingly intact. As the scouts uncovered more of the hidden city and discovered more hidden ruins all along the underground tram network, Bethel's Anvil would eventually boast a thriving archaeological business.

The tram system itself was an engineering marvel. It used a form of anti-gravity to move trains from one place to another. Trains could even pass each other in tunnels simply by the precision manipulations of the gravity fields. Admiral Surry finally had to make the tram system off-limits from her engineers who clamored to learn its secrets. Others could learn those secrets; the Admiral and her fleet had a mission, and that had to take priority.

––––––––

M
any light years away, in the area of the realm furthest from Tammerain space, in an isolated, and very well protected system, several hundred new warships had moved to the system boundary and were ready to jump out. These ships represented the latest advances in kingdom defense technology.

Included in their number were fighter carriers, battleships, dreadnoughts, and a few ships never seen before in modern warfare; a smallish frigate sized craft whose prow was marked by an unusual amount of missile tube openings. This ship had one mission, to seek out and destroy capitol class ships. The missile boat was armed almost exclusively with the new hyperspace missiles. All of her brethren in the fleet had improved computer systems capable of receiving targeting hand-off from the small ship.

The missile boats had larger companions that were little more than heavily armored, medium freighters. These were ammo litters, and carried a missile supply twice that of the launching vessels. Each launcher had two of these ships that stayed with them until their missile supply was emptied, at which time they would return to a supply base to reload.

Another new class of ship was for the support of the fleet, lacked every type of weapons save for point defenses; a flying engineering vessel that could surround a damaged ship and begin repairs. The damaged ship could either remain in the fight, or the gantry itself could jump them both back to a dry-dock facility capable of repairing it.

Loaded on the carriers and larger ships were new fighter craft, these new ships had improved power units, computer systems, and more powerful weapons including small mass drivers that fired tritainium coated antimatter rounds. The tritainuim had a property that allowed it to maintain the antimatter in a magnetic containment for a set amount of time without a power unit. If a round missed its target, the antimatter would destroy the round when the magnetic field degraded.

A newly discovered technology that was just finishing development would give the small fighters, as well as the hyper-missiles, a major advantage. It had not been included simply because time had not permitted it. The scientists that developed it, called the new drive system a spatial/temporal fold drive. The techs called it a 'jump' drive. The military called it instantaneous interstellar travel.

Depending on the mass of an object, this drive could move it to almost any point in space-time with little to no transit time. For vast distances, there was a resultant transit time measured in femto-seconds, or trillionths of a second. The drawback of the drive? Mass and density. Although not yet clearly understood, this type of travel dealt with an entirely different set of physics.

The scientists that developed this new type of science had built a set of 'jump gates'. They placed one gate in polar orbit of the second planet in the system, and moved the other gate a hundred light years away, in uncharted space. It took the cruisers towing the gate almost two years to get it in position and activated. It took them less than a second to return to the gate at Xanadu. No other drive technology had needed to be installed on the ships.

Plans were under consideration for placing the new transit gates all over the Kingdom, and several new gates had been built, but they remained in a storage orbit, except for the one that had been sent to Centauri Prime, and 'hidden' in the system. Currently the gate could only link with the other active gate in Xanadu, (the distant test unit had been remotely deactivated shortly after the test jump) and was to be used as a bolt-hole for the king and as many of the congress as could get to it in an emergency. As a safety precaution, a ship could only use a gate if had a recognized IFF signature. One drawback to the system was that a gate could only 'link' to one other gate, and then only if that gate was not already 'linked' to another gate. The gates themselves did not like to be close to one another when they were active, so multiple active gates could not be set up within a light-hour of each other.

In the Xanadu system, two hundred of the new ships were standing by near the resident gate waiting for the transit order. The gate had already been linked to Centauri Prime, and all that remained was for each of the ships, one at a time to fly into the gate's event horizon. The gate did not look like a big ring, nor did it look like a huge pulse rifle, it was simply a smallish, (compared to a capitol ship, or a station) device that seemed to sit placidly in whatever gravity well it had been placed in. However, if you were in a ship, within about fifty miles of the unit when it was activated, you would be sent to the receiving unit instantly. You would appear in the same place relative to the gate unit in the distant system.

Multiple vessels could be sent at once, but that could get problematic very quickly from a navigation stand-point, so a safety protocol had been included. Only one ship at a time, and the transit would not occur if there was a ship within the receiver's event horizon. In the event of an emergency, that could be over-ridden.

Once linked, transit was one way. If Xanadu linked to Centauri Prime, then transit could only be from Xanadu to Centauri Prime. To travel back to Xanadu, the Gates would need to disconnect and reconnect with the Centauri gate initiating.

The Centauri gate had been added to the existing System SATC(Space/Air Traffic Controller) facility so the gate could be controlled from that facility. When it was first brought online and tested the link formed, but transit refused because there was more than one ship in the event horizon. It took the bright boys days to figure out the gate was detecting the station itself, as well as the small shuttles that were either docked with it or stored in the station's internal landing bay. The multiple ship protocol was rewritten in order to allow the controller to select the transiting ship, and to allow for 'never transit' tags to be added to IFF signals.

The order to begin transit was given, and while the ships at the outer edge of the system began making their normal hyperspace jumps that would eventually get them to their assigned duty stations, the ships of the new Centauri Fleet began the four-hour long operation of transiting the fleet to the Capitol World that normally would have taken them much longer.

––––––––

"M
ajor," Lieutenant Carmichael called over the comm. She was the nominal 'pilot' of the TG
Flyer
, but the Guardians and one other 'pilot' took turns with her during long flights.

Jon opened his comm. "What's up Carmichael?"

"Astrometrics is predicting the formation of a transit point that will drop out very close to Centauri Prime. It'll take a few hours to get there, but we can make it before it closes. Are you interested?" The pilot replied.

"Sure, go ahead and change course, are you comfortable with it, or would you like Chloe to come up there?" John asked. Using a transit point was very different than flying in normal hyperspace. Transit points were the natural formation of what 'The Gates' were created to mimic. However, in the naturally occurring ones, there was a potentially hellish navigational computation that most computers simply couldn't deal with. Luckily, the
Flyer
wasn't equipped with one of them.