Last Ship to Darius

Chapter Fifteen

"Okay, its time to start playing like we mean it," said the new Queen.  Stacy-Op was addressing her Privy Council,  whose august membership included Lord General Duo Formsley, Royal Counseler Nusan xxx, Royal Counseler Anne xxx, General Belson, and several others from the old Queen's previous retinue who where currently required to keep continuity of the government.

"Yes, your majesty, I concur, " replied Duo, speaking for himself and several Admirals who he had brought along at the Queen's invitation.  "We have our launch window for the Destroyer and we've breached the chamber at Arcadian Hills.  We know now all our options and as you say, its time to start moving into action."

"Your guidance is appreciated, Lord General" she said with a sarcastic voice tempered with a warm smile.

Duo grinned at his former mentor and continued.  "Yes, milady. Belson's team is busily going over the arcadian craft we found under the hills  It is approximately 6 kilometers in length or at least the main Battle Mass has that dimension, plus in storage are two 4 km solar arrays, support structure and four 2km by .5 kilometer storage containers for deep space runs.  The Battle Mass is all we need presently.

We took four sleeper-physicists recommend by Admiral xxx, brought them out of cold sleep and put them to work.  They are making slow but steady progress.  They are extremely confident they will have adapted our power systems to the Arcadians, and we should be able to run some test diagnostics without powering the ship up and risk detection.

In the meantime, we have run several surveys in the vicinity, making our presence visible to the Greenie spy-sat overlooking the area.  Our hope is that this will look like routine activity to the spy-sat and thus we'll be able to make sure that there aren't any other caches nearby.

The nose cone of the ship contains some rather large optics for what are obviously beam weapons of some sort, however, we are analyzing gas and chemical samples.  They don't appear to be filled with what we would use to lase or anything we could create plasma with -- at least without some enormous power.  However, when we get the power systems running, we will most likely be able to create a test bed at our other underground laboratory -- one which we do not believe the Greenies are surveilling.  The physicists are excited and one is devoting most of his time to that effort.

The majority of the remainder of the Battle Mass are longitudally connected cylinders of 400 meters in diameter.  These contain a wide range of chemical propelled missiles as well as some using an electromagnetic drive we are not familiar with.  Once again, our power studies will open the door there we believe.  We have carefully taken one of these E-engines off of a missile, and are preparing a test run as soon as we have the power figured out.

Similarly, we have been studying the drive section, which as you  know, is where we actually entered the ship at first.  The same power problem there, with the additional note that whatever the power source is, there are 16 power reactors -- for lack of a better term -- supplying 16 nozzles at the rear.  Reaction Mass appears to be simple water, so we can only assume the power reactors produce both heat for mass ejection as well as system power for use on the ship.  The conduits running longitudally along the interior of the ship are 60 meters in diameter each, two per reactor, leading to a distribution center above the reactors in the drive section .  Several 100 meter conduits run to the front of the ship, connecting through obvious removable connectors at section breaks, eventually winding up at the nose cone. This tells us we have the power source for the beam weapons already, so once again its down to solving the power problem.

Back to the Weapons Carriers again.  There are 64,000 missiles of varying types in each carrier, a total of eight are fastened around the central ship core.  The missiles appear to be in salvo racks, as best as we can tell, and we believe the ship can salvo 10 missiles per rack, with 100 racks available per carrier.  That means this ship can salvo a total of 8000 missiles salvo cycle -- we have no estimate as to a full salvo time, but it could be very fast -- like in the one minute range.  A total of 64 such attacks can be launchd -- that is an incredible 272,000 missiles launched.

As we have no means to create reloads at this time, we are fervently hoping to find a cache of reloads somewhere on planet -- besides the one stores container that is.  The Admiral believes that that search is in vain.  It is his believe that the Arcadians either did not not bring along reloads, or they are in stores containers similar to the ones we have found, however they are probably on one of the moons or other planets in the Darius system. It may take decades to find them unless there happens to be some sort of log entry to lead us to them -- always assuming we can read any log entries we find.

The one container we have has only 8000 reloads.  One of the other stores containers have water, food, technical supplies, and what appear to be a wide variety of personal weapons.  Another has what appears to be armored land vehicles, some electromagnetic beam weapons on an armored land vehicles, something equivalent to our tanks.  The third has what appear to be small atmospheric fighters in storage breakdown condition.  One of our mechancal squadrons is attempting to put one of these in working condition.

Each of the Weapons Carriers has ports for a space fighter wing.  Four are light craft with projectiles, the other 4 are heavier craft with both projectiles and what we believe are beam weapons -- again the optics lead us to believe this.

The fighters, however, are not fueled, and the chemical tanks for the beam weapons are empty.

The main ship's tanks are all empty as well.  However, non-volatiles are stored in the cache area, enough, or so we believe, to fuel the fighters non-volatile stores.  However, the volatiles are nowhere to be found.  We find empty tanks on ships and in the caches, so we can only suppose the Arcadians could not store them safely.  We are thus unable to use any hypergolics until we figure out what they meant to use.  This may not be a major problem.  90% of the missiles are solids and don't need fueling.  We should be able to work out or own hypergolics for the fighters.  As I said, the ships engines are mass ejection -- water -- so that is no problem.  If we can power up the reactors, we then have motive power once the ship is in space.

The major problem, of course, is getting the ship into space.  We do not have the lift capacity to move a 6 kilometer long ship into space -- we haven't even begun to finish a mass calculation for this thing.

We can steal everything off of it, however, and piece meal fashion, lift the weaponry off planet.  It will take some time.  Months, many months.  The ship is actually composed of three major sections, the drive section, the core section, and the nose cone.  We can lift the nose cone, but it will be difficult and will consume alot of of planetary hypergolics to get it out of the gravity well.  The drive section is massive.  1 kilometer by 500 meter rectangle of very dense structure, with very heavy reactor vessels -- if that's what they are -- and loads of heavy electronics.  Fortunately the main control conduits appear to be optics, so only the power conduits have large mass.

The upshot is that unless we can figure out the hypergolics used by the Arcadians, we are not likely to get the drive unit off the planet.  Again the Admiral believes that there is a low gravity solution in the system somewhere -- the Arcadians wouldn't have landed a spaceworthy ship in a gravity well without a good reason.  It is intact, and not a crash site, so he believes, and I concur, that there must be means to lift it off planet.  We just have to find it.

So the current plan is to look, but not waste much manpower on that job.  We are going to lift the nose cone into space and attach it to our destroyer -- assuming of course we solve that power problem. We will leave the core and the drive section on planet, and use it for a test bed and training facility - obstensibly in the power research effort.

The stores containers will be emptied as we need them -- for instance, if we figure out how to operate any of the armor or beam ground vehicles, we'll add them to our arsenal.  Same goes for the atmospheric fighters.

The Weapons Carriers, like the drive section, are too massive to lift.  So we will strip the Salvo racks, empty of course, and move them out of the gravity well.  Then we'll move the missiles.  Then we'll move the fighters, and finally the fighter launch bays which appear to also be quite modular.  Once in space we will build our own capital ships -- perhaps a total of eight, each capable of 1000 salvos, 64 times.  That will make the Darian fleet the most capable of the human race.

All this, of course, will take many years, if not a few decades.  So our first effort is a crash program to modify one of our Destroyers to accept 10  salvo racks and a wing of fighters.  That will pretty much gut our current weapons system, so this will be our only Arcadian equipped ship, but will also be about ten times more capable weapons wise if our estimation of the destructive yield of the missiles is correct.  Oh by the way, all of the missiles appear to have their own terminal guidance, so we only need to figure out how to point them and launch.  The physics and weapons guys are confident this won't take long at all.

Our estimate of the destroyer refit time is three months -- too long to be useful against the current two Greenie ships we have observed.

The launch window we are working on for the unmodified Destroyer will have us spaceworthy in less than a week.  We will take a rather sneaky peek around the planet and then do a stealth pass to the gate, squirt our message, and then come back in system using silent running.  Our goal on the return journey is to see if we can spot any other ships in system.  Obviously, there could be a few lieing doggo, but that is a risk we'll have to take.  Since it appears the Greenies just came waltzing in without any fanfare indicates to us that they probably observed the system for awhile, deduced where the inhabited planet was, and then just came over for a look see.  We believe the artifacts somehow drew their attention -- we're still working on that.

So anyway our best guess is that they don't believe we are regular space farers, although the four space ports on planet probably told them we are space capable.  They probably don't have a clue about our hidden capabilities, and unless they've been watching for a long time, don't know about the gates or our inconsistent, long time between trading visitors.

So that means we have lots of surprises for them, and our returning ship will most likely not find any ships lurking in system, simply because there are none.  Or there is a mother ship out there, from which these two "smaller" ships have been dispatched.  That seems the most likely.  However, we have refrained from doing an active search with terrestorial sensors both to keep from alarming them as well as hiding any ability we have to execute deep space scans from the surface.

The off planet satellite systems, of course, never reported our two visiting Greenie ships, so it is clear their stealth technology would make their mother ship invisible to us anyway.  So a visual mapping near planet is the next job to tackle -- the returning ship will start that survey by peeking around the limb of the planet where our second destroyer will be lifting off.

Once we have two ships up, we will have the 2nd one go looking at moons for Arcadian caches as well as keep an eye out for the mother ship.

Having said all this, it is very likely that if there is a mother ship, there is a 50-50 chance we, here on the planet, will see it come out of stealth mode as it accelerates to catch our first Destroyer as it moves away from the planet.  Our hope is that the Destroyer can be warned and make a run to the gate and get the squirt off and close it.  If that fails, our next hope is that the 2nd Destroyer can do an unplanned launch, and dee-dee to a hiding place we've picked out in system.  Then when the time is right, it can take a long end run around, keeping its drive pointing in a direction that will hopefully keep us from being detected -- this assumes we will have tracked the mothership.

If both ships are destroyed, we will keep number three hidden, and work on getting it modified with the Arcadian weaponry.  That will be our best hope.  On planet, we should be able to fight it out with them.  The unknowns are considerable, however.  If there isa mother ship, then what are its planetary bombardment capabilities.  The two ships we have seen have nukes, but we've not seen anything else of interest and we can counter nukes with our own interceptor missiles.  In fact, we estimate we can take their two ships out if they remain in atmoshphere for more than a few hours.  If they choose to run and leave the atmosphere, then they get away.  Then we are back to square one and wondering about their planetary bombardment.  Again, it its lobbing nukes in, we should be able to counter those high in the atmosphere.  Clearly the two smaller ships don't have the mass to carry enough nukes to overwhem us, so again its all about the mothership.

The Admiral believes that if there is a mothership, and we do damage to the smaller ships, the Greenies may decide it isn't worth playing around here anymore and take off -- perhaps into their own gate system or strike out with hitherto unknown propulsion towards a base of their own somewhere out there." and the Lord General waved his hand in a vague gesture.

"If they proceed at speeds we can follow at, we will do so for awhile and see if we can spot their gate system or get a good vector as to where they are headed.  Since our Destroyer is a local ship basically designed to use the gate system, it won't have the stores carrying capability to follow for very long and will have to return when it reaches its maximum range from planetary orbit.

So that, your majesty, is the plan in about as complete a form as we have it today.  We are going to attempt to ignore the Greenies on planet as long as they let us do so.  They appear to be quiet up in the ice fields, we presume they are studying the artifacts they have taken.  Hopefully they are not going to get much out of them.  Counselar Nusan believes the artifacts the Greenies have are day-to-day commercial or housekeeping goodies, not weapons, although one appeared to be computer like -- or more to the point -- a workstation of some sort.

That is about it, I think, if anyone else wants to add..." but all the others shook their heads.

"Well and good, Lord General.  It looks like you all have done a goodly job of it, we cannot fault what you've taken into consideration, and the steps you recommend appear sound.  You have our approval."

"Thank you, your majesty."

Belson was once again back with the teams.  He looked up in the hanger with awe, still not quite used to what he was seeing. The visit to the hide site for the Destroyer he had visited had been impressive, but it had only been a minor awe compared to that he was feeling now.

The shale rock had surrounded a walled in hanger, complete with lights and a control room, all they had to do was add power.  Obviously the early Darian survey team had found the ship, and promptly decided it was a treasure for Darians to explore.  Setting up the hanger had been relatively easy, the huge girders held up rock slabs in a depressed dome shape, obviously a nice piece of architecture, with a goodly number of supports resting on the ship itself.  Thus if the ship were to be moved, 100 meters of rock and dirt would come crashing down.  But the supports had been built with ingenious mounts for arcs that could be attached to take tension off the ship, so it was therefore possible, with a little engineering, to reinforce the structure from the sides and thus take the pressure totally off the ship.

In any case, the ship, being a kilometer high, left a huge hole in the ground, and the hanger was enormous.  They had smuggled in the necessary ten generators to power the ten banks of lights and environmentals.  They had carefully dug a set of tunnels that could be used to disperse the air being recycled through the hanger, hopefully not triggering an infrared alarm on the spy sat above them.

There were two science teams at work in the hanger, one set at the far end, nearly 5 kilometers away, and one set hear where Belson was leaning against the outer wall of the drive section.  The ship itself had been laid in a series of cradles which supported the lower surfaces in precise heights above the floor of the hanger.  This, he had been told, was the work of the Arcadians, not the Darian survey team which probably came along several millenia later.  The material used in the cradles was in of itself very interesting to the science folks, especially the materials people who were all agog over it.  After all, the 6 kilometer ship must have massed many millions of tons, and therefore the material used in the cradles was drilled into the bedrock underneath.  Moreover, the material itself was supporting that mass.  Granted the total mass was spread out over a number of separate points, but even so, each one was holding up a world's worth of weight against the pull of Darius' .98 Earth gravity.  Not an easy task, not one any human known material could accomplish.

Interestingly enough, though, a preliminary analysis of the material showed that it was an alloy of metals found on Darius, so it was both terrestrial and extra terrestrial.  The Arcadian science that made such strength in materials was the gold at the end of the mechanical physics rainbow and thus the Lord General had pulled a lot of rank to force the mechanical guys to focus on the ship, not the cradles.

Inside the Drive Section, the scientists -- a collaboration of many different disciplines -- were busily analyzing the reactors.  If you could call them that.  They weren't, by any human standards, familar at all.  For instance, they weren't atomic piles, didn't ressemble what one would expect to find in a fusion device.  They were chemically active however, as far as one might expect -- the nuclear reaction was, after all a chemical reaction in the grossest terms.  But these reactors were fueled.  It was clear by the safeguards put in place by the Arcadians.  So if they could get basic power up and running -- by somehow melding human power systems with Arcadian power systems, they should be able to activate the controls for one reactor.  And then the learning would begin.

While Belson was fascinated by all this, he was at the same time frustrated.  He had gone through all that trouble with the F.I. program, only to be stuck playing archeologists -- well technological archeologist to be precise.  But he would rather be with the Marines on the newly unburied Destroyer, aptly named "the mole" by the noncoms who had been part of the discovery team.

The Mole was only 400 meters long, but still pretty awesome in its own rights.  The reports that the Lord General had been sending him indicated that the awakened Fleet personnel were about finished making the ship operational.  Fortunately for them, the hide site was intended by the designers to provide access to space, thus a launching ramp was built into the forward section of the hide.  A sliding cradle on one thousand needle bearing mounted chromolly wheels, the strongest substance on Darius, was supporting the Destroyer.  When it came time to launch, the cradle would zip along until it rose up the ramp, imparting a 45 degree launch angle to the ship, and it would then separate from the cradle.

Unfortunately, the Arcadian ship was not so easily launched.  Rather, the ancient's ship was here almost as if it was part of a collection -- propped up so all could see her beauty, but not anywhere near ready to be lofted into space.  It would take some pretty exotic fuel to provide the impulse needed to clear the massive Arcadian ship from Darius' gravity well -- certainly well beyond anything human kind had come up with so far.

But then that was the hope and the promise of the find.  If they got power solved, then the language exercises might proceed at a brisker pace, and perhaps translations of logs might allow the Darian scientists to tap into the metalurogical and physical sciences that they needed to get a leg up on the Greenies.

Again, the thought of the long term process that this team was facing, only served to frustrate Belson, who really wanted to be where the action was, not in some deep dark hole with decades of discovery ahead of them and no short term application to their very critical short term problems.
 

"You sent for me, your majesty -- majesties" amended Duo as he noticed the older Queen was in the room as well as Nusan.

"Yes" replied Stacy-Op, and she gestured for him to sit at the wide table, where drawings were carefully laid out and signs of study were all about .

He took a comfortable seat and waited.  It didn't take long.  The older Queen rose and sat close to him, leaning in and he recalled her former penchant for violence. It was not reassuring.  And being a martial type himself, he realized that was exactly the meaning of the movement and the intent - her tense gaze and entry into his body space clearly pointing to confrontation.

"Duo, you haven't been all together honest with us, have you?" asked the older woman.

He matched her gaze with his own rocky visage, but Nusan moved so that she too was in his vision, her arms crossed.  She too did not look too happy.  So this was to be a three way ball buster, ehh.  Hmmm.  He wondered what had set this off.

"Well if you'd clue me in, I'd be happy to do my best to solve your problems, milady.  But trying to lean on me won't work.  I've stood my ground against more formidable foes, although, I must admit I am not happy to be faced with the anger from the ones I serve, love and respect."

"Oh how political" replied Stacy-Op, but Duo could see she was not as edgy as the other two.

"Okay, so I'll come clean.  Just tell me what you want to know," he countered still not sure of what he was being upbraided for.

The older majesty simply stared at him, but then relented.  "I don't think he knows, Stacy.  He's oblivious.  It's not an act."

The young Queen nodded and the room relazed a little.  Nusan still had her arms crossed.

"The problem, Uncle Duo, is that we all sense something is missing from the knowledge we collectively know and so much of that which is missing appears to be stuck in the minds or genetics of people unknown to us.  The sleepers for one are still much of a mystery.  "

Duo nodded, for he had been thinking about that as well.  "Stacy-Op, I quite agree.  But look here.  I don't have the answers anymore than you three.  But I have some ideas on how to find them."  He explained the approach he had been rolling around in his mind for a few days now and they listened intently, and finally the Queen nodded her assent.  "Get started, Duo.  I want some answers and I want them fast."

Thus Belson found himself yanked off the archy dig project, thankfully.  But the new mission was as puzzling as the first, and about as rewarding.  More mysterious than ever, the Lord General had him, a team of docs, and a couple of the sleeper Admirals flitting about the planet looking for caches of sleepers and weapons.  If Duo's map of hot spots and his intuition was correct, Darius was literally dotted every so often with lots of buried treasures.

And moreover, the minds of the men and women in sleep cells buried with the caches, as they had already discovered, were also treasure troves.  The Sleeper Admirals, upon seeing the codes on the entrances to the cache sites, would blink and jot down a few code words.  Once inside, the sleepers withing would be given the code words as authenticators and spill their guts rather quickly and succinctly to the debriefers.  The docs of course were there to make sure the sleepers were awoken carefully, and that their care afterwards was according to the two Sleeper Docs directions.  There were eight teams like Belson's scouring the planet, intent upon waking up every sleeper that could be found.

The weapons caches were nice of course.  Darius, a largely agrarian world with the occasional metropolis nearby, was quickly becoming a technology world as each cache yielded communications, computing, power, and medical technology that had before now had been of little interest to the population.  And even though when all was said and done, the newly awoken military and scientists from the caches would not swell the number of inhabitants on Darius significantly, it was clear their knowlege and thirst for more was going to be a driving force from here on out.  That fact alone should have been an indicator, had they realized it.

Yet there seemed little time for reflection as the impetus of the wake up program swelled.  It was like an ancient telephone tree.  Everyone called had the job of calling the next.  Thus once they woke up the correct few teams, those inspired to wake others, a geometric planetary call up was in effect.  One of the scientists with Belson estimated that if the General's map, constantly updated by the newly awakened sleepers, was correct, there would be several hundred thousand well trained combat and technology experts on planet by the end of next week.  A fleet of arriving Fleet ships from the gate would not have as much impact.

Of the eleven sites he had supervised the openning for, two of them had several older soldiers who demanded to speak to "command and control".  And soon they were whisked away.  Later other transport arrived to take the rank and file, but these special cases both encouraged and alarmed Belson.  His F.I. training told him that there was a reason for all this mystery, and he certainly could understand the imperative of hypnotically placed orders.  The Duo Formsley in his own head told him to go with the flow, and so he assumed he'd be let in on the secrets he needed to know when it became necessary.  For now, he had become the Field Duo, so to speak, giving orders that seemed logical and sensible, knowing full well that the logic came from the whispers of his F.I. training rather than that young man he once had been. In fact, he was beginning to feel some imagined age, perhaps an artifact of the training itself -- a sort of identification with the age of the four or five veterans stuck in his head.

He had met, in fact, one of the other vets he had been subconciously linked to.  A rather crusty individual known to his men only as Gunny.  Gunny was the archtypical Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant.  Someone had told him, in an aside, that Gunny had at one time been THE Chief Master Gunnery Sergeant of the Marines.  That meant he advised the command authority as the most senior of the seniors of the NCOs in the Marine Corps.  Pretty heady stuff.  And Gunny was both in his head and at that particular point standing in front of him saluting.  Noting Belson's F.I. eupulet and the brevet General insignia, the Gunny had cocked his head and asked, "You wouldn't be looking out at me with my own eyes, now would you General?"

Belson had failed to suppress a grin and the Gunny had shooken his head.  "Poor bastard. Well, let me know if you have any questions."  And from that point, Belson knew he had an unwavering loyalty from Gunny and could rely on him to anything he asked.  Belson had been half tempted to keeping the man near him, but realized that the efficacy of hte F.I. training depended upon his being able to consult his mind instead of the man, and this allowed him to share the vast knowlege and experience with others.  He left the Gunny to his devices, and clearly this had been the right decision.  That particular Gunny was supervising the massing of all the armor vehicles and heavy combat gear into various undercover marshalling points around the globe.  He had only asked for a brief set of orders from the Lord General which had been forthcoming immediately, and then set out to work.

And Belson had seen a lot of that.  One might expect a crusty soldier to ask for a link to "C&C" or the "CINC" for a minute, then come away with a set of highly independent orders giving them a wealth of authority.  Belson could only assume the Lord General was recognizing men and women he had worked with in the past, and was not only happy to set them loose on the tasks at hand, perhaps he was also relieved to have the help.  Belson's own experience as well as the F.I. training had taught him that Sergeants ran the military, literally, so it wasn't all that much of a surprise.  He did reflect, however, that some of the officers he had seen, at least before Duo assumed the military leadership on Darius, could not -- would not have dealt with this state of affairs gracefully. Perhaps that was why the Lord General was putting so much on the shoulders of his F.I. trained young officers.  They were all going with the flow as if it were the common sense thing to do.  Which, Belson agreed, probably was the right approach.

The current batch of sleepers were coming out of their wakeup fugue, and the Docs were beginning to go through the final steps in their process, so Belson knew he was about to meet some old veterans ready to be given some new orders, if not apologetically asking if they might issue a few of their own.  It was funny how that worked.  Either an impetus born of training or implanted he wasn't sure, but clearly he found the diplomatic old salt an incongrous mix.  Yet every one of them seemed to understand the possibility that the officers before them might not take too kindly to having noncoms taking charge of the situation.  Belson, by now certainly, but even before, was happy to have all the help he could muster.  Perhaps that was the feeling Duo was having too. He satisified himself of that when the Docs gave him the sign that he could talk to the first man woken at this site.

"Sergeant Kelly, Sir.  Might I have a private word with the General, Sir?"

"Talk away, Kelly.  We are on a mass wakeup and everyone hear has been through this drill a dozen times now.  We're at war, as you might expect.  Extra-terrestials and they've nuked us twice now, so we don't have time for niceties."

"Yes Sir.  I'll be needing a line to the CINC in a few minutes, but in the meantime, I'd like your leave to organize my men and put them to work on some important shit before I do that."

"Carry on, Sergeant."  At a nod from the Admiral at his side, he consulted the little list of code words for this hide site.  "In the manner of having nothing to do what-so-ever and relevant to nothing, does Polaris mean anyhting to you?

The Sergeant, like so many before him, blinked and then saluted.

"Yes Sir.  I have a status report for you.  We are a line artillery and mobile missile regiment, Sir. We can be operational in about 8 hours if necessary, but normally would like about 24 hours to be fully capable and have a low risk of infant fatality, Sir.  My team is composed of mostly vets of five or six campaigns, Sir, so we can get right to if needbe.  My Officers and the noncoms in this outfit have exercised well together, and in one combination or another we've all been in combat together.  You can trust us to take an objective or hold ground as needed.  I recommend you expedite the wakeup of our Colonel Evans, he is a pretty sharp tactician and was also the G3 and G2 at various times.  I think you'll find him helpful, Sir.  And I have the locations of several other sites you might not be aware of."

"Very good, Kelly.  Why don't you give the locations to the Admiral's aide, as well as the names of the other officers or noncoms  you think we should put a priority on.   Anything I need to do at the moment?"

"Ah, other than get me a line to the CINC, no Sir."

"That's already on.  Get yourself some food and some electrolytes into you.  I take it this is not an emergency call you need to make?"

"No Sir, a few minutes will be fine."

"Good.  What's your unit's designation, Kelly?"

"Randy Dogs of the 1st Armored Divison, Sir.  We've been doing this collectively since World War II on Terra, Sir."

"Fine tradition.  Carry on, as the Brits would say."

"Yes General."  The old Sarge snapped a very crisp salute and made a parade ground turn before relaxing into an old veteran saunter off to the tables set up with food and drink.

Belson grinned to the Admiral who returned it, shaking his head in disbelief.  Randy Dogs indeed.  There were going to need a USO around here pretty soon.

Duo pointed his bright green laser pointer at the overhead and made it form a circling gleam of light on the map.

"This is the second big cache we've found. It has a fourth Destroyer and the crew had us wakeup the Captain.  Turns out he is an old spacer that the Admirals all clucked their tongues over.  Seems he is the best of the Fleet.  It also indicates that Fleet has been sandbagging us all along. So far, its looking like they put some heavy iron out here, probably clones all, but heavy iron never-the-less.  The key here is that they expected we were going to need some heavy help.  I don't personally think they had a clue about the Greenies, but I suspect someone buried the secret of the Arcadian ship pretty deep, but took steps to ensure we had the knowlege necessary to protect the find should we need it.  The Greenies coincidentally became the fools that stumbled over the trip wire."

The Queen nodded and her two shadows, Nusan and the older majesty also replied in kind.

"Here is my theory.  At the time the survey team arrived on Darius, the state of affairs back home was not too good. They were running out of funding for much exploration.  The gates were a problem to explore.  To illustrate this..." and he changed to the next presentation slide, "...take a look at the basic key code for a gate destination.  The operation is pretty simple.  On the correct frequency, you send a series of binary carrier bursts at a repitition rate of 100 Mhz.  This allows you to send a 2048 bit code quickly.  The gate will respond with its own code if it recognizes the destination.  As you can see, there is plenty of room for non usuable, null codes.  So stumbling upon one that works is rare, let alone one that you might really desire to use to get somewhere.  In any case, if you copy what was sent to you back to the gate, that is the source code, it will lock down that destination -- you can't go there.  Only someone coming from there will be able to unlock it, and only if they do the sequence correctly..  If you send only the destination again, it will energize the field, and you simply send the transition code, which is a cypher of the two 2048 bit codes. "

He made sure the ladies were all following him.  He continued as he saw they were getting it, ""We know the cypher sequence because of the orginal gate find centuries ago.  It included directions on how to do this.  The key here is having your source code in hand.  On occasion, as a security measure, we believe, the gate will transmit a false source code in the initial sequence.  If you don't recognize that and let it reset, it will lock itself down and only someone coming from the other side will be able to get it to open again.  The reset period is on the order of weeks.  You can tell its reset cuz if you send the destination code, it will reply normally. A locked gate will repeat the destination -- almost like a query saying 'surely you don't mean THAT destination, don't you know it's locked?'  By the way, this is how we've discovered some locked destinations -- very handy that."

"So here's the deal.  If you want to explore you have to be careful.  You send a possible destination code and watch the gate's response.  If it sends back your source code, you know you have a vaild destination.  You catalog it, and then wait for reset, or send a probe through.  But sending probes is kind of useless, cuz you have to program them with the return codes, pretty dangerous.  If you send people through, they can go through with finger on button and blow themselves to hell and gone if they find trouble on the other end, and also keep from blindly sending the codes through.  Another method is to do your exploring from a gate you don't use much, and therefore reduce the risk of the probe returning to a tender spot in your defenses..

That, more or less, was the strategy employed.  Until we met the Trikars.  They are the only other living race of beings we have discovered -- and until the Greenies, the only race.  You have to set this all in perspective.  Our intiital research into gate locations led almost always to another hub gate, one with no rational destination -- i..e no system nearby and in some cases, deep cold space.  Stations so to speak.

Thus it was pretty clear early on that the infinite cosmos is just that  -- infinite.  No friendly or unfriendly neighbors. Then we popped into Trikar space.  They were waiting for anyone to come through the gate.  Somehow they had turned on some sort of audit trail at the gate, had our source code, and simply shoved our ship back through. And then they immediately sent a probe after us, it did the lock the gate thing, and then blew itself up.  A pretty clear sign we weren't welcome there.  We've not seen hide nor hair of them since then either.

So here we are, funding the vast new transit system, but finding nobody home.  That, in-of-itself, is pretty scary.  Why build such a huge system and not have anybody use it.  Where'd everybody go.  And our only neighbor, if you want to call the Triskars that, are damned emphatic that they don't want any part of your neighborly bullshit.  What's up with that?"

Needless to say, folks funding the research got pretty fed up and quickly.  Then we found the Darian system.  Four habitable planets.  Supposition is that the survey team, on their last bucks, happily went home and said, "Hey we found a nice colonizable planet!"

So out came the pocketbooks and money poured in to build up a new colony on Darius.  This all took some time, however.  In the meantime, the survey guys, a pretty independent lot, probably looked at the Arcadian ruins as good and bad.  Good cuz they could get some real attention from the folks back home.  Exploration would be alive again.  Research and study.  Expand the base of knowledge.  Maybe learn some really cool stuff.  But alas, we surmise anyway, the Arcadian relics were undecipherable.

The ship was clearly a warship.  Not good news.  Where did everyone go?  Looking at the Arcadian warship, it was clear the answer was probably not good.  And considering the growing paranoia back home, perhaps they thought, "Well hell.  If break this news, that will be the end.  However, if we sit on this awhile until our own technology advances well enough  to figure this shit out, then we can reveal it all to the people with the money in a positive light.  We can immediately show return on their investment, and we can improve our state of affairs.  To do otherwise risks our shutting down our own gate like the Triskars.  And that would be a true waste.

So they reburied the ship, left some clues by lightly covering the Arcadian ruins, hoping that some time in the next 100 years some Darians would ring the bell and Fleet and Science would come a running.

At the same time, the built some safeguards in. They built a gene manipulation program into the colonist's genome.  They established a constitutional monarchy, and invited the colonists to ship out here. Terra is probably trading with a few of the other worlds conlonized, but like all bureacracies, it would take months if not years for a rescue mission to be mounted.  So before the colonists got here, the survey guys buried a working military force, some ships and material, as well as perhaps some other stuff on other planets.  The idea was that when it would be needed, the planet -- no I take that back -- the planets with an S -- could rally to defend themselves.  The legendary Fleet coming to the rescue is probably a myth.  The rescue fleet is here, or at least in the Darian system already.  We simply have to get off planet and go find it.  I have the distinct feeling that the other three habitable planets are at pre colony state.  Some 100 years ago we were supposed to become space farers and go out and settle those planets.

However, the gene manipulation backfired. Instead of making scientifically curious folk, Darians settled down into their agrarian lives, and said 'screw technology'.  Becoming pretty hedonistic, live was comfortable for the last century and so Darius stagnated.  It was only the Queen's pushing the envelope that began a few small triggers in the gentically coded hypnotic commands that would bring the population out of its fog.  So in essence, your majesty" and the General focused his attention on the older Queen, "You can probably be credited with saving the planet.  A little late, but on the mark never-the-less."

The older woman nodded graciously, but still didn't seem to be all that satisfied with the comment.  Duo figured there was a lot of ancesterial guilt there, and chose to let her dwell on it in her own time.

"In any case,.that is where I believe we are at present.  We are about 100 years behind the eight ball. It wouldn't matter really, but the Greenies have forces us to realize the problem.  And while they have been quite remarkably quiet of late, I suspect that this is a matter of focus or rational intent rather than simply luck.  If there is no mothership, then this might mean they do indeed have their own gate system, or perhaps are using ours.  In any case, they may have reinforcements just a few weeks away via a gate trip.  Obviously that is not good news.  Not much better than if there is a mothership.

However, if there is a mothership, then we have a big advantage.  We DO have a gate system we can use, and we can go begging for some help.  Course we have the Arcadian ship, and we if we do this right, and probe Terran sensibilities, we might find that the time is ripe for exploration and get on the positive side of the trade equation.  An exploration team arrives, suitably armed due to the irritating presence of what appears to be an unfriendly non human race nearby.

I for one, vascillate between believing the two extremes from day to day.  First there is a mothership and we must proceed carefully so we don't tip our hand about the gate.  Or two, there is no mothership and we can get out and not only explore the other planets, but also explore our Terran reception.

Either way, it seems clear that the other planets are important to us.  Any day now I expect we are going to find a cache with a man who knows the survey team's intent.  He will clue us in on the hide sites off planet and then we will have no excuse to get out there and uncover our system resources left just for this event.

So our original plan seems pretty good.  Let's get our asses into space, poke around carefully to make sure there is no mothershp around, and then go into top gear to find resources hidden in system. That way if the Greenies have reinforcements coming, we will have something to respond with.  Our message up the gateway will be modified.  We'll make it like an RFP.  We'll lock the gate from the Hub side.  We'll send comms through waiting for the terms to match our desires, and then open the gate when we feel it is to our best interest.  This does two things.  First it keeps some idiot trader from coming through and alerting the Greenies to our gate system -- assuming this is not how they got here in the first place.  Second, it makes sure the Terrans don't decide to come storming in and taking us over.  By the time they negotiate with us, and we have all the control there, we will have our own forces up and ready, sitting in a position of power and enabled with some pretty cool Arcadian technology or so we hope.

Of course, all this depends upon the Greenies remaining as docile as they seemed to have turned.  I suspect that the people they have are contributing to the Greenies understanding us, and fortunately, they grabbed acadamians and students. They don't have, for instance, anyone with a military mindset, so they might feel we are pretty harmless.  And if they don't feel we are a threat, they may decide we are ripe for colonization, but also that there is no hurry.  Time is on our side.  The longer they play at being non-aggressive, we will grow in strength.  Assuming they aren't watching everything we do without our realizing it, we should be able to build up quickly enough to give them some surprises if they do give up on their quiet life.

I propose that we also modify the plan to park the Admiral out at the gate, watching broadcasts from Darius IV.  We can hide some code words that tell him we are getting scared and want him to ring the alarm.  And of course he can make his own judgements by watching the planetary news and getting a feel for what's going on.  In any case, I'd like a senior, responsible veteran out there who is tasked with making decisions based on planetary/system survival.  I'd go, but I think I can be more help here, besides, I don't know port from starboard"

The Admiral gave him a wane smile and nodded.

"Thank you for the briefing, Lord General," Stacy-Op replied after a moment of reflection. She asked a few questions as did the others of the Privvy council, and then there was more quiet reflection.

"Status on our search" Stacy-Op asked then.

"We are about 70% complete.  As I said, I still have hope we'll find the right clue or man with the clue.  Until then, we don't have much hope of readily finding off planet resource -- I emphasize that no one has come forth with off planet information so far.  The Admirial believes we may have one more ship to find -- we have five so far, and a squadron, in his time, was six Destroyer class and two cruisers.  He thinks the Cruisers are probably not in a Gravity well, and that the last ship's hide site will include info on how to find the Cruisers.  I can only hope he's correct."

"We have, so far, 285,000 well trained, combat tested veterans awake, with an incredible amount of equipment, enough to arm maybe half a million troops, as well as air and space borne specialists.  With six ships, and the ground and atmospheric forces in hand, I think we could take on the attack of one of the other planets in system.  For all we know, the Greenies have settled on one of them.  Or, for that matter, there might be other early colonists there -- colonists who do not have space travel or lost the capability in a retrograde colony growth pattern, not uncommon in the fictional lore of colonization."

"The forces at hand are stationed at four key points in the middle or southern latitudes, so we don't believe the Greenies are aware. The sites we are going to now are all increasingly northern, and we are moving slower and being more circumspect so that we don't tip our hands.  However, any large movement of equipment or the unburying of  a sixth ship will be put off until we have the first five up and operational.  That isn't to say we won't have the crews awake and ready.  Again we will have every sleeper awake by the end of next week.  That will maximize our chances of finding the clue to the whereabout of off planet resources.  "

"And if there is a mothership out there?" asked Stacey-Op.  "Won't they have been watching all the southern hemisphere movements with some trepidation?"

"Well unless they are truly invisible and sitting in close orbit, they probably won't be able to distinguish our pretty well covered clandestine movements.  Of course I could be wrong.  But we can't remain paralyzed worried about that.  It would mean doing nothing, and I continue to concur with your earlier decision to get moving on our defense.  I think we would have known by now if the Greenies perceived a threat.  And the movement of some million tons of armored vehicle and 285,000 troops would have triggered some sort of reaction. But so far, nada.  I think they aren't watching and today anyway, I don't think there is a mothership."

Belson was more comfortable with the Queens, her counsolers and of course the Lord General.  It was odd, actually.  He had been an uneasy member of the royal household staff, and one would have thought he should be nervous around them, at least when he wasn't in the comfortable servant role.

Of course he still served, but in his current capacity as Duo's eyes and ears in the field, and of course the unofficial (as far as the public was concerned) consort of the new Queen, he felt amongst friends.  Well, perhaps friends and mentors -- it was hard to feel an equal to Duo despite the F.I. training that placed a little of him in his own head.

But he had come to feel comfortable with Nusan, and she was pretty much a part of Duo, and that helped. And the older Queen had given over to a respect for him and his role with Stacy-Op, perhaps his being the mature one in the relationship had helped foster that respect.   And since she had forgone her usual harpy like lustful wenching, she no longer made like she wanted his body. That was a welcome relief.

And of course Anne, who more than once had come to him for help and with questions when they were both very young -- she was like a school days chum, despite her previous and current ranks in the royal entourage.  And after all, he also held the rank of Royal Counseler, more a tribute to the days with strategy sessions with the older Queen.  It was interesting that no one had thought to rescind the title, and at a formal function just this morning he was reminded of the title, surprising him of that oversight.  Still no one seemed at odds with his retaining the title and the little Duo voice once again prompted him to "go with the flow" -- perhaps it might serve useful this honorarium.

And now as he presented the General with his thinking on the search for possible system resources left behind by the survey teams way back when, it seemed almost natural to be briefing him while the close council of the majesties looked on.

He slipped the data store into the slot and the briefing display on the wall lit up with the table he prepared.  It was a simple affair, and hadn't taken long to put together.  The difficulty had been in getting the data.  No one on Darius appeared to be  cognizant of the kinds of analysis he was doing -- it was a sad fact that scientific wonder about the solar system they lived in was almost nil.  He had turned instead to some of the officers from the Fleet complement that had been awoken.  A few seemed eager to help him think it all through, giving suggestions and drawing little system maps that all agreed on the planets, fields of debris, rings, and moons.  Obviously the Fleet people had been briefed quite well.  He had also made a mental note to update the F.I. training with such data so the Darian F.I.s would not be ignorant of their space surroundings.  This lack of knowlege was disgusting.

He walked them through the strategy he had formed for finding resources hidden in-system.

"I believe the debris fields are the best bet.  You can hide a lot there.  As you can see, the probabilities we came up with have led me to that conclusion -- and my gut says its right.  My F.I. training," and everyone knew he was referring to the amalgamation of Duo and several other vet's thought processes in his head, "...says that if you want to hide something you put it where you can retrieve it easily but not so easy to find that anyone will come along and trip over it.  I rate the possibility of an artificial storage location -- satellite or planetoid -- as a no go -- to easy for an unauthorized searcher to find.  Likewise, putting a large spacecraft on planet is pretty stupid.  Even the Destroyers we've found on planet are on the edge of credible likelihoods.  I -- the F.I.s -- wouldn't have done it that way."

He looked over at Duo who was also nodding.  His little voice reminded him that Duo came along after the Survey teams had done these things, so it was surely a case of  "Don't blame me, it wasn't on my watch."  And a brief flash told him that no one, as usual, had thought to inform the Lord General before putting him down in a sleeper cell.  Nor had they implanated a hynoptic trigger either.  Pretty stupid really.

Shrugging that off, he continued, "Of the debris fields, the easiest to hide a large ship the size of a cruiser would be the Darian Debris Field -- 500 million km distant from us, surrounding the inward planets similar to the Terran asteroid belt.  In this case, however, there are definite pockets of dark objects of hugely varying size, while the Terran equivalent, while not uniform in size by any stretch of the imagination, are held within a definite and fairly small size.

But being 500 million km away means it would be a journey of some time.  Even using the fairly advanced propulsion of the Fleet Destroyers drive system, it will be months for a round trip. It's a pity, but the most likely place is also one of the hardest to spot our prey in.

On the other hand, the rings of Darius 5 and 6 also have a wide range of rock that could also hide a Cruiser, there being no less than 100 larger than Cruiser size rocks.  Any one of those could have a hollowed out storage cache there and a crew could fire it up and literally drive it out of storage and be in space.  I think the Lord General and the Admiral are pretty much in agreement that this would be the ideal.

However, being ideal means that any other military strategists might also figure it out, making the hiding place a little too easy to find.

Then come the natural satellites.  While moons have low gravity, the mass of a huge Cruiser still would require huge expenditure of energy to get the ship off the surface.  For this reason alone one might be able to reject.  However as we've seen here on Darius 4, an accelerated carrier on a rail gun could be used to aid the spacing of a Cruiser from a moon. For this reason, one of our search methods could be simply looking for composite material or ceramic debris used to create the rail gun.  If they are indigenous, the ceramic will most likely have the same system level background radiation common to ceramics on this planet, hardly lethal, but also certainly telltale.

Of the moons, our own here on Darius 4 is an obvious first choice, however, again, it is also too obvious.  Since we are relatively close as compared to moons around other planets in the Darian system, we'll visit it first, perhaps in parallel."

He looked around to see if everyone was still with him and seeing this was the case, concluded his pitch.

"If possible, I'd like to recommend we send a Destroyer to do some geographical pattern mapping on the surface of M-4 and then M-3a, b, and c.  In the meantime, while that search is being conducted, move directly to the Darius 5 ring field.  Again the F.I. says that is far enough away to not be too obvious yet close enough to be useful.  And as I said, the ring field is a pretty good choice for hiding things.  Any questions?"

"Yes," said the Lord General immediately.  "I don't fault your logic one bit, General, but I think there is another possibility you've left out."

Belson looked at his chart, trying to spot the error.  But he reallly didn't see it unless it was something to do with the gate or out system entirely.  His puzzled look made the General laugh.

"Don't worry, your work here is impeccable.  No I am referring to the simple answer.  If we happen to ask the right guy, maybe he will tell us where the bloody ships are hidden, exactly where in fact.  I am willing to bet that before we are ready to set off on your expeditions, we will have that information in hand.   My little voices are telling me not to go off half cocked. So I am willing to wait just a little longer before committing ourselves to conducting a search. off planet."

Belson saw the Queen nodding and he realized that his little effort had been a backup plan in the making from the start.  The Queen and her advisors were well ahead of him.  Well that was nice.  Gave him some confidence in Darian leadership anyway, despite the slight ego shot he took.  He was a big boy, though, and he could take it.  And since no one seemed to think he was being foolish and he hadn't stepped into foul smelling residue while presenting, he supposed he could retain some pride in this clever thinking.  Even if it was not in the direction the leadership was going.  Sigh.

Belson's team finally finished clearing the shale-like material on their latest, perhaps last hide site find.  They had been led, like the last four, by coordinates from a recently awoken sleeper vet.  Unlike previous and similar events, the sleeper, a full Colonel, had insisted upon coming along with them to this site.  He was a little edgy and that spoke volumes to Belson.  The rest of the men they had awakened from induced cold sleep were calm, tight and polite.  This fellow, was edgy, tight and impolite.  Not only had he insisted they move immediately to the new site before finishing the awakenings at his site, but he promptly asked for a group of people to come along as security, as well as a fast ship to move some key people out of the the new site pronto.

So as they prepared to open the door and the Colonel and Admiral agreed on which code words were important at this new site, Belson had the feeling the Lord General was going to be pleased with this find.  Of the remaining five potential sites in the North, this was also the least protected in terms of both over-the-horizon and directly overhead recon from the Greenies.  While they had isolated themselves at the ice cap, it was also true that they were keeping a combat air patrol up and running.  And they were close enough that a fairly straight, if not severely oblique shot from a recon ship could see the entire area they were working in.

As a result, Belson not only ordered a fast ship to scurry any important people away, he ordered up five ships, so he'd have some decoys.  His plan was to have one go screaming off at low altitude to see if it drew fire and then make plans based upon the reception that one received.  He had a mole team drilling a long tunnel underground to the west, where a cliff met the sea.  A sub was being dispatched and he hoped he could convince the Colonel that the safest route was via the water, the sub transporting the VIPs West and South til they could be safely picked up by hover jet out at sea, the rendevous far enough South not to attract attention.

The Lord General had also given him full control of the situation for once, telling him in no uncertain terms that if he wanted to, he could debrief anyone they found.  On the spot, if necessary.  Belson liked that idea.  Get as much down as possible, and then send out stealthy ground transport which would continually add arc to its course to make it difficult to trace back to their location.  It would rendevous with a fighter and take whatever information it had at top speed to HQ.  He was, in fact, making his best attempts at covering all contingencies. Once he had the data, he'd send out the land option, and when that was safe, he'd try a single fast mover aircraft, and last but not least, he'd move the actual personnel through his tunnel to the ocean.  Since the tunnel was being cut with a beam cutter, it was slow work, but it didn't make the horrendous seismic noise of a mechanical drill.

The team leader now signaled the Colonel to step up, and he did so, keying in the proper code sequence to open the door to the hide site.  The door unlocked and the officer leaned on the door to force it open.  They moved into the hide site's anteroom, and attached the power cables and high pressure air lines needed to bring the site up to safety standard atmosphere and temperature.  The site king, a seasoned Sergeant that had helped open every site that Belson's teams had explored, now moved in to power the site up, watching for any traps or other security meaures.  In a few minutes he was satisfied, closed the main power buss and then powered up the lights in the caveronous area.  As expected, a huge Destroyer like in a ramped launch cradle.  They crowded into the anteroom to look over the schematic of the hide now displayed on the wall, now that there was power in the facility.  The Docs, wearing breathing apparatus, moved quickly toward the indicated area, and opened up the sleeper vaults.  It was a large area, again expected since the Colonel's edginess told them it was a major hide site.  2000 personnel were stored here.  Unique to this site however, was a second smaller room with four sleep cells in it.  These were also rare, triple redundant cells.  The Colonel sighed heavily with relief when the Docs pronounced the occupants of the special sleep suite alive and well.

It didn't take a genius to figure out that these three men and two women were the VIPs and that they would be awakened immediately.  One Doc stayed to do that job while the rest moved back to the main sleep facility.

Belson backed out of the room, noting that the Colonel was still pretty agitated.  He realized the man was probably an aide to one of the five, or had a personal relationship, another rarity in the sleeper ranks. From outside the doorway, Belson could see the men working.  A Sergeant brought up a new set of air tanks, obviously the environmentals were going to take longer to bring up a breathable atmosphere here -- longer than a tankful of air would last.  The first of the fast ships was due, so Belson worked his back to the entrance to observe the setup of the camohide that would be used to keep prying Greenie eyes from noticing their operations. The hide framework was being put up in sections that were immediatly covered with the camo plastic and then a new "row" of the structure and material was readied.  It was pretty impressive the way they simply rolled out the material, let it adjust to the surroundings, and then forced it up with round poles tied to a forklift.  Then the supporting structure members were levered into place, and finally the material fastened to the erected framework in sections.  The result was that no framework was ever exposed to overhead view and the only side view was from the South.  It made their chances very good -- it was a very low probability that the Greenies would spot their operation at this rate.

The only risky part of the operation was the movement in and out of the area by aero vehicle.  The one incoming right now had assumed terrain following under its own camo cover, the outer skin using overhead photos to adjust the reflectivity and color to closely match the ground around them.  It was an amazing technology, the aircraft being one that had been recovered from their second cache site.

A noncom pointed out the incoming ship or Belson wouldn't have seen it.  It swooped down a ridge and disappeared behind it, and after a few minutes pause, it could be seen coming to them only a few feet off the ground, its dust cloud looking like a herd of animals milling around.  It touched down and then amazingly, a small herd of animals were released, making the camoflauge effect perfect.  Then the vehicle taxied under the camo and shut down its engines.

[ more on the wakeup of Fleet Admiral Carstairs and the Crew of the Invincible ]

Fleet Admiral Carstaris saluted the Lord General, bowed to the Queen and then sat down at the wide table in the war room.  Actually to call it the war room was almost laughable.  Earlier in its history, it had been more like a bordello, the older Queen having used it to seduce any number of the unwitting young men paraded before her.

None of that history was apparent now, however, as the Fleet Admiral, a distinguished and rigid military man of unflinching bearing and a pretty surly if not dour disposition, waited quietly for his cue to brief them.  This was the close council again, and Belson, again feeling out of place, watched as the emotions on the faces of the participants attempted to mask their nervousness, fear and excitement -- producing odd mixtures of facial expression in each person.

The Lord General, as usual was poker faced.  Resolve and that scary blue steel was present, but then only when he was drinking or fighting did that change.  Nusan, sitting with her hands not visible, presumably in her lap, never-the-less looked like she was going to chew one of her arms off starting at the fingernails and rapidly munching onward at rapid pace.  Anne was a proper figure, also sitting with the attitude of "hands in lap, waiting".  Only she had an excellent poker face, almost bored in contenance.  The older Queen, well she always looked like she was ready to take out the knives and begin carving, so nothing new there.  Belson repressed a shudder from his earlier days in the royal household -- he remembered far to well the searing anger of the older woman and was indeed glad they had a new Queen -- especially since his relationship with that lady was, to say the least, far more amenable.  The new Queen, Stacy-Op was about to speak despite her own nervousness.  Yet she had the resolve and the drive to move things forward, and indeed she was looking forward to this exchange.  You could see it in her eyes and the way was beginning to lean forward.

In his earlier days Belson would not have registered any of this.  But his F.I. training, and he suspected it was specifically the homongulus that represented the tactical, management and people skills from Duo Formsley, now made them all look quite transparent.

"My Dear Admiral.  Welcome to our humble little world.  I'd like to say that we regret having to wake you and your companions, however, that would be a lie.  For some weeks now we have been agitating ourselves over certain events that I understand you have been briefed on.  So it is with some anxiety and anticipation that we have asked you here today.  Please, if you would, summarize what you know of the intentions of those who placed you and your companions in sleep cells here on Darius 4."

"Your majesties and Lord General.  I mean no disrespect, but there are others in this room that I need reassurance for.  My information might mean some will pay dearly with their lives if it falls into the wrong hands, and not to be too dramatic, but could mean the very survival of this system."

Duo spoke up.  "Admiral, you and I have no history together.  However, I know of you, as you may know of me.  The people in this room are cleared for anything you might say, as we here are the strategic council that intends to ensure the survival of the system here, and are also responsible for the gateway node this system protects.  Your information will enable us to make decisions relative to the defense of this planet, system and gate node.  Be assurred, this is the command authority for Darius 4, consisting of both Royalty, Military Command and Control, and Civilian leadership."

The Admiral blinked at the correct phrasing and obvious to all in the room, having personally experienced the same drama behind the eyes, the Admiral was now responding to a hypnotic trigger.

"Accepted.  The Darian system was found to be a class 1 protectorate under the Survey Command colonization program.  However, at the time, funding to bring a full Fleet presence, and specifically a functioning long term presence, was not available.  Indeed the timing could not have been worse.  It was the determination of the highest levels of command within Survey Command, that instead a smaller force could be buried, literally, with the specific mission to lie in stasis until the planetary government reached a point where they could both marshal the necessary support forces as well as a need for such military force would be felt."

"Having been told of the circumstances of my awakening, I accept that both conditions are now true, and that I am free to give you whatever aid that I may provide.  I am, in ancient parlance, at your service."

The Queen nodded her head in response to the Admiral addresssing this last to her.

"We thank you, Lord Admiral.  We shall call on you and your companions to help us form up a space fleet for the obvious purposes.  However, there are some exceedingly important questions we need to ask you..."

"Pardon me, your majesty, I know it is generally a major breach of protocol to interrupt, but I think timeliness exceeds protocol at the moment.  And I sense much tension here, and I would like to change the atmosphere.  It is my judgement that better decisions will be made If I do so.  May I?"

Stacy-Op inclined her head ever so slightly, a gesture Belson had seen in the older Queen, but never before performed by his fiance.  Obviously Stacy-Op was maturing to fit her new role.

"I have four very important technical pieces of information to give you and this council.  One, is the location of various strategic and tactical resource caches in the Darian System.  Two is a set of special codes for the Gate which I believe none of you are aware of.  Three is a set of operational plans which from the basis of gate protection, and which those on the opposite side of your gate will expect will form any strategy you take up.  You are, of course, free to form your own strategies, however, knowing of the basis, you will be better able to predict the very predictable responses on the other end of the system.  And four, I am the only person in this region who has been fully briefed on what we knew of the Arcadian ruins found here, as I was the first non-Survey command officer to arrive and made responsible for the protection of those ruins.  And I imagine some of the agnst I feel in the room is due to your discovery of the rather large planet killer vehicle buried under those ruins."

A collective sigh escaped most of those in the room, Belson noting that the Lord General and his right hand man both nodded to the Lord Admiral, verifying that the newcomer had hit the right spot.

"Ahh, yes.  I see I am right."  He pulled a small data file from his tunic, obviously having prepared a little before attending the council, and inserted it into the reader.   A planetary system chart came up on the overhead display.

"The following coordinates map out strategic and tactical resources hidden in this system.  As you can see, they are primairly clustered around the gateside orbit of Darius 4.  Darius 3 was assumed to have too high a gravity for comfortable colonization, however, 4 and 5 were deemed suitable.  However, from what I have been briefed, you have not initiated contact with Darius 5 colonists, so I can only infer they did not survive or have gone retrograde and are unable to contact you.  In any case, we can, if you so desire, become space worthy in very short order and resolve that question while we uncache the necessary systems and equipment we need."

Looking at the system model, Belson could see that there were notations around the planets 4, 5 and 6, including their moons and in the case of 5 and 6, their ring fields.  Also way out on the outer edge of the solar system, in an area that was not shown on any instructional material available on Darius, were planets 7 through 12.  As these were very far out, they were obviously dark objects and Darian astronomy and lack of scientific zeal had masked their existence for more than 200 years.  Belson shook his head at the shameful apathy.

The Lord Admiral continued, "...Out here we have the Darian debris field, between 8 and 9.  It is about 1000 times larger than the Terran equivalent which they call the Asteroid Belt.  They in fact have a station opearting just outside the major density of their belt called Beltway, a huge colony that mines asteroids for local processing as well as sends inward huge chunks to stations all along the inner orbits enabling a very large and capable space industry.  Of course, I am speaking of its status 200 years ago, but I should emphasize that if one were to analyze the current Terran asteroid mining industry, you would find that they haven't even begun to dent the visible matter yet, let alone any new discoveries of dark objects.  With that in mind, the 1000 times larger statement should indicate to you that the Darian System, if developed in the model of the Terran system, is very rich indeed.  In the normal wake of space exploration and the establishment of an off planet mining industry, it was felet that Darian expansion would eventually lead the miners to the bigger rocks in the Darian Belt.  Next to the biggest out there, is a rock 10,000 kilometers wide.  Inside, a full sized Fleet Cruiser is hidden, with crew and a number of reloads of fuel and weapon loads.  There is also a second cache of space interceptors.  Nearby on a smaller rock is another cache with a Destroyer and other weapons."

"However, the more important piece is on the far edge of the debris field.  Lieing surrounded by smaller debris, which clings to it like it were statically charged, is an Arcadian Dreadnaught exactly like the one that you have found buried on planet.  With it are the hypergolic fuel manufacturing plants.  I have the Survey teams analysis of the proper materials, or at least what we believed 200 years ago to be the proper materials required to being operation.  In about three Darian months, we should be able to mine the appropriate materials from surrounding debris to being manufacture of the fuel for the Dreadnaught located there.  We also identified a batch of arcadian tugs that could be used, once fueled to lift large portions of the Darian 4 dreadnought off the planet.  We estimated at the time that with these tugs and the fuel already manufactured, we could be operational with the second dreadnaught in about six Darian months.

There are also four Arcadian Destroyer class tonnage ships and two Cruiser tonnage class ships in system as well..." and the locations were highlighted on the display.  "As you can see, they are well spread out, but along an orbital swing line that would make it quite easy to assemble our fleet by simply moving inward along the plane of the planets as they swing by.  It is this organization of the Arcadian artifacts that led us to copy their efforts and locate our own hidden resources similarly.  But this is no coinincidence.  The next realization I speak of pretty much put the Arcadians in the class of the Gate Engineers in our minds anyways.  There is no such coincidence that every so often that planetary lineup also matches that of the Arcadian caches.  We determined at the time that Darius 5 and 6 were at one time, given to modification of its orbit swing -- as in the actual slowdown for a period of time to enable Darius 5 and a speed up in orbital velocity for Darius 6  inorder for the two planets to be in the correct positions to make this all possible.  The modification of planetary orbits is an emmense technological feat that frankly I doubt we will ever match or even near being capable of pulling off."

His words stunned the council and Belson, like the others felt a chill.  It was certainly a good thing that they had not stumbled upon the Arcadians like they had the Greenies.  Moreover, a fraction of that capability would mean that the Arcadian ships and other weapons artififacts might easily make the Darians the strongest of the human colonies.  Rich too.

"I thought being a Queen meant I would have all kinds of power -- political, legal, you name it," pouted Stacy-Op.

"You could always do like your predecessors.  Start chasing the hired help, that is.  God knows they can't always have some excuse to get away.  Eventually you'll catch one," replied Belson.

"Can a brevet General be considered hired help?" she asked trying to be coy but not really pulling it off.  First of all, her eighteenth birthday had come and gone so quickly and no magical new found level of experience or maturity had arrived with it.  To the contrary she felt somehow less in each.  And Belson's being away every day since that all important day meant she could not renew her efforts of recent past.

"No, not hardly.  That fall more under the realm of dangerous liasons, milady."

She gave him a dirty look and turned away.  This was even more frustrating than before.  But then she recalled what Nusan had told her.  Some men had severe reactions to being ruled by their women.  Oh it might be okay if duty required it, but there were many, perhaps the majority, who wanted to feel like they were in control.  Some were even willing to be very good natured about it.  They would follow up to a point but then quietly, skillfully, simply take over.

And of course it depended on the woman.  Nusan had admitted that her own emotions had a definite line that, once crossed, left her unable to be in control.  She was literally at the mercy of her man.  She also admitted she was happy for the situation without going into any great detail.  Suffice to say, she was happy with self and her somewhat fuzzy, continually moving line which was sometimes easy to cross, sometimes requiring some additional time and care.

Stacy-Op of course didn't have a clue.  Her hormones would pretty much guarantee, at age 18, to be predictably fickle.  One minute in absolute control, the next in flaming agony.  Lately, this god awful burning sensation when she was around Belson -- well, to say the least she was wary of thinking of it too much  since the very thoughts themselves had disastrous effects -- some quite visible in today's fashions.
 

Chapter Sixteen