Talosian Chronicles 2: Star Dancer (25 page)

Ian sighed and sat back in his chair. Isn’t there enough to do without people wanting to add more? He rubbed his temples as he felt a headache coming on. Glancing at the monitor on his wall he looked at the timer counting down the arrival of the Super Nova.

It will return to normal space on the far side of the sun in just under twenty-four hours. Ian and his people had less than one day to get everything they had been working on finished and deployed. One day. There was at least a week’s worth of work to do before people he cared about started dying.

Kyle and his team had sent the upgrades down to Talos so they could upgrade their landing facilities to accommodate the Wasp fighter variant, as well as the refit specs for the Hornet fighters themselves. The last word he got from them was that not only were they still cranking out weapons platforms for seeding out in space, they would have all their fighters upgraded to the Wasp variant by the time the Caldarians arrived.

He wasn’t sure whether to cry or cheer about that. Most of the pilots down there were the kids that Cindy and Talena had trained. There were still older pilots there, but he had need so many of them up here, that he had all but stripped Talos of pilots over the age of eighteen. At least they would have one of the newest fighters if they had to fight, but he would much prefer it if those kids stayed on the ground.

Gold Squadron had been refitted with the upgrade, and silver squadron was currently being upgraded, with their completion being sometime this evening. That would leave one whole squadron left that was still in unmodified Hornets, while the other squadron was down at the moon base manning the Shadow fighters that had gotten built. Ian was considering sending his Hornet pilots down to the moon base to man the extra Shadows that got built when his door chime sounded. Without looking up, he said “Come!”

Janet and Julie Laskar entered his office, and Ian quickly stood to help Janet to a chair. She looked like hell.

“Janet, what’s wrong? You look horrible!” Ian asked gently.

“It’s the nightmares, Ian. I haven’t slept in over a week,” the woman said quietly. “But something’s changed, I think I’ll be okay tonight.”

“Please tell me its good news?” Ian asked, trying to get the woman to smile. It worked, she did.

“Some of it is. The Caldarian will arrive here, and there will be a horrible battle. A few of them actually. A lot of people are going to die. But I think we are going to win. It’s still fuzzy, so I can’t give you details, but I am sure it was that big ugly ship blowing up at the end and not us. There is something else going on there though, it isn’t bad, at least, I don’t think it’s bad. But something important is going to happen shortly after the big ship explodes. That is so fuzzy all I could get from it was a feeling, no details at all,” Janet replied. “I felt this was important enough to come and tell you before I checked in to Main Medical.”

“I really appreciate that, Janet, but you could have called me, or had Beth call me down to medbay after you checked in,” Ian said. “In fact, Come on, I’ll take you there myself.” He took the woman’s hand, helped her up, and led her to the door.

“Oh, Ian, you don’t have to do that, Julie can get me there!” Janet replied.

“I am sure she could, but I’m going to make sure you get there safely anyway. We all owe you a great deal, young lady. We want to keep you around long enough to have a celebration in your honor,’ Ian replied.

“Ian, I appreciate the thought, but... There won’t be any celebrations. In war, there are no winners, only survivors. We will be far too busy seeing to the survivors when this is over,” Janet replied, sadly.

“Then it is my job to make sure there a lot of them to look after,” Ian replied softly, trying not to upset the woman any more.

They rode the maglev in silence and Ian all but carried her down the short hallway to Main Medical. Ian honestly couldn’t tell if she were awake or not when he placed her on the floating gurney provided by one of the interns. But before he turned away, her eyes snapped open, and she grabbed his wrist. “Phoenix needs a bigger nest. Build a bigger nest, Ian,” Janet said and closed her eyes again.

The interns pushed her back into the maze of hallways that was Main Medical, while Ian looked at Julie. “Any clue what she meant by that last bit?”

Julie shook her head. “No, she’ll sometimes do it in the middle of the night, but we don’t even listen to her anymore. No one can figure out what she means.”

Ian shrugged. “Since we’re here, wanna go visit your grandkids?”

Julie grinned. “I thought you’d never ask!”

––––––––

L
unar Research and Training Base

Selene, (Earth’s Moon)

Sol Sector.

––––––––

G
etting off the shuttle Alan expected to feel lighter, even though he had no doubt he was in fact on the moon, he felt the same as he did on Earth. It immediately came to him that they had artificial gravity and had adjusted the base to Earth normal gravity for the benefit of those that lived and worked here.

A young man walked up to him, “Major Carlson?”

Alan nodded. “I’m Carlson, but I don’t think I’m a Major anything except a pain in the butt!”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you Sir, I’m Tom Wilcox, one of the guys working on the FROG unit. Major Anders told us he was sending a Major Alan Carlson of the Marines up for us. Thank you for coming up here to test this out for us. I know it’s probably getting pretty frantic down there,” Wilcox replied. “If you would follow me, I’ll show you to your quarters before we go to the lab.”

“Lead on. It’s a lot busier down there, that’s for certain. I expect it’s getting the same way up here though, isn’t it?” Alan asked, making a mental note to corner Ty about the rank.

Tom shrugged. “It seems a lot busier, but I don’t really see anything happening other than more people moving about faster than they did before we knew about the enemy ship. That’s one of the reasons we asked Major Anders to send one of you guys up here. We’d like to get this into production so we have a few of them for the fight. If we can get the bugs worked out of it, we can get it into production.”

“I thought all the production up here was set to producing fighters and drones?” Alan asked.

“Well, it is, but we kinda cheated and built our own production bays. That was really the only way we could get the prototypes built,” Tom admitted.

“Necessity is the mother of invention, huh?’ Alan said, smiling.

Tom chuckled. “Something like that. The Base itself is still under construction, so bays like ours are allowed for prototype assembly in order to prevent interruption to the main production runs. If we get it finished, and it’s approved for production, then we would normally hand this off to the production department. However, if this gets approved, we might have to do our own production for a time, which is why we built four bays. We can produce two units at a time as long as the bays have raw material to replicate the parts from.”

“Is that an issue? I admit I have no idea how replicators work,” Alan asked.

“Not really, not right now at least. With the construction going on, the drones are producing more raw material than they are using in the construction because they are digging under the surface. They are simply dumping the excess into the shared materials repository. Once the base is finished, though, they’ll have to set up some kind of mining operation somewhere,” Tom said. “Not really my department, so I don’t really know what the plan is, but I’d imagine something like that is in the works somewhere.”

“This all just seems so fantastic to me. Everywhere I turn there is another wonder to behold. I knew there was a lot of advanced tech, but the sheer volume is a bit overwhelming when you’re faced with it all at once and you’re not used to it,” Alan said.

“You must be kinda new,” Tom grinned. “But, yeah, it can be a little overwhelming until you get used to it. When I first got a look at everything, I thought I’d died and gone to geek heaven!”

“Well, I’ve been with the community for a couple of months, but I wasn’t working or living at Talos. In fact, I’ve only been to Talos twice. I haven’t been to the ship yet, and this is my first trip to the moon. By the way, Ty asked me to steal a couple of these if we got them to work.”

Tom grinned. “I’ll see what we can do. They do work, at least as far as we can test them they do, but we need someone that can fight the unit in order to make damn sure they’ll do what we want them to do.”

“I haven’t been a combat soldier for a few years, but I think I can still remember what to do,” Alan said grinning slyly.

“”We asked Ty for a soldier with combat experience,” Tom said concerned.

Alan smiled at the self-named ‘Geek’. “Oh I have a bit of combat experience. I worked as a fly swatter before I was promoted away from that. I used to work for the NSA, Tom.”

Tom’s eyebrows shot up. “Black ops? That’ll work. But during testing, try to keep in mind this was designed and built with regular warfare in mind. They don’t really lend themselves to the whole sneaky part of low intensity conflict fights.”

“Sneaky part?” Alan asked.

“The drone itself is somewhat large for subtlety. It stands eleven feet nine inches tall,” Tom replied.

“Tom, low intensity conflict warfare has little to do with being sneaky. What it means is that smaller teams are used to do the fighting as opposed to full armies. Even if multiple teams are used, it’s still low intensity conflict,” Alan replied. “Subtly can be a part of the operations of a team, but not all the time.”

“Oh, so if there were a couple enemy hover tanks outside harassing the base, instead of dropping the whole Marine detachment on them, we’d send out four of these FROGs. That’s Low Intensity Conflict?” Tom asked.

“Exactly. You don’t use a nuke to swat a fly, you use a fly swatter,” Alan replied, grinning.

“...and you were a fly swatter, I get it,” Tom replied, grinning. “You should do just fine for what we need.”

While they had been talking, they had been walking. Alan was surprised when the young man stopped before a door that was down a hallway just off the main hub. “This will be your quarters during your stay. Nothing fancy, I’m afraid, just basic single quarters.” He opened the door, and gave Alan a quick tour. “Kinda like a hotel room, except the living room, bathroom, bedroom and kitchen are all separate rooms. When you get the chance, be sure to read the safety instruction on the smart sheet.” Tom picked up what looked like a sheet of plastic about the same size as a piece of paper. He showed it to Alan, then set it back on the coffee table in front of the couch.

Alan dropped his bag on the couch. “Like a studio apartment. I’ll read them later, I get the feeling you want to get going to the lab.”

“Heh, yeah, we’re in a bit of a hurry since we’re trying to get the units ready for this fight, and the enemy ship will be here in less than twenty-four hours,” Tom replied. “Follow me, and I’ll show you the lab and introduce you to the others.”

“I’m curious, when the ship was still crashed on the surface, how is it that no one ever discovered it? I know that NASA at the least has been scanning the lunar surface for decades. “They’ve used everything from visible light to x-ray and UV. Even cloaked, the ship should have been detected somehow, but it wasn’t,” Alan asked.

“No, it wasn’t. You see, before Ian Williams was approached by the AI of the ship, that AI spent most of its time making sure the ship remained undiscovered. Mostly by hacking into the probe doing the scanning and giving it false data, or by setting up a reflector to mimic the surrounding area if the scan was being done from Earth.” Tom explained. “The AI was named Olympus at the time, but now since the ship was recommissioned, the name has been changed to match the ship. Now, we have our own AI, but he still needs to make sure the base doesn’t get detected. I don’t know how it’s going to work when the enemy gets here.” Tom said, frowning. “Maybe we can remain undetected by the enemy too.”

“You can hope,” Alan replied, not knowing what else to say to the young man. That effectively ended the conversation, but luckily they had also arrived at the ‘lab’.

It was built on the surface, and was easily the size of a small aircraft hangar. On the far side, two huge robots stood in yellow and black taped off area, next to large airlock doors. From about ten feet all the way to the door they entered from was covered by a plethora of equipment, computers, and other smaller, work stations. On the left wall, two huge gantries stood, with two more of the robots in them. Beside those were two smaller, more man-sized frameworks of what could only be the bays Tom had told Alan about.

A large jovial looking man walked up to them quickly and offered his hand. But before he could speak, Tom introduced him. “Major, this is Dr. Wilhelm Schmidt, the lead scientist on this project.”

The big man’s grin grew. “Ja, I’m German.”

Alan chuckled. “I would hope so! It’s a pleasure to meet you, Heir Doktor.”

“It is a pleasure to meet you as well, Heir Major. You will help us by testing the units, ja?” The Man asked.

“Yep, that’s what I’m here for,” Alan replied as the rest of the ‘crew’ began to gather around, like they hadn’t seen another human in a while.

“The rest of our team, Major. Doktor Mikael Hiramenfski, Cybernetics.” Dr. Schmidt said waving to the first man he saw as he turned. The smaller man bobbed his head in greeting, “Actually, it’s Michael Hiram,” he grinned.

“Ja, ja, whatever,” Schmidt said, and moved to the next person. “Doktor Olivia Schmidt-Wilcox. In addition to being my daughter, she is our computer genius,” he said proudly. “Oh, and she’s married to Tom.”

Alan chuckled and saw Tom cringe out of the corner of his eye. He nodded his head to the pretty young woman.

“Next there is Jerry Dale, Cybernetics intern working for Doktor Hiramenfski; Alicyn Winterfell, my intern; and Shelly Meyers, who is studying with Olivia. You’ve already met Tom, our resident gopher and mechanic,” Schmidt finished.

“Actually, I have several degrees and certifications in mechanical engineering, but I think my father-in-law would like me to pursue a doctorate,” Tom replied. “I also handle the weapons systems on the beast.”