Beyond Pi Snippet 2

 Sitrep: I received the manuscript back from Rea and passed it on to Goodlifeguide. Shelley said she'd get it back to me in a week. Fingers crossed.

In other news, I managed to get a little work done on my R2. Unfortunately, the work bench is now occupied so I am back to a holding pattern there.

I have been working on Expanding Horizons. It is slowly coming together.

Anyway, on to the snippet!

 

Port Royal

 

Vice Admiral Horatio Logan staredpensively at the reports. His eyes didn’t really see them; he was deep inthought. After a moment, he tossed his stylus down that he liked to fiddle withand then sat back in his chair.

He was a sleeper, someone who had beenborn during the era of the old Federation. He had served in the navy during theXeno war and had been marooned in deep space near Pyrax. Centuries had passedbefore he had been picked up and sold to the Anvil space station in Pyrax.

He had spent a lonely century there untilhe’d married and had a single daughter Shelby. He had aged terribly, but whenAdmiral Irons had turned up like a breath of fresh air, he had been reborn likethe phoenix of legend, undergoing a full anti-geriatric treatment and officerupgrade.

He had held the fort for the admiral inPyrax for years before the admiral had settled in Antigua and the real work hadbegun to restore the Federation while simultaneously fighting off theHorathians. In a way, the pirate threat had been a spirit send; it had been anexternal threat for everyone to rally around. The escalation to xenophobia thatthe late pirate emperor had imposed on the galaxy had ramped up the threat andnearly overwhelmed them before they got the upper hand.

He had several adventures but now he wasin Pi sector, holding the sector while building the gate complex and then doingsome strange shit. Now he was spinning his wheels. Well, more or less,he thought with a pang.

He was tempted to get another cup ofcoffee but held off. He’d had four cups already and although he had an ironconstitution courtesy of years of sucking down navy coffee and his implants, hedidn’t want the caffeinated beverage at the moment. Though it did help to clearhis thoughts from time to time.

The first units that had come through thegate had been Vice Admiral Blechley’s TF 1.4 fast reaction force. Two supercarriers, a squadron of battle cruisers, and a couple squadrons of cruisers anddestroyers plus support ships. It had been made clear that they were on loan.That was how Admiral Irons had gotten around the limits Congress had imposed atthe time.

Not that they were in place anymore. Arecent naval appropriations bill had clarified the status of Seventh Fleet andthe other paper tigers around Federation controlled space. After the attack onthe Sigma gate complex, Congress launched their usual committees andinvestigations. They had been horrified by the parlous state of the defenses atsome of the gate star systems. They had pointed fingers at the navy but hadbacked off from demands of someone’s head when the media had flipped the scriptand pointed out that Congress had savagely cut back on the navy’s budget.

Well, that was changing now, for good orill. He knew the jury was out on which it would be. He welcomed more hulls forhis deployments. And he was amused that Congress had been irked that Blechleyhad left to conquer Tortuga under their orders, yet also irked that she wasn’tthere to defend the gate star system.

Which meant that they’d have to agree todeploy more ships and build a proper budget for Seventh Fleet.

Which was a welcome thing as far as he wasconcerned. Seventh fleet had just the one shipyard in New Cornwall. CommodoreVestri Sindri had gotten it up to building modern battle cruisers but had beenstopped short of building them in quantity or building larger units. They hadspent the past ten years building up the infrastructure in the star system, themanufacturing processes, and thus laying the groundwork for when the leashfinally came off.

Which it had for the most part. Theyfinally had permission to go to full production in New Cornwall. He wasgrateful for that. Now they just had the little matter of finding the warmbodies to populate the ships.

Fortunately, the gate was here and open.He knew that veterans would be coming through the gate and shipped on to NewCornwall to take possession of those ships. Depending on how things went on theTau and Sigma fronts, some of those ships might even ship to Rho or even acrossthe sector and into Sigma to help out there.

He had Blechley for a limited time.Shannon was a good officer but looking for more. Admiral Irons had made thatpart clear. Two years, which meant she could punch out Tortuga and possiblyDevil’s Anus in the north and then return. By then ships should be comingthrough that would be assigned permanently to Seventh Fleet to replace her.

In a way, it was good. Blechley would gether combat ticket punched, and he would have two out of three of the remainingpirate nests in his AO taken out. He would have to follow up with pickets tosecure the star systems though, which meant more cruisers.

Then there was the problem of the damnpirate plagues. He shook his head over that one. At least the enemy commandershad stopped trying to spread the disease. The prowlers that had been dispatchedto scout behind the enemy lines and sow sabotage had reported that the enemyhad not cut their own throat and destroyed the civilian populations they weretrying to exploit. Far from it, they had occupied many of those worlds and evenstarted to get their manufacturing up and running again. There were two reportsof industrial equipment being returned to worlds in order for them to beinstalled and used. That was a surprise to him.

The occupiers were not gentle in theirtreatment of the population, nor their demands for tribute. But the civilianswere alive at least for the moment. With luck and a bit of grit from Blechley,the pirates would be driven out and the populations could be mended andrestored.

His biggest headache at the moment was thenorthern pirate base, the ‘Dante’s Playground.’ The Prowler Meridian hadscouted the pirate base. It had the remains of a battle moon quadrant thereacting as a hellish orbital fortress and base. A dreadnought had also managedto get there, and worse, the enemy had a bone yard and a lot of incentive tosort themselves into one hell of a threat to his northern border.

So far, his people had managed to fend offa couple raiding parties from that direction. They had been quiet since then sohe had to wonder if there was a bottom to their resources.

He might need to send another scout tofind out, he mused.

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Lieutenant Beau noted her principle wasthinking and allowed him to do so without interruption. It meant the paperworkwas not getting signed, but for the most part, he was just signing off ondecisions that had already been made.

Admiral Logan was a good partner. Sheappreciated him, and she knew that he appreciated her. She ran a scan throughthe document lists and then moved the priority ones to the top of the pileagain. The electronic shuffling would not be seen by her principle.

If she had to guess at the train ofthought he was going through, he was either concerned about the strategicsituation in the sector, his daughter’s safety in Tau, politics, or the overallstrategic situation. Those came in the order of likelihood. Of course, he mightbe having paper fatigue and a desire to “play hooky” and work on some engineeringproject. He was an engineer after all.

She had received stories from other AI whohad principles with similar mindsets. The most famous of course was AdmiralIrons. They made for excellent leaders because they led by example. They dug inand were not afraid to get their hands dirty. They also cared about theirpeople. But they were not the best administrators and did not care for officepolitics or petabytes of reports and such things.

That was where she came in. She acted asan electronic assistant; she handled the bulk of the paperwork among otherduties. She filtered the reams of paperwork to spot glaring errors for him toact upon. But she couldn’t shield her principle from all of it nor would she.She also knew his strong sense of duty would invariably lead him back to workin a few more seconds.

As if on cue, the human admiral picked hisstylus up again and began to fiddle with it as he got back to work.

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