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Strategos (A Great Captain Roberts Tale!!) - Part 3 - A Light In The Black -
Chapter 3[]
Intelligence[]
Cargo bays on an M9…
...Battle station are laid out both along the axis and surrounding it.
"Unimprinted. My god." Billie Hoel knew what her remote was seeing. These were Nirasaki 400-C units. Fresh, blank machines waiting for personality overlays and core data.
Virgin.
Over a dozen of them. Right from the factory. "What?" Siegel was a little nonplussed, "What do you mean?"
"They don't have any imprint, they're ready for formatting," Billie said. "Factory fresh, Caspar cores, Captain Siegel. They do not even have Dharaval's scan laid on them yet."
"So… stolen from the factory?" Siegel mused.
"Probably. Keep looking, if they wanted to build an SDS they would have needed to put the scanning equipment somewhere for building their initial personality and skill matrices. If they put the cores here, then here is where it was set up."
"ALICE, run inventory checks again, see if there are any areas with blank records, or with additional power running where it should not," Siegel ordered to the room, adding, "Please?"
There was a moment of silence, then, "I… can't find one, but there are areas not reporting."
"Really." Siegel looked at Billie Hoel. "Terminal six, bring up a station damage control diagram, and highlight areas where your internal monitoring is not reporting."
"They hid it from the station's AI?" Hoel mused.
"Seems like something people would do, so aff, they would hide it from the AI." Siegel asserted. "Add visual configuration from the external survey files dated last week."
The images overlaid.
"That… is nearly a quarter of the station as a whole, ALICE." Billie noted.
"There are docks down there. Enclosed ones, we thought they were unfinished."
"They might be." Hoel stated.
"EVA?"
The AI's remote nodded.
Symbols of the Outworld Alliance[]
They had to use…
…manual forcing jacks to open the doors in the unlit sections.
"Oh my dear." Helena muttered.
The spacing was radial in the enclosed environment, and it was clearly NOT the third and fourth grav decks.
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Bonaventure Class Corvette
"Four of them. Bonaventures Class ships like Evanescent." Billie Hoel explained. "They wanted to build an SDS using the most common warship ever built, one that had been dumped on the surplus market or given away like booby-prizes to the territorial states."
Lighting came up as the breakers were closed.
Each of the ancient corvettes were marked with the symbology of the Outworlds Alliance.
"We're going to need more techs." Siegel mused aloud. "We need a survey of condition and readiness on those hulls."
“They are by rights yours, but I do have a few AIs in need of new hulls if you want experienced crews to go with them.”
"Have them brought up." Seigel suggested. "We need them… I hope these do not require too much work to adapt."
"I had a nasty thought," Billie commented. "LAMs, Corvettes, and I think those bays were for fighters, though they could be small craft on export models."
"Raiders,." Siegel agreed. "These were being prepped as raider forces, for the uprising."
"Automated raiders for a faction of the Outworlds that wanted to fight the Star League, but did not have full support of their population??"
Siegel nodded in her suit, "Aff… only they were knocked out before they could put their plan into action. And now, we benefit."
“Lucy is going to pitch such a fit about keeping on calling my forces Destroyer Divisions.” Helena chuckled.
Giving birth to new AIs[]
"Well… we know…
…why they didn't have the AI's imprinted?" Helena commented later.
They were standing in the room where the prep was supposed to be, and half the scanning gear was missing still.
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Larry Nichols
"They weren't finished?" Larry Nichols asked.
"They weren't finished," Helena said. "Truk's data on Caspar systems shows more equipment is needed to make the scanned copy-equipment for digitizing the image, resolving it… but…"
"But?"
She held up a bit of glass fiber cable. "But, I can pull my right eye, plug in and feed it direct or Amanda can."
"They'll be, what, half-Desmonds?" Amanda asked, pushing at a stray piece of unfinished installation.
"More like a synergy," Helena told her. "We won't know until we try it, but the theory from Truk's records suggests it'll be either a complete mess, or a blending of the programs since there's nothing to force a division."
"Get a blank, and plug me in." Amanda stated. "That's how we find out, right? And I'm not the one with a galaxy-spanning load of obligations… and Desmond agrees."
"Now wait a damn minute, Captain!!" Nichols wasn't pleased by this idea at all. "What happens if something BAD happens? We don't know if this is even safe!!"
"We find out. I won't be hurt, I'm the Greatest Privateer You'll Ever See!" the girl smiled wildly. "Yo, ho-ho."
"At least check with Fleet Captain Foster first." Nichols insisted. "Get the medical people and the tech crews to look this over!"
"We've got time." Helena observed. "Also Mister Nichols is right, the scans in the initial project relied on Admiral Dharaval being terminally-ill, because it WAS that dangerous. Also remember what I said about having AIs that need new hulls, we’re not exactly desperate."
"We need the hulls now, we don't have crews…" Amanda listed off, "...and the surveys on the four in storage show someone already altered the CIC fittings and removed most of the manual controls. So we either see if the gear works first, or we don't send for cores we can't be sure will fit and interface properly."
“Truk already helped put one in a Bonnie, two cores are right here, there is far less risk in trying a technical solution like that than plugging in someone that cannot be backed up,” Helena countered.
"Lady Cameron," Dave Foster's voice came over the common channel. "We're doing it your way. Roberts, you may assist, but I'm not wasting the time I have in you on a dumb stunt. Captain Siegel, go with Hoel, find the two best condition Bonnies in cold storage, and have your tech crews prep them for Lady Cameron's unhoused cores."
"Sey-la."