She was just to ask someone what they were doing when she noticed a familiar person standing in the middle of the commotion talking with the dock master. She made her way towards him.
“Clan Leader,” she said as she reached him.
“Ah, Aileen. Good, I was just about to comm you,” Clan Leader Isani said.
Alieen looked at his Nel face and tried to catch any indication of his mood, but Nel faces were always hard to read. “Well, here I am. Why did you want to speak with me?” she asked.
“I wanted to let you know that we have made some last-minute additions to your cargo. They are some things that Adrian ordered from the research department. We managed to get most of them done before now, so I thought that you might as well take them to him,” he said while he gestured with his left hand, making a circle, meaning tiredness. “Adrian would have annoyed me to no end if he’d found out that these things were finished and I’d waited another four months until the rest were done to send them.”
Aileen smiled, relieved that it wasn’t anything concerning her departure. “Of course, Clan Leader, I’ll make sure that he gets them.”
“Good.” Isani brought his palms to his stomach and turned them sideways, thanking her. “I shouldn’t even be here, I have too much work to do. But more work is worth it if it keeps Adrian from not annoying me.” With that, he turned and left.
Aileen watched as the dockworkers finished loading the cargo, and then she boarded her ship. She walked through the access hatch and made her way to the observation deck. Once she entered, a hologram appeared in front of her. It was of a male Nel, dressed in typical Empire garbs—tight skin-suit with an overcoat.
“Welcome on board, Sentinel,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said. “Will we be departing soon?” she asked as she sat down in one of the chairs. A holographic interface appeared in front of her. She tapped the few hard light switches floating there and the walls of the room disappeared, showing the area around the ship as if seen through a wraparound window.
“The Forge gave us permission to leave at our leisure, Sentinel,” the ship’s AI said.
“Good,” she said, sitting alone in the observation deck. This wasn’t a passenger ship, and the rest of the crew was busy with their jobs. She was just hitching a ride.
She watched as the ship slowly disengaged from the docks and started towards the tunnel that led out of the asteroid. She looked around at the thousands of ships docked. Some were in various stages of construction, while others were there simply to leave off supplies or take them from Warpath to some other system.
Aileen watched in awe as the ship exited the massive asteroid and set a course towards the outgoing trans-lane that would take her to the Waypoint system, and from there she would make her way to Sol and Mars. Once, the trip would have taken her more than a year. But that was mostly because ships lost a lot of time trekking through star systems between trans-stations. Now, with the skimming technology, they could move from one trans-station to the other in a matter of minutes. The trip to Sol would take her barely a month and a half. They even had much better hyperspace tech now. With the new power generators and hyperspace generators, they had vastly increased their speeds. A hyperspace trip to Earth would take barely nine months, compared to the 60 years it had once taken Olympus to cross that same distance. It was amazing. But trans-space travel was still faster, especially now when they could skim from trans-station to trans-station.
The cargo ship reached the outgoing trans-station and waited as more ships scheduled for transfer to Waypoint arrived. The transfer to Waypoint occurred on a schedule, as a trans-lane couldn’t be used while ships were still in transit. Transfer from Warpath to Waypoint happened once per day, as travel time was about twenty hours.
Aileen waited for another twenty minutes, looking around her at the many different kinds of ships. From transports to cargo ships, to even two patrol ships. Then the massive station placed just outside of the trans-station sent out a countdown to transfer. The cargo ship wouldn’t be using its own trans drives to pass through—it had nowhere near enough power to send all ships inside the area through, as the amount of mass that had to be pushed through was great, and that meant a more powerful field was needed. Instead, the massive station would project the field and send them through.
The timer reached zero, and all the ships in the trans-station disappeared in a flash of violet light.
Chapter Twenty-Three
October; Year 53 of the Empire – Sanctuary
“And I need to do that why, exactly?” Tomas asked.
“They fulfilled your demands, Tomas,” Nadia said, infuriated with her Emperor, “and you already set the precedent when you accepted Nuva into the Empire.”
Tomas sighed in defeat. “If I summon the Clan Leaders outside of the scheduled meetings, I am going to pay for it. They already grumble because they need to come here twice a year.”
“Do you want the Trivaxians to feel slighted on the day they are finally accepted into the Empire?” Nadia asked pointedly.
“No,” he grumbled.
“Then summon the Clan Leaders,” she told him.
“Fine. But they better not try to make this about more than a simple acceptance ceremony, or I swear to everything the next meeting we have I am going to just let them yell at each other.”
“No, you will not,” Nadia said, and stood from her chair in front of Tomas’s desk. “Now, I have another hundred things to care of,” she said, and left the office.
Tomas cursed under his breath. It had taken the Trivaxians more than sixteen years to complete all of Tomas’s demands. To remodel their society, to invent and build a hyperspace generator all on their own, and then go and colonize another system, with the Empire only supervising. And they had done it. Their colony was thriving. Their society had adopted the ways of the Empire, and now they would join them and get access to all the technology Empire possessed, everything that they needed to start as the newest Clan of the Empire. There would be oversight, of course, until they grew comfortable with the technology. But in another five years, they would have all the advantages of being a part of the Empire.
They would be the first non-human or Nel race in the Empire, whose numbers were now almost equal. Both the Nel and the humans numbered around a billion, placing the Empire’s total population at just north of two billion. It was all thanks to the laws he’d put in place when he’d created the Empire regarding the progeny centers. But now, with the Trivaxians being added, that number would skyrocket, and people of Trivax would outnumber both the humans and the Nel. Their population was close eight billion. And the other race that was trying to be accepted, the Furvor, had about nine billion, and they too were close to finishing all their requirements. But they would suffer penalties because of their attack on Trivaxians.
And then there were the Guxcacul, who would also ask to be accepted, if what he was hearing was correct. They had a small population, and as they already possessed a lot of advanced technology, Tomas didn’t need any special requirements for them. But they were still trying to rebuild their homeworld back up after the war with the Sowir.
And lastly there were the fifty billion Nel living in the Nelus system. They were holding out, trying to recover on their own through trade with the Empire, but over the years Tomas had seen their frustration. They were watching the growth of the Empire and were likely wondering what they could do if they were a part of it. But he knew that he couldn’t just let them in like that; they needed to change their beliefs fundamentally if he was going to accept them.