Tomas turned his holo table on and started looked at the countless number of reports. With a sigh, he opened one and started reading.
Laura Reiss, Fleets Master of the Empire, stood in the fleet command room of the massive command-class ship. Around her were countless floating holograms, surrounding people sitting in chairs around the room. In the middle was a dais, and from there she gazed around at the people working. To her side was a hologram of the ship. Its enormous size was not apparent on the scaled-down hologram.
“It is impressive,” Laura said.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Fleet Commander Nair Hakeem of the First Fleet said from her side.
Laura studied the wide arrowhead-shaped ship. Sitting at 4200 meters in length, another 3000 wide, and 1800 tall at its tallest, it really was impressive. It held the most sophisticated communications and battle sensors that they possessed. But it was not meant as a ship for battle; it was the ship that guided the battle. Designed specifically as a flagship of a fleet, it had few weapons, sacrificing that for armor, shimmering fields, and shields with enough power to make sure that nothing could pass through them. It of course had the latest Watchtower interface that now ran on multiple levels of communications, hyperspace communications, lasers, radio, and the newly developed normal space FTL comms built from the technology they’d learned from the sphere. It also came with several levels of the best encryption that the Empire had.
The ship also served as control point for the drone command teams, whose control had been removed from the Watchtower interface and delegated to designated teams of pilots. The command ship had one hundred and twenty teams with ten people each, meaning that it could control up to twelve hundred drones.
With a gesture, Laura zoomed out and the hologram showed the fleet of ships surrounding the Empire command ship Avalon. Around it were the ten new Leviathan-class dreadnoughts, sitting at 3000 meters long, 2000 wide at their widest, and 700 meters tall, shaped like arrowheads too, borrowing the design from Warpath’s Harbinger. Like all dreadnoughts classes before it, they were almost fleets unto themselves, only now they were larger and much deadlier.
Ever since the Fleet had gotten reorganized—the older models retired to Clan defense or put into storage, and newer models built—the form of the fleet had changed. They wouldn’t be building a great number of these new dreadnoughts, only ten per fleet. And they didn’t need to; those ten alone had firepower enough to lay waste to entire fleet like the one that they had used to invade the Sowir home system. Their weapons and defenses all used tech from the sphere, or adapted from it, with a few purely human inventions. The Fleet had also started to build all their ships to be modular, like the Vanguard Fleet. This would allow them to upgrade their ships much easier, although it did add a bit to the construction time, as they didn’t fabricate entire hulls in several large pieces.
Around the dreadnoughts floated the one hundred new battleships, 2000 meters long, 1200 wide, and 550 tall. They followed the design similar to Warpath’s Titan, with its apparently overlapping carapace-like plates. Then there were the four hundred new cruiser ships, 1000 meters long, 300 wide, and 500 tall, designed like sleek talons. And lastly the twelve hundred drones, which were the upgraded versions of the former Vanguard drones. These were 760 meters long, 380 wide, and 180 tall, and shaped like irregular rectangular boxes.
This made the grand total number of the First Fleet 1710 warships, plus the command ship and the auxiliaries that pushed that number to 2000, which was the number that all their new fleets now had. And once the last five command ships finished their production, the Empire’s six war fleets would be finished. Twelve thousand warships protecting the Empire’s territory, which was now a prolate spheroid almost 1000 light years across at its two furthest points, and some 600 at its two closest. The Empire’s territory was now split into six sectors, each with an area of at least 150 light years across in all directions. And each of the fleets would be stationed and charged with patrolling and protecting their sector.
Soon, all fleets would leave for their areas of the Empire. The Third Fleet was the one that was stationed in the First Sector, which encompassed Sanctuary. The First Fleet was stationed in the Second Sector, which was now former Sowir territories. The other fleets had been spread out across the area of space between Sanctuary and Sol, although there wasn’t yet the same number of people and colonized systems in the volume of space that they were charged of protecting. And the Sixth Fleet, with Fleet Commander Johanna Stern back in command of a war fleet, would be stationed in Sol, at the border of their Empire.
“Congratulations, Fleet Commander.” Laura turned to Nair. “Looks like you are the first Fleet Commander to have a fully completed fleet.”
“Thank you, Fleets Master. But Avalon’s sister ships will be finished in a few days,” Nair responded.
“Yes,” Laura said as she turned to look at the holo again. “Soon enough.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
November; Year 53 of the Empire – Mars
“Is it working?” Adrian asked one of the techs standing to his left.
“For now. The liquid is solidifying at an acceptable rate, and the materials are being incorporated within the predicted range,” she answered over the comms, as they were outside on the surface of Mars.
In front of them was a massive, round black pool of liquid with a diameter of almost one hundred meters. It was only a part of the construct; belowground was where most of the facility stretched.
“How long will it take?” Adrian asked.
“Some parts go slower, others faster. Building the engines, for example, is tricky. But all together, we are looking at fifty hours,” the tech responded.
“I guess that that is amazing, considering that it is building an entirely finished shuttle all on its own,” Adrian commented.
The tech didn’t respond. Instead, she focused on the holographic display in front of her. They had been trying to crack one of the technologies from the sphere that would eventually allow them to build entirely finished ships in a matter of hours. They had the copies of many technologies from the sphere. Not the entire database—it was too large, and they couldn’t even begin to fathom their more advanced stuff—but this particular technology looked similar to the 3D printers, and the shuttle they were now building would rise from the liquid resin fully formed. But beneath the pool was the massive factory that provided the liquid materials needed for the shuttle’s construction. It used light, oxygen, and electric currents to shape and build according to blueprints provided to it. The tech was amazing, but was still nowhere close to what Adrian wanted. He tried to control himself as he knew that it was impossible for them to start using the technology on the same level as the People had. They needed time to learn how and why it worked. But his plans were long reaching, stretching for hundreds of years into the future.
Adrian sighed, then turned and started towards his shuttle.
“Get us home, Iris,” he said once he was inside and had removed his helmet. The shuttle turned on and slowly lifted off the ground, and Iris appeared in front of him.
“The new Sentinel should be arriving soon,” Iris said.
“Aileen, yes. That makes four of us who have psionics in the Empire,” Adrian said.