Johanna sat up in her bed still screaming, her hands in front of her face to ward off the heat of the flames. Then suddenly she felt light shine through her closed eyelids, her eyes opened almost unwillingly, and she saw that she wasn’t in her old ship’s command center, but in her bed, on board her new flagship. As she started to calm down, she realized that she could hear someone calling her name.
“…alright Fleet Commander?” A voice that seemed to come from everywhere said.
Johanna calmed and slumped back onto the sheets that were drenched in her sweat.
“Yes Turiel, I’m fine. It was just another nightmare.” Johanna said.
“They have been occurring more often in the last few months, Fleet Commander.” Turiel, her ship’s Ai said.
“They come and go.” Johanna said, she had trouble with nightmares ever since her return from Earth, thirty years ago.
“Maybe you should talk with—”
“No.” Johanna interrupted the Ai. “I’m fine, it will pass. It always does.”
“As you say Fleet Commander.”
With a groan Johanna got up from the bed, her sleeping attire, a simple old fashioned shirt was completely wet with her sweat, as was the bed and the covers. She sighed and gathered the linens up in a bundle and put them across the room in the washing bin where the cleaning crew would take them to be washed. With a thought she activated her HUD and glanced at the clock in the corner of her vision, noticing that it was close to the time when she usually got up for her shift. Then she went into her bathroom to take a long shower.
Alone with the sound of running water over her body, she reflected back on the nightmare. It was the same one she always had, a nightmare about the Ra’a’zani ship. She knew intellectually that losing most of her fleet wasn’t her fault, that they simply didn’t know the capabilities of the Ra’a’zani, but even now after all this time it weighed her down. It wasn’t only about her fleet, it was the fact that the actions of her fleet indirectly caused the destruction of Earth, and death of billions of people.
She couldn’t have known that Ra’a’zani possessed a weapon capable of rendering an entire planet uninhabitable, nor that they would be prepared to use it, but in the end it happened on her watch. When she returned to Sanctuary, the fact that the Emperor and her peers didn’t hold her accountable only served to make her feel worse. But eventually she came to terms with what had happened, even though there were still some marks left over.
Her superiors wanted her to stay in command of the Second Fleet, but she refused. At the time she didn’t feel comfortable commanding a war fleet. It wasn’t until five years ago that she stepped back on the ship. Now Johanna was in command of the Empire’s First Exploration Fleet. And she loved the job, she still commanded warships, the Empire had learned its lesson, the galaxy was a dangerous place and the exploration fleet needed protection. But their purpose was mostly exploration.
The First Exploration Fleet consisted of all old class warships that the Empire’s war fleets no longer used, four old class dreadnoughts, seven light cruisers, five heavy cruisers, and four battleships along with ten exploration frigates, two repair ships, five supply ships, two mining ships, and three factory ships. The fleet was fully self-sufficient, capable of operating independently for long periods of time, years. They produced their own food, processed materials they mined, and filtered water they gathered from asteroids, comets, or planets.
The frigates were new ships built ten years ago, they were small about a hundred and twenty meters long. Their purpose was to go on solo missions and look for systems of interest for the fleet, usually that included scouting the unmapped trans-lanes. There had been many cases where a frigate would go through the unmapped trans-lane to a system that had no outgoing trans-lanes, in those cases they would need to come back to the fleet using hyperspace. Which depending on the length of the lane they went through could mean months or even more than a year of travel time in order for them to rejoin the fleet.
The two mining ships were also of a new generation, with their own cargo shuttles and crew proficient at mining in space. Their usual targets were asteroids or small moons, but every now and then they would find a rich planet. When that happened, they would send miners down on the planet to collect samples. The mining ships purpose was to replenish the supplies of the fleet, but also to look out for rich systems and rare ores. All finds were cataloged and results sent back to the Empire. The Empire then sends people and builds facilities for a large scale mining operations.
The Empire was in a constant state of expansion and needed every bit of resources in order to feed its growth. The Empire claimed almost all systems that had a large amount of ore, which had increased its territory tremendously. There were sixteen colonized systems in the Empire, systems where people of the Empire lived, and those sixteen systems were all contained within a sphere of some 60 light years. The Empire had presence in a lot more systems beside those sixteen, they had mining operations in suitable systems within 100 light years, and monitoring stations in others close to the Sowir border as well as in the systems marked for future colonization.
In truth the Empire’s territory was an oblate spheroid some 100 light years wide and about and 80 high in reference to the galactic center. The Empire’s territory was below the galactic plane – the Empire used the galactic center as one of the points of reference for its maps, but the galaxy wasn’t a slim disk, it had depth, so they also used the galactic plane. A referential tool that split the galaxy in half.
The three factory ships kept the fleet supplied with anything it needed, the large nine hundred meters long ships, each held large fabricating factories capable of producing everything the fleet needs, but also fabricating satellites, com drones, monitoring stations and even facilities for starting colonies. They were the reason why the fleet didn’t need to return to the Empire often. The supply ships carried all of their food processing and water refinement factories. The ships had few agroponics bays, but most of their food came from processing bio matter in the bio-fabricators.
As for the warships, they were ships that had been built before the Empire was founded or just after. They were good ships, powerful, but the Empire’s technology had leaped forward in the last few decades, enhanced with the new technologies they discovered, acquired from the Nel, or those that Johanna brought back from Earth. The newer ships were bigger and far more powerful, the dreadnought Mk 2 class warships were the foundation of the Empire’s fleets, mush as the older class was.
Johanna’s fleet of forty two ships was tasked with exploring the territory around the trans-route from Sanctuary to Earth, as the Empire’s main expansion was in that direction. The plan was for them to eventually bring their home system under the Empire’s control. Even with Earth ravaged and uninhabitable it was still humanity’s home. For now they had only a few small unmanned scanning stations that monitored the system looking for any signs of the Ra’a’zani return. The Empire was fueled by its rage towards the alien race, by the need to avenge the billions they enslaved and then slaughtered. Eventually they will encounter them again, and the Empire will enact its justice. Every resource that the Empire gained, every technological advancement was for that purpose.
But spreading their territory to Earth wasn’t going to be easy. First there was more than 600 light years between Sanctuary and Earth, and while they had already spread their influence they still had a lot more to go. There were obstacles other than the distance in their path. The direct path to Earth was right through two systems that were inhabited by fledgling civilizations. One was a civilization still on the level of primitive tribal communities, but the other one was a civilization that was much more advanced. When Johanna first encountered them they had already reached space, and had sent a mission to the planet closest to their home world. The mission was endangered, the ship they sent was damaged and Johanna had helped. In doing so she had revealed the existence of alien life to the ship’s single passenger and revealed her fleet to Trivaxians.