Port Lazarus
28 August 3144
“It has been too long Amanda.” Helena greeted her at the docks.
"Lifetimes." Amanda returned the hug, "My girls haven't' been giving you too many fits, have they?"
“No more than you did.”
“Funny, that, I've got more gray hairs than you, so they must've been at least slightly less stressful. I brought some extra presents."
“I read the reports. I’m glad you made it safely. Though it sounds like we may need to beef up patrols along the trade routes.”
"Well, y'know, I'm a troublemaker. Sixty Jade Falcons, the surviving crew of CJF
White Aerie, aka SLS
Indianapolis."
“Well I guess I should be glad you managed sixty. The Mongols have a nasty tendency to suicide rather than surrender or evacuate.”
"Enough of the crew weren't Mongols to find the keys to the escape pods, and they even evacuated their CO." Amanda confided, "whom I've been keeping drugged in the secure section of the medbay."
“Well sounds like Juanita is going to have an interesting afternoon then.”
"Yah, she will…how's Dave doing? And the others?"
“Dave’s looking forward to meeting with you as soon as he’s off shift. Which should be any minute now.”
"How did the diplomacy go? I noticed there's signs of mobilization, but not as many as I feared."
“Trillian is vexing my daughter but we’ve made good progress there. Alaric agreed to a one year peace but he’s definitely planning something. Hence why I couldn’t completely clear Dave’s schedule for him to be here to meet you.”
"Alaric
Steiner is his mother's boy, at least, Priss thinks so and the data we have suggests she's right." Amanda noted. "He's up to something, bet on it."
“Yes. He’s shrewd enough that he’s engineered the situation to where we would be the aggressors and breakers of the treaty if we did anything now. I hate to say it but he could win the peace if peace were the way of the Clans.”
"Damn, I was hoping I was wrong." Amanda muttered. "Okay, so we have a year to prepare for the storm."
“Meanwhile there are Lyran systems willingly flocking to him that I can’t do anything about. So when the time does come he will be a formidable foe.”
"Figures. I've got some science work Kolossus and Persistence came up with back home, we need to test it." Amanda sighed, "it won't fix the HPG problem completely, but it might help the actual eventual fix."
“Whatever you need.”
"I need your core forge." Amanda said simply, "For about a month, and we brought the Germanium in bars in the hold, see, we have one experiment at Kolossus, but we need a second site this deep in, they're building a third at Port Orphan now, but you've got a proper
forge..."
“From what I understand HPG cores are different beasts than Warship cores but if there is even the slightest chance we can even ease the Black Out, if not outright fix it it is worth it.”
"Excellent…" Amanda palmed out a Data-chit, "your AIs are going to want to parse this data and run sims while we're doing the work, I don't understand most of it, and that's with over twenty years of Kolossus
teaching me."
“Honestly I think K-F theory is meant to evade most people. Hell sometimes I wonder if Kearny and Fuchida purposefully structured their journals and papers to pull our legs.”
"Kolossus said a lot of key data was omitted in the published versions." Amanda told her, "He's been playing with it for centuries, he's found…'gaps' and some of those gaps led to this research, thing about research is that any experiment has to be replicated."
“So it shall be. I don’t think you’ve met Zulu yet. Of my AIs she’s the science nut. So good luck keeping your sanity.”
"Oh, Kolossus would adore that!" Amanda said cheerfully, "I think even when I was AI I wasn't quick enough mentally to satisfy him. A proper AI with the right interests and he might not be bored."
“I imagine so. You’ll also need to meet Truk.”
“Apologies for the delay but I am here my Lady.” Truk’s avatar walked up to them. “A lot of work to be done these days and as capable of multitasking as I am still feels like there isn’t enough of me to go around. Looks like Amusing Anecdote needs some armor repair and a few internal systems looked at. I have my best crew on it.”
“Thanks Truk.”
“Just don’t be in a rush to undo all my crew’s hard work. I know we’re about to be at war again but it would be nice to see my work last a while.”
“I’ll do my best, Truk.”
“I have more news so let’s find ourselves a bar.” Helena smiled.
Hubble’s Bubbles and Brews“So what’s this other news?” Amanda asked.
“Seems we’re in a race with each other for who becomes a grandmother first. Well in my case again. Trillian is trying to set Roderick up with one of your daughters and if that doesn’t work out she wants to set him up with Lori.”
“That fills me with a lot of conflicting emotions…”
“Preacher, choir.”
“Yeah that must be especially confusing for you, your daughter being the second choice.”
“Very much so.”
“Being a mom has changed a lot for me.”
“Unavoidable.”
A waitress sat down a bottle of spiced rum, one low gravity shot tumbler, and a low gravity tea kettle and tumbler.
“You’ve really changed.” Amanda noted.
“I probably waited too long to clean up some bad habits but I have.”
“So it’s true.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t seem particularly bothered by it.”
“Living as long as I have I have gained an appreciation for the gift that is mortality. Plus I do have a succession plan in place and a spare if need be.”
"That's good. That's
real good Helena…I expected more…ire, I guess is the word, Vendetta and Kolossus told me that you'd been informed on the calving experiments."
“I’ve accepted it would be like being angry at water for being wet. It is who you are, indeed I’d probably have done similar if my circumstances were different. I didn’t because I already have a trusted network of friends and allies.”
"I neglected mine while I was running it." Amanda stated, "I got into this idea that I could make…replacements? It didn't work out that way, but it took Kolossus denying me access before they could make me stop trying."
“It is a hard lesson to learn. One we’ve both been stubborn about in our own ways. Making and maintaining connections.”
"At my lowest, I'd lost something on the order of fifty IQ points, it's taken most of this year in recovery just to get them back. The becoming stupid was part of why Kolossus cut me off."
“You’re taking steps. It will be a long journey but you’ve started it. And it makes me happy you’ll be making part of it here.”
"I'm here, because here is, as Vendetta put it, 'not Kolossus' and I have to live in the real world here, instead of concocting horror scenarios with the intent of breaking my own mind, that said, Trillian's trying to set Roderick up with one of my daughters, is it Priss?"
“Yes. She’s been trying to organize the independents to help them protect themselves from bandits and pirates.”
"Huh…I kind of wondered how she'd turned out once she wasn't in the virtual environments, once she got a taste of being human."
“Well fortunately I’ve managed to rig things so most of your daughters are here for a visit with you. Some had to be away. Peregrine should actually be back here soon though.”
"That's also good…but you're a bit wrong. I calved sixty five times, only a dozen or so have been transferred to an organic body, the rest are content to live in virtual worlds, helping Kolossus analyze exploration data or run simulated experiments."
“If I had known it was that many I would have made the trip back to Kolossus during some of the relative peace periods and pulled you out myself.”
Amanda chuckled weakly, "Yah, We kept it quieter. The sickening part is that while I was rigging in, I got a share of their memories, their perspectives back, especially when one of my girls had to upload after a death. I'm not certain they learned all the lessons they needed to-Perfidy in particular didn't seem to develop a decent sense of self preservation."
“I don’t think I could handle that. As it is I’m having to force my staff and AIs to keep which unit my Sally is billeted with from me so I won’t be gun shy about sending it into danger.”
"The difference, Helena, is you're a
good mother by nature, I'm…not. I've had to learn how, and made a lot of mistakes." Amanda poured herself a drink. "By all rights, my kids have every reason to despise me."
“Oh mistakes are par for the course. I screwed up so badly the first time my daughter ran off. Now I’m making the mistake of not getting to know my children as adults. I know some of that can’t be helped as David and Nathan have made their lives in the Alliance and have returned there to live them and I guess I’m fixing that with Lori.”
"At least you're fixing it." Amanda allowed, "nobody can fault that part."
“Now you can get to know your daughters too. And look at the time.” Helena smiled as Dave Foster entered the bar. “I do believe this is my cue to let you have some alone time with your adoptive father figure. We’ll talk more later I’m sure.”
***
"You've gotten gray." Amanda greeted Admiral David Foster, "gray-er. That hair's almost
white now."
He chuckled, "And you have not been dying yours." he gestured, "Not the child I knew, a
Black Lion Battleship?"
"They were pre-damaged when we got there, and I followed your lecture." She allowed, "have a seat old man, it's damned good to see you in reality, instead of just a simulated memory!"
He chuckled and sat at the table, "Your drinking habits remain atrocious."
"Yep. The SLDF uniform actually looks snappy on you, sir, and the ranks are correct-not some 'fleet captain' thing, you're an actual
admiral in a real navy now."
"I would be remiss if I said I didn't sometimes miss that collection we put together, Amanda. What really brought you out here, because I know it was not nostalgia."
"Super-Science." Amanda said, "and a chance to relive some of my youth…and nostalgia."
He joined her laughter. "The Amanda Roberts I remember, still scowled over the memory of Amos Forlough…and the Star League."
"Yeah, well, you know what the best way to prevent an Amos Forlough is, is to be involved enough to stop them from getting into a position to act. To do
that, It's best to be in that kind of position, or at least adjacent to it." she topped up her glass, "besides, some kind of Star League is going to be absolutely necessary, and soon."
"Soon?"
"On a galactic scale. Within a few thousand years at the outside, but the sooner we get one, the sooner we can be ready for what's out there. The BIG mystery is that aside from the accident that crippled Erinyes, they haven't hit us yet. It might be we're too small, or they're busy with bigger fish, but sooner or later mankind is going to get the attention of whatever whacked that planet….at that point, it won't be what it likely was this time."
"Which is?"
"Kolossus thinks it's someone's stray shot, likely from the lesser magellanic cloud. Something fired from so far away, and so long ago, that a return shot would take potentially millions of years to arrive. Our logic is based on Fermi's Paradox and what Kolossus has observed about non-carbon lifeforms-that is, it's actually really easy for life to occur, and the Inner Sphere is full of it, except, only one intelligence, which doesn't fit the pattern, the volume of space we're in, should be
lousy with intelligent life."
"And it isn't."
She nodded. "Hypothesis is, we're not the first, or the tenth, or the ten-thousandth,we're just the most recent. Intelligent life is the best reason for the extinction of intelligent life…and I don't know about anyone else, not really, but I'm kind of against going extinct."
“And Helena represents our best shot at avoiding such a fate of all the players on the table.” Dave nodded soberly.
