Ploughshares to Swords

Sola’s weave drive hummed underfoot as Dustin walked silently through the corridors to the bridge. The entire vessel seemed subdued - but not the quiet of those mourning or incapable of finding the words to express their emotions as had been the case for much of the flight from Yuran to l’Adran space. The silence now was one of purpose; of a crew set on achieving their mission without detection. Laughter might spill from a cracked bunkroom door, or the sounds of debate from the galley - but in the corridors people moved briskly and with intent. They did after all have important cargo to deliver.

Dustin’s crew had been doing what they could to help the l’Adra in the aftermath of the destruction of the tall alien’s homeworld when the courier had arrived. The Prometheus was the first of the second wave of scout ships fitted up at Titan; unlike the previous vessels her armaments had been stripped back in the aftermath of the attacks. Instead, she was fitted for speed; not a researcher but rather a missive carrier.

It had been Emely who had understood instantly why the humans had built a ship designed purely to carry a limited cargo of data crystals. “The galactic network is under the control of the council.” She’d opined, adding “and you’ve seen what they’ve been saying on there about the Yuran and l’Adra attacks. Any dissent gets shut down pretty quickly; I wouldn’t be surprised to find they’re monitoring communications at the very least, if not outright tracking flights.” Thus, the courier ship - and Dustin’s current mission.

An order had come from the council; no aggressive action was to be taken, the proctor’s mission still stood and the attacks were clearly the result of accidents or incompetence. Dustin and the rest of the human fleet were supposed to keep looking for what they had already found; a neat method of containing the growing cries for action by pointing to the fact that action was being taken. Most importantly, however, the council had reminded a number of those involved that the maintenance of a military for the protection of other species outside the borders of your own territory was a right reserved by the council itself.

Hence the data crystals currently sitting in a briefcase in Dustin’s quarters; what constituted a military vessel had been gone over with a fine toothed comb by the best legal minds humanity had to offer. As a result, the schematics on those crystals were technically just heavily armoured mining barges; the fact that several of their systems could be swapped out easily for directed energy weapons, or industrial mining drones replaced with fighter wings in the same hangers was just a coincidence. And the combat-capable bridges and high-range sensor arrays were just prudence when there were pirates causing the council so many issues.

As to why it was Dustin’s ship and not the Prometheus that was delivering the crystals - that was a matter of deception in case vessels from Earth were being monitored. Officially, Dustin was traveling to the Rabyth homeworld to undertake part of the pairing ritual with Rye; a minor affair, and one that required them to not see their family for the duration. Frustrating as it was that he still wouldn’t get to meet his betrothed’s parents (he had thought they might attend his and Meli’s wedding, but in the end only Rye’s cousin and her family had been able to make it), it did provide a good excuse to meet with Flass - and Rye seemed happier about the fact. She was somehow more nervous than Dustin was about him meeting her mother, and had privately suggested that if it were up to her they wouldn’t do so until after the pairing was complete.

Reaching the door to the bridge, Dustin allowed himself a small chuckle at his thoughts of Rye and the mission. It was thanks to his family shy chief engineer that there would be one other thing the new vessels he was about to request be built would have that mining barges didn’t. Rye had finally managed to get all her notes on making the shield systems work into a format that made sense to other people - and the schematics were already on their way to several of their friends. Anyone trying to take out a human, Rabyth, Vex’ess or Velcan “mining” vessel would very soon be in for a rude awakening.

As it happened, the bunny girl was stood on the bridge as Dustin entered, deep in discussion with Bleu - which wasn’t surprising. The doctor had made some suggestions for improvements to the medbay, and now that the room was finally not seeing heavy use the pair of women were able to get deeply into the planning phase for this latest construction project. They looked up briefly, giving him a warm set of smiles before returning to their conversation, leaving him to cross the floor without distraction.

Settling into his chair, Dustin glanced around the rest of the bridge. Emely was lounging in her seat - seemingly in an **** imitation of his own casual posture, as there wasn’t anything for the communications specialist to do while they were in the weave. Trea’k and Naera were elsewhere - the plant woman having asked for some additional time to talk with the counsellor in the aftermath of the conflict they’d witnessed. Meli was at her station, and smiled up when she saw him looking around, while Sammie’s head was flanked by the weave-drive arms. Even though this route was well mapped, the dark-skinned pilot had asked to fly it for practice. While they’d had no official orders as such yet, everyone guessed it was just a matter of time before they weave-jumped into the unknown in pursuit of the shadowy destroyers of worlds.

His timing in getting to the bridge had been impeccable. Barely a minute after he’d finished reviewing who else was sharing the space with him, the countdown to arrival began - before the screens flickered to show the traffic-heavy Rabyth home system. Rye glanced up from her conversation once more and gave a low whistle. “Flass isn’t messing around, is he?” she murmured, gesturing at the platforms that now dotted the flight paths like buoys. “Armed?” Dustin said, looking over at his engineer. Rye squinted at the screen, then sauntered over to a nearby terminal and tapped at the controls.

“Yup” she replied after a moment, adding “hidden well though. Unless ya know what to look for, they’re active, or ya deep sweep them with a sensor grid which would be incredibly rude and to be honest basically a declaration of war for a species as important to the galactic community as mine is. I didn’t sweep them, in case you’re worrying - and on regular scans they look almost identical to navigation satellites. Which the council has been nagging us to deploy since Artificer-General Groven’s time, a good three or four hundred years ago.”

Dustin nodded, but the bunny girl wasn’t finished. “Look at the scans sometime though - there’s about three times as many vent ports as you’d need for a navigation node. Could be deep sweep sensors, but those wouldn’t be deployed in the middle of the system. Thus, armed; my guess would be four heavy rail cannon, or possibly two plasma casters per station. Anything hostile drops in here, they are going to have a very bad time of it.”

In fact, when Dustin queried the leader of the Rabyth sometime later, sitting in the ambassadorial ready room and with the case of data crystals open on the table between them, Rye’s guess had been absolutely correct. “You know I’m rather glad I sent her off with you, lad.” The old Rabyth remarked, swirling a glass of potent brandy before taking a deep swig. “This really is rather tasty stuff, for a soft drink. Where was I? Oh yes, Rye. She’s turned into the engineer I always thought she could be, if she’d stop worrying so much and let her hair down. Didn’t expect her to start pairing up with you; thought she’d be solo forever, so that’s an added bonus.”

Flass set his glass down at that point and leaned forward. “This whole business with the council goes beyond stupid. I don’t know what’s on the message crystal your Axworth included in amongst all the schematics, but after talking with the Vex’ess envoy to Rabythion, I’ve got a pretty good idea.” The artificer-general sighed, pulling his cap off and scratching behind one of his long ears for a moment before glancing back at Dustin. “We’ve got to move carefully; if we shift too much production to your craft, the other side is going to notice and start snooping more than we want. We’ll get you your hulls - and I’m pretty sure the overqueen’s factories are already churning out the components your yards are going to need to finish them off - but building everything at Titan would be a mistake. Too easy to monitor, and I wouldn’t put it past those bastards to try and adjust the specifications for what’s allowed so that you’d need to scrap your newly built fleet. What you need is somewhere off the beaten path. Here.”

At that, Flass pulled a crystal of his own from one pocket and after a moment’s hesitation handed it to Dustin. “Let’s just say that we didn’t always trust that the council would act in everyone’s best interests. My predecessors made plans in case things fell apart. The construction facility listed on there is mothballed, but we keep it up to date and it’ll do what you need it to do. You’ll have to staff it, and I of course have no knowledge of ever giving you Rabyth state secrets in the event that things go wrong.” Dustin put the crystal carefully to one side and nodded. “Thank you, artificer-general. We’ve got the manpower, but as you said - if we deployed it all at Titan it’d alert everyone we don’t want alerting.”