opportunity to ask all the questions she normally didn't feel comfortable bringing up. “How long were you with him before you, um-” she found herself suddenly lost trying to find the right word.
“-grew up?” Alice asked with a raised eyebrow. “About seventeen years, he was thirty four when he let me loose.”
“Wow. No wonder you guys fit like father and daughter.”
“Does it look that way to everyone else?”
“Most people think you're his bio daughter, yup. People who know better don't bother correcting them. If something's close enough to the truth so it doesn't make a difference, well, then why not just leave it be.”
“I had no idea, I thought it was just the way I felt.”
“Nope, looks pretty much like you're his. The two of you remind me of a father and son I met who were part of a carnival once. They stayed on the next estate over for a few months while they worked off a debt to the household. His dad was this thin, wiry tall guy and looked mean all the time. Emris, his son, looked all skinny like he hadn't grown into himself yet, but you could tell just by looking at them that they were father and son. They walked the same, did things the same way, and his father was even teaching him his trade so they were both really good at their work. If they were working on something they only needed to say the bare minimum, and when it got technical, whoa, it was like they were talking in a different language.”
“What did they do?”
“They were mechanics, which, I know, you and Captain aren't, but it's just the way you two handle the bridge, even the way you kind of like to just go off on your own and think. Sometimes I wish I could do that, just go somewhere alone and figure things out but I end up hitting the ship stores or a materializer and I walk away with munchies. If I did too much thinking alone I gain two kilos in no time!” Ashley exclaimed exaggeratedly.
Alice couldn't help but laugh and nod. “That took some getting used to, stopping when I wasn't hungry anymore. I see your point though, I think I was just alone for too long after Bernice got married. Even before then it was always just her and I then everyone else. We didn't really let anyone get between us. Now I'm on a ship with thousands aboard. Doesn't look like I'll be starved for company.”
“Really? I'm still having trouble sleeping. I turn the lights down to get a few winks and all I can hear is my own breathing. I left a hologram on of Goodbye Wayne the other night real low just so I felt like there were people nearby.”
“The cowboy movie?”
“Yahuh, you've seen?”
“I haven't seen the newer version, just the one from the thirties.”
“That's the one! I like it when Wayne spits in Lorne's hat, it still gets a laugh.”
“I have a collection of the classics, even some from the film days on Earth, I'll have to-” Alice's command and control unit blinked and Cynthia came on; “We have incoming, Ma'am. It looks like a group of Eden Fleet ships.”
“We're on our way,” Alice replied. “Put the ship on high alert, I need everyone at battle stations. I'm bringing up my command interface here.” Alice said as she activated an interface on her command and control unit and started striding towards the nearest express car doors.
Ashley was just about to start running when Alice stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. “On a ship like this it makes more sense to interface with your post remotely. Running will only distract you until you get there and you'll have to adjust to your station while you're out of breath.”
Ashley nodded, falling in step beside the other woman, bringing up the remote hologram of the helm. It appeared in front of her as though she was actually there and moved along in front while she walked. “This is strange, how are you looking at the bridge?”
“My cybernetic eye is interfaced with my C and C unit. I can see the bridge as though I were there. If my neural comm were still working I could give orders through the speaker system without talking.”
Ashley watched what the pilot and navigator were doing, what the Navnet was saying about the incoming ships and shook her head. “Those ships are four times our mass and launching fighter drones just like the ones that came after the Cold Reaver. They must have followed us, I'm sorry.”
“It's not your fault, it's amazing that you got away at all,” Alice said as they stepped into the lift. It shuttled them up then towards the front of the Command Deck.
Agameg Price saw the hologram of Alice Valent appear right where he was sitting in the Captain's chair and moved to his tactical station. It immediately started giving orders. “Flight Deck, do we have any fighters on long range recon?”
David Monroe, the night watch for the Flight Deck didn't look up from the central station beneath the bridge as he replied; “We have a Uriel thirty one minutes out manned by Scrubber and Hardcore. Assigned to medium range recon, still no word from Hitman.”
“Don't worry about Hitman, he's on long range retrieval. Recall all fighters and secure the hangars for faster than light. Helm, plot a course to intercept Scrubber and Hardcore's next scheduled wormhole exit point. We're going to pick them up before we go on mission.” Alice's hologram turned towards Agameg. “Tactical, how many torpedo stations do you have ready?”
“Five, the rest of the crews report that they're on their way to stations. What about cloaking?”
“We have a bare section of hull from the work being done on the main emitters, it'll stick out like a sore thumb. What about our gunnery posts?”
“Can't find Frost, but his second is already on the gunnery deck and emergency decompression is underway. Readiness estimate stands at forty nine seconds.”
“What do you mean you can't find Frost?” Alice asked, exasperated.
“His locator isn't coming up. It's like his personal command unit is powered down.”
“Anything on the bio trackers?”
“Nothing, but they're only active on sixty three percent of the ship, he could be in one of the dead sections.”
“Contact Stephanie, have someone from security on it. Until then, tell the torpedo and gunnery teams that anyone not in their seat and ready in the next ninety seconds gets left at the next port. How long until the first drones are in firing range?”
“They're launching and holding station around their carriers, but if they started moving now they would be on us in under two minutes.” Agameg replied.
“I have eight fighters ready to launch and six on their way into our gravnet about to be picked up. We could scramble them and try to buy some time,” interjected David.
“Not going to happen. My tactical screen shows there are over three hundred drones out there, each with a quarter the firepower as one of our fighters and three times the armour. We'd be murdering our own pilots with those numbers. The order to recall stands.”
“Aye, Ma'am,” replied David passively. He was a cool headed young pilot with more experience than most on the ship, Paula had recommended him as the night shift watch for the Flight Deck, and he accepted it even though he quietly made it known that he'd rather be out in a fighter himself. His call sign was Diver.
The large, heavily armoured split oval doors leading onto the main bridge parted just enough to allow Alice and Ashley through. They walked straight to their seats. Alice's holographic representation disappeared, while Ashley's holographic representation of the controls hovering in front of her faded the moment she replaced the nafalli night pilot, who took a seat beside the communications station, just in case she was needed later.
The main holographic display on the bridge appeared in front of everyone and Alice closed her eyes. Everyone had seen it happen in simulations, where she looked at the status of the Triton through that electronic eye and saw more information at once than most could stand. “Laura, how are our shields?”
She was just arriving on the bridge then, and the main doors closed, the sound of them pressing together and sealing filled the compartment. Laura stopped to stand at field control as the hologram above her wrist faded. “Refractive and energy shielding are up and at full, gravitational shielding will be up in six seconds.”
“Thank you, Liam, how much power do we have for a wormhole?”
Liam and Finn appeared at the engineering stations on the bridge, even though they were actually standing at two completely different sections of the ship. “Power isn't the problem, it's the main emitter's capacity that you should worry about,” his hologram relayed from the main engineering control centre.
