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Warringer
Chapter 9
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Washuu shook her head. The humans of Earth always continued to surprise her. They had just left Camp David and were back on the way towards Andrews in a helicopter. As she had left, she had overheard a few technicians talking.
The things they were throwing around were incredible. The technicians were those who had seen the files of the DVDs first and than made copies for the Pentagon and the CIA. They had seen one or two of the files and were getting the most inovative ideas she had heard in a long time. Not even at the Galactic Academy the students and professors had ideas like this.
The worst part was that the ideas she had overheard were very possible.
There was the idea of one shot launchers for missiles packed together in a pod that could be jettisoned from a ship and than fired. But the worst part was that the technician who had the idea had said that he got the idea from a series of science fiction novels called 'Honor Harrington'. Washuu had done some searches and the basic ideas from the books were all possible. Be it Missile Pods, Laser heads, LACs...
Out of curiosity she had done a simulation of a possible ten shot missile pod. The results were devastating. They could be put onto the outer hull of just about every space ship she knew and fired. Magnetic accelerators could give the missiles a good starting speed before they acquired their targets and went to a terminal velocity approach. Those Pods would be about the size of galactic transport standard container.
Even worse was that they were cheap to produce Quantum 2 level technology, even with Earth technology. A Pod in and of itself would cost about 50 million dollar, while each missile could be produced for about 10 million.
Another idea was building a modified version of the G.O.D. Sattelites from the DVDs. Exchange the main Ion cannon from the satellite with several smaller versions from the Monsoons gunboats, add twenty three shot KKV missile launcher akin to the Missile Pods, add a high powered reactor system and several turrets with Pulse particle weapons and a shield, and you got a defense satellite that could take on a Minbari Tinashi on its own.
Washuu shook her head again and than looked at the screen of her holographic desktop, as it alarmed her that it had found something.
The desktop had been put on a normal Internet search for anything out of the ordinary.
She pulled up what the computer had found and was greeted with the layout of one of her favorite Internet forums, One of the comments to the aliens threat was that Dark Knight would be crewed by giant transforming humanoid robots, but considering that the comment came from Fanboyus Prime, it didn't surprise her. There were other comments about the crew, raging from BUGs over Space Marines to Jedi.
The surprising thing however was a thread started by Psychosama, featuring the image of a Monsoon straight from the Jane's article on the DVDs, complete with a link to a Public Domain server. Looking at the Server, she found that it contained everything that was on the DVDs. And there was also a growing number of mirrors of the server on just about every University server in the world.
She turned her head and looked towards the helicopter where Tenchi flew back to Andrews with this new guy, Clark.
"We definitely need to talk..." she muttered getting a strange look from both her daughter and the princess.
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Again he couldn't help but stare at the images on his TV. CNN had live footage from one of the many kinetic impacts, as they had called it. It seemed that the first aliens in their saucer shaped ships had fired at just about every major population center. Tokyo had been hit three times. Mexico City was burning from six hits. In New York one of the World Trace Center Towers had collapsed after a kinetic impact had punched a hole into it and than destroyed a good part of the Central Park. Just like two other impacts had caused great damage to the Bronx or Brooklyn.
He shook his head. He didn't really know what he should think about the new space ship that had showed up about six hours after the beginning of the bombardment and had simply destroyed the attacking ships.
For a moment he wondered how it would be to command a ship again. Or how it would be to command a space ship.
Again he shook his head. He was a little to old for that with his now 67 years. But...
The telephone rang and shook him from his thoughts. He wondered who would call him now and picked up the receiver.
"Yes?" he asked with his Russian accented voice and a female voice answered.
"Marco Ramius, I presume. I am Dark Knight."
For a moment the former commander of the Red October stared at the receiver.
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Dark Knight chuckled in her virtual reality. She had known that Marco Ramius would say 'yes' to her little proposal. He hadn't really said 'yes', but he would.
Ramius was just too much of a seaman and a commanding office to just stand aside and not be the commander of a ship. While he hadn't jumped the gun and said yes the first she had mentioned her proposal, he had listened to the single points of her suggestion and said that he would think about it, while asking for her phone number.
With Ramius, the hopefully growing space fleet of Earth would have one of the best ship commanders she could imagine. In fact he was the first of a number of officers Dark Knight thought would be the best for the new fleet. In the beginning the fleet would be small after all and needed all the good officers it could get.
Maybe she could get the 'Vilna Academy' together?
Than she looked over to her wall of virtual displays, each of them now showing the sensory data she had gotten from the moon.
She had taken her time to analyze the strange Tycho Gravimetric Anomaly with her now techno-magical improved sensors, taking layer after layer from the surface and the material of the moon. It was surprising. Normally everyone would miss the strange reading if they didn't look for it. Hell, even she had missed the reading before, until something had happened to get her attention after whoever was behind the strange gravimetric field had decided to download the entire data from the Server Satellite.
Since than the field had dropped in capacity, meaning that he/she/it wanted to be seen by Dark Knight and no one else.
The next was the sheer size of the area below the field. It got more than twenty kilometers below the surface and covered the entire Tycho Crater, that was about 5674.5 square kilometers.
For a moment, Knight hesitated. Should she just call him/her/it? Maybe it was the best thing to do.
She took her tachyon link trancievers and directed them at Tycho.
"Dark Knight to whoever is below the gravimetrical field. Please respond."
She transmitted the message in all languages she knew, including Interlac. She was surprised that she got an answer after the transmission in Minbari.
"This is Nathan. I wondered how long it would take you to contact me."
The voice on the other side sounded male and spoke English.
"Nathan, huh? Who or what are you?"
"I could ask you the same question. You look very much like a mix of Vorlon and human technology."
Knight chuckled.
"You are good."
"No. I'm just a very advanced quantum computer who survived the death of the race that constructed him more than a hundred thousand years ago."
Kinght winced a little.
"Who killed them?"
"Vorlons and Shadows, in a sudden fit of cooperation. They decided that my creators were to much of a threat to their little games with the population of this galaxy."
Kinght frowned and her eyes narrowed.
"So the Vorlons and Shadows exist here too," she muttered." And are their usual selves."
"Why were you build on the moon?" she finally asked after a moment of silence.
"Because it was the ancestral home of my creators, the Ancients. You may also call them First Mankind, if you want. My last orders were to hide myself until the Second Mankind would find me. Or until they would need my help. In a sense both apply now, after the attack on Earth."
"And than?"
"Help them. There weren't any specific orders how."
Knight looked at the screens where the gravimetric fields lowered so much that she could look through them, but no one else could. She noted that the surface of the Tycho crater was still the same, but a hundred meter below large caverns started.
"I am not a military installation. Most of my systems are industrial in nature. But I will need a few weeks or month to get them back online and start to work. I wouldn't use all the technology I have however, since most would bee too much for mankind as it is now. The technology from the Database in orbit however just need a few modifications I already made to introduce Level 2 shields and a Level 2 slipstream drive with Level 3 over ride for emergency situations."
Knight chuckled.
"You already answered a good deal of questions I wanted to ask and told me that you would do things I wanted to ask you to do. I like your style, Nathan."
"Thank you. Dark Knight. I have a very high runtime laying dormant. I can afford to thing things through."
There was a short pause.
"I also have a small number of Ancient ships in my hangars. I know that Earth is going to need then in the next future, as I have a large number of Slipstream wakes coming into this direction. I will need about a week to get them online, but The wakes will be here before I can get them online. Not to mention that I don't have crews for these ships."
"I guess Tenchi will deal with that, when he talks to the UN in three days."
"I hope he gets them to pull themselves together in this one."
"Oh, I guess he will."