4.4

"Alright. Everybody ready for their roles?"

A chorus of agreements met her words.

Lucy nodded, in response. "Stage Four begins now, then. Goodluck, everyone. Dismissed."

The holograms winked out, and Lucy leaned back, smiling. The table in the center blinked, the representation of the Lightchaser fleet dividing into four.

The plan was fairly simple, at this point. One big fleet wasn't efficient enough, so we were splitting it into four, two with eleven Lightchasers and two with twelve.

It was a bit experimental, at this point. Time would see the fleets split or merged as we determined what was better for efficiency and effectivity. I doubted that the number Lightchasers to a fleet would go below five, though.

Theoretically, we were all going our separate ways. Each fleet would be heading in its own direction, after all. In practice... not so much.

Wormholes were great like that. Sure, you needed big ones to move ships, but you did not when you were only trying to send data. Take that thought, and that leads to our next strategy:

We're going to build a networked web of wormholes.

It was a surprisingly practical ideal, in terms of energy costs; a bunch of small wormholes in proximity didn't need that much energy to run. Even a small asteroid would keep one going for... quite a long time. Upkeep costs would increase with size, but not traffic or distance.

So, take a Harbinger Probe, a few Stone Ships, grab a suitably large mass at a suitably safe place, and then open a small wormhole to another system. It doesn't have to be big, since size can be altered afterwards. Even a wormhole only a centimeter large, however, can transmit an amount of data that is basically arbitrarily large.

Build a communications relay, stick one end through the wormhole, and just like that, you've got an effectively instantaneous interstellar communication device.

Go to the other system, create another wormhole to a third system, repeat the process, and you've got a chain. Theoretically breakable, if the communicators or wormholes in the second system were lost, but that's why the Stone Ships are there; to defend the Harbinger Probe and the wormholes it is sustaining.

But why stop there? Add more wormholes, such as four or five wormholes per system. What you create then is not a chain, it's a web. No breaking that. At most, you could isolate a single system- if you could get through both the Silence and the Stone Ships.

Which was good.

For both of us, to note. I was benefitting because it would keep my mind in one piece, rather than scattering fragments of myself across these stars. They were benefitting because it meant they could network their ships and fleets even across galactic distances with very little lag- an advantage that was so massive that it was impossible to overstate just how important it was.

And a necessity, too, considering that our population was tiny compared to everything else in the galaxy. Coordination, and efficient use of resources, were the only way we were going to matter on the galactic scale.

Hence the split. Though another reason for it was to not have all of our eggs in one basket.

But enough about that. There were four task groups, at the moment. Lucy headed one, and as one might guess if they knew her personality, that one was going to be heading in the general direction of Earth.

Not straight there, though. We were going to be taking a bit of a long way, passing to every star on the way there rather than just skipping vast swathes of space.

I hoped that this would delay us for long enough to get us some... experience. Allies too, though I was less hopeful on that.

Well... Nothing to do about that now, I suppose. We'll just have to see how things go.

I nudged Lucy's mind, and she sat up straight a moment later. With a flick of her fingers, she summoned the star map again, still coloured from last time.

A few more gestures had it zoom out, a grid scale appearing. She kept going, stars shrinking into little points of light, just about disappearing- right before an icon appeared at the edge of the map.

"That's our target." Lucy said. "That's Sol." She pointed at it, and a line flashed into existence, a thin thread linking Sol and our current location.

She paused for a moment. "MUM. What's the shortest path there if we limited ourselves to jumps of five light years at a time, targeting stars within a thirty degree cone of Sol?"

The hologram flashed, before the line shifted, turning jagged and twisting instead of straight and perfect. Now, it linked stars, showing a path to Sol.

It crossed an almost disturbing amount of red markers. A lot of blue, too, with a small amount of yellow.

"Seven hundred and eighty nine jumps." MUM reported. "Average jump length of three point eight light years. Three hundred and thirty one confirmed Warp Storm Exposure or Containment Zones. Two hundred and sixty confirmed former colony sites. One hundred and eighteen resourcing systems. Seventy nine miscellaneous stars. I calculate that this path is not completely safe."

"Then we'll just have to make it so." Lucy threaded her fingers together. "Save that course."

"Confirmed, commander."

That's her decision, then? Well, if that's what she wishes. I was pretty much back to full, now, in terms of energy, so why not...

I made a point of memorizing the route. Matching the stars on the map with the stars that I could see. The first one was...

There. Another red dwarf, not actually marked in any colour. Just an isolated star, lacking a major planetary system. The only worth it had was the bounty of energy in its star.

How meager.

And yet, under other circumstances, such a thing would be a great treasure to me. Peace and quiet with a meal like that... If I lacked the bond of Symbiosis, then the meaning changed completely. As it was, instead of a boring treasure, it was just boring.

Ah well. No trouble in that. A bit of boredom between bouts of interest was just fine.

Especially since the future is going to be very interesting indeed.