PrincessColumbia

  Diane contempted an oddity.

  The construction of both the new ship, the I.S.S. Abigail Adams, and the Rapid Deployment Central Command structure in which Diane now stood had proceeded without a hitch. Preliminary review had turned up no gatchas (Something Diane insisted on doing no matter what, one never knew what a previous link in the chain of custody may have let slip…or a malicious third-party actor managed to intercept with a man-in-the-middle attack. Being one of America’s spooks and trained on how to do exactly that, she felt she was justly paranoid about it.) and her little informal team of experts all agreed, the new craft and the methods to build them were going to be an absolute net-win for the station.

  The Abigail Adams was a big ship, intended to be a heavy hauler for missions like the one they were undertaking now. In the tradition of ship-based militaries throughout history, the ‘Fast’ in "Fast Response Tactical Cruiser" was anything but, more of a suggestion that the unit was fast in comparison to the stationary facilities avaible to said fighting force. It had facilities that included a dedicated field hospital, a built-in mini refinery that was connected to a limited fabricator, and space enough to carry a significant compliment of GroPos (Ground Pounders, a.k.a. – ‘army’ grunts who often made up the bulk of any given fighting force) and a solid supply of combat ready vehicles, and the central jewel of the new construction, the RDCC.

  The Rapid Deployment Central Command structure, which strangely (to Diane, at least) didn’t include the ‘structure’ part in the abbreviation) was a massive…‘vehicle.’ In that it had its own thrusters, parachutes that deployed when transiting from orbit to the surface of a pnet, and genuinely massive treads that allowed it to extremely slowly move once it was on said pnetary surface, it counted as a vehicle. All forms of self-propulsion and guidance were so far in the realm of ‘secondary’ that calling it a vehicle was an exercise in pure technicality. It was, effectively, a mobile building that was intended to be orbital dropped from a FRTC to the surface of a pnet, position itself in an ideal location (or at least as close to ideal as one could possibly manage in a potential combat situation), and then dig in. Once pnted, the RDCC turned into a building, self-powered and practically a comparatively tiny fortress. Nearly every aspect of its abilities was extremely limited…on its own. It came equipped, however, with five vehicles that deployed as soon as the building itself stopped pretending to be one. Four were construction mechs that could be operated by a single pilot at full operation, though there was room for an extra in each of the cockpits. The fifth vehicle was a combination harvester/mining ptform/medium cargo transport.

  This st vehicle was the most critical component and would require the most protection once the whole deployment hit the dirt, as until it deployed to collect the avaible resources and materials in the area, defenses wouldn’t get built, infrastructure essentials like power would be strictly onboard the RDCC (such as sor and battery), and the RDCC’s more advanced capabilities would remain potential instead of realized.

  Once Diane put the pieces together of what she had, she had never been more excited to py a mini-game in a VRMMO in her life.

  There was probably not a gamer with gear worth the time to put together that hadn’t gotten into the emution scene at some point or another. Especially people who liked shooters (like Diane), it was a rite of passage to set up a VR rig that allowed you to emute the most ancient and venerable of FPS code that was still in heavy use even (in-game) centuries ter, the cssic DOOM. If you cimed to enjoy Doom in any form, whether VR or console, phone or desktop, unless you’d at least once pyed the original DOOM running on an emutor, you’d get ughed out of the community. Diane had even read blogs of some rabidly avid gamers that went so far as to custom 3D print and fab their own copies of the ancient hardware on which the original codebase was written. There were even videos avaible of people who took the viewer through step by arduous step of building out these legacy rigs from an empty workbench all the way to a functional CRT (or, if you 'cheated,' an LED/LCD dispy with a faux-CRT cabinet), CPU, keyboard, and mouse.

  Once one had their emutor setup (or physical legacy rig, for the ambitious), the world of digital gaming history was id out like a virtual entertainment smorgasbord. ‘Bottles’ of games from the earliest days of personal computer gaming or consoles or even arcade cabinets were littered across the ‘net. After the first century, the companies that held the rights to the games just…gave up. There was simply such a vast array of options for finding and downloading to your personal console the files that let you py whatever legacy game you wanted that it cost the company more to enforce than they recouped. Not to mention the bad press of suing teenagers and college kids who were often the ones who pyed the legacy games the most. Student income (or ck thereof if you still lived with your parents and didn’t have a job) did not lend itself to a robust gaming habit if one relied solely on the big triple-A studios.

  Of the many titles avaible to py (even behind the American Wall), the old Command & Conquer series remained immensely popur even over a century ter. Some RTS fans preferred Starcraft, especially given the very early e-sports support for the game, but Diane counted herself as a fan of C&C far more than Starcraft.

  She had even tried her hand at the great-great-great-granddaddy of RTS games, Dune 2. In addition to serving as her introduction to the Dune franchise of books (she loved the parallels to their modern world, not to mention the themes of a religiously motivated society seeking to recim the destiny of mankind from tyrants and oppressors), she also greatly appreciated that even a century and a half ter (nearly six centuries in-game) it still set the standard that hadn’t much been improved upon for battlefield command and control interfaces. Many of the modern military hardware interfaces could even trace their control schema back to Dune 2, C&C, and Starcraft.

  And after all, what was Gaxies Unlimited: Master & Commander but the test and most advanced iteration on the RTS concept?

  In the two days it took their upgraded Shipyard and fabs to build everything out (at a blistering pace compared to their previous build capabilities), Diane got more and more excited the more she read the documentation and created a simuted preview of the completed ship and building in her holo-environments. There was no doubt in her mind; this was absolutely a mini-game mode. It couldn’t scale to even the might of a fleet ship for one of the major powers, the entire thing was temporary (as rapid deployment builds for military purposes tended to be), and was rgely stationary once the RDCC was pnted. But as a brief diversion for the pyers during a major mission or story campaign? It was a perfect change of pace from the normal ‘commander’ level missions and drama and could be adapted to nearly any of the character csses in the game.

  Though she imagined the S.A.I. who pyed the Swarm would probably find the mini-game a little boring and same-y to their standard game py. She hadn’t yet met a Swarm pyer to even think about inquiring.

  Gathering the required personnel was a challenge, though not as much of one as she’d thought. When she’d put out a recruitment call to the residents aboard the station, she’d been pretty much flooded with volunteers, mostly from the former sves that had become permanent…citizens, for ck of a better term. Indeed, the difficulty had been in winnowing the applicants down to those who were actually qualified. Chattel sves were not, generally, trained to fight in military engagements.

  The children (and she was floored when girls as young as 13 volunteered) were easy enough to dissuade by pointing out that they were far too young. But the women who were of or over the age of majority were heartbroken. They wanted, it seemed, to give back to the woman who’d rescued them from svery as well as pay it forward. They’d heard rumor that the upcoming campaign was one of liberation and there was, apparently, nothing like a sve experiencing freedom to ensure that as many as possible also experienced it.

  Diane eventually had to promise to train them so that, should the opportunity arise, they’d be ready in the future if they couldn’t help out now. Some conversations with the head of the academy as well as a call to Rokyo to contact some friends from her time in the service for advice got that ball rolling, at least.

  As far as just getting bodies in seats for the ground pounders, they had a…lean crew. Diane had needed to tap her security division in order to bulk out the body count simply because there weren’t enough able-bodied people with training among the residents of her station to fill the seats on the Abigail Adams.

  The Engineer Corps, however, was much easier. She’d never met an engineer who didn’t want to solve problems, even when that problem was, "How do I tear a superfluously new behind in that guy all the way over there?" When the request was put out to the engineering-trained people of the station, she had to firmly tell about half the volunteers that they were already serving in critical positions and they were not allowed to depart from said critical positions for the siren’s call of using high explosives in a live fire environment with the full awareness and permission of the person in charge. There were a surprising number of engineers from the time prior to her ciming ownership of the station; they were apparently often the first left behind by pirates, rogues, and mutineers when it came time to dump-and-run on the apparently abandoned station.

  Getting everyone kitted was a bigger ask, but fortunately with the shipyard and scrapyard handling the rger scale tasks, the old fabrication facility was able to handle the building of the specialized armor, tools, and other kitting needed for the engineers.

  The days when a single sergeant could be used to handle an entire operation were long gone, the GroPos (she had to get a better name for them, they weren’t army and they certainly weren’t regur security) had two plus a lieutenant and the engineers had a sergeant that reported directly to her.

  She wasn’t dumb enough to try and put more than a governor on that particur engine. She’d seen too many of her superiors, both in MMOs in her high school career and in her regur jobs, where mentioned ‘superiors’ got their asses (and sometimes their jobs) handed to them because they tried to tear down the brick wall that was the engineer of the team, and here she had an entire squadron of them.

  Once everyone was filed onto the Abigail Adams, Diane found her quarters aboard the RDCC and let the ship’s captain (an older woman with more sass than she had years behind her) take the ship out of dock and underway.

  She mostly kept herself occupied during the trip in the small cabin, a cozy affair barely bigger than her student housing room during her first year of college, reading reports and studying the avaible information they had on Leke Idus, which honestly wasn’t much. A pnet on the inside of the "goldilocks belt" of the star system, that is the zone of possible orbits that would actually allow life that wasn't an extremophile, fairly close to Darkskye in Independent space. The data packet did have a note about a Terran presence, but not much else. She also noticed that Leke Idus was suspiciously close to the Crotixian border for the Federation to be stretching their interest that far into Independent space without an ulterior motive. She imagined the economic benefits to having a presence on the pnet were icing on the cake.

  The Abigail Adams arrived, as Benjamin predicted, at the tail-end of what had been some pretty stiff opposition to the family’s efforts to remove the Terran influence. The amount of damaged property and uncovered infrastructure was startling, but pretty much everyone was feeling vindicated with the entire enterprise when the ship’s science officer remotely connected to the colony’s government computers (the security was, apparently, already abysmal and the fighting had introduced a raft of vulnerabilities) and confirmed that about 90% of what damaged infrastructure they were able to map just from orbit was unsanctioned, unauthorized build-outs done by the Terrans. Only about 5% of the sites found and destroyed by the family were on the colony’s records.

  It was around then that Diane decided it was time to call a conference of her field commanders for the op, so she went to the command center’s operations hub (it wasn’t big enough for more than one person, so was hardly an ops ‘deck’) and was about to take her seat when she spotted the oddity.

  It wasn’t so much that the item itself was odd, it was the presence of it.

  She couldn’t think for the life of her why her guitar was mounted in a specialized bracket clearly intended for it in the RDCC’s ops hub.

  "D’hani," she said to the air, "Any idea what my guitar is doing here?"

  The comms picked up her voice and the system’s A.I. parsed her intent, connecting her to the Abigail’s bridge. The captain’s voice that always seemed to have an undercurrent of gentle (and sometimes not so gentle) sarcasm replied, "Because it’s not up on my bridge, obviously."

  Dian snorted in mild, if confused, humor, "Well, that’s rather self-evident, but that does beg the question of why it’s here at all. And, you know, not in my quarters," she tilted her head mostly unconsciously, her mind scrambling to solve this particur puzzle with inadequate clues, "The one on the station. Where I left it."

  "What, Russe didn’t tell you?"

  A few pieces of said puzzle started to fall into pce, but she decided to pursue the question anyway for completeness’ sake, "No, he didn’t. I haven’t seen him for more than about five minutes since I tasked him with experimenting with upgrades to the ships."

  Diane heard the sound of a drink being noisily slurped from some sort of container and waited for the irascible old Liari woman to have her moment of wordless snark, "That’s what Russe said the guitar was for. When I told him not to mount that eyesore of an instrument rack on my bridge he said it was intended for you to be at your most effective as a Commander when aboard my ship."

  Diane pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger, "…right. I’m betting he forgot he never told me he was doing this."

  Captain D’hani cackle-snorted, "You know how it is with these tech-heads. ‘Give a mouse a cookie,’ and all that. That’s why you hired me for this boat."

  Diane sighed, a slight grin at the humor of the situation, "That I did. You’re too damn insubordinate for any other job."

  "Say that with a smile, missy!"

  Diane snorted and stepped up to her control station, "I’m smiling through the tears," she said as she activated the C&C circuit.

  As D’hani’s wizened face appeared on the holographic feed, the elder Liani gave Diane a toothy grin, "Tears of joy, surely." Next to D’hani’s holographic bust rezzed in four others, her three sergeants and her lieutenant.

  Lt. Cooker was a no-nonsense individual who came to the station shortly after Diane eliminated the Branwell Consortium. He’d been discharged from the Terran military after a near-exposure to a centuries old chemical weapons canister even though the chemical inside the weapon was by that point inert. The military did love to adhere to its protocol, however, and the medical discharge was processed by the time he’d returned to his duty station. With, apparently, nowhere back home to go to and word spreading from Indep space that a new station had opened up with a leads-from-the-front commander, he’d sought employment on Diane’s security team. She thought him overqualified at the time but was gd she’d gone ahead and hired him, when the need for ground pounders came up he was a perfect fit.

  His two sergeants, Garner and Lipsum, were an oddly matched pair. Garner was, for ck of a better term, a tightass. If there was a rule he knew it, followed it, and expected everyone else to follow it. Lipsum was the opposite, telling anyone who asked her that the rules were less important than results and so didn’t bother to even learn them, let alone follow or enforce them. They tended to bance each other out and, under Cooker’s watchful eye, actually managed to run a tight ship, at least so far what with their current action being their first actual possible combat scenario.

  The third sergeant had already earned the nickname ‘Wildcard,’ and came from one of the more, to use the term that first leapt to mind when Diane had read… their file, one of the more ‘hippy-dippy’ colonies Earth had established. Or, to be more accurate, a bunch of humans had founded the colony without permits, pns, authorization, remit, or any form of support. About 50 years after Earth had cracked FTL, a commune (Diane felt dirty even thinking the word at first, it was still a bit of a challenge to not associate the word with the Soviet actor cells in the Cold War MMO she’d grown up with) had managed to gain a member that had actual money and bought themselves an interstelr ship. Before anyone knew it, they’d packed everyone aboard and jetted off for the unknown and hadn’t even bothered with a goodbye message. By the time the rest of Humanity stumbled onto them a century ter, they’d shocked the hell out of everyone when they’d not only survived on their new home pnet, ‘Nue Xanadu’ according to the gactic registry, but had started a trade network with neighboring star systems.

  As for Terry Gensmith, a.k.a. – ‘Wildcard,’ themself (Themselves? Theyself?!) they were listed as a ‘nonbinary’ this had resulted in Diane receiving a lecture from both Norma and, to her surprise, Katrina on proper use of pronouns. It still wasn’t computing for her, especially given she could (and did, both times) bring up Wildcard’s medical records from their onboarding physical to show the very apparent male genitalia and the distinct ck of any hermaphroditic features. They even had a goatee! Facial hair was, like, the MOST masculine trait someone could have, and to cultivate and groom ones facial hair into as identifiable and distinctive style was, to Diane’s mind, a freaking billboard decring their manhood to the world. Masculine forms of address, such as ‘he’ and ‘him,’ were always at the tip of Diane’s tongue whenever she was looking at him…THEM.

  In both conversations, the other woman (both hologram and S.A.I.) had pointed out that Diane, herself, was an example of how someone’s physical traits didn’t necessarily have anything to do with ones pronouns, to which Diane had replied that her existence/character race just proved her own point; she had tits, she didn’t have facial hair and had no desire for any, she wore clothing made for women and was (to her very secret shame) actually rather proud how much of a woman she looked that even with her very ‘butch’ tendencies absolutely nobody questioned whether she should be using ‘she’ and ‘her.’

  In the end, she’d agreed to use they/them pronouns to get the lectures to stop. If nothing else, she acknowledged, using the terms someone wanted others to use for them was simply polite and, save for the cognitive dissonance that apparently only she suffered from, it cost her nothing to do so.

  She still had to rapidly correct herself in her head when speaking with them, however.

  "Okay," she said to the virtually (heh) assembled group, "Let’s get this started before too much of the fun happens without us. Let’s get the sitrep. Captain, how’s the weather out there?"

  Captain D’hani swept her hair back with her non-prosthetic hand to tuck it behind one of her pointed ears, "Well, there’s a couple of Terran ships in orbit, they’re not bothering us right now but we’ve warned ‘em off anyway. They’re taking us seriously ‘cause their hulls have holes in them. Looks like the GeneMods managed to do some real damage before making ndfall. There’s an intersystem mothership hanging out around the gas giant that reads as friendly, so I’m guessing that’s their FTL transit or something."

  Diane blinked in confusion, "…hold on, what’s a ‘jeen-mod’?"

  The other four returned her confused look, "…wow, boss," answered D’hani, "You do kinda live in the clouds in that penthouse suit, don’cha? GeneMods, short for ‘Genetically Modified Human.’ The whole station’s using it to refer to ‘the family.’"

  Diane blushed at the insinuation that she, like the oligarchs in charge of America’s economy, was out of touch with the common citizen, "…okay, maybe I’m a little out of touch."

  Sgt. Lipsum snickered, "As long as you’re not out of time."

  Diane smirked back at the other woman’s holographic projection and meaningfully looked at her wrist where a watch would be for her outside the pod, "What, did it become Thursday and nobody told me?" She winked at Lipsum with a grin.

  Wildcard, D’hani, and Lipsum all snickered and Cooker rolled his eyes. Sgt. Garner frowned and looked like he wanted to chew someone out for some form of protocol viotion, but since at least two superior officers (Diane and D’hani) were active participants, no chewing would be in the offing.

  Diane returned the conversation to the topic at hand, "Do you think the Terran birds are going to cause problems once we become active participants?"

  D’hani shrugged, "Maybe, but they’re in bad shape. I’d be shocked if they hung around any longer than to finish getting their people off the surface. Besides," she waved her prosthetic arm, a unit she’d specifically designed to look ‘retro’ and robotic as possible (which, of course, to Diane it looked futuristic as the ‘retro’ design came from the in-game 26th century), "Once you drop, we're losing, like, half our weight. Plus we're already mustered for immediate deployment once we're done here, so there's going to be a dozen or so dropships worth of people and weight we don’t care about. With a boat this big," she knocked on what Diane assumed was the arm of her captain's chair since it was below the frame of the holo-camera, "It's about mass more than anything. We just gotta keep our ass pointed at 'em and lob some grapeshot to deal with the mess."

  Diane nodded, "Ell-tee," she said, keeping herself from smiling as she slipped into imitating Rokyo when the older woman referred to Leki's service rank, "What's it look like on the ground?"

  The lieutenant nodded and activated an overhead topographical satellite picture in the middle of the rough circle formed by their holographic busts, "The colony is still pretty small, only a slightly higher popution than the station's. That said, their access to the local mineral-harvesting pnts have given them a bit of wealth. That means there's been some expansion that, as you can see, the Terran's have taken advantage of. The Federation offered to help them build out by sending construction equipment and personnel, then built out four times what was requested in secret. Our GeneMod friends," seven dots appeared on the map, all moving rapidly in the direction of some target or another, "Have ensured that none of the secret Terran buildings have remained secret."

  Diane gave a grim smile as she examined the level of destruction so far, "Hot damn, that's some good work! How many 'GeneMods' are represented per dot, there?"

  "One," stated Cooker levelly.

  Diane blinked, "…there's only seven members of the family down there?"

  Cooker nodded, "I had the sensor team on the ship confirm what my equipment was telling me. There's only seven GeneMods working as part of this operation."

  The stunned feeling Diane knew was written on her face was being mirrored by Wildcard and Lipsum. Garner looked like he'd just opened his fridge to find all his milk had gone sour, and D'hani gred at the seven dots like they'd personally insulted her grandmother and the principals of mathematics.

  "Fuck," swore Wildcard, "I'm gd they're on our side!"

  PrincessColumbia