Chapter 11 Cats & Dogs
The Sector 12000 Irregularity describes the notable increase of mammalian-evolved lifeforms in Sector 12000. First discovered by Batract scout vessels, who noticed that, unlike in the rest of Federation space, almost all species in this sector are mammalian.
With a Federation standard of one in every 50 planets, the Federation quickly decided to leave this sector of space to Batract integration, since mammalian species are seen as intrinsically emotional and inherently aggressive.
Were any of those species to be allowed to reach Level 2 or higher development independently, the Federation Senate feared it could unite those mammals into a powerful and dangerous force.
Even if such species were granted a full seat in the Federation, it would inevitably alter the balance of power.
— Excerpt from Encyclopedia Federatio, 300 B.I.
———
Admiral Sanders had her little rituals. Little nuggets of normalcy, fixed points in the day that helped her keep her sanity.
One such ritual — the holiest of holy ones — was her morning coffee. Specifically, her air-dry morning coffee after a shower.
Of course, no one except Zeus and a few lovers knew about this ritual.
Would any of her staff or the enlisted hear of it, well, she could imagine how they, especially the male crew, would react.
She never cared. For ten minutes, she could be herself: naked, sitting on a towel on her bed, enjoying God's personal gift to humanity. Colombian coffee.
She, Cassidy, not the other person. Not the Admiral. Ten minutes, and they were holy.
A beep of the intercom ruined her day, only three minutes after her shower. Whoever was calling her now would regret it for the rest of the day.
'Admiral, I hope I'm not disturbing you too much, but there's an unknown ship about to enter the system. Transit in about three hours.'
Zeus. He should know better. Too bad a Digital Sentience can't be impressed by death glares.
Admiral Sanders was about to answer when she saw the little red light on the upper side of her terminal, indicating the camera was on.
Grabbing her towel, she covered her chest.
"Zeus, privacy!"
'Oh, sorry, Admiral. This was never an issue until today.' The light disappeared.
"Well, I didn't know you were sentient then." As she said those words, she realized how odd this was. Humans had no issue letting a VI observe the network and every corner of the ship. But the moment they knew an intelligence was watching, they felt watched.
'How is that relevant?' Zeus sounded genuinely surprised, and maybe a bit hurt.
It disarmed her immediately. On some levels, Zeus was like his namesake — an unseen god of her ship. On others, he was a little child.
And oddly enough, she felt protective of him. She remembered when he went online, when she took command of her new flagship, the Niobe . She had named him that day.
"It's, ugh, I can't explain. Just leave it at that. And don't spy on naked people, ok? So… what about that ship?"
But it seemed Zeus wasn't ready to accept that answer.
'Admiral, one question — how can I know if people are naked if I can't look to check?'
Sanders rubbed her temples. It was going to be one of those discussions, like the many she'd had over the last few days.
She almost suspected that Zeus was happy the secret was out, at least with her. He came to her with all kinds of questions, mostly about how humans dealt with emotions.
"We'll talk about it later. So, the ship?"
'An unknown ship was registered at 2030 station time. Commodore Garcia had ordered the first and second scout wings, as well as fifteen drone swarms, on an intercept course to catch the unknown ship before it could enter further into the system.'
Sanders shook her head, pushing away the privacy discussion with Zeus and focusing on the ship.
Commodore Garcia, her new second-in-command, had done the right thing. He was a surprisingly efficient officer, once you looked past the cocky exterior.
The shock on his face when he got promoted was priceless. Later, in the officers' club, she heard him complain to his former first officer, wondering aloud whether he should take the position as Deputy Commander for the Burrow System.
"I've spent my whole life stickin' it to The Man. If I do this, I'll be The Man. I don't think I can be The Man."
That alone was worth the fight to get him promoted.
Slipping into her uniform, she made her way to the OPS.
As she entered the Operations Center, a crewman snapped to attention and called out the official "Admiral on deck!"
She hated it, and her staff usually skipped it. But then Russo arrived, and with him came the annoying screaming. Tradition is one thing. Stopping people from working is another.
Commodore Garcia looked out from the commander's office at the back of the OPS and greeted her with a nod.
She hushed the crewman away, murmured an "As you were," and stepped the five steps up to the office.
Garcia was already waiting with a coffee for her.
He handed her the coffee with his usual greeting, "Admiral," and went silent. He knew she wasn't a morning person.
The whole reason she joined the Navy and not the Army. Too much screaming and too much jumping around in the mud in the morning.
Today, she just cut to the chase. "We got a visitor coming?"
Garcia raised an eyebrow, probably wondering how she knew already.
"Yes, I sent a welcome committee, and we're waiting for them to leave transit. The ship is faster than known Batract ships, so we assume it's some sort of scout vessel."
She looked up, voicing her deepest fear about who else the visitor could be. "Or the fucking Squid."
Garcia shrugged. "Or the fucking Squid."
Where the Hyphea Squid — the biological ship that had left Burrow before the Burn — went was a mystery. All Aligned ships were much slower, and even the Nuk knew little about the systems in the direction of the Squid's flight path.
"OK, give me a status report. Anything else of note?"
"Mostly small stuff, sir. I put it all in my written report. Only three notable things."
Sanders sipped her coffee, reclining in her chair.
"Drake's ship, the Guardian , has filed a flight plan to Sirius. They will leave in a day. And they filed a flight plan for a Sleipnir to dock shortly before departure."
"Thank God. If something had happened to him while in-system, Georgiou would have killed us."
Garcia just nodded, then continued.
"The Magellan is asking to resume their exploration of the ruins on Burrow's Moon."
"Smith playing Indiana Jones again?" Sanders took another sip. "Let him. Maybe they'll learn how to make programmable matter. I heard the engineering teams were running around with erections all day when they found out."
Garcia pressed a few buttons on his pad. "Done. And the 4th Expeditionary left for Beta Hydri."
"Good."
For months now, they had been preparing their fleets to go on the offensive again. But with the Burn and the evacuation, progress had been slow.
Then Sol was attacked, and everyone wondered whether to send ships home to ramp up their own defenses.
Luckily, Admiral Georgiou knew that was nonsense. They had to stay on the offensive, or they would be crushed in an attritional war.
But attack where? That's been the fucking question.
That's when they had formed the 4th Expeditionary — an advanced scouting fleet, but strong enough to pack a punch.
She snapped her chair back upright and looked Garcia in the eyes. "So, one week into the job — how do you like it?"
"I hate the paperwork, and suddenly everyone is asking me things. Frankly, I'm starting to regret being such a pain in your ass these last few months."
Sanders had to grin. Finally, a glimmer of the old Garcia shining through the armor of professionalism. She had been afraid his new rank had killed the fire.
"Good. Remember, it only goes downhill from here."
"That's what I'm afraid of, sir."
Garcia turned to walk out of the office when Sanders remembered something. "Oh, Garcia — the provisional government has informed me they want to name you Hero of the Republic. I heard they're planning a statue for your work on the stasis ships."
The departing Garcia just shook his head and kept walking.
It's the small things that make this job enjoyable.
Then she reclined back in her chair, reading the night shift's reports and sipping her coffee.
————
Chokrata turned back from the engineering station. The readouts were clear — their FTL drive was about to blow, again.
He hit his pilot, a female Psstips, on the head. "I told you that you tax the drive too much going that fast."
"And I told you I'd scratch your eyes out if you ever hit me on the head again," Mikkra retorted. "We'll reach the Shraphen, and then we'll be able to fix your trashcan."
The damn Psstips was a talented pilot, the best he could hire, but her nose for business was horrible.
"Do you know what that will cost?"
"Ahh, don't blow your neck sack off. You're making enough as it is."
Chokrata slowly vented the air out of his neck sacks — his species' physical sign of anger. Yes, the profits would be good.
His sources had told him the Shraphen were actively engaging in a revolt against the Batract. Morons, the lot of them. Like all mammals, they just couldn't accept defeat.
He licked his dry eye with his tongue.
Even better for him. He had filled his whole cargo hold with forbidden weapons, hired a crew, and now they were here.
He had hoped for some idiotic species to rebel while he was in the sector, and he had gotten lucky.
A blocky figure shoved himself through the door to the pilot capsule. "Captain, the whole reactor is about to blow."
Nacket, his trusted gunner and bodyguard. The only one on his crew he truly trusted, even if the dry skin made Chokrata's slime sacks crawl.
Mammals had to wear fur. Amphibians like Chokrata had hairless but wet skin. What unethical genetic construct was Nacket?
He was one of the many slave species that the Batract sold throughout Federation space. Chokrata had found him years ago in the slums of Nir. The youngling had just strangled a Hrun three times his size with his bare hands.
That had amazed him enough to instantly recruit the Nacket arboreal.
Mikkra turned in her pilot's chair, wiggling her chest, and almost sang, "Hello, Nacket."
Nacket's face turned red. "Hello, Mikkra."
Chokrata still had no clue what the red face meant — probably some stomach-turning mammalian breeding display.
Ever since the Psstips joined his crew, the boy had been different. Staring at the female pilot's chest and backside as if they were cast from pure platinum.
And the worst of it — the damn pilot enjoyed the attention. Mammals. Only interested in sex.
Chokrata pointed his gripping pad at Nacket. "You, check the cooling, and tell the other lazy bastards to secure the cargo."
Then he turned his red eyes to Mikkra. "And you — bring us out of transit in one piece."
Then he licked his other eye. The stress made them drier.
Mikkra shouted from her chair, "Transit!"
The universe turned inside Chokrata's head. Transits always confused his senses — that's why he needed expensive pilots.
Then they were back in real space.
"We're getting called, Captain."
Now? That was unusual. Shraphen were militaristic, but that was astonishingly fast. Come to think of it, no species had ever registered them so quickly.
Light lag alone should have prevented their sensors from picking them up at this distance.
"What the hell?"
Mikkra's shocked voice alerted him to look up.
Ships in front of his tender. Massive ships. Military-looking — aggressive, long, bulky things.
Definitely not Shraphen.
He looked at the transmitted message.
It was sent in four languages: Shra, Nuk, Batract Galactic Standard, and one other — unknown.
The order was clear. Cut engines, cut power to weapons, and prepare for scan.
Easy enough. But how had those unknown aliens known their transit point that precisely?
His sensors warned of multiple active scans.
Mikkra seemed to grow more nervous by the minute. She licked her furry paws — a typical Psstips stress relief. Disgusting.
"Call them. Let's see who we have here."
The ugly ships had robbed his pilot of all her snarkiness, and she sent an automated message requesting a video call.
For long moments, nothing happened. Then the screen lit up.
An ugly pink face appeared on the screen. A voice from the speaker sounded out in Batract Galactic Standard.
"This is the ASN Herrodes . You are entering Shraphen space under the protection of the Aligned Planets Navy. State your business."
He hit his pilot on the head, trying his best not to blow his neck sacks. "Go get Nacket. I think we found his people."