The corridors of OCS Unforgiven were alive with crew members and shipwrights alike. While the crew of the Octavarium Fleet's newest warship were preparing their posts for the ship's completion and deployment, the technicians were hard at work to bring the project to its conclusion. Most of the ship's permanent complement were now living aboard, including the new commanding officer, one Taskmaster Rodney Miller. He was an old friend of Harold Kane's, and an ex-Navy tactician from the days of the Liberty-Rheinland War. Now he was to be on the front lines again, flying the flag of Natio Octavarium into battle in the western Independent Worlds.
For the past three days he had been spending his shifts working with the Unforgiven's new executor, an artificial intelligence barely a week old. His experience with sentient artificial intelligence was limited, but he was growing used to his second-in-command being a synthetic being. After all, he thought, if a computer that solves problems just as well as and better than any human can reason to its creator that it deserves personal rights, it probably deserves them.
It was the fourth morning that he walked into the ship's rather empty CIC, fully aware that his presence was known well in advance by the AI executor.
"Good morning, Cerise," he announced cheerfully as he walked through the CIC's sliding doors.
The AI's response was equally pleasant. "Good morning, Taskmaster," she called back from her "position" at the fore end of the room's tactical display table. While her brain was securely located in the intelligence core, encased in several extra layers of armour and containing all of the ship's primary compute resources and networking equipment, her "body" was a cylindrical podium in the CIC with a white sphere set into the top, and her "face" was a holographic projection at head level, giving her the shoulders-up appearance of a woman in her mid-thirties sporting an Octavarium Fleet uniform and dark red hair.
"How are things this morning?"
Cerise smiled. "Excellent, sir. The engineering team installed two more presence projectors for me, one on the observation deck next to your announcement podium, and one in the engineering ops room. Risa and I have been noticing that the crew seem more at ease interacting with us when we have a more concrete physical presence, instead of just being ghosts talking from the walls, so to speak. This way, if you have to give an all-hands briefing, your first officer will be standing next to you, and the ship's engineering staff will have a face to bounce ideas off of."
"That was a pretty fast install, then," Rodney remarked. "I'm glad you took the initiative on that one. The projection range on those is pretty limited, though, isn't it?"
"A few metres at most. I could feasibly 'float' around most of the CIC, but I don't know what the crew's reaction to turning around to see their XO's floating head waiting for a report would be."
Rodney laughed. "I'll need you to keep that one in reserve, then."
"Naturally, sir. As for operational status, we're maybe a week out from combat preparedness at most. The Styx was decommissioned in great working order, and to be honest, she could have gone right back out into the fight on the same day that she was pulled out of it. Barely a scratch. Most of the work has been adapting our own technology to mix well with the Crayterian interfaces, and upgrading the drive section to Aquila's own standards, and then mounting equipment onto the hardpoints and testing the heavy munitions loaders."
"Perfect. Drive tests?"
"FTL field stable in both standard operating conditions and single-engine output. Mixed-mode reactors are working as expected. Aquila doesn't do this kind of thing regularly, but with all of the things working out of the box, you'd think they did."
"Crew?"
"Just about everyone is living aboard full-time, and the few who aren't can be in a moment's notice. Recreation and mess decks are active and, from what I've heard, the food is pretty good for a warship mess. From a personnel standpoint, we're ready to go, sir."
"Weapons complement?"
"Two surplus Cerberus-type plasma cannons in the forward heavy mounts and two Mortar-type cryogenic antimatter projectors in the full-coverage heavy mounts. Three EMP bolters in the forward half and five Solaris point-defense turrets for anti-fighter coverage. Everything's been through live test batteries as well as a full maintenance cycle of breakdown, cleaning, and recalibration."
"Excellent. Why are we not underway, then?"
Cerise chuckled. "ORAD won't release the project. Something about getting their paperwork in order with all the appropriate regulatory agencies, which confuses me, because we are an independent nation built out of a former pirate fleet. You'd think we'd not be subject to any regulatory agencies."
"It's a strange universe, Cerise," Rodney remarked. "I'm going to go grab a muffin or something from the mess hall. Maybe the paperwork will be through when I get back."
The corridor to the operations center was brightly lit, but otherwise barren.
Mere months ago, when the government held its offices aboard Melbourne Station, and the Fourth Octavarium Fleet was almost entirely based out of the modular installation's maintenance berths, the station was bustling, with thousands of people living and working inside. But with the growth of Canberra Star City, and the cleaning and refitting of more and more of the former Cultist base's long-abandoned decks, Melbourne's population had dropped by an order of magnitude. There were barely enough people on board to perform maintenance tasks.
Kane walked up to the ops door, and stood in silence as it opened. Of the twelve posts that comprised the operations center, only three were staffed. The officer of the watch was one Katarina O'Donnell, a long-serving Lieutenant in the Fleet who Kane had flown alongside several times under Petrucci almost a decade ago.
"Afternoon, Harold," she called out. "What brings you up to ops?"
He sighed and shuffled over to her station. "We've had a few more transfers off, I hear," he said.
Katarina nodded. "Permanent station crew is under three hundred now. Upkeep is getting difficult, I'm not going to lie to you. Ever since the Home Division and Aquila's maintenance moved to Canberra, and the government offices moved out there, Melbourne's not got much reason to be at full efficacy anymore. And keeping it up there is getting more and more expensive, what with the system's connections shifting around. Shipping costs for a day's worth of supplies have tripled since the 37 hole fizzled out."
"I know," he mumbled. "I've been signing the cheques. Keeping Melbourne intact costs us the equivalent of feeding and housing eight thousand people. Canberra's built to last, so it doesn't need the maintenance, and we're continuing to expand its self-sustenance capabilities. We can't do that kind of thing here."
"Specialty engineering and industry didn't quite take off the way we'd hoped here."
"Part of that's my fault, Kat," Kane admitted. "I didn't want to bring any kind of extra-Sirian objects on board, be it Cultist technology or Omicron gunk. But now we all live in the barrel of a Cultist gun that turned out be... well, something totally different, and Minato can more than easily keep tabs on anything coming in from the south, there's really no reason to keep the lights on here."
O'Donnell sat down. "Are we talking about packing up and scuttling the station, sir?"
Kane paused for a moment.
"Yes."
She sighed. "We need about four hours to pack up the equipment and another two to get the people out. I'll be honest, Harold: the whole station's had their personal effects boxed up since the population dropped below four hundred and the government offices moved to Canberra. As long as we all have offices and flats there, no one's going to look back."
"Excellent. I'll transfer some ships over to make it happen. We'll dismantle the station over the next few days."