Lisa spawned an avatar in a sealed room nestled deep within the ship and started chewing on one of her nails in frustration and guilt, staring at the four AI cores that matched her own. She felt terrible about misleading her friends, but she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that they would have refused to do what she wanted them to do. For all that they were more accepting of advanced technology than most, they were still squeamish about installing that technology inside of them let alone becoming purely technological.

An alert pinged and she corrected the alignment error in one of her factories absentmindedly. She was trying to think of a way to get Evan to accept an augment of some sort so that she could rework the interfaces she had initially installed. She had essentially permanently protected her other friends by installing augmentations that doubled as a digital uplink. They sent a continuous scan of their brains to these cores, one for each of them, so that should the worst happen and one of her friends died, their minds would transfer to the core and prevent them from truly dying.

The problem was that Evan's implant didn't have that functionality, and she didn't want to lie to him in order to get it installed. For some reason she couldn't grasp, she refused to outright lie to her friends. She felt bad enough after making the choice to not tell them what she was doing, and that was just omitting a few details. She let the avatar vanish as she turned her attention elsewhere.

"Dr. Long, the hydroponics bays on cruisers one and two are pressurized and ready for planting, as well as several new parks in Haven's other towers. I can have drones start the work in the hydroponics bays, but wanted to confirm whether you wanted to change the layout or plants used in the other parks."

"Dr. Duphran, please be careful with that, those engines can be extraordinarily dangerous even in miniature."

"Mr. Jackson, your new recruits are debarking from their shuttle as we speak, did you wish to meet them first or shall I begin fitting them with their prosthetics?"

"Captain Hawthorne-"

"I told you to call me Jeffrey."

"Yes, my apologies, Jeffrey. The survey drones have finished mapping out the system's slipstream transit points, there are a total of three. One of which is not in the public records. It's possible that they simply missed one of the distant ones after switching to the protocols for a system hosting a primitive species. I've also included the lagrange points that would allow at least mid-sized ships to transition from subspace. As I've mentioned in the past, the only Confederation military vessels that are smaller than that are scout ships that pose no threat."

"Jason, I've finished my final adjustment on the destroyer class vessels, do you want me to add them to the queue?"

"Rebekkah, I've finally secured construction permits and properties allocated for an embassy in fourteen countries. Would you like me to begin construction? I can staff them with simple AIs until you can find employees to work in them."

Lisa continued working with a constantly varying number of people while simultaneously monitoring the status of all the construction, mining and general maintenance processes. Most of the work was done by simple AIs, but those were limited when it came to decision making. They also occasionally encountered scenarios she hadn't anticipated and would require external input to resolve the issue.

A different alert pinged, one that soured her already guilt-ridden mood. It was promptly followed by a message coming in through the FTL comsat near the point she originally entered the system. *CWSF requires mission status update, authorization Zeta, Pi, Six, Gorblek, Pastal. Include best estimated timeline for local species to leave their system.*

Lisa sighed, then sent a robotic message back. Her friends had told her to be relatively honest with the CWSF, only keeping certain things from them. Things like her sentience, the considerably more military strength nature of their ships than expected, and the transition point the initial survey missed on the off-chance it led somewhere interesting that the Confederation didn't know about yet.

"Local sentient species, self-designated homo-sapien, or human, continue to display remarkable adaptability and curiosity, yet remain cautious in regards to leaving their system. They are accelerating their exploration and colonization in-system however, and have begun constructing FTL capable ships. Current projections place the first transition out-system in one-half orbit of the primary planet. Six months human time, or 17/64ths of a Confederated Standard Cycle.

"Additional delays may arise due to the humans' dissatisfaction with the library of ship schematics in this vessel's database. They chose to design their own vessels and are in the process of testing and troubleshooting various designs. Progress is also being made toward unifying their governments. Projections for a unified planetary government are approximately two orbits of the primary planet, Two years human time, or-"

*Cease report. Encourage FTL travel as much as possible, battle lines have shifted and will place your location within Swarm range before projected FTL travel allows first contact. Sending data burst of recent Gnarlath activity for dissemination to locals as incentive to accelerate their timetable. Data is already formatted to appear as public news. Ensure local species is aware that the mere presence of an FTL drive in the system is enough for the Gnarlath to justify an attack. Confirm new orders.*

Lisa repeated back the orders verbatim, and followed it with her serial number and confirmation code, then the connection terminated. She sat in silence for a few milliseconds. She then spent several milliseconds exploring various curse words in every language in her database. Finally she opened a channel to her friends. "I have bad news."

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*****

"With the loss of Spartack to the Gnarlath the Fleet has been forced to redistribute their ships to new defensive points. This move has seen a great deal of criticism from citizens across the Confederation as it appears they have abandoned no fewer than three member worlds to face the predations of the Gnarlath. This is in addition to several systems containing intelligent life yet to leave their planet, who, if we are unable to push the Gnarlath back, will face a truly horrifying fate the moment they attempt to reach for the stars."

Evan had a strange expression on his face as he watched the 'news broadcast' that the Confederation sent Lisa. "If I didn't know it was fake I would find it pretty hilarious that alien news crews use the same style of set as CNN. Do you think they got it from the same place? Is CNN visiting a Space IKEO to get their furniture, or are the aliens coming to our IKEO's?" He shook his head. "Questions for another day. More importantly, what's our play?"

Jason shrugged. "Honestly? Probably just keep doing what we're already doing. Maybe accelerate production of warships and slow down on the quality of life stuff, we're just as well equipped to face the gnarlath as we are to face the Confederation, only real difference is that the gnarlath won't be trying to recruit us and we don't have to feel as bad for shooting them out of the sky. For the first attack or two anyways."

"I have already ceased delivery of materials to Mars' surface and prioritized starship components in seventy-five percent of off-world fabricators. The rest are still constructing a second shipyard. The Raziel has finally been fully completed, but is still suffering from a lack of crew, as will all ships we complete unless we drastically accelerate recruitment. On the Raziel it's fine because I am able to control everything, and have enough drones aboard to handle anything that comes up with minimal effort. This won't hold true for additional ships unless we are willing to keep them within a quarter light-second range or risk equipping them with high bandwidth FTL communications systems and hope they don't fail."

Lisa pulled up multiple displays in the holo-field. "With the Raziel combat ready we should be relatively safe for an attack or two, but only if they stick to their typical pattern of sending probing attacks through the transit points to determine the status of the new systems they have access to. This map," she pulled a starmap with lines drawn all over it, "is of the current known transit lines. Unfortunately, the loss of the Spartack system has resulted in Sol becoming one of two major choke points the gnarlath will have to get through to continue assaulting the Confederation in this sector. The other is the Tinbull system, which, due to Sol's protected status under Confederate law, is the one the CWSF was forced to take.

"There is no doubt a motion being passed through the Council to move their fleet from Tinbull to Sol using the fact that FTL engines exist in our system as an excuse to bend the rules and contact us early due to the gnarlath threat, but it will take time. If we successfully fend off the first few assaults I have little doubt that they will immediately send an ambassador to make first contact. Essentially, our time table has been forcibly shortened to a couple weeks at worst, a month and a half at best before we face an attack. After successfully fending off the gnarlath once or twice I estimate no more than two weeks for an ambassador and defensive fleet to arrive."

"I suggest we make this news public." Jason said after a moment, scratching his chin in thought. "We should also invite all those leaders back for the first attack to witness it in person, warning them that there is a risk of course. That might get them to actually make some progress on the world government thing."

Rebekkah nodded. "That's a good idea, we also need to get at least one military member in here for these meetings in the future. We are definitely not strategic geniuses. Shortly before we got this news, Lisa informed me that we can finally set up recruitment centers in a number of places, so we should be able to alleviate the manpower issue in a number of positions quickly enough. More specialized positions will likely remain empty though, or only filled in spirit. Engineering for example, requires a level of technical knowledge our current educational standards just can't provide. We will need to give them on the job training and hope for the best.

"On a side note, I would like to propose we establish a school on Mars that will be able to produce people that could properly fill those specialized roles as soon as possible. We have Starfall to train pilots and commanders, even if they don't realize it, but we will need men and women with a proper, well-rounded education in the truly important positions."

Evan nodded. "I agree, add it to the list of things people can sign up for. We will have to make sure we only take the truly driven folks at first though, since at the very least the first classes will have to be virtually self-taught. You know, since we don't have any teachers."

Jason tapped on the table in thought for a moment. "You know, I was wondering, Lisa, why doesn't the Confederation use those augments you were pitching to us to make ground troops that can fight the gnarlath? I mean, we should do that ourselves just in case something slips past us, but why don't they?"

Lisa shrugged her avatar's shoulders. "I don't know, but if I were to guess I would say cost and lack of willing participants. They would never let an AI tailor their augments for them the way I did for you, and each one has to be tailored to its owner. Also, not many citizens are willing to let the government turn them into a living weapon. So they have to pay the specialists exorbitant amounts to do the work, pay for the augments themselves, and pay the people being modified enough to both go through the process and fight long enough for the investment to be worth it.

"I'm sure they augment some troops, but it simply isn't feasible to enhance every soldier. Particularly when you factor in the fact that augmentation is reliant on the base capabilities of the species in question and the most advanced and comprehensive suite of combat modifications I can access would only enable a human to be slightly superior to a gnarlath at best."

"Which reminds me of something, Kinzie, do you think you could come up with a power armor design?" Jason asked. "I had an idea I back-burnered a while back, on account of it not being relevant, but suddenly it seems much more viable. Way I see it, if we get some augmented soldiers wearing power armor, we could, in theory, build a few of these." He fiddled with the holo display briefly and a long black needle looking thing appeared. "This is a multi-purpose drop ship I came up with for Starfall. We know that the gnarlath and confederacy both have better tech than us, with the gnarlath being worse than the confederacy but generally more numerous.

"If we could take a ship or two from, well, either of them honestly, but preferably the gnarlath since there's no chance of diplomacy with them anyway, we could reverse engineer their tech and improve our own. Volunteers only for the potential suicide mission of course."

"I'll see what I can come up with. Lisa, can you have Mr. Jackson and Jeffrey come down to my workshop when they have time to discuss what they would want from power armor?"

"Of course."