Petty Officer 3rd class Roisin Gabrielle Reynard-

The door slid closed behind Midshipman Princeton with a dangerous finality. The Executive Officer sat back in her chair and looked at me, pointing at the other side of the table. “Have a seat,” she said. Taers were rather childlike, although sized like adult humans, and were as close to immortal as you could get. She might be the only one left, which may be the reason for her ironic last name of ‘Taera’.

The entire room was done up in a very old-fashioned style. Wooden walls in the bottom half with elegant paper above, there were several small chandeliers of what looked like silver dangling from heavy cross-beams. I knew that the ship was mostly modern alloy walls, but the officer’s mess was clearly designed to look like an ancient seafaring sailing ship, and the two dozen heavy dark wooden stools just added to the effect. I pulled one of the chairs out from under the heavy wooden table, planted it firmly on the large oriental rug, and sat down carefully.

“Ma’am?” I asked, when I was planted on the stool, one foot hooked into the rungs… I suppose that there was no risk of anything tilting as on a traditional ship.

“I was the one that allowed you on this vessel, the personnel files go through me unless the Captain specifically requests someone. You were a… problem an old friend was trying to get rid of. I was on Ostrogath before it was invaded last year, but the Valkyrie fleet is known for being where fleet problems come to rest. I know full well what gremlins are, and when that friend noticed you in intake, I made sure you were shuffled around where you needed to go.”

Wow. Was it luck or enemy action? “Yes ma’am,” I said quietly, trying to puzzle out where she was going with this.

“I understand the difference perfectly well between enhanced bio-maturity and standard galactic years. Technically, my species never enters bio-maturity at all, I was a child for nearly fifty years before I finally chose my class. So I would like to know your emotional maturity.”

“I am not an adult yet, but I don’t want to be around males until I am at least a class master. If you know anything about Maenads, you will know we tend to bond early, and I don’t want to be a slave.”

She nodded slowly and waved at my wrist. “You hacked the UI. I can tell you have more than two affinities. Why? And what is it?”

I sighed. She was an empath, and while I had a really decent will, straight-up lies would probably be discovered. “I have adept tech, Ma’am. I was captured by slavers, and I needed to be official to protect myself if they found out what I was. So I just kept my mouth shut when they started calling me a boy until I could get through basic and get rated. That’s where all the confusion came in.”

“You went through orc conscript basic?”

“No, Ma’am. They assumed a Gremlin is the same as a goblin, so I went through tech basic. It was rough, but I wouldn’t have passed orc basic. I am strong, but nobody is as strong as an orc at tin.”

“And your unregistered affinity?”

“Spiritual, Ma’am. I was a conscript. If I admitted to spiritual, I would have gotten sent to the Meditech trainers and spent the next few years building cyborgs and necro drones. I do not approve of necrotics for faith reasons, ma’am, and would take my own life before I’d allow them to force me to sell my soul.”

She sighed. “What traits do you have from spiritual?”

“Triage and remote healing, Ma’am. I picked them both up while I was in J-school, training with the troopers. I wrote it off as swarm tech, but spiritual gave it a lot more depth.”

“Aid?”

I shook my head, “No, true healing. I don’t have enough ranks to regenerate, yet, but I am not a purist… I don’t mind helping install upgrades or prosthetic adaptations if needed, I just don’t want to force a living spirit into a dead body. That’s...evil.”

She nodded slowly. “Yes, your tech and spiritual would make you a natural for the hybrid path. And with physical, even as a female, the fleet would jump to put you on a battlefield raising cyborgs. I can understand your caution. We are not fleet, though. If you have true healing, if you wanted to take the medical path, You’d be in OCS before you can blink.”

I shook my head, “No, Ma’am. I want to command a ship.”

“Why?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I am sorry, Ma’am. I cannot tell you unless you are willing to swear mental confidence.”

She leaned back and looked at me carefully. “You know, I could advise you be returned to the depot and get reassigned.”

I shrugged, “I am sure you can. It is your right and duty.”

She nodded, “But it is extremely important to you. Alright, as long as it doesn’t endanger the ship, I swear mental confidence. But I cannot promise I won’t pester you about it or try to change your mind.”

I smiled a little, “Thank you, Ma’am. As you probably know, I am a Maenad. Do you remember the species cited during the anti-gene mod trials?

“Dryads, Nymphs, and Maenads.”

I smiled, “Exactly. Maenads were one of the three cited as being created as slaves. We were designed as companions to heavyworlders, shieldmaidens, and living weapons, easily controlled by whichever male decided to become our mate.”

I shrugged, “Imagine a modern delver with a fanatically loyal woman by his side. Strong, physically competent, able to keep him safe and repair almost any damage, and able to heal almost any wound. True healing is common in my family. He could beat her, abuse her, starve her, or do whatever he wanted, and after bonding, she would stay loyal. She couldn’t even THINK of betraying him without wanting to kill herself, and willing to do anything he asked her to do.”

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She nodded, “That explains why you want to be on a drone ship.”

I shrugged, “Every few years, the fleet goes on another recruitment drive and the bounty hunters they hire to collect recruits know where our major world is. So they collect as many newly of-age Maenads as they can, unbonded and ready to be bonded to the first male of almost any gene mod that decides they want one.”

She looked at me weirdly, “They don’t conscript females.”

I nodded, “That’s the rule, but they certainly collect them, and none of them ever make it to a recruitment center. What do you imagine happens to them?”

She went pale.

I nodded, “Yes, Ma’am. I only escaped because I was a late bloomer, and have bigger than normal ears because my great-grandfather was a batkin. They thought I was a goblin and threw me into the meat grinder instead of taking me to one of the neutral worlds to sell. I imagine that attractive women, guaranteed loyal, with traits like true healing and the ability to hack into nearly any system or build almost any tech would be in pretty high demand on the slave markets of certain United Planets.”

She sighed, “And you want a ship so you can start a crusade. You know, as many times as it’s been stomped out, slavery always comes back, right?”

I nodded, “Of course, Ma’am. But if I get the right path, I can, at the very least, protect MY world, and punish a lot of those who have been destroying them. I cannot kill every slaving bounty-hunter scum in the galaxy, but I can kill a lot, and terrify the rest.”

I was not going to add that with the right ship, I could also rip the pulse generator out of Korse’s atmosphere. Without that, in just a generation or two we would be able to protect ourselves perfectly fine, even against the UPF. After hundreds of years, that one big surprise was still haunting us.

She sighed and nodded. “Well, the rest of your UI, is it correct?”

I smiled, “Mostly, Ma’am. I am still technically a Gremlin for… I am thinking about a month. My traits and attributes are correct, though, but my physical is liable to increase, and I have been...ahh… eating like an orc trooper because of it.”

She nodded slowly, “Your attributes are incredible for your age and lack of development. Is this usual?”

I shook my head, “No Ma’am. All Maenads breed true for females, and the father’s race for males, but a lot of genetic traits get passed. My great-grandfather was a batkin, my grandfather was a gnome, and my father is a sorcerer. I didn’t get the sorcery affinity, but it did allow me to get cross-discipline sorcery as a tech trait, but nerd runs in the family… I am scrawny, though.”

She nodded, “Some of these traits are very odd. I understand that Multidimensional Trigonometry is needed for both hyper and warp engine navigation, and quantum milling and remote node allow you to assemble drones on the fly without tools, both incredibly useful for a drone fighter, but not necessarily officer material. But what are Cross-discipline sorcery, and micro-active swarm?”

“Cross-discipline sorcery allows me to… sort of enchant, software. It allows me to use software and hardware glyphs to allow drones, or any computer, really, to hold and controllably disperse magical energy. I don’t know many spells, since they are different for an SI without a soul or a computer, but right now it allows me to set up a database, such as a control drone, as a temporary control node. That means that with the right kind of drone, I could remote from… very very long distances away.”

“How far away and how many?”

“If I can set it up in advance, and have enough energy? I could control, and even assemble from scratch or parts, up to six full-sized battle drones through the controller. In fact, if I had a smart enough control drone and a decent raw material, like an asteroid belt, I could build them given a few hours… I know a lot of drone designs,” I shrugged, “Up to about 2 AU’s, or farther with a custom-made control drone with its own SI.”

She whistled, “That’s way outside of the standard engagement range. It’s just too bad you can’t control more. Six drones are enough for a smaller fight, but not a big one like a tyrant.”

I shrugged, “I haven’t finished training yet, Ma’am. I am only tin. with the right path that could expand enormously. On the simulators, with higher rankings, I was able to drop a drone fleet and multiple auto-dreadnoughts.”

“So what about micro-active swarm?”

I sighed, “That’s a weird one. It doesn’t work on drones larger than 15 microns, but it was a trait from my father’s sorcery that I was able to apply to tech, like cross-discipline sorcery. That’s how I can build a drone from raw materials, really raw materials. I can create, and control, up to six billion separate drone-like entities. The problem is, right now, it takes me a very long time to do anything with them… even building a swarm could take me a week if I used decent materials, like buckyballs and nanofragments.”

She nodded, “I could slide you into engineering OCS even faster than medical. But again, that wouldn’t lead you to command. You know, when you opt-out, you could always go as an independent delver to try and get a ship reward or earn enough for one.”

I nodded, “But if that happened, and I wound up fighting a bunch of bounty hunters, the fleet would consider me a pirate.”

She nodded slowly. “I might be able to get you on the Nav track. How does that relate to the cross-discipline sorcery thing?”

I shrugged, “It’s just something that helps with my control. Remoting across several AUs has massive signal loss and degradation, as well as delay. With the right frameworks, it lets me send my signals bouncing through the closest branes and back into the real world at its destination, so no signal delay or degradation.”

She looked surprised, but I wasn’t sure why. “What branes?”

I shrugged, “I don’t know… I haven’t studied enough of them yet. I know it can use hyperspace and warp space, as well as the null, and I know it CANNOT use the Chaos Realms. Nothing can survive there.”

“So if you had a drone that could go into warp, you could still control it in real-time?”

I nodded, “Yes, but it would be a really short trip. I mean, I could control it to its destination, since warp space doesn’t have a distance, but once it got there, if it was more than a couple of AU’s, I’d lose it the moment it exits.”

“Can you push through, say, a rift’s horizon?”

I shrugged, “I have no idea, but it should work. I have never been close enough to a rift to try.”

“If you could, does that mean you could run exploration drones through a rift without having to enter it yourself?”

I shook my head, “No. rifts would absorb a drone instantly. That’s why SI’s can’t safely close rifts. Without a sentient presence, a rift can suck up anything that enters it. But I could certainly stay in the safe zone, if it has one, and send out drones to chart it or maybe handle threats up to their combat rating. That was an important part of my plan.”

She chuckled. “In that case, I do have an OCS path offer for you. Fair warning, it’s a command track, but it’s the hardest command track possible. I think you might be capable, but it’s also dangerous, lonely, and is likely to kill you someday.”

“Oh? What Path is it?”

She smiled, “The stellar explorer branch.”