Chapter 16

..[ MATIVO ]..

I had been surprised to receive a communication request from Basinger, Mondhe’s caretaker. Mondhe wanted to spend time with me but the amount of channels she had to go through to get in touch with me had proved too much for her. So, she had resorted to asking for help from her caretaker.

The hybrids were expected to grow out of the caretaker system at the age of fifteen. When that happened, the caretaker would relinquish their role as the primary guardian and they would either renew another fifteen-Year tenure as a caretaker or move on to other jobs. No one had yet failed to renew their tenures. And there was a long list of waiting caretaker hopefuls. The caretaker was one of the lucrative jobs, if you were into taking care of kids, that is. A considerable number of the worker-slaves had applied for the caretaker job but most had failed. Going in it for the money was a big no, and I had made sure that all caretakers would give their all into rearing the wards under them. I was responsible for bringing this kids into the universe, it was my duty to make their lives less stressful until they could take care of themselves.

I had planned to visit the next generation of ships, and decided to take Mondhe with me.

“Wow! I still can’t believe the size of them.” Mondhe was leaning slightly ahead of her seat in an effort to get a full view of the ships. Compared to them, our Class One shuttle capable of only carrying two people, four if pushed, was miniscule.

The new additions to the Explorer Class of ships were arranged in a wide wedge formation with one ship slightly ahead of the wedge. There were twelve of them in total, but only eleven formed the wedge. The twelfth was the one flying slightly ahead of the wedge. It was also my next ship. The Swift. So called for being the fastest in the fleet. It was theorized that it could cross a fifteen thousand light-Year distance in a Year at cruising speeds. I didn’t want to think about how it avoided running into things at such speeds.

“These can only accommodate a crew of hundred thousand if pushed to their limits. The new Colonial Class can easily accommodate one million,” I told her. And that made her lose interest in the Explorers, if only for a few minutes.

“Why would you need so many people in a single ship?” she asked as she settled back on her seat, turning to face me with a very mortified expression.

“It is the cheapest way to transport people who are heading in the same direction. Lump them all together,” I told her and then decided to add what I had been briefed on two Days earlier. “Our probabilists think that we are at the precipice of two events: either meeting civilizations comparable to us in terms of technology, or not meeting any intelligent species at all.”

“Oh!” she replied in a low voice.

“We need that many people to go around colonizing the planets we discover. And to bring to heel those who try to resist.” I added with a slight maniac grin.

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“Soldiers,” was all she said.

“Imagine it. One million highly trained, space faring, Energy using troops; even Earth wouldn’t be able to stand against us for long.” I deflated after that though. “Our Energy users are too few though. It could take nearly two decades to have enough Energy users to fully equip all the Colonial Class ships.”

“There is already over a million Energy users. I checked!” she quickly defended when it appeared like I wanted to argue. But she had still got it wrong.

“Preteen potential Energy users, who will take at least a decade to mature and learn to use the Energy proficiently enough to be considered a threat.” I said, turning to her after placing our shuttle at a cruising speed behind the wedge. “There are over hundred Colonial Class ships being produced each year, it will take a lot of genetically engineered people to fully crew all of them. Unless people agree to be bioaugmented, then we could have the people we need in a year.”

“Why so many ships? Aren’t you afraid they might become obsolete fast with the way the top speed has been increasing?”

“Oh, sweet child. It’s called delayed release. We haven’t seen any increase in speed for a few Years now.” I told her, “My scientists say we might not be able to get any major breakthroughs for over a century.”

“You have plateaued off.”

“Yes, that’s the word.” I exclaimed.

“Maybe that’s what I should focus on.” She gave it a thoughtful look.

“Light core research? I didn’t think that was your thing,” I said. She had expressed interest in a few things, but light cores were not one of them.

“I don’t know. This feels like something important, something that needs to be done.”

“But that doesn’t mean you have to be the one to do it.”

“If everyone thinks like that, who will?” she asked.

“There are people with a passion for light core research, you don’t.” She gave me a look then. “I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do it; just… think about it. What do you want to do with your life? And remember, you have centuries, millennia, maybe even eons, ahead of you.”

A few minutes of companionable silence stretched between us before I decided it was time to visit our next home for the next five Years.

“Take us in, and weave through all the ships before boarding Swift.”

She looked at me, more anxious than happy, “Now? You want me to do what now? Wouldn’t it be easier to just fly into Swift?”

“And how would that count as piloting experience?”

She grumbled something under her breathe before taking over as the pilot. The transition was easy, all I had to do was switch control to her console. Her start was jerky, but she settled down after a few seconds.

“You offered quite the controversial advice,” she said as she made an over pass on one of the ships.

“What?”

“I listened to the speech you gave in preparation for the last expedition.”

Finally, I understood her. “Oh, that.”

I tried remembering what exactly I had told her, and what I had said back then. I remembered nothing of that speech. But I believed there was no way I had been controversial in my advice to her. I would have known.

“I wasn’t. Why do we use shuttles for communication?”

“Because they are faster than any other means of communication we have,” she answered after realizing it hadn’t been a rhetorical question. I rarely did those.

“And why is that?”

“I don’t know.” She didn’t even hesitate. She must have thought about it before. Maybe that was something she could work on.

“Because the idiot that forced people to work on faster-than-light travel couldn’t be bothered to give two cents to communication technology.”

“I see.”

“Yeah.” I settled back on my seat, thinking of all the arguments I got involved in during my early Years when family thought I should pay as much attention to communication too. It was one of the many reasons I had taken to keeping Jacy at my side in important meetings. She could argue my points way better than me. Even when she was against them; like my ignoring communication.

“I just don’t have a passion for it, so it never became a priority.”