Jacob paged through the design documents he finally got his hands on while the last of the satellites were deployed. He had been in Earth orbit for over a week now. It took a long time to properly deploy that many satellites because he had to change orbits multiple times to ensure full coverage and avoid colliding with other satellites.
The weapon program documents that he found had been kept offline, preventing Jacob from figuring out what the US and other agencies were up to. He wasn’t surprised that the US, along with other nations were taking steps to reduce possible infiltration and keep him from finding out they were building weapons that could harm him. He left plenty of clues about his capabilities when he hunted down the Redline folks. Had he not been in such a hurry and so damn angry at the time, he would have done a better job covering his tracks.
Jacob started at the most likely sources, but his early searches came up empty. That’s when he left little presents on any connected devices to copy relevant data and alert him if something appeared.
It took less than a day after his arrival in orbit to get a ping.
One of the researchers involved in the weapons program connected a secure USB drive to a networked computer. Jacob thought he got lucky, but the timing of the incident and the fact that the computer belonged to Nathaniel Stern led Jacob to believe it wasn’t a mistake. There was also the readme text file from Nathaniel asking for input, without making it too obvious that he was asking for Jacob’s direct input.
“Hopefield must really be cracking down if they are going to these lengths to show me what they are working on,” Jacob mused.
The design was for a missile. No surprise there. Earth didn’t have any other weapon that could reach out and hit another vessel in orbit with any sort of reliability. Then again, neither could missiles, except these perhaps.
“Didn’t take them long to figure out how to weaponize phase coils,” he muttered.
The missile did away with any sort of rocket propulsion, replacing it with a gravitic plate. The changes didn’t stop there. A simple nuclear reactor replaced the propellant systems. The reactor was not of alien design; it was a design commonly used in some of Earth’s long-range satellites, the type of ones they sent to other planets.
That meant they hadn’t figured out the alien reactor science yet, or that they had focused primarily on offensive options. He would have done the same in their situation.
Their design didn’t output a whole lot in the way of power, but it was enough. The gravitics probably required most of the reactor’s output, but the phase coils only needed enough charge to activate and deactivate. Based on the schematics, the missile had about five minutes of fuel on board at max output.
Considering it was a missile, that was probably more than enough.
Then there was the warhead. To no surprise, they were designed to accept current nuclear warheads.
Apparently, they weren’t taking any chances. Considering what they were up against, it was probably for the best. Honestly, the design was solid. It had the power to take out a ship and the ability to get most of the way there without getting intercepted. It was a far cry from what the Russians had tried to launch his way.
What Nathaniel needed was an avionics package that made everything possible. Humanity was struggling to figure out the complex mathematics behind programming transition endpoints. To be fair, most ships relied on onboard AIs to calculate the tricky math behind that.
Jacob liked Nathaniel, and if Earth could put up some sort of defense itself, that was less work he had to do. He quickly whipped up a barebones avionics package and the processing requirements to make it happen. Earth didn’t have an AI, despite what they liked to call their LLMs, and the supercomputers required to calculate the multi-spatial equations wouldn’t fit into the missile, but they didn’t need to. All they had to do was upload the coordinates to the missile after they were calculated.
He also decided to purloin the missile design for himself. Melody and the station both had launchers, but they were currently empty. He hadn’t bothered refilling those empty weapon racks because the old Concord missile designs hadn’t been all that advanced.
They used gravitics, along with a void bomb warhead, but they didn’t employ any sort of phase coil to get them to their target, which made them easy to take out.
Jacob had to redesign the weapon to fit into the standard Concord launchers instead of the ballistic missiles Earth was retrofitting. It was tight, but he had access to a smaller, more efficient power system with the power cores. He had brought a few dozen crates of the compact energy devices with him, just in case. He would need to be frugal with these new missiles because they were expendable ammunition, unlike his energy cannons or void cannons, and he didn’t have the means to build more power cores aboard the enormous vessel.
Rectifying that oversight was high up on the list of things to be completed once he returned to the station. Fitting the additional manufacturing machines into the ship was going to take some serious redesign work.
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One of Jacob’s virtual windows beeped. He looked over at the window and smiled. The last satellite was finally deployed. He notified his contacts on Earth, then transitioned away from the planet to a position halfway between the Earth and the Moon so they could activate the FTL blockers.
He might be willing to assist, but he wasn’t willing to be trapped in orbit if shit hit the fan, which he expected it would. Melody didn’t have the luxury of switching phase coils, and he didn’t understand enough about the massive coils aboard the vessel to begin tinkering with them to rectify that problem. There was a possibility he could still transition away, even with the satellites active, but it was a risk he wasn’t willing to take.
Jacob helped Earth test the grid by probing it with a few maintenance drone ships he had on board. It was working as intended, leaving the drones emerging in a high orbit instead of Earth’s atmosphere.
The stress of the premature reentry even disabled one of the drones, forcing him to send the others to collect it. He doubted the t’uk ships would be as susceptible, but they might get lucky.
Since there was nothing left to do but wait, Jacob quickly wrapped up the new missile design. He didn’t need anything as powerful as a nuke for a warhead, so he added a single energy cannon to the inside, or at least the energy compression portion.
Jacob calculated that the power of the warhead would far outstrip a shot from an energy cannon if he fed the entire power core into a single, focused blast. It wasn’t anywhere near as powerful as a nuke, but it would certainly be a surprise. There was also less concern about collateral damage with his design.
Just to be safe, Jacob outfitted a dozen of the new missiles with void bomb warheads. They wouldn’t do jack shit against a shielded vessel, but if he breached a ship’s shields, he could fire a single missile off and take that vessel out of the fight.
He sent the designs to Barry as well. Might as well outfit the station with a full complement of the new weapons.
***
Tealo’s fleet transitioned into the human system. They appeared near the unofficial comm relay. The closest vessel blasted the unit apart, which took longer than expected.
“The comm relay was shielded, sir,” the comm officer reported.
“Have the humans noticed our arrival?” Tealo asked. His fleet wasn’t stealthy, so he was relying on speed and surprise in case they had anything that could harm them.
“The device was actively transmitting radio signals. They appear to be targeted at the human planet.”
Tealo wasn’t surprised by that. The scout had indicated that a borganian vessel had been on the surface. If it were still in the system, it could be acting as an early warning system for the humans.
“Go to active sensors. Let’s see what we are dealing with.”
The fleet started the slow crawl deeper into the system while the sensors worked to provide a clear picture of what they were flying into.
It took a full hour for the full sensor sweep to come back. What he saw wasn’t good. An enormous ship sat equally distant from their target planet and its only satellite. The ship’s AI had identified its silhouette immediately, as if Tealo could confuse it with anything else.
The humans had managed to get the derelict planetary conditioning vessel into a flyable state. The fact that it was here meant their scout had been detected as well. He doubted the ship had been completely repaired, given how much damage their intel said it had, but he wouldn’t know for sure until they got closer and the sensor resolution improved.
“Transition us to the next planetary orbit,” he ordered.
His fleet had enough ships to destroy the vessel, even if it was shielded, but he wasn’t going to go in guns blazing. That was a good way to wind up dead.
***
Jacob had been floating around Earth for the better part of two weeks, bored out of his mind. He couldn’t even risk going back to the station to work on his projects, so one of his avatars was doing it for him.
Alarms blared, breaking the drudgery. Jacob immediately abandoned all his avatars on Earth, letting the people he was in contact with know that the t’uk had arrived. He tried alerting the station, but the comm link would not connect.
“Those fuckers blew up the comm satellite!” Jacob was more annoyed than surprised.
He tried connecting to his avatar on the station next, using the relay, but a massive headache sent him to his knees, so he quickly released the connection. “How the hell did they find my relay?” he asked as he shook off the lingering effects of trying to connect to the station.
At least he hoped they had found the relay, because the alternative was that the station was destroyed.
Once the pain receded, Jacob activated the overlapping shields on Melody. Unlike his slapdash approach to shielding the station, he had spent considerable time estimating the perfect layout of shields for Melody. Each shield emitter had four others covering it, and where they overlapped, the vessel took on a shimmer, similar to the Astryx battle fleet that had shown up at the station.
It also answered the question of why the Astryx vessel’s shields were visible. They were running redundant shield generators.
Jacob didn’t have the luxury of a centralized shield generator thanks to the size of Melody and its internal layout. Otherwise, he would have just purchased a similar, if smaller, version of a station shield generator and shoved it into the vessel.
His method was probably better anyway, since he could replace shield generators with ease. He had enough spares aboard to replace a full half of the ones on the ship, and enough maintenance drones to do it all at once if it came down to it.
That’s not to say his design was without issue. He did have to modify the borganian generators to flatten out the shield curve, allowing for as much coverage as possible without reducing the overall strength too much. That meant the shield was closer to the armored hull, which was actually preferable. He also had to tweak the missiles slightly so they could traverse the shields without him having to flick them on and off.
He really hoped his efforts were enough. Oh, he almost forgot one last thing. Massive hangar doors opened across the vessel, and from them emerged all of the combat drone ships. Mixed in amongst those were the specially prepared science drones. Those immediately transitioned to Earth, using their upgrades to bypass the blocker field and appear just above the ocean surface, where they waited.
Most of Earth’s militaries were busy preparing for the aliens’ arrival, but Jacob quickly erased any evidence of the science ships and programmed any of the spy satellites above Earth to ignore them. If he didn’t have to use them, he didn’t want humanity to know they were even down there.
Melody’s scanners picked up the t’uk fleet as they repositioned near Mars orbit. They were gathering better intel. He really wished they had just rushed in and gotten it over with.