16 Moving Forward by Stuart Grosse

Author:Stuart Grosse
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

(BSN Shinokage, Amazon Gateway, Amazon System)

Cali moaned responsively as she bounced upon my lap while we relaxed on the Shinokage. The cruiser, along with the Shadowdancer and Simo Hayha were patrolling the Amazon system to ensure that foolish people didn’t try to land on the surface. Well, other than the group from the Empire.

Actually, we were watching that group with some interest. A group calling themselves the Friends of Humanity had conducted a test on Earth using Nomads as guinea pigs to try and make a new ‘sanctuary’ just north of London. Their methods involved setting off several EMPs to knock out the nanites in the area, and then rushing down with shuttles to try and set up the ‘fence’ before the nanites could fill in the sudden gap. On paper, it should have worked. Unfortunately, the whole thing ended in failure and the shuttles just barely managed to get out of the atmosphere before the nanites could get through their shields.

As for why it didn’t work? Well, I’d made the command decision to leave out a lot of the pertinent information about Greenwave and the fences when Black Star announced anything. Kept it off the forums or chat rooms, too. See, the first thing one thinks of when you talk about trying to defeat some technological menace is an EMP. It is so basic that everyone at least considers it, even if a lot of systems have moved past the point where an EMP will actually affect the circuitry. As an anti-tech superweapon, however, Greenwave was specifically hardened to shrug off an EMP.

So, someone in the Friends of Humanity group got the great idea that if knocking the nanites out didn’t work, maybe they could try blowing them up. The new plan involved actual nuclear weapons. More than a few of them, actually. There was literally no chance in hell that the Empire would allow these idiots to set off a bunch of nukes over North America, where they wanted to build their compound, so they’d come out to currently unclaimed space, to see if they couldn’t create a ‘sanctuary’ on the Amazon planet.

The Friends of Humanity ships (basically commercial freighters given a new coat of paint) flew in what could only be called a ‘formation’ if one took chaos theory and applied it to three-dimensional movement and then had a group of data points somewhere in the field. These were clearly civilian pilots at the helm of the freighters. Probably just people who had a few hours of flight experience before they came on this trip. If this was the level of technical expertise involved with the rest of their operation, I could see why the Nomads had decided not to come along on this leg of the venture.

Well, that, and the fact that apparently these humans were basically the Klan, but in space. They didn’t care too much about race, honestly, though they did have something against people who got cybernetics or other augmentations for anything other than ‘my arm got blown off’ or similar situations.

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