Chapter 2 - Choir

Note : The end of the chapters I had ready for The Gestalt Empire. Might end posting there, might drag up some other old stories, we shall see.

I also had a bit of an epiphany from due's comment on the previous chapter. One of the reasons I wanted to write this story is because it's a lot more...personal. All my other stories are industry and production centric but in an entirely automated way. Even Alexandra, with her coterie of AIs, has very little personel to manage. This story on the other hand, by the very nature of its technology, is almost entirely about interpersonal and command skills. Arcadia isn't an engineer, she's a scientist and a..manager ? Diplomat ? Her greatest ability was never her computational capability, otherwise she'd have never launched Arcadia Systems in The Fallen World or recruited Ghost.

No, Arcadia's greatest strength was people. She could find and empathize/connect with just about everyone. It's a facet of her I haven't really explored anywhere in depths, and I think that's why I want to write this story in particular.

Chapter 2

Imperial Survey Cruiser Kiralix

Omega Pavonis star system

If anyone remembered who had decided to call an assembly of a particular Gestalt a 'Choir', they had never bothered to tell the Imperial Archives. Nevertheless, it was an accurate name. Though not as literal as for, say, Arcadias, every group of Gestalt tended to synchronize when in a large group of their fellows.

The Aryas came trooping in in a vague swarm, buzzing about with conversation, which turned from excited to confused as they realized no one was manning the large counter.

A few on the edge noticed their captain waiting for them, and before long the entire group of Aryas was staring at Arcadia and her little knot of Euriskas.

Arcadia cleared her throat.

"Ladies, if I may have your attention ?" It wasn't actually necessary at this point, but it got the Aryas to move forward and spread so that they could actually all hear her. "Officially, all of you are simply going to be here grumbling about a delayed breakfast. Unofficially, I'm here to get ahead of any rumors."

Onboard a survey ship, especially amongst a Choir, rumors could be extremely dangerous. If she didn't set the record straight, something was bound to go wrong and it could be even worse for the Arya her Euriskas had been so careful not to detain than if she'd simply been thrown into the brig. That went double for Gestalts like Aryas that were already very social among themselves to begin with.

Arcadia got up from her seat, and walked over to the Euriskas, who parted, revealing the trembling Arya. Vilka, her name tag said, though Arcadia didn't need it.

She tapped Vilka's shoulder.

"Your sister has done a terrible mistake. She had an illegal, class three narcotic made and intended to use it. Thankfully, she was convinced otherwise, but the fact remains that she was found in possession of a class three controlled substance. You all know the penalties for that."

There was a sea of bobbing heads as the Aryas nodded.

"But this is a survey vessel. On our long journey among the stars rules will be broken, and what happened beyond the Empire's gaze must remain there. Am I understood ?"

Once again, the Aryas nodded in almost disturbing synchronicity.

"Then I will leave you to your breakfast." Arcadia surveiled the sea of nigh identical faces, and she sighed internally. She had to make sure.

So she extended her talents, and her mind expanded, and she saw the Aryas shift as they felt her.

Arcadias hadn't overthrown human rule and established the Gestalt Empire because they were the best and most charismatic Gestalt commanders in history. They had managed it because they were capable of forming hiveminds. She was, in effect, a biological server. Every Gestalt had the capacity to reach out electronically through their implants, but thanks to the abherrance of advanced computer systems for interpretation there simply wasn't anything that could allow them to interface with each other's thoughts.

Arcadias could do that. With varying degrees of effectiveness of course. With other Arcadias, she could great a full hivemind, a 'groupmind' as they called it, effectively becoming a giant network that could act as one. But she could also extend it to other Gestalt lines. They couldn't meld together, but she could feel their emotions directly and they could feel hers, her mind somehow able to interpret data that would have been foreign even to their fellow Aryas. She could see through their eyes, and touch their minds in ways even their greatest scientists couldn't quite explain.

Now she wasn't just speaking, she was also broadcasting her thoughts and emotions. It wasn't telepathy per se, if nothing else it was purely technological when you came down to it, but it would be literally impossible to misread her intentions or anything she was saying.

"But let me make this clear : this. Never. Happened. As far as the ship's logs and internal security is concerned, there was never an infraction here, and if you start ostracizing her there will be hell to pay. She may have made a mistake but she is still your sister. Yes, she did something stupid that might have endangered you had she gone through but she didn't. She made the right call, even if someone else had to talk her out of it, but we've all been there, no matter who we are."

"Aye aye ma'am !" Chorused the assembled Aryas, and Arcadia nodded, satisfied. She could feel worry and…solidarity in their minds, and she withdrew.

She'd triggered the behaviors she wanted. Instead of ostracizing the poor girl, they'd close ranks around her. That could bring about its own problems, but it meant she'd be reintegrated, even if she'd probably be under de facto surveillance by her sisters for the rest of the journey.

"Then you are dismissed, and bon appétit."

"Thank you captain !"

Arcadia smiled, and left, the Euriskas in tow, taking a few seconds to wave the Trooper and her coterie of Sapphires back in.

It would be a shame to have that damned riot now that she'd gone through so much trouble to avoid any lasting issues.

*****

"Captain on deck !"

There was lax protocol aboard her ship, but there were some things you didn't compromise on, and everyone on the bridge saluted as Arcadia walked through the door.

"At ease." She called out, and everyone relaxed. She nodded towards the Controller, her executive officer. "Sylvie, status report."

Controllers were average height for a Gestalt, about a meter seventy to her meter eighty, but what differentiated them was their pure, white hair and equally white irises. They looked blind but were anything but, and they were the only Gestalts outside of Arcadias that could actually interface with other's minds, though in far more limited capacity, only being capable of receiving, not broadcasting. While it may be inferior to what she could do, it also made them fantastic executive officers and coordinators, though their name laid front and center the higher hopes they once had for their capabilities.

"We are closing in on the anomaly we detected yesterday. All shuttles have been recalled and the last one came onboard five hours ago."

Arcadia nodded. Their exploration and survey shuttles were basically the bread and butter of the ship. In the absence of advanced electronics and the complete ban on remotely controlled drones, let alone autonomous probes, they were effectively the only way to actually do most of the survey work. Yes, they could put the ship itself in orbit of whatever they wanted to scan, but the price of its size and ease of maintenance was that the cruiser itself was slow as hell. If they didn't want to have to visit a fleet base or shipyard every six months or so, there was literally no other choice. At least if they wanted reactionless propulsion, but having to spend half of their time skimming fuel for a fusion drive would defeat the purpose of moving around faster.

"Still no further data on that anomaly ?"

"Not anything worth interrupting your routine over ma'am. It has mass and it occults starlight, but everything we throw at it just gets absorbed. It's also…well, anomalously stable. In this orbit it should have gotten catapulted by another body into a new trajectory, but it's not."

"So, probably some attitude corrections ?"

"If it has a grav drive we can't detect it, and there's no plume of reaction mass."

"Great. Alright, still on course for a complete relative stop at ten light seconds ?"

"Yes ma'am, three million kilometers."

The controller looked vaguely rebellious, but Arcadia shook her head.

"I'd rather eat a bit of delay and have to pull the shuttles out for a close in inspection than risk the entire ship." Ten light seconds wasn't that great a distance, in interplanetary terms, it was about ten times the distance that separated Earth, humanity's homeworld, from its now heavily terraformed and bustling satellite Luna, and less than a fiftieth of the distance between Earth and the sun. But it was far enough away to be out of the range of most shipboard energy weapons and it would give them ample warnings for a missile launch. She didn't expect the strange anomaly to shoot at them, but the only artifacts found outside Imperial borders were usually remnants of human sublight arkships launched during the Extinction War with the AIs and they had a nasty habit of dropping mines in their flight path, to take out hypothetical robotic pursuers.

Of course the AIs had never bothered, they realized from the get go that they could make a missile swarm beyond anything those arkships could deal with, that could reach velocities that meant they couldn't evade them either, and could simply deal with their fleeing creators after dealing with the ones still fighting back.

There had been attempts to contact the arkships since, but most of it had to be done through the business end of a carrier group. The arks simply didn't believe any transmissions, when they were even able to receive them in the first place, and the only way to truly signify to them that resistance was futile was to jump a ship fifteen times their size near them and tell them that they were now under the Protectorate.

Last estimates were that there were only about thirty arks unaccounted for, and about half of them they were reasonably certain had already failed due to design or manufacturing flaws. Still didn't mean they couldn't have left some surprises behind.

That or this was their first official encounter with something alien, in which case their mission was going to be called short and she was probably going to end up on the fucking succession if she wasn't good enough at deflecting all the credits onto the other Gestalts. She'd embraced survey command because she wanted to be as far away from the Sol groupmind as possible after all. She loved her sisters to death, but she was going to suffocate in there !

Well, technically they'd already encountered 'alien' life, but it was just offshoots from whatever panspermia event had originally affected Earth, and it was limited to remarkably ordinary, Earth-style bacteria or a handful of plants. Well, most Terran life was one or the other, but still. And more importantly, nothing spaceborne outside of frozen micro organisms in comets.

The other evidence of aliens…was buried deeply under the black mountain complex on Titan. And none of her crew would know about them.

There were some secrets even the Arcadias agreed must be kept.

Like the fact that there were some doubts the AIs had never gone rogue on their own. The theories that something had made them turn on humanity. Something contained inside a strange probe built with materials the Empire couldn't even fathom, let alone replicate or properly date, but that, according to geological surveys, had been buried inside the Jovian moon for several hundred thousand years at every least.

"Understood captain." Said the Controller. "And I approve of your caution, but it still rankles."

"Well, it is the only interesting thing that we've stumbled across this trip." Which, over a full year into their eight year cruise, said a fair bit.

Then again, no one said this would be an interesting job to begin with.

"This isn't the age of exploration anymore. I'm honestly amazed we found anything."

Arcadia nodded.

It was indeed a long time since the Empire discovered the jump drive and began walking among the stars. Technically, they'd had interstellar capabilities before that, but there had been an interdict on interstellar exploration until a form of FTL was invented.

There used to be hundreds of survey ships, working in entire fleets. Now there were three dozen, and half of them were about to be decommissioned in favor of newer vessels. Hers was, miraculously, one of the new ships, though the design itself was over a century old. Exploration simply wasn't big on the Empire's agenda anymore. Not that it wasn't justified, the Empire had overstretched itself and had to consolidate, they had more resources and systems than they already knew what to do with, but it still rankled a bit sometimes.

"Alright. I have the con."

"Aye aye ma'am, you have the con." The executive officer stepped away from the command seat, which Arcadia promptly sat down in.

"Now, let's get ourselves some data. Ready the shuttles for departure."

"Should we send a security detail ?"

Arcadia hesitated.

The 'security detail' was generally for planetary explorations. To survey the stars her cruiser might have been built to do, but it was still a naval ship, and so she had an infantry platoon onboard. And not Euriskas either, she had genuine marines, twenty five Varias, ten Calibers and five of the towering Mjolnir, with power armor, heavy weapons and an assault shuttle to carry them. It was obscene amounts of overkill for almost any scenario short of encountering an arkship, but just in case, she had them.

And if there was someone more bored than these girls onboard, she had no idea who they could be. Even the Rubies that managed the ship's pathetic weaponry at least got to shoot an asteroid out of the proverbial sky for kicks from time to time, under the pretext of 'testing the proper functionning of the onboard weapon systems'.

"Sure. I'm not sure they'll be able to really affect anything, but it'll give them something to do." And keep the Calibers from starting card games, even if only for a bit. They had all the Aryas knowing how to play old school, twenty first century blackjack within two weeks of setting sail. At this point it was a wonder they hadn't repurposed an area of the recreation deck into a casino ! "Send the orders. Let's have a closer look at our anomalous friend there."