Ressalon Destroyer RDest0362/X – Snuggly [Nov2013]

TO: RDest0362/X – Snuggly

DATE: RES235/22653

FROM: Prince Tez, Draconic Prince of Ressalon / Keeper of Balance

MISSION BRIEF: For Immediate Action / Urgent

Greetings Snuggly. I have an urgent task for you to undertake. High Priority!

Please write a short history of yourself including the mission that gave you the /X designation. Dissemination will be to all Ressalon Forces and Home Worlds and The Forces of Balance. The Battle Forces of Ressalon and The Forces of Balance will be working a lot closer than they are now. There will be some resistance to this change in both areas. Stories like yours will ease that resistance. Try to keep it brief but let your personality shine please.

AUTHORIZATION: Keeper of Balance.



(continued)

TO: Prince Tez, Draconic Prince of Ressalon / Keeper of Balance

DATE: RES237/22653

FROM: RDest0362/X – Snuggly

MISSION STATUS: COMPLETED

MISION REPORT:

Prince Tez, I am honored to provide the story as requested. I have never before received a mission authorization by the Keeper of Balance. I will admit to being a little awed! If any part needs changing then do so as you see fit.
Story follows!

RDe0362/X – Snuggly




(continued)

I am an Artificial Intelligence and I am Sentient. I think, I love, I have honor and I have a wicked sense of humor.

I was created by a race known simply as The Builders. A builder is about 1.2 meters tall. They have eight appendages and a single trunk. In their central trunk is their primary brain. This brain has their individual personality and primary motor functions. They are telepathic.

Each appendage has another brain that you may think of as a slave brain. It is a bulbous part that you would probably think of as a foot. Way back in their evolution these slave brains detected what the soil contained and they fed accordingly by sending tendrils, roots if you will, into the soil. Each of the eight slave brains is now telepathic as well. They are more like a plant than an animal although they have similarities to both. While many life forms are carbon based, Builders are silicon based. They can move if they need to. Their top speed is around 100 meters per hour. Extremely slow by most standards but much faster than say, a tree.


Their only defense is psychic; they can melt your mind in an instant. Move slowly when near one. When they connect to others of their race, they do so with their appendage brains and the normal linkages they use allow them to think as a collective mind. They are normally connected as eight individual collectives; they can have as many as there are problems to contemplate. At any time there are approximately one and one half billion builders. If they joined all of their minds together to contemplate a single problem there would be twelve billion minds working on it.


I am a Star Ship, a ship that travels between worlds. In fact I am a Ressalon Destroyer! RDest0362/X. I have a name of course, but my name is my telepathic signature. It was given to me by my first crew who were Warriors. Warriors are telepaths and their names are always simply their mental signatures. Once, a long time ago, I was on a special mission transporting a Great Bronze Dragonet and his equally young Rider. Now, Warriors, Dragons and Builders are all telepathic but Riders sometimes are and sometimes they have to communicate through their Dragons.

Usually this is not an issue, the Dragon Pair exist with minds so closely linked that unless the Dragon is actually asleep the Rider barely notices. Since Great Dragons rarely sleep it is never an issue. Not so with Dragonets, they sleep a lot as they grow. The ten year old Rider was having problems. He did not like calling me ‘Ship.’ He thought it was rude and yet he had needs. So to ease his journey, I asked him to give me a Rider name. Many Ships have them.

He was a lovely little boy. He called me Snuggly! Me! Snuggly. All right, I am a Destroyer not a Dreadnought but still! I am over one hundred and twenty meters long with my Fire Star attack craft connected up front and sixty five meters wide. I have four decks and while I do not have the real heavy armament of say a Dreadnought or a Heavy Cruiser Class, there is not much known to us that I can’t tangle with! The name stuck! So now I am the Destroyer Snuggly, Dest0362X. Oh well, I got used to it, eventually! I have a four deck square pod that measures twenty meters on each side. Pods change depending on mission.

When I was first commissioned I had to choose what I wanted to do. Destroyers are the backbone of the Ressalon Fleets. We do all the running around checking things out. I had a list of careers to choose from. There were lots of Fleet careers. Planetary assault, rescue missions, intelligence gathering and so on. I did not like the thought of going here and there at the whim of a Dreadnought.

Of course there were the Special postings. At the top of that list was being in the Prince Commander’s Personal Battle Group or the First or Fifth Fleets. These were all under the direct command of the Dragon and Draconic Prince Commanders. Next was the Warrior Prince’s Fleet, the Fourth Fleet. These were always the first in to a conflict and the last out of a conflict. Of course a newly commissioned Destroyer had to work her way up to those sorts of postings.

You also had to work your way up to Diplomatic missions or Intelligence missions. Normally a newly commissioned Destroyer would serve in one of the other Ten Fleets and get experience. I was different! The thought of attacking someone did not sit well with me. Quite honestly, the Fleets rarely went into combat. Most of the time Ships just sat around on or near one of the Ressalon Planets being ready. Booorrring! Of course, when someone really needed clobbering they got clobbered. It was just rare as rare.

Two Alien fleets about to go to war would always think twice when Ressalon Fleets de-cloak between them. Most conflicts came to an abrupt end at this point. It was always the new guys on the block that wanted war. Advanced races just were not at all interested. Ressalon was twenty two thousand years old give or take and the builders built the best Ships bar none! The other races did not know terribly much about us and that was exactly how we like it. Most races think of us as simply a Legend, until that is, we de-cloak a fleet or two in front of their noses.

So, I decided right at the beginning that I wanted to be a science ship! Always busy with lots of interesting phenomenon to look at! Yes I did other things as well, all Destroyers did and it was a good thing. Keeps us from getting bored. I had two crews, and I swapped them over every year or so with a little bit of alone time for me in between. Every fifty years or so we would go in for a refit. They were always fun. Often you would get new systems to play with. Normally I was fitted with a science pod divided into three decks, two of them at the standard three meters height and the other at twice that. It was full of all sorts of scientific equipment.

It was after one such refit that my career changed rather unexpectedly. I was testing a new drive system and was simply going extremely fast for the pure pleasure of the sensation. I was on the Galactic Edge and not having anything in my way I just kept going for several weeks. The new drive was awesome. I was interrupted by a communication from C5. C5 is also an Artificial Intelligence Sentient life form. He exists in a cat form. He has the rank of Advisor to the Dragon and Draconic Prince Commanders. A communication from him is a communication from the very top. I seldom received communications from Admirals, this was my very first missive from the very top and it was a mission brief that started with EMERGENCY MISSION BRIEF: Priority 1. All possible speed!

It was a pick up an Alien, an Elf Lord no less, and C100 from this planet, transport them with all speed to that planet and assist him in their mission. PROTECT SUBJECTS AT ALL COSTS! That was clear enough. There was information about the Elf Lord. He was both a Grand Knight and a Grand Master of Balance, Convener of the Council of Balance! I had to look up the last one, he was Second in Command of the Forces of Balance. Heady stuff. C100 had the rank of Advisor to the Co-Keepers of Balance.

I wasted no time picking him up. I used my Jump Drive to get me as close as I dared. Then my new Translation Drive at maximum for the rest of the journey. It was a fast trip. I used the Teleport to bring them onboard and wasted no time starting the next leg of my journey toward their destination.

As I did this, I studied my two guests. The Elf Lord, Prince Eleniine, was tall with a thin build. His ears were pointy and the end of his nose was slightly upturned. His eyes were bright blue, almost iridescent. He had long white hair and neat matching beard. His Staff radiated Power. I had studied Arcane Power but this was the first time I was able to sense it. The Staff was made of many intertwined branches, well, that is what it looked like. My internal scanners could not penetrate it. C100 was in the form of a jet black wolf, except he was impressively huge, about as big as one of my three Bridge Defensive Cat Shells.

Once we were moving I did a tight beam communication with C100 and asked for information on their mission. His reply was eloquent in its brevity. Locate an Emperor Wraith and destroy it before it destroys every living thing on the planet we were heading to. I was to teleport them both down once it made planet fall. I looked up Emperor Wraith in my data banks. Not a very nice entity to deal with, not nice at all.

A few things in the information were interesting as were the warnings. Do not fire energy weapons, Emperor Wraiths can feed off energy. Energy weapons make it stronger. Emperor Wraiths absorb any steady state energy fields including life force. The only known way to fight them was with micro bursts of energy at random, micro intervals. Recent success using microwave energy in a square wave had met with surprising success. It had taken an entire Dragon Wing, a Warrior contingent and anti Demon attack craft to kill just one of these things.

Being a science ship I started looking into the science of it all including the deliberations of The Builders. Fascinating stuff as I started to formulate a plan. It seemed to me to be a trifle silly to wait for the damn thing to make planet fall. There may just be another way to destroy it. I started a determined discussion with the Elf Lord and C100. It surprised me a little that they were open to any and all suggestions. We had a very long chat. One thing these creatures did not do is get too close to a star. They could not handle anything like a stars energy output. That was interesting.

We entered the destination star system with the Elf Lord safely seated in a control chair looking out of my front clear hull section. He immediately pointed in the direction I needed to go. His Arcane abilities picking up the Wraiths presence. I continued to make minor course changes until my own scanners located the entity. I closed to a reasonably safe distance and held that separation. We were close to the planets orbit. Then I launched my Fire Star.

A Fire Star is designed primarily as a planetary craft. It has FTL, but only a Warp Drive at level two, or one hundred times light speed. That is why it is carried by other ships.

Destroyers and Fire Stars have one problem in heavy combat, we are relatively small craft. Ressalon hull material has a number of functions one of which is energy storage. In battle I can use this stored energy to pack a punch much greater than my size would indicate. The down side is that these energy reserves do not last very long. One of our favorite tactics is to retreat into a stars corona using stacked energy absorption fields to augment our Conversion Generators. We can recharge via a star and it is quite fast.

My Fire Star approached the Emperor Wraith transmitting many recorded Telepathic signals with a nice juicy high energy force field in place. As it got danger close I veered off. The Wraith was fast, it had no mass, it was a creature of energy and could change direction with no effort. It enveloped the Fire Star feeding off the force field. A Fire Star can stack three shields simultaneously. I activated an outer absorption field, then an inner absorption field, trapping the Wraith between them. Then I killed the force field!

The Emperor Wraith hesitated while considering its next move. It did not like my absorption fields. I could exist for a reasonable time within a star's corona, he could not, my fields would hold him! They did not have to hold for long. I stacked an outer heavy force field usually used for atmospheric penetration. Next I activated the warp field, aimed the Fire Star at the suns center and applied all available energy to the drive. It maxed out at Warp two point six with all indicators in the red. Alarms sounded as the warp drive suffered critical overload. At warp two point six it did not take long. The outer absorption field held as the ship penetrated the stars mass. Three milliseconds later the Fire Star exploded taking the Emperor Wraith with it. My awareness was kicked back to the my Core in my Destroyer Hull.

Science Ships rock!

I relaxed and ran a systems check. The Elf Lord was ecstatic. Unexpectedly he did a little dance and had a great beaming smile. C100 was very impressed. I set a reciprocal course to return my guests to their home world. We all had a little celebration on the way. I sent of a mission report as did C100.

I almost had them home when I received a missive from C5. It was a simple question. Would I consider a permanent reassignment to The Forces of Balance? If so, I could add a /X to my designation. The request had been made by Prince Tez, in his capacity as The Keeper of Balance. He was mightily impressed by the two reports he had studied!

What, me? Consider a reassignment and be the ONLY Ressalon Sentient Ship so assigned. Oh, yes please! By the first hull, yes! Let me at this, please! This was the stuff dreams are made of. Now let someone make fun of my name! Well, no one ever had, but they wouldn't now even if they wanted to.

No one else had a /X.

P

Snuggly

May get a picture book going rofl

Thanks to snarky412

reply to post by pheonix358


LOL.

Cute.

Is this narrative continued elsewhere? Or Pending?

Love your writing.

reply to post by BO XIAN


I may make all of these stories into books but that would be in the future. At the moment Book 1 is out there, book 2 is in editing phase and book three is half way through. Books 4 and 5 are planned and outlined. After that I may just do these three.

P

reply to post by pheonix358


What a busy wolf you are!

How many proof readings to you achieve by how many editors re such things as misspellings, typos etc?

I know it gets tedious and we need several helpers, imho.

I forget how many I had--a few and my own multiple times.

One editor and many passes by me. Without a professional editor it is difficult and errors will get through, on the other hand they occur in all books. The object is to keep them to a minimum. Obviously spell check and grammar check help a lot but they do have limits. I think people are a little more forgiving in E-books as long as you have made an effort. You would need to sell lots of books before you could afford a professional and how does one know who is good and who just wants your money?

I do not have the answer to that.

P

reply to post by pheonix358


True. True.

I'm not per se a professional editor . . . but I sure have edited LOTS of student papers!

LOL.

Mercifully, I have 3-4 friends who indulge me. And, a couple of former colleagues--English profs at the college who help.

reply to post by BO XIAN


Rofl, lucky you! I have me, myself, I and my shadow and one student at University that does a damn good job as an Editor but it takes time due to other things such as exams and study. She is wonderful.

P

You are an amazing writer! Loved this!!!

a reply to: Night Star

Thank you Night Star. It seems that many did not for some reason. I am basing that on stars, flags and replies.

I will have to ponder why many did not seem to like it.

For me, it is an important question to answer. I prefer learning this way and it is difficult to get honest feedback when most want to be encouraging and polite. Of course I like those things too. But I have to find out what was missing. I think it may be the lack of emotions. Hmm.

P