The Blockade, and other things

Assembling the forces
With the success of the blockade in their hands the travellers considered what to do first. The trade routes all went through Wildeman, so that was selected as the base of operations for Slayed. They would need trusted captains like Krrsh and Jaggad to take control in other key systems, as well as needing some of their own ships. That meant they would first go to the Space Station.

Before they left they were visited by Tipper who was still working for GeDeCo. He told them he was expecting that the Empress was going to need to move quickly to shore up her borders, and that there would be resources made available to them - in a logistics sense - from GeDeCo. After all, they wanted Drinax to prosper. This meant that Slayed and the others could use their forces to enforce the blockade and not worry about supplies and the movement of people.

They also contacted the representatives of the systems that had joined the empire and advised them of what they would be doing, and collected pledges of ships and support from all. Rendezvous points and numbers of ships were agreed, and a network or couriers to keep everyone informed of what was happening was established.

Space Station Surprises
Arriving at the Space Station they were met by Goff who advised them that aside from one small matter the station was, as of the day before, fully operational. The small matter was the science labs that housed their own computers, and which again needed Ducal clearance.

Entering the codes the research computer started up and after a moment, in which it seemed to be getting its bearings, it greeted them. Like the other computer it had no memory of what it had been doing before it shut down, but did have access to all research material that had been stored in it.

Intrigued to know what was being worked on, Slayed instructed the computer to produce the most progressed research - material that was in prototype or production state - so that they could see what might be possible to use. Professor Cheese was brought into the room, and after he calmed down from the excitement he got to work with Slayed sifting through and interpreting the information.

Researched seemed to have been focused on propulsion and drives, weapons, medicine, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Cheese informed them that the medical breakthroughs that were being worked on here were now common place, although it was interesting that Sindal had been at the forefront. The psychological outputs, mostly to do with maintaining sanity while stuck in a space ship for very extended periods of time were somewhat esoteric and could not easily be adopted and used. 

The other three were more promising. The weapons research was into turret-mounted meson weapons. These would ignore armour and radiation shielding, whilst themselves doing a lot of damage and radiation. Putting these into practice was going to be problematic given the resources on the space station as only early prototypes had been developed.

The artificial intelligence work seemed in part to have been built into the station already. Certainly the ALF system, as well as the research computer, were more advanced than anything the party had encountered before, although they had not been in advanced research labs where these things might be most useful. The research papers made it clear that it would be possible to clone ALF if they needed to, although the computer for that would be excruciatingly expensive.

That left the propulsion research, which was sufficiently progressed that blueprints for an early production version were in the research computer. If the war had gone on for a few more months then this new drive may have been able to sway the tide of battle.

Making things
With the station up and functional Goff wanted to know if they should start building anything in the shipyards. He was against making trade goods to sell as that would arouse suspicions, although selling some raw material left over from mining would be innocuous enough.

The party considered what they had learned and decided to make a ship that would use the new propulsion system. The plans seemed to suggest a limit of 200 tons so they decided to make something that would look like a normal yacht. As it was unproven they put in a jump-1 drive in case they needed to get out of trouble. With that they put collectors, which were slow but would collect enough fuel for a jump within a week. The ship would have a little armour and some hidden turrets, as well as some modifications to the hull. It would look like a yacht, but that was about it. It was a high performance test platform.

Wildeman 
With the ship started they instructed their ships to move to Wildeman and neighbouring systems to enforce the blockade. When they arrived they found that the system defense boats were complete, and the carrier ship was returning from delivering the first one. The other two would be delivered in the coming weeks. Slayed again took some of the profits from selling trade goods, although it was noted that this was starting to draw unwanted attention and that stopping the trade might be wise. Making more SDB carriers should be their focus for the time being.

The blockade
Over the coming months forces were secretly put in place so as to not tip off anyone, and when the time came to block trade, it was almost completely successful. A couple of systems proved troublesome but within 4 months they had completed the blockade and were confident that short of an imperial or aslan taskforce it would hold. They returned to Drinax to inform Empress Rao.

When they returned to Drinax with the news Rao was overjoyed. She had worried that it might take a lot longer, and at the cost of many more lives than had been lost, to enforce the blockade.

As a reward Rao gave Slayed a small box that had been held in the vaults of the Scholars Tower. She had instructed that all resources be brought to bear and there were some interesting items now being used. This device had its own power source and contained within it a full map of the known galaxy. It was up to date even though it was hundreds or thousands of years old and could therefore be used to help with astrogation checks. It was also possible to zoom in to planets and moons and see, somewhat fuzzily in places, the surface features. Where he device had been was much clearer for some hours afterwards, which suggested it was also scanning its surroundings although that could not be detected.

Rao declared that she expected that the blockade would need to be held for about two months while the imperium and aslan created delegations to come to Drinax and negotiate terms. The party took this opportunity to return to the space station where Goff informed them that due to complications with the prototype drive the build was taking twice as long as expected. The yacht would not be ready for another three months.

With Rao telling them to be back on Drinax within two months for negotiations, and the prototype ship not ready, the party considered what to do next.

To be continued.