Mortal Protection Services Chapter 49: XII.TD: The Diltipositor

XII.TD: The Diltipositor Jimantha Jimsonson Aboard the Sapphic Asemia. The Scourge cut the comm line... apparently the fighting within itself had become far worse than Marta had realized. "So that was Dilt, right? Not just his voice." Ingamar said from his seat on his bridge. He looked like shit. He hadn't slept properly for two days. I probably looked just as bad, because neither had I. Leia looked worse... She'd been crying her eyes out. She was currently 'asleep' at her station, head down, though I was starting to think she was actually asleep asleep, because she didn't react at all to her dad's voice over the comm from the scourge. Luke didn't have his comm line open, but last I saw him onscreen he'd completely stopped crying, and just looked mad . In truth, no one in the family had really slept since Dilt did his surprise suicide run, at least not well. Except, of course, Mafdet. Her Majesty , our high matriarch, had been hanging around in real space on one ship or another. Mostly she napped, but she was providing emotional support none the less. She showed up right after Dilt's subspace pop blew out poor Ensign Yoto's eardrum. Don't worry it was fixed quickly, but seeing that pretty little man hurt... well I didn't like it one bit. Anyhow, I pet the dozing Mafdet in my lap, and replied to my brother, "He used coded language, too. Told us to have 'Frodo's hero' open up. That's the SAMWISE, surely, but where does he want us to open it?" We decided the best thing we could do was to meet all the flesh masses we were tracking that were coming our way at the edge of the next star system over, where it seemed the scourge was reinforcing its border. If it wanted to have a pitched-battle in a single star system, well, the Children of Sol would oblige that request. Our fleet had grown. No longer just the Amish Papacies and Sapphic Asemia, now we had a proper fleet, and I'm not just talking about the IGBTYOT and the thousand something dinoships. The FAP and Earth both sent massive reinforcement through portal central station to our beachhead. The Earth actually sent two fleets. One government, one mercenary. Headed up by the Throngler and the Jim's Revenge respectively. The Blasty-Mc-Bang-Pew was the flagship over five thousand other ships from the FAP. Some were small, some were large, some were actually older versions of the Blasty that they'd retrofitted with modern weapons and taken out of mothballs. The FAP had gone whole hog, delivering everything they had in a single massive burst of production and political will. The Earth and her worlds had done likewise, though fielding only a thousand ship between the two fleets. I got the feeling the Earth fleets were worth more than the FAP fleet in the coming battle. Needless to say, our fleet was no longer a surgical strike force designed for cold war black ops. Instead we were a full blown 'defense' force, ready to fight the entire fucking Scourge at once in one of its star systems. We spent another day in flight. We got some medically induced better sleep, fucking doctors. Well, all of us except maybe Luke, since his crew was all {Math Formula} and {Math Formula} types, the other PMS students. Damn androids don't sleep. I couldn't get {Math Formula} - the XO over there - to promise me anything more than a hot coco and a bedtime story about dinosaurs for his captain. So, most of us were better rested as we planned our operation. "Any idea where Dilt wants us to open the SAMWISE portal?" I pulled up the tactical holo-map and stared at it a moment. There were some gargantuan subspace wakes headed our way. I stared at the map a while longer, nothing hopped out to me as some sorta X marks the spot. "No idea, but there's whole hell of a lot of mass, very obviously coming our way to play. Maybe we should destroy that first, and then worry about what Dilt wanted." Ingamar sighed. "Fine. I could do with a little violence. Probably make us all feel better to kill something. And besides, mayb