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“Really?” Park asked
interestedly. “Could be just what we need against the Dark Ships.”

“I doubt any one new weapon will
do the trick,” Ronnie shook her head, “but doing it this way we can work with
lower powered phasers and get more efficient results. We can fire them more
frequently too, although our phasers are already the fastest charging ones in
the Alliance. I need a bit of separation so the nose of the craft doesn’t get
in the way, however, and if I put the things out on the wings I’m afraid the
drag will cut down on lifting power.”

“They could be mounted in orbit,”
Park suggested. “That’s why I was asking about how often a carrier really
needed to launch.”

“Only as a final resort,” Ronnie
told him. “I think having the guns move out onto the wings after orbit is
achieved is going to be the solution, but Naeridore may be right about keeping
it simple.”

“It doesn’t sound any different
than having the landing wheels retract after takeoff,” Park pointed out, “or
deploying the missile racks just before battle.”

“True enough,” Ronnie admitted.
“Maybe I’m worried about nothing, but we’ll run the
 
tests with a model anyhow and see how it
goes.”

“Could the guns be stowed away
inside the bodies of the wings themselves?” Park asked.

“Unfortunately not,” Ronnie shook
her head. “There’s not enough room in there… Hmm… but there might be room
inside the body of the carrier. That would work. No extra drag on the body… oh
sure some added complexity in deployment, but as you said, no real difference
from the way we deploy the missile racks. The only consideration will be the
weight. Thanks, Park. What would you like to name the new ship class?”

“Excuse me?” Park asked,
surprised at the apparent change of subject.

“I’ve had the honor of naming all
the new prototype ships so far,” Ronnie explained. ‘I guess Arn figures that
since I’m inventing them, I get to name the first ship, but the novelty has
worn off. You may have just solved the launch problem for me, so why don’t you
name the ship, and of course the name of the first ship of any class determines
the name of the class itself.”

Park considered and decided,
“I’ll think about it. How many of these things do you plan to build?”

“One,” Ronnie laughed. “All the
rest will be fabricated in Questo.”

“Oh, yes,” Park smiled. “Of
course. As it happens I have another project for you.”

“I’m too busy,” Ronnie told him
seriously. “Ask again in a year or two.”

“You haven’t heard the request,”
Park pointed out.

“Park,” Ronnie responded. “Do you
have any idea how booked I am. Do you understand how long it takes to design a
new ship or weapon? I have seven or eight new projects going on here at a time
and as soon as one reaches fruition or gets junked as a no-go, two or three
more pop up to wait in the queue.”

“Your sensors are having trouble
seeing the Dark Ships now,” Park told her.

“What?” Ronnie almost screamed.
“How can that be? No, I shouldn’t be so surprised The Alliance ships always had
trouble detecting and targeting them. Tell me what happened.”

Park described the encounter and
what they did to follow the Dark Ship. “Fortunately their stealth capability
has no effect on the hyperspatial noise your method uses to track a ship,” Park
told her.

“Well, of course,” Ronnie shrugged
that aside. “How could it. No matter what you do on the visible spectrum, the
electromagnetic noise created by going into hyperspace would not be affected.
But… oh heck! Well, I think you came up with the solution, but it can’t have
been easy. I’ll see if we can make frequency modulation on our sensors more
easily adjusted. Seems to me that scanning on a broader band might help as well
in case they adjust again. If I knew just how they did it, I could make this
fool proof, maybe.”

“If we knew for certain how they
are doing it,” Park pointed out, “We would be doing the same thing.”

“Maybe we are,” Ronnie commented.
“I’ve incorporated everything I know about stealthing capability into the
material and shapes of my latest ships, this carrier and her fighters included.
What you don’t see here, because they are already in production are the new
single ships. They’re small but well-armed. I designed them mostly for
defending Pangaea in the atmosphere, but I wanted them to be able to chase
enemies at least to the moon. I also have a small three-man ship with a star drive
coming off the new line in Questo. I figure they’ll be excellent courier ships.
I figured, ‘Why send a large ship out just to drop off a few messages or
documents?’ They could also be used to ferry a passenger or two so long as
everyone was willing to sleep in shifts.”

“Good to know,” Park nodded.

“And they can dock with the new
carriers should push come to shove,” Ronnie added. “I designed the airlocks so
the larger fighters could dock for refueling and arming, although each one
takes up the space of two of the two-man ships, but about those Dark Ships. Send
me whatever logs and recordings you have of your encounter and I’ll see what I
can do.”

“One more thing,” Park pressed.

“Promise?” Ronnie asked.

“You have to get out more,” Park
told her. Her face hardened and he pushed on. “Even Arn is worried about you
and he doesn’t normally noticed these things. You used to have a tan, you know.
When was your last vacation?”

“Anytime I visit Questo is
vacation enough for me,” Ronnie replied. “Look, Park, I appreciate the concern,
but I’m doing what I love here. I don’t need time off, just more hours in the
day.”

“Maybe what you need is a day or
two each week when you can just sit on a hill somewhere and doodle new ideas on
a pad,” Park suggested. “It would get you out in the sun and I know you have a
good team here who can work without supervision for a day or two at a time.”

“How do you know that?” Ronnie
countered.

“I know you wouldn’t be working
with anyone who wasn’t good enough to work unsupervised,” Park laughed, “but I
also know that so long as you’re in the shop you’re going to be looking over everyone’s
shoulders. Give them some time to breathe even as you take the opportunity for
yourself.”

“Who’s been complaining?” Ronnie
asked suspiciously.

“No one I’m aware of,” Park
assured her. “Worried about you, yes; complaining, no. Or maybe we need to put
you on a ship as an engineer again for a trip or two.”

“I haven’t the time for that,”
Ronnie denied.

“It would give you the chance to
talk to other engineers and designers,” Park pointed out.

“Tempting, but if the Dark Ships
are back they’ll all be as busy as I am, but I’ll tell you what. I’ll try to
schedule one afternoon each week to inspect working ships at the port,” she
offered.

“That’s really just adding to
your workload,” Park told her, “but I’ll start with that. However, you are
ordered to attend all parties you are invited to.”

Ronnie blanched. “Park, that’s
not fair! Do you have any idea of how boring most of Arn’s get-togethers are?
Most everyone is a politician or thinks he is and all they want to talk about
are ways and means to get things accomplished in the city council. Why do you
think I resisted their attempt to take my research wing into the Van Winkletown
government?”

“Not the boring parties, I’m
sure,” Park replied.

“Avoiding those is just a perk,”
Ronnie admitted, “but they wanted to put me on the city council. Well,” she
reconsidered, “they thought that would be an inducement, but I could see they
really wanted to know what I’ve been up to down here and figured making R&D
a Van Winkletown department would make them privy to all the stuff we want to
keep hidden.”

“It could still have been
officially secret,” Park pointed out.

“Sure,” Ronnie argued. “Secret,
but known to everyone on the council, and they get re-elected every two years.
Three people can’t keep a secret and they number about thirty. And I guarantee
you that most of them will tell their spouses and girlfriends just to show off
and within a few weeks there wouldn’t be anyone in the colony who didn’t know
which wrench I picked up first in the morning.”

“I doubt Arn would have let them
co-opt your department,” Park commented.

 
“Technically they can’t anyway,” Ronnie told
him smugly.

“Why not?” Park asked. “Seems to
me a government can pass any law it likes.”

“Oh, they can create an R&D
department of their own, but this one is part of the Exploration Corps and that
organization is independent of the Van Winkle government. They even recognized
that in the new charter they passed a couple weeks ago.”

“I didn’t hear about that,” Park
noted. “Arn must be spoon-feeding me the changes.”

“There have been a lot of them,”
Ronnie shrugged. “But the drafters of the new charter didn’t try to include the
Exploration Corps in their new system of governance because there are more Mer
and Atackack in it than humans and the Mer, at least, would have protested on
behalf of their people. I’m surprised Arn didn’t mention it.”

“He’s probably just getting ready
for an early retirement,” Park commented.

“Early retirement, my butt!”
Ronnie laughed. “He’s running for president.”

“President?” Isn’t that a bit
high-falooting a title for the leader of a few thousand people?” Park asked.

“The new council wanted to call
Van Winkle a nation until Arn pointed out that it would alienate our allies.
Neither the Mer nor the Atackack think of themselves as sovereign nations. Not
in the same way we might. In some ways, each Mer city is a city-state, but they
all recognize Prime Terius as their ‘Prime of Primes.’”

“I know that,” Park nodded, “and
the Atackack have a vaguely tribal organization.”

“Very vague,” Ronnie nodded, “but
the Mer see us as another city-state although a special one as Terius is
willing to treat Arn as an equal so long as neither tries to give orders within
each other’s territory, which they don’t. The Atackack, respect us so long as
we respect them and that works too. Calling this a nation would have been like
building a wall between us.”

“That’s all we need,” Park shook
his head.

“Well, Arn did his best to squash
that, we’re still just a city,” Ronnie informed him, “but we’ll be a city with
a president. Seriously it’s just a fancy way to say ‘mayor’ and in some ways it
will make Arn sound like a prime among the other primes.”

“But the Mer don’t really take
their governments very seriously,” Park commented. “The Primes’ main jobs are
to organize those activities not accomplished by individuals, like their
aerospaceports, but they don’t have taxes to levy and they don’t have a budget.
Frankly, I don’t know how they manage to raise the money to build anything…
they don’t have money, except for the fees we all charge foreign ships to land
and that’s very new for the Mer and it’s not money any of us spend here on
Earth. The Mer have no problem with that; Alliance money is something we use
for Earth in general, but all the adult humans remember governments from the
old days. They were talking about taxes and laws even when Arn was still
running Van Winkle like a military outpost.”

“I think Arn can keep the council
in line,” Ronnie shrugged.

“Arn can,” Park nodded, “but what
about the next man or woman who gets elected? For that matter just who does
this new government consider to be citizens?”

“Anyone who is an established
resident in Van Winkle,” Ronnie replied.

“I guess that’s fair,” Park
admitted. “I was afraid they were going to claim all humans. That would have
included Bill Bolger and his philosophers at the Homestead, not to mention the
various folks who have moved to Questo and other Mer cities. In turn, that
would have infringed on the way the Mer view their own system of governance.”

“So Arn insisted as well,” Ronnie
told him. “You should read the new charter for yourself, though and then make
up your mind. When you get right down to it, it doesn’t really establish much
that wasn’t already the way we were doing things.”

“I’m not going to be comfortable
with a bunch like that being able to pass laws,” Park commented. We didn’t have
any real lawyers and politicians in the project, but I don’t imagine these
amateurs are going to do things any better.”

“Well, you might like this,”
Ronnie chuckled. “Our neo-politicians draw no salary and any expenses they
incur come out of their own pockets. At the moment we don’t really have any
more money than the Mer do, but if and when we do, these guys are going to be
real hesitant to pass a law that needs police to enforce it because the cost
will be on them.”

“I wonder how long that will
last,” Park commented. “It’s a government. Eventually, it will want to be in
charge of everything.”

“But it won’t get its hands on
the Exploration Corps,” Ronnie smiled. “We’re officially a joint venture by all
the peoples of Earth and under no one’s control but our own, and you are in
charge.”

“I’m an international leader?”
Park wondered.

“You have been for a long time,”
Ronnie laughed.

“That’s a hell of a thing for an
anarchist.”

Park still thought of concluding
a telephonic call as “hanging up,” even when it was a holographic call via his
torc. “Well, I had almost a whole day before the first crisis,” he told Iris
the next evening in their living room.

“Crisis?” she asked, not showing
a much concern as the word might have deserved.

“I’ve been away for almost two
years and somehow everyone did their jobs just fine in my absence. Now all of a
sudden no one can make a move without my say-so. That call was from John Minns
at the spaceport. They want to upgrade the sensors and communications
equipment.”