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Asina and I each had half an hour of putting out those routine little metaphorical fires that seem to sprout like magic when the boss is away even momentarily. Hers had to do with the supply of metals – both iron and aluminum – that our shipyards and plane assembly required in thousand ton lots. Taman, her assistant, was a good accountant who couldn’t be told we had access to more wealth than was apparent, and had tried to scale back or split an order of metal we needed immediately if not sooner. Mine had to do with a design issue on the proposed gunships. Makis understood why the main firepower had to sprout to one side, but Ghent, our liaison, was a former fighter pilot who wanted it all firing forward and tried to coerce a design change from him. I explained to Ghent for the seventeenth time that transports could keep one wing and therefore the guns aligned with it pointed at a target indefinitely, a feature that couldn’t be replicated for any forward firing weapons. Ghent may have had experience using fighters to strafe demonic legions; I had access to records from an Earth he didn’t know existed, and from the Empire as well, although Imperial tech was tens of thousands of years past anything Calmena could produce. We looted technology from pre-contact Earth because there was no living memory of Imperial equivalents and few designs for their production. The Swass-class transports that were the basic design were an almost exact copy of an Earth transport plane called a C-130 Hercules, and the gunships based upon them had been known as Spectres. I’d been told the new guns for them would be every bit as effective as the original Spectre.
Once the metaphorical brushfires were out, we retired to Asina’s office to play Sephia’s message on our datalinks. The basic message was what we’d expected – how Calmena was important to the upcoming war, how we were going to make an outsize difference to the outcome, how she knew we’d make her proud. The basic message was one she’d repeated over and over again in our time on Calmena, but it brought tears to our eyes hearing it from her mouth one more time, and we loved her for it. Her straight pale blonde pageboy cut was slightly longer than the last time we’d seen her – it wasn’t a recent recording. We checked the timestamp and it was almost ten years old. Asina had loved Sephia as a replacement for the mother she’d lost as a child. I wasn’t an orphan, but she’d become a beloved aunt, equal in my affections with TiaEsperanza and Tia Luz and TiaGrace. I made a point of copying the message to archive; I wanted to be able to play this message again someday, a cherished memory of a dear friend.
The message had an update – numbered twelve. Evidently one through eleven had been deleted. It was short and to the point. The Sephia in this message looked a little thinner, her hair a little shorter, and her face more determined. She spoke straight into the screen, bright blue eyes blazing defiance. “Joe, Asina, and the rest of you. They don’t want me to tell you yet, but if you’re seeing this, I’m beyond any discipline they might impose. Believe me when I tell you that right now your most important concern is ammunition for the weapons you have. Make what use of this information you can.”
The timestamp was three days old.
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