Van Tudor and his family. That’s what the crew of the *Fafnir* have become plus he’s added a lot of other people to that family. They are now truly a family since both Van with Torina and Icky with Paxomar now have children. Van has built the Nexus on Earth and it is now a galactic trading hub bringing in ships from anywhere in the galaxy to do business with Earth. And business is booming. They had to heavily defend the Nexus from the Equal Grasp and that would include a family bunker where the children and their parents reside when on Earth. Of course they still use the old farm house for meetings and stuff, but the Nexus has become the focus of their operations on Earth.
Everything seems to be going very well, except for the constant threat of Calamity. Calamity, what ever it is, has seemly infected various machines or computer driven objects and made them go haywire often endangering the humans that work with these machines. Perry, Netty-P and Netty have tried to develop protection protocols against Calamity, but they can’t actually protect every computer system on Earth. Fortunately, the large majority of computers and even Artificial Intelligence systems on Earth are too primitive for Calamity to infect and control. Van’s crew are still finding the remnants of the Equal Grasp and rooting them out as they go. They did locate a hidden satellite used by the Equal Grasp and Yotov. This satellite was very stealthy and was also very heavily armed.
So, they went to decommission that dangerous weapon system only to find it occupied by a very nearly dead human. It was also controlled by three AIs that were definitely not of human origin. The human was actually placed there to make the final decisions on when to fire the weapons, but fortunately, they were never used. When the Equal Grasp lost to Van Tudor, they definitely forgot about this lone human and he had ran out of supplies a while ago so he was in bad shape.
When Perry and Netty-P took control of the AI in the satellite, they found out that they didn’t actually want to do the job as directed by the Equal Grasp. They wanted to join Van’s movement to straighten out the galaxy. Van was OK with that, but he didn’t like calling these entities AI’s. He wanted to call them Created Persons and that would include Perry, Netty-P and even Netty. Van had always include these entities as living beings and treated them as people. So, that’s what they would call them and their kind from now on.
Then Funboy came to Van to talk to him about Gabby. Gabby was Vruk which was a race that didn’t normally mix with other races. Gabby was the exception and she had become a valuable member of Van’s crew. Gabby could cook so that’s what she mostly did aboard the Fafnir, but Gabby also had the uncanny ability to plan and organize vast projects. Van currently had her as the Director of the Nexus where she was masterfully coordinating all the shipping activities of the sight. But, as Funboy told Van, Gabby was very, very sick. It turns out she needs something and she needs it immediately. So, that’s the next project that the entire crew gets involved in. They will save Gabby one way or another.
Van is building a pretty large empire. The Quite Room, aka galactic bank, has been funding his efforts so far. They are making some money on the Nexus, but he knows the Quiet Room wants to know what their long-term returns on their investments will be. The Quiet Room has done some analytics on Van Tudors efforts and the results point to the strong possibility that Van and his efforts as they are now, will not result in success and could result in galaxy-wide chaos! So, Van has to do something different and something that places him and his crew and those that follow him in a position to influence not just Earth, but the entire galaxy!
The end of this book comes quickly and, if I am honest, a little anticlimactic. What he does can’t just stop at this point so we’re definitely going to see more in the next book, “Fist of Orion”, available o/a 19 January 2025.