The Unknowing War (Optimum Project sequel)

Chapter 1

Preparations

After three days of repairs and meetings we finally announced that the Alliance Titan was now in a state of war.

Preparations were underway for countermeasures against our opponents attack method, dubbed 'the drone net' due to its internal relay system. Pix was operating round the clock, constantly developing prototypes for fighters and possible face to face combat.

I walked into the titan's engineering bay, through a massive obstacle course of experimental machinery and engineers sprinting to an fro, constantly in the search for parts or other engineers of other specialties. I slipped into one of the private workrooms and sat in a metal rolling chair, opposite of the Titan's head engineer, Pix.

"So Pix, what'd you call me down here for exactly?" I asked nonchalantly, after all, nothing was really surprising to me anymore.

"Well, I want you on my engineering team." Pix said simply, his somewhat chubby face was buried in a tablet as he looked over design plans for what looked like The Dragon.

Ok, perhaps I could still be surprised,"but, I thought I was a fighter pilot, not an engineer."

Pix snorted and set the tablet aside, opting for a hologram projector he sets to display a design diagram of The Dragon just above the table.

"Look here," he points at a power distributor placed just behind the engines, which pulses yellow for a moment, "I believe you are acquainted with the issues this could cause being placed here."

I suddenly flashed back to the first battle against a drone net, after taking down a few of the enemy fighters I took damage to a point directly behind my engines, crippling my ship. I nodded, "yes, I am aware."

Pix nodded, "Now, we knew that putting the power distributor there could cause issues, energy loss, power fluctuations and failures, but we couldn't figure out where to place it other than there."

I nodded, "So what does that have to do with me becoming an engineer?"

He pointed at me, "An engineer and a pilot, you must be both if you're going to be what you are," he gestures to the bio-machine / AI that sits infused with my arm, called Tom.

"You would do well to remind him that I am one of the few reasons you remain alive." He quipped.

I rolled my eyes, "you are so full of it, I got along fine before I ended up being stuck with you."

Pix gave me a somewhat knowing look and answered my question, "we spent months working on a solution, but you, you came up with one in fifteen minutes."

He flicked his fingers and the distributor in the hologram exploded into tessellations, then, small micro machines flooded in and began constructing formations throughout the ship.

"We kept viewing the distributor as one device, mainly because we couldn't figure out how to take it apart and it still remain effective, and yet you came in and in fifteen minutes theorized and produced a solution by thinking outside the box; you broke the distributor up into component parts and placed them in the odd nooks and crannies between bits of the ship, had the nanites create loss-less transfer cables, and did it in such a way that general damage to any area wouldn't disable the ship." Pix sat back and began shaking his head, looking at me with a rather unsettling amount of admiration and pride.

"Thanks, but I have a question; if I'm to be a pilot and an engineer, how am I going to attribute training to both simultaneously? There are scheduling conflicts with that." I replied

Pix nodded, "you see, I thought about that; I have decided that I am going to give you either a device you must fix every week, a scenario and what you would do, or both with a limited set of resources to achieve the goal, Much like an independent study. You will be responsible for educating yourself in any skills that may be needed, and the engineering mainframe and any of the engineers not involved in the development of the scenario to educate you. Sound fair?"

I thought it over, "sounds fair to me."

Pix grinned, "good, good," he reached back into a cabinet and pulled out a drone net communications antenna and various signal jamming tools. "Your first assignment is to develop an operating signal jammer for Drone Net strikes, I have an antenna in my office sending signals to yours, you have 2 weeks to jam the signal." I accepted the parts and left the room, nodding to various engineers as they greeted me on my way out.

I had a lot of work to do.

-----------------------------A/N-------------------------
Ta-da! Told you there would be a sequel to the optimum project! I have no idea how often I'll be updating due to the fact that after writing the same story line, genre, theme, etc. you start to lose steam, as it were.

Also, as I consistently find that I can't locate pictures that accurately portray certain things online, I'm going to download unreal engine 3 so as to create my own character images, ships, etc, and make a custom cover for this book and "Project Mini". So who knows, maybe I'll build my own game for "The Optimum Project"!

It's all still in the "maybe" phase, but thanks anyway for your guy's amazing support.

-gmoney ;)

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