While we know there’s a FTL comm service in the CU, we don’t know its name (or I managed to totally miss it!)

So I’ll open the silly thing up to suggestions as I sometimes lack imagination on such things.

Best I’d come up with was:

FTL One – Your best (and only) way to get a message to cross the stars!
(short of putting a note in a bottle and having it shipped to its final destination …)

((yes, I found a FF one I liked for the new one going in – any guesses?))


Okay, current thoughts on a chapter:

It’s Always the Finer Details That Get You in the End

“The word is out,” the female cheetah morph stated at Neal’s question. “In ensuring that they couldn’t block their FTL services you gave away our network.”

“Do we know just what exactly happened?” Neal asked with a frown.

“We know they started at one endpoint to reload and regain control of their network relays. And it was working just fine as the ones you reprogrammed were willing to talk to either network. Then they took down a hub connecting several legs …”

“And ours stepped in,” Neal guessed.

“And confused the hell out of them,” she agreed. “Just the leg they’d ‘fixed’ stayed down – all the others quickly reconnected without their hub. Then when they got their hub back online only the reprogrammed leg wanted to talk to it; the other legs seeing it as a much more restricted connection than the one they were already attached to.”

“Were they able to reestablish their connections?”

“Only after we deliberately degraded our links,” she admitted. “They’ve officially whined to the Federation council, who didn’t know anything about it, but is now looking into matters. I understand that when they tried whining to Star Fleet; it was pointed out just how dismal their system has been the past few decades, and that Star Fleet was finding the new network much more useful than the old one.”

“Damn,” Neal muttered. “It was bound to happen sooner or later, I was just hoping for later.”

She snorted lightly before saying, “Concerned parties talked it over and opened the network fully. No advertising as yet, but it’s there to be found – though some of the connections will warn of the limited bandwidth they currently have to work with.”

“And I wasn’t a concerned party?” Neal wondered.

“I understand you were busy cutting off a few Rakshan tails and feeding them to their owners,” she pointed out. “Not that the word wasn’t already spreading after you gave Star Fleet the codes to use our network.”

“Thoughts?”

“We’ll try and speed up the deployments where we can. This won’t be the ‘Tada!’ opening we had originally planned on, but it might actually be more interesting to watch the cascades of discovery as people trip over it and then tell their friends. Speaking of tripping over it, an acquaintance of mine that’s not involved in any of our projects inadvertently sent me the perfect advertisement – when we get to that stage.”

~~~

The scene was someone’s large room, and it cut in and out several times as a small raccoon morph played with recording controls, and an adult could be seen with their back to the camera chopping something in the kitchen area.

“Mom, can I call Grandma?” the child half begged her mother.

“I’m sorry baby, but you know we can’t reach her from here.”

“Can I try?”

“Sure, baby. Select Comm on the console and hit the Go button. There’s a local connection and there would be an FTL option.” Barely heard by the system was the mutterings of, “As if Quad-da-crap would ever extend their network out this far.”

“FTL option says Frontier Fantasy FTL!” the child told her.

“Yeah, that’d be a good name for our link if we could get one out here,” the adult was heard to chuckle without turning around. “Then you’d have to find and select the station Grandma’s on and key in her code.”

There was a minute of silently watching the comical faces made by the young when absorbed in a difficult task.

“It’s calling!” the child finally exclaimed.

“Sure it is, baby.”

An insert opened, showing a very confused looking older raccoon.

“Hi, Grandma!” the child cheerfully yelled out just as her mother started to move the pot of whatever she’d been chopping.

“Sunspot? – How? …” and the mother was now spinning around in astonishment on hearing the new voice – the pot hitting the floor with a muted clunk.

“Missed you, Grandma,” the child was saying as the two older raccoons simply stared back at each other in shock.

~~~

Neal smiled as the scene faded. “Yeah, the old ‘but we know that that’s impossible’ look.”

“Which you seem to like to generate at every chance,” the cheetah morph growled through a grin.


“Alright, we’ll see how it goes,” Neal agreed. “Bet on it picking up faster on those planets that we had a hand in helping set up their local comm network.”