Brute Forcing It

Three months later.

Ayaka and Captain Marinakis were in the captain’s ready room on the Farsight, attending a virtual meeting with the task force’s leadership. Things had settled into a routine, and the meetings had gone from daily, to weekly, and now this was the second monthly meeting they were holding. Nothing of any note had yet been accomplished; the situation remained unchanged.

“We’re still functioning on skeleton crews to reduce resource consumption. Even though we have the replicators, our problem with the algae in the feedstock tanks remains unsolved, but we’re still working on it and should have a solution soon,” the fleet’s head of logistics reported.

For the past six weeks, the crews of the ships had been rotating in and out of VR training simulations, with only skeleton crews maintaining the ships in reality. The initial mission planning had called for restocking their algae tanks and supplementing them with organic compounds from asteroids in Proxima Centauri and on the