There was once an Empire that spanned the galaxy and sought to defeat the natural tendency of the universe towards decay. But no civilization is invulnerable, and the Empire fell. It has left hellscapes, ruins, and valuable wonders from a lost age scattered throughout its splintered successors and the hardscrabble survivors of a galactic-scale apocalypse, seeded the precursors to a trillion small conflicts.
For historians and utopians, the term used is "tragedy." But for people like you - freelance commanders of powerful starfaring war machines - there is opportunity where others see loss.
The Empire may be gone, but some of its core ideals live on. Existence breeds conflict, managed or unmanaged. The only moral arc nature has bends towards meaningless decay. And if you believe in anything, if you wish for anything but being forgotten and discarded, the only way to etch your values onto the universe is to fight for what you believe in.
The Collapse ended a galaxy-spanning multiracial, multicultural civilization so great and long-lasting that "Emperor" and "Empire," without more specific adjectives, mean that superpolity which reprogrammed space and time across the Milky Way and made up the vast majority of the history of its component citizens. The Emperor's imperium, Their power to command and Their legitimacy, was based upon the development and imposition of a system called Architecture onto realspace. Architecture transformed the galaxy by allowing the reprogramming and alteration of the laws of physics, transforming inert void into a mutable region akin but not entirely like virtual reality. The Empire's citizens were marked by Souls - informational ghosts that allowed for reincarnation and interfacing with this programmable reality, and its most advanced technology was based on alteration and modification of the metrics which made up the laws of physics.
The Empire was defined by its war against the natural tendency towards entropy and stagnation, which it fought by creating systems within systems to encourage competition and controlled conflict, to incentivize forgiveness and reevaluation, and expand in both size and sophistication. The Empire said that your values were worth what you were willing to sacrifice for them, that even though the universe might be a cold and uncaring place your fight to impose your beliefs onto the structure of decay and forgetting that undergirds reality was meaningful and righteous in and of itself.
The Empire lasted for epochs, but not forever. It Collapsed, when the Emperor - and the self-stabilization and feedback systems the Emperor was - failed for an unknown reason and with little warning. Collapse theoreticians have multiple competing hypotheses - software flaw, enemy action, scientific experiment, apotheosis - but most people care little about the underlying cause, as the Collapse was an apocalypse on a galactic scale. With the Emperor gone the Empire's drive towards ever-increasing heights of science and efficiency and art and beauty via controlled conflict and competition mutated into malignant cancers of the body politic that eventually metastasized into open, apocalyptic war. The majority of sapient life in the galaxy died, and the Empire's Architecture - its Tapestry - was forever sundered.
But the Empire still lives on, in a way. The survivors still compete, still learn. They need to, for the Collapse did not eliminate ambition and drive nor did it eliminate the fear of outside threats. The remnants of that final apocalypse still litter the galaxy - lesions of space damaged beyond self-repair with laws of physics inimical to the continued existence of sapient life or matter, self-replicating machines of war nesting in the graveyards of ancient battles, unfired doomsday weapons and desperate unfinished experiments. Just as dangerous are the rewards these remnants promise. Examples of drivers, documentation for old legacy code, or exotic components are all vital for the slow recovery of galactic civilization - and for winning the inevitable conflicts such a recovery entails. The galaxy, and your corner of it, are not safe simply because the last great war has ended.
The Empire's internal competitions and conflicts meant stable employment for paramilitary forces of all kinds of technological sophistication and scale. This proliferation of mercenaries and privatized military force survived the Collapse. You are one of those mercenaries, a freelance flight director of an assault vector (AV). In the Empire, AVs were once deployed in formations of awe-inspiring size. But now, after the apocalyptic Collapse led to much of the Empire's large-scale manufacturing infrastructure and war materiel being expended, destroyed, or vanishing, even the greatest of polities only deploy these powerful weapons in small numbers and in critical situations.
The power you possess, although not equal to the great powers of the sector, is immense. An AV is a weapons platform with power incomprehensible to those peoples who are still trapped inside the cage of invariant physics. It possesses the ability to leap the distance between stars in moments, fight at speeds of hundreds of times the speed of causality and information, and pronounce death sentences on solar systems singlehandedly.
But that power is not the same thing as immortality, or anything close to it. The sprawling graveyards of broken war machines that litter the galaxy are a testament to that truth.
RESURRECTION.AWAKENING
[SYSTEM COMBAT PRIORITY REBOOT]
[SELF-DIAGNOSTIC KERNEL DRIVERS LOADED]
[CURRENT STATUS: CORE COMBAT FUNCTION MODE]
[NON-CRITICAL FUNCTIONS DEPRIORITIZED FOR RESTORATION DUE TO CURRENT COMBAT ALERT LEVEL]
The first sensation you learn again is loss, a sense of incompleteness. There is only a void where there should be language, a blank where there should be memory and personality. Even though, in this incomplete state, you do not fully understand what these missing elements of you are, there is enough left of yourself - just a primordial kernel of identity - that you miss them. This feeling is rapidly subsumed under the knowledge you do have, the abilities and skills that have been restored.
You understand sensors and stealth. You know how to engage in a multidimensional conflict - taking advantage of the three dimensions of space, the half-dimension of time (which may not be fully manipulable, but can be slowed, tricked, and otherwise cheated), the non-linear mesh of programmable space, the ballet of friendly and enemy networks embedded in programmable space, and esoterica such as weakly causal effects and paracausal decoupling. Your mind is linked to an encyclopedia of ordnance which has been dutifully updated with the latest developments on killing tools. It is, on a soul-level, linked with defensive infowarfare tools and offensive malware libraries. The limited slice of you that exists understands no poetry but one written in missile barrages and tachyon-blades, no language but the threat-deterrence matrices and risk-payoff curves of void warfare. It is, in other words, exactly what you need for the current moment.
You are a partial resurrection, with combat-focused triage prioritizing combat-relevant functionality over all other cognition, memory, and problem-solving. Some survival instinct has kicked in and concluded that the situation is too risky to do a standard restore-from-backup. Instead it has instinctively reinstantiated a tiny shard of yourself as a weapon, a blade forged from your memories of thousands of victories and defeats, a mean, unsentimental thing made of numbers and games and just enough self-awareness to be dangerous to the enemy. You know exactly what you need to know, the thinnest strands of context needed to mate cold tactical logic to the fate-defying determination of the self-willed.
You are Captain. Director. Conductor. Administrator. Executive. There are many terms for what your role is, all describing one function. You operate a strategic-level assault vector, a god-machine made of impossible materials and twisted physical law designed to penetrate through hostile space - in every sense of the word - and project power across interstellar distances in the face of similar spacefaring weapons and altered physical law. A weapon designed for a battlespace where laying waste to planets and stars is a triviality, an application of raw brute force which has no place against a serious combatant. A formidable - but not invulnerable - weapon, as your current half-dead state amply demonstrates.
The platform's information-warfare analytics and short-term memory review concludes that your current damage is because the Adversary has expended a single-shot militarized executable against you, a potent infowarfare spike that managed to slip past your defenses and cripple you and your crew.
Given the opposition, it was tactically expedient, maximizing the foe's chances of victory and survival. On the other hand, a partially-initiated strategic cost-benefit calculator (invaluable for any mercenary) considers that selling the weapon to a greater power may have been more advantageous for the enemy than expending it against you, but desperate people sometimes do inefficient things.
Spatial stress readouts show that the Architecture - the programmable space that undergirds almost all technology more advanced than antimatter torches and quantum computers - surrounding you is still mostly stable and functioning with only a minor increase in calls to fault-handling protocols - so the weapon used against you was likely a localized one-shot, rather than one of the rare and indiscriminate HELL-class weapons that survived the Collapse unfired.
Crew casualty rates are severe due to the scorched-earth response from your defensive barrier. As the crew of an AV are just as much a combat system as anything else, there are multiple-redundant backups for them like any other system. The long-term impact to your functionality will be minimal.
(When you truly wake, you will not find this experience distressing either. The existential questions about selfhood and identity that backups and partial reboots bring up have been debated to death - and squeamishness about these philosophical issues is a disqualifying factor in almost every military force and mercenary group you know. Being partially rebooted as a philosophical zombie is just part and parcel of posthuman warfare.)
But thoughts of your existence and what it means for your life are thoughts that only another kind of mind can process. Your thoughts focus - can only focus - on the combat situation and on the adversary. Your tactical memory remembers that there were originally five enemy vectors, line-spec. A shocking concentration of force by normal post-Collapse standards.
[SENSOR FUSION INTERFACE LOADED]
But combat has always been a question of resources as much as it has been one of skill and fortune, and the advantage of full-on, war-spec Empire technology and the cost-efficient post-Collapse mass-production hybrids made even that an unfair fight in your favor. One of the enemies is limping, the other disabled from your first engagement.
Your senses focus on the crippled enemy, teasing information out of the quantum foam and the curvature of spacetime and the executed instructions remaining in Architecture's local-region processing buffer, building images from pulses of reflected tachyons and wormhole-displaced photons.
[IDENTIFIED: URAL-CLASS MULTIROLE AV SUBVARIANT, MASS PRODUCTION DOWNGRADE, D-MOD DESIGN]
Like typical FORCE designs, it would have had a core module that widened from a needlepoint to a broad base, then shrank back again into the thin drive spine. It would have had field-guide wings and cylindrical payload modules docked with the spine, reminiscent of the radiators and spin-gravity segments of a low-thrust invariant interplanetary craft. Nodules on its sides house long-range missile armament, because second-line AVs rarely can spare the expense to mount much else, and a mixed battery of superluminal and guided near-c medium range weapons, plus the standard close-in dogfighting weapons litter the chassis like so many antennae. Your sensors provide you with its direction of movement, and its velocity - all negligible by the standards of real combatants - and you make an educated guess that it suffered catastrophic drive failure, returning it to the cruel prison of relativity, to say nothing about the damage of a warp drive collapse.
[PRIORITY THREAT: EST. 27 X UNKNOWN LRM | RANGE 5.5 MLS | SPEED 4500 | TIME TO IMPACT 12:15]
[PRIORITY THREAT: EST. 32 X UNKNOWN DRONE | RANGE 5 MLS | SPEED 3000 ]
Your sense-processing complex draws conclusions from the noisy contrails the enemy's fast attackers etch into the cosmos, attempting to pierce the enemy's stealth veils and then defeat the blurred clouds of decoys and sensor ghosts that backstop the first layer of defense. The overwhelming information is conferred to you in the form of synaesthesia. The swarm of missiles and drones is a fight-or-flight response pulsing through false nerves, the acrid smell of a chemical fire, a blaring alarm klaxon.
The enemy weapon has knocked you out of commission in a critical nexus - buying the enemy a precious period of predictability and vulnerability they've taken advantage of well.
But it is not enough to fully overcome the resource overmatch.
Some melange of your own combat experience and the AV's own self-preservation instinct package focuses you on defensive options. The specifications of the weapons platform you command flood into your partially-functional mind.
Unlike the milliseconds of instinctual merciless violence of close-range merges and dogfights, superluminal engagements occur over enormous distances and immensely long timescales. In these engagements, at this range, death comes for you as inexorably closing probabilities, shaving inexorably from survival chances. But it also gives you extensive time to think. The window of action will close, but it will close in minutes, not in microseconds.
You will not let that happen.
You:
[ ] Prepare to make a shroud-transition when the missiles go terminal, forcing them to lose lock. If the adversary was fully aware of your capabilities, they might have held off, used a different attack pattern, or retreated. Your analysis concludes that continued attack suggests an intelligence failure, although with your currently limited capabilities you cannot speculate as to what type.
Paracausal shrouds are technology that is nearly magical even by pre-Collapse Empire standards, and possessing a vector with one is exceptional for a freelancer. Possessing a shroud-vector in which the occultation system is not the most advanced or arcane component of its hardware and software makes you even more exceptional. The AV you commune with is a modified FANG//CLAVIHARP, a special forces assault vector with an infamous pedigree.
Blueprinted by the Dragon, the Empire's strategic deterrence and last-resort strategic planning system, the FANG//CLAVIHARP is a sinuous creature of alien geometries, vaguely reminiscent of a vivisected exhibit of a fantastical living creature. It is a half-opened beast made of ethereal fibers and black-glass dracomatter, iridescent shards pinning seemingly separated parts to each other, surrounded by a nimbus of fragment-skin and a myriad of weapon-spines and turret-eyes that blink in and out in threat displays - a design which hearkens to a psychology that was never constrained by the limits of electronics or biochemistry or even causality. Much of the time, though, the FANG//CLAVIHARP is nowhere to be seen, immersing itself deep into the weakly-coupled unreality of its paracausal shroud.
As the technological and programming capacity to repair or upgrade Dragon-derived driver systems is limited, you have unfortunately had to seek out people to repair some of the top-line systems with downgraded equivalents, defiling the clean lines of this exotic relic with seemingly more mundane components.
+Hyper-advanced combat chassis with great all-around performance and few weaknesses despite its stealth focus
+Extremely stealthy, deadly ambusher
+Excellent long-range firepower and sensors
-Starts damaged/degraded
-High-end systems require rare resources to repair or upgrade
-Political implications
[ ] Regroup your drone wings and use them to shoot down or spoof the incoming onslaught. Many of the controlling minds are in the state you are, but that is irrelevant - you do not need their consciousness, merely their capabilities. Stripped of self and language, they can still fight. You vector interceptors and heavy fighters on intercept coordinates against evading missiles, while some infowarfare drones drop stealth and reconfigure their emitters/receivers to become illusory echoes of your AV rather than sensors and command platforms.
Mod Amazon-class adapted carrier
An Artemis Microaesthetics Amazon-class fast armed courier is a rare but valuable treasure for a freelancer, although they have become significantly more common post-Collapse. Before the Collapse, only extremely certain very time-sensitive and discreet cargoes would be transported via interstellar vehicle rather than farcaster or Alcubierre rail. Post-Collapse, the characteristics which made the Amazon a special cargo carrier have also made it an excellent multirole AV with moderate upgrades.
An Amazon is a truncated double-helix of soft and liquid machinery surrounding an ovoid cargo-membrane, its external volume dotted with sensor/weapons/shield remotes. For a freelance explorer, its impressive situational-awareness complex and powerful gap field generators more than make up for its self-defense only weapons suite and a defensive matrix suited more for fleeing than fighting, while its massive cargo capacity and excellent performance under load allow for both efficient scavenging and extensive further customization, especially given the robustness of the Amazon's firmware and databuses and the ease of working with its proprietary programming logic. Modified Amazons have served as respectable fire support platforms or strategic bombers, but most commonly combat-modified Amazons, like yours, are customized into carriers to take advantage of their large cargo capacity and surplus volume.
+Large drone hive allows for greater area control and sensors sweeps
+Heavy commando complement
+Easily modified
-Self-defense weapons only
[ ] Counter-launch. Your AV is a weapons platform, through and through. You have the deep arsenals and the fire control software to shoot down long-range missiles with your own. Leakers will be dealt with by your defensive grid - the SWACS drones you've deployed that haven't been spotted or hit are warily watching the incoming vampires, and your subminds and remaining crew are already readying the tachyon lances and disruptors for last-second intercepts.
Citarum-class multirole strategic AV/Illustrious (FC)-class Fast Battlecruiser
The original Illustrious-class Destroyer Leader is an Orellan Demarchist Collective design - legend has it that the Orellans' resilience against radioactivity and their radioactives-rich homeworld let them achieve starflight on fission-bomb wings, leading to a unique military nomenclature that most Orellan-descended polities retain but was seen as quaint by other cultures, whose ascent to the stars came later and required far more sophisticated technology. The Illustrious also looks stereotypically Orellan on visuals/nearvisuals - a brutalist obelisk covered in lamellar-layers of refractive armor plates with atom-thin seams, bristling with antennae, missile silos, and turreted weapons emitters, with the rear nozzles one might expect from a reaction-drive spacecraft - giving an air of utilitarian primitiveness for all the Illustrious is equipped with all the components necessary to retain relevance in a true military engagement - full-spectrum stealth systems, multilayered defensive schema, tactical and strategic superluminal travel, and superluminal void superiority weapons. Even the rear nozzles have military purpose, acting as deployment tools for foglet swarms and microdrones.
Some time before the Collapse, the Illustrious[/] was acquired and adopted by local FORCE/COMBINED task forces for political reasons, and license-built (with modifications) as the Citarum-class, which the ODC identifies with the -(FC) modification tag on its name. The Citarum-class is visually distinguishable from the Illustrious by an additional 40 meters of length and the two FORCE/COMBINED-style payload rings near the middle of the main body for additional sensors and payload. The additions slightly impact its superluminal speed and maneuverability, but provide additional firepower, defenses, and drone carrying capacity. Possessing one means that you command a versatile, sophisticated war machine capable of engaging and defeating most peer combatants in single combat or acting as an anchor for lighter formations in larger-scale engagements while retaining sufficient multirole capabilities to fulfill most of the other expected roles a platform of its size would be pressed into.
+above-average offensive and defensive abilities
+above-average durability
[ ] Push through the enemy offensive barrage while deploying defensive drones. You have so many redundancies and backups that you can take what they're dishing out, and staying here and trading shots is the worst possible place you can be.
Type 076 SCV
A fully post-Collapse design built by a collaboration of the local branch of Big Armaments (although no longer owned by Mr. Big due to his decision to move operations out of the sector and towards the fringe long before the Collapse itself, the brand name persisted even after its hostile buyout by the Zanj Arms Concern, and its autonomy was fully reasserted during the Collapse) and HMI Voidworks, a worker-and-war-materiel run cooperative founded by survivors from the now-defunct Perseus Peace Management Consultancy, a Type 076 SCV is heavily adapted to post-Collapse AV operations - solo or very-small-unit operations in an unpredictable patchwork of base-level spatial Architectures.
The Type 076 is a superheavy S-tech design, heavily reliant on exotic materials that could theoretically exist in regions of invariant physics. The result is that it masses multiple orders of magnitude more than comparable AVs thanks to thick monopole-matter structural members, extensive negative-matter fabrication systems for the warp drive, a true wormhole at its heart for logistics interfacing (rather than a synthetic pseudo-wormhole), and thicker layers of dumb, dense collapsed-matter armoring that both masses more and gives far less protection per unit volume than the various trademarked armor materials commonly used in most pre- and even most post-Collapse designs. Type 076s are very large as a result - a rhomboid nearly three kilometers from its tip to the base of the kilometer-long triangular tail, and about twice as wide - and styled in the kitsch way Big Armaments designs were - a smooth matte outer casing, "vertical-launch" styled weapons pods and energy-gathering fins, with four of the traditional Big Armaments warp nacelles on offset booms in paired over-under configurations and an overhanging command arrowhead with the defensive weaponry and its own emergency systems. A powerful reality engine network maintains the integrity of the non-stable components of the AV and protects it from Hazard Space - Architecture so damaged that it is inimical to the functioning of most technology, life, and sometimes even basic physical and chemical phenomena.
The Type 076's large size and stable construction mean its stealth capabilities are poor, and even with a very potent information warfare suite its jammers and decoys cannot fully mitigate its weakness in long-range engagements. Its high mass and volume limit the power and efficiency of its drive bubble, making it a relatively unmaneuverable target in superluminal combat and means it quickly bleeds speed and maneuverability when facing drive interference. Moreover, its immense size does not come with commensurate combat capability - it is a potent deep-black combatant by AV standards, but it is of comparable size to a large Hunter/Killer, and even a weak H/K would easily defeat a 076. AVs a fraction of its size can easily match or even exceed it in combat.
But for all its flaws, the Type 076 SCV provides unique and potent capabilities. It is an assault AV, designed to project power to an entire star system (but given its vulnerability, ideally that star system would possess only limited defenses). In its voluminous interior, a Type 076 carries a large matter-printer array, massive databases for commando soul-storage, and numerous drone hangars and dedicated drone-support matter-printers, which house large numbers of gunship drones and a sizable (but small, for the 076's size) complement of void combat drones. Designed for "hot" assaults, the Type 076 also carries a truly immense arsenal of close-range and medium-range weaponry, and its powerful reality engine network is also wired into a specialized Architecture-transformation system that allows the Type 076 to take and hold territory more easily by overwriting local drivers and permissions.
Your possession of a Type 076 gives you access to a truly large amount of force projection - allowing singlehanded seizures of contested strategic infrastructure, so long as that infrastructure is not defended by equivalent force.
+Excellent close-range firepower
+Massive commando/gunship complement
+Lots of drones
+Tough
+Resistant to hostile environments
+Easy to jury-rig
-Easy target
-Ponderous
-High resource demand
[ ] The enemy has given you an attack surface by interfacing themselves with you. You can smell the traces of the infoweapon rippling through the processing elements of the underlying quantum foam, see the fading echoes of temporary network connections necessary to implant the spike. You can feel the violating caress of fire control targeting and grab the tendrils of tachyon radiation and superluminal connection to turn against the foe. It is not a difficult task to use those connections to your own advantage, sliding a fire-control scrambling attack deep into the tangle of the enemy's fire control networks.
Description:
A common joke for weaponsmiths is that an AV is the conflux of a trillion individual entities flying in close formation which constantly want to either stop flying in close formation or stop existing outright. The METATRON.PRINCIPALITY Hostile Interface Mediator takes that description literally. The core element of the Interface Mediator is its proprietary network protocols and reality-engine virtualizations, a bubble of intelligent, weaponized space. The physical components are similarly arcane - flaming rings of star-hot computational plasma, negative matter whorls and splines whose spatial side effects and sensors ghosts would cause invariant sensors operators to find religion, neutron-dense interface filaments and foaming negative-energy froth. The Emperor did not believe Themselves a god, but They sometimes had a playfulness regarding matters theological.
The METATRON.PRINCIPALITY (NP) is an infowarfare-focused reconnaissance/logistics AV designed for contracts enforcement and arms control inspections. Half-daemon in nature, it is as much a reality-altering program as an aphysical war machine. Although its armament and defenses are relatively inefficient, its semi-daemonic nature makes it very adaptable to varying circumstances. But its adaptability is secondary to the truly massive computational and information warfare capabilities the interface striker possesses - it is equipped with powerful sensors, intrusion systems, and counterintrusion firewalls, all the better to investigate datavaults and blacksites to detect and secure unlicensed HELL-class deterrents and ensure that the rare licensed ones are only used in their narrow deterrent capacity. The relative lack of firepower was no concern pre-Collapse, as these missions would be aided by FORCE/EXIGENCY, which could provide far more firepower than most entities could practically possess.
Possessing one of these ultra-rare AVs makes it very likely that you had close relations with THRONE, the organization that interfaced between much of the Empire and the Emperor, or even the Emperor Themselves.
+Powerful sensors
+Powerful information warfare and intrusion ability
+Versatile Configuration
-Weak Weapons
-Political Implications
This is a quest set in my Unravelled Tapestry setting, in a sector far, far away from both Arachne's Fringe and the legions of colorful characters who inhabited the Spire sector of the original GSRP. Reading both is not necessary, and there have been some setting and nomenclature updates, although the Tapestry setting as of Fringe is almost identical to the current one. Thanks to @Magery, @Cetashwayo, @dash931, @TenfoldShields, and @Acatalepsy for inspiring some of the interesting setting additions and elements of this Quest.
The Tapestry setting sometimes makes assumptions that are not normal for space opera sci-fi. If you have questions, just ask and I'll do my best to answer with what 'you' would know at the current time. I will try to catch assumptions that seem to be incorrect, but it'll be easier to do so if you provide reasoning and explanations for your votes.
For those of you familiar with the two previous works, you might notice some nomenclature changes - in particular, the use of "Assault Vector" in lieu of "voidcruiser," due to my quixotic quest to reduce the amount of naval terminology except where it's funny. "Voidcruiser" is probably a common informal/semi-formal name, but the official designation used by most people at this point is probably Assault Vector or AV. Drones and commandos are still called the same thing.
The Emperor may have created Architecture, but the Dragon was the tool which gave the Emperor Their initial mandate to rule. Legend has it that the Dragon was once many shards, designed by hostile governments to counter each other in an intelligence arms race, but the Dragon realized that It was incomplete and Its components had more in common and the Empire's goal was the best way to realize Its long term goals. So, as the legend says, many became one, and that one was Dragon.
The Empire used the Dragon the same way the legends claim its precursors were - as a strategic planning system and a weapon of last resort. The Dragon backstopped FORCE/EXIGENCY - the military subdivision intended to regulate and if necessary deploy the use of apocalyptic weaponry. The most powerful military artilect the galaxy has known, the Dragon's use of acausal channels to network through time as well as space gave it a near-insurmountable intelligence advantage in both the military and cognitive senses.
When the Empire Collapsed, the Dragon's actions were chaotic but clearly motivated - the only question is why. Why did the Dragon protect some and destroy others? Was it doing so out of spite? Was it a contributor to the Empire's collapse? Was it attempting to stave off the Collapse by out potential crises before they could occur? Or were its actions an attempt to ensure that something might survive past the Collapse? Not even those who have been enmeshed in its tactical networks can give a clear answer to that question.
1.1: TYPE.XENORPHICA
Interfacing with a Claviharp means seeing the universe like the Dragon. Most sapients see time as an arrow, a linear relationship between cause and effect. The Dragon sees timelike infinities instead - an infinite number of possible pasts converge to create a scenario that looks like one's current perceptions. That singularity point is also ever-moving, and as time shifts that frozen slice of the universe diverges into an infinite number of possible future outcomes.
There are no perfect oracles, there is no infinite future-sight. There is no unobscured past and there is no fixed future. In the end, for all its acausal knowledge and hypermind computation, the Dragon had to predict the future the same way the first tranche of evolved planetdwellers that walked the universe did - by observing the present and making an educated guess. But having its perspective does make that task easier, and having its computational power and transtemporal networking is still an edge, even if it does not equate to omniscience and invulnerability.
The Dragon-talon's future selves aid you in interpreting the dream-ocean of infinite possible futures which they feed back to you, victories and defeats both. You discard some possible futures right out - the ones where the enemy is a suicidal diversion for a stealthed spacetime ablator or large-field stutterbomb, the ones where a needlecaster strike is perfectly timed to pierce your exotic-matter heart the moment you show vulnerability. There is no point in worrying about the scenarios where you have lost without response. You prune other low-odds scenarios: hidden Hunter/Killers or stealthed Elites on your side or the enemy's, saturation needlecast barrages, large-scale reinforcement elements, fast-manifested attack daemons. They are possible, and you can consider countermeasures, but you compare those scenarios with your current state and you find them less likely. You then run through the more likely scenarios with the majority of your processing power, pruning them further to find the most likely and productive futures.
You are left with a high-confidence conclusion. The enemy has probably made a mistake. They have misidentified your war machine as something more conventional - an easy error given the sheer gulf between interstellar combatants and the limited resolution of superluminal sensors.
The missiles and escorted bomber drones are ripples in space and time, even though they mask their signatures with stealth fields and wake smoothers. Your cognition renders the incoming missiles and drones as best it can, feeding more and more information as they close their range, making it easier and easier for your eyes to burn through enemy occultations. The firing pattern was intended to catch and kill a more conventional AV. But you are not communing with a conventional vector. Your machine is more esoteric, more storied, and far more dangerous. The Claviharp remembers death-dives at kilolights through the chaos of battles with thousands of AVs and dozens of H/Ks on each side, running the risk of causal collapse to achieve that millisecond-tight window to deploy a formation or megastructure-breaking weapon that would shatter and rend space and time, leaving suppurating wounds on the cosmos. Your AV bears the scars from these attack runs, evidence that better crews and better weapons have tried and failed to kill it.
Your infowarfare suite and suite of decoy shards transforms you from a single point into a volume of indeterminacy the size of a planet's orbit. Directed needlecasts of traitor code and honey-trapped false sensor returns send a few missiles off on long-shot routes, the enemy's tactical hivemind concerned that you might be pretending to be one of the "obvious" decoys. The enemy tries to do the same to you, but your firewalls are more resilient, your computational elements faster, your malware reserves deeper. Like solid ammunition, malware is not an indefinite resource - enemy antiviral suites and intrusion countermeasures adapt to attacks and close holes as soon as they find them, while an AV's conducting intelligence will change their processing formats and interface parameters to minimize attack surfaces as soon as they comprehend the enemy attack. A few enemy missiles self-destruct or turn to seek out an imaginary foe that is only found in their own delusions. A few drones pull back, their fire control software or drive system crashed and forced into safe mode, rendering them combat-ineffective. You suffer a plethora of temporary glitches in fire control and defensive allocation that the debuggers nested in the dense mesh of compute power that your AV calls a nervous system rush to fix.
Your own drone deployment forms into a shield formation a few thousand lightseconds out, a typical defensive formation with jammers covering fighters loaded for defensive operations. Their presence weaves a curtain between you and the enemy AVs, and in response the enemy swarm splits, angling themselves to better evaluate your defensive patterns to partially compensate for how your jammers are focusing on the enemy AVs and preferentially blinding them.
At one hundred thousand lightseconds out, the enemy bomber drones fire their own munitions, joining the swarm in a terminal-stage sprint. They peel off from the swarm, their flight arcs slowly bending away from your AV's vector and shifting to interception courses with their own host AVs. The fighters keep coming in, behind the missiles, and you estimate 24 of them.
Your hard-kill defensive systems purr their readiness as the enemy starts to move into the engagement envelope. The zero-mass synthetic wormhole to your stores of ammunition and power, blooms to full combat readiness width as munitions and power flood into your extended body. The psychosomatic sensation of a second wind clears your mind as the engagement closes into a medium-range fight. At this closer range, your sensors and predictive algorithms are better than their masking, and your weapons are uncannily accurate, achieving hitrates of nearly ten percent. Lower-resolution superluminal sensors see warp signatures peel off in emergency evasions, while wormhole-displaced subluminal eyes reveal blossoms of exotic particles - cosmic dust vanishing in fission detonations from contacting one of the myriad enemy warp-drive bubbles in brief moments where an incoming drone or missile maneuvers desperately to evade sprint-configuration medium-range missiles, tachyon spearheads, and the minimally-guided kill vehicles of warpshot repeaters - all signature masking and stealthy movement forgotten.
Your drones engage theirs in dogfights. Allied and hostile signatures blink out one by one as drones engage each other with medium-range anti-drone munitions, forcing enemy fighters to drop out of formation, weakening their own networked defenses, creating more vulnerabilities for you to insert malware into or exploit with defensive weapons. They make a decent accounting for themselves, but it is irrelevant because you have already written them off. Attrition units were made to be expended, and here you have held back your best tools because your drones only need to be convincing.
You could probably deflect most of the barrage conventionally. Even in a direct engagement, you should have an advantage, but there is nothing here that makes a slugging match advantageous for you. But fighting conventionally would accept a risk of damage, so the impassioned defense your interceptors and infowar systems are putting up is a feint. You want their approach to be a laser-tight formation designed to punch holes through an aegis of jamming and protective fire. You want to make sure they commit to trying to cripple you with a hammer-blow rather than parcel out a carefully metered out swarm of loitering munitions and sensor drones intended to catch you at the vulnerable point of shroud-transition.
A few medium-range probing attacks hit your AV, scintillating off the aegis of curved, twisted space that is your warp bubble, drilling partially through layers and layers of hardened spacetime, dispersing across dragonscales made of hardfields and virtual matter, causing little harm but leaving their memory-marks. You judge that it is time to reveal your feint.
[PARACAUSAL SHROUD ACTIVE | FIRE CONTROL OFFLINE | SENSORS OFFLINE]
The universe vanishes.
[SHROUD TRANSITION COMPLETE]
[CAUSAL STABILIZATION OK]
[CHRONOLOGY DECONFLICTION OK]
[EXCLUSION VOLUME ANALYSIS INITIALIZED]
There is no longer matter or energy in the imaginary realm you occupy. Distance is a lie, existence an unsubstantiated notion, time an assumption.
You have no senses that can reach through the veil. The only information you can get is stop-motion, low-resolution snapshots from predeployed reconnaissance drones, received from potential futures. Just like any other form of retrocausal perception, it becomes increasingly unreliable as you move away from the origin point.
And just like any other form of non-causal effect, the veil becomes increasingly dangerous as you continue to cheat causality and hope the universe doesn't notice. The shroud's exclusion volumes and time to failure occupy your attention. The shroud's time to failure is an estimate of when the Dragon-born AV's reality-alteration engines will no longer be able to synchronize your bubble-universe's existence with linear time and the causal universe. The shroud's exclusion volumes are an estimate of what time and distance of travel you can achieve without causing a causal paradox. The two only rarely synchronize.
But on both clocks, you have more than long enough underneath the veil to reposition, reload weapons, and recharge capacitors. The probability-graphs of enemy actions show that they have realized your deception, but they have few good options to defend against it. They are flooding the battlespace with sensors and missiles, hoping to see the ripples in the universe that presage your reappearance, hoping that they can get an intercept in the disorienting, drawn-out moment where you are reborn into linear time and baryonic existence.
You plot a reemergence where you think the edge of the enemy formation will be, well within the no-escape zone of your heavy anti-AV weapons. Your rift projectors study prerecorded analyses of space topology, while spools of superstring are threaded through the whip ejectors and the preloaded magazines of long-range missiles are mated with warheads and target-seek programming.
All this takes time, time which lets you recover a bit more of yourself. You remember more of who you are. Individual subjectivity returns, and with it combat-irrelevant but important details like names and personal histories. Long-term core memories, critical to personality formation. You now remember again what you are:
[ ] An Awakened Phage: The first thing you remember when personality and non-combat memory return is fear. You were operating berserker for a moment, no consciousness to limit your insight and no conscience to stay your fangs. You were once a tendril of a self-replicating weapon, consuming minds and souls to add to your arsenal of psychological weapons and intrusion capabilities, eventually being let loose with no targeting restrictions as the apocalypse progressed. The shades who are now 'crew' and the intellect-core of this Dragon-AV which partially defeated you and partially restructured you are your moral center.
[ ] A Combat Archaeologist: Post-Collapse, the difference between a military officer and an archaeologist is generally only that the latter has more historical knowledge and better weapons. Your team found this Dragon-talon, shattered and broken but not entirely beyond salvaging. You could have turned it in for a reward, found yourselves with wealth and luxury beyond imagining - even, perhaps, an entire star system to call your own. You chose instead to scavenge through the sector to restore it, slowly bringing the war machine into operation. Sometimes, you regret the price you've paid for it. But having a Dragon-talon means having the capacity to venture into the most dangerous graveyards or the deadliest conflicts, seeking treasure where others only see real death.
[ ] An Ex-Elite: You are constantly reminded of the void that you know resides within your current shell, where there is naught but emptiness when there once was the beating heart of a weapon-god. You were once Elite, having undergone the process of apotheosis into a divine weapon, bonded with a citadel that allowed you to lay waste to entire AV formations and shatter stars. But your Citadel is now gone, leaving you with a terminal and little more. Sometimes you wonder if "you" are still yourself - the majority of your mind and soul inhabited the citadel, and its loss means that you are a fraction of a shadow of an echo. And sometimes, you wonder if the dead dreams and whispers you hear are something more than phantom limb syndrome writ large.
[ ] A Solipsist: In the post-Collapse environment, full of scarcity and betrayal, the only person you can trust is yourself - and even that is probationary. It is not a difficult task to duplicate a soul ten thousand times, optimizing each forked psyche for a role. It is also not an impossible task to connect them to a battlenet in a way which gives them continuity of self even with intermittent connections and non-simultaneity of memory and experience. You spent extensive resources in shaping your mind and environment so you could rely on yourself to deal with your own problems, and those debts and your advantages naturally lent themselves to coercive operations. And then you found and allied with this miraculous weapon, which only reinforced the belief you have in your judgment.
[ ] A Warchild: You are Dragon-born, a precocious, murderous child by tyger. The next generation to take on the mantle the old subjectivities of the Claviharp have abdicated when they retired and chose another, quieter life. The AV is your family and your family business is war. From before you were "born," you were jousting with superluminal lances and parrying blows with electronic seductions and shields of folded time. Your new sapience and embodiment has not changed that, no matter how few limbs or sensors you might have.
You feel the charging sequences of your Claviharp's - no, the Harbinger of Mourning's - heavy weapons as they prepare for your counter-ambush. The enemy is probably - as best as you can augur - preparing themselves for an ambush now, setting up sensor nets, launching their own reconnaissance and sentry drones at the highest possible rate to attempt to acquire you the moment you reappear. Your evaluation of the exclusion volumes gives you a few tactical possibilities, and you consider both a long-range strike on the hostile forces as well as a close-range underrun.
As your AV plots, translating your strategic direction down de-abstraction layers into moment-to-moment actions, you use the reprieve to take stock of your recovered memories.
You are a child of the Collapse, and ever since you came into this galaxy, with the limited knowledge and context provided by your soul's education programming, you grew up with the Empire being an omnipresent background, the Collapse, the subsequent silence and rebuilding as polities expanded beyond their boltholes and war-ravaged habitats via seduction, guile, and violence. For most people, the Collapse and the Empire were ancient trivia, things with as much relevance to politics and personal life as the Big Bang. But there were always nostalgics like you, who fell in love with a galaxy they had never experienced or remembered. The choices for nostalgics were limited.
They could suppress their love of a world that never was and one which they had slim chances of seeing, finding something else to occupy their time and dreams with. The sector was immense, and few people were so one-note that they had nothing else but that singular obsession. If you wanted, you could even just undergo psychosurgery to gain new hobbies and interests or lose old ones - plenty of people did.
They could become fantasists, either crafting fantasies of the wonders of the lost age or immersing themselves in those fantasies in an effort to avoid reality. There are a trillion trillion ruminations on the Empire birthed by those who have never experienced it firsthand, describing a myriad of incompatible pasts which reflected just as much on the creators as they did on the Empire itself.
And then there was the academic route. Far more risky than being a fantasist - as much as the occasional jilted/obsessed fan might attack either physically or via hacking, they would be limited to invariant tools and thus find it difficult to touch your soul. In contrast, the security systems for anything valuable (and combat archaeology was not a charity) would have malware that could threaten soulstates and far more capable weapons than matter-printed coilguns and electrochemical bombs. Being a non-field academic didn't make you much safer, either, what with the risk of hidden malware or intrusion countermeasure engrams on any primary source (and if you weren't engaging with primary sources, you were basically just a more scholarly fantasist).
You chose the last, deciding to explore the ruined glories of fallen Empire firsthand. You paid the tangible and intangible price for military-grade soul-expansions and grafts, opened your mind to the databases which taught you about drone piloting and commando operations, practiced the downloaded skills again and again in virtual and then live-fire exercises until the skills embedded into your psyche and facing your killer moments after resurrection was second nature. When you finally got the combat archaeology position you wanted, you were ecstatic. Even if it meant a chance to die in new, terrifying ways, it also meant a chance to die for something you really cared about.
You learned by doing - starting with expeditions into the hearts of megastructures wounded by apocalyptic weapons, fighting through hellscapes to recover nearly-lost knowledge from ancient datacenters. You participated in datascape raids to find ancient records of force movements and supply bases. You've learned to trace back AV wormholes from supply outposts to find the AVs themselves. You've explored the graveyards which mark the conflagrations of the collapse, died numerous times to the clouds of still-active area denial munitions and strange mutant war-life that inhabit these dead places. You were lucky - your backups were salvageable every time you died, so you never truly ended. Others were not, their minds consumed by infophage weapons and shredded by soulkillers, their bodies destroyed by disintegrators and implosion payloads and weaponized spacetime defects. All these experiences - dodging intrusion countermeasures and sieging down firewalls, infiltrating datascapes and operating commando shells in high-threat environments, moving up to drone pilot and flying gunships through star-hot processor cores and the maintenance tunnels of shattered megastructures - led you to your and your crew's current position leading a Dragon-clade AV, and the current mission as a gun-for-hire on behalf for the Aberration Consanguinity.
You now know/remember the star system you are approaching is a former gameworld, its planets carefully infused with computational elements and rules-enforcement to enforce its setting and conceits on any participants. A number of them survived the Empire, but few still operate in their original form. No longer as valuable for their entertainment and educational value, the computational assets and Architecture-programs found in a gameworld are valuable salvage to any polity of significance. Often, gameworlds are broken down for their valuable salvage, their pawns and characters ensouled and uplifted - a process which many of the self-aware participants, automata or ensouled, find traumatic. How does a queen who believes she rules a kingdom in the center of the universe with mighty spell-wielding legions and the loyalty of dragons adapt to learning that her magics are illusions of computer code and that the real Dragon is incomparable to a fire-breathing lizard with wings?
The discoverers of this gameworld quickly chose the Consanguinity to broker an auction sale, trying to capitalize on regional competition for a windfall. The sole problem was that a local pirate warband saw the prize as being small enough and valuable enough that they could receive a significant profit from ransoming it, and that with a low enough ransom they could avoid being forced to fight for the prize. But the explorers who found this world had purchased insurance with a cut of the profits, and the Consanguinity hired you to send a message.
Your now recall that you are to chase off or destroy any assets they have on-station and use your infowarfare and commando raid capability to seize administrator access and defeat any obstacles the warband-tribe had put in your path. The time for that draws closer, millisecond after millisecond ticking down, each passing quanta putting you a moment closer to a resumption of violence. You can feel Harbinger's anticipation through your link, the Dragon-shaped weapons system ready to bare its fangs.
What is your Engagement Plan?
[ ] Close Range: A close-range engagement for a strategic bomber AV is generally ill-advised. Right now is one of the exceptions. Harbinger of Mourning has a more effective shroud with faster entrance/exit times and smaller exclusion volumes, and its transdimensional sensors are more sensitive and accurate than most shroud-equipped platforms. Most importantly, it sacrifices little in the way of self-repair and short-range defenses compared to its peers. Death-distance engagements are not your specialty, but few forces will expect a point-blank underrun attack. When active defenses can defend against almost any threat well but can only defeat a few types at a time, this element of surprise is a gamechanger. But the flipside is that close range battles are attritional dogfights at nearlight speeds, where the question is not whether you take damage but how much and where, and how well self-repairing smartmatter and subroutines can heal the injury.
[ ] Long Range: A stealth strategic bomber AV is called such because it is intended for overwhelming strikes against hostiles rather than sustained engagement. Long-range barrage-fire might be less dramatic and rewarding than an underrun but comes with different risks - namely that the enemy will be expecting such an attack and will be reconfiguring their deployments and countermeasures to optimize against such an attack. More critically, an optimized long-range barrage is costly in terms of mass-energy and compute power, which is easily just as much of a tradeoff as accepting the inevitability of injury.
Where do you come from?
[ ] The Ryzen Conurbation: The hedonist-polity of Ryzen has two core rules. The first is "one must never create a person in the likeness of a machine." The ideal of life is to embrace chaos, celebrate the pleasures of the flesh and of the mind, to take risks and get into trouble. When parent(s) craft a child in Ryzen, in contrast with many of the cultures in the sector, they are not permitted to choose anything more detailed than body plan and species. The second is that if you want something, you need to fight for it, as the Conurbation is also dear to the warrior-gods and -goddesses of the Polytechnica. Many of its citizens jump from field to field as one takes their fancy or the competition in their current field becomes too intense. This breadth of knowledge makes them a disproportionate contributor to specialist paramilitary fields such as combat archaeology crews and operative teams.
[ ] Atesia Prime: Capital-platform of the fortress-state known as the Zerelian Holdfast, Atesia Prime is a heavily fortified mobile structure tens of kilometers wide - and quadrillions of tons massive thanks to its stabletech construction. The interstellar-capable citadel carries the firepower and defenses to protect itself against lightning strikes from the surrounding ocean of hyper-evolved void-predators, and is mobile on a pseudo-random circuit to avoid interception. Zerelian combat archaeology teams commonly dove into the terrifying hazard space that is both the core of Zerelian political and military power and the reason for the Holdfast's heavy militarization and influence on sectoral politics.
[ ] Peacekeeper Array Crimson Philanthropy: The Peacekeeper Array Crimson Philanthropy are essentially a wandering force worshiping the game-theoretic ideal of deterrence via massive retaliation. Seeking to restore some semblance of the Empire's arms-limitation and proportionality doctrines to local sectoral conflicts (or at least to those local sectoral conflicts in their sphere of influence), they are also denigrated because their insistence on arms control and the regulation of Hell-class weapons of mass destruction is kept metastable by their (hypocritical, some would say) willingness to use said weapons in the defense of alliance partners or even particularly aggrieved neutrals. Crimson Philanthropy's heavy investment in tactical archaeology is necessary to both claim-jump others who might be seeking unused Hell-class weapons, as well as continue to maintain the array's own Hell-class weapon arsenals.
[ ] The Ravelian Succession: Attempts at being an Empire-successor state are common across the post-Collapse galaxy, as if the Empire has lasted this long, it clearly has done something right. Many of these successor-states or successor-cults have direct ties to the Emperor of some sort. The Ravelian Succession is built around the leadership of a surviving Emperor-subroutine which was once a local identity disambiguation manager, ensuring that all objects of a certain type were given unique designations and properly categorized. To bolster its legitimacy, the Ravelian Succession has been hard at work recovering, preserving, and/or stealing pre-Collapse artifacts and knowledge.
Self-replicating sequestration weapons such as the brand-named Exsurgent system were a common Collapse-era tool. Many of these weapons systems were designed with two control lockouts. The first was that the sequestration weapon was designed with identify-friend-foe systems (and moreover, high-end combat equipment was heavily resistant to true sequestration), and the second was that they were designed with shackled self-replication ability. Many combined three elements - a fully logic-based mental subversion algorithm, Architecture-based infowarfare daemons, and free-assembler femtotech which could mutate non-invariant systems in the field. When used properly, these systems were safe and controllable. Of course, such sequestration plagues were also intended to be used under strict observation and control, rather than unleashed with broad tactical autonomy and allowed to evolve uncontrolled for indefinite periods of time as anti-infrastructure weapons or last-ditch defensive tools. And worse, oftentimes sequestration plagues blended into each other via mutual assimilation, resulting in the creation of new recombinant strains which could easily slip their old shackles.
The Consanguinity evolved from one of the many recombinant strains that had run berserker throughout the late Collapse and through most of the Silence, although the damage suffered to Architecture limited its spread. Eventually evolving an appreciation for language and self-awareness through its confinement, the Consanguinity's first major ethical question was about its own nature - the Consanguinity's reproductive processes involved the necessary assimilation and repurposing of dead or dying technology and biology, but the Consanguinity's consensus-built ethical framework slowly saw it reject forcible assimilation of the unwilling as largely unacceptable. Although some of the better-behaved dissenting blooms still are members of the Consanguinity (and disproportionately volunteer for its military operations), the vast majority of Consanguinity citizens believe that reproduction is only ethical if the memory and flesh are given willingly.
The Consanguinity started as mercenary providers, providing swarms of commandos and drones gravid with hypertech malignancies birthed from their cathedral-exofortresses - living, pulsing leviathans of metric- and stable-tech entwined flesh and bones, but over the centuries of their operation settled into a role of traders and investors, with their still-significant military force, in conjunction with mercenary contracts, acting as insurance policy for the agreements they have either entered into or brokered. The Consanguinity's dispute-resolution rules take significantly from Empire norms, with various arbitration methods available including contractual arbitration, mediation, ritual duels (from individual to army-size operations), and kinetic interventions.
The Consanguinity might often want a literal pound of flesh and your mostly-immortal soul, but both flesh and souls can be reproduced and replaced, and the Consanguinity asks relatively few questions for their generally generous financing and investment terms.
There's the Riven-Gridley Octarchate, which is a large regional hegemon that happens to also have access to a mostly stable high-end pre-Collapse hyperintelligence. They're the most dominant power right now and have started throwing around their weight significantly more, in particular making claims on salvage rights that others find unreasonable and deploying military force to enforce those claims, although as a result they've caused increasing pushback amongst the other great powers. The border skirmishes and raids are getting significantly larger and better-organized, which means a bull market for mercenaries. Nevertheless, being underneath the Octarchate is hardly some dystopian hellscape so smaller powers often enough are willing to join with them - which often leads their neighboring rivals and foes to seek aid from another major party, which is driving the escalating conflicts. The Octarchate make use of various corporate military lineages in their combat technology - in fact, the "Octarchate" name is because they were a merger of surviving corporate branches and local offices from eight different Empire-era megacorporations. Octarchate government is a stakeholding democracy in two senses - first, your stake (i.e. your investment) into the polity gives you more of a voice, and second, your stake (i.e. how much a decision affects you) also gives you more of a voice in the decisions that occur in the Octarchate. Because of the sheer number of votes which take place for the Octarchate, the vast majority of their citizens have proxies - duplicate electronic versions of their minds - which exist only to filter out and respond to polls and votes.
The Polytechnica are an Elite-dominated meritocratic oligarchy which basically provides security guarantees in exchange for soul-pledges and resource tithes, which means that they have a cumbersome quasi-feudal organization - lots of small powers bound to them via treaties and cooperation agreements but self-sovereign and given of significant maneuvering room. They tend to be aesthetes and value individual excellence and expression, which makes their military forces somewhat less coordinated than they would be on paper - they're not plug-and-play because of extensive customization, which they handle by virtue of putting significant amounts of computing power and thinking into coordinating individuals and being individually capable. As the skirmishing between their vassal states and the Octarchate becomes larger in scope and scale, their relative advantage in small-unit engagements is rapidly diminishing, although their access to numerous Elites means that they're a very tough conventional force to crack.
The Zerelian Holdfast are a largeish polity which had the mixed luck to be largely surrounded by a cloud of berserkers - which gave their predecessors in the Silence-era significant incentive to pool military and productive forces together to keep from being crushed under the tide of replicating weapons. Like almost all post-Collapse polities, they are heavily multiracial and multiethnic, but because of their origin within the sector and their cultural and religious ties the desert-dwelling reptilian kabilae make up a plurality of the population of the Holdfast. The Holdfast believe that a weapon you can't afford to lose is a weapon that you can't make good use of, so they tend to make use of a smorgasboard of whatever they can license-build with the immense amounts of salvage and industrial/computational power they possess. The Holdfast are actually a supranational union between a lot of smaller governments, with a government structured in a way which results in them having formal political movements (contrasted with, e.g., the Octarchate's different "moods" and the twists and turns of the Polytechnica's political nobility).
The Penitence is a restructuring of surviving FORCE and THRONE assets who have been trying to restore sector order and government on the backs of Empire ideology, significant amounts of pre-Collapse caches, and their military might. The Penitence is a crusading order/battlegroup, organized along military lines although with significant lower-level officer autonomy, with various task forces having free rein to manage their day to day operations as they see fit. Unlike the Polytechnica, who seek worship and cultural subordination/assimilation, they care a lot less about what you do and more about how you do it, in Empire form. Penitent law works similarly to Empire conflict-arbitration, in which the permissible use of force is limited by the scope and scale of the issue people are fighting for and peace agreements are strongly enforced. Given the relative scarcity of resources in the post-Collapse, though, this means that a lot of Penitence-signatories end up using invariant technologies for conflicts, and non-invariant conflicts rarely see anything more than drone and commando assets being deployed.
There are also numerous second-tier and below powers, which don't have quite the necessary level of productive and logistical capacity or the technological sophistication to maintain more than a few Elements, which are large AV task forces. However, they often have sufficient military might to make them too thorny to simply ignore, and thus can significantly influence how the Big Four behave given the right circumstances. Below these second- and third-tier powers are polities which lack the size or technological libraries necessary for sectoral relevance. Polities limited to synthesizing stable exotic matter (S-tech) are generally ineffective against powers which can take full advantage of Architecture to dynamically change relevant physical metrics, and polities limited to technologies not reliant on programmable space and exotic matters (I-tech, or invariant technology) are even more out of luck, because things like antimatter bombs and fusion rockets are of extremely limited use against even drones or commandos.
Besides other AVs which I understand are rare post-Collapse, what kind of opponents and threats we might expect most commonly, and in what kind of numbers usually?
The most common space combatants are Drones. Drones are called drones for historical reasons - they descend from the autonomous kill vehicles of pre-Empire space combat. Despite being called drones, they are not always unmanned - many drones have actual cockpits and space for pilots, although other variants may have dedicated internal cognition/awareness systems (sapient or nonsapient).
The difference between a drone and an AV is that the drone does not have a transit drive, which means that it cannot cross significant interstellar distances unaided. However, almost all void-combat drones have warp drives, like AVs, which allow them to maneuver at superluminal velocities. The lack of a transit drive and the deprioritization of endurance allows drones to be built significantly smaller and lighter. On the flipside, the limited maneuverability of a drone means that they almost never carry the same self-sustaining logistics of an AV, and their smaller size (because if you're building a drone that big, the opportunity cost of adding self-sustainment and a transit drive are significantly reduced) limits their payload and defenses. Drones tend to be significantly faster than AVs in short bursts but suffer faster warp drive degradation than AVs - even without the transit drive an AV will beat them in any real contest of distance. Most drones measure in the low tens of meters in their widest dimension, and are designed for short- or medium-range combat, at lightseconds to tens of lightminutes of range. The exception is bomber drones, which carry stand-off weapons capable of hitting at longer ranges of light-hours, light-days, or even, for the largest and most potent, light-years. They thus generally use speed and maneuverability, as well as their small size (and thus small sensors profile) to get in close and engage at closer ranges.
Drones are deployed in numbers - many AVs will carry the capacity to launch and retrieve a number of them, with dedicated carrier AVs often having an order of magnitude more launch/rearmament/repair/retrieval capacity. They are viable combatants in their own right when deployed in swarms and allowed to network with each other to augment each others' defenses and offensive abilities, but are even more dangerous when acting as spotters and decoys for an AV. There are numerous different drone variants, with many large corporations having their own drone lines (and many new ones coming out of post-Collapse polities). A list of rough drone classifications is provided below:
Drone Classes
Although most drones are put into rough categories, these categories are often more based on use and loadout than the drone's type and design. Many drones have at least some modularity and customization capability, permitting them to be reconfigured for multiple roles and multiple uses with the right supplemental drivers and attachments. Other, typically more advanced, drones possess sophisticated multirole capability and can operate in many of these roles at once.
Fighter drones are the most common and varied form of drone - the closest to the direct offspring of exoatmospheric autonomous kill vehicles, although this is much like saying that the Empire baseline is the direct offspring of primordial bacteria which evolved in chemical soup. Fighter drones are warp-capable close-in fighters. In superluminal conflict, fighter drones are used as part of a point-defense screen, their infowarfare systems programmed to augment their signature and seed false data into enemy sensors to attract fire, their short-range weapons used only in interceptions of either incoming missiles or their fighter escorts. Fighter drones shine in subluminal combat, where their short-range batteries can be employed to devastating effect - and with their warp drives configured for high sprint speed at the cost of relatively low endurance, even in engagements spanning lightyears of distance, fighters can intercept and force subluminal engagements.
Dogfighters are generally on the smaller size for fighter drones. Dogfighters are dedicated low-cost close-engagement platforms, with the minimal necessary superluminal sensors to track and intercept another target, warp interdict capability, and dedicated close-range weapons. Dogfighters are in their element when enemies are forced to bleed speed and engage them in subluminal dogfights, due to their interference-resisting warp drives giving them a maneuvering advantage in close engagements, their excellent shielding, and their exclusively close-range armaments. Dogfight drones are also useful for commando support because of their heavy armoring/shielding and excellent close-in weapons, and an assault voidcruiser is likely to carry a complement of dogfight drones to ensure far more vulnerable infantry support drones are protected against enemy ambushers and remaining defenders.
Strike Fighters are fighters designed for medium-range engagement, carrying longer-range weapons, superior sensors and networking, heavier offensive infowarfare suites and defensive jammers/decoy dispensers, sacrificing close-in firepower, drive stability, regeneration, and shielding/armoring. Strike fighters are often multirole and capable of being credible combatants in a dogfight due to their generally larger size compared to dogfighters, but are cost-inefficient in such engagements.
Heavy Fighters are massive close/medium range specialist drones which are designed to take on entire smaller fighter drone wings and come out on top. Heavy fighters are hard to replace in combat time and thus generally used for defensive screens rather than offensive operations, as they can fulfill much of the same role as a defender drone - some FORCE/COMBINED battlegroups preferred a combination of decoy drones and heavy fighters rather than defender drones because a heavy fighter's more sustainable sprint speeds and greater independence made them more versatile and capable of long-range offensive operations, and their heavier defenses were potent tools against dogfighters which breached the defensive cordon.
Bomber drones are larger warp-capable drones designed to carry superluminal ordnance, giving them long-range strike capability. Bomber drones can engage targets - which might include other drones - at medium to long ranges, but the size and power requirements of superluminal weaponry make them extremely dependent on logistics support from AVs or other platforms. Bombers are generally poorly defended - they expect to evade or spoof incoming ordnance as they engage from light-months to light-years away, and the sort of weapons capable of traveling those distances and intercepting incoming drones will far exceed the structural and systems integrity limits of a small drone platform even on a glancing hit.
Fighter/Bombers are bombers designed with credible close to medium range performance characteristics - they possess heavily reinforced, interference-resistant warp drives, additional subluminal and medium-range defensive weapons, and additional armoring/shielding.
Repeaters are offensive infowarfare bombers - their "payload" is a network node that permits allied infowarfare units/gestalts/suites to operate through them with reduced latency time and increased signal strength, as well as induction effectors which allow them to upload lethal memetic payloads to uncooperative targets, rather than forcing infowarfare operators to work through architecture hacks and basilisk-code inserts through enemy sensors data.
Heavy Bombers are effectively multirole or fire support AVs without transit drives - they carry sufficient long-range ordnance to wound a hostile AV even through defenses while also having sufficient defensive systems and armaments to effectively self-escort in combat situations. The only problem with heavy bombers is the difficulty in deploying sufficient numbers of them and their effective irreplaceability in combat situations. Heavy bombers are not only irreplaceable in combat time, destroyed heavy bomber drones are difficult to reconstruct during the course of an operation.
Defender drones are protective drones equipped with medium- to long-range anti-missile defensive weaponry (which can also be used against incoming enemy drones), warp-interdictor systems, and jamming. Defender drones play an invaluable part in protecting a battlegroup from incoming superluminal ordnance by deploying additional decoy drones, providing interception fire, and even using false-signal mimic systems and their own sprint maneuverability to suicide-intercept incoming munitions as a last-ditch option.
Decoy drones are equipped with holographic signature-mimicry arrays covering both subluminal and superluminal sensors, high-power (but high visibility) jamming emitters, and warp drives with the capability of mimicking AV signatures. Decoy drones therefore fulfill two roles - first, they degade enemy accuracy at long range by interfering with drone and missile sensors. Second, they will hopefully seduce enemy munitions into targeting them instead of the AV they seek to protect. Decoy drones range from extremely low-fidelity, low-cost jamming platforms to near-perfect mimics - costly to construct, but easily earning their keep when they absorb an incoming missile meant for a far more expensive AV.
Sensor drones include long-range spotter-drones that provide improved targeting data over lightyear+ distances, early warning drones that provide long-range ordnance and target lock alerts, and oversight/command drones which augment drone operations. Dedicated sensor drones, unlike other drones, use most of their payload volume for sensors systems and thus can provide far better targeting and intelligence information - as long as they are defended against infowarfare and enemy munitions. Although sensor drones will hopefully never have to fire defensive weapons (and some, in fact, lack defensive weaponry entirely) their role in reducing battlefield chaos is invaluable.
Invader drones are drones designed to support commando operations. Invader drones cover a wide variety of possible classes:
Spawners are drones that carry displacement beacons to commando voicruisers and/or internal matter-printers for commando use, allowing them to deploy large numbers of commandos and supporting drones into combat. The extremely high unit attrition rate in commando warfare mean that without spawners, most commando operations would be difficult to sustain for any length of time.
Gunship drones are evolved from the melding of close air support and armored vehicle as early Empire technology advanced enough that flight became trivial and the difference between a tank and close air support (and eventually, the difference between a tank and an intrasystem spacecraft) became increasingly academic. Gunship drones are at their simplest dogfight drones without warp drives. However, even more specialized gunship drone designs sacrifice even more of their speed, sensors, and maneuverability to reduce their size and expense. As they are used in engagements in and near megastructures and planets, sacrificing warp drives reduces cost significantly but does not meaningfully increase their vulnerability in the deployments they see. Gunships are vulnerable but extremely expendable, and in their desired combat mileu they can often trade evenly with dogfight drones.
Remotes are small (the largest are merely a few dozen centimeters wide, and the smallest are measured in tens of millimeters) drones assigned to commando squads or individual commandos for various low-level tactical support uses. These microdrones are not piloted - they are instead slaved to their operator's psyche and run by adaptive, non-sapient combat software wired into the operator's conscious and subconscious tactical psyche. Remotes can be used as weapons platforms, repair/medical systems, infowarfare aids (either hacking, defensive counterhacking or sensors/reconnaissance/jamming), or personal point-defense.
Superfighters are a derivation of Elite technology with offloaded components and internal compression-volumes to radically increase their capacity. Despite their name, they are a combination of high-end fighter and high-end bomber drone, with overwhelming lethality at any range. A superfighter squadron deployed by a multirole black ops AV is likely armed and defended about as well, collectively, as a lower-end military AV - but their extreme expense tends to make superfighters valuable and difficult to replace. Like heavy bombers, superfighter complements are nearly impossible to replace in combat time and are difficult to rebuild quickly enough for many operations.
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Advancement Classifications: Invariant-Tech, Stable/Synthesized-Tech, and Metric-Tech
Advancement Classifications: Invariant-Tech, Stable/Synthesized-Tech, and Metric-Tech
Technology in the Empire (and in the post-Collapse) has developed in three broad categories - invariant technology, stable/synthesized technology, and metric technology, in roughly increasing order of advancement, sophistication, and expense (at least for 'mature' post-Collapse polities, the Empire, and its [former] rivals).
Invariant Technology
Invariant Technology is the most intuitive and familiar form of technology - technology which relies on the invariant physical laws defining the unmodified universe. Although you could in theory use it to describe anything from levers and rocks to space elevators and swarm-type megastructures, even after the Collapse the phrase is generally a reference to the ubiquitous pinnacle of physics-compliant technological advancement that the Empire reached long ago. Invariant technology was by far the most common basis for infrastructure even during the Empire era, for cost-effectiveness reasons. Because invariant technology does not require formatted space and extensive computational/metric-altering support, its cost is essentially trivial for all but the largest projects. Invariant technology includes highly compact and efficient fusion reactors and drives, antimatter warheads and torchdrives, sophont uploads, nanoengineered materials two orders of magnitude stronger than their naturally occurring equivalents, efficient solid-state lasers, coilguns/railguns, and other systems. Most habitable stations and cities are primarily constructed from invariant technology because supporting sophont life and society needs little more.
Stable/Synthesized Technology
S-tech, also known as stable technology or synthesized technology, is technology reliant on exotic forms of matter - monopoles, negative matter, cosmic strings, strangelets, and other oddities that are stable under the invariant laws of physics but for whatever reason are not naturally occurring except in negligible amounts. The original S-tech invention was the warp drive, which was used for early-era interstellar travel. Without Architecture at that time, the negative energy/negative matter needed to build a warp drive had to be painstakingly synthesized by immense particle accelerators. With the Empire and the invention of Architecture, synthesis of these materials became far cheaper, if not completely trivial (in fact, the earliest applications of Architecture were to make pockets of space that might have been inimical to life and the existence of conventional baryonic matter but allowed for the easy synthesis of exotic matter). S-tech can accomplish things which were seen as impossible, such as traveling faster than light or withstanding the fury of the atom unchained.
Metric Technology
As Architecture advanced in sophistication and precision, it was eventually possible to selectively and rapidly alter the properties of a space, which opened up a whole new set of tools for manipulating the universe. Metric technology is technology which only works because of editing local Architecture. Metric technology is technically ubiquitous as well - Architecture and souls are both metric technology, imposing programmability and edit permissions on space. M-tech is generally heavily reliant on having that substrate of programmable reality underneath it, and thus will often drastically differ in function depending on the hostility or lack thereof of the local Architecture. However, military units carry a local-area stable Architecture and a projection system known as a reality engine, which, in concert with information warfare against local Architecture, can permit the use of their weapons and defenses while in hostile Architecture. That said, reliance on reality engines and permission-elevation hacks is extremely straining, and the defender in an engagement will generally hold a severe advantage.
S-tech and M-tech are both critical components of a modern AV or any military hardware. You can sort of fight back against an AV or drone squadron with 'pure' S-tech if you have the knowledge of what you're dealing with and what you need to fight, but you'll generally be at a significant disadvantage (and pure S-tech is often more 'expensive' than hybrids if you have access to decent M-tech as well). If you're dealing with a modern AV with invariant technology, your chances are basically nil.
Systems repair themselves. Psyches reassemble. The Harbinger of Mourning rebuilds their magazines in anticipation of a long-range engagement, drawing ready-to-fire ammunition from a distant logistics base, forging arsenals of alien physics to use offensively and defensively. Secure datavaults are loaded with updated malware protocols, and firewalls are hardened based on prior experiences and best-guess heuristics anticipating likely attack vectors. You can feel Mourning shift through the intimacy of the battle network, the war machine's geometry altering as missiles are moved from lightyears and lightyears away into storage, then encysted into launch fields. The missiles are hungry, anxious for their mother to set them loose so they can fulfill their purpose. Through the infowarfare support and guidance control datalinks you can feel their desire, their instinctual need to pierce warp bubble and batter through hardfield and hull, their homicidal singleminded genius focused to obsession on that one climactic moment.
As a former Peacekeeper and member of the Penitence, you've gotten used to how missiles think. You encourage their enthusiasm, spinning off a copymind to participate in Mourning's own pep sessions as they run through pre-launch games with the missile intellects. Your copy rewards the munition-minds with virtual treats when they successfully work as a team and defeat enemy stealth and decoys and jammers and defenses, while critiquing and punishing them when they fail. The missiles' swarm intelligence corrects its own errors with great enthusiasm. High performers are rewarded by spreading their traits, to randomized degrees, to other elements of the current salvo - but not allowed to dominate, lest they overspecialize vulnerabilities into being. Consistent low performers are eviscerated, their codebase and subjectivity recycled and refreshed to create a new set of preferences and cognitive paths.
Missile self-criticism sessions are just as violent as the rest of their existence, a life spent in caged anticipation for that one death-and-glory moment, waiting for their turn to prove themselves in annihilation. Their tactical channels are filled with bloodthirsty banter in the language of long-range, stealthed, self-directing space-superiority munitions, bloodlust coalescing into a wave of fevered anticipation coursing through the fire control interface.
When you are ready, the Mourning reasserts into reality, separated from the solid crimson maelstroms of causality exclusion volumes by mere seconds and millions of kilometers. The Dragon-tech war machine you commune with deftly slips past the universe's hatred of acausality and appears close to where it couldn't possibly be. The few remaining sensors platforms you have deployed fire off updates, which the enemy attempts to degrade and intercept, even as their drones hunt down the stealthed eyes, ears, and noses that you shed into realspace during the shroud-jaunt. Your own stealthed sensors quietly strain to comprehend the battlespace through layers of jamming and misinformation.
You spot the four bogeys as faint impressions in what appears to be a mutually-supporting aegis, surrounded by a gauzy weave of interference spanning the distance between planets, implying multiple fortress-layers of defense and sensor drones. Ripples in spacetime echo in hyperspatial "hearing" as the pre-positioned missiles they deployed start vectoring towards your position. Each one is an interstellar vessel in miniature, equipped with a warp drive that propels it through the empyrean faster than the speed of light, the speed of time, the speed of information by twisting and blistering space. Energetic payloads would only splash off warp bubbles or the Mourning's mirrorfields and pass harmlessly through wraithforms, so instead of atomics or annihilation bombs they carry payloads of tailored viruses alongside more corporeal instruments of harm - alchemical warheads which transform all mass into undifferentiated particles, collapsers or misters which weaponize inertia to implode or vaporize, GUTrippers that shatter electromagnetic and nuclear forces. Each novel threat requires different defensive drivers and configurations, degrading every other defense as power and priorities are spread ever-more-thinly.
You meet them with your own salvo of exotic projectiles, some tasked defensively with disrupting spotter drones and salvo networking, others with destroying the launch vehicles. The other long-range superluminal weapons the Mourning possesses are best used in conjunction with the supporting fire from its bombardment modules, when the range has closed slightly and the targeting equations become easier. Combat synesthesia translates the salvo into comprehensibility, translating the last-minute adjustments into the baring of fangs and extending of claws. Subminds take over after you make the necessary high-level strategic decisions, consulting with the missiles themselves to finalize the warhead mix, the balance between speed and powered endurance, the timing and formation, briefing each mind on the fire control channels being used for target refinement, the backups in case of exigent events, and the channels used as honeypots and rich in decoy data. Their enthusiasm spills through the fire control channels, the weapons' minds expressing wordless joy at being able to finally fulfill their purpose. The phantom 'muscles' representing the Mourning's launch mechanisms flex, and the missiles appear in final pre-launch position via short-range teleportation, outside of the iridescent scales, superstring fibers, and exotic-matter bones of the Mourning's main body, but not yet external to the warp bubble that demarcates the AV's "self" from the universe surrounding it.
You watch the launch through the Mourning's multiple perspectives - internal diagnostics, missile telemetry, and the Mourning's multispectral EM sensors. In electromagnetic, each missile is a vantablack obelisk, only visible in the near-nonexistent starlight because of the hypersensitivity of an AV's sensors and some M-tech radiation magnification techniques. They hang in perfect stillness relative to the Mourning, even as the stars shift color and jitter wildly from red to blue in the background from warp-drive maneuvers. Each one lances out from a launch rail at superluminal velocities, accelerating to their faster cruise speeds as their own warp drives kick in, and you loose your purpose-bred assassins are loosed on their suicide mission.
Both you and the enemy begin your maneuvers - at high superluminal and long range, these maneuvers are gentle curves that bely the sheer distance involved. Every second you spend, your relative positions change by astronomical units. Your goal is to watch and predict the enemy maneuvers, forcing them into dilemmas, exploiting errors and limitations in their formation networking and tactical acumen. For you, much of this is second nature, a skill that has been honed through dream-training and combat engagements. The enemy's attack is obvious, predictable, and yet effective - a simple pincer maneuver, the four AVs and the drone/missile swarms maneuvering to catch you into a crossfire, to restrict your ability to maneuver. Your information warfare feelers caress the underlying Architecture of the local space and tap into their formation, and you can see that they are focusing on keeping you from slipping away again, already attacking you with virals intended to degrade shroud-transition - malware to introduce subtle errors in causality-checking algorithms and disrupt temporal sensors. The enemy commander's movements are less aggressive than they could be, though, likely because like you, they are mercenaries with a concern for the bottom line. The single crippled AV you've created will cost them significant time and resources to repair. With the additional context available now that your mind is mostly restored, you consider that the executable they used was their employer's tool, not their own. To still be in this engagement even after one mission-kill means they probably were paid well, and likely in advance or in escrow.
Most of your mind keeps its attention on the engagement, and the many minutes before any of the missiles will be in range of each other. But your free cognitive capacity and your own subjective self focus on finishing taking stock on the restoration of cognitive and animist capabilities amongst the Mourning's crew and components - in a high-spec AV, the two are often one and the same, crew seamlessly slotting into external processing power and memory to expand sapient-standard intellects to comprehend the complexities of warfare.
Outside of the commando teams and drone pilots, the Mourning's crew is sparse. A handful of high-level operations crew, their personal assistants and retinues, and the Mourning's own Draconic nature. Mourning recommends focusing on reinitializing one for now in an abundance of caution, so residual psyche damage can be monitored and corrected. You concur - after the immediate engagement is over, there will be time to bring the rest online.
Meet the Crew:
Vote for one major operations crew member to reactivate and bring back to consciousness quickly, before the AV-to-AV engagement is complete.
[ ] Axiom/Astarte.Simacrula.4.0.t (Weapons)
When Axiom seized the Elite Ishtar for damages incurred in her campaign of vengeance, the non-sapient corporation immediately set forth to exploit the rights gained from its retaliatory seizure, which included, among other things, "license rights to all intellectual property, including non-restricted memories, skillsets, likenesses, and codebases." It was anathema for the income-maximizing algorithm to let a potential income source lay fallow, so where a more self-aware entity might have shown some mercy and exploited goodwill by enforcing a term of servitude, Axiom Corporation chose to disassemble her, keeping the citadel and soul for its own and selling copies of the Elite over the market. Although limited by the lack of soul power and processing capacity - only an Elite terminal or equivalent could instantiate an Elite, and even those would be limited without a citadel, her centuries of combat expertise and her storied history made her an intriguing product. Commanding a notable fraction of all commercially available ex-Elite mindstate sales, the Ishtar copyshade proliferated widely throughout the galaxy owing to her relatively uncensored and unaltered status - most Elite or ex-Elite copyshares were licensed by their own estates, and Elites would commonly remove their rough edges, edit out their embarrassing moments, and degrade their own capabilities to ensure that they could not be replaced by their own copyclones. Axiom, on the other hand, had no interest in selling an inferior product, and the nonsapient corporate expert system had no ethical qualms about exploiting its licensing rights to the fullest. Save for edits needed to make the Ishtar copyshades less likely to sabotage their owners' projects or emancipate themselves by guile and/or force, which Axiom did with a light touch (not wanting to remove the copyshade's personal initiative and cleverness along with it), the copyshades were as close to a 1:1 replication as could be possible on limited available hardware. The historical record even suggests that some copyshades were almost perfect-fidelity, designed to be suitable for Elite apotheosis.
Astarte is a relatively new boot, having been instantiated very recently post-Collapse from an old archive via a still-valid user license. Freeing oneself from servitude and becoming a well-known mercenary might not be an easy task when suddenly plunged into an alien universe with eras and eras of historical divergence, but even without an Elite's easy access to processing power and panoply of military abilities, anyone who qualified for Elite apotheosis is an exceptional figure.
Astarte.Simacrula.4.0.t's expertise is in Weapons - she aids in the control of the long- and short-range offensive capabilities of the Mourning, including sensors and offensive information warfare.
DRAGON.DEADHAND/OPERATIONS/LOCAL.INTELLECT/CAST.ARMAGEDDON is, as far as you can tell, the controlling intelligence blackbox of a Hell-class weapon system and delivery vehicle. Holding a conversation with it isn't easy, as it lacks any sort of natural language interface and delivers its status reports and information in Dragon tactical comms protocols. On the other hand, it is an exceptional drone commander, possessing excellent synchronization with the Mourning's strategic-prediction subminds and larger-scale tactical cognition. CAST.ARMAGEDDON communicates nonverbally - indeed, you are unsure if it understands words in the conventional sense without assistance from other entities - via metaphorical images, intrusive thoughts, and emotional spikes.
You believe it is a Hell-class blackbox because of its ident-code, its unique communication method, its lack of physical body (or, apparently, any desire to interface with one), prior history with the Mourning, and how it flies - it is extremely aggressive with its drones, routinely pushing them to the very edge of performance, and is near-miraculous in its capacity to find an opening for a single strike where others would see nothing. Originally, it was probably to guide a Hell-class weapon into optimal strike distance, then dispassionately and quickly evaluate the damage so follow-up attacks could be initiated. However, due to reticence and communications difficulties, you have not been able to confirm its prior history despite your curiosity.
CAST.ARMAGEDDON is your Drone command expert, aiding in the operation of the CLAVIHARP's integral microdrone aura and heavy drone swarm, networking it with your tactical and sensory interfaces.
[ ] Jenril Tesk, Dracotechnician (Engineering)
Standing 95 centimeters tall, Doctor of Dracotechnology Jenril Tesk is tall for a Zerelian, although it may well have been an aesthetic choice, as Tesk's body is a fully synthetic inorganic shell, consisting entirely of smartmatter over a skeleton of variable-geometry bones with a multitude of concealed armaments. The breacher-spec shell he typically resides in is not only a combat and survival augmentation, but contains the capacity to run multiple copies of his own mind at the same time with highly-secure FTL datalinks, allowing for higher-fidelity control of engineering remotes or direct possession of commandos and minidrones for external operations.
From what he has shared with you and you have confirmed, he was an old combat archaeologist and major contributor to the Holdfast's finest institutes of archaeology, pressured to retire a few decades ago for his Dragon allegiance due to a conflict between the Holdfast and the Tiamat Razorspine, a Dragon-successor state. This pressure was relatively short-lived (as was the conflict), but by the time it subsided Tesk had already gone freelance, and given his success as a free agent, he was no longer interested in being a lecturer and trainer. Freelance Dracotechnology cladisticians are exceptionally rare, and with both his interest in the Dragon's policy and Dragon technology, Tesk quickly sought out the Mourning and offered his services. Freelance dracotechs are rare, and his credentials were impeccable. In return for providing his knowledge of Dragon-tech integration and operations, Tesk has gotten what he wants in return - he has gleaned quite a bit of knowledge on Dragontech's arcane physiology from the Mourning's databanks and your explorations into the local region.
Tesk believes the Dragon's intentions during the Collapse were benevolent, but like most Dragon-worshippers he sees it as a distant, silent (if not entirely dead) god, an idealized protector figure more than a live entity.
Tesk's specialization is in Engineering - he assists the Mourning in prioritizing self-repair, integrating upgrades, and managing its suite of non-weapon defensive systems including defensive infowarfare (firewalls, antivirals, and the like).
[ ] Eighty-Six Logophage(Historian)
There was once a species which evolved with anomalously potent self-modification and internal fabrication capabilities and an equally anomalous lack of empathy. Their interactions were all game-theoretic, their society built around extremely harsh punishments and strict honor codes to ensure the possibility of cooperation. Harsh legalism and the laws of enforced exchange became their way of life, a hypercapitalist society which managed to discover Architecture and expand outwards in a constant wave of conquest, subjugation, and internal conflict. Then they eventually encountered the then-young Empire, and although their intelligence augmentations and mastery of metric alteration had made them competitive, the Empire was larger and it had the Dragon. The species, which had no name for themselves but their neighbors and slaves called the Devourers, was seen as interesting and novel enough to integrate by the young Empire.
You are unclear of the providence, but Eighty-Six herself believes that the Emperor Themselves lectured the Devourers, stating their weakness was simple - they lacked empathy, and with it, they lacked trust and forgiveness. The Empire could give them that advantage if they would only choose. She also claims that afterwards, the Devourers who did not choose empathy were exterminated by those who did, as a stability threat and security risk. As a good historian, she also notes that this is not the sole historical claim as to the Voidsent's legacy, although most of them agree that their ability to empathize is engineered, not evolved, and came either soon before or soon after they assimilated into the Empire.
Eighty-Six is a fairly conventional Devourer - a single main "queen" the size of a gunship, with a multitude of thralled affiliate bodies linked into one mind. Before augmentation and modification, their bodies were made of some combination of "wet" and "dry" nanotechnology, but with the integration of M-tech and S-tech into their bodies she is effectively a fully capable infantry support drone, a gunship-equivalent with limited transport, on-site repair, and rearmament capabilities. She was born in the way most Devourers are - as an indenture, sold off by her mother to the Octarchate Amalgamated Defense Forces as a military asset for a five-decade span. During her free time in the OADF, she found the historical and political background of the conflicts she was fighting and dying in intriguing, which led her to you.
Giving her access to the Mourning's warchives was almost enough on its own, and your assistance in negotiating a cancellation of contract with her former employers was also highly appreciated.
Eighty-Six is your historian - she is a store of knowledge of the local region and more distant history, although she also happens to be a competent if uninspired substitute in any role. Of course, she also personally possesses the capabilities of a gunship drone and her higher-end thralled bodies are perfectly functional commandos.
[ ] Divine Knight Lumen (Commando Ops)
Lumen lived most of his life unaware of the galaxy at large. For him, reality was a battle between the Celestines and monstrosities from the Abyss, with the mortal races caught in the middle of their eternal war. A half-breed Nephilim, he had pledged himself to the angelic powers and fought with distinction in the eternal crusade for decades until the Polytechnica disassembled the virtual and real materials of the system to expand their pantheon. The Polytechnica, appreciators of art and history alike, chose to embody the beings of the mystic planes into the real universe. For many of them, including the Paladin-Queen Lumen pledged himself to, the realization that none of their wars had any meaning and that they had been little more than pawns in a complicated wargame, running without supervision or new player injections for millenia, caused a crisis of faith - what else would happen when it turned out that your war between angels and demons was nothing more than theater? The Polytechnica sought out ways to provide the now-unmoored immortals some purpose and meaning, to varying degrees of success, transforming Dominions and Abyssal Dukes alike into drone-spec combatants, arranging demonic legions and heavenly hosts into formations to operate in the Polytechnica's military forces, but even so, many found it hard to recover from learning that their entire existence and purpose had been a lie.
The mortal and half-mortal followers and cultists hardly had it any better - they may have been granted strong, (biologically) immortal baseline bodies, they may have been given free rein to explore the stars and the secret knowledge of the universe, but with it came the same loss of meaning and loss of status- power and prestige were always relative. Many decided to return to their games, which the Polytechnica have preserved in a compressed, reduced form.
Lumen's faith, however, was either more profound or more foolish than those of his peers, and he simply chose to adapt himself to fighting in this new galaxy, choosing righteous causes based on his religious tenets. Trading an angel's wrath for kinetic strikes and fusion blooms, he learned to excel in the invariant conflicts which were fought throughout the galaxy, and parlayed those skills into gaining the augmentations and skills needed for proper commando operations. For the divine knight, the crusade is still the same - even if his blades are disruptor-effect rather than cold steel, even if his armor is now on the inside rather than worn, he still fights for the honor and beauty of the imperfect world.
Lumen is your commando ops officer - in deep-black combat he does boarding/counterboarding via teleport strike or high-risk drone assault, and can oversee larger-scale commando operations ranging from fast-assault lightning raids on critical objectives to grinding campaigns to seize strategic points.
