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Devastation Comes In Big Packages [Planetary Annihilation/Multicross SI]

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Hey, you know what would really piss those guys off? Nanobot colonies that imitate biological life forms until the most blasphemous time.

Better yet use those to infiltrate the vong society and unveil themselves as leaders and people of renown at the most appropriate time. Let's see if we can use all that holy war and point it internally until all of those assholes just rip themselves apart.
 
Or you could make nanobot grey goo that only goes wild in the presence of Vong DNA, and otherwise barely ever replicates itself.

Just spread it throughout the Empire, and then watch the fireworks when the Vong invade.
 
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36 – Gearing Up
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    • 36 – Gearing Up
    ​
    I'm not going to sit around and wait anymore for the Empire and Rebellion to have their fights. It won't matter who wins if the Vong just go and kill everyone. Which I don't plan to allow.

    So!

    I'm going to need to steal a few things.

    Luckily, Albert is in Hub, so that's one down. The Rebellion is doing…something. Luke actually did go out and find Katarn who is apparently in his 'just a badass commando' phase of life. I'm sure they'll do fine. The Empire on the other hand is in a bit of quandary as they search for just who has been stealing their Super Star Destroyers. Palpatine and Vader have personally executed over twenty high ranking officers

    Next?

    Executor and Vengeance – wait. I should back up a bit.

    Ok, first I infiltrated the security systems surrounding the Kuat Drive Yards, also known as the place where the Empire commissions a truly gigantic portion of their ships from, and spoofed just about everything I could. Sensor logs, visual camera readings, detection systems of all kinds. All of that came down while I replaced it with vaguely adjusted repeats. Thankfully unlike my unit cap I can basically cause whatever havoc I like with regular computer systems. Despite what the movies might show, space is way bigger.

    So when I had Executor and Vengeance come 'up' from beneath the ecliptic with their stealth systems – mine and the stolen ones from the Empire – activated, I had pretty much ensured that there would be no one watching. A few adjustments to canned orders on the intercoms and communicators ensured that the majority of the people working on the Eclipse were moving off.

    No one wants to avoid lunch breaks.

    Ugly bird, she was, what with being less than a third complete. The axial super laser had been one of the first pieces installed but it wasn't actually even functional just yet. It didn't have engines installed. Instead they had focused on just putting in the framework that would ensure that it didn't outright collapse while in space.

    Even though it had been commissioned besides the other hulks in the system, it still wasn't nearly as far along as the other Super Star Destroyers.

    Which…weren't meant to be present in canon. Yet another representative of what after effects my actions in this galaxy had created. Taxes had been raised further, funds pulled from various humanitarian things, all to build more weapons of war at the Emperor's demand. People have died who I had no intention of harming because I'd stolen what the Emperor thought he needed more than the affection of subjects whose stories would not get out.

    The Razor's Kiss wasn't meant to be completed for some time, at which point she would blow up and be recovered by one of the Imperial Warlords and be renamed the Second Death. These other ones? Completely new to me. Let's look at the logs…Dominator…what.

    They've named this next one Executor. A replacement for the one I've stolen, perhaps? Even that is less confusing than the fourth and final one.

    The next one has a name I only recognize because of the same guy who would originally take the Razor's Kiss's corpse. Zsinj, who is right now still a member of the military. It was Brawl, which I took, that he would later rename into the Iron Fist. Which is the name of this new one. So I guess the Emperor was still planning on giving it to him, I suppose?

    Too bad for the guy, considering that I'm taking all of these ships. It's a matter of minutes for the stealthed Vengeance to move in, with its thousands and thousands of fabricator arms sprouting all over the place like particularly constructive mold. Really I've pretty much turned the entire thing into one giant mobile sea urchin looking thing only instead of spikes we've got fabricator technology.

    Three…two…one…go!

    Stealth field falls because of course I can't work the fabricators with it on and all of a sudden all five of my new ships are being built faster than they could ever have possibly been constructed. As it is, I'm not even focused on making them complete. All I need is their engines and superstructures to be capable of surviving transit. As such five gigantic clouds of glowing nanites go to work as the Vengeance operates on all of them simultaneously.

    As for the other guard ships in the system – patrol cruisers and Mandators and the like – they see nothing. Specifically because I either hack their systems or for the ones where open windows are more of a thing I initiate minor power failures that have everyone on the ship scurrying around instead of watching the ship yards where I am stealing the hard work of the Kuat organizations.

    Interestingly, the super laser for the Eclipse has all of its technology down, it was just a matter of installing it. I, of course, have all the plans needed by this point thanks to outright breaking down the firewalls and every electronic defense present. I could fabricate my own Eclipse-class ships at this point by using the Mega Yard or the Dishes. The rest of the Kuat Drive Yard databanks have information on all their other star destroyer variants, so basically I've got the entire catalogue. Even including the interdictors…of which I already yanked.

    Huh.

    Anyway…Vengeance is fabricating, fabricating…there. Engines done. Superstructure reinforced. As I activate my new ships and point them in the direction of Hub, I keep the complete information suppression going. Everything is perfectly fine, at this point, because no one knows that I'm even here. They're fixing the problems on the ships in the patrolling groups while the sensors remain spoofed instead of down.

    So basically all I've – god damn it.

    Workers.

    On the shipyards. That I didn't do anything to. Dozens, hundreds of them looking out the windows right now with gaping mouths that are opened so wide that if I didn't have the cameras under my control I could still probably see them from Hub.

    Damn it.

    Ah fuck it. Release everything, let them see! Let them see the Executor and the Vengeance. Fuck it. Fuck it!

    Fuck it! We'll do it live!

    A system wide transmission takes up every screen that has the pixels for it, including down on the planet below. Instead of the face I showed the rebellion as Theta – black with grey – or Beta – all black – I generate a new face. One I can fabricate later for a third body. This one has blue photoreceptors and I've colored all of its body shining gold. Not bronze. Not dull gold. Bright, kind of shiny gold.

    As for the message…

    "Greetings! My name is Alpha, and this is a heist!"

    The Eclipse, followed by my four new Executor-class vessels, jump out of the system.

    "Heist complete. Thank you, and have a nice day. Also," I have the face lean in slightly, "Vader! Thanks for the second Executor, the first one was kind of getting old!"

    Then I cut the transmission.

    Back to Hub. Let the Empire stew on that.
     
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    • And so the galaxy learns of Alpha, the greatest of thieves, and builders.
     
    At this point I'm just building various 'identities'.

    Hell, I might as well call my faction 'The Network' for all that I am an army of one.

    The SI internally calls himself Theta, but...eh.

    I dunno, still just thinking about it.
     
    37 - The Gathering
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    • 37 - The Gathering
    ​
    Chaos engulfed the holonet shortly after I left. The Empire was yelling and Vader was force choking and Palpatine released some kind of public message decrying my actions. The Rebellion was yelling and checking all over their contacts and they were now doing an even more thorough check of everything I'd given them. There were meetings on who the mysterious 'Alpha' could be, on who 'Theta' and 'Beta' might have been and more than a few were suddenly worried about droid rebellions on both sides of this galactic civil war. Which was silly, all things considered, but there wasn't much they could do to stop me. I'd withdrawn almost everything in my possession back to Hub which was so far off the beaten path that there wasn't even a name or the sector it had been in much less the various other star systems present.

    By the time all of my ships got back, the Empire had gone ballistic searching for the Rebellion and when they couldn't find them they took their anger out on easier targets. Pirates throughout the galaxy suddenly found themselves as the punching bag of the most powerful military around. Normally I'd feel bad about that but hey, pirates. There were some smugglers and underworld people who were probably aligned with the Rebellion but with all the ships and money I'd given them they didn't have to rely on those kinds of people nearly as much as they used to.

    So yeah, didn't feel that bad.

    Far more important was what had been happening in Hub. I'd continually been using the Mega Dishes to make more Mega Dishes. In the time it's taken me to take the Maw, deliver the prisoners to the Rebellion, and steal everything else, the original one was far less alone than it used to be.

    As in, the joys of exponential growth had borne fruit. One makes one which makes one while the original makes another…yeah.

    A hundred of them now floated silently in the void.

    Better, they all now came equipped with their own gravity manipulators, tractor beams, and minor thrust and movement engines. I'd upgraded them with the same systems that the Nightcloak superweapon had which allowed hundreds of satellites surround a planet in unison.

    So, a hundred gigantic dishes with radii of twenty six kilometers of fabricator arms with orbital ranges. That's…a lot of fabricators. Frankly an almost ridiculous amount. I still didn't know if they'd be enough or not, but there was a bright side.

    Every single planetary body in Hub was now utterly covered in extractors and generators. Below, shoved right along the border of the ecliptic, was something that I could now only describe as the Storage Continent. At the beginning, the kilometer by kilometer cubes had only constituted a small area in relation to the vastness of space. But with the Mega Yard pumping them out almost constantly this entire time, an entire solar system providing materials, and nothing better to do, they'd just kept growing in number. Every now and then a Dish would pass by and bind them with a lattice work of metal to keep them from bumping back and forth.

    Except now…there were thousands. Energy and Metal, storage, just floating there in space. At first I had just had them be a single layer, but that kind of got a bit inefficient so I started building on top of the current layer before shoving it just a little lower. And, remember, each cube was a single kilometer by kilometer.

    So when I say that the Storage Continent was seven thousand kilometers in length and width, and five thousand kilometer in height, I'm basically saying that I've got stored resources not for days but potentially years.

    But I still didn't know if it was going to be enough.

    So I had the Cry of Gimli escort eighty of my Dishes towards the galactic rim's edge. Right up until the very edge of the blackness of space where the galaxy extended no further. At each solar system we passed, all uninhabited due to the sheer distance I suppose from the rest of everything, I left a few Dishes to begin repeating their feat in Hub – extractors and generators ad infinitum. This took a good few days while the Empire and Rebellion ran around like chickens with their heads cut off.

    Back in Hub, I'd had the Dishes continue building more of themselves.

    So, to summarize the last two months of the year…

    I covered eighteen entire solar systems with extractors and generators. More and more Dishes were generated, until there were about twenty per system beyond Hub. Within Hub I'd gone to about two hundred.

    The galaxy, which I'd largely left to itself by this point, just barely started to calm down. The Rebellion did some covert missions, the Empire some overt ones, but basically even after all I'd done they managed to retreat into some kind of equilibrium. One that now somewhat favored the Rebellion more than it had before. Which was nice.

    The Storage Continent continued to expand as fast as the Mega Yard could make them – which is pretty horrendously fast – while my resources built up ever further.

    I might not have had a Paragon building, but I was still exponentially gaining ever more resources. Of course, the part where I diverged was that other than the resources used to build more storage, Dishes, extractors, and generators, I didn't actually use it that much. I didn't even bother finishing the ships I'd stolen, they weren't going to last for what I had intended beyond a few minutes.

    I'd also had the Executor and Vengeance stay out of Hub, and instead immediately head to Fondor where the Emperor was building two Vengeance-class ships and three more Executor-class ships. I didn't even bother learning their names before I took them. Engines, reinforce the structure to survive hyperspace, and then I sent them right on to Hub. After that, they hoofed it over to Byss, just in time to catch a large escort fleet of ships trying to move the second ever Eclipse-class ship to some secret location.

    They needn't have bothered.

    Some cursory looks for the Eye of Palpatine didn't turn anything up but in the end a single nineteen kilometer asteroid-ship-thing isn't going to be able to change events if I decided to stop letting the Rebellion take on the Empire. I have no doubt that I could scour the galaxy of their presence given time. But the Vong outright had thousands of worldships. That's a bit more than either the Rebellion or Empire could handle, from my perspective.

    Well, that's a bit wrong. They could, but the problem is that even when the Vong were defeated in canon they dealt far too much damage for me to accept. They'd burned too many worlds, killed too many entire planetary populations, for me to accept just letting the rest of the galaxy could handle them.

    Not when I could do better.

    So, stretching into mid-way through 4 ABY, long after the Battle of Endor should have occurred, I had finally satisfied what I thought would be necessary in terms of resources.

    Now?

    Now I build.
     
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