I'll do that in a bit. It's slated within the next few chapters. But first.
38 – I, Hephaestus
Imagine, if you will, the resources and workforce required to build the Death Stars. Thousands of slaves, including wookies, geonosians, and others died in the process of that. Resources were pulled from taxes across the galaxy while metal was harvested from multiple worlds. The specialized crystals that let the super lasers fire in the first place were also highly difficult to have at all in the first place. Over a trillion credits for both. It took twenty years to build the first one, but that was in secret. The second started immediately after the first was destroyed and is operational right now, if I'm right, even if it's not finished with the armor. It even might be given the time delay, or be even less if I pissed the Emperor and Vader off enough to keep killing the architect over my antics. I don't know.
If it
is finished and supposedly fully impervious, I'll deal with that then.
Now, imagine what is in my capabilities. I have no work unions to satisfy, no supply chains to maintain, and the ability to build star ships in minutes – seconds if I put multiple Dishes on it – instead of months and years like the organics of the galaxy. I have metal and energy flowing into my ever growing Storage Continent at the level of
multiple star systems, including dozens of worlds and moons and asteroid belts.
Three hundred Mega Dishes float in a vaguely sphere shaped formation with at least two kilometers of empty space between them, with their fabricator faces pointed inward.
Within the empty space of that sphere, I've put every single thing I have. The
Cry of Gimli, Executor, the
Vengeance, the
Eclipse, and every other ship I've taken since I tore apart the Maw Installation. Joining them is the skeletal Albert, the prototype Death Star. The remaining Reddingtons are being left on Drich, leaving the 'Beta' and 'Theta' bodies there. The rest, including the
Justice, were reclaimed minutes ago.
I'd also stolen corporate secrets worth tens of billions of credits, using the black market and holonet auctions to purchase things that the computers couldn't replicate without a physical example first. On every kind of weird fuzzily defined metal in existence.
Beskar, I already had down to the molecular level.
Now I had Neuranium, one of the densest materials in the galaxy, a single millimeter of which could stop almost all scanners.
I had phrik, a metallic compound which was incredibly durable but also stupendously light, a good lightsaber resistant material.
I had cortosis. I had songsteel, I had durasteel, I had ultrachrome, I had…
I had nothing else to do but activate the Dishes.
Then for the first time in several months, my entire economy slammed down into the floor. Not all the way, mind you. But it came close to hitting parity with the amount of resources that I was bringing in. Only a bare trickle of metal and energy was making it into the Storage Continent at this point. Within the area of effect from within the giant Dish sphere…
It looked like the birth of a star, almost. It was practically a giant nebula of nanites. My own little miniature Oort Cloud of Dishes pouring metal and energy into the blazing light within.
What I would create would not be fragile. It would be a weapon of war. Possibly the greatest in the galaxy. No, scratch that. This
universe.
My resources continued to pour in, and in, and in. First to disappear from my control net was the
Executor, the first ship I'd ever taken. Gone forever. Then the
Iron Fist. Over the next while the rest of them all were subsumed. Even Albert, the prototype Death Star, stopped registering. Both of the Eclipse-class ships lasted longer but then they too were broken down and reconstituted further into my weapon. The
Vengeance, and then the rest of the other Super Star Destroyers disappeared into the growing cloud. My stealing into the Maw Installation gave me files enough that I could have recreated the prototype of the Death Star as many times as I wanted.
That wasn't what I was doing.
You see, for all that the Death Star was good…I already had plans for building Metal Planets inside of my databanks. Or, perhaps more importantly…the Annihilaser. Which, when combined with the focusing and targeting data of the axial laser of the Eclipse-class and the concave dish laser of the Death Stars…meant that I had the potential to build it with just a tad more accuracy and directed power. Not a lot, almost negligible, but it was still an improvement.
I wasn't building a Death Star. Or a Metal Planet.
The
Cry of Gimli disappeared from my ability to register within the cloud. Never used except for basically grunt work. Sad, but not entirely unexpected given my own tendencies at cautiousness. Alas.
The cloud – and what it was building – kept growing. The Dishes had to move backwards just to keep up, shifting back and back as the sheer volume and size of what they were making continued to increase. The other Dishes I had elsewhere in the galaxy actually made it to another star system with a nearly dead star and a few more planets on it. The resources began to pour in further even as the drain on them continued. The other systems with my structures in them were basically untouched as I let the Dishes there rest.
It continued to grow. Three hundred Dishes continued to use their own engines to withdraw a little further every now and then as the thing they built grew ever further in size.
I let it do so. It would not be done for a slight while yet.
For the first time in a long time the Mega Yard stopped producing Storage Cubes. Now I would defeat myself in the arena of mental issues. I couldn't stand not being in total control of my units, but that was no longer a possibility if I wanted to affect things on a broader spectrum. So I went back through time, examining the stories and knowledge of the Confederacy. Droid Captains, Droid Generals, Droid Admirals. All programmed…but not under the direct control of the overall leaders, or in my case, leader.
So I'd hacked, and purchased, and examined, the holonet long being my bitch at this point. Almost no databanks were beyond me. Almost no information that I couldn't take.
My ships might never have been precisely pretty, but I wasn't a big designer.
As such, I'd taken the basic Lucrehulk design as a homage to the people I was blatantly stealing and then improving the ideas of. Only instead of it being two big arms and a sphere in the center, it was a cube. Because why the hell not. I kept the gun emplacements where they were with some internal upgrades and cleared out some of the more organic bits. That one episode of Star Trek was right, removing all of the things revolving around keeping organics alive and/or healthy saved a lot of space, time, and energy…though I'm pretty sure I've mentioned that before.
Inside, I was putting a whole host of fabricator arms, set to auto create completely unpainted grey HK droids. Each would come with its own incredibly sophisticated suite of tactics for all kinds of situation and would be equipped with a miniature armory. Rapid fire weapons, a sniper rifle, an anti-armor blaster cannon, and various grenades. All of them would be made of a mixture of light and durable metals – considering that making them all out of quantum crystalline materials made into an alloy with the rest of my stuff would be unfeasibly resource intensive – but have servos strong enough to let them move easily across any environments. Additional varieties could be made later, for more hazardous environments and targets.
Droid tanks, droid starfighters, droid shuttles, droid specialists of all kinds. All of them in far deadlier aesthetic than those dinky B1 droids. With my programming put into them there would be none of that silly little bantering that occurred in the Confederacy's metal armies. I'd even made a few commando units with jetpacks and jetboot modifications alongside their quantum crystalline armors. Far more expensive but only needed in small numbers – hopefully. All of these would be producible in-house, as it were. The ships themselves would carry more than enough resource cores to run themselves. Each one would come with a single HK-G, or a General, that would have even more sophisticated programming with incredibly hard locks to prevent them going asshole on me. They wouldn't be able to modify the fabricator designs or hopefully turn against me. Loyalty programs are a major go, in my book.
I ain't about to have another Geth situation.
Better yet, because it's not a unit I control…
No. Unit. Cap.
I could produce these and just let them go after establishing an objective without ever bobbling my unit cap except for the initial single slot being taken up before I released it. They could then produce endless units and send them down to whatever planet I needed them to.
I had an army unto infinity.
If anything went wrong I could take command of the HK-G in control of each ship and subsequent army and fix it. If worst came to worst, I could use the reclamation protocols to remove them all entirely. I wasn't going to really focus on creating an infinite fleet either, I'd trust the stealth systems of my new ships to allow them to hit the enemy with boarding pods. Even if they couldn't they'd
still come with their turbolaser batteries.
I didn't dare build any of them though, not now. I couldn't spare the resource strain.
Because all the while, what may be my magnum opus in this galaxy continues to build.
Instead I direct my Dishes to seek out further uninhabited systems. All alone the very rim of the galaxy, far and away from all civilization. More moons, more asteroids, more planets. More extractors. More generators.
It was needed to create something that could take on a force capable of almost entirely crushing a galaxy save for the brave sacrifice of a very few.
The very few.
I could understand that, especially with my current limitations.
...and now we wait.
