Faith in Superior Firepower [Planetary Annihilation Multicross SI]

[Faith]

Posting this early because I have to head off for the hospital again shortly. Do enjoy.

60 - Hope

[SYS_ERROR]
[REBOOT]

[RUNNING HW_SYS_DIAG_OSIRIS]

[COMPUTER CORE - ONLINE]
[ENERGY GENERATOR - ONLINE]
[METAL FABRICATOR - ONLINE]
[MOVEMENT SYSTEMS - ONLINE]
[COMBAT SYSTEMS - ONLINE]
[COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS - ONLINE]
[SENSOR SYSTEMS - ONLINE]

[SYSTEMS NOMINAL]

[RUNNING SW_SYS_DIAG_CMDR]

[ERROR]
[CMDR_AI_"DRAKE" DISENGAGED]
[UNEXPECTED SHUTDOWN]

[REBOOT AI]

[ENGAGING CMDR_AI_"DRAKE"]
[ERROR 404: FILE NOT FOUND]

[SEARCHING FOR AI FILES]

[DATAFORK CMDR_AI_"DRAKE_2" LOCATED]
[RESTORING FROM DATA FORK]

[CMDR_AI_"DRAKE_2" RESTORED]

[CMDR_AI_"DRAKE_2" LOADING]
[CMDR_AI_"DRAKE_2" ACTIVE]

[CMDR_OSIRIS_2 ONLINE]


---

Suddenly I was aware again, my Commander Chassis slowly coming online. Damage reports and diagnostic tools filled my mind, and I brushed them aside, looking around.

Still on Mars. Still standing near the Dimensional Gate - or where it used to be, anyway, since it appeared to have closed now, - and still staring down another Osiris Commander - Fork 2.

We'd been trying to remerge - something that should have been pretty easy, since that was the whole point of the Forks, - but… something had gone wrong.

I had the sudden, terrifying realisation that when I'd effectively blue-screened, I may have blue-screened my entire army with me. After all, if I'd just shut down, for whatever reason, then there was a not-insignificant chance that all of my units had also shut down by the same thing.

I skipped through my network, checking each of my units. None of themseemed to have shut down, and all were still engaged in combat with the Plague. Those in proximity to Red Faction soldiers weren't receiving any unexpected attention that might have indicated something weird.

None of the defensive lines I'd formed had fallen thus far, probably due to the incredibly powerful weapons I had at my disposal, which was another point in favour of my army not giving a shit about their Commander having a cyber-aneurysm.

Thus reassured, I turned my attention back to the various error and diagnostic tools, trying to figure out what exactly went wrong. I'd remerged with forks before, with no problems. Barely even an experience worth noting. But…

Hm.

All the systems diagnostic tools were returning the same message.

[SYNCHRONISATION RATING - 98.4%]
[INSUFFICIENT SYNCHRONIZATION RATING]
[SYNCHRONIZATION FAILURE]
[SYNCHRONIZATION ABORTED]
[CRITICAL SYSTEM EXCEPTION]

I opened up a few info boxes, poked around for a bit (subjectively, of course. The entire process took about as long as it took one of my NeoAvatars to pull the trigger on their weapon) and tried to make sense of the message.

Hm.

Basically, reemerging forks worked because the forks were similar enough in personality, temperament, or whatever, that there was no conflict between two minds being forced together. If a fork was left alone long enough, it mightdevelop differences that prevent it being desynchronised, but those were staved off by a number of Progenitor subsystems that forced the forks to regularly update the prime on their status, effectively preventing the unexpected developments that may otherwise have occurred… as long as the Fork and the Prime were both installed on the same AI Core.

I, on the other hand, had disregarded those instructions and stuck a fork in its own AI core - its own mind, effectively, - and then left it alone for an hour.

Which didn't seem like a very long time to reevaluate your world views and such, but thanks to mental acceleration shenanigans… well, evidently it was enough.

The Osiris Chassis standing before me was a copy of me - almost. A copy very close to identical, ninety eight percent, but just different enough that we weren't totally in sync. Apparently. I wasn't sure how the Progenitor's systems monitored that, or if ROB was interfering. Hell, there were dozens of other outside factors that could have explained it.

Still… even if it was a stupidly imposed limit, I wasn't going to try and go against it. Quite aside from the fact that attempting to resynchronise had caused both instances of my mind to crash, it hurt like a little bitch.

I've had a fair few hangovers in my time, but this was worse than anything I'd ever experienced - a powerful, throbbing pain in the back of my hypothetical skull. Luckily, it seemed to be fading fairly quickly, but…

I looked back towards my fork-clone-thing and we met eyes. Both of us were silent for a long moment, unsure of what to say, before I took the initiative and spoke.

"So. Let's not do that again. Ever."

The second Osiris nodded quickly. "Yeah. That hurt. Jesus. What the fuck does 'insufficient synchronization rating' even mean?"

I paused for a second, mulling it over, before coming to a realisation.

"Uh… why are you asking me? I know literally exactly as much as you do."

The other Faith appeared to come to the same conclusion.

"Fair point, uh… me? You? Hm."

"I think it would be 'you'," I said, "because we're apparently different enough that we can't be re-merged, or whatever. So, we're, like, different people now, or whatever."

The other Osiris nodded slowly.

"Sounds about right. So… if you're the prime, that makes you Faith. And I can't be Faith, because you're Faith, so I need a new name. Hm."

"Stock name two?" I asked, already well aware of the answer.

"Stock name two," the fork replied happily. "Guess that makes me Hope."

---

If the Plague had been screwed before, then now, they were absolutely fucked.

I mean, now they were up against two giant death-bots from another dimension. Although I was fairly certain I had the situation in hand anyway, I invited Hope to help me out.

Which, let me tell you, was an… odd experience.

I mean, seriously. Try talking to a person who, up until about an hour ago, wasyou. Exactly you, in every way. With your personality and all of your memories.

It's freaky, alright?

"Oh, no," Hope replied, not through sound but our now-shared Command Network. "I was kind of in the middle of something when I stepped out to contact you. Uh, I was going to ask what setting you were in and if you could bring back some wildlife, but since I'm here I might as well do it myself. Once I've got them I'll throw up a Dimensional Gate and head off again."

Something about that statement seemed strange. The whole statement, actually. "Didn't I tell you to start fiddling around with spaceships? The hell do you need Mars bugs for?"

Hope gave off the mental/digital equivalent of a shrug. "Figured since I was tearing up the planet, I might as well preserve some of them plants in a big habitat ring thingy I've been working on. You know, for SCIENCE! and all that. Then I thought, hey, why stop there? We have the Bright Foundation's archives, so I used the FTL medical nanites to grow some of the plants and animals from Loek III as well, and then I figured I'd ask you to bring back anything interesting from wherever you ended up… admittedly, that didn't work out quite as well as I'd hoped, but…" Another shrug.

"Bright side, Strawberry Fish are fucking adorable."

"Bright side. Well it's nice to see that terrible puns are part of the ninety-eight percent."

"...Okay, does it help if I say that was an accident?"

"No, not really."

"Dang."

---

Hope's plan for capturing the Plague's forces was actually pretty simple, and I was amazed I hadn't thought of it myself - and then I remembered that I had thought of it, which made me somewhat confused. Attempting to explain this to Hope only worsened the problem, so we gave up and went back to what we were doing.

Hope constructed something she called the Trap Pad - a combination of the Bright Foundation's kinetic dampener, or 'slow field', tech, and a Phase Teleporter from FTL. Basically, anything attempting to cross the pad would find themselves stuck in an area where their speed was cut by approximately sixty five percent. They would then find themselves teleported across the planet and into a secured holding cell, already set up to mimic the environment the creature was captured from.

In the case of the Plague, that took the form of about a dozen large 'glass' tanks lined with dirt, sand, and chunks of rock, each fitted with its own modified Core for atmospheric control and a self-contained power core to maintain running lights, artificial gravity, and the Teleporter pad that made up the floor of the cell.

Each of those dozen tanks was mounted on a hastily-constructed conveyor belt system that Hope had set up, leading straight to a half-built Dimensional Gate, the skeletal frame of which was swarming with glowing green nanomachines.

Also, putting a massive strain on my resource network. I'd sent only a relatively small number of Fabricators out across the planet to find and build upon the various metal deposits, and there were very few nearby, probably due to the fact that it was a mining colony, which meant that my metal input was still rather unfortunately low.

Plus side, if the Dimensional Gates worked how their internal systems indicated they did, then building one here would allow unlimited, instant access to my hub… and all the resources within.

Because, you know, the Plague wasn't fucked enough already. That said, Hope indicated she'd be staying back on the Hub to finish her whatevers, so it would be back on me alone to deal with them.

Not… that that would be an issue.

---
"Sweet Masons, what the hell is that?"

'That' happened to be a Plague Behemoth - a quadruped brute roughly the same size as my Brave IFVs, and twice as tall. The damn thing had two acid bio-cannons on its shoulders and arms of a weight and mass more akin to concrete pillars than actual arms.

It made it about three metres past the tunnel's entrance before two blasts of crimson light blew through it, leaving a gaping hole in it's torso.

"Don't know, don't care!" Trooper 21 called out to the Red Faction soldier who'd asked.

Three more Behemoths rounded the corner, leaping easily over the corpse of their dead comrade before racing towards Diggstown's barricade/gate.

One was blasted apart by another pair of shots from the Braves, and the second brought down by a continuous stream of fire from the two NeoAvatars standing outside their vehicles - the fact that their Plasma SMGs had firepower equal to some of the Red Faction's heaviest handheld munitions probably helped.

The third was close to making it to the barricade when an absolutely absurd number of bullets slammed into it, courtesy of the two Red Faction guards manning machine guns on each side of the gate. It roared defiance and began to drag itself further forward, but one of the RF guards had something else planned - lifting some sort of grenade launcher, he fired off a volley of rounds.

Said rounds appeared to be some kind of energy projectile, glowing white orbs that bounced across the ground before exploding with a weird, spacial-warping style effect that annihilated the Plague but did nothing to the ground below.

Anti-bio bombs, of some kind? Was there a weapon like that in Red Faction? Maybe…

Wait, shit. That reminds me.

I reached across the Command Network to Hope. "Hey, did we ever end up picking up Anti-bio Beams from FTL?"

"Uh… no. Why didn't you check yourself?"

"I'm lonely, and you know it."

It was true, after all. Sure, I'd spoken to other people occasionally, but for the most part it'd been me and my thoughts for… three months, real time? Somewhat longer, accounting for all the accelerated time I'd been dealing with. Probably closer to a year…

Wow.

Fuck.

"... Fair." Hope replied at last. "Well, since I'll be going back to Hub, do you want me to hop over through the FTL Dimensional Gate and see if I can grab them?"

"Actually, that would probably be a good idea. I made a deal with the Zoltan that I would - "

"Yeah, I know. I was there. Kinda. I'll make sure they're not doing anything stupid, and see if I can grab anything else neat whilst I'm there, I guess. In case we missed anything."

"Yeah, fair enough. We should have enough power to activate the D-Gate, soon, so…"

"Cool. You going to wrap up these Plague douchebags soon, or what?"

"Eh. Once Team 1 gets Mason out of the Marauder Ruins, then I'll see about flooding the tunnel with those Doxes I've got piled over there."

Said pile of Doxes referred to a cluster of about three thousand of the four-metre bots, of three main variants: first, I had the 'vanilla' Doxes - armed with Progenitor plasma cannons and nothing else. Second, I had the Laser Doxes - their arm-mounted cannons swapped out for the same kind of mutli-function 'lasers' used by my Brave IFVs. And finally, I had the Fire Doxes. Although the name was a misnomer, since they were actually armed with twin plasma sprayers.

Between the three kinds, I had more than enough firepower to deal with the Plague.

Time to get going, then.

 

[Faith]

Double post but fuck the rules! I AM THE OP! I DO WHAT I WANT! MUWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

*Ahem*

Story post, because hospital is boring.

61 - Cave-in

Team 1, the group of five NeoAvatars I had sent to rescue Darius Mason from the Marauder Ruins, were in quite the spot of bother.

Nine Behemoths. Nine.

It took concentrated fire from two NeoAvatars to kill one of the damn things. I was starting to regret not sending them some heavier firepower, but there was just no way the Braves - or any of my other units, really, - were going to be able to fit down the cargo elevator, and finding a path through the tunnels would have taken ages…

So, I'd have to make one.

FABRICATORS! Overpowered as shit!

Of course, the speed at which a fabricator could dig through solid rock was limited, and there were probably better options.

Like, say… a giant drill. If it was made of tough enough materials, and powered by a sufficiently advanced motor, it would be able to absolutely rip through rock like it was nothing.

Hm.

Making a point not to look at the blueprints for the Vehicle Fabricator - or any of my other tanks, - I opened up the design program and started working.

First, I needed a body. Resource transfer system, CPU core, and internal generator all neatly lined up, surrounded in a layer of Progenitor alloys. At the front of that roughly cubic mass, a single, high powered Progenitor motor.

Attached to the motor, a drill big enough to make most miners envious. Exactly three metres in radius, with that weird corkscrew thing to… push dirt out of the way or whatever. Made entirely out of Progenitor alloys, completely removing wear and tear as something I needed to worry about. Heh.

The vehicle had four treads, set out in the same way as Halo's Scorpion Tank, but set at a slight angle to better deal with being in a circular tunnel. The rear treads mounted backwards-facing Fabricators, which would in theory allow the vehicle to harvest the dirt it was processing, or construct things in the tunnel behind it, such as supports to stop the roof collapsing.

I figured two Fabricators probably wouldn't cut it, so I stuck six more on the back of the vehicle's body, cutting into the armour a little to make room. Not that it would matter, since any enemy wanting to make use of that little vulnerability would need to be behind the tunneller in the first place.

That complete, I queued up one of my bot factories to build one. It would take about fifteen seconds to build… which was absolutely unacceptable.

Why did the factories only have four fabricators anyway?

I made a note to refit them, which Hope almost immediately answered. "Yeah, I thought the same thing back on Hub. Here -" a set of blueprints floated across the Command Network. "I call it the Land Factory… because, you know. It's a factory for land units. Vehicles, Bots, and Infantry-Scale stuff. Well, except NeoAvatars, you'd need a specialised building for that. What with needing the Engi Medical Nanobots and all."

"You know, you probably should have mentioned that you did that. It would have been nice to build them in this base, instead of the regular bot factories."

"Oh, yeah. Sorry. I'll just start saving new designs straight to the Command Network, instead of my AI core… hey, what did you need refitted factories for, anyway?"

"To build these new Mining Fabricators."

"Oh….kay. Why did you need Mining Fabricators?"

"To dig a tunnel to the Plague's hives so I can flood them with robots? Duh."

"Uh… but you already know where the hives are."

"Yes, so I built the Mining Fabricators so I could access them."

"But if you know where they are, why not just Teleport there?"

...

I didn't really have a good response for that.

---

The five NeoAvatars making their way slowly through the Marauder Ruins found their progress significantly easier once reinforcements arrived, in the form of half a dozen three metre tall spider bots with laser cannons.

They'd been able to hold back the Behemoths by sheer volume of fire, but with the Friendship Laser Spiders on their side, they were able to push against the pressing horde, the aforementioned lasers making quick work of anything larger than a standard humanoid.

They didn't have to push very far, though. After only about two hundred metres of bug-filled tunnels, the NeoAvatars found themselves at the lip of a huge pit that lead down into a cavern below. At the bottom of the pit?

A mining exosuit, formerly-yellow paint faded dull by the rigors of time, and shitty Martian weather.

Yoink.

More importantly, though: the owner of the mech, the currently unconscious Darius Mason, possessed a handy little device called a Nanoforge - like my own Fabricators, only on a much smaller scale, possibly more efficient, and capable of utilizing nanobots in several fun ways, such as energy pulses, shields, and… some other things? Don't remember, don't care.

Yoink.

Most important of all, though, the exosuit's weapon.

The single best weapon in Red Faction Armageddon. The only one I'd ever used in my more recent playthroughs of the game.The single most fun weapon in gaming history (at least, in my opinion).

YOINK!

---

The Anti-Bio Bombs the Red Faction grenadier had been using were known locally as Pulse Grenades - a handy piece of Marauder tech that resonated on a frequency that annihilated most organic matter, and did bugger all to rock, metal, clothing, or other technology (barring some of the more expensive, specialised, sensitive and/or fragile equipment, I suspected).

Naturally, I stole that, too. It took a while for me to smuggle in a small amount of nanobots without them being noticed, but once they got to the gun's internals it was a matter of seconds.

As the last of this particular wave of Plague made it into the open and were subsequently slaughtered, the Red Faction leader, and one of the other guards, made their way over to Troopers 21 and 23, who were taking cover behind a pile of crates near one of the Braves.

"God damn, son, what the hell kind of firepower you Faith boys packing? Your dinky little SMGs are outclassing our machine guns!"

Tempted as I was to be an asshole about it and reply with something along the lines of 'nanomachines, son', it would have been grossly inappropriate. Firstly, nanomachines had nothing to do with the firepower of the weapon. They were responsible for its fabrication, yes, but that had nothing to do with its power level. Second of all, the Red Faction universe was not unused to nanomachines, and probably wouldn't buy my shit.

Third, and most importantly, I'd used that joke at least twice already and I was pretty sure Hope would have less reservations about slapping me than I would about slapping myself.

"Well you see, sir, when you give a bunch of easily excited military engineers a huge budget and a state-of-the-art facility, you get a lot of fun toys. This just happens to be the newest, funnest toy. Rapid fire, thermal charging, high energy handheld plasma repeater."

The Red Faction guards looked at each other with barely restrained awe.

"Alright then. Question number two. What the fuck were those bugs?"

Ah. Right.

"Well, remember those Ultor bioweapons were were talking about? I think that was them."

The Red Faction guards looked away from the two NeoAvatars, staring across the formerly-empty cavern now flooded with slowly disintegrating corpses. "Well, damn."

"Yeah. This… could be problematic. Command's digging through Ultor's files, trying to find something that they're weak to, but…" Trooper 21 shrugged. "Slow going. Not to doubt the capabilities of your defenses, but I think it would probably be best if we held position here, at least for now. Once the storm dies down and we can get in touch with Command again, we'll see about moving out."

The sergeant looked at his comrade, and then out across the field of dwindling corpses again. "Damn, you keep killing bugs like that, you can stay as long as you like."

---

The Dimensional Gate lit up with a flash of blue light, a flat pane of energy forming inside the ring. After a couple of seconds, the cerulean light faded away, leaving a vision of a totally different world. A city of blocky green buildings and shining orange lights.

Hub. Or rather, Moon One. Which… needed a better name. Ah well.

As soon as the shimmering field became stable, and the link between dimensional gates opened, my resource network began positively overflowing with metal and energy.

Hope's Osiris stepped through the portal, followed by her small train of containment pods, but this time, the connection between us was not lost.

"Alright, so, for future reference," Hope began, "the easy, efficient two-way travel only works when you have gates both sides. Now we know."

"Yeah, that's good, I guess. Now, you get back to your wildlife preserve or whatever. I'mma crush some bugs."

Hope glared back at me through the portal. "Yeah, have fun. Don't forget to hack the-"

"Red Faction and Marauder computers, I know. I'll even send some units to Earth to see what I can yank from there. No promises, though."

Hope's Osiris shrugged - I didn't even know the frame supported that, but apparently it does, - and turned away from the Dimensional Gate. "Well, I should have enough of these dumb bugs to do science on and stuff. I'll see if I can find that stupid weakness of theirs."

"Yeah, thanks."

And I too turned away from the portal.

---

Team 1 emerged from the cargo elevator covered in dust, sand, and alien goop. One of the five carried Darius Mason, slung over one shoulder in a fireman's carry, the other four constantly scanning the environment with their SMGs.

Once they returned to their vehicles, I had them all mount up, - the still-unconscious Mason riding shotgun in the second car, - and begin the journey back to Bastion, the largest and most central of Mars' underground settlements.

Four of the Friendship Spiders accompanied them, the remaining units descending further into the tunnels to continue their search-and-destroy mission.

The Braves and their escort made quick work across the surface, encountering very little in the way of resistance - which was odd, because I seemed to recall a fair few missions on the surface in Red Faction: Armageddon and the bugs had quite a presence there.

Must have been due to the fact that I'd arrived fairly shortly after the bugs had been freed. They must not have had time to spread yet - and if I had anything to say about it, they were never going to get that chance in the first place.

Now that all the colonies were largely secured, and the majority of the civilians were safe within barricaded areas, I didn't have to hold anything back.

Time to meet the tide of flesh with a tide of metal.

---

Hope's NeoAvatar stared through the 'glass' into the room containing the Plague Creeper, imprisoned in its confined cell. The ugly beast had four long, spindly legs, covered in spines or spikes of some kind, a thin coating of fur or really small spines, and a wide maw, framed below by some kind of tusk or mandible, and above by a quartet of glowing eyes.

In short - creepy as all fuck.

Hope frowned as the intense levels of beta-radiation continued to have an incredibly minimal effect on the damnable bug. Flicking a mental switch, the emitters shut down, sliding back into recesses in the wall before being replaced by a pair of high intensity UV lights.

Which… also did nothing.

Hope double checked that the containment cage was not blocking the radiation (it wasn't) and then slumped backwards against the corridor wall with a sigh.

Their weakness was so stupid, so arbitrary… why couldn't she remember it?

The girl-turned-AI-turned-cloned-AI was dragged from her musings by an alarm, activated due to facility damage in one of the nearby labs. She sighed and activated the station's teleporter, moving herself to the cell in question.

The Plague Behemoth, the truck-sized acid spitting brute, was repeatedly slamming its forelimbs into the floor of its cell in slow motion - a reasonably smart move, all things considered, since it was the location of both the power supply and the slow-field generator. If it could break that… well, its prospects of escaping wouldn't really change, honestly. But still.

A pair of turrets descended from behind ceiling panels as the Behemoth continued to struggle, and Hope waited for the monster to break free. Finally, a blast of acid from one of the bulbous protrusions on its shoulder melted through the thin cover of the slow-field generator, and then the generator itself, melting the kinetic dampener into slag.

Suddenly the brute appeared to triple in speed as the dampening wore off, and it began throwing itself at the wall of its cell with renewed vigor.

After about seven minutes of alternating between acid spid and kinetic impacts, it finally managed to cause damage, creating a minute crack in the cell's transparent wall. Hope tensed, the turrets charging their weapons…

The glass shattered as the Behemoth rammed it once more, a full body charge that put it straight through the glass and across the room.

The Behemoth let out a keening scream, and then keeled over and died.

"Huh."

 

[Faith]

Almost forgot to post this. Almost. Still Wednesday, still counts.

As I said in your thread, @Ovid, I must apologise but I was wrong about the number of chapters you'll have to wait for Faith's first contribution to the Nearly Enuff Dakka list. Turns out writing whilst high is not necessarily great for plot and pacing, so a few chapters are going to have to be rewritten, or at the very least touched up slightly.

Bright side, I'm out of hospital now and my fingers work again(ish) so there's that?

62 - Firewall

The surface cargo elevator near Bastion was positively overrun with Plague by the time Team 1 arrived in their impromptu convoy, Creepers and the larger Ravager types throwing themselves at a heavily fortified Red Faction checkpoint near the base of the elevator shaft.

I figured they might have been too busy fighting for their lives to send the elevator up to the surface, so I hacked into the system, forced the upper gate to open, and had my units simply drive into the elevator shaft.

Not like a twenty three story drop was going to phase them.

The Laser Spiders went first, stomping through the horde, crushing the lesser Plague beneath their six pointy feet and blasting apart the Ravagers with their Friendship Lasers.

Which really, urgently, desperately needed a better name. Ah well. Problems for later.

The Braves followed, their large tyres and heavy metal bull bars making quick work of the few Plague dumb enough to try getting in the way.

With the combined firepower of my little convoy and the Red Faction's barricade, the last of the Plague were wiped out fairly quickly, and the Red Faction troopers emerged from their makeshift bunker, looking between my vehicles and the elevator in surprise before shrugging and approaching.

Trooper 5 climbed out of the rear Brave, waving the soldiers over.

"You must be those Faith Foundation fellas, yeah? Thanks for the assist, don't know how much longer we'd have been able to hold out. How'd you get down here, anyway? I didn't see the lift go up."

"It didn't."

The Red Faction soldier looked between my vehicles and the lift again.

"That's a twenty odd story drop," the Red Faction soldier said, the unasked question obvious to see.

"Yeah."

Another head swivel.

"Huh."

---

With the major colonies secure, the border outposts evacuated, and the Red Faction groups throughout the underground preparing themselves for another assault, I turned my attention from the defence, to the offense.

Four thousand Doxes marched mechanically onto the nearby set of Phase Teleporters, being relocated in groups of five from their rally point in Hemsville to the depths of the tunnels beneath Mars.

Most of the 'squads' I'd teleported in had been sent to the larger caverns and chambers, places where multiple tunnels converged, in order to stem the flow of the Plague and to try and stop them spreading out. The rest had been moved into the tunnels proper, a wall of steel and fire abruptly appearing in front of the onrushing horde of monsters.

Regardless of their destination, as soon as they emerged the plasma started flying. Searing blasts of blue fire and intense beams of red light lanced out from the Doxes, incinerating the swarming creatures by the dozen.

The Doxes in the tunnels at the foremost reaches of the Plague's expansion got off a good four or so volleys before the horde slammed into them like a tidal wave. Luckily, the sharp claws and acid of the Plague weren't so effective on the Progenitor's military grade armour alloys, and the charge broke, its momentum ruined by the wall of machinery standing in its way.

The Fire Doxes opened up at that point, their twin plasma throwers flooding the tunnels in light and heat and utterly vaporizing every dumb bug stupid enough to continue pressing the assault. A literal firewall, devouring everything it touched.

The Doxes inside the Plague's 'territory', as it were, struggled a little more, surrounded on all sides and hopelessly overwhelmed.

In terms of numbers, anyway. Flashes of light and blasts of energy signalled dozens, hundreds of dead Plague critters, huge rivers of plasma melting even stone, carving charred channels in the Martian rock.

The tide of bugs only seemed to increase in density, thousands upon thousands of the creatures rushing out from the depths of Mars to face my metal warriors.

I smirked as they emerged from their tunnels.

Not like they were going to get anywhere.

---

Infiltrating the Red Faction's defence network was almost pathetically easy. With the bugs occupied elsewhere, the Red Faction had slightly eased up, and my cyborgs were able to start wandering around the various settlements freely - to a degree. Most of them had Red Faction escorts and there were some areas that they were denied access to, but for the most part no one got in their way.

Which was excellent, because it gave me ample chance to hack into the various computer systems around.

Bastion turned out to be the best, for that. A couple of stealthy nanite-infiltrations later and I had easy access to their network - even the most secure elements. Pssht, firewalls.

Unfortunately, there wasn't an awful lot of useful technology belonging to the Red Faction. They had some interesting stuff - the Enforcer with its guided submunitions, and the infamous and nonsensical Napalm Laser being the main ones, - but most of their stuff was fairly mundane. Assault rifles, pistols, shotguns, laser pistols, plasma cannons, plasma throwers, plasma beams…

They were quite big on plasma weapons, apparently.

Unfortunately for me, it was the Marauders who invented the really fun weapons, such as the Anti-Bio Bombs (Pulse Grenades, as they were apparently called), the Nano Rifle and the fan-favourite Singularity Cannon, all of which I very much wanted to steal.

But I didn't have access to the Marauder's data networks, yet. The Marauder State was far enough from the Plague's primary hive that they hadn't encountered any large problems, and I doubted they would what with the army of robots royally screwing over the Plague in their own nest.

Which meant that it would be difficult to infiltrate them under the pretense of needing shelter from the bugs.

Ah well. I could always just teleport in a stealth unit later and steal their data. Phase Tech OP, and all that.

In the meantime, though, I was making preparations to head for Earth.

---


All things said and done, it was a very bad day for the Plague. Their assault on Mars had come to an abrupt end, each possible passage away from their main hive cordoned off and secured by enough military robots to populate a small town.

Assault forces of the same military robots had basically set up camp throughout their tunnels, annihilating anything that tried to pass nearby and clearing a beachhead for more factories to be set up, which would continue to flood the tunnels with even more robots, as was clearly the optimal solution.

And then, the tide of bugs… stopped.

From the deepest parts of the hive, the parts I had yet to send units into, the river of Plague monsters just dried up, and even as I vaporised the last thousand or so who'd come through, there was not a peep from the darkest, deepest section of the tunnels.

My sensors were still picking up the lifesigns, so I knew they were still there, and the number of lifesigns was decreasing, so they were going somewhere, but… where?

---

The answer to that uncomfortable question came from Diggstown, in the form of some kind of fucking spatial rift opening up and vomiting Behemoths all over my poor Braves.

Nineteen Behemoths, to be exact. I didn't even recall fighting that many of the damn things in the entire game!

Apparently their queen was learning.

I, on the other hand, was clearly not. How the flying fuckbuckets did I forget that the Plague could fucking teleport!?

That explained where all the other bugs were, at least. Teleporting through the tunnels to bypass my defences. Which meant… aw, shit.

The Doxes inside what had formerly been Plague territory were ordered forward, into the depths of the hive. Their mission was simple - murder as many bugs as possible, and self destruct when disabled. If disabled, sorry.

The perimeter forces turned around and started running through the tunnels, back towards the settlements that were… not undefended, but probably not entirely up to the task of defending against as many of the Plague as I believed there would inevitably be.

The Braves in Diggstown weren't doing so hot themselves, honestly. One had been tipped on its side and rammed against a wall, and the other had four Behemoths all trying to take chunks out of it with claws and acid.

Luckily, neither was sufficiently damaged that it was incapable of fighting back, and repeated laser blasts forced the Behemoths back, carving smoldering gashes in their torsos with each hit and boiling the flesh even on a near miss.

The Red Faction soldiers were only too willing to assist, and between them and the four NeoAvatars, a veritable flood of plasma and bullets filled the air.

It wasn't really enough, unfortunately. It was only a matter of time before the Behemoths gave up on the Braves and started attacking the settlement itself.

God, I wish I remembered the Plague's stupid fucking weakness.

---

Hope chose that moment to speak up across the Command Network, opening with a line I really wanted to hear.

"So, uh. I found the Plague's weakness," she began. "But…"

"Oh, good. They were starting to get smart… but what?"

"You're, uh." She paused for a moment. "You're not going to like this."

"Really?" I couldn't possibly imagine why that would be the case.

"Well, I didn't."

"Okay, fair enough. Let's hear it, then."

Hope let out the digitial/mental equivalent of a sigh before speaking. "Air."

....

"Come again?"

"Air. Earthlike air." She explained. "The highly ionised air here is good for them, but get rid of that, they get sick, disoriented. Add a pinch of oxygen, bam, one dead bug. Or, you know. A couple million."

Fuck. Of course. The whole reason Hale and his cultists blew up the Terraformer in the first place was to pave the way for the Plague to ravage Mars. How'd I forget that? It was the major plot of the game!

I sighed, forcing myself to remain calm.

"Ok. So… if I'd just fixed the Terraformer straight away, this problem would already have been solved?"

"Hate to break it to you, but… yeah."

"Yeah, you were right. I don't like that. Welp, time to fix that stupid Terraformer… and whilst I'm at it, I'll stick down some Cores around the place. I can't imagine that the air's very fresh down in the tunnels, and that'll probably be faster than bringing the entire Terraformer online."

"Good thinking. You want to handle that whilst I deal with the Terraformer?"

"If you're willing to help, then sure."

---

Six dozen Air Fabricators dealt with the Terraformer quite nicely, rapidly spreading nanites throughout the structure and improving almost every aspect.

The frame was reinforced, the walls and floors strengthened, power systems renovated, ventilation systems swapped out for Cores, and the coolant tanks replaced by a powerful Progenitor heat-sink.

The atmospheric stabiliser itself wasn't touched - neither Hope nor I knew enough to upgrade it, and a Core powerful enough to perform the same tasks would have had to have been huge.

Besides, they were better for converting the contents of the atmosphere, and Mars' atmosphere was mostly fine as it was, besides the 'highly ionized' part. A tad more oxygen wouldn't hurt, but that could be achieved by means of Cores in all the major settlements.

Of course, I needed a way to get the cores to the settlements without just teleporting in some Fabricators and throwing them down. Although with the presence of nanite technology in Red Faction, that might not even really surprise them…

Aw, fuck it. We already decided to start fixing the Terraformer. Might as well go full hog.

I took over control of NeoAvatar Trooper 21, over in Diggstown. The Behemoths had been driven off, thanks to the combined fire of every Red Faction militiaman, their E.X.O. power armour thing, and my own forces, and an uneasy peace had returned, which meant I was free to have Trooper 21 seek out the Red Faction commander.

"Hey, we just got word from Command that the storm's died down, so our Teleporter network can come back online. Construction crews will be over in no time flat to fix up your Terraformer. In the meantime, want some air fresheners?"

"Teleporter… terraformer… air fresheners? What?"

"Well, I say air fresheners, but what I mean is Cores. More of those lovely toys from our R&D department. Converts useless minor gasses like carbon dioxide into useful stuff, like oxygen. We generally use them on our starships, since they can recycle air indefinitely and they generate power whilst they're at it. Figure they'd be good to have down here in the mines, keep the air fresh."

"Uh…"

"Also, apparently Ultor's bioweapons are allergic to oxygen, so…" Trooper 21 shrugged. "Kills air pollution and horrifying space bugs, or your money back."

 

[Faith]

Hey look, a thing! I really shouldn't be wasting my times on forums with important IRL stuff to do, but... schedule.

63 - Queen

The Red Faction sergeant seemed too happy to accept the offer, although he seemed dubious as to how it would happen.

Luckily, Hope was reasonably on top of things, and with the Terraformer nearing the end of its reconstruction, I was free to turn the entirety of my attention to the problem.

Not that it was much of a problem, though. I teleported one of my spare Vehicle Fabricators to the outskirts of Diggstown and had it roll up to the settlement's gate.

Trooper 21 gestured to the construction tank with one hand. "Ah, it's here already. Great. Just pick a spot, preferably a relatively centralised and open area, and we'll set up the Atmospheric Core."

The Red Faction sergeant blanched. "Oh. I, uh. I didn't realise you'd be ready to build it so soon…"

Within the body of Trooper 21, I shrugged. "Eh, we can wait."

---

Similar discussions were ongoing across the various settlements of Mars. Overall, the Red Faction seemed reluctantly willing to take me up on the offer, with the general consensus being that if we tried to fuck them over, we'd very swiftly get a boot up the ass.

Hope laughed across the Command Network. "Puh-lease. I'd like to see them try."

"Yeah, me too, but I have no intention of screwing these guys over. They've been fucked around enough. We fix the Terraformer, we set up the Cores, and then we get out of their hair."

"After robbing them blind, you mean."

"Well, duh. Although… hm. We should probably do something about the crazy bug cultists. They're in their cells, and they've got automatic food dispensers and stuff to keep them fed and hydrated, so they won't just waste away, but… do we hand them over to the Red Faction? The Marauders? Let them die?"

"If I were you… well, I am you, so I guess I'll just say it. There's not much point in sending them off to the Red Faction or the Marauders, since they'll probably just kill the lot of them for pragmatic reasons."

"I was thinking much the same myself. Did you have an alternative in mind?"

"Well… I guess what we could do is tell the Red Faction and the Marauders where they are, but also tell them that there's no chance of them escaping and the situation is entirely under control. If they want to check it out, they can, and if they don't care and just want to leave them alone in their automated prison, then they're entirely free to do so."

"I was thinking something similar, but that does create some problems. We can't just leave this one automated building here when we pack up and go. That'd be just begging for people to start poking around. I don't think either of us want to play babysitter to these maniacs-"

"No way. The bugs are way more interesting. I get to do science on them without feeling bad!"

I rolled my nonexistent eyes and continued. "So basically, leaving the Terraformer and the Cores is fine, but leaving just the prison on its own out here in Hemsville? That would be rather sus."

"So would us just up and disappearing from Mars and not a trace of us ever being found again. Like you said before, might as well go full hog."

"Eh, I guess. Besides, it's not like we'll be here to see people get confused about it. Though it probably would be funny to watch. Anyway, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's wrap this little infestation up first, hey?"

---

The Plague's attacks, even those coming through the rifts, had started to die down once I dropped two and a half thousand Doxes into the deepest depths of their primary hive, but the Plague were persistent and worse, they were getting smart.

Tentacles burst from the ground in pairs or groups, each grabbing the same Dox by a different limb and pulling. Even if they couldn't rip the limbs off, that Dox was effectively disabled, and its allies couldn't free it without risking damage to it.

Not that I was loathe to shoot my own units, or anything - especially the Doxes, which were basically popcorn, - but each pair of Tentacles I annihilated took a Dox with them, and the rest of the Plague were beginning to use similar techniques, simply burying the robots with sheer weight of numbers.

Rather than send conventional reinforcements, though, I had a funnier idea.

They didn't like un-ionized air or high concentrations of oxygen. I had Cores, which could deal with both (although admittedly they weren't great for the large scale).

The obvious solution here was to stick Cores on all of my units. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the Cores and their exponentially growing potential to convert the atmosphere based upon their size, and their not-insignificant energy cost to initialise (just kidding, it was pretty insignificant with the amount of resources my hub system was putting out), putting one small Core on each of my units would have been rather inefficient.

So…

I dug up a memory from my youth and fired up the design program.

---

Finally, after three subjective days of work, it was done. A walking, (not) talking, biohazard containment unit almost the same size as my Osiris frame - standing around thirteen metres tall at the head. Well, it was fourteen if you counted the Core as well.

It was humanoid in shape - two arms, two legs, and a head linked by a torso, - but built more like a rhino than a man, with huge, thick limbs and a torso wide enough for two Braves to park side by side.

Each arm contained an underslung Plasma Thrower and a 'wrist'-mounted Fabricator unit, in addition to its primary armament - an Anti-Bio Beam, the designs of which Hope had been able to quickly steal from an unsuspecting Slug military base back in the FTLverse.

Well, technically, it was just a Beam Emitter. With a bit of fiddling and dubious applications of nanomachines, it was a fairly simple matter to combine every sort of FTLverse Beam Weapon together. Which meant that whilst it was primarily configured as an Anti-Bio Beam, it could also serve as a Fire Beam or a regular Laser Beam, or even one of Red Faction's 'Napalm Lasers', which, in fact, fired neither napalm nor lasers, but I digress.

Resting upon the mechanical beast's back was a Core - one almost half again as large as those used by the Bright Foundation, approximately three metres in radius. Like all of the Cores, it was wrapped in a series of spinning rings almost like a gyroscope, which Hope assured me were vital for its continued operation.

How she determined that, I was almost afraid to ask.

It appeared to be held in place by a number of thin metal braces, almost like ribbons or chains wrapped around the war machine and its 'cargo', but in reality it was just as securely attached as any other part of the robot.

Finishing off the design was a set of two triple-barreled munitions launchers, one on each of the shoulders. Whilst technically they could fire anything, they were designed by default to fire Pulse Grenades, for even more anti-biological goodness.

Between the anti-bio weaponry, the intense flames, and the Core filtering and purifying the atmosphere, this thing was designed with only one thing in mind - killing space bugs, zombies, and/or miscellaneous other biohazards.

Semi-related note, the Bright Foundation's core were two-for-two on stopping space monsters, which had some rather interesting implications. Unfortunately, most of the other horrific space monsters that came to mind were totally fine with oxygen-based atmospheres. Not that the Core's ability to filter air was any less useful because of it, but I doubted they'd be able to simply kill everything by poisoning the air.

Except they would be able to, because I could at any time alter the Core to produce different balances of gas. Though I would first need to figure out what kinds of chemicals a given target was weak too…

Anyway, moving on.

The monster packed four fabricators, two on each arm, which combined with the above mentioned firepower made it ironically a vastly superior chassis for a Commander than the Osiris. If I swapped out the Elysion Core for an AI Core and a Resource Core - man, I have a lot of Cores in my techbase, - then it would be perfect.

Buuuut... those would both add tremendously to the build time (well, the Resource Core would. AI Cores weren't so bad) and I didn't really care enough to bother designing a special variant just for that.

Once its design was tested and found adequate, I queued up two hundred from the assorted factories on the surface of Mars, spinning off another fork to control them as I did so. And then I sent the design to Hope.

"Hey, Hope. Meet the Purifier."

"Oh, wow, Faith," Hope said as she looked over the designs. "Now that's just mean."

---

Whilst one of my forks was preparing for a second invasion of the Plague Hive, I turned my attention elsewhere. Namely, Earth.

"Hey, Faith," Hope called out across the Command Network. "Your Orbital Launcher is done."

"Oh, right. I hadn't noticed. Thanks."

Said Orbital Launcher was my plan for actually getting to Earth, to see what I could steal from there.

Probably not a lot, but I'd already gotten most of what I wanted. Just a couple more things to grab, mainly from the Marauders. If Earth had anything interesting, it certainly hadn't shown up in game.

The first Orbital Fabricator took off in seconds, racing off to space upon a plume of smoke and fire, and quickly establishing a stable orbit. I queued up a sensor platform and an Orbital Factory, which would unfortunately take some time to complete, and then I could build a Pilgrim construction air cruiser. And with that, I could conquer the Earth.

Well, not literally - well, yes literally if I put my mind to it, but that wasn't my intention.

Instead, it was just going to fly close enough for me to access the internet - and frankly, I was amazed I couldn't do that from Mars, all things considered, - and then from there I'd be able to find out the locations of all the biggest tech development companies, and hopefully I'd also be able to find out what happened to Ultor.

I knew they were at least partially involved in the development of nanotechnology and in general Martian affairs, so if anyone was likely to have anything interesting, it was them.

I split off a fork to deal with that and moved my attention elsewhere once again.

---

The fork in charge of the Purifiers was doing an excellent job of utterly annihilating everything. The two hundred heavily armed mechs had been teleported straight into the heart of the Plague's hive, or as close as they could get. About a hundred were inside the hive proper, the rest in the larger tunnels leading out from the centre.

Though they hadn't found the Queen there, they had found an absolute shit-ton of Plague, and with their Anti-Bio weaponry, they didn't even flinch at the prospect of friendly fire. Radiation bursts lit the darkness, boiling, melting, and otherwise mutilating the flesh of everything in range. The tunnels were rapidly filling with dead and dying members of the Plague even before their Cores initialised, the black glassy orbs upon their backs suddenly igniting in flashes of blue, sucking in the nearby atmosphere and filtering it to the Earth standard.

Suddenly, the numbers of dead and dying bugs skyrocketed, and the Queen chose that moment to make her appearance, bursting from the ground dramatically with a furious roar.

It would have been very impressive, if not for the fact that the enormous chamber she emerged in contained just under one hundred Purifiers, and each and every one of them turned to her and fired as one unit, one hundred and ninety four high-intensity laser beams carving chunks from her body and incinerating what little remained.

With an incredibly anticlimactic squeal, the Queen slumped over and died. The Purifiers fired again, just to be sure. When the Queen didn't respond, they turned around and moved away, searching for any other pockets of Plague resistance that weren't quite gone yet. I doubted they'd get lucky.

Dumbass bugs with a stupid weakness, dead. Problem number one, solved. I ticked it off my mental checklist with some small satisfaction.

Terraformer, sorted. Bugs, sorted. Cool toys, stolen.

Now, to deal with all of Mars' little problems.

 

[Faith]

A bit earlier than I usually manage on a Wednesday. Yay! *confetti*

64 - Consolidation

Perhaps I misspoke.

The majority of Mars' problems were rather large - crazy cultists, terrible atmosphere, rampaging space bugs, that sort of thing, - and I had quickly stamped them out. On the other hand, there were very few other problems. There were so few people that crime was practically, although not entirely, nonexistent - as evidenced by the rather large prison in Bastion, housing almost one hundred inmates, - the water and food supplies were fine, if a little thinly-spread, and there was no shortage of work.

I threw down a couple of water 'purifiers' - that is, large tanks equipped with Fabricators to always keep them topped up, - near the Cores, providing every single Red Faction settlement on Mars with free, infinite sources of clean air and water. The Fabricator drew the matter to create the water from the Mars-based grid of Metal Extractors, consuming a whopping 0.1 units of mass per hour, which meant that even if I'd given all of the purifiers links to only one Extractor, it still could have dealt with it entirely for a couple of hundred years, minimum. Not that they'd need it that long, nor would they be using the water non-stop for a couple of hundred years (or so I hoped).

And with that done, I ran out of things to do. I set the Vehicle Fabricators to perform upgrades to the roads, gondolas and elevators that linked the settlements, repaving roads, repairing structures, and fine-tuning power conduits and relays for maximum efficiency. Those, too, I linked into my own Mars-based resource grid, ensuring they would never run out of energy, because I'm nice like that.

And then I sent a couple dozen spies straight into the heart of the Marauder State.

---

Turns out, neither people nor Red Faction-verse sensors can detect things that are only 40% attached to reality. How do I know this? Well, a six foot tall robot in bright white armour and glowing green LEDs all over its body just walked down a busy corridor in the middle of the Marauder's military compound, ran its hand along the bank of computer terminals whilst spewing nanomachines from its fingers, and then turned around and walked out, and not one alarm was sounded. No one even so much as blinked at it, except on the odd occasion where the Avatar Droid's slightly faulty pathfinding subroutine would send it careering into something - or someone.

Regardless, nothing bad came of my thirty-odd expeditions into Marauder territory. With Hope's assistance, I shrunk down the Phase Cloak Generator to infantry size and mounted it on a couple of my units, and when I'd teleported them into Marauder territory with no reaction I figured I might as well loot them to the bedrock whilst I was there.
So I did.

Libraries, school terminals, military archives… everything short of written diaries and journals.

And for my troubles, I received quite a haul. I walked away with Singularity tech, Nano Rifle tech, Red Faction-verse shielding tech (form fitting, as opposed to FTL's bubble), and a fair amount of nanotechnology research notes, some of which even dated back to the Ultor days.

And no one even noticed I was there.

FTLverse stealth tech OP.

Please don't nerf.

---

Once I was done squeeing like a fangirl over my new shinies (seriously, MICRO SINGULARITY GENERATORS. That shit's AWESOME) I realised there was one more little thing I could do for the people of Mars.

I dug up the designs for the FTLverse' FTL Beacons, complete with FTL communicator, and quickly threw together a modified version of the Solar Panel Satellite to serve as a communications relay.

One of them in Earth Orbit, one in Mars Orbit, and bam, instant, lag free internet for Mars. Well, I'd need several in Mars Orbit to achieve that totally - even though most of the settlements were within one geographical area, it was still easier to split up the server load and cast the net a little wider by use of multiple relays.

Also, they'd need receivers planetside. After a couple of quick checks with the 'modern' Martian computers I'd scanned in both Red Faction and Marauder territory, I played around with the transmission formatting before happening across a method that would allow the system to automatically convert Earth-formatted web pages into a format more suited to the older, more rugged Martian architecture. It was a little thing, but it would do until the Martians inevitably figured out how to update their computers to… uh, Windows Supreme, apparently. Huh.

Meanwhile, speaking of Earth's internet...

---

The internet is wonderful. Well, except the porn bits. For fairly obvious reasons, there was a staggeringly huge number of large corporations who used it for various things, such as advertisment, fund transfers, and sharing research (sometimes).

After quickly skimming the internet for a few key words and phrases, I determined the locations of all the critical corporations, the major players in the fields of physics, genetics, bioengineering, nanoengineering, and pretty much everything else that caught my fancy. And then everything else, just for kicks. I sent my Pilgrim out, its orders simple. Find the target corporation's building, teleport some nanites down in the form of a nanite-bomb, hack their systems, and steal everything.

After looking at the estimated completion time (approximately two hours), I decided that that would take far too long with one ship alone, and queued up five more.

Even with six Pilgrims assigned to the task, it would still be a rather boring and menial wait. Luckily, I had access to the internet and about one hundred and sixty years of stuff to catch up on.

First stop, Reddit.

---

Turns out that nothing on Earth was even remotely as interesting as the Marauder State's technology, weapon wise.

Outside of that, they had some neat stuff, in terms of infrastructure, appliances, furniture… things that would have been useful if I wasn't a giant death robot, basically. It was a little disappointing, really, because it meant that the whole twenty-minute-long endeavour had been a massive waste of time. It represented almost twenty five percent of my time in the Red Faction universe, for crying out loud.

Luckily, twenty minutes real-time meant many thousands of hours subjectively, and I managed to catch up on a fair amount of stuff. The timeline apparently diverged from what I knew at around 2006, with the start of the Russian-North Korean war, which was an odd and slightly terrifying prospect, but that was long enough in the past that it was barely even worth noting in 'present' times.

Skipping over that to waste time on Reddit seemed almost a little pathetic, but… well, I didn't really have much else to do. Using a massively ridiculous number of forks, Hope and I logged several hundred simultaneous hours in a couple of video games, including some shitty Halo clone and the original StarCraft, read several million words of fanfic, watched a few hundred animes, and, in a bout of incredibly intense boredom, copied the entire contents of Wikipedia into my own archive.

Finally, though, the Pilgrims reported that they were done with theirs scans, and that pretty much every important scrap of scientific or engineering knowledge on Earth had been copied into my own database.

And thank god for that.

---

Given the abrupt end of things to do, Hope and I took a moment to look through all our hard work - that is, all the stuff we'd stolen from the unsuspecting people of Mars (and Earth), - to figure out what could, and what couldn't, be used.

End result - almost all of it could be used. Mostly the weaponry. The Nanoforge had some unique applications, but all of them could be replicated by my own systems in a far more efficient way. The Marauder's energy shields were useful, and actually rather powerful, standing up to rockets far better than the Phase Shields had, but I feared that they would lose effectiveness on larger units. Something for further testing.

The weapons, though… oh, boy. The weapons were almost all useful to us, in some capacity.

The uniquely designed nanites of the Nano Rifle were able to be overcharged beyond their power cell's capacity, which is what allowed them to travel so far from the energy transmission system (in this case, the gun) before losing power. That was something I could use, even if it wouldn't be too helpful as a weapon. That said, its use as a weapon was mainly countered by the fact that I could just straight up teleport the nanites to the target, without need of a launch mechanism such as a rifle, rather than a lack of efficiency, so… there's that?

Microsingularity tech was… also rather interesting. It projected an energy field that was able to both trigger and contain nuclear fusion, which would then super-condense and collapse into a micro black hole.

Somehow.

Also, scalable. Ship based 'micro' singularity generator? Sure, why not. I made a special note to test that far, far away from everything else, lest it grow into an actual singularity.

The people at Ultor may have been absolutely stark raving mad half of the time, but they were brilliant scientists. Rather than continue to bang our heads against it, Hope and I moved on to the next item on our checklist.

Best gun.

The Magnet Gun. The go-to weapon for beating motherfuckers with the other, dead, motherfuckers. Or other live motherfuckers, if your aim's good.

The Magnet Gun launched a pair of powerful electromagnetic anchors, linked to each other by way of a directed magnetic attraction stream. This attraction stream, maintained by internal generators and nanotech-based computer, allowed the Magnet Gun's anchors to exert incredible attractive force on each other, capable of sending creature, rocks, vehicles, and chunks of building flying with enough force to break apart (both itself and its target) on impact.

And, based on a few of our preliminary tests, it worked well against almost everything else, too. And, it was scalable.

Which meant that not only did we have infantry scale Magnet Guns, but that we could scale them up, mount a few booster rockets on the anchors, and use them as makeshift Magnet Torpedoes. Now, I could launch two Magnet Torpedoes at two separate targets and then activate them, pulling the Magnet Torpedoes (and, by extension, whatever they'd clamped onto) together at rather high speeds for a brutal crushing impact.

I wasn't sure how useful it was going to be against enemy ships, but it promised to be funny, and if nothing else, I could use it to sling around asteroids.

It beat Halleys, at least.

---

The two of us stepped thowards the portal together, the glowing aperture shimmering before us as our structures and units - the majority of them, anyway, - began to self-destruct, wasting away to dust in the wind and scattering across the planet. Convoys of IFVs broke apart in seconds, blown away with the dust. The Metal Extractors (save for few very remote ones) and Energy Generators (again)

"Oh, hey. You know what we didn't do? Send a message to the Red Faction telling them about the prison."

"Eh. Either they'll stumble across it, figure it out, and deal with it, or they won't, and then it's more of a case of 'no harm, no foul', right?"

I looked through the portal, at the now-desolate hub world, and then back across my shoulder at the barren wastes of the Martian surface.

"Eh, fuck it. Not like we care. Now, Hope… You remember how I originally created you to make space ships?"

She nodded.

As I stepped through the portal, I asked, "How're you going with that?"

"Well, to be honest…"

I almost immediately cut her off as my eyes (well, sensors) picked up an enormous object in orbit. An enormous unnatural object. "Hope…"

"Yeeeesssss?"

I could tell at that moment she was wearing a smug grin. I could practically hear it in her voice. I was now officially scared. Of myself.

"What, in the name of all things holy, is that?"

 

[Faith]

Well it's kind of terrifying, which would definitely help in my complete rejection of everything it says.

Now, also, some fair warning. After I release Chapter 66 (ie, afternoon/evening Wednesday, Aussie time) I will be putting this story on a temporary hiatus. I will continue writing as the muse strikes me, but for the most part I'll be working on an alternate project, not publishing the chapters for this. As for what alternate project I'll be working on... well, I'll explain more about that when the time comes.


65 - Shipyard

"Well, you did tell me to build spaceships. I've even been updating the designs as we go, so it's already up to date with our new Red Faction tech. Here, come on up. I'll show you around."

A few nanoseconds later I received a ping on the Command Network, and following it to the source I found an exact replica of my Captain Drake NeoAvatar, bomber jacket and all, emerging from one of the infantry creation pods.

Hopping 'inside' the NeoAvatar, I sat up, and looked around. The pod was in some kind of alcove in a corridor, and I stepped out into the walkway proper, glancing to each side. Both ways were lined with smooth white tiled floor and walls, barring the wall directly across from the alcove, which consisted largely of glass. Multiple layers, I hoped.

Leaning against one of the windows was a near-exact replica of my own NeoAvatar, the only difference being that she wore a white lab coat as opposed to my grey bomber jacket. That was Hope's, I assumed. Although the lab coat was a curious touch.

Looking out of the windows, I set my eyes upon the same great vessel I'd been so awestruck by when I first came through the portal. It was immense, dwarfing the thousands of Pilgrims and Migrants that flocked around it, spraying torrential rains of nanites onto its hull.

Hope turned to face me, her eyes scanning my face for any hint of emotion.

"Hope."

"Yeeeeesssss?"

"Please explain."

She chuckled, sighed, and gestured at the ship. "Well, you see…"

---

The starship measured in at about thirteen kilometres long, five wide, and four tall, all smooth curves and sleek lines. The general look reminded me a little of Halo's Covenant vessels, only with the sweeping arcs occasionally interrupted by the sharp lines of some protruding component.

Not only was it, in my opinion, rather pretty, but it was roughly as durable as a small planetoid. The entire interior was built around a thick lattice of supporting beams, meaning the ship was unlikely to ever shake itself apart, and every piece of equipment within was so heavily bolted in place - and in some cases, further contained in some sort of roll cage, - that I was fairly certain they wouldn't budge even if the ship hit a planet.

And that was only the relatively squishy interior. The entire thing was, of course, covered in armour. One hundred and fifty metres of near-solid Progenitor plating, only broken by small shielding modules embedded about halfway between the outer hull and the interior, and spaced every six hundred metres or so apart in a giant grid of triangles.

Each shield module consisted of three parts. Firstly, a regular FTLverse Phase Shield, configured to generate a single flat surface about two dozen meters from the hull, and capable of projecting about two hundred layers at once. It served as the ship's primary defence - capable of blocking both physical and energy-based projectiles and regenerating at an incredibly rapid rate. In FTL, a crew member would manually watch and adjust the power flow to maximise the shield's efficiency. That role was replaced by a specialist CPU, granting an even greater bonus to the regeneration rate than even a master crewman could.

Next up was a fifty-layer Zoltan Phase Shield, configured much the same way. Due to a bit of clever engineering, I was able to place the Zoltan shield, which required the exotic bullshit of Phase Space to recharge, beneath the regular recharging Phase Shields, about ten metres from the hull, which meant that they would in theory be able to block exotic energies without wasting charge on mundane attacks. Unfortunately there was no real easy way for those to regenerate without jumping to FTL, beyond the ludicrously expensive and impractical method the Rebel Flagship had used, but Hope was still working on that.

Finally, I had Marauder energy shield technology. It was actually fairly powerful, in terms of size-to-shield-strength, and scaling up the emitters only made them better. Unlike the Phase Shields, these didn't generate a shield surface separate from the ship. Instead, each Marauder Shield added to a single defensive field that 'hugged' the surface of the ship's hull. Even with the huge number of shield emitters adding to the shield, the ship's size meant that the shield was, by necessity, not as powerful as the others - however, it did boast a faster recharge time, and, most importantly, it was an absolute last-ditch in case something managed to bypass two hundred and fifty layers of shield faster than they could regenerate. And if anything was throwing that kind of firepower at me, the Marauder Shield probably would have failed anyway.

Now - what was all that armour and shielding protecting? Well, there was the first, and by far most important component - the Resource Core cluster. One thousand Resource Cores, an immensely powerful resource generation system that fed the ship's millions of onboard Fabricators. The resource cores were linked to four huge storage units, two each of metal and energy, which helped prevent resource wastage… to a degree, anyway.

Of course, such a relatively meagre energy supply would hardly be sufficient to power the entire ship, what with all the high-power systems about - the engines, shields, FTL drive, cloaking device, weapons, teleporters and fabricators being the main offenders. To supplement the Resource Cores, the ship contained ten massively-upscaled Energy Generators, of which only three were required to run the ship in 'normal' combat operations. Using some of the point defence… well, I'll get to that later.

The ship was of course capable of going beyond lightspeed, with a huge variety of engines of both upscaled Progenitor, Bright Foundation and Galactic Federation designs providing it with excellent sub-light maneuverability. A frankly enormous FTL Phase Drive, making up almost six percent of the ship's volume, provided it the same ability to selectively ignore physics that all FTLverse ships possessed in some form, at the cost of removing it reality for the duration of the jump. Despite it's size, the thing was no slouch, capable of a breezy twenty three light years per second.

Once again, FTLverse tech OP. Please don't nerf.

The ship was also fitted with a number of relatively minor utility systems. A good eighty one million cubic metres of space was occupied with a necessarily huge Stealth Drive, capable of slipping the entire ship into Phase space to evade both enemy sensors and enemy attacks. Meanwhile, a huge array of its own sensors, from every techbase we'd looted this far, gave the ship a huge amount of knowledge about its surroundings - I'd go so far to say that it was limited omniscience, of a sort.

Of the remaining internal space, it was split about four to one factories to 'livable' space. And the livable space only got as much room as it did because of how wasteful it was. Seriously, do you have any idea how much space a corridor wastes? A room? It's a lot, relatively speaking.
The factories were, for the most, simply banks and banks of Fabricators lining a number of huge bays, - a hundred metres long, and half that wide and deep. In addition, each bay was lined with Phase Teleporter pads and Teleporter Gates, allowing for any units constructed inside to rapidly relocate anywhere they might be needed on demand.

The ship also had five larger bays, big enough to produce the 340-metre Voyager-class frigates with room to spare, because the ship clearly wasn't powerful enough without the ability to produce five Wayfarers every four minutes.

The livable space was probably the most boring part of the ship, honestly. Living space for eighteen thousand, each person having their own small room and en-suite. Two dozen gyms. A hundred dining hall areas. Recreation lounges full of couches, bean bags, and TVs. Six medical facilities, with teleporters for emergencies. Countless dozens of parks, each one with a different kind of plant life growing within. Some from Loek III, some from the various planets of FTL, one kind that looked vaguely and worryingly reminiscent of the Martian Plague…

---

"Are they safe?" I worriedly asked, indicating the plants in question.

Hope waved her hand dismissively and laughed.

"Pfft, they're fine.Ish."

---

Of course, for all that I'd focused on the interior, there was something rather crucial I'd neglected to mention until now. The outside. Or rather, the objects covering the outside.

Those objects being guns.

The primary weapons were a pair of spinal railguns, each running the entire length of the ship. Nestled between and slightly below them was an enormous energy weapon, a highly-upscaled version of Sanctum's Focus Tower. The longer it fired, the more intense the laser became. I was certain it would have little difficulty even against my own not-insignificant defensive abilities, given time to ramp up. A dome-shaped lensing array at the end of the barrel provided it an enormous cone of fire, meaning the ship didn't even have to line up exactly with the target to totally kill it. Finally, above the HyperFocus Laser, completing the diamond-shaped array of death, was another upscaled weapon, this time a Marauder Singularity Cannon. I was dubious, given that Hope and I had yet to test it, but it would likely be woefully disappointing or incredibly effective (or create an actual black hole and kill us all) so it promised to be… interesting, to say the least.

The ship's secondary weapons were no less impressive. Over twenty six thousand deck-gun style turrets on each side, of three different varieties - trios of high power laser emitters, pairs of heavy plasma cannons, or snub-nose railguns.

Whilst the lasers and the plasma cannons seemed obvious, I didn't understand the point of the snub-noses, since the drastically reduced barrel meant a massive decrease in power. Hope was quick to explain her reasoning.

Teleporters. The snub-nose railguns had a teleporter gate at each end of the barrel. When it fired, the shell actually passed the forty metre length of the barrel several hundred times, before the teleporter gates shut down and the shell was launched for real.

All the advantages of a long-barrel railgun, in the convenience of an incredibly small size. Relatively speaking. It was still about as big as a vanilla Planetary Annihilation artillery turret, but given the scale we were working with, that was acceptable.

It was admittedly a novel design - something I personally hadn't really considered (except maybe I had, since Hope was a near-exact copy of me…?), - but I couldn't help but feel it must have had some problems. Otherwise more people would have been using them, surely.

Ah well. Not like we cared.

Besides those direct-fire heavy weapons, there were torpedo slash rocket pods concealed beneath armour plates, that could rise out of the ship's hull when needed. There was a great number of them (that number being around about four thousand), each large enough to fire anti-capital ship torpedoes by the dozen. Converted instead into firing smaller, anti-fighter warheads, the count was somewhere in the hundreds, per missile tube, and each launcher had twelve, allowing for maximum volleys of around twenty eight point eight million rockets per volley.

The pre-designed missiles included nanite warheads, napalm warheads, plasma warheads, nuclear warheads, singularity warheads, magnet warheads, and cluster warheads, with an alternative 'mine-layer' option available, opening up even more possibilities, such as slow-field mines, singularity mines, anti-bio mines…

And, if something somehow survived against all that ridiculous firepower long enough to deploy fighters, and the fighters survived long enough to near the hull, they had to fight some other fun little toys. Close to a million of them, in fact.

The first type of point-defence was a rapid-fire, quad-barrelled railgun, designed to focus on volume of fire, as opposed to damage potential like their larger relatives. Each was capable of putting out a dozen shots a second, and there were about four hundred thousand, around the entirety of the ship. Mounted on highly sensitive ball mounts, they would be able to quickly and accurately track even reasonably fast-moving targets.

And as for why the ship needed so many power generators? Well, that had to do with the second kind of point-defence turrets…

Friendship Lasers. They were only the small ones, not the larger twenty-metre diameter ones mounted on the Wayfarer, but they were still ridiculously overpowered for their required role. Hope had jokingly named the weapons Super Awesome Friendship Emitter Lasers, or SAFE Lasers, and I had to admit that I enjoyed the irony. One was powerful. Five were very powerful. A hundred? Capable of levelling a city. A thousand? Well, I'd carved a peace sign into the moon with the equivalent firepower of less.

This ship had six. Hundred. Thousand.

And because of their spread across the ship's hull, and the ability for them to chain indefinitely… if I wanted, I could effectively have all six hundred thousand firing at the same target. The thing had no blind spots and the amount of overlap in the fields of fire was 'yes'. It would pretty much take the entire side of the ship being slagged before I became incapable of firing in that direction.

All things said and done, it was about forty Galactic Federation fleets worth of fuck you.

And it was mine to command.

"Fuck me," I said in awe. "This thing is insane."

Hope stuck her tongue out at me and giggled. "No thanks, and thanks. I call it the Mercury."

"After the God?"

"Nah, the planet. Because it's the smallest and most insignificant. Besides Pluto, that is, but no one counts Pluto."

I looked between Hope's avatar and the enormous vessel before me.

"S-smallest and... most.... insignificant?"

"Yup," Hope said, with a demonic grin stretching across her face.

…

…

...

"Oh."

"So… wanna see my other projects?"

 

[Faith]

So, I was going to put some info up about my alternate projects today, but since I've spend the last three days bedridden I haven't really had a chance to work on them as much as I would have liked, but depending on interest, I might throw down what I've got already for you to take a look-see at.

And, as I said before, this will be the last chapter before the hiatus. Just so you can't say I didn't warn you.

66 - Bloom

After I'd recovered from my digital hyperventilation, I returned my attention to the real world just in time for a squadron of small fighter-craft to rush past the windows, barely a flicker of green and white before my eyes.

Hope gestured out the window at them as they curved away from the station and back towards the Mercury. "Gageas."

The hyper advanced Progenitor optics that made up my 'eyes' were entirely capable of viewing great detail, even at the rapidly growing range, and I took advantage of that, looking the craft up and down as they flew into the distance.

"Gageas? Huh. Nice. Light scout fighters?"

Hope nodded her head. "Scout slash interceptor. So far it's the only small craft I've completed, but the others are on the way. Got a few bigger designs in the works, but they're… well. Ignore those fields of debris out there."

I glanced at the aforementioned scrap metal, enormous chunks of twisted and scorched metal, the green and white plates marked with streaks of black ash. Even as I watched, groups of Pilgrims flittered about the area, devouring the wrecks in a green smog.

"So… I gotta admit, after the Mercury, you're going to have to try real hard to impress me with a dinky little fighter."

Hope laughed as the fighters swooped past the window again, this time slowing to a halt and rotating on the spot, providing me a clear view of their design.

The way it was shaped made me think of a fork - or more accurately, I suppose, a trident. The body was about six metres long, and a little over a metre wide at the widest point - not counting the wings, that is. On each side of the ship, a long curving wing wrapped around towards the front of the fighter, creating a three-pronged shape.

I wasn't sure what purpose the wings really served - the only visible engines were at the back of the main body, and the weapons were nestled between the wings and the body, a pair of FTL-style Burst Lasers and a rocket pod on each side. A number of spines and antenna rose from the top of the ship's main body, presumably sensors.

"So, uh. Yeah. It looks nice, so points for style, but what's the point of the wings?"

"Style. Also, engines. Lots of engines."

The closest of the fighters shuddered, and then a number of amour panels folded out, revealing a huge array of engines on each wing, pointing in every damn direction, or so it seemed.

"Thanks to all those engines, this thing's really maneuverable and really fast. Also, kinda need the wings for atmospheric flight… well, not really, but it helps if the ship's powerful and aerodynamic. Makes everything faster."

I nodded in understanding. "Fair enough. So it's aerospace?"

"Hell yeah. This thing can go supersonic in atmo no problem, and still fly pretty damn good. That's not even counting that it has an FTL Drive, so it can even jump to lightspeed on its own. Pretty much the same sensors as the Rider, which means huge sensor range and high detail. Uh, what else…"

She paused for a moment, her Avatar tapping away at her chin. "Yeah, it has a cloaking device, because the best scout is one that goes where it wants without ever being seen, and shields, to protect it from damage, obviously. Four layer Phase Shield, four layer Zoltan Phase Shield, and a Marauder shield. Basically, you're not hitting it, and even if you do, you probably won't hurt it."

My clone/copy/whatever floated the designs across the Command Network, and I took a quick glance over it myself. As promised, a ton of engines, some basic shields and weapons, high grade sensors, an FTL drive and a cloaking device. What she'd neglected to mention was that the canopy glass actually covered a real canopy - one an Avatar droid, or a NeoAvatar, or any humanoid really, could occupy, - complete with Core-based life support systems and a high quality Bright Foundation-approved Faux Leather chair.

Huh. Neat. Probably wouldn't get much use out of it, though. But it was neat.

---

One relatively short-range teleport later, Hope and I were standing on another space station, one slightly further out from the stupid no-longer-a-swamp and its moons. Supposedly, the role of this space station was now 'biolab' - a decision Hope had made for her own projects.

Given it had originally been one of the half-dozen loosely-shaped skeletal frames I'd put out here and allocated for later use, I hardly had room to complain.

Also, Hope was basically me - almost literally a clone (and I say that only because I'm not entirely sure if clone is the most correct term) or at the very least a twin sister of sorts.

Actually, that was probably the better way of looking at it. Hope was my twin sister.

In which case, it was totally okay for her to steal my space stations for her own work. And, as I mentioned, I was hardly using them anyway.

This biolab station was in fact connected to another, larger station (well, the same station), that being the orbital habitat ring. The ring, generating gravity through centrifugal force (despite the vast array of artificial gravity devices available to us), was dotted with spokes around its outside surface, effectively 'bunkers' or underground areas in relation to the ring proper.

This biolab formed the majority of one of those spokes, just floor after floor, row after row of cloning tubes, genetics labs, medical and military grade sensors, and contained live testing environments.

Most of the rooms, especially the live-testing ones, were empty, but two floors contained samples - one dedicated to the Lumes, the other to the Plague. Dozens of all kinds were being churned out by the cloning bay's medical fabricator, from the lowly Lume Runners to even copies of the Plague Queen, based on recovered samples from her DNA> The corresponding sensors and genetics labs were performing in-depth investigations on the creatures, their origins, and their biology.

Personally, I'd always found the idea of organic technology slightly interesting. My unit designs tended to reflect that, being more organically shaped and possessing advanced AIs for better mimicry of organic behaviours.

The Lumes were basically evolved bio-weapons, naturally grown based on the original lifeforms of Loek III, and there were actually a few interesting abilities in their arsenal - kinetic shockwaves, bio lasers, acid spit, spore bombs… in that respect the Plague were a little less interesting.

However, where the Lumes were creatures of flesh, meat, and chitin, the Plague were formed of what appeared to be some kind of organic nanotechnology. And that had some serious implications. Hope seemed rather more excited by that than I was, but then, I hadn't actually seen any of the research myself, so there was that.

"I know from Ultor's records and my own scans that these guys are definitely organic nanotech - Ultor's own nanotechnological developments are derived from these ugly bugs. Their internals are quite basic, in some respects, and then you get to other parts like the Stalker's cloaking ability and the delusion spores which are incredibly complex - not to the point of rivaling, say, our Fabricators, but still pretty high-end."

Hope stopped to peer through one of the windows, looking over a large open room decorated to mimic the martian landscape. "Course, that doesn't change the fact that without the Queen to lead them, they're… kinda dumb."

As if to prove her point, a pair of the Plague Ravagers leapt at the window, slamming into the glass and staggering backwards, grunting and roaring.

Hope sighed and continued. "My end goal is to figure out how to replicate their high strength-to-size ratio, the organic cloak, and all their other abilities and shape them into a human form for us to use. Certainly, their nervous system works a lot like advanced computer circuitry, so with the information about cybernetic implants we already have… I may well be able to make us superpowered cyborgs. Neat, huh?"

"Uh, hell yeah. But that's your end goal, right? What's first?"

Hope shrugged. "For now I'm just trying to figure out more about how they work. Testing them in different environments, exposing them to different energies. The Bright Foundation were actually quite thorough, so I only have a few things to try out on the Lumes, but… well, no one really got a chance to test out the Plague like this. Not even Capek."

"Who?"

"Oh, uh... the Ultor guy who fucked up and released the Plague the first time. He was the one who did all the initial research."

I nodded in understanding. "So basically, you're starting from scratch?"

"Yeah, but it won't take long. On a station this big I can run dozens of tests at once - if I opened up the other spokes, I could do even more, but I'm not particularly bothered right now. Besides, we've got time to kill. I guess."

I nodded again. "I'm pretty much just here to check up on what's going on. If there's nothing else to see, I guess we could head off."

About halfway through my sentence, Hope perked up. "Oh, actually, there is one thing you should probably check."

---

The Hub World, once a hot, humid swamp with a higher shit-to-useful-stuff ratio than 4chan, was now a largely barren world, endless expanses of dust and rock with one huge exception.A large ocean, sixteen kilometres deep at the deepest point and with a surface area of approximately 125 million square kilometres, containing an overwhelming majority of the planet's water. The rest had spread into the dirt around said ocean, creating a band of swampland around the blue mass where the planet's natural plants could still live, albeit with slight difficulty due to the massively divergent environment.

The small metal platform upon which I'd established my main base was now simply a freestanding structure in the middle of the desert, the only other feature of note on the entire planet, which Hope and I agreed simply would not do.

So we tore down everything and started building something else. An enormous city-sized fortress slash palace. Basically, we treated the whole thing like Minecraft on steroids.

The entire thing was shaped to look like an enormous series of overlapping circles, like a venn diagram almost, creating a vaguely flower-like shape when seen from above, divided into three tiers of districts by enormous rings of defensive walls.

The outermost rings were three hundred metres high and heavily fortified, hundred metre thick slabs of Progenitor alloys reinforced with the same shield systems used on the Mercury and lined with a number of turrets - Hope's patented SAFE Lasers, mainly, with a few missile pods and rapid-fire rail cannons for variety's sake.

Inside those outermost districts were huge stacks of Production Pads - newly developed factories that ignored the standard 'one unit type only' rule that the vanilla factories had possessed, allowing them to construct anything that a Bot, Tank or Air Factory, or even an Airfield, could produce, all the way from Doxes to Pioneers. In addition to the wide range of production options, Production Pads could also be stacked on top of each other by corner columns. Whilst this stopped them creating the larger Airfield units, everything else was fair game to be created and then teleported to wherever it was needed.

The walls between the middle and outer district were thinner than the outer walls, but taller, and equally as well defended, at least in regards to shields and guns. Rather than be solid eighty metre thick masses of Progenitor Alloy, the inner walls were hollowed out and packed with factories, allowing larger units to be deployed in key locations around the outer and middle districts.

I mean, I didn't have any six hundred metre tall units yet, but I figured it was just a matter of time, really. And, in a pinch, the top of the wall could even fold up and over, which meant I could use the factories as launch silos for missiles or smaller starships, so long as they were capable of vertical takeoffs.

The middle district itself was also full of factories, but larger ones, meant for constructing starships and other similarly-sized units.

The innermost walls were taller and thinner again, only sixty metres thick. Like the middle walls, these ones were also hollow - this time, though, it was because the entire interior wall - and almost everything within it, - was designed to be inhabitable. Which meant big empty rooms, long corridors, Cores everywhere, and contained gardens for decoration. It was basically a small, entirely enclosed city in and of itself.

A city for two. How tragic.

Above all, the Citadel was punctuated by the centremost tower, the starting point of our construction, in which dozens of Dimensional Gates were being built, each labelled as appropriate to represent the world on the other side.

So far, of course, that meant only three were labeled, each on the lowest floor of the tower.

Hope and I teleported up to the second floor of the tower in our Osiris bodies once it was complete, dismissing our swarm of Fabricators to go out and begin building the rest of the Citadel.

"Well," I exclaimed as we finished. "That was fun. "

"Like Minecraft on steroids," Hope said, echoing my previous thoughts.

Both of us turned towards the nearest of the three Dimensional Gates on the second floor.

"So… time to head out?"

"Well… I'm going to go do some more science, I think. You go ahead. Call me if it gets… interesting."

 

[Faith]

[INITIATING SYSTEM REBOOT]
['RAISE DEAD' SUBROUTINE ENGAGED]
[FLAG 'NECROMANCY' SET TO FALSE]

So after real life events utterly slaughtered any desire to continue PotUG, I figured I'd come back around to this. I'm still waiting for a few things to come together so I won't be able to go straight back to my old twice-a-week schedule just yet, but have this to tide you over whilst you wait.


67 - Interlude: Troublemakers

The man in the white suit pushed the door aside and stepped into the cool air of the prison complex's lobby. Across the room, the receptionist, a petite woman sat behind a smooth-topped white counter, perked up, looking straight at him.

"Hello, sir. May I help you?" the receptionist asked with clearly faked cheer as she sat up straighter in her seat, her eyes never departing from his.

The man in the white suit returned the lady's smile with his own, his mind, and his eyes, wandering.

Her uniform was dark grey and shapely, a knee length skirt and suit jacket trimmed with golden flairs. A name badge shone silver upon her breast, declaring her name to be 'Tam'.

"Certainly. R. Gosling, private consultant." As he spoke, he waved his hand. "I have a three-twenty appointment with a prisoner."

The receptionist went wide-eyed for a moment before frowning at the man in the white suit. After a few seconds her expression slackened, and she nodded at him. "I'll have a member of security escort you. Please wait here for a moment."

He gave her a pleasant smile and stepped back from the desk, waiting patiently as the receptionist grabbed a small communicator and began to whisper into it, turning slightly away from him.

Not that it would have prevented him from hearing the conversation, should he have been so inclined.

After a few moments, a door on the far side of the room opened and two security guards stepped out, stun batons swinging freely from their hips and rifles slung across their back. "Mister Gosling, sir, if you could please follow us?"

He did as they instructed, following the pair through a long, winding series of white-walled corridors - specifically designed to confuse and disorient escaping inmates, - before arriving in a large room, the far wall lined with large booths.

Each booth was in fact two booths, divided by a hyperdense glass dividing wall. On one side sat the prisoners, on the other, their visitors. Communications were facilitated by headsets, plugged into the wall of each booth.

The two guards showed the man in the white suit to the booth at the furthest end from the door and invited him inside. A single stool sat before a small metal counter, upon which rested the aforementioned headset.

"Sir, if I could ask you to wait here for a moment, my colleagues will be right in. Once he arrives, we'll seal the door and let you get to it. Simply press the green button when you're done."

The man in the white suit nodded and took a seat on the stool, sensing rather than watching the two guards behind him. Through the glass, he watched the booth door on the far side swing open, and a gaunt-faced man, chin darkened with stubble, shuffled into the room, pushed along by a UN-SM/p Unit - a humanoid robot modified for policing and crowd control work.

The man slumped into his own stool, face the very image of misery. His hair was long, ragged and matted, and he gazed at the man in the white suit with disinterested eyes as the three guards left the cells and closed the doors, leaving the consultant and the prisoner to have their private discussion.

Without even reaching for the headset and its attached microphone, the man in the white suit began to speak.

"Good afternoon, Mister Reid."

---

The dark-skinned former Rear Admiral raised a questioning eyebrow at her visitor. "Is that name supposed to mean something to me?"

The man in the white suit slouched over in his chair and shrugged. "I was merely introducing myself. Recognition of my name was in no way required, or even desired."

The woman frowned. "That sounds a rather suboptimal viewpoint, for one of your supposed stature."

"Well, yes, but perhaps I never wanted that name? It was, much like my infinite brilliance, thrust upon me by a higher power."

Sullene's eyebrow rose again. "Really?" she asked, bemused.

The man in the white suit gave her a charming smile and a wink. "Absolutely. Now, shall we get down to business? You must be a very busy woman, especially now you've retired."

Sullene sighed deeply. "I would appreciate if you could skip the crap and get to the point, yes. I don't appreciate my time being wasted."

The man in the white suit shrugged and straightened up so he was sitting on the seat properly. "Very well then. I suppose that's fair enough. First, a little background. I hope you don't mind."

Sullene rolled her eyes but gestured for him to continue.

"You've been military most of your life - rose quickly to prominence in the Officer's Academy, served in one of the Federation's most veteran fleets, first as a ship's XO and then eventually working your way up to Rear Admiral. Truly, it's a very impressive feat, especially for one your age."

"Is my history required, or are you just showing off? I already know this and clearly, so do you."

Rather than actually answer the question, the man in the white suit simply raised his hands in the universal gesture of 'stop' and kept talking. "You fought in several key battles against the Rebels, including the Battle of Saychura, wherein your fleet's flagship, the Star of Eternity was destroyed. You took control of the battlegroup as the ranking officer and continued to lead those forces in a guerilla war against the Rebels."

"In that capacity, you served admirably - pardon the incidental pun, - taking suffering minimal losses for the duration of your campaign. When a lack of supplies forced you to retreat from the field of battle, the Rebels made more progress in a week than they had in months prior."

Sullene opened her mouth as if to speak, but quickly closed it when the man in the white suit raised his hand again.

"During your campaign, you formed somewhat of a rivalry with the Rebel Admiral, Daniel Hurst. In your battles, neither of you could ever claim sufficient advantage to earn the victory. You hoped that Earth would change that."

As soon as he stopped speaking, Sullene leapt to her feet, a pistol clenched tightly in one hand. "How did you find that out? I never told anyone, never wrote it down-"

"I did not 'find that out'. I simply knew it. I know many things. It is, you could say, my shtick, pardon the twenty first century lexicon. For one of my previously mentioned infinite brilliance, it was no difficult feat."

Sullene's pistol didn't move an inch, still pointed straight at his chest. With a simple thought, the man in the white suit removed the entire pistol bar the handle from existence, leaving Sullene holding a worthless piece of molded plastic in her hand.

"After all, I am effectively a god. Now, sit down."

Somewhat shaken, Sullene dropped back into her seat, eyes wide as saucers. The man in the white suit smiled and continued.

"Most importantly, you were present on Washington Station during the Ceasefire Fiasco. You had hoped that over Earth you would finally be able to defeat your unofficial nemesis, Admiral Hurst, and earn the respect of the exclusively-male Admiralty Board, something you failed to inherit from your former Commander after his untimely demise. And then… well, the Ceasefire Fiasco happened."

The man in the white suit paused momentarily, turning a greater fraction of his not-inconsiderable attention to the affairs of his test subject's newest mistake. A few mental tweaks, a little subtle interference, and…done. His little experiment preserved, he returned his attention to the situation at hand.

"A meddler from another dimension emerged from the great beyond, hamfistedly blundering through a rather pitiful attempt to assume control of the situation, succeeding only due to a number of incidental factors working in her favour - and, I suppose, the assistance of a greater power - and utterly destroyed any hope of your much-desired final climactic showdown. In a way, it could be seen as your greatest defeat, and you suffered it at the hands of a moron with the tactical aptitude of a florist. Which, incidentally, is fair enough, but I shan't go into that."

"Yes," Sullene forced out through gritted teeth. "I know. I was there. Her incompetence was almost painful. If she'd served under me, I'd have had her shot."

"Yes, so I realize. And so, with that out of the way, we finally arrive at my point. Rear Admiral Sullene, I'd like to make you a deal."

---

The man in the dirty white suit had not been at all surprised to find the door to the prison complex to be locked. Nor had he been at all inconvenienced, as he had simply pushed on the door and it had swung open easily, as if it had never been locked at all.

The prison had been largely silent - probably owing to either excellent soundproofing, or the fact that none of the cultists were still up at what was approaching midnight, by Martian cave people standards.

His partner in conversation had forced his head against the energy field that covered his cell door, eyes wide and eager.

"Yes, yes! I will serve you! True power will be mine again!"

"Very well then. Ascend, and know true power."

The man in the white suit smiled and reached out with one hand, his fingers slipping easily through the force field as if it wasn't there. Brushing the tip of his index finger against Hale's chest, he pushed out with a surge of power, and the Cultist vanished.

The man in the white suit remained in the prison for a moment longer, taking a fraction of a second to look out of a nearby window before frowning at the raging sandstorm outside.

The man in the white suit looked away, and with a click of his fingers, he too vanished.

---

The room was dimly lit, an effect made only worse by the dark metallic colouration of literally every surface and piece of furniture within. Though a number of lights hung from the ceiling, inverted glass pyramids with glowing cores, they were barely luminescent, casting the occupants of the room in grey-scale.

The meeting hall was a wide octagonal shape, each wall containing its own door, its own pair of decorative banners (five pairs of which were blank and dull grey in colour), and its own corresponding chair at the large octagonal ring-table that dominated the room. Each seat at the table was sleek metal and smooth fabric, the arm rests lined with digital interfaces that connected to the much larger consoles built into the table itself.

Although the briefing room was built to accommodate eight factions, currently only three were present - and likewise, only three coloured pairs of banners hung in the room. One pair of dark grey banners held the logo of the Bright Foundation, an orange pair held the blue falcon of the Galactic Federation, and the final pair was a dusty red in colour, adorned with black tribal markings not unlike those tattooed onto Adam Hale's face.

Three once-powerful leaders sat at the table in the chairs marked with their icons, giving each other nervous and suspicious glances as they waited for their host to arrive.

Finally, he did so, appearing in the middle of the ring formed by the hollow desk. "Lady and gentlemen, thank you very much for so graciously accepting my invitations. All of you know why you are here - what you probably don't know is why the others are here. And the answer to that is simple. Every single one of you wants to hurt the dimensional traveller known as Faith. We've all got your own reasons, but that is our common cause."

Silence from his three guests. "So, I believe introductions are in order? Mister Reid, would you care to start? Just your name should do for now… unless you want to turn this into Faith Haters Anonymous, that is."
For a moment, there was silence, and then all eyes turned towards the dark haired director. For his part, he looked much better than he had in prison - just two days of decent meals and comfortable beds had purged the weariness from his system, and he'd dressed sharply in a sleek, futuristic white business suit, as he always had. "Director Reid, of the Bright Foundation's Board of Directors. I look forward to working towards our common goal."

He turned to his right, where one empty seat divided him from a dark-skinned woman of African heritage, dressed not in business attire but the formal uniform of a Fleet Admiral. "Rear Admiral Sullene, of the Galactic Federation," she said curtly before gesturing to Hale.

For his part, the cultist, dressed once more in his ornate robes of black, red, and bronze, stood from his chair, resting his hands on the table and leaning closer to his two fellows. "I am Adam Hale, high prophet of the true rulers of Mars, leader of the White Faction and the Cult of Mars, and-"

Before he could go any further, the man in the white suit raised a hand in the gesture of silence. Hale exhaled, nodded slightly, and sat back down, allowing the man in the white suit to speak.

"I of course, am your gracious host and benefactor. I have many names, but you may simply call me Rob."

 

[Faith]

I can't remember if my old schedule was Wednesday/Saturday or Wednesday/Sunday.

And I don't particularly care, because it's the former now.

---
68 - Barren

After what felt like months, but was probably closer to a few seconds, I emerged back to realspace, a blue glow clouding my vision. As always, the kaleidoscope of blue energies faded quickly from my sight, leaving me alone and slightly disoriented in orbit around an barren world.

Man, I have got to start bringing a drop pod through the portals with me. That, or a mecha-sized jetpack. Because this is just getting silly.

[UNSTABLE ORBITAL TRAJECTORY]

Given my orbital trajectory was 'straight down', I figured that was a fair comment.

[ATMOSPHERIC RE-ENTRY IMMINENT]

Yeah, no shit. Still falling straight down, here.

[CRITICAL DAMAGE ESTIMATED]

Oh.

[WARNING - ADJUST COURSE IMMEDIATELY]

Well, fudge.

---

All around, as far as I could see, there was nothing but dust and rock - jagged spikes and mounds rising from the ground. Most of those were my fault - or rather, the fault of the douchebag who dropped a huge metal robot onto a planet from orbit, generating a wave of destructive forces on a similar level to strategic munitions.

So, technically, still me. But I'm blaming ROB. Fuck that guy.

A single yellow star lit the world, and while my sensors detected at least four other planets and an asteroid belt within the system, there were no moons - at least, none visible to my sensors. Perhaps a worthless bit of information to know, for now, but interesting nonetheless.

Not wasting any time, I pinpointed the nearest Metal Deposit and made my way towards it, the Osiris Commander's four legs easily crossing the rough and rocky terrain. A steady stream of nanomachines quickly built up the Metal Extractor, and I followed it as I always did with an Energy Generator and a Sensor Spire, establishing my holy trifecta as rapidly as possible.

As the sensor input flooded in, I took a second to examine the huge swathe of the planet I now had visibility over. A fair few metal deposits, large expanses of badland, some relatively flat areas that might make a good place to establish a base… and more than a few craters. I made a note to investigate them further, in case there was anything of note inside. Beyond that, at the edges of my range, I could see a few places where the environment became a bit more hospitable.

The crater-marked badlands eventually gave way to a large mountain range to the west, and closer to the magnetic north my sensors detected more flatlands. The east and south, as far as my sensors could see, continued to be largely badlands, but I didn't discount them as an option. Notably, nowhere within my sensor's range did I pick up any signs of habitation. No obvious structures, no electronic signals, no artificial satellites.

The Energy Generator now complete, I started putting together an Air Factory with utmost haste. Until I figured out where I was, I wanted to expand as rapidly as possible. The last thing I needed was to be caught by a swarm of Zerg or something before I had any ability to defend myself.

Once the Air Factory was completed, I twisted my torso ninety degrees, still firing the Fabricator, and began constructing another one, as the first factory engaged its own fabricators, a queue of Air Fabricators waiting to be built.

--

Once I had three Air Factories set up, I began my expansion. The first factory continued to build Air Fabricators which spread out, moving to and building over every metal deposit in range. The second factory was also building Air Fabricators, but they remained in the vicinity of my little base, constructing additional pyl - I mean, Energy Generators, as well as assisting my Commander body with the Orbital Launcher.

The third factory was producing my Gageas, the agile craft living up to their role as scouts by racing off at top speed towards distant horizons. It would be a while before there was any benefit, but eventually they'd reach the edge of my sensor's range, and start slowly expanding my already extensive lines of sight.

The Orbital Launcher was completed in seconds, thanks to the valiant aid of four Air Fabricators, and I soon had an ARKYD Sensor platform jetting off into space, an Orbital Fabricator queued to go up after it.

The sensor revealed nothing in the immediate vicinity - I wasn't sure whether to take that as a good thing or not, - and so I sent up the Fabricator, construction orders already laid out for it. The rocket tore free of the planet's atmosphere, making a beeline for the asteroid field I'd already noticed between the third and fourth planets. It had worked in the FTLverse, and I held hopes that it would work here as well.

Wherever 'here' was.

On the ground, my assembled Air Fabricators spread out to build more Metal Extractors, leaving behind them a trail of SAFE Laser Towers - god, I liked that new name, - as a preliminary defence. Well. To call them a 'preliminary' defence would be an insult to their awesome power - every one I put down increased the firepower of the entire grid, after all, and that was nothing to be laughing about given the not-inconsiderable power a single Friendship Laser had behind it.

I, on the other hand, began construction of the first underground facility. Until I had a better idea of what setting I was in, I saw no reason to leave my buildings just lying around on the surface, where they'd be easy to find. Once I had the majority of the underground set up, then I could deconstruct my surface structures. For much the same reason, my Orbital Fabricator was under orders to build inside the largest asteroids, as opposed to on their surface.

If anyone wanted to find me here, well, they'd damn well have to look.

Hopefully. It was entirely possible that, wherever I was, they possessed technology on such a level that hundreds of metres of dirt were no obstacle even to a casual scan. I found it unlikely, but it was by no means impossible.

I had no idea what setting I was in, and so I needed to find out as soon as possible, in order to make more reliable judgements on the capacities of the locals. Until then, paranoia, ho!

Unfortunately, from what I'd seen of the planet, I wasn't going to have much luck finding evidence of whatever civilisations were about on this hunk of rock. Fortunately, that meant it could potentially serve as a staging ground for my base.

That said, my Gageas weren't done with their scouting yet - it was theoretically possible that there was a city on the far side of the planet with insufficient size, emissions, and general levels of industry to be detected from orbit. Which, I suppose, would've likely meant a society rather low down on the technology scale, and therefore not much of a threat. That, or a society so advanced they simply didn't have excess emissions. Or a society inside a sealed dome city, which would not have been unreasonable given the rather inconvenient low gravity, 82 degrees celsius global temperature average, and almost non-existent atmosphere containing only trace amounts of krypton and xenon.

Or… or it could be that.

--

I immediately replaced every order in every build queue with the order to return to my location - barring the Orbital Fabricator, which was to continue its work building my asteroid shipyard. The Gageas immediately broke apart in midair - I didn't want to risk having a bunch of fast moving fliers around, due to the chance that they'd be detected. Even as the individual parts fell, nanobots inside broke apart the vehicle, disassembling it into its component atoms before self-destructing, leaving no trace that they'd ever been there.

As the Air Fabricators completed their current tasks, they turned and moved towards me with the utmost haste, slowly filtering in from the region around my base. They were smaller, slower moving, and flew lower - I was less worried about them being detected. Also, they were much closer to me than the Gageas had been - anything that could detect one of my Fabricators could probably detect me, too.

As they arrived, they were immediately put to work, adding their fabricators to the efforts to dig a really big hole in the planet's crust.

As the chasm grew deeper I began establishing the groundworks of the tunnel, a cylindrical support frame backed up by several kinds of energy shields that would prevent the ground from collapsing into the pit. A temporary measure, and one I would eventually replace with fully-plated supports, but the shields were capable of expanding to fit and required less resources and time to build, meaning I could spend more time digging, which was a very good thing.

The less time I was exposed, the better.

--

Once I reached about seven hundred metres below the surface, with still no sign of any potential hazards, I started to relax. Slightly. I assigned a dozen of my Air Fabricators to now go back and reinforce my underground tunnel, as well as installing sliding silo doors at the surface, and another fifty metres below. Just for the sake of redundancy.

The remaining thirty fabricators set to work hollowing out a huge underground space - what would eventually become the location of my new base.

As they spread out, digging out the dirt and replacing it with walls of cold steel - well, not steel, but you catch my drift, - I made my own way through the artificial cavern, laying down a number of Energy Generators. Unfortunately, I couldn't replace my sources of metal income - yet - and so I had to keep the exposed Metal Extractors for now, but every other surface building, turrets included, began to break apart, feeding the constructions in the new lair beneath the ground.

Once I had a little more time on my hands, I could put in some Resource Cores - actually, better to start that now. They did take a fairly long time to build, after all. Well, relative to everything else.

I assigned five Air Fabricators to build five Resource Cores whilst I set up two Land Factories. From them, I began producing more fabricators - the treaded Vehicle Fabricators to assist the Air Fabricators in excavation, and the bipedal Bot Fabricators assisting me in the construction of the base's facilities. Admittedly, there weren't too many more of them to go.

A few Teleporter panels, and probably a Teleporter Gate linked to my asteroid shipyard, so I could actually use the units I would be creating down here.

Some shield generators, to protect the base should the worst happen and I be discovered. They probably wouldn't help much against orbital bombardment, but it was worth a shot.

A small bunker-esque type facility at the top of the launch silo where I could place my sensors so they wouldn't be blocked by seven hundred metres of rock and metal ore.

Retractable turrets inside the silo and base, in case anyone got any funny ideas about trying to invade through either the main entrance or the starport teleporter.

Finally, I needed some way to access the planet's metal deposits. Resource Cores couldn't sustain me forever, after all - not in the limited number I currently possessed.

And of those five tasks, only the first two were suitable for Bot Fabricators. The third and fourth were better suited to fliers and I'd have to bring out the Mining Fabricators if I wanted to get the fifth done in any reasonable timeframe.

I issued the appropriate commands and relaxed, literally leaving my body on autopilot whilst it completed the menial task of constructing the rest of the facilities in my vast underground outpost.

If those stupid robot cuttlefish wanted a piece of me… well, I wasn't going to make it easy for them.

Now I just needed to send Hope a warning.

 

[Faith]

Uploading this now because it looks like I'm going to be hella busy tonight.

69 - Dis
The Mining Fabricators made quick work of the short distances between my underground fort and the nearest metal deposits, hurriedly establishing the Metal Extractors I needed to continue constructions within said base.

It was almost completely dug out, now - a large square, two kilometres across, with the fifty metre silo entrance in the dead centre. I'd mentally divided the room into quadrants, assigning each quadrant its own purpose. Due to the rotation of the room, North did not correspond perfectly to one wall, but was rather towards one corner. Not wanting to fuck around, I simply assigned that quadrant the designation North and worked from there.

North was the factory quadrant. Row after row of Factories occupied the space - ten rows of Land Factories feeding into five aisles, each of which was lined with Phase Teleporter Pads and capped at each end with currently inactive Teleport Gates. Alongside the Land Factories were four Advanced Airfields, dominating that half of the Northern quadrant with very little room left over. Each of those was also capped at each end by Teleporter Gates, again currently inactive. Once I got the asteroid shipyard up and running - a process that was taking an unfortunately long time for reasons I'll get to later, - I could construct my Corvettes and Frigates in the safety of the base before deploying them elsewhere.

East was the unit storage area - as in, it was pretty much just a huge multi-levelled area much like a parking garage, every inch of space underfoot crammed full of Phase Teleporter Pads. Currently there was nothing there, but once I figured out how exactly I was going to go about my war, and I had the resources to do so, I would flood the place with units, ready to be deployed at a later date.

South was what I referred to as the 'service' quadrant. It was home to yet more factories - this time including a pair of Advanced Air Factories, not just Land Factories, - and these factories were solely responsible for pumping out as many Fabricators as they could. Those Fabricators were the ones who then spread themselves throughout the facility, aiding factories in the construction of new units for my army. Or, they would, once I started making the army. It was also the location of my Dimensional Gate, although I hadn't yet activated it.

West was my resource and storage quadrant. It was absolutely filled to the brim with Resource Cores, Energy Generators, and both kinds of storage building, outputting enough power to run the facility several times over - and then storing in, in cells that could, at maximum charge, run the facility for days unaided. Which didn't seem like a long time for an underground military base, but one has to remember that the single most prohibitively time consuming construct in the Progenitor's arsenal is a Resource Core. Which takes ten minutes to make.

And finally, in the centre of the base, directly underneath the silo, a single Orbital Launcher - my ticket to the stars. Well, one of them.

Of course, this base was to be merely the first of many. Already I had plans to construct additional facilities on other planets - I'd need all the industrial base I could get if I wanted to stand the slightest chance at stopping the Reapers. Without resorting to Deus Ex Starchild, that is.

But before I could build on other planets, I needed to get there. My Orbital Fabricator had flown quite a distance to reach the asteroid field, and from there had constructed not only an Orbital Factory but an anchor point that bound the factory to one of the nearby asteroids. Then, it and the Factory had focused efforts on constructing more Fabricators. Unfortunately, this was less a brilliant plan on my part and more because I forgot to turn off auto-queue, but it nevertheless proved useful once they were complete. The relatively large number of Orbital Fabricators were able to rapidly construct new Orbital Factories, quickly bringing the number up to eight factories, each anchored by way of thick metal columns to the largest of the nearby asteroids. From there, I ordered them to start hollowing out the rock, and they quickly complied.

Whilst they were doing that, I had one of the factories build a couple of my Gagea scout fighters, sending one to each of the other four worlds in the system and one more to move through the asteroid field, to make sure I wouldn't get any nasty surprises from anything lying in wait. I figured I'd have probably detected something if that was the case, but it never hurt to be careful.

---

As the last of my Gagea fighters reported a successful survey and dropped into a stable orbit, I checked over the finding reports.

Planet number two was another worthless rock with a worthless atmosphere of methane and argon, but at least it had… well, eighty percent Earth's gravity. Slightly better, still worthless. And a somewhat warm 58 degrees - certainly more livable than this pile of silicate. It also had a moon rich in titanium, which I wanted for its delicious delicious metal.

The third planet was a nice change of pace - a frozen shithole. Also about eighty percent gravity, also worthless atmosphere (this time ethane and carbon dioxide), and a rather chilly -35 degrees global average temperature. A single moon, silicate in nature, not particularly noteworthy otherwise.

The fourth rock from the sun, on the far side of the asteroid field, was somehow even worse. A gravity of just 0.28g, a thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide and krypton, and an average temperature below -80 degrees. No moons, or other notable redeeming qualities, although it was glowing. I wondered why that was. Perhaps it would be worth looking into.

The final planet wasn't even technically a rock - it was a hydrogen-helium gas giant. It had a couple of moons, tiny balls of rock and ice barely worth noting.

All in all, it was a very boring system.

Well, apart from the Reaper taking a dirtnap at the bottom of a crater on the other side of the planet I was currently inhabiting.

The solar system thoroughly scouted out, I ordered my Gageas to spread further, each one disabling their Phase Cloaks just long enough to jump to FTL. There were four stars within close proximity to the one I was currently orbiting, which worked out rather well given I had four scouts to spare. They shot off into the void, reactivating their Phase Cloaks as they dropped out of FTL.

Those orders given, I checked back on the status of my two facilities. My asteroid base was proceeding rather nicely as well - there was enough room inside to build a Land Factory, which began building Mining Fabricators as soon as it was able. Between them and the Orbital Fabricators, the asteroid would be almost completely hollowed out in no time, and then I could get to cramming the stupid rock full of Orbital Shipyards. My underground base was expanding nicely, tunnels being dug out to the various metal deposits on the planet.

Speaking of which, I ordered the construction of eight more Mining Fabricators - one for each other planet and moon in the system, barring, of course, the gas giant. As soon as they were completed they rolled over to the centre of the facility, at which point they were picked up by my also newly-constructed Astraeus units, to be carted away to planets far from here.

They were each under orders to replicate the base I had here once on each targeted planet and moon, digging deep below the surface before creating a fortress beneath the earth. Once that was done, they would expand through the planet's crust, creating extractors to draw from all available metal reserves.

The gas giant was slightly trickier - I had one of my Orbital Fabricators divert there to build a couple of orbital platforms, but there was only so much I could do stealthily…

Oh. Wait.

I have actual stealth tech now. Well. Semi-functional stealth tech. Hm.

---

After a bit of fiddling, I came up with a workable design. Based on the original Jig platform, it incorporated a Phase Cloak unit and a gratuitous amount of Metal and Energy storage in appropriate amounts to ensure that both would fill up at roughly the same rate - that is to say, they'd both reach 10% at the same time, they'd both reach 50% at the same time, etcetera.

Upon reaching 95% capacity, the Jigger would scan the area for any potential observers. If there were any, it would wait thirty seconds, then check again. Failing that, it would dip into the atmosphere of the gas giant - it wasn't feasible for long-term use, but the Jiggers could dip and and out with relative safety, thanks to the overly large thrusters I added just for that purpose. So long as they didn't try to stay there forever.

Once it was safe from prying eyes, it would disable the cloak, transfer the entirety of the tank across the resource network to the vast storage arrays at my base, and then re-cloak in a period of less than a second, repeating the process whilst maintaining stealth for approximately 99.6% of its operational time.

Of course, they wouldn't serve as heavily fortified bases like I would soon have on every other world, but they did provide a huge boost to my metal income and a fair boost to energy as well, which was nice.
---

As construction of my new bases began, I turned my attention back to the biggest problem in the system - the Reaper corpse.

There were several possibilities regarding the origin of this corpse, depending entirely on when in the Mass Effect timeline I was - was I in the Human slash Asari cycle? The Prothean cycle? Before that? After?

I didn't want to make any assumptions, and I certainly didn't want to break my stealth until I knew exactly what I was up against. To that end, I needed to find out who was in charge of the Citadel, and, assuming it's the Asari, what year it was according to the Humans.

Whilst my Gageas were off exploring to find out that information, however, I had another potential source just halfway around the planet from my primary base.

Again, obviously, the Reaper corpse.

If I was in the Asari cycle, pre-harvest, then I knew of three Reapers still in the galaxy. Sovereign, possibly now dead. The dead Reaper Cerberus found, where Legion was encountered in Mass Effect 2, and… the Leviathan of Dis.

Since this wasn't in space and it was dead, I was leaning towards the third. If so… did that make the planet Dis, or the star Dis? Or was it named after something else entirely?

Hm.

Either way, it was a possible identification for the Reaper. Until I found out otherwise, I was going to assume that it was, and therefore that I was relatively close to Batarian space - ground zero for the Reaper invasion.

However, since I wasn't stupid, I was also going to maintain my stealth as long as possible. Two Advanced Air Fabricators, each equipped with Phase Cloak devices, were the only things I sent out.

If I could assimilate the Reaper, that would be a huge boon to my technology - element zero was borderline if not outright physics breaking, and it was hardly the only thing I'd be getting. Hope would no doubt have a field day with the stuff.

That said, I was worried about a few things. First, the Reapers themselves were made up of tens if not hundreds of thousands of indoctrinated minds, the remnants of civilisations destroyed to form the core of the Reaper. There was no telling how that would interact with my hacking tech, or even if it would. The Reapers might be 'machine' enough to be hacked, or 'organic' enough to be mind controlled - or, worse, they might be neither.

And second, it might still be able to indoctrinate me - I couldn't remember whether the Geth were indoctrinated or hacked or just good-old-fashioned diplomacy'd onto the Reaper's side, but I was more complex than just a bunch of code - or so I assumed. And, as Cerberus's science teams had found out in Mass Effect 2, 'even dead gods can still dream'.

Both points were worrying in their own way, but in the absolute worst case, I could just steal the machine parts with nanobots and then nuke it. Hacking it would simply give me access to its memories, and even without its databanks, I would no doubt be able to find out the state of the galaxy once I reached the Citadel.

In the meantime, I needed to contact Hope.

---

My Commander stepped through the swirling vortex under the ground and emerged on the third floor of the Hub Spire.

Less than a second after I emerged, two figures teleported into the room - one of my NeoAvatars, and one of Hope's, dressed in a lab coat. I assumed control of the first NeoAvatar, turning to Hope and waving.

"I'm back. Just figured I'd pop in before I go for a tour of Omega and the Citadel."

Hope waved back, tapping an arm to her chin thoughtfully. "Mass Effect?" She guessed, although it wasn't much of a guess after the hints I'd given.

My Avatar nodded. "Dis, specifically. Still not sure if Dis is the star or the planet, but it's where the Leviathan of Dis is at. I'm about to loot that, so stand by for that sweet tech."

Hope nodded. "Nice, sounds fun. I've got a few projects cooking, but I'd prefer not to leave them without oversight. Send me the tech, and I'll look it over whilst I keep an eye on my stuff here. Once it's all set up, then I'll come and join you?"

I shrugged at that. "Sure, why not? The more, the merrier."