70 - Leviathan
Faith
Some idea of what I'm doing.
- Location
- Land of Waves and Warmth
Aaand this, because I finished re-editing it.
Brace yourselves. The Butterflies are coming.
70 - Leviathan
The first thing I noted about the crashed Reaper was that it was big. Almost two kilometres long. That made it… Sovereign class, then. One of the biggest Reapers around.
How strange, then, that the Reapers hadn't removed or destroyed it since the last cycle. Unless, assuming again that I was in the Asari cycle, Sovereign asked them not to, in hopes of another race finding it and becoming indoctrinated by it.
Which, in fairness, worked on the Batarians. Will work on them?
Ugh, potential time travel tense.
I wondered how they were able to drag this thing away from the planet. Must have taken a hell of a lot of eezo - maybe they found a way to reactivate its core?
It didn't look particularly damaged, actually. The frontal hull was covered in scuff marks, and its tentacle leg things were bent out of shape, but it seemed like that was a result of the crash, not the cause of it. Certainly, it didn't look damaged enough to be dead.
Could it have been killed by something else, then?
The Leviathans? No, they refused to act against the Reapers in fear of being found and destroyed. It wouldn't have been them, then.
The two Stealth Air Fabricators moved in, carefully approaching the long dead Reaper. When point defense guns and Oculi drones refused to reveal themselves and open fire, I had the two Fabricators progress further, eventually coming to a halt twenty or so metres from the hull.
After a continued absence of attacks, they closed the rest of the distance, spraying green clouds of nanomachines onto the ancient alien vessel. One flew 'up' the hull, towards the tapering point at the 'top' of the Reaper's body, whilst the other flew across the Reaper, passing over its 'eyes' and the main weapon concealed within. Behind. Around. Next to. Whatever.
Information began filtering in from my nanobots - outer hull armour composition, power conduit design, locations of airlocks and access hatches - why the hell did a Reaper need airlocks and access hatches? - and little else of note.
Seconds later, I received the blueprints for the Reaper's main gun. A continuous beam weapon that fired liquid metal alloy at a fraction of light speed, giving it somewhere around 250 kilotons of firepower. Based on what I knew of Sovereign and the other Reapers, that would be enough to cleave through… pretty much any Citadel ship I encountered, up to and including Dreadnoughts, like a very hot knife through butter.
Well, at least now I had a benchmark. A benchmark on an order of magnitude lower than the majority of my weapons on a similar scale. And by majority, I mean all of them except the Ion Cannon. The one designed solely to disable enemy ships without outright destroying them.
Guess the space-cuttlefish aren't going to be so tough after all.
---
Meanwhile, my Gageas were sending me information as well. Of the four nearby systems, there was one small system, with three planets and two asteroid belts, two medium systems, five planets and an asteroid belt each, and one large system with six planets.
No immediately obvious signs of habitation anywhere, really, except… wait. A Mass Relay.
It was in the large system, farther from the star than even the furthest planet. After a few moments of observations and calculations, an Orbital Control subroutine informed me that the Mass Relay was locked in a perfectly circular orbit around the star. Goddamn Leviathans, being such show-offs.
Regardless, if I was going to find signs of life anywhere, it would be there.
The Gagea assigned to that system broke off from its original route, making a break for the Relay.
It was, as I had expected, a big metal tuning fork with a glowing blue gyroscope in the middle. Even from some distance, my Gagea could pick up a large volume of space traffic around the relay, ships ranging from smaller freighters up to what appeared to be some kind of military cruiser.
I made a note to send a Fabricator or two over there to start assimilating. It was almost a shame that the Relay was inhabited, in that it meant I wouldn't be able to just outright eat the thing. On the other hand, I could eat the ships around it, if there were any, and through them access the Extranet, which would no doubt prove useful. And with, what, a dozen species worth of history? It might even make an appreciable dent in my data storage space.
Heh.
---
Whilst the expansion of my sensory borders was underway, however, I made a point not to fall behind in the expansions of my bases.
Now that each planet in the Leviathan of Dis's solar system - really needed to check if Dis was the star or the planet, - had its own underground facility, well secured from any bombardment attempt and rapidly growing to consume all their planets' useful resources, and my orbital base was in much the same state, I felt it was time to stop maining econ and get to the busy work.
The busy, busy work of killing giant cuttlefish. To that end, I was already working on assimilating the Reaper's technologies, admittedly in a slow and possibly over-cautious way. But I had no need to wait for the shiny Reaper technology to be stolen and reverse engineered before I could set up the factories for my units, and so that's what I began to do.
In orbit around each terrestrial planet in the solar system, dozens of Orbital Fabricators began construction of huge lattices of Fabricator arms and microthrusters, skeletal hexagonal frames about thirteen and a half kilometres long, and half that wide and high - just big enough, essentially, for me to build Mercuries within them.
And if at any point it just so happened that we chose to upgrade the Mercuries with Mass Effect technologies, then the Staryards would make overhauling any pre-existing ships a breeze.
Those Fabricators thus occupied, I turned my attention back to the Reaper.
---
Assimilation of the Reaper was slow - between my caution and the Reaper's size, little progress was made. My two Fabricators were zig-zagging across the Reaper's hull, one working from the front towards the back, and one from the back working towards the front. A constant rain of nanites fell upon the Reaper corpse, filtering down through the alloy armour and getting to the valuable electronics within.
Although, to be honest, they weren't that valuable. Most of the Reaper's internal systems - at least, the ones nearest to the surface of the hull, - were fairly mundane. Power conduits, capacitors, air filtration systems, and the like. There were a few of what I presumed were Element Zero systems, some kind of field emitters I suspected were the shield generators being the most common kind, but without power to the vessel none of them were active.
Unfortunately, I knew from the games that the Indoctrination Field would be active - or at least, almost certainly so. Both the Leviathan of Dis and the other Reaper Derelict had both been able to indoctrinate people even beyond their 'deaths', but I recalled the Reaper Derelict still having some power and, judging by its size, the Batarians had to have found a way to bring the Leviathan of Dis online somehow - there was no way they would be able to tow it off-world otherwise.
So the question was - would the Indoctrination Field still be active if the Reaper's main core wasn't? Was the Reaper indoctrination field a result of technology or something else?
I also recalled that in one of Mass Effect's DLCs, indoctrination artefacts were contained in a lab relatively safely thanks to some awesome energy shield thing. Would the shields I'd picked up from FTL and Red Faction protect me from indoctrination? Was I already immune as a result of my less-than-organic nature?
Gah, so many questions, and no real safe way to test. Hm.
Well, no safe way short of creating and sacrificing forks-turned-full-AI. Which seemed… wasteful. And cruel. And, in a way, literally suicidal. Best not do that.
Given that there wasn't really a lot I could do about it either way, I just kept working, slowly filtering the data through the Dimensional Gate for Hope to peruse herself. Hopefully - heh, - she'd be able to find a way to test it safely. She seemed much better at science than me… which was odd, all things considered. Could such a short period of divergence really create such a huge change?
I doubted it, and decided to place the blame on ROB. It seemed the most simple solution.
After a few moments of idle contemplation, I received another notification from my Fabricators - apparently one of them, or rather, it's payload of nanites, had finally gotten all the way through the Reaper's shell and into the interior space.
It was difficult to tell what said interior space was used for - the nanites didn't exactly have convenient high-quality optical sensors for me to borrow, so I had to wait for the nanites to filter out all throughout the room - a somewhat slow process, given the relatively small number, - to get a feel for what was inside.
Based on the information I was receiving, the answer seemed to be 'Dragon's Teeth'. And lots of them. Apparently I'd stumbled into some kind of store room.
Dragon's Teeth are basically the Reaper version of infantry barracks. Except instead of being a place for soldiers to be trained, outfitted, and stationed, it was more like a torture spike for prisoners or recently-dead to be impaled upon and turned into Husks.
Credit to the Reapers, it was a lot more space efficient. Of course, it also converted all the gooey organic parts of a body into nutrient slurry and from there into cybernetic parts, turning the victim into a mindless robot space zombie in the process, so…
Well, the Reapers were hardly upstanding paragons of virtue and morality, so I wasn't really sure what I was expecting.
Either way, I took those designs and passed them through the Dimensional Gate. The actual transformation method wasn't anything special - nanomachines, the likes of which I already had access to. However, the transformation process was controlled by a form of artificial intelligence that used the nanites to scan a body and calculate the most efficient way to convert it into a mechanical Husk, without requiring oversight from a Reaper or equivalent greater intelligence.
If I could apply that same sort of artificial intelligence to my own systems, - without the crazy Reaper brainwashing part, obviously, - then I could theoretically fire nanites at any organic life and create my own units from them.
The idea of tagging an enemy with a Nano Rifle and instantly turning them into a loyal robotic minion was certainly an impressive one… and also terrifying and horribly immoral. Definitely not something I'd be using against sentients if I could help it. Against things like the Zerg, though… well, I was sure I could find a use for it eventually.
Soon enough the nanites filtered through the hull in other places, and I started receiving more and more detail about the Reaper's inner shell. The actual livable space in the Reaper, the corridors and control rooms, seemed to be quite limited - most of the other space appeared to be huge power conduits, heat sinks, and storage bays, presumably to house more Dragon's Teeth or the Reaper's fighter equivalents, Oculus drones.
Unfortunately, due to the sheer density of the technology inside the Reaper, the Fabricators and their nanites weren't having the easiest time stealing all of the rare shiny technologies. I'd still yet to locate the Reaper's central AI, shield generator, or Eezo Core, which were all probably deeper into the superstructure. And whilst I had found what I assumed to be propulsion systems dotted around the Reaper's hull, they clearly relied on some form of Element Zero reaction and thus far I had no way to replicate that.
In fact, the only system of note I'd recovered thus far was the gun, and whilst it was impressive in the context of the Mass Effect universe, compared to, say, my Friendship Lasers, or the Little Ray of Sunshine, it was basically just a glowy red super soaker.
Only the fact that my weapon technology far surpassed my shield technology even made it worth noting - if my shields were on par with my weapons, I'd probably be able to just fly on through without taking any damage at all even under fire from multiple Reaper cannons.
Even more unfortunately, Mass Effect's kinetic barriers weren't even that great. Sure, they could deflect any kinetic attack given sufficient power (which I could no doubt provide) and the more powerful ones even worked against lasers, (as long as the shield was activated beforehand, since they couldn't activate fast enough in reaction to simply detecting laser fire) but they were on the same order as the Reaper's weapons… which meant, still an order of magnitude below the kind of things I was bringing to the field.
Still, I doubted I'd run into anyone else slinging around my level of firepower, especially here of all places, so it wasn't too much of a concern. And, it was entirely possible that by throwing more power at the kinetic shields I could make them stronger even than the Reapers had, so maybe they wouldn't be so useless after all.
---
Gagea 02-003 approached the Mass Relay in maximum stealth mode - Phase Cloaking online, engines turned right down, passive sensors only, and all non-essential systems, such as weapons and shields, completely disabled.
Maybe it was overkill - my own sensors had trouble picking up the stealth systems, what with the whole 'taking a half-step out of physics' thing they had going on, and I was willing to put money on Progenitor sensors being much better than anything else the denizens of the Mass Effect universe were carting around. Still, no sense in taking chances.
The Gagea drew closer to the Mass Relay, the scout fighter's advanced sensors picking up a small number of ships in the vicinity of the Relay. Most were smaller, civilian-looking vessels with no clear armaments or fighter drone escorts, but one stood out from the rest - mainly because of the human writing scrawled across the hull.
Human writing meant human crew. Human crew meant human computer systems. And that meant I'd have a much easier time hacking it, hopefully.
Now, one major advantage of the FTLverse's Phase Teleporter is that the teleporter system itself is absolutely not limited in the slightest by range. Given sufficient power, phase rifts can be opened any distance away from the emitter. With the Gagea serving as the spotter to ensure the phase rift was on target, I loaded up one of the aforementioned teleporters and activated it, teleporting a single cloaked Fabricator almost fourteen lightyears in an instant, depositing the craft just to the rear of the slowly drifting human freighter.
The Fabricator fired its own thrusters, drawing closer still to the freighter, and then unloaded its fabricator, the payload of nanites quickly infiltrating the ship's computer systems.
Eezo core schematics, weapon tech, communications protocols… all mine.
Had I been inhabiting a human body I might have been tempted to rub my hands in glee. As it was, I simply smiled inside and got to work.
Brace yourselves. The Butterflies are coming.
70 - Leviathan
The first thing I noted about the crashed Reaper was that it was big. Almost two kilometres long. That made it… Sovereign class, then. One of the biggest Reapers around.
How strange, then, that the Reapers hadn't removed or destroyed it since the last cycle. Unless, assuming again that I was in the Asari cycle, Sovereign asked them not to, in hopes of another race finding it and becoming indoctrinated by it.
Which, in fairness, worked on the Batarians. Will work on them?
Ugh, potential time travel tense.
I wondered how they were able to drag this thing away from the planet. Must have taken a hell of a lot of eezo - maybe they found a way to reactivate its core?
It didn't look particularly damaged, actually. The frontal hull was covered in scuff marks, and its tentacle leg things were bent out of shape, but it seemed like that was a result of the crash, not the cause of it. Certainly, it didn't look damaged enough to be dead.
Could it have been killed by something else, then?
The Leviathans? No, they refused to act against the Reapers in fear of being found and destroyed. It wouldn't have been them, then.
The two Stealth Air Fabricators moved in, carefully approaching the long dead Reaper. When point defense guns and Oculi drones refused to reveal themselves and open fire, I had the two Fabricators progress further, eventually coming to a halt twenty or so metres from the hull.
After a continued absence of attacks, they closed the rest of the distance, spraying green clouds of nanomachines onto the ancient alien vessel. One flew 'up' the hull, towards the tapering point at the 'top' of the Reaper's body, whilst the other flew across the Reaper, passing over its 'eyes' and the main weapon concealed within. Behind. Around. Next to. Whatever.
Information began filtering in from my nanobots - outer hull armour composition, power conduit design, locations of airlocks and access hatches - why the hell did a Reaper need airlocks and access hatches? - and little else of note.
Seconds later, I received the blueprints for the Reaper's main gun. A continuous beam weapon that fired liquid metal alloy at a fraction of light speed, giving it somewhere around 250 kilotons of firepower. Based on what I knew of Sovereign and the other Reapers, that would be enough to cleave through… pretty much any Citadel ship I encountered, up to and including Dreadnoughts, like a very hot knife through butter.
Well, at least now I had a benchmark. A benchmark on an order of magnitude lower than the majority of my weapons on a similar scale. And by majority, I mean all of them except the Ion Cannon. The one designed solely to disable enemy ships without outright destroying them.
Guess the space-cuttlefish aren't going to be so tough after all.
---
Meanwhile, my Gageas were sending me information as well. Of the four nearby systems, there was one small system, with three planets and two asteroid belts, two medium systems, five planets and an asteroid belt each, and one large system with six planets.
No immediately obvious signs of habitation anywhere, really, except… wait. A Mass Relay.
It was in the large system, farther from the star than even the furthest planet. After a few moments of observations and calculations, an Orbital Control subroutine informed me that the Mass Relay was locked in a perfectly circular orbit around the star. Goddamn Leviathans, being such show-offs.
Regardless, if I was going to find signs of life anywhere, it would be there.
The Gagea assigned to that system broke off from its original route, making a break for the Relay.
It was, as I had expected, a big metal tuning fork with a glowing blue gyroscope in the middle. Even from some distance, my Gagea could pick up a large volume of space traffic around the relay, ships ranging from smaller freighters up to what appeared to be some kind of military cruiser.
I made a note to send a Fabricator or two over there to start assimilating. It was almost a shame that the Relay was inhabited, in that it meant I wouldn't be able to just outright eat the thing. On the other hand, I could eat the ships around it, if there were any, and through them access the Extranet, which would no doubt prove useful. And with, what, a dozen species worth of history? It might even make an appreciable dent in my data storage space.
Heh.
---
Whilst the expansion of my sensory borders was underway, however, I made a point not to fall behind in the expansions of my bases.
Now that each planet in the Leviathan of Dis's solar system - really needed to check if Dis was the star or the planet, - had its own underground facility, well secured from any bombardment attempt and rapidly growing to consume all their planets' useful resources, and my orbital base was in much the same state, I felt it was time to stop maining econ and get to the busy work.
The busy, busy work of killing giant cuttlefish. To that end, I was already working on assimilating the Reaper's technologies, admittedly in a slow and possibly over-cautious way. But I had no need to wait for the shiny Reaper technology to be stolen and reverse engineered before I could set up the factories for my units, and so that's what I began to do.
In orbit around each terrestrial planet in the solar system, dozens of Orbital Fabricators began construction of huge lattices of Fabricator arms and microthrusters, skeletal hexagonal frames about thirteen and a half kilometres long, and half that wide and high - just big enough, essentially, for me to build Mercuries within them.
And if at any point it just so happened that we chose to upgrade the Mercuries with Mass Effect technologies, then the Staryards would make overhauling any pre-existing ships a breeze.
Those Fabricators thus occupied, I turned my attention back to the Reaper.
---
Assimilation of the Reaper was slow - between my caution and the Reaper's size, little progress was made. My two Fabricators were zig-zagging across the Reaper's hull, one working from the front towards the back, and one from the back working towards the front. A constant rain of nanites fell upon the Reaper corpse, filtering down through the alloy armour and getting to the valuable electronics within.
Although, to be honest, they weren't that valuable. Most of the Reaper's internal systems - at least, the ones nearest to the surface of the hull, - were fairly mundane. Power conduits, capacitors, air filtration systems, and the like. There were a few of what I presumed were Element Zero systems, some kind of field emitters I suspected were the shield generators being the most common kind, but without power to the vessel none of them were active.
Unfortunately, I knew from the games that the Indoctrination Field would be active - or at least, almost certainly so. Both the Leviathan of Dis and the other Reaper Derelict had both been able to indoctrinate people even beyond their 'deaths', but I recalled the Reaper Derelict still having some power and, judging by its size, the Batarians had to have found a way to bring the Leviathan of Dis online somehow - there was no way they would be able to tow it off-world otherwise.
So the question was - would the Indoctrination Field still be active if the Reaper's main core wasn't? Was the Reaper indoctrination field a result of technology or something else?
I also recalled that in one of Mass Effect's DLCs, indoctrination artefacts were contained in a lab relatively safely thanks to some awesome energy shield thing. Would the shields I'd picked up from FTL and Red Faction protect me from indoctrination? Was I already immune as a result of my less-than-organic nature?
Gah, so many questions, and no real safe way to test. Hm.
Well, no safe way short of creating and sacrificing forks-turned-full-AI. Which seemed… wasteful. And cruel. And, in a way, literally suicidal. Best not do that.
Given that there wasn't really a lot I could do about it either way, I just kept working, slowly filtering the data through the Dimensional Gate for Hope to peruse herself. Hopefully - heh, - she'd be able to find a way to test it safely. She seemed much better at science than me… which was odd, all things considered. Could such a short period of divergence really create such a huge change?
I doubted it, and decided to place the blame on ROB. It seemed the most simple solution.
After a few moments of idle contemplation, I received another notification from my Fabricators - apparently one of them, or rather, it's payload of nanites, had finally gotten all the way through the Reaper's shell and into the interior space.
It was difficult to tell what said interior space was used for - the nanites didn't exactly have convenient high-quality optical sensors for me to borrow, so I had to wait for the nanites to filter out all throughout the room - a somewhat slow process, given the relatively small number, - to get a feel for what was inside.
Based on the information I was receiving, the answer seemed to be 'Dragon's Teeth'. And lots of them. Apparently I'd stumbled into some kind of store room.
Dragon's Teeth are basically the Reaper version of infantry barracks. Except instead of being a place for soldiers to be trained, outfitted, and stationed, it was more like a torture spike for prisoners or recently-dead to be impaled upon and turned into Husks.
Credit to the Reapers, it was a lot more space efficient. Of course, it also converted all the gooey organic parts of a body into nutrient slurry and from there into cybernetic parts, turning the victim into a mindless robot space zombie in the process, so…
Well, the Reapers were hardly upstanding paragons of virtue and morality, so I wasn't really sure what I was expecting.
Either way, I took those designs and passed them through the Dimensional Gate. The actual transformation method wasn't anything special - nanomachines, the likes of which I already had access to. However, the transformation process was controlled by a form of artificial intelligence that used the nanites to scan a body and calculate the most efficient way to convert it into a mechanical Husk, without requiring oversight from a Reaper or equivalent greater intelligence.
If I could apply that same sort of artificial intelligence to my own systems, - without the crazy Reaper brainwashing part, obviously, - then I could theoretically fire nanites at any organic life and create my own units from them.
The idea of tagging an enemy with a Nano Rifle and instantly turning them into a loyal robotic minion was certainly an impressive one… and also terrifying and horribly immoral. Definitely not something I'd be using against sentients if I could help it. Against things like the Zerg, though… well, I was sure I could find a use for it eventually.
Soon enough the nanites filtered through the hull in other places, and I started receiving more and more detail about the Reaper's inner shell. The actual livable space in the Reaper, the corridors and control rooms, seemed to be quite limited - most of the other space appeared to be huge power conduits, heat sinks, and storage bays, presumably to house more Dragon's Teeth or the Reaper's fighter equivalents, Oculus drones.
Unfortunately, due to the sheer density of the technology inside the Reaper, the Fabricators and their nanites weren't having the easiest time stealing all of the rare shiny technologies. I'd still yet to locate the Reaper's central AI, shield generator, or Eezo Core, which were all probably deeper into the superstructure. And whilst I had found what I assumed to be propulsion systems dotted around the Reaper's hull, they clearly relied on some form of Element Zero reaction and thus far I had no way to replicate that.
In fact, the only system of note I'd recovered thus far was the gun, and whilst it was impressive in the context of the Mass Effect universe, compared to, say, my Friendship Lasers, or the Little Ray of Sunshine, it was basically just a glowy red super soaker.
Only the fact that my weapon technology far surpassed my shield technology even made it worth noting - if my shields were on par with my weapons, I'd probably be able to just fly on through without taking any damage at all even under fire from multiple Reaper cannons.
Even more unfortunately, Mass Effect's kinetic barriers weren't even that great. Sure, they could deflect any kinetic attack given sufficient power (which I could no doubt provide) and the more powerful ones even worked against lasers, (as long as the shield was activated beforehand, since they couldn't activate fast enough in reaction to simply detecting laser fire) but they were on the same order as the Reaper's weapons… which meant, still an order of magnitude below the kind of things I was bringing to the field.
Still, I doubted I'd run into anyone else slinging around my level of firepower, especially here of all places, so it wasn't too much of a concern. And, it was entirely possible that by throwing more power at the kinetic shields I could make them stronger even than the Reapers had, so maybe they wouldn't be so useless after all.
---
Gagea 02-003 approached the Mass Relay in maximum stealth mode - Phase Cloaking online, engines turned right down, passive sensors only, and all non-essential systems, such as weapons and shields, completely disabled.
Maybe it was overkill - my own sensors had trouble picking up the stealth systems, what with the whole 'taking a half-step out of physics' thing they had going on, and I was willing to put money on Progenitor sensors being much better than anything else the denizens of the Mass Effect universe were carting around. Still, no sense in taking chances.
The Gagea drew closer to the Mass Relay, the scout fighter's advanced sensors picking up a small number of ships in the vicinity of the Relay. Most were smaller, civilian-looking vessels with no clear armaments or fighter drone escorts, but one stood out from the rest - mainly because of the human writing scrawled across the hull.
Human writing meant human crew. Human crew meant human computer systems. And that meant I'd have a much easier time hacking it, hopefully.
Now, one major advantage of the FTLverse's Phase Teleporter is that the teleporter system itself is absolutely not limited in the slightest by range. Given sufficient power, phase rifts can be opened any distance away from the emitter. With the Gagea serving as the spotter to ensure the phase rift was on target, I loaded up one of the aforementioned teleporters and activated it, teleporting a single cloaked Fabricator almost fourteen lightyears in an instant, depositing the craft just to the rear of the slowly drifting human freighter.
The Fabricator fired its own thrusters, drawing closer still to the freighter, and then unloaded its fabricator, the payload of nanites quickly infiltrating the ship's computer systems.
Eezo core schematics, weapon tech, communications protocols… all mine.
Had I been inhabiting a human body I might have been tempted to rub my hands in glee. As it was, I simply smiled inside and got to work.
