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Faith in Superior Firepower [Planetary Annihilation Multicross SI]

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A facility working on dimensional gates, with the only success leading to a Vogon who's a dedicated poet?
 
Researching the effects of FTL travel or crew being placed in suspended animation? Basically, the zoltan research station needed to use the crystal stasis pod on... except you don't have the pod, don't have any non-stolen medical data, and you just attacked their ships?
 
Rossum said:
Researching the effects of FTL travel or crew being placed in suspended animation? Basically, the zoltan research station needed to use the crystal stasis pod on... except you don't have the pod, don't have any non-stolen medical data, and you just attacked their ships?
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To be fair, the Zoltan did fire first. So it's not fair to say that they attacked the Zoltan. Rather, the Zoltan attacked them.
 
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32 - Competition
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    • I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING PLEASE HELP

    Actually, I have a pretty good idea what I'm doing. I'm just super stressed from IRL stuff and I think my writing quality has dropped as a result, but I wanted to do something other than stress about shit I can't do anything about, so I wrote this.

    Anyway, enough of my problems.

    32 - Competition
    Officially, Zoltan station LDC-952 was nothing but a military communications relay, for the kinds of message that couldn't be transmitted on open channels. Troop deployments, espionage reports, etcetera. Not just for the Zoltan forces, but the Federation as a whole. Its main purpose was to prevent Rebels from just being able to intercept military communications at any old relay.

    Which would have been fine, except, based on what I'd learned from the files on the bomber, the crew of the station had decided to switch to the 'winning' side. For six months they'd been leaking classified military intelligence to a fleet of terrorists.

    Well, they might have been terrorists. Certainly they did some rather... questionable things, but... the game never really elaborated on the details. Besides the bit where they outnumbered the Federation by a massive amount despite being a human-only group, so far as I'd seen in the game.

    Either way, the station had been feeding them intel with which to wage war against the Federation.

    Which was bad enough, without taking into account the unofficial purpose of LDC-952.

    Military grade artificial intelligence research. Apparently, this particular station had been responsible for the hacking and cyberwarfare segments of the Rebel Flagship AI. Which it was now calling to its location by way of what appeared to be a very long-range distress beacon.

    Which was just my luck, really.

    I noticed a single, low volume ping coming from the station towards Rider 06, and as soon as it arrived, everything went to hell.

    ---

    The seven Slug cruisers were not very happy with me. I'd already gleaned that, though, by the vast and slightly terrifying array of guns they had pointed at me.

    "Halt, unknown vessel! Stand by and prepare to be boarded! Your crew is under arrest on suspicion of vandalism, littering, and terrorism!"

    Arson, murder and jaywalking in reverse, apparently. I guess they weren't happy with me going around firing military grade nanomachines at civilian vessels.

    Based on how the Zoltan had reacted to Rider 06, I felt they probably wouldn't approve of me shooting nanobots at military vessels either.

    Which was fair enough, I suppose. They had absolutely no way of knowing what the hell I'd been doing. I could have been layering the ships hulls with micro explosives, or something.

    Unfortunately, they wanted to board my vessel. Which was a slight problem, for the reason of Rider class vessels not having anywhere to board, on account of effectively being a ton of sensors and generators with a couple of big-ass engines on the back. The amount of free interior space was measured in cubic millimetres, and most of that was because I was too lazy to expand far beyond basic cuboids in the manufacture of the various interior systems.

    Depending on how I played my cards, it would either be a massive issue, or a total non-issue.

    If I stayed, there would be trouble. No way around it. Either they'd try to board, fail, and shoot me, or I could shoot them before they got close, which would result in them shooting me. Dangerous - insofar as anything I'd seen thus far might have classified as dangerous, given the strength of my shield system, - but I would get the chance to nab some neat new toys.

    On the other hand, I could cut my losses now, run like a little wimp, and not worry too much. I'd already obtained Glaive Beams from the Zoltan - and whilst the Bio-Beam would be nice, I could probably find it later. Mind control, too. If anything, I was likely to encounter that very shortly, in fact, if the Rebel Fleet was nearly as powerful as I recalled it being. I'm pretty sure the Flagship had a Mind Control device, anyway.

    Choices...

    If I'd learnt anything from the myriad video games I'd played, it was that superior firepower was almost always the best option, and, failing that, running away like a little bitch was a good backup.

    So I spun up the FTL drives.

    ---

    Rider 06 was not having a good day. In any sense of the term.

    Firstly, it had been shot up by two Zoltan craft. Then, it had been shot at by turrets on the station.

    Then, an enemy artificial intelligence, some kind of old prototype from the Flagship, had deployed a jamming signal, attempting to cut it off from my network. Luckily, Hypertech Bullshit was able to circumvent that, but it was almost a lot worse. If they'd gotten their hands on my tech...

    Actually, I had no idea if they would even be capable of reverse engineering it. And most of the technology was compartmentalised inside big boxes of Hypertech Alloys, which had thus far shown to be pretty resilient to... just about everything thrown at them.

    Either way, I didn't want them getting my toys.

    The enemy AI sent another signal out, and this time, I have no idea how, it got through the various layers of cybersecurity, tearing into my network.

    [DANGER-ALERT]

    Tearing into me! The bastard!

    [HOSTILE AI DETECTED]

    It was like some asshole with a jackhammer was romping around inside my skull, throwing fireworks over one shoulder and blasting Skrillex from ten thousand boom boxes. Pain lanced through my head, and I felt as if my nerves were on fire - and let me tell you, that's a weird experience for someone who no longer has a nervous system.

    [CYBERWAR MODULES ACTIVE]

    Once I got my mind back into gear and realised what, exactly, was going on, it became much easier to deal with. The Rebel AI was somehow advanced enough to pose a threat to me - I could feel it, reaching through my mind. A push of... I want to say mental effort, but that would imply a more spiritual or magical force. Digital effort? It didn't help that, in this situation, there was nothing to 'see' - nothing but a blur of numbers, strings of code, and flashes of radiation. It was worse than the time I'd watched the Matrix whilst high - and that had been a hell of an experience in and of itself.

    [ENGAGING HOSTILE]

    Whatever kind of weak resistance I was putting up, it worked. Kind of. I could push back, drive it away, but it fought back, and it seemed only to get more stubborn the further I pushed it back. Reminded me a little of my sister. And all of a sudden, the AI was chewed up and torn apart by... something. A subroutine? I hadn't activated any, but an anti-hacking failsafe would make sense.

    Then the AI did something really annoying. The shredded 'remains' of its 'digital corpse' split in half. And then again. And then again.

    And suddenly I was under attack from all... sides? Describing a fight inside one's mind is difficult. Sue me. Desperate, I spun up a few more streams of consciousness - using its own tricks against it. In a matter of attoseconds, I had each of its minds blocked with one of my own.

    If watching two separate events with two separate minds was confusing, watching one event from eight perspectives was fucking chaos.

    Of course, the cheating bastard wasn't satisfied with me countering its bullshit with my own. It didn't have to do much to gain the advantage again, though, because at that moment three hundred ships, ranging in size from ten metre long 'fighters' to half-kilometre cruisers, appeared on the edge of the system and opened fire.

    ---

    Well, I thought, as I merged the multiple concurrent threads into one stream. That was a rather quick loss.

    At least it meant I didn't have to deal with the AI any more, since it was no longer linked to my network.

    Additionally, it proved that humanity hadn't developed that much - their response to a single hostile had been to fire literally every gun in their three hundred and seventeen strong fleet at it - all seven thousand. Even with shields several times more powerful than a ship its size should have possessed, and armour made of alloys so bullshit it defied logic, superior firepower proved as effective as it always did, and blew Rider 06 into a lot of tiny scraps - which promptly broke apart into a swarm of nanobots which harmlessly dispersed and self-destructed, denying all potential assets to the enemy.

    At least that was the only ship I'd lost thus far - Rider 11 had made it out of the Slug system fine, and none of the cruisers had seen fit to pursue. And I now knew where the Rebel fleet was. I didn't want to kill them, per-se, but if I wanted to do anything at all to them, I needed to know where to find them.

    And preferably, I wanted to do it quickly. If the Rebels had that level of firepower... well. Not something I particularly wanted to mess around with. I didn't want them levelling any cities or destroying random space stations or anything like that.

    I'd need something with non-lethal options that expanded beyond the Fabricator - the Ion weapons I'd stolen from the Engi would work well for that. But I didn't want to waste time fiddling around with the design of the Cavalier - that thing I wanted to keep as a 100% murder machine.

    So I needed another new design. One loaded with Ion weapons, to disable enemy ships. And shields, and an FTL drive. Engines, sensors, and reactors were obvious necessities.

    I mentally sighed and got to work again.
     
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    • 33 - Preparation
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    • Real life struggles continue to be real, but I'm a little happier with this than I was with the last one.

    33 - Preparation
    Like the others before it, the Tracker was based on the Elysion Frigate design. Unlike the others, it wasn't armed with a single plasma cannon.

    Instead, it was packing a number of Ion weapons - a heavy Ion Cannon on the nose, four Twin Ion Repeaters on the sides, and two missile pods. Whilst I hadn't stolen any Ion Missiles (nor was I aware of any even existing, although I was pretty sure there were Ion Bombs) it had been a fairly simple matter to build a missile with an Ion Emitter built in.

    I mean, it lost the warhead, meaning it could only do non-Ion damage from physically hitting the enemy ship, but a homing, shield ignoring Ion weapon was too good to pass up.

    And unlike the protagonists of FTL, I was not limited by such factors as ammunition. I could just fabricate more missiles pretty much ex nihilo, with the ship's on board Fabricator.

    Of course, the Tracker was also equipped with the same shields, engines, FTL drive, reactor and sensors as the other ships. To do otherwise would be foolish. Although I wanted to get a signal jammer at some point, as well. Perhaps I'd have to revisit LDC-952 and steal theirs. Later.

    Over the head of my Osiris, Rider 11 dropped out of FTL and reconnected to the network. It was the ship that had travelled the furthest, and thus taken the longest time to return to me.

    As for why I was recalling my fleets, well.

    I'd already almost tipped my hand just with the two Riders that had been out and about. The fact that I had an FTL Gate hanging around right near a local beacon was also a pretty big tip-off that something was up, but said beacon had nothing around it and generally didn't seem particularly populated. I'd just have to hope no one popped in for a visit.

    Until I got cloaking, at least.

    Anyway, I wanted to stay out of sight, for now. Or try to, at least. I figured, so long as the Rebels thought they'd destroyed my ship - for they probably wouldn't be communicating with the Slugs, who were allies of the Federation, - they probably wouldn't come looking for me.

    Which meant I was free to build up my forces. From what I'd seen, the Rebels possessed three hundred ships ranging from fighters to cruisers. I wasn't sure if that was their entire fleet or just a fraction, but I was leaning strongly to the second - I hadn't detected the Flagship amongst them in the brief seconds I'd had to scan them, and it seemed improbable that a force with only three hundred ships could pose any sort of threat to an interstellar, multi-species Federation.

    So, I figured I'd need to be ready to fight way more than three hundred ships. If I made, say... two thousand Trackers, that should be sufficient to deal with any number of enemy ships. Multiple target firing, ho!

    Of course, just sitting around and waiting for two thousand corvettes to build would be boring as hell, and I wasn't going to pass up the opportunity to steal more stuff.

    So - whilst I waited for the ships to build, I had a bit of time to go scouting. But I didn't want to go out in a Rider or a Pioneer - since they looked the same from the outside, they'd attract the same kind of attention from the Rebels that I was trying to avoid.

    If I made another new type of ship...

    ---

    It was based heavily on the style of ships used by the Rebels and the Federation, inspired by their designs and following a similar ascetic. At about thirty metres long, it was smaller than any of my existing ships, but on the larger end of FTL-verse 'fighters'.

    The perfect blend of 'disguised' and 'sufficient dakka'.

    It was armed with two Ion Repeaters, two overhauled Glaive Beams, and a single missile pod on the roof. If it had been the weapons from the game, it would have been powerful. With my overhauled, upgraded weapons, it was flat-out unfair. Because I could, I also fitted it out with a large drone bay at the front - it wasn't like I was exactly strapped for space.

    It packed the same shield, reactor, engines, sensors and FTL drive as my other ships, just in lesser amounts to account for interior design.As I didn't expect to have many people on board poking around the systems, I wasn't too worried about the fact that they were clearly far more advanced than most other FTLverse technology.

    Then, I added in a few 'comfort' systems - life support (an Elysion Core, not the oxygen purifiers used in FTL), a medical bay, and a cloning bay (limits are for suckers), in terms of important systems, and a kitchen, recreation room, bathroom, and a number of bunks. A total of a fourteen rooms that existed entirely for the purpose of my disguise.

    Again, not like I was strapped for space.

    So. I had a ship. Armed, armored, and fully equipped. All it needed now was a crew.

    Good thing I had a cloning bay.

    ---

    Genetics is hard.

    I had unfortunately few points of reference to start from - the medical records from a couple of the ships I'd stealthily assimilated, but none of the people I'd thus far robbed looked anything like me. Of course, I didn't need the people to look like me, but as a nineteen year old female, I reserve the right to be vain as all hell.

    Alas, achieveing the results I wanted was largely to be a game of trial and error. Luckily, I had a lot of time to mess around.

    Also, giant hypertech supercomputer. That helped. Just a bit.

    Combined with the limited medical data stored in the Medical Bay, including the information on cybernetics they included as standard, and the Engi Medi-bots from the cruiser I'd looted, I had a fair bit of knowledge to go on.

    Didn't stop it taking ages.

    ---

    A green glow emanated from the glassy tube in the centre of the room, flakes of illuminated dust gathering in clumps before forming into a clearly recognisable shape - a vague facsimile of a human skeleton, all metallic limbs and chrome plates. Well, not actually chrome, but whatever. The bottom half of the 'skull' was hollow, everything above packed with delicate machinery. Two silvery-white orbs sat in the eye sockets, a very faint green glow emerging from within.

    The first stage complete, the glow died down and the cloning bay's medical nanobots engaged, taking the place of my own fabricator nanobots. Layers of flesh and blood formed, wrapping around the robotic body, forming an incredibly realistic layer of skin that covered the entirety of the body, leaving only gaps around the eyes. Thin lips formed around the 'mouth', completing the skin and throwing the damn robot firmly into uncanny valley territory. Just like the rest. Except this one looked rather like my... old body, I guess. Well, I took a few liberties. Added a couple of inches to my height. Sue me.

    The third stage was the fastest, woven strands of carbon fibre nanotubes anchored to the metallic skull and spreading out behind the cyborg's head. A quick flash of green light later, and each strand was covered in a layer of thin coloured silk.

    It looked like hair, and felt like hair, but was far, far harder to break.

    Finally, the fabricator bots returned to paste on several layers of clothing - a skintight vacuum suit, beige cargo pants, a loose black t-shirt and a grey bomber jacket, the entire ensemble trimmed with green stripes and decals.

    Perfect.

    And that bought me up to six cyborg crewmen. Good enough for my purposes. And it left me a couple of rooms extra in case I needed them. Certainly it would help with the disguise - not every ship in space was fully crewed.

    As this latest cyborg was to be mine - hence why I'd based it on myself, I transferred my primary focus to the new body, reaching out with my arms and flexing my fingers.

    Although, after being a four-legged death machine for so long, taking control of a human-sized cyborg was rather strange. I spent a while staggering about before I got back into the groove of walking around with two legs.

    It took somewhat longer than I'd like to admit.

    Once I'd gotten the hang of movement again, I turned to look at the rest of my 'crew'.

    Five individuals, not including my body. Two more females, and three males. And, thus far, no idea how to control them. I could have 'driven' the bodies all myself with the separate thought streams, but I was worried some things wouldn't carry over well enough, or would carry over too well - mannerisms, vocabulary, even how they walked. I didn't really want to take any chances - not that it should matter, but nevertheless I wanted to avoid the risk.

    But my other options were limited. Since they were robots, more than cyborgs - the only organic parts being the skin and a few organs needed to maintain it, - I could have programmed them with basic AI like any of my field units - but I wasn't confident enough in my abilities to do anything that level of complicated, nor did I want to give them Commander level intelligence - something I was apparently capable of doing.

    Personally, the idea of creating a Commander level intelligence fucking terrified me. I had no idea whether I would have any sort of control over it, whether it would be willing to aid me or just fuck off on its own to wage war against everything that moved - and the things that didn't, too.

    Too risky. The worst of three bad options.

    But I still needed to pick one.
     
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    • You could probably just give them all very basic AI. Enough to walk around, press buttons on the control panels, and fight intruders. Just have them act like generic mooks or trained soldiers. If you aren't comfortable with their facial expressions, cover their faces with gas masks or something. So long as they can look in the general direction of intruders and yell things like "Mantis on board!" or "Take cover!" or something then people could just assume they are especially well-trained crew.

    You can even have a drone bay with (several) repair drones and anti-personnel drones running around if you don't feel like programming them to fight your opponents or repair stuff. Just have your crew look busy and carry weapons, then the drones do all the real work.

    Though slugs might be able to sense something is up if they try reading your mind and and get nothing. Slugs can sense sapient beings with their psychic powers but can't detect drones. They can detect Lanius and Engies, however. So they might be able to sense you (or your ship) depending on how you react to psychic powers but drone-crew would likely just look like drones to them.
     
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    Copy Past with Synchronization?

    It did worked exceptionally well for Tachikoma, after all.
     
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