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?"
