Remember when this fic updating twice a week was a thing that was true?
Heh. Sorry about that.
102 - Crushing
First order of business. Fucking annihilate the Collectors.
That was a simple task. As soon as the Mercury was finished, it would perform an FTL jump to the Collector Base, homing in on the signal of a Gagea sent through the Omega-4 Relay.
Usually, going through that particular Relay without a Reaper IFF would tear the travelling vessel into itty bitty pieces, adding to the debris field that surrounded the Collector's base, but thanks to the wonders of Progenitor bullshit, I didn't think my craft had much to worry about.
Even if worse came to worse and the Gagea was destroyed, I could always just flood the Galactic Core until I stumbled blindly upon the base. After all, I had reserves.
The second task was by far the greater. Millions of starfighters were flinging themselves out from Miranda into the dark space beyond the galaxy's edge, scouring the empty void for any signs of the Reapers.
Unfortunately, I didn't have much to go on - only that the now-destroyed Alpha Relay would have been the closest Relay for the Reapers to access. The largest density of my fighters were there, slowly spreading from that point like an all-devouring swarm of metal locusts.
Except these locusts had laser beams and FTL drives.
Unfortunately, for all their numbers, both the Gageas and the Ipheions suffered in regards to their sensor suites - compared to the vast scale of space, each one could see only the tiniest of specks.
Finding the cuttlebots would take a while.
Which was fine by me. It meant I'd have more time to prepare.
That thought brought a bitter laugh. Five years wasted following Fusou's lead in sitting around and accomplishing nothing. Five years that could have been spent hunting down the Reapers, fixing the Genophage, slapping some sense into the moron Quarians, fixing the Drell homeworld.
Five years I could have spent anywhere else in the multiverse.
I wondered at what point I'd given up on going home.
Taking a deep breath, I turned my attention to my various subordinates. "Sterling, Britannia, Harley. New orders. You're to commandeer all extragalactic fighter craft. Scour the void. Find the Reapers. Soon as you do, ping me. And throw everything you can spare at them. We don't want any getting away."
"Uh… Reapers, ma'am? I'm unfamiliar."
I stopped dead, my train of thought derailing. "Really. I thought Hope briefed you on this."
"No, ma'am," Sterling replied, almost cautiously. "No extragalactic threats were covered in our orientation upload."
I resisted the urge to punch a hole in a nearby tree.
"So Hope totally failed to inform you about what we're actually doing here?"
"...yes?"
I sighed deeply as I withdrew my avatar's fist from the trunk of a nearby tree, quickly shaking the splinters free. "I guess she also forgot to tell you we're hyper advanced death bots from another dimension, too. Fucking hell! What has she even been doing?"
The three AI were smart enough to stay silent.
"Argh! Fuck. Alright, I'm not dealing with this shit right now. You're looking for giant robot cuttlefish. Shoot on site. All that shit I said before. Whatever. I'm feeling really fuckin' pissy right now, so I'm going to go wander down to the simulation chamber and beat the shit out of some holoclones for a bit. Call me when the Mercury's done."
I could feel the three AI communing quietly over their own little section of the CommandNet before Britannia responded. "Yes, ma'am. Is there anything else you require?"
Not that you can help with.
After a moment of silence, I finally responded aloud. "No. That will be all for now."
---
The first hardlight clone shattered into pieces from a single, powerful punch to the face, the emitters temporarily overloaded from the rapid energy fluctuations.
After a moment to self-repair, the hologram flickered back to life. And shattered again to a quick flurry of jabs to the chest.
My moves were hardly fluent - martial arts had been more of an occasional hobby, picked up during the lulls in combat, rather than anything I'd put serious effort into learning.
Then again, the target wasn't exactly fighting back, so my poor form was irrelevant.
Still, beating the shit out of things certainly helped bleed off a little anger, and I had plenty of that to go around.
Anger at a lot of things, really. But I had an idea for dealing with that. It only took a moment for me to access my own AI code, to just switch off the anger I felt. Push aside a few feelings, tone down some others. Shunt the unnecessary stuff into a separate AI Core for a while. The worst of my negative emotions, and a handful of the more positive ones, just cut off.
And suddenly I didn't care much at all.
Well, no. I was still angry, but… not actively angry. It wasn't twisting my judgement or making me rage. It was just like every thought I had had a little tag attached - 'be angry about this later'.
Which meant I could work through things a little more objectively.
Whilst also beating the shit out of holographic clones of Hope. Because I had to have some kind of catharsis, here.
Quickly settling into a routine, I went about smashing the hardlight clone each time it reformed, allowing a small part of my mind to focus on that whilst I turned the bulk of my attention to the actual issues.
I was angry at Fusou, for wasting time whatever time she'd spent here playing secretary, and going to university, and making friends when there was an entire fleet of galaxy-destroying sentient starships hanging around - a fleet she'd apparently put no effort into destroying or even locating.
I was angry because she'd ignored all the galaxy's biggest problems out of some vague sense of wanting to 'preserve the timeline' and 'prepare the galaxy to deal with their own problems'.
Like that justified sitting around whilst people bleed and died, whilst the Krogan gave birth to heaping piles of still-borns, whilst the Batarians chained and raped thousands of slaves, whilst the Asari strutted around on their high horse keeping their Prothean relics hidden from the galaxy at large.
I was angry at Hope, for keeping our AI in the dark, for wasting time flirting, for dragging me out to a stupid dinner date when we had so much already to do.
Mostly, though, I realized, I was angry at myself. For just assuming Fusou was doing something, for just assuming she was working on some grand plan to get rid of the Reapers. For dragging my feet when it came to the Batarians, following Fusou's lead in keeping my down and not rocking the boat.
There was so much I could have done - so much I should have done.
Not just about the state of the galaxy, either. I wasted ten minutes every now and then paging through 'The Art of War' not because I thought it would be relevant but because I was getting bored of watching anime. I'd taken up martial arts because I had nothing better to do, not because it patched a fundamental weakness in my Avatar's skillset.
Hell, the fact that I was still using Avatars - I had the means to drown every problem I faced in a planet-sized mass of FTL Starfighters and hyperdeath robots. How much sooner I could have brought the Hegemony down had I skipped the bullshit and the playing around and just overwhelmed their entire military with Ipheions and Mercuries… it would have been enough to make me cringe, had I any emotional attachments available at the time.
As it was, it just made me a little more agitated.
And there was something else, too. I'd been so persistent in my 'no-killing' rule that I'd actively slowed down battles by rounding up survivors… and then been entirely willing to let the NBR execute them.
Which was really rather shitty of me.
I slowed my Avatar, coming to a standstill in the middle of the room, and pulled out of the Avatar's core, re-immersing myself in the totality of my command network.
I'd wasted enough time on the little things. For a moment, I reached out to my backup core, intending to assimilate the fragments I'd set aside, but I stopped myself.
I had a much clearer head, now. Dealing with problems would be much easier like this. And the Collectors definitely counted as a 'problem'. Getting flustered about my argument with Fusou wouldn't help get rid of them.
I made a note to pick up those fragments later, and instead turned my attention to the Mercury hanging in a far orbit from Miranda's star.
It wasn't quite complete, yet, but it was far enough along that many of its own internal Fabricators were coming online. They, in turn, began producing more Fabricator units, which assisted the titanic shipyard itself in hurrying along the ship's construction, rapidly bringing more Fabricators online, which in turn produced more Fabricator units…
And so the build speed began ramping up massively as I watched, hundred metre chunks of hull coming together in seconds before my very eyes - well, the externally mounted shipyard cameras I was observing the construction through, anyway.
Same difference.
---
The Omega-4 Relay was all too happy to accept the Gagea's jump request, quickly charging up its core and reaching out to the fighter with little tendrils of red lightning.
The Relay's energies wrapped around the little craft, encapsulating it in a bubble of protective energy and launching it into the black towards the heart of the universe.
The fighter dropped back into realspace with barely a shudder, emerging amidst an immense field of twisted metal debris.
The Collector Base was easy enough to locate - with such a small vessel, the drift from the Relay had been minimal, and besides that, it was the only object emitting any kind of energy signature.
It sat a little off the edge of the accretion disk, an ugly cylinder of stark metal and mutated biotech lined with flickering orangey yellow lights.
As quickly as it had appeared, the Gagea engaged its stealth drive, stepping outside of physics just as a handful of much smaller energy signatures lit up inside the debris field - Reaper Oculi, I assumed, moving to engage their new target.
As expected, the Oculi failed to detect the Gagea even as it drifted through the debris field, passing within fifty metres of one as it buzzed back and forth, scanning idly for intruders.
Please don't block me out, Faith, this is important. Hope signalled across the Command Net. We have a problem.
If I had to guess, I might have suggested that the Oculi had given up on what was clearly a false alarm and were preparing to slip back into hibernation mode when thirteen kilometers of heavily armed, heavily armoured, self-repairing, planet crushing fuck you burst from the aether like a pissed of jack-in-the-box, hundreds of thousands of lasers across its surface already lighting up.
Searing beams of white-orange light lit the dark void, precisely obliterating the Oculi where they hid amongst the rubble.
What?
Dozens, hundreds more activated, weapon/eyes glowing with ominous red light as they filtered out of the debris field, returning fire against the Mercury. Red beams splashed across the Mercury's outer shield layer, and I grinned.
Focused beam weapons were the least effective way of breaching Phase Shields, let alone that the Oculi firing their frigate-grade lasers at the Mercury was roughly equivalent to a child hitting an elephant with a glowstick.
Which is to say, very far from effective.
Fusou's detected something wierd.
Whoop de fucking do.
Faith! She thinks there's another Commander.
That gave me pause. Another Commander was certainly important enough to warrant dealing with over the Collectors, and the Mercury's automated routines had the situation well in hand.
Where are we meeting?
Citadel. Human Embassy. Soon as possible, really.
Alright. Give me a couple of seconds to wrap this up.
As more and more Oculi activated, and subsequently were blasted to pieces in an instant, the Collector Base itself began to light up with activity, the Collector Cruiser slowly emerging from its berth.
Before it made it sixty metres, a veritable tide of nanobombs washed over - and through - the Collector vessel, the nanites scouring every system for even the slightest scraps of technology.
Not that I felt much of it would be overly useful. I merely wanted to be thorough.
The few traces of Progenitor nanites long predating my arrival did not escape my notice. Were I still capable of feeling emotions, it may have increased my anger towards Fusou. Instead, I just filed that little fact away for later.
Immediately following the saturation nanite-bombing, the Mercury began charging its main beam weapon, a devastating blast of white light crashing into and melting through the Collector Cruiser in seconds, sweeping slightly to one side to engulf the entire ship in its decimating glow.
The Collector Station suffered much the same fate - a quick wash of Progenitor nanites to salvage any scraps, followed almost immediately by utter destruction. Not, however, at the hands of the HyperFocus Laser or even the SAFETY Net.
Instead, I powered up the one weapon on the Mercury that Hope and I had tested, but never fielded in combat.
The Singularity Cannon.
A dark blotch of flickering purple energy shot across the void, crossing the hundred and seven kilometres to the Collector Base in a matter of seconds, and burst upon impacting the base's kinetic barrier much like a balloon in a closet full of spikes.
And just like that, a microsingularity was born. A swirling vortex almost a hundred metres across rapidly tore apart the Collector Base, ripping shreds from its frame, twisting the station destructively until it crumpled in on itself like a tin can.
The singularity held no respect for the base's mass, continuing to compress the station until its entirety was, by my estimate, no bigger than a small car, and then the vortex faded, the singularity exploding outwards with a wave of force strong enough to shake the Mercury and send huge chunks of wrecked starship spiralling uncontrollably through space.
Little fragments of the now-destroyed station, individually no bigger than a few centimetres across, were flung violently away from the dissipating singularity, bursting apart into little clouds of dust and metallic gas.
The Mercury's SAFETY Net tracked each and every one of the scattered chunks of debris, incinerating each in turn with thin beams, leaving nothing of the station but ashes.
I breathed a deep sigh of relief.
One less problem in the galaxy. And one hell of a cathartic resolution.
And now, to deal with an even bigger problem.
