Q2Y25
In a lot of ways even I was surprised by the sheer industrial output capacity of my own people. Between the nine fully completed WISE Spheres, in the last three months -- with a perhaps excessively dedicated zeal that tapped into the mostly otherwise indolent population of the Hosts to manage coordination on a scale I'd never before witnessed from them -- my people had churned out an outright astonishing 50 Masada Fortresses.
Well, the bare skeletons therein, at least -- the finishing work would be completed by the Maggtoid populations that would be seeded onto the stations themselves, using the autofabrication systems built into the Masada Fortresses, from harvested materials in their adjacent dimensions once deployed, and eventually 'refurbishing' the original manufactured materials as they went. In six months the first fifty of the Masada Fortress habitats would be fully completed; in another six months they would be purged of all matter with a dimensional origin from any Jovian-occupied territory.
Mind you -- 'fully completed' was not the same as 'fully functional'; while I had insisted on a practically ground-up complete overhaul on how every technology my people had access to was implemented for the Maggtoids and the Masada Fortresses as opposed to the rest of the Jovian League, the one principle I had not stinted on in the slightest was on redundancy. With little more than a month of finishing work the Maggtoids within the fifty habitat-fortresses would be able to begin their duties. The only question from there was where to deploy said small moon-sized space habitats for their intended purposes.
And that was where the fact that my people had built fifty of the things would come into play. We currently had seven separate "colonized" dimensions, with a smattering of deadworld universe-dimensions inhabited by research outposts, Seeker monasteries, and logistical outposts.
Laying down six Masadas each at a full psionic-riftgate maximum range from any given colonized dimension and from each other, for each such colonized dimension would allocate 42 of the fortresses. Eighteen of which would be assigned to the deadworld spaces 'surrounding' (inasmuch as such a term could ever actually apply) the Mass Effect 'verse, where the Jovians were most firmly entrenched. This would leave another eight such forts -- five of which would be deployed within vicinity of the psychic-riftgate "waystation" dimensions that connected the Mass Effect, Babylon 5, Sliders, and Stargate 'verses to one another. One for each waystation, thanks to there being two required to make the transit from the Sliders and Babylon 5 'verses.
This still left another four fortresses. And for those ... for those I had a slightly different mission in mind. One that would test the limits of what the Masada Fortresses could really accomplish, but also one that would potentially finally solve a long outstanding problem of the Seekers' self-imposed mission of uplifting me to godhood.
The final four Masada Fortresses? Those would be used as jumping points to launch an invasion to support an alternate dimension of the Stargate 'Verse. One, specifically, where the Ori were already present in and dominating the Milky Way while the Tau'ri's far more canonical fleets were struggling to resist. All so that my people could gain access to the methods the Ori used to empower and extract power from their followers.
This would solve multiple problems at once, though I really wasn't enjoying the idea of so many of my people being willing to die "for the cause" -- even though every last one of them would be doubly volunteers: first volunteering to become Shades, and secondly volunteering to become Rangers and take up station duty within the psychic hive mind "collective unconscious" of an individual Maggtoid hive per Shade.
Each Masada fortress would initially have only about two hundred or so Shades, with each of the half-ascended military officers of the League inhabiting the hive link of a hive with about ten million Maggtoids when at full capacity, but starting at somewhere more like five hundred thousand. This would not be quite the stretch it might seem superficially, as taking up residence within that psychic "space" was not the same as extending themselves fully into the mind of each individual Maggtoid. For all but a very small number at any time, it would be more like feeling a whisper of presence in the back of their admittedly extremely small minds. A bit akin to the feeling one gets when they "feel eyes on the back of your neck".
It was, all in all, an ambitious plan. To test Maggtoid ship and troop capabilities against the most potent local military known to League space, and thus refine their drone programming in real applications. Initially each of the "invader" Masada Fortresses would have a single squadron of voidships per hive -- a pair of battleships with a crew of ten thousand Maggtoids each and measuring in thusly at six kilometers along the longest axis and two kilometers along the shorter axises, equipped with a light smallcraft and dropship capacity in case of solo operations but otherwise armed with spinal mass hyperaccelerators designed to use Tachyon eddies and linear accelerators to launch nanite bolloids with structural integrity fields and arcane-backed banishment circuity at superluminal velocities, and upon impact to infest a vessel's power and computer systems to sabotage and overload them; a half-dozen cruisers measuring in at half the dimensions of the battleships and a third of the crew capacity, designed around heavy smallcraft complements intended to primarily act as counter-interceptors making use of Ethereal-derived Blaster-Launcher weaponry to flood intercessory space with payloads intended to disrupt any opposing smallcraft and make it more difficult for the Maggtoid's weapons to be shot down by simply confusing enemy sensors with random noise of bursts of energy, and to permit the onboard Maggtoid Commanders to utilize vehicle-grade psionic amplifiers to attempt to commandeer the minds of the crews of any enemy ships at least long enough to get them to commit critical errors or even engage in friendly fire, or to induce enemy vessel's engineering crews to overload critical components.
All backed with two dozen 'destroyer' class vessels which broke pattern to operate with a 'disk'-like form factor at one kilometer in radius and peaking at one hundred meters in height, with a crew of five hundred Maggtoids -- which utilized Replicator technology to keep a functionally unlimited number of missiles based on a fusion of kara'kesh and star-trek hologram technology to perform sheer missile spam with various possible payloads within the contained forcefields -- the simplest of which being basic hydrogen and designed to impact on enemy shields in a contained point at near-lightspeed and inducing high energy shaped-charge fusion events directly against any such barriers, with alternative 'banishment' payloads based on the same nanotech bolloids of the battleships. Any given 'destroyer' vessel could launch several hundred of these forcefield missiles per second and could keep launching so long as the energy supply of the ship was still available.
Defensively the vessels all shared a similar doctrine based on the use of Star Trek hologram emitters to generate Star-Trek style shield emitters in a "phalanx" array outside of an X-COM-derived gravimetric-sheer shield bubble and double-hulled armor layer, with both layers benefiting from structural integrity fields and energy webs, with a dedicated repair system in the empty space between hulls based on the systems of the automated repair drydock the Enterprise NX-01 encountered -- and an interior shield layer inside the double-hull based on joint psionic and arcane shielding methods; although the reliance on exclusively arcane energies rather than also eldritch did limit the use of Wards to only Tier 3 -- but that was separate from the Shields which themselves were borrowed from the Youjo Senki calculation methods, rather than the Laundry File calculation methods.
The Maggtoid vessels only benefited from Arcane-backed anti-perception glamour, psionic 'invisibility' projection, and thermoptic camouflage for concealment (on top of the usual dimensional jamming and arcane-backed wards).
The Masada Fortresses of course benefited from all of this -- and were also stationed in isolated demiplanes that could, theoretically anyhow, only be accessed by someone with a planar Slide-equivalent device such as my people had developed ... and even then only if you had the right signal-key to bypass the planar-slide jammers.
I honestly had no idea how any of this would fare against the capabilities of the Ori and their warships, but at the very least the fact that we'd have eight hundred 'squadrons' entering that contested space should radically tip the balance of power even if they were outgunned and outclassed on an individual level by Ori shields and weaponry. Only time would tell.
There was another matter that pushed the urgency of getting the Masada fortresses online -- and it was one that was partially responsible for why the Synod had decided that going 'public' with their construction was a more sane idea. Now that we were actively searching for signs of energy signatures and technologies that did not belong in the 'Verses we had been to, the Agent's people had found a few more incidents of the same overall pattern that we'd found in the Star Trek 'Verse.
The Agent's Farseeds had scoured the 'Verses that I was willing to allow my people to travel to, using a combination of hired CAE Oracles and specialized sensor suites to isolate energy patterns known to be native to the given 'Verse -- or known to be present thanks to Jovian intervention at least -- and in no fewer than three instances they had found cases of 'contamination', all by the same as-yet undiscovered extradimensional source. In addition to the Trek 'Verse, there was also sign of activity in the SeaQuest DSV 'Verse, one of the generic "zombie apocalypse" 'Verses, and in the WestWorld 'Verse. There was also sign of the unexplained signature in the proximity of two deadworld dimensions within psychic riftgate distance from the permanent riftgates that my people used to maintain connections between 'Verses that were sufficiently distant from one another to require such.
The thing that was most deeply troubling about this pattern was the lack of any proximity pattern to them ... excepting that my people had been present in those places at some point -- or more specifically that I had been there, as I had never had any interest in revisiting the SeaQuest 'Verse after my initial foray there. The distance between these places what also quite large, dimensionally speaking -- one would have to make multiple dimensional transits even using range-augmenting methods such as psychic rift formation to even attempt to make that kind of a jump.
So whoever these people were ... they appeared, somehow, to be tracking my transits somehow. But even that assumption didn't really hold up; it wasn't chronological for example; nor was it based on frequency of visits. I, and the various members of the Synod, were at a loss to explain it.
The one thing we did know was that it was becoming more and more clear that whoever these people were, I would definitely need to treat them as a hostile polity until demonstrated otherwise; after all -- if they knew who I was enough to know how to track me by my Censor-connected transits between realities, even if only partially, then if they were at all compatible with my morals and stances they would simply reach out to my people. Oh, the initial contact would be tense -- I was simply too paranoid for it to be other -- but I was never a "shoot first" kind of guy, unless you were talking about the sorts of things where shooting first is your only hope of ever shooting at all.
It was troubling. I didn't like it -- not one bit.
Was I perhaps biting off more than my people could chew with setting up the Ranger Corps and the Maggtoids to basically be condemned to fighting a war on two fronts? Well ... honestly, maybe. But the Ori -- for all that they were a true challenge for the Maggtoids -- were a known challenge. Whoever was sniffing in my turf? I'd hoped for the Maggtoids to be bloodied before encountering them, to be at peak veterancy. But I would have to take what I could get, I supposed.
AN: This is a crap chapter. I know this is a crap chapter. And it's well below my usual chapter length. It also took me three weeks to even get it out. Maybe I just need to beat my head against this brick wall like a Xianxia protagonist trying to force his way through a bottleneck, eh?
I make no promises about the next chapter being any better. But with any luck I'll pick steam back up again, you guys. :-/
