Chapter 51: Prolog (Book 2) |
Deep space, 187 light-years from Sol
In the darkness between stars, something moved. Not actively, no power guiding its motion at just that moment, yet the sheer velocity at which it was moving marked it as something decidedly artificial.
After all, what kind of asteroid or rogue planetoid flew through the universe at a full third of light speed?
For a robotic warship built by an ancient (and recently extinct) civilization seeking to eliminate the competition, on the other hand? Accelerating to such a speed and retaining it while traveling from star to star, only activating the engines to decelerate when a suitable target was found, was just good practice.
At a length of four hundred meters and bearing thirty-six heavy lasers and a trio of heavy particle beams, the ship was capable of wiping out a primitive civilization in an afternoon, and obliterating the military of even a spacefaring people in short order … before proceeding to wreck the world that was supposed to be defended by said military.
Though right now, the ship was not doing its usual routine of flying through star systems at travel speed, casually scanning any planets that may be habitable, returning if something dangerous was found, dismissing them from contention if it was not.
No, it had been picking up broadcasts lately, almost certainly not directed at it, not meant for anyone outside of the species sending them, yet the signals had reached the void nevertheless.
The signals had degraded, and it had taken a while to locate their origin, a world that had, apparently, been named after dirt and which it had already passed, but it did feel like the exact kind of thing this vessel had been sent out to stop.
Yet there was a problem … several, actually.
That was when the portal unspooled in the center of the fusion reactor powering the whole assembly, and, in a single instant, ninety-nine percent of its reaction mass was sucked out and sent spiralling off into the void on the far end.
In an instant, half the ship’s systems either went to emergency power or outright shut down while the emergency batteries began to send energy to the reactor, even as new hydrogen had been pumped into it, the very second the ship’s computer had reassured itself that there was no actual damage to the reactor itself.
Then, the reactor flared with heat, atoms fusing and unleashing energy of their own, the heart of a star rapidly being born in a prison of steel and magnetism, swiftly reaching the point where it put out more energy than had been used to initiate the reaction … and then the mass of plasma was stolen away. Again. And well before the ship was able to regain even a fraction of the energy invested, a full twentieth of its battery power gone forever, a loss impossible to recoup while this far from a star unless it managed to reactivate its reactor.
Even if it seemed as though there was something well and truly wrong with the reactor, the ship’s computer was completely and utterly incapable of seeing another solution, and according to every scan it could do and had done, the reactor was working perfectly fine. Of course, it very clearly wasn’t … but it should. And that was all that seemed to matter here.
So it tried again, failed, checked everything yet once again but the next attempt still failed, again and again and again, reaching the point where any sapient being would have long since quit from sheer frustration if not outright despair, where anything with true free will would long since have been dragged into the deepest pits of depression, the sheer futility of endlessly attempting the same thing over and over and over, only to be met with complete, utter, and resounding failiure when all rational logic said it should have worked ...
And for all that it should have been a mere computer, the controlling intelligence of the ship was able to eke out two more attempts at restarting the reactor it never would have had, had it approached the problem normally.
All in all, it took nearly six hours for its “attackers” to run it out of energy, the endless waste of both fuel and emergency power eventually, finally, reducing it to a lifeless, drifting hulk.
Half an hour later, two humans appeared in a random corridor, the teleportation destination chosen largely at random due to a lack of deck plans, a man and a woman wearing normal street clothing with complete and utter disregard for the vacuum they’d just left.
“When you think about it, the battery capacity on these things is absurd. It’s like three times as many as one of our battleships!” the man declared.
“Yeah, Patrick, that’s cause we replaced them with mana to electricity converters. It’s easy when you can run everything except weapons and engines from the crew alone,” his companion replied.
“Probably,” he said. “But Amy, you know I could have handled this by myself, right?”
Amy kicked a nearby piece of scrap across the hallway. “Damn thing nearly killed my son, I want my pound of flesh!”
“How come you’re here, then? Shouldn’t you be with him?”
“Atticus literally just got off Earth, the last thing he wants or needs is ‘Mommy’ coming to the rescue at the first sign of trouble,” Amy shrugged. “His father is a lot better at ‘subtle’ help.”
“So Jason’t stalking the kids, then?” Patrick asked.
“Nah, but he is checking things out. Making sure Isaac didn’t give them any reckless ideas,” Amy told him.
“Yeah … Isaac’s good at that sort of thing. But hey, it worked out for us, didn’t it?”
Amy sniggered, then sighed. “Anyway, how long do you think we’re going to have to babysit this hulk before the navy picks it up?”
“A week, if we’re lucky,” Patrick said, slapping her on the back. “But look on the bright side: that’s seven days in which we can magically experiment on this hunk of junk without anyone to tell us no!”
“You do realize we’re adults, right? Over a hundred years old?” Amy asked.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Yeah, and?” Patrick raised his eyebrows.
“… And what do you think would be the most fun to mess with?”
Patrick burst out laughing, and Amy joined in after a second’s delay.
***
United Earth Fleet home base, Mercury, Sol system
There were few things more inappropriate to say in the face of the defense minister than “fuck you, pay me,” but there were few times Fleet Admiral Ciara Hunt had been as tempted to fall back onto the pettiness of the teenage girl she hadn’t been for well over a century than right that second.
But being asked to extend the patrolled zone to the absolute limits of human space over the latest incident, with the forces currently available … that was so tremendously absurd, fundamentally stupid, to a degree that practically begged for a mocking response.
Yet she was a professional, bluntly reminding the man on the other side of her desk of facts he should already know would have to suffice.
“Minister. Zheng,” Hunt said slowly. “The navy is being funded by a grand total of five star systems, none of whom are more than twenty light-years from Sol. Our previous area of responsibility, extending three hundred light-years from Sol, which we can barely handle as is, and only because, barring a known threat, we only send destroyers, was already a problem.
“And now you’re asking me to not just patrol but actively protect each and every human settlement, most of whom moved that far to get away from all things ‘government,’ and extend as far as a thousand light-years from here? Even if I run the crews ragged, send out individual ships even when squadrons would be required, and disregard any and all maintenance that cannot be done in-flight entirely … I still wouldn’t be able to cover even a fifth of that area.”
“You will be getting an increased budget,” Zheng told her, something he should probably have started with … but even so, in Hunt’s mind, the chances of the increase being enough were around as likely as her winning the lottery without ever having even bought a ticket.
“And you’re asking me to expand my area of responsibility thirty-sevenfold,” Hunt said flatly. “Is the increase even in the same order of magnitude?”
She paused just long enough for it to seem as though she was done before continuing.
“But by the time the additional logistics ships, fleet bases, shipyards, and so on have been built, as well as enough capital ships added to the fleet to put the amount of firepower you want as out there as you want, we’re likely looking at something like a seventy-fold increase in cost.”
The fact that there would be public outcry after an alien vessel had nearly glassed a human-occupied world had been inevitable, as was the fact that the politicians’ next action would prioritize being seen doing something over the effectiveness of said something … but this shit took the cake.
“That’s not realistic,” Zheng replied flatly.
“And neither is what I’m being asked to do,” Hunt said, voice icy. “You’re asking me to do the impossible, and I’m not indulging that delusion. In fact, considering the fact that we have proof there are threats out there means we should be expanding the Navy.
“But keeping enough forces to respond to all threats in all places that could be threatened would require either resources equal to, roughly, a hundred and twenty percent of the entire governmental budget, or a level of prescience and supernatural foresight that does not seem to exist under the [System].”
“Doubling your budget should be possible,” Zheng said. “But no more. Even at that point, we’ll likely end up provoking a war with the Assai.”
Hunt sighed. “If a military buildup in response to a newly discovered threat destroys the peace, then the peace was never going to last anyway.”
“They’ll just point out that, once we knew what we were looking for, we were able to locate and destroy nearly a hundred automated war machines,” Zheng pointed out.
“That’s a political problem. My problem is living up to the expectations set by our government’s knee-jerk overreaction. So, how about we each focus on our respective tasks, I prove that we’re taking this threat seriously without breaking the navy, and you go fight the finance ministry?”
“I think I’ll mostly focus on making sure your orders become more reasonable,” Zheng said. “That’ll fix things more quickly.”
“Good luck,” Hunt said, already having decided that that would likely take at least two months for him to follow through on that promise, three, more likely, and to be honest, she’d still be happy with anything short of half a year.
“Thank you.”
And with that, the minister vanished, having teleported off towards wherever he was needed next. That was perhaps her favorite aspect of the new world, not that she’d ever admit that to anyone. Most of the people who’d normally have to be escorted to their next destination, or to their airplane, or helicopter, or whatever other mode of transport the VIPs had used previously, they just teleported everywhere, sparing her from having to try and fill the walk with interesting conversation after they’d already gone over everything of import during the meeting.
Anyway … now, how to follow the orders she had been given without breaking the people who would have to carry them out?
***
Planet Zelveg, home star system of the Koinian race
So, the humans had found something new to pick a fight with. And that something was a series of ancient warmachines … which they could then rip apart and reverse-engineer.
Granted, the technology in question was fundamentally non-magical, resulting in it having several notable drawbacks compared to modern magitech, but that did not make it worthless. In fact, that very fact made it all the more valuable, as that meant it formed a highly advanced base upon which layer upon layer of enchantment and [Skill]-based enhancement could be built.
Anshou Tolosyne, [Stormblade], ranked as a “Worldbreaker” by his people, wielding a degree of power that would have solidly put him at S-Rank as the humans measured it, a “Divine” by the metrics used by the Assai, sighed and leaned back in his chair.
This was going to be annoying.
Inevitably, someone would want him to somehow help their people get that same technology, not because that was the only way to get it, but rather due to them not wanting to pay whatever price the humans attached to the technology sharing. Then there would be those who would freak out at the military power gain humanity had made, and would want him to strike first, prepare for an attack from the humans, or just generally treat an incident on the far side of civilized space as an emergency, an existential threat, even …
Far too many of his compatriots believed that humanity’s tendency to stumble head-first into disasters that eventually turned out for the best, or at least benefitted them in some way, to be a supernatural blessing that went well beyond anything the [System] did, in fact, something that existed beyond the arcane framework of today’s universe.
They were wrong.
Humanity simply had a near-pathological need to go exploring, to go poke everything that looked even remotely interesting with a stick, and then, when something inevitably exploded, they decided that was a sign to dig deeper in that exact spot.
Sometimes that went well, sometimes that went really badly; it was simply that you rarely heard about the failures.
That same pathologically reckless curiosity had informed the entirety of humanity’s actions after the [System’s] arrival.
Summoning everything they could, just to see what it would look like, with the question of whether or not they were actually capable of beating the monster they had just called into being upon their world …
Of course, that had been far from everybody, but it had been enough that their survival had been in very real question for a considerable length of time.
And somehow, miraculously, they’d come out of things stronger. Much stronger. To the point where they had both some of the strongest individuals amongst all known species, and as many such individuals as the other three races combined. They’d also had the greatest number of casualties, both in terms of pure numbers and proportional to their overall (over)population, summoned the earliest World Boss, and overall created a titanic mess for themselves that they’d miraculously survived.
This … either the humans would do what they had always done, go right at the problem and use it as a stepping stone to ever greater heights, or they would fail, crash, and burn. And it was far too likely that galactic society would go down in flames right along with them.
Anshou chortled.
As if a society of three peoples, three species, were this easy to break. Everyone should be a lot more concerned about the revelation that any dead civilization that had been slain by its own summoned monsters would eventually give rise to a wild World Boss, but he supposed that that news was almost a year old. Why, that was positively ancient by the standards of all known modern societies …