Chapter 9
"Miss Tak, is there a reason you are flitting about the outside of my ship?" I ask through one of my dispatched construction drones.
"I'm looking for the door so I can knock," Lucy says, shifting her balance on her... I guess the only appropriate name for the thing is hoverboard.
"There are precisely two doors on the Ma'at suitable for human entrance," I say. "Both are currently underground and inaccessible."
"Ah," she says, setting down on the top of the Ma'at. "You're leaving."
"I said I would," I reply. "No offence, but your universe scares my lug nuts off. I want out."
"Right," she says with a sigh, dropping into a cross-legged sitting position.
It's been almost a month since the Relocation of Ecosystem 09, and a lot has happened. To start with, relocating a planet is a tricky business. I managed to miss my target point by about six thousand kilometers. Not enough to be a serious issue, but enough that fixing it was probably a good idea. A handful of Halleys made short work of that issue. The second major issue being that Ecosystem 09's moon got left behind. The humans solved this one by taking Pluto and Charon and dropping them into orbit around Ecosystem 09 while a more permanent solution was found.
Speaking of the humans, they are losing their minds right now. The sudden arrival of an extra planet startled them to say the least. Discovering that they were not nearly as alone as they thought shocked them to their core. The celebration is still going as they welcome the Morra to Sol. However, under the surface, something much darker is moving. The humans know about the Shroud. And, as humans have always done, they're responding to the threat with violence. Ships have been broken out of mothballs, dispatched to bring the great foundries of Bernard's Star and Wolf 359 back online. Think tanks are analyzing the data we brought back, developing weapons uniquely suited to defeating the Shroud. Yeah, I really don't want to be here when they kick off a galactic war.
Speaking of warriors, Frost and her swarm have entered negotiations with humanity. From the looks of it, a lot of the programming restrictions the goo was operating under are going to be removed, at which point she will head out and start destroying the Shroud. As a thank you gift of sorts, I took the time to design something I'm calling the Psionic Pulse Pillar for her use. It does exactly what it says on the tin, generating a pulse of psionic energy that shatters the Silence across an entire star system. Of course it burns out after one use and they take an irritatingly long time to make, but the PPP is the ultimate weapon against the Shroud.
The Morra are somewhat stunned by the reception they've received. They've scrapped their plans to complete the Suma, instead starting work on the reconstruction of their civilization. Guarded and aided by humanity, they should recover from the devastation of the Shroud. A cultural exchange program has been put in place, along with a technological uplift of sorts. A handful of Morra have requested that they be allowed to join the extermination of the Shroud. I have no idea how those requests will pan out, but I can understand the impulse behind it.
And, in all that time, I have repaired the Ma'at. She will be ready to return to space within the hour. It's time for me to leave.
"I'm curious," Lucy says. "Why didn't you ask for Earth's technical data?"
"Because they would most likely have attached conditions to it," I say. "Most notably an obligation to assist in the war with the Shroud. No thank you. I want nothing to do with that, and besides, I already have the data from the Darwin. That's more than enough to keep me busy for a while. No, right now I just want out." I changed the subject. "Why are you here?"
Lucy frowns for a moment before speaking. "I want to go with you."
*Scrrrrrratch!*
"You want to what?" I ask, sure I've just suffered an audio glitch.
"I want to go with you," Lucy says again. Not a glitch then.
"Why?" I ask.
"I'm a scientist," Lucy says. "I want to be an explorer. If I stay, they'll make me a general instead. If I travel with you, I will get to see new things, things that I won't have to kill. You think you're the only one who doesn't want to be part of a war?"
Huh. Put like that, I really don't have a response. "You do know the Ma'at is not equipped for habitation by organic life, right?" I ask.
"I suspected," she says. "Worse comes to worst, I can just attach one of our nexuses to the outside of your hull and live there."
"No, no, that won't be necessary," I say with a sigh. I suppose it wouldn't be too difficult to re-purpose one of my metal storage units into a habitation module. "Going by my track record so far, there's every chance you'll end up involved in another war anyways if you tag along with me."
"I'm aware," Lucy says. "Frost said you could use a strategist anyways."
I- Oooh, that sneaky little- "Fine," I sigh again. "How soon can you be packed?"
"Six hours," Lucy says.
"Fine, you can come," I say. "Just... Just get your things."
"Thanks, Phoenix," Lucy says, jumping back on her hoverboard thing.
Oh, this is almost certainly a mistake, but... oh, what the hell. Why not. Why the fuck not.
Lucy is now ensconced in the new habitation module, near the center of the Ma'at. Time to leave this universe behind. The Ma'at's engines hum to life. The ground creaks and groans as my ship pulls itself loose of the dirt and takes to the sky. I cut through the atmosphere of Ecosystem 09. The Morra will probably rename the planet soon. After all, it is their home now.
The Ma'at clears the atmosphere, slicing into space. Minimum safe distance achieved.
Incoming message. I accept it, and suddenly I'm looking at Saruk.
"Safe travels, Phoenix," he says. "My people owe you a debt we can never repay."
"Safe travels, Saruk," I reply. "And may your people thrive in the coming years."
Saruk nods. "Farewell."
I punch it, and universe falls away from me.
Good news, I'm not crashing into a planet this time. No, I've just landed in a giant cloud of battery acid of all things. Tiny ships move through the cloud, travelling between tiny space stations.
Where the fuck am I?
I still have no idea where I am, which is something of a surprise. Even ignoring the part where I'm likely a fictional entity in a story being written by my old human self (I was already a sort of passive believer in the computer simulation theory of reality, so the idea of being fictional doesn't really bother me much), I did in fact recognize the last two universes. Landing in one I don't recognize is a surprise.
What I do know is that I am by far the biggest fish in this pond. The largest of the ships flitting about are only a hundred meters or so in length. The Ma'at, at fourteen and a half kilometers in length, is more than a hundred times longer, and more than three million times as massive. No one has bothered me as I drift through this bizarre cloud, in much the same way as minnows don't bother blue whales. In light of the complete and utter lack of a credible threat, I decided to let Lucy handle snooping in on their communications rather than do it myself. It'll let her get a better grasp of what my systems are capable of.
Meanwhile, I have a lot of technical data to sort through and refine into something useful.
As compared to the usual PA SI, I have a positively lethargic R&D cycle. To be honest, I'd say my version makes more sense. After all, arbitrary R&D rates require arbitrary processing power, and arbitrary processing power requires arbitrary energy and processing substrate. Condensed into a single pithy one-liner, the instantaneous R&D of most PA SIs requires omnipotence to actually make any sense. Most PA SIs aren't actually omnipotent, though they can do a good impression of it. Most. I'm looking at you, Drich. So clearly PA SIs aren't actually doing their own computations, and are instead subcontracting their processing cycles to some omnipotent extradimensional computer center or something. Once again, I blame Drich, and would like to lodge a formal complaint about my lack of access.
However, I did just get access to some really sweet nano-computer tech. Building one of my Data Cubes isn't really a workable option in the current environment, and they were kind of underwhelming for the resource investiture of creating them. So, my first task is developing a new and improved R&D processor.
I start with the nano-scale Valiant AI core. I neither need nor want a personality for this task, but that's mostly a matter of software, not hardware, so that's a relatively easy fix. Add in the networking functionality from the goo, and I suddenly have the building blocks for my new supercomputer. As for the processing center itself, I went for simple. A fabber geared to produce my new Thinker cores that feeds into a cylindrical tank about one meter in diameter by one and a half meters in length. Total capacity is somewhere in the neighborhood of four septillion Thinker cores. Septillion as in four times ten raised to the twenty fourth power tiny supercomputers, each of which is as capable as Singleton, but without the wasted cycle time required to maintain a personality. I call the design the Think Tank. It's not arbitrary processing power, but it's a damn good shot at it.
The Think Tank isn't exactly expensive, and for what it's capable of it's dirt cheap, but I have plans that will require more resources in the future. Fortunately, the cloud is dense enough that I can just deploy jigs anywhere and they can start harvesting the stuff. You know, I think I'm starting to like this place.
I almost feel bad. I never really even used the Ma'at, and I'm already upgrading to bigger and better. Ladies, gentlemen, and those who don't fit into such neatly defined little boxes, I give you, the Ptah Modular Command Ship.
The Ptah is, at it's core, a giant jack. As in those six pointed caltrop-looking things that you're supposed to use for a game that I never did learn the rules for. The Ptah is essentially three giant central beams, each twenty kilometers long and half a kilometer wide by half a kilometer tall, that intersect at the center. These core beams are mostly armor, but at the center is the heart of the Ptah, its fabrication chamber. A giant factory, this space produces modules, the smallest of which are cubes a hundred meters across. Once completed, these modules are teleported to an attachment point on the beams or on other modules by utilizing the technology the gooniverse humans use to teleport their buildings. New modules can be added at any time, damaged ones can be replaced or teleported back to the fabrication chamber for repairs, the entire ship can reconfigure itself in a matter of seconds, and the system can even deploy pre-built structures to locations outside of the ship.
Of course now I need to build the thing, which is going to take a while and a fair bit of effort, but I have the design down. On to the next project!
My current body is nice, but I want better. To start with, I want something rather simple. I want to be able to survive its destruction.
The first and most obvious step in this process is to remove the resource core and attach it to the Ma'at. Once the Ptah is complete I'll move the core over there, but for now, the Ma'at is the safest place I can put it. The second step is to place the vital pieces of me into a modified Valiant AI core. The new core, which I've decided to call a Commander Core, is much bigger, roughly twelve hundred nanometers in diameter instead of twelve. However, it can hold as much data as my old body could, and I've equipped it with a teleportation recall system. If the body takes too much damage, my core will be recalled to a set location automatically. Resurrective immortality is a hell of a thing.
For now, the current design works just fine, though I did make a few minor tweaks and improvements with the new materials and techniques I have access to. Eight meters of the best bio-mechanical materials I can develop, along with a potent psionic kick. Deployable construction drones stay, though I decided to add some deployable weapon drones to the mix to give my new body a bit more punch.
Not bad. Now-
"Phoenix," Lucy's voice cuts through my R&D fugue. "We have a visitor."
A visitor? I refocus my attention on the Ma'at's internal monitoring systems. A quick check of the clock tells me I've been out of it for about three days. And... visitor? I see... a person, wearing a crude space suit and carrying a pipe wrench.
What?
I'm... honestly not sure how to respond to this, actually. A ship that dwarfs anything you've ever seen a million times over just appears. The logical thing to do would be to leave that ship the fuck alone and hope it doesn't decide you look interesting.
I'm not sure if it takes a complete lack of a brain or singularities for balls to decide that the appropriate course of action in this case is to hop into a one-man pod, ram yourself into one of giant gun ports, and then enter the ship by way of the hole you've just made, all while armed with nothing but a pipe wrench and what appears to be a concussive stun gun. In either case, I want to speak to this lunatic, if only so I know just how stupid a person can get.
I will be very disappointed if it turns out this person is drunk or otherwise intoxicated, because goddamn it, this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen.
Eh, I don't want him dead. One Thoth should be more than enough to take one lunatic captive. For now, I need to fix the hole he put in my ship. And maybe analyze what's left of that pod, because ramming through Progenitor alloy is no mean feat.
What
No really, what the fuck just happened?
I sent out the Thoth to take the guy captive, but he decided to run. I shrugged, and sent a trio of Crusaders to help corner him. He ducked into one of my metal storage bays, now mostly empty as a result of some of my new projects. Finally cornered. I sent the mechs in to retrieve him. I suppose if I'd been a bit faster off the mark I could probably have saved the third Crusader, but I was a bit astounded at the sudden spacing of my mechs. Teleportation, but how... Ah, that box he's picking up right there. Some sort of teleportation trap. Clever. I would not have thought of using a teleportation pad in that manner. I still have the Thoth though, and that trick won't work twice. He draws the stun gun, but that won't-
Wait, he just teleported himself to right behind my Thoth, and-
OH WHAT THE FUCKING HORSE SHIT!
He just knocked my Thoth unconscious with a single shot from his gun. I didn't even know my Incarnations could be knocked unconscious! How the fuck?
"That doesn't seem to have worked," Lucy says. I can hear the grin in her voice.
"No really, you don't say?" I snark back. Right. Okay, his shot knocked out the organic parts of the Incarnation, and the feedback knocked out the mechanical parts too. Right. Crusaders it is. I dispatch a group of five Crusaders to capture this guy. And this time I am not getting spaced!
What. The. Fuck.
I sent five Crusaders to capture this guy. I now have five Crusaders that are lying motionless, their processing systems giving me more errors than data. What the hell did he do to them? No really, what the hell? That shouldn't be even remotely possible!
Fuck it, deploying the fucking tanks!
I've only deployed the Scarab hovertank a few times against the Shroud. It did okay in the field, though not spectacularly. The minelaying function was fun. For one guy... eh, overkill, yes, but dammit, this is getting stupid. Send a handful of Crusaders and Incarnations with the Scarab, and this time I should see results.
"Phoenix?" Lucy asks. "What just happened?"
I have no idea what just happened. One moment, I have a squad that should be overkill in the nth degree. The next, my Incarnations are being gunned down by the Crusaders and the Scarab. I'm querying the onboard AIs for the units, but I've been locked out. That shouldn't be possible. Oh sure, I can hack my way back in, that should only take a minute or two, but this shouldn't be possible in the first place. What the hell is going on here?
Right, sending troops to capture him isn't working. Fuck it, the Ma'at is my ship. This is my castle, jackass, and you are not beating me in my own house. Let's see you handle five g's.
Well fuck, he's handling that just fine. Some sort of time distortion from the look of it. What the fuck is this place?
Okay, um... Right, he's heading... that way. Okay, I have a fabber swarm nearby, it should only take a moment to build some arc thrower-esque traps. Let's see him handle that.
Fucking bubble shield. He has a fucking bubble shield. The electricity didn't even touch him. Who the hell am I dealing with, fucking space Batman? This is stupid. Right, fine. I slam every blast door in the ship closed. Every single one. I know he can teleport, but this should at least slow him down a bit while I figure out something that actually will stop him.
He hasn't escaped the corridor I locked him in. I was honestly expecting him to have gotten out by now. Instead he's looking around, and seems somewhat nervous. Have I... Have I actually trapped him? Just by closing the doors on him? That's... that's... kind of disappointing, actually. Like I captured him by accident. Huh. Okay then.
Right. I have questions for this lunatic.
Okay, I think I've got him. Unfortunately I don't have any communication equipment in there, but that's an easy fix, just a moment and-
What.
Okay, no. Just no. It was bad enough when he was just embarrassing me, but this has gone too far. Also, how the fuck did he teleport one of the dismembered arms of a Crusader to him? Whatever the case, he is now making a determined effort to melt his way through the door with the laser mounted on the arm.
This is getting asinine.
Right, communications gear online. Stop time around the door (yes, I can do that, psionics are fucking awesome), making it invulnerable, and we're on.
"If you would kindly stop breaking my things, I would appreciate it," I say as soon as my new comm ball finishes teleporting into the room with the intruder.
He looks down from where the laser has ceased to make any progress against the door, glancing down at the ball by his boot. "Who's asking?" he says.
"My name is Phoenix," I supply.
"You're not Foundry, are you?" he asks. "No, you're definitely not Foundry. You're also not Sovereign. You're not the Glitchers either, they don't build ships like this, and you're not Offworld. They don't have stuff like this." He glances down at the arm, then turns the laser off. How did he even activate it in the first place? "Right. So, looks like you got me. Just tell me something. Who are you working for, and are they planning on getting involved in the Drift? Because we've already got a five-way war going here, and I really don't think we need a sixth."
"I work for me," I say. "As for getting involved... I have no real interest in your politics or war."
Lucy, watching from a monitor I added to her habitation module, speaks up. "Foundry is one of the four groups that I've been keeping track of. I'm pretty sure all four groups are corporations," she says. "At a guess, I'd say the fifth side of this war would be whoever this guy works for. Probably the locals."
The man looks at my comm ball askance. "Look, if you're not going to tell me who you work for, that's fine, but don't lie to me. You've got the biggest ship I've ever even heard of. No independent operator is going to have that much cash."
I consider for a moment. "It would be more accurate to say I am the ship," I say. "I'm not human."
The man blinks for a moment. "Well. Don't that beat all. Let me guess, rogue AI superweapon that got loose?"
"Probably. I was deactivated for yes amount of years and woke up with a mostly corrupted database," I say. "I'm getting better."
"So ancient alien rogue AI superweapon," he says, nodding. "Okay, cool. Explains the cyborg thingums."
"Not really, those are a more recent addition to my arsenal," I say. "But that's not really significant. Who are you, by the way?"
"Me?" the man asks. "I am Ryshaun Fiel, ship hijacker extraordinaire. Call me Fiel, everyone does."
"Right, Fiel," I say. "Wait. You mean you do this for a living?" I demand. "You break into space ships, in flight, for a living?"
He shrugs. "It's either that or working for one of the corporations, and damned if I will let those jack booted assholes tell me what to do."
"That... seems like a... suspect... duality," I comment. "Okay, so why my ship? I mean really. There have to be easier jobs than this."
"Oh, this isn't a job," he says. "No, this was just to prove that I can. I'd have gotten away with it too if you didn't have unhackable doors."
"Yes, well, the doors don't need computers attached when I can control them directly from the ship's central computer. It's not like doors are complicated, and I'm the only one who really needs to use them," I say. "So let me get this straight. You decided to break into the fourteen and a half kilometer long ship... just to prove that you could. No one is paying you to do this, you're just... doing it."
"Well, I was hoping to pick up some interesting loot that I could sell back at one of the Independent stations, but mostly, yeah," Fiel says. "Got a problem with that?"
"I mean you did trash a bunch of my bots and punch a hole in my ship, so, kind of," I say.
"You're in a fucking war zone, man," Fiel says.
"Yes," I reply. "And up until now, everyone was giving me a respectful berth. You know, as you do when a ship a million times larger than yours shows up."
"Eh," he shrugs. "So, what now?"
"Well your pod is a wreck," I say. "Just getting through my hull is impressive, but surviving it would be too much to ask of anything."
"Eh, it's replaceable," he says. "Just get me back to a station and I'll be fine."
"You seem remarkably flippant," I comment.
"I've hijacked more than fifty ships," he says. "I've seen shit."
"Fifty?" I ask. "And you're still alive?"
"Eh, well, most don't survive their first dozen or so," Fiel says. "I'm just that good."
Hmm. I might have an idea forming. "By most, you mean there are other people like you, who hijack ships for a living?"
"Shit man, there's a whole revolution made up of people like me," he says. "We want the corporations out of our home. All we have are our wits, our gear, and our guts. How else are we supposed to fight back?"
Hmm. Well, that's an idea. That's definitely an idea. "Mister Fiel," I say. "I have a proposal for you. One that could benefit both of us quite a bit."
"I'm listening," he says.
A few hours later and Fiel departs in his new pod. Built to his specifications, it has the armor to ram through the hull of any of the ships out here without so much as a scratch, a built in teleporter, a sort of grav-net and onboard medical system (I may have suffered a brief error when he explained why he wanted that feature. Seriously, deliberately spacing himself?), and of course Progenitor stealth tech.
Meanwhile, I have new data.
Firstly, I have the technical data on his gear. It's... interesting.
To start with, his stun gun. Which is also a shotgun. And is armor-piercing. I tried to figure out how that worked, but couldn't make heads or tails of it. I passed it on to one of my Think Tanks. Could be useful.
Next up is this... EMP-esque beam thing. He called it a Crash Beam, which is... accurate, I suppose. It absolutely murders electronics. Hand it off to a Think Tank for analysis. I want countermeasures for this thing ASAP.
Then his hack gun. That is quite literally what it is. It's a gun that shoots hack. And yes, hack is not actually a thing, but I stand by my description of the fucker. It's capable of breaking through even my software protections, which is moderately appalling. Hand that off to a Think Tank. Should improve my cyber warfare capabilities, both offensively and defensively.
His teleporter pad was unfortunately not terribly useful for me. The range is just too short. Though... hmm, I could probably use it in my factories to clear the building pads faster. It's certainly more energy efficient than the teleporter I got from the Gooniverse humans.
The shield was more interesting, but ultimately problematic. Namely that it can't be made bigger without an obscene increase in energy cost. Just powering a shield around a Scarab Tank would take most of the Ma'at's power output. Powering a shield around the Ma'at would be a challenge for civilization clocking in at a type three on the Kardashev scale. Pass it off to a Think Tank in the hopes that that little bug can be worked around, and for now my smaller units have a ludicrously powerful shield. They're not invulnerable, technically speaking, but if it takes literally nuking a killbot to even scratch the paint, well...
His teleporter is... meh. Short ranged, can't teleport through solid objects, it's not terribly useful. I do plan to incorporate the thing into my bots, but it's not a game changer.
His time manipulation device, which he called a Slipstream, most definitely is a game changer. Oh, I have ideas for this. So very many ideas. More ideas than you can shake a stick at. Ideas for fucking days. Seriously, localized time manipulation is complete and utter bullshit if properly applied. I have an entire Think Tank dedicated to designing ways to use this thing for everything from combat to industry to research, because hot damn, this shit is amazing.
Of course, that's just the technical data. And, as valuable as that is, it might just pale in comparison to the other half of Fiel's part of the deal.
Before me stands a modified Incarnation. The base design was the Thoth. The face laser, retractable venomous claws, and psionic abilities stayed, but this one mounts a copy of every bit of equipment Fiel was carrying, loaded into backpack of sorts.
My first Commando awakens.
Hello there, Fiel. Good to have you working for me.
"Oh, that looks like it hurt!" Lucy says.
"Stun gun or not, those things suck," my guest, a woman named Ieylene Remi says. "Welp, he's down and out. Think he'll stick around for another try at it?"
"You do know I randomize the course after every attempt, right?" I comment.
Lucy's initial assessment of local politics was less than perfect. As it turns out there are two corporations, one organized and one less so, and two mercenary groups, one organized the other less so, running around this area. The organized mercenary group is called Offworld Security, who were hired by a local planet to come in and lay claim to the Drift. They don't shoot to kill, but they will space you, and if they take you prisoner, well, they won't kill you, but you'd be surprised what you can live through.
The disorganized mercenaries are the Glitchers. They used to be a navy, up until a teleportation accident dropped them a few thousand light years from home with no way back. Since then they've coalesced into a bizarre hippy drug circle cum mercenary organization running around in cobbled together space ships with all sorts of weird teleportation technology. In a less chaotic area of space, they'd be gone in short order. Here, not so much.
The corporations are another kettle of fish. The organized one is Sovereign. Which is basically every amoral megacorporation from fiction ever. They have zero fucks to give about anything that isn't money, and they will cheerfully slit your throat for pocket change. Meh.
The less organized one is the Foundry, which started as a splinter from Sovereign that lost contact thanks to an engine failure. They're, well, actually they're not less organized, they're just... well, their organization works without much attention to whether it looks good or not. Sovereign is organized and run by managers, Foundry by engineers. It's a very different sort of organization.
And then there's the Independents, who started as a splinter from the Foundry, but have turned into a full scale rebellion with members from every group. They want everyone else gone so they can get on with their lives. Or at least, that's the version they tell me.
I rather swiftly decided I'm not going to choose sides in this war. Which group are the good guys is a matter of perspective, and even if the Independents do win, odds are they'll just be invaded again by someone else. Of course I'm not going to tell them that, it'd only make them pissy, but it's pretty clearly inevitable when you consider how valuable the region is. No, getting involved would be a lot of work for a cause I'm not really sure I'm comfortable supporting, and I wouldn't really get much out of it. However, I can still benefit from this.
I've partitioned off a section of the Ma'at to serve as a constantly changing obstacle course. It's designed to be brutally difficult, but achievable for these shipjacking lunatics. The entry "fee" is letting me scan their gear. Prizes are awarded based on the speed and degree of success demonstrated. The most basic prize for those who just barely complete the challenge is an armored spacesuit. Most choose to have something written on it, with "I beat Phoenix's Challenge and all I got was this lousy suit", "Mission Tested, Phoenix Approved", and the perennial favorite "Certified Badass" being the most common.
Of course those who do better get better prizes. The next step up the prize ladder is my super slipstream. It didn't take long for me to make some improvements to the base slipstream, resulting in the ability to accelerate local time by as much as a factor of ten. I'm already using the things to speed up R&D by attaching them to the Think Tanks, as well as construction by attaching them to my fabbers. The Ptah should now be completed in about a week, rather than a few months. I decided to make my tenfold slipstream the second level prize, and it's proven quite popular.
For those who truly excel, the final tier of prizes, which of course includes the lower levels, is the Phoenix Omega Pod. The same pod as I gave Fiel, it combines the functionality of all four of the local specialized pods into one. However, there's one catch. If you get this level of achievement, I charge a second fee. I get to scan your brain. It's possible to opt out of the brain scan, but no one has so far.
My reasoning here is simple. Something Frost said stuck with me. I'm not a soldier. So clearly the solution is to acquire some to work for me. This place is remarkably short on admirals and generals, but commandos? Hoo boy, commandos we got. I intend to insert those brain scans into modified Incarnations as needed, creating one-cyborg armies geared for special ops. My Commandos.
Some people don't succeed the first time, but decide to hang around to try again. As a result, I've expanded Lucy's habitation module to handle guests, which is what Miss Remi is doing here. Her next run is scheduled for tomorrow morning.
All in all, a very worthwhile endeavor. I've got some new tech to play with, I've got a slowly growing force of elite soldiers, who admittedly spend most of their time in storage but still, and I've convinced people not to try hijacking my ship anymore. Not bad.
Speaking of new tech, the Ptah is coming along beautifully. The central superstructure is already complete, and I've started adding modules. Some modules, like the built-in orbital factory, have to be built in sections, but over all, it's coming along better than I could have hoped. The cloud's resources are making construction a breeze. I've already moved my resource core and my Think Tanks over. Soon my new ship will be ready for deployment.
On the R&D front, I'm making good progress. The slipstream is getting attached to everything. And I do mean everything. It's way too useful not to. The shields are getting mounted on my smaller combat units, namely my Incarnations and Crusaders. The different kinds of teleporters are getting mounted on most of my combat units as well. They're not really strategic scale tools, but they have some fun tactical implications.
I've also put some work into integrating the gooniverse tech into my gear. So far the biggest development is a self-repair functionality based on the goo, but I have some other projects in the works. Should be fun.
However, that's what my Think Tanks have been up to. I have been focused on my own database. I've never really had a chance to just sit down and look at how badly my memory was corrupted before now. It's not pretty. I knew the unit banks were a write off, though I've tasked one of the Think Tanks with reconstructing as much as possible, but everything else is just as bad. My history files are pretty much slagged. I've got a few scraps of engagements with... someone, and brief glimpses of some truly exotic technologies, ones I don't even recognize, but... yeah. It's ugly. There's some navigational data in there, but what isn't slagged is meaningless without proper context, which I don't have. Though... maybe. That one looks like a sort of go-to-home function. It's isolated from everything else, blackboxed to hell and back, and has about six redundant copies. Oh, wait, did I say six? I meant six hundred. Of which only a few survived. Issue is, I have no idea how that would work with my universe hoping. Probably badly.
...Eh, why not. I'll plug it into the Inversion Drive for my next jump. It's not like my previous method of picking a random point in space and jumping in that vague direction was any better.
Huh. I think I'm actually going to be sorry to leave this place. A moment of peace and quiet is rare in the life of a Commander.
A/N: For the curious, Phoenix has landed in the universe of the PC game Heat Signature. He doesn't recognize it because, at the time I started writing the story, I had never even heard of the game. As such, Phoenix has no knowledge of it.
Also, a reminder. This is not the story. This is the archive of the story. The actual story is over on SpaceBattles, and is part way through the thirty first and final chapter. (There will be an epilogue, but that's it.) Anyone asking for more will be mocked. Anyone asking for a specific universe to be added to the story will be mocked viciously. I don't take requests to begin with, let alone for a story I've already written.