Chapter 4

As they came across the train depot, Skye dropped off Anna and Wojtek, rising to her full height as she observed the enemy forces setting up defensive positions.

Various mechs were wandering around, and she could see what looked like artillery battery mechs being deployed. "My forces will deal with most of the heavy lifting. You and the other troops can push to secure the train, while I pull the majority of the Rusviet attack away from you. Good luck." Her piece said, Skye started marching off to start her own assaults.

She had satellites over the area keeping an eye on everything, so she'd know if anything happened. She also wanted to see just how effective her forces were in a real battle against Rusviets. She assigned group commanders pretty much at random, letting them command their own strike groups to get objectives done. Currently, they only had one, which was to decimate the Rusviet forces. How they went about doing this was up to them, but by the time the train left the station, she didn't want a single non-surrendered Rusviet left alive in the area.

Since her own forces were entirely invisible and undetectable aside from touch, she doubted that her forces were capable of anything less than total domination. As they moved into position, they awaited her go-signal, guns lined up on targets, bombs itching to be dropped, artillery solutions plotted and re-plotted, all waiting for one simple message from her. "Fire."

As soon as the word was given, all the guns of her forces opened up. The rapid-fire shots of the Dox, the Slammers, Vanguards, Levelers, Strykers, all of her units were engaging their ground targets. Even the Anti-air was firing at them, the Spinners and Storms directly targeting and engaging ground units. Above them, bombs dropped from her many aircraft, as well as bullets fired from her fighters and strafers.

The only available units in her force that weren't firing were the orbital units, which would probably be even more overkill than this display of pure destruction. The Rusviet force, as predicted, stood absolutely no chance. One moment they were gearing up for a defence against a Polanian assault, and the next, a rainbow of coloured weapon trails had obliterated them.

As quickly as it began, it was over. All the Rusviets being targeted were dead. All of the mechs had been disabled or destroyed outright. The enemy force was so hilariously outmatched by her units that to call it overkill was a monumental understatement. And these were all regular, unupgraded versions. When she got back to the Home System and brought out the idea of upgrading their units, the Colonels would probably collectively experience a system crash at the possibilities.

Mounting guns on other units was pretty tame compared to making their own units. A mobile Halley Gun, a mobile Unit Cannon even, was impressive but so much less than they were capable of. And buildings, well they could be changed, made more efficient. Modular, grid-based systems that flattened the ground and expanded out like zerg creep, each grid containing a hexagonal structure that was perfectly designed for what it was needing, leaving little wasted space.

Maybe they could even put weapons onto the buildings, that way they didn't require so much extra space for defences. Perhaps even implementing a portal relay system, so the factories could be underground and hidden, and when they were finished with one unit, it would be teleported to the rally point, the construction space then clear for another unit to immediately begin production.

The possibilities truly were endless.

Skye ended up sending her infiltrator to inform Anna that she would be busy, but that the infiltrator would be hanging around.

To that end, she had outfitted the unit with a proper AI core and set it to follow only orders coming from herself or from Anna, nobody else. If someone attempted to order it repeatedly or attacked it, the infiltrator would notify her. This was because, after a short while of production, her humanoid chassis had been completed back at base, and she was honestly feeling a bit selfish about using it immediately, like a kid on Christmas wanting to play with the shiny toy.

She had her teleport AI open a connection between herself and the teleporter ring in her base, stepping through the tear in reality and observing her factories. They all had now been upgraded with their nanite pods and quadrupled nanite sprayers, as well as the resource pods located beneath them, putting her economy even more ludicrously into the green.

A few factories over, her chassis awaited. She stepped away from the pad, walking up onto one of the factories. She set it to upgrade her, waiting as the nanites opened up her chassis, slipped into her internals and added the necessary components for what she had been working on for such a long time. When they were done, they replaced the stripped-away armour, the rest disappearing into thin air.

As the new devices activated and interfaced with her hardware, she ran diagnostics and checked to make sure they were operating correctly, before marching across the base towards her waiting chassis. It was...well, the only way to put it was that it was her. Of course, that was only on the surface level, internally it was absolutely nothing like her. But to the outside world, it was her old body.

Settling down her main chassis, she focused on the new components, activating the technology within. A feeling almost like someone pulling on her spine came across her as she lost her connection to her systems, then another feeling of being pushed forwards as she gained access to new systems. Immediately she began running diagnostics and tests, having done the same dozens of times in her simulation and having made a habit of it, breathing a sigh of relief when she received back no error messages, everything was...wait, breathing?

Taking another breath, she pulled her lips into a grin as she enjoyed the simple feeling of breathing again. It was...weird to enjoy it, especially when she knew it was entirely unnecessary. In order to mimic conversation better she had set up the nanites to help her imitate breathing, and so when she took in a deep breath, her chest expanded and she felt the nerves in her throat as the air flowed past them, then again as she exhaled.

Looking down, she rubbed her fingers together, relishing the sensation of having actual hands again. She pinched the hem of her shirt, having had her body built with them on as to protect her own modesty, and tugged on it, the tactile feedback being incredibly enjoyable. It wasn't a combat unit, obviously, though her body did possess a downsized Dox cannon in her right arm and each of her fingers in her left hand contained small nanite sprayers that were each about as powerful as the sprayer on a T1 fabricator bot.

Something she hadn't actually given much thought to was how the nanites actually worked. Metal was actually just the easiest way to describe the mass that was used by fabricators to produce nanites which could change into any scanned material. It was how the nanites produced the flesh and bone and blood that Anna's father needed for the operation. So theoretically, so long as she provided an infinite source of mass, she could produce an infinite quantity of nanites.

That got her thinking to theoretical physics like black holes. If she could figure out a way to harness the power of a black hole and use it as a source of infinite energy, especially compacted into an energy core and contained within her humanoid chassis, she'd have infinite power with which to focus entirely on grainlets of matter replicators. It would effectively be an unlimited source of energy, and from that infinite energy would be infinite mass. If she could pull it off, it'd be...amazing. But that was something she would let her Colonels work on when she got back to the home System.

Thinking of the Home System made her curious about whether she actually could find a way back. On a whim, she ran across the base, a journey that took a lot longer in her human-sized form but was made faster when she hitched a ride on a Leveler, and started spraying a teleporter into existence. When it was completed, she then focused on her Quantum Communications, binding them to the teleporter gate and sending that signal out into their comms.

She was a little bit surprised when the gate then, almost immediately, connected to another gate. She felt a connection to the Colonels she hadn't felt since she disappeared. She sent a message of re-assurance, updates on what had happened, then requested updates of her own. Apparently the Colonels had kept working, and when she disappeared, which they also noted was before they could show her what they'd all been working on, they had come up with the idea of binding teleporter gates to their quantum communications, as well as dozens of other attempts to locate her.

Deciding she wanted to know what else they'd gotten up to, she requested that information, and received dozens of exabytes worth of data as the Colonels all tried to send her their information. All of their information, which meant literally millions of copies of the same data. She immediately clamped down on that transfer and got the Colonels to compress their work down, and not to send duplicates.

After a few seconds of the Colonels planning out what to do, she ended up receiving a single folder with a list of all the creations, improvements and changes they had made. The most interesting entries that she picked out of the still incredibly-long list was that they had built a Dyson Swarm of Solar Arrays around the sun, constructed a metal planet using the resource pods to produce infinite metal after getting basically infinite power from the Dyson Swarm, then used said Metal Planet as a grounds for their tests, of which there were...well, countless spinoff entries.

The problem they quickly ran into was that she was the only one capable of a spark of creativeness. They hadn't really thought about upgrading units or factories, their thinking too linear for that. They made improvements to their tech based on what she had said, making things smaller and more efficient. They'd even managed to harness the power of the Metal Planet Superlaser, shrinking the planet down to the size of a marble yet containing the power of an annihilaser, something that was very interesting to her.

How it worked was probably breaking the laws of physics and thermodynamics again, so she opted not to think about it too much. Instead, she gave them the reports of what changes and upgrades she had made, then gave them permission to see what they could come up with, and to send her their data if they thought it'd be of use. Almost immediately she received the joint recommendation from all the Colonels that she replace her resource pods with pure matter replicators, and remove the Advanced Power Generator grainlets to be replaced with a cluster of MPC, or Metal Planet Cores. The energy output by the cores would massively trump the comparatively useless APGs and would let her produce basically an unlimited amount of metal, though at a frankly exorbitant cost, since each MPC was incredibly expensive to construct.

She told them to find a way to incorporate it and any other upgrades into her current, humanoid chassis, as well as her regular Osiris chassis. She also set them to work on a way to maintain quantum communications without a teleporter gateway, a problem quickly solved when she received the information that they had made the teleporter device even more miniature, which would be able to fit in her human chassis comfortably, as well as the AI core to control it.

When she then asked how many things they'd miniaturized, thee report she received was hilarious. Literally everything that the Colonels knew how to make had been massively miniaturized, including units like the Dox and the factories that made them, just because they had run out of other things that needed to be miniaturized. Subsequently, she had them design an upgraded humanoid and Osiris chassis that incorporated those upgrades and miniaturizations, as well as allowing them to upgrade all the blueprints currently in the available blueprints.

She sent them all the designs and half-baked theories she had come up with for improvements, then gave them permission to colonize any planet with no intelligent life they found and build as many Colonels into the network as they wanted. Their first request, which came quickly after she gave this permission, was permission to construct a design that she quickly dubbed a Data-Planet. The idea was that they would construct a planet in dark space which was filled with processors, AI cores, and would basically be the equivalent to a countless quantity of Colonels, which she authorized happily. They predicted that with each Data-Planet, their ability to upgrade and create new creations would grow to a staggering degree.

They had other requests and suggestions, to which she eventually gave up trying to manually do it and instead sent out her simulation program to them all and told them they could use those to run internal simulations until they had their designs perfected. If they wanted to, they could even stay separated from the others, then when they'd all made their own designs they could bring them all back together, compare notes and confer on the best format of their upgrades. Between a small group of scientists, creating their own ideas and then sharing them was a good source of innovation. When the group size was millions of Colonels, getting bigger at an incredibly fast rate?

It was an inconceivable progression of development.

After the Colonels created a stable bridge between her current location and the Home System, she felt confident to let them simply work while she went back to the Polanians.

The Colonels would work on upgrades and improvements to basically everything in their arsenal, creating entirely new things when they needed to in order to fill niches. Quite amusingly, one of the first things they created was a device that would stabilize the space around her, using terms that went way over her head like quantum entanglement and particle agitation. According to their theories, it should stop another rip in space-time from forming in her immediate vicinity. The problem currently was that they needed time to miniaturize it, since it was about as big as her humanoid chassis.

What was useful about the stable bridge was that it let them retain a line of communication to her, so if they had a groundbreaking invention they could inform her of it and bring it to her attention. The only problem, again, was that they weren't really great at inventing new things. When they encountered a problem, like her being swallowed by a rip in reality, they could make a solution, or improve on something existing, but inventing entirely new things wasn't really their forte.

They hadn't invented the matter extractor, or the MPG, they were already in existence, the Colonels just took the existing objects and found ways to shrink them down to absurdly small sizes. Sure, they were incredibly advanced in that way, but, probably as a limitation of their programming built-in by the Progenitors, they couldn't really invent new things without a need to do so.

That was the main reason why she was so important. She was pretty much the only one able to think of new things, which the Colonels could take to the end of their logical conclusions and present her with upgraded and miniaturized versions of them. Without her, they would be, and had been, stuck just upgrading what already existed for the years she was just speeding through time, then in a frenzy for the week or so she had been missing.

Ordering her infiltrator to fire another teleport spike, she stepped through a teleporter gate and sending herself to it, not surprised to be stood on a moving train where Anna was sat on the back looking out the way they came, Wojtek laying beside her. Walking over, she sat down and dangled her legs off the edge of the train, grinning at the surprise on Anna's face. "Surprise, this is what I was working on. Granted, it's not quite where it could be after I reconnected with where I came from, but it's me. Well, as close an iteration of me as I can actually pull off." She said with a shrug, internally jumping with joy that she actually had arms that could shrug, and a face that could, well, pull faces!

Idly she realized that theoretically she could use the data her nanites had gotten from all the Rusviets they'd swarmed over in order to make her an actual biological body, but that'd be incredibly inefficient compared to her current body. "Wait, Skye? You are...a lot smaller than before. And more human-like." Anna then smiled at her, bringing a grin to her own lips. "So, not just a giant living mech then? I think Nikola Tesla himself would bow down in front of you if you showed up at his factory in your...err, bigger form."

"Yeah, I set it up so I can hop between them. Right now my Osiris chassis, the big one, is just idling at my base doing nothing, but if I wanted to I could tell it to move somewhere and it would, or just swap to take direct control. Before it was like...well, like piloting a tank." When Anna pulled a face, she scratched her head as she tried to explain it. "It'd be like that in the sense that it's disconnected. I look through its eyes and control its movements, but not quite as well or as neatly as if I were actually controlling it like I am controlling, well, myself!" She said as she threw her arms out.

"I...err, I kinda get it?" She could see from the look on Anna's face that she was lost on the difference, and being fair there wasn't a significant one, she was able to do it with her infiltrator easily enough after all. "So, will you be joining us when we breach the blockade around Kolno? You'd save a lot of lives by assisting us." Skye grinned as she pointed up at the sky behind then, getting one of the Kestrels following the trail to drop its visible spectrum cloaking for a moment, then disappear again into thin air.

"My aerial units will be keeping the Rusviets at bay." There weren't any land units following, as they were all too heavy and would leave easily-noticed tracks. Not that it mattered, but between the orbital units that were currently spreading out to look across the entire world, as well as the Omegas, SXX-1304s and Anchors being constructed in orbit, she wasn't worried. Each of them had a wide area they could attack, a far-cry from the game, bu that was because in the game scale was incredibly compacted.

Here, the limits that the game placed were either changed drastically or removed. Or, in the case of orbital weapons, the scale itself was what changed. The orbital units still had the same rough range, but the difference was that when put above a real planet, in a geosynchronous orbit that was managed by the thrusters present on all the craft, that range cone meant they could cover from France to Russia, an effective zone of attack that was about 2000km across.

The Anchors were the only craft that didn't inherently possess thrusters, a fact that was easily fixed by retrofitting several omni-directional manoeuvring thrusters onto it using the fabricators already in orbit, the design of which she took fro the SXX-1304 Laser Platforms, which used the same system to move themselves while retaining stability. Most of the time they simply used them to maintain orbit, but would use them to move when ordered.

Of course, she could have used the 'upgraded' versions the Colonels made, but those were all miniaturized. While useful in some regards, she preferred having units that weren't basically just tiny but equally powerful versions of what they already used. In the same vein, she could be replacing all her units with utterly tiny versions, but the reason she didn't was the simple fact of personal preference. She wanted units she could see and interact with. Her ride on the Leveler in her base was great fun, even in its simplicity.

To be deprived that, when her units were perfectly capable as they were, was just unacceptable.

With the path entirely cleared by bombing runs and strafes from her aircraft, the train encountered no opposition as it charged towards the beleaguered town.

As it did so, Skye found herself contemplating her next actions. Fenris would probably come after Anna's father, and as that would upset her new friend, that wasn't allowable. Pulling on her machine side a little, she slowed time down and used her simulation program, coupled with the data already received from her satellites, to try and predict the likelihood that Fenris would successfully kill her father in the time before his own natural death, or at the very least succeed in their goals in some form, either through kidnapping, coercion or another route.

The probability was practically one hundred percent. And that was without intel on exactly how far-reaching Fenris was, meaning she had to make estimates that she had kept low-ball to be on the safe side, as well as rough projections and estimates of what was going to be happening in the coming days, weeks and months. The likelihood of Anna's life being derailed, pun intended, was far too high to be allowed. That left one choice.

Fenris as an organization had to be purged. Every member needed to be killed. She acquainted their organization to HYDRA from the MCU. She could kill a lot of them, but the rest would scurry and burrow away like rats, and would peek back up again to again try to nibble their way through whatever wires they needed to in order to put themselves in a position of power.

Their only problem was that by annoying her, they'd done the equivalent of nibble through a live wire. Now, her only problem was that Commander tech was really not built for infiltration. Other Commanders would detect stealthed units easily, so incognito actions were basically useless to them, meaning her data-banks had dick-diddly in terms of actual infiltration units. If they existed before, that data didn't exist on her own nor any of the databanks of her creations. The Colonels had pulled all the data they could from the chassis of the Rallus Commander, which amounted to nothing useful, just more data-sets identical as her own.

That meant she needed an actual infiltrator unit. Her scaled-down Osiris was good for a temporary use, but she'd need...well, now that she thought about it, she already had a solution. Locusts. They were literally a swarm of nanobots. If they weren't set to attack and were instead ordered to avoid touching people at all costs, then the odd few that hit people would literally have no effect, for a simple yet effective reason.

A nanobot was 10 micrometres in size. 10 micrometres was 0.01 millimetre. To make a chain of nanobots a meter long, you'd need 100,000 of them, and to fill a 1m³ cube would take 1,000,000,000,000,000 nanobots, or one quadrillion of them. The only reason they were visible at all was because the swarms that made up a Locust unit were literally numbering in the hundreds of trillions, enough that as they clumped together, they became visible. Obviously, they did so in-game for the simple fact that needed to be visible to be easier to see and use or attack.

If she simply created swarms of nanobots and ordered them to spread across the world, they would be like an invisible tide of nigh undetectable machines. They were so small that hitting people wasn't going to be noticed, their stealth systems would hide them from all forms of detection the planet possessed, and after a minor edit in which she replaced their sensors from the miniaturized Gil-E's, they could see for kilometres, and read papers on a desk from across a room easily. Skye tried to think of a drawback, and ended up drawing a blank. Their energy use, as with all her units, was supplied from the same nebulous inventory system that all her creations drew upon for energy and metal, such a tiny amount that calling it nothing was an understatement.

The game never had an energy cost for units, but that wasn't the case here, all her units did use power of course, it was just such a small amount that even after populating several planets, she didn't notice the extra few points of energy drain all those units caused. She reasoned that this was because she didn't actually use units that couldn't supply their own power requirements very much. All of the regular units had internal power generation, which supplied them with enough power to fire their weapons and do their normal actions, thus not siphoning off the regular energy grid.

Only units like the Locusts, as well as a few rare ones like the Gil-E coincidentally enough, had energy generation either too weak to sustain itself in the case of the Gil-E, or non-existent in the form of the Locusts. They were simply too small for internal energy generation to be plausible. The Gil-E she reasoned was because it was meant as a stealthier unit, and having a strong enough power generator to fuel itself would also give its location away easier.

In the game, nothing could hide from radar and whatnot, but supposedly the Gil-E was capable of entering a faux-dormancy, where it could hide in wait, waking up when its quarry was able to be fired upon. A dormant machine wouldn't be noticed by radar, as it only contained enough power generation to re-engage its connection to the quantum inventory and power itself on.

Idly, she ran a simulation of her humanoid chassis being shot at by Gil-E's that had caught her by surprise, ten of them shooting at her back. Two of the shots managed to break through her back plating and caused minor damage to one of the nanite pods located on her back. She mentally flexed, all the nanite pods activating as they quickly moved to repair the internal and external damage, finished long before the four-second reload for the Gil-E's finished.

So, her chassis, which had pretty much paper-thin armour, took ten shots from Gil-E's and was repaired way before they could fire again. In the game, after 16 seconds, those Gil-E's would have killed a Commander Chassis, doing 3500 per salvo whilst a commander had 12500 health, only enough to survive three salvos. Of course, the situations were different, and against a massed assault she'd die like many Commanders would have before, under an endless tide of metal, but she had increased confidence in her humanoid chassis to survive a surprise attack.

Still within the simulation, she wiped it clean, using her slowed-down perception of time to start working on compiling an orders packet for her Locusts. She had to stipulate various things, give orders for certain situations, situations where contacting her was necessary, stuff like that. Their main goal was to find any usable intelligence on Fenris as well as any other organization with plans involving one Piotr Kos.

Returning her focus to the real world, she started having her T2 bot factories produce Locusts. She also assigned the factories to assign the order packet she had made to all created locusts, watching as the first swarm appeared and subsequently broken apart, becoming essentially a cloud of IFF tags as it flew outwards. That was another reason why the swarm was so packed up, so that it would be identified as one unit. Now, there were trillions if not quadrillions of them all heading off to do their own thing.

She set the factories to keep producing more until she enough to cover the entire planet several times over, running the maths of that in her head, a far easier prospect. It took 10,000,000,000, or ten billion, nanobots to cover a meter squared. The entire surface of earth was 510.1 trillion meters squared. 10 billion multiplied by 510.1 trillion was 5.101e+24, or in regular numbers 5,101,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 nanobots. 5.1 septillion nanobots.

Each unit of Locusts would be made of about 300 trillion nanobots. That meant that to cover the entire surface of the planet with a single layer of nanobots would be about 17,003,333,333 units, 17 billion in an easier form. That, of course, meant the entire surface though, and she didn't quite need that. Just for simplicities sake she took that 17 billion units down to 15 billion.

Each swarm of Locusts took 5 seconds to build, 3 more seconds to fly off the factory. With four arms on each factory producing them, that time was knocked down to 1.25 seconds. That meant that in 1.25 seconds, the fabricators on the factory were able to produce 300 trillion nanobots. Multiplied by 20 to get a round number of seconds at 25, which was 6 quadrillion nanobots, she then divided that by 25 to get the per second production, which was 240 trillion. Divided by 4, one for each sprayer, and each one was able to produce 60 trillion nanobots a second.

By bypassing how units were meant to be formed, she ordered the factories to stop producing Locust swarms, and instead to produce nanobots instead, with them all receiving the order packet she had made. She had 35 T2 Bot Factories, all of which were producing Locusts. That meant that, now that she had solved the 3 seconds of wasted time on the factory, and changed production to be continuous, every second, those 35 factories collectively produced 8.4e+15 nanobots, or 8.4 quadrillion per second.

5.1 septillion divided by 8.4 quadrillion left her with the seconds she would need to wait for the entire planet to have enough nanobots to cover it entirely, not including travel time of course. That number was 1,062,708,333, just over a billion seconds. Divided by 60, then 60 again, she got 295,196 hours, or 12,299 days. That meant that in about 33 years she'd have produced enough nanobots to cover the planet.

However, that was with just 35 factories. And sure, they wasn't quite the right factories, but what was there to stop her from using the other types to produce them? It was just a game limitation when it came down to it. Sure enough, when she ordered a land factory to produce Locusts and gave it the blueprint, the fabricator got to work spraying them into existence, proving that the factories were just limited by game design, but when under her direct control, she had far more free will over how they operated.

That was when she turned her attention to the moon, which was, to her eyes at least, slowly but with increasing speed being covered in the creeping sprawl of red and black T2 Air Factories. Production had slowed for a while thanks to her implementing the design that had several resource pods under each factory, but it meant that her economy basically became unspendable, even if she produced an absurd quantity of pretty much anything.

Anything, which now included endless swarms of nanobots.