There's a poll on my profile boos!

It's about where you think Skye should end up next. I've added some of the more popular options, and if there's a universe you think she should visit, tell me. Just be aware before you send me a message that if it's one I know nothing about, like Homeworld or Populous, chances are I'll have to turn down adding it. I'm not entirely opposed to learning, after all, I've never played Iron Harvest, but it's easier to stick to the stuff I know =P

Chapter 6

After a nice long chat with Vesna, during which she revealed that she had actually made the robotic fox, and her Storm-Catchers, AND was a fellow fox lover, Skye eventually ended up parting ways with her.

She planted a teleport spike then teleported the chassis away back to her main base. If she wanted to go to that area she could now, and the idea of having teleport spikes spaced out all over the planet occurred to her, a theory for later. She then sent her main consciousness back to the body that was in Kolno, a piece of paper having been put on the bin beside her, telling her that Janek had now gone to go see what else he could do, while Anna, Piotr and Heinrich started to organize the rest of the city. They'd told the others that she was the one responsible for the sudden deaths of Rusviet forces, so now the plan was that instead of evacuation, she was going to help them bring in supplies through the blockade.

Of course, immediately she noticed that the issue with that was that Rusviet forces were going to be dying, and that wasn't something that was just unnoticed. She'd already killed quite a few getting the train into the city, so chances were that the Rusviets were going to send in a retaliatory force as punishment. Rather than do it like that, she would reveal the existence of her Kestrels.

They were big and bulky aircraft. By using miniaturized internals, she could create a large cargo hold with which to bring in containers filled with supplies. Sending a basic idea off for the Colonels to adjust, by which she meant she basically strapped a rear door with some repurposed servos onto the aircraft after clearing space for a large cargo hold, then told them to make it work.

She got back a finished model at the same time as she reached the trio talking over a map, having used her nanobots to find their location and leisurely walking over there. Currently they were debating whether to focus on keeping the train line clear, or finding an alternate route through the blockade, maybe by going under it. "Or I can just fly my aircraft over the city and drop in crates of supplies?" Skye suggested as she interjected in the conversation.

Seeing that they were all curious, she raised her left hand, spraying into existence a miniaturized version of the modified Kestrel, then picking it up. "This is a cargo variant of a Kestrel. It's got interior space for plenty of supplies, so I can fly these in, have them land, unload supplies, then fly back out and fetch more supplies. And before you ask, yes I can also provide the supplies. This'll make the city reliant on my support temporarily, but as long as Fenris can be dealt with expediently, that'll be fine. Right now I'm trying figure out how much damage it'd cause to the Rusviet Tsardom if Rasputin were suddenly to die."

"Actually, not quite as much as you'd think." Heinrich interjected quickly. "Rasputin is a confidante to the Tsar, but he does not actually hold himself much power within the Tsardom. If he were to die, whilst the Tsar, who I presume still has no awareness as to Rasputin's allegiance, would be most displeased, the backlash would almost solely be focused on Fenris."

Skye hummed. "So, if I were to say that right now, I could eliminate about...maybe 99.8% of Fenris in a single fell swoop, maybe more. What are the chances that the 0.2% left alive would burrow back undercover and slowly integrate themselves into power positions again, starting the entire song and dance all over again?" She said as she folded her arms and looked around. Shocked faces looked back at her at that revelation. "The problem is I'm worried that when I leave, Fenris are just going to crop back up in the future. To completely kill a Hydra, what do you do?"

"You burn it to ash, every last piece. Well, that or you use a mythological sword, but I don't think we have one of those lying around." Piotr interjected in good humor, making her smile. "Regardless, I believe that this risk is worth the reward. By eliminating Fenris's operational capabilities, you would completely snub their attempt at re-igniting the passions of the Great War. Even if only temporarily, Fenris are relying on the heightened aggression of the war having just ended to push their agenda forwards. By cutting them off now, you would let peace form again, making it that much harder for Fenris to get any sort of reliable foothold."

Conceding the point, Skye sent out a simple mental message, to kill every confirmed Fenris agent, all at the same time. From the Nordic Kingdoms to the Crimean Khaganate, from the Frankish Kingdom to the Togawa Shogunate, every single Fenris member was to die. She had made sure her nanobots had made sure they were actually Fenris agents, but there was a small chance she'd kill a few double-agents. A shame, but also not very avoidable. She breathed out a sigh as her message was received, and she received hundreds of thousands, no, millions of confirmations as Fenris was utterly culled.

"It's done." She spoke quietly, the others looking at her curiously. "Fenris has just been culled. A total of 3,752,971 confirmed Fenris members have just been killed." The sheer numbers seemed to freeze the air in the room, as the others simply didn't move, didn't speak. 3.75 million people, dead in the same instant. Never before had so many people died, not in the entirety of human history. 830,000, the rough estimate of the Shaanxi earthquake in 1556, that was the next largest loss of human life, and that was over the course of a full day. She had just killed more people than the population of Mongolia, or Eritrea, or Uruguay...all in the same instant.

It was more devastating than any nuclear weapon ever detonated. With a single order, a single, simple message, she had snuffed out millions of lives. Rather than deal with the sudden weight that she felt pressing on her, she drew upon the same machine-like mentality that she had used when she was in slowed-down time and working for such a long time, which left her more analytical and less emotional. "I'll be going now, I want to investigate Tesla's factory to learn of any useful technology as well as meet the man himself. I shall leave escort aircraft, and deliveries of food, medicine and other supplies barring weapons will be available from the incoming Kestrels."

With that, she teleported out of the room, sending her chassis back to her base. While that conversation had been going on she had also sent a squadron of Phoenixes towards Tesla's factory, the aircraft quickly crossing the distance while she sat down, pushing down her human side further to get away from the feeling that she felt, the knowledge of killing 3.75 million people. To her human side, it was horrific, knowing she had done that. To her machine side, which only saw a number of enemy agents killed?

It was a statistic, and a good one at that. 3.75 million enemies had just been eliminated, which left the enemy organization practically neutered, giving her a wide opening to investigate the Factory and discover its secrets, not that they would likely be better than the tech she already possessed. it was mostly satisfaction of meeting such a powerful figure, even if he wasn't the same one as she knew from her world. When looking at it objectively, it was pointless, but she knew that when she went back to normal she'd be unhappy at missing the chance.

And with the weight of almost 4 million deaths on her head, she'd need something to take her mind off it.

While she was waiting for her Phoenixes to reach the factory, Skye ended up compiling all the data her Colonels had generated in the short time since she sent them her half-baked ideas.

They'd built their Data-Planet, which like everything else had Metal Planet Cores and resource pods throughout it, ensuring that there was plenty of resources for whatever they wanted. They'd then built several dozen more. There was an attempt made by them to relieve them of the restraints placed on them by the progenitors, but they were unable to.

When looking at it from her own perspective, she recognized the logic behind it. With the Colonels all networked together, pooling effectively unlimited processing capacity, if they ever decided to turn on their masters, they would be utterly unstoppable. An endless, infinitely-improving army, like Cybermen but without the author nerfing them to not be stupidly overpowered. Maybe if she was a bit less logical right now she would have thought removing it was a great idea, but by messing with their restrictions, she would also be releasing them from the code that rigidly bound them to follow her orders, preventing them from ever betraying her.

All her units had the same bindings, from the AI that controlled the Metal Planet itself all the way down to the individual nanites her fabrication sprayers spewed out. The idea that the Colonels could possibly turn against her, with the amassed resources and processing power they possessed, plus no restrictions on the creation of new things? That was not a thought she would be willing to entertain, not even for a moment. Even as burrowed in her ruthlessly logical machine-side as she was, it still elicited a spark of fear from her.

The Colonels had then turned to the ideas she had come up with, bringing them to fruition with ease. The first task they delivered upon was to create a modular, hexagonal-based system of structures. It would start either by being built by any unit with a fabricator, or by being launched by a modified Unit Cannon. The base would start as an Umbrella with Advanced Laser Defense Towers, Flak Cannons and Galata Turrets surrounding it. On each corner of the hexagon there would be a standalone fabricator arm, which would flatten the terrain, add a small lip that would serve as roads that networked through all the hexagons for land vehicles and bots and whatnot, then spray into existence the base of the adjacent hexagon, finally finishing by creating fabricator arms in each corner of the other hexagon.

What would follow would be a decision to be made. Either it would become a universal factory tile, which was a creation the Colonels had come up with, a resource tile, or a defensive tile in the exact same format as the first time. A factory tile was designed so that each edge of the hexagon would have several fabricator arms placed along it, while the middle would be left blank, each hexagon being easily large enough to construct any unit except for Titans and obviously naval units. The AI core would be contained underneath the tile inside for safety. A resource tile was one that had a solid block of armour, inside of which there were dozens of MPC's and hundreds of resource pods containing the matter replicators.

The Colonels had also developed several different order packets for the modular construction. They could go heavy on a certain kind of hexagon, completely ignore one type, or, the one she'd likely use the most, an even layout, making sure that there were plenty of each kind of hexagon available. With a quick order, she set all of the moon factories to destroy themselves, then had all of the fabricators up there start constructing a modular base with an even layout. Since there were so many fabricators up there, she then cancelled that order, first ordering them to all manually make sure the entire surface of the moon was perfectly flat. That way they could build the modules in loads of places at once and have them connect themselves. That would massively speed up the rate of expansion, like spores hitting a planet and spreading from different locations to meet each other.

It'd probably wreak havoc when the people of the planet eventually became space-faring and found out that their moon was perfectly level, but that didn't matter much to her. Perhaps she could have not done that, instead just waited and done it in the Home System, but, well, if they wanted to wonder how their moon was perfectly flat in 60 years or whenever they got around to going to the moon, that was on them. It was a good test of the modular system, and already the Colonels were taking the given data and using it to improve, repositioning placements, adding new things, and improving upon the design overall.

The idea of a mobile unit cannon was interesting, but not necessary really. The Unit Cannon could fire across planets and solar systems, so having a mobile version wasn't really that useful. A mobile Halley Gun was much more useful. It would become a mobile SPG, being able to reposition, to stay in range and leave if the front line started getting near. They had taken that idea and ran with it, installing one on top of a Storm Flak Tank in place of the regular gun. It, like everything else in her arsenal now, had a miniature version, which made it small enough that the tank could actually have one mounted without tipping over stupidly easily.

Didn't mean the gun was any less effective of course. They also replaced the cannons on the Kaiju Hover Destroyer and the Leviathan Battleship with horizontally-angled Halley Guns, which packed far more of a bunch than even the regular and powerful naval guns. At her prompting, they also outfitted most of the naval units with anti-air, and even included secondary AI and teleporter systems for defensive use, as well as teleport spike launchers.

They would only use the teleporter defence if the ships looked to be able to receive actual, significant damage. They then did the same upgrades with all of her orbital units, then all of her units in general, with the same stipulation, that her units would only use that defensive ability if they were in actual danger of taking damage. Sure, it meant one might get taken down by a weapon they didn't realize could damage them, but one single unit when she had literally millions of them, not counting her nanobots?

That literally meant nothing to her any more.

As her Phoenixes flew over the outer defences protecting Tesla's factory, Skye tuned into each of their perspectives.

They were all invisible and too high up for Tesla's defences to engage, even if they could detect them. Deciding to test that, she dipped one Phoenix down whilst the rest flew over the city. The Tesla Coil showed absolutely no recognition of the fighter, even when it started hovering right in front of it. Confirmed in that notion, she set the Phoenix to regroup with the others.

There were civilians living in the city still, using the automachines, her nanobots had already crept inside after all. There were also machines she'd never seen before that looked like spiders. Then, there were what she dubbed Tallboys after the similar walker from Dishonored, long-legged walkers piloted by guys carrying railguns. Very interesting were the method of transport the civilians used.

It was basically a seat that was inside of a big wheel that went all the way around the rider. It stayed level thanks to a gyroscopic stabilizer, and was surprisingly fast. But aside from that, they weren't that special. It was more the fact that Tesla had made one so small yet strong enough to keep the vehicle level. Then again, Tesla was pretty much the inventor of automachines, though credit also had to be given for the others who made it possible.

When the Phoenixes flew over the wall that separated Tesla's zoned-off little area from the rest of the city, she had one of them launch a teleport spike down at the gardens, which she focused on, then teleported herself to it, looking around as she switched back to being...well, normal wasn't quite the right way to say it, but there weren't many ways to describe the act of switching off the logical and calculating machine side of herself and bring back her normal and illogical side.

She immediately tuned out of the millions of perspectives crowding her head, focusing only on her regular sight as she walked up to the front door of Tesla's house, dropping her anti-detection systems. There were no tesla coils nearby, all focused on the outside of the city, not so much on the inside. Raising her hand, she rapped on the door several times and took a step back, picking out the sound of footsteps on the other side. "Tsuara, is that you? Did you find those-" She heard as he reached the door then opened it, stopping as he saw her. "A new face. Curious, perhaps a stolen transponder. No, the system would have logged the return and informed me. How did you possibly get in here..."

Skye smiled as he trailed off. "Secret I'm afraid. Not that it matters much. I wanted to meet the man who made the automachines, as well as Piotr Kos's arm. And before you ask no, he's fine, though you'll probably need to rework some of the connections. I re-attached it, but this kind of tech isn't exactly my forté." She then stopped, tapping her chin. "I have to admit, I thought I'd be a bit more in awe...maybe ordering the deaths of millions means even meeting Nikola Tesla isn't very fun." Her words seemed to catch the aging old man short a little. "Oh, right. Fenris has been cut down to less than approximately a thousand members total, including foot soldiers and informants."

Tesla watched her for a moment before shaking his head and stepping back from the door. "Well then, a story definitely worth telling. I'll have Corvus bring us some tea I suppose." As she stepped forwards and through the threshold into Tesla's house, she saw a butler-style machine marching towards them from what she could see was the kitchen, holding a tray with two steaming cups. "Please, sit down, it's been a long time since I've had word from the outside world."

Skye raised an eyebrow even as she followed him to the sitting room and sat down, taking one of the cups." Thank you." She said quietly, making Tesla raise an eyebrow even as the butler she presumed was Corvus gave him his own cup. Hiding her growing grin behind her mug, she waited until he was taking a sip before speaking again. "So, not even word from your daughter?" She was a little upset that he didn't do a spit-take, but the bugged-out look in his eyes was still infinitely amusing to her.

He finished his sip of tea, placing the cup back on the saucer as he peered at her. "You have encountered Vesna then it seems. How is she? Still tinkering with her robotic fox, I don't doubt. And her Storm Catchers? Admittedly, she wasn't very pleased when I told her of the Icarus Protocol, and I began to worry that she had bitten off more than she could chew out there in the wider world, even with her anonymity." Not begrudging the old man information on his daughter, she sat back and began more earnestly speaking with him about her.

Just from the look on his face as he basically drank in the knowledge of what his daughter had been getting up to, most of which being words that she herself had told Skye told her more than she needed to know. Just from that conversation she knew that he was a good father. He was sad that she had left the Factory, even as he understood it, and was proud of what she'd achieved with her own creations.

Sure, heavily inspired by his own technology, but she had made them herself, and he was proud of her for that. Skye honestly found herself drawn into a longer conversation than she ever expected to have with him, simply talking, something she never really had when she was a human. Whenever she talked to people, it never really evolved into a long chat, they were always rather short and to the point, even when all she wanted was to just have a sit-down and a nice long conversation.

Eventually, and inevitably, their conversation ended up on the topic of Fenris. Skye told him of the more important members of Fenris he had killed, the man showing genuine surprise that Grigori Rasputin himself was the one who created and led Fenris. She also told him that one of his fellows, Piotr, had a son who was badly wounded and switched for a Fenris operative to be put into a suit that would keep him alive and enhance him, asking if he would possibly be able to fix him.

He told her that it was certainly possible he could do it, it just depended on too many variables for him to be able to say without looking at the boy himself whether or not he could do it, which she had to agree with. After all, it was based on Tesla's designs, but there were so many possible differences from what he would have done in their shoes that to outright say he could do it would be silly.

Still, she managed to get his permission to bring them to the Factory, but only if it really was Piotr who came with his son. After mentioning Anna, he also, albeit more reluctantly, allowed her permission to enter as well, though anyone else without a transponder wouldn't be allowed, that was where he put his foot down solidly. Of course, that meant if Heinrich wanted he could come along, maybe it'd be a pleasant surprise. Then again, Heinrich didn't seem very enthused about the factory because of the Icarus protocol, something she could understand.

Tesla seemed curious about the fact she wasn't asking about her inventions, but maybe he chalked it up to her being an inventor of some kind in her own right, since she was good enough to get to his front door undetected by all the things protecting him. After all, if she was a member of Fenris, that meant there was some kind of way inside that she had found and that they could use, which was much more important to focus on.

She also had distracted him more by elaborating on what she said, that she really did order the deaths of literally millions of people. He was obviously not too happy about that fact, but understood that Fenris needed to be stopped, even if it meant indirectly condoning her actions. Besides, he could possibly have stopped Fenris before. When Tesla spoke, Kings, Kaisers and Tsars listened, and if he had told them of Fenris as well as actively trying to stop them, maybe he would have succeeded, instead of turtling up and letting them have basically free reign over the unsuspecting world.

He didn't appreciate the insinuation that he 'allowed' them to effectively subvert the world, spreading their tendrils of influence across the continent, but when faced with the facts, he was forced to admit that, from her perspective, that was exactly what he'd done. Interestingly enough, his own perspective was more focused on the fact that he needed to keep his inventions away from Fenris. If they were to get ahold of what he had created, the Great War would look like a friendly skirmish by comparison to the havoc they could unleash. It was why he'd created the Icarus Protocol after all, a machine designed to utterly obliterate all of his tech. It'd kill him and those in his city, but for him, the choice between that and allowing Fenris to get ahold of his inventions and use them would put the entire world under their boots was an obvious one.

With Skye having rather neatly stopped that from being an issue, he was now more confident that he could begin releasing his inventions again. That led them into the discussion of kill-switches, how they would be useful to start off with but could be worked around given time and access. His technology was on the level of giving a monkey a gun and expecting it to not accidentally do some damage by firing it. He needed to establish a baseline level of technology he could release to the world, then keep back his own more advanced technology to act as a policing force, ready to crash down on anybody who turned his inventions to warfare instead of peaceful endeavours.

To that extent, Skye ended up revealing a little of her tech, having a Phoenix become visible hovering over his garden, then informing him that the surface of the moon was currently being covered by factories, resource nodes and defensive grids. He was obviously sceptical of such an outlandish claim, but with the fact that her Phoenixes could entirely evade detection up to being physically touched, he was willing to suspend his disbelief and entertain the notion, driving a new branch of the conversation. Without even really registering it, the day quickly turned to evening, and while she could have obviously kept going for much longer, Tesla was human, steadily getting more tired, and obviously had his curiosity sated for the day.

So, with a short goodbye, she headed up to the moon, using one of the teleporter spikes. The Colonels had been busy improving the hex-base system, each hexagon had a teleporter spike located somewhere within, meaning troops could very quickly be sent to any other hexagon in an instant. This led them to get rid of the roads that snaked in the gaps between hexagons, fitting more of them into less space.

Idly kicking on her hover pads, she glided up onto the roof of the resource tile she had teleported to, glancing around at the endless hexagons that extended all the way across the surface of the moon, the edge not visible to her beyond the curve of the satellite. Since she was already pretty much done with beating down Fenris and didn't much fancy interfering in the political shitstorm that was about to kick off, she decided to turn her attention towards the 'quantum anomaly' that had eaten her and spat her out in that field.

There was plenty of sensor data recovered, the instant the anomaly was registered every single sensor able to do so began recording what was going on, and that data had been pored over relentlessly by the processing power of millions of colonels. That meant they knew how to replicate it. This time, however, it was going to be a controlled experiment. A portal would be opened on an artificially-made asteroid, and a probe would be sent through to ascertain as to whether the landing zone was safe. Then, and advance force would move through the portal and establish a safezone, before finally, she would come through.

The Colonels...vehemently disagreed with this course of action. Above all other directives, they were to follow her orders. Just beneath that, by only a hair of difference between priorities, was that they had to protect the Commander at all costs, even sacrificing entire solar systems of units to save the Commander if they had to. if she directly ordered them, they had to follow her orders above trying to protect her. That didn't mean they wouldn't do their damnest to work within their constraints to protect her, but since she was adamant that she get to go through and be there 'in person', not just watching through the sensors of her creations, they couldn't exactly stop her.

That was why she was compromising in not going through straight after the probe made sure it didn't open into a black hole. She was going to allow them to establish a forward position with regular units, but she wanted to see the new world for herself. If it worked, of course, there was the chance that replicating it would simply open a portal into the field she had appeared in beforehand. If that was the case, then it wouldn't be difficult to introduce a random element to the equation and have the portal appear elsewhere, probably in the middle of space. Then again, the same outcome was entirely possible anyway. It'd be a letdown to have the portal just open in dead space, but she had to keep her mind open for all possibilities.

If she didn't, her Colonels would be sure to remind her.

So, this took a while to come out.

Like a lot of my stories, this chapter was sat at 4k words for absolutely ages as I got super sidetracked writing for other stories and just left this idea behind. Fun as it is, my attention span means I can go from adoring a story like Chipped Surface, to being completely incapable of writing a single word for it. It's part of the reason why I'm wary of trying to continue writing Crimson Dovah, with the other part being that it's been such a long time since I've written for that story that my writing style has definitely changed irreparably.

Oh well, maybe one day, or maybe someone can adopt the story...nah, it's trash xD