Sorry for how long this took to release, I've been pretty miserable recently.

I had my wisdom tooth pulled on Thursday and I still can't bite down on Monday, and I'm honestly so done with tomato soup that if I never see another can again it'll be too soon. Still, that's no excuse, because I haven't actually written anything for a week aside from this AN. I realised when looking through documents that I actually finished Closed Compartments chapter 10 so that could go up on Pat reon and this could go up on here.

Meep.

Chapter 7

As she stepped through the artificially generated wormhole and into the small forward base that had been established, Skye's first thoughts were...disappointment.

Sure, she wasn't expecting to appear in a metropolitan area like a city or something, surrounded by life, but she was at least hoping to appear somewhere interesting. The wormhole had deposited the vanguard probe and the scouts on an asteroid which her sensors told her was about two lightyears away from the nearest star. The asteroid itself was only a few kilometres in circumference and was simply hurtling through space leisurely.

As such, she jabbed her arm out and sprayed out the start of a hex-base, then kicked on her thrusters and moved upwards a little. Scanning around, she couldn't find any solid matter bigger than a kilometre in circumference within a half-lightyear range, meaning her half-baked plan of building a magnetic accelerator to propel a teleporter spike towards the nearest system wasn't very viable. Of course, that didn't mean she couldn't do it, as she commanded the Colonels to develop a method of sending a teleporter spike to the nearest star as quickly as they could, and very quickly got the design back thanks to the genuinely insane amount of processing power they collectively had available.

After the equivalent of twelve-million-years of testing, they had perfected the process of being able to, at will, tear open linked anomalies between two points. The machine required to make these tears, at first, was about the size of Earth. And, as good little machines, they had compacted it right down to the size of a tennis ball. By their standards, that was practically gargantuan, but then again, this was literally bending space-time to make two points that are really far apart come really close together.

The way it worked, at least that she understood, was that by using the same principle that the anomaly that had appeared around her occurred, they could rip open space and selectively choose where the rip ended up. In their first few years of testing, it was utterly uncontrollable, appearing absolutely anywhere with no rhyme or reason. By the thousands, they had it down to a few miles in area. But now, after millions of years of equivalent testing in an instant, they could precisely select the exact micrometres of the area that the anomalies would appear in.

Activating the nano-pods dispersed over her body, she had them replace her own teleporting system with the new and improved one, at the same time as being able to remove the teleporter spike entirely and simply use teleportation directly on her own. She kept the AI, which was linked in with the new system, able to perform its functionality with even great effect.

Skye ordered the Colonels to replace all the tech in all of her creations with the upgraded versions, though made sure to stipulate that they take great caution in doing it as to not fuck something up. It wouldn't be good if they removed it all and suddenly she wasn't able to get back to see Vesna or Anna or even Tesla. Not that she needed to be able to visit, but it was nice having people to talk to if nothing else.

Focusing on the distant star, she brought up the steadily-expanding map of their local area, all the sensor data automatically being used to create a detailed map of the region. She selected the area beside that star, and prompted her internal AI to open a wormhole between herself and the system. After a moment and a confirmation, a new rip in space appeared, though this one resembled a window more than a black void, allowing her to see through it and see what was at the other side as if it was literally just on the other side of a...well, a window.

She drifted through with a short burst from her thrusters, looking towards the star and the single planet orbiting around it. There were no life signs detected, nor any ruins or signs of previous life, so she simply created a pod filled with nanites, assigned it to go and assimilate the planet using an order packet, then booted it towards said planet and re-opened her system map.

If there was life to be found, she was damn-well going to find it!

After ten systems of nothing found, Skye decided that just letting her Colonels handle the expansion project while she fiddled with a design that was rattling around her head.

She kept a modicum of mental attention towards their actions, the steadily expanding network routinely cataloguing new systems. None of them had even the modicum of life that the planets of her home system had, no trees or plants. There weren't even bio-signs deep in the oceans near geothermal vents, so those planets were clearly not destined for intelligent life for at least a few billion years, which meant she was alright with those worlds being assimilated, her new way of regarding her hex-base system, since it did make sense.

Now, the Colonels already knew the reason why they weren't finding anything notable, because they were about a thousand light-years above the galactic disc. However, instead of letting them use the new 'warp drive' to simply head straight down there, she wanted them to wait and to build up a presence before doing so. If they dropped into the galaxy and started getting attacked, maybe by another Commander who had been given time to take over an entire fucking galaxy, they would be so utterly fucked that to say losing was inevitable was an understatement.

This prompted them to immediately start designing counter-measures, counter-counter-measures and then counters to those CCM's, self-destruct protocols, all manner of things they wanted to do. She simply told them to assemble project files for her to peruse whilst they did what they'd been told, then returned her attention to her newest project. The Phoenix and the Avenger were nice, but she wanted a better fighter in general.

They both were more versatile now, the Avenger able to go into the atmosphere and engage targets there, whilst the Phoenix could do the same in orbit, but they were both designed for commander-on-commander combat, and it showed. They weren't very manoeuvrable, since if she lost one, as a commander, she was expected to have about ten million more in the battle and producing another million every few seconds. They also weren't very well armed or armoured, not compared to what they could be armed with. Again, the idea was that instead of being good, they would be innumerable.

So, she got to work. First, she had to choose the chassis to use, and after a lot of deliberation she picked the Phoenix. The tri-wing configuration appealed to her more, plus could have more weapons and thrusters and technology attached to it. She stripped away the armaments, the thrusters, basically everything, leaving her just with an empty hull to work on, then replaced the essential components, which had been miniaturized just like literally everything else, inside of a thick box of armour right in the middle of the craft.

Next, she started to work on thruster placement. RCS thrusters on the nose, tail and wing-tips and simulated showed the Phoenix turn into an aircraft that could do a 180 in under half a second. Thrusters from the LR-96 Pacifier Missile dispersed along the back side of the aircraft gave it a top speed of 45km/s in one bar of atmosphere, a substantial increase of their original top speed, almost quintupling it. She also planted a few miniature ones along the front side of the craft to act as a braking system, in case it couldn't turn around in time.

As for armaments, she went with repurposed Galata Turret missiles, scaled up, their propulsion replaced with the same thrusters from the LR-96 except smaller, and attached to missile racks in the undersides of the two horizontal wings with miniature fabricator sprayers placed to replace any fired missiles. On the top wing, on both sides, was an array of upscaled and upgraded Gil-E rifles on gimbal mounts. Finally, on the upper side of the horizontal wings, she placed three miniaturized Holkins guns on each side.

For the piéce de résistance, she added small little fabricator arms to the craft, some on each wing, some on the main body, turning it into a hybrid of a ludicrously powerful attack fighter and a fabricator. She sent off the design to her Colonels to test and improve, though required that all improvements had to be assembled into a project file for her to allow or disallow based on what she wanted. If she just let them go crazy with it, chances were high it wouldn't even look the same. Literally the next moment, they collectively sent a request to miniaturize all of the weapons, since they didn't need to be nearly as big to be just as powerful. And, equally as quickly, she denied it outright.

Sure, it would be effective, but she liked having visible guns on her stuff, so even if it was inefficient, it was staying, and that was the end of that.

Checking through the project file dossier the Colonels had compiled for her, Skye realised a very important fact.

While she had things like the Helios and the Omega, she didn't really have a proper brawler-type vessel. Sure, the hybrid Phoenix/Avenger craft she'd made was powerful, but against an enemy commander who could blast it with a shot from a Helios or an Anchor, it wasn't enough. Speaking of which, she made a mental note to come up with a new name for it, since just addressing it as such wasn't very fun.

But, she needed to think of a good spacefaring vessel to use. Starting off with the Omega, she took the improved design that the Colonels had already made and started working on it. First, she upscaled the entire ship, up to a length of three kilometres. Since internals were not an issue for her, the ship retained its shape, but became...well, a monster was the easiest way to put it.

Inside of the ship was tens of thousands of MPC's and Matter Replicators, and on the belly of the ship were dozens of large doors, which led into fabrication hangars. Those hangars were designed to be able to produce the hybrid fighters and then launch them, whilst the ship itself provided all of the energy and matter needed for construction. Essentially, the longer the ship was left alive to produce ships, the more lethal it would be.

Externally it was practically coated in Galata Turrets, Flak Cannons, Advanced Laser Defence Towers, sensor suites, Catapult Missile Launchers, Nuclear Missile Launchers and Anti-Nuke Launchers, the entire ship was bristling with all kinds of weaponry and technology. There were also fabricator arms of all shapes and sizes as well as nanite pods scattered all over the ship, so it could self-repair and even construct objects externally. For all intents and purposes, it was a Fleet-ship. It was a carrier, a cruiser, destroyer, battleship and all other kinds of ship rolled into one.

There was, however, one rather important discovery she had made. The walls that were by default constructible even by the commander possessed shield technology. And not a weak shield either, those shields had enough integrity to take 5 shots from a Gil-E before going down. She fiddled around with that stuff for a while before giving up and getting the Colonels to work on a way to use those shields as protection.

And, as a credit to how difficult it actually was to work with, they weren't instantly finished, despite having a countless number of Data Planets floating around in the hone system available to supply processing power to the problem. Granted, it 'only' took about five real-time seconds to finish, but considering how every other issue had been handled practically instantly, that was really saying something about the difficulty of manipulating the shield technology.

Their solution involved a lot of technobabble but boiled down to creating a controlling VI that was able to take certain parameters and apply them to the generated shield, changing it accordingly instead of it simply being a straight sheet that ended at certain points. Using this not only meant they had a shield that wouldn't go down until their quantum energy storage was depleted, literally a fruitless task, but it could also be used as a hyper-lethal weapon. The shield could be extended to slice through enemies, split them apart with atom-slicing precision, deflect physical projectiles, the whole nine yards. She immediately had one installed into every single one of her creations, which meant that so long as she still had power, nothing she possessed could be destroyed.

Well, not quite true, but close enough. There were certainly ways to counter the shield, such as a strong enough electromagnetic pulse, or with sufficient and instantaneous penetrating power it could temporarily be overwhelmed, but with a VI managing the shield, being able to pierce the shield before it recognized the threat and increased power accordingly was very unlikely, it would take a speed that she highly doubted could be realistically brought to bear. As a baseline level of power, the shields on the fighter could withstand shots about ten times as powerful as the Holkins gun, so whoever attacked would have to hit with force greater than that practically instantly.

On the Fleet-ship, that shielding was raised to the degree of being able to stop asteroids. With the shields active, it could literally crash into an asteroid, and the asteroid would break into a million pieces before the ship did. Skye set up a bunch of Orbital Factories to spray a bunch of Fleet-ships into existence, and while they did that, she gave a stipulation to the Colonels.

After they had a million Fleet-ships completed and ready to go, only then would they enter the galaxy directly.

Flicking through the absolutely titanic Orbital Shipyards the Colonels had designed, Skye realised that maybe a million ships was actually too few.

Every time she presented them with an issue, like the fact that the normal shipyards could only build Omegas as their biggest ships, and even then it was a near thing, they came up with a bunch of solutions. Then they would connect together, remove the ones that were just not as efficient, tweaking the ones that remained with any of the good ideas from the other designs, then each took those remainders and separated apart again to remove and optimize things further until they had a final selection which they could compile and send to her in neat little files.

The one she was most interested in was a truly colossal structure, tens of kilometres long and circular. Basically, it was like a giant barrel with both ends removed, and the inside of the barrel lined with factories. It was also, as was everything else, covered in armaments, and had one very important and newly-developed structure. See, the Deepspace Radar was designed for in-system use, which just wasn't acceptable if they were potentially going into a galactic conflict.

As such, the Colonels had seen the issue, pointed it out to her, and once given permission they started to develop ways to fix it. Eventually, they came across the idea of using tiny wormholes, absolutely minuscule, in fixed coordinates around the sensor array. These wormholes would essentially act like tiny, nigh-undetectable little windows floating in space harmlessly, allowing the sensor array to detect anything in an area around those little wormholes.

The easiest way to think of it was like the sensor array was in a cardboard box, but that it was able to poke dozens of holes in the box and could then see through all those points...except it could see in a radius instead of directly...basically it was a good thing to have for information gathering. The Colonels had done plenty of testing and established the various hole counts the device would need to view certain distances, encompassing a bubble about 50 light-years across. They could go larger, but the Colonels deemed that unnecessary for a default setting.

Scout sensor probes would be different, they would go up to a range of a thousand light-years, though at the requirement of the sensor array needing to be much larger, since looking at so much more space needed exponentially more material and power, such that projections showed building a sensor that could cover the whole galaxy would be about the size of a planet, which was not worth it compared to regular sensors. But, because of this, if they were end-to-end across the galaxy, it would only take 105 of them to see in a straight line across the entire thing. As such, alongside the Fleet-ships, these SSP's were being produced and were going to be sent by wormhole all across the galaxy, covering the entire disc with far more than necessary.

The Orbital Shipyards also possessed sensor arrays, but these were of a different specification. Rather than seeing out really far, they were much more close-quarters, only a light-year in distance. However, because of this, that area was far more closely watched, meaning literally nothing bigger than the size of an atom could escape the sight of the sensor array. If anything so much as farted in that area, the sensor array would detect it.

But where the real magic came in was in the shield projection technology. From simulations the Colonels had run, if a horde of Avengers were to be discovered, a spherical shield could be formed around them, then compressed, crushing the Avengers. As long as power was able to sustain the damage, they would be crushed into a ball of useless metal. Because of that, they would be able to selectively crush targets with almost terrifying ease.

Sometimes, Skye wondered just how the Precursors could have missed so much valuable stuff in their own technology, then remembered that they had been made in a game, so obviously logic was not a strong component there. She constantly found that, while their technology was impressive, there were so many applications that obviously hadn't been used for the sole reason that they initially existed in a game.

Then she recalled that something had to have merged the game and reality, so she stopped thinking about it as she didn't want to incidentally piss off any cosmic entities.

As soon as the millionth Fleet Ship was released from its docking berth, the Colonels sent a request to disperse probes into the galaxy.

Despite the fact she was leery of it, she allowed them to do it, her focus on the literally million ships that were just floating around in the Home System. They all possessed warp drives and thus could near-instantly travel from their current locations into the galaxy itself, so keeping them there was best really. All at once, the probes opened wormholes into pre-selected locations across the galaxy and travelled there, then opened countless wormholes each and sent their probes through. Almost immediately an overwhelming number of unidentified contacts were detected, and so she stepped in directly, observing the hastily-created virtual models of what had been detected.

Thankfully, they were unidentified, which meant there weren't any Avengers or Omegas or Aestreus craft, nothing recognised, so it was a small mercy. She flicked through the first few dozen models, not recognising any, before she came across one that tickled her mind slightly. It was...very slope-based and had a big hole in the middle. Not from battle damage, the ship was literally designed with a giant oval-shaped hole in the middle of it.

After a minute of trying to directly recall it, she gave up and started an image comparison search, comparing the model to what her memory banks recalled, and quickly got a hit. It was an 'Ahlatania-class Dreadnought' apparently, an Asari Republic ship. That meant Mass Effect...which meant Reapers. Suddenly, she found herself rather...well, nervous but also excited.

The Reapers were...well, they themselves weren't scum, only the Leviathans who made them were scum, they were just doing what they were programmed to do. If she programmed a program to delete any new files made on her computer, she couldn't get angry at the program for deleting those files. She would still eradicate them because they were utterly disgusting to her, but she wouldn't get angry at them.

No, that anger would be focused entirely on the Leviathans.

"Okay, this shit makes no fucking sense."

Glaring at the small glob of Element Zero floating in front of her, Skye rubbed her forehead. It had taken a very short period of time for the Colonels to discover the material, and an even shorter time to freak out about it as she gave them everything she knew about 'Eezo', since by all accounts it didn't make sense. The positive and negative current thing was pretty easy to solve, since all it took was to create a circuit and have the Eezo channel either type of current through itself, with moving parts allowing the Eezo to always stay in the way of the correct current.

But being able to reduce mass and then remove the Eezo and have the mass retain its energy broke conservation of energy in an unbelievably big way, and she possessed technology that literally shoved its fist up time's ass and stole alternate versions of material from it as easily as taking lunch money from a toddler. If she made a block of metal weighing one ton weigh a gram and then sent it flying and removed the Eezo reducing its mass, it would still move the same as it had when it weighed a gram, meaning if she lifted it up at one gram and dropped it at one ton, she could harvest the extra energy for literally limitless power.

The Colonels had a fucking field day with the stuff, experimenting with all the different uses for the stuff. They didn't just use decreasing mass, they also increased it. By doing so, they were able to ram one Fleet-ship through another, in simulation obviously, and have the ramming ship take no damage whilst the other ship was ripped in half. The real kicker was that after some analysis, nanites were actually able to form Element Zero, including in the Home System once it had been analysed, proving that it even worked outside of the universe of origin.

Very quickly they started to mess around with the stuff, creating tiny little perpetual energy generators that were nigh-undetectable, and integrated them into Gil-E's, making them completely invisible to even commander-level sensors, yet generating more than enough energy to operate and connect to the quantum network. They were literally the perfect little assassin dogs now. And that wasn't all, they put those generators into practically everything, from the smallest Dox and nanite to the colossal Fleet-ships. Being able to reduce mass and increase speed drastically, then increase mass and smash apart an enemy or take a full broadside with negligible effect was incredible.

While they did that, Skye was focused more on the people. Earth had already been found, and as it turned out, they had already activated the Charon Relay and begun colonizing other worlds. However, the first contact war had yet to happen, so that was good. The problem was that she wasn't actually sure which of the countless systems and worlds was the Shanxi system, so she couldn't even stop them there.

She was debating the pros and cons of jumping a Fleet-ship into a system they were travelling towards and having them 'discover' her. The benefits would be that they would be the ones discovering her, so it would seem at least a little less likely that she was actually looking for them. But on the other hand, her ships didn't use Mass Relays, and had no idea how to even do it.

Assigning the Colonels that task quickly saw a probe being sent over, which began trying to interface with the relay. The probe eventually, after some trial and error, managed to interface with the relay and got a query on the total unlightened mass of the ship. Sending that back saw the relay activate, and the probe got sent through in short order, hurtling through the generated corridor without time dilation.

If the Colonels could blue-screen from physics being bent over and spanked, they probably would have crashed years ago.

Shorter and shittier, I know, but it's my birthday (When I wrote this, it's long-since gone xD) and I honestly can't be bothered to make this longer, sawwy.

I wanted to get this uploaded today anyway, so here you go ^.^ And yeah, Mass Effect won the poll from ages ago by a long shot, so here we are. Sorry if the Colonels feel a bit cheaty, but, well, I had a choice between overpowered and cheaty, or more normal but utterly illogical. With so much time and so many resources, having them not be so powerful would genuinely be illogical, at least in my eyes.

Well, hope you enjoyed this garbage chapter =D