Jump Chain Gothic 12 - BTVS 4

Part 6

Colony. Halloween World.

I'd returned to the colony that my group had set up on this world just to check up on the place. My companions and I had stepped back from managing the colony so that the locals could run the place. They'd have to once the Jump was over so I'd decided a while back to have control of the colony handed over to some of the people living in it while my group was still around to help out if needs be.

As luck would have a group of traders from another colony, who'd been let on the secret that kept this place hidden, had set up here just as I'd come for a visit with Miranda and Padme, the two companions who'd invested a lot of time and energy into the colony and wanted to make sure that it was all still going okay.

While here I met with a trader who was offering me things of value in exchange for food, ammo, and enough trade goods to go start a new life somewhere, I didn't mind offering so much because I could just replicate what this man wanted in exchange for what he had to offer, assuming that any of what he had was worth anything to me.

"Show me what you've got," I said.

I'd brought the trader into the small and simple office that I kept here at the colony, and I'd cleared as much space on the desk as I could do that he could display some of the goods he was offering. The trader wore an outfit that must have been made up from bits of the junk he'd picked up along the way. He wore some pieces of armour from different settings and an odd assortment of clothing, none of it was clean.

"This is Iron Man's helmet, from some version of the guy" I was told.

The helmet's electronic systems were all fried and since I already had access to Iron Man's tech I wouldn't have wanted it anyway. I figured that this Iron Man must have tried flying under the Red Sky, not a wise thing to do if you didn't have the right kind of shields.

"Take a look at these" requested the trader.

He took out an entire box of stuff from inside his coat, showing me that it had bigger on the inside pockets, and opened it up, and I saw that the box was also much larger on the inside. As for its contents, most of what was in there was total junk, pre-Halloween jewellery, watches and such, all worthless to me, but there were a few diamonds in the rough.

An example was a Legion of Superhero Ring, they were used by a futuristic version of the Justice League to allow members who couldn't fly under their own power to take flight. This ring was damaged, but it might be possible to repair it so I put it aside.

Another diamond in the rough was a Lawgiver which was a voice-activated machine pistol that served as the standard sidearm issued to Judges in the fictional world of the Judge Dredd comics. Each Lawgiver had a sensor on its grip that is programmed to recognize the palm-print of the authorized user registered to the weapon. If anyone else, including another Judge, attempted to use the weapon it would quickly self-destruct in the user's hand.

This information was only accessible by Senior Judges and above and was demonstrated by Judge Dredd when one of his partners was killed during an investigation. This version came from one of the comic books and didn't work, but again it was something that could be fixed up later. I had a hopefully dull decade coming up and I would need things to work on during that time.

I ran a scan using my Omni-tool on a strange prong shaped projectile that turned out to be made from metals I had no record of so I brought that to as it looked like something used in one of the Predator movies. Aside from that, there was nothing else I wanted so the trader and I began bartering. He had a few other odd bits of tech to show me, but I already access to those pieces of technology so we most discussed prices for the few things I wanted.

Once the trader had been paid I went to find Miranda and Padme, they should be done here by now.

(Line Break)

Moon Base. BTVS Verse.

While my Battlestar remained in the Halloween Universe within the Sol system, I'd come back to our moon base in this universe, so as to oversee the creation of a new vessel the Gothic Consortium Battlestar Artemis. Which would serve Padme as a ship she would use for diplomatic missions of sorts, as part of her efforts to find work for the group she'd named the Gothic Consortium.

I'd already built a small ship to use as a people carrier, but Padme had used her skills in the area of debate to convince me that building another Battlestar was a good idea. The Halloween Universe was a hostile place and since I wanted to find ways of making money, so as to buy cool stuff, it made sense to have Padme out there helping with her own ship and it wouldn't take long to build the large vessel thanks to time dilation technology. As for crew, I didn't need to find any as I could make my own.

As for the Battlestars they were the most important warships of the 12 colonies, in their native universe. They were capital ships, effectively the space equivalent of aircraft carriers, but they also combined some of the attributes of battleships. Our version of the ship was primarily meant for exploration, yet they did work as a warship if we so desired it to, and existing versions already had performed that role rather well, and with their large cargo bays, they were also well suited for moving trade goods.

The hull of the Battlestars were divided into the main hull with the bridge and propulsion systems, as well as the winged hangar bays on the port and starboard sides. Each hangar bay would be filled Viper class starfighters that I'd created special Asari pilots for, who had the genetic memories of fighter pilots, uploaded memories from others, and training on the holodeck so that these recollections become more real for them.

We also had room for some M-Ships, or would once the Battlestar was built as I would use magic to expand the internal space of the hangar bays and we would be able to keep some of the smaller craft inside capsules, so if we needed to we'd be able to send out hundreds of fighters.

As for shields, like the others, this Battlestar would have two. One that projected as a bubble and one that hugged the hull. This was important as the hull of the ship wouldn't be that well armoured as replicated metals had to be used. I didn't want to spend a lot of time feeding the Matter Furnace so I could better create armour plating for the ship. Besides this was a diplomatic vessel not meant for combat and it was hardly defenceless since it had two layers of shields.

Because of this, the design involved ways of keeping the ship out of a fight. Aside from having a hyperdrive that could reach nearby galaxies in mere hours, or even sooner if we didn't mind the extra engine maintenance, the ship had both a phase cloak and the hull hugging shield could be switched to a regular kind of cloak in case the phase cloak broke down.

Another layer of protection was the warding magic which should prevent any sort of remote viewing of the Battlestar. Meaning that it didn't show up on many kinds of scanners even when not cloaked. It would not hide the ship from those with senses like mine, like Force Users, but getting a weapon's lock on the Battlestars was not easy.

The inside of the ship would also be warded against stuff like demons, something I'd started doing to the properties I owned both in this reality and the Halloween World colony. They worked find against vampires, I'd mind-controlled one of the walking leeches in Sunnydale and tried to make it get past the wards, and it hadn't been able to, but I didn't know how effective the wards be against other demonic creatures, but they weren't a lot of work to put up so it was still worth the effort.

Unlike most ship-based energy weapon systems in the Stargate verse, which are designed to fire individual pulses of energy, the Asgard plasma beams that my ships used fired a narrow, high-intensity beam of superheated plasma. These beams are capable of overloading and penetrating even the most advanced shields and burning through the hulls of an enemy vessel with comparative ease, causing heavy damage; if the beam hits a critical area the target can be destroyed in only two to three shots. This incredible ship-to-ship weapon might be one of the most powerful and efficient my group had ever encountered.

We even had our own versions of the transphasic torpedo which were an advanced type of torpedo weapon of unprecedented destructive potential used by Starfleet. The torpedoes could be launched from standard starship-mounted torpedo launchers. A single torpedo was capable of destroying a Borg cube. This weapon technology was acquired by the crew of USS Voyager in 2378 from Admiral Kathryn Janeway of an alternate timeline.

Since we'd had phase cloaks for a while it hadn't been hard for Seven of Nine to create a torpedo that went out of phase so as to bypass defences like shields, point defences lasers, and heavy armour. These small torpedoes would de-phase inside enemy vessels before going off. Since this required the weapons to be aimed very well there was a chance that the torpedoes would fail to go off if part of them phased wrong, and got stuck in a bulkhead or something like that. So they would be fired in pairs so that at least one of them would denote and the explosive payload would destroy a disabled torpedo as well so as to keep the tech out of other people's hands.

"Having such a heavily armed ship for diplomacy sends the wrong message" Padme stated as she joined me in looking over the designs, which had been improved upon since my Battlestar was built "Does it really need so much firepower or the stealth technology?".

Perhaps not, but it was much easier to copy and then improve upon the existing Battlestars than design a new model. It saved a lot of time.

"We can remove some of the weapons," I said to Padme "but you'll need the defences, it's a dangerous universe out there".

She'd lived on Halloween Earth so she knew what I was talking about and while the ship might not need torpedoes it should keep its plasma cannons.

"Very well" she agreed.

While she spoke some more about what a diplomatic ship should have I only partly listened as I was already coming up with some ideas for further improvements to the Battlestars.

(Line Break)

Phobos. Halloween Universe.

I had no desire to go to the Mars of this universe, as while much calmer than it used to be, it was still a world of war with many kinds Martian Tripods going up against Titan Legions of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and other things that would destroy me without pause.

Unlike Earth, the red planet had no oceans so nearly every square inch of its surface could be fought over and had been since the start of this crazy universe. My probes let me know that it was likely that a few of the human factions who would come out on top, once the dust settled, and if they didn't turn on each other Mars could become a major player in this messed-up galaxy.

Since the Adeptus Mechanicus had ships you'd think that they'd simply have wiped out their foes from above, but they hadn't, this was for two reasons. The first involved plenty of the Martian factions having energy shields of some sort to protect themselves with. The second reason was that the Adeptus Mechanicus considered Mars to be holy and as such, they didn't want to blow more of it up than they had to. Hence the long ground war fought with very cool war machines.

The single moon of Mars, the other called Deimos had vanished, was more peaceful than the planet they orbited, or at least they were now. By the looks of things here that hadn't always been the case, and the group I'd brought with me, which was made up of Triss, Veronica, Faith and Valkyrie, all of us dressed in power armour, examined this base it became clear to me what had happened here.

It was clear that some version of the demons from the Doom games had been here. Mars itself was demon free as far as I knew, either due to the lack of any portals to that version of Hell, or because the fighting factions on that world had driven them off and then gone back to fighting each other. In this chaotic universe either could be the case.

According to my files, Deimos was used to store nuclear waste and is also the home of teleportation experimentation with Phobos. At some point, after the Halloween Spell made this place, or maybe during, something had gone wrong, Deimos vanished, and the Phobos base I stood in now was attacked by an unknown force, that I knew to be demons.

"No light or heat" I heard Verconia say "But the gravity is normal and if it wasn't so cold we could even breathe the air here".

With Cortana's aid, it wasn't much work to get the systems up and running, and while we'd have to stay in our Iron Monger suits for a while, as it was still too cold, at least now we could look around and check out the computers. The systems here were decades ahead of what had been available on my Earth when I started Jump Chain, but when compared to the computers I was used to working with they were rather simple.

According to the records, events here at the start had been much like in the game in that some troopers had been sent here when the alarms went off and had found the human personnel there slain or transformed into some sort of zombies. The complex had come under the command of a Cyberdemon and its minions, who were gradually transforming the advanced facilities built there by humans into a grim bastion of great evil.

In the game a single marine was somehow able to battle his way to the Cyberdemon's lair at the Tower of Babel, and destroyed its infernal master, avenging the loss of human life on the moon station, in this universe something else had happened. Arguably even cooler.

The Grey Knights, a Chapter of Space Marines specifically tasked with combating the dangerous daemonic entities of the Warp and all those who wield the corrupt power of the Chaos Gods, had come to this moon to cleanse it with holy fire and steel.

As the Grey Knights' fortress-monastery is based on Titan, the largest of the moons of the gas giant Saturn here in the Sol System, it made sense that they'd deal with a demonic outbreak here, and I suspected that they had something to do with why the Doom demons hadn't tried conquering Halloween Earth despite there having been at least one portal between their Hell and that planet.

Once the computer systems were fully back up and running, at least most of them, my group and I got to watch a holographic recreation that began with some people becoming possessed while lower-ranking demons began to attack everyone on the base. As expected the battle, if such a one-sided slaughter could be called that, ended up with the demons taking over the base.

Then many hours later, after the other moon had vanished and all human life was ended on this moon, the Grey Knights came, only a few squads of them, but they annihilated the demonic forces with their anti-demon weapons and amazing mental powers.

This wasn't the only base on the moon of Phobos, and it seemed likely that other squads of Grey Knights had cleansed the others. They also met with the only two non-demonic lifeforms on the whole moon, one was a human marine who somehow managed to kick some demon ass, and another guy who reminded me a lot of the Master Chief from Halo for some reason.

Rather than kill them the Grey Knight teamed up with the two Doom guys and they all went through a portal to hell, as part of a plan to close it I assumed, and while many of them returned hours later, which could have been days or weeks in Hell, closing the portal behind them, what interested me was the Grey Knight that fell when they were leaving the portal. He was the only loss the Grey Knights had while in this base and doing whatever it was that caused the portal to close, at least on this side of the portal.

"We need to find that body," I told the group.

While Faith made some quip about me normally only caring for female bodies we raced off to recover the corpse which to me wasn't as important as what the dead guy had been carrying and wearing when he'd died. Aside from the material value of his equipment, his helmet should contain more information as to what had happened here.

Once we found the body it became clear to me right away that the Grey Knight's gene-seed had been removed, and this was a dam shame as the gene-seed of the Grey Knights came from the Emperor directly rather than a Primarch, and I would have loved to study that.

While his Aegis Armour, the suits of power and Terminator armour worn by the Grey Knights that were incredibly well-crafted, anointed and inscribed with prayers and wards, ritually consecrated and psychically charged, had been badly damaged, I felt certain that any number of demon hunting organisations on Halloween Earth would trade well for it after I'd had a chance to study it.

Working in tandem with the Grey Knights' formidable psychic powers, the Aegis armour protected the wearers from the effects of the Immaterium and the Daemons it spawns. The armour's ritual blessings and psychic resonance also serve to confound the perception of any enemy, resulting in an effect called the Shrouding. The psychically charged nature of the armour allows its mere presence to induce intense terror and pain in any nearby daemons and warp spawn, also loosening their grip on the material realm.

While the armour was no longer usable and beyond my ability to repair, even my understanding of advanced technology had its limits, the helmet was intact and I cared about the data it contained because I wanted to know what happened on the other side of the portal.

Sadly for me, one of the other warriors had picked up the fallen knight's Nemies Force Weapon, which was a demon-killing tool I would have dearly loved to have inspected his Psilencers had been left behind. They were a type of psionic weapon created by an unknown Xeno race and made use of by the Grey Knights Chapter. Whether the technology was stolen or freely given to the Grey Knights is not known; all that is known is that it is unlike any weapon within the armouries of the Imperium. They function by channelling the psychic might of the user where it is not only focused but somehow amplified.

The unique design means that it lacks a triggering mechanism but instead, the wielder channels his psychic might into the containment core of the weapon, after which, focusing crystals channel the resultant energy into a refined azure energy pulse capable of destabilizing the physical form of a Daemon. While the Doom demons were not made of the same stuff as the Daemons of the Warp, if the footage was anything to go by it was deadly to them too.

"Let's find out what happened on the other side of the portal," I said as I hooked up my Omni-tool to the Grey Knight's helmet so that we could take a look at the Knight's recent mission "Should be interesting".

(Line Break)

Deimos. Hell.

In the Warhammer 40k universe, Kaldor Draigo was the Supreme Grand Master of the Grey Knights Space Marine Chapter. Despite having become lost in the Realm of Chaos within the Warp for at least a century, he was sometimes able to return to realspace to fight alongside his Battle-Brothers in the Grey Knights during particularly dangerous daemonic incursions.

While that was what had happened to him in his native verse here in the Halloween dimension his life was a different story. He'd been created by the chaos spell like so many others and while knowing that they'd been created by heretical sorcery did lead to some of the Grey Knights questioning themselves and their role, those doubts had been banished when a demonic presence had been detected on Mars even as the newly created Grey Knights began to get organised.

The Grey Knights always kept a battle-ready company of warriors on the moon called Titan should there be a threat to the Sol System from the denizens of the Warp. The demons that had appeared on both of the moons of Mars were not the spawn of the Chaos powers, but they were still demons and thus there needed to be some purging done in the name of the now absent Emperor.

So with bolter and blade in hand, he'd lead his brothers into battle once more, by the time they'd arrived at Mars one of the moons, the one the Grand Master currently stood upon, had vanished but the other could still be saved so the Knights had cleansed off all demons.

Compared to the horror of the Warp the demons that had invaded the moons of Mars were weak things, yet the Knights had shown them no mercy and knowing that they might merely be the vanguard of a larger invading army Draigo had understood that the demonic foothold in this reality needed to be purged.

Then when they'd come across the portal the Grand Master had known what they would need to do. There was no ritual site on this side of the gateway, no demons making sacrifices so as to sustain the portal, and Draigo had quickly reasoned that the gateway was powered by something on the other side.

When the Knights got to the other side of the portal they discovered that an entire moon had somehow been transported to a demon realm and was now floating in the air above a hellish landscape, which would no doubt account for the complexes on the moon being so warped by the foul powers and taken over by demons in ways that the bases on the other moon hadn't been.

"Brothers we must discover what keeps the portal open," said the Grand Master to his warriors.

Some force had to not only be sustaining the portal they'd come through but also keeping the island afloat as gravity, which seemed normal enough here, should have caused it to come crashing down to the surface of the Hell below.

The Grey Knights hadn't been granted any time before now to think much about this as they'd been busy cleaning up the bases of this moon of the demon scum that infected them. On this side of the portal, the demons had proven a greater challenge and there had been more powerful breeds as well. A few brothers had fallen in service of the Emperor, if He existed anywhere in this universe, and when their bolters had run dry the Knights had used their blades and psychic might as ways of destroying the demons.

The Grand Master's Titansword, which was a master-crafted blade an extremely potent anti-daemonic weapon, capable of badly injuring even the mightiest Greater Daemons and Daemon Princes of the Dark Gods, had destroyed many of the demonic scum that called this realm their home.

"If it is below us how will find it?" one of the Knights asked.

A few of the warriors had jump packs that should allow them to fall slowly enough so as to land safely on the ground below. The Grandmaster selected the handful of warriors who would go with him while the rest would leave this place and once the portal on the moon of Mars was closed, and he would close it, then they could return to Titan.

"Go, brothers" ordered the Grandmaster "Return to Titan and remain watchful over this system. There could be further demonic invasions in the future".

Dragio was unsure if the Grey Knights had any purpose in a galaxy that lacked the Emperor's guiding light, and they could not reach Holy Terra due to a strange barrier, but the rest of the system did contain human life which would need to be protected from the demons in future.

Before long most of the Knights were heading back to the portal while a handful of the warriors jumped from the moon and into the hell below, intending to shut down the source of the portal even at cost of their own lives.

(Line Break)

Phobos. Halloween Universe.

Once I'd gotten all the information I could from the helmet, and that was all I learned about what went on in Hell as this Grey Knight had left that moon soon after the Grand Master ordered it, I did my best to salvage the corpse of the Grey Knight while thinking about how all this explained an old mystery.

A while back I'd encountered demons from the Doom games below Area 51 and an active portal to Hell that should have been a gateway for a full-on demonic invasion. Only something had been keeping the bigger and smarter demons back, and the demons who'd been in the base hadn't done much until we threatened the portal.

Now I was thinking that the Grand Master of the Grey Knights and those that went with him must have done something to prevent a full-on invasion, like say crashing that moon of Mars that the demons had dragged into their dimension onto the surface of that Hell world. I would never know for sure, but it would explain why the demonic leaders had never invaded Halloween Earth via Area 51, because they'd all been killed by the Grandmaster of the Grey Knights.

It might even be the case that Kaldor Draigo was still in the Hell going all Doom Slayer on the locals and that was why they'd never invaded. This was cool to think about but it meant little to me as I would have no further contact with the Grey Knights, those still on Titan could be someone else's problem. They'd taken the Doom Slayer and Doom Marine with them so those two killers would likely be on Titan doing something.

"Let's fan out and loot this place for it is worth" I ordered.

There was a whole universe out there to explore and I'd spent far too much time and effort on mining for my liking so it was time to loot this place and move on to somewhere new.

I soon found something taking, a version of the Praetor Suit, which was the armoured suit worn by the Doom Slayer in Doom (2016). The suit is given to the player at the very beginning and is worn for the entirety of the game, and this had to be a version of it.

The suit was mostly dark green, silver, black and bronze in colour, with slightly lighter legs and helmet. Both the colouration and the overall design of the suit seemed to be made to resemble the original Doomguy appearance, though the Praetor Suit covered the Doom Marine's whole body, including his arms. In addition to this, the Praetor Suit also appears much more technologically advanced, with a complex visor and internal systems which allows the Doom Marine to travel to Hell and return again unharmed. In my files, this suit is described as being made from nearly impenetrable materials and may be responsible for what appears to be the Doom Marine's superhuman abilities.

In the background lore, the suit was said to have been given to the Doom Marine by an entity only referred to as "the wretch". While the demons' scriptures claim that the armour was made in hell, closer examination revealed English text and even logos for human manufactures, suggesting the armour was actually made on Earth and had no magical properties at all, or that the armour is of human origin and the Wretch made some special upgrades to it. If the later was the case I'd found out by trying to disenchant the suit, if not then it could still be suited so that I could try to use its design to improve on my existing power armour technology.

Soon I found some weapons, including some form of plasma rifle that was based on an early 21st-century high-intensity plasma gun design, it has been enhanced with something called Argent energy technology that was developed at the UAC Mars Base, which I guessed was one of the places on Mars that so many factions were fighting over.

After these enhancements, it has become standard-issue equipment for many militaries in the Doom universe it came from and had obsolete the heavy assault rifle. Its plasmoid projectiles caused damage through both kinetic and thermal energy. It had a high rate of fire, emitting small bright blue spheres of plasma.

According to the data I found on the technology, unlike previous versions of the weapon, the plasma spheres have a small blast damage effect. This can be substantially increased through the use of the weapon's modified firing mode, which was a single larger plasma orb that when emitted detonated in the air, covering the nearby area in burning napalm-like plasma for a short period of time.

The Plasma Rifle became a standard-issue among military units with the advent of Argent powered electromagnetic accelerators. From what I knew of Argent energy it wasn't something I wanted to mess about with even if I could have accessed it, still the design of the weapon would be useful because by the time I got the Warhammer Jump I would need the best weapons for my bot armies and having more designs meant more options.

Another weapon I picked up was the Gauss Cannon which was a powerful and incredibly accurate weapon that fires steel flechettes (metal spikes essentially) at extremely high velocities using a magnetized chamber. They weren't the most advanced weapons around, but the more tech I had access to the better.

While I had no time to find a physical copy of the weapon I did find the blueprints for the BFG 9000, which fired a green burst of plasma, damaging enemies near the projectile during flight and vaporising targets upon impact, as well as causing significant splash damage to enemies standing in the vicinity of the projectile's explosion.

The BFG 9000 was the most powerful weapon in the game, as it is able to kill any non-boss creature in a single direct hit, how that worked in real life I didn't know, but I could use the design for a heavy weapon in the Warhammer 40k universe.

"Boss," said Triss over the comm "I'm in the command centre of the base and if this tech is working right someone has noticed us here, and they're sending people here to met us, they might not be friendly".

There were a number of warring factions on Mars who wouldn't anyone setting up on the planet's now single moon.

"Grab what you can I'll meet up with you and we can portal out of here".

There was a whole universe out there with interesting stuff to study. No sense getting into a firefight here with someone we knew nothing about, not when we already had some really good stuff.