IA IA disclaimer fhtagn!
Author's Note: It's time to call in the Fleet. Oh, and smear all the council's dirt all over the extranet.
Thessia (POV: Captain Yelena Val Emerson of the ASBTV [Allied Sapient Beings Trade Vessel] Presentation)
As we arrived at Thessia from our staging point 50 light years off, I felt a bit of apprehension as to our course of action. I was travelling with 1,000 other 30 km long vessels, holds currently loaded down with video games, cartoons, movies, literature, and other cultural parapernalia. And cyberwarfare equipment. Not to mention Warp Missiles, too many Finagle-damned Warp Missiles in my opinion given that each ship carried over 200 of the things with each one being capable of rendering an entire hemisphere of the Asari home-world uninhabitable. Of course, there was also the standard 350,000 Very Light warp missiles/sensor probes used for point defense per ship, but those counted as proactive defenses rather than weapons.
Admittedly, if everything went well we'd only be doing a cultural exchange and maybe signing a trade agreement, but regardless of how things went the purpose of this mission was obvious to anyone who looked. By putting thousands of ships bigger than anything they could field right on their doorstep, we'd be telling them that messing with us would have dire consequences, even though they didn't know about the WMD applications possessed by warp drives.
The moment of truth came now, as we dropped warp 10 light minutes out from Thessia. Immediately, we sent a radio transmission identifying ourselves as being a trading mission from the ASB, using our FELs dialed down to a lower power setting and set for a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum. As we waited for light lag to let them see and hear us, I went over my reasoning for popping up where we did. First, showing up several light minutes out misled them that our drives may have problems dealing with gravity wells, which was a patent falsehood. Second it gave them a lot more breathing room than if we'd shown up in orbit without really hindering our ability to kill their world if everything went FUBAR thanks to warp missiles. That extra breathing room was important, as it made them less likely to panic and start shooting us, and despite what some may think, we weren't genocidal [censored] who killed worlds for shits and giggles. Maybe out of self-preservation, but not for shits and giggles.
25 minutes passed before we got a reply, though most of that was probably light lag. During that time, I changed the lubricant of the synthetic body I was currently wearing for a 'face to face' meeting, and simulated lunch. Sure, this body didn't need to eat besides a trickle of fusionables and the occasional chunk of raw materials for the self-repair system, but food tasted too good for me to give it up willingly. I was just finishing up the desert course (a sweet & spicy pudding based on a fruit Dusty had invented before his untimely demise) when the alert that we had received a reply came in. Without further adieu, I cancelled that simulation and switched to the Command Center shared VR. Settling into the command seat, I ordered "Set us to maximum dilation factor, we're going to need a lot of extra time to think. Also, I missed what the aliens said, please play it back."
My communications officer obliged, and I heard the Asari transmission "ASB trading fleet, We are willing to engage in trade with you. There will be no need for you to approach Thessia further, we will come to you. We don't have any docking facilities big enough for your ships anyway." That was fine for me, still I ordered a Very Dangerous Array of Very Light warp missiles to be deployed out to a range of 5 light minutes. If they tried to perform a super-luminal attack on us, we'd be able to intercept them before they got anywhere close. I then ordered a return transmission of "We would appreciate if you approached at slower-than-light speeds, so as not to trigger our automated defenses against inbound FTL munitions."
20 minutes later I received a return transmission of "This is acceptable. We typically use slower-than-light for in-system flights anyways, as the hassles of our FTL system make it only worth bothering with for extra-long flights, such as interstellar. Estimated arrival time is in a bit under seven and a half of your hours."
I nodded. Let's see... 7.45 hours times 8 for time compression meant I had roughly 2.5 subjective days in which I could do whatever. I decided to go for a steampunk fantasy MMORPG with the rest of the crew while we waited.
7.45 hours later
Just as I was about to finish destroying the clockwork lich's last revival engine, the alert that the Asari trade fleet would be here in 10 subjective minutes sounded. Sighing, I took one last shot with my Aetheric Accelerator, and watched the silver blast of force race out to smash the intricate construct of Mage's Brass and crystallized Mana. I then exited the sim and went took control of the WormComm operated Gynoid I would be using for face to face interactions. I dressed as I went, getting into a formal captain's uniform i had run off the fabricator while I was in the personnel rapid transit lift. A quick check to make sure that my synthskin was on right and in good condition, and out into the spectator box for the hangar I went.
The hangar doors were admittedly a weak point in the ship's armor, but a necessary one. Still, the door was 50 meters thick. The armor layer was 5 times thicker in all other locations besides the engines, weapon hard-points, and sensors. The hangar itself was 300 meters long, 80 high, and 240 wide, which fit the 150 meter long freighter they'd sent wonderfully. As they set down on the magnetized flooring (it would be no good wasting perfectly serviceable gravitons in an area they'd just get in the way most of the time), the door started to close. 20 seconds later, the door slammed shut, and standard nitrogen/oxygen breathable air was pumped in. When the atmosphere was up to 1 Bar of pressure, the lighting briefly flashed green, and the interior doors to the cargo lift unlocked. With that done, I went to the hangar bay to greet our guests.
They didn't activate the landing ramp until I came out without wearing the helmet of my vacuum suit (which I'd only bother with if I were wearing my biomorph, but whatever), though I'm not sure if that was courtesy or just them taking their sweet time to get everything set up. However, about 2 minutes after I went to stand by the landing ramp, it opened. When I'd heard that Asari looked disturbingly like baseline humans, I was a bit incredulous. Seeing them in person however, killed any doubt I had. Apparently I zoned out a bit from shock, but recovered in just 0.5 real-time seconds thanks to my virtual time compression.
The Asari in question seemed equally shocked, and took a few seconds to recover. I broke the ice by saying "This particular ship is loaded with entertainment media, we are willing to give the first shipload free as a promotional, but will need some compensation for any further sales. Worth noting is that all the electronics are black-boxed, and downloads are heavily copy protected." The leader of the Asari group made what I guessed was an affirmative gesture, and stated
"This particular vessel is loaded with [circumventing writer's block by not defining cargo], We are willing to trade these loads evenly, and then have another vessel pick up the complementary load."
At this point I also decided to warn them that "Also, our definition of black-boxed and heavily copy protected is 'if you open it without very specific authorization all the functional bits will self-immolate." That seemed to give her something of a jolt, so I reassured her that "But don't worry, those things are encased in one of the most indestructible materials it's possible to make. We build to last after all."
28 hours later, at the staging point system 50 light years away
The 'entertainment media' was successfully offloaded from 8 ships, with the rest just running off fruits from the fabricators that what we'd gotten said should be safe for the Asari to eat or other random junk we thought they might like. What we got back was scanned for reproduction in the fabricators or spawning in the rec-room virtual realities if we thought it could be useful (and any encoded information whatsoever was classified as 'useful'), before being broken down into raw matter for use in the fabricators or as fuel regardless of what it was.
However, the intimidation part of this mission was more-or-less complete, with the WormComm network informing us that the operations at Palaven, Sur'kesh, Irune, Dekuuna, Rannoch (which was more to go and ask the Geth what they actually thought of organics than intimidation), and Kahje had gone smoothly as well. Complications had, however, arisen when dealing with the Batarians. That was understandable however, given that the operation there wasn't so much intimidation as "go down to all their planets at once and forcibly liberate all their slaves."
The important bit was that everyone they'd done the 'trading' with took some of the entertainment electronics. The reason was that each unit had a minuscule WormComm in it, powered purely from the end back in the ASB's main sphere. They were also designed to be able to network with any electronics in a 100 meter radius that were wireless enabled. Put that together with them basically being a solid lump of computronium all the way through except for the WormComm, power supply, user interface (including audio, visual, and Olfactory outputs) and thermite charge, and divining their true purpose would be borderline impossible. Then there was the fact that each unit contained a volunteer cyberwarfare AI using about 95% of the available processing power from a slab of computronium several orders of magnitude greater than what was needed to run a human-level mind.
It was then that we got the message we had been waiting for: The Extranet is Ours.