Gates of War - Chapter 10 (Commander SI - Multiverse)

CID: Day 163

I watched as one of two orbital factories finished constructing one of my new projects. One of my first homemade ship designs, designated “Quiver”, was a spacecraft carrier design. It was a rather simple design, following the philosophy of the Terran Federation ships in form, but possessed an appearance of sharp angles and squared hull plating that made it definitely progenitor in origin. In other words, sharp angles on the armor, but not quite the stereotypical space brick.

A mere 100 meters in length, 22 meters wide and tall at the front, while 30 at the back. The engines utilized the powerful fusion drives that allowed the ship to accelerate to 60,000 kp/s, or just a little over 0.2c before it can’t accelerate more within a meaningful amount of time. The Hyperspace Stabilizer Ring added to those dimensions, but overall it didn’t really matter, aside from the fact that it was far more effective then the older TFDF. This was done by adding a metal alloy on the ring’s diameter that allowed the energy field produced by the engine to match wave frequencies. This allowed the ship to slip in and out of hyperspace far more easily, making misjumps far less likely to happen, and also allowed for a 20% increase in jump distance.

My optics focused on the four exit ports on the sides of the ships forward section. Taking up the prow of the ship was a rectangular shaped indentation that dipped into the hull five meters before ending with a flat panel across the whole inner surface. Across that surface were lines that appeared to be placed for appearances, much like pictures or symbols on a ship to show allegiance or unit, or history. This image was in fact something more practical, as the lines of the image were in fact molecular circuits that activated upon use of the ship’s primary function. The lines connected directly to the sides of the indentation, which was not ship plating but something else entirely.

The sides of the ship’s forward section also possessed the same indentations as the prow. There were four per side, but smaller, and more numerous, as well as extending from the ship at a 45° angle upwards for the top pair, and downwards for the bottom pair. Like the prow, they also possessed molecular circuitry for operating and powering the same thing in the Prow. Finally, that was one final indentation on the rear of the ship, center of the aft and surrounded by engines. I was leery about this last one, but if things worked as they should, the choice in design should never be an issue.

With a mental flick, the signal to activate to the ten teleportation gates on the planet was sent. These ones were not the standard gates, the stargate looking ring that allowed one to simply walk through. These were rectangular in shape, and were placed before an electromagnetic accelerator rail I placed before it. Nine of the gates possessed rails that were each five hundred feet long, each possessing ten Phoenix Aerospace fighters, and all awaiting orders.

With anticipation, I flicked another command and connected those gates to the ship. The nine rectangular indentations flare brightly before energy erupted into a bright white light, revealing the ship borne gateways for what they really were. Another command sent, and the first fighter engaged its engines before being pushed at high velocity through the terrestrial gate and out the space gate upon the prow. I grinned and cheered at the success of the concept. Two months of designing and working out the quirks and problems of the design had been well worth it.

The fighters from that terrestrial gate shifted into forward positions ready for launch, and with an order, the fighter that was launched commenced the ‘landing sequence’. It flew around until it was facing the rear of the ship. The engines were running to simulate the danger of being off course, and the fighter stayed on target, barely deviating into the engine exhaust path and passing through the gate without issue. This fighter appeared through the tenth gate that lacked a launch rail, and it flew over and landed directly behind the nine fighters it was once in front of, awaiting launch once more.

I can say with confidence that the Gate-Carrier design is a complete success!

Now I possessed a way to launch fighters in large numbers without requiring extremely large carriers, and spending too much time, energy and materials building something that merely carries them. With the two hundred orbital factories I currently have, and a construction time of fourteen hours, I could build 2,400 of these in one week as opposed to the other design that would allow me to carry sixty fighters, and require the ship to be 240 meters long at minimum, and build only 960 in that one week. Granted it’s not that big a deal right now given that I’m just in the buildup stage, but numbers matter.

On the other hand, I couldn’t just send these ships anywhere, activate them, and send fighters through. I needed some kind of gate network, or something that allowed for instant transfer without needing a gate. It was a surprise to me as I looked into the idea, and decided to look up the data the Progenitors possessed about hyperspace, and found out that the Progenitors had in fact done this themselves, and called it the Hypernode Network. Hyperspace nodes were much like a relay system, only it allowed whatever went through a gate to transfer to a far-off location without having to enter and exit a series of gateways like everything else did. If a node was tied to a gate, that would be the exit point for the first gate.

They could also change the stopping location on the fly, and even change the locations of the number of units in transit by changing the point of connection. So, they could send three hundred planes through, and after five nodes, separate that three hundred into groups of ten, and then the thirty groups into thirty different directions, each arriving on a different planet, or arriving on the same world in case one node or two were destroyed or compromised.

The progenitors did this for civilian traffic, and military traffic for quite awhile, but the war made it more or less impossible as the network was constantly destroyed, compromised, booby trapped to self-destruct after a number of units in energized form activated it. Entire invasion forces were annihilated in this manner. So, gateways and sending commanders from world to world in essentially siege warfare was the end result.

Now granted, I don’t really have to worry about these issues due to the Gbaba simply lacking the capabilities to locate, let alone compromise the Hypernode Network I was currently designing from scratch, though with an idea of where to go thanks to Progenitor data. However, there was one little problem with the concept that even the Progenitors had.

Transfer Degradation.

The further the range of the nodes from one another, the longer it took for one signal to reach another. Just like how with internet games back home, when you are playing on a server across the planet, the signal ping is really, really high. It takes time for whatever you are calling on to get sent to you.

The other half of that problem is that going through Hyperspace ain't like walking through a door when it comes to going from system to system. It’s more like stepping through a door, and falling in every direction at once for a certain time, before landing through the other door. If you go through a fall for too long, pieces of you will fly off and never come back. When nodes are close to one another, as close as lightyear distances can be, then this isn’t really an issue.

When said node is fifty light years from the connecting node?

You might have issues, such as suddenly losing the entire starboard half of your command section, and port side of your engine section, since those parts flew off too far to come back at the end of the ride. Now that’s just a ship, imagine that with the human body…

I already understood this via Battletech, but to have the understanding I now possess about actual mechanics, and the effects…

I have a healthy new respect for those spacers, and fear of misjumps. They're lucky they come out at all when they do misjump. I don’t want to deal with what happens when you don’t.

It also gave me a good reason to build that other carrier design, and design a third carrier design I was still in the midst of designing, since Titan Class carriers are not a thing in the games. I ‘glanced’ mentally at the schematic I was partly finished with. I had the final shape of the Titan Class Carrier finished, and more or less had everything I wanted in it, but I kept it undone mainly because as I continue to try things out and see what works and doesn’t, I will make changes to the design until I am satisfied.

The design was very much a flying brick, though it had very large anti-ship cannons, thousands of pin-point defense weaponry, and an incredibly powerful Fusion Furnace to provide all the power it needed to function without the energy network. While said furnace was incredibly efficient, I wanted it to actually drive the ship as well via waste heat based, plasma fusion torch. It provides enough thrust to allow the ship to reach a meaningful velocity of 0.04c, but it took around a day to accomplish this. Good enough, since I wasn’t going to throw this into a battlezone, unless absolutely necessary.

The Ship was divided by three sections. Thirty percent of the ship was engine and power systems. The middle section, took up twenty percent and provided all the command and control systems, along with resource storage for the front section. The front section which made up the final fifty percent was only three things. Fighter storage and transfer/launch system, fabrication systems for returning fighters or making new ones, and gate systems to launch those fighters out through the smaller gate-carriers, and gates to receive once the fighters returned through the gate-carriers.

Of course, if for some reason, mainly the destruction of Gate-Carriers, the gate systems cannot be used, the doors beyond the gates can open up and launch fighters like a normal carrier. The one compromise, and flaw in the design as primarily a super Gate-Carrier ship, is that there's not really a system to retrieve fighters except through the launch tubes they leave from. If the ships operate as they should, however, this situation shouldn’t ever happen. Then again, plans and the enemy...

That aside, the most important thing to know about this ship was that it was in fact a Titan, and as such was very, very, very large. To make it capable of carrying 4,500 fighters, I had to make the ship 1,620 meters long, 80 meters tall, and 200 meters wide.

I could have made this bigger...but that would require a shitton of Starfish, Orbital Fabbers, and maybe a huge ass shipyard. Anything bigger than this with my fabrication capabilities would take half a year to nearly a year to make just one. This could be made in a month with all my current assets, three if I subdivided those assets to make four of these at the same time. The same couldn’t be said for anything bigger where it jumps substantially as I increase the number being made.

When I have more than enough assets to make monstrosities the size of metal planets, or Dahak's, then I’ll see to working on that. Right now, this will do.

I glanced at the name of the design and grinned. It wasn’t a terribly clever name, but I felt it fit the theme of the Titans. I called it the “Pandora”. Inside this box was nothing but a promise of pain, suffering, and death by fire, but within it was the purpose to bring hope to those it fought to protect. I thought I was being creative when I came up with that, but then I am my only critic.

I shook myself and focused back on the task at hand. I had started construction of my other homegrown ship design at the same time as my Gate-Carrier, and was about to finish itself. It required fifteen hours to build as opposed to fourteen, allowing me to construct 2,240 per week, which was good as this ship’s purpose was simpler in purpose.

Out came a ship that was 280 meters in length, as well as 80 meters tall and wide along the entire length. Funny part to me was that only 54 meters of that length was actually ship, with the hyperspace stabilizer ring placed exactly in between that. The other 126 meters of the ship was a long-truncated octagon, with a 35 meter wide bore for the Particle Accelerator Cannon which the ship was built around.

My “Sniper” class artillery ship slowly left the dock where it was built and oriented itself towards a small asteroid, I had brought in. It was placed at the maximum effective targeting range of the weapon, approximately 5.36819375 light seconds, or exactly one million miles, and given some equipment to give off the same heat, EM, and radar silhouette signature as a Gbaba scout ship.

I gave the order, and the weapon began its charge up sequence. Electromagnetic accelerator charged up at the same time the Hydrogen atoms become ionized. The procedure took approximately ten minutes, which in battle was forever, but for a maximum charge, was nothing.

With an order, the ship fired, unleashing an incredibly bright white beam of energy towards the target. The beam was travelling 0.96c towards the helpless rock, covering the distance in 0.0015532968033037 seconds. The asteroid simply burned as the beam went through it with practically no resistance, before falling apart like a cloud of dust. The atomic bonds of the rock were simply destroyed by the overwhelming energy the beam transferred over, before causing the atoms themselves became energized to the point where they couldn’t hold together anymore, and then split apart.

Like a dust in a sawmill, the cloud that was the asteroid combusted in a spectacular display of atomic destruction before the vacuum of space retook its hold over the space it once existed.

The beam itself continued onwards for another nine million miles, the beam reducing itself from 35 meters in diameter to 25 at five million miles, 25 to 10 at eight million miles, before the particles finally burned out the energy into nothing at almost exactly ten million miles. All of this happening in the span of 1.5 centiseconds.

I would have grinned widely if I had a mouth. My artillery ship was good to go. The Gbaba really didn’t have anything to defend against this form of weaponry except electronic warfare. Jamming and spoofing wouldn’t work on me though, especially if I got eyes in the area where EM is high.

It was a minor note to me at this point, but I realized that this all happened so fast, that the human eye would only see a bright flash that their eyes could barely comprehend even existing. Fortunately, I have various charge levels for “slower” beam travel speeds so as to give viewers a “flashy” battle.

These won’t be as bright, with the human senses able to comprehend the event. Said beams wouldn’t have the ten-million-mile range, but they would take much less time to charge then ten minutes. On the other hand, this was a plus as the people of Safehold wouldn’t even notice the beam firing since it happened so quickly, so no signs of “God” from me to them today.

I looked over to the fabricators as they continued their task of producing Orbital Factories. Eventually I will have enough to produce a veritable flood of metal in space, and I will overwhelm the Gbaba. Then...get back to Pillar. Aside from Safehold, there’s very little to keep me in this universe for much longer after my Crusade is complete.

I’ll need to build that gateway the Progenitor system gave me, and that will take...time. Given the fact I am constructing a shit ton of orbital factories however, the time will come. I was designing new Space Fabrication Ships which I am naming the “Collector” Class, and a Fabrication Titan for the Interspace Gate.

I paused for a moment as I looked at the distant dot that was Safehold...and once more pondered about it. At this point, Nimue being kept as she was is not in dispute, but my other thought was. I had my Avatar unit...why not send it down there and just...have an adventure or something? It was made for that originally after all.

It wasn’t the first time I asked myself this. I’ve asked a few thousand times in fact, thanks to multi-lines of thought. Given everything I now have...wouldn’t it be within my power to have a free instance of myself? It wouldn’t have everything I have now...but isn’t that okay?

I’ve pondered this, and have been pondering it for a few weeks now, and now I’ve come to a decision. The limitations of the Avatar were fine for a few reasons. The first and most important reason is that with the reading of the third library core, reading my own data, I finally broke the mold and created Femto-circuitry.

While the Progenitors have done far better, one technology the Terran Federation had over me was to create Molecular circuitry, which was smaller than my own Nanomachines. Once I learned to make them however, and redesigned the Nanomachines to use this I had found something that made me wish I could cry.

I was able to increase nanomachine efficiency to the point where I could do more with nearly half the required machines. This decreased my build times by a whole 10%.

I was sooooooooo happy! Then I got more Happy!

I redesigned the nanomachines again, this time adding a tiny EM field generator to it. It was so small it wouldn’t amount to anything...until you added my tractor beam into the mix and the photons interacted with said EM fields and actually shaped themselves according to the shape of the bots orientation. This made it easier for the machines to assemble whatever they were fabricating as they could just move things without having to touch the particles and molecules, increasing fabrication by speed by another 15%, reducing build times by 25% overall.

I sat in my avatar that day and actually cried in joy for nearly ten minutes.

Then I had the idea of improving the brain of the Avatar with Femto-circuits to increase its data capacity and computation and analysiation capabilities. I soon realized how...insanely hard it actually was to make, even for me, the bullshit Progenitor Galaxy Siege Unit. I had to utilize thousands of lines of control over a few hundred nanomachines per line and a good month of total focus just to accomplish it. One month to create the new Avatar Brain, but it was well, wellworth the effort.

Nanomachine were little robots whose size was 10−9 meters in size, and were on the same level as Human DNA strands. Femto-circuits however were even smaller, being 10−15 in size, on the same level wavelengths of Short X-rays or long Gamma Rays. Or to put it in another way, if the Nanobot was the size of a human, the Femto-circuit is the size of a flea. The result however was a brain sized CPU that possessed enough computation and control capability to equal a Commander in only the most basic of capabilities. As a result, my Avatar was now capable of building basic progenitor structures and units on its own without any issue.

I was so proud of myself. Then I came back down and took the avatar unit I had already made and swapped brains.

I will admit however...I wanted more out of it. I wanted an Avatar unit that could do everything I could do right now. Despite the new brain however, this is the best I can make. Until I figure out how to make Femtobots, and then use them to make Zepto-Circuitry anyways.

Then the thought occurred, and I realized I could make up for the lack of data my Commander Chassis had in other ways. Using those same Femto-Circuits, I could create a Structure that basically was a giant Hard Drive that my avatar could interface with anywhere in the system it was in. It would have all the designs and data I collected as I went about my Crusade, and the Avatar could read and use it.

When I left the universe for Pillar, the data stream to it would probably stop until I re-establish a connection, but it’s a good go between until then.

I made my way over to the Throne on Dustball and created an instance for myself. My decision to have a piece of me go on an adventure, was “yes”, and so it shall be.

Looking down at myself, the Avatar stared up at me, a wordless question went between us.

You gonna be alright?

We gave the electronic equivalent of a smile. We’d be fine.

“Alright then. I’m off.” Mini-me said as my air factory finished constructing a progenitor tech-modded Skimmer. It floated over to him and lowered a ladder to its interior. With a climb and a hiss of the hatch closing, the Skimmer turned and flew over to the one gate that was connected to Safehold.

I felt the Skimmer go through and appear dead center of the continent that was Armageddon Reef. Soon it turned and began to fly to the north to an unknown final destination. With a slight amount of hesitation, I relinquished total control over the vehicle and felt my other self now operate completely on his own. I disconnected the Skimmer from my senses and granted him true freedom from myself.

It was odd...letting what was myself go...but for some reason I felt...sad. I like to let go of a beloved family member...but then who did I know better than myself?

I vocalized a sigh as I stood back up. “Welp. Back to work.”