Gates of War - Chapter 8 (Commander SI - Multiverse)

CID: Day 42

After two more days, more reading, finishing the second core, a bunch of experimenting, extensive commander modification, and one realization later, I had finally found the ships. Due to orbital drift over the last few centuries, the ships were found nearly opposite of where my reconnaissance had begun. The realization that allowed me to find them so much more quickly was the fact that if the Terran Forces wanted to make certain the ships would be undamaged no matter what amount of time had passed, that not only would they have to put them inside a protective shell, but in a place with almost zero gravitational drift.

In other words, they had to be in a Lagrange point. With little to no gravity effect upon an asteroid, it can stay in that spot forever and not be worried about. With this shift in strategy, and using the sensor suite of the Recon Shuttles and myself by extension, all such points were mapped and checked. It was 52 hours later that a point was surveyed and a single hunk of rock was found, with an obvious metal door on it.

It came as no surprise to me that they had been placed into an asteroid of considerable size. They had to be protected from the rigors of time while hidden in such a location somehow, and being inside of a huge chunk of rock fifty miles in diameter just made sense. Of course, I had no idea how or why the pioneers had placed the ships here instead of someplace less difficult for humanity to eventually find, until I remembered that Langhorne’s megalomania was already well known and the last thing needed was him cutting off humanity’s past completely.

Using a satellite fabber, I constructed a gate upon the asteroid and poured out a new design of fabrication vehicle when I realized where the place was. The new fabrication unit was a modification of the Skimmer I designated Starfish. Just as I replaced the piloting section and control systems with weapons and networking with the Hornet, I did so here as well but instead utilize nanolathe arms with a core.

Five arms stuck out from the unit, making it somewhat squid like in shape. Each arm possessed a nanite beamer/sprayer, coupled with three micro work arms within each of the larger arms for precision handling of objects where a tractor beam wasn’t good enough.

These units were capable of operating in almost any environment, but they were most at home in the vacuum of space as their design doesn’t make them as able in any of the other environments as the normal fabbers were, except perhaps underwater due to the way that environment operates. I felt satisfaction about that as I watched the two dozen units float about within the docking bay where the three ships were kept. They were large at 462 meters in overall length, and I appreciated the aesthetic they went for.

A long hull that wasn’t quite blocky, but enough to be pleasing to my eyes, with a ring just past the central section. Its purpose wasn’t habitation as such rings tend to be on ships, but rather to act as a sort of “stabilizer” for traversing in and out of hyperspace, and to mount large anti-ship torpedoes that were themselves 31 meters in length and armed with high yield, fusion based warheads, each with a yield of 400 megatons. A total of sixty such torpedoes were mounted on the ship, thirty six on the ring and twenty four on the hull near the stern, giving it a total yield of 25,000 megatons.

There were entire fleets of ships like this, dozens to hundreds of ships firing their torpedoes in a “Macross Missile Massacre” styled attack in order to do any damage they could before facing the Gbaba’s own superior forces. It worked often, but it was only a temporary victory as the Gbaba returned with greater numbers than before, and before the human forces could recover and rearm. Which is how most of the war was lost, unfortunately, as the Gbaba employed a tactic Progenitor Commanders often employed, and that was drowning the enemy in steel.

Doesn’t matter how big your guns are, or how elite your soldiers are, when you are outnumbered a hundred to one.

I shook myself from such thoughts as the Starfish began to scan the ships from top to bottom, thoroughly injecting nanites into the entire structure within minutes, giving me all the information on the ships I could ever need. Now I had the designs in my database, and within the computers of the ships was the data that thankfully was not corrupted on the most important thing. Gbaba combat data.

Everything I needed to fight these fuckers was mine now. I now also possessed the same for the TFDF side of the equation. All of the Terran Defense Force Ships were now mine as well, and the tactics and strategies in how to use them in combination to my own knowledge from the Library Cores and Progenitor Library I had in my head on Commander Warfare. I was now officially ready to begin my war.

“...But not just yet.” I say to myself out loud.

I wanted to do more than just take the fight to the Gbaba. I fully intend to let them know who it is that’s fighting them in time, but I first needed to do one very important thing. I needed to take the technology and make it my own. Apply it to my forces my way, and make it unique to me, and see if I can push what technology there is to its limit. Starting with my largest limitation until now.

Faster than light travel.

My Starfish began to absorb the ships into my network and more or less nanite-nom everything in the base to give me templates while I perused the scientific, physics, and engineering data on Hyperspace Travel. Several thousand lines of thought dedicated to this line allowed me to quickly learn what I needed about Hyperspace as a travel medium, and I drew parallels quickly. It was basically a “Discontinuous” drive, or a “Teleport” type Hyperdrive. Battletech and Battlestar Galactica come to mind, though this particular version was somewhere in between the two.

Like the Battletech version, this form of travel requires you to be a relative distance away from powerful gravitational forces such as the sun and various planets. Unlike Battletech, and like Galactica, the drive doesn’t require a massive recharge time, nor is it so limited that you have to be practically out of the solar system to use it.

The stabilizer-ring the ship possessed was mostly responsible for that as it allowed for easier insertion into the other dimension, and acted as a means to shape the space/time bubble that formed around the ship during transition. It didn’t necessarily need it, just as a rowboat doesn't need a rudder to turn, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier to navigate as it is moving.

Hyperspace Communications also followed the Battletech principle, using a large communication array that sends a message through hyperspace to a chosen destination, but due to the fact that this universe’s FTL was far more developed than Battletech, they of course had developed Communications far beyond what Battletech had as well. It could function like a radio and send a signal out in all directions, or it could send a tight beam transmission towards one target, and the range between the two forms of use varied.

The use of omni-directional broadcasting had an effective range of 20 light years before the signal deteriorating into nothing but static, and was detectable by any transceiver made to pick up such signals. The tight beam transmission was around 100 light years in signal range, and could just be pointed in the general direction of a given location rather than accurately needing a pinpoint shot like Comstars HPG stations.

It was fascinating. One part of me reminded that this was all ultimately a work of fiction, and thus was bullshit. Then another part said “...we’re a giant von neumann robot from an RTS game in a universe written by the creator of Honor Harrington. You have noroom to talk.”

Ultimately, the data showed that the capabilities of the Terran Federation wasn’t anywhere close to the Progenitors in capability. The use of Hyperspace to create a network for transference of resources and energy to not only myself and other fabricators, but directly to my combat units made this data utterly primitive in comparison.

The problem I realized a while ago was, I knew how it worked, but lacked the means to actually build other things to take advantage of it simply because I didn’t know how. Sure, I used Hyperspace to communicate with my own forces regardless of distance, and I knew how it worked, and how to use it, but that didn’t mean I could build them since that particular bit of data was lacking. Now I had that data, and not only could I now build a communications network and FTL drives, but I can improve them and make them work in different ways if I wished.

I felt bitter about being placed in an “Assault” Commander rather than a full builder. Then I wouldn’t have had to even bother with gaining new technologies in the first place. I could just make whatever on a whim like so many other commanders supposedly could.

Can’t have things too easy though, right Bastard?

Silence was ROB’s reply as I began to go over the other systems in the ships design, and inwardly nodded as most of the tech wasn’t anything I really needed, though the mind/computer interfacing tech with cybernetics and the human bioware was interesting and I took note on working with it in the future.

The metal materials utilized in mental/computer for allowing mental signals to be sent and received in a rate that turned the already powerful human brain into a true CPU for ship functions were simple enough for me to create with my present capabilities, and the programming needed to sift out random thoughts from the human memory to specific commands was copied, and I made a note to increase its overall capabilities for future Avatar units in case they required my level of command capability and I am not around.

Weapon systems aren’t anything I couldn’t already make, or in some cases, already am making but better. So in the end, aside from the basics of ship design that accommodates a human crew, as well as general ship building, the real things of worth were the mind/machine interface technology, the Hyperdrive and the systems to make it work, Hyperspace Communication Systems that allowed me to create my own network which will be improved when I am finished, and the supremely valuable combat data from regarding the Gbaba, their capabilities, limitations, tactics and strategies, and what works and doesn’t work against them.

Though skimming through it now...I can already tell that I am going to utterly bury them since I can do their favored tactic of outnumbering the enemy, and do it by a few orders of magnitude given enough time.

I left the Starfish to finish their task and focused on the task at hand and began the first step of my overall strategy. Look over the designs, improve them to the point of absurdity, and then make a ton of them, and then begin my Crusade.

Time is what was needed, and right now, I had plenty of it.