Gates of War - Chapter 6 (Commander SI - Multiverse)

CID: Day 34

Three days had gone by since my little battle in the skies, I had built up over a dozen orbital fabbers and hit the “reclaim” button on the space gun, and sent a few over to the farthest planet in the solar system.

The laser satellites were a bit harder to deal with, but fortunately the orbital fabbers possessed their own version of sensor jamming. While units may not be able to hide indefinitely from a fellow commander, especially once a Commander has a Radar network setup using hyper bands, these satellites hadn’t been given that kind of capability. Not that they weren’t impressive in themselves though. They were quite the flashlights. I learned however, to my chagrin, that the Avengers didn’t really have anything to worry about. The scout planes were easily destroyed because...they were just that weak. Avengers? They could have tanked a full powered blast with a five second duration before the armor was compromised, and then another five seconds to do the Avenger in. Ten seconds was forever in a battle. So instead of destroying the satellites, I merely took control of them and kept them for my own uses, such as looking down on the world.

Speaking of world, I learned something about this one...

The data I had been able to retrieve from the space platform, and had been going over was...interesting, and it made me take a bit of pause considering who made the thing.

Terran Federation Space Forces.

There was little data to go with on the primary data drive, aside from the times these things were used, and when it was made. The one thing that brought concern however was the fact that the platform was made to detect and eliminate anything that used electrical power. When the platform detected an increase in electromagnetic energy, it would look for the source, and then bombard the hell out of it, using the laser satellites primarily, or do it itself if it was a big enough source. Once dealt with, it would then scan the planet for anything else that met its scrutiny, and then killed it, before shutting back down.

So, basically, I tripped it when it detected my planes. If this were a world like my own, the plane would haven’t even been noticed as it blended in. In a world where electricity wasn’t even discovered yet? Even all the stealth I had couldn’t block it the planes from being seen, when it stood out like a flare in the dark. I was fortunate that the lasers, while they had their own sensors, were slaved to the orbital’s sensors for data, otherwise I’m fairly certain they would have fired upon my base after the umbrella unleashed so much energy fire. They couldn’t rely on thermographic data to track the Avenger’s as they traveled to the platform either since jamming was in effect on top of small heat signatures. Once they were upon the platform however, the platform used its own defenses and left the lasers alone. Whoever programmed it to not use the laser/missile satellites even when enemies were close to the platform was either very arrogant, or stupid.

Of a greater concern was the purpose of the defense system. While I didn’t have all the data, apparently the purpose of the platform was preventing humanity from “ascending”. It was purposefully keeping this world at their current level of development. This was especially telling since the platform had existed for a little over 800 years. So as far as I knew, the TFSF had for some reasondecided to keep mankind in medieval stasis on this world.

I didn’t know whether to give them the benefit of the doubt, or to get pissed off at that. I decided to keep a cool head because I had no real answer to their reasoning. The only source that could provide one was the signal that was continually pinging from Not-Vatican. With my reclamation of the platform, I had deduced from its records the proper codes, protocols, and frequencies to communicate with the system there.

So, I needed to connect with it, and was about to do just that with the large Radar Satellite I had built a few hours ago.

With the ability to make satellites and orbital factories within my capabilities, I no longer needed to actually make spy planes, and risk waking something else up. Nor did I want them to actually get noticed by the locals, as it appeared the battle made quite a show in the sky and got a lot of people going into the churches. What that meant for the society down there, I had no idea, but I’ll find out soon enough.

Within a few hours, the satellite had taken a position over the city, and began to connect the signal to me. I inputted the proper codes and dove into the system, and immediately split my attention ten thousand times over, looking over bit of piece of data to be had in the system and making it my own. Particularly anything that could tell me of the events that led to the creation of the system.

I got what I wanted after about twenty minutes, or 4.96 weeks given all the lines of thought.

I was...I had to open about nineteen more anger lines of thought just for the bleed out, as I learned the truth of not only the platform, but of my situation.

I had no proof before that ROB had in fact been involved one way or the other of my becoming a commander, though it was on the top of the list of candidate reasons for my being here. It was more or less confirmed just now. Not only was I a Commander from Planetary Annihilation, but I was in another equally fictional universe.

Said universe was the Safehold Series by David Weber.

All the data I could ever need to know was there. From Operation Ark, to Eric Langhorne’s creation of a world theocracy that I knew existed even to this time, to the purposeful prevention of innovation to prevent mankind from being detected by Gbaba (Juh-Bah-Buh), who were responsible of course for going all Minbari on them and killing humanity no matter where they hid themselves, and of course the burning of Earth.

I opened 10,000 lines of thought and reviewed every bit of data for an hour, or 416.6 days collectively with all the lines. I had learned everything I needed to know about Langhorne and his plans and most of what came after. I had raged and thundered, but it took pause as I began reviewing the Gbaba, and what led up to the events that finished with Safehold.

I learned about the enemy...the Gbaba...of how it all started. Their tactics, their technology, the combat footage of action against them. Then I watched as they fought and beat back the Earth Defense Forces on every planet they burned. However, nothing could have prepared me for Earth.

I had spent a few ‘months’ reviewing the footage on the “Fall of Earth”. I watched as the Gbaba threw hundreds of thousands of ships against the tens of thousands of Earth’s military forces. They were brave, staunch, and fought to the last. Among civilian and military alike, there were many heroes. So many. The doctor who was trying to save her patients even as the hospital burned around her. The Police Officer who rammed his patrol vehicle through buildings to render aid to those fighting the invaders. The injured captain who single handedly piloted his dying ship, and rammed it into a Gbaba destroyer to buy the escaping civilian ships time to jump to hyperspace. The twelve-year-old boy who used his older sister’s exo-frame to carry his little brother away from thier burning suburb. Each worthy of ballad and song, and enough of them to be sung for hundreds of years without pause. If I could, I would have wept.

I watched particularly as my homeland, Alaska, was burned out of existence. I had some footage on the ground there from Anchorage, which had increased in size by ten times since my era, and was now the state capital. I watched as the Gbaba ships positioned themselves over the state, and fired their RKVs en masse. Thousands of penetrators slammed into the ground, creating explosions equivalent to nuclear weapons. With such force exerted upon the land mass, the portions of the Ring of Fire nearest to the state erupted almost immediately, coupled with massive earthquakes.

One calamity after another. It all grew until a pair of massive explosions of biblical proportions were set off. Both of the Caldera volcanoes in Alaska, Mt. Katmai, and Mt. Aniakchak, asleep for ages, awoke violently. They exploded and sent immense amounts of ash into the atmosphere, blocking the sky from view entirely. All lines on the ground were lost a few minutes after as pyroclastic clouds rushed from hundreds of vents created by these resurrected holes in the earth. Forests erupted into flame, before becoming engulfed by gray clouds, and the urban areas soon followed. Little was needed to be said as to the final fate of the land and those who manage to last to that moment before the footage was cut.

All the burning rage had petered out of me, and was replaced with a cold hatred. Had I not seen it all up to this point, I would have debated whether pursuing the Gbaba was worth doing at all, despite the knowledge of what they had done. Having seen it all in vivid detail, in sound, picture, text, and motion...it was worth it.

I took a moment to set the computer system in the church system to safe mode, allowing it all to appear normal to anyone of the Four who would walk in at some point.

Pulling out, I focused and worked out a plan. I now had a course, and a cause. I would see it through. I would take a page out of the God Emperor’s hand book and build up my forces, and when the time was right, thrust out into the universe. I would enact a crusade against the Gbaba. Mankind survived in order to eventually go back to the stars and perhaps strike back at the Gbaba. I will bear this burden for them, and deliver our Vengeance.

With that course set...reviewed my plan.

Operation “Growing Storm”

1. Gather: Scout the planet for all remaining caches of technology left behind by the Operation Arkrunner.
2. Rescue (Optional): Search for Nimue Alban’s Cave. Located in the Mountains of Light. Take everything that isn’t nailed down, and then the stuff that is nailed down, then make a choice. Uplift humanity with her help, leave her asleep, or wake her to join me on my Crusade.
3. Leave Planet: Head for the outermost planet of the solar system, and do a Commander thing.
4. Ship Salvage: Find the three ships hidden in the Solar System’s Asteroid Field. Take them apart for what’s useful, and then make my own ships.
5. Fleet/System Build: Build up a “HOLY SHIT” huge fleet. Also Fortify the system to the point where the Sol system from 40k would go, “Aww, lookit you. Trying to be impenetrable. So cute. Keep it up and when you grow up, you’ll be imposing and nightmare inducing like ME!”

Okay...now I know I’m a little nuts. I just anthropomorphized a solar system...which I’m now thinking as a MILF...

Aaaaaaanywaaaays...That operation will be promptly followed by…

Operation “Swinging Pendulum”

1. Scout / Build: Take a fleet of ships out and map the galactic sector out, searching for any remnants of humanity that may have somehow escaped from the Gbaba, as well as search for any and all Gbaba forces. Along the way build a shit ton of bases, with enough defenses to make even a Zentraedi Fleet look like it won’t be enough.
2. Network: Use the Teleporter system to connect the various base systems together in order to create a constant supply chain to Safehold, and the various other bases with ship building capabilities, which in time will be ALL OF THEM.
3. Reclamation: Seek out and Take Back the Solar System. This system above all else. All other systems are to be sought out for remnants, but otherwise claimed as  needed for the network. Also set up memorials for the fallen along the way, if any are found.
4. Wolfpack: Begin entering in last known Gbaba controlled space, and utilize hit and run missions, for the purpose of taking their shit and making it mine, and reconnaissance.
5. Endwar: Begin full scale war upon Gbaba, until they surrender completely and unconditionally, or they are no more.

All I can say is that it was a damned good thing I took the time to decompress the packet files back on Pillar, and fiddled with the design programs, and unlocked all the of the templates my unit came equipped with. It gave me a lot of leeway in knowing what designs worked, and more importantly as to why they did.

When it came to aircraft...I realized I had all the bases covered to begin with. I had heavy and light craft. I had interceptors, attack, bombers, gunships, transports, Aerospace, and reconnaissance covered. The fabricators added a new dimension to air superiority that lacked in the current US military arsenal, to put it mildly. So, while I could make units different from what I had already, I didn’t feel it was necessary considering all the areas they covered.

The only thing I didn’t have was a multi-role fighter craft that could do space/air/ground attacks in one package. While technically all my aircraft were capable of doing both air and ground attacks, all of them were optimized for their purpose. A Kestrel could engage in air-to-air combat, but it would never match a Hummingbird, and a Hummingbird lacked the range and power of a Phoenix despite both being interceptors.

So, I decided to follow an old axiom. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

That said, the only thing I was actually lacking were spacecraft designs in the ship category. The only designs I could call ships were the Omega and Helios designs, and only Omega was actually a ship. It wasn’t even that good of a ship either. I will give it a break however, since it was primarily made for system defense, and orbital operations. Not deep space missions. It’s basically an orbital artillery unit that can shoot anything, and in that regard, it does its job extremely well.

So, I had to design some new spacecraft soon. I made the decision to wait until I found those three Ark-Finder ships first though, since they were actual warships, with actual Hyperspace FTL drives, and a variety of other things I would need. They would primarily act as a springboard for my own designs.

So, in addition to reading everything I had from the Church Computer, as well as my own Progenitor files, I had my fabbers go about removing everything I had built. Within the next few hours I will have left nothing behind anywhere on Safehold, save for Armageddon Reef where I left a single Teleporter surrounded by defenses to prevent entry.

I snorted. As if anyone on this world wanted to anger their god by entering where “Evil had been felled”.

So, this was my first day. Reclaiming the Orbital Platform, learning about history, and then enacting a plan. The other thing I had done was go over to the Mountains of Light to the far north and scan for any advanced structures hidden underground. Specifically, around or about the largest mountain on the planet. It didn’t take me long to find Nimue’s cave.

It was amazing to me how well it was all preserved, but then again it was preserved via nitrogen atmosphere. The Tactical AI that kept things together, OWL as it was called, had tried to enact security measures, but I was simply faster. In addition to the prodigious processing capabilities of Commanders in general, the fact I could attack the system with a thousand lines of thought, nanomachines with their own processing power, and more, thus having a hundreds of thousands of attackers hitting it instead of just one, had completely overwhelmed the poor thing.

OWL when it came down to it was actually a simple AI, practically a VI really, and it just wasn’t up to task to fight me off, despite being incredibly capable compared to the super computers from my old life. After reworking and repairing the damage I did, I put OWL back together and he was working like he always had.

As for Nimue...I debated myself on waking her up. I wasn’t sure how she’d react to me, let alone anything else. However, since this wasn’t the “real” Nimue, but rather a digital copy of her, I decided to simply absorb her Pica, and her, into my memory. Looking at her coding now, it was impressively complicated, but not compared to my own, let alone a non-ROBed commander. So, for the time being, I would leave her in my memory in a special file for her, with a reminder placed into the file to alert me of her existence in case I forget.

The rest of the place, otherwise, wasn’t too impressive, but it did give me an idea of what the Federation was capable of. I took the three APCs, the 747 sized Assault Shuttle and its weapon systems, the fabricator in the largest chamber which was a wooden club compared to my lightsaber, the medical facility with nanite treatment systems, the SNARCs (which I wanted), and Skimmers (which I also wanted), along with the true treasure of the entire facility. Three data cores, containing the written works of...pretty much everything this universe's humanity could squeeze into this small hole in the ground.

It contained the equivalent of the Library of Congress from my own 2021, which compared to the total knowledge of 25th century humanity, was not a lot. It was still a wealth of information that would take me weeks to go through entirely, even with my maximum lines of thought going at the highest processing speeds. Time I will spend doing as soon as I head off planet. From what little I skimmed through however, there was enough practical data and knowledge in there to restart humanity all the way up to the 24th century.

I needed those ships in the belt though. Knowledge is one thing, but without the actual things for me to look over, I would be going at this the hard way. I prefer to have it easier if I can.

Once I had everything, I needed from the place...there was little else for me to do but simply absorb and remove everything that was artificial, and fill the void with rock and iron, making it seem like it was never there.

With that, my first day on this world was done.

On the second day, the orbital fabbers I sent to the farthest planet had reached their destination, and began building a Teleporter there, followed by a few dozen orbital construction yards. The planet was a dustball with zero atmosphere. Like Earth’s moon, only browner. In fact, that’s the name I gave it, Dustball. The locals weren’t even aware of it yet due to a lack of telescopes powerful enough to look into space. In fact, from what little I could get from the locals, they think it’s actually a distant star. One named Orillias. Which was an angel under an angel under the founding fuckhead Langhorne. So no on that name.

Soon enough the gate was connected to the one here on Safehold, and it was used it to transport all my ground and air fabbers over. They then began building up my base of operations, starting with resource gathering. One day later and a good portion of the planet had been covered with metal extractors, feeding not only my insatiable need for raw materials to make more stuff, but also to feed my ever-needy forces that used missiles and bullets. As for power, while I did make entire complexes full of advanced energy plants, providing more energy than I could ever possibly need personally, I focused more on fabricating solar arrays in Dustball’s orbit.

Each one provided a ton of energy, and didn’t take up space on the ground, which I needed for more important things. What those were, I have yet to determine. Speaking of space, I pretty much owned it now with the dozens of laser and railgun satellites I was placing in orbit. With the energy production of the solar arrays, my production needs were more than fulfilled at the moment.

Especially with the half dozen energy and metal storage complexes I had begun constructing all across the planet. Speaking of metal, despite having all of the thousands of metal extractors all over the planet, my main focus for metal extraction came primarily from the Jigs over fourth planet of the system, a purple and beige gas giant that had somewhere around two dozen moons. The dozens of orbital fabbers I had made in the last day that weren’t doing anything were sent over to create Jigs, along with more Orbital Construction Yards for future use, and defense creation.

Alongside all of the buildup and transfer to Dustball, I looked over the toys I had gotten from Nimue’s cave. The PICA, and the SNARCs were my main focus given what they were for and able to do. PICA, or Personality Integrated Cybernetic Avatar was a real prize for me.

The big thing about Nimue’s PICA was it was state of the art. Literally the best money can buy, courtesy of Nimue’s absurdly wealthy dad. It more or less was an artificial human when it came down to it. The eyes were the finest artificial eyes the Federation’s technology could build, faithfully mimicking the auto responses of the human “wetware” they’d been built to emulate. For those with serious mobility problems not even modern medicine could correct, they’d been something like the ultimate in prosthetics. For all intents and purposes, a PICA was a highly advanced robotic vehicle, specifically designed to allow human beings to do dangerous things, including extreme sports activities, without actually physically endangering themselves in the process.

It wasn’t a bad idea to be honest. It would allow people to have actual adventures...so to speak.

First-generation PICAs had been like something out of the 1950s. They were, as Nimue had said “about as aesthetically advanced as one of the utilitarian, tentacle-limbed, floating-oil-drums-on-counter-grav, service ’bots used by sanitation departments throughout the Federation”.

But, by the time the Federation had been destroyed by the Gbaba, they became fully articulated, full-sensory-interface, and physically perfect copies of whoever was using them.

In other words, the ultimate LARP tool.

Hell, they looked human inside as well. The “muscles” were constructed of advanced composites, enormously powerful but exactly duplicating the natural human musculature. Their skeletal structure duplicated the human skeleton, but, again, was many times stronger, and their hollow bones were used for molecular circuitry and power transmission. And a final-generation PICA’s molycirc “brain”, located in the torso, was almost half the size of an actual human brain. It was large by federation standards when it came to computers, but it needed to be, for although a PICA’s “nerve” impulses moved literally at light speed—somewhere around a hundred times as fast as the chemically transmitted impulses of the human body—matching the interconnectivity of the human brain required the equivalent of a data bus literally trillions of bits wide.

It was nothing compared to the “brain” and capabilities of a Progenitor Commander unit, as everything a Commander could do if pushed were literally a million times greater at its extreme. Right now, I was keeping my own capabilities low because I was...somewhat still reeling from the fact I was a FUCKING robot now. I would let it go soon enough, especially as I absorb the library data, and start being an actual commander. In other words, Overpowered.

Going back to the PICA, one would wonder why the Terran Defense Forces didn’t just use the hell out of the PICA units for unlimited soldiers. Well...there were limits for them.

A PICA could be directly neurally linked to the individual for whom it had been built, but the sheer bandwidth required limited the linkage to relatively short ranges. And any PICA was also hardwired to prevent any other individual from ever linking with it. That was a specific legal requirement, designed to guarantee that no one else could ever operate it, since the individual operating a PICA was legally responsible for any actions committed by that PICA. Eventually, advances in cybernetics had finally reached the level of approximating the human brain’s capabilities. They didn’t do it exactly the same way, of course. Despite all the advances, no computer yet designed could fully match the brain’s interconnections. Score one for the Progenitors.

Providing the memory storage of a human brain had been no great challenge for molecular circuitry; providing the necessary “thinking” ability had required the development of energy-state CPUs so that sheer computational and processing speed had finally been able to compensate. A PICA’s “brain” might be designed around completely different constraints, but the end results were effectively indistinguishable from the original human model…even from the inside.

That capability had made the remote operation of a PICA possible at last. A last-generation PICA’s owner could actually load a complete electronic analogue of their personality and memories into the PICA in order to take it into potentially dangerous environments outside the direct neural linkage’s limited transmission range.

The analogue could operate the PICA, without worrying about the risk to the owner’s physical body, and when the PICA returned, its memories and experiences could be uploaded to the owner as his own memories. There’d been some concern, when that capability came along, about possible “rogue PICAs” running amok under personality analogues which declined to be erased. Which was why the law required that any downloaded personality would be automatically erased within an absolute maximum of two hundred forty hours from the moment of the host PICA’s activation under an analogue’s control.

Long story short, they didn’t want to deal with the moral implications of making a “person” that was not the original, just to send them to die. Slavery, etc., yadda yadda, Cyberpunk dystopia.

Regardless of their reasons for not using it, the PICA was as “real” a robot as the Federation was able to make, and now it was mine.

While it was within my capability to make such a thing myself, having one in my database which can be improved with progenitor versions of the tech was just easier. It would also allow me to have myself a “body” outside of the Commander, plus a variety of other things such as infiltrators, spies, and robot infantry on the human scale that was damned near actual human. On the nicer side, it was a potential means of healing people, providing new leases on life, and of course giving the likes of Nimue and Owl their own bodies in which to live. I would have to push the technology a little bit to allow actual reproduction in male and female models for those who wish to have kids. Coming up with the genetics would be a bit of a task, but nothing I or a dedicated geneticist couldn’t figure out.

The SNARCs and the Recon Skimmer were the other pieces of tech I focused on. The Self-Navigating Autonomous Reconnaissance and Communication platform was a human sized spy drone with state-of-the-art stealth and intelligence gathering systems. The Skimmer was simply a larger version that could be manned. Truth be told, there wasn’t anything either device had that I already didn’t have or could make. The Smart-Skin on the fuselage of both craft was useful as it was a more effective design than what the Progenitors utilized at the basic level. If I had pushed for full stealth capabilities, then I could make my units invisible to the naked eye with armor plating that shifted colors to appear like they weren’t there. It would cost a bit more metal to make, about 20% on average on top of the standard base unit cost, but I could have it.

The Smart-Skin however was cheaper, and better comparatively due to the low cost. While it wasn’t as mind bending as what I could do if I pushed for it, the Smart-Skin stealth capabilities increased unit cost by only 1% compared to the 20% of the full visual stealth armor.

Why had the game not utilized invisible units if I had this capability? Because Commanders can see through that shit. If the TDF were to send a Smart-Skin equipped skimmer with a nuke inside to blow me up, I would have seen it anyways as Commanders have the best sensor systems of any unit ever. Adding a Radar tower not only amplifies the range, but also allows my other units to take advantage of it. It helps that the advanced radar can do it even when I’m not there to help out.

The toy I really wanted from the Skimmer however, was the tractor beam.

While the Progenitors had every toy you could imagine, that was a long time ago. Frankly, I was working with only the bare minimum of equipment and designs at my disposal. Like in Total Annihilation, the galaxy was burned and entire planets grinded down to the outer core in order to fuel the manufacturing of endless war machines, in an endless war that lost not only entire world's, species both advanced and primitive, but also a great many bits of technology. Now all I had were templates to get the job done. Hence why, gamewise, the commanders had to claim technology as they went along.

Because of this loss, I couldn’t do much beyond designing new units with technology I already had, as well as improving what I had to the best it could be. Like with the lasers.

The tractor beam was one of many first steps to increasing my tech base beyond what the basic and advanced design packets contained.

The tractor beam was pretty simple as well. It used a combination of electromagnetism to shape particles via electrons into a more solid form in order to grab a hold of something. The medium of light helps as Photons provide the means of particle envelopment. With the design in place, I set about a few hundred lines of thought to run it through a variety of simulations to see how to make it better. I could have dedicated thousands is not tens of thousands to speed up the research dramatically, but I wanted to spend those lines on the library, and focus on finding the ships.

I set my factories to build up several dozen Phoenix Fighters, which upon completion would set out to find the two or three ships the Terran Naval Forces left behind for the future descendants of this world to find. It would take a while for them to search, but with a few lines of thought dedicated to overseeing it, I had all the time I needed.

My final acts of the second day was to create ten thousand SNARCs and then set them to surveillance operations, and then to set one hundred thousand lines of thought to focus on the first library core, and set to reading. It began to stretch my mind, being in so many places at once...but I would go slow. I can handle it.