Logical Irrationality 6 (Patreon)

Logical Irrationality
Chapter 6

-VB-

It took me one day to set up all of the factories for bot production.

During that day, what factories were put to work started churning out Doxes and Bluehawks instead of fabricator bots, basic infantry and anti-land, air, and orbit units respectively. By the end of that same day that saw the construction of all factories, I had some three thousand doxes and one thousand bluehawks.

Oh, and one thousand Booms, but those were made as a part of a back up plan.

I didn’t bother to make any of my versions of Necrons, even though I had that technology in my grasp. Making them would require specific factories that needed too much time to make, and necron constructs took much more time to make than the simpler Made to Die Doxes and LRM on legs Bluehawks that came naturally to me as a Commander.

When the night was the deepest, I launched my attack.

I watched the futile attempts of the jaffas under whichever goa’uld that ruled this planet. They tried to huddle, they tried to break up, and they tried to hide. Nothing worked in the face of overwhelming power.

They had called in their Al’kesh to do bombing runnings, but those Al’keshs died an ignoble death when my bluehawks shot LRMs by the dozens and then hundreds. The mere five Al’keshs that came to the jaffas’ rescue blew up in the skies.

It should have been a resounding victory, but it wasn’t.

I watched from afar after having fired a missile to take out the Stargate as the goa’uld ran through it and left their jaffas to die.

The entire battle took a total of one hour and eight minutes as I hunted down everything goa’uld related.

Once the jaffas were dead, I found myself with hungry and trembling slaves, wondering if today was the day they were going to perish. I herded them on to my transports and had them brought to newly constructed bubble habitat. While they would not be joining my orphans who lived in their own habitat, I would do my best to help them.

At the same time, I cranked my operations up to complete my projects faster. The goa’uld survived, which meant that I could soon be facing a goa’uld mothership in orbit. I had no desire to sit and wait for them, not when they could just as easily land troops as they could rain down orbital strikes.

-VB-

By the end of the first week of my arrival, the planet lost its green and blue hue in favor of a slowly growing blue-tinted gunmetal gray as I built up my production facilities. At the same time, I experimented and successfully made a Necron-Commander hybrid technology for spaceships.

See, Planetary Annihilation Commanders and their technology was bullshit. The end game units of PA were these things called Titans, and the biggest of them were as big as planetoids but with distinctly non-spherical and thus engineering nightmare form.

And for reference, this small planetoid would jump and down upon a planet as its primary method of attack, causing seismic “attacks” that not only destabilize a planet’s structure but ripped and shattered anything in the same one-eighth of the planet’s surface.

The Commanders got around the standard engineering problems - like how someone would built a quadrapedal planetoid - with ridiculous structural, dimensional, and material engineering. English didn’t have the terms to describe it beyond “non-standard element metamaterial that scams the Laws of Physics like a call center scams people.” Then I went and combined that with the Necron and their own brand of physics-breaking bullshit.

What I got in the end was a material capable of self-repairing and adapting like the necrodermis but incapable of being reduced to atom like the necrodermis can be when it came in contact with enough force.

Finally, I used that material and Necron inertialess drive to create my own spaceships.

Unfortunately, I was a lazy man when it came to designing, so I stole designs of the fictional Gallente Federation spaceships from EVE Online.

My most prolific space warships were the four hundred yards long Thorax-class cruisers. Each of these cruisers were armed with twelve 600mm autocannons, two 2mm positron beam lasers, and equipped with multi-gigaton tanking energy shield generators, altered inertialess drives, and sublight thrusters capable of reaching 0.1c.

By itself, it could take on a hundred Doxes and win.

And so when the inevitable goa’uld retaliation came, I met them with a thousand Thoraxs.

-VB-

Ba’al glared at the thousand ships arrayed before him, and knew that if they were even half as powerful as a ha’tak, then he might lose.

When his governor-servant of the O’mal mining world came to him begging him for aid, he executed him for his incompetence and marshalled his ha’taks to put down what was probably an invasion of primitive civilization.

What he saw in front of him dashed that assumption.

This … was something that would require the High Council’s input.

“Retreat!”

They turned to run, and Ba’al winced as one of the five ha’taks he brought with him blew up as some kind of cyan beam of light pierced through its shield, armor, and hull.

And just as his ship jumped into hyperspace, it lurched as his flagship’s shield went down and hull got breached.

It was only thanks to his decision to arrive further away than the usual drop-ins that he survived.

He took a deep breath in. “I must contact Apophis,” he spoke as he left the bridge. “Prime, keep course and get us back home.”

“Yes, Lord Ba’al!”

Ba’al fumed at his loss as he made his way towards the long distance communication room to contact the very person he hated to see even a glimpse of. Ever since Ra died, Apophis lorded over the rest of the System Lords, and Ba’al grated against that.

The smug bastard will hold this over his head for centuries to come, but this was a bigger issue than some favor. Apophis will call upon the High Council, and the Goa’uld System Lords will put down the newcomer.

-VB-

Five days passed since then.

Ba’al considered what had happened in the past five days.

One, he lost one of the five ha’taks of his expedition fleet to the unknown newcomer.

Two, he failed to down more than a handful of the newcomer’s ships in return.

Three, he called the High Council and got a meeting scheduled, which was to take a year from today. The very act of getting the High Council scheduled gave Apophis a favor. Beyond that, he would also owe anyone who came to help favors as well. Weak favors, yes, because they would be coming in as a group and thus have to split one strong favor for many weaker ones, but each weak hook was one that would forever haunt him for years to come.

He was not going to let that happen. He needed to plan on how he was going to get them to call those favors. Perhaps he could orchestrate problems that he would “conveniently” discover and offer to help when they were too busy to take care those new problems on the spot.

Just as he was thinking about who he would “help” first, a jaffa ran into the throne room, gasping and bleeding. Ba’al stared at the jaffa.

“My lord! There were boarders-!” the jaffa reported frantically. “Milord, I’m-!”

And screamed as a blade pierced through his chest from the back and lifted him up.

Ba’al stepped back in fear as whatever killed the jaffa tossed him out of the way and showed itself to him in the narrow corridor of the ha’tak.

It was a scarab, much like the ones that decorated many of the golden walls of ha’taks.

But no scarab decorating walls and halls of goa’ulds were black with green glowing eyes. Nor as big as a man.

He didn’t even have time to scream before the scarab jumped him.

-VB-

Ramming the much bigger ha’tak had been an ingenious move on my part, even if it cost me a cruiser.

Ba’al, who I roughly recognized through the visual receptors of the canoptek scarab, would have retreated successfully without that Thorax depositing its boarders into the ha’tak itself. Fortunately for me, he died along with the rest of the jaffa aboard the ha’taks.

As it was, I discovered that Ba’al had called for help, but goa’ulds being goa’ulds, they weren’t going to help him immediately and delayed the meeting to get him the help (not the help itself) by a full year.

This was enough for me to turn my new home system into a fortress system complete with megashipyards to pump out ships even faster than I was right now.

“Sir?”

My new “fun-sized” body looked down at one of the Warhammer orphans I’d brought with me. She was a … growing girl. She would have her time soon. I was sure that she would grow into a heartbreaker with her lustrous hair, kind eyes, and heart-shaped face.

Her name was …

“Ah, yes, Pelia. What can I help you with?”

---

“... What are you doing?” Pelia asked the giant robot in charge of all of the other robots. He was a giant robot, but somehow, he made a smaller robot that looked like a person!

Well, almost like a person. He had weirds lines that on his limbs and body that looked more like space between body parts. He didn’t have a shiny skin like a robot but a fleshy skin like she did.

He was creepy.

He’s been doing nothing while his robot minions were doing all of the work!

He was suspicious.

“I’m coordinating.”

“Oh,” she muttered. “... Like how?”

“I am in every single machine you see around you. Deeper in some and less so in others. Because I am those machines, I can act through those machines. Thus when I coordinate those machines, I am moving a lot of machines at once.”

“What are you doing with them?”

“Do you remember the explosions in the sky from half a week ago?”

“Yeah! It was pretty.”

“That was me fighting people. Slavers.”

“... Oh.”

“I managed to sneak a few of my machine soldiers aboard their ships. I am now killing the slavers, turning the ship around, and piloting them home.”

“So no more slavers?”

“Just no more slavers that know about us right now.”

“Are there a lot of them? Slavers?”

“Yes,” he hissed. “Depending on how widespread they are, I may need to go into full war mode.”

“Will it… change anything here?” she asked me.

He shook his head. “No. I will ensure nothing happens here.”