Kick the Sphere 1 (Battletech Celestial Forge) (Patreon)

Tags: Celestial Forge, Not RNG, Battletech, 30th century

Kick the Sphere

Chapter 1

-VB-

I had a dream.

"You know as well as I do that I do not trust you," I snapped at my Enemy. "You have done everything in your power to see me and mine bullied, attacked, maimed, and killed. Give me a reason why I shouldn't do this?"

From the center of a room where I held not just my power but the lives of billions at stake, I looked at the face of the man who has persecuted me for years.

The man didn't know how to reply. He's already tried many approaches and exhausted them all.

"Are you going to surrender?" I asked when he couldn't come up with a reply.

When he still didn't respond aside from glaring at me…

Well, I was done. Done with this piece of shit world. Done with this piece of shit universe.

"... then goodbye, shitfucker. I'm going to enjoy this."

I cut off the connection with a thought and glared at the massive screen covering the inner spherical wall of the control chamber.

There was no one but me aboard my flagship.

No one but me to bear the sins of what I was about to do.

I reached out and flipped the metaphysical cover off of the mental triggers connected to the ship's most dangerous weapon.

Not a lot of things get more dangerous than antimatter bombs.

I pushed down upon the triggers.

The ship rumbled as five hundred missiles roared out from the launchers and flew towards Earth.

And when they impacted, I watched the homeworld crack in half before shattering completely, spewing its guts everywhere.

My revenge was complete.

… I sighed as I activated the second trigger.

As one, the remaining antimatter missiles activated at once from within their holds.

As the world waited out for me, I wondered if I could go back to my meaningless old life.

As I stumbled out of my bed, I muttered grumpily to myself.

"' watched too many sci-fi shows lately…"

A quick trip to the bathroom later, I was out and about the house, preparing for another day ahead of me.

When the alarm clock shrilled its 6:30 a.m. warning,  my hand was already over it and then I was walking out of the house for another productive day.

-VB-

My day job was … shit.

Living in a frozen factory world of Vakarel within the Free Worlds League was not bad. I wasn't a peasant farmer in the Combine, at least.

My problem was that despite remembering my past life and having tried my hand at improving my new lot in life, I remained where I was as my parents had been at my birth: a lowly factory worker.

Ever since I became fifteen years old, my life has followed the following routine: wake up, eat, get to work on foot, work without lunch, leave after a twelve hour shift, return home with groceries, eat, entertain myself for an hour, and then go to sleep.

Life was hard because Vakarel was hard. A frozen world with barely any sunlight, Vakarel sat near the border between the Free Worlds League and the Magistracy of Canopus. While the two didn't fight a lot, they still did. Vakarel, thus, had a lot of factories - not Factories but unimportant factories - that made and produced goods for border worlds near FWl-Capellan Confederation border whose planet got raided to hell and back every five years or so.

Thought I was gonna say Canipus-League border? Yeah, no. Canopus doesn't do fights with the League. The former wants to be left alone and the latter is too busy being a Successor State.

A successor state within the Inner Sphere was… It was kind of like France, Holy Roman Empire, and the Byzantine Empire, vying for legitimacy and power as each proclaimed to be the legitimate successor to the Roman Empire. In the case of the Successor States of the Inner Sphere, the Free Worlds League was one of five Successor States - free Worlds League, Canopus Confederation, Lyran Commonwealth, Draconian Combine, and the Federated Suns- that proclaimed to be the true successor of the Star League, which once held domain over 99% of humanity.

The era I lived in was called the Third Succession War, because it was the third of its kind that embroiled the Five Successor States. Sure, it wasn't as bad as the first or the second, but it was a low level, constantly shimmering war of raids and retaliation.

The Free Worlds League fought, of course. It was a patriotic duty to fight, even.

I didn't care for it.

My second life was shit, and on a province within the FWL where social mobility was impossible on pain of death, I was just waiting for either an opportunity to get off this fucking ice rock … or die and move on to my next life.

What was there for me to look forward to? Like I said, life fucking sucked on Vakarel. The best thing we had was entertainment imported from the Magistracy. Food sucked worse than the British, Russia could learn a thing or two about winter here, penguins couldn't survive on Vakarel, and my parents died with a shit ton of other people because the Noble lord who owned our asses couldn't be bothered to fix a goddamn machine in the factories.

I slipped my plastic plate into the sink, cleaned up, and got dressed for work.

When I walked outside, I found a friend waiting for me.

"Hey, Alan."

I looked up and saw my coworker, Janice. She was five years younger than me. Barely an adult by no longer extant American standards, she's been working for almost a decade, though I only met her two years ago.

Her light brown eyes glimmered with mischief and her ginger inverted bob cut hair bounced with delight. No doubt she was already thinking of ways to tease, prank, and rile me.

One of these days, I really might act on some of my urges.

"Hey, JanJan," I smiled before locking the front door of my dingy apartment.

"Let's go already, slowpoke!"

"Oi, I'm not a slowpoke," I grunted half-heartedly as I walked away. She quickly followed me with light, skipping steps.

"Uh huh, uh huh."

"Why do I put up with you again?"

"Because I flashed you and only you my tits."

"I didn't even ask."

"But I did anyway. And now, I have you on blackmail."

"It's blackmailing, not on blackmail."

"Lomoka, lomaka," she tutted with the local variant of the "to-mae-to, to-mah-to." Except the lomaka in question was a digging fish(?) that liked rotten feces.

We walked around the block while taking care to not slip on soot and dirt packed black permafrost, boarded a tram packed with other commuters, and waited as the box tram chugged and clunked towards the factory.

-VB-

When I got home, I was tired. After a twelve hour shift like that, I generally got tired.

Grunting as I set my stuff down on the one of two chairs next to a tiny dinner table, I opened my kitchen cabinet and pulled out a cheap plastic covered black ration bar, the cheapest if nutritious ration that scrap metal can buy.

Yes, it was exactly what I knew it to be and most people suspected it to be: recycled biomass.

That lomaka animal native to Vakarel? The thing that ate rotten feces?

Yeah, that's the animal they used to make this stuff.

Like I said, recycled biomass.

I reached down to my fridge and pulled out the only thing around here cheap enough to make eating the literal recycled shit bearable.

Urbie Rats.

I already butchered Earth's big cousin (weighed in at a kilo) and just needed to cook it.

Compared to some of my coworkers, I was eating well because I knew how to trap and hunt in urban slums.

At least, I wasn't like the cannibals over in the actual slums two levels below my level.

The stove turned on, and I gingerly stuck a plastic stick through the pink rat meat and held it over the fire. Oil dripped from the cooking rat, and I made sure it fell into a collector. After fifteen minutes over the open fire, it was done. I chopped it up and then laid down slices of the meat over slices of black ration bars, and then ate it like sushi.

I just enjoyed the taste of rodents instead of lamenting over the fact that I ate recycled shit. Life was easier that way, and I have had a lot of practice.

With dinner done, I cleaned up the kitchen, added the rat oil to the bigger collector, and pulled out my most prized possession: a half-broken Canopian datapad that somehow still worked.

I turned it on while grabbing a meticulously maintained 8 kilo dumbbell and doing bicep curls.

When the broken thing finally turned on completely and showed me a broken and staticking screen, I went to my favorite app and turned on the net hitchhiker.

I couldn't choose what I saw because the hitchhiker grabbed onto whatever was in the air, but by God, I enjoyed my free entertainment.

Unless it was local propaganda.

PING

"Holy sh-!" I hissed as I jolted in surprise at the loudest pinging I have ever heard in my lives, and it didn't come from my datapad. I looked around and heard nothing else.

I blinked and then shook my head from where I was on my holezridden couch.

"Am I that stressed out right now?" I asked myself as I ran a hand down my face. "Maybe I should stay away from the forge tomorrow…"

I dropped my hand and opened my eyes.

Then I promptly froze as I saw words floating in the air on a semi-transparent screen.

"Wut."

I looked at the title.

[Celestial Forge Menu]

My entire body stilled and my mind bluescreened. It took a while for the reboot, and when it did, I blinked, blinked, rubbed, and blinked again.

The screen followed my front but not my eyes.

After a dozen experiments and attempts to see anyone playing a prank on me, I … came to the conclusion that I was hallucinating from a very bad batch of ration or rat meat.

I was hallucinating, so why not enjoy it?

I looked down the menu.

Buy (100 P)

Purchases

Inventory

Help

"Help?" I muttered.

The screen changed.

… and from the 1/1,076 pages at the bottom right, there were a lot of words and images for me to look over.

I stowed that away for now and went back by saying back. It worked, so I didn't question it.

"Buy," I said and the screen flickered close and then reopened to a larger menu with options. There were a lot of options to choose from, each with their own category names. On a whim, I chose tools and looked over the list. Most were greyed out and those that weren't were all 100 P in cost.

Whatever.

I blinked as I saw a name I was familiar with, and it was basically free!

“Yoink that PDA… hur hur,” I chuckled tiredly.

There was a light plop on my lap right after that. I looked down and my eyes bugged out when I saw an actual PDA. The one hand design with slick appearance missing from any tech I’ve encountered in my life here just screamed alien.

I gawked at it and then looked back up to the Forge Menu.

Holy shit.

This was real?

I looked back down, and picked up the PDA with trembling hands. It turned on the moment my hands touched it, and I saw immediately what this was for: Habitat Construction.

"Holy shit."

Where was I going to hide this thi-?

I looked back up and remembered that one of the menu options had been inventory.

Could it be…?

I backed up to the main menu, called up inventory with a shaky voice, and … pushed the manipulator down onto the screen that only I could see, probably.

I sat there on the couch as the manipulator disappeared and I saw a box form on the screen with the manipulator in it.

"Holy shit."

And then I realized something.

Before death did, an opportunity had come and I wasn't going to waste it.