Winning Peace - Chapter 28 (Patreon)

Here's the mission: Get a quarter of the way across the galaxy, steal a massive derelict bio-ship, and get back across the same distance without being noticed by the various powers at play.

Honestly, it's easier than it sounds.

Even with galaxy-spanning civilizations having spread through the relay network, the majority of systems had neither a relay connection nor any significant monitoring presence. My alcubierre drives were also in their fifth iteration and able to cruise at a comfortable one hundred light years per day without issue. Without any need to limit myself to the relay network or activate dormant ones, I was able to traverse the interim space between my primary manufacturing system and my destination without too much trouble.

“So that's a Reaper, then,” Mesonoxian Sky said, his tone more of a statement than a question.

“Its corpse, at least,” I replied, leaning back casually as I watched the ancient hulk being loaded into the even larger vessel. “Inasmuch as they can die, anyway.”

The other individual's attention shifted to me in a flurry of color and pixels in the holographic display. “That's ominous as fuck, Doc. What's it mean?”

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.” I shrugged. “Even if he was a rather foul person, Lovecraft's personal neuroses made him oddly prophetic. Sufficiently advanced technology which fuses biological matter and electronic systems is effectively immortal. Even if the core processor or intelligence is gutted, other systems aren't reliant on it for direction, so they just keep on working.”

“Huh. So... how old is it?” Sky asked me, turning to look at the last of the ancient ship disappearing into the huge maw of my own ship.

“A billion years,” I replied bluntly.

The swarm of pixels stilled, flashing into a colorless white in shock. “Holy shit, really?”

I nodded, my sensors sweeping over Sky as I observed his surface thoughts flickering through the mostly-digital existence he now enjoyed. Even if he was still nominally attached to part of his organic brain, that percentage of his existence was slowly being phased out. Last analysis showed a little less than a third remained. Where Thonis-Heracleion had charged ahead, Mesonoxian Sky wanted a slow incremental change into his form of choice.

“So... why'd you choose me, teach? I'm sure TH and Miasma would have been happy to come,” Sky asked.

“They have their hands full with the other project and helping the next class acclimate,” I replied, scrolling through updates on the information coming out of that region of space.

“Still can't believe you just happened to run across that system,” Sky stated, turning towards me curiously. Or, at least, his head did. “There's a lot of open space between here and home.”

I hummed. “The planet was off the relay network, but only just. The next system over has a deactivated one and I was trying to skirt around them. What was that old quote? Be careful you do not meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it? Something like that.”

 Sky nodded, an odd full-body motion that jumbled some of the floating fragments of his body. “I guess that makes sense. Those things do tend to be near garden worlds.”

He was quiet for a moment and I felt a presence in the same data stream I was sorting through.

“Huh, looks like they're up to a seventy-percent evacuation rate,” Sky noted, and I agreed.

“It's impressive. They'd be further along if we hadn't needed to push forward an emergency terraforming project,” I replied. “Their new homeworld is livable, but only just barely.”

Sky snorted. “I'm sure they'll be irritated at not being blown to smithereens and being forced to live in extravagant arcologies instead. It's only five years, Doc. They'll be fine.”

I tucked my hands behind my back and nodded. “I know, Sky, I know. It's still irritating to be confined to bottlenecks at this stage. I'd very much like it if I didn't keep running into problems that strained my ability to handle.”

Sky snorted again. “So says the man who considers evacuating an entire planet with a population of ten billion to be a mere 'problem' and not a crisis of untenable scope and scale.”

I rolled my eyes. “Would you rather I have just bypassed the world about to explode from an extremely rare 'core fusion' incident and left all those people to die?”

Mesonoxian Sky was quiet for a moment, then shook his head, all joviality gone. “No. No, even the thought of it... they look too human for me to even consider it in the abstract. It would be one thing if it was those weird frog-people, the salarians, but... their eyes are different shades, their ears are different shapes, and their skin is actually small scales, but... they look so human.”

I sighed and shook my head. “It's probably not a coincidence. They aren't all that far from our corner of the galactic neighborhood, after all. I wouldn't be surprised if the Protheans hadn't found them as well and tinkered with their DNA, too.”

Privately, the reason I wouldn't be surprised is because I'd pulled the location of that world from the Mars Archive after I'd properly translated it. A quick search through the vast troves of data had yielded some interesting results, but most of them could wait. The people of Accosia didn't have that time, though. Marked as a astro-geological curiosity, the discovery of their species had only been significant because of their ability to use very specialized biotic nodes to guide the growth of native crystals into a unique form of technology the Protheans hadn't seen before, even if they were only using it to create basic tools and weapons at the time the Prrothean survey team had run across them.

 Well, that and the fact that their home planet was going to blow up in a few tens of thousands of years.

Which, well... the Protheans had been going to save them. For a given value of 'save,' anyway. The Empire always needed new vassal species, after all. It hadn't been marked as a priority, though, and the Protheans wanted to give them a bit of time to develop their technology and society before uplifting them, much like the asari and humanity. They'd discovered that the whole assimilation process went easier if your people had at least gotten to a certain level of development analogous to what humanity would call 'classical civilization.'

Then the Reapers hit and suddenly uplifting a bunch of primitives was the last thing on anyone's mind.

 “The Bio-Regressives are still pitching a fit about that,” Sky replied, then paused. “Will we be... introducing the people of Accosia to humanity?”

“I'm still considering whether to take an active role in that or simply point both parties in the right direction,” I admitted. “It's one of the main reasons I've let you kids handle all of the interactions. As long as they've never seen what a human actually looks like, they won't be able to link their strange saviors to the new race they just encountered.”

“Would it be so bad?” Sky asked after a moment. “Perhaps not going so far as realizing that we're human, but introducing ourselves as trans-sapient aliens. We could be role-models for humanity at large.”

It was an interesting thought, something I'd hadn't considered myself. “I have enough on my plate at the moment, but it's something to consider. The accosians will need time to resettle their people and come to terms with the fact that they aren't alone in the universe. They might make a good friendly first-contact for humanity, though. Hmm...”

“I thought that was kind of the reason why you didn't just use portals to get them to their new home,” Sky admitted.

“If it had been necessary, I would have disclosed the ability in the name of saving those people,” I replied with a shake of my head. “However, the portal technology remains both a logistical ace up our sleeves and the ultimate method of retreat in the event of a losing engagement. I very much do not want the Reapers to decide they need to stage simultaneous attacks on all of my facilities in order to corner me.”

“I thought the plan was to alpha strike them?” Sky asked, then hesitated. “Even if I don't know how you're planning to 'alpha strike' a self-reproducing AI army numbering in the billions that have been around for longer than the Earth has possessed algae.”

“I'm planning for failure,” I stated. “With stakes like these, with my experiences with the Last Dogs, I'm readying myself for potential total war across the entire galaxy in the event my initial plans do not go according to my wishes.”

Mesonoxian Sky was quiet for a moment as the enormous ship carrying the Reaper corpse began to seal itself and make ready for launch. “Yeah, I can see that, Doc. What about all the pieces that broke off when it landed?”

“When the initial probe landed and started setting up shop, I sent a bunch of autos through. The robots used my most advanced scanners to pick up anything that had fallen off and determine exactly what form of indoctrination this unit used so we weren't going in blind. That way I could ensure the cargo vessel was properly sealed once the reaper was contained.”

“What kind of indoctrination?” Sky asked, curious, and I felt him rooting through files. “Ah.”

I nodded. “There are different vectors. Biological, nanotech, audio, visual, and more besides. This one primarily used an advanced viral loadout, not unlike what the Last Dogs used in their 'Last Bark.' Of course, this is many hundreds, if not thousands, of generations more technically advanced.”

There was a long, drawn out hiss of static. “Jesus Christ, that's nasty.” I knew he was more speaking to himself as he reviewed the files than actually conversing with me. “Eugh, cocoons. Fucking nasty.”

“The Prothean archive didn't mention anything about that, so I assume there's been some refinement of the process over the last... several hundred million years,” I explained. “There's also a secondary nanotech hazard, but that's more easily accountable for. All I had to do was ensure the structure used to contain it was reinforced with hyper-diamond coatings to prevent it from being subverted.”

“...I can totally see why you didn't want to tell us about this. Fuck. I mean, just... fuck.” Mesonoxian Sky uttered quietly, his entire digital avatar seeming to shiver in a fractal movement of individual pieces akin to a multicolor snowstorm. “What made you reconsider?”

“Watching the rest of humanity build a capable military highlighted the various redundancies. I have several in place for various things, but... even with the personal backups I have stored for myself, I want other options in case they're contaminated or subverted. I won't be informing the new kids, but you, Hexadecimal Miasma, and Thonis-Heracleion will all receive a briefing of some of my contingencies that I'll expect you to review and give me your thoughts on without consulting with each other.” My notification didn't cause much outward movement of the younger man's expression. Or, well, his 'expression,' at least.

Still, eventually Sky nodded. “I get what you're saying, Doc. Still, I don't think we'll stand a chance in hell against anything that takes you out.”

I shrugged. “Better little chance than none at all, and if you aren't made aware of the upcoming fight...”

Sky sighed, another long static hiss. “Yeah. I get it.”

He sounded tired.

I wonder if I sounded the same way sometimes.

Probably.

We were both silent as the ten-kilometer long craft disappeared into a huge portal projected onto a prepared area of the surface of Dis. The gate snapped shut as soon as the ship was clear, then another one opened and a second massive vessel came sliding through before stopping a few miles above the crater and calculating trajectories for a split-second. That done, the gut of the ship disgorged something that would, at a glance, seem similar enough to the bio-ship I'd just stolen.

“That's the fake, huh?” Sky asked, watching the hulk fall to the planet and displace a load of material to mask the old impact.

“Indeed. I consider it a small miracle that the ship was still here to find,” I stated. “The Mars Archive didn't have any concrete answers as to why the derelict Reaper has been left in place this long, but if one of the races from this cycle discover it and attempt to salvage it, I would rather they incorporate my technology than the Reaper's.”

“With all of the backdoors, sleeping trojans, and hardware vulnerabilities you've installed, I can see why you'd rather that outcome,” Sky commented just a touch snidely.

I hummed. “You disapprove.”

Sky paused, then shook his head. “I don't like it, but that doesn't mean I don't see the utility in it. I've seen you reports on the Council Races and all the data-mining you've done on their public networks. Even disregarding the private stuff... the asari are the least objectionable and they're still aiming to take the galaxy over as a cultural and technological hegemon. The salarians, I understand why they resorted to biological warfare after the krogans nearly wiped them out, but still... the things they've done since then... they've practically engineered a new race out of them to serve as their own slave caste. And t he batarians... they don't even make the pretense of using non-sapients and they're the military arm of the council.”

I was quiet, letting him air his grievances. They were essentially echoes of my own, after all.

As familiar as many of the actors were, the stage and props around them were radically different. I couldn't pinpoint an exact divergence from what I knew of as 'canon,' though that could be my admittedly piecemeal recollection of the games and media from my past life.

Regardless, it seemed that after the Rachni Wars, the Council had sought a more formal military structure to guard against further rachni incursions. The great bulk of their forces were smashed and their homeworld turned into a dead, airless rock, but a few queens had apparently escaped the slaughter. The result had been that the Council had never truly moved away from a semi-paranoid war footing, even with krogan war bands roving the outer reaches of their space to ward off raids by insectile forces.

Ultimately, the asari and salarians had signed off on the accession of the Batarian Hegemony to full Council status and granted them a seat.

I'd like to say it was the wrong decision.

 I wanted to condemn it as an objective mistake against the very real costs the bargain had resulted in.

However, I'd run the numbers. The Rachni Wars had bled the Council white. If the destruction of Suen had ended the conflict rather than turn it into a galaxy-spanning guerilla conflict that constantly threatened to break out into a new major war...

If the wars had ended, they could have stabilized without needing to make hard choices.

 As it was, though, they'd needed the batarians more than the batarians had needed them.

 And when the krogan rebelled, it just made everything worse...

 “I think it's the right thing to do, even if I don't like it,” Mesonoxian Sky stated sadly, drawing me from my musings even as the massive ship below us disappeared back into the portal it had emerged from.

I nodded, exhaling in one long breath. “Let's get out of here. Our work is done and I'll leave a stealth probe to watch things in the event someone does find it.”

“What about all the autos?” Sky asked, gesturing towards the robots filing into a smaller ship.

“They were used as part of the initial scouting force that identified the indoctrination vectors this Reaper used, so they're contaminated,” I replied, allowing him to watch me set a course for the local star.

 Mesonoxian Sky grimaced, then snapped off a salute. “Thank you for your service.”

I huffed a short laugh, then mimicked the gesture. “It's the best send-off I can give you guys. Sorry it had to be this way.”

 They weren't sentient, of course. I wasn't so cruel as to send something with a sense of self into a Reaper just to get information out of it when a soulless robot would do. Still, there was something innately human about getting attached to a tool that had done its job well, even if you knew it had to be discarded for the good of everyone.

One quick jump by the small ship and it was melting away into so much slag. Sky and I held the salute for another moment, then slowly relaxed as I set in a course for our own vessel back through the portal we'd come by. We popped out the other side in a distant orbit around another star. Five stellar lifting stations were drawing plumes of energetic matter off of the stellar furnace, each of them building a duplicate.

“This is, what? The tenth system you're building up in?” Sky asked, plugging himself into the data feeds of the ship we were on.

“Eleventh,” I corrected mildly, heading for the airlock myself. “You can head back to Redoubt if you like, I want to do a visual check on the terraforming projects in this system. You know, just in case we end up needing another world to receive an entire planet's worth of refugees.”

Sky barked a harsh electronic laugh, something I had to think was intentional given the high-fidelity speakers on my ships. As far as odd quirks, though, wanting to intentionally sound digital rather than organic was a mild one.

“I'll wait for you to get back. I kind of want to take a tour of the Arcturus system with Hex and he won't be free for another day or two. Might as well pass the time giving this system a once-over. It's called Illos-Theta, then?”

 I turned and nodded at Sky's question. “We're a few systems over from a former garden world that has a Prothean Archive I'm looting on it. I didn't want to set up shop directly in-system, but a base nearby to keep watch seemed like a good idea, especially with everything the base contains.”

“Eh, something else interesting to pass the time,” Sky called, then slipped through the connection to the processors to my stellar lifters and hopped onto one of the probes circling the system via their QEC.

I shrugged and stepped out into the black void of space, forcibly dumping the contents of my lungs into a cloud of crystalline vapor. Feeling the reactors within me spool up, I propelled myself forward with a steady acceleration of one earth-gravity and took a slow course around the local asteroid belt before aiming myself towards the in-progress garden world.

This. This makes it all worth it.

Quarian History: 1-3 (New)

Quarian Society: 1-3 (New)

Quarian Language: 1-3 (New)

Quarian Military: 1-3 (New)

Volus History: 1-3 (New)

Volus Society: 1-3 (New)

Volus Language: 1-3 (New)

Volus Military: 1-3 (New)

Drell History: 1-3 (New)

Drell Society: 1-3 (New)

Drell Language: 1-3 (New)

Drell Military: 1-3 (New)

Krogan History: 1-3 (New)

Krogan Society: 1-3 (New)

Krogan Language: 1-3 (New)

Krogan Military: 1-3 (New)

Rachni History: 1-3 (New)

Rachni Society: 1-3 (New)

Rachni Language: 1-3 (New)

Rachni Military: 1-3 (New)

~~~

This chapter is in honor of literally anyone and anything except for Comcast, who has the special honor of having made it incredibly difficult to write and post. This is in addition to the birthday stuff going on this week that's made writing difficult in general.

Anyway! Here's the next chapter of Winning Peace and, likely, the last one for it this month.

I plan to have a chapter of Speedrun out either Friday night or early Saturday morning and, after the weekend, I'm going to try and get a new chapter of Industrious: Engineering Marvels out to cap the month off with.

In the meantime, thank you for your patience and support. Rock on, stay awesome, and I hope you all have a good week.