Winning Peace - Chapter 33 (Patreon)

“It's nice here,” Sasha spoke quietly as she curled closer to me.

“It is,” I replied absently, doing my best to stay focused on the here and now instead of the myriad other bodies I was piloting on automatic. To ground myself, I stared down the slow-moving curtain of rain rolling over the fields below.

Shaxi had, over the course of the last year, quickly become 'home' insomuch as anywhere was these days. I still held so many jobs, knew so many people, was a part of so many families, but this one... this one was special.

Sasha was here.

The view, too, was soothing, though less than my lover. The view in front of us stretched for miles. It was a remote section of the planet that was low-priority for settlement, a thin rocky chain of an island that received too much rain, too much wind, and too much heat for anything but the hardiest of bushes to grow, turning it into something of a blasted crag-filled landscape.

I'd quietly sent notice to the Stellar Council that it was mine now, along with a payment of a few new technologies they'd been trying to get me to hand over for a while.

The claim had gone through within the hour.

Officially, it was marked as an 'Endemic Species Habitation Preserve,' of course. The SC couldn't precisely make it public they were playing favorites, but hidden in one of the many appendices was my name permanently enshrined as the reserve's overseer. I could, technically, be fired from my position and the land reassigned to a new overseer or purpose altogether, but that would be a serious escalation in what was a nominal detente between myself and my government.

They knew better than to try and screw with me, in other words.

It also probably helped that there actually were a few endemic species on the island that totally weren't the result of my mad science and a weekend getting drunk with Sasha. The important part there was that they were all deathly allergic to saltwater and would never make it to the mainland without human intervention, and even if they did they would starve to death without the specific nutrient-rich bush that grew on the island and nowhere else.

Which was very good, because those snakes get fucking huge and their venom could dissolve starship plate. And the bear-sized pigs they predate on were nothing to shrug off either.

Our home, and it still made me happy to think about that descriptor, rested atop a high cliff, overlooking the blasted landscape below with the ocean in the distance. That said, my paranoia wouldn't let me refrain from installing an emergency bunker that tunneled down beneath the island as well as evacuation points in every room. I'd even taken the risk of installing the kind of shielding that no one else had around the small compound. If I felt especially crazy, the building could even launch itself into space with the same kind of terrifyingly bullshit drive I usually saved for the warships I'd been building to fight the Reapers in the event literally everything else went to hell.

...but it probably wouldn't come to that.

We're close, so close.

It wouldn't be long now, likely only twenty years or so. If that.

“You're thinking about the Reapers again,” Sasha observed, poking me. “You're lying in bed with a beautiful woman and you're pondering the galactic extinction event around the corner.”

I chuckled and twisted to kiss her. “Can you blame me? I know I've prepared, but...”

“I'm... not going to pretend it doesn't bother me too, Z,” Sasha admitted quietly, shivering against me in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. “I suppose it helps that there's nothing I could actually do to stop them.”

'Unlike you,' went unsaid.

There was silence for a moment.

“Would you want to?” I asked.

Sasha sighed, stretching languidly against me. “We've been over this, Z. I'm not like you. I can't just shed pieces of myself like articles of clothing and I can't treat the Ship of Theseus as a solved problem.”

 “There are other ways to do it. It doesn't have to be cybernetics,” I stated, raking my eyes over her dusky skin. That was still the same, even after all these years, though her black hair now had artistic streaks of blue running through it. Apparently it was a current fashion trend.

She gave me a warning look. “I also don't want to turn into some inhuman monster.”

I raised up both hands. “A solution which I was definitely not recommending. There's no part of me that thinks you'd be okay with radical bio-augments if you weren't okay with radical cybernetics.”

Sasha sighed, the slight tension leaving her body as she lay back and stared up at the ceiling for a long moment. “I just know I'm going to regret this, but... alright, what did you have in mind?”

“Totally non-invasive,” I replied, reaching up to brush a lock of her hair from her face. “It'd be like the helmet we use for the sleeves when we go into town. Just projecting your consciousness into another body that you're using like a puppet. You seemed okay with that when you were using the Lazuli-body.”

Sasha hummed thoughtfully and nodded, her face still conflicted. “That... wouldn't be the worst, I guess? Something humanoid, though. I've heard horror stories about people using full-dive VR for too long as a different body plan and having dysphoria attacks when they log off.”

I smiled and nodded, relief filling me. Sasha was my weak point. If I was honest, she'd always been. That wasn't to say I didn't care about the people I was making connections with in my other bodies, but she was special even among those. If I could convince her to take a 'war-body' out occasionally, I could relax a little more at the thought of her squishy flesh-body stowed away in a black site bunker made of non-baryonic matter. “Humanoid body plan, gotcha. Anything else?”

“Let me think.” Sasha was quiet for a moment after the request.

I complied, allowing my hand to drift through her hair as I did so.

“I want it to be more than human-shaped,” Sasha finally stipulated. “I want it to be able to pass for human. If this is something that I'm going to have to spend days or weeks or months in while the galaxy falls apart so you can feel confident I'm safe-”

Busted.

“-then I want it to be as human as possible.”

I allowed myself to grimace slightly as I grunted. “So you want something like what I use, then. Just... not to be constantly plugged into it.”

My girlfriend turned towards me in surprise, looking me up and down. “I thought this body was baseline.”

I gave her a grin and chuckled as I stretched before tapping the center of my chest. “Powered by a miniature collapsed star. This body outputs more energy than most of the Sol System combined. Though with the amount of antimatter they're stockpiling for military use, that won't be true for much longer.”

Sasha trailed a hand down my arm, inspecting the artificial flesh anew. “Part of me wants to know about all of the things you've been working on while we've been apart. The other part of me is a little bit frightened by the possibilities if what you're saying is true.”

“You know most of the important stuff already,” I stated, rising from the bed and heading towards my dresser.

“Clearly not.” She stated thoughtfully.

“You're the one who said saving ten billion sentient aliens from the destruction of their home world was important,” I reminded her. “I gave you full access to basically everything I used to do that.”

“Point,” Sasha stated, throwing off her blanket to stalk towards her own dresser. “Though telling me about those important things doesn't mean you're off the hook for not telling me about the other important things.”

I gave her a long look as I thought it over. “Full disclosure, you'll be happier not knowing.”

Sasha stopped slipping on her blouse and turned to look at me oddly.

I sighed at the unasked question and ran a hand through my hair. “Right now you think it would be a challenge for me to conquer humanity, or any of the other galaxy's races, for that matter.”

“It would be,” Sasha confirmed slowly and hesitantly. “Based on what you've shown me so far. Even with the stellar lifting devices and the ability to virtually print starships on demand... you have, what? Fifty of those students of yours, max?”

She paused, considering my claim as she narrowed her eyes at me.

“I've seen enough to know that virtually all of the Citadel's systems infiltrated and you could corrupt their systems whenever you wanted, but... I've also seen the threat assessments on them. The Protheans had such a technological edge over the Citadel that they had to introduce physical interlocks and redundancies. You wouldn't be able to take them down that way. Do damage, serious damage? Almost certainly, but conquering them...”

I huffed a laugh and, with a mental trigger, a portal popped open on one of the white panels along the wall. As Sasha squeaked in surprise and gave me a mild glare, I beckoned her. “C'mon. Got something to show you. Finish getting dressed and follow me through.”

“Warn me next time!” Sasha yelled out before sighing and grabbing a long skirt.

 My amused smile lasted through the portal as I made my way into the remote outpost. It was an artificial satellite a few kilometers long in a Venutian-level orbit. Just beyond it was a trio of three enormous gas giants that had probably prevented the creation of a binary system. However, unlike Earth's Jovian and Saturnian giants, all three of these worlds were fifty percent larger and within what would have been Earth's orbit.

One result was a complete lack of habitable planets in the system.

Another result was no less than six moons which either did support primitive life or could with little effort on the part of any advanced species.

The one that most interested me right now was the veritable sea of moderately-sized asteroids and a further dozen dwarf planets. The system was an extreme rarity, something which actually resembled the popular media representation of an asteroid belt due to an odd gravitational resonance that kept all of the rocky bodies within a tight loop around the star. It wasn't quite the shooting gallery those now-ancient movies depicted, but it was far closer than reality had any right in being.

Looking over the sensor arrays, I picked my target and headed towards an airlock.

Moments after I jumped out, Sasha popped up on the holographic screen. “Did you just jump out the fucking airlock?!”

'Yes.' I didn't really speak, but my voice was interwoven with an advanced VI to show my current body speaking in another holo-window for her. 'I'm perfectly fine, honey. All of the sleeves I use are fully-capable of interstellar travel independent of any sort of vessel.'

In my mind's eye I saw Sasha's mouth fall open. “Interstellar travel? You're shitting me.”

'What's so hard to believe about that?' I replied, innocently amused at her disbelief.

“You'd need some kind of drive so compact that it could fit into a human-no, wait,” Sasha paused, shaking her head. “You've got a portal inside you, don't you? That's how you're doing this!”

I laughed outright. 'Nope! Totally legit, here, I have an interstellar star drive so compact that it fits inside the human torso's dimensions. I could make it from here to Shanxi the long way and back before the end of the day.'

“You could, wait, where are-” I kept up my leisurely travel even as Sasha accessed the computers to try to find out where this system was located. Eventually, she pinpointed it on the very edge of the Orion arm, curling out into the dark space beyond. “That... even at just that distance, that's incredible. But you could go faster, couldn't you?”

'Perhaps a bit?' I asked jokingly, ignoring the glare she sent my way even as it faded into speculation. 'Honestly, the real problem with the drive is that I can't activate it planet-side. Or, at least, I shouldn't.'

“Dare I ask why?” Sasha pressed.

'Because certain aspects of the drive's propulsion negatively affect quantum physics at a fundamental level and start... well, unraveling isn't the best word, but it gets the point across. Albeit, it would be a particularly energetic unraveling. One on the order of a substantial matter-antimatter reaction.'

“And you carry that thing around with you?” Sasha asked, disbelief tinting her tone again before she held up a hand to forestall me. “No, of course you do. You're you.”

'You could make that sound at least a smidge less insulting,' I complained.

“I could,” Sasha replied, retaining smirking rights for her own face as she sighed. “So was this what you wanted to show me?”

'No,' I replied as I repositioned a set of small drones around the dwarf planet I'd picked out. 'This is.'

I raised my hand without further warning and as the energy lance projected from it, brought it down in a clean slice through the thousand-kilometer thick stellar body. It was large enough to have come into a spheroid shape, if roughly, but there was still debris around it that hadn't been either absorbed or ejected. Still, even its daunting size to a normal human didn't save it as my power sawed through the planetoid.

I heard Sasha's sharp intake of breath over the line as the dwarf planet lingered, apparently unharmed, for a long moment before the two hemispheres began to drift apart.

'While I don't put it outside the realm of possibility that the Reapers might have something which could hurt me, it would likely require me to hold very still and allow them to charge it up before firing,' I explained, watching as the shards of a planetoid exposed a rapidly-cooling semi-molten core. 'At this point, it's not really about whether or not I could win against them, it's about how much damage they would be able to achieve in the process of my victory.'

“That's why you haven't initiated an alpha strike,” Sasha realized slowly, her throat working as she swallowed convulsively. “You want to give everyone as much time as you can to get ready.”

'Or at least to properly receive the nudges I'm giving them. The turian-prothean war will likely open the companion relay in the Shanxi system, if humanity doesn't beat them to it in the next few years. But the rachni and the accosians are in a delicate position right now given how limited and concentrated their populations are.'

 Time, time, time... it's always the one thing I never seem to have enough of. Or, at least, it''s the one thing I can't hand out to the people who need it the most.

I theoretically could, though my 'power,' whatever it really was, had resisted many of the theoretical technologies I'd need to accomplish such a feat. The Power of the Time Lords would not be mine to command, and for that I was thankful. Time was something I was loath to tamper with even had I the bone-deep certainty nothing would backfire horribly.

 I couldn't touch magic either, not that I tried too much beyond a few exploratory choices. I'd advanced far enough that I could transmute matter of a planetary scale using hard science. Magic would just slow me down at this point, though a few select options held quite the allure. The Kaleidoscope's True Magic would have been extremely useful for when I eventually got tired of this reality and decided on another grand adventure.

I knew enough mundane science and technology that I was toying with a few experiments that might produce a viable alternative anyway, and I wasn't in any true rush.

No, at this point it very much was a waiting game. Every day, month, year that went by meant more rachni, more accosians, and more humans. Even if the worst happened and a few planets were taken out, they could survive and rebuild.

More than that, I wanted Harbinger himself. If I initiated things now, he could slip away in the chaos and find some desolate rock to hide behind for a million years before starting things over again. I had to get them all, every last one of them, and the most dangerous was the one that had been left 'awake.'

I would wait.

“Tell me everything,” Sasha stated suddenly, apparently having made her choice.

'Alright Alice, let me show you how deep this rabbit hole goes.'

“Oh fuck off, Z.”

~~~

So, had a sick day, sorry about that. Nothing too debilitating, just some gastrointestinal unpleasantness and general funk that knocked me out for a while. But I've since bounced back, thankfully.

On a more relevant note, here's the next chapter of Winning Peace, which...

Well, we're closing in on First Contact with the Citadel, which will either be the coming chapter or the next. 34/35, so look forward to that.

Besides that? I'm going to be working on a chapter of Industrious' Marvel timeline for the coming week, along with another chapter of Winning Peace.

I think that's everything? Rock on and stay awesome.

PS: Sometime this month I'll be releasing the first of the epilogue chapters for my CG Quest, just FYI.