Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

[cliffc999]

Normally I hate timelines. I feel that if a historical overview is necessary to understand the setting, the author should be able to get it into the story organically.

However, the past couple weeks of discussion in-thread has been making me think that in the case of this specific setting, it might help to provide one. This timeline will be complete up to the most recent chapter of the story, chapter 7.

Note: Unless otherwise specified, all events are from the canon timeline as well as this story's timeline. Story-only events will be clearly marked as fanon.

Timeline of the GURPS Traveller Interstellar Wars Setting

40,000 BC (approx.) - Mysterious precursor race that a later galactic era will label "The Ancients" scatters primitive homo sap. from Terra to seed many worlds across the Milky Way galaxy. Some of these various separate races of humanity will go on to later develop interstellar travel, others will remain minor planet-bound races until contacted by visitors from the stars and/or exterminate themselves before they can reach that point. One human race in particular, who will go on later to found the Vilani Imperium, is settled upon the planet Vland.

20,000 BC (approx.) - Earliest written historical records on Vland.

6500 BC (approx.) - Start of Industrial Revolution for the Vilani.

5500 BC (approx.) - Vilani develop space travel. Centuries of expansion at interstellar 'slowboat' speeds commences.

4700 BC (approx.) - Vilani develop the jump-1 drive.

4700 BC to 900 BC - Vilani great age of expansion and exploration. They map star systems for as far as their scouts can practicably reach and contact many other human races and several sentient alien races, ranging from the Bwap to the Nugiiri (or as they will be known in the main Traveller RPG, the Droyne). The Vilani of this era are more interested in trade and exploration than they are in conquest, and confine their rule to a sphere of worlds surrounding Vland.

900 BC to 500 AD - The Consolidation Wars. 'Pocket empires' of various other races arise, and dissident Vilani factions begin to grow beyond the Vilani sphere of influence. The core Vilani culture, in response to this changing galactic environment, slowly shifts towards a more imperialistic outlook. The discovery of jump-2 drive by the Vilani shortly before the start of the Consolidation Wars gives them a priceless strategic advantage, which they choose to exploit to the fullest while they still have it. The Vilani slowly and methodically defeat every other potential rival within their sphere of influence.

A specific target of the Consolidation Wars was a rising interstellar society created by a nonhuman sapient race called the Vegans, who had obtained jump-1 drive via indirect trade contacts and existed notably outside the borders of Vilani space at that time. Although vastly smaller than the Vilani, it is felt that if left to themselves for enough centuries they could expand into a considerable problem, and so the decision is made to nip that in the bud. By the year 120 the Vegans are subdued while they are still only a small multi-system polity of slightly over a dozen worlds, and to this day Vegan worlds, while formally under Imperial rule, enjoy a high degree of local (but not interstellar!) autonomy.

The Vegan conquest is the furthest expansion to rimward and trailward that the Vilani Empire will go, and the former Vegan domains will form what will come to be called the Duusirka and Urima Subsectors. The world of Shulgiasu, 6 parsecs away from the former Vegan capital at Muan Gwi and the largest forwarding operating base settled for the Vegan conquest, is designated as the capital world of the new Imperial Rim Province.

500 - Founding of the Ziru Sirka. The Isgiirdi, the ruling council of the Vilani, proclaims the founding of the Ziru Sirka or 'The Grand Empire of Stars'. Realizing that the Vilani have astrographically expanded to the point where even jump-2 drive would not permit an effective span of control for their current society, the Vilani deliberately and consciously begin a long-term social-engineering effort focusing on stability and uniformity of culture and precedent and turn their backs on any form of research or exploration that carries too high a risk of destabilizing change. Exploration beyond the new borders of the Empire will be permitted only under special circumstances and all territorial expansion is abandoned.

800 (approx.) - The Kimashargur, a dissident Vilani faction, romantically long for the old days of technological advance and galactic exploration. They are at this point still Imperial loyalists who simply believe that the Imperium's stability can still potentially be threatened by unknown elements from outside its borders, and that some separate segment of Vilani society must take up the responsibility of expanding beyond Imperial borders to know what's out there. These sentiments meet only weary tolerance at best, and receive no official cooperation.

950-1100 (approx.) - The Vilani Imperium officially cracks down on the Kimashargur as an outlaw movement, and several shiploads of refugees manage to flee beyond the borders in the hopes of founding their own independent state beyond Imperial reach. They settle several worlds including Dingir, Gashidda, Iilike, Shulimik, and Nusku, but their separatist 'pocket empire' is eventually seen as a threat by the Saarpuhi Kushuggi of the Imperial Rim Province and their reconquest by the Imperium is completed in 1100 AD. The borders of the Imperium expand slightly to encompass the dissident kimashargur worlds, but no further expansion is authorized beyond that.

An insignificant, primitive world named Terra is at this point only three parsecs away from the nearest Imperial world in a straight line, although without a jump-3 drive the nearest reachable Imperial world is at Nusku (3 jump-2s away from Terra).

[insert normal Terran history here]

2000-2024 - Resource depletion, war, and climate change cause a crisis on this timeline's Terra that OTL only experienced in significantly lesser form. Several international cooperative efforts to address these problems fall apart due to either not encompassing a sufficiently wide sweep of nations or lacking any coordinating authority capable of resolving disputes between competing great powers.

2024 - The Treaty of New York. Sheer force of necessity eventually makes the UN Security Council permanent member nations agree to changes in the UN charter that abolish the Security Council veto, change the Security Council to the Advisory Council, and increase the executive functions of the Secretary-General.

Although this rule will continue to be honored more in the breach than in the observance for decades to come, the UN Charter is also formally amended to require, not merely request, all UN member nations to abide by UN environmental and national security policy.

2024-2050 - The massive political compromise of the Treaty of New York is resented by almost everyone but still considered to be less awful than the alternative risk of a global collapse. To the surprise of most member nations the UN actually does begin to make substantial progress in addressing several of the ongoing problems, even as growing concerns about 'blue beret imperialism' still alarm many people.

2050-2088 - With their ambitions put in check on Earth, the global great powers begin a major expansion into space, a region beyond most formal UN authority. The formerly-marginal lunar settlements that had begun in the early part of the century now receive a major expansion into a viable colony, and serve as a jumping-off point for the settlement of the rest of the solar system. Some particularly noteworthy milestones during this period are the invention of artificial gravity manipulation in 2052, the reactionless thruster in 2054, and the launch of the first interstellar slowboat to Alpha Centuri circa 2060.

2088 - Terra independently rediscovers the jump-drive.

Fanon: In the story timeline this is done by Dr. Jean MacAndrew. In canon, the discoverer is unnamed.​

2092-2093 -The prototype jumpdrive is refined into a working jump-1 drive capable of interstellar range. A multi-national effort led by the US Space Force begins construction of Terra's first FTL starship, StarLeaper One.

2098 - First Contact. Colonel Lorette Strider of the US Space Force, the captain of StarLeaper One, makes first contact with the Vilani when Terra's first interstellar expedition to Barnard's Star encounters an unauthorized band of Vilani prospectors operating outside Imperial borders.

2098-2114 - The Contact Era. After the initial rush of excitement, the Vilani establish a minor trading outpost at Barnard's Star to allow Terrans to trade Terran for Vilani goods and explore social contact with the Imperium. As Terran science is actually somewhat ahead of Vilani technology in a couple specialized fields such as medicine and genetics, while the Vilani as yet have no comprehension how rapidly Terran scientists will reverse-engineer Vilani core technologies such as jump-2 drive, this is seen as a good deal by both sides. No formal diplomatic recognition of Terran sovereignty is made, but informal diplomatic exchanges will continue on both sides.

However, the inability or unwillingness of Terrans to remotely fit within Vilani cultural norms causes rising tension, especially when the new Saarpuhi Kushuggi of the Imperial Rim Province, Shana Likushan, allows her particular intolerance for Terran 'barbarism' to set the pace for relations. Both the officers of her own provincial fleet elements and the commanding officers of the several Terran nations with a workable military space presence respond to the new threat environment by ratcheting up tensions.

Lorette Strider, who left the US Space Force in 2099 to become a UN diplomat and informal ambassador to the Vilani, sets out in early 2114 aboard the USS Thomas Jefferson, a US Space Force frigate, carrying a last-ditch proposal to try and head off what Terra perceives as an impending conflict.

2114-2122 - The First Interstellar War. In 2114 a Vilani merchant convoy breaches the restricted defense perimeter around the US Space Force base at Barnard's Star, refusing to answer hails and with their transponders deactivated. The Americans respond to what appears to be a sneak attack in progress by firing on the merchant vessels, destroying all but two of them. What few Vilani military vessels already present in-system engage the American forces in a skirmish to cover the retreat. Tragically, one of the casualties of the battle will be Lorette Strider, lost with all hands aboard the USS Thomas Jefferson as it jumps into the system while the engagement is already in-progress.

The Vilani never clarify whether or not their vessels deliberately or accidentally entered Terran military airspace, and do not send any diplomatic representation demanding reparations or indemnities. Instead, Shana Likushan dispatches a punitive expedition to Barnard's Star that methodically destroys all Terran warships and base facilities in the star system, then declares the 'barbarians' suitably punished for their insolence and returns to Vilani space.

At this point in time Terra had no conceivable way to resist a Vilani incursion, had any been made. Terran warships were no match for Vilani ones in either size or technology, their commanders had no prior experience in space warfare and little basis for theory, and the several national fleets in space did not even have any provision for a unified command structure in an emergency.

Several Terran armed merchant vessels, stranded in Vilani territory by the start of hostilities and equipped with jump-2 drives purchased from Vilani manufacturers, will begin a desperate, unsupported behind-the-lines campaign of raiding and sabotage, attempting to both do anything they can to aid the Terran war effort and successfully make their way back to Terran space. Meanwhile, Terra itself frantically rebuilds as much of their fleets as they can, and places them under a unified UN command.

In 2122 a second Vilani punitive expedition will enter the Barnard's Star system, reacting to Terra's renewed militancy, and be fought to a draw by the new Terran fleet. Saarpuhi Kushuugi Likushan, having had her ship losses approach the point where her superiors could begin to notice the effects on her provincial budget, instead offers to recognize Terra's claim to all currently Terran-occupied star systems - including Barnard's Star - in return for an armistice and a commitment to stay out of Vilani space.

2123 - The 'Free Trade Movement', already a growing concern on Terra, ignores the peace terms and continues what are now outright smuggler runs into Vilani space.

2124 - Founding of the Terran Confederation. In reaction to the Vilani threat, and after years of debate, the United Nations formally dissolves and its powers and responsibilities are transferred to and augmented by what is explicitly ratified by all Terran member nations as a new, sovereign one-world government.

Terra finishes reverse-engineering the jump-2 drive.

2125-2134 - The Second Interstellar War. Shana Likushan reacts to Terran smuggling of goods into Vilani space by declaring it a violation of the peace terms and sending yet another punitive expedition. It is speculated but not confirmed that she seized upon this largely as a justification, and what she was actually reacting to was the founding of the Terran Confederation.

Forewarned of the attack by the Free Traders operating in Vilani space, the Confederation Navy advances beyond Barnard's Star to meet the Vilani thrust at Agidda, the star system in-between Barnard's Star and Nusku. The Battle of Agidda is a tactical draw but a strategic victory for the Terrans, as the Vilani choose to withdraw from the star system and leave the Terrans in possession of the field.

What follows is a 'false war' where neither the Vilani nor the Terrans make any serious attempts to advance against the other, but merely maintain a full wartime footing and skirmish with each other on the borders. Unknown to Terra, Shana Likushan had been significantly distracted by the assassination in 2129 of her direct superior Usham Sharrukin, the then Apkallu Kibrat Arban Kushamii or "Minister of the Four Quarters of the Rim Marches", and his immediate heirs. With an impending civil conflict caused by the struggle of several of the great clans of the Vilani over who would be appointed the new Minister over the Rim Marches in the absence of the core Sharrukin clan, Likushan felt it necessaty to send the bulk of her forces coreward to help bolster the fortunes of the Sharrukin family against rivals. This will be the closest that the Vilani Imperium had come to having a significant internal conflict in several centuries.

Leaving only a token of her forces facing the Terrans to intimidate them into believing that the full bulk of her forces were present and playing a waiting game, she was vulnerable to a major Terran drive on Nusku in 2134 when Confederation intelligence finally determined that the majority of her fleet had been sent off somewhere else, even if they were not certain why. The Terran drive on Nusku was repulsed with losses, but Shana Likushan realized that her military position was untenable and rapidly offered the Terrans generous terms in exchange for peace before she could risk losing an actual major Vilani colony, and not merely an outpost, to a foreign power. The terms of the treaty officially recognized the Terran Confederation's sovereignty over everything between the Agidda and Procyon star systems as an autonomous ally of the Vilani Imperium, and the Second Interstellar War comes to a close.

2135-2145 - Shana Likushan's diversion of the majority of her fleet to bolster Sharrukin efforts in the core, although they resulted in the loss of the Second Interstellar War, achieved their desired goal of keeping the Sharrukin clan from losing control of their quarter of the Imperium. She was rewarded for her efforts with a promotion to a high position in the Imperial Court on Vland itself, and stepped down as Saarpuhi Kushuggi to be replaced by Kadur Erasharshi in 2135.

Convinced that Terra is too dangerous to be allowed to exist as a potential rival to Vilani power, whether trapped in an astrographic 'pocket' or not, Erasharshi begins planning the conquest of Terra from the day he takes power on Shulgiasu. He is aided in this effort by his director of covert intelligence, Sharik Yangila.

Erasharshi's substantial military preparations include the expansion and colonization of Imperial military outposes on formerly uninhabited star systems to prepare an alternate invasion around Terra's flank via the Procyon jump-routes, diverting much of his budget into a military expansion of the fleets under his authority that nearly doubled their size, and ordering the Imperial Rim Province onto a full wartime economy. He also moves his seat of government from the capital at Shulgiasu to the Imperial world of Dingir, only 4 jumps out from Nusku and 6 jumps out from Procyon, to allow him to more rapidly communicate with the intended front lines. These violations of standard operating procedure make him far more positioned to be a successful conqueror than any previous Vilani effort at Terra, but only at the cost of alienating most of the Rim Province's bureaucracy at the same time he left his provincial capital to concentrate on other matters.

Terra meanwhile continues its own military buildup, including the development and building of a new class of heavy cruisers, but is both unaware of the full scope of the potential danger facing it and unable to match the sheer scope of the Imperial Rim Province's economy even if it had known.

2145-2148 - The Third Interstellar War - The Siege of Terra. Kadur Erasharshi opens his campaign with a sneak attack on two fronts, sending a major fleet incursion towards Terra both from Nusku and Procyon separately. With the Terran fleets forced to split their deployment, Erasharshi personally commands his main Nusku fleet and decisively smashes the Terran Navy at the Second Battle of Agidda. Although his losses are nontrivial, he methodically completes the reconquest of Agidda, Barnard's Star, and Procyon, and then halts his thrust down the Procyon flank to maintain that fleet as a threat-in-being as his Nusku fleet makes the drive on Terra itself.

However, while his successes are profound on a military front, politically he has grown more and more vulnerable. Not only was he reaching the end of his logistical tether, but unanticipated political difficulties were rapidly eroding the margin of support that he'd painstakingly planned for. The disgruntled and insubordinate layers of Vilani government both underneath and adjacent him begin undermining his position substantially with higher authorities, facing him with a nigh-impossible choice; to either abandon his Terran campaign and return to Shulgiasu to consolidate his political authority, or to find a way to make Terra surrender quickly and thus be able to return home in triumph before his enemies can successfully have him relieved of his position.

His main fleet reaches Terra itself in 2148 and he orders the nuclear bombardment of a dozen Terran cities, with threats of more to come if Terra does not unconditonally surrender to him. Although the Terran Navy is unable to drive his fleet from the Sol system by main force, their continued resistance and the enraged defiance of the planet beneath him makes him reluctantly acknowledge that he cannot hope to crush this world's resistance quickly enough to win the immediate victory that he needs. Almost simultaneously, word reaches him from Shulgiasu that his political position was about to entirely collapse.

Out of time and options, Erasharshi faces a choice of either ordering Terra's immediate destruction or abandoning his campaign. He chooses to withdraw. Many of his subordinates believe that Terra had been so humbled and brought to the brink of destruction that they will never again dare to raise their hands against the Imperium. Erasharshi disagrees, but knows he cannot politically survive continuing his campaign and can only fall back to hopefully try again later.

Fanon: Sophia Nowak is born in Plock, Poland, on February 11, 2148. Her and her parents are the only survivors of the Nowak family, with her infant older brother, both of her grandparents, and several cousins and other relations all dead in the nuclear destruction of Warsaw.​

2148-2156 - The Third Interstellar War: The Terran Counteroffensive. The nuclear bombardment of Terra convinces even the most committed separatists and pacifists that the Vilani Imperium is the bitterest enemy of all mankind, and the entire planet comes together as one to yet again rebuild the Confederation Navy and launch a counter-offensive against the Vilani. The Procyon system is retaken in 2151, and at 2156 the Terran main fleet clashes against the Vilani forces holding Nusku. Without Erasharshi's military leadership available to them, as he is still stuck on Shulgiasu making efforts to recover enough of his position to assemble sufficient resources and support for a second major attack on Terra, the Vilani commanders at Nusku are outmaneuvered by the embittered Terran forces and withdraw from the star system. Terran ground forces land on Nusku and for the first time in history the Ziru Sirka loses a major colony world, not merely an outpost, to conquest by outsides.

The fall of Nusku makes Kadur Erasharshi's already vulnerable poltiical position entirely collapse. One of his last acts in office is to accept the Terran Confederation's offer of armistice, officially ending the Third Interstellar War.

As the population of Nusku still has a strong cultural kimashargur element from their original settlement, even after centuries of Imperial rule, between that and lenient policies by the Terran civil authorities the bulk of the Vilani population of Nusku rapidly becomes reconciled to Terran rule.

2156-2169 - The Empty Peace. Kadur Erasharshi is removed as Saarpuhi Kushuggi of the Imperial Rim Province, to be replaced by his director of covert intelligence and principal assistant Sharik Yangila. He then vanishes from Imperial history, erased from all records in a manner normally reserved only for convicted traitors. Even after the eventual conquest of the Vilani by Terra and their obtaining direct access to the Imperial Archives his fate still remains a mystery to historians, with even his date and location of death only a thing to be guessed at. It is also speculated that Sharik Yangila, his most trusted assistant, had some role in his downfall but nothing is never known for certain.

Fanon: Sharik Yangila betrayed Kadur Erasharshi after things already were lost, so as to make it appear that the failure of the Terran campaign had been due to his incompetence and malfeasance rather than Imperial political backbiting and Terran obduracy. She saw this as the only way to make it politically possible for any successor to Erasharshi - whether herself or someone else - to gain support for a major drive to conquer Terra in the future, a thing she entirely agreed with Kadur Erasharshi about the necessity of.​

Terra begins to explore the fringe of unclaimed stars to rimward of Procyon and just outside the Imperial borders, accessible to Terra only through a jump-link via Procyon itself. Although they are all vulnerable to being cut off should Terra lose control of Procyon, it is still seen as the only opportunity the Confederation has for exploration and expansion given that they have already settled and claimed all worlds within the 'pocket' formed by the limitations of jump-2 drive around Terra and in-between the two ends of the Procyon-Nusku corridor.

Terran traders, explorers, and even corporations expand outward from Nusku, taking advantage of the Confederatoin's official diplomatic recognition by the Vilani as a sovereign polity to start exploring Vilani markets as legal visitors and not just gray-market traders or smugglers. This new exposure to Terran goods and culture, as well as the shock of an outside race actually being able to take a major world away from the Imperium, will eventually go on to directly and indirectly embolden malcontents and dissidents of all kinds both in the Imperial Rim Province and, eventually, elsewhere in Imperial space. For right now, many lower-ranking Vilani authorities perceive only that the losses and tension of the border conflicts is being replaced with new economic opportunities and a chance for prosperity.

A tragic side effect of this is that wide exposure to Terran populations leads to several major outbreaks of disease in adjacent Vilani territories, as while Vilani immune systems are not especially weak Terra's biosphere contains several unusually virulent and aggressive strains of microorganisms by Vilani standards. As Confederation medical science remains ahead of Vilani medical science in several respects, Terran outreach missions are required to deal with these outbreaks. (This is an artifact of several 'wonder drugs' having been obtainable by simple gathering and harvesting processes from Vland's plant life, meaning that Vilani medical science has never needed an advanced grasp of several subfelds such as virology before. Vilani medical technology, outside of certain 'wonder drugs' that promote tissue regeneration and suchlike, remained at a solidly 20th-century Terran level for the bulk of the Imperium's existence)

Saarpuhi Kushuggi Yangila has a distinctly different opinion about the Terran problem, but for now is quietly concentrating on sufficient intrigues to make her political position unasailable and guarantee substantial support both from her superiors and her neighbors before making her own attempt on Terra. Also, not being a military genius herself she is vigorously driving the reorganization and retraining of her fleets in an attempt to identify who among her officers are the most talented commanders she has, and then promoting them into new positions. And while it was politically impossible to begin major R&D efforts into new warfighting technology, she also orders a major search through Imperial records for any prior warship or weapon designs, even as far back as the Consolidation Wars, that have fallen out of use in recent centuries but could still be useful for countering the Confederation Navy, and incorporates the most useful of these designs into her new warship construction. As a result her burgeoning fleet is smaller than Erasharshi's was, but is even more powerful and with better logistical support and endurance.
​

Fanon:
May 15th, 2166 - Sophia Nowak first obtains the Celestial Forge and passes her CAT exams with National Honors.
Fall 2166 - Sophia Nowak completes Public Service Preparation Camp and arrives on Peraspera.
Fall 2167 - Sophia Nowak leaves Peraspera, having provided the key insight into the success of the Peraspera Terraforming Project, and begins studies at MIT.
Spring 2168 - Sophia Nowak graduates MIT with a bachelor's degree and is drafted into the Confederation Navy
Fall 2168 - Having successfully completed Basic Officer's Course and OCS, Ensign Nowak reports aboard the CSS Gladstone, a Bannerjee-class system defense boat homeported at Nusku.
Spring 2169 - After privately developing her revolutionary 'ultracapacitor' technology and successfully obtaining a patent and selling the rights to High Frontier Development Consortium, Ensign Nowak receives official acknowledgement of her scientific genius. She receives a promotion to Lieutenant j.g., and is assigned to the "Skunk Works", DARPA's advanced R&D facility at Ganymede Base in the Sol system.​

The canon future is of course going to be nowhere near what actually happens in the story now that the MC is starting to spin up to speed. But I will get it typed up sometime and in another timeline post so people know what we're diverging from.​

 

[cliffc999]

The following is a direct quote of the "How Did Terra Survive?" sidebar from page 29 of the GURPS Interstellar Wars sourcebook.

Spoilerboxed for length:

Spoiler: How Did Terra Survive?

How Did Terra Survive?

Viewed from a distance, the Interstellar Wars era is a historical puzzle.

In 2114, Terra was a single technologically backward world on the fringes of the Vilani Imperium, with only a few tiny interstellar colonies. The Terrans had never fought a significant conflict in space. They were outnumbered thousands to one in manpower and in economic productivity. Yet after less than 200 years, Terran civilization had not only managed to survive every Vilani assault, it had attained a dominant position within the Imperium.

The Terran ascent to Imperial rulership is actually the lesser mystery. Terrans had a great deal of help, both from dissident Vilani factions and from the empire's subject races. Still, that help only came after the Terrans had demonstrated that they could hold out alone against the might of the Imperium. So how did Terra remain independent through the first three Interstellar Wars?

By the late 2200s, students of Vilani history had come to a startling conclusion: the Vilani of the Interstellar Wars era genuinely were not the same as their galaxy-conquering ancestors. What's more, the change was a matter of deliberate choice.

The Vilani were masters of the social sciences, able to build social and political institutions that were effective and stable over very long periods of time. However, Vilani methods seemed to require a "closed system", a society that was self-contained and insulated from outside contact. The unpredictable influence of outsiders made Vilani social engineering less effective, less able to produce a stable community.

Some Terrans speculated that the Consolidation Wars were an attempt to create such a closed system, a Vilani-controlled sphere which would include every starfaring culture in existence. Once the Consolidation Wars were over, a great change took place in the Imperium, turning every citizen's ambitions toward the eternal struggle for social status. Bold, outward-looking leaders were no longer needed, and could even be a liability to the new Imperium. Ambitious citizens were deliberately shackled, weighed down with tradition and the constant need to defend against internal rivals.

Naturally, this approach depended on the absence of any new starfaring civilizations outside the sphere of Imperial control. For many centuries, the Imperium was indeed unrivaled. However, once new starfaring "barbarians" began to appear, the transformed Imperium found itself unable to muster a decisive response.

Imperial leaders who were primarily interested in political intrigue would ignore outsiders, or would even hire foreigners to assist against their internal rivals. The occasional conquest-minded leader might still arise, but in order to make a barbarian conquest he would have to turn his back on his peers – who would then combine to bring him down. The effect was to halt each Vilani conqueror before serious harm could be done to any foreign target.

Thus the Vilani Imperium failed to bring more than a tiny fraction of its power to bear on Terra. Even that miniscule effort was almost enough to wreck Terran civilization – but in the end it left Terra independent, able to rebuild, and eventually able to carry the fight to the Imperium itself.

 

[cliffc999]

Given that people are now thinking about buying the PDF to get their hands on setting info, looks like I'm writing more fact sections after all. You've already gotten a broad outline of the history, so for this one we'll tackle a bit about 'so how does this Imperium even work, anyway?'

Notes About The Vilani Imperium


Astrography

Galactic directions are traditionally given in terms of coreward (towards the galactic core), rimward (away from the galactic core), spinward (with the direction of the Milky Way's rotation), and trailward (against the direction of the Milky Way's rotation). Typically, coreward is 'north' or towards the top on star maps and trailward is 'east' or to the right.

The Ziru Sirka, or 'Grand Empire of Stars', covers a region of space shaped vaguely like a vertical rectangle that bulges in the middle, stretching approximately 250 parsecs coreward of Terra and 120 parsecs across at its widest point. Terra is located almost directly at the rimward tip or 'bottom' of the Imperium, and the Imperial capital of Vland is almost 200 parsecs coreward of it. There are over ten thousand star systems within the borders of the Imperium but only four thousand of them have major inhabited planets, with slightly over four thousand more of them having outposts (usually for purposes of allowing stopovers and support on a jump-route long enough to require way stations, or resource exploitation or military bases).

As interstellar expansion is limited by the number of viable jump-routes no single part of which covers more than a 2-parsec gap between stars, the vagaries of the starmap mean that quite often you have no direct route from A to B and have to dog-leg around quite a bit. So expansion outward from Vland was anything but even, especially given the navigational difficulties too far coreward.

The nearest provincial capital to Terra is Shulgiasu, seat of the Underking of the Imperial Rim Province (Saarpuhi Kushuggi). Shulgiasu is 11 parsecs from Terra in a straight line, but the jump route to get there requires a long dog-leg to spinward and then back trailward that encompasses 18 jumps in total.

The Terran Confederation is located in a vertical 'corridor' of stars anchored at the rimward end by Procyon and at the coreward end by Nusku. There are no jump-2 routes rimward or trailward of the Terran pocket, and only a few dead-end stars (such as Alpha Centauri) within jump-2 range. All viable jump-2 routes from Nusku lead into Imperial territory. Procyon is at the extreme rimward edge of a slight bulge of Imperial territory, and by traveling 'around the corner' from it you can reach an expanse of unclaimed star systems rimward of the Imperial border. All jump-2 routes from this expansion sector to Terra pass through Procyon.

The Emperor

Technically, the government system of the Vilani Imperium is an absolute monarchy. The Shadow Emperor (commonly referred to merely as the Emperor) or Ishimkarun is the only authority figure in the Empire that can make new laws or repeal laws.

Of course the affairs of so much as a minor polity, let alone the largest known interstellar empire in the galaxy, cannot remotely begin to be managed by a single individual. To the Vilani this is a feature, not a bug. They deal with the Emperor's mortal limitations not by delegation but by precedent - in the absence of a new ruling from the Throne covering a particular situation, the most relevant prior ruling stands. Having started from a carefully engineered system of laws to begin with and then having had 3000+ years of painstakingly gathered and recorded precedents since, this system actually functions; there are very few situations that don't already have a ruling that cannot be at least mostly adapted to deal with the matter at hand and by a lower level of the Imperial bureaucracy. Especially since some rulings actually are of the format 'In situations such as this, official X is allowed to proceed at his discretion... within broad limits Y to Z.'

Obviously this means that the Vilani system is set up to be extremely conservative and with a uniformity of method that reduces the need for different, widely-spread bodies to communicate in order to adequately coordinate their affairs. That was deliberate.

This also means that the single most valuable commodity in Vilani politics is the Emperor's time; if you cannot find a bureaucratic solution to your problem that can be executed by successfully applying prior precedents then you have to get the Emperor to hear you out and sign a permission slip for you to break the rules. Given that there's only so many hours in a day, this means that the Emperor can deliver serious sanctions to any particular department or faction simply by choosing not to pay attention to them, and likewise tip the scales in favor of any faction by picking their latest submission off of the top of his inbox. This is also deliberate, and one of the main sources of the Emperor's authority to begin with. Anybody who tries going their own way without him will rapidly be made vulnerable to the bureaucratic and administrative machinations of every competing faction by the Emperor's simply choosing to ignore them and devote his extra time to facilitating the requests of their rivals, and simple peer pressure will yank them back into line almost immediately.

This also means that the single most important skill for a Vilani official of almost any kind is how good he is at bureaucracy, because their chief and largely only form of dispute resolution short of threats and violence is applied rules lawyering. That was also deliberate.

Obviously of course the Emperor also has conventional sources of authority such as being the commander-in-chief of their military, unlimited powers of high and low justice at his effective whim, and the immense traditional reverence (immense by Vilani standards, a society that already places an extreme weight on tradition and precedent) held for both the legitimacy of his authority and the absolute sacrosanctness of his person. But the first, and usually the only, source of coercion that he has available to use is his ability to pick and choose what he actually pays attention to.

The office of the Shadow Emperor is not hereditary; when the old Emperor passes away a new one is elected the Isgiirdii, the Vilani high council, from among their ranks. Votes are held by open ballot and after each round of voting, the nominee with the lowest number of votes is dropped from the ballot and then another round of voting is begun. Eventually one surviving candidate will hold the majority of the votes, at which point the other candidate drops out and leaves the new Emperor standing alone. One more ceremonial round of voting is always held at this point, so that each new Ishimkarun is officially elected by a unanimous vote.

The Isgiirdi

The Isgiirdi, the high council of the Vilani Imperium, is composed of representatives selected by each branch of the Imperial government via what internal processes that particular branch favors. It's three functions are to propose legislation to the Emperor, to advise the Emperor upon request, and to elect the new Emperor from among their ranks when the old one passes away. There are 300 total delegates but only fifteen of them hold the office of 'Speaker'- one each for the Army and the Navy, three apiece for each of the three great shangarim (more on these later), and four at-large Speakers selected by the Emperor.

The office of Speaker is important because legally, they are the only members of the Isgiirdi actually allowed to talk to the Emperor at all. (And now you know why he's formally called the 'Shadow Emperor' - he's not a public figure.) Everybody else in the Imperium has to go through one of the Speakers in order to petition the Throne. The Emperor is of course allowed to be in contact with anyone he wishes, but that's a case of "Don't call him, he'll call you."

The Imperial Government

Although it has aristocratic ranks and dynastic houses for the purpose of ensuring long-term continuity, functionally the Imperial government is a corporate bureaucracy.

The three Shangarim, or "bureaus", are three huge agencies that collectively manage virtually all of the day-to-day operations of the Imperial government. They each ultimately descend from a power group among early Vilani society - the aristocrats, the shugili or what was effectively the old priestly caste, or the industrialists. Each of these bureaus both has direct administrative control of a portion of Imperial territory and bureaucratic authority over all activities within their bureau's broad specialty anywhere in the Empire.

Yes, this mixed control means that there's a tremendous amount of bureaucratic cooperation - or infighting - to get anything done on a large scale at all. That was also deliberate. (In fact, there's very little about the Vilani system of government that is not deliberate; they have spent millenia of effort socially engineering and fine-tuning this thing, and it shows.)

The section of Vilani space that encompasses the entire Imperial Rim Province and thus is the one ultimately dealing with the Terran problem is underneath the territorial supervision of Sharurshid, the Vilani bureau whose primary Imperium-wide bailiwick is shipping, commerce, and industry. Makhidkarun is the bureau whose bailiwick encompasses the administrative functions normally thought of as government functions - police, media, education, etc. Naasirka is the bureau whose function covers the 'basics of life' - largely food and energy production and distribution.

The Imperial Hierarchy

Parallel to the multiple interlocked bureaucracies of the three great Shangarim is the official Imperial 'noble' hierarchy, each member of which (save the Emperor) is a hereditary dynast of one of the great clans that traditionally compose the senior management ranks of one or another of the Shangarim. Usually, an Imperial noble in a given territory will be from a family of the same bureau that has been assigned that territory as a fief, but not always. An attempt to wrest the office of the Apkallu Kibrat Arban away from the Sharrikun family of the Sharurshid bureau and claim it for one of the ruling families of a rival bureau is the affair that so distracted Shana Likushan away from the Second Interstellar War.

Starting from the top - the Emperor - and stepping one rank down we have the twelve "Great Ministers of the Four Quarters", or Apkallu Kibrat Arban. These titles are traditionally reserved for leaders of the three great shangarim and their most trusted and senior subordinates. Each of these nobles supervises the activities of 2-4 sectors of the 14 or so sectors that collectively comprise the Vilani Imperium.

The next rank below them is that of Underking, or Saarpuhi, each of which supervises approximately 80-150 separate worlds, a number that usuallly comprises a significant chunk of a single sector. Simple astrography means that the Saarpuhi Kushuggi, the Underking of the Imperial Rim Province facing Terra, operates on a somewhat looser leash and with more discretion than a Saarpuhi in one of the Imperial core sectors would.

Beneath the Saarpuhi are the ranks of the 'supreme governors' or Sarriiu who typically oversee subsectors with a dozen or so inhabited worlds apiece, and 'provincial governors' or shakkanakhu who occupy a flexible level of the bureaucracy that can end up overseeing anywhere between one and half a dozen worlds as needs require.

Each of these titles, save that of Emperor, is hereditary - but with a twist. A Vilani noble title cannot be inherited by the first or secondborn child of the prior occupant of the title, but must be granted to a third or lower-born child. The first two children are still members of the executive or 'noble' class, but are expected to show merit, work their way up the bureaucracy, and find other suitable high offices to be appointed to. Furthermore, adoption for the purpose of gaining an heir is not permitted under any circumstances.

This is, of course, deliberate. It's intended to ensure that there is a slow but regular turnover of lower-ranking titles to new families as old ones fail to have a large enough number of heirs and leave the titles vacant for reassignment, as well as ensuring that any particular family dynasty spreads out in each generation to make new connections. This fosters more complex and multifaceted webs of obligation and prevents any one great family from permanently consolidating too much power.

Beneath the aforementioned hereditary are the equivalent of Life Peers in Terran aristocratic nomenclaure, non-hereditary noble ranks assigned at need that fill out the management ranks of the entire Imperial government bureaucracy. Some of these ranks, such as the high admirals and generals of the Imperium, are in practice wielding more seniority and prestige than all but the highest of the hereditary nobles despite being life titles.

Of note is that Vilani lifespans tend to run almost 150% of Terran lifespans due to certain variances in their evolution, which has a certain steadying effect of its own on the rate of social change and dynastic turnover.

Subject Races

Approximately 10% of the total population of the Imperium are non-Vilani humans of other offshoot races, and another 10% are nonhuman sapient races. Very few of them had star travel before the Imperium assimilated them, and even the largest and most advanced interstellar polity - the Vegans - still only controlled somewhat over a dozen worlds.

The Vilani treat their subject races with a mix of naked imperialism and generous inclusiveness. So long as a subject race shows even a moderate tendency to wish to conform to Vilani culture and government, they are treated identically under law as any other Imperial subjects. Obviously the hereditary and conservative nature of the higher ranks of the Imperial government means that subject races (human and otherwise) have very little direct representation there, but Vilani rule tends to be no less benevolently oppressive to conquered peoples than it is to their own population. Only the most incorrigible resisters have their worlds still under trade interdiction or forcible military occupation.

On the other hand, a subject world that doesn't want to follow Vilani law and culture is going to get pressured until it does, even if they have to use sledgehammers. The only exceptions that begin to made are for races nonhuman enough in their psychology that the Vilani have to settle for just having them conform to their legal and bureaucratic system and let their culture handle itself.

This legal equality combined with uncompromising cultural imperialism means that the Vilani have been having to deal with occasional uprisings and local unrest for about as long as the Imperium has existed. Given the immense advantages of size that the Imperium has against any single world, this is seen as no more than an inevitable but minor problem caused by quirks of sophont nature that would be impossible to engineer out of a population and are simply dealt with if and when they occur.

Of particular note are the Anakundu, a human strain that was one of the earlier races assimilated into the Imperium. Having been only at a Neolithic level of development when the Vilani made first contact, pretty much their entire culture and industry is the result of Vilani uplift. They are nigh-invariably strong Imperial loyalists and are one of the very few non-Vilani races to occasionally hold high positions in the Vilani government.

The current Saarpuhi Kushuggi of the Imperial Rim Province, Sharik Yangila, is an Anakundu.

 

[cliffc999]

For completeness' sake, here's what I had on the scratch pad for the revised chapter 8 before I realized I was stuck.

Nothing really new, it's just the part I saved from the abandoned chapter 8 before I attempted the sudden swerve to 'kidnapped by Grandfather'.

---

Chapter 8

In 1943, the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation set up its Advanced Development Projects office in response to the appearance of the German Me-262 jet fighter plane. Drawing their initial complement from the team of engineers who had already produced the successful P-38 Lightning long-range fighter and the droppable fuel tank, the ADP managed to design and build a workable prototype for the XP-80, the first US jet fighter, in only 143 days. Although the F-80 production model did not see widespread line service until the Korean War, the success of the ADP made it a permanent institution at Lockheed - a highly select and secretive group of hand-picked engineers and scientists, given abundant resources and encouraged to run amok with minimal oversight by the design bureaucracy. They were soon named "The Skunk Works" in a reference taken from the 'Lil' Abner' newspaper comic strip of the time, and over the next several decades successfully designed and built the U-2 and SR-71 high-altitude reconaissance aircraft and the F-117, F-22, and F-35 stealth fighters. Their engineering legend put the term 'skunk works' into general usage for any high-level working group given a high degree of internal autonomy and minimal oversight from the rest of the organization to work on secret projects.

And just like the Americans' Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, the name and legacy of the Skunk Works had also been inherited by the Terran Confederation and was now currently bestowed upon DARPA's top-secret multi-disciplinary R&D facility at Ganymede Base.

Achievement Unlocked: Where The Magic Happens
(Successfully Get Reassigned To The Skunk Works)
Reward: 100 CP

Heartened at the unexpected CP reward, especially since I'd tapped myself out buying the Black Computer, I immediately re-opened the Celestial Forge's interface and picked out an item that I'd already had my eye on but hadn't picked up yet. Now that I had 100 spare CP again and was about to embark on a new phase of my life where it would be most useful, it was time to pick up PhDs (Fantastic Four).

I was admittedly courting a minor existential crisis by taking this, but Genius Patrol or no Genius Patrol I needed to properly arm myself for any upcoming conflicts with the R&D bureaucracy. Like an athletics team, showing potential might get you drafted but you had to actually put up the winning #'s to get paid the big money. And while I wasn't really concerned about my personal wealth, especially given the ultracapacitor tech I'd just sold, I was definitely going to be in some serious competition for research budgets with whatever scientists were already older and more established here and I'd need every edge I could.

And so, I picked up the item that not only promised to add several more PhDs' worth of specialized expertise to my knowledge base but also to make my records and backstory show that I'd always had sufficient academic and professional credentials for any expertise I actually possessed, regardless of source. Which was frightening to think about, in the sense that the Celestial Forge apparently had the power to retroactively edit time and space and my own personal history in order to insert things that had never actually happened, but... as uncomfortable as the thought made me feel, the fact remained that I'd been violating causality as I'd known it ever since I'd first started tapping a mysterious otherworldly force for knowledge and abilities from outside reality. Now I'd just have to more openly confront that that was what I was doing.

In limited doses, at least.

So instead of arriving at the Skunk Works as a precocious young college student with some very promising theoretical math and a noteworthy commercial patent, I arrived as some type of absurd young genius who'd somehow discreetly obtained multiple PhDs in only several years, without that coming to notice until I chose to reveal it. Which had a definite affect on how much support I'd be given in my first project, because if there was one thing that people with high-end academic credentials believed in with all their heart it was that having enough high-end academic credentials was the essential proof of smartness. Which... well, I'd been starting to learn that when you were trying to persuade other people to do something then what you could get them to believe was true was often far more important than what was objectively true.

Admittedly, I was just a wee bit nervous about how Genius Patrol was going to figure this one, but one of the several reasons I'd taken this item was to test just how far the Celestial Forge could go in making these kinds of things happen. If they didn't react like they'd just had their own memories and case studies on me edited, then I'd know more about the extent of the Forge's powers. And if they did react like it? Well, then I'd have to come clean... and while I didn't want to do that at all, if I ended up needing to do so then I'd want to have that happen as early in the process as possible.

"So, Lieutenant. You have how many PhDs?" Rear Admiral Alexis Davenport, commanding officer of the Skunk Works, asked me with a skeptically raised eyebrow.

"After the first one, they were willing to accept complete-at-your-own-pace remote coursework and dissertation-only for most of the others." I deflected. In actuality I'd never attended a graduate school or written a doctoral dissertation in my life, but my latest purchase from the Forge had promised that it would materialize records and backstories as necessary to explain my degrees, and it had certainly delivered.

"I know that the youngest person to obtain a doctoral degree since the 20th century was only 15 years old, but the only other people to obtain as many graduate degrees as you have were perpetual students for decades. You're twenty-one." she said incredulously.

I honestly didn't have an answer for this one that didn't feel awkward, so I just nodded.

"And you have total recall, it says here." she said, glancing back down at her desktop holodisplay. "Between that and all your credentials, it's no wonder that you've been able to cross-reference so many different scientific disciplines."

"I think that's why I've only recently started to pick up speed with my inventing." I said, happy that she'd given me the opportunity to start spinning this in a certain direction. "One of the primary bottlenecks in R&D is that normally, no one person can know or apply everything relevant to a particular problem if some of the necessary pieces of knowledge aren't part of their normal specialty. Only I'm a... general specialist?"

"Is that how you originally got the inspiration for your FTL communication hypothesis?" she asked me.

"Yes ma'am." I said. "If you start from McAndrew's fourth equation and then cross-reference that with-"

She immediately cut off my impending flow of ascended high math nerdery with an upraised palm. "I read the precis." she said. "More importantly, so did several of the other jumpspace physicists around here. But however promising the theory look, of course it needs testing. How soon can you have a prototype design for us to look at?"

"I worked it out while jumping back from Nusku." I smiled at her, and hauled out my Black Computer, morphed into a portacomp, and beamed the relevant file into her desktop system.

"Hmm." she said, looking at it. "According to your rough estimate, we're looking at enough expense here to almost pay for a Crockett-class' entire jumpdrive."

"The production model will be notably cheaper, once we work out all the quirks." I said. "But yes, the initial prototype is going to be a bit of a project."

"Indeed." she nodded. "Still, the ultracapacitor speaks well of your talent for practical application as well as theory, and you come highly recommended. Spend the rest of today finishing your in-processing, and can you have your presentation ready to show the review board by 1100 tomorrow?"

"Yes ma'am." I agreed, having already written it at the same time I was busy finishing my preliminary schematics.

"Then if we can clear the final hurdle, you'll get your budget and your lab. And then, we'll see what happens."

* * * * *​

"Damn, it's all just flowing together." Dr. Saunders, the Skunk Works' leading jumpspace physicist, said with a commendable attempt at masking his envy.

"Sometimes you just get... fortunate." I temporized, realizing at the last minute that crediting my victory over him to mere luck would only piss him off even further.

When I'd originally gotten the Celestial Forge I'd been like a child with a new toy. Being able to perform at a vastly higher level of ability than I ever had before made me feel powerful, feel important. Even if I was capable of exercising strategic patience if I exerted enough willpower - witness my career track to date - I still was full of eager anticipation at the point when I would start being famous, where everyone would start praising my genius.

And now I was finally starting to reach that point and I realized that I only felt embarassed. Because it wasn't really my genius at all they were praising, was it?

Case in point, my new lab partner. Dr. Saunders was 37, and had had his career marked and mentored from childhood onwards just as carefully as the Genius Patrol had marked mine. Early graduation from secondary-ed. Early National Honors on his CAT exams, but with actual entry into Public Service held back until he reached age 18. Bachelors' degree completed before he even hit his Public Service draft. Double service credit and early release, just like I'd earned mine. Two PhDs before he was twenty-five, credited with refining the Vilani jump-2 drive for even greater fuel efficiency than they could manage before he was thirty. He'd been assigned to the problem of deep-space jump breakout - finding a way to plot a hyperspace jump that didn't have to terminate in a gravity well, so that a ship with extra fuel tanks could cross the 3-parsec gulf in the stars surrounding Confederation space by doing a double-hop - and had been making noteworthy progress towards that end before I'd come along.

And now a girl slightly over half his age was about to entirely upstage him, and would soon enough render the project he'd spent the last two years working on entire unnecessary... and unlike him, neither her brilliance nor her accumulated knowledge were due to her own efforts. I suppose that the accident of birth that gave him his raw intelligence could be equated to the quirk of fate that granted me access to the Celestial Forge, but all of my alleged genius and insight into jumpspace theory was from my having taken Ragnarok Proofing and PhDs. A few achievements, some spent CP, and voila! I was now being welcomed and feted as the Confederation's most brilliant researcher, but what I actually was was a cosmic stenographer. The Forge was doing it all for me, all I was doing was taking credit for other peoples' work.

I'd always felt mildly scornful when I'd read fiction about heroes who had 'imposter syndrome' - you were getting it done, so did it really matter that your gimmes were coming from the plot instead of from the normal way? The people you helped were still helped, right? The bad guys you beat were still beat?

And now I was seeing the problem from the other side and... well, younger me was still correct about that bit. What really mattered to everyone else was that the work was getting done, not about how or why. But older me was coming to realize that even if your internals didn't necessarily matter to those around you, they always still mattered to you.

"Isn't that the truth." Dr. Saunders replied to me manfully, and I pushed my woolgathering aside and got back to work.

Since I'd made sure that one of my new PhDs would be in jumpspace physics, I had all the information I needed to begin seamlessly integrating Battletech jumpdrive tech into our own native version. The actual nuts and bolts of building a jump-9 ship would still need a lot of ancillary details to be worked out, not least of them being somehow figuring a way to shrink the whole damn setup down into something of a more reasonable size, but my first project was of course the FTL communication method I'd promised that I could build, and given that I already had the full schematics for one the only thing I needed was to take enough lab time - and go through enough of the steps myself where other people could see it - that it would appear to be a process of invention, not just copying things from a set of mental notes.

The Hyper-Pulse Generator, or HPG, was the primary method of interstellar communication in Battletech. It was a variant of K-F drive technology that was used to create an artificial 'jump point' instead of pushing a large mass through an already-existing jump point. Using a giant installation the size of a small radio telescope, it fired an electromagnetic signal into jumpspace where it would omnidirectionally propagate to be picked up by every HPG receiver within range. They were also extremely large and expensive, and required equally large and expensive receivers. A 'short-range portable' HPG was one that weighed only twelve tons and required an entire Battlemech just to move.

So for my first FTL comms demonstration I'd decided to build something simpler, a variant of the "black box" or K-Series FTL comm tech that the Star League had invented almost 50 years before the HPG. Although their transmission bandwidth was much narrower, limiting them to text messages instead of audiovisual, the most advanced models of K-series transmitters had almost twelve hundred light-years of range, exceeding even the Word of Blake "Super-HPG" plot device from one of the later Battletech arcs. The K-Series technology had been abandoned by the Star League in favor of the HPG as soon as the latter was invented, and their capability to interfere with JumpDrives and HPGs had been given as the reason. But as it turned out, that reason was a lie - if properly tuned, the 'Black Box' technology had no such interference at all. Apparently the Star League, or possibly early ComStar, had wanted HPG technology instead because it made centralized control of communications far easier, and had been willing to mislead everyone else to get it.

Or maybe they'd just screwed up. I didn't know for certain, as I was having to reconstruct the motives of the people in the Battletech setting from what fragmentary lore knowledge I did have and their full technical database. It was entirely possible that they'd simply overlooked this in their research, especially given what had happened to systematic research and development upon the collapse of the Star League and the outright cargo cult level of thinking that had surrounded much of their advanced "lostech".

Still, that was the Inner Sphere's problem. My problem was making this damned thing work so I didn't fall flat on my face at the first hurdle, and I was fortunate that I'd bought all my magic PhDs because I doubt I'd have gotten enough people to listen to my theories without them. But math was math, and despite the intense academic nerd fights I'd been forced to struggle through I did manage to convince the powers that be that my 'new theories' about jumpspace interface allowed for beaming an electromagnetic signal from one precisely tuned receiving station to another, so after weeks of building, testing, refining, and building again, and after several laboratory demonstrations that indicated that the thing was working as a communications device, it was time for the first field test to see if I'd actually managed to make an FTL communications device. Because proving that we were going substantially in excess of lightspeed, let alone at the FTL multipliers we'd need to make this substantially faster than just using a jumpship, would require us to be shooting across a distance substantially further than the width of the lab, or for that matter the orbital habitat we were working in.

And so after a few weeks' of work, and some vigorous pretending on my part to have already done most of the pure theory by myself before I'd even gotten here so as to get to the field tests as soon as possible, it came down to the final hurdle. The first of our field-range paired FTL units had been finished, and one of them was sitting in front of me right now while the other one was onboard an interplanetary shuttle currently over two light-minutes away. We'd synchronized two atomic clocks to each other before placing one at each end, and at a preset time the shuttle would simultaneously transmit the same message to us both by FTL pulse transmitter and with its ordinary comm laser. The message would be several paragraphs of text to be typed in by an operator onboard the shuttle only after separating from the station, to be chosen only after the shuttle was already on-station so as to try and preclude any fraud on my part by pre-arranging a message. Obviously the validity of the test would be if both messages - the one being sent by FTL pulse and the one being sent by lightspeed laser - matched exactly, and the one of them arrived more quickly than the other. Equally as obviously, the operator for the test was someone I'd never met and who had been randomly selected from a pool of candidates at the last minute, with all suitable safeguards to prevent prior collusion.

With an incongrously quiet 'ping!', the transmitter signaled reception of the first message.

"Holy shit!" the comm tech manning the panel whispered quietly. "Um, message received, sir!"

Rear Admiral Davenport, the commanding officer of the Skunk Works, leaned forward to look over his shoulder and start reading it herself. "I [name], do hereby swear, before the Great and Living God, that during my engagement, and while I am an employee of Russell, Majors & Waddell, I will, under no circumstances, use profane language; that I will drink no intoxicating liquors; that I will not quarrel or fight with any other employee of the firm, and that in every respect I will conduct myself honestly, be faithful to my duties, and so direct all my acts as to win the confidence of my employer. So help me God." she recited. "Wait, what the heck is this?"

"It's the code of conduct for Pony Express riders in the American Old West." I answered her. "Someone's a history buff, it would seem."

"Apparently so." she agreed, both of us forcing ourselves to breathe steadily as we waited and waited and-

"Second message received!" the comm tech burst out as the panel went 'ping!' again. "Right on the dot, and... it's a match!"

"It's a textual match, but does it hash correctly?" the admiral asked tightly.

"One hundred percent." I said, peeringly closely at my own readouts. "Every bit, byte, and checksum is identical. Both signals are the exact same set of data packets. We did it!" I irrepressibly burst out at the end.

"You did it." she answered me, breathing heavily. "Congratulations, Dr. Nowak. Actual, honest-to-god FTL comms. You just put yourself in the history books right next to McAndrew."

I kept my embarassment off my face and replied as calmly as possible. "Or I will have, if and when this technology is ever unsealed from 'black' status. Because we can't let the Vilani even suspect this exists."

"No, we can't." she agreed. "But we'll still have to find a way to use it. Still, even though they'll be taking our recommendations into account, that one's for the Strategy Board. We've still got the longer-range tests to do, let alone the first interstellar-range test."

"Yes we do." I said. "And I can already see a couple things in the datalogs that-"

Quest Completed!
A Rising Thunder
Objective: Advance the Terran Confederation's tech level to be superior to Vilani Imperial Standard Technology in at least one militarily significant area before the start of the Fourth Interstellar War
Reward: 1000 CP, Terran Confederation Victory

I reeled as the notification flashed in my mind's eye. I'd finished already? I mean, yes, workable interstellar FTL communication would qualify as both a 'military significant area' of technology and well in advance of Vilani capabilities, and with the proof-of-concept a success Dr. Saunders and the rest of the Skunk Works could finish refining my design into a useable application even if I dropped dead at this very instant, but- already?

"Dr. Nowak?" Admiral Davenport prompted me.

"Sorry, got distracted." I grinned at her weakly. "And yes, we definitely need to press forward with the testing schedule. Given the clarity of the results we just got, I'm thinking we might skip the light-minute test and try for a signal from beyond Pluto orbit..."

* * * * *​

So, now what?

I stood in the wardroom of Clarke Station, one of the several orbiting habitats around Ganymede that the Skunk Works' spaceside facilities were distributed among, and stared out the panaromic window at the stars.

The sheer speed with which I'd completed my main mission from the Celestial Forge had shocked me. Admittedly, it had taken me slightly over three years to get to this point but the fact was that I'd managed to avert Terra's prophesied defeat in the Fourth Interstellar War well before it had even started. Tensions on the border had been steadily worsening, but were not yet at the levels that had prefaced the Third Interstellar War, and while ONI had several indicators of a military buildup going on in the Imperial Rim Province the Imperial government had yet to so much as start enacting trade sanctions again, much less anything more overt.

And yet I didn't feel victorious. On one level that was simply common sense - the fact that we were now apparently on track to win some kind of victory in a Fourth Interstellar War in no way meant that the conflict between the Confederation and the Imperium would be permanently resolved, so obviously I'd still have some kind of work left to do in that regard even if the Forge had yet to give me any new quests to replace the main one I'd just finished.

But on the other hand, right now I had every reason to be optimistic in my outlook. After all, one of the main forces driving the Confederation and the Imperium to keep butting heads was the fact that our expansion into the larger galaxy was unavoidably forced to be in the Imperium's direction, given the limitations of jump-2 drive and the 3+ parsec interstellar gulf surrounding Terran space on all but one side. And that was a limitation I was soon enough going to render obsolete. As soon as I could get a jump-9 drive built, we could expand rimward and trailward away from the Imperium, into areas of space they hadn't even charted yet. And if we could do that-

But, that would be a project for a later day. For right now, I really needed a vacation. I'd been busting my hump flat-out on one project or another with only brief, if any, breaks ever since I'd graduated secondary-ed, and I had over a hundred million sols in the bank from my share of the advance that High Frontier had paid my family for the ultracapacitor patent license and a whole lot of accumulated leave to spend it in. My application for some time off had just been approved, and in a little while I'd catch an interplanetary shuttle back to Terra and-

And then what?

I stared at the stars, sloshing brimfull of thoughts and feelings, and realized that I couldn't think of a single solitary thing I was actually eager to do. The recreations I'd used to enjoy were childishly simple and relatively unentertaining to my newly expanded brain, but right now I felt like I'd throw up if I even looked at a computer terminal or a lab workbench at any point in the next month. And the advice Mr. Stepczinski had given me was still filed in my supernaturally accurate memory along with everything else, so just going out and getting plastered was a non-starter as well. The last thing the Confederation needed was for their one-girl science revolution to develop a drinking problem or something.

You're just tired, I told myself. You've been working too hard for too long, and you need a rest. So go find a tropical beach , lay down on it, and sleep in and vegetate. When you get your energy back, your inspiration will come with it. That's why people take vacations in the first place.

I turned away from the window and headed off towards my compartment to start packing my bags. I'd already checked out with my chain of command, so I didn't have anyone else I needed to stop and talk to before my shuttle left. Time to start my vacation.

---

And, this is where it stalled completely out when I couldn't so much as get a mental image of who she was going on vacation with or where, and after several days of failing to I realized that my muse just had given up on trying to make this go anywhere. Damn fickle things, muses.​