Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

Labels were a two-edged sword.

On the one hand, the ability to quickly classify and index a complex phenomenon using a simpler idea was called "abstraction", and a capability for doing that was not only necessary for a sapient being to function but part of the actual definition of sapience. On the other hand, labelling something too hastily or broadly meant that it was entirely possible to miss critical parts of the picture, even with a perfect memory, because you didn't actually open the mental filing cabinet drawer holding the key data because according to your index it didn't hold anything relevant to the problem.

The tech database jammed into my head with Ragnarok Proofing had indexed an entire body of knowledge under 'fusion power", so after looking briefly at the performance specs for their fusion plants and realizing that our contemporary fusion powerplants had a comparable power output for at least as small a size I'd decided to push a detailed exploration of that particular tech to the back burner while I concentrated on things I knew were better than ours, such as FTL drive...

... until a cross-reference from the mental database about Battletech FTL technology led me back to fusion power by a most unexpected route. Because somebody in the Inner Sphere had seriously mislabelled their "fusion" reactors. When I actually did a detailed review of the theory and practice of how the damn things actually worked deep inside their guts, my hair stood on end.

If I'd thought the math behind Vilani jumpdrive was weird, then Battletechnology bordered on dark magic. A Battletech "fusion reactor" was actually some kind of dimensional flux generator. It was an application of the same technology that allowed them to bang a high-voltage current through some superconducting coils in just the right way and end up forcing open a rift through time and space. Used one-way with a tremendous charge all dumped from the capacitor at the same time, you bamfed a starship hull multiple parsecs in a blink. Used another way, it warped space to the point that the stream of hydrogen you fed into the reaction chamber would just start having the protons spontaneously start trying to occupy the same space at the same time without needing anything as tedious as a magnetic pinch field or a high-powered ignition laser to get the reaction going. At that point it was simply a matter of feeding the resulting superheated ionized plasma through a magnetohydrodynamic coil to generate electrical current. Much like how a conventional generator made electricity by having a rotating magnetic field sweep across conducting coils, only in this case the rotating magnetic element was made out of highly charged plasma.

Or to put it more simply, you shot hydrogen gas into one end, then twisted the very fabric of space and time until fusing particles fell out. And the Battletech setting used this to power generators, and barely explored any applications for such an unprecedented (to say the least!) technology beyond that. I'd already known that the Clans basically treated Star League knowledge as religious lore and just built what the Sacred Blueprints told them to build, but what had even happened to the scientific method in the Inner Sphere? No wonder they thought that the best way to build a high-tech war machine was to take an industrial exoskeleton and make it an even bigger target, while firing anti-vehicle weapons over iron sights at close visual range-

But the practical upshot of all this was that when I realized that Ragnarok Proofing went far deeper than simply giving me a better jumpdrive and that the Inner Sphere had made a great many things that actually were superior to our tech, even if a surface read of the game didn't show it. Because if there was one thing consistent about the people in Battletech it's that they made tremendously inefficient use of their technologcal and industrial capabilities. Honestly, they were the proverbial thumb-fingered engineer who took a thousand-sol torque wrench and used it to pound nails with.

Which is why the invention I was about to show the gentleman from High Frontier Development had nothing to do with FTL tech at all. In addition to the part where what I needed right now was any kind of 'win' on the R&D front, to break out of the naval/tactical track that I had somehow been bureaucratically pigeonholed in, there was also that basically anything that would be a gamebreaker for Terra against the Vilani would also let the Vilani crush us like insects if they got it. And for all that they didn't like making sudden big changes to their tech as opposed to generations of incremental improvement, I couldn't just blithely assume they were idiots. If I put something out there that flipped the entire game table over, they'd do their best to get a copy for themselves. Which meant that until I was already working inside an ultra top-secret environment I didn't want to even begin to write down, let alone share, any of the good stuff. Because I had to plan for the possibility - especially here on Nusku - that the Vilani might possibly have agents inside any non-classified workspace.

To be fair, they also could theoretically have an agent inside even the most classified workspace but at some point you actually had to trust other people to be able to do their jobs or else no large-scale project could even begin to function. I just didn't want to set that point too far out on the first day. So after the "fusion" incident had left me realizing that I'd overlooked a lot of the potential of Battletech's setting, I'd gone back and deliberately worked my way through the mental "index" of the Ragnarok Proofing database, reading at least an overall prospectus of the technology contained within instead of just looking at the "label" on the filing cabinet drawer and moving on. And after I started doing that, it didn't take me very long to find exactly what I needed, and so I latched on to the particular possibility I'd discovered there and gotten to work.

And that's why the invention I'd brought to show them today was a high-density powerpack adapted from the battery that allowed a Clan Elemental suit of power armor to not only run and jump for an entire day without refueling but also fire an ER Micro-Pulse Laser that had a power requirement and damage similar to the Small Laser that the Inner Sphere mounted on light mechs. That was at least an order of magnitude more efficient than the highest-density accumulators possible to build with Vilani technology, and they charged quite rapidly as well. The overall commercial value of such a substantial improvement in portable energy storage technology was incalculable. Everything from smartphone batteries that could charge in ten minutes and last for a months' normal operation on up to electric cars with 10x normal range were possible with this. And hopefully the commercial potential would be huge enough to persuade someone that I actually was a genius inventor, so please buy my invention and give me enough of a rep that when I make a 'theoretical breakthrough' in FTL physics later on, somebody will actually be willing to fund a project at least the size of the original StarLeaper One to test it out.

Fortunately, it wasn't just math that I had to persuade them with. Another reason for starting with the battery technology is that it was actually small enough for me to build a sample of on top of a workbench. My folks did admittedly have to take out a second mortgage on the house to afford the lab setup that let me actually make the demonstrator, not to mention how much it cost in power fees to actually charge the damn thing, but when I dumped something the size of a 20th-century car battery on top of the workbench and invited them to hook it up for a load test on the same machinery they used to test the giant capacitor banks built for starships, and it demonstrated that yes it was actually capable of holding enough electric charge to fuel a fully-loaded groundtruck for an 800-kilometer journey, and did so using one small battery instead of a rack full of accumulators that would fill most of the back of the truck cab... well, we'd arrived first thing in the morning to talk to R&D, and by mid-afternoon we were in the CEO's office. Becuase quick-charging, ridiculously durable, and relatively cheap batteries that also held a ridiculous amount of charge per unit volume would be useful in building almost anything.

"You understand the delicacy of our positions here, Ensign Nowak. As an active-duty member of the Confederation Armed Forces... are you familiar with the story of John Garand?" Mr. al-Ghazali, one of the richest men in Confederation space and the owner and CEO of High Frontier Development asked me.

"The designer of the World War II standard infantry rifle for the North Americans?" I replied. One of the 'equivalent of ten PhDs' that Well-Researched had given me had been in Terran history, after all.

"The very same." he replied, mildly impressed. "And one who never received so much as a dime in royalties for his invention, despite it being the most widely manufactured firearm in the world during the largest planetary war in the history of Terra... because he was a government employee at the time he developed it, and therefore they owned all rights to it."

"That was both because Mr. Garand had specifically been hired as an ordnance engineer at the government's Springfield Arsenal - meaning that any firearms R&D he engaged in would have been part of his official duties - and because as a patriotic act he short-circuited any potential legal dispute over the ownership rights to his invention by voluntarily signing all of his interest over to the government." I pointed out matter-of-factly. "I developed this on my own time, and I am and have ever since graduating training been assigned as a line officer and on ship duty - as an electronic warfare officer, not even an engineer - and certainly not in any research or development posting. Also, while I admit it's largely a my-word-versus-theirs situation because I was doing it off-the-books and not as an official class project, the bulk of this research was completed by me during my period as an undergraduate student at MIT prior to my being drafted." And okay, that last bit was an outright lie, but it's not as if anybody could check. And at least this way I could get some retroactive use out of my having spent that year at MIT and not getting anything finished, by making the official story 'I'd been moonlighting on this the whole time but my getting drafted had interrupted the final phase'.

"Can you substantiate that?" the corporation's Chief Legal Officer, henceforth a silent witness to our conversation, asked politely.

"My notes and calculations from that period weren't exactly collected with an eye towards having to prove a case in court later, but they still have digital timestamps." Indeed they did, and forging them all letter-perfect had been a chore and a half. "And in addition, my parents and I had an agreement that in return for funding my experiments they would be assigned the interests in my first major success - an agreement whose intent predates my entering naval service, even if we only formalized it in writing after I actually had that success."

"While verbal contracts are generally considered legally binding, the difficulty of actually proving the exact terms of verbal contracts in case of dispute is why it is ill-advised to attempt to take anything into court that you did not get first in writing." she replied.

"I'm sitting right here." my mother said mildly. "Does that difficulty with verbal contracts still exist when both parties to it are willing to attest to it, in every particular?"

"Provided you both filed separate affadavits swearing to commit yourself to the original handshake agreement with no dispute, I think we could make that stand up." the Chief Legal Officer replied to both us and her boss after a long moment of thought, and he nodded. "And, of course, the government has no valid claim on intellectual property not only whose development process began before Ensign Nowak's entering naval service but the rights to which were already assigned elsewhere before her enlistment. The only difficulty would be proving it, and the only substantial obstacle to that would be if you and your parents tried to submit... varying claims."

"Even so, the fact remains you came here first as opposed to notifying your chain of command." Mr. al-Ghazali said. "And however valuable your invention, even with the legal options we just explored we'd still have to engage in a nontrivial amount of litigation before we could commercially develop it or else risk an entire capital investment being obviated by a later legal ruling." he trailed off, not being rude enough to say I am going to use this as an excuse to really put the price down. out loud.

"My daughter had no intention of going behind the backs of her chain of command, sir." my mother stood up for me. "But obviously she didn't want to trouble the military procurement bureaucracy with such a matter until she was certain there was actually a commercial value in her invention worth contacting them about."

"In addition to the fact that as a major defense contractor, High Frontier would know far more about who to talk to and how without letting that process interfere in the flow of business than I would." I chimed in. Yes, we're tailgating off of your patent attorneys for free instead of bankrupting ourselves hiring one of our own, but that only gets you so many points shaved off the royalties we're asking.

"We do have several useful contacts to speak to in that regard, that is true." Mr. al-Ghazali smiled back, amused at what we weren't saying and how we weren't saying it. "So, presuming that any disputed ownership of your intellectual property rights could be settled in our favor with relative amiability, and your patent application likewise, then we would be prepared to offer..."

It took until well into the next day to finally get a contract signed, and getting it done even that soon required us to take a knee at the end of the process. Because what I'd needed most right now was a quick and definitive resolution, as opposed to the most profitable one I could possibly get. Indeed, we were lucky to get one percent of the gross as royalties out of the old skinflint, and a substantial portion of that was still being paid in stock options instead of cash. But we also got a two hundred megasol advance and a binding commitment that he'd deal with all the legal disputes - if any - regarding the rights to my new 'ultracapacitor' technology. In return for which he'd have proprietary rights on one of the most profitable inventions of the decade (so far!) for as long as my patent lasted.

Of course, the main reason I'd done all of this in the first place was to get the name of 'Sophia Nowak' rammed directly up the noses of the most senior ranks of the Confederation Navy's military R&D and procurement bureaucracies, because the aforementioned legal proceedings would of necessity blow right over, if not through, any bureaucratic firewall that Mr. Dumonte might have put around my case file for whatever reasons they might have had. And given that Mr. al-Ghazadi and High Frontier were already one of the largest defense contractors in the Confederation, if anybody would have sufficient influence with said procurement bureaucracy to get this one rammed through than they would.

And last, but certainly not least, I got to make Mom and Dad future billionaires. Which was worth the whole trip all by itself.

* * * * *​

I actually ended up making one more patrol in the Gladstone, because even an expedited trip through the court system over the rights to 'ultracapacitor' technology was still going to take several months. Fortunately, as the major parties to that litigation were the Confederation bureaucracy versus High Frontier and my parents - the entire point of the dodge we were working is that they were the ones who owned the intellectual property rights, after all - all I had to do was record my sworn depositions and then I was free to head back out and be safely away from the entire brouhaha. Of course, everyone on the Gladstone from Lt. Prescott on down knew about what was going on, so it was already accepted as a foregone conclusion that no matter what happened next my tour onboard would be ending the instant we touched dirt again at the end of patrol.

And sure enough, it did. Even before we'd made planetfall we'd already gotten the word on the com that one Ensign Sophia Nowak was being reassigned. Likewise, I'd gotten a message from my parents stating that Mr. al-Ghazali's lawyers had gotten an expedited ruling from the Confederation courts confirming that the intellectual property I'd developed on my own time, starting before I'd even joined the Navy, was indeed mine to sell as I saw fit. With that completed and the patent application also being suitably greased through in a hurry by megacorporate influence, my parents had already collected all 200 million of the advance and would be in a position to collect far more than that once the High Frontier Development Consortium finished revolutionizing the entire battery industry.​

Hidden Quest Completed!
All Sorts Of Applications
Objective: Obtain Your First Patent
Reward: 200 CP

... could you give me some non-hidden quests, Forge? So far I only really have one of those, and that one's a nightmare.
Also, apparently "at least one military significant area" requires me to make a noticeable improvement in an area of tech, not just one militarily significant invention, or else the ultracapacitors would already have met the minimum requirements for the 'avoid losing the Fourth Interstellar War' quest.

But hey, at least I now had enough points to grab an item that I'd had my eye on for the past couple of weeks... the Black Supercomputer. Even more ridiculous than the Ceph nanotech, this item was straight-up absurd. It could be magically summoned or banished with a thought, promised literally unlimited storage - which by itself violated the laws of thermodynamics in at least two separate ways - and 'borderline infinite' processing power, was indestructible, immune to malware, and also was advertised as having a selective perception filter on it that would keep anyone from noticing anything unusual about it. Most importantly, it was supposed to be magically immune to malware... which meant I would finally have an entirely secure digital storage device to keep things in, even in a hypothetical future where I might have things I didn't want to share with my superiors. Or anyone else. So yes, I was definitely yoinking it when I got it.

And after we made planetfall and I officially mustered out from the CSS Gladstone, touched base with my folks, signed what patent paperwork I needed to sign, and attended a celebratory dinner with Nusku's latest multi-millionaires (and accepted them discreetly transferring slightly less than half of the 200 megasol advance High Frontier had paid them into my own account, minus the gift taxes), at the end of my weeks' leave at home I reported back to base to arrange for transport to Terra and my new duty station, only for the personnel clerk at the window to direct me to a private meeting room instead, where an unfamiliar Navy officer with the shoulderboards of a full captain waited to greet me.

I fought down my immediate reflex to brace to attention and report in the best boot camp fashion and instead actually took in the conference room, focusing particularly on the lit holographic icon floating over the table signifying that not only was this a secure conference room but that the room's inbuilt bug-jamming systems were currently activated. I also noted that a tablet computer was laying in front of him on the table, with a familiar-looking set of instrument readings on the holographic display.

I let the door close behind me, stood to attention, and politely asked "Do you normally work with a Mr. Dumonte, sir?"

The captain nodded at me in reply. "Captain Li Jiang, Office of Naval Intelligence. And yes, I do. At ease, Ensign, and have a seat."

I took the chair offered to him and let the silence fill the room, until after a ten-second pause he nodded again and continued. "I'm almost entirely certain of what the first question you'd like answered is, but before we reach that part of the conversation I need to address another matter. And since attempts to indirectly evaluate you have proven inconclusive, we've finally decided simply to ask."

"Sir?" I non-answered.

"Were you always as intelligent as you are now?" he replied evenly. So, they'd gotten - or at least guessed - that far.

"No sir." I answered him forthrightly.

He exhaled sharply, and I could see his posture relax slightly. "May I ask when this started?"

"Shortly before my CAT exams." I answered truthfully. 'And no sir, I don't have any idea how it happened. It... just happened."

He didn't even pretend to not be looking down at the display of his tablet as he nodded in acknowledgement of that. Yup, they've definitely a lie detector aimed at me this time. Well, that's why I wasn't lying...

"Mr. Dumonte. Dr. Ahmedi, and myself - and several others - are members of a high-level multi-agency working group, the Advanced Aptitude Tracking And Coordination Council. Unofficially, some people refer to us as 'the Genius Patrol'. Our mission is, of course, to do our best to locate exceptional and specialized talents that could be of exceptional value to the Confederation and then make sure that they're assigned where those talents can be best utilized."

I raised an eyebrow at that obvious bait and finally asked the question. "And this relates to my previous assignment how, sir?" I trailed off politely.

The corner of his mouth quirked. "We made a mistake." he admitted, and then waited in a clear 'You're not the only person who can play conversation intiative games.'

I nodded in acknowledgement of the touch he'd just scored and continued. "And that mistake was...?"

"An error in classification." he admitted. "Your scientific accomplishment on Peraspera showed that even as the most junior and unofficial member of a team, you were still capable of steering its efforts in a more productive direction as well as synthesizing many separate obscure bits of information that would normally never be coordinated with each other to draw an insightful conclusion. And then you went to MIT and after a year of dedicated research - and we had more than a little bit to do with how easy you found it to apply for unupervised lab time - seemed to produce no results except for one microbiology project that, given how thoroughly you destroyed it and then abandoned the entire effort, was apparently an abject failure."

They'd gotten that close? Eep! But at least they clearly had no idea of what I'd actually destroyed, or else they'd have intervened immediately.

"... you'd thought that my greatest genius was my leadership potential?" I asked incredulously as the centi-sol finally dropped.

"Can you blame us?" he said. "Until the ultracapacitor, outside of a certain talent for computer programming all of your successes ultimately were achievements of analysis, planning, and organization. Does that describe a scientist, or an admiral?"

"That's why you drafted me and assigned me to ship duty." I realized. "You thought I'd been putting myself down a blind alley, so you tried to redirect me."

"It's happened before. Anyone who has come to the attention of our office at all would almost invariably be the smartest person their entire school district has seen in years. Quite likely the smartest person they've met so far in their entire lives. So of course they all think that they can be the next Einstein or MacAndrew. But you better than most people can appreciate how even a very a high degree of 'normal' intelligence still isn't quite the same thing that allows someone to work out special relativity or invent the jumpdrive." Captain Jiang explained. "And it's not just scientific genius that the Confederation needs."

"So normally you let young geniuses self-select for what they're best at... but if you have reason to believe they've gotten that wrong and are stubbornly head-butting a stump, you steer their careers a little harder. And on top of that, there's the bit we just acknowledged about how all of your institutional expertise at tracking or predicting the development and education of human brains doesn't quite apply to me due to...?" I trailed off meaningfully.

"Whatever unique situation is going on with your neurology, yes." he acknowledged. "However, we already have an in-depth examination of your brain structure from Dr. Ahmedi's initial evaluation of you, and likewise sufficient DNA samples to analyze. And even schoolchildren, let alone senior officials, know the parable of the golden goose. So while we have every intention of putting you into a lab, it won't be as the research subject." he finished with a suitably disarming chuckle. "And between our belated recognition of how our initial decision in your case was in error and what by now is your more than adequately proven reliability, you're getting the assignment you initially asked for out of OCS. Because while I still have no doubt that you'd make a masterful admiral or senior intelligence analyst in your future, your ultracapacitor research - and the determination with which you've pursued it - has demonstrated that the best use of your talents almost certainly lies there."

"I'm going to the Skunk Works?" I asked with a smile I couldn't restrain.

"DARPA's advanced starship R&D facility at Ganymede." he agreed. "And unlike what would normally await the average newly-reported aboard Lieutenant Junior Grade, Rear Admiral Davenport has already been given a quiet heads-up from our office about you."

"Lieutenant j.g.? So I'm being promoted." I stated rather than asked.

"You've been an Ensign for almost a year by now, which makes you eligible for promotion below the zone." he replied. "And you've certainly earned it."

"Well, between that and your board's recommendation, that will hoepfully make my actually getting the budget to work on my next idea more likely." I said.

"You have another piece of research already in the works?" he asked.

"All I have on this one is theoretical math, and the projected budget to actually try and turn it into working hardware would be notably in excess of what it took for me to make the prototype ultracapacitor. But so far the math looks really promising to me, and I believe that the potential rewards far outweigh the risks." I replied.

"What potential rewards would those be, Lieutenant?" he asked me curiously.

"FTL communication, sir." I answered smartly, and carefully kept any expression off my face as I saw him literally jawdrop.

* * * * *​

Interlude
Saarpuhi Kushuggi's Palace
Kankhali City, Shulgiasu, Duusirka Subsector (Imperial Rim Provincial Capital)

Underking of the Rim Worlds Sharik Yangila stood with her back to her lavishly appointed desk, standing and facing the video display that was currently configured as a panoramic exterior view from the highest tower of her palace. An early riser, it was her regular habit to greet the rising sun in this fashion, and to take a quiet hour to reflect and meditate upon her plans and goals before the press of her regular workday began.

Terra, she thought firmly. Eleven parsecs away as the photon travels. Eighteen jumps away as the starship travels, thanks to the vagaries of astrogation and the several three=plus parsec gaps in the starmap that prevent direct travel. Approximately fourteen billion people set against the Ziru Sirka's several trillion. Barely a dozen inhabited worlds to our thousands. And trapped in an astrographic pocket that prevents expansion in any direction save through Imperial territory, thanks yet again to the vagaries of the starmap and the limitations of jump-2 drive. As far as the Imperium is concerned, merely the latest troublesome minor race to be encountered at our borders. As far as I know the Emperor has yet to even be notified of their existence, and the Minister of the Four Quarters - my immediate superior - only began to acknowledge them when the results of the latest war required us to report that Imperial territory had been conceded to the Terrans. The vast majority of Vilani society has yet to even notice they are there, and even most of my own subjects who have encountered them believe them only to be meddlesome traders and brave yet still primitive warriors. Perhaps a minor or moderate blemish on the peace and order of the Ziru Sirka, but surely no actual threat to our ancient and well-ordered society.

Fools. The Terrans are the greatest threat to our way of life that we have encountered since the Consolidation Wars themselves, and virtually no one other than myself can see that! she fumed. Not even the loss of Nusku has opened their eyes. Over one billion subjects of the Imperium now submit to a foreign master! A settled, inhabited planet has been taken away from the Imperium and conquered by outsiders, the first time that has ever happened to us, and yet even that does not open their eyes!

She turned away from the majestic glow of Shulgiasu's primary star and the equally majestic cityscape it illuminated to began firmly pacing a well-trodden course up and down her office floor.

Eighty years ago they did not even have jumpdrive, and now they have fully reverse-engineered our own and their ships match the speed of ours parsec for parsec. They were still a balkanized world during our first campaign against them, and yet they survived - yes, survived and unified! Three times we have punished them, and three times have they thrown us back! Kadur Erasharshi was the greatest military commander the People had seen in generations, a callback to the ancient vigor and daring we had during our initial expansion into the galaxy, and even he could not defeat them by main force.

She halted and twitched her shoulders against the most painful of her memories, then took a deep breath and continued onwards.

I pray that wherever your spirit is, Kadur, you will one day forgive me for betraying you. But I had to betray you, sir. Your losses in ships and materiel were about to reach the point where the Minister would order your relief anyway. And if I had not done what I did - if I had not altered the records to make your failure apparently one of treason on your part, as opposed to being due to the attrition the Terrans had forced upon us - than not merely you but the entire concept of conquering the Terrans by force at all would have been discredited.

The Imperial Court would almost certainly have decided that the benefits would not outweigh the cost, and that with the Terrans trapped in an astrographic pocket there was no need to fear that expansion anyway. And they would have forever sworn off any further attempts to reduce them by force, and allowed them to persist in the same informal autonomy with which we accomodate the Vegans. After all, even an interstellar society is no threat to the supremacy of the Empire so long as it can be prevented from geographically expanding. What can a mere pocket empire of several worlds do to the vast, irresistible mass of the Grand Empire of Stars, after all?

And the answer is, they can destroy us. Our society has lasted so long, maintained order and stability so well, that too many people are forgetting the lesson our ancestors fought and burned in the Consolidation Wars to learn - that stability is not a state of being, it is a process. It must be maintained. Our society has been engineered at every level to ensure uniformity of method, respect for precedent, and proper procedure. Intelligence has its place, but innovation merely for innovation's sake is worse than inefficient - it is dangerous. Over the course of centuries we have refined our science, our engineering, our culture and recordkeeping and bureaucracy and laws and precedents and thousands of things both major and minor so that we not merely hold entropy at bay but defy it, spit in its very face and dare it to try and tear down what we have so painstakingly built.

Sharik slowed her breathing and fought for inner peace, reflecting as she always did on the comforting, enduring, beautiful structure of the Ziru Sirka and the social engineering which had created it. A society that according to its most ancient history had once been much like the Terrans in its youth - brilliant, energetic, flush with youthful arrogance, and dreaming that they were the untrammeled lords of creation itself. A society that had leapt out to conquer the stars, then almost destroyed itself with civil war as its reach had so far exceeded its grasp, and then had created the Grand and Glorious Empire of Stars out of the ashes of the Consolidation Wars. A society that had not foundered in blind superstition like the Egyptians of ancient Terra, but had instead consciously chosen to put aside advancement solely for advancement's sake as a thing for reckless youth, that a truly mature interstellar society must consciously set aside.

As a senior agent and then senior supervisor of the Vilani intelligence service, she had not only made a dedicated study of the Terran problem but had lived for over a year on Terra itself as a covert operative, some years prior to the conflict the Terrans had named the 'Third Interstellar War'. During her exposure to Terran culture she had come to learn about several of their religious and cultural philosophies, and so was one of the very few Vilani who had even heard of - let alone began to understand - the ancient Terran way of life called 'Confucianism'. To her it had been a most admirable attempt at creating a rational and structured society where religious belief merged with adminstrative regulations merged with criminal law to transform society into a tool for giving everyone a place and making them satisfied with said place, a harmonious collective that would maintain itself intact down the centuries without more than the most minimal necessary changes to survive.

Of course the ancient Chinese had failed in this regard, but what else could be expected from pre-industrial primitives without even the most basic acquaintance with psychological science or mathematical sociometrics? Expecting them to succeed at the task would be as absurd as expecting primitive hominids to build a jumpship without access to anything but wood and stone. They simply had not possessed the tools, the precursor sciences, necessary to design such a structure. but the Vilani had possessed those tools, even as far back as the Consolidation Wars. And after those wars had taught them the harshest lessons in why said tools were necessary, they had finally set about using them. And with them they had created the most prosperous, enduring, and peaceful empire in all of human history. Any human history.

And for all the strict hierarchy of the society of the Ziru Sirka - after all, without clear delineations between those who led and those who followed, those who organized and those who labored, there would only be anarchy - their society also recognized merit as much as it may. A hereditary element to power was unavoidable, because the human instinct to conserve resources and influence for their family above strangers was impossible to eradicate without eradicating humanity itself, but the principle that a political system was most viable not when it encouraged right-thinking humans to do the proper thing but when it also set itself up so that even flawed humans had positive incentive to follow proper courses of action was so obvious that even a Terran had independently figured it out. Not that very many of his countrymen had had the wit to listen to him.

Even Sharik Yangila herself, born of a minor human offshoot called the Anakundu who had been conquered by the Imperium centuries before and who carried no pure Vilani blood at all, had still been able to have her achievements recognized enough to stand where she was today - an Underking of an entire province, only two steps down from the very Emperor himself. There might be some few scraps of kimashargur malcontents who still fumed at the Vilani 'oppression' and 'tyranny' of the Anakundu even today, but they were foolish dreamers drunk on ancient legends and with no appreciation for the reality around them. For if even a non-Vilani-blooded daughter of the Imperium such as her could rise so high, then could not anyone?

No, for all her personal ambition Sharik Yangila still felt nothing but gratitude and loyalty to the society of the Ziru Sirka. A society that could let a common-born nobody like her rise high enough to direct the fate of a full sixteenth-part of the Imperium itself. A society that rewarded devotion with protection, rewarded service with prosperity, rewarded harmony with harmony. A society so stable that it can operate and stay viable for millenia despite having expanded several times past what any Terran would consider a viable span-of-control limitation at maximum jumpdrive speed.

A society that has been so successful at keeping the wrong ideas from gaining any purchase for so long that most of us have forgotten how vulnerable we can be to them.

The angle of the rising sun reached the point where, as it did every day, it informed the Saarpuhi Kushuggi that her usual morning ritual was drawing to a close.

I will finish our great work, Kadur. If they will not give me a larger fleet than yours, then I will refine the fleet I do have until it can strike even harder and deeper into Confederation space than ever before. If Terra's will to resist has proven too strong for us to overcome by main force, then I will weaken and divert it before I bare our fangs again. Already my decade of false peace is beginning to lull their suspicions. Already the undisciplined masses of their 'democracy' are starting to choose representatives willing to shrink their military budget, lower their perpetual state of readiness, even if some few of their officials are still wise enough to see the danger. Already my operatives do their best to inflame nationalist tensions and separatist impulses among their own provinces, only so recently united into a world government at all. When they are weak enough... when they are diverted enough... and when we are ready enough...

One way or another, I will ensure that the Terrans can never threaten us again.
​

* * * * *​

Author's Note: Sometimes, a few thousand words can take twice as long to write as twice that many words. But, Sophia finally gets to start inventing things, the Genius Patrol finally realizes where they goofed and moves to fix their mistake, and we get our first glimpse at a Vilani POV and some foreshadowing of what's to come.

Oh, and as for the current date, it's mid-2169. Canonically, the Fourth Interstellar War began in 2173, although Sharik Yangila began her first overt moves in 2170.

The fate of Kadur Erasharshi in canon is an unsolved mystery - the sourcebook merely says he got relieved, and then got mysteriously vanished from Vilani history and records. The 'he got executed for treason' and the bit with his chief subordinate (and she was, canonically, his lieutenant) betraying him so that she could continue on with his work instead of having the entire concept Imperially ordered to be abandoned forever is me filling in some blanks.

Unspent CP: 0
Purchases: Black Computer (Lucy)​