Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

The party in the central concourse of Peraspera's main habitat was in full swing, and a whole world was coming together in triumph. Even those of us who couldn't crowd into the main public areas were busy having their own celebrations in whatever rec rooms or meeting rooms that they could find.

The Project had finished getting approval from the the Colonial Bureau in January 2167 but it had taken until late May to finish all of the surveying, calculating, checking, double-checking, and prepositioning necessary to pick a proper impact site and take advantage of it. Asteroidenbergwerke GmbH, Terra's largest megacorporation in the field of deep-space mining and heavy industry, sent one of their heavy mining ships under government contract to take care of the business of finding a suitable piece of cometary ice - just a wee bitty one, astronomically speaking, because even if we were aiming at the opposite hemisphere we still didn't want to shake the planet we were living on too hard, and the best-positioned piece of ice we'd found had been located such that planetfall would be early July. And part of me still suspected that the reason the rock had just happened to drop on July 4th is because the AB GmbH vessel's captain had been North American.

Since then it had been a matter of waiting for the water vapor to finish recondensing in the hole we'd dug and form a suitable freshwater sea, to seed it with the right strain of tailored cyanobacteria, and to spend several weeks biting our knuckles as we waited for the sampling teams to bring us confirmation that this whole multi-megasol expedition would actually work. But yesterday we'd just finished compiling and confirming the results, and everything was green - pun intended. The algae bloom in our new inland sea had hit the part of the ideal-growth-of-population curve that was basically a vertical line, and the undramatic yet still detectable change in atmosphere was already being sensed over two hundred klicks downwind. The proof of concept had been a complete success.

Hidden Quest Completed!
A Breath Of Fresh Air
Objective: Ensure The Success Of The Peraspera Terraforming Project
Reward: 600 CP

So even if we failed to get a full planetary self-sustaining cycle going here - and we were still optimistic that we could - then we could just drop another chunk of ice into the mix and repeat step one until the worldwide tipping point was reached. And while obviously the 'how long' was still only a rough estimate at this point, the 'what' was now solid. It wouldn't be in in my lifetime, but probably at some point in my grandchildrens' lifetimes (assuming I had any, of course), a new Terra-type garden world would be added to the Terran Confederation. Some day in the future, assuming the Vilani didn't get us first, billions and billions of people would breathe the free air on a world I had helped build.

The Peraspera Terraforming Project would of course continue in the role of managing and maintaining the worldwide oxygen bloom and making whatever adjustments to the ongoing growth cycles might be necessary, but we'd won. The Project was no longer a blue-sky long-range speculative investment with no end in sight but was now a solid geo-engineering proposition. Even decades before there'd be breathable atmosphere on this planet the colony growth was expected to skyrocket in the near future, given that we were only one jump-2 out from Terra itself and all of the Confederation's major corporations and investors would have a solid basis for future expectations to work from.

And while of course nobody was going to ignore the entire Terraforming Project team and all its distinguished scientists to just hand all the credit to a 19-year-old girl still in her initial Public Service tour - nor should they, because while I'd certainly been a catalyst to the process the fact remained that my brainstorm had only been possible by building on the foundation of their years and years' worth of painstaking research - everybody who had been part of this would remember that I'd been there. Even the history books would remember me, if not necessarily in the starring role of our ensemble cast, because Dr. Ward and Dr. Michel had been very insistent that I be written into the official Project logs with full mention.

"So you're the supergenius kid that made this happen!" a good-natured rough-hewn voice broke into my slightly - slightly! - buzzed ruminations. I looked up to see the burly form of one of the construction crew I didn't really know talking to me. "Come on, this is a time to celebrate! Put down the water and have a real drink!" he said as he offered me a beer.

I smiled and handed him my glass in an obvious challenge, and he smiled back and grabbed it and took a deep swig - to immediately start coughing and hacking.

"Peugh!" he wheezed, having not been warned that you did not try to gulp this stuff. "What the hell are you drinking?"

"My dad's favorite vodka, Sobieski 100." I smirked as I took my glass back and sipped.

"Hahahahaah!" he laughed, not expecting a shrimp of a girl like me to be drinking something a lot stronger than he was. "Okay, kid, you got me fair and square. You always prank people like this at parties?"

"We couldn't afford champagne to celebrate when I was a kid, so, vodka it was." I said. "And today's a day to taste like home."

"And how many of those have you tasted?" Mr. Stepczinski said, apparently having decided to intervene at seeing me drinking with strange roughnecks.

"... this is the second one." I admitted.

"Aaaand you're cut off." he said matter-of-factly in his Warrant Officer voice.

"I've had more than this and been just fine!" I protested.

"Whatever you did at home is between your and your parents," Mr. Stepczinski agreed, "But I know that you haven't so much as sniffed a cork since you got here. Did you remember to factor in that you've probably lost most of whatever tolerance you had in the interim?"

"... oops!" I admitted, flushing with embarassment. "Okay, you've got a point there." The crewman trying to pick me up took Mr. Stepcinzski's hint like a gentleman and wandered off, and I went and poured my half-full glass into the disposer before I got myself a cup of the non-alcoholic punch instead.

"Drink for birthdays, not for funerals." he acknowledged. "Nothing wrong with celebrating, especially today. It's just that nothing ruins a good night out than being too drunk to remember it."

"Speaking from experience?" I replied cheekily.

"Very much so." he acknowledged without hesitation, and we shared a chuckle. "Sorry to be leaving?" he continued insightfully.

"Yeah." I said softly as we walked over to one of the dome windows to look out at the horizon. "I realize I'm only reconfirming my legend as terminally weird, but I really liked it here." I said quietly. "And now I've gotten a year's bonus credit for my contribution to the Project, which I didn't even know Public Service did-"

"It's happened before for other kids who managed to pull off some major feat entirely outside expectations but yes, it's not something they give just for doing your job well." Mr. Stepczinski explained.

"Anyway, double that credit to two years because it was here, and that plus the year I've already served means I'm a free woman." I agreed. "Which is why tonight is doubling for me as my farewell party."

"Not just for you." he said affectionately. "Freedom." he continued.

"It's what everybody wants, especially teenagers." I agreed. "But then you actually get it, and all you can do is ask yourself 'Now what do I do?'"

"It's not just people your age." he surprised me. "I went into the Army straight out of secondary-ed and stayed there for more than thirty years. When I retired barely two years' ago, that was the first time in a long, long while that I had to navigate on my own outside of a big support system. Always being told where to go, what to do, what other people expect from you - sometimes it chafes, but it's also a comfort."

"Like your favorite overcoat." I said. "Sure, it might feel a little stifling occasionally but it's also warm and cozy. And the weather outside can be really, really cold sometimes."

"Exactly." he agreed, pausing briefly before continuing. "You remember how I wrote Recruiting Command about you late last year, right?"

"Of course I do, you'd asked me before you sent it. But I still haven't heard anything back." I answered him. "Not even now that I'm in the queue to return to Terra for my out-processing."

He shrugged. "Maybe they're just saving themselves the jump-mail fees and waiting to contact you on Terra. It's not as if Public Service is going to just kick you out on the street as soon as you arrive."

"No, I've got the whole separation rigmarole to go through before I transition back to civilian life. So, yes, I'm sure any recruiters who want to talk to me will just catch me when I get to Mumbai."

"Likely." he agreed. "So, any ideas on what you want to do next?"

"Save the Confederation." I answered truthfully, and then I inwardly cursed my blood-alcohol content as I clamped my lips shut.

"From what?" he asked, turning towards me at my non sequitur.

"Sorry, read too many space operas." I made a joke out of it. "Really, I want to invent stuff, but there's just so many possible directions to go in-"

"Sophia?" Dr. Ward interrupted, and we both turned to face him. "I am afraid that the most horrible part of the celebration is now upon us, and you will not be able to escape."

"The speeches." I sighed melodramatically. "Well, having done all that we could, we shall now suffer what we must." I misquoted Thucydides.

"No wonder you were already getting into the vodka." Mr. Stepczinski joked, and we headed back towards the celebrating.

* * * * *​

I wasn't that surprised when Public Service HQ had me retake my IQ test and several other psychometric exams like the ones for memory, reaction time, etc. nor that I was getting individualized retesting this time from one of their senior psychologists. By this point even the most obdurate bureaucracy would have had to start realizing that I was something well out of the ordinary, and would be curious to try and measure exactly how not ordinary. I didn't try to hold back anything except perhaps the most blatantly superhuman feats of recall I was capable of, with the results that they made me take a different and more advanced IQ series again, along with a neuro-psych evaluation. Dr. Ahmedi finally explained that the reason for their apparent befuddlement was because I'd scored over IQ 200 - in other words, beyond the ability of psychometric testing to even measure - both times. So what the Forge's perk text had promised regarding my Genius Intellect, it had certainly delivered and more.

Those test results plus my noteworthy achievements to date got me a face-to-face session with a senior placement officer, as opposed to just exchanging emails with the assignment office's bureaucracy like a normal person. Although I had several possibilities ranging from direct induction into the Naval Academy on up to an undergraduate internship at Hasegawa Limited, the Confederation's primary shipbuilder. But there wasn't the slightest trace of any resentment at being bureaucratically snubbed when I passed on those to instead accept the offer of a full-ride scholarship plus generous stipend from MIT. Indeed, Mr. Dumonte congratulated me for keeping an appropriate work/life balance in mind at hearing that after spending a year and change working double-time on Peraspera, I wanted to just spend the next eighteen months or so working at a relatively normal college student's pace on Terra instead of rushing to graduation on some double-shift schedule or something. Because with all the college credits I'd managed to test out of or rack up in the field, I was only three semesters away from a degree if I didn't push it.

Of course, I didn't tell anyone that I had an ulterior motive for taking it at a walk rather than a run. Notably, I wanted as much time as possible to at least bootleg some time with MIT's lab facilities to study that Inert Ceph Technology sample I'd carefully stashed away. And with the reward CP I'd gotten for the terraforming success, I now had enough CP to buy a Bolthole Protocol (Honor Harrington) perk from the Celestial Forge to help me do that. It was the only perk I'd seen on the list available for purchase that promised to be useful for that kind of reverse-engineering, and even though Confederation R&D wasn't as heavily based around reverse-engineering Vilani tech as it had been in the first several decades after first contact I was certain that a superhuman reverse-engineering capacity would still come in useful later even without factoring in the Ceph nanotech.

Although as it turned out, the very first thing that particular perk had been useful for had been for giving me an existential crisis. Because "Honor Harrington" was a name I'd recognized.

One of the unanticipated effects of actually discovering intelligent life in the universe had been the withering away of the science fiction genre in both literature and popular entertainment. Before we'd begun to really see the galaxy, we could dream that potentially anything was out there and that the galaxy was ours to explore. But after we'd met the Vilani, we knew what was out there - and that the galaxy was already theirs, and they didn't want us out and about in it except on their terms.

We'd dreamed that the stars were ours, or at the very least that we'd be able to meet any 'friendly visitors' out and about in it on at least roughly equal terms - but the reality was that the Vilani had been an interstellar civilization since at least the Bronze Age, the current Vilani Imperium had codified in its final form at the same time as the Fall of Rome (or at least if you believed Vilani primary-ed textbooks, which he had no real reason not to at least for information that basic), and that the Imperium had over two thousand inhabited planets, several thousand more outposts and small settlements, and literal trillions of population. There were even actual alien aliens in it, and not just human variants like the Vilani that had evolved in parallel to us out of the proto-hominids that some hypothetical 'Ancient' species had apparently seeded all over the spiral arm.

And we couldn't even realistically dream of expanding in the direction away from the Vilani imperium we bordered, because Earth was caught in a pocket. At the maximum possible range of a jump-2 drive, only seventeen star systems were reachable from Terra at all without having to pass through Nusku or Procyon. And that was every star system possible to reach, including oxygen-less (for now) rocks like Peraspera or systems without anything even that barely inhabitable which were only useful because of their positions in space and could otherwise be settled only with asteroid or deep-space habitats, like Agidda. There were five more non-Vilani star systems you could reach after transiting Nusku, arranged in a little dead-end string of 1-parsec and 2-parsec jumps, but aside from that and the jump-route back to Terra, the only way on from Nusku involved entering the Vilani Imperium proper. And since we'd only taken Nusku away from the Vilani at the end of the Third Interstellar War...?

The other way out of the Terran pocket, through Procyon, at least had the potential to lead to an entire uncharted subsector - the Capella subsector, which lay just beyond the Vilani imperium's rimward border - that we were expanding into as judiciously and yet as rapidly as we dared, but any route to the Capella subsector would be cut off if we lost the Procyon junction. And the other jump-2 from Procyon led to Sirius - which although an uninhabited star system with no useful planets was still of critical importance to Confederation naval strategists, because there were two jump-1 routes leading from Sirius to Vilani space.

And that was all there was. Although the Vilani were coreward and spinward of us, Terra essentially being on one 'corner' of their space, all of the potential infinite and uncharted expanse of the galaxy that lay to trailward and rimward of us might as well not be there at all - because we couldn't get to it. Even the nearest stars in that direction were jump-3 away from Terra or farther. And outside of the core Terran pocket itself, even what stars we could reach beyond the seventeen I'd just mentioned would almost certainly all be cut off from us in the opening phase of any interstellar war. If we lost safe transit through Nusku - we wouldn't even have to lose the planet - then everything on the 'Nusku arm' beyond it would be cut off, and if we lost Procyon then we'd lose contact with the entire Capella subsector. Which didn't change that subsector from still being dotted with almost a dozen settlements and long-range outposts, but you had to have some serious testicles to volunteer for those expeditions. Of course, Terrans being Terrans, they'd gotten some volunteers anyway.

The practical upshot of all these hard realities of astrogration was that mankind had at one time dreamed of the wide open frontier of space... and then reality had shown up and slammed the cattle gate shut right in our faces. So it wasn't surprising that the more recent generations' had chosen to focus their taste for entertainment in other directions than the sci-fi genre. After all, the entire point of escapism was to not think about how unsatisfying your current reality was. And that's why although the sci-fi genre still existed, it was nowhere near mainstream anymore. Nowadays if you wanted to get your SF fan on then your only two real choices were either 'niche' or 'vintage'.

And my parents, and me along with them, had been devoted fans of the vintage stuff. Now admittedly massive cultural milestones like Star Trek were still in general knowledge (although sometimes I cynically suspected that that was largely because Lorette Strider, the captain of StarLeaper One, had actually written her frustration that her attempt to name it the Enterprise had been shut down into her official autobiography), but the other classics of the 20th and 21st centuries were ofte more obscure. Heck, less than half the kids at school had even understood what my Star Wars jokes were referring to.

And Honor Harrington had been the titular protagonist of David Weber and Eric Flint's long-running space opera series of the early 21st century. I'd wondered all along what the heck those names in the parantheses at the ends of perk names in the Forge's purchase menu had referred to, but since I hadn't had any way to figure it out at the time I'd just noted them and moved on. But with the Harrington revelation I was now quite certain that I knew what those parenthetical additions meant. And if further corroboration were needed then "Bolthole" was a name I had also recognized - in the Honor Harrington series it had been the code-name for the Republic of Haven's super-classified project to reverse-engineer and then mass-produce the superior technology of their enemies, the Star Kingdom of Manticore.

So either Robert A. Heinlein's "World As Myth" hypothesis that he'd used as a framing device to retcon several of his own sci-fi novel series as actually existing in the same multiverse all along was more real than he'd dreamed and fictional things actually were true somewhere and speculative-fiction authors were actually just transcribing events from elsewhere without knowing that they did so (or perhaps just by mind boggling coincidence, who knew)... or the Celestial Forge was some kind of massive reality-warping force that could selectively breach the boundary between reality and fantasy, even to the point of creating material objects in the real world. Or it was actually some nigh-omnipotent entity having the world's biggest practical joke on me, a la that 5th-dimensional imp from an old 20th-century comic book I'd seen once, but that would just be a subcase of door number one up there. Or none of the above.

I spent several days just trying to process this revelation and utterly failing, because even a 200+ IQ didn't help you much with logicking something out when the fabric of reality itself might arbitrarily warp on you when you weren't looking, but eventually I came to the conclusion that if I thought too hard about this I'd give myself a nervous breakdown and that barring a miraculous break in the case, the only thing I could do right now is resolve to react to everything happening as if it were just... ordinary, real things that I had to deal with each on their own merits. Because if you couldn't be sure whether you were a man dreaming you were a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming you were a man, then your only recourse was to fall back on the same solution Zhuangzi had - to decide that whether or not your 'human' life was a dream or was reality it was still your human life either way, and so while you were a human you had to do as the humans did. Because trying to butterfly while being in human form would mean breaking your legs when you jumped off the roof.

Some dedicated searching in datanet media archives for mentions of old and obscure fiction of prior centuries turned up that 'World Seed' had been a very obscure and not well-regarded series of science fantasy novels dating back to the 2010s, although paging hurriedly through a copy of the first book had left me with the impression that the Forge was sometimes taking inspiration from things for which the perks really didn't have much to do with what was going on at all. 'SyFy' had been an obscure TV network of the same era, although it had never had a show called 'Combined Continuity' so presumably its perk was likewise a pastiche/homage as well. 'Crysis' didn't produce any hits at all. likewise 'Lords of the Night', although a 'lich' had apparently been a type of monster in a tabletop RPG called 'Dungeons and Dragons'.

I took a moment to sigh in relief that I had never seen a perk for anything magical rotate in or out of the purchase queue in the Celestial Forge, even if at least two of my perks had come from settings where magic had existed. Because one complete breakdown in everything I thought I'd understood about the nature of reality was enough, thank you. I was going to have enough of a problem trying to reconcile everything I thought I knew about physics with things like Star Trek technology, assuming a perk for it ever showed up, but trying to work in actual fantasy-literature spellcasting? Oh my aching head! Even so, I was going to have to seriously think about any purchase from the Forge from now on, given that reality itself was apparently much more flexible - or possibly more fragile - than I'd dreamed.

But once I'd finally started getting myself past the shock of what I'd just discovered about my new abilities, I buckled down and got back to work.

I'd settled in to my new student routine at MIT with quite smoothly, without any of the problems that I'd had in... well, basically anywhere before here. I suppose things were different at one of the very top tech universities in all of the Terran Confederation. With over twelve billion people on Terra alone, on top of the billion-plus spread out over all the colonies, there was a lot of competition to get in here and you didn't make the grade for MIT unless you had serious brains. No, not even if your parents were rich enough to buy you a university for your birthday. Oh, there were definitely still-prestigious schools where net worth could help you get in, at least one of which was just down the road from here, but there'd be little point in buying someone's way into MIT if they wouldn't be able to make the grade after they got here. So while it wasn't quite true that everyone here was a genius, at least the vast majority of the student body here didn't have problems being around them.

And I in particular was a student on a custom graduation track, given how much I'd tested out of before coming here, so my having started the fall semester a few weeks late didn't change anything at all. I hadn't needed more than a couple of weeks to catch up, and since I was already in 300-series courses then like any other non-freshman student I was able to sign up for unsupervised lab time provided I could persuade my student advisor it was relevant. And given the accomplishment that had gotten me into this school in the first place, it was really not hard to convince them that I had an interest in doing some independent research on cyanobacteria and thus be allowed to sign up for time on the microbiology lab's superconducting atomic force microscope. I actually did get some work in on cyanobacteria variant studies for the first few lab periods until the grad student TA finally trusted me not to break the thing and left me alone with it while he went off to do his own homework.

Which is how I was finally able to get to work really studying that Inert Ceph Technology. Because if you wanted to find a way to examine advanced molecular machinery, there were worse ideas than repurposing one of MIT's multi-million-sol scientific instruments already intended for high-precision three-D imaging of molecular structures. And once I could actually see the bits and pieces of the alien nanotech the Celestial Forge had given me, and watch its processes at work, my Bolthole Protocol kicked in.

I'd expected to have to spend months studying this thing to crack its code, but when Bolthole Protocol had said that I would "need only spend a few moments working at something to get a basic idea of how it works" it hadn't been lying. Never mind how normally impossible that would be, my initial hypothesis that my abilities were at least partly drawn from the realm of fiction was now experimentally confirmed. Because only in a bad holovid would a scientist normally be able to take such a brief look at such an insanely complicated process and almost immediately and supernaturally intuit the basic operating principles of a non-organic industrial nano-machine.

I also received confirmation that my initial impulse to bury this thing in an improvised self-destruct rig had been a good idea, because the destructive potential of this thing was flat-out terrifying. It was only in a 99% stable and inert configuration even now, and even before my first session of studying it was over I was feeling a distinct case of yikes!

You could deduce a tool's function from the basic functional elements of its shape and size, no matter how weird or alien its surface aesthetics were. Flat surface and heavy weighted head? Probably a hammer. Long rigid rod with high tensile strength and a chisel tip? Likely a prybar. A round handle and shaft with a pointed cruciform tip? Phillips-head screwdriver. And so forth, and so on. So when I saw a self-replicating nanomachine with an onboard computer element and manipulative surfaces that were just the right size and shape to latch onto DNA molecules and start yanking and pulling, it wasn't hard to figure out that this was by all appearances some type of advanced programmable bio-weapon.

After my third chance to get it under the microscope and do some very tentative poking and prodding, I'd finished my preliminary evaluation. The Ceph nanotech sample was the product of some alien race of almost unbelievable sophistication. Even in its mostly-inert and partly-fragged state, with most of the onboard data apparently wiped and its onboard computational capacity crashed, this thing had still taught me an unbelievable amount about nanotechnology. The holy grail of nanotech was a self-replicating "dry" assembler capable of complex molecular manipulation. You wouldn't need a specialized tank of solution for it to viably replicate in, you wouldn't have to assemble each batch of nanites yourself because you couldn't let it self-replicate more than a few times before mutation started kickign in, and you'd be able to just load its networked micro-scale atomic computers with the whole blueprint of what you wanted them to build and let them build them. Toss a huge pile of carbon and some nanites in a pit, come back the next day to find that they'd built you a diamond statue. Or a carbon-fiber boat, complete with boat engine. Or whatever else.

Or in the case of the Ceph nanotech, the ability to be released into the wild and then self-replicate and infect any organic life it came in contact with, and then mutate the DNA of that life in what first-approximation analysis told me could be almost any arbitrarily complex fashion that the nanites' programmer had the knowledge to genetically engineer in the first place.

Towards the end of October I'd managed to figure out enough of how to communicate with what was left of the nanites' onboard computer systems to begin winkling out the basics of its programming language, as well as learning quite a bit about the design and structure of molecular computers in the first place. And with a lump in my throat, I'd risked turning loose a very small sample of the nanites on a simple lactobacillus bacteria culture with instructions to turn them into a variant that would secrete a medical protein called lactase, a simple genemod that pharmaceutical companies had been doing for over a century. And I'd just finished confirming that the program had succeeded entirely - the lactobacillus had been re-engineered precisely on cue, in less than ten minutes and in one of the desktop isolation compartments where you could set up and run entire microorganism experiments using remote manipulators. Because only idiots worked with the first draft of genetically engineered microorganisms where you could actually breathe them.

So, the proof of concept was done. With the Ceph nanotech and the research notes carefully kept in my head - even without those notes, if you were prepared to spend months or years with an entire research team and a megasol-scale budget using non-Forge-boosted scientists to duplicate my research - you could turn loose stable, controllable nano-bio-agents in the confidence that the Ceph's quite frankly incredible anti-mutation capabilities would let them indefinitely replicate without 'genetic' drift.

I potentially held the key to solving the original quest the Forge had given me right here. Because one of the things you could do with this kind of technology would be to build a lethal nano-weapon with a programmable 'clock' and the ability to selectively target genetic characteristics. With enough work you could design an infection that would harmlessly, tracelessly enter the metabolisms of people and stay there, and then spread between them like any airborne-capable virus normally would. Only unlike the common cold, which only had a contagious period of several days between initial exposure and actual appearance of symptoms in the infetee, this nanite could be designed to lay dormant for years. And to spread, and spread, and spread, until literally anybody who had met anyone who had ever met anyone etc. etc. carried it latent in their systems, as the clock ticked and ticked and ticked... until the preset delay period ended, and everybody with the nanites in their system just dropped dead.

And given that the last time the Terran and Vilani gene pools had shared a common ancestor was hundreds of thousands of years ago at the best estimate, it would not be hard to come up with a series of genetic targeting criteria that would include virtually the entire Vilani gene pool while entirely ignoring the Terran one. Because while Vilani and Terrans were one species - we were both homo sapiens enough that a Terran-Vilani pairing would produce fertile offspring that bred true - the ethnic divergence between us and them was orders of magnitude greater than that you could find between any two humans of Terran stock, however widely separated. I was literally more closely related to an original homo sapiens from Olduvai Gorge than I was to any random Vilani in the street.

Use a ten-year incubation period just to be on the generous side, and then all I'd have to do is fine-tune the right targeting program, load it into the Ceph nanite sample, expose any person entering a Terran/Vilani trade enclave any time soon, and at the end of that decade the entire Vilani civilization would just... cease to exist. Even if there was a statistical less than one percent fraction of survivors, and according to my first-approximation analysis that would be generous, no civilization could remotely survive even a fraction of those losses. The Black Death had "only" killed about a third of the population of Terra - concentrated in Europe, naturally but the Middle East had also lost approximately 30 percent of its people and even faraway Asia had substantial casualties - over seven years, and the upheavals of that had almost shattered Western civilization like a dropped egg. It took almost two centuries for the world to recover from the population losses, and I could deliver a holocaust that would make that look like a cafeteria food fight.

All by myself. Right now. Just a little more work, and the galaxy would be Terra's and Terra's alone. This would almost certainly be the most militarily significant - and by far the most devastating - technology I could invent. Terran Victory.

And all I'd have to do is commit the greatest act of genocide in known galactic history. Kill several trillion sentients, the vast majority of them who'd likely never even heard of Terra, let alone made war on it. Anoint myself the First Horseman of the Apocalypse. And the Fourth Horseman as well.

I stood silently crying, facing the damnable bio-isolation workbench, as I mentally writhed in an agony of indecision. I was only nineteen, dammit! I shouldn't have to make decisions like this, not by myself! I should be able to ask my parents, or my teachers, or the Confederation government, or... or anyone!

But at the same time I shrieked silently at the cosmic unfairness of it all, the same rock-hard stubbornness that had gotten me punched repeatedly all through school metaphorically held my head down and rubbed my nose in it. I knew that the real reason I was having such a paralysis here isn't because I was afraid I was wrong, but that I was afraid I was right. That it really was a mutual war of extinction in the end. That I would be morally derelict if I didn't take this opportunity while I had it, while the advantage of surprise was still ours. That if I was able to ask anyone else, even up to the Secretary-General himself, what they should I should do then they'd roll the hard six and say Yes. Yes you should.

I reached forward and slammed the EMERGENCY PURGE button on the touchscreen as hard as I could, and watched as the armored plastic of the bio-isolation bench darkened to avoid searing my eyes out as the powerful ultraviolet lamps mounted inside the case revved up to full power. Between that and the powerful solvents now being pumped through the case, it was the work of only a minute to destroy any possible microorganism in the chamber, and then I opened it up to be confronted by the tiny blue-glowing bit of Ceph nanotech I'd separated from the main sample and hooked up to the test rig. I stood staring at it, then plopped it back in the vial with the rest of the Ceph sample and walked across to the plasma arc furnace. Tossing the entire Ceph capsule into the chamber and sealing the furnace up again was the work of a moment, and then I walked over to the control panel and cranked the temperature slider all the way up as far as it would go and set up a full 120-second burn. Two minutes at 30,000 degrees. A simple press of a button. And one Imperium-destroying superweapon lost beyond any hope of recovery.

My heart, already down around my shoetops, sank right down into the floor as I realized that there was no Forge prompt in response to the very significant decision I'd just made. No Achievement, no Hidden Quest, nothing. Not the slightest bit of recognition that I'd just faced the bitterest temptation of my long life and made an irreversible decision.

So. The Celestial Forge had no interest in the ethics of my choices. It responded to what I did, and offered me tools and prompts to shape my actions in broad, but it was demonstrably indifferent to morality.

God help us all.
​

* * * * *​

Author's Note: Bit shorter than the chapters before it, but sometimes you reach a stopping point where you just want to let the moment sink in before you pick up again.

Note: She still has everything she learned about nanotechnology design from studying the sample in her perfect memory, before anyone screams 'wasted points!'. But it's not a story where the protagonist doesn't make significant choices, even if that means she risks being wrong. And she was just never going to go for the 'push a button, kill all Vilani everywhere' solution and still be herself.

As to why burn the sample? She refers to it in her inner monologue, but I'll restate it in even plainer English - she was well aware that even if she wasn't willing to ever use that kind of bio-weapon, somebody else might. And that if they had physical possession of the Ceph nanotech it was possible - not likely, but still actually possible - to reproduce her research without her, even if it would obviously take a lot longer and be notably more expensive of a project.

Unspent CP: 400
Purchases: Bolthole Protocol (Honor Harrington)​