Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

[Faralis]

Sophia didn't mention it because it was not the sort of thing she'd notice at the time, but David was very, very pretty.

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A lot of people are more lenient with those types, sadly... both male and female...

 

[BomeranG]

About your fears of pacing, as everyone else said I think the pacing is fine too but you could still add more clues (or outright meta statements) about how much time passed between different paragraphs.

An empire-building piece, like you said this would be, will necessarily have lots of time skips and such along with real-time parts and maybe flashbacks; so clarifying how much time passed like the mentioning 2-month mail rotation time in the parents' video might be something to do.

Also happy about the GURPS setting. It is a personal favorite of mine. Admittedly more because using 3d6 instead of d20 makes a much better bell curve than the setting, but I like it when people remember GURPS. (And I'm much more familiar with GURPS tech levels)

 

[WaNoMatsuri]

Stepczinski

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Stepczynski. Well, Stepczyński but I won't expect miracles
Unless it was anglicized spelling but then why Sophis isn't Novak?


The welcome wasn't very warm but on the Plus side, it could only get better!
And now she gets to go to an official function and possibly get recognition in the wider world. Or they think shes somebodys girl and investigate. Or not, depends on culture and level of co rruption.

 

[Setras]

Still not quite satisfied with the pacing on this chapter

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No no, it was quite good, I thought. I don't think you could have set the pace up any better without dropping the whole conflict part in the beginning, and that was an interesting character development moment. Don't second guess yourself so much.

Just a couple of chapters in and we've already seen some great tech points she'll be able to improve in the future. And she's being smart about her purchases, which is always nice to see.

 

[Faralis]

So in a few years kids in school would study Newton, Einstein and Nowak no? ^^

 

[Setras]

So in a few years kids in school would study Newton, Einstein and Nowak no? ^^

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Lol, give her a few years with the forge and people will be telling Einstein and newton to get on her level

 

[Xiosdestro11]

Lol, give her a few years with the forge and people will be telling Einstein and newton to get on her level

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Give it one before every scientist alive wants to chat with her.

 

[LZB1285]

Couple of typo's for you.

fredom of travel

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freedom

master determinals

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data-terminals (?)

 

[cliffc999]

I stood at the Warsaw Ground Zero Memorial, a single unadorned black marble spire almost a hundred feet tall set on top of a tall plinth. A simple inscription in illuminated gold letters was prominent on each side of the base.

Not Yet Lost While We Remember
September 22nd, 2147

The Vilani had detonated a single 10-megaton fusion warhead over six and a half kilometers directly above where I was currently standing. The fireball hadn't touched the ground, but the shock wave had knocked down buildings as far away as Zielonka and the heat pulse had set everything on fire all the way to the north side of the Narew River. Over two million people had died that day. Mom had been over thirty klicks away from here, still working at her job at Walesa Downport despite being in her second trimester with me, which is why were both still alive. Dad had been lucky enough to be on one of the orbital defense platforms that the Vilani had stopped wasting missiles on after it had taken enough damage for its weapons and firecontrol were no longer operative. But three grandparents - my mother's father had already passed away years ago - and an aunt and an uncle and an older brother that I'd never met had all died here. If I went up to one of the many touchscreens circling the base of the plinth and pulled up the casualty list, I could still see their names.

And eleven other cities around the world had suffered similar fates.

We'd made First Contact with the Vilani in 2097, when the US Space Force's StarLeaper One - the first interstellar jump-drive starship built by Terra - arrived at Barnard's Star on its maiden voyage to encounter a small outpost of Vilani prospectors working just outside the Imperial borders. Jumpdrive had first been invented in 2088, but it hadn't had the range to make an interstellar expedition practical. Since one of the limitations of jumpdrive was the inability to plot a course that doesn't terminate in a relatively large gravity well, even with double tanks to allow you to make two jumps in rapid succession without refueling you couldn't solve the range problem by simply using interstellar space as a waypoint. And our earliest crude jumpdrive fell short of even standard jump-1 technology, let alone jump-2, and hadn't had the range to make even Alpha Centauri in a single jump. And while artificial gravity technology and reactionless thrusters had already allowed us to launch several slowboat 'generation ships', in 2098 they were still nowhere near reaching their destinations, much less at the point of being able to communicate back.

But luckily astronomers had discovered a rogue - an object of planetary or near-mass drifting through interstellar space, independent of any individual's star's gravity well - in a position to where you could reach just reach it with StarLeaper One's jumpdrive both Sol and Barnard's Star, so by using that as a waypoint they were able navigate a route to Barnard's Star and back. And so they'd returned to Sol in 2098 to announce that Terra's very first manned interstellar voyage had discovered intelligent extraterrestrial life on the first try.

As soon as the Vilani prospecting team we'd stumbled over were able to inform their superiors, the Imperial government of course sent an envoy to Terra. Their attitude was condescending, but remote - they seemed surprised that despite our newness to space and inferior tech level we weren't asking for admission into the Imperium to share in its bounty and civilization, but neither were they particularly insistent that doing so was a requirement. No formal agreement was reached but the Imperium recognized our claim on Barnard's Star in return for our agreeing to not supersede their already-existing mineral rights. Because although the Vilani prospectors had reached Barnard's Star first Terra had been the first to officially claim it with an actual government-sponsored mission of exploration, which made it ours by Vilani rules. And so despite the system having no habitable planet and being largely useful only for space industry and asteroid mining Barnard's Star still rapidly became a border trading outpost between Terra and the Imperium. Our medical tech and biotechnology surprisingly turned out to be comparable to or superior to theirs in many respects, even if they were well ahead of us in jumpdrive, power generation, material science, gravity manipulation, and several other fields, so we were soon enough able to buy - and rapidly reverse-engineer - Vilani jump-1 civilian starship technology and everything else they were willing to sell us.

But it was still very much a situation akin to old Imperial China dealing with the not-really-people beyond their borders. Agreements ultimately existed on the sufferance of the Imperial officialdom involved, not as a binding promise between sovereign equals, and Saarpuhii Kushuggi Shana Likushan - Kadun Erasharshi's predecessor as governor of the Imperial Rim Province - began to grow impatient with Terra's lack of deference. And her subordinates took their cues from her and as it affected their dealings with us Terrans more and more, tensions rose. Terran space exploitation, at one point so demilitarized that StarLeaper One hadn't had a single weapon mounted anywhere in it, rapidly started to go full-on space navy underneath the aegis of the more powerful national governments.

Although it was at that point the most shocking event in Terran history from our point of view, the First Interstellar War had from the Vilani point of view been a minor punitive expedition in retaliation for border incident. In 2114 the American fleet detachment at Barnard's Star had fired on a Sharurshid merchant convoy that had jumped directly into the restricted space near their military base without transponders or answering hails in the mistaken belief they were an attacking task force. Two Vilani ships had been destroyed while the rest were able to escape, and so Saarpuhii Likushan - Erasharshi's predecessor - had responded by sending a task force to Barnard's Star to punish the offenders tit for tat. Although we'd outnumbered them they still had the technological advantage despite all our reverse-engineering up to that point, and in addition were a veteran space navy with thousands of years of collective institutional experience to draw upon up against a brand-new clutch of spacefaring polities that had never fought an interstellar war before and the command of whose forces were still divided amongst multiple competing nations. And so the First Battle of Barnard ended with a decisive Vilani victory, as they were able to both handily gain the initiative, defeat our separate fleets in detail, and pound us with long-range missile fire from outside our effective weapons range. By the time they were done, Barnard's Star no longer had any meaningful capability to resist the Vilani fleet at all.

So if Likushan had decided at that moment to make a full-scale push towards Terra then the Confederation would never have existed and all my classmates and I would have grown up speaking Low Vilani. But she'd set her strategic objective as merely defending the honor of the Imperium against barbarians and holding the frontier she'd been set to defend, not conquest, so after destroying our military assets at Barnard's Star her task force commander followed his orders and jumped back home.

Of course, Terrans being Terrans, we didn't do what she was clearly expecting to happen and sue for peace after being suitably chastened and awed by the might of the Imperium. Instead, we'd recalled every combat-capable starship hull available from anywhere else, strapped anything that would shoot on anything that could fly, and had war colleges all around the planet frantically doing a post-mortem of the First Battle of Barnard to assess our mistakes, understand and apply what we'd learned the hard way about Vilani fleet tactics and space combat as we built up for another push. And more importantly, this time the Terran fleet would be a fleet, not fleets, because the painful lesson of First Barnard had made each contributing nation agree to consolidate their ships underneath a single United Nations chain of command as a fully integrated force.

Upon finally acknowledging the reality that no, us crazy-stubborn 'barbarians' still hadn't quit yet, in 2122 the Vilani sent a second and larger punitive expedition back down the corridor from Nusku to Barnard's Star to nip our defiance in the bud... and the Second Battle of Barnard ended for us in a qualified victory. Although we'd taken substantial casualties, this time around we'd bled the Vilani enough in return that they'd chosen to withdraw in good order while they still could instead of risk slugging it out to the finish. After all, we were notably closer to home than they were.

At this point Saarpuhi Likushan apparently decided that officially acknowledging the first actual military defeat by the Vilani Imperium at the hands of 'barbarians' in who knew how many centuries would not be career-enhancing. And so after coming to an 'officially unofficial' understanding with us Terrans that in return for acknowledging our claim on all the planets on the jump-routes between Barnard's Star and Procyon (including Terra itself, of course) that Terrans would likewise stay entirely out of Vilani space, both sides sailed their fleets home and declared victory to their own people and the First Interstellar War was over.

And with the fresh impulse of 'We only barely survived being conquered because the enemy withdrew in the face of our new unity', as well as the sobering reality of the Vilani Imperium still being out there and so much larger than we were and having already fought one war with us and who knows if/when it would happen again, the majority of the world collectively agreed that the UN was simply not enough to weather that kind of future storm. And so the Terran Confederation was formally founded in 2124.

By 2125 we'd managed to reverse-engineer jump-2 technology from Vilani wrecked we'd salvaged in the First Interstellar War, giving our ships parity with even their most advanced fleet units in strategic movement even if we still werent' fully equal with them in other respects. With jump-2 it was now possible to not only make Barnard's Star in a single jump but to move past it to the Vilani world of Agidda, the closest Imperial territory to Earth at that time. Of course we own Agidda now, and Nusku beyond it, but that came later.

And we'd built up to that tech level just in time, because the Second Interstellar War began at the end of 2125. With jump-2 drives of our own Terran Free Traders - or as the Vilani called them, smugglers and spies - were able to travel into the Imperial interior to make contact with Vilani markets without having to go through the official Imperial channels and restrictions to do so, and of course to learn anything they could about Vilani society, culture, and capabilities that they might not want us to know. Saarpuhii Likushan had gotten quite insistent that the Confederation stop doing that, and our protests that the Free Traders were not Confederation employees or contractors (and honestly, most of them weren't!) and that our legal system did not permit us to arbitrarily seize and shut down merchant shipping that was not breaking any Confederation laws fell on deaf ears.

So soon enough she tried another punitive expedition, and was shocked at how surprisingly capable her Terran adversaries had become since the last one. We'd had enough forewarning of the incoming attack to steal a march on the Vilani and ambush their fleet a jump before they hit Barnard's Star with an expedition of our own to the Agidda system, and the first cruiser-level fleet engagement - the Vilani hadn't sent anything larger than a destroyer in the First Interstellar War - between Terran and Imperial forces ended with the Vilani withdrawing and Terra having possession of the star system. Although it had been officially claimed and settled Imperial territory for several centuries in reality the Vilani settlement at Agidda was a mostly-abandoned ghost town due to it not proving economically viable, so there was no effective opposition against our putting in a base there.

The rest of the Second Interstellar War was mostly a 'false war', with the Vilani concentrating on keeping us fenced in and the Terrans confining offensive operations to commerce raiding across the Sirius gap, and the occasional small skirmish. Given the vast size disparity between us and them the idea of trying to drive deeper into the Imperium was a fool's errand, so Terran strategy was largely focused on trying to figure out how to bring the Vilani to the peace table again. We weren't sure what the Vilani were waiting for, but by the early 2130s it had been obvious that some kind of internal political shakeup in the Imperium had been seriously distracting them and that this was the reason their op-tempo had been stalled. When intelligence figured out that the Vilani had been keeping only a holding force against us while sending the bulk of their fleets elsewhere to respond to whatever it had been, we took the opportunity to make a major raid on Nusku in 2134. Although we were driven off with losses, Saarpuhii Likushan saw the writing on the wall - her enemy had become wise to her ruse, and she was vulnerable to a major attack. The Armistice of 2134 granted the Terran Confederation official recognition as a sovereign state and possession of every star system from Agidda and Procyon, and so the Second Interstellar War came to an end.

A couple years later the news finished making its way back to Terra from the provincial capital at Shulgiasu that in 2135 Saarpuhii Likushan had been rewarded for whatever her contributions had been to whatever internal political crisis the Vilani had been undergoing with an appointment to a high position on Vland, the capital of the Vilani Imperium. Stepping down as governor of the Imperial Rim Province, she began the long journey coreward back to the heart of the Vilani Imperium and as far as anyone knew never concerned herself with a single thought about us irritating border barbarian Terrans ever again.

And her replacement as Saarpuhii Kushuggi of the Imperial Rim Province was a name every Terran would soon come to know in infamy - Kadur Erasharshi.

I pulled my drifting thoughts away from the review of the history of Terran-Vilani conflicts with a tiny mental flinch and refocused on the mission that had brought me here today. We'd arrived back at Terra in mid-January 2167, and Dr. Ward and the other senior scientists were still in conference with the Colonial Bureau about the comet drop idea, because they certainly hadn't expected me to be the spokeswoman for it and neither had I. After all, we wanted the Confederation government to take the idea seriously. But since proving the necessity of the rock drop depended largely on all of the simulations and analyses that had depended largely on the new specialized analytical software utilities and mathematical structures that I'd designed, I'd still needed to come along so that I could demonstrate to the Bureau's own technical experts that no, we hadn't just gun-decked ourselves all the data we'd needed to 'prove' our conclusions but that these were still legitimate, if innovative, techniques. Besides, I was still getting my legitimate credits for my share of the discovery, and had still come to Terra to be part of the process. We'd just all agreed to let the older and more established people do the lion's share of lobbying for our proposal in conference. But that meant that unlike the Project senior staff I'd arrived with, I actually had some free time to work with during this visit. And Dr. Ward had been entirely willing to grant me permission to make a day trip to go visit the old hometown, even if my parents had moved to Nusku in the interim.

Contrary to popular fiction, a nuked city did not actually remain an uninhabitable, radioactive ruin for over a century afterwards. Even the Ground Zero regions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, let alone the rest of the city, had been cleared as safe to resettle within two years of the initial atomic bombing. The main source of longlasting radioactive contamination, such as that which had contaminated the site of the Chernobyl disaster, was isotopes like cesium-137 - and those isotopes weren't the ones produced by the nuclear fusion reactions used in atomic warheads. Even the earliest primitive fission bombs, with their kilograms and kilograms of 'dirty' fissionables such as uranium-235 and plutonium-239, would have the radioactivity from any fallout they produced decay to safe levels within weeks. Between the fact that modern warheads used a gravitic implosion to compress the lithium-deuteride reaction mass to induce a fusion explosion without requiring any fission 'primer' element at all and the fact that Warsaw bombardment had not only used an airburst but had chosen to maximize the overpressure damage radius with a detonation altitude high enough that the fireball didn't even touch the ground, the ruins of Warsaw hadn't had any real irradiation at all. Certainly nothing that would have left detectible traces even by the time I just started primary-ed, let alone anything that could have posed a health risk to me by the time I'd made my first salvage run through these ruins along with Dad.

We'd always been... not short of money when I was growing up, but very aware of how easily we could run short of money if we'd run into anything more than a minor bobble. We'd never gone hungry but our standard of living had been somewhat below that of most of my classmates, and we'd had little to spare for fancy luxuries or entertainments. If there was a trick about thrift-shop living and bargain-hunting that I hadn't learned by the time I was old enough for secondary-ed, I couldn't imagine what it was. And it's not because my parents couldn't find responsible work or had poor spending habits, but simply because they'd chosen the absolute worst timing to buy a new house.

Mom and Dad had not only been classmates in the same school, they'd grown up on the same block and been sweethearts all through secondary-ed. So it was entirely expected when he'd married the literal girl-next-door as soon as they'd both finished their initial Public Service tours and came back home. Mom had spent hers on Armstrong Highport as admin support and gotten a job in a local office, and Dad had gone into the Navy for his draft period and had chosen to re-enlist for it as a career. So they'd gotten married, had their honeymoon, and gotten started on my older brother Michal. And only several months after that, the Third Interstellar War had started.

As it workd out Dad was never posted outside of the Sol system, but that hadn't prevented him from seeing combat when Kadur Erasharshi, who'd been personally commanding his invasion fleet, conclusively demonstrated that he was the most skilled commander the Vilani had ever sent against us. The Terran fleet was decisively defeated, almost smashed, at Agidda in 2146, the secondary Vilani thrust down the Procyon-Sirius link to Vilani space was pressing our flank too hard to allow us to commit enough of the reserve down the Corridor to stop him, and by mid-2147 his methodical, remorseless advance brought him into the Sol system itself.

And out of the tens of millions of tragic and painful stories created - or cut short - by Erasharshi's bombardment, one of them in particular was why my family had been so damn short of money for so long. Specifically, the part where for the first eight years of my life we'd still had to make mortgage payments on the new house my folks had bought to start off their married life with, despite the fact that the house in question had been blasted into burnt matchsticks at the conclusion of the Siege of Terra and my grandparents and baby older brother along with it. If my mother hadn't been on a temporary assignment at Walesa Downport handling admin tasks for crisis logistics the Siege as drafted civilian support, she - and I - would have gone up with them.

But homeowner's insurance didn't pay off for acts of war or acts of God, and the mortgage terms on the house hadn't contained any escape clauses for those, and the finance company in question had used some extremely predatory litigation to get a court ruling that they were allowed to garnish the estates of the deceased to make good their own real estate losses when so much of the property loans they'd been holding had had both the loanholders and the properties in question turned to ash. And while my parents had still been alive, my grandparents - who'd co-signed the loan - were not, and so our family finances had been sucked dry through that loophole and we'd struggled like hell to climb out of the hole ever since. A situation made worse by the fact that Dad had to leave the Navy early immediately after all of this had happened, which meant Mom had had to go right back to work as our family's primary paycheck after she'd finished giving birth to me and taking her maternity leave and Dad could only get part-time gig work at best in-between being my primary caregiver. Even after that situation had finally been resolved by a higher court and the finance company had been suitably fined and responsible officers imprisoned - turns out they'd gotten the original favorable ruling by 'incentivizing' the judge, go figure - we still hadn't gotten any of the lost money back.

And so one of the things my Dad had gotten into to try and supplement our finances was to go on mostly-legal salvage runs through the Warsaw ruins. Even nowadays there was still a lot of the old city that had yet to be claimed and cleared for reconstruction, because the seat of government's permanent relocation to Plock meant that the money and interest for the current economic expansion were centering around there. So even with all the non-radioactive hazards of rubble, spilled industrial toxins, relic fuel depots, smashed utility lines, and all the rest, a prudent person could still do a lot of profitable digging here. Heck, most of the hoard of actual paper books I'd grown up with had come from a mostly-surviving branch library building on the outer limits of the blast. But even with confining ourselves to marking and recovering valuables for return to their legal owners in return for a finder's fee, and only keeping the occasional abandoned shelf full of books or non-precious odds and ends for ourselves, it had still helped a lot. And while Dad hadn't taken me along on one of the salvage runs until I'd been tall enough to see over the kitchen counter, I'd still been here often enough to be able to get around the ruins without him.

So after paying my respects at the Memorial I'd changed into a pair of metal-lined work boots and protective coveralls - just in case - and gotten to work.

There was just too much we didn't understand - and I certainly didn't understand - about the Vilani. Oh, we could send diplomats to their provincial capital and other planets, visit their worlds, learn their languages, read through their libraries, buy everything they were willing to sell and then reverse-engineer the hell out of it, even cultivate their misfits and welcome their defectors and smuggle trade goods to their black-marketeers, but that was a far cry from actually knowing what the hell was going in with them. Especially at their highest levels. We only had the barest idea of exactly what echelons of seniority existed above the Saarpuhi Kushuggi and exactly what laws or customs governed their interaction and vassalage, and we didn't even know the Vilani Emperor's name, merely the fact that he (probably a he) existed.

For that matter, it was anyone's guess whether they'd even told the Emperor that us Terrans existed yet. We'd made first contact with the Vilani almost seventy years ago, after all. So even with the over two years' worth of travel time between here and Vland even at the absolute top speed Imperial fast courier ships could manage with Pony Express style hand-offs of the mail between ships at every stop along the way without even pausing to scratch, there had certainly been ample opportunity for at least one official diplomatic note direct from the Throne, even if it was purely a form letter. If a person actually got on a passenger ship at Nusku and headed for there, changing ships as necessary and with the typical level of rest stops and waits in-between jumps, then the average length of the trip would be five years. As far as I knew no living Terran had ever seen the Vilani capital, and I didn't expect that streak to break any time soon.

Which is why I was here going through the half-collapsed wreckage of a luxurious townhouse in what was left of the Zoliborz district. Obviously I'd never been here while it was still open, but my perfect memory had let me recall every word of the book that had led me here.

After sixteen years of peaceful contact, it had become routine for Terran citizens to visit the Imperium for purposes of trade, cultural exchange, technical exchange, etc. Some trading firms had even managed to purchase civilian Vilani starships to operate with, Terran ships being incapable of the jump-2 drive necessary to make it across either the Nusku or Procyon jump-routes to reach the Imperium proper from our corner of space. And most of these ships had found themselves caught more than several jumps away from home when the First War suddenly began, and threatened with capture and internment by suddenly hostile Vilani on all sides. Every luckless Terran dependent on Vilani passage to move between stars had been immediately detained, of course. Some of them never made it home. And even some of the Terran-crewed ships that had retained immediate freedom to maneuver didn't last very long.

But unlike the Vilani, us Terrans liked to arm even our merchant cruisers, and the ones that had escaped capture had immediately gone privateer. Without support, orders, or official sanction, these intrepid souls had fought their own behind-the-lines campaign of privateering and sabotage until eventually the news of the war's ending had finished circulating back down the jump-routes to eventually reach them. Even then it had been a near-run thing for these vessels to sneak back home to Terran space, using 'wilderness' refueling by skimming atmosphere at gas giants instead of proper port facilities, because the Imperial Navy was still pursuing them as pirates. But some of them had actually made it back to Terra and been received with a hero's welcome, and Captain Tomaj Dubicki of the JV Van Rijn had been one of them.

And although he'd been one of the many casualties of Warsaw, my peerless memory let me recall every word of the biography of one of Poland's heroes of the First War that I'd read for a book report in secondary-ed - including the mention in the "About The Author" section that he'd lived in this district. A minor hack into what by now was distinctly low-security dead-file data in the municipal archives had gotten me his address, and so nerving myself up for the technical illegality I was about to commit I began to dig through the half-collapsed wreckage of Captain Dubicki's house as best I could.

Sadly, by the time the sun began to get low in the sky I still hadn't found what I was looking for. Although portable digital storage media had evolved past using EMP-vulnerable magnetic-oxide storage before my father had been born, none of the datachips I'd salvaged from the house had contained the information I'd sought. Most of it had been what you usually found on datachips in someone's house - downloaded entertainment media and offline backups of their computer's storage drive, if any. If Captain Dubicki had kept any unpublished memoirs or journals, copies of ships' logs, etc, after he'd retired, then either he hadn't stored them here or they were buried deeper than I had the ability to dig out.

Okay, fine. So I'd had a setback. I'm sure I'd have more of those in my lifetime. But if I couldn't find an immediate solution here then I'd just have to keep my eyes open for an opportunity elsewhere. I needed to learn about Vilani society and culture in ways you couldn't from any official education, the ways only possible by debriefing someone who'd actually lived there for years. That wasn't Captain Urshargii of the Beowulf, that is, because even if he were a sincere defector that still didn't mean I could be certain where his loyalties would lie if he even began to suspect the true nature of my interest.

But even if I couldn't do it right away, I was resolved to eventually crack this code one way or another. I was not going to commit the basic logic error of assuming that just because the Forge had promised a 'Terran Confederation Victory' for completing the initial quest the Forge had given me, that this automatically meant that said victory would be a final victory. After all, we'd won the Second Interstellar War but that hadn't prevented there being a Third. So I was certain that even if I did complete that quest, I'd still have a lot of work to do.

And that meant I'd need to understand what the heck Terra was really up against here, because if I didn't then how the heck could I help work out the best way - any way - to defeat it? Because if my review of the first three Interstellar Wars had taught me anything, it was that as near as I could calculate the only real reason we weren't dead yet is because the Vilani had never pursued a war against Terra with remotely as much determination as we'd tried to hold the line against the Vilani. For us the defense of the Confederation and Terra in particular was a clear-cut case of win-or-die; if we lost our motherworld and our sovereignty, we lost everything. For the Vilani... what were we to them, really? What motivated them beyond the obvious? Why had Saarpuhii Likushan been so relatively indifferent to us, but Saarpuhii Erasharshi so determined to conquer us yet still unwilling to take the final step of genocide even after proving he had no moral scruples against deliberate nuclear terror strikes against noncombatants? What were the mysterious Vilani internal politics that so distracted both of the Imperial Rim governors we'd dealt with just when we needed it the most? Hell, when it ultimately came down to it, why did the Vilani Imperium do anything at all?

And if anyone in the Confederation actually knew the answers to those questions, her last name damn sure wasn't Nowak. I'm sure the Confederation government had all sorts of well-researched intelligence appreciations and socio-economic valuations to justify their belief that we were entering a period of a longer peace and could shift the Terran total effort accordingly... but I also had the Celestial Forge telling me that they were wrong.

So while I definitely needed to keep working on military R&D - as well as geting accepted by and given opportunities to contribute to Confederation military R&D - I also needed to start educating myself on more than just the sciences. The very existence, let alone the real underlying mechanisms of operation, of the Vilani Imperium was a puzzle that needed solving. And no matter how long it might take me, I was going to solve it.

Achievement Unlocked: Where We're Going, We Don't Need Roads
(Discover A Main Quest Objective On Your Own Rather Than Wait For Forge-Granted Prompts)
Reward: 300 CP

Quest Granted!
Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations
Objective: Learn how Vilani society and culture really works, and why it came about in the first place
Reward: 1000cp, Hope

My heart soared at seeing that last word, until an instant later my more prudent self reminded me of what the last thing that came out of Pandora's Box had been... and how the world had had to suffer through everything else that had come out of that box before it had. Even so, if seeing that message wasn't an incentive to keep on keeping on, then nothing was.

And now that I finally had some CP available to spend again, I could take this opportunity to snag an option I'd seen rotate into the Celestial Forge's list of available options recently, and that I'd been worried would time out before I triggered another one of those achievements.

Inert Ceph Technology (Crysis) wasn't listed as a perk but as an item, and my astonishment at the Celestial Forge being able to not only grant intangible knowledge but to spontaneously materialize real things if I picked the right choice didn't stop the small transparent vial that the item's description from appearing right in the palm of my hand.

I hurriedly held the vial up and looked at it. Some type of small metallic component with what looked like faintly glowing blue crystalline fibers threaded into it, assuming the item description in the Forge could be believed - and I had no reason not to - I was currently holding the most advanced piece of technology on all of Terra. A 'mostly inert' sample from what was apparently some type of alien war robot, this 'Ceph commander' sample - and I had no clue who or what the Ceph even were except to hope that they didn't show up in our part of the galaxy any time soon - was composed of self-replicating nanomachines, a technology that neither the Confederation nor the Imperium were remotely close to developing. The potential of self-replicating nanotech that could operate in the open air had only begun to be explored even by the 21st-century's most optimistic futurists and speculative-fiction writers, let alone actual scientists. The only self-replicating nanomachines that Terran technology could even began to work with were genetically-engineered microorganisms like the cyanobacteria variants the Peraspera Terraforming Project had been working on, and if I could ever unlock the secrets of this sample then I could potentially go entire orders of magnitude beyond such simple biological efforts.

Or I could accidentally the entire planet in a nightmare 'gray goo' scenario, especially given that the item description specified that it was only in a "relatively safe" condition to handle. I was not unaware of the possible risk I was running by mucking around with something like this, especially before I had access to the sort of advanced hot-lab facilities you'd logically want to even begin this kind of project. However, the way the Forge rotated available options on or off the purchase menu over time and in no predictable pattern, with no guarantee of repeating, meant that if you saw something like this then if you passed on buying it when you could, however inconvenient the timing, then you risked never seeing it again. Although if the item description hadn't also specified that the sample was "delicate", then I'd gladly have risked that before I risked trying to store this thing anywhere on an inhabited planet.

As is, since I couldn't begin to try poking around with this thing until after I'd completed my Public Service and gotten in position to control an advanced laboratory of my own with proper containment features, and I certainly wasn't going to try and bring this back to Peraspera with me - I'd have nowhere to hide it there - I now had to figure out a way not only to safely store an alien nanotech sample but and leave it unattended for at least a year with as much assurance as possible that it wouldn't be stolen, released into the wild by some passing idiot or natural disaster, or 'wake up' and start spontaneously eating its way out of the container. Without doing or buying anything that would alert the authorities, and without any substantial travel from where I was standing now - especially not anything that crossed a Customs barrier.

Well. Good thing I was a genius.

A quick drive of my rented groundcar to a department store that sold ordinary spacer gear and a chemical supply store gave me what I needed, and I returned to the Warsaw ruins with them. I'd purchased a small lump of metallic sodium at the chemical supply store, which had been packaged inside a small sealed jar of mineral oil for safety, and opened up the jar and dropped the Ceph vial into the mineral oil. A quick use of epoxy putty resealed the jar, and then I put the jar inside a vacuum-rated thermos container intended for spacer usage and sealed that with the epoxy as well. And so with two separate layers of watertight containment between the exterior of the thermos and the metallic sodium I then dropped the entire thermos into a five-gallon jug of water. I chose a mostly-intact ruin well away from any areas where reclamation and rebuilding work was going on to maximize the odds it wouldn't be disturbed for years and stuffed the jug inside an out-of-the-way maintenance closet on the ground floor, carefully memorized its position, and walked away.

If the nanites spontaneously 'woke up' and started to eat their way out, they couldn't reach the outside atmosphere without first breaching both the sodium jar and the vacuum thermos. At which point, of course, the sodium would react with the water to produce intense amounts of heat and highly caustic sodium hydroxide. And if those nanites could survive being simultaneously flash-broiled, exploded, and soaked in extreme alkaline, then the "delicate" in the item description would be a flat-out lie. Likewise, any external event violent enough to expose the nanites to external air - earthquake, random nearby explosion, etc. - would also have to breach the barriers between the sodium and the water first, to the same result.

Was this a perfect solution? Of course not. But hey, for a solution improvised on the spot on a budget of less than a hundred and fifty sols, it was still not bad.

I couldn't erase my tracks in the dust without making it look like someone wanted to erase their tracks, which would be worse than doing nothing at all, so I simply walked a search pattern through the entire building as if a particularly determined salvager had already combed the entire building and taken whatever had been there to be taken. By the time I was done with that it was already quite late, but that was all right. I wasn't expected back until the day after tomorrow. So I could just sleep in late, then catch a quick atmospheric shuttle back to Paris where the Colonial Bureau's headquarters offices were located and play tourist for a day before I went back on the clock.

Yawning softly, I began the drive back to the motel and sighed with satisfaction at a job well done. Maybe the Vilani cultural resaerch objective wouldn't be completed right away, but at least I knew what I needed to do and still had time to do it. And as for the Ceph nanotech sample? Well, if I couldn't eventually get a 'military significant technology' out of studying that then I'd need to stop claiming to be any kind of genius at all. It would take a while before I could be in a position to capitalize on the opportunity, but I still had this opportunity now. And that certainly put me ahead of where I'd been yesterday.

My tired brain was cycling through half-baked ideas for staging a claim that I'd found this mysterious xeno-artifact somewhere and how before I arrived at the motel and firmly told my brain to start shutting up and letting me sleep. Like Dad had said, the world would still be here in the morning.

* * * * *​

Interlude
Public Service Bureau HQ
Mumbai, India, Terra

The several men and women around the conference table in one of the many comfortably-appointed executive meeting rooms towards the top of the PSB office tower were a varied lot. Although the nature of this particular project was officially underneath the Public Service Bureau's jurisdiction, by nature of its task the PSB coordinated with several other Confederation agencies and departments on this one. The men and women who formed the inter-agency working group that ultimately directed controlled this particular PSB project had the official bureaucratic designation of the Advanced Aptitude Tracking And Coordination Council, but had long since been unofficially designated "the genius patrol".

"And that wraps up everything we had scheduled." the PSB senior executive who was the official chairman of the group announced. "But several days ago we had an unexpected development in a case file we hadn't expected to show any substantial movement until after her Public Service tour had completed, so barring strenuous objection I thought I'd take this opportunity to slip it into the queue."

"It can't wait until the next meeting?" the woman who represented the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration asked quietly.

"The young lady in question will be jumping out by next week, so we need to evaluate if there's any need for immediate action before she leaves." he replied.

A brief round of nods and murmurs around the table indicated everyone's agreement, and the photograph of a petite young blond girl appeared on the holo display.

"Sophia Nowak, born February 11, 2148 in Plock, Poland. The first anomaly in her case was when she scored National Honors on the 2166 CATs when her tested IQ and primary and secondary educational transcripts would have projected a score in the mid-90s at best. Up until her CATs her profile and metrics all fit within the typical curve of a hardworking straight-A student, highly intelligent in an ordinary fashion but not anywhere near the range that catches our particular interest. Likewise, the routine IQ testing given at the start of secondary-ed scored her as 134, and while we've had National Honors students that low they almost invariably had eidetic memory in addition - which she'd also tested negative on."

"If you're bringing this case to this board then I'm presuming that cheating or test error were already conclusively ruled out." the Ministry of Education representative stated.

"Of course the use of semi-intelligent agent programs to ensure that all students don't see the same list of questions precludes archaic forms of exam cheating such as slipping the student the answer key ahead of time, but that still leaves open hacking the tests, corrupting the grades database, proctor malfeasance, et cetera." the PSB chairman agreed. "But yes, the red flags were suitably investigated and nothing even mildly questionable was found about her CAT series. So the results were upheld and published, and her range of intiial Public Service choices curated accordingly."

"Which means that either everything we know about statistical psychometrics spontaneously ceased to exist in Miss Nowak's local vicinity, or she was not only deliberately underperforming her evaluations all thorough primary and secondary-ed but did so accurately enough that they didn't trip any statistical markers of manipulation there." the uniformed Navy captain who represented the Ministry of War's particular interests on the 'genius patrol' thought out loud. "Which would mean that our young genius here was a very very high-rated genius indeed, in addition to being furtive bordering on legitimately paranoid." He frowned.

"No, look at the pattern here." the woman from the MoE said. "Computer, highlight all significant educational disciplinary incidents and put them on the general display."

"Academic hazing." the second PSB representative on the committee, a developmental psychology expert, spoke up. "Learned very early on that the nail that overshadowed the other nails too much got hammered, didn't have the social aptitudes to learn one of the several other ways normally used to defuse that pattern, and was intelligent enough - and apparently got her hands on at least some of the textbooks in the field to know how to avoid obvious signs of statistical manipulation - to pull a turtle defense instead. But I don't see any of the other incidents or indicators that accompanies that level of peer group alienation...?"

"Unusually good support system at home." the Navy officer said, having focused his own initial skim of the data on the family history. "Father was formerly career Navy, mother had excellent evaluations for both self-discipline and initiative in her own initial Public Service tour, only one working parent and the other a full-time caregiver, no siblings." he summarized briefly. "So she didn't grow up alienated from humanity in general or uncertain of her value as an individual, she just internalized that her classmates weren't worth bothering with or safe to show off around."

"Wait, it says here her father separated from the Navy less than a year after re-enlisting to go career after his initial Draft tour?" the DARPA representative asked with mild puzzlement. "But I don't see any notations for either disability or disciplinary discharge-?"

"Sole survivor clause." the captain replied. "Her parents were originally residents of Warsaw, as were virtually their entire extended families. After the Siege, Adam Nowak was the only person remaining who could continue his family line and so he was granted an immediate hardship discharge."

"Ah." the DARPA rep nodded. "So, that's family background and a reasonable explanation for the anomaly. But just National Honors alone wouldn't explain why you brought her up with such-"

The table fell momentarily silent as the display shifted to the next section of the dossier.

"Apparently once Miss Nowak stepped into the testing center, she'd decided that since she was now officially starting her adult career she was going to start making up for lost time as best she could." the Navy captain said matter-of-factly.

"Starting with her choice of Public Service posting. As was the usual policy with a National Honors candidate we gave them a wide range of carefully-curated options intended to let them self-select for whatever their particular interests and aptitudes might be, whether they be scientific, administrative, political..."

"Nothing makes one of these young potentials waste that potential faster than trying to shove a square peg into a round hole." the DARPA rep agreed. "Better to let them pick which direction they want to run in first on their own and only move in to nudge them if it looks like they're conspicuously wasting their talents."

"Although we don't usually expect them to ignore the entire list and instead volunteer for one of the least-desirable hardship postings we have." the chairman said.

"Why was that choice of hers even accepted?" the MoE rep asked.

"Because we'd had enough of a problem filling that particular manpower requirement that the assignments office had reached the 'any warm body at all' level of desperation, and so the instant they got a real life volunteer for there they had her locked in for it and taken out of the 'awaiting assignment' queue in the system before anybody inside the genius patrol had even noticed what was going on." the chairman explained. "And our particular working procedures hadn't taken the possibility into account that a National Honors prospect would pick 'None Of The Above' on us, so the automated systems assumed that her being officially assigned at all meant that she must have been assigned to somewhere we'd approve of. So there was no computer flag for our attention, and as for anyone noticing it manually... well, we all know what the spring rush is like."

"If a charging herd of elephants wanted to be noticed then it would need to schedule an appointment in advance." the psychologist joked wryly. "I'm assuming that this particular flaw in our routing systems has been patched?"

"Yes." the chairman said. "But we didn't even know she was on Peraspera until her first monthly evaluation finished coming back down the jump-mail route and, like the progress reports on all of our prospects, had a copy automatically forwarded to us."

"And by that point there wasn't anything to do for it except wait and see what happened. At least Peraspera was a double-credit situation, so even if it was entirely a developmental dead-end for her otherwise it would still only be two years. Which I'd speculate was the reason she'd picked it in the first place, to expedite her route towards university." the psychologist said out loud.

"But she didn't. Developmentally dead-end there, that is." the Navy captain said wryly. "Qualified as apprentice watch-stander underway as a sensor tech before she even got off the ship taking her there, immediately wangled herself a position as a research assistant when that isn't even a function the PSB normally covers there, using the frontier tutoring/testing procedures to rack up multiple college credits before she's even finished her first year-"

"Ran into much the same problems with her age-mates that she'd had in her educational career." the MoE rep pointed out.

"But this time, she didn't let that stop her." the DARPA rep stated. "And now she's being credited in official academic publications, as well as having done legitimately groundbreaking innovation in the field of computer-assisted complex very large statistical-array analysis. Before she's even reached a college, let alone graduated from one." She gave a low whistle of awe. "That 134 IQ has to be the worst lowballed estimate since Custer guessed wrong about how many Native Americans he'd find at the Little Big Horn."

"Who's Custer?" the Navy captain asked, only for the chairman to wave them down.

"Not germane." the psychologist agreed. "But yes, I have got to get this young lady into my lab and give her a rigorous re-examination myself. Just from my preliminary WAG off of her field achievements over the past five months, her actual IQ has got to be-" She shrugged. "I honestly wouldn't want to guess at this point, except to say that it's obviously very high indeed."

"Far too many of the young people we mark and track as very high-potential candidates as they come of age turn out to be just that, potential." the chairman agreed. "All spark, no fire. That's why the genius patrol is a full-time job, and why even with all the advances of modern psychometrics what we do is still as much art as science. But Miss Nowak isn't showing just vast potential but is also producing genuine results, and doing so at a remarkable rate indeed. We cannot afford to let this one end up coasting or dead-ending, people. But we don't have a standard operating procedure for a situation like this either. It's time to brainstorm."

"Wait one." the Navy captain said. "My query just returned a new hit from the military datanet? Wait one..." he tapped some keys, then murmured a voice command. A new report flashed into being on the main display.

"What's this?" the DARPA rep asked.

"An email and attached report from a Chief Warrant Officer Alexander Stepczinski, Retired, currently employed as the chief datasystems technician at the Peraspera outpost." the captain replied. "He sent it in for the attention of Recruiting Command, who promptly dead-filed it as 'it's from outside our normal channels so it doesn't mean anything', but there was still an archive copy of it and as soon as I told ONI's network that I was particularly interested in anything about young Miss Nowak it got bounced straight to my inbox."

"She'd taught herself advanced microcode interfaces that quickly, when her most advanced computer eduation on record was only basic secondary-ed comp-sci?" the DARPA rep raised her eyebrows in astonishment as she skimmed the report. "And she not only coded a hotfix for mainframe CPU firmware that would normally have required the original manufacturer's dev team to do, but finished doing so before they finished their own even after you subtract travel lag?"

"Either self-taught, or at least half-reinvented from herself from first principles." the PSB psychologist said. "That's... okay, forget the right end of the bell curve, that's completely off the curve of human learning speed. It's not like we haven't seen neurophysical outliers before in the genius patrol, but I can't recall ever seeing one quite like this."

"Right. No matter what else we decide today, Office of Naval Intelligence is going to start moving on the Top Secret background investigation as soon as I can get back to my desk." the captain said firmly. "The process takes long enough as is given all the friends, family, and acquaintances that we have to interview, and will take even longer in her case with the communications lag of her parents being all the way out at Nusku. And it's a safe bet that whatever use the Confederation ends up finding for her talents, it's going to involve something important enough to need the highest level of clearance we can grant."

"Agreed." the chairman stated. "Are there any other recommendations?"

* * * * *​

Author's Note: Hat tip to Domino for giving me the idea for the 'genius patrol'.

And yes, we now have our first Forge purchase that's actually something legitimately outside the scope of the normal Traveller experience entirely... even if she can't immediately capitalize on it yet. But hey, before you can harvest the crops you've first got to plant the seeds. And she'll certainly be getting some use out of it sometimes.

Also, I've decided to use these ANs to do purchase tracking for chapters. The list and full-text of perks will still be maintained in the Mechanics post on page one, but we'll also do this...

Unspent CP: 200
Purchases: Inert Ceph Technology (Crysis)

 

[elbrop]

This update started with a bit of a clunky info dump but got a lot better when you had characters interacting and talking.

 

[Jao]

The nuking of Warsaw by the Aliens happened In 2047, yet first contact happened in 2097, yet the war started in 2114, yet the formation of the Confederation in response to losing the first battle of the war (which happened in 2114) was formed in 2024. These dates needs to be fixed.

 

[krayken0422]

September 22nd, 2047

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We'd made First Contact with the Vilani in 2097

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Considering first contact, the memorial is probably 2147?

And so the Terran Confederation was formally founded in 2024.

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Also, 2124.

Fun chapter, especially the interlude!

 

[TroyX]

I do so love to see competent professionals on the side of the angels.

 

[yojorocks]

Great chapter, loved the genius patrol stuff at the end, but the timeline was driving me nuts:

And so the Terran Confederation was formally founded in 2024.

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Not Yet Lost While We Remember
September 22nd, 2047

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Sophia Nowak, born February 11, 2048 in Plock, Poland.

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National Honors on the 2066 CATs

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I'm not positive on any of these, but I think they should all be after the year 2100, instead of 2000?

 

[mpbjunkie]

Thanks for the chapter!

I too thought the beginning section was a bit clunky, but still interesting. The interlude with the "genius patrol" was great. A fascinating concept, well-executed.

For those unfamiliar with the franchise, what are the capabilities of the ceph sample and how hard will it be to reverse engineer/learn from it?

 

[Skierus]

Author's Note: Hat tip to Domino for giving me the idea for the 'genius patrol'.

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Could we change the name of the agency? Genius Patrol sounds like a joking term like how members of the USMC are called crayon eaters. maybe something like Outlier Recruitment and Monitoring Agency O.R.M.A

Edit: I know they are a subgroup of the PSB here but this sounds like it would be a minor yet high-value agency all its own.

 

[mpbjunkie]

Could we change the name of the agency? Genius Patrol sounds like a joking term like how members of the USMC are called crayon eaters. maybe something like Outlier Recruitment and Monitoring Agency O.R.M.A

Edit: I know they are a subgroup of the PSB here but this sounds like it would be a minor yet high-value agency all its own.

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Apparently they're officially the Aptitude Tracking And Coordination Council.

 

[A/N]

As it workd out Dad was never posted outside of the Sol system,

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worked

I needed to learn about Vilani society and culture in ways you couldn't from any official education, the ways only possible by debriefing someone who'd actually lived there for years.

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Seems like a longer term project and strange thing to spend more time on than actually preparing militarily.

Inert Ceph Technology (Crysis)

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How much did it cost, does she have left over points to make more purchases, is she saving them for the next batch, or is she spending everything instantly because these nanotech are that good? Finding out how much it cost outside the story isn't great for understanding her mindset or plans there.

Maybe the Vilani cultural resaerch objective wouldn't be completed right away, but at least I knew what I needed to do and still had time to do it.

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research

Still had time? She has no idea when the deadline could be. For all she knows an alpha strike is already on the way, limited cultural/political knowledge of the enemy being what it is? More realistically, the guy could rally enough support to kick off the war anywhere from months to years from now, or could even arrange violent incidents to start the war as a means of rallying support around him in the moment.

"Apparently once Miss Nowak stepped into the testing center, she'd decided that since she was now officially starting her adult career she was going to start making up for lost time as best she could." the Navy captain said matter-of-factly.

"Starting with her choice of Public Service posting. As was the usual policy with a National Honors candidate we gave them a wide range of carefully-curated options intended to let them self-select for whatever their particular interests and aptitudes might be, whether they be scientific, administrative, political..."

"Nothing makes one of these young potentials waste that potential faster than trying to shove a square peg into a round hole." the DARPA rep agreed. "Better to let them pick which direction they want to run in first on their own and only move in to nudge them if it looks like they're conspicuously wasting their talents."

"Although we don't usually expect them to ignore the entire list and instead volunteer for one of the least-desirable hardship postings we have." the chairman said.

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A little too much "as we all know" and agreeing with themselves or something, I don't know how to quite phrase what exactly made this jarring, sorry.


The first half was very much a clunky dump of info that didn't seem to tie in very well. The bit about Terrans going pirate by necessity and being welcomed back as heroes, and searching the specific wreckage for any info about the enemy culture, kinda worked, but most of the rest could have been a smoother.

I completely thought they were going to note her suspicious purchases at that scene break, ha.

 

[Kildar]

Sooo...... what I took from the history dump is that technically the Terrans started it?
I mean, yes the Vilani went too far.... but every fight was started by the Terrans, then ended by the Vilani.

Are we the bad guys?

Edit: Tongue in cheek guys

 

[litaispe]

And if those nanites could survive being simultaneously flash-broiled, exploded, and soaked in extreme alkaline, then the "delicate" in the item description would be a flat-out lie

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Ceph nanotech is delicate enough that you can safely study it on a planetary body with only minimal chance of gray goo. After all, you can destroy it with near future man-portable firearms.

Unlike say Homeworld: Cataclysm antagonist "The Beast". Which has nanotech which is a viral biomechanical virus who's primary hosts are armored starship, and measures it's propagation rate in hundred of meters per second.

 

[Kildar]

Ceph nanotech is delicate enough that you can safely study it on a planetary body with only minimal chance of gray goo. After all, you can destroy it with near future man-portable firearms.

Unlike say Homeworld: Cataclysm antagonist "The Beast". Which has nanotech which is a viral biomechanical virus who's primary hosts are armored starship, and measures it's propagation rate in hundred of meters per second.

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The Ceph sample is enough to produce crysis suits right? I never found out how they managed that.

 

[ProtagNeptune]

Nice chapter.

 

[WaNoMatsuri]

Typos

my fatherhad

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hte

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sample but and leave

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Kinda clunky info dump but I expect it will get better as you progress enough to get us up to speed on the setting.

 

[Acolyte]

That fucking insurance company is the actual final boss of the series. Thats a fucked up evil thing they did, probably ruined thousands of lives.

 

[Xiosdestro11]

I wanna be a fly on the wall when they try and test her iq again.

 

[nobodez]

First off, aside from a bit of "As You Know, Bob" in the final section, it's a good chapter.

The potential of self-replicating nanotech that could operate in the open air had only begun to be explored even by the 21st-century's most optimistic futurists and speculative-fiction writers, let alone actual scientists.

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Also, I assume this is supposed to read "22nd-century", since she's in the 22nd century.

 

[cliffc999]

Also, I assume this is supposed to read "22nd-century", since she's in the 22nd century.

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No, she's referring to what's contemporary sci-fi for us.

 

[Potato and Chip]

While one of most visible examples of ceph nanotechnology was always the nanosuits that doesn't seem like it's relevant to Sophia right now. Which makes me wonder if she's going to figure out the ceph main usage for nano machines: terraforming. Considering that the ceph were actively changing earth for habitation and currently Sophia is doing her service at a science station studying how planets develop there is synergy there.

I assume that said nano machines can't create atmospheres or environments out of nothing (why else would the ceph be so focused on earth when there are nearly an infinite amount of other planets without angry monkeys on them) but they seem capable of shifting a present biome into something more preferable as well as accelerate planetary development.

 

[cliffc999]

I assume that said nano machines can't create atmospheres or environments out of nothing (why else would the ceph be so focused on earth when there are nearly an infinite amount of other planets without angry monkeys on them)

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As I understand it, one of the later Crysis games reveals that prehistoric Earth was actually the Ceph ancestral home planet or something. But yeah, you didn't come to Crysis for the plot.

but they seem capable of shifting a present biome into something more preferable as well as accelerate planetary development.

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She's never heard of Crysis or the Ceph, so she wasn't thinking in terms of terraforming when she bught it. She bought it because the description said that they were self-replicating nanomachines that could work outside a specialized environment, and none of the interstellar powers in the setting has technology that can do that. Not only is the original tabletop RPG from 1977 (even though I'm using the modern GURPS remake, the remake did not substantially change the setting tech tree), but outside of the necessary FTL drive and the popular tropes of energy weapons and artificial gravity the Traveller universe was intended to be relatively 'grounded' sci-fi. And yes, I'm turning loose the Celestial Forge on said 'grounded' environment. That's one of the reasons I picked here.

And once you've solved the problem of making nanomachinery that can replicate freely in the wild and yet still stay under control, you can start to do a lot of things. You don't even have to turn it loose to eat the enemy, you can just mine things or build things with it much faster and cheaper, or use it to assemble things on a more precision scale, or suchlike.

 

[Faralis]

Damn. Only 3 chapters and this already is one of my favourite fics in this forum. You do you do, cliff, Great job!

This update started with a bit of a clunky info dump but got a lot better when you had characters interacting and talking.

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I understand what you say, but honestly is info needed. Maybe he could have divided it into several chapters, but the past of the Terran Vilani relations is a very necessary thing to know. Even if is not as interesting as the PSB reaction to our OOC protagonist, that's for sure.